It's curious, isn't it…

Space exploration is literally an international (even interplanetary etc, ffs) endeavor, something that recognizes no boundaries (especially no national boundaries, which are literally made up). How the fuck do people get patriotic about it, when it's telling them to their face that their patriotism is complete bullshit?

People who are otherwise not even interested in science get all excited when the space mission is of —"their" country… and feel pRoUd. They don't even know or care what the fuck the mission is for.
(Of course it might be a good thing when people get interested in all these things, in astronomy and stuff for example, and I'm against the elitist notion that such stuff should only be exclusive to the "highly educated" etc.
But this is different: the question here is of patriotic madness and hypocrisy.)

Astronomy, space exploration remind us that the countries are all made up, the borders are imaginary.


Another thing is the question of whether such costly (even extravagant) missions are acceptable when there is still rampant poverty.
Some people easily dismiss this question by saying that both are not mutually exclusive. It is of course true that with or without any space missions poverty would still exist; that is because the government wouldn't care about the poor anyway and the system requires poverty to continue to exist; poverty is manufactured and perpetuated by the system.
Nevertheless, one can't dismiss the question so easily and those who do generally don't give a fuck about the poor, which is highly contemptible. Such costly space missions (or any other projects etc) should make us question why there's still so much poverty and should turn us against the system.

Simply put, what point is there in crossing planetary "boundaries" when you can't even overcome national boundaries

No Gods, no Masters!

Read: Labor Discipline and the Decline of the Soviet System by Don Filtzer

"Just go with the flow"

No thanks, dead bodies go with the flow, I'm alive

Renzo Novatore on the antagonistic attitude of Nietzsche et al towards the working class:

If you want to go from the field of the living to the field of the dead, it would be the chance to immediately encounter F. Nietzsche himself, the satanic, playfully destructive philosopher, saturated with desperately and divinely creative, intoxicating poetry, discoverer of the strangest and most original truths of the human mind—well, he himself, I said, when he tried to concern himself with social questions was seized by the same myopia, by that same weakness: which one might call: The ignorance of great men! and in that book of his… Beyond Good and Evil, he sought to create (though under a formula all his own) a certain legislative theory for the use and consumption of a certain aristocracy (which I would call imperialistic) that he invented at the complete and exclusive injury of the people.

And saying that it would be enough that the people went to quench their thirst (oh! if they only had thirst…) at the springs of Nietzschean philosophy to throw it all into the air in an absolute and radical way both in the spiritual realm and in that of this materialistically experienced life of ours… Yes, precisely this, all in the air including his theory of aristocratic (thus not very aristocratic in the libertarian sense) domination!

In this instance Stirner himself seems more noble, more logical, and less cruel to me…

In fact on social questions, if it were granted to me to give advice to the great men, I would say (at least to those who are still living, and who still know how to read) to go back a bit to read that little, but so valuable, booklet that is called The Soul of Man Under Socialism, author Oscar Wilde who is more than one of their peers… But perhaps it is useless to make predictions about this since, alas!, there must be a certain fatality that weighs on all things. Even on the brains of the great men… With all this, however, I can’t yet close this topic without adding something else that is perhaps what matters most. And that is to explain, from my point of view, the psychology of this ugly affair.

It is, I believe, and I don’t just believe, I’m sure, that the phenomenon is explained like this. The great man, by his nature, lives in the world of his own greatness, meaning outside of the life of the people. Two lives, two worlds, two realities, and also two faults, this: that the people still haven’t learned how to become deserving of the name that they bear, that is: real people. The great men that of not having learned how to become truly great. Meaning that they still have to learn to not stick their so keenly delicate nose into the affairs of the people. Politics is a low, vulgar thing, linked to the economy, or rather is the economy itself. Now the economic affair, being an affair of the belly and of the kitchen, is important, indispensable, the most indispensable of all, but an affair for cooks, so not for poets and higher men.

— Renzo Novatore,
The Great Brains… in the Time That Turns

"Then first of all ban cricket, a British invention"

Renzo Novatore's and Emma Goldman's Libertarian Aristocracy

Aristocratic anarchism? A contradiction in terms!
Why would these anarchists speak of "aristocracy" with anything but contempt? What the hell is 'libertarian aristocracy' anyway?

This (libertarian) "aristocracy" has little to do with the political aristocracy; is in fact opposed to it, libertarian as it is. It is only aesthetic and cultural, and of course anti-political (not apolitical).
Their individualism, or that aristocratic aesthetic, is the very negation of the bourgeois elitism/individualism/aristocracy etc.

Now, in the case of Novatore in particular, it might seem from his writings that he was elitist or extremely individualistic. But it has to be kept in mind that he was no elitist academic making judgements about the masses from on high; no leader of any vanguard party.

Born in a poor peasant family, he was—right from his childhood—too rebellious and free spirited to fit into the authoritarian society around him.
"Unwilling to adapt to scholastic discipline, he only attended a few months of the first grade of grammar school and then left school forever. Though his father forced him to work on the farm, his strong will and thirst for knowledge led him to become a self-taught poet and philosopher."

At a young age he became a militant antifascist and lived the life of a vagabond by robbing the rich. He was almost always fighting the law and the Fascists no less. After being connoscripted for WW-I, he deserted the regiment and was sentenced to death for that. Etc etc.
Novatore was understandably pissed off that the dull, submissive masses were not rising up against the state and the capitalists; that they were even supporting the Fascists etc.

To quote Novatore himself:
“The proletariat bowed and resigned under the burden of enslavement disgusts me…. The proletariat in revolt is quite a pleasure for me. And I enjoy seeing the idiotic bourgeoisie weeping and despairing because the sacred table of the right to property has fallen broken under the rebellious fist of the new force.”

Below are some quotes from Goldman and especially from Novatore, referring to the libertarian "aristocracy":

“Nietzsche was not a social theorist but a poet, a rebel and innovator. His aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse; it was of the spirit. In that respect Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats”.

— Emma Goldman,
Living My Life

Now that the age of obligation and slavery is agonizing, we want to close the cycle of theoretical and contemplative thought in order to open the breach to violent action, which is still the will of life and the exultation of expansion.
On the ruins of piety and religion we want to erect the creative hardness of our proud hearts.
We are not the admirers of the “ideal man” of “social rights”, but the proclaimers of the “actual individual”, enemy of social abstractions.
We fight for the liberation of the individual.
For the conquest of life.
For the triumph of our idea.
For the realization of our dreams.
And if our ideas are dangerous, it is because we are those who love to live dangerously.
And if our dreams are mad, it is because we are mad.
But our madness is supreme wisdom.
But our ideas are the heart of life; but our thoughts are the beacons of humanity.
And what the war has not done, revolution must do.
Because revolution is the fire of our will and a need of our solitary minds; it is an obligation of the libertarian aristocracy.
To create new ethical values.
To create new aesthetic values.
To communalize material wealth.
To individualize spiritual wealth.

— Renzo Novatore,
Toward the Creative Nothing (X)