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Obdicut posted:I don't even understand the desire to have servants. It'd feel incredibly awkward to me for someone to clean up my messes and drive me around and be all deferential. How is it not awkward, and if you treat them badly, how do you ever feel certain that they haven't, like, pissed in your whiskey? And I think it goes without saying she'd treat them badly. The thing is, back in the day there actually was a need for butlers, chambermaids, nursemaids, governesses, scullery-maids, cooks, gardeners, under-gardeners, bootblacks, footmen, drivers, etc. Wealth was largely tied up in land, or physical resources that required management, and with the upper-classes also being required to go to war and in many respects being the political class ( for a given value of politics, anyway ), they genuinely did need people to take care of all the day-to-day menial tasks that needed doing. Of course, it was also a way to signify wealth and status. It might help to think of it like this: An English Earl in 1660s wasn't going to spend five hours in the kitchen making his own dinner any more than a modern CEO is going to do so today, both are going to pay someone to do it for him. The main difference is that in the 1660s the cook lived with the Earl, whereas today the CEO is likely to stop by a restaurant on the way home. Once the industrial revolution kicked off, having servants increasingly became an indicator solely of status and wealth rather than actually filling a necessary function, as the bourgeoisie grew into a class of its own. And that's what Tunney is tapping into when she talks about having servants and the "Techies" being the new aristocracy: Her politics/philosophy is the purest distillation of the bourgeois attempt to enhance their own status and standing by stealing the trappings of the upper class and "true" aristocracy, so that she and the other "Techies" can finally have the recognition and status they "really" deserve. Of course, the upper classes are never going to go along with it ( because the "Techies" are nouveau-riche, pretentious upstarts ), and those of us in the working-classes can see through the bullshit for what it is: Desperate, autocratic masturbation-fantasies by the socially insecure.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 06:04 |
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# ? Jun 11, 2024 11:43 |
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Aurubin posted:Well Kaczynski was a brilliant mathematician. I thought his manifesto, neo-Luddite as it was, had some valid points about the pains that would be felt by the computerization of mundane tasks. That said, he thought sending loving letter bombs was the best way to advocate his position. Kurt Godel starved to death because his wife wasn't around to test his food to make sure it wasn't poisoned. Leaps of logic are still logical to those making them, even if they're crazy to everyone else.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 08:48 |
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His manifesto is reasonably concise (though pretty crotchety) and certainly more coherent and better informed than anything Tunney ever wrote. It's just that whole bombing thing. Most paranoid schizophrenics don't send mail bombs either.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 09:45 |
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Rather than aristocrats coders most resemble medieval monastic clergy with developers resembling Chanceries, the medieval office that wrote stuff down for the illiterate court. The monastic clergy were very good at acquiring wealth and maintaining rents because they could read and write and were much better at keeping records than the secular nobility. It is noteworthy that monastic clergy were generally the nastiest and harshest manorial lords of the feudal system, sure a secular lord might slaughter some peasants for fun but pretty consistently every monastic lord would make sure to keep a record of exactly what bullshit taxes, fines, services and rents had been imposed upon their peasants, scrupulously recorded who was allowed to what with land and Abbots would be loathe to make any kind of compromise with the peasantry because it would be recorded in the abbey's history they'd given in to their lessers. However while the monastic clergy were good at acquiring wealth the secular nobility were much better at acquiring and wielding power. TLM3101 posted:Once the industrial revolution kicked off, having servants increasingly became an indicator solely of status and wealth rather than actually filling a necessary function, as the bourgeoisie grew into a class of its own. Isn't it the case, in Britain at least, that domestic servants were the largest sector of employment at the start of WW1? As it became less necessary it actually became more popular as status symbol. The same is the case here with automation likely to make the need for servants even less (although cleaning/janitorial work is apparently one of the hardest jobs to automate) Tunney, a person who works for one the companies likely to do the most automating, still wants servants. Some assholes just want power over people I guess. Jabberwock posted:The fact that she shits on the "dumb" and "low" workers who create and maintain the infrastructure that allows her to sit and self-aggrandize comfortably in a warm cubicle in a building that's not piled with garbage and insects and rot and feces shows such a profound obliviousness to her privilege and basically the entire functioning of technology and human civilization that it makes her boasts about her intelligence and greatness seem somehow even more laughable than they already are. Jesus. The only consolation is that the powerful will probably throw most coders under the bus too once automation causes a paradox of thrift large enough to render most of the economy unnecessary to the real global aristocracy.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 10:19 |
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ReV VAdAUL posted:Rather than aristocrats coders most resemble medieval monastic clergy with developers resembling Chanceries, the medieval office that wrote stuff down for the illiterate court. The monastic clergy were very good at acquiring wealth and maintaining rents because they could read and write and were much better at keeping records than the secular nobility. It is noteworthy that monastic clergy were generally the nastiest and harshest manorial lords of the feudal system, sure a secular lord might slaughter some peasants for fun but pretty consistently every monastic lord would make sure to keep a record of exactly what bullshit taxes, fines, services and rents had been imposed upon their peasants, scrupulously recorded who was allowed to what with land and Abbots would be loathe to make any kind of compromise with the peasantry because it would be recorded in the abbey's history they'd given in to their lessers. Interesting comparison. I hadn't really considered that angle, but it's certainly food for thought. Of course, in some places the secular authorities and spiritual authorities ended up residing in the same person ( e.g. the various arch-bishoprics of the HRE ), giving you the worst of both worlds, which is what I suspect these 'Dark enlightenment' ( Jesus loving Christ on a mule what a pretentious name ) would hold up as their goal. ReV VAdAUL posted:
I don't have the definitive numbers, but yes, domestic servants were a huge sector of employment in Britain by the beginning of WW1. Hilariously, as devices that automated certain household tasks became available, such as vacuum-cleaners and washingmachines, they were marketed primarily as a way to make the servant's day easier. If I recall correctly, there's a BBC documentary floating around on YouTube that covers it, I'll try to find it for you when I'm not at work. ReV VAdAUL posted:Automation scares the hell out of me because as the powerful need normal people less and less then our, already meagre, bargaining power in society drops away and the cost to the powerful to straight up murder us becomes ever more minor. On the cusp of this we're seeing some of the powerful's most necessary servants voicing horrific stuff like Dark Enlightenment. Yeah, the upper classes are not going to let self-important nouvau-riche pretenders get a foot in the door without a fight, so I suspect that the coders are going to be in for a rude awakening once their usefulness runs out.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 10:45 |
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TLM3101 posted:Yeah, the upper classes are not going to let self-important nouvau-riche pretenders get a foot in the door without a fight
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 10:48 |
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McDowell posted:Crossposting and refining this GBS post for those who don't want to deal with crude antiqueer opinions: The main problem is that neoreactionaries are not just one of the new perspectives. Their beliefs are a logical consequence of the ones that the West cherished, preserved and actively promoted for many years. We have been told for many years that the free market nearly always provides the best solution for society problems, that ownership trumps democracy whenever they are in conflict and that the amount of money you possess is the main indicator of your usefulness to the society at large. The libertarians and Dark Enlightenment people are only taking these ideas to their logical conclusion. Some of these groups, of course, are more dangerous than the others. Bitcoiners, for example, just built a cargo cult around the economy, built a banking systems out of code and busted GPUs and wait for the gods to bless them with wealth and status. People like Justine Tunney, however, have the potential to be dangerous because they actually toil around the communications infrastructure. They have enough power to actually build their ideology into the system.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 11:32 |
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Gantolandon posted:The main problem is that neoreactionaries are not just one of the new perspectives. Their beliefs are a logical consequence of the ones that the West cherished, preserved and actively promoted for many years. We have been told for many years that the free market nearly always provides the best solution for society problems, that ownership trumps democracy whenever they are in conflict and that the amount of money you possess is the main indicator of your usefulness to the society at large. The libertarians and Dark Enlightenment people are only taking these ideas to their logical conclusion. Which is why I connected the movement to Ron Paul, with the siren call of 'free markets', 'liberty, and 'State's Rights'. An alternative is to reconstitute the role of the State. ISPs should be regulated as utilities, and public IT services could allow individuals to better approximate perfect information in an ideal free market (IE the government acting as matchmaker for housing and employment)
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 14:37 |
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Emanuel Collective posted:I wouldn't give too much analysis to Justine Tunney's political "theories" to the extent they're deviations from a form of government where she, Justine Tunney herself, rules everyone. For example, see her latest tweets Sadly, this actually is a thing in certain tech circles (mostly extreme SV bubble universes) where people have actually managed to convince themselves that coders and engineers are literally the smartest people on the planet who are good at literally everything, and that the world would be so much better if we booted out all those politicians and bankers and businessmen and put programmers and software engineers in charge instead. We'd have to end democracy, of course, to prevent the enlightened coder-kings from being overruled by the dumb masses who are too stupid or lazy to even learn Node.js, let alone govern a country. It descends from Plato's dream of wise philosopher-kings, the only people whose wisdom is great enough to have true ideas, being the only ones truly fit to rule a state, except that SV types have substituted themselves for the philosophers because all that money they have clearly shows they're smarter than philosophers and all their ~disruption~ shows that they're the ones with true ideas now.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 15:23 |
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The more I think about it, the more I would like to know what Justine actually does. I'm a software tester, and most programmers are OK people while programming leads are assholes. They don't know how to program, or have forgotten how. They know man-hours, module architecture, and data structures, but not much else. Justine seems like she fits the role of the "illiterate court" riding the coattails of the real technoliterati who have the misfortune of working on her team.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 15:35 |
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Main Paineframe posted:Sadly, this actually is a thing in certain tech circles (mostly extreme SV bubble universes) where people have actually managed to convince themselves that coders and engineers are literally the smartest people on the planet who are good at literally everything, and that the world would be so much better if we booted out all those politicians and bankers and businessmen and put programmers and software engineers in charge instead. We'd have to end democracy, of course, to prevent the enlightened coder-kings from being overruled by the dumb masses who are too stupid or lazy to even learn Node.js, let alone govern a country. It descends from Plato's dream of wise philosopher-kings, the only people whose wisdom is great enough to have true ideas, being the only ones truly fit to rule a state, except that SV types have substituted themselves for the philosophers because all that money they have clearly shows they're smarter than philosophers and all their ~disruption~ shows that they're the ones with true ideas now. It is nothing new, however. The same notion was already popular within the business circles and became their rallying cry. The press regularly praises politicians for making ~tough~ decisions and scorns dumb populists who promise to give the masses what they want. Our culture disdains ideology and presents it as selective blindness that prevents you from seeing the ~facts~. The techies from SV didn't invent the technocracy, they just subverted it so they got to be the aristocracy instead of some dumb bankers. McDowell posted:Which is why I connected the movement to Ron Paul, with the siren call of 'free markets', 'liberty, and 'State's Rights'. The problem is that most states willingly reduced themselves to the role of protectors of free market and became too weak to control it anymore. Reversing this trend will be hard without weakening the markets first - for example through a giant financial crisis.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 15:52 |
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It is this faction of the tech community that enables Evgeni Morozov to write books that consist of "LOL" in snarky long form.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 16:59 |
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Gregor Samsa posted:It is this faction of the tech community that enables Evgeni Morozov to write books that consist of "LOL" in snarky long form. At a certain point communities become so absurd that only writers from the former SSRs can truly document them.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 17:05 |
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Pornographic Memory posted:Well she's also somebody who thinks aristocrats were actually better people, as opposed to people as good as anybody else who just happened to be distant descendants of some guy who was buddies with a king or something at one time. Try 'able to yell more loudly' and 'able to convince three of his buddies that going and stealing some other guy's horses was a brilliant idea.' TLM3101 posted:The thing is, back in the day there actually was a need for butlers, chambermaids, nursemaids, governesses, scullery-maids, cooks, gardeners, under-gardeners, bootblacks, footmen, drivers, etc. Wealth was largely tied up in land, or physical resources that required management, and with the upper-classes also being required to go to war and in many respects being the political class ( for a given value of politics, anyway ), they genuinely did need people to take care of all the day-to-day menial tasks that needed doing. Of course, it was also a way to signify wealth and status. In the continuing antics of my family, we have a cousin who ran off and left her first husband to go with Joseph Smith out west. She did well for herself, but the relevant point is that she was an ardent feminist, to the point she ran for Senate, though it was illegal, and was a correspondent with Susan B. Anthony and the like. A real, honest to goodness social revolutionary and suffragette. She was also a huge proponent of polygamy. Why? Because the second wife could take care of the household, freeing up the first wife for intellectual pursuits and effort. That's the kind of thing that changed _everything_ once mechanical assistants like the washer and dryer or vacuum cleaner popped up. We owe a lot to freedom from toil, and every so often it's worth reflecting on it. A few simple mechanical devices set half the world free. Main Paineframe posted:Sadly, this actually is a thing in certain tech circles (mostly extreme SV bubble universes) where people have actually managed to convince themselves that coders and engineers are literally the smartest people on the planet who are good at literally everything, and that the world would be so much better if we booted out all those politicians and bankers and businessmen and put programmers and software engineers in charge instead. We'd have to end democracy, of course, to prevent the enlightened coder-kings from being overruled by the dumb masses who are too stupid or lazy to even learn Node.js, let alone govern a country. It descends from Plato's dream of wise philosopher-kings, the only people whose wisdom is great enough to have true ideas, being the only ones truly fit to rule a state, except that SV types have substituted themselves for the philosophers because all that money they have clearly shows they're smarter than philosophers and all their ~disruption~ shows that they're the ones with true ideas now. This has all happened before and it will all happen again. Reminds me of Heinlein's 'The Roads Must Roll.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll I suppose it's the key difference between his Functionalism in the book and actual Technocracy. Warcabbit fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Jul 26, 2014 |
# ? Jul 26, 2014 17:14 |
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anonumos posted:The more I think about it, the more I would like to know what Justine actually does. I'm a software tester, and most programmers are OK people (WHO WRITE BUGS) while programming leads are assholes (WHO TRY TO FIGURE OUT WAYS TO NOT FIX BUGS). They don't know how to program, or have forgotten how. They know man-hours, module architecture, and data structures, but not much else. Justine seems like she fits the role of the "illiterate court" riding the coattails of the real technoliterati who have the misfortune of working on her team. Google-information-oligarchy: Its not a bug, its a feature!
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 21:33 |
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McDowell posted:Crossposting and refining this GBS post for those who don't want to deal with crude antiqueer opinions: If this were the case, why would they use Tunney as their spokesperson? As near as I can tell, she hasn't been very good at getting people to buy in to the extreme right-wing tech-flavored libertarian worldview, the same way that people like Moldbug apparently have. It seems much more likely that she's doing this of her own accord, is too mentally ill to realize that she's become a laughingstock, and that since the ratio of criticism is (for once) skewed away from GBS-style transphobia and instead toward her ghastly opinions, there might be merit to what people are saying about her.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 22:10 |
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This guy couldn't have picked a better pseudonym than "Moldbug". Slightly villainous yet weak and utterly laughable at the same time. edit:
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 22:30 |
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Luisfe posted:Everything she writes makes it look like she wants to live in Shadowrun. Goddamn. To be fair, that's the best place for a huge troll.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 04:45 |
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Seriously what this dude writes is standard internet libertarian bullshit, the only reason people even pay attention is because he chopped off his dick. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 05:07 |
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oh ok
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 08:16 |
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There's enough to pin her with without needing to talk poo poo about the fact that she's transgender.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 11:28 |
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shrike82 posted:There's enough to pin her with without needing to talk poo poo about the fact that she's transgender. Yeh. She's a proto-fascist who threw a tantrum 2 years after leaving the Occupy movement, then hijacked OWS's social media tools (claiming she owned them) and ran the OWS brand into the ground promoting her bullshit Shadowrun fantasy fascist government (a far cry from OWS's anarchist roots). Her missing dingleberry is not a problem at all. Her lovely beliefs are the problem.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 11:41 |
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One of the things I find interesting is how in statements like this she betrays how ill read she is. This is exactly the type of rhetoric you expect from some one who has read the Wikipedia article about the Republic and not the whole book its self or how she opts to reference Dr.Who and doesn't go for a low hanging high-brow fruit like Nietzsche line about looking into the abyss. edit: I feel dirty reading this woman's twitter I am going to read a big stack of Hannah Arendt books. side_burned fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Jul 27, 2014 |
# ? Jul 27, 2014 22:02 |
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Shadowrun has magic and a native american uprising. She wants to live in a steampunk webcomic.
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 00:33 |
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Vicas posted:Techies are all about mindless references and not at all about connotations http://www.sociali.st/ In SV, words mean whatever you want them to mean.
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 00:34 |
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This is still the best startup: http://www.piedpiper.com/#hello
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 00:37 |
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Grondoth posted:Shadowrun has magic and a native american uprising. She wants to live in a
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 01:25 |
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Gantolandon posted:It is nothing new, however. The same notion was already popular within the business circles and became their rallying cry. The press regularly praises politicians for making ~tough~ decisions and scorns dumb populists who promise to give the masses what they want. Our culture disdains ideology and presents it as selective blindness that prevents you from seeing the ~facts~. The techies from SV didn't invent the technocracy, they just subverted it so they got to be the aristocracy instead of some dumb bankers. Except they still aren't any meaningful aristocratic class, because guess what happens when capital dries up and companies which don't make anything especially "profit" stop selling for ten figures. Tech fetishists in the vein of Tunney and Moldbug and Land have no capital, they have overinflated wages out of line with the rest of the country and an attitude to match. Looking at the upcoming tech bubble burst and the knock-on effects it could generate, it is sometimes heartening to remember that the silver lining to this Capitalism bullshit is that it takes no prisoners. Or rather that it does take prisoners, they just don't realize it until its too late.
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 01:47 |
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Do you these "dark enlightenment" types just hang around each other exclusively? Because I can't imagine anyone who dreams of being one of the new overlords is capable of having normal people friends.
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 01:58 |
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Lycus posted:Do you these "dark enlightenment" types just hang around each other exclusively? Because I can't imagine anyone who dreams of being one of the new overlords is capable of having normal people friends. These are people who think photoshopping fake magic the gathering cards of themselves with "intellectual" quotes is a good idea that people wouldn't make fun of them for, what do you think?
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 01:59 |
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Nintendo Kid posted:These are people who think photoshopping fake magic the gathering cards of themselves with "intellectual" quotes is a good idea that people wouldn't make fun of them for, what do you think? I honestly thought those were being made to mock the people in them, not completely unironically. Like even the descriptive text is generally incredibly negative. Then you realize that these idiots believe those things to be positive traits and not at all insufferable.
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 02:13 |
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Willie Tomg posted:Except they still aren't any meaningful aristocratic class, because guess what happens when capital dries up and companies which don't make anything especially "profit" stop selling for ten figures. Tech fetishists in the vein of Tunney and Moldbug and Land have no capital, they have overinflated wages out of line with the rest of the country and an attitude to match. The funny thing about Tunney is that unless she has some successful start-up background or has been at google for quite a while, she's towards the low end of the SV tech totem pole. As someone who is 'only' pulling down a low six-figure salary, she's pretty much a useful idiot for the millionaire startup disruption artists she vicariously counts herself as one of. She's essentially the adult version of the kid on the little league championship team that sat on the bench the whole season but crowed louder than anyone else about winning it all.
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 02:25 |
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Hmm, looks like she deleted her twitter...
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 15:39 |
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Forgall posted:Hmm, looks like she deleted her twitter... Censorship! How dare we make fun of her!
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 15:41 |
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McDowell posted:With the rise of Alexander Dugin and ISIL we can see a coming conflict between post and antimodern visions. Hopefully the postmodern political struggle between Birchers and Yuppies in the US will be over soon. One day neoreactionaries could seize on ideological disillusionment to impose their 'traditional' social order of rigid castes, one where people who think too much get or ask too many questions get publicly executed. I get what you mean, but I think Dugin and ISIL are bad examples. As I recall Dugin got fired from his job a few weeks ago and ISIL is, well, they're a group of insane Islamist fundamentalists. They do what you'd expect insane Islamist fundamentalists to do. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the grand scheme of things, in the large scale of "the world", Dugin and ISIL are almost irrelevant. Dugin came up with his poo poo in the mid-90s and is very much something you'd except from an ardent Russian nationalist. I doubt we'll see much of a schism between postmodernism and antimodernism in the Western world. Fabulous Knight fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Jul 28, 2014 |
# ? Jul 28, 2014 15:59 |
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Maybe she figured out that large corporate employers rarely take kindly to people openly advocating slavery and genocide on their public Twitter (that also references the company)?
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 16:20 |
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Fabulous Knight posted:I get what you mean, but I think Dugin and ISIL are bad examples. As I recall Dugin got fired from his job a few weeks ago and ISIL is, well, they're a group of insane Islamist fundamentalists. They do what you'd expect insane Islamist fundamentalists to do. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the grand scheme of things, in the large scale of "the world", Dugin and ISIL are almost irrelevant. Dugin came up with his poo poo in the mid-90s and is very much something you'd except from an ardent Russian nationalist. I doubt we'll see much of a schism between postmodernism and antimodernism in the Western world. Dugin probably got fired because his antimodern ideas were becoming a liability to Putin (which sounds like what happened to Justine today), and the adoption of very similar ideas recently by neoreactionaries online suggests that his arguments are gaining ground. The connection with ISIL might be a little hyperbolic but hey, I'm trying to illustrate the threat of reactionary revolution. The US hasn't been through the chaos Russia saw in the 1990's and we have yet to see a postmodern malaise or a Limonov-like troll figure, so a retreat into 'tradition' is not guaranteed.
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 16:28 |
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Radbot posted:Maybe she figured out that large corporate employers rarely take kindly to people openly advocating slavery and genocide on their public Twitter (that also references the company)? Yeah maybe she started figuring things out. My guess: "I don't have time for these rabble, I'm retreating to rarefied circles where I can converse freely with the elect" (the elect: Weev and Mencius Moldbug)
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 16:39 |
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Nintendo Kid posted:These are people who think photoshopping fake magic the gathering cards of themselves with "intellectual" quotes is a good idea that people wouldn't make fun of them for, what do you think? I must have missed this, is there a link? Fabulous Knight posted:I get what you mean, but I think Dugin and ISIL are bad examples. As I recall Dugin got fired from his job a few weeks ago and ISIL is, well, they're a group of insane Islamist fundamentalists. They do what you'd expect insane Islamist fundamentalists to do. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the grand scheme of things, in the large scale of "the world", Dugin and ISIL are almost irrelevant. Dugin came up with his poo poo in the mid-90s and is very much something you'd except from an ardent Russian nationalist. I doubt we'll see much of a schism between postmodernism and antimodernism in the Western world. ISIL's running around killing a bunch of folks in a civil war in a volatile region. I wouldn't call that "almost irrelevant". Radbot posted:Maybe she figured out that large corporate employers rarely take kindly to people openly advocating slavery and genocide on their public Twitter (that also references the company)? If true, that's kinda awesome - getting smacked down by the folks who she's espousing as übermensch.
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 16:45 |
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# ? Jun 11, 2024 11:43 |
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Jackson Taus posted:I must have missed this, is there a link? https://web.archive.org/web/20131104025220/http://radishmag.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/heroes-of-the-dark-enlightenment/ This has most of them.
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# ? Jul 28, 2014 17:17 |