InediblePenguin posted:

"but it was big in Victorian times and WWI" is in no way any kind of a counter to the argument about the Germanic Sturm und Drang movement. The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774 and therefore predates your examples quite neatly

Woolie Wool posted:

Is reinventing old ideas from principles, giving them stupid names, and passing them off as his own work Moldbug's schtick or something?

The Vosgian Beast posted:

There's a reason he caught on in the Less Wrong sphere.

Ian Winthorpe III posted:

I guess it runs the gamut from complete craziness to valid criticism of the tensions and dogmas inherent in contemporary progressive politics - gender theory wackiness, the schizophrenic attempt to reconcile Islam and Feminism, the ever-shifting grievance hierarchy and the absence of any grand collective vision or indeed, inspiring personalities.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

I wasn't trying to counter your argument. I just remember thats where i heard about that mentality first. sorry.

divabot posted:

He didn't get his bad habits - neologism, self-references to self-references to self-references that never actually resolve to a falsifiable claim, delusions of competence, pontification ex culo - from LessWrong, he started about the same time as Yudkowsky started writing the Sequences (and commented on them in the early days). However, they do indeed seem to be why he (a) fit right in (b) succeeded in recruiting neoreactionaries from amongst them.

I will credit Moldbug with less blatant nerdsniping and I couldn't find as many anime references and allusions. (Though I now sorta hope someone will point them all out to me. In general, the answer to "wtf LW?" is always "anime". Yes, even Roko's basilisk.)

Hbomberguy posted:

What's the term for the behaviour - I call it the 'dark god' for some reason - where someone supports a system and fantasises about its proper function and how it's all supposed to ideally work, but since actually-existing versions of that idea come along and inevitably have drawbacks or fell apart, they then have to supplement it with a simultaneous second fantasy of some dumb reason why it didn't work?

You see it everywhere, but especially with fascists (the jewish KGB faked the holocaust, things were fine) and libertarians (we've never actually had capitalism so all the sins of currently-existing capitalist countries don't really count and if we had no restraints whatsoever this would improve things, that drat big government!!!), and I'm sure there's a real term for that specific kind of fantasy.

Maoist Pussy posted:

Unlike Communism, of course, Fascism actually has a functioning historical example that is not based on Germanic death-metal album covers. I'll give you a hint:

Hbomberguy posted:

What's the term for the behaviour - I call it the 'dark god' for some reason - where someone supports a system and fantasises about its proper function and how it's all supposed to ideally work, but since actually-existing versions of that idea come along and inevitably have drawbacks or fell apart, they then have to supplement it with a simultaneous second fantasy of some dumb reason why it didn't work?

You see it everywhere, but especially with fascists (the jewish KGB faked the holocaust, things were fine) and libertarians (we've never actually had capitalism so all the sins of currently-existing capitalist countries don't really count and if we had no restraints whatsoever this would improve things, that drat big government!!!), and I'm sure there's a real term for that specific kind of fantasy.

Hbomberguy posted:

What's the term for the behaviour - I call it the 'dark god' for some reason - where someone supports a system and fantasises about its proper function and how it's all supposed to ideally work, but since actually-existing versions of that idea come along and inevitably have drawbacks or fell apart, they then have to supplement it with a simultaneous second fantasy of some dumb reason why it didn't work?

Hbomberguy posted:

What's the term for the behaviour - I call it the 'dark god' for some reason - where someone supports a system and fantasises about its proper function and how it's all supposed to ideally work, but since actually-existing versions of that idea come along and inevitably have drawbacks or fell apart, they then have to supplement it with a simultaneous second fantasy of some dumb reason why it didn't work?

You see it everywhere, but especially with fascists (the jewish KGB faked the holocaust, things were fine) and libertarians (we've never actually had capitalism so all the sins of currently-existing capitalist countries don't really count and if we had no restraints whatsoever this would improve things, that drat big government!!!), and I'm sure there's a real term for that specific kind of fantasy.

Hbomberguy posted:

What's the term for the behaviour - I call it the 'dark god' for some reason - where someone supports a system and fantasises about its proper function and how it's all supposed to ideally work, but since actually-existing versions of that idea come along and inevitably have drawbacks or fell apart, they then have to supplement it with a simultaneous second fantasy of some dumb reason why it didn't work?

You see it everywhere, but especially with fascists (the jewish KGB faked the holocaust, things were fine) and libertarians (we've never actually had capitalism so all the sins of currently-existing capitalist countries don't really count and if we had no restraints whatsoever this would improve things, that drat big government!!!), and I'm sure there's a real term for that specific kind of fantasy.

rudatron posted:

. The idea of a 'fall from grace' is kind of a romantic theme, common from light conservatism (Jeffersonian america as this ideal of rural liberty/goodness as a US example) all the way to our very own Roman LARPer here in Maoist Pussy. I mean people just believe simple stories, even if they have no reason to.

OwlFancier posted:

I would struggle to call the roman empire "graceful" however.

Race Realists posted:

https://twitter.com/Thug_Violence

PoesLaw.jpg

rudatron posted:

Not just that, it's fall wasn't a 'fall' as you may understand, ie-

quote:

MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.
8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!… Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

Darth Walrus posted:

Futurist Manifesto:

Darth Walrus posted:

ArgoATX posted:

Count Chocula posted:

I love the Futurist Manifesto as a piece of poetry, and I usually whip it out at any oppurtunity - first heard it in an Art History class and I just think the rhetoric is very stirring. I'm to the Left of your average... anybody on most things, but I love the appeal to technology and speed as opposed to so much poetry I hear that's about nature and such. I dunno what speedracer.gif is, but that is one of my favorite movies.

1337JiveTurkey posted:

Reading a bit too much into the 'psychology' in the thread title here but maybe there's a link between beliefs like Dark Enlightenment and some sorts of personality disorders. People toss around terms like narcissist or sociopath to describe them but they act quite differently in the formal sense than those sorts of people.

Schizoids and schizotypal people come to mind because they've got a lot in common with the stereotypical DE nerd. Extremely introverted, no close friends, never in a relationship, sometimes lost in an internal fantasy world, have some strange and/or idiosyncratic beliefs, don't fit societal expectations, very aloof, often mistaken for Asperger's , don't react much to other peoples' emotions, don't show many emotions themselves, perceive themselves as "different", tend towards anxiety disorders and depression, and so forth.

Everyone is going to fit a few of those at times but the people who fit all of them even when it's disruptive to their lives are the ones with serious problems. And they're devilishly hard to cure since the person with the disorder doesn't perceive anything wrong with those thoughts and behaviors even if they recognize that their lives are a loving train wreck. So these political beliefs sort of give a way to explain and understand those problems. It doesn't fix anything but it at least gives a sense that they've got a grip on the problem and that there's a solution.

So it may not start with the racism, sexism and so forth but people end up more receptive to such ideas in order to feel less desperately unhappy.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

The Roman empire fell for the following reasons

The Vosgian Beast posted:

The Roman empire fell for the following reasons

Woolie Wool posted:

That seems like an enormous stretch, especially considering how hierarchical DE thinking is. Authoritarianism is not just about giving orders, it's about taking them from the ideology's designated authorities, and you'd be better off trying to herd cats across the Great Plains than trying to discipline a bunch of schizoids. I would expect them to be more drawn to vulgar anarchism, or anarcho-syndicalism if they're a bit more sophisticated.

1337JiveTurkey posted:

If they think that they'll be those authorities based on their "logical" (read: doesn't respond to others' emotions) nature, they might be willing to accept a hierarchical system in theory. People with PDs aren't exactly known for thinking the consequences of their beliefs to their logical conclusions here. Otherwise my money'd be on objectivism.

Guavanaut posted:

I'm always wary of trying to fit members of a political movement into any type of pathology, even when they're as out there as NRx, simply because there's a long history of doing that to any political movement that isn't the dominant one at the time.

You don't have to go back that far to find documents on the mental illness that is communism.

Darth Walrus posted:

Also, it's a mistake to tie fascism to Imperial Rome too much. It's a modern industrial-age ideology with about as much of a relationship to the Roman political system as Wicca has to pre-Roman Celtic druids. Mussolini using the trappings of his country's semi-mythical golden age for his philosophy of dictatorship didn't mean he had a direct line to the ancient wisdom of millennia-dead consuls and senators, and while it hearkens back to the good old days, breaking with tradition is a core element of fascist philosophy. See, again, the Futurist Manifesto: