Cingulate posted:

It is true the Gods demand human life; and they will richly reward those who die on the altar, by sending them to the second-highest heaven (the highest heaven is for children who die in infancy).
In that world, if not only this were true, but if you were absolutely convinced that this is the state of the world, deeper than any conviction you hold right now, would you be pro human sacrifice?

OwlFancier posted:

I would probably be extremely racist if I lived in a pen and paper RPG setting.

OwlFancier posted:

I would probably be extremely racist if I lived in a pen and paper RPG setting.

Anticheese posted:

"But they're always Chaotic Evil! The Monster Manual justifies my actions!"

Guavanaut posted:

But not against owlbears?

Anticheese posted:

"But they're always Chaotic Evil! The Monster Manual justifies my actions!"

Number Two Stunna posted:

If you guys want to understand these guys, why don't you go to one of their subreddits/forums and ask them what they're all about?

This thread is just a bunch of circle-jerking about how awful people who have right-wing opinions are.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Yeah to be honest I'd only be a race realist if there were, in fact, actual major differences on that level but even then it'd be hard to justify telling an individual orc that he wasn't allowed to study math because orcs are, on average, less intelligent than other races.

But see that doesn't mean an individual orc is necessarily stupid. Though his race's average intelligence is 8 the -2 means that the natural maximum is still 16 which is still pretty drat smart even by the standards of other races. From a purely mechanical standpoint, anyway; even then it's tough to say "orcs can never be smart" when their average is less smart. Even if a stereotype has some truth to it you can't use it to predict how a specific individual will act.

Granted in my own D&D world I made one of the most powerful wizards alive a troll so what do I know.

OwlFancier posted:

It's mildly terrifying to consider what would happen if somebody got their hands on the monster manual for the reality we live in.

Cingulate posted:

Ok but the trick is not: what is the morally justifiable response to living in such-and-such world? The trick is, in what world do you think one ought to be a "race realist"?
Why? How?

Cingulate posted:

Why? How?

Guavanaut posted:

Even the bits that contradict the other bits?

I'd think having the monster manual for the reality we live in would be useful if only to determine whether Stephen Fry is really in there or not. They'd keep on bringing out new editions though.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Only in a world where every member of one race has a certain trait and another does not. If you had a world where, say, one race was completely unintelligent beyond words with two syllables and very basic math then I could see being a "race realist" about them because then the reality is that that race isn't bright at all and can't accomplish much intellectually.

It would have to be pretty drastic, though. I'm talking an entire race of people that would all be mentally retarded by human standards.

OwlFancier posted:

Can you imagine what would happen if the bible was literally and undeniably true, and it told you every meaningful functional detail about everything in the world?

Cingulate posted:

Okay. From this exercise, have we learned anything about "Race Realists"?

Cingulate posted:

Okay. From this exercise, have we learned anything about "Race Realists"?

Cingulate posted:

Okay. From this exercise, have we learned anything about "Race Realists"?

Cingulate posted:

Ignoring the contradictions part: well I guess a bit - Ted Chiang wrote a fantastic story about that.

Bob le Moche posted:

rudatron posted:

This view isn't new, but it's also simplistic. You have an incredibly distorted view of liberalism if you think they are the people who can't deal with facts. The people most guilty of distorting truth or propagating lies are the echo chambers like Brietbart. The absolutely shamelessness of these distortions is unique to the far right. Hell, the presidential candidate who has said the most number of disprovable lies is the one pandering to reaction, Trump, and it's not even close . Those facts about black incarceration and crime are often completely fabricated by reactionary movements on places like twitter, and you won't know unless you actually look up the real ones. That contradicts your 'hidden truth' narrative. That and its not really hidden anymore, people broadly know that minorities are disadvantaged, and unfairly so, hence policies to try and give them a leg up. This isn't unspoken, it's common knowledge.

wyattsalazar posted:

General ideology: Reactionary, the First Order wing. I was redpilled by Snoke. The tl;dr. version is this: optimize for intelligence, optimize for dark side (As much as possible in a declining galaxy) and select for a complacent population.

Number Two Stunna posted:

If you guys want to understand these guys, why don't you go to one of their subreddits/forums and ask them what they're all about?

This thread is just a bunch of circle-jerking about how awful people who have right-wing opinions are.

Bob le Moche posted:

Number Two Stunna posted:

If you guys want to understand these guys, why don't you go to one of their subreddits/forums and ask them what they're all about?

This thread is just a bunch of circle-jerking about how awful people who have right-wing opinions are.

Woolie Wool posted:

If liberals really had that much in common with reactionaries, reactionaries wouldn't try to silence or murder us every time they get even close to power.

Bob le Moche posted:

laughing at racist jokes feels liberating when you've internalized both the racism and the social pressure to deny it.

Bob le Moche posted:

Ok I'm going to attempt to express some things that I feel might help to better understand the Dark Enlightenment and extreme reactionary movements in general, but bear with me because it might be a bit counter-intuitive to most and I might be approaching this from a somewhat different angle that what I've read so far in this thread.

So where do such ideas come from originally? I feel there's a somewhat mistaken intuition that some hosed up people somewhere in their basement come up with them and spread them on the internet and that they then somehow seep through and contaminate the mainstream culture and "normal" conservative ideology etc from such initial echo-chamber nuclei of extremism.
I really don't see things that way. I propose that neoreaction is actually better understood as a "distilled" form of what is quite simply the dominant ideology of our society. Its origin is not to be found within a few deranged minds but inside the very structure of how our entire civilization and its whole set of institutions are organized. Most people do not really think things through to the extent that proponents of NRx do, and are able to hold completely contradictory beliefs and values about society without ever being put in a context where they have to confront and resolve them. That is, most people actually have already internalized the logic of neoreaction simply by virtue of having existed within contemporary society since birth, but have done so on a completely unconscious level, and in their conscious lives are able to operate always in complete denial about it. The people who turn neoreactionary are those who find themselves in a situation where for whatever reason "not thinking about uncomfortable things too much" is no longer the easiest thing to do.

The set of institutions I'm referring to include things like, the nation-state, the military, the police force, borders, private property, the education system, prisons, the justice system, citizenship, the job market, etc. These things did not always exist, they all appeared in their modern form more or less around the same period of history, they are now a fact of reality pretty much everywhere on the planet whether we like it or not, and we as individual humans have to deal with their existence. These are also all institutions that both liberals and conservatives will defend as being necessary, good, legitimate, etc. Our entire society is organized around them and around the ideological justifications of "individual freedom" and "meritocracy".

Everyone in our society learns pretty early on, by going through the school system, that not only are we not all equal, but that society is everywhere attributing value to us along certain metrics. We are taught that people who get better grades are "better" than people who get bad grades, they will go on in life to be more respected, have more power, etc. They also "deserve" this. This continues in adult life where our value on the job market varies wildly and where some of us are just deemed to be worth more than others by society, to get promoted, etc. Others end up becoming incarcerated and this is also something they "deserve". This is a fundamental fact of existence in class society and is so hegemonic as to be something that we barely ever think about. Most kids are not stupid and they also figure out easily that the value placed upon various human lives tend to be highly correlated with things like race and gender, that there's a clear pattern there. Some "kinds" of people will tend to be successful and others not, some "kinds" of people will tend to be criminals and others not. However what they quickly learn is that you are not allowed to say that out loud. You get heavily punished through social policing if you dare externalize the observation that white men tend to be "better" along the very same values that you are forcefully socialized into accepting. This is taboo and to exist within this society you have to both internalize its hierarchy as legitimate and just, and pretend that its organization is based purely on "merit" and "individual choices" which are things that are constructed to have nothing to do with the context in which someone is born. This is the fundamental contradiction at the core of our ideology. The closer you get to the ideological apparatus, the more important your voice or the better access you have to a public platform, the stronger this taboo become. So if you're condemned to obscurity in a low-paying job where you don't have any contact with the public, nobody really cares that much that you're a huge racist, or that you don't give a gently caress about following the rules, but if you go to university, go into politics, the media, management, etc you have to learn pretty quickly to suppress and hide these feelings you might have about the (actually quite obvious) logic of very the processes that put you there in the first place.

This is why reactionaries complain so much about "political correctness" (or "the cathedral" in NRx terms), they identify this superego pressure to suppress, to live in denial about our own omnipresent racism, and it feels to them like an absurd oppression because they've fully internalized the actual, underlying and unconscious, racist and sexist, values of our society. They cannot stand these contradictions. They see this performance of liberalism as a giant hypocrisy and in that, they are correct. They find pleasure in transgression: laughing at racist jokes feels liberating when you've internalized both the racism and the social pressure to deny it.

Both liberals and reactionaries have accepted the notion that IQ is an objective measurement of something called "intelligence" which is a neutral measure of a person's worth. They also both have accepted the notion that law and order is good and that commiting a crime is bad, that criminals should be put in jail etc. When the reactionary then encounters the statistical fact that white people have a higher IQ than black people on average, or that there are a lot more black people in prison, this takes on the allure of having discovered a hidden knowledge. When the reactionary then sees that liberals are made uncomfortable by those facts and that they'd rather pretend they don't exist or not think about them too hard, the reactionary is vindicated in his belief that he holds some secret truth which is being suppressed by the "cathedral" and it's quasi-religious faith in complete contradictions.
Of course, there is another possible way of resolving these contradiction, and that is to fully reject the very legitimacy of these constructions, of the institutions of power, and by extension the logic of our entire society. To see them as the tools of patriarchy and white supremacy that they are, and to assert that there is nothing good, true, natural or universal about their justificating ideology, that our entire civilization has been constructed to enable the brutal oppression and exploitation of some groups by others. This is something that is quite difficult to do when you have been given any stake at all in the system, as most of us have. If you are anything other than an outright criminal, a self-destructing political radical, or maybe a rare tenured postmodern academic, your entire identity and sense of self-worth, your entire hope for continued existence, is based on the position that you've been given within the system, and climbing its hierarchy is probably what all your desires revolve around in some way or another.
But most people never have to resolve these contradictions at all, it's completely possible to hold them in mind without ever being force to confront them. It is a constant source of anxiety for many liberals for sure, but it's completely possible to live your entire life in denial like that, or selectively picking and choosing what parts of society you reject (the ones you don't have a stake in personally). In some ways living like that is actually a privilege though, it's the situation that liberal professionals and educated people find themselves in. They get to convince themselves both that they're "good people" and better than the stupid redneck racists and sexists, and also that they deserve the position of privilege that they've been given by a society which is fundamentally just and good except for a few "bad apples" or for exceptional "corruption".

As soon as they start being affected directly though, a liberal will usually turn into a reactionary. As soon as their own personal involvement in racist/sexist structures are what's being examined they'll lash out and defend their fragile privileged ego at any costs. As soon as a liberal white male professor starts getting students that ask why 90% of the authors in the syllabus are white males, he'll start writing online op-eds about how safe spaces on campus are destroying free speech or whatever.
Many liberals are happy to self-congratulate and feel superior by making fun of the xenophobe right-wing racists who are afraid of refugees, but ask them if they think borders should be fully open and they'll probably say no, they'll probably defend the idea that borders should exist, that they should be guarded by an armed force, that people born inside them deserve citizenship and the right to vote and state services and people born outside them don't, and they'll make up some story about why all of this is necessary and good while being completely oblivious to the ways this system reproduces the very racism they like to make fun of. What should be done with the people who are willing to risk their lives to cross the border illegally? What happens when oppressed groups are willing to confront the police in large numbers and break the law and risk their lives to liberate themselves and destroy the old society? Good liberals don't think about these questions too much, until they are forced to do it by circumstances, at which point they might very well turn out to be reactionaries.

Maoist Pussy posted:

The Left's transformation into apoplectic morality squad made the rise of a new Alt-Right inevitable.