|
Goon Danton posted:So what is "America is a communist country" actually supposed to mean when you run it through your moldbug decoder ring? It obviously can't mean what it says in normal English. "Politicians in America do things, and sometimes, those things are done for left-wing reasons, or reasons that would have been considered left-wing by long dead people"
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 15:36 |
|
|
# ? May 14, 2024 16:47 |
|
Goon Danton posted:So what is "America is a communist country" actually supposed to mean when you run it through your moldbug decoder ring? It obviously can't mean what it says in normal English. It means something like "a lot of US policies are driven by the same kind of hypocritical pseudo-empathy that drove the policies of communist regimes."
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 18:36 |
|
Silver2195 posted:It means something like "a lot of US policies are driven by the same kind of hypocritical pseudo-empathy that drove the policies of communist regimes." Thank you for the input, Moldbug.
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 18:43 |
|
The Vosgian Beast posted:Thank you for the input, Moldbug. I was explaining what it was supposed to mean. I didn't say it was a helpful way of framing things.
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 18:50 |
|
Goon Danton posted:So what is "America is a communist country" actually supposed to mean when you run it through your moldbug decoder ring? It obviously can't mean what it says in normal English. He spends most of his time arguing not why America is a communist country but rather why you can't say America isn't a communist country, essentially turning the issue into a probatio diabolica. For a long time the closest Moldbug comes to explaining what the hell he actually means is a suggestion that America is somehow the Typhoid Mary of communism: Unqualified Reservations posted:The basic problem with the outside agitator Commie subversion narrative is that it's way too optimistic. Were communism some exotic pest, it would be easy to eradicate. Perhaps we could find some kind of microscopic wasp that kept it in check in its strange foreign homeland. Indeed, the usual pattern with an invasive species is that resistance to it is strongest in its actual homeland. If "Russia and Mexico both had revolutions, therefore America is communist" doesn't convince you, then you're obviously a dirty communist yourself. Thousands of words later, he gets around to making his own argument: Unqualified Reservations posted:And what is communism? As a political formula? Perhaps we can define it, with a nice 20th-century social-science jargon edge, as nonempathic altruism. Or for a sharper pejorative edge, callous altruism. Unqualified Reservations posted:So, for example, in classic Bolshevik communism, who is the revolution for? The workers and peasants. But... in classic Bolshevik communism... who actually makes the revolution? Nobles (Lenin) and Jews (Trotsky), basically. To wit, the groups in Russian society who are in fact most distant - emotionally, culturally, socially - from actual workers and peasants. Unqualified Reservations posted:Once you learn to recognize the distinction between empathic and nonempathic altruism, you'll see it everywhere. Empathic altruism - charity - is simply good. Nonempathic altruism - communism - is simply evil. There's not a whole lot of gray area between good and evil. Evil motivations can certainly, by coincidence, produce good results - but this is an accident, which has little or nothing to do with the supposed "good intentions." The Ultimate Proof That America Is Communist: white people callously deigned to let black people vote
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 19:33 |
|
quote:Heck, for the last 50 years, one of the central purposes of American political life has been advancing the African-American community. And over the last four decades, what has happened to the African-American community? I'll tell you one thing - in every major city in America, there's a burnt-out feral ghetto which, 50-years ago, was a thriving black business district. Bwuaahahahahahahahahahahahaha
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 19:43 |
|
Like can anyone confirm that Moldbug has ever actually seen a black person before, maybe to him they're just weird vaguely bad abstract ideas.
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 19:46 |
|
Parallel Paraplegic posted:Like can anyone confirm that Moldbug has ever actually seen a black person before, maybe to him they're just weird vaguely bad abstract ideas. Freedom is Slavery posted:The fear that someone, somewhere, is exercising power over someone else, is one of the most basic cues of the callous-altruist mentality. Let me kill the master and free the slave. Out of altruism! Not sadism or ambition, of course. My hands are pure.
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 20:09 |
|
quote:But slavery is simply dependence, and the default state of the newly "freed" slave is to be dependent on his new master - you, because you killed the old master. So your sadism itch is scratched, because you get to kill; and your ambition itch is scratched, because you become a slavemaster. So did this guy just base his entire worldview on taking KOTOR2 at face value?
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 20:15 |
|
Parallel Paraplegic posted:Bwuaahahahahahahahahahahahaha I read that and my first response was "You mean like Tulsa?"
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 20:27 |
|
You know, I like Aurini. Not as in 'I think he would be a good human being', but as in he actually loving states, in way fewer words than Moldbug, his ideas. And in that succinctly stated proposition, you can see just how utterly bullshit his ideas are. Moldbug, instead, takes thousands of words to propound on his idiotic ideas. So basically, Aurini would say "I hate niggers." Moldbug would take at least three paragraphs to say the same thing.
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 20:49 |
|
Yeah but if you come right out and say it far fewer people will bother twisting themselves into knots to justify giving you public platforms.
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 21:03 |
|
You really need to flatter the intellects of your rear end in a top hat readership, really tongue the ol' intellectual taint if you will, to get people who think they've arrived at their station in life through logical first principles to unconditionally defend your vigorous public racism.
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 21:18 |
|
Peztopiary posted:You really need to flatter the intellects of your rear end in a top hat readership, really tongue the ol' intellectual taint if you will, to get people who think they've arrived at their station in life through logical first principles to unconditionally defend your vigorous public racism. It's like the good somewhat smug feeling you get out of reading a "hard" book like Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses or homestuck except Moldbug doesn't hide his terrible ideas the way James Joyce hid his fart fetish or whatever his deal was
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 21:27 |
|
^Nothing wrong with loving Homestuck. It's like being a Sanders voter. What you do with your fandom is the question. I dunno, Moldbug isn't the most annoying of the DE people, but his inability to own his racism is sad. At least the HBD people and the other alt-rightists are honest about it.
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 21:39 |
|
Lottery of Babylon posted:The Ultimate Proof That America Is Communist: white people callously deigned to let black people vote To quote Phil Sandifer out of school (from the current draft): quote:And then, as you’d expect, he begins to go through various interpretations to show how they are either obviously idiotic or true. And yet there is one interpretation that, astonishingly, never occurs to him: “America is in some meaningful fashion run according to the philosophical principles of Karl Marx.” In fact, literally none of the thirty uses of the word Marx appear in the essay in question, “Technology, communism, and the Brown Scare.”
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 22:23 |
|
I'm starting to think this Yarvin chap isn't nearly as clever as his purple prose attempts to suggest.
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 22:49 |
|
A White Guy posted:You know, I like Aurini. Not as in 'I think he would be a good human being', but as in he actually loving states, in way fewer words than Moldbug, his ideas. And in that succinctly stated proposition, you can see just how utterly bullshit his ideas are. Moldbug, instead, takes thousands of words to propound on his idiotic ideas. Yeah it took Moldbug 4,160 words to say "I'm a white nationalist ON PAPER"
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 22:59 |
|
Peztopiary posted:^Nothing wrong with loving Homestuck. It's like being a Sanders voter. What you do with your fandom is the question. I dunno, Moldbug isn't the most annoying of the DE people, but his inability to own his racism is sad. At least the HBD people and the other alt-rightists are honest about it. I threw that Homestuck jab in there because there was this incredibly stupid PBS Idea Channel thing titled "Is Homestuck this generation's Ulysses?" or something like that.
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 23:17 |
|
Tesseraction posted:I'm starting to think this Yarvin chap isn't nearly as clever as his purple prose attempts to suggest. I mean he's clever in that he realized that for anyone to take him seriously he had to couch everything he does in impenetrable and put on an air of vague academic-ness, which is more than a lot of people with Very Bad Ideas do
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 23:19 |
|
DStecks posted:The best thing is that the basic admission that white nationalism might have value, even theoretically, is a giant red flag for "has hosed-up views on race", and they think that it isn't. If that makes any sense? Like, they think they can be ambivalent about it, like people who say they like communism on paper but acknowledge it doesn't work, but saying you think white nationalism might be ok basically means you think there's such a thing as a "white nation", which is inherently a racist myth you're buying into. To his, uh, "credit," I'm pretty sure his denying there is a white nation or white Racial Community is exactly what would disqualify him (and some of the other smarter and more prominent neoreactionaries) as a white nationalist. He thinks white people are superior to blacks as a matter of course, and that the Cathedral lying about this is one more incidental proof of its perfidy, but the idea of a "nation" is unacceptably modern = populist = demotist = communist. "White nationalism has value" in that Vaisyas serve as a potential political ally, but ultimately even whites would be best served by having a chip installed in their brain that prevents them from disobeying a direct order from Elon Musk.
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 23:27 |
If communism is so pervasive and all powerful even when it is in retreat except in some national parties of varying levels of actual adherence, perhaps we should join the winning team.
|
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 23:28 |
|
Parallel Paraplegic posted:I mean he's clever in that he realized that for anyone to take him seriously he had to couch everything he does in impenetrable and put on an air of vague academic-ness, which is more than a lot of people with Very Bad Ideas do Well you say that, but then I think of Creationism and Liberty University et al. Basically I think eloquent duncery is becoming the new normal. Among wingnuts, as in.
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 23:33 |
|
Nessus posted:If communism is so pervasive and all powerful even when it is in retreat except in some national parties of varying levels of actual adherence, perhaps we should join the winning team. It's that old joke about the rabbi who only reads anti-Semitic newspapers in order to hear good news about Jewish victories for once.
|
# ? Apr 20, 2016 23:57 |
|
The Vosgian Beast posted:It's that old joke about the rabbi who only reads anti-Semitic newspapers in order to hear good news about Jewish victories for once. Jewish humour is the best. Such as this: quote:Q: Is one permitted to ride in an airplane on the Sabbath?
|
# ? Apr 21, 2016 00:00 |
|
divabot posted:To quote Phil Sandifer out of school (from the current draft): I think this is a manifestation of a weird blind spot Moldbug has (though he's not the only one to have it) where it's assumed that only people from a handful of countries/cultures (in his case the US, the UK, China, and sometimes France and Russia) can have real agency. Marx was a German, ergo Marx cannot have had a real impact on the history of ideas. Edit: Another example of this blind spot is Moldbug's assumption that the Arab Spring was somehow caused by either the US government or the mainstream English-language news media (Edit 2: or by Western NGOs, which is at least superficially more plausible than blaming the New York Times but still ignores the actual causes). Silver2195 has a new favorite as of 00:27 on Apr 21, 2016 |
# ? Apr 21, 2016 00:19 |
|
Silver2195 posted:I think this is a manifestation of a weird blind spot Moldbug has (though he's not the only one to have it) where it's assumed that only people from a handful of countries/cultures (in his case the US, the UK, China, and sometimes France and Russia) can have real agency. Marx was a German, ergo Marx cannot have had a real impact on the history of ideas. Marx lived in the UK for a good period of time and was buried there. He was also a correspondent for an American newspaper that was on the Union side of the Civil War. He even wrote a letter of congratulations to Lincoln. Thus, all of Marx's influence is through the United States, particularly through the Communist Republican Party.
|
# ? Apr 21, 2016 00:23 |
|
Reflections85 posted:Marx lived in the UK for a good period of time and was buried there. He was also a correspondent for an American newspaper that was on the Union side of the Civil War. He even wrote a letter of congratulations to Lincoln. Thus, all of Marx's influence is through the United States, particularly through the Communist Republican Party.
|
# ? Apr 21, 2016 00:31 |
|
Tesseraction posted:Well you say that, but then I think of Creationism and Liberty University et al. Somebody doesn't remember William F. Buckley, Jr. Eloquent duncery has been common among the right for a long while.
|
# ? Apr 21, 2016 02:14 |
I used to read The National Review as an antidote to my ultra-left wing college. Conservative papers have decent cultural sections.Parallel Paraplegic posted:It's like the good somewhat smug feeling you get out of reading a "hard" book like Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses or homestuck except Moldbug doesn't hide his terrible ideas the way James Joyce hid his fart fetish or whatever his deal was I...what? Ulysses is about a zillion things, and some beautiful sentences. Don't compare that to the DE idiots. The only place they intersect is in the chapter where a long-winded anti-Semetic blowhard chases Bloom out of a pub. Though I do enjoy getting lost in long-winded books and essays - Sandifer scratches that itch, and I suspect that Nick Land's pre-DE work will too. Count Chocula has a new favorite as of 10:36 on Apr 21, 2016 |
|
# ? Apr 21, 2016 10:33 |
|
eschaton posted:Somebody doesn't remember William F. Buckley, Jr. I'd say he was the man directly responsible for its normalcy, but he was at least more intelligent than your average NRx.
|
# ? Apr 21, 2016 13:53 |
|
Richard Weaver and Russel Kirk wrote in a style very reminiscent of Buckley; of course going back further you have Moldbug's hero Carlyle. I find the former group way more readable than the latter, but both are very self-consciously stylized.
|
# ? Apr 21, 2016 14:27 |
|
Count Chocula posted:I...what? Ulysses is about a zillion things, and some beautiful sentences. Don't compare that to the DE idiots. The only place they intersect is in the chapter where a long-winded anti-Semetic blowhard chases Bloom out of a pub. I'm not comparing them directly I'm saying he's aiming to give readers the same good feeling you get from reading a hard book but have them tied to his stupid ideas. Also it was a joke.
|
# ? Apr 21, 2016 14:40 |
|
Parallel Paraplegic posted:I threw that Homestuck jab in there because there was this incredibly stupid PBS Idea Channel thing titled "Is Homestuck this generation's Ulysses?" or something like that. Homestuck's segments on Troll Romance are more relevant and applicable to real life than anything Moldbug's ever shat out of his keyboard
|
# ? Apr 21, 2016 14:46 |
|
There's a bit in Foucault's Pendulum where the principal characters are discussing the rules of the Knights Templar (don't drink, fight saracens, be humble, etc, etc). They remark that organizations tend to only codify and write down explicit rules when people are breaking them all the time, and at least one person has broken them in a public or exaggerated way which upsets or embarrasses the people running the group. They then invent a humorous story of a knight who broke all the rules of the Templar in one day. ...Yep. It's pretty funny. Not sure why I suddenly thought of it, though. RIP Umberto Eco.
|
# ? Apr 22, 2016 03:24 |
|
Doc Hawkins posted:...Yep. It's pretty funny. Not sure why I suddenly thought of it, though. RIP Umberto Eco. quote:politics and hobbies, ruined and derailed by inter-sexual drama. Purposeful groups should therefore adopt rules to eliminate sociosexual drama and improve group cohesion. Apparently, men are such drama-llamas that the mere threat of the possible presence of a woman is enough to destroy their social fabric.
|
# ? Apr 22, 2016 03:51 |
|
Fututor Magnus posted:https://twitter.com/AuerbachKeller/status/723241267136700416 I was actually kind of with him for a few tweets, like "yeah all those people that talk about subhuman muslims and whatnot" and then I got to the end and realized he's talking about dudes who get labeled "creepy" and scare away girls, right?
|
# ? Apr 22, 2016 04:42 |
|
David Auerbach posted:There's no such loving thing as an untouchable outside India/Pakistan/Bangladesh you loving fool.
|
# ? Apr 22, 2016 04:44 |
|
|
# ? May 14, 2024 16:47 |
|
In case you guys didn't get the dynamics of it all: https://twitter.com/AuerbachKeller/status/723240305277984768/photo/1 Woolie Wool posted:There's no such loving thing as an untouchable outside India/Pakistan/Bangladesh you loving fool. No, no, it all checks out. Women won't want to associate with the creepy crypto-fascist white dude, it's a sound analogy.
|
# ? Apr 22, 2016 05:14 |