The Vosgian Beast posted:

On the off-chance this is like the TvTropes thread and there's some mentally unbalanced goon considering this: Jesus Christ, do not doxx St_Rev what is even wrong with you?


He's an ex-indie rock dude who left the world of rock music for the world of thought.

Unfortunately his version of thought is a cargo cult version built out of silicon valley buzzwords and LW jargon

https://twitter.com/GabrielDuquette/status/721445668259241984

https://twitter.com/GabrielDuquette/status/721446120740810752


https://twitter.com/GabrielDuquette/status/782625118270984192

ate all the Oreos posted:

So he's a professional That Guy You Know Who Thinks He's Really Deep When He Gets High

I Killed GBS posted:

i don't think rev is a nazi, i think he's just a profoundly sad and small man who is incapable of enjoying anything in life

pookel posted:

It's not that they're Nazis, it's that they're banal, shallow edgelords who don't see why everyone takes this Nazi business so seriously.

Also, the right is convinced that A) Hitler was really a leftist anyway because it says "socialism" right there in the name, and B) leftists think Hitler was worse than Stalin because progs don't really care about genocide, only about racism. (If they cared about genocide they couldn't be socialists, because Stalin murdered millions of people too and he was a socialist, therefore socialism is just as bad, QED.)

Another fun alt-right thing is to wear shirts alluding to Pinochet as a dig at Che T-shirts. It was explained to me that "free helicopter rides" is alt-right signalling, referencing Pinochet's habit of dropping people out of helicopters to murder them. IIRC, he liked to do it to pregnant women. Hilarious!

pookel posted:

It's not so much "trying to offend" as that they're trying to prove that being offended is, in itself, an aggressive act of emotional manipulation. Their game is to be as grossly offensive as possible so that they can accuse you of censorship if you object.

It's basically the geek social fallacy taken to the extreme.

ate all the Oreos posted:

Yeah I've never thought of "edgelords" as trying to offend others, more that they think that it makes them interesting and ~real~ to reject the moral compass they believe society (or their parents or whatever) thinks they should have. Like they're trying to offend a hypothetical person constructed of their subjective interpretation of how the world thinks they should act.

failing forward posted:

They have "figured it out" and the rest of us are sheep.

My favorite DE thinker is Lovecraft. It took me, embarrassingly, 2 years to find him writing about "Western decadence." He was a shut-in for a lot of his life, a virgin (probably) until 34, and as everyone knows, a HUMONGOUS racist. As a mechanistic materialist, he didn't believe in the soul, and the hopeless, existential theme of his writing reminds me so much of some of these men.

(Also "Product of his time" my loving rear end. I bet Poe wasn't a racist. Please don't tell me if you know I will find out one day anyway....)

failing forward posted:

They have "figured it out" and the rest of us are sheep.

My favorite DE thinker is Lovecraft. It took me, embarrassingly, 2 years to find him writing about "Western decadence." He was a shut-in for a lot of his life, a virgin (probably) until 34, and as everyone knows, a HUMONGOUS racist. As a mechanistic materialist, he didn't believe in the soul, and the hopeless, existential theme of his writing reminds me so much of some of these men.

(Also "Product of his time" my loving rear end. I bet Poe wasn't a racist. Please don't tell me if you know I will find out one day anyway....)

failing forward posted:

(Also "Product of his time" my loving rear end. I bet Poe wasn't a racist. Please don't tell me if you know I will find out one day anyway....)

Nessus posted:

Poe was a Southern man from before the Civil War so I'm gonna go ahead and make an assumption. That said, if we throw out everyone who was racist in the past, we will find that history began approximately thirty or forty years ago.

BobHoward posted:

Wanna click this, but I also really don't wanna. Because when I was a teenager I was convinced Starship Troopers was a Great Work, but now... and as interpreted by at-righters...

pr0zac posted:

Starship troopers is an amazing farce of what is current alt-right belief so you should be cool even if they don't get it

neonnoodle posted:

I'm halfway through A Confederacy of Dunces and I wish to thank this thread for making me mentally prepared for it.

quote:

A Confederacy of Hyoomans

"With the breakdown of the Pagan system, the gods of Order, Militancy, and Morality gained ascendancy." Ignatius was writing in his Livejournal.

After a period in which the western world had enjoyed chaos, freedom, unity, and oneness with its Animal Self, there appeared winds of change which spelled evil days ahead. An ill wind blows no one good. Fortuna's wheel had turned upon thr otherkyn, crushing its collarbone, smashing its skull, twisting its tail, puncturing its pelvis, sorrowing its soul. Having once been so high, inner beauty fell so low. What had once been dedicated to the animal soul was now dedicated to Hyoomanity."

"That is rather fine," Ignatius said to himself and continued his hurried typing..

Christian murderers gained control of Europe, calling their insidious gospel "The Enlightenment." The day of the locust was at hand, but from the ashes of Othyrkyn there yet arose no Phoenix. Records tell of a humble and pious peasant, Kyrynxx Proudbreath, who went to town to reveal his draconicity to the lords of the New Order, and was perforce slain for Hyooman purposes that we may call questionable at best. (See Reilly, Ignatius J., Blood on Their Hands: The Crime of It All, A study of some selected abuses amingst sixteenth century Georges, a Monograph, 2 pages, 2000, Rare Book Room, Left Corridor, Third Floor, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans 18, Louisiana. Note: I mailed this singular monograph to the library as a gift; however, I am not really certain that it was ever accepted. It may well have been thrown out because it was only clearly laser-printed upon quality paper.) The gyre had widened; The Great Chain of Being had snapped like so many paper clips strung together by some drooling idiot; death, destruction, anarchy, progress, ambition, and self-improvement were to be the Hyomans' self-chosen fate. And a vicious fate it was to be: now he was faced with the perversion of having to GO TO WORK.

His vision of history temporarily fading, Ignatius added a noose GIF at the bottom of the page. Then he added a 5k jpeg of a revolver and a little box of scarily Photoshopped smoke in which he added the text GAS CHAMBER. He added a general "nightmare" Photoshop filter to all the graphics, and then labeled the journal entry as "APOCALYPSE". When he had finished decorating the page, he saved the comment, adding its wisdom to the mighty Livejournal indictment that was birthed by his martyred knowledge. This had been a very productive morning, he thought. He had not accomplished so much in weeks. Looking at the last 20 entries in his Livejournal, Ignatius thought smugly that within their carefully justified text and wild ASCII fury were the seeds of a magnificent study in comparative history. Very disordered, of course. But one day he would assume the task of editing these fragments of his mentality into a jigsaw puzzle of a very grand design; the completed puzzle would show literate beings the disaster course that history had been taking for the past four centuries. In the five years that he had dedicated to this work, he had produced an average of only six LJ enteries monthly. He could not even remember what he had written in some entries, "checking back" to respond to the comments of the rabble being beneath him. But no matter how carefully he edited and crafted his past statements, honing his keen wit to an obsidian edge, he was limited by the sheer raw genius of his psyche. After all, he thought calmly, Rome was not built in a day.

Ignatius pulled his flannel nightshirt up and looked at his bloated stomach. He often bloated while lying in bed in the morning contemplating the unfortunate turn that events had taken since the Furry Holocaust.. Doris Day and Greyhound Scenicruisers, whenever they came to mind, created an even more rapid expansion of his central region. But since the attempted arrest and the accident, he had been bloating for almost no reason at all, his pyloric valve snapping shut indiscriminately and filling his stomach with trapped gas, gas which had character and being and resented its confinement. He wondered whether his pyloric valve might be trying, Cassandralike, to tell him something. As a medievalist Ignatius believed in the rota Fortunae, or wheel of fortune, a central concept in De Consolatione Philosophiae, the philosophical work which had laid the foundation for medieval thought. Boethius, the late Roman who had written the Consolatione while unjustly imprisoned by the emperor, had said that a blind goddess spins us on a wheel, that our luck comes in cycles. Was the ludicrous attempt to arrest him the beginning of a bad cycle? Was his wheel rapidly spinning downward? The accident was also a bad sign. Ignatius was worried. For all his philosophy, Boethius had still been tortured and killed. Then Ignatius's valve closed again, and he rolled over on his left side to press the valve open.

"Oh, Fortuna, blind, heedless goddess, I am strapped to your wheel," Ignatius belched. "Do not crush me beneath your spokes. Raise me on high, divinity."

"What you mumbling about in there, boy?" his mother asked through the closed door.

"I am praying," Ignatius answered angrily.

"Patrolman Mancuso's coming today to see me about the accident. You better say a little Hail Mary for me, honey."

"Oh, my God," Ignatius muttered.

"I think it's wonderful you praying, babe. I been wondering what you do locked up in there all the time."

"Please go away!" Ignatius screamed. "You're shattering my religious ecstasy."

Bouncing up and down on his side vigorously, Ignatius sensed a belch rising in this throat, but when he expectantly opened his mouth he emitted only a small burp. Still, the bouncing had some physiological effect. Ignatius touched the small erection that was pointing downward into the sheet, held it, and lay still trying to decide what to do. In this position, with the red flannel nightshirt around his chest and his massive stomach sagging into the mattress, he thought somewhat sadly that after eighteen years with his hobby it had become merely a mechanical physical act stripped of the flights of fancy and invention that he had once been able to bring to it. At one time he had almost developed it into an art form, practicing the hobby with the skill and fervor of an artist and philosopher, a scholar and gentleman. There were still hidden in his room several accessories which he had once used, a rubber glove, a piece of fabric from a silk umbrella, a jar of Noxema. Putting them away again after it was all over had eventually grown too depressing.

Ignatius manipulated and concentrated. At last a vision appeared, the familiar figure of the large and devoted collie that had been his pet when he was in high school. "Woof!" Ignatius almost heard Rex say once again. "Woof! Woof! Arf!" Rex looked so lifelike. One ear drooped. He panted. The apparition jumped over a fence and chased a stick that somehow landed in the middle of Ignatius's quilt. As the tan and white fur grew closer, Ignatius's eyes dilated, crossed, and closed, and he lay wanly back among his four pillows, hoping that he had some Kleenex in his room.

Nessus posted:

Poe was a Southern man from before the Civil War so I'm gonna go ahead and make an assumption. That said, if we throw out everyone who was racist in the past, we will find that history began approximately thirty or forty years ago.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

I feel like "edgelord" would mean they're trying to offend when at this point, they're so far from most humans that they've lost sight of the way value judgements matter to the people making them that they have no idea why someone would not want to be friends with a dude who wants black people hung on lamp posts

Race Realists posted:

really wish you stopid libtards would stop projecting your racism. they dont hate blacks or think they're inferior at all

they just, dont want to be around them is all

cuz they bring down property values [insert crime statistics followed with scientific racism here]


EDIT: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/783347230245736448

The Vosgian Beast posted:

He means the book, not the movie

Race Realists posted:

really wish you stopid libtards would stop projecting your racism. they dont hate blacks or think they're inferior at all

they just, dont want to be around them is all

cuz they bring down property values [insert crime statistics followed with scientific racism here]


EDIT: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/783347230245736448

BobHoward posted:

Correct. I tend to forget there is a movie of it. At the time, when enough leaked about the script, I was all "how DARE they take so many liberties with Heinlein", so I never saw it. I should get around to watching it someday, these days I probably would enjoy Verhoeven's piss-take on the fascist themes in ST-the-book.

Race Realists posted:

EDIT: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/783347230245736448

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Peel posted:

I'm a big fan of space colonisation, but I'd have a lot more respect for Musk's talk about it if he was funding research on all the other much more generally important technical obstacles with the same vigor that he makes minor improvements to rocketry (is he? I haven't investigated because all I hear about him doing is minor improvements to rocketry wrapped in adventurous rhetoric).

There's a reasonable argument that the romance of manned spaceflight is an advert for the space program in general even if manned spaceflight isn't yet very practical or important, but it loses its force a little when the rocket romantics have grown up and have billions of dollars to invest and want to waste it on Martian suicide missions.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

When I was a teenager who had seen the movie and not the book, I heard nerds on the internet bitching about how they cut out all the awesome power armor and mini-nukes, so I went to go read the book.

There is one chapter of power armor and mini-nukes, followed by a rant by someone's worst uncle who never gets invited to Thanksgiving anymore for what felt like five billion pages, though I'm sure you knew all this. In summary, watch the movie, never reread the book, it has Neil Patrick Harris as a space nazi

Pomp posted:

The movie was definitely worse for not having revolver style drop ships

divabot posted:

At least he makes nice cars.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

When I was a teenager who had seen the movie and not the book, I heard nerds on the internet bitching about how they cut out all the awesome power armor and mini-nukes, so I went to go read the book.

There is one chapter of power armor and mini-nukes, followed by a rant by someone's worst uncle who never gets invited to Thanksgiving anymore for what felt like five billion pages, though I'm sure you knew all this. In summary, watch the movie, never reread the book, it has Neil Patrick Harris as a space nazi

The Vosgian Beast posted:

When I was a teenager who had seen the movie and not the book, I heard nerds on the internet bitching about how they cut out all the awesome power armor and mini-nukes, so I went to go read the book.

There is one chapter of power armor and mini-nukes, followed by a rant by someone's worst uncle who never gets invited to Thanksgiving anymore for what felt like five billion pages, though I'm sure you knew all this. In summary, watch the movie, never reread the book, it has Neil Patrick Harris as a space nazi

BobHoward posted:

In its defense, Starship Troopers is pretty short so the 90% of it which is an extended rant isn't that long. And Heinlein is vastly more readable and entertaining while ranting than, say, Ayn Rand.

These are pretty weak defenses aren't they.