neonnoodle posted:

Chesterton had a huge influence on both Tolkein and C.S. Lewis, and Chesterton (and Belloc)'s Catholic socialism was pretty compatible with monarchy. Not coincidentally, Chesterton and Belloc were also xenophobes who thought the influx of ethnic immigrants to Britain, combined with evil technological capitalism and banking, was going to ruin their pastoral fairyland.

edit:
This stuff works great if you're a Tory (like the article you posted gets into), but it's completely antithetical to American values. David Brin has a nice essay series about how awful the values of LOtR and even Star Wars are.

I'm trying to remember who it was who observed that in genre fiction, high fantasy has always been the domain of Christianity and European ethnic identity, and conversely sci-fi is dominated by assimilated Jews. The point being that sci-fi embraces a metropolitan, technological, secular and democratic future ideal that is very much in line with the sorts of American dream stuff that brought Jews to the US. It's reformist and progressive by its nature, even when it's dystopian, because the dystopia is usually a critique of lower social states like fascism. High fantasy on the other hand is nostalgic about a return to a social order where white kings, queens and knights literally lorded over everyone else by divine right.

The Time Dissolver posted:

Iron Dream was a miserable slog that makes its point in about 20 pages but just goes on and on.

Merdifex posted:

Funny thing that Scott Alexander had some good words to say about T-N Coates on Tumblr, I didn't closer, but I bet NRx isn't happy. He also called him a good writer, being probably one of the few people who would praise Coates's writing vs. his content.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Gene Ray was more likable than most of these people, because no one took him seriously

Asclepius Hot Rod posted:

Oh. My. That accent is...god awful! Since the trans-Atlantic accent is practically dead in the US and only heard in old movies and radio shows, he had to CHOOSE to speak that way. Such an enlightened individual indeed!

His love of Rome and the fact that he is a lawyer reminds me of someone who posted in the Roman/Greek Ask/Tell thread several years ago. Dude was convinced that the "Old Ways" were superior to modern life and that he would have been an aristocrat under the old Roman system. I wonder if they are the same person.

Terrible Opinions posted:

I could see the value of a long-form article because it wasn't just Nazis they were trying to escape, but literally every other movement and activity that Dark Enlightenment idealizes. Runaway capitalism, non-Nazi fascists, industrialization specifically the industrialization of war, futurists, military monarchs, etc were all things specifically pointed to as absolute evils in early twentieth century romanticism because it was all inspired by WW1 and its immediate aftermath.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

There is not a thread on SA immune to the Fallout curse.

Munin posted:

I've been listening to this very good set of podcasts on the French Revolution and that sentiment is very much present there.

Woolie Wool posted:

Now you know what "purity balls" are for.

Dr. Video Games 0081 posted:

What's the best superhero comic? Final Crisis?

divabot posted:

please stop talking about race and instead talk about RED TIDDAY UP WHITE TIDDAY DOWN again

no hold on

Cingulate posted:

Why do you assume the SD of Haitian IQ is 15?

Next assignment: why should you not have thought so?

(I'm not defending the original statement, which was probably also made by a statistically illiterate person.)

Cingulate posted:

Whose agenda? This ESR person? I don't know, probably something related to taxes and government trying to help the disenfranchised?
In the long run, people's agendas matter much less than truth.

Cingulate posted:

Can you ask that a bit more precisely? (What would what imply for what?)

Cingulate posted:

I bet STEM people are more progressive on basically every issue than fair comparison groups (e.g., matched for gender and age). To phrase the same point differently: thinking computers will solve all the world's problems is a lot better than thinking guns will.

Count Chocula posted:

I dunno how you get from something so simple into racism. I guess I could start my own antinatalist site or group, but there's no point - I'd just alienate people, and it's not like philosophy will make people stop having kids.

Count Chocula posted:

It's not 'some people', though. It's 'nobody should be born'. It's 'birth guarantees death'.

Doc Hawkins posted:

You should see him when he gets serious.

Cingulate posted:

cuck

divabot posted:

Yudkowsky fellation in Scientific American Blogs. None of his opinions have changed in the years since the Sequences. He's also kind enough to directly state that giving him money for AI pseudoscience is ridiculously more important than mosquito nets, you plebs.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Check his rap sheet.

divabot posted:

Just recorded 75 min of Eruditorium Press podcast with Phil Sandifer to plug Neoreaction a Basilisk. Hopefully I didn’t babble or talk over him too much.

Skype is the correct way to make international calls. Couldn’t find the USB soundcard to plug the professional quality microphone into, so I did the phone call on … my phone. Which means I got to put software on my phone to turn it into a phone. Quality not great but not horrendous. It’ll be good enough, Phil thinks.

I’ve known Phil since like 2004 and we’ve never spoken before. We conversed marvellously and sparklingly. If we ever make it down a pub together it will need to be recorded for posterity and profit.

I won’t spoiler the podcast (except to say that red tidday UP got a few minutes), but we hope it will entertain and inform. And it should be vital and informative material, particularly for rationalists trying to work out how to hate the book accurately, let alone how to hate me accurately. A hopefully useful contribution to sneer culture.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SUWK_pWrbw

Tesseraction posted:

What does 'steelmanning' mean by the way?

Heresiarch posted:

When the hell did Pando stop being just a bunch of press releases?

It's still garbage but it's different garbage, I wonder what happened.

Count Chocula posted:

Are there any good non-rear end in a top hat/NRX adjacent sites for nihilism and antinatalism?

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Count Chocula posted:

They should just embrace the 60s/70s setting and make the freaky New Wave Sci-fi show TOS was always straining to be. Totally trippy and queer.

pookel posted:

I just realized that Scott Alexander apparently learned how to write on TVTropes.

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

Harry Potter and The fart noises seems very bad op. As does yud

The Vosgian Beast posted:

HPMOR is so bad that I legitimately can't even get through Let's Reads of it or whatever they're called.

I have no idea why people bother arguing over whether it's scientifically accurate, or really rational, when just on a basic page-to-page basis it's the worst thing ever

Jack of Hearts posted:

I think it's kinda fascinating, because someone has created a didactic philosophical "novel," with an actual fan base, worse that Atlas Shrugged itself.

Avenging_Mikon posted:

Found a guy similar to hbomb, and this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBcLJR-zooA
Helped me realize Stefan and Peter Molyneux are not the same person.

Curvature of Earth posted:

From what I've picked up, SA peaked around 2005. It's userbase was probably mostly college students, and only ten years have passed since then. Late twenties to early thirties is hardly "old as balls".

If you want old, you'll need to go to LinkedIn.





Feel free to crack jokes about the unique age/horrifying gender distributions of Hacker News!

If I had to guess which of these sites best represents SomethingAwful's age skew, I'd say Hi5 (a site I've never heard of outside these charts). No idea where we'd fall in gender distribution.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Here's the latest from Mister Mean-Spirited, a man so edgy, he hasn't been able to touch anyone in years https://mister-mean-spirited.blogspot.com/2016/07/it-is-time-for-backlash.html

Tesseraction posted:

Milo once again reminding us we should def. take him seriously

https://twitter.com/Mobute/status/753828087318532096