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Yeah there's no such thing as the dark ages. The fall of Rome meant that most of the Roman ways of doing things stopped being practical because they were dependent on a lot of Roman institutions which kind of got annihilated during the collapse of the Empire, what you're left with is the less industrialised approach used throughout most of Europe that wasn't Romanised, but those cultures continued to develop new ways of doing things, sometimes cribbing bits from Rome but also adapting to the limitations of their society. The nominal borders of the Roman empire expanded much faster than its culture did, and while parts of it were quite Romanised, a lot of it was not. Which is further exacerbated by the migrations that were going on during the decline of the western Empire bringing in a bunch of their own ideas about society and technology. In some ways you can look at it as the veneer of Roman-ness being destroyed and the underlying cultures reasserting themselves while drawing from the experiences of living as part of the empire, leaving you with more of a fusion of Roman and native culture and technology. In some ways this was happening even before the fall of the empire because the late Roman empire took a lot of ideas from the people it fought, the legions didn't tromp around with Gladius and Scutum and Lorica Segmentata during the late imperial period, they carried long swords, oval shields, and wore chain mail, because it worked better and was closer to what the locals were making and using already. In either case the Church didn't have much to do with it beyond being one of the few places you'd find books and literacy for quite a long time.
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Jul 30, 2015 15:47
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Is there a rundown of what the things listed in the title of the thread are? Because I've never heard of them before and am having a little trouble piecing it together from the answers given.
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Aug 4, 2015 16:35
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Oh wait that says racial realism, I've been reading it as "radical realism" because that sounds less stupid. From the other thread it looks like it's what you'd get if Tolkien had written Atlas Shrugged and Mein Kampf and then all the terrible tolkienesque fantasy still happened after he died and this is the kindle-only published derivatives of that.
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Aug 4, 2015 16:46
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First reply remarkably prescient, I feel.
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Dec 14, 2015 13:17
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What, as in, you do absolutely what I tell you but I make no pretense of trying to construct a functioning state? Seems straightforward if nothing else.
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Dec 14, 2015 15:23
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Ddraig posted:Still worth reposting because they're hilarious and are a fair and balanced critique of Dark Enlightenment thinkers: 
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Dec 21, 2015 22:58
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In fairness if I had a skull I would probably want to look at it a lot, skulls are cool.
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Dec 21, 2015 23:04
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Chwoka posted:You were born with one Brb figuring out how to get my skull out.
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Dec 21, 2015 23:07
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Helsing posted:If you find yourself repeatedly rearranging the skull's location so that it will feature prominently in your next youtube rant about "the loving niggers" or how American women are "the most decadent sluts since the fall of Rome, going out to get gangbanged every weekend" then it may be time to take stock of your life and how you're spending it. Look if I find myself having to make those arguments I need every bit of help I can get, the entire video is going to be wall to wall skulls with skrillex in the background because gently caress knows nothing I say will be remotely believable.
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Dec 21, 2015 23:27
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I dunno that creeper stare would probably keep me from coming within more than 30 feet of him.
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Dec 22, 2015 16:30
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Violet_Sky posted:From the A/U/G thread in PYF: More to the point how did the friend look at that and think "Yes."
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Dec 22, 2015 20:28
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Deified Data posted:I'm bald and kinda evil-looking as well but I counteract this by dressing and acting like a normal human being, not Kane from C&C. You may be missing a trick there, you can apparently earn a living doing that and get people to go out with you. Also pretending to be Swedish Bandit Keith up there.
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Dec 22, 2015 22:03
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GunnerJ posted:Well, this is why you don't let philosophy students with Viking blood in their veins and a half-baked political agenda get access (somehow??) to warships capable of out-running and out-gunning the worlds' professional navies (again, somehow??????), I guess Tomorrow Never Dies really wasn't a very good film.
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Dec 23, 2015 16:20
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"I wouldn't say I deny the holocaust, I'm just saying you can't prove it." "I'm holocaust agnostic, I'm just asking questions."
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Dec 23, 2015 19:27
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Ddraig posted:Seeing as how they don't usually let the royal babies be seen until their carapace can take root he may be right about more things yet. I thought they had to wait until they could find a suitable human host to sew the starspawn into?
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Dec 23, 2015 20:29
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I dunno if there's much room for "intellectual" xenophobia here in the UK between the EDL/UKIP and the generalized xenophobia inherent in the national discourse.
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Dec 29, 2015 19:52
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Doc Hawkins posted:As opposed to the United States where The US tends to be really good at breeding interestingly insane people whereas I find we tend towards the mundane kind of insanity over here.
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Dec 29, 2015 20:36
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Motto posted:They're just concerned about the "sudden" politicization of media. It's stunning how many of them believe that works containing messages and being colored by the views of their creators is a recent and unusual development, rather than an inherent and crucial part of any creative medium. Everyone knows when you can't detect the politicization of media it's because it wasn't politicized and not because it's completely reinforcing your worldview rather than someone else's.
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Dec 30, 2015 03:48
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Is it really a strawman if you're showing footage of the actual human people saying it? Surely that that point it's straw golemry at least.
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Jan 3, 2016 00:32
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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? Communism. Though I suppose it would be something like a no true scotsman fallacy, whereby every example that falls short of the imagined ideal automatically gets excluded from the list of examples as to retain the idea of the perfect record. Doing that accurately is one thing but when you do it just automatically and without justification, it's probably a no true scotsman. Though as it's applied to state ideologies I guess it would be No True Scotland?
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Jan 7, 2016 00:22
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I would struggle to call the roman empire "graceful" however.
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Jan 7, 2016 03:21
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The unsteady tumble down a very long flight of stairs with a landing in the middle of the roman empire.
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Jan 7, 2016 03:52
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Darth Walrus posted:Futurist Manifesto: Never has speedracer.gif been more appropriate.
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Jan 7, 2016 04:13
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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. 
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Jan 7, 2016 04:29
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I love his work but yeah it's hard not to read it as an extrapolation of his absolute, pant-making GBS threads, mind destroying terror of the concept of race mixing.
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Jan 8, 2016 03:44
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Guavanaut posted:What were his principal arguments against it? All the later opponents of race mixing managed to make it seem like a good thing. Going by his writing that I've read, that mixed race persons will summon the elder gods from their slumber and hasten the inevitable destruction of mankind at the hands of the cold and indifferent cosmos. I have no idea why he didn't like it but he really, really didn't. He was born into a somewhat wealthy family that had a few financial troubles, but I believe he lived most of his life pretty well off. I don't think he ever worked, he seemed to be a lot like his characters, and he really hated foreigners. I get the distinct impression he was very classist as well, very attached to polite society of the twenties, so it might be an extension of that. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 04:01
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Guavanaut posted:I thought you had to make an actual effort for that to happen, like race mixing with fish. It's a recurring theme in his stories that the cultists are always either mixed race fish/lobster/outer god-men or actual normal humans who are mixed race, the bad guys are always a cult full of swarthy foreigners/mixed race people or the bad guy always has servants who are swarthy foreigners/mixed race. Like you might not notice it but seriously almost the entirety of lovecraft's horror stories can be summed up as "holy poo poo I am terrified of miscegenation!" Barring maybe Mountains of Madness. Which is probably one of his stronger books. But yeah otherwise, call of Cthulhu has the cultists as nonwhites, charles dexter ward has the guys collecting nonwhite servants as they become evil. Innsmouth is all about fish loving, dunwich horror features it as the central plot point, the one at martense mansion features both inbred hicks as cannon fodder and a race of CHUDs. And most of the stories have some bit where he laments the passing of high society and social mores to the endless march of modernity and foreign ideas. Basically Charles Dexter Ward is probably somewhat autobiographical in its early stages I think. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 04:12
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Nessus posted:While I can't speculate too much on the inside of his head, it was probably a mixture of "Ray's Choice" of: Ok so yeah he literally is writing about himself at the beginning of Charles Dexter Ward I guess the modern day equivalent would really be something like DE goonlords with a dose of weeaboo fetishism. Obsession with some largely imagined glory of the honourable past when things were just better and a hatred of anything that smacks of progressiveness. Hmm, the idea of a Lovecraft who had the opportunity to read Tolkien is rather terrifying. I can only imagine we'd have gotten some amazing fanfiction out of it.
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Jan 8, 2016 04:25
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Nessus posted:I'll give the old bigot this, most of his stories are about the horror of the inevitable fall and defeat of the stuff he fetishized, at least in some way. He had a sense of humor about it, and I'm pretty sure most of these dudes don't. True, I'm probably being a little harsh on him in that sense. I genuinely do think he writes some really good fiction and if you take the death of the author into account you can read them as some just genuinely gorgeous pieces of horror. He is obviously really invested in his literature and his essay about supernatural horror is a good if rather lexically difficult thing to read (if you think Lovecraft is bad in fiction he is nigh incomprehensible when he gets going, it's amazing) and for the most part he keeps a lot of his overt bigotry out of his stories, they aren't just pages of ranting about the drat blacks being what's wrong with the world. But if you know his position beforehand it's real easy to see how it informs his writing, and you can just as easily read it as a massive allegory for Why Race Mixing Will Destroy Humanity. But yeah he has a weird fatalist streak to him which I guess would be consistent with his fondness for antiquarianism. E: though actually I think I just remembered that he didn't work but his wife did and he sat at home all day trying to get his pulp horror published. Dude's the original goon. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 04:36
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Dapper_Swindler posted:honestly my favorite story of his was Herbert West–Reanimator. which is basically just creepy Frankenstein I'd probably suggest either The Case of Charles Dexter Ward if only because it's something you should read at least twice, because some of the plot points make a lot more sense once you know the ending, it's a really good mystery book that doesn't actually tell you all the answers, but you can figure them out with time. Or At the Mountains of Madness because it's a very good slow building suspense book, very atmospheric. Count Chocula posted:Mountains of Madness is hilarious 'cause you're like 'oh cool, no racism in this one, finally' and then the protagonist spends 30 minutes staring at alien friezes and deciding that some of them were 'degenerate artwork' as opposed to the 'civilized' art in this series of scene from an utterly alien civilization I always got more of a Rome-Greece allusion from that one myself but maybe I'm just being nice. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 04:45
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I admit the whole "fading glory" type of worldview is really weird to me because I associate it most strongly with Tolkien who did an absolutely peerless job with it. I dunno if Tolkien was particularly racist or not, it's easy to read it into his books, but at the same time there's so much other depth to the work that it isn't a focal point really. Also I think he does a much better job of saying "yes everything is always going to poo poo but it's still important to do what you can" which is something I can't help but feel a lot of the turbonerds who buy into this DE nonesense seem to be missing. I think a lot of people have a lot of different reactions to discovering nihilism. Or just coming to the conclusion that the world is perhaps kind of poo poo. I guess that response informs a lot of my interest in fiction, actually, given that I love Tolkien, Lovecraft and Garth Nix as they all can be read as explorations of that idea. But even reading Lovecraft what I mostly got was sadness at the inevitability of the decline. I don't know many popular authors who have a really angry response to the idea, which is to me why Dark Enlightenment people are so weird. They seem like allegedly adult men whose view of the world is what I had when I was 15 and thought that the best response to the word being a bit poo poo was to become an ultradark edgelord accelerationist. It's almost parody, and they take it so seriously. It's the weirdest response to discovering nihilism I've ever seen, and I have no idea how it can persist for so long in one person. It's like their brains just snapped and they started looking to death metal lyrics for life advice or something. The videos of that Aruini guy are so obviously trying to evoke this weird, almost 1930's stylishness mixed with modern pop star rock and roll hedonism. It's almost cargo cultish, like if you wear the trappings of the thing you want you can somehow attain it. I can only comment more on the style than the substance because to be honest I have trouble understanding a lot of the substance of the idea but there's this definite sense of trying to recapture some lost ideal that's just fascinating, if it wasn't so depressing in how it actually ends up being executed.
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Jan 8, 2016 05:02
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Count Chocula posted:I'm not a fan of Tolkien but he wasn't racist or anti-Semetic. I'm pretty nihilist and anti-natalist, and I'm planning on reading Nick Land's old books before he founded NRX. But what that gives me is a sense that nothing matters and a despair because of that, mixed with the sense that I'm/humanity is free to do anything and a seeking for answers in bullshit science. I don't see where the racism comes in, or the social views that resemble a parody of Republicans. Unless it's an attempt to displace that massive fear of death onto an Other - but then I hold with Ernest Becker that the fear of death is at the root of everything. It certainly seems to be at the root of this bollocks. The whole thing smacks of generalized terror and uncertainty of how to deal with it. I mean, fear of the brevity of life is something everyone has to deal with eventually and it's not an easy thing to deal with by any means, I used to have a lot of problems with nihilism when I was younger. But I think I just never found any good answer to it, I can't help but feel that DE as a response to waking up to a lovely world just... doesn't give you an answer without a lot of wilful suspension of disbelief. I guess if you've been raised to buy into racism and stuff already then maybe it's more appealing and fits your view of the world more, but to me I just can't envision getting the answers I wanted when I was younger from this philosophy. In the end I think I just eventually gave up worrying because whether I have an answer or not, spending my life worrying about it isn't going to help. I got too tired and too sick of feeling like poo poo about it and just stopped. I guess I'm lucky because I don't think I could invest the amount of energy these people do into perpetuating the anger at the manifold Other who are responsible for all the things I don't like about my life. I'd never have time for anything else. Going back to Tolkien it seems like a complete surrendering of one's agency which is something that a lot of really good lost glory fiction explores, and generally comes out in favor of not doing that in the face of adversity. It's weird that message just seems to miss or be rejected by some people who I would honestly expect to have been exposed to it. I'd be fascinated to know why they did reject it if so. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 05:23
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I was more thinking in the rather simple sense that the world is very clearly divided into different races and most of the people except the humans are broadly defined by their race. And also the bad guys are the Inscrutible Easterners who live in the desert. Also the elves are magical perfect pretty white guys. If you're looking for it it's easily read but as I say I never really got the impression that Tolkien was racist, just that his books can be read somewhat that way if you want them to. Again as you point out though, there's a lot more to them than that which is the other thing that would make me think that they're a more serious exploration of small c conservative idealism than anything else.
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Jan 8, 2016 06:01
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rudatron posted:I don't think DE is simply a manifestation of frustration or When Nihilism Goes Wrong. That period you describe in your own life OwlFancier sounds more like the angst of just growing up. But I think if there is a correct response to Nihilism it's got to be self-actualization, or at the very least a reorientation towards a subjective humanism. I dunno, maybe I was just lucky in that I personally didn't spend much time being a nihilist, despite being atheist from a very, very young age. I'd actually like you to talk more about it, if you don't mind. What would you like to know? quote:Regardless, I think nihilism is too simplistic an answer. As is frustration, everyone grows up wanting to be an astronaut, yet everyone else grows up out of it. That's all a bit odd to me, I wasn't raised religious and didn't understand what a conscience was until I was a good bit older, so having difficulty with guilt like that is sort of a strange idea. I mean specific guilt yeah that's a thing and generally my response to it would be to make amends, but this kind of generalized guilt that you need a philosophy to overcome is kind of weird. I can't say I think I do enough bad in my life to need that, I've never really wanted to. I guess maybe if you have very warped desires centred around profoundly unethical things? But I would surely expect them to notice that being terrible to women and angry about gays/jews/foreigners/black people/whatever is not really making them happy. None of the people who post their youtube videos of them sitting surrounded by skulls and rationing out their jim beam seem very happy with their lives. I just don't get it, it seems like a really specific and exhibitionist kind of anxiety and depression if it's as you describe. Generally I would only be able to cultivate that if I did it quietly.
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Jan 8, 2016 14:05
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I guess it's just weird because my response to that would be to think "Maybe I could be less racist?" If some idea you hold isn't doing you or anyone else any good, why not change it? It's real hard to see where they'd get the reinforcement of its utility from because they're so public about it. That's why I mean I could only do it quietly, it's a lot easier to hold self-defeating ideas if you don't talk to people about them. Personally as to the nihilism question, I've always been nihilist for as long as I can remember, I remember asking my mum how she dealt with waking up every day knowing you're dying. She got defensive about it and told me to stop thinking about it, not too helpful. So I spent most of my childhood trying to figure out how you stop thinking about it and never had much luck. My problem was mostly that I kept looking for some inherent value, some objective truth that I could hang onto, and nothing ever stuck, couldn't get away with religion because it seemed too self-deluding, I couldn't keep up the pretense. Empiricism is certainly useful but it doesn't give you any comfort. Eventually I think over the course of my life I got to the point where I came to accept the lack of any concrete foundation for a belief system, and then embraced it. I can't really explain how it happened because it sort of just did, in the background, over time, while I was busy worrying about other things. Nowadays I still have the constant reminder of mortality and the certain, everpresent knowledge that nothing means anything and everything will be more or less the same in the end regardless of what any of us do. But I don't see a point in being mopey about it. It is what it is and whether you like it or not it's happening, so try to be happy, because that's far more pleasant. Once I stopped looking for objective value I started seeing subjective value as more important too. All beliefs are founded on nothing but that just means that if one is valid, so are all. Of course many may not stand up to empirical scrutiny which I still have a fondness for, but there's no one Absolute Truth that invalidates all other beliefs, so there's no need to worry that much. I guess that's what makes it hard for me to really understand the viewpoint of stuff like DE, partly because it seems so ardent, as though it's the answer to truly fundamental questions of life, to which I would argue there is no satisfactory answer. And also it's just such a weird viewpoint to take. It's so specific and brash and seems to be centered very heavily around being in conflict with the rest of the world, which just does not seem like the kind of thing I would want as someone in a position of deep personal doubt. I already felt in conflict with the world because of it being kind of lovely. I don't think I could handle my coping philosophy requiring me to be utterly despised by a large portion of the world and to revolve around ranting to people about all the subhuman plebs who are ruining everything. It doesn't seem like it does a very good job of satisfying either immediate tangible contentment or long term philosophical contentment. I get that there may be some aspect of martyrdom to it but just how people manage to keep up that degree of belligerence for so long is beyond me. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 15:25
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Guavanaut posted:Sounds like absurdism, which is an interesting philosophy. Have you read any Camus? I don't think I've read any formal philosophy. Absurdism seems related but not quite it, as I don't reject the possibility of objective meaning as much as I've just never been able to find any and find the search kind of exhausting. I'm not very familiar with Kierkegaard but I would have thought that maybe he might have desired more that people take visceral joy in living as they choose, because that emotion is important to your wellbeing, than in the inherent need to really pick a stance and start beating everyone else around the head with it because doing that in itself is important.
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Jan 8, 2016 16:05
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I guess that makes the Dark Enlightenment somebody's idea of an ideal religion. Moderately terrifying.
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Jan 8, 2016 16:27
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Xae posted:TES lore is really funny to dig into because very obviously some upper middle class kids D&D campaign in the 80s with a ton of racial stereotyping. If I recall correctly the redguards in the original games had some... pretty  racial stat modifiers.Redguards being TES black people.
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Jan 9, 2016 21:57
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Lady Naga posted:They had a positive ability modifier to athletics and a negative ability modifier to speech in Oblivion. I think in daggerfall or arena it was buffs to physical stats and negatives to intelligence.
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Jan 9, 2016 22:01
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It makes more sense in DnD because you are literally dealing with different species, except apparently they can also gently caress each other, but functionally orcs and elves and dwarves are different species, and when you start getting some of the weirder stuff like half-dragons and shardminds and stuff it makes more sense still. But in TES redguards are literally just black people. They have different species in the game with the elves and that but there's also a bunch of human phenotypes which they treat a bit weirdly. More of a problem with TES's application of it than anything.
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Jan 10, 2016 05:03
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