Let no one reduce us to the status of ascetics. There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought.
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Oct 9, 2018 • 28 tweets • 5 min read
Yesterday I was reading about the ideas of Girard. His first big idea is mimetic desire: when you look for the source of your desires you find that most of them are imitative; you desire them because you see other people desiring them
Mimetic rivalry: If you have a mentor or a leader, you ape his desires, and especially because he is above you, he becomes a model for mimetic desire. This converts him into a rival, a competitor
Oct 6, 2018 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
I have been asking myself, what, precisely, is the dark enlightenment? As with most names of ideas in our strange little corner of the world, the name has a certain cringey edgelordy quality, much like the words “cringey” and “edgelordy”
On top of that it’s an oxymoron, made possible only by the fact that the word “enlightenment” has lost all metaphorical valence. But nonetheless it captures something important
Oct 4, 2018 • 27 tweets • 4 min read
Let’s take a little break, let’s have some lighter fare; video games.
But first, my brethren, let us pray:
Oh lord, if it means having a house and a steady job and 2.5 kids in a heteropatriarchally normative society, then please please please turn me into an NPC
I made free to play mobile games professionally for a number of years, and as a child I did almost nothing but game. These are my qualifications. I didn’t write this out of antipathy to gamers, I was only able to write it because I used to be one
Oct 2, 2018 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
Nietzsche was the first and greatest Feminist! Truly! I will reveal this truth to you now. Who could forget the opening line of Beyond Good and Evil, wherein the old philologist says it plainly: SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman--what then?
That Nietzsche himself goes on to speak from a masculine perspective in no way detracts from his feminism, for he was the progenitor of all of "postmodern" thought, and without him there could have been no Foucault, or Derrida, or Deleuze
Sep 29, 2018 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
The truth is sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. Flags, nations, armies, and banks get a lot of people aroused.
The libido does not need to be de-sexualised, sublimated, or to go by way of metamorphoses in order to invest economic or political factors. --D&G
Sep 27, 2018 • 22 tweets • 5 min read
Any time you draw a line, someone will accuse you of reductionism. "It's not a binary, man, it's a spectrum". My models allow for gradients of being, but when people play the binary/spectrum game, they aren't seeking clarity, they're seeking blurriness
Anti-reductionism fits with the "man the sly rule bender" hypothesis. Too much clarity makes hypocrisy too difficult, and we instinctively seek room for hypocrisy, it's the water in which we swim. Unprincipled exceptions are good, they are vital atom of social order
Sep 25, 2018 • 20 tweets • 3 min read
My friends, I have had some overtly political words for you lately, and I regret that I felt a need to speak of those things. I would much rather live in a world where no one could be persecuted for expressing any viewpoint, but I cannot imagine that world will ever come to be
I often think of how twitter is almost perfectly structured to create arguments: this is its accidental genius, and the source of its popularity.
Sep 23, 2018 • 23 tweets • 4 min read
An intellectual Turing test is when a person on the right tries to pass for a person on the left, or vice versa. We have long observed that most rightists can pass an intellectual Turing test, and most leftists can’t
This is not because of any innate tendencies, but because the consequences of failing the test are asymmetrical. My honest views on most topics could make my professional life very difficult
Sep 20, 2018 • 34 tweets • 5 min read
The greatest misunderstanding in the history of morality is that “selfish” motives taint actions with immorality
Altruism, selflessness, is not a virtue, not even a little bit. It’s a vice, and it’s going to be the end of us
Doing things that have no benefit to you isn’t noble or admirable; it’s facile and reckless.
Sep 16, 2018 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
It's been several months since I was the object of anyone's online hatred. I find it edifying; once it was the exclusive privilege of kings and nobles to be hated by a mob, but now even someone as common as I can experience it
Truly we are living in an age of luxury!
I like to consider these things at the personal level. Someone sends out a tweet you dislike. What is the motivation of a person who quote retweets it out of anger? What causes that anger?
The NPC question has reached critical mass. What's an NPC, how do I know if I am one, how dare you presume to call people NPCs? NPCs come from RPGs, they are "non-player characters", passive manikins with finite, scripted behaviors
An NPC is, variously, a person with no inner monologue, a person who does not conceive of their life in terms of narrativity, or, in the parlance of our time, a basic bitch. And yes, the world is full of them.
Sep 13, 2018 • 31 tweets • 6 min read
These days, it seems that men and women hate each other. When I speak to them in person, they conceal it, but in virtual spaces, where one is free of watchful eyes, where only strangers hear us, then we let down our guard, and say the base truths of our nature
I think some of you, many of you, still have not internalized the revelation of "hellbaked", and if there is one thing, only one, that I impress upon you with this account, it is that.
Any sufficiently complex book can be a Bible. A complex book is a mirror, and as you return to the same book over and over, you are glancing into a mirror, Narcissus looking at his reflection.
The same book looks different to you as years pass; your reflection changes as you grow older, and you gain more experience.
Sep 9, 2018 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
As I have said before there is nothing toxic about masculinity, and yet, and yet, my friends, there are many things that men do that are shall we say less than ideal, things that are hurtful to women, and shall we not call those things “toxic” ?
I have been driving towards a model of self-bootstrapping idea models, mental maps that draw themselves, whole ideological edifices that unfold in the mind from a few words. Model seeds.
I was talking about this with @gritcult the other day, what does it mean to be human? Obviously the question is meaningless if you view it from the wrong zoom level, but supposing the nature of Man could take a walk in mind space, what are the boundaries of his kingdom?
The human condition is tension—tension between what one will do and what one ought to do, tension between the animal and the machine, tension between society and self, tension between man and woman, tension between heart and head
Sep 3, 2018 • 30 tweets • 4 min read
A big difference between the right and the left is an acknowledgement that there are limits to the malleability of the world around us
The leftist imagines utopia but utopia is impossible whether on Marxist or cultural Marxist grounds, though for different reasons. At root the leftist seems to think that good intentions can reshape the world.
Sep 1, 2018 • 38 tweets • 3 min read
One liners, inspired by that @yungdeleuze thread
The idea that ugly people have inner beauty is largely a myth
Aug 29, 2018 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
Today my friends I will preach to you about INEQUALITY, and I am going to explain why inequality is a virtue, and why we should cultivate inequality, embrace inequality, strive for inequality
When we look around us and we meet our fellow man (and woman!) what drama do we see played out again and again but the tragedy of aimlessness and nihilism? The other day a friend said to me, "I am basically a nihilist. I smoke weed and drink and fuck. I have nothing to live for"
Aug 27, 2018 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
When you know the name of a spirit you can command it. The spirit world, the occult world, is in truth the world of words and ideas. What is a spirit? A virtual thing, in the body, yes, of the body, but also somehow ephemeral, made of invisible things, words and perceptions
Dualistic and gnostic worldviews are perennially popular for this reason; they describe something true, even if it is not the whole truth, or the most useful truth; you are a body, as Allan Watts said, but this is only shocking or revelatory because you feel you are more
Aug 24, 2018 • 26 tweets • 6 min read
Being bullied is good for boys, being mocked by peers triggers hormesis, when young boys fight with each other it galvanizes them. Being too emotional IS weakness, because emotion clouds the mind. Being powerful is a virtue and being weak is a sin.
Young boys antagonize each other because it is low-stakes training for adult life, which is dangerous, and where there is no protective parent nearby to make sure things don't get out of hand. It does teach men to defend themselves, and this is good, the world is dangerous
Aug 21, 2018 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
No nuanced and thoughtful words survive first contact with a person of average intelligence.
A group of people is slightly smarter than its dumbest member
Nuanced/thoughtful words cannot survive in the metamind of a group of people
The above is a slight exaggeration, in part because of the same effect it tries to describe.
In order for an idea to disseminate, it must be unequivocal.
Simplicity/complexity is not the only limiting axis.
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