Writing that last post involved looking up Nazi mystic Savitri Devi again, and I had forgotten that she wrote a book about … her favorite cats

She remained a long time leaning over the low verandah wall, looking into the dark courtyard where the cat had disappeared. “My poor, beautiful puss,” she kept on thinking; “you don’t know where you are running!” An insurmountable feeling of powerlessness oppressed her. “Every animal, every plant, has its destiny, like every person and every kingdom,” she reflected; destiny, its destiny: the mathematical result of millions of former lives, that nothing can change. I have done my best. Now go your way, my poor furry sphinx! Go your way, since you must — in order to live and learn, as we all do!”

And she suddenly remembered the war that was taking a bad turn — now in September, 1943 — and she thought of the thousands of men and women of good Nordic blood, enemies of National Socialist Germany, who were also “going their way,” the way of perdition, deaf to the Führer’s call. And tears welled up to her eyes as the feeling of utter powerlessness grabbed her once more.

uncrediblehallq:

tanadrin:

taymonbeal:

ozymandias271:

I am increasingly coming to believe that “spiritual abuse” is a much better term for the thing than “cult” is. 

A lot of times people use “cult” to mean both “this group causes harm” and “this group is really weird.” Spiritual abuse keeps the focus squarely where it belongs– on the harm. 

Spiritual abuse is less all-or-nothing. A thing either Is or Is Not a cult. On the other hand, you can be spiritually abused in the context of Catholicism even though Catholicism is not a cult. Instead of asking “is this thing a cult?” we can ask more sensible questions like “how much spiritual abuse is there in this group?” and “what beliefs of this group provide cover to spiritual abusers, and how?” In addition, this allows us to help spiritual abuse survivors who were abused in the context of major religions. 

Spiritual abuse draws out the similarities with interpersonal abuse in a way that I think is very helpful for analysis. 

Spiritual abuse has no connection to the awful Christian countercult movement. 

One limitation of spiritual abuse is that it is difficult to apply to, say, Objectivism, because Objectivism is not a spirituality. Perhaps consider changing the name to “ideological abuse”?

uncrediblehallq:

“Ideological abuse” also works better for describing, like, LessWrong.

Wait, when has Less Wrong been ideologically abusive?

“Yudkowsky using his critics’ health problems to strong-arm them into deleting their criticism of him. Yudkowsky telling people if they don’t find his views obviously true, they just must not have high enough g-factor and it should teach them how all their smart friends aren’t up to the standards of LessWrong. Things like that.”

Do you have specific examples/context for these?

For the latter, this is what I’m talking about:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2l0/should_i_believe_what_the_siai_claims/2f14

For the former, I could give a link but I’m hesitant to. The person in question was being targeted for online harrassment by Yudkowsky’s followers, and I don’t want to be responsible for sending any more hate his way.

I’m pretty sure I know the story in the former case, and –

uh, well, isn’t this all a pretty routine example of people being kind-of-dickish to one another on the internet?  Not ideal, but not worse than the sort of thing that happens every day on tumblr to people who have fallen out of favor with some social group or other.  Comparing that to the sort of thing that happened between Rand and her followers seems a few orders of magnitude off.  (”A guy got some internet hate from an online social group” is not exactly, uh, thought control, at least not outside of a broader framework of manipulated behavior.)

In what way is this not a rhetorical trick along the lines of, say, “my school principal uses rhetoric to defend authoritarian policies, much like Hitler”?

(via uncrediblehallq)

nostalgebraist:

nyan sandwich has a tumblr?  oh for fuck’s sake

just keep in mind the sort of stuff this person writes over at his own blog when deciding whether arguing with him is a worthwhile use of time, intellectually or even in terms of entertainment value

OK, to make this more explicit: the OP of the “Male Bias in Rationality” post is a neo-reactionary who unironically writes about things like how the neo-reactionary movement can take cues from Nazism, or how it makes sense for parts of it to exclude “women, fatties, degenerates, and whatnot.”

I mention this not in the spirit of a “this person is problematic” SJ recipts type post, but to point out that this person’s basic preconceptions are vastly different from those of the people who are responding to the post or reblogging the responses.

I can’t imagine any meaningful, valuable back-and-forth happening between that OP and those responders without one or both sides having some big philosophical epiphany, which is not going to happen.  Conversationally, this person is a waste of time to you guys and you guys are a waste of time to him.

aguycalledjohn replied to your post: ozymandias271: neoreactionaries are h…

I still don’t get the connected between the relatively reasonable “demoracy has issues lets have something better and more authoritarian” and “ewwww sex deviants icky!”

As I mentioned yesterday, I think neoreaction makes much, much more sense if you imagine that it isn’t about thinking through ideas, it’s about identifying with the far right in a general sense (out of a desire to feel edgy / shocking / superior / etc).  There are a lot of different ideas on the far right, not all of which are even compatible; neoreaction is about all of them at once, because it’s specifically about thinking of yourself as “far right,” not about any of the individual ideas packed into the concept of the “far right.”

It’s very telling, for instance, that that guy I linked was citing the Nazis as a positive example.  That’s something you almost never see people do in ordinary political conversation.  Usually, unless someone is a literal neo-Nazi (which these people aren’t), they think of Nazism as a clear, unequivocal failure/tragedy that is something their ideology must take pains to avoid and distance themselves from.  There isn’t really a middle ground there.  Nazism is one of those things that looks terrible except from the inside; either you sign onto it wholesale, or you realize how horrible it is.  The fact that this guy is citing Nazis casually as (roughly) “people we might want to take some ideas from” suggests that none of this is proceeding according to anything like ordinary moral reasoning.  These people are not trying to figure out what is best; they’re trying to figure out which metaphorical outfits will most effectively shock their metaphorical parents.

That’s the only way to make sense of any of this.  The more I read of it, the less it looks like sincere thinking about politics.  (I was actually less down on neoreactionaries when everything I knew about them came from the Anti-Reactionary FAQ, which made them sound sincere and possibly reasonable, just very confused.  Then I actually starting reading them and realized they were worse than that)

ozymandias271:

neoreactionaries are having a hilarious fight right now

AFAICT some people are objecting to the ex-Occupy Wall Street trans lady neoreacto who wants the CEO of Google to be dictator on account of she is a sexual deviant and has lefty friends

I think Anissimov is just sad that she’s more cyberpunk than he is 

I’m reading a post about this and it is Poe’s Lawing my brain to pulp

On the other hand, if we are an explicitly right-wing activist movement, it makes sense to exclude people based on who they are. If you want to join the Nazi party, you gotta understand that you can’t have jewish friends anymore, and you especially can’t be a jew. I get it. There are good reasons to draw such boundaries, and for any actual organization associated with NR, I fully support excluding women, fatties, degenerates, and whatnot when that seems like a good idea.

“I want to be evil, sure.  But which classic archetypes of evil should I follow?  It’s a question we should all be asking ourselves”

(via bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190)