220
we're not Nazis btw
(awful.systems)
Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
It’s true though. They’re not nazis. They’re incapable of being fired by any fundamentally political or spiritual ideals, no matter how ultimately black and nihilistic, at all. Even if these people were full-throated card-carrying members of the American Nazi party marching through Times Square with a swastika flag throwing out copies of Der Sturmer from a Panzer tank they wouldn’t be nazis. The fact is that they’re just the purest distillation of 20th-21st century media culture yet: they’re so utterly saturated in media that the only choice they’ve made, the only choice available to them, was whether to lean into the goodie or the baddie vibe, and they plumped for “baddie” because it suited their contrarian aesthetic and then, without even leaving a ripple on the surface, they slipped into the role and inhabited it so thoroughly that it is, literally, indistinguishable from who they are.
These people are nothing less, and 100% nothing more, than your childish glee at getting to play the villain in an RPG.
I’m saying this goes further!
Actually I feel kind of irked that this reply seems to just miss the part at the end of the paragraph that says “it is, literally, indistinguishable from who they are”
I didn't miss it. I just don't see any need to be elaborate about the word nazi, although I do appreciate what a crushingly insulting description of them you gave
Scholars of fascism and nazism do it all the time! The target of quotes like that is supposed to be those who deliberately muddy the waters. The “call a nazi a nazi” principle is a blunt instrument, and there are other tools in the anti-nazi kit.
[some hours later…] ah, the quote is from AR Moxon, whom I happen to know is both (a) not remotely averse to going deeper on what makes the nazis, (b) distinctly averse to not going deeper
Paraphrasing Santayana, we must understand why people become fascist, or else we will not understand how to prevent ourselves from making the same mistakes of dehumanization and black-and-white reasoning which characterize their piss-poor attempts at logic.