YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

I’m not massively invested one way or the other in your refusal to reply because I violated rules I didn’t know existed that you didn’t explain and which don’t make any sense to me

I guess I can edit the original comment to ALSO put…explanatory text?…in a NSFW box

Well I’m not really critiquing his writing style. I’m using a reasonably complementary analysis of his writing style to sternly criticise his thought. That means I fundamentally disagree with your own paragraph in praise of his thought, whereas I actually disagree with you that his writing is poor - I think he’s an intelligent and effective writer.

I am going to state my well-worn opinion that TLP doesn’t do that, he doesn’t have a particularly good grip on how narcissists think, certainly doesn’t say anything that could productively grapple with narcissism, is a boring asshole, and is shit at his job. But his style is incredibly flattering to the reader’s pessimism. He knows how to tell you you’re getting the good shit nobody else will give you - it’s just that it isn’t particularly good shit.

Check out Section III of your classic.

What have you learned so far? Do you think you've understood?

You heard the story, you heard the words, but your mind unheard it and replaced it with something else. Even after I tell you this, you'll have trouble remembering it.

You think Narcissus was so in love with himself that he couldn't love anyone else. But that's not what happened, the story clearly tells it in the reverse: he never loved anyone and then he fell in love with himself. Do you see? Because he never loved anyone, he fell in love with himself. That was Narcissus's punishment.

You thought Narcissus rejected all those people because he was in love with himself, but he rejected them all before he loved himself. Loved himself? Do you think Narcissus rejected them because he thought he was better than them? Or better looking? How would he have known he was so beautiful? He didn't even recognize his own reflection! He rejected all those people because they loved him.

What does he do with that passage? It’s a numbered section so it must be important! He bullies you. Or rather, he bullies somebody. But of course, you DID read sections I and II. So you know that in the last sentence of Section II he’s cleverly turned the tables on the traditional interpretation of the story, a point he goes on to reiterate at the end of this Section III. But he’s planted in your mind one of two ideas, depending on what kind of reader you are (a) if you’re a pliable reader, you might question whether you REALLY got it without being told a second time, (b) if you’re a little more self-confident, now it occurs to you that there IS another kind of reader - not nearly as careful as you are - to whom Section III DOES apply.

What effect does this have? Primarily, it’s giving you the idea that TLP is the smart one in the room. The straight talker who keeps people on their toes and makes them pay attention.

But what’s true in his reversal isn’t actually that clever, it’s actually just this:

if no one ever seems right for you, and then the one person who does seem right doesn't want you, then the problem isn't the person, the problem is you

Now if I had told you this banal truism in that one sentence, and then added to it the heavy implication that you - and everybody else you know - is a pitiable narcissist who needs to read a lot more blog posts to get well, you might be tempted to say I was (a) an arsehole, (b) going a bit overboard with the narcissism thing.

You might not be tempted to read the other 7 or 8 sections of my post.

This stuff has real consequences. TLP’s particular view puts such banal truisms on a foundation of reactionary masculinism and pessimism. You are fallen, and you - you pitiable narcissist - need to be SHAKED BY THE THROAT to cure you of your narcissism. Well I am here to tell you that that’s wrong. Perhaps it works for this person or other, or they THINK it works for them because it flatters their own aspiraingly muscular pessimism, but by and large it doesn’t. By and large, what works for people is communication, community, and connection.

And he makes it sound, if you really twist it apart, like that’s what he’s telling you works. But he isn’t! He’s telling you to eat what you’re given and forget entirely about what you thought you wanted.

He is RIGHT that nothing is never not about us. But that doesn’t make us narcissists. That sets up an implied standard that he doesn’t state outright because it’s ludicrous: in order to not be a narcissist, on this view, you would have to never consider yourself in your own choices. Those choices, by the way, which are the only choices in the universe over which you have any control! It’s funny that we’re doing this in a thread about slave morality, because I would hazard that at the root of TLP’s pessimism (re: narcissism) is the impossibly high standard for self-sacrifice set by Christianity - a standard I have personally seen bring many people to their knees (and that is, of course, another criticism of TLP: to take him at his word is to learn how to punish yourself into oblivion).

If it helps you on your way to those things to be bullied now and again, fine, and I’ve certainly seen that work on a temporary basis, but TLP’s panacea stops at the surface and takes no interest in the deeper person. Of course it does, he’s doing a Hunter Thompson bit!

Nietzsche doesn’t “speculate” that slave morality kicked off with the Jews because they were a particularly oppressed group, and really got going under Christianity. He states it outright, and he doesn’t care whether any oppressed group could have done the same. He interprets the known history of Christian and Jewish morality as being the history of “slave morality” and calls it “genealogy” - it isn’t an economic argument.

That’s all I’ve got, I don’t care.

Jerking it for hours in an empty hotel room, bathed in the natural understanding that at home your partner is doing the same

You guys aren’t getting it. It’s like what I said in another comment about how he’ll just “straight up tell you” and you don’t need to guess what he thinks about black people. He does think the problem with Nazi Germany is that, amongst other things, they didn’t have a big enough PR budget. That’s his whole thing! His whole idea here is to tell you that genocide is good in the service of a well-run dictatorship!

This isn’t an even a “let me guess” situation, Yarvin’s whole innovation is that he will just straight up tell you

How is this guy so renowned?

His rich audience are also stupid

while dB is a more objective measure of pressure level.

Quibble: dB is not an objective measure, nor does it purport to be. It uses an objective yardstick (pressure) but it is scaled for hearing according to an approximation of subjective experiences (hearing) of pressure.

I’d also strongly suggest that not only “can” the frequency response measured off the TV be false, it will be false. It’s not just that TV sound has been highly processed, there’s just no way that the audio equipment a news crew uses picks up anything like the true sound of an environment, especially not the sort of full-spectrum noise emitted by an industrial compound. Of most interest here is that the signal picked up by those mics is liable to drop off somewhere below the range of human speech, whereas industrial equipment like that is liable to have big peaks beneath those frequencies and further, descending well past 20Hz (the bottom end of human hearing).

Persistent low frequency and sub-sonic noise is associated with severe mental distress and physical ailments.

In fact this is why it’s important to recognise the subjectivity of the decibels measure: (not only because) the body/brain responds differentially to frequencies across the spectrum, and at different volumes. It also responds according to all sorts of other variables, and these can’t really be untied from the question of noise level. Persistence, locatibility, perceived subjective control of one’s own aural environment - all of these are fundamentally tied to both the “physical” and “psychological” effects of hearing (insofar as these can be untied).

Some of the symptoms described in the article (nausea, vertigo, fainting, panic attacks) can be the result of all of these variables, given a sufficiently persistent uncontrollable sound source. You just can’t untie them and peg them all to objective noise level.

Others (such as hearing loss and fluid leaking out your ears) are associated with prolonged exposure to sub-sonic noise, and again this can be as much an issue of time and persistence as “objective” sound level.

If we want to know “how bad” a noisy environment is for people, we simply don’t have a choice but to look at its effects first. You just have to look at the subjective effects people experience first, or you’re not looking at sound in the first place. You’re grasping at some independent objective measure which won’t ever actually tell you what you want to know, except in the most limited circumstances.

Conspiration should totally be a thing. “Omg, your 30,000 word Grassy Knoll post was conspirational!”, “Just the conspiration I need while I drink my defluoridated coffee and put on my tin foil hat to not go to work every morning!”

By and large no. Read the comments under anything on LessWrong, for example, and it’s trivial to pick out the vast majority of nominally substantive posts lighting on the one thing that got them mad, just like you and I, in amidst a chorus of nothing remarks equivalent to “so brave, so powerful”. They’re just people man, after all.

Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.

They’re all in for Chess as a sine qua non metric for intelligence if you spend enough time staring into the pit. Better to call it g than IQ tbh. Not only does it (chess) have the lick of rigour, it has the nerd cultural cachet and the ludicrous white masculinity complex.