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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   31987 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Huh. I wouldn’t have guessed, since I’d only seen it in occult circles topics, like “tulpa.”

What’s a “thede”? Now that I’ve mentioned it, is my phone going to get haunted?

Tulpa sometimes pops up in psychological (and as a result, ratsphere) contexts, though I'll admit the difference between that and occult ones can be blurry at best.

Thede is a formalization of "who are we doing this versus" concept, in the sense that the thede is a group that you would favor defending, and elthede is a group that you'd attack. It's distinguished from ingroup/outgroup in the recognition that these things are concentric, situational, and opposed: the hated rival school's football team is elthede to your football team until they make it to the championship, in which case it's more important that someone from your state beats the weirdos from Florida, which in turns falls by the wayside under an alien invasion. Like a lot of NRx-adjacent terms, it smuggles a lot in with its assumptions -- most seriously the belief that a coherent group needs someone Other to exist -- but the common usage watered down to the extent that didn't really survive.

This is a derail, but wait, Moldbug decided to make his castes Dalit, Vaisyas, Brahmins, Helots, and Optimates?

I feel like there’s a lot to unpack from this mishmash of cultures.

Do you know if nydwracu is still around somewhere? He was fun.

They were haunting the tumblr ratsphere for a while, but I haven't seen much if anything under that name since 2016. They were going through a spasm of switching tumblr names on a pretty regular basis, though.

I googled to see if they'd done anything more recent - found nothing after 2016. last post were just some fanfiction and the last post of their blog saying they're done with politics

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