domain:drmanhattan16.substack.com
FistfullOfCrows
6m ago
You shouldn't take Eco's definitions for anything at face value. Half his point apply to commies as well.
ulyssessword
6m ago
You could try libtcod (python 3), which I found on /r/roguelikedev. It sounds like it matches what you're doing.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
22m ago
You mean like a critique of Marxism as "the communists took the Christian idea of heaven and tried to make it a reality on Earth, which thus failed terribly?"
Critiques like that of Marxism are a subset of the anthropological phenomenon Girard is describing. Girard's point isn't limited to a single political ideology. It's a critique of the entire modern mindset, and the desire to 'build a better world' on the back of a designated enemy. He saw this pattern repeating everywhere, from the French Revolution to modern social justice movements. The Antichrist is the principle that weaponizes compassion for victims to create an engine of perpetual conflict. It's a critique of secular humanism and its endless quest for new victims and new oppressors, a quest which leads to a permanent state of social conflict - the 'chaos marketed as order' I mentioned.
Personally, I found it always rich that a religious institution which had been a steadfast ally of the ruling classes for most of its existence thought it had any moral standing to criticize people
Then you don't understand religion. A religious institution without a belief in its moral standing is a social club. A religious institution derives its morality from divine authority. You are judging it on criteria it doesn't care about, you can't then be flummoxed that it doesn't care about your judgement.
I am still unsure what point you think Thiel is making when he speculates about Greta Thunberg being the antichrist, and if it is a purely theological point (which might be beyond an atheist such as myself) or a sociological point dressed in the language of Christianity. From the "secular perversion of Christian ideals" angle, I would imagine something like "Friday For Future takes the Christian ideal of humans being good stewards of creation and strips it from its Christian roots." But without the basis of Christianity, this idea becomes unsound?
Thunberg is a shibboleth. She is just a good representative of the secular doomsday cult, she's a child prophet.
Regarding Stewardship you are missing the point entirely, deliberately it seems? Or was that Marxist line literally all the thought you put into understanding Girard's thesis? The idea doesn't become unsound, it becomes dangerous. We don't understand all the ways certain sociological concepts interact, which ones affect which. Compassion is good, but decoupled from religion, from a framework of original sin, grace, transcendence, and forgiveness, it turns suicidal. It gets coopted by grifters, narcissists, psychopaths. Perhaps that is what Thiel is doing! If it is, it would have been a lot harder to figure out without Girard's Antichrist.
It is my firm belief that human virtue significantly predates any religion known today, and that Christianity has no intellectual property rights on caring about the natural world (FFF) or trying to alleviate the suffering on Earth (EA) or equality (SJ) or trying to avoid bad consequences of technology-driven change (AI safety).
Do you similarly believe Christianity has no ip rights on the development of everything you just mentioned? Because I see a pretty direct (straightforwardly direct in the case of social justice) through line from Christianity to them. They aren't just virtuous, they are virtuous according to the tenets of Christianity and built on a bedrock of assumptions that most other cultures in history found bizarre.
I agree that there is something wrong with the world, actually. Personally I would mention negative externalities (the driving force of both climate change and AI x-risk) first and foremost. Then there is the increasing spread between capital and income, and the related rise of real estate prices, global poverty, and an increase of anti-liberal patterns both on the left and on the right, the related demolition of the concept of truth, social media induced loneliness, a military conflict in Europe and the total clusterfuck of the Middle East, to mention but a few. Interestingly enough, a lot of these are things in which Thiel is either in the position to alleviate the problem and does not or in which he is actively profiting from being part of the problem.
What are you arguing now? That Thiel sees different problems to you? Actually most of those things, I'm pretty sure, Thiel would argue are symptoms of... You guessed it, the Antichrist. In the Girard sense. Dismissing his position as 'deliberately obfuscated' would carry more weight if you hadn't already admitted you have no idea what Girard said or any interest in finding out.
The entire point is that the quasi-religious framework he's using explains the rise of things like the 'demolition of truth' and the 'anti liberal patterns' you mentioned. And that by tying the religious and secular conceptions of the Antichrist together Thiel provides a way two disparate groups he belongs to - Christians who believe the bible is true if not necessarily 100% accurate and tech bros - can share culture.
From what I understand, Mussolini's fascism wasn't particularly racist by the standards of the time, at least not until his Italy had become utterly dependent on Nazi Germany during the war and he gave Hitler some racist policies as a concession.
I'm very far from an expert on Italian fascism, but to the extent that I know anything about it, to me it seems characterized by being a strongly collectivist nationalist ideology that is both a response to and a rejection of both capitalism and communism. This is reflected in Mussolini's own path of having been a socialist when younger, then turning away from mainstream socialism because he disliked its internationalism and was more interested in making Italy great again.
Perhaps the core concept of Italian fascism was the idea of using an extremely powerful nationalist state to overcome the conflict between capitalists and workers and forge both together into dynamic collaboration that could revitalize the nation without the total class upheaval or internationalism pursued by mainstream socialism.
Hitler pursued the same concept, and in that sense Nazi Germany was a fascist state. Both Mussolini's and Hitler's ideal was that the fascist party would become completely dominant over society and subordinate all other power groups - churches, capitalists, labor movements, intellectuals, etc. - to its own will. There could still be churches, capitalists, labor movements, and intellectuals, but they would be ruled by the party/the government (one and the same thing, in the fascist ideal). Any disagreements between those groups would be mediated by the government for the greater good of the nation, and the individual interests of the groups would not be allowed to interfere with the greater goal of making the nation strong.
The key ideological difference between fascism and Bolshevism was that fascism did not seek to do away with capitalism, only to utterly subordinate it to the government, and that fascism was explicitly nationalistic in a way that Bolshevism (while it often pursued nationalistic goals in practice) rejected thoroughly on the level of ideology.
Unlike traditionalist conservatism, fascism was also profoundly revolutionary in its ethos. It did not seek to conserve existing mentalities except to the degree that they would be pragmatically useful, it did not seek to return to a pre-modern way of being, it had little use for religion other than for pragmatic reasons, and it had no issues with technological progress. Like communism, it sought to create a new kind of man. It had totalizing ambitions. In the ideal fascist future, there would be no distinction between individuals, the party, and the state. In this perhaps it was influenced by the recent experience of total military mobilization during World War One. The fascist state perhaps sought a similar, but perpetual mobilization of all society in the service of the one goal of national strength, even in peacetime.
Another key characteristic of fascism was that it explicitly glorified struggle and conflict as a means of both spiritual and material renewal. Fascism considered peace to be a lower state of being and believed that man could only fully fulfill his potential in combat, whether literal or metaphorical. This is another key difference between fascism and communism. The professed ideal of communism was to bring about a new society in which class warfare had been overcome for the people's benefit. Communism glorified being a warrior for the sake of the cause, but the image of the ideal society that communism sold to people as its ultimate goal was a peaceful one. Fascism, on the other hand, considered war in itself to be a good thing, something that elevated and spiritually purified human beings. Communism, on the ideological level, claimed to seek to overcome social Darwinism. Fascism, on the other hand, considered social Darwinism to be inherently good - it just sought to reduce or at least master social Darwinism within the nation, in order to become better at social Darwinism in competition between nations.
There are various powerful political entities today that share some aspects of fascism, but none that I can think of really have the whole package.
The People's Republic of China shares fascism's characteristic of binding capitalists, workers, intellectuals and so on under an extremely powerful and nationalistic government that manages their conflicts for the supposed greater good. However, in its current form it does not actually have (although it might claim that it does) fascism's profoundly revolutionary ethos.
Trumpism also, to a much much lesser extent, shares the idea of binding capitalists, workers, intellectuals and so on under a strong nationalistic government that manages their conflicts for the supposed greater good and rejects both pure profit-seeking capitalism and the social upheaval of communism. Hence the ethos of right-wing populism, the tariffs, and so on. However, while Trumpism might in practice to some extent be collectivist, it does not explicitly glorify collectivism - on the contrary, no matter how collectivist some of its policies might be in practice, on the level of ideology (that is, on the level of the image that it seeks to convey) it actually glorifies individualism, or supposed individualism, and it glorifies small government no matter how much Trumpism in practice might actually strengthen the government. On the level of ideology, Trumpism promises to free society from the excesses of the left, not to subordinate individuals to an all-powerful state. The music of Trumpism also has strong notes of a desire to return to a supposedly better past. In this it differs from fascism. Fascism sought to make Italy great again, but just in the geopolitical, nationalist, and martial sense. In other words, it was nostalgic for the Roman Empire's martial ethos and geopolitical strength but as far as I know it did not want to return Italy to the social conditions of the Roman Empire. Also, unlike fascism, Trumpism does not glorify endless combat and struggle. Trumpism instead claims that, with the problems caused by the left eliminated, society will just be nice and hunky-dory.
ThenElection
35m ago
Freud was a much bigger influence. But, a quote from him, to highlight the issues with the genealogical approach:
The Communists believe they have found a way of delivering us from this evil. Man is wholeheartedly good and friendly to his neighbour, they say, but the system of private property has corrupted his nature... psychologically [communism] is rounded on an untenable illusion. By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, a strong one undoubtedly, but assuredly not the strongest. It in no way alters the individual differences in power and influence which are turned by aggressiveness to its own use, nor does it change the nature of the instinct in any way. This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were still extremely scanty; it shows itself already in the nursery when possessions have hardly grown out of their original anal shape; it is at the bottom of all the relations of affection and love between human beings.
Freud was a classical liberal in his politics. But we can draw a very clear line from his thought to the Frankfurt School. Can we then conclude that the Frankfurt School was anti-socialist? No; the existence of a genealogical relationship is interesting and often a useful lens to view things through, but to stop there without looking into the content of the theories can lead to very wrong conclusions.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
37m ago
GameMaker was good enough for Hotline Miami, so you could try it. If you're married to Python, you're stuck, as there aren't that many Python game engines that have enough plugins for you to skip the boring stuff.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
47m ago
I have to second this. Godot, for all that it infuriates me because it doesn't suit my very specific use-case, is actually a really good starter game-engine. It's lightweight, easy to use, and contains all the essential bits and bobs.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
57m ago
Assuming you've been starting from absolute scratch, i.e. only the standard library, there are game engines that solve the question of "having a framework to click buttons in and have objects that move around". The problem might be that learning a game engine might be just as hard if not harder than learning a programming language.
Godot is one of the engines that people make 2D games with today.
I'll never forgive Eco for managing to establish his "definition" as the one every midwit on Reddit reflexively reaches for, simply by the virtue of being a fancy writer of the worst mental masturbatory kind.
It's not completely bad, but something like "a progressivist ideology aimed at a complete rebuilding of society that tries to capture the discontent of the dispossessed masses and wears a reactionary façade to appease the elites and the middle class" is a much better one, in my opinion. However, this means that Fascism 1.0, as created by the Mussolini, is only possible in an industrialized state undergoing a demographic transition, where you have a massive restless working class.
The US is nothing like that. It's a post-industrial country that does have some restless working class, but it wasn't going to be captivated by communist agitators any time soon.
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