coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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4hr ago
If the the criterion has predictive value then it’s a good reasoning tool. You appear to not want to provide an argument as to why it’s not predictive. There has been atrocity propaganda since time immemorial, yet never have men admitted to being put in such a humiliating position for that purpose. We actually find a trend of humiliating stories being hushed aside so that the nation and soldiers don’t lose morale. Why would the trend be bucked and broken today, just now, in 2026? Why should this be the first case in history of atrocity propaganda where the alleged victims — from a fierce honor culture nonetheless — stand to gain only immense social humiliation, losing all morale?
Do you have any evidence that fear of being raped by Israeli dogs is actually impacting their morale?
Because men all over the world fantasize about dying for their country. Men do not fantasize about being raped for their country. A Hamas militant who dies gains honor for their family. A Hamas militant raped gains dishonor for their family. Unless you think that Palestinians are the only people in the world who bypass basic human motivational thinking, they will be averse to signing up for Hamas if the outcome is rape as opposed to torture. Notice how in action movies, the protagonist may be tortured, but is usually not raped. Do you need a source on the stigma of rape in Palestine?
Your hypothetical "What if you could save your comrades by being raped by a dog?" is ridiculous and, of course, dishonest. No one asked a Palestinian to get raped by a dog for Hamas.
How would you have felt today if you didn’t have breakfast? The Fallujah Dog Rape Hypothetical informs us how humiliating rape is for men, that it is maximally aversive, and thus necessarily reduces morale and recruitment, especially so in an honor culture. The known outcomes of an activity influence the willingness of people to engage in an activity.
If you really want to pose analogies, the equivalent would not be "Volunteer to be raped by a dog" but "Volunteer to claim you were raped by a dog," or if you believe the dog-rape really happened, "Volunteer to fight an evil enemy who might rape you with dogs if you are captured."
Well no, the story is now publicized widely, so Palestinian would-be militants will learn about the story. Hamas telling them they won’t be raped by a dog will not be very convincing, and as they are not yet recruited, they have no reason to believe Hamas once that story has sunk in.
It explains their motive if you think "reducing their morale" is an Israeli objective
Yes? Of course that’s their objective. How could you think that’s not their objective?
if you think they have failed to achieve their objective
I thought this was common knowledge. Hamas is still out there, and they haven’t been able to exile the native Gazans.
You are, as usual, just imagining an fantastical "Evil Israelis who do Evil Things because Evil (Jews)”
Is it your opinion that Israelis have not previously committed evil acts?
It's pure made-up atrocity porn
If they already raped Palestinian prisoners, and the chief lawyer of the IDF had to leak the video to try to bring the soldiers to justice, and then they dropped the charges, then I’m not sure why you’d think it is beyond the Israelis to rape prisoners with dogs. Because the last thing is already 80% evil, and adding a dog is only 20% more evil. Unless you think that this didn’t happen, or would prefer not to think it would happen. Do you think they killed aid workers and hid their corpses? Do you think they destroyed statues of Jesus with a sledgehammer in Lebanon? Did you know there’s a holiday where some Israelis throw puppies on a bonfire?
it's like claiming Abu Ghraib was part of a systematic plan by US forces to demoralize Iraqis and make them stop resisting. Maybe you believe this was the case, but then you have to believe that from the top on down, the entire US chain of command was not just sadistically evil but extraordinarily stupid.
But I pretty much believe this, except for the demoralization part. Abu Ghraib was extremely evil. People were tortured with dogs and there are accounts of rape by guards. This is actually a good argument toward my view I hadn’t even realized: unfathomably evil torture facilities have existed in recent memory.
coffee_enjoyer
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5hr ago
If they are attempting to persuade a Western audience, why would it matter that the dog is contaminated? We don’t have the social norm. And if this is the most horrifying event they can imagine, why would they want every young Palestinian learning that this could be their fate?
This only helps Hamas in a two-dimensional reading. Hamas is not in need of fabulous tales of torture when there are already real tales of torture. Yet Israel stands to gain an aversive threat that could actually make young Palestinians wary of signing up for Hamas. Americans are concerned about children starved and bombed, aid workers killed, land taken in Lebanon. Arabs might care about the dog part, but this was published in the NYTimes for a Progressive readership which already learned that Israel dropped the charges on that rapist a few months ago. It is not clear that this story is in Hamas’ favor, it requires a dozen men to destroy their family reputation forever, and it is actually more useful for Israel to have this story out than Hamas. If you’re Israel, you realize that you you can’t get to Hamas in any past attempt, so why not use psychological horror?
coffee_enjoyer
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8hr ago
It has very limited usefulness elsewhere
For this to be the case, there would need to be a lot of cases in history where someone lied about something which would lead to overwhelming personal and familial shame. Do you think that’s true?
It is extremely unlikely to decrease morale or enrollment of new recruits--what, they're not afraid of being imprisoned or bombed or run over by tanks, but the rape-dogs will terrify them?
That’s exactly how it is. “What, as a teenager you fantasized about dying a heroic death to save your family or nation, but not being sodomized by a dog?” You can easily socially reinforce males to die in war through patriotism. That comes out of instinct. You cannot make them eager to be sodomized by dogs. There is nothing in Palestinian culture which would allow such a thing. (Imagine you’re the USM commander of the battalion ready to begin the Battle of Fallujah. More than 100 Americans are expected to die. You’re preparing your troops. But wait! Due to unforeseen circumstances, we can actually win the battle if just one soldier is sodomized by a dog and talks about it publicly. Who is the heroic soldier willing to save 100 lives by being raped by a dog? I think every few would raise their hand, maybe your intuition says differently. But now imagine they were all Muslim fundamentalists from a culture where women will not find husbands if their brother was raped and who find dogs ritually contaminated. And this explains the Israeli motive, given that destroying all of their dwellings and starving their children did not significantly curtail their morale. It makes sense why Israel would use dogs for rape because nothing else has reduced Palestinian morale.)
There is a very obvious benefit to Hamas lying about Israelis raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs
How much more important is the “dog” element compared to the previous, evidenced cases of rape in Israeli prisons? Does the “dog” element move the needle?
Atrocity propaganda almost always serves to increase morale and recruitment by representing the enemy as unspeakable monsters
This is 100% true, but you will not find a case of atrocity propaganda in history where a man writes publicly “yes, it was I who was raped by the German Hun when they took Belgium! It was my backside which suffered!”
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
In historical analysis, there’s a useful concept called the criterion of embarrassment. If a claim is highly embarrassing to the claimant, then it’s more likely to be true, as normally people are unwilling to lie when they stand to gain only shame, humiliation, and loss of status. For instance, while every holocaust writer talks about the Jews who acted as informers and helpers to the camp guards, no author ever claims that they themselves informed or collaborated, because to be an informant (or moser) against another Jew is the most shameful sin in Judaism. Hence, such a narrative does not exist, as the author would be delivering himself only social approbation. “Raped by a dog” is like this. It is a claim that is maximally shameful to a Palestinian claimant given their unique cultural values. It’s a claim that would arguably harm the Hamas cause by decreasing morale and the enrollment of new recruits. And it’s an unnecessary claim, given that the IDF’s top lawyer already resigned in order to publish a video of the Israeli soldiers raping a prisoner.
Lying about this would not serve an essential function, and according to the criterion of embarrassment, I think it’s likely these prisoners are telling the truth about what they think happened. (Phrasing it this way because they may have been made to think the rape involved a dog, as part of a psychological terror campaign).
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
No 19th century Brit, no matter how much he had pride in his social class, would have preferred a Mohammedan Pakistani or a Heathen Indian (as they would have called them) to take the place of their own race in their own universities en masse. This would have been unthinkable to them. Read about how Kipling didn’t want White blood wasted trying to civilize them. Or look at Mulready’s paintings which were specifically designed to make his viewers care about their own poor instead of foreign aid. Dickens literally wrote about his desire to exterminate the Indian race while he was writing those empathy-laden stories to inculcate love for the White poor in his novels
Dickensians, understandably, speak of his humanity, of his generosity of spirit; and yet, this humane author advocated mass-slaughter of the Indian people. In the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, Dickens – not once, but several times – made his feelings quite explicit, writing in a letter at one point that were he Commander-in-Chief in India, he “would do [his] utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of late cruelties rested … with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth…”
It’s not atypical of cultures which practice in-group preference to also have a class system. Everything is relative.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
That’s a post-1960s change. It shouldn’t be difficult to find the opinion that the British had on other races in the 1800s. “Seeing the story hundreds of times just confirms the obvious moral and intellectual superiority” is not how stories of victimhood work. They induce feelings of compassion, care, and gradually in-group preference. This was behind BLM and even Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Yes, that’s why you have to present them with these stories hundreds or thousands of times.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Solid and fact-based post.
IMO the error of the Charlottesville protest was all optics. As the White undergrad admissions rate at UVa decreases by 7.5 points per decade, there are only 60 years until there are 0 White undergrads at UVa, or at least a South Africa style pittance alloted to the dispossessed kin of Jefferson. A protest against replacement is a no-brainer if your interest is to increase the wellbeing of your group. (Were you a Tibetan, a wigger Uyghur, or a Kurd, this activity would be amply funded by USAID). If you want to signal strength, ie with a torchlit march, you need control of every single camera in the vicinity. You should have hand-selected thirty people and gone somewhere private and just made it seem like it was a big march. The point of this, I suppose, would be to recruit members. Of course the media would be there and find the ugliest person saying the dumbest thing and link that to your movement. This is 101 stuff. And you didn’t actually want to signal strength anyway, you wanted to signal victimhood. You needed to show a White Virginian having to work at a slaughterhouse surrounded by Hondurans who don’t speak English, and then show a random Muslim from Pakistan getting a scholarship to UVa with a clear look of superiority on his face. Then you had to send those flyers to wealthy Virginians, and do such things hundreds or thousands of times, and then do like fifty other things, and then you get to do a public torchlit march. The ancient victory triumph is the last of the things you do, not the first thing you do.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
I think the question could be delegated to the intelligence-gathering of the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK. They would make sure that the rumors of your nail-polishing habits aren’t being disseminated by a company that produces clip-on nails.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
I think you can get to it in months from 3% if you have the capabilities of Iran, but this is a double moot point: DNI + five eyes says no desire to build one (no whistleblower has said otherwise), DNI says destroyed in Operation MC Hammer (sub-operation can’t touch this). Maybe even a triple moot point because of the fatwah, a quadruple moot point because it would be an irrational decision for them to ever aggressively launch a nuke, and a quintiple moot point because Israel is an aggressive power (increasingly religiously extremist at that) in the Middle East with nuclear weapons that aren’t inspected.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
Yeah, they went out of their way to signal their goodwill by keeping enrichment levels below 3.67% during the Iran Deal.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
Succinctly: wealthy and disloyal pro-Israel Americans lobbied Trump to get rid of the Iran deal, because spending the blood and treasure of Americans for the safety of Israel is desirable to them, motivated by a mix of nationalism, racism, and religion. And you can hardly fault them! If I could pressure loads of Israelis to die and waste trillions of their own dollars to expand American hegemony, I would do the same. (Of course, they would respond to this by ensuring I have no influence.)
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
But Iran had a promising nuclear medicine program that required enrichment. It exported radiopharmaceuticals to neighboring states. They need Mo-99/Tc-99m for cancer imagining. It is a top 3 producer of Tc-99m. They need to produce 90% of their domestic medicine because sanctions. They’ve been shouting about this since 2019 and the answer “sorry, all those kids with cancer have to die without treatment” is obviously not satisfactory.
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
I don’t think you want an actively hostile environment like American suburbia in a game. But as an example, if Elywnn Forest had too much beautiful red foliage and flowers and apples galore, then it’s not as nice to receive a small red cloak, as you’ve seen red everywhere. If the starting castle wasn’t so small, it wouldn’t be nice to get to Stormwind. Or if it already contained different kinds of grasses, then there’s no novelty reinforcement from entering Westfall. In a theoretical gamified North Korea, maybe they’d want to reinforce the loyal citizen of Pyongyang by introducing a new color or color scheme every 5-15min walking pace, like with WoW zones.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
I’ve been thinking about why Vanilla WoW was so good apart from nostalgia:
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Unwanted reinforcer satiation was reduced as much as possible. If you want the player to feel awesome upon obtaining a colorful cloak or a new spell, then you don’t want everything in the world vivid and dazzling, because the novelty and pleasure of these things reduces the power of those reinforcers. If the mobs are colorful and the characters around you are all wearing awesome things, then picking up some basic “red cloak” is no longer as pleasant, and thus no longer reinforced. Pleasure from stimuli are competitive to each other. (In a boring classroom, even a black and white VHS is a good reinforcer; not so in a mall).
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The above applies even to the aural components of the game. The ambient environmental “background sounds” in original WoW are low stimuli, in between music and sound effects. This means that the aural cues for looting, leveling up, fulfilling quest are more reinforced than if the game has a default high level of aural pleasure (a soundtrack too dazzling).
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The greatest reinforcers are reserved for compelled immersion. By the time you’re bored with your spells, you travel to buy a new spell in a specific familiar environment. All of this immersion is secondarily-reinforced by the more primary reinforcer of Fun Ability + Novel Animation + Growth-Feeling. You have to spend money, which heightens and potentiates this experience. To get a new spell, you might have to travel for 10 minutes, remembering the things you did in the environment. Other great reinforcers are the discovery of a new area where the environmental cues (novelty) change abruptly, which only take on so much reinforcing power because the previous environment was not filled to the brim with novelty.
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Summarizing some of these above points: you want to reduce the novelty and fun of every single part of the game which is not earned after immersion. This is a balancing act, because obviously it can’t be so boring that you don’t want to play at all. But you actually want the player to be as bored as possible while still playing, so that all of the great reinforcement occurs when he is compelled to feel immersed in the character and world.
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I think Vanilla devs were like wizards of psychology, at least in practice, because they arranged boredom in an intelligent way. The WoW player is actually bored, and even in a state of annoyance and displeasure, when he has collected 8 leather scraps and needs 2 more to go. But he keeps playing, because of the Ovsiankina Effect (w wish to continue what we started). There is even a “biological preparedness” factor at play, because when we are frustrated we don’t mind bashing some enemies. So the WoW player is put into a carefully-managed negative and bored state for an amount of time, which he might associate with a particular set of mobs (rather than the game entirely), and by the time he has collected 10/10, he is now biased toward collecting the reward for the quest rather than quitting. The period of boredom is forgotten. There is now something else to do. And it’s also forgotten because the “frustrated / boredom state” occurs at a mnemonically-weak point in the game. Finding a new mob is fun and memorable; returning home for a reward is fun and memorable; but the weaponized boredom happens at a moment that is naturally unforgettable, lacking serial-position bias or novelty bias.
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The reason why immersion is essential is not because it’s just one pleasant feeling among many. It’s an essential condition for continued engagement with the product, because if the fun you’re having in the game can be found elsewhere, then you may decide to simply have that fun elsewhere. If “exploring” is the fun, you might decide to explore a new game. If “fighting”, you might play a better fighting game. But you can’t find Azeroth or ChunkNorris the dwarf warrior anywhere else, and you’ve become addicted to that as it exists as a collection of cues which govern all the greatest rewards (reinforcers) of WoW.
There are then some other things worth exploring, but I’ve already written too much: the zone soundtracks often contain an odd sound you would never hear anywhere else, increasing the power of its associative memory potential because of uniqueness; there is a “biological preparedness” factor of increasing status and strength as a grunt character (versus already being a hero).
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
But Nietzsche is the one who provides the subjectively-created value schema here. His advice is to create your own values and be autonomously self-governed, and to feel the most “power” which he defines circularly as successfully overcoming a subjectively-defined “resistance”. At no point does one actually have to measure against some objective standard. If someone is simply placing an arbitrary resistance in their week, so that they can feel the pleasure of dominance or “power” over their own devised lifestyle, then there is no self-overcoming. At least in Christianity, there are objective standards to measure against, and actual fears and fixations which require a man overcome himself, plus the external role model to enable this activity.
Christianity had already completed its own self-overcoming
If Christianity were already the most adaptive system for a man to overcome himself, then why would we depart from the system that works and trust Frederich Nietzsche to guide us on our journey? Where is the proof in the form of successful Nietzschean households and organizations? I can at least drive to a monastery and witness a boomer living in a cell owning nothing, and without complaint (a miracle unto itself).
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
One day I hope we find a TQ measurement similar to IQ. The low IQ do not realize why what they like to do is destructive. Similarly, I don’t think the low TQ realize why the art they like is destructive (to their own wellness and civilization). Until we have twin studies measuring the longterm impact of beholding works by different artists on wellbeing and prosocial behavior, we will just have to disagree.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
People are moved by the placebo effect, authority bias, the desire to fit in, and ambient cues in the environment. Just as they were in 1924, four years after Novus Angelus, where this was proven:
Annoyed at the cold reception his wife Sarah Bixby Smith's realistic still lifes had received from an art exhibition jury, Jordan-Smith sought revenge by styling himself as "Pavel Jerdanowitch" (Cyrillic: Па́вел Жердaнович), a variation on his own name. Never having picked up a paint brush in his life, he then painted Yes, we have no bananas, a blurry, badly painted picture of a Pacific islander woman holding a banana over her head, having just killed a man and putting his skull on a stick. In 1925, Smith entered the banana picture under a new title of Exaltation in New York's "Exhibition" of the Independents at the Waldorf-Astoria. He made a suitably dark and brooding photograph of himself as Jerdanowitch, and submitted the work to the same group of critics as representative of the new school "Disumbrationism". He explained Exaltation as a symbol of "breaking the shackles of womanhood".[1] To his amusement, if not to his surprise, the Disumbrationist daub won praise from the critics who had belittled his wife's realistic painting.
More Disumbrationist paintings followed: a composition of zig-zag lines and eyeballs he called Illumination; a garish picture of a black woman doing laundry that he called Aspiration, and which a critic praised as "a delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Hart and Negro minstrelsy, with a lot of Jerdanowitch individuality";[2]: 111 Gination, an ugly, lopsided portrait; and a painting named Adoration, of a woman worshipping an immense phallic idol, which was exhibited in 1927.
The same year, Jordan-Smith confessed to the Los Angeles Times that the Disumbrationist paintings were meant as a spoof
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https://time.com/archive/6656527/hoax/
The Revue du Vrai et du Beau (Review of the True and the Beau-tiful), French art journal, wrote under a reproduction of “Exalta-tion” as follows: “This artist has a distinctly individual manner in representing people and objects, and uses the brush to symbolize the sentiments. In this he is at times a little literary. . . . Pavel Jerda-nowitsch is not satisfied to follow ordinary paths. He prefers to explore the heights and even, if necessary, to peer into the abysses. His spirit delights in intoxication, and he is a prey to the esthetic agonies which are not experienced without suffering.”
One showed a jet-black Negress at a washtub, with socks hanging on a clothes line overhead. Displayed at the No-Jury Exhibition (Marshall Field’s, 1926) under the title “Aspiration,” it was selected out of 480 others for special praise and reproduction by the Art World of Chicago. Wrote Lena McCauley, art critic of the Chicago Evening Post: “It is a delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Hart and Negro minstrelsy with a lot of Jerdano-witsch personality.”
Other Jerdanowitsches were bequeathed to the world. One showed a sprinkling of eyes against a dark background gashed by zigzag lightning flashes. To the uninitiated it looks like rash on a hairless dog. La Revue Moderne of June 30, 1927, grew ecstatic over this one, wrote about “this strange artist’s inspirational paintings,” recounted his troubled biography. Another of his inspirations was a woman kneeling before a totem pole in the Polar regions, its title “Adoration.”
I do not consider it art. I do think this is just rusing the tasteless and easily-influenced.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
I do not like modern Catholic art or music. It has been aesthetically barren since halfway through the 20th century, at least, and terminal before. (This is hardly due to bias, because some of my favorite composers are Orthodox John Tavener and Arvo Part, recently dead and living, and I’m not an Estonian or British Eastern Orthodox). Even the new “traditional”ish style is mediocre-to-okay, and my God, I have no words for the new stuff. Neither is this just me liking old stuff, because I do not like Eastern Orthodox iconography, generally speaking. Traditional European art moves you with powerful social emotions, with everything working together to heighten to effect, and pieces were selected according to the taste of patrons who didn’t need to flex pretention, having nothing whatsoever to prove, being the highest status and occasionally sovereign. Also, it focused on perfecting a handful of scenes for a maximum social-emotional response, ie the crucifixion must have been painted 200 times a year in every city, and gradually the visual language of the scene evolved to become perfect through a centuries-long selection process, involving artists selecting the best micro-motif over hundreds of years, the wisdom transferred in studios with an imitative learning structure. But we want to discard all that today, because we are very foolish.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
He failed to grasp that the Cross is a superior path to Selbst-Überwindung (self-overcoming) than what he describes, in that it more accurately models the phenomenological experience of struggle and suffering in pursuit of a superhuman aim. Nietzsche hazardly circumambulates around an idol of someone who overcomes his social values to achieve a greater value, while missing that this has been painted better within the Christian story. Christ withstands His culture’s priests and academics (scribes), empire, false accusations, and so on to obtain Glory. This is modeled by the believer who “carries his cross”, denies himself, loses his life to find it. What is the Zarathustra model? To yap in self-pity about how pity is bad. His whole heroic description is woefully cloudy and nonsensical.
The thing is that the Cross Model already proved itself successful for the things Nietzsche claims to love: glory, creativity, greatness, nobility, experimentation, science. The Cross model can produce a JS Bach, who explored the limits of mathematical-music science while keeping beauty in mind, while his culture already moved on to different musical fashions (the fugue was not in vogue). He sired 20 children. He wasn’t afraid of getting into a knife fight or harshly rebuking his students. He synthesized a new style. This is the musical ubermensch! His music expresses glory better than anyone before or after him.
Yet Bach, the ubermensch of note, did this while writing “Jesus, help” at the start of every work, and ending with “To God alone the Glory”. This is because He internalized a better social model. The suffering of Bach’s mind at work was a crown of thorns, not a Zarathustrian self-obsession. His doubts were the leers of the crowd. His obstacles were the heavy beam of the Cross. His work, a taste of the heavenly banquet. It’s all there, Nietzsche missed it and ruined a generation of men. To this day, not a single good thing has ever come from Nietzsche or Nietzscheans. And even the demise and humiliation of Germany in world history was influenced by the social model of Nietzsche! (While, ironically, the “slave morality” Mennonites will continue hymning in Low German until they become half of North America). It is not Zarathustra who successfully “sweetens the dregs and the bitter shame of suffering”.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
Everything in traditional Western art served a Point, a Good, which promoted individual and collective health (or wellbeing). They portrayed the horrors of the crucifixion because this is necessary for your ultimate felicity and beatitude. Art featuring the aversive stimuli of the Cross was made and consumed exclusively by people who understood the image within a cohesive and strict narrative involving a combination of dogmas:
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that the pains and horrors shown are the consequence of your own bad behavior (sin), which led to this event;
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that Jesus, innocent and blameless, suffered and died in order to redeem you from these evils and their consequence, out of an interest in your wellbeing and desire to see you in paradise
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that Jesus, as an example for the whole human race, endured all injury and injustice with righteousness, obedience, faith, virtue, compassion, and obtained the ultimate reward in doing so
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that you are in a lifelong and eternal bond with Jesus, and thus have a perfect moral influence exerted upon you continually
The off-putting and shocking nature of it is instrumental according to a complicated list of givens. There would be no point in expressing it otherwise. And importantly, an angel would never be depicted as so weak, miserable, and ugly. Either they are awe-inspiring and powerful, or they are innocent and beautiful. That’s also part of the cultural package of traditional western art.
Nietzsche's critique is something like this, that the crucifix is ugly and the solemn hymns about blood and so one are also unworthy, and a good strong civilization with an inner vitality should only show strong glorious victories
Nietzsche never grasped Christianity. I agree with his critique of a hypothetical strawman Christianity believed by a hypothetical race of strawpeople.
You can't get around the fact that to defend the moral authority of the pictures you linked as positive examples, you have to defend the actions of the Catholic Church
Actually, I have to defend the lifestyle of a community of young devout Catholics over the lifestyle of a commune of young art students, because both are in communion with their respective traditions. Do you have any doubt which one would have behaviors more conducive to wellbeing? I don’t think I would be able to find a clearer divide between people who are halfways to inner hell and people who are at least a little bit close to human felicity.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
The most dangerous evil is the one that can successfully trick you! In real life it looks like someone politely asking you to construct value and goodness with yourself as sole authority, gently nudging your intuitions in the wrong direction and coaxing you with enticing status gains.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
If you show a random group of teenage students that “Novus Angelus”, how could it possibly be good for them? I don’t see any rational path toward an argument that this would better their life or make them happy. The figure has an instinctively ugly face and form, and it’s evidently intended to humiliate the angels by depicting them as such. So it is the depiction of something normally glorious as pathetic. Okay. We can rationally see how it would make them worse: they are seeing an ugly and pathetic humanoid-like figure; they are being told it is “art”, which will confuse them; they are desacralizing something culturally important. If you wanted to increase unhappiness among humanity, you would show them this nonsense and say it is art, and they will infer, “hey, this is very important to look at”, so you’re biasing them to internalize filth, inhumanity, even evilness. Why?
Compare that antisocial filth to Tiepolo’s Annunciation. Even having almost no cultural understanding, you can see the good of the work. A student would see: a young woman reading is visited by an angel who points her to something mysterious and glorious above. If you show this to 100 students, all 100 of them would be benefitted. They would internalize a sense of something better, a sense of wonder and mystery, maybe a sense of the importance of reading. Or show a boy Salvatore Nobili’s Sant'Antonio in Campo Marzio and his life could change forever — he would be more courageous, more moral, more humble.
The purpose of art is not to make people very opinionated about art or to try to trick them like an intellectual gypsy. The point is to greaten us. We evolved the ability to make art to display our health and signal our competence. We evolved the ability to appreciate that art because we appreciate health. We evolved the ability to think with complexity because it sustained our common health and civic health over generations. The art instinct would have never developed in humanity if we had the degeneracy of the art snob. The art snob does not understand the point of anything, they are sick and their soul is cut off from the Realm of the Living.
coffee_enjoyer
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8d ago
Don’t think so. The YouTubers and figures who criticized Zoe the most (Internet Aristocrat, Sargon, Milo) would join the Trump train within a year. The board /pol/ on 4chan where people disseminated information would turn Right. I suppose we can call it the proto-Right, but the reason they hated Zoe was (1) her game was trash but rated highly by someone she dated, (2) she was a slut and they wanted her personal behavior to affect her professional life. By late 2014 the Left was beginning to promote anything that helped SJW, which means that if you didn’t love a trash game made by an SJW then you were no longer on the Left.
What fun thing are you doing with AI?
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