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madeofmeat


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 09 08:04:09 UTC

				

User ID: 1063

madeofmeat


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 4 users   joined 2022 September 09 08:04:09 UTC

					

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User ID: 1063

Anyone who hears about Emil Kirkegaard, Steve Sailer et al, for the first time, googles them, and picks the result that shows up very near top.

The Flat Earther thing looks superficially like 20th century science crackpottery, but it's socially more like a fandom. The old-school crackpot theorists were individual deranged people pursuing their theories about free energy generators or the value of pi being wrong. Flat Earth is a worldview stance more than a complex scientific theory, and all that's expected of a follower is to assert that they believe this to be a fact. "Pi is actually 3.1446..." or "nuclear power isn't real" don't have quite the same immediate worldview shifting juice for someone reading about them and then professing to believe them as "the Earth is flat" has. The people making the Flat Earth materials might be mostly insincere, but the follower fandom seems quite real, and before social media crackpot theories didn't really have fandoms like this.

Dan Freedman's babies. There's also a video.

Rules of thumb for less embarrassing culture are that it's not quite contemporary (things from 20 years ago are different, things from 50 years ago are different again), while maybe being Lindy enough to have stayed somewhat on the radar until now and not fine-tuned to have 14-year-olds as its core audience. Closer details are very much an illegible signaling game. Good starting point is probably to try to not be stuck in the comfort zone of fiction made to be effortlessly consumed by teenagers and get some sense of perspective with things aimed at adults.

FWIW, I did feel instant cringe at your OP juxtaposed with your username. I can't really see making a big deal out of wanting to see superhero movies fit the aesthetics of positive conservatism. Either declaring the movies as low-value culture that's beneath you (despite finding them fun), or just going to see the movie because you think you'll enjoy it no matter what the filmmakers believe would be fine. The problem is maybe less that you enjoy the movie but more that you come off as not knowing any culture you find much higher-value than a superhero movie because going to see the superhero movie seems to present such a major dilemma for you.

One that stuck with me back from the SSC Culture War thread days was BarnabyCajones' post about how street preaching used to make sense and then didn't.

Default view on an user's @-page should probably be comments, not posts, since people don't write a lot of standalone posts here.