nihilsupernum:
leviathan-supersystem:
nihilsupernum:
leviathan-supersystem:
nihilsupernum:
leviathan-supersystem:
theinternetcrab:
nihilsupernum:
oh god i went on twitter again for the first time in a while
i suddenly understand why people want to kill neoreactionaries
i guess the cool people saw it becoming shitty and left, making it shittier
wow. uh. im not with them.
neoreaction was full of fucks from the beginning I am surprised people are surprised
i’d just like to interject to say: i was right all along, i am always right, my aesthetic is impeccable, and roses grow wherever i walk.
oh hi again <3
uh
i mean
you were right about predictions for the quality of alt right twitter in october 2015
there are other things you are wrong about, like some politics stuff, the importance of beauty to aesthetics, and botany
the concept of objective beauty is wrong and for nerds, all images are just patterns of photons with no inherent value or lack of value outside of what we assign to them. while there exists a cultural context in which aesthetic concepts exist, this cultural context is shifting constantly (so a “good artist” is someone adept at interacting with or shifting the cultural context, not someone who’s better at mimicking some kind of arbitrary ideal of “beauty”).
thus the idea that there’s some absolute standard of beauty is absurd, and also, not incidentally, tied to horrible politics as well (moldbug. his horrible politics.)
i mean sure technically
but also people are collections of atoms and objective morality doesn’t real, but we still think about ethics
i dont think that beauty is objective but uh, the real reason i care about this is that i perceive beauty as an emotion very strongly and it’s one of the strongest and most pleasurable emotions i experience (besides, um, acute affection and winning at stuff, but those are for nerds)
and your aesthetic is like Saying Something and ironic and whatever
which i get the purpose of, but at least in the context of the way my brain is, not caring about beauty in your aesthetics is like if you only ate potatoes and vitamins as an artistic statement
nice artistic statement, but you deprive yourself of the pleasure of eating things that arent potatoes and vitamins
i get that art isnt really about beauty but, um, aesthetics arent really about art i suppose? im not trying to convey a thesis with my aesthetic so much as just list things that make me happy to look at/concepts that delight me/etc
you’re misunderstanding my point- i’m not against people looking at images which make them happy/delight them, and virtually every #aesthetic post i make delights me to the core. my point is that the metric for which images elicit that response of delight isn’t fixed, and changes vastly between people, or over time, or due to context.
thus, the whole “finding beauty in ugliness” thing which has been the major conceptual current in art since at least the 1900′s is actually really valuable and important- since it creates an ever shifting conception of what images are beautiful. this results in the creation of a multitude of different aesthetic forms- and thus, is more likely to hit the maximum number of peoples “this image/concept delights me” buttons.
moldbug, in his typical moldbugginess, utterly misses the point- to moldbug, artists who find beauty in “ugliness” are merely liars- when in reality, they’re shifting and altering the aesthetic discourse, and trying to find new and unexplored methods of pushing peoples “this image delights me” buttons- an important, admirable goal.
if we were to listen to moldbugs advice, and to arrive at a single cultural standard for beauty and stick with it, then the culture would end up producing basically the same art over and over and over again, and it would get wicked boring. the claim that culture should arrive at a single definition of visual beauty is heavily dependent on a fallacious assumption that there exists some *objective* standard of beauty, which is clearly false.
regarding ethics: much like the discourse around aesthetics, the discourse around morality is an attempt to maximize human well-being. the way it achieves this is obviously different though- while the goal of aesthetic discourse is trying to hit the maximum number of peoples “this image delights me” buttons, the goal of moral/ethical discourse is to minimize human suffering. so while the discourse around aesthetics should be constantly cycling, and re-discovering/re-interpreting old concepts, the discourse around morality should undergo a more…. evolutionary form of development, gradually moving toward the model for ethics/morality which most effectively minimizes human suffering. neoreactionaries, meanwhile, want to just give up on creating the best possible moral/political framework, and instead to just assume feudal Europe got everything right (even though the actual historical evidence completely refutes this absurd claim)
this is all besides the point though, really. my main point is you’re vastly overestimating the degree to which my visual aesthetic is ~making a statement~, and vastly underestimating the degree to which i’m simply posting images i find visually pleasing.
[epistemic status: i know nothing about art or art history. i dont understand art and you cant make me be responsible for understanding art. i just like things which make me happy to look at. periodically, somebody tries to explain art or poetry or music or whatever to me. i dont want to know. too much pointless fighting and not enough pretty things and metrics i can quantify. also, i dont actually really understand fighting about whose aesthetic is correct or whose hometown makes the only correct kind of $WHATEVER_FOOD or whatever and only participate because it’s a type of phatic communication people seem to enjoy]
i have no idea what moldbug thinks about aesthetics and why would anyone read moldbug for the ideas anyway. the only reason to read moldbug is that moldbug is fucking poetry and i hate actual poetry
if you’re just posting things you find visually pleasing, then i am happy for you and dont really have an opinion on that
i assumed it was a political thing bc everyone in your corner of the internet has basically the same aesthetic (which probably implies that it’s subconsciously a political thing or something but to be honest who cares)
also, like, of course there isnt an objective standard of beauty as a physical property of the universe or w/e, but useful generalizations can still be made about the concept of beauty (which is how we can have the word ‘beauty’ at all, for that matter)
there are upsides to unified conceptions of beauty, as a solution to coordination issues and probably as something which unifies society and w/e too
but otoh, i never appreciated beauty as a thing at all when i was forced into it (like “this is beautiful, enjoy it”) and didnt realize that perception of beauty wasnt something people were basically just lying about for status until i started doing the aesthetic blogging thing, so (and ive gone to art museums after i started appreciating beauty and rarely saw many things there that i’d reblog on tumblr)
+ i doubt that aesthetics is only about prettying people’s “this image/concept delights me” buttons, aesthetics are about pressing buttons in general, they can be impressive or comforting or nostalgic or whatever and not set off the “#the aesthetic” reaction. but here i think we might have a name overlap for two different things
but anyway, this distracts from the important thing, which is: YOU KNOW WHEN YOU’RE LOOKING AT A SUNSET OR SOMETHING AND IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL AND AWESOME AND YOU TRY TO SEND PICTURES OF IT BUT THEY’RE NOT VERY GOOD AND DON’T CONVEY THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE OF THE SUNSET AND IT SUCKS BECAUSE YOU WANT TO SHARE HOW AMAZING IT IS