It’s impressive how many facts he knows, but he warps them into Jenga towers of speculation that can’t possibly be true, almost compulsively, without bothering to justify himself.

Damn, Scott, you are so close.

[deleted]

Anybody care to guess whatever on earth he might be referring to?

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of what an “antimeme” is, it’s … well, the opposite of a meme. If you understand the idea of a meme as “an idea that spreads quickly”, then an antimeme is an idea that resists being spread. Something you can see every day, and yet never remember or notice.

Siskind didn’t come up with the term, he’s just using it in this book review. If you click through the link he provides, you get to the SCP wiki (a collaborative fiction community where people write stories that center around an organization that maintains a collection of unusual objects with strange, supernatural properties). The “There is no Antimemetics Division” is a fairly popular, rather entertaining series of short stories that play around with the idea of entities and objects with antimemetic properties.

He gives angels as a relatively accessible idea of an antimeme; in popular culture they are very comforting humanlike beings with wings and halos, but in the original writings, they were almost universally terrifying, sometimes almost unhuman monsters. As if the Biblical description of angels aggressively resists popularization.

The reference to “fnord” is also an example of a literary antimeme.

Presumably he could come up with other examples – David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water”, the movie They Live, which satirizes consumerist society, and perhaps some other examples that might be increasingly more controversial or at least less accessible, and for that reason he feels uncomfortable mentioning them.

At any rate, this is where Siskind switches from explaining the idea of an antimeme, to comparing the book he was reviewing to one. That the author has some idea that they want to express, but can’t manage to communicate it because the writing gets in the way; it can’t help but get in the way, because the idea itself resists understanding.

“He’s also impressively erudite, drawing on the Greek and Latin classics, the Bible, psychoanalytic literature, and all of modern movies and pop culture.”

In other words, TLP has the same cultural depth as any basic bitch who went to college. I don’t know how erudite TLP really is, as I refuse to read his blog again, but this is pretty lame as far as endorsements go.

Honestly that post is a goldmine. Like, for the first time I could really see his rationalization abilities stretching thinner and thinner as not even him could give any remotely sensible meaning to the screed he was reviewing. In the end he had to capitalute, but rather than admitting that sometimes alt-right erudite contrarians are just unstable sociopaths prone to dellirium, he just decided that any guy who read Lacan has Doctor X-like superpowers mere mortals cannot phantom, so to save the author and not disappoint his frog readers. One of his goofiest tricks so far, and that’s saying a lot.

Society found some psychopathic elites sitting in vampire castles and basically begged them, “PLEASE take our freedom and make us worse off!” The psychopaths answered “I dunno, seems like a lot of work and we’re already pretty rich”, and Society was like “No PLEASE we are begging you!” and the psychopaths shrugged and said okay, you can have a little oppression, as a treat.

Tyrannical government is an imperfect solution here; our government occasionally resembles democracy, which makes us complicit in its actions. What people really crave is domination by corporate HR departments. The moral arc of the universe tends towards more and more power getting ceded to corporate HR departments and things like them.

Hmm, maybe the reason the “““moral arc of the universe”“” tends towards consolidation of power in massive corporations has to do with the inevitable outcome of capitalism, instead of being “oppressed” by “psychopathic elites sitting in vampire castles”[insertion of triple-parenthesis left as an exercise for the reader] being something everyone “secretly wants”?

After reading a book criticizing society’s interpretation of Freud, he gets the bright idea to use fucking projection as a safe pretext for his fascist wish-fulfillment fantasies.

he does realize that the SCP wiki is a work of collaborative fiction, doesn’t he?

And yet nobody’s mental image of an angel, nor any popular artistic depiction of an angel, has anything in common with the Biblical description

Neon Genesis Evangelion has entered the chat

Man, Scooter really needs to get The Illuminatus Trilogy out of his fucking mouth.

Having actually checked the source, this is a bit of a stretch to HBD or whatever specific “forbidden knowledge” bullshit we’re picking on Alexander for today - righteous as it is to do so - seeing as he’s not exactly waggling his eyebrows conspiratorially like he does when he’s really getting up a head of steam

It’s like one flourish where he’d usually lay it on thick and try to make a point of it

If anything what I read of his review left me more sympathetic to him than the mediocre psychiatry blog guy from ten years ago who has a self-published book out now apparently

Anybody care to guess whatever on earth he might be referring to?

Not really, but maybe nothing… If there’s a clear answer someone please inform me, but I’ve been getting the impression lately that these spaces have reached a critical mass of bigotry and conspiratorial thinking that the dogwhistles to pander to them are about all of it, and none of it anymore if that makes sense. Vague gesturing at the illuminati and things polite society doesn’t want to hear can grab overly credulous leftos, too, and just generally make your nonsense sell to a wider demographic.

This is stupid though because Biblically Accurate Angels is actually a super common meme? To the point that it’s getting old and not nearly as clever as everyone seems to think it is?

Yes they have lots of eyes, yes it’s kind of fun that the angels in the Bible look more like something from HP Lovecraft than fat babies, but also, haven’t we beat this particular horse to death?

Oh look! Something that is usually positive and holy is actually scary! Religious experiences combine elements of exaltation and terror! Aren’t I blowing your mind?!

Bonus: to my knowledge, the term fnord first appeared on SSC in the article Nydwracu’s Fnords. (Remember Nydwracu?) I don’t want to read the article again because I’ve lost enough brain cells as it is, but if I recall correctly, it’s mostly sneering at people who acknowledge the obvious fact that neoreaction is evil and don’t feel the need to be civil about it.

The argument is: I accuse him of becoming a cult leader, he denies it. During a recent spat, he said something like - “okay, I agree that lots of people are fascinated by me / attracted to me / tend to do whatever I want, in a way that doesn’t make sense under the normal rules, and that you couldn’t replicate even if you wanted to. You can judge me for it, or you can admit there’s a hole in your map, something that I understand and you don’t. If you want to understand it too, read Lacan.”

What the fuck

I gotta say i read the lacan fanfic analysis because i am losing control of my life. I failed my semiotics class in college. I still didn’t need super powers to comprehend the higher grade anti memes on display 💀💀💀💀💀

Like i would prob not read a book where the author is yelling at fictitious me but like saying people have a defense mechanism against the giving tree is not rocket science idk y’all

[deleted]

was that part of revelations the 1928373929th change to the bible or the 1928373930th change?