Hall published a noncommittal review of a dodgy-sounding book

I don’t even know who Harriet Hall is, but this undersells it. Just in the wikipedia link that we can all see, she says that the (fake) issues raised by Abigail Shriner in Irreversible Damage, “urgently need to be looked into”. That book, far from a mere “dodgy-sounding book”, was an enormously influential, best-selling, and intensely transphobic avalanche of lies and self-serving distortions.

I have been sufficiently tempted to point out one of the ways in which this is horribly stupid viz. it is written from the perspective of somebody who is a liability to whatever scene he claims to have been a part of

Fanatics want to share their obsession, and mops initially validate it for them too. However, as mop numbers grow, they become a headache. Fanatics do all the organizational work, initially just on behalf of geeks: out of generosity, and to enjoy a geeky subsociety. They put on events, build websites, tape up publicity fliers, and deal with accountants. Mops just passively soak up the good stuff.4 You may even have to push them around the floor; they have to be led to the drink. At best you can charge them admission or a subscription fee, but they’ll inevitably argue that this is wrong because capitalism is evil, and also because they forgot their wallet.

Everybody with half a brain knows that actually fanatics are frequently fucking deadbeats, who are therefore incapable of materially contributing beyond their physical presence. That’s fine, but it doesn’t lend itself to the financial stability of the collective enterprise, especially if they expect to get free stuff out of the bargain, which they frequently do. Of course, this isn’t the case for everybody, but that just proves the point that this is unbelievably fucking stupid

Mops relate to each other in “normal” ways, like people do on TV, which the fanatics find repellent. During intermission, geeks want to talk about the New Thing, but mops blather about sportsball and celebrities. Also, the mops also seem increasingly entitled, treating the fanatics as service workers.

“Fanatics” like this treat whatever community has sprung up around its artists as a vending machine for personal connection and social clout. They love to be a part of something but they’re too insecure to let other people love it too, and they lose their ability to meaningfully contribute because they’re so busy policing the boundaries of the space. This isn’t a “fanatic” actually, because again, it’s just a(n extreme and highly idealised) type of guy, but again that is proving the point of the stupidity of this enterprise.

Mops also dilute the culture. The New Thing, although attractive, is more intense and weird and complicated than mops would prefer. Their favorite songs are the ones that are least the New Thing, and more like other, popular things. Some creators oblige with less radical, friendlier, simpler creations.

cf. Bob Dylan, “Judas”

Even reading just a paragraph of the article you get the sense that Chapman is an insufferable dork who feels somehow burned about something in his past

The strangest thing about it is that the complaints are played so much to such an intense stereotype it’s as if Chapman is the only person in his model who actually embodies what would otherwise be a ludicrously idealised and caricatured type, and it turns out to be the horrible deadbeat superfan who ruins everything trying to make it his personal possession

Chapman is a fucking moron, and not rationalist curious but deeply embedded in rationalism. “Post-rationalism”, when it was new, was nothing more than a way of being into (at the shallow end) Deeprak Chopra type shit for personal growth on “rational” grounds (“if it works it isn’t stupid” or whatever) without getting kicked out of the clubhouse. It’s harder to see those outlines now because mainline rationalists have effectively adopted that plus far more extreme attitudes in their day to day over the last 5+ years, so post-rationalism looks harder to understand and more interesting than it really is or was.

Chapman himself was trying to do rationalist existentialism (hence his title, “Meaningness”, the quality of being meaningful, with particular respect to “having meaning in one’s life”).

Of course he was naive, but he’s also just writing yet another completely oblivious ass-pulled blog pretending to do meaningful sociology with just whatever shit came off the top of his dome. It’s identical to everything else written in this regard within 15 miles of LessWrong and should therefore be ignored except insofar as its laughed out of the room.

At most, you need to add to it as the field progresses, but I doubt literary analysis ever turns out to have been wrong.

Sometimes. But more importantly a good literature prof will be highly responsive to ongoing changes in the world around them with respect to the selection of texts, texts themselves will develop new resonances as times change (consider how Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded might have changed before and after MeToo), and as critics generate new literature of their own, new perspectives have to be considered. These points, it turns out, all circulate around what you said here:

I don’t think works of literature get a lot of updates as time passes

This isn’t really true. At the most basic level of analysis (which isn’t strictly correct, but will do for now), there are never less than two components, and one of them does change as time passes. (1) The words themselves, usually printed on a page without much variation between copies, and (2) the reader of those words. This “reader” is a hugely complicated object, and the text itself doesn’t really exist in any meaningful sense without one (dried ink letters are not “language” as such, but at most a record of information which generates language upon activation by a mind). It is this “reader” (or the huge variety of “readers” who continue to come in and out of existence as time passes) who generates changes that have to be kept up with in the study of literature, but that reader is a vital object of study in the (very roughly speaking) twofold object of literary studies.

Even the idea of an unchanging but growing corpus disguises, and yet relies on, this twofold division. The maintenance of such a corpus relies on the maintenance of a tradition of readers entrusted with the assumptions and techniques of interpretation pertinent to the ideals of that tradition. What is often foregrounded here is the maintained tradition, external to individual readers, but it is those individual readers who, collectively, actually do the work of keeping it.

The job of an up-to-date literature course is to attempt to account for such changes over the span of a three month term/semester, and it’s the consequent process of selection and refinement that generates the work which is being suspiciously handed off to a scammy robot in the article.

Meditations on Moloch is “soul-wrenching”, apparently. Jesus fucking Christ.

In what world do these people grow up? “Oh my God, conflict exists between interests and values, things are hard, not every problem is tractable”.

There used to be a refrain that “Moloch” is effectively Siskind’s word for capitalism, because he can’t bring his libertarian heart to name what everybody understands. But that’s wrong, because Siskind’s view is no more than the shallowest Burkeanism. And the worst thing about every single anti-Utopian is that they all assume everybody else feels as mugged by imperfection as they do.

Just the very starkest most ratiocinationary combination of a contrarian red herring and a false dilemma

yeah dude the reason people think MDMA isn’t worse than meth is that it isn’t their heart rate they’re worried about with habit-forming meth consumption

It’s all a system. None of that shit is organic. Even on /r/SSC TP0 and Kirkegaard had to pretend they didn’t actually know each other personally

These people are racism Trotskyists

For a moment I thought I’d replied in the wrong context, but it looks like I just straight up replied to the wrong thing. My bad either way

Ooooh somehow I replied to your reply to the comment rather than to the comment (originally replying to me)

I was mostly referring to comments like yours

It’s more that I think the whole discussion is completely head-ass

Nobody who knows anything about the sub should think it’s remotely worth asking beyond “I guess a mod did that”, it’s literally always been this way

No, I’ve done a lot of research here and it may be time

I just think, and perhaps this is just me, that it is weird, conspiratorial, speech to summarise your research into this question as, paraphrasing, ‘I found out one of the old mods has gone alt right’ and nothing more

It’s also defensive speech to say “people are allowed to comment on the vibe”. I know they’re allowed to comment on the vibe! I think they’re weird for detecting a bad/weird vibe! I think it’s indicative of a conspiratorial framing! There is so little information to go on in these speculations, and literally none of it out of keeping with ordinary goings on at SneerClub, for anyone remotely invested in anything that has ever gone on there

Similarly, I found your speech to frame the question itself conspiratorially, as if the fact that one of the old mods has hints of having gone alt right - despite having nothing to do with any recent posts on the subreddit - is worth mentioning at all, certainly not as the only thing of note that your research turned up

Answer on a postcard

Throwing in that comment about Son_of_Sophroniscus was pretty out there! My roll would be pretty damn slow had you just left that out. But instead we’ve got that, people talking about a “weird/bad vibe”, reading tea leaves all over the shop…

But even in just your own case, it seems like the opposite of not jumping to conclusions to throw in references to old mods going alt right that bear absolutely zero relationship to any of the handful of posts on the “resurrected” sub

“Why, for fuck’s sake?”, as an illucutionary act, seems to do a lot more than simply “asking the obvious question”

But it is, indeed, in typical reddit fashion to omit that sort of thing from one’s own complaint about the response one got to one’s provocation, notwithstanding the traditional SneerClub response to user’s complaints, which is of course “if you want to leave, but can’t, we can help with that”

People are still subscribed to the subreddit. When a post gets made, it goes on their reddit feed. Lots of mobile users in particular will just have seen it pop up while doomscrolling.

All I know is one fundamental thing: between 49 to 100 per cent of you are all fucking nuts.

/u/completely-ineffable, who founded the sub, and closed the sub a year ago, literally just made a post! That’s all that happened! I’m distantly in touch with that person! Everything is fine! In fact I’d almost be tempted to theorise it was all a dumb ruse to see if you lot turned out to be crazy people!

And it seems to have worked wonders!

Who even put the term “resurrected” in there? It’s one post, followed by a smattering of others including posts bickering about the supposed resurrection! What monstrous goings on are people permitting themselves to imagine?

Smart, funny people create good times

Good times attract unfunny morons

Unfunny morons create bad times

Bad times attract smart, funny people