re: #267 Colère Tueur de Lapin

So, over at WeHuntedtheMammoth dot com, David Futrelle has a great post about the ebil geniubus, seb gorka (not a Ph.D.). Seems the gorkster was taken in by this parody Nintendo twitter account and riled up all the right whinging gamer assholes out in intertubes land.

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Gorka and his followers want it to be true. That’s different from gullibility. They won’t back down from what they feel, and what they concluded, unless they get shamed.

Because if they treat it as true, then they get to feel heroic, and anyone they hate is that much more irredeemably depraved and thus deserving of no sympathy, no understanding, and no mercy.

Always…always…remember that these people operate with a completely different understanding of “truth” (epistemology) than everyone else. Things are “true” because treating them as “truth” has temporary utility for their self-gratification; when that utility expires then something else can be “true.” This is why ultimately, they’re nihilists and narcissists…they want to believe they believe things, but any time they take on a belief they hollow out the core premises that might restrict their selfishness and whim. The defining component of the US “right”—and in its most flagrant form, the open reactionaries—is this shallowness of thought. Ideas, ideologies, morals, trends exist to extract clout…and thus argument from authority…from.

ETA: hence the power of shame to make them back down, or at least stop articulating their specific claims. Since ideas only matter as units of clout, an idea that draws derision is quickly disavowed or concealed, ideally while claiming to have never actually held that idea (“I was just joking/being ironic/trolling/trying to trigger X”).

It’s an obvious parody account, but that doesn’t matter: they want to believe. The underlying assumption about society, culture that they project onto a tweet—they believe them to be True a priori, and are just seeking anything that’s homologous.