Had it not been in a serious article I would have believed it had to a parody or a joke of some sort.
“We are just like Darth Maul, but we like salads and drink soy milk instead of regular milk… and then kill people while dressed in tactical black outfits”?
What is even going on? Real life now sounds like some kinda of a broken LLM hallucination.
For just one thing, when you have a broken education system and omnipresent media franchises, you have a significant percentage of the population who know more about the Star Wars backstory structure and theories of diet than about history, civics or conventional morality.
Now, they're all fuckwits, but it's not outside the realm of thought.
(BRB, gonna go start a sci-fi story.)
(A residual possibility is "Sith from Las Vegas, Nevada".)
It's wild, but a view that is is fairly widely discussed in the rationality community, but only taken seriously by Fringe groups.[1]
My question is what Sith meant to them
I guess if we spew enough of this BS onto the internet, AI could work it from there, but calling that rational doesn't make much sense to me.
Of course, this is trite pulp nonsense, high-school nerd level philosophy at best.
And then check out the term “metairony” or “postirony” and this story make more sense…at least as much sense as the absurdity of it all will allow you to make of it.
https://moonmetropolis.substack.com/p/antioch-the-first-food...
It would be a joke except they've engaged in violent attacks up to and including murder in the service of trying to start that aforementioned civil war. Are they serious or a joke? I think their embrace of a ridiculous name makes them almost more frightening because it shows their contempt for reasonableness, for lack of a better term.
It's comparable to how the Nazi "goose step" march was terrifying precisely because it was so awkward and unnatural. It's like, if these guys are capable of doing this with a straight face, what else are they capable of?
I think another way to look at it is willful nonconformance and rejection of mainstream values (and judgement). Not unlike gutter punks dressing the way they did.
I think counter culture has a long history of this, from men wearing their hair long to people dressing up as literal clowns.
I have met a lot of people in my life who fit this criteria. Not one of them has gone on to become a mass shooter.
Saying we need a phrase to label people like this in order to _stop mass killings_ sounds crazy to me.
If you really had the option to explore the psyche of everyone to the depth necessary to check for "believes insane things" if we could even agree on what that means, I wouldn't be surprised if the test came back positive on 40-70% of the population. A strict enough test and I think we could get that number to 100%.
Isn't it a meme at this point how people win the nobel prize in one field, and then say some nutty nonsense about a completely different field? The human species is rational, insane, brilliant, stupid, compassionate and vicious, ugly and beautiful all at once. All of us.
More compassion for self and others would be my preference.
No, but with a few friends getting together, cheering them along, and feeding into their collective insanity, they could very easily get together and do something serious. Most of the insurrectionists (the people who invaded Congress, not the people who went home after attending the rally) in Jan 6th can be described as such. That network of 'friends' is critical for actually motivating them to get off their ass and act on their beliefs.
> More compassion for self and others would be my preference.
The problem is that it's much easier to violently destroy, than it is to create, and the damage that a group of angry people who believe an utterly insane thing is disproportionate.
There is a name for that; it's the "Nobel Disease" or "Nobel Syndrome". Sometimes people swap "Nobel" and "MD".
A. Nonbizarre delusions (i.e., involving situations that occur in real life, such as being followed, poisoned, infected, loved at a distance, or deceived by spouse or lover, or having a disease) of at least 1 month’s duration.
B. Criterion A for schizophrenia has never been met. Note: Hallucinations, if present, are not prominent and are related to the delusion theme (e.g., the sensation of being infested with insects associated with delusions of infestation.
C. Apart from the impact of the delusion(s) or its ramifications, functioning is not markedly impaired and behavior is not obviously odd or bizarre.
[... etc ...]
"appears to behave normally in regular matters and is capable of independent living, does not match other DSM symptoms, but believes insane things".
None of you think the major religions teach some insane things? Okay then.
“ Such ridicule typically will not occur after a religious conversion brings a previous non-conformist into the fold of the culture’s dominant religion.”
I was on the phone so couldn't type much, but my point is the concept of the collective cognitive imperative (much better explained in the book than in Wikipedia, to be fair) would answer your question by saying "it's not that nobody thinks that: it's that enough people accept those insane things to the point that 1) they don't think they're insane things, 2) you'd be an outsider (or even considered insane) if you point out the fact that they're insane things.
I'll try to give an example that would work in my cultural context (South America): someone making a rain dance during a drought would be considered by most to be something from harmlessly silly to crazy. Someone praying to the christian god for guidance or help would be seen as normal.
I mean, if they didn’t, then they probably would be religions, just “stuff everyone believes or has reasoned discussions about”.
Spoiler: they can’t all be right.
However, if I were to take a guess, it’s something like “people sometimes believe things without proof”. But obviously this is not true only of religious people, other people have their own creation stories – the sole difference is their’s don’t involve worship. And I agree they can’t all be right, but perhaps one of them is.
These are axioms, you cannot derive them, you can only derive from them. Saying “my axioms are rational, yours are ‘insane’!” is frankly childish, and speaks to a deep lack of understanding of the essence of reason.
Certain mental conditions absolutely do, in a legal sense. Some conditions onset from brain injury and tumors, some to drug exposure, some are genetic, etc. For those unfortunate few who are afflicted, the most humane outcome is to intervene to keep them away from harming themselves and others, though often they are left unattended to by overstretched mental health services.
Even for non-Ill-defined, PTS and other trauma or just learnings- can do that to anyone and age doesn’t help to escape the reasoning-habits. Wise are those that can stay free from mental cages.
It’s very easy to find apparent incoherences in humans behavior by selectively picking out and not searching the motivations. This is the base attack for teenagers bullying book.
Oh sure, and the jury. One can do both - mock murderers and their ridiculous ideology and study it seriously to, perhaps, prevent others from taking the same path. One doesn't preclude the other, though.
To a certain degree I think these group enjoy being taken seriously, being in the news, fawned over, their writings analyzed by people going over their "deep" and "insightful" ideas. So that direction could be playing into their hands to a certain extent. For now, I'll go the "ridicule" path, I think.