Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

    • vulture_god@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      11·
      3 months ago

      Great article. It’s always fun to read about smart people lionizing a terrible person like Aleister Crowley and inevitably going insane (or dead, in Jack Parson’s case).

      The article never discussed the topic directly, but for others interested in esoterica would probably enjoy reading about the concept of egregores.

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        3 months ago

        terrible person like Aleister Crowley

        Wait, why is Crowley terrible? Wasn’t he basically an overly enthusiastic cosplayer that did all the drugs and all the sex? So basically an occult hippy? Am I just unaware of him abusing people or some other dark shit?

          • Mike@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            3 months ago

            Claim to fame! Aleister Crowley was born a short walk from the house where I grew up, although then he was plain old Edward Crowley. My home town isn’t that keen to be associated with him, largely because of the above - at a superficial level he was a harmless crank, a rich kid who decided to start his own religion and dress up in robes, but once you dig down into the history he was a pretty unpleasant, exploitative man - a classic cult leader.

        • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          3 months ago

          I mean, I really don’t think you can have a sex cult without at the very least some abuse. It’s also good practice to treat occultism as weirdo fascism.

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
            8·
            3 months ago

            It’s also good practice to treat occultism as weirdo fascism.

            the coincidence happening over and over is a tad unfortunate

        • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          3 months ago

          I read his Wikipedia recently and he just seemed like a user who was careless with the people in his life. His philosophy was “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”, which is obviously open to abuse and exploitation.

          • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            3 months ago

            Ye that’s why I’m asking, cause even RationalWiki doesn’t have a chapter on abuse or anything.

            • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
              9·
              3 months ago

              Here are some bits from Wikipedia:

              He offered a libertine education for the children, allowing them to play all day and witness acts of sex magic. He occasionally travelled to Palermo to visit rent boys and buy supplies, including drugs; his heroin addiction came to dominate his life, and cocaine began to erode his nasal cavity. There was no cleaning rota, and wild dogs and cats wandered throughout the building, which soon became unsanitary. Poupée died in October 1920, and Ninette gave birth to a daughter, Astarte Lulu Panthea, soon afterwards.

              New followers continued to arrive at the Abbey to be taught by Crowley. Among them was film star Jane Wolfe, who arrived in July 1920, where she was initiated into the A∴A∴ and became Crowley’s secretary. Another was Cecil Frederick Russell, who often argued with Crowley, disliking the same-sex sexual magic that he was required to perform, and left after a year.

              Subsequently, a young Thelemite named Raoul Loveday moved to the Abbey with his wife Betty May; while Loveday was devoted to Crowley, May detested him and life at the commune. She later said that Loveday was made to drink the blood of a sacrificed cat, and that they were required to cut themselves with razors every time they used the pronoun “I”. Loveday drank from a local polluted stream, soon developing a liver infection resulting in his death in February 1923.

              Employing a local boy, Mohammad ben Brahim, as his servant, Crowley went with him on a retreat to Nefta, where they performed sex magic together.

              Crowley was intrigued by the rise of Nazism in Germany, and influenced by his friend Martha Küntzel believed that Adolf Hitler might convert to Thelema; when the Nazis abolished the German O.T.O. and imprisoned Germer, who fled to the US, Crowley then lambasted Hitler as a black magician.

              Pasi described Crowley’s fascination with the extreme ideologies of Nazism and Marxism–Leninism, which aimed to violently overturn society: “What Crowley liked about Nazism and communism, or at least what made him curious about them, was the anti-Christian position and the revolutionary and socially subversive implications of these two movements. In their subversive powers, he saw the possibility of an annihilation of old religious traditions, and the creation of a void that Thelema, subsequently, would be able to fill.” Crowley described democracy as an “imbecile and nauseating cult of weakness”, and commented that The Book of the Law proclaimed that “there is the master and there is the slave; the noble and the serf; the ‘lone wolf’ and the herd”.

              It’s always the same boring old squalid shit with these basic nietzschean bitches. Not many people I have less respect for.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      3 months ago

      you know, I’d wondered previously about the higher-than-average divinity-and-spirits obsession among TPOT. between some of the history of land/ccru there, the other shit previously observed in the stubsack (iirc?) about rightoids and aliens/fairies (and ofc the nazi history of occultism)… what a fucking faith to make

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        3 months ago

        Truly the weirdest consequence of crank magnetism and conspiracy syncretism is the kinds of bedfellows you find. UFO cults align with Christian dominionists because the aliens are actually demons (or vice versa - which direction isn’t important).

        It feels like modern fascism is less driven by orthodoxy (right belief) than they are by orthopraxy (right action) to the degree that as long as they aren’t actually in power anyone who hates on the right people and rejects the right facts can join the same club regardless of what they actually think. The weirdo occultism of the Nazis was largely tied to the project of reifying their racial hierarchy in all aspects of society by establishing that the Aryan race had the best religion and the best history in addition to the best genes and the best country. The weirdo occultism of modern fascism doesn’t have that kind of thread to it that I can see, and I don’t know what that means for ongoing development. Does it turn into a source of internal strife as they get closer to having actual influence? Do they settle into a more specific doctrine and cull the ranks of those who don’t adopt it? Or is accepting a consensus reality actually the optional part here as long as the group can broadly agree on what to do?

        • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          3 months ago

          Helena Blavatsky and Rudolph Steiner made up much of what went on to constitute esoteric Hilterism ab nihilo.

          Blavatsky, in particular, was a prolific bullshitter in the Frankfurtian sense. She invented the notion of the Aryan master race as a thing that exists in the future, which white europeans should strive to bring into the world.