My post about Heartiste and the sour slut grapes the other day inspired the following highly ironic series of Tweets from Mr. H and one of his fans.
I am overwhelmed by the intellectual firepower on display in these Tweets!
RedPillPhill has offered other highly erudite critiques of my writing in the past.
Cathedral apologists like @DavidFutrelle and @devincf are running scared. Their output is reaching fevered pitch and a screechy womanly tone
— RedPillPhil (@RedPillPhil) August 28, 2014
.@DavidFutrelle pointing and sputtering doesn't stop what's true from being true, even if it does hurt your tender leftist equalist feelings
— RedPillPhil (@RedPillPhil) July 28, 2014
@Aurini @DavidFutrelle @heartiste @Steve_Sailer @ChuckGLP @voxday those like manboobz are the real racists and misogynists
— RedPillPhil (@RedPillPhil) July 28, 2014
Hmm. This last one seems debatable, given that RedPillPhil is a Dark Enlightenment “race realist” who recently retweeted this lovely cartoon:
— Illustrious Fishy (@Weelittlefishy) July 15, 2014
Apparently posting racist cartoons and calling me a womanly panty-sniffer is how Phil plans to win the war. What war? THE CULTURE WAR.
Stop just reading information and mentally masturbating. Take action. THIS IS A CULTURE WAR.
— RedPillPhil (@RedPillPhil) July 28, 2014
Is the Dark Enlightenment called the Dark Enlightenment because everyone involved in it has their head permanently up their own ass?
Wait. They ascribe Dark Triad traits to Sarkeesian? Of fucking course they do.
You know with her completion of a college education, no criminal history, long term planning, lack of numerous short term relationships, she’s a shoo-in for psychopathy. Yep.
And narcissism, what with her… hoop earrings? And lack of empathy in her… I don’t even know.
I mean, I could see them twisting a Machiavellian case by alleging her moral concerns are fabricated, and everything she does is a lie, if you believe that… you get 1 of the dark triad traits.
Let me add that like a lot of folks who don’t understand respect, these guys often confuse it with fear.
These are guys who got shot down by their first crush when they were 13 or so…and gave up because it was “too hard”. And they’re bitter that so many others seem to have figured it out.
Thus Spake ZaraBina:
It’s one of those heavily-laden subcultural terms that sounds cryptic to outsiders but has profound meaning within the subculture.
The definition linked by Kirbywarp is reasonably good, but in practice it means more, particularly among the libertarian/dork enlightenment set: By calling David Futrelle an agent of the “Cathedral,” RightSaidFred RedPillPhil is telling his fellows that Mr. Futrelle hates men, white people, and heterosexuals (and especially heterosexual white men) and wants to steal the rightful profits of hard work and success and give it all away to the lazy, stupid untermenschen and destroy western (i.e. white, male, heterosexual, cisgendered) civilization. And David DOESN’T EVEN LIFT BRO.*
It’s also a snarl word, like a climate change denier calling you a “warmie” or a religious reactionary calling you a “pagan.” The meanings also include “heretic, mutant, traitor!”… but the primary meaning is generally “SHUT UP!”
* In case it needs to be said: I don’t think any of that is true of David, but RedPillPhil does, or at least wants others to think it’s true.**
** Well, it’s possible he David DOESN’T EVEN LIFT BRO. I don’t know whether he regularly lifts things or people, or whether the things and people he putatively lifts include bros. The details of what, when, and whom David lifts are not my affair.
More on “cathedral” and the dark enlightenment in general here.
The imagery is so cool to me; I would totally read fiction based on it. Shame that people take it seriously, and that it’s basically a big-ole collection of all of the bigotry and teenage angst humankind has yet produced.
RPP:
Heartiste:
Oh dear…Bina&ktrantingredhead&PocketNerdI don’t think “Cathedral” has here any MRA-specific meaning (or libertarian one, for that matter)-it’s just a term originating in DE discourse, standing for…well, many diverse things. Essentially, it’s a hypothetical power structure (including, but not being limited to, teachers, academics, journalists and politicians) supposedly responsible for enforcement of “Enlightenment” principles, and as such can be used as an explanation for any social outcome or phenomenon, which is found “degenerate” by DE ilk.
So, then, “Cathedral” is just their shorthand for “people who are smarter than us, a clear majority of society, and who make us feel inferior because they can see what backward shitlords we really are”? Got it.
Thus Spake Zarakirbywarp:
Yeah. The imagery can be entertaining, but for me it’s ruined when you realize the core philosophy is “I am a Superior Person! But for some reason I’m not yet a billionaire CEO astronaut playboy. Therefore women and minorities must be stealing my stuff.”
Argh! HTML code fail! The last paragraph of my comment should read like:
Shorter Cathedral: I’m on the wrong side of history and it makes me cry and soil myself. Now I might have to succeed on my own merits instead of merely relying on being a white cishet male.
These guys think they’re so intellectual, but they’re no different than Pat Robertson or Fred Phelps.
They dismiss snark as unintellectual because they aren’t actually intelligent and witty enough to come up with good snark of their own. When they try, it’s sophomoric crap most people grow out of in middle school. They can only go with “you’re fat/gay/womanlike lol!”
@Pocket Nerd:
You forgot to add, “And women want to steal my precious man-juice so they can have babies and then make me pay child support so they don’t have to work ever. Good thing for me that I see through their clever ruse and don’t allow them to sperm-jack me.”
Nothing screams manly confidence like the handle “RedPillPhil”. Also, I do doubt that they read a whole lot of “information” but I don’t doubt that they vigorously mental masterbate all day long.
Ties back to the line about ‘Women are afraid that men will kill them; men are afraid that women will laugh at them’, perhaps?
But yeah, there’s certainly a good bit of ‘Respect mah authoriteh!’ coming from some of these folks.
And the descriptions of ‘Cathedral’ above definitely makes them sound like Objectivist types, firmly convinced that the only reason they aren’t running things and able to do whatever they want is that the rest of society actually dares to try and give the unworthy chances as well. They’re the protagonists of their own stories, damnit, how dare these NPCs get more attention than them?!
Which ties back into the Kathy Sierra piece from before, too, about the ‘Koolaid Point’…
Anyone else reminded of Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass?
Not only are they no good at anything requiring wit, they’re actively incensed that we don’t find their arguments merit Taking Seriously, as they do. They think they’ve come up with something wildly new and original and clear-thinking, but really it’s just a stale reformulation of the following reactionary tropes:
Blacks are all lazy, degenerate and rapey!
Asians are going to outbreed us whites, oh noes!
Give women birth control, the right to choose, education, and the vote, and what do they turn into? SLUTS!
And why, oh why, are those sluts befriending blacks and Asians, instead of superior white cis-het male ME ME ME???
Calling this sludge a “Dark Enlightenment” is an awfully fancy way of saying “We don’t have the wits or the inclination to fight the real enemy (capitalism); we’re just gonna make up newfanglish terminology so people won’t realize that we’re the same old same old that they’ve already won out over countless times before. Maybe THEN they’ll Take Us Seriously!”
Thus Spake Zaraphasma :
I’ve been hearing “Cathedral” in libertarian discourse since at least 1999 (when I still had libertarian leanings myself). It’s not a new thing, although the typical usage has evolved considerably in the last 15 years; originally it referred solely a top-down command economy (which libertarians like to conflate with any kind of economic regulation whatsoever); nowadays libertarians seem to use it to mean simply “anything and everything about modern economics that we don’t like.” If a libertarian starts talking about the Cathedral, he’s probably only a few sentences away from calling somebody or something “statist”.
If I were a betting man, I’d wager a tidy sum that Moldbug had the libertarian usage in mind when he exapted the term for Dork Enlightenment purposes.
And you’re right, Cathedral is not MRA-specific — but my original point is that it’s very telling how libertarian and DE phrases keep popping up in MRA circles.
“Neoreactionary Cat knows that the opposite of quality is equality.”
“Those like Manboobz are the real racists and misogynists.”
“He ignores biological realities of women and blacks to serve his ideology.”
Posted directly one after another on the same Tweet. Wha… How did he type the second one without spontaneously combusting? Even literal seven-year-olds would stop mid-sentence to wonder if they’re taking the rubber/glue schoolyard mentality too far.
Against equality, but tries to use racist as an insult.
I really love how they have to invent words for concepts they loathe. “Equalist”, for example. Is EGALITARIAN really so hard to type out? Their fingers must be constantly trembling with rage at knowing themselves to be constantly out-thought like this. Maybe that’s why they’re trying to save keystrokes.
@titian blue:
Very much so, especially when you look through the MGTOW glossary and see how they redefine sexist slurs. “Whore” doesn’t mean “has too much sex,” silly, it actually means “puts too high a price on sex” as in “doesn’t have sex readily enough.” Suddenly Tom Martin makes a lot more sense.
@vaiyt:
More like “uses racist as an insult again people who want equality.” It’s even more backwards.
*against
@Bina
“Egalitarian” wouldn’t fit into that sick burn of a pun.
@Pocket Nerd Thanks, it’s always nice to learn something new, even when the subject isn’t exactly something you could call appealing. Also, this kind of rhetorical convergence wouldn’t be really that surprising, given how many of DEers, including Moldbug, lean heavily libertarian. One would be hard-pressed to not notice the obvious parallels between how those two groups try to frame debates by trying to portray their opponents as religion-driven (be it overarching “statism” or “progressivism”).Which is pretty hilarious, considering that DEers are supposed to stand for The Traditional Way™
Vaiyt,
He probable means racist against whites. Everyone knows reverse racism is the only true racism!