People fear irony because it destabilizes meaning and poses the threat of nihilism. But nihilism is nothing to fear so long as you wear Mylar glasses when staring right at it. 5 minutes of nihilism per day lowers the risks of fascism by 17% and boosts vitamin D levels
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Elsewhere, I've argued (well, tweeted) that meaning is memorability. To complete the argument, the perception of beauty is registration of meaningfulness, which is integration into memory. Which creates a conservative bias.
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Meaning is memorability.
Dunno why it took me so long to see this.
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And in another thread, I argued for why aesthetics is an entry drug into conservatism specifically (broadly understood as any ideology with a long history, including for eg old-labor)
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aesthetics seems to be the entry drug of conservatism everywhere in the world 
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Aesthetics are related, but not equivalent to, emotions ("awareness of emotional coherence" perhaps?) and I think my position on aesthetics is similar to the stoic position on emotions in general -- they're something to be consciously self-regulated.
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Ie, if you're not interrogating and regulating your aesthetic responses pretty critically, you create the same kinds of problems you get from not interrogating and regulating emotions. Various sorts of hijacking, overconfidence, unfounded gut feelings of deep certainty etc.
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Except, more so. Unregulated aesthetic responses are more dangerous because they are not generally extreme or acutely stressful. Most people don't feel out of control, but like they're simply being tasteful and appreciative. It doesn't feel like emotional discomposure.
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I'm kinda meh on emotional stoicism. It's an overrated thing imo, but this sort of aesthetico-stoicism is under-rated. A big part of it is regulating disgust responses, stress from contemplating disorder and chaos, etc.
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The proper term for this is conscious tastelessness.
Conscious tastelessness is to aesthetics what Spockian emotional self-regulation is to emotions.
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I've always been consciously tasteless for the lulz and to annoy aesthetes, but at some point a few years ago, I started noticing that the consequences ran deeper than just fun trolling, so I started adding some considered intellectual justifications underneath...
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This is probably the main aspect of my shit that attracts genuine haters :D
Many people seem annoyed or bored by me, or contemptuous of shit I get up to, but I've only ever seen aesthetes develop some level of hatred... though fortunately it's only necessary, not sufficient
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Sidebar: there is a distinction to be made between affective irony and substantive irony. It's like the difference between wearing camouflage as fashion vs. having military experience with actual camouflage. The latter runs deep and may not present as affective irony at all.
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Irony as a way of seeing has a much stronger grip on personality than irony as a way of presenting. It's like seeing a thing and its conceptual shadows at the same time, all the time.
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Just as military veterans (I'm guessing here) are probably always a bit aware of the camouflage possibilities of whatever environment they're in.
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I rarely do affective irony in my writing; don't have a good ear for it. But irony-in-seeing is probably something I'll never be able to shake off. Permanent double vision. A kind of philosophical drunkenness I guess.
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It's not the kind of aesthetic really, but whether aesthetics are the master rather than the servant of thought
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Riffed on the good-servant/bad-master effect here.
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Aesthetics is one of those Good-Servant-Bad-Master (GSBM) things
So many things are GSBM... optimization, rationality, ritual, humor, nerdery, community, prowess, money, power.
it only takes falling for 1 GSBM to go from live player to dead player... bam, you're a shell script
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