"Fascism doesn’t just exist in the marketplace of ideas, but in actual persons living in our cities, funding and constructing their visions for our collective future." said the man in the brownshirt, unaware of his own uniform
> Samo assures me, he counts Karl Marx among his personal influences, and says Palladium has in fact published a Marxist. What he doesn’t mention is that they prefer to publish monarchists and white supremacists.
Genuine monarchists are pretty rare in America. Not nonexistent but.. Can these claims be substantiated or am I reading breathless hyperbole?
(No idea if either of those are credible; they're just what DDG gave me. I did skim the headlines on Palladium's website and it looks like center-right pretentious slop to me.)
Part of this is just class interests. We now have a bunch of billionaires who--shock, horror--align with billionaire interests. The days of the maverick operating out of their garage are long over.
But another part of this is transhumanism, which is a weirdly popular movement in tech circles.
The core tenet is transhumanism is that humans will eventually transcend their current form and becomes who knows what exactly? Some view this as the singularity, which in part explains the AI hype.
But part of this is the latest incarnation of the prosperity gospel, an early (and now pervasive) idea that wealth is a demonstration that you are favored by God. Another version of this is the myth of meritocracy under capitalism. So if you're wealthy, it's because you're better than all "the poors", by definition.
How does this relate to transhumanism? Well, if you're better than everyone else, you think your genes should be passed on to this ultimate transhumanist future by, say, having a ton of children. Even if you're a completely absent father, it doesn't matter. You believe in the supremacy of your genetic heritage.
> Print inevitably precipitates a face-to-face community, giving it the capacity to represent and in turn catalyze real-world movements.
I've never gone to a people-who-read-$PERIODICAL party. Ever. Maybe it's common for pro-union zines that the author used to contribute to, but Popular Science, Newsweek, or the like don't have any corresponding community associated with them. There's no Architectural Digest-affiliated underground interior decorating scene.
I think the author far overestimates the importance niche zines like the one they were a part of, or Palladium for that matter, have in the national dialogue.
> For the untainted, effective altruism (EA) is a very online social movement popular in tech circles, which was originally concerned with how to get rich philanthropists to donate to the most “effective” charities
Man this really makes me mad. Why do people love to hate on EA so much? Why is effectiveness a bad things? Is the author really advocating giving money to random charities? Or do they prefer no giving at all? Is it just that EAs make people feel guilty about their own charitable giving? Is there even a reasoned critique here, or is the author just picking up on a vibe against EA and going with it to give an air of smug knowing sophistication? A little wink and nod to the audience, who will of course have heard of EA, I mean who the hell is supposed to be reading this piece?
A lot of people question the "effective" part of effective altruism, and simply saying "we support more effective giving" is not convincing, especially when the most public figurehead of the movement is/was a convicted fraudster.
My main problem with EA is that it's used as a pseudo-alternative to proper public services and redistribution under the pretense that if we let rich people do what they want to - they will be "more effective" at it than the evil inefficient government.
What actually happens is they cut random shit, pocket the billions they save on taxes, spend a few millions here and there to feel good about themselves, and leave the chaos for someone else to sort out.
Silicon Valley was never liberal. It was always pro libertarian, wrapped in some kind of social progress branding. What changed is that the mask slipped...
The same people, who preached openness and democracy, now pivot overnight to nationalism and strong state fantasies when regulation or taxes appear, like for example Marc Andreessen recent disgusting ideological flip-flops.
Calling this an intelligentsia is too kind, when its more wealthy tech bros with PhDs rediscovering pre 1910s reactionary ideas and mistaking contrarianism for depth. When Peter Thiel bankrolls figures like Eric Weinstein, it is just money confusing confidence for intelligence.
The latest is [1] Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale openly calling for public hangings to show “masculine leadership”, what just proves how unserious this crowd is. They do enterprise software but want medieval justice systems. They are deeply dumb, but in a very well funded way... :-)
> The same people, who preached openness and democracy, now pivot overnight to nationalism
Nationalism isn't necessarily incompatible with open democracies. People in a democracy can vote for nationalistic policies without there being any contradiction.
Nationalism isn’t inherently immoral. Nationalism is the belief that people with a shared history, culture, language, or identity, ought to have political self-determination and a special loyalty to their own nation.
Where nationalism can go wrong is when it becomes exclusionary (eg defines nation as ethnic, racial, or religious), when it claims moral superiority, suppresses internal dissent, escalates into zero-sum thinking (success defined in terms of other nations losing).
Here’s an idea. What if instead of left/right wing, you’d sort ideas into useful and useless buckets, given that the context of these labels will change depending on your use case. X is useful for Y, but useless for Z. Ideally, you are tooling around with pro-social ideas for your governance or societal organization frameworks, which is a necessity if you’re optimizing for freedom, morality or ethics.
Sadly, in lieu of understanding larger societal contexts, our roles in them, and reasoning about uncertainty using grounded frameworks or rationale, most people have a tendency towards tribalism, and this is evident for proponents of both left- and right-wing ideologies. What we’re up against is already codified as the seven deadly sins, and despite the centuries of human societal and technological progress, these basic assumptions about anti-social human behavior still hold true.
The problem is when folks lock themselves into positions which they unfortunately convince themselves are beyond reproach. I like the Hegelian approach to ethics and freedom in society, but of course anyone may convince themselves that he’s speaking from their perspective, which I think is great. It shows how similar we all are.
This reflects an interesting development in Bay Area politics, which has global impact through tech companies.
A few decades ago, tech, science and liberalism were bedfellows in the Bay Area. Apple was famous for its anti-authoritarian "1984" ad, directed by Ridley Scott. Google proclaimed "Don't be evil".
I'm not sure quite what to make of the current trend of the dominant "technocrats", and their employees, from being liberal to supporting division within society.
But it does not seem conducive to a perpetuation of what made the Bay Area such a productive environment, from scientific, cultural and business perspectives.
> "A few decades ago, tech, science and liberalism were bedfellows in the Bay Area."
A few decades ago was before the meteoric internet and mobile web boom and the deluge of non-hackers with CS degrees and MBA types with dollar signs in their eyes that flooded into the tech industry. The hacker ethos turned from "information wants to be free" into "f--- you, pay me" in only a few short years simply because the old guard was diluted away to nothingness by so many newcomers.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 42.2 ms ] threadGenuine monarchists are pretty rare in America. Not nonexistent but.. Can these claims be substantiated or am I reading breathless hyperbole?
Rated as centrist: https://www.allsides.com/news-source/palladium-magazine-medi...
Rated as right-center: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/palladium-magazine-bias-and-c...
(No idea if either of those are credible; they're just what DDG gave me. I did skim the headlines on Palladium's website and it looks like center-right pretentious slop to me.)
But another part of this is transhumanism, which is a weirdly popular movement in tech circles.
The core tenet is transhumanism is that humans will eventually transcend their current form and becomes who knows what exactly? Some view this as the singularity, which in part explains the AI hype.
But part of this is the latest incarnation of the prosperity gospel, an early (and now pervasive) idea that wealth is a demonstration that you are favored by God. Another version of this is the myth of meritocracy under capitalism. So if you're wealthy, it's because you're better than all "the poors", by definition.
How does this relate to transhumanism? Well, if you're better than everyone else, you think your genes should be passed on to this ultimate transhumanist future by, say, having a ton of children. Even if you're a completely absent father, it doesn't matter. You believe in the supremacy of your genetic heritage.
Another way to put all this is simply eugenics.
> Print inevitably precipitates a face-to-face community, giving it the capacity to represent and in turn catalyze real-world movements.
I've never gone to a people-who-read-$PERIODICAL party. Ever. Maybe it's common for pro-union zines that the author used to contribute to, but Popular Science, Newsweek, or the like don't have any corresponding community associated with them. There's no Architectural Digest-affiliated underground interior decorating scene.
I think the author far overestimates the importance niche zines like the one they were a part of, or Palladium for that matter, have in the national dialogue.
Man this really makes me mad. Why do people love to hate on EA so much? Why is effectiveness a bad things? Is the author really advocating giving money to random charities? Or do they prefer no giving at all? Is it just that EAs make people feel guilty about their own charitable giving? Is there even a reasoned critique here, or is the author just picking up on a vibe against EA and going with it to give an air of smug knowing sophistication? A little wink and nod to the audience, who will of course have heard of EA, I mean who the hell is supposed to be reading this piece?
I stopped reading there. So frustrating.
What actually happens is they cut random shit, pocket the billions they save on taxes, spend a few millions here and there to feel good about themselves, and leave the chaos for someone else to sort out.
See Elon's crusade against American institutions.
EA today is about as "altruistic" as the CCP is "communist"
The same people, who preached openness and democracy, now pivot overnight to nationalism and strong state fantasies when regulation or taxes appear, like for example Marc Andreessen recent disgusting ideological flip-flops.
Calling this an intelligentsia is too kind, when its more wealthy tech bros with PhDs rediscovering pre 1910s reactionary ideas and mistaking contrarianism for depth. When Peter Thiel bankrolls figures like Eric Weinstein, it is just money confusing confidence for intelligence.
The latest is [1] Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale openly calling for public hangings to show “masculine leadership”, what just proves how unserious this crowd is. They do enterprise software but want medieval justice systems. They are deeply dumb, but in a very well funded way... :-)
[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/palantir-j...
Nationalism isn't necessarily incompatible with open democracies. People in a democracy can vote for nationalistic policies without there being any contradiction.
Nationalism isn’t inherently immoral. Nationalism is the belief that people with a shared history, culture, language, or identity, ought to have political self-determination and a special loyalty to their own nation.
Where nationalism can go wrong is when it becomes exclusionary (eg defines nation as ethnic, racial, or religious), when it claims moral superiority, suppresses internal dissent, escalates into zero-sum thinking (success defined in terms of other nations losing).
Sadly, in lieu of understanding larger societal contexts, our roles in them, and reasoning about uncertainty using grounded frameworks or rationale, most people have a tendency towards tribalism, and this is evident for proponents of both left- and right-wing ideologies. What we’re up against is already codified as the seven deadly sins, and despite the centuries of human societal and technological progress, these basic assumptions about anti-social human behavior still hold true.
The problem is when folks lock themselves into positions which they unfortunately convince themselves are beyond reproach. I like the Hegelian approach to ethics and freedom in society, but of course anyone may convince themselves that he’s speaking from their perspective, which I think is great. It shows how similar we all are.
A few decades ago, tech, science and liberalism were bedfellows in the Bay Area. Apple was famous for its anti-authoritarian "1984" ad, directed by Ridley Scott. Google proclaimed "Don't be evil".
I'm not sure quite what to make of the current trend of the dominant "technocrats", and their employees, from being liberal to supporting division within society.
But it does not seem conducive to a perpetuation of what made the Bay Area such a productive environment, from scientific, cultural and business perspectives.
A few decades ago was before the meteoric internet and mobile web boom and the deluge of non-hackers with CS degrees and MBA types with dollar signs in their eyes that flooded into the tech industry. The hacker ethos turned from "information wants to be free" into "f--- you, pay me" in only a few short years simply because the old guard was diluted away to nothingness by so many newcomers.