If anyone is wondering about the actual views and arguments of Moldbug and his neoreactionaries, they were covered and responded to by economist blogger Noah Smith here.
The crux of it (and something I never saw quite covered in all the essays bouncing around) is
"Essentially, neoreaction is the dream of a society of mostly white people, living in a hierarchy based both on group membership (aristocratic lineage, gender, race) and individual ability (IQ). The neoreactionaries do not demand total racial purity. But many seem to think that if multiple races live in the same country, the races should be placed in a hierarchy of power, status, and freedom, apparently based on the average IQ of their racial group. Since the movement is about European traditionalism, it's not clear whether white people would be given a special place in the hierarchy, even above those groups whose average IQ is higher than that of whites.
As for women, many neoreactionaries appear to want them to return to traditional social roles - homemaking and child-rearing - and to submit more willingly to the sexual desires of men. Finally, there is some sense that within these group boundaries, the neoreactionaries might want a limited meritocracy - in other words, maybe the smart should rule. However, some neoreactionaries (particularly Anissimov) praise the idea of aristocracy, apparently believing that naturally superior people would manage to win the titles of nobility, and that their descendants would remain superior.
In other words, the neoreactionaries want the West to be a lot like the Ming Dynasty, but for white people. I've often thought of Europe as "the China that never quite made it"; neoreaction seems like the latest manifestation of a dream that refuses to die. "
The neoreactionaries aren't interested in the Enlightenment as a set of fundamental ideas, but as a time in history they find congenial: after the scientific revolution, before democratic, industrial capitalism steamrolled the aristocracy.
They are like an alternative version of the Society for Creative Anachronism, re-imagining the Enlightenment historical period in ways that leave out the things they find icky but that are in fact inevitable consequences of the times. For SCA that's reimagining the High Middle Ages without the plague. For neoreactionaries it's reimagining the Enlightenment without the end of slavery, or the rise of individualism and democracy.
For those of us who pursue Enlightenment ideals rather than Enlightenment historical accidents, they are an unfortunate bunch. SCA members would feel the same way about anyone who was serious about bringing back feudalism, or reducing society to "warriors, priests and peasants."
Most neoreactionaries I know don't care much for the Enlightenment at all. Some pine for monarchy, others for Skynet, still more for the farm. A difficult bunch to generalize, united only by their shared (but uneven) disdain for democracy, (post-)modernism, and egalitarianism.
Getting the views of neoreactionaries from Noah Smith is like getting the views of Luther's 95 Theses from Pope Leo X. How about, you know, just reading Moldbug?
Seriously, any interest I've ever had in whatever he's talking about has been stymied by his lack of concision, even simple methods like the pyramid style which allows for the full treatment. When this blew up I tried reading, then skimming the Carlyle essay, couldn't make myself (and I am somewhat interested in learning about political philosophies I'm not yet familiar with, and of course the peculiar institution is a very important thing to those of us in the US). A bit like the Wheel of Time when the plot stopped.
In contrast, I devoured the full UR archives over the course of a couple weeks. In this context, his verbosity is a feature, not a bug, because it's people like me Moldbug was trying to reach.
Looks like this person edited their comment. Anyway, you're right, Noah Smith is one of the less objective filters you could seek to fairly summarize a right-of-left-of-center viewpoint.
Life is too short to do a lot of silly things like veg on junk TV or fart around on Twitter or read the entire Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality all day yet I admit that I sometimes persist.
Moldbug is a strange and fascinating bird that is not immediately meant to be understood, but experienced. There really is no one else like him. For those with a taste for the antiquated charm of letters filtered for the post-post-modern generation, he writes entertaining and challenging essays that lets us peek behind the lacquered veneer of modern society to get a feel for what it is that we don't realize we have forgotten. He is certainly not for everyone, but a "fascist racist sexist anti-Christ" he is decidedly not.
I never claimed it was a wikipedia entry. Just that if you were interested in what the views expressed by neoreactionaries were, here's one source I read about it.
And? The question is not "how fringe is Yarvin's politics," the question is "does the fact that he has fringe politics mean he should be kicked out of a conference where he would not be speaking about politics."
Clark does a great job elucidating the point I've heard many other people struggle to present. One of the things I love about writers that specialize in legal matters, they're very good at articulating a position.
The "questions for sponsors" bit is particularly sharp at cutting towards the discrepancy between the standards dissenters expected from the conference and those they saw. There may be widely agreeable answers to the "how is this justifiably different?" question, but the conversations so far have largely skated around it with sophistry.
Also, I'd recommend everyone read the "Tolerating everything except the outgroup" link, but the writing style and/or position might prevent you from seeing the message.
I enjoy your writing but I think I disagree with the successes that you attribute to the blue team. Some of them are right on, but some successes are only that if you say that blue means liberal like Adam Smith was a liberal and not a mercantilist. That's just my take though. Cheers!
The general, reductionist way I've seen it put and like, is that the "blue team" has been so successful in the culture war that they are now reduced to policing the battlefield and shooting the survivors. Which Yarvin obviously was, seeing as how there's little to no chance Urbit will ever get a chance in this current totally politicized environment.
It's a good summary - generally balanced, but skewing toward the side of letting CY speak on Urbit, and asking some pointed questions about why he was removed after acceptance.
I'm surprised by apparent predominance of support here on HN for Strangeloop's position. While clearly legal, it's strikes me as a terrible precedent to require speakers on technical topics to pass a political litmus test. I'd be interested to know the actual direction that the sentiment lies. Do those who support Curtis appearing at the talk (wisely?) refrain from posting out of (legitimate?) fear of career repercussion? Or am I (comfortable speaking because I'm largely outside the industry) in the minority?
Do those who support Curtis appearing at the talk (wisely?) refrain from posting out of (legitimate?) fear of career repercussion?
This. It also has the perverse effect of leaving the defense of "racists" to actual racists (e.g., [1]), thereby leading to guilt by association: "See, only racists are willing to defend this guy, so he's obviously a racist!"
More recently, perhaps within the past year or two, I've been seeing online a polarization and evaporative cooling effect in action. There doesn't seem to be as much middle ground and nuance as there has been in the past. Any support or acceptance for an officially disapproved entity is tantamount to total or unqualified support or acceptance.
Many moderates - in this case, moderate supporters of Yarvin, as shown in the comments here - appear to be fearful of getting tarred with the scarlet "R" and facing career threat. The scarlet "S" and "M" are also significant.
In contrast, the "C" is not threatened nowadays, if it ever was. Left-wing extremism is given a pass, while right-wing extremism is always tarred with the "R" brush. People rarely use the "F" word - they just default to "R", which is far more damaging.
(I mean: racist / sexist / misogynist / communist / fascist above.)
You can expand the above a bit by distinguishing between "c", "I, Steven Klabnik, am 'a communist' as the simplest thing to describe me", vs. "C", "I, Julius Rosenberg, became a member of the US Communist Party when it was popular, required careful vetting and submission to party discipline, which by definition made me a traitor."
And this reminds me of a quote by the not moderate Jim Hightower, "There's nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos."
but I've also been sitting on a 75%-written blog post that I'm hesitant to actually post.
Not because of career repercussions (I have never had an employer who really gave a shit what I write about in my spare time) but because of conference repercussions.
I am promoting a book, and to that end I am scheduled to speak at various conferences and meetups. And I worry that the mob would somehow try to get me uninvited. It's not like there's an actual policy that Yarvin violated that I can be confident I'm on the right side of.
So I am torn between my natural inclination to say exactly what I think, and the more practical takeaway of "don't write or have written anything that might anger the mob".
I mean, I feel like I'm conveying my exact preferences pretty clearly ("let Yarvin speak"), the question is more how much I want to antagonize the people who got him uninvited.
I typically avoid posting in these sorts of threads, very little good has come from political debates on the internet that I've seen, but your last sentence pushes me to speak up.
Status-quo social thoughtcrime is rather terrifying to me. There's no "easy" way to amend laws or lobby a system to address the issue, as one would against a governmental stance.
It's also cyclical, as less "clean" people speak out against it, the "only rapists defend rapist" situation mentioned by sister posts occurs, and the entire culture of defending someone who might be distasteful, separating the issue from their broader history, diminishes.
I can't claim to judge you for your decision, I fully acknowledge the unfortunate state of things and your ability to make a choice that best serves your needs, but for the sake of putting my money where my mouth is; I think he should have been allowed to speak (espousing viewpoints I disagree with is far and beyond an offensive enough act to cause me to want to petition against someone, and even then, I would not attempt to convey that aversion as anything more than my personal stance).
The fact that I (or you, or any of us) feel any uncertainty due to fear of the repercussions for merely voicing this opinion only serves to reinforce my conviction that it needs to be voiced.
That is very, very true. It is, frankly, impossible to force change in such a situation unless you already have a large enough soapbox to be heard and can build a network of similarly minded [and widely read/heard] individuals.
I think, regardless of political affiliation, we have to admit to ourselves that most people are prepared & willing to silence people with beliefs they find odious. Please note that I said "beliefs" not "actions".
The right to vocalize and discuss our beliefs freely is something that must be fundamentally protected, most especially when it is odious. The only way to do that is to make it both legally permissible [as the law can apply violent force] but also socially permissible to the point of indifference for people to voice different beliefs [even the odious, bigoted ones].
It's not like there's an actual policy that Yarvin violated that I can be confident I'm on the right side of.
This is the bigger issue - the chilling of all controversial views and debate.
It's less about "violated Rule XXIV, subsection (c) of the Code of Conduct" and more about "wrote some stuff that made us feel funny and we're worried that something awkward might happen at the meeting". Yes, the organizers have the power to rewrite the schedule for bad reasons or no reason at all. But it's important to point out what was done, and why we think it was done.
I for one support Curtis on this issue, but tend not to post here on the subject except under an alternate username. I do this because I do in fact fear the "social justice" crowd and their ability to mess with people and their careers when they don't follow the party line.
If I were to hazard a guess, I think I'm not alone in this and I think you're not in a minority (or at least a small one). The recent HN stories seem to get a good number of "silent upvotes" before anyone steps into the fray to add a comment.
> I do in fact fear the "social justice" crowd and their ability to mess with people and their careers when they don't follow the party line
This is something I'd love see SJW's here react to. How do you feel about the fact that you have created a climate of fear amongst people who disagree with you?
Would you prefer convincing them of the correctness of your position, but willing to accept that at least by making them afraid you are helping further your cause?
Or are you concerned you've become the kind of discourse-stiffling monster you set out to defeat?
Or are you proud you've made the priviledged afraid?
Or something else entirely?
Because don't kid yourself: people are increasingly afraid to speak up on these issues because they are genuinely afraid of the consequences to their future employment prospects. Personally, I see that as a shameful situation, antithetical to any reasonable notion of a just society.
[Disclaimer: I've been accused at times of being an SJW, an MRA, a shill for Big Carbon, and quite a few other things besides.]
"How do you feel about the fact that you have created a climate of fear amongst people who disagree with you?"
I don't think they care or, more specifically, if you fear then you don't think correctly and should shut-up[1]. Its quite a common attitude in movements and has happened many times.
1) or they'll add you to a blacklist to shut you up - the clean modern version of disappearing a person
My guess is that they would be happy that they've created that climate of fear. I've noticed a trend among at least some in the "social justice" community that sees progress happening in terms of suppressing bad actions/speech until those who remember it die off. A lot of believing that the way forward is to akin to waiting for the "old racist generation" to die.
I've been involved in anti-racist/anti-fascist work, either directly or on the periphery, for about ten years at this point. This takes many forms, from street confrontations with fascists, protests at book readings and other events, and also disrupting fascist conferences and similar.
Anti-Racist Action is the organization that has developed the most tactical and strategic influence in this space, not by design, but by chance (and it largely doesn't exist anymore). Disrupting fascist meetings by denying them space by getting hotels to drop them is the bread and butter of any ARA chapter. It's the easiest thing to do, and most modern tumblerites aren't willing to get in the streets with a bandanna and a baseball bat, so it's what gets done now. And in fact, it's likely that this sort of thing happens because ARA activists got involved in more liberal groups, etc., and the tactics just trickled down.
Personally, I have developed political differences with the "SJW" orthodoxy myself (though obviously in the other direction), and have seen the effects of this sort of attack applied on a social level. It has made my own work slightly more difficult, because I have to pick my comrades more carefully to ensure that they won't alienate me from my network. But this isn't a big deal for leftists, because there are already so many camps that are mutually oppositional that you'd need to do that already for some of your politics anyway. What's new in the last few years is having that extend away from your class alignment. (This is an answer to a question you didn't really ask, which is how the "SJW" community itself is affected by this, though it is what came to mind when I asked myself how I felt about it.)
As far as this issue and other similar issues are concerned, I'm overjoyed that, as you put it, a climate of fear exists for fascists, misogynists, racists, and similar. I hope that this continues and only worsens for these people.
I'm happy for many reasons. The first is that it has, as you've said, made privileged people afraid. I think this is only the beginning. Privilege creates safety, and as it is removed, I think the unsafety of the oppressed will in part come to the currently privileged classes. But if I could flip a switch and make every man feel the persistent, gnawing fear that a woman has of men, I would in a heartbeat. I wouldn't even consider whether the consequences were strategic, I would just do it.
I'm also happy that these people are achieving real victories. This is nearly impossible to do in a post-reformist landscape, and so the people involved in getting this fascist kicked out of this conference will have a real victory under their belt where their friends who are campaigning against some law that will inevitably pass or for some reform that will inevitably never happen won't. I hope that these victories can motivate people into taking more action. Burnout is a huge problem in activism and successes stave it off.
I would not say that I set out to defeat a "discourse-stifling" monster. The monsters I set out to defeat were patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. These systems violently oppress, they don't "stifle discourse." In fact, they LOVE discourse! When people are discoursing, they aren't in the streets. I've seen so many promising movements hobbled by reformism that I'm glad the possibility no longer exists, though that isn't at all the fault of SJW-outrage (and is rather a consequence of the fact that the economy is in large part so perilous that nobody can afford the concessions that were previously won by reformists). So if discourse is permanently removed as a tactical and strategic option for future leftists, I'll consider it a victory.
You might be unsurprised to find out that free speech is not valued on the left or among "SJW" groups. I suggest you research this further,...
Thank you for confirming my suspicion that if you scratch the surface, all political extremists are motivated by the same all-consuming, destructive nihilism.
Well, it's a high-stakes game. As Benjamin Franklin said, you hang together or your hang separately.
But far more put there by the state, make no mistake. It's not like there haven't been plenty of purges and organized campaigns of systematic repression from the state to the left. But you like ignoring that when we talk about fascist programmers not being able to present their widgets, don't you?
"most modern tumblerites aren't willing to get in the streets with a bandanna and a baseball bat"
Probably because this is a really stupid course of action to begin with, independent of tumblr.
Using baseball bats to reinforce your political views seems like a great idea until your opponents show up with guns. Which means you, now, have to show up with guns, and so on, until you're a full-on terrorist group.
Well, that and you risk going to jail for assault with a deadly weapon, and you don't want to be in the same cell with someone from the Aryan Brotherhood when they find out your reason for jailtime was assaulting white power groups.
Using baseball bats to reinforce your political views seems like a great idea until your opponents show up with guns.
I have to wonder if this dangerous person lives in the US, or at least the true US, the 2/3rds of which allow concealed carry. I marvel at how the National Socialist Movement and some "White Nationalists" thought it wise to meet in New Jersey and Illinois, respectively, where and when it was illegal to carry concealed (not groups of smart people, it would seem :-). Hmmmm, for that matter, Ohio is in one way the worst state in the union for self-defense, because the burden of proof is on the person claiming it. (These incidents mentioned at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Racist_Action)
Try that shit in the state of Missouri where Strange Loop is meeting and you'll very possibly get legally shot. Counterwise the Nazis were greatly aided by prior Weimar efforts at gun control, which they of course reinforced once they started getting formal power.
In fact, all these actions by the left in the US strike me as extremely unwise, for in the many possibilities of "this will not end well", those of a very well armed population putting paid to their pretensions should be quite prominent in their minds.
But venues for anti-fascist violence most certainly include "protests at book readings and other events, and also disrupting fascist conferences and similar", or so you seem to be saying, and most certainly per history in the US (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Racist_Action#History). But as I noted elsewhere, the non-protest/march incidents happened in viciously anti-gun states (although that's no longer true for Illinois), where those using guns to defend themselves from hammers and baseball bats would have gone to jail as well.
Plus, if what you say was true, can you point to some incidents where your side actually, you know, got shot for their troubles? I mean your violent side, not the pre-Black Power civil rights period of this.
Were? The black panthers still exist. They have nothing to do with people calling themselves "anti-fascist" though.
"Do you think that white nationalists don't take guns to their protests and marches?"
I think the kind of person who talks about carrying around baseball bats isn't going to go to these marches.
What you think is hilarious is on you and your weird sense of humor. If you go to a meeting with baseball bats, eventually, the people you're disrupting are going to bring weapons stronger than baseball bats.
Hmmm, I wasn't thinking of sdfghjkl34567 and company as cowards, but now that you mention the possibility, maybe it isn't a coincidence that the calm events (not protests and marches) they brought baseball bats (and hammers) to in the US, at least per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Racist_Action#History were in states where their targets couldn't legally carry guns. It would be interesting to check with Google to see if their targets meet elsewhere relatively unmolested.
The wikipedia history for ARA itself is a pretty reductive list of actions compared to all ARA-aligned actions. Again, I mentioned ARA because they popularized the tactic of shutting down meetings by pressuring hotels (which is not to say they invented secondary target activism), not because it was the only group doing so or for any other specific reason.
Anti-racist and anti-fascist organizing happens under the mantle of a thousand different groups all over the world. There are antifa in Russia that have it much harder than antifa in France or the UK or the US.
> Anti-racist and anti-fascist organizing happens under the mantle of a thousand different groups all over the world.
And yet we are asked to believe that an obscure blogger flirting with monarchist political thought would introduce a dangerous authoritarian element if allowed to present on a technical topic. Thanks for putting this into context.
I would not call Moldbug obscure; neo-reactionaryism is growing especially in tech circles and legitimizing its source is a dangerous act, not because he will seize power given the platform, but because it communicates a lack of concern with the threat "neo-reactionaryism" or fascism represents.
Discussing an individual's technical contributions does not legitimize their political views, let alone their technical ones.
And the big threat today is not neo-reactionaryism, but zealotry in all its forms. Radicals from any group are more dangerous than moderates from a single distasteful group, and they all use exactly the same tactics to win. And if we're going to win by burying bad ideas through threats and intimidation instead of openly dismantling them through rational and ethical thought, then I'm not sure the battle is even worth winning.
The "new" black panthers exist, but as a former actual black panther I know says, I don't see their breakfast programs.
Antifa did and do routinely disrupt fascist actions with physical force and frequently got (and get) shot for it. Sometimes the antifa are the ones doing the shooting.
But most of the time the antifa are hilariously underarmed compared to the (as you've pointed out) very well armed rightists and it's a combination of bravado and stupidity that they take the actions they do. The KKK, neo nazis, etc., have all had weapons stronger than baseball bats for a while. There's no "eventually." Do you understand what I'm saying?
> But if I could flip a switch and make every man feel the persistent, gnawing fear that a woman has of men, I would in a heartbeat.
There's not much point in railing against racists / sexists / etc. if you're going to make equally condescending generalizations about the victims you're trying to save.
Ted Kaczynski was wrong about a lot of things, but reading this I can't help but think he was correct in his diagnosis of the ills of modern leftism (power process, feelings of inferiority, oversocialization)
> But if I could flip a switch and make every man feel the persistent, gnawing fear that a woman has of men, I would in a heartbeat.
Would it not be better to work towards nobody feeling such fear?
> I'm also happy that these people are achieving real victories ... their friends ... are campaigning against some law that will inevitably pass
Once again championing (any) change itself over sane outcomes. Oppressive laws and the march of the machine are inevitable, so let's just fight each other?
Your comment is a poignant example of everything gone wrong with the "progressive" mentality. Thank you for being candid though.
>Would it not be better to work towards nobody feeling such fear?
But that isn't the hypothetical. Do you understand the concept?
Certainly if I had a faeries & unicorns switch I'd hit that as well, but we don't always have the options we'd like.
In the meantime, if it's possible to make fascist programmers afraid for their careers, that's great for me. It means fascist movements are disrupted before they can even form. God knows leftists have been afraid for long enough.
You came up with that specific hypothetical and it inherently carries your framework. It is set up as a zero sum interaction where everyone needs to be brought down rather than lifted up. But fighting injustice with more injustice is a race to the bottom.
By your usage, I presume you're using definition #1 of http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascist even though you are not capitalizing it. If it is possible to make Fascist programmers afraid for their careers, then Fascists cannot possibly wield much power.
On the other hand, the results of mob justice look an awful lot like a distributed implementation of fascism definition #2 - how is it not appropriate to describe, for example, a summary firing for political views as such?
Dictionaries are descriptions, not proscriptions, of words. I'm not "using" any definition of fascism other than the one I've built up in my own mind based on my own lived experiences. I'm not going to be questioned on a dictionary.
It is true that all exercises of political power are at the end of the day coercive. My personal take on this is to minimize political power, but to do this takes a specific social arrangement that doesn't exist in the present day.
The hypothetical I came up with is one where it's easier to attack an existing system than to create new and liberatory systems. This is the same as reality. It is much, much easier to get a fascist talk removed from a conference than it would be to get everyone at that conference to come to an appropriate understanding of feminist and anti-racist thought and praxis. There are certainly people involved in education, propaganda, and outreach, but this is by nature a much slower process and one that will not bear fruit in any reasonable time span. It is certainly not fast enough to counteract things like fascists at conferences, so we shut down the fascists.
I also obviously disagree as to whether denying a fascist the ability to spread fascism is injustice, or more broadly, whether attacking the oppressor classes and limiting their ability to oppress is somehow unjust. But then, I also care much less about any concept of "justice." Certainly the world is not a just place, and I question whether the concept of justice as communicated by oppressor classes is something we need to bring with us into the future.
If your definition differs, please describe it. Sharing definitions is necessary to communicate, as opposed to simply lobbing feels back and forth.
> My personal take on this is to minimize political power, but to do this takes a specific social arrangement that doesn't exist in the present day.
So in the mean time, you switch to maximizing political power? Why exactly do you think this would end any differently than it has in the past - simply empowering new autocrats borne by new religions?
> But then, I also care much less about any concept of "justice."
How can you propose to have a society without justice? When people feel wronged, their desire is to get greater revenge. Without moderating this force, feuds grow ever larger.
It seems as if you're envisioning a magic society where everybody just "gets it" and nobody transgresses against one another. And since you can never have that (there will always be differences of opinion), you take solace in mob destruction but yet still tell yourself you're fighting the good fight.
>> distributed implementation of fascism
> Do you notice the contradiction?
Not at all. The result is the same for those on the receiving end. (and for your inevitable thought of 'well they deserve it' - that's exactly the position of the oppressors you're fighting against. good job!)
It is much, much easier to get a fascist talk removed from a conference
How does one distinguish a "fascist talk" from a "technical talk presented by one accused of being a fascist"? Is the difference relevant? I think Moldbug views himself as anti-fascist, and argues that Fascism and Communism are alternative undesirable endgames for democracy: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/carlyle...
And I'm not sure whether one should equate Moldbug with Yarvin. Is the blogger a pseudonym, a construct, a caricature, or an alter-ego? Should a comedian be equated with their on-stage persona? An actor with the character they play? An author with their protagonist?
I (truly) appreciate the insight your earlier comments provide.
>How does one distinguish a "fascist talk" from a "technical talk presented by one accused of being a fascist"?
Well, pragmatically, the difference is immaterial, because to maximize the memetic intensity of anti-fascism, we have to attack all fascists everywhere all the time. Within the fold, there is very little opposition, because once one valid point has been made, going against it is nearly impossible.
This is the real danger in going down the ideological-purity path the way the mainstream extreme-liberal tumblerite bloc has. I get around this by maintaining a network of people I trust implicitly as comrades and who also trust me, but this is how ideologic drift happens in, say, activist groups.
>I think Moldbug views himself as anti-fascist
Well, nobody's the villain of their own story.
>Is the blogger a pseudonym, a construct, a caricature, or an alter-ego? Should a comedian be equated with their on-stage persona? An actor with the character they play? An author with their protagonist?
Do you think Moldbug is intended as a fiction?
>I (truly) appreciate the insight your earlier comments provide.
Don't think they provide so much insight. I'm one person and pretty idiosyncratic in my ideology and praxis. I am certainly not representative and I'm sure I would disagree with (just as an example) most of the people whose twitter comments were cited in the OP's article.
I just wanted to say that yes, I fully enjoy the fact that people are now afraid to be racist, sexist, etc., at tech conferences.
No, I think they are essays where in the author is testing out ideas to see how they hold together when criticized by the world. Some of these ideas are deep beliefs, where the question is simply how the outside will react to hearing about them. Some of them are fragments of arguments he's trying to piece together, in the hope that the process of writing will clear things up in his own mind. Others are probably there simply because he was drawn in the cadence of the language.
But I do think that Moldbug is consciously a persona, and not identical to Yarvin. And I don't think either is a fascist by any reasonable definition. Racist? Yes, the writing is racist by the current way the word is used to label practically any belief in racial differences. But I'd prefer to judge the author (Yarvin) by how he treats others in the world, not how he writes about the world in the abstract.
I fully enjoy the fact that people are now afraid to be racist, sexist, etc., at tech conferences.
If this was the only outcome, I'd might agree with the tactics. But what if their pragmatic reaction is to simply avoid situations where they can be accused of these things? Don't hire women, because they might accuse you of sexism. Don't hire minorities, because you might lose your job if accused of racial prejudice?
In such an environment, silence is likely the best strategy. But along with the silence is likely the belief that everyone else shares the same opinion, but similarly doesn't speak about it. I believe more in sunlight as a disinfectant: get the ideas out in the open. I think it's good for people to hear more points of view they disagree with.
I'm one person and pretty idiosyncratic in my ideology and praxis.
Yes, but that ideology is so different from mine that I learn just by the knowledge that such a viewpoint exists.
> In the meantime, if it's possible to make fascist programmers afraid for their careers, that's great for me. It means fascist movements are disrupted before they can even form. God knows leftists have been afraid for long enough.
Disrupting fascist movements sounds like a great idea, but is that really your intent?
> But if I could flip a switch and make every man feel the persistent, gnawing fear that a woman has of men, I would in a heartbeat. I wouldn't even consider whether the consequences were strategic, I would just do it.
Because it seems your intent is to make others as afraid as you are regardless of the consequences. Unless it's not, in which case things would probably be a lot more clear if you stopped flip flopping and refusing to define the words you use.
"Would it not be better to work towards nobody feeling such fear?"
When you ask questions like this, you give the respondent authority, because it is worded in a way that gives the possibility that the respondent might say something intelligent in response.
The outrageousness of this comment brings to mind something I often wonder when I see modern online leftism: if a rightist were to post a comment in an attempt to discredit leftism by making it seem as evil and destructive as possible, it's not clear how he could top this.
Modern online leftism is indistinguishable from a rightist failing an Ideological Turing Test.
I've been involved in political activism of one kind or other for decades, mostly in ways that are opposed to your ideals, so I'm not one tiny bit surprised to find a lefty who is opposed to free speech, nor am I unfamiliar with the "theoretical basis" for such abhorent positions.
I wanted to cast as broad a net as possible in my question, as I know how eclectic the left is: the two major Communist parties in my country spent most of their political capital fighting each other while the mainstream drifted gently, and rather too far, to the right.
Your myopia, anger and hatred are unfortunately true to the rightwingnutjob's caricature of anyone interested in building a just society, which makes the job of sane social reformers more difficult. Just so you know (yeah, I know, we're you're enemies too... and it's important to have a comprehensive enemies list, isn't it?)
And while on the one hand I can take heart in the knowledge that you'll never get close to achieving your goals, I'm also saddened that you will spread so much toxicity into your environment on your way to ultimate failure. The world needs more love, not more hate, or more fear.
Yes, communism is certainly a dead horse these days. It's a little disappointing to me, but then I was never an electoralist and would never have taken either of those parties seriously. It's a little hilarious to read "I know how eclectic the left is: there were TWO communist parties in my country!" I suggest you research the left a little more, specifically the libertarian (in the original sense) left.
If you have a specific idea at all about how the world should be better, the people who oppose that are certainly not your friends. I think you're mistaking vision for myopia, dedication for anger, and pragmatism for hatred... but then you certainly hate me more than I hate you.
I'm probably just as unsure as you about whether I'll achieve my goals, but I have to try, because to do anything less would be a betrayal of all of humanity. I believe everyone is responsible for their actions, and so if I'm to be responsible I have to act somehow.
It's very easy to say that "the world needs more love," but love doesn't break bricks, as the saying goes. I doubt your own activism is limited to "love"; you probably do things that are intended to make reality assume some objective state. In doing that, you are preventing your opponents from forcing the world into their preferred state. This is no different from opposing free speech. I just have a more complete vision of the world that I want, and it doesn't include Mein Kampf or Birth of a Nation or hacker news's casual misogyny and racism.
Personally, I also don't understand what definition of fascism you are using(and another person call you out on it earlier...). Defining it as "the one I've built up in my mind" pretty much means it's noise to me, since it does not carry any information(I have no idea what kind of definition you've built up in your mind).
It is not possible for anyone to understand what definition of any word anyone is using. Regardless of dictionaries human concepts are organic and subjective and very difficult to communicate. The entirety of human art is based on this concept. If you can see only noise there perhaps you have subsisted on a barren rule-based if-then existence a little too long.
> It is not possible for anyone to understand what definition of any word anyone is using.
So instead of attempting to clarify what you mean by 'fascism' to further discussion, you effectively declare that the words you use only have meaning to you, making further discussion impossible. I hope then it's acceptable to use the word 'gay' to designate 'lame' (especially among my gay friends), unless you're also stuck in that barren rule based wasteland too.
Words only point to a reality. And while we cannot know the entirety of that reality, it can certainly be made much clearer in this case. Words are useless unless they're communal property and their meanings (sufficiently) shared.
>You might be unsurprised to find out that free speech is not valued on the left or among "SJW" groups. I suggest you research this further, because I can't communicate to you in a single hacker news comment why this is, or what theoretical basis it has.
Who needs theory? Practicality tells all.
Extreme ideologies don't value free speech, because free speech allows the unwashed masses to communicate to each other just how ridiculous they think your ideology is. This is true regardless of where an ideology falls on the oversimplistic "right-left" spectrum: North Korea, Fascist Italy, Communist Russia, Oligarchical-Capitalist Russia, Cambodia, North Vietnam, Burma, Communist China, pretty much the entire Middle East, etc. The list goes on and on and on.
Suppress free speech and criminalize dissident thoughts, and you establish a social basis for staying in power - for the good of the people, of course.
It's unsurprising that extreme ideological adherents are always united in at least one common idea, regardless of the actual content of the ideology they are espousing: the belief that people themselves don't know what is best for their own interests and must be closely watched and shepherded (and culled) if they fall into an annoying habit of thinking on their own.
I'm sure you've studied these political ideologies extensively (though my political ideology is pretty obviously very far from the ones you've listed). But it doesn't seem like you've ever questioned the sacred cow that is free speech to you.
I would give you some discussion questions, but I'm sure you'll never, ever move past this roadblock, so I won't feed the trolls.
No trolling here. I'm a staunch believer in free speech, no matter how distasteful.
Not because it is a sacred cow, but because I believe the benefits to free speech far outweigh any drawbacks. (For largely the same reasons, I support open data in government to an much further extent than I think most people would.)
Out of curiostity, Mr Throwaway, what -ism do you use to identity your personal ideology?
>North Korea, Fascist Italy, Communist Russia, Oligarchical-Capitalist Russia, Cambodia, North Vietnam, Burma, Communist China, pretty much the entire Middle East, etc.
>though my political ideology is pretty obviously very far from the ones you've listed
No, there really are people out there like that. If you haven't run into one before, you should perhaps consider yourself fortunate, but then again that perhaps limits your view of how evil people can be, especially at the "gut" level, the level that's best at motivating actions or at least preparations.
>You might be unsurprised to find out that free speech is not valued on the left or among "SJW" groups. I suggest you research this further, because I can't communicate to you in a single hacker news comment why this is, or what theoretical basis it has.
Communist here. Fuck you: of course we care about free speech.
> I'm overjoyed that, as you put it, a climate of fear exists for fascists, misogynists, racists, and similar. I hope that this continues and only worsens for these people.
That 'climate of fear' also exists for those people who don't fall into such cleanly vilifiable categories, and yet occasionally engage in language and behavior that could be categorized as such, often unknowingly because those definitions seem to depend on contexts they cannot determine, have different meanings for each individual, and are rapidly being expanded to encompass broader categories of thought and behavior.
> I'm happy for many reasons. The first is that it has, as you've said, made privileged people afraid. I think this is only the beginning. Privilege creates safety, and as it is removed, I think the unsafety of the oppressed will in part come to the currently privileged classes. But if I could flip a switch and make every man feel the persistent, gnawing fear that a woman has of men, I would in a heartbeat. I wouldn't even consider whether the consequences were strategic, I would just do it.
One thing I've noticed about the fearful is that they tend to resent the fearless, and want everyone to live under the same fears they do. It's a very primal thing, as people who fear the same things are part of the same tribe. These fears are not used to achieve anything strategic, but to define the very culture members exist in, and so are vigorously spread and defended regardless of any practical value they may have. In such a culture you will never get beyond that fear. You can see this most readily in religious sects, but many political movements are little other than that.
And regardless of the 'harm' fear prevents, it is still the antithesis of knowledge, and a society ruled by fear cannot be ruled by knowledge. In such a society knowledge itself is a threat, and the only people willing to discuss controversial ideas will either be the ones courageous enough to question or hateful enough not to care. The fearful of course will not be able to tell the difference.
Personally, that is not a price I am willing to pay for a 'safe' society. That doesn't mean such a system is right or wrong, only that it doesn't align with my values. But regardless of differing values, it still troubles me that anyone would take such joy in other people's fear and unsafety, and I don't think any good can come of that.
> So if discourse is permanently removed as a tactical and strategic option for future leftists, I'll consider it a victory.
And yet here you are, using a throwaway account to engage in tactically and strategically driven discourse.
> While clearly legal, it's strikes me as a terrible precedent to require speakers on technical topics to pass a political litmus test.
It's funny, in some countries you have laws against hate speech - it probably wouldn't be legal to write stuff like "blacks make good slaves because of their genetics" [sic] - but in the US because of the free speech thing society relies on all these extrajudicial lynch mobs. So... terrible precedent or common sense?
I'm all for Strangeloop canceling his talk, however not for reasons of his political leanings, but because i consider Urbit to be nonsense and the way it handles itself to be dishonest.
That said, this entire conversation has an amazingly suppressive effect on me. This is primarily because i come from east germany, have grown up in its social era until my early teens, and have seen how it changed since the wall fell, and thus consider myself strongly socialist and glad that germany itself still is strongly socialist. I am left.
And i find myself under attack for what i consider to be a human-friendly view. I see talk of leftists, the red guard, communists, etc. etc. etc. and find the american internet to be extraordinarily busy painting what i consider to be my political leaning as "terrorist".
I think it comes from scarcity and changing demographics... there is a very real feel of loss off status and power among the white middle and working class.
You are right about the crazy views on socialism and German politics in general.
Please provide one example of a person being fired, or otherwise enduring serious economic consequences, for publicly voicing socialist or communist views. There are none. There are dozens of quite recent examples of rightists or libertarians or traditional Christians enduring serious consequences for free speech. In America we once had the red scare where a witch hunt hit socialists/communists. These days we have the "brown scare" hitting anyone right of Jeb Bush.
I'm not very familiar with US politics. When i say attacked, i was primarily talking about the articles talking about strangeloop. (It sounds like you misunderstood me there.)
On the other hand, consider how "Obamacare" was attacked, and (if i understood correctly what came out of your country) changed, cut and successfully damaged, thus affecting wide parts of the US population. ( http://www.galen.org/newsletters/changes-to-obamacare-so-far... )
Also, i find it a little disingenuous to ask for something and in the same breath declare delivery of such impossible.
Name one person who was fired for supporting Obamacare. That is the relevant question in relation to your unclear point. I dare say you don't even understand. Name one person who was fired for comments in support of the federal involvement in local police matters in relation to the Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown incidents. The left is in power. The only people getting fired are those in opposition to the left.
With regard to your link I don't know whether you're obtuse or spraying squid ink. The topic under discussion is consequences for voicing free speech.
Please provide one example of a person [...]
enduring serious economic consequences
To be clear here: People are being damaged through anti-left actions without even needing to have voiced anything. Plus, you can't deny that plenty people are trying to get people fired over this.
As for this:
Name one person who was fired for comments in support
of the federal involvement in local police matters in
relation to the Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown
incidents. The left is in power.
What exactly was the federal involvement? What exactly was done that would otherwise not have been done? I do not know the details, and do also not understand how any of that connects to left politics. Please educate me.
Edit: I'm sorry for the edits, and i hope you see this post only after i am done editing. One last note on this:
The topic under discussion is consequences for voicing free speech.
I was answering someone who was asking if people were afraid to speak up on the matter. I am saying, yes, i am, because i see american people who have many listeners brand me indirectly but surprisingly aggressively for my beliefs.
The following link is an ongoing set of updates of people who have fallen victim to the so-called "brown scare" - being fired, ostracized, or otherwise penalized for holding right-wing views.
It's a lot more pervasive, and has been going on a lot longer than most people think. The Brendan Eich or Pax Dickinson purges are probably the most known to the HN community, but there are many, many more.
Even though I'm deliciously close to 200 karma I'm going to ask this anyway...
If someone has a view that is actually destructive for the forum its aired in ( I'm speaking hypothetically now ) does it have to be accommodated.
By that, and I genuinely want to know what you guys think, what if a political candidate advocated the end of democratic elections? A "one man, one vote, one time" kind of thing. How is that handled in an open society?
Extreme conservative opinions like Mr Yarvins are actually shocking to me. I don't think his particular writings should be banned or anything like that. However, are they so reactionary as to represent to the organizers a position that they don't want to even tacitly or obliquely endorse?
I will say this, the first post on this subject the other day saw me having one of the most interesting exchanges I've ever had on HN. That was cool.
Some important context to recognize in this incident is that it was a handful of explicitly (leftist) political personalities that rose any stink to begin with. Clark more or less names them all in his piece. Most of the ones who pushed to censor Urbit from Strange Loop even admitted that they personally were not attending the conference. Most conference attendants would not have had the first clue that a member of the Urbit team maintained a conservative political blog from 2007 to 2013 or so under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. The ones that did probably would not care too much about it as most of them are not preoccupied with aggressive radical politics. They'd attend the talk, or not, and go on with their lives.
It's a heckler's vote. Now, the conversation is about Yarvin and his politics. But if these 3-4 radical and deeply political agitators had not made this an issue to begin with, everyone attending the conference would have just known they were attending a presentation on Urbit (if they even chose to check out that session).
In other words, if this is established as a precedent, then a passionate enough fringe group can create the "destruction" they claim to be against to justify covert ideological policing. That this is occurring at a strictly technology event with a reputation for openness to innovative, experimental ideas is particularly chilling.
"Nice conference you got there, shame if this speaker I don't like created a controversy for you"-type manipulation does not seem as bad or obvious when the targeted beliefs are foreign to your own. Stepping back and anticipating the implications reveals a troubling future, and one that is occurring in many industries at once.
You know, I've actually heard of that as an actual racket in other industries...
That's really interesting that the most prominent voices against him aren't attending...I don't know.
I don't think that you have to imagine done kind of follow on effects...i think the US probably irreversibly stopped being a free society when it became a national security state. So, I guess what I'm saying that it doesn't seem our of character in the US. I would just add that it's actually bidirectional pressure from both the left and the right depending on the subject and the area.
I'll stop rambling... Thanks for the background info, though...
Extreme conservative opinions like Mr Yarvins are actually shocking to me. I don't think his particular writings should be banned or anything like that. However, are they so reactionary as to represent to the organizers a position that they don't want to even tacitly or obliquely endorse?
Given that the reaction of the organizers was to remove Yarvin's talk, with extremely vague justifications, I think both sides could agree that the answer to this question is "yes".
But didn't Alex Miller make it clear he knew nothing about Yarvin's politics, that he was exercising a Heckler's Veto due to the people who were protesting Yarvin's politics?
As has been noted by others, this could be interpreted as the latter issuing a "Nice conference and career you have there, it would be a shame if anything happened to them". A political interpretation, yes, but one of pure power politics, vs. anything requiring an actual analysis of the putative issue, Yarvin's politics.
While Moldbug holds hideous political views, if the talk is on tech. and doesn't overlap him advocating hideous things, then this is akin to the old Hollywood blackballing, the excuse for dropping him was pathetic, and I agree that promoting a culture of free speech must be a core value of a liberal society.
I'm pretty far-left (though more liberal than leftist), and found the black-and-white leftist-bashing in the article didn't add much besides giving the author the opportunity to vent his spleen at a segment of leftists while pretending we're all some monoculture, which is ludicrous. Would have been better to just focus on the issue of why an open society needs to be willing to accept diverse political views, even hideous ones like Marxism or neoreactionary craziness, without using it as a platform for pontificating about a crudely conceived culture war.
In Hungary after the government change they saved a whole bunch of communist statues that were being taken down and made a museum out of it. I think it's interesting and worth seeing.
The problem with Hitler wasn't just the ugly and noxious ideas he had, but what he did. Moldbug is a ignorant crank, but on that front he isn't doing much besides ranting, largely in the incoherent jargon he's invented. I don't like him, and can't stand his views, but I fully believe that preserving his freedom to think and say ignorant and stupid things is important to protect, and any attempt at a cure is likely worse than the poison.
I'm been told by plenty of people that I'm a loon with crazy political views (Tea Party family members mostly), but if I was working on an interesting tech. project, and wanted to do a talk at a tech. conference about it, I'd hope that wouldn't be a factor in conference organizers rejecting me.
If I'd started a political party founded on ideals of illiberalism, dictatorship, and subjugation of the people I hated and worked to gain political power in the US, then I'd say not accepting me at a conference could be more easily justified as the conference would then become a political platform for me regardless of what the talk was about.
> while pretending we're all some monoculture, which is ludicrous
Actually, progressives do seem to be relatively monocultural when it comes to, as the article says toward the end, "tolerating everything except the outgroup." Either that, or the intolerant faction(s) are very dominant and end up getting their way quite a lot.
As well as the examples cited in the article, another good example is Brendan Eich being forced out as chief of Mozilla due to having political views that some progressives deemed to be "incorrect."
"The left" is an umbrella term for all kinds of causes that don't all share the same concerns, values, or goals, while "progressive" is basically a replacement term picked up once right-wing propagandists had poisoned "liberal" and "left" enough that some people gave up using them (which was a dumb move IMO). Environmentalists, labor rights activists, gay rights activists, and anti-war activists fit under the umbrella but often have little in common, and can have stark disagreements. I'm going to guess you don't identify as someone on the left, and so you get your information about what's happening from filtered sources rather than spending time paying attention to the debates, bickering, and disagreements that various sorts of left-wingers have, rather than taking a detailed at what's actually thought or discussed. I understand, I ignore Tea Partiers, though I also try not to claim they are a monoculture, since I know I don't really know much besides what the latest staggeringly stupid thing one of them said was, which is certainly not representative. That's the problem with Internet echo-chambers, they radically warp perspective by limiting what information you see as well as bias its presentation, and give an reductionist illusion of some single entity when there are many diverse factors in play.
Alternately, you could just look at the actual cases the ACLU takes, which often enough support people and causes that aren't darlings of some faction or another on the left.
For the record I was against Eich's firing (and know a number of leftists who were similarly against), I donate to the ACLU and the Sierra Club, and used to be an anti-war protester long ago. I also am enough of an exception to your generalization that you might want to reconsider your stereotype.
To play devil's advocate, a conference is not only about the speeches, but also about the people you can meet there.
Inviting Moldbug bring not only his own person but also his followers. It's understandable if your goal is to foster a diverse crowd to not invite a group of people who constantly argue against any kind of modern society.
To be fair, neoreactionaries are mostly notable for their startling lack of real-world achievements. Yarvin is exceptional in this regard. (Tunney has disclaimed "neoreaction" of late.) They tend to have extensive blogging credentials, however. (And are a dab hand with an occasional cheese dip.)
edit: if there are others with notable real-world achievements, I will eagerly accept correction.
Peter Thiel? I don't think he's ever come out and explicitly said "I am a neoreactionary", but he did say "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," and the co-founder of Tlön (company that is making Urbit) is a Thiel fellow.
A lot of people who blog on these ideas maintain pseudonyms to prevent Strangeloop-like witch hunts ruining their professional lives.
Neoreactionary ideas have been picked up and directly cited by cultural influencers like Ross Douthat, Ed West, and William Gibson, however. They see themselves as a right wing Frankfurt School - not noteworthy for their identities, but for their subtle cultural impact.
No, the school of social philosophy associated with Carl Grünberg, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse.
Check out Eclipse of Reason,Escape from Freedom,The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and The Theory of Communicative Action when you get a chance. Primary sources and all.
Well, if the mysterious sdfghjkl34567 is to be believed, then you don't get to decide what neoreactionary means, and so don't get to decide if you are one or not as far as others are concerned.
On the other hand you did start a petition to turn over government rule to Google, and believe the bottom 1/3 of the population should be live in servants to the top 1/3. What this has to do with neoreactionarism I have no idea, but apparently many people think it's associated.
P.S. I'm still not convinced that you're not a troll, but then again I'm not sure if this is not exactly the kind of $#@% that needs to be stirred up.
> To be fair, neoreactionaries are mostly notable for their startling lack of real-world achievements.
That's not fair at all. You make a value judgment by referring to (but not defining) 'real-world achievements' and follow it up with an ad hominem, instead of deconstructing the actual ideas involved.
It also makes perfect sense that following any political view radically different from the mainstream will lead to less 'real-world' success, as not only does compromising your politics for success potentially alienate you from your allies, but mainstream society will be actively and deliberately trying to prevent you from achieving that success (and apparently speaking at technical conferences).
For example, I would not have been successful in the Roman Empire, Communist Russia, or Nazi Germany unless I was willing to compromise my politics. I'm not exactly successful now because my politics don't precisely line up with the 'mainstream'. But that still says nothing about how ethical or tenable my political stance is.
That's a good way of putting something I was thinking. And you clearly said "devils advocate"...it may be an unpopular point but its probably close to what the organizers were actually thinking.
> Inviting Moldbug bring not only his own person but also his followers. It's understandable if your goal is to foster a diverse crowd to not invite a group of people who constantly argue against any kind of modern society.
Imagine if your sentence was reformulated like this instead.
> Inviting Harvey Milk bring not only his own person but also his followers. It's understandable if your goal is to foster a diverse crowd to not invite a group of people who [insert claim here] against any kind of modern society.
See the problem? :(
Tolerance is hard, I know, but something we need to foster nonetheless.
Even if we don't allow these people to conferences, we still share roads, grocery stores, national identity, tax revenues, employment opportunities, classrooms, etc, with them. Humanity sucks badly enough at cooperation already! Let's not ever actively discourage it!
This is diving into the Paradox of Tolerance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance). This posits, should we tolerate the intolerant? Comparing Harvey Milk, who fought for increased tolerance of a group, vs Moldbug, who argues against increased tolerance of another minority group, doesn't exactly follow.
I'm uncertain if I'm willing to consider the position with Moldbug intolerance, because of the paradox listed. This is not someone with a pro-gun or anti-tax or some other form of political speech that are culturally arguable without being an intolerant viewpoint against a group of people.
Still, that's just pointing out the difference. I feel like a bit of a fence sitter to be honest. That being said, I have left jobs because of a boss that had, what I considered, intolerant viewpoints of LGBT and non-white people.
Basically, a Breitbart columnist said that they were putting an article about me today. When this happens, a wave of harassment generally follows. I did not delete that or any other tweet on this issue.
(They seem to have decided to post about something else instead, we'll see.)
As I said in the last thread, I don't really plan on reading and responding to much here, but since this is on the front page, might as well correct the inaccuracy.
I'm having a hard time understanding the "hate speech is violence" perspective. I feel like that position can only be held by someone who has never actually been assaulted using real, actual violence. I guarantee, being punched feels a heck of a lot worse than standing next to a person who (potentially) talked positively about slavery.
As a follow up, I've read a bunch of Unqualified Reservations since this whole brouhaha started (and I read some before, I find it occasionally amusing) and I've never seen any of the racism or hate speech I see claimed. I have seen a lot of out-of-context examples, but every one I tracked down was simply using shocking imagery to make a larger point. There is quite a bit that speaks frankly of slavery and the relationships involved, but nothing I've seen that I could consider racist, unless the very concept of slavery is supposed to be considered racist... which is ridiculous, in my opinion.
> unless the very concept of slavery is supposed to be considered racist
I've never read a word of Moldybug or whatever, but in the American context, the very concept of slavery is absolutely considered racist and rightly so. America's history of slavery is completely inseparable from racism.
Slavery as a concept has nothing to do with American racism or American history. Slavery existed long before America was a dirty thought in a pilgrim's hatted head, and it still exists today, and it will likely exist so long as humans are recognizably human.
To outright decide that all mentions of a word have such a narrow context is something I cannot accept as valid. It's thoughtcrime.
Concepts are understood in contexts. Everyone involved in this context is American, so it's natural for slavery here to be viewed through an American context. In that context, slavery is inherently racist.
After all, it's not like Moldbug's writing shies away from this idea.
> Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences.
I'll agree, it's very human and natural for people to deliberately misunderstand things so they can work themselves into a rage over things. It's intellectually dishonest, particularly in this case, and so I give it no shrift.
If all you have to make your case is rhetorical tricks (like "look! somewhere in this man's million plus words he talked about Africans being slaves! Slavery is therefore a specific kind of racist in all conversations") then I work from the premise that there isn't much of a case to be made.
You're unintentionally perpetuating the stereotype that US citizens do not know or care about history. Those people involved may be American, but surely some of them can look beyond their own noses to realize that a person speaking in broad, abstract strokes isn't talking about them in particular.
Nonsense. I'm saying that people live in the real world with real contexts, not in Context-Free-Abstraction-Land.
Real contexts, where abstract concepts have been concrete realities, put natural and rational limits on the ability to treat those concepts as abstract ideas to be debated solely on their hypothesized merits rather than their hard realities. There is a very rational difference between arguing in favor of communism on an American college campus, where communism is a lovely abstract ideal, and arguing in favor of it in Romania or Ukraine where communism was a brutal reality.
Moldbug is an American, being read by Americans, writing about his support for the institution of slavery, and explicitly saying that some races are genetically better suited for slavery than others. It is far more rational to treat that as racist than to bend over backwards and pretend that it is not in the name of free debate.
Such mischaracterization is a giant red flag for knowing you're dealing with groupthink. Moldbug's points venture into forbidden thoughts and attack the national religion, so the knee jerk reaction is to regroup at ad-hominem by ascribing simplistic straw men.
FWIW, reading "A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations" made me identify as liberal. I wholeheartedly agree with Moldbug's analysis of the arrow of time and condemnation of the machine(s) of USG and the Cathedral. But I believe he unjustly discounts the idea of distributed force wherein aggression is unproductive, and IMHO making that work at lower levels is a better goal than the federated centralization of take-it-or-leave-it fiefdoms. (Then again, this growing feel-good "SJW" cancer has me rethinking how enlightened such a society could be, but I digress...). He also discounts how technology has made subjects ever-more transparent to their rulers, with a simple handwave that rulers wouldn't be interested in unnecessary policing. (If I am guilty of oversimplifying here I apologize - it's been a while since I read him and I'm recalling my main takeaways.)
I don't believe in Urbit for similar reasoning - it seems like its entities are opaque objects where the only primitive is composition, and punts to delegation for solving the hard problems. I'd previously gone down a similar "immutable universal code" fugue with r6rs as the basis and eventually considered it a dead end.
If speech advocating things (or "public identification with") that are harmful is violence, communism certainly qualifies with a death count of around 150 million.
Communism doesn't advocate that though. People advocating it are not necessarily supporting those deaths or saying they were necessary for communism to have worked there.
On the other hand, saying that some races are more suited to slavery is about as direct as it gets.
Besides, those deaths weren't due to the policies of communism, rather the particular regime. Hell, British colonialism is responsible for a lot of deaths too. Tons were under the East India Trading company (and the governments that it morphed into), which was a capitalist venture and all of its harmful policies were profit-oriented. There are probably other examples, I don't know.
(I don't exactly support communist ideals, but I don't really think it's something that deserves to be taboo'd.)
I get where you are coming from but verbal abuse can be incredibly scarring. As someone that experienced both I can assure you of that... And ill grant that you weren't really talking about abusive speech... But hate speech especially from a superior...be it job or school... An authority figure, I could see where that would be just as bad.
Even in this reply you've had to use a metaphor for physiological abuse (a scar, a bodily mark of harm) to elevate the seriousness of emotional damage, to the extent this emotional damage is even lasting, and it doesn't have to be, while something like a scar is unequivocally permanent barring some kind of advanced cosmetic treatment.
Whether some emotional damage is "scarring" (i.e. permanent) will depend on, well, a lot of things, but almost no kind of emotional damage has to be permanent because of the way our physiology of emotions behaves. Your resilience, your existing beliefs, what you expect out of the world, and so on will determine how you respond to stressful stimuli. Learning that people don't live forever can be 'scarring' (not really) to a two-year old, but, people eventually adjust to this information, because stress tolerance exists. If everything were as equally stressful as the first time we heard it, our bodies would be overwhelmed with cortisol all the time. Since this obviously doesn't happen, our bodies can (and do) adapt to stressful stimuli in various ways.
Comparing emotional damage to scars is probably a false analogy. Your skin will never fully adapt to a gash, and being stabbed once isn't going to change the way your body responds to stabbings. But your body will adapt to stressful emotions, or at least it is capable of doing so. In the worst case it's probably like a muscle tear, but in most cases emotional stress is more like some kind of the muscle trauma that happens during resistance training, which the body adapts to.
I don't know that the mental machinery is as elastic as you say. Our bodies to indeed adjust to mental stress, in fact parts of the brain that respond to fear and stress will overdevelop in relation to other areas producing aberrant behavior.
There are mental trauma, that has not been caused by physical trauma, that will end up being like the gash you describe never being able to acclimatize to.
I take your point about the use of the word scarring...I was just trying to draw a certain type of similarity into the conversation...it certainly isn't a perfect analogy.
One other thing, though...is it really a surprise that discussing mental or emotional damage would use a physical analogy? We don't culturally have a large body of language for describing things accurately that are "just in your head."
I don't get why this was downvoted. I was polite. I tried to articulate a counter point. Is it just that people really disagree with the hate speech part or that mental trauma can be as serious as physical trauma??
Physical analogies are dated when we have accurate terms now.
"There are mental trauma, that has not been caused by physical trauma, that will end up being like the gash you describe never being able to acclimatize to."
I'm not so sure about this.
Stress happens because of stress hormones. You can develop a tolerance to those hormones like you could develop a tolerance to any drug.
The range of experiences that human emotion can adapt to are vast. People in far more violent societies have adapted to far more horrific things. If we didn't have the ability to adapt to extreme shock we'd be screwed as a species.
It doesn't lead to suicide. It predisposes one to suicide, but the trauma isn't insurmountable. What causally leads to suicide is the choice to take some kind of weapon and use it on yourself.
You seem really invested in this idea. I think that we are at odds on the idea that mental damage can be insurmountable. I could speculate as to why, but in the end I think we should just call it good.
How do you reconcile your statement that "I have not called for violence against any person and do not condone it." and your tweet about being "100% okay" with a violent "antifa" movement?
Presumably his as of yet inchoate concept of a tech "antifa[scism]" movement does not, at this time, "call for violence against any person". Heck, it doesn't have to, when all his side has to do is the "Nice tech career you have here, it would be a shame if anything happened to it" (why Alex Miller had to capitulate). Violence will be entirely irrelevant until those of us who are getting shut either start staging a counterrevolution (don't ask me how) or start forming our own counterrevolutionary tech culture; then things might get interesting, especially since we can limit our venues to those which allow concealed carry ^_^.
Which, oddly enough, includes Strange Loop! (Unless the Peabody Opera House screens attendies with metal detectors (!), in Missouri law even a "no guns" sign at such a venue only means you have to leave if asked.)
I made this word up a long time ago, but the "nice tech career you have there" move can be called 'bluelisting' -- i.e. censorship of someone's outside-employment speech via threatening someone's at-employment livelihood. I think it's a problem, and an increasingly huge one.
People who are virulently anti-libertarian inexplicably adopt very libertarian "employers should be able to hire/fire anyone they want" responses when this practice is criticized, as if they don't see any kind of problem with the ability to readily get someone fired for arguing controversial beliefs outside of their workplace.
But, think about it this way: you obviously can't deeply engage the views of others at work, unless you have a very open-minded workplace or those views somehow relate to your job performance. (I doubt questions like "is it immoral to do [insert drug]?" or "should prostitution be legal?" would ever be workplace appropriate, but they're sincere views people hold that dictate drug policy via public opinion for example.)
So, if you can't talk about these things at work, where the hell do you talk about them? I'm guessing on the internet, because colleges are the next option and they're only available to a fraction of the population for four years at a time. So the internet is no longer an option, where? I'm asking this question rhetorically. If society has no battlegrounds for beliefs, democracy is permanently is screwed, because you need some kind of battleground for beliefs to refine beliefs in concordance with reality in the first place.
If society has no battlegrounds for beliefs, democracy is permanently is screwed, because you need some kind of battleground for beliefs to refine beliefs in concordance with reality in the first place.
Many of us US gun owners say "Soap box, ballot box, bullet box", but of course long term denial of the first invalidates the second. We're watching all this in horror because we really don't want to be forced to the third.
Especially since one way or another, such former democracies fail hard when faced with inconvenient truths the ruling class has been denying and "The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!" Doesn't have to be political, could be e.g. transmissible bird flu coupled with our current SJW public health authorities, as the Texas Ebola cases demonstrated.
Ironically, conservatives wouldn't be working themselves up over why Strangeloop might want to exclude Yarvin. Tribalism is intrinsic to humanity, and central to the concept of a tribe is the power to exclude. We like to associate with people that think like we do. We place limits on that for idealistic reasons, but it's ridiculous and futile to try and erase all elements of tribalism from our social interactions.
Glad that leaders in the white community stood up against terror supporters! (In a country where organized, armed whites shoot children, strangle friendly cigarette peddlers and assault bikini-clad women relaxing on lawns.)
Many whites are decent people. I have white friends and even dated whites. But in my experience, many vocally support sending armies abroad to spread capitalist law. I know the PC police (real police) hate hearing this, but it helps when good whites openly condemn supporters of terror. Otherwise maybe they should go back to Europe?
"Emerging languages, alternative databases...code-heavy." That's from StrangeLoop's 'About' page. The fact is, the talk would have worked, not the least because it's consistent with the conference's overall mission.
Folks looking for a polite argument with Curtis could have had one.
Thought experiment: is there any extremity of leftist (or progressive if you prefer) thinking (say, on a personal blog) that could conceivably get one disinvited to speak on a technical topic at a conference of this sort?
It depends on what you call left. I bet someone that seriously proposed violence against some institutions or industries would get disinvited. Animal rights extremists or eco-terrorist organizations might fit that bill too.
As a counterexample? Does he fit here? Does he speak mostly on politics rather than other topics? Then again, his political beliefs/actions are so polarizing that maybe it's hard to separate them from his work in other areas (somewhat akin to what the organizers of Strangeloop claim in their case.)
Does Noam Chomsky get heat for his political views? I was amused when I realized the Chomsky I'd heard about in CS classes was the same person I'd read about in political news. I guess his views are more palatable to the people criticizing Mr. Yarvin.
I would say that if being part of a bombing campaign isn't an impediment to becoming a Distinguished Professor at UIC, then being part of a bombing campaign isn't enough to get him disinvited from StrangeLoop either, however many astonished tweets might have greeted his appearance on the program: becuase, in that case, it would have been easy for the organizers to separate his political thought from his educational thought. Of course that's speculation on my part.
Just playing devils advocate, he had renounced violence by the time he joined academia hadn't he? He wasn't Carlos the Jackal. Honestly, I can't remember the whole weathermen story.
This whole episode does make you wonder where the line would be drawn in the future.
Indeed, but I believe the unfortunate timing makes the lack of reaction to this article even more of interest. Juxtapose that with the leaders of our ruling class singing the very militant Battle Hymn of the Republic in the National Cathedral five days later (http://www.mrrhoads.com/national-cathedral-dc-battle-hymn-of...)....
I think in Chomsky's case his work in linguistics actually overshadows his political work because he is so foundational.
I wonder how popular Chomsky's radical left views actually are among techies...assuming what I hear about libertarian views being prevalent...its not necessarily a natural fit.
And somewhat discredited at this point? I don't care to write up a bunch, but his ideas about universal grammar built on genetic properties have not fared well over the years. I know he's done other stuff, but that seems his main claim to fame, excluding the political stuff.
It is absolutely unimaginable that Chomsky might be uninvited from any conference for anything he has ever said (one piquant example: defense of the Khmer Rouge).
Let's face it: the window of conference political acceptability covers the point -infinity. We know the upper bound is finite, and shrinking.
The more left-wing you are, the more society will reward you. For example, I was never really able to get a good job until after I had spent a bunch of time doing radical left-wing activism. Around age 27, I helped organize thousands of people to stage protests in Manhattan. I ran subversive media campaigns. I openly called for an anarchist-communist revolutionary overthrow of the U.S. Regime (which is ironic if you consider that America is already a communist country.)
All these experiences helped me get socially connected with a lot of powerful and important people. They all loved me. I even put the fact that I engaged in this sort of troublemaking on my resume. I'm not kidding. I even talked about it at job interviews. Stuff like this impresses people. There's no doubt in my mind that it led to my current level of success, writing code for a living.
This whole concept of paying attention to fellow techies' political views is weird to me. The concept of caring about them to this degree is even weirder.
Politics is a common topic here, of course. I've participated in my share of such discussions. But I couldn't tell you who took what position. I'd definitely never look at a prospective conference speaker and say, oh, that's the guy who believes X, where X is any political subject. Not even as a neutral observation, let alone as criticism.
Is this a real thing? This conversation feels like a window into an alternate universe.
Is this a real thing? This conversation feels like a window into an alternate universe.
I'm with you there.
I've helped organize a couple of small regional meetings, and I have literally zero idea what the political leanings of the speakers or attendees were. Nor did I care.
If someone were into radical politics in his free time, that would be his own business. If any of the speakers had veered off into unrelated violent or rude speech (e.g. racism, calling for war, political uprising, etc) at the podium, for a technical talk, that would be addressed on the spot. (I've never seen this happen.)
> I've helped organize a couple of small regional meetings, and I have literally zero idea what the political leanings of the speakers or attendees were. Nor did I care.
But if you are informed of their political leanings, and then don't take 'appropriate' action, then that says something about YOU, like how you endorse and advocate such politics.
Well, he is an active detractor of Democracy, it's possible he could try to spread his agenda through technology (take a look at the colonialist imagery in Urbit).
His view on gender 'roles' is also dangerously close to hate speech (and before any of you calls me an islamophobic: as a non-muslim white male he has no cultural heritage that could justify his opinion, so it's different).
I have very little idea what Yarvin's view on "gender roles" is but assume it's a traditional Anglo-European one that subjugates women to men, the same as virtually every culture everywhere has before the past hundred-odd years.
So this seems to suggest that you believe that "non-Muslim white males" have no cultural heritage whatsoever, which is... odd.
This still doesn't explain why Yarvin being present at a conference, giving a non-political talk on technology (presumably with no so-called "hate speech" content), represents a threat to anything or anyone at said conference.
The answer is: it doesn't. He was removed because some politically influential leftists wanted him declared a non-person.
The trouble with democracy is that it's not a system of government where everyone has their say, but one where the majority rules. A democracy does not protect individual rights, but the 'rights' of the majority. And members are not required to have any skills or qualifications before making an impact on how the government is run. Democracy is NOT an ideal, there's a lot to criticize, and even the founders of the United States understood this. But all these excluded middle thinkers think that if you're critical of democracy, then you're pro communist/socialist/monarchist/etc, which is nonsense.
Here's a relevant example of where relying on democracy would have compromised citizens constitutional rights.
> His view on gender 'roles' is also dangerously close to hate speech
Then you really have no idea what hate speech is, and should ask someone who survived the holocaust or had a cross burning in their front yard.
> and before any of you calls me an islamophobic: as a non-muslim white male he has no cultural heritage that could justify his opinion, so it's different.
When the hell did islamophobia enter the picture?!? Regardless, you don't need 'cultural heritage' to 'justify' an opinion. You do however need facts to support a conclusion. Are you saying that certain conclusions can only be made by those with a specific cultural heritage, regardless of the facts?
On the one hand, I find this situation disturbing, because a technical talk at a technical conference has nothing at all to do with politics. On the other hand, I somewhat understand Strangeloop's situation: it is pretty clear that even if this a completely technical talk, the other attendees would make it about politics---you know, the whole "bad speech should be fought with more speech" thing?---which would cause problems for the conference.
On the third hand, though, I find the popehat post, complete with the use of "social justice warrior", to be especially repellent. Although I do congratulate Clark on the ability to be a conservative intellectual---I now have a puddle of condescension on my office floor.
So, a question: now that Alex Miller's activities outside of the technical content of Strangeloop - I.E., banning a presenter over his personal politics - have created such a large distraction from the technical content that is to be presented at Stangeloop, will he be stepping down?
So on the word of a few individuals he doesn't name, with information he doesn't bother to validate for himself, Alex decides to remove Curtis from the lineup because he might be 'distracting', not because of what he'd say, but just because he'd be present. This implies an environment where we're powerless against unnamed accusers, an authority who is unwilling to evaluate the merits of a case, and a group of people who are so unable to separate technical matters from politics that the mere presence of someone they disagree with makes it impossible to focus.
And you know what? I've seen exactly this sort of behavior from other corporations and both the 'left' and 'right'. It's something all groups naturally default to, and active measures need to be taken in order to avoid it. And while I get why people want to remain anonymous, I also know you cannot have the free flow of ideas when anonymous accusers can cost you your position, by making accusations they never need to verify, over things you never intend to address at a venue.
We need to challenge ideas, not bury them, especially at a conference like Strangeloop. And if the Urbit presentation was deemed good enough to hear before these facts came to light, then it's still good enough to be challenged on that basis.
P.S. By excising Curtis Yarvin in an attempt to avoid "overshadowing the talk and acting as a distraction for launching the conference as a whole", Alex Miller has done just that. And if I were to put on my tinfoil hat and give a bad faith reading of all this, considering the internet savvy are well aware of the Streisand Effect, I'd say this was exactly their intent.
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[ 243 ms ] story [ 2614 ms ] threadhttp://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/06/cur...
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/neoreactionaries....
The crux of it (and something I never saw quite covered in all the essays bouncing around) is
"Essentially, neoreaction is the dream of a society of mostly white people, living in a hierarchy based both on group membership (aristocratic lineage, gender, race) and individual ability (IQ). The neoreactionaries do not demand total racial purity. But many seem to think that if multiple races live in the same country, the races should be placed in a hierarchy of power, status, and freedom, apparently based on the average IQ of their racial group. Since the movement is about European traditionalism, it's not clear whether white people would be given a special place in the hierarchy, even above those groups whose average IQ is higher than that of whites.
As for women, many neoreactionaries appear to want them to return to traditional social roles - homemaking and child-rearing - and to submit more willingly to the sexual desires of men. Finally, there is some sense that within these group boundaries, the neoreactionaries might want a limited meritocracy - in other words, maybe the smart should rule. However, some neoreactionaries (particularly Anissimov) praise the idea of aristocracy, apparently believing that naturally superior people would manage to win the titles of nobility, and that their descendants would remain superior.
In other words, the neoreactionaries want the West to be a lot like the Ming Dynasty, but for white people. I've often thought of Europe as "the China that never quite made it"; neoreaction seems like the latest manifestation of a dream that refuses to die. "
https://theumlaut.com/2014/07/29/a-gentle-introduction-to-ne...
They are like an alternative version of the Society for Creative Anachronism, re-imagining the Enlightenment historical period in ways that leave out the things they find icky but that are in fact inevitable consequences of the times. For SCA that's reimagining the High Middle Ages without the plague. For neoreactionaries it's reimagining the Enlightenment without the end of slavery, or the rise of individualism and democracy.
For those of us who pursue Enlightenment ideals rather than Enlightenment historical accidents, they are an unfortunate bunch. SCA members would feel the same way about anyone who was serious about bringing back feudalism, or reducing society to "warriors, priests and peasants."
Getting the views of neoreactionaries from Noah Smith is like getting the views of Luther's 95 Theses from Pope Leo X. How about, you know, just reading Moldbug?
http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com
Seriously, any interest I've ever had in whatever he's talking about has been stymied by his lack of concision, even simple methods like the pyramid style which allows for the full treatment. When this blew up I tried reading, then skimming the Carlyle essay, couldn't make myself (and I am somewhat interested in learning about political philosophies I'm not yet familiar with, and of course the peculiar institution is a very important thing to those of us in the US). A bit like the Wheel of Time when the plot stopped.
Read Moldbug, people.
Life is too short to do a lot of silly things like veg on junk TV or fart around on Twitter or read the entire Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality all day yet I admit that I sometimes persist.
Moldbug is a strange and fascinating bird that is not immediately meant to be understood, but experienced. There really is no one else like him. For those with a taste for the antiquated charm of letters filtered for the post-post-modern generation, he writes entertaining and challenging essays that lets us peek behind the lacquered veneer of modern society to get a feel for what it is that we don't realize we have forgotten. He is certainly not for everyone, but a "fascist racist sexist anti-Christ" he is decidedly not.
The "questions for sponsors" bit is particularly sharp at cutting towards the discrepancy between the standards dissenters expected from the conference and those they saw. There may be widely agreeable answers to the "how is this justifiably different?" question, but the conversations so far have largely skated around it with sophistry.
Also, I'd recommend everyone read the "Tolerating everything except the outgroup" link, but the writing style and/or position might prevent you from seeing the message.
Or was, till I took an arrow to the knee.
Anyway, thanks for your kind words re the post!
The "Exit, voice, and loyalty" terminology might seem odd if you don't know it's origins. It's from 1970 book by economist A. O. Hirschman that's coming back in popularity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty. Hirschman gives an 1978 intro/postscript in his own words here: http://homepages.wmich.edu/~plambert/comp/hirschman.pdf
I'm surprised by apparent predominance of support here on HN for Strangeloop's position. While clearly legal, it's strikes me as a terrible precedent to require speakers on technical topics to pass a political litmus test. I'd be interested to know the actual direction that the sentiment lies. Do those who support Curtis appearing at the talk (wisely?) refrain from posting out of (legitimate?) fear of career repercussion? Or am I (comfortable speaking because I'm largely outside the industry) in the minority?
This. It also has the perverse effect of leaving the defense of "racists" to actual racists (e.g., [1]), thereby leading to guilt by association: "See, only racists are willing to defend this guy, so he's obviously a racist!"
[1]: https://twitter.com/B8GodDante/status/607201146017615872
Many moderates - in this case, moderate supporters of Yarvin, as shown in the comments here - appear to be fearful of getting tarred with the scarlet "R" and facing career threat. The scarlet "S" and "M" are also significant.
In contrast, the "C" is not threatened nowadays, if it ever was. Left-wing extremism is given a pass, while right-wing extremism is always tarred with the "R" brush. People rarely use the "F" word - they just default to "R", which is far more damaging.
(I mean: racist / sexist / misogynist / communist / fascist above.)
And this reminds me of a quote by the not moderate Jim Hightower, "There's nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos."
No and yes. I have been pretty vocal about it on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/joelgrus/status/606474432509394944 https://twitter.com/joelgrus/status/606673594198794240
but I've also been sitting on a 75%-written blog post that I'm hesitant to actually post.
Not because of career repercussions (I have never had an employer who really gave a shit what I write about in my spare time) but because of conference repercussions.
I am promoting a book, and to that end I am scheduled to speak at various conferences and meetups. And I worry that the mob would somehow try to get me uninvited. It's not like there's an actual policy that Yarvin violated that I can be confident I'm on the right side of.
So I am torn between my natural inclination to say exactly what I think, and the more practical takeaway of "don't write or have written anything that might anger the mob".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
Status-quo social thoughtcrime is rather terrifying to me. There's no "easy" way to amend laws or lobby a system to address the issue, as one would against a governmental stance.
It's also cyclical, as less "clean" people speak out against it, the "only rapists defend rapist" situation mentioned by sister posts occurs, and the entire culture of defending someone who might be distasteful, separating the issue from their broader history, diminishes.
I can't claim to judge you for your decision, I fully acknowledge the unfortunate state of things and your ability to make a choice that best serves your needs, but for the sake of putting my money where my mouth is; I think he should have been allowed to speak (espousing viewpoints I disagree with is far and beyond an offensive enough act to cause me to want to petition against someone, and even then, I would not attempt to convey that aversion as anything more than my personal stance).
The fact that I (or you, or any of us) feel any uncertainty due to fear of the repercussions for merely voicing this opinion only serves to reinforce my conviction that it needs to be voiced.
I think, regardless of political affiliation, we have to admit to ourselves that most people are prepared & willing to silence people with beliefs they find odious. Please note that I said "beliefs" not "actions".
The right to vocalize and discuss our beliefs freely is something that must be fundamentally protected, most especially when it is odious. The only way to do that is to make it both legally permissible [as the law can apply violent force] but also socially permissible to the point of indifference for people to voice different beliefs [even the odious, bigoted ones].
This is the bigger issue - the chilling of all controversial views and debate.
It's less about "violated Rule XXIV, subsection (c) of the Code of Conduct" and more about "wrote some stuff that made us feel funny and we're worried that something awkward might happen at the meeting". Yes, the organizers have the power to rewrite the schedule for bad reasons or no reason at all. But it's important to point out what was done, and why we think it was done.
If I were to hazard a guess, I think I'm not alone in this and I think you're not in a minority (or at least a small one). The recent HN stories seem to get a good number of "silent upvotes" before anyone steps into the fray to add a comment.
I also find myself not posting sometimes because of repercussions at a later date....not too often, but you know...
This is something I'd love see SJW's here react to. How do you feel about the fact that you have created a climate of fear amongst people who disagree with you?
Would you prefer convincing them of the correctness of your position, but willing to accept that at least by making them afraid you are helping further your cause?
Or are you concerned you've become the kind of discourse-stiffling monster you set out to defeat?
Or are you proud you've made the priviledged afraid?
Or something else entirely?
Because don't kid yourself: people are increasingly afraid to speak up on these issues because they are genuinely afraid of the consequences to their future employment prospects. Personally, I see that as a shameful situation, antithetical to any reasonable notion of a just society.
[Disclaimer: I've been accused at times of being an SJW, an MRA, a shill for Big Carbon, and quite a few other things besides.]
I don't think they care or, more specifically, if you fear then you don't think correctly and should shut-up[1]. Its quite a common attitude in movements and has happened many times.
1) or they'll add you to a blacklist to shut you up - the clean modern version of disappearing a person
I've been involved in anti-racist/anti-fascist work, either directly or on the periphery, for about ten years at this point. This takes many forms, from street confrontations with fascists, protests at book readings and other events, and also disrupting fascist conferences and similar.
Anti-Racist Action is the organization that has developed the most tactical and strategic influence in this space, not by design, but by chance (and it largely doesn't exist anymore). Disrupting fascist meetings by denying them space by getting hotels to drop them is the bread and butter of any ARA chapter. It's the easiest thing to do, and most modern tumblerites aren't willing to get in the streets with a bandanna and a baseball bat, so it's what gets done now. And in fact, it's likely that this sort of thing happens because ARA activists got involved in more liberal groups, etc., and the tactics just trickled down.
Personally, I have developed political differences with the "SJW" orthodoxy myself (though obviously in the other direction), and have seen the effects of this sort of attack applied on a social level. It has made my own work slightly more difficult, because I have to pick my comrades more carefully to ensure that they won't alienate me from my network. But this isn't a big deal for leftists, because there are already so many camps that are mutually oppositional that you'd need to do that already for some of your politics anyway. What's new in the last few years is having that extend away from your class alignment. (This is an answer to a question you didn't really ask, which is how the "SJW" community itself is affected by this, though it is what came to mind when I asked myself how I felt about it.)
As far as this issue and other similar issues are concerned, I'm overjoyed that, as you put it, a climate of fear exists for fascists, misogynists, racists, and similar. I hope that this continues and only worsens for these people.
I'm happy for many reasons. The first is that it has, as you've said, made privileged people afraid. I think this is only the beginning. Privilege creates safety, and as it is removed, I think the unsafety of the oppressed will in part come to the currently privileged classes. But if I could flip a switch and make every man feel the persistent, gnawing fear that a woman has of men, I would in a heartbeat. I wouldn't even consider whether the consequences were strategic, I would just do it.
I'm also happy that these people are achieving real victories. This is nearly impossible to do in a post-reformist landscape, and so the people involved in getting this fascist kicked out of this conference will have a real victory under their belt where their friends who are campaigning against some law that will inevitably pass or for some reform that will inevitably never happen won't. I hope that these victories can motivate people into taking more action. Burnout is a huge problem in activism and successes stave it off.
I would not say that I set out to defeat a "discourse-stifling" monster. The monsters I set out to defeat were patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. These systems violently oppress, they don't "stifle discourse." In fact, they LOVE discourse! When people are discoursing, they aren't in the streets. I've seen so many promising movements hobbled by reformism that I'm glad the possibility no longer exists, though that isn't at all the fault of SJW-outrage (and is rather a consequence of the fact that the economy is in large part so perilous that nobody can afford the concessions that were previously won by reformists). So if discourse is permanently removed as a tactical and strategic option for future leftists, I'll consider it a victory.
You might be unsurprised to find out that free speech is not valued on the left or among "SJW" groups. I suggest you research this further,...
(edit: parent edited post, this no longer makes sense. Original was about revolutionaries never expecting the guillotine to fall on their own neck)
But far more put there by the state, make no mistake. It's not like there haven't been plenty of purges and organized campaigns of systematic repression from the state to the left. But you like ignoring that when we talk about fascist programmers not being able to present their widgets, don't you?
See: The Holocaust The Great Purge The Reign of Terror etc
Probably because this is a really stupid course of action to begin with, independent of tumblr.
Using baseball bats to reinforce your political views seems like a great idea until your opponents show up with guns. Which means you, now, have to show up with guns, and so on, until you're a full-on terrorist group.
Well, that and you risk going to jail for assault with a deadly weapon, and you don't want to be in the same cell with someone from the Aryan Brotherhood when they find out your reason for jailtime was assaulting white power groups.
I have to wonder if this dangerous person lives in the US, or at least the true US, the 2/3rds of which allow concealed carry. I marvel at how the National Socialist Movement and some "White Nationalists" thought it wise to meet in New Jersey and Illinois, respectively, where and when it was illegal to carry concealed (not groups of smart people, it would seem :-). Hmmmm, for that matter, Ohio is in one way the worst state in the union for self-defense, because the burden of proof is on the person claiming it. (These incidents mentioned at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Racist_Action)
Try that shit in the state of Missouri where Strange Loop is meeting and you'll very possibly get legally shot. Counterwise the Nazis were greatly aided by prior Weimar efforts at gun control, which they of course reinforced once they started getting formal power.
In fact, all these actions by the left in the US strike me as extremely unwise, for in the many possibilities of "this will not end well", those of a very well armed population putting paid to their pretensions should be quite prominent in their minds.
It's hilarious to me that you seem to think leftists could set off an arms race.
Also, what do you think the black panthers, weather underground, etc., were?
Plus, if what you say was true, can you point to some incidents where your side actually, you know, got shot for their troubles? I mean your violent side, not the pre-Black Power civil rights period of this.
"Do you think that white nationalists don't take guns to their protests and marches?"
I think the kind of person who talks about carrying around baseball bats isn't going to go to these marches.
What you think is hilarious is on you and your weird sense of humor. If you go to a meeting with baseball bats, eventually, the people you're disrupting are going to bring weapons stronger than baseball bats.
Anti-racist and anti-fascist organizing happens under the mantle of a thousand different groups all over the world. There are antifa in Russia that have it much harder than antifa in France or the UK or the US.
And yet we are asked to believe that an obscure blogger flirting with monarchist political thought would introduce a dangerous authoritarian element if allowed to present on a technical topic. Thanks for putting this into context.
This will be great news to the neoreactionaries. How do you figure?
> because it communicates a lack of concern with the threat "neo-reactionaryism" or fascism represents.
And what is the threat, if not that they will seize power?
This thinking, right here, is a problem.
Discussing an individual's technical contributions does not legitimize their political views, let alone their technical ones.
And the big threat today is not neo-reactionaryism, but zealotry in all its forms. Radicals from any group are more dangerous than moderates from a single distasteful group, and they all use exactly the same tactics to win. And if we're going to win by burying bad ideas through threats and intimidation instead of openly dismantling them through rational and ethical thought, then I'm not sure the battle is even worth winning.
Antifa did and do routinely disrupt fascist actions with physical force and frequently got (and get) shot for it. Sometimes the antifa are the ones doing the shooting.
But most of the time the antifa are hilariously underarmed compared to the (as you've pointed out) very well armed rightists and it's a combination of bravado and stupidity that they take the actions they do. The KKK, neo nazis, etc., have all had weapons stronger than baseball bats for a while. There's no "eventually." Do you understand what I'm saying?
There's not much point in railing against racists / sexists / etc. if you're going to make equally condescending generalizations about the victims you're trying to save.
Would it not be better to work towards nobody feeling such fear?
> I'm also happy that these people are achieving real victories ... their friends ... are campaigning against some law that will inevitably pass
Once again championing (any) change itself over sane outcomes. Oppressive laws and the march of the machine are inevitable, so let's just fight each other?
Your comment is a poignant example of everything gone wrong with the "progressive" mentality. Thank you for being candid though.
But that isn't the hypothetical. Do you understand the concept?
Certainly if I had a faeries & unicorns switch I'd hit that as well, but we don't always have the options we'd like.
In the meantime, if it's possible to make fascist programmers afraid for their careers, that's great for me. It means fascist movements are disrupted before they can even form. God knows leftists have been afraid for long enough.
By your usage, I presume you're using definition #1 of http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascist even though you are not capitalizing it. If it is possible to make Fascist programmers afraid for their careers, then Fascists cannot possibly wield much power.
On the other hand, the results of mob justice look an awful lot like a distributed implementation of fascism definition #2 - how is it not appropriate to describe, for example, a summary firing for political views as such?
It is true that all exercises of political power are at the end of the day coercive. My personal take on this is to minimize political power, but to do this takes a specific social arrangement that doesn't exist in the present day.
The hypothetical I came up with is one where it's easier to attack an existing system than to create new and liberatory systems. This is the same as reality. It is much, much easier to get a fascist talk removed from a conference than it would be to get everyone at that conference to come to an appropriate understanding of feminist and anti-racist thought and praxis. There are certainly people involved in education, propaganda, and outreach, but this is by nature a much slower process and one that will not bear fruit in any reasonable time span. It is certainly not fast enough to counteract things like fascists at conferences, so we shut down the fascists.
I also obviously disagree as to whether denying a fascist the ability to spread fascism is injustice, or more broadly, whether attacking the oppressor classes and limiting their ability to oppress is somehow unjust. But then, I also care much less about any concept of "justice." Certainly the world is not a just place, and I question whether the concept of justice as communicated by oppressor classes is something we need to bring with us into the future.
Finally
>distributed implementation of fascism
Do you notice the contradiction?
No. Distributivism comes to mind.
> My personal take on this is to minimize political power, but to do this takes a specific social arrangement that doesn't exist in the present day.
So in the mean time, you switch to maximizing political power? Why exactly do you think this would end any differently than it has in the past - simply empowering new autocrats borne by new religions?
> But then, I also care much less about any concept of "justice."
How can you propose to have a society without justice? When people feel wronged, their desire is to get greater revenge. Without moderating this force, feuds grow ever larger.
It seems as if you're envisioning a magic society where everybody just "gets it" and nobody transgresses against one another. And since you can never have that (there will always be differences of opinion), you take solace in mob destruction but yet still tell yourself you're fighting the good fight.
>> distributed implementation of fascism
> Do you notice the contradiction?
Not at all. The result is the same for those on the receiving end. (and for your inevitable thought of 'well they deserve it' - that's exactly the position of the oppressors you're fighting against. good job!)
How does one distinguish a "fascist talk" from a "technical talk presented by one accused of being a fascist"? Is the difference relevant? I think Moldbug views himself as anti-fascist, and argues that Fascism and Communism are alternative undesirable endgames for democracy: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/carlyle...
And I'm not sure whether one should equate Moldbug with Yarvin. Is the blogger a pseudonym, a construct, a caricature, or an alter-ego? Should a comedian be equated with their on-stage persona? An actor with the character they play? An author with their protagonist?
I (truly) appreciate the insight your earlier comments provide.
Well, pragmatically, the difference is immaterial, because to maximize the memetic intensity of anti-fascism, we have to attack all fascists everywhere all the time. Within the fold, there is very little opposition, because once one valid point has been made, going against it is nearly impossible.
This is the real danger in going down the ideological-purity path the way the mainstream extreme-liberal tumblerite bloc has. I get around this by maintaining a network of people I trust implicitly as comrades and who also trust me, but this is how ideologic drift happens in, say, activist groups.
>I think Moldbug views himself as anti-fascist
Well, nobody's the villain of their own story.
>Is the blogger a pseudonym, a construct, a caricature, or an alter-ego? Should a comedian be equated with their on-stage persona? An actor with the character they play? An author with their protagonist?
Do you think Moldbug is intended as a fiction?
>I (truly) appreciate the insight your earlier comments provide.
Don't think they provide so much insight. I'm one person and pretty idiosyncratic in my ideology and praxis. I am certainly not representative and I'm sure I would disagree with (just as an example) most of the people whose twitter comments were cited in the OP's article.
I just wanted to say that yes, I fully enjoy the fact that people are now afraid to be racist, sexist, etc., at tech conferences.
No, I think they are essays where in the author is testing out ideas to see how they hold together when criticized by the world. Some of these ideas are deep beliefs, where the question is simply how the outside will react to hearing about them. Some of them are fragments of arguments he's trying to piece together, in the hope that the process of writing will clear things up in his own mind. Others are probably there simply because he was drawn in the cadence of the language.
But I do think that Moldbug is consciously a persona, and not identical to Yarvin. And I don't think either is a fascist by any reasonable definition. Racist? Yes, the writing is racist by the current way the word is used to label practically any belief in racial differences. But I'd prefer to judge the author (Yarvin) by how he treats others in the world, not how he writes about the world in the abstract.
I fully enjoy the fact that people are now afraid to be racist, sexist, etc., at tech conferences.
If this was the only outcome, I'd might agree with the tactics. But what if their pragmatic reaction is to simply avoid situations where they can be accused of these things? Don't hire women, because they might accuse you of sexism. Don't hire minorities, because you might lose your job if accused of racial prejudice?
In such an environment, silence is likely the best strategy. But along with the silence is likely the belief that everyone else shares the same opinion, but similarly doesn't speak about it. I believe more in sunlight as a disinfectant: get the ideas out in the open. I think it's good for people to hear more points of view they disagree with.
I'm one person and pretty idiosyncratic in my ideology and praxis.
Yes, but that ideology is so different from mine that I learn just by the knowledge that such a viewpoint exists.
Nobody on the Left talks like that. I'm guessing you're actually one of Yarvin's own bunch masquerading as an antifascist to discredit the cause.
Disrupting fascist movements sounds like a great idea, but is that really your intent?
> But if I could flip a switch and make every man feel the persistent, gnawing fear that a woman has of men, I would in a heartbeat. I wouldn't even consider whether the consequences were strategic, I would just do it.
Because it seems your intent is to make others as afraid as you are regardless of the consequences. Unless it's not, in which case things would probably be a lot more clear if you stopped flip flopping and refusing to define the words you use.
When you ask questions like this, you give the respondent authority, because it is worded in a way that gives the possibility that the respondent might say something intelligent in response.
There is no such possibility here.
How terrifying.
Modern online leftism is indistinguishable from a rightist failing an Ideological Turing Test.
I've been involved in political activism of one kind or other for decades, mostly in ways that are opposed to your ideals, so I'm not one tiny bit surprised to find a lefty who is opposed to free speech, nor am I unfamiliar with the "theoretical basis" for such abhorent positions.
I wanted to cast as broad a net as possible in my question, as I know how eclectic the left is: the two major Communist parties in my country spent most of their political capital fighting each other while the mainstream drifted gently, and rather too far, to the right.
Your myopia, anger and hatred are unfortunately true to the rightwingnutjob's caricature of anyone interested in building a just society, which makes the job of sane social reformers more difficult. Just so you know (yeah, I know, we're you're enemies too... and it's important to have a comprehensive enemies list, isn't it?)
And while on the one hand I can take heart in the knowledge that you'll never get close to achieving your goals, I'm also saddened that you will spread so much toxicity into your environment on your way to ultimate failure. The world needs more love, not more hate, or more fear.
If you have a specific idea at all about how the world should be better, the people who oppose that are certainly not your friends. I think you're mistaking vision for myopia, dedication for anger, and pragmatism for hatred... but then you certainly hate me more than I hate you.
I'm probably just as unsure as you about whether I'll achieve my goals, but I have to try, because to do anything less would be a betrayal of all of humanity. I believe everyone is responsible for their actions, and so if I'm to be responsible I have to act somehow.
It's very easy to say that "the world needs more love," but love doesn't break bricks, as the saying goes. I doubt your own activism is limited to "love"; you probably do things that are intended to make reality assume some objective state. In doing that, you are preventing your opponents from forcing the world into their preferred state. This is no different from opposing free speech. I just have a more complete vision of the world that I want, and it doesn't include Mein Kampf or Birth of a Nation or hacker news's casual misogyny and racism.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
So instead of attempting to clarify what you mean by 'fascism' to further discussion, you effectively declare that the words you use only have meaning to you, making further discussion impossible. I hope then it's acceptable to use the word 'gay' to designate 'lame' (especially among my gay friends), unless you're also stuck in that barren rule based wasteland too.
Words only point to a reality. And while we cannot know the entirety of that reality, it can certainly be made much clearer in this case. Words are useless unless they're communal property and their meanings (sufficiently) shared.
Why is it important to you that it be gray? Why are you implying that the status of Hacker News is affected by this?
Who needs theory? Practicality tells all.
Extreme ideologies don't value free speech, because free speech allows the unwashed masses to communicate to each other just how ridiculous they think your ideology is. This is true regardless of where an ideology falls on the oversimplistic "right-left" spectrum: North Korea, Fascist Italy, Communist Russia, Oligarchical-Capitalist Russia, Cambodia, North Vietnam, Burma, Communist China, pretty much the entire Middle East, etc. The list goes on and on and on.
Suppress free speech and criminalize dissident thoughts, and you establish a social basis for staying in power - for the good of the people, of course.
It's unsurprising that extreme ideological adherents are always united in at least one common idea, regardless of the actual content of the ideology they are espousing: the belief that people themselves don't know what is best for their own interests and must be closely watched and shepherded (and culled) if they fall into an annoying habit of thinking on their own.
I would give you some discussion questions, but I'm sure you'll never, ever move past this roadblock, so I won't feed the trolls.
Not because it is a sacred cow, but because I believe the benefits to free speech far outweigh any drawbacks. (For largely the same reasons, I support open data in government to an much further extent than I think most people would.)
Out of curiostity, Mr Throwaway, what -ism do you use to identity your personal ideology?
>though my political ideology is pretty obviously very far from the ones you've listed
That is very arguable and not obvious at all.
"But if I could flip a switch and make every man feel the persistent, gnawing fear that a woman has of men, I would in a heartbeat."
If that's intentional parody, it's brilliant. If not, I guess there's always therapy.
Communist here. Fuck you: of course we care about free speech.
That 'climate of fear' also exists for those people who don't fall into such cleanly vilifiable categories, and yet occasionally engage in language and behavior that could be categorized as such, often unknowingly because those definitions seem to depend on contexts they cannot determine, have different meanings for each individual, and are rapidly being expanded to encompass broader categories of thought and behavior.
> I'm happy for many reasons. The first is that it has, as you've said, made privileged people afraid. I think this is only the beginning. Privilege creates safety, and as it is removed, I think the unsafety of the oppressed will in part come to the currently privileged classes. But if I could flip a switch and make every man feel the persistent, gnawing fear that a woman has of men, I would in a heartbeat. I wouldn't even consider whether the consequences were strategic, I would just do it.
One thing I've noticed about the fearful is that they tend to resent the fearless, and want everyone to live under the same fears they do. It's a very primal thing, as people who fear the same things are part of the same tribe. These fears are not used to achieve anything strategic, but to define the very culture members exist in, and so are vigorously spread and defended regardless of any practical value they may have. In such a culture you will never get beyond that fear. You can see this most readily in religious sects, but many political movements are little other than that.
And regardless of the 'harm' fear prevents, it is still the antithesis of knowledge, and a society ruled by fear cannot be ruled by knowledge. In such a society knowledge itself is a threat, and the only people willing to discuss controversial ideas will either be the ones courageous enough to question or hateful enough not to care. The fearful of course will not be able to tell the difference.
Personally, that is not a price I am willing to pay for a 'safe' society. That doesn't mean such a system is right or wrong, only that it doesn't align with my values. But regardless of differing values, it still troubles me that anyone would take such joy in other people's fear and unsafety, and I don't think any good can come of that.
> So if discourse is permanently removed as a tactical and strategic option for future leftists, I'll consider it a victory.
And yet here you are, using a throwaway account to engage in tactically and strategically driven discourse.
Do you not recall the self-immolation of the Mozilla Community during the Brendan Eich CEO fiasco? Big overlap in the two communities.
It's funny, in some countries you have laws against hate speech - it probably wouldn't be legal to write stuff like "blacks make good slaves because of their genetics" [sic] - but in the US because of the free speech thing society relies on all these extrajudicial lynch mobs. So... terrible precedent or common sense?
That said, this entire conversation has an amazingly suppressive effect on me. This is primarily because i come from east germany, have grown up in its social era until my early teens, and have seen how it changed since the wall fell, and thus consider myself strongly socialist and glad that germany itself still is strongly socialist. I am left.
And i find myself under attack for what i consider to be a human-friendly view. I see talk of leftists, the red guard, communists, etc. etc. etc. and find the american internet to be extraordinarily busy painting what i consider to be my political leaning as "terrorist".
You are right about the crazy views on socialism and German politics in general.
On the other hand, consider how "Obamacare" was attacked, and (if i understood correctly what came out of your country) changed, cut and successfully damaged, thus affecting wide parts of the US population. ( http://www.galen.org/newsletters/changes-to-obamacare-so-far... )
Also, i find it a little disingenuous to ask for something and in the same breath declare delivery of such impossible.
With regard to your link I don't know whether you're obtuse or spraying squid ink. The topic under discussion is consequences for voicing free speech.
As for this:
What exactly was the federal involvement? What exactly was done that would otherwise not have been done? I do not know the details, and do also not understand how any of that connects to left politics. Please educate me.Edit: I'm sorry for the edits, and i hope you see this post only after i am done editing. One last note on this:
I was answering someone who was asking if people were afraid to speak up on the matter. I am saying, yes, i am, because i see american people who have many listeners brand me indirectly but surprisingly aggressively for my beliefs.It's a lot more pervasive, and has been going on a lot longer than most people think. The Brendan Eich or Pax Dickinson purges are probably the most known to the HN community, but there are many, many more.
https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-bad...
If someone has a view that is actually destructive for the forum its aired in ( I'm speaking hypothetically now ) does it have to be accommodated.
By that, and I genuinely want to know what you guys think, what if a political candidate advocated the end of democratic elections? A "one man, one vote, one time" kind of thing. How is that handled in an open society?
Extreme conservative opinions like Mr Yarvins are actually shocking to me. I don't think his particular writings should be banned or anything like that. However, are they so reactionary as to represent to the organizers a position that they don't want to even tacitly or obliquely endorse?
I will say this, the first post on this subject the other day saw me having one of the most interesting exchanges I've ever had on HN. That was cool.
It's a heckler's vote. Now, the conversation is about Yarvin and his politics. But if these 3-4 radical and deeply political agitators had not made this an issue to begin with, everyone attending the conference would have just known they were attending a presentation on Urbit (if they even chose to check out that session).
In other words, if this is established as a precedent, then a passionate enough fringe group can create the "destruction" they claim to be against to justify covert ideological policing. That this is occurring at a strictly technology event with a reputation for openness to innovative, experimental ideas is particularly chilling.
"Nice conference you got there, shame if this speaker I don't like created a controversy for you"-type manipulation does not seem as bad or obvious when the targeted beliefs are foreign to your own. Stepping back and anticipating the implications reveals a troubling future, and one that is occurring in many industries at once.
That's really interesting that the most prominent voices against him aren't attending...I don't know.
I don't think that you have to imagine done kind of follow on effects...i think the US probably irreversibly stopped being a free society when it became a national security state. So, I guess what I'm saying that it doesn't seem our of character in the US. I would just add that it's actually bidirectional pressure from both the left and the right depending on the subject and the area.
I'll stop rambling... Thanks for the background info, though...
Given that the reaction of the organizers was to remove Yarvin's talk, with extremely vague justifications, I think both sides could agree that the answer to this question is "yes".
As has been noted by others, this could be interpreted as the latter issuing a "Nice conference and career you have there, it would be a shame if anything happened to them". A political interpretation, yes, but one of pure power politics, vs. anything requiring an actual analysis of the putative issue, Yarvin's politics.
Rather, the "hecklers" who advised the organizers to drop CY/MM were the ones who held this belief.
I'm pretty far-left (though more liberal than leftist), and found the black-and-white leftist-bashing in the article didn't add much besides giving the author the opportunity to vent his spleen at a segment of leftists while pretending we're all some monoculture, which is ludicrous. Would have been better to just focus on the issue of why an open society needs to be willing to accept diverse political views, even hideous ones like Marxism or neoreactionary craziness, without using it as a platform for pontificating about a crudely conceived culture war.
In Hungary after the government change they saved a whole bunch of communist statues that were being taken down and made a museum out of it. I think it's interesting and worth seeing.
I'm been told by plenty of people that I'm a loon with crazy political views (Tea Party family members mostly), but if I was working on an interesting tech. project, and wanted to do a talk at a tech. conference about it, I'd hope that wouldn't be a factor in conference organizers rejecting me.
If I'd started a political party founded on ideals of illiberalism, dictatorship, and subjugation of the people I hated and worked to gain political power in the US, then I'd say not accepting me at a conference could be more easily justified as the conference would then become a political platform for me regardless of what the talk was about.
The fact that a horrible, unconscionable, genocidal dictator was also a painter makes his paintings more interesting, if anything.
Actually, progressives do seem to be relatively monocultural when it comes to, as the article says toward the end, "tolerating everything except the outgroup." Either that, or the intolerant faction(s) are very dominant and end up getting their way quite a lot.
As well as the examples cited in the article, another good example is Brendan Eich being forced out as chief of Mozilla due to having political views that some progressives deemed to be "incorrect."
Alternately, you could just look at the actual cases the ACLU takes, which often enough support people and causes that aren't darlings of some faction or another on the left.
For the record I was against Eich's firing (and know a number of leftists who were similarly against), I donate to the ACLU and the Sierra Club, and used to be an anti-war protester long ago. I also am enough of an exception to your generalization that you might want to reconsider your stereotype.
Inviting Moldbug bring not only his own person but also his followers. It's understandable if your goal is to foster a diverse crowd to not invite a group of people who constantly argue against any kind of modern society.
edit: if there are others with notable real-world achievements, I will eagerly accept correction.
Neoreactionary ideas have been picked up and directly cited by cultural influencers like Ross Douthat, Ed West, and William Gibson, however. They see themselves as a right wing Frankfurt School - not noteworthy for their identities, but for their subtle cultural impact.
ah, the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory? http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism um, ok
Check out Eclipse of Reason, Escape from Freedom, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and The Theory of Communicative Action when you get a chance. Primary sources and all.
- 2014/05/27: @ReactionaryTree I don’t identify as a neoreactionary. Although I talk to a lot of people who do. https://twitter.com/justinetunney/status/471281445013843968
- 2014/05/30: @tesseractiv I don't identify as a neoreactionary. I already had my movement. I don't want to join any others. https://twitter.com/justinetunney/status/472425936692854784
- 2014/06/28: @nullvoid9 I'm not a neoreactionary :'( I'm also friendly and will treat you with the same respect you give me. https://twitter.com/justinetunney/status/482757375854522368
- 2014/08/04: Who said I was a neoreactionary? I keep telling people I'm not, but no one believes me. http://ask.fm/JustineTunney/answer/116475763475
- 2015/01/15: @DurrutiOvercloc Well, most of the things. Like, I’m not pro-slavery. I’ve also never called myself a neoreactionary. https://twitter.com/justinetunney/status/555603973286400000
- 2015/03/11: @jhamby @justkelly_ok I'm not a neoreactionary. I've never been one. Also Shanley is a huge racist. https://twitter.com/justinetunney/status/575829516079263744
On the other hand you did start a petition to turn over government rule to Google, and believe the bottom 1/3 of the population should be live in servants to the top 1/3. What this has to do with neoreactionarism I have no idea, but apparently many people think it's associated.
P.S. I'm still not convinced that you're not a troll, but then again I'm not sure if this is not exactly the kind of $#@% that needs to be stirred up.
That's not fair at all. You make a value judgment by referring to (but not defining) 'real-world achievements' and follow it up with an ad hominem, instead of deconstructing the actual ideas involved.
It also makes perfect sense that following any political view radically different from the mainstream will lead to less 'real-world' success, as not only does compromising your politics for success potentially alienate you from your allies, but mainstream society will be actively and deliberately trying to prevent you from achieving that success (and apparently speaking at technical conferences).
For example, I would not have been successful in the Roman Empire, Communist Russia, or Nazi Germany unless I was willing to compromise my politics. I'm not exactly successful now because my politics don't precisely line up with the 'mainstream'. But that still says nothing about how ethical or tenable my political stance is.
Imagine if your sentence was reformulated like this instead.
> Inviting Harvey Milk bring not only his own person but also his followers. It's understandable if your goal is to foster a diverse crowd to not invite a group of people who [insert claim here] against any kind of modern society.
See the problem? :(
Tolerance is hard, I know, but something we need to foster nonetheless.
Even if we don't allow these people to conferences, we still share roads, grocery stores, national identity, tax revenues, employment opportunities, classrooms, etc, with them. Humanity sucks badly enough at cooperation already! Let's not ever actively discourage it!
I'm uncertain if I'm willing to consider the position with Moldbug intolerance, because of the paradox listed. This is not someone with a pro-gun or anti-tax or some other form of political speech that are culturally arguable without being an intolerant viewpoint against a group of people.
Still, that's just pointing out the difference. I feel like a bit of a fence sitter to be honest. That being said, I have left jobs because of a boss that had, what I considered, intolerant viewpoints of LGBT and non-white people.
Basically, a Breitbart columnist said that they were putting an article about me today. When this happens, a wave of harassment generally follows. I did not delete that or any other tweet on this issue.
(They seem to have decided to post about something else instead, we'll see.)
As I said in the last thread, I don't really plan on reading and responding to much here, but since this is on the front page, might as well correct the inaccuracy.
edit: wording
I've never read a word of Moldybug or whatever, but in the American context, the very concept of slavery is absolutely considered racist and rightly so. America's history of slavery is completely inseparable from racism.
To outright decide that all mentions of a word have such a narrow context is something I cannot accept as valid. It's thoughtcrime.
After all, it's not like Moldbug's writing shies away from this idea.
> Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences.
If all you have to make your case is rhetorical tricks (like "look! somewhere in this man's million plus words he talked about Africans being slaves! Slavery is therefore a specific kind of racist in all conversations") then I work from the premise that there isn't much of a case to be made.
Kind of like what you're doing right now?
Real contexts, where abstract concepts have been concrete realities, put natural and rational limits on the ability to treat those concepts as abstract ideas to be debated solely on their hypothesized merits rather than their hard realities. There is a very rational difference between arguing in favor of communism on an American college campus, where communism is a lovely abstract ideal, and arguing in favor of it in Romania or Ukraine where communism was a brutal reality.
Moldbug is an American, being read by Americans, writing about his support for the institution of slavery, and explicitly saying that some races are genetically better suited for slavery than others. It is far more rational to treat that as racist than to bend over backwards and pretend that it is not in the name of free debate.
FWIW, reading "A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations" made me identify as liberal. I wholeheartedly agree with Moldbug's analysis of the arrow of time and condemnation of the machine(s) of USG and the Cathedral. But I believe he unjustly discounts the idea of distributed force wherein aggression is unproductive, and IMHO making that work at lower levels is a better goal than the federated centralization of take-it-or-leave-it fiefdoms. (Then again, this growing feel-good "SJW" cancer has me rethinking how enlightened such a society could be, but I digress...). He also discounts how technology has made subjects ever-more transparent to their rulers, with a simple handwave that rulers wouldn't be interested in unnecessary policing. (If I am guilty of oversimplifying here I apologize - it's been a while since I read him and I'm recalling my main takeaways.)
I don't believe in Urbit for similar reasoning - it seems like its entities are opaque objects where the only primitive is composition, and punts to delegation for solving the hard problems. I'd previously gone down a similar "immutable universal code" fugue with r6rs as the basis and eventually considered it a dead end.
On the other hand, saying that some races are more suited to slavery is about as direct as it gets.
Besides, those deaths weren't due to the policies of communism, rather the particular regime. Hell, British colonialism is responsible for a lot of deaths too. Tons were under the East India Trading company (and the governments that it morphed into), which was a capitalist venture and all of its harmful policies were profit-oriented. There are probably other examples, I don't know.
(I don't exactly support communist ideals, but I don't really think it's something that deserves to be taboo'd.)
Whether some emotional damage is "scarring" (i.e. permanent) will depend on, well, a lot of things, but almost no kind of emotional damage has to be permanent because of the way our physiology of emotions behaves. Your resilience, your existing beliefs, what you expect out of the world, and so on will determine how you respond to stressful stimuli. Learning that people don't live forever can be 'scarring' (not really) to a two-year old, but, people eventually adjust to this information, because stress tolerance exists. If everything were as equally stressful as the first time we heard it, our bodies would be overwhelmed with cortisol all the time. Since this obviously doesn't happen, our bodies can (and do) adapt to stressful stimuli in various ways.
Comparing emotional damage to scars is probably a false analogy. Your skin will never fully adapt to a gash, and being stabbed once isn't going to change the way your body responds to stabbings. But your body will adapt to stressful emotions, or at least it is capable of doing so. In the worst case it's probably like a muscle tear, but in most cases emotional stress is more like some kind of the muscle trauma that happens during resistance training, which the body adapts to.
There are mental trauma, that has not been caused by physical trauma, that will end up being like the gash you describe never being able to acclimatize to.
I take your point about the use of the word scarring...I was just trying to draw a certain type of similarity into the conversation...it certainly isn't a perfect analogy.
One other thing, though...is it really a surprise that discussing mental or emotional damage would use a physical analogy? We don't culturally have a large body of language for describing things accurately that are "just in your head."
"There are mental trauma, that has not been caused by physical trauma, that will end up being like the gash you describe never being able to acclimatize to."
I'm not so sure about this.
Stress happens because of stress hormones. You can develop a tolerance to those hormones like you could develop a tolerance to any drug.
The range of experiences that human emotion can adapt to are vast. People in far more violent societies have adapted to far more horrific things. If we didn't have the ability to adapt to extreme shock we'd be screwed as a species.
Cheers.
http://popehat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/steve.png
Which, oddly enough, includes Strange Loop! (Unless the Peabody Opera House screens attendies with metal detectors (!), in Missouri law even a "no guns" sign at such a venue only means you have to leave if asked.)
People who are virulently anti-libertarian inexplicably adopt very libertarian "employers should be able to hire/fire anyone they want" responses when this practice is criticized, as if they don't see any kind of problem with the ability to readily get someone fired for arguing controversial beliefs outside of their workplace.
But, think about it this way: you obviously can't deeply engage the views of others at work, unless you have a very open-minded workplace or those views somehow relate to your job performance. (I doubt questions like "is it immoral to do [insert drug]?" or "should prostitution be legal?" would ever be workplace appropriate, but they're sincere views people hold that dictate drug policy via public opinion for example.)
So, if you can't talk about these things at work, where the hell do you talk about them? I'm guessing on the internet, because colleges are the next option and they're only available to a fraction of the population for four years at a time. So the internet is no longer an option, where? I'm asking this question rhetorically. If society has no battlegrounds for beliefs, democracy is permanently is screwed, because you need some kind of battleground for beliefs to refine beliefs in concordance with reality in the first place.
Many of us US gun owners say "Soap box, ballot box, bullet box", but of course long term denial of the first invalidates the second. We're watching all this in horror because we really don't want to be forced to the third.
Especially since one way or another, such former democracies fail hard when faced with inconvenient truths the ruling class has been denying and "The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!" Doesn't have to be political, could be e.g. transmissible bird flu coupled with our current SJW public health authorities, as the Texas Ebola cases demonstrated.
Ken is the free speech Popehat, Clark is the ... lesser Popehat.
Many whites are decent people. I have white friends and even dated whites. But in my experience, many vocally support sending armies abroad to spread capitalist law. I know the PC police (real police) hate hearing this, but it helps when good whites openly condemn supporters of terror. Otherwise maybe they should go back to Europe?
Folks looking for a polite argument with Curtis could have had one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers
Does Noam Chomsky get heat for his political views? I was amused when I realized the Chomsky I'd heard about in CS classes was the same person I'd read about in political news. I guess his views are more palatable to the people criticizing Mr. Yarvin.
This whole episode does make you wonder where the line would be drawn in the future.
2001-09-11, NYT
I wonder how popular Chomsky's radical left views actually are among techies...assuming what I hear about libertarian views being prevalent...its not necessarily a natural fit.
And somewhat discredited at this point? I don't care to write up a bunch, but his ideas about universal grammar built on genetic properties have not fared well over the years. I know he's done other stuff, but that seems his main claim to fame, excluding the political stuff.
Let's face it: the window of conference political acceptability covers the point -infinity. We know the upper bound is finite, and shrinking.
All these experiences helped me get socially connected with a lot of powerful and important people. They all loved me. I even put the fact that I engaged in this sort of troublemaking on my resume. I'm not kidding. I even talked about it at job interviews. Stuff like this impresses people. There's no doubt in my mind that it led to my current level of success, writing code for a living.
Politics is a common topic here, of course. I've participated in my share of such discussions. But I couldn't tell you who took what position. I'd definitely never look at a prospective conference speaker and say, oh, that's the guy who believes X, where X is any political subject. Not even as a neutral observation, let alone as criticism.
Is this a real thing? This conversation feels like a window into an alternate universe.
I'm with you there.
I've helped organize a couple of small regional meetings, and I have literally zero idea what the political leanings of the speakers or attendees were. Nor did I care.
If someone were into radical politics in his free time, that would be his own business. If any of the speakers had veered off into unrelated violent or rude speech (e.g. racism, calling for war, political uprising, etc) at the podium, for a technical talk, that would be addressed on the spot. (I've never seen this happen.)
But if you are informed of their political leanings, and then don't take 'appropriate' action, then that says something about YOU, like how you endorse and advocate such politics.
See how it works ;)
Note: it was written in 2010 and I am sure that over the last 5 years a lot will have changed.
His view on gender 'roles' is also dangerously close to hate speech (and before any of you calls me an islamophobic: as a non-muslim white male he has no cultural heritage that could justify his opinion, so it's different).
So this seems to suggest that you believe that "non-Muslim white males" have no cultural heritage whatsoever, which is... odd.
The answer is: it doesn't. He was removed because some politically influential leftists wanted him declared a non-person.
The trouble with democracy is that it's not a system of government where everyone has their say, but one where the majority rules. A democracy does not protect individual rights, but the 'rights' of the majority. And members are not required to have any skills or qualifications before making an impact on how the government is run. Democracy is NOT an ideal, there's a lot to criticize, and even the founders of the United States understood this. But all these excluded middle thinkers think that if you're critical of democracy, then you're pro communist/socialist/monarchist/etc, which is nonsense.
Here's a relevant example of where relying on democracy would have compromised citizens constitutional rights.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/06/12/gay_marriage_a...
> His view on gender 'roles' is also dangerously close to hate speech
Then you really have no idea what hate speech is, and should ask someone who survived the holocaust or had a cross burning in their front yard.
> and before any of you calls me an islamophobic: as a non-muslim white male he has no cultural heritage that could justify his opinion, so it's different.
When the hell did islamophobia enter the picture?!? Regardless, you don't need 'cultural heritage' to 'justify' an opinion. You do however need facts to support a conclusion. Are you saying that certain conclusions can only be made by those with a specific cultural heritage, regardless of the facts?
On the third hand, though, I find the popehat post, complete with the use of "social justice warrior", to be especially repellent. Although I do congratulate Clark on the ability to be a conservative intellectual---I now have a puddle of condescension on my office floor.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/sl-notes/yarvin.txt
So on the word of a few individuals he doesn't name, with information he doesn't bother to validate for himself, Alex decides to remove Curtis from the lineup because he might be 'distracting', not because of what he'd say, but just because he'd be present. This implies an environment where we're powerless against unnamed accusers, an authority who is unwilling to evaluate the merits of a case, and a group of people who are so unable to separate technical matters from politics that the mere presence of someone they disagree with makes it impossible to focus.
And you know what? I've seen exactly this sort of behavior from other corporations and both the 'left' and 'right'. It's something all groups naturally default to, and active measures need to be taken in order to avoid it. And while I get why people want to remain anonymous, I also know you cannot have the free flow of ideas when anonymous accusers can cost you your position, by making accusations they never need to verify, over things you never intend to address at a venue.
We need to challenge ideas, not bury them, especially at a conference like Strangeloop. And if the Urbit presentation was deemed good enough to hear before these facts came to light, then it's still good enough to be challenged on that basis.
P.S. By excising Curtis Yarvin in an attempt to avoid "overshadowing the talk and acting as a distraction for launching the conference as a whole", Alex Miller has done just that. And if I were to put on my tinfoil hat and give a bad faith reading of all this, considering the internet savvy are well aware of the Streisand Effect, I'd say this was exactly their intent.