hopefully this is alright with @dgerard@awful.systems, and I apologize for the clumsy format since we can’t pull posts directly until we’re federated (and even then lemmy doesn’t interact the best with masto posts), but absolutely everyone who hasn’t seen Scott’s emails yet (or like me somehow forgot how fucking bad they were) needs to, including yud playing interference so the rats don’t realize what Scott is
At the risk of kind of picking around the edges here … something caught my eye in #5:
Michael successfully alerted me to the fact that crime has risen by a factor of ten over the past century, which seems REALLY IMPORTANT and nobody else is talking about it and it seems like the sort of thing that more people than just Michael should be paying attention to.
This claim is ridiculous. The homicide rate in the US was something like 30 or 40 per 100,000 people in colonial times, reducing every century, and it’s around 5 right now, since the increase from the 1960s - 1990s has gone back down.
Maybe, in the past 100 years, we have passed so many bajillion new statutes that it has increased crime tenfold, but that’s not what the reactionaries are saying at all.
crime has risen by a factor of ten over the past century
Indeed, [citation fucking needed]
The irony of crediting Moldbug with a potent explanation for bad poetry is rather amusing. It’s almost a shame that Scott here cops out with a “The margins are too small for my proof”, although maybe it is secret mercy.
I looked into this one a while back—I’m pretty sure it’s the explanation Scott launders in “Whither Tartaria?”. Moldbug (2007):
And what has entirely disappeared, as the quotes above should make quite clear, is any sense of a mutually critical aristocratic elite…
There is not even a concept of what it would mean to “succeed” outside this system. There is simply no independent pool of taste.
Alexander (2021):
Best-case scenario, you want a field that talks to itself enough that you get status for impressing other experts with your expertise, not for impressing the public with demagoguery.
But if you talk to yourself too much, you risk becoming completely self-referential, falling into loops of weird internal status-signaling.
Honestly, this kind of involution is already thoroughly discussed within a lot of creative fields (which Alexander admits he hasn’t read, so this is likely still downstream of Moldbug). It’s just that when a poet says something like this, they usually aren’t attributing it to a gigantic 75-year-old New Deal octopus. (Alexander himself leaves it to his commenters to blame socialism.)
Don’t forget the:
- Vile dose of racist ranting.
- Simultanously complaining about the elite, but then saying it’s only because it’s been watered down by the plebs.
- Vile understanding of “poetry” as status marker.
- Not going back further in time than 19th century, and extremely suspiciously marking the “height” of peotry between 1920a to mid-1960s, not at all coinciding with the civil rights act.
Thank you for reminding me how vile Moldbug is ? ^^
I really should do that deep dive into Moldbug/Yarvin’s earlier garbage soon. last time I brought urbit up on r/SneerClub, some weird fucker stumbled upon the thread 5 days later (by searching for urbit — all of their other posts were either urbit related or on r/SSC) and tried to debate me on “how do you know it’s fascist”
like fuck I don’t know, maybe it’s the user and developer base being just all fascists? the only folks I can prove are using it are that one cryptocurrency nazi suicide cult that got exposed a few months ago
i looked into this and put it into the Neoreactionary Movement article on RationalWiki. Current version of the paragraph:
Moldbug’s early “The magic of symmetric sovereignty” (19 May 2007)[44] is short, comprehensible, and gets its point across in 1,666 words, rather than barely getting started in that much space. Its thesis is that totalitarian sovereignty would work well if it were unassailably secure. His arguments are made of handwaves and holes, but the interesting bit is the libertarian-style thinking, in which all the hard bits of politics and why humans are complicated are handwaved away because he wants so much for his reasoning to reach his desired conclusion. If something looks like an insufficiently-explained logical leap, don’t assume he’ll get around to properly explaining himself later. Much as per Yudkowsky’s style on Overcoming Bias and LessWrong, the apparent references lead to references leading to references, and hardly ever resolve to clear and well-supported substantiation.
…
After early-period commenters kept calling out his ridiculous misuse of basic terms and glaring factual errors, Moldbug adopted his better-known style, in which he spends a few thousand words redefining English to make his striking theses (e.g., “America is a communist country”[46]) less transparently ludicrous.
oh and anyone making that claim about urbit, fucking lol
100%! I was trying to work out how to post it here, but of course the answer is Just Post
Scott is incredibly lucky that Topher is actually as nice a person as Scott pretends to be
my post:
just reposting the 2014 leaked email about how Scott Alexander (Scott Siskind) had specifically intended Slate Star Codex to promote neoreaction and race science
not a single person denied the email, they were just outraged at the leaker for breaking confidence
Yudkowsky even declared that they should be shunned, lol
this email is surprisingly little spoken of, I keep finding SSC/ACX readers who’ve never heard of it. for once the rationalists had the good sense not to fuss about it
i keep pointing centrists at this email and they can’t reconcile the SSC article they liked with the writer of SSC explicitly saying he’s trying to make them more racist
if you’re wondering why techbros are all neoreactionaries these days, it’s because they received scott’s message fidelitously. SSC is a major vector of techfash radicalisation.
reasons to keep the fuckin receipts
text of scott email: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/lm36nk/old_scott_siskind_emails_which_link_him_to_the/gntraiv/
topher brennan tweets when posting the email: https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/643403673004851200/reddragdiva-topher-brennan-ive-decided-to-sayalthough I feel no particular urge to steelman young earth creationism, it is actually pretty useful to read some of their stuff. You never realize how LITTLE you know about evolution until you read some Behe and are like "I know that can’t be correct…but why not?
I would agree that Scott knew very little about evolution. I would in fact go further and suggest that he still knows very little about evolution.
(Incidentally, Behe isn’t a young-Earth creationist. He’s the kind who says that the Earth is old, but some things can’t have evolved because shut up that’s why.)
Yeah, Behe’s one of the leading lights (dimmest bulbs?) of the so-called “Intelligent Design” movement: a molecular biologist who knows just enough molecular biology to construct strawmen arguments about evolution. Siskind being impressed by him tells me everything I need to know about Siskind’s susceptibility to truly stupid ideas.
Transcription of Yud’s running interference:
I feel like it should have been obvious to anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside and has no ethics and will hurt you if you trust them and will break rules to do so, but in case it wasn’t obvious consider the point made explicitly. (Subtext: Topher Brennan. Do not provide any link in comments to Topher’s publication of private emails, explicitly marked as private, from Scott Alexander.)
(Let not this post be construed as casting aspersions on any of the many, many people who’ve had honest disagreements with me or us, including loud or heated or long ones, that they conducted by debates about ideas rather than insinuations about people.)
Yuddy, bubby, that’s not what “subtext” means.
i know writers who use subtext
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