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> has posted racist and bigoted statements on his blog Still need a citation on this. LambdaConf's own review found this: He is quoted by white supremacis

by Mizza 11y ago

> has posted racist and bigoted statements on his blog Still need a citation on this. LambdaConf's own review found this: He is quoted by white supremacists but denies being one; He has never written any hate speech or resorted to insulting or vulgar language (except as a literary device); He is not pro-slavery in the historical sense, but believes individuals have a right to voluntarily sell themselves into slavery; He believes that democracy is a failure (incompatible with “freedom”), and that white male software engineers are most qualified to run “government”. http://amar47shah.github.io/pages/lambdaconf-yarvin-call-for-feedback.html http://amar47shah.github.io/pages/lambdaconf-yarvin-call-for... Since then, it's just been a "me too" pile on, which is apparently the new par for the course.

codygman 11y ago
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-carlyle-matters.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-car... Googling that blog for slave, race, etc gets you more.
- Mizza 11y ago
  I'm not reading that whole thing. Got a choice sample? The only thing I can find is "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." He's saying that, to colonists, Africans made better slaves, and that a part of that, though not all of that, could be explained by genetic differences. He's certainly not saying "we should enslave Africans", or even "Africans make better slaves". Without touching the statement itself, I don't see how that statement means that he's a white supremacist or a bigot. (Also, this was written in 2009.) [To me this seems like another witch hunt for smug social points as if it wasn't, somebody would have pointed out the actual problems of the statement, or that truth of modern white/western supremacy is that we all benefit from it, as many Africans are still essentially enslaved. What any of this has to do with speaking at a tech conference is beyond me.]
  - ewofwkweoifd 11y ago
    My understanding is as follows. The root problem is that merely identifying races on a genetic basis is racist. If you believe that the race of a human refers to anything more than a social / ethnic / cultural construct, you are a racist. This seems like a fairly neutral belief. However it's wrong scientifically by definition. In population biology, races are formed when there is absolute geographical isolation of a population. Without isolation, you get clustering of alleles but you don't get distinct races. Over time, the clustering of alleles diminishes, much like gas dissipating into a room. If you're really struggling with this, just ask which race does the child of a man from race A and a woman from race B belong to? And when that child reproduces with more people from either race A or race B, what race do they belong to? And then ask how long has there has been contact between human populations? Do we know if there was ever a time that human populations were truly isolated? End result is that biologists agree there is only one human species, Homo sapiens, and one human race (a.k.a. subspecies), Homo sapiens sapiens. The page on Wikipedia about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism > Scientific racism is [...] the practice of classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races. So what happens here is that first Moldbug puts forth the false premise that there are genetic / biological races. Then he says stuff like black people have a lower IQ, but he's not discriminating, rather it's the belief that having a higher IQ is better that's discriminatory. (This was in the recent blog post about how he's not a racist.) Not only is this a really slippery position, but everyone gets so caught up in his arguments built on the false premise of the existence of races that it actually starts to implicitly build support for the false premise. I personally believe that getting people to accept this premise is the point of the trolling.
    - brighteyes 11y ago
      But he doesn't say there are biological races. All he says in that quote is that biology is the simplest explanation for different outcomes of slavery for different groups of humans. (Of course, he's wrong, there are other equally simple explanations, like "culture".) In any case, it's not clear if he is implying that the simplest explanation is even true. He changes the subject in the next sentence after it: this isn't an article about genetics. One interpretation is that, yes, he's a racist and he sees no reason to explain further since he sees his racism as self-evident. Another is that he doesn't care about the cause, and just mentions a simple explanation in order to be able to move on to what he actually wants to talk about. I don't know which of those (or something else) is true. It's an offhand sentence in a long article, many interpretations are possible.

by Mizza 11y ago

codygman 11y ago

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-carlyle-matters.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-car... Googling that blog for slave, race, etc gets you more.

Mizza 11y ago
I'm not reading that whole thing. Got a choice sample? The only thing I can find is "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." He's saying that, to colonists, Africans made better slaves, and that a part of that, though not all of that, could be explained by genetic differences. He's certainly not saying "we should enslave Africans", or even "Africans make better slaves". Without touching the statement itself, I don't see how that statement means that he's a white supremacist or a bigot. (Also, this was written in 2009.) [To me this seems like another witch hunt for smug social points as if it wasn't, somebody would have pointed out the actual problems of the statement, or that truth of modern white/western supremacy is that we all benefit from it, as many Africans are still essentially enslaved. What any of this has to do with speaking at a tech conference is beyond me.]
- ewofwkweoifd 11y ago
  My understanding is as follows. The root problem is that merely identifying races on a genetic basis is racist. If you believe that the race of a human refers to anything more than a social / ethnic / cultural construct, you are a racist. This seems like a fairly neutral belief. However it's wrong scientifically by definition. In population biology, races are formed when there is absolute geographical isolation of a population. Without isolation, you get clustering of alleles but you don't get distinct races. Over time, the clustering of alleles diminishes, much like gas dissipating into a room. If you're really struggling with this, just ask which race does the child of a man from race A and a woman from race B belong to? And when that child reproduces with more people from either race A or race B, what race do they belong to? And then ask how long has there has been contact between human populations? Do we know if there was ever a time that human populations were truly isolated? End result is that biologists agree there is only one human species, Homo sapiens, and one human race (a.k.a. subspecies), Homo sapiens sapiens. The page on Wikipedia about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism > Scientific racism is [...] the practice of classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races. So what happens here is that first Moldbug puts forth the false premise that there are genetic / biological races. Then he says stuff like black people have a lower IQ, but he's not discriminating, rather it's the belief that having a higher IQ is better that's discriminatory. (This was in the recent blog post about how he's not a racist.) Not only is this a really slippery position, but everyone gets so caught up in his arguments built on the false premise of the existence of races that it actually starts to implicitly build support for the false premise. I personally believe that getting people to accept this premise is the point of the trolling.
  - brighteyes 11y ago
    But he doesn't say there are biological races. All he says in that quote is that biology is the simplest explanation for different outcomes of slavery for different groups of humans. (Of course, he's wrong, there are other equally simple explanations, like "culture".) In any case, it's not clear if he is implying that the simplest explanation is even true. He changes the subject in the next sentence after it: this isn't an article about genetics. One interpretation is that, yes, he's a racist and he sees no reason to explain further since he sees his racism as self-evident. Another is that he doesn't care about the cause, and just mentions a simple explanation in order to be able to move on to what he actually wants to talk about. I don't know which of those (or something else) is true. It's an offhand sentence in a long article, many interpretations are possible.