10 ms·

Could you provide citations for those posts? This is the first I have heard of either Curtis or Moldbug, and I'm having trouble seeing the connection you're dra

Could you provide citations for those posts? This is the first I have heard of either Curtis or Moldbug, and I'm having trouble seeing the connection you're drawing. However, it seems to be the consensus. [edit: I see that there are secondary sources — but I'm curious about a primary source. Shouldn't that be the most important?]

obstinate 11y ago
Google is helpful here. There are plenty of articles that have been written about him (speaking as someone else who hadn't heard of him until today). This is the one I'm reading right now: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/ http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/
- leereeves 11y ago
  I'd never heard of him either. Now we have. If the goal of banning him from the conference was to suppress his ideas, his opponents remind me of George Bush standing beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    The goal of banning him is probably not to "suppress his ideas". I'd imagine the goal is something more like "not allowing the experience of conference attendees to be made a little less pleasant in the service of what is a quirky and maybe interesting but probably pretty marginal technical talk".
    - leereeves 11y ago
      Allowing some to have a more pleasant experience by excluding others... Once upon a time, liberals argued against that.
      - tptacek 11y ago
        I don't think you really believe, were the shoe on the other foot and you were the one organizing Strange Loop, that there's nobody you'd consider excluding.
        leereeves 11y ago
        I've never refused to work with anyone because of their political beliefs.
        cwyers 11y ago
        Calling support for slavery a "political belief" is rather tame at best and outright misleading at worst.
        tptacek 11y ago
        I haven't read a Moldbug post that actually supported slavery.
        cwyers 11y ago
        In that Carlyle essay, he says these, among other things: "Once we get this far, we are almost all the way to Carlyle on slavery. We have not agreed that a man can be born a slave, but we agree that he can sell himself into slavery. That is: he can sign a contract with a master in which the slave agrees unconditionally to obey and work for the master, and the master agrees unconditionally to protect and support the slave. Moreover, this contract need not be a mere expression of sentiment. It can and should be enforced by the State, just as a loan is. If the slave changes his mind and runs away, the State will capture and return him, billing the master for the expense. Or at least, these are reasonable terms under which two parties might agree on the permanent relationship of master and slave." "A person makes a good slave if he is loyal, patient, and not exceptionally bright or stubborn. But even great intelligence is not necessarily a bar to a good experience in slavery, as the experience of many Greek slave philosophers, such as Epictetus, shows. A slave must carry the unique burden of personal dependency and obedience, which we are all used to expressing only toward impersonal government agencies." "Of course, like gay marriage (or ordinary marriage), slavery is not without its abuses. When we think of the word 'slavery,' we think of these abuses. Thus, by defining the word as intrinsically abusive, like marriages in which one party beats the other, we can conveniently define away all the instances of slavery (or, for that matter, marriage) in which the relationship is functional." I mean, if those are not actually supporting slavery, it seems to be only because he takes care to voice a lot of pro-slavery rhetoric without actually crossing that line.
    - gladius17 11y ago
      "The goal of banning him is probably not to "suppress his ideas"" Wrong, moron. That is exactly what the goal is. It is of course not something that a moron like you would ever admit to....because it sounds bad. But we can argue and argue and eventually it will come out. And then you'll make some other excuse why it's still OK. Because you're a hypocritical piece of shit asshole.
    - anon_adderlan 11y ago
      Um, as far as I understand, he wasn't banned from attending StrangeLoop, just that he had his talk pulled. Given that, could we please either clarify this with Alex, or stop claiming this as it just further distorts the truth and politically weaponizes this situation even further?
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  Why read an article _about_ him, as opposed to reading what he actually said? Are you concerned about contracting wrongthink?
  - obstinate 11y ago
    I do not know the man's writings. There are many links on that page to things he wrote. So this is the most informative link I am likely to be able to provide. As for why not read his writings: why not read the writing of the timecube guy, or those of reactionary christian authors? Because I try not to waste my time on idiotic polemic.
    - tjradcliffe 11y ago
      If you keep firmly in mind that he's a complete crank, his iconoclasm can be quite entertaining in short intervals (maybe one article a year.)
  - gwern 11y ago
    Probably because his blog posts are like millions of words of meandering stream of thought and links to public domain books and you would have to spend the next few months of your free time to read most of his posts? Occasionally funny and insightful, but concise and well-written they are not, burying the real content under mountains of fluff.
    - dropit_sphere 11y ago
      You're gwern, so if you said you'd read enough to say you understand his writing, I'd believe you. But someone reading the Baffler article will not have the same understanding you do---and worse, they'll think they do.
lukev 11y ago
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.fr/2009/07/why-carlyle-matters.html?m=1 http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.fr/2009/07/why-carl... Relevant obnoxious quote, in a sea of drivel: In all these relationships, the structure of obligation is the same. The subject, serf, or slave is obliged to obey the government, lord, or master, and work for the benefit of same. In return, the government, lord or master must care for and guide the subject, serf, or slave. We see these same relationship parameters emerging whether the relationship of domination originates as a hereditary obligation, or as a voluntary obligation, or in a state outside law such as the state of the newly captured prisoner (the traditional origin of slave status in most eras). This is a pretty good clue that this structure is one to which humans are biologically adapted. 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.
- k_brother 11y ago
  Right, I think I saw this one pulled elsewhere. It's still not clear to me that the author holds that view, or that he's just putting forth a weak analysis. Considering the response, I thought there would be something explicitly aggressive.
- emjr 11y ago
  "Natives did not make good slaves, and so Africans were imported." That alone is so innocuous as to appear in elementary school textbooks. Is this really what the whole row is about?
  - cactusface 11y ago
    No, it's because he said it was due to genetic differences between population groups. This makes him a "true" racist in that he believe there are different races, or sub-species, of homo sapiens (sapiens). There is a scientific consensus that this is not the case, because races only exist if population groups are completely isolated, which humans never have been. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
hibikir 11y ago
It's pretty difficult. Racism, like other ideas that at some point were not considered unacceptable in public, is nowadays covered in what we could call Hermetic writing: In other words, instead of saying what they really want to say, a racist says things that imply they are OK with racism. A way that you can find all over his writings is talk about how people and businesses should be free to refuse dealing with people for any reason whatsoever. It's not quite saying 'I do not like brown people', but instead 'In my ideal society, we are free to discriminate against brown people, or people that don't share my religion'. It's the same kind of rhetoric you'll find in traditional racist groups. That's enough for many people to call that rhetoric racist, but I see how you might not agree. What I find most amusing is that in that libertarian utopia where people can discriminate at will, you can discriminate people because of their political views, or because you think it'd make some people feel less welcome, and that's exactly what happened here. Having people that defend the right to discriminate at will complain due to discrimination is interesting to say the least. Either way, I don't think this is an economic decision though. Last year, StrangeLoop ran out of tickets in a few hours. This year, I know they had more companies wanting to sponsor the conference at than they had slots! So Alex could have reacted either way to this controversy, and he'd have done fine economically. This just seems like very predictable behavior given their pro-diversity direction, taken after a few years ago, they had so few women that they had turned all the female restrooms in the opera house into male restrooms, leaving just a single 'family room' in the entire venue for women. If anything surprises me, is that they didn't vet their speakers before accepting submissions. Rejecting conference talks because of who the person is happens all the time. What turned this into a contraversy is that they rescinded the invitation after making the list public. I would be surprised if, for next year, they don't add an extra step to their process, to try to catch something like this in advance.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- tptacek 11y ago
  Edit: It seems to me like Yarvin is pretty overt about the racial stuff. His isn't a Rand Paul-ian "we don't need the Civil Rights Act, let the market take care of it" posture, but rather one that leans heavily on the just-world hypothesis to draw conclusions about the inferiority of Africans.

obstinate 11y ago

Google is helpful here. There are plenty of articles that have been written about him (speaking as someone else who hadn't heard of him until today). This is the one I'm reading right now: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/ http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/

leereeves 11y ago
I'd never heard of him either. Now we have. If the goal of banning him from the conference was to suppress his ideas, his opponents remind me of George Bush standing beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner.
- tptacek 11y ago
  The goal of banning him is probably not to "suppress his ideas". I'd imagine the goal is something more like "not allowing the experience of conference attendees to be made a little less pleasant in the service of what is a quirky and maybe interesting but probably pretty marginal technical talk".
  - leereeves 11y ago
    Allowing some to have a more pleasant experience by excluding others... Once upon a time, liberals argued against that.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      I don't think you really believe, were the shoe on the other foot and you were the one organizing Strange Loop, that there's nobody you'd consider excluding.
      - leereeves 11y ago
        I've never refused to work with anyone because of their political beliefs.
        cwyers 11y ago
        Calling support for slavery a "political belief" is rather tame at best and outright misleading at worst.
        tptacek 11y ago
        I haven't read a Moldbug post that actually supported slavery.
        cwyers 11y ago
        In that Carlyle essay, he says these, among other things: "Once we get this far, we are almost all the way to Carlyle on slavery. We have not agreed that a man can be born a slave, but we agree that he can sell himself into slavery. That is: he can sign a contract with a master in which the slave agrees unconditionally to obey and work for the master, and the master agrees unconditionally to protect and support the slave. Moreover, this contract need not be a mere expression of sentiment. It can and should be enforced by the State, just as a loan is. If the slave changes his mind and runs away, the State will capture and return him, billing the master for the expense. Or at least, these are reasonable terms under which two parties might agree on the permanent relationship of master and slave." "A person makes a good slave if he is loyal, patient, and not exceptionally bright or stubborn. But even great intelligence is not necessarily a bar to a good experience in slavery, as the experience of many Greek slave philosophers, such as Epictetus, shows. A slave must carry the unique burden of personal dependency and obedience, which we are all used to expressing only toward impersonal government agencies." "Of course, like gay marriage (or ordinary marriage), slavery is not without its abuses. When we think of the word 'slavery,' we think of these abuses. Thus, by defining the word as intrinsically abusive, like marriages in which one party beats the other, we can conveniently define away all the instances of slavery (or, for that matter, marriage) in which the relationship is functional." I mean, if those are not actually supporting slavery, it seems to be only because he takes care to voice a lot of pro-slavery rhetoric without actually crossing that line.
  - gladius17 11y ago
    "The goal of banning him is probably not to "suppress his ideas"" Wrong, moron. That is exactly what the goal is. It is of course not something that a moron like you would ever admit to....because it sounds bad. But we can argue and argue and eventually it will come out. And then you'll make some other excuse why it's still OK. Because you're a hypocritical piece of shit asshole.
  - anon_adderlan 11y ago
    Um, as far as I understand, he wasn't banned from attending StrangeLoop, just that he had his talk pulled. Given that, could we please either clarify this with Alex, or stop claiming this as it just further distorts the truth and politically weaponizes this situation even further?
13thLetter 11y ago
Why read an article _about_ him, as opposed to reading what he actually said? Are you concerned about contracting wrongthink?
- obstinate 11y ago
  I do not know the man's writings. There are many links on that page to things he wrote. So this is the most informative link I am likely to be able to provide. As for why not read his writings: why not read the writing of the timecube guy, or those of reactionary christian authors? Because I try not to waste my time on idiotic polemic.
  - tjradcliffe 11y ago
    If you keep firmly in mind that he's a complete crank, his iconoclasm can be quite entertaining in short intervals (maybe one article a year.)
- gwern 11y ago
  Probably because his blog posts are like millions of words of meandering stream of thought and links to public domain books and you would have to spend the next few months of your free time to read most of his posts? Occasionally funny and insightful, but concise and well-written they are not, burying the real content under mountains of fluff.
  - dropit_sphere 11y ago
    You're gwern, so if you said you'd read enough to say you understand his writing, I'd believe you. But someone reading the Baffler article will not have the same understanding you do---and worse, they'll think they do.

lukev 11y ago

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.fr/2009/07/why-carlyle-matters.html?m=1 http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.fr/2009/07/why-carl... Relevant obnoxious quote, in a sea of drivel: In all these relationships, the structure of obligation is the same. The subject, serf, or slave is obliged to obey the government, lord, or master, and work for the benefit of same. In return, the government, lord or master must care for and guide the subject, serf, or slave. We see these same relationship parameters emerging whether the relationship of domination originates as a hereditary obligation, or as a voluntary obligation, or in a state outside law such as the state of the newly captured prisoner (the traditional origin of slave status in most eras). This is a pretty good clue that this structure is one to which humans are biologically adapted. 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.

k_brother 11y ago
Right, I think I saw this one pulled elsewhere. It's still not clear to me that the author holds that view, or that he's just putting forth a weak analysis. Considering the response, I thought there would be something explicitly aggressive.
emjr 11y ago
"Natives did not make good slaves, and so Africans were imported." That alone is so innocuous as to appear in elementary school textbooks. Is this really what the whole row is about?
- cactusface 11y ago
  No, it's because he said it was due to genetic differences between population groups. This makes him a "true" racist in that he believe there are different races, or sub-species, of homo sapiens (sapiens). There is a scientific consensus that this is not the case, because races only exist if population groups are completely isolated, which humans never have been. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

hibikir 11y ago

It's pretty difficult. Racism, like other ideas that at some point were not considered unacceptable in public, is nowadays covered in what we could call Hermetic writing: In other words, instead of saying what they really want to say, a racist says things that imply they are OK with racism. A way that you can find all over his writings is talk about how people and businesses should be free to refuse dealing with people for any reason whatsoever. It's not quite saying 'I do not like brown people', but instead 'In my ideal society, we are free to discriminate against brown people, or people that don't share my religion'. It's the same kind of rhetoric you'll find in traditional racist groups. That's enough for many people to call that rhetoric racist, but I see how you might not agree. What I find most amusing is that in that libertarian utopia where people can discriminate at will, you can discriminate people because of their political views, or because you think it'd make some people feel less welcome, and that's exactly what happened here. Having people that defend the right to discriminate at will complain due to discrimination is interesting to say the least. Either way, I don't think this is an economic decision though. Last year, StrangeLoop ran out of tickets in a few hours. This year, I know they had more companies wanting to sponsor the conference at than they had slots! So Alex could have reacted either way to this controversy, and he'd have done fine economically. This just seems like very predictable behavior given their pro-diversity direction, taken after a few years ago, they had so few women that they had turned all the female restrooms in the opera house into male restrooms, leaving just a single 'family room' in the entire venue for women. If anything surprises me, is that they didn't vet their speakers before accepting submissions. Rejecting conference talks because of who the person is happens all the time. What turned this into a contraversy is that they rescinded the invitation after making the list public. I would be surprised if, for next year, they don't add an extra step to their process, to try to catch something like this in advance.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 11y ago
Edit: It seems to me like Yarvin is pretty overt about the racial stuff. His isn't a Rand Paul-ian "we don't need the Civil Rights Act, let the market take care of it" posture, but rather one that leans heavily on the just-world hypothesis to draw conclusions about the inferiority of Africans.