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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'v

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. edit: wording

Cowen 11y ago
> 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.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  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.
  - Cowen 11y ago
    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.
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      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.
      - Cowen 11y ago
        > it's very human and natural for people to deliberately misunderstand things so they can work themselves into a rage over things. Kind of like what you're doing right now?
    - Sacho 11y ago
      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.
      - Cowen 11y ago
        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.
deleted 11y ago
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mindslight 11y ago
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.

Cowen 11y ago

> 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.

oldmanjay 11y ago
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.
- Cowen 11y ago
  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.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    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.
    - Cowen 11y ago
      > it's very human and natural for people to deliberately misunderstand things so they can work themselves into a rage over things. Kind of like what you're doing right now?
  - Sacho 11y ago
    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.
    - Cowen 11y ago
      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.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mindslight 11y ago

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.