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by tapitsbo » Sat Nov 21, 2015 2:36 am
by Wombaticus Rex » Sat Nov 21, 2015 12:24 pm
by slomo » Sat Nov 21, 2015 7:00 pm
tapitsbo » 20 Nov 2015 22:36 wrote:given how the post-Occupy left seems to be spurring a lot of reaction these days towards the right, maybe this is a good place to run the name Justine Tunney by this board
I smell puppetry and manipulation in and around all of the political trends in different directions during the past few years. Or are we supposed to believe that was totally possible in the sixties but just wouldn't happen now?
by tapitsbo » Mon Nov 23, 2015 7:12 am
by General Patton » Tue Dec 15, 2015 5:57 pm
http://annsterzinger.com/rachel-haywire ... zler-know/
Lest I wind up in jail for trying not to wind up in jail…
I have no evidence that Rachel Haywire actually misused any funds from the Trigger Warning Indiegogo campaign. For all I know she has a perfectly lovely and organized accounting ledger which she just never let me see because… er, because…
Yeah, that’s where my mind kept getting stuck. She told me about all the crazy expenses she had doled out for, but none of it made much sense, and a ledger was never proffered.
Let me repeat: I never saw proof of what happened with the finances.
There were all kinds of frightening indications that she might have spent all the money on God knows what: her lame excuses for stalling in paying me for my writing and labor; her insistence that I take half the money now and get the other half after continuing to work for her for an indefinite length of time; her admission during our last Skype call that she was pretty much broke; her suggestion that she and I take any extra “mad money” and go on a “sexcation” to see some guy she was interested in, presumably with me as winggirl.
Therefore, I moved to expose her not because I was certain she had committed any crime, but because there were enough indications to make me afraid she might have. And considering her past behavior toward myself and others, I had reason to suspect she would try to pin the blame on me should the shit hit the fan.
The bottom line: I wanted to make public the fact that I never saw the money, and I was never allowed to touch the money or see any financial records; for all I know Rachel has virtuously put it in a trust fund for the magazine or invested it in gold bonds for the future. So for your sake and mine, avoid all slander, libel, etc.
http://mattforney.com/rachel-haywire-fa ... terzinger/
Four months after her edgelord site Trigger Warning was crushed under the weight of her unwarranted self-importance, Haywire is back. Specifically, she’s been running around messaging various individuals falsely accusing me of raping Ann Sterzinger—my friend, neighbor and podcast co-host—with the intent of getting me blackballed out of the alternative right.
by tapitsbo » Tue Dec 15, 2015 6:03 pm
by General Patton » Tue Dec 15, 2015 6:43 pm
by Wombaticus Rex » Wed Dec 16, 2015 2:08 pm
tapitsbo » Mon Nov 23, 2015 6:12 am wrote:
Somebody like Land, however good, bad, boring, or interesting he is, seems at least to be very aware of this. Is his current stuff still part of neoreaction?
The basic tenets of Heroic Reaction:
— Moldbug is over-rated.
— Capitalism needs to be brought under control.
— The errors of fascism are dwarfed by those of libertarianism.
— White racial community is the core.
— ‘Atomization’ is a serious problem.
— Answers are already easily available, so over-thinking is unhelpful, and even seriously pathological.
Unlike #NRx, #HRx is primarily a political movement. Its theoretical appetite is modest, since it has faith that everything it truly needs can be retrieved — more-or-less straightforwardly — from the folkish past.
Among the many myriads confusedly aligned with ‘Neoreaction’, a number have already expressed an explicit interest in abandoning this odd cult for a bolder, brasher, more politically dynamic successor, stripped of techno-commercial Vulcanism, race-treachery, and intellectual circumlocution. Far more would join the exodus (from #NRx) if energetically led. Others would pour in from elsewhere. All #HRx still requires is a commander. Then it could be huge.
From the moment #HRx is born, the scale of (apparent) #NRx would shrink dramatically. That is an outcome, I suspect, that could be endured among the remnant with serene stoicism.
by Wombaticus Rex » Wed Dec 16, 2015 2:22 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Wed Dec 16, 2015 1:08 pm wrote:First off, NRx has never been, nor has it ever aspired to be outside of comment sections, a "movement" in any sense. I don't think I'd have any interest if it was. NRx is definitely more of a conversation.
We are building a new system of government. American-led western civilization is in structural decline and cannot be fixed within the liberal demobureaucratic paradigm. We will buy out the key stakeholders with shares on our new system, and replace the whole thing. This sounds a bit audacious, but bear with us:
Our new system is a synthesis of modern business practice and historically successful political wisdom: The best we really can do about government is to find the most competent people we can, and put them absolutely in charge. If they care about us, that's great, but even a totally selfish government wants to cultivate its people so that they pay better taxes, as long as it is secure and competent enough to think long term. It is hard to make such non-utopian truths palatable, but this is the most reliable path to a flourishing civilization.
We don't know enough to get all the details right yet, and the idea is too speculative for huge funding, so we can't pull this off with a monolithic all-or-nothing moon shot strategy like Apollo. We will have to use an incrementally developed and incrementally profitable strategy like SpaceX: To build worthiness, we are doing research and working out the details of the key social technologies on a series of increasingly ambitious civilization-building projects. Eventually we will be able to build city states and fix our whole civilization.
In short, the procedure is this:
Become Worthy. Test and prove our ideas on smaller projects. Build a great organization that is at least 10x better than the current system.
Accept Power. Offer a better deal to stakeholders. Amnesty and stake in the prosperity of the new system in exchange for cooperation.
Rule. Responsible government delivers prosperity for everyone involved.
We will do everything peacefully, legally, and ethically, and try not to rock the boat, but the failing ideological apparatus will lash out at us anyways. Such is the nature of the job. Despite the difficultly, we can't just sit and watch our civilization decay; we have to do something. Besides, if we succeed, we can look forward to glory, flourishing civilization, and a trillion dollar company.
by tapitsbo » Wed Dec 16, 2015 2:31 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Wed Dec 16, 2015 2:22 pm wrote:Wombaticus Rex » Wed Dec 16, 2015 1:08 pm wrote:First off, NRx has never been, nor has it ever aspired to be outside of comment sections, a "movement" in any sense. I don't think I'd have any interest if it was. NRx is definitely more of a conversation.
...a conversation about intractable problems. Socialists know they've got the solutions, fuck if they work or not.
One of the odder turns NRx took this year was the formation of sublimely self-important Hestia Society, an attempt to create a Neoreactionary Canon and enforce orthodoxy, rather than continuing the open tent policy. The results are nothing short of adorable:We are building a new system of government. American-led western civilization is in structural decline and cannot be fixed within the liberal demobureaucratic paradigm. We will buy out the key stakeholders with shares on our new system, and replace the whole thing. This sounds a bit audacious, but bear with us:
Our new system is a synthesis of modern business practice and historically successful political wisdom: The best we really can do about government is to find the most competent people we can, and put them absolutely in charge. If they care about us, that's great, but even a totally selfish government wants to cultivate its people so that they pay better taxes, as long as it is secure and competent enough to think long term. It is hard to make such non-utopian truths palatable, but this is the most reliable path to a flourishing civilization.
We don't know enough to get all the details right yet, and the idea is too speculative for huge funding, so we can't pull this off with a monolithic all-or-nothing moon shot strategy like Apollo. We will have to use an incrementally developed and incrementally profitable strategy like SpaceX: To build worthiness, we are doing research and working out the details of the key social technologies on a series of increasingly ambitious civilization-building projects. Eventually we will be able to build city states and fix our whole civilization.
In short, the procedure is this:
Become Worthy. Test and prove our ideas on smaller projects. Build a great organization that is at least 10x better than the current system.
Accept Power. Offer a better deal to stakeholders. Amnesty and stake in the prosperity of the new system in exchange for cooperation.
Rule. Responsible government delivers prosperity for everyone involved.
We will do everything peacefully, legally, and ethically, and try not to rock the boat, but the failing ideological apparatus will lash out at us anyways. Such is the nature of the job. Despite the difficultly, we can't just sit and watch our civilization decay; we have to do something. Besides, if we succeed, we can look forward to glory, flourishing civilization, and a trillion dollar company.
The notion that power is fungible fascinates me. I do not think, despite their pretensions of cold, unflinching objectivity, they're anywhere close to cold enough.
Anyways, point being: my interest in neo-reaction isn't the Silicon Valley Monarchism LARP shit, but the conversation about how & why human politics is malfunctioning, exiting culture wars rather than "winning" them, and the inquiry into what really sustains civilization.
Interesting that those participants with the most background context -- knowlege of history, real life experience with complex problems -- exude the least certainty.
by Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jan 24, 2016 1:51 pm
What the hell happened to neoreaction?
Read a Moldbug post from any part of his blogging career, then read anything produced by neoreaction and you will have to conclude that neoreaction is a concerted effort to propagate concepts and ideas that either have zero connection to anything he wrote, or are in utter total opposition to him. It’s not hard to find once you notice.
The key figure in this process is Land and his Xenosystems blog, the connection of the likes of Curt Doolitle are just as insane as Land’s but others have gone down this route seemingly unaware of what they are doing.
One of the best ways to see this is to start with four posts by Moldbug which make certain points very clear. Two posts are from 2007, the third is from 2009, and the fourth is from 2010.
Beginning in chronological order, we have the post A reservationist epistemology, which as advertised by the title, outlines his epistemological thinking which is pretty important with regard to the political theory he espouses. Of central importance to this position is this quote on reason. Reason, he declares is:
“irreducible and untranscendable. Reason is no more and no less than common sense. It is not possible to construct a useful definition of common sense, nor is it possible to construct a system of thought that improves on common sense. Any system that purports to do so is either (a) bogus, or (b) justifiable via common sense, and thus a special case of it.”
This epistemological underpinning is pretty much key for the whole of UR, and its connection with the realisation that someone with reason needs to be in charge should not need spelling out. This is followed by a decrying of “algorithmists, who believe they have some universal algorithm which is a drop-in replacement for any and all cogitation.”
This is an area I have covered in some depth before in this post, so will not go into further analysis here, but I will just repeat my astonishment that materialist liberals blockchain as governance, hyper liberal empiricism anarchists and other such rejecters of human reason led governance in favour of force or system X, Y and Z have latched onto a school of thought purportedly inspired from UR. The mind boggles. To rub this in even further, take this post from 2010 with the following quote
“Why, then, is this fallacy so conventional? In the fallacy of “rule by law,” and the fallacy of “rule by science,” we see a common thread: the fallacy of “rule by formula,” in which it is pretended that an government can be conducted by some mechanical process, in which the human character of the governors is irrelevant.”
Or this from here:
“The democrat, who is typically also an aristocrat, thinks or allows himself to think that, by dethroning the king and transferring the king’s powers to an assembly, he is destroying the sovereign imperium. But he is not; he is only dispersing it.
If some alliance of democrats so much as renders the king subject to the rule of law, they are transferring the king’s judicial powers not to no one, but to a concrete human body – a judiciary. They have fragmented the imperium and produced the constitutional solecism of imperium in imperio. Their monarchy is certainly doomed, at least in any substantive sense. And thus men laid, centuries ago, the foundation for all our feral subway yoofs. Imperium fragments irreversibly and entropically – monarchy descending to oligarchy, oligarchy to aristocracy, aristocracy to democracy, democracy to mere anarchy”
And to really drive this home, how about this from a post about patchwork, the supposed influence for exit based hyper capitalism:
“In reality, no sovereign can be subject to law. This is a political perpetual motion machine. Law is not law unless it is judged and enforced. And by whom? For example, if you think a supreme court with judicial review can make government subject to law, you are obviously unfamiliar with the sordid history of American constitutional jurisprudence. All your design has achieved is to make your supreme court sovereign. Indeed if the court had only one justice, a proper title for that justice would be “King.” Sorry, kid, you haven’t violated the conservation of anything.”
Just google “imperium in imperio” and “Unqualified Reservations” to keep digging for yourself.
The next post that supplies a window into how utterly feral neoreaction has become is this post from 2007 titled UR’s advice for President Musharraf which can be compared to the A Letter To France published at Social Matter. Both posts are very much in line with each other, the reasoning, the political theory and the concepts are in lockstep – there is no disconnect between them. Then look at the response the “Letter to France” generated in the comments sections which was furthered in the comments here. We in effect go from neoreaction claiming to be derived from someone who wrote this:
“Here is how to abolish politics: involuntarily retire all Pakistani judges, journalists and editors, teachers and professors, NGO employees, and politicians. Pardon them fully and unconditionally for any crimes they may have committed. In fact, award them half-pay pensions for their service to Pakistan, which was counterproductive but often sincere.
Seize and permanently confiscate all media and publishing firms in Pakistan, all party buildings and funds, all private schools and universities, and all nongovernmental organizations. Abolish the parties permanently. Reorganize and rename the schools and universities, confining their mission to science and engineering. Import Western or Western-trained scientists and engineers, at competitive salaries, to bootstrap university departments. Put army officers in charge of the NGOs, and handle them case by case.”
To then claiming that someone who wrote the following sounds like “Moldbug following major head trauma.”:
“France is closed for reconstruction. Her borders are sealed and will remain sealed indefinitely. All foreigners, including diplomats, are either deported or interned. Frenchmen stranded abroad, including diplomats, are either repatriated or expatriated. These measures will not be reversed until France is once again a nation, not a province of Globomerica.”
And:
“All civil servants of the Sixth Republic are deemed communist until proven patriotic, and retired with full benefits. Initially, the new government is staffed entirely by former military officers. Where hiring is necessary, any experience in the official or para-official sector, security forces excepted, is an unconditional disqualification.”
The ridiculousness of neoreaction only gets worse when you get to the 2009 post titled “Seasteading, without that warm glow” in which Moldbug lays out quite forcefully his theoretical objections to seasteading and the idea of exit. In short, Moldbug states “IMHO, seasteading is a brilliant example, in at least three regards, of What Not To Do” and then goes on to provide Carlyean (remember him? We will get to him and his eviction from neoreaction later on in this post) objections to the entire concept of exit.
To start with, the first problem is laid out clearly as:
“The misconception appears in your use of the word “governments,” plural. Your picture of political reality on Planet Three appears to be: the planet’s land area is divided into 200-odd sovereign states, whose interactions are governed by international law….Now, you know this is not a perfectly correct picture.”
And why is it not a perfectly correct picture?
“in the ghost world, the world I described earlier, the world of 200 countries and international oceans – the world that everyone thinks they live in, those dupes or inverse cheats – seasteading is, or at least might be, a viable plan. In the real world, which exists, it ain’t.
In the real Planet Three, as we’ve seen, the government is much larger than in the ghost Planet Three. For instance, in the ghost Planet Three, Paul Romer is a private citizen. In the real Planet Three, he is a government official. He is not the only one.
And in the ghost Planet Three, USG governs America, on behalf of Americans. In the real Planet Three, an entity that includes USG plus its immense penumbra – call it EUSG – governs the world, on behalf of – God knows who. Itself, basically.
In the real Planet Three, USG is incredibly powerful. There is no reason to think that any ship or structure, anywhere at sea, will be able to sustain any nontrivial infringement of US law – especially if any part of its organizational structure includes US persons or US entities.
But EUSG is even more powerful. Because EUSG includes those nebulous and distributed forces that comprise “international public opinion.” Ie, the organs which dictate international public opinion – since people, generally, are not philosophers and believe what they are told to believe. While these organs are not monolithic or hierarchically organized, they somehow magically seem to always agree with each other. The Washington Post never gets into an organizational catfight with the New York Times, or Harvard with Stanford. This, of course, is because all are ticks on the same horse – Washington – and must gallop together.
Imagine a stateless seastead city that could defy US law. You are probably fantasizing. But you might get away with it, if your seastead city had “international public opinion” on its side. Now, imagine a stateless city that could defy “international public opinion.” You are really fantasizing – that is, under today’s world order. You seek to change that order; you cannot assume what you are trying to achieve.
Thus the appeal of seasteading depends existentially on the very illusions it seeks to destroy. “Not a true thing, but a false thing.” In the ghost universe, the oceans of Planet Three are a free space for new experiments in government. In the real universe, they are a space administered by a single government – and have been for over 200 years. Until 1914, that government was HMG. Since 1945, it has been USG. When you go to sea, you are swimming in USG’s pond. Frankly, you might as well do your seasteading on Lake Superior.
Does international law assure you of this right, or that right, or the other right, at sea? No doubt Martian law also assures you of many fine privileges. Carlyle tells us: there is no right that is not also a might. Should your rights be violated, to whom will you appeal? If the judge of appeal is also the violator, or there is no judge, there is no law and no rights. More phantoms.”
Of course, now neoreaction is pretty much marinated in exit and systematic weaponisation against governance in the liberal mould. Examples are easy to find which are on the side of Patri Friedman contra Moldbug , see here, here, here and here for examples, so many examples in fact that when anyone unfamiliar with Moldbug comes upon neoreaction they see only “EXIT” stamped in big writing, along with delusional “global arbitrage” AKA “snake oil”. Either the Cathedral exists and the whole world is de facto USG, or it is not. There has to be a breaking point in which your utterances fail to connect to Moldbug, and I must surely have demonstrated that neoreaction has gone way past that point long ago, but I am not even close to finishing at this point.
Now let us move on to the fourth important post, this time it is from 2010 and is titled From Mises to Carlyle: my sick journey to the dark side of the force. This is as clear a statement of the centrality of the Carlyean philosophical and political cannon to Moldbug’s thinking and political philosophy. Something which is reinforced on numerous other posts such as here, here, and here. Carlye is quite challenging, but there are a few points which can be picked out without too much effort which clearly have an influence on Moldbug. The first is the character of the leader upon society – this is key. The second is the understanding that modern governance is merely chaos occasioned by a rejection of order, and not a march into enlightenment. I’m sure Carlyle would smile grimly at the blockchain, exit stuff that neoreaction pumps out – fraud upon fraud. As Moldbug notes in ‘Why Carlyle matters’:
“What we see instead, from both the Carlylean and Alinskyist perspectives, is a monotonic slope. This is the slope of order. Order slopes up to the right: true right, which is reactionary, is always the direction of increasing order, and true left the direction of increasing disorder. It is especially valuable to have a clear definition of this polarization, which seems to have evolved independently so many times in history. David Axelrod would surely get along with the Gracchi, and Pinochet with Sulla.”
The influence goes deeper, and is more rich than I can express in this post, but suffice to say, if you cut out Carlye, you cut out Moldbug – and surprise – neoreaction has cut out Carlyle from the beginning really. Well, to be more precise, 99.9% of neoreaction couldn’t care one bit for Carlyle, whilst Land was happy to oblige and formally eject him here (rejection of the Carlyle/ Moldbug left –right spectrum), as well as here (rejection of road to order and opening of potential exploration of “An ultimate (or basic) fanged freedom” AKA “imperium in imperio”) and again here in very clear expression as opposed to the more measured and tentative expression of subversion at the start of Xenosystems (such as here):
“The Dark Enlightenment (essay) was clearly catalyzed by the work of Mencius Moldbug, but it was to have had two Anglo-Thomistic or Doubting Thomas intellectual-historical pillars (and neither were Thomas Carlyle). The first was Thomas Hobbes, who was at least touched upon. The second was to have been Thomas Malthus, but the series was diverted into the foaming current of the Derbyshire affair and the outrages of Leftist race politics.”
At this point, there is nothing left of anything related to Moldbug, and any claims to the contrary are superficial at best. The entire thing has been quite successfully subverted and hijacked by Land and his brand of Liberalism that he has not even bothered to continue covering up. That he has succeeded is in large part due to neoreaction being devoid of anything connecting it together but a “feeling” or an “élan.”
Neoreaction is pretty much Land’s now, because no one else in neoreaction seems to have a clue despite occasional grandstanding, which is a pyrrhic victory really. The thing has failed,and will now only serve as a skin to disguise and propagate liberalism.
by Wombaticus Rex » Sun Feb 14, 2016 7:11 pm
I don’t have all of this in one place yet, but I’ll try to give you a summary. And in honor of you accusing me of paranoid rants, I’ll try to present it in as deliberately conspiratorial and tinfoil-hattish a way as possible. I make no guarantees I will stand by any of this when I’m sober / when it’s not 3:30 AM.
People naturally divide into ingroups and outgroups. Although the traditional way of doing this is by race or religion (leading to racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, etc), in modern America this is gradually being replaced by a more complicated division based on social class and political affiliation. Rural working-class people have become a very different tribe (“Red Tribe”) than college-educated urban people in gated professions (“Blue Tribe”), with different food preferences, sport preferences, entertainment preferences, dialects, religions, mores, and politics. These two groups are vehemently opposed.
(if you only read one link in this piece, read that vehemently opposed one. The rest are just citations; that one contains an important piece of the story that’s hard to summarize).
While politics is about equally split between them, the media and academia are almost entirely Blue Tribe.
To make the point about the media: a 2008 study found that 88% of contributions by people in the media went to Democrats; a 2004 study with slightly different methodology that limited itself to journalists found an even larger bias. Here’s a survey that finds that if journalists were their own congressional district, they would be the most liberal district in the country, much further left even than Berkeley, California.
To make the point about academia: a recent analysis found that 91% of Harvard professors who donated to a presidential campaign donated to Hillary (with the remainder divided between Sanders and all eight GOP candidates). Jon Haidt’s does a lot of work on this at heterodoxacademy and finds that there’s a 14:1 ration of liberals to conservatives in the non-economics social sciences. Meta-analyses in psychology, psychiatry, and economics all find that the personal views of experimenters affect what results they get; the psychology study, which quantifies the results, finds a very large effect size – larger than most effect sizes actually discovered in social science, meaning we have no idea how much of what we know is real effect and how much is experimenter political bias. On a related note, only 30% to 50% of experiments in psychology persist after replication attempts (other academic disciplines are as bad or worse). On a related note, meta-analyses observe clear evidence of publication bias in politically charged domains – for example, this meta-analysis finds that papers are more likely to be published as opposed to file-drawered if they support the liberal position rather than the conservative one. Also, lots and lots of people in academia, even the very liberal people, will admit this is true if you ask them directly. Haidt, Tetlock, et al (see previously cited paper) have found lots of horrifying things like journal editors saying explicitly and proudly they’d refuse to publish articles that support conservative ideas, or professors saying that other academics whose research implies conservative ideas shouldn’t be hired or given tenture.
So given the fact that our knowledge of the world is coming from a 90-percent-plus liberal group that’s working hard to enforce orthodoxy, and then being filtered and broadcast to us by another 90-percent-plus liberal group that’s working hard to enforce orthodoxy, our knowledge of the world is…about as skewed as you would expect from this process. To give just one example, every number and line of evidence we have suggests that the police do not disproportionately target or kill black people compared to the encounter rate (see Part D here and this study) but the conventional wisdom is absolutely 100% certain they do and anybody who questions it is likely to sound like some kind of lunatic.
Once again, I think of these political differences as secondary to (and proxy for) more complicated tribal/class differences, and these tribes/classes really really hate each other and are trying to destroy each other (remember, multiple experiments – 1, 2, 3 – find that people’s party/class/tribe prejudices are stronger than their racial/religious prejudices). So imagine an institution that’s 90% Klansmen, with all its findings interpreted by and transmitted through a second institution that’s 90% Klansmen, and consider how useful (or not) the information about black people that eventually reaches you through the conjunction of those two institutions will be.
Because the Blue Tribe’s base is in education and the opinion-setting parts of the media, their class interest is to increase the power of these areas. I don’t want to sound too conspiratorial by making it sound like this is organized (it’s not), but classes tend to evolve distributed ways to pursue their class interests without organization. In this case, that means to enforce credentialism (ie a system where the officialness of your education matters more than your ability) and orthodoxy (whether you hold the right opinions is more important than ability). We see the credentialism in for example the metastatic spread of degree requirements. You need a college degree to have the same opportunities as you’d have gotten from a high school degree in 1960. This isn’t because jobs require more knowledge today; there are thousands of jobs that will take you if you’ve got an Art History degree, not because Art History is relevant to the job, but because they insist on candidates having some, any, college degree. The Blue Tribe protects its own and wants to impoverish anyone who doesn’t kowtow to their institutions. For the same reason, we get bizarre occupational licensing restrictions like needing two years of training to braid people’s hair, which have been proven time and time again not to work or improve quality, but which effectively lock poor people (and people who just don’t do well with structure) out of getting livable jobs.
The opposite of credentialism is meritocracy – the belief that the best person should get the job whether or not they’ve given $200,000 to Yale. In my crazy conspiracy theory, social justice is the attack arm of the educated/urban/sophisticated/academic Blue Tribe, which works by constantly insisting all competing tribes are racist and sexist and therefore need to be dismantled/taken over/put under Blue Tribe supervision for their own good. So we get told that meritocracy is racist and sexist. Colleges have pronounced talking about meritocracy to be a microaggression, and the media has declared that supporting meritocracy is inherently racist. Likewise, we are all told that standardized tests and especially IQ are racist and hurt minorities, even though in reality this testing helps advance minorities better than the current system. For the same reason, colleges are moving away from the SATs (an actual measure of student intelligence), to how well students do in interviews, how well they write essays, and other things which are obvious proxies for social class and tribal affiliation.
STEM culture and nerd culture is (was?) this weird alternative domain that had Blue Tribe advantages like education and wealth, but also wasn’t drinking their Kool-Aid – they took pride in being meritocratic, they didn’t care what college you went to as long as you were smart, and they were okay enjoying their own weird culture instead of following sophisticated trend-setters. The Blue Tribe was spooked, so they called in their attack arm, and soon enough we started hearing these constant calls in Blue-affiliated media and circles to destroy nerd culture (2, 3, etc, etc) because it is inherently misogynistic, racist, etc. It’s why we’re told that Silicon Valley is full of “brogrammers” and “techbros” (compare “Berniebro”, which everyone now agrees was a Hillarysphere attempt to smear Sanders supporters). It’s why we’re told that tech is “incredibly white and male” and “needs to get less white” and just generally has this huge and unique diversity problem – even though in reality it’s possibly the most racially diverse industry in the country, at a full 60% non-white. It’s why we’re told that there is terrible bias against women in science academia, when in fact anyone can read the studies showing that controlling for all other factors, women are twice as likely to be hired for tenure-track STEM positions as men and academic science is not sexist at all. It’s why we’re told women fear for their lives in Silicon Valley because of endemic sexual harassment, even though nobody’s ever formally investigated if it’s worse than anywhere else, and the only informal survey I’ve ever seen shows harrassment in STEM to be well-below the average harrassment rate.
What’s happening at GitHub itself right now is actually a pretty good example. The old CEO was fired because of various accusations (later investigated and found to be false; the firing was not revoked). The new CEO has banned the term “meritocracy”, replaced workers managing their own affairs with a system of no-doubt-well-credentialled middle managers, and given lots of power to a “diversity team” that declares all remnants of the old company culture racist and sexist. According to Business Insider, there’s now a “culture of fear” and a lot of the most talented employees are leaving. People are saying GitHub made some kind of mistake, but I suspect all is going according to plan, the talented employees will be replaced with better-credentialled ones, the media will call everybody who left “techbros” who were suffering from “aggrieved entitlement”, GitHub will join the general Silicon Valley 2.0 landscape of open-plan offices and Pointy Haired Bosses, lather, rinse, repeat, and ten years from now bright-but-lower-class unsophisticated people without college degrees won’t be able to find a job in Silicon Valley any more than they can on Wall Street or anywhere else.
I am pretty darned Blue Tribe myself – I’m pro-choice, pro-fighting-climate-change, pro-gay, pro-transgender, non-religious, pro-higher-taxes-on-rich, pro-single-payer, anti-gun, ready-for-Hillary, etc – and after having watched the Republican debate tonight I can honestly say I’m terrified at anyone other than the Blue Tribe having power. But just as I can be proud of my Jewish heritage but also upset about the occupation of Palestine, so I can be proud of the Blue Tribe and not too happy about their project of crushing everybody else with an iron fist regardless of the collateral damage. Doing anything about this is a dauntingly large project, but my own comparative advantage is in picking apart some of the sillier studies they use to put a fig-leaf over what they’re doing.
by American Dream » Sun Feb 14, 2016 7:28 pm
by Wombaticus Rex » Sun Feb 14, 2016 7:42 pm
American Dream » Sun Feb 14, 2016 6:28 pm wrote:Does he even understand the difference between Classical Liberalism, Social Liberalism & Neoliberalism?- and/or is he deliberately blurring the distinctions in order to construct a better straw man?
Certainly he is selectively appropriating some of the shallowest form of Privilege Politics, in the service of some very distorted ideas about layers of the working class as representing the center of social conflict conflict. A more sophisticated analysis of social power would be easy enough to provide but wouldn't serve his polemics much at all...
“his arguments only seem well-reasoned to people with NO knowledge of the subject matter (like him), and thus his main effect (just like that of his mentor, Eliezer Yudkowsky) is to keep smart people from learning things"
...
“Reading Slate Star Codex, I feel like I’m finally starting to understand how postmodernism happened. First, there’s the whole thing of looking at your friends and a few books you happened to have read recently, and jumping to grand conclusions about all of society throughout all of history. Second, there’s the thing of him writing lengthy posts elaborating at great length on something that might be either boring and obviously true or bold and innovative but also completely wrong.”
...
“it’s basically a fish trap for aspies. people who can’t grasp nuance or understand basic human behavior, but are nonetheless obsessed with details and complex systems will inevitably gravitate toward this kind of horseshit. ultimately it’s a bunch of STEM-inclined dudes on the autism spectrum sitting around attempting to unpack societal problems like it was all a game of fucking sim city.”
by American Dream » Sun Apr 03, 2016 1:27 pm
Controversy Rages Over 'Pro-Slavery' Tech Speaker Curtis Yarvin
If you're not an engineer, you likely have not heard of LambdaConf or Curtis Yarvin, A.K.A. "Mencius Moldbug." That the conference and the person are colliding, though, matters for the movement to diversify the world of tech.
BY TESS TOWNSEND
A screenshot of a March 2015 story appearing on conservative blog Breitbart, about functional programming conference LambdaConf deciding to retain Curtis Yarvin as a speaker. The acronym "SJW" stands for "social justice warrior," a pejorative phrase used by far right-leaning conservatives, typically to refer to people who openly express liberal viewpoints online. IMAGE: Breitbart screenshot
LambdaConf is a conference revolving around a style of coding called functional programming. If you're not an engineer, you probably haven't heard of it -- at least, not before the last two weeks when the gathering gained attention on Twitter for all the wrong reasons.
The Memorial Day weekend event held this year in Boulder, Colorado, is hosting Curtis Yarvin, creator of experimental computing platform Urbit, as a speaker. Yarvin's online writings, many under his pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, convey blatantly racist views. He expresses the belief that white people are genetically endowed with higher IQs than black people. He has suggested race may determine whether individuals are better suited for slavery, and his writing has been interpreted as supportive of the institution of slavery.
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