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reposting David’s repost of Scott Alexander’s leaked neoreaction and race science emails (circumstances.run)
submitted 3 years ago by [M] to c/sneerclub@awful.systems
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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

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[–] 1 point 3 years ago (5 children)

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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (1 child)

    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.)

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    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 ? ^^

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years 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.

    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoreactionary_movement

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