It’s curious to see the frequency of posts that start with “I am not a neoreactionary, but...”. (This includes my own). If I’m not mistaken, they seem to outnumber the actual neoreactionary posts by a fair margin.
I think a call for patriarchal racially-stratified monarchy is catnip around here. Independently of its native virtues, I mean. It’s a debate that couldn’t even happen in most communities, so it’s reinforcing our sense of LW’s peculiar set of community mores. It’s a radical but also unexpected vision of a technological future, so it has new ideas to wrestle with, and enough in the way of historical roots to reward study and give all participants the chance to learn. And it is political without being ossified in to tired and nationally televised debates, with new insights available to a clever thinker and plenty of room to pull sideways.
For that reason, I’m a little worried that it will receive disproportionate attention. I know my System 1 loves to read the stuff. But System 2… Enthusiastic engagement with political monarchy- pro or con- is not something I would like to see become a major feature of Less Wrong, so I think I’m going to publicly commit to posting no more than one NRx comment per month, pending major changes in community dynamics.
I agree with Toggle that this might not have been the best place for this question.
The Circle of Life goes like this. Somebody associates Less Wrong with neoreactionaries, even though there are like ten of them here total. They start discussing neoreaction here, or asking their questions for neoreactionaries here. The discussion is high profile and leads more people to associate Less Wrong with neoreactionaries. That causes more people to discuss it and ask questions here, which causes more people to associate us, and it ends with everybody certain that we’re full of neoreactionaries, and that ends with bad people who want to hurt us putting “LESS WRONG IS A RACIST NEOREACTIONARY WEBSITE” in big bold letters over everything.
If you really want to discuss neoreaction, I’d suggest you do it in an Slate Star Codex open thread, since apparently I’m way too tarnished by association with them to ever escape. Or you can go to a Xenosystems open thread and get it straight from the horse’s mouth.
Please do not upvote my comment here or comment in response if you agree. Instead, please vote on other comments to express agreement, so as to bring about the suggested outcome.
For that reason, I’m a little worried that it will receive disproportionate attention.
Worried? This is the only place I’ve even heard of it. This place gives the very false impression that it’s something that matters to people out in the real world.
Edit: the only exposure elsewhere ive had is when a friend who is a conisseur of bizarre stories about silicon valley shenanigans he can laugh at linked me to some article called ‘geeks for monarchy’. He was 100% sure the writer had been trolled and found it hilarious.
Hadn’t seen that one (as previously stated). That is indeed a funny troll. However, my friend found the reporting in the geeks for monarchy article so outlandish that he was sure someone was putting a credulous writer on.
I think a call for patriarchal racially-stratified monarchy is catnip around here. Independently of its native virtues, I mean. It’s a debate that couldn’t even happen in most communities, so it’s reinforcing our sense of LW’s peculiar set of community mores.
Personal opinion follows. Contest it if you like, but your chance of swaying me by arguments without giving very hard evidence is low.
The fact that this is “catnip” for LW-ers is a bad thing. We ought to be giving neoreaction about as much credence as we give Creationism: it’s founded on bad ethics, false facts, and bad reasoning, and should be dismissed, not discussed to death.
Creationism was discussed to death long before Lesswrong existed, which is why people downvote attempts to rehash it as a waste of everyone’s time. To the extent that Neoreaction is something different than plain old Reaction, a) it’s a relatively new memeplex, so if it’s bad, someone has to do the work of swatting it down, and b) when the Neoreactionaries aren’t busy reviving obscure archaic words for their own jargon, they’re using Lesswrong-style jargon. You run the risk of outsiders pattern-matching LW and Neoreaction together either way. I’d prefer the association be “Lesswrong is a place where neoreactionary ideas are discussed and sometimes criticized” than “Lesswrong is that place that sounds very similar to Neoreaction minus the explicit politics”.
That being said, there’s ample discussion already on Slate Star Codex, and I wouldn’t want to see it crowding out other topics here.
when the Neoreactionaries aren’t busy reviving obscure archaic words for their own jargon, they’re using Lesswrong-style jargon
I believe the fact that neoreactionaries make frequent use of LW jargon is down to more than a founder effect.
There are multiple aspects to the LW memeplex that perform significant legwork in laying an epistemological foundation to mug intelligent social liberals with reality, which is close to the defining trait of neoreaction. To wit,
Physicalism, determinism, a universe Beyond the Reach of God; the universe is capable of arbitrarily deviating from wishful standards of fairness and equality, there are no cosmic attractors towards justice, humans can be effectively damned beyond redemption by biological variables outside the loci of moral agency.
Generalised optimisation systems; once you understand these, the leap to criticism of democracy as a massive cybernetic failure mode is almost trivial.
Game theory, for the public choice extension to the above.
A deep epistemology of taboos, which form the Dark Matter of democracy, around which our governing narratives swirl otherwise inexplicably.
Beliefs as constraints on expectations, versus belief as attire; this in itself is sufficient to generate enough conflict with official truth to put one far beyond the Overton window.
Ok, but I didn’t say this had already happened. I said it is something I would not want to see happen in future. Possibly you were just using my comment as a convenient anchor for a point you were already prepping for someone else, but it doesn’t really make sense to address it to me.
I’m pleased to see more neoreaction here. This post makes me confident to come back.
Lesswrong needs to use rationality to speak out against the social justice warriors more. We need more rationalists to explain Gamergate and other initiatives. SSC and Ozy come out in favor of Gamergate and Eron Gjoni for example. Politics need not be the mind killer with showing sufficient working.
a) it’s a relatively new memeplex, so if it’s bad, someone has to do the work of swatting it down,
Really? Because most ideas are bad, and that by default includes most new ideas, so I don’t see why a new “memeplex” shouldn’t justify itself rather than having a right to be taken seriously.
I’d prefer the association be “Lesswrong is a place where neoreactionary ideas are discussed and sometimes criticized” than “Lesswrong is that place that sounds very similar to Neoreaction minus the explicit politics”.
Out in the world, LessWrong is more closely associated with Peter Thiel’s brand of libertarianism, and gets all the flak and critiquing usually given to techno-libertarianism.
Because most ideas are bad, and that by default includes most new ideas, so I don’t see why a new “memeplex” shouldn’t justify itself rather than having a right to be taken seriously.
That horse has already left. Neoreaction is a thing now.
Among a self-selected group of nerds on the internet, yes. Whenever it gets noticed by larger society, said society reacts (ahaha) with revulsion. This is both as it should be, and as the neoreactionaries predict, but the point is that I don’t think it’s going to grow beyond the usual demographics of nerd-focused extremist movements.
“Lesswrong is that place that sounds very similar to Neoreaction minus the explicit politics”.
That’s only an observation that could be made by someone who knows what neoreaction sounds like. On the other hand by having LW posts about neoreactionary ideas anybody reading LW comes into contact with them.
Would you prefer that I had not posted for that reason?
In general, t seems...backwards to restrain the things the community talks about out of concern for how others will view the community as a result. Sort of like declaring a police state to protect the nominal freedoms of a Constitution. Shouldn’t we talk about whatever interests us?
That said, in this particular instance, the OP is very contentious, with a significant of votes and just barely over 50% positive. It is something that at least many members of this community don’t want to hear about.
Would you prefer that I had not posted for that reason?
Yes, but not very strongly. Given that your post is overall it positive karma it’s however alright. Karma votes
show you whether a majority thinks your post has a place or hasn’t. Votes decide what threads have a place in discussion and which haven’t.
Sort of like declaring a police state to protect the nominal freedoms of a Constitution.
Online communities are not states with guaranteed freedom of speech.
In general, t seems...backwards to restrain the things the community talks about out of concern for how others will view the community as a result.
It’s not only about the perception of outsiders. It’s also about what the people in this community think.
Online communities are not states with guaranteed freedom of speech.
Yes. I was making a poor analogy. Isn’t the value of lesswrong that we are able to explore ideas things that are not admissible elsewhere for lack of interest, lack of training, or direct aversion? (This is obviously contestable. I invite you to contest it.) If the fundamental value of the community is compromised out of concern for its reputation, then the reputation is of increasingly less value.
Isn’t the value of lesswrong that we are able to explore ideas things that are not admissible elsewhere for lack of interest, lack of training, or direct aversion?
If you read the about page, that’s not how LW statement of purpose is phrased.
it’s founded on bad ethics, false facts, and bad reasoning
Well I’ve been looking around NRx for a while and have seen a lot fewer false facts then in the “mainstream” sources. Do you have any examples of NRx false facts.
As for “bad ethics”, If you define “bad ethics” as ethics that go against the current Progressive possition then yes NRx has “bad ethics”. Of course by that definition any one who had 1994!”good ethics” has 2014!”bad ethics” and conversely, similarly someone who has 2014!”good ethics” like will turn out to have 2034!”bad ethics” and conversely, [Edit: and someone pointing out certain true facts has “doubleplusungood ethics”].
As for “bad ethics”, I you define “bad ethics” as ethics that go against the current Progressive possition then yes NRx has “bad ethics”.
Right and wrong are not defined by factional allegiance.
similarly someone who has 2014!”good ethics” like will turn out to have 2034!”bad ethics”
Dear God, I hope so! 2014 is barbaric! Have you even seen how many people are hungry, thirsty, sick, ignorant, enslaved, or debt-peons? Have you even bothered checking how much raw misery there is?
Dear God, I hope so! 2014 is barbaric! Have you even seen how many people are hungry, thirsty, sick, ignorant, enslaved, or debt-peons? Have you even bothered checking how much raw misery there is?
Um, that’s not what 2034!”bad ethics” means. That is in fact precisely the attitude that makes you 2014!”good”. Obviously I don’t know which of your attitudes will make your current self 2034!evil but some possibilities. (Note these are all from different event branches.)
1) Do you believe people’s job should have a relation to their skills? That makes you a 2034(branch A)!evil abelist.
2) Do you believe your job should have any relation to your preferences? That makes you 2034(branch B)!selfish.
3) Do you believe people should be free to say “Allah doesn’t exist”? That makes you a 2034(branch C)!evil Islamaphobe.
4) Do you believe parents have any responsibility towards the upbringing of their children? That makes you a 2034(branch D)!patriarchal oppressor.
I could invent more scenarios, but you get the idea.
Yes, but progressives always imagine that their views that will be vindicated in 2034. and their opponents’ cast out. They never seem to consider the possibility that their current views will be regarded as wrong/outdated/evil, and those of their opponents (or possibly some as yet unknown view) triumphant. This pathology is not unique to progressives, but seems to be worse among them, because of their self-image as being “on the right side of history.”
In that case how are you defining “right” and “wrong” are you using when you make the claim the neoreaction is based on “bad ethics”? If the answer is “whatever feels wrong to eli_sennesh”, you might want to look into how you came to have those feelings.
I posted an explicit statement of a moral system I’m willing to call my current view waaaaay up in the thread. Go use that algorithm, and then explain to me how neoreaction isn’t bad ethics.
It appears to me that neoreaction has a severe problem talking to ethical naturalists in general, as it founds itself on a strong ethical antirealism that doesn’t allow for ordinary-realist nor constructivist ethics, instead considering all available concepts of right and wrong to be mere cultural and material contingencies, thus yielding a fundamental imperative to preserve one’s existing cultural “values” at all costs. Add the (frankly bizarre, given the circumstances: if nothing is true and everything is permitted, what’s so bad about Cthulhu?) view of “progressivism” as corrupting, and then add the normal human impulse to consider Purity-Poison as a moral axis, and you’ve got the basics of neoreaction.
The problem being, it all only hangs together if you assume both the normative relevance of the Purity-Poison axis to attack “progressivism” (scare-quotes because today’s conservatives get tarred as “progressives”), and the view of all morals and values as culturally relative.
Of course, I think I might be mixing Caroline Glick with neoreaction here, but she’s practically a neoreactionary who evolved outside the San Francisco futurist community anyway.
So before you can really make this point you want to make, you have to conclusively prove not merely that some political party or another fails to represent “real” ethics (for the record, I’m a pragmatist-socialist politically, and thus consider myself at home in none of the mainstream parties in any country where I can vote), but that realist ethics are in the general case impossible.
This is a bizarre and uncharitable misreading, and it ought to be clear that this is so from not only the contradiction you point out, but also the number of Christians in neoreaction.
First of all, ought-statements can’t be grounded completely in is-statements, but they also can’t be grounded completely in other ought-statements. Many disagreements that will appear to the progressive as normative in character are actually descriptive. (I wonder if this is related to progressivism’s retreat into deontological rights-talk, which does make it a moral argument—but deontology, while useful for some things, is hopelessly absurd as an actual grounding for ethics.) Is Roissy a deontologist, a utilitarian, or what? Who knows? -- his disagreements are generally descriptive ones, and, since the ethical systems that humans in similar cultures and circumstances(1) actually use generally give similar outputs to the same inputs(2) (except for unrealistic edge cases like the trolley problem), it doesn’t really matter.
Second, go look at the Hestia Society’s motto. The groundwork for one of the neoreactionary positions (though there isn’t only one, and this particular one isn’t limited to neoreaction) follows easily from a rejection of both Whig history and anarcho-primitivism: if civilization is vastly preferable to savagery, but the continued existence and advance of civilization is not guaranteed by the World-Spirit, present-morality maximizers pose a serious threat of unwittingly making tradeoffs that will be disastrous later, by weakening the foundations of civilization and contributing to collapse. Even if progressivism is a present-morality maximizer, it has not established—and (because Whig history) is incapable of establishing—that it is not making these tradeoffs. To even ask that question is to leave progressivism.
(Yes, this is one of those permanent states of emergency that leftists sometimes rail against—but it’s not as if they don’t have their own.)
Roissy is an educated Western urbanite, and IIRC Jewish.
Similar enough for moral discourse to be possible without immediately collapsing into philosophy.
… What are you talking about? Who’s Roissy? You appear to have responded to the wrong comment, written an irrelevant rant, and dragged in your voting brigade to receive +6 points.
What? It’s a perfectly valid response to your claim that neoreaction is filled with moral anti-realists who are obsessed with arbitrary value preservation. Also, Roissy is Heartiste.
It doesn’t seem a valid response to me, since it doesn’t explain why neoreactionaries actually think, why they think it, and how they justify realism about their own views (that is, why they think neoreaction is true for all rational humans and not just plausible to a small clique). It mostly just attacks “progressives”.
If it helps, I think maybe you are thinking of “neo-reactionaries” and “progressives” as being a local modern phenomena, perhaps even just happening in the comments of this article.
If you post a PDF in the thread with your own idiosyncratic ideals, that serves for you to describe what you mean and stand for and think is good, and functions as the “ground” of a debate that you’re willing to defend.
On the other hand, nydrwacu is coming at this from the perspective of a deeply-read aspiring expert in the practicalities of political semiotics. I think, for example, that his reference to a capitalized “World Spirit” is a reference to Hegel’s concept of a Weltgeist which was widely known in the past, and explicitly used as a concept under which to organize actual historically existing political factions. If you were “against the Weltgeist” it had a simultaneously factional and practical meaning that was necessarily related both to meta-ethical doctrines and to propaganda processes that bound factions into social machines with many real world consequences that can themselves be judged.
When you said “neoreaction has a severe problem talking to ethical naturalists in general” (presuming pointing with the word “neoreaction” to speakers in this thread as “neoreaction”) nydrwacu responded by pointing to actual “neoreactionaries” (not “I’m not a neoreactionary but I read them sometimes” but full fledged ones) who are not LWers and not in this thread (like Roissy and the Hestia Society) who appear to have some grounding in “naturalistic ethics”. However their naturalistic ethics are grounded in things other than something with historical continuity with the faction that used the Weltgeist in their rallying cries…
(Or at least that’s what they claim… For myself, I think neoreactionaries are in some sense just “super-ultra-progressives” if their own theories are applied to them in ways they might object to.)
A deeper issue here might be that neo-reactionaires have explicit theories about political categorization processes themselves (how they work, when they disgree, how to use them, etc), and one of their categorization techniques is socio-political cladistics.
Thus, if you use a Weltgeist-like justification, and are clearly influenced by previous Weltgeist-using political thinkers, neoreactionaries will sometimes lump you cladistically as all being part of the same unfurling memetic-political process that they can read about in history books and try to do bayesian updates thereby.
This is itself a somewhat controversial orientation. It is politically essentializing and can cause people to feel insulted when the descriptive process is applied to them with results they don’t like based on history and people they don’t even know about… if they didn’t put the word “Weltgeist” in their personal statement of beliefs how can they be held responsible for the actions and consequences of people who did?!
However, despite the shortcomings of cladistic analysis, you can see that operating at this level of abstraction might be appealing to a certain kind of smarty-pants. Also, it has at least the virtue of creating a pre-stated data-based solution to some games of reference class tennis that might otherwise happen in political debates.
That’s nice, but it seems to support the preconception I held, not refute it: neoreaction is all one elaborate game of “kill that faction/clade we don’t like!” and, when called to offer positive evidence in favor of their own particular set of truth-claims… they don’t even seem to make particular truth-claims, let alone offer positive evidence to justify those claims.
I don’t particularly give a damn about the factional games. Just offer a set of truth claims and their justification, and then we can talk.
We ought to be giving neoreaction about as much credence as we give Creationism: it’s founded on bad ethics, false facts, and bad reasoning, and should be dismissed, not discussed to death.
If this were as obvious to the rest of LW as it is to you, I think neoreaction would already have been dismissed by us.
Something like 95% of LWers self-classify as social liberals. Why would such a phenomenally non-socially-conservative group fixate on neoreaction unless it had some surface plausibility? (Prismattic observes that neoreaction is relatively new, and uses our jargon. I think the former fact doesn’t actually explain much, because new a-priori-unappealing-to-LW ideas are surely being born all the time, yet we don’t hear about them. That neoreaction uses bits of LW argot is probably more relevant, but it’s hard for me to imagine it being the whole explanation. Would a serious creationist last long here just because they larded their comments with our jargon?)
Something like 95% of LWers self-classify as social liberals.
Regrettable! I’d hope more would have the good sense to be Communists ;-).
Why would such a phenomenally non-socially-conservative group fixate on neoreaction unless it had some surface plausibility?
Because people are often attracted to things which offend them, like Republican Senators and homosexual prostitution ;-). This is pretty obvious if you model LWers as human beings rather than Bayesian utility maximizers.
That neoreaction uses bits of LW argot is probably more relevant, but it’s hard for me to imagine it being the whole explanation. Would a serious creationist last long here just because they larded their comments with our jargon?
That depends. Was he once a spokesman for the Singularity Institute?
Regrettable! I’d hope more would have the good sense to be Communists ;-).
At least you can console yourself with communism’s infinite growth rate since our first survey!
Because people are often attracted to things which offend them, like Republican Senators and homosexual prostitution ;-). This is pretty obvious if you model LWers as human beings rather than Bayesian utility maximizers.
It may be “pretty obvious”, but does it work as an explanation? Other socially conservative ideologies (like the mainstream US conservatism represented by “Republican Senators”; Nazism; and old-school, pre-Internet reaction) haven’t captured LW’s attention as neoreaction has, despite landing in the same category of “things which offend” social liberals. (And I’m not even considering left-wing ideologies fitting that criterion. I’ve yet to see any Holodomor-denying Stalinists here, for instance.)
That depends. Was he once a spokesman for the Singularity Institute?
The fact that this is “catnip” for LW-ers is a bad thing. We ought to be giving neoreaction about as much credence as we give Creationism: it’s founded on bad ethics, false facts, and bad reasoning, and should be dismissed, not discussed to death.
I note (and others have noted) that SSC, although hosting the definitive NRx takedown, still puts NRx ideas in the sphere of things to be discussed calmly with steelmanning; whereas it reacts with actual disgust and lack of philosophical charity to feminism, social justice, Tumblr, etc. And that Yvain was literally surprised to find himself becoming more right-wing after hanging around neoreactionaries, i.e. that he was picking up his ideas from his friends.
If you haven’t been watching closely, David Gerard has been spreading these same smears about me on RationalWiki, on Twitter, and now here. His tweets accuse me of treating the Left in general and the social justice movement in particular with “frothing” and as “ordure”. And now he comes here and adds Tumblr to the list of victims, and “actual disgust” to the list of adjectives.
I resent this because it is a complete fabrication.
I resent it because, far from a frothing hatred of Tumblr, I myself have a Tumblr account which I use almost every day and which I’ve made three hundred posts on. Sure, I’ve gently mocked Tumblr (as has every Tumblr user) but I’ve also very publicly praised it for hosting some very interesting and enlightening conversations.
I resent it because I’ve posted a bunch of long defenses and steelmannings of social justice ideas like Social Justice For The Highly Demanding Of Rigor and The Wonderful Thing About Triggers, some of which have gone mildly viral in the social justice blogosphere, and some of which have led to people emailing me or commenting saying they’ve changed their minds and become less hostile to social justice as a result.
I resent it because, far from failing to intellectually engage with the Left, in the past couple of months I’ve read, reviewed, and enjoyed left-leaning books on Marx, the Soviet economy, and market socialism
I resent it because the time I most remember someone trying to engage me about social justice, Apophemi, I wrote a seven thousand word response which I consider excruciatingly polite, which started with a careful justification for why writing it would be more productive and respectful than not writing it, and which ended with a heartfelt apology for the couple of things I had gotten wrong on my last post on the subject.
(Disgust! Frothing! Ordure!)
I resent it because I happily hosted Ozy’s social justice blogging for several months, giving them an audience for posts like their takedown of Heartiste, which was also very well-received and got social justice ideas to people who otherwise wouldn’t have seen them.
I resent it because about a fifth of my blogroll is social justice or social justice-aligned blogs, each of which get a couple dozen hits from me a day.
I resent it because even in my most impassioned posts about social justice, I try to make it very clear that there are parts of the movement which make excellent points, and figures in the movement I highly respect. Even in what I think everyone here will agree is my meanest post on the subject, Radicalizing the Romanceless, I stop to say the following about the social justice blogger I am arguing against:
[He] is a neat guy. He draws amazing comics and he runs one of the most popular, most intellectual, and longest-standing feminist blogs on the Internet. I have debated him several times, and although he can be enragingly persistent he has always been reasonable...He cares deeply about a lot of things, works hard for those things, and has supported my friends when they have most needed support.
(DISGUST! FROTHING! ORDURE!)
I resent it because it trivializes all of my sick burns against neoreactionaries, like the time I accused them of worshipping Kim Jong-un as a god, and the time I said they were obsessed with “precious, precious, white people”, and the time I mocked Jim for thinking Eugene V. Debs was a Supreme Court case.
I resent this because anyone who looks at my posts tagged with social justice can see that almost as many are in favor as against.
And I resent this because I’m being taken to task about charity by somebody whose own concept of a balanced and reasonable debate is retweeting stuff like this—and again and again calling the people he disagrees with “shitlords”
(which puts his faux-horror that I treat people I disagree with ‘like ordure’ in a pretty interesting new light)
No matter how many pro-social-justice posts I write, how fair and nice I am, or what I do, David Gerard is going to keep spreading these smears about me until I refuse to ever engage with anyone who disagrees with him about anything at all. As long as I’m saying anything other than “every view held by David Gerard is perfect and flawless and everyone who disagrees with David Gerard is a shitlord who deserve to die”, he is going to keep concern-trolling you guys that I am “biased” or “unfair”.
Please give his continued campaigning along these lines the total lack of attention it richly deserves.
I’m a SSC fan and highly sympathetic to SJ goals and ideals. One of the core LW meetup members in my city can’t stand to read SSC on account of what he perceives to be constant bashing of SJ. (I’ve already checked and verified that his perception of the proportion of SJ bashing in SSC posts is a massive overestimate, probably caused by selection bias.) As a specific example of verbiage that he considers typical of SSC he cited:
And the people who talk about “Nice Guys” – and the people who enable them, praise them, and link to them – are blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort”.
When I read that line, I didn’t take it literally—in spite of the use of the word “literally”. I just kind of skipped over it. But after it was pointed out to me that I ought to take it literally, well… “frothing” is a pretty good description.
I remain a SSC fan, but I’m less likely to just blank out the meaning of these kinds of things now.
No matter how many pro-social-justice posts I write, how fair and nice I am, or what I do, David Gerard is going to keep spreading these smears about me until I refuse to ever engage with anyone who disagrees with him about anything at all.
Have you considered that you should stop bending over backwards to get SJW’s to like you since it’s not going to happen anyway?
Yvain admits that he had negative personal experiences with feminists that may have left him prejudiced. It’s a bias, but at least he is aware of it.
Biases aside, I think that many people, including Yvain, are concerned by the large political influence that SJWs can exert. NRx, as wrong as they might be, hold virtually zero political influence at the moment, hence debating them is just an intellectual exercise. SJWs can influence mainstream media, college policies and even legislation. They are perceived as hostile towards straight white men, and especially towards geeks (nerds, sci-fi fans, gamers, etc.). For people belonging to these groups, political opposition to SJWs is a matter of self-preservation.
Not so. This guy might describe himself as a “pickup artist” and even work with Real Social Dynamics, but much of the community considers his ‘methods’ to be quite disgraceful. (Note that RSD itself is among the most reputable pickup groups nowadays, regardless of this particular controversy.) And SJW’s (in the Tumblr sense) had little to do with him being barred from entering so many countries.
Why shouldn’t it? Julien Blanc is not a UK citizen, he’s an alien national who wishes to do business in the UK by teaching his methods there. Entering the country is a privilege, not a right.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Anyway, yes, a government has the sovereign right to deny foreign citizens the possibility to enter the country, but it needs legal basis to do so. It’s not like any random clerk at the visa office can turn you back because they don’t like your face. I don’t know what legal justification they used to keep Julien Blanc out, but given the type of people that the UK has let in its territory, I guess it was probably quite unusual.
We are not talking about the rights of a sovereign government. HM Government can bar, say, anyone with a moustache from entering the UK and it would be fully within its rights.
Tumblr!social_justice and Tumblr!feminism (note the Tumblr! part) are not political ideas, though; they’re more closely described as echo chambers (whoops, sorry, I meant to say “safe spaces”, of course.) where meaningless duckspeak is endlessly repeated—so reacting with disgust and ridicule to them is arguably appropriate given LW’s and—plausibly—SSC’s goals. Neoreaction at least makes the grade as something that’s (marginally) politically relevant. Which is still not saying much, of course.
While Tumblr is of course awful, the simple answer is for Yvain to treat Tumblr as I treat neoreaction: close the browser tab and move on with life, good riddance to bad nonsense.
When I close the browser tab with neoreaction, I have a decent chance of never meeting a neoreactionary in my real life, so the problem is solved. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same thing about Tumblr!feminists. They are also rare, but I have already had the “pleasure” of meeting three of them. (Twice, they have cost me a female friend, because they were a friend of the friend, and have successfully convinced my friend that I am an evil person, because I happen to have an Y chromosome, which is a huge red flag for them. The third time, they have publicly accused my friend of being racist, when she dared to say that some traits correlate with certain genes, in a group of people who previously said more or less that genetics is a burgeoise pseudoscience.)
Unlike neoreaction, feminism happens to be a topic in real life (one could even call it a billion dollar industry, if we include all the government money spent on gender studies, female-only projects, etc.), so its perversions have a real impact. Many people spend a lot of time online, and if they meet the Tumblr version first, some of them will conclude this is the true version.
echo chambers [...] where meaningless duckspeak is endlessly repeated
Imagine how intolerable NRx would be if it were to acquire one of these. Fortunately, their ideas are too extreme for 4chan, even, so I have no idea where such a forum would be hosted.
It’s about the difference in quality of debate. Their manifold flaws notwithstanding, at least most neoreactionaries are articulate (Moldbug almost esoterically so). SJWs on the other hand feel entitled to go apeshit on you—to hell with convincing and productive debates.
The steelmanning is due to the fact that neoreaction is a strange composite of a few very good things (originality, aesthetics, appreciation for virtue) dispersed in an extremely toxic medium of hatred, drive for dominance, and undue confidence in the rightfulness of their own ideas. (Most of neoreaction only makes sense from a sociopathic perspective). A mind that is wise and cautious in judgment sees the good along with the bad and figures out these guys can’t quite be total sociopaths if you listen to them talking about what they like and strive for (and besides some of them can put up a strong case for their position), and so proceeds to attempt to filter the good ideas from the hateful drivel. A productive discussion may sometimes ensue; NRs may be quite hateful, but their natural habitat is the ivory tower rather than the sewage system that is the comments section. If you want far right low level trolling, there are better places for that.
By contrast—I don’t know what your experience was with SJWs, but this is how it was for me—SJWs do nothing but low level trolling. They aren’t going to give you anything you can conceivably desire out of the discussion (not even timely exit); they just want to fight. It’s a great stretch of imagination to connect their verbal abuses to that one trait that psychologically distinguishes left from right, tenderness of heart. It’s not difficult to see how they can be even worse than NRs at endearing themselves to one. The fact that they managed to exasperate Scott, who comes off as a supernaturally patient person in general, is a fact that should bear some consideration.
Having only a passing familiarity with Slate Star Codex, I can’t claim to have much knowledge of the context here. However, using information gleaned from this comment alone, I would say that polite steelmanning is probably the default reaction to a lot of things as far as LW readers are concerned (this is obviously and sadly untrue outside of these circles), and that if feminism, social justice, and Tumblr were reacted to with genuine disgust, something probably happened to justify that disgust. If I’m wrong about this, feel free to inform me.
“In the past two months I have inexplicably and very very suddenly become much more conservative. This isn’t the type of conservativism where I agree with any conservative policies, mind you. Those still seem totally wrong-headed to me. It’s the sort of conservativism where, even though conservatives seem to be wrong about everything, often in horrible or hateful ways, they seem like probably mostly decent people deep down, whereas I have to physically restrain myself from going on Glenn Beck style rants about how much I hate leftists and how much they are ruining everything. Even though I mostly agree with the leftists whenever they say something.”
You specifically said he was “hanging around neoreactionaries”. It sounds like a quibble, but it’s actually worth knowing the real result. The entire weight of your original statement implied his ideological change came from the people he was actually spending time with IRL. But now in this latest post you admit you were wrong about that, and that’s important.
It’s curious to see the frequency of posts that start with “I am not a neoreactionary, but...”. (This includes my own). If I’m not mistaken, they seem to outnumber the actual neoreactionary posts by a fair margin.
I think a call for patriarchal racially-stratified monarchy is catnip around here. Independently of its native virtues, I mean. It’s a debate that couldn’t even happen in most communities, so it’s reinforcing our sense of LW’s peculiar set of community mores. It’s a radical but also unexpected vision of a technological future, so it has new ideas to wrestle with, and enough in the way of historical roots to reward study and give all participants the chance to learn. And it is political without being ossified in to tired and nationally televised debates, with new insights available to a clever thinker and plenty of room to pull sideways.
For that reason, I’m a little worried that it will receive disproportionate attention. I know my System 1 loves to read the stuff. But System 2… Enthusiastic engagement with political monarchy- pro or con- is not something I would like to see become a major feature of Less Wrong, so I think I’m going to publicly commit to posting no more than one NRx comment per month, pending major changes in community dynamics.
I agree with Toggle that this might not have been the best place for this question.
The Circle of Life goes like this. Somebody associates Less Wrong with neoreactionaries, even though there are like ten of them here total. They start discussing neoreaction here, or asking their questions for neoreactionaries here. The discussion is high profile and leads more people to associate Less Wrong with neoreactionaries. That causes more people to discuss it and ask questions here, which causes more people to associate us, and it ends with everybody certain that we’re full of neoreactionaries, and that ends with bad people who want to hurt us putting “LESS WRONG IS A RACIST NEOREACTIONARY WEBSITE” in big bold letters over everything.
If you really want to discuss neoreaction, I’d suggest you do it in an Slate Star Codex open thread, since apparently I’m way too tarnished by association with them to ever escape. Or you can go to a Xenosystems open thread and get it straight from the horse’s mouth.
I believe that the parent and grandparent should be the first two comments someone reads when visiting this article on the “Best” setting.
Here is the current open thread on Slate Star Codex if you want to vote with your feet to move NRx comments over there. I link so that Yvain doesn’t have to :-)
Please do not upvote my comment here or comment in response if you agree. Instead, please vote on other comments to express agreement, so as to bring about the suggested outcome.
Worried? This is the only place I’ve even heard of it. This place gives the very false impression that it’s something that matters to people out in the real world.
Edit: the only exposure elsewhere ive had is when a friend who is a conisseur of bizarre stories about silicon valley shenanigans he can laugh at linked me to some article called ‘geeks for monarchy’. He was 100% sure the writer had been trolled and found it hilarious.
No, this was the troll post: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2014/02/a-reader-writes-of-his-experience-among-the-dark-enlightenment-types.html
Hadn’t seen that one (as previously stated). That is indeed a funny troll. However, my friend found the reporting in the geeks for monarchy article so outlandish that he was sure someone was putting a credulous writer on.
Straightforwardly equating NRx with monarchy is a very surface-level (mis)understanding.
Personal opinion follows. Contest it if you like, but your chance of swaying me by arguments without giving very hard evidence is low.
The fact that this is “catnip” for LW-ers is a bad thing. We ought to be giving neoreaction about as much credence as we give Creationism: it’s founded on bad ethics, false facts, and bad reasoning, and should be dismissed, not discussed to death.
Creationism was discussed to death long before Lesswrong existed, which is why people downvote attempts to rehash it as a waste of everyone’s time. To the extent that Neoreaction is something different than plain old Reaction, a) it’s a relatively new memeplex, so if it’s bad, someone has to do the work of swatting it down, and b) when the Neoreactionaries aren’t busy reviving obscure archaic words for their own jargon, they’re using Lesswrong-style jargon. You run the risk of outsiders pattern-matching LW and Neoreaction together either way. I’d prefer the association be “Lesswrong is a place where neoreactionary ideas are discussed and sometimes criticized” than “Lesswrong is that place that sounds very similar to Neoreaction minus the explicit politics”.
That being said, there’s ample discussion already on Slate Star Codex, and I wouldn’t want to see it crowding out other topics here.
I believe the fact that neoreactionaries make frequent use of LW jargon is down to more than a founder effect.
There are multiple aspects to the LW memeplex that perform significant legwork in laying an epistemological foundation to mug intelligent social liberals with reality, which is close to the defining trait of neoreaction. To wit,
Physicalism, determinism, a universe Beyond the Reach of God; the universe is capable of arbitrarily deviating from wishful standards of fairness and equality, there are no cosmic attractors towards justice, humans can be effectively damned beyond redemption by biological variables outside the loci of moral agency.
Generalised optimisation systems; once you understand these, the leap to criticism of democracy as a massive cybernetic failure mode is almost trivial.
Game theory, for the public choice extension to the above.
A deep epistemology of taboos, which form the Dark Matter of democracy, around which our governing narratives swirl otherwise inexplicably.
Beliefs as constraints on expectations, versus belief as attire; this in itself is sufficient to generate enough conflict with official truth to put one far beyond the Overton window.
I keep hearing people say this. This is a rationalist site; why hasn’t anyone gone out and generated some statistics?
I don’t understand which half of that sentence you are objecting to, or what statistic in particular you would be looking for.
“crowding out”
Ok, but I didn’t say this had already happened. I said it is something I would not want to see happen in future. Possibly you were just using my comment as a convenient anchor for a point you were already prepping for someone else, but it doesn’t really make sense to address it to me.
I’m pleased to see more neoreaction here. This post makes me confident to come back.
Lesswrong needs to use rationality to speak out against the social justice warriors more. We need more rationalists to explain Gamergate and other initiatives. SSC and Ozy come out in favor of Gamergate and Eron Gjoni for example. Politics need not be the mind killer with showing sufficient working.
Really? Because most ideas are bad, and that by default includes most new ideas, so I don’t see why a new “memeplex” shouldn’t justify itself rather than having a right to be taken seriously.
Out in the world, LessWrong is more closely associated with Peter Thiel’s brand of libertarianism, and gets all the flak and critiquing usually given to techno-libertarianism.
That horse has already left. Neoreaction is a thing now.
Among a self-selected group of nerds on the internet, yes. Whenever it gets noticed by larger society, said society reacts (ahaha) with revulsion. This is both as it should be, and as the neoreactionaries predict, but the point is that I don’t think it’s going to grow beyond the usual demographics of nerd-focused extremist movements.
Are “nerd-focused extremist movements” a thing? I can’t think of any other examples.
They’re a topic of much past discussion on LW, in fact.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorder/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/cxg/link_nerds_are_nuts/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kat/the_benefits_of_closedmindedness/
http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html
As a matter of fact, extremist movements often seem to target or arise-from the educated sections of the middle-class...
So… ‘nerd’ means ‘educated middle class’?
And by this definition, haven’t some movements grown beyond this demographic?
People have posted about creationism on LessWrong?
That’s only an observation that could be made by someone who knows what neoreaction sounds like. On the other hand by having LW posts about neoreactionary ideas anybody reading LW comes into contact with them.
Would you prefer that I had not posted for that reason?
In general, t seems...backwards to restrain the things the community talks about out of concern for how others will view the community as a result. Sort of like declaring a police state to protect the nominal freedoms of a Constitution. Shouldn’t we talk about whatever interests us?
That said, in this particular instance, the OP is very contentious, with a significant of votes and just barely over 50% positive. It is something that at least many members of this community don’t want to hear about.
Yes, but not very strongly. Given that your post is overall it positive karma it’s however alright. Karma votes show you whether a majority thinks your post has a place or hasn’t. Votes decide what threads have a place in discussion and which haven’t.
Online communities are not states with guaranteed freedom of speech.
It’s not only about the perception of outsiders. It’s also about what the people in this community think.
Yes. I was making a poor analogy. Isn’t the value of lesswrong that we are able to explore ideas things that are not admissible elsewhere for lack of interest, lack of training, or direct aversion? (This is obviously contestable. I invite you to contest it.) If the fundamental value of the community is compromised out of concern for its reputation, then the reputation is of increasingly less value.
If you read the about page, that’s not how LW statement of purpose is phrased.
To quote the About page
In this case “automatically” rejection would be a poor description even in the case where NRx is more discouraged.
For a long time, LW was the only place you would read this stuff outside the tiny NRx blogosphere.
Well I’ve been looking around NRx for a while and have seen a lot fewer false facts then in the “mainstream” sources. Do you have any examples of NRx false facts.
As for “bad ethics”, If you define “bad ethics” as ethics that go against the current Progressive possition then yes NRx has “bad ethics”. Of course by that definition any one who had 1994!”good ethics” has 2014!”bad ethics” and conversely, similarly someone who has 2014!”good ethics” like will turn out to have 2034!”bad ethics” and conversely, [Edit: and someone pointing out certain true facts has “doubleplusungood ethics”].
Right and wrong are not defined by factional allegiance.
Dear God, I hope so! 2014 is barbaric! Have you even seen how many people are hungry, thirsty, sick, ignorant, enslaved, or debt-peons? Have you even bothered checking how much raw misery there is?
Um, that’s not what 2034!”bad ethics” means. That is in fact precisely the attitude that makes you 2014!”good”. Obviously I don’t know which of your attitudes will make your current self 2034!evil but some possibilities. (Note these are all from different event branches.)
1) Do you believe people’s job should have a relation to their skills? That makes you a 2034(branch A)!evil abelist.
2) Do you believe your job should have any relation to your preferences? That makes you 2034(branch B)!selfish.
3) Do you believe people should be free to say “Allah doesn’t exist”? That makes you a 2034(branch C)!evil Islamaphobe.
4) Do you believe parents have any responsibility towards the upbringing of their children? That makes you a 2034(branch D)!patriarchal oppressor.
I could invent more scenarios, but you get the idea.
Except that 100% of your scenarios are based upon the concept that politics dictates ethics.
That there are many things that are considered good in 2014 but will no longer be considered good in 2034 is a standard progressive position.
Yes, but progressives always imagine that their views that will be vindicated in 2034. and their opponents’ cast out. They never seem to consider the possibility that their current views will be regarded as wrong/outdated/evil, and those of their opponents (or possibly some as yet unknown view) triumphant. This pathology is not unique to progressives, but seems to be worse among them, because of their self-image as being “on the right side of history.”
Except that, once again, I am not defining right and wrong by political faction. You are.
In that case how are you defining “right” and “wrong” are you using when you make the claim the neoreaction is based on “bad ethics”? If the answer is “whatever feels wrong to eli_sennesh”, you might want to look into how you came to have those feelings.
I posted an explicit statement of a moral system I’m willing to call my current view waaaaay up in the thread. Go use that algorithm, and then explain to me how neoreaction isn’t bad ethics.
It appears to me that neoreaction has a severe problem talking to ethical naturalists in general, as it founds itself on a strong ethical antirealism that doesn’t allow for ordinary-realist nor constructivist ethics, instead considering all available concepts of right and wrong to be mere cultural and material contingencies, thus yielding a fundamental imperative to preserve one’s existing cultural “values” at all costs. Add the (frankly bizarre, given the circumstances: if nothing is true and everything is permitted, what’s so bad about Cthulhu?) view of “progressivism” as corrupting, and then add the normal human impulse to consider Purity-Poison as a moral axis, and you’ve got the basics of neoreaction.
The problem being, it all only hangs together if you assume both the normative relevance of the Purity-Poison axis to attack “progressivism” (scare-quotes because today’s conservatives get tarred as “progressives”), and the view of all morals and values as culturally relative.
Of course, I think I might be mixing Caroline Glick with neoreaction here, but she’s practically a neoreactionary who evolved outside the San Francisco futurist community anyway.
So before you can really make this point you want to make, you have to conclusively prove not merely that some political party or another fails to represent “real” ethics (for the record, I’m a pragmatist-socialist politically, and thus consider myself at home in none of the mainstream parties in any country where I can vote), but that realist ethics are in the general case impossible.
This is a bizarre and uncharitable misreading, and it ought to be clear that this is so from not only the contradiction you point out, but also the number of Christians in neoreaction.
First of all, ought-statements can’t be grounded completely in is-statements, but they also can’t be grounded completely in other ought-statements. Many disagreements that will appear to the progressive as normative in character are actually descriptive. (I wonder if this is related to progressivism’s retreat into deontological rights-talk, which does make it a moral argument—but deontology, while useful for some things, is hopelessly absurd as an actual grounding for ethics.) Is Roissy a deontologist, a utilitarian, or what? Who knows? -- his disagreements are generally descriptive ones, and, since the ethical systems that humans in similar cultures and circumstances(1) actually use generally give similar outputs to the same inputs(2) (except for unrealistic edge cases like the trolley problem), it doesn’t really matter.
Second, go look at the Hestia Society’s motto. The groundwork for one of the neoreactionary positions (though there isn’t only one, and this particular one isn’t limited to neoreaction) follows easily from a rejection of both Whig history and anarcho-primitivism: if civilization is vastly preferable to savagery, but the continued existence and advance of civilization is not guaranteed by the World-Spirit, present-morality maximizers pose a serious threat of unwittingly making tradeoffs that will be disastrous later, by weakening the foundations of civilization and contributing to collapse. Even if progressivism is a present-morality maximizer, it has not established—and (because Whig history) is incapable of establishing—that it is not making these tradeoffs. To even ask that question is to leave progressivism.
(Yes, this is one of those permanent states of emergency that leftists sometimes rail against—but it’s not as if they don’t have their own.)
Roissy is an educated Western urbanite, and IIRC Jewish.
Similar enough for moral discourse to be possible without immediately collapsing into philosophy.
… What are you talking about? Who’s Roissy? You appear to have responded to the wrong comment, written an irrelevant rant, and dragged in your voting brigade to receive +6 points.
What? It’s a perfectly valid response to your claim that neoreaction is filled with moral anti-realists who are obsessed with arbitrary value preservation. Also, Roissy is Heartiste.
It doesn’t seem a valid response to me, since it doesn’t explain why neoreactionaries actually think, why they think it, and how they justify realism about their own views (that is, why they think neoreaction is true for all rational humans and not just plausible to a small clique). It mostly just attacks “progressives”.
I have upvoted for asking good questions :-)
If it helps, I think maybe you are thinking of “neo-reactionaries” and “progressives” as being a local modern phenomena, perhaps even just happening in the comments of this article.
If you post a PDF in the thread with your own idiosyncratic ideals, that serves for you to describe what you mean and stand for and think is good, and functions as the “ground” of a debate that you’re willing to defend.
On the other hand, nydrwacu is coming at this from the perspective of a deeply-read aspiring expert in the practicalities of political semiotics. I think, for example, that his reference to a capitalized “World Spirit” is a reference to Hegel’s concept of a Weltgeist which was widely known in the past, and explicitly used as a concept under which to organize actual historically existing political factions. If you were “against the Weltgeist” it had a simultaneously factional and practical meaning that was necessarily related both to meta-ethical doctrines and to propaganda processes that bound factions into social machines with many real world consequences that can themselves be judged.
When you said “neoreaction has a severe problem talking to ethical naturalists in general” (presuming pointing with the word “neoreaction” to speakers in this thread as “neoreaction”) nydrwacu responded by pointing to actual “neoreactionaries” (not “I’m not a neoreactionary but I read them sometimes” but full fledged ones) who are not LWers and not in this thread (like Roissy and the Hestia Society) who appear to have some grounding in “naturalistic ethics”. However their naturalistic ethics are grounded in things other than something with historical continuity with the faction that used the Weltgeist in their rallying cries…
(Or at least that’s what they claim… For myself, I think neoreactionaries are in some sense just “super-ultra-progressives” if their own theories are applied to them in ways they might object to.)
A deeper issue here might be that neo-reactionaires have explicit theories about political categorization processes themselves (how they work, when they disgree, how to use them, etc), and one of their categorization techniques is socio-political cladistics.
Thus, if you use a Weltgeist-like justification, and are clearly influenced by previous Weltgeist-using political thinkers, neoreactionaries will sometimes lump you cladistically as all being part of the same unfurling memetic-political process that they can read about in history books and try to do bayesian updates thereby.
This is itself a somewhat controversial orientation. It is politically essentializing and can cause people to feel insulted when the descriptive process is applied to them with results they don’t like based on history and people they don’t even know about… if they didn’t put the word “Weltgeist” in their personal statement of beliefs how can they be held responsible for the actions and consequences of people who did?!
However, despite the shortcomings of cladistic analysis, you can see that operating at this level of abstraction might be appealing to a certain kind of smarty-pants. Also, it has at least the virtue of creating a pre-stated data-based solution to some games of reference class tennis that might otherwise happen in political debates.
That’s nice, but it seems to support the preconception I held, not refute it: neoreaction is all one elaborate game of “kill that faction/clade we don’t like!” and, when called to offer positive evidence in favor of their own particular set of truth-claims… they don’t even seem to make particular truth-claims, let alone offer positive evidence to justify those claims.
I don’t particularly give a damn about the factional games. Just offer a set of truth claims and their justification, and then we can talk.
If this were as obvious to the rest of LW as it is to you, I think neoreaction would already have been dismissed by us.
Something like 95% of LWers self-classify as social liberals. Why would such a phenomenally non-socially-conservative group fixate on neoreaction unless it had some surface plausibility? (Prismattic observes that neoreaction is relatively new, and uses our jargon. I think the former fact doesn’t actually explain much, because new a-priori-unappealing-to-LW ideas are surely being born all the time, yet we don’t hear about them. That neoreaction uses bits of LW argot is probably more relevant, but it’s hard for me to imagine it being the whole explanation. Would a serious creationist last long here just because they larded their comments with our jargon?)
Regrettable! I’d hope more would have the good sense to be Communists ;-).
Because people are often attracted to things which offend them, like Republican Senators and homosexual prostitution ;-). This is pretty obvious if you model LWers as human beings rather than Bayesian utility maximizers.
That depends. Was he once a spokesman for the Singularity Institute?
At least you can console yourself with communism’s infinite growth rate since our first survey!
It may be “pretty obvious”, but does it work as an explanation? Other socially conservative ideologies (like the mainstream US conservatism represented by “Republican Senators”; Nazism; and old-school, pre-Internet reaction) haven’t captured LW’s attention as neoreaction has, despite landing in the same category of “things which offend” social liberals. (And I’m not even considering left-wing ideologies fitting that criterion. I’ve yet to see any Holodomor-denying Stalinists here, for instance.)
Ba-dum-tssh!
I was media director and also came up for the idea for Singularity Summit, yes.
I note (and others have noted) that SSC, although hosting the definitive NRx takedown, still puts NRx ideas in the sphere of things to be discussed calmly with steelmanning; whereas it reacts with actual disgust and lack of philosophical charity to feminism, social justice, Tumblr, etc. And that Yvain was literally surprised to find himself becoming more right-wing after hanging around neoreactionaries, i.e. that he was picking up his ideas from his friends.
I’ve been advised to come here and defend myself.
If you haven’t been watching closely, David Gerard has been spreading these same smears about me on RationalWiki, on Twitter, and now here. His tweets accuse me of treating the Left in general and the social justice movement in particular with “frothing” and as “ordure”. And now he comes here and adds Tumblr to the list of victims, and “actual disgust” to the list of adjectives.
I resent this because it is a complete fabrication.
I resent it because, far from a frothing hatred of Tumblr, I myself have a Tumblr account which I use almost every day and which I’ve made three hundred posts on. Sure, I’ve gently mocked Tumblr (as has every Tumblr user) but I’ve also very publicly praised it for hosting some very interesting and enlightening conversations.
I resent it because I’ve posted a bunch of long defenses and steelmannings of social justice ideas like Social Justice For The Highly Demanding Of Rigor and The Wonderful Thing About Triggers, some of which have gone mildly viral in the social justice blogosphere, and some of which have led to people emailing me or commenting saying they’ve changed their minds and become less hostile to social justice as a result.
I resent it because, far from failing to intellectually engage with the Left, in the past couple of months I’ve read, reviewed, and enjoyed left-leaning books on Marx, the Soviet economy, and market socialism
I resent it because the time I most remember someone trying to engage me about social justice, Apophemi, I wrote a seven thousand word response which I consider excruciatingly polite, which started with a careful justification for why writing it would be more productive and respectful than not writing it, and which ended with a heartfelt apology for the couple of things I had gotten wrong on my last post on the subject.
(Disgust! Frothing! Ordure!)
I resent it because I happily hosted Ozy’s social justice blogging for several months, giving them an audience for posts like their takedown of Heartiste, which was also very well-received and got social justice ideas to people who otherwise wouldn’t have seen them.
I resent it because about a fifth of my blogroll is social justice or social justice-aligned blogs, each of which get a couple dozen hits from me a day.
I resent it because even in my most impassioned posts about social justice, I try to make it very clear that there are parts of the movement which make excellent points, and figures in the movement I highly respect. Even in what I think everyone here will agree is my meanest post on the subject, Radicalizing the Romanceless, I stop to say the following about the social justice blogger I am arguing against:
(DISGUST! FROTHING! ORDURE!)
I resent it because it trivializes all of my sick burns against neoreactionaries, like the time I accused them of worshipping Kim Jong-un as a god, and the time I said they were obsessed with “precious, precious, white people”, and the time I mocked Jim for thinking Eugene V. Debs was a Supreme Court case.
I resent this because anyone who looks at my posts tagged with social justice can see that almost as many are in favor as against.
And I resent this because I’m being taken to task about charity by somebody whose own concept of a balanced and reasonable debate is retweeting stuff like this—and again and again calling the people he disagrees with “shitlords”
(which puts his faux-horror that I treat people I disagree with ‘like ordure’ in a pretty interesting new light)
No matter how many pro-social-justice posts I write, how fair and nice I am, or what I do, David Gerard is going to keep spreading these smears about me until I refuse to ever engage with anyone who disagrees with him about anything at all. As long as I’m saying anything other than “every view held by David Gerard is perfect and flawless and everyone who disagrees with David Gerard is a shitlord who deserve to die”, he is going to keep concern-trolling you guys that I am “biased” or “unfair”.
Please give his continued campaigning along these lines the total lack of attention it richly deserves.
I’m a SSC fan and highly sympathetic to SJ goals and ideals. One of the core LW meetup members in my city can’t stand to read SSC on account of what he perceives to be constant bashing of SJ. (I’ve already checked and verified that his perception of the proportion of SJ bashing in SSC posts is a massive overestimate, probably caused by selection bias.) As a specific example of verbiage that he considers typical of SSC he cited:
When I read that line, I didn’t take it literally—in spite of the use of the word “literally”. I just kind of skipped over it. But after it was pointed out to me that I ought to take it literally, well… “frothing” is a pretty good description.
I remain a SSC fan, but I’m less likely to just blank out the meaning of these kinds of things now.
Have you considered that you should stop bending over backwards to get SJW’s to like you since it’s not going to happen anyway?
This is a frankly boggling rant I have no intention of engaging.
k
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/20/social-justice-for-the-highly-demanding-of-rigor/
Yvain admits that he had negative personal experiences with feminists that may have left him prejudiced. It’s a bias, but at least he is aware of it.
Biases aside, I think that many people, including Yvain, are concerned by the large political influence that SJWs can exert.
NRx, as wrong as they might be, hold virtually zero political influence at the moment, hence debating them is just an intellectual exercise.
SJWs can influence mainstream media, college policies and even legislation. They are perceived as hostile towards straight white men, and especially towards geeks (nerds, sci-fi fans, gamers, etc.). For people belonging to these groups, political opposition to SJWs is a matter of self-preservation.
Today’s example.
Not so. This guy might describe himself as a “pickup artist” and even work with Real Social Dynamics, but much of the community considers his ‘methods’ to be quite disgraceful. (Note that RSD itself is among the most reputable pickup groups nowadays, regardless of this particular controversy.) And SJW’s (in the Tumblr sense) had little to do with him being barred from entering so many countries.
And why should the gracefulness of his methods matter for the purpose of granting a visa?
Why shouldn’t it? Julien Blanc is not a UK citizen, he’s an alien national who wishes to do business in the UK by teaching his methods there. Entering the country is a privilege, not a right.
Check your privilege! XD
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Anyway, yes, a government has the sovereign right to deny foreign citizens the possibility to enter the country, but it needs legal basis to do so. It’s not like any random clerk at the visa office can turn you back because they don’t like your face.
I don’t know what legal justification they used to keep Julien Blanc out, but given the type of people that the UK has let in its territory, I guess it was probably quite unusual.
Fair enough, but are we applying this standard uniformly, given the fact that e.g. Rotherham happened.
We are not talking about the rights of a sovereign government. HM Government can bar, say, anyone with a moustache from entering the UK and it would be fully within its rights.
Tumblr!social_justice and Tumblr!feminism (note the Tumblr! part) are not political ideas, though; they’re more closely described as echo chambers (whoops, sorry, I meant to say “safe spaces”, of course.) where meaningless duckspeak is endlessly repeated—so reacting with disgust and ridicule to them is arguably appropriate given LW’s and—plausibly—SSC’s goals. Neoreaction at least makes the grade as something that’s (marginally) politically relevant. Which is still not saying much, of course.
While Tumblr is of course awful, the simple answer is for Yvain to treat Tumblr as I treat neoreaction: close the browser tab and move on with life, good riddance to bad nonsense.
When I close the browser tab with neoreaction, I have a decent chance of never meeting a neoreactionary in my real life, so the problem is solved. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same thing about Tumblr!feminists. They are also rare, but I have already had the “pleasure” of meeting three of them. (Twice, they have cost me a female friend, because they were a friend of the friend, and have successfully convinced my friend that I am an evil person, because I happen to have an Y chromosome, which is a huge red flag for them. The third time, they have publicly accused my friend of being racist, when she dared to say that some traits correlate with certain genes, in a group of people who previously said more or less that genetics is a burgeoise pseudoscience.)
Unlike neoreaction, feminism happens to be a topic in real life (one could even call it a billion dollar industry, if we include all the government money spent on gender studies, female-only projects, etc.), so its perversions have a real impact. Many people spend a lot of time online, and if they meet the Tumblr version first, some of them will conclude this is the true version.
What country do you live in that allows you to think these things only exist on the internet?
Imagine how intolerable NRx would be if it were to acquire one of these. Fortunately, their ideas are too extreme for 4chan, even, so I have no idea where such a forum would be hosted.
It may strike you as anarchy, but pretty much anyone can host a forum on the internet for insignificant amounts of money or even for free.
Of course we have one, but it’s secret.
Everyone knows about your 8chan board, bro :P
[deleted]
It’s about the difference in quality of debate. Their manifold flaws notwithstanding, at least most neoreactionaries are articulate (Moldbug almost esoterically so). SJWs on the other hand feel entitled to go apeshit on you—to hell with convincing and productive debates.
The steelmanning is due to the fact that neoreaction is a strange composite of a few very good things (originality, aesthetics, appreciation for virtue) dispersed in an extremely toxic medium of hatred, drive for dominance, and undue confidence in the rightfulness of their own ideas. (Most of neoreaction only makes sense from a sociopathic perspective). A mind that is wise and cautious in judgment sees the good along with the bad and figures out these guys can’t quite be total sociopaths if you listen to them talking about what they like and strive for (and besides some of them can put up a strong case for their position), and so proceeds to attempt to filter the good ideas from the hateful drivel. A productive discussion may sometimes ensue; NRs may be quite hateful, but their natural habitat is the ivory tower rather than the sewage system that is the comments section. If you want far right low level trolling, there are better places for that.
By contrast—I don’t know what your experience was with SJWs, but this is how it was for me—SJWs do nothing but low level trolling. They aren’t going to give you anything you can conceivably desire out of the discussion (not even timely exit); they just want to fight. It’s a great stretch of imagination to connect their verbal abuses to that one trait that psychologically distinguishes left from right, tenderness of heart. It’s not difficult to see how they can be even worse than NRs at endearing themselves to one. The fact that they managed to exasperate Scott, who comes off as a supernaturally patient person in general, is a fact that should bear some consideration.
Having only a passing familiarity with Slate Star Codex, I can’t claim to have much knowledge of the context here. However, using information gleaned from this comment alone, I would say that polite steelmanning is probably the default reaction to a lot of things as far as LW readers are concerned (this is obviously and sadly untrue outside of these circles), and that if feminism, social justice, and Tumblr were reacted to with genuine disgust, something probably happened to justify that disgust. If I’m wrong about this, feel free to inform me.
Where did Yvain state this? I didn’t think he had any neoreactionary friends.
“In the past two months I have inexplicably and very very suddenly become much more conservative. This isn’t the type of conservativism where I agree with any conservative policies, mind you. Those still seem totally wrong-headed to me. It’s the sort of conservativism where, even though conservatives seem to be wrong about everything, often in horrible or hateful ways, they seem like probably mostly decent people deep down, whereas I have to physically restrain myself from going on Glenn Beck style rants about how much I hate leftists and how much they are ruining everything. Even though I mostly agree with the leftists whenever they say something.”
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
“friends” may be an overstatement. But definitely “people whose ideas he steeps himself in”. Well done, you have a convert in the making.
You specifically said he was “hanging around neoreactionaries”. It sounds like a quibble, but it’s actually worth knowing the real result. The entire weight of your original statement implied his ideological change came from the people he was actually spending time with IRL. But now in this latest post you admit you were wrong about that, and that’s important.
These things are disgusting. Slate Star is increasing in reasonableness.