That’s the nom de Web under which Yarvin writes mind-numbing political tracts. Yarvin/Moldbug is a self-proclaimed “neoreactionary,” an unabashed elitist and inegalitarian in the tradition of Thomas Carlyle, one of his heroes. (He fits neatly into the “Natural-Order Conservative” category of a conservative taxonomy.) His worldview: Democracy sucks, the strong should rule the weak, and we could use a good old-fashioned dictator to clean up this mess. That, and he believes that “human biodiversity”—as in the “science” of racial differences, à la The Bell Curve—is real, valid, and very important. Neoreactionary thinking is far more complicated and far more verbose than this—which is in part a deliberate attempt to keep the great unwashed from paying too much attention to such Important Thought. If you’re curious, the tireless Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex has written extensive rebuttals of neoreactionary theory, which go to prove Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
So maybe not so much racism as straight up bullshit?
Mind numbing is right. How can people wade through that sea of words to even tell if this guy is a racist?
Payne gave no examples of such hate speech, but others pointed to Yarvin’s 2009 celebration of Carlyle’s abstract celebration of slavery. This and other Yarvin pieces certainly reveal him to be a bigot at the very least, but it’s a major reach to call them hate speech, since they’re about as intimidating as skim milk. Calling it such insults those who suffer under the very real and violent hate speech of actual hate groups.
This rabbit hole is a very scary and deep rabbit hole, reading the docs for the “general purpose” folding@home VM he is building that has its foundations in this twisted and impossible to decipher politics only leads to more confusion.
That said, this kind of writing even in paragraph size gives me the creeps
Maybe. For one thing, failed child prodigies always have it in for non-failed child prodigies. For another, deplorable Ashkenazi ghetto inbreeding produced a world in which a picture of me at any age is easily mistaken for Aaron Swartz at the same age - which is just creepy.
One moment there bud… I think you are missing out on what is really creepy here.
I’m assuming he’s not going to be talking about his beliefs at this programming conference, right? I’d say that if he has something actually relevant to present and he stays on topic, he shouldn’t necessarily be kicked out. But of course, attendees are free to not show up for his talk and just read the summary instead. And if this is a person has a reputation for being abrasive it might be better to have him stick to publishing his stuff in writing rather than presenting it in person.
Sort of… when you read through the documentation of his weird project the politics appear to be referenced and to be the main driver for building this thing.
Society only works because people who have opposing views are generally polite enough to tone them down in each others presence. If he’s in a position to make a positive contribution and is able to keep his misanthropic tendencies to himself while there, what’s the big deal with him speaking just about coding?
If he undertakes to just talk about coding and is still blacklisted despite such an undertaking, then he’s being punished for a thought crime.
If he’s invited and can’t keep his more unpleasant thoughts to himself —or actually acts on them— then he should be kicked out for actually doing something wrong.
I honestly can´t be bothered to do deeper research on this guy´s political views and I am hardly qualified to judge the merit of his contributions to computer science. I just think the two don´t neccessarily have much to do with each other. People, and programmers especially, can be borderline genius in one field and completely unqualified in another (social interaction or politics for example). I also think that the mindset and lifestyle often displayed by good programmers lends itself to the development of abstruse social ideology in some cases.
That’s different then. A professional conference like that shouldn’t let people push their private political agendas, even if they are doing something interesting in the process.
The fact that they invited him is part of what makes this an ‘honoring’ act, and part of what makes it problematic. If he were presenting at the conference because he had submitted a presentation proposal and the contents of the presentation had been reviewed and accepted amidst hundreds of other presenters who would also be presenting research, that would be one thing. But inviting him to speak makes it seem like they think he should be some kind of keynote speaker or something.
You have a functional programmer at a functional programming conference, surrounded by other functional programmers. What are they going to talk about? Historical essays on the nature of slavery? Mmnnope. Tiny issues in Haskell syntax? Bingo! I have worked with Haskell programmers.
I am glad I don’t have to make choices like this, but…
What is this guy like when you meet him? Anyone? If he stays on topic, and you don’t know he is the weirdo that everyone was talking about unless someone else tells you, so invite him and things are probably working as well as they can do. Advertising his other side is just drawing attention to it. If he’s going to stand up and say that women and black people can’t code, you definitely don’t want him (though he could run for President). If he probably stays on topic, but may go off at a tangent when answering questions from people who want to poke him and see how he reacts, then you’re screwed whatever you do.
Moldbug is the founder of the neoreactionary redpillers; overt pro-slavery white supremacist, nothing subtle about it.
His crew also tend to be quite fond of the elimination of women’s suffrage and ability to deny sexual consent. A tendency towards misogynistic and homophobic fantasising with a violent theme, too.
Counter-enlightenment MRA neo-fascists wrapped in a mountainous word salad of incoherent bullshit, basically.
But it’s a platform to talk about some technical issue clearly unrelated to their odious views, whereas with your example of Vox Day talking at a science fiction conference, I think it’d be pretty impossible for his views on what makes good science fiction not to bring to mind connections to his views about the proper place of everyone who isn’t a conservative white man, even if he didn’t bring them up explicitly. It seems to me there’s a distinction between technical/scientific fields and more humanistic ones here–would you say that if a racist scientist came up with some genuinely groundbreaking new model or results unrelated to their racist views, they shouldn’t be invited to spread awareness of it at scientific conferences? What if James Watson discovered some important new result in molecular biology, for example?
Wow! That is a peculiar kind of babble that those racists have isn’t it? Reminds me of some of the rambling philosophising of the Hugo award rigging crowd. Something about the twisted prose. Smug yet self-hating at the same time.
You get really mixed emotions reading that stuff: boredom of course, repulsion, and not a little pity. It’s a dark, dark world (or cave perhaps) that those people inhabit.
And don’t be so sure. Sometimes you need one certain personality in one certain spot for things to happen in geologically short time. The Russkies floundered rather bad after Korolyov died.
Also, getting something done fast can be worth much more than just getting it done.
