Originally published at: Silicon Valley investor called for far-right mob to harass "vulnerable" journalists | Boing Boing
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Christ, what an asshole.
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Seems like what Adam Curtis has been exploring for some time.
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A VERY informed & interesting take on the whole thing by Elizabeth Spiers: Slate Star Clusterfuck - My New Band Is
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What was really going on is that certain plute adherents of the “Californian Ideology” (with its absolutist techno-utopian view of free speech as exemplified by Slate Star Codex, combined with “free”-market fundamentalism, social libertarianism, and extreme privilege-blindness) that’s long been entrenched in Silicon Valley techbro culture decided to ally themselves with fascists/neo-feudalists (who they can totally control as their tools /s). As you note, they made this decision years before Biff became a serious political candidate. I wouldn’t be surprised if Srinivasan has gone full-fascist in the intervening years like his mentor Peter Thiel already was back in the 2010s.
He has a new series out. “Can’t Get You Out of my Head”. As Curtis becomes more mainstrearm in his discussions about fear and money, I see that conservatives are now trying to smear him as a left-wing version of a Qanon conspiracy theorist.
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I’d call it the “Dick Enlightenment” but there’s nothing enlightened about it.
Also: I’m totally gonna start a band called “The Bronies.”
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PS: I ike your avatar…
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48 posts were split to a new topic: Gawker journalism
Thanks. To be clear, it’s not a sign that I approve of political street violence*. I do oppose fascists, Stalinists, and oligarchs (the modern equivalent of Weimar’s wealthy monarchist conservative establishment – see e.g. Srinivasan).
[* ETA: as some dimwit tr0lls have tried to imply]
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“Rationalist”… So that’s the new go-to word for Ayn Rand selfish-as-fuck Objectivists?
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What’s always been clear to me, living here, is that Silicon Valley is full of people who aren’t rational, they’ve just convinced themselves they are (and are blind to the kinds of cognitive deficits we all share, when it comes to themselves), which is really dangerous. (It’s one thing to strive for rationality, but that requires acknowledging that it’s really not possible.) Just a bunch of dudes sitting around smelling their own farts thinking it’s the scent of genius.
All other kinds of problems flow directly from that. (E.g. “disruption” - if you, unlike everyone else, is rational, you can apply your rationality to solve problems that no one ever has! You don’t need to be an expert, as you can start with first principles and reason your way from there. You can just blindly blunder in and apply that rationality and the outcome will be good and definitely won’t result in fucking up a whole industry and destroying the lives of thousands of people, oops…)
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That was my interpretation.
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This whole debacle reminds me of this classic:
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Evil link. I found that it turned on notifications, even though I clicked no.
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endarkenment
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So neo Nazis.
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Not quite. Nazis are socially conservative, at least in their ideology. Think more of the wealthy and libertine
Weimar-era Germans who thought they could use the Nazis to preserve their privileges.
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the Rationalist movement
A couple of years ago I ran across something I thought was interesting and kept reading. On its own it was fine, though it ultimately did not live up to its initial promise and turned out to be kind of useless, but I followed some of the references it linked and read those, trying to learn more. This ended up being my introduction to the Rationalist movement.
I didn’t have to read much to decide “Rationalist” is a misnomer. I didn’t find much rational about it, and at times I wondered whether it was just a joke. It mostly struck me as a philosophy outlining how people with power can fuck with people without power while making it look like sound career advice, with bonus points for getting a victim to take ludicrous advice seriously.
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