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“A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

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Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I only saw two twitter comments complaining before the disinvitation, and one of those was proud communist Steve Klabnik.

A few things. I was not planning on getting involved in this conversation, but since dang decided to un-flag it, I'm going to leave one or two comments, but don't plan on sticking around very much. As tptacek said elsewhere in this thread, politics + HN == nightmare. First of all, many more people complained than me. You didn't look very hard. Second, I'm not _strictly_ a communist: I'm certainly very left-wing, and…

It was relevant to the statement I was replying to: "I see more and more echoes of the worldview and tactics that ultimately killed just shy of a hundred million people or so last century, and yes, it scares me." You've labeled yourself a communist in the past, if that's not strictly accurate I stand corrected.

My personal background is well known. I'm here logged in with my real name, I'm not hiding it. I don't know how Gawker's opinion of me is exactly relevant to whether or not you're a communist but that's fine.

If there's nothing wrong with being a communist why are you acting like I've slandered you by bring your background into this? It doesn't add up.

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#252

All I long for is logical consistency and empathy... Various comments from the discussion: > Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."? Getting dis-invited from a tech conference is not losing the right to say anything. The state is not punishing Yarvin for his speech. Giving a talk at a private tech conferences is not a right protected by anyo…

I think your counter-arguments are very bad. I thank you for sharing them here, because I don't think they reflect uncommon opinions at all, and I think they are too easily accepted without reflection.

With regards to the "defend to the death your right to say it" hyperbole, I agree that it is overstated. Furthermore, it is true that getting dis-invited from a tech conference does not involve losing the right to say anything; nor is the state punishing speech. However, it would be an error to overlook the fact that speech is being punished.

Yarvin would have been welcome at the conference had he not revealed his racist opinions in [what was intended to be] an unrelated forum. Those opinions revealed, he was unwelcome, without (as far as I can tell) any particular reference to his actual public behaviour. So as a practical matter, if the conference's reaction should be considered normative and appropriate, he had a right to say things... unless he wanted a career.

Now, you may well wish to argue that this reaction should indeed be normative and correct. However, I am not sure that you would be as comfortable with your actual words in another context. We could be discussing this in Russia in the 1950s, for instance, and agreeing that Yarvin shouldn't have kept his jewish-sounding last name if he wanted a career, or got forbid spoken about his anti-socialist economic views.

In such a case, our circumstances would have been very different, of course, and it is incredibly easy to draw broad distinctions between counter-factual racist fantasies and failing to disguise one's ethnic background. But the mechanism is the same, and here you are stating an indifference to --- defending, even --- the mechanism.

Another commentator writes that "kicking people out of your conference hands veto power to whomever determines what racism is and when something is racist."

It seems to me that if a popular arbiter of opinion about racism could mobilize a grassroots reaction against racism as they saw it, when they saw it, and when they felt like it; and if that grassroots reaction probably would not have occurred without their instigation: under those circumstances, this assertion would come quite close to being true.

Again, this is not something peculiar to racism, or fighting against racism, or any particular political struggle at all. It is a mechanism whereby interest groups influence the direction of public discourse and policy. Yet here --- despite the certainty that there are interest groups using such tactics, somewhere in the world, whose views are pure anathema to you --- you are not actually defending the fight for social justice and inclusion; instead, you defend the mechanism.

More realistically, I do not think that you intended to even do so much as that. Your reply at first reads as an announcement of indifference and antipathy to the author's concerns. A rejection of actual argumentation or discussion, in other words. (This itself, in case you might overlook it, is rather far from an inherently virtuous sort of response.)

However, your parenthetical comment does attempt to justify the mechanism, and the comment is notable in that it specifically rejects the protection of actual minorities, instead embracing a "market" determination of right or wrong: in other words, the nature of a protected minority is to be determined by the opinion of the general majority.

A third commentator complains about a sort of reverse-racism burden, in that the "straight white male" is doubly impacted, as both the target of discrimination, and as a target of discrimination who is not a member of "a protected class." I do not think that this is a very defensible argument. However, "accept that the world isn't perfect, and feel lucky you don't have it worse" is not any better.

At risk of beating a dead horse, one must in general ask oneself if the response defends the structure or the substance of the allegedly discriminatory circumstance. I will assume you can predict my response to this as an argument defending the discriminatory structure. Insofar as the response is a defense of the substance of the circumstance, then it seems to be implicitly appealing for deference and calling for restitution, of sorts, in that a hardship should be accepted in recognition of the hardships of others. This is a very powerful and emotionally appealing argument... when made to address apparent discrimination that arises out of minority protection. The 'Why The "Safe Area" Of The [Women's/LGBT/Native] Center Is Not Discriminatory' speech would be the typical example, in my experience.

Here, it is much less appealing, and also misses the point. Reading your response literally, one should infer that any member of an identifiable group ultimately needs to accept that "the world isn't perfect" and that they will face some degree of 'oppression'; they should protest against and fight that oppression only if it is too much oppression, or too deadly. I am almost certain that this is absolutely not something that you meant to say. I suspect that you meant to convey that you thought the commentator's experienced/feared discrimination was trivial and negligible.

This would be fine, as a response, but the attempt to convert it into a self-evident, justified response on this basis is very weak, and I feel that the problem is that you are trying to do the easy thing rather than the hard thing, and to end argument or dialog rather than invite it. "You can see this playing out in video games..." really? Straight white men are falling prey to reverse discrimination in video games? I would love to hear the commentator attempt to justify this view. It would be satisfactory enough, I think, to simply end discussion by responding that "this is ridiculous unless you feel like making a cogent argument to the contrary." Instead, however, you let it slide completely: you even accept the premise. I feel that if you were not intent on justifying [reverse] discrimination (because it is reverse[1]), and instead were concerned about discrimination period, you would not have missed the opportunity to talk about what does or does not constitute discrimination --- let alone missed the fact that this is a ridiculous, indefensible imagination of what discrimination is.

Finally, the commentator who writes that "my personal opinions would get me called racist, sexist, and homophobic by Marxist standards and I was exhausted by the political mask I had to assume just to find and keep work."

Again, structure, substance, escape_goat goes on for a paragraph or two here in a now-predictable manner, let's skip to the good part... suffering.

You are responding to someone reporting a sense of alienation and mental exhaustion specifically because they had to wear a 'mask' in the workplace. Your response is that you imagine that it was a lot easier for them to wear that mask than it would be for them to change their skin color, or gender, or age.

This seems obviously true, as those are very difficult things to change. It is also true that these visible, physical qualities have created barriers in the tech industry. But it leaves begging the question of whether anyone should be required to wear a mask, and under what circumstances. Is it wrong to discriminate against co-workers on the basis of the color of their skin, but not wrong to feel uncomfortable around them if they act "too black"? Is it okay to create a "non-homophobic" environment and then fire people for revealing their sexual orientation? I am thinking that perhaps there are some circumstances where you would not find "it's easier to wear a mask" to be a satisfactory response at all. Even though, yes, it's easier to wear a mask.

Similar to the case of the third commentator, but more problematically, your response is clearly predicated against the complainant because of their (white, straight, male) identity and whatever mixture of personal emotions, political views, or what-have-you that makes someone fear that their views would be seen as racist, sexist, or homophobic by 'Marxists'.

Again, the central, crucial abstract question (should anyone feel this alienated in the workplace?) and the difficult, complicated particular questions (why does this person, as an individual, feel so alienated, and are those feelings justified; do they reflect a work environment that unknowingly makes rigid ideological demands; do they reflect mental health issues; could this person comfortably work with a black/gay/female co-worker [which of these] without 'wearing a mask'; would a black/gay/female co-worker be able to work with them; would the situation be altered by empathy training, counselling, mediation; and so on...) These go unanswered.

And this is your response to someone's actual personal suffering, so one must infer that you do not oppose discrimination because it causes human suffering. If there is a different, justifiable basis for opposing discrimination, then you should be straightforwards about that, as this would be the most crucial aspect of your response by far.

[1] An oscillatory model of discriminatory impulses resulting in the balanced distribution of prejudice floats into my mind when I say this.

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#253
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be fine to ban Curtis if his talk was about his politics. It would be fine to ban him if he did not agree to abide by the code of conduct. The conference obviously does not owe him a platform to discuss his politics. But his talk was about Urbit, not about his politics, and Urbit is a genuinely fascinating piece of technology. Even if the project fails, by studying it, I have learned a lot of ideas that I ha…

What have you learned by reading the Urbit code? I found it impenetrable, but didn't try very hard to decode it.

It wasn't the code itself that I learned from. I have more been enriched and stimulated by reading the blog posts, documentation, hacker news threads, and mailing list. A couple of the more interesting ideas are:

* He created Nock, which in a way is bytecode language, like compiled java bytecode or the .NET CIL. But his idea was that this bytecode should be the simplest possible thing, far, far simpler than the CLR. In fact, it should be versioned in Kelvin versioning, starting at 5,000 and counting down, until it is finally perfected and will never need to change. Going forward, all consumer apps will always compile down to this bytecode. All new hardware platforms can build interpreters for this bytecode. I think that is a pretty novel and neat approach. If it caught on, it would ensure that any program we wrote now could be run for the next thousand years.

* His view is that to beat spam, you simply need to have a finite number of cryptographically secured identities. This number can be large. But if it is finite, that means accounts will not be costless, which means the market over time will be able to solve the problems of trust and filtering out spam in a way far superior to how it works today.

It's hard to do the ideas justice by trying to repeat them myself. In reading through the material it was just lots of little things, where I said to myself, "Ah, that is a neat solution to that problem, I wonder if he'll be able to make it work."

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those calling for his removal from the conference cited this six-year-old blog post about Thomas Carlyle as their only specific complaint. http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-car...

This is factually not true, and since you claim to have read my complaints, this comment appears disingenuous. More specifically, I linked http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/ and http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/ as a brief introduction if you don't want to wade through the torrent of Dark Enlightenment shenanigans.

The OP asked for a link to "the most objectionable content by Curtis Yarvin". The article I linked was the only specific Moldbug post I saw those on Twitter objecting to.

OP didn't ask for third party articles complaining about Curtis Yarvin, so your comment appears disingenuous.

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#255

All I long for is logical consistency and empathy... Various comments from the discussion: > Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."? Getting dis-invited from a tech conference is not losing the right to say anything. The state is not punishing Yarvin for his speech. Giving a talk at a private tech conferences is not a right protected by anyo…

>Getting dis-invited from a tech conference is not losing the right to say anything. The state is not punishing Yarvin for his speech. Giving a talk at a private tech conferences is not a right protected by anyone.

I don't have a strong opinion on this, but a lot of people confuse Free Speech, the ideal, with Free Speech, the legal right. A lot of people get upset when people are fired or ostracized for their political positions. Even when it doesn't involve the government and isn't protected. E.g. a lot of people were fired or ostracized for being communists in the 50s.

The rest of your comment is just "other people's problem's are worse than yours, so you don't have any right to complain".

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#256

Isn't Urbit named for the Mencius Moldbug blog, whose writer repeatedly refers to same as "UR"? How distinct is Urbit and Yarvin from the advocacy of the Moldbug UR blog? The association between Yarvin and that blog isn't exactly cryptic; for instance, Yarvin has given somewhat recent video-recorded talks espousing many of the same ideas as the blog, purposefully and in some depth. Is it possible that the most boring…

I have at least attempted to be _very_ clear that I do not begrudge the organizers of this conference for exactly the reason that you say. Your 'boring interpretation' lines up with my understanding of the situation. As has been said many times in this thread, Yarvin is free to say what he believes, and I am free to say what I believe, and organizers are allowed to do what they want. This is how a free market of idea…

Booting out Moldbug makes sense as long as we boot out any avowed communists or Marxists as well. Those philosophies led directly to the deaths of tens of millions in the past century, so any reasonable person should find them highly offensive.

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#257
post #235
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, the St. Louis hacker who first suggested urbit would be a great fit for Strange Loop (hi Justin!) is an African-American. An obsession with collective identity and collective characteristics - all proletarians are noble, all Germans are masters, all rednecks are racists, etc, etc - is common, perhaps for obvious reasons, in the democratic era. And in particular, all parties responsible for the atrocities…

Urbit -- Since we have you have you here, could you respond to the accusations of racist views that are being attributed to you? In particular, do you consider yourself to be "racist", and if so, what does this term mean to you? I read your blog for years, and I never got that sense that you were advocating for personal or institutional discrimination against individuals on the basis of their race. Did I miss this po…

I shouldn't post as urbit. Quite a few other people, few of whom agree with me on anything, have worked on the project.

The word "racist" and its conjugations does not appear in the English language until the 1920s - see Peter Frost's cultural history [0]. If you asked Shakespeare if he was a "racist," he would not know what you meant.

"Racist" is essentially a term of abuse which no group or party has ever applied to itself. Like most such epithets, it has two meanings - a clear objective one, describing a person who fails to believe in the anthropological theories of human equality which became first popular, then universal in the mid-20th century; and a caricature of the vices, personal or political, typically engaged in by such a foul unbeliever.

I actually like the answer given by Steve Klabnik above [1]. To call Steve a communist is a serious personal insult, and you can get banned for it [2]. However, Steve reserves the right to call himself a communist, or not, as he likes. This is actually kind of cool...

[0] - http://www.unz.com/pfrost/age-of-reason/ [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676630 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676861

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#258
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read a Moldbug post that actually supported slavery.

In that Carlyle essay, he says these, among other things: "Once we get this far, we are almost all the way to Carlyle on slavery. We have not agreed that a man can be born a slave, but we agree that he can sell himself into slavery. That is: he can sign a contract with a master in which the slave agrees unconditionally to obey and work for the master, and the master agrees unconditionally to protect and support the s…

Moldbug did in other places explicitly denounce hereditary, chattel slavery and called it evil.

His actual view seems to be that it should be legal for a person to sign a permanent, life-long employment contract, mediated and regulated for abuse by the state, where the person gets a guaranteed wage in return for having to provide labor. The idea is that for the lower end of the bell curve, this is a lot more humane than subjecting someone to the capriciousness of the capitalist system, where a person can be fired at will. Note that some on the left have made the same argument. There was a leftist critique of the end of serfdom in Eastern Europe, by which they accused the end of serfdom of being a greedy power-play by the feudal lords, who wished to renege on their obligations to provide for the serfs. Does this view make Moldbug evil?

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#259

Isn't Urbit named for the Mencius Moldbug blog, whose writer repeatedly refers to same as "UR"? How distinct is Urbit and Yarvin from the advocacy of the Moldbug UR blog? The association between Yarvin and that blog isn't exactly cryptic; for instance, Yarvin has given somewhat recent video-recorded talks espousing many of the same ideas as the blog, purposefully and in some depth. Is it possible that the most boring…

Sorry, but no. urbit, from the Latin urbs == city, is actually a good bit older than UR.

The initials are somehow very compelling - another couple of great literary UR blogs are the Unz Review (unz.com) and Uncouth Reflections (uncouthreflections.com).

I will admit that urbit has very few users, as technically we're really not launched at all. We were thinking Strange Loop might be a good place for this, but I guess not.

Re: “A Statement with My View on Curtis Yarvin and Strange Loop”

#260

What outcomes do actions like this encourage? Well, it encourages controversial writers to stay in the shadows, hide their real identities, lest the vigilante mobs find them. This outcome also encourages people in general to say less, creates an atmosphere of self-censorship, and so harms our free society. Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say i…

To 'defend it to the death' will require more than just sitting behind a keyboard posting on the hacker news forums.
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