Urbit, afaik, is not tied to Yarvin's political views, and he takes special care not to bring politics into Urbit talks.
What Urbit does have in common with Yarvin's political writing is his tendency to play three-card monte with what he's actually doing by employing oblique references to things smart people are interested in, whole-cloth invention of vocabulary, and complex chains of reasoning which are often missing critical bits.
Do you have an example of sleight of authorial hand concealing weak reasoning?
I ask as I've occasionally suspected something similar, purely because Moldbug's floridly verbose prose style (and this is me saying that!) makes his essays each a marvelous hike into the semantic equivalent of the deep back woods, and there are many thickets within those bosques where a sneaky thing might well choose to hide. (Probably from revenuers.)
It's clearly a style choice, because Yarvin doesn't do it; only Moldbug does. And, I mean, I like it; it is a rare pleasure for me to encounter a modern writer who plays with language in a way that's other than masturbatory. But it does seem well suited to making up for weakness of reasoning with strength of narrative, and I'd be interested to see someone point to an example, or better several, of Moldbug palming a card.
It started in the early days of Unqualified Reservations. He used to write relatively short posts, about 1500-2000 words; the comments sections promptly filled with people calling him out on his bad reasoning, lack of knowledge and misuse of terms. He then pivoted to his better-known style, where he first spends 1000 words redefining basic terms so that he can make striking statements (most famously, "America is a communist country") without being called on them immediately.
> Urbit, afaik, is not tied to Yarvin's political views,
This is incorrect: read the old version of the security chapter, before it was bowdlerised to make the startup look less unviable: http://archive.is/UK8So
> and he takes special care not to bring politics into Urbit talks.
This is because being the founder of neoreaction is now hanging like a radioactive anvil over his startup. (Even though Urbit is basically his "My Favourite Toy Language", and I'm pretty sure nobody would have taken the slightest interest if it was just from that OpenWAP guy rather than that neoreaction guy.)
Which bits of Urbit do you see as designed to further reprehensible ideology? I'm well aware of Moldbug's political views, which you're free to call reprehensible if you want, but if there's a clear link from Urbit to those views then it's lost on me. If you're going to throw out accusations like that, you ought to justify them at least a little.
I agree that it is described confusingly. I don't understand it well enough to know one way or the other whether it's remarkable.
Old old versions of the Urbit docs talk about things like duchies being passed down from father to son, how Bitcoin is terrible because it enables immoral things, and how trolls will get kicked out of the Urbitverse for not conforming to social mores. Some people see that stuff as neoreactionary dog whistles.
Newer versions of the docs are far less political, so either Urbit has changed or they're just keeping it quiet.
How does urbit, the technology, further a reprehensible political ideology? I assume you mean Moldbug's ideology, which I agree is reprehensible, but how does urbit further it?
Urbit, intrinsically, is some obfuscated functional computing ideas put together in a mildly interesting way. In practice, however, it's used as a vehicle for Yarvin to get himself into events/conferences/conversations where he promulgates his views.
i saw him speak at lambdaconf, and there were no politics, not even sneakily hidden before or after the camera was rolling. Nor did he run around and do anything objectionable during other talks, or in the hallways.
> Politics of any sort is out of scope at a functional programming conference. I pledge to treat other LambdaConf guests as if they were colleagues at a large company or fellow students at a university, and neither utter nor show any content that’s out of scope or otherwise disturbing. My pen name has been “doxed,” but professionally I behave as if it was a secret.
I didn't claim that was his motivation, I claimed it was the practical outcome of urbit, and it is. His presence prevented a great many people from attending lambdaconf because they had a legitimate fear of the racist violence he advocates, and refuses to recant. You'd have to work a lot harder apologizing for fascist bigots to make me feel any embarrassment for calling out their negative impact on communities I care about.
Claiming politics is out of scope is absurd, and is a rhetorical mechanism designed to, at a minimum, preserve the status quo. His politics are abhorrent -- accepting his declaration of them as irrelevant when they're anything but is effectively siding with them.
Most of the criticism of Yarvin is by those unable to distinguish between descriptive and normative ideas. His writing is a giant "what if" that mainly rejects the provincial notion that only today's common views are the most sound.
I'd bet that the adjacent commenter's idea of "[his racist advocacy] is well documented" comes from Twitter and Tumblr quotes taken out of context, cyclically retweeted in outrage.
The social media shitstorms raised by mere announcements of his later-cancelled attendances is enough to draw attention to his dead blog and propagate his ideas to receptive ears, without him actually doing any new political-advocacy work. This arrangement seems quite ingenious for its efficiency, but I suspect it came about accidentally.
