Why does it matter what his political beliefs entail on a technical subject?
More to the point, while I'm guessing you didn't dox him or whatever, the fact that he wrote under a pseudonym and (as a person having read his blog) had no idea of his actual name, I get the impression you went out of your way on this one. I don't really care about right or left (I think both sides are idiotic), but it seems like you're going out of your way on this one.
Your first sentence implies that technology and politics are divorced. I disagree with this. Furthermore, _certain_ views merit more consideration than others, especially with regards to something like a conference, see raganwald's comment elsewhere in this thread about conferences being cultural.
Second, I've been aware of Yarvin long enough that I am not particularly aware of how I came to know the psudonym. I don't remember it as being particularly private. I did not go out of my way, I saw his name on the program and instantly remembered. I'm not in the habit of digging through histories, but when I see a name I recognize, I recall a history like anyone else.
> Your first sentence implies that technology and politics are divorced. I disagree with this.
I find that perspective strange. Machinery does not particularly care what end it's put to.
> Second, I've been aware of Yarvin long enough that I am not particularly aware of how I came to know the psudonym. I don't remember it as being particularly private. I did not go out of my way, I saw his name on the program and instantly remembered. I'm not in the habit of digging through histories, but when I see a name I recognize, I recall a history like anyone else.
You try to minimize your association, but you took the effort to get him banned from speaking about a neutral topic because you dislike his political views. You ARE a censor. Frankly I think you're way worse than him, because at least he'd let you talk.
Amusingly it appears I have been slowbanned because of my participation in this conversation. Oh well.
Moldbug's fundamental definition of Left and Right is that the most purely Left organisation makes everything political, because everything is effected by persuasion, and the most purely Right organisation makes nothing political, because everything is by compulsion.
This is becoming a pretty fruitful way for me to analyse sentences along the lines of "the code is political." The interpretation is that if you 'accept' the code in some fashion, you are implicitly persuaded of some political proposition. This is a complete funhouse way of looking at what Yarvin might actually be doing: providing a structure that you can choose to execute, and that will instantiate certain unbreakable rules under which you must (are compelled to) operate. There's no subtext, it's right there in front of you in the most immediate manner possible. You either run it or you do something else.
Two branching lines of thought from here are that a) even as people like Klabnik try to separate the 'acceptable' political thought from the unacceptable residue of racism etc., they are constantly attacking at a political level, and b) looking at a rigorously defined computational system and trying to work out what the deep hidden politics of it are, is rather like the beginning meditator's mistake of thinking that mindfulness involves access to some distant source of knowledge. Rather, mindfulness involves noticing literally the most immediate possible thing, the activity of your own mind, which is with you every moment of your waking life.
I did not, I am saying that when you claim I'm putting in a lot of effort to dig through someone's history, that's wrong.
> you took the effort to get him banned from speaking
If by 'took the effort' you mean 'sent a few dozen tweets over a few hours', then sure, that's effort. I didn't even particularly strongly argue that he should be banned, though I am certainly happy about the outcome here. I never even directly contacted the organizers, just stated my opinion in public, just as you're doing here.
> I find that perspective strange. Machinery does not particularly care what end it's put to.
Well it's a human activity like anything else. The technology itself might not be "political" [though that's debatable], but the attitudes and views of the practitioners will colour everything surrounding it. And Klabnik has shown that he has a big enough personality to impact the communities that he chooses to involve himself with, for better or for worse.
As someone new to this dialogue I find these second-hand sources highly suspect. There seems like a big difference between this one person and that movement. I don't really see him 'leading' anything. Why not stick to primary sources?
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.
This guy sounds like he would be happy to see anti-Zionism as a litmus test for conference speakers.
Is that the kind of tech industry you want? Should speakers at technical conferences have all their political opinions pre-vetted for approval by a panel of progressives?
Aren't we already there, though? This is one of the reasons I left Silicon Valley three years ago. 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. Luckily, SV isn't as large a percentage of the tech industry as it likes to think. It's just over represented on tech news sites.
So, you have to be a Marxist to be offended by homophobia? Or are redefining Marxist as "someone who gets offended by non 'politically correct' speech"?
It'll be his decision next time too. And now that the Red Guards know he'll succumb to even the slightest bit of pressure, there will certainly be a next time.
I don’t know that we can use words like “succumb.” It’s always that way when you have a strong opinion about a particular matter.
For example, we can praise Obama for listening to scientists on certain matters, than complain he is caving under lobbying pressure on others.
In the end, I prefer to say that it is Alex’s decision. He didn’t crumble, succumb, get browbeaten, or anything else. He decided, and that means you can hang the responsibility around his neck.
People who can’t decide shouldn’t run things, it’s that simple.
> He didn’t crumble, succumb, get browbeaten, or anything else.
How can you possibly know that? People have lost their jobs and have been forced out of their own companies for less than allowing somebody who other people might consider "racist", "sexist" or "homophobic" to talk at their conference. You can't be aware that these things have happened to other people and say that it doesn't influence the decision.
Once it was brought to his attention, the decision Alex faced was either let Curtis go on and eventually be forced out of his own conference or disinvite him and strengthen the atmosphere of political compliance. I think he made the right short term choice for him, which is all you can realistically expect people to do, but in the long term allowing this sort of thing to persist will come and bite him in the ass.
The longer this goes on, the more radical you need to be to not become victim to the political correctness mob. In the end, if you're a straight white male, you will fall prey to it because you're not a protected class. You can see this playing out in video games, movies and SF&F publishing right now. Joss Whedon and Wil Wheaton especially are vocal feminists who have taken a beating by feminists because their views aren't extreme enough.
Look at the people making the accusations. They're all straight, white men. Socialists are typically upper middle class straight white men. Nice try painting me as racist, sexist or homophobic, though.
Look at the twitter hashtag #notyourshield. The PC hatemob isn't liked by women, people of color or LGBT. They tend to dislike straight, white men telling them what it's like to be black, female or gay.
I have a real problem with your telling me what people of colour like and don’t like. Last time I checked, you don’t speak for me either.
And the entire premise of your world-view is broken. When you frame these white liberals as “speaking for” people of colour or speaking for women, or speaking for LGBT people, you are presuming that racism, sexism, and homophobia are strictly issues for people of colour, women, and LGBT people.
And therefore, if someone who isn’t one of these people speaks out against it, they must be some kind of paternal mansplaining social justice warrior.
In reality, some such people exist, but so do people who are egalitarian, and feel that racism, sexism, and homophobia are simply wrong. They aren’t speaking for anyone but themselves, and that is why you get some people pointing that out. But just because they don’t speak for me, for example, doesn’t invalidate that they speak truth to power.
As long as they don’t claim to speak for me, thats fine. Unlike you, who tried to suggest what people of colour think without qualifying your statement by admitting that you want to present some cherry-picked examples that suit your cause.
Painting people who speak out as a “PC Hatemob” really speaks to the fact that you relish taking an extremist position.
So given that you are way out in batshit-crazy tinfoil-hat land, what’s in it for me to talk to you? I doubt that anyone reading our respective words is going to be swayed from whatever position they already held. People who agree with you will mindlessly upvote you for saying what Fox News has been saying for years.
Nothing you have said really provokes any kind of “hmmm...” from me. It’s like talking to a well-written Markov Chain that was trained on a corpus of GamerGate tweets.
I’m loathe to personalize this discussion with a comparison of your anecdotal experiences and mine. And to be honest, once we start bandying about hot-button phrases like “the social justice left,” I have a feeling that we’re on a slippery slope towards ayn rand and men’s rights.
The repeated kills of previous threads on this topic illustrate the problem goes much deeper than Strangeloop. HN itself has long been policed by left wing stormtroopers eliminating anything they disagree with.
I used to believe it could be saved but now I generally believe that the era of technology having a place for iconoclastic freethinkers is long over.
The great thing about technology is you can always make your own space. You can have a niche website — or other technological forum — that is a bastion of iconoclastic freethinkers.
The problem that you're experiencing is that the mainstream public is now very much using technology. That means the average opinions expressed on the web on the internet have become much more mainstream. Which, pretty much by definition, means the average opinion has become much more hostile to iconoclastic thoughts.
I'm not talking about the mainstream. I'm talking about hiring and funding within our industry. If you haven't noticed a chilling effect over the last few years, maybe you don't have any nonconforming opinions.
I run my own (self-funded) company, so I haven't been subject to hiring or funding in a few years.
I wouldn't be shocked if a future client held our espoused opinions against us. I tend to strongly stand by any opinions that I advocate for publicly, and I'm willing to handle the repercussions from those opinions.
If I felt the repercussions of those opinions were disproportionate I would advocate for those opinions anonymously. The ability to espouse unpopular opinions is the main reason why I strongly advocate for allowing anonymous speech.
There are skeleton keys and lockpicks to open any lock on any door, so am I giving myself a false sense of security by locking my door when I leave for work?
Sometimes just having basic security that keeps a casual attempt from opening my door / accessing my password from succeeding is enough.
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