The fact that this is “catnip” for LW-ers is a bad thing. We ought to be giving neoreaction about as much credence as we give Creationism: it’s founded on bad ethics, false facts, and bad reasoning, and should be dismissed, not discussed to death.
I note (and others have noted) that SSC, although hosting the definitive NRx takedown, still puts NRx ideas in the sphere of things to be discussed calmly with steelmanning; whereas it reacts with actual disgust and lack of philosophical charity to feminism, social justice, Tumblr, etc. And that Yvain was literally surprised to find himself becoming more right-wing after hanging around neoreactionaries, i.e. that he was picking up his ideas from his friends.
If you haven’t been watching closely, David Gerard has been spreading these same smears about me on RationalWiki, on Twitter, and now here. His tweets accuse me of treating the Left in general and the social justice movement in particular with “frothing” and as “ordure”. And now he comes here and adds Tumblr to the list of victims, and “actual disgust” to the list of adjectives.
I resent this because it is a complete fabrication.
I resent it because, far from a frothing hatred of Tumblr, I myself have a Tumblr account which I use almost every day and which I’ve made three hundred posts on. Sure, I’ve gently mocked Tumblr (as has every Tumblr user) but I’ve also very publicly praised it for hosting some very interesting and enlightening conversations.
I resent it because I’ve posted a bunch of long defenses and steelmannings of social justice ideas like Social Justice For The Highly Demanding Of Rigor and The Wonderful Thing About Triggers, some of which have gone mildly viral in the social justice blogosphere, and some of which have led to people emailing me or commenting saying they’ve changed their minds and become less hostile to social justice as a result.
I resent it because, far from failing to intellectually engage with the Left, in the past couple of months I’ve read, reviewed, and enjoyed left-leaning books on Marx, the Soviet economy, and market socialism
I resent it because the time I most remember someone trying to engage me about social justice, Apophemi, I wrote a seven thousand word response which I consider excruciatingly polite, which started with a careful justification for why writing it would be more productive and respectful than not writing it, and which ended with a heartfelt apology for the couple of things I had gotten wrong on my last post on the subject.
(Disgust! Frothing! Ordure!)
I resent it because I happily hosted Ozy’s social justice blogging for several months, giving them an audience for posts like their takedown of Heartiste, which was also very well-received and got social justice ideas to people who otherwise wouldn’t have seen them.
I resent it because about a fifth of my blogroll is social justice or social justice-aligned blogs, each of which get a couple dozen hits from me a day.
I resent it because even in my most impassioned posts about social justice, I try to make it very clear that there are parts of the movement which make excellent points, and figures in the movement I highly respect. Even in what I think everyone here will agree is my meanest post on the subject, Radicalizing the Romanceless, I stop to say the following about the social justice blogger I am arguing against:
[He] is a neat guy. He draws amazing comics and he runs one of the most popular, most intellectual, and longest-standing feminist blogs on the Internet. I have debated him several times, and although he can be enragingly persistent he has always been reasonable...He cares deeply about a lot of things, works hard for those things, and has supported my friends when they have most needed support.
(DISGUST! FROTHING! ORDURE!)
I resent it because it trivializes all of my sick burns against neoreactionaries, like the time I accused them of worshipping Kim Jong-un as a god, and the time I said they were obsessed with “precious, precious, white people”, and the time I mocked Jim for thinking Eugene V. Debs was a Supreme Court case.
I resent this because anyone who looks at my posts tagged with social justice can see that almost as many are in favor as against.
And I resent this because I’m being taken to task about charity by somebody whose own concept of a balanced and reasonable debate is retweeting stuff like this—and again and again calling the people he disagrees with “shitlords”
(which puts his faux-horror that I treat people I disagree with ‘like ordure’ in a pretty interesting new light)
No matter how many pro-social-justice posts I write, how fair and nice I am, or what I do, David Gerard is going to keep spreading these smears about me until I refuse to ever engage with anyone who disagrees with him about anything at all. As long as I’m saying anything other than “every view held by David Gerard is perfect and flawless and everyone who disagrees with David Gerard is a shitlord who deserve to die”, he is going to keep concern-trolling you guys that I am “biased” or “unfair”.
Please give his continued campaigning along these lines the total lack of attention it richly deserves.
I’m a SSC fan and highly sympathetic to SJ goals and ideals. One of the core LW meetup members in my city can’t stand to read SSC on account of what he perceives to be constant bashing of SJ. (I’ve already checked and verified that his perception of the proportion of SJ bashing in SSC posts is a massive overestimate, probably caused by selection bias.) As a specific example of verbiage that he considers typical of SSC he cited:
And the people who talk about “Nice Guys” – and the people who enable them, praise them, and link to them – are blurring the already rather thin line between “feminism” and “literally Voldemort”.
When I read that line, I didn’t take it literally—in spite of the use of the word “literally”. I just kind of skipped over it. But after it was pointed out to me that I ought to take it literally, well… “frothing” is a pretty good description.
I remain a SSC fan, but I’m less likely to just blank out the meaning of these kinds of things now.
No matter how many pro-social-justice posts I write, how fair and nice I am, or what I do, David Gerard is going to keep spreading these smears about me until I refuse to ever engage with anyone who disagrees with him about anything at all.
Have you considered that you should stop bending over backwards to get SJW’s to like you since it’s not going to happen anyway?
Yvain admits that he had negative personal experiences with feminists that may have left him prejudiced. It’s a bias, but at least he is aware of it.
Biases aside, I think that many people, including Yvain, are concerned by the large political influence that SJWs can exert. NRx, as wrong as they might be, hold virtually zero political influence at the moment, hence debating them is just an intellectual exercise. SJWs can influence mainstream media, college policies and even legislation. They are perceived as hostile towards straight white men, and especially towards geeks (nerds, sci-fi fans, gamers, etc.). For people belonging to these groups, political opposition to SJWs is a matter of self-preservation.
Not so. This guy might describe himself as a “pickup artist” and even work with Real Social Dynamics, but much of the community considers his ‘methods’ to be quite disgraceful. (Note that RSD itself is among the most reputable pickup groups nowadays, regardless of this particular controversy.) And SJW’s (in the Tumblr sense) had little to do with him being barred from entering so many countries.
Why shouldn’t it? Julien Blanc is not a UK citizen, he’s an alien national who wishes to do business in the UK by teaching his methods there. Entering the country is a privilege, not a right.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Anyway, yes, a government has the sovereign right to deny foreign citizens the possibility to enter the country, but it needs legal basis to do so. It’s not like any random clerk at the visa office can turn you back because they don’t like your face. I don’t know what legal justification they used to keep Julien Blanc out, but given the type of people that the UK has let in its territory, I guess it was probably quite unusual.
We are not talking about the rights of a sovereign government. HM Government can bar, say, anyone with a moustache from entering the UK and it would be fully within its rights.
Tumblr!social_justice and Tumblr!feminism (note the Tumblr! part) are not political ideas, though; they’re more closely described as echo chambers (whoops, sorry, I meant to say “safe spaces”, of course.) where meaningless duckspeak is endlessly repeated—so reacting with disgust and ridicule to them is arguably appropriate given LW’s and—plausibly—SSC’s goals. Neoreaction at least makes the grade as something that’s (marginally) politically relevant. Which is still not saying much, of course.
While Tumblr is of course awful, the simple answer is for Yvain to treat Tumblr as I treat neoreaction: close the browser tab and move on with life, good riddance to bad nonsense.
When I close the browser tab with neoreaction, I have a decent chance of never meeting a neoreactionary in my real life, so the problem is solved. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same thing about Tumblr!feminists. They are also rare, but I have already had the “pleasure” of meeting three of them. (Twice, they have cost me a female friend, because they were a friend of the friend, and have successfully convinced my friend that I am an evil person, because I happen to have an Y chromosome, which is a huge red flag for them. The third time, they have publicly accused my friend of being racist, when she dared to say that some traits correlate with certain genes, in a group of people who previously said more or less that genetics is a burgeoise pseudoscience.)
Unlike neoreaction, feminism happens to be a topic in real life (one could even call it a billion dollar industry, if we include all the government money spent on gender studies, female-only projects, etc.), so its perversions have a real impact. Many people spend a lot of time online, and if they meet the Tumblr version first, some of them will conclude this is the true version.
echo chambers [...] where meaningless duckspeak is endlessly repeated
Imagine how intolerable NRx would be if it were to acquire one of these. Fortunately, their ideas are too extreme for 4chan, even, so I have no idea where such a forum would be hosted.
It’s about the difference in quality of debate. Their manifold flaws notwithstanding, at least most neoreactionaries are articulate (Moldbug almost esoterically so). SJWs on the other hand feel entitled to go apeshit on you—to hell with convincing and productive debates.
The steelmanning is due to the fact that neoreaction is a strange composite of a few very good things (originality, aesthetics, appreciation for virtue) dispersed in an extremely toxic medium of hatred, drive for dominance, and undue confidence in the rightfulness of their own ideas. (Most of neoreaction only makes sense from a sociopathic perspective). A mind that is wise and cautious in judgment sees the good along with the bad and figures out these guys can’t quite be total sociopaths if you listen to them talking about what they like and strive for (and besides some of them can put up a strong case for their position), and so proceeds to attempt to filter the good ideas from the hateful drivel. A productive discussion may sometimes ensue; NRs may be quite hateful, but their natural habitat is the ivory tower rather than the sewage system that is the comments section. If you want far right low level trolling, there are better places for that.
By contrast—I don’t know what your experience was with SJWs, but this is how it was for me—SJWs do nothing but low level trolling. They aren’t going to give you anything you can conceivably desire out of the discussion (not even timely exit); they just want to fight. It’s a great stretch of imagination to connect their verbal abuses to that one trait that psychologically distinguishes left from right, tenderness of heart. It’s not difficult to see how they can be even worse than NRs at endearing themselves to one. The fact that they managed to exasperate Scott, who comes off as a supernaturally patient person in general, is a fact that should bear some consideration.
Having only a passing familiarity with Slate Star Codex, I can’t claim to have much knowledge of the context here. However, using information gleaned from this comment alone, I would say that polite steelmanning is probably the default reaction to a lot of things as far as LW readers are concerned (this is obviously and sadly untrue outside of these circles), and that if feminism, social justice, and Tumblr were reacted to with genuine disgust, something probably happened to justify that disgust. If I’m wrong about this, feel free to inform me.
“In the past two months I have inexplicably and very very suddenly become much more conservative. This isn’t the type of conservativism where I agree with any conservative policies, mind you. Those still seem totally wrong-headed to me. It’s the sort of conservativism where, even though conservatives seem to be wrong about everything, often in horrible or hateful ways, they seem like probably mostly decent people deep down, whereas I have to physically restrain myself from going on Glenn Beck style rants about how much I hate leftists and how much they are ruining everything. Even though I mostly agree with the leftists whenever they say something.”
You specifically said he was “hanging around neoreactionaries”. It sounds like a quibble, but it’s actually worth knowing the real result. The entire weight of your original statement implied his ideological change came from the people he was actually spending time with IRL. But now in this latest post you admit you were wrong about that, and that’s important.
I note (and others have noted) that SSC, although hosting the definitive NRx takedown, still puts NRx ideas in the sphere of things to be discussed calmly with steelmanning; whereas it reacts with actual disgust and lack of philosophical charity to feminism, social justice, Tumblr, etc. And that Yvain was literally surprised to find himself becoming more right-wing after hanging around neoreactionaries, i.e. that he was picking up his ideas from his friends.
I’ve been advised to come here and defend myself.
If you haven’t been watching closely, David Gerard has been spreading these same smears about me on RationalWiki, on Twitter, and now here. His tweets accuse me of treating the Left in general and the social justice movement in particular with “frothing” and as “ordure”. And now he comes here and adds Tumblr to the list of victims, and “actual disgust” to the list of adjectives.
I resent this because it is a complete fabrication.
I resent it because, far from a frothing hatred of Tumblr, I myself have a Tumblr account which I use almost every day and which I’ve made three hundred posts on. Sure, I’ve gently mocked Tumblr (as has every Tumblr user) but I’ve also very publicly praised it for hosting some very interesting and enlightening conversations.
I resent it because I’ve posted a bunch of long defenses and steelmannings of social justice ideas like Social Justice For The Highly Demanding Of Rigor and The Wonderful Thing About Triggers, some of which have gone mildly viral in the social justice blogosphere, and some of which have led to people emailing me or commenting saying they’ve changed their minds and become less hostile to social justice as a result.
I resent it because, far from failing to intellectually engage with the Left, in the past couple of months I’ve read, reviewed, and enjoyed left-leaning books on Marx, the Soviet economy, and market socialism
I resent it because the time I most remember someone trying to engage me about social justice, Apophemi, I wrote a seven thousand word response which I consider excruciatingly polite, which started with a careful justification for why writing it would be more productive and respectful than not writing it, and which ended with a heartfelt apology for the couple of things I had gotten wrong on my last post on the subject.
(Disgust! Frothing! Ordure!)
I resent it because I happily hosted Ozy’s social justice blogging for several months, giving them an audience for posts like their takedown of Heartiste, which was also very well-received and got social justice ideas to people who otherwise wouldn’t have seen them.
I resent it because about a fifth of my blogroll is social justice or social justice-aligned blogs, each of which get a couple dozen hits from me a day.
I resent it because even in my most impassioned posts about social justice, I try to make it very clear that there are parts of the movement which make excellent points, and figures in the movement I highly respect. Even in what I think everyone here will agree is my meanest post on the subject, Radicalizing the Romanceless, I stop to say the following about the social justice blogger I am arguing against:
(DISGUST! FROTHING! ORDURE!)
I resent it because it trivializes all of my sick burns against neoreactionaries, like the time I accused them of worshipping Kim Jong-un as a god, and the time I said they were obsessed with “precious, precious, white people”, and the time I mocked Jim for thinking Eugene V. Debs was a Supreme Court case.
I resent this because anyone who looks at my posts tagged with social justice can see that almost as many are in favor as against.
And I resent this because I’m being taken to task about charity by somebody whose own concept of a balanced and reasonable debate is retweeting stuff like this—and again and again calling the people he disagrees with “shitlords”
(which puts his faux-horror that I treat people I disagree with ‘like ordure’ in a pretty interesting new light)
No matter how many pro-social-justice posts I write, how fair and nice I am, or what I do, David Gerard is going to keep spreading these smears about me until I refuse to ever engage with anyone who disagrees with him about anything at all. As long as I’m saying anything other than “every view held by David Gerard is perfect and flawless and everyone who disagrees with David Gerard is a shitlord who deserve to die”, he is going to keep concern-trolling you guys that I am “biased” or “unfair”.
Please give his continued campaigning along these lines the total lack of attention it richly deserves.
I’m a SSC fan and highly sympathetic to SJ goals and ideals. One of the core LW meetup members in my city can’t stand to read SSC on account of what he perceives to be constant bashing of SJ. (I’ve already checked and verified that his perception of the proportion of SJ bashing in SSC posts is a massive overestimate, probably caused by selection bias.) As a specific example of verbiage that he considers typical of SSC he cited:
When I read that line, I didn’t take it literally—in spite of the use of the word “literally”. I just kind of skipped over it. But after it was pointed out to me that I ought to take it literally, well… “frothing” is a pretty good description.
I remain a SSC fan, but I’m less likely to just blank out the meaning of these kinds of things now.
Have you considered that you should stop bending over backwards to get SJW’s to like you since it’s not going to happen anyway?
This is a frankly boggling rant I have no intention of engaging.
k
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/20/social-justice-for-the-highly-demanding-of-rigor/
Yvain admits that he had negative personal experiences with feminists that may have left him prejudiced. It’s a bias, but at least he is aware of it.
Biases aside, I think that many people, including Yvain, are concerned by the large political influence that SJWs can exert.
NRx, as wrong as they might be, hold virtually zero political influence at the moment, hence debating them is just an intellectual exercise.
SJWs can influence mainstream media, college policies and even legislation. They are perceived as hostile towards straight white men, and especially towards geeks (nerds, sci-fi fans, gamers, etc.). For people belonging to these groups, political opposition to SJWs is a matter of self-preservation.
Today’s example.
Not so. This guy might describe himself as a “pickup artist” and even work with Real Social Dynamics, but much of the community considers his ‘methods’ to be quite disgraceful. (Note that RSD itself is among the most reputable pickup groups nowadays, regardless of this particular controversy.) And SJW’s (in the Tumblr sense) had little to do with him being barred from entering so many countries.
And why should the gracefulness of his methods matter for the purpose of granting a visa?
Why shouldn’t it? Julien Blanc is not a UK citizen, he’s an alien national who wishes to do business in the UK by teaching his methods there. Entering the country is a privilege, not a right.
Check your privilege! XD
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Anyway, yes, a government has the sovereign right to deny foreign citizens the possibility to enter the country, but it needs legal basis to do so. It’s not like any random clerk at the visa office can turn you back because they don’t like your face.
I don’t know what legal justification they used to keep Julien Blanc out, but given the type of people that the UK has let in its territory, I guess it was probably quite unusual.
Fair enough, but are we applying this standard uniformly, given the fact that e.g. Rotherham happened.
We are not talking about the rights of a sovereign government. HM Government can bar, say, anyone with a moustache from entering the UK and it would be fully within its rights.
Tumblr!social_justice and Tumblr!feminism (note the Tumblr! part) are not political ideas, though; they’re more closely described as echo chambers (whoops, sorry, I meant to say “safe spaces”, of course.) where meaningless duckspeak is endlessly repeated—so reacting with disgust and ridicule to them is arguably appropriate given LW’s and—plausibly—SSC’s goals. Neoreaction at least makes the grade as something that’s (marginally) politically relevant. Which is still not saying much, of course.
While Tumblr is of course awful, the simple answer is for Yvain to treat Tumblr as I treat neoreaction: close the browser tab and move on with life, good riddance to bad nonsense.
When I close the browser tab with neoreaction, I have a decent chance of never meeting a neoreactionary in my real life, so the problem is solved. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same thing about Tumblr!feminists. They are also rare, but I have already had the “pleasure” of meeting three of them. (Twice, they have cost me a female friend, because they were a friend of the friend, and have successfully convinced my friend that I am an evil person, because I happen to have an Y chromosome, which is a huge red flag for them. The third time, they have publicly accused my friend of being racist, when she dared to say that some traits correlate with certain genes, in a group of people who previously said more or less that genetics is a burgeoise pseudoscience.)
Unlike neoreaction, feminism happens to be a topic in real life (one could even call it a billion dollar industry, if we include all the government money spent on gender studies, female-only projects, etc.), so its perversions have a real impact. Many people spend a lot of time online, and if they meet the Tumblr version first, some of them will conclude this is the true version.
What country do you live in that allows you to think these things only exist on the internet?
Imagine how intolerable NRx would be if it were to acquire one of these. Fortunately, their ideas are too extreme for 4chan, even, so I have no idea where such a forum would be hosted.
It may strike you as anarchy, but pretty much anyone can host a forum on the internet for insignificant amounts of money or even for free.
Of course we have one, but it’s secret.
Everyone knows about your 8chan board, bro :P
[deleted]
It’s about the difference in quality of debate. Their manifold flaws notwithstanding, at least most neoreactionaries are articulate (Moldbug almost esoterically so). SJWs on the other hand feel entitled to go apeshit on you—to hell with convincing and productive debates.
The steelmanning is due to the fact that neoreaction is a strange composite of a few very good things (originality, aesthetics, appreciation for virtue) dispersed in an extremely toxic medium of hatred, drive for dominance, and undue confidence in the rightfulness of their own ideas. (Most of neoreaction only makes sense from a sociopathic perspective). A mind that is wise and cautious in judgment sees the good along with the bad and figures out these guys can’t quite be total sociopaths if you listen to them talking about what they like and strive for (and besides some of them can put up a strong case for their position), and so proceeds to attempt to filter the good ideas from the hateful drivel. A productive discussion may sometimes ensue; NRs may be quite hateful, but their natural habitat is the ivory tower rather than the sewage system that is the comments section. If you want far right low level trolling, there are better places for that.
By contrast—I don’t know what your experience was with SJWs, but this is how it was for me—SJWs do nothing but low level trolling. They aren’t going to give you anything you can conceivably desire out of the discussion (not even timely exit); they just want to fight. It’s a great stretch of imagination to connect their verbal abuses to that one trait that psychologically distinguishes left from right, tenderness of heart. It’s not difficult to see how they can be even worse than NRs at endearing themselves to one. The fact that they managed to exasperate Scott, who comes off as a supernaturally patient person in general, is a fact that should bear some consideration.
Having only a passing familiarity with Slate Star Codex, I can’t claim to have much knowledge of the context here. However, using information gleaned from this comment alone, I would say that polite steelmanning is probably the default reaction to a lot of things as far as LW readers are concerned (this is obviously and sadly untrue outside of these circles), and that if feminism, social justice, and Tumblr were reacted to with genuine disgust, something probably happened to justify that disgust. If I’m wrong about this, feel free to inform me.
Where did Yvain state this? I didn’t think he had any neoreactionary friends.
“In the past two months I have inexplicably and very very suddenly become much more conservative. This isn’t the type of conservativism where I agree with any conservative policies, mind you. Those still seem totally wrong-headed to me. It’s the sort of conservativism where, even though conservatives seem to be wrong about everything, often in horrible or hateful ways, they seem like probably mostly decent people deep down, whereas I have to physically restrain myself from going on Glenn Beck style rants about how much I hate leftists and how much they are ruining everything. Even though I mostly agree with the leftists whenever they say something.”
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
“friends” may be an overstatement. But definitely “people whose ideas he steeps himself in”. Well done, you have a convert in the making.
You specifically said he was “hanging around neoreactionaries”. It sounds like a quibble, but it’s actually worth knowing the real result. The entire weight of your original statement implied his ideological change came from the people he was actually spending time with IRL. But now in this latest post you admit you were wrong about that, and that’s important.
These things are disgusting. Slate Star is increasing in reasonableness.