The one basically follows from the other, I think. This isn’t a reactionary site by any means; the last poll showed single-digit support for the philosophy here, if it’s fair to consider it a political philosophy exclusive with liberalism, libertarianism, and/or conservatism. However, neoreaction/Moldbuggery gets a less hostile reception here than it does on most non-reactionary sites, probably because it’s an intensely contrarian philosophy and LW seems to have a cultural fondness for clever contrarians, and we have do have several vocal reactionaries among our commentariat. Among them, perhaps unfortunately, are most of the people talking about race.
It’s also pretty hard to dissociate neoreaction from… let’s say “certain hypotheses concerning race”, since “racism” is too slippery and value-laden a term and most of the alternatives are too euphemistic. The reasons for this seem somewhat complicated, but I think we can trace a good chunk of them to just how much of a taboo race is among what Moldbug calls the Cathedral; if your basic theory is that there’s this vast formless cultural force shaping what everyone can and can’t talk about without being branded monstrous, it looks a little silly if that force’s greatest bugbear turns out to be right after all.
(There do seem to be a few people who gravitate to neoreaction as an intellectual framework that justifies preexisting racism, but I don’t think Moldbug—or most of the neoreactionary commentators here—fall into that category. I usually start favoring this theory when someone seems to be dwelling on race to the exclusion of even other facets of neoreaction.)
The one basically follows from the other, I think. This isn’t a reactionary site by any means; the last poll showed single-digit support for the philosophy here, if it’s fair to consider it a political philosophy exclusive with liberalism, libertarianism, and/or conservatism. However, neoreaction/Moldbuggery gets a less hostile reception here than it does on most non-reactionary sites, probably because it’s an intensely contrarian philosophy and LW seems to have a cultural fondness for clever contrarians, and we have do have several vocal reactionaries among our commentariat. Among them, perhaps unfortunately, are most of the people talking about race.
It’s also pretty hard to dissociate neoreaction from… let’s say “certain hypotheses concerning race”, since “racism” is too slippery and value-laden a term and most of the alternatives are too euphemistic. The reasons for this seem somewhat complicated, but I think we can trace a good chunk of them to just how much of a taboo race is among what Moldbug calls the Cathedral; if your basic theory is that there’s this vast formless cultural force shaping what everyone can and can’t talk about without being branded monstrous, it looks a little silly if that force’s greatest bugbear turns out to be right after all.
(There do seem to be a few people who gravitate to neoreaction as an intellectual framework that justifies preexisting racism, but I don’t think Moldbug—or most of the neoreactionary commentators here—fall into that category. I usually start favoring this theory when someone seems to be dwelling on race to the exclusion of even other facets of neoreaction.)