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December 29 - December 30, 2017
The cautionary tale in this regard is Angela Nagle’s appalling Kill All Normies, which takes the jaw-droppingly foolish methodology of simply reporting all of the alt-right’s self-justifications as self-evident truths so as to conclude that the real reason neo-nazis have been sweeping into power is because we’re too tolerant of trans people.
Indeed, it’s tough to seriously argue that Land’s sense of horror at crackers doesn’t have the same relationship to garden variety intellectual snobbery that Moldbug’s insistence that making a good slave isn’t a bad thing has with racism.
God and the King look the same for a reason, and it’s not because Henry VIII was Yahweh’s problematic fave.
one rather suspects white centrists are about the only people happy with the “we solved racism in the 1960s so let’s stop talking about it” consensus.
It is, after all, the great one-liner critique of Mencius Moldbug: he’s exactly what you’d expect to happen if you asked a software engineer to redesign political philosophy.
the reason racism might be insoluble is less, as Derbyshire suggests, a fundamental “trend to separation”129 and more that there are still white people like John Derbyshire
this is where the right to be invaded draws its almost primal power from: the one thing Anglophone culture is unique in is never having experienced being taken over by another culture.
Moldbug, Yudkowsky, and Land don’t just “do poorly” with empathy—they represent the most visible and explicit edge of a Cathedral-scaled system of values that casts the desire to listen and try to understand people who are different from you as anathema to reason itself.
after thousands of words railing against the Cathedral for secretly being a religion, he’s accidentally reinvented religion. And then lost the holy text. You couldn’t parody it better.
For Marx, capitalism, wracked by such endogenous crises, had become a fetter on the further development of human potential. To the Austrians, most humans—and their pesky desire not to starve to death in a crash—are a fetter on the further development of capitalism.
Saying that without state interference the market would be free is like saying that without the soil, the vegetables you eat wouldn’t need washing.
the alt-right obsession with “virtue signalling” is a characteristic bit of projection in this regard, mistaking the empty platitudes by which they dress their propaganda as normative liberalism for the whole of leftist thought.
Plenty of reactionaries have been very sane about their loathing. You can do that when your mechanism for arriving at theories of material life is to openly just make shit up.
Capitalism compels everyone. Even the people it privileges are compelled to compete against each other, and to thus repeatedly tip the world they own into chaos… a truth so terrible that almost nobody on the planet wants to know it.
the first priority of praxeology is in effect to enshrine inequality and deprivation as basic facts of the universe of comparable ontological standing to time itself. Even if he’d done this well, it would very clearly be a dick move.
She’s not being careless in disregarding the entire question of trans people’s lived experiences; she just hates trans people so much that she can’t even imagine that they might have interiority beyond the nefarious agenda she projects onto them.
