Yeah, I can [imagine articles advocating communism in mainstream
publications]. In the Economist it’d probably be a lengthy thinkpiece on
some Marxist economist’s analysis explaining the failure of
partially-socialized medicine and laying out how they’d want it to work
in a Communist state, and it’d be peppered with references to
revitalizing an ideology tainted - “perhaps rightly, and perhaps
permanently” - by its legacy in Eastern Europe. There’d be a quote from
a market monetarist sputtering indignantly.
At what point in that paragraph is there anything about a communist
bias?? Am I just hallucinating or…?
I imagine it has more to do with the "I could get an article published in basically every mainstream magazine arguing for communism" line, which was almost certainly juxtaposed against how poor, sad right wing economists or HBD advocates or Communist Computer God obsessed rats are oppressed by the communist leftist social Marxist agenda running everything and not letting their voices be heard.
Just for you, I went digging for the context, and, hey, what do you know:
> I’m more gesturing at, like, the current tendency of liberalism to be indulgent-if-dismissive of anything more liberal than it and **bigots-and-monsters toward anything more conservative** than it. **I could get an article published in basically every mainstream magazine arguing for communism, I could get communist speakers invited to campus, if I declared I was a communist I wouldn’t lose any friends - is it still radicalism if the establishment pays your speaker fees and the printing costs for the leftist newsletter?**
That poor red tribe, always being oppressed by the horrible, left-wing, communist establishment.
>there are probably leftists who’ve written about academic and establishment co-option of leftism but leftist writing is unreadable for me. (And the people who wrote it would have been **tenured professors at major universities, who don’t give any of their six-figure salaries to charity because ‘what we need is revolution, not incremental change.’)**
Yes. All those tenured professors with six-figure salaries who refuse to give to charity because ~~they do not exist this is a fiction entirely imagined in your head~~ they say we need revolution, not incremental change.
>This is an odd artifact of our times - my grandmother is full of stories about fighting her college to try to get permission for a Socialist to speak - but not an artifact of tolerance in general, since **my college refuses to allow socially conservative speakers on campus.**
So, literally, yes. Poor Milo, or whoever the right-wing clown *du jour* in 2015 was, was being oppressed by the vast, all-powerful, and intolerant leftist establishment.
> Yes. All those tenured professors with six-figure salaries who refuse to give to charity because
> ~~they do not exist this is a fiction entirely imagined in your head~~
> they say we need revolution, not incremental change.
What, haven't you heard that 70% of tenured professors are Marxists-Leninists-Maoists who are leading Antifa and funding it using the money they earn with their six-figure salaries paid by George Soros, where they could instead send their money to ~~Eliezer Yudkowsky's personal account~~ poor people in Africa's ~~fishing~~ treated bed nets ?
It is in fact possible for Africans to understand what you EAs want them to do and disagree. But this is a subject that has already been covered in this sub.
Interesting that this is the one thing on which rationalists are perfectly happy to call people racist right-wing dumbfucks instead of counter-arguing.
The rationalists have a bait-and-switch thing where they claim they want to send treated bed nets to poor people in Africa to funnel money towards their AI risk nonsense. It's called "effective altruism", look it up.
I struggle to see the normative claims you are attributing to her in what she actually writes. She seems to only be making claims of the form “far-left ideas are tolerated by liberal institutions while conservative ideas are not.” She doesn’t actually say that Milo is being “oppressed” or any of what you seem to be reading into it.
> Do you really have nothing better to do than misrepresent 3-year-old tumblr posts?
Clearly not, this is obviously an extremely high-value intervention.
Your account has existed for 23 days, and all you’ve done is post
sneers targeting a handful of people.
The people you’ve chosen mostly seem to have their hearts in the
right place; and the posts you’ve chosen are pretty unobjectionable,
compared to some of the truly scary nonsense that comes out of
rationalism.
Am I missing something?
“A rationalist has said a thing” isn’t the pure, organic,
bakery-fresh sneer I come here for…
Seconding this. Some of the recent sneers make me suspect a false-flag attempt to make sneerers look stupid, though on second thought not *all* of them were bad so this explanation is unlikely. Still, this one is a pretty bad sneer if only for the sheer magnitude of available alternatives; rationalists mass-produce objectively-cringeworthy stuff on a regular basis.
Hmm, should I go through them one by one? You posted quite a lot.
I found your criticisms of Ozy a little weak for the most part, your one link to slatestarscratchpad was not sneerworthy, and the current unitofcaring link is pretty bad. Your Alicorn criticism was fine but *still* not quite as sneerworthy as is possible to achieve in the rationalist community - I'd rate it borderline. Your best was maybe the Brave New World one or the one where non-rationalists shouldn't opine about Brent Dill.
Sorry, I think that Gamergate apologism, anti-communist hysteria, support for abuse and rape, MRA talking points, etc. coming from people who cultivate an image of "having their hearts in the right place" is worst than obviously fascist people at /r/slatestarcodex because the former can convince good-faith leftists (like you, I hope) that they are in the right, when they really, really, aren't.
Dunno about any particular case - but it's long been the case that rationalists will say or do something appalling, burn the evidence when called on it, then pretend they didn't ever say that.
Bloomberg, Time and The Economist have all written glowing profiles of Marx and his criticisms of capitalism (getting them somewhat wrong, to be fair), but they normally add the caveat that his "proposed solutions" are misguided or were misused.
I think she's wrong, but her claim really isn't *that* out there.
I just looked through her posts, and TUOC is hardly a libertarian and doesn't consider herself one (see: her support of universal healthcare, redistribution, e.t.c). She's in favor of certain types of deregulation, in zoning, trade and immigration for instance, but this seems to have pretty universal support among economists across the spectrum.
But, regardless, are you seriously applying the temporarily-embarrassed-millionaire meme to an EA? Isn't it possible to be a little more creative?
Sorry but EA is a bunch temporarily embarassed millionaires who try to imitate millionaires by doing philanthropy but are temporarily embarassed ones so they do it badly.
TUOC has the exact same brainworms all other rationalists have, she just uses nicer words. [Here's](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/142553260621/official-opinion-on-chariot-for-women-the-new) her straight up saying she hates women.
> [the person who talked to him about that] was remarkably cool with I HATE WOMEN IM NOT A WOMAN YOU CANT MAKE ME" as a response to a generic startup hype article
I assumed because of the "dysphoria-fueled meltdown" that she was part of the sadly large set of misogynist trans men. Still, internalized misogyny is a thing, and she did in fact admitted that her reaction to this article was to do that.
I haven't slept well last night, sorry for that.
I'm not sure what I have to explain ? She admitted that her reaction to hearing about this start-up was to shout at the woman showing her the article about it that she hated women. This is misogynist.
The problem is that it sounds, to me ears, like a fairly obvious joke, albeit one buried in a bunch of unfortunate implicit misogyny. Being buried in unfortunate implicit misogyny does not automatically render a joke (a) not a joke, or (b) misogynist. For example, if one of my lesbian friends says "oh God I hate women" 'cos she got stood up on a date that's not misogynist, and the same can even be true for men.
What it sounds like here is that she reacted similarly: "oh my God I hate women for being irrational about Uber". Now, that's possibly shitty behaviour, and it's very arguably misogynist (I'm honestly not gonna step in on that one: I'm a very cis queer white dude). However, it's also not an "admi[ssion]" that she hates women, it seems more like a report of something semi-coherent she blurted out to communicate that she's pissed off about a specific thing women did (for very potentially shitty and misogynistic reasons), just like my lesbian friend, who clearly doesn't literally intend to admit that she hates women.
I know this sounds pedantic, but it's something I want to lay out to particularly enthusiastic users like yourself, because I've been here before when it comes to moderating subreddits that risk erring on the side of "call-out" subreddits. Certain people get really into it, post a lot, and use the "save" button more like a shotgun than a mouseclick: at that point anything becomes fair game and those people just post whatever without reflecting on whether they're saying something within the bounds of a reasonable truth. I don't really mind if that's where your head's at, and you do you however you need to, but it's annoying and I will definitely ban you if you keep making me look at it.
FYI: this sort of report is more annoying than “shitty attempted sneers”. If you’ve got an issue just post it, dickhead.
When you’re so far to the right everything leftward looks red
Slightly tangential, butJames Fallows’ sneeragainst the Economist is one of the greatest of all time.
At what point in that paragraph is there anything about a communist bias?? Am I just hallucinating or…?
Imagine reading this post and concluding the author believes “The Economist has a communist bias.”
Do you really have nothing better to do than misrepresent 3-year-old tumblr posts?
Your account has existed for 23 days, and all you’ve done is post sneers targeting a handful of people.
The people you’ve chosen mostly seem to have their hearts in the right place; and the posts you’ve chosen are pretty unobjectionable, compared to some of the truly scary nonsense that comes out of rationalism.
Am I missing something?
“A rationalist has said a thing” isn’t the pure, organic, bakery-fresh sneer I come here for…
https://archive.is/uixqw
Goddammit, I’ve previously given TUOC as an example of a mostly sane rationalist.
Are ANY of them not infested with fucking brainworms?
I should write for The Economist.
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