Or is he just an useful idiot for the right?

Quoting myself here: being critical of capitalism while having a strong fondness for “tradition” (see all SSC’s posts on “Chesterton’s Fence”) would get you a speaking slot on National Review’s annual cruise, if they still had one.

EDIT: I dug up my original comment because I’m a narcissist.

I had a very similar experience with SSC back in the day.

The main problem with SSC, in my opinion, is that Scott refuses to extend women and minorities the same charity he extends straight white men - and that is why, as far as I’m concerned, he falls firmly in the ‘right-wing’ camp.

Scott’s writing almost never ‘steelmans’ left-wing views the same way he ‘steelmans’ right-wing ones. The best possible interpretation of this is that he writes assuming all of his readers are already leftists - but in that case we have to assume he compltely ignores his own community, which we know he doesn’t.

He also never, ever ‘steelmans’ minority/women’s issues the same way he does men’s issues. Think of ‘Radicalizing the Romanceless’ - personally I would have no real issue with a piece like that if there was some actual balance; if he ever approached a feminist or race issue right-wingers thought of as ‘silly’ with nearly as much empathy, respect, and consideration. But he doesn’t. As far as I know he almost never does. He has a serious problem of waxing eloquently about the in-group while attacking the out-group, and then having the audacity to wonder why people think he has an in-group at all.

If there was a version of ‘Radicalizing the Romanceless’ for women or minorities, then I would honestly think SSC was just another classic Enlightened Centrist who couldn’t tell the difference between personal suffering and systemic oppression (because yes, as a dude I know never getting a date can be a soul crushing experience - but girls can’t defeat the patriarchy by going to the gym or downloading Tinder and therein lies the difference). But as far as I know there isn’t (or at least I never came across one before I quit reading the blog), and that told me all I needed to know about who Scott thinks deserves charity.

Plus I feel like writing the entirety of ‘Meditations on Moloch’ and managing to not make that final link to capitalism was another red flag. How far gone would you have to be to write all of that, and do all of that thinking, and not realize that Moloch is clearly just capitalism? But that’s weaksauce - I think I may be being influenced here by a comment I read a year ago saying that Scott didn’t think Moloch was capitalism, but I never bothered to look up a source for that.

I suggest reading his big hits like “you are still crying wolf”, “untitled”, and the oldie but goodie “generalizing from a single example” or some such. Other big hits too, basically just focus on his most read pieces to avoid both cherry picking and getting lost in a haystack of things ~nobody reads. He’s more misogynist than he is racist, though.

It really doesn’t leave much room for doubt. If he just wore a MAGA hat that wouldn’t necessarily make him a racist, but writing an article of how not racist Trump is (who e.g. paid for ads for the execution of central park five, got elected on the muslim ban, did the muslim ban first thing once elected before scott’s update, etc), is in and of itself a racist act, much like how similar denials in other context can be antisemitic in and of themselves.

Do you think Scott is actually racist?

Ducks walking and quacking and so on and so forth.

There’s this phenomenon Scott likes to talk about, I’m sure there’s a name for this but I forget. You’re reading a newspaper and there’s a story about a topic you know well, and it’s obvious the author is completely lost. It gets one thing after another all wrong and you laugh about how silly it all is. Then you turn the page to a completely different topic and suddenly the previous page’s farce is out of mind and you’re back to taking everything at face value again.

Every time I reevaluate what I should think about Scott’s writing, that’s what keeps jumping at me. Before I started following the blog myself, I had friends link individual posts and I generally liked them. Over the few years that I was a regular reader I learned about a number of cool new things, enjoyed many of his posts and passed them on. I keep wanting to say it’s not all bad, but how sure am I about that, and how qualified am I to judge?

I mean sure, a lot of Scott’s stuff is obviously trash and when I see actual experts commenting on Scott’s posts, sometimes on topics that I don’t have strong feelings about which looked fine to me at first, he tends to get buried… but those other posts, they still hold up, right? Right?

The anti-libertarian FAQ was enlightening and I always felt Meditations on Moloch had a very strong anticapitalist interpretation.

Been saying this for years. There’s a line at the beginning of the essay where he considers and rejects that Ginsburg might have been referencing capitalism with Howl’s Moloch but like…he was a father of the beat poets writing about the monstrous façade of civilization IN THE 1950s! It’s not just not a stretch to say capitalism comes into play there on some level, it’s ridiculous to consider otherwise.

I think he wildly uncritical of anything outside his direct area of expertise and that causes him problems.

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My first experience with Scott happened to be when someone linked his “Lies, Damned Lies, and Social Media” post in a debate about false rape accusations (here if you want to see the trainwreck), and when I checked the comments the most recent one was a very long post pointing out that he basically pulled his estimated statistics out of his ass. After that I had a hard time really taking him seriously.

You’re at about level three or four here and making excuses for what you can tell is pretty terrible stuff.

I will disagree with the sub here and say most of his stuff is generally fine. Some of his stuff is really good. Some is really bad.

And its okay to have a differing opinion than this sub - opinions are free to change and grow as you also change and grow (and learn, and read more, and think more).

I like this sub because some of the dunks are hilarious, and I agree with. Sometimes I disagree - and that’s okay, I don’t need an echo chamber, and having your beliefs and ideas challenged is good (to a point).

nah scott is a right-winger any way you wanna slice it

I also find much of what Scott has written to be interesting and useful. It introduced me to a lot of interesting concepts and his attempts to stay balanced are sometimes successful. I do think people apply weirdly high standards to his writing, probably because of how irritating the followers can get. Obviously a lot of it is problematic, but so is all political commentary. I doubt Scott is any more racist than the average pundit or scientist in America (that is to say, he is somewhat racist and not very aware of it).

I think the most harmful part of Scott’s writing is the intellectual paranoia that he and others will be persecuted for “telling it like it is”. This is simply not true in the scientific community and propagating it is the same bullshit that lead to conservatives somehow believing Facebook is biased against them. There are plenty of conservative scientists in fields like Psychology (most of I/O psych) and people talk about significant gender differences literally all the time. Sure, a conservative probably won’t get tenure in a gender studies department, but there aren’t a lot of leftists getting tenure in business school either. There’s definitely more stigma against HBD, but that’s mostly because the topic attracts racist assholes who refuse to take criticism.

So I think in that one specific area, Scott has definitely been harmful because that persecution complex (when combined with the more judgmental left activists) seems to push people rightward. It’s definitely suspicious that he only rails against the few leftists who got like one person fired and mostly ignores the volume of death threats and harassment coming from the right that constantly force people out

Nah I’m in the same boat. I found lots of his posts really enlightening and they definitely shaped my thinking. I also really enjoy his fiction writing. Honestly the SSC “style” (the sort of naive positivism) has incredible intuitive appeal to me, even though I realize it’s a flawed way of thinking. Out of curiosity are you also an upper-middle class white guy?

I guess I am the right wing of the Sneer Party: I like and admire Scott.

Scott’s fan club, on the other hand, is terrible. If someone thinks that Scott is one of the important public intellectuals of our era, I agree with them. If someone thinks that Scott is the only important public intellectual of our era, then it’s because Scott is uniquely flattering to their reactionary or crank beliefs. This is why communities centered around Scott inevitably become megaphones for cranks and reactionaries.

Do you think Scott is actually racist?

As always, it depends what you mean by racist, but for any sensible definition, no, he’s not racist. He enables and empowers the far right, but so does liberalism as an ideology. I think he’s a pretty sincere liberal along with all the ups and downs that go with that.

For what it’s worth I don’t think the community (such as it is) is particularly racist or far right either. The loudest commenters were always the most far right (and they’re also the ones first in line for sneers), but the SSC surveys consistently showed that social democrats were present in abundance but just didn’t comment very much.

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SSC also helped me understand trans issues.

Which articles ?