posted on May 11, 2021 01:48 AM by
u/completely-ineffable
51
u/loquinatus61 pointsat 1620704946.000000
Selected quotes, with comments.
“Gamergate, where some geeky gamer women and geeky gamer men got
angry at each other and it somehow ended up in front of the United
Nations.”
Yup. That’s exactly what happened, just two groups equally to blame
getting mad at each other. Rape threats? Scott has never heard a woman
complain about those, and if he did it’s not like you can just believe
women when they tell you about sexism.
“We have vague memories of cultural turmoil around the time atheism
discourse switched to social justice discourse, with some atheists
resisting, losing, and becoming a permanent target of mockery.”
I believe the ‘vague memory’ should be “Rebecca Watson was
propositioned at a conference in an elevator at 4AM in a foreign country
and said that it made her uncomfortable and atheists lost their
shit”
“Nobody was able to figure out a way to be feminist which survived
this critique, other than to call yourself a feminist but actually only
talk about race.”
??? Well you guys heard it here first, every feminist was destroyed
by intersectionality. Nobody managed to be an intersectional
feminist.
Also here’s a really really long video essay that touches on the
skeptic community through the lense of fake stories made up to make the
assumed narrator look bad. https://youtu.be/BiU7aGZ-o68 , tangentially
related but I saw it recently.
“coverage-dominating debate over the possibility that Trump might be
racist, based mostly on his position about immigration plus a few
ambiguous remarks that he later denied meaning.”
Hey Scott, there’s a Whole Fucking Wikipedia Page on this
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump with 426
sources if you think they’re biased. But I guess if you can’t prove
racism from first principals it doesn’t really exist.
“So I predicted that hip young people would go far-right. It was the
only way left to shock the establishment.” (Note: he starts 3 paragraphs
in a row with some phrasing of “I predicted that hip young people would
go far-right”)
Occupy Wall Street? Student debt? No, see the problems immediately
facing young people can be solved by conservatism, actually.
“A repressive orthodoxy has taken over the government, the media, and
big business, and set itself up as the arbiter of morality, able to
blacklist anyone who disagrees.”
>"A repressive orthodoxy has taken over the government, the media, and big business, and set itself up as the arbiter of morality, able to blacklist anyone who disagrees."
He's obvs referring to Liz Cheney
> A repressive orthodoxy has taken over the government, the media, and big business, and set itself up as the arbiter of morality, able to blacklist anyone who disagrees.
Remember when Gamergate chumps called a third-party voluntary Twitter blocklist a blacklist? What Siskind's talking about is *almost* as serious.
I’m loving the idea that 2014 was “before social justice went
mainstream”. Civil rights movement? Never heard of it!
It really seems like he is unaware that outside of the internet blog
slapfights he thinks are the most important things in the world, there
are actually social movements that have been going on for decades, based
on ongoing issues affecting peoples actual lives. He acts surprised that
the youth didn’t become far-right in response to annoying feminist
blogs, but has he considered that it’s because the far-right is actually
fucking wrong and evil?
On the same lines, he seems to think that feminism started with the creation of a bunch of blogs in the early 2000s. Susan B. Anthony, Ida Wells, Betty Friedan, bell hooks - literally who? How many comments on Slashdot or Fark did their blog posts get?
> Many early feminists ignored racial issues because they were talking about their own experiences.
Is this a comment about the suffragette movement of the 19th century, or blog posters in 2010? The answer (and Scott's utter lack of ability to make this historical connection) may surprise you!
When I was a little boy (in the 90's) I loved computers. So much so that I only really liked things that were improved or mediated by computers, I hated old objects and ideas that weren't in my perception _improved_ by computers. Of course I grew up and started to grok culture a bit more and shed that childish notion, but I bring this up to note that it appears Scott never did. The civil rights moment doesn't exist because it was pre-internet. Woke exists because it was mediated by the web.
As I've said many times before, totally ignoring all prior research and just making shit up from first principles is **very** on brand for the rationalists.
Scott is so arrogant and self-involved he literally can’t conceive of things that have a history longer than the period of time he’s been online and people have been criticising him for his terrible views.
The popularity of socialism among young people may have more to do
with 40 years of Reaganomics gospel and entire lifetimes of
post-recession precarity than “signaling” or internet catfights, but
what do I know? I haven’t even checked Google Trends.
Interestingly, 2020 did expose some of the shallowness and futility
of what he calls “New Socialism,” and a few of its paragons actually
are moving to the right, to which, good riddance.
Also the collapse of the USSR. Having a nominally socialist strategic threat pointing nukes at you does make it rather easy for elites to tell all kinds of lies about socialism. Millenials and younger do not remember this, and Boomers seem to not realize that they can't just repeat the propaganda that worked in the 1980s and expect it to work in a wildly different context.
You could make an interesting case that the USSR shitting the bed led to the current decadent phase of American conservatism, possibly culminating in the right falling in love with Vladimir Putin because a goo-brained game-show host told them to.
Last time I checked on the New Socialists, they were [whining about BLM protests](https://louisproyect.org/2020/07/28/chapo-trap-house-and-matt-taibbi-crack-down-on-the-antiracists/) after watching Bernie lose and becoming mostly irrelevant.
I expect at least Anna Kachiyan to go full brownshirt within a few years.
Psychoanalysis chic is the lamest excuse for black pilling yourself, I really hate that about Kachiyan and cant listen to that shit for more than an hour every 8 months
But in fairness continental philosophy did offer Marx+Freud to a lot of people, as a drug
Freud has a lot of blackpill
Scott has a frequent tendency to confuse autobiography for history,
and this post is a glaring neon sign to that effect. Just replace every
instance of “such-and-such thing started happening in x year” with “the
first time I ever heard about this thing was in x year,” and
suddenly this ahistorical jibberyjoo makes all kinds of sense.
It’s also the only way you’ll ever properly understand a line like
this:
Maybe it was even partly due to naivete - a lot of people hadn’t
really met anyone who thought differently from them before, and assumed
that changing people’s minds would be really easy.
Yeah there is an amazing narrowness of vision thing going on there, verging on solipsism.
One of his conflict theory pieces had the absurd line "nobody has any real policy disagreements", which I took to mean, "anybody who disagrees with me doesn't really exist for me (until they become a threat in which case I'll write 100K word screeds against them)".
> "nobody has any real policy disagreements"
That is breathtakingly naive/treacherous, depending how charitable you want to be. "You don't really disagree for any substantive reason, you're just lying/want attention/ignorant" keeps slithering out of his writing.
That and the "I so dearly want to be a genius evil mastermind who gets revenge on people who make me look bad(by presenting my words)" stuff is just suffocating.
Suspicously absent from this analysis: any mention at all of gay
marriage or other LGBT issues. (besides comparing the “anti-sjw”
movement to gay rights, lol). Bit of a weird omission when documenting
internet movements from the 2000s to now, isn’t it? Especially when it
was a big part of the religious fights of the 2000’s that he brings
up.
I’m guessing the omission because it would be hard for him to deny
that the left side of the culture war here was unambiguously correct and
good, and made real achievements that helped people.
A warning: I was mostly sympathetic to Internet atheism, but mostly
unsympathetic to Internet feminism. I think these histories are easier
to write from a sympathetic position - any study of Internet culture is
basically a study of crazy people, and the failure mode is to point and
laugh at them without looking for real understanding.[…]All I can do is
try my hardest, and trust readers to keep me honest if I screw up.
[…]
I was heavily involved in this discourse, more than in any other part
of this history, so I am a bad person to have writing about it.
Hey Scott, if you think that it’s important to write about things in
a certain way and you also think that you can’t write about a topic in a
certain way, what you can do is just… not write about the
topic, and write about something else instead! It’s pretty easy -
most of us manage to get through our entire lives without publicly
writing pages of nonsense.
> I was heavily involved in this discourse,
I was pre-gaming for a hotel party at Skepticon with Amanda Marcotte when I learned that she knows all the words to Patti Smith's "Gloria".
The race phase seems to have peaked in 2018 and started declining,
before being given new life by George Floyd and BLM. The Google Trends
results raise the tantalizing possibility that racial issues can’t keep
increasing forever. They could eventually crash the same way religious
and gender issues did (probably to be replaced by something else even
more divisive and awful).
A naive prediction: our cultural obsession with race has a time
limit. At some point, like our obsessions with religion and gender
before it, it will become so overdone and pathetic that people will
switch to a new hobbyhorse.
he’s become literally a Kelly cartoon
https://i.imgur.com/q3GGVDr.jpg
It strikes me that Scott is now stuck. His schtick used to be playing
around in the gray area between acceptability and alt-rightism, and he
was pretty good at it. This is why he was able to keep a career for so
long while still playing footsie with the misogynists and the
eugenicists.
The issue now is that he’s made the leap and he’s dependent on his
fan base to pay his bills, and that kind of fan base is always going to
want each piece of new content to be more norms pushing than the content
before. If he wants to keep them subscribed, he’s gotta keep feeding
them red meat, but by doing that he’s closing the door on any career
other than this. That’s a bit worrying when you realize that going too
far can get him deplatformed while also being effectively un-hireable
for any other job, while pulling back will cause him to lose fans who
will migrate to whoever toes that line more effectively.
I think that this is the very problem of all edgelords: they live selling a gateway drug. But there is only a finite number of potential customers, and they simply can't compete with the big scary narcos who sell proper cocaine. That's why they always have a side product (usually advertised as the main one), be it generic neuroscience and atheism for Harris, self-help for Peterson, or psychiatry and (non political) book reviews for SA. So they keep attracting people who are not interested in politics and not only nerds offended by cancel culture or whatever. But if they get a bit too attracted by the easy money and attention to be made by political edgelording, in the short term it's super remunerative, in the long term all their base will just go down another ladder of the pipeline and for newcomers they will be indistinguishable by Ben Shapiro
It's also easy for edgelords to fall into a local minimum; toxic enough to be easily banned and unemployable otherwise, and not popular enough with the deplorables to be immune from true cancellation. Scott probably hasn't done one tenth the harm that someone like Tucker Carlson has, but unlike Tucker he doesn't have the ear of the Murdochs and therefore he needs to carefully avoid getting banned by Patreon.
Yeah exactly. If the standard for being a Thiel protegé is Yarvin, I don't see why he would want to fund this guy who does not even shit on democracy that often. I think his popularity with the deplorable is sky high right now because he is martyr, but how long will it last? How long before he comes begging to the NYT to do another mildly critical article so he can be victim of an "hit job" by liberal elites again? It's an unstable business. Nobody grew rich selling weed after all, either you open a nice legal bar with the profits, either you start supplying the heavy stuff. As you said, a dealer of soft stuff has all the risk of the job with very little reward for it.
Also: the ones who fail to realise it's a grift, entirely funded by wingnut welfare sponsored by billionaires.
Scott spoke quite openly of fabulously good terms offered him by Substack, enough to quit his day job as a psychiatrist.
I can't even tell whom the grift is benefiting other than Scott, though.
Substack's business plan seems to be the following:
* Pay "big-name authors" (term used loosely) with VC money to post blog entries on Substack and get a big audience of Substack readers.
* Provide a platform for people to subscribe to their favorite authors.
* Take a cut of these subscriptions.
But judging by literally every other platform for this kind of stuff, I'm extremely doubtful that there is actually a horde of people who are willing to collectively pay psychiatrist-level money to rehash culture war dreck over and over again. As soon as the VCs wise up and realize that this market doesn't exist, the large payouts to big authors will go away, and Scott & Friends will go back to their day jobs (maybe continuing to blog, maybe not). I don't get it.
The rich guys think they can influence the world via chuds on Substack.
Substack is a good old fashioned SV VC play, in that its business model never did make sense.
I think the result is that it really will pay well but his influence will be enormously diminished AND he will be cut off from normal society and normal healthy feedback. I think it's bad because all these people, especially Greenwald, don't understand how their identity and ideology are being damaged, because they think they are above manipulation. It really bums me out, honestly. The institution you work at and the audience you write for DOES change you.
see he SAYS that and I think it's legally true, but when i read some of his older stuff it became clear he doesn't understand how stimulants or ssris work
I think he really wasn't trying to be edgy before. I think he was trying to be a convincing accelerationist. His Moloch piece was the most influential and it was really just about humans being smaller than technology.
I think what you're referring to is the awful taint of the Substack brand. And I disagree that he is alt-right. I think he is a libertarian accelerationist who views neoliberalism as an effective alibi for any tragedy, i.e. "but people lifted out of poverty etc etc". In this regard he has much in common with anyone who uses neoliberalism as a shield to protect white supremacy.
In other words, he basically views anything as acceptable if it grants an escape route from death and through tech ultimately destroys every aspect of society he regards disgusting. Which of course in an unconscious way includes people of color and their problems, which I think most accelerationists basically regard as beneath them.
I've met a ton of these people. They are Malthusians. They think we can tolerate people of color if there are enough resources to go around, created by technology. And if we fall back to racist nationalism, it will just be about the resources, "something something gee whiz I guess the Repugnant Conclusion has its limits". I was at a book release talk by Robin Hanson and he said this explicitly btw during a side argument with someone. They inherently doubt all moral/civilizational progress and differ from alt-rightists because they are only sentimental about whiteness and the Enlightenment as it contributes a fantasy about scientific knowledge.
> And I disagree that he is alt-right.
well, he's literally a scientific racist who literally wanted SSC to promote reactionary ideas, so at this point I think we're splitting hairs between different sub-populations of mallard
Whole thing reads to me like a passionate treatise on the rise and
fall of Carson Daly and Total Request Live
I truly don’t know how long this Substack brand of edgy white male
media exiles could possibly go on. It’s *so* fucking boring. I could
read old Slatestar posts. I can’t read this. His attempts at punchy
sentences………………………
For a while, this meant geek feminists had vast society-wide
power
The first milestone on that path was Milo Yiannopoulos.
The exact moment this happened was the first time someone used the
word “woke” ironically.
I don’t think there will be some sort of glowing artifact of
knowledge that comes out of these internet cycles nor guessing about
them- Lord knows there wasn’t from the 80s or 90s subcultures. Not to
get all Adam Curtis but it just never really happened. If alternative
rock is any lesson, these things are just washed away like soap scum
down the drain.
Way off-topic, but the long-term degeneration of grunge is [rather interesting](https://thebaffler.com/latest/this-is-what-insanity-sounds-like-zeger).
> I truly don't know how long this Substack brand of edgy white male media exiles could possibly go on. It's *so* fucking boring.
Substack is wingnut welfare, this time funded by neoreactionary Silicon Valley VCs rather than existing billionaires. Pour in buckets of money to make discourse worse.
It's an almost entirely fake market. Woe betide the culture warrior who forgets this and has to subsist on his actual audience.
Read [El Sandifer's take](https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method), ffs don't wade through the original
To be scrupulously fair, the movies came out after that ... and in the Venn overlap of Internet Atheism and Internet Feminism, they were greeted as [trash fires](https://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/08/sexual-freedom-in-a-shopping-bag-sex-and-the-city.html).
Selected quotes, with comments.
“Gamergate, where some geeky gamer women and geeky gamer men got angry at each other and it somehow ended up in front of the United Nations.”
Yup. That’s exactly what happened, just two groups equally to blame getting mad at each other. Rape threats? Scott has never heard a woman complain about those, and if he did it’s not like you can just believe women when they tell you about sexism.
“We have vague memories of cultural turmoil around the time atheism discourse switched to social justice discourse, with some atheists resisting, losing, and becoming a permanent target of mockery.”
I believe the ‘vague memory’ should be “Rebecca Watson was propositioned at a conference in an elevator at 4AM in a foreign country and said that it made her uncomfortable and atheists lost their shit”
“Nobody was able to figure out a way to be feminist which survived this critique, other than to call yourself a feminist but actually only talk about race.”
??? Well you guys heard it here first, every feminist was destroyed by intersectionality. Nobody managed to be an intersectional feminist.
Also here’s a really really long video essay that touches on the skeptic community through the lense of fake stories made up to make the assumed narrator look bad. https://youtu.be/BiU7aGZ-o68 , tangentially related but I saw it recently.
“coverage-dominating debate over the possibility that Trump might be racist, based mostly on his position about immigration plus a few ambiguous remarks that he later denied meaning.”
Hey Scott, there’s a Whole Fucking Wikipedia Page on this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump with 426 sources if you think they’re biased. But I guess if you can’t prove racism from first principals it doesn’t really exist.
“So I predicted that hip young people would go far-right. It was the only way left to shock the establishment.” (Note: he starts 3 paragraphs in a row with some phrasing of “I predicted that hip young people would go far-right”)
Occupy Wall Street? Student debt? No, see the problems immediately facing young people can be solved by conservatism, actually.
“A repressive orthodoxy has taken over the government, the media, and big business, and set itself up as the arbiter of morality, able to blacklist anyone who disagrees.”
No comment on this one.
I’m loving the idea that 2014 was “before social justice went mainstream”. Civil rights movement? Never heard of it!
It really seems like he is unaware that outside of the internet blog slapfights he thinks are the most important things in the world, there are actually social movements that have been going on for decades, based on ongoing issues affecting peoples actual lives. He acts surprised that the youth didn’t become far-right in response to annoying feminist blogs, but has he considered that it’s because the far-right is actually fucking wrong and evil?
The popularity of socialism among young people may have more to do with 40 years of Reaganomics gospel and entire lifetimes of post-recession precarity than “signaling” or internet catfights, but what do I know? I haven’t even checked Google Trends.
Interestingly, 2020 did expose some of the shallowness and futility of what he calls “New Socialism,” and a few of its paragons actually are moving to the right, to which, good riddance.
Scott has a frequent tendency to confuse autobiography for history, and this post is a glaring neon sign to that effect. Just replace every instance of “such-and-such thing started happening in x year” with “the first time I ever heard about this thing was in x year,” and suddenly this ahistorical jibberyjoo makes all kinds of sense.
It’s also the only way you’ll ever properly understand a line like this:
no, because i have a fucking life
Suspicously absent from this analysis: any mention at all of gay marriage or other LGBT issues. (besides comparing the “anti-sjw” movement to gay rights, lol). Bit of a weird omission when documenting internet movements from the 2000s to now, isn’t it? Especially when it was a big part of the religious fights of the 2000’s that he brings up.
I’m guessing the omission because it would be hard for him to deny that the left side of the culture war here was unambiguously correct and good, and made real achievements that helped people.
Hey Scott, if you think that it’s important to write about things in a certain way and you also think that you can’t write about a topic in a certain way, what you can do is just… not write about the topic, and write about something else instead! It’s pretty easy - most of us manage to get through our entire lives without publicly writing pages of nonsense.
Scott is really losing his touch, isn’t he? My House, MD take: I think Dr. Sandifer’s critique really got under his skin and now Scooter has the yips.
he’s become literally a Kelly cartoon https://i.imgur.com/q3GGVDr.jpg
It strikes me that Scott is now stuck. His schtick used to be playing around in the gray area between acceptability and alt-rightism, and he was pretty good at it. This is why he was able to keep a career for so long while still playing footsie with the misogynists and the eugenicists.
The issue now is that he’s made the leap and he’s dependent on his fan base to pay his bills, and that kind of fan base is always going to want each piece of new content to be more norms pushing than the content before. If he wants to keep them subscribed, he’s gotta keep feeding them red meat, but by doing that he’s closing the door on any career other than this. That’s a bit worrying when you realize that going too far can get him deplatformed while also being effectively un-hireable for any other job, while pulling back will cause him to lose fans who will migrate to whoever toes that line more effectively.
Whole thing reads to me like a passionate treatise on the rise and fall of Carson Daly and Total Request Live
I truly don’t know how long this Substack brand of edgy white male media exiles could possibly go on. It’s *so* fucking boring. I could read old Slatestar posts. I can’t read this. His attempts at punchy sentences………………………
It’s unfathomably dull, pathetically online, charmless dreck
I don’t think there will be some sort of glowing artifact of knowledge that comes out of these internet cycles nor guessing about them- Lord knows there wasn’t from the 80s or 90s subcultures. Not to get all Adam Curtis but it just never really happened. If alternative rock is any lesson, these things are just washed away like soap scum down the drain.
Oversimplify anything in 100000 words: the Scott Siskind method
@ whoever reported this for “1: It’s promoting hate based on identity or vulnerability” please comment & explain
[deleted]
bit of an understatement bud
Are any of the keywords the Other Side uses included in the graphics? Cancel culture, or libtards perhaps (I’m rusty)? I saw none.
Help a recent SC member out: what is ‘Untitled’?
Edit: nevermind, googled it, no way I can read through all this shit. Goddamn.
The comments section features a wonderful discussion about IQ PGSes starring Steve Sailer that goes exactly as well as a you think it does
The final episode of Sex and the City aired on February 22, 2004. :|