I remember when that email surfaced. There was a mild gnash and a
stifled wail, and then nothing.
In the grand scheme, it’s probably not that big a deal considering
that those of us who dislike SSC and its fanbase are already well aware
of Scott’s secret reactionary worldview, and those who love SSC more or
less share that worldview (at at least don’t have a problem with it,
which is just as bad, in my opinion), so they take no issue with the
email (other than the privacy breach).
And getting anyone outside of Terminally Online cultures to care
about any of this would be a monumental undertaking.
I mean, it's been five years since he posted Kolmogorov Complicity and stage whispered that he was a big ol' racist. I can't believe people are still surprised to find this out.
they deny it in the face of the smoking gun email. "well i don't see it in the text of the blog posts" BY CHRIST'S FAT COCK THAT'S THE FUCKING POINT. Centrism: a hell of a drug.
Strongly agreed. I used to be a fan (started reading after this leak and unaware of it), and got into it based on a bunch of seemingly interesting speculation about drugs, AI, blah blah. I began noticing a shift to more reactionary content once the whole NYT thing went down, and thought, "okay this seems like a bit of an extreme swing but maybe the sudden exposure just broke his brain." I've turned out more and more since he's started posting open culture war bait, but it did honestly surprise the shit out of me to learn this was a grift the whole time..
So anyway OP, this was legit a good public service.
> started reading after this leak and unaware of it... I began noticing a shift to more reactionary content once the whole NYT thing went down
Topher posted these emails after the NYT article was published, though?
I'm not a "fan", but I do like his writing and read his stuff every once in a while. Previously categorised him as "the only Rationalist I'm able to read without puking". To be honest it's probably not going to change - I'm just going to have this context of a few more disgusting views I wasn't aware of.
Even the good stuff is for the purpose of advocating reaction and racism - it is literally and explicitly the purpose of the blog existing, jesus fuck - so I'd suggest less straining through sewage for undigested kernels.
As a purely political tactic, Scooter was probably correct to simply not address them and brainwash his stans into not addressing them either. When you do approach die-hard rationalists about this, the response is something like "It's unfair to bring those up because they are private correspondence" and that violates their precious everyone-must-behave-civilly-to-rationalists rule.
While I generally agree you should not hack people's private accounts to access their personal information, I am not on board with "one person cannot share correspondence they were part of," particularly when the other correspondent is a notable figure and the correspondence is "I'm a secret racist and a liar."
This brainwashing of his stans seems to have done its job. It shortened the half-life of the conversation and kept it isolated mainly to anti-rationalist (e.g. SneerClub) circles and prevented any serious reckoning from taking place within the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent spaces. (Well aside from the typical "How dare the EVIL LIBERAL MEDIA DISCREDIT OUR HERO!!!! They don't even subscribe to our CIVILITY NORMS!!!")
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Mastodon, is in fact, GNU/Mastodon, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Mastodon. Mastodon is not a social network unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning social network made useful by the GNU copypastas, free software weirdos and vital load-bearing memes comprising a full Tumblr as defined by BOFA.
Of late I’ve decided that rationalism/longtermism represents a sort
of proto-fascism that may end up being way more potent (either alone or
in combination with other currents) than Christofascism or neo-Nazism
alone would be. The other two are more dominant now, and have more of a
history, but a rationalist fascism seems uniquely well-suited to appeal
to a broader swathe of the public than outright Christofascism or
neo-Nazism. It’s very easy to get people to see something as legitimate
if you dress it in the garb of science and rationality, even in these
modern times.
A friend’s comment about how futurism was important in the
development of Italian fascism really helped crystallize this.
I have to be honest, I don't see "broad appeal" as a strength of Rationalism. They're just so fucking *weird*. "Longtermism" in most of its forms is going to get you blank stares from most normal people. I think think if there is going to be a fascism with broad appeal (and I'm not sure there will be, I see reason to be cautiously optimistic in e.g. the 2022 midterms), it'll be eco-fascism. I think for a lot of relatively wealthy westerners, the prospect of a pitch that goes something like "you didn't do anything wrong, why should you change your lifestyle because of those dirty refugees" will be able to get a disturbing amount of traction.
They have a strong appeal to very specific types of people. Effective altruism and now longtermism fit into a certain slot for people who want to claim the moral high ground while being totally contrarian and devoid of compassion about suffering that affects real observable people right now. (Or even more specifically for people who want to feel like they're actually making the world a better place by being paid more money in their annual bonus than most people will ever see in their lifetimes to do data plumbing for a company that sucks the private life out of users it hooks on an infinite scroll.)
Hardly anyone would think of separating morality from compassion like that - use rationality to channel their compassion more effectively, sure, but not just care about the numbers more than the human beings they represent, or appear that way. Even real diagnosable psychopaths don't want people to think they're psychopaths. I don't think this culture could exist without the internet; it takes some kind of human-alienating and group-isolating media to make people feel rewarded for being assholes.
> I have to be honest, I don't see "broad appeal" as a strength of Rationalism. They're just so fucking weird.
They *are*, but they're also keenly interested in marketing themselves. And I think the rhetorical emphasis on Progress with a capital P, technology, rationality, and meritocracy very closely matches what society thinks are the virtues of Western civilization. They're also things society is very very bad at critiquing, even when they really should be. Those strains of thought have broad appeal (hell, part of the left is all in on them).
From a comment I made elsewhere, talking about stuff I've seen in futurist rhetoric more broadly:
> You have a sociopathic disregard for the biosphere as a whole, you have the assumption that we must drive forward heedless of the cost to create a new society, you have people otherizing those who aren't fully part of the modern industrial society (rural people, certain indigenous groups) and favoring their dispossession or forceful incorporation, you have apologetics for genocide, and you have an corporate structure that exerts more and more control over people's lives.
Those things aren't only present in rationalism, but from what I've seen the rationalist community intensifies all of them and is less apologetic and more open about it.
Combine that with the IQ obsession, and it seems like the only major gap in the development of a fascism is a nation. But even here, I think that "modern Western civilization" could perhaps become a nation and pan-Western nationalism could fuse with a rationalist fascism.
> I think think if there is going to be a fascism with broad appeal (and I'm not sure there will be, I see reason to be cautiously optimistic in e.g. the 2022 midterms), it'll be eco-fascism. I think for a lot of relatively wealthy westerners, the prospect of a pitch that goes something like "you didn't do anything wrong, why should you change your lifestyle because of those dirty refugees" will be able to get a disturbing amount of traction.
I don't really think "eco-fascism" is really the right word for something that is fundamentally about maintaining the ability of westerners to pillage the rest of the biosphere. It's only "eco" in the sense that it recognizes ecological problems exist. But quibbles aside--we already have what you're describing, don't we? Draconian immigration controls are a fairly average governmental policies in Europe, Australia, and the USA.
> And I think the rhetorical emphasis on Progress with a capital P, technology, rationality, and meritocracy very closely matches what society thinks are the virtues of Western civilization.
But fascists *already* do the whole "defenders of Western Civilization" bit. I don't think you need Rationalism to get there, and I think taking on the baggage of people who talk about acausal robot gods is not going to help you.
> But quibbles aside--we already have what you're describing, don't we? Draconian immigration controls are a fairly average governmental policies in Europe, Australia, and the USA.
We have lite version of it. We do not have the version of that which is trying to deal with what happens when half the population of India turns into refugees. Or the *Water Knife* version where the same border controls are replicated internally.
Rationalism is certainly an elite philosophy for social elites. As is longtermism. However, we do see how elite fashions filter down to the middle classes. The amount of fawning MacAskill interviews I've seen in bourgeois media is a testament to that.
Fully fledged Rat/EA/Longtermism might not flourish in the bourgeois but it *will* give the impression that the Great and the Good are looking out for the best interests of humanity as a whole so all those nasty BLM types complaining about not being able to breathe on account of the police brutalizing them should shut up or be put into some kind of camp where they can really concentrate on why they're wrong.
I think that Musk is also a good example of this. While Musk, from what I remember, usually hasn't gone into the acasual robot god shit, he has gone on about interplanetary colonization, AI safety, simulation theory, and transhumanism. He is a grifter but I also see him as an ideologue who genuinely believes what he says (it just happens to also stroke his ego).
The shine has worn off Musk of late, but I remember when his ideas about The Future were given a lot of credence in mainstream publications, and you'd see other prominent people (including scientists who should've known better) saying similar things.
Yeah, but I think the point is that this is (to some extent deliberately) an elite ideology, not a mass-oriented one. It doesen't have the "Even YOU can be a warrior for the nation!" kind of mass appeal that OG fasicsm did
It's not populist; that is true. But, at least in my limited experience, that kind of tech elitism had a hold on the public and many average people will defend or advocate those ideas. Just because something isn't populist doesn't mean it isn't popular, you know?
To be fair, I can see it playing an important role. The Nazis provided multiple narratives and fronts of ideological convincing to create their fascist coalition. I could see a successful fascist political movement try to appeal to multiple demographics in this way. In the rural areas maintain a light christo-fascism, and towards the very urban middle and upper classes utilize this fascist Rationalism. Of course it would be a completely incoherent political philosophy, but so was Nazism. They appealed to farmers, urban futurists, christians, soldiers, artisans, business owners, and more.
As long as you have one shared boogeyman (wokeism/socialism in our modern case, rather than Jews, but actually still also Jews) it can work. For Rationalists, wokeists are suppressing the reality of IQ (maybe even race and IQ), they hate "meritocracy," they don't care about competency or technological and economic progress. For christo-fascists... well we know their tropes well. Then you can throw in eco-fascists as well, the woke elite are leaving chemtrails, feeding us soy, they want us to eat bugs, "The WEF!" And so on...
It's honestly a terrifying prospect, all the ingredients are there waiting for some demagogue to unify them. Trump is thankfully too idiotic and incompetent to thread that needle.
Solid post; I wasn’t aware of this. This is going into my “starting fights on the internet” bookmarks
I remember when that email surfaced. There was a mild gnash and a stifled wail, and then nothing.
In the grand scheme, it’s probably not that big a deal considering that those of us who dislike SSC and its fanbase are already well aware of Scott’s secret reactionary worldview, and those who love SSC more or less share that worldview (at at least don’t have a problem with it, which is just as bad, in my opinion), so they take no issue with the email (other than the privacy breach).
And getting anyone outside of Terminally Online cultures to care about any of this would be a monumental undertaking.
Splitting hairs a bit, but isn’t it more “elephant network” than “elephant site”?
Of late I’ve decided that rationalism/longtermism represents a sort of proto-fascism that may end up being way more potent (either alone or in combination with other currents) than Christofascism or neo-Nazism alone would be. The other two are more dominant now, and have more of a history, but a rationalist fascism seems uniquely well-suited to appeal to a broader swathe of the public than outright Christofascism or neo-Nazism. It’s very easy to get people to see something as legitimate if you dress it in the garb of science and rationality, even in these modern times.
A friend’s comment about how futurism was important in the development of Italian fascism really helped crystallize this.
also posted to tunglr and chan
I met some rationalists in Vancouver years back. They had just come from a Greg Johnson event in seattle.
That I’m Not a German podcast was great. Would be cool if someone could run it through whisper, a lot of obscure stuff in there.