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Right-Wing Blogger Curtis Yarvin Is Wrong. Democracy Is Good. (https://jacobin.com/2022/12/curtis-yarvin-right-wing-blogger-democracy-monarchism)
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Ah this sucks:

Asked point blank by the moderator whether he thought the explanation for Haitian dysfunctionality was cultural or genetic, Yarvin evaded the question, saying he didn’t know how to test the difference.

If the moderator knew more about far right discourse they could have asked him in reaction to this if he believed genetics determine culture. This is trick they often pull, saying culture when they mean genetics.

I think the better way to deal with that is to just go on the offensive and treat anything other than "it's definitely not genetics" as the race science it's trying to be. Make him commit, don't get dragged down the rabbit hole of letting him slice his words however he wants.
Absolutely. Most of the time the rhetorical flourish to this is based on an argument connecting IQ as an accurate measure of intellectual potential and point out correlations in measures of IQ and socioeconomic status, ignoring cofounding factors by cherrypicking twin study anecedotes while ignoring statistical effects. Hammer away at the fact that the potential effects of genes\* on IQ are dwarfed measured effects of national school lunch programs. \*Also criticize the way these measures are derived: most of the x% of intelligence is genetic "studies" are using polygenic inheritance, which is entirely correlation and cannot disentangle many epigenic factors that are "inhereted" but not genetic.
How do you know it’s not genetic?
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Very unhelpful, smug, self-satisfied, defensive redditoid style retort. [For people who want a lol, look at this racists post history (CW: racism and transphobia), and then my posts in reply to this dweeb here (I'm throwing his own lines back at him). And just to no longer waste anybodies time reading that, im going to delete all the comments. So that is where there is a long line of [removed], [deleted] here. Further lol, their reactions to their own posts here were reportable (I obv did) and the reddit admins have taken action (doesn't seem that there was any real action so far, but this means their 'we found proof of bad shit' meter is better than twitters!]
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Just drop a hyperlink wtf is wrong with you
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Damn boy u lonely. ​ most of your post history is railing against people debasing themselves on the internet and you gotta go and debase yourself on the internet.
Some people never really grow out of their 4chan phase. Sad!
I genuinely think they act contentious online as their only means of social contact, which genuinely is sad.
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Projecting?
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Really brave of you to post something this brazenly dumb, OP.
Too repugnant IRL to make any friends I guess
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No u :)
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Ok Dr Freud. Denounce me harder daddy :)
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Very evasive response
I’d tell you to fuck off back to TheMotte, but if you’re TPO you were banned from there years ago for being insufferable. What you idiots get out of faking expertise in hateful shit like this is beyond me: if you were for real I’d at least understand it’s hard to kick a career to the curb just because you’re awful about everything!
An honest to God TPO sighting! It's like the ivory billed woodpecker if shitheads!
Yawn

Hey jacobin! Nice of you to add your support 8-10 years into the fight

I mean, I knew about Molbug a decade or so ago, but I never dreamed he'd be namechecked by a Senate-elect candidate. I thought he'd be a nasty little infection that'd burn out as tech culture matured, but I forgot that tech culture doesn't have to mature.
it helps having a billionaire backing chuddery as hard as possible for a decade or two and being said billionaire's favourite political thinker
Also helps having your point being easily provable With democracy we have the receipts, it’s a terrible system for most people and if you like it then you like it for faith based reasons.
boy are you in the wrong sub
If you want to optimize for porn, video games, fentanyl, and Casinos then democracy is great way to order your society
I have bad news for you about semi-constitutional monarchy, the principality of Monaco.
Maybe they'll take on that young upstart "gamergate" movement next.
"Support" is a strong word given how chummy Burgis seems to be with Yarvin and pals https://www.thaddeusrussell.com/
Wow
Permission for reddit to display this comment has been withdrawn. Goodbye and see you on lemmy! https://lemmy.world/u/psychothumbs
It's changed since I linked it, here's what it looked like when I linked it https://web.archive.org/web/20221205043541/https://www.thaddeusrussell.com/

Who is this guy? And what’s his relation to Rationality?

Permission for reddit to display this comment has been withdrawn. Goodbye and see you on lemmy! https://lemmy.world/u/psychothumbs
IIRC Yarvin (as Moldbug) got his start on LessWrong. He's grown a good bit beyond that since then though. At one point he was some sort of advisor to Bannon while Bannon was in the White House, though I have no way of judging how much influence he had (and suspect he'd exaggerate if asked).
He got his start on Robin Hanson's Overcoming Bias.
One of Hanson's early "Oh I don't believe this at all but check this out..." things. In his defense, I don't entirely understand Hanson's thing. Like, Molbug is relatively simple: he's a fashy edgelord and he really believes his rhetoric no matter how much winking he's doing. I admit I do not have a grasp on what Hanson "actually" believes in the same sense I (think) I do with Molbug.
They believe that they don't want to agree with ess jay dubs, because they have feelings sometimes unlike True Rationalists, whose only emotion is anger at the New York Times.
He did? Between him and Yudkowsky, how does Hanson even find these weirdos? Were they just blog commenters that Hanson selected to write under the Overcoming Bias header?
same subculture (the rationalist subculture is a descendant of the Extropian subculture) and also Hanson is a massive chud
This might [help a bit](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoreactionary_movement) note that Moldbug now sports long hair, and that a lot of people in LW are NRx (in fact, if you had heard about NRx in the past few years, it probably was due to a link to Rationalism (that or via the various 'Dark Enlightenment' racists/sexists/etc)).
>in fact, if you had heard about NRx in the past few years, it probably was due to a link to Rationalism I've actually only heard of it from this subreddit.
Well, sneerclub does have a link to Rationalism.
Touché
for reasons unknown I’m allowing this one, I guess because Yarvin has explicit ins with the rationalist crowd now
He's always had explicit ins with the rationalist crowd.
more explicit then, the ones where I’m not sharply divvying things up anymore to prevent spam
he's always been in our bailiwick, sadly
Listen to him, he’s pretty brilliant, and he’s just a philosopher. He convinced me that democracy is painfully mediocre at best. A democracy couldn't design a mouse-trap, let alone a decent society.

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To who?
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Huh, and do you consider yourself to be more on the Sneer Club or SSC side of that divide? This piece is closer to the Sneer Club perspective - and in fact was just removed from the SSC sub on that basis. I think there's value in putting that sort of content in front of SSC readers, but if anyone they're who I'd expect to be insulted.
> Huh, and do you consider yourself to be more on the Sneer Club or SSC side of that divide? I wonder where does David Gerard fall on the Bitcoin vs Buttcoin side of the divide
You are losing me, who is David Gerard?
You must be new here. (To answer honestly, David Gerard is one of the more well known people here, and on buttcoin, he does a lot of wiki work in various places, but is most well known for writing a lot of anti bitcoin stuff, including several books, [See his site for more info](https://davidgerard.co.uk/) he also semi-regularly posts here and on r/buttcoin (on of the bigger anti cryptocurrencies subs). Pro crypto/lesswrong people also see David as the source of all evil, the puppetmaster who sets up all the strawmen for the gullible media to use or something).
This comment has been removed due to reddit's overbearing behavior. Take control of your life and make an account on lemmy: https://join-lemmy.org/
I mean I moderate SneerClub, so
Permission for reddit to display this comment has been withdrawn. Goodbye and see you on lemmy! https://lemmy.world/u/psychothumbs
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I'm just here to tell you that I really don't think you've navigated this interaction wrongly, fwiw
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Criticizing the rationalists? I guess I was concerned he was having some "we should not be having any contact with those people" reaction.
Foolish mortal. I AM SNEERCLUB!
No, *I* am SneerClub
the rest of us immoderate it

“But such comparisons shouldn’t blind us to the disturbing commonalities between Yarvin and less eccentric conservatives and even liberals. Yarvin’s edgelord bluntness drives him to openly express what’s implicit in far more mainstream ideas.”

Fuck this noise