33 pointsby betterthanever4 hours ago8 comments
  • tptacek4 hours ago
    Nobody loves these kinds of pieces more than Yarvin. Look at how important he must be!

    My Yarvin-contempt bona fides are as strong as anyone's here (maybe except for 'lisper) and I resent the implication this article makes about Hacker News and "race realism". It is in fact not common here. Use the search bar. I've been monitoring this (and jumping in when it pops up) for several years now --- this and DNSSEC are my two "beats", the two things I'm careful to pay attention to --- and it comes up rarely and mostly by the same fringey actors.

    Race-realism claims are almost always quickly flagged off the site by the community. Almost every time I've reported something to Dan and Tom, I've looked dumb, because it was flagged dead 2 minutes after my email landed.

    We're a deeply imperfect community (like every other community, in our own idiosyncratic ways), but compared to other communities this is not one of our flaws.

    • TimorousBestiean hour ago
      > I resent the implication this article makes about Hacker News and "race realism". It is in fact not common here. Use the search bar.

      Flagged and dead comments won’t show up in a search, but people can and do have conversations under them for days after the flagging. You were in one of these just this week.

      Your claims about the prevalence of non-dead, explicit “race realism” may be true (like the sibling comment, I disagree), but it doesn’t seem to tell the whole story either.

      • tptacekan hour ago
        If you disagree, feel free to provide links. I can.
        • TimorousBestiean hour ago
          And have you play No True Scotsman? I’ll pass, thanks.
    • asveikau2 hours ago
      Can't say I've made any attempt to quantify it or talk to mods, but I feel this site is more receptive to racist right wing garbage than most communities I read or comment in.
      • tptacek2 hours ago
        It’s not. It’s unusually inhospitable to it. It’s also explicitly a guidelines violation.
        • asveikauan hour ago
          Often they do what Republicans used to do, which is mask it, dress it up to be polite and plausibly deniable, or make it seem like they're just a mainstream right of center person. Other times it surfaces as the way people vote on comments. But I feel it strongly here. It's not everyone by any means, but there is a contingency for it here.
    • cramsession3 hours ago
      [dead]
  • paultopia4 hours ago
    Glad someone finally stopped pulling punches in describing Yarvin's wickedness and imbecility.

    There's a kind of elegance and charm to this style of just heaping abuse on people who richly deserve it---Hunter S. Thompson was its greatest practitioner and this is in that tradition nicely.

    • quantummagic4 hours ago
      > Glad someone finally stopped pulling punches in describing Yarvin's wickedness and imbecility

      That's much too simplistic and mean spirited. We're not going to address the problems we're facing with personal dismissals. Yarvin, the man, isn't the problem. Some of his ideas are ridiculous and unworkable, but they're motivated by something real and unaddressed by many other commentators. The current zeitgeist, which is centered on personal attacks and dismissals is contributing to our problems, and inability to make any real progress at addressing them, by increasing factionalism and intellectual silos.

      Edit: As to the addition you made to your comment, we live in a very different world than when Hunter S. Thompson was making his contributions.

  • civvv3 hours ago
    Yarvin is a basement dweller and 4chan intellectual, high on his own supply of pseudo-intellectual takes. What is sad and worrying is that these kinds of politics are increasingly moving out of the fringe internet and into pockets of power (eg. Thiel and Vance). It is problematic that these ideas now linger only one or two steps away from the most powerful and influential person in the world.
  • keybored3 hours ago
    I feel like I care about freak ideologies more than as a passing curiosity based on how powerful those people are. I would care if it was Peter Thiel but not so much if it is a freak subculture among upper middle class SC programmer phreaks.

    Ideology is overrated. Look instead at what people ranging from self-identified right-liberal to progressive values actually do en masse.

    Maybe a Habermas was more insidious than a Hoppe. (What do I know as if I could ever read Habermas.)

  • 4 hours ago
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  • LAC-Tech4 hours ago
    Author dislikes yarvin because he's a white supremacist.

    I dislike him because he denies Israel exerts control over US foreign policy, while repeatedly saying the Gaza Strip should be ethnicaly cleansed. He tries to pretend he's this subversive free thinker, but when you peel away the layers it's just another Randy Fine lurking within.

    But apparently white supremacism is worse than this... other kind of supremacism he has. The supremacism we dare not prefix but which kills orders of magnitude more people.

    • steve_adams_863 hours ago
      > He tries to pretend he's this subversive free thinker

      This is one of the greater ironies about him and the people who admire his writing and ideas. They have a tendency to be firmly connected to rails, incapable of reflection or deviation from the course they've chosen. Regardless of if the ideas are workable or remotely sound, they charge forward.

      I suppose most ideologies rooted in notions of subversion or free-thinking tend to suffer in similar ways. Any time you start to believe you've figured something out that others haven't, or that you're outside the confines of conventions, you're either a genius or very ignorant. None of these people are geniuses.

      • LAC-Tech2 hours ago
        I was a fan of his at one point. I did enjoy him talking about the English Civil war and Glorious Revolution, the US War of Independence, etc etc. He introduced me to the "Whig View of History". And his substack post about the ludicrousness notion that the occupation of the US Capitol my a mob in 2021 was a serious attempt at a revolution/coup was a welcome antidote to the hysteria at the time.

        But the thing with Yarvin is - he's widely read, but if you dig deeper into any one thing, his reading is shallow.

        And like most extremists I have read (from communists to anarcho capitalists), he is pretty good at diagnosing problems but awful at proposing solutions.

  • tastyface17 minutes ago
    Just as a reminder, Silicon Valley darling Curtis Yarvin recently said this:

    "We have only one problem. The problem is: our billionaires are n—ers. They may be rich. But they're n—er rich. The nature and function of their wealth is profoundly negrous. You can probably name exceptions. I can too. But in every way, the exceptions prove the rule"

    https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:sefgphqp2xqwh2hawaixykwz/po...

    And yet he still happily pops up at social gatherings with these elites.

  • lambdaphagy4 hours ago
    [flagged]