A progressive points out that a minority group is doing poorly (Is "minority" newspeak?) Various emotional stories of people being oppressed decades ago are presented. Menacing white people is implied as the solution, or at least justifiable. After all, they aren't a protected class.
Some reactionary nerd points out there might be mental differences between groups. That might explain the differences. Uh oh, he's insulted a protected class. Then he argues that white people shouldn't be menaced. Maybe they should even become a protected class too. Isn't that basically white nationalism? Maybe he even says white people should resist being menaced. Now he's even hit "inciting lawless action".
So he is quickly banned. His place is filled by some boomercon. That makes less honest or intelligent arguments against the progressive. But ones that don't violate the rules. Or maybe he just ignores the progressive entirely. The progressive's argument looks a lot stronger against these clowns, and he prevails. The free marketplace of ideas at work.
Yarvin is just sick of the rules being unwritten and inconsistent. I get it. "Just tell us how many minutes we have to clap for Stalin, please." That's not the point, and you know it.
Despite my comment above... I cried while reading your poem about your wife last night. As an idiot father and husband myself, I feel a very visceral empathy for you and your family. It is a terrible and useless tragedy for you all to suffer through. I am so sorry.
I simply have to comment on this. Here is hoping the $10 I spent to have the privilege is worth it.
What if I told you there is someone who had almost total executive control over a major western government, and not only understood the nature of the power he did and didn’t have but used it effectively in order to run rings around the established order of all sides and get through things that not only were anathema to the established order but made serious inroads into enshrining this victory so that the power of his side would be effective long after he was gone? What If I told you that not only has he done this, but also has hundreds of pages of free blog posts explaining what he believes and how he achieved these things? (posts that would not look out of place on your own substack, give or take a bit of rhetorical flair).
Check out this post from 2018, and compare it to your recent post on the (lack of) power Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have.
Do some companies have great power? Yes but only in limited ways. Facebook is in many ways a great company and Insider sneering at Zuckerberg is largely jealousy. (Their current problem is a consequence of senior people there not understanding rapidly changing political dynamics but they’ll learn about politics faster than the politicians learn about engineering.) But Facebook cannot program fashion and opinions. Neither can marketing companies — almost all they do fails. Nobody can in free societies (Communist/fascist countries are obviously a different argument.) It’s too complex. Facebook, like great politicians, surfs waves that it very rarely (if ever) creates. Cambridge Analytica is a normal company in its field in my experience — it exploits the ignorance about marketing, data science, and psychology to sell snake oil to gullible people who almost never have the technical education to question them scientifically. That’s normal. What’s abnormal is that a large section of the media takes snake oil so seriously and suspends their usually hyper-critical faculties. The reason is that politics is melting their brains.
You’d assume that I was either wildly exaggerating or lying. After all, if this person exists, why have you not heard about him?
Is this going to be like one of those narrative scams that writers pull where they find someone who made some small decision way in the past that had unforeseeable snowball effects (that they obviously didn’t intend or plan for) and then say something like ‘meet the most influential person you’ve never heard of’ (oh and by the way they did that exact same thing with this guy at one point, though in his home country the sheer amount of winning he did meant everyone has now heard of him)
He’s called Dominic Cummings. He was recently booted from Johnson’s government after pissing off too many people (not before laying the groundwork for every popular/successful thing the Johnson government has done, including the current vaccine rollout that has done more to enshrine brexit as settled than any election or act of parliament).
Every based thing that has happened in british politics for the past 4 years has his hand on it. You might not be that familiar with british politics and the in and outs of it, which is fair enough. If you are though, you know this guy is the reactionary Walter White. His K/D ratio against elite institutions and personnel is rambo tier. That brexit happened in spite of enormous institutional opposition is largely down to him.
There isn’t much more I can say other than a strong recommendation that you check out his most elucidating blog post which recaps the initial referendum and encapsulates much of his political ideology. He even talks about OODA loops!
Fair enough. I've tried to find any evidence that he had but didn't find anything on this blog. Would you mind linking to the podcast episode in question?
Alright, I listened to the episode. I deffo think it is still worth checking out more of the guys blog, even if you believe his previous actions were futile.
While this article is overall an interesting take, it suffers from the cavalier stance on demographics I've seen Mr. Yarvin make in many of his other writings. The central fallacy of this is his appeal to the fact that good government (in the Yarvinian sense of effective government) can make up for bad or conflict-prone demographics. While this may be true, there's another dimension of the government necessary to bring this about that isn't mentioned: it isn't just good government, but strict, intrusive, and authoritative government. The classic case everyone likes to cite of a successful multicultural state is Singapore. And Singapore does have an effective, efficient, transparent government. It also still practices public canings and jails you for spitting on the sidewalk. While good government is obviously essential, government that can be good without being intrusive and dictatorial is ideal, and the latter seems more or less impossible with a multicultural society to manage.
There's also another dimension of this fallacy that goes unstated. While good government makes bad demographics survivable, good demographics also make bad government survivable. And the writings of this substack should make it more than evident that good government is not a given, nor a constant when and if it comes about. Take Sweden, a classic socio-demographic case. Sweden has had what Yarvin would call a bad government for decades now. Yet Sweden up through the 90s would by all accounts be a pretty nice place to live. It was only with the introduction of multicultural conflict that the system became unworkable for the average person. So, if bad government is more common than good, and good government can't be guaranteed to last, it would seem prudent to desire a demographic state that makes the periods of bad government more tolerable.
The Yarvinian response I would expect to bring this back to an issue of government would be saying any demographic policy change is "regime-complete," but I don't think it is. While obviously something like deporting all non-white residents (which isn't something I think would be a good idea or that I desire) would be regime-complete, even relatively "cucked" mainstream right parties can pass policy that at least slows down demographic change, making bad government more tolerable while good government is cooked up by the likes of this publication. So, I don't think there's any excuse to ignore demographic issues, along with policy that could at least keep them from getting worse, by making some hand-wavey appeal that good government will ultimately solve this, as well as every other problem.
(P.S., I'm sorry for your loss Mr. Yarvin, but I wanted to make this critique while the article it was in response to was relatively new, so I hope you don't take this in bad taste)
Great article! However, I have one point of contention: 4chan is not the most uncensored platform online. As you correctly point out, it, too, has its own janitors ("jannies"), and those jannies do obliterate threads. They get rid of them for content that is illegal in the United States, of course, but they do so for other reasons as well. One of the more legitimate reasons is the deletion of threads that are off topic to the board they're being posted in; you wouldn't ask for opinions on a music album in the literature board, for example. However, these janitor positions are pretty routinely infiltrated by the usual suspects. It's a recurring conversation among 4chan users that certain boards -- such as /g/ (Technology; computers, programming, electronics, etc) and /tg/ (Traditional Games; board games, card games, dice games, tabletop RPGs, etc) -- have janitors who aggressively delete threads that contradict woke orthodoxy.
This problem is bound to arise specifically in any centralized platform. This raises the question of what a decentralized, or at least less centralized, platform even is. You can find this on something known colloquially as the "fediverse." People on the right were rightly mad at how maliciously they were silenced on placed like Twitter, and so they created Gab and Parler, which are basically just Twitter clones exclusively for conservatives. Well, what if, instead of that, you had 10,000 Twitter clones that could talk to each other?
That makes moderation effectively impossible, at least with how the current Internet is structured. Good luck shutting someone up when there are who knows how many shady Lithuanian VPS hosts who accept BitCoin payments. The implementation details of a truly censorious state (or ancillary actors, like corporations) actually quelling this are pretty daunting considering that any idiot with $5 and a domain name can go on Linode and start their own "instance."
So while I'm certainly not above paying money for premium content, that doesn't stop me from reveling in the gutter while I'm at it, hence why I'm in your blog and on my own instance of the fediverse in two separate tabs. But notably, one window.
It's open registration. Not all are. I think you should create an account and click around in the "Known Network" tab for a while. My instance is pretty small, so if you want a bigger one (or you just don't like my brazen shilling), you can go to one of these instead:
I commented weeks ago that Curtis seemed to have hit an expository wall. Now with this personal devastation, the future of his Gray Mirror exploration is in doubt. That said, our friend’s writings, especially from just before the election to just after, impress me as among the most thoughtful, most illuminating I have read. For weeks at a stretch, Curtis was on fire—and a pleasure to ride shotgun with
I'm sorry for your loss. I keep thinking about you and your family since I found out last night. I am myself a mother of a 10-year-old, so this gives me a lot to think about, but your poem makes me think back to the decade-long illness and death of my father a few years ago. I was visiting my parents on the night of his death (he was 56), so this brings back a lot of memories of all that happens before, during, and after. I think the only helpful thought I have found in dealing with loss is that there are all these other people out there who are experiencing the same thing. Otherwise, it still feels unreal. The years of knowing it was going to happen don't prepare you for it.
I think your rewrite of substack’s hate clause could be made quite a bit clearer, by replacing ‘other’ with ‘unprotected.’ The opposite of protected is unprotected— ie:
“We prohibit content that (a) incites concrete lawless action, or (b) menaces or insults, individually or collectively, any protected group of which the author is not a member. Other [Unprotected] groups or persons may be insulted. Other abstract [Unprotected] groups, but never persons, may be menaced. We also prohibit (c) any form of white nationalism.”
Clause (c) could also be usefully rewritten in terms of ‘unprotected groups’ since of course, in reality any form of group solidarity or advocacy of collective action by any unprotected group is as prohibited as white nationalism— thus (c) should be written as ‘any advocacy for unprotected group solidarity is prohibited; any unprotected group collective action is prohibited.’ This formulation covers the general case, and everyone can immediately see that engaging in any form of male solidarity or advocacy of male solidarity or any call for male collective action is also prohibited.
Then of course, list the protected groups, in order, since of course, protection is a stack, not a yes/no. Those higher in the stack are protected agains those lower in the stack. Those lower in the stack are not protected against those higher in the stack:
black trans
black LGB
black female
black male
POC trans (POC does not include high IQ minorities, such as Jewish or East Asians)
POC LGB
.
.
.
Jewish, etc
High IQ Asian, etc (High IQ Asian includes Korea, Japan, Korea, China, India, but not Pakistan or the Middle East which are included in POC)
White, etc
stack endeth with white male.
Although perhaps we are ignoring the important qualifier woke/non-woke.
After all, does anyone seriously doubt that a non-woke black or a non-woke female, or even a non-woke trans has forfeited their protected group membership? Of course they have. Candice Owens is not a member of a protected group, she is, as an openly non-woke black woman, factually black female, but, of course, morally a white male.
Indeed, I have no doubt that in the end, when all the kinks are worked out, the stack will collapse down to:
Political Correctness was based on the assumption that morality is socially constructed and culturally relative, and therefore has no place in the public sphere. Ie: there is no "good" or "bad;," and any words that connote goodness or badness shouldn't be allowed in public discourse. Political Correctness means creating and adhering to a public-sphere vocabulary that attempts (or pretends) to be morally neutral and culturally baggage-less. I say this because there's been heavy historical revisionism to the effect that PC was always a right wing slur for "politeness." But no, it was an actual project, and lefty academics were actually excited about it. "Woke," I think, came from hip hop. The first person I heard using it was Lauryn Hill, back in the nineties.It meant "awake to the fact that you are in a systemically racist society." So, "woke" is a narrower term than "politically correct." No one remembers these historical details, but I think they're important.
I'd say the way it's used now, 'PC' is a subset of 'woke'. However, I do agree with the typically leftist argument that PC has been a thing forever, just in other forms.
Sorry for you loss, Curtis.
A progressive points out that a minority group is doing poorly (Is "minority" newspeak?) Various emotional stories of people being oppressed decades ago are presented. Menacing white people is implied as the solution, or at least justifiable. After all, they aren't a protected class.
Some reactionary nerd points out there might be mental differences between groups. That might explain the differences. Uh oh, he's insulted a protected class. Then he argues that white people shouldn't be menaced. Maybe they should even become a protected class too. Isn't that basically white nationalism? Maybe he even says white people should resist being menaced. Now he's even hit "inciting lawless action".
So he is quickly banned. His place is filled by some boomercon. That makes less honest or intelligent arguments against the progressive. But ones that don't violate the rules. Or maybe he just ignores the progressive entirely. The progressive's argument looks a lot stronger against these clowns, and he prevails. The free marketplace of ideas at work.
Yarvin is just sick of the rules being unwritten and inconsistent. I get it. "Just tell us how many minutes we have to clap for Stalin, please." That's not the point, and you know it.
Curtis don't be a coward! Let us comment on your poetry!
Despite my comment above... I cried while reading your poem about your wife last night. As an idiot father and husband myself, I feel a very visceral empathy for you and your family. It is a terrible and useless tragedy for you all to suffer through. I am so sorry.
Our prays are with you and your family
Alright Curtis.
I simply have to comment on this. Here is hoping the $10 I spent to have the privilege is worth it.
What if I told you there is someone who had almost total executive control over a major western government, and not only understood the nature of the power he did and didn’t have but used it effectively in order to run rings around the established order of all sides and get through things that not only were anathema to the established order but made serious inroads into enshrining this victory so that the power of his side would be effective long after he was gone? What If I told you that not only has he done this, but also has hundreds of pages of free blog posts explaining what he believes and how he achieved these things? (posts that would not look out of place on your own substack, give or take a bit of rhetorical flair).
Check out this post from 2018, and compare it to your recent post on the (lack of) power Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have.
Do some companies have great power? Yes but only in limited ways. Facebook is in many ways a great company and Insider sneering at Zuckerberg is largely jealousy. (Their current problem is a consequence of senior people there not understanding rapidly changing political dynamics but they’ll learn about politics faster than the politicians learn about engineering.) But Facebook cannot program fashion and opinions. Neither can marketing companies — almost all they do fails. Nobody can in free societies (Communist/fascist countries are obviously a different argument.) It’s too complex. Facebook, like great politicians, surfs waves that it very rarely (if ever) creates. Cambridge Analytica is a normal company in its field in my experience — it exploits the ignorance about marketing, data science, and psychology to sell snake oil to gullible people who almost never have the technical education to question them scientifically. That’s normal. What’s abnormal is that a large section of the media takes snake oil so seriously and suspends their usually hyper-critical faculties. The reason is that politics is melting their brains.
You’d assume that I was either wildly exaggerating or lying. After all, if this person exists, why have you not heard about him?
Is this going to be like one of those narrative scams that writers pull where they find someone who made some small decision way in the past that had unforeseeable snowball effects (that they obviously didn’t intend or plan for) and then say something like ‘meet the most influential person you’ve never heard of’ (oh and by the way they did that exact same thing with this guy at one point, though in his home country the sheer amount of winning he did meant everyone has now heard of him)
He’s called Dominic Cummings. He was recently booted from Johnson’s government after pissing off too many people (not before laying the groundwork for every popular/successful thing the Johnson government has done, including the current vaccine rollout that has done more to enshrine brexit as settled than any election or act of parliament).
Every based thing that has happened in british politics for the past 4 years has his hand on it. You might not be that familiar with british politics and the in and outs of it, which is fair enough. If you are though, you know this guy is the reactionary Walter White. His K/D ratio against elite institutions and personnel is rambo tier. That brexit happened in spite of enormous institutional opposition is largely down to him.
There isn’t much more I can say other than a strong recommendation that you check out his most elucidating blog post which recaps the initial referendum and encapsulates much of his political ideology. He even talks about OODA loops!
https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-branching-histories-of-the-2016-referendum-and-the-frogs-before-the-storm-2/
Bro he has read and knows about Dominic Cummings. He even remarked upon the futility of Cummings's project on the Hermitix podcast.
Fair enough. I've tried to find any evidence that he had but didn't find anything on this blog. Would you mind linking to the podcast episode in question?
Alright, I listened to the episode. I deffo think it is still worth checking out more of the guys blog, even if you believe his previous actions were futile.
I'm a HUGE fan of Dom. I should've clarified. Every reader of Gray Mirror should absorb Dom's blog output.
God bless you, Curtis.
While this article is overall an interesting take, it suffers from the cavalier stance on demographics I've seen Mr. Yarvin make in many of his other writings. The central fallacy of this is his appeal to the fact that good government (in the Yarvinian sense of effective government) can make up for bad or conflict-prone demographics. While this may be true, there's another dimension of the government necessary to bring this about that isn't mentioned: it isn't just good government, but strict, intrusive, and authoritative government. The classic case everyone likes to cite of a successful multicultural state is Singapore. And Singapore does have an effective, efficient, transparent government. It also still practices public canings and jails you for spitting on the sidewalk. While good government is obviously essential, government that can be good without being intrusive and dictatorial is ideal, and the latter seems more or less impossible with a multicultural society to manage.
There's also another dimension of this fallacy that goes unstated. While good government makes bad demographics survivable, good demographics also make bad government survivable. And the writings of this substack should make it more than evident that good government is not a given, nor a constant when and if it comes about. Take Sweden, a classic socio-demographic case. Sweden has had what Yarvin would call a bad government for decades now. Yet Sweden up through the 90s would by all accounts be a pretty nice place to live. It was only with the introduction of multicultural conflict that the system became unworkable for the average person. So, if bad government is more common than good, and good government can't be guaranteed to last, it would seem prudent to desire a demographic state that makes the periods of bad government more tolerable.
The Yarvinian response I would expect to bring this back to an issue of government would be saying any demographic policy change is "regime-complete," but I don't think it is. While obviously something like deporting all non-white residents (which isn't something I think would be a good idea or that I desire) would be regime-complete, even relatively "cucked" mainstream right parties can pass policy that at least slows down demographic change, making bad government more tolerable while good government is cooked up by the likes of this publication. So, I don't think there's any excuse to ignore demographic issues, along with policy that could at least keep them from getting worse, by making some hand-wavey appeal that good government will ultimately solve this, as well as every other problem.
(P.S., I'm sorry for your loss Mr. Yarvin, but I wanted to make this critique while the article it was in response to was relatively new, so I hope you don't take this in bad taste)
A riveting critique of white nationalism by a fellow white person.
Great article! However, I have one point of contention: 4chan is not the most uncensored platform online. As you correctly point out, it, too, has its own janitors ("jannies"), and those jannies do obliterate threads. They get rid of them for content that is illegal in the United States, of course, but they do so for other reasons as well. One of the more legitimate reasons is the deletion of threads that are off topic to the board they're being posted in; you wouldn't ask for opinions on a music album in the literature board, for example. However, these janitor positions are pretty routinely infiltrated by the usual suspects. It's a recurring conversation among 4chan users that certain boards -- such as /g/ (Technology; computers, programming, electronics, etc) and /tg/ (Traditional Games; board games, card games, dice games, tabletop RPGs, etc) -- have janitors who aggressively delete threads that contradict woke orthodoxy.
This problem is bound to arise specifically in any centralized platform. This raises the question of what a decentralized, or at least less centralized, platform even is. You can find this on something known colloquially as the "fediverse." People on the right were rightly mad at how maliciously they were silenced on placed like Twitter, and so they created Gab and Parler, which are basically just Twitter clones exclusively for conservatives. Well, what if, instead of that, you had 10,000 Twitter clones that could talk to each other?
That makes moderation effectively impossible, at least with how the current Internet is structured. Good luck shutting someone up when there are who knows how many shady Lithuanian VPS hosts who accept BitCoin payments. The implementation details of a truly censorious state (or ancillary actors, like corporations) actually quelling this are pretty daunting considering that any idiot with $5 and a domain name can go on Linode and start their own "instance."
So while I'm certainly not above paying money for premium content, that doesn't stop me from reveling in the gutter while I'm at it, hence why I'm in your blog and on my own instance of the fediverse in two separate tabs. But notably, one window.
My instance is: https://iddqd.social/
It's open registration. Not all are. I think you should create an account and click around in the "Known Network" tab for a while. My instance is pretty small, so if you want a bigger one (or you just don't like my brazen shilling), you can go to one of these instead:
https://freespeechextremist.com/
https://shitposter.club/
https://glowers.club/
https://kiwifarms.cc/
I commented weeks ago that Curtis seemed to have hit an expository wall. Now with this personal devastation, the future of his Gray Mirror exploration is in doubt. That said, our friend’s writings, especially from just before the election to just after, impress me as among the most thoughtful, most illuminating I have read. For weeks at a stretch, Curtis was on fire—and a pleasure to ride shotgun with
Curtis, I'm so sorry.
I'm sorry for your loss. I keep thinking about you and your family since I found out last night. I am myself a mother of a 10-year-old, so this gives me a lot to think about, but your poem makes me think back to the decade-long illness and death of my father a few years ago. I was visiting my parents on the night of his death (he was 56), so this brings back a lot of memories of all that happens before, during, and after. I think the only helpful thought I have found in dealing with loss is that there are all these other people out there who are experiencing the same thing. Otherwise, it still feels unreal. The years of knowing it was going to happen don't prepare you for it.
I hope you are well, Curtis. Thanks for your enlightening contributions to the world.
I think your rewrite of substack’s hate clause could be made quite a bit clearer, by replacing ‘other’ with ‘unprotected.’ The opposite of protected is unprotected— ie:
“We prohibit content that (a) incites concrete lawless action, or (b) menaces or insults, individually or collectively, any protected group of which the author is not a member. Other [Unprotected] groups or persons may be insulted. Other abstract [Unprotected] groups, but never persons, may be menaced. We also prohibit (c) any form of white nationalism.”
Clause (c) could also be usefully rewritten in terms of ‘unprotected groups’ since of course, in reality any form of group solidarity or advocacy of collective action by any unprotected group is as prohibited as white nationalism— thus (c) should be written as ‘any advocacy for unprotected group solidarity is prohibited; any unprotected group collective action is prohibited.’ This formulation covers the general case, and everyone can immediately see that engaging in any form of male solidarity or advocacy of male solidarity or any call for male collective action is also prohibited.
Then of course, list the protected groups, in order, since of course, protection is a stack, not a yes/no. Those higher in the stack are protected agains those lower in the stack. Those lower in the stack are not protected against those higher in the stack:
black trans
black LGB
black female
black male
POC trans (POC does not include high IQ minorities, such as Jewish or East Asians)
POC LGB
.
.
.
Jewish, etc
High IQ Asian, etc (High IQ Asian includes Korea, Japan, Korea, China, India, but not Pakistan or the Middle East which are included in POC)
White, etc
stack endeth with white male.
Although perhaps we are ignoring the important qualifier woke/non-woke.
After all, does anyone seriously doubt that a non-woke black or a non-woke female, or even a non-woke trans has forfeited their protected group membership? Of course they have. Candice Owens is not a member of a protected group, she is, as an openly non-woke black woman, factually black female, but, of course, morally a white male.
Indeed, I have no doubt that in the end, when all the kinks are worked out, the stack will collapse down to:
activist woke (party cadre)
passive woke (the people)
non-woke (enemies of the people)
Sticks and stones...names should never hurt you.
https://allenfarrington.medium.com/national-socialism-in-the-birthplace-of-the-enlightenment-a2218337af43
These laws want to be hated
— (PS: is there anyone who thinks “woke” and “PC” aren’t a single thing? Not a rhetorical question.)
I believe one is more polarizing.
Perhaps one is more “empowering”?
Offensive? Defensive?
Active/passive?
Rambling over.
I appreciate your writing, plenty of food for thought.
Political Correctness was based on the assumption that morality is socially constructed and culturally relative, and therefore has no place in the public sphere. Ie: there is no "good" or "bad;," and any words that connote goodness or badness shouldn't be allowed in public discourse. Political Correctness means creating and adhering to a public-sphere vocabulary that attempts (or pretends) to be morally neutral and culturally baggage-less. I say this because there's been heavy historical revisionism to the effect that PC was always a right wing slur for "politeness." But no, it was an actual project, and lefty academics were actually excited about it. "Woke," I think, came from hip hop. The first person I heard using it was Lauryn Hill, back in the nineties.It meant "awake to the fact that you are in a systemically racist society." So, "woke" is a narrower term than "politically correct." No one remembers these historical details, but I think they're important.
I'd say the way it's used now, 'PC' is a subset of 'woke'. However, I do agree with the typically leftist argument that PC has been a thing forever, just in other forms.