24 Comments

Who said neoreactionaries can’t indulge in a little Bronze Age piracy?

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UR the king*

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The philosophy podcast should have a warning that if a listener only listens once, he's a philosopher; any more than that, he's a deviant.

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Shit I'm a deviant now...

Malice's comment, "...we wake up together, I stroke your cheek and say, 'We're philosophers now'," was just... Well, worth watching the whole thing for over again, anyway.

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Of course the pinkos make you pay for a podcast

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pinko is an exonym. also just do a custom pledge of 1$ and that gets u the content

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Aimee Terese/What's Left podcast introduced me to the name "Mencius Moldbug" way back in 2019 when she had a different cohost, and she was much more of a standard leftist critiquing the left movement from inside. Aimee has more than any other person changed the way I think about politics and I will always be thankful for that. Really cool to see these two on a podcast episode together now!

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It's a real shame that I have to pay for a service I'm only going to listen to one episode

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The Donald Rumsfeld episode is interesting. 'The Work of Degeneracy' has no teeth whatsoever.

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Here's parenting for you: [from thehill(dot)com] -- Tampa-area school district imposes mask mandate after 10K students forced to isolate -- Joseph Choi 8 hrs ago -- A Tampa-area school district, the eighth largest in the U.S., voted on Wednesday to issue a mask mandate after more than 10,000 students and staff members were forced into quarantine or isolation at the start of the school year.

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Couple points, random, some need to be dug into and I'm shooting from the hip, but... I do have access to FL's DOH numbers -- I am contracted with their reporting unit.

1. Note that headline mixes "students and staff" in that 10k figure. What is the exact % of students catching it in that number? I know the national average and the FL averages are similar: around 1.92% of those with a Case are children. Yes, "delta infects more children than alpha," but you're talking about up from 0.5% to <2%. That's a panic headline.

2. Calling it now: FL has peaked. The Case and Hospitalization #s have been flat the last 2 weeks, and this week they're dropping, Hillsboro (Tampa's county) in particular dropped precipitously this week.

3. I still can't tell what is causing it, but oddly Hillsboro is a major county in FL and the only one in the whole state that has had an absolutely flat hospitalization rate despite the case spike. Every other county had a major ramp up in cases starting in June, with a hospitalization rate that has like a logarithmic lower trail behind it (e.g. as cases triple and quadruple, hospitalizations stay a similar percentage, only doubling and tripling, the percentage being very low). I can't publish exact numbers, I'd like to keep my job. But my point is, I've been puzzled all summer that Hillsboro is one of the highest case spread counties, yet hospitalizations have been constant the whole time. Really weird. I don't know their vax rate, I don't have their age demographics ready, it could be a relatively young demo county, etc.

3. "Quarantine" means "you were in contact with someone who contracted COVID," not "you contracted COVID." Last week Hillsboro cty picked up 8000 cases, less than 40 hospitalizations, again probably 2% of each of those were kids; the week before, 6500 new cases, less than 30 hosp, guess that 2% of those were kids. So last week, 160 sick kids and maybe 10-20 kids in the hospital in a county of 1.5 million people, caused 10,000 students-and-staff to hide in their homes. And now everyone needs to wear a mask or face the wrath of Karen's accusations of you being a murderer despite not even being infected.

I get that this disease is real and has killed people. There have been more heart attacks this year in the same county than COVID deaths though. Nothing is in perspective, and everyone's foaming at the mouth trying to control each other. There's just something very UU Progressive and paternalistic about this "virtue" that you shame other people for not taking care of you. It's like they've never met human nature before: The only guarantees in life are that there will be jerks, death, and taxes. There's no acknowledgement of reality, just chilling out and accepting that real life kinda sucks, and your high-minded morals and lecturing are not going to change that.

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By "here's parenting for you" I was sarcastically referring to the monstrous child-abuse being perpetrated by these child-masking governments. The isolation of 10,000 kids because they were in the proximity of children found to be "positive" is equally disgusting and demonic. Even if my child were "positive" but minimally ill and wanted to go to the playground I'd take him to the playground, because that's what human beings do.

I don't think that it's a panic-headline: I think that the headline expresses contempt for, and moral horror at, the demonic crime of isolating 10K kids and masking the rest. It's equivalent to "A Soviet province, the eighth largest in Russia, voted on Wednesday to subject all males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to biweekly interrogations after more than 10,000 young men were forced into gulags at the start of the year."

I want to make it very clear what my position on this subject is. Mask-mandate-perpetrators and their supporters are psychically the same as Nazis in the 1930s. They would have been eager, energetic Nazis.

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Excellent response. And I wanted to bolster your claim with some (soft though reasonably accurate) numbers and claims. I fully agree. And in between posting my last and this post, I learned that a distant cousin of my wife's just died of COVID. He was a physical trainer in great shape on a great diet, though unvaccinated and never wore masks. He caught it from someone who was vaccinated and wearing a mask. The fact of the matter is, real life happens, and we do not need to be demonizing each other for personal decisions, especially when outcomes may not even be tied to those decisions. This sort of faking certitude then leveraging that to enact tyranny and hate on neighbors is bizarre and horrifying, I fully agree with you.

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Obv I meant 4. and can't edit my comment. :(

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Ah crap, Philosophy is going to be a euphemism from now on, isn't it?

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The Black Mamba analogy was great! We all need to walk through tall grass from time to time. It’s helpful to know what the mamba’s habits are before you set out.

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What are your thoughts about Vox Day? You and Michael started discussing him but then moved on to other topics.

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August 19, 2021
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Don't be that guy. Not only is that a dumb take, but it's like nothing they said in this interview actually sunk in.

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It seems that the basic take was "he has said stuff that's smart, so he should be treated as somebody with a capacity for intelligence". Which is true and good advice, but doesn't necessarily mean that the bulk of his work is great.

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That was my take as well, but it's the details I'm interested in (what they agree with, disagree with, etc).

Like Yarvin, Vox has had a great deal of influence on right-wing internet culture. Yarvin and Malice are both great people to explore the nuances of that influence.

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August 19, 2021
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Do you have a specific example of antisemitism?

Vox is good friends with Milo Yiannopoulos and Martin Van Creveld, and supports the right of Israel to exist. That's not exactly textbook antisemitism.

Something that Michael Malice has argued in defense of Yarvin is that it easy to dismiss an interesting, heterodox thinker by taking something they've said (often out of context) and acts as if that characterizes their entire work. That's what I see you doing here and I don't think it is constructive.

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Yarvin is friends with a lot of antisemites, that's not exactly textbook being jewish.

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