I had to look up some of the references and read pieces of the pieces that were linked throughout the text. It was worth every minute and I enjoyed reading it.
"I am sure a lot of Gray Mirror readers feel, in some sense—alone."
I'm one of only a few people I know (OK, OK, I'm the ONLY one I know) who sent my adult children screen captures from UR, back in the day. And NOW, I went and spent $100 on this latest foolishness.
But, today, I got my money's worth: "Academia in the 20s has a lot of problems, and it’s only getting worse. Yet there are still history nerds out there, right now, who are seriously studying the Wars of the Roses—as though George Floyd had never existed!"
So it’s not just that everyone—at least, everyone cool—is on the same page. It’s more like: everyone is reading the same book—at the same speed. No wonder all the peasants are seeing conspiracies in their motherfucking soup. If you saw a group of bright red dots move across the evening sky this way, what would you think they were? Pigeons? Remote-controlled pigeons, illuminated by lasers? Sometimes even Occam is baffled.
Started reading @ 4 AM, now my wife, pregnant, is pissed and hungry since I couldn't put it down until I finished @ 7. There is the old trope "I am sorry for the long letter, I didn't have time to write a shorter one." There needs to be the Yarvin inverse: "I'm sorry for the short post, my hard drive ran out of space."
Now I've ordered Burden of Brown from Amazon and am probably on a list.
I remember reading that and being extremely unimpressed. For a writer like Scott, the substance of his FAQ was mostly cherry-picking quotes and attempting to deboonk them, very very disappointing! One of his “finer” talking points seemed to be calling Curtis out on how, actually, crime didn’t increase in Britain in the 20th century, or something. How much time does he think we spend pondering that here?
I was so very, very disappointed that there was no takedown, or really discussion, of the Cathedral. I mean come on— that’s kind of our thing! But I guess it would kind of derail Scott’s career to stop writing as if our institutions are actually legitimate or capable of reform.
That said, “Meditations on Moloch” is a far better challenge to anarcho-capitalism and similar ideologies including much of what was written about on Unqualified Reservations. Of course, Yarvin these days has done a 180 on the ability of capitalism to save our civilization.
You’re correct in the first and second paragraph. Section 4 of Anti-Reactionary FAQ is good for Gray Nihilists like us to read. A direct contention with s. 4 of that post would just be really fun to read. But going line by line and refuting rebuts with facts and logic is not really Yarvin’s style.
How would you say Yarvin’s ideas have changed w/ regard to capitalism’s role in civilization. UR-era neocameralism patchwork still seems essential to his thought (Plan A for Coronavirus, Bitzion, GM #5 advocates patchwork for the armigers/yeoman/lazzari). He’s advocating joint-stock monarchy in this essay.
All I can see is that the Antiversity has been replaced with the sort of “political amplifier” political party that he describes in The political amplifier and automate your vote.
Before, on UR, he was talking about waiting until power is simply given to the antiveristy because the antiversity is so competent and the Brain is so incompetent and desperate. Now he advocates this method of hacking democracy using democracy. Using negative, sardonic, political energy as fuel.
Yarvin obviously still believes that running the country like a corporation would be better than running it like a liberal democracy (or oligarchy). But a lot of his older work rests on the assumption that an absolutist regime with corporate characteristics would be enough to benefit people across the board. His new “nomos of the earth” stuff contains a lot of anti-capitalist undertones (make-work? Technological restrictions? AI simulation chambers) which remain pretty esoteric. But I think he’s drawn from BAP in that a revolution in government is only the FIRST necessary step to restore man’s soul.
Well said. We need a sort of CEO who is also a philosopher king. The time-scale at which the ideas in your parenthesis would need to be profitable is extremely long.
Bayesian logic is a trick of the mind to reach the desired conclusion while pretending to have analytically concluded no other conclusion is equally likely. It puts the logician in the frame of mind of the answer to the problem simultaneously with the formulations of the questions. Our minds are not particularly good at parsing what is and what could be, and thus the Bayesian approach to hypothesizing is fraught with internal conflict and self-deception. Arriving at a solution predetermined by the subconscious is frighteningly simple with a Bayesian approach, and thus its user is forever shackled to proving himself to be right before he has even engaged the upper rungs of his conscious awareness.
On even his most self-indulgent forays, Curtis is more interesting than almost anyone else writing today. But I do feel that the more recent posts have produced rather diminishing returns, as one by one we check off the things that will not happen: restore the Stuarts; introduce any monarchical regime; spark a revolution that will physically, not just intellectually, destroy the regime and reigning mindset; find a separate peace apart from the internet; and now, find a separate peace in cyberspace. All of our friend's brilliant, elegant, and at times elevating words seem to be leading to something rather simple: if a real revolution cannot happen, then there remain essentially two courses: exile or collaboration. All else is scratching an itch that can't be helped. If I were advising a 20-year old I would say: make millions of dollars and built a fort. The rest is filling polluted time and space.
As much as get money and hide seems tempting, It is far more noble to try and save the west. We are here now, our side has lost tell now because we hide. We should hide no longer but work towards the restoration of civilization.
Curtis is hobbled by his desire to retain multiculturalism, which is completely incompatible with monarchy. I think he knows this, and hopes a solution will (someday) present itself.
Why should a people—any people—not rule themselves?
This isn't some idle question: it's literally the justification for the American Revolution. And the British were our freaking *cousins*, and the taxes they took were pitifully low (esp. compared to today). If *that* was unacceptable then, well…
Curtis is really trying to do all of this without force. He wants it peaceful, no one punished, etc. Bygones be bygones.
So who rules? More specifically: which *tribe* rules this multi-ethnic empire? Are we really going to go with the British "White people rule everything" model in the 21st century?
Again: why not let each people rule themselves?
Is there *any* coherent argument against doing that? If someone has one, I'd love to hear it.
Why categorize ethnically? Aside from it just being boring and basic bitch, a lack of inner-conflict makes it vulnerable to outside propaganda and values. Afterall, it's very that crucible that has spread America's cultural seed all over the world.
Because in multi-ethnic situations, studies and simulations show that ethnicities (read: tribes) that act in a coherent fashion (high in-group preference) dramatically out-compete those that don't in any kind of iterated game situation like, say, an economy.
We see this play out all around us daily. History is full of it, the British Empire being just one example.
When that happens, the ethnicity that is "winning" ends up ruling the other ones. Hence my question: which "tribe" should rule this multi-ethnic empire? Does Curtis have an answer?
Or is he, like you apparently, trying to wave away this "dominant power idea" as "boring and basic bitch"? I mean, I'm fine with people waving it away—it just makes my tribe more competitive. Maybe consider embracing nonviolence and disbanding your armies…
Evolutionary mechanisms often serve the purposes of non-biological tribes. The Valley elite has a high in group preference for people who have an engineering background and have read Zero to One.
To say that these people are actually guided by an in-group preference for those most closely genetically related is to contradict what we see with our eyes. Half of these peoples kids are mixed race.
The core idea is that the evolutionary mechanisms you’re citing can be appropriated to serve a tribe which is not biologically related.
Also, on a personal note, because I want you to be okay, I want you to know that exactly no one in your tribe of any significant quality or productivity is thinking in terms of what makes their tribe more competitive, and their not acting it out either. Any one you would want in your tribe doesn’t act in a way that serves their biological brethren, even if they do, they do it diminishingly as time goes on.
So GM #5 outlines how to do indirect rule peacefully. He also builds on how to do it w/ orbital/terrestrial rules from #6. Those two pieces answer your questions. The people running the show will be armigers, as they’ve always been. The bee ruling class will probably represent Silicon Valley in its make-up and culture. That’s my reckoning
> The people running the show will be armigers, as they’ve always been.
This is insufficiently precise: *which* armigers?
It matters if they are from the same tribe, or another one altogether. It matters where they are replenished from—are they like priests in the Catholic church, extracted from the population? That gave the church a ton of stability and grounded them in the population they rule.
Or are they foreign, ruling over a people they have no allegiance and understanding of, and no possibility of gaining such?
I 100% agree that armigers run the show; this is self-evident. But it matters *which* armigers they are, since they are not interchangeable and their *legitimacy* and *value* to the (much more numerous) people matters in practice. (If it didn't matter, civilizations would last forever. That they don't is evidence that quality-of-rule matters. See the "Bums always lose" article for why that is.)
Well the idea is that people DO rule themselves insofar as the orbital/terrestrial rules are obeyed. In #5 sections of yeomen totally culturally isolated from one another and only technologically isolated as much as their own leadership chooses. What’s your issue with such a low level of interference by the sovereign as outlined in #5 and #6?
Because there is no period in history where groups have true sovereignty and aren't involved in actively either fighting or plotting against each other. The most stable systems are unipolar or bipolar. Multipolar systems are just a special kind of power vacuum.
Let's be accurate. Calvinism on the Continent led to Puritanism on the Island, which led to weirdo congregationalism in the USA which became leftist liberalism. Calvin was non-wokey.
Wokeism has features of a religious cult, but it lacks what religion provides: a stable set of rules and assurances simple believers can live a life, according to the rules in a manner in which it is possible and satisfying. Wokeism has features, which makes it a religious cult, but the basis of what the cult is about changes rapidly and provides nothing a simple believer can actually rely on. Despite the fact that terms like "white supremacy" or "hetero-normative cis-patriarchy" are absolutes, they only serve the purpose to create an absolute evil.
There is nothing good or even achievable in Wokeism. The cult leads followers into a vast darkness of contradictions and intellectual voids, something that religions, which grant a purpose, a meaning and a sense for life at it is, usually try to avoid.
In the Christian religion there are forgiveness, humility and stuff that Nietzsche hated so much, but whatever one think of it, it has characteristics, which are different from wokeism.
What Lindsay is tyring to avoid on his side is that his atheism and the ideologies that surrounded it, was flawed in the first place and easy prey for wokeism, exactly for the reason that atheism like wokeism cannot provide anything positive and life supporting.
If one becomes a parent the stability in life is more important than anything else.
If you are able and circumstances allow you to raise your kids full time, you want to do it in an environment which is stable, has clear rules and support the general idea that all your lives are valuable and everyone owes everyone respect.
There is no reference to "weak" in my post. And power is obviously achievable in Wokeism. But to be religion and to be regarded as a religion and not a religious cult, something has to be stable over a longer period of time, let's say a century, to develop themselves into a reliable framework. Wokeism is unstable, not weak. If it is getting weak then because it cannot adapt to it's own instability any longer. That takes time and we can assess that Wokeism will have another 20 years or so to come crashing down. But it will inevitably.
I've listened to a lot of his stuff and don't recall him mentioning him.
Lindsay is a good barometer for "normal, believes in democracy/liberalism, but still thinks for himself…ish." He won't bend the knee, but I suspect he will proudly go down with the democracy ship if it comes to that.
When I read a new post here at Chez Gray its usually in the morning over a cup of coffee - this one was so long it took me five cups and I won't sleep till Monday - when I think of Scott Alexander, the first thing that comes to mind isn't rationalism but length. I often feel his book reviews and more exceptional posts are longer than the books/subjects themselves - he's a wee bit on the wordy side lets say, something him and Curtis share...so I'm wondering if the purpose of this post is actually a challenge to Scott to write a longer response than this post - something that could be published by Tor as a novella SFF trilogy - whaddya say Scott - you got 50k words in ya for this? C'mon!
On a more serious note. The need of the CDC leadership and its formerly world-class minions to STAY ON THE SURFBOARD as the political COVID waves continue to curl, higher and higher is causing industrial scale disaster in the West, while the dreaded CCP seems to be managing at least tolerably.
They released what they call "guidance" (a synonym in our age for "goodthink") this week. The subject was "reopening schools safely". After an introductory paragraph covering the inadequacy of the fake remote/hybrid education, the absolute imperative of resuming schooling, and the UTTER ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE of serious risk in so doing - the rest present all the reasons that the most venal and corrupt teacher's union (and the competition is fierce) could come up with to keep the schools closed.
There must a thousand Netflix and movie directors who are very good at the front end through the middle: laying out a premise, teasing out plot fragments, twisting the tension, layering on effects, showing their Haskell W moves, and so on. There are but a handful who can take all of this frothy set up and produce a good, coherent resolution to it. We talk a lot about "narrative" but, at least in the entertainment--and punditry--cosmos, there's relatively little of
it in evidence.
My guess is Curtis is having a bit of trouble figuring out where to go from here. And I sympathize--no one else has a clue either. As I noted yesterday, his march since summer has systematically eliminated one platitude after another, leaving us, yes, nihilism. But nihilism is a tough destination to stay put in. We westerners, after all, are not very good Buddhists--we keep wanting to fill the void with something. Even our Bodhisattvas have skin rash.
So, in Curtis' case we get these essays on the two Scotts. I hope I won't seem ungrateful if I say that nothing about these two individuals interests me in the slightest. Indeed, Curtis's attention to them strikes me as unworthy--as essentially a geeky cat fight of interest only to other cats or geeks. This is probably a cost of living in Silicon Valley, which encourages you to pay attention to others who live there. But we who do not care about them or find them of any consequence. They are part of the noise that every day comes closer to killing us. The less seen and heard the better.
We want Curtis wrestling with "the answer". And if that means the next two or three posts read: "Not sure what to think or do--need more time", then that is fine. We have a vast totalitarian lite future to wade through. We have all the time in the world.
It took me three hours to get through it.
I had to look up some of the references and read pieces of the pieces that were linked throughout the text. It was worth every minute and I enjoyed reading it.
"I am sure a lot of Gray Mirror readers feel, in some sense—alone."
Well, not any more.
idk how many hours, but took me a couple of very long sittings on two different days
I'm one of only a few people I know (OK, OK, I'm the ONLY one I know) who sent my adult children screen captures from UR, back in the day. And NOW, I went and spent $100 on this latest foolishness.
But, today, I got my money's worth: "Academia in the 20s has a lot of problems, and it’s only getting worse. Yet there are still history nerds out there, right now, who are seriously studying the Wars of the Roses—as though George Floyd had never existed!"
WHO ELSE CAN WRITE LIKE THIS?
And like this:
So it’s not just that everyone—at least, everyone cool—is on the same page. It’s more like: everyone is reading the same book—at the same speed. No wonder all the peasants are seeing conspiracies in their motherfucking soup. If you saw a group of bright red dots move across the evening sky this way, what would you think they were? Pigeons? Remote-controlled pigeons, illuminated by lasers? Sometimes even Occam is baffled.
Fuck the New York Times.
Started reading @ 4 AM, now my wife, pregnant, is pissed and hungry since I couldn't put it down until I finished @ 7. There is the old trope "I am sorry for the long letter, I didn't have time to write a shorter one." There needs to be the Yarvin inverse: "I'm sorry for the short post, my hard drive ran out of space."
Now I've ordered Burden of Brown from Amazon and am probably on a list.
An article from you addressing Scott's "The Anti-Reactionary FAQ" would really be awesome.
I remember reading that and being extremely unimpressed. For a writer like Scott, the substance of his FAQ was mostly cherry-picking quotes and attempting to deboonk them, very very disappointing! One of his “finer” talking points seemed to be calling Curtis out on how, actually, crime didn’t increase in Britain in the 20th century, or something. How much time does he think we spend pondering that here?
I was so very, very disappointed that there was no takedown, or really discussion, of the Cathedral. I mean come on— that’s kind of our thing! But I guess it would kind of derail Scott’s career to stop writing as if our institutions are actually legitimate or capable of reform.
That said, “Meditations on Moloch” is a far better challenge to anarcho-capitalism and similar ideologies including much of what was written about on Unqualified Reservations. Of course, Yarvin these days has done a 180 on the ability of capitalism to save our civilization.
You’re correct in the first and second paragraph. Section 4 of Anti-Reactionary FAQ is good for Gray Nihilists like us to read. A direct contention with s. 4 of that post would just be really fun to read. But going line by line and refuting rebuts with facts and logic is not really Yarvin’s style.
How would you say Yarvin’s ideas have changed w/ regard to capitalism’s role in civilization. UR-era neocameralism patchwork still seems essential to his thought (Plan A for Coronavirus, Bitzion, GM #5 advocates patchwork for the armigers/yeoman/lazzari). He’s advocating joint-stock monarchy in this essay.
All I can see is that the Antiversity has been replaced with the sort of “political amplifier” political party that he describes in The political amplifier and automate your vote.
Before, on UR, he was talking about waiting until power is simply given to the antiveristy because the antiversity is so competent and the Brain is so incompetent and desperate. Now he advocates this method of hacking democracy using democracy. Using negative, sardonic, political energy as fuel.
Yarvin obviously still believes that running the country like a corporation would be better than running it like a liberal democracy (or oligarchy). But a lot of his older work rests on the assumption that an absolutist regime with corporate characteristics would be enough to benefit people across the board. His new “nomos of the earth” stuff contains a lot of anti-capitalist undertones (make-work? Technological restrictions? AI simulation chambers) which remain pretty esoteric. But I think he’s drawn from BAP in that a revolution in government is only the FIRST necessary step to restore man’s soul.
Well said. We need a sort of CEO who is also a philosopher king. The time-scale at which the ideas in your parenthesis would need to be profitable is extremely long.
Bayesian logic is a trick of the mind to reach the desired conclusion while pretending to have analytically concluded no other conclusion is equally likely. It puts the logician in the frame of mind of the answer to the problem simultaneously with the formulations of the questions. Our minds are not particularly good at parsing what is and what could be, and thus the Bayesian approach to hypothesizing is fraught with internal conflict and self-deception. Arriving at a solution predetermined by the subconscious is frighteningly simple with a Bayesian approach, and thus its user is forever shackled to proving himself to be right before he has even engaged the upper rungs of his conscious awareness.
I stand with Will. https://wmbriggs.com/post/34533/
On even his most self-indulgent forays, Curtis is more interesting than almost anyone else writing today. But I do feel that the more recent posts have produced rather diminishing returns, as one by one we check off the things that will not happen: restore the Stuarts; introduce any monarchical regime; spark a revolution that will physically, not just intellectually, destroy the regime and reigning mindset; find a separate peace apart from the internet; and now, find a separate peace in cyberspace. All of our friend's brilliant, elegant, and at times elevating words seem to be leading to something rather simple: if a real revolution cannot happen, then there remain essentially two courses: exile or collaboration. All else is scratching an itch that can't be helped. If I were advising a 20-year old I would say: make millions of dollars and built a fort. The rest is filling polluted time and space.
As much as get money and hide seems tempting, It is far more noble to try and save the west. We are here now, our side has lost tell now because we hide. We should hide no longer but work towards the restoration of civilization.
Curtis is hobbled by his desire to retain multiculturalism, which is completely incompatible with monarchy. I think he knows this, and hopes a solution will (someday) present itself.
Hard to fault the man for trying…
He analogized his vision with the “indirect rule” of the British Empire. Does this not work in some way he’s failed to see?
The problem Curtis is up against is this:
Why should a people—any people—not rule themselves?
This isn't some idle question: it's literally the justification for the American Revolution. And the British were our freaking *cousins*, and the taxes they took were pitifully low (esp. compared to today). If *that* was unacceptable then, well…
Curtis is really trying to do all of this without force. He wants it peaceful, no one punished, etc. Bygones be bygones.
So who rules? More specifically: which *tribe* rules this multi-ethnic empire? Are we really going to go with the British "White people rule everything" model in the 21st century?
Again: why not let each people rule themselves?
Is there *any* coherent argument against doing that? If someone has one, I'd love to hear it.
Why categorize ethnically? Aside from it just being boring and basic bitch, a lack of inner-conflict makes it vulnerable to outside propaganda and values. Afterall, it's very that crucible that has spread America's cultural seed all over the world.
> Why categorize ethnically?
Because in multi-ethnic situations, studies and simulations show that ethnicities (read: tribes) that act in a coherent fashion (high in-group preference) dramatically out-compete those that don't in any kind of iterated game situation like, say, an economy.
We see this play out all around us daily. History is full of it, the British Empire being just one example.
When that happens, the ethnicity that is "winning" ends up ruling the other ones. Hence my question: which "tribe" should rule this multi-ethnic empire? Does Curtis have an answer?
Or is he, like you apparently, trying to wave away this "dominant power idea" as "boring and basic bitch"? I mean, I'm fine with people waving it away—it just makes my tribe more competitive. Maybe consider embracing nonviolence and disbanding your armies…
Evolutionary mechanisms often serve the purposes of non-biological tribes. The Valley elite has a high in group preference for people who have an engineering background and have read Zero to One.
To say that these people are actually guided by an in-group preference for those most closely genetically related is to contradict what we see with our eyes. Half of these peoples kids are mixed race.
The core idea is that the evolutionary mechanisms you’re citing can be appropriated to serve a tribe which is not biologically related.
Also, on a personal note, because I want you to be okay, I want you to know that exactly no one in your tribe of any significant quality or productivity is thinking in terms of what makes their tribe more competitive, and their not acting it out either. Any one you would want in your tribe doesn’t act in a way that serves their biological brethren, even if they do, they do it diminishingly as time goes on.
So GM #5 outlines how to do indirect rule peacefully. He also builds on how to do it w/ orbital/terrestrial rules from #6. Those two pieces answer your questions. The people running the show will be armigers, as they’ve always been. The bee ruling class will probably represent Silicon Valley in its make-up and culture. That’s my reckoning
> The people running the show will be armigers, as they’ve always been.
This is insufficiently precise: *which* armigers?
It matters if they are from the same tribe, or another one altogether. It matters where they are replenished from—are they like priests in the Catholic church, extracted from the population? That gave the church a ton of stability and grounded them in the population they rule.
Or are they foreign, ruling over a people they have no allegiance and understanding of, and no possibility of gaining such?
I 100% agree that armigers run the show; this is self-evident. But it matters *which* armigers they are, since they are not interchangeable and their *legitimacy* and *value* to the (much more numerous) people matters in practice. (If it didn't matter, civilizations would last forever. That they don't is evidence that quality-of-rule matters. See the "Bums always lose" article for why that is.)
Well the idea is that people DO rule themselves insofar as the orbital/terrestrial rules are obeyed. In #5 sections of yeomen totally culturally isolated from one another and only technologically isolated as much as their own leadership chooses. What’s your issue with such a low level of interference by the sovereign as outlined in #5 and #6?
Because there is no period in history where groups have true sovereignty and aren't involved in actively either fighting or plotting against each other. The most stable systems are unipolar or bipolar. Multipolar systems are just a special kind of power vacuum.
Thicc
Can’t believe we get this stuff for free. Will I have to unsubscribe to keep this trend going?
The gentleman must have switched from cognac to Armagnac — forget the bottle, straight out of the cask.
The first piece of writing that made me long for cocaine in many, many years
Curtis, what do you think about James Lindsay making a case that wokism should be recognized as a religion? https://newdiscourses.com/2020/09/first-amendment-case-freedom-from-woke-religion/
He even calls it “lapsed Calvinism”.
I’ve long wanted for somebody to make this exact case, though I wish there were some lawyers who would pick it up, too.
I think CY was on to the Calvinism - wokeism connection in the UR days.
Let's be accurate. Calvinism on the Continent led to Puritanism on the Island, which led to weirdo congregationalism in the USA which became leftist liberalism. Calvin was non-wokey.
Very thorough summary, Ron.
Calvin was pretty wokey & wonky. A good Genevan wouldn't feel too out of home in Salem MA.
He was a theocrat, not woak, who assumed establishment vav Church. Salem was a bastardized disestablished abomination of all that.
But wonky - yeah. :-)
Wokeism has features of a religious cult, but it lacks what religion provides: a stable set of rules and assurances simple believers can live a life, according to the rules in a manner in which it is possible and satisfying. Wokeism has features, which makes it a religious cult, but the basis of what the cult is about changes rapidly and provides nothing a simple believer can actually rely on. Despite the fact that terms like "white supremacy" or "hetero-normative cis-patriarchy" are absolutes, they only serve the purpose to create an absolute evil.
There is nothing good or even achievable in Wokeism. The cult leads followers into a vast darkness of contradictions and intellectual voids, something that religions, which grant a purpose, a meaning and a sense for life at it is, usually try to avoid.
In the Christian religion there are forgiveness, humility and stuff that Nietzsche hated so much, but whatever one think of it, it has characteristics, which are different from wokeism.
What Lindsay is tyring to avoid on his side is that his atheism and the ideologies that surrounded it, was flawed in the first place and easy prey for wokeism, exactly for the reason that atheism like wokeism cannot provide anything positive and life supporting.
If one becomes a parent the stability in life is more important than anything else.
If you are able and circumstances allow you to raise your kids full time, you want to do it in an environment which is stable, has clear rules and support the general idea that all your lives are valuable and everyone owes everyone respect.
Religion can provide this.
> There is nothing good or even achievable in Wokeism.
Power is achievable by Wokeism, as is social change. It's also catnip for activists and incredibly difficult for (neutered) Western society to resist.
As a power idea, it is incredibly dominant (even: totalitarian). Dismissing it as weak because it's "not a religion" is unwise.
There is no reference to "weak" in my post. And power is obviously achievable in Wokeism. But to be religion and to be regarded as a religion and not a religious cult, something has to be stable over a longer period of time, let's say a century, to develop themselves into a reliable framework. Wokeism is unstable, not weak. If it is getting weak then because it cannot adapt to it's own instability any longer. That takes time and we can assess that Wokeism will have another 20 years or so to come crashing down. But it will inevitably.
Does Lindsay read GM?
I've listened to a lot of his stuff and don't recall him mentioning him.
Lindsay is a good barometer for "normal, believes in democracy/liberalism, but still thinks for himself…ish." He won't bend the knee, but I suspect he will proudly go down with the democracy ship if it comes to that.
Still worth talking to.
I know he was memed into reading UR, but some UR readers have been hostile towards him for actually doing it and liking the ideas he found there.
Worth every second
When I read a new post here at Chez Gray its usually in the morning over a cup of coffee - this one was so long it took me five cups and I won't sleep till Monday - when I think of Scott Alexander, the first thing that comes to mind isn't rationalism but length. I often feel his book reviews and more exceptional posts are longer than the books/subjects themselves - he's a wee bit on the wordy side lets say, something him and Curtis share...so I'm wondering if the purpose of this post is actually a challenge to Scott to write a longer response than this post - something that could be published by Tor as a novella SFF trilogy - whaddya say Scott - you got 50k words in ya for this? C'mon!
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1276138147521400833.html
The author Zero HP Lovecraft on the Rationalists.
He reads the comments apparently.
On a more serious note. The need of the CDC leadership and its formerly world-class minions to STAY ON THE SURFBOARD as the political COVID waves continue to curl, higher and higher is causing industrial scale disaster in the West, while the dreaded CCP seems to be managing at least tolerably.
They released what they call "guidance" (a synonym in our age for "goodthink") this week. The subject was "reopening schools safely". After an introductory paragraph covering the inadequacy of the fake remote/hybrid education, the absolute imperative of resuming schooling, and the UTTER ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE of serious risk in so doing - the rest present all the reasons that the most venal and corrupt teacher's union (and the competition is fierce) could come up with to keep the schools closed.
OK, talk about burying the lede ...
There must a thousand Netflix and movie directors who are very good at the front end through the middle: laying out a premise, teasing out plot fragments, twisting the tension, layering on effects, showing their Haskell W moves, and so on. There are but a handful who can take all of this frothy set up and produce a good, coherent resolution to it. We talk a lot about "narrative" but, at least in the entertainment--and punditry--cosmos, there's relatively little of
it in evidence.
My guess is Curtis is having a bit of trouble figuring out where to go from here. And I sympathize--no one else has a clue either. As I noted yesterday, his march since summer has systematically eliminated one platitude after another, leaving us, yes, nihilism. But nihilism is a tough destination to stay put in. We westerners, after all, are not very good Buddhists--we keep wanting to fill the void with something. Even our Bodhisattvas have skin rash.
So, in Curtis' case we get these essays on the two Scotts. I hope I won't seem ungrateful if I say that nothing about these two individuals interests me in the slightest. Indeed, Curtis's attention to them strikes me as unworthy--as essentially a geeky cat fight of interest only to other cats or geeks. This is probably a cost of living in Silicon Valley, which encourages you to pay attention to others who live there. But we who do not care about them or find them of any consequence. They are part of the noise that every day comes closer to killing us. The less seen and heard the better.
We want Curtis wrestling with "the answer". And if that means the next two or three posts read: "Not sure what to think or do--need more time", then that is fine. We have a vast totalitarian lite future to wade through. We have all the time in the world.