Post facto, it seems given the monster that these people have actually unleashed and empowered, the preemptive negative reactions to what they had been saying in public were actually pretty fucking justified. And I say this with the perspective of someone who generally believes in open debate, hates cancel culture, and who was reading Yarvin as he was writing under the Moldbug nym and found much of his analysis compelling. But it always struck me that Yarvin came to the exact wrong conclusion wanting to run thermodynamics backwards. Even Urbit, I had thought there was something novel and universal there, until I realized it was actually just describing another Java 1.0 dressed up in fancy equations and four-letter words. Like sure, if you could travel back in time and make all computing equipment run Urbit, Java, or Rust that sure would make a lot of things easy. Except in the real world, other languages already exist and have anchoring utility that is likely to keep them existing.

I keep pondering a steelmanning of this idea of the Elite Jewish Conspiracy, pushing this radical acceptance of non-traditional lifestyles onto our society through various distributed leadership positions. I think that needed to get more mainstream treatment - stepping back and looking at it impartially, does this not seem an awful lot like what one would expect as counterbalance to the cultural memory of the Shoah? An attempt to prevent such an utter industrial-scale waste of human life and potential in the name of uniformity from ever happening again? And maybe the right answer is that we needed to get past its cloying overreactions, incorporate it into our baseline society, and move forward - instead of giving in to the simpleheaded authoritarian powermongers promising to simplify the world for us if only we hand them the power with a mandate to destroy.

Group chats rule the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40660867 - June 2024 (184 comments)

I identify as very liberal/progressive (and was, e.g., already helping out trans people before many "woke" people were born), and I'm very skeptical of (and often angry at) techbro right-wingers, but I was also taught to believe in "the marketplace of ideas".

(Of course I know it's not that simple today, due to large numbers of bad actors with Internet-powered soapboxes, massive organized psyops of various kinds, and sketchy social media companies. But please bear with me.)

So I was horrified by the years of large numbers of liberal/progressive people who were rabidly witch-hunting, attacking, de-platforming, etc. people with whom they disagreed, and sinking to the levels of bad-faith non-dialogue as some of the people they attacked.

When a student at a great liberal arts college (to which I was donating) was in the news, for leading an effort to prevent an invited campus speaker from being heard, and the university didn't gently smack the basics into the student, I stopped donating.

(I recall my thinking at the time: I knew people who very much needed money, and who never had the privilege to attend the university that this student was pissing away.)

Even if a large slice of liberal/progressive hadn't gone rabid, maybe we still would've ended up in the horrifying situation of Nazi salutes at a US Presidential inauguration, and the various actions following.

But their behavior definitely helped drive some voters that direction, at the same time the behavior forfeited many opportunities to teach and to learn.

Also, after articles like these, will calls for "viewpoint diversity" finally apply to conservatives who chase out even the moderates from their spheres? After years of the left being accused of suppressing opposing views, I haven't seen quite the same backlash against conservatives building up ideologically homogenous spaces like the group chats in the article.