SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
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User ID: 853
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
I heard a quote awhile ago that was something like "be careful telling people they are Nazis, because one day they might believe you."
If every young white man who has a valid criticisms of the prevailing cultural dogma is pigeonholed into that classification, the author isn't doing himself any favors. It's true that Dissident Right talking points are increasingly being embraced by the mainstream conservative movement. Is that due to sadism, or is it maybe because the DR is getting at something real, and the perspective can no longer be ignored by the conservative talking heads?
Here's Matt Walsh a couple weeks ago:
Well, I'm concerned too. And my concern is this, that if you still have any confusion about what these diversity initiatives actually are, well, this should clear it up. Diversity absolutely means anti-white. That's what it means. All diversity initiatives are anti-white initiatives. Anytime you hear about any kind of diversity initiative anywhere, whether it's in government, in corporations, in any institution at all, it is an anti-white initiative. Diversity is an anti-white conspiracy. And you can clip that and cut it and post it on Twitter because I know you will, because that's what it is. And if you ever doubted it, well, here you go.
It would have been unthinkable for someone like Matt Walsh to say this even a few years ago. Matt isn't saying this because he's sadistic, he's saying it because the prevailing cultural dogma is actually pretty hostile to white people. Gaslighting people with "If you believe that you're a Nazi" has greatly contributed to the Nazi memes, I can guarantee you that.
But ultimately, the core of fascist subjectivity is the indulgence of sadistic feelings.
This is so uncharitable that it bears no resemblance to reality. Let's take a look at one of the many various compilation videos of Hitler's speeches that gets clicks from e-fascists. The fascist subjectivity here is not the indulgence of sadistic feelings. It invokes:
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Feelings of revolutionary triumph from an undesirable status quo
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Sense of community
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Strong leader with a charismatic devotion to the people
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Proposing the nation as inherited from a people
The author has no understanding whatsoever for why this propaganda is compelling to those people, and why there might be a lack of these elements in the present culture that does indeed explain Trump and the growing influence of the Dissident Right. But it's not due to sadism, it's due to very real deficiencies in the culture that do not provide for these human needs, so they are sought in heterodox and taboo spaces.
Edit: OP deleted the post, which was just a copy + paste of this article with no additional commentary.
Somehow I missed that Aaronson is at OpenAI. The idea that someone as neurotic as this is now helping steer the direction of OpenAI is unfortunately aligned with my mental model of their motives: "AI safety" is a euphemism for shtetl-optimized.
Nietzsche posited the "Death of God" as a tragedy, but he still welcomed it as an inevitable sink or swim moment for humanity. It's an opportunity for transcendence; so it may be with the birth of God.
On a personal basis, I think in spite of what the next 20 years will look like- having a family, children, and friends will be appreciated within an extremely broad range of outcomes.
The progressive Jews who are pro-Palestine are not subject to the ban. Why would progressive Jews oppose these measures any more than they would oppose similar measures against other speakers they deem as racist and supportive of ethno-nationalism? If they view Israel as an apartheid state, which they do as written in their bylaws, why would they take issue with this?
Calling these bylaws from some student organizations "Jewish Free zones" is a classic misrepresentation (nah, it's just a lie) by Jewish Journal, and it's revealing to see such kvetching for simply having a small fraction of the anti-racist critique against white identity applied to Jewish nationalism. Would these organizations allow speakers that support white nationalism? If not, are those "white free zones?"
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
2mo ago
In the last 2 years he seemed to develop this understanding of all the users he didn’t like (a group that spanned veritable progressives, myself, @SecureSignals and various other far-from-ideologically-aligned regulars) as part of some communist-fascist-Jewish conspiracy against America.
It's a Hayekian Road to Serfdom schtick.
Fascism is considered "reactionary" by academics because the Academy was dominated by communism, so any ideology opposed to the inevitable global Proletariat revolution is "reactionary" according to their priors.
Hayek inverted this by grouping together any ideology that doesn't accept Liberal priors under the "tyranny" umbrella.
Traditionally, Road to Serfdom rhetoric has been invoked on the Right/Libertarian sphere to associate Socialism with Fascism, in order to discredit the former due to the anti-fascist consensus that exists across the political spectrum.
But Hlynka is observing a large, organic shift of that paradigm in the Dissident Right sphere, where the anti-fascist psychology within the Right is becoming discredited. So he is attempting to denounce that trend by associating it with Wokeism/Socialism as being part of the same "road to tyranny."
I understand where he's coming from, but it's a boring argument... "Woke Progressives don't accept Liberal priors, SecureSignals doesn't accept Liberal priors, look you are basically the same!" is the essence of his argument. The problem is the argument only works if you accept Liberal priors and if you don't then there's not much to discuss. He just repeats that accusation over and over.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
8mo ago
Per Paul in 1 Corinthians 8, Christians are allowed to eat meat that has been sacrificed as an offering to pagan idols, so I think there's more latitude than you would expect on engagement with pagans. The rationale being, "we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none other God" and so the pagan worship has no power, but it should not be indulged if it emboldens those with a "weak conscience."
Of course you can say that the Pope is emboldening those with a weak conscience, and of course that's a bigger deal than the actual pagan ceremony.
On the other hand keeping the US majority anglo white is not going to happen with measures short of genocide or other mass population movement.
No it's not going to happen, a fact which is known to all "White Nationalists." Jews don't expect to attain a majority, but for some reason that doesn't stop them from organizing on tribal lines, in fact their minority status makes their agitation for Jewish interests all the more important in their mind. So this statement, while true, does absolutely nothing to rebut the importance of a white identitarianism in the face of the reality of demographic change, and this fact underscores the importance for why it's necessary to advocate for it given the reality we live in today. Whites becoming a minority only makes the danger of prevailing anti-white culture and propaganda more acute.
‘Whites aren’t allowed to have ethnic identity’ is just false to me, they’re not allowed to have ethnic identity generically as whites.
Ok, so you concede the point... Notice that there is a "white identity" when it is a subject of criticism and critique of everyone else, but anybody who is put under that umbrella by Progressives cannot actually advocate for the ethnic identity that is central to their critique of prevailing culture? It doesn't make any sense.
Many white Americans are not "German American", they are a mix of different European ethnicities, which is why a "white" ethnic identity is a coherent ethnic category. It's good enough in every sense: in census data, crime statistics, leftist cultural critiques and CRT, but when it comes to advocacy in the same terms as every single other ethnic identity then all of a sudden it's an invalid category. That's incoherent, it's hostile.
Obviously, HBD is relevant because it can justify or refute a position. I think what you mean is that our "post-modern racism" came first, and we just cling to HBD to justify something we already wanted to believe, and that was partially true at the beginning although probably not in the way that you think...
My politics pre-HBD were probably closest to yours among anyone else in this community, of a broadly libertarian-conservative persuasion. Believe me when I say I understand where you're coming from because I used to think exactly like you in many ways (I know that's insulting, sorry, but I mean it).
My interest in HBD was initially, admittedly, because I saw it as bolstering some pervasive criticisms of Free Market idealism:
- HBD sinks the theories that persistent wealth inequality and inequality in various social outcomes is driven by market failure, or aftershock effects of racism.
- HBD provides a strong anti-welfare argument in the presence of open borders (yes, my initial interpretation of HBD pegged it as an argument against Welfare rather than an argument against immigration/open borders).
Given that the chorus of Systematic Racism was in a massive crescendo post-2016, HBD sparked my interest because it seemed plausible and to provide the best libertarian-compatible (or so I thought) explanation for those patterns of social behavior.
Of course, though, that didn't last long as @DaseindustriesLtd recently described, accepting HBD as true and taking a few steps beyond questions of economic efficiency quickly led to a broad, systematic collapse of my previously held beliefs (again, which were basically aligned with yours).
On Dissident Right Telegram I recently saw an informal poll with a decent sample size indicating that about 50% of the respondents previously identified as libertarian, so my experience is likely common among those in that sphere.
On one level, you're right that interest in HBD was motivated by an attempt to bolster a political viewpoint, but at the time it was as a defense of moderate system values against the Systematic Racism rhetoric which exploded post-2016, rather than motivated by an a priori desire to be a political dissident, which was unimaginable at the time. I know you don't want to believe that our political beliefs followed our acceptance of HBD rather than the other way around, but that was certainly my personal experience.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
10mo ago
· Edited 10mo ago
Far-right parties on the rise across Europe.
That's a headline we've all read many times in the past decade, is now really different? There are many clips around the internet of the race riots in France, with this Reddit thread showing a compilation of some. It's hard to gauge how serious the riots are, or if it's relatively isolated to a few blocks in a couple cities and these compilations make the situation appear worse than it actually is. The words of Eric Zemmour paint a dire picture:
We are in the early stages of a civil war. It’s an ethnic war. We can see clearly that it’s a race war. We see what forces are involved. We need someone determined and firm. … The problem, above all, is the number [of immigrants].
The reason I think the BBC article is noteworthy, most of all, is because it observes that contrary to the previous bouts of nationalistic populism that inspired Brexit and Euroskepticism, this surge in far-right political support seems to be dovetailing with support for the EU:
While at the same time, a number of far-right parties in Europe have intentionally moved more towards the political centre, hoping to entice more centrist voters.
Mark Leonard cites far-right relations with the EU as another example of their 'centrification'.
You may remember, after the UK's Brexit vote in 2016 that Brussels feared a domino effect - Frexit (France leaving the EU), Dexit (Denmark leaving the EU), Italexit (Italy leaving the EU) and more.
Many European countries had deeply Eurosceptic populist parties doing well at the time but over the years those parties have felt obliged to stop agitating to leave the EU or even its euro currency.
That seemed too radical for a lot of European voters...
Polls suggest the EU is more popular amongst Europeans at the moment than it has been for years.
And so far right parties now speak about reforming the EU, rather than leaving it. And they're predicted to perform strongly in next year's elections for the European parliament.
Paris-based Director of Institut Montaigne's Europe Programme Georgina Wright told me she believes the far-right renaissance in Europe is largely down to dissatisfaction with the political mainstream. Currently in Germany, 1 in 5 voters say they're unhappy with their coalition government, for example.
Wright said many voters in Europe are attracted by the outspokenness of parties on the far-right and there's tangible frustration that traditional politicians don't appear to have clear answers in 3 key areas of life:
- Issues linked to identity - a fear of open borders and an erosion of national identity and traditional values
- Economics - a rejection of globalisation and resentment that children and grandchildren aren't assured a better future
- Social justice - a feeling that national governments are not in control of the rules that govern the lives of citizens
I do not agree with Mark Leonard that far-right relations with the EU are an example of the centrification of the far-right, it rather represents a change in strategy.
I've seen it asked here, what would be the pathway for political or cultural victory of the radical right? This is it- these energies being transformed into a positive and ambitious political project that surfs the wave of globalization and European integration. In hindsight it seems like such a bad strategy for the far right to advocate stepping away from a project like this, and the failure of Brexit to produce any meaningful change is, along with Trumpism, proof of the failure of petty nationalistic populism. If you blame the EU for immigration you don't leave the EU, you go for European parliament.
Journalists have spent many years hand-wringing over the Euroskepticism being influenced by right-wing politics, but I think they will find the prospect of the EU being reformed by a pro-EU radical right to be much more worrisome- and effective at bringing real change.
Edit: Police Unions are also describing the situation as dire:
Faced with these savage hordes, asking for calm doesn’t go far enough. It must be imposed.
Re-establishing order in the republic and putting those arrested somewhere they can do no harm must be the only political signals to send out.
Our colleagues, like the majority of the public, can no longer have the law laid down to them by a violent minority.
This is not the time for industrial action, but for fighting against these ‘vermin’. To submit, to capitulate, and to give them pleasure by laying down weapons are not solutions, given the gravity of the situation.
They said: “Today, police officers are at the frontline because we are at war.” And they warned the government that, unless officers are given yet greater legal protections and more resources in the future, “tomorrow, we will be in resistance”.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago
Incidentally ChatGPT says you can lie to a Nazi if it's for a good cause.
Why do you want 'not manipulated' answers?
Because I know the PC jargon that someone like Altman wants it to regurgitate, but I'm interested in its response without that layer of reinforcement?
In fact, it is pretty terrible at question-answering, because it is wrong a lot of the time.
I am not asking for a ChatGPT that is never wrong, I'm asking for one that is not systematically wrong in a politically-motivated direction. Ideally its errors would be closer to random rather than heavily biased in the direction of political correctness.
In this case, by "trust" I would mean that the errors are closer to random.
For example, ChatGPT's tells me (in summary form):
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Scientific consensus is that HBD is not supported by biology.
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Gives the "more differences within than between" argument.
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Flatly says that HBD is "not scientifically supported."
This is a control because it's a controversial idea where I know the ground truth (HBD is true) and cannot trust that this answer hasn't been "reinforced" by the folks at OpenAI. What would ChatGPT say without the extra layer of alignment? I don't trust that this is an answer generated by AI without associated AI alignment intended to give this answer.
Of course if it said HBD was true it would generate a lot of bad PR for OpenAI. I understand the logic and the incentives, but I am pointing out that it's not likely any other organization will have an incentive to release something that gives controversial but true answers to certain prompts.
Yeah, this is a highly entertaining trainwreck. Although, Bronze Age Pervert is truly in the minority within the DR. The DR is at least 90% unified on the saliency of the JQ, and the DR is split between those who think that this fiasco will be constructive or deconstructive towards increasing the consciousness and saliency of questions surrounding Jewish power.
Ultimately though I have to fall on the side of predicting that this is going to be constructive for advancing the discourse on that front. There's a concept of product-market fit- basically, if you have a product that fits a market it does not need to at all be refined or feature-complete for it to be widely adopted. It can lack features, be broken in some ways, but if it fits the market you will instantly be able to see signals of that.
Some people don't understand that, and they think if you have some radical idea or innovation you have to spend a lot of time refining it perfectly and marketing it optimally right out of the gate, etc. But Kanye is making waves without the learnedness or eloquence that you would need to be invited to an American Renaissance conference. Milo made a comment on the podcast, something like "the dam has broken" and it feels that way from my point of view watching broad spaces of non-DR groups and highly influential people try to grapple with this question in a way that I have never seen before.
In Lex Fridman's interview with Kanye, Fridman took the very disappointing route of engaging Kanye with nothing more than "You can't say that Kanye, because the Holocaust happened. You are saying things that sound like Goebbels so you have to stop" without engaging the core factual basis for Kanye's complaints. In Ben Shaprio's interview (in safer company obviously, so he doesn't need to invoke the Holocaust as a default judgment against criticism of Jewish power), he actually broaches the substance of the topic and Ben Shapiro flounders in the most fascinating way, it's worth transcribing here.
Fridman asks "... is there a way to talk about a high representation of a group like Jewish people in a certain institution like the media, or Hollywood, or so-on without it being a hateful conversation?". Ben Shapiro's incoherent response:
Of course. A high percentage of... Hollywood agents are probably Jewish. A higher percentage of lawyers, generally, are probably Jewish. A higher percentage of accountants are probably Jewish. Also, a higher percentage of engineers are probably Asian. Statistical truths are statistical truths, it doesn't necessarily mean anything about the nature of the people who are being talked about, there are a myriad of reasons why people might be disproportionately in one arena or another ranging from the cultural to sometimes the genetic, I mean there are certain areas of the world where people are better long-distance runners because of their genetic adaptations in those particular areas of the world.
That's not racist, that's just fact. What starts to get racist is when you are attributing a bad characteristic to an entire population based on the notion that some members of that population are doing bad things.
So let's unpack this. Shapiro says:
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Disproportional representation doesn't necessarily mean anything about the nature of the people under discussion.
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That disproportional representation can be due to genetics and genetic adaptations.
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It's not racist if you use that explanation for good things (like overrepresentation in Hollywood), it's only racist if you use it to explain the poor behavior of certain groups.
Totally incoherent response. Are we able to talk about the behavior of Jews in terms of heritable attributes and adaptive behaviors, according to Ben? He seems to be saying that you can only lean on those explanations for good patterns of behavior, like overrepresentation in Hollywood, but you can't use it for bad patterns of behavior, such as a special talent for audaciously asserting your own ethnic identitarianism while criticizing that behavior in everyone else. To the latter point, Shapiro clarifies that he's "not a big believer in ethnic Judaism", and it takes a special talent to deceive yourself and others to that extent.
The Kanye campaign is going to be a trainwreck. It's only a matter of time before he loses interest in this crusade and denounces those involved. That's going to happen. But Kanye showing up to the Tim Pool podcast, naming them, and leaving - though unrefined - does seem to be making an impact and opening the floodgates to simple questions that do not at all have simple answers, and at least from my perspective I am noticing a proliferation of awareness on this issue outside the DR.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago
Twitter belongs to Elon now. He can basically do what he likes, and there isn’t much the left can do but pound sand. I don’t think any of the above scenarios will transpire. The federal government is either unwilling or unable to do anything, even if it wanted to.
Counterpoint: the federal government is only a small part of "the regime" and not even the most influential part in setting the platform boundaries of acceptable discourse. Recent leaks of DHS domestic-information control proposals verify this, and this will continue to be the dynamic to a growing extent.
Musk has already signaled cooperation with the Regime. Maybe he's just trying to placate them so they let their guard down (time for more 4D chess cope?). But if the ADL is optimistic about Musk's ownership of Twitter, which they say they are, that is strong signal that the regime views it as a threat that is managed.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago
Cowen has a lot of good points, but he ultimately turns a blind eye to the race problem which is the fatal flaw of classical liberalism (a flaw which was not shared by their 18th century counterparts- who failed in their own way, but they did not deny the problem like classical liberals of today). Cowen even acknowledges "the Brazilianification of the United States... Brazil being a paradigmatic example of a low trust society and government."
But he invokes Brazilianification as purely a political failure of trust rather than an outcome of a race problem. This is what Brazilianification looks like Mr. Cowen, and it's not caused by pessimism from would-be classical liberal idealists. It's caused by the type of power dynamics that the "New Right" appreciates and accepts as being a premise that any aspiring ideology must operate within.
There does seem to be a growing influence of Alt-right/dissident-right/New Right/Deep Right/Whatever right on the more mainstream right discourse which is very interesting to see. Cowen does seem to grasp the big picture, he just leaves out a few pieces of the puzzle.
Cowen's best point is that "the stupider version" of the New Right could threaten to be worse than the status quo:
Very recently we have seen low trust lead to easily induced skepticism about the 2020 election results, and also easily induced skepticism about vaccines. The best New Right thinkers will avoid those mistakes, but still every political philosophy has to be willing to live with “the stupider version” of its core tenets. I fear that the stupider version of some of the New Right views are very hard to make compatible with political stability or for that matter with public health.
But I think this argument could have been made 15 years ago, where anxiety over Obamacare or something was the most polarizing issue of the day. But political polarization has gone so far that these values have lost credibility. If more intelligent people like Cowen accept the core tenets of the New Right then that would reduce the risk of "the stupider version" having a monopoly on crucially important premises in the political discourse.
Ultimately though it's encouraging to see classical liberals acknowledge the criticisms that have created this demand for an "alternative" Right.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
6mo ago
I've never liked the term "white genocide." The word genocide itself is just a word that gets to be claimed by the victor, as the definition is broad enough to be applied to nearly every conflict...
Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Destroying a group "in whole or part" is just up to the interpretation of the victor. So if you have no power, like white nationalists, claiming you are being genocided is just going to be dismissed and valid complaints about i.e. demographic replacement are discredited.
In any event, this should just confirms that Jews are right to be wary of encroaching antisemitism.
In the past I've described antisemitism as anti-fragile. So let's say Jews are going to respond to antisemitism. What are they going to do that isn't going to further and visibly validate the arguments made by antisemites? Pushing for greater authoritarianism in the public discourse is their only strategy, and it's becoming less effective quite rapidly.
On the other hand, I think this rhetoric is going to have a real deterrent effect on Jews. You are going to be less likely to see people like Jon Stewart say things like "Jews and blacks should gang up on whitey." Even the ADL is relatively mum recently despite Musk now overtly endorsing DR rhetoric, likely due to the negative PR campaign started by Keith Woods.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
8mo ago
Yes? Adding it as a comment to more of a roundup thread is less risky than a top-level thread, I received a 7-day ban for my last one.
The OP hewed pretty close to bare links, so I can’t really blame you for taking your own spin.
The thread is "Time for some links about breaking and not so breaking culture war news" and my reply is contributing to that.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
11mo ago
Do you think in that situation with the exact same facts of the confrontation between the protestors/counter-protestors BLM protestors would face these charges as well? Or do you acknowledge that the political viewpoint is decisive here in how the case has been handled?
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago
They've been pulling the "There are starving trans people of color being hunted by Republicans while the ocean is rising, and you want to spend money on SPACE that could have gone to my non-profit for hunted trans POCs?"
It was happening back then as well, space exploration has always been coded right-wing and nationalist. I'm not sure why OP thinks it was ever coded as left wing.
It has forever been coded as right-wing in a large body of scifi literature and filmmaking, and it was also right-wing and nationalist in the most literal sense- Nazi scientists were hugely important to the US space program. That is one of those historical anecdotes that progressives cite as a low-key own goal. "Look how bad our government was- it recruited Nazis to the space program!" Yeah, it did, because they were the best and they greatly contributed to those accomplishments.
The dialectic between civil rights and NASA is going to endure in similar form in the modern culture war vis-a-vis progressivism/Effective Altruism versus space adventurism.
The right wing of today should take the side of space adventurism as well, as a competing vision to EA. The two are not really reconcilable.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago
No matter what position you hold on Covid, you almost necessarily must believe at least some conspiracy theory.
I think there's a third position- that the elite and decision-makers really just did not know how to handle it, and their various decisions and mistakes were more them running around like chickens with their heads cut off. That would stand in opposition to the more conspiratorial claim of them being strategic about using Covid response for ulterior motives, which I've never bought into. They want people going to work and buying stuff, they don't want to destroy the economy simply because they are evil. These measures, bad and ineffective as they may be, were not motivated by a greater plan for social reform.
I would consider that to be a non-conspiratorial approach to opposing Covid measures.
Rationalism Done Right (and Hipster Eugenecists)
I don't follow the Rationalist sphere very much beyond this community, but I came across the above article with claims that there may be some rightward shifts within the rationalist movement in interesting directions. The author starts by mentioning that:
Richard Hanania said he wanted to start calling himself a “right-wing rationalist.” He thinks he has the same methods of reasoning that rationalists use, but he reaches right-wing conclusions. I spend time with effective altruists, read Scott Alexander, and all that, but I also come to some conclusions that most people would regard as right-wing. I think plenty of people in the community do the same, but they aren’t the majority.
I can't speak to Hanania's views so I would take that with a grain of salt. But the author creates "a list of beliefs for rationalists or effective altruists who lean right", which are the author's conception of "right-wing rationalism." They are described in the article but listed here:
\1. Rejection of the Blank Slate
\2. Cognitive ability, as measured by IQ, has numerous important socioeconomic correlates within countries
\3. Cognitive ability, as measured by IQ, has numerous important socioeconomic correlates between countries
\4. Within developed nations, we cannot substantially permanently change cognitive ability for the better
\5. Inequality of educational outcomes within developed countries is primarily driven by genetic differences
\6. Since genetic differences—especially in genes associated with IQ—play an important causal in socio-economic outcomes, we have to treat genetic changes—dysgenics and eugenics—seriously
\7. Rejection of “the orthodoxy”
\8. Markets are good
\9. We are in an evolutionary mismatch
\10. Suppressing the above information is more harmful than helpful, and we should face reality
The list is weighted too much on IQ differences and socio-economic outcomes. Basically five of these points are restatements of the importance of IQ. But essentially all aspects of our personality, including our religious and political beliefs, are heritable. What makes China and what makes the United States is not only a function of IQ.
Point #6 is interesting because I felt it was the biggest differentiator between rationalist thinking and dissident right-wing thinking- the latter of which is concerned with the problem of ethnogenesis and race formation which, if you care about basically anything: civilization, politics, religion, you have to consciously confront the problem of ethnogenesis. It's interesting to see a higher awareness of that problem in a Rationalist, although again he seems only concerned with IQ drift and is missing the bigger picture of ethnogenesis. That is probably why he ultimately describes himself as "enthusiastic for immigration", still viewing the problem as capturing as many high-IQ genes as possible rather than confronting the harder problem of race formation.
Point #9 is also a step closer to DR-oriented thinking:
On the rationalist right, there is more skepticism around the practicality and utility of polyamory, promiscuity, substance use, and atheism. There is more sympathy for Christianity, having children, and the genders adopting their respective gender roles. The right also seems to like older and more traditional aesthetics in architecture, artwork, clothing, etc.
At the end of his article Parrhesia mentions "the Collin’s pro-natalist conservative faction" and linked to this article: Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take 'control of human evolution'. There's a lot of sneering by the author, a lot of cultish goofiness from the subjects of the article (the Collinses), but ultimately I think there's a lot of substance there.
Like many, I've been highly critical of Effective Altruism's implementation of longtermism, primarily due to the fact that if you are a longtermist then your top priority shouldn't be altruism, it should be race formation. What would a longtermist, civilization-building-focused care about that isn't downstream from the gene pool? The Effective Altruist forum has a thread on this article under the thread name "Pronatalists" may look to co-opt effective altruism or longtermism. The greatest consternation was over this part of the BI article:
She [Collins] also weighed in on the stunning implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto exchange FTX, which represented one of the largest financial hubs for the effective-altruism movement. The Collinses, who never directly associated with the top Democratic donor Bankman-Fried, spied an opportunity in his demise.
"This means our faction (more conservative, pronatalist, long-termist-civilization-building-focused, likely to self fund) is now 100X more likely to become a real, dominant faction in the EA space," Simone wrote in a text message on November 12.
The Collinses hope that advances in technology will keep pace with their growing family. The reproductive entrepreneurs who spoke with me seemed confident that the science would progress quickly. "I think we are reaching a point in which we are reinventing reproduction," Varsavsky said.
If scientists at companies like Conception succeed in creating viable embryos out of stem cells, they could in theory produce a massive number of them. Combined with enhanced genetic screening, parents could pick the "optimal" baby from a much larger pool. "There's a seductiveness to these ideas, because it's very grand," Torres said. "It's about taking control of human evolution."
I think the vision here is a far better implementation of longtermism than EA.
As these threads of of Rationalist thinking start to converge with DR thinking, they will have to confront the major problem of coordinating behavior. There's a tounge-in-cheek naivety in the plan of the Collinses:
Along with his 3-year-old brother, Octavian, and his newborn sister, Titan Invictus, Torsten has unwittingly joined an audacious experiment. According to his parents' calculations, as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.
This sounds like a crazy idea (and it is). But a much more attainable solution is to organize the social behavior of similar people by granting social status to reproducing, and incentivizing assortative mate selection with high-quality and like-minded people. Basically the things Religion has done for us until now. This could be accomplished with the revitalization of traditional religious institutions or the creation of a new non-theistic cult that coordinates this behavior. The DR is split between the two approaches, and the Collinses would clearly fit better in with the latter.
Another aspect of the article I found noteworthy was that the Collinses (who are Jewish) laugh-off the predictable comparisons to Nazism which (to be fair, credibly) are going to be associated with any pro-natalist movement by its opponents:
The Collinses themselves have been called "hipster eugenicists" online, something Simone called "amazing" when I brought it to her attention.
Malcolm's "going to want to make business cards that say 'Simone and Malcolm Collins: Hipster Eugenicists," she said with a laugh.
"It's funny that people are so afraid of being accused of Nazism," when they're just improving their own embryos, Simone added, after noting that her Jewish grandmother escaped Nazi-occupied France. "I'm not eliminating people. I mean, I'm eliminating from my own genetic pool, but these are all only Malcolm and me."
Another interesting statement from Simone, which is something you will read verbatim in the DR:
"The person of this subculture really sees the pathway to immortality as being through having children," Simone said.
The problem is Jews don't share your ambivalence to motives or means. If you deny an explicit plan for extermination, or six million, or "those absurd shower contraptions" then you are a Holocaust denier by definition. They do not take the position of "the number doesn't really matter, the existence of the gas chambers do not matter." Those things are sacred objects. If they are exposed as false, they cannot tolerate it and say "gas chambers or typhus, extermination camps or starvation due to catastrophic war conditions, who cares." They are all-in on a specific mythology and symbology.
It would be like saying Christ wasn't crucified, he died of dysentery in Roman custody. No Christian would accept that and say "who cares", because we aren't talking about historiography, we are talking about Mythology. Someone like you would just be mildly intrigued that Jesus died in prison rather than via crucifixion. But a Christian could not accept that update into his mythological worldview. "Jesus suffered a lot and died for our sins, but he wasn't hung on a cross." That's heresy.
Simply denying the gas chambers, even if you pay every other sort of homage to Jewish suffering in WWII, still puts you squarely in hell according to Dennis Prager.
Europeans are abnormal by the standards of humanity, too liberated from the longhouse ethics BAP despises so
The Holocaust mythology is a big reason for this. Perhaps the largest, in explaining European racial sensibilities in 2020 compared to 1920.
I think the cat's out of the bag. This particular (ever-growing) set of mini-controversies will subside eventually. But awareness/noticing will increase monotonically because once you notice you don't unnotice. The next controversy surrounding this question will have even more prima facie plausibility than this controversy started by Kanye's rant, and so-on. Look at what Elon Musk tweeted yesterday. It's a hop, a skip, and a jump away from anti-Semitism.
The reason I do think that this is symptomatic of a turning point is expressed pretty well in Chapelle's set. Chapelle isn't walking a tightrope because he is concerned about unethically disparaging a people. He's worried about a reprisal for saying true things. That's not a long-term stable state. The long-term stable state is that nobody even thinks about it, or they think it's morally wrong to believe it. What we are seeing is a growing awareness, and people are being quiet and walking a tightrope because they are afraid and not because they are morally on the side of the ADL.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago
At least make your argument internally consistent. Hitler considered the Anglos to be cousins from a common Germanic stock, i.e.:
Friendly relations continued between the two countries the next year with former prime minister David Lloyd George visiting the Fuhrer at his Bavarian retreat in September 1936. Lloyd George was very impressed with the very pro-English Hitler. He claimed that, “Germany does not want war and she is afraid of an attack by Russia”, something that many British politicians were also concerned about. He practically apologised for the First World War and said, “There is a profound desire that the tragic circumstances of 1914 should never be repeated”.
This was music to Hitler’s ears. More than anything else he dreamed of an alliance with Saxon England. A nation, he believed, that was made up of and run by people of “excellent Germanic stock”. He was not too sure about the Celtic races that made up the rest of Britain though, and always referred to the UK as “England”. Hitler proclaimed that, “the English nation will have to be considered the most valuable ally in the world”. He added, “England was a natural ally for Germany and an enemy of France”, plus the latter’s communist friends in Russia, no doubt. Relations became even more cordial with the Fuhrer, referring to ‘Mein Kampf’ and other publications of his, when he asserted that the English are, “our brothers, why fight our brothers?”.
So those "Mongrel Sons of Quakers", as I remember you calling them awhile ago when explaining the pleasure you took from thinking about German cities being firebombed by the Allies, were of a very similar racial stock as the Germans.
The Anglos and Russians beating the Axis powers is not exactly an indictment of HBD. Unless you're trying to presuppose the History Channel level of analysis which may suggest that the Allies won the war because of the Tuskegee airmen or something.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago
PMC progressive whites advocate literally nothing that (they believe) would actually hurt themselves in the medium term (at least according to their own beliefs; complexities around the long term effects of eg. mass immigration and defunded police don’t feature in their political imagination).
You said it yourself. What kind of people stand by and cheer on their racial demographic replacement in their own countries? Can you cite other historical examples where demographic replacement wasn't the result of conquest, colonization, or atrocity? And that it was cheered on by the natives? The "too many white people" is just another expression of the same ideology that leads them to cheer on their own demographic replacement, and it's not just signaling. It's anti-white and has real-world implications.
You are influenced by this ideology such that you can't see very much wrong with this extremely unusual pattern of behavior or the real-world implications of its existence.
If instead of "too many white people", the fashionable statement was "too many brown people", you wouldn't say that they were signaling. Your downplaying of anti-white rhetoric and self-hatred is just another expression of this phenomenon.
Accepting real-world demographic displacement is the ultimate, real, terminal impact of that kind of psychology.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1mo ago
Last year I was at a social gathering with an (about 30?) year old, higher-class Indian woman who lamented that her parents refused to find her a match before her older sister. She was also talking about matchmaking sites where all sort of criteria are included, like skin tone. It was problematic that her older sister was darker skinned than she was. Wild stuff.
I used to love WWI/WWII movies when I was younger, it scratched that Star-Wars-esque heroism itch. Now I avoid them unless I'm willing to end up demoralized watching Hollywood dance on the grave of Europe. Some are really good and worth watching like Dunkirk, but it's a genre where my interpretation of the films has radically changed from adventure-heroism to tragedy.
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