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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29188 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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We finally hit reset, Mencius Moldbug had an unqualified podcast with the NYT. I can distinctly remember back in 2019 when the word NRx got you looked at with suspicion, now the guy who NRx has gone past, the pioneer is getting mainstream awareness. Moldbug is not the force he once was and his older stuff is where his talents lie but seeing him on NYT still makes me feel like that the horizon is indeed made of canvas.

This can also mean that Yarvin has sold out but I still find that highly unlikely, his views have influenced me a lot, a lot of you reading this too must feel this way. Will we have Nick Land next, will the thermidor continue? who knows, for now, Neo reaction arrives from the future.

Would any Yarvin fans mind sharing a favorite series of paragraphs that really exemplify his work? I could never get into him.

He is very verbose. If you want a quicker intro into NRx, check out truthinaworldoflies.com on the Wayback Machine. I would recommend an open letter to an open-minded progressive. The entire book is really good, and here is a quote by him I really like.

If you accept Dr. Watson’s fallback position, his intellectual Torres Vedras—as Professor Gates does—the Cathedral is already a goner. Its defeat is not a matter for further research. It is a matter of freshman philosophy. The Cathedral has chosen to fortify, not as a minor outpost but as its central keep, the position of not-A and not-B (actually, since not-A or not-B would suffice, the typical insistence on both is a classic sign of a weak position). Its belief in the statistical uniformity of the human brain across all subpopulations presently living is absolute. It has put all its chips on this one.

And the evidence for its position is really not much stronger than the evidence for the Holy Trinity. In fact, the Holy Trinity has a big advantage: there may be no evidence for it, but at least there is none against it. There is plenty of evidence against human neurological uniformity. The question is simply what standard of proof you apply. By the standards that most of us apply to most questions of fact, the answer is already obvious—and has been for at least thirty years. If not a hundred.

This is really good for 2008, 16 years is a long time. His work led to Nick Land writing the Dark Enlightenment and Xenosystems, Spandrell writing BioLeninism and IQ Shredders, Jim Donald writing Blog.reaction.la, fosetti, hestia society, the evolution of Jims blog into sub branches like truthinaworldoflies.com written by a long time dutch commetor there named Alf and Setting the record straight by Aidan Maclear. Passage press, Mytery Grove, Imperium Press, Amazon all have at least Moldbug if not land.

He is verbose but very much worth reading. NRx is now hard to differentiate from Rx or reaction, what makes them neo afterall beyond Lands CCRU transhumanism ideas. I have not seen many explicit differences, maybe I need to start reading this stuff properly again this time around, have not in a while.

I dunno why people say he's so verbose. He's really not except for a few of his essays. The amount of writing he does is less than required of a typical humanities undergrad ; same for the amount of effort to read him compared to college assigned reading. The verbosity of the prose itself is not that much different from other writing in an academic setting or even many op-eds, such as from the New Yorker. I think so many people's attention spans are fried.

Academic writing is fucking terrible. It's like they are trying to be as dry and boring as possible on purpose to signal how serious and high-status they are. Compare the writing in your average prestigious journal paper to a good popular science book like The Selfish Gene or Pale Blue Dot.

Moldbug's writing is terrible in a different way; overtly obscurantist and meandering. It's intentional, but I don't like it. The Dreaded Jim describes it thus:

I say things in the crudest and most direct possible way, a full frontal assault on crimestop, while Moldbug liked, and Namefag Yarvin likes, to use long winded circumlocution, so that people likely to crimestop out what he is saying will have an easy time crimestopping thoughts they do not want to hear.

It's not about length; I can read long texts, if written well. I don't balk at reading a 10k-word blog post by Scott Alexander.

It is an acquired taste, I guess, or most people skim rather than read his posts. Judging by his huge huge subscriber count and fame, evidently, this style worked for him.

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