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Notes -
Scott says something dumb about ordo amoris
Even knowing what he is talking about and his moral principles behind saying such a thing, he comes off as dumb. I've never agreed with Scott with everything (particularly his polyamorist leanings) but I think that this is the final breaking with SSC and myself. Rationalism is a train that I've ridden for ten years, and now I am finally getting off. Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.
It seems odd to me to associate this type of charity with rationalism/EA specifically when it has been a common practice for centuries for religious institutions to collect a larger fraction of congregant's income than the US spends on foreign aid and at least in theory distribute it to feed, clothe, and house destitute strangers. If giving away your posessions to the poor were an inherently suicidal worldview, then the world would not be full of Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists instead of Nietzschean neoreactionary twitter pagans.
Yeah, one thing that Nietzschean neoreactionaries on Twitter sometimes don't understand is that almost nobody likes them. I agree with some of their takes, but most of them seem so weird and morally repugnant to me that I wouldn't want to be friends with them. Surely it should be possible to, say, have a neoreactionary attitude to immigration or whatever, without gleefully calling for people to suffer like many of these people do. A lot of the time they don't even like each other - their communities, just like most extremist ideological groups, are constantly full of them bickering in petty drama and accusing each other of not being ideologically correct. Ironically, many of these people are obviously losers who are psychologically driven by the same kind of resentment that Nietzsche described, just like many extreme leftists are.
Christians at least often make a point of seeming like nice people and being welcoming to outsiders.
It's a pathology I used to notice on the online left as well. If you're in a heavily-online space and engaged in curating your identity, you want to stand out from the pack and grab attention. The best way to do that is to say radical things. Occupying an extreme position also allows you to more easily denounce your rivals for not being as hardcore or based as you are, since the biggest threat to a wannabe-thought-leader like this is competition from others in the same space. The result is pressure towards radicalising yourself, taking stronger and stronger positions that more clearly mark you out from the normies. This is particularly the case because, unlike in the real world, online all you have are words - you're often pseudonymous, and even if you're not, it's much harder to point to actual things you did in the real world for other people. So it's all self-presentation, and the way to get attention there is to be extreme and weird.
It might work for a while, but it falls apart the moment you try to build a mass movement or appeal to people in the real world. Once you've talked yourself into taking extreme or insane positions, you've handicapped your appeal to anyone else, because it turns out that most normal people have pretty basic moral instincts, and recoil from things that seem absurd or repugnant. We've seen that happen with woke overreach; the right-wing equivalent is unlikely to be any different.
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