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Comment by Goladus | Hacker News Reader

This is so dishonest.

The medium post[1] is about a specific media enquiry, which did not ask about his functional programming work at all. Yarvin stated, for good or ill, that he intended to answer the questions honestly. Your criticism in context is thus completely out of line. You are blaming a guy being asked about his political views for answering those questions.

Your summary of the rest of the article is ridiculously biased and unfair. You present no syllogisms, no evidence, no logic, no conclusions. Just an extraordinary claim of white surpremacy.

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We're strangers to each other. Don't call me "dishonest" ("ridiculously biased and unfair" is fair game, though, obviously, I disagree). I'll similarly refrain from doing the same to you.

I've read both of Yarvin's Medium posts. I think perhaps you only read one of of them. Given the degree of stridency in your objection to my comment, I'm guessing you also haven't carefully read the Mencius Moldbug posts that kicked all this stuff off (that's fine: he writes in a deliberately obscurantist fashion in order to foment exactly these kinds of misunderstandings).

A few weeks back, one of the most ardent supporters of his Lambdaconf talk (who went on to raise a not-insignificant amount of money to help sponsor it!) reported attending a Founders Fund event with Yarvin. In person, Yarvin was evidently so flagrantly racist that he was ostracized by other attendees.

Doubtless, Yarvin would respond by objecting to the concept of race, or to the assertion that "suitability for slavery" is a bad thing, or that intelligence is generally a good thing, or by juxtaposing some ridiculous bit of pop culture ("do you believe in the Holocaust? Well, I mean, you're saying the Holocaust as portrayed in Inglorious Basterds...?") against the circumstances of Epictetus, or whatever the fuck else is in his tiresome bag of rhetorical tricks.

People aren't making this stuff up about him.

To prevent ambiguity, these are the posts I read:

[1] https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/how-to-respond-to-hostile-...

[2] https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lam...

I have not read Mencius Moldbug posts, and I don't think I'll do so in the foreseeable future. Chalk it up to a lack of interest.

> In person, Yarvin was evidently so flagrantly racist that he was ostracized by other attendees.

I would like to judge this for myself. It's not personal; I won't take anyone's word for it. I'm not the same race as Yarvin. I'm Indian. Being a different race, and given India's history, I think I'll be sensitive enough to racism. And if I don't like Yarvin in person, I'll avoid personal interactions with him too. And if they ask me after that, I'd still support allowing Yarvin to attend the conference the next year. The only way I'll change my mind is if Yarvin doesn't stick to his proposed (technical) agenda during his talk, or if he is personally responsible for being disruptive to other people interacting with each other. For example, someone getting too drunk and creating a ruckus would be grounds for exclusion, in my book.

In contrast to all this, there are extremely well-known companies that are adversely affecting my life with their abuse of patent laws. Yarvin and Urbit have zero impact on my life, one way or another.

That is a completely legitimate perspective to have, and I personally have no issue with it. I gather, from the hyperventilation I'm seeing elsewhere, that there exist people who are not OK with you being OK with Lambdaconf. I am not one of those people, and generally would not want to hang out with those people either.

> I gather, from the hyperventilation I'm seeing elsewhere

I suspect a lot of the people "hyperventilating" are legitimately scared by social justice activism.

I look at Yarvin and see a guy who wrote a blog for 7 years as a creative, intellectual, philosophical outlet. Some of his ideas are controversial and some are just weird. Paul Graham paraphrasing Michel de Montaigne wrote: Expressing ideas helps to form them. If you can't express ideas that might be controversial then what is the point? I don't see any coherent argument presented for why his work is particularly dangerous, threatening, or otherwise worth punishing him individually for writing it.

How would you feel, Thomas, if a very small but aggressive, dedicated, and unethical group of activists decided to start hounding you? How would you feel if these activists spread grossly unfair characterizations of your body of comments here at Hacker News? How would you feel if media ran thoughtless clickbait hit pieces at your expense? How would you feel when posters on Hacker News parroted these uncharitable and unfair opinions about you?

If you find yourself thinking, "well I am a virtuous person and never say things that could be used against me," then you are naive. When twitter activists (social justice or otherwise) choose to target you, the truth will not matter. Your intent will not matter. All that matters is whether they can succeed in ruining your life as an example for others. THEY will decide the narrative. They will shape perceptions.

So yes, this scares me. And what scares me the most is when people who are considered to be smart, objective, and rational fall for it. And what I hate are the terrorizing "activists" who legitimately want me to be scared out of some warped idea that I deserve it.

If you think you're going to get me to reconsider my take on Yarvin by empathizing with the amount of flak he's taking, you have a higher bar to clear than you might think. I come from 1990s vulnerability research. Look into how intractable grievances got resolved there, and get back to me. To fully empathize, have all your utilities turned off, first.

Yarvin is a racist. It's not a secret. He couldn't even help himself from pitching racism (I'm sorry, "HBD") in his Lambdaconf announcement! He's not exploring the idea as an essayist.

He's also a third-stage guild navigator grade message board nerd (it takes one to know one) with the full bag of tricks ready to deploy for when plausible deniability becomes convenient to him, as it has with you. It's much more fun to get people like you twisted up into knots about the fairness of it all than for him to face the social consequences of the odious beliefs he's preaching.

But by all means, anonymous HN commenter, do continue telling me how scared I should be of people mining what I've written and using it against me. There's a lot of that writing to find, an embarrassing amount here in particular, and I've signed my name to all of it.

I am unlikely to see any reply you write to this, given how old the thread is. Sorry.

> We're strangers to each other. Don't call me "dishonest"

Then don't engage in name-calling of people you haven't met. It's inherently dishonest and I stand by my assertion.

> In person, Yarvin was evidently so flagrantly racist that he was ostracized by other attendees.

If this is true, he is no threat and will alienate himself. He will be judged and treated on the merit of his own actions and behavior, without undue influence from the press or name-calling parrots on social media.

> I'm guessing you also haven't carefully read the Mencius Moldbug posts that kicked all this stuff off (that's fine: he writes in a deliberately obscurantist fashion in order to foment exactly these kinds of misunderstandings).

It doesn't matter. You failed to base your puerile name-calling in any manner of argument whatsoever. That is inherently dishonest.

> People aren't making this stuff up about him.

So you say, but do not explain. The most you've been able to do is relate is both hearsay and simple opinion (no facts). Until you explain, stop calling him names, or I will not stop calling you dishonest.

From this comment, I'm not sure you know what the word "puerile" means.

FWIW, I read both of his Medium posts and the tweets Meredith made about his behavior at the Founders Fund event and I think you're being dishonest.

Do go on.

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