For fucks sake, just read something Nick Land has written in recent years and let him smear himself. He literally argues for "hyper racism", composed of scientific racism and eugenics. He also has promoted Atomwaffen affiliated Order of Nine Angles. A literal neonazi terrorist network.
A pathetic hit piece.
Osama bin Laden cited Noam Chomsky in some of his anti-America diatribes, does this mean Noam Chomsky should be blamed in any way (even slightly) for the actions of Al Qaeda?
> > It is also ridiculous to smear Nick Land because he is "ebraced by white nationalists".
Edit, with:
> this 'person X is bad because nasty person Y likes him' smear tactic has got to die.
Land's history is... very interesting. His earlier works (such as "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest") shows his materialist roots, but over time he began to be influenced heavily by the CCRU (which cyberfeminist Sadie Plant created) and Deleuze and Guatarri's works on schizoanalysis, along with a heavy doze of amphetamines(!). In his most productive, drug-fueled form he wrote what he called "theory-fiction", Deleuzian theory combined with fiction (cyberpunk, horror), leading to writings such as "Circitries" and "Meltdown". Land might have been overappreciated in the creation of accelerationist philosophy, but I still think he was an incredible poet. Sadly, his overreliance on drugs literally "broke" him, and after some physical/mental health issues he moved to Shanghai and after that became the neo-reactionary we know today. I think it's a quite lame ending to his philosophy career, many of his collegues tried to persuade him to budge towards the left and failed, and Land himself says that he wants to leave behind his amphetamine-fueled past self.
What seem to me to be the key quotes [1]:
> The most prominent model of such a filter is found in the theory of assortative mating. [...] It is assortative mating on the basis of [socio-economic status] that has lifted it to prominence, both because it seems unquestionably to be happening, and because the implications of its happening are extreme.
> Assortative mating tends to genetic diversification. This is neither the preserved diversity of ordinary racism, still less the idealized genetic pooling of the anti-racists, but a class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a vector towards neo-speciation. It implies the disintegration of the human species, along largely unprecedented lines, with intrinsic hierarchical consequence.
> The genetically self-filtering elite is not merely different — and becoming ever more different — it is explicitly superior according to the established criteria that allocate social status.
> That it is a consummate nightmare for anti-racism goes without question, but it is also trans-racial, infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways that leave ‘race politics’ as a gibbering ruin in its wake.
Whilst it is clumsily reinventing ideas that have been done better a million times already in science fiction, it doesn't seem very neonazi.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141007023855/http://alternativ...
A and B sharing core beliefs does not mean A == B.
The largest sects, The Church of Satan (athiest) and the Satanic Temple (non-theist) don't have a belief in Satan as a deity.
There is a subset that actually does though but they are a minority of a minority.
> But the thing about grail quests is – if you make a wrong turn two blocks away from your house, you end up at the corner store feeling mildly embarrassed. If you do almost everything right and then miss the very last turn, you end up being eaten by the legendary Black Beast of Aaargh whose ichorous stomach acid erodes your very soul into gibbering fragments.
> As far as I can tell from reading his blog, Nick Land is the guy in that terrifying border region where he is smart enough to figure out several important arcane principles about summoning demon gods, but not quite smart enough to figure out the most important such principle, which is NEVER DO THAT.
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I suppose the link is there because Scott Alexander thinks that he's written some stuff which is worth reading, and that readers of the blog will be able to distinguish that from the rubbish. Needless to say, this is completely outside a present-day NYT journalist's model of the world.
[1] https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10459/1/...
If only a world-famous newspaper could look into this and find out, so that you would not have to guess.
The article author could have simply labeled his writings as "racist" or "not racist", but newspaper articles traditionally stick to reporting sourced facts and quoted opinions and let the reader draw their own conclusion.
Alternately, the author could have provided context about Land in the form of additional facts and opinions. This would undoubtedly make the article more informative, but it would also make it longer. There are plenty of other things the article could have added context about, but ultimately the format demands a certain length.
I do think the article is suggesting that he's racist. Newspaper articles have to choose which facts and quotes to include and how to integrate them into a narrative, and those choices inevitably betray the author's opinions. In general, I think this phenomenon of hidden opinions is harmful. It's a downside of the traditional practice of separating factual articles from opinion, since it gives readers a false sense of having learned the objective truth when in fact what they've absorbed is partially someone's opinion. When newer media platforms choose to eschew the distinction between fact and opinion in favor of presenting an authentic but opinionated voice, there's merit in that. But I think there is also merit in the traditional approach of trying to preserve that distinction, even if the results are inevitably imperfect. I wouldn't want the New York Times to give up on it.
> So he denounced the works of one person who believes bad things, but he also linked to a second person, who may or may not believe bad things, but is liked by a third group of people who also believe bad things, so...logically...that must mean he actually does...support the first person? Despite denouncing them, because he didn't link to them, which proves...something…?
Nowhere in the paragraph you quoted does it allege Scott supported Curtis Yarvin personally. What it implies is that Nick Land is one of the "neoreactionaries", which, according to Wikipedia [1], he is.
The "embraced by white nationalists" part is a bit more tricky. It does imply that Land's writings are bad because white nationalists like them (more than others do). In the abstract, of course, this is not necessarily true.
Perhaps it's just a coincidence that white nationalists like him, or he's just a symbol; one can like country music without liking conservatism. (But it's unlikely he's merely a symbol when he literally writes about race.)
Perhaps his writings are relevant but they're misinterpreting him; Social Darwinism does not implicate Darwin.
But a third possibility is that his writings are just racist – though perhaps cloaked, perhaps the motte in the metaphorical motte and bailey – and as such provide an intellectual foundation for white supremacy.
Personally, I'm not sure what the answer is, because I don't know much about these people. But my priors point to the third option as most likely, given how intellectual movements tend to be organized. Which means that the fact of his being embraced by white nationalists was informative, which means it was appropriate for the reporter to include it. Sure, if the reporter is omitting some critical evidence or context that would lead to an opposite conclusion, that would be unethical. But the reporter is not obliged to include every argument that could possibly be made in his defense, either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment