The MSM is so obsessed with becoming the ultimate authority of what is true that I hardly find it surprising they’d have this reaction to somebody who’s such an effective ambassador for reasonableness.

Jealousy is a dreadful and bitter motivator.

> Perhaps Alexander's ultimate virtue is epistemic humility: His pieces are long, sometimes inconclusive, and accompanied by diverse commentary because he's committed to his own fallibility and lack of omniscience.

This is good, but the way he does it in respond to actual criticism[1] can be annoying. It reminds me of a squid spraying ink everywhere before escaping.

[1] mostly that they like to make fun of progressives/feminists, but tolerate people doing eugenics in the comment section because the commenters are nicer to them personally

Can you point to any examples that you found particularly annoying?

>His own cite of his comment about how there's a thin line between feminism and literally Voldemort is another good example. Yeah he's edited it and seems to be going for "it's just a joke bro", but if you live in the kind of bubble where you casually condemn the whole of "feminism" as an evil then you've probably got a weirdly fascistic friend group and/or auudience.

How can you honestly not see the delicious irony of this statement?

The specific people he was condemning in that essay really were pretty bad. Mostly a few women trying to advance a political agenda on an uncharitable reading of the other Scott and then a lot of men piling on in case it got them laid.

Plastic recycling is a scam indeed, see previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714880

I dislike that you call people dumb or facist because they made a different judgement than you did, in regards of the "Is Trump worse than campus authoritarianism". Other people are able to feel differently about things.

Well in the context of fascism one of those things is an authoritarian government leader that praised dictators and tried to take over the government and another is a paid activity that's voluntary.

If you want to make obviously dumb claims about fascists, you might get called out.

Perhaps you should articulate a well-defined definition of fascism and provide arguments for why you clasify someone as a fascist if you are going to criticize someone else whose viewpoint is dfferent. Calling out someone for 'obviously dumb' claims assumes a universal non-subjective definition at the very least. It's also a seriously lazy way to argue a point.

>I think I originally started reading his stuff because he had informed and humorous takedowns of some extremist libertarian/fascist ideas like neoreaction and dark enlightenment, but I guess to know that much about the topics probably is a reflection of the circles he's moving in.

So you read and liked stuff that confirmed your likely ideological priors, but you disliked stuff that questioned them.

Do you actually expect a less-partial observer to agree that the fault here is with Scott rather than you?

"Against murderism" was the last time it came up, I think? In context I believe it was supposed to be anti-anti-Trumpism, or at least that you should talk to Trumpists more rather than deplatform them.

The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it.

>The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it.

Honest question: how do you read books if a 10k word article is too long?

I'm not OP, but I find it easier to read a 50k word book than 10k blog article. The latter had better be really good (and many of Scott's are) if I'm going to make it to the end.

It's probably something about the nature of reading on a screen, on a device that's capable of fifty zillion other things at the press of a button. When I'm reading a book, there's only the book. Less willpower is required to maintain my focus.

Long blog posts are much easier to read if I send them to my Kindle, but I rarely bother.

Edit: a word

I read many books but skip many long blog entries. Blogs tend to be in sore need of editing, and most the books that make it to print are in general far higher quality. The main strength blogs have to me are time to print, which makes them more “real time” than books.

Reading them feels different, right? Books have pages so you can go back and forth, they have editors, and so on.

More importantly, dense literary works exist but usually pop essay books are trying to prove a point. SSC essays usually try to make you forget you had a point, and instead go up a meta level in service of his extremely evenhanded let's-all-be-friends persona.

Which conflicts with the pretty bad comment section that always wants to sit around discussing culture war. (Which exists but is not worth quite as much time as they want to put into it.)