The initials are somehow very compelling - another couple of great literary UR blogs are the Unz Review (unz.com) and Uncouth Reflections (uncouthreflections.com).

I will admit that urbit has very few users, as technically we're really not launched at all. We were thinking Strange Loop might be a good place for this, but I guess not.

Here's an honest summary of what I think:

I find it very easy to see the importance of a serious general-purpose overlay network, since I think that's the future of the Internet, so much so that I think something like Urbit will make IPv6 irrelevant. I'm philosophically inclined to appreciate that work.

I find that the programming model you've attached to it --- the Nock/Hoon stuff --- makes it easy to dismiss the work. I think you winkingly acknowledge and encourage that (for instance: the new pronunciation of ASCII characters), but don't really know why.

The combination of relentless idiosyncrasy, world-building ambition, and your many tens of thousands of words of (to me) odious philosophical writing leaves me in a place where I can empathize with the dilemma you'd post to a conference organizer. Your defenders on this thread seem to take it as an axiom that you'd just get up on stage, explain why you decided to code in line noise instead of Lisp, and talk about our beautiful overlay network future. I'd like to see that talk, too. But I don't think that's actually an axiom. It's seems just as likely that you'd use your network design as a launching point for a 5 minute digression on the evils of democracy.

Later: I just want to be clear that I'm writing for the thread, not directly to you. I don't know which if any of these points you even disagree with.

There is a common fallacy whereby people assume that "unknown odds" should be estimated as having a 50% chance of occurring. Your phrase "it seems just as likely" could easily be interpreted to mean that you think there is a 50:50 chance that Yarvin would ignore the tech and speak instead about his political views. Were you to believe this, you'd be making a fairly strong assumption.

I don't think this is what you meant, but I think it's a reasonable reading of your words as written. For the respondent to politely point out that Yarvin stuck to the technical details in a previous talk is constructively responsive to this reading.

If a reader doesn't interpret something you've written in the way you intended it's possible (but not "just as likely") that the reader is not the one at fault. Telling them to "read a little more carefully" is being unnecessarily rude to someone who was contributing useful information.

I bet you actually think "your team" won something just now. But the only thing you've done is ensured you go down in history as the immature fuckwits you sadly are.

I'm OVERJOYED that you are personally too stupid to understand what his code is good for. This guy is like a gold coin laying on the sidewalk, being constantly trampled underfoot, which nobody is smart enough to bend down and pick up.

Without y'all making him into a martyr, we'd likely have never heard of him, or his project....and the future might have been a very different place. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being an unimaginative, clueless, self-absorbed asshat.

We just so happen to have a use for his invention that will make him a multi-millionaire in short order. You'll be reading about Mr. Yarvin in the magazines in a few years.

You may want to reflect on what is so seriously wrong with your way of thinking about the world that it causes you to fail, time and time again, to appreciate and respect genius when you see it.

Could it be your massively overinflated ego and sense of self-worth?

Maybe you're not the special little shit you've always imagined yourself to be.

Could it be because you have spent your entire life searching for something to be pissed off and offended about, and thinking of about how you can rank up in society and step on others to do it?

Maybe it's because you're busy doing anything and everything but what the geniuses are doing: studying technology, and thinking new thoughts.

How many new words and concepts have YOU invented, you judgmental prick?

Nathan Klein

(Remember that name.)

It's too bad cause I think urbit it super-interesting, and even the weirdness surrounding the blogs (I came across later) were also super-interesting (but I don't agree with most of those, it was like curiosity-interesting).

I think the tech-conference should have taken the chance, though. Because it is (thought) provoking.

What follows don't really resemble "thoughts." Maybe the word does not mean what you think it means.

As has been said many times in this thread, Yarvin is free to say what he believes, and I am free to say what I believe, and organizers are allowed to do what they want. This is how a free market of ideas is supposed to work.

Not that it matters, but you palmed a card there by equating holding the same position on gay marriage as Barack Obama in 2008, or wearing a tacky bowling shirt, as "reactionary." It kind of seems like anything which disagrees with a microscopic sliver of online activists is reactionary now.

There was no big ruckus when he was the CTO for the Mozilla Foundation, either. But when you become the CEO of an organization, you become its public face in many ways. And he had some baggage, there. Like it or not, many corporate CEOs are held to different standards of public discourse by their employers, because companies generally don't want to risk alienating consumers.

Now, I don't know that it was right for him to lose his job. That was probably the wrong thing to happen at this point in time. I have big problems with companies being able to exercise control over people's expression of their political beliefs and actions. I feel bad for him losing the position, I really do. On the other hand, if he was not going to be able to effectively run the foundation and there were schisms forming in the community that's so essential to the continuation of the foundation's work...what are you, as Mozilla, to do?

I mean, if you had a corporate leader who came out publicly and said, "I don't think mixed race couples should be allowed to marry," she or he probably would not last much longer in that position. And I'll bet most people would not have much of a problem. In fact, I don't have to bet about a situation like that — nobody shed too many tears for Donald Sterling.

It's a complicated issue. I'd strongly suggest reading (or listening) to the things that Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan (both gay writers with very different political bents) had to say afterwards. Savage pointed out, very interestingly, that this ouster, while pinned on the "gay mafia", was really something that came from other large tech companies, from online journalistic enterprises, and from inside Mozilla itself. It may just be the first pang of society saying, "Bigotry against gay people is not socially acceptable, just like many other forms of bigotry." Again, like it or not, society does this all the time. See, again, Donald Sterling for a case study in it.

He also apologized repeatedly for offending his coworkers, so it's incorrect to say he "expressed no regret."

In fact, I think the vilification of Eich neatly demonstrates why Proposition 8 won at the ballot box. Religious people were frightened that their religious beliefs would first be rebranded as bigotry, which would then give their ideological opponents the opportunity to punish them. The fate of Eich seems to confirm these fears.

We hear this a lot, but I have to wonder to what extent the schisms would have formed if Mozilla had firmly said that people's political views outside of the workplace are irrelevant, rather than looking weak at the first breath of complaint.

I do agree with you that society does this all the time but many of the things society does are counterproductive, and this is little different. Is Mozilla stronger now that it's made clear that it views half the population of the United States as an active enemy, purely on the basis of their political views?

"Forced to make a tearful apology" Rather say that he made a tearful apology, because he regretted his wrong action and felt apologetic. Or, if you have access to some sort of privileged information and actually know that he was forced, I've got another rejoinder: forced to apologize!? No! The humanity.

Nominal.

Those who would say that are enemies of intellectual life. Can you safely express ideas outside the Overton Window, for curiosity's sake, on your own time? No, they shout in unison!

But now, for any intellectual worthy of the name, the Overton Window is narrow and constraining. If you fancy yourself an intellectual and you think that the present Overton Window is a big enough sandbox to play in, you are not very much of an intellectual. If noting (for instance) that different people are different is outside of the Overton Window, the sandbox is tiny indeed.

This is emphatically not how the free market of ideas is supposed to work.

I don't think you appreciate what the "free" in "free market" refers to...