As a follow up, I've read a bunch of Unqualified Reservations since this whole brouhaha started (and I read some before, I find it occasionally amusing) and I've never seen any of the racism or hate speech I see claimed. I have seen a lot of out-of-context examples, but every one I tracked down was simply using shocking imagery to make a larger point. There is quite a bit that speaks frankly of slavery and the relationships involved, but nothing I've seen that I could consider racist, unless the very concept of slavery is supposed to be considered racist... which is ridiculous, in my opinion.

edit: wording

Such mischaracterization is a giant red flag for knowing you're dealing with groupthink. Moldbug's points venture into forbidden thoughts and attack the national religion, so the knee jerk reaction is to regroup at ad-hominem by ascribing simplistic straw men.

FWIW, reading "A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations" made me identify as liberal. I wholeheartedly agree with Moldbug's analysis of the arrow of time and condemnation of the machine(s) of USG and the Cathedral. But I believe he unjustly discounts the idea of distributed force wherein aggression is unproductive, and IMHO making that work at lower levels is a better goal than the federated centralization of take-it-or-leave-it fiefdoms. (Then again, this growing feel-good "SJW" cancer has me rethinking how enlightened such a society could be, but I digress...). He also discounts how technology has made subjects ever-more transparent to their rulers, with a simple handwave that rulers wouldn't be interested in unnecessary policing. (If I am guilty of oversimplifying here I apologize - it's been a while since I read him and I'm recalling my main takeaways.)

I don't believe in Urbit for similar reasoning - it seems like its entities are opaque objects where the only primitive is composition, and punts to delegation for solving the hard problems. I'd previously gone down a similar "immutable universal code" fugue with r6rs as the basis and eventually considered it a dead end.

> unless the very concept of slavery is supposed to be considered racist

I've never read a word of Moldybug or whatever, but in the American context, the very concept of slavery is absolutely considered racist and rightly so. America's history of slavery is completely inseparable from racism.

Slavery as a concept has nothing to do with American racism or American history. Slavery existed long before America was a dirty thought in a pilgrim's hatted head, and it still exists today, and it will likely exist so long as humans are recognizably human.

To outright decide that all mentions of a word have such a narrow context is something I cannot accept as valid. It's thoughtcrime.

Concepts are understood in contexts. Everyone involved in this context is American, so it's natural for slavery here to be viewed through an American context. In that context, slavery is inherently racist.

After all, it's not like Moldbug's writing shies away from this idea.

> Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences.

I'll agree, it's very human and natural for people to deliberately misunderstand things so they can work themselves into a rage over things. It's intellectually dishonest, particularly in this case, and so I give it no shrift.

If all you have to make your case is rhetorical tricks (like "look! somewhere in this man's million plus words he talked about Africans being slaves! Slavery is therefore a specific kind of racist in all conversations") then I work from the premise that there isn't much of a case to be made.

> it's very human and natural for people to deliberately misunderstand things so they can work themselves into a rage over things.

Kind of like what you're doing right now?

You're unintentionally perpetuating the stereotype that US citizens do not know or care about history. Those people involved may be American, but surely some of them can look beyond their own noses to realize that a person speaking in broad, abstract strokes isn't talking about them in particular.

Nonsense. I'm saying that people live in the real world with real contexts, not in Context-Free-Abstraction-Land.

Real contexts, where abstract concepts have been concrete realities, put natural and rational limits on the ability to treat those concepts as abstract ideas to be debated solely on their hypothesized merits rather than their hard realities. There is a very rational difference between arguing in favor of communism on an American college campus, where communism is a lovely abstract ideal, and arguing in favor of it in Romania or Ukraine where communism was a brutal reality.

Moldbug is an American, being read by Americans, writing about his support for the institution of slavery, and explicitly saying that some races are genetically better suited for slavery than others. It is far more rational to treat that as racist than to bend over backwards and pretend that it is not in the name of free debate.

If speech advocating things (or "public identification with") that are harmful is violence, communism certainly qualifies with a death count of around 150 million.

Communism doesn't advocate that though. People advocating it are not necessarily supporting those deaths or saying they were necessary for communism to have worked there.

On the other hand, saying that some races are more suited to slavery is about as direct as it gets.

Besides, those deaths weren't due to the policies of communism, rather the particular regime. Hell, British colonialism is responsible for a lot of deaths too. Tons were under the East India Trading company (and the governments that it morphed into), which was a capitalist venture and all of its harmful policies were profit-oriented. There are probably other examples, I don't know.

(I don't exactly support communist ideals, but I don't really think it's something that deserves to be taboo'd.)

I get where you are coming from but verbal abuse can be incredibly scarring. As someone that experienced both I can assure you of that... And ill grant that you weren't really talking about abusive speech... But hate speech especially from a superior...be it job or school... An authority figure, I could see where that would be just as bad.

Well just to keep this on topic, I'm not aware of any authority Curtis Yarvin has, so how could anything he says rise to that level?

Fine point.

Even in this reply you've had to use a metaphor for physiological abuse (a scar, a bodily mark of harm) to elevate the seriousness of emotional damage, to the extent this emotional damage is even lasting, and it doesn't have to be, while something like a scar is unequivocally permanent barring some kind of advanced cosmetic treatment.

Whether some emotional damage is "scarring" (i.e. permanent) will depend on, well, a lot of things, but almost no kind of emotional damage has to be permanent because of the way our physiology of emotions behaves. Your resilience, your existing beliefs, what you expect out of the world, and so on will determine how you respond to stressful stimuli. Learning that people don't live forever can be 'scarring' (not really) to a two-year old, but, people eventually adjust to this information, because stress tolerance exists. If everything were as equally stressful as the first time we heard it, our bodies would be overwhelmed with cortisol all the time. Since this obviously doesn't happen, our bodies can (and do) adapt to stressful stimuli in various ways.

Comparing emotional damage to scars is probably a false analogy. Your skin will never fully adapt to a gash, and being stabbed once isn't going to change the way your body responds to stabbings. But your body will adapt to stressful emotions, or at least it is capable of doing so. In the worst case it's probably like a muscle tear, but in most cases emotional stress is more like some kind of the muscle trauma that happens during resistance training, which the body adapts to.

I don't know that the mental machinery is as elastic as you say. Our bodies to indeed adjust to mental stress, in fact parts of the brain that respond to fear and stress will overdevelop in relation to other areas producing aberrant behavior.

There are mental trauma, that has not been caused by physical trauma, that will end up being like the gash you describe never being able to acclimatize to.

I take your point about the use of the word scarring...I was just trying to draw a certain type of similarity into the conversation...it certainly isn't a perfect analogy.

One other thing, though...is it really a surprise that discussing mental or emotional damage would use a physical analogy? We don't culturally have a large body of language for describing things accurately that are "just in your head."

Physical analogies are dated when we have accurate terms now.

"There are mental trauma, that has not been caused by physical trauma, that will end up being like the gash you describe never being able to acclimatize to."

I'm not so sure about this.

Stress happens because of stress hormones. You can develop a tolerance to those hormones like you could develop a tolerance to any drug.

The range of experiences that human emotion can adapt to are vast. People in far more violent societies have adapted to far more horrific things. If we didn't have the ability to adapt to extreme shock we'd be screwed as a species.

And mental trauma from torture or combat that leads to suicide?

It doesn't lead to suicide. It predisposes one to suicide, but the trauma isn't insurmountable. What causally leads to suicide is the choice to take some kind of weapon and use it on yourself.

You seem really invested in this idea. I think that we are at odds on the idea that mental damage can be insurmountable. I could speculate as to why, but in the end I think we should just call it good.

Cheers.

I don't get why this was downvoted. I was polite. I tried to articulate a counter point. Is it just that people really disagree with the hate speech part or that mental trauma can be as serious as physical trauma??