SneerClub

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 25 Sep 2023 10:59
Open in Logseq
    • SneerClub is the only anti- Rationalism hangout I know of. It's a bit too sneery for me, but I comment there on occasion. I have mixed feelings about Rationalism, and while I think their core beliefs are wack their practices are occasionally worthy and interesting, and I don't really want to take a sneering stance towards them. But sometimes I can't resist.
      • Update: has been defunct since June 2023 due to Reddit changing their policies. My collected sneers
    • There's something about the name I like. In a way, every club is a SneerClub, there is an inside and and outside and the insiders are sneery to those who don't belong. The only intellectually defensible position is to be a universal non-joiner, and avoid taking even that as an identity
    • I don't know that I actually posted this, but I like it:
      • The most ridiculous (yet also somehow endearing) thing about rationalists is the combined belief that (a) we are just on the verge of creating an agency far more powerful than our own and (b) if we just math hard enough, we can contain it.
    • Scott is...happy?...that Mencius Moldbug's terminology is catching on at Fox News ("mainstream TV") : SneerClub
      • I was also an early "sparring partner" of Moldbug. Fortunately most of that stuff is gone from the net but I just dug some out of the Internet Archive. Eventually I gave up on it as a waste of time, but I remember the horrified feeling I got when I realized that what I thought was just a weird little corner of the internet was actually a growing influence on real politics and a significant ideological contributer to Trumpism – I think it when I learned that he was watching election returns with Peter Thiel is what did it for me. That some of the jargon has made it to Fox News doesn't surprise me in the least, and shouldn't surprise Scott. There is no daylight at all between NRX and the Republican Party in 2021.
    • SSC Attempts to Review David Harvey's "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" : SneerClub
      • Siskind's whole "conflict theory" machinery is part of an elaborate effort to deny not just class conflict but conflict in general. It very often leads to weird blind spots; I wrote about it here. It's a very weird mode of thought. I mean, it's one thing to dislike conflict, it's another thing to try to write about political and economic matters as if conflict didn't exist.
    • It is 2021 and Scott Siskind is still relitigating Untitled : SneerClub
      • Yeah there is an amazing narrowness of vision thing going on there, verging on solipsism. One of his conflict theory pieces had the absurd line "nobody has any real policy disagreements", which I took to mean, "anybody who disagrees with me doesn't really exist for me (until they become a threat in which case I'll write 100K word screeds against them)".