neoreaction

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 23 Jan 2024 02:06
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    • An extreme right-wing political ideology that for some reason has a serious following in a subset of the technology world, with considerable overlap with the Rationalism community. Also called NRx by those in the know. Neoreactionaries don't like to be called fascists or white nationalists, but their writings contain astounding levels of toxic racism and calls for violence, just the sort of thing you would expect from fascists or white nationalists.
      • Scott Alexander has put a lot of effort into distancing himself from neoreaction, which is good, but he's basically in trouble for being in.a social position where he had a need to do that. Which might not be quite fair, but this is how things work.
    • Founded more or less by Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug. I actually tried to engage with him and his followers when this movement was getting off the ground and he had a very verbose blog called Unqualified Reservations. The blog comments are gone, here's a representative one of mine ](http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/10/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-4.html#1437567684200948985))from archive.org
      • Universalism must be a hardy infection indeed. It is the underlying motivator of everyone from Lincoln to Hitler to Gandhi to bin Laden. It rules everyone from the starry-eyed internationalists who work for NGOs to the rabidly xenophobic and nationalistic Kim Jong Il. It has infected both sides of every war in the past couple of centuries. The only people who seem to have immunity are the you, maybe a few libertarians and reactionaries, and the nations of Dubai and Singapore, perhaps China. It seems like the memetic equivalent of E. Coli -- essentially omnipresent, usually relatively benign, occasionally pathological.
    • Another very different critique may be found in Elizabeth Sandifer's Neoreaction: A Basilisk which draws out the connections between rationalism, neoreactionary politics, and quasi-Lovecraftian hyperstition .
    • Another recent (May 2022) fawning article: Curtis Yarvin, Political Theorist - Tablet Magazine
      • This gets at something:
      • The essence of Yarvin as a historical figure begins not with his politics but his talents as a computer engineer... To separate his roots in technology from the politics he developed is to miss what is most powerful about him—his understanding of the hidden designs behind the systems of knowledge and power that keep both computers and societies running. The universal rule that he deduced is almost mystical in its simplicity: Order is good, not merely in an instrumental sense because it leads to virtuous outcomes; it is good in itself. Whatever leads to more of it is also good, while anything that produces disorder is bad.
      • I think that accurately captures one of the core aspects of Moldbugism, but of course it's extraordinarily wrong. Order is not always good, too much order is oppressive, and societies need a healthy amount of disorder along with their order. "Order is good" is a ridiculously oversimplified political philosophy, and is reminiscent of of the bad guys from Illuminatus!, which revolves around a war between the forces of order and the forces of chaos.
    • Oh holy shit this is hilarious, why have I not seen this before