Nobody loves these kinds of pieces more than Yarvin. Look at how important he must be!
My Yarvin-contempt bona fides are as strong as anyone's here (maybe except for 'lisper) and I resent the implication this article makes about Hacker News and "race realism". It is in fact not common here. Use the search bar. I've been monitoring this (and jumping in when it pops up) for several years now --- this and DNSSEC are my two "beats", the two things I'm careful to pay attention to --- and it comes up rarely and mostly by the same fringey actors.
Race-realism claims are almost always quickly flagged off the site by the community. Almost every time I've reported something to Dan and Tom, I've looked dumb, because it was flagged dead 2 minutes after my email landed.
We're a deeply imperfect community (like every other community, in our own idiosyncratic ways), but compared to other communities this is not one of our flaws.
> I resent the implication this article makes about Hacker News and "race realism". It is in fact not common here. Use the search bar.
Flagged and dead comments won’t show up in a search, but people can and do have conversations under them for days after the flagging. You were in one of these just this week.
Your claims about the prevalence of non-dead, explicit “race realism” may be true (like the sibling comment, I disagree), but it doesn’t seem to tell the whole story either.
Can't say I've made any attempt to quantify it or talk to mods, but I feel this site is more receptive to racist right wing garbage than most communities I read or comment in.
Often they do what Republicans used to do, which is mask it, dress it up to be polite and plausibly deniable, or make it seem like they're just a mainstream right of center person. Other times it surfaces as the way people vote on comments. But I feel it strongly here. It's not everyone by any means, but there is a contingency for it here.
I'm a moderator here and I urge you to email us any time you see any comments that fit this category (hn@ycombinator.com). This is something we take seriously and act on quickly when we see it. People don't always tell us because they don't know they should, but I'm telling you very clearly: you should.
Yarvin is a basement dweller and 4chan intellectual, high on his own supply of pseudo-intellectual takes. What is sad and worrying is that these kinds of politics are increasingly moving out of the fringe internet and into pockets of power (eg. Thiel and Vance). It is problematic that these ideas now linger only one or two steps away from the most powerful and influential person in the world.
Glad someone finally stopped pulling punches in describing Yarvin's wickedness and imbecility.
There's a kind of elegance and charm to this style of just heaping abuse on people who richly deserve it---Hunter S. Thompson was its greatest practitioner and this is in that tradition nicely.
> Glad someone finally stopped pulling punches in describing Yarvin's wickedness and imbecility
That's much too simplistic and mean spirited. We're not going to address the problems we're facing with personal dismissals. Yarvin, the man, isn't the problem. Some of his ideas are ridiculous and unworkable, but they're motivated by something real and unaddressed by many other commentators. The current zeitgeist, which is centered on personal attacks and dismissals is contributing to our problems, and inability to make any real progress at addressing them, by increasing factionalism and intellectual silos.
Edit: As to the addition you made to your comment, we live in a very different world than when Hunter S. Thompson was making his contributions.
I feel like I care about freak ideologies more than as a passing curiosity based on how powerful those people are. I would care if it was Peter Thiel but not so much if it is a freak subculture among upper middle class SC programmer phreaks.
Ideology is overrated. Look instead at what people ranging from self-identified right-liberal to progressive values actually do en masse.
Maybe a Habermas was more insidious than a Hoppe. (What do I know as if I could ever read Habermas.)
I'm a "leftist" on paper and in my heart. I helped organize a union, I believe in a better future where we abolish wage-labor and tear down unjust hierarchies, I don't believe in the legitimacy of things like copyright or borders, I think all people are created equal that we should judge people by their deeds and behavior rather than the color of their skin or their religion, etc. I want to see space colonies of happy socialists using robots to garden in domes. I want solar panels powering the great cities of the world with electric cars and wind-turbines. I want to see progress. I want us to clean up the planet, and move heavy industry off the planet so we can live in some solar-punk fantasy while my kids can explore the stars. I like sailboats and gliders and building cabins in the woods and learning languages and programming computers and ... the list is to long to fully express here, but I love life. I want to be happy and fulfilled and I want others to be too! I'll even help!
But most people do not seem to want to be happy now. Everyone seems miserable while I'm doing more or less ok and looking at me like I'm an asshole because I have hope.
It seems though that the people I once I identified with, saw as my friends and allies, are literally anti-tech right now. I get it, it's popular to hate AI, it's popular to hate the billionaires, I get it, I am not a fan of capital either. Lord knows I'm not. Still, I don't have this all consuming rage I see everywhere. I still am amazingly optimistic at the possibilities for the future! I think it'll be a rocky road, but I think we'll get there. I don't know if it is because I have lived through a great tragedy and the only thing that has let me live has been medical science, but it feels right now that there's a strong regressive core to the "left" in America right now. I'm not talking about idpol or whatever. It's more this pervasive nostalgia that concerns me. This idea that "if only things can go back to how they used to be" as though that is even possible. That's all I see from either side of the spectrum here in the states. From the Republicans, it's "I wish it was 1950 and black people couldn't vote." From the Democrats it's "I wish it was 2009 again and I had hope for the future." But hope is a verb too, and you have to actually do it in order to accomplish anything. You have to have some reason to get out of bed in the morning. But the whole zeitgeist the entire internet and most of the leftist paces I have been in is this weird aft-facing drone of discontent. 2009 wasn't that great. Neither was 1996. I certainly wouldn't translate my life backwards, for one, I'd be dead or suffering immensely, but on the other side, we can't. So wishing for this weird nostalgic fever dream isn't going to make it true. We have to go forward, we have to make the world better! We have to show people that the world can be better.
But today, everyone is convinced of doom and decay and rot and nobody's willing to hope anymore because hoping is no longer in vogue.
I'm still going to hope, and I'm still going to "build" because action precedes motivation. We need to do things to make the world better, not just know about them. Ideology is overrated. I just want to do things to help people live a better life and accomplish the things that make life worth living. I often feel very alone in this desire. Like I'm a weirdo for not just wanting to talk about how fucked up things are. But the wild thing is that things have been much much worse...
Just as a reminder, Silicon Valley darling Curtis Yarvin recently said this:
"We have only one problem. The problem is: our billionaires are n—ers. They may be rich. But they're n—er rich. The nature and function of their wealth is profoundly negrous. You can probably name exceptions. I can too. But in every way, the exceptions prove the rule"
Author dislikes yarvin because he's a white supremacist.
I dislike him because he denies Israel exerts control over US foreign policy, while repeatedly saying the Gaza Strip should be ethnicaly cleansed. He tries to pretend he's this subversive free thinker, but when you peel away the layers it's just another Randy Fine lurking within.
But apparently white supremacism is worse than this... other kind of supremacism he has. The supremacism we dare not prefix but which kills orders of magnitude more people.
> He tries to pretend he's this subversive free thinker
This is one of the greater ironies about him and the people who admire his writing and ideas. They have a tendency to be firmly connected to rails, incapable of reflection or deviation from the course they've chosen. Regardless of if the ideas are workable or remotely sound, they charge forward.
I suppose most ideologies rooted in notions of subversion or free-thinking tend to suffer in similar ways. Any time you start to believe you've figured something out that others haven't, or that you're outside the confines of conventions, you're either a genius or very ignorant. None of these people are geniuses.
I was a fan of his at one point. I did enjoy him talking about the English Civil war and Glorious Revolution, the US War of Independence, etc etc. He introduced me to the "Whig View of History". And his substack post about the ludicrousness notion that the occupation of the US Capitol my a mob in 2021 was a serious attempt at a revolution/coup was a welcome antidote to the hysteria at the time.
But the thing with Yarvin is - he's widely read, but if you dig deeper into any one thing, his reading is shallow.
And like most extremists I have read (from communists to anarcho capitalists), he is pretty good at diagnosing problems but awful at proposing solutions.
You and I are on different pages. From here in Canada, that occupation of the US Capitol was (and still is) a dark moment in history for me, and a signal of worse things to come. There is no hysteria in my opinion, and the way things have unraveled since is a clear demonstration of why the outcry and outrage was very well-founded.
I also don't agree that extremists are particularly good at diagnosing problems. Instead, they tend to be confidently wrong in a way that's exceptionally compelling if you're emotionally vulnerable to their cause. This is why they rarely succeed in creating collective movements that involve broad cooperation and collective structures that can function and endure. They've misdiagnosed the issue, and they typically can't recruit people based on ideological merit, shared purposes, goals with clear outcomes, or other cohesive and productive substrates. They're more like cults and less like cooperative, coherent, purpose-driven organizations. Yarvin and his set fit squarely into this bucket.
These people typically talk too much and don't actually do anything. It's because there's nothing _to_ do when your ideology is a nebulous, discordant, illogical, and emotional dump.
Nobody loves these kinds of pieces more than Yarvin. Look at how important he must be!
My Yarvin-contempt bona fides are as strong as anyone's here (maybe except for 'lisper) and I resent the implication this article makes about Hacker News and "race realism". It is in fact not common here. Use the search bar. I've been monitoring this (and jumping in when it pops up) for several years now --- this and DNSSEC are my two "beats", the two things I'm careful to pay attention to --- and it comes up rarely and mostly by the same fringey actors.
Race-realism claims are almost always quickly flagged off the site by the community. Almost every time I've reported something to Dan and Tom, I've looked dumb, because it was flagged dead 2 minutes after my email landed.
We're a deeply imperfect community (like every other community, in our own idiosyncratic ways), but compared to other communities this is not one of our flaws.
> I resent the implication this article makes about Hacker News and "race realism". It is in fact not common here. Use the search bar.
Flagged and dead comments won’t show up in a search, but people can and do have conversations under them for days after the flagging. You were in one of these just this week.
Your claims about the prevalence of non-dead, explicit “race realism” may be true (like the sibling comment, I disagree), but it doesn’t seem to tell the whole story either.
If you disagree, feel free to provide links. I can.
Can't say I've made any attempt to quantify it or talk to mods, but I feel this site is more receptive to racist right wing garbage than most communities I read or comment in.
It’s not. It’s unusually inhospitable to it. It’s also explicitly a guidelines violation.
Often they do what Republicans used to do, which is mask it, dress it up to be polite and plausibly deniable, or make it seem like they're just a mainstream right of center person. Other times it surfaces as the way people vote on comments. But I feel it strongly here. It's not everyone by any means, but there is a contingency for it here.
I'm a moderator here and I urge you to email us any time you see any comments that fit this category (hn@ycombinator.com). This is something we take seriously and act on quickly when we see it. People don't always tell us because they don't know they should, but I'm telling you very clearly: you should.
[dead]
Yarvin is a basement dweller and 4chan intellectual, high on his own supply of pseudo-intellectual takes. What is sad and worrying is that these kinds of politics are increasingly moving out of the fringe internet and into pockets of power (eg. Thiel and Vance). It is problematic that these ideas now linger only one or two steps away from the most powerful and influential person in the world.
Increasingly moving out? They've taken over the entire government. We are well on our way to a dystopia. Nice job, everyone.
Glad someone finally stopped pulling punches in describing Yarvin's wickedness and imbecility.
There's a kind of elegance and charm to this style of just heaping abuse on people who richly deserve it---Hunter S. Thompson was its greatest practitioner and this is in that tradition nicely.
> Glad someone finally stopped pulling punches in describing Yarvin's wickedness and imbecility
That's much too simplistic and mean spirited. We're not going to address the problems we're facing with personal dismissals. Yarvin, the man, isn't the problem. Some of his ideas are ridiculous and unworkable, but they're motivated by something real and unaddressed by many other commentators. The current zeitgeist, which is centered on personal attacks and dismissals is contributing to our problems, and inability to make any real progress at addressing them, by increasing factionalism and intellectual silos.
Edit: As to the addition you made to your comment, we live in a very different world than when Hunter S. Thompson was making his contributions.
I feel like I care about freak ideologies more than as a passing curiosity based on how powerful those people are. I would care if it was Peter Thiel but not so much if it is a freak subculture among upper middle class SC programmer phreaks.
Ideology is overrated. Look instead at what people ranging from self-identified right-liberal to progressive values actually do en masse.
Maybe a Habermas was more insidious than a Hoppe. (What do I know as if I could ever read Habermas.)
I'm a "leftist" on paper and in my heart. I helped organize a union, I believe in a better future where we abolish wage-labor and tear down unjust hierarchies, I don't believe in the legitimacy of things like copyright or borders, I think all people are created equal that we should judge people by their deeds and behavior rather than the color of their skin or their religion, etc. I want to see space colonies of happy socialists using robots to garden in domes. I want solar panels powering the great cities of the world with electric cars and wind-turbines. I want to see progress. I want us to clean up the planet, and move heavy industry off the planet so we can live in some solar-punk fantasy while my kids can explore the stars. I like sailboats and gliders and building cabins in the woods and learning languages and programming computers and ... the list is to long to fully express here, but I love life. I want to be happy and fulfilled and I want others to be too! I'll even help!
But most people do not seem to want to be happy now. Everyone seems miserable while I'm doing more or less ok and looking at me like I'm an asshole because I have hope.
It seems though that the people I once I identified with, saw as my friends and allies, are literally anti-tech right now. I get it, it's popular to hate AI, it's popular to hate the billionaires, I get it, I am not a fan of capital either. Lord knows I'm not. Still, I don't have this all consuming rage I see everywhere. I still am amazingly optimistic at the possibilities for the future! I think it'll be a rocky road, but I think we'll get there. I don't know if it is because I have lived through a great tragedy and the only thing that has let me live has been medical science, but it feels right now that there's a strong regressive core to the "left" in America right now. I'm not talking about idpol or whatever. It's more this pervasive nostalgia that concerns me. This idea that "if only things can go back to how they used to be" as though that is even possible. That's all I see from either side of the spectrum here in the states. From the Republicans, it's "I wish it was 1950 and black people couldn't vote." From the Democrats it's "I wish it was 2009 again and I had hope for the future." But hope is a verb too, and you have to actually do it in order to accomplish anything. You have to have some reason to get out of bed in the morning. But the whole zeitgeist the entire internet and most of the leftist paces I have been in is this weird aft-facing drone of discontent. 2009 wasn't that great. Neither was 1996. I certainly wouldn't translate my life backwards, for one, I'd be dead or suffering immensely, but on the other side, we can't. So wishing for this weird nostalgic fever dream isn't going to make it true. We have to go forward, we have to make the world better! We have to show people that the world can be better.
But today, everyone is convinced of doom and decay and rot and nobody's willing to hope anymore because hoping is no longer in vogue.
I'm still going to hope, and I'm still going to "build" because action precedes motivation. We need to do things to make the world better, not just know about them. Ideology is overrated. I just want to do things to help people live a better life and accomplish the things that make life worth living. I often feel very alone in this desire. Like I'm a weirdo for not just wanting to talk about how fucked up things are. But the wild thing is that things have been much much worse...
Just as a reminder, Silicon Valley darling Curtis Yarvin recently said this:
"We have only one problem. The problem is: our billionaires are n—ers. They may be rich. But they're n—er rich. The nature and function of their wealth is profoundly negrous. You can probably name exceptions. I can too. But in every way, the exceptions prove the rule"
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:sefgphqp2xqwh2hawaixykwz/po...
And yet he still happily pops up at social gatherings with these elites.
[flagged]
Author dislikes yarvin because he's a white supremacist.
I dislike him because he denies Israel exerts control over US foreign policy, while repeatedly saying the Gaza Strip should be ethnicaly cleansed. He tries to pretend he's this subversive free thinker, but when you peel away the layers it's just another Randy Fine lurking within.
But apparently white supremacism is worse than this... other kind of supremacism he has. The supremacism we dare not prefix but which kills orders of magnitude more people.
> He tries to pretend he's this subversive free thinker
This is one of the greater ironies about him and the people who admire his writing and ideas. They have a tendency to be firmly connected to rails, incapable of reflection or deviation from the course they've chosen. Regardless of if the ideas are workable or remotely sound, they charge forward.
I suppose most ideologies rooted in notions of subversion or free-thinking tend to suffer in similar ways. Any time you start to believe you've figured something out that others haven't, or that you're outside the confines of conventions, you're either a genius or very ignorant. None of these people are geniuses.
I was a fan of his at one point. I did enjoy him talking about the English Civil war and Glorious Revolution, the US War of Independence, etc etc. He introduced me to the "Whig View of History". And his substack post about the ludicrousness notion that the occupation of the US Capitol my a mob in 2021 was a serious attempt at a revolution/coup was a welcome antidote to the hysteria at the time.
But the thing with Yarvin is - he's widely read, but if you dig deeper into any one thing, his reading is shallow.
And like most extremists I have read (from communists to anarcho capitalists), he is pretty good at diagnosing problems but awful at proposing solutions.
You and I are on different pages. From here in Canada, that occupation of the US Capitol was (and still is) a dark moment in history for me, and a signal of worse things to come. There is no hysteria in my opinion, and the way things have unraveled since is a clear demonstration of why the outcry and outrage was very well-founded.
I also don't agree that extremists are particularly good at diagnosing problems. Instead, they tend to be confidently wrong in a way that's exceptionally compelling if you're emotionally vulnerable to their cause. This is why they rarely succeed in creating collective movements that involve broad cooperation and collective structures that can function and endure. They've misdiagnosed the issue, and they typically can't recruit people based on ideological merit, shared purposes, goals with clear outcomes, or other cohesive and productive substrates. They're more like cults and less like cooperative, coherent, purpose-driven organizations. Yarvin and his set fit squarely into this bucket.
These people typically talk too much and don't actually do anything. It's because there's nothing _to_ do when your ideology is a nebulous, discordant, illogical, and emotional dump.