Not A Tzimisce

And man, I am just fascinated by the sheer number of cults that float around a movement called "rationalism".

Quick critical thinking lesson:

Then Geoff posed a thought experiment: What if Tyler took a pill, then started floating off the ground, and touched down five minutes later — then would Tyler feel that he needed to use a scientific tool in order to trust his own observations? What if Tyler took another pill from the same jar, and the second time he took the pill he floated off the ground, then touched down five minutes later? How long would it take for Tyler to conclude that each pill made him float for five minutes?

Anybody who says something like this is trying to recruit you to a cult, sell you snake oil, or both, 100% of the time no exceptions.

"If I keep proving that I can guess which card you picked out of the deck, why would you ever bother to examine the deck?"

It's paywalled now, so I don't know if it was previewed for a while, or if I accidentally pressed the button that gave me my one free article, or what, but I did read the whole thing.

The executive summary is that, like a truly surprising number of people the George Floyd riots broke her brain, and she gravitated towards a neoreactionary discord because they were actually willing to listen about her feelings of stress about living in the St Paul Minneapolis region and not really knowing how to deal with the riots without calling her a racist.

I don't really care about that part, riots are scary, I've often found that, especially back then left-wingers had a tendency to psychoanalyze you and explain why you were making an argument from internalized racism or whatever and right-wingers were often more able to argue directly which is, honestly, easier to deal with. "You're wrong" is a more respectful and less disorienting way to argue than, "I bet so-and-so only thinks this way because he's secretly a conservative."

The real question, which she not only never addresses and in fact seems totally unaware of, is what the fuck Curtis Yarvin was even doing there.

According to Laurensen, both now and at the time she was obsessed with the fear that increasing polarization would lead to a civil war and the final collapse of the American government, and she is intensely patriotic.

So when Yarvin sent a message to the group saying he was looking for a new fiancee (???) she thought, in her words, "What's the worst that could happen?"

So, like... Your mental health is suffering because you're afraid that increasing polarization will lead to the collapse of the government, and you're wondering what is the worst thing that could happen if you get engaged to a man who is funded by billionaires with the explicit project of increasing political polarization until the US government collapses and is replaced by an authoritarian government?

I mean... like, just off the top of my head...

It's so weird, she even brings up the leopards eating faces cliche, and like, she seems put out by it and thinks it's unfair, but she also wrote this whole article where in the middle she says, essentially, "I was having nightmares about face eating leopards, and the danger they posed to the country, so when the head of the Face Eating Leopards Party asked for a fiancee, I thought, hey, why not?"

She's a really overly wordy writer, but she is so accidentally revealing that it almost comes off as a bit.

We need some sort of "Horseshoe but rotated 90 degrees theory" for this kind of thing, where you continuously talk about your centrism and then read Yarvin and go, "Sure, can't see anything wrong with this!"

In these kind of narratives, it's always hard for me to tell what's genuine naivetee and what's self-aggrandizing lies.

One thing I noticed very early on as a child was the way that Christians who claimed to have converted from militant atheism often seemed to have pretty much no grasp of the most common atheist arguments or skeptical culture.