Curtis Yarvin, perhaps better known to some of you as ‘Mencius Moldbug’, is, in real life, a computer scientist, and, as far as I can tell, rather a gifted one. (For a while I shied away from using his real name, in order to protect his identity, but I think that cat is thoroughly and irreversibly out of the bag at this point.)
As Moldbug, he wrote for years on political theory at his blog, Unqualified Reservations. The ideas he developed there were sharply at odds with prevailing liberal, and even conservative, orthodoxy, and have had a reverberating influence. (Moldbug is widely considered to be the father of the burgeoning “neoreactionary” intellectual movement.)
Mr. Yarvin stopped writing as Moldbug some years ago. He had said most of what he wanted to say, I think, and wanted to focus on his professional work. But his identity became known, and as surely as night follows day his heterodox opinions started getting him in trouble with the social-justice commissars who police all public discourse these days. As a result he began to be banned from professional conferences.
Now it seems that one of those conferences, LambdaConf, has decided to defy the would-be censors and let Mr. Yarvin speak. As they should.
The story is here. Mr. Yarvin has also released a statement about his views, here. (I think its tone is far too apologetic, but I understand that this is a young father with a career he’d like to preserve, so I can hardly blame him for that.)
5 Comments
“Moldbug is widely considered to be the father of the burgeoning “neoreactionary” intellectual movement”. I enjoy reading some of his NRx writing until it goes into hyper wordy mode. Also I never understood that he is as young as he is. Explains the “present culture” speak he uses…he as well as some of the other NRx writers like those at Nick Steves blog. I try to follow some of them, some with success and some it is pointless. It seems I should have watched “The Matrix” when it came out about 1999 from what I can tell. That was a bad year in my family so I missed most everything. Still, I may pick up the movie to get an idea of what it means and why it is used in much of NRx writing.
I hope Curtis stays the course and holds strong.
I’ve registered my distaste for Moldbug’s unnecessarily dense and convoluted prose before, although I have to say that the piece you linked to, Malcolm–the “statement about his views”–was more readable than most of his work, even though many of the commenters on that piece obviously disagree with my assessment. (Some said they left his piece “more confused” than when they’d arrived.)
As for people thinking he’s some sort of slavery advocate… well, them folks is jes’ plain stupid.
I’m in a minority, I think: I like the way Moldbug writes. Prolix, yes, but fun to read. I don’t mind a long ride if the scenery’s nice.
This event is building steam and heat it seems: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/save-lambdaconf-and-an-open-society–3#/
The spectacle of these mediocrities, these Lilliputians, swarming in this way is terribly dispiriting. Unable to take on someone as brilliant as Moldbug in a fair contest of ideas, they seek to silence him. Unable to do even that, they just start burning down the city.
They are Entropy, and Chaos. No compromise is possible with such forces of darkness.