Moldbug made Slate. After they described his politics as nutty (which they are not: a benign dictatorship is an efficient method of running a country, as is a competent aristocracy. Which is why S.M. Stirling used that model for the Draka and then the Chosen).

I have a soft spot for neoreactionaries: it is the Roundhead in me. However, I have no time for activists who want to shut people up. If people want to troll, even to the point where the logic gets to insane troll level, then the correct response is mockery.

Neoreaction may be a better model of human nature than Marxism. Besides, in general, the Tories kill less people than the Reds do: the Tories only fight the enemy, while the Reds wish to destroy all the enemy and the half of their own side they do not deem pure enough for the new socailist state.

The decision to toss Yarvin is foolish but not because it’s censorship. By making the issue about Yarvin being a “distraction,” Miller has created a perverse incentive. By that logic, anyone could get tossed from the conference if enough people object for any reason at all. Miller admits as much when he says he hasn’t even read Yarvin’s political writing. (I can’t blame him.) Ergo, make enough noise, and you can get your target kicked out of Strange Loop. This is the mentality of “no platforming,” as it’s known in the U.K., a tactic that was once used to exclude (sensibly, in my opinion) National Front members from public life but has now become so widespread that even the hard-left New Statesman is objecting to the practice. If the problem is, as Miller wrote to Yarvin, that people’s “reactions are overshadowing the talk and acting as a distraction,” then all objectors need to do is create a distraction to get a presenter thrown out.

Let us extend this principle. In 1978, members of the International Committee Against Racism entered a talk being given by sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, threw water on him, and chanted, “Racist Wilson you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” By Miller’s logic, the possibility of this sort of distraction, however ungrounded, would still be grounds for tossing out Wilson. Moreover, Miller’s logic directly encourages this sort of troublemaking. Hacker and technologist Meredith L. Patterson suggested a better strategy last week: “If [Yarvin] gets up on stage and makes with the casual racism, by all means, end the talk early and boot him … [P]re-acting to something that hasn’t happened yet is nonsense.”

Popehat has written wisely and legal type words that are far beyond the competence of this Kiwi to comment on. He is well worth a read. He argues that conferences are private meetings and that Strangeloop can ban anyone. Well, yeah, perhaps.

Because here have I scars. A couple of years ago my college decided — at least for the kiwi meeting — to forgo sponsorship by commercial interests, by which they meant drug companies. I was the chair of the conference that year. I said… well, if that is what the committee want, it is your conference, and you set the rules. So I cut the budget, and we ran a tight meeting — we kept the speakers from Australasia, and we made a surplus. But then the drug company reps (and NZ is a small place, I know who they are) wanted to enrol. And I let them.

Because I would let anyone who paid in. Anti-psychiatrists? Yep, we invited some of them. Scientologists? Pay up, and no you cannot have a stand either. You is commercial. (We had stands for the librarians and some government agencies and resource groups). I banned stands from other commercial groups (such as some therapy training providers). Because consistency. But I would not ban people: in particular if someone I dislike wanted to speak and had written a reasonable abstract, I let them do so.

Because it was a technical meeting and I wanted collegial courtesy. If Yarvin is Moldbug and goes and talks about Urkit — which is software, at a software conference, it is no different to me talking about evidence for this treatment or that… and not talking about Theology, because it is a technical conference. Or politics. Because it is a technical conference.

But to the leftist everything is political. Ironically, Moldbug predicted this. Goog is google, and Moldbug is commenting that there are more Serbians (from Serbia) than minorities (from Wimmins studies or Watts) there.

You know, Goog, once you start lying, there’s really no end to it. For one thing, even if your enemies ignore lying, defensive evasion, and other telltale “beta” behaviors, they still own you. They’ve just decided not to eat you just yet, maybe in the hopes that you’re still getting fatter.

So in a way I actually like to see the #BrownScare getting big in Silicon Valley, because I think there’s a lot of potential for opposing it here. A lot of wasted potential. Which will probably remain wasted, but why not try, eh? Dear fellow geeks, there’s no need to get purged. Your predator, though powerful, is not complicated, and not that hard to hack if you’re careful. Indeed, properly organized, you may even be able to overcome him.

It’s actually not hard to explain the Brown Scare. Like all witch hunts, it’s built on a conspiracy theory. The Red Scare was based on a conspiracy theory too, but at least it was a real conspiracy with real witches – two of whom were my father’s parents. (The nicest people on earth, as people. I like to think of them not as worshipping Stalin, but worshipping what they thought Stalin was.) Moreover, the Red Scare was a largely demotic or peasant phenomenon to which America’s governing intellectual classes were, for obvious reasons, immune. Because power works and culture is downstream from politics – real politics, at least – the Red Scare soon faded into a joke.

As a mainstream conspiracy theory, fully in the institutional saddle, the Brown Scare is far greater and more terrifying. Unfortunately no central statistics are kept, but I wouldn’t be surprised if every day in America, more racists, fascists and sexists are detected, purged and destroyed, than all the screenwriters who had to prosper under pseudonyms in the ’50s. Indeed it’s not an exaggeration to say that hundreds of thousands of Americans, perhaps even a million, are employed in one arm or another of this ideological apparatus. Cleaning it up will require a genuine cultural revolution – or a cultural reaction, anyway.

I’d rather let people talk. I might, then, quietly, tell some people they are talking rubbish, and publically confront some people who erroneously think they can make public policy out of good intentions and without evidence that what they suggest and “know will work” actually will make a change for the better. Which has happened. Even when I am chairing the meeting.