Weird Internet Communities

[dubsartur]

An Old Media article on Curtis Yarvin mentions that after his wife died suddenly, in 2021 and 2022 he dated people including Caroline Ellison.  People involved in the community say that while Scott Alexander was writing a Neo-Reactionary FAQ he attended events with Curtis Yarvin who does not have a day job so had lots of time to hang around blathering. Yarvin also dated a feminist sex blogger who went by the handle Clarisse Thorn (RationalWiki has an article on a similar type of person called Ozy Brennan). My Early Social Media community was mostly people 1000 km or more away so this merging of meatspace and IRL (and different communities) feels alien.

According to the article Yarvin knows Razib Khan, Steve Sailer, and many other cranks well.

[Jubal]

Came across someone in a history FB group advertising his book on "medieval history" which actually seems to be an explicit ultra-Catholic argument for the restoration of monarchy, entitled Missing Monarchy. Kind of rare to see those sorts of sentiments outside their own bubbles.

[dubsartur]

Unfortunately, the refusal of Americans to control their oligarchs means that you just need to amuse one rich person to make a fringe Internet idea into a global sensation.  And Amazon etc. don't care what they publish or advertise as long as it does not cross a few simple lines.

As far as I am concerned, the whole country is like a pet owner that lets their pit bull chase all the smaller dogs and people at the park.  Utter abandonment of personal responsibility.

[dubsartur]

He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who claimed he performed human genetic engineering with CRISPR and spent three years in prison for his trouble, is moving to America:

"My new lab in Austin, Texas is being prepared and I'll be settling down there," he said. ... "My mission is still in the field of embryonic genetic editing." ... The controversial figure said he had given up trying to win over conventional academia and intended to spread his influence among his online fans instead. ... His growing rejection of mainstream academia has largely been attributed to his second wife, Cathy Tie – a 29-year-old Chinese-Canadian bioinformatician and entrepreneur who founded Ranomics, a genetic screening company, and Locke Bio, a telemedicine company, in Toronto. ... He also said that Tie had helped to create a cryptocurrency called meme coin to enable public support of his research.

Elon Musk has connections to Austin and several figures in this thread live or have lived there.

At least the Kaiser just let portugaling Lenin out! Would be funny if ICE deports He to a gulag in Honduras for stealing jobs from American mad scientists.

[dubsartur]

Has anyone else encountered the idea of "the big sort" or "the great sort" on American right-wing social media?  The idea that the Invisible Hand of the Market just alots capable people to good jobs? (And don't talk about the state of public education and public health in many places, or how many jobs in say high-status journalism are for the children of the last generation of celebrities and elected officials- people like that also tend to be anxious about chatbots taking jobs).

[Son of the King]

I've not seen it named but have vaguely seen the idea alongside other free market type discussions. I find myself questioning if the people who imagine it to be true have ever actually interacted with another person whilst working.