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.

[dubsartur]

An establishment rag in NYC just shared a leak on the current socialist Democratic candidate for Mayor of NYC from Crémieux Receuil, a race crank Twitter and Substack personality who the Guardian thinks is a graduate student named Jordan Lasker. Receuil was among those who recently sued RationalWiki to stop saying documented true things about him.  Said rag described him as "an academic and an opponent of affirmative action" not "a blogger obsessed with telling the Internet about the hereditary inferiority of black and Black people." 

Crémieux is part of the network in this thread but I am not going on twitter to work things out (RationalWiki mentioned Richard Hanania, Aporia Magazine, Natal Conference, a Libertarian charter city called Infinita, and something called Manifest in Berkeley where LessWrongers and race 'scientists' network).

I see indications that said candidate is not a great person, but the small-C conservative establishment siding with racists against socialists is how you get Nazi Germany.

Crémieux is sad that guesses about the mayoral race have not moved on the prediction market Polymarket so he presumably tried insider trading and shorted the candidate's chances before the leak https://www.dewereldmorgen.be/community/rassenbiologische-hit-job-op-zohran-mamdani-in-the-new-york-times/ Manifest was billed as about prediction markets but attendees noticed "there are five HBD bloggers among the invited guests and Curtis Yarvin has organized a party"

Supposedly Crémieux has a Reddit handle which begins with a six-letter slur for trans people.  Do none of these people have healthy sexuality which is based on respecting the people they want to take to bed not hating and fearing people who are different from them or seeing them as resources to harvest?  And why did they all spent their youth calling for despicable policies rather than arguing about BSG versus Dr. Who and writing fanfic like normal nerds?

[dubsartur]

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.

I am told there is a far-right book by a social media personality with a title or handle like Bronze Age Pervert (and I can kind of grok the John Ringos who fantasize about being warlords who cut a swathe through their enemies by day and amuse themselves with captive women by night, or the people who start a band on go on tour and meet a groupie, but my thoughts on sophists who invent patter and use drugs and cult tactics to get much younger people dependent on them like some of the figures in earlier posts in this thread are not printable). Jordan Peterson has thoughts on Ancient Near Eastern literature.

A characteristic of the current phase of American social media is fringe figures gaining influence in old institutions.  Fifteen or twenty years ago someone very influential on 4Chan or Tumblr (although there was a Tumblr to twitter to the headlines pipeline) would not be given access to the NYT or appointed by a close associate of POTUS.  The visible mental collapse of prominent figures like Rudy Giulianni and Elon Musk also feels new (plenty of prominent people were deeply messed up but they kept it out of the headlines, and if they got in the news like Tiger Woods and his wife they often took a break).

On whether someone with Indian parents born in Uganda and resident in the USA is African-American (Ugandan), I have applied to American universities which try to ask your race without saying race (my ethnicity is Canadian and Anglo but there are never boxes for either).  My thoughts there are also not for the Internet except that I imagine that people interpret the stupid question many different ways and that people with all kinds of ancestry might get lumped in as "black"  or "Hispanic" in the USA depending on circumstances (a pale-skinned Mexican in a business suit who speaks excellent English might be safer than a working-class tourist from Calabria drunk on real American whiskey).  One way I heard it explained is that if you leave it blank they can guess your race, if you enter it they have to trust it.  Lots of people have toyed with "is a white South-African or a Tunisian African-American?" or more interestingly "is an immigrant from Kenya African-American if she is not part of Black culture but has more encounters with police than most of us on this forum can imagine?"