
Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum - zwtaylor
https://urbit.org/blog/2017.9-eth/
======
aeontech
Every time I read something about Urbit I am reminded of the Lewis Padgett
short sci-fi story, "Mimsy Were The Borogroves" [0], [1] describing children
discovering alien future toys, and subsequently via use of those toys learning
to manipulate reality in incomprehensible ways.

I still have not been able to figure out if there's actually something that
amazing about Urbit, or if behind the obfuscated terminology there's nothing,
and I am reluctant to commit to the time required to find out for myself. It
doesn't help that people who spend time in that land seem to all forget how to
speak about it except in the terms of Urbit, unable to translate it for
laypeople. I suppose that's true about any highly technical subject though.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves)

[1]:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&lpg=PA181&dq=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&lpg=PA181&dq=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&pg=PA181#v=onepage&q=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&f=false)

~~~
chc4
I'm one of those people that get it, so I'll try to explain it without going
off the deep end and waxing poetically about planets or whatever.

Urbit is a platform for building decentralized apps. To that end, it's a
tightly integrated set of different features that play into that: an identity
system so that all the apps can refer to the same people by the same handle, a
typed RPC network for easy message sending, and an append-only log of all
events that platform handles being the most important parts.

Right now you can build decentralized apps like Mastodon, except they 1) take
hours to setup a node, along with having to know arcane Linuz sysadmining 2)
aren't actually decentralized, but federated. Urbit wants to make it easy to
setup your own server, which runs as a node for all these decentralized apps
(instant messaging, Twitter, etc.), along with be useful for server-y things
like aggregate APIs (email, Facebook).

There's not actually anything that amazing about Urbit once you figure it out.
It just wants everyone to be able to run their own server, and make it easy to
build decentralized apps that talk to other Urbit servers. The important part
is that somehow, they saw how bad trying to do that currently is, said "let's
rewrite everything", /and then did/. It's like reading about Oberon or
Plan9/Inferno.

Edit: This post is probably the worst introduction to Urbit imaginable. It
basically is a technical spec for bootstrapping a PKI over Ethereum, and you
should expect about as much as if you got linked something from BitTorrent
about that. It assumes domain knowledge from both Urbit and Ethereum (both of
which are terrible to explain), and /doesn't actually matter/ for most people
interested in Urbit. Please don't use this as the benchmark for "babies first
urbit intro".

~~~
tptacek
This is a good, well-written explanation of the most reasonable, mainstream
aspects of Urbit, leaving the impression that it's essentially like a P2P
version of AWS Lambda.

But of course, that's not all it is.

It's also a ground-up reinvention of mainstream functional programming
languages like Lisp, built on the foundation of an abstract virtual machine in
which the "decrement" operation can be performed natively only by incrementing
a number until it's 1 less than the current number. All of these concepts have
their own weird names; for instance, the constant-time version of "decrement"
(this is a programming environment that goes out of its way to achieve
constant-time decrement†) is an example of a "jet", where a jet is apparently
a non-native implementation of an algorithm that can be expressed but not
efficiently on the VM that they've chosen to build their entire system on and
it just gets weirder and weirder from there.

You don't have to memorize the new names they've come up with for most of the
ASCII punctuation characters, like "gal", "gar", and "hax" for "<", ">", and
"#", "but it helps". A normal engineer's reaction to a system that tells it
that _it will help to remember a new name for the pound sign_ is to ask "Why?
What fresh horror lurks in the deeper meaning of your new name for the percent
sign? And why won't you tell me _before_ I commit to this system?"

Stuff like that would be bad enough, but the founders ideological views are
also infused into the system, and those views are not mainstream distributed
systems engineering views. For instance: the most available first-class
address in the system is in a 32 bit address space. Why? Not for efficiency,
but because the authors believe there aren't and never will be 4 billion human
beings on the planet worthy of having a first-class address in their system.
This, by the way, is their actual response to the objection of an overlay
network with 32 bit addressing.

I agree that the best way to explain this system while encouraging people to
engage with it is to distill it down to anodyne concepts and then sprinkle
"decentralization" on top. But of course, this system isn't really that. From
the proteins of its cell membranes to the DNA in its nucleus, this is a system
that coercively projects the idiosyncrasies of its founders into everything it
comes in contact with. It's decentralized and free in the sort of way its
founders would explain with a 3000 word paper that invented 50 new terms in
its abstract.

People confused about Urbit are probably not confused about the value of
serverless computing or of overlay networks. Those are pretty straightforward
concepts we can all get our heads around. There is something deeper that is
challenging about Urbit.

† _Rather than, you know, just deciding to have it._

~~~
chc4
I'll admit, Hoon is weird. But complaining about Nock is like complaining
about the JavaScript VM. You can JIT it and replace common functions to
replace with calls to C functions instead. Nock defines the /results/, not how
to get them. Jets are basically just because the Nock spec didn't want to have
to outline a bunch of primitives that don't really matter, since they would be
replaced with native calls anyways.

As for ideological views: there are 4 million planets. They are, essentially,
houses, but each one of those planets can also issue 2^16 "moons", which can
themselves be their own people. I don't know the reasoning behind why 2^32,
but I'm also not going to ascribe the reasoning to human worth any more than I
would the author of IPv4. There are also 2^64 comets, which are their own
ships outside the trust heirarchy, which really just means that they have a
default karma of 0 because they have no cost, and so can be Sybil attacked -
not that they can never get a positive karma, or that you couldn't use one
indefinitely instead of a planet (just that it's be unwieldy). Saying Urbit
can't scale bigger than IPv4 is kinda like worry that Hoon can't be programmed
in Chinese - there are probably bigger problems, and it could be solved by
just doubling the amount of galaxies. Hell, Urbit is open source. There would
be push back against doing it, but there is nothing stopping that from being
patched in tomorrow.

The most common thing I've see n called fascist in Urbit is it's identity
system, and this Urbit+Ethereum spec seems to be a direct solution to some of
it. Now, even buying a star you don't have to trust the owner of the galaxy
you bought it from, because it's a redeemable token.

~~~
tptacek
Whoah, hold on. I hate to zoom in and nitpick, but I'm not guessing when I
provide that reason for the 2^32 bit address space. It's the official stated
answer from the project itself.

And I'm not saying the problem with that design decision is that it's amoral
(let's stipulate that it isn't). I'm saying that it's _extremely
unconventional_ , a landmine of orthogonal ideology buried in the architecture
of the system. Before committing to building a new product in someone else's
framework, I'd want to know about all such weird decisions, and about why they
are that way. Maybe Urbit's principles are compatible with the way you think
about every possible aspect of how your system will interact with any of its
users ever (since that's what you're buying into when you literally adopt an
entirely new network to build against and deploy on). But maybe not!

Most framework designs coercively project opinions about whether the
efficiency of register-sized addresses are worth the flexibility tradeoff, or
whether it should be easier to define new URL patterns versus making it easier
to dispatch the full complement of HTTP verbs, or whether closures are first-
class or sum types are worth the complexity. Not a lot of programming
environments ask us to determine what double-digit percentage of the world's
population is too irresponsible to deserve an address. Again: their words
(almost; I changed the order).

I'm trying to be careful not to use loaded terms like the f-word you just
used, by the way. What I think about Urbit's founder is not necessarily the
same as what conclusions I'd draw about this particular system, which is, I
think, fatally flawed on its own demerits.

~~~
ineptech
> I'm not guessing when I provide that reason for the 2^32 bit address space.
> It's the official stated answer from the project itself.

Link? My understanding was that the official answer was "there should be about
as many urbit addresses as adult humans so that they're too expensive to spam
from, and if urbit is ever so wildly successful that we start running out, it
won't be that hard to add more." (though I don't remember where I picked that
up either)

~~~
tptacek
_A 32-bit planet is a tool, not a toy. Like a car, it 's a device for a
responsible and independent adult. There aren't 4 billion cars in the world,
nor 4 billion independent adults._

 _If you aren 't an independent adult, and you don't need or even shouldn't
have unconditional digital freedom (no one's 8-year-old daughter needs
unconditional digital freedom), a moon from someone else's planet is fine.
(Even most of today's independent adults don't complain enough about being
Facebook's moons.)_

It's literally a bullet in their "objections" post.

~~~
ineptech
You said the founder believes "there aren't and never will be" 4B people
"worthy" of an urbit planet. I'm asking where you got that "never will be"
part.

I think your reading of that bit you quoted is extremely uncharitable. I don't
see where urbit is passing pronouncements on anyone's "worthiness". The way I
read that quote is, "an urbit planet is server software, and there are way
less than 4B people with a server to run it on."

------
gcb0
To everyone either 1) comparing it to some sci-fi text or 2) saying it is
unparsable: It is no accident. This is written like a religious text.

I am not kidding. It might have came out like this by accident, but i could
spend days mapping the semiotics of this to, say, scientology "books".

The most blatant technique there is the slightly out of place technical terms
and insertion of sci-fi elements. Here is a paper on christian texts and the
use of metaphor on the willingness of the audience
[http://cogprints.org/4863/1/Cognitive_Semiotics_and_On-
Line_...](http://cogprints.org/4863/1/Cognitive_Semiotics_and_On-
Line_Reading_of_Religious_Texts.pdf)

------
azeirah
I'm still very confused about urbit, but think it's quite interesting to
follow. I found that this video explains it reasonably well. Watch it from
6:00

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md4boH1eZvc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md4boH1eZvc)

This snippet also helps:

> Making the web programmable

> The first thing your Urbit can do is act as a transparent layer to your
> existing services. We’d like urbit to be usable as a self-hosted IFTTT for
> geeks. Your urbit can hold your keys, store data, run programs and
> seamlessly connect to your existing services. Plus, with a global revision
> controlled filesystem it’s easy to share API connectors and keep them up to
> date.

> With an Urbit running on your machine you can ls your Gmail from Unix. Write
> a short script to poll Twitter on a keyword and deliver the results to your
> email or into a Slack channel. Send an SMS when an HTTP request doesn’t
> resolve. These are just a few examples. Your Urbit is designed to make data
> trapped in your existing services feel like an extension of your local
> programming environment.

[https://urbit.org/posts/vision/](https://urbit.org/posts/vision/)

~~~
hossbeast
So identity, IoT, and literally everything in between.

------
StavrosK
Is this meant to be understandable by people? Am I missing some context?

~~~
to3m
You can get started, sort of, from the white paper:
[https://urbit.org/posts/](https://urbit.org/posts/)

(TL;DR: "Urbit also invents a lot of alien technical jargon. We admit that
this is annoying. Abstractly, it’s part of the clean-slate program: words
smuggle in a lot of assumptions." \- to which all I can say myself is:
qupnux.)

~~~
QAPereo
I think you need to demonstrate some truly massive and revolutionary value
before you ask people to learn your new language, otherwise you really just
come off like a cult.

~~~
flatline
Exactly. One of the primary MOs of a cult is to hijack people's language and
replace it with their own. It is a means of thought control, a method of
creating a sense of belonging, and a way to make cult members feel superior
about their "knowledge". Onecoin has become an outright prosperity cult in
Asia. I see shades of the same everywhere in crypto.

------
noncoml
Urbit likes like an awesome idea. Are they shipping a product? Or it’s just
theory for the moment? If it’s the second, any idea when we can expect to see
the first products?

~~~
jdoliner
Urbit's test network has been up for a year, this post is about bringing
online a more hardened version using Ethereum.

------
natural219
For those confused about Urbit's value proposition, I recommend Isaac
Simpson's briefish explanation here. Funny enough, the original version was
posted behind Medium's membership paywall, and the public link was just
recently distributed:

[https://storage.googleapis.com/urbit-
extra/etc/the%20not%20s...](https://storage.googleapis.com/urbit-
extra/etc/the%20not%20so%20dark%20future%20-%20isaac%20simpson.pdf)

My own perspective regarding these new decentralized platforms is that we're
at the very tail end of low-hanging fruit in regards how easy the next
generation of software innovation will be to explain to "your average
layperson". The problems that decentralization are trying to solve are
uniquely understood by developers, particularly people well-versed in the
metagame of content, advertising, identity, and privacy on the web, which is a
vast field filled with thousands of great reasons to consider
decentralization, but are unfortunately hard to distill down into a 30-second
elevator soundbyte.

Another problem is that having high-density conversations about software
innovation is fundamentally absurd. Every software innovation is ultimately
just "another way to write code", so you can boil down everything Urbit and
IPFS and Ethereum are doing to "well, our current code for everything is this
way, and it seems to suck, so we're going to try writing the code a completely
new way". That's it. Every time someone asks "what can you even do with this
thing?", the answer is "well, you can develop software on it".

Edit: Apparently the original article has been un-paywalled. Perhaps you can
access it here:

[https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so-
dark-f...](https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so-dark-future-
of-the-internet-400c9b667e2)

~~~
b1daly
I'm not sure about Urbit as a solution, but they have identified a very real
problem around the issues of identity and information that is connected to
identity.

This essay sums it up nicely, so I won't repeat it. But I very much identify
with, and am personally vexed by, the disorganized, Balkinized, online world
we citizens of the "first world" are being forced to navigate.

One idea I don't grasp is how an Urbit server might integrate with a service
like Facebook. Let's say you could set up your Urbit server to integrate your
social news feeds from different services.

Would this violate the terms of service of a system like Facebook?

One could hypothetically create an application that at least would handle
submission of personal content to any social network. And it could thereby
keep a local copy of the content. But it would have to scrape the site, or use
the provided API, to present any response to posts.

The linked article mentions that Facebook sued a company that tried to market
an app that would present an integrated social news stream from FB and
Twitter. I wonder how they would respond to an app that would let a user setup
their own system to do the same thing?

I find the increasing power of the big tech companies disturbing, though I do
appreciate the services they provide.

~~~
Fang_
> Would this violate the terms of service of a system like Facebook?

Yep. As far as I'm aware they don't allow you to display Facebook content next
to content of competing sites, like Twitter. But if everyone's doing that
locally on their own machines, how will Facebook know? And what can they do to
stop them?

If the API is being used, they can take that away. But website scraping will
remain as a viable (if slightly sub-optimal) way of getting the data out.
Facebook won't stop its users from using its website, after all.

------
equalunique
I think that the modified Etherium browser they propose will help a great deal
towards visualizing / seeing the Urbit network "in action."

------
mbrock
People are very strongly repulsed by what they perceive as excessive novelty:
Lisp parentheses, Haskell monads, Urbit jargon. Maybe because it comes off as
antisocial. I somehow really enjoy all those things.

------
fra
It's not clear to me what this means for folks who bought urbit stars earlier.

~~~
state
Addresses can be committed to the contract in exchange for sparks. The
contract then holds those addresses, until someone burns a spark in exchange
for them.

We're not sure exactly when or precisely how that market will get initialized
— but you get the basic idea. Your star ownership will get mirrored in the
contracts.

------
oh_sigh
How does Urbit team feel about Richard from Silicon Valley(the show) seemingly
getting his idea to "invent a new internet" from Urbit?

~~~
Fang_
Hi, member of the Urbit team here!

There was definitely a feeling of "holy shit they're doing our thing!" going
around, but we can't be entirely sure if they got the idea from Urbit
specifically. More likely, they aggregated ideas from all decentralization
projects going on right now.

Definitely cool to see these kinds of ideas being represented in more
mainstream media though!

------
archagon
Huh, apparently the creator[1] of Urbit is one of the original folks behind
the very gross dark enlightenment school of thought, and also associated with
Peter Thiel through his startup. Well, that saps my interest in the project
rather quickly. I'm sure there will be alternatives from people whose
principles I'd actually be happy to support.

I strongly believe in voting with my attention and/or money against ideals
that are abhorrent to me, so I thought I'd put it out there for others in the
same boat.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin)

~~~
sillysaurus3
The idea that certain people are radioactive needs to die. Even if someone is
a blatant racist, one way to deal with them is to take their good ideas and
use them as your own. You can't do that if you're morally opposed to even
understanding it.

~~~
archagon
I agree. Which is why I can under no circumstance support Urbit, but would be
happy to see a parallel project without the toxic founder. I hope most people
feel their hearts constrict when they read up about what Curtis and his ilk
believe[1] and don't immediately reach for the "PC culture" bugbear with
comments like mine. To me, it's clear that zero dollars should be going
towards the sustenance of such ideas.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment)

~~~
sillysaurus3
I've spent the last 15 minutes reading everything I can find about the
subject, and honestly nothing seems very inflammatory. Have you read this?

[https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-
lam...](https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lambdaconf-
anyway-35ff8cd4fb9d)

He seems like a reasonable, intelligent person, and people have gone out of
their way to mischaracterize what he did say and to label him a racist.

He was also writing under a pen name, and -- believe it or not -- roleplaying
is common recreation. Just because Moldbug believed something doesn't mean
Chris believed those things.

All in all, I think this is just another example of the insular tribalism
present in all of Silicon Valley. It's ironic that the place that prides
itself on being the most tolerant and the most progressive is in fact so
victorian and reductionist that their ideas can't withstand a simple debate.

Easier to label and shun, eh? I'm not a fan.

It's somewhat ridiculous that I have to add a disclaimer that I don't share
any of their ideology, even in secret. I'm proud of my beliefs, and this has
nothing to do with the politics at play. If you're going to be inclusive, then
be inclusive. To shun someone so intelligent and to reduce their entire body
of work to a few glib sentences isn't a productive strategy.

From my perspective, it seems strange that anyone could read that Medium post
and come away hating Chris. He's clearly here to talk tech, not politics. So
what's the problem?

 _When you join a Twitter mob and serve as a sort of informal government — by
deciding, for instance, who can speak at a conference — you’re feeding your
inner chimpanzee. It feels good. Your conscience may be convinced that it’s
spiritually the right thing to do. But your limbic system is just plain high.
Twitter is a drug cartel. The drug is power. Or at least, apparent power._

Hear, hear. When you seek to suppress an idea, people like me get curious. Why
are you so worried that Chris is the founder? It makes me want to dig in to
their beliefs and decide for myself.

Don't you see? Speaking out like this actively helps the very side you're
trying to defeat. They come off looking reasonable, whereas your argument
boils down to "He's toxic because reasons."

One of the most persuasive things you could do in this situation would be to
post a quote written by Chris. Posting a quote from Moldbug would be the
second most persuasive thing. Failing either of those, are we supposed to just
take your word for it that the dude should be excluded from society?

This whole "label and exclude" thing is for the birds. Why not judge ideas
instead of people?

~~~
21893120975
\-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512

> One of the most persuasive things you could do in this situation would be to
> post a quote written by Chris. Posting a quote from Moldbug would be the
> second most persuasive thing. Failing either of those, are we supposed to
> just take your word for it that the dude should be excluded from society? >
> This whole "label and exclude" thing is for the birds. Why not judge ideas
> instead of people?

Don't mind if I do:

\- From my perspective, Urbit is culty vaporware which does nothing out of the
ordinary that actually DELIVERS. CY (or MM, whatever) seems to me what can
best be described as an edgelord, using sophistry to make himself sound
smarter than he is (which might still be plenty smart) and stirring
controversy by going against mainstream views _just because_.

Arguements: Urbit ticks all of the boxes for techno-cults like we saw in the
60s and 70s.

* invent their own special language * reinvent everything from scratch to improve group cohesion * dismiss any criticism as "not getting it"

I will be convinced if anything USEFUL comes out of urbit. Not "can't you see
that it WOULD be useful", but "here, I built this thing". That settles the
technical argument for me

On the edgelord topic, two quotes, one from the link you gave and one form the
AMA he gave
([https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarvin_developer_of_urbit_ama/))

Quote 1:

> HNU(“human neurological uniformity”). is not a natural null hypothesis. Its
> doubters don’t need to disprove it. It needs to prove itself. Genetic and
> anatomical inhomogeneity is normal in the species. Statistically, its
> presence is expected and its absence would be remarkable. No such absence is
> found.

I don't want to judge the politics, but just on the intellectual criticism and
CONTENT:

1\. He switches and dodges between "statistical" and absolutist language. A
uniform distribution is something very different than uniformity. 2\. Without
any external bias or information, neither presence or absence of a uniform
distribution is expected, or remarkable. 3\. To just assume HNU or non-HNU as
a given without asking for "why" and just attributing it to species/genome is
simplistic

Notice how he never makes an actual CLAIM, or clarifies everything, just uses
vague language and puts himself in the persecuted role

Quote 2, answering what I think is a...fan? who asked for some clarifications
to the writings (broken apart by me):

>Fascism no longer exists. It's as dead as Odinism. You can reinvent Odinism,
but it's not Odinism, it's fake Odinism. Unless it's a joke (and don't get me
wrong, Nazi Microsoft chatbots are funny), it's pathetic. Actually, the fact
that /pol has made Hitler funny is the best possible evidence that Hitler is
completely dead.

Ok so far,though you could start arguing that this is weasely sophistry by
arguing about the exact definition of "fashism", and you can disagree on
whether fashism in the hitler style is truly dead, but nothing evil. It's a
bit of a tautology (nothing can exist exactly like it was before), but ok.

>What's alive is the ideological system that defeated fascism -- which
committed plenty of atrocities of its own. Of our own. When we think about
crimes from the last century, it seems more relevant to think about the crimes
we committed, not those they comitted

Here the little bit of sophistry turns into a blatant misdirection: instead of
talking about fashism, he's talking about general human attrocities while
creating a false equivalency. But let's assume he means it in an innocent way,
just badly phrased, and REALLY cares about the current attrocities and
problems in modern society and will take actual positions.

>What is fascism? It's exactly what everyone thinks it is. The conventional
wisdom is perfectly correct. Our historians have a merciless, laser-sharp
understanding of everything bad that fascism was and everything it did wrong.
What hasn't been done is turning this same laser on our own institutions.

Except, yes, it has. Ask any civil rights advocate, ask ACLU, ask anyone
outside of the mainstream for the last 50 years. Criticism has been abound, it
was just silenced. Blatant misrepresentation

>As for the word "slavery," it means too many things at the same time. Robert
Nozick in the '70s devised a beautiful little paradox for people who think
they can define "slavery":
[[http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/no...](http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/nozick_slave.html)].
Try it.

Again, instead of talking about the THING, playing with definition. By this
point we might want to abandon the hypothesis of innocence and assume
sophistry. But nothing horrible yet (except the blatant misrepresentation in
the last sentence). Just because words change over history does not mean they
don't carry specific meaning _right now_

>For example, is "debt slavery" slavery? Or is it only slavery when you can't
declare bankruptcy? Oddly enough, our society has one form of debt that can't
be shed in bankruptcy: student loans. The institutions that benefit from it
are our most powerful and privileged.

Good point, if taken alone. Notice here he ACTUALLY makes a statement for
once. There are other people who'd argue that student loans, prison labor etc.
are modern forms of slavery.

>What Carlyle said about slavery is that you can ban the word, but not the
institution.

You can also ban the institution. Look at norway, germany, any other country.
And yes, there is no perfection, but that is _missing the point_.

>There are plenty of people today who will be paying off their student loans
until they die. Is this the same as being whipped by Leonardo DiCaprio unless
you chop your quota of sugarcane? It is not.

Correct, nobody claims it is. But he implies people claim that.

>Is it "slavery"? Dunno, you tell me. Are they both bad things? Sure. Is
everything that can fit, or has in the past fit, under this label, evil? If
so, it would be a very unusual label.

Actually, from our perspective: yes, it would. Some forms might be more
acceptable (house slaves in ancient greece/rome), but nobody would _choose to
be a slave_ coming from our society. Just because the world changes, doesn't
mean you can dismiss it.

>As for your last question, it's simply a matter of who has actual power in
our society. Everyone wants to think of themselves as powerless and/or
oppressed. But actual power dynamics are not hard to find.

This is true. You can argue it is also shying away from taking a stand, but
it's implied that he did that somewhere else, so ok.

Synopsis:

In a question for clarification asked by someone who seemed to express
sympathy, we have enough dodging and sophistry to severely question the
intellectual merit of his position. Without taking any other judgement, I
classify him as "edgelord". I couldn't find an email, but I would love to
interview him via a GPG signed email chain, so there is accountability for
statements. My keys for this:

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~~~
sillysaurus3
This is a great reply, and I felt myself being persuaded by it. Then I thought
about it. Your criticism of his writings appears to boil down to "He's not
taking a stance." Is that an accurate summary?

If so, then it's impossible to be ok with excluding him.

~~~
archagon
Sounds to me like the criticism is more along the lines of “his argument is
intentionally occluded by dog whistle writing”.

~~~
21893120975
exactly :)

~~~
sillysaurus3
Do we all agree that society is excluding him even though neither of you can
find a single quote worth this judgement? Because even if you aren't excluding
him, that's what is effectively happening. He's being blacklisted and you both
are one step removed from whatever precipitated it. It's hard not to read this
as bandwagoning.

Yes, it takes effort to discredit someone. But that's a good thing. Imagine
being in his shoes, and no one will listen to reason because they heard some
internet comment from a third-hand source that vaguely insinuated he's a
racist.

I'm not too familiar with his writings either, but the point is that it's up
to you to prove his beliefs are crazy. It's not okay to handwave and say zero
dollars should support his project just because he voiced a vague opinion.

