That other post was not a good-faith analysis of the incident, and its denouement was a single-sentence graf that claimed every intellectual adversary of Yarvin was a communist.
I flagged this post as well, because the community interest in the norms of a single tech conference don't outweigh the the fact the issues here are toxic to the community itself. HN is terrible at discussing politics, and this is basically a story about politics.
I'm curious what "politics" you think this discussion is about. I mean, if Yarvin were an avowed Stalinist, I hope we'd have the same arguments being made, which don't have much to do with his particular heterodoxy.
Don't security conferences attract some rather idiosyncratic characters? Why should I choose one that culls those too far outside the mainstream over the merit of their presentations?
First, no, I don't think security conferences tend to attract white supremacists who advocate for the abolition of democracy and hint at the benefits of a restoration of apartheid.
Second, security conferences --- at least the kind I'm familiar with --- are different from Strange Loop. Strange Loop speakers are selected on the basis of presenting interesting and entertaining ideas to the audience. There are a couple people who get Black Hat talks on those terms, but most Black Hat talks are accepted based on how important their technical contribution is. If you have a new EMET bypass technique, nobody really cares whether you're a closet monarchist, because they're there to see the EMET bypass, not you.
So if Strange Loop were a conference with presenters chosen totally on technical merit, you would still prefer they dis-invite a presenter with Yarvin's racial views? I think you're arguing that it's a trade-off regardless (sure) but do you have any idea where a political line is, Left or Right, where we should start expressing disapproval when those on the wrong side are excluded?
I'll take your word for it that Yarvin is way on the far side of any such line, but I'm still pretty curious about roughly where it is these days.
I'll leave it at this. If I was Strange Loop's organizer, what I might have written is:
I don't know exactly how to articulate where our line is on providing a stage and a microphone to people with ideas I find repellent. I've never been in a position to need to draw that line. I'm not interested in spending a lot of time surveying it further. For now, it suffices to say that wherever the line is, advocacy for apartheid and genetic predisposition to slavery crosses it.
Incidentally, the use upthread of the term "Stalinist" is telling. Yes: if Yarvin had been a Stalinist, I do think we'd be having the same discussion, Yarvin's views seeming approximately as far to the right as "Stalinism" would put him to the left.
Perhaps the standard on HN is that there be a high-quality post and high-quality discussion, and that therefore, it could be that one particular post gets flagkilled, but not another when the community/mods want to discuss an issue but dislike giving eyeballs to a low-quality post.
Or they all get flagkilled regardless of content if the community/mods do not want the issue discussed here, even if a particular post is well-reasoned and well-written.
Here's an excerpt from that rambling, incomprehensible post:
> But, from our point of view here, all these people believing, like everyone around them, that sovereignty must be concentrated and tightly defined, that nobody should have influence over government who wasn’t officially part of government, and the rest of it would be neoreactionaries. Similarly, today, with the exception of a few points of economics, the ideas that almost everyone in communion with Harvard University believes are communist ideas, and would have been labelled as such even fifty years ago.
OK, not everyone can find the time to read "The Elements of Style" but then this comes up:
> Why was Adria Richards lying? Because that’s her job. As some guy wrote, “It’s a mistake to think these people have opinions. They have careers.” Her career was to go around technology events, and fuck them up in the name of women’s access. Why? Whatever is the point of that? The point of that is to create a line of control from political activists to industry. Because of Adria Richards, and the many like her before and since, everyone in the technology industry knows that they cannot afford to upset far-left activists. They only succeeded in this, though, because people like Alex Miller believed their lies—that these misdemeanours against political correctness, such as making similar jokes to those aired in Superbowl commercials, are responsible for a 5:1 male–female ratio or whatever in technology...
I literally can't make any sense of that, except it involves Adria Richards, and why the fuck is she even relevant to this? I'll admit, that previously submitted (and rightfully flagkilled) post was the first I had read about this Strangeloop thing, by merit of it somehow reaching #1 on HN...and after having read the current OP, I'm much more inclined to give benefit of the doubt to Curtis Yarvin. The previous submission did nothing except make me think that Yarvin was backed by rabid anti-SJWers.
Pretty sure that the concensus is that the author of that submission is insane and trying to read his screed as something coming from a mentally healthy person is a waste of time.
Read it as a non insane person, found it a little rough around the edges but still a perfectly valid and relevant collection of statements. It's a sad world, one where anything that steps out a little bit of the approved "think here" zone is automatically flag killed.
"After all, the people we are talking about are communists... Similarly, today, with the exception of a few points of economics, the ideas that almost everyone in communion with Harvard University believes are communist ideas, and would have been labelled as such even fifty years ago."
This is a core tenet of Moldbuggian neoreaction, that American and European politics are run by a "Cathedral" that adheres to communist beliefs. Claiming that mainstream political positions are communism is absolutely insane.
His view is almost coherent and makes me reflect on how I unconsciously polish the edges of my own ideas to make them fit. I can see him doing the kind of thing you or I or anyone sane might do to smooth out the rough spots in our belief systems, and seeing him do those apparently innocuous things with ideas that are obviously crazy encourages me to ask if I'm believing anything crazy myself. It has happened before.
I agree that submission was more than a little out there, but it's strange how little impact this event has had on HN, given the subject matter. Maybe this submission will break through.
To indulge in a bit of tinfoil-hatting re "some people just wanted to silence it": Tlon, Corp., the Red Hat to Urbit's Fedora, rejected Y-Combinator funding last year.
If you're implying that we'd censor an HN post because of some arcane YC-related detail, that's false. None of the people who work on HN have any knowledge of what you're referring to. We haven't the cycles to keep track of such things even if we wanted to—our hands are rather full—and they'd play no role in HN moderation if we did.
The post in question was downweighted by user flags. The only thing we did was unkill it so an ongoing discussion (such as it was) could continue, which is standard practice.
Thanks for unkilling it. The most fascinating part of this issue to me remains how "uninterested" HN is in discussing it (insofar as the mechanics of HN allow us to collectively express interest).
Fair point. I meant that if the HN front page were your only source of information, you'd have to be pretty lucky to have stumbled across any of these threads.
I don't have any objections to the way HN works, just surprised so many users see this topic as flag-worthy relative to those seeing it as an interesting discussion.
EDIT: Nevermind. I see this is back on the front page.
Yeah I posted this because I felt HN people are smart enough to question and discuss this decision without being told to do so by some goofy conservative blog. (N.B.: I didn't and would never flag that other submission, because goofy conservatives don't bother me and the actual topic was interesting, but I understand that tastes differ so I'm not surprised that others flagged it.)
The earlier post was flagkilled by users. We unkilled it because there was an ongoing discussion, but did not turn off the flags. That's what we do in nearly all such cases.
The current post was penalized by the flamewar detector, but we've canceled the penalty because the community clearly wants to talk about this, and what you posted is as close to a canonical source as we're likely to get.
Is it acceptable to flag such things? I only flag such articles because the discussion quality tends to be really low. There's little insight in the comments. While they may be important topics, and I'm sure some folks have interesting ideas, the results don't seem very useful.
Is it that we're not interested in discussing it, or only interested in discussing it if certain people / viewpoints are not allowed?