Help me @sneerclub you’re my only hope https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean
Some right-wingers have responded to the piece, but their responses are mostly “but I like being bad and cruel” - which seems to prove Bulldog’s point.
I think we can do better - that it’s possible to make a case against “slave morality” that doesn’t rely on being pro-badness and cruelty.
Fuck me, you’re making me read Slatescott again. I can’t wait to see how he will case for badness and cruelty without relying on being pro badness and cruelty.
Skimmed a bit up to the discussion of architecture not being as impressive nowadays or something.
Ok here we go:
Tate has, in some sense, many good qualities. He’s strong, athletic, and motivated. He earned tens of millions of dollars through hustle and hard work. He’s charismatic and compelling and, before his arrest, was one of the Internet’s most iconic influencers. I think master morality has to approve of all these things.
“Hustle and hard work”? That’s what we’re gonna call being a sex trafficker?
Hand tipped here:
I would like to end up with an overall negative view of Tate. And if I do a simple calculation, (virtues - vices), then it seems like if his nonmoral virtues were strong enough, they could overcome the moral vices. If Tate was a really really good kickboxer, he might still end up in the black. It seems much more intuitive to say that no amount of nonmoral virtues can make up for his moral vices. But now we’re back at the full slave moralist package again! Some “compromise”!
If we accept that there are some vices that cannot be made up for by virtues, we might need to cancel someone. People might need to be held responsible for the things they do. So Scott cannot accept it. There has to be a way to let the baddies in as long as they’re actually doing important work.
You can argue “master morality is about being strong and good; slave morality is just about preserving your pathetic little feelings”. But most of life is people’s pathetic little feelings. People have proven over and over again that their decisions - about what to do, what to buy, who to vote for, even what to die for - depend more on what lets them feel dignity and self-respect than on any purely material considerations.
Slight of hand: now slave morality is all about feelings and master morality is about material needs. What the heck? We established that slave morality was based on the idea that masters inflicting real hardships on their peasants was bad, didn’t we? You could make the same argument about Scott morality (as described above) because the objective would be to allow you to feel good about supporting people who do bad things as long as they also do good things.
And speaking of slight of hand, this is going to be my pull quote:
Hanania is terrible at being right-wing.
This comment tho:
I wonder if there are people who go to r/antiwork to obsess about the rigged system, and then go to r/StarCraft to appreciate pro players achieving glory in battle. Seems like one’s morality might be highly domain specific.
“Haha I’ve caught you you hypocritical lefist! You enjoy (watching) people better (at StarCraft) than you after all!”
If Tate was a really really good kickboxer, he might still end up [morally] in the black.
What the heck am I reading?
If I wanted to sound like a rationalist I’d tell Scott to check his fallacies, specifically category error. It’s just such basic, wilful misconstrual on his part. Yeah, me liking my spaghetti quite salty doesn’t mean I want to add salt to the dessert!
That’s all besides the original point being that a rigged system is one where the best do not rise to the top, so even if our socioeconomic system and… Starcraft streamers (lol) were comparable categorically, which shouldn’t have to be said they in any way aren’t, the OG point is precisely that so much talent goes underutilized and glory unrealized due to a lack of broad cultivation and opportunity.
I don’t get what makes people this way, with such small souls, just painstakingly intent on being miserly. Same thing with JK Rowling, she has all the money in the world to have the wildest pleasures or to leave everything and go off to some yurt for a spiritual search and instead she just purposefully acts in the most destructive and self-constricting manner. And this applies more generally to the awash-in-cash techbro and rationalist sets as well. You have the resources to do really interesting things, and yet you dedicate your time to making Juiceros.
such an excellent nazi bar they have there.
Nietzsche doesn’t “speculate” that slave morality kicked off with the Jews because they were a particularly oppressed group, and really got going under Christianity. He states it outright, and he doesn’t care whether any oppressed group could have done the same. He interprets the known history of Christian and Jewish morality as being the history of “slave morality” and calls it “genealogy” - it isn’t an economic argument.
That’s all I’ve got, I don’t care.
It is really fucking maddening how people like Scott won’t think of morality, or politics, or economics, or really any kind of social or philosophical question, outside of the realm of the psychological. The history of the world can only be about overcoming bias.
But that’s just the thing! Nietzche’s fundamental innovation is to view all of these things: morality, politics, economics, indeed any kind of social or philosophical question through an incredibly narrowly psychological lens. It’s his obsessive persistence in this, and his excessive sensitivity to the deep irrationality in human nature (I hesitate to go with many people in saying “brilliance”, because what’s “brilliance”?), which makes him such a powerful critic of Western culture. For Nietzsche, the entire history of the world is nothing more than the history of individual sick people working out their issues, and generally doing badly.
But Siskind doesn’t have any of that, because he can only think in terms of a shallow combination of overcoming bias and his own unexamined prejudices. Siskind’s problem is that he doesn’t even view the psychological psychologically.
I ain’t reading all this. I don’t even know who Yglesias is.
My first thought: Man, why the fuck does the numbering of the sections annoy me so much?
Second thought: Ok, I’m skimming this because again fuck all these words. Looks like he’s trying to explore something about “master” and “slave” morality that I will not dig into because it’s probably a bunk formulation of thought. Why does Edward Teach, the pirate, come up? The section did not appear to explain it.
Final thought: Okay, I think I was right not to read any of this. Essentially, it is just a paean to some truly terrible people (Tate, Hanania, Ayn Rand etc.) in the form of a shaggy dog story, with Nietzche referenced a lot.
Anyway, now I’m fighting the urge to get drunk on scotch, listen to “No Surprises” by radiohead and walk into the fucking ocean
I missed that(or have forgotten it already, a think which happens a lot with me re Yglesias. I have him mentally tagged as vague shithead, but never can recall why (and am aware this could be wrong)), tried a google search and couldn’t find anything, what is the story?
David told the story in a recent Tech Won’t Save Us episode, basically Matty boy came to BlueSky, everyone started laughing at him for his bad takes (as well they should), and Matty cried for a block function so long and intensely that they gave it to him so he’d shut the fuck up.
Edward Teach is supposedly the pen name of The Last Psychiatrist who was sort of a precursor blog to slatestar, if only in the sense that it was a psychiatrist who was also a good writer, blogging about the human condition. He was doing parable-style short-form fiction way before slatescott, for instance.
While I don’t remember there being any particular ideological overlap, both him and siskind seem to scratch the same itch for a lot of people, and siskind claims to be a fan.
ideological overlap
Oh they absolutely are both infuriatingly coy reactionaries.
Here’s for instance a million words by TLP, and they all say “i hate women”.
I might actually hate TLP so much more, because he’s more seductive, better at that typical nietzschean flattery of the reader, and for some reason even people here tend to view him more positively.
Wasn’t that like his last post ever though?
Him not being an overt eugenics enthusiast while also not being the popular face of AI scientology probably helps ingratiate him to people here. Additionally, even though admittedly I haven’t really bothered to revisit since he stopped posting like a decade ago, whatever overall sociopolitical agenda he might have had can’t have been as glaringly obvious as siskind’s, which can make for some inconsequential reading.
He wasn’t usually. Another difference with siskind was that with TLP you mostly knew where you stood, or at least I don’t remember any near-end-of-text jumpscares where it’s revealed the whole thing was meant as really convoluted IQ apologetics, or some naive reframing of the latest EA embarrassment.
