cyarvin

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.

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 committed.

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.

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/nozick_slave.html]. Try it.

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.

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

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.

I said "character and intelligence." One thing that's hard for the 20th century to understand is that the ability to survive as an agricultural slave is a talent -- just like the ability to survive in Auschwitz. (Read Primo Levi.)

It was not necessarily the best, the worst, the smartest or the dumbest who survived in Auschwitz. Auschwitz selected for a very different set of talents than the normal, sane world, in which being nice and smart is better than being mean and dumb. Similarly, early American slavery selected for talents that Africans had and Indians lacked.

(It's not militarily hard to enslave people in their native land when you're as ruthless as a medieval Spaniard -- guerrilla war in Latin America is a postcolonial phenomenon, not a colonial one) As I understood and understand the matter, the complaint of the conquistadors about their Indian captives was that they too easily refused to work and eat, and essentially just died. This is similar to the fate of the last of the Tasmanians. Hunter-gatherer peoples don't do well when forced into inactivity/drudgery. Intellectuals also don't do well with drudgery, although we're just fine with inactivity. So the conquistadors imported agricultural peoples to do agricultural labor.

I would make a terrible agricultural laborer and an awful agricultural slave. (I am also not very good at being a master, though for different reasons.) Am I praising myself for this lack of talent?

Yes, it may have something to do with my high intelligence. (It also has something to do with my poor character.) Intelligence can be a liability. You don't have to be an agricultural slave to realize this -- all you need to do is go to an American high school.

What I learned in an American high school was that intelligence does not make me special or better. I agree that if I thought smarter people were better people, given the fact that no magic process has distributed the smarts equally, I would be a racist in the classic sense. (I also don't agree that the talent to be a master, or the talent to be a slave, makes a person better or worse.)

It's hard, especially for smart people, to give up the idea that smart people are better than stupid people. The ancient Greeks lent similar prestige to athletics; they believed a fast runner was spiritually better than a slow runner. They fought a lot of wars, so athletics mattered a lot to them; we write a lot of code, so problem-solving ability matters a lot to us. But one is a muscular talent, the other is a neurological talent. Neither has any mystical significance.

Once you stop believing in the mystical importance of intelligence, I think it's very easy to accept that it's unequally distributed (as athletic talent certainly is). I understand that this is very hard for our society, and especially for people like me who grew up believing that good grades were holy and professors were gods.

All I can say is: they're not. Or at least, so I believe. I hope this helps you understand the context of my remarks a little better.

1. Changing minds isn't really an option. But the set of people in 2016 who care strongly about politics -- in either direction -- is surprisingly small by historical standards. Normal people are also receiving huge levels of obvious crazy from both left and right, both mainstream and alternative sources. This results in a basically healthy response of "tune this out, I just want to code."

2. Urbit is not an altcoin -- it's digital address space. "Digital land, not digital money." But the differences are relatively small. Basically, digital currency needs a blockchain because supporting high-frequency, low-friction transfers is a critical property of money. It's not a critical property of real estate. And it's certainly nice to see this very weird notion of digital ownership become mainstream and commonly understood.

3. I actually feel very bad for the conference organizers -- both with LambdaConf and Strange Loop. I know what I'm getting into and they don't; they have a very hard problem to solve already, and then they get this nonsense. To which there's no easy answer at all.

While I'm obviously super impressed with John de Goes (LambdaConf), I'm not in any way mad at Alex Miller (Strange Loop). I am not the conference organizer type, but my cynical expectation would be that an organizer has many different ways of making sure a problem like this doesn't arise -- Google being one of them.

Instead, there's a commitment to anonymous decision processes (I don't even know how they do that) and a really high level of principle. Yes, even in the case of Strange Loop. I'm glad I don't have that job!

Everything I say I believe (at the time -- I still get flak for telling people not to buy bitcoin in 2013, because the gubmint was gonna shut it down. Well, it still could happen).

But it's difficult to separate opinion X from the commonly accepted stereotype of people who believe opinion X. It easily turns into a game of progressive telephone in which Twitter is talking about someone who has my name, but is otherwise Leonardo DiCaprio from Django Unchained. Or maybe Edward Norton from American History X.

I think one of the worst tropes in people who, for example, don't believe that human evolution stopped at the neck, is that they inhabit these stereotypes and make them their own. It's like Weev with his swastika tattoo. Really, Weev? Did you need to?

It's actually quite possible to recognize that human population genetics has a lot of impact on politics and history, and also recognize that human population genetics has nothing at all to do with your individual, personal and professional human relationships. Nor does politics.

As for "race," you can learn way more about someone from a minute of conversation than from a full genome sequence -- even if we knew how to decode the information in the sequence, which we don't. As for politics, there is essentially no one sane who thinks of themselves as evil or wanting to do evil. I have lots of progressive friends, and you'd be surprised how many ways we can find to see the world in the same way.

I honestly don't think of myself as ever having been involved in "politics." Honestly I think politics in any real historical sense is almost dead -- people hardly care. At least, compared to the past. Would anyone care about the 2016 election if Trump weren't running? And Trump is a throwback from the past, not an omen of the future. The future is grey anonymous bureaucrats, more Brezhnev every year.

I'm a writer -- when I have interesting things to say that I feel like no one else is saying, I can't help posting them. I'm not sure there's much in this category at present. I certainly can't compete in the great sport of turning Microsoft chatbots into Nazis.