The garbage doesn’t matter because I can tune it out.

I’m pretty sure I’ve dunked on this quote before, but I can’t even imagine the hubris on display here. Obviously if you read a bunch of convincing lies you’re going to end up believing some of them! He knows he’s reading propaganda (I’ve fucking read articles written by him talking about how Moldbug deliberately tries to trick the reader into believing bullshit by appealing to innate biases), but he’s 100% sure he can divine the “hidden truths” just by thinking about it with his big Rationalist brain!

It’s like seeing someone using heroin because they’ve convinced themselves they’re too smart to get addicted, except dumber because at least that guy didn’t write a fucking anti-heroin FAQ!

Getting pretty far afield here, but goddamn Matt Yglesias’s new magazine sucks:

The case for affirmative action for conservatives

“If we cave in and give the right exactly what they want on this issue, they’ll finally be nice to us! Sure, you might think based on the last 50,000 times we’ve tried this strategy that they’ll just move the goalposts and demand further concessions, but then they’ll totally look like hypocrites and we’ll win the moral victory, which is what actually matters!”

I feel like a lot of his worldview centers around nerds vs everyone else.

He has the strongest in-group bias of anyone I’ve ever seen - if you say something bad about nerds or rationalists or men or Zionists or any other group he considers himself a part of, you must be motivated by cruelty and malice. It’s the kind of mindset that pretty much always ends with you denying the humanity of your enemies and embracing whichever fascist strongman promises to get rid of them.

On a completely unrelated note: I just clicked though to his latest post; gleeful praise of Trump for striking Iran, which is of course irredeemably evil for opposing Israel and thus must be destroyed.