[jimrandomh]

If you're going to start a massive drama based on accusing someone of saying something bad, please quote the bad thing directly. When you call someone an "advocate for slavery", I check your accusation for links and verifiable quotes. If there aren't any, then I reflexively assume this is someone who ran over your dog, stole your girlfriend, and said nothing of the sort. Thank you.

EDIT: I have been informed that Jon Sterling may have read an out-of-context quote in which Yarvin may have been summarizing 19th-century philosopher Thomas Carlyle, whom Wikipedia describes as a "satirical writer", and not had his dog run over after all. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11363159) But also he might really believe it, and I'll only have to read about 1.5*10^5 words to be sure.

[masklinn]

The individual in question is Curtis Yarvin aka "Mencius Moldbug".

Quote: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CGr9pDjW8AA23uT.jpg

Source: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.be/2009/07/why-carl...

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

[jimrandomh]

Thank you for the links. I really feel like they needed to be part of the original post.

Yarvin's writing is... rather too voluminous for me to feel confident that I know what he believes, in so little time, but I did see a few things in that seven-year-old post which made me question the interpretation given:

> "Lifetime employment and slavery are, of course, practically synonyms, and indeed the same phenomena of reciprocal loyalty and dependency were said - repeatedly, in my memory, in the '90s on NPR - to emerge."

> ...

> "Carlyle is in fact ready to be as indignant as anyone over these abuses. He reasons: since slavery is a natural human relationship, this bond will exist regardless of whether you abolish the word. And it does - if only in broken and surreptitious forms."

This leads me to think that he's using words in a non-standard way. An unwise way, given the response it's gotten him, and I certainly wouldn't invite him to speak anywhere if I thought he was going to say things like that. But I'm really not okay with seeing someone attacked for beliefs I'm not sure they actually hold, in domains unrelated to those beliefs, by people who don't appear to be trying to be charitable.

[rwmj]

He certainly is a wind-bag. I always suspect that these looney philosophers are deliberately obscure and long winded because their arguments wouldn't stand up if they were written in plain english.

[teacup50]

That quote is out-of-context. In context, he's apparently attempting to explain Thomas Carlyle's views.

I forced myself to read that entire article, and by the end of it, I still had no idea whether Moldbug held the views he ascribes to Carlyle.

[nailer]

That doesn't seem to back up the assertion, unless the reader is unaware of the meaning of 'parsimonious'.