Michael Tae Sweeney: Yes it's important to understand that "gray team" ideology was invented as a way to make reactionary theocratic politics and klan-style racial bigotry palatable to tech guys who are mostly highly educated atheists.

Yes it's important to understand that "gray team" ideology was invented as a way to make reactionary theocratic politics and klan-style racial bigotry palatable to tech guys who are mostly highly educated atheists.

That crazy article people are passing around prompted me to search some of the terms mentioned in the discussion around it. www.newyorker.com/culture/anna...

Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Mediawww.newyorker.com How a controversial rationalist blogger became a mascot and martyr in a struggle against the New York Times.

I had, like, a 3 month period of being super into SSC and I wish I could remember what the moment was when I realized that Siskind was just dumb and evil and walked away because it saved me from...a lot, apparently

i still read his substack because i think hes an important bad guy to keep track of and a funny outcome of his audience becoming more and more right wing is he now spends a ton of time taking reader letters about hydroxychloroquine seriously.

Lol, that's probably (well-deserved) torture for him, having to cater to the one right-wing brain worm he probably doesn't have. You're right that he's an important bad actor, though

It's fitting that his philosophy of open-mindedly big braining even the most facially shitty and stupid right-wing arguments has led to spending all his time writing things like "Contra This Closeted Nazi Who Says Medicine Doesn't Work."

He can be quite intelligent on some topics (usually psychiatry related), but he is profoundly foolish and rather arrogant about it on others. He has an educated audience lurking, so you'll see Ph.D's show up and be like, "Actually this is my area and this dumb. Here's why," and it just bounces off.

I’d amend that to highly specialized atheists. They’re not well educated at all, regardless of what they think about themselves.

THIS. A lot of Silicon Valley is educated/intelligent along a very narrow axis only. And those that aren't, aren't the target audience for this schtick.

Never heard of these people before this weekend. I’d like to go back to not knowing.

I'm with you, best never to have heard of these people!

This highly educated atheist studied degree levels physics and remembers *why* we devised a method of dropping a sun on people.

Greyshirts or Gryshemde is the common short-form name given to the South African Gentile National Socialist Movement, a South African Nazi movement that existed during the 1930s and 1940s. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_A...

South African Gentile National Socialist Movement - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

This guy would get sporadically recommended every now and then in online corners, and I never specifically identified anything wrong with what he was saying (it often wasn't very interesting), but something about him always gave me bad vibes

There's a decent amount of misogynist resentment serving as leverage; Scott Alexander carefully scrubbed his blog of it when he started getting more mainstream exposure.

There's hints of it everywhere when you see who Alexander is in constant dialogue with and promotes to his audience. "Let's talk about people's opinion of this new movie. And the random audience member quotes I've selected are Steve Sailor and Richard Hanania. Just 3 dudes talkin' 'bout film."

"Grey team" just seemed to be a sexy rebranding of the general zone of libertarian politics with emphasis on the more paleolibertarian subvariant that is into things like race science and warm relationships with would-be theocrats.

I'm so out of the loop can someone explain what this is like I'm 5

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