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0 pointsTuna-Fish5y ago0 comments

What I understand from his writings is that Scott feels that Nick land has made interesting observations and had novel new thoughts, and has then followed them off a cliff. For example, from Meditations on Moloch: [0]

> But the thing about grail quests is – if you make a wrong turn two blocks away from your house, you end up at the corner store feeling mildly embarrassed. If you do almost everything right and then miss the very last turn, you end up being eaten by the legendary Black Beast of Aaargh whose ichorous stomach acid erodes your very soul into gibbering fragments.

> As far as I can tell from reading his blog, Nick Land is the guy in that terrifying border region where he is smart enough to figure out several important arcane principles about summoning demon gods, but not quite smart enough to figure out the most important such principle, which is NEVER DO THAT.

[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

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twic5y ago

This is key. Nick Land is not fungible here, not either an interchangeable racist or an interchangeable cipher who some racists like. He's someone who started off as an interesting and creative thinker who had a lot of influence on the blob of lefty internet-flavoured critical theory philosophy stuff which still drives the online intellectual left [1], but then veered off into unproductive nastiness.

I suppose the link is there because Scott Alexander thinks that he's written some stuff which is worth reading, and that readers of the blog will be able to distinguish that from the rubbish. Needless to say, this is completely outside a present-day NYT journalist's model of the world.

[1] https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/10459/1/...

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