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Mangione's Twitter (wonder if they'll scrub it) makes him seem like a centrist techlib quoting Harari and Haidt, maybe centre-right since he also reposts some right-wing stuff about immigration and so on. Basically the furthest thing from either anprim or populist one can imagine. An ACX poster, maybe even a Motte poster. Quoting Ted Kaczynski would then be more in the "look at this interesting and radical way of thinking" sense than an expression of any true agreement.
The slatestarcodex sub has good discussions about his online presence:
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1hahupw/the_suspect_of_the_unitedhealthcare_ceos_shooters/
He lived in Japan for a short time (I think?) and this could have written by a grumpy Motizzen:
https://x.com/PepMangione/status/1780863519677940189
The Mishima-pilled American, truly a rare phenomenon
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Nitter link for those who don't use Twitter.
He seems to lean left on the environment and animal rights, and of course there's that whole anti-capitalism thing. Psychedelics also code "left" to me, but that probably just means I am old enough to remember the 20th century.
But yeah, this could have been written by a tradcon:
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Yeah, he really does seem like a Mottizen. He is definitely not some Reddit-tier intellect who thinks that killing scapegoats is how you affect change.
https://x.com/wesyang/status/1866199181326463467
For someone with this mindset to go on to execute some random CEO shows a potential break with reality. Apparently, his socials seem to indicate he had cut off contact with some of his loved ones for a few months prior to the incident.
Stay safe out there people, and don't do drugs.
As a tangent, I disagree with his assertion that oppressive architecture is not intentional. There is explicit evidence of architects explaining that they intentionally design buildings to be psychologically destabilizing. For an example, refer to the debate between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman, which has previously been discussed on The Motte.
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That's kind of guaranteed isn't it? Anyone who randomly shoots a stranger has broken from reality.
I am worried his previously rationalist behaviour will be picked up by the media and this will lead to a crackdown on tech bros and the grey tribe in general. The media has never liked tech bros, but they are absolutely seething at the moment.
The opposite?
It seems like this tech bro had a mental breakdown and decided to randomly shoot a "bad guy" in direct opposition to his previously espoused beliefs. Of course, the mass media response is basically a love fest with a million stories that go something like "Murder is wrong, but can you blame him". He's also very good looking which helps.
Cruel irony #1: a rationalist lost his mind, did something completely retarded, and gets praise for it in the mass media. But rationalists who do pro-social things like buy malaria nets get shit on.
Cruel irony #2: this would-be Raskolnikov comes from generational wealth. The middle class striver he assassinated is actually a lower social caste than he is. Typical.
Everything about this killer screams weakness and insanity.
This is why I am afraid it's going to turn into another club to beat tech bros with. People, especially in the media, will feel bad about cheering on a guy's murder (especially with the optics you note) and to mollify their guilt they will blame the murderer and tech bros by association and go way overboard in hating on anything associated with him to demonstrate their virtue.
I don't know, I can't explain it well, but I feel like I just spotted a scissor statement in the wild with this whole story.
You're assuming their hatred of techbros will outweigh the one for CEOs and the worst parts of the American Healthcare system.
I think it's a lot more likely that this guy becomes a cautionary tale: "if you insist on being evil someone will snap and kill you" type of deal. It's a lot more politically useful.
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Do you not figure some Mottizens could believe that what he did was an optimal action while in their normal state of mind? There are reasons to assume that related positions, if they are present, would be underdefended in the discourse here: after all, a defense would involve a lot of needle-threading to get dinged by mods and the community for fedposting, nor trip any possible actual fed-operated web crawlers that may have been deployed for early threat identification. (Internet lore certainly includes tales of excessive post-election Twitter posturing resulting in unexpected Secret Service home visits.)
Oh, I'm sure some Mottizens could.
But the Twitter screenshot I shared demonstrates that the killer had a nuanced view of societal problems that disavows scapegoatism. So for him to go and execute a scapegoat seems like a pretty extreme pivot.
I'm inching closer to the pitfalls I just described myself by going there, but executing such a "scapegoat" has effects that go beyond "the scapegoat is now dead", and therefore "saying that any or all problems are but-for causally due to the existence of the evil CEO is facile and wrong" and "it is a good intervention to unalive the CEO" are compatible viewpoints.
Someone could believe that this should be done pour encourager les autres, and the intervention will leave every actor that is involved in this complex system second-guessing how far they can go until some Luigi chooses to throw a koopa shell at them, and perhaps choose to exercise restraint; they could believe, in an Assangian way, that just the necessity of hiring more and fancier security details will raise transaction costs for similar enterprises in a way that will make them just a bit less sustainable; they could even anticipate the approximate shape of the popular reaction that we actually got and conclude that the society-wide soul searching and increased salience of the system that the scapegoat figureheaded alone will cause beneficial changes as a side effect, outweighing any negative ones. What impact do you figure this event had on the probability that a startup pitching "reform medical insurance" gets funded a month from now?
It will have a negative effect. This is the same logic that leads dictators to execute generals who lose battles and then wonder why they can't get any good generals. The would-be reformer will avoid the industry entirely now.
Prediction: UHC denies fewer claims and premiums skyrocket. Again.
Health insurance for my family costs over $20,000 a year and covers very little. This asshole just made it go up again. Thanks, bro.
Well, I don't intend to make the case that what the shooter did was in fact positive-EV with respect to your or my value function here. But given your prediction, there are possible value functions that he could have that would make that outcome positive-sum for him - he would just need to have the right mixture of concavity (weighing outcomes of the form "one individual denied prohibitively expensive life-saving surgery" much more than one million times "moderate misery due to your finances being wrecked by high insurance premiums") and aversion to surprise/betrayal (someone who thought they were covered being unexpectedly denied being a much bigger deal than someone not being able to afford insurance at all with higher premiums). The former is basically just left-wing care-foundation ethics, and the latter is common.
Surely depends on what kind of reform they planned. There are reform plans that do not entail becoming a successful insurance CEO with a target painted on your back. You might think that any such plans are reforms for the worse, but the shooter may think otherwise (e.g. see above).
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Between Brian Thompson and Shinzo Abe, we seem to be developing a worrying new meta of assassinations in which they can be used to martyr the assassin and move the world ideologically against the target, rather than the reverse.
Communists were already doing that a hundred years ago, it's a common trick. They even used to play themselves up as victims when the czar pardoned them for trying to assassinate his family, and it worked on the intelligencia because they are universally retarded and easily molded by any propaganda delivered with enough repetition and chutzpah.
Just one of those little moldbuggian "isn't that weird" quirks of history you only notice examining it from a critical perspective.
Anarchists, not communists. Random assassinations of public figures are a chaotic evil act, not a lawful evil one.
Sorry, but this is Reddit nonsense. Real life does not follow D&D character alignment rules, and no communist is going to say "oh noes, I can't assassinate this strategic opponent because someone's interpretation of 'authoritarianism' means I must follow the laws of a regime I abhor".
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You have to balance this against assassination targets like Lincoln and JFK, though, who I think definitely got cast in a sympathetic light post-assassination.
Funnily enough there's another moldbuggian take about that.
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I guess my question is did he leave enough metadata behind that someone could find his reddit account prior to authorities finding it and scrubbing it?
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You're not kidding. Halfway down I remembered I was looking at the account of an (alleged) murderer and not just some guy whose Substack I have bookmarked.
Maybe check to see if any of those substacks (or Motte posters) suddenly go silent.
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Substack writers are all murderers, it's part of the signup process ;) You didn't know?
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It wasn’t quite the psyche-shaking revelation that reading Caroline Ellison’s Tumblr was, but he certainly seems more relatable than I was expecting.
I missed this. Any choice juicy bits? Or just reminiscing on drug-filled orgies?
https://caroline.milkyeggs.com/
I don't recall much about it, I don't think there was too much straightforwardly juicy stuff, besides these two bits that most made the rounds
I had forgotten about this one. This is some Shakespeare-level forshadowing. Such a tragic figure.
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He's also seems to be in "the agricultural revolution and its consequences are a disaster for the human race" camp. That's super anprim coded. Maybe not return-to-monke, but definitely anti-agricultural.
If you're actually Ted-pilled, the last thing you'd do would be the sort of tech-posting his Twitter acct is full of, like this post.
A lot of "Ted-pilled" people, probably the majority, consider themselves so while simultaneously being people he would have really liked to kill in particular.
Is it weird that Ted was such a math genius, and a criminal mastermind who avoided getting caught for years, but he still struggled to make a basic bomb? Meanwhile the poorest of poor in Afghanistan with no education were still cranking out IEDs that killed soldiers wearing body armor.
Keep in mind most of the ieds were made out of old artillery shells and such, not stuff you could buy at Home Depot. Also a lot of guys blew themselves up practicing how to splice cellphones onto 500lb bomb fuses because their mom called at a bad moment.
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It's a lot more complicated than you're making it out to be, people who like Ted and tech accelerationists are a lot closer to each other politically than a lot of groups, they read the same authors and discuss the same ideas, and often agree with each other if not on specifics.
This is like saying Mussolini could never have been a fascist because he was a socialist in his youth.
Wrong. He became a fascist because he was a socialist.
If someone is described as being "anprim", then yes, I'm going to expect finding anarchism and primitivism in his latest statements on social media, which do not demonstrate that, indeed in many ways the opposite.
A lot of smart people of this variety read Kaczynski as a sort of a brain candy, "look at how avant-garde I am by giving the time of the day to a terrorist" kind of way. I know I've done so, certainly.
He's one of the foremost figures of the philosophy of technology, a folk hero of sorts and required reading for anyone critical of the modern world or any sort of dissident in the West. It's not exactly a surprise people read him. Even though they should really be reading Ellul.
That said if you read him you know he's explicitly not an anarchoprimitivist.
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