I wasn't arguing that. Just that illegal entry is not the same as a speeding ticket was my point. Overstaying on legal entry is civil, and just unlawful presence. I believe that's a bit less than half the population.
Unlawful presence is 100% of the offenses you'll be able to catch in a Sunnyvale mall parking lot, and it disproves the OPs contention that they are all "criminal, by definition."
You can use ALPR to track people who are known to have entered illegally or who have been sentenced to deportation and are avoiding their sentence. Illegal aliens are criminals.
I really don't think you understand the difference between unlawful presence and improper entry. One of these is a crime while the other is not. Restating your false premise at the end doesn't make it more true; unlawful presence in the U.S. is not a crime, that's a simple fact.
You're missing the point. No one will be caught entering the U.S., with or without a visa, in a Sunnyvale mall parking lot. All you will likely be able to catch is unlawful presence, which is a civil matter and not a crime.
If you think Ayaan Hirsi Ali wants conversation rather than extremist actions, I believe you may have missed the bulk of her work. For example, this Reason interview (http://reason.com/archives/2007/10/10/the-trouble-is-the-wes...) with the following exchange:
Reason: [...] Do you think Islam could bring about similar social and political changes?
Hirsi Ali: Only if Islam is defeated. [...]
Reason: Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam?
Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace.
Reason: We have to crush the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that mean, “defeat Islam”?
Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated in many ways. [...]
This sounds like it's meant to be a correction, but the post your responding to mentions neither legal fees nor damages. Are you responding to the right comment?
Yes. My point is to make a distinction between using the high cost of the legal system for leverage and relying on the court system to actually dispense justice. Often people are bullied into a settlement because legal cases cost money, and the other side has more money, but that isn't happening here.
If the courts rule against you, and we believe the courts are just, then it shouldn't matter how the process was financed, or whose interests were involved.
Considering this is the only one of the lawsuits he's funded that he's revealed, it's unclear that all of them have merit. On top of that, they forum shopped this specific case and dropped claims that would have allowed Gawker's insurance to cover damages.
Further, even in the cases where there is merit, that does not preclude them being SLAPP.
My understanding is that this judgement alone is sufficient to cause Gawker's financial problems, and that there aren't others that are material. Correct me if I'm wrong on the facts here.
>Further, even in the cases where there is merit, that does not preclude them being SLAPP.
I think it's worth differentiating cases with merit from cases where there has actually been a clear judgement against the defendant. I have a hard time calling the second class unethical, regardless of the motivation.
What do you mean "there aren't others that are material?" Thiel himself has said that he's funding other suits against Gawker. The impending threat of a billionaire with a personal vendetta is a significant part of their financial problems.
Had Gawker won the case in federal court, as it was expected to and likely would have, or if they win on appeal, suddenly Thiel's actions become unethical? This hardly sounds like a well-thought out ethical system, but it seems like people only care about a free press or free speech depending on whose ox is getting gored.
I trust the courts mostly (especially in well trod areas of law), so I assume that if they find for one party and reward large damages that the suit was legitimate. Before the ruling, or if the ruling was reversed, I don't know whether the suit is legitimate or not. The ruling doesn't change its ethical status, it changes my knowledge of its ethical status.
"Wrong-think" as a phrase is one of those thought-terminating clichés. People are voicing their disagreements with his professed viewpoints, yet you are using that cliche to dismiss them without addressing their viewpoints. This does not lead to a vigorous discussion in the marketplace of ideas.
> "Wrong-think" as a phrase is one of those thought-terminating clichés.
Agreed.
> People are voicing their disagreements with his professed viewpoints,
Voicing their disagreements with his pseudonymous comments from a completely different non-urbit context. I suspect (but I don't know) that if he wanted the public's perspective on his non-conformant political thought to skew the public's views on his technical design work, he wouldn't have used a pseudonym in the first place.
> yet you are using that cliche to dismiss them without addressing their viewpoints.
Quite the opposite. I am using that cliche, in a question, to ask if that is what the parent is asking (inciting?) us to do: arbite non-conformist thought.
The viewpoint that (here) I intentionally don't address can be summarized as: "I heard the designer wrote something that I disagree with elsewhere, under a pseudonym - more than once! I hereby dismiss anything he has to say on any matter." That's like saying: "Hitler lover strawberries, so we must all agree to avoid them."
> This does not lead to a vigorous discussion in the marketplace of ideas.
I agree, but... what marketplace of ideas? The aforementioned comments have nothing to do with the merits (or lack thereof) of urbit. A public shaming of a heretic is not a marketplace of ideas. Maybe the guy doesn't pay his taxes. Maybe he's behind on child support. Maybe he eats puppies for breakfast. I don't know. I also don't know that it really matters, as regards the merits (or lack thereof) of his engineering design.
And, I'm sorry. It seems that I have contributed to the thread going even further afield than it already had. I shouldn't have said anything to begin with...
The marketplace of ideas means you don't get to dictate what others find relevant.
For some, this means that they don't want to be professionally or socially associated with someone who thinks some ethnic groups make genetically good slaves. People can vigorously discuss whether his writings crossed lines of acceptable behavior.
However, you're also free to discuss the technical details as much as you want! If that's what's relevant to you, that's perfectly acceptable as well, and it doesn't require you to defend his other writings.
Just to take it to absurdity, and I'm not claiming Moldbug is a member of the Nazi party, but society would not collapse if we shunned people who espoused, for example, the ideals of Hitler and the Nazi party.
Sorry for knee-jerking, but there is really no basis for equating Mencius Moldbug to a Nazi, and I think it hurts the discussion when you do! I have read some of the texts in question, on the insistence of people who say I should disavow this person who I consider to be a real pal. I read the post "Why I am not a White Nationalist" and I don't know how anyone without an agenda can come to the conclusion that this is a person with hate in his bones.
I am stating that there are plenty of beliefs that do not cause society's collapse if we shun them. The only reason I mentioned Moldbug was that he's part of the dialog here, and I wanted to make sure people did not misconstrue what I said as a claim about him.
Since you just misconstrued what I said, I was clearly unsuccessful.
The shunning policy had done quite contrary consequences. The Lambdaconf campaign drew a lot of attention to the very person they want to no-platform, more and more people begin to search the identity Curtis Yarvin/Moldbug, even come to read his articles and try to interpret his ideologies, no matter whether they gonna protest or support.
P.S. the nazi party was a frequent practitioner of this shunning policy.
Please try to follow the conversation. I was addressing the claim that shunning certain beliefs would cause society to collapse, and I've clearly demonstrated that to be false. Not sure how what you've ranted about here ties into that.
In an individualist perspective, I agree with you, shunning won't cause society to collapse.
But when people advocating it to an aggressive level-extensively campaigning the rejection of a certain person at social scale, this is dangerous and smells like politics, and was exactly the way how hitler shunned the jews.
He defends what he posted under Mencius Moldbug in a Medium blogpost here[0], which is nominally level-headed. There are in fact genetic differences across ethnic groups (sickle cell anemia comes to mind immediately), and it would be silly to think that the only possible generic changes are changed skin color and a specific blood disorder.
You can say that since men have a statistically higher muscle density, they are genetically better slaves than women are. That does not mean that I'm advocating we enslave all men, or that slavery is anything other than abhorrent.
Everyone focuses on something, if you want to extend your argument he should have also focused on diet, type of exercise, type of housing slaves are kept in, etc.
Focusing on every single factor that could possibly effect slavery would be an endeavor probably greater than the average lifetime.
Saying that some group of people or another would likely make better slaves than others is no different than saying that a certain group is more likely to be poor than another or be in jail than another. It may be considered in bad taste to discuss, but it isn't morally wrong to discuss.
It is simply remarking on what is, not what should be.
First off, in my opinion I don't really care what anyone thinks. I care about what they do and what they encourage other people to do (I can't find anything about moldbug treating anyone in any negative fashion nor encouraging others to do so). However, in the context of racist thoughts:
1. (Least bad, though still racist/bad) Believing that other ethnic groups are "better" or "superior" rather than "different". So if you honestly believed that the ethnic groups are inferior due to their genetic traits (I do not consider being predisposed to slavery, jail, being poor etc something to consider a group inferior for especially since it wouldn't be that clear cut anyway. It'd actually be something like "predisposed to aggressive behavior, which leads to jail" or something anyway).
In the case of hard evidence of a genetic predisposition to something directly negative it is possible for this opinion to be technically correct but still racist and morally wrong.
2. (Worse than 1, implies 1) Believing that actions should be taken to the detriment of the "inferior" ethnic groups and/or benefit of the "superior" ethnic groups. This would include things like enslaving people, not hiring them, promoting/demoting people based on ethnic group etc. There are a lot of items in this list including everything America did to the detriment of the Africans.
3. (worse than 2, implies 1 and 2) Actually carrying out actions or encouraging others to carry out actions that are to the detriment and/or benefit on a particular ethnic group.
In my case, I'd be willing to work with a 1. but would respect them less than otherwise. A number 2. would be dicey, i -might- be able to work with them if they don't talk about it and aren't going around regularly talking about it to others but it would drive me crazy. I would not agree with censoring/banning people from number 2. I would quit/not hire/stay away from someone with number 3 and would support banning them from communities though still not censorship (I am hardcore against censorship).
Under point 1, a belief that some ethnic groups are less intelligent than cattle, but believing that it is not a negative trait, would not be racist? I'd classify that as a racist belief, wouldn't you?
Where would that subhuman line be? If they think an adult from one ethnic group is as intelligent as an infant in another, but that there's nothing wrong with that, is that believing they're subhuman and hence racist?
These things have no clear lines, welcome to reality.
This response applies to the previous line about being the intelligence of cattle as well, now that i've given it more thought.
Intelligence can be measured so more context would be needed here. In this hypothetical scenario has one group of humans either fallen through some kind of circumstance to a lower level of intelligence(not knowledge) or another has gained significantly more intelligence through some means? In that case they should probably be considered separate species not separate races so we're in a whole new ballgame.
Either way, when "humans" are potentially that different (there's no defensible claim today that any group of humans is significantly less intelligent than any other really) this issue gets very hairy.
Someone thinking that today would definitely be racist.
"Controversial" is the pinnacle of weasel words. How do you feel about his belief that some ethnic groups are genetically better slaves, and do you think that his views would make people from those ethnic groups feel welcome in your community?
It would demonstrate a lot about the HN community if we could get through an entire Urbit post without it devolving in to yet another debate on Curtis Yarvin's (incredibly lengthy, vague and contradictory, and entirely irrelevant) views on race.
So you come here only to insult? or are you advocating thoughtcrime? nazi german and ussr and their thoughtcrime days had long gone, hope you aren't in any effort to bring them back.
Because there are a great fewer purely technical decisions in the world of software than some people around here seem to believe, and people's beliefs, worldviews, experiences and identities matter. They matter a lot. And to the extent that software is, as they say, "eating the world," the kinds of people who are writing software and the kinds of people that aren't has a profound impact on our society.
If you look at Bitcoin and the blockchain as a purely technical achievement, it's marvelous and incredible, a testament to human ingenuity. The problem is that money is not a purely technical problem, and people involved in Bitcoin who ignore that open themselves to a whole lot of relearning, like when people who are given the ability to steal a whole lot of money end up stealing a whole lot of money, like at ShapeShift[1]. Banks have been dealing with these kinds of problems for decades (or, depending on how you look at it, hundreds if not thousands of years). But if you only concern yourself with the technical aspects of Bitcoin, not the social or political aspects, you can miss things that seem obvious with the benefit of hindsight.
And the software that people creates has implications that range far beyond technical questions. A great example of how we can encode assumptions that come from our beliefs, our experiences, who we are and where we happened to be born into software without even realizing that we've done so is the fantastic essay "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names[2]." Reading that should be a real eye-opener about how, without intending to, programmers can end up writing software that is built for people Like Them and is unaccomodating to people who Aren't Like Them.
Most of the talk about his personal views here are about his views on race. It shouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone that the sort of people who are at Hacker News are likely more white than the rest of America, much less the world. As are a lot of the people writing software in use today. Sometimes that means that Google Photos categorizes someone's pictures of himself and his girlfriend as "gorillas"[3], which is the sort of error one imagines Google would be a lot less likely to make if they had more African-Americans working on their code and testing their software before release. Or machine learning algorithms that courts use to predict recidivism rates in determining sentencing have much higher false positive rates for African-Americans than whites.[4]
And making this place more welcoming to Curtis Yarvin by focusing discussion on the technical merits of Urbit and ignoring his personal views is a signal to a lot of other people about what we as a community value and what we don't. And I think it's a bad signal, because it alienates people with valuable and important viewpoints that we ought to be finding ways to be more open to, not less.
It shouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone that the sort of people who are at Hacker News are likely more white than the rest of America,...
White like Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai, you mean?
Google is 60% white. Facebook is 55%. Microsoft is 59%. USA is 63%. Do you have any evidence that HN is whiter than Google and Facebook? Why not say what you really mean, namely that there are too many Asians?
Or machine learning algorithms that courts use to predict recidivism rates in determining sentencing have much higher false positive rates for African-Americans than whites.[4]
Not according to the R script written by the very authors of the piece you cite. That script is unable to find statistically significant evidence of bias. They found very strong evidence (p < 0.001) that the statistical model is highly effective, albeit imperfectly calibrated [1].
It's silly to say that by focusing on a technology project and ignoring the people involved, we alienate people. Where I work we have similar views - "meritocracy" is one of our core values, not the dirty word it's become in the valley. As the only member of my race at this company this makes me feel welcome - I'm as valuable as the things I build, who cares about my race?
[1] This means that higher score means higher recidivism rate, but a 60% score doesn't necessarily mean 60% recidivism probability. Probably should have run isotonic regression or something like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotonic_regression
> That script is unable to find statistically significant evidence of bias.
I don't know if you're doing this (again and again) intentionally or not, but racial bias is not statistical bias[1]!
> It's silly to say that by focusing on a technology project and ignoring the people involved, we alienate people.
How do you know it's silly? Have you done any research on that? Because people who have actually done some research have come to the conclusion that it is your assumption that is silly[2].
> "meritocracy" is one of our core values
Meritocracy is not a value (or not a distinguishing value). It's what every (long surviving) system believes itself to be. The term is ironic and generally means "a system that deludes itself about its own fairness". The term was coined as a satirical joke, and has no other well-defined meaning.
[1]: Unless your statistics includes every possibly pertinent variable, or you manage to prove total independence of your model's variables from all other variables.
> And making this place more welcoming to Curtis Yarvin by focusing discussion on the technical merits of Urbit and ignoring his personal views is a signal to a lot of other people about what we as a community value and what we don't. And I think it's a bad signal, because it alienates people with valuable and important viewpoints that we ought to be finding ways to be more open to, not less.
So if someone working on an open source project were to blog, completely separately from the open source project, their personal views on, say, abortion you'd be OK with it if whenever we tried to have a discussion about that project people started discussing that contributor's views on abortion?
If not, what is the criteria for deciding what kind of unrelated personal views are OK to bring up in technical discussions?
It's worth noting that slippery slopes are a rhetorical fallacy[1] -- most slopes aren't slippery and most things aren't even slopes. I outlined why I think these personal views are relevant to the discussion. I don't think it's useful or necessary to lay out a general principle as to when personal views are relevant to the discussion, and I don't see any danger that Hacker News will be overrun by irrelevant discussions of someone's personal views if we continue to engage in this relevant discussion of personal views.
For instance, instead of talking about Urbit, we're instead mired in the finer points of one guy's murky theories on sociology.
This is not an interesting discussion on Hacker News! Racists are not exactly a rare breed, nor do the outspoken ones ever (intentional Sith absolute) bring anything interesting to the discussion.
But I was referring to the fact that nobody else is solving this specific problem. You either stay happy with your collection of walled gardens or you wait to see if he can unbreak the internet.
In fact in this case, the work goes ahead anyway. Perhaps you end up using it in ten years, or perhaps you don't. But neither of us gain anything from this argument at the present time.
There are plenty of people working on this problem who aren't self-inflated racists. For example, https://sandstorm.io/ tackles a lot of the same questions without any of the deliberate obfuscation or insular community of Urbit (and, I might add, without a completely insane and un-optimizable VM underneath).
They recommended it themselves but are solving more:
> If you're interested in that approach, I'd encourage you to check out sandstorm.io. This solves the problem for applications like a blog, email, or gitlab. What it doesn't do is make decentralized applications easier to build.
Because they're so repugnant that they make reasonable people question why anyone would be willing to tolerate, let alone defend him. He's freely declared himself so reprehensible that it impairs his ability to lead any project because it will inevitably attract this type of discussion.
If you'd prefer this not to be the case, please outline what restrictions on free speech you'd like emplaced so that people would not be able to discuss his views.
> He's freely declared himself so reprehensible that it impairs his ability to lead any project because it will inevitably attract this type of discussion.
He's incapable of leading a project because you're unwilling to control yourself?
Yup, failure to understand the simplest aspects of public discourse and narcissism to the point of putting one's own desire to spout a bunch of violent racist crap above any consideration for how it might impact people you want to work with is pretty disqualifiying for project leadership. He's incapable of leading a project because he's unwilling to control himself.
Stop with the ad hominem attacks and start posting something of substance. If you have examples of these 'repugnant' views then share them, I haven't seen anything that matches that description when read in context.
I would benefit from this. I don't doubt that Curtis's views are probably offensive, but I haven't seen a clear description of them to conclude that for myself. I tried reading some of his writing, but it seemed so abstract and obfuscated that I gave up before understanding what he was trying to get across. I've seen one-sentence descriptions of his beliefs and they sound horrible, but I've also seen enough tweet-length mischaracterizations of others' beliefs to take those as accurate.
Is there like an intermediate-level overview of Curtis's offensive beliefs, with a glossary and index? I'd be surprised if nobody's assembled one; it could make the ad hominems so much more effective.
The closest thing I know of is Scott Alexander's Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell [1]. It's more of an essay/argument than an impartial overview, but (besides being a good read by one of the smartest and most interesting bloggers on earth) I think it's the most even-handed, neutral and informative thing you're likely to read about Yarvin's beliefs.
(NB - the article refers to Yarvin as "Mencius Moldbug", his nom de plume for political ranting)
The comments that I have seen from him on that topic (and it should be noted that I have only read a small part of his comments so this may not be representative of his thoughts on these matters) implied that those groups were better slaves because they were more resilient or stronger, so were able to better survive slavery than less resilient or weaker groups.
I don't see why that would make people from those groups feel unwelcome. If anything I would expect people from the groups that he says were genetically not as good as slaves to be the ones who would feel unwelcome. The implication is that they are weaker or less resilient.
Was that on Urbit's homepage? The docs? The IRC? The subreddit? Over e-mail?
Was it something like "yeah it is a functional system... hey have I mentioned how much potential you have for whenever you feel like dedicating your life to slavery?"
...or was it just the guy rambling on a blog of his under a pen name?
It's pretty obvious to anyone that the guy's views are obscenely offensive, but if the guy is strictly professional when it comes to Urbit, treats everyone with the same respect and works just fine along with many people that despise his views, how are the project's goals tainted?
Because people don't just see Urbit, if they end up participating long-term. They see Yarvin, and he definitely is not one to hide his worldview.
As much as some people like to pretend it's only about tech, tech is made by people and it requires them to interact with each other, and that can never be completely confined to code.
By definition no, of course. But I have never done a non-trivial amount of open source-style work (coding or otherwise) with someone who shares their political views online, without learning about them somehow.
And in fact, every Urbit contributor in this thread who's mentioned this has also heard about Yarvin's political views, and not from this thread. It appears to me there's already a kind of self-selection process in Urbit contributors, towards those who are comfortable tolerating his garbage. And that's exactly the problem.
Well, if you define "comfortable tolerating his garbage" as "contributes to Urbit despite it being Yarvin's project", then tautological assertion is tautological.
There is certainly some self-selection for people who don't throw tech babies out with political bathwater. I count myself as one such person. I mean, I continued using Javascript and Firefox even after hearing about Brendan Eich's political contribution! Feel free to draw incorrect inferences regarding my opinion of gay marriage.
I have also toyed around with Urbit, and have (in a sense) made minor contributions. Feel free to draw incorrect inferences regarding my opinion of Yarvin's political writing.
It's not about your beliefs or what people infer about them. In fact it's not about you at all- it's about the other potential contributors and users that Yarvin is alienating, despite all the claims in this thread that his views don't impact the project.
I mean, I guess you're technically correct: If nothing else, the impact of his views on the project is that it results in the exclusion of people who choose to exclude themselves from projects created by "the wrong people".
But of course that's trivially true of all projects, so why do you think it's such a problem in this particular case? If you answer "because his views are really bad" while acknowledging that they otherwise have no direct bearing on the technology, you're basically saying "because he's really unpopular".
I have no love of Yarvin's politics, but that sort of cure is worse than the disease.
Where we seem to differ is in the importance of those people who avoid Yarvin (or Torvalds, or other more or less abrasive open source contributors), as well as the reasons they avoid him. It's more than merely ideological for many people, it's personal.
I don't acknowledge that his views have no direct bearing on the technology, either, and that's tied up in my first point. We design things for ourselves, for the most part, so by excluding (perhaps inadvertently) people with different perspectives on life, we lose out on valuable input.
Thanks for the clarification. I'm certainly not claiming that people who avoid the project are somehow "less important" as a result of their decision. And I wouldn't doubt that it's personal for them - "mere ideology" also seems like a pretty personal thing!
I think we agree that Urbit would benefit from a larger, more diverse user/contributor base. What wouldn't? We're just ascribing agency in different places. I view the claim that Yarvin is excluding people as a sort of rhetorical sleight of hand. What he's actually done is 1) publish some really unpopular opinions, and 2) build Urbit. It is entirely possible to evaluate 2 on its own merits[1]. So I'm disappointed to see so many people write it off for other IMO less relevant reasons.
It reminds me a bit of a "Christian-friendly" Linux distro I once saw that omitted software written by known homosexuals. Would you also claim that the gay programmers were (perhaps inadvertently) excluding a subset of Christians? I suspect most people would agree in this case that agents of exclusion are the ones actually performing the exclusive act, rather than ones who happened to be "the wrong people" from another group's point of view.
[1]: This is true even in the presence of a strong political influence on the technology. I honestly don't see much of a connection between Urbit and Moldbug's politics, but then the latter never made much sense to me, so maybe I'm missing something. If there are politically objectionable aspects to the software, then by all means object! But plain old guilt by association is a weak argument in any context, doubly so in a technical one.
Yes, in a hypothetical platonic code-only way you can separate Yarvin from his work to some degree. But you're underestimating the impact of the word "personal" here- some people avoid communities like this not as a boycott, but for their personal safety or emotional well-being. That's the point where they go from the excluder to the one being excluded.
That was the example Moldbug used, claiming that Africans made genetically better slaves than Native Americans. 5F36B5F62640 contended that the groups that were not better slaves should feel unwelcome. This is just the basic logical implication of taking those two claims together.
Rather than attacking me personally, is there something I missed or was incorrect about?
You created a 'should' from a 'would', and therefore implied that 5F36B5F62640 had ill-feelings towards Indians.
I'm not attacking you personally, nor am I speaking to you personally. I am just pointing out to anybody reading this, that you just tried to smear somebody.
Of course, whether you did so on purpose is another matter.
You're grasping a bit on this. Logic does not dictate that there were implied ill-feelings on 5F36B5F62640's behalf. In fact, I can categorically state that from the one post I've read from them I do not believe they have any such ill-feelings!
To restate, then:
"Wait, so your argument is that only Native Americans would feel unwelcome in this community?
Is this supposed to be in his favor?"
I appreciate your dedication to accuracy, and I must assume this satisfies your complaint.
He also claims that some ethnic groups are genetically predisposed to being good slaves. Please think critically about this, instead of just saying "well, he says he's not racist!"
He tried to explain that opinion further: "The ability to survive as an agricultural slave is a talent."
I've no idea whether Spaniards and Englishmen really did find Indians unfit for slavery but I guess the argument that is being made is that more of them might have been kept alive if they were able to provide greater economic value to their conquerors. Sick, I know.
Agree that it's not an opinion fit to be voiced in modern society, however, it doesn't seem to be the opinion that people are trying to cast it under.
You may think that such a statement is merely logical, but it becomes rather something else when one, like Moldbug, has a long history of rhetoric where it seems pretty clear his sympathies are with the oppressors.
No, it's not merely logical, it's instrumental. Curtis Yarvin had a bone to pick with progressive society. I think it's highly likely that he still thinks it is ignorant, just as it does of him.
However, I don't think misconstruing his words is a good attack. The dust eventually settles.
Certainly, but a characteristic of SLAPP is the plaintiff hasn't got a solid case, their purpose is to drag legal procedures long enough to bankrupt their target.
That is not true. Our legal system views some lawsuits as themselves being illegitimate attempts to silence people by forcing them to defend against frivolous, meritless lawsuits (see SLAPP). It does not view lawsuits as SLAPP-worthy merely because based on who's paying the bill.
Unless there's some international border in Sunnyvale I missed, I don't think the ALPRs will catch any illegal entry.