SneerClub

Almost all are avowedly committed to the ideals of tolerance, pluralism, and diversity in faith; if you were to say that a belief system should be dismissed simply because it is essentially religious in nature in essentially any other context, they would be some of the loudest voices speaking out against you. So why should TESCREAL be any different? Why is it that religion as a whole is fine, but not this religion?

Because a religion passing itself off as scientific is a bad thing? Just spitballin' here.

Hochman correctly deduces that R9PRESENTATIONALism originated in the 18th century, but fails to realize that the roots of this movement actually lie with the Bavarian Illuminati, a secret society which was supposedly suppressed by edict in 1784 but has in fact maintained a shadowy existence influencing politics up to the present day.

I hate to "give it to them", but the targets of TESCREAL are reprehensible BUT fascinating. It's kinda fun to learn about people like the Cosmists or Nick fucking Land. But the targets of this dude are basically unknown academics. The right doesn't need a convoluted acronym to dump on those, they already have "woke".

So, R9PRESENTATIONALists are classicists who defend the "traditional university" and the Great Books canon, while also denouncing large institutions and aiming "to elevate the perspectives of underprivileged minorities".

Sure, Jan.

It feels like this person was mad at the TESCREAL label and decided to make a blog post going "nuh-uh, I know you are but what am I"... except they have none of the academic ability of the TESCREAL authors so they just sort of pile on labels and ideologies without properly showing any causal or ideological relationship (like the TESCREAL authors do). Heck, they outright screw up words and definitions in a few places, (Orate sticks out to me).

Having made the very poor decision to wade through all of that, and taken the necessary nap to try and let my brain stop overheating from the strain, here's what I'm left with:

This gets at part of why the TESCREAL bundle is such an awkward frame to work in. Emile Torres and the other writers who have broken it down do a very impressive job of drawing connections between the different members of the bundle not only through ideological consistencies and historical development of a body of work but through direct links between people and organizations that eventally led to this bizarre but influential sci-fi eschatology where our most important moral duty as a society is the development of post human AI that can move us one step closer to having forty gazillion simulated "people" doing who knows what in their Dyson spheres until the last sun goes out. Unlike most millenarian movements the people who work to advance these ideas don't (or at least didn't) have a central organization or a single ideology so you can't just criticize LessWrong or Effective Altruism in the same way that you could criticize the Branch Davidians or Heaven's Gate. And that really does feel like the most relevant point of comparison here: a terrifyingly large share of our collective money and power are controlled by people who seem to adhere to a bizarre secular apocalypse cult, but that cult doesn't have a name because these people don't organize that way. Describing the TESCREAL bundle does an admirable job of naming the problem and constructing it from the ground up, which is honestly a far more "good faith" handling of their belief system than any alternative I can find.

The most relevant point of comparison I can think of is the idea of "leaderless resistance" in both activist and terrorist activities. Even though you have a bunch of people who plan and take actions to advance their shared beliefs, they recognize the vulnerability created by doing so through an explicit heirarchical organization, so they don't create one. Unlike the klan or other terrorists, TESCREAL is able to use celebrity and public communities as their points of recruitment and activity rather than drawing media attention through atrocity, but the same ambiguity and pattern of disavowal seems to play in how the network operates. Anything too far outside of mainstream acceptability can be disavowed by LW as a specific organization or by Elon and Thiel as specific individuals, even as they're all broadly on the same "side" of the issue. TESCREAL is an attempt to name that "side" in a way that prevents this. People can argue whether or not they or their faces are adherents of TESCREALism, but not the existence of TESCREALism.

However, the fact that it's a constructed bundle rather than a preexisting flag that these people have claimed explicit allegiance to makes the attempt to describe the problem look like a bad-faith effort to construct an enemy where none exists. And that appears to be what the R9PRESENTATIONAL bundle (even more awkward than TESCREAL! Good job!) is trying to do. Most of the bundle doesn't refer to specific elements of an array as much as adjectives that can apply to a whole host of different activities and organizations. Transhumanism, for example, is a complete and specific structure of beliefs. "Relational" is an attribute of many different ideologies and while I think the idea is that the underlying bundle views all of these qualities as good the central thing he's trying to describe already has names like Humanism, Environmentalism, Socialism, Anti-capitalism, Ludditism, and so on. I think the problem is that the author doesn't want to demonize any of those actual ideologies that oppose TESCREALism either explicitly or incidentally because they're more popular and powerful and because rather than being foundationally opposed to "Progress" as he defines it they have their own specific principles that are harder to dismiss.

Most of the connections that the writer here draws are also well outside of living memory, while the oldest elements of TESCREAL appear to date back to cyberpunk science fiction in the 1980s and the surrounding conversations about technology and the meaning and importance of humanity. The defining elements came together over a period of decades, not centuries. While some of that was writers building on a body of knowledge and theory, that just brought us back to the end result where the central idea existed but didn't have a name, so one had to be constructed for it by naming it's constituents and ideological forefathers. By contrast, R9PRESENTATIONALism seems to have its "real" roots in obscure or unpopular theological disputes in the early 19th century. Even if those disputes did have some impact on the intervening history of thought, naming and outlining those and avoiding talking about anti-capitalism and environmentalism as central ideas to the tech backlash makes the attempt to construct a category very transparent. The author doesn't want to be anti-socialism or anti-environmentalism, but does want to do the tech thing that socialists and environmentalists are criticizing, so he needs to reframe those criticisms as arising from somewhere else that he can more comfortably position himself against.

This, combined with the emphasis on opposition to postmodernism, means that we're very likely to, whether the author intends it or not, end up going down some weird roads with this. I'm not sure if we're going to get to Jordan Peterson ranting about "Postmodern Neomarxism" or if we're going to end up doing the full Alex Jones thing, but just like those two zoo exhibits it should be fun to watch from outside the enclosure.

A man with a swastika tattoo shouting "nuh uh, you're the real nazis!"

I like that his first argument out of the gate is "You call us a secular religion? Well maybe we are, what happened to religious tolerance?" Just perfect how you tee yourself up to fall in line with the religious conservatives when needed.

We really need bring some sceptical epistemic attitudes back. Maybe some kind of eco-atheism, keeping yourself grounded on actual real shit. (for some definition of real)

Pronounced ruh-nine-presentationalism

what in the world does any of this bull shit have to do with showing off your mid-tier Yamaha sport bike

I attempted a point by point sneer, but there is a bit too much silliness and not enough cohesion to produce something readable.

So focusing on "Post-critique":

OP misspels of some of his "enemy" authors, in a way directly cribbed from Wikipedia suggesting no real analysis.

[...], such texts included Ricouer's Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, and Kierkegaard's works [...]

Ricouer should be Ricœur or at the very least Ricoeur. (Incidentally OP also makes a very poor summary of his work)

Complete and arbitrary marriage of epistemic post-critique and literary post-critique, which as far as I can see have nothing to do with each other beyond sharing a name, and in fact even seem a bit at odds with each other in how they relate to recontextualisation.

I would say this is obviously bot vomit, but I have known humans to be this lazy and thickheaded.

My goodness that's a lot of words for completely missing the point that policy shouldn't be informed by religious beliefs.