It was a good way to while away the time at jury duty back in the days when you had to physically be there until you were called. I encountered a tournament player who beat me maybe 4 times out of 5. I also played in a chess tournament where my opponent was considerably stronger and faster and quickly put me in a position where I had to think long and hard to try to avoid disaster (fruitlessly in the end). She would make her move, wait a few seconds to see if I would reply, and then get up and disappear into a back room where, I found out later, she was playing backgammon. I looked her up and learned that she was a rapidly rising women's chess star but was better known as a semi-pro backgammon player.
It's wild that anyone doesn't know that. It's less surprising than the fact that disallowing someone with 34 felony convictions from being President would also require a Constitutional amendment. Both the pardon power and the qualifications for President are specified by the Constitution, so of course the Constitution must be amended to change them.
I started programming on an IBM 1620 with 20,000 BCD digits of memory, 20 usec to add 2 digits, 160 usec for branch not taken, 200 usec for branch taken. I remember these and many other details but I have no desire to go back because I'm not an idiot. The first computer I owned was an Amiga 1000, to which I added a 50 MB hard drive that cost me $1000. Again, no desire to go back. Same with bad fonts.
Yes, he had to distance himself from it because his audience turned out to be significantly more horrible than him and it was getting on his nerves. But he still holds significant sympathy towards race science views.
No, unfortunately they don't. Scott Alexander Siskind is definitely sympathetic to race science and neoreaction, that's WHY he wrote the "anti"-reactionary FAQ. It's probably the most popular document about "neoreaction" on the internet and made many many people more aware of neoreactionary ideas. He did this intentionally because he likes neoreactionaries and thinks they are correct about race science and that they're useful allies.
There is simply no other way to explain this email [0] that he wrote.
One critical point, he discusses "criticizing" the neoreactionaries, and says he disagrees with them on several points.
> I want to improve their thinking so that they become stronger and keep what is correct while throwing out the garbage. A reactionary movement that kept the high intellectual standard (which you seem to admit they have), the correct criticisms of class and of social justice, and few other things while dropping the monarchy-talk and the cathedral-talk and the traditional gender-talk and the feudalism-talk - would be really useful people to have around. So I criticize the monarchy-talk etc, and this seems to be working - as far as I can tell a lot of Reactionaries have quietly started talking about monarchy and feudalism a lot less (still haven't gotten many results about the Cathedral or traditional gender).
There are a "few other things" he thinks they're right about, but he specifically lists all four things that he thinks are problematic. None of them are race science, which implies that race science is one of the "few other things" he thinks they're correct about.
You can put this together with enough of his public writing to see where he stands on the issue. He's clearly aligned with "race realism".
This entire email is also accompanied by a threat never to reveal these thoughts of Scott's. Why? Because he knows that being outed for his real views would do serious damage to his reputation. That's also why he got mad at the NYT, because they had his number and he didn't want anyone to find out about his real politics.
If you're the kind of person who is naive enough to think "He wrote an anti-reactionary FAQ, how could he be a reactionary?", I am sorry, but you're dealing with a lying snake.
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