Urbit
Oh dear. Let me start by saying that I find Urbit interesting in it&#x27;s own right. I&#x27;m generally interested in distributed systems, and Urbit&#x27;s Nock and Hoon are weird languages that I&#x27;m interested in despite not coming close to groking. That said, we should also remember where it came from (without throwing the baby -- if there is a baby -- out with the bath water). Curtis Yarvin previously wrote a blog called Unqualified Reservations under the penname Mencius Moldbug. <i>Ur</i>bit takes it&#x27;s name from this blog. He voiced a number of regressive views there, including very racist and anti-democratic ones. Some choice quotes:<p>&gt; No one who condones Che, Stalin, Mao, or any other leftist murderer, has any right to ask anyone else to dissociate himself from a rightist who didn&#x27;t even make triple digits. Anders Behring Breivik is a terrorist. Nelson Mandela is a terrorist. Nelson Mandela is the most revered living political figure on our beautiful blue planet… If you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you&#x27;d like to fuck.<p>&gt; Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences.<p>&gt; Political power is a property right, however you slice it. It is owned, not deserved. It is not a natural or &quot;human&quot; right. And it has no more to do with freedom than brake fluid with fondue.<p>Curtis Yarvin is a libertarian. As an anarchistic, I consider libertarians my non-committal brethren. I don&#x27;t have a̶n̶y̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ much against libertarians, but the weird thing about Curtis Yarvin is that he&#x27;s a <i>monarchist</i> libertarian. He literally wants a strong man ruler who enforces libertarian policies through an iron grip. He also believes in binary genders, which is reflected in Urbit&#x27;s requirement of the user to identify as a Lord or a Lady. His personal views aren&#x27;t just an aside, they&#x27;re reflected in the name and workings of this system.<p>Some more quotes, in case you&#x27;re not yet convinced of how horrible Curtis Yarvin is:<p>&gt; Was royalism a perfect system? It was not. But if we imagine a world in which the revolutions and civil wars of the last four centuries had never happened, it is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.<p>&gt; Modern Americans have enormous difficulty in grasping hierarchical social structures. We grew up steeped in &quot;applied Christianity&quot; pretty much the way the Hitler Youth grew up steeped in Hitler. The suggesting that slavery could ever be or have been, as Aristotle suggests, natural and healthy, is like suggesting to the Hitler Youth that it might be cool to make some Jewish friends… We think of the master-slave relationship as usually sick and twisted, and invariably adversarial. Parent-child relationships can be all three. But they are not normally so. If history (not to mention evolutionary biology) proves anything, it proves that humans fit into dominance-submission structures almost as easily as they fit into the nuclear family.<p>&gt; In my opinion just about every country on earth today would benefit from a transition to military government…<p>&gt; It&#x27;s a reality of modern American life that race confers privilege. As a reactionary, how can I possibly object? A society without hereditary privilege is like a cheeseburger without cheese.<p>Again, none of this means that Urbit doesn&#x27;t have interesting ideas that could be used&#x2F;forked. But this is the context that this system was created in, and it <i>is</i> reflected in the system.