Do you have an example of sleight of authorial hand concealing weak reasoning?
I ask as I've occasionally suspected something similar, purely because Moldbug's floridly verbose prose style (and this is me saying that!) makes his essays each a marvelous hike into the semantic equivalent of the deep back woods, and there are many thickets within those bosques where a sneaky thing might well choose to hide. (Probably from revenuers.)
It's clearly a style choice, because Yarvin doesn't do it; only Moldbug does. And, I mean, I like it; it is a rare pleasure for me to encounter a modern writer who plays with language in a way that's other than masturbatory. But it does seem well suited to making up for weakness of reasoning with strength of narrative, and I'd be interested to see someone point to an example, or better several, of Moldbug palming a card.
It started in the early days of Unqualified Reservations. He used to write relatively short posts, about 1500-2000 words; the comments sections promptly filled with people calling him out on his bad reasoning, lack of knowledge and misuse of terms. He then pivoted to his better-known style, where he first spends 1000 words redefining basic terms so that he can make striking statements (most famously, "America is a communist country") without being called on them immediately.
I ask as I've occasionally suspected something similar, purely because Moldbug's floridly verbose prose style (and this is me saying that!) makes his essays each a marvelous hike into the semantic equivalent of the deep back woods, and there are many thickets within those bosques where a sneaky thing might well choose to hide. (Probably from revenuers.)
It's clearly a style choice, because Yarvin doesn't do it; only Moldbug does. And, I mean, I like it; it is a rare pleasure for me to encounter a modern writer who plays with language in a way that's other than masturbatory. But it does seem well suited to making up for weakness of reasoning with strength of narrative, and I'd be interested to see someone point to an example, or better several, of Moldbug palming a card.