I have upvoted for asking good questions :-)

If it helps, I think maybe you are thinking of "neo-reactionaries" and "progressives" as being a local modern phenomena, perhaps even just happening in the comments of this article.

If you post a PDF in the thread with your own idiosyncratic ideals, that serves for you to describe what you mean and stand for and think is good, and functions as the "ground" of a debate that you're willing to defend.

On the other hand, nydrwacu is coming at this from the perspective of a deeply-read aspiring expert in the practicalities of political semiotics. I think, for example, that his reference to a capitalized "World Spirit" is a reference to Hegel's concept of a Weltgeist which was widely known in the past, and explicitly used as a concept under which to organize actual historically existing political factions. If you were "against the Weltgeist" it had a simultaneously factional and practical meaning that was necessarily related both to meta-ethical doctrines and to propaganda processes that bound factions into social machines with many real world consequences that can themselves be judged.

When you said "neoreaction has a severe problem talking to ethical naturalists in general" (presuming pointing with the word "neoreaction" to speakers in this thread as "neoreaction") nydrwacu responded by pointing to actual "neoreactionaries" (not "I'm not a neoreactionary but I read them sometimes" but full fledged ones) who are not LWers and not in this thread (like Roissy and the Hestia Society) who appear to have some grounding in "naturalistic ethics". However their naturalistic ethics are grounded in things other than something with historical continuity with the faction that used the Weltgeist in their rallying cries...

(Or at least that's what they claim... For myself, I think neoreactionaries are in some sense just "super-ultra-progressives" if their own theories are applied to them in ways they might object to.)

A deeper issue here might be that neo-reactionaires have explicit theories about political categorization processes themselves (how they work, when they disgree, how to use them, etc), and one of their categorization techniques is socio-political cladistics.

Thus, if you use a Weltgeist-like justification, and are clearly influenced by previous Weltgeist-using political thinkers, neoreactionaries will sometimes lump you cladistically as all being part of the same unfurling memetic-political process that they can read about in history books and try to do bayesian updates thereby.

This is itself a somewhat controversial orientation. It is politically essentializing and can cause people to feel insulted when the descriptive process is applied to them with results they don't like based on history and people they don't even know about... if they didn't put the word "Weltgeist" in their personal statement of beliefs how can they be held responsible for the actions and consequences of people who did?!

However, despite the shortcomings of cladistic analysis, you can see that operating at this level of abstraction might be appealing to a certain kind of smarty-pants. Also, it has at least the virtue of creating a pre-stated data-based solution to some games of reference class tennis that might otherwise happen in political debates.