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Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

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Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#111

Post by tempestn »

legitster wrote: post #40

Growing up, one of my criticisms of Orson Scott Card's "Enderverse" was how unrealistic it seemed that children could literally rise to power simply through posting theories and arguments on the internet. How wrong I was.

One thing I'll say for the current era is that it has made a lot of such fiction appear more realistic in hindsight.

Another example is the Silo book series, recently adapted to a series on Apple TV. I remember reading those books thinking it was insane than the people would act in such clearly counter-productive ways against their own interests, or that leadership would make up elaborate lies rather than just telling people the truth so they would see why certain actions were necessary. And now I'm watching the same plot a decade later, and it all hits home.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#113

Post by thrance »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #60
nehal3m wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this even is their final form...

I think it is. This stood out to me: > As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most d…

Indeed, we'll have one last neoliberal half-competent democratic leadership that will undo ~10% of the damage Trump did, and then we'll have the true final boss. The current fascist was ok, but the next fascist will be the reaaal deal.

Much suffering is to be found in the future. I find solace in the fact that all fascist states eventually crumble under the weight of their irrationality and incompetence.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#114

Post by impossiblefork »

bdangubic wrote: post #75
cempaka wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good measure of where China really stands is the fact that it continues to do business with Israel, even though it would be quite trivial to cut ties.

countries have no friends or enemies, only national interests

This was a radical and fantastic idea of Palmerston's, which led to vigorous debate.

But the interest in Palmerston's case going against Portugal and hunting the slave ships with the intent of ending the slave trade. That's what he felt was England's interest.

Other things Palmerston cared about was that no country would end up powerful enough to dominate the entire world-- that's another thing he saw as part of England's interest. How sad to reduce interest to economic concerns or maintaining traditional alliances, when the idea was initially to justify this act of going against Portugal and the traditional alliance.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#115

Post by kragen »

nailer wrote: post #109
kragen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the Vice President of the US is a devotee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:JD_Vance/Archive_1#%E2%80... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:JD_Vance/Archive_2#Politi...

Can you post direct links to actual references, rather than Wikipedia talk pages?

That's a perfectly reasonable request, but I didn't have them.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/15/jd-vance-5... is one, I guess. Aha, https://unherd.com/2024/11/j-d-vance-de-facto-prince-of-the-... says,

> Vance has described himself as a “reactionary” at war with the “regime”. He drops casual references to his personal friend Curtis Yarvin, and he’s fond of delivering thunderous pronouncements like “the universities are the enemy” (the title of a 2021 speech) and “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_JD_Vanc... looks like the jackpot, though, leading to https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-w...:

> Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration. “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said on a conservative podcast in 2021, adding: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024 [and] I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

Which links to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMq1ZEcyztY.

And https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right... is entitled, "What Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and others are learning from Curtis Yarvin and the New Right,":

> Yarvin had given people a way to articulate a notion that somehow felt subversive to say out loud in America—that history was headed in the wrong direction. “Somebody said something earlier that captured it for me,” [Yarvin's girlfriend] Laurenson said, just before they had to leave to go to a slightly hush-hush private dinner with Vance and a few others. “They said, ‘You can be here and know you’re not alone.’” (...)

> “So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said. Murphy chortled knowingly. “So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went on. “And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#116

Post by evklein »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #51
runako wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> society is beginning to burn through its seed corn This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time. Other countries continue to invest in the future. China, among others, do not suffer the current American fatalism.

> in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief... that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time. I mean, living in 2025 America that's not a bad default assumption to make, is it? By default when the solar salesman (or pest control salesman) comes to the door I consider it a scam because it generally is (same for phone sales, and most internet ads). Is everything a scam? No. B…

I have no empirical evidence of this to present, but if you view every transaction as existing on some scale of scam-iness, where one side is you lose your house and wife and kids and the other is an amazing deal for you, the average position on that scale has shifted toward the backside pretty much the entirety of my life. Anything that comes to me first, I pretty much always write off as a scam. Email from someone I don't know? Scam. Car dearlership advertising 0% APR for 5 years on a brand new car? Scam. Even something like my workplace offering a new optional benefit - probably a scam. Did things always feel like this?

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#117

Post by foldU »

eikenberry wrote: post #110

Didn't have time to make it through the entire (long winded) article, but is it wrong to boil down his thinking to the simple idea that a benevolent, competent dictator is the best form of government? I ask as this seems like a very simplistic and obvious idea. The problem isn't that this is necessarily incorrect, it is how do you find this mythical figurehead? History has shown that we have never discovered a system…

he addresses this, you simply get airline pilots to pick them

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#118

Post by BobbyJo »

eikenberry wrote: post #110

Didn't have time to make it through the entire (long winded) article, but is it wrong to boil down his thinking to the simple idea that a benevolent, competent dictator is the best form of government? I ask as this seems like a very simplistic and obvious idea. The problem isn't that this is necessarily incorrect, it is how do you find this mythical figurehead? History has shown that we have never discovered a system…

> The problem isn't that this is necessarily incorrect, it is how do you find this mythical figurehead?

I think, historically, the problem has also been: what happens when they die? Then you need lightning to strike twice.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#119

Post by freejazz »

antisthenes wrote: post #12

It's pretty sad that loonies like this get a platform at all. The ultimate irony is that New Yorker in this case is writing an article about him, mocking his views...yet legitimizing them at the same time by associating their name with this kind of person at all. How is this guy different from any other of the thousands moderately-successful tech people with an obscure hobby project (Urbit). Just because of his far-o…

>How is this guy different from any other of the thousands moderately-successful tech people with an obscure hobby project (Urbit). Just because of his far-out-there views?

Did you read the article? Because he sits in immediate proximity to the power of the executive branch of the federal gov't, wherein a number of its most prominent members are devout fans of his who espouse his work...

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#120

Post by ben_w »

soulofmischief wrote: post #45
runako wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> society is beginning to burn through its seed corn This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time. Other countries continue to invest in the future. China, among others, do not suffer the current American fatalism.

China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100. They're well on their way to a massive population shock if they don't thread the needle carefully. There's also been lots of stories about bank closures and Chinese citizens losing their money. Additionally, China, like the US and many other world powers, is a totalitarian authoritarian government which is hostile towards its people. Whether China has high-speed…

> China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100.

75 years is a long time. At lot can change.

75 years ago, China was just finishing its civil war, with the losers retreating to Taiwan. Land reform had an "estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement

The infamous famine was only about 65 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

Now, I won't claim confidence that they will solve anything; but they are a dictatorship and they deliberately had a "once child" policy for a bit to prevent massive over-population, so it's absolutely conceiveable that their leadership sees too few children per woman and says "ok, new rule: if you want a kid, first one has got to be a girl, mandatory screenings during pregnancy".

> increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.

Given how cheap surveilance is, all nations faced a choice before GenAI made it even weirder: Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Only solution I can see is extreme liberalisation, where personal behaviour most of us find repugnant is not just legally permitted but also socially permitted.

Now that GenAI is in the mix, we need someone trustworthy to document reality and say what has even really happened. Insert your own jokes about the intersection of "government" and "someone trustworthy", but the need exists.

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