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Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

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Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#231

Post by AnimalMuppet »

1. Yarvin's system may work well if you put perfect people in place, and keep perfect people in place. Well, that's true of a lot of systems. Yarvin finds flaws in democracy with imperfect people, but his system needs perfect people in order to work. That's... not an improvement.

2. Even if you have these perfect people, they're going to be rare. Who's going to put them in power? The mass of non-perfect people? Why are they going to do that?

3. Yarvin fails his own test. He's looking for people whose blogs create no negative reactions? Yarvin stands self-condemned; he's not worthy to say how things should be run.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#232

Post by ordinaryradical »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #187
soulofmischief wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I directly use energy, both current and future (access to resources) as the main currency of my economic model of the world, not money. So I do understand that China is well-equipped to weather the storm on multiple fronts. But that's orthogonal to the fact that they will experience major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy, and also to the fact that China is a totalitar…

> China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime? I've been hearing this is eminent for my entire life.... > major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy Ah Peter Zeihan's evergreen bugaboo. Chinese old people != American old people, the cost of old people is completely different. While China does have a Ponzi economy, much like t…

You’ve been hearing it’s eminent because most of Chinese history has played out this way and the Chinese world view sees government as dynastic and cyclical as opposed to progressive or something else.

It’s plausible because it’s culturally coherent but that does not necessitate it. Communism could have easily been too alien to succeed but Mao made it contextual, so it unified the society instead.

The way I look at it, every government has an existential risk of getting out of sync with its host culture. When that happens, the system breaks and you get an irruption—revolution, civil war, Balkanization; is the current Chinese system and its overall direction compatible with its cultural inheritance? The degree of that answer is the degree of risk.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#233

Post by p3rls »

biophysboy wrote: post #99
senkora wrote: post #5

Scott Alexander also recently had a take on Curtis Yarvin’s recent actions: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out The gist of it is that he had interesting ideas on political systems in the past, but that his current ideas are nonsense, and in fact his old work explains exactly why his new work is nonsense.

A sci-fi variant of autocracy is not an interesting idea though. Why is a CEO king and a royal board of directors interesting? Its not even novel: his proposal is identical to that laid out by the "technocracy" movement a century ago.

technocracy, aka the progressive movement, aka the acknowledged antecedents of most this thread's political views -- funny how things change

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#234

Post by p3rls »

senkora wrote: post #5

Scott Alexander also recently had a take on Curtis Yarvin’s recent actions: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out The gist of it is that he had interesting ideas on political systems in the past, but that his current ideas are nonsense, and in fact his old work explains exactly why his new work is nonsense.

[flagged]

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#235

Post by sanderjd »

n2d4 wrote: post #91
defen wrote: post #74

Question for 'dang - is it possible to dig up the oldest post on this website that links to somewhere on "unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com" and has some amount of comments? It would be interesting to see how people were reacting to his ideas when he first posted them.

There's a filter for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unqualified-reservati... You can also use https://hn.algolia.com to find it.

This one is interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49533.

Submitted by pg!

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#236

Post by ben_w »

giantrobot wrote: post #170
ben_w wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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_…

> Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Lucky us, we get both. Not only both spying but both blackmailing us. No good for the common person can come from a panopticon.

I think you're underestimating the scope/magnitude of the problem.

But first: Governments can't function if they're not the top power — sovereign — in their territories. If they don't effectively block the growth of criminals, they always lose, and then the criminals replace them. This argument also applies to foreign governments intelligence agencies interfering locally.

For scope, consider: if some government was actually serious about road traffic laws, how long would it be before everyone that drove in their jurisdiction was banned from driving? I think the answer is between a week and a month.

If the UK fully enforced just its heroin laws and gave up literally everything else, the net effect is it would triple their prison population. If they tried to enforce all drugs laws, they'd bankrupt themselves building prisons.

A true panopticon government cannot function without commensurate liberalisation.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#237

Post by paleotrope »

runako wrote: post #25
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #18

I mentioned this previously, but I frequently think back to Gibson's "Jackpot" -- a cross-lashed, polycausal catastrophe: Lots of bad little things accumulating, building up a certain momentum. I think that even as far back as 2009, an astute observer would have noticed that society is beginning to burn through its seed corn. In some places, things are now getting extremely acute: https://www.neilobrien.co.uk/p/the-c…

> 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.

Please, the fatalism you see if concentrated in the overproduced elite. Overrepresented on the internet.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#238

Post by sanderjd »

ivraatiems wrote: post #80

The key driver behind Yarvin's ideology seems to be arrogance, covering perceived self-weakness. I think that's what makes it appealing to so many Silicon Valley "nerd king" type figures, and also why it has the form it does. Yarvin comes off - not just here, but through his writing and his work - as absolutely obsessed with proving himself and being smarter than everyone. He admits he has the gifted child need to pr…

... does it look impressive? I happened across it again recently, and it reinforced my previous view that it seems like a total mess and waste of a time.

What I honestly remain unclear on: Are these serious efforts - both the political writing and the technical work - or is it elaborate trolling?

Does anyone know?

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#239

Post by cjbgkagh »

ordinaryradical wrote: post #232
cjbgkagh wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime? I've been hearing this is eminent for my entire life.... > major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy Ah Peter Zeihan's evergreen bugaboo. Chinese old people != American old people, the cost of old people is completely different. While China does have a Ponzi economy, much like t…

You’ve been hearing it’s eminent because most of Chinese history has played out this way and the Chinese world view sees government as dynastic and cyclical as opposed to progressive or something else. It’s plausible because it’s culturally coherent but that does not necessitate it. Communism could have easily been too alien to succeed but Mao made it contextual, so it unified the society instead. The way I look at i…

I’ve been hearing it’s eminent because China is not a democracy, I hear the western perspective.

I see revolutions as an alternate elite agitating for change. In my model an effective suppression of an alternative elite is sufficient to prevent revolution. In my model it comes down to which secret police are more effective, the MSS or the CIA.

Which is especially relevant here because how much of the ‘Thielverse’ is really a CIA cutout, is Yarvin an external expression of an internal CIA power struggle.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#240

Post by ponector »

ben_w wrote: post #120
soulofmischief wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_…

>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.

It can go both ways. 75 years ago Great Britain was superpower. Nowadays people are struggling to afford living there. And future is grim.

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