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Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

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Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#251

Post by timmytokyo »

rendang wrote: post #249
timmytokyo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://miniver.blogspot.com/2024/01/scott-alexander-siskind...

This is just a preaching-to-the-choir description of the fact that Siskind does not hold 100% to egalitarian leftism. Unless you're already a doctrinaire egalitarian leftist, I don't see why reading this would change your opinion of him by a millimeter

Yeah, I guess it's true that people who (1) like eugenics and "human biodiversity" (i.e., race science), and (2) think neoreactionism is "edgy and cool" are not egalitarian or leftist.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#252

Post by coldtea »

mmustapic wrote: post #225
rendang wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you say the same thing about parents?

No. In most countries there are laws restricting what parents can do. On the other hand, nobody is proposing a father figure running a country, so I don't see the connection here.

>nobody is proposing a father figure running a country

Nobody? Isn't that one of the oldest job descriptions or similes for a ruler?

Hell, even Stalin was addressed as "loving father".

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#253

Post by TSiege »

sanderjd wrote: post #241
TSiege wrote: post #229

Why is this post being flagged?

Presumably because it's mostly political in nature and people here are generally tired of the whole Curtis Yarvin thing. We've had like an extra ten to fifteen years of hearing about this guy than most people... I didn't flag it, and clearly I'm here commenting, but I'm also sympathetic to people flagging this.

Given his salience atm and his presence here that you mentioned, I believe flagging this post reflects poorly on hackernews

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#254

Post by Hikikomori »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #44
sitkack wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's foppish and playful more than he is scary. This is a very unwise stance to take. Peter Thiel has teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to implement this plan. This is why A16Z and Musk put Trump in power, it is precisely to implement this plan.

Musk is on the outs. And what if there is no grand conspiracy? We're extremely far from any of Yarvin's "plans" at any rate. Yarvin's most cherished plan was to create a shadow university called the "Antiversity" -- a sort of repository of all truths unbeholden to politics and fads. Is this a bad idea? Which other Yarvin ideas scare you so?

https://www.project2025.observer/

Its ongoing, and this is just phase 1 of whatever they've cooked up. But its not like all Yarvins ideas are happening, its an amalgamation of his ideas and Christian fascism. It's likely they will just Trump at some point and then they'll have their true puppet believer as president.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#255

Post by coldtea »

exizt88 wrote: post #67

One of my favorite things about Curtis Yarvin is that one of his main ideas is laughably easy to prove wrong. He says that whenever we go into the past, the previous generation seems to be more "right-wing" than the current one. Which is almost comically wrong. For example, you get Victorian Era being much more conservative than its predecessor, Georgian Era. Same goes for Christian Roman Empire vs Pagan Roman Empire…

Well, it's not about being monotonically the case year-over-year, but the overal "weighted average" direction of the vector pointing towards less right-wing.

Obviously e.g. the Weimar youth was liberal and partying and then Germans turned to fascism in the 30s. But that was a temporary setback, not the general direction of change. Overall Germans of 20th century are much less conservative and right wing than Germans of the 19th century, same for 18th century and so on.

It's also not really about antiquity, but about the arrow of modernity (say, 16th century onwards). The concept of left/right wing is not something applicable to Pagans and Romans (although both were way more "right wing" than the Christian era if we try to judge them under this anachronism).

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#256

Post by esseph »

cassepipe wrote: post #73
ceejayoz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And what if there is no grand conspiracy? You did the thing! "'How dangerous is it that we are being linked?' Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people”—social-justice warriors—'wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kin…

Source ?

The link?

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#257

Post by colechristensen »

skrtskrt wrote: post #175
colechristensen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Antiversity" -- a sort of repository of all truths unbeholden to politics and fads. Is this a bad idea? It's not an idea in good faith. The people talking the loudest about political bias and trends being "wrong" are very much more likely to be extremely biased and following fads themselves. If you actually cared about unbaised truths you'd be having good faith debates and be open to critical interpretation. But th…

Yes and by and large things that "they won't teach you in college" are because they have been already looked into and rejected by any serious academic. These institutions are not above criticism (particularly in regards to economic theory IMO) but universities not teaching like, race science and holocaust denialism is not because they are scared of some "alternate truth" out there.

>These institutions are not above criticism

And there's a troubling problem that the criticism isn't being addressed.

One of the reasons we're in the political extremist situation is that the only ones seemingly capable of getting anything done are the fascists with no respect for rule of law. People get so sick for so long of nothing getting better that large numbers of them are turning to extremists who are actually addressing problems. Not in good ways or ways that many of us support, but they're in power because they're doing something.

Reasonable people failing to address reasonable problems encourage extremists. Now more than ever we have to do a great job of fairly managing our own house or it's going to get taken over by people will do it one way or another.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#258

Post by krapp »

goatlover wrote: post #195
freedomben wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like Yarvin's ideas that I've heard, but GP has a point. There's almost no point to posting something that will just get downvoted quickly (which any defense of Yarvin certainly would), regardless of whether it makes any interesting points. Once it's dead it won't get much if any interaction. It's not about being afraid of people criticizing, it's about expending the effort to write a quality comment that won…

It probably has a lot to do with Yarvin's influence at least partially leading the tech CEOs and the current administration down a similar authoritarian path as the USSR, North Korea, China. Or maybe better comparison, Putin's Russian and Orban's Hungary. Why should we take those ideas seriously in liberal democratic societies? We don't take Mein Kampf's ideas seriously.

I don't know about other liberal democratic societies, but there are plenty of people in the US who take Mein Kampf's ideas seriously, and there have been since it was published. Hitler credited America's genocide against Native Americans, segregation and eugenics ideals as an inspiration in it.

American culture has never been entirely averse to authoritarianism, so long as it sends the correct signals (white majority, Christian sympathy, anti-government.) There will always be a significant number of Americans taking such ideas seriously, this is simply inevitable in a culture whose second most foundational principle is the right to shoot people with guns.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#259

Post by Hikikomori »

p3rls wrote: post #233
biophysboy wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Musks grandfather was part of Technocracy Incorporated in Canada before it was banned, then moved to south Africa as Canada wasn't racist enough.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#260

Post by UncleOxidant »

ragnese wrote: post #196
evklein wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Did things always feel like this? I wonder about this, too. What were things like in, say, the 1960s? When you went to buy a new appliance, did you feel like the appliance was designed to intentionally screw you as much as possible via planned obsolescence, anti-consumer-repair measures, purchased "warranties" that had tons of fine print so you could never actually benefit, etc? Even as a kid growing up in the 80s…

> When you went to buy a new appliance, did you feel like the appliance was designed to intentionally screw you as much as possible via planned obsolescence

I feel like it's way worse now. We bought our first home in 1990. It was built in 1974. The Whirlpool dishwasher was original from when the house was built. It was harvest gold, but we discovered there were almond and avocado green panels inside the door and you could switch them out if your decor changed, meaning that they were planning for this dishwasher to last a while. In the 20 years we lived there we only had trouble with it once and it turned out that replacing a solenoid was quite easy to do. When we moved to another house we rented that house out. That dishwasher lasted until 2014. A dishwasher that lasts 40 years is unheard of now. Our last dishwasher barely made it 7 years.

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