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Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

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Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. You should read what Schopenhauer had to say about government, and this was barely 150 years ago, in the mid 19th. > "In general, the monarchical form of government is that which is natural to man; just as it is natural to bees and ants, to a flight of cranes, a herd of wandering elephants, a pack of wolves seeking prey in common, and many other animals, all of which place one of their number at the head of the…

The counter-argument is that even if you say democracy is sub-optimal, it’s certainly more stable than monarchy. Monarchy sounds good when you have a benevolent philosopher-king that does all the right things, but what if you get a bad king? That could mean decades of poor leadership. With a monarchy, lighting has to strike over and over again.

Yet throughout history monarchies have been, by and large, more stable than democracies. There are well-attested dynasties that have lasted for many centuries -- the Zhou, Abbasid, and Rurikid dynasties were all in power for >700 years!

The Abbasid dynasty was at last conquered by the Ottomans -- themselves a >600-year dynasty.

Is there a democracy worthy of the name that has ever lasted >300 years?

"Certainly more stable than monarchy" -- nothing certain about it! History teaches just the opposite.

Sure, from time to time you get a bad emperor. Rome was lousy with bad emperors, towards the end. They tended to be "managed" by their handlers/Praetorians, and the empire marches on.

And Chinese history is basically like: Strong+cunning warrior leads a rebellion and establishes a dynasty, seizing the Mandate of Heaven. His heir, though still vigorous, is less strong and less cunning. His heir is weaker and duller still. By the 10th generation the emperor is a ne'er-do-well who does nothing but eat and write insipid poetry, and the empire is left to eunuchs and oligarchs who loot the populace. Rebellion ensues, a new warrior starts a new dynasty, and so it goes... This predictable cycle was stable for well over 1000 years.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#302
> The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp.

If the prize is being "all-powerful", then you can just assassinate your way to king-CEO, after which you're immune. This system is incredibly easy to hack, and has happened countless of times throughout history.

Giving people cryptographic keys to disarm weapons is not going to change much about that and is just hand-waving with extra steps. Try disarming my knife with your cryptography. Oh no, I repeatedly stabbed you in the chest before you could enter your passphrase. Too bad.

This is like communists: "yeah sure, in the past it ended in spectacular failure, but this time we'll get it right!" (if they're not outright denying things such as Stalin's purges from ever happening that is).

What strikes me is just how incredibly naïve, dumb, and unsophisticated all of this is.

Yarvin seems to have convinced himself that he's always the smartest person in the room, always acts fully rational, and that everything he says is a singularity of pure logic. It's easy to end up with some very curious ideas that way, especially if you combine that with his psychological ... issues.

Once you start dismissing people that disagree as "too dumb to understand the ideas" or consider giving them "Voight-Kampff test" to prove they're not "NPCs" you know you're off the deep end.

If nothing else, all of this is useful to read as a cautionary tale: how you too, as a smart person, can believe some really dumb stuff (to say nothing on the morality of it all).

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not necessarily, egalitarian cultures like N Europe practice eugenics through selective abortion of the disabled.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#304

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/red-pill-pr... Another dropout; never finished his PhD: "At 15, Yarvin entered college as part of Johns Hopkins' longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. A year later, he transferred to Brown University in Rhode Island as a legacy admission to the Ivy League liberal arts college, where his parents had met in the mid-'60s. After graduating, it was on to a…

"When I ask people to answer that question, I ask them to look around the room and point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy, because these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies. You're looking around, and you see, for example, a laptop, and that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy."

A computer. What a coincidence.

His entire world revolves around computers. As such, his theories are detached from reality.

https://www.nytimmes.com/2025/01/22/opinion/trump-vance-yarv...

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#305
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world population is supposed to start declining between 2080-2100 depending on your source. It's not just China, it's a global problem.

It's a China problem that they are currently projected to lose half of their massive 1.5bil population within a century, potentially putting significant strain on existing social and economic infrastructure.

So is the United States, but that is also the global population trend.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-po...

https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-release...

https://www.aei.org/articles/fewer-and-faster-global-fertili...

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#306
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world population is supposed to start declining between 2080-2100 depending on your source. It's not just China, it's a global problem.

It's a China problem that they are currently projected to lose half of their massive 1.5bil population within a century, potentially putting significant strain on existing social and economic infrastructure.

It's a global population trend.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-po...

https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-release...

https://www.aei.org/articles/fewer-and-faster-global-fertili...

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#307

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

> Unless you're already a doctrinaire egalitarian leftist, I don't see why reading this would change your opinion of him by a millimeter

It seems possible that if someone wasn’t familiar with Scott’s position on race science, they could read about his position on race science and then have that influence their opinion of him.

Out of curiosity, are you lumping everybody into two groups? The way your sentence was worded it sounds like there are on one hand people that believe in race science, and on the other hand “doctrinaire egalitarian leftists”. If the only qualification required to be a “doctrinaire egalitarian leftist” is “not believing in race science”, then you’ve kind of just said “Unless [you don’t believe in race science], I don’t see why reading this would change your opinion of him by a millimeter”, which might actually kind of underscore some people’s issue with him.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been difficult since ~2020 to truly read pieces that are heterodox. Everyone who was painting outside the lines was effectively erased from the polite society of the online squares. Yarvis doesn't even touch many of the existing third rails today.

lol, this is the opposite of the case. It has never ever been easier to consume content (text, audio, video, whatever) outside the mainstream.

The president of the United States was kicked off Twitter in 2020. Parler was removed from the App Store in 2020.

"Now" is a lot different than 4-5 years ago.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#309
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.

Having had a stint in my youthful life where I studied Technocracy a great deal, I still see some powerful concepts that I can't let go of. The emphasis on standardization and elimination of the price system, even if nothing more than a though experiment on human nature, seemed like worthwhile concepts to consider. Rather than demonize the technocracy movement, I would recommend some investigation into the ideas that underpinned it, especially as we now witness a transition from a limitless growth world to steady state.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No. There were pretty big changes after 1987, 9/11, and 2008. Even prior to the current regime this is not what normal used to feel like in the US.
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