Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 453 posts

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#331

Post by const_cast »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #145
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? That's exactly why the idea is incorrect. People wise enough and unbiased enough to be entrusted with unchecked power are few; ones that are incorruptible enough to be trusted with it for long are even fewer. And those who want such power are almost always the people who are least to be trusted with it. So, yeah. T…

It's true, a humble and selfless person would never take on such a job, because they understand themselves well enough to know they can't handle it. Only someone narcissistic would willingly take on that role, which is why we repeatedly see dictators of that nature.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#332

Post by nine_k »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #329
NickC25 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he is also committed to race science, the belief that diversity is fundamentally bad Ironically, he's jewish. He's a modern day tech-bro Clayton Bigsby.

How is this ironic?

Most prominent racist movements of last few centuries considered Jewish people undesirable, all the way to the idea of complete extermination.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#333

Post by LAC-Tech »

I always thought Yarvin was an interesting writer. Like a lot of people on the political fringe (and I've seen this from libertarians and socialists as well) he's fantastic and diagnosing problems and making us look at our own system with new eyes, but rather fumbles when it comes to workable solutions.

He also seems to lose all biting insight and critique when it comes to one certain state he has a legal right to be a citizen of. I'll leave this for readers to find out which one.

I've never made much of his apparent association to JD Vance. Maybe this is the sort of street cred stuff vance liked to surround himself with, much as Obama did with his Bill Ayers association, but I doubt it affected either men much in practice.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#335

Post by const_cast »

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

Progressiveness is like waves of wind. It comes and it goes, and it goes more often then it comes. We have extremely brief sections of time where a lot of progressiveness is achieved, and then we have longer periods of darkness where we stagnate or regress.

Reconstruction, followed by Jim Crow. The late 70s had a period of progressiveness, of openness, especially towards homosexuals. Then AIDS came, and that was all forgotten. The 80s were another dark age.

In the 90s we had another brief opening, but that too ended sooner than it started. We didn't pick up until the 2010s. By 2014/2015 progressiveness was on the way out, just in time for marriage equality to push through. And now, we are in another dark period and have been for a while.

Technocracy just follow wherever the wind blows. Progressiveness will come back, and hopefully we can push enough through that we'll be set for the next decade to come. That's really what it's all about - get as much done as fast as possible, so that it cannot all be reverted, no matter how hard conservatives try.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#336

Post by sanderjd »

homefree wrote: post #327
sanderjd wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, ok, I read this. Are there any parts of it that you find particularly thoughtful about power or areas of democratic failure that are worth thinking about? I think we probably just fundamentally disagree here, because to me, this whole thing seems like drivel. Are there gems in there that I'm just not recognizing?

The idea that stuck out to me is even if you repeal chevron deference and argue congress should be making laws like it’s supposed to, the outcome will be vague laws which then get interpreted by the courts, pushing the real legislation from administration technocrats that might at least be subject matter experts in the best case to unelected judges that probably don’t know anything. The symbolic idea of who holds pow…

Thanks, that's helpful. I agree that first point is interesting, but it's maybe the most mainstream view he expresses in the article. (The issue of judicial power is pretty commonly discussed by normie liberals as well!) But that's not really a knock against it. So fair enough, thanks for calling that one out!

I think the doge thing is silly though. It didn't fail because it was "constrained in ways that make success unlikely", it failed because: 1. There was obviously just arithmetically not enough money in discretionary spending to make more than a tiny dent in spending, and 2. They never made even the most cursory effort to improve efficiency, and just went with this ideological chainsaw approach. Maybe there's some version of the idea that was (and is) a good one, but it was always doomed to fail as conceived and led.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#337

Post by const_cast »

coldtea wrote: post #248
kiitos wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely deny that there are any interesting ideas in there. We've done this, it was called the dark ages and it sucked and we moved past it. Engaging with this pablum in any way is granting it attention and vigor it obviously doesn't deserve.

> We've done this, it was called the dark ages and it sucked and we moved past it. Well, the "dark ages" is now widely considered a misnomer, and that time is seen as an important era development-wise.

But the development was very slow, and it was held back by policy and a stronghold by leaders onto the status-quo.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#338

Post by const_cast »

Sabinus wrote: post #296
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he says rich people should rule the world, ergo rich people like him and attempt to encode his very stupid ideas into our politics, ergo we all have to care what he says It’s really a testament to how astonishingly stupid some of those rich folks are that they find any of Yarvin’s work compelling.

That's what I've been wondering. How is this much different from Nixon's trickle down economics? An idea the wealthy are happy to promote because it protects their influence.

More to the point, how is this any different than serfdom? The inevitable result of "optimize for the wealthy" seems to be that. And, well, we did that. And it sucked.

I don't understand why we're reinventing feudalism over and over again and acting like it's novel. Giving all the tools to the wealthy doesn't make society a better place, and we've proved that. It decidedly stagnates everything, which, ironically, leads to very poor living conditions, including for the wealthy. So it's not even good for them, it's just self-destructive.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#339

Post by const_cast »

declan_roberts wrote: post #308
sanderjd wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

.. which are actions by private institutions, not affronts to free speech. And, might I remind everyone, where because of legitimate calls to violence which did actually result in a real insurrection, for real.

I mean, it's not like these were just empty words. People did actually die. Donald Trump did, and still does, repeat a lot of lies with the intention of sowing chaos and violence.

Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

#340

Post by biophysboy »

quadragenarian wrote: post #309
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.

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…

My basic issue with technocrats is that they conflate aesthetic rationality with effective rationality. The perfect city is not a symmetric grid, for example. Yarvin’s writing is Brasilia in Substack-form. A lot of tech “geniuses” are like this (e.g. Thiel, Andreesen)
Post reply on HN