371–380 of 453 posts
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I never quite put it together but Vance worked at Mithril Capital for Peter Thiel. Thiel's other ventures include Palantir, Valar Ventures and he's an investor in Anduril. How can someone be such a diehard Tolkien nerd and endorse government by corporation? Does he think the hero was Saruman?
The fact that he named his surveillance company Palantir tells me that he's got that story flipped around.
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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 s…
I mean, democracy became popular less than 300 years ago, so probably not. That being said, if you squint then the UK is pushing 400 years of some form of democracy (modulo all the biased voting and the franchise only being given to rich people).
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> 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…
The only issue the fridge has had is that one of the defroster heater coils died (it has two- I guess because it's a side-by-side style, so the freezer part is tall). It wasn't very hard to replace. In fact, the hardest part was actually finding the part, itself.
I'll never understand why this man gets so much attention.
He found patronage in the American oligarchy (look up his ties with Peter Thiel, for example) and as a result, his ideas are now directly implemented by the current administration, that is 100% subservient to capital.
I mean it's so weird, one day some Republican says positive shit about Orban and the whole left wing media screams "oh no they're going to pull an Orban" and now suddenly it's "well actually no, we heard Vance has once read a Moldbug rant so actually they're going to install a king-CEO". Next day Trump is a fascist, the day after he's "Putin's asset". It gets a bit ridiculous to be honest. Do we really believe the administration believes in anything at all? I'm not convinced anybody running the US right now has the attention span to read a Yarvin post all the way to the end. It just feels like obsessive fearmongering to me at this point, stack up all the bogeymen you can think of on one big pile and say that the Trump administration is all of them at the same time.
I say this as someone who thinks Trump is the worst thing to happen to the world in quite some time. I worry that all this panic actively hurts the opposition and that anybody who kinda sorta likes Trump is going to be very tired very fast of this kind of reporting.
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And Trump said he knew nothing about project 2025 before the election. Yarvin has been close to Thiel for many years, is his advisor in some capacity, has invested in Yarvins companies, likely even friends. Vance worked for Thiel and his political career was bankrolled by Thiel. And you believe they barely know each other?
Thousands of people work for Thiel that closely. Most of them don't know each other at all.
Vance has called him his good friend before.
Trumps administration is implementing RAGE, something Yarvin came up with.
Why are you even trying to deny it when its so easily shown to be true.
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And Trump said he knew nothing about project 2025 before the election. Yarvin has been close to Thiel for many years, is his advisor in some capacity, has invested in Yarvins companies, likely even friends. Vance worked for Thiel and his political career was bankrolled by Thiel. And you believe they barely know each other?
Is it plausible? yes. So far evidence directly from Yarvin contradicts this and there's no hard evidence pointing to them being good buddies so I'm willing to accept his account.
Vance has called him his good friend before.
Trumps administration is implementing RAGE, something Yarvin came up with.
Why are you even trying to deny it when its so easily shown to be true.
https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrif...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-w...
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There are some Israeli officials who are extremists and talk that way, but they represent a right-wing extreme bloc of Israeli voters. These officials have a lot of power and influence right now for a variety of reasons. But this is by no means true of the majority of Israeli officials, nor of the public.
I'm sorry but the majority party in the Israeli government is unquestionably motivated by racism. I don't really care about the specific number of Israeli officials nationwide and their relative levels of personal racist views. The Israeli government is unabashedly engaged in a racially motivated genocide, and the officials carrying it out are in no way apologetic about their motivations. I never said anything about…
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I'm sorry but the majority party in the Israeli government is unquestionably motivated by racism. I don't really care about the specific number of Israeli officials nationwide and their relative levels of personal racist views. The Israeli government is unabashedly engaged in a racially motivated genocide, and the officials carrying it out are in no way apologetic about their motivations. I never said anything about…
They are attacking Hamas who are dedicated in their charter to destroying Israel as a state. Hamas is not a race.
> Over two-thirds of Israeli teens believe Arabs to be less intelligent, uncultured and violent. Over a third of Israeli teens fear Arabs all together
> 50% of Israelis taking part said they would not live in the same building as Arabs, will not befriend, or let their children befriend Arabs and would not let Arabs into their homes
> Another 2007 report, by the Center Against Racism, also found hostility against Arabs was on the rise. Among its findings, it reported that 75% of Israeli Jews do not approve of Arabs and Jews sharing apartment buildings; that over half of Jews would not want to have an Arab boss and that marrying an Arab amounts to "national treason"; and that 55% of the sample thought Arabs should be kept separate from Jews in entertainment sites. Half wanted the Israeli government to encourage Israeli Arabs to emigrate. About 40% believed Arab citizens should have their voting rights removed
Etc, etc. Many more examples can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Israel
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His father was Jewish but his mother is said to be a Protestant. He doesn't describe himself as Jewish as far as I can see.
Ironically, the same is true of Karl Marx! His father converted to Lutheranism and Karl was baptized as such. As a young man he wrote a paper on the topical question of the Jews in Prussia[0], regarded in the modern day as antisemitic, though probably tame for the era. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jewish_Question
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He found patronage in the American oligarchy (look up his ties with Peter Thiel, for example) and as a result, his ideas are now directly implemented by the current administration, that is 100% subservient to capital.
To be fair I don't follow at all. Are you saying that it's more likely for the US under Trump to become a Yarvin-style ultracapitalist monarchy than, say, an Orban-style just-about-dictatorship? Despite the fact that the first is one crackpot's weird idea on the internet and the latter is a model with a playbook that's demonstrated to work extremely well in practice? (if your goal is to stay in power as long as you c…
Fascism is always a big tent movement, that is surprisingly lenient in who it allows inside. Ultraliberalists (Thiel...), Christian traditionalists (Vance...), pro-Russians (Gabbard...), etc. They all find a seat in Trump's administration.
You have to remove this idea from your head that fascism is a focused ideology with a consistent system of ideas. It is anything but. There is no grand Machiavellian plan to build X, Y or Z.
My previous comment attempted to explain why Yarvin's ideas came into the public's eye: because he was sponsored by one of the factions that today occupies a prominent role in Trump's administration. Nothing more.
While fascism is internally inconsistent, it does exhibit some consistent aspects, explicited in the short essay I linked you. Close relations with the capitalist class is one of them, and indeed, this ties together Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, Trump...
So to answer your question: no, I don't think we're likely to get a CEO-king. But we will get a generic authoritarian government, which is where Orban's ended too. Not out of sheer ideology but as a result of every faction's pull towards something like that.
You might want to consume less liberal media, as those are forever clueless about what's happening since they can't reason about the prevalence of capital in Trump's politics. Actual left-wing media has been pretty spot-on in my experience, in predicting the general outline of Trump's policies. Deporting citizens? check. Cutting medicare/medicaid? check. Undoing constitutional checks to power? check.