Apparently DOGE isn’t killing enough people (literally or metaphorically)
This post reminded me to ask: what’s the over-under on Moldy skipping out on child support?
oh god has he spawned???
thrice
he’s got that hybrid vigor
It’s been a long time since I read any moldbug, and I vaguely recalled him as someone as a tedious reactionary who wouldn’t stop goddamn writing. Was he always this murderously unhinged, openly fantasising about mass graves?
Anyway, I hope the realisation that the ultra rich are no smarter or more capable than anyone else gnaws away at what ever he has in lieu of a soul and consumes the rest of him.
@rook @sneerclub No; back in the early 1990s he was an amusing usenet troll with a sideline in ice-cold sarcasm, but the libertarianism hadn’t eaten his brain yet (although it had already gotten to his elder brother, the cypherpunk).
This appears to be him in his Downfall era, pacing his doomsday bunker off his tits on Pervitin.
Yeah the genocidal imagery was downright unhinged, much worse than I expected from what little I’ve previously read of his. I almost wonder how ideological adjacent allies like Siskind can still stand to be associated with him (but not really, Siskind can normalize any odious insanity if it serves his purposes).
Obvious joke is obvious, but
The essay brims with false dichotomies, logical inconsistencies, half-baked metaphors, and allusions to genocide. It careens from Romanian tractor factories to Harvard being turned “into dust. Into quarks” with the coherence of a meth-addled squirrel.
Harvard isn’t already full of Quarks?
Ooh, pants-on-head stupid semantics nonsense detected.
First, the government needs to be run top-down from the Oval Office. This is why we call it the “executive” branch. “Executive” is a literal synonym of “monarchical”—from “mono,” meaning “one,” and “archy,” meaning “regime.” “Autocratic” is fine too. The “executive branch” is the “autocratic branch,” or should be if English is English. Libs: if these words don’t mean what they mean, what do they mean?
Executive, as in pertaining to execution. Executing the the duties of a government as defined by legislation. Where the fuck did Curtsy get the impression that “executive” is somehow synonymous with “monarchical”? Did he mix it up with “exclusive”? Even corporations often have multiple executives with different roles.
Mr. Thiel you have so much fucking money couldn’t you afford a fascist philosopher king who is more intelligent than this guy who thinks an “executioner” is a guy that makes you a dictator?
Did he just pull a “according to the dictionary”? Sorry Moldbug, you just are radically uncool no matter how many leather jackets you get.
Wait, late realization. So, if we are doing this, does this mean Moldbug is now on the side of the SJWs regarding the slave/master debate in regards to hardware? It is after all, literal slavery now, NRx: if these words and your logic don’t mean what they mean, what do they mean?
(Don’t take this as me being anti renaming the slave/master shit).
No, he’s in favor of human slavery, so he still wants to keep naming schemes evocative of it.
That is true.
the pampered boot is the pampered boot, no matter the windowdressing it applies
As anyone who has tracked SovCit discourse can confirm, the English language was definitively codified for all eternity by the 1996 edition of Black’s Law Dictionary and all other projects including future editions of that venerable title are the result of communist plots to undermine the sanctity of American freedom and our precious bodily fluids.
Shorter Moldbug: I am smarter than the framers of the US Constitution. Also, those traitors were wrong.
I agree with him insofar as Trump and his lackeys definitely think and act as if it was the “autocratic branch” and both the legislature and judiciary don’t seem to be interested in disabusing them of that notion
Etymology is not destiny. Otherwise, naughty children would be full of nothing, and (Borges’ example) sarcophagi would be the opposite of vegetarians. So, Moldy’s argument would be bad even if it were founded on linguistic facts, which it isn’t.
Exactly. It’s one thing to claim “nice comes from Latin nescius meaning ignorant therefore nice means stupid” and another to say “octopus and helicopter mean the same thing because helicopter comes from helico- meaning helical or spiral and pter meaning wing.”
Hehe, Nescius Moldbug.
sarcophagi would be the opposite of vegetarians
Unrelated slightly amusing fact, sarcophagos is still the word for carnivorous in Greek, the amusing part being that the word for vegetarian is chortophagos and how weirdly close it is to being a slur since it literally means grass eater.
I am easily amused.
His fears are my hope, that Trump fucking up hard enough will send the pendulum of public opinion the other way (and then the Democrats use that to push some actually leftist policies through… it’s a hope not an actual prediction).
He cultivated this incompetence and worshiped at the altar of the Silicon Valley CEO, so seeing him confronted with Elon’s and Trump’s clumsy incompetence is some nice schadenfreude.
aww, poor baby, he didn’t consider the risk of incentives around an avaricious power-hungry narcissist! whoops! what an utterly embarrassing and predictable mistake to make
(get fucked moldbug)
He will never stop to reflect that his “philosophy,” such as it is, is explicitly tailored for avaricious power-hungry narcissists, soooooo
“what if my CEO god-king decides not to follow my plan” is a thesis even the worst startup founders have muddled through and I find it repeatedly funny as fuck that this mediocre monster of a man is hitting it
maybe it’s indicative of other things? maybe he believed so hard in the plan that he misjudged felon’s ability? maybe felon just conned him easily? extremely possible on multiple fronts, and still just as funny
imagine how fucking frustrated the little shitgoblin must be. it makes my angry heart flutter!
It’s weird how you can always find autocracy supporters in every era despite the overwhelmingly strong and incredibly obvious counterargument “what if the autocrat wants to do something you don’t like”
I’m reminded of an old essay from Siskind that tried to break down the different approaches to disagreement as either “conflict theory” - different people want different, mutually incompatible things - and “mistake theory” where we all want the same basic thing but disagree about how to get it. Given the general silicon valley milieu’s (and YudRat’s specifically) affinity for “mistake theory” I think the susceptibility to authoritarianism and fascism fits remarkably well. After all, if we all want the same basic thing the only way the autocrat could do something we don’t like is if they were wrong, so we just have to get a reasonable enough autocrat and give them absolute power, at which point they can magically solve all problems. See also the singularity God AI nonsense.
If I had my wish, it would be that this doesn’t just remind people of how authoritarians can be/are evil or incompetent, but also that the general structure isn’t actually more “efficient” because whatever delays the democratic process introduces are dwarfed by the inevitable difficulties of just trying to do anything at the scale of any modern state, much less the sheer scale of the USA.
I actually think it’s part-and-parcel of Yarvin’s personality. As much as he rails against “the Cathedral,” PMCs, whatever, he himself is a perfect example of a pathological middle manager. Somebody who wants power without having to shoulder ultimate responsibility. He craves the childishly simplified social environment of a medieval-fantasy king’s court, but he doesn’t want to be the king himself. He wants to be (and has been, up until now) the scheming vizier who can run his manipulation games in the background, deciding who gets in front of the king but not having to take the heat if the king makes a bad decision. (And the “kings” he works for have made plenty of bad decisions, but consequences have only just begun to catch up.)
I suspect this newfound mainstream attention is far more uncomfortable than it is validating for him. Perhaps the NYT profile was a burst of exhilaration, but the shine has worn off quickly. This correlates with the story last year about him coming back to Urbit as a “wartime CEO.” If Urbit is so damn important for building his ridiculous vision, why wasn’t he running it the whole time? He doesn’t actually want to be CEO of anything. Power without responsibility.
As a prominent intellectual voice criticizing the current administration, our boy Curtis should really be grateful that they don’t hew more closely to his preferred fascist project, as if they did they would have the incentive to be just as if not more brutal in stomping out “credible” independent opposition from the right as from existing liberal institutions. After all the fascist project relies on subverting existing institutions that are too tied up in their own bureaucracy and politicking to effectively oppose them, while the whole point Yarvin has made across his whole career is that the fascists have no such impediment or incentive for restraint. The Night of the Long Knives predated Kristallnacht by more than 4 years, after all.
if I were to make any predictive guesses about this at all (and I know the possible folly herein): probably the biggest issue with this is that he’ll try use it as a beacon for others (thiel? thiel-shaped people) to put effort behind “correcting the path”
and there’s enough ghouls invested in this to try that a not-insignificant amount
