Indeed. I remember when the Blacks in the NYT forced a White editor to quit because he had said some bad word. With demands that more of their own Blacks be promoted to get the higher salaries.
But of course, they can only do this with the approval of the Jewish Sulzberger family and its Jewish chairman A.G. Sulzberger, and the Jewish editor-in-chief Josef Kahn. ("Noo, the Sulzbergers are only mixed Jewish!" Just like Obama was only half Black, so clearly not motived by being Black.) So maybe the radical Black effort in the newspaper was only possible with the approval of those at the top, after all. We saw this in Hollywood too. "#oscarssowhite"! Though Moldbug would never say this. It's safer to focus on monarchy (good) vs democracy (bad).
NYT Interviewer: “your background information confuses me.” (All this obfuscation! Sounds like a freshman complaining in a philosophy class.) And yet the NYT hails itself as America’s, and possibly the world’s, preeminent daily.
And that is the problem at the core of Moldbug’s argument. He seems to argue that any king (or absolutist corporate state) is better than any democracy. And yet we’re as likely to get Boeing kings as we are Apple kings. More likely I’d bet, since “capitalists” these days primarily seem to hollow out their product lines and human staff so that they can manipulate currency, buy back stocks, and play with the numbers of their books.
I like Yarvin. He makes me think. And making fun of the interviewer is rock star cool. Just make sure you aren’t taking him too seriously
To the point. Yarvin's iconoclasm towards "The Cathedral" is refreshing, but I do not trust his tech bro pro technocrat instincts. Running a society is way different than designing a computer and way more messy, and less controllable. Like many borderline autistic savants he is dazzled by the brilliance of his own metaphors to the point of not fully thinking through if they full map reality.
I was reading Moldbug back in the early 2010s, and I have to admit he is kind of wordy.
That and, as you said, we're likely to get pretty crappy kings. Whether it's heirs with 10 great-great-grandparents or people who believe men and women are the same, elites tend to get hermetic and believe their own BS after a while.
The NYT Magazine portion of the interview was the typical gotcha journalism where musty left/liberal shibboleths were dusted off and presented as deadly daggers aimed at Yarvin's more "edgy" ledes and arguments over the years. The attempt fizzled and no ground was gained by either side.
The follow-up online interview (available in the video) was wonderful: Marchese brought a more open and honest agenda to the encounter and was rewarded by understanding, instead of fighting, just what Yarvin was saying. Then the light went on; one can only hope it burns long and brightly.
Yarvin is interesting and I get the allure of dispensing with democracy since the system we have regularly ignores public opinion (illegal immigration, DEI) and busies itself with things completely unrelated to the welfare of the public but which are very important to various contractors that live off of federal largesse and offer lucrative post ‘public service’ employment. But I am not sure that I have seen any good explanation of how his alternative would avoid the same problem.
When people advocate for this they imagine people like themselves, I'm sorry, I mean people like they imagine themselves to be, running things. Problem solved.
And he can't explain why democracies from Turkey to Japan don't have mass immigration and cultural Marxism. He is just fooling people with his monarchy fantasy.
And if a democracy turns to a dictatorship today, why would it be a monarchy? It's ridiculous.
I've listened to several long interviews with Yarvin and used to read his rambling Mencius Moldbug posts. Many of his insights are interesting. I liked his essay on the ways in which blacks are treated as a new aristocracy. (https://malcolmpollack.com/2014/01/05/noblesse-sans-oblige/).
I also agree with Yarvin that democracy is inherently flawed. Some of its problems were laid out in a 01/10/2019 iSteve comment from Krakoklastes:
"If a candidate or a party passes some hurdle, such as a plurality or majority of votes, they have the legitimate authority to force everyone to pay for anything they decide to do, for a set period of time – including:
• doing some subset of the stuff they promised to do in the policy platform for which they were elected;
• doing stuff that was not part of their platform;
• doing stuff that they specifically said they would not do; and
• not doing stuff that they specifically promised to do."
That said, I don't see monarchy as a solution. Rome had its Seven Great Emperors and Singapore had Lee Kuan Yew, but other than a few exceptions, the track record of absolute rule is not encouraging.
Democracy is inherently flawed in that it doesn't scale. That's why the US was never a democracy. The design was chief executive elected by electors who were elected by a portion of society as determined by individual states. The central government was supposed to have powers limited to those things best handled by a single authority. The rest would go to the States or the people. If you didn't like how your state did things, you could try another.
I don't know Yarvin's work but I agree Monarchy is not the answer.
The thing to remember about the presidency is that it is a big world and a short day. There are limits on what one person can direct. And the system has not been updated to fit the limitations of one individual no matter how talented.
As an example, there should be multiple vice presidents who handle different portions of the government. The current president has over 200 direct reports. That is too many.
Winston Churchill: “Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.”
I have extremely mixed feelings about Mr. Yarvin. On the one hand he is an OG who is one of the founders of what we now call the dissident right, and was then called the alt-right. He helped bring acceptability to discussions we have here around subjects like race realism. OTH he is a slimy Jew (kidding sort of) and unashamed technocrat which just makes him another wing of the WEF crowd.
Yarvin is entertaining, but he is a satirical humorist more than a serious political thinker. And I don't trust anyone who publicly proclaims 'I am an intellectual', though I assume that that's part of the humorist schtick.
To get an idea of how brilliant he is, check out his comments as Mencius Moldbug on an iSteve post on the Shakespeare authorship controversy from c. 2010.
There are a few good, cogent concepts in his dense prose; the Cathedral, for example. Another one is that sovereign power can be subdivided, as in a democracy, and still be a unitary whole. Finally, the oligarchs always rule.
Well, if you talk to people who lived in Pat Brown's California, the products of state government were pretty darned good. From what I hear, hiring for state positions was pretty much the opposite of DEI, and people got fired for even middling performance. And as late as 1987, a real estate lawyer in Glendale told me it was still "the Wild West" in terms of development.
"It is a fifth-generation hereditary absolute monarchy. And this was very much the vision of the early progressives"
It was, back in the day. A lot has changed in five generations, including the vision.
Hard to see the current state of the NYT as vindicating monarchy.
Uh yes. Things have definitely changed from 5 generations ago.
Indeed. I remember when the Blacks in the NYT forced a White editor to quit because he had said some bad word. With demands that more of their own Blacks be promoted to get the higher salaries.
But of course, they can only do this with the approval of the Jewish Sulzberger family and its Jewish chairman A.G. Sulzberger, and the Jewish editor-in-chief Josef Kahn. ("Noo, the Sulzbergers are only mixed Jewish!" Just like Obama was only half Black, so clearly not motived by being Black.) So maybe the radical Black effort in the newspaper was only possible with the approval of those at the top, after all. We saw this in Hollywood too. "#oscarssowhite"! Though Moldbug would never say this. It's safer to focus on monarchy (good) vs democracy (bad).
NYT Interviewer: “your background information confuses me.” (All this obfuscation! Sounds like a freshman complaining in a philosophy class.) And yet the NYT hails itself as America’s, and possibly the world’s, preeminent daily.
And that is the problem at the core of Moldbug’s argument. He seems to argue that any king (or absolutist corporate state) is better than any democracy. And yet we’re as likely to get Boeing kings as we are Apple kings. More likely I’d bet, since “capitalists” these days primarily seem to hollow out their product lines and human staff so that they can manipulate currency, buy back stocks, and play with the numbers of their books.
I like Yarvin. He makes me think. And making fun of the interviewer is rock star cool. Just make sure you aren’t taking him too seriously
To the point. Yarvin's iconoclasm towards "The Cathedral" is refreshing, but I do not trust his tech bro pro technocrat instincts. Running a society is way different than designing a computer and way more messy, and less controllable. Like many borderline autistic savants he is dazzled by the brilliance of his own metaphors to the point of not fully thinking through if they full map reality.
I've inherited an iPhone from my wife and there are definitely ways in which it shits that ought to have been fixed by now,
I was reading Moldbug back in the early 2010s, and I have to admit he is kind of wordy.
That and, as you said, we're likely to get pretty crappy kings. Whether it's heirs with 10 great-great-grandparents or people who believe men and women are the same, elites tend to get hermetic and believe their own BS after a while.
True. Plus companies go bankrupt quite often which is less common with nation states.
The NYT Magazine portion of the interview was the typical gotcha journalism where musty left/liberal shibboleths were dusted off and presented as deadly daggers aimed at Yarvin's more "edgy" ledes and arguments over the years. The attempt fizzled and no ground was gained by either side.
The follow-up online interview (available in the video) was wonderful: Marchese brought a more open and honest agenda to the encounter and was rewarded by understanding, instead of fighting, just what Yarvin was saying. Then the light went on; one can only hope it burns long and brightly.
Yarvin is interesting and I get the allure of dispensing with democracy since the system we have regularly ignores public opinion (illegal immigration, DEI) and busies itself with things completely unrelated to the welfare of the public but which are very important to various contractors that live off of federal largesse and offer lucrative post ‘public service’ employment. But I am not sure that I have seen any good explanation of how his alternative would avoid the same problem.
When people advocate for this they imagine people like themselves, I'm sorry, I mean people like they imagine themselves to be, running things. Problem solved.
And he can't explain why democracies from Turkey to Japan don't have mass immigration and cultural Marxism. He is just fooling people with his monarchy fantasy.
And if a democracy turns to a dictatorship today, why would it be a monarchy? It's ridiculous.
I've listened to several long interviews with Yarvin and used to read his rambling Mencius Moldbug posts. Many of his insights are interesting. I liked his essay on the ways in which blacks are treated as a new aristocracy. (https://malcolmpollack.com/2014/01/05/noblesse-sans-oblige/).
I also agree with Yarvin that democracy is inherently flawed. Some of its problems were laid out in a 01/10/2019 iSteve comment from Krakoklastes:
"If a candidate or a party passes some hurdle, such as a plurality or majority of votes, they have the legitimate authority to force everyone to pay for anything they decide to do, for a set period of time – including:
• doing some subset of the stuff they promised to do in the policy platform for which they were elected;
• doing stuff that was not part of their platform;
• doing stuff that they specifically said they would not do; and
• not doing stuff that they specifically promised to do."
That said, I don't see monarchy as a solution. Rome had its Seven Great Emperors and Singapore had Lee Kuan Yew, but other than a few exceptions, the track record of absolute rule is not encouraging.
Democracy is inherently flawed in that it doesn't scale. That's why the US was never a democracy. The design was chief executive elected by electors who were elected by a portion of society as determined by individual states. The central government was supposed to have powers limited to those things best handled by a single authority. The rest would go to the States or the people. If you didn't like how your state did things, you could try another.
I don't know Yarvin's work but I agree Monarchy is not the answer.
The thing to remember about the presidency is that it is a big world and a short day. There are limits on what one person can direct. And the system has not been updated to fit the limitations of one individual no matter how talented.
As an example, there should be multiple vice presidents who handle different portions of the government. The current president has over 200 direct reports. That is too many.
Everybody wants to design a system where they are the order givers and others are the order takers.
NYT: I have to say, I find the depth of your background information to be obfuscating, rather than illuminating. How can I change that?
CY: You could take your Adderall.
Winston Churchill: “Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.”
I have extremely mixed feelings about Mr. Yarvin. On the one hand he is an OG who is one of the founders of what we now call the dissident right, and was then called the alt-right. He helped bring acceptability to discussions we have here around subjects like race realism. OTH he is a slimy Jew (kidding sort of) and unashamed technocrat which just makes him another wing of the WEF crowd.
Yarvin is entertaining, but he is a satirical humorist more than a serious political thinker. And I don't trust anyone who publicly proclaims 'I am an intellectual', though I assume that that's part of the humorist schtick.
Drukpa Kunley parodying Curtis Yarvin is infinitely better than original Yarvin.
To get an idea of how brilliant he is, check out his comments as Mencius Moldbug on an iSteve post on the Shakespeare authorship controversy from c. 2010.
Jewish is Jewish, brvh.
/pol/ is always right.
“ I have to say, I find the depth of your background information to be obfuscating, rather than illuminating. How can I change that?”
Something just sounds odd about that.
I wonder if you could have prepared for the interview by asking Grok or whatever to answer questions as Yarvin.
I have tried reading CY/MM a few times and heard him on a podcast or two.
He tends to speak in riddles and I have no idea what he means.
There are a few good, cogent concepts in his dense prose; the Cathedral, for example. Another one is that sovereign power can be subdivided, as in a democracy, and still be a unitary whole. Finally, the oligarchs always rule.
Thanks. I might give them a try.
With friends like these (but maybe not this guy)...your ideas and writing may percolate right up to the top and inform policy for the US.
Well, if you talk to people who lived in Pat Brown's California, the products of state government were pretty darned good. From what I hear, hiring for state positions was pretty much the opposite of DEI, and people got fired for even middling performance. And as late as 1987, a real estate lawyer in Glendale told me it was still "the Wild West" in terms of development.
Everything went bad after the rise of identity politics. A toxic idea if there ever was one.