I really recommend the essay about Yarvin, Land, and the other guy in Elizabeth Sandifer’s book. It’s very long, but worth it to sort through his mess of a political worldview. It really all just boils down to racism, at the end of it. She’s a very funny writer who can make this morass of dumb ideas clear…
He really is. I am so sick of people like him getting long-form essay length coverage as if they’re dumbass ideas about politics and history are worth anything… There are actual smart people who’ve read and thought hard about this stuff and maybe we should listen to them instead.
To prevent a C.E.O. from staging a military coup, the board members would have access to cryptographic keys that would allow them to disarm all government weapons, from nuclear missiles down to small arms, with the push of a button.
Everything before this point shows he knows nothing about history or psychology or anthropology or philosophy. Which is expected; he’s a tech bro.
But this shit is so bad it doesn’t rise to the level of “wrong”, and it’s in his alleged lane.
Engineer’s disease is bad enough, but that people who otherwise should know better, who have some education in some of these subjects (like Vance) are fans is mindblowing. I assume they’re just really into the anti-democratic fantasies and wave away all the obvious nonsense.
I wonder, though, if he didn’t so much “reinvent it” as once read something (possibly just the wiki page) and think, “yeah, that sounds like a good idea.”
He’s full of weird fantasies about sci-fi tech that doesn’t exist and wouldn’t ever work (like putting what he sees as superfluous people in VR prisons). There’s a lot of “ideas that an ignorant 12 year old would come up with” from him, which reminds me of Trump. The whole administration and the people they look up to all operate on that level, it turns out.
Umm, wow. OK, that has just got to win the “Dumbest Thing I’ve Read (at least) This Week” award. Holy shit, this is a guy that some idiots actually listen to?
Tell selfish assholes that actually they’re the greatest and all the inferiors should be bowing at their feet while they stomp on them, and you will get called a philosopher by them. It’s not like anyone was actually captivated by Ayn Rand’s brilliant reasoning and storytelling either.
It’s funny, I read about Yarvin years ago, from people who knew him personally when he transformed (in their telling) from entertaining goof to something malevolent, and I assumed he was just a crank. Then, when it became clear that there were people who actually took him seriously (the TESCREAL gang and then Vance, etc.), I thought that perhaps he wasn’t just a crank, but someone who had read history and political philosophy and twisted them into something monstrous but compelling. But now that I actually read his words, I realize he is just a crank. I guess when one lives in a kakistocracy, actual political philosophers get replaced by internet cranks whose monstrous visions for an anti-democratic future match up with those in power.
In the 2019 mini-series “Years and Years”, they did a decent job showing that yes, the people involved in an authoritarian dystopia don’t need to be smart. In fact, these systems can be very attractive to people who wouldn’t do well in an honest, fair, and open competition.
