#mencius moldbug

[marinetti-dinner-party]

If I tried to position myself as court vizier and scholar of the would-be neofeudal IMPERIVM only for Joyce Carol Oates to mog me on the Internet I would kill myself lol

[kontextmaschine]

It's nuts that when the 2010s were over and done, Mencius Moldbug was one of the figures to come out relevant going forward

[nodynasty4us]

Curtis Yarvin wants American democracy toppled. He has some prominent Republican fans.

The New Right blogger has been cited by Blake Masters and J.D. Vance. What exactly is he advocating?

[weirdellis]

Doodles as I watched a Curtis Yarvin discussion.

[rendakuenthusiast]

Probably my favorite Moldbug podcast appearance is this one with a random Ethiopian man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKdOoR4zhOc

“To put it shortly, I am an Orthodox deacon in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. I am an Austrian - not an Austrian economist, but someone who appreciates Austrian economics - and who genuinely, although as paradoxical and tension-seeming as it may be, is open to the ideas of both anarchy and monarchy - that monarchy originally, rooted partially in Ethiopian history and institutions that are indigenous, but also in the idea of Jesus as King. And then is also someone, you know, interested in all sorts of things from martial arts to film to literature, reading, writing, you name it.”

[arcticdementor]

"The UN is trying to replace the European population, and that tech companies are assisting them." is not an accurate summary of Moldbug's thesis. Most political coalitions and policies have a "Bootleggers and Baptists" dynamic. One part of the coalition is doing it for selfish reasons, the other part is doing it for reasons of holiness/righteousness. The righteous give cover for the self-interested, the self-interested give money/power/funds to signal boost the righteous. The "Cathedral" -- which is a political coalition that dominates almost all academic institutions, prestige media outlets, NGO's, the non-gun toting departments of government, and the Democratic Party -- has this "Bootleggers and Baptist" dynamic with regards to immigration. The political schemers understand that brown immigrants overwhelmingly vote Democrat, because the Democrats give them the benefits and status. The votes and political power are then used to fund and empower all the Cathedral institutions. The righteous faction believe that immigration and spending money on the poor is good for all sorts of moral reasons. Why do capitalists go along with it? Because contrary to popular belief, capitalists are disorganized and individually much weaker than the mass of the Cathedral. And they want to be seen as high status good guys. The Cathedral sets out what it means to be a good guy, so they are following along. Jeff Bezos is not strong enough to shift the zeitgeist by himself, if he tried promoting overtly right-wing ideology he would be demonized far, far, worse than he is now (see the demonization of people like William Shockley, the Koch brothers or Donald J Trump). Being seen as a high status good guy is worth a lot more than the difference between $10 billion and $15 billion. The carrot is getting treated as a high-status humanitarian, but there is also a stick. There are a million complicated laws that most capitalists are probably stepping on. You could make a strong case of fraud "using deception to gain something of value" against Mark Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc. If these guys don't pay the Danegeld, if they are not seen as good guys through their donations and words, they could easily end up in jail. One additional reason for the capitalists going along with it -- there are something like 100,000 harassment/discrimination/hostile workplace lawsuits every year. Some of these can cost companies hundreds of millions of dollars. In these lawsuits, everything the company does gets counted as a circumstantial evidence in the case. So if the case against Google is, "My manager was an asshole to me and promoted a less qualified man over me because I am a woman," it matters a lot for winning the suit if your company has all these programs promoting women empowerment, versus if the CEO said in an interview "James Damore was basically right." If he says latter, that will be used as evidence against the company in court. This whole thing then spirals -- with everyone afraid of speaking publicly the right-wing view on race/sex issues, the next generation won't even be exposed to the ideas and they will be true believers.

“georgemonck”

[drethelin]

This is amazing

[der-unverantwortliche]

Deep irony of Moldbug is his description of Puritinism as psuedopapism speaking ex cathedra- essentially armed Libertarians to conceive of the MSM-Gov-Academia network in the same way Milton or Dee or Bruno or Wycliffe etc viewed Church governance.

Deploying an intellectual heritage created by independents & nonconformists AGAINST the Jacobites during the English Civil War, in order to claim that Cromwell was the real SJW. It's like Crypto-Anglicanism, which is what the Puritans came here to avoid lol.

The Great Ejection that followed the restoration of Charles II & Anglicanism was the reformation of the Ex Cathedra authority Moldbug's ostensibly against. The same dissonance exists in Carlyle, who can't tell if he loves or loathes Cromwell.

"POOR Cromwell,—great Cromwell!" Carlyle begins his essay, in which he criticizes him as a sort of Trumpian doofus hypocrite, but one of admirable character, even the "one man, that I can get sight of, who ever had in the heart of him any such purpose at all."

To stand against Democracy would put one on the side of the Royalists against the Parliamentarians- but to also stand against a stultified aristocratic bureaucracy, puts one at odds with the Royalists. Carlyle solves his dissonance with Hero Worship, which is ultimately, Fascism.

However- Moldbug tells us that Fascism is tainted with Democracy- in that a Hero cannot exist without a Hero Cult to recognize him. "The rise of democracy is the cause of the Holocaust." - & yet Cromwell looms over Carlyle, & Carlyle over Moldbug, hero cults within hero cults.

Instead of looking at "Democracy" as the fundamental cause of 20th century violence, this sort of Idealism over Materialism thesis, we'd be better off reversing it & noting that Democracy is downstream from media technology, impossible without newspaper, telegraph, radio, etc.

Form > Content. Content is merely former forms reformed, framed in new forms, as McLuhan noted that all media contain older media as content. To criticize the "democratic", an obvious element of internet blogging, is to flail hopelessly against the form we are within.

We can reframe a Moldbuggian thesis- that "Democracy" is a veil to hide Media Monopoly. Better to bust ex cathedra information dams in the name of "Democracy" than to reserve them in the name of Jacobitism- thus, the Puritans are redeemed for demanding information to flow freely.

If a Libgen model is "democratic" & JSTOR is "traditional autocracy"- what use do I have for this damned tradition of credentialed curation? Politics are downstream from Culture, & Culture is downstream from media environment. The only battles that matter are technological.

Thus Urbit- the democratization of information monopoly, providing each man ownership of his own data, is properly a Puritan project- a RADICAL puritan project in the mode of English Non-Conformists like Milton's Aeropagitica. Moldbug's Jacobite pose dissolves into Lollardry.

was here, but is no longer, so here it is again.