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You are here: Home / Politics / Glibertarianism / Thursday Evening Open Thread: American Axolotls

Thursday Evening Open Thread: American Axolotls

by Anne Laurie|  May 22, 20145:26 pm| 54 Comments

This post is in: Glibertarianism, Open Threads, Assholes, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own

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For entertainment purposes only!, as it says on the jar… Courtesy of commentor JWL, The Baffler‘s Corey Pein examines the pale neotonic monsters that squirm where “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream Of A Silicon Reich“:

…. Welcome to the latest political fashion among the California Confederacy: total corporate despotism. It is a potent and bitter ideological mash that could have only been concocted at tech culture’s funky smoothie bar—a little Steve Jobs here, a little Ayn Rand there, and some Ray Kurzweil for color…

“Read Mencius Moldbug,” Tunney told her Twitter followers last month, referring to an aggressively dogmatic blogger with a reverent following in certain tech circles.

Tunney’s advice is easier said than done, for Moldbug is as prolific as he is incomprehensible. His devotees, many of whom are also bloggers, describe themselves as the “neoreactionary” vanguard of a “Dark Enlightenment.” They oppose popular suffrage, egalitarianism and pluralism. Some are atheists, while others affect obscure orthodox beliefs, but most are youngish white males embittered by “political correctness.” As best I can tell, their ideal society best resembles Blade Runner, but without all those Asian people cluttering up the streets. Neoreactionaries like to see themselves as the heroes of another sci-fi movie, in fact, sometimes boasting that they have been “redpilled,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in The Matrix—a movie Moldbug regards as “genius.”

“Moldbug.” The name sounds like it belongs to a troll who belches from the depths of an Internet rabbit hole. And so it does. Mencius Moldbug is the blogonym of Curtis Guy Yarvin, a San Francisco software developer and frustrated poet… Moldbug reads like an overconfident autodidact’s imitation of a Lewis Lapham essay—if Lewis Lapham were a fascist teenage Dungeon Master.

Yarvin’s most toxic arguments come snugly wrapped in purple prose and coded language. (For instance, “The Cathedral” is Moldbuggian for the oppressive nexus of liberal newspapers, universities and the State Department, where his father worked after getting a PhD in philosophy from Brown.) By so doing, Moldbug has been able to an attract an audience that welcomes the usual teeth-gnashing white supremacists who haunt the web while also leaving room for a more socially acceptable assortment of “men’s rights” advocates, gun nuts, transhumanist libertarians, disillusioned Occupiers and well-credentialed Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

When Justine Tunney posted her petition online, the press treated it like comic relief that came from nowhere. In fact, it is straight Moldbug. Item one, “retire all government employees,” comes verbatim from a 2012 talk that Yarvin gave to an approving crowd of California techies (see video below). In his typical smarmy, meandering style, Yarvin concluded by calling for “a national CEO [or] what’s called a dictator.”

“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” Yarvin said in his talk. He conceded that, given the current political divisions, it might be better to have two dictators, one for Red Staters & one for Blue Staters. The trick would be to “make sure they work together.” (Sure. Easy!)…

***********

Apart from being grateful to have outgrown the sillier dreams of our adolescence, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

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Reader Interactions

54Comments

  1. 1.

    Morzer

    May 22, 2014 at 5:32 pm

    Now I know the source of some of David Brooks’ and Thomas Friedman’s sillier ideas. To the taxi-drivers and Applebee’s salad-bars of the world, I offer an unreserved apology. You were not to blame.

  2. 2.

    Scott

    May 22, 2014 at 5:34 pm

    For their vision of the future, you can watch the SyFy channel show, Continuum, where government has been turned over to the corporations. Fun times

  3. 3.

    FDRLincoln

    May 22, 2014 at 5:35 pm

    These people saw the activities of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in the Alien movies and thought that the Company were the good guys.

    Bunch of wannabe Carter J. Burkes.

  4. 4.

    AnotherBruce

    May 22, 2014 at 5:36 pm

    Is there some kind of hormonal deficiency that these guys are making up for? It must be miserable to be a teenager all your life.

  5. 5.

    Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill

    May 22, 2014 at 5:37 pm

    a movie Moldbug regards as “genius.”

    And given that THE MATRIX was written pretty much as a repudiation of much of this kind of mentality, that tells you all you need to know about these so-called geniuses.

    Going to go run sprints in the heat. I actually enjoy this, so it’s not hell on me (I like heat), but it is work, and I confess to being a bit tired. Time to move…

  6. 6.

    gocar mozart

    May 22, 2014 at 5:37 pm

    The full manifesto in all its crazy luster can be found here:
    http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/

  7. 7.

    ranchandsyrup

    May 22, 2014 at 5:41 pm

    I watched a podcast with Tunney where she was vaping the whole time and going on about how the caste system is good and trying to clear up how she was the superstar behind OWS.

    Also, too, pic of Michaela celebrating Biggie Smalls’ birthday yesterday. Still the greatest. Would have been 42. Died at 24.

  8. 8.

    srv

    May 22, 2014 at 5:43 pm

    I thought we already had a dictator?

  9. 9.

    SatanicPanic

    May 22, 2014 at 5:45 pm

    Wow, these people are nuts. And desperately ignorant.

  10. 10.

    sharl

    May 22, 2014 at 5:46 pm

    Tunney is Bizarro-World awesome. She was interviewed on Emoprog Army Radio (whole thing is pretty long, well over an hour), and delivered some Grade A weirdness.

    ETA: Yep, ranchandsyrup upthread at #6 provides an accurate thumbnail description of this interview.

  11. 11.

    SatanicPanic

    May 22, 2014 at 5:47 pm

    @ranchandsyrup: That guy was the greatest, although I kind of think he might have killed Tupac.

  12. 12.

    kindness

    May 22, 2014 at 5:49 pm

    Who here likes Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young? As a subscriber, Rolling Stone sent me an upcoming article on the Boxed Set they are about to release on their 1974 re-union tour (which I saw at The Nassau Coliseum). Anyway, they included a clip of David Crosby’s ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ and it is the awesome. Go listen.

  13. 13.

    Kylroy

    May 22, 2014 at 5:50 pm

    David Brin tore into these fuckers a few months back: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2013/11/neo-reactionaries-drop-all-pretense-end.html?m=1

  14. 14.

    jonp72

    May 22, 2014 at 5:52 pm

    I actually knew Curtis Yarvin from college (Brown University, early 1990s). We were on the Quiz Bowl team together. He was the typical angry geek who always thought he knew more than he really did. He used to spazz and jolt his entire body every time he would hit the buzzer. It was such a trademark for him that we ended up calling it “Yarvinating.”

  15. 15.

    ranchandsyrup

    May 22, 2014 at 5:52 pm

    @SatanicPanic: I suppose I’m a Biggiebot so I naively reject that theory and ascribe to some of the more fanciful L.A. gang conspiracy theories that somehow put the blame on Suge Knight.

  16. 16.

    PsiFighter37

    May 22, 2014 at 5:55 pm

    I have some kind of weird-ass throat infection – it really only started manifesting last Wednesday in the form of lip sores, but I had a really sore throat – no coughing, but really pained soreness and constriction. White tongue, loads of feverish sweating, then freezing. I went to the doctor and got some antibiotics (even though I’m told it is a viral infection) and some eardrops (I developed an ear infection as a wonderful byproduct). My throat feels better, but now I have a sustained period of feeling light-headed (I think being at work was not a good idea – I didn’t feel light-headed at all sitting at home yesterday and doing nothing except watching movies), and my lips are covered in even more sores, which feels shitty and looks even worse.

    It’s probably the worst time of the year to get whatever the hell this is – it is way too nice to be stuck inside trying to get better from some kind of viral infection – but that is life. About the only upshot is that even without exercise, I’ve had to decrease my calorie intake (I simply had no interest in eating when my throat hurt), along with the booze intake (no drinks since Sunday – feels like nearly an eternity).

    With regards to my friend who appears to be in trouble mentally – I caught up with one of his other good friends from school, and he mentioned a fact I didn’t know – apparently he freaked the shit out when he was first fired before calming down. I had no idea, and it leads me to believe that depending on whatever happened, maybe he mentally snapped at that point and has been in a slow decline that has been accelerating a little bit more recently. It would make sense, given I never really got a sense of the ‘old’ him after I found out he had been let go.

  17. 17.

    jl

    May 22, 2014 at 5:55 pm

    The monotony of this neotony is like a botched lobotomy.

  18. 18.

    ranchandsyrup

    May 22, 2014 at 5:57 pm

    @sharl: thx for linky to the podcast sharl. :)

  19. 19.

    Calouste

    May 22, 2014 at 5:57 pm

    the State Department, where his father worked

    So another glibertarian who got his start in life thanks to the government?

    Color me surprised.

    EDIT: And looking at jonp72’s comment just above, went to the same university as his dad as well. Sounds like he did it all on his own, yes sirree.

  20. 20.

    SatanicPanic

    May 22, 2014 at 5:58 pm

    @ranchandsyrup: That is plausible too. Suge might have killed Biggie too. Who knows.

  21. 21.

    Morzer

    May 22, 2014 at 6:00 pm

    @Calouste:

    Well, you see, he was the little sperm that could.

  22. 22.

    ranchandsyrup

    May 22, 2014 at 6:01 pm

    @SatanicPanic: You ever catch the Biggie biopic “Notorious”?

  23. 23.

    dr. bloor

    May 22, 2014 at 6:04 pm

    . His devotees, many of whom are also bloggers, describe themselves as the “neoreactionary” vanguard of a “Dark Enlightenment.” They oppose popular suffrage, egalitarianism and pluralism. Some are atheists, while others affect obscure orthodox beliefs, but most are youngish white males embittered by “political correctness.” As best I can tell, their ideal society best resembles Blade Runner, but without all those Asian people cluttering up the streets. Neoreactionaries like to see themselves as the heroes of another sci-fi movie, in fact, sometimes boasting that they have been “redpilled,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in The Matrix—a movie Moldbug regards as “genius.”

    Coulda saved a bunch of words by just using “narcissistic assholes.”

  24. 24.

    Baud

    May 22, 2014 at 6:06 pm

    Yarvin concluded by calling for “a national CEO [or] what’s called a dictator.”

    I nominate myself.

  25. 25.

    Morzer

    May 22, 2014 at 6:08 pm

    @Baud:

    Seconded! No, what.. wait . I meant, I second my own nomination. Of myself.

  26. 26.

    Calouste

    May 22, 2014 at 6:11 pm

    Eric Schmidt as national CEO, eh?

    I’m sure after he runs the US into the ground, like he did with Novell, he’ll do better the second time around when he has a few people around who know what they are doing, like with Google.

  27. 27.

    Mnemosyne

    May 22, 2014 at 6:17 pm

    @dr. bloor:

    most are youngish white males embittered by “political correctness.”

    IOW, Mumsy and Daddy told them they were special snowflakes, and then they grew up and discovered that, not only were they not the smartest people in the world, some of the women and/or POC they encountered were actually smarter than they were. And they can’t handle the competition, so they’re rather block Those People from being able to compete at all.

  28. 28.

    AWJ

    May 22, 2014 at 6:19 pm

    There’s something deeply ironic about these Dark Enlightenment/Red Pill types. They like to think of themselves as bravely facing up to inconvenient truths that the majority of Western society refuses to see because acknowledging those biotruths would mean admitting that our way of life is unsustainable. Democracy can’t work because the masses (especially the masses of duskier hues) are too stupid and tribalistic to restrain themselves from looting their betters. Sexual equality is a pipe dream because women between the ages of puberty and menopause are little more than automata programmed by their hormones to find and fuck the alpha-est bad boy they can catch.

    And yet, for all the unflinching facing of inconvenient truths these dudebros do… they’re fervent global warming denialists to a man. I guess some truths are just too inconvenient even for the darkly enlightened.

  29. 29.

    rikyrah

    May 22, 2014 at 6:32 pm

    The Cost: What Stop and Frisk Does to a Young Man’s Soul
    Every afternoon when Trey left school in his car, two white patrolmen would follow him in their cruiser, sometimes a few blocks, sometimes several miles, before turning on their patrol lights.

    When my godson Trey was a toddler growing up in Brooklyn, every white woman who saw him fell in love with him. He was a beautiful child, sweet natured, affectionate, with cocoa-colored skin and a thousand-watt smile. I remember sitting with him and his mom in a pizzeria one day, watching as he played peekaboo with two white ladies at a nearby booth. “What a little doll!” the ladies cooed. “Isn’t he adorable?”

    I told Marilyn I dreaded the day he would run up against some white person’s prejudice.“His feelings are going to be hurt,” I said. “He won’t know it’s about this country’s race history, he’ll think it’s about him. Because so far in his young life every white person he’s ever met has adored him.” Marilyn nodded, but her closed expression seemed to say I was talking about things I didn’t really understand.

    ……………………..

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/21/the-cost-what-stop-and-frisk-does-to-a-young-man-s-soul.html

  30. 30.

    Pogonip

    May 22, 2014 at 6:35 pm

    I don’t know anything about an Endarkenment, but the men’s right’s types have a serious problem. They like pussy but hate women. And this I’ll tell you brother, you can’t have one without the other!

    And I still want to know what became of Elmo’s kittens. They’re the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in weeks. I must know!

  31. 31.

    Trollhattan

    May 22, 2014 at 6:38 pm

    This can never get old. Never, I say!

    President celebrates Seahawks’ Super Bowl

  32. 32.

    Anoniminous

    May 22, 2014 at 6:39 pm

    Special! Snowflake! got a degree in C++, wrote an email app for the iPad, and is now ready to Rule The World!

    pfui

  33. 33.

    Quicksand

    May 22, 2014 at 6:40 pm

    I have been following Tunney for quite a while and have had quite a difficult time trying to decide for myself whether she is (a) amazingly deluded, or (b) trollin’ hard.

    I have long hoped for (b) — much respect — but regrettably more and more facts are pointing to (a).

    That Emoprog Army Radio Hour podcast is well worth checking out, and not just that episode. They are just getting started so the production values are, well, amateurish. But the content is interesting.

  34. 34.

    Villago Delenda Est

    May 22, 2014 at 6:54 pm

    @Baud: They would not find me suitable. My first official act would be to have them all crucified.

  35. 35.

    Baud

    May 22, 2014 at 7:09 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    That’s actually in the job qualification.

  36. 36.

    sharl

    May 22, 2014 at 7:13 pm

    @Quicksand: Yeah, I’ve seen a few emoprogs scratching their heads over that. I don’t know which she is either – I suppose she could be both – but fwiw genuine übertroll weev adores her, as does a troll better known in these parts:

    MorningMoneyDoug ‏@DougJBalloon May 20

    If you’re not following @JustineTunney your Twitter license should be revoked.

    ETA: fixed final link

  37. 37.

    bemused

    May 22, 2014 at 7:27 pm

    @rikyrah:

    Gutwrenching.

  38. 38.

    Wag

    May 22, 2014 at 7:30 pm

    @AnotherBruce:

    No hormone deficiency. It’s that nobody (male or female) will fuck them

  39. 39.

    The Pale Scot

    May 22, 2014 at 8:05 pm

    @Kylroy: David Brin rocks.

  40. 40.

    The Pale Scot

    May 22, 2014 at 8:10 pm

    @Baud: If asked I could be persuaded to accept the office of dictator. First order of business is rounding up all the morons who can’t be bothered to use their turn signals.

    Why yes, I do live in Florida.

  41. 41.

    Matt McIrvin

    May 22, 2014 at 8:13 pm

    @The Pale Scot: Brin is actually kind of irritating himself sometimes; he’s extremely thin-skinned, and also has this incessant “I am the Reasonable Man beyond Left and Right” tic that amounts to a sort of aggressively hectoring Broderism. I think it comes from his being a basically libertarian guy who eventually realized that US libertarians espouse a lot of nutty things, but who still has the basic habits of thought.

    But against right-wing nutjobs, he’s good.

  42. 42.

    The Pale Scot

    May 22, 2014 at 8:23 pm

    @Matt McIrvin: I can’t say that I’m a steady reader of his blog, when i do I skim, but I do find nuggets. Not sure I would call him a glib, he just can’t understand how one could be “educated” and still be irrational.

    All of his novels before the Asimov reboot were great, I just couldn’t go back into that world so those stories could be great too. The Uplift trilogy impelled (? can’t think of the right word) my opinions about the narcissism, hubris and conceit of man.

  43. 43.

    tsquared2001

    May 22, 2014 at 8:28 pm

    @AnotherBruce: That is exactly what I thought – grow the fuck up, already. Your whole life can”t be centered around you not getting laid.

  44. 44.

    tsquared2001

    May 22, 2014 at 8:43 pm

    Otherwise, the agenda includes watching the Canadiens try to make this a series while listening to Aaliyah and enjoying what feels almost like summer weather.

  45. 45.

    low-tech cyclist

    May 22, 2014 at 9:13 pm

    Yarvin concluded by calling for “a national CEO [or] what’s called a dictator.”

    Earlier today, the thought crossed my mind that if the new wave of oligarchs were actually any good at running the country in a way that enabled practically everyone to make a decent living and dealt with long-term problems like climate change, with the tradeoff being that they would get a pretty hefty slice of an expanded pie, most people would vote to hand them the reins.

    However, they just want to grab everything for themselves right this minute, no matter what the cost to anyone else, and have no interest in dealing with actual problems.

    So fuck this dictator shit with a rusty rebar.

  46. 46.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    May 22, 2014 at 9:33 pm

    He conceded that, given the current political divisions, it might be better to have two dictators, one for Red Staters & one for Blue Staters. The trick would be to “make sure they work togethe

    The ‘tard is deep in this one I see.

  47. 47.

    SFAW

    May 22, 2014 at 11:23 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    They would not find me suitable. My first official act would be to have them all crucified.

    Ich auch.

    What That Idiot (a/k/a Yarvin) fails to understand is that he would be one of the first to get disappeared. Not because he’s a threat, but because he’s A Fucking Imbecile With Delusions of Having A Clue.

  48. 48.

    Mike G

    May 22, 2014 at 11:39 pm

    Yarvin concluded by calling for “a national CEO [or] what’s called a dictator.”

    These guys don’t live in the real world where most of us do, where the CEOs of large organizations are manipulative semi-bright self-dealing douchebags. Or to repeat myself, Mitt Rmoney.

  49. 49.

    mclaren

    May 23, 2014 at 12:24 am

    Unfortunately, engineers and programmers tend to gravitate toward these kind of fevered autocratic wet-dreams. Not sure why.

    Read Heinlein. It’ll make the hackles on the back of your neck stand up. (“An armed society is a polite society.” Und so weiter. I think we need to tell the people at Virginia Tech or that Arizona theater all about that philosophy…)

    Heinlein was a mechanical engineer, specializing in linkages.

    Programmers are the most arrogant and at the same time the most clueless people I’ve ever met. Programmers don’t actually know anything. They can’t actually do anything — aside from making little drop-down menus pop up on your computer screen. Ask a programmer how to do something in the real world, like make a souffle, and they stare at you like guppies in a fish tank with their little mouths opening and closing.

    I’ve always thought that programmers were classic Golgafrincham B Ark material. Arrogant ignorant incompetent programmers like Paul Graham (whose attitude seems to be that anyone who isn’t white and male and rich is a non-player character in the video game of life) or Joel Spolsky, who writes millions of words about his alleged expertise in programming and then designs his own custom development language which compiles down to (get this!) Visual Basic… Holy shit.

    These people are walking talking cartoons. They come straight out of the comic strip ZIPPY THE PINHEAD. And they think because they made a pile o’ bucks in the Dot Com bubble that they’re qualified to give us advice about life, the universe, and everything…?

  50. 50.

    mclaren

    May 23, 2014 at 12:31 am

    @SFAW:

    Yeah, Scalzi has a classic essay where he describes what would happen to the Yarvins of the world if they ever put their autocratic we-dreams into practice. They’d get turned into thin strips of Objectivist jerky.

    I really don’t know what you do about the “taxes are theft” crowd, except possibly enter a gambling pool regarding just how long after their no-tax utopia comes true that their generally white, generally entitled, generally soft and pudgy asses are turned into thin strips of Objectivist Jerky by the sort of pitiless sociopath who is actually prepped and ready to live in the world that logically follows these people’s fondest desires. Sorry, guys. I know you all thought you were going to be one of those paying a nickel for your cigarettes in Galt Gulch. That’ll be a fine last thought for you as the starving remnants of the society of takers closes in with their flensing tools.

    Source: “Tax frenzies and how to hose them down,” John Scalzi, 26 September 2010.

  51. 51.

    Soonergrunt

    May 23, 2014 at 12:47 am

    Remember that these are the guys who couldn’t get dates in Junior High and High School. So they turned to reading Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein, and watching distopian Sci Fi and playing Dungeons And Dragons.
    I’ve never read Ayn Rand.
    We don’t understand them because we aren’t still stuck at 14.
    Remember what John Rogers said: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” Add in Starship Troopers, and you get these shit-heads.

  52. 52.

    PIGL

    May 23, 2014 at 12:38 pm

    @AWJ: the real problem with democracy is that there about 25% assholes (technically speaking, authoritarian followers) that can reliably be exploited by the would-be or actual plutocrats to gum up the works. I am strongly in favour majority suffrage, if you will, but I think that the plutocrats now understand how to exploit universal suffrage to its inevitable undoing.

  53. 53.

    Dalunay

    May 23, 2014 at 1:36 pm

    The ‘Dark Enlightenment’ screeds did get something right. Corporations are a form of government. Where they go from there is utterly stupid, of course, dictatorship takes profound ignorance of human history to propose. It’s unsurprising that their best proponent is mostly self-educated.

    We can mock them, but it’s worth taking the argument somewhat seriously. What they see is that corporations are a form of government, and dictatorships are very effective governments in certain situations (e.g. Silicon Valley start-ups). They think this is news, for some reason. The corporations are governments thing, perhaps it is. Dictatorships can be effective, not so much.

    Western civilization has been discussing this stuff for centuries, which is how we got to democratic republics for civic government. We also (in the U.S. at least) have very fragmented government – theocratic government (church) is separate from civic government (state), and economic governments (corporations) are largely independent of both. Civic government is split between local, state and federal.

    What we haven’t explicitly grappled with or discussed, anywhere in the world, is the rise of economic governments over the last century and a half. These guys are some of the first to have noticed it, kudos to them. (Although you could argue that the cyberpunk authors beat them to it.) But the ‘dark enlightenment’ guys have drawn the wrong conclusions; dictatorship isn’t the answer to civic government problems because dictatorship works in Silicon Valley startups, guys. Instead, democracy is the answer to corporate government corruption and abuse in large corporations, because dictatorship leads to wretched, oppressive government when it’s writ large.

  54. 54.

    J R in WV

    May 23, 2014 at 5:13 pm

    @mclaren:

    Heinlein wrote fiction, not political science. I don’t suspect he intended “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” to be the founding document of a new world order. “Starship Trooper” is a fairy tale, not least because travel between solar systems is impossible. None of the ideas in any readable science fiction are intended to found new philosophical orders of monks living high upon mountain tops.

    This is why the novels of Ayn Rand are so terrible – they ARE intended to be the founding documents of a new world order! Same for Lafayette Ronald Hubbard – bad, sad, treyf, not inspired fiction.

    I wrote this in the early morning, left the house to run errands, and find it here still lurking on my machine, all alone. So I’m thinking I am meant t push the submit comment button…

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