A SparkNotes version of the latest Very Serious Right-Wing Thought Leader spotlight, because the New Yorker takes far too many words, unlike Mr Charles P. Pierce for Esquire:
I can’t do better than James Fallows’s assessment of Curtis Yarvin, the Caesarist Internet crank who has a grip on many members of the techno-Right, including the vice president of the United States of America, J. Divan Vance, and who also seems to be a dumb person’s idea of a smart person, if the dumb person is playing Dungeons & Dragons while watching Gladiator on mushrooms. Yarvin is the subject of a fine profile by Ava Kofman in the current issue of The New Yorker. In a thread on Bluesky, Fallows calls Yarvin a “barroom savant.”
If you’ve lived in a small town, you know the character of the “barroom savant.” Knows the inside story on everything. Knows what “they” are covering up. Tells you that he (always “he”) tested into Mensa. But never went mainstream. Feels sorry for you if you believe what “they” say. And what books you need to read to blow your mind. And did I forget, he has a “genius IQ?” We’ve met this guy before…
To circle back to the start, guy high on his own supply of the virtues of the “high IQ”—as individuals, and as breeding stock. My sample-size of interviewees is limited but over the years have had first-hand exposure to: One [professor] in college. One [professor] in grad school. Nine or ten people I’ve interviewed and written about. Each of whom was a Nobel laureate. Strangely, none talked about their own IQ, or anyone else’s. But this guy does. As Trump does too! I give you, the intellectual leader of Thiel, Vance, Miller, and the MAGA era! (I was tempted to say, “We call it The Aristocrats.”)
C’mon, Fallows. Unleash that inner blogger!
Kofman’s piece is a treasure trove of empowered lunacy spooned out by Yarvin into the hungry mouths of America’s techno-oligarchs—most of whom have a lot more money than sense, as Rod Stewart once sang. He first came to their attention when he was blogging as one Mencius Moldbug and dropped a 120,000-word dung-bomb onto the innocent Intertoobz…
Yarvin also quoted The Matrix in his screed, which is the kind of dead giveaway that a fondness for Atlas Shrugged used to mean. This manner of thinking always will find suckers. The problems always come, however, when they find suckers with money, and Yarvin struck the motherlode…
Deep in the piece, we discover that Yarvin’s flight from political sensibility began with, of all things, disillusionment when he discovered that swift boating John Kerry wasn’t enough to derail his 2004 presidential campaign. Also, Kofman gets major points for describing Yarvin’s crackpottery as being “surrealized” by the Trump administration. The Triumph of the Swill.
Baud
You find the worst people, AL.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: These “leading intellectual lights” are so stupid, and their followers are even more stupid. You can’t really save the stupid who are convinced that they are smart.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
This is the kind of post that warrants a reprint of how Adam L described Edolf several years back:
khead
Suckers with money who haven’t played BioShock.
Mrscoachb
MrCoachB and I have always called these know it alls ….”the guy at the end of the bar”, there’s one in every local pub
Obvious Russian Troll
@khead:
I think the odds are pretty fair that Yarvin did play BioShock and still didn’t get it. Much as Paul Ryan could sing along to Rage Against the Machine without getting what the songs were about.
RepubAnon
The Triumph of the Swill sounds like a good title for a documentry on Trump’s rturn to the Presidency.
Gloria DryGarden
Maga+ intellectual + hero= ?
oxymoron?
I question the emotional and social intelligence of people like yarvin, and his fans…and all the people who knowingly voted for his program..
moonbat
I’ll subscribe to anyone’s newsletter who can give us a good read on Theil’s MO.
Yes, I know he’s an I’m-going-to-live-forever vampire and he owns J. Divan Vance lock, stock, and barrel, but is he the type to flame out spectacularly like we saw fElon do this week when his worldview as himself as the god-king we’ve all been waiting for to enslave us is questioned?
BeautifulPlumage
Good morning all! Nice to see this twit getting the light he deserves. And yes, quoting The Matrix without understanding The Matrix is peak faux-intelligence.
suzanne
I read recently that Yarvin has started sleeping with women again, since his wife died. Apparently he briefly dated Caroline Ellison, who was the girlfriend of Sam Bankman-Fried. Just so you can be reminded that the worst people in the world are indeed all fucking each other.
suzanne
@BeautifulPlumage: The Matrix was made by two transwomen, which is an irony that seems to be lost on these assholes..
Matt McIrvin
@Obvious Russian Troll: A friend of mine thinks a lot of the recent mainstreaming of Randism is because of Bioshock.
I recently read someone suggesting that satire is harmful, full stop; because, contrary to what we were all told in English class, to depict a thing IS always functionally the same as endorsing it, regardless of the artist’s intentions, because people are dumb as rocks. (François Truffaut famously thought this was true of critical depictions of war in film. But maybe it’s far more general.)
It depresses me because of the sheer amount of art that would be better off eliminated if this is true.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m not that radical, but I appreciate the point. I feel like a lot of “satire” we see isn’t really satire, it’s mimicry, which does end up looking like an endorsement.
Matt McIrvin
@BeautifulPlumage: Andrew Tate used to tell his loser bro audience that they were all trapped in the Matrix, enslaved in a false world, and that the only way to escape the Matrix was… to devote your entire existence to accumulating as much money as possible! Because the super-rich, they were the ones who were free of the Matrix.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: SNL!
NeenerNeener
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, I’m afraid the MAGAts and normies that watch “Mountainhead” are going to go all in on tech bros breaking up the world into network states that they rule. The movie makes it sound so inevitable.
Steve LaBonne
@schrodingers_cat: We don’t need to save them. We need to save the world FROM them.
trollhattan
“J. Divan Vance”
God love you, Charles Pierce.
schrodingers_cat
At some level the twin Trump wins and rise of crackpots like this Yarvin person tell me that America especially its white and weatlhy demographic has become inward looking and afraid. Elevation of these revanchists is not sign of a confident society.
Bupalos
I highly recommend Kofman’s piece which I think she reads herself on NYTaudio. I mean, it’s very well done and just kind of depressingly jaw-dropping at every turn. The emotion I felt while listening to it to reminded me of how I felt watching The Freedom Kids (or whatever they were called) performing at the Trump rally in 2016. It’s a little disorienting.
These things always remind me though, we need to have a little deeper mental vocabulary for these weird burnt children than incredibly stupid. Which I’ll say again is more about the way we’ve made a religion of intelligence than any kind of accurate representation. Yarvin is smart. He’s well read. He’s taken his intelligence, some incredible psychological and personality issues, and a life of screen-time and parleyed them into becoming just an absolutely terrible human being. And that happens. It’s not rare. Being smart doesn’t come packaged with more important human virtues or emotional capacities. He’s much much worse than “stupid,” and he and the other money-soaked techno-futurist lunatics have almost nothing in common with Trump supporters broadly or almost anyone else. Trump supporters it’s fair and instructive to call “stupid.” We need words like “mangled” for the Yarvins and Thiels.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
100%
Baud
@Bupalos:
Libs use stupid because they don’t want to call white people immoral or evil.
Steve LaBonne
@schrodingers_cat: Whole lot of “death agonies of failing empire” going on.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: At its core racism or bigotry is stupid in addition to being evil.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I do think (and others have made this observation too) there’s a lot of right-wing “irony” that is not irony at all, but hyperbole intended both as bullying humor and as a testing of the waters. They’ll endorse a cruelly exaggerated version of what they actually do believe, see how far they can take it without getting serious pushback, and dismiss any pushback as somebody not being able to take a joke.
And in the early days of the phrase “fake news”, it was really about all of those sites that pushed straight-up hoaxes and had some fine print calling them “satire”.
But the complaint in question was actually sparked by the anti-satire guy re-watching Verhoeven’s hyperviolent 1987 science-fiction satire RoboCop. I suppose that was a lot like the antiwar movies Truffaut was criticizing in that, in between the fairly sharp depiction of corporatized/militarized law enforcement serving as an oppressive force, it had a lot of almost pornographically gory violence in it, and he argued that all it was doing was desensitizing people rather than offering any sort of real critique. Which for RoboCop was probably true, because I know many viewers just responded to that violence as they would to any violent cop movie. It was a movie that tried to have it both ways, to some degree, with its good-cop protagonist who was fighting a violent drug gang along with, as it developed, the corporation that effectively owned him. And the sequels were much less sharp in their writing.
schrodingers_cat
@Steve LaBonne: That’s the rub it doesn’t jibe with reality. US under Biden was among the best run and wealthiest countries in the world. Across any metric.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
It’s possible to be stupid and a decent person, however. You don’t need smarts to have scruples.
Drunkenhausfrau
OT: any of you jackals know of a graphic artist/cartoonist who might want a gig for an immigrants rights group in Miami? Putting up billboards and trying to convey info with imagery.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Matt McIrvin: Reminds me of what happened with Archie Bunker. He was supposed to look bigoted, etc. but a lot of bigots loved him because they assumed the show endorsed his actions. And of course, the show did make him loveable despite his bigotry
Steve LaBonne
@schrodingers_cat: But now we know what was lurking right under the surface. Dying empires usually have interludes in which stability is temporarily restored. But the fatal sickness is still there.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen RoboCop, but I don’t know that I’d single it out to make some larger point about society.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: Bigotry is motivated stupidity.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: Nah. I use “stupid” when I mean stupid. Most stupid people I know are white people, but then, I interact with more white people than any other “color.
ETA: Now, what I mean by “stupid” varies with the behavior that I’m observing in the other person. Usually “short-sighted” is what’s probably going on — the lack of understanding that what the stupid person is doing is going to hurt him and others real soon now.
TONYG
@schrodingers_cat: Yarvin, Musk, Thiel and other assholes of that ilk remind me of certain men (almost never women) who I worked with during my “career” in I.T. The ones who were convinced (or who pretended to be convinced) that they were the smartest guys in the room. In reality those fucks would quickly get a reputation as being the people to be avoided like the plague, because their main activities were covering their own asses while stabbing other people in the back. Assholes who are worse than useless.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: This is the crux of it. So depressing.
When Obama was elected twice, I thought, “Wow, we’re ready to join the world!”
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: YES!
Captain C
@suzanne: She’s got a thing for unwashed-looking techbros with bad hair.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Agreed. May be stupid is not enough of a descriptor, whatever their intellectual capacity these people are morally bankrupt.
schrodingers_cat
@Steve LaBonne: I disagree with the formulation that the US is a dying empire. This is the leftwing tankie talk and also the MAGA cult talk. Not surprising since it comes from one source, Russia.
trollhattan
In which “Sorry, Trump budget cuts, byeee” becomes a good thing.
You hate to see it. I expect a blizzard of lawsuits funded by the RW lawsuit complex.
Jeffg166
I always find it telling when someone feels the need to tell me they are smarter than I am. They might be. I don’t engage with that type of if I can help it.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: There are a number of points being made in the backstory, but the main plotline is basically about Murphy being made into RoboCop by a greedy and power-mad corporation, that seeks to control him and destroy him if they can’t, and then regaining some degree of individuality. But it pulls some of its punches: if I recall correctly, the company has an Old Man type at the top who is really a decent sort, and the top villain is his scheming underling who is in league with the murderous drug kingpin.
Steve LaBonne
@schrodingers_cat: I hope I’m wrong, though there certainly are many aspects of American imperialism that won’t be missed. But I don’t see how we recover from the massive damage being inflicted every day now. And the fact that so much lasting damage could be inflicted in a few short months is a demonstration of the underlying rot in our culture and institutions.
Bupalos
@Baud: I think this is along the lines that I’m thinking of. To me it’s ultimately a religion around intelligence. If you weren’t stupid, you would be good. What people like Trump or Yarvin or Musk or Thiel lack is not intelligence. It’s generally a fundamental ability to recognize and relate to other human beings as human beings. They can’t experience love or friendship or believe in mutual benefit because they can’t see other humans. That’s what comes through in the Yarvin thing. From his theories to his basic interactions, he comes off as a guy in solitary confinement.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: The rise of the techbro right, the tankie left (BS from Vt is their patron saint) and the MAGA movement are all fueled by white men and wanna be white men who have realized that they are not only not the best of the best they are nothing special.
Obama’s election and reelection brought home that point. This is their revenge.
Steve LaBonne
Le trahison des clercs
schrodingers_cat
@Steve LaBonne: Define American imperialism. I can’t critique it unless I know what exactly you mean by it.
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffg166: I’ve also seen the preemptive defense “I’ve done SO MUCH of my own research on this topic, read so many more books than you, that, bro, you shouldn’t even bother arguing with me, I’m going to flatten you with my erudition.”
I saw someone try that with the claim that Western civilization’s Peak Oil-induced collapse was imminent, about 20 years ago. (Remember that? I was more of the opinion that Peak Oil wasn’t going to come fast enough to save us from fossil-fuel-induced climate change, which seems to be more the truth. The problem now isn’t really that cheap oil is ending, it’s that the hydrocarbon and coal industries are reacting to the potential drop in demand from people worrying about environmental costs and introducing competitive energy substitutes.)
Steve LaBonne
@schrodingers_cat: The decades of American domination of the world economy, and far-flung military establishment, that succeeded WWII. Obviously its consequences were a mixed bag, some very important contributions to global stability and prosperity and some very bad behavior. All of that is over now for better and worse.
schrodingers_cat
@Steve LaBonne: It was definitely better than the order that preceded it. I wouldn’t call it an empire. What the British had was an empire.
Steve LaBonne
@schrodingers_cat: And note how the Brits have struggled to figure out who they are, and what their place is in the world, since they lost it. Suez was one event in their extinction burst. Trump is ours.
Hoodie
@Matt McIrvin: I think we get a similar desensitization from satire involving Trump. Trump’s outrageous behavior is entertaining in a way similar to the way a WWE heel is entertaining. Satire often reinforces this effect. This allows him to get away with truly corrupt, sociopathic behavior, while other Republicans are not able to get away with similar behavior because they don’t fit that role.
Obvious Russian Troll
@Matt McIrvin: The possibility that your friend is right scares me.
Matt McIrvin
@Steve LaBonne: The thing about the UK is, in some ways it has a pretty good thing going in its post-hegemonic existence as a top-tier European economy… but it’s always got to deal with its imperial-nostalgic element doing their best to politically sabotage that. Over and over and over.
If our post-hegemonic future is only that bad, I can live with it.
Steve LaBonne
@Matt McIrvin: Since Farage isn’t in power yet, we’re certainly much worse off for the time being.
Anyway
Breaks my heart AND pisses me off that all the mocking of Vance when he was first announced as VP pick didn’t amount to anything. We still didn’t beat them :-(
Steve LaBonne
@Hoodie: Somewhere Neil Postman is shaking his head sadly and saying “I told you so.”
Eunicecycle
@Dorothy A. Winsor: All you had to do was listen to the words of the “All in the Family” theme song to know what Archie was about. “Girls were girls and men were men.” “Didn’t need no welfare state. Everybody pulled his weight.” Of course the show itself was a rejection of that mindset but people did love Archie. White privilege personified and proudly ignorant!
jimmiraybob
Hip hip to Yarvin the Great!! To Yarvin the Magnificent! Ruler of the Dunning-Kruger realm!
Rugosa
@Bupalos:
There is a sort of stupid that is unrelated to anything an IQ test measures. As you say, it may be lack of social and emotional intelligence. It may be fear of upsetting a world view that has served them. Think of engineers who believe in creationism – you would think they’re too smart to believe ancient superstition but their mental functioning has a blind spot. If Genesis is only a fable, maybe man wasn’t created to rule over the earth. Maybe other creatures have some claim to it, too. For idiots like Musk and Yarvin, believing that they are supermen destined to rule is their justification for exploiting everyone else. If they question that, their world falls apart.
schrodingers_cat
@Steve LaBonne: The post WWII system that the US put in place is quite different from the British Empire. Trump’s election is definitely an inflection point. But the future is not yet written.
Tony Jay
@Matt McIrvin:
I always suck my teeth when I hear ‘Imperial nostalgia’ as an explanation for modern British neurosis, because it just doesn’t work. It’s not so much that anyone misses being an empire, most people are generations removed from that period and can’t even imagine it. It’s much more that the British sense of self had come to rely on the calming sensation of safety that being at the heart of an empire provided. When you’re top dog, no one can really hurt you, and if anyone does hurt you then you can hurt them back. You don’t feel threatened, you don’t fear subjugation or oppression, because you’re strong enough to sit at the top table and are insulated from being punched down on.
What the modern UK is suffering is a big dose of partially manufactured reality. Even post-Suez we were spared from the truth about our situation by Cold-War realpolitik and the usefulness of our remnant economic and cultural ties, and then for the longest time we had the comfort blanket of our position in the EU. We were so comfortable that it took the twin wounds of Thatcherite economics and a malignant right-wing Press to suck out the national marrow and replace it with a drip-drip-drip of divisive venom, leading to the self-inflicted mutilation of Brexit.
The modern UK is full of very frightened people who have been told since they were children that foreigners are playing them for fools, immigrants are stealing their jobs and that it’s all a conspiracy concocted by the Loony Left to overthrow the Crown and turn ‘their country’ into one of those third-world shitholes Great Britain used to throw up against a wall every few years to show who was boss.
In short, the UK is suffering from all the symptoms of being an oppressed colony, while being gaslit by the people exploiting it into blaming The Other rather than the people who have actually managed the country’s decline.
And yes, it’s not just the UK.
Sister Golden Bear
@suzanne:
Who’ve said The Matrix is a trans allegory—and a reminder that at the time estrogren came in…. you guessed it… red pills.
Elizabelle
Jebus. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto came in at a sleek 35,000 words.
What do you know. Wiki has it. Unabomber’s “Industrial Society and Its Future.” WaPost link.
Steve LaBonne
@schrodingers_cat: I fear a lot of things are in fact written. It will be quite a long time before the US is a trusted partner again. The destruction of American science, the incineration of our trade relationships, and the fiscal black hole into which the GOP is thrusting us spell serious and unstoppable economic decline. And a reasonably healthy political culture is nowhere on the horizon.
Elizabelle
@Sister Golden Bear: Who will tell them? These people who know everything?
cmorenc
@Matt McIrvin: It is actually true that having enough money and liquid assets to be free of any need to work for anyone else (or perhaps to choose not to work at all) nor do nor be anywhere you don’t want to be is called having “fuck you” money, because you have the secure ability to respond to anyone trying to demand something of you with “fuck you!” without repercussions.
That said, no one is free from adverse events out of your control, such as cancer or rejection from a romantic interest. Also, of course money does not of itself buy happiness or contentment, but it sure can remove quite a few sources of unhappiness and discontent (not nearly all, but a substantial portion nonetheless). But one key thing it does not bring is any purpose to life, beyond making and keeping money. And it can bring the insecurity of never confidently knowing that the people around you are there because of affection and respect for you rather than because of your money.
Take Donald Trump’s money away from him, and he would quickly be abandoned and scorned by the army of sycophants who surround him.
Steve LaBonne
@cmorenc: Retirement on a modest but adequate income brings all of the independence without the insecurity and discontent. That’s why making that impossible is a major goal of the assholes.
narya
Re: the “guy at the end of the bar.” One of the most entertaining things about Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder novels is that they usually feature a conversation among the guys at the end of the bar where the gang meets (in a back room) to plan their various capers. And, of course Cliff at Cheers.
cmorenc
@Steve LaBonne: That is among the reasons GOP ideologues, including eg the Heritage Foundation hate the ACA – because it frees employees from being captive to employer health coverage, which economic captivity undermines employee bargaining power and mobility to seek other employment. Their glibertarian economic model regards employers and employees as equally free agents in the capitalist system, yet seeks to effectively undermine employee leverage at every practical and legal turn.
jimmiraybob
@schrodingers_cat:
“America especially its white and weatlhy demographic …”
I wouldn’t confine it to the wealthy. I grew up in a poor, working-class, white neighborhood in the 60s that I was able to escape at an early age when I transferred to a school of mixed humanity. Assumed-privilege is born of a lack of humility and an inborn or learned sense of supremacy.
Liminal Owl
@trollhattan: Couldn’t we shorten that to J. DiVance?
Matt McIrvin
@Tony Jay: Almost all of that sounds exactly like the US in 2025.
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: This statement by Tom Barrack, U.S. Ambassador to Turkiye and Special Envoy to Syria, does not speak to the general argument here but I thought it was significant in its own right:
Turkish journalist Ragip Soylu commented:
During the first three months after the Assad regime fell last December, I saw plenty of proposed maps dividing Syria into four statelets. I wasn’t sure whether the Trump administration would go along with these dangerous and short-sighted schemes, because they had strong advocates in and adjacent to the administration– mainly Islamophobes and misguided Israel supporters.
But Trump’s announcement on his Gulf trip that Syrian sanctions would be lifted and, and his appointment of Tom Barrack as Special Envoy for Syria make it clear the U.S. has come down on the side of a united and thriving Syrian nation. I think this will be to the great benefit of Syrians, and as well to other people in the region including the Israelis.
Juju
@schrodingers_cat: Those types can never be saved. They aren’t smart enough to figure out how stupid they really are.
Juju
@Obvious Russian Troll: Thank you for making me laugh out loud today.
Trivia Man
@trollhattan: i prefer the term Shady Vance
Matt McIrvin
@cmorenc: It sure seems like the richest multi-billionaires in America are more captives and servants of the bullshit machine than even the rest of us. Somehow fuck-you money can’t buy them freedom from it, in fact it entangles them further.
Matt McIrvin
@Steve LaBonne: Today, that’s being rich. But you don’t feel rich because there’s always someone unimaginably richer, and that feeling is binding in itself if you let it be. The people chasing super wealth are just letting it rule them.
schrodingers_cat
@jimmiraybob: I was talking about the wealthy techbro demographic attracted to Yarwin and other “prophets”. You are describing the demographic that votes R. The first is the subset of the second.
pluky
@Bupalos: Thinking of Frank Herber’s ‘twisted mentats’ in the Dune books.
DMcK
@Matt McIrvin:
The same can be said of Verhoven’s adaptation of Starship Troopers. When I saw it, it seemed that the audience were equally divided between those (like myself) who took it as a shrewdly hilarious send-up of Heinlein’s cryptofascist vision of a militarized authoritarian culture which exists solely to wage war, and those who took it on its face as an endorsement of same.
brendancalling
@Matt McIrvin: Even Swift’s “Modest Proposal”?
Matt McIrvin
@DMcK: I remember thinking that his Starship Troopers maybe worked as a satire of militarism in general, but didn’t really directly attack the points that Heinlein was trying to make in the book (and there was a lot there to attack). I recall hearing rumors that the project was only directly associated with the Heinlein license relatively late in development.
Trivia Man
I read the book about 50 years ago and one concept has been part of my thinking ever since. All high school students are required to take History and Moral Philosophy. No grades, just required participation. The teacher must be a veteran.
In that class he encouraged everyone to examine ALL government and NOT assume that “it is ours so it is the best”. What OTHER forms could be used? It taught me to at least consider different options. In politics and everything else.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Matt McIrvin: Bioshock wasn’t really satire; it was more of an indirect critique. A zealous libertarian who’d burn a forest to the ground rather than have the government turn that forest into a national park decides to build his version of paradise, and as you learn as you go through the ruins, the whole idea of the underwater city of Rapture as a libertarian utopia was pretty much doomed from the word “go”, because the owners and builders ignored fundamental aspects of what makes a stable society actually function.
Anyway
Right? They’ve bought into this mindset that Ds are after their money, are going to take it all away. Whereas any moves by Ds in this direction are at most timid, too little — why are they so afraid?
Tony Jay
@Matt McIrvin:
Yup. Same snow job, same results.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Gloria DryGarden: all of the people who never did any of the assigned reading, while simultaneously claiming they understand everything now, dude, because they read part of the cliff notes
HopefullyNotcassandra
@moonbat: if Mr. Thiel does want to live forever, how can he be on board with destroying our scientific base like DOGE is doing through the NIH cuts and attacks on universities?
Does Mr. Thiel think he can pick off fired NIH scientists and doctors for cheap? It really does not work that way. Surely he comprehends an interrupted study loses much of its scientific value?
None of the tech bro public narratives make sense with what is actually being destroyed in this country right now. I think they all may be high on something more than their own supply.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Bupalos: he comes off as a guy who slept through every political science class he took (if he took any).
He has no conception of government based in any kind of reality. He appears ignorant of the need for refuse and sewage disposal. He is writing what techbros want to hear.
karensky
@Steve LaBonne: yep
Ruckus
@Anyway:
Enough people wanted shitforbrains. That they got his VP as well likely didn’t actually matter all that much to them. I think that a lot of his voters liked/voted for him because of his “wealth.” Now how much that is we are very likely to never know. Because most everything that comes out of his mouth is bull and shit. It’s what and how he’s dealt with everything his entire life. It’s all he knows.
Ruckus
@Juju:
They also don’t have the whatever to believe it when a lot of people tell them how stupid they are.
Elizabelle
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: And then scuba diving bears showed up.
Gloria DryGarden
@HopefullyNotcassandra: when I took poli sci, we had to write papers, and explain why we were in favor of liberalism, or realism. Writing a paper for a college course, even a 5 page thing, takes some thought and examination, some clarity and understanding of opposing concepts. I don’t think you can spin up bullshit and misrepresented philosophies, and get a passing grade, let alone write a decent paper.
so I expect you’re right, he didn’t take such a class, and write papers, and try to understand. A better writer might be able to compare and contrast between differing aspects and points of view, to bring clarity. It’s different than spinning things toward a certain point of view by incrementally twisting facts.
(I’m thinking specifically of how the epoch times does this. They start out reasonable , on a premise it’s easy to agree with, and the subjectivity slips in after a few sentences, as their premise and aim veers off the road and into the fiction highway.)
Gloria DryGarden
@Trivia Man: there are several books being mentioned, and I can’t figure out which one you’re referring to. And you aren’t replying to anyone in particular.
I wish you would make your reference clear.
to be fair, I just spent 30-60 minutes scrolling and skimming, reading most of the comments, trying to figure this out. Having not read or watched most of the referred books and movies, only the matrix, it is not clear. So I don’t know which book to glance at to follow up.
Do I need pie, to avoid this annoyance, or can you be more clear?
Timill
@Gloria DryGarden: Having read that book at least – it’s Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.
Gloria DryGarden
Fascinated by the different angles on stupidity.
really love the idea that bigotry is motivated stupidity. Also, that stupid might mean, short sighted…
getting specific is useful, sometimes. Im reminded of the education theorist, Howard Gardner, who points out there are multiple intelligences, and not everyone has all of them. Math, language, are the school intelligences they teach to and value, but there’s also kinesthetic, musical, artistic/visual, spatial, interpersonal, intrApersonal, nature and spiritual intelligences. People might be good at some things, and not others.
And then common sense, which is a set of taught and learned cultural expectations and norms..
And not everyone looks at he bigger picture, the long term consequences, cause and effect thinking about complex systems. it’s pretty different than thinking about what’s in it for me and my closest buddies.
so “I’m smarter than you” is too broad, and the superiority it implies, is rendered meaningless.
Gloria DryGarden
@Timill: thank you.
schrodingers_cat
Knowing your own limitations is a sign of wisdom. No one can be smart about everything and that is okay.
apocalipstick
@Baud:
Or ‘satire’ is defined as inherently humorous, or synonymous with parody. It’s work to teach people that satire can be tragic.
WTFGhost
It’s true, too. I’m a genius, and I don’t tell anyone that they’re really smart. Oh, sometimes I gush over an accomplishment – “that was *brilliant*!” – but only because it was, in fact, brilliant, elegant, fast, beautiful, whatever.
If I ever told someone “you really are good at this!” the way Trump pretends people talk to him, I’d be talking to a *child*. “So, a flu shot won’t help Covid, because Covid is not the flu.” “Oh, so a flu shot won’t help?” “Correct, you’re really good at this, Mr. President! Someone give him a cookie!”
If you’re talking to really smart people, and they consider you a peer, they don’t tell you “you’ve joined the club,” or anything. They just *listen* to you. And if you want to say something, they make time to hear it. And they’ll share their own thoughts, and if you say “what about X?” they’ll have an answer – or they’ll curse your name, and think about X, which a smart person could miss. That’s how you know you’ve joined the club – when people listen, with anticipation. That’s real respect.
apocalipstick
@Bupalos:
Very similar to the way that we need to realize that matriculating at an elite college is zero guarantee of any moral education. When I mentioned that Whiskey Pete Hegseth was a graduate of Princeton and Yale, Ms. Stick said “Well, something happened to him.” No, nothing happened to him; the mistake is in assuming that graduation from two Ivy schools meant he was any sort of good person.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: I hope that theory is not true. It does, however, track with what really stupid people think/do many times.
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: Good point.
Paul in KY
@Bupalos: Socially he’s a misfit or a misanthrope.
Paul in KY
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Archie, at conclusion of series, wasn’t near as much of a bigot/asshole as he was when show began. That was intentional, of course. The chuds who loved Archie’s bigotry seem to miss that point (probably on purpose).
Paul in KY
@Bupalos: They have no empathy.
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: Saint Bernie is alot better than any of them, IMO.
Paul in KY
@Obvious Russian Troll: Would have liked to know what Voltaire or Oscar Wilde would have thought of that theory.
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: That is ‘reality’ at its most basic.
dnfree
@Elizabelle: Have you read the science fiction story “Bears Discover Fire”?
dnfree
@Gloria DryGarden: “And then common sense, which is a set of taught and learned cultural expectations and norms.”
My dad used to tell me “You’re smart, but you don’t have any common sense!” He was right, and I knew it. What common sense I have acquired is from observing and learning from other people who seem to have it.
Chris T.
@dnfree: Long dead thread but I feel the need to jot this down :-)
Years ago, on the walls of a bathroom stall at the university I went to (I know, a strange place to find this), someone had written:
As far as I can tell Twain / Clemens never said item 2, and I might misremember the attributions, but the pairing always struck me as appropriate.