I think one should think of democracy as primarily a political violence reduction mechanism. Therefore it’s wrong to construct a critique of it on the grounds that it’s ineffective (it generally is).
I also am displeased at the fact that Yarvin seems to consistently gloss over the brutal potential downsides of monarchical rule. As an example all middle eastern countries can be described as monarchical or pseudo-monarchical. In both cases the level of brutality either prominently displayed or done covertly is beyond comprehension. The routine torture and subjugation of people is baked into the cultural consciousness by now and taken for granted, and people constantly make jokes about the secret police being around the corner.
It just comes across to me as an engineer seeing a political system that’s topologically pseudo-distributed and basically written with spaghetti code, and he’s trying to refactor it more to his liking, using a simple metric and failing to note the auxiliary effects i.e violence reduction.
p.s the violence reduction is tangentially tied to what you were saying about psychology. It basically works because people can always suppress their urge by voting harder next cycle or whatever other democratic outlet they have. Whether it does what they think it does is irrelevant; psychologically it does the job. This of course has limits and we might be approaching that in America.
Regarding malice, I think we've gotten very good at masking it, but it certainly hasn't disappeared. We're much more feminine, passive aggressive, indirect. That doesn't excuse malice objectively, although it is the excuse of our time, in the same way killing your tribal enemy was excused in more masculine times.
Curtis's rationalization strikes me as merely stating, "well this is the excuse for malice of our time, therefore we can't be too hard on these people". I guess there's *something* to that, but it doesn't strike me as particularly truthful, or even useful. We need to recognize and address malice in the guise it exists.
I didn’t expect to hear Yarvin quoting Saul Alinski! Based on this Podcast, his ideas aren’t nearly as different from the founders’ as I expected for someone called a neo-monarchist. I’d start with the federalist papers before reading anything by Yarvin - he offers more heat than light, IMO.
I think one should think of democracy as primarily a political violence reduction mechanism. Therefore it’s wrong to construct a critique of it on the grounds that it’s ineffective (it generally is).
I also am displeased at the fact that Yarvin seems to consistently gloss over the brutal potential downsides of monarchical rule. As an example all middle eastern countries can be described as monarchical or pseudo-monarchical. In both cases the level of brutality either prominently displayed or done covertly is beyond comprehension. The routine torture and subjugation of people is baked into the cultural consciousness by now and taken for granted, and people constantly make jokes about the secret police being around the corner.
It just comes across to me as an engineer seeing a political system that’s topologically pseudo-distributed and basically written with spaghetti code, and he’s trying to refactor it more to his liking, using a simple metric and failing to note the auxiliary effects i.e violence reduction.
p.s the violence reduction is tangentially tied to what you were saying about psychology. It basically works because people can always suppress their urge by voting harder next cycle or whatever other democratic outlet they have. Whether it does what they think it does is irrelevant; psychologically it does the job. This of course has limits and we might be approaching that in America.
Regarding malice, I think we've gotten very good at masking it, but it certainly hasn't disappeared. We're much more feminine, passive aggressive, indirect. That doesn't excuse malice objectively, although it is the excuse of our time, in the same way killing your tribal enemy was excused in more masculine times.
Curtis's rationalization strikes me as merely stating, "well this is the excuse for malice of our time, therefore we can't be too hard on these people". I guess there's *something* to that, but it doesn't strike me as particularly truthful, or even useful. We need to recognize and address malice in the guise it exists.
Yarvin is just Neo-conservatism with a human face.
I didn’t expect to hear Yarvin quoting Saul Alinski! Based on this Podcast, his ideas aren’t nearly as different from the founders’ as I expected for someone called a neo-monarchist. I’d start with the federalist papers before reading anything by Yarvin - he offers more heat than light, IMO.