The Post-Left and Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America

Incredibly depressing stuff. I am increasingly convinced that while history has no great men, it is occasionally cursed with uniquely terrible dudes.

The post-left is not exactly led by Yarvin, but it is clear his "philosophies" deeply inform it. It's a depressing read, even more so because I've been reading about Yarvin, his shitty philosophy and the post-left emergence on the west coast since 2015 (at least!).

I think one of the notable things is how Yarvin is a specific type of guy, one who believes himself an ultra computer genius and spends too much hanging out on HackerNews and/or places like it. He is the exact type of guy that the post-left is composed of, built on Steve Bannon's realization that the type of white kid who sits in World of Warcraft Barrens Chat and types slurs like they're the highest form of humor could be politically activated.

I do wonder if we're missing a sort of essential ingredient in discourse to counter balance Yarvin, a tech-person philosophy of empathy, mutual aid, and the type of anarchistic thought that built the internet in the first place.

Andreessen has been known to urge his associates to read Yarvin’s blog. “Tech people are not interested in appeals to virtue or beauty or tradition, like most conservatives,” the State Department official said. “They are more like right-wing progressives, and for a long time Moldbug was the only person speaking to them this way.” (Andreessen and Thiel declined to comment.)

It is clear that, if there is a mass audience for Yarvin or not, he has a particularly powerful small cadre that is his audience and it is having and impact. What we've got from this is a shitshow of tech-rich who think that we need to figure out how to do genocide without being cursed by history. Dark and ugly shit that a particular group of morons thinks makes them real thinkers who are considering 'the important necessary thoughts'; when all they are is egotists looking for excuses that keep them or put them in charge.

Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”