the alt-right

I literally quote that you find him interesting, and say nothing about whether or not you agree with him?

dude wtf. what does the word "defending" mean to you? and if you just meant "defending" on grounds that he's interesting then wtf does his support of breivik (& his vile moral transgressions) have to do with it? what you're saying makes no sense unless you are conflating interesting w/ correct.

i know that in 2017 it's verboten to ever admit that you were wrong or back off a position but i'd have so much more respect for you if you stopped digging holes and were just like "you're right that was out of line i don't think you're pro-breivik," or "i didn't understand what you were saying about authoritarianism" or whatever but every new attempt to reframe it just makes you look more and more intellectually dishonest.

I tried reading part 1 of the Moldbug open letter again. I'm suspecting fairly strongly that he is just not a very intelligent person.

― My Body's Made of Crushed Little Evening Stars (Sund4r), 11. februar 2017 14:45 (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i disagree. he says things that i know are wrong but he also says things that are interesting + frames things in provocative ways. tbh i'm surprised when someone reads open letter and comes away thinking it's just the ramblings of some dumb dude.

― Mordy, 11. februar 2017 14:50 (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's defending him. I read that and I see red again. And it's because I hate Moldbug so fucking much.

And I've never said you were pro-breivik, wtf?

Ban Fred b

fred, this is why i said you conflate "interesting" w/ "correct." because you do.

Ban Mordy too tbh

But you know what Mordy? Just go fuck yourself. I'm not going to explain again how traumatic Breivik is, so you can shit on it some more.

i've called kevin mcdonald the most interesting contemporary antisemite. i would be very offended if you quoted that and said i was defending him and then justified your anger by recourse to his moral failings as a jew hater. someone can be evil and be interesting. someone can be good and be boring. learn to distinguish between the two.

yeah fred idgaf about your breivik trauma. it's just a way to short circuit how fucking dumb you're being by trying to cop some sympathy. own up to your shittiness please.

Fuck you too.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/42/Carlb-sockpuppet-02.jpg/220px-Carlb-sockpuppet-02.jpg

what do u feel about the fact that [one of?] the most famous frederiks in history was the most famous proponent of enlightened authoritarianism?

Mordy, I'm not sure you're well. Weren't you going to take a break until you got over you're own Trump-related trauma?

The name means King of Peace, btw. It's one of two names given to Danish kings as well, so I'm pretty well aware of the connection. Am I supposed to think anything about it?

i feel pretty well, actually, thank you. but impugning someone's mental health to score a point in an argument is another screaming recommendation for your moral superiority. tell me more about yr seven degrees of breivik.

oh sweet a flamewar! could y'all hold on for a sec tho? i have to feed my tamogotchi and update my aim away message and i don't want to miss this

Fuck your tamogatchi sleepingbag we had a famine once

lololol <3

1845: An Gorta Mór 2

tbph i want to know who cast the second vote

guys this is what happens when we have a thread that doesn't talk about steely dan

Fuck steely Dan an all after what the Brits done on us in 1603

Mordy, I did not say you were pro-breivik, I did not say you agree with him. I admitted that I misread what you said about authoritarianism - though for the record, it then turned out you meant what I thought you meant. You've admitted you were defending Moldbug, but keeps on shitting on me for having said that you do so. To quote a major asshole who proves you can actually be both evil and boring: "you're a sloppy enough thinker to make basic reading comprehension errors, assume the meanings of words, and construct strawmen to argue with, all while demeaning the ppl you're talking to for no reason but to bolster your own moral authority. a shitty stupid person. basically the worst kind of person you can be. i don't think that's really you, but it's far too often the discourse you prefer on ilx."

boring enough to quote eh? it'd be higher praise if it wasn't coming from such an oaf. tbph i still like you - you're feisty even if you're not half as clever as you think you are, and this forum can use a little fire now and again. i hope you learn to put your feistiness to good use.

And I fear you're a hopeless piece of shit. tbph I mostly pity you. You're boring, stupid, and quite honestly seem scared and scarred.

i think you've continued to misread the tone and conversation. i feel neither scared nor scarred. i'm mostly amused by sparring w/ you; i think you're pretty transparently full of shit here and have progressively degraded the level of conversation over and over again to cover for each preceding revelation of stupidity. i suspect this is your MO in general - you try to distract ppl from embarrassing arguments that go poorly for you by riling up as much of a clusterfuck as possible. i've been willing to accommodate you bc it's the weekend and it really didn't take much time. but just bc your blood pressure is rising and yr heartbeat rapid does not mean that everyone is feeling the same terror of exposure.

I don't think you'd ever be brave enough to do anything but feign amusement, so whatever.

Not enough total toilet protection ITT

Also Fred definitely lost

tbph I mostly pity you.

Jesus Christ dude could you be any more of an obnoxious concern troll?

hard to find a cluster where everybody's on Mordy's side but

And I fear you're a hopeless piece of shit. tbph I mostly pity you. You're boring, stupid, and quite honestly seem scared and scarred.

― Frederik B, Saturday, February 11, 2017 3:38 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Fred has never been mad, he thinks it's funny, actually

Mordys being a self infatuated pedantic dick btw.

Harsh. In that case I can't even imagine what you think of Frederik.

guys we all need to relax and listen to some Kenny Loggins

You're boring, stupid, and quite honestly seem scared and scarred.

LOL. There may be many ways to criticize Mordy but these are none of them.

Also Fred definitely lost

― El Tomboto

yeah mordy did a great job proving what all of us already knew about fred, good job

even Glass Joe fights a few tomato cans now and then

(So far, part 2 of the Moldbug open letter is a lot better than part 1.)

What would it take to get you guys to stop saying 'Mencius Moldbug'?

Or to stop reading jk Rowling entirely

Mind of Mencius

I'm partway through part 9. Guy has really let me down. Despite all the horseshit, I had a certain respect and admiration for an American tech bro who was willing to take conservatism not just to the point of wanting to undo the New Deal or Civil War but the American Revolution itself, not just liberal democracy but the Protestant Reformation. And his connection of progressivism to Protestantism is interesting. But what does he want to replace all of this decadent liberalism/Americanism with? Restoring the political power of the papacy or the old European aristocracies? No, he just wants to turn everything over to the even more pervasive Americanism of corporate capitalism and make tech CEOs dictators, based on the largely American belief that the private sector handles everything better than the public sector, which he holds to be so self-evident that he never argues it aside from creating a strawman fictional state-owned burger chain and claiming that it would be a disaster compared to the brilliance of McDonald's or Burger King, overlooking the large number of successful publicly owned institutions (Statoil, the BBC, the University of California system, any number of publicly owned health care or health insurance systems). My fiancee (a contract instructor who is not sure yet if she is getting paid to create an online course this semester) and I did have a good laugh about the idea that, as university professors, we're actually running the world though.

From the comments:

As one of the very few people who read this blog on occason and could conceivably be called an open-minded progressive, let me just say that this series is not accomplishing its stated goal. I find the material you dredge up fascinating but entirely unconvincing.

I confess that I've given up on reading the postings all the way through, since they exceed my attention span. My random dips into them reveal propositions like:

- Noam Chomsky is the power elite (I suppose that explains why he is such a so pervasive presence on the talk shows and op-ed pages).

- Some obscure humanities prof is the living embodiment of evil.

- Busby Berkely == Leni Riefenstahl.

- Present-day governments are omniously oppressive, yet they can be rebooted painlessly in a single operation. The result will be control by a single individual whose powers extend to being able to disable all extant weaponry from a button on his desk.

Exactly who this person is, or why the current holders of power are going to sit still while he accumulates such power, I'm not sure. Maybe I missed that part. But whoever he is, he will avoid both being the object of a cult of personality and being a faceless bureaucrat, because those are both bad.

The above propositions are entertainingly ludicrous. No progressive is going to take them seriously. That's too bad, because progressivism (like any belief system) could stand to gain from having its suppositions questioned.

JUNE 6, 2008 AT 8:21 PM

My fiancee (a contract instructor who is not sure yet if she is getting paid to create an online course this semester) and I did have a good laugh about the idea that, as university professors, we're actually running the world though.

https://mises.org/library/intellectuals-and-socialism

I gave the Hayek a quick read over lunch, and may read more closely after I'm done with my day of world domination, but I don't think it says the same thing that Moldbug was saying. What is your opinion of it, Mordy?

I think Moldbug is clumsily reaching for the same idea - that there's a class of intellectuals who create the ideological conditions that the rest of the country comes to adopt and Moldbug would call this group the Cathedral.

in a way, a lot of revanchists have defined themselves by which war they thought was won by the wrong side. your average neonazi: ww2, obv. old euro patrician types: ww1. segregationists: the civil war. colonialists: a bunch, indian independence. royalists: the english civil war. trads and anti-muslim folks: constantinople.

moldbug's bright idea is to roll these all into one thing and say it was a common enemy winning them all.

write about it at great great length with the right tone of snide condescension, bob's your uncle

"Moldbug is [...] class. [...] Adopt [...] Moldbug." - Mordy

smdh @ another shameless defense of this guy

in a way, a lot of revanchists have defined themselves by which war they thought was won by the wrong side.

i like this

there's a class of intellectuals who create the ideological conditions that the rest of the country comes to adopt

This, the way you write it, does not strike me as especially controversial (ideas have to come from somewhere, after all) but it seems like an extremely mild reading of Moldbug. A lot depends on why these intellectuals are coming up with the ideas they do, the amount of diversity of thought that is present among intellectuals, and whether there are other powerful forces in society who might be able to counter or even influence the intellectuals.

Afaict:
Hayek - In 1949, socialists dominate the intellectual class (even though they are a minority among economists) because: left-wing parties are better at targeting them (suggesting, on its own, that politicians can have some influence over intellectuals); because socialists are doing a better job of articulating a large-scale vision of how things should be, which is important for intellectuals; because socialism seems to line up with currently influential ideas in STEM disciplines; and because conservatives have more opportunities (that offer more wealth and short-term influence) outside academia. This can change if right-wingers develop a grander, more visionary theory of society (which Hayek's own career served to demonstrate, let alone the history of the world since the 70s).

Moldbug - The 'Cathedral' of professors and journalists (who are trained by professors) not only wields power indirectly by putting ideas out there and shaping the Overton window but they are literally making and administering the key political decisions since democratic bodies have outsourced all real decision-making to the Cathedral, creating a new (or cosmetically new) aristocracy. They favour progressive ideas not because anyone influences them nor because of any intellectual or ethical principle but because progressivism increases the power of the intellectual class itself. There is no significant dissent within the Cathedral of progressivism and the Cathedral will never move away from progressivism because of this predatory self-interest.

Me - I see the same story at most universities I come across: shrinking budgets, less security and dismal pay for younger professors despite their higher levels of academic qualification, increased corporate involvement, more pressure to pander to students. The Cathedral is either failing at empowering itself or doing a damn good job of painting itself as the underdog.

I have to admit I haven't read the Moldbug piece in quite a while and my takeaway was primarily the way I described it. It's very possible that he has this other stuff going on as well (that they are administering political decisions directly, that progressivism is the reigning ideology only because it increases the power of the intellectual class) and I glossed over it bc, as you point out, it's pretty dumb. Intellectuals of the Cathedral are not making the decisions themselves (though per his schemata Obama is the par excellence representative of the Cathedral and he certainly was) but they're creating the context in which decisions are made. It's hard to imagine that Moldbug believes that academics are all living high on the hog and just using ideology to keep u their decadent lifestyles. Surely he knows that despite some comforts of the professorial life that are unavailable to most of us (like tenure) no one is making as much money as business ppl. Maybe he doesn't though. My argument would be that the intellectual class trades the promise of security + amazing pay for the influence that the position brings, to have the mantle of the "public intellectual." And I don't think that progressive beliefs are uniquely able to sustain the intellectual class - I see no reason why right-wing ideas couldn't do the same as long as they placed the academy at the center of its cosmology. I'm split on the diversity of thought question. From my experience it's not extremely diverse and even at my fairly conservative undergrad institution a professor who was awarded a Templeton grant caused a huge stir from the vast majority of the [left-leaning] faculty who were uncomfortable with that fact.