15 replies to this topic

[PLEASUREMAN]

I have written about Mencius Moldbug before (see http://mpcdot.com/fo...reactosphereppt for an indication of where he rests in the "dark enlightenment" cosmology).  To be honest I like him, if for no other reason than being an unusually good writer, not only by blog standards but by the slightly higher standards of mainstream intellectuals.  And not only that, but by being able to hold my interest when I see he's full of s**t (see: http://mpcdot.com/fo...dbugs-cathedral).  I didn't say he's an unusually good thinker.

He doesn't always make sense, but his nonsense at least reminds you of sense.  Discourse has been ruined by what has happened to the media--we're lucky to get Moldbug when 99% of the time the most we can hope for is Diane Sawyer soothingly intoning about a duck that has befriended schoolchildren.  Our discourse is tragically formless and inane, a hissing gas that inflates the floating Macy's heads of fashionable discussants and smells like Hitler's farts.

It used to be that when we wanted to hear something stupid drift out of the seams of one of these billowing caricatures, we at least got treated to the refined argument of a Noam Chomsky or a John Kenneth Galbraith.  Now we get inanities like Matt Yglesias and Hannah Rosin.  Go on Bloggingheads.tv, which is Robert Wright's idea of an intellectual salon, and sit through one of those excruciating discussions.  You'll start wondering what that duck is up to.

Moldbug, despite updating his blog once a quarter and only then to remind you that he's still pretty impressed with Thomas Carlyle, has evidently attracted notice outside the alt-rightosphere.  Not just Moldbug but the entire (I wish they were joking) "Dark Enlightenment".  Moldbug links to a reaction to his reactionaryism that attempts to sum up what Moldbug and these guys are all about.

Quote

Perhaps the one thing uniting all neoreactionaries is a critique of modernity that centers on opposition to democracy in all its forms. Many are former libertarians who decided that freedom and democracy were incompatible.

“Demotist systems, that is, systems ruled by the ‘People,' such as Democracy and Communism, are predictably less financially stable than aristocratic systems,” Anissimov writes. “On average, they undergo more recessions and hold more debt. They are more susceptible to market crashes. They waste more resources. Each dollar goes further towards improving standard of living for the average person in an aristocratic system than in a Democratic one.”

Exactly what sort of monarchy they'd prefer varies. Some want something closer to theocracy, while Yarvin proposes turning nation states into corporations with the king as chief executive officer and the aristocracy as shareholders.

This is from Techcrunch (nerds), so Moldbug doesn't get gentle agreement.  The argument he gets is pedantic, involving pointless questions such as "Are democracies good for stability?"  Obviously this is a question that depends entirely on the sociopolitical environment one is examining, but neo-reactionaries and anti-neo-reactionaries usually address the question as if there is one answer for all times and places.  It's depressingly stupid.

As a reminder, we at MPC think this whole Dark Enlightenment thing is pretty oddball stuff.  Monarchism, Carlyle, theocracies, all that business.  It's just too much marching around in your grandfather's clothes in the attic, dreaming of another time.  The people I know who are big on monarchy I wouldn't trust to park my car.

Moldbug doesn't really have a clue, nice guy though he is, but neither do his nerd critics, so let's skip all that.  It's just boring to read.  However, these are people who are into seasteading, hacker culture, and other Burning Man-style idiocy, so while nothing they have to say is important it is often very, very funny.  In a way it is the most sublime modern entertainment there is, watching people whose mental furnishings are autistically curated argue with each other the dumbest questions posed about human society.

Like it's some big deal to these Techcrunch spergs to prove that monarchy isn't the way to go.  They make a living commenting about mercurial developments in technology and then arguing over marginal sociopolitical ideologies.  It's as though their mission is to only say and do things that are pointless.

The Techcrunch blogger, Klint Finley, goes on about The Cathedral for awhile.  As you know I hate the whole stupid thing, it's completely mindless.  Finley glosses over it and gets to the only thing he can really notice about anything, which is that this Cathedral business seems like a cover for RACISM (more on that later, he says, but then he never actually says anything later).

He should have consulted that Dark Enlightenment PowerPoint image I linked at the start, because while there is a certain amount of cross-pollination among these groups, they don't actually have much to do with each other other than a general complaint about liberal fagginess.  Much of what they seem to have in common is simply that they're nerds who spend a whole lot of time on the Internet and are a little too responsive to what they find there.

Klint Finley, although it would horrify him to think so, has just as much in common with them as they have with each other.  The stuff about "naggers are dumb"--which is practically a tautology anyway--is incidental.  It's all the detached, unfocused, aspie intellectualism that is their problem, and it's as easy to see in an open source listserv as in the comments of an HBD blog.  More fresh air, guys!  Less bloviating about sexism in the tech industry and whether or not naggers are genetically compelled to buy ridiculous footwear.

And so humorless!  The closest they ever come to laughing is a sort of parroted memespeak that none of them can claim to have originated--it just expells from them, witlessly.

This is Finley's obnoxious conclusion:

Quote

It's not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with literal caucasian geeks. It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world, but that they are simultaneously being oppressed by a secret religious order. And the more media attention is paid to workplace inequality, gentrification and the wealth gap, the more their bias is confirmed. And the more the neoreactionaries and techbros act out, the more the media heat they bring.

We don't need more public shamings and firings - what we should want is for neoreactionaries to change their minds, not their jobs. As Jessica Valenti wrote for The Nation about the firing of John Derbyshire - a cause célèbre for - neoreaction: “After all, what's more impactful-a singular racist like Derbyshire or Arizona's immigration law? A column or voter suppression?”

It's just shitlib babble formed out of the latest trendy catchphrases.  All of these causes are very narcissistic obsessions that say a lot about the monoculture of liberal nerds.  I always want to shout "nagger!" in their faces because they are such huge pussies about everything.  Just using the word "impactful" probably warrants cuffed ears.  I mean, what a f****t.

Enter--if you can stand reading any more about these weirdos--sci-fi writer David Brin.  I don't read sci-fi, because I have self-respect and taste, but David Brin sure writes it.  (Or types it, as Capote might say.)

As if convinced that he must first bore us, David Brin describes the awful plot to some awful novel he wrote about rich people in the future plotting oligarchy in the future:

Quote

Yet, I also describe this particular lordly cartel as smarter than average. They know that the vast, educated middle class has access to powerful technologies that, should they become enraged, could make the guillotine look like louffa. Hence, they take their coming transition to rulership seriously, much as the Medici dukes of Florence did, during the Renaissance. Amid that alpine conclave, I show them calling on their hired intellectuals and house savants to take up the role of Machiavelli. To study and report what went wrong with past eras of oligarchy and feudalism, innovating ways to do it better, this time.

This would only be slightly clever if their conclave was called a TED conference, and it would only be really funny if Sam Hyde III crashed it.  As it is it sounds like some nerd version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Brin then blows very hard about the Enlightenment:

Quote

For three hundred years, in realms as diverse as science, wealth-creation, error-avoidance, innovation, justice and happiness, it has outperformed all previous societies combined. But that is not the secret sauce. Its key trick, above all, was a very strong mythology of egalitarianism, individualism, pragmatism and liberality

For three hundred years!  Eat it, Rome!  Such silliness is to be expected form sci-fi authors, who tend to know little about the real world.  Brin wraps his hyperventilation in a tinsel neocon package, gushing about MARKETS! and DEMOCRACY! and SCIENCE!  Did I mention I was missing Moldbug already?  My eyes were bleeding for some of that old-fashioned Carlyle talk--tell me about the monarchy again, daddy!  But first I had a Brinful of blogging to get through.

Quote

Idolatry of the Nietzschean ubermensch or superman -- the figure every geek supposes himself to be -- oppressed and kept from his natural place on-top by jealous mobs of bullies, like those who oppressed him on the playground.  Where every young nerd (myself included) muttered: "just you wait till I come into my powers!"

From Ayn Rand to Harry Potter to Star Wars to Orson Scott Card, how many mythologies have catered to that fantasy, in all its voluptuous, masturbatory solipsism?  In contrast, can you count any mythic systems -- other than Star Trek -- that encouraged a different view? Recognition that "I am a member of a civilization"? One that made million miracles possible? Not by unleashing a few demigods, but by stimulating the collaborative and competitive efforts of whole scads of bright folks who are merely way-above-average?

I don't know why Brin namedrops Nietzsche, I'm pretty sure Ayn Rand is as far back as he goes.  If he's heard of anyone before the age of comic books I'd be awfully surprised.

Brin then summarizes Finley, and again brings up Star Wars:

Quote

Every time I read that [Lucas rambling about star kings -PM], it leaves me breathless. Stunned. I appraised that perspective - and its toxic lesson - in Star Wars on Trial.  Indeed, I have elsewhere explored the emotional underpinnings of all this:

Indeed, and we won't be reading about that.  In his galloping senility, Brin describes communism as "a quasi-feudal theocratic cult" and Hitler and Stalin as "absolutist-oligarchist reactions to democracy".  Then, still arguing quixotically about monarchy, he provides North Korea and South Korea as proof that monarchies and theocracies are, like, dumb, and liberal democracies are awesome (this appears to require a lot of semantic hair-splitting).  This is where Moldbug later picks his beef, which we'll get to but not before noting something else ridiculous Brin says.

Quote

It is said that every generation is invaded by a fresh spate of invaders -- their children. In our case, western civilization has raised many generations steeped in memes of suspicion of authority and questioning the home-and-familiar, one of the most unusual things that any culture ever preached to its own offspring!  I appraise this reflex favorably in my essay and book Otherness.  These memes are what led to so many successive self-improvement campaigns, from constitutionalism to elimination of slavery. They led us hippies - for example - to march against horrid assumptions that all other generations took for granted -- wasteful and inherently impractical superstitions like racism, sexism and environmental blindness.  They also guarantee that new immunal rejection reflexes will be applied against the Boomers' assumption sets by even-newer generations!  So be it.

I suppose this is a reference to trannies or something.  Brin is completely unreflective, as is generally the case with neocons, babbling excitedly about PROGRESS! even while ignoring such things as a self-genocidal birthrate decline in the West, escalating consumption of resources, the collapse of unipolarity, massive and destabilizing demographic shifts, massive wealth concentration, and the disturbing increase in neoteny and Eloification--all brought to you by MARKETS! and DEMOCRACY! and SCIENCE!

In short, while Moldbug has nothing to put up against it (his horniness for monarchies is profoundly silly), what Brin endorses is a dangerous and complacent belief in progress with an intuitive resistance to examining drawbacks (the relief from "sexism" and "racism" is merely slogan fondling).

Enter (finally) Moldbug.

Moldbug immediately makes a chaos of everything.  The man simply cannot make a metaphor that works.  As Moldbug tells it, the past is a foreign country, and the present is a province of that country.  But the past is also a metropolis, and the present is a bunch of provincial hicks commenting about it with their smart alek insults.  Then he drags in Ovid and "the Pontic Greeks" and starts talking about Pontus (the present, apparently), and pretty soon it's Pontus this and Pontus that, like he's been summering there for years.

Quote

In Rome, of course, critics were no problem.  Out here in Pontus, it's pretty much all, you talk like a fag.  What makes the provincial critic so grimly, hilariously terrible is that he imagines himself not just equal to the wits of the metropolis, but vastly superior.  Is it even possible to respond?  Shall the man of letters respond: "excuse me, 'Dr. Lexus,' but I am resolutely heterosexual - as if it mattered - and 'my s**t,' as you call it, is anything but 'all retarded'?"

This is all directed at Finley and Brin, as far as I can tell, and possibly also Dr. Lexus.  It's not a great start because it's about as defensive as they'd like him to be about his neo-reactionary Dark Enlightenment, which they depict as Rick Moranis in the Darth Vader outfit from Spaceballs.

Quote

No, obviously no one should ever respond to a journalist.  (Or a Stasi-Mann.)  It's a mistake to think these people have opinions.  They have careers.  They're paid by the click and not paid well.  If you or I had Mr. Jones' job,  we'd write what he writes or lose it - maybe in slightly better English.  It's a mistake to anthropomorphize Mr. Jones.  He's a piece in a machine.

Mr. Jones is probably another metaphor or something--don't worry about it.  It's obvious Moldbug is hurt by all this--terribly hurt by the insults and the caricatures and the snark coming from people he doesn't really respect but who do have something he can't quite shake respect for, which is representation of other minds.  David Brin, who can hardly be called famous, is nevertheless known by an audience that will agree with what he says automatically because they think just like him.

I think it's what keeps intellectuals in mass society in check, fear not of the state but of the public.  This fear turns every television and computer into the watchful gaze of everyone else.  Orwell had it backwards--we are not stared at through the monitors, it is through the monitors that we stare--that is how we are most useful.  The weapon of a mass audience (or even whatever smallish audience David Brin's Star Wars trials have) is more useful in policing ideas than Stasi agents.  This is in fact how things worked in East Germany.  Sure there was the Stasi, but more than the Stasi there was a corrupted populace that spied on each other either as self-protection or for self-advancement.

For most people this is unimportant and trivial--it would take CNN headlines, not David Brin blog entries read by a legion of fat virgins, to make them feel invaded.  But for people like Moldbug it is often unnerving.  Intellectuals tend to get a little hysterical when they suspect a lot of people are watching them with disapproval.  (There's also the fact that conservatives are more unnerved by public disapproval than liberals are, which I've talked about in other threads.)

So Moldbug lashes out at Brin, basically calling him unread and ignorant, without anything close to a real cut, while copying and pasting huge quotes from any book lying near him.  It's not a pretty scene because it's obviously Moldbug throwing wadded up balls of paper at the monitor while screaming and waving his arms around.  (The North Korean example is obviously stupid, but it's so stupid it doesn't deserve a reply, let alone this roosterish demonstration of book reading habits.)

Next: The Comments

[PLEASUREMAN]

Moldbug's post is pretty bad (it's impossible to read all of it), and even before David Brin pops in Moldbug takes abuse:

gwern:

That's seriously lame. You can actually implement your worthless Urbit programming ideas & even get venture capital, but you can't respond to the longest, most thorough criticism your ideas have ever gotten?

Anonymous:

Writing eccentric and flamboyant prose and aping the style of 19th century writers like a tryhard might have worked when you were relatively unknown. Now it's causing you to be a victim of your own success - your ideas are widespread enough that people are devoting considerable energies to analyzing them and criticizing them, and suddenly you look less endearingly idiosyncratic and more like you just don't give a s**t about polite and constructive discourse.

hat:

Being constantly sarcastic about the intentions and intelligence of your interlocutors is not the same as being funny, and trying to engage ideas seriously is not the same as being humorless. Then again I'm sure you think a novel-length essay is never complete or "humorous" without calling someone a fag, so I really don't know what you even think is funny.

While harsh these are all pretty on target--Moldbug deserves it.  I mean David Brin does seem like an idiotic neocon and Finley is just some random geek blogger but Moldbug's response to them is pitifully defensive.  I think he's too used to getting easy praise from people who see big streams of Carlyle and assume something smart is going on here.

As if to help Moldbug out, David Brin shows up and starts screeching about MARKETS! and DEMOCRACY! and SCIENCE! all over again like some Chatty Milton doll:

David Brin:

The English-speaking branch is pragmatic, contingent, and its most important philosopher was not Hume, or even Locke. It was Adam Smith, who made clear what any sensible person knows -- and what your rants demonstrate -- that we humans are all delusional, all the time.

Moreover, the only way truth can prevail is to remove the power of ANY individual or group to domineer and proclaim their vision to be gospel, forcing others to nod, instead of poking at your flaws.

Smith -- and the American framers - declared that all is contingent and that the best people to see through YOUR delusions are your competitors. (Um duh?) Hence we establish arenas for maximizing the benefits of competition -- testing and finding the best products, services, theories, policies and justice… by making everybody compete on level playing fields called markets, science, courts and democracy.

Whatever--who cares?  But now the good part, where Brin himself begins spastic flailing:

David Brin:

Oh but then he dives into his true nastiness: "What shines through every line of Brin's screed is this revolutionary passion for murder, desolation, destruction."

Okay, there is only one response that piece of s**t deserves: I look you in the eye and call you an evil person and a liar. Were these the days you yearn for, the ensuing duel would leave your anatomy changed, though I figure I'd have to stand in line. How utterly you depend on the rights that you claim to despise!

When I finish here, I'll have no truck with your vileness, ever again.

  WERE THESE THE DAYS YOU YEARN FOR...PUNK

In fact, destruction really is at the bottom of Brin's MARKETS! and DEMOCRACY! and SCIENCE! religion, and it's commonly applauded by neocons as such.  I don't know why he considers acknowledging this "true nastiness" much less "evil", but Moldbug gets a small bit of credit for provoking this outburst in what I was sure was a whiff.

David Brin:

The world oligarchy is looking for boffins to help them re-establish their old - pyramidal - social order. And your screeds are clearly interview essays. "Pick me! Pick me! Look! I hate democracy too! And I will propagandize for people to accept your rule again, really I will! See the fancy rationalizations I can concoct????"

For Brin all this globalism is sweetness and light because it's raising living standards and material wealth.  Personally I think that view is a tiny bit short-sighted, and that we might not be ready just yet to close the book on what 100 years of the expanding globalist enterprise has done for or to human society (apart from the huge encouragement it's given to seasteaders and transhumanists).  It seems to me that if there was a golden age at hand it would not feature Africa bursting with more naggers--but call me racist.

Brin's response is followed by chatter, but still some real gems:

Radan Rusanov:

David Brin himself? Oh boy.

Seems the Cathedral is mobilizing its Potockis and Czarnieckis - low level courtiers all - to nip you in the bud before you grow too popular... we'll see who triumphs in this Zhovti Vodi...

Indeed we shall, my friend (I assume it's some PS3 video game reference).

Brin then makes another, more embarrassing comeback (one more bit of truck with vileness before he wets his bed):

David Brin:

Couldn't help it. I needed to see if Moldburg's followers truly were the sort that a smart monarch would hire, after he took over. As happened when Machiavelli, a fervent democrat, was captured and tortured by the Medici victors, there can come a time when you face the inevitable and try to make a new life under the new (ancient) system. As Machiavelli succeeded in doing

Alas, reading these comments, in which not one of you grappled with the issues that I raised in either my posting or my response (above), I must conclude that a smart monarch would hire none of you. Good serfs, though. Be careful what you wish for.

Danlil for for example. Riiiiiiight. I am the person online who touts Adam Smith most often and speaks up for strong, competitive markets…… yet I am a "leftist." Talk about instant self-labeling as a sophomore.

Navi, likewise… instead of engaging the fact that democracy, markets, science and courts all use competition, in which rivals point out each others' errors… the core Smithian methodology... he sneers "brinny-boy." It happens that scholars of the field think very highly of this parallel… and you are welcome to disdain that appeal to authority! But I am hoping that at least one or two of you are interested in concepts, more than snarking: == For a rather intense look at how "truth" is determined in science, democracy, courts and markets, see the lead article in the American Bar Association's Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000, "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition." http://www.amazon.co...tag=contbrin-20

[Not one of you dealt with the flat out fact that the worst oppressors of freedom and market competition in 99% of human societies were your beloved lords. Close your eyes now and envision yourself popping into such a time and place… and DROP the masturbatory fantasies that you'll teach them textile weaving or gunpowder and become an instant lord. Picture your average life in those eras. Then envision yourself speaking up to criticize the duke's son who just raped your daughter.

Dear Mr. Brin, we have naggers to do the raping now.  Racist!

Anyway, then--oh s**t, here he is again!

David Brin:

I note that not one of you who assailed my reference to the duel that would have ensued in YOUR favored society from Moldburg's titanic slander, had the balls to turn and look at the provoking insult, which was dishonest and evil in every conceivable way and the sure sign of a man of deeply low character.

Indeed, it raises an interesting matter for your discussions. Ever read Shakespeare? Here, I'd doubt it. But the more erudite among you might note that in the Bard's works, and Marlowe and Virgil and Homer and so on, the characters are obsessed with such stuff. Honor, reputation, insults and duels.

It is part and parcel of hierarchical social orders and you apparently want all that back! Yet you mock my passing reference to the low chances of survival in the world that you desire, of a courtier who is as cavalier with outright, vicious, and counter-productive lying as your host here clearly is.

Read that paragraph again. Follow the logic. One or two of you… I hope… with notice the irony. This immoral man is not worthy of a decent person's sideways glance.

Then we have Deogowulf, whose deliberate obtuseness wins the prize. Dig this. Were we entirely unable to overcome delusion, we'd still be on all fours. Just because there is a problem, that does not mean there aren't solutions. Indeed, the only solution to human propensity for delusion is Reciprocal Accountability.

Reciprocal (and effective) criticism discovers faults and delusional errors, because we can see each others' delusions, even when we cannot see our own. In a free market we point them out and 3rd party consumers then judge. (Ooops! I forgot! I'm supposedly a "leftist!")

In fact, a fair number of modern people CAN see a fair fraction of their own delusions. These are the ones who were scientifically trained. Of course, they are also the ones who expose all of their notions to reciprocal accountability, daily. Instead of gathering in in-group communities who chant agreement with each other in little Nuremberg Rallies of shared incantation. As when you fellows shrug off Alexander's refutation with blithe, circle-jerk general dismissals, instead of dealing with the devastating refutations that he raises.

In fact, when the New Lords take over. … (and I have always admitted the odds are on their side)… they will want boffins and intellectual lackeys who are able to grapple with such things. With the ferocious honesty of Machiavelli.

Let me repeat… you fellows will not get the jobs. Ironically, clear-eyed Alexander probably will. And you will be working for him. Likely in the fields.

Sorry, did I say Moldbug was defensive?  Well, forget I mentioned it, Brin takes the cake, bun, and trophy for insane defensiveness after being criticized (ineptly) by an extremely minor blogger.  By the way, is David Brin a Jew?  Just wondered about that Nuremberg reference.  If he's not a Jew then that's definitely over the top.

I don't know if David Brin will be making additional appearances.  Maybe Moldbug will run away in fear of what Brin would do were he not such a major fan of MARKETS! and DEMOCRACY! and SCIENCE!  He's some evil f**ker anyway.

Sources:  http://unqualified-r...-concerned.html, http://techcrunch.co...s-for-monarchy/, http://davidbrin.blo...etense-end.html

[Saucer Lord]

Quote

When I finish here, I'll have no truck with your vileness, ever again.

And then I shall say forsooth, varlet, and quit mine sight!

[basic bae]

PLEASUREMAN, on 30 November 2013 - 02:46 AM, said:

Quote

No, obviously no one should ever respond to a journalist.  (Or a Stasi-Mann.)  It's a mistake to think these people have opinions.  They have careers.  They're paid by the click and not paid well.  If you or I had Mr. Jones' job,  we'd write what he writes or lose it - maybe in slightly better English.  It's a mistake to anthropomorphize Mr. Jones.  He's a piece in a machine.

Mr. Jones is probably another metaphor or something--don't worry about it.

Explanation of Mr. Jones is linked right at the beginning

Wiki:

biographer Robert Shelton describes the song's central character, Mr. Jones, as "one of Dylan's greatest archetypes", characterizing him as "a Philistine, a person who does not see... superficially educated and well bred but not very smart about the things that count."

It's a variant of Moldbug using ideas and quotes from any book lying near him. In this case, Dylan's biography, or maybe just Wikipedia.

Edited by karmakowski, 30 November 2013 - 07:33 AM.

[tommy]

Quote

By the way, is David Brin a Jew?  Just wondered about that Nuremberg reference.  If he's not a Jew then that's definitely over the top.

Yes, he's a Jew.

[PLEASUREMAN]

[Ricin Beans]

"Further posting will be futile echoes".  What a dorky way to drop the microphone as you walk off stage.

[Legs McDuck]

Sounds like a bad echo of Whittaker Chambers vs. Ayn Rand.

Cass Sunstein's summary of the original. From Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg...s-ayn-rand.html

Quote

In Chambers’ account, Rand created a fairy tale, “the old one known as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.” Rand’s Children of Darkness are caricatures of identifiable figures on the left, especially familiar to “those who think little about people as people, but tend to think a great deal in labels and effigies.” Because “Atlas Shrugged” doesn’t deal with people as people, Chambers believed that it “can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.”

Chambers goes so far as to link Rand with Karl Marx. Both, he says, are motivated by a kind of materialism, in which people’s happiness lies not with God or with anything spiritual, and much less with an appreciation of human limitations, but only with the use of their “own workaday hands and ingenious brain.”

Chambers connects Rand’s arrogance with her contempt, even rage, against those who reject her message. Thus Chambers’ final indictment: “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding, ‘To a gas chamber -- go!’”

These are strong words, to say the least. If they are taken literally, they aren’t exactly fair. Rand certainly objected to them. William F. Buckley Jr., the founder and then-editor of the National Review, reported that after Chambers’ review was published, “her resentment was so comprehensive that she regularly inquired of all hosts or toastmasters whether she was being invited to a function at which I was also scheduled to appear, because if that was the case, either she would not come; or if so, only after I had left; or before I arrived.”

If Chambers’ gas chamber comment wasn’t an accurate reading of anything that Rand actually prescribed, it nonetheless captured some of the anger and violence that simmers in her text. (Compare Rand’s cartoonish and sometimes brutal depictions of romantic passion with Chambers’ account in “Witness,” at once tender and thunderstruck, of falling in love with his wife, Esther.)

In his review of “Atlas Shrugged,” in “Witness,” and in countless other places, Chambers’ work is closely connected with an important and enduring strand in conservative thought -- one that distrusts social engineering and top-down theories, emphasizes the limits of human knowledge, engages with particulars, and tends to favor incremental change. This is the conservatism of Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott and Friedrich Hayek.

[Probably Not Posting Here Anymore]

Also from the comments, something calling itself "Dystopia Max" advises Brin:

Quote

When you've completed your transition, please post again, as we Royalists are all very interested in your intellectual and emotional development

Here, I think "transition" refers to dark enlightenment redpill neoreactionaryism not tranny ball-mutilation. "We royalists" is just too precious for words.

[PLEASUREMAN]

Both Moldbug and Brin attract awful commenters.  In Moldbug's case they are nerds attempting to mimic his starchy diction but who end up sounding like a snotty 13-year-old who has just read the collected letters of H.P.Lovecraft.

Joan of Argghh!:

Why, Mr. Jacobson, I can certainly see that, surrounded as we are by a delightfully mirthful essay on the intellectual paucity of one's detractors, and within comments on same, I needed to qualify "mettle" to your satisfaction. But I cannot see why it would seem an improvement on my comment. Alas, I am an ass!

Inasmuch as those pretending to intellect can ignore reality and its attendant iron-clad Truth, it's really a given that they are not serious as detractors or intellects. It's why one wishes for more iron, instead of suffocation by many vain words.

Well, whatever, you won't be having sex anytime soon.

Brin's commenters, on the other hand, are more like middle-aged comic book readers who excitedly gush over a sci-fi author you've never heard of (unless of course you were a barrister at his Star Wars trial).

LarryHart:

Dr Brin,

I haven't even finished your main post yet, but I'm already burning with rightous anti-romanticist indignation (yes, and realizing the trap that righteous indignation can be) the same way I was over the weekend when I took my daughter to see the new "Hunger Games" movie.

Of course it's Dr. Brin, M.D., you cad!  Just imagine that indignation coming from someone in a comic book store with Dr. Pepper stains on his t-shirt.  When Brin replies to him (driving down a highway near his home would have sufficed) he jizzes ecstatically.

LarryHart:

Wow! Who'd have thunk back in 86 or 87 when I picked up "The Postman" as an impulse buy that the author would know my name?

If I don't get back "here" before the holiday (one of my favorites of the year), Happy Thanksgiving one and all. I realize not all the regulars here are American, but best wishes anyway.

Indeed, the famous paperback novel "The Postman".  Dr. Brin, may Larry cradle your balls in his wrinkled old hands?  Hoping to curry even more favor, Larry tries out a bootlicking reference to the Holocaust.

LarryHart:

A totalitarian government may be able to build a pyramid or invade a neighbor or exterminate Jews more efficiently than a democracy ever could, but what do those "accomplishments" mean to the average man on the street?

Bite your tongue!  The average man on the street might well be better off with less pornography, fewer payday loan businesses, and less frequent wars against sand naggers who throw rocks at the Israeli Gestapo.  He might want fewer naggers and Mexicans in the schools his children attend and driving his wages down.  I'm pretty sure Jews have something to do with all that stuff.  Certainly the big Dr. Jew you adore does, he supports it.

Finally, one last example of how these intellectual giants debate:

Cesar A. Santos:

Maybe I should add compassionate as well.

As a thought experiment, a ruler not interested in his own personal gain but in making his state and people the best and most advanced he can, and with the necessary knowledge, competency and unfettered power to do so, would be practically unstoppable in achieving such goal.

The practical difficulties would be to find such a person and how the system would survive after his death.

Believe it or not the best discussion of such a scenery was made in an X-man cartoon. Scott admits that Magneto would probably achieve his goal of building an utopia if he managed to control the world but that it wouldn't survive his death.

Now if you add immortality to the mix...

David Brin:

Cesar Santos you pull a lovely trick. You lay down your main point as an "of course" axiom and hurry on to say "but there is the problem of succession."

But your main point axiom is absurd. Please show me the examples from history when autarchs -- even great and good kings (and I admit there were some) -- ever accomplished as much as the western democracies have in the last 200 years…. in direct proportion to how democratic they became.

[PLEASUREMAN]

[Abelard]

I sure did lol at his bug-eyed descriptions of fascism and communism.  MPC has long been aware that these were simply different manifestations, albeit more extreme thanks to prevailing social conditions in the countries where it happened, of managerialism.  The one difference I would note is that in liberalism we're forced to be tolerant of these tantrums, where in Stalinist Russia a degenerate like Brin would have wound up in the gulag and put to some use for once in his life.  Manual labor, a Jew's worst fear!

But truly, I do get a bit tired of the caricatures of history that are very common these days in various mainstream media.  None of these cretins has ever once bothered to pick up a book about the middle ages and if they did they might learn it really doesn't match up with the ridiculous pop-culture ways they like to portray it.  You could tell me that this is a niche interest, and that's true, but I think that if you're going to comment on something you have an ethical obligation to at least know a bit about it.  But liberals, generally lacking a sense of common decency, don't seem to agree, they think you should just be able to spout off on whichever subject with no regard for truth or integrity.  So, expecting them to appreciate the achievements of high middle ages Europe - which in fact laid the groundwork for the Renaissance and later cultural phenomena - is just asking too much.

PS regarding Carlyle, I think some of his writing still has relevance.  The more reactionary aspects of it may be outdated, but his work has some highlights, for example when he talks about the societal pathology caused by liberalism.  He was probably one of the earliest people to do this, although I'm not sure.  And he was very forward-thinking with his analysis of the type of people who were elites in his day (and who became the managerial caste in due time).

[Master Diversity Trainer]

a relative of Gordon f**king Ramsay?

[A little backstory]

Pure 888 goon diction

The use of archaic contractions and language betrays a bookshelf overflowing with trashy nerd fiction

'TWILL BE BETTER THAT I STAY AWAY FROM THIS POSTING; I SHAN'T DEIGN TO RETURN THUSLY TO SUCH A BASE DEN OF KNAVES AND LOW MEN

[TAO]

more like Dork Embarrassment amirite.

[zimbabwebucks]

my gay dad raped me now I'm a blogger