Destroying federal governance seems on point for people who read Yarvin and want to rule feudal micro-states as techno-kings.

I guess they see themselves as high officers in those states. I fail to understand how someone could read about living in a dictatorship and go "yeah, I would like to live like that"

You don't have to see yourself as a high officer. You just have to imagine that you will be restored to your deserved state. In that state you are slightly better than average, and only those who are morally defective suffer. (Those are the ones who are now unjustly keeping you from succeeding on your merits.)

The high officials are the truly great ones who have restored the natural order. You don't need that. You just require being recognized as somewhat better than most.

This is how the entire history of racism worked in the United States. You may be a poor white person, living in a crappy neighborhood, with a crappy job, but atleast you're not black with things like Jim Crow, police, and redlining making sure legally your life is even worse. Plus your boss looks just like you and said you're a cultural fit so you may even be rich like him one day!

You reminded me of the Lyndon B Johnson quote which seems more relevant that ever. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

The trouble with this quote is that it's too easy to misinterpret it exactly in favor of the people it's criticizing.

Racism is a system for pitting poor white people and poor black people against each other. But the perpetrators are not the people in the other tribe, they're the people telling you that there should be separate tribes.

Racists were just temporarily embarrassed by the civil war.

Were they? If so, embarrassed about what? Losing it?

I think they and right wingers are only embarrassed by losing, it explain their behaviour.

Bacon's Rebellion [1] in colonial Virginia, 1676-7, was a a multi-race and cross-class uprising against the colonial government and the aritocratic planter class. The rebellion's failure was followed by measures that served to alienate the poor white population from the enslaved black population.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_Rebellion

Democracy is complicated. The world is complex, but you get only a limited set of choices (in some implementation a few more, in others a few less) which means the burden in the end is on you. Now you take the wannabe dictator, which takes that all of you "I'm like your dad and will care about all those problems, so you only have to care about your direct environment, doing your job, taking care of your family, all else will be handled"

Evidence suggests ~30% of people are content to be worse off in order to inflict a larger loss upon others. This paper makes for rather grim reading but imho provides a very useful heuristic for understanding the political enfironment in an era of mass communication.

Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451

This really feels like the best explanation for what's happening right now :c

Isn't 30% roughly the percent of people who voted for this situation?

> Evidence suggests ~30% of people are content to be worse off in order to inflict a larger loss upon others. This paper makes for rather grim reading but imho provides a very useful heuristic for understanding the political enfironment in an era of mass communication.

Pinning this on human psychology is ignoring how the game is set up. If you structure something in such a way that the person who gets the most points wins and gets a prize, a move that causes you to lose one point but causes your only opponent to lose two points will put you ahead. That's arithmetic, not psychology.

The issue, then, is when we allow things to be structured that way -- as zero sum games. Instead what we should be doing is stamping out anything that fosters artificial scarcity.

Moreover, as the paper points out, that's what happens in dyadic systems. Which is to say, two party systems. If you have the option to cost yourself a point but cost one of your opponents two points, that's an advantageous move in a two-party system, but not in a five-party system even with a zero-sum game, because then you've cost yourself a point against three of the four other parties. So if you want to get rid of that, have your state adopt score voting (specifically score voting, not IRV or any of that mess) instead of the existing voting system which mathematically constrains us to a two-party system.

  > I fail to understand how someone could read about living in a dictatorship and go "yeah, I would like to live like that"

fwiw there are religious people who read about the great kings in the bible and wish they had one of those today, and they vote (not endorsing, just sharing my experience)

There are also religious people who look forward to the coming of the “end times”. They also vote.

yep, they definitely do

More importantly, US oligarchs are religious. Mostly evangelical, mormon or some postmodern derivative, like Thiel, Yarvin, Musk and their ilk.

In the US, even people who aren't very religious in practice still harbour religious beliefs like the state of Israel being a divine entity. I.e. like Ted Cruz, who knows some english biblical phrases but isn't religious enough to stop himself from playing golf with the pharaoh, and yet strongly holds on to the antisemitic zionist belief that jews must move to the state of Israel and eradicate their neighbours.

I think Cruz is likely a lot more religious than he puts out only because his brand of religion is, or at least was, too extreme for a lot of people. His father is a fundamentalist leader a la Handmaid’s Tale, which should have been a lot more worrying a lot sooner for a lot more people.

Partly being submissive, partly betting on being among the rulers, partly distaste for most of the world, and partly just idiocy and insanity

Wow, that's possibly the bleakest set of opinions I've ever seen detailed.

I can't help but think that this is typical self-loathing and ensuing self-destruction turned towards society itself. I need to read his actual writing, though. I'm sure there's also some element of actively pandering towards people in power desperate to justify their hold through some ideology.

I can outbleak that! In 2 paragraphs!

Although it seems more robust in the long term*, anti-intellectualism probably has a cliff of adaptivity, just like academia, ideology, or indeed any collection of values

*The foundations of China's rise can ultimately be traced to the cultural revolution? Now we wait.

So you don't know that the vice-president's mentor completely agrees with him

Of course I know Thiel is probably one of the most evil people alive. But I suspect he's a lot more evil than he's let us know. But this guy seems to have built his career off of actively propagating resentment and hate. If you read about Thiel's upbringing it's entirely unsurprising the two get along so well.

CF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swakopmund#Until_Namibian_Inde...

> Swakomund was known for its continued glorification of Nazism after World War II, including the celebration of Hitler's birthday and "Heil Hitler" Nazi salutes given by residents. In 1976, The New York Times quoted a German working in a Swakopmund hotel who described the city as "more German than Germany". As of the 1980s, Nazi paraphernalia was available to buy in shops.

Yeah, I knew where he grew up

Just read his Gray Mirror posts or watch a podcast with him. If you really want to get the full experience you need to go back to his unqualified reservations stuff but it can be VERY tedious.

He is simply not that smart nor that interesting. Just a mega cringe-lord loser who got the ear of other cringe-lord losers who happen to be unfathomably wealthy.

Yeah, it's amazing to me that any of these clowns consider themselves intelligent when they end up holding philosophical and political beliefs that the average high-schooler could tell you are completely wack.

The natural consequence of the worship of financial success, strong isolationist tendencies, and social atomization. When you "don't rely on anyone else" and managed to make billions with your "own wits" anything you think must be genius or at least correct, right? It's insane how our current socioeconomic structure has effectively let men with the social maturity of twelve year olds gain absurd amounts of influence and power.

Also not much of a coincidence that Yarvin is an out and out white nationalist, though he denies it, or at least the name: "I am not a white nationalist, though I am not exactly allergic to the stuff" - whatever the hell that mealy mouth answer is meant to mean.

He even wrote a bloviating article to further clarify that he is not a white nationalist. You'd be forgiven though, if you didn't read the title. It spends most of the article sympathizing with, understanding, agreeing with and talking of how white nationalism "resonates" with him. But don't worry, he swears he's not one at the end!

If the US was a rebellious teenager then they are past their doing coke and doing corn phase and onto their face tattoo and smoking meth phase.

The administration is so devoid of any value it staggers the mind. The only thing that I can agree with is that our dependence on China is not a good thing (Oh yes, and minimizing governmental fraud and waste) -- the concepts, not any of the actions done to address these concerns.

What makes this mess even more disheartening is that about of third of the population loves it.

Agreed.