Curtis Yarvin and other far right thought leaders are smuggling their political candidates into power--but all their ideas are recycled fantasy fiction.
Substack is the only place I run into the New Right, Alt Right, White Right, or whatever other subcategories are listed in their holding pens.
They mostly remind me of Kevin Kline’s character in A Fish Called Wanda. Defensively insistent on their intellectual superiority. They REALLY hate to be called stupid.
Man, *A Fish Called Wanda* is toward the top of my list of classic movies I've never seen but feel like I need to see, and now I want to push it higher on that list so that I can fully appreciate your comment
I watched that video of Yarvin with Tucker Carlson. He’s an incoherent moron. These people accuse liberals of being communists but they are in fact the biggest radicals and totalitarians. And they need to be called out on that and not be afforded any of this both sides bullshit.
If you haven’t, anyone with even a passing interest in “Curtis Yarvin is an idiot” studies should read Neo-Reaction a Basilisk by El Sandifer. It has a really fantastic title essay that looks at Yarvin and a few other fellow travelers (Land, Yudkowski) and seems particularly prescient given that it was primarily written back in 2015 and 2016 before the election.
Doesn't fill me with warmth and happiness that I'm seeing a lot of references to Yarvin lately. He's right up there with Nick Fuentes on my existential threat watch list.
I love this. Way back in the days when everyone was still on FB, I had an interesting interaction with a friend of a friend. He said, hey watch this amazing speech by Jordan Peterson, and so I watched it. He asked me what I thought of it, and I had a one-word answer: tedious. The guy totally lost it. An argument ensued in which he decided to explain to me why my answer to him was a crime against nature, and at one point thought he had me figured out when he said "Admit it. You want to kill all cis-het men." This is the world these guys live in: where saying you think JP is tedious is synonymous with saying all cis-het men should die.
It's funny cause I cannot imagine a tool more similar to Agent Smith than twitter. Thanks for the article, since I live in my leftist bubble I wasn't aware of these obsessions to fictional characters. The fact that they believe they live in a fictional world terrifies me tbh
Reading this I was reminded of a scene in Donald West lake's novel "Good Behaviour". There is a scene between the CEO Big Bad and his son where he is explaining that America is becoming a feudal state (and that is a good thing). Effectively Corporations are the new lords, workers/consumers are serfs, the goal is to extract as much wealth as possible and they can even start wars. (There is a subplot about how this CEO hired a mercenary army to assist in the overthrow of a left wing Central American Government so that the corporation can extract the abundant natural resources.) Effectively the Thiel/Musk vision of society. This is all the more prescient in that it was published in *1987*!!! I also highly recommend his 1997 novel "The Ax" which was also very prescient in ways I won't describe (to preserve the surprise).
Good example of why I’m a subscriber, SPD. You have a gift for pinning down the crazy for at least a second so I can finally glimpse what’s going on out there.
Agree on Yarvin: tediously misunderstood historical analogies and ponderous edgelordism. I wrote a thing saying pretty much that:
https://open.substack.com/pub/theideaslab/p/curtis-yarvin-pseudo-intellectualism
Substack is the only place I run into the New Right, Alt Right, White Right, or whatever other subcategories are listed in their holding pens.
They mostly remind me of Kevin Kline’s character in A Fish Called Wanda. Defensively insistent on their intellectual superiority. They REALLY hate to be called stupid.
Man, *A Fish Called Wanda* is toward the top of my list of classic movies I've never seen but feel like I need to see, and now I want to push it higher on that list so that I can fully appreciate your comment
OMG that is so perfect.
I watched that video of Yarvin with Tucker Carlson. He’s an incoherent moron. These people accuse liberals of being communists but they are in fact the biggest radicals and totalitarians. And they need to be called out on that and not be afforded any of this both sides bullshit.
If you haven’t, anyone with even a passing interest in “Curtis Yarvin is an idiot” studies should read Neo-Reaction a Basilisk by El Sandifer. It has a really fantastic title essay that looks at Yarvin and a few other fellow travelers (Land, Yudkowski) and seems particularly prescient given that it was primarily written back in 2015 and 2016 before the election.
Doesn't fill me with warmth and happiness that I'm seeing a lot of references to Yarvin lately. He's right up there with Nick Fuentes on my existential threat watch list.
I love this. Way back in the days when everyone was still on FB, I had an interesting interaction with a friend of a friend. He said, hey watch this amazing speech by Jordan Peterson, and so I watched it. He asked me what I thought of it, and I had a one-word answer: tedious. The guy totally lost it. An argument ensued in which he decided to explain to me why my answer to him was a crime against nature, and at one point thought he had me figured out when he said "Admit it. You want to kill all cis-het men." This is the world these guys live in: where saying you think JP is tedious is synonymous with saying all cis-het men should die.
It's funny cause I cannot imagine a tool more similar to Agent Smith than twitter. Thanks for the article, since I live in my leftist bubble I wasn't aware of these obsessions to fictional characters. The fact that they believe they live in a fictional world terrifies me tbh
Good stuff....
I have this tick where I roll my eyes at any knowing mention of the matrix.
What these techbros don't know about content...
Reading this I was reminded of a scene in Donald West lake's novel "Good Behaviour". There is a scene between the CEO Big Bad and his son where he is explaining that America is becoming a feudal state (and that is a good thing). Effectively Corporations are the new lords, workers/consumers are serfs, the goal is to extract as much wealth as possible and they can even start wars. (There is a subplot about how this CEO hired a mercenary army to assist in the overthrow of a left wing Central American Government so that the corporation can extract the abundant natural resources.) Effectively the Thiel/Musk vision of society. This is all the more prescient in that it was published in *1987*!!! I also highly recommend his 1997 novel "The Ax" which was also very prescient in ways I won't describe (to preserve the surprise).
Good example of why I’m a subscriber, SPD. You have a gift for pinning down the crazy for at least a second so I can finally glimpse what’s going on out there.
Thank you, and I really appreciate your patronage!