Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
i'm in the middle of freefalling down a research rabbit hole and ran across this person decrying curtis yarvin as a fake monarchist who doesn't understand what makes REAL monarchism good:
https://www.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/comments/1iy4fto/moldbug_morons_and_monarchism_an_xpost_of_my/
someone in the replies asks the obvious question
and their answer is that you can just kill the monarch
If all you have is a blog, it's natural for you to think that you can effect regime change through blogging.
But there's a very large step between
Culture matters. The US has had a de jure republic for almost 250 years. Even though the presidency has steadily moved to a more central role, it's one thing to have a literal KING in place. There needs to be a story there, and saying "we need to be more effective or the Chinese will win" doesn't really cut it.
It took France almost 100 years to finally establish republican rule: revolution, Directory, First Empire, Bourbon Restoration, Orleanist monarchy, Second Republic, coup, Second Empire, catastrophic military defeat, Third Republic.
Then we get narrow Pyhrric victory in WW1, defeat again, collaborationist dictatorship, 4th republic, de Gaulle gets fed up, 5th republic.
Even today the French president has more power than in many other republican constitutions.
How does Yarvin propose to remove the republican idea from American consciousness?
On one hand, I appreciate their acknowledgement that legitimacy matters to a government's ability to govern. While the talk about the king as a figure tied to a broader structure that creates obligations and requirements just as strongly as it does power and privilege isn't entirely historically accurate it's at least less absurd than Yarvin's notion of the dictator as a kind of unmoved mover - someone with both absolute power and absolute discretion to do what they want with it.
At the same time, if you follow that chain of thought to it's actual conclusions you end up with some kind of radical democracy. Like, legitimacy is just a way to ask the question of why anyone should bother to do what the guy calling himself king says. Historically speaking this often boils down to trying to judge how credible the threat of violence is should you refuse. If the king isn't going to be around in a week due to an ongoing succession crisis then there's no point in getting ready to pay his taxes next month, essentially. But if we reframe the question another answer becomes available: why should people consent to be governed? And the democratic answer is that the government represents their interests and is trying to organize and take actions they support. Government by consent of the governed is a descriptive statement about how governments operate, not a normative one about how they should. Once you account for the extra costs and consequences of needing to manufacture consent through violence and repression the supposed efficiency of dictatorship evaporates.
Good link, thanks.
The commenter totally missed what a shock the executions of Charles I and Louis XVI were. The natural reaction to "if the king is bad just kill him" is for the king to more or less aggressively remove threats to their persons.
In basically every case in history where people decided to kill a bad king, there was a period of chaos and violence that followed it. The killing of Charles I happened during the English Civil War, and the killing of Louis XVI happened during the French Revolution. This has happened many times in Chinese history, with the fall of an imperial dynasty leading to several decades of civil war (most recently in the early 1900s). But I guess if you have a big clever brain with big clever thoughts, you don't need to look at history.
If the only way to get rid of a bad king is to kill him, he will do anything he can to defend his power, including using as much violence as necessary. (People generally do not like being killed.) Even if you successfully get rid of him, good luck establishing a proper government afterwards with all the violence you've caused. And who knows if the new king is gonna be better or worse? A better system would instead have a mechanism that replaces officials on a regular basis, say every few years, and ensure that these replacements are peaceful. Oh wait, that's liberal democracy. If we do something boring like support democracy, how will people ever think of us as special, clever thinkers with bold, contrarian thoughts?
Bro, your system involves giving all the power to one person. You cannot then say they have no responsibility or that they're "inoffensive" when they abuse it.
source?
Love a good no true Scotsman in the title.
Unrelated: apparently our king/queen (no idea which one specifically was to blame) is why .nl doesnt celebrate 1 may.
"It's only monarchy if it's got a Habsburg jaw, otherwise it's just sparkling tyranny."