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Notes -
Brother W.H.A.T.
Have you ever purchased any item that was manufactured overseas? Isn't it nice how cheap they are? They're cheap because the USA ensures global commerce is smooth, very smooth. They're also cheap because the USD is very strong because the USD is the reserve currency.
Do you have any investments? The strength of the USA equity market is in part due to its status as a global superpower.
Do you enjoy anything paid for by the government? Like roads, electricity, massive defect spending on factories and bridges. The USA is able to run obscene defects due to the USD being a reserve currency generating strong demand for it, reducing inflation.
Do you have a 30 year fixed mortgage? Same mechanism there. Did you grow up in a house that had one? Massive W for you guys.
I could go on...
I'm not saying the blue tribe aren't nightmares, I wouldn't even vote Dem if I was American. But let's not be dishonest here, if you live on American soil you enjoy massive benefits as a result.
Depending on how you define "overseas," then potentially practically everything, given not much is manufactured here in AK.
No, because SSI asset limits (my net assets can't exceed $2k) prevent me from having any kinds of savings or investments.
I can barely afford the (recently increased) rent on my apartment, even after my (maxed-out) government subsidy.
I grew up in a mobile home. (Back in high school, I was actually able to briefly shut up an obnoxious lefty classmate by "calling him out" on his use of the phrase "trailer trash" by pointing out that I was an example of such.) That is, aside from the times we were living in a house my parents built themselves out in the Alaska bush, with no electricity, no running water, no sewer or septic, a woodstove for heat and cooking, and so on.
I've been a supporter of Alaska seceding from the US since 4th grade. I'm a monarchist who thinks the "Founding Fathers" were vile traitors. I think that Neema Parvini is right that the threat to Western Civilization is the continued existence of the United States.
Alaskan monarchist? Yeah, I'm thinking based
So are you an Anglophile? How did you come about to becoming a monarchist?
Not especially, particularly given the state of the British Monarchy since, well, the "Glorious Revolution," really. (I'd argue, in particular, that the whole point of bringing in Georg Ludwig of Hanover, thanks to the Act of Settlement, was to prevent there from being a real monarch — note how Walpole emerged then.)
Lots of various things. My entire time in public education was an endless fight with administrators, which left we with a deep and abiding hatred of bureaucracy. Later, reading Max Weber had me understanding that bureaucracy is a product of Weberian rationalization, which is itself a core component of modernity and the "Enlightenment." A couple incidents in junior high disillusioned me as to America's pretensions to equality and classlessness, as well as the entire idea of "rule of law."
I went to college in Southern California, where I met real Blue Tribers (who weren't just rich teenagers poorly aping their parents politics), and realized that they weren't a bunch of naïve-but-well-intentioned over-optimistic utopians a la Sowell's Conflict of Visions and Pinker's Blank Slate, but a different tribe, one very, very hostile to my own.
I was raised with the lower-class "redneck" American suspicion of government. (Yes, I know this sounds paradoxical; just bear with me.) With Reagan's bit about the nine most terrifying words. With an understanding that Barney Frank's "government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together" is utter nonsense. Government is not "us." Government is them. Government is the IRS, the EPA, the ATF.
I was given a version of "the talk," about being as polite and deferential to the cops as possible, because every one of them is a Michael Tritter, a petty tyrant who will readily abuse his powers to utterly destroy your life should he feel even the slightest hint of you failing to respect his authoritah. That when seconds count, the police are minutes (or in rural Alaska, hours) away. And yet, at the same time, "back the blue," as it were, because they're still a necessary evil, preferable to the criminal scum they suppress. (Cue the crude metaphor from "Team America.")
Government is the Sheriff of Nottingham, robbing you of much of your harvest for some asshole living up in a castle, because he was born to the right family, and occasionally grabbing your sons to go get killed fighting some other asshole in some other castle — and that's what it will always be. Our illusions that it is otherwise in "our democracy", that it could ever be otherwise, are just that: illusions.
And yes, I read Yarvin back in his Moldbug days. But it was not so much his arguments (I have plenty to say about his proposed solutions to our problems; and how his so-called "monarchy" of a CEO appointed by a shadowy cabal of anonymous "shareholders" to maximize the metaphorical gold extracted from the peasantry, with cryptographic locks on their troops' weapons, and so on, is unworthy of the term), as those of the various prior thinkers he referenced, from Carlyle to Hoppe. (I'm glad I went down the "libertarian to monarchist pipeline" — not that I was ever a libertarian, really — given that at least two other people I went to grade school with (and who were rather libertarian in high school) went down the "libertarian to fascist pipeline" instead, and are now pretty much 1488/GTKRWN types.)
TL;DR: my 40+ years on this earth have taught me that democracy is a sham, the American experiment has failed, liberalism is based on a false anthropology, the entire "Enlightenment" project (which is falsely given credit for science and technology that it does not deserve) was a terrible mistake, and that if we are to have the slightest hope of ever expanding beyond this small, fragile (doomed) rock, we're going to have to radically overhaul Western civilization in ways that involve looking heavily at the pre-Enlightenment world. (Along with, I think, some elements of Confucianism, particularly Xunzi's variety of it.)
Thank you so much for the write up. Very interesting read.
Unfortunately for you, now I want more! I'm going to look into Xunzi. But I'd love to hear more about what your proposed model is.
I've got several unfinished essays looking like they're about to turn into chapters of a book/manifesto laying out my views. With titles like "Society is Not a Van der Waals Gas" (on liberalism having faulty anthropology), "You are not Avalokiteśvara" (on concentric loyalties and telescopic philanthropy), and "Evolution is Not a Creation Myth" (on how most people who "believe in evolution" don't even understand it, treat it as something that doesn't apply to modern humans, have "Creationist-adjacent" views on central planning and "high modernism," and implicitly accept the Creationist position that telos inherently implies a conscious, telic "purpose-giver").
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I'm with you on all the other stuff, and I would be with you on this one if in practice we only ran the obscene deficits during incidents of particular need punctuating longer periods of fiscal responsibility, but the fraction of fiscally responsible leaders in either tribe is a rounding error. Carefully-dosed limited-time opioid prescriptions are useful for acute injuries, but if someone's heroin addiction has gotten too bad for them to go cold-turkey and they're increasing their doses exponentially to make up for the diminishing returns, you don't praise their easy access to dealers.
I'm not saying the defects are smart or wisely spent (they're not!)
But the fact you get to have them at all is a massive form of economic stimulus that benefits the people of America in the short run
I guess they're at least an opportunity, even if one that's been squandered at best and backfired at worst.
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