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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30634 thread views

Israel-Gaza Megathread #2

This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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Curtis Yarvin wrote about this clusterfuck: Gaza and the nomos of the earth. It makes some humorous connections between American foreign policy and dog fighting pits, and visualizes a world where America stops trying to meddle and just lets "might makes right" rule:

But this is how might makes right. Now, picture this victory—the victory of force and order over turmoil and chaos—worldwide, cleaning up all the world’s open sores. You are picturing the fall of the American empire—and realizing that, like the USSR (if much better), the GAE can actually fall upward. Almost all the problems it supposedly exists to solve will rapidly solve themselves as soon as it is gone.

Curiously, he's arguing for the US cutting Israel loose, militarily and diplomatically, but that this would lead to Israel finally sorting out the Palestinian problem, through force. I say curious, because I'm not sure if Israel is actually strong enough to stand on its own without the US supplying weapons, but if they are, well, I say Israel is illegitimate, but so be it: I don't believe in wandering into a barbaric hinterland to impose one's sense of justice or civilization, which is a big point of agreement between me and Yarvin.

Definitely felt called out hard by this line:

Are you addicted to Anglo-American missionary imperialism? Test yourself with two easy checks. Do you genuinely, emotionally, care about the plight of the Palestinians? Do you know where Stepanakert is? If your answers are “yes” and “no,” you need help.

I need help I guess, except I don't believe in militarily intervening in favor of the Palestinians.

I wonder what is the proper relation of a civilization to the barbarians. Yarvin says:

The basic way for a country to be neutral in a war is, as Hamilton observes, to trade freely with both sides, but not sell weapons (“contraband of war”) to either.

And yet, so much of the world is barbaric. Kinda makes you hope Better Angels of our Nature is true.

Can someone invent a Curtis Yarvin reading LLM so that I can finally make sense of this guy's massive wall of rambling texts full of unfinished sentences

You're assuming that there is much (if any) sense to be made.

The easiest way to understand Yarvin is to think of him as a LLM that's been handed the prompt "Defend a straw-man of monarchism in the style of a Berkley-educated Marxist".

More charitably he's a deeply progressive Jewish Academic in the same general mold as Scott Alexander or Scott Aaronson who noticed the same fundamental contradiction at the heart of Liberalism that Hobbes, Burke, and Smith did back in the day, but instead of turning away at the last second the way Scott would, or tying to deny it like the other Scott, he steered into it.

If the endstate of maximizing individual autonomy/social atomization is a world of might makes right than might must make right.

He's basically Bill W if the cause of Bill's downfall had been Liberalism instead of Alchohol, an ardent liberal who thinks that liberalism must be banned for it's own good and who seems to be unable to grasp the concept of moderation.

What would Yarvin’s thought look like if he was, by your standards, an “actual” conservative?

Hard to say, you might as well ask "what would your dog look like if he were a cat?" or vice versa.

I've written about this at length on the old site but the ultimate problem with Yarvin (and the wider NRx movement) from a traditionalist/right-wing perspective is that that their goals and methods of are those of a radical Marxist. He might try to wrap his philosophy in the superficial trappings of traditionalism, but at the end of the day he is more a revolutionary than he is a reactionary.

Were he to get his way all existing social norms/morality would be bulldozed to make way for a more explicitly materialist and inductive dialectic based on race class and education (not necessarily in that order). He pursues this course because he believes that instantiating a dictatorship of the proletariat Gnon is the shortest path to maximal freedom / personal autonomy.

In short, both his methods and his goals are those of the adversary.

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