"Who set up this Zoom call? Who selected the 900 people? What is this list? Wouldn’t you like to know, you fascist peasant? Go back to Dubuque, smoke some heroin and jack off into your Playstation 5. You! Hayseed! Why are you even reading this story? It’s about your betters—for your betters. We now return you to all the news that’s fit to print."
This alone was worth like, 6 months of subscription bucks.
In the recent Jordan Peterson podcast with Douglas Murray, Jordan mentions knowing and talking to one of this group based in LA - about 20 minutes in - about crafting a centrist message...very interesting...
I'm here happily reading a lovely new piece from Curtis over my morning coffee when the coffee in my mouth flew onto the tablecloth when I read the translated: "a coalition of communists and communists, communists and communists," ROTFL - if you ever lose your day job I hope you'll consider stand-up comedy. Luckily I still have a lot of coffee left...
Here is an internal critique of the argument you've been making re. Trump and Trumpism, not just in this piece but starting last fall. There is a bit of a - well, maybe not "contradiction" but at minimum a "tension" between two points you cycle through:
(a) Trump could have used his office to get a lot more done, if only he knew how to wield power. He couldn't have been FDR but he could have created an FDR-like moment, and achieved way more than he did. But he was feckless and ignorant (in the literal sense), so he didn't.
(b) The office he held has infinitesimal power. It is ceremonial in nature, which is it can do some things, but mainly by jawboning, but in a jawboning contest between the occupant and the Cathedral, a President will lose (especially over time. See also the girly-man gubernator of Cal-leee-fornia during his first term, when Arnold challenged the California-version of the Modern Structure).
Now, if (b) is the case then Trump could not have done more than he did. But (a) implies that he could have, if he wasn't, well, Trump. Therefore (b) doesn't hold, at least to the degree to which you argue it does.
(The natural reply to what I am saying here - see replies to this comment - is that the circle of A and B can be squared because reasons. Well, I think that will produce a muddle. It might be though that in some parts of a post our gracious host under-estimates what a President with enough brazen and shameless boldness can do, while in other parts of a post he over-estimates it. But that still means that his "on the one hand and on the other hand" arguments here need to be better fitted to each other).
Simply put, a president who understood the logic of the bureaucracy to the point that he could win at chess against it, had at least several dozen trusted people he could place in key positions throughout it and who had an actual concrete mission (more than an aspirational slogan) could actually make this change. I suspect there are roughly five such people who have lived in America in the last century. None served as US president. There will probably be hundreds so qualified in the next, when it will likely have been too late.
Curtis didn't say this explicitly, but I saw it as a tacit argument. Bill Barr was the closest thing, but he believed in the system too much to go scorched earth as was necessary. He should have distracted the press by covering some statuary tits up with sheets like John Ashcroft did and then ordered the removal of all nonsense policies that countermanded the president. Alas, it didn't happen.
The bureaucracy almost has to be seen from the inside to be believed. Bureaucrats worship process. They even have quasi-religious slogans like "we serve something bigger than ourselves." In the bureaucracy's dream, everyone in the private sector is a Klingon subordinate waiting for the right time to assassinate his boss and take command of the IKS Gordon Gekko. This vision is more accurate as a description of the bureaucracy itself than the private sector. But it is very much the dream.
Movies are a bit like dreams, and we even process them as such, but they are received rather than created inside. In the movie of the last four years, Trump was the Jello mold of the captain on a hover chair from the all-time best Pixar film WALL-E. However, instead of Making Earth Green Again with the title robot's aid (and that of his merry band of rogue bots), the movie ends with the captain permanently confined to quarters and the malevolent autopilot Otto having taken total control of the ship. The rogues in this movie wear Buffalo costumes and believe they're receiving orders from some high-value Scrabble letter. They are easy to portray as terrorists and fascist hooligans. If only they had a WALL-E to give them a missional purpose. As the credits roll, we see Otto and it's lieutenants debating ways to jettison Captain Trump out of the airlock. (25th Amendment? Ex post impeachment?) Trump needed not only to win the election, but to have a WALL-E and EVE and a heaping dose of curiosity to understand the nature of his reality. Instead, he got Lindsey Graham and Sean Hannity.
That's a good explanation and reminds me why I miss Foseti (remember his old blog? I suppose Foseti is somewhere but I don't know where). Anyhow since Curtis is working on a book (it's why we're all here, right?) he needs to make this case explicitly, not leave it untied. It's why I said there was a tension in what he has been saying these past months, but not necessarily a contradiction.
I agree. I hope the book's argument is tighter. If I hadn't in a past life personally witnessed the bureaucracy from the inside, I wouldn't have been able to visualize the contours and textures that Curtis can seeing it through his parents' eyes.
I still loved this essay, though. Laughed out loud multiple times.
Oh, I hope my various comments don't leave the wrong impression. I critique these posts of his not to be tggp, but because I like these posts too. I laugh, I cry, I kiss 100 bucks goodbye, the whole works. My aim is to be not like the peanut gallery lobbing spitballs but like a discussant at a conference panel - identify areas that could be improved.
I suppose at some point he'll make a post that I'll be dismissive of but it hasn't generally been the case recently.
Only speculating, trying to read the tea leaves, but it seems to me that Curtis is still fleshing out his thesis--at times he seems, from my perspective, to vacillate between taking the detachment approach and still wanting to make the arguments, highlight the hypocrisy, etc. I'm grappling with this very issue myself, so I'm eager to see how his approach/outlook develops.
Detachment as a practice doesn't sound so bad in a vacuum, but gets tougher when you see the enemy at the gates. (Eg, HR 127, the new firearm licensing/registration bill)
Resisting my alarmist impulses, for now. Any of you have an opinion on this?
Solid critique. I’d guess the idea is that the office is ceremonial as it currently exists, but it only currently exists that way because it isn’t inhabited by a king.
Donald Trump could have done something with the office if he were a king, like FDR. Since he wasn’t, it was ceremonial. The ostensible circularity of such an argument disappears if one accounts for the ability of will (Virtù) to rend new shapes from existing paradigms. A weak will, however, will have to operate within the paradigm it is granted.
TL;DR I'm tired of hearing about Trump. Figured your next post would be about how the GameStop revolution is a great example of how dissidence will only end up fortifying power in the end.
Wonderful! As others have said, this is magnificent writing! I cannot recall exactly when I felt the same about reading something, but it's probably a combination of the Tom Bombadil ... detour ... ("what the heck is happening?") and the attack on Weathertop. Hoping against hope we will soon get to go to Rivendell.
As someone who has read Moldbug since 2008, I will say this is easily a top 10 post, ever. I have already re-read it three times. I have shivers reading it. No better summary exists of the Trump dream that we bought into.
I totally agree - just read for the 2nd time - one my favorite Curtis posts - the ending Dreams bit reminded me of Hunter S. Thompson's requiem for the 60s and the American dream at the end of Fear and Loathing in its poetic truth and grasp of the moment...
> Imagine turning the steering wheel of “the tide of media momentum.” Excuse me, but: what the hell is this country? How the fuck does it work? And in particular: what the fuck is all this bullshit? “Progressives” are invited to email me, and explain. BTW: my grandparents, too, always called themselves that. They were actually CPUSA members. Discuss.
Socialists are to progressives as Lutherans are to Calvinists: there's a lot of vitriol (many Calvinists are appalled that Lutherans drink, like, beer and wine, and baptize babies; Lutherans can't fathom the Eucharist consisting of wonder bread and grape juice every three months, or the lack of an organ in Sunday services or clergy wearing robes), but in the end, there's not a huge amount of difference.
Socialists are low status, progressives are high status. Communists are the weird greasy-haired low-status ones who the socialists try to dissociate from, like Calvinists would from Mennonites. They all believe they are *very* different from one another (and they will tell you at length when you suggest otherwise), but the explanations are boring. NERD ALERT!
As far as I can tell, the only substantive difference between progressives and socialists of all parties is that progressives enjoy their material lot, feel guilty about it, and so perpetuate this identity cult thing in order to feel like the oppressed revolutionaries they know themselves to truly be. Socialists think the identity stuff is nonsense (and they're right), but still prattle on about worker exploitation and worker control. Above all, they hold it as an article of faith that the right is censoring them and violently oppressing them; even if the right is obviously being censored, it's always worse for those in the left by definition. From the outside this is patently absurd, but these "folks" will expend thousands of keystrokes to disabuse you of this notion.
With respect to your grandparents, I suspect they were calling themselves progressives for status and/or fear reasons, whether misplaced or not.
Chinese fan here, thanks for the Ming Dynasty shoutout, they could’ve really used it if weren’t for those dirty peasants and nomads ;) I am under the impression that Curtis actually know more about China than a lot “serious” social science professors in the US.
Can only speak for myself here, what do you mean by the structure of the USG? The three branches or the oligarchy? Doesn't matter I guess. Once blue-pilled and then red-pilled, I admired the USG, but then Trump happened (I have no ill-will against Mr. Trump, even though his is a brazen psychopathic lair, my distaste for Chinese government is certainly stronger), it didn't take a genius to see the deep rot in the USG. By thinking they can outplay the CCP, mainstream (Clinton-Bush-Obama admins) elites in the USG, the cathedral included, had made a grave mistake, and not admitting to it is probably a bigger mistake. China Joe might turn the tide around, but I certainly won't bet any money on that.
"If you’re a prole, and you get wasted, and trespass, and even jack Citizen Pelosi’s podium—everyone loses their minds. (The podium, at last report, was still undergoing the elaborate reconsecration process.)"
I thought a 'podium' was where Olympians accepted their medals?
I thought a 'lectern' was where people from my local AA speaker meeting talk about how great they are?
So, the only point of a King is to preside over the existing System. Obviously if the King isn't a member then the System will kick him out.
So it doesn't matter who the King is until the System runs out of other peoples' money. E.g., France in 1789. Then, perhaps, the System will be replaced by a new System, and a new type of King. Or not.
These comrades (and others of unspecified gender) are continuing to brag about their, um, "fortifying" activities more prolifically than BTK and the Zodiac Killer combined (https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/). Many of our same communist friends and communist front groups are named in the Time article (including the "hundreds" of people on a Zoom call, many of whom were "freaking out"). The bragging has been dialed up to 11. Though they do their best to spin and editorialize, the authors even write gems like this sentence:
> [Communists] fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, *recruited armies of poll workers* and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time.
Why confess this out in public? I imagine that some communists were operating like this in Texas and Florida. I imagine those states have laws on the books against recruiting partisan poll workers with the intention of rigging the vote. Not that the courts would allow any such cases to prevail (this is an oligarchy, after all), but the Texas AG seems to have no problem crafting reasonably decent lawsuits. And the first rule of litigation is that if you're arrested or being sued for an amount within a few orders of magnitude of Jeff Bezos' divorce settlement, you're already fucked. Even if the case is dismissed.
What the hell is the motivation here!? For the bragging, that is. Is Comrade Podhorstwessel angling for a better position? Is he resentful that his genius ability to rig elections is not remunerated either in cash or status? Is he just a wannabe oligarch bro super impressed with himself?
Even the tics are used at around the same frequency. The writers even invert the connotations of "cabal" and "conspiracy" to describe the communist good guys. (Take that, "brazen" and "outspoken!")
This comment is long enough, but all preceding is to say is I'm glad I subscribe. Curtis' hors d'oeuvres (including contrast with the reporting on fascist hooliganism) primed my palette well before Time Magazine trotted out le plat principal; I may have missed some of the intricacies in the flavors and textures otherwise.
"Who set up this Zoom call? Who selected the 900 people? What is this list? Wouldn’t you like to know, you fascist peasant? Go back to Dubuque, smoke some heroin and jack off into your Playstation 5. You! Hayseed! Why are you even reading this story? It’s about your betters—for your betters. We now return you to all the news that’s fit to print."
This alone was worth like, 6 months of subscription bucks.
In the recent Jordan Peterson podcast with Douglas Murray, Jordan mentions knowing and talking to one of this group based in LA - about 20 minutes in - about crafting a centrist message...very interesting...
I'm here happily reading a lovely new piece from Curtis over my morning coffee when the coffee in my mouth flew onto the tablecloth when I read the translated: "a coalition of communists and communists, communists and communists," ROTFL - if you ever lose your day job I hope you'll consider stand-up comedy. Luckily I still have a lot of coffee left...
Here is an internal critique of the argument you've been making re. Trump and Trumpism, not just in this piece but starting last fall. There is a bit of a - well, maybe not "contradiction" but at minimum a "tension" between two points you cycle through:
(a) Trump could have used his office to get a lot more done, if only he knew how to wield power. He couldn't have been FDR but he could have created an FDR-like moment, and achieved way more than he did. But he was feckless and ignorant (in the literal sense), so he didn't.
(b) The office he held has infinitesimal power. It is ceremonial in nature, which is it can do some things, but mainly by jawboning, but in a jawboning contest between the occupant and the Cathedral, a President will lose (especially over time. See also the girly-man gubernator of Cal-leee-fornia during his first term, when Arnold challenged the California-version of the Modern Structure).
Now, if (b) is the case then Trump could not have done more than he did. But (a) implies that he could have, if he wasn't, well, Trump. Therefore (b) doesn't hold, at least to the degree to which you argue it does.
(The natural reply to what I am saying here - see replies to this comment - is that the circle of A and B can be squared because reasons. Well, I think that will produce a muddle. It might be though that in some parts of a post our gracious host under-estimates what a President with enough brazen and shameless boldness can do, while in other parts of a post he over-estimates it. But that still means that his "on the one hand and on the other hand" arguments here need to be better fitted to each other).
Simply put, a president who understood the logic of the bureaucracy to the point that he could win at chess against it, had at least several dozen trusted people he could place in key positions throughout it and who had an actual concrete mission (more than an aspirational slogan) could actually make this change. I suspect there are roughly five such people who have lived in America in the last century. None served as US president. There will probably be hundreds so qualified in the next, when it will likely have been too late.
Curtis didn't say this explicitly, but I saw it as a tacit argument. Bill Barr was the closest thing, but he believed in the system too much to go scorched earth as was necessary. He should have distracted the press by covering some statuary tits up with sheets like John Ashcroft did and then ordered the removal of all nonsense policies that countermanded the president. Alas, it didn't happen.
The bureaucracy almost has to be seen from the inside to be believed. Bureaucrats worship process. They even have quasi-religious slogans like "we serve something bigger than ourselves." In the bureaucracy's dream, everyone in the private sector is a Klingon subordinate waiting for the right time to assassinate his boss and take command of the IKS Gordon Gekko. This vision is more accurate as a description of the bureaucracy itself than the private sector. But it is very much the dream.
Movies are a bit like dreams, and we even process them as such, but they are received rather than created inside. In the movie of the last four years, Trump was the Jello mold of the captain on a hover chair from the all-time best Pixar film WALL-E. However, instead of Making Earth Green Again with the title robot's aid (and that of his merry band of rogue bots), the movie ends with the captain permanently confined to quarters and the malevolent autopilot Otto having taken total control of the ship. The rogues in this movie wear Buffalo costumes and believe they're receiving orders from some high-value Scrabble letter. They are easy to portray as terrorists and fascist hooligans. If only they had a WALL-E to give them a missional purpose. As the credits roll, we see Otto and it's lieutenants debating ways to jettison Captain Trump out of the airlock. (25th Amendment? Ex post impeachment?) Trump needed not only to win the election, but to have a WALL-E and EVE and a heaping dose of curiosity to understand the nature of his reality. Instead, he got Lindsey Graham and Sean Hannity.
That's a good explanation and reminds me why I miss Foseti (remember his old blog? I suppose Foseti is somewhere but I don't know where). Anyhow since Curtis is working on a book (it's why we're all here, right?) he needs to make this case explicitly, not leave it untied. It's why I said there was a tension in what he has been saying these past months, but not necessarily a contradiction.
I agree. I hope the book's argument is tighter. If I hadn't in a past life personally witnessed the bureaucracy from the inside, I wouldn't have been able to visualize the contours and textures that Curtis can seeing it through his parents' eyes.
I still loved this essay, though. Laughed out loud multiple times.
Oh, I hope my various comments don't leave the wrong impression. I critique these posts of his not to be tggp, but because I like these posts too. I laugh, I cry, I kiss 100 bucks goodbye, the whole works. My aim is to be not like the peanut gallery lobbing spitballs but like a discussant at a conference panel - identify areas that could be improved.
I suppose at some point he'll make a post that I'll be dismissive of but it hasn't generally been the case recently.
Only speculating, trying to read the tea leaves, but it seems to me that Curtis is still fleshing out his thesis--at times he seems, from my perspective, to vacillate between taking the detachment approach and still wanting to make the arguments, highlight the hypocrisy, etc. I'm grappling with this very issue myself, so I'm eager to see how his approach/outlook develops.
Detachment as a practice doesn't sound so bad in a vacuum, but gets tougher when you see the enemy at the gates. (Eg, HR 127, the new firearm licensing/registration bill)
Resisting my alarmist impulses, for now. Any of you have an opinion on this?
LOL 'not to be tggp'.
Hello old timer friend!
I know it's a violation of the first two rules of fight club, but just this once can you tell what "tggp" means?
Solid critique. I’d guess the idea is that the office is ceremonial as it currently exists, but it only currently exists that way because it isn’t inhabited by a king.
Donald Trump could have done something with the office if he were a king, like FDR. Since he wasn’t, it was ceremonial. The ostensible circularity of such an argument disappears if one accounts for the ability of will (Virtù) to rend new shapes from existing paradigms. A weak will, however, will have to operate within the paradigm it is granted.
P.S. I see KINGS has grown on you some since we last conversed about the show.
TL;DR I'm tired of hearing about Trump. Figured your next post would be about how the GameStop revolution is a great example of how dissidence will only end up fortifying power in the end.
This is more of an Ivan comment than an Alyosha comment
It’s more of a Kirillov comment, really.
Wonderful! As others have said, this is magnificent writing! I cannot recall exactly when I felt the same about reading something, but it's probably a combination of the Tom Bombadil ... detour ... ("what the heck is happening?") and the attack on Weathertop. Hoping against hope we will soon get to go to Rivendell.
As someone who has read Moldbug since 2008, I will say this is easily a top 10 post, ever. I have already re-read it three times. I have shivers reading it. No better summary exists of the Trump dream that we bought into.
Thanks, truly.
I totally agree - just read for the 2nd time - one my favorite Curtis posts - the ending Dreams bit reminded me of Hunter S. Thompson's requiem for the 60s and the American dream at the end of Fear and Loathing in its poetic truth and grasp of the moment...
"All the faces are on them."
I read this as "all the faces of protestors are visible in the videos." Are you sure this isn't the intended meaning ?
100% that’s what it meant, given the context
> Imagine turning the steering wheel of “the tide of media momentum.” Excuse me, but: what the hell is this country? How the fuck does it work? And in particular: what the fuck is all this bullshit? “Progressives” are invited to email me, and explain. BTW: my grandparents, too, always called themselves that. They were actually CPUSA members. Discuss.
Socialists are to progressives as Lutherans are to Calvinists: there's a lot of vitriol (many Calvinists are appalled that Lutherans drink, like, beer and wine, and baptize babies; Lutherans can't fathom the Eucharist consisting of wonder bread and grape juice every three months, or the lack of an organ in Sunday services or clergy wearing robes), but in the end, there's not a huge amount of difference.
Socialists are low status, progressives are high status. Communists are the weird greasy-haired low-status ones who the socialists try to dissociate from, like Calvinists would from Mennonites. They all believe they are *very* different from one another (and they will tell you at length when you suggest otherwise), but the explanations are boring. NERD ALERT!
As far as I can tell, the only substantive difference between progressives and socialists of all parties is that progressives enjoy their material lot, feel guilty about it, and so perpetuate this identity cult thing in order to feel like the oppressed revolutionaries they know themselves to truly be. Socialists think the identity stuff is nonsense (and they're right), but still prattle on about worker exploitation and worker control. Above all, they hold it as an article of faith that the right is censoring them and violently oppressing them; even if the right is obviously being censored, it's always worse for those in the left by definition. From the outside this is patently absurd, but these "folks" will expend thousands of keystrokes to disabuse you of this notion.
With respect to your grandparents, I suspect they were calling themselves progressives for status and/or fear reasons, whether misplaced or not.
Time wanted a piece of the action:
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
(Count the number of times "bipartisan" is used as a positive, and "GOP" is used as a negative!)
Chinese fan here, thanks for the Ming Dynasty shoutout, they could’ve really used it if weren’t for those dirty peasants and nomads ;) I am under the impression that Curtis actually know more about China than a lot “serious” social science professors in the US.
I'd be really interested in how the Chinese view the structure of the US government.
Can only speak for myself here, what do you mean by the structure of the USG? The three branches or the oligarchy? Doesn't matter I guess. Once blue-pilled and then red-pilled, I admired the USG, but then Trump happened (I have no ill-will against Mr. Trump, even though his is a brazen psychopathic lair, my distaste for Chinese government is certainly stronger), it didn't take a genius to see the deep rot in the USG. By thinking they can outplay the CCP, mainstream (Clinton-Bush-Obama admins) elites in the USG, the cathedral included, had made a grave mistake, and not admitting to it is probably a bigger mistake. China Joe might turn the tide around, but I certainly won't bet any money on that.
I’m just curious if they see the Cathedral or if they think we’re governed by a (poor-functioning) democracy.
>Host of the Words to Win By podcast and Principal of ASO Communications, Anat Shenker-Osorio
"Words to Win By"... lol
"If you’re a prole, and you get wasted, and trespass, and even jack Citizen Pelosi’s podium—everyone loses their minds. (The podium, at last report, was still undergoing the elaborate reconsecration process.)"
I thought a 'podium' was where Olympians accepted their medals?
I thought a 'lectern' was where people from my local AA speaker meeting talk about how great they are?
Anybody here speak-a Engrish?
So, the only point of a King is to preside over the existing System. Obviously if the King isn't a member then the System will kick him out.
So it doesn't matter who the King is until the System runs out of other peoples' money. E.g., France in 1789. Then, perhaps, the System will be replaced by a new System, and a new type of King. Or not.
> might makes right
no. might _stomps_ right
These comrades (and others of unspecified gender) are continuing to brag about their, um, "fortifying" activities more prolifically than BTK and the Zodiac Killer combined (https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/). Many of our same communist friends and communist front groups are named in the Time article (including the "hundreds" of people on a Zoom call, many of whom were "freaking out"). The bragging has been dialed up to 11. Though they do their best to spin and editorialize, the authors even write gems like this sentence:
> [Communists] fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, *recruited armies of poll workers* and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time.
Why confess this out in public? I imagine that some communists were operating like this in Texas and Florida. I imagine those states have laws on the books against recruiting partisan poll workers with the intention of rigging the vote. Not that the courts would allow any such cases to prevail (this is an oligarchy, after all), but the Texas AG seems to have no problem crafting reasonably decent lawsuits. And the first rule of litigation is that if you're arrested or being sued for an amount within a few orders of magnitude of Jeff Bezos' divorce settlement, you're already fucked. Even if the case is dismissed.
What the hell is the motivation here!? For the bragging, that is. Is Comrade Podhorstwessel angling for a better position? Is he resentful that his genius ability to rig elections is not remunerated either in cash or status? Is he just a wannabe oligarch bro super impressed with himself?
Even the tics are used at around the same frequency. The writers even invert the connotations of "cabal" and "conspiracy" to describe the communist good guys. (Take that, "brazen" and "outspoken!")
This comment is long enough, but all preceding is to say is I'm glad I subscribe. Curtis' hors d'oeuvres (including contrast with the reporting on fascist hooliganism) primed my palette well before Time Magazine trotted out le plat principal; I may have missed some of the intricacies in the flavors and textures otherwise.
Wow. Curtis, you fucking nailed it. I'll be re-reading this one and recommending to others.