#moldbug

Always and everywhere, the worst way to resist a regime is to inhabit its stage villains. Like most bad choices, this choice is a bad default. It’s as you lived in 15th-century Paris and thought the Church was very corrupt and bad—but there was no alternative. You couldn’t be a cool Enlightenment philosophe or at least just a Protestant. Because it was the 15th century. And there weren’t even words for these things. So you asked your priest: if not God, King and Church, in what would I believe? Who is against God and King and Church? And your priest said: Satan. And so, thinking logically, you became a Satanist. This probably actually happened to you, except it wasn’t a priest but a “guidance counselor.” The way the world works never changes. If some party A asks how it should operate in opposing some opponent B, B’s vision of who its opponents are and how they operate is hardly the place to start! You could start with a clean slate. You could start with any other period in history. Instead you start by literally aping your enemy’s propaganda. The only possible cause of any such choice is laziness and/or immaturity: not promising qualities in an aspiring aristocrat. So while in a way we can’t really blame you for falling into the default, which means falling into a trap, in a way it still is your fault. Not finding Voltaire or even Calvin on the menu, the right response is not to give up and settle for Satan—but to invent Calvin or Voltaire. On one side of the coin, this is an epic challenge; on the other, an epic opportunity.

And the truth is, maybe I could have been that person, if I had actually gotten off my ass and wrote. But we’ll never know, unless I do try, and it may be too late anyways.

Moldbug's aesthetic

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Interesting how the people who get their lives ruined are only on one side of the political spectrum. Covington and the next non-issue can dominate the news spectrum for ages- remember how CNN doxed someone over a boomer tier meme? And yet, you will never see the same fervor applied to someone on the left. This is true for one simple reason- the left is far far better at organization and institutional control than the right will ever be. When the left wants to protest for gun control or women's rights or whatever the fuck, they have busses running and fancy printed signs within hours. The right can't even have a 20 person rally without getting fucked on by antifa footsoldiers and demonized in the media for it. And yet in theory, CNN and Soros on the left have mirrors in Fox and Koch on the "right". The fundamental difference is that the right wing establishment is too used to hierarchies. Their movements all have leaders and a chain of command, making them too slow to be meaningful in the internet age. On the other hand, ideas spread throughout the left like wildfire, and the institutions simply have to write the next talking point and get the logistics ready. There is no waiting for approval, no focus groups, just GO! This is also why every protest on the left turns into a protest for the entire left, because all the ideas are completely intermixed. The only group on the right with the same spontaneity is /pol/, and they lack any sort of institutional backup. However, the hegemony of the left will cause any attempts to build a reactive right wing network to be met with ostracism, or with violence from antifa footsoldiers who are immune to the rules the leftist institutions have set for the right. Therefore anyone outside the mainstream left who wants to organize in order to change the system (this goes for everyone from poltards to ancaps to anprims to tankies who are a bit too woke on corporate influence for their own good) will have to organize networks of trustworthy, like minded peers in secret, and do everything in their power to accelerate the inevitable collapse of the modern left before they step out of the shadows.

Moldbug

NYC seemed to shake the decay once, maybe that's the template? What does a Guliani figure for SF look like? Is such a thing even viable given demographic trends?

Why doth Zuck ban shitlords? Is the creator of “Facemash” passionately committed to social justice? Well, maybe. He may have no power, but he is still a bigshot. Bigshots often do get religion in later life—especially when everyone around them is getting it. But—does he have a choice? If he has no choice—he has no power.