I think the left is worried about Vance and is trying to push the “This R is even worse than Trump” playbook, which will be used for the next 30 years.
Sure, Trump was Hitler, but this guy, he’s Mecha-Hitler!
I think it's a left-wing conspiracy theory, and it's good fodder that their political organizers will use to drive them absolutely hysterical ahead of the 2028 election. Some variation of this happens every election.
My rule of thumb with all of this is would George HW Bush, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford hang around with these people and associate with them? If the answer The Gipper would give is “yeah that guy is a loon. I don’t like him…and maybe let’s have the NSA make sure he’s not up to anything dangerous” then I don’t want anyone who associates with these weirdos. Vance is just too close with this crowd for my liking.
Thanks for saying that and not accusing me of sounding like blue anon. I got kicked out of a fb group for telling them they sounded like a blue anon cult 😂
I just want low taxes and China and Russia boxed in. The anti egalitarian attitudes of Thiel and his harem of followers is weird and seems like wacky GOP fan fiction written by neckbeards with too much money.
Basically the opposite of natural rights. Dark enlightenment supporters like Yarvin argue that the constitution and bill of rights were not intended to be interpreted in ways that go against the common good of society. He says they are nothing more than pieces of paper and the president should just ignore them because, according to Yarvin, the existential threat posed by liberalism overrides the constitution. (Yarvin refers to both republicans and democrats as "liberals" in his books)
Also ties into the common good constitutionalism legal theory by Vermuele whose entire premise is "the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to 'protect liberty'".
The Dark Enlightenment is a fringe, far-right philosophical and political movement that fundamentally rejects the core values of the Enlightenment, such as democracy, equality, and human rights.
That is not JD Vance. There is no relationship between Vance and NRx
He wrote an article about it more than a decade ago, and I am not saying that to be rude or a jerk. This guy has said things that should not fly. I’ll find the article.
“…I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.”
“Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”
“In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”
Thiel never explains exactly how he plans to do this though he mentions exploring cyber space, outer space, and seasteading. From where I sit, he at least got himself a VP in his pocket. And have you heard of the company he founded, Palantir? He is no libertarian.
How? This is pretty much what Thiel is advocating for in public. It isn't a conspiracy when it's coming from the horse's mouth. Dark enlightenment is pretty much what Thiel's philosophy is built around.
Yarvin's ideas are reviled not so much because they're wrong, but because they're dangerous to the existing order.
If you've seen Idiocracy and current trends in education, can you deny that there's something prescient about the film, and can you think of a way to alter that trajectory that doesn't involve societal engineering with a eugenic bent?
** Edit: By "eugenic bent", I don't mean execution or mass sterilization of undesirable groups, I mean trying to set up structural incentives to promote reproduction among those with sufficient resources and pro-social values to produce offspring conducive to a stable and successful population, and to discourage the opposite. **
Can you look at the voter base and the shallowness of understanding about the issues and see no reason in the idea that maybe democracy is fatally flawed over the long term?
But these ideas are outside of the Overton window, and they deny the most basic shared premises our society is built on, so they must be maligned and dismissed rather than engaged with to preserve the status quo.
Even paying them the nominal respect of taking their concerns seriously is a threat to what we have going now, which despite all its flaws, could be a whole lot worse.
I think Yarvin’s Parable of the Motorcycle Helmut was apt:
Let’s say you see a motorcycle driver who’s crashed on the side of the road. You immediately rush to help. You take off his helmet to help him breathe—and this is a big mistake. You’ve forgotten your first aid class where they told you you very much mustn’t do this as it can hurt their spine. The man you were trying to rescue is now paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life.
Horrible tragedy, anyone would agree, but you are morally blameless. After all, you were just trying to help and only innocently caused the carnage.
Yes. But what if we discovered there was someone who drove around looking for crash sites, and whenever he saw a crashed motorcyclist, took off their helmet, paralyzed them, and then said "Oops!"
We would not consider that person blameless. We would be forced to conclude that far from being a misguided, but well-intentioned good samaritan, they are actually a psycho who gets off on hurting motorcycle crash victims.
Same with the left. Take any issue. The poverty trap effects of welfare have been beyond dispute for decades for any reasonable observer. The black-lives-destroying effects of under-policing have been beyond dispute for decades. Etc etc etc etc. And yet they keep pulling off the motorcycle helmet at every opportunity, and then going "Oh no! Who could have foreseen this?"
At some point you have to be forced to conclude that they’re not well-intentioned but misguided. That there’s something much darker going on.
This parable assumes that harm is being done by the action though. Would love for you to support that claim and not just display it as common sense because that is not common sense.
JD Vance is the Vice President. He has quoted Yarvin in a podcast. Yarvin and Thiel are close. Thiel took Vance under his wing as soon as he graduated from college and has funded tons for him. JD Vance is a heartbeat away from being president.
Do you see why I am concerned? I’m not here to waste my time trolling or spreading conspiracy— I promise you this, and if anyone ever shows me I have shared bs, I will admit it do my best to make it right.
I think so; I think it's because you're of the opinion I explained above: that these ideas cannot be safely engaged with, and therefore should not be engaged with at all.
And I'm not concerned - or rather I am concerned inasmuch as I share your view that the ideas are dangerous.
However, we differ in this: I think it better to engage with these difficult questions and see if we as a society have what it takes to wrestle with them, than it is to bury our heads in the sand and pretend like the issues that fuel his ideas aren't real and aren't existential threats.
In other words, I'm more concerned about the dangers of pretending everything is fine, than I am about the dangers of trying to contend with the things that are fatally not fine.
Sure, we can be concerned in the abstract about both of them, but the approach of burying our heads and refusing to talk about these ideas is mutually exclusive with the approach of engaging with them.
I don't fault you for preferring the first one, the dangers are real and the concerns are legitimate, but I prefer the second approach and therefore I see the vice president engaging with them as a good thing, not a bad thing.
“In a 2021 podcast interview with internet personality and blogger, Jack Murphy, Vance said: "There's this guy Curtis Yarvin who's written about some of these things...I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people."
Yarvin, meanwhile, has also garnered support from Silicon Valley leaders, including Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and a friend of Vance's, among others, and Trump's incoming top State Department official Michael Anton. Yarvin spoke about installing an "American Caesar" on Anton's podcast.”
That's hardly a solid indication of anything except Vance having seen something written by Yarvin. He once mentioned something a blogger said during an interview with another blogger.
This is why I'm suspicious anytime the media uses words like "has ties to" without describing them. It always ends up being something vague and inconclusive like this.
Sounds like a conspiracy theory, any evidence that Vance wants to radically transform the US government away from being centred around natural rights?
I think the left is worried about Vance and is trying to push the “This R is even worse than Trump” playbook, which will be used for the next 30 years.
Sure, Trump was Hitler, but this guy, he’s Mecha-Hitler!
I like Vance fine. Idk if he'd be my first choice in a primary, but I'd still turn out and vote for him if he is the nominee in 2028.
Idk much about Thiel to really have an opinion on him.
I don't like the Dark Enlightenment (isn't it an oxymoron?)
I think it's a left-wing conspiracy theory, and it's good fodder that their political organizers will use to drive them absolutely hysterical ahead of the 2028 election. Some variation of this happens every election.
My rule of thumb with all of this is would George HW Bush, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford hang around with these people and associate with them? If the answer The Gipper would give is “yeah that guy is a loon. I don’t like him…and maybe let’s have the NSA make sure he’s not up to anything dangerous” then I don’t want anyone who associates with these weirdos. Vance is just too close with this crowd for my liking.
Thanks for saying that and not accusing me of sounding like blue anon. I got kicked out of a fb group for telling them they sounded like a blue anon cult 😂
I just want low taxes and China and Russia boxed in. The anti egalitarian attitudes of Thiel and his harem of followers is weird and seems like wacky GOP fan fiction written by neckbeards with too much money.
I don’t even know what “dark enlightenment” even means or is supposed to imply.
Basically the opposite of natural rights. Dark enlightenment supporters like Yarvin argue that the constitution and bill of rights were not intended to be interpreted in ways that go against the common good of society. He says they are nothing more than pieces of paper and the president should just ignore them because, according to Yarvin, the existential threat posed by liberalism overrides the constitution. (Yarvin refers to both republicans and democrats as "liberals" in his books)
Also ties into the common good constitutionalism legal theory by Vermuele whose entire premise is "the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to 'protect liberty'".
Yeah I didn’t know about it until last year I think: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dark-Enlightenment
The Dark Enlightenment is a fringe, far-right philosophical and political movement that fundamentally rejects the core values of the Enlightenment, such as democracy, equality, and human rights.
That is not JD Vance. There is no relationship between Vance and NRx
Sounds like a blue anon conspiracy theory to me. Doesn't concern me
He wrote an article about it more than a decade ago, and I am not saying that to be rude or a jerk. This guy has said things that should not fly. I’ll find the article.
They’re all pretty open about it. It doesn’t really sound like a conspiracy theory when they just talk about it openly
Source: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian
From Peter Thiel’s 2009 Think Piece:
“…I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.”
“Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”
“In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”
Thiel never explains exactly how he plans to do this though he mentions exploring cyber space, outer space, and seasteading. From where I sit, he at least got himself a VP in his pocket. And have you heard of the company he founded, Palantir? He is no libertarian.
How? This is pretty much what Thiel is advocating for in public. It isn't a conspiracy when it's coming from the horse's mouth. Dark enlightenment is pretty much what Thiel's philosophy is built around.
Yarvin's ideas are reviled not so much because they're wrong, but because they're dangerous to the existing order.
If you've seen Idiocracy and current trends in education, can you deny that there's something prescient about the film, and can you think of a way to alter that trajectory that doesn't involve societal engineering with a eugenic bent?
** Edit: By "eugenic bent", I don't mean execution or mass sterilization of undesirable groups, I mean trying to set up structural incentives to promote reproduction among those with sufficient resources and pro-social values to produce offspring conducive to a stable and successful population, and to discourage the opposite. **
Can you look at the voter base and the shallowness of understanding about the issues and see no reason in the idea that maybe democracy is fatally flawed over the long term?
But these ideas are outside of the Overton window, and they deny the most basic shared premises our society is built on, so they must be maligned and dismissed rather than engaged with to preserve the status quo.
Even paying them the nominal respect of taking their concerns seriously is a threat to what we have going now, which despite all its flaws, could be a whole lot worse.
I think Yarvin’s Parable of the Motorcycle Helmut was apt:
Let’s say you see a motorcycle driver who’s crashed on the side of the road. You immediately rush to help. You take off his helmet to help him breathe—and this is a big mistake. You’ve forgotten your first aid class where they told you you very much mustn’t do this as it can hurt their spine. The man you were trying to rescue is now paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life.
Horrible tragedy, anyone would agree, but you are morally blameless. After all, you were just trying to help and only innocently caused the carnage.
Yes. But what if we discovered there was someone who drove around looking for crash sites, and whenever he saw a crashed motorcyclist, took off their helmet, paralyzed them, and then said "Oops!"
We would not consider that person blameless. We would be forced to conclude that far from being a misguided, but well-intentioned good samaritan, they are actually a psycho who gets off on hurting motorcycle crash victims.
Same with the left. Take any issue. The poverty trap effects of welfare have been beyond dispute for decades for any reasonable observer. The black-lives-destroying effects of under-policing have been beyond dispute for decades. Etc etc etc etc. And yet they keep pulling off the motorcycle helmet at every opportunity, and then going "Oh no! Who could have foreseen this?"
At some point you have to be forced to conclude that they’re not well-intentioned but misguided. That there’s something much darker going on.
This parable assumes that harm is being done by the action though. Would love for you to support that claim and not just display it as common sense because that is not common sense.
JD Vance is the Vice President. He has quoted Yarvin in a podcast. Yarvin and Thiel are close. Thiel took Vance under his wing as soon as he graduated from college and has funded tons for him. JD Vance is a heartbeat away from being president.
Do you see why I am concerned? I’m not here to waste my time trolling or spreading conspiracy— I promise you this, and if anyone ever shows me I have shared bs, I will admit it do my best to make it right.
I think so; I think it's because you're of the opinion I explained above: that these ideas cannot be safely engaged with, and therefore should not be engaged with at all.
Yeah, and yet there our VP is all engaged up in it
And I'm not concerned - or rather I am concerned inasmuch as I share your view that the ideas are dangerous.
However, we differ in this: I think it better to engage with these difficult questions and see if we as a society have what it takes to wrestle with them, than it is to bury our heads in the sand and pretend like the issues that fuel his ideas aren't real and aren't existential threats.
In other words, I'm more concerned about the dangers of pretending everything is fine, than I am about the dangers of trying to contend with the things that are fatally not fine.
Let’s be concerned about both of them together, yeah?
Sure, we can be concerned in the abstract about both of them, but the approach of burying our heads and refusing to talk about these ideas is mutually exclusive with the approach of engaging with them.
I don't fault you for preferring the first one, the dangers are real and the concerns are legitimate, but I prefer the second approach and therefore I see the vice president engaging with them as a good thing, not a bad thing.
Maybe if the Vice President had a backbone and a mind of his own I’d be more confident in his ability to engage with people like Thiel and Yarvin.
Perhaps the pain the country feels now will renew a focus on civic education so we can come together to hold our government accountable.
We know Vance used to work for Thiel, and we know Thiel likes Yarvin. I haven't seen any real connection between Vance and Yarvin directly.
Vance mentioned him on a podcast and recently saw him in person. I’ll find those sources to share.
Vance saw him once in person at a party and called him a fascist, if I recall. Not exactly a deep intimate relationship.
Here’s his quote and more from an article in Newsweek:
“In a 2021 podcast interview with internet personality and blogger, Jack Murphy, Vance said: "There's this guy Curtis Yarvin who's written about some of these things...I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people."
Yarvin, meanwhile, has also garnered support from Silicon Valley leaders, including Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and a friend of Vance's, among others, and Trump's incoming top State Department official Michael Anton. Yarvin spoke about installing an "American Caesar" on Anton's podcast.”
That's hardly a solid indication of anything except Vance having seen something written by Yarvin. He once mentioned something a blogger said during an interview with another blogger.
This is why I'm suspicious anytime the media uses words like "has ties to" without describing them. It always ends up being something vague and inconclusive like this.