What the hell do the terrorists even want?

IRA: Wanted Northern Ireland to be part of Ireland.

Palestinian Terrorists: Want to take over Israel

Ted Kaczynski: Wanted people to stop chopping down his forest

OK City: Revenge for Ruby Ridge and Waco

9-11: Incoherent hate of America

Madrid Train Bombing: None

Anders Breivik: didn’t like communists

Tsarnev Brothers: Incoherent hate of America

Charlie Hebdo: disliked Hebdo’s Muhammad cartoons

Paris attack: ISIS support

San Bernardino Christmas party shooting: incoherent ISIS Support

Oregon Occupation: Opposition to the BLM

Brussels bombing: ISIS Support

Easter bombing in Pakistan: hatred of Christians

Say what you will, the IRA, ETA, and PLO had clear, coherent goals. Goals they were willing to kill babies to achieve, but still goals. You knew what they wanted and could at least hypothetically negotiate with them about it.

Since 9-11, the attacks have been increasingly incoherent. Why would Pakistani-American citizens attack the US in support of one side or the other in a civil war going on in Syria? Why would the children of Chechen refugees attack the country that took them in? Why would a guy living in Afghanistan believe it is anti-Muslim for the US to protect the interests of Muslims in Kuwait? Why move to the EU and then violently object to the laws or foreign policy? For that matter, why the hell would anyone support ISIS?

We may infer a kind of pan-Islamic tribalism which regards the US (and other Western nations) as acting against Islamic interests, but even this is incoherent. Why would Osama bin Ladin feel the need to stand up for Saudi Arabia when the Saudis could do it perfectly well themselves?

In reality, the US prior to 9-11 was pretty agnostic on Muslims. Palestinians were unpopular, due to terrorist attacks against Israel, but countries like Egypt and Jordan attracted the average person’s interest only because of their pyramids and long history. Most US actions in the Middle East over the past 55 years had been motivated by Cold War or “peace keeping” concerns.

The US supported Egypt in the Suez Crisis, keeping the Suez Canal under Egyptian control, an obvious economic boon to Egypt. We have supported, at various times, the Shah of Iran, the King of Jordan, Iraq against Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan against Soviet invasion. We intervened militarily on behalf of Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Somalia.

The US gives a substantial amount in foreign aid to other countries every year; in 2013 (the Wikipedia only lists our foreign aid for 2013 and 2012,) we gave 42.829 billion dollars–or $134 from every American citizen–to Muslim countries from Afghanistan to Yemen. (See bottom of post for my list of aid dollars per country.)

It has only been since 9-11 that Americans really become aware of the “Muslim world” as a coherent entity (if such exists) with which “we” are supposedly in conflict.

Before then, as mentioned before, our concerns were largely leftovers from the Cold War era. The “modernizers,” like Kemal Ataturk, King Hussein of Jordan, the Shah of Iran, and Saddam Hussein were “the good guys,” capitalists intent on modernizing their countries and promoting free market economic opportunities.

I recall a conversation I had with a high-ranking US government official in the weeks before 9-11. He pointed out a picture of the King of Jordan he had hanging in his office, and referred to the king as “a good guy” and “one of our friends.”

The “bad guys” were the Communists. If you’ve read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, then you know that the Iranian Revolution was a communist revolution. The triumph of “radical Islam” in Iran was a Communist revolution against Western Capitalism.

Saddam was our guy against the Ayatollah, until he invaded Kuwait (which may be partially our fault due to our ambassador inadequately conveying the idea that we would invade if he did.)

The Palestinians are supported by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Cultural Marxists, and regular Marxists.

Anti-capitalism is anti-colonialism is anti-modernism is anti-Westernism is radical religious fundamentalism.

The Muslim world is split between two factions, modernizers who want capitalism and are happy to work with the West, and radical internationalist who oppose Western influence and want to return to religious fundamentalism through out the Islamic world.

This is why the invasion of Iraq failed and could not help but fail: we took out our own guy, the modernizer, the capitalist. Who would replace him? Another capitalist? No, we got the opposition party, the fundamentalist, the communist, ISIS.

We took out the capitalist and put the communists in power.

We fucked ourselves, to the tun of 3 trillion dollars and thousands of dead soldiers. (And Iraqis.)

 

 

Table of 2013 US Aid to Muslim countries in millions of dollars (I picked Bosnia, on behalf of whose Muslim population the US intervened following the breakup of Yugoslavia, as my “minimum Muslim %” cut-off for inclusion in this list.) My apologies if I’ve missed any.

Afghanistan 5265.95
Albania 298.38
Algeria 207.96
Azerbaijan -63.13
Bangladesh 2669.1
Bosnia 550.04
Burkina Faso 1040.11
Chad 399.33
Comoros 81.9
Djibouti 152.95
Egypt 5505
Eritrea 83.69
Gambia 110.8
Guinea 499.5
Guinea Bissau 103.6
Indonesia 53.3
Iran 131.3
Iraq 1,541.4
Jordan 1,407.9
Kazakhstan 91.3
Kyrgyzstan 536.6
Lebanon 626.4
Libya 129.4
Malaysia -119.4
Maldives 22.9
Mali 1,391.3
Mauritania 291.2
Morocco 1,966.1
Niger 773.1
Nigeria 2,529.4
Pakistan 2174.1
Senegal 982.8
Sierra Leone 443.7
Somalia 991.9
Sudan 1,163.1
Syria 3,626.7
Tajikistan 382.2
Tunisia 713.6
Turkey 2,740.5
Turkmenistan 37.3
Uzbekistan 292.5
Yemen 1,003.5

Does the Growth of Cities Contribute to Revolutions?

Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are ostensibly “working class” candidates (and draw their support overwhelmingly from white voters,) and yet, Trump and Sanders voters don’t see themselves as allied or their candidates as advocating for the same people.

As usual, I’ve actually been reading about the French Revolution, rather than modern American electoral politics.

To summarize quickly, just in case it’s been a while since you read anything on the subject, much of the revolution was driven by hoards of hungry peasants roaming around the streets of Paris, marching on Versailles, breaking into the democratic assemblies, etc. These hungry, mostly urban peasants are generally credited with helping start the revolution and driving it to the left.

Their most frequent and vocal demand, quite sensibly, was bread. France had some very bad winters/harvests around that time, and liberalization of trade policy with Britain put a lot of textile workers out of business. The result was high grain prices and unemployed people, which leads, of course, to starvation, and if you’re going to die, you might as well do it trying to get food from the king than just succumbing in an alleyway.

The trend in the countryside tended to be the opposite of that in the cities–rural peasants felt the pinch of taxes and bad harvests, but at least they had their own farms to depend on, and rarely had the population density to march on anything, anyway. The peasant revolts in the French countryside during the revolutionary years, like that in the Vendee, tended to be counter-revolutionary and intended to push the country in a more conservative direction.

The counter-revolution in the Vendee was ruthlessly suppressed, unlike uprisings in the city.

Peasants in the city got listened to, at least early in the revolution–perhaps simply because they were in the city; they could both put pressure directly on the government, which happened to be located in the cities, and they had more opportunities to converse with and gain the ears of government officials.

Revolutionary changes that made life better for peasants in the city often made life worse for peasants in the country (whence the counter-revolutions in the countryside.) City peasants chiefly desire lower grain prices; country peasants chiefly desire higher grain prices.

In both the French and Russian Revolutions, the urban poor became convinced that high grain prices were some sort of rural conspiracy–perhaps an anti-revolution urban conspiracy–with rural peasants supposedly hording grain instead of selling it in order to drive up the price and, perhaps, destroy the revolution.

In both cases, the revolutionary governments responded by forcibly confiscating grain from the peasants (in Russia, this led to mass starvation in the countryside, as the peasants truly had not been hoarding grain!) and introduced price controls.

Communism (or more mildly, socialism,) is supposed to be about all of the poor, but in practice it often pits the needs of one group of peasants against those of another group. The growth of cities themselves may contribute to the tendency toward instability by creating a new group of people who do not have their own farms to fall back on when food prices rise and whose income is dependent on economic cycles/factors outside their own control, leading to hungry times in the city whenever a factory has to lay off workers due to a slowdown in production.

 

Bernie Sanders’s supporters basically see themselves as supporters of the urban poor; Donald Trump’s supporters basically see themselves as supporters of the rural poor.

On a related note, from the NY Times, 2/13/16 (h/t Steve Sailer)

“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow,” Mrs. Clinton asked the audience of black, white and Hispanic union members, “would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the L.G.B.T. community?,” she said, using an abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. “Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”

At each question, the crowd called back with a resounding no.

Short thoughts on French and Russian Revolutions

The French Revolution was caused, primarily, by a confluence of three factors:

1. Bad harvests=> to starving peasants. Starving peasants will risk death for food.
2. The gov’t went deep into debt to fund expensive wars and could extract no more taxes from the starving peasants.
3. The legal system was crusty and inefficient, due to old age.

The Russian Revolution was primarily caused by WWI:

1. It was far more expensive than Russia could afford,
2. Unarmed peasants ordered to fling themselves in front of German machine guns react a lot like starving peasants told to go eat cake
3. Probably a lot of starving peasants.

I don’t know if the Russian legal system was as crusty as the French one, but the whole thing was run by Nicholas, which is not a good sign.

In both cases, the immediate priority for the revolutionary gov’t ought to be halting the deaths of the peasants. Things like standardizing weights and measures or executing the monarch, whether you like those ideas or not, far fall, fall below “getting people bread” and “getting rid of the machine guns.”

Unfortunately, at least in the Russian case, instead of replacing their old, peasant-starving gov’t with a gov’t sensitive to the caloric needs of its people, they replaced it with a gov’t that was massively better at not getting overthrown by starving peasants.

Leading promptly to the starvation of millions of people.

Communism’s Death Toll: Bug or Feature?

In your garden-variety discussions of communism verses everything else, someone generally brings up the 85 to 100 million deaths attributed to communist regimes, and of course someone else responds that this is, as it were, merely a bug; a flaw due to having incorrectly implemented Marx’s ideas.

But after one too many death threats from a self-described Marxist (over, if I recall correctly, whether or not Rachel Dolezal is a terrible racist or was just trying to be helpful,) I thought to myself, “You know, what if the whole killing-all-your-enemies thing is really more of a feature than a bug?”

Of course, “Let’s kill lots of people!” tends not to be the greatest rallying cry for polite society, but it is hardly a secret that a great many political regimes have killed lots of people.

Just talk to anyone whose grandparents happen to be German about WWII, and you’ll probably hear a spiel along the lines of “The Hitler Youth just meant a hot meal in a time when people were hungry. Grandpa didn’t really want to invade Poland or kill all the Jews or any of that stuff.”

It’s as though all of these guys mysteriously disappeared:

 

Here’s a theory: most of these people were actually totally on board with the kill-the-enemies agenda.

 

Now, to be honest, most of the people I know personally who call themselves Communists are really nice people who aren’t interested in killing anyone. But some of them I’m not so sure of, and some I’ve met, I’m quite sure would happily ship their enemies off to Siberia. All the while swearing, of course, that they were just in it for the stew.

Communist Party of Great Britain at London May Day march, 2008

As for the original communists, the ones advocating “class warfare,” killing their enemies was probably the entire point.

This post wouldn’t be complete without hipster Stalin:

Thoughts?

Les Miserables

It has long amused me that one of America’s favorite plays is essentially pro-communist propaganda.

“But wait,” I hear you saying, “Isn’t Les Mis about the French Revolution, which is totally like the American Revolution’s little brother?”

No. Les Miserables takes place during the June Rebellion of 1832. The French Revolution happened in 1789, about 40 years earlier.

That’s kind of like the difference between 1945 and 1988, or 1968 and 2012.

“Ah,” you say, “but weren’t the French into all of that liberty and equality stuff? Isn’t that what the revolution is all about, just like the American Revolution?”

Look, did you hear anyone in the musical singing about how the taxes on their tea/coffee/wine were too high? Or how they wanted to vote? Or pretty much anything about liberty?

The whole play is about how much life sucks for the French proletariat because they are being oppressed by the state and the petty bourgeoisie.

Communism and democracy were not originally thought of as opposites. Communism is just a later evolution of the same intellectual tradition that brought us democracy.

You think of government and business as two different entities–unless you are an anarchist, of course. If you are an anarchist, you know they are one, and you are correct. It doesn’t matter who wears the boot that stomps your face–king, president, dictatorship of the proletariat, corporate boss–it’s still a boot stomping your face.

Not long before the American and French Revolutions–the big one, in 1789, with Robespierre and the guillotines and the Tennis Court Oath and whatnot–the economic and political system in Europe were one and the same.

You knew this, of course, because you studied Medieval and early modern European economics, manorialism and feudalism in school during the 11 months of white history, right? If so, you can skip to the end.

But if all you remember from history class is something about a bunch of art that was painted in the Renaissance, and then blah-blah-Athenian Democracy-something-something-American Revolution?

*Sigh*

Okay. So “feudalism,” is basically a contractual system of obligations and responsibilities between land owners and tenants. Wikipedia defines it as, “a combination of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.” This is the super-simplified version.

The Medieval Lord, starting in the early Middle Ages, was the guy who owned a big chunk of land, typically called a manor. He owned it because he or his ancestors had conquered it, or because he or his ancestors got it from the king who’d conquered it, and no one else had the military power to conquer him and take it away from him.

Roland (vassal) swears fealty to Charlemagne, his king

The lord’s vassals were people who received a chunk of land to live on and farm in exchange for swearing loyalty and rendering certain services to the lord. For example, they might be required to tend to the lord’s fields 2 days a week (leaving 5 days for their own.) Or they might be required to serve one month a year in the lord’s army, in exchange for which the lord guarantees that they won’t get conquered.

Gathering the lord’s wheat

Economically, the vassal might be required to only take his grain for grinding to the lord’s mill, in exchange for which the lord guarantees him access to a functional mill, or to only mate his cows to the lord’s bull, in exchange for which the lord guarantees a higher quality bull than the peasant could afford on his own. The vassals were required to take their disputes to the lord for adjudication, and the lord was required to provide sound legal judgment on the cases brought before him.

The manor was the basic economic and legal unit of medieval society, producing all or nearly all of the goods necessary for its residents, including a bakery and mill for bread production, a tannery for leather, and quite often, luxury trade goods, like wine. All of this was coordinated and directed by the lord, (or the lord’s employees).

Plan of a typical manor, with mill, pasture, fields, and woodlot.

The system was not limited to lords and their vassals; not only were there a variety of noble landholders, independent landholders, etc., the Roman Catholic Church also owned a great deal of land, which was similarly administered. I have read that 20% of the land in France on the eve of the French Revolution was actually owned by the Catholic Church. The system persists, diminished, in many monasteries–like the Grande Chartreuse Monastery, whose monks and nuns have supported themselves via the production and sale of Chartreuse Liquor since the early 1700s. (The monastery itself was founded in 1084.)

Grande Charteuse Monastery, France

Chartreuse Liquor aging in the Grande Chartreuse Monastery

HBD Chick has all sorts of interesting things to say about manorialism, and in particular, how it (and the Catholic decree against cousin marriage,) may have selected for certain personality traits that influenced the development of modern Europe.

Interestingly, during the Ostsiedlung, the German eastward expansion that took place between about 1,000 and 1945 the 1400s, manorialism was spread to eastern Germany via recruitment of people from western Germany to come live in what we would now call “company towns.”

Poznan, a planned Ostsiedlung town laid out in a grid

Ostsiedlung in action: The Locator (with a special hat) receives the foundation charter from the landlord. He recruits settlers, who clear the forest and build houses. The locator acts as judge in the village.

I believe the Germans also used a similar selection process when immigrating to German-founded towns in the US, probably resulting in German immigrants to the US being a particularly high-quality lot.

But an even more interesting case is the Dutch East India Company. Established in 1602, it was granted by the Dutch parliament,

“a 21-year monopoly to carry out trade activities in Asia. It is often considered to have been the first multinational corporation in the world ^[2] and it was the first company to issue stock.^[3] It was a powerful company, possessing quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, imprison and execute convicts,^[4] negotiate treaties, strike its own coins, and establish colonies. … By 1669, the VOC was the richest private company the world had ever seen, with over 150 merchant ships, 40 warships, 50,000 employees, a private army of 10,000 soldiers, and a dividend payment of 40% on the original investment.^{[27]” —Wikipedia}

The Dutch East India Company engaged in a bunch of wars, and its territory later became the Dutch East Indies, which in turn expanded and became the modern country of Indonesia, to say nothing of their activities in other countries.

Closer to home,

“Nine of the original American colonies were colonial corporations whose charters granted them broad governmental powers subject to retention of “English liberties” by the residents therein and the king’s right to collect customs on merchant shipping. “…one Body corporate and politique in Fact and Name, by the Name of the Governor and Company of the Mattachusetts Bay…” was typical language in these charters. These corporations were even sometimes (as in this case) sold from one set of investors to another: the modern legal distinction between commercial and political (e.g. municipal) corporations was not yet common. …

“The idea that a majority can “consent” for other members their class also comes from medieval corporate law (it certainly does not come from contract or tort law). “Constitution” was often used as a synonym for “charter.” The United States Constitution can be profitably viewed as a corporate charter, ratified by a majority of delegates to conventions in each State but shorn of royal imprimatur. “The Queen…grants…” became “We the people of the United States…do ordain and establish.” “We the People” granted rights to ourselves, in some vague collective way. This makes no sense in legal terms outside the context of corporate charters.” –Unenumerated’s “Corporate Origins of the United States“

Anyway, by the time of the American Revolution, feudalism was on the decline. It was still vaguely around in France, making trouble for people now that regular economic activity crossed old feudal jurisdictions, and Wikipedia claims that some feudal landholdings were still around in Germany until just before WWII, but large tracts of free, open land on the American continent meant that feudalism had never been a major force over here. When American colonists ran short on land, they could just engage in a little class warfare and redistribute it from the Indians to themselves.

What is this fancy new idea that came roaring in with the American and French Revolutions? What is democracy? We Americans think of democracy as simply the right to vote for our own government. Where the opening up of vast new tracts of land had effectively made each man the master of his own economic destiny, the American Revolution made them, collectively, masters of their political destinies.

But back on the continent, the vestiges of feudalism still persisted; vast tracts of land were not free for the taking. Revolution came not just to the political, legal end of the system, but also the economic.

“In the eighteenth century the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau in his hugely influential The Social Contract (1762), outlined the basis for a political order based on popular sovereignty rather than the rule of monarchs.^[4] His views proved influential during the French Revolution of 1789, in which various anti-monarchists, particularly the Jacobins, supported the idea of redistributing wealth equally among the people, including Jean-Paul Marat and Gracchus Babeuf. The latter was involved in the Conspiracy of the Equals of 1796 intending to establish a revolutionary regime based on communal ownership, egalitarianism and the redistribution of property.” — Wikipedia

By the time Les Miserables was published in 1862, Marx’s Communist Manifesto was already 14 years old, and communism had gone from being a sub-text in the French Revolution to a full-fledged ideology in its own right. The 1832 rebellion described in Les Miserables falls smack into the time of the early communist development, predating the publication of the Communist Manifesto by only 16 years.

Les Miserables is not about liberty, in its anarchic sense nor its American sense. It is not, for the most part, about the values that compelled Americans into their revolution. It is about the tribulations of the poor, miserable, wretched French proletariat. It is about the democratization not of the political order, but of the economic order.

It’s really the perfect combination. American elites lean communist and can appreciate Les Mis for what it is without explicitly endorsing Stalinism. But the American lower classes can also join in, enjoying the illusion that it has something to do with the founding American mythology.

That time Germany literally infected Russia with Memes

I burst out laughing at the park today at the sudden thought of Germany sending Lenin on a sealed train to Russia, the train an enormous syringe injecting the Marxist meme-virus–carried in an actual human body–that then infected and took over the whole country.

Then I remembered that the Communist regime killed tens of millions of people and stopped laughing.

Russia eventually shook off the virus, but not before shedding millions of infectious cells to other countries.

The Marxist Meme-Plex as Cargo Cult of the Industrial Revolution

So I was thinking about Marxism, and how strange it is that it only ever really caught on in precisely the countries where it itself proclaimed it shouldn’t, and never became very domestically important in the countries where it was supposed to go.

It’s kind of like if there were a bunch of people going around proclaiming “This is what Mexican culture is like,” only none of them were Mexican, and actual Mexicans wanted very little to do with it–you might suspect that the stuff being called “Mexican culture” wasn’t all that Mexican.

Only we’re talking about overthrowing the state and killing a bunch of people, rather than tacos and Cinco de Mayo.

Marx proclaimed that Communism, (by which I mean Marxist-style communism inspired by Marx and written about by Marx in his many works on the subject, which became the intellectual basis for the international communist movement that eventually triumphed in the USSR, China, Vietnam, Cuba, N. Korea, etc.) was supposed to be the natural outgrowth of capitalism itself in industrialized nations, but the list I just gave contains only barely-industrialized or practically feudal nations.

Marx was, of course, a mere mortal; one cannot expect anyone to write thousands of pages and come out correct in all of them. Still, this is a pretty big oversight. A great deal of Marx’s theory rests on the belief that the form of the economic system dictates the culture and political system: that is, that capitalism forces people to act and organize in certain ways in order to feed the capitalist machine; feudalism forces people to act and organize in certain other ways, in order to feed the feudal machine.

So for the capitalist, industrialized countries to not go Communist, while a bunch of non-capitalist, non-industrialized do, seems like a pretty big blow to the basics of the theory.

Kind of like if I had a theory that all noble gases were naturally magnetic, and all metals weren’t, and yet metal things kept sticking to my magnets and noble gases seemed relatively uninterested. I might eventually start thinking that maybe I was wrong.

Of course you can pick and chose your Marxism; you might like the idea of the “commodity fetish” while throwing out the rest of the bathwater. Have at it. But we are speaking here of believing both broadly and deeply enough in Marx’s theories to actually advocate overthrowing the state and murdering all the Kulaks.

My own theory is that Marxism appealed to the wrong group of people precisely because they were the wrong group of people.

Actual scientists tend to have little interest in pseudo science. Actual members of a culture don’t get excited by fake versions of their culture. And people with actual experience with industrial capitalism have little interest in Marxism.

In short, Marxism became a kind of myth among unindustrialized or barely-industrialized people about what would happen when the factories came, and so believing the myth, they made it happen.

Marx had intended to create a “science;” describing patterns in his data and thereby making predictions about the future. When that future didn’t happen, the first reaction of his followers was to double down–the theory must not have worked because evil bad people were sabotaging it.

(If it happens naturally, why would it have saboteurs?)

Many people have accused Communism of being a religion–an atheistic religion, but a religion nonetheless. SSC wisely asks Is Everything a Religion?–since practically everything does get described as a religion. EvenCargo Cult Programming.)

Every worldview–every meme-plex, as I like to call them–involves certain beliefs about the world that help people make sense of the vast quantities of data we absorb every day and make predictions about the future. My observation of the sun rising leads me to believe there is a consistent pattern of “sun rises in morning” and that, therefore, the sun will rise tomorrow. “Science” itself contains many such beliefs.

Religions, like all other world views and meme-plexes, provide a way of organizing and understanding one’s observations about the world, generally through appeal to supernatural agents. (It rains because Zeus is peeing through a sieve; suffering exists because sin.)

The obvious reason belief systems get called religions is to insult them and suggest that they are irrational.

Of course, none of us is entirely rational; the idea that bags of rice that suddenly fell from the sky were the gift of the sky gods makes as much sense as any other if you have no other information on the subject. Scientists believe wrong and irrational things, too.

The critical difference is that science attempts to falsify itself–a theory cannot even be described as “scientific” if it cannot be falsified. All meme-plexes resist change, both because of human biases and because it’s probably a bad idea to try to re-formulate your beliefs about everything every time you happen across a single discordant datum, but science does attempt to disprove and discard bad theories over time–this is fundamentally what science is, and this is why I love science.

A faith, by contrast, is something one just believes, even despite evidence to the contrary, or without any ability to disprove it. For the deeply faithful, the reaction to evidence that contradicts one’s theory is generally not, “Hrm, maybe the theory is wrong,” but, “We aren’t following the the theory hard enough!”

The former leads to penicillin and airplanes; the later leads to dead people.

Note: I feel compelled to add that not all faith leads to dead people. Faith in Communism certainly did, however.

Marxists failed to admit information that contradicted their theories; they just killed people who contradicted their theories for being counter-revolutionaries.

 

Moldbug

So I hear Moldbug was dis-invited from a tech conference (where he was to present on tech-related subjects) because someone didn’t like his politics.

If you haven’t read Moldbug, his main schtick seems to be that he thinks the French Revolution was a bad idea and we should go back to having a monarchy. (To be fair, I am oversimplifying a guy whose blog is >2x as long as War and Peace. I should probably also throw in that he coined the term “Cathedral” and described Progressivism as a religion and is generally opposed to it.)

I understand that most people think Moldbug’s ideas are weird, but if you let guys who think Stalin was an okay dude into your conferences, (and they do; actual communists face very little discrimination in modern America, as evidenced by the fact that many of them are happily employed at major universities and tech companies,) then you really ought to extend the same political agnosticism to a guy who wants to reinstate the Stuarts.

I converse regularly with people who openly refer to themselves as international communists and count them among my friends, despite believing that they are kind of wrong and that their ideology leads to mass murder. They mean well, I suppose. Of course, if they start looking funny at the Kulaks, I may have to change that assessment.

Likewise, I would have no objection to conversing with Moldbug; he is an interesting guy with an obviously expansive intellect, traits I admire in people. I doubt he means anyone ill-will, and he certainly doesn’t have the political power to put any of his ideas into motion. Republicans can and actually do bomb people in Iraq or Iran or Syria or wherever they feel like when they happen to have power, which is fairly frequent. Moldbug isn’t going to reinstate the Stuarts or any other part of his agenda (whatever that is.)

Shame on those who made it their 5-minute mission to try to ruin someone’s career just because he has some wacky political ideas.