[Ava Kofman in The New Yorker]

Curtis Yarvin is a pathetic little man:

"As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient—a “vibes coup.” Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow."

Much of this piece goes into his background, which in my view at this point gives him too much oxygen. It's no surprise that he was almost a libertarian - libertarianism feels very adjacent to the views he publicly writes about - and his ideas about federations of city states are very much in line. (They're also very much in line with what someone might say if they'd never read or understood any European history.)

I mean, this is bananas:

"Yarvin proposes that nations should eventually be broken up into a “patchwork” of statelets, like Singapore or Dubai, each with its own sovereign ruler. The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. [...] To prevent a C.E.O. from staging a military coup, the board members would have access to cryptographic keys that would allow them to disarm all government weapons, from nuclear missiles down to small arms, with the push of a button."

And he loves dictators, etc etc. Overall, this piece is like a litmus test: if someone comes away with anything other than revulsion for the man, you'll know what to think of them. That so many of the people in the current administration fit into that category speaks volumes.

Oh, and finally, there's this:

"Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”"

That backlash is overdue.

#Democracy

[Link]