Moldbug General

Who here /moldbug/?

Let's have a thread to discuss the ideas of Mencius Moldbug.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin
thermidormag.com/mencius-moldbug-10-years-on-a-critical-retrospective/
cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0381.html
cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0412.html
cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0407.html
unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html
youtube.com/watch?v=g1qroWiZF90
youtube.com/watch?v=vGf6_XyjBy0
xenosystems.net/page/177/
moldbuggery.blogspot.ca/
thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/
archive.fo/gUrVr
scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3167
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Who?

Urbit is so autistic it's great. Moldbug's asperger hits those godlike levels where he is more god than man. It's just a shame no mortal can understand him fully.

I think the alt-right should take more from the NRx than it does, mainly the aristocratic hierarchy.

I'm a big fan. Wish he kept writing.

He identifies the extent of the problem better than anyone else.

Modlbug, real name Curtis Yarven. For some reason I can't link directly to his blog "Unqualified Reservations" but here's his wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

His wiki seems to be a bit pozzed, it claims that Steve Bannon had "opened up a line" to Moldbug at the White House which is total nonsense. There's also some other crap there which has been taken out of context to smear him but that's wiki for you.

NRx is one of the most interesting sects of the online Right, if you want to call it that, in terms of theory. It still remains largely obscure though which is probably not the worst thing to be honest. I think NRx is better off in the fringes otherwise it will become contaminated just as the alt-right was.

Good read:

>Moldbug 10 Years On: A Critical Retrospective

thermidormag.com/mencius-moldbug-10-years-on-a-critical-retrospective/

>But I distinctly recall wondering: why did it take so long for human progress to achieve democracy? After all, you have many centuries of extremely sophisticated European Renaissance and post-Renaissance thought. Yet the victory of democracy on the European continent was not complete and assured until the lives of those now living. In England, it was not complete and assured until the 20th century. Only in America was it old, and even then not that old. And then there was the Roman Empire... and so on.

>Moreover, I learned, in the real world today, there were only two real alternatives. Democracy, or Hitler. Or Stalin. Democracy or tyranny. Yet when I read the history of Europe before the 20th century, ie, the century of democracy, I did not see anyone or anything like Hitler or Stalin.

>What, exactly, is the difference - as a matter of political organization - between the regime of Queen Elizabeth, and that of Hitler? Democracy puts both in the same category: nondemocracy. Absolute personal despotism, to be exact. But... there is a difference, isn't there?

>All these objections are neatly summed up in Churchill's famous aphorism, if it is really Churchill's. Democracy, whose flaws are not in any way secret, appears to you as the worst of all systems of government, except for all the others. And what do you know of all the others? Nothing at all, of course. (Or at least, nothing nonmagical.) Hence the statement sounds true, because it is true. So far as you know. That migraine spot again!

>There's a hypothesis forming here. We notice that all our blind spots seem to be in the general area of political democracy. Where they lead to misimpressions, those impressions tend to cast democracy in a falsely positive light. What if democracy was like communism? What if, for everything and anything in the world today that is broken, we could say accurately: it is broken because it is democratic. To fix it, get rid of democracy.

>This appears unthinkable, of course, to you. You were raised as a true democrat. Note that if you'd been raised a true Communist, you would have perceived Communism in just the same way. And, of course, Catholicism, and Islam, and so on. But Communism (which is in fact best seen as a splinter branch of the global democratic movement) is the best analogy, because it is so recent.

>No, comrades, Communism is not the problem! Communism? The problem? On the contrary, comrades - Communism is the cure! We suffer, not because we have been true to Communism, but because we have been untrue to Communism! To get back on the right track, comrades, we must redouble our efforts to achieve Communism... and so on.

>I think of this when I hear anyone acting under the delusion that they can restore the American political system, presumably to some imagined youthful vitality. The American political system! The true nature of that system, gentlemen, is now quite apparent. Long has it battened on the rest of the planet; its final dessert is now apparent. As any epidemiologist would expect, America was that country most resistant to American democracy. Resistance is not immunity. In the end, every elm must meet its beetle.

>So this is a quick and easy general-purpose explanation which can shed light on a remarkable variety of apparent historical anomalies. As a people, we believe insane things, because democracy has driven us all insane. After all, it's had two hundred years to do so. Its edifice of magical thinking is a wonderful thing, ornate as a Disney castle, more worthy of admiration than destruction. Sadly, it is the castle of evil, and God's sweet fire will melt it in a flash.

>Here are three words that will permanently cure you of democracy - if any three words can. Imperium is conserved.

>That is: no form of government can be defined as un-government or self-government. There is always a government; there is always a process by which this government makes decisions; this process always consists of the decisions of one or more human beings, and no other party or force. Therefore, either you rule, or you are ruled by others. Typically the latter. As Maine writes in Popular Government: "democracy is a form of government." In other words, it lacks any spiritual connotation; like any form of government, it can only be judged by its results.

>As who writes? In what? Here is one old book that can cure you, if any old book can: Popular Government (1885), by Sir Henry Maine. Read it once. Read it twice. Read it three times. It's free. It explains everything, just about. Well, not quite - but almost. Once you've read Maine, perhaps you are ready for Filmer. And with just those two, you can be right back on track! Of course, the 21st century may start to strike you as pretty bizarre. But it is, you know.

>But if old books are not your scene, once again: imperium is conserved. Taking this as our lodestar, we have no trouble in diagnosing the fundamental disease of democracy. The condition (which is incurable) is imperial decay - that is, the broadening of the decision process, from a single executive decision to a universal-suffrage election.

>The democrat, who is typically also an aristocrat, thinks or allows himself to think that, by dethroning the king and transferring the king's powers to an assembly, he is destroying the sovereign imperium. But he is not; he is only dispersing it.

>If some alliance of democrats so much as renders the king subject to the rule of law, they are transferring the king's judicial powers not to no one, but to a concrete human body - a judiciary. They have fragmented the imperium and produced the constitutional solecism of imperium in imperio. Their monarchy is certainly doomed, at least in any substantive sense. And thus men laid, centuries ago, the foundation for all our feral subway yoofs. Imperium fragments irreversibly and entropically - monarchy descending to oligarchy, oligarchy to aristocracy, aristocracy to democracy, democracy to mere anarchy.

>Which fruit has taken many a year to ripen. But what a fruit it is! Now, at last, we see it in its glory. No other recent day knew such a thing. Yoofs! As St. Exupery wrote in the '40s:
For centuries, humanity has been descending an immense staircase whose top is hidden in the clouds and whose lowest steps are lost in a dark abyss. We could have ascended the staircase; instead we chose to descend it.
At the bottom of the stairs: anarchy, hell, Haiti, Mogadishu, Lagos. For you they are waiting! For you, for you, for you, these hells! For you! Stop on the stairs; listen quietly; hear Mogadishu, in the blackness below, reeking of piss, waiting for you; purring; licking her chops. She wants you. You! And your family! Anarchy is hungry, hungry, always hungry. Insatiable. Yet patient.

>And at the top? Versailles. Louis XIV. Elizabeth I. The greatness of Britain. The greatness of Europe. The fire of yesterday, untarnished by time! The glory of princes! Cardinals, in their red hats! Black-robed Jesuits, terrible, intense! Against them, the burning martyrs of the Reformation! What a world! A gleaming, cloud-borne Olympia in the blue, far above our wet gray reality. Gentlemen, we have only our butts to turn around. Why not climb, and fast? Two steps in a jump? Three?

>No, there is a problem. It cannot be done. Imperium is conserved; imperium decays. And cannot, in any way, be made to undecay. Cold does not flow to hot; power does not shrink; we cannot climb the stairs. At most sit on them, and shiver in the deep fog. Waiting. Sooner or later, Mogadishu will ascend. Must we come to it? It will come to us. Sooner or later. Sooner...

>No! There is one desperate way - and one only. Having descended for centuries, shambling, sitting, resting, going on - we cannot climb. Fast or slowly, at a walk or at a run. Climbing is impossible; ascent is essential; there is only one way. We must leap, in one bound, to the top. The asymmetry is fundamental. Obey it.

>Divine-right monarchy is very easy to understand, even for an atheist like me. We have already derived it. To an atheist, the King's authority must be absolute, not because he is appointed by God, but because he is appointed by no one. If someone appoints him, that man is King. If their roles are divided - the famous "balance of powers" or "checks and balances" - they will struggle, and one or the other prevail. Probably the many over the few.

>Thus we see high tempers and fisticuffs in the chambers of state. The mice must be governed by the elephants, but all this trumpeting and trunk-lashing alarms them. What if they begin to stomp. As imperium decays, the State becomes conflicted and incompetent, incapable of making good decisions or any at all. And at worst, of course, it actually fights itself.

>Thus the modern divine-right monarchist says, not that God has chosen any person or family to rule, but that sovereignty exists and someone must hold it. The more narrowly and stably held the imperium is, the safer it is.

>he did a Cult of the Dead Cow textfile

Shit, I love these things!
A few of the last ones are pretty red pilled, and now I see why.
cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0381.html
cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0412.html
cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0407.html

>The emphasis on stability is essential, because this answers the question we asked earlier: the difference between Hitler and Louis XIV. The difference is that the famous dictatorships of the 20th century were not stable royal dynasties, or anything close; they rested entirely on the personal position of the dictator, whose absolute authority concealed contending factions at all times, and could at any time have shattered into those factions. If the mere death of a single human being, for instance, can result in regime change, a regime cannot be regarded as stable. It thus exists in a state of permanent if suspended civil war. This is very far from Filmer, and it can quite reasonably be expected to result in a gruesome variety of tyrannous manifestations, as of course was seen in the 20th century.

>A Bourbon Gulag or a Tudor Holocaust are entirely inconceivable. Even St. Bartholomew's was a peccadillo by the standards of a Marat, a Lenin or a Mao. Why? Because imperium is conserved. A stable monarch has no reason to massacre the Jews or shoot the Old Bolsheviks. Being stable, holding a monopoly of power, he has nothing to fear. Stalin and Hitler did. Hence, tyranny results not from the concentration of imperium, but from its dispersal.

>It matters, of course, who holds the scepter. But it does not matter as much as you think - so long as that individual is competent and sane. When we look at what Hitler did with Germany between 1933 and 1939, for instance, we tend to say: "but on the other hand, he killed the Jews." Of course, Augustus held exactly the same position in Rome. If he killed the Jews, history does not record it. Hitler was a maniac; Augustus was not a maniac. We know what Augustus did.

>Cannot we marvel at what the Third Reich achieved, with the knowledge that it was run by a maniac? In the hands of a non-maniac, what might it have done? In the hands of an Augustus, for instance? Well, somewhere in Germany in 1933, there might have been an Augustus or two. Or even three. But Germany in 1933 was a democracy. And that democracy elected not Augustus, not Frederick the Great, not even Kaiser Bill. It elected -

>Wait. Who did it elect? Gee. I've forgotten already. I hate these migraines. An Austrian, I think. A sergeant? A private first-class? Someone like that. A man of the people, that's for sure. History is so confusing.

Moldbug is way too big brained for this gay ass board full of redditors and faggots

We used to have Reactionary threads all the time. I remember we had a whole load on Carlyle.

Dark Enlightenment is more of a way to view political reality. Because that view happens to be very accurate in its analysis, it is the best bet on overthrowing the current suicidal liberalism and replacing it with better one, since it describes how powers that be operate.

Noteworthy: all of NRx agrees with how the system operates, it's what should come next part which is under constant debate.

I'm personally fond of the bloodless breakout idea: we simply thank current bureaucracy and politicians for their service, give them nice pension and leave them. No resentment, no historical burden, no pendulum possibly swinging back. Everyone is happy.

Letting go of burning hatred is difficult, but it is highly advisable. Possibilty of sudden death forces everyone to fight back.

Who /galacticplanetarystarlord/ here?

i need to read the docs on clay, eyre and ames i've been putting it off for so long, i need and want to contribute to urbit to make it actually fucking real, it will save everything

What a good intro into the NRx stuff ?

unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html

Thanks user!

>It's easy to lose a book of Tacitus, it's much harder to lose a country - but it happened. The country's name was 'Rhodesia' and it is no longer found on any map. The Earth's crust being relatively stable, the place where it was still exists. But you wouldn't want to go there.

Can you give me the quick-run-down on Urbit, I am javascript code monkey.

treating the internet the way the internet treated the phone companies, Urbit is a new foundational layer on top of the two most important technologies we use today UNIX + TCP/IP which were both developed separately and without the other in mind and thus do not scale well and have basically fixed us into this one specific design pattern of the client/server architecture whereby giant monopolistic companies with data silos control everyone's data and true peer to peer distributed networking is impossible. if you want to socialise with someone on the internet you should be sending packets directly to them, not through some Zucc owned facebook intermediary for some reason. Urbit makes this possible by giving humans static routing addresses which are easily memorable. they have their own address space which is pretty interesting, the first 256 (8-bit) addresses are galaxies, 16-bit addresses are stars, 32-bit addresses are planets, these 'urbits' are like virtual machines which can run in the cloud and the intention is for everyone to use them as personal servers. instead of sending your data over to random companies databases, you control all your data in your urbit and just connect with other third parties APIs keeping you in control. it turns things from a 1:n relationship (one user managing multiple accounts spread across websites, resulting in password fatigue etc.) to a n:1 relationship where all your computing is done by your urbit and you don't have to compromise your data by being a digital serf in someone else's fiefdom. it is basically intended to be a new software stack and stable foundational layer that will take over the world by the end of this century.

it keeps far far deeper and more autistic than this however, but this gist is they want everyone to have their own personal servers which are as easy to operate as an iphone because right now normies don't have a hope of operating a linux box in the cloud on their own

youtube.com/watch?v=g1qroWiZF90

not sure, it worked the first time I tried it. maybe Sup Forums trusts me with blog links because I've been shitposting all day

.com rather than .co.uk perhaps

Sounds like FidoNet zones, regions, and nodes.

except at the base level it is a very very simple Turing complete virtual machine called Nock that is intended to be the assembly language of the Urbit land, it also has a functional programming language called Hoon which self compiles to Nock and a non pre-emptive event sourcing OS written in Hoon called Arvo

He can't really keep writing because Urbit and other stuff takes up all of his time now.

I was talking more about the self-sufficient routing. Sorry, didn't mean to be unclear.

he shouldn't anyway, i want urbit to succeed, he's already redpilled the shit out of thousands of people, there is little more he can add without going over old ground, plus the more he gets associated with edgy political commentary the more likely people are going to want to boycott urbit

Moldbug is interesting for sure as with other NRx theorists. UR was where I began to question the merits of democracy and his theory of patchwork governments is pretty intriguing, despite being totally impractical and borderline Marxist.

this, unfortunately

Moldbug is very smart and well read but he is not writing to people like us. Remember who he is surrounded by in his daily life and in his IRL social circles: silicon valley leftist intellectual types. He's writing to persuade those faggots, not people who are already redpilled.

His writing is also purposefully verbose and abstruse. He is trying to obscure his true message. This is done 1) make it more likely that lefty faggots swallow his redpills by disguising them, 2) to make it harder for journalists to quote mine, and 3) keep the quantity of his readers low and quality high by increasing the amount of time and effort required to digest his ideas.

For these reasons I prefer Nick Land. He writes about similar ideas but his writing is far more concise and palatable.

Also Moldbug is a Jew so he can't be trusted.

Bumping, more people need to learn about neoreactionaryism.

Have you seen the recently released interview with Nick Land?

youtube.com/watch?v=vGf6_XyjBy0

The editing and the music is a bit obnoxious though. Skip in about 3 minutes to get to the talking.

any links to any of his writing ?

I'd take a look at some of the Nick Land stuff starting with the earlier posts on his Xenosystems blog.

xenosystems.net/page/177/

moldbuggery.blogspot.ca/

>keep the quantity of his readers low and quality high by increasing the amount of time and effort required to digest his ideas

this is also the approach with Urbit

TEN

FEET

HIGHER

Thank you for the links user!

If you're new to Moldbug, Neoreaction/Dark Enlightenment, etc., I recommend starting here: thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/

There are also a few podcasts worth listening to:
> The Myth of the 20th Century Podcast
> Weimerica Weeky
> Ascending the Tower

I can vouch for Myth of the 20th Century and Ascending the Tower. I've yet to listen to Weimerica Weekly.

>The English word for an adult unrelated dependent is “slave.” The transfer of the bulk of the African-American population from the control and responsibility of private masters, to the State, is not a freeing of the slaves. It is a nationalizing of the slaves.

my nigga Curtis is woke af

bump for actual interesting political discussion

We are going to need to ACCELERATE that process!

I love his writings but I don't know anything about technology or Silicon Valley, so his video on YouTube about Urbit left me scratching my head. Basic gestalt on Urbit?

A lot of people in the NRx community spent a lot of time and were initially redpilled on Sup Forums, back before the collective IQ and quality of discussions dropped post-shill invasion.

Any of you lads have some spicy NRx memes?

...

not since ferretlord karl boetel tapped out of the reactosphere

...

...

Reading Caryle has been an amazing experience, and his writing style is incomparable. He writes like some sort of cross between an Old Testament prophet and a fanatical Calvinist preacher!

This is so damn true.

In Canada, since the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, we further dispersed our 'imperium' so the unelected judiciary have an absurd amount of power to pass laws politicians, who are always concerned about the next election, are too afraid to vote on in the House of Commons.

a Politico article suggested that Steve Bannon was secretly in contact with Moldbug.

archive.fo/gUrVr

Bannon is a corporatist/protectionist in the Hamiltonian mold. I doubt he is familiar with Mises, Hayek, or Rothbard. If he were, he wouldn't praise the "American System" on 60 Minutes. It would strike me as utterly bizarre that Bannon has been influenced by Moldbug or has ever been in contact with him, but we do live in strange times.

Is there any evidence at all for this? I remain very skeptical. Although at the same time, I wouldn't put it past Bannon to be at least aware of Moldbug. He name dropped Evola in a speech in Italy one time and he's a fairly esoteric figure.

I doubt he is familiar with Mises, Hayek, or Rothbard

That's a pretty normie bunch, I'd be surprised if he hasn't heard of if not read each of them, especially with his reputation of being extremely well-read.

> Is there any evidence at all for this?
Not that I know of and Moldbug apparently denied it also (which you would expect either way).

As I see it, you can't even begin to scrape the surface of Moldbug's utterly obscure musings without already being steeped in libertarianism, particularly right-wing libertarianism of the Hoppean variety. If Bannon is or was steeped in libertarianism such that it led him to Moldbug, why does he sound like a Pat Buchanan-style protectionist and trade warrior when talking about economic issues? I know of very few "red-pilled" libertarians who suddenly become "economic nationalists." Maybe Bannon is also steeped in HBD research and doesn't see libertarianism as workable? He's also a "former" spook, so what he says is inherently untrustworthy anyway. Hard to know what to make of him.

Moldbug showed up here under the name "Boldmug" somewhat recently:

scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3167

Worth a look if you like his takes.

Have you read his French Revolution?

>Barrere, who once 'wept' looking up from his Editor's-Desk, looks down now from his President's-Chair, with a list of Fifty-seven Questions; and says, dry-eyed: "Louis, you may sit down." Louis sits down: it is the very seat, they say, same timber and stuffing, from which he accepted the Constitution, amid dancing and illumination, autumn gone a year. So much woodwork remains identical; so much else is not identical.

> As I see it, you can't even begin to scrape the surface of Moldbug's utterly obscure musings without already being steeped in libertarianism, particularly right-wing libertarianism of the Hoppean variety.
I agree this is probably the case for most but not absolutely necessary prerequisite.

> If Bannon is or was steeped in libertarianism such that it led him to Moldbug, why does he sound like a Pat Buchanan-style protectionist and trade warrior when talking about economic issues?
Contrary to what most libertarians seem to think, including myself at one point, libertarianism isn't the ultimate redpill. Lots of libertarians eventually give up on libertarianism.

> I know of very few "red-pilled" libertarians who suddenly become "economic nationalists."
If you hang around alt-right and NRx types, you'll see that a very large chunk of them fit that description and are also former libertarians.

> Maybe Bannon is also steeped in HBD research and doesn't see libertarianism as workable?
Perhaps. Certainly it's true that libertarianism isn't workable. As a hardcore ancap at heart, that was a hard pill for me to swallow.

I am finishing that Epic Poem now, but very slowly. I don't want it to end! Moldbug was not overstating when he said Carlyle is one of the greatest English-language writers ever. He even makes you feel slightly sorry for the seagreen incorruptible!

"All eyes are on Robespierre's Tumbril, where he, his jaw bound in dirty linen, with his half-dead Brother and half-dead Henriot, lie shattered, their "seventeen hours" of agony about to end. The Gendarmes point their swords at him, to show the people which is he. A woman springs on the Tumbril; clutching the side of it with one hand, waving the other Sibyl-like; and exclaims: "The death of thee gladdens my very heart, m'enivre de joi"; Robespierre opened his eyes; "Scélérat, go down to Hell, with the curses of all wives and mothers!" -- At the foot of the scaffold, they stretched him on the ground till his turn came. Lifted aloft, his eyes again opened; caught the bloody axe. Samson wrenched the coat off him; wrenched the dirty linen from his jaw: the jaw fell powerless, there burst from him a cry; — hideous to hear and see. Samson, thou canst not be too quick!"

To me Libertarianism seems really naïve. For the last 50-or-so years all their "freedom of speech" and "freedom of assembly" has been used as a weapon by the Left in order to dismantle the system, and now they're also saying "freedom to do business with who you want" in order to defend de-platforming in the digital sphere. Not to mention their individualism which can not beat a collective attack.

>doesn't trust Yarvin
>but he trusts Nick Land, the cyberfeminist
T O P K E K

just make it an /nrx/ general. really surprised I don't see more here actually.

I'm on a similar journey, it seems. I no longer think of myself as a Rothbardian and I find our Anglo-American notions of individualism to be a decadent luxury in a world that cares not a wit about the individual. I am feeling a slow shift taking place in my own thinking after discovering NRx, and I must admit that it is slightly painful and stress-inducing to realize that my political philosophy is completely muddled and confused now as a result. I am still trying to find my intellectual footing after Moldbug removed the foundation beneath me, which I assumed would never give way! I have heard NRx described as "post-libertarian." Nick Land called it something like a "morphing of libertarianism under conditions of extreme duress." Seems accurate.

> To me Libertarianism seems really naïve.
I agree but those the examples you cited are not necessarily the result of libertarian naivete.

The problem with the libertarian movement, as I see it, is that their strategy has been to attract people from the left by making leftist issues a main part of their focus.

> In favor of gay marriage? Great! We want the government out of marriage completely!
> Want to use drugs? Great! Your body is your property!

This message has attracted a bunch of fucking degenerate leftists into the libertarian movement. During this last election cycle, the divide became extremely apparent with figures like Jeffrey Tucker going into full SJW faggot mode, and many others leaving the movement for the alt-right.

If you haven't already you should should read this book.

Too intellectual for LARPing Nazis, methinks. It's even above the heads of basic bitch alt-right figures. Could you imagine Cernovic, Milo or Jack Prosobiec talking about treatises written by Grotius, crime rates in Victorian England, or the opinions of Loyalist governors in revolutionary Massachusetts about the American Revolution?

I'm familiar with this one. I wonder whether Hoppe has ever weighed in on NRx. I've never heard the Mises folks or Tom Woods talk about it either. You know the philosophy is obscure when even libertarians seem to be unfamiliar with it!

I had a similar experience under the influence of Land. It's been very disorienting, but also exhilarating in a way. I'm still trying to reconcile everything in my head.

I've had to reconsider many aspects of the Platonism I hold so dear.

I've made a couple of NRx generals before but they get extremely low reply counts. Seems people would rather discuss e-celebs. I don't know what happened, a couple of years ago you used to find neoreaction threads here quite often.

That's another form of their naïveté in my mind, just like the "[non-white] are natural conservatives" you hear from Tories and Republicans.

"If we can get the Leftists in, we'll get them to see how right we are!"

Have you tried to move people away from these vloggers and on to more substantial thinkers? How they turn on you!
>You're a shill for wanting me to read!

nice find

The libertarian movement nowadays is a joke (for the most part). Cucker's metamorphosis into a lefty still makes me want to puke. I always thought he was over-the-top and smarmy ("Life Without the McDouble" is a good example), but now he is completely toxic and vicious. A true victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome and the influence of the SJW millenials he hangs out with like Cathy Reisenwitz. Meanwhile, the open borders people at Reason and CATO don't appear to notice what has happened to Germany and Sweden and wants Trump to grant amnesty to the Third World. Cathy Young wants WW3 with Russia because Putin is a big fat meanie. The LP Convention was just a sad affair. Gary "What is Aleppo?" Johnson praised Hillary and had Bill Weld as his running mate. I think the last bunch left still doing God's work is the good Dr. Paul, Tom Woods, and the right-libertarians down in Auburn who "get" immigration -- the Mises and Lew Rockwell folks. But, on the whole, and as usual, libertarians have lost the script while the world around them rapidly becomes less libertarian.

Mass democratization of Sup Forums. It was better when it was run by elites. Moldbug strikes again!

Being exposed to Hoppe is actually what helped me move on from libertarianism. I realized that the logical conclusion of an ancap society would effectively be monarchy.

I think the reason you find so many alleged libertarians paying lip service to the Left is because they've basically given up but they don't have the stomach to formally declare themselves Leftists. Ron Paul, bless his soul, tried and tried but ultimately his brand of libertarianism failed to get a foothold electorally. At that point, many libertarians looked around and said we either assimilate ourselves into the Left (the dominant force in America according to Moldbug) or we embrace something slighly more radically Right-wing which is regarded as an almost demonic force in the current dispensation. This is where the alt-right comes in and other movements tangential to it, many alt-righters are of course disaffected libertarians.

> I think the reason you find so many alleged libertarians paying lip service to the Left is because they've basically given up but they don't have the stomach to formally declare themselves Leftists.
> many libertarians looked around and said we either assimilate ourselves into the Left
I see it differently. I don't think it's a case of libertarians becoming leftists as much as it is leftists becoming libertarians.

Libertarians recruiting from the left has been an overt strategy since Rothbard's early days. It's been going on for several decades.

Just look at High Times... er, I mean Reason Magazine. They're still exploiting the "court the left" strategy.

Well in that case it seems that they have received more than they bargained for.