Ram Lama

The problem we’re faced with right now is less conservative vs progressive, and more liberal democracy vs authoritarian autocracy. Pence represented a move towards autocracy that strained, but did not outright break, the bounds of liberal democracy.

Eight years ago, Mike Pence’s positions represented a step in the wrong direction. Now, Mike Pence’s positions represent a step in the right direction.

Mike Pence has not actually improved; this just shows how much the situation has deteriorated.

In the spirit of DOGE, I have done an audit of household expenses. I’ve found that if my roomies agree that I’m the only one who gets to eat, we can cut 2/3 of our collective grocery costs 🤔

Musk, Thiel, and all of the techbros trying to push us towards monarchism functionally *are* Roko's Basilisk, just stripped of the technobabble that makes it sound like an exotic or novel problem.

What folks missed about Roko's Basilisk is that, whether intentional or not, it was always just a pretentiously scifi way of asking "There will be a dictatorship in the future. It will punish you if you don't help it come to be. Do you ally with it preemptively in the hopes of not being hurt by it?"

Musk: unchecked, unbalanced.

Lol- yeah. And that particular root seems fairly innocent.

My guess is that the overlap between the meme and the reference to dukedom in the city state context was too much to pass up for Musk.

In Venice, the Doge was the head of state, elected for life by the oligarchy.

Elon isn’t president. He’s Duke- and he’s not even hiding it.

This isn’t hidden or obscured. The spelling is exactly the same.

Want to hear something that people in the deep right talk about, but I haven’t heard from people on the left?

DOGE isn’t primarily a cryptocurrency pun. Doge is an Italian position with the same etymological roots, and similar authorities, as Duke.

YouTube video by Signified B Sides Why I don't think we should waste our time making anti Trump content...

FD Signifier’s video today offers a spin on the grey rock approach to dealing with toxicity in the MAGA movement.

Starve the trolls.

Just try to avoid falling into apathy or doomerism while doing it.

youtu.be/IoaebrLEIr4?...

People who think that government should be run like a tech startup need to pay a hell of a lot more attention to the failure rate of tech startups.

Finishing up my dive into Yarvin with the Behind the Bastards episodes on him.

Somehow the Trump administration, and the interwoven webs of Vance and Musk, became scarier. I didn’t think that was possible.

Only about an hour or so into more laidback Yarvin interviews, but there hasn’t been anything even worth responding to.

I was ready to be surprised and have this be a “I don’t agree with his solutions, but his critiques are largely solid” kinda thing… but this ain’t that.

Okay... enough of listening to interviews with Yarvin where he's being on his best behavior. Time to look into interviews with folks who agree with him enough that the mask can slip a bit.

Something that's hard to take seriously about this interview with Yarvin: when he whines about having to wear a mask on a plane in the same breath where he advocates that countries should have had extreme Covid lockdowns.

The stance isn't inherently hypocritical, but does require mental gymnastics.

The hegemonic cultural influence of Western Enlightenment is worth critiquing, but to think that fascist regimes would do better if they had less brain drain seems to miss the part where the rigorous adherence needed for fascist ideology to be upheld creates hostile environments for intellectuals.

He seems to be making some major- and egregiously incorrect- assumptions about what causes the intellectuals to abandon the 'courts' of these 'modern monarchies'.

He seems to think that intellectuals are blindly pulled into western enlightenment and miss how fascism actively pushes them away.

Now Yarvin is talking about how modern fascist regimes fail in part due to their intelligentsia leaving, and conjecturing that if the respective 'courts' of these modern monarchies were the home of intellectuals then the problems that the fascist regimes fell prey to would be avoided.

The more centralized executive authority is, the less beholden it is to outside forces and the less it has to hedge its bets; the more it can recklessly pursue agendas that are blatantly destructive to groups it has authority over.

The thing I like about that kind of conjecturing though is that it can be give insights for how to manage collective intelligence- society.

Democracy basically tells authorities that they don't know what they'll be assessed by until they're actually assessed- so they have to hedge their bets.

If you told it to make everyone happy, it might do it in a way that collapses the economy. If you tell it to make the economy perfect, it might do it in a way that makes everyone miserable. If it's not sure which one it's supposed to pursue, it has to try to balance them.

That's the theory, anyway.

One of my favorite 'solutions' to the super AI problem is that in order to avoid the super AI from pursuing a singular goal with catastrophic efficiency, you tell the AI that it will be judged by a set of criteria that it doesn't have access to.

The theory is that this makes it hedge its bets.

The more centralized executive authority, the fewer mandates there are to benefit from those diverse perspectives.

Authoritarianism is inherently brittle.

Responsible leadership on any scale *requires* input of diverse perspectives in order to identify and mitigate problems that are only visible to certain subgroups.

One of the strengths of democratic governance is it has built-in, if often underutilized, structures that encourage diverse input.

I've also yet to hear Yarvin touch on the human equivalent of AI's paperclip problem.

Can a centralized executive authority theoretically accomplish their goals more efficiently? Arguably yes. But absolute devotion to accomplishing a goal can be catastrophic.

But I've yet to hear him touch on the inevitability of that centralized authority using their executive powers to control the groups that are supposed to hold them accountable.

Which seems like a disastrously glaring oversight for even the most forgiving interpretation.

One of the more interesting angles is that while he's calling for a US monarchy, his monarchy *seems* to explicitly include room for democratic processes to replace the monarch. So less traditional monarch and more CEO. Centralized authority that's held accountable by the 'board' (the people).

Doing a dive into Curtis Yarvin today- one of the more influential minds behind the philosophical underpinnings of the current 'conservative' movement in the US.

First impression is that he's the tech bro's equivalent to Russia's Aleksandr Dugin.

A fairy tale for the modern age 🤔

But at least this is a realistic and precedented level of bad? Is it okay to feel a moment of relief at that?

I need a shower.