It's exposing the intellectual bankruptcy of the Silicon Valley elite. Between the stupidity and kowtowing it has revealed a startling amount of groupthink and cowardice, even among people I once held as independent thinkers.
Yarvin's claim: "[In] F.D.R.’s first inaugural address,... he essentially says, Hey, Congress, give me absolute power, or I’ll take it anyway"
From FDR's speech: "I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis--broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency..."
Operative phrase: "I shall ask the Congress"
These people are, at best, dishonest and cowardly. Even more disappointing, it's increasingly clear the only indicator of actual intelligence is net worth. This is rather lossy signal, unfortunately.
Interview: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-in...
Also: It's a literal interview lol. You get to read his own answers to (very light) skeptical questioning.
You can see him completely elide (or forget, or not know?) that CEOs are accountable to boards and, ultimately, to shareholders. You get to see him dismiss his own child's fears about Trump's wall by first forgetting (or deceiving, again) that Trump did indeed start building a physical, literal wall, then assure his child that his life won't change as he attends a fancy private Mandarin immersion school in San Francisco.
The hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty just cannot help but seep out of this supposedly serious thinker!
Of course the real value of his philosophy is its conclusion that the ultrawealthy should rule the world. So the ahistoricism, dishonesty, and internal incoherence hardly matter to the Silicon Valley elite.
Oh, and before someone comes and brings up the court packing proposal, it didn’t have to happen, and FDR’s main claim to making the proposal was that he had a mandate based on his, iirc, at the time 3rd supermajority sweep of the electoral college, unlike, say our current President who claims a mandate while not even winning 50% of the popular vote and fell way short of even 400 electoral college votes.
Court packing would have required the coördination of the Congress and the President to essentially remake the Supreme Court. It's distinctly different from Musk turning off funding to legally-mandated programmes.
You are talking about the guy who sent American citizens of Japanese descent to interment/forced labor camps and got hundreds of thousands of Americans killed in WW2, a war we should have never joined. He committed much more evil than anything Trump has done and will ever do.
2) I truly don’t understand the “none of your business?” Whose behavior am I obsessing over? Only candidates I can think of are POTUS and his inner circle which… is absolutely my business…?