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Comment by dev_throwaway | Hacker News Reader

Ah, yes, I remember Yarvin. His goal was to become a cult leader for billionaires whose brains had turned to mush from surrounding themselves with only yes-men for decades.

The theory was that their imagined sense of being above others would make them easy marks.

Apparently he was correct. What a wild timeline we are living in.

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Very funny how Thiel is such a Lord of the Rings fan and he got wormtongued by this guy.

I find it uncanny how much the ring's effects on its wearers match modern smartphone addiction, and how much the working mode of Denethor's corrupted palantir match the way modern disinformation works.

Makes me think that, as with SciFi dystopias, they took LOTR as an instruction manual instead of a cautionary tale.

Conservatives have the media literacy of a dead chicken.

See: necessity of writers of The Boys making it increasingly obvious that homelander & co are are the bad guys. So many conservatives are stunned when they learn homelander is directly written based on trump.

Yet somehow idolizes Mordor as simply technologically advanced whereas everything outside it is “mystical and environmental and nothing works”.

This guy thinks nature doesn’t “work”

the rest are hypnotised as they try to understand urbit, which is to computers as the Bogdanov mathematical thesis was to pure maths.

Urbit was essentially Yarvin's political ideology written as a programming system. It was all about being king over the Urbit address space and creating a feudal community of super users ruling over regular users.

Read his stuff years ago and it's so transparently ... stupid.

You really have to be blessed with the right kind of mix between psychopathy and idiocy to think that he's somebody to listen to.

> right kind of mix between psychopathy and idiocy

Affulenza is real. These guys are brain-damaged.

At least they only have all the money.

At least money is not power.

Or you just have to be the Vice President of the United States!

Reading Yarvin, I get the impression that he has never seriously investigated and contemplated how both governments and corporations work. His ideas are very feels-oriented. He makes a lot of bizarre and invalid assertions about both regarding operations, inputs, and outputs. He seems to live in an ironically academic affluenza bubble that's quite divorced from reality.

He is a fairly deplorable contributor to political theory and an uninspiring writer who hasn't done anything useful in any of his endeavours as far as I an tell. Has Urbit ever done anything useful? How much money has gone into it, and how much of it was his? Wait, sorry Curtis; tell me again about the efficiency of private corporations.

> Ah, yes, I remember Yarvin. His goal was to become a cult leader for billionaires whose brains had turned to mush from surrounding themselves with only yes-men for decades.

Many such cases: Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, etc.

It's really bizarre that these bozos seem to be in control now. Don't see how it ends well.

Yudkowsky isn't a billionaire nor someone who cons them. Did you mean someone else?

It’s pretty clear to me they mean Yudkowsky is another con ?

I'm not aware of anything he sales, where to do I buy his merch? Jones had horse pills.

Yudkowsky’s MIRI was funded by Thiel in its early days. And I think that was a good thing btw. They have a noble mission.

I doubt Kurzweil is a billionaire as well.

Do you have a specific criticism of anything Yarvin has said? Specifically the things which he talks about in every interview he's given in the past 5 years.

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