Moldbug would have seen clearly that the N-COVID-19 narrative, lockdowns and restrictions, and subsequent Antifa/BLM riots that broke open the lockdowns, were all a manifestation of a High & Low versus Middle dynamic, where the elites use the underclass against middle Americans who represent the only real threat to their rule. It is not an accident that the public closure directives fell entirely on small businesses, churches and volunteer civic society. In contrast, the Washington Post owning Jeff Bezos’s Amazon is bigger than ever.
I think that this is spot on, and is actually an indictment of Republican Governors who bought into the hype. A few didn't, but most let themselves be stampeded into harming their base. The Democrat Governors who are still keeping up the lockdowns are doing so knowing that they are hurting a Republican constituency, so there's no expectation that they will want to ease up. But the GOP crowd should have known better. This is why I call them the "Stupid Party".
Go read the whole thing. Some of us were skeptical about the panic from the start. Others should have been.
I think the shutting down of the economy, the cloth mask wearing, and social distancing are comparable to bleeding the patient as they did G. Washington. Will we have the perspective to see this, I wonder?
ReplyDeleteI cannot approach Moldbug for the life of me. Any post that involves him literally turns into a Spam-O-Rama. You link to a couple pieces, each of those link to two or three more, and then I end up with an exponentially growing mess to slog through. I gathered enough to wonder if maybe the wrong guys won the civil war and WW2...
ReplyDeleteOnly the idiots and the elderly are concerned about the pox now. I think the thing now is that the United States and possibly Canada can no longer function as countries. Our populations are too diverse, our leaders are too weak to hold people together, and some portions of our nations are in such dire financial trouble from corrupt and incompetent management, that they will collapse under their own weight unless they can avail themselves of other people’s money.
Bloodshed will come of this.
Mr. Borepatch, you are a thinker. A compliment, but an earned one. And you run a good blog. I'd never heard of the guy you mentioned, 'Mendacious' Moldbug, so I clicked the links and read them and the comments. Moldbug sounds interesting, but doesn't seem ultimately to be delivering his arrows to his target, I would say. Why? He seems to have some presuppositional errors in his calculus, IMHO.
ReplyDeleteFirst, to attribute communism to John Calvin, the Protestant Reformation and the Puritans? Seriously? The 'perfectibility of Man'? Good grief! They were all committed to a world view centered on the theological concept of total depravity, Man's precious innate value, his greatly gifted, yet profoundly fallen state, his utter lostness outside of a redeeming, powerful act of God, and that act directed to specific 'elect' individuals, and even then that those benefiting most from it see "through a glass, darkly", and are prone to screw up in all kinds of ways. in sum, the utter inability of Man to perfect himself in this life. The whole idea of human perfectibility seems far more compatible with Romanist thinking, where (I think) there is not a counterpart to Calvin's idea of total inability.
To understand politics, as Russell Kirk correctly said, you must understand the culture, because politics is downstream from culture. When you have a culture war, you will have schools of thought emerging from the culture(s) present, and a resulting tug-of-war.
the American Left might have thought they were manipulating and leading along the USSR, but that doesn't mean they were more than presumptuous erring egotists. Russia's culture was driving Russian politics. Their prior experience of nothing but totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and their view of the value and meaning of human life were all far more Oriental than Western.
As to World War II, and its outworking, Churchill has written that he knew quite well that whatever lands Stalin took he would keep. The Allies were fighting a pragmatic war, with a limited goal, the destruction of Nazism, and not much else.
Libertyman, except they know what they're doing today.
ReplyDeleteGlen, Moldbug is thick going, there's no doubt. His concept of the "Cathedral" is brilliant, though, and explains a lot of modern government. (Explanation at the link)
Etaion, the Puritans believed in the concept of The Elect - since God is all knowing and all powerful, he knew from the beginning of time who would be saved and who would be damned. It's not perfectibility per se, it's detecting the already perfect (well, saved). And they did in fact initially set things up as a communal/communist colony. They changed after famine set in, but there was a very strong tendency towards the communal.
That said, you're absolutely right that many of his arrows do not hit the target.
I certainly stand corrected on the issue. What a wet fart this whole mess has become.
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