The yarvin stuff is crazy to me mostly because he legitimately is an awful writer. So much unexplored angst in his work it feels like Im reading catcher in the rye again but he's completely unironic. Surely the neoreactionaries can find someone a bit more eloquent?
They have Land, but he understands exactly what he is doing and he will hurt you if you're not very careful. Yarvin is perfect for edgelords precisely because that's not true.
I read it and… I don’t get it. There isn’t much of a real argument.
Like in the famous “gentle introduction” he spends like 10000 words to convince you that… maybe Samuel Adams was an asshole? Okay, fine. Therefore the American revolution was a fraud, because… some Tory wrote a witty book mocking its leaders? Wow, so you are saying that a major revolution was not absolutely black and white and that maybe some of the folks on “our” side were dicks? What a revelation. Meanwhile there’s little engagement with the actual ideas, which are the important and lasting part.
That’s just one example. I have no interest in spending days deconstructing those walls of text. Let’s just say they did not change my mind on anything.
I have this theory that much of Yarvin’s underlying motive is a sublimated rage out about the idiocy and hypocrisy of San Francisco politics. He lived there at the time. But he couldn’t just say damn these SF latte sipping rich lefty people are hypocritical assholes. If you don’t like a place then for fuck’s sake just move.
A big irony is that SF is not a well functioning democracy. It’s a one party state controlled by boomer NIMBY property owners with a gigantic divide between rich and poor. It’s a f’ing feudal city state run by landlords, and he thinks the whole world should be like that?
I happen to dislike a lot of things about how SF is run and some things about its zeitgeist which is why I don’t live there.
Treating each link as a reference, the perhaps more famous "Open Letter" has a bibliography about eight hundred items deep.
That sounds impressive as hell till you actually start looking at them. Filtering out Youtube, broken, and frothing-at-the-eyeballs, less than a hundred were interesting and a couple of dozen proved actually worth following, when I carried out this exercise for my own interest some time around 2013.
As a collator, that gives Yarvin a considerably poorer score than Noah Smith, which I think would embarrass me were I either man. As anything else, I'm not sure whether Smith or Yarvin is actually more useless, but I may just need to move the decimal one place to the left in my epsilon.
