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/lit/ - Literature

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16570981 No.16570981 [Reply] [Original]

>dude America needs an Augustus to save it
>FDR was already an American Augustus, except when he did it he was bad
>I hate the left, I have no leftwing friends
>but the establishment left are my kind of people and I hope Bernie Sanders wins

What did he mean by all this? No, seriously, I like the dude, but could someone explain to me how he can rationalise those opinions?

>> No.16571009

he was a jew

>> No.16571037

He's one of those "philosophers" that are stuck in limbo between not liking modern society but not wanting to embrace marxist critique so ends up not making a lot of sense

>> No.16571039

FDR, Lincoln, and Washington were Augustine in that they made sweeping changes and set the trend of the nation for and epoch. That he recognizes this doesn't mean he agrees with the changes that they used their power to implement. His association with the left while simultaneously deciding them can pretty much be answered with >>16571009

>> No.16571048

>>16571037
Its easy to critique modern society and oppose Marxist thought, its not easy to critique modern society and oppose Marxism as a Jew though

>> No.16571069

>>16571037
Absolute monarchy is the true antithesis to modern societym

>> No.16571167

Why do you guys pay attention to such obvious flash in the pans? I will NEVER read Moldbug.

>> No.16571190

>>16571167
They're shills, you see.

>> No.16571238

you were expecting intellectual sophistication from a guy who named himself after a Harry Potter character?

>> No.16571271

He needs to attack a society that gave him an extremely good and comfortable life. He isn't suffering with the problems affecting most of the population while playing the role of a relief valve to avoid an explosion. It's the same situation with most of the "philosophers" you see around; pretending to go against the statu quo they need to maintain.

>> No.16571295

Augustus was extremely socially conservative and intent on reviving traditional morality, how was FDR like him?

>> No.16571314

>>16571295
Yup.
And he changed Rome from a Republic to a Monarchy.

>> No.16571336

>>16571048
/thread

>> No.16571545

>>16571069
>modern society opposes modern society
Retard

>> No.16571550

>>16571238
Is that what the name is from?

>> No.16571591
File: 743 KB, 1384x1496, 1563466643167.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
16571591

Any leader that has to win an election to govern is not an Augustus. Why do people keep talking about Lincoln, or FDR, or some other president, as if they're comparable to Augustus? Augustus was the undisputed monarch of the Roman Empire who ruled for life and ended the Republic. No American president is anything like him. There have been compelling, charismatic, powerful presidents, but so what? The Romans had compelling, charismatic, powerful consuls and generals. Like Scipio Africanus. That didn't make them equivalent to Augustus.

Why do so many of these people know nothing about Roman history?

America is just BARELY getting into the period where we MIGHT have an Augustus. Trump is roughly equivalent to either Sulla or Marius, depending on your view of him. Trump is the one who is going to get us on the road to an actual Augustus, not any of the people Moldbug has posited.

>> No.16571611

>>16570981
I can rationalize the first two.
>america needs an Augustus
Augustus was a much needed stable figure after decades if a crippled and corrupted republic.
His administration fixed a lot of social issues by promoting a culture that returned to traditional values of personal responsibility.
He was able to accomplish this by holding complete power for an extended period of time and by using his own money for several infrastructure improvements.

>FDR was a bad Augustus
FDR was a very powerful figure for an extended period of time that saw America through the great depression and WWII.
However he confiscated everybody's gold and then devalued the dollar so the government would make all the money from doing so.
He used social programs to create a nanny state that created a downward inflection point for America's values and lifestyle. So a similar figure to Augustus but used his influence for opposing purposes.

>> No.16571626

>>16571591
T_D go back

>> No.16571631

>>16571591
Lincoln was absolutely a benevolent dictator and a miracle for the United states. Once habeas corpus was suspended he had all the power he could reasonably wield, and wield it he did.

>> No.16571640

>>16570981
>FDR was already an American Augustus
How? I heard he was a wimp with no convictions or beliefs, that he acted where it hurt less, where he was pushed

>> No.16571662

>>16571591
"Augustus" is really just a figure of speech. It's not accurate, but it's still better than trying to predict the future with this stupid "X is totally a modern-day Y and whoever comes after him is totally going to be Z" crap.
>Trump is roughly equivalent to either Sulla or Marius
lmao

>> No.16571664

>>16571591
What are you talking about? If anything Augustus and Caesar ruled more through the will of the masses than the Republican senate ever did

>> No.16571686

>>16571631
He and Washington are more comparable to Cinncinnatus.
>>16571591
Except Marius actually loved the military or something.

The Augustus comparison is made to FDR because his opponents believed he was going to seize power (a projection of course, the wealthy may have already attempted an earlier coup with the business plot). He also got THREE terms which Americans think makes you a de facto king because we are retarded.

>> No.16571692

Imagine if there's a nuclear war and all that survives are hard drives and twitter servers. All that people will know of our era will come from pseuds like moldbug.

>> No.16571713

>>16571686
Washington absolutely, that's why the town Cincinnati exists.

Unfortunately Lincoln never really got to return to his life after saving everybody, although he almost certainly would have

>> No.16571754

>>16571686
>He also got THREE terms which Americans think makes you a de facto king because we are retarded.

Hasn't Angela Merkel ruled for over a decade in Germany? She's been chancellor longer than FDR was president, but nobody thinks she's a queen.

Moldbug is yet another thinker that I find is really not all that smart. He has some interesting, and novel, ideas, but these have been investigated better, and fleshed out more carefully, by other, superior thinkers. Moldbug himself basically seems to have serious gaps in his knowledge and blind spots in his thinking which cripples him as a serious philosopher.

A lot of these internet-era thinkers are like that. Nick Land is exactly like that, too. On a lesser scale, so is Kantbot. All these guys, they have some original ideas, but they lack a really good overall knowledge base and they are incapable of fully fleshing out the novel ideas they have.

>> No.16571768

>>16571754
everyone who isn't a brainwashed normalfag knows she's trying to create a crypto-German empire through the EU and is trying to install herself as empress

>> No.16571774

>>16571768
The EU, especially the Eurozone, has always been a crypto-German empire. The British sniffed this out from the start and that's why they've always been wary of it.

>> No.16571775

>>16571754
>he doesn't just ignore the holes in his system and proceeds to enforce it on all of mankind, possibly ushering a nuclear apocalypse

>> No.16571792
File: 117 KB, 533x800, moldboomer.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
16571792

He's back, boys https://graymirror.substack.com/

>> No.16571811

>>16571754
>On a lesser scale, so is Kantbot.
What has Kantbot EVER thought of? I'm serious, I genuinely didn't know who this guy was before he started trying to get in with the Dirtbag Left crowd after learning that Red Scare made $10k/mo.

I read an article by him how Fantasy is shit because it's not just a circlejerk about German Romanticism anymore, and it took far too many tens of paragraphs to say what I just said in a sentence.

>> No.16571812

what's this guy's basic gestalt? Is that the same one with the laughable photoshoot with the jacket? Can someone give me a rundown?

>> No.16571839

>>16570981
where does he imply that because we already had effective dictators (good or bad) we cant have another AVGVSTVS

>> No.16571860

>>16570981
Moldbug is a decent intro for showing somehow who believes we live in a democracy how the government actually works, however the moment he starts talking about fucking blockchain it gets retarded

>> No.16572080

>>16529789
> Augustus
https://youtu.be/zXYu7E8HHxo?t=29

>> No.16572114

>>16571812
>Democracy is dead. We have killed it. What shall we do to become worthy of it?

>> No.16572124

>>16571692
The worst possible future.

>> No.16572142

>>16571295
Augustine and FDR were both autocrat reformists.

>> No.16572184

>>16571754
Nick Land isn’t really comparable to Moldbug, at least before he became a twitter boomer.

>> No.16572210

>In 1944 America’s last king, the dying FDR, about to literally conquer the world, chose a nonentity as his successor, to implement his pharaonic will: that no one would inherit his throne. So he literally chose a nobody as his VP. With this nobody as President, the personal regime of King Franklin would live forever as a permanent oligarchy.

>With a nobody in the Oval Office, all the wires of personal control (often informal), by which the White House commanded the New Deal and the Allied war machine, would snap and could not be reconnected. The bureaucracy would run itself, forever. This act of succession turned a monarchy into an oligarchy and created the Modern System

seems his problem with FDR is that he made America go in the opposite direction of monarchy

>> No.16572232

>>16571591
Trump is a fraud, that kike wont usurp the government and if he did it would be because Israel told him to.

>> No.16572889

>>16571591
Incredible bait. Amazing.

>> No.16573384

>>16571591
Rome was great. But Rome did not have Q.

>> No.16573528

>>16571271
kys egalitranny

>> No.16573534

>>16572889
That's not bait, that's a pseudo-Spenglerian take on America as empire.

>> No.16573535

>>16571812
Basically nietzsche for millennials and techie bugmen.

>> No.16573551

>>16573535
literally nothing to do with Nietzsche. According to Moldbug he is a 'third rate Carlyle', which is sort of accurate but he also has a bunch of evopsych and libertarian stuff going on.

>> No.16573562

>>16573551
also I can't remember if he ever mentions him, but Moldbug's Cathedral is a clear sort of inversion of Gramsci's cultural hegemony in which the cultural organs like the schools and press are actually more powerful(at least longterm) than the upper class.

>> No.16573775

>>16570981
Why do you people INSIST on caring about losers like him?
I guess you can empathize with him or something.

>> No.16573779

>>16571069
try living in North Korea.

>> No.16573869

>>16571037
Marxism is not threatening to the establishment

>> No.16573880

>>16573869
Orthodox Marxism is, the US got quite spooked by it. Intersectional Marxism though not so much

>> No.16575066

>>16573779
Kim cries like Moldbug.

>> No.16575832

>>16573562
He doesn't mention him because it has nothing to do with Gramsci. Try Pareto or Mosca instead and the 'political formula'

>> No.16575881

>>16571692
That would be pretty cool but Moldbug doesn't use twitter.

>> No.16575888

>>16571550
No

>> No.16575910

>>16573869
Nothing is a threat to the establishment atm anon. Even the dork enlightenment is just another brand.

>> No.16576909

I like Moldbug, but every prescriptive argument he's ever made has been complete shit. He seems to be able to correctly diagnose problems, with a far keener eye than pretty much anyone on the right, and the fact that every serious "dissident," right or left, adopts his taxonomy of power and political language tells you he's on to something.

That being said, his understanding of ideology is laughable and he'd do well to actually read Marxist critique like Althusser. This informs his prescriptive arguments, like the "cozy revolution," and that "if we don't oppose power, it will eventually burn itself out without any antagonists!!" Shit like that is retarded.

>> No.16576923

>>16576909
This. Also it’s important to keep in mind that the Cathedral is more of a historical analogy than an accurate systematization of phenomena. He’s just saying thats where normativity meaning now come from

>> No.16577046

>>16573880
The US was spooked by Orthodox Marxism because it was the official ideology of a foreign state. In a world where the Russian Revolution never happens, one can easily conceive of the US becoming "Communist with American Values" and painting itself as the enlightened progressive opponent to Imperial Russian despotism.

>> No.16577339

>>16576909
Thing is, there is no concievable way for a true right winger to effectively gain power in todays current system. Anyone can 'oppose' it sure, but to what end?

>> No.16577396

>>16577339
You should work to create circumstances in which it is conceivable to achieve power. That’s sort of the point of Urbit, which is well-intentioned regardless of its efficacy: parallel institutions that aren’t dependent on establishment power. Information networks, economic self-sufficiency, etc

>> No.16577397

>>16577339
Although, Moldbug has talked about military coups being a possible attempt at restoration in his earlier blogposts.

>> No.16577451

What's a good starting point with Mr. Mold?

>> No.16577482

>>16577451

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/01/noam-chomsky-killed-aaron-swartz/

>> No.16577489

>>16577451
An Open Letter to Open Minded Progressives is his least obnoxious and most prescient. A lot of the observations will seem banal and self-evident now.

>> No.16577501

>>16571591
you cant rule Rome without the some approval from the plebs

>> No.16577506

>>16577482
>https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/01/noam-chomsky-killed-aaron-swartz/
That is definitely NOT a beginner-friendly Moldbug post.

>> No.16577507

>>16575881
unlike nick land

>> No.16577534

>>16571591
You're right about the roman stuff but also deserve to get shit on for thinking Trump is anything but a kike puppet

>> No.16577538

>>16575881
>cringe is cool if ironic
Kys

>> No.16577542

>>16577506

It was the first time Moldbug clicked for me.

>> No.16577544

>>16573869
Maybe in China.

>> No.16577548

>>16573869
>redistribution of wealth not a threat to the establishment
what reality are you living in dude

>> No.16577549

>>16577451
None. Don't get memed retard.

>> No.16577578

>>16577548
>

>> No.16577582

>>16577548
Who does the redistributing?

>> No.16577587

>>16570981
daily reminder he's a crying onions baby man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbpicjtBOwc

>> No.16577598

>>16571591
Trump is actually more akin to the Gracchi brothers. It'll be decades before America gets its sulla and even longer until Augustus.

>> No.16577613

>>16570981
>I hate the left, I have no leftwing friends
>but the establishment left are my kind of people and I hope Bernie Sanders wins
One of Moldbug's most helpful insights is that the "culture war" is not superstructural. Caste struggle, not class struggle, is the engine of history. Moldbug is thus a bit of a caste traitor—his cultural taste remains patrician, but his political sympathies lie with the plebs.

>> No.16577625

>>16571591
>>16577598
I'm pretty sure FDR is the logical equivalent to Sulla insofar as he oversaw an authoritarian turn toward democratic orthodoxy against the constitutional deviations of populist participatory models. WW2 was pretty much something like a global Roman civil war.

>> No.16577627

>>16577613
>moldbug is really a delight
Cringe.

>> No.16577631

>>16571037
he believes in the iron law of oligarchy, and from that standpoint the dictatorship of the proletariat and communism by extension are nonsense, even standard liberal democracy is nonsense

>> No.16577639

>>16570981
USA is DOOMED.

>> No.16577643

>>16571039
yes, he says the US had a king (a person with real executive power who used it to do things) every 80 years, then a slow decline into shitty oligarchy, then new king, ...

>> No.16577651

>>16571295
they were similar in the kind of power they yielded, not in their politics

>> No.16577666

>>16571591
augustus also had to win the people, do you even know who augustus was and how he got into power? lmao

>> No.16577677

>>16571591
Trump is an actor at best with barely any power, so a Nero and with nowhere near the power Nero had

>> No.16577698

>>16571754
>He has some interesting, and novel, ideas, but these have been investigated better, and fleshed out more carefully, by other, superior thinkers.
and yet he btfo's any normie political analyst somehow, maybe Moldbug is shit, but he is way above average political discourse

>> No.16577706

>>16571811
kantbot is just an ironybro, he doesn't think anything

>> No.16577714

>>16572210
yes, the whole of Moldbug is basically:
explicit power > implicit power

>> No.16577720

>>16571591
Fuck you for using spenglerian rhetoric while simultaneously attaching a shitty gook comic to your post

>> No.16577722

>>16573562
>>16575832
Gramsci was just a cheap Pareto ripoff, so it makes sense

>> No.16577765

>>16576909
he doesn't want to oppose power, he just wants to make power explicit and efficient

>> No.16577780

>>16577548
there's nothing that cements power more than people living off redistributed wealth lmao, redistributed by the power of course

>> No.16577813

>>16577548
Yes, getting more people on the govt. dole SURELY will upset the system. Being beholden to its hand-outs is super, duper independent.

>> No.16577824

>>16577587
what's wrong with crying? have you never cried?

>> No.16577866
File: 1.08 MB, 510x843, reading things.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
16577866

>>16577824
>NOOO YOU CAN BE A RAGING CRYBABY AND PRESENT YOURSELF AS THE VOICE OF REASON SIMULTANEOUSLY, EMOTIONAL BIAS IS A HECKIN STRAWMAN

>> No.16578828

>>16577866
Wrong picture bro. But seriously, he just got a bit emotional probably because he related somewhat to her experience. Sure, crying may very well be a form of manipulation in some cases, but not this one.