The liberals thought we did a pretty good job at fascist containment. But the fascist laid low and found weaknesses. It always knew if it was going to take down liberalism, it was going to be from the inside. So it buried itself in its institutions, and started looking for weaknesses.
When the time was just right, the fascists surrounded both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party (and yes, this is very much an America-centric conversation), and out popped populists on the left, and populists on the right. The 2008 Financial Crisis was the moment they waited for.
This is where all the famous “libertarians” line Rockwell, and Block and Hoppe, send out their troops to seize the Republican Party. They knew what they had to do. Goebbels had it all written down for them. He passed on the fascists knowledge of how to weaponize the human spirit against itself.
So it sought to establish the media infrastructure that would ultimately become the replacement media, having fully discredited the establishment, elevate a fool like Donald Trump, who we can control, with his stupid narcissism. But we’ve made the masses just so mad enough at the elites, and fueled this culture war, so expertly to bring us to this moment … that in your anger, which they so expertly controlled, as their father Goebbels intended of you, that you will hand control of your precious stupid little liberal institutions over to us. And our friends Putin, and Orban are waiting for us guys. “Let’s put these liberal fuckers down for good. We just need to get rid of thjs Trump guy, right after he blows this whole constitution thing up.” Then they’ll figure out what to do with Beijing and their Eastern totalitarianism, which they think is way less sexy than their paeanistic stuff. So they’ll fight that out later.
It’s what makes the Austrian school such a pernicious school of thought in my mind. It’s why its produced so many outright fascists! Its goal is to convince the liberal by their predilections to reason, to give up on any notion of a Greater Good.
Its goal is two-fold: to convince you there is no Greater Good (to sell you on cynicism). But if you’re just too romantic for that, convince you it’s impossible to know what the Greater Good is (so why try? Leave it to the market!)
The fascist wants to convince you of that, because he’s got big plans. And you’re in them.
View quoted note →It always made perfect sense that fascists travelled in libertarian circles. There should have been, in retrospect, nothing at all surprising about it. If libertarianism is not met by a representative of the collective interest, fascism just comes out the other side. It should come as no surprise to true liberals that the fascist would want to convince you there is no collective interest. They’ll never convince socialists of that. That’s why they whisper in your ear.
The libertarian impulse is a beautiful, necessary and emancipatory part of the human spirit. Without it, we’d all already be in bondage. Or dead. But the libertarian impulse, improperly contained is ultimately self-destructive and closes in on its own contradictions. It should actually not that all be surprising, to find that when, uncontained, its contradictions emerge in the fascist tendency.
Someone privately asked me why I am wasting my time refuting the hyperbitcoinization narrative. They suggested that if I’m right, it doesn’t matter in the end. They also suggested this represents an unnecessary argument *within* the bitcoin conversation.
One, I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time at all. Because my goal isn’t even to convince people who hold the view that hyperbitcoinization is inevitable. In fact, given their predilection for simple, self-consistent narratives and their tendency to dismiss my attempts as nuance as a “lack of critical thinking skills”, I don’t actually expect to convince them of anything. But I do want to debate them, if for no other reason than I can test the strength of my own ideas. Which for me, is pretty important to being intellectually honest with one’s self. Alas, it does not surprise me that they refuse the opportunity of debate. Because, well, you can guess where I’m going.
The audience for things like this are always the unconvinced. The people who are coming to bitcoin for the first time and trying to make sense of it. I seek to give them a theory of bitcoin I think makes sense, and steers it towards its potential. That focuses people on believable use cases, that will hopefully, on balance direct research and development into more productive products and ideas.
Also, I am just generally fascinated by people who think they have everything figured out, and can smugly claim that something in the future is “inevitable”. I’ve never thought anything about the future is inevitable. To me, the future is an epistemic fog-of-war. The fact some people think they see it with overwhelming clarity (even in the narrow issue of money and markets) by playing forward some theory from a first principles foundation, says to me something about human nature that, quite frankly, I see as the seeds of fanaticism at worst, and sophistry at best.
As for the worry that I’m trying to create unnecessary discord within the bitcoin conversation, this just offends my intellectual and truth-seeking sensibilities. If I think something is wrong, and I feel strongly enough about it that I want to say something about it, then I’m going to. I don’t know what to tell you. Suggesting that it’s counterproductive to engage in a debate against a relatively popular strain of thought, in a field I work in, that I think is wrong, is just bizarre to me.
It’s the anti-intellectual golem showing up again.
When the crux of your argument is to just start demanding the other party subscribe to more simplistic categories of thought, you’re through the Dunning-Kruger looking class.
When they start dismissing nuance and complexity as a lack of critical thinking skills, you know you’ve come face to face with the golem of anti-intellectualism.
Is it true because you want it to be? Or is it true because it fits the facts?
Culture is an emergent epistemology. The relationship between an emergent epistemology and a person is the person's belief that it is best for their sentiments and goals.
I had a thought. Seemed important. So I wrote it down in this Google Doc. Thought about making it a Medium post. But a Google Doc will do (warning: I reserve the right to keep editing it):
Google Docs
The Academy
The Academy The Academy is the institution upon which civilization is founded. It is upstream of everything that you think of as an institution in...
I have literally no problem with the US government forcing divestment of TikTok by ByteDance. None. I don't see how they can "ban" it without running afoul of the First Amendment -- and should they try to engage in direct censorship of the platform through something like mandatory filtering by ISPs, I'll be right there with you all.
But if you think forcing a Chinese company, serving the interests of the Chinese Communist Party, that wants to spy on our kids, and manipulate their worldview, with the goal of destabilizing our institutions is "all's fair love and war", due to some highfalutin libertarian principle, than you're actually a moron.
Continue to be amused by people who get angry and animated about my "obviously wrong" opinions about Bitcoin, without fault, refuse to debate me live when I offer to do so. Usually because I'm "not worth [their] time".
If I'm so out of my depth, why not make a fool of me, and take the W? These people spend large amounts of their time deeply in the bitcoin discussion, get offended by my contributions to it, but don't have the time to engage.
I'll be honest, I'm starting to think it's because they're worried I'll wipe the floor with them. Not that they're managing their highly valuable time.
🤷🏻♂️
Saying you choose to abstain, because you don't believe in settling for the least bad option is political equivalent of saying "the cancer will definitely kill me. But the chemotherapy is really bad for my body, and I want nothing to do with that. So it's tragic if the cancer eats me alive, but I want nothing to do with my hair falling out."
The functional difference between the politically apathetic and the impossible-to-please, armchair puritans is basically zero.
The more certain you are, the less you know. This isn't some throw away line. The more you foreclose the possibility of being wrong, the less likely you are to listen to arguments against your beliefs, or believe evidence that contravenes it.
I look around, and I see more and more people enslaved to a rabid certainty of what's right and what the future holds.
If you start a sentence with "nothing can convince me ..." you might well say "let me warn you, I'm a closed-minded zealot on this particular topic."
One thing that doesn't get talked about ever, is what left-progressives, libertarians and anarchists all have in common: they all have excessively romantic notions about unconstrained human nature. The power structures they're focused on don't necessarily overlap in big ways. But the mistake is the same.
Ultimately, problem with acting and justifying action in purely deontological terms, is consequences don't care about your moral sentiments. Wars are just battles. It's the peace that must be won.
There is no final destination awaiting us if we can just get through today's struggles. Our civilization of liberty is a ship that sails through endless waters. Through calm seas, and through storms. The ship could sink. Our job is to keep it seaworthy. And make no mistake ... those are storm clouds on the horizon.