The reason cited in that post (Romney! He sucks! ) isn’t that interesting, he basically suggests voting for Obama for the standard revolutionary right wing reasons.
Dear conservatives! Eat the pain! There are two kinds of Americans celebrating tonight—true believers, and right-wing extremists.
I do recommend reading the entire post, its quite well written. Indeed I can’t help but be convinced by the reasoning in this part:
Dear conservatives, I agree with you about Mitt Romney. It seemed clear to me that Mitt Romney was a basically decent and capable individual. Had America been what you thought it was, had the Presidency been what you thought it was, he would have been a perfectly fine man for the job.
But you cannot convince even yourself that America deserved Mitt Romney. Can you? Read your Maistre. Louis XVI, too, was a basically decent and capable individual—believe it or not. France could have thrived under him and his heirs to the present time. Indeed France without the Revolution—any European nation without the Revolution—would be the greatest nation on earth today. America not excepted.
Would France have deserved this triumph? Maistre says no. What she deserved was punishment, and God agreed. At least, if we can equate God with reality—a point on which theists and atheists can, I hope, concur. The reality is that France was scourged from end to end, and has not even come close to recovering. Why? As an atheist, I assert, it was a coincidence. Impiety proceeded tragedy, sure, but might not piety have proceeded it as well? As always, history proves nothing.
Dear conservatives, America’s battle is yet to fight. It may not be your battle. But to hand it off to a basically decent and capable individual, a Mitt Romney, is to say: I see no battle. I would rather sleep. If there is a battle, God, I’m sure, will take care of it while I’m sleeping. Surely, with our model institutions and constitutions, we cannot lose. And if we do—it was a coincidence.
Dear conservatives, I have a question for you. Suppose God appeared to you in your sleep, and gave you a choice. You could lose your country, but keep your institutions and constitutions. Or, you could lose your institutions and constitutions, but keep your country. Which would you choose?
But I don’t have to choose, you say! Au contraire, mon frere! I will save my country, by saving her institutions and constitutions! Which are the best in history ever! Look at all this corn and bacon! Dear conservatives, this is just your way of cursing God. Do you think he doesn’t have enough fools and drunks to look after?
Do you know what terrifies me? What terrifies me is that not only do I not think America deserves Mitt Romney, I don’t even think America deserves Barack Obama. After all, a couple of centuries of diligent looking-after has run us up quite a tab with God. A tab that will be paid or punished. What terrifies me is that while I see no collective interest in paying the tab, it doesn’t seem to me that the punishment has even begun to begin. Barack Obama isn’t exactly Robespierre, you know. “Capable” might be going too far, but “basically decent” isn’t that much of a stretch.
What terrified me about Mitt Romney is that four years, eight years, of Romney would have been pure borrowed time. There was not even the slightest intention to pay the tab. Your intention, dear conservatives, was to sleep and be merry. Your debt is already terrifying. Fall on your knees, dear conservatives, and thank God from the bottom of your heart that you didn’t put another decade on it.
I empathized with the emphasised parts particularly deeply. Much like Moldbug I think there is much to be terrified of. Democracy is not a safe vehicle to crash in. And I’m quite sure it will crash.
You’re convinced by that strange melange of moralistic sin reasoning and politics? (I have no idea what a purely secular version of that could be—what would be ‘borrowed time’ without his religious interpretation? A dollar of national debt is a dollar of national debt, be it run up by Romney or Obama, or run up early and left to compound versus a larger sum run up later.)
Beethoven is more appropriate here, not to describe Romney but Moldbug - “so he too is but an ordinary man!”
He was writing for a different target audience gwern. Consider this an open letter to disappointed mostly God fearing conservatives from an atheist reactionary. I still found it emotionally appealing for reasons I explained in other comments. I don’t doubt Moldbug wrote it under an emotional affect as I said elsewhere. I’m kind of disappointed that you read “debt” as literally as you seem to have. To de-pack the secular non-moralistic argument as I read it:
“We have been chipping away at the foundations of institutions we barely understand for centuries now, burning up inherited civilizational capital . The Romney’s and even Obama’s of the world are good enough managers to help treat the symptoms but not the causes of this for years or even decades to come, helping us to pretend that the fundamentals are sound while they get much worse.”
The reason cited in that post (Romney! He sucks! ) isn’t that interesting, he basically suggests voting for Obama for the standard revolutionary right wing reasons.
I do recommend reading the entire post, its quite well written. Indeed I can’t help but be convinced by the reasoning in this part:
I empathized with the emphasised parts particularly deeply. Much like Moldbug I think there is much to be terrified of. Democracy is not a safe vehicle to crash in. And I’m quite sure it will crash.
You’re convinced by that strange melange of moralistic sin reasoning and politics? (I have no idea what a purely secular version of that could be—what would be ‘borrowed time’ without his religious interpretation? A dollar of national debt is a dollar of national debt, be it run up by Romney or Obama, or run up early and left to compound versus a larger sum run up later.)
Beethoven is more appropriate here, not to describe Romney but Moldbug - “so he too is but an ordinary man!”
He was writing for a different target audience gwern. Consider this an open letter to disappointed mostly God fearing conservatives from an atheist reactionary. I still found it emotionally appealing for reasons I explained in other comments. I don’t doubt Moldbug wrote it under an emotional affect as I said elsewhere. I’m kind of disappointed that you read “debt” as literally as you seem to have. To de-pack the secular non-moralistic argument as I read it:
“We have been chipping away at the foundations of institutions we barely understand for centuries now, burning up inherited civilizational capital . The Romney’s and even Obama’s of the world are good enough managers to help treat the symptoms but not the causes of this for years or even decades to come, helping us to pretend that the fundamentals are sound while they get much worse.”