#so maybe he's gotten a lot more fashy since then idk
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tanadrin · 5 months ago
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hmm. see my other reply--srinivasan seems to be using "gray tribe" in a very different way from SA, given that he sees it as more allied to the red tribe than the blue one. SA has always seemed to be to be more of the center-libertarian type (IIRC he once described himself as a "liberaltarian"), which is not opposed to stuff like police reform and is often quite skeptical of state power in what I think is a salutary way. very different from srinivasan here, who's just being a right-wing troll.
The whole "techbros should leave and start their own country" is very much in line with the Archipelago blog posts.
the archipelago posts are kind of explicitly conditioned on a counterfactual:
Imagine a new frontier suddenly opening. Maybe a wizard appears and gives us a map to a new archipelago that geographers had missed for the past few centuries. He doesn’t want to rule the archipelago himself, though he will reluctantly help kickstart the government. He just wants to give directions and a free galleon to anybody who wants one and can muster a group of likeminded friends large enough to start a self-sustaining colony.
it is also explicitly thought experiment, not a policy proposal:
So although Archipelago is an interesting exercise in political science, a sort of pure case we can compare ourselves to, it doesn’t look like a practical solution for real problems.
the principle that seems to animate it--"If people want to go do their own thing in a way that harms no one else, you let them"--looks to me like the exact opposite of "secede an existing territory from the united states in order to create a repressive fascist city-state."
in my opinion you are collapsing the broad spectrum of "people you disagree with" to a single point, and i think that's a mistake. SA is a racist, of the "credulous centrist easily swayed by bad right-wing arguments" variety, but he's not a fascist. those categories, while both bad, are distinct in important ways. importantly, while srinivasan is adopting some of the surface features of what you might term gray tribe/rationalist rhetoric to try to broaden his appeal, his immediate upstream source for his ideas seems to me to be is trumpism and right-wing culture war stuff. i think the underlying politics of these two people is actually pretty different.
>go to hear an aspiring politician >as him if he's a right-wing authoritarian or a left-wing populist >he says "neither. i am charting a bold new direction. a fusion of the best ideas from the left and right. a third way, if you will, not beholden to any outdated dogmas of anachronistic ideology." >he shows me his policies >mfw he's a right-wing authoritarian
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