So under anarcho-capitalist principles, a division of the world into state-like bodies, defining whatever laws they like within their territories, is perfectly legitimate and acceptable. Since that is the world as it stands, I don't see what the anarcho-capitalists are complaining about.

I think you know that they are complaining about not getting their adolescent utopia of doing what they like, and not being beholden to The Man.

Moldbug somehow argues that external pressure would keep sovereigns from making their patches into slave labor camps

In my opinion this is very similar to the standard libertarian argument, except that instead of companies on the free market, MM speaks about sovereigns. And it didn't convince me, too.

I am not defending MM here, I am just trying to understand him and pick the parts of his theory that seem correct to me. This is not one of them.

But to be fair, and fight the status quo, imagine that we are both subjects of the Moldbuggian Kingdom in the alternative universe, and we are discussing pros and cons of democracy, as a hypothesis. In that case, Hitler and Pinochet would be actually arguments against democracy. Like: "Let's imagine that we try this democracy thing here. What makes you believe that people would not vote for an evil charismatic leader like Hitler? Also, even a democratic country needs a strong army, somehow isolated from the election process (otherwise a foreign attack during the election day would defeat the unprepared country). So what makes you believe that an army leader could not take over the power, like Pinochet?" And it would be your turn to convince me that it cannot happen, which would be rather difficult, because in reality, it happened.

To be clear, my point is that horrible evil things can happen in any political regime. Including democracy; including libertarian utopia; including MM's utopia. Therefore "it could happen in a regime X" is not a sufficient argument for democracy. At best, it could be made to a statistic argument about how likely do different horrible things happen in different regimes to an average person.

And we should include all the horrible things that happen, not just those caused by the government directly. To take everything that happens in a country as a result of the government action or inaction. If the tyrant executes one hundred people, that's one hundred people dead. If the small criminals independently murder one hundred people, that's also one hundred people dead. The government is equally responsible for both. Just like the tyrant could decide to not execute those hundred people, so could the government decide to spend a bit more money on police instead of something else. Sovereign government has total power over their territory; therefore also it has total responsibility. All crimes that happen in a democratic country are the crimes of the democratic government. And that is a lot of crimes. Again, no government can bring that crime to zero, but we can still discuss whether government X can bring the total crimes in the country to a lower level than government Y. According to MM, the democratic governments are pretty bad at this.

I proclaim the case on Patchwork closed.

The American patchwork resulted in civil war. The Italian patchwork was eventually invaded.

Both were still extremely productive and raised living standards dramatically and furthermore made innovations that changed the world for the better. I consider the evidence that patchworks are bad insufficient.

Recall that in Neocameralism/Patchwork CEOs are under plausibly tight control to ensure profit maximization. You are using loaded terminology. Your argument is much better if you talk about profit maximizations not necessarily being as benign as imagined in a transhuman world rather than importing connotations of alpha apes doing anything they want and this ending badly.

+Tyrants are known to enjoy domination and torture of subjects even at cost to themselves (e.g. Hitler, Mussolini, the Kims, Pinochet or the various post-soviet dictators).

Disappointed you would do this. Down voted.

Note that Moldbug spins some long, unlikely, hyper-Functionalist story somewhere on UR - as an attempt to juggle the Holocaust into a different reference class, maybe?

Oh come on. Pot calling kettle black. You kind of do stuff like that all the time my friend. Without linking to the actual article related to this (which I don't recall) is from a consequentalist view of communication nothing but a boo light.

I strongly disrecommend all variants of "I told you so".

Isn't doing politics here kind of dull? If you want to discuss this start an open thread politics discussion. If you want I can produce random quotes from respectable and influential leftist authors about various demographics that they believe will need to be physically removed for their utopia.

Does that sound like a certain Sam0345? You bet it does!

This seems like an ad hominen since you know many readers dislike Sam0345. They do sounds similar in that they are right wing.

I hesitate to say - as it might sound rather extremist - but I'm trying to hint that 1) "right-wing" leanings might be incompartible in their essense with both neurologically egalitarian leanings and the acquired memeplex of Universalist morality, 2) that most readers of this are likely to share - on a fundamental psychological level - a sufficient part of the Universalist memeplex, and 3) that it follows that right-wing philosophy might be in its core objectively hostile to your extrapolated volition.

I can point to many neurologically produced leanings that universalism requires us to suppress as well. Also I can make the argument that most people have sufficent non-Universalist memes in their mind that a logical extrapolation of where universalism might evolve in the next century or so will terrify them.

So what does that leave us with? Try to preserve the balance between Universalist and non-Universalist human values we are most comfortable with? Heh, say hello to a strategy that we have empirical evidence is a losing one: Conservatism.

Many people who go "yuck conservatism" today will be going "yay conservatism" in 2030, especially if we really are living in a period of rapid evolution for the Universalist memeplex where many people can't abandon their old values and opinions fast enough to keep pace. This still won't make conservatism a winning strategy.

I'm pretty sure that principled or even pragmatic libertarians are already considered extreme. Indeed they have been called "far right" and possibly scary to non-libertarians on this very forum. How extreme might they be considered in 10 or 20 years when their few remaining status raising talking points are largely accepted as common wisdom among educated people?

If you're curious about this Preston character, here's a long and detailed analysis of how his ideas fit into the broader context of American right-wing decentralized anti-progressivism. (By some leftist I've never heard of.)

Based on my impression, Moldbug is more or less a monarchist

One of the many elephants in the room is that monarchy is a system where it was completely normal for the monarch to impose their religion on their subjects. Moldbug makes a big thing about this tenuous, almost invisible Cathedral thingy, but if he gets his utopia he may well find hismelf dealing with the real thing.

Mencius' conception of useful hierarchical authority models puts CEO and Monarch in a similar space.

In the sense that there is a single guy at the top, I suppose. But then by that logic you can argue Moldbug ought to have no problems with a parlamentary democracy with a prime minister. The point is not that there is a single guy in charge at the top, but the system of incentives that girds the society and gives it shape. There is a big difference between the British monarchy in the Stuart period ("bring back the Stuarts!"), and what Moldbug is actually advocating.