I've seen several people on Less Wrong recommend Mencius Moldbug's writings, and I've been curious about how he became so popular here. He's certainly an interesting thinker, but he's rather obscure and doesn't have any obvious connection to Less Wrong, so I'm wondering where this overlap in readership came from.
[EDIT by E.Y.: The answer is that he's not popular here. The 2012 LW annual survey showed 2.5% (30 of 1195 responses) identified as 'reactionary' or 'Moldbuggian'. To the extent this is greater than population average, it seems sufficiently explained by Moldbug having commented on the early Overcoming Bias econblog before LW forked from it, bringing with some of his own pre-existing audience. I cannot remember running across anyone talking about Moldbug on LW, at all, besides this post, in the last year or so. Since this page has now risen to the first page of Google results for Mencius Moldbug due to LW's high pagerank, and on at least one occasion sloppy / agenda-promoting journalists such as Klint Finley have found it convenient to pretend to an alternate reality (where Moldbug is popular on LW and Hacker News due to speaking out for angry entitled Silicon Valley elites, or something), a correction in the post seems deserved. See also the Anti-Reactionary FAQ by Scott Alexander (aka Yvain, LW's second-highest-karma user). --EY]
Well fascist is roughly equivalent to authoritarian which is the fancy schmancy new term term for right wing reactionary. Which seems to me to be in the ball park for an Austrian school kook royalist and self described right winger who thinks libertarians are far too liberal for his tastes.
"Disagreement about politics with people doesn't make what they have to say automatically bad or wrong."
Strictly true but in generally false. I think a person's politics is a good indicator of how rational they are. Current research bears me out that authoritarians are more susceptible to motivated reasoning (the current term of art for confirmation bias). Chris Mooney makes an excellent case that epistemic closure is more prominent among conservatives than it is among liberals. Climate change denial, free market fundamentalism, and a broad assortment of conspiracy theories and paranoid delusions are rampant on the far right today. The left is relatively free of such hysteria.
While I agree that it is best if one has opponents to push back against I also think there are limits. "We should murder kittens live on TV" does not rise to the level of an honorable opponent any more than "We should have an aristocracy and let them do what ever they want" does.
I don't think a royalist follower of von Mises has anything interesting to say. Those who would admire such even less so.
You seem to be using nearly all the words in this sentence as mere boo lights.