What is the case against meritocracy?
One has to separate ‘primordial’ meritocracy from the structured, deliberate, extreme meritocracy that exists in the modern west.
It has always been true, under every socioeconomic system man has ever devised, that smart young people have worked their way up the ladder. Historic royal courts (say those of the Tudors in England) often had a surprising number of people of low birth (at least in the second generation) who had worked their way to some kind of power. It was possible and even common for fortunes to radically shift for a family in a single generation. In a few decades families of no historical presence (who had maybe been peasants, then small time landholders, then gotten involved in regional politics) made it to court, to the king or queen’s ear. The current American system of deliberate meritocracy, open job applications, slander against ‘legacy’ applicants, criticism of “nepo babies”, the surging of second generation immigrants into the establishment at rates unseen even in the early 20th century is what is comparatively new. The worship of meritocracy, in other words.
Modern American meritocracy is bad because I see no reason why the child of two Brahmins deserves vastly more wealth and power than the child of two average Mayflower descendants just because the former is “more intelligent”. Though I have a reputation as something of a Jewish chauvinist on this board, I actually sympathize with the Ivy League admissions committees of the 1920s that capped us at 10% or 20% of a student population. Simple IQ is not enough to justify your rule. Tell a Hausa or Fulani or Yoruba that the Igbo deserve to rule Nigeria because they’re smarter and richer and they have every right to laugh you out of the room. Mere intelligence does not by default grant you the right to power over other men.
Meritocracy breeds the most extreme, most perverse form of entitlement. The entitlement that having a big boy IQ means you are owed a significantly greater money-making capacity (and thus comfort, power and prestige) by society than someone of more modest intelligence. I reject this notion. Perhaps it is particularly intelligent people who themselves owe a duty to society. I recall a comment by a regular user on a previous account (possibly @Esperanza) about how, growing up in Ireland in the 1980s, almost the entire graduating class (in engineering at the country’s most prestigious university) left for the United States, for fortune. What could Ireland have become had they decided to stay, to force change, to build things at home even if it was hard, to serve instead of to seek to merely enrich themselves, again and again?
I am relatively intelligent. But I despise the vanity of IQ meritocracy, the narcissism of it, the dweeb superman, the programmer ubermensch who believes not only that the arbitrariness of fate entitles him to rule (this is true, obviously, of any system), but that he owes nobody for it. Silicon Valley, America’s IQ meritocracy headquarters, is so devoid of duty, of nobility, that it has allowed San Francisco to collapse into shithole status. All the tech men can do is either defend it, whine without doing anything or flee to Texas, which is arguably even more pathetic. Bill Gates’ only noblesse oblige is funding third world mosquito nets and attempting to design a better toilet for India, his philanthropic service to his own people is limited or nonexistent.
I have found in my life that ‘strivers’ of humble birth often have pathological character flaws that make them extremely dangerous. These include mild sociopathy, lack of gratitude, poor etiquette and manners, rudeness, a belief that their success is entirely their own doing, deep-seated jealousy of those they perceive as doing better, and immense, insatiable greed. Often, they do not even particularly enjoy life, they just try to min-max it, like a video game theory-crafter. They seek power and so ought, quite rationally, to be denied it or at least to be handed it very, very slowly.
Obviously baseline intelligence in positions of power is necessary for the successful functioning of society. But how much? Must they be the most intelligent people from all the land, or can they merely be quite intelligent people who also have other things about them that should be valued in a ruling class?
2rafa
8mo ago
Birthrates: It's not (just) money, it's time
The rich are the only ones having more babies than before...Reversing the conventional wisdom that it's the poor who have the most kids, the greatest relative share of three-child households actually now lies with families making over $500,000 a year. One set of researchers, Moshe Hazan and Hosni Zoabi, dubbed this phenomenon the “U-shaped fertility” curve (in other words, the very poor and very rich are having the most children).
For over a decade now, sociologists have noted a curious quirk to birth rate data when sorted by income. While total fertility rates do decline with rising income (as has long been popular wisdom, depicted in eg. Idiocracy and so on), they do so only to a point. After a certain threshold, fertility rates shoot up again, as this chart shows. In the US (the above research is from 2022), this inflection point happens, depending on data, somewhere between $250,000 and $300,000 for white couples.
One interesting thing about fertility rates is that people always say they want more children than they have:
In 2018, fully 41 percent of those surveyed by Pew said that the ideal family size was three or more kids, the highest answer to that question in 20 years.
This is usually ignored because it is undone by revealed preferences in the richest societies on earth, or it is used as argumentative fodder for the left when they argue that fertility rates have declined because people can't afford as many children as they want (sometimes ridiculed given that people are vastly richer than in other nations or at other times when TFR has been much higher).
But maybe these two pieces of information do, together, tell us a little bit about why many PMC types in the West don't have more children, or children at all.
What happens at, say, $500,000 a year (in most of the US) that makes having three children so much easier? The answer seems obvious to me - affluent people can afford to spend time away from their children, and therefore feel more comfortable having (more of) them.
100 years ago, when up to a quarter of the working class in developed countries were employed as domestic servants, a middle-class mother who did not particularly want to spend all day, every day with her children did not have to do so. There were other women to handle that kind of thing. This was before most of these kind of women worked much, but even so, spending all day, every day with the children wasn't interesting. My grandmother, who grew up bourgeois in Berlin on the eve of the Second World War, remembered rarely ever seeing her mother as a young child until they had to flee to the US.
I grew up with rich people, and one of the interesting things one notices is that the people from the very wealthiest families, centimillionaires and billionaires, often marry very young and have children young. I know a number of (completely secular) rich white couples with three children aged 27-30, the time when many professional Americans are barely out of graduate degree programs or still stuck in a tough junior role or in residency. I'm still friends with a few of them, and the big thing that strikes me is how unchanged their lives are from many childless late-20s PMC people. They have nannies for the kids, so they can go back to work within a few months if they choose to. They have maternity nurses when the babies are first born, so they never need to wake up at night. They have people to look after the kids if they want to go to a summer wedding in Italy, or to a week skiing in Aspen. They can come and go from their homes as they please without worrying about who will look after the children, whose food, clothes, hygiene, trips to and from school and so on are handled by others. They see their children when they want to hang out with them, on their terms.
I understand, also, the British upper-middle and upper class urge to send kids to boarding school at a young age. Freed from daily parental obligation, relationships often grow stronger, not weaker. And parents are freed, again, to enjoy life on their own terms.
I think a substantial proportion of would-be parents, particularly in the PMC, don't particularly want to raise their own children, at least not all the time. They don't want to do the dirty work. Clearly the deal the super-rich have isn't economically viable to give to everyone else. But maybe some things are. State-funded boarding schools from a young age, state-funded daycare (open 24/7, not just during daytime on weekdays), state-funded maternity nursing so you can drop your baby off and visit it (or take it home occasionally) instead of not sleeping through the night for a year or two. I know this sounds insane, but I genuinely think this might lead more people to have (more) kids in the West.
There’s a kind of incoherence to ‘stolen election’ claims that I dislike, in that they’re almost always made by people who assume that the permanent bureaucracy / deep state / powers that be / white supremacist patriarchy / Russia / etc means that Our Guy can win but still lose anyway.
If the deep state can have its way even when /ourguy/ wins, then why does it also need to rig elections? Either elections don’t matter because the President has no power, or they do matter because the President actually has a lot of power, but Trump just failed to do anything with it.
I’m convinced the stolen election narrative was profoundly damaging to the Trumpist right and GOP more generally in the US. What is more demoralizing than suggesting that ‘they’ will win even if you come out to vote? Or even, if you take the theory further, that they ‘allowed’ Trump to win in 2016 knowing, presumably, that they could control him or prevent him from doing anything they didn’t want him to?
The stolen election narrative was strategically moronic. It exists solely to assuage Trump-the-man’s ego, and spread because the modern US right is in large part a Trump personality cult, so various operatives, media figures etc wanted to do their best to remain on his good side. A single shout out or mockery from the oracle of Mar a Lago can make or break a career, so playing to his ego was so important they forgot strategy to claim that Donald actually did win for real.
(I think all US elections involve some low-level corruption, rigging and machine politics, but that broadly the most popular candidate in the majority of the country - pursuant to minor discrepancies in popular vote subject to the unique dynamics of the EC system obviously - wins).
2rafa
7mo ago
“I am adjacent to the corners of the dissident right from which stuff like this would come. I’m friends with many, many people, who live in that world and know it like the back of their hands. Somehow, nobody has ever heard of these groups that end up in national media. They have no history, they somehow organized themselves to the point of having uniforms and flags without ever leaving a trail on the internet, and weren’t known even by hardcore alt right autists until the day they make their national media debut.”
That’s because these guys aren’t Twitter dissident right, they’re much lower brow working class types, some veterans, some ex-cons, some both, they’re in the suburbs and exurbs in the south and Midwest, well away from urbanite dissident righters retweeting 34-tweet threads about celtic admixture, pictures of Leopoldville in the fifties and graphs about immigration demographics. These guys are on stornfront and lower brow sites, they have tattoos, they’re more interested in fishin and huntin than in Crusader Kings 5 or whatever.
And these are what, likely, the numerical bulk of real life ‘extreme rightist’ antisemitic types are like in the US, most of whom do not listen to Nick Fuentes and who have not read A Culture of Critique.
The creation myth that grew out of World War II is the foundation of our entire civilization. It is the basis of our state boundaries. It defines ultimate good and ultimate evil. It tells us what is sacred.
"Guys, I swear, the first 200 years of liberalism had nothing to do with the West's current predicament. The cultural change that followed 1965 emerged completely inorganically out of the juice's takeover of western civilization (which must have happened very quickly in like what, 20 years?), classical liberals are completely absolved, the founding fathers are completely absolved, the Scottish and French enlightenments are completely absolved, Hegel is completely absolved. Everything bad that has happened to Western civilization is solely down to who won WW2, please disregard anything that happened previously unless it backs up this point."
This is why the MacDonald school can never adequately explain modern Western civilization. You can't disregard liberalism, you can't disregard the French and American revolutions. You can't disregard laicite, disregard republicanism, disregard individualism, disregard the concept of personal liberty and the rejection of primal or atavistic identity as central to Anglo civilization. That Jews and other non-whites had some impact on the development of these memes and their ultimate and eventual transmission is truth. That they invented them is not. Western civilization before 1939 was not progressing in a 'trad' direction. Even the Nazis would - in many facets of domestic policy - have been regarded as absurdly progressive to a European in 1870. The NSDAP was not radically socially conservative in its treatment of gender or sex. German women's enrollment in medical schools, for example, fell from 20% to 17% during Nazi rule, hardly a substantial decline. (Fun fact: this is vastly higher than the proportion of women at American medical schools at the same time.)
The problem for the counter currents crowd (and the wider 'classical' alt-right affiliated with eg. nazi apologism and revionism) is that they are so blinded by their hatred of Jews that they refuse to consider that progressivism/liberalism was not a particularly Jewish invention, and they are so blinded by their obsession with Hitler and his defeat that they refuse to consider that many of the things they hate about modernity actually have their roots much further back in the writings of gentile white philosophers, thinkers, politicians and so on. The enemies must be internal, whites (as this very article implies) are at worst misguided idiots or taken advantage of.
"No more brother wars" goes the far-right chant. Yet there were 2000 years of "brother wars" before the one that they allege the Jews started. The European Parliament is a cesspit of achieving nothing, yet everyone in it is white (actually, apparently 24 out of 705 MEPs are "people of color"), there has never been a non-white European Commissioner etc. Belgium remains as divided as a country as it was when it was near enough 100% white. The East Slavs are tearing each other apart. Getting out of this quagmire requires some humility, and not of the pathetic "how could we let ourselves get tricked like this?" sort, but of the genuine "we made and believed some poor ideas" variety, one that takes some responsibility for the past without blaming the eternal outsider, and which can articulate a positive rather than a vengeful vision of the future.
As for a homeland, the last places likely to be supermajority white are a few poor countries in Eastern Europe with poor economic prospects (Ukraine is a big one), Denmark and possibly Finland, Iceland (which receives a lot of immigration, but largely from Poland and Romania) and - in an amusing bit of irony - Argentina (and Uruguay). I would recommend the avowed identitarian considers acquiring EU citizenship by whatever means necessary (not hard even for the unskilled white American as long as you aim for a lower-tier Euro country, although Germany is pretty generous as it is) and then moving to Denmark, learning the language, and trying one's hardest to assimilate into their society. Copenhagen is actually very nice, I'd stay if I was a Dane.
I was thinking of putting this in the fun thread, but does anyone else think (wokeness aside) that Baldur's Gate 3...isn't that good?
I admit I'm a lifelong Dragon Age stan and will defend that franchise to the end (even for its many flaws), but I've played a huge number of 'classic' CRPGs (including both actual classics like Planescape and Arcanum and modern classic-style games like Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun Returns, Tyranny and Wasteland 3) and enjoyed them all.
I really don't like the writing in Baldur's Gate 3. It feels like fanfiction written by fantasy nerds who have never actually read anything that wasn't genre fiction. The romances are really poor and designed to cater to tumblr horniness (yes, even by Bioware standards), characters shuttle between Marvel-humor and absurdly melodramatic 'deep' or 'sentimental' moments with nothing in between. Everything feels like an in-joke or reference. There's a sincerity there (unlike DOS2) , but it's an insincere sincerity, like the moment in a superhero movie before the final battle when everyone suddenly gets serious and someone mentions that their team is like a family.
I played Hogwarts Legacy earlier this year, and that really is a mediocre game (beautifully recreated castle aside) with very average writing and a dull main storyline. But one thing I really appreciate about it - at least now I've played Baldur's Gate 3 - is that it takes its world, ridiculous and weird and nonsensical and full of a billion plot holes though it is, seriously. People in Baldur's Gate 3 don't act the way humans (or humanoid races who are essentially humans on the inside) do in the situations that they're in.
The world feels very small, and very banal, and very modern, and choices are "moral dilemmas" as imagined by a DM who is very active on the D&D memes subreddit. Maybe this is what many players want, as it certainly provides the experience of tabletop Dungeons and Dragons when played with a dungeon master who collects funko pops and has the poster of every MCU movie in their bedroom, but it falls a little short of the best titles in the genre, which are written by people with wider tastes in fiction.
Playing Pentiment by Josh Sawyer/Obsidian, one gets the sense that this is a game written by a man with a genuine interest in the source material and with a broad literary taste. David Gaider, who wrote Dragon Age, stated that his primary influence in the script and tone was the 1968 movie The Lion of Winter, about Henry II's court in 1183, not high art but of which Roger Ebert said "One of the joys which movies provide too rarely is the opportunity to see a literate script handled intelligently. 'The Lion in Winter' triumphs at that difficult task; not since 'A Man for All Seasons' have we had such capable handling of a story about ideas. But 'The Lion in Winter' also functions at an emotional level, and is the better film, I think."
By contrast Baldur's Gate 3's writers appear YA-fictionbrained. The script lacks a trace of high culture or even midbrow influence. The lead writer was, like many writers in games, an ex-game journalist, one of modernity's more ignoble professions. The emphasis genuinely seems to be on recreating the average nerd DM's campaign in digital form, but the whole point of a professionally produced product is that actual writers should be able to do a better job than some software engineer who writes campaigns in his spare time, so this is little consolation.
I also find the gameplay disappointing. This is to some extent by default, since RtWP is a vastly superior mechanic for CRPGs than turn-based gameplay (because it allows one to fast-forward through trash encounters and to play at one's own pace). But even by the standards of good turn-based combat systems, Baldur's Gate 3 is poor. A big part of this is because of the direct translation of many 5e mechanics into a game, which is ridiculous since they were designed for abstraction to make tabletop play viable. The combat system has too many actions, too many redundant spells (ability systems in games where the DM can essentially decide what each use of each ability can do are completely different to rules-based video games) lifted directly from the source material. And too many abilities is a big problem, because the biggest difference between a CRPG and tabletop is that in a tabletop game, you play only one character. In a CPRG, you play 4-6, so the logic of combat complexity changes.
A second problem is the incessant on-screen dice rolls, which are ugly and immersion-breaking (the whole point of digital games, some would say, is that they can put this kind of thing behind-the-scenes). A third issue is that D&D itemization is fine for tabletop campaigns where you can carry a handful of items, your inventory is a box on a lined piece of paper and there are three combat encounters in a 4 hour session, but it works less well in a game where there are mountains of loot and players are used to more interesting itemization than +2 swords or things that provide a single-point increase in one stat. The game is also extremely easy, but that's a more common complaint.
There doesn't seem to me an inherent reason why games can't have good writing. After all, at least some mainstream movies have good dialogue and are written by well-read screenwriters, it's not impossible. I think it's something about expectations. Game designers, directors and fans are so used to only consuming genre/fantasy/scifi fiction that they don't even understand what's possible, what's out there.
2rafa
6mo ago
[NYTimes, Friedman] Why a Gaza Invasion and ‘Once and for All’ Thinking Are Wrong for Israel
When The Times’s Israel correspondent Isabel Kershner recently asked an Israeli Army tank driver, Shai Levy, 37, to describe the purpose of the looming Israeli invasion of Gaza, he said something that really caught my ear. It was “to restore honor to Israel,” he said.
All these Islamist/jihadist movements — the Taliban, Hamas, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis — have deep cultural, social, religious and political roots in their societies. And they have access to endless supplies of humiliated young men, many of whom have never been in a job, power or a romantic relationship: a lethal combination that makes them easy to mobilize for mayhem.
And that’s why, to this day, none of these movements have been eliminated once and for all. They can, though, be isolated, diminished, delegitimized and decapitated — as America has done with ISIS and Al Qaeda. But that requires patience, precision, lots of allies and alternatives that have legitimacy within the societies from which these young men emerge.
Perhaps the greatest political challenge is what to do with surplus young men. It is this group that lies behind most terrorism, ISIS, inceldom, much of the dissident right, most challenges with policing and crime. Rich countries have more options than poorer ones, as do countries with lower birthrates compared to higher ones (due to reductions in the proportion of violent, dispossessed young men as a percentage of the total population).
2rafa
5mo ago
I haven’t found anywhere with equal quality commentary. Twitter is terribly formatted and seemingly encourages by its very nature edgelording, rudeness and one-upmanship. Reddit is full of morons who tediously invade any serious discussion about anything, and any well-moderated communities are (as we found out) banned from having interesting discussions. So what’s left? A few other obscure forums (DSL is fine but worse than here, with worse writing, and I prefer the Reddit structure) and blog comments sections (where participation is structured around what the singular blog author posts).
When something interesting happens, this is usually the place that I want to discuss it. ‘Experts’ can be found on Twitter, but that’s not really the idea - after all, I’m hardly an expert. Instead, I want discussion about current events with smart, somewhat ideologically sympathetic people in an environment that respects long-form writing, politeness, manners and which is well moderated to ensure the above.
Where else has that?
Not all people, not all civilizations, not all tribes, are equal. This is a core conservative conceit, it’s also inherent to ideas like HBD that you yourself agree with. Human progress has always involved the conquest of some peoples by others.
“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, 'The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.' They had not the right, nor had they the power.”
- Winston Churchill on Palestine (1937)
‘Punching down’, in other words, may be more moral than ‘punching up’. The many settlers of the Americas did what they did and so, perhaps, will the Israelis.
Right, Chinese are pretty much all new money (if they have money), so it’s a different cultural perception of wealth. My parents would get angry because my best friend’s parents would give me like $1000 in cash for my birthday aged 10, which they found ridiculous and unreasonable (and would make me share it with my siblings). But I came to understand that - for them - to give me a card and a chocolate bar, the kind of gift ten year olds might give each other, would have been insulting. Arab friends were similar. The point of wealth in non-Hajnali cultures is to share it with chosen acquaintances, friends and family for your own prestige and good fortune. It’s like that funny /r/Europe thing recently where the Scandinavians all said it would be weird to offer your kid’s friends who came to play after school dinner, because the custom is that the child should go home for food. Or the Dutch with their endless ‘tikkies’ for €3 coffees. Nobody in the Arab world or in China would ever split the bill for a coffee, or even dare to suggest it, the idea would seem ridiculous unless both people worked for a western company and it was some expenses thing (and even then, someone would just pay). It’s an honor to pay for another.
And yeah, eating ramen broth is often a bad idea, as delicious as it is.
2rafa
6mo ago
So they fire 6-10,000 missiles and kill only 3-4000 Gazans in surgical strikes, many of whom may well be actual Hamas fighters. Then they decide to throw a missile at a hospital and kill 1500+ civilians at the same time, because? If the response is to hasten civilian departure / ethnic cleansing, then there’s a whole escalation hierarchy that doesn’t involve that level of bad press.
2rafa
1mo ago
The entire US medical system is fucked. Higher drug costs are a substantial input cost, but another huge one is the AMA.
The steps for fixing US healthcare are actually pretty simple:
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Smash the AMA cartel by allowing unlimited immigration of doctors trained in Canada, UK, Australia, NZ and Ireland without any licensing requirements, re-doing residency etc. Allow doctors from other Northern European (not southern) countries if they pass a tough English written and oral exam that requires fluency. This will lower US doctors’ salaries (currently 300% or more of what they are in Europe) by half, to a more reasonable rate where surgeons are respectable PMC but not making a million dollars a year solely because the AMA lobbies to restrict residency places. Doctors should be paid $120-300k a year at the cap, with the high figure for the most elite surgeons in tough specialties. Why is the American middle class paying for anesthesiologists to make $700k a year when their equivalents in European countries that are almost as rich are paid like $150k? There are almost a million doctors in America, this overpaying adds up.
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Handle drug pricing centrally. Insurers pay a price negotiated by a trade association chartered for that purpose and which represents all US insurers (including the state for the VA etc), exempt from the usual rules around cartels. The trade association negotiates as a bloc and can therefore refuse to accept pricing that is any more than a basket of comparable countries (eg rest of Anglosphere) + 20% (at most). Pharma companies will essentially be forced to comply, since there is no other major wealthy market that would possibly pay more than the US. The reason manufacturers can charge so much is that (much as with doctor pay) so much of the cost is offloaded onto third parties (eg employers for most health insurance) in a way that causes huge economic drag but which is often not immediately visible.
2rafa
1mo ago
It’s a shame he was simply unable to follow the rules. He made some very good posts, but then would have occasional outbursts at random people. Who can forget the time he was randomly racist to @self_made_human and accused him of not being able to understand English because he was Indian or something?
BAP's point is that some people on the right imagine that "if HBD awareness goes 'mainstream', racial spoils systems will end", when in reality racial spoils and denial of HBD are only tangentially connected.
It would be quite easy to have both widespread awareness of HBD and racial spoils systems like affirmative action, because the primary point of these systems is to distribute resources (like well-paid sinecures, social status, political influence) between groups. It's actually a very classically liberal viewpoint to believe that meritocracy must be absolute and that everything should be distributed based solely on talent.
EDIT: As @Ioper says below, this misunderstands the central progressive impulse, which is the drive toward equality. "From each according to ability, to each according to need" is a direct rejection of the idea that talent should be rewarded with a superior quality of life.
And the global viewpoint suggests this, because many nations far beyond the WEIRD bubble practice affirmative action widely even though DEI politics isn't dominant there. Hindu nationalists practice it, the CCP practices it, the Brazilians and Nigerians practice it. Sure, global homogenization is a thing, but in many cases these policies exist for much more mundane reasons than high-minded progressive equality politics, like reducing the chance of explosive civil conflicts.
There's a delusional fantasy among some rightists that if only the (white) public "knew" about HBD, the wool would fall from their eyes and they'd instantly adopt conservative positions on a wide range of policies. In reality, leftist ideas are much more resilient than that. They can justify affirmative action, reparations and so on in countless other ways, and in some cases already have.
2rafa
7mo ago
there will 99% of the time be some reluctance expressed to take that step
If someone doesn't want to meet in person, why not just move on?
Controversial, but I suspect that sissy hypno porn etc viewed by terminally online males is responsible for more MtF conversions than what middle aged LGBTQ activists are advocating in schools.
The former has a direct pipeline to transition (along with programming, nerdy pursuits, being an incel etc). The latter doesn’t seem to, it seems unlikely that some fuddy duddy old teacher interrupting the usual sex ed lessons students don’t pay attention to anyway in order to talk about whatever trans activists want them to somehow leads to large numbers of otherwise completely normal boys deciding they’re transwomen.
The material responsible for the huge uptick in trans identification isn’t taught in class, it’s available freely online in huge volumes and dealing with it is much more difficult than banning kids from attending drag performances.
TL;DR: Autogynephilia isn’t caused by cringe story books in which Jimmy has a trans mom and a cis mom lol.
I don’t agree with forcing expansive gun rights on liberal states whose electorates have clearly rejected them.
Complain legitimately about the way in which red states had progressive politics forced upon them (in some cases at gunpoint). And by all means advocate the federal government enforcing policy on the states when it comes to borders, immigration, foreign policy and (actual) interstate commerce, as conservatives rightly do in the first two cases.
But I see no reason why conservative gun owners must force the population of Hawaii to accept a law which both doesn’t affect the gun policy of conservative states and is transparently deeply unpopular there. Similarly, I’d find it wrong if and when a progressive Supreme Court limited gun ownership rights in a conservative state.
It doesn’t seem bad if Texas is the Wild West and Hawaii is East Asia when it comes to gun policy. Conservatives still have plenty of places to live. Regional differences in view on permissiveness around vices, weapon ownership, abortion and so on are part of the normal tapestry of life in countries with hundreds of millions of people.
It’s mainly that (a) many of them are based in countries that have outlawed the death penalty and local legislators have threatened them if they provide those drugs, and that (b) many large institutional investors (including eg. pension funds in countries that have outlawed the death penalty) have said they’ll divest if they supply the drugs. Given the low number of executions and this the small size of the business, it’s not worth even minor reputation loss or business risk.
The perfect method is probably the guillotine or something similar, because it has near zero room for error and because death is near enough instant.
One of the greatest questions of the Iraq War, and a question with significant implications for our understanding of the competence of the 'deep state', Pentagon and intelligence services in general, is this:
Why didn't the CIA fake evidence of WMDs in Iraq?
As time has passed since 2003, the 'mainstream' antiwar narrative, in which every important person supposedly 'knew' there were no WMDs but advocated for invasion anyway, has been shown to be largely ridiculous. It is likely, as discussed by Jervis and others who have done the most research into the cause of the intelligence failures in Iraq, that a substantial proportion of the intelligence establishment, including senior officials at the CIA and MI6, considered it highly likely that Saddam was, at the least, in posession of extensive chemical weapon stocks. The long since retired head of MI6 at the time said just this year that he was convinced they were there:
"Asked if he looks back on Iraq as an intelligence failure, Sir Richard's answer is simple: "No." He still believes Iraq had some kind of weapons programme and that elements may have been moved over the border to Syria. "
They weren't united about what to do, hence certain Cheney actions, and they didn't have much proof, thus the Office of Special Plans and intense efforts to convince Powell etc to act, but even many of those who didn't advocate invasion believed it was likely that he had these weapons. Most crucially, as Jervis argues, they overfocused on Saddam's refusal to allow international weapons inspectors as almost a guarantee that he was hiding WMDs, because why else would he refuse them? (Saddam ultimately claimed, under interrogation in 2004, that he refused to allow them because he didn't want Iran to find out how 'degraded' his weapon stocks were.)
So why, after it became clear weeks - and certainly months - into the invasion that there were no WMDs, did the US 'deep state' (including the intelligence services, perhaps with Pentagon assistance and/or with WH approval) not fake them? This anti-conspiracy is critically important for a few reasons:
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It would likely have been significantly easier to fake chemical and/or biological weapon stocks in Iraq than to commit many of the other conspiracies placed at the foot of Western Intelligence services or the 'deep state'. The US didn't destroy its own chemical weapon stocks until 2022, and anthrax would be a trivial process for a small, highly focused internal intelligence unit to acquire or manufacture. No 'Bush planned 9/11' tier conspiracy theory is required, this would have been a focused, limited program in the vein of countless mid-late 20th century US intelligence operations involving a small number of operatives. While the coalition alleged variably the existence of (official link) chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, the nuclear allegations were extremely vague and largely amounted to the idea that Iraq 'might' have started such a program, or that Saddam had 'met with' nuclear scientists or tried to acquire nuclear material.
It was not, therefore, necessary to manufacture the presence of nuclear weapons or nuclear material, for which a longer, riskier and more complex supply chain would be necessary. The presence of moderate stocks of chemical weapons, plus some anthrax, would have been sufficient to make the pre-war claims largely accurate, or at least accurate enough to be respectable.
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It's unlikely the international press would have trusted the denials of ex-Baathist officials or scientists around planted evidence, and in the event of requiring an eyewitness, only a few people would had to have been paid. Even if the fakes weren't universally believed, they would have sowed enough FUD that US motives for the war wouldn't have been thoroughly discredited. There was no need to 'prove' the full extent of the pre-war allegations, only to lend them broad credence. 'There were no WMDs in Iraq' served as a major argument used by people hostile to the policies of the Bush and Blair administrations after 2003, led to major protests and enquiries, and soured the popular perception of those governments extensively.
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The Iraq War led to a climate in which CIA regime change operations supported by boots-on-the-ground became substantially less easy to slip through the political process. Even if we assume that (a) the CIA was ambivalent about an invasion, thus the OSP and (b) that the CIA didn't particularly care to prop up the careers of neoconservative politicians who suffered if they didn't find WMDs, the number of US regime change ops, and the number of direct military interventions involving ground soldiers, have declined significantly since 2003, even relative to the 1990s. Military involvement was (beyond those existing engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan) limited to Syria, Libya and some support for Yemen and Ukraine, civil involvement to Ukraine and a couple of others, and the Iraq War's intelligence failures have led to a political climate in which committing ground soldiers to foreign conflicts is extremely unpopular. The presence of WMDs would have made all this significantly easier. For example, the CIA's failed rebel training program in Syria was in part a consequence of the US' steadfast refusal under Obama and Trump to support their regime change operation with a substantial number of ground forces.
Categories of explanation:
- Intelligence agencies were simply too incompetent to fake even a modest stockpile of WMDs in Iraq under US occupation, despite having free rein of the country, access to near-unlimited resources and the fact that sufficient chemical and biological weapons would not be difficult for them to acquire or manufacture. This scenario makes countless other conspiracy theories much less likely; if the CIA is so incompetent it can't even stash and then 'find' some anthrax in a Baghdad warehouse, clearly a lot of conspiracist allegations would strain their abilities far too much to be realistic. 'By the time they realized there were no WMDs, they couldn't fake it any longer' is also questionable and seems to lack coherent reasoning. It might even have been smart, if there was any doubt at all, to prepare some possible weapons for planting, 'just in case'.
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- Intelligence agencies didn't care enough to fake them, or actively chose not to. This explanation also seems unlikely because of the predictable and dire consequences, as I cover above, for the CIA's operational reach, of the intelligence failure and the subsequent extreme reluctance by future administrations to commit ground forces to regime change operations. A strong case can be made that the Iraq War rationale being proved bullshit in front of the world prohibited regime change operations from Venezuela to Syria and beyond, where a US expeditionary force could have made the difference but politicians were worried about an Iraq / Afghanistan repeat. Even if the CIA didn't want war in Iraq, finding no WMDs in Iraq wasn't good for the US foreign intelligence ops in the future. Most people would never hear of the Office of Special Plans, if US foreign intelligence fails, it's "the CIA" at fault. A variant of this is the schizoposter classic "they did it to show how much they could get away with".
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- The CIA prioritized the humiliation of Bush and Cheney, and the wider coalition effort, over the negative consequences for themselves. I don't think this scenario is impossible. You spend decades cultivating intelligence assets in a complex way, managing regional powers against each other, handling competing interests, a little propaganda here, a little assassination there, and then suddenly some PNAC moron comes in and wants to invade Iraq and demands you prove there are WMDs there. But still, many people in intelligence believed they were there, and again, the CIA arguably suffered when they didn't find them, and the "humiliation" of Bush and Cheney was limited and Bush (and Blair) won re-election in 2004/2005. It also suggests a degree of hostility toward neoconservatism that was more extreme than the reality in the CIA at the time.
What do you think?
2rafa
4mo ago
I agree with this. It’s both a strategic mistake and a grave political failure to use the courts to target Trump now.
2rafa
6mo ago
There are no new strategic options today that didn’t exist yesterday. That has always been the problem. Egypt doesn’t want Gaza for obvious reasons. An occupation would be unimaginably bloody, expensive, permanent and occupy a huge amount of the IDF’s attention when there are other threats to the north.
They can’t trade for the hostages because I can’t imagine the public will support them doing so now. Hamas will demand every single relevant prisoner Israel has, and that’s not politically viable and would be extremely stupid from a security perspective. They’ll have to go in, eat the casualties, and accept the inevitably brutal videos and pictures of the resulting civilian deaths.
KSA will performatively pull out of negotiations (exactly as Iran wants, presumably) but will continue dealing with Israel behind the scenes. Maybe Biden can offer more help in Yemen to save some face but the situation there is complex and it’s unlikely. The most important thing for Israel is that it moves toward firing squads and summary execution of perhaps 10,000-30,000 fighting age men in Gaza, as well as the entire political leadership, mercilessly but quickly and professionally. But then again, I’m a Zionist.
This whole subject reminds me that I’ve long thought it would be a good change for the president to be appointed by state legislatures on a weighted majority-of-majorities basis, with a weighting system based on census data. So much of the issues with American politics are because congress has zero accountability to the states’ governments themselves, only to individual voters to some extent.
In general, direct elections to the federal level could be done away with as much as possible. It’s inefficient and confusing for people not only to elect 3+ levels of representative but then to do so in multiple forms (eg bicameral states, and congress itself for both senators and reps).
Recentering more politics around the states makes state politics more important and means that any president with a more radical plan is likely to be supported by a large ground-up movement in state houses across the country, instead of Trump being a one man band whose movement largely begins and ends with him.
2rafa
28d ago
Violent crime is the biggest converter from lib to con because it disproportionately affects affluent urban liberals (who are more likely to live in big cities, donate to political parties, be involved in politics, be involved in media etc).
If you live in a distant outer suburb of Dallas or Phoenix it’s unlikely that the Summer of Floyd had much personal effect on your neighborhood, which had no homeless people or significant crime before and after 2020.
If you live in Manhattan, or Georgetown, or Santa Monica, or the Mission, or in the Loop, you will 100% have seen a significant decline in the ‘social fabric’ / urban quality of life since 2020. There are many reasons for Reagan’s landslide victories but a part of them were that rich urban Democrats had gotten very fucking tired of decay. Sure, Mondale still won NYC (although not the state), but Reagan got 40% of the vote in the city.
Even in Manhattan Reagan got close to 30%, Donald Trump got 9%. And Reagan wasn’t merely charting the decline of the GOP in NYC; he got like 50% more of the vote in Manhattan than the several previous Republican candidates. And that discounts the big shifts the Dems made on crime too.
Hanania has written about this, but big cities becoming shitholes is one of the surest ways to shift the country to the right.
2rafa
4mo ago
How can it work? It’s clear a conviction wouldn’t remove him from the ballot, so electorally it wouldn’t work, and any loss from being arrested and being unable to campaign would likely be made up by the zealotry of his supporters and any number of GOP politicians (including the VP pick) being invited to campaign on his behalf.
For some reason I was thinking about the OJ Simpson trial today, and it reminded me of your comment.
The most damning evidence in the OJ trial (barring DNA which was little understood by juries at the time) wasn’t the glove, or the record of Simpson’s movements, or the police interview. It was the fact that his defense could not provide any alternate account of what happened to Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman whatsoever. Two young white (well…) people killed in brutal fashion in a rich part of LA, somewhere that would have had witnesses to on-street commotion, and zero evidence (for any alternate explanation). They hinted or gestured at some kind of gang, or a drug deal, or something related to the restaurant where Goldman worked, but they had nothing, not one shred of evidence for even the most faintly plausible alternate theory of why these two people were murdered by someone other than OJ. This from an extraordinarily skilled legal team with unlimited budget to hire private investigators, research leads and come up with theories.
Holocaust revisionism functions in much the same way. Details about the process of execution, the precise methods, quibbles with testimony, calling the veracity of various accounts in question, all mirror OJ’s defense strategy. The glove don’t fit, the police officer who found the evidence was a virulent racist who had motivation to lie to convict a successful black man with a pretty blonde wife, and the whole trial was surely just another libel against a rich black guy and, especially after Rodney King, who would doubt the hostility of the cops toward black men etc…
But there was and is no alternate theory. The best revisionists can do is, as SecureSignals does, to gesture at possibilities. “Oh, maybe they all went to Russia, changed their names and lived happily ever after”, or “maybe the Austro-Hungarians randomly overcounted the Jewish population by 400% and there were actually far fewer Jews than anyone thought in Eastern Europe”. None of these are evidenced, they’re not supposed to be. They’re mere gestures, hints, seeds of doubt, held together by a narrative in which devious Jews are permanently hostile to white/aryan interests and therefore are probably lying anyway. There is, as @To_Mandalay has said, no real alternate hypothesis; some revisionists apparently argue that Himmler was supposed to kill all the Jews but then didn’t because he was actually a traitor to the cause, which conflicts with other revisionist theories, which conflict with others.
Revisionists avoid believing in strict alternate hypotheses (for example presenting multiple options in the same book or article and feigning ambivalence about which could be true) since doing so would pin them down and make very obvious the extreme dearth of evidence they’re built upon. But it is reasonable for historians to request that they provide and defend comprehensive and evidenced alternate theories for the disappearance of European Jewry.
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