2rafa
6d ago
2rafa
2d ago
No, the country music audience likes baseball
More than football? Hispanics I agree of course. But I do think there has been a big decline amongst Ellis Island Americans. Every suburban white male New Yorker (be he Jewish, Irish or Italian) over fifty seems to like baseball, almost no young ones do.
2rafa
8d ago
Yeah, there was a recent interview with Trump about a lot of this stuff and he seemed pretty uncommitted. If you read this the author is entirely hysterical, but the substance is thin. A lot of what Trump appears to promise is actually him just repeating and agreeing with the question he’s being fed; “oh, Mr President, are you sure you’re really going to deport all 12 million illegals and put them in deportation camps and use the military?” “Yeah, sure, we gotta do it, sure”. KellyAnne Conway, that avatar of competence, says earnestly that he’s going to move a lot faster this time. We shall see. I think much of Trump’s personal attention will be devoted to trying (and likely failing) to prosecute people he believes have wronged him. So it really depends on his advisors.
MMT covers a wide range of actual policy positions, some reasonable and some not. But in general it’s a retarded third world conspiracy that leads to stuff like Turkish and Argentine hyperinflation directed by idiotic leaders who reject any link between inflation and borrowing, not merely in theory but in practice. The unique situation the US and to a lesser extent other Anglo countries are in with regards to the effect of public borrowing on inflation is unique because of their balance of trade, foreign investment, very large service sectors and so on, just like Japan’s weird dynamic, and doesn’t prove MMT in any genuine way.
2rafa
5d ago
One, illegally allow in tens of millions of people into the United States; two, trick the (hopefully) absolute morons in the GOP to pass a "compromise bill" which allows a hostile administration to staff a army of bureaucrats which can more quickly adjudicate asylum claims under a "more strict" standard (it's really not) than one which could be adopted by executive fiat and then quickly stamp "approved" on large percentages of the illegally released people who now get automatic work permits. And it would have worked if it wasn't for that stupid Trump who is just so bad, doesn't care about immigration or the country, and opposes it because he just doesn't want Biden to get a win. And thank God for that
Literally none of this matters.
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Almost all illegals are eventually released or make it into the interior. That was true even with Trump’s remain-in-Mexico policy because there is no wall and Trump is no closer to getting Congress to build one than he was this time in 2016. That is to say even migrants turned back eventually make it into the interior, where they’re never deported unless they commit serious violent crime and ICE arrests and deports them which of course only happens to a tiny minority of illegals migrants, and even in those cases most return illegally.
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Because of 1 (a fundamental issue which, again, Trump has zero realistic plan to fix), the only difference between handing every migrant a green card (or, hell a passport) and not doing so is one generation. Every child of every single illegal migrant in the US born on US soil is a full citizen of the United States. That’s the trick with ‘amnesty’; it means nothing, because the demographic impact is guaranteed in any case. Birthright citizenship is the ultimate incentive for illegal immigration. Talk about “work permits” is hilarious; their sons and daughters have the same rights and privileges as you.
So, yeah. The only two things that would do “more” than this bill would be a meaningful end to most illegal inflows (impossible without transnational coast to coast impenetrable wall, and even then asylum seekers could just come legally and overstay visas if they could get them) and an end to birthright citizenship (almost certainly impossible without constitutional amendment). So this magic alternative to this bill (which again, would allow a GOP administration to take minor incremental steps to somewhat reduce inflows) does not exist. There is no plan, there never was, and Trump killed it because he didn’t want to give Biden what he felt was some kind of ‘win’, whatever the cost.
2rafa
4d ago
This is just cons complaining about the lib version of 'noticing'. Pattern recognition applies to everyone. If they've detected specific transaction patterns highly predictive of possible mass shootings, why is it wrong to acknowledge that? Would you have the same sympathy with some Muslim garden supply business owner regularly profiled and investigated for his high-volume fertilizer purchases? I know for a fact that this kind of transaction analytics is responsible for preventing a lot of successful terrorist attacks, and I also know that conservatives don't care when it's used on their outgroup.
2rafa
8d ago
I think a Biden victory would see a linear decline along the current trajectory of extreme wokeness being less cool (note this is very different from the grander arc of liberalism).
Trump could go either way. The DEI zealots might become only more enraged and zealous, and those on the left who don’t like Biden will be quickly stirred up if Trump actually gives people like Rufo some amount of political power and attempts even a small amount of Project 2025 stuff. Trump is a controversial guy and most powerful people in America don’t like him, that can’t be dismissed.
But there is another possibility, which is that 2016-2021 sucked all the political energy out of the system, especially on the left, such that the whole thing just kind of crumbles ideologically. Again, not the grander arc of liberalism, which will continue, but a crisis of conscience, as happened to the left after Reagan and Thatcher won and the postwar corporatist consensus crumbled.
I think a lot of it will depend on the specifics of the election, whether it’s a landslide either way, conduct of both parties during the transition period, and on Trump’s rhetoric. As weird as it sounds, I don’t think it’s impossible that he leaves office at the end of his second term having accomplished almost nothing and yet being more liked, or at least more tolerated, than when he got in in 2016.
2rafa
11d ago
Seems like a largely bullshit claim; it’s well established that aesthetically supporting a designated terrorist organization or even bragging about doing so doesn’t actually make you a ‘member’ of that organization.
If it did then half the Irish in Boston would have been arrested in the 80s.
2rafa
9d ago
A little-discussed phenomenon is that since 2011 or so, low-wage pay has skyrocketed in major urban areas. People who were making $8 an hour in 2008 make $30 an hour today. Meanwhile, white collar workers who made $50 an hour (converted to hourly pay) in 2008 may make $75 an hour today, a much smaller increase.
The cost of childcare, fast food, hotel rooms etc for white collar professionals (ie. the upper middle class) has therefore increased much faster than their own incomes.
2rafa
9d ago
I find him interesting personally. He’s a troll to some extent, I think he was literally fifteen or sixteen when he started doing it and it was essentially reading out smug /pol/posts in front of a camera. The issue for him now is that he can’t do anything else, there is no off-ramp for him, and competition in the DR grift-verse has intensified dramatically, so he’s kind of stuck. I think the difference between him and a lot of other people in the same space is that he didn’t really have time to develop much personality as a young man beyond his internet persona.
If you mean intellectually, if you’re here probably not, his content is essentially boilerplate /pol/ third-worldist collage posting and his voice and shock jock radio host affect are (in my opinion) annoying, like a very smarmy teenager’s. If you’re interested in those views they can be restated with more complexity in all the usual DR places online and a lot of what Fuentes does is rephrase this stuff for his zoomer audience anyway.
2rafa
3d ago
Could you not just manipulate vote totals so they go +20 when they fall too far below 0.
I agree that the dissident right is overdosing on hopium regarding antisemitism.
With the exception of some of the Muslims (and not even all of them, since many at elite universities are largely secularized DEI libs who do not or barely follow any tenets of Islam) these protestors are not racially or religiously hostile to Jews in and of themselves. At most they consider Jews to be ‘white people’, whom they may dislike, but that is hardly the basis for a coalition with white rightists.If this is how young progressives protest against what they perceive as ‘white ethnonationalism’ on the far side of the world, it does not take a great intellect to imagine how they feel about white ethnonationalism in the United States, which is the central policy position on the dissident right.
It is cathartic for far rightists to see Jewish people finally getting their supposed ‘comeuppance’ for supporting progressive policies in the diaspora while defending an ethnic homeland in Israel (allegations of hypocrisy were not unfounded, although many did ‘pick a side’ and advocate liberalism in both, like Soros, or in neither, like many Jewish conservatives).
In practice, though, the most strategic thing for the dissident right to do would be to shut up. Each major Jewish donor or lobbyist who leaves the left because of its anti-Israel activism, even if they merely become politically neutral rather than center-right (let alone hard right, let alone far right) is a win for conservatives. Richard Hanania made this point more eloquently.
The coming together of leftist and rightist antisemitism is not particularly likely. Blue haired DEI activists who think Israel is a white nationalist fascist police state oppressing innocent people of color (much like Amerikkka amirite) are unlikely to agree that the progressive ideology, media, art and culture they love, which in fact is the impetus behind their antizionism itself (!) is in fact degenerate art and subversion created by the very Jews they are protesting against. The protestors like everything the rightists dislike about Jews except their zionism, while the antisemitic far right sympathize on some level with ethnonationalism but dislike everything else.
However, I disagree that antisemitism will not rise. It is clearly rising, as is visible in everything from comments on mainstream YouTube and TikTok content, in Zoomers memes and in real life among younger people, both white and non-white in the West. That does not mean that things will necessarily get very bad for Jews, at least in the Anglosphere (it was still much worse a century ago), but it is undeniable.
2rafa
8d ago
By roided I don’t just mean bodybuilder physique, I also mean the distended stomach, like what Joe Rogan has which people say is a result of steroid use. Muscles help but they’re not a significant factor as long as he’s neither skinny fat nor actual fat. Henry Cavill is hot because he’s tall and has a great face, if he had the physique of a runner or something it would make minimal difference, that was my point.
2rafa
7d ago
Recently found out that Zuck’s kids are named Maxima, August and Aurelia. The LARP is real.
2rafa
21d ago
Great post. It’s an extreme loss of state capacity for internal violence. Look at Mao’s China, successful eradication of a centuries-long opioid epidemic (in which as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of urban young men were heavy addicts) in fifteen years. And it wasn’t because he killed everyone; he killed the more obvious dealers, sure, but you actually don’t need to kill that many people to trigger prosocial change. If the US army rolls into the South Side of Chicago, or Baltimore, or St Louis, and starts blasting, you could quite possibly limit the death toll to three or low four figures in each city (ie barely above the actual homicide rate) and still seriously dissuade violent crime. And as you note, the Malayan Emergency, Mau Mau and really the entire history of British India show that you don’t actually need that many people or that much violence to accomplish this. 15,000 British ruled over 400,000,000 Indians. In 2003, 130,000 NATO forces ruled over 20,000,000 Afghans, a vastly more favorable ratio. And yet they lost, because they were too afraid to do the needful.
We were discussing South Africa earlier in the thread, and there are parallels to that situation (even though I disagree with apartheid and think the Boers are largely responsible for their presently poor condition). Even with the whole world against them, there is no way that 5 million Dutch and English in a country with a huge resource bounty and extensive arable land armed with literal nuclear weapons and modern technology, and bordered by countries that (unlike Israel’s foes) had no capable armed forces and definitely did not want a war with them, could not have held out indefinitely - even at a relatively high standard of living. But there was no will for it. The situation in American cities, as I noted in my post on Seattle a couple of months ago, is the same. It’s not a resource question, a few armed police could clear out the homeless permanently in a few hours. It’s a will question, like a hoarder who lives in filth because they just can’t throw anything away for psychological reasons even though there’s a dumpster right outside.
2rafa
3d ago
It’s been an occasionally dredged up topic in literature circles since about 2009, in part thanks to a general sense of impending doom that a lot of mainstream libs have had since then and because there are plenty of ways for them (as noted) to twist Zweig’s words into applying to the present culture war, even if this is relatively poor practice. There are also many literary comparisons (often unfavorable ones) to Joseph Roth. I don’t think there’s any reason why this year in particular would make it a thing, though, I bought my copy in Vienna while looking for books about Austria I could read in German.
2rafa
9d ago
Of course, but even if your failed-out creative writing major becomes an English teacher making a modest salary, he's still surrounded by women, many of them young and attractive. Even if they'd rather a doctor, an average-to-good looking male teacher won't have trouble dating or getting married. Male nurses are a himbo profession and always seem to do well with women.
2rafa
4d ago
Fair enough, I just think conservatives should own up to the ways in which politicians they elected are in part responsible for the dramatic escalation in state surveillance of financial transactions and other data in search of allegedly malicious actors.
2rafa
11d ago
Farmers are an extremely powerful constituency because they have money, are rural (privileged in most democratic systems, especially in the US with the Senate) and have a salt of the earth reputation (like doctors and firefighters, farmers do a ‘good’ job).
Screye had some good examples of how the farmers stymied Modi’s essential land reforms in India (which would in the medium and long term have had hugely positive impacts on Indian prosperity). In France the farmers just dump shit on the street and ruin daily life in the cities until their subsidies are restored. In almost every Western country farmers are often very wealthy with millions of dollars in land (usually pretty liquid given a robust farmland market).
A substantial proportion of the US obesity crisis is due to HFCS subsidies for farmers:
Just six commodities — corn, soy, wheat, cotton, peanuts, and rice — account for 94% of FCIP support. Many of these commodities are not used to provide affordable nutrition but are instead heavily processed into the fillers and sugars that are likely a large part of people's health problems, including obesity.
But as with doctor pay and healthcare costs (or indeed with cutting firefighter numbers because there are far fewer residential fires than there were 50 years ago), because farming is a ‘good’ job, the public can be baited into supporting these people and serving their interests indefinitely.
Lab grown meat, if it can be made cheaply and to taste indistinguishable from the real thing, would be an immense scientific achievement that would improve billions of people’s lives. And even though I don’t value farm animal wellbeing particularly highly, it would still reduce a lot of animal suffering which on some level is probably a good thing if it can be ensured without harming humans in any way.
2rafa
7d ago
Some good writing this month. I enjoyed @coffee_enjoyer and @FiveHourMarathon’s brief discussion of the Amish Question. There’s a risk when discussing isolated and backward tribes that one projects the way that we do today onto hunter gatherers in the Amazon or the Sentinelese, where we assume that we were like them instead of acknowledging that they - for not having settled, for not having advanced - are the unusual ones and so may not tell us as much about our ancestors as we think. Similarly, the Amish aren’t necessarily a fair or accurate example of most traditional civilizations in many ways, or of what ‘we’ could be if we attempted to restore some of those institutions.
A second issue is the peculiarity of the group. I think it unambiguously true that the Amish probably are happier and have higher QOL than most modern westerners, but the degree to which this is the product of trad-ness is hard to measure. Consider those Mennonites who stayed in the Alps and assimilated into normal mountain Swiss society. Today they live in one of the richest and highest functioning countries on earth, a place bus drivers make a hundred thousand dollars a year, where the median household wealth is among (possibly the) highest in the world. A clean and exceptionally safe country, an ordered country, a place in which one’s neighbors will indeed send the police to tell you to stop playing music after 9.30pm. A place where the recycling is always sorted (God help you if it isn’t). Possibly, alongside Denmark (which has its disadvantages) the final remaining civilized country in the West.
It is hard to compare the Amish with their assimilated cousins in Switzerland because Swiss statistics are muddied by lower performing French and Italians (and others). But a lot of the ‘Amish QOL advantage’ might just be HBD.
2rafa
4d ago
I thought both of them had murky alleged ties to sex work but might be mistaken.
2rafa
22d ago
They don’t typically think they’re taking the side of Hamas (some do but they’re in the extreme minority), they think they’re taking the side of a rainbow future one state solution where Jews and Muslims live together in peace, harmony and democracy. That is indeed hopeless naïveté, but no moreso than ‘defunding the police will reduce crime’, which they almost certainly also believe.
2rafa
21d ago
Porn is inherently low status. Even in the 80s, being caught going into a porn store to rent a VHS was the height of embarrassment, made fun of on sitcoms etc.
It’s not just that horniness is embarrassing. The level of cringe was much greater that, say, merely catching your friend picking someone up at the bar for a one-night stand. The idea that you watch porn instead of actually getting laid makes you - in the eyes of much of society - a loser.
This is what really makes selling porn online so difficult to make profitable. Terms like “post nut clarity” (which, yes, has a real-world meaning but is most commonly used in relation to porn) speak to the shame of the whole enterprise. Men don’t want to feel like the kind of men who pay for porn.
There’s more deniability when it’s free. If I relentlessly make fun of Disney adults for 10 years and then go with my brother and his kids when they invite me along, my cognitive dissonance is limited. If I spend $300 for a ticket and rock up with Minnie Mouse ears and a rockabilly dress and a Snow White tattoo, I’m going to feel like a fucking loser.
Men don’t want to pay for porn because it makes them feel like losers. I don’t see why that’s not the obvious answer. When men had to pay to access it, more swallowed their pride. Now that it’s free and plentiful online, only the most committed coomers do.
The people rallied and there was an extensive campaign by the family. Netanyahu was always opposed to these deals and had written about it. But the mob won out. Even now there are rallies about accepting any price to get hostages back, it’s just that for once more people have a desire for revenge than are willing to help the enemy to do so.
I’d guess the kind of people who liked baseball (coastal white ethnics) are now the dominant soccer audience in the US. Baseball seems to have completely died in terms of younger audience.
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