2rafa
3d 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
1d ago
Biden can deport 15 million people today? The law mitigates some percentage of the legal challenges by pro-migrant groups that would be inevitable (and will be) in any executive-led effort.
2rafa
5d 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
5d 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
I wonder if Massachusetts has anti-political discrimination laws on the books like California. Could be they were advised by their lawyers that the conservative legal activists were circling (eg. that a rejected candidate for an academic position might be a plaintiff).
2rafa
3d ago
Unlike you, I’m not a never-Trumper! But I’d want a conservative President with the kind of deep congressional connections and sleazy lobbying ability to actually be able to pass things, especially in the event of a trifecta. That is the primary way of achieving anything in the American political system that isn’t bipartisan. A President who deeply understands and can manipulate the congressional GOP, plus a trifecta, plus abolishing the filibuster are the necessary ingredients for civil service reform in the US.
Trump’s problem isn’t really fecklessness or his personal lack of convictions. It’s that he doesn’t seem to be able to wrangle his own faction in congress. If the US had a party-led system where Trump was head of a party and could fire/deselect reps and senators at will, that would be fine. But open primaries, no term limits and various other factors mean that he’s at the mercy of congress.
2rafa
3d ago
You mean the thing he did at the very end of his presidency which might well be struck down by his own Supreme Court anyway?
2rafa
5d 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
3d ago
Well I have no intention of voting for Biden in November, so I’m well aware of that choice. I just think that’s the reality of the American political system and why a genuine dealmaker (not merely an insider like Biden, although I’ve been surprised at what he’s done despite his incompetence and senility) is the ideal candidate for either party.
2rafa
5d ago
Even in 2015 the Tories won the Jewish vote 50-29, and that was when the Labour candidate for Prime Minister was Jewish.
Jews voted more for Labour in the mid-20th century because many were poor recent immigrants from Eastern Europe and voting at that time in England was still very class-and-region based.
2rafa
3d ago
Sure, but that isn’t no understanding of free expression, it’s just a different one. For most of the history of the US states had various laws banning various kinds of speech, so did the federal government during the wars. Absolute free speech is a 20th century interpretation of the first amendment.
What type of school did you attend?
A private hippie school, then prep school. Somewhere people who grew up in Manhattan private school circles would have heard of, but not like Dalton or Trinity. My school was coed; both my brother and sister went to single-sex schools, for no particular reason.
Some people are interested in demographics. The school was perhaps 5% black, 5% visibly Latino (hard to tell, could have been more), 30% Asian (two thirds east, one third south, a couple of southeast here and there) and 60% white, including Arabs. Of the whites, maybe half were Jewish or half-Jewish and most of the rest were Italian, mixed-white (like, Brazilian mom, Swiss dad, or blonde mom from the Midwest and Italian dad, that kind of thing). Perhaps 10% of the student body, maybe a little less, were the predominantly but not entirely white kids of European or Canadian expats in NYC. I had more Catholic background friends from before prep school and from our local neighbourhood, but wealthy people who have those backgrounds in NYC tended, in my experience, to prefer to send their children to the Catholic private schools even though they were personally largely secular (I don’t think any remained or became religious). There were some WASPs of the regatta sort, but not many; again in my experience most of the very old family WASPish people I grew up around knew what schools they were sending their kids to from birth, and it wasn’t ours. A lot of those people I knew as a kid went to tier-1 schools or to boarding school.
The school was relatively academic. Probably not as much as my dad would have liked. College admissions stats were mostly impressive except for the occasional off year, but again more like tier-2 than tier-1 of Manhattan prep schools. Because the demographics of the school were less old money than some other Manhattan prep schools there was less of an Ivy at all costs bias for the smartest kids, so people went all over the country, except for those of us who stayed in the city, of course. There were some super rich kids, and some poorer kids (in truth middle class), but most parents were upper middle class by general standards, including mine for the majority of my time there until maybe the last year.
How were your relationships with teachers and peers?
Pretty good. Friend groups formed at fell apart pretty quickly. As in every school there were social hierarchies, but bullying was relatively rare and the school was very tough on it when it happened. I remember my teachers being nice, kind people who with a few exceptions mostly cared. Classes were always full of a lot of intellectual debate among the ~30% of people who cared. We had many clubs and activities, ran mock presidential debates and elections, played sports semi-locally, boring normal high school stuff. I was extremely successful in one activity, participated in a few others. If you wanted to do something weird or different that few or no other kids did they would help you find whatever league/organization/etc you needed in the city, or would have a relationship with other prep schools where you could do it.
The salacious stuff happened, people (a small minority of people) started doing coke in school bathrooms when we were maybe 14 or 15, threw huge parties when their parents were away on weeknights, sometimes stuff would go down and the teachers would try to figure out what happened. The Euro expats were always the most into that because their parents often seemed to leave them for long periods.
I started high school at the zenith of Gossip Girl’s popularity, and while that was based loosely on Brearley/Collegiate there were definitely a lot of people at our school who felt that should be their life and wanted to LARP as if it was. The reality was much more lame since the vast majority of us really did have parents who cared, but there were moments that stick with me like an indoor pool party where we probably drank $50,000 of someone’s parents’ vintage champagne, finding (bad) clubs only happy to let dumb rich kids in to spend thousands of dollars on bottle service with suspicious fake IDs and so on.
Sexually it was pretty prudish for a liberal elite school. I wonder if this was already zillennial sexual conservatism beginning in earnest but I remember my ex-hippie parents being mildly surprised that all three of their children waited until they were in long term relationships in their senior year or in college. (Yes, this was a topic of conversation in our household; if you’ve ever watched Easy A, my parents are Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson in that movie, they watched it and agree.) There were a couple of hot teachers in their twenties who were known for hitting up former female students after they graduated, I remember that not seeming a big deal to me at the time, but again it didn’t happen to anyone in my social circle.
How involved were your parents?
Not hugely involved? They came to parent teacher meetings two or three times a year (whenever they happened). They had an additional meeting when I started applying to college, then one more that also had me in it. That was pretty much it. There were some helicopter moms who could be found in the lobby every other day waiting to speak to one teacher or another, but I don’t think it did them much good.
I wish my parents had been slightly more involved because I was very shy and unconfident but could probably have made a valiant-if-unlikely attempt at HYPS (never applied) if really pushed, but I got into a very good college anyway and it hasn’t damaged my life in any way.
2rafa
4d ago
I mention this last point as its been surfaced by the retirees I've spoken to about why they chose to move there, repeatedly, without prompting.
Surely there are ‘virtually no Jews’ in the vast majority of the US. What were their negative experiences with Jewish people if you asked?
2rafa
5d ago
People in Jeff's circles who aren't begging for handouts acknowledge pretty openly that he was a scumbag for what he did. He and his duck-faced new woman are viciously mocked by everyone from the well-educated inhabitants of elite tech and political circles to the literal tabloid press that made fun of him for his 'alive girl' texts and delights in publishing pictures of the couple where they look awful.
Being one of the richest people in the world is always going to attract a baseline level of respect from the majority of the people who surround you, since a pittance from you is enough to set them and their descendants up for generations. Still, I'd hesitate to say that Jeff came out of it better than Mackenzie. You also don't acknowledge that she didn't demand her fair share, she didn't care enough to and settled for much less. She could have demanded (and would have been granted) both more equity and voting shares in Amazon if she wanted them.
2rafa
3d ago
English law does recognize the concept, since it’s part of the ECHR which is British law. But the ECHR does caveat hate speech, dangerous speech and so on.
2rafa
3d ago
will burn New York City and DC down simultaneously
Why is that certain? This is a community that has a high rate of general crime, but is otherwise highly atomized. They have been drafted before. Most are very much apolitical. Drafting would likely only happen in the event of war with China, and they sometimes have a contentious relationship with Asians anyway.
2rafa
5d ago
I agree that many figures in all radical movements (almost certainly including Fuentes) have some kind of relationship with law enforcement / intelligence, because the FBI/CIA can ruin the life of pretty much anyone if they want to. I doubt he’s consciously repeating what they want him to though. It’s more that he’s at a dead end, he can’t become respectable again like Hanania, he isn’t funny enough to go back to being a cool edgy comedian like Hyde, if he moderates on any position his base will call him cucked and abandon him.
2rafa
3d ago
If he’s making $20m in a month I can’t see what’s so pressing about avoiding his kid’s birth.
why you and other ostensible progressive organizations do not seem to care about their enclave or crime
In NY state and in NJ it’s often secular Jews at the forefront of anti-Haredi policies. Every charity and organization designed to ‘deconvert’ (essentially deradicalize) Chareidim is funded by secular Jews, in many cases literally by George Soros. Consider that this is in marked contrast to, say, Islamist deradicalization efforts, which in the West are pretty much entirely funded by non-Muslims. It’s secular Jews who are most aggressive about lobbying the Israeli government to take away more privileges from the ultra orthodox too. In Haredi circles there are extremely common ‘conspiracy’ theories that secular Jews (who among other things they low key blame for the Holocaust) are trying to destroy their communities, both in the US and in Israel.
One of the reasons the ultra-orthodox have shifted so aggressively to the GOP in recent decades is precisely because the NY and NJ Democratic coalitions, which have a lot of senior Jewish politicians and leaders, have a fundamental contempt for them and their way of life, view them the way elite white northeastern Episcopalian progressives view Southern redneck trailer trash. They in turn spread this attitude to their Italian, Hispanic and black associates, which is why the most common complaint in Brooklyn 770 circles is that wealthy secular Jews said and did very little when eg. black people were attacking the black hats. Recently they’ve accused secular Jews of coming after the ultra-Orthodox by targeting the landlords/slumlords who finance a lot of the community.
2rafa
5d ago
With the exception of the very poor and very rich (which even most highly intelligent and conscientious people will never be), income and tfr aren't really correlated much among secular Westerners.
2rafa
6d ago
Yes, many more people learnt to sing in school, and choirs were also more popular. With training most people’s voices can be made pleasant at singing, especially with conservative vocal range.
2rafa
2d ago
A good move would be to appoint a president with absolute power under the constitution (ie to make any law except that which SCOTUS rules unconstitutional) for a single 8-year term, with Congress’ sole function being to approve a new debt ceiling every 5 years and - but only with a supermajority in both houses - to dismiss the president if necessary. A secondary mechanism could involve a supermajority of state governments doing the same. That’s enough safeguards to avoid an insane dictator while allowing for high capacity governance.
2rafa
5d ago
From 2019:
In the 2017 election, 67% of Jewish voters backed the Tories and 11% supported Labour, according to figures supplied by JPR. A poll this autumn suggested that Jewish support for Labour in next week’s election could fall to 6%.
The first and as yet only Jewish Prime Minister was Disraeli in the 1860s and 1870s.
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.
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