2rafa
10mo ago
If you’re rich, Bhutan is still very good. There’s a $200 / person / day tourist tax, which keeps the riffraff out, and the government largely limits construction of lodging to well-established global 5* brands like Aman and Six Senses. They’re, in turn, forced to hire local guides (who are actually very competent, ime).
Civilization is creeping in, so you probably only have 5-10 years left, but the ruling class are keenly aware that preserving a certain charming pastiche backwardness (while also being very safe, clean and welcoming) is the future of the economy, and they act accordingly. It’s also a lot of fun to be in a Buddhist country that hasn’t yet been turned into a strip mall like the more developed parts of the rest of Southeast Asia.
I think one of the toughest lessons for ethnats to realize is that elite ethnic solidarity, at least for most west-of-Hajnal whites, is and has always been a total fantasy. The English ruling class will never prioritize the English working class or even regular middle class (which pilots, being officers, generally are) over anyone else, especially people of their own class from other lands. They may have affection for their country, for its institutions, and for People Like Them, but they have never much cared for most of its people. There isn’t any solidarity; perhaps there never has been.
They might be delusional to think that they can replace a native working class with an imported one at no loss of performance or deference, but they shall find out either way.
2rafa
10mo ago
What ethnic solidarity is there in Putin’s Russia? Much of the inner circle aren’t Russian, the business elite are pretty diverse, millions of Central Asian immigrants pour into Moscow and St Petersburg over time etc. Putin offered a vaguely nationalist justification for the invasion of Ukraine, but he and the rest of the FSB elite aren’t, by and large, sympathetic to identitarians and regularly throw them in jail, shut down rallies, bookstores and groups and even assassinate them.
China was ruled by Manchus for centuries, and even now the situation for Han in terms of affirmative action and legal rights relative to minority groups is arguably substantially worse than it is for whites in America - China literally exempted minorities from its one-child policy for decades, allowing many to expand much faster than the Han population. Before they’re regularly suppressed, online Chinese dissident rightists regularly complain that Han are discriminated against, some even advance various conspiracies that the Manchurians are still in charge.
Hardcore ethnonationalists (largely under the banner of “religious zionists”) are actually a minority in Israel, but their centrality to Bibi’s longstanding coalition with the ultra-orthodox (who don’t care about an ethnostate) and the center-right who are afraid of terrorism gives them enough power to have a decisive say in policy. Perhaps this counts as ethnic solidarity given Judaism is both ethnicity and faith, but I’m not sure it’s clear that the ‘secular elite’ in Tel Aviv have much more ethnic solidarity than whites, really. They’re just participants in a country with different demographics and therefore politics to the modal European country.
That leaves Japan. I think in many ways the Japanese are just luckier than Western Europeans. Their economic boom happening 10 years later than it did in Western Europe (more immediately postwar) and the fact that Japanese fertility rates in the 1930-1950 period had been very high by Western European standards (~4-4.5 vs 1.8-2 in the UK) meant that there was less need to import Gastarbeiter, and Korea’s immense poverty meant that when they did need them, they could look next door rather than further afield (not that there was much Korean immigration postwar). In Europe, the Germans and even Brits did first look south to Italy, Greece and so on, but the whole region was booming (and most of the poorest European countries were behind the Iron Curtain) so they looked to Turkey, Pakistan, the Caribbean etc instead.
On Facebook and Instagram, 100% of users are “logged in”. That means Meta likely has their date of birth, sex and name. Users who post content (a substantial proportion of Facebook and Instagram users) share their picture, location tags on the places they’ve been and - in most cases - their whole list of real-life friends and social connections (as friends/followers) with Meta.
On Reddit, most users aren’t logged in. Most users who are logged in never post or comment. They certainly don’t share their real face, age or in most cases gender directly with Reddit. The issue on Reddit is therefore a hybrid of Twitter’s issue with lurkers (which implemented an extremely harsh login wall that even Elon Musk has maintained, so even scrolling down on someone’s Twitter forces an unblockable pop up demanding sign-in), and anonymous forums’ issues with anonymity.
You can predict that an account that follows a college subreddit, the NFL subreddit, the Tinder subreddit and some videogame subreddits is a young, single, college-age male, but that’s nowhere close to the data that Meta has on that person’s account.
Reddit is trying to do what Instagram and TikTok did, and what Twitter is trying to do, by attempting to force all regular users into making an account even if they just want to scroll through this week’s top fifty cat gifs or the latest ice hockey news. Third party apps often provide a very high quality signed-out user experience that Reddit wants to kill, plus they often reduce or remove ads and reduce or remove the additional feature (like avatars) that Reddit uses to try to encourage users to make accounts and engage more with personalizing their profile (and so being more likely to add further data points to be sold to advertisers).
2rafa
10mo ago
I thought the general understanding is that the Nazis did well with the provincial lower-middle class, ie. artisans and shopkeepers, and attracted some poor rurals and some elites (in smaller proportions). Urban proletarians largely voted for communists or social democrats.
2rafa
10mo ago
I agree to an extent. At the same time, plenty of people in ‘Obama’s class’ have trans kids. I know a few and know of more; it just doesn’t make the news that, say, Jamie Dimon has a trans kid (he doesn’t as far as I know). Elon Musk has a trans kid. Jennifer Pritzker is trans. Are there many ultra-rich trans people? No, but there aren’t many in general. The ultra-rich aren’t, by and large, secretly conservative in their politics even if wealthier people by and large practice more socially conservative lifestyles than the very poor.
Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Bernard Arnault, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Stephen Schwarzmann, Henry Kravis, Warren Buffett, even Elon Musk when he isn’t 🤔posting to own the libs on Twitter have extremely “normie” political views in public and in private. At most, they’re socially conservative to the level of tens or hundreds of millions of Americans. Maybe 1% of billionaires are secretly harboring ultra-edgy politics, but the same is true of everyone else. For the most part, the super rich and super powerful watch the same media as everyone else, send their kids to elite colleges that teach exactly what you think they do, and are fully invested in the general ideological current of the present.
2rafa
10mo ago
Even within the SSPX there will be people whose grandparents or great-grandparents decided during Vatican II that their families were going to pursue a moral traditionalist interpretation of Catholicism and just went with it (and who now merely see it as their family’s church) and the more zealous converts who regularly read First Things and go on tradcath forums and decide to deliberately pursue membership of their local SSPX congregation for pure ideological reasons in the 21st century.
2rafa
10mo ago
Based, Seethe and Cope were co-opted by online leftists though, you see them all the time on Tumblr and Twitter from the usual crowd.
2rafa
10mo ago
“Gross” as in disgusting is another good one used primarily by the left.
For the inverse I think “ugly” is a word that used to be used by both sides but which now is more of a conservative word. “Wicked”, “cursed”, “Satanic” (obviously) and other words with quasi-religious or archaic connotations are used more by the right.
Obviously there are also words like “degenerate” or “bigoted” that are strongly coded to one side and have been for many years.
“Hellscape” is a word both sides like to use to refer to their enemies’ ideal world.
The bulk of anti-Israel criticism in American politics has been from the hard left since at least the late 1970s. Most Republicans strongly support Israel and even on the hard right there’s a general ambivalence until you reach the Nick Fuentes tier.
So pro-Israel activists found it very easy to approach red state politicians with the argument that criminalizing “antisemitism” based on a definition under which criticism of Israel‘s existence is antisemitic essentially provided a way of weaponizing ‘hate speech’ against the progressive / leftist college activists they dislike. Meanwhile, the left would be hard pressed to vote against a bill that increases charges against those harassing people because of their faith, especially after the Muslim ban etc etc.
The law is extremely tuned specifically to the above college speech concerns. It makes harassing or ‘intimidating’ someone because of their religious beliefs a third degree felony. Who is showing up and harassing or intimidating attendees to a college talk by another Israeli ex-diplomat about why Palestinians are terrorists? It probably isn’t the local college chapter of the Proud Boys or the local Groyper Association. It’s the Socialist Society, the LGBTQIA2S association, the Students for Justice in Palestine club, Jewish Voice for Peace and the Islamic Students’ Association. Conservatives don’t usually picket talks by people they dislike in any case, and where the far-right criticize Jews, it typically has little to do with either Zionism or their religious practice.
Given the above, it seems pretty easily understandable why DeSantis and others signed these laws. Antisemitism isn’t a high status belief on the right, more incidents like the Charlottesville tiki rally are seen as bad for mainstream conservatives in the US, and getting one over on annoying campus progressive activists is a plus and something DeSantis has already committed himself to through many other actions. Is it constitutional? Probably not, I guess, but I’m no legal scholar.
There were forms of homosexuality historically common to many different regions in the world, some of which only saw widespread condemnation during the first wave of globalization (eg. in Japan it happened during the Meiji Restoration, and sodomy was only banned for a single period from 1872-1880). In Thailand Kathoey / ladyboys have a long history. What is common to many of these things is that they were tolerated without having the same status (obviously) as heterosexual relationships / marriage. Homosexuality was at many times tolerated and common in Chinese history.
But when countries that have historically more lax attitudes to homosexuality encounter Western gay rights activism, legal change is often swifter than it was in the West itself, which may have had more residual Abrahamic aversion to gay rights that took longer to reverse.
2rafa
10mo ago
Elites is used all the time by the left but I think it’s slowly being replaced by “billionaires”.
2rafa
10mo ago
Are societies still ruled predominantly by men much more competent than those ruled (in part) by women? Most of the more disastrous decisions in 20th century western politics (eg. mass immigration) were made by parliaments that were 90%+ men.
2rafa
10mo ago
He’s not really a leader though, he’s naturally popular for the same reason, say, the child of an A-list celebrity might be very popular at their school. He’s rich and famous and everyone knows it from the minute he arrives at school. His leadership ability is minimal and until almost the end of the story it’s the adults who are in charge and who order the main characters around.
2rafa
10mo ago
Lead actors are almost always cast (even subconsciously) for things like facial symmetry that predict attractiveness.
2rafa
10mo ago
There’s some apex fallacy here. Men don’t generally admire women for their achievements, because they don’t generally admire other men for their achievements either. The Don Draper I-don’t-think-about-you-at-all is the default.
A rare point of agreement. When women do right-tail well (say Margaret Thatcher), they have plenty of men and women admirers. I don’t think this is really a strongly gendered thing, most people just aren’t very impressive.
A male friend recently gave me the dating advice that what's important in a partner is that they are "naturally happy", which struck me as a hilariously insufficient and condescending criterion, better suited to choosing a puppy.
Nothing is more important in a partner than temperament. Choosing wisely here is one of the most important decisions most of us will ever make.
In general, I find gender wars very dull. Almost all men and women have always been and will always be without any significant power. In the cloistered world of the elite, women’s power has waxed and waned over the centuries, but it has always been and remains less than men’s power (even in the girlboss era, the vast majority of senior politicians, business leaders and culture creators are men of course).
You say women seem more interested in stories about men than vice versa, but what are they actually interested in?
For example, the bulk of the female Sherlock fandom, which you mention, is essentially yaoi shipping of Holmes and Watson in a gay relationship. It’s not about deduction or criminology or the mysteries themselves. Young women’s fascination with gay men (see Manga and to some extent aesthetically Kpop) is complicated but can be summarized as a safe, distanced, jealousy-free outlet for sexuality and sexual exploration. Dragon Age is a female-dominated fandom, but almost all fanfiction is romance fanfiction (either explicitly or less so) related to a handful of romanceable (male) NPCs and either other NPCs or a female player character.
So men and women do have different tastes, but women sometimes find things in masculine stories/franchises that let them tell stories appealing to women in those settings. Men have no need to find masculine narratives in women’s stories, because men (a) read much less than women and (b) have plenty of their own stories to focus upon that are already core parts of the mainstream/popular fiction canon.
2rafa
10mo ago
Melissa McCarthy
Perhaps one of my edgiest opinions is that McCarthy and Jason Statham are really funny in ‘Spy’.
2rafa
10mo ago
Dutton is a theologian who moved into evopsych. His work is universally worse than Kierkegaard’s, but I wouldn’t necessarily write it off completely.
The most important thing to remember is that the world will change so much over the next fifty years that attempting to extrapolate population trends to the earth of a century from now is kind of ridiculous. AI, embryo selection, the nature of labor, all these things are going to change things a great deal.
2rafa
10mo ago
I’d say staunch ideological leftists call themselves leftists all the time. Average Democrats don’t, but the right calls them that, so that’s the asymmetry you’re witnessing.
2rafa
10mo ago
General trend of emphasis you see in corporate comms. Eg. Apple doesn’t say “The iPhone now lets you…” they say “iPhone now lets you…”. They remove the ‘the’.
2rafa
10mo ago
As a guy, he’s a showman, an edgelord and an occasionally odious troll. As a researcher, it’s a mixed bag, but it’s slim pickings in the field given the usual reasons and he has published some interesting analyses, plus (partially) built the platform for many other amateur evopsych researchers, so credit is owed.
I hope I wasn’t suggesting that women like Sherlock Holmes for the relationships, women do after all like crime fiction (almost all fiction except hard science fiction and some forms of fantasy, really) more than men. I was trying to say that I don’t think women reading more stories about men than men read about women necessarily tells us anything more than that they do so.
The big gap is that most modern literary fiction is written by women and is by far a women-dominated form of creative expression, but few men read it. Men used to read books, but as visual media became cheaper, more plentiful and more widely available they have gravitated more to television, movies and games, while women enjoy those things but have remained readers, too.
Interestingly, the rate of violent crime in many MENA countries is actually not particularly high.
Everyone remembers teachers in school who could command a class authoritatively to the extent that nobody even whispered when they were talking, and others who would be so weak as to allow the exact same group of, say, 11 year olds to run riot. I remember reading and watching interviews with some of the young male Syrian, Afghan etc migrants to Germany and so on after the 2015 refugee crisis. What seemed to be shared most of all was twofold:
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A deep-seated contempt for Western society for its liberalism. This, of course, is broadly shared by internet rightists, so can hardly be a major point of disagreement.
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The belief, real or fictional, that authority in the West was extremely weak and that, presumably unlike at home, they could get away with almost anything. This, of course, is also broadly agreed with by internet rightists.
Import young men from traditional cultures to a degenerate western society full to the brim with licentiousness, in which many crimes are barely policed, in which traditional morality has all but broken down, and you can’t be surprised if they take advantage.
The grooming gangs of Rotherham were able to rape so many girls in part because they knew there would be no posse of fathers and uncles coming for them. Most of the girls didn’t even have fathers, they were products of single motherhood in the dregs at the bottom of English society. In Pakistan, fathers and brothers risk jail to protect their family’s honor all the time.
Similarly, when it comes to work, Swedish Somalis are no doubt capable of working if the choice is between labor and starvation. If it’s between labor and generous welfare, though, the basis for the decision changes.
Opposition to mass immigration is fair, and there are many reasons why it is justified. But the truth is that - for the most part - these migrants do what they do not because it is in their nature but because Western countries allow them to. The old 4chan “they are laughing at you” really does apply here.
There are very few places on earth that are more dangerous (as a tourist) than the most violent large Latin American cities. Most of Africa is much much safer as long as you stay out of conflict zones, for example (and I mean conflict zones specifically, not say ‘the Congo in general’, much of which is very safe).
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