What the hell is going on in Russia?
In general, I think far too little credence is given to what one might call the "retardation hypothesis", namely that a lot of powerful people are kind of stupid, or at least - if they are intelligent - also impulsive, prone to anger and lack of self-control and often unwilling to consider the advice of smart people around them.
I don't think Prigozhin's run to Moscow was a psy-op or 5D chess. At the same time, I also think it was never likely that the few thousand fighters that made it to Moscow would be able to make a play for the whole country. He lacks the regional powerbase, lacks the ideological column, lacks the administrative expertise, much of the public still has some degree of fondness for Putin, and the estimated 50,000 strong FSO, plus the air force, plus large remaining portions of the military appeared to stay loyal to Putin. It was not a 1917 situation, and nor was it a present-day Sudan situation where the rebel/mercenary army was much better funded and much larger relative to the official military.
Assuming I'm right that it isn't 5D chess, I think Prigozhin's initial gambit was to occupy Rostov-on-Don as a 'protest', win some major concessions from Putin (maybe firing Shoigu, giving Prigozhin more of what he wanted, maybe money, whatever) over the phone immediately, then go back to Ukraine. Instead, something seems to have gone wrong, maybe Putin played hardball, and some portion of Prigozhin's forces decided to march on Moscow. This caused some degree of panic. Putin eventually semi-relented and here we are.
It's obvious why Prigozhin accepted the deal: he never actually wanted to die, he wanted concessions. Marching on Moscow forreal forreal, to borrow from the zoomers, would have been certain death for him and the men he might care about (eg. senior Wagner officers). He couldn't escape to the West or any Western-friendly country because he'd be extradited to the Hague for war crimes. He's too hot for the Arabs to accept him now, and neither them nor the Iranians want to annoy Putin. A Prigozhin that was Putin's enemy would be stranded with nowhere to go, wanted by both Russia and the 'West'.
Taking Lukashenko's deal (which Putin might have put him up to) was Prigozhin's only option by Saturday evening. As to why he attempted the move in the first place, I think a combination of impulsive rage and a desire to show Putin he was serious explain it pretty easily. Putin called Prigozhin's bluff and - at great cost, I'd argue, but nevertheless - he won.
The main issue with immigration in most of Europe isn’t the laws on the books, it’s the utter inability to deport most people who are in the country illegally or semi-illegally (failed asylum seekers etc). The deportation apparatus doesn’t exist, deportations are subject to years of legal challenges, whole regions of the world are “too dangerous” to deport to or don’t have the appropriate level of relations with European countries (or just don’t want the listless young men back) and so on.
While the law needs changes, and incoming illegal immigration needs tackling, large scale deportation of those illegally in Europe is the biggest hurdle. In the US politicians openly declare they have zero intention of deporting all 15 million illegal immigrants, in Europe they say they want to but then just…don’t.
Antisemitism is definitely increasing in the US on the left and right. But I don’t see it becoming central to politics for a few reasons.
The first is that the last time there was major antisemitism in European countries (including the US) Jews were the most ‘visible minority’ with any political power. Blacks in the US had no political power and this was in any case before the majority of the great migration to the northern cities had occurred. Today whites are far more likely to have issues with other minorities than Jews.
The second issue is that the right and left approach antisemitism from completely different angles. As the speech you quoted from the AmRen conference down thread suggests, the problem the hard left has with Jews is that they’re too white, and that this quality is what makes Israel an ‘apartheid state’ and ‘white supremacist’. The problem the hard right has with Jews (if they have a problem with them) is that they’re not white enough, that they advocate against ‘white interests’, undermining European civilization from within.
These views are fundamentally opposed; black nationalists and white ones can agree on their contempt for Jews but will quickly disagree on what is owed to black people. Islamists and white nationalists can agree on hostility toward Jews but will quickly disagree on the status of brown and black migrants from Islamic countries in the West. And white nationalists and some far leftists may agree that some wealthy or influential Jews support progressive policies in America but ethnonationalist ones in Israel, but their desired resolutions to this hypocrisy are literally diametrically opposite to each other.
The only theory that makes sense is the argument, advanced in some white nationalist circles, that without the leadership and financial contributions of Jewish people the organized left and center-left would crumble. I don’t find this persuasive; progressivism in the West was a powerful force long before the large scale involvement of Jews in politics and many European countries with very few Jewish people involved in political life still have large, influential, gentile left-leaning political factions that also support all the stuff that angers reactionaries.
What’s the point of the weird opinion canvassing you do here? You’ve been banned like ten times for hmmposting as @sarker said yesterday. I don’t even mind your presence because I think you post some interesting discussion points, but I wish you’d be honest about why you’re doing it.
The only question the right needs to be asking is this:
What will it take (institutionally, legally, even diplomatically) to effect mass deportation of 10m + illegals? They need to be rounded up, processed and removed without successful injunction or legal challenges for this to occur. This is the only viable deterrent and the only viable way to ‘close’ the border. If you don’t deport, everything else is worthless. Large transit camps, mandatory nationwide enhanced e-verify with prison sentences for employer noncompliance (all the way up and down the chain of command), roadblocks in all major cities to root out illegal migrants with immediate deportation if unable to prove citizenship and - most importantly of all - an end to birthright citizenship to kill the incentive.
Trump spent a long time saying it should happen. But even he didn’t dare even propose the mechanism by which it would happen, and if there’s any reason (above all else) for pessimism on this issue, it’s that.
2rafa
8mo ago
The blackest of blackpills is that you really can just kill all your enemies and stay in power for the rest of your life.
Costin the Jew, Israel and Me
or
Bronze Age Zionism
In the Atlantic last week, a profile of Costin Alamariu, listless MIT graduate, former investment banker, itinerant philosopher, schizoposter, dissident right fixture and, of course, 'Bronze Age Pervert'. And, it seems, Romanian-American Jew, likely one of many whose exit was bought in the final years of Ceaușescu's dictatorship by Israel (in exchange for cash, arms and loans).
I once argued extensively on the previous iteration of this forum that it was extremely unlikely that BAP was Jewish (even though he occasionally said things to this effect, he also sometimes claimed he was joking, and in any case non-gentile-white (especially Jewish) ancestry is a meme in dissident right circles). While BAP's more extreme antisemitism was clearly performative, and his 'racism' often as hostile to sedentary, fat American whites as it was to other groups, it was more viscerally (if not intellectually) radical than that of most Jewish far-right antisemites, like Ron Unz. I referred to various posts and comments, and even his appearance in what was at that time one of the only leaked pictures of him. In this article, the author all but confirms that Alamariu is, in fact, actually Jewish, which means I was wrong. I extend a mea culpa to those who disagreed with me.
It is hard to say for sure that BAP is 'the' central figure in the modern dissident right, although I struggle to think of a more prominent personality among online, English-speaking dissident rightists (MacDonald is much less well-known and comes across in many cases as a dull academic, Fuentes is a clown, and Spencer is a laughing stock within the movement even if he is likely still more famous outside of it), but he is certainly one of them. Jewish far-rightists (whether they are open about their ethnic identity or conceal it) are nothing new; Jews are overrepresented, as Sailer has joked, in every intellectual endeavor except perhaps golf-course architecture. The British-Jewish writer Tamara Berens, writing in Mosaic (a more religious sister magazine to Tablet) briefly describes BAP's Jewishness and his feud with Nick Fuentes in a 'report' on dissident right antisemitism, though she does not really engage with his ideas as regards his Jewishness. Discussion of Alamariu's political identity as distinctly Jewish is largely nonexistent beyond the occasional tweeted insult directed at him by detractors on the far-right since his identity became widely known.
We might distinguish here (in a way BAP could reject) between purely genetic and cultural identity. Raised in a first-generation Jewish immigrant family in the heavily Jewish community of Newton (in 2002, almost 40% of Newton's population was Jewish), with a best friend who - The Atlantic reports - is now in a position of "leadership in his synagogue" and with numerous Holocaust survivor relatives, Alamariu seems in many ways to have grown up in a substantially more Jewish milieu than many secular Jewish-Americans, myself included. At university, he seems to have been profoundly influenced by the work of Strauss, one of the more famous Jewish-American philosophers of the late 20th century (certainly on the right).
So is BAPism, incoherent and unfocused though it is, particularly Jewish in a way that even most theories of political philosophy established or contributed to by Jews are not? I think it might be.
-
Alamariu's political philosophy fits most neatly into the early Zionist, post-Nietzschean climate of a subset of early 20th century Jewish intellectualism in Central Europe. Early Zionism, particularly in the Germanic world, was extremely heavily influenced by Nietzsche, Herzl himself paraphrases him several times. The Nietzschean new man became the New Jew, the Israeli. Large aspects of BAP's discussion of both gender identity and Jewish identity (when he is being serious) paraphrase the work of the German-Jewish writer Otto Weininger, with the notable exception that Weininger considered Christianity the 'antidote' to the ideas he dislikes, while BAP considers it a descendant of the same philosophy. BAP's extreme misogyny is also largely taken from Weininger. This connection was noted in some cases long before BAP's own Jewish identity was widely confirmed. Both consider Jewishness as a quasi-metaphysical state of being distinct from the ethnic reality of being Jewish; to some extent this is a rejection of the hard HBD group-selection stance of MacDonald or even (arguably) Ron Unz, though the latter's views are somewhat fluid on this question.
-
Jewish dissident rightists face a unique obstacle compared to their gentile peers, which is that they must square their politics with Israel. Consider that to the modal white nationalist, the mythical Western European or North American overtly ethnat twenty-first century state is a fantasy; like Wakanda, hidden from colonialists in the deepest jungle, it can be imagined without compromise or concession to reality. For the Jewish reactionary, Israel is an impossible obstacle because it actually exists. This separates the modern Jewish dissident rightist even from his late-19th or early-20th century equivalents. BAP's writing on Israel is limited, but his most significant commentary is in this piece from 2019, in which he explicitly links western wignat identity and Israeli 'religious zionism', and condemns them both as essentially vapid, empty ideas. The piece is rambling and contradicts itself multiple times, but in it one can see (perhaps) a uniquely Jewish contempt for modern Israel grounded in the above German-Jewish philosophy.
I will now expand on this second point.
"It was always the criticism of traditional secular Zionists—the ones, after all, who founded Israel not waiting for religious deliverance—that it was precisely the rabbis, the priests, that had corrupted the Jewish nation to weakness and that made impossible its ability to establish a state. [Yoram] Hazony’s “religious Jewish nation” has been tried before, in the diaspora, and was rejected by secular Zionists for a reason. It is powerless."
To be a Jewish rightist is for me to look upon Israel as an impossibly profound disappointment. A fetid, desert shithole full of ugly, functional, modernist architecture, a tiny, valuable tech and export sector propping up a vast population of fecund religious peasants who dress like 18th century Polish fur traders and who lack the slightest inclination to high civilization or even to the defense of their homeland (and who indeed consider it religiously illegitimate), assorted barbarians, and Slavs with 1/8th Jewish ancestry. To the left, generic Western globally-homogenized secularists. In the middle, the Mizrachim and Sephardim, dull and largely irrelevant beyond electoral politics and clinging to their religion. And then the 'religious zionists', ironic quasi-descendants of Jabotinsky, not-quite-shtetl dwellers practicing a bizarre form of nationalist socialism in which their mission under God is to build more razor-wire-fenced ugly Arizona-esque suburban architecture on the hills outside East Jerusalem taken from Arabs in the belief that this represents the height of their potential contribution to the world.
Where once early Zionists considered themselves in the Nietzschean mold, establishing an outpost of European civilization in the Middle East that could - with the help of Jewish ingenuity and intelligence - perhaps eventually become a best-case example of Western civilization, a great European state that belonged to the (Ashkenazi) Jews as the other European states did to their respective peoples - by the mid-late 20th century Zionism had become a debased form of nationalist socialism in the German fashion, in which the only thing that mattered was the preservation of Jews as a tribe in the most vulgar way. Or, as BAP writes:
"Israel’s reason for existence continues to be the reason it was founded: it is a state founded for the sake of racial survival. As such it doesn’t matter that it experiences cultural decay, political instability, or that it has grafted on some other institutions, borrowed from Western liberalism, which it had to borrow primarily for public relations purposes."
In Israel, high culture is irrelevant in part because when the only important thing is racial identity and racial survival, nothing else matters. Israel represents the ethnostate as it is in practice, the worship of the lowest common denominator provided he is "one of us". Ethnonationalism, for BAP, is an inherently debased ideology because it elevates the worst of a people on an arbitrary basis. As Kevin Williamson argued upon Trump's election, not every poor white Appalachian deserved to succeed in modernity, even if Donald told them every failure wasn't their fault; the same thing should apply to Israel but does not, for there an imbecile or lowlife is still, "at least" Jewish, still belongs and so must be accomodated and even (as Alamariu's family was) intentionally retrieved. Ethonationalism as slave morality, in other words. Survival is not enough, birth rates do not in fact detemine civilizational greatness, or Niger would be the finest nation on earth. @SecureSignals once asked about my view on ethnonationalism, I guess this is it: that you can lose even if you win, and that it can be a path to the worst kind of tolerance of the worst aspects of your own people.
It is here, then, that the Jewish roots of BAP's ideology and identity might lie behind the Greco-Roman LARP, in the yearning for a grand national project that never quite worked the way it was hoped to. There is a deep mourning for a 'European' Ashkenazi Jewish state, one that goes far beyond the right. One sees it everywhere in remaining diasporic fiction and culture, sometimes even in Israel, but its most notable (or famous) example is in Michael Chabon's 2007 book 'The Yiddish Policeman's Union', which imagines a fictional Ashkenazi state carved out of Alaska, in a world in which Israel in its Middle Eastern incarnation collapses into anarchy and war just a few months into its existence. The plot itself is largely a thinly-veiled attack on George Bush's policy in the middle east; Chabon is a leftist anti-zionist who opposes Jewish in-marriage (ie. encourages Jews to marry gentiles for the sake of diversity). Still, on the left as well as the intellectual right, then, the unsatisfactoriness of Israel is a mounting disappointment. A state built to serve the weakest members of a tribe cannot turn around and build a culture that worships strength, success, or achievement. Discussion of the failure of Zionist utopianism is now commonplace, even as those who grasp at it fail to understand why it happened.
So the Jew leaves the shtetl, where in some form (whether in Judea or elsewhere) he has lived for millenia, accomplishing almost nothing of note. He changes the world, and for a brief, glorious period it appears as if he is capable (at least) of true greatness, of something approaching eternity, of a new, maybe even greater, civilization, grander than what has come before. And then he fails to build it as he returns to the desert, so he restores the shtetl (so kindly brought over wholesale by the chareidim) and disappears into mediocrity, into nothingness. Terminal decline. The fear of this desert haunts me as it seems to do Alamariu because Israel, really, is the graveyard of Jewish exceptionalism. Perhaps it is better to gamble on the future of the West than to accept fate and be swept beneath the sands of the Negev where one might disappear from history.
I think storytellers in general have always been very fond of “the king is actually dead” tropes (list) because they serve to make things interesting, but real life examples are very much rare.
The big problem is that the inner circle who actually do encounter and know the leader personally (and who would therefore know he was dead) also stand to benefit the most from his death, and so are the least likely to maintain the veil of secrecy.
Putin’s death is a great opportunity for Medvedev or whoever else to clean house, declare the invasion a mistake made by idiots, and to focus on the old pastime of personal enrichment and kleptocracy. For nobody in the inner circle to do it would take the genuine and sincere ideological commitment to the Ukrainian war as a national project that I suspect is lacking in the Kremlin.
2rafa
11mo ago
Homicides are usually recorded and so serve as a good proxy for wider violent crime rates, and homicide rates are much higher in the US.
Medical workers who kill patients are some of the hardest murderers to catch, but major cases have been found in the US and Europe, there doesn’t seem to be much difference.
2rafa
1mo ago
On the gripping hand, I really do hate the ATF with all my heart. What do you think, could they have picked up ol' Brian at the airport rather than creating the conditions for an early morning shootout?
There needs to be much stricter control of both federal and local/state law enforcement executing these ridiculous and unnecessary midnight raids just to frighten suspects and their families. It obviously leads to more violence since people are going to be delirious seconds after waking up. If an alternative is reasonable a judge should be able to sanction the relevant law enforcement agency.
One of the things that I find interesting about Google is that when they were making (and now they are making) a ton of money, they didn't split the profits between investors (either via buybacks or dividends) and staff, they just hired orders of magnitude more people.
In finance, things are very different. If the bank is making a lot more money, as much money as possible gets used to pay everyone (those at the top much more than those below, of course) a lot more. As Warren Buffett famously noted, banks are run as much for employees as for shareholders, and indeed more for the former. Investment banking teams hire, for the most part, the minimum possible number of people they can get away with without making shorter decks/worse pitches than the next bank. That's one of several reasons behind the 100 hour week. Everyone is mostly happy with this, nobody wants to halve their bonus so they can work a few fewer hours.
Google is also famously a company that many have declared is run more in the interests of its employees (engineers described as coasting, practically retired, etc) than its shareholders, and the only two of the latter who matter are off in Hawaii on the beach anyway.
But at Google, they've spent 15 years printing money, and instead of just paying all the engineers $5m a year each, they decided to hire 25,000 more engineers to make failed products. It seems like such a weird failure of incentives. Were the early employees just so rich from their equity stakes that they didn't care about money anymore? Why did they agree to hire so many more people instead of just paying themselves from the unbelievable rents they extracted from the rest of the economy? Did Sergey and Larry really want that many more people on payroll?
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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'.
/
- 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".
/
- 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
5mo ago
Very cringe that the official subreddit is named Aotearoa rather than just New Zealand. On the other hand, I suppose it’s an interesting form of accepted cultural appropriation, whites are encouraged to use the Maori terms and the white rugby players do the Haka, whereas in other Anglo settler colonies like the US or Canada or even Australia whites putting on Indian chief hats and LARPing Navajo rituals has gradually become less socially acceptable, at least in the PMC.
The largest problem is that the central government doesn’t control spending. This is why the terminal case of money printing exists, Argentina’s constitution is extremely fucked up and resembles a combination of the pre-civil war US, the EU and a modern federal country. Provinces are supreme other than some powers they nominally ‘delegate’ to the federal government. There are like 20 provinces and many are controlled by a single party, cluster of local patricians or just a single family.
Read this extraordinary OECD profile. Argentina is one of the most decentralized countries in the world. Provinces seem to have a constitutional right to borrow up to 25% of their income (most of which comes from their share of federal tax receipts) per year from the federal government. It would be as if US states could unilaterally require the federal reserve to print money for them on an ongoing basis, without Washington being able to do much about it. The federal government collects something like 85% of tax income, but then distributes in practice well over the appropriate share of it to the provinces through this weird arrangement and must pay for all spending at the federal level on the military, infrastructure, etc.
In theory the federal congress can take over provincial government to rein in spending in an emergency, but in practice local power centers are themselves so populist and so entrenched that this is widely seen as impossible, and whenever a federal politician tries to bring the provinces to heel, the provincial elites get scared their powerful patronage networks will go unfunded and so replace the leader with someone more amenable.
If you look at spending patterns every time there’s a remotely non-terrible year in Argentina spending jumps 10-15% in real terms. Like the friend whose money seems to run through his fingers, they can’t not spend everything they have, and more. And of course the provincial system creates perverse incentives where each province has to maximize its bennies before the whole thing goes kaput again.
There’s a very amusing irony to internet socialists claiming patriarchy is the result of capitalism.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels discuss ‘patriarchy’ in an interesting and sometimes under-remarked upon way. They don’t support or criticize it, necessarily, but they analyze it. As most know, they say that patriarchy or the general form of family relations is essentially a form of property relationship that, in securing paternity, allows for the inheritance of private property (principally land).
Interestingly, Marx and Engels also argued that patriarchy was in terminal decline by the mid 19th century, because capitalism (a) made conditions so poor for proletarians that most had no property to pass on, reducing the power of the patriarch and (b) women increasingly had their own wealth because capitalism pressed them (and children) into the labor market, also reducing the power of the patriarch.
So the great irony is that while, yes, Marx and Engels weren’t ‘defenders’ of patriarchy and did indeed criticize the effect on women of socially conservative societal norms (especially in bourgeois society, where they were personally more comfortable), they actually considered many aspects of patriarchy to be in severe decline under capitalism due to the profit incentive and desire of capitalists to erode the traditional family to grow their workforce.
In other words, Karl Marx himself thought capitalism eroded patriarchy.
2rafa
23d 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.
The most important thing to understand about investment banking analysts (and associates) is that they do - in the purest, Graeberian sense of the word - a bullshit job. Moreso even than consultants.
Investment banking is a critical part of a market economy. But the role of the analyst and associate is a curious historical oddity. Before modern investment banking emerged in the 1980s the role didn’t really exist; junior bankers were clerks and then the good ones quickly became dealmakers. It emerged because every major investment bank can handle the same IPOs, M&A, secondary offerings and so on in exactly the same way. There is no functional difference whatsoever between hiring Goldman Sachs and hiring Morgan Stanley, or Barclays or Citigroup for that matter, to IPO your big tech business or to issue debt for your public athleisure company. They know the same people at the same funds, can structure the same things in the same way etc.
At the boutique and mid-market level, and in niche markets where capital is harder to find and more picky (like the one I work in), actual skill on the part of bankers is required because it’s not guaranteed that you’ll actually be able to raise money (for example). But at the major bank (‘bulge bracket’) level, even the most retarded banker of all time is not going to have any issue IPO’ing Arm or issuing equity on behalf of Nvidia or Shell.
This led to a strange arms race starting in the late 1980s among bankers about who could add the most ‘value’ to their client offering. The banks operate as a soft cartel in fee terms, so Barclays isn’t going to undercut Goldman by offering half the fees in basis point terms on a deal. But they can compete on flair, and on pitch decks. This, in turn, led to the pitch deck arms race that exists today, where junior bankers work 100 hour weeks making up bullshit numbers for PowerPoint slides that nobody reads in the hope that this will surely lead to us getting the deal and not the shitstains at MS or Bank of America and so on.
In the 1980s, a pitch deck might be a few hastily Xerox’d pages stapled into a booklet. Today it’s a 200 page brochure. No bulge bracket bank can opt-out because then you look like amateurs next to Goldman’s production design (all BB banks have large graphics departments that work on this stuff, not even outsourced to India but often actually in NYC/London). Clients don’t care because they pay the same fee regardless (as mentioned), so they might as well take the brochure.
The analyst economy works for banks. Most analysts leave after a couple of years, either because they’re forced out or go to private equity, those who are good enough and don’t want to leave can stay and eventually rise to become actual dealmakers (above VP you’re essentially working a normal corporate sales job most of the time).
Beyond the fact that the need for the role is nonexistent (analysts perform no intellectual labor, just downloading and copy-pasting from Bloomberg/Factset), I think one of the best things AI could do would be to get everyone to realize how pointless pitchbook inflation has been. But it’s more likely this is just an excuse for layoffs because deal volume is down since 2021.
2rafa
1mo ago
The US has sanctioned Venezuela, funded an armed coup attempt and continuously worked to undermine the country. As with most of America's foreign policy misadventures it ends up with a massive flood of migrants.
Venezuelans are fleeing because 25 years of catastrophic socialist policies have completely destroyed the economy. Leaving the current government in power is the single biggest cause of migrant outflows, and they will continue as long as the Chavistas are in control.
Did the Speaker of the House of Commons alter precedent because he was worried MPs would be murdered if he didn’t?
Parliamentary procedure in Britain is labyrinthine and extremely boring, so I will attempt to summarize briefly the procedure under which the events occurred. To simplify, the Conservative government has a large majority in Parliament, but there are still designated days where opposition parties can put forward motions that will almost certainly never affect government policy but which they want to ‘discuss’ (i.e. use to grandstand to supporters, media and potential voters) in front of the legislature.
Yesterday, it was the Scottish National Party’s turn to discuss a motion calling for (implicitly) a unilateral ceasefire by Israel on Gaza. The SNP’s leader, Humza Yousaf (who is not an MP) has spoken regularly about Palestine, is himself Muslim and has a wife who is Palestinian with family in Gaza. But Scotland itself has only a very small and electorally insignificant Muslim population. The primary reason for the SNP’s motion was that, after various major scandals on everything from transwomen to embezzlement, their grip on Scotland and its fifty parliamentary seats is likely to be significantly weakened at the next general election, with Labour likely to reclaim many seats from them. Labour has not committed itself to a ceasefire in this way, but has called for a “humanitarian pause”, which both sides have admitted is largely a semantic distinction, but a distinction nonetheless. The SNP intended that many pro-Palestinian Labour MPs would vote with them on the motion (which again was seen as having had no chance of actually passing), going against the wishes of their party, making the Labour leader look weak, and hopefully therefore gaining some ground on them ahead of the election.
In a surprise move, the Speaker (who was formerly a Labour MP but must remain officially neutral) allowed Labour to hijack the SNP’s ‘opposition day’ by first allowing a vote on a Labour amendment before the vote on the SNP’s motion. The Labour amendment was largely the same but clarified that Israel ‘could not be expected’ to cease fire until all hostages were released. By convention, one opposition party would not be able to table an amendment to another opposition party’s motion on such a day, only the government can. The procedural details are complicated but essentially the action ensured in practice that the SNP felt their motion wouldn’t come to a vote the way they intended (this is confusing for me, but so much of British parliamentary procedure is essentially arbitrary and malleable that I suppose this is explained by something). The SNP and the Conservatives both walked out in protest (the latter opportunistically, because it allowed them to sidestep the whole ceasefire vote for now, and because they may have been worried their amendment wouldn’t pass), and harshly criticized the speaker, Hoyle, who it turned out was warned by his own clerks that this would happen.
But the question remains why Hoyle, who despite being ex-Labour has retained a relatively positive reputation in the House, accepted Labour’s request for an unprecedented amendment insertion into the SNP’s opposition day motion. What did Starmer (the Labour leader) say to him? This morning, rumors swirled that Starmer had ‘extorted’ Hoyle in some way. There are two ways of interpreting that allegation, if it has any substance.
The first is that Starmer transparently reminded Hoyle of the fact that the speaker is re-elected by each incoming parliament, and that Starmer will almost certainly be the next Prime Minister with a large majority at his disposal. And ultimately, whatever the reason, the act avoided any nasty Labour infighting over the SNP motion that would otherwise have been expected. This seems to be the SNP allegation, that Hoyle did Starmer a political favor both to take the wind out of the SNP’s sails and to avoid discontent in his own party, in exchange for job security at the next election. (Note that if Hoyle was removed as Speaker, he would presumably return to being a Labour MP under Starmer).
The second possibility is darker, and has been alleged openly by many Conservative politicians today. Supposedly, Hoyle is a mild-mannered man who considers himself responsible in part for the safety of MPs. Per this narrative Starmer supposedly showed or related to him death threats made by Muslim constituents to Labour MPs and their families if they didn’t vote for a ceasefire, and suggested on that basis that Hoyle must allow the amendment or, presumably, any assassinations of MPs would be on him. It is only two years since the last MP was assassinated by an Islamist constituent, who explicitly said he did so because he held said MP responsible for the death of Muslims, so Hoyle allegedly went over the advice of his clerks to try to prevent it happening again by letting Labour table their amendment. Of course, this in and of itself could easily just be a manipulation tactic by Labour.
As it is likely in neither Hoyle nor Starmer’s interest to reveal what happened (and if either did, it is questionable whether they could be trusted), the events - for now - are likely to remain the subject of great speculation.
2rafa
2mo ago
Isn't that what happened here? In 1972, King County was 92% White. In 2022, it was 63% White. We imported a bunch of people who are incapable of maintaining American civilization, and they vote with their coethnics for racial spoils. In Seattle, most of this is Asians, of various stripes, but it's also Mexicans, and more recently Africans.
Most of the hobos I saw in Seattle were white, and of the black ones I’d guess at least a substantial proportion were ADOS. And your own video link does, in your own words, show that the primary proponents of this kind of thing are white locals, whose ancestors have presumably been in America for at least some time. That suggests it’s self inflicted by locals rather than a product of federal immigration policy. The Asians and Latinos who push these policies are usually just those assimilated into that white progressive milieu. I very much doubt the Asians in general are hugely in favor of this, they seem largely apolitical and are disproportionately targeted by criminals in the crime wave (eg the pregnant Asian woman randomly shot at the intersection last year).
It's not unrelated, it's directly related.
Of course they’re both examples of dysfunctional liberalism in practice. But it was unrelated to the story.
Libertarianism is incompatible with democracy. I think this is the obvious realization that people like Hoppe had.
Libertarianism + democracy is the end of libertarianism for two primary reasons.
The first is that pretty much only (some) Anglos like libertarianism; the Swiss have their guns and direct democracy but they also call the police if you play music after 9pm or use the wrong recycling bin. Because Anglos have tended to establish the world’s wealthier major states, mass immigration to them if open borders should exist is inevitable. These other peoples are unlikely to have a particularly great fondness for libertarianism, and so will slowly dismantle it as soon as they get the vote (just as happened, to some extent, in the US from the 19th century onwards). You could limit citizenship to only descendants of some core population, but that in turn both eventually ends ‘democracy’ (certainly in the popular modern sense) and creates a huge resentful underclass prone to supporting upheaval, as happened in Liberia.
The second reason is that even without mass immigration libertarianism trends towards high degrees of inequality and thus creates a lot of ‘losers’ drawn to redistributive movements hostile to libertarian ideas. Unlike the capitalist welfare state and feudalism, both of which involve extensive patronage economies, libertarianism leaves the rich fundamentally exposed. The result is an unstable, high inequality, Latin American style political economy, in which rich libertarians routinely race off against socialists in both democratic competition and (low and high intensity) military conflicts that create huge instability and economic deadweight that stunts growth and productivity and often manifests itself as extreme corruption and high levels of violent crime.
“Libertarianism” / “classical liberalism” is a thought experiment, the outcome of which is rationally that the long-term best functioning societies typically involve elites that grant some receptivity to public opinion but do not chain themselves to it. Call it managed democracy, Venetian oligarchy, ‘Singapore style autocracy’ or whatever you want. (Democracy is political incelism etc etc). Even if it worked it would be a poor idea; one should consider the deeply tragic and deleterious effects of a lack of strong (compulsive) guidance on the underclass, as has been the case since the 1960s and which is the product of “social liberalism” ie social libertarianism.
2rafa
4mo ago
Historically poor women have always worked, and have worked outside the home in large numbers in cities since the Industrial Revolution made the previous system of cottage industries economically untenable. In the US, single women reached 50% labor force participation outside the home by 1930, so well before the sexual revolution. The archetypal Victorian factory - if in textiles, paper, pottery or a number of other industries - also employed large numbers of women. A lot of female labor force participation graphs from the mid-20th century also limit the y axis to somewhere around 45-75%, so the growth looks larger as a proportion of the starting number. Even in the 1960s, a substantial number of women worked outside the home.
People who talk about the civil rights era and women usually have no idea what they’re talking about. Equality of the sexes was inserted as a poison pill by a Southern Democrat in the 1964 act, but it passed anyway and nobody paid it much attention. Profession specific bars were dropped for a variety of reasons, while prosecution of sexual harassment in the workplace was more of a cultural shift than a legal one, since a lot of it had always been a crime under various other terms.
2rafa
5mo ago
I went for a walk this morning and passed the staging area, by Marble Arch, for the now weekly Palestine protests. On opposite sides of the street, and in an excellent bit of unintentional visual comedy, sat the information tents for the Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party respectively, both in many ways orthodox Marxists, and yet sworn enemies for reasons you can read about in this twelve-part volume. (They largely concern just how disastrous the fall of the Soviet Union was for the world revolution, and an apparent disagreement over the nature of North Vietnam’s specific form of communism.)
Both factions have seemingly determined that these Palestine protests are the main way they might attract new blood, and therefore hand out many posters and flags with their respective logos on them. So a bizarre spectacle plays out on London’s streets, as two bands of aging white communists try to appeal to young Muslims (who likely neither know nor care about Marx) in the waging of this strange internecine war among Leninists.
If the Arabs destroyed Israel militarily there would be a lot of kvetching for a few years, then nothing. The refugees/survivors would presumably be accepted by various Western countries, and in a decade Palestine would be just another MENA shithole riven by internal conflict between Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which would adopt a lot of secular Palestinian nationalist elements, and Saudi-backed Sunni militias, who would adopt the rest. It would be a poor dump and nobody would care about it ever again.
Of course, one other thing is that the Jews would never again retake the land (at least in the foreseeable future). America would decide that ‘what’s done is done’, neither Turkey nor Cyprus nor Egypt nor anyone else would give Jews staging ground for an operation to retake their country, the ‘West’ would decide that annoying the Arabs further was unwise and besides, the Jews would be back in the diaspora and settled.
But that underlines the point, really. 98% of the region is Arab, always has been and always will be. Sympathy is therefore difficult. Say the price to secure a white supermajority in Western Europe and North America forever was to hand a tiny sliver of land - say the state of New Jersey, or half of Flanders - to everyone else as an ethnostate. Practically every single wignat I’ve ever encountered would take that deal instantly, no matter the fact that a few locals would be mad. US secessionists talk openly of handing half their country to the ‘enemy’ in a ‘national divorce’.
But the Arabs, even after being trounced several times, throw a fit at the idea of losing - and this is true even in the case of an unrealistically expansionist Zionism - a tiny percentage of their land. And that’s a ‘worst case’ scenario; the Jews have no interest in Arabia itself, nor in Persia or almost all of North Africa or Anatolia (despite having an extensive history in those places).
In truth, there is more than enough land in the region to settle all Palestinians without great hardship, without approaching an unliveable population density and without removing almost all of the region from Muslim control. The Palestinians have been offered a vastly better future than practically any other defeated people in history (in many ways including the Germans and Japanese, who suffered more, lost more, and sacrificed cultural autonomy to American global homogenization, whereas Palestinians have preserved their Islam, their radicalism, their irredentism and most cultural traditions), including the Jews (whom they expelled from their own lands after the founding of Israel, of course).
To me this is as if someone complains that communists have taken over their country and expropriated them. Tragic, I obviously sympathize. Then they say ‘well actually they haven’t, they’re actually just social democrats and they taxed me a little on my billion dollar fortune’. My sympathy is lowered. The expropriation of Arabs in former mandatory Palestine is sad, but it does not seem to me sadder than the expropriation of the region’s Jews (something that of course happened not once but repeatedly for centuries before the founding of Israel), which few seem concerned with.
My continued position is that the Israelis have treated the Palestinians substantially better than Arabs have treated Jews, than Shiites have treated Sunnis (and vice versa) and than warring Sunni tribes have treated each other in most of the conflicts in the region’s history. When they force their way out of their containment zone (implemented due to their attacks on civilians), they have a chimp out and rape, torture and kill women and children like a bronze age warband with RPGs. What mercy do they deserve?
Who's on Threads?
99% of social media products fail, even those from established and successful tech (even social media) companies. In the last two years alone Clubhouse and BeReal have been extremely well-funded, seen a surge in users, and then fallen into seemingly terminal decline. The default assumption should be that Threads fails.
Still, it's an interesting product. The most interesting thing about Threads is that it isn't really trying to be Twitter. It has no web app and doesn't seem designed for Twitter's main use cases (breaking news/announcements of various kinds, and anonymous short-form internet discussion and meme propagation through networks of people who follow each other with mutual interests).
Threads has no web app and can't be used signed-out, and unlike both Reddit and Twitter the majority of normal users won't be anonymous, because their Threads account will be linked to their Instagram account. Of course creating a secondary anonymous Instagram account to use with Threads is a possibility, but it's certainly more hoops to jump through than on Twitter.
'Following' on Threads isn't particularly important. You can do it, and you'll definitely see someone's content, but most of the feed is 'suggested content' that the algorithm thinks you'll like. On Twitter, you build your social network and it sometimes recommends good accounts to follow. On Threads, you start with a default pool of content that is maybe 20% your Instagram friends and 80% top trending, and then over time the algorithm corrects to maybe 20% your Instagram friends, 10% top trending, and 70% algorithmic dopamine rush.
Threads is trying to be the TikTok of text.
This strikes me as potentially a far more compelling business case than Twitter, whether or not Zuck actually pulls it off. Reddit, Twitter, various forums and so on are full of vast amounts of compelling short-form text content - jokes, short stories, news, memes, smut, 'ask me anything' type content, gossip, political or current affairs commentary, the occasional compelling chart or graph or whatever - but accessing them requires effort.
On Reddit you're the person who has to go to a specific subreddit (or sets up a custom homepage with your favorites), looks for the content, sorts it, then manually clicks on each link, sees if the post is good. On Twitter, you slowly and laboriously build out your network of followers by weaving in and out of other people's tweets and replies, clicking on their profiles, dismissing them if they're boring, private or post nothing, or maybe scrolling through them and then following them if they seem interesting. In the end you have a custom feed of X followed, but any time you want to expand your circle of interests / followed list, you repeat some form of this process.
Threads, if it works, will distil all this text into the most compelling nuggets of content (presumably with some kind of monetization or influencer model at some point) and then deliver an infinite conveyor belt of them algorithmically tuned to your exact interests. What Reddit and Twitter require their users to do manually, Threads will automate. You like jokes from 'The Office' or short-form fanfiction of Disney movies or thoughtful criticism of video game mechanics or DC political gossip? (Millions of people do.) Threads - if it's able to build a user base big enough (it probably won't) - will deliver an endless supply of these to you directly, no searching or following or whatever necessary, just content. Just like TikTok.
Like TikTok, Threads rejects large aspects of the 'creator economy' that exists on YouTube, Twitch and Instagram (although the latter is moving away from it). ByteDance recognized that most users don't care where their content comes from, TikTok is happy to blow up one post from a small time creator to a hundred million views (if it's really funny or whatever), then never promote any of their other content ever again if the algorithm determines it's less compelling. The magic of TikTok is that while there are many successful creators, much of the content comes from relative randoms who languish in obscurity posting stuff with 5 views until they have one really funny sketch, or one really adorable video of their dog or whatever, then that gets shared unbelievably widely.
Most people aren't consistently compelling content creators, but millions of people probably tell one really funny joke a year, or have one genuinely insightful realization. On Reddit these moments usually get lost in the noise, on Twitter they're buried because they're made by an account with 12 followers that only posts a few times a month. On Threads, the algorithm can recognize that they're something special due to proportional like rates or sharing or whatever, and promote the fuck out of it. Then multiply that by millions of creators, and you can establish this successful force-feeding of content.
You could outline the history of social media kind of like this:
A first generation, in which people primarily followed real-life friends or acquaintances of those friends (and so on). Those real-life friends shared their thoughts, pictures, ideas, inane ramblings and so on. This was Facebook and its predecessors like MySpace and Friendster.
A second generation, in which companies realized that dedicated creators (comedians on twitter, models on instagram, vloggers on youtube) were more compelling than most people's friends, and made content that kept users on the platform longer than your inane high school friend's narration of their mundane life. This is the dawn of 'parasocial' media like modern YouTube, Instagram, Twitch and Twitter. Sometimes people still follow real-life friends on these platforms, but increasingly (especially off Instagram), dedicated creators make up the vast majority of the content they consume. Reddit, as a descendant of forums, gradually evolved into this on many/most mainstream or default subreddits.
A third generation, in which instead of the 'creator economy' being like a grocery store where users search for and pick out products, the software itself does it for you, learning your likes and dislikes and then delivering an endless stream of compelling, dopamine-hit content that you can scroll through at your leisure without ever having to search for anything, with zero friction. This is TikTok's genius, and it's why TikTok is the only major new success in social media in over a decade.
Threads probably won't succeed, but I think the idea of a TikTok For Text will at some point. The model is just too good for the idea itself not to work.
More options
Context Copy link