2rafa
2mo ago
This is a news discussion forum and this has been the biggest news for a while, clearly it’s going to be the central topic.
When will the AI penny drop?
I returned from lunch to find that a gray morning had given way to a beautiful spring afternoon in the City, the sun shining on courtyard flowers and through the pints of the insurance men standing outside the pub, who still start drinking at midday. I walked into the office, past the receptionists and security staff, then went up to our floor, passed the back office, the HR team who sit near us, our friendly sysadmin, my analysts, associate, my own boss. I sent some emails to a client, to our lawyers, to theirs, called our small graphics team who design graphics for pitchbooks and prospectuses for roadshows in Adobe whatever. I spoke to our team secretary about some flights and a hotel meeting room in a few weeks. I reviewed a bad model and fired off some pls fixes. I called our health insurance provider and spoke to a surprisingly nice woman about some extra information they need for a claim.
And I thought to myself can it really be that all this is about to end, not in the steady process envisioned by a prescient few a decade ago but in an all-encompassing crescendo that will soon overwhelm us all? I walk around now like a tourist in the world I have lived in my whole life, appreciating every strange interaction with another worker, the hum of commerce, the flow of labor. Even the commute has taken on a strange new meaning to me, because I know it might be over so soon.
All of these jobs, including my own, can be automated with current generation AI agents and some relatively minor additional work (much of which can itself be done by AI). Next generation agents (already in testing at leading labs) will be able to take screen and keystroke recordings (plus audio from calls if applicable) of, say, 20 people performing a niche white collar role over a few weeks and learn pretty much immediately know how to do it as well or better. This job destruction is only part of the puzzle, though, because as these roles go so do tens of millions of other middlemen, from recruiters and consultants and HR and accountants to millions employed at SaaS providers that build tools - like Salesforce, Trello, even Microsoft with Office - that will soon be largely or entirely redundant because whole workflows will be replaced by AI. The friction facilitators of technical modernity, from CRMs to emails to dashboards to spreadsheets to cloud document storage will be mostly valueless. Adobe alone, which those coworkers use to photoshop cute little cover images for M&A pitchbooks, is worth $173bn and yet has been surely rendered worthless, in the last couple of weeks alone, by new multimodal LLMs that allow for precise image generation and editing by prompt1. With them will come an almighty economic crash that will affect every business from residential property managing to plumbing, automobiles to restaurants. Like the old cartoon trope, it feels like we have run off a cliff but have yet to speak gravity into existence.
It was announced yesterday that employment in the securities industry on Wall Street hit a 30-year high (I suspect that that is ‘since records began’, but if not I suppose it coincides with the final end of open outcry trading). I wonder what that figure will be just a few years from now. This was a great bonus season (albeit mostly in trading), perhaps the last great one. My coworker spent the evening speaking to students at his old high school about careers in finance; students are being prepared for jobs that will not exist, a world that will not exist, by the time they graduate.
Walking through the city I feel a strange sense of foreboding, of a liminal time. Perhaps it is self-induced; I have spent much of the past six months obsessed by 1911 to 1914, the final years of the long 19th century, by Mann and Zweig and Proust. The German writer Florian Illies wrote a work of pop-history about 1913 called “the year before the storm”. Most of it has nothing to do with the coming war or the arms race; it is a portrait (in many ways) of peace and mundanity, of quiet progress, of sports tournaments and scientific advancement and banal artistic introspection, of what felt like a rational and evolutionary march toward modernity tempered by a faint dread, the kind you feel when you see flowers on their last good day. You know what will happen and yet are no less able to stop it than those who are comfortably oblivious.
In recent months I have spoken to almost all smartest people I know about the coming crisis. Most are still largely oblivious; “new jobs will be created”, “this will just make humans more productive”, “people said the same thing about the internet in the 90s”, and - of course - “it’s not real creativity”. A few - some quants, the smarter portfolio managers, a couple of VCs who realize that every pitch is from a company that wants to automate one business while relying for revenue on every other industry that will supposedly have just the same need for people and therefore middlemen SaaS contracts as it does today - realize what is coming, can talk about little else.
Many who never before expressed any fear or doubts about the future of capitalism have begun what can only be described as prepping, buying land in remote corners of Europe and North America where they have family connections (or sometimes none at all), buying crypto as a hedge rather than an investment, investigating residency in Switzerland and researching countries likely to best quickly adapt to an automated age in which service industry exports are liable to collapse (wealthy, domestic manufacturing, energy resources or nuclear power, reasonably low population density, produce most food domestically, some natural resources, political system capable of quick adaptation). America is blessed with many of these but its size, political divisions and regional, ethnic and cultural tensions, plus an ingrained highly individualistic culture mean it will struggle, at least for a time. A gay Japanese friend who previously swore he would never return to his homeland on account of the homophobia he had experienced there has started pouring huge money into his family’s ancestral village and directly told me he was expecting some kind of large scale economic and social collapse as a result of AI to force him to return home soon.
Unfortunately Britain, where manufacturing has been largely outsourced, most food and much fuel has to be imported and which is heavily reliant on exactly the professional services that will be automated first seems likely to have to go through one of the harshest transitions. A Scottish portfolio manager, probably in his 40s told me of the compound he is building on one of the remote islands off Scotland’s west coast. He grew up in Edinburgh, but was considering contributing a large amount of money towards some church repairs and the renovation of a beloved local store or pub of some kind to endear himself to the community in case he needed it. I presume that in big tech money, where I know far fewer people than others here, similar preparations are being made. I have made a few smaller preparations of my own, although what started as ‘just in case’ now occupies an ever greater place in my imagination.
For almost ten years we have discussed politics and society on this forum. Now events, at last, seem about to overwhelm us. It is unclear whether AGI will entrench, reshape or collapse existing power structures, will freeze or accelerate the culture war. Much depends on who exactly is in power when things happen, and on whether tools that create chaos (like those causing mass unemployment) arrive much before those that create order (mass autonomous police drone fleets, ubiquitous VR dopamine at negligible cost). It is also a twist of fate that so many involved in AI research were themselves loosely involved in the Silicon Valley circles that spawned the rationalist movement, and eventually through that, and Scott, this place. For a long time there was truth in the old internet adage that “nothing ever happens”. I think it will be hard to say the same five years from now.
1 Some part of me wants to resign and short the big SaaS firms that are going to crash first, but I’ve always been a bad gambler (and am lucky enough, mostly, to know it).
2rafa
4mo ago
I don’t think Trump is reliable enough as a human being to be a Russian asset, all else aside.
I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and I wouldn’t lose any voters
An iconic quote, for sure, but what is he actually saying? He’s saying that enemy propaganda runs off him like water off a duck’s back, it has no effect. Imagine the infamous Trump ‘pee tape’ alleged by Christopher Steele released tomorrow in The Guardian. Would anyone believe it? We live in the age of AI video now, so presumably not, but even in 2016 special effects were already very good, Trump’s opponents very rich, Trump’s supporters already very suspicious of mainstream media.
This makes Trump a very poor Russian asset. The classic tools of Russian tradecraft - conspicuous-but-plausibly-deniable assassination and kompromat - are both unusable (the former because it would only bring more anti-Russia politicians to power and the latter because it would have no effect on Trump’s popularity). The only other thing the Russians had in the Cold War, and the source of most double agents, was communism and ideology, but Trump has little of that and these days neither does Russia.
2rafa
1yr ago
Well we can look at the facts, which are that since the 1980s gay rights have become widely accepted, gay marriage legalized across the West; homophobia seriously reduced, and yet at the same time ages of consent have risen (substantially in parts of Canada and Europe), punishments for abuse of children have hugely increased, many more people are in jail for these crimes, and - perhaps most significantly - it’s much less socially acceptable for a 25 or 30 year old man to have a 15/16 year old girlfriend in 2023 than it was in 1973 or 1993. That’s a good thing (in my opinion), but it suggests that things are moving further against the direction you suggest is likely.
2rafa
1yr ago
Three overlapping claims count as Ayys. Here are my thoughts on all three, add yours.
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Life somewhere else in the universe: Very likely, it's quite possible primitive life even exists elsewhere in the solar system.
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Intelligent life somewhere else in the universe: Moderately likely, FERMI paradox can be resolved in a number of satisfactory ways.
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Intelligent life that has deliberately visited earth, in person, regularly since the middle of the 20th century: Very unlikely.
2rafa
2mo ago
You live in a country in which the average household income is $80k.
Do you:
A) Self deport your entire family back to a country where the average income is $5k a year
B) Risk a 1% chance of being deported back to that country and a 99% chance of staying in the country where the average household income is $80k.
?
This remind me of when Europeans say “let’s just pay Somalis/Syrians/Afghans to go back to their home countries”, as if the average Somali Swede doesn’t know the lifetime value (for them and all their descendants) of Swedish citizenship over Afghan citizenship isn’t many millions of dollars.
Even if the odds of deportation back to El Salvador were 80%, it would still make sense to stay, by the way. Of course they’re nowhere near that.
2rafa
6mo ago
I strongly question the insurance-based model for healthcare expenses.
One of the things that makes insurance work is that most people never need to use it. Life insurance stops being a thing (in almost all cases) when people retire - and most people make it to retirement. Car and home insurance are things most people pay for every year and yet use maybe once in a lifetime. Many people go on vacation every year for almost their entire lives and yet never file a single travel insurance claim. One third of physicians have been sued according to malpractice claim firms, but this is across a 40-year career - perhaps one in every sixty or seventy years as a doctor will they be (on average) required to use their malpractice insurance, if that. Most ships never sink. Most buildings never burn down. Most planes never crash.
Health insurance is different.
Many Americans, especially in old age, file health insurance claims most or all years. This is not what the classic insurance model is designed for, especially given the cost of some healthcare, which is why the US has created so many ‘workarounds’ that twist the provision of insurance to ameliorate the fundamental fact that health insurance makes no sense. These include Medicare (for a certain vast class of people no insurer could afford to insure) and Medicaid (for another vast class of people no insurer could afford to insure, just for a different reason). It’s why employers have to contribute to health insurance as a stealth tax, because otherwise many people would not be able to afford it. What is the difference between a system in which the government taxes companies by forcing them to pay for employees’ healthcare and then directly pays for the unemployed’s healthcare, and a classic single payer system? Multiple providers which are never really competitive because of an opaque pricing structure.
As with college tuition, the state has created a monster with no cost control, because the government backstops the most expensive treatment for a growing percentage of the population with unlimited “free” money. In a way, the US already has nationalized healthcare, just like it nationalized college education, it’s merely been nationalized in an extremely inefficient way.
I live in a country with a mediocre public healthcare system, in which almost every doctor and nurse is directly employed by the government in a full time capacity. But the NHS isn’t bad because it’s the NHS. It’s comparatively much cheaper than almost any other first-world healthcare system in a country populated primary by Europeans (can’t compare to eg. Singapore or Japan where people are much healthier and the culture is different). The NHS sucks because everything is done for the cheapest price possible, there’s been no economic growth in 20 years, and British GDP / capita is half of that in the USA, because Britain is poor. Its mediocrity is for the most part a consequence of the British economy, which is poor for largely unrelated reasons.
But I increasingly think the model, or maybe at least the Australian or Swiss semi-public models, could be successfully exported to the US. The usual criticisms of universal healthcare are already rendered bullshit by the American system. Homeless psycho scumbags already get millions of dollars in free healthcare in the US subsidized by the middle class taxpayer that they never pay back, it just gets taken from them in a slightly different way. The NHS isn’t really more “socialist” than the US system at all, because working people are still paying for everyone else in the same way. Old people (by far the most expensive demographic) already get free single payer in America. In fact, the US system is arguably even more unfair, since it costs much more as a percentage of GDP than the British system, which given usage statistics means middle class Americans are relatively redistributing more of their wealth to the old and poor in healthcare costs than many Europeans are.
2rafa
7mo ago
I am firmly of the opinion that there very much should be English literature faculties in the Anglosphere. There should be perhaps 12 in total. Oxford, Cambridge, the Ivy League, Stanford, Berkeley. That is sufficient. Each should have the full complement of specialists, modern literature, Shakespeareans, so on, maybe thirty or forty academics each. That is enough.
The same is true for academic philosophy. The same is true for anthropology, Latin, Ancient Greek, Egyptology and so on. These are all worthwhile fields. There is nothing wrong with an advanced civilization having a couple hundred academics who specialize in niche fields within the humanities. Let us have our Chaucer experts and our Hume biographers and our hieroglyphics translators and so on.
But the idea of thousands of English literature or philosophy professors? This is wholly unnecessary. The best, the 99.99th percentile verbal IQ people who also want to be academics (rather than entertainers or salespeople or whatever) can do these jobs at a handful of elite research universities. Nobody else needs to. Nobody else should.
2rafa
9mo ago
Most people are much less productive from home. Home has more distractions; you can play with your dog, hang out with your partner and/or children, watch TV, play video games, do chores, do online shopping without the risk of your boss who sits behind you noticing that you do so for four hours a day, can go for random naps. If you trick yourself into thinking you don’t really need to do this project today you can stop working at 3pm and treat the rest of the day like a weekend, take a two-hour lunch to see a friend etc.
In the office, you can either do your job, procrastinate at your desk (as above, riskier and more boring than doing so at home) or spend time talking or coworkers, which bosses look upon more fondly than other kinds of socialization since they think it helps ‘team cohesion’ or leads to ‘water cooler moments’. You also don’t want to be the guy who always leaves two hours before everyone else, whereas people mostly don’t notice the person who goes afk from their wfh teams chat early.
It’s trivially true in my experience working with otherwise motivated and ambitious people that employees cannot be trusted to work from home. Humans are a social species and our obligations to each other break down - even against our own will! - when we don’t see the people to whom we owe them.
The difficulty I have always had with this theory, as I say below, is that it doesn’t explain why the high IQ minority in India - which, after all, would be larger than the population of most first-world nations - doesn’t at least create a developed-tier society for itself.
We have many examples of countries where you have a large population at one level and a minority that performs much better. And whether it’s in compounds or in open cities, they typically live in much more advanced, first-world level communities than the rest of the population.
I watched this recent video about a city that Guatemala’s rich built for themselves. It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it looks like a nice European city. Sure, the majority of the country lives in third world conditions, but that didn’t stop the largely European elite from building this. Rich Brazilians too, don’t accept living in squalor, nor do the wealthier South Africans. Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia likewise build clean, functioning, safe and high quality neighborhoods. Even the British themselves did this in India, and the neighborhoods they built are still some of the most desirable in the country, with gardens and parks and tree lined streets.
But the Brahmins, as you say, just give up, or don’t seem to care. And I’ve had this conversation with many Indians, and they all agree (often they bring up the topic; I’m not inviting my own cancellation) that India’s beyond hope and there’s little use even trying to clean it up, it just is what it is, as if both the space program and garbage piling up in a street where traffic is intermittently blocked by a wandering cow are immutable realities of Indian life.
I struggle to understand why all these smart people are content with this, and I think it’s because emigration is an option. If you’re a smart Indian and want to live in a clean and developed country, it’s much easier to move to one (as you are doing) than to carve out a space like that in India. But that’s also pretty sad for India. This is the land of the Vedas, the cradle of civilization. It should look like it.
2rafa
1yr ago
while the US Army has tried to go back to a more "traditional" style of ad where white men parachute out of a helicopter, it's failed to bring back the volunteers[.…]the new ad that dropped on 11/6, "Jump" (Twitter, YouTube)
Failed to bring back the volunteers…in 5 days?
Does it not seem more likely that the US is at full employment and military pay is dogshit? Junior enlisted soldiers in the army are paid, it seems, less than $25,000 a year. There may be additional pay for various things, but given a young man (even with only a high school education) can make double that in some low skill jobs or triple (or quadruple) that in the trades, why would anyone become a soldier? In 2009 when there were no jobs anything was better than nothing. Today, blue collar work is in an extraordinary boom.
It’s interesting that many pieces note the last time there was such a big recruitment shortage in the military was in 1999. What else was the case in 1999? A booming US economy and a thirty year low in the unemployment rate. This seems like antiwoke opinion writers projecting their politics onto the more mundane material considerations that more likely affect military recruitment.
RedScarePod isn’t a “left wing” subreddit, the hosts of the podcast were vaguely connected to the Chapo ecosystem but have drifted rightward over the years, but in any case they’re largely irrelevant - threads about the latest podcast episode get only a handful of comments compared to hundreds on many regular threads daily. There is some generic performative conservatism, but I wouldn’t describe it as a right or a left wing sub. It’s a contrarian subreddit for shitposting by young-but-not-zoomer smart-ish people who understand a decade or more of internet culture references. Reminds me of somewhere else…
The subreddit’s main audience is the same group of people who once posted on /r/drama (in fact, it’s pretty much the same picture, and almost every rdrama.net regular who is still on Reddit is on RSP), ie. very online 25-35 year old urban PMC late millennials who grew up in the early 4chan/SomethingAwful era and whose politics, such as they are, are largely unchanged from those shitposting days. Many of those people are also here, of course. The language is generic very online language (“we’re so back”, [x]cel, “it’s all over for [x]”, -pilled) you see it all the time on Twitter and even elsewhere on Reddit. Whenever a very online term breaks into the actual mainstream on TikTok and generic meme pages (eg. “-ussy” posting, remember those days on /r/drama?) it becomes déclassé and is slowly dropped in most contexts.
I agree that there are people who are meta-fans of politics, but I think they’re more likely to be found on other politics subreddits, on Twitter and on Substack. Richard Hanania, for example, is a politics enthusiast. So is Nate Silver.
Most RSP posts aren’t particularly political, it’s less political than Drama was back in the day even before the mods cracked down under admin pressure. Disliking fat people and an endless series of jokes about borderline personality disorder and being gay don’t map neatly into the American political spectrum. There’s a trans-critical contingent but ‘misgendering’ is usually downvoted. Views on abortion are progressive and the occasionally anti-abortion podcast hosts are clowned on by the subreddit’s users regularly for their stance.
To some extent, Drama, RSP and KiwiFarms (in the last case with caveats) are the last remnants of the pre-Gamergate internet, when politics was a thing and people had stances on these issues but they were not always the central and defining character trait that motivated online discussion.
2rafa
1yr ago
I think it very unlikely that you could not find a woman with whom you could fall in love, build a family and have a happy and fulfilling life. There is a lot to be said, especially if you haven't found this so far, for being strategic in your search. If you'd like someone very trad, joining a traditional religious congregation of your choice could be a good idea. There are plenty of shy, homebody women aged 29-32 who don't hang out on the beach in bikinis (and perhaps a few who do!) and who would very much like to get married to a decent man, which could be you. You're a decade out of college, hardly old enough to give up on the simple happiness that many people in much worse condition (both in history and right now) have successfully found.
Without defending sexual liberalism (with which I have many issues), I think the main reason you feel the anguish that you do is that you feel taunted, by people 'advertising' something you think is out of reach for you (or at least largely out of reach). I don't think it's out of reach, necessarily. You're vague about why you feel you're not attractive to the kinds of women you see out on the beach. What exactly do you think you don't have? It is unlikely you will change the system (as you yourself say, you are no leader of men), but it is likely you can find your own happiness within it.
2rafa
2yr ago
Men are incentivized (whether this is by nature, society, life, the laws of the universe, whatever isn't really important) to find one thing they're very good at and to run with it.
For men, beauty is a floor and status is the ceiling. For women, status is a floor and beauty is the ceiling. A man may benefit from his looks, but wins because of his status. A woman benefits from her status, but wins because of her beauty.
Consider two beautiful underwear models moonlighting as baristas to make ends meet - one man, one woman. Who is more likely to have the opportunity to marry hypergamously? Consider two very successful but ugly corporate lawyers - one man, one woman. Who is more likely to have a more attractive spouse than themselves, the man or the woman?
Women's status is assured, but largely set. Men's is not assured, but usually malleable.
This often causes great consternation to members of both sexes.
I’m firmly in favor of publicly funded museums, opera, theater, art. But this stuff should be funded by states and cities, not by the federal government! There’s an extraordinary obfuscation in this kind of thing being funded federally.
All this agency dismantlement will have negative consequences in many ways. But the principle of it is fair, that this huge expansion of the federal bureaucracy occurred without the consent of the public and for no good reason other than that people involved wanted to expand their fiefdoms and preserve their sinecures.
A federation of states! Why not? Why shouldn’t it be so?
2rafa
6mo ago
Like so many systems dreamt up by congress, the H1B mechanics were poorly designed from the start. A lottery? That's incredibly stupid. The DV lottery is one thing, kind of dystopian but one can see the 'logic' (in the progressive mindset) of allowing random people in poor countries to gamble on a kind of Ellis Island vision of making it in America.
But the H1B system requires certainty. A simple fix would just be to cut the total number by 60-80%, then turn it into a bid system. Each visa is auctioned off to the highest bidder. This would have two effects. Firstly it would provide companies with some certainty, because prices would be pretty stable, with some fluctuations depending on the strength of the economy/employment market. Secondly, it would immediately cut out Infosys/Tata/Cognizant etc because the "apply for literally every engineer we have in India, then send over the ones who win the lottery" tactic would no longer work and the new bidding price would be unaffordable for anyone who wasn't generating substantial economic value.
Another issue is the abuse of the O-1 system, which has risen from like 10,000 to 40,000 visas a year (inc dependants). There's no way there are that many exceptional people moving to the US each year. This is a visa designed for Hollywood stars and Harvard academics that is again being exploited by the tech sector.
2rafa
8mo ago
The replacement of traditional writing with a combination of discord, streaming and 4 hour long podcasts truly is a disaster. Want to see Elon’s “most compelling” case for Trump? Just waste all your free time today listening to my podcast and it might come up at some point. At least TikTok forces some kind of pace.
2rafa
11mo ago
“We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology,” the GOP platform says. “In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.”
When it comes to capitalization, we’re all Germans now.
2rafa
1yr ago
Great post. It’s an extreme loss of state capacity for internal violence. Look at Mao’s China, successful eradication of a centuries-long opioid epidemic (in which as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of urban young men were heavy addicts) in fifteen years. And it wasn’t because he killed everyone; he killed the more obvious dealers, sure, but you actually don’t need to kill that many people to trigger prosocial change. If the US army rolls into the South Side of Chicago, or Baltimore, or St Louis, and starts blasting, you could quite possibly limit the death toll to three or low four figures in each city (ie barely above the actual homicide rate) and still seriously dissuade violent crime. And as you note, the Malayan Emergency, Mau Mau and really the entire history of British India show that you don’t actually need that many people or that much violence to accomplish this. 15,000 British ruled over 400,000,000 Indians. In 2003, 130,000 NATO forces ruled over 20,000,000 Afghans, a vastly more favorable ratio. And yet they lost, because they were too afraid to do the needful.
We were discussing South Africa earlier in the thread, and there are parallels to that situation (even though I disagree with apartheid and think the Boers are largely responsible for their presently poor condition). Even with the whole world against them, there is no way that 5 million Dutch and English in a country with a huge resource bounty and extensive arable land armed with literal nuclear weapons and modern technology, and bordered by countries that (unlike Israel’s foes) had no capable armed forces and definitely did not want a war with them, could not have held out indefinitely - even at a relatively high standard of living. But there was no will for it. The situation in American cities, as I noted in my post on Seattle a couple of months ago, is the same. It’s not a resource question, a few armed police could clear out the homeless permanently in a few hours. It’s a will question, like a hoarder who lives in filth because they just can’t throw anything away for psychological reasons even though there’s a dumpster right outside.
2rafa
1yr ago
For some reason I was thinking about the OJ Simpson trial today, and it reminded me of your comment.
The most damning evidence in the OJ trial (barring DNA which was little understood by juries at the time) wasn’t the glove, or the record of Simpson’s movements, or the police interview. It was the fact that his defense could not provide any alternate account of what happened to Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman whatsoever. Two young white (well…) people killed in brutal fashion in a rich part of LA, somewhere that would have had witnesses to on-street commotion, and zero evidence (for any alternate explanation). They hinted or gestured at some kind of gang, or a drug deal, or something related to the restaurant where Goldman worked, but they had nothing, not one shred of evidence for even the most faintly plausible alternate theory of why these two people were murdered by someone other than OJ. This from an extraordinarily skilled legal team with unlimited budget to hire private investigators, research leads and come up with theories.
Holocaust revisionism functions in much the same way. Details about the process of execution, the precise methods, quibbles with testimony, calling the veracity of various accounts in question, all mirror OJ’s defense strategy. The glove don’t fit, the police officer who found the evidence was a virulent racist who had motivation to lie to convict a successful black man with a pretty blonde wife, and the whole trial was surely just another libel against a rich black guy and, especially after Rodney King, who would doubt the hostility of the cops toward black men etc…
But there was and is no alternate theory. The best revisionists can do is, as SecureSignals does, to gesture at possibilities. “Oh, maybe they all went to Russia, changed their names and lived happily ever after”, or “maybe the Austro-Hungarians randomly overcounted the Jewish population by 400% and there were actually far fewer Jews than anyone thought in Eastern Europe”. None of these are evidenced, they’re not supposed to be. They’re mere gestures, hints, seeds of doubt, held together by a narrative in which devious Jews are permanently hostile to white/aryan interests and therefore are probably lying anyway. There is, as @To_Mandalay has said, no real alternate hypothesis; some revisionists apparently argue that Himmler was supposed to kill all the Jews but then didn’t because he was actually a traitor to the cause, which conflicts with other revisionist theories, which conflict with others.
Revisionists avoid believing in strict alternate hypotheses (for example presenting multiple options in the same book or article and feigning ambivalence about which could be true) since doing so would pin them down and make very obvious the extreme dearth of evidence they’re built upon. But it is reasonable for historians to request that they provide and defend comprehensive and evidenced alternate theories for the disappearance of European Jewry.
The popularity of pro-Palestine content on TikTok is primarily due to the fact that Anglo media is increasingly internationalized. Previous generations of social media content saw very little overlap between culturally distinct communities; sometimes American memes would filter down, but memes from the periphery almost never flowed up to the Anglo metropole. With the third generation of social media and TikTok/Reels that has changed, core Anglo users now often see algorithmically successful content from the Spanish, continental European, Arab and South and Southeast Asian spheres if it goes very viral. Some domains like beauty and fashion (where content is primarily visual) are even more diverse.
The Muslim world is almost a quarter of the world’s population. It’s increasingly middle or upper income, increasingly online, increasingly Anglophone. Many influencers who do well in the West are partly or wholly or Arab descent. Major nations like Indonesia and Malaysia are now pretty much full on social media, and their most viral content often makes it to the West, it’s not siloed. The only thing that unites plebs across the entire Muslim world is contempt for Israel. The degree of hostility usually varies, but because many global Muslims have a simp complex around Arabs (eg replacing local dress with hijab and niqab, or thawb for scholars) there is a special race to prove just how pro-Palestinian you are for peripheral (eg. Malay, black African, Bangladeshi) Muslims groups far from the Arabian peninsula. Witness that Malaysia is for example much more anti-Zionist than Saudi Arabia or the UAE, even though Israel and Palestine are on the other side of the world and are inhabited by people ethnically and culturally very distinct from Southeast Asia(ns). But if you speak to Muslim Malays, they see it as their big and noble duty to the Muslim world to be anti-Israel, serving in this sense a function like a crusade.
Helped along by a rapidly growing and ever more powerful Muslim population in the West, plus some good memes, the Palestine complex seamlessly inserted itself into the generic DEI memeplex that already dominates on these apps. This has been a long time coming and has been obviously on its way since at least 2009, maybe earlier. 18 million Jews, as funny as they may be, can’t out-meme two billion Muslims, especially in the current DEI climate in the Anglosphere. The cultural and commercial energy is with them.
It’s interesting to look at this in the wider context of Zionism, because of course the greatest mistake the Zionists made was believing that the Holy Land could be held by the Jews easily and forever onward. But you have to understand that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many bourgeois Jews and gentiles in Europe considered the Muslim world to be a largely passive, defeated people. By the end of World War 1 pretty much every single Muslim country in the entire world was subordinate - whether under colonial rule or indirect suzerainty - to a European empire of one kind or another (the UK, France, Soviet Union) all led by non-Muslims. The young elite of the Muslim world were secularizing, Europeanizing, going to private schools run by French missionaries, urbanization seemed to see declines in religiosity. Many early Zionists, especially on the Anglo-French side, expected that Europeans would rule over the Arab world, including the Levant, forever. After all, the Ottoman Empire was over, the region was largely scarcely populated, local rulers were most fine with serving European foreign policy. Revolts were regular but mostly easily put down by modest European forces. Neither Arab nationalism nor Islamism were yet major forces to threaten Israeli dominance of Judea and Samaria. Israel had a bright future as an informal outpost of empire surrounded by the statelets of various other client peoples.
They did not predict how much the world would change, and now it seems hopelessly naive to imagine it would not. In hindsight it was very stupid to pick a fight with that many people.
As the other replies have said, the vast majority of “homeless” people are unemployed or mostly unemployed people living in their parents’/friend’s/trap house or in their car or couchsurfing. Even the majority of homeless people of no fixed abode aren’t like those living in tents on Venice Beach. These people can indeed be helped by cheaper housing costs or state-subsidized housing schemes. But they also aren’t what is usually meant by the public when talking about the homeless problem.
The problem is with the minority of homeless who are psychotic fent or meth addicted predators. These are the people living on the street in San Francisco or LA and causing problems for everyone else. Demography of the more general “homeless” population isn’t relevant. These are people who deliberately refuse shelters with space because they want to stay on the street to do drugs, offering them housing isn’t going to solve that problem or associated problems with drug-related crime done by people who want a fix.
I was thinking of putting this in the fun thread, but does anyone else think (wokeness aside) that Baldur's Gate 3...isn't that good?
I admit I'm a lifelong Dragon Age stan and will defend that franchise to the end (even for its many flaws), but I've played a huge number of 'classic' CRPGs (including both actual classics like Planescape and Arcanum and modern classic-style games like Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun Returns, Tyranny and Wasteland 3) and enjoyed them all.
I really don't like the writing in Baldur's Gate 3. It feels like fanfiction written by fantasy nerds who have never actually read anything that wasn't genre fiction. The romances are really poor and designed to cater to tumblr horniness (yes, even by Bioware standards), characters shuttle between Marvel-humor and absurdly melodramatic 'deep' or 'sentimental' moments with nothing in between. Everything feels like an in-joke or reference. There's a sincerity there (unlike DOS2) , but it's an insincere sincerity, like the moment in a superhero movie before the final battle when everyone suddenly gets serious and someone mentions that their team is like a family.
I played Hogwarts Legacy earlier this year, and that really is a mediocre game (beautifully recreated castle aside) with very average writing and a dull main storyline. But one thing I really appreciate about it - at least now I've played Baldur's Gate 3 - is that it takes its world, ridiculous and weird and nonsensical and full of a billion plot holes though it is, seriously. People in Baldur's Gate 3 don't act the way humans (or humanoid races who are essentially humans on the inside) do in the situations that they're in.
The world feels very small, and very banal, and very modern, and choices are "moral dilemmas" as imagined by a DM who is very active on the D&D memes subreddit. Maybe this is what many players want, as it certainly provides the experience of tabletop Dungeons and Dragons when played with a dungeon master who collects funko pops and has the poster of every MCU movie in their bedroom, but it falls a little short of the best titles in the genre, which are written by people with wider tastes in fiction.
Playing Pentiment by Josh Sawyer/Obsidian, one gets the sense that this is a game written by a man with a genuine interest in the source material and with a broad literary taste. David Gaider, who wrote Dragon Age, stated that his primary influence in the script and tone was the 1968 movie The Lion of Winter, about Henry II's court in 1183, not high art but of which Roger Ebert said "One of the joys which movies provide too rarely is the opportunity to see a literate script handled intelligently. 'The Lion in Winter' triumphs at that difficult task; not since 'A Man for All Seasons' have we had such capable handling of a story about ideas. But 'The Lion in Winter' also functions at an emotional level, and is the better film, I think."
By contrast Baldur's Gate 3's writers appear YA-fictionbrained. The script lacks a trace of high culture or even midbrow influence. The lead writer was, like many writers in games, an ex-game journalist, one of modernity's more ignoble professions. The emphasis genuinely seems to be on recreating the average nerd DM's campaign in digital form, but the whole point of a professionally produced product is that actual writers should be able to do a better job than some software engineer who writes campaigns in his spare time, so this is little consolation.
I also find the gameplay disappointing. This is to some extent by default, since RtWP is a vastly superior mechanic for CRPGs than turn-based gameplay (because it allows one to fast-forward through trash encounters and to play at one's own pace). But even by the standards of good turn-based combat systems, Baldur's Gate 3 is poor. A big part of this is because of the direct translation of many 5e mechanics into a game, which is ridiculous since they were designed for abstraction to make tabletop play viable. The combat system has too many actions, too many redundant spells (ability systems in games where the DM can essentially decide what each use of each ability can do are completely different to rules-based video games) lifted directly from the source material. And too many abilities is a big problem, because the biggest difference between a CRPG and tabletop is that in a tabletop game, you play only one character. In a CPRG, you play 4-6, so the logic of combat complexity changes.
A second problem is the incessant on-screen dice rolls, which are ugly and immersion-breaking (the whole point of digital games, some would say, is that they can put this kind of thing behind-the-scenes). A third issue is that D&D itemization is fine for tabletop campaigns where you can carry a handful of items, your inventory is a box on a lined piece of paper and there are three combat encounters in a 4 hour session, but it works less well in a game where there are mountains of loot and players are used to more interesting itemization than +2 swords or things that provide a single-point increase in one stat. The game is also extremely easy, but that's a more common complaint.
There doesn't seem to me an inherent reason why games can't have good writing. After all, at least some mainstream movies have good dialogue and are written by well-read screenwriters, it's not impossible. I think it's something about expectations. Game designers, directors and fans are so used to only consuming genre/fantasy/scifi fiction that they don't even understand what's possible, what's out there.
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.
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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.
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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.
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:
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.
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.
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