2rafa
21d ago
I’ll tell you what’s not well this Wednesday: this website. Was what felt like a two+ hour outage until pretty recently.
Trudeau is a terrible politician and leader who, as you note, in may ways damned Canada by adopting the kind of harebrained immigration policy that even Angela Merkel might have balked at.
You’re also right that a lot of this dissident right reaction is cope and seethe. The reason is simple. Extremist politics is and has always been dominated by outsider groups, especially autistic men. Autistic people have a very strong concept of fairness, which is widely noted by psychologists. Autistic people find people “breaking the rules” more viscerally painful, annoying and unfair than neurotypical people. The fact that life is unfair, that many people do, in fact, “get away with it” and always have and always will, is more painful to them than it is to everyone else.
This manifests itself in two key ways. First, autists seethe about the political and social opponents (real or imagined) more than mentally normal people. This is expressed often in the desire for them to be “punished”. So according to these people Trump must be “punished”, Trudeau must be “punished”, Stacies must be “punished” as per Rodger etc. it’s not enough for them to be removed from power, they have to suffer because that is them repaying their debt to the rules they broke.
Secondly, autists*, who dominate most politically extreme movements, always prioritize “owning” the enemy over actual positive change that doesn’t necessarily directly (even if it may indirectly) hurt one’s enemies. The joy experienced at watching a fat blue haired liberal cry after being OWNED in a college debate is far greater than the joy of getting a promotion, a tax cut, a nice annual return on your investments. The joy of watching some Hispanic guy who used the OK sign FIRED for being a white nationalist, or of forcing some poor parents to accept unreservedly their child’s medical mutilation because the law says they can’t stop it far outweighs the boring mundanities of single payer healthcare.
The most psychologically healthy people I know (not me) often don’t think about this form of punitive, absolute, rules-based “justice” at all. Which isn’t to say they don’t care about unfairness or corruption or whatever, it’s just to say that they are able to acknowledge and live with the unfairness of the world, perhaps find it sad, but don’t let it guide their every emotion and value.
* political autists, of course. Those whose special interest is vintage stamps or taxidermy couldn’t care less
2rafa
26d ago
Yeah. To be fair, Ulbricht did do 11 years in jail. SBF will probably do similar, his parents seem to be quite well-connected and some EA autists from Silicon Valley will probably be in the next or next-next Dem administration.
You need men, you don’t need ethnic diversity. Lesbian separatism is a weird punchline, a trivia question, something from the ‘70s. Ethnic nationalism is real and has had many successful exclusionary movements execute substantial, genuine ethnic cleansing in the last century alone, if you look at tribal wars of extermination historically it’s even more common.
Women disliking men, really, is socially meaningless. What, is the kingdom of women going to enslave all men? Even legendary homosexual misogynist BAP thinks that some form of female control of men can only be achieved by way of complex psychological conditioning process called “the longhouse”, arguably a metaphor for civilization itself, not martially (obviously). Women love men and men love women, that’s biology. Patriarchy waxes and wanes as a function of technological development, primarily.
Biology has much less to say amount a society of diverse people who (at least initially) look very different getting along together forever. It doesn’t preclude it, but it doesn’t endorse it either. And the historic example suggests real, bloody conflict between ethnic groups is very much commonplace. That is why people take it more seriously, probably.
2rafa
27d ago
You’re making my point. The leaders of those countries are still nominally members of the state church (or indeed head of it).
Now imagine, say, the president of Germany announces he’s converting to the Anglican Church. That’s interesting. That’s unusual. That suggests a much more genuine belief than King Charles formally being an Anglican.
2rafa
28d ago
Every Catholic monarch of a Catholic state is Catholic by definition. If you’re the next Crown Prince of Liechtenstein, a devoutly (and officially) Catholic country ruled by a Catholic monarch, you can’t really abandon Catholicism, which both your people believe in and which forms the spiritual justification for your rule. If you’re an atheist you can break the rules but you have to keep your beliefs to yourself.
A religious Catholic by choice in a non-Catholic land is already signalling much more devotion to Rome and to the Pope than someone who doesn’t really have a choice. They are more likely to actually believe. The threat of eternal damnation carries more weight.
2rafa
28d ago
There are many Americans (including those of non-Mexican descent) who retire in Mexican resort towns, sure. That’s a very different visa class and lifestyle to working a regular job in Mexico.
The same is true even with less economic inequality in Europe. Spain is full of English and German retirees, but barring a few senior corporate executives at Inditex or Santander the only non-Spanish speaking English and Germans who work there are a small number of low pay service workers whose jobs are catering to their own nationality’s tourists and retirees.
2rafa
28d ago
I don’t think it’s very common for even the tiny minority of successful retail traders to join a professional fund, the approach to risk management alone would make that a compliance challenge at the best of times. It has happened, but far more common is what Jane Street, Two Sigma etc do (as far as I know) where they pay savants for trade ideas directly. There are quite a few basement dweller math geniuses who make a living that way.
“Trump doesn’t need Congress to pass a bill to stop bombing Iran, just like he didn’t need Congress to pass a bill to start it”
2rafa
29d ago
“The President launched a disastrous war that he lost, and now to save face wants to claim victory by signing a far worse version of the deal we negotiated under Obama, and which he left and rejected. The Iranians know the Democrats actually stand by their word, so when we come back to power, we’ll negotiate a better deal ourselves” is a powerful argument and certainly doesn’t make it look like like they co-own the war, which Trump would claim either way if necessary. By the way, this works even if they agree to the same deal later on - there’s no game theoretical reason for the Dems to agree.
2rafa
29d ago
For the Saudis the pipeline would transit only Jordan and Syria, both effective Arab client states. For the UAE and other GCC nations the pipelines would transit Saudi Arabia, which is more contentious.
There is no doubt this is a victory for Iran. No regime change, nuclear development will continue unabated and, most importantly, an aesthetic and propaganda victory for the Islamic Republic. US sanctions relief will be limited and the Iranians know it, although the wildcard there is whether the Europeans agree to some of it in a political deal.
In the long term, I think this is more mixed for Iran than many realize. The infrastructure destruction has been extensive. As oil prices come down again, a boom in oil revenue will be temporary. Iran is extraordinarily corrupt, and that includes the IRGC; those $2m shipping tolls are unlikely to fund necessary reconstruction and might not even fund weapons purchases after the relevant figures have taken their cut.
Much of Iran’s non-oil export industry, especially around chemical, medicine and some industrial manufacturing and export, has been destroyed. If oil returns to $65 a barrel it’s unclear how fast that can be rebuilt, especially if the IRGC, now firmly in charge, channels as much as possible toward rearming and the nuclear program. The civilian infrastructure destroyed is extensive, and public anger will mount further if much of it goes unfixed while the IRGC spends all it can on munitions and drones.
Eventually, as humiliating a defeat as this is for Trump (not that he cares, and not that he will pay for it) in objective terms, it might herald the end of the Islamic Republic, some years from now.
It was probably poorly worded. My point wasn’t that revenge is limited to autists, or that mob mentality around this kind of thing as in your last example isn’t real. It’s that there is a specifically autistic catharsis around someone who was perceived to be ‘getting away with it’ apparently no longer ‘getting away with it’. To the victim or even observer this may be indistinguishable from ‘you hurt me, I hurt you’ revenge but I think there is a distinction, it’s more about the rigidity of the underlying rules. This is why I think autists are drawn to clear cut extreme ideologies like corporatist fascism or communism that define enemy classes and establish strong rules for the in group and out group.
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