The sexual revolution involved worsening the lives of a substantial proportion of the population (both men and women) to benefit a tiny minority of men. This was probably always an untenable state of affairs, given that even the men in question often had daughters (by contrast, billionaires and kings do not typically have family who are paupers or peasants). Society - even liberal society - is governed by countless rules, minor and major, designed to prevent some parties taking advantage of others even if it is "consensual". You can't pay someone $2 an hour even if they consent, you can't sign up to 30 years of indentured servitude even if you consent, you can't practice as a self-taught surgeon even if all your patients consent. You can't engage in duels or cannibalism even if both parties consent. So we agree that clearly 'consent' isn't everything; we're not (for the most part) ancaps. Some things are social negatives, and it is understood that tolerating them is bad for society, period.
Part of reversing the sexual revolution is making sure that promiscuity has consequences. Yes, that includes for women (although as Red Pillers seem to delight in reminding them, 'hitting the wall' is the consequence for women anyway, and most slut shaming has always been by other women, which continues comfortably well into the 21st century even in progressive circles). But it also means consequences for men. The '60s rocker lifestyle of fucking a thousand 14-16 year old girls while on tour across the country is a net negative for society. It benefits a small number of men at the expense, in many ways, of everyone else (who is impacted directly or indirectly by mountains of damaged women created as a consequence). Sexual libertarianism is as degenerate as any other form of liberalism, and therefore I really do support measures to give it more consequences. If cases like these act as a deterrent for the next generation of Russell Brands, they will have served their purpose, whatever the truth.
And in Brand's case, he really is an infamous asshole, a pseud, and has a proven record of being a huge piece of shit. So it's hard to feel bad for him.
No electricity, water, or fuel for Gaza until hostages freed - Israel
Israel's Energy Minister Israel Katz says the siege of Gaza will not end until Israeli hostages are released.
In a social media post, Israel Katz said no "electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter" until the "abductees" are free.
[From the BBC news live tracker]
I think this is a smart move. Even if the hostages being released remains very unlikely, it puts more of the moral burden for the siege on the Gazans, who do (broadly) support Hamas.
I often think this. Who is building beautiful things these days in the public realm? Beautiful schools, libraries, railroad stations, hospitals, parks, museums, even apartment buildings? Yes, there are always a handful of examples, sandwiched between generic shitty modern buildings or awful pastiche. But not enough. No one’s thinking big. You have to inspire people.
I was watching some shitty talk show appearance by the astronauts who are supposed to be going to the moon again with NASA next year. The commenters on the YouTube video (who I presume watch a lot of talkshow clips) were saying it was the most applause they’d ever seen on the show, the audience were standing up and hollering and cheering and so on. People want to believe in something real. Yes, a return to religiosity would be a good thing, but there also has to be real progress, real improvement, something in the kingdom of earth or whatever the biblical term is that inspires and drives people, that suggests some kind of civilizational progress. ChatGPT is good, but right now it’s unclear how it’s going to improve most people’s lives and if anything most people who look into LLMs get panicked about becoming permanently unemployed.
If I was president I’d organize a huge World’s Fair for the 250th anniversary of America’s founding in 2026. Host it in New York, in Flushing Meadows park where the last big one was, around that giant sphere that once symbolized all the possibility of the late 20th century. Invite all the great corporations, every state, other countries, to come and present their vision of the future. Make it free to visit. Hire Robert Stern to design it in a vaguely mid-century Americana style. Have all the classics - the house of the future, the car of the future, the plane of the future etc. It wouldn’t solve the country’s problems (“the controversy over drag queen story hour in the California state pavilion continues…”), but I think it would be mostly fun and hopeful.
Do Trump Supporters Actually Want To Win?
Prompted by this sanctimonious, if interesting, FT column. Emphasis mine:
Just because liberals have always feared the emergence of a competent demagogue doesn’t mean populist voters have yearned for it to the same degree. How much of his base did Trump lose after failing to build that wall on the Mexican border?
DeSantis believes that politics is downstream of culture, that culture is shaped in institutions, that conservatives have ceded those institutions to the organised left. The Gramsci of Tallahassee doesn’t just diagnose the problem. He is creative and dogged in installing a rightwing counter-hegemony. Ask Disney. Ask the educational bureaucracies of Florida. This is more thought and work than Trump has ever put in to the cause. It is also perfectly beside the point. I am no longer sure that populist voters want to win the culture war.
For a long time, a certain pro-Trump (or anti-anti-Trump, if you want) narrative on the 'intellectual right' was that there was no real alternative to Trump. Sure, they conceded that most criticisms of Trump-the-man were correct, but this was the Flight 93 Election. The alternatives were all versions of Mitt Romney or Marco Rubio, who didn't say the things Trump occasionally did. We can restate the Flight 93 theory like this:
"Trump is vulgar, he's a liar, he's a cheat, he violates conservative or even general principles of decorum and morality. However, he's the only person even discussing the things we care about with a large public audience, and therefore it is a conservative responsibility to vote for him even if this amounts, merely, to a roll of the dice. If he wins, there's a chance he might do some of what he promises. The only alternative to Trump is certain defeat."
DeSantis' presence complicates the Flight 93 theory. DeSantis has a record of some competence on conservative issues. Certainly not enough for the very online dissident right, but they had soured on Trump by late 2017 themselves, and so have no horse in this race. Whether DeSantis of Yale and Harvard is a 'true believer' is a complicated question, but then again the same could be said about Trump of New York via Wharton; the former certainly seems a much more capable administrator.
The column posits that Trump's success against DeSantis in this phony war stage of the 2024 primary campaign is a case of "vibes based politics" winning over 'substance based politics'. In 2016, intellectual conservatives could defend Trump because - whatever the vibes were - he was the only candidate on substance, too. In 2023, the banality of Trump's support is more clear. Ironically, it leads to a case for an interesting question - if Trump had merely attached his vibe to Ted Cruz' political platform in 2016, would he still have won? Was it less 'build the wall' and more who the frontman for building the wall was? The smart case for Trump would seem to be reducible to:
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DeSantis is a "phony" or establishment conservative who will turn in office and resign himself to implementing the Mitch McConnell checklist of tax cuts, deregulation, more money for the military and cutting some welfare spending. The problem with this is that Trump was in office and accomplished little but (some of) the above, and hardly has a lifelong history of staunch conservative politics himself. If the problem is associating with elite circles, Trump has a long history of the same.
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DeSantis can't win the presidential election even if he takes the primary, Trump can. This argument is more persuasive, if only because Trump's record shows he has technically convinced enough people in the right places to vote for him to show he can win. But Trump also lost a presidential election, never hit a 50% approval rating (even once, something Biden has apparently managed) and seems not to be experiencing any great groundswell of public support from swing voters. The promise of Trump is now tainted by the reality of Trump, so MAGA might ring slightly more hollow to those who aren't true believers.
liberals have always feared the emergence of a competent demagogue
I love this line because thinking about what your enemies fear is often an interesting thought experiment. Republicans are being presented with a choice between Trump and an American Viktor Orban. Nothing is settled, but they appear to strongly prefer the former.
2rafa
3mo ago
'Eunuch-maker' case: Male escort jailed for removing man's genitals
A male escort who cut off a consenting man's genitals and filmed the procedure for a pay-per-view website has been jailed for five years.
Damien Byrnes, 36, removed Marius Gustavson's penis and testicles with a kitchen knife in February 2017. Byrnes, along with Jacob Crimi-Appleby, 23, and Nathaniel Arnold, 48, pleaded guilty to causing GBH with intent. Crimi-Appleby froze Gustavson's leg in dry ice, leading to its amputation, while Arnold part-removed a nipple.
Crimi-Appleby was jailed for three years and eight months. Arnold was given a two-year suspended prison sentence. The Old Bailey had previously heard the procedure carried out by Byrnes is linked to a subculture where men become "nullos" - short for genital nullification - by having their penis and testicles removed.
Prosecutor Caroline Carberry KC said Byrnes, from Tottenham in north London, was among 10 people charged with taking part in extreme body modifications. She told the court Byrnes was hired by Gustavson, who called himself "the eunuch-maker" and had been involved in "numerous" extreme body-modification procedures including the removal of other men's genitals.
Kate Mulholland, the Crown Prosecution Service specialist prosecutor for London, said: "Consent is not a defence to the illegal surgical procedures the men willingly took part in to remove their ringleader's penis, leg and nipple, in non-sterile and on occasion life-threatening circumstances." [emphasis mine]
To summarize, four gay men are convicted over the illegal surgical removal of one of the men's genitalia, a leg and a nipple. Three were fetishists (including the ringleader, who was the 'victim' of the procedures), one was an escort. The escort subsequently blackmailed the ringleader, and it was this blackmail attempt that resulted in the case coming to the attention of the police and all four men being arrested and charged.
The man who removed the genitals (Byrnes, the escort) was jailed for five years. The man who removed the leg (Crimi-Appleby) was jailed for three years, with his comparatively young (but still adult) age and alleged 'grooming' by the ringleader mitigating factors. The man who removed the nipple (Arnold), and who stole anaesthetic from the hospital where he worked as a nurse, was spared jail with a two-year suspended sentence because his coworkers all agreed he was a really nice guy. The ringleader, Gustavson, the 'victim' of the procedure, will be sentenced in March.
There are a number of interesting CW-related issues in this case.
I. The "nullification" fetish
With the exception of the escort, all the men involved in the case belonged to a niche fetish revolving around becoming eunuchs. Interestingly (and unlike many other niche sexual fetishes, eg. those involving sexual cannibalism), nullification actually spans both gay and trans subcultures and might actually be a predominantly trans subculture. In fact, a moderate number of fetishists I found online appeared to be natal women (ie. FtM), although most who actually carried out illegal body modification are of course men (removing the breasts and the entire vagina/clitoris presumably being beyond the capabilities of backroom amateur surgeons, plus greater male risk-taking etc).
Among trans people, 'nullification' is often the desired goal of non-binary 'truscum' (those who believe that you need to be dysphoric to be trans, but more generally 'hardcore' transgender activists who despise those they consider cis identifying as trans for 'clout'). (Reddit thread) By this logic, while a 'cure' for males who want to be women is vaginoplasty, and for females who want to be men is phalloplasty, for a 'non-binary' dysphoric individual, these are unsuitable, since the whole point is to be 'between' genders. Nullification to Ken Doll status is sometimes seen as a goal. It also isn't actually illegal, and at least some years ago (again, according to reddit) there were American doctors willing to perform it.
In this case, the men involved do not seem to have been trans. Instead, they were participants in the 'eunuch' fetish subculture among gay men, where participants are known as 'eunuchs', 'nullies' or 'smoothies' respectively. Beyond eunuch communities themselves, one of the major sources of information about the subculture comes from TERFs, who are uniquely hostile towards eunuchs among gay men, because they (typically lesbian women) see them as - alongside transwomen - the vanguard of inserting fetishes into the 'LGB' movement they once held dear. Here, for example, is a long takedown of Gustavson by Canadian TERF website Reduxx.
Of course, Gustavson didn't only remove his genitalia but his leg, too, something that would likely classify him as suffering from 'Body integrity disorder', a partially-recognized psychological condition. Again, some patients, even in the UK, have had healthy limbs surgically removed, although this was highly controversial and the practice was largely discontinued. In Australia, a surgeon sought ethical advice about a similar case in 2017; this medical ethics article covers a similar case of a man with a lifelong goal of having a leg amputated, but who was unable to find a doctor willing to perform the surgery.
A core goal of eunuch fetishists is to have their fetish classified as a gender identity, which would allow them much easier access to surgery. It is this that drew the ire of the TERFs, who generally dislike sadomasochistic gay male fetishes but aren't particularly focused upon them. This creates an interesting dynamic - for the TERFs, the association between eunuch fetishists and trans activists allows them to criticize the latter by association, while for Gustavson (who took a leading role in both Norwegian and British pride organizations), association with the 'mainstream' trans movement created the opportunity for a medical embrace of the subculture.
[One last interesting (although less relevant) question remains about the eunuch fetish, namely that nullification would seemingly remove sexual desire, which would seem to be important to a fetishist. This journal article hints at an interesting theory, that gay men live in such a non-monogamous and non-commital romantic landscape that nullification often serves as a fantasy involving the eunuch sacrificing their sexuality to win a dyadic, deep bond with another man (who requests it of them), for life.]
II. Consent and the nature of surgery
The statement by the prosecutor in this case ("consent is not a defence to the illegal surgical procedures the men willingly took part in to remove their ringleader's penis, leg and nipple, in non-sterile and on occasion life-threatening circumstances") is interesting because it does not clearly state whether the issue was the mutilation or the legality thereof. Certainly much of the case appeared reliant on footage (or descriptions of it) of the procedure, the fact that it was sold on a fetish site, and the fact that the participants were physically healthy individuals with no need to perform the procedures. The body horror aspect of the case was a major feature of the prosecution's case, and even the press release seeks to create empathy for the police and prosecutors who had to watch and work with the footage and other evidence.
At the same time, as discussed above, 'body integrity disorder' surgeries have been performed without legal challenge in the UK, gender reassignment is legal, and (as I say) there is some evidence that nullification procedures have been performed legally (in very, very small numbers) by doctors in Anglo countries like the US, UK and Australia. And the statement does leave open the door that the main issue the Crown has is that Gustavson was 'operated' on illegally, not the nature of the operation. One wonders whether the sentences would have been as strict if the participants had been transwomen waiting for a gender reassignment surgery slot, but it is the UK so it's hard to say.
There are arguably legitimate reasons why consent isn't the central factor in whether a surgical procedure is legal. The primary one is, of course, that blanket legalization would lead to the poor or desperate being taken advantage of by untrained surgeons who might mutilate them in horrific and costly ways, perhaps for life. Society has (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-myth-of-consensual-sex)[decided] that the cost of allowing consensual unlicensed surgery is great enough that it ought to be outlawed. The medical profession (or cartel, or guild, depending on perception) is then given a valuable monopoly on licensing surgeons in exchange for minimum standards of training and therefore supposedly quality.
But if a surgeon refuses to perform a nullification surgery on a gay man (for legal or personal reasons) but is happy to perform similarly invasive surgery desired for similar reasons on a transwoman, are we really just saying (as the TERFs argue) that some fetish-driven lobbying campaigns are more successful than others?
III. On the welfare hustle
Man, this case really has it all. Buried in the article is this line:
Crimi-Appleby, 23, from Epsom in Surrey, admitted freezing Gustavson's leg, in February 2019...Gustavson, who now uses a wheelchair, received about £18,000 in benefits payments afterwards, the court heard.
Illegal surgery, especially in a welfare state, is costly. Gustavson went to hospital immediately after each of his major illegal procedures (which he set up and organized), where he required additional treatment (he claimed, it's suggested, that he mutilated himself on these occasions). This was paid for by the state and therefore the taxpayer. The issue of cost (which ultimately falls upon taxpayers or insured people) is also rarely discussed in relation to legal gender reassignment, even though vaginoplasty and phalloplasty require lifelong treatment and upkeep, regular visits with doctors, and (as with transition generally) lifelong use of prescription drugs.
The amputation of the leg, though, adds an additional dimension. When he returned home a disabled man, Gustavson was entitled to disability welfare, which he duly claimed. Few (particularly in a relatively rich country in which jobs are pretty easy to come by) are likely to amputate a limb to claim welfare, but other options (like severe mental illness) are more viable:
I encountered a patient whose medical record revealed that he’d had several hundred prior admissions to psychiatric facilities across the nation. During a 30-minute evaluation, it became clear that the patient was faking an episode of psychosis in order to gain admission to the hospital. When challenged, the patient eventually confessed that he had never suffered from any mental illness. Each month, after exhausting his disability payments, he ate and slept for free on mental health wards, where psychiatrists were afraid to turn away a patient who claimed to be hearing voices and having suicidal thoughts.
Society doesn't seem capable of managing this level of defection (or, alternatively, is just willing to swallow the cost). And while amputating a limb or making up a fake mental illness might be clear-cut, what about other self-inflicted conditions, like smoking or drug related illnesses? Is the purpose of welfare to support the deserving poor (like those born with disabilities through no fault of their own, widows raising children, and perhaps the elderly who never made enough to save for retirement), or is it to provide a minimum standard of living for everyone, no matter how objectionable? When Gustavson is released from his (likely) prison sentence, he will be able to continue claiming disability welfare as a wheelchair-bound person. Is that right?
If I could design an elite college admissions system, here’s what I’d do:
I like the idea of an admissions essay. With two caveats:
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It must not involve any mention of the author, their life or their personal experiences. Every writer takes inspiration from their own stories, but thinly veiled personal narratives would be explicitly discouraged.
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Applicants are advised that essays about niche topics unfamiliar to admissions officers are strongly preferred.
The essays would be 950 words, with a 10 word margin, to encourage some discipline. Students would be encouraged to write about something officers hadn’t heard much (or anything) about, which would encourage original research. The essays would serve as strong indicators of verbal IQ, which is much more important for making it into the elite than spatial IQ.
Write an essay about a bizarre facet of local politics in a tiny village. Cover a weird crime nobody has ever written about. Tell me about a strange academic debate that occurred in a single third-rate Armenian university in the dying days of communism. This would drastically improve the jobs of admissions staff. It would also encourage genuine diversity of interests and even background to some extent.
The best essayists, who at Harvard, Yale and Stanford I would expect to rival the better staff writers at a Vanity Fair or equivalent, would be invited to interview.
The interview would involve three components.
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The first would be a small talk stage where a handful of candidates would be put in a room with each other and some faculty. Their behavior would be observed. The ability to build rapport is critical. Some bias around attractiveness would creep in here, but this is a good thing, because the elite should be largely fit and beautiful.
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The second would be a viva or panel where the interviewers would meticulously question the candidate about their essay, its inspiration and sources, the research and writing process, and the core nature of their point or argument. This element would test a student’s ability to defend themselves, to debate and to argue. It would also verify that their admissions essay was likely their own work, and that they are an intelligent and competent individual.
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In the third component, a candidate would be handed another essay (by another candidate or pre-prepared by admissions, I’m undecided) that they had never read before. With five minutes of preparation, and before the same panel of academics and admissions staff, they would have to discuss the essay, defend any arguments therein, and rationalize any stylistic or other choices, plus defend (without evidence) the essay from criticism. This crucial stage would test a candidate’s ability to bullshit convincingly, the most important elite skill there is.
A score would be assigned based on the above three components, with each receiving equal weighting, and that score would determine admissions decisions.
What are your ideas for new college admissions systems (beyond the boring ‘just base it on the SAT’)?
I was actually thinking about this subject recently while reading Wikipedia biographies of Soviet spies (this guy died in 2020, after spending 50 years in Moscow post-defection!) from decades ago.
It is telling that the volume of high-profile defection seems much, much lower today than it was at the height of the Cold War. The influence operations we have today are either low level things, like your $42,000 case, or stuff like Bob Menendez being comically and publicly bribed with literal gold bars by the Egyptians, which the intelligence community has obviously known about since it first happened. I think the motivation for high-volume elite defection just isn't there anymore.
When you read the biographies of famous Cold War defectors, almost all of them were motivated by a genuine belief in the Communist system. For every greedy Aldrich Ames there were a half dozen Rosenbergs, Philbys, Blakes and so on who truly believed in the Marxist message and revolution. And it's telling that the few major spies the West has seen since the 1991 have also been motivated either by extreme narcissism (Manning) or by genuine political conviction (Snowden's libertarianism).
Most of the people that were recruited as double agents in the 50s and 60s, certainly in higher-IQ positions, really believed. They believed they were serving global revolution, serving a superior system, and that the sooner the USSR outcompeted the West and the West had its revolution, the better. Many genuinely believed the above would happen in their lifetime, very soon even, such that even if they were discovered and as such either imprisoned or forced to officially defect and flee, they would return home before long.
China and Russia don't really have much to offer American double agents. They can flip the occasional low-level operative with the promise of money, but the scale of US surveillance over global banking is such that multi-million-dollar payoffs to poorly-paid intelligence agents are pretty much impossible to get away with permanently for now, even with crypto (it's not like trying to convert your Chinese monero into dollars to buy anything isn't going to tip anyone off, especially if every bank already has you flagged as intelligence, which they do). Your only options in the case of defection are living a shitty life in Moscow or Beijing as an eternal foreigner in a system that doesn't care about you and which is essentially just a poorer, more authoritarian and more corrupt version of what exists in the West. (And they know it too, which is why Snowden and others will be under permanent surveillance in case they attempt to defect back.)
And I think this is increasingly visible in the way that China and especially Russia conduct international espionage. China outright kidnaps random prominent Americans / Canadians / Brits etc and holds them hostage until its people are released (eg. the Huawei heiress). Russia does the same, but maintains order by assassinating double agents who defect to the West on foreign soil at an increasingly aggressive pace, presumably to keep its people in line and convince them that they'll never be safe if they leave. Foreign influence operations by both nations are increasingly short-termist, amateurish, or just chancers, like the largely abortive attempts via Manafort etc to influence Trump, which were mostly just an embarrassment for everyone involved.
Neither system really has anything to offer. If you become a true enemy of the West you better (a) hope you enjoy your miserable life in Russia or China, (b) hope neither nation tires of you enough to trade you for someone they care about, (c) accept that even many neutral nations (India, the UAE etc) will be 'no go zones' because the US can and will extrajudicially kidnap you and the local government won't care enough to stop you, or they'll just trade you for money/influence/weapons/some other foreign policy goal.
Cuba is arguably the only exception. If you have some cash, or are given some in exchange for defection, you can enjoy a nice, comfortable retirement on the beach. There are plenty of modern-enough international resorts catering to Canadians and Europeans, the weather is good, the food and alcohol are good, it's comfortable and you can live very well for a very small amount of money. And because Cuba isn't Russia or China, you're not a high priority enough threat that receiving visitors or conducting some limited business is impossible. In time, rapprochement of some kind will likely continue (unlike Russia or China where it seems ever less likely), your defection may well be washed under the bridge, and everything will turn out (possibly) fine. And unlike Venezuela or Bolivia, where a successful US-aligned coup led by people who will gladly ship anyone the CIA wants back to Washington is at least possible in the near term, Cuba's system is very unlikely to experience that kind of revolution.
So, interestingly, Cuban intelligence might well have an easier time than their peers in the anti-American axis.
“I will accept Russian control of the occupied territories and pledge to block Ukraine’s candidacy for NATO in exchange for Russia exiting its military alliance with China. I will end sanctions and bring Russia back into the world market. In this way, I will elevate Russia as a strategic check on China’s designs in East Asia.”
You don’t have to be a professor of international relations to see why this idea is retarded. So you accept Russian control of Eastern Ukraine and lift all sanctions on Russia, and then Russia has to ‘exit’ (ambiguous) its ‘military alliance’ (something that only partially exists on paper anyway) with China….or else…what? Vivek restores sanctions on Russia for not sufficiently breaking ties with China (pointless, even a temporary break in sanctions will allow for large scale repatriation or transfer of Russian capital in anticipation of future sanctions)? Are you going to trust Putin? How will that be measured? Why wouldn’t cooperation continue in an underhanded way? Once you force a Ukrainian defeat and unilaterally lift sanctions you’re not in a position of strength toward Russia, you’re in one of total weakness. And Vivek can’t threaten Putin with Ukrainian NATO membership because, as Putin knows, there are other member states that would be amenable to vetoing it regardless of what the US says.
And most importantly, Russia can never be a ‘strategic check’ on China’s designs in East Asia. What does Vivek think he can do, get Putin to invade Manchuria in case Gyna threatens to bomb Taiwan? Send Russia’s three remaining seaworthy warships to the South China Sea? And Vivek is an isolationist who only cares about Taiwan until 2028 or whatever anyway (when he believes TSMC will no longer be critical) so why care about a long-term ‘check on China’ at all?
Still, Vivek is a high verbal IQ arch-grifter who has never created a substantial, profitable business, bilked investors out of $400m to buy a $5m failed drug from GSK (and burned through that entire capital in a doomed pivot) and then himself pivoted into politics when the cheap money dried up. He has never accomplished anything that is both impressive and good for society in his entire life. Even Trump is a better businessman, so perhaps this is what America deserves.
2rafa
7mo ago
See Malaysia's temporary-cum-permanent introduction of affirmative action. For example, Malays get access to higher-paying government bonds, they can buy cheaper property in new developments, their companies are privileged for govt contracts, they can more easily get into universities... There's a similar system in India as self_made_human points out. In Australia, Indigenous people get their own special job pathways and a great deal of govt expenditure focused on their communities.
Malays get this so that they don’t riot against the Chinese minority who dominate the country’s economy, as they already have before. For the Chinese, bumiputra is a price they are willing to pay for the preservation of their economic power (and its associated privilege, as it’s not as if they’re less clannish than the Malays are), a fig leaf that minimizes racial hostility. The alternative might well be being kicked out of Malaysia entirely, and while that would be bad for the Malays, it would also be bad for the Chinese affected.
It really is so wonderfully charming how devoted Texas Republicans are to ensuring poor and underclass women are forced into having more babies than they currently do. This certainly won’t lead to problems down the road, because impoverished single mothers famously raise the most well-adjusted sons who commit crime at well-below-average rates.
Hopefully SCOTUS eventually limits this specific form of depressing ridiculousness.
It’s fascinating that even Turkheimer, one of the most prominent anti-HBD academics in this debate (and one of the most prominent academics in the space in general) barely gets 30-40 retweets in his commentary on a huge paper like this. It kind of shows how, even on the anti-hereditarian side, academic opinions don’t really matter. Sure, Vox might quote Turkheimer in an article on why group genetic differences are supposedly bullshit, but his views have nothing to do with why the article was written, they could be omitted or he could have never replied to their email and the article, save for the quote, would have been exactly the same. Turkheimer is useful to bolster the ‘mainstream’ narrative, but his role is narrow.
Arguing for hereditarianism is like being an economist in the Soviet Union in 1950 and arguing, using complex economic models and a lot of math and comparative data, that free markets could be better than centrally planned economies. The amount of data you have is completely irrelevant; your faculty peers of the establishment position might halfheartedly attempt a rebuttal as an intellectual exercise, but in truth everyone knows that the reason your paper isn’t going to lead to any big policy debate is because the Party has its ideology and intends to keep it and, most importantly, does not justify its maintenance of the current system on the grounds of an ongoing scientific enquiry. Marx and Lenin performed the scientific analysis, by definition socialism follows capitalism, by definition a reversal is undesirable and morally and thus politically wrong.
Likewise in this case. The right has the strange idea that progressive universalism, perhaps because the scientific revolution was coterminous with the emergence of many liberal ideas, is grounded in some kind of (flawed or misguided) scientific analysis. Certainly it has aspirations to that effect. But progressivism as ideology was never founded on ‘science’, it was founded on feeling and on sentiment, and so no scientific evidence can challenge it.
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
18d ago
It is by now common knowledge that Russian intelligence very nearly took over Deutsche Bank without anyone in the German government even knowing (or caring), and while pressuring the German financial regulator into pursuing a criminal investigation into the Financial Times' journalists trying to figure out why it didn't make sense.
What is less commonly understood (and in part only now being revealed) is what a combination of hilarious disaster and glorious victory the Russian intelligence operation in question was. Having stumbled onto Jan Marsalek, the co-founder of Wirecard (a longstanding fraudulent German fake payments startup), an autistic Austrian-Czech who was obsessed with secret agents and James Bond, while he was abortively attempting to extend his scam to Russia, Russian intelligence compromised him with the help of an ex-pornographic Russian actress and several "retired" FSB officials.
Over the years, Wirecard helped move (with Marsalek's full approval) the funds of sanctioned Chechens, questionable Libyans, and shady Russian-Israelis between East and West, with the help of ex-KGB fixer Stanislav Petlinsky and his Israeli financier son. They had under their control the darling of the entire German tech industry, a man praised by Merkel, and a company so overvalued it was genuinely attempting to buy Deutsche Bank. They had thoroughly taken control of Austria's intelligence apparatus, which meant they had unlimited access to classified intelligence from Western allies, the entire European border entry database and so on. And then it failed, because it could not locate 1.9bn Euros.
It turned out that a great deal of the FSB program, as it happened, had only tangentially to do with what one might consider the interests of 'Russia' the nation. Much of it - including large elements of the assassination program - had to do with the grift, the transferring of money, the profiting of various senior officials, and the fear that MI6 or the CIA would buy the information on who was making money in Russia (and how) from defectors like Skripal and Litvinenko. A competent FSB would have furnished Wirecard with the money needed for KPMG to sign off its audit (something well-paid accountants are always desperate to do) by showing proof of the 'missing' 1.9bn euros. But when it came to it, the FSB could not do this. The Russians, for all their immense capability and cunning, were so addicted to the grift that they were unable to salvage their own intelligence operation because they were too busy enriching themselves.
A tragic tale. Marsalek is now an Orthodox priest in hiding deep in Russia. Its inhabitants, that great people of so many contradictions, live to fight another day. I'm excited to see what they come up with next.
People desperately want to believe “elites” are the ones molesting kids when in reality it’s likely (as with all other crime) to be disproportionately underclass men who do so. For every Epstein or Prince Andrew there are thousands of nobodies in trailer parks and ghettoes across the West who mostly never get caught and who cumulatively harm vastly, vastly more people. “The elites are more debauched/degenerate/satanic” is the classic peasant conspiracy; there has never been much evidence for it, and for every Byron or de Sade there were countless unrecorded cases that were only less salacious because the people involved were nobodies.
As regards strangely high eBay or Etsy (etc) prices, this has been a thing for decades and while it’s occasionally a (usually very unsuccessful) attempt at money laundering, it’s often just mentally ill individuals. The same thing is true if you look at weird eBay where people “pay” insane amounts for things - the purchaser is usually challenged in some way and the money never changes hands because they don’t have it. I remember being maybe 10 and asking my father what happens if you win a bid and don’t pay, and him saying the government takes the money from you. Alas, that generally isn’t the case.
People are deeply hostile to the reality, no matter who you are, that fulfilment and happiness and ‘living a worthwhile life’ essentially come down to a very simple recipe.
Marry young(ish) to someone of good temperament, have a reasonable number of children (three or more), work a job you can somewhat stand, have some kind of spiritual life. Above all, tend to a dense circle of friends and family who you trust and who trust you, who live nearby and who you see often. Save a little money if you can. Try to do good by those who care about you.
This advice is proven over countless generations. It applies to almost all people, everywhere in the world. It is attainable for everyone in the global middle class and above, which is everyone here and certainly everyone writing political commentary on the internet.
But it’s also kind of scary, because if it’s that easy to be happy and fulfilled despite living in a decadent, empty, atomized, soulless, blah blah blah modern hellscape (etc etc), then why aren’t you doing it? Masturbation about joining Wagner or the Foreign Legion or fighting a war against China or leading The Revolution is much more interesting, because the very fact that these things are unlikely to happen means that they confer no obligation or even pressure to improve.
The fact that the recipe for happiness is so easy is precisely what makes it so terrifying, because it means failure to achieve it is usually our own fault.
2rafa
3mo ago
Trump represents a pent up peasant and heartland burgher rage in a way that no other GOP politician can.
Yes, they want to “own the libs”, but that’s misses out the most important part. They want Donald Trump to own the libs. Owning the libs is important but not essential. Donald Trump is essential. Better Trump is in power and fails than DeSantis is in power and actually succeeds. This is, in effect, the decision that is being made.
But in a wider sense, American conservatives aren’t serious people. They consider forcing impoverished black single mothers to give birth to more children higher priority than ending mass immigration. That considered ending the tiny amount of GDP sent to Ukraine (tying up a longstanding geopolitical foe for years at the cost of zero American lives) more important than ending affirmative action - which only happened because of a 30-year effort by some autistic Jewish guy who couldn’t let it go. These are people who genuinely abhor the pittance spent on America’s empire when it has been the mission of every great Western civilization to conquer, to expand and to rule other lands and peoples.
They live in an imaginary mid century fantasy that is itself a product of Hollywood. They do not aspire to greatness, personally or collectively. Kevin Williamson was right about Trump, and about his supporters. The libs - if he wins again - will be “owned” well and truly for 4 years, and then simply pick up where they left off. Trump doesn’t understand institutions, but his supporters don’t care. The ‘deep state’ will let him spend 4 years in the AG’s office fighting spurious legal cases against his onetime political foes, and all the while the rest of Washington will tick along as usual.
2rafa
1d ago
Porn is inherently low status. Even in the 80s, being caught going into a porn store to rent a VHS was the height of embarrassment, made fun of on sitcoms etc.
It’s not just that horniness is embarrassing. The level of cringe was much greater that, say, merely catching your friend picking someone up at the bar for a one-night stand. The idea that you watch porn instead of actually getting laid makes you - in the eyes of much of society - a loser.
This is what really makes selling porn online so difficult to make profitable. Terms like “post nut clarity” (which, yes, has a real-world meaning but is most commonly used in relation to porn) speak to the shame of the whole enterprise. Men don’t want to feel like the kind of men who pay for porn.
There’s more deniability when it’s free. If I relentlessly make fun of Disney adults for 10 years and then go with my brother and his kids when they invite me along, my cognitive dissonance is limited. If I spend $300 for a ticket and rock up with Minnie Mouse ears and a rockabilly dress and a Snow White tattoo, I’m going to feel like a fucking loser.
Men don’t want to pay for porn because it makes them feel like losers. I don’t see why that’s not the obvious answer. When men had to pay to access it, more swallowed their pride. Now that it’s free and plentiful online, only the most committed coomers do.
But let's put aside speculation about technical issues and focus on what is SBI's department: writing. Well, thing are not looking so good there either
There are maybe 10 AAA games that have ever been released with passable writing, and probably two thirds of them are from two studios (Rockstar and CDPR). That’s passable, by the way, not good (which would lower the number to maybe one or two, though I’d rather not debate which exactly they are).
Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.
Kotaku has written an article about it, the article's author claims that you can't be racist against white people.
Gawker was famous for paying writers for clicks, she seems to be doing a very good job. Amusingly, the same practice on the same website (then under different ownership of course) led in substantial part to the original Gamergate moment.
Like for example many western AAA titles in recent years struggle with modeling female faces for some reason, and the in-game models look uncanny valley-ish and quite unlike the people they're modeled after, and the conspiracy-inclined are saying that the characters are deliberately made ugly to challenge the patriarchal standards, or something.
Japanese games always anime-ify all their characters’ faces, even in the rare cases in which they use facial capture. It’s extremely jarring when playing yet another Japanese game with ‘realistic’ (by which I mean not-cartoon or exaggerated in art style) environments and anime plastic skin triangle face NPCs, where everyone looks like the picture Koreans bring to the plastic surgeon. But that’s a personal preference, probably.
Western games tend to go for direct scans rather than yassification. I think there’s a general emphasis on ‘more real’ characters, but it’s pretty common across the board. British TV tends to avoid casting extremely beautiful actors in many roles (especially in comedy and ‘gritty’ drama) and it seems to have been that way for a while, and probably isn’t the result of feminism. And, for example, the women in ‘Suicide Squad’ by Rocksteady, which you note these consultants worked on, don’t seem to have been made particularly unattractive physically in the clip you link, judging by Harley Quinn and Wonder Woman at least.
Mass Effect Andromeda
This really brought me back. But really, the face model for Sara Ryder does seem to look a lot like the final character model, people just cherrypicked pictures in which the model was mewing/posing instead of smiling or moving her facial muscles and therefore showed her prominent jowls and squareish jaw.
2rafa
5mo ago
This is just a weird mind worm that Catholics have. They’ve lost control of society, of culture, Francis is on the verge of allowing gay marriage, Vatican 2 has been in place for 60 years, divorce is commonplace, but one brain-dead infant needs to be pumped full of drugs and kept alive as a vegetable for the longest possible time. Maximizing the number of deformed, disabled, unwanted, underclass or critically sick babies appears - in the 21st century perhaps along with supporting large scale immigration - to be the guiding principle of the Catholic Church.
This isn’t even opposition to euthanasia, because as others have suggested, she wouldn’t survive for any period naturally (which is the traditional threshold), but rather must be artificially kept alive in what amounts to a gruesome and morbid Frankenstein-esque medical experiment.
I will respect Catholic trads when they actually fight for for something that might improve civilization in a material way for people currently alive and their healthy descendants instead of kvetching endlessly about irrelevancies. Until then, for God’s sake if for nobody else’s, they ought to let this deeply unfortunate child rest in peace.
It’s clear that wokeness isn’t the cause of bad game writing. The very suggestion is ridiculous.
Firstly, game writing has always been terrible barring a number of exceptions that can literally be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Secondly, countries with less ‘wokeness’, like Japan, have even worse, more hackneyed and more cringe game writing than their western counterparts.
Thirdly, some of the rarest examples of good game writing, like Disco Elysium, are explicitly leftist, woke fiction (bordering on actual political propaganda) far to the left of the average ‘Sweet Baby Inc’ employee.
The vast majority of bad game writing since the invention of video games, and probably still today, can be lain squarely at the feet of straight white (and Japanese) men. This is not in any way to suggest that wamen or minorities are any better (just look at modern YA fiction to see they are not), but it’s clear that the dire state of game writing is not their fault.
2rafa
3mo ago
Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. If you don't have mass immigration they're irrelevant, especially with the pace at which automation via LLM (including in the material world with PaLM-E and other multimodal models for robotics) is advancing.
It doesn't really matter if South Korea's population falls from 50m to 10m provided two things are true:
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Firstly, that total productivity can be maintained (this seems likely with LLMs able to take over a large percentage of white collar labor over the next few years, and robotics + multimodal LLMs likely to take over a large percentage of blue collar labor over the next decade or two). In this case, no economic collapse is likely, and while fiscal policy might need to adjust to redistribute generated wealth, that's not an existential issue.
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Secondly, that those very same advances mean that military preparedness isn't damaged by falling number of young men, which again, advances in drone warfare suggest is likely. Plus, North Korea's birthrate is also collapsing (see Kim's recent comments) and it has half SK's population, so any disadvantage is unlikely to be large.
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
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 don’t know why people discount the fact that Trump isn’t coming to “they stole the election from me” from some kind of neutral position. Trump is a historically, notoriously thin skinned man who lashes out at a lot of criticism and almost compulsively responds to it (eg tweeting @ minor columnists, celebrities or TV hosts who criticized him). The default assumption should be that he’s never going to accept that he lost fair and square, and will claim fraud. A lot of Trump supporters who believe the election was stolen believe it because he said so. Expecting this to be some kind of intellectual debate is ridiculous. Biden stole the election because Trump lost, and because Trump can’t lose and can’t believe he could lose. The evidence must then be obtained, as a secondary process.
This is why ‘stolen’ can mean many things, from hacking electronic voting machines and stuffing ballot boxes to planning protests (ie the ‘fortify the election’ meme) and engaging in the same dirty tactics that have been the norm in American politics for almost 250 years.
People who believe the election was probably stolen based on intuition: will you rescind your claim if Trump wins this year?
A Week On The Worst Coast
It was late morning on a weekday in Seattle, ostensibly one of America's wealthiest major cities and home to an impressive number of globally significant businesses. It was February, but the weather was a comfortable fifty degrees, and it was not raining. I had arrived the previous night from the airport, but as I drew the curtains of the Fairmont (the city's status as a 'Tier 2' North American metropolis in our internal booking system meant the Four Seasons was, alas, out of budget) I noticed something strange. The city was dense, there were cars on the roads, we were surrounded by office buildings which seemed, despite covid, to at least have some tenants, but the streets were almost devoid of pedestrians. Seattle was empty.
I decided to visit the city's major tourist attraction,
the first Starbucks storePike Place Market. The concierge furnished me with the name of a (British themed, amusingly) breakfast place there. Apple Maps said it was a ten-minute walk through the center of downtown, past the art museum and various office towers. The city did not look apocalyptic from above, at least from the Fairmont. It seemed tranquil. But again, foot traffic was eerily light for a major downtown on a weekday morning. Within a minute of my departure a grubby white woman, quite young, ambled-shambled-ran past me, mumbling about something. She was completely naked except for a short tail of toilet paper hanging out of her. This was rare even for Manhattan hobos in broad daylight, at least beyond the usual places. Around another corner a tall black fellow wearing an old bicycle helmet, neon vest and torn sweatpants starting walking up to me. I prepared myself for a quick exit across the street into the symphony orchestra, but he was actually quite polite and asked, shakily, if I might have any money. He was polite and I was apparently still a little freaked out after the naked lady, so I gave him the $10 I had in my pocket. He bowed, walked away, then muttered loudly some slur about 'fucking white people', which seemed uncalled for after what I'd done for him (perhaps he knew I was Jewish?).I continued walking. Three men and a woman in heavy winter coats were engaged in what seemed like haggling over a drugs purchase, or maybe they were just shooting the shit while they shot the shit. Another group of hobos had set up what seemed like a slightly longer-term presence just outside the headquarters of Zillow, which according to Google has never returned to its Seattle offices (though they still seem to own the lease). At this point, after several minutes of walking through downtown Seattle on a weekday mid-morning, I had not encountered a single normal pedestrian. Not a student. Not an office worker in a quarter zip. Not a #girlboss with a coffee in her hand shouting into her AirPods. The city had been ceded.
I expertly dodged a homeless guy wearing what looked like a girl's tank top and board shorts literally foaming at the mouth while gyrating and staggering wildly by the Four Seasons, then arrived by the waterfront. Here there were people, but they were construction workers in great numbers working on some kind of public works project by the park. One stepped over a homeless man lying on the street as if he wasn't there, or rather as if he was some kind of immovable feature of civic life, like a fire hydrant. I arrived at the cafe. The girl serving me told a group of Amazon corporate employees visiting from India ahead of me that they had reduced hours recently, first closing for one day a week, then two, now three or four. There were no longer enough customers to justify opening seven days a week. I ate, then walked past the 'first Starbucks' around the corner. Online tourist guides say you need to get there first thing in the morning or you'll wait for hours, but when I arrived there was no queue (you got me, Brits) at all.
Outside, construction workers continued their labor renovating some part of the market. A hobo shambled next to his cart outside the giant neon Public Market sign and shouted at some tourists who ran into the Target next door. Two brawny construction workers stood by and shrugged. I decided to follow the tourists. The Target had a detachment of a half dozen cops inside of it (I counted). Real police, not security. Given that the Seattle PD has only 940 officers, this amounted to 0.6% of the entire city's police force guarding a single Target outlet. I felt honored. Every single shelf in the cosmetics section was a locked cabinet. I paid, left and decided to head to the Nordstrom flagship store for some shopping, resolving to Uber back to the hotel if I bought anything. Along the way, I passed a city whose commercial life seemed in terminal decline. Empty storefront after empty storefront. Even the big luxury apartment buildings with sea views had huge 'for rent' banners draped across them. In 2016, Seattle had 16 homicides. In 2023, it had 73.
The route was a big mistake. The way from the market to Nordstrom had me turn at 3rd and Pine, home, as I would later find out, to "Crackdonald's". Hopefully you find this generally amusing, but I'll be honest, this part was scary. Among other things I got shouted at, someone tried to grab my (cheap) bag, a woman who was completely out of it stumbled into me, collapsed, then got up. I should have turned around but stupidly continued walking past the (unbelievably still open for business lol) McDonald's when a city employee in some kind of uniform grabbed my wrist and guided me through, then said I didn't look like I was from here and should avoid this intersection at night. I entered Nordstrom, which I assume only remains in business for corporate headquarters reasons, because there were almost no customers inside. The hobos were visible from Chanel, where I was ultimately reminded of the absurd markup European luxury brands charge Americans; the sales assistant sent two security guys from the store to wait with me on the empty sidewalk for my Uber.
On the five minute drive back, I marvelled again at the seemingly extraordinary amount of construction work the city was pursuing downtown. Widening sidewalks, planting trees, resurfacing streets, everywhere the logo of the Downtown Seattle Association and its key partners (Amazon and so on) was visible. A lone open ice cream store sought new workers at $27 an hour, an annual wage 50% higher than the median income in Britain. It was clear that Seattle was a very rich city. Yet it was also clear that it was a lawless shithole, abandoned by all but the hardiest pedestrians for point-to-point car transfers. And even then, they seemingly increasingly avoided the urban core. This is what marks the biggest difference between Seattle and places like Johannesburg; there, in the poor and violent downtown, one can see that the material situation is dire. There is no money. In Seattle, there was money. This was a choice, one unprompted (seemingly) by any major political change as occurred in South Africa. It seemed, inexplicably, as if this was what these wealthy and otherwise productive citizens had chosen for their city, clear-eyed and uncompelled, even as they invested billions in civic improvement most of them would never be able to use. Why were they doing this building? Did they not realize that the reason downtown was doing less well than it has been was not a lack of tree cover in summer or sidewalks that were too narrow for throngs of pedestrians to traffic them simultaneously, but a rather more immediate and pressing issue?
At the same time, it was hard not to participate in a general sense of despair at this pretty and useful city of 800,000 held hostage by, perhaps, a couple thousand psychotic homeless addicts. These were not well armed young men of the kind who create so much trouble in Rio, or in Caracas, or in the worse parts of Mexico. They were big, dumb, lumbering addicts, or skinny little things, out of their minds. They probably weren't going to shoot back, at least not accurately. And it was not lost on me that, in a different kind of society, the small corps of policemen in the Target alone, equipped with enough materiel, could have in a few hours dealt with the issue permanently. It was hard not to want them to, though it wasn't and isn't my call to make.
In the afternoon we went with some of our clients to eat at the University Village, an outdoor mall and dining complex near the city center. As they did in Johannesburg in Sandton, the productive class had built here an enclave, a kind of urban Disneyland guarded by a large cohort of ever-present security staff. But there is a crucial difference between the two: South Africa's transformation, for better or worse, was imposed upon it by the world. Seattle's was enacted by its own people.
The concierge at the hotel said Portland was even worse.
My work almost never brings me home to America (and my family all live on the East Coast), so in my morbid curiosity I jumped at the chance to see for myself how bad things had gotten since 2020. Downtown Los Angeles was a shithole, but it apparently has been since they built the highways (except for that brief 2015-2017 golden age) and I assume they'll try to clean it temporarily for the Olympics. San Francisco, which I had been expecting to be in the condition Fox News promised me, was slightly better than I expected, I must admit. Not that it wasn't a dump, because it was, but it didn't really appear worse than it was before 2020. SF was (laughably) considered a "Tier 1" city (and had a weirdly cheap Four Seasons), so I stayed in the FS by Union Square, famous for shithole status and close proximity to the Tenderloin. Honestly, there were a lot of normal people walking around during the daytime and even in the evening they still outnumbered the hobos. The financial district seemed fine enough, and in general the hobo problem, while worse than Manhattan, was no worse than Boston was late last year, and I thought Boston was still liveable, probably. The signs of decline were around us in the closed businesses and empty offices, but it was Singapore compared to Seattle. The food in San Francisco has seen big declines, though, we ate at well-reviewed / recommended places and what had once been one of the great food cities in the world seems to have lost all its good cooks in the last few years.
More than anything else, though, the trip underscored just how much of a farce the extreme urban decline of West Coast cities has been. Other countries have real problems. When their cities become hellholes, it's because their economies have collapsed, or because they've been taken over by extremely well-organized criminal gangs funded with cartel money in a nation too poor to pay for honest police, or because they're locked in years-long siege situations with militarized gendarmerie, or because they recently imported millions of people from cultures that hate them and don't care about their rules. But on the West Coast the shithole city problem wasn't the fault of any of those things, not even mass immigration (certainly not of the legal kind, although honestly very few of the hobos appeared to be Latino). Nor was it a grand act of clear-headed sadomasochism, amusing as that would be, because I can't really say most of the people I met there were happy about what had happened.
No, in America, the great cities of the West Coast had been destroyed because, like a prison warden deciding one day to become an inmate for no reason at all, their inhabitants had voted to legalize crime and - in so doing - to be held voluntarily, collectively hostage by the dregs of humanity their cities both produced and attracted from elsewhere in the country, bussed to California for the mild climate and pathologically altruistic host population. That the problem could be solved almost immediately by a competent government (even without resorting to the most extreme methods) was perhaps, in fact, the point. Perhaps you are supposed to take the BART with the filth every day, supposed to step over the needles, supposed to fear for your safety every time you walk around after dark, supposed to know just how easily this could be fixed at almost no cost and effort and yet watch powerlessly as it never happens and things just keep getting worse for no real reason at all.
Unrelated side point: holy hell were there an insanely high number of transwomen on the West Coast. I encountered more in that week than I have in my entire life. Two unrelated baristas at two different coffee places in the same morning were both transwomen, then so was the receptionist at the office we visited a half hour later. Wild. I now understand where all the very online trans people actually live.
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