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2rafa


				

				

				
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2rafa


				
				
				

				
15 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 06 11:20:51 UTC

					

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User ID: 841

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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 store Pike 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.

I think Greer avoids thinking about the clear national distinctions between, say, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games, like the majority of similar American fiction, is a retelling of the popular retelling of the American revolution. This is the ‘one story’ in American fiction. A plucky band of rebels overthrow throw the evil king, whose soldiers have drip. Star Wars is the same thing. The rebels, of disparate origins (Albion’s Seed style) are always scrappy, don’t have lavish bases, struggle to survive, and get a big break because of individual acts of heroism. Every single villain ultimate faction in most American genre fiction is the British Empire. Not British people, really, who Americans usually like, but the British Empire of the Yankee imagination.

Then look at Harry Potter. In Harry Potter institutions are fundamentally good. Hogwarts, the main source of authority, is led by someone who is ultimately a kind, powerful old man trying to do his best for his people. Most people in the Ministry of Magic are good. There may be corruption, subterfuge, individual villainy, but the story literally ends with the hero becoming a magical cop working for the government, where the father of one of the three main characters (who becomes a secondary partial surrogate father to the hero) also works.

The same is true if you compare American spy stories (like Bourne) with British ones (like Bond). James Bond presents MI6 as a positive institution for Britain and the world, staffed mostly by honorable people. The head of MI6, M, is always a good person, even if they make mistakes. Some senior politicians might be villains, but the main source of institutional authority in the fiction is a noble institution, only occasionally infiltrated by villains.

How often, in American spy fiction, is the CIA fundamentally wholesome and good and led by a brave and honorable man or woman? Even American spy fiction by hardcore jingoists like Tom Clancy often relies on either the corrupt agency trope or - at least - the incompetent, out of touch, slow and shitty bureaucratic management trope. Bond is about protecting the system, Bourne is always on the run from the CIA hit squads trying to kill him.

YA fits American fiction so well because the American story is this Star Wars thing, retold for each new generation. I don’t even know if stories about ‘defending’ institutions in America are viable, even Jack Ryan is a liberal at heart. Everything needs to be torn down or at least reformed, all the time, and both the right and the left agree. Every political movement, every successful narrative, must cast itself in the rebel-soldiers-in-1776 mold.

Plane grounded in France over human trafficking fears

A small and largely ignored story from this afternoon (now pushed off the BBC news homepage, and barely reported on in the American press).

A plane carrying 303 Indian passengers has been grounded at an airport in north-eastern France on suspicion of human trafficking, French media report.

The Airbus A340 was flying from the United Arab Emirates to the Nicaraguan capital, Managua.

It was grounded during a technical stopover at the small Vatry airport in Marne department on Thursday after an "anonymous tip-off", prosecutors say.

The official facts, then, are that a chartered Romanian plane flying from the UAE to Nicaragua, but carrying 300 Indians, was grounded en route in France because of an “anonymous tip” about “human trafficking”.

The details of the story raise some interesting questions. There is no Indian community in Nicaragua to speak of; the relationship is so unimportant that neither nation even has an embassy in the other (India’s affairs are handled via their embassy in Panama, Nicaragua’s via their embassy in Tokyo). There is no plausible reason for Indians to be trafficked for labor in Nicaragua, which has a large poor domestic labor pool itself and high unemployment.

So what explains this curious set of affairs? Reading between the lines suggests a different story, one that is barely even hinted at in the plain text.

The Indians on board intended to immigrate illegally to the United States, part of a growing number of migrants from outside the Americas now using the southern route. The plane was chartered by an organization promising to facilitate at least part of that journey, with someone who doesn’t ask questions.

The “anonymous tip” was almost certainly from the United States, which is waging a largely futile war against the above by trying to limit global migrant inflows to Central America. Grounding a foreign plane transiting two other foreign nations is something the US has done before, but would prefer to avoid if possible, hence the “anonymous tip” whose source the French obviously know (grounding a plane merely traversing one’s airspace because of an anonymous tip about some passengers, barring threat of imminent terror attack, isn’t something countries do often) but choose not to share.

As long as birthright citizenship exists, the United States will be uniquely attractive to any would-be illegal migrant. No other major wealthy nation (other than Canada, which almost necessarily requires migrants to traverse the US to reach it) promises the descendants of illegal migrants immediate, guaranteed citizenship.

Market capitalism leads inexorably to ever more socially (although not necessarily economically) progressive politics in Anglo countries because it successfully filters ambitious, right-wing young men, largely by their own choice, into professions where they make money but are not involved in the running of core political, cultural and educational systems, because careers in them almost all pay much less than comparable careers available to men of the same social class and intelligence in other sectors (eg. whether you’re a Yale grad or a community college grad, a job in ‘media’ or ‘education’ is still going to pay less than a career in much of the private sector).

The only time ‘business conservatives’ in an Anglo capitalist society have cared about politics in the last 150 years enough to make a difference is when they perceived there to be imminent threat of ‘actual socialism’ involving, to a greater or lesser extent, some kind of revolution that would actually expropriate them and make their lives, and those of their families, much worse. Not the distant threat that America or England becomes Brazil in 100 years, or that tax rates may rise a little, but the threat that it becomes Lenin’s Russia or the Paris Commune in 5 years.

If you think about it, it really is the perfect scheme. It’s like running Vogue and wanting to ensure your magazine is staffed only with wealthy young women of the right social background, so you decide to preference degrees in History of Art and require a 2 year unpaid internship before any job offer. You will get what you ask for.

If all the smartest young people in a society become quants at Jane Street UNLESS they care a huge deal about leftist politics and have a strong dislike for Wall Street…you get a society that looks a lot like this one. The human capital in conservative politics is dogshit because unless you either host a prime time Fox News show or are senior enough in the congressional GOP to get good kickbacks after you leave office on the corporate circuit, why bother? The remote chance you might possibly maybe have some influence on power some day, if you’re lucky (but will probably just be poor)?

We can look at this very sub, full of very intelligent conservatives. Almost to the man or woman every single one (including, if you’ll stoop to somewhat less intelligent ones, myself) works in tech, in finance, in the corporate world or in the private sector in general to some extent. And high school teachers making $50k a year have a much bigger effect on the politics of the next generation than an investment banking MD making $1m a year, or than almost any FAANG engineer.

But would you rather be the teacher?

'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?

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.

The difference is that people don’t really care when gang members in Chicago kill each other, they do care when people uninvolved in crime who live in middle class or wealthy places get killed randomly.

The vast majority of homicides in the US are things you don’t need to worry about as the average middle class white or asian person. Mass shootings of this kind (or school shootings, or the Las Vegas thing, or Islamist terror attacks on office buildings or a marathon finish line or whatever) trigger a fear and panic response because the people affected are not the kind of people who are the victims of regular violent crime very often.

I bet the homicide rate for white Chicagoans who make more than $100,000 a year is not high enough to be concerning.

You have to understand that in France all public rhetoric is much grander than it is in the Anglosphere, which seemed to have had a self-conscious moment sometime in the 1960s or 1970s after which grandiose speeches were declared eternally "cringe". Even Obama only partially got away with it, and that was mostly when he was quoting MLK or JFK or Lincoln or a founding father. This extends to everything (even corporate memos or emails from the CEO if you've ever worked with the French). By itself it doesn't mean anything. Macron himself makes grandiose speeches all the time about France's civilizational mission blah blah blah and nothing happens.

So when you hear this, and you imagine, like, a prominent police official in the US or UK saying this:

Facing these savage hordes, asking for calm is no longer enough, it must be imposed!

..and it representing this huge moment of change where the wool falls from their eyes and the civilizational meaning of all this becomes clear,

well, you're kind of thinking of it the wrong way. That's just how the French speak, loudly and with a very small stick.

I think there are two points. Firstly, House was always written as an asshole, and secondly, yes, there was a big shift around 2013 when “punching down” became unacceptable.

You don’t even need to go back to House in 2004 to see it. Modern Family’s run is fascinating from this perspective. The first two seasons (2009-2011) have a huge number of Asian jokes, Hispanic jokes and gay jokes (the Asian woman doctor is a terrible driver which is played for stereotype laughs, the Asian child’s (adoptive) uncle asks “will she even be able to pronounce her own name?” (its ‘Lily’). The show isn’t mean spirited but sometime around Gamergate it became unacceptable to have otherwise ‘good’ characters use ethnic/gender/sexuality based humor.

Is Google playing to lose in this antitrust case?

These seem to be the facts: Google pays Apple $10bn a year to be the default search engine on iPhone. This fee amounts to pure rent-seeking behavior on Apple's part - if Google doesn't pay up, they can go to Microsoft (who, even if they're not willing to match Google's fee, will pay something, for reasons outlined below). Google is the most popular search engine, the great majority of users don't really care what the default search engine is anyway, and it costs Apple nothing in engineering, reputation or other costs to make Google the default. Essentially, Apple makes $10bn for nothing.

Why does Google pay? The iPhone search market is extremely important to Google. iPhone users make up the majority of affluent smartphone users in the world's wealthiest countries, which means that they're far more valuable to advertisers, and therefore Google's most valuable users. iOS also has supermajority marketshare among young people in the crucial 18-35 demographic in the US (and is disproportionately owned by affluent young people around the world), considered by far the most valuable to advertisers.

Losing the iPhone demographic to Bing would amount to cutting out the majority of affluent and/or young consumers in Google's key ad sales markets, a blow far more substantial than their percentage of Google's total userbase would suggest. So Google pays $10bn a year because the alternative is the enemy taking the most valuable customers (or customers of the customers, if you want to be pedantic) of their central product.


But this risk only exists if the alternative to Google is Bing. If the alternative to Google is the search engine equivalent of the browser choice screen that appears when you install Windows (after the antitrust trials of the 2000s), the problem is much reduced. The vast majority of Apple users, when presented with a choice at setup between, say, Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo will pick Google, the same way they currently do on PC (for both browser and search engine). A small number of Apple users might switch, but there's every chance these are worth far less to Google than $10bn a year, which Google pays to avoid Bing being the default, not to avoid a choice in which most people will choose them.

The biggest loser if Google loses the antitrust case isn't Google, it's Apple, who miss out on the $10bn. Even for the world's most profitable company, $10bn in pure margin represents 10% of net income in a good year, so that's no small amount. For Google, by contrast, as long as the great majority of iPhone users pick Google over Bing (and there is every indication that they will), they're freed from a $10bn ransom and don't have to hand over all their top users to Microsoft.

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.

I think it’s very damning when critics-of-critics of the sexual revolution rely on the same flawed arguments.

  1. “The alternative is women not working or very young marriage (as in 1950s America)”. Countries in Islamic North Africa and - as @self_made_human says below - India have both high numbers of young women working and comparatively much more conservative sexual morality than the West. Women worked in substantial numbers outside the home in Western countries since the middle of the Industrial Revolution, a hundred years before the sexual revolution. The idea that female labor force participation automatically generates liberal sexual mores simply isn’t as obvious as some people seem to think. Similarly, the Saudi birth rate collapse of the 1980s and 1990s happened while native female labor force participation was extremely low (suggesting, again, that women working was not the primary cause of falling birthrates).

  2. “It’s not that bad”. Yeah, but it’s not that good, either. As I’ve argued before, and as more ‘feminist’ critiques of the sexual revolution by people like Louise Perry discuss, women don’t really get anything out of casual sex. They get neither status nor (in almost all cases) pleasure, so why do they do it? For the same currency (male attention) that women have always received, except previously they didn’t have to put out for it. That, not “women in the workplace”, is the sexual revolution. What benefit did 13 year old girls passed around between adult rockstars as groupies in the 1970s get from this glorious state of affairs? Again, seemingly very little.

  3. There is something to @BurdensomeCount’s occasional suggestion that some people (typically smarter and higher status than usual, although they are not close to a majority even among that group) are able to successfully decouple sex and relationships. It would be unfair of me not to say that I’ve met women (and of course men) like this. But it’s also clear to me that they’re far from the majority, and policy around vices must take into account how most or many people respond to a thing. There are long term functional heroin users able to maintain some semblance of a ‘normal’ life, but they are in the minority. I won’t speak for men, but most women I know who’ve had lots of casual sex with strangers don’t seem to have benefited from or enjoyed the experience, and many regret it and say they would advise their own daughters against it.

  4. These don’t seem to be imaginary problems. Data on things like how promiscuity affects relationship success and satisfaction lead detractors of the sexual revolution to often note the fact that many young people today probably would be happier getting married in their mid twenties to an exclusive partner. I think this is what most women want. Men’s desires are more debatable, since a large part of the incel phenomenon is (as you correctly suggest) anguish that they’re not ‘chads’ rather than actual discontent with the dynamics of the wider system. But even many men suffer from the emptiness of single life, and men seem to, as @Questionmark says below, struggle on their own too.

More generally, a lot of modernity serves the interests of a small minority of happily atomized PMC ‘decouplers’ who want to maximize their individual freedom at the expense of the institutions that allow for a more broad-based happiness. “I can gamble without getting addicted, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can smoke mountains of 20%+ thc weed without losing all motivation and sitting on my couch watching SpongeBob all day, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can find meaning and happiness in hedonism, consumption and career success, so why shouldn’t we abandon traditional forms of spirituality? I can have casual sex with many people without any physical harm or psychological damage coming to me, so why shouldn’t I be able to without condemnation?” The problem comes if freeing these people from the chains of tradition and obligation actively damages the lives of many others, and I think it does.

Most people (and yes, I include myself in this) don’t particularly desire a great deal of individual liberty. They want a clear, well-trodden path, a route that works, a comfortable life, ‘traditional’ happiness in the form of a stable community and family. They don’t want to have to set out in the world on their own without a map and to figure out everything for themselves.

Look at the interminable number of TikTok and Instagram gurus. The Tates and the Female Dating Strategists. The Hustle Bros and the Girlbosses. What are their (often very young) audiences looking for? Someone to tell them exactly what to do and how to do it. They represent an organic rejection of personal freedom, of individualism, which is aberrant and dysfunctional.


Have you watched the show Fleabag? One of the reasons it resonated with so many young women is that it’s about this. Of course its creator is a liberal feminist, she doesn’t even really understand the implications and the true theme of her own work (this is not unusual of course). But there’s a scene in the second season where the protagonist, who has wasted her twenties and early thirties doing nothing and having endless casual sex with strangers, is sitting in a confession box at a church begging the priest, begging God, to tell her what to do, to give her a path, to free her from the atomized and empty and depressing nature of her existence. Here’s the monologue.

Of course, the scene is subverted (she later sleeps with the priest); I consider it unlikely the writer even consciously understood the impulse she was describing. But I also think that in the moment it’s so, so real, more than the creator knew while writing it.

“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.

Judging people entirely by what they wrote years ago is such a weak, modern thing.

Go back a century or two (or even to the middle of the twentieth century) and huge ideological journeys over the course of a lifetime, from left to right, from right to left, back again, across religion and secularism, republicanism and absolutism, liberty and tyranny are commonplace among public intellectuals, writers, politicians and philosophers.

One thing arguably quite unique about progressive cancel culture is its utter resistance to even capitulation or apology. Most historical ideological movements were quite happy to adopt former foes if they agreed to repent. Yes, you had to convert or die, but at least you could convert. This was the normal thing. Often only those who refused out of principle to convert, or (in rarer cases) who were believed to have converted insincerely, were not spared. The CCP famously even spared and converted the last Emperor of China, who was widely considered to have gladly sold out his countrymen to the Japanese (and so was not merely hated for being a monarch).

When the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, Puyi was repatriated to China after negotiations between the Soviet Union and China. Puyi was of considerable value to Mao, as Behr noted: "In the eyes of Mao and other Chinese Communist leaders, Pu Yi, the last Emperor, was the epitome of all that had been evil in old Chinese society. If he could be shown to have undergone sincere, permanent change, what hope was there for the most diehard counter-revolutionary? The more overwhelming the guilt, the more spectacular the redemption-and the greater glory of the Chinese Communist Party"

It speaks to the fear, the emptiness, the hollowness of progressive ideology that they actually don't believe they can facilitate sincere conversions to the faith. 'If you once denounced us, you are an enemy for all time' isn't something that comes from a position of strength but from one of weakness.

Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak. The system isn't strong enough to overcome racial and religious differences completely but it's also much stronger than many right-wing doomers seem to think. After the kerfuffle everyone moves on. There's no reason to think it will be different this time.

Right, people in the West, in France in this case, are much too comfortable to do anything here. And that’s for a number of reasons.

  1. The threshold for “do something” is absurdly high. The most politically charged question for the French far-right is, of course, repatriation. That means stripping millions (at least 6-7m in France) of people of citizenship based on ancestry and then deporting them to a third country that doesn’t want them (you think Algeria or Morocco want millions more listless, angry young men?). This violates every constitutional statute, the EU, the ECHR. Most citizens still find even the idea of this shocking and distasteful. It is about as beyond the pale in Western Europe as banning women from the workplace or forcing 8 year olds back into factories. Even Zemmour, as I’ve said, doesn’t begin to hint at doing this.

  2. France is a highly ghettoized society. In building the banlieues on the periphery, the French ensured the inner arrondissements of Paris avoided the same fate as the downtown areas of many American cities from the 1960s onward. But the price for that was ignorance. In London, social housing occupied by Somalis sits next to $15m townhouses. In America’s great cities, at least in their downtown areas, you now can’t walk a few blocks without encountering the ravages of the underclass. In Paris, what is out of sight is out of mind. And France is so centralized that what happens outside Paris really doesn’t matter very much.

  3. The “choices” are becoming starker as demographics change. Even though the majority of the population remains native, birth rate disparities mean that a highly disproportionate percentage of young people - of particular relevance, obviously, young men - are from MENA communities. One can imagine a situation where 60% of the population is still native in 20 years, but 50% or even 55% of fighting-age males are from those communities. At that point, the situation is extremely dicey. The military and police have recruited from diverse communities heavily, there’s no guarantee what side they’d be on in a serious civil conflict. Most French with any money would flee elsewhere in the EU or overseas. A weak central government collapsing or maintaining limited control over a military kept in bases or deployed abroad and then roaming bands of young men fighting district by district is a possibility. At that point, one’s money might well be on the Algerians.

  4. Comfort will be prioritized until it’s too late. What is unreasonable will become reasonable too late. What is foretold will become reality too late. A Lebanese Civil War that started in 1958 would have likely been much better for the Christians (who then still constituted a majority, before the PLO was forced out of Jordan) than the civil war that began in 1975 was. Ben-Gurion even offered to carve out a state for Christians in 1956. But the Maronites of 1958 were too comfortable. They never thought their position would be truly threatened. They could not imagine the rivers of blood that would flow through Beirut.

So it goes.

"I heard", "I spoke to a guy", "I met someone who said", "single image of a sphere hovering above the water, and four diamond shaped lights from craft on a training mission", "the sensor array was switched off by the aliens" etc etc etc etc etc... Mountains upon mountains of bullshit.

I would have liked just one person to stand up before congress and describe alien physiology, say they met an alien, describe in detail and captured spaceship. Anything. Yes, that could (and almost certainly would) still be either schizo fantasy or outright fabrication, but at least it would be a concrete, real claim. Little green men, ET, flying saucers, weird sci fi computers.

Instead, the stories are always the same. Something heard, something rumored, bright lights, weird shapes spotted by fighter pilots in the distance, sensor arrays messing up. Always vague. Show me the aliens and I'll believe.

I have changed in a good many of my opinions, and would like to go to America for a half year or so because it is certain that these people possess a secret method which raises the most common fellows into an individual who stands up boldly and moves about freely and unconcerned.

It is possible that the America of, say, 1870 to 1970 was an extraordinarily unique place in world history in which, for a great many reasons, three things were simultaneously true for ordinary people:

  1. The rewards for ambition, competence, and conscientousness were extraordinarily great

  2. The price for personal failure was still very high

  3. It was possible for many to rise well above their station in life due to very rapid economic growth

I struggle to think of many other societies in which all three were simultaneously true. The few examples I can think of (the four 'Asian Tiger' economies from the 1960s to 1990s, maybe) were also temporary, and true for a much shorter period than the US.

But in such a society, propriety, boldness, ambition and self-respect would likely be more common among those who had great hopes of participating in that ongoing boom.

A low effort comment follows:

This kind of blatant QAnon retardation bothers me a lot less than the supposedly smart groyper dissident right types who spend all day posting obscure remixes of old memes behind a dozen layers of irony who believe that they’re fomenting some kind of actual uprising. The former are just kind of dumb, Alex Jones listeners. The latter sometimes have actual intellectual potential, but they waste it on feeling superior.

Say what you will about Russia (and I agree with the general consensus that this entire war and the last decade of Putin’s presidency has been disastrous), stuff is happening there. American dissident rightists don’t believe in making anything happen, even on a localized level they’ll shirk responsibility to, say, get married young and have a big family. These people are, as Karlin (ironically) accurately suggests, detestable. It’s the entire BAP mindset of laughing at your enemies while (with great effort) curating an air of impossibly grand smugness. Blah blah Ancient Greece blah blah masculinity blah blah semi-un-ironic gayposting blah blah all our enemies are evil and satanic blah blah mocking other people with almost the same ideology for not being radical or cruel enough blah blah [thread]posting about how everything is so much worse than you had imagined blah blah imagine engaging with mainstream politics lmao what a loser etc etc etc… If I was Robin DiAngelo herself I could not have imagined a better vehicle to destroy any hope for the Anglophone right than the void of promise that is dissident right twitter.

The big lesson for Western rightists should be simple: get off twitter at all costs. As a platform it encourages insincerity, vindictiveness, needless pile-ons (most importantly within movements) and wanton posturing over genuine promise.

The issue with aboriginals is that the urban population is full of whites with distant aboriginal ancestry (almost uniformly 75%+ European) using their newfound (they certainly wouldn’t have considered themselves aboriginal in 1973) identities for the usual grievances / racial spoils, and the rural population, where almost all aboriginal Australians who are half or more native live, deals with the same problems as every indigenous community from Greenland to Hawaii (principally alcoholism, drugs and - a less charitable commentator would say - fecklessness).

The problem is that modernity is unavoidable (especially in the developed world) and so when presented with the choice of continuing their harsh, strenuous pre-modern existence (as much as that might even be possible) or living off welfare and getting drunk all day, they pick the latter. It’s sad that visitors can no longer go to an Indian reservation and - outside of certain exhibits - witness the natives living in tipis and wearing carefully sewn native fabrics and headdresses and whatever, but let’s be real, that takes a lot of work compared to buying $2 t shirts made in Bangladesh. And, in defense of the natives, there are plenty of Europeans who similarly live off welfare and spend their days drunk or high, too.

Really, though, the above are just a few years ahead of the rest of us. If we survive the singularity then we, too, will spend our lives on our little reservations, everything provided from above, occupying our time in what will probably be ways no less degenerate than the average dweller in an aboriginal settlement somewhere in the northern territories.

Firstly, welcome back to your usually scheduled programming.

  1. As the other user said, Hitler’s territorial plans had a long history that predated his rise to power. Lebensraum/the ‘Drang nach Osten’ was - far more so than antisemitism or rearmament or domestic economic or political reform - the central ideological message of the National Socialists from the mid-1920s onward. Books and articles about the idea of a ‘Volk ohne Raum’ / people without (enough) land became bestsellers, irredentism and expansionism went beyond nazism to become a pillar of the entire German hard right. Almost all of Germany’s problems were, at one point or another, blamed on it - and as you suggest, this was the means by which the Nazis blamed the Treaty of Versailles and Jews for many of Germany’s problems.

  2. Unz makes Hitler seem like an extreme retard in this piece. If his own intelligence was informing him that America and Britain were looking for an excuse to declare war, why would he give them an excuse by taking Poland? Hitler’s own war plans largely prove Unz wrong. If he merely (as is often suggested by the far right) wanted to fight communists, the invasion of Poland and Czecheslovakia, and the deal with Stalin, make little sense. The strategy in the east confirms imperial ambitions, already plainly discussed, that in the medium term would have resulted in the ethnic cleansing of the West Slavs almost universally. As for the Jews, one of the main reasons they were concerned wasn’t their property in Germany (largely already sold by 1938, and the majority of German Jews had already fled) but the vast Jewish populations of Poland and elsewhere in CEE which they feared Hitler would expropriate, persecute or kill, which of course he eventually did.

Unz’ argument is essentially that even though predictions of what Hitler would do to occupied Eastern Europe largely came true and fully retroactively justified efforts to try to stop him, he originally - despite his consistent arguing for German manifest destiny eastward for almost two decades before he embarked upon it - didn’t actually want it. Seems pretty ridiculous to me.

My dad started on Wall Street in 1977. He always jokes that when he did, finance was seen as a dull career for old men. Senior bankers did OK, but it was no great path to riches. The CEO of the bank might make half a million dollars a year. Everyone else made much, much less. Salaries were higher at IBM, which he applied to but which didn’t give him an offer after the interview, than they were at Goldman Sachs. Star stock-pickers like Soros could make money, but there were only ever a handful of them and they were largely separated from the rest of Wall Street. My father speaks fluent Spanish and French, but went to a second-tier college so the State Department wouldn’t hire him, which was fair.

I say all this because I think we often forget that the present situation, where very smart people can easily make 10x a government salary in the private sector, is mostly a recent invention. When my father graduated college, a job in the federal civil service was an elite position with a good salary, full job security and a gold-plated pension. In 1972, the President made $200,000 a year. Almost nobody in the private sector came close. Today, he makes $400,000 a year. 25 year old software engineers and investment banking associates at good firms routinely make more.

The irony is that even the modern political grift is usually quite unprofitable, even outside the state. (And many classically successful political operators did, at various times, work for the federal bureaucracy, in the military, etc., including Nixon, whose first career choice was the FBI). Sure, Tucker made money, but he was at the top of the pyramid and still got cancelled. On the left, things aren’t much better. It’s a question not of where the skilled people are, because we know where they are (in finance and tech, by and large) but of why they don’t build careers in government, where they would grow to understand the levers of power that (later, as politicians) they could manipulate effectively. That, in turn, comes down to what @throwaway182127 was discussing below.

But I think it’s less that smart young people today don’t go into the federal bureaucracy because they think it discriminates against men, or against whites. It’s that it simply doesn’t pay very well. Smart young people will go for whatever offers the opportunity for wealth and status. In some societies, that might be the military. In others, it might be Blackstone, Bain, Sequoia, KKR and Google. The intellectual types who don’t want wealth (or who have it) will work in the arts or academia, the ones who do will work in finance, biglaw, consulting or tech. The rest are the dregs.

One of the best things a DeSantis type administration could do would be to raid the Republican statehouses for the top 5% of junior staffers by intelligence and charisma, and to insert them (as far as possible) into D.C. Of course, replacing the federal bureaucracy wholesale is less legal.

You've understood some of it, but not the context. Saltburn is actually just the latest entry in the long tradition of English upper-class snobbery towards the upper-middle class.

Like Evelyn Waugh and Julian Fellowes (who write stories with similar messages, if less sexy in style), Emerald Fennell is from the bottom of the English upper class. Her father is a semi-famous jewelry designer who went to Eton, but who was born into a merely gentry army family in colonial Egypt. Her parents set her up with children of her father's higher profile clients as friends, and at Oxford:

Fennell was, writes journalist K.J. Yossman, "part of a rarefied...social set whose family names I recognized from gossip columns and history books… Balfour, Frost, von Bismarck, Guinness, Shaffer."

In essence, she was the least wealthy and least noble of the upper class set at the time. This always breeds the harshest resentment towards those in the class just below you (the actual upper-middle class, people with money but no name, no title and no estate, ie. arguably Emerald herself and certainly her children had her father had not done his best to elevate his daughter's station in life).

An earl or a duke, to say nothing of a member of the actual royal family, has no need to denigrate the upper middle class because their position is secure. A marquis, after all, can marry a prostitute and she's still lady so-and-so, marchioness whatever and her son is still the heir to the title. This is to some extent why neither Harry or William married their own kind; even their uncle's wife, the Countess Spencer, is a Canadian charity worker. But to someone on the precarious fringe of the peerage, someone who speaks the right way, runs in the right circles, went to the right schools but who lacks significant wealth, title or lineage, guarding one's privilege against the next rung down is critical.

Saltburn is about snobbery. Ollie hides that he's upper middle class not primarily because it will get him more sympathy in the American sense that the wealthy Felix will feel sorry for his poor friend. He hides that he's upper middle class because to be upper middle class is the worst possible thing you can be in the presence of 'old' money, because it's to be present in the same spaces as them as both an ignorant and uncouth annoyance and a reminder of a changing world. The English upper classes have a long history of liking the working class as relatively noble, deferential salt-of-the-earth type people (see downstairs in Downton Abbey), but disliking the middle as money-grubbing shysters. Ollie's betrayal is in claiming to the former while actually being the latter.

As this article says:

Only someone with a name like Emerald Fennell could make a film like Saltburn: a treatise on the horror and aesthetic depravity of the petite bourgeoisie. Saltburn might claim to satirise the frippery of the British aristocracy, but this is dishonest. The film’s brain says “eat the rich!” but its soul says “eww, the middle class.” It is a film that confidently demarcates the middle classes as the true villains of Great Britain: untrustworthy and covetous social climbers with none of the exotic intrigue of the poor, nor the blasé taste of the rich. In Saltburn’s universe there is no greater sin than bourgeois aspiration.

In Britain, the most important thing is to know one's place. Getting rich is fine, at least some of the time. But social climbing is never acceptable and a perennial source of mockery for anyone caught attempting it.

The impression that people who spend a lot of time in dissident right circles (ie our corner of twitter), regardless of their own politics, have of Africa is indeed an unsalvageable shithole, The Camp of Saints, 7.5 tfr Nigeriens trapped between the desertification of the Sahara and ISIS, millions in desperate Libyan camps trying to make it to Europe with the belief they’ll be soccer stars, millions more in the Congo being raped and butchered by gangs fighting over diamond and rare earth metals mines, an orgy of violence and - even in comparatively peaceful parts of Africa - miserable, grinding, absolute poverty. Africa, Addio in other words.

And it is true, of course, that all those things exist to some extent in Africa. But it is also true that they provide, at best, an extremely incomplete picture. Since 2016 I’ve travelled regularly to Sub-Saharan Africa, everywhere from Nigeria to Namibia, from Sierra Leone to South Africa, from Zimbabwe to the DRC to Ethiopia. And the world I see, as someone in finance, is obviously as skewed as the world a UN volunteer in a refugee camp sees.

But I have to say, the progress in the last ten years alone has been incredible. Often it’s obscured on statistics because of the collapse of EM currencies since 2014 (and more generally since 2010), and because population growth, which is slowing down, has been so high. Sometimes the stats do show this, as in e.g. Rwanda. Kinshasa is a completely different city to the one it was a decade ago. So is Addis, which has hugely developed and is now often (airport aside) quite pleasant, with a neat monorail that’s mostly clean, some good public spaces, despite the fact that they’ve been fighting a civil for for a few years now. Both cities, by the way, are cleaner than Mumbai. The growth of the middle class in many of the places I work has been extraordinary, entire suburbs with air conditioned malls and movie theaters emerging wholesale from the earth, even in countries not blessed or cursed with great natural resources. Government is (slowly) getting more competent, things are moving beyond paper into digital, where they’re more easily tracked and the petty corruption that cripples all developing countries is slightly more easily detected. The living condition of the great majority of Africans, who do not live in war zones or even in grinding poverty (perhaps a third do, which obviously isn’t great, but it isn’t the majority), is improving.

Things are being built, sometimes to great (although underreported) success, some of which I have helped to fund. New hotels and restaurants and luxury apartment buildings line the main streets of nearly every major sub-Saharan capital, along with new parks and gardens, the emergence (at last) of actual public services, including street cleaners and so on. And there is, a few countries (like South Africa) excepted, an air of infectious, absolute optimism. Last time I was in Kinshasa our clients took us out to try interesting Chinese-African fusion food, we went to a warehouse gallery that could have been in LA, we even walked around which I’d never have done 5 years ago. Small things, of course, and limited to the country’s top 5% at most (and in any case, some will say, evidence of the American monoculture spreading far and wide), but still progress in some sense. Many Africans live lives that are now comparable to the ‘global middle’, including in large parts of Latin America, India, parts of the Middle East and so on.

Even if one accepts the DR position on various evopsych concepts, it is a fallacy to suggest this means there is some “maximum level of development” to which a people or nation can aspire. Does that mean charity is warranted? I wouldn’t say so, but then I think charity is never warranted beyond one’s immediate community, where judgment about impacts is easiest. But Africa is far from a lost cause, and I’m very optimistic about its future (although, of course, I have every incentive to be).

And yet, despite visiting great injustice upon Muslim lands (freeing Greece, invading and occupying the Ottoman capital, ruling the numerical majority of the world’s Muslims from West Africa to India to Malaya, arguably giving Israel to the Jews) it was only after mass immigration started that things like this began happening domestically.

This is undoubtedly the best-moderated community on the internet. I've never seen anywhere that even comes close. Nowhere else allows the free discussion of politically charged topics while enforcing standards of politeness, decorum and basic writing ability that keep out undesirable users.

This is a place for people who want to discuss certain topics without being called a faggot / kike / whore / cuck / whatever by drive-by plebs and that is both meaningful and rare. I suppose it could be 'better', but I don't see how, and the issues I do have (like the lack of leftist users) seem unsolveable given basic social dynamics. So I think this place is probably the best it can be.