Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Don't know how I misread that from the google results, I even thought to myself "huh, WSJ columnist gets a feature in NYT".
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
I can only speak to one part of this, but you don't have to go far in northeast DC to get grungy - you just have to walk around. There are basically two patterns of American urban dysfunction: two sides of the tracks, and block-by-block neighbourhoods. As an example, Chicago is almost entirely side-of-the-tracks, and modern NYC is almost entirely block-by-block. NE DC, you'll be walking through a street of fancy townhomes with Little Free Libraries for five minutes, then you'll be in the hood for three minutes, then you'll be on a nice block again but walking slow because the guy in front of you is cracked out of his head and you don't want to pass him, then you're properly back in In This House We Believe land, then rinse and repeat.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
I agree with this, and I know Justin well enough that I know this was a crafted scissor statement (he even called his shot with the Jake Paul post immediately after).
What gives me whiplash is hearing that Bill Galston wrote an article with the phrase "Husband Material" in the title. Either that was imposed by an NYT editor, or that old Brookings fossil's banging an intern 50 years his junior (or, possibly, it was a common phrase in the 1970s before its recent recurrence in modern gender war discourse).
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Early noises that The Klob will run. Very, very unlikely that the Republicans will challenge, it would take an exceptional candidate.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
Walz is almost certainly guilty of nothing that he was responsible for. That's how modern political machines work - we have advanced beyond the need for brown envelopes.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
Kapuscinski is a wonderful writer. Sadly little of the culture of obligation he describes has changed since then, though young people's access to the internet is starting to blunt it. Good for Malthusian survival, bad for capital accumulation.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
Well, as far as "enemy of the US" goes, much of it (e.g. subsidizing Cuba) is standard small-potatoes third-worldoid stuff, but what really grinds Washington's gears (under Biden as well as Trump) is VZ cozying up to China. Maybe they were worried about their military relationship with Russia too, except that we've now seen exactly how effective S-300s are in Bolivarian hands. The Southern Caribbean is seen as a critical security interest for the US and they want China out of there yesterday, see also the Panama stuff.
Also, it seems to me that Trump's understanding of agreements is that there is always one party which gets fucked over by them, and therefore he only agrees to deals which fuck over the other party. I seriously doubt that he is going back to the 50-50 sharing of profits from before the nationalization.
None of this kremlinology is all that relevant to the actual state of the VZ oil industry. As you say, it was nationalized back in the 70s, and basically chugged along until Maduro. Under Chavez, the locals decided that a) they should give a bunch of their oil away for free for political purposes and b) lol who cares about maintenance bro just steal the money for new parts, then Chavez got lucky in dying before the consequences really hit Maduro. It's more Eskom than Mohammad Mosaddegh. So what you have now to make a deal over is a basically defunct industry with $150bn in sovereign debt to deal with before Western experts can get the oil pumping again.
their citizens might start to ask questions about the purpose of having a military.
It's a military kleptocracy, bro, if their citizens were allowed to ask questions Maduro would already be in Nicaragua.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
In the US, where there's relatively extreme weather and fairly bad infrastructure, the optimal strategy would be to get yourself in charge of some kind of disaster preparedness agency, and do the sloppiest, laziest job that you possibly can in preparing for/responding to that disaster. As an example, you could refuse to respond to wildfires because of the risk to plants. The hard part of using this approach to cause mass casualties is that there will be many other people, often with better local political connections, running the exact same life strategy, and they're more fairly described as satisficing for mass casualties.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
I agree with you on the wider thrust, but there is also Nick Land's point about "Dr. Gno" - something along the lines of "with every x years' advance in technology, the IQ required to destroy the world drops by a point". And when you crawl high up enough along the bell curve, you'll find someone who'll do it.
IMO the actual bottleneck is not intelligence but time preference. Someone who can get in the frame of mind to cause the mass death of innocents - unless they're some true sociopath, like Bin Laden, or an academic virologist - wants to do it now, ASAP, let me kill/die now so I don't have to spend any more time like this. Most mass shooters could have 10xed their kill count if they were rationalist killmaxxers, but at that point, thankfullyish, too much of the mind has snapped off into little fragments.
Bartender_Venator
10d ago
From all the Venezuela experts I know, it's incorrect to think of the previous regime as Maduro commanding the loyalty of various power-holders as if he was some Arab dictator. He was an increasingly ineffectual figurehead "in charge" while the real power-holders, mostly in the military, made decisions - the man was a bus driver, not a colonel. These military power-holders don't need to become a puppet of the US to get what they want, just to stop being an enemy of the US. There are many things that could go wrong still but, assuming nobody on either side chimps too hard, realistically the political stuff on the VZ side is a smaller issue than the bond restructuring on the US side.
Seconded. Gurri's book is the book to understand modern populism.
I would also add Leo Strauss's What Is Political Philosophy (essay), Burnham's The Machiavellians, Nick Land's Xenosystems: Fragments (google for pdf), and Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism. Consider Baudrillard as well. The first three will give you a good overview of the stages of political theory leading to the new right, and Fisher is the last leftist theorist of any intellectual note to gain real memetic reach (Zizek is not what you're looking for here lol).
Bartender_Venator
11d ago
Yes, I think this is the obvious play if you are a high-ranking Venezuelan crony right now, particularly in the military rather than the civilian patronage structure.
Bartender_Venator
11d ago
You are an american or american-adjacent whose post history is largely getting mad at Trump for cucking to da jooz. The reality is that, yes, capitalism, and specifically Western capital investment into otherwise dysfunctional countries, plus western trade opportunities, does make them richer. Very quickly and effectively. It also has a tendency to make them more functional, at least within the limits of the people you're working with. Now, the US is also very happy to bring aimless neocon foreverwar or lefty post-colonial massacres to third-world countries, and this could certainly degenerate into the former. But there's no particular reason it has to, and if there's one thing that Trump loves, it's making deals.
Bartender_Venator
11d ago
I agree in theory, but the issue is not with information asymmetries, really - that's just how it's sold as 'fairness' to the public. Insider trading is bad because it radically distorts incentives for insiders and encourages all kinds of violations of fiduciary duty.
Bartender_Venator
11d ago
Many of those interests know they would be much happier and richer if they could align with the US and get the oil flowing. That's what the deal Maduro was trying to make was about. Hopefully we get the right general taking charge.
Bartender_Venator
11d ago
Filter bubbles are real. You're very happy to skim a For You feed and only see what you want to see, which is that, surprise surprise, Outgroup is a blob of stupidity. I've curated my spaces for quality - which is actually infinitely easier to do on the right. It would be gauche to boast about my friends, but as far as I can tell, the people making the argument that there are no smart people on the right (which, by the way, is something you have the burden of proof on) just don't get invited to good parties. Of course, there are stupid people in the coalition, and some are even as embarrassing as the ones on the left, but that's all political coalitions larger than a groupchat, you can live with reality or you can get into little huffs about it.
Bartender_Venator
12d ago
"Don't believe your lying eyes"
Bartender_Venator
13d ago
To answer the question "why is it blowing up now?": as Hanania has noted on a number of occasions, conservatives by and large don't read. Neutral tone (or even hostile) print journalism isn't going to catch their attention the way video is, even (especially) if the latter is sloppy.
I like that people are considering a viable take, given that the last Conservatives Are Mad Current Thing before this one revolved around a highbrow-toned article in Compact Magazine. Goldfish seem to have better memories than a lot of posters.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
Good point, but I'd file this under "the men that are willing to commit are undesirable", as I assume the great majority of the men giving away all that unwanted sexual attention would be willing to commit.
I think you underestimate the myopia of male horniness here.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
Coffee_enjoyer has a rather simplistic view of this stuff, but yours is pure denial. Epic poetry was born as a means of exploring and understanding violence, not moralizing about it (see, for instance, Odysseus's slaughter of the suitors). Grand architecture was born as a means for the projection of power and the defense of strongholds, space travel as a complement to/substitute for nuclear war. The veneer you mention isn't a thin one. In fact, it's the thick crust built over those instincts that makes civilizations great, but the desires to take and to destroy, even the desire for sadistic violence - and, above all, the need to get better at those - are some of the core drivers of civilization. It's only with fairly advanced civilization we even get the concept that this violence could be bad in itself, instead of merely situationally unacceptable (you can rape the Sabines, but you can't rape Lucretia).
Now, there are many ways to deal with it, like the introjection of sadism Nietzsche mentions as the root of guilt cultures, or the sublimation of male energies into productive effort that Freud prefers, but it's not some mere chimp impulse we should beat down in boys. Our schools/phones produce enough castrati as is. Let 'em take it to sports, the arts, the boardroom - when necessary, the military - and remind the world that homo sapiens is the apex predator even when he isn't killing.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
Even in Christian Europe it was only in the Middle Ages with the rise of chivalric ideals that "cunning" ceased to be considered one of the manly virtues appropriate for a leader. Robert Guiscard is the last one I can remember to really make it his brand (many Crusaders, merchants, etc. after that, including Guiscard's descendants, but they're treated as much more morally grey). While the chivalric virtues that superseded "trick your enemies and take their gold" can be gotten out of Christianity, they were built into the Church as part of a semi-secular project to build centralized power structures and make the military aristocracy somewhat more controllable.
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
goose_chasing_man.jpg
"What was the epic poetry about?"
Bartender_Venator
15d ago
Very simply reducible to "I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger."
Bartender_Venator
17d ago
An effortpost on all of this would be interesting to write, but I don't know if I want to be known as the guy who writes about Japanese prostitution.
My understanding is that 90%+ of this world is not open to foreigners, and even less if you don't speak Japanese, so I would think you could do so without undue suspicion.
Hope you continue and expand posting on this work. We need more investigators and fewer Takes.
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