JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
Some times Charlie was in the trees.
User ID: 4009
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
Hablo Espanol?
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
As much as I enjoyed the book, my feelings about Peter Watts echo my feelings about Ayn Rand. Like on on one hand I get it, on the other I can't help but think that the popular lessons taken from this story are not the lessons you should be taking from this story.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs"
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
for the record, I dislike you as well.
^ Seconded and endorsed.
While the organizational center may have moved from the country club to the local steak house or climbing gym, the organizational structure and underlying principles have not changed.
It's kind of hilarious how many people in this thread are telling me I'm just being lazy...
They aren't wrong though. Doing a google search or asking ChatGPT is only a calorie or two removed from doing nothing at all. It is quite literally the bare minimum of effort a person could possibly expend.
I am genuinely trying to help you, and I am pretty sure @Dean, @Turniper, and @Thoroughlygruntled are as well. You need to understand that this is not some "Giga brained ploy" it's a core component of the culture you are trying to make contact with. The people you want to meet are not going to respect someone because they say they are intelligent or motivated, what they do respect is people who demonstrate agency. Something that Richard Nixon, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Kyle Rittenhouse all have in common. Similarly the people you are trying to meet do not "lack an understanding of how political organizations are built" so much as they are implementing a different organizational model. The Republican Party is not a top-down technocratic organization and expecting it to behave like one is only going to lead you astray.
I honestly want to thank you because what you're suggesting is that not all is lost and maybe I have allowed myself to become too "black-pilled".
However, at the same time, if what you are saying is true, I feel like it only reinforces the lesson that I ultimately took away from that experience. An understanding that the trappings of nobility and "elite human capital" are more often than not orthogonal to nobility of the soul. Credentials do not make a man worthy of respect, choices do.
Millienials woke up to the grift and Gen-Z seems to have been born nihilistic. They know the boomers looted the store and then stuck everyone else with the bill. They, rightfully, are enraged by this but only a small fraction has eaten the bitter medicine and realized "ah, shit, we're going to have to fix this ... and it's going to be hard for a while."
This tugs at a thread that I wanted to bring up in response to @DoktorGlas and @Botond173's earlier posts on fertility and gender-dynamics but was struggling to find a way to do so without it being immediately dismissed as being uncharitable, or drawing broad generalizations about the outgroup.
I think there is a very real sense in which the post-modern liberal ethos of emancipation, self actualization, and the maximization of one's earthly/material material conditions and status is simply incompatible with forming healthy relationships and families. Having a family means accepting that you are no longer the main character in your own story and that is bridge that a lot of people today are hesitant to cross, a painful truth that many recoil from.
As I mentioned in one of those earlier threads, our first child was not planned, and if you had asked me at the time if I was ready I would have said "no", but in hindsight if my partner and I had waited till we we ready, we may never have had children at all, never mind enough children to justify multiple car seats. Both my partner and I have had friends and family who asked us why we didn't just get an abortion? What they were really asking is "Why would you (a presumably rational and intelligent person) willingly accept an inferior quality of life?". I never really had a good answer to that question, at least not one I could articulate, beyond "I choose to". But I feel like there is the outline of an answer in your last two paragraphs.
The future belongs to those who show up. So if you want to have a future, be one of the people who shows up.
Ah, your previous comment had me primed towards the racial angle.
Yes it was pretty much the same attitude.
As a first step? yes but again fieldcraft.
Imagine you join such a group or attend one of their vigils and notice that 3 out of the 8 men there all go to the same gym and very specifically not that other gym.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
A lot of high level planning and wrangling used to happen over TeamSpeak which has since been largely displaced by Discord and Signal due to better mobile integration.
I wouldn't say it's "the norm" but it is in no way surprising.
As I brought up in my post from a few days ago, the the US Republican party isn't really a national organization in the way that our European commentors would naturally assume upon hearing the words "political party" or even in the way that US Democratic Party is. It is more a loose confederation of state, municipal, and regional parties who's individual scope, resources, and levels of engagement can vary wildly. This distributed party structure was baked in to the party's founding as a cross-regional cross-social-class coalition focused on a small number of specific core issues, and has persisted to the present day both out of cultural inertia and as a defense mechanism against subversion by the forces of "liquid modernity".
Speaking of which, you don't survive as a sincere conservative (as distinct from edge-lords posting on X) in this post-modern age without developing a level of reflexive fieldcraft. Advertising yourself as a young conservative seeking other young conservatives is a good way to get yourself canceled by both sides. Another way to think about it is that the first part of the entrance exam for joining the resistance is "can you find them?". This ties into what @Turniper was saying below about how the functions where the actual connections are made and work gets done are not going to be discoverable via a simple google search and how this is by design.
As far as actionable advice, all I can really offer you is "go where the conservatives are" but remind you that as an educated urban youth who's posting on a site like this one, where you think they are and where they actually are, may be very different.
By way of example, my introduction came through the fandom of a sports team.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
Shades of the Gibson's Bakery case?
No, the students in question were overwhelmingly white and middle eastern, while the local population was substantially black.
The key thing to understand is that it really can be any group. I went to a prestigious school and one of the biggest pieces of culture shock for me when I got there was just how endemic cheating, fraud, and petty theft were. If you weren't trying to game the system in innumerable little ways you were viewed as a rube or a mug. If you called out a fellow student for shoplifting from the corner store or rifling through an unattended bag you'd get a reputation as a scold. I was actually told once by a TA that I was "hurting myself" by trying to do my classwork honestly instead of taking advantage of available "opportunities".
In my experience "it's perfectly fine and indeed our right to pluck the pigeons among 'them' who we owe nothing to at all." describes the attitude our elite just as much as it does our underclass.
Meanwhile, I'm in camp "Yes rationality, punctuality, hard work etc... are in fact "White Supremecy". As such Clarence Thomas is clearly "white".
isn't there a real faction of the left which is actively opposed to competent center-left government on the basis that a reactionary backlash creates the necessary conditions for their own ideology to succeed?
This is basically the thesis of Lenin's book What is to be done.
I can also think of a historical example where in a band of revolutionary socialists embedded within a wider workers movement were able to execute Lenin's plan to great effect. Unfortunately for Lenin and his movement, the socialist affinity for back-stabbing reared it's ugly head and the wider left has spent the intervening decades desperately trying to convince both themselves and everyone else that the evil mustache man was never a true leftist to begin with.
Yes, and not just fuel them but justify them.
I do believe that there is a tipping point where "pettiness" becomes a pro-social response.
Poliver: Are you really going to die over some chickens?
Sandor: Someone is.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
To clarify, my concern here is more that the electorate might throw a larger brick, or perhaps a Molotov cocktail, through the establishment's window.
Yes, that is a bit more concerning. But I also see that as something that is largely outside Trump and the MAGA Movement's control.
I think it depends on whether our resident technocrats and anti-populists choose to adapt or double-down.
The real trick is figuring out how to do it without effectively doxing myself or getting bogged down in current events because a lot of the players are still in the game. And yes they should have listened, a major theme of the story would be how establishment attempts to "tamp things down" instead contributed to the eventual crash.
As for what comes next, that is a legitimate concern, but for my part that concern is tempered by the fact that Trump is the kind of guy cares about "legacy". Characterize it as narcissism and self-aggrandizement if you like. He does seem to be genuinely concerned with how future generations will remember him, and the sort of world he is leaving to his kids.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
I agree that this is probably at least part of it.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
The important thing is not to elect "the right people". The important thing is to make it profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.
The makeup of the electorate can be changed only when one or another existing faction within the party seeks to change the rules to benefit themselves, or when an outside force appears that hacks the evolutionary created rules. Trump(ism) was such a force: Trump did not have majority support within the existing Republican electorate when he announced, but he was able to hack the system and stack enough wins to become inevitable before a single competitor could be settled on.
One of these days I will have to write my oral history of the Republican civil war, but today is not that day.
In any case that is not how I remember things going down.
What Trump did was accurately identify key fault lines that cut across large swaths of both the conservative and corporate sides of the Republican electorate as well as former Democrats who'd been alienated by the national party's embrace of things like open borders, decarceration, drag queens in pre-schools, and men in women's sports. IE "it's the economy stupid", bread and butter issues are what win elections. This should not have been such a novel insight but this is where the whole "skin in the game" element comes into play.
By the spring of 2016 it was already clear that the upcoming election would be a fight between the beltway establishment and some variant of the Tea-Party with Hillary Clinton representing the establishment. A vote for Hillary was a vote for more of the same, and for a large swath of the population who viewed the foreign, financial, and domestic policies of the last decade as just one massive fuck-up after another "more of the same" was not a compelling sales pitch. @faceh's rant about rewarding failure reflects much of the sentiment I heard from voters at the time. As such it seemed clear to me that despite being the favorites of the national party neither Jeb Bush nor Chris Christie ever really stood a chance. If a voter wanted business as usual, what did either of those two have to offer over Hillary? Accordingly the 2016 Republican primary looked like it was Ted Cruz's to lose. However, Cruz's campaign was hampered by the fact that he was a career politician with no real accomplishments to his name aside of being able to climb the party ladder. As such there was a lot of discussion at the state committee level about whether Cruz had the balls to fight the beast or would he become just another beltway stooge if elected.
something I don't think that a lot of our more liberal posters here really grasp is that despite their surface level similarities the internal organization and power structures of the Republican and Democratic parties are radically different. Republican state and municipal committees are more like independent chapters than wholly-owned subsidiaries. State and municipal reps wield real power and a national party endorsement doesn't carry the same weight in funding or in raw primary votes that it would in the Democratic Party. The Florida RNC backed Trump over Jeb Bush despite Bush being the governor of Florida at the time, and there wasn't anything the national committee could do about it because Florida was a net contributor to the national fund.
Enter Trump, Trump doesn't have Cruz's problem, he's not a career politician, he has a portfolio of accomplishments he can point to, and for all the sneering from establishment liberals about him not being a proper gentlemen, there is no question in anyone's mind about whether he has the balls or stomach for a fight. By adopting the most popular planks of the Tea-Party platform he immediately made himself the front runner. Cruz and Trump would fight it out to the end, but the choice was only ever going to be between Tea-Party original recipe (Cruz and Rubio), and Tea-Party extra crispy (MAGA). When Rubio threw his lot in with Trump, that put an end to the debate.
Trump isn't "wearing the Republican party like skinsuit" so much as he is the brick that the electorate has chosen to throw through the establishment's window. You and others keep throwing around words like "destruction", "chaos" and "weaponized incompetence" like this wasn't the plan from the start. It's only "incompetence" if you define "competence" as supporting a top-down liberal order.
I believe that the conflict between people with "skin in the game" and people without will be the defining conflict of this generation. I believe that a lot of the drama surrounding MAGA and the various European populists movements (EG. Marine Le Pen in France) can be explained in the context of this conflict. Finally I do not expect this conflict it to go well for a lot of posters here as IMO statements like "meritocracy is pointless" are luxury beliefs afforded to people who are not being tested on a regular basis.
JeSuisCharlie
Sumner, Hebdo, Kirk
2mo ago
Vivek's problem is that his whole persona is designed to appeal to edge-lords on twitter, when edge-lords on twitter are a overwhelmingly Democratic Party constituency. Meanwhile the MAGA crowd having taken his statements at face value have concluded that he must be either a beltway grifter or a progressive Trojan Horse.
Honest answer, It's an interesting story that raises legitimate questions about the the nature and value of consciousness. At the same time there is a certain sort of person who is going to interpret the narrative not as a thought experiment but as a blueprint and/or instruction manual because they are autistic
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