MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Isn't Succession based on the Murdochs, though? Rupert is notoriously Australian, and it looks like all three of James, Lachlan and Elizabeth spent most of their careers outside the US.
Per Wikipedia, Logan Roy (the Rupert-equivalent) is British in-universe.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
The parallels between this and the alt-right in the US around the early Trump era are noticeable. It appeared that the youth of America was so tired of cringe progressivism that their parents were into that the alt-right acted as a kind of new punk, though in the US the alt-right evaporated fairly quickly after Trump was elected.
Except that the alt-right youth in the US was a fringe social media phenomenon - in the 2020 exit polls, we see the young voting for Biden and the old voting for Trump. (The equivalent pattern in the UK is even stronger.) The alt-right youth thing in continental Europe is translating into right-populist parties doing as well (or occasionally better) among young people as they do among oldsters. Front National in France, the AFD in Germany, the FPO in Austria, PVV in the Netherlands, M5S in Italy are all turning out the youth vote in a way Trump or Farage profoundly doesn't.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Yes - the burglars had been recruited by Liddy and Hunt, and paid by Liddy, who was personally loyal to Nixon and not to the Deep State - as demonstrated by his willingness to commit crimes for Nixon (including the burglary of Ellsburg's shrink). Hunt had a CIA background and it is within the realms of plausibility that the CIA was using him, but Liddy had left the FBI on bad terms in 1962 and had been pursuing a career in right-wing Republican politics ever since.
Following the money tells us that the CRP (which was not a deep state organisation) knew that they were hiring Liddy and Hunt to carry out criminal black-bag ops. Even if Hunt did entrap Liddy into the Watergate burglary on behalf of the CIA, it would be a case of anundercover Fed sabotaging a criminal group by convincing them to take on a bigger job than they were capable of, not a false flag op.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3d ago
Secondly, slave holding interests arguably lost that election because of running John Breckenridge as a third party candidate instead of backing Stephen Douglas.
Interestingly, I don't think this is true. If you assume that a united Democratic Party keeps Douglas's votes + Brekenridge's + Bell's, Lincoln still wins the Electoral College (with 169/303 EVs instead of the 180 he got). The Lincoln vote is very efficient because he carries a lot of northern states by small margins over Douglas, and isn't on the ballot at all in the South so he doesn't waste votes in states he can't win.
For a united Democratic Party to win (presumably with Douglas as the nominee), they need to pick up some Lincoln votes as well - and that doesn't seem particularly likely. Looking at the states where Lincoln got just over 50%, Douglas would need to pick up NY, OH or IL and IN. We know that Lincoln outpolls Douglas in Illinois in a straight matchup (the Republicans won the popular vote in the 1858 Illinois state legislature elections following the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but the Democrats won more seats so Douglas was elected senator, and there was a further swing to the Republicans between 1858 and 1860).
The Southern secessionist narrative sure looks better in a scenario where Lincoln was elected President as a 40-60 popular vote loser!
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3d ago
Definitely possible, but not the most likely theory. There is a section in the draft effortpost called "Why did Sunak do it?"
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
Murder is the easiest crime to count, and OWID has homicide rates falling since a 1990s peak in every Western European country with decent data (except Sweden, which has a migration-driven uptrend since 2010 but is still below the peak). In the UK, crime measured by the Crime Survey for England and Wales has been falling consistently since 1995 - this is a victim survey so results are not affected by willingness to talk to cops, and the scope of crimes counted has been consistent over time. I don't know how to find the equivalent survey data for other countries.
I live in London, and the drop in crime since the 1990s is as viscerally obvious as it was in post-Giuliani NYC. Before you quibble, I have been to the alleged "Islamic no-go zones" in Tower Hamlets, and some of the individual estates that have been taken over by Muslim gangs were so rough beforehand that the Muslim gangs were an improvement - just like when Mexican illegals take over a black neighborhood of a US city, the fall in crime is real.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
Agreed, but that's about 125k people. Demographically, the English-speaking Caribbean is dominated by Jamaica and Trinidad (and Puerto Rico if you count it).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
Then again San Francisco exists so perhaps I am wrong.
When I was in SF, the derelicts who were making the place unlivable were far more likely to be black-looking (i.e. presumably ADOS blacks) than any of the immigrant groups people are complaining about. If I had to guess, I would say the second-largest subgroup were white American druggies.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
law & order they remember from their childhood back.
Crime is still lower than it was in the 1970s-1990s pretty much everywhere in the 1st world, and everyone who can actually remember the bad old days knows this. The only people who see brown faces on the streets and assume that crime is out of control are American racists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
There are dozens of "this is the real diet that works that Big Food doesn't want you to know about" diets which have worked for large numbers of people including smart people. The only thing they seem to have in common is severely restricting refined sugar.
I don't see how you can live well as a normie in a country where the bread is sweetened by default.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
We need physicians to know the proper technical term for each small part of the body so they can talk to other physicians about it quickly and precisely. "Fracture of the left thumb" is not acceptable medical writing because the orthopaedic surgeon who reads it now has to find the X-ray image to know which bone in the thumb is fractured.
You can argue that Latinate technical terms make medicine harder to learn than strictly necessary, but the alternative of using technical terms that sound like ordinary words is worse (I've taught physics, I have the scars). In any case, my experience of dealing with doctors is that the technical terms named after obscure 19th century surgeons are more confusing that the Latinate ones.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
The English-speaking Caribbean is roughly as messed-up as black America. Jamaica is by far the largest country, and has the highest murder rate in the world at 53/100k (vs about 21 for black Americans). Trinidad (40), the Bahamas (31) and Belize (28) are all worse as well and Barbados (15) is not much better. I think this is the best indicator because most other indicators of ADOS dysfunction are improved by fiscal transfers from white Americans. The islands which remain colonies seem to be better off.
Windrush-era immigration from the British Caribbean to the UK was not selective, and British Jamaicans are the most dysfunctional subgroup in the UK that is large enough to have good statistics. (Gypsies are probably worse). But the DOS crime problem is eminently fixable with competent policing - the black British murder rate is about the same as the white American murder rate at 4.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
The institutional Progressive Conservative Party of never recovered from the 1993 electoral disaster when they were reduced to 2 seats. The rump PCs eventually joined the Canadian Alliance - technically it was a merger of equals and the new party was called "Conservative Party of Canada" but what actually happened was more like a takeover of a failing company with a valuable brand.
But yes, British Conservatism isn't going anywhere. There is a possibility of of 10+ years of left-wing dominance if the right is split between a dead institutional Conservative party that refuses to go away and a successor conservative party.
The consensus among British politics-watchers is that if the Conservatives win enough seats to staff a full opposition operation in Parliament (this requires about 60 MPs who are able and willing to do moderately demanding unpaid opposition frontbench jobs on top of their work as a constituency MP, so probably 100-odd MPs in total) then the institutional Conservative and Unionist Party should be able to recover. Per polls and spread betting markets, this is significantly more likely than not. Dominic Cummings, of course, thinks otherwise.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
"You are looking at the world as it should be, not as it is"
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
Most welfare is welfare-for-the-old, not welfare-for-the-poor. Westerners find the Indian alternative to welfare-for-the-old a lot less attractive than just ponying up on tax day.
- Social Security: 5.5% of GDP
- Medicare: 3.2% of GDP
- Not having your demented mother-in-law around the house: Priceless
There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's the fiat currency printing press.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
That is an easy one - Labour are going to win in a landslide. A 1997-scale landslide (Tony Blair's Labour got 43% of the vote and 418 seats out of 659, with John Major's Tories on 31% and 165 seats) would be a good result for the Tories relative to polling or public/media expectations. A Canada-style wipeout with the Conservatives not winning enough seats to fully staff the opposition front bench is definitely a possibility, though not a likely one.
Labour are 20-25% ahead in opinion polls vs. 15-20% at this stage in the 1997 campaign, and arguably that difference is bigger than it looks because the pollsters changed their methodology after favouring Labour in 1992 and 1997.
The "shy right-wing populist" vote that allowed Brexit and Trump to dramatically outperform polls isn't going to save the Tories:
- There were never enough of them to overcome a 20+ point poll lead
- In the UK (less true in America) it isn't clear how many of them are still alive - age is the big demographic gap in UK politics (whereas race and education are in America), but for various reasons British Millenials are not moving right in middle age the way previous generations did.
- The government has pissed off right-populist voters through general incompetence, public sector austerity, and talking tough on immigration while not doing anything about it. If these voters exist, they are going to vote Reform or stay home in disgust, not vote Conservative.
And they're off. Rishi Sunak has called a (technically early) General Election in the UK, Polling Day is 4th July. Effortpost to follow. Feel free to post questions you want me to cover.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
My understanding of the Zimmerman/Martin case is that there are no witnesses to how the altercation started between Martin and Zimmerman that ended up with Zimmerman on his back and forced to shoot Martin, but there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that it was a "fighting" situation. Clearly if you start the tape with Zimmerman on the ground then it looks like Zimmerman defending himself against a criminal attack by Martin, but there is no reason to think that Martin (who was going about his lawful business peacefully at the time, regardless of his rapsheet) would respond to Zimmerman following him in a car by hiding in the bushes on the offchance that Zimmerman came back to confront him on foot allowing Martin to jump him.
The most likely scenario and, roughly, the prosecution theory of the case, is that Zimmerman (legally but stupidly) confronted Martin to ask what he was doing, Martin took offence, two hotheads verbally escalated when they should have de-escalated, and blows were thrown. The tape starts when Martin has already won the fistfight and is trying to finish the job, and we see Zimmerman pull out a gun and finish it his way. Classical "fighting" scenario, except someone bought a gun to a fist fight. With reasonable doubt as to who threw the first punch, a clear acquittal under SYG.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
The context of the "indefinitely confined" issue is a disagreement about whether people who were staying home because of COVID-19 were eligible to vote by post on medical grounds. Eventually the Wisconsin Supreme Court said that they were not, but not in time to purge the voter rolls. So this isn't a case of fraudulent voting - it is a case of irregular voting due to blue-county election officials making an incorrect interpretation of State law in an unusual situation which the Supreme Court didn't correct in time, and voters acting on advice from their counties. Prosecuting individual voters over this would be an abuse of process. Part of the Project 2025 playbook is that an incoming Trump II administration should launch federal prosecutions of the county officials, which would be (and is intended to be) catastrophic for the resilience of the American electoral process, but would not be legally outrageous.
I don't know enough about Wisconsin law to know how likely it was that these votes could have been tossed if the Trump campaign had raised the issue in post-election litigation, but "large numbers of facially valid Dem postal votes should be tossed on technicalities" was an argument the Trump campaign mostly chose not to run with - both in its litigation strategy and in its public messaging.
Instead, he was found guilty, the rationale was not communicated clearly and effectively, and there isn't even agreement over how it should be judged.
This is a problem inherent in jury trials, not people acting stupid in this case. If you are trying to answer "why guilty?" for yourself, you can reasonably assume that the jury accepted the prosecution's theory of the case, but that doesn't have the same impact as a written, reasoned judgement by a judge in a bench trial.
I think juries have generally performed well when they have been given this type of case, but I wouldn't trust a jury to be able to explain its reasoning in a way which clarified rather than obfuscating.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
This feels to me like another example of how America does not really seem to have a coherent philosophy when it comes to gun possession and use of force.
Interestingly, once you go meta the guns are irrelevant to this case - both the car and the mob are deadly weapons, and IIRC car vs mob situations had ended in fatalities without guns being present in other BLM-related clashes. The issue is the American (mostly Red Tribe) culture of escalatory self-defence. (Of course, there is a feedback loop because self-defence culture makes permissive gun laws easier to pass and carrying a gun makes it easier to engage in escalatory self-defence).
The best take on the theory I have found is this post by Mark "Animal" MacYoung - his business appears to be training for violence professionals, but his website is mostly targetted at the general publ[ic with a message of "if you are not a violence professional, it is sufficiently easy to avoid situations where violence is likely that learning how to do this has a much better effort/reward ratio that learning combat skills". My summary of the idea is that
- There is a big moral, legal, and practical difference between fighting (which MacYoung is trying to use as a semi-technical term), criminal attacks, and defending yourself against a criminal attack.
- In particular, a fight follows a series of mutually escalatory threat displays which serve three functions: giving the other guy opportunities to back down (usually futile because someone who is going to back down does so at the first opportunity), getting yourself into the mood for violence, and performing a social ritual which in the right male-dominated subcultures makes the coming violence licit. This has the side effect of eliminating any possible element of surprise and putting both combatants into a situation where certain techniques are useful.
- Whereas a criminal attack is not usually preceded by a threat display - a competent criminal doesn't let you know he is criming on you until he has got you into a position where you have little chance of successfully defending yourself. In the stereotypical knife mugging, the knife is already at your throat when the first verbal threat is made.
- The vast majority of fighting situations are avoidable by not challenging people to fights, not behaving in ways that would provoke people to challenge you to a fight, and backing down from fights over trivialities. All of these are harder than they look because the situation involves strong emotions, mostly- non-verbal communication, and often intoxicants.
Because I am lawyer-brained, I tend to think of it as the difference between "duty to retreat" (DTR) culture and "stand your ground" (SYG) culture. (Note that the legal DTR isn't an invetion of modern hoplophobes - it is a codification of centuries-old English common law that was originally made by and for warrior-elites. But in the late 19th century most US States (some through the legislature, others through their Supreme Courts) decided that backing away from fights when you were in the right was unmanly and/or un-American, leading to the first wave of SYG laws. There is a second wave in response to the 1970's crime wave.
DTR culture says that the right to self-defense does not generally extend to fighting situations, even if you are right on the merits. This doesn't have to apply absolutely everywhere - the "castle doctrine" is the idea that the rules in your own home are SYG even if they are DTR in the streets. This means that the appropriate police (or other authority figure) response to a fight is to punish both parties unless one was so badly hurt that their crime was self-punishing. And if there is a fight ending with a corpse, then the winner is going down for some lower-degree homicide regardless of what was being fought over or who threw the first blow. A corollary is that to make DTR culture work at urban population densities, you need something like broken windows policing to stop obnoxious blowhards ruling the streets by behaving badly and treating a request to stop as a challenge to a fight. Someone who spits on the floor in a biker bar is going to receive a challenge to a fight which will end with them backing down or getting beaten. Someone who spits on the floor in your local golf club clubhouse is going to be warned by the Secretary and kicked out (ultimately backed by a threat to involve cops) if they continue. Someone who spits on the street needs to face the same kind of consequence.
SYG culture says that a man should only back down from a fight if you are wrong on the merits or have no reasonable chance of a good outcome(and that a RealManTM has developed combat skills to the point where the latter should only happen if massively outnumbered), and that challenging someone to a fight is praiseworthy if they are engaging in sufficiently anti-social behaviour. The corollary is the response of the authorities to a fight needs to include investigating the merits of the dispute - although common police practice is to arrest both parties and let the lawyers sort out blame. But if SYG laws are enforced as written, most fighting situations involve both parties having a sufficiently plausible claim to self defense that they could raise reasonable doubt and secure a criminal acquittal if they hired a fancy lawyer. The other problem is that most fights happen in sufficiently confused situations and investigations are sufficiently difficult that "investigating the merits" usually means "blame the guy who looks more like a stereotypical wrong'un". It probably isn't a coincidence that American SYG culture developed at a time when the wrong'uns were conveniently colour-coded, although there isn't anything inherently racist about it.
It should go without saying that DTR culture produces better outcomes if you have cops doing their jobs - you have a lot less fighting, and a lot less community-breaking post-fight litigation. But if the cops can't or won't do their jobs then the alternative to SYG is anarcho-tyranny. This is a particularly serious problem in the places which need most policing and often get least - schools and prisons.
The Perry case looks like a fighting situation - you have evidence that both sides were spoiling for a fight beforehand, a series of decisions by Perry to end up in that situation that would be a display of truly shocking poor judgement if he was trying to avoid the fight, and mutual escalation by threat display (car driven towards a crowd, crowd swarming car, gun kind-of-sort-of brandished). So from a DTR perspective, Perry is morally guilty and it is easy to make a close legal call (was Foster holding the gun in a way which made him a threat in the legally relevant way) against him. From a SYG perspective, the key question is whether Perry was right on the merits, which comes down to how sympathetic you are to street protest in general and BLM in particular.
This post is too long already so I won't do the list, but I think most scissor shootings that do not involve cops (Zimmerman and Rittenhouse) are fighting situations and the scissor is that DRT and SYG are working from completely different moral frameworks.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
Out of interest, why Rotterdam over other places in the Netherlands?
FWIW, I think modern Christian purity culture is bullshit (in the Harry Frankfurt sense of something fake and not intended to be taken seriously, not as a moral condemnation). Apart from a small number of families still practicing Christian patriarchy most "conservative" Christians are living in mainstream post-sexual revolution America and lying to themselves about it.
There is a certain minimum degree of patriarchy in societies with enough socially necessary physically demanding work that they need non-elite men to be productive (i.e. not hoe cultures). It is an interesting question how close medieval Christian patriarchy got to that minimum. I find it entirely plausible that if you asked the question "Where was the best place to be a non-elite woman in year X given various gender norms in different cultures?" that the answer would be "Cishajnal Western Europe" for most values of X between 1100CE and the present.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
Even among RealMenTM, there is a lot less competitive participation sport for Bowling Alone type reasons.
When I was a kid, the culturally dominant paradigm for male participation sport in the UK was pickup games of football (soccer for you Americans) or basketball and the preferred marketing message was "What you are doing is a facsimile of professional team sports, so you should wear what the pros wear in order to be winning like them."
In the current year, the culturally dominant paradigm for male participation sport (I have no idea how accurate this is, but advertising follows the culture) is "Do you even lift, bro?" strength-based gym culture. Strength training is fundamentally PvE in a way which pickup football (or whatever the American equivalent is) is PvP, but even more so the culture of lifting with your gym bros is one of collaborative self-improvement, not competition. I have aged out of the target audience for sportswear marketing, but if I was marketing activewear to gym bros, I would reflect this change in my marketing messaging.
This is even before we consider the modern trend of selling sportswear to the spectators as athleisure. I notice that the men I see in the streets in traditional casual styles are, on average, in much better shape than the men in athleisure. FWIW I don't think the same is true for women, where athleisure appeals to the "I've got it and I want to flaunt it, and sportswear is an excuse to dress sexy before sunset" crowd.
The Dutch alt-right is pretty explicit about this. Pim Fortuyn was openly gay, and both Fortuyn and Geert Wilders have made "Muslim immigrants are violently homophobic, which is un-Dutch" key points in their campaign rhetoric.
More options
Context Copy link