MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
Why do we keep getting teams of trans lesbians of color then?
Because there are lots of all-male teams by default, and the ones which self-define as trans lesbians don't get cancelled for being all-male?
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
Was "retarded" or "retard" ever used as a specific technical term allowing fine distinctions in the way "moron", "imbecile" and "idiot" (in increasing order of retardation) were? I am not an expert, but I think "retarded" was the first turn of the euphemism treadmill after idiot/imbecile/moron became un-PC, and "retard" has never been anything except a schoolboy insult derived from "retarded".
I don't think the euphemism treadmill applies to warrior/soldier though - the people talking about "warriors" think that both "warrior" and "soldier" are both strongly positive descriptions that you wouldn't want to euphemise.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
I think "forcing a conflation" and "erasing a distinction" are synonyms. The whole point that @quiet_NaN is making, and which I endorse, is that "warrior" and "soldier" are different words with different meanings, and that the US Army and US Marine Corps are, and should be, soldiers, and mostly are not, and should not be, warriors.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
The obstacle course was predictable: her parents had just moved into her brother's place, trading their retirement for the privilege of asking pointed questions every time their daughter wanted to leave the house looking nice. They're not tyrants. They're just Indian parents, which means they're constitutionally incapable of letting their adult children exist unobserved.
For all the educated girls from non-WEIRD cultures I knew, "he's a doctor - and no he's not married, you know I'm not that kind of girl" would have made this problem 90% less troublesome than you are making it out to be, or in some cases 110% (as in her mother would have become an actual ally). Was this true in her parents' corner of Indian culture?
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
Erasing the warrior-soldier distinction is bad because it makes it harder to talk accurately and precisely about violence professionals, and in particular to call out certain failure modes in civil-military relations.
Erasing the warrior-curmudgeon distinction is bad for the same reasons.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
My read is that systematic abuse of disability programs (i.e. everyone in the system knows and does not care that the people getting the bennies are not as disabled as they are claiming to be) by white men between 50 and retirement age, particularly in poorer areas, is widespread and unofficially tolerated in many countries, including the US. In the UK this has been the case since the mid-1980's - despite multiple ineffective government crackdowns.
I agree that social welfare programs are not for able-bodied young males.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
By social stereotype of the era, the fathers of the bastards were high-status men (whether or not married yet), not men who were too poor to marry.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
What men want is irrelevant, since women control the reproductive bottleneck both legally and biologically.
Women who have less kids than they claim to want say the thing stopping them reproducing is a lack of male investment. (I am including "started too late because I married late" as lack of male investment even though the proximate cause of not having more kids is age-related infertility.)
As a matter of physical reality, your point 2 is correct - women can reproduce without male investment. But to do so is very low status, just as it always has been. In practice, it is also dependent on a system of government transfers - raising kids in third-world poverty is illegal for good reasons, and you can't raise kids in first-world poverty as a single mother on a lower-middle-class salary without supplementing it with child support or government bennies.
I note that the political faction that is most worried about falling fertility wants to dismantle the public subsidies for single mothers and reinforce the systems that make them low-status. Nobody who thinks low fertility is a problem thinks encouraging single women to pop out more bastards is the solution.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
Agreed, which kind of makes the point. You may aspire to be let's say a warrior of Christ despite degenerate "epicurean liberal" consensus. I think it captures the ethos of masculinity - to be disagreeable toward degenerate ideas despite it being unpopular to an extent, where you are willing to be martyred for it. It does not mean that you will commit violent acts of terrorism of course, but some bravery and confidence in righteousness of your worldview is commendable. You can maybe start with unabashedly saying blessings before eating your lunch in Google canteen. Very warrior like behavior.
Priests and warriors are not the same thing. Both are traditionally masculine roles, particularly in the Christian West, and both are supposed to cultivate the kind of moral and religious basedness you are talking about here. But the warrior isn't supposed to be martyred - he's supposed to send the infidel to his "martyrdom". From a warrior's perspective, saying blessings unabashedly while undercover in enemy territory doesn't make you badass, it makes you an idiot.
In the context of this sub-thread, "warrior" isn't a metaphor for someone who tries to achieve something against determined opposition - it is a reference to people who make actual, real-world physical violence a way of life. Warrior-elites in this strict sense are a key feature of most societies. The taming of warrior elites into aristocracies who only fight the enemy, not among themselves, is part of the transition from barbarism into civilisation.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
Medicare, medicaid and SS also give some opportunity for grift, and so does defense budget
Medicaid is mostly block granted to states, so no room for grift at the federal level. SS is mostly giving money to oldsters, where grift is hard. (Uncle Sam knows your date of birth and contribution record). There is significant retail rorting of SSDI, but mostly by Red Tribers so not something a Trump-led DOGE would want to go after.
Medicare and military procurement are where the big grift is, and therefore where it makes sense to start if you want to root out waste, fraud and efficiency. In terms of who should lead such an effort, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) is the US government's leading expert on Medicare fraud, having led one of the largest Medicare frauds in history as CEO of Columbia/HCA. Another expert on Medicare fraud who owes Trump a favour is Phil Esformes, who bilked Medicare out of $1.3 billion before being pardoned by Trump.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
This is a very strange word use problem that I suspect stems from the stick up the arse of the USMC. US Marines are not an elite amphibious expeditionary force like the modern Royal Marines, or seaborne troops who specialise in boarding actions like the OG marines. (In so far as that latter expertise still exists, it sits in the law enforcement function of the Coast Guard). US Marines are, in fact, soldiers in the traditional English meaning of the word, which is the sense that Dr Deveraux of ACOUP and the Angry Staff Officer are using. But as part of their effort to maintain a distinctive culture, mission etc. from the army the USMC profoundly object to being called "soldiers".
My guess is that someone sympathetic to the USMC started using "warrior" as a general term for soldiers and marines and it stuck, rather than someone deliberately trying to end up on the wrong side of the soldier/warrior distinction.
When British politicians want to talk about soldiers in a way which includes things like the Royal Marines and the RAF Regiment, they tend to say "troops".
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
There is an alternative reading where Scrooge represents Puritan austerity (which was specifically opposed to the secular aspects of Christmas celebrations, with Cromwell's major-generals sending their most pious soldiers out to confiscate overly-rich Christmas dinners) and the Weberian "Protestant work ethic". The arguments Scrooge uses on the pleasant portly gentlemen were real political positions used by real right-liberals as the basis for important legislation at the time Dickens was writing, and the real people saying these things saw themselves as pious Protestants and justified their positions in Weberian terms.
Given the social context Dickens was writing in, the anti-Weberian reading seems more plausible than the antisemitic reading, although the nature of great fiction is that both are present in the text, and it is almost certain that both were present in Dickens' brain.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
I think Jews see all conspiracy theories as latently antisemitic because of bitter experience - most conspiracy theorists and conspiracy-focused political movements will eventually graduate to Jewish conspiracies and old-fashioned anti-semitism. This process appears to be happening to Zoomer MAGA as we speak.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
So "declare war on Islam" means treating Muslims roughly the same way you want to treat all nonwhite immigrants in the US? That isn't a standard sense of the term "war".
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
Most Israelis marrying outside Israel are heterosexual secular Jews who don't want a religious marriage for one of any number of good and sufficient reasons, or who the official Rabbinate refuses to marry for reasons which I am sure the Rabbis find very persuasive. I have met multiple couples in such marriages, including one case where the Israeli Rabbinate considered a British-born Reform Rabbi insufficiently Jewish to marry an Israeli Jew.
That Israel recognises foreign marriages, including foreign marriages between Israeli Jews, and therefore including same-sex marriages, is a load-bearing part of the social contract between secular and religious Jews in Israel.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
American Jews support the American left (for now, although they are shifting right). Jews everywhere else are right wing. Especially the Israeli Jews.
Secular, Conservative and Reform Jews support the left. Modern Orthodox Jews support the right, although they only do so noisily in Israel. Haredi and Hasidic Jews support whoever the Rebbe sells their votes to, which in both the US and Israel in 2025 is mostly the right. (In 20th century Israel the auction was more blatant and sometimes the left was the high bidder).
The reason why American Jews are left-wing is that they are less likely to be Orthodox. I rounded up some statistics here.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
This is true, but the institution also wasn't averse to competent people at that time. If it were, he probably would have left and gone somewhere else, as many competent people have done recently.
The fact that an institution (namely King's) was averse to competent women at the time was utterly fundamental to the story of DNA. Franklin was in the process of winding up her research on DNA and moving to Birckbeck at the time Watson and Crick made their discovery, which was a clear downgrade in institution quality and a move she would not have made if she had felt welcome at King's. It isn't clear how much the issue was pervasive sexism vs. pervasive anti-semitism.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3d ago
I don't think "liberalism" (here being used to refer to the prevailing value system of the pro-establishment left in the early 21st century Anglosphere) rejects the masculine virtues. The problem is that "liberalism" has decided that it needs to focus on promoting the masculine virtues in women through "Lean in" culture, physically badass women in popular entertainment etc.
The strong form of this claim is that liberalism hasn't rejected men or masculinity, but it has rejected masculinity in men.
The weaker form of this claim is that the culture-directing institutions of liberalism don't actually reject masculinity in men, but it has decided that it doesn't have the bandwidth to promote it given the dire need to create more girlbosses and warrior women.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
The rise and fall of trans self-ID was a phenomenon that happened entirely within the subset of the Blue Tribe who might use tumblr to share something other than cat pictures or pr0n. I don't think these people have gone away, I just think a lot of them are identifying as something other than trans. In the educated British circles I move in, "neurospicy" people (and particularly "neurospicy" people with vaginas - noughties autism advocacy was a bit boy-centric) can now identify with and be proud of their "disability" without needing to question their gender identity.
[The more cynical would say that this is because the Yookay will give you a subsidised Motability car for having a mild mental illness but not for being transgender, but as far as I can see the same vibe shift is happening among people who wouldn't think of rorting Motability]
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4d ago
Put simply, HBD is the most straightforward way to explain the vast differences in societal development we see at a global level:
Countries with lots of Muslims and Blacks tend to be hellscapes with ...
I agree with you that Muslim-majority countries usually underperform non-Muslim countries with similar biological stock (North Africa vs Southern Europe, Muslim Africa vs Christian Africa, Pakistan vs India, Iran vs Indian Parsis), but critically Muslims are not a biological group and "Muslim-majority countries underperform" is a cultural explanation, not an HBD one.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
I've never missed the last train while sober enough to drive.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
The full guidelines give offence levels of 43 and 38 for 1st and 2nd degree murder respectively. Cross-referencing against the table in your link gives a life sentence as the only option for 1st degree murder and 235-293 months (c. 20-29 years, of which 85% will be served behind bars) for someone with a clean record whose 1st offence is 2nd degree murder.
I don't know whether US (or NY) law knocks premediated murder down from 1st degree to 2nd on the basis of "diminished responsibility because he was batshit in a way which falls short of legal insanity". But that looks like Luigi's best hope.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
· Edited 8d ago
"This is a canary in the coal mine. People are getting fed up. There's going to be more of this. CEOs better take note."
Boogaloo rhetoric is bad, and I think PMC Blue Tribers engaging in it may be a new low, but it is very LARPy. If everyone is thinking "I'm mad as hell, but I'm too pro-social to raise the black flag and start slitting throats myself. There are other people like me are just as angry and not as restrained so I'm hopefully anticipating things going down when someone else does." then nothing goes down, or worst-case you get a bunch of disorganised pseudo-political violence by people who aren't quite right in the head, which is what we are seeing in the US now.
I don't know why 2020's America, a society which produces mass material prosperity on a grander scale than any other in human history, is full of people (on both sides of the aisle) claiming that they are suffering to the point where raising the black flag and starting slitting throats would be an understandable response. But empirically 2020's America is not full of people who are actually suffering to the point where raising the black flag and starting slitting throats is a likely response.
But given that all the cool kids online are raising metaphorical black flags in their mothers' basements, it doesn't surprise me that people who should know better are talking like this. And given the taboo against assassinating elected politicians, health insurance CEOs are the closest thing to an acceptable target in places where the high-status politics is pro-establishment left.
I don't think this is particularly a partisan issue - online pro-2nd amendment culture definitely includes sharing wish-fulfillment fantasies about how one more Blue outrage will finally drive other Reds (but definitely not the poaster) to take back the country by force of arms. The one time I went shooting IRL with American 2nd amendment activists, everyone spent the drive to and from the range talking smack about shooting Democrats, but reverted to talking like grownups as soon as their hand was anywhere near an actual gun. I particularly remember ESR's post about armed anti-lockdown protests in Michigan because he has written a lot about healthy gun culture and is definitely smart enough to know better than to engage in Boogaloo fantasies.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
The way my model of Trump thinks about dealmaking is that if the weaker party walks away smiling, the stronger party has screwed up.
This is a phenomenological model based on looking at his behaviour across four careers - I don't have a strong theory about what psychological traits make him think this way, so I doubt we have a real difference of opinion here. I see "Trump is viscerally attracted to strength and repelled by weakness" as a (probably correct) mechanistic explanation for why he behaves in the way predicted by my phenomenological model, not a rival model.
Fred Trump's money and connections meant that Donald has always had the option of refusing to play if he isn't the biggest dick in the game. Negotiations with China are the first time he has had no choice but to enter a negotiation where pointing his finger and saying "You're Fired" isn't an option, and he got a lousy deal in his first term and appears to be surrendering like a Frenchman in his second term.
The boats are carrying cocaine. Assuming that the maps and accompanying discussion in glossy reports produced by various anti-drug orgs (pre-2025 US, UN and NGO-produced reports broadly agree) are correct, most of the cocaine on these specific boats is not ultimately heading for the US.
Some cocaine enters the US by boat after island-hopping across the Caribbean, but most cocaine landed in Trinidad, Suriname, or the Dominican Republic is going to be smuggled in air passenger baggage into the relevant European country with historical links, at which point in can then move freely within the EU (and in practice almost freely to the UK or Switzerland). European street prices for cocaine are currently more than double US ones, so that is more lucrative for the smugglers.
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