MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
No bio...
User ID: 1678
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
7mo ago
the official version is not really believed by anyone educated above 5th grade civics
Unfortunately, this is not my experience. Some of the most conformist people I've met have had higher education degrees. I think Chomsky wrote something about this some years ago, how the primary function of universities is to increase compliance with the system. Interesting thought.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
7mo ago
The Aryan Invasion Theory is to Indians what HBD is to Western liberal-leftists. No matter how much data and evidence is served up, many simply refuse to accept the facts, period. Incidentally, I've found Hindu nationalists to be the most strident in their opposition, which goes to show that science denial isn't a left-wing problem alone.
It's mildly amusing to me that the genetic evidence simply piles up ever greater in the West whereas the debate in India becomes ever more disconnected from reality the more the Hindu nationalists start to dominate discourse. Khan's own attempts at watering it down could perhaps be because a significant fraction of his audience and social circle are Indians. It's simply a touchy topic and perhaps he is trying to triangulate. I agree with you that his interpretation is iffy at best.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
7mo ago
Why do you think the book isn't doing gangbusters
Because the thesis of the book is wrong. News recently came out that 94% of new jobs went to PoC in the US, thanks to corporate pledges in the wake of the BLM riots. A straight reading of the civil rights law would have prevented that, so clearly the rulebook isn't as important as Hanania claims. The people who claim that the system is run on anti-White animus are correct and Hanania is wrong.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
8mo ago
Fallout of the Hanania doxxing. The University of Austin (not to be confused with the public university), which billed itself as a haven of free speech, has now uninvited Hanania after the latest revelations.
I think this says a lot about the "anti-woke right". It's basically just warmed over liberalism from 20 years ago. If you're not willing to cross the rubicon and talk frankly about topics like race and crime, then what's the point of your "heterodox" university anyway? This is why the right keeps losing: it's full of spineless cowards.
People make fun of SJWs but at least they have the courage of their convictions.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
9mo ago
So Georgia Meloni, the supposed far-right firebrand of Italy, is now planning to radically open up visa access for non-EU migrants. PiS in Poland are planning similar measures, even as they've let in record number of workers from moslem-majority countries since they've took power. Of course, the rhetoric from both the Italian and the Poles are all about asylum seekers and illegal migration. Sort of reminds me of GOP rhetoric about stopping people at the border even as they get jawboned by business lobbies to liberalise legal avenues for work visas.
It's the same thing here and it deserves to be pointed out that these fake populists in Europe are ultimately in thrall to the same power system as the old parties are. What's driving large-scale migration isn't some evil plot. It's not Soros or even the Kalergi plan. It's just capitalism. Both of those individuals may be colorful but ultimately the driving force is structural.
Of course, my explanation is boring, perhaps even banal, which is why it will never take off. Not enough drama. As for these developments, I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".
Incidentally, when reading about Max Weber's life in recent days, I found out that he was quite nationalistic as a young man and even campaigned against cheap foreign labour (principally from Eastern Europe). Quite ironic for someone who later became a liberal intellectual, but also amusing in that it shows that this thing has been going on for a lot longer than people realise and it likely won't end soon either.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
10mo ago
Roberts' poison pill of allowing race to be discussed in personal essays and then allowing universities to take that into account mostly nullified this decision. As others have noted, this tactic has been used by universities in several states like California in previous years.
I would say this is a small and positive step, mostly for normative reasons, but in practical terms it's a whimper rather than a bang.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
If Twitter dies then it is because TPTB want it to die. There's an ADL-sponsored advertiser boycott going on right now, for one.
The fact of the matter is that Twitter doesn't need as many people as it had. Many of those employees had "narrative control" functions. Some of the Japanese users noted that when the mass firings began, suddenly all the trending topics were things like manga or video games rather than politics which is what it was before. Thereby suggesting that Twitter employees had a "steering function".
That's the crux of this entire affair. Twitter wasn't a free platform, it was used as a propaganda vehicle by powerful establishment interests. A mass firing of these "narrative control" workers is potentially dangerous to the regimes, because free speech is now seen as a threat to their power. It is the same reason why Julian Assange had to be taken down.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Yes, that's an actual headline at Yahoo News, published just a week ago. It's basically a long anti-white rant by a bigoted ethnic activist. I am fascinated that white Americans are so sissified in the face of this open bigotry. In many ways, their patience is Christ-like. I for one don't hope for a tit-for-tat development, because this world needs less tribalism and conflict. But as long as anti-white racism isn't called out, I can't take people who claim to be anti-racists seriously. And the editors at Yahoo news allowing this vile rant to be published shows that its ingrained in US culture.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
9mo ago
Around 80% of South African youths are functionally illiterate.
It's fair to say that if the black radicals get what they want, South Africa will quickly become Congo (at best).
Thus far, black elites are smart enough to understand that, which is why they don't give in to those radical demands. But if I were a white South African, I wouldn't make any long-term bets on the country. Then again, some of these white families have lived there for centuries, so I can understand their reluctance to just walk away. Easier said than done.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
6mo ago
None of the major non-US powers required for WW3 (Russia, India, China) have great stakes in any of this. If Russia was losing in Ukraine, I'd be more worried.
The only power that cares is the US but none of its potential adversaries in the region (Lebanon, Iran) have nukes nor are any of remaining nuclear powers willing to use theirs to defend them. So a nothingburger. Sleep tight.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
8mo ago
Vivek Ramaswamy has written an article on his foreign policy doctrine, focusing on China.
He is squarely taking aim at the "neocons and liberal internationalists", in other words the two main constituents of what Obama referred to as "the Blob" dominating foreign policy in D.C. He is predictably being called an isolationist and WaPo columnists are freaking out.
WaPo columnists themselves are not relevant but they are often mouthpieces for more powerful interests. Trump was hated for many things but one underappreciated aspect of why the Blob hated him was his instinct not to start new wars. In fact, he is one of the few presidents in recent memory who did not start a new war and he tried to get out of Syria - twice - but was undermined by his own bureaucracy.
Vivek is a much smarter guy than Trump, so I wonder if the Blob would be able to run circles around him the way they did around Trump. I doubt it and I suspect they doubt it too, which is why I think a campaign to destroy Vivek is likely to ramp up before too long. Trump couldn't be controlled outright but at least he could be misled.
you don't seem to have much to say here
Then I did not succeed in trying to point out that there's been an unbearable sense of superiority among a certain segment of Europeans, and as an European myself, I'm not sure if this counts as "boo outgroup bad" given that it's essentially self-criticism. The post also tried to weave together a narrative how US liberals like Michael Moore spent much of the first decade of the 2000s trying to glorify Europe, and how the latest developments may try to undermine that. Perhaps if I had made clear that I was European, people would have been less offended. Many responses assumed I was American.
So I am not sure if I agree that there isn't material to mine here, though I will agree that using low-effort slurs like europoor was probably a bad choice of words and I'll try to keep that in mind going forward. It was meant as a tongue-in-cheek way to open the conversation but clearly it didn't land.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
11mo ago
Honestly he just comes across as a weird schizo, but it sure is amusing to see the uptick in Latinx and Indian nazis.
If memory serves, the leader of the far-right "Proud Boys" group was mestizo.
Feudal problems require feudal solutions. In this case, the king (Spez), is checking the power of the upper nobility (power mods) by playing them off the lower nobility and peasants (small time mods and users). This ensures a smooth transition of power, as the lower mods who will be actioning these requests have moderation experience, familiarity with the communities they will be moderating, and they will be selected specifically for their collaboration with Reddit against other unaligned forces.
In the real world, the house nearly always wins. The scrappy upstarts gets brutally beaten down and possibly destroyed. Hollywood has destroyed so many lives by feeding people false fantasies during their childhoods (often with parents helping to pile on) as people later become confronted with life as it is rather than an idealised version that never existed.
This reddit drama is just a microcosm of that. It's also a gentle reminder that much of our actual lives are essentially hyperauthoritarian with basically zero democracy. A lot of anarchist theorists have noted this in the past when analysing our modern liberal capitalist systems, but it's nice to get another confirmation with this entire saga. Ultimately the only voices that actually matter can be counted on a single hand. That is true in almost all large organisms, ranging from large communities, corporations to even nation-states.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
9mo ago
The Hollywood actors guild is on a strike. They are joining the Hollywood writers' strike, which has been ongoing for a few months. I did not know this, but apparently Fran Drescher (the loudly nasal woman from "The Nanny") is the president of the union.
Is this strike a big deal? Well, for one, it's the biggest strike for over 60 years. But what caught my eye was her rationalisation. You can read a summary of the demands.
A key demand has been surrounding generative AI. Actors do not want companies to create their own AI replicas of actors, nor to use generated voices and faces.
One possibility could be the actors raising the AI bogeyman as a cover to demand better pay. And to be sure, they are asking for a fairer split from the streaming model. Yet the AI demands are not directly linked to compensation per se, but rather asks about blanket bans. This does suggest that AI fears are genuine and real. Given very rapid progress in the generative field in recent years, perhaps they are right to be so.
Whenever I've read about jobs displacement from AI, invariably experts have opined that "the creative stuff will go last". Clearly the people who know their trade best are disagreeing with the experts. I'm not sure if this means that actors are paranoid or if we should disregard the expert consensus. Either way, I suspect we may see more and more of these kinds of Luddite strikes in the future, but perhaps not from those who people expected it from.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
6mo ago
I recall reading that Israel also tried to push its African asylum seekers into the West and then there was HIAS' role in the Syrian refugee crisis.
I am generally speaking more sympathetic to Israel than to the Palestinians but I think many Westerners are wildly overstating how much in common we have with the Israelis, at least the part of Israel that is ascendant.
There's been speculation that a ground invasion may not happen at all but rhetoric coming from Israel's defence minister would make it very hard to climb back from:
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to troops on the Gaza border: "You now see Gaza from afar, soon you will see it from the inside. The order will come."
Hard to be more clear than that. Others have noted that Israel's bombing campaign signals indecision but doing massive air strikes is normal procedure before any urban warfare. Certainly the US did the same before the Fallujah campaign.
More interesting to me is the endgame. Some kind of ethnic cleansing is clearly a goal that Israel pursues, but it prefers if it was done in co-operation with Egypt. Remove the Palestinians "temporarily" to tent cities for safety and then refuse to take them back. The Egyptians are smart enough to understand this and refuse to play ball (alternatively, seeking a higher price for their complicity).
The Israeli foreign minister has also stated that after the war is over, the territory of Gaza will decline. This was assumed to be annexation. But now the latest rumors making the rounds are a new buffer zone. I suspect the Israeli top brass are still debating these things among themselves. The final decision will probably be decided by a combination of battlefield developments and external pressure. But it certainly seems clear that Gaza's territory will shrink. Already 100K people are internally displaced with bombed out houses. That will increase dramatically in the case of a ground invasion. Perhaps this could be the endgame: making a huge number of inhabitants unable to return to smoldering ruins and thus force them outside Gaza (just as most people who lived in Mariupol left and likely never came back).
Either way, skepticism about any potential ground invasion now appears unwarranted barring any unforeseen event.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
6mo ago
The odds were always low because of the war aims. The sheer number of hostages means that any ground operation would be all but impossible. Moreover, a series of Israeli ministers have communicated very clearly to the public that hostages are of a secondary importance.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
SBF had a long interview with NYT where they were remarkably soft on him. The whole thing can be read read here.
For my part, it seems like he has little remorse and is spinning things as "things expanded too fast and I made a mistake". The fact that his hedge fund (Alameda Research) was propped up by client deposits without their knowledge is not something he wishes to mention.
Over at Twitter, he has been consistently deleting tweets such as his Nov 7th tweet assuring everyone that FTX has a "long history of safeguarding client assets". Some are speculating that his recent gibberish tweets are in fact a way to keep his tweet count constant, so to not alert bots when a large amount of tweets are suddenly deleted (as some bots may begin to do auto-archiving). In his interview with NYT, he instead spun his new tweets as some kind of cryptic message he wants to send.
All these things re-affirm my view that he's basically a manipulative psychopath. What's disappointing but not surprising is the soft gloves treatment he gets in the NYT. One cannot help but ask whether his status as democrat megadonor plays a part in that.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
6mo ago
Most elites are left-liberal and thus have an emotional affinity to Marxism in a way they never will to far-right politics. It's about ideological proximity, not rationality. The fact that Marxism was genocidal when it was fully practiced is almost irrelevant.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
8mo ago
God isn't real, of course, and I doubt Vivek thinks so either. Hinduism is remarkably tolerant of atheism.
As a sidenote, I've been impressed by him. I think his willingness to be ruthlessly realistic about limits to America's commitments to Taiwan is a breath of fresh air. Reminds me of 2016 Trump. I still think Ye Olde Orange Man is a clear favorite, but if he gets barred from running due to legal issues, I think Vivek is a top contender. I wouldn't call him very charismatic, but he at least isn't robotic like DeSantis and unlike DeSantis, his campaign feels less controlled by donors and GOPe activists.
I think Trump's secret was that he intuitively understood that GOP conventional wisdom isn't actually that popular among the grassroots and so breaking with it hardly carries punishment with the voters - quite the contrary, in fact. If Vivek grasps the same fundamental truth then he has a very good shot.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
An anonymous substacker has written up a good piece on the Rise of the West. Essentially, he comes to the conclusion that the divergence began in the 1000-1500 A.D. period and that subsequent colonisation efforts by Europe of the rest of the world was simply an outgrowth of those earlier advantages.
This of course upends the familiar trope of "the West got rich by the backs of the Third World" so popular with leftists in the West and in countries like India, across the political spectrum. I bring this up because if the poor countries of the world today have any hope of catching up, they should first re-examine honestly why they fell behind in the first place. Yet I see precious little of that, except mostly moral grandstanding about the evils of the exploitative West.
This also has domestic political implications because a lot of white guilt-driven narratives are sprung from the narrative that the West got rich by exploitation and thus the logical corollary is that evil white people should repent (preferably through monetary reparations). The narrative that colonisation was simply a natural outgrowth of European pre-existing advantages that grew over time naturally undermines it. One could also note that the Barbary slave trade, or the slave auctions in the Ottoman Empire, shows that the Third World was far from innocent. But of course these historical facts don't have high political payoffs in the contemporary era, so they are ignored or underplayed.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
So Israel had its fifth(!) election in four years a few days ago. I wanted to wait until we got 100% of the votes counted before commenting. The big story is that Netanyahu (henceforth called 'Bibi', which is his nickname) is almost certainly going to be back as prime minister. He has already beaten Ben-Gurion - arguably the most important founding father of Israel - in being longest-serving PM and looks set to extend that lead.
Israel had all these elections because the country is very divided without any faction seemingly being able to take the lead. The previous PM ruled in an uneasy Arab-Leftist-Centrist coalition with even right-wingers like Lieberman supporting them. Lieberman used to be Bibi's defence minister and has very hawkish views, yet he is also a secularist and couldn't stand both Bibi personally nor his religious support parties.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a coalition which has nothing in common except "everyone hates Bibi" didn't last long.
Bibi is often accused of being corrupt and perhaps he is, but more coverage has been dedicated to the surge of the far-right in the wake of this election. The far-left Meretz party (mostly supported by secular Ashkenazi urban liberals) didn't make the cut to be voted into the Knesset. An Arab hardline party also just missed the threshold. As a consequence, Bibi's coalition will notch up 64 seats in the 120-seat Knesset.
The mainstream narrative is that this represents a "dark turn" in Israel's chapter. The reality, more likely, is that the far-right notched up wins after a surge of riots and terrorist attacks. A very long twitter thread from an Israeli politics watcher makes a convincing case. In other words, it isn't a sign of a sudden religious fanaticism so much as a response to crime and terrorist attacks.
Besides, if the far-left Meretz party would have combined with other left-wing parties like Labour then they would have both made it to the Knesset (parties can combine on so-called "electoral lists"), denting Bibi's margin of victory. If the Arab parties had united, Bibi's coalition would have gotten even fewer seats, likely sub-60. Thereby, Israel's deadlock would have continued. Napoleon used to say that luck was a quality in of its own and some of his generals had it and some didn't. Bibi has proven himself lucky, but counting on this kind of luck going forward is probably unwise. If the opposition learn from its mistakes next election and unites into more electoral lists, it will be very hard for him to repeat such a victory.
I do think Israel has a long-term RW trend but this election probably is a bad case to make for it. A more salient conflict is the religious/secular divide. It cuts across the left-right spectrum, as the example of Lieberman shows. But even secular voters can support far-right religious parties in times of increased tension, and this election proves it.
Going forward, the price for Bibi will be to give the religious parties what they ask for, namely continued lavish funding of their educational institutions without much secular knowledge imparted. This equation sits at ill ease given Israel's high-tech economy, which is supported largely by secular or "modern Orthodox" workers. Such a giveaway with no strings attached is deeply impopular in the secular strongholds like Tel-Aviv. I suspect balancing the electoral compulsions with the preferences of the those who actually run Israel's economy will be more difficult for him than dealing with any outside pressure "expressing concern" over perceived democratic deficits. The ADL is already warning Bibi it won't keep quiet.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
6mo ago
All eyes are on Gaza but reports are also coming in that the Israeli military is putting the West Bank on full lockdown.
Part of this is to prevent wider contagion but it surely cannot be lost on various government ministers (some of whom belong to the utter fringes of the Israeli far-right) that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to do things in the occupied territories that otherwise wouldn't fly. Israel has a narrow time window for any such actions, so while the world is glued to what happens in Gaza, I would also try to keep an eye on the West Bank.
I suspect the real prize for many members of this govt would be simultaneous ethnic cleansing of both Gaza and West Bank in a massive show of force. 300K reservists have been called up. I'm not predicting it will happen, just pointing out that if there was ever a time, then that time is now.
I used to think it was just a matter of reaching enough people, but I've now come to realise that evidence doesn't really matter for a great number people if it interferes with their ideology and/or personal interest.
The amount of people in the West who would be negatively affected if HBD became the dominant intellectual frame of reference is now massive. They have a clear personal stake at never allowing that to happen. Dispassionate scientific inquiry is in fact something very few are interested in. You can show them a thousand papers. It won't matter. They will only use it to indict you for heresy.
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