Soteriologian
3d ago
Movies in particular, no, but there's an enormous amount of quality video content produced on shoestring budgets on YouTube. NileRed, 3Blue1Brown, Adam Ragusea, Practical Engineering etc.. It's not just a handful of people: there are many channels on a myriad of topics, produced by people who as far as I can tell have no major studio backing. It's just regular people with cameras, doing stuff they find interesting and showing other people.
I'd wager this "industry" already dwarfs legacy producers of similar content.
I don't think there's anything stopping people from producing movies, the will just isn't there for whatever reason. But It's been done before: The Blair Witch Project was a successful low-budget film, and it managed to achieve fame even without the help of internet video distribution!
As for writing, there's SlateStarCodex, which was just a guy who decided to make a website to publish his writings. It was pretty big once upon a time, so I hear. He wrote a book, too!
Soteriologian
3d ago
There's this magical idea among the Substack literati, who all appear to be deranged graphomaniacs themselves, that a True Artist will always produce work regardless of material circumstances. But do you really think Philip Roth or John Updike or Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith would have published dozens of novels between them if they couldn't make a living at it?
I don´t mean to be overly hyperbolic, of course. But even back in Ye Olden Days, yeah, great writers were often persecuted. John Locke fled England on fear of his life. John Bunyan wrote much of Pilgrim's Progress from prison.
Today, with the advent of the internet, it's much easier. Fuentes had his bank accounts and credit cards locked, was put on a no-fly list, and booted from every major social media platform. Has that stopped him?
Or take all the AAA video game producers that have been ideologically captured. So what? Just make your own studio! Clair Obscur just won game of the year! And the runners up were like... Hollow Knight: Silksong (produced by a grand total of 3 people, if my knowledge serves me right) and Hades 2. You really can just Do Things, and out-play people with orders of magnitude more institutional privilege.
Anyway, the other thing I wanted to highlight with my post is that complaining about institutional capture is a really bad battle tactic. I won't contend that fighting to retake institutions is a bad idea (though it's not the sort of thing that inspires anything in me personally). It's probably a good idea. But complaining that you don't like the status-granting institutions lends them more status, because it looks like they correctly kept all the losers out. For anyone seeking to go on their own Long March to retake the institutions, you need a more compelling battle cry than "No, no, you can't refuse to accept me, my test scores were good!" I propose something akin to Harry Potter's line when he retook Hogwarts: "How dare you stand where he stood!"
Soteriologian
3d ago
The advantage of the conventional educational system, and of government grants in general, is just how damn much money is thrown out there
I guess, but in a world of technology, even a tiny amount of empowered talent can compete with an ocean of well-funded incompetence. Telegram famously has like 30 employees, and it's one of the largest social platforms on the planet.
Regarding Thiel & co, it's honestly kinda baffling to me how much worse they've gotten with selecting people to fund in recent years. They used to be much better at identifying talent. Take Vitalik Buterin. We can debate whether Ethereum is a scam or not, but it is certainly extremely successful, and Vitalik himself is not a grifter: he is very gifted technically. He has good knowledge of cryptography, and has written extensively on it.
Similarly, take this recent tweet by Paul Graham. I agree with him, but it's a frankly baffling admission: are you seriously conceding that none of the people in charge of distributing large amounts of money know anything about how technology actually works? You don't think, maybe, you could get some actual electrical engineers and high-tier software developers on your staff instead of a bunch of socialites and wordcels? It legit boggles my mind.
Then again, the website I'm typing this on barely loads half of the time I try to visit, so apparently running a small forum requires S-tier talent these days.
Soteriologian
3d ago
It's always amusing to me to hear Tolkien talk of his own work. He does not seem entirely self-aware of what he's doing, in contrast to Blake, who, despite being less intelligent, is in some sense much more clearheaded. I know that sounds rich given Blake's galaxy-brain prophecies, but he at least is under no delusion that he is discussing archetypes which do have some degree of correspondence with real-world thoughts and behaviors, and is not ashamed to make those connections explicit, rather than try to waffle around with "Oh no, I never do symbolism or allegory! I think that's so crass" like Tolkien does.
Like there's this interview I watched recently where Tolkien is disavowing symbolism and the interviewer is like "Come on, man, the Tree of Gondor is so obviously symbolic of the state of Gondor" and Tolkien's like "oh, well, yeah, obviously, but I didn't mean symbolism like that." Ok, well what do you think symbolism is, man? If I had to read between the lines, I think he had unpleasant interactions with not-particularly-intelligent fans trying to read his work like Pilgrim's Progress or something ("by Orcs, did you mean the Russian communists?!"), which he found so off-putting that he overcorrected in disavowing the notion entirely.
Soteriologian
4d ago
Watson did his actual research i.e. his succeeding in the university, because that's where the equipment, the mentorship and the funding was. You cannot strike out and make it on your own as a particle physicist.
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.
And yes, I do concede that universities have access to funding. But as the Trump administration is showing, you can just... not fund them anymore if you think they're full of nonsense. Plus, private funding is abundant these days, and hungry for talent. There's far more money than there is talent. Thiel himself just threw a bunch of money at a chip startup that was a complete scam (and should have been transparently so from the outset): he clearly wants to given money to talented people, there just aren't enough of them in his contact list.
Soteriologian
4d ago
I have trouble sympathizing with any of this. An institution's prestige comes from the people that compose it. If you're competent, the institution doesn't grant you prestige, it leeches off you to obtain prestige. If you're useless, it is the institution that grants you prestige (at the expense of its own reputation).
Take James Watson. He recently had all his stickers revoked by the "status-granting institutions" he was a member of for being a bad man and saying mean things. Guess what? I cannot name a single one of those institutions off the top of my head. But you know what name I do remember? James Watson.
The way you respond to an institution not accepting you or granting you status is just to go succeed anyway. Then the institution will suffer the reputational damage of looking like a clown for rejecting you. What you definitely should not do is fail at life and then cry publicly that the institution rejected you, because that vindicates their rejection! You are literally granting status to the institution by telling everyone they correctly rejected a failure! If you fail, at least be quiet about it, so the institution doesn't get the status boost.
This is especially accented when you consider how many successful people abandon status-granting institutions of their own will. Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard, and apparently thought it was a waste of time, so he left. This makes Harvard suffer reputational damage (though I suppose they get credit for accepting him in the first place. But still, it's at least nominally supposed to be a school, which, ya know, is supposed to be telling you the Secrets of the Universe you need to succeed. If you just leave and succeed anyway, obviously none of those secrets were necessary). Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were also dropouts.
"Oh, well you're just choosing S-tier examples," you retort. "For regular humans, the world doesn't work like this." Ah, but check this out:
For men, the team found one correlation with GRE scores: men who scored in the top 25% of the GRE’s quantitative section were more likely to leave graduate school without a degree than men who scored in the lowest 25%.
So no, it's not just S-tier exceptions. Competent people do not need institutional blessing. Only the incompetent do.
This even plays out in the finances of institutions. If you're smart, you get scholarships to attend university--they pay you to go there! Why would someone pay you to teach you the secrets of the universe? Well, they're not. They anticipate you're going to be successful anyway, and so they pay you a bribe to waste some time with them so they can act like they took some part in it. For all the people that they don't anticipate will be successful, they charge tuition. This reputational laundering is, quite literally, the business model.
Soteriologian
4d ago
It's kinda amusing--my innate distaste for Orcs was so strong that when I played Warcraft 3 as a youngster, I was annoyed that I couldn't skip the Orc campaign, so I just stopped playing the campaign entirely. (Which was ridiculous, since as it turns out, the Orc campaign is really good!).
What was always especially odd to me is that as I've grown up and encountered people who identify as orcs (nobody in my circles growing up did), they're not people I'd have identified as orc-ish at all. Like Russians do not look anything like orcs to me, and I found it astonishing they would interpret Lord of the Rings as such. Maybe the very lower class, prison sort kinda look like orcs, but one could say that just as well of the British lower class, or probably any lower class. And Grubby was (and still is) one of my favorite pro gamers, and he's the Warcraft 3 Orc God. Grubby looks about as opposite of an orc as a human could possibly look.
As an adult, the whole theme has become even more amusing: Warcraft 3 obviously got the term "orc" from Tolkien, but Tolkien wasn't the first to use the term, either! The first, to my knowledge, to use it was William Blake, who used it in a similar but slightly different sense: Orc is not what we'd call the orcs themselves, but is rather a spirit of destructive rebellion that possesses humans. He uses it to refer to the Americans in America, A Prophecy, where he gives um... a very unflattering description of Americans, basically burning down everything beautiful in the world and infesting it with fire and plagues in their war against the angel Albion.
Soteriologian
4d ago
They do, however, say that about Superman
Well, they say a lot of things about that movie, especially in response to what everyone else thinks the movie was about
Soteriologian
4d ago
The thing about all this is even the Jews themselves don't believe it. They watch It's a Wonderful Life or Harry Potter or Star Wars, and see characters like Potter and the goblins and Watto and say "That's me! Yes, they're not technically Jewish, but it's an antisemitic stereotype!" You literally cannot put a greedy, sleazy character in a story without the Jews saying you must be talking about them. Why do the Jews never look at George Bailey or Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker and say "That's me! Yes, he may not be canonically Jewish, but he's obviously just a stand-in for a Jew in this fictional setting."
For what it's worth, they're hardly alone in this. The Russians watch LotR and see the orcs and say "That's me!" They even play horde in WoW.
Not everyone wants to be a hero. Heck, I myself play Diablo, see Zoltun Kulle, and say "That's me!"
Soteriologian
5d ago
I propose a Peocracy: rule by whomever has the biggest penis. Mandatory physicals every 4 years replace elections.
Soteriologian
6d ago
Private group chats already solve this, and they're quite popular. As is leaking their contents to the media.
If you mean public platforms, you can just make the discussion public but membership private (ie, invite-only). For any violators, you have a nice provenance tree that you can snip wherever the admin deems necessary.
Soteriologian
6d ago
Gang tattoos are a thing everywhere gangs are. Drug gangs are not exactly bastions of high human capital. They are very primitive in their mental processes.
In the age of cheap camera surveillance, solving low-class crime is purely a problem of political will. There are no other relevant factors.
Soteriologian
7d ago
It's tricky, but the premise does seem to hold: checking out the El Salvador emigration data, we can see it's 5x lower than it used to be. And it dropped by a factor of 2 the moment Bukele took office!
Now that Bukele has shown that you can, in fact, just put the violent criminals in prison, maybe others will give it a shot.
Soteriologian
7d ago
The thing is the US is already so non-white. Whites account for around 50% of US births, which is pretty bad compared to most of Europe, as far as I can tell, although it's a bit tricky to compare numbers due to how data is collected and classified.
And Eastern Europe is mostly okay (I mean, they still have cratering fertility. But at least it's not buoyed by third-world migrant births).
Soteriologian
7d ago
There's subtlety: the big appeal isn't that he is a racist/antisemite; it's that he refuses to lend moral authority to these labels in the first place.
His "anti-black racism" mostly just boils down to "put the criminals in prison," which is not actually racist by any sensible definition.
Soteriologian
7d ago
I was shocked he didn't know the black vs white homicide rates off the top of his head. Any self-respecting internet racist should.
You can't just say the words "per capita" and act like it resolves the question. You need to say the actual per capita numbers. That is what resolves the discussion.
Soteriologian
7d ago
Yeah, the reason I call it a blind spot is how unable to acknowledge the traditional roles (s)he is: as soon as you open your analysis to timescales longer than a human lifespan, the tradcon worldview makes a lot of sense. It's not arbitrary. It's not silly mysticism on par with a shaman performing rain dance.
Even if you find the traditional arrangement infuriating, at least have the basic intellectual honesty to acknowledge that this is how humans reproduce, and you need both pieces for this to work. In the words of Augustus:
If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance; but since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way without them, we must plan for our lasting preservation rather than for our temporary pleasure.
Today, one might label him gay (although I don't like applying modern labels to ancients), but the point is he's at least clearheaded enough to acknowledge the underlying mechanics of why society is the way it is, rather than gaslight himself and everyone else into thinking some weird degen lifestyle is totally equal to traditional marraige.
Soteriologian
7d ago
The thing is you have to force economic conditions that are worse than the place they came from -- sufficiently worse to overcome the activation energy to get up and move again, at an older age than they did the first time!
In some sense, South Park had it right decades ago: the solution to all the Latin American migrants is to make Latin America less bad, so nobody will bother migrating in the first place. But the time to do that was decades ago, back when.. US policy was quite literally the opposite, creating the infamous Banana Republics.
Now, for Europe, which has a much smaller share of migrants, and many of them are on welfare, this is a much easier matter.
Soteriologian
7d ago
"It's hard so we shouldn't even try" is a pretty common rhetorical tactic that I see on this topic
I don't do rhetorical tactics. I'm not a streamer, I have no fanbase or audience to pander to. I'm not going to lose my ad revenue if I say an oopsie.
I say it's not realistic because it isn't. To engage in the deportations of 15+ million people is ludicrous, and as I mentioned, that's not even the bailey: the bailey is a white ethnostate, which would require 40+ million deportations. That's either a chart-topper in all world history or very close, in terms of quantity of people relocated by a government. The notion that the United States, in anything like its current incarnation, could engage in 1930s Stalin-level population migration is not realistic. You would need a Julius Caesar-tier figure, and that's not the sort of political personnel you can pick up the phone and order from CATO.
And to the perfect being the enemy of the good: I'm not sure "good" is the word to use here, so let's use the word "partial": does reducing the quantity of non-whites by, say, 3 million, change anything at all about the trajectory of the country? Not really. You still have tens of millions of non-whites. All you've done is inflame a bunch of racial animosity among the still-very-much-muilticolored demographics of the country. And make no mistake, these people aren't just going to sit there and let you do this: if millions of coloured people actually believe they're under serious threat of deportation, you will have major political instability--not the BLM sort, the full-scale civil war sort. And you still have sub-replacement white fertility and a massive generation of retiring boomers.
Further, I don't trust the Trump administration's numbers on deportations, mostly because I don't trust them on anything else. They seem to be outright fabricating economic numbers (with the not-so-subtle intent to bully their own central bank), so I'm certainly not going to trust their remigration numbers.
In my estimation, there are only two realistic routes to a white ethnostate for Americans: major economic collapse, which might shake things up enough that large numbers of people who don't have some connection to agriculture (which is mostly white) flee the country as refugees, then hope the Mormons and Amish can form new state(s) and rebuild everything. Or you try the Israel tactic, of gathering some sort of white identity community, flying off to a hopefully-not-already-inhabited piece of land somewhere (cough), and make your ethnostate from scratch. Both of these are extremely uncomfortable, but the former is something that occasionally happens even without anyone trying to make it happen, and the latter is quite literally how the United States was founded.
With this sort of thing in mind, how many voters would choose any of the above over Gavin Newsom and AOC running in 3 years, promising a return to the regular old world of 2013?
Soteriologian
7d ago
I think even if all these were implemented tomorrow, the US would not look meaningfully different in 20 years.
Soteriologian
7d ago
Take Contrapoints, for example. Beneath the tongue-in-cheek pizzazz and glamour, and modulo the enormous blindspot of his/her own sexuality, there really is a person who has deep affection for western philosophy and art. Almost scholarly. There is nobody remotely comparable on the dissident right.
Soteriologian
7d ago
My conspiracy take is legacy establishment figures like Tucker and Piers at least to some extent agree with Fuentes's message and are intentionally amplifying it by inviting him on their shows to be slain by him. In the words of Mycroft Holmes (from the British TV series): "This is a battle we must lose, because they are right and we are wrong."
That said, it's kind of a shame that Fuentes is the best the dissident right can produce. He has a lot of problems, certainly not the least of which being that he complains without proposing any serious solutions. Take the illegals question: what is the actual proposal here? There are tens of millions of illegals in the United States, especially if one counts those present on legal but dubious pretense (previous amnesties, asylum, birth to an illegal migrant, etc.), which seems to be the bailey. A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memory (e.g., the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan). It would be a challenge even for Stalin. Or take the Jewish oligarchy Fuentes loves to complain about. What exactly is the proposal? Nationalise Oracle Corporation and boot Larry Ellison off to Israel? Make all the Jews wear gold stars so everybody knows to stop doing business with them? Because apparently saying "They trust me. Dumb fucks." is not a compelling enough signal for the masses to not cede their entire social infrastructure to that person.
My personal take is there is no serious way to solve the problems Fuentes names. For a country that never got itself into these situations in the first place, like Poland, sure. Fuentes's ideology can work. But for countries like the United States or the United Kingdom, this is not feasible. The best they can hope for is a non-bastardised implementation of classical liberalism: maybe actually put the criminals in prison for once, instead of releasing them on some harebrained pretense of "the Pakistanis don't know rape is bad." Bukele, basically. But any notion of "retvrn to ethnostate" is fundamentally non-serious. And I mean that in a deeply practical sense: I don't think any amount of "the secret is just be evil" makes it realistic.
Soteriologian
8d ago
It doesn't make sense why they'd choose someone like Luigi to frame. He's obviously cute as hell: plastering his face all over social media with WE CAUGHT THE KILLER is surely going to make people think assassinating unpopular CEOs is the sexiest thing ever. Heck, judging by the court photos coming out, I wouldn't be surprised if Brooks Brothers has contracted him as a model to market their new Winter Season apparel.
If the feds wanted to frame someone to quell the enthusiasm, they'd choose someone ugly, preferably with an existing record of unpopular crimes (ie., sex crimes).
Soteriologian
8d ago
I don't think the Snowden or Assange comparisons make sense. You have to be on-site to shoot someone, whereas leaking documents to the press can be done from anywhere. In fact, afaik Assange has never been to the United States.
That said, while I do think escaping after a successful assassination is actually-difficult, it really does look like Mangione and Robinson were both basically retarded in their attempts. You don't just waltz off to McDonald's while you're still hot. And you definitely don't watch someone else get caught by going to McDonald's while they're still hot, make a joke about it in your Discord, then run off to the much-safer sanctuary of Dairy Queen instead.
Oh, come on, it's much more than that. It's not merely a crest. In the books, the White Tree is dead, and no sapling of it was found. When Aragorn returns and ascends to the throne, he is led by Gandalf to find a lost sapling of the dead tree, which he returns to the courtyard and plants, where it grows and blooms. This clearly symbolic of the loss and restoration of the line of kings.
It's not just the football logo for Team Gondor.
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