Soteriologian
26d 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
26d 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
26d 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
28d ago
I propose a Peocracy: rule by whomever has the biggest penis. Mandatory physicals every 4 years replace elections.
Soteriologian
28d 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
28d 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
29d 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
29d 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
29d 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
29d 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
29d 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
29d 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
29d 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
29d ago
I think even if all these were implemented tomorrow, the US would not look meaningfully different in 20 years.
Soteriologian
29d 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
30d 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
30d 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
30d 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.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Given the quality of his manifesto, either it was written by the cops or that $40k/year prep school he was valedictorian of is a total scam. The manifesto isn't even competitive with the median sneedpost on Reddit, much less the median mottepost.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I know it sounds gay, but it really is a loss of civilisational vision. There is no Mandate of Heaven that inspires gifted people to actually build cool stuff.
Part of this is that everything is so myopically chart-driven from the top down. It's one of the things I like about the Arabs: was the Burj Khalifa "worth it" in some strictly financial, bean-counter sense? Almost certainly not. It would have been vastly more efficient to build a bunch of concrete boxes and use the space for the same purpose.
But the Arabs do not have such a severe chart-worshipping brainworm infestation. The Burj Khalifa is badass, and badassery justifies itself.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
I do start to worry that we don't have a sufficient supply of competent people
I think this is less of a problem than may at first appear. I think large amounts of human capital is locked up in playing video games. Obviously the median player is basically useless, but there are so many skilled players who don't aspire to much besides playing video games.
I was watching a former world record run of FFVII recently and the guy doing it was the most milquetoast underachiever in life I could imagine. He was talking about how his dream job was to finish community college and get a union job as an electrician. Or take Haelian, a pro Hades player with multiple world firsts in various challenges: before switching to full-time gaming, I think he worked at Walgreens (as a shelf stocker, not a strategist at corporate HQ). As a strong believer in Spearman's hypothesis, I'm confident these people severely underestimate how gifted they are and how successful they could be in mainstream professional work. They're just lowborn, and don't view the professional world as something that's even available to them. And it's not like the cultural class markers even relevant anymore -- this isn't Victorian England, where you have to hold your spoon in the right way or be shunned by civilised society. Musk is off smoking pot on Joe Rogan, and Alex Karp is apparently doing crack before going on interviews. The behavioral standards are not high. If you're competent, you're allowed in.
Soteriologian
1mo ago
Russia has quite a lot of nuclear power, which is remarkable considering that, as you say, they care minimally about the environment and have abundant access to fossil fuels. Further, it's worth noting that the more civilised European parts of Russia are the parts with the most nuclear power, comprising around 40% of their generation.
If nuclear power is competitive with Russian fossil fuels, that means it's pretty darn cheap!
China doesn't have much nuclear power at present, but they are investing an enormous amount in building plants, and their forecasts are that it will quadruple in proportion of their energy supply over the next 25 years--and that's with the buildout of other energy sources!
Soteriologian
1mo ago
The voters maybe, at least the under-40s, but the blue party is tightly controlled by pro-Israel donors, which is why Kamala quite literally sunk her campaign over the matter. I'm confident she'd have won the election if she'd just given some pro-Palestine statements and made some empty girlboss threats to reign in Israeli behavior (which she could easily backtrack on after being elected. No need to keep campaign promises to anyone who isn't a large donor).
Soteriologian
1mo ago
They have AI trained on all our racist group chats.
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:
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.
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