functor
1yr ago
I believe much of the issue that the right has in the US and to a lesser extent in the rest of the anglosphere minus the UK is an aesthetic that is difficult for upper middle class people to swallow. The US is a two party system, so right = republican party even though they hardly fill the entire tent of right wing thought. The republicans have a weird mix of strip mall baptist church combined with oligarch wealth vibe to them. Someone who lives in a major city, is educated and well travled probably feels out of place at a Trump rally. Even in the UK but even more so in other European countries there is a brand of pearl necklace wearing urban right wing that likes neoclassical apartments in major European cities and enjoy high culture. The Republicans seem too focused on rural boomers who are opposed to change and want a culture that is fairly alien to the PMC.
I believe wokeness among the left is highly exaggerated in right wing circles. Wokeness is used to brush off the left as deranged, malicious or extremist when the majority of people who voted for Biden are not libs of tiktok-material. A lot of people are rightfully upset with the state of health care in the US, a lot of people do care about environmentalism, a lot of people see the cost of college as bonkers and a lot of people aren't really impressed by televangelist theology. The republicans would be better off looking themselves in the mirror than making the 2342 "feminist on college campus pwned” video on YouTube in which a bipolar woman is turned into a circus act for public humiliation. I am not convinced that the democrats would deliever better health care, cheaper college or a greener planet but they at least lift the issues.
functor
5mo ago
On the one hand we have a group that wants millions of arabs to live in the same town as their grandparents live. On the other hand we have a group that wants millions of arabs to be refugees. There are good moral reasons to oppose ethnic cleansing but also the massive net positive of arabs staying put in their home towns. If one doesn't want large numbers of arabs on the move, the natural response is to support Hamas. Israel's efforts to destabilize Syria have been a major humanitarian crisis but has also had consequences reaching far beyond the local region. Religion or not, there is no reason for the Palestinians not to fight back.
functor
4mo ago
specifically post-Cartesian philosophy that sees materialism as the ultimate truth and the universe as nothing more than meaningless particles bouncing into each other, cannot coexist with human society.
There is a major paradox in this philosophy, as it often takes a maximalist tabula rasa view. The world is supposed to be nothing more than mechanistic particles, yet the human psyche is untouched by it. Biological essentialist is used as a slur in the social sciences. Subjects such as human biodiversity, heritability of criminal behaviour or Iq or differences in evolutionary strategy between males and females are the ultimate taboo. A person can be born in the wrong body which means that the person isn't their body.
The view is that we are some free floating spirit that happened to be attached to a body. The phrase my friend who happens to be black is a perfect example of this reasoning. He was created black, he can't be anything else than black. There is no he without his black body. Yet we talk about it as if there is a he independent of his body that got inserted into the black body at birth.
Descartes philosophy is deeply flawed in that he both believed in mind body dualism and a mechanistic world. Either we are meat bots, aka mind = body or the world isn't mechanistic. Mind body dualism doesn't work in a mechanistic world. If there is no ghost or spirit there is no dualism.
How this giant contradiction in the middle of the modern world view doesn't explode goes beyond me.
functor
4mo ago
Is anyone else a successful person living like a NEET/incel? I was a nerdy kid growing up. Went to a technical university with few parties and studied Math. Realized that lectures were pretty boring and that there were better ones on youtube, so spent several years in a small apartment in front of a computer. To break the monotony, I made sure to exercise daily and got in great shape. I ended up working at a major tech company and did pretty well but had terrible work life balance. After inheriting a historic apartment in the downtown of a major city, I moved there even though I had no friends there. Three years later I have a good job, I am tall and in great shape and I live for almost free with views of a cathedral.
Yet my life is not really different from that of a NEET. I wake up at 9, sit in front of the computer for most of the day except for exercise and shopping. I have a limited social life and haven't had a girlfriend in years. My life wouldn't be that different if I was living in my parent's basement and gaming instead of working. The only tangible difference would be that I could order fewer cool things online, and I wouldn't have to answer emails.
I can't decide if I am a winning high status male or an incel loser, I seem to be at both ends of the spectrum at once.
functor
11mo ago
Germany is in a recession, and I paid 80 cents/kWh in December in Sweden. My gym still hasn't opened its sauna, and I got shamed for having 18 degrees in my apartment in the winter. Inflation is the highest it has been in decades, and there was a major shortage of firewood. The system didn't snap, instead there is a cost of living crisis combined with cities turning off their street lights and companies banned from expanding due to lack of power. I agree that people adapt. Covid didn't end the world, yet it created problems that will continue for years.
As for energy, the renewable hype died with cheap gas. The wind-hype only worked with cheap nat gas as a backup. Now we have almost free power some days, followed by extreme prices other days. Building a long term functioning electrical grid is different from just generating power. Cheap, bountiful wind power didn't alleviate the high prices when the wind wasn't blowing in the winter.
Imagine if any other foreign group were so outright in tying financing to their state interests. Israeli/jewish control over the US isn't even hidden at this point.
As for support there really only are two support bases for Israel in the world, zionist jews and American evangelical boomers. Israel has never been popular in Europe, latin America or Asia. The support base for neoconservatism is largely a generational thing. Young Americans are equally split between favoring Hamas and Israel and that is in a country that is more hardcore zionist than Israel.
The almost fanatical support for a foreign nation that is culturally alien was never organic. It hinged on carefully controlled media narratives. Once people in Palestine got phones and their images could be spread around the world Israel was inevitably going to lose public support.
What would be the signs of the elites believing in aliens?
If the top of society believed in aliens, we would notice a few changes. The obvious first move if we are in real risk of an invasion would be aiming more sensors towards space. We would need far more telescopes, satellites observing other bodies in our solar systems and antennas. Astronomy is a miniscule portion of the global economy and ramping it up Manhattan project style could greatly increase capacity within a decade or two. We wouldn't even need investments that would account for 0.01% of global GDP to completely change the roadmap for telescope construction. Instead, the 30 meter telescope in Hawaii is getting delayed in endless legal processes.
Defending a solar system is far easier than attacking one. Even at relativistic speeds it takes decades to get here. There is no hiding in space, and hitting dust particles with a large ship at 10% of light speed will make the ship glow brightly. Sci-Fi often presents aliens as magical, but they would be bound by the same laws of nature as we are. Slowing down from relativistic speeds requires immense amounts of energy. Hitting a small metal object at relativistic speeds is equivalent to being nuked. At 10% of light speed, a tungsten rod is 30 000 km away one second before impact. Launching swarms of weapons at them would realistically be able to destroy an enemy ship.
If we are facing an alien invasion in the coming decades, we would see far greater investments in launch capacity. The SLS program was delayed and not exactly managed as a project critical to the survival of all life on the planet. The European Space Agency is meandering along with the Ariane 6. We aren't seeing the capacity to put large numbers of nukes in orbit. We aren't seeing a race to build a rail gun on the moon to launch volumes of munitions at high speed toward an enemy armada.
If the world leaders truly believed the aliens were here, NASA wouldn't be struggling with a budget 2.5% the size of the US militaries.
functor
5mo ago
Why would the Palestinians agree to less than half of their land? As for Gaza they are under a blockade and can't export goods. They have the right to strike back as long as Israel is conducting acts of war against them.
functor
1yr ago
China is never going to invade Taiwan, it defies sense to attack an island with 22 million people, the size of a county. Storming it D-Day style would be a high risk, costly endeavour that would anger the world. Their tactic will be to gain control of the sea and pressure Taiwan into making agreements, while offering a reunification bonanza of government handouts along the way. Responding by attacking the Chinese navy would be too aggressive by the US, and this approach avoids a costly war.
The worst possible tactic is a naval blockade against a country that is far from self-sufficient.
functor
1mo ago
And how do you think running Venezuela into the ground by sanctioning them will impact migrant flows? Migrants flee Venezuela because it is bad, so making it worse should lead to more migrants. Clearly, the US hasn't been able to topple Venezuela's government, and the US has made it worse in Venezuela. In other words, foreign meddling once again lead to a migrant crisis.
The US has a long history of backing coups in Latin America, funding militias and creating banana republics. This has made the region less stable and created more incentives for people to leave.
functor
6mo ago
The taliban defeated NATO after NATO spent 2 trillion dollars fighting them. If anything tech is helping Palestine. We have seen cheap drones that are mass produced take out an Israeli tank today. With every Palestinian having a cell phone and most of the middle east on social media it has become harder for Israel to brutally suppress Palestinians. Israel can no longer control the narrative when so much of the public's view comes from the internet and not pro Israel media organizations. The Palestinians are increasing in numbers and fighting an ongoing insurgency at home is cancerous for a society. Furthermore, Israel is already deeply split between conservatives, an extremely woke portion of jews and sectarian fundamentalists that are breeding at a high rate.
functor
7mo ago
I largely agree. However, the sexual market place is bigger than the individual. The sexual revolution has limited the bargaining power of women and the extent to which men will wait for sex. In a hook up culture competing by showing more skin and sleeping faster has become widespread. Trying to make the demands a women could make decades ago such as waiting for sex, demanding that the man provide for the family etc isn't really feasible.
functor
1yr ago
As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?
No, for the same reason the torries failed, the mainstream right parties are the parties of corrupt oligarchs who signal to the working class by making fun of woke people. The democrats are portrayed as the elite party among online right wingers, but the republicans are to a great extent the party of Boeing, Raytheon, or Exon mobile. Boris Johnsson could be funny, but in the end his brexit ended with replacing polish workers with Pakistani cheap labour, since his donor class voters want open borders. The working people who supported brexit weren't specifically hating eastern Europeans, they didn't want immigration. The republicans will be more loyal to the military industrial empire and wall street than to their working class voters. Four years of Trump, and he delivered on everything he promised to Israel and almost nothing he promised his base.
Most left voters are not online twitter mobs. Most of them want cheaper health care, they dislike extreme wealth disparity, and they want to protect the environment. Instead of having an honest discussion surrounding the grievances of most democrat voters, the online right fights bipolar 21-year-olds having a meltdown on a college campus, ignoring that 29950 out of 30000 students on that campus were not protesting some event.
The mainstream right has tanked all over the western world. In the anglosphere the right as a whole has tanked because of the first past the post voting system. In the rest of the west, newer right wing parties have picked up the slack.
functor
4mo ago
This reads like the equivalent a woke college student listing off
While opposing the wokest country in the middle east that is flooding Europe with migrants? The hivemind on this subject is the neo-con war machine and the media dominated by AIPAC and the ADL pushing for more war in the middle east and more refugees to Europe.
They created that situation for themselves by not chilling down with the suicide bombings and indiscriminate rocket fire.
Why would they accept being put in Gaza with their country split into two pieces? Why would they accept not being able to live where they or their parents grew up? If the Israelis could stop the occupying, they wouldn't get hit with rockets.
Because they launched 3 wars with help of their coreligionists and lost all of them
Again, why would they accept becoming refugees and not fight back? They have seen how Israeli zoomer soldiers hide in the bathroom and cry while trying to defend a strong point from an attack from a lightly armed militia. There is nothing that says they can't fight back and win. Fighting a large tank battle might not have been the best option. Fighting with FPV-drones, rockets and ambushes might work. Iraq and Afghanistan are great examples of how globalists were removed from a country by continuous small attacks. The Palestinian population has grown extensively since then. The Irish lost a bunch of armed conflicts against the British before most of Ireland became independent.
that work visa program could have turned into a permanent residency program.
Clearly, the Likud was instead creating a refugee crisis on Europe's boarder by expanding settlements and slowly growing Israel. Unfortunately for Netanyahu, his population is increasingly consisting of a woke people, haredi fundamentalists and muslims.
functor
9mo ago
Belgians are still split after 211 years in the same country. Northern Ireland can't overcome differences so small that the average western European would have difficulties telling them apart. Czechs and Slovaks couldn't function together. Turks and Kurds have tried for a millennia. Sri Lanka had major terrorist attacks committed by people whose ancestors came there during Charlemagne's lifetime. Sunni and Shia arabs have spent 1400 years fighting over a minute doctrinal difference and the conflict is so infected that some believe it is a divine will to exterminate the other. Russia has tried to integrate Chechens for centuries. 70 years of Soviet propaganda washed off in a few years.
People are wildly optimistic concerning integration. While most people realize that they would not become Ugandan by taking a language course or reading about Ugandan values, people assume that Ugandans can become middle class westerners simply by being informed. There is a deep underlying Chauvinism behind the western view of assimilation. It is simply assumed that our way of life is superior and once the barbarians have been instructed in our superior ways they will adopt them. Meanwhile, the west is busy deconstructing the same "racist, patriarchal, oppressive social structures" that we are bewildered that the migrants don't adopt.
Integration is exceedingly difficult, takes multiple generations, and often doesn't occur at all. The lack of miracles is not failure. France has succeeded far beyond Syria, Mexico with its natives revolting, Kashmir or Ukraine.
I honestly think much of the debate is driven by wishful thinking caused by the fear of accepting that the multicultural project won't work.
functor
1yr ago
Meritocracy is unsustainable. The idea that one could skip competing in life and get a low paying job and have kids ignores the fact that you would likely end up with an unattractive partner. A master's degree and a senior dev title at a respectable firm combined with the apartment that is barely affordable with that salary greatly increases one's attractiveness on the dating market. Getting a job at a hardware store and living in something affordable with that income would be the equivalent to a shadowban on tinder. You aren't getting an iq 120 woman with a beautiful body and high general factor of personality if your life is mediocre.
In traditional societies, people didn't have to worry about competing to the same degree. If your father farmed you farmed, if your dad was a blacksmith you became a blacksmith. Instead, we spend 20 years fighting a zero-sum game for who can post the most travel photos in tropical countries, get the most educational prestige, get an attractive apartment etc. If you can't get into a good college, you can get a master's degree. If you didn't get the top job after graduating, you can become a middle manager at a mediocre firm and outrank the junior at a good one. By trading time for status in a zero-sum game, people are incentivized to push life ahead of them and not settle.
Eating disorders are a lot rarer in traditional societies. Lip fillers, overtly sexualized social media and obsession over appearance are having a ruinous influence on women's mental health. Instead of marrying one of the guys next door, they are either going to absurd lengths to compete or having poor self-esteem for not looking like a tiktok model. Instead of giving people a place in the world and treating with them respect for filling the role that place fulfills, we have a race in which we judge people's worth and moral value on their place in it.
functor
1yr ago
The issue with traffic is that more traffic causes more traffic. Freeways are like giant walls running through cities making walking and cycling hard. Car infrastructure takes an absurd amount of space making walking and cycling more difficult. Driving makes every other method of transport far more dangerous. Many parents drive their kids to school because it is too dangerous to walk and the danger is other parents driving their kid to school because it is too dangerous to walk. A person in Houston can't really choose a low car lifestyle in the same way that a person in Barcelona can. Not having a car in a city with a lot of cars really sucks, not having a car in a city with few cars is just convenience.
Public transit works best when transporting relatively large amounts of people relatively short distances. Urban sprawl is absolutely awful for public transit with vast distances and few people in walking distance of each stop. Cars make public transit worse.
Cars only benefit the person in them while slowing everyone else down and making the city worse for everyone else. Car based cities are a giant prisoner's dilemma and the best way to handle the situation is therefore a collective reduction in car usage.
Is walking an alternative in the second place? Would you let an 8 year old ride a bike to school through the area in the second photo?
functor
3mo ago
The military was in many ways the organization that least represented conservatives. It has always been the power tool of the globalists and internationalists. In a global empire, the capital city will be multicultural. The US elite won't be loyal to the population of the fly over states when their empire consists of a billion other people and their interests. The US elite won't consist of WASPs when the empire is less than 10% wasp.
The US military doesn't protect America, Americans or the American way of life. It protects international trade, aka shutting down production in the rust belt and outsourcing production to cheap countries.
Socially conservative and nationalistic minded people won absolutely nothing in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen or Afghanistan. On the contrary, these wars were against the interests of conservatism. If anything, the average conservative voter has a greater strategic interest in supporting the groups fighting against the US military.
functor
5mo ago
In 1915 the Bolsheviks were a sausage fest. In 1989 it was dominated by women. In 1922 the NSDAP was a sausage fest, in 1938 it was supported more by women than by men. Putin got more male than female votes in his first election. Today he has a solid lead among female voters. Here in Sweden the socialdemocrats consisted of young radical men a century ago, now they absolutely dominate women with a massive rift between female and male voters.
Women are rarely actual extremists, they rarely support causes that get them in trouble or are controversial. They seem to mainly virtue signal the values of the system. The modern day SJW is the reincarnated church lady. It would be difficult to differentiate the values of these new radical feminists and the values of the HR department at IBM.
Women's radicalism isn't really a problem and it has historically played an important role as women have been the enforcers of the morality of the society they live in. Had women not policed men we would have devolved into degeneracy. If a man lives in a clean house, has good manners and is well dressed it is probably because a women at some point in his life forced him to behave.
Had these women lived 90 years ago they would have been the biggest Mussolini supporters.
functor
8mo ago
This option is hardly new. You can get free sperm from a hot guy for free at a bar. As long as she isn't absolutely hideous a women should be able to sleep with a top 1% man. Maybe not on the first Friday night, but with a bit of effort, most women should be able to get pregnant with a real hunk.
The real step father is the government who protects, provides and parents the child. This isn't stable, as the people paying the taxes aren't getting the benefits. She wants men to pay taxes but not have any obligations as a wife. The state is a terrible husband. Children to single mothers (mothers married to the state) preform worse on all most all metrics. I find it mindblowing that there are people who have such faith in the system that they believe that the state will provide for them for decades to come. The welfare state is a ponzi scheme funded by debt that clearly isn't meeting its expectations already.
As for good genes this won't work as well either. Good genes is less about having some super mutation and more about not having negative mutations. A person with few harmful mutations and no unusually beneficial ones will be far better off than someone with a mix of stellar and subpar genes. With a rather aesthetically displeasing mother it is likely the child will inherit some unfortunate mutations.
Imagine if whites took back power in South Africa, pushed the people in Lesotho into an area 1% the size of current Lesotho. Then they put up a fence around it and economically blockaded Lesotho. Imagine, 30 000 people in Lesotho were killed in a military campaign with relentless airstrikes against Lesotho. Imagine that an event was being held in which a South African soldier was going to visit an American university and talk about how South Africa must ethnically cleanse itself of black people as there was no black state before the Boer.
Would anyone be the slightest bit surprised if the event got cancelled?
The difference here is that the Israeli mass expulsion of Palestinians is close to the EU. From Sinai to the EU is the same distance as Miami to Daytona Beach.
Israelis are allowed to get away with things nobody else can get away with and are surprised that they can't get away with more.
functor
3mo ago
Why would it be practical to genocide millions of people and piss off the entire middle east? Israel provides little benefit at an enormous cost. The sensible solution is to dump Israel and befriend the arab states.
functor
8mo ago
Suburbia is souless and atomizing conpared to traditional towns and cities. There aren't people on the streets, there are cars. There are no natural places to meet people, distances are vast and people are isolated in their fenced in homes. suburbia encourages loneliness. It is quite absurd that people are so isolated that they prefer being in a cubical just to have people around them.
functor
9mo ago
At the same time non religious women's fertility is falling while religious women are still reproducing.
Religiousness is hard in a world when it isn't the norm. It is hard to be a genuine believer in a nihilistic society. Religiously inclined people who are pushed in a more liberal direction by the zeitgeist of society are becoming the dominant group along with the welfare class who fail at using contraceptives. Once religiously inclined people gain a significant portion of the population, they will move the norms in their direction, thus creating a religious revival.
Our society is heavily selecting for two groups: the religious with conservative values and welfare class people. The liberal left are not reproducing.
The idea that we can just replace the population with other people is ludicrous. A nation is like a family, just because someone does the dishes and is pleasant doesn't make them a part of my family or mean that they can live there. France is a nation and a people, not an economic zone. There are countries that are nothing but administration of an area of land and these countries tend to be unsuccessful. Countries created after colonialism as nothing more than lines drawn on a map by foreigners concerned by 19th century geopolitics are terrible. Not to mention that we are giving up our history, culture and our way of being to save a government program.
Furthermore, every country is now in serious resource overshoot. Our consumption is wildly unsustainable. The population of humans is several times higher than what it was when we lived sustainably and each human consumes far more. Population reduction has benefits, cheap housing and nature. If you ride through rural Europe on a train you will barely see any real nature. You will mainly see urban sprawl and agriculture upheld by mountains of petrochemicals. Exponential growth in the number of humans isn't sustainable at all. We have witnessed a collapse in insect and bird populations over the past decades. Forests in Europe are largely gone and high intensity agriculture wrecks the land it uses.
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