The neocon hype cycle:
A new Hitler is launched. Saddam, Osama, Gadaffi, Putin, Ho Chi Minh is this evil person motivated by evil who wants to destroy the world because it is evil! We have to act now before the new cartoon villain kills us all! Nobody wants to talk about the lead up to the conflicts and the very real grievances the next Hitler has. His motivations are by default nothing but his cartoonish evil and his arguments don't have to be discussed.
Freedom fries and hype. We will take Berlin next week! Mission accomplished! People are waving their flags and hyping up the military operation that is quickly and surgically remove the new Hitler thanks to the new wunderwaffen. This war isn't like all the previous disasters, we are going to win cheap and fast!
A plan designed by politicians rather than generals is launched. We aren't actually going to have a war time economy and do what it takes to win the war in Ukraine. We weren't actually going to build a military base in every valley in Afghanistan, we weren't actually going to nation build Libya. We want the cheap discount option that is easy to swallow. Ukrainian soldiers can be trained in six weeks. Not because they can learn a year's worth of material in six weeks but because it is a nicer option than the alternative.
People start acting for the sake of acting. There is no goal in Afghanistan, nobody knows what winning looks like. But we have some spare stuff lying around so we can donate that to the Afghan national army. Do they need it? Do theyhave a plan for how it is going to be used? What will eventually replace it? Who cares, people who ask those questions are terrorist lovers listening to the Dixie Chicks.
The misadventure goes way over budget, hundreds of thousands of people die and we get flooded with migrants. Now people don't want to talk about it anymore.
Years pass and people start denying that they ever supported that war. However, have you heard of the next Hitler! They may have lied about every previous war, but this new Hitler they are being completely honest about. We have to kill him, the media that told us Iraq has WMDs and the Afghan army has 300 000 soldiers says this guy eats babies!
functor
16d ago
Ukraine's demographic pyramid says no
The future of Ukraine is Somali and Bangladeshi migrants working on farms owned by American financial institutions and managed by HR women educated in the US. Most likely the migrants will actually find their new homeland less enticing to have children in and probably will have fewer than migrants in western countries.
As for Russia the number of Russian men who have served is far below WWII levels. There might be a small effect, but I doubt it will be significant.
functor
10mo ago
There has been a consistent majority against immigration to Sweden for decades yet politicians have pressed on. Even among non SD-voters, the views on immigration tend to be right of the party.
What you are forgetting is the main issue, social cohesion, the sense of beloning and the deep trust that has existed in Swedish society. Swedes in Dubai don't socialize with rich arabs. Most people have friends in their own age group, with similar levels of education etc. People don't want to feel like an alien in their own community. Swedes start moving out of an area as early as 4% of the inhabitants being migrants. Even if the migrants weren't more likely to engage in migrants and even if they paid more in taxes most people don't want to live in a Bangalore even if the people there are smart and productive.
The idea that society is nothing more than a platform for economic exchange completely misses most of human experience and what builds a strong well functioning society. Take the top 10% of ten countries and put them together and you want have a super-country. You will have a corrupt, dysfunctional society.
functor
1yr ago
More likely, oligarch financial institution demands ESG ratings. These ratings are then handed down the chain of command until they land on some middle manager at a welding company in a very white town and have to be rammed through. It used to be that companies had owners, today the owner is a vast network of middle managers representing dozens of funds who may very well be investing in each other, forming a large circle. Nobody is really in charge, the decisions are made far from the people who implement them and the owners barely are aware of what is going on. Companies that want to increase their rating can hire a diversity manager to fix their score. The score is calculated on an Excel spreadsheet which will in turn be used to calculate another score on another excel spread sheet so that someone on lower Manhattan can write a nice report advertising their financial instruments.
functor
13d ago
There is a niche for a third tier university to accept autistic weirdos who are kicked out of tier one institutions. This is far from just a wokeness issue, a lot of geniuses are difficult people. By creating a safe space for researchers who don't see what is wrong with asking a woman if she is pregnant or fat and giving them long term research grants, a university can increase the chances of getting groundbreaking research. If a university punches high above its weight class in research, it could compensate for other issues.
It wouldn't surprise me if a university in Asia adopted this strategy. Find deplatformed westerners and build a top tier research facility that rivals famous institutions with several times the budget.
functor
6mo ago
It is typical of any revolution. The idea is that everyone is going to be free and liberated and we will have utopia. The reality is when traditions and norms are removed, we get a massive behavioural sink. People get the freedom to act shortsightedly and selfishly. The response is twofold, one group says the revolution should be rolled back while the other group claims the revolution was sabotaged and the saboteurs need arresting. The problems might be recognized by both sides, the issue is that the solutions are incompatible. The feminists want to have total freedom for women but use state power to ensure that men don't act in self interest. Conservatives want to go back to sexual dynamics run by traditions and norms rather than a one controlled by state power.
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
Political / ideological affiliation for all graduate programs outside of the licensing professionals (law, medicine) has shifted left since at least the 1990s. And educational / teacher's graduate programs are in a league all of their own. There's left, there's progressive, there's actual socialists, and then there's teacher's colleges.
I think a big problem is that universities now have entirely separated departments from the others. Something that can be taken as an axiomatic truth in one department can be seen as completely false in another. Peer review has become review by your small subfield. Papers should have to have a randomly select a peer reviewer from another department. It would be interesting to see a neuroscientist, pediatrician, psychologist or psychiatrist review education papers. Just taking zoologists who are used to studying how animals behave and function in an ecosystem and toss them into sociology or education would be intriguing. Academia has become too specialized for ideas to propagate or for there to be effective cross-breeding of ideas.
The academia works on layers of abstraction. On the bottom there are mathematicians and physicists who describe the fundamental truths of the world, a bit higher up we have chemists, biologists and neuroscientists, in the middle there are psychologists, engineers, and doctors and on top we have economists and sociologists and historians. Generally, peer review should include people from a lower level of abstraction.
Economists and sociologists should be be put on small islands together, neuroscientists and educators would be another high priority combo.
functor
9mo ago
I largely agree but, but I am not sure it is a given. There is nothing requiring the state to subsidize single women to the extent it does. Strong independent women who don't need no man do infact need massive bailouts from the tax payer. Single mothers get more government handouts and benefit from a plethora of social programs. If taxes were lowered and schools instead required tuition and if medical care was financed entirely privately single motherhood would become far less attractive. Even in terms of their jobs single women often work in tax payer professions often providing services to themselves. For example a single mother might work as a teacher thereby providing free child care services to other single mothers. Men who don't sleep with these ladies pay.
If there is a way that this unravels, it is the services deteriorating to the point that relying on them in order to be a strong independent women doesn't work.
functor
9mo ago
Yes, the failure of many men was in not screening the mothers of their children for acceptable behaviour before knocking them up.
To be fair though, there aren't exactly as many innocent virgin women without an instagram account as there are men. Men have to compromise on something, looks, virginity, Iq, personality, tattoos, mental health, weight etc. Most people are forced to settle rather than are able to chose whatever they dream of.
I believe that one of the reasons why so many people are single today is because too many people are unattractive. Lots of people are obese, many women have tonnes of bagage, there are men who can't do a single pull up or survive three days without electricity. Partially due to the housing market a lot of young men live with their parents. People are remaining single because they can't find someone decent while they themselves aren't decent.
functor
1yr ago
Indians/Asians are the ones who truly care about grooming gangs.
English people who complain about illegal immigration, grooming gangs or terrorism are often not really animated by those issues but are upset that they don't feel at home in their country. English are losing their sense of belonging, their culture, and their community. Terrorism or crime aren't really impacting that many people, and car crashes or excess salt in diets cause more harm than migrant crimes or ISIS. Living in an atomizing housing block next to a Somali family instead of a community in which people know each other and that feels English is what is motivating an anti immigration sentiment. Since people don't want to say that they prefer living in a traditional English community but instead have to move to an area with good schools and complain about 0.000001% of the population getting killed by mentally ill ISIS supporter.
In my experience, Indians have a utilitarian perspective on society. They don't really have much sentimental attachment to it but rather see it as a transportation system, a medical system, a market place and an investment. If English people are replaced by Chinese their real estate investment might go up. Pakistanis raping girls in their area is clearly not good for business so they want them shut down. Their perspective isn't ideological, their perspective is a question of profit. Boat migrants are not profitable, jihadists are not profitable, groomers are not profitable.
functor
4mo ago
So if someone defends European/white culture they get banned. Yet, he is upset that people aren't banned when they oppose zionism.
And on that note I think you’d get many people here arguing in that direction if a large and well armed movement of native Americans was kidnapping, raping, killing etc large numbers of whites under, in part, that slogan, and Harvard was tolerating that chant.
If someone wanted to build white settlements on reservations, set up economic blockades around the reservations, kill hundreds of natives every year and then conduct relentless airraids for months on them when they resist they would have been completely wiped out of academia.
functor
4mo ago
Would a native American who said "from the pacific to the Atlantic the Native will be free", be kicked off campus? Would "From Zimbabwe to the sea, South Africa will be free", make them kick you off campus? Funny how these big jewish sponsors were fiercely opposed to any for of white nationalism yet see any opposition to their ethnostate as genocide. Funny how white identities can be completely deconstructed and how thought crimes against diversity get people unpersoned yet the same logic doesn't apply in the other way.
I really see no reason for us goyim to support them at all. For the left, Israel is everything they claim white nationalists to be except worse. You don't see many on the alt right proposing massive airstrikes on the suburbs of Paris. For the right the Zionists is the ADL pushing woke agenda, mass migration into western countries and banning thought crime on twitter. The zionists have managed to alienate almost everyone except themselves and a dying number of evangelicals.
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
6mo ago
The right-wing extremists
Not wanting a 9% of GDP deficit isn't extremism. Pretty much anywhere else in the world including the US up until a few years ago the current US fiscal policy would be called extremism. Not wanting 2 million illegal immigrants flowing into the country a year is apparently extremism.
The GOP promises its voters fiscal responsibility and reduced immigration. The voters get open borders, bailouts for wall street and billions for defence contractors and foreign wars. At some point the base has to demand that the GOP delivers on something for the non oligarchy. Continuing to vote for the GOP because the other side is scary and at some point they may throw you a bone goes against the experience of the last five decades. The GOP base needs to walk out until the GOP starts delivering.
Did the FED create wokeness?
I graduated with a CS degree ten years ago, and I still regularly meet my old class-mates. Some are right-wing, often libertarian types, while some have gone full woke including some unexpected ones. The main factor separating the two seems to be what industries they are in. Those who write software for the electrical grid, defence contractors, or industrial machines seem to have moved rightwards over the past decade. Those who work in industries propped up by low interest rates have all gone radically left. Spotify's headquarters are close to my office, and I am good friends with several of their employees. Their business-model is essentially dependent on an extreme individualist philosophy. If music is an integral part of culture, something that is typically experienced live and locally, the business of making cents per thousand listens is infeasible. Spotify is built on billions of people listening to the same pool of music. No nations, no borders, just atomized consumers is a suitable ideology for such a company. Grubhub, uber, twitter and Netflix make small sums of money off vast quantities of people. In a more nationalistic world, they wouldn't be nearly as valuable. My woke friends nearly all went for a company that has millions of clients all over the world, generating tiny profits off each client. The art stemming from these companies tends to be bland and placeless. Strong collective identities such as nationalities, ethnic groups, traditions and gender roles doesn't flow well with a world consisting of users.
These companies had another pillar holding them up besides global homogenization, low interest rates. Spotify, Netflix, Uber, and Twitter have lived for over a decade without any real profits. They have consumed monstrous amounts of cash without generating much revenue. This has only been possible because of low interest rates. If bonds were yielding 8% a year, borrowing money for fifteen years and dumping it into spotify wouldn't have been an attractive investment. These companies have lived on cheap credit and a globalized world pooling wealth into a few major cities. A global financial hub is going to be multicultural, it won't be able to have a strong culture or strong norms, and it will be inherently individualistic. NYC needs rich arabs buying expensive apartments. Those working in finance insurance and real estate benefit from Saudis buying lavish apartments which are empty 95% of the time. A janitor trying to buy a house is less amused by Saudi oil flooding the NYC housing market.
Those coding for the electrical company are more interested in people who are committed long term to their society. They don't need a global market, as their market doesn't extend further than the grid. Their interest is people with high skin in the game in terms of the society they live in and who are willing to make long term investments in the grid.
Those on the left seem to still view the elite as those managing local businesses. They see the elite as conservative, and having the values of my friends working at industrial companies. They seem to have missed the growth of a new elite that is international by nature. This elite builds its wealth on taking a 0.1% fee for managing the investments of millions of people, or charges a few cents per payment on their fintech app. My suspicion is that they don't want to see the nature of the new elite, since so many of them make their living serving it. Universities need foreign students, journalists need international readers. The blue tribe is urban because they make their living teaching, entertaining and managing with funding coming from tech/finance. The bookmakers at the coliseum in Rome were more dependent on Rome as a vast empire than the farmers were. Thousands of people betting on gladiator fights required an empire to sustain it. Farmers on the other hand didn't like competing with slaves.
Interest-rates are rising and tech lay-offs are in the news. Spotify, twitter and Facebook are slashing employees. Meanwhile, new nuclear power is in the news and thousands of coders will be required. Defence contractors are trying to hire all the people they can find. Reindustrializing has lead to a surge in jobs in manufacturing, and the machines require code. Government, health care and other sectors are in dire need of developers and there is no shortage of jobs. We are seeing a shift away from 10 cent per thousand adds to agricultural machines.
With higher interest rates San Fransisco, LA, NYC, and London will decline as portions of GDP and manufacturing hubs will increase their portions of GDP. We are seeing a shift away from a global woke class to manufacturing, both in rust belts in the west, but also in China and various developing countries. The end of occupy Wall street is often viewed as the start of the great awokening, the end of the global financial crisis was the FED printing money. The great awokening occurred roughly at the same time as zero interest rates started to have a tangible effect on the economy.
Meta is different products from one large company. X wants an app in which you can send money or chat with your friend all in one app. Facebook and VR-gaming headsets are different products and therefore they have different names. Alphabet is a parent company yet, we have google search, docs, slides, mail etc. Google drive isn't incompatible with search.
WeChat is a model that can work in the same way a larger google ecosystem works. Musk made his initial fortune with online payments and banking. A twitter that allows for small transactions could be immensely useful. With that said keeping the twitter name for it could have been better.
functor
1yr ago
With large cities and many niches, people can find communities to belong to that have selected for people just like them. My gym is 95% men, other gyms are 95% women. My job is all male, my hobbies are all male and not just that but select for people with specific personalities. Meeting through friends is hard when the friendship circle is too similar. Most likely people vote the same as their friends, have the same level of education, similar age group, gender and so forth.
The only really open public arena are bars, but they generally aren't much better than tinder, just more time-consuming.
Personally, I hired a photographer who does viral marketing for fashion in order to go from the 60-70th percentile to the top 10%. I strongly believe a lot of guys could greatly improve their looks by having better pics. I took thousands in order to get good ones. It is hard to take good photos, and having 20 pics to choose from in your phone's gallery is guaranteed failure. Women have often taken thousands of selfies and learned the art. Most men have no idea how to take good photos. Good cameras help a ton, lighting is key, and practice helps. Men are underselling themselves by using awful pics.
I believe a future trend is going to be better arenas for people to meet such as single's nights, speed dating and other ways for people to meet irl.
functor
1yr ago
The idea of trying to hide and defending ones farm is one of the worst ideas in the American right. Chicago has African levels of murder and the people who built it vote democrat and have BLM profiles on their linkedin since they isolated themselves in suburbia. This is the same mistake the French elite made by moving to Versailles. If you isolate yourself from society, cohesion will plummet. If people don't interact there is no understanding left. This will rip society apart and create a soulless city. American cities tend to lack public spaces, life on the streets and genuine culture and instead have stroads and strip malls. A walkable mixed use development is much more likely to have a living culture with less fat people and a stronger identity as people actually interact with each other and have chances to form a collective identity. If you are nothing but an atomized consumer isolated from the others, bringing in cheap foreign labour seems much more appealing than if they have to live next door.
A healthy society should be one large community in which different classes play different roles but fundamentally are one team. How are people going to identify with each other if they live in isolated enclaves? The goal should be to maximize skin in the game as people climb the social ladder. Greek and Roman aristocrats went into battle first, the same should apply today with the added requirement that they use public transit and drink tap water. Low skin in the game for the top is a dangerous direction for a society to wander.
American sprawling cities are the most woke and most pro multicultural places on Earth. Even places in Europe that are considered multicultural are as white as Boston. The idea that suburbia would lead to a better society for right wing people seems to be empirically false. It seems to lead to generic urban sprawl in which the top third is isolated from the rest of the society and slowly loses its connection to the rest.
functor
18d ago
Granted, my career in finance was short, and I only worked in tech, but in my experience most finance was underwhelming.
There were a lot of people who more or less had a call center job. Some were doing telemarketing, trying to sell pension-investments. Others were calling people, trying to get them to sign a form promising that they weren't using their pension money to fund ISIS. There was no point to the latter job except ticking a box for the regulators. Lots of people had jobs where their job was to open piles of PDFs, find a key number and insert it into an excel spreadsheet.
With that said, some developers and traders were truly impressive and had almost super human abilities. The issue is that the company was an inverted pyramid. A few people kept the show going, while the majority were support staff. The people who actually did the core work were remarkable people whose jobs won't be automated until we have AGI. The majority were just doing tedious office work in a toxic work environment.
The one thing that keeps demand up for junior employees is that regulation increases the demand for staff. There are fewer and fewer doers and more and more people who have to ensure that the clients aren't on some list of Russian oligarchs or that have to create graphs of carbon emissions in the investment portfolio.
functor
3mo ago
Populism vs donor class politics.
A lot of younger Americans think health care is too expensive and has to become substantially cheaper. A lot of young people aren't enthusiastic about forever wars. A lot of young people think housing costs are unsustainable. A lot of young people would be skeptical of NSA spying. These issues cut across the left/right divide. Both a rightwinger and a leftwinger can agree that wall street is becoming parasitical and is sucking money out of the real economy. The boomer elite believe in the system, the younger party members see the system as broken and want to change it.
The situation is a bit like the situation in France in the 1780s. Older members of the elite believed in the system, a lot of young people didn't. That doesn't mean the youngsters agreed at all on how the situation was to be fixed.
functor
8mo ago
How many people in the year 2000 would have supported any of the woke stuff today? Even mass immigration is unpopular and has continuously been so. The left has done an incredible job at pushing the overtone window. They take positions that are unpopular and they fight and fight and fight until they are the status quo. Once things are the status quo people accept them and don't debate them much.
The right is stuck worried about polls and continuously compromises while never launching its own campaigns. The right needs to find new battle grounds, take positions that are impopular and fight to make them status quo. Gay marriage was not popular. Gay marriage lost and lost and lost. The left pushed and pushed and pushed.
The right needs to do the same and find newer more radical positions outside the mainstream and make them the mainstream.
functor
11mo ago
I still see no plausible scenario for these AI-extinction events. How is chat-GPT 4/5/6 etc. supposed to end humanity? I really don't see the mechanism? Is it supposed to invent an algorithm that destroys all encryption? Is it supposed to spam the internet with nonesense? Is it supposed to brainwash someone into launching nukes? I fail to see the mechanism for how this end of the world scenario happens.
functor
1yr ago
Transgenderism is religious dogma taken to its logical extreme. The fundamental thesis of the religion is complete mind body dualism. They see humans as a blank slate sould that randomly attached to a body and thereby has had many constraints and suffering imposed on it. Their goal is to liberate the free soul from the constraints of the physical world. The view can't be understood outside their theology. HBD, genetic explanations for class our sex differences, are the ultimate heresy against their religion. They invalidate the core principle and understanding of their theology. The woke ideology is built on a worldview that free souls were created, they were bound to physical constraints through evil and the march of history is toward liberating the soul.
The more tech Silicon Valley take is that this will be done through genetic engineering/AI/fusion powered utopia. The more social science approach is through "justice".
Academia has fallen into a pit because academia consists of writing commentary to other peoples work. In the social sciences the commentary is to a large extent based on philosophers and thinkers that had ideas that are invalid. Rousseau doesn't live up to scientific scrutiny. Yet the ideas that stem from his thinking aren't tossed out. There needs to be a search algorithm that can search citations iteratively and redact those papers whose fundamental principles are false. Papers built on ideas such as "Existence precedes essence" are wrong since your DNA is at least as old as your existence, since you became you at the point of conception or later.
Wokeism in Academia is theologists arguing about the number of angels on a needle. They are taking religious ideas with weak scientific basis and arguing them to their logical conclusion. Transgender issues are so explosive even though they are marginal issues since they fundamentally are a clash of theology. Theologians could spend centuries arguing about the word "Filoque", we are seeing similar debates today centering around the new religion.
Democrat voters =/= democrat party.
Lots of people vote democrat because they dislike the republicans for no woke reasons. I am sure when I list reasons, people will rightly point out that many of them apply to democrats as well but are more commonly associated with republicans.
a) Health care being expensive/inaccessible
b) Neoconservative warmongering
c) Republicans clearly valuing corporate profits over the environment.
d) Trickle down economics not trickling down.
Thinking all democrat voters are like the democrat party itself is
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