functor
5mo ago
Do they actually need to hire conservatives? Just kicking our a lot of liberals would achieve the objectives. DOGE's prime objective is to deplatform leftists and they are doing so at an incredible rate. If the left lost its armies of professional activists they would be heavily undermined. Killing USAID doesn't just hit wokeness in America, it hits wokeness globally. The issue with building a right wing bureaucracy is that bureaucracies naturally tend toward the left.
DOGE just needs to turn thousands of full time activists away from their activist career and give them new careers selling real estate, managing paperwork at a hospital or SEO-blogging.
For those on the fringe right, imaging what the right could achieve with tens of thousands of full time activists with billions in funding and top tier connections. Now imagine losing that.
My prediction is that we are going to find that a lot of people aren't actually as woke as we thought. They just played around with it. The people who wanted to defund the police would never walk through the ghetto at night alone with no police. The middle class posers talk about body positivity and trans rights while being skinny and living hetronormatively. They love diversity on twitter but live in an all white neighbourhood.
functor
5mo ago
The US is swimming in debt, is deeply divided and is being overtaken by China. The US is far less ahead than it was 50 years ago. Most of the countries in the region trade more with China than the US. The US portion of global GDP, population and military might is in decline. This is an awful time to get involved in forever wars containing direct ethnic cleansing over a tiny strip of desert.
Creating a giant refugee crisis on the border of Europe while impacting a bunch of countries in the middle east by engaging in mass ethnic cleansing is the worst PR imaginable.
functor
7mo ago
Status is key, however there is another mechanism that is playing in here.
With hypergamy and women not needing men for protection and provision women can seek higher status men. Men can achieve higher status by spending more time. Even if you wanted to just have kids at a young age it is going to be hard to find an attractive wife without going to college, without traveling, without buying a nice house etc. The status that you get from getting a low skilled labour job and from renting a place that a 22 year old can afford doing unqualified labour is shooting yourself in the foot on the dating market.
There is no time pressure to have kids. We have effective contraception and people are pushing through grad school, trying to buy a place in the right side of town or trying to take the right tinder pics on Bali so they can get an attractive partner. If people were more naturally paired up more kids would be born.
functor
8mo ago
With Trump and Elon being friends and Trump even talking about Starship and starlink during the victory speech I think it is likely that we might actually go to the moon. Trump's new friends are tech heavy and Elon is a main character and a true space nerd.
functor
9mo ago
The death of the liberal media.
When the newspapers were laying off large numbers of journalists when the internet was rising I was optimistic thinking that tens of thousands of leftist propagandists losing their job would be a positive thing.
In the end the media that replaced the legacy media wasn't less woke. Instead they just publish press releases from the rand corporation as news instead of doing actual journalism. The death of the liberal media wasn't the death of liberalism in popular culture, it was a shift from the media being critical of power to the media re-printing press releases.
functor
9mo ago
Cultural marxism is effectively Antonio Gramsci. He absolutely wanted to influence culture and was pushing marxism.
The cultural revolution clearly shows that the communists wanted to influence culture.
Especially the early soviet union wanted to greatly impact culture.
This isn't more of a conspiracy theory than that right wingers want to change culture. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy that people with similar political views want the same thing. That christians tend to be pro life isn't a conspiracy. They are not all congregating in a central lodge. Many of them aren't really taking orders from above and those who are such as catholics are entirely open about the church's stance.
functor
3mo ago
It really made sense after WWII when the US was 50% of the world's GDP, had fighter jets while most of the world was technologically barely in the 1800s and had nukes.
The US portion of global GDP and population has steadily been falling as the rest of the world has been catching up. China has greater industrial output than the US and are not a century behind the US in tech, in fact they are a head in certain fields. Other countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Saudi Arabia etc have developed at a far faster rate than the US. In 1950 the US was the sole supplier of many industrial goods, today the reliance on American products is reduced as there are alternative suppliers for most products.
Invading countries is substantially harder today than it was in the past. Britain could take a quarter of the world, no country could hold that much territory today. Defensive technology is simply too good. Even Houthi rebels have ballistic anti ship missiles.
The US won't be able to maintain its status as an exceptional unipolar hegemon in a world in which the US isn't as exceptional. The US might be more powerful than a specific country but isn't powerful enough to be everywhere at once. They simply can't enforce a world order globally. They can enforce it in a subset of the world but the US would be stretched thin trying to enforce it everywhere at once.
functor
4mo ago
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians fought in Bakhmut, a town of 100k people along a thousand km long line. They lost.
France, Britain and Germany would truly struggle to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers in a high intensity conflict in Ukraine. They would struggle to defend a single city. There is no European army that could hold a sizeable portion of the front except for Ukraine/Russia. The scale of the Ukraine war is vastly beyond what any European leaders have imagined for decades.
functor
5mo ago
The current arrangement is fundamentally broken. The US has the dollar as the reserve currency, making the dollar too expensive. This is great for the American finance, real estate and insurance industry that require little labour and are capital intensive. The US as a reserve currency means that the world is subsidizing the financial markets in the US.
This means that the US becomes an incredibly expensive country to do business in. The working poor in the US are well paid. They are just living in a financialized economy with high costs. With an overvalued dollar, real estate in the US is way too expensive which means that American workers have to be well paid. All that money sloshing around the American financial system keeps medical insurance expensive.
This worked in 1960 when the US was so technologically superior that much of the world ended up selling bananas and clothes to the US for dollars that then were used to buy overpriced industrial products from the US. As the world has caught up, much of the US has gotten shafted. They have high costs of living while struggling to compete with cheap foreign products in a globalized economy under pax Americana.
Trump wants to keep the US dollar dominance while having a more normal internal market by having tariffs. Prices will be high within the US while Americans will continue to be relatively rich while going abroad.
For the rest of the world the deal is awful, we will have to sell products to the US in order to get dollars and then pay a 25% tariff in the products we buy. So if we want to buy oil we have to sell 100 dollars worth of goods to get 80 dollars of money post tariffs that the Americans just print so we can get our oil.
Deportations can be done easily and cheaply without any government involvement.
Require some proof of being legally in the US for opening a bank account. I highly doubt the banks don't know exactly who people are already. Make sure digital forms of payment as well as credit is impossible without legal paperwork.
Limit the time window that a Latin American driver's license is valid in the US and make Latin Americans registers when they start using that driver's license. Driving without a proper license should be punished.
In order to buy alcohol and cigarettes with a latin American passport there should be an American passport stamp in the passport.
Companies should be investigated for tax fraud if they hire illegals.
Make at least larger landlords verify the identity of their tenants.
Make it impossible to register illegals at schools, universities or other institutions.
When I was in the US I had to fill out information to register who I was when I stayed at a hotel. Make that process only go through for people legally in the US.
Create a miserable user mode for illegals in the US and they will leave. The US has millions of illegals because the US facilitates illegals in their country. Stop facilitating them and it will stop being fun to be an illegal in the US. Mexico is not Sudan, life there is not that bad.
functor
1mo ago
Not a volunteer firefighter but served a decade in an army reserve unit in a European country.
First off the quality of these types of organizations vary massively depending on the volunteers they get. Volunteering and being active can make a major difference, and that does motivate a lot of people.
Excitement is a motivator. Regular life is boring and many strive for something a bit beyond it. You get interesting experiences, great training, action and some great stories.
It is a way of finding a group of guys on a mission. Usually the quality of men is reasonably high, and the team spirit is good.
Compared to other hobbies it is still financially lucrative. Boating, motorcycles or mountaineering are far worse financial decisions than serving in a volunteer organization yet you still get cool toys. Arguably cooler toys than most hobbyists.
For some there is social prestige, for some they want to show that they are tough and manly and not just weak office workers. Some want to escape their regular lives, others want to break the monotony of 9-5 office work.
functor
7mo ago
The Arabs still have many homelands and there was no distinct Palestinian identity before Israeli independence.
That argument isn't going to convince Arabs, it isn't meant for the jewish population. It is an argument for Europeans meant to justify a massive refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep. The arab states have absolutely no reason in aiding a mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. For us in Europe we have zero reason to want to see millions of arabs move. Even if it is to other arab states it is still a disaster as it is destabilizing.
Israel has not only been involved in plenty of wars that has ended up with migrants in Europe. The ADL and plenty of other jewish groups have been pushing hard for mass migration into Europe.
So if not living in your own ethnostate makes it perfectly fine to evict people there is no problem if the rest of the world forcefully evicts all jews?
So it would have been completely fine to ethnically cleanse all Finns and Estonians pre 1918 as they had never had a state? Basques have never had an ethnostate so are they free game?
functor
9mo ago
The right needs female voters.
The western world created the most mentally ill women of all time. We have the most stressed women that sleep the least and have the most mental problems of any society. Women are having far fewer children than they say they want, are obeser than ever and more addicted to psychiatric medication than ever.
The sexual revolution was a disaster for women and defending it in order to be pro women isn't a viable strategy. Hookup culture, hyper sexualization and the breakdown of family is not something that will help women.
Rather than pushing issues that are hurting women the right should focus on how the left is terrible to women. Defund the police saved criminal black men by throwing women under the bus.
functor
1mo ago
As a startup founder LLMs are enormously useful but not primarily for coding.
LLMs are great for issues such as: "which AWS service to use", how to make pitch deck, which type of adds should I buy, how do I configure a firewall for my server, how to find a good accountant, how to file taxes, gitlab or github and so on.
I don't have a large team of experts, I don't have a lot of time and I have a multitude of different roles. I am CFO, CTO, CEO, dev ops engineer, lawyer, and HR. AI allows me to be somewhat competent at all these tasks and allows me to solve them quickly. The new paid version of ChatGPT is great at quickly producing mock ups and even suggestions for features and user stories.
LLMs are going to allow far more people to start a company and to be able to launch things. Need a NDA and LLMs will make a professional looking PDFs in a minute or two.
Rather the opposite, North America has too few countries. Quebec should be independent, California should be independent, The south should be independent as a minimum. Giant states are hard to keep together and don't work well. There is too little cohesion, decisions are made too far from the ground and the interests are too different.
There used to be a British colony, it split in 1776, then fought a war against itself in 1812 and then split again in the 1860s. The current state is that American politics is a mess with people living in completely different realities.
functor
5mo ago
expressed willingness to sell out his base.
No, he is focusing on "Make America great again", not wasting endless sums of money fighting wars in the middle east that end up destroying the local christian population. His base has won absolutely nothing from the last few decades of neo con wars. His base got nothing but debt and mentally ill veterans from the fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq. Providing Israel with endless welfare is the opposite of America first.
Will the Jews who support the Republican party exclusively because they're the most unwavering about Israel turn coat
Trumps loyalty should be to the US, not people whose loyalty is to other countries.
functor
6mo ago
The wars always follow the same patterns and have since the 1800s. A long backstory is ignored, and instead the new boogeyman is launched. There is no reason why this boogeyman exists, he is just evil and wants to wreck the world. A great sense of urgency is instilled and we all have to act now or else Ho Chi Minh, Gadaffi, Castro or whoever else is going to come to your town and murder babies! They are purely evil and have no arguments whatsoever, they are just cartoon villains.
Then the war starts with a big hype, freedom fries, this next war is so high tech, cheap precise and so different from all the others! Don't ask any critical questions, a few special forces operators can take all of Afghanistan in a few weeks and win! There is complete hype, the media asks barely any critical questions, and the psyops are in overdrive.
Then the war drags on, the casualties and costs mount, the refugee crisis grows and "we will be in Berlin next week" attitude is replaced with cynicism. During this phase the debate doesn't get better because now it is a sensitive topic. The war ends and people still don't want to talk about it, hold anyone responsible and even talk about it. It becomes embarrassing for the "Saddam will nuke as all crowd" when they have to face their fiasco.
These things become public frenzies whipped up by the media that fall apart with critical questioning. This isn't too different from defunding the police in Detroit. Every linkedin user is supposed to cheer it on, and a critical question makes everyone in the room deeply uncomfortable.
The west is incredibly good at psy-ops and unfortunately the main target is western leaders. Western leaders genuinely thought Ukraine's summer 2023 offensive would be a success because they had been psy-oped into thinking Russians are orcs with WWII tech who will collapse at the sight of a modern tank. The support for Ukraine has been haphazard because western leaders have been utterly convinced Russia is going to collapse any moment and the battlefield is Legolas and Aragon turning beheading Uruk-Hai into a sport.
The fact that so many in the west were shocked when the war broke out points to the absolute lack of understanding of the situation and what a filter bubble westerners are stuck in. The reaction was to double down and isolate their filter bubble even further.
During the invasion of Iraq Baghdad Bob was on CNN and there were at least some journalists running around on the ground. Today the media is so focused on purity that we would never see a live interview with even a Ukrainian soldier.
The sad thing is people who think every previous war was a farce will join the hype for the next war.
functor
11mo ago
Golfing isn't a sport, it is a networking event. You and three other people get to spend four hours together while having a bit of fun and experiencing some emotional ups and downs.
Sailing is largely about being a bunch of guys on a yacht and having fun together.
I was recently invited to a sporting event to which a friend has season tickets to the lounge. My friend doesn't even like sports, he just wants to be in a lounge with people who spend two months average salary to be in a lounge.
functor
11mo ago
One presidential candidate got shot.
The other one went AWOL and is tweeting that he is no longer running.
functor
13d ago
One of the greatest mistakes many progressives such as feminists make is using what they want as a starting point instead of thinking what incentive structures they are creating. The thinking easily becomes I want x while completely ignoring what incentive structures they are creating.
The reasoning becomes "I want to wear whatever I want". There is not enough thought put into that women are competitive and that the end result is going to be thongs becoming standard swimwear for women and that the hyper sexualization caused by a race to the bottom of who can get the most attention will be harmful.
functor
22d ago
It took 14 years, a massive refugee crisis to Europe, the destruction of the country and a decimation of the Christian population to get a jihadist dictator that somewhat controls the country. The ambition is not what it was in 2003.
Kind of clashes with the American rhetoric of unprovoked invasions and the horrors of Russian aggression in Ukriane.
functor
1mo ago
Most likely Elon came in with incredible energy and his typical spirit of wanting radical change in a pace that leads to cities on mars with autonomous cars and humanoid robots in 10 years. He then comes into government and has to act with mainstream republicans that are tugging on Trump in the opposite direction.
functor
7mo ago
Absolutely. They have put enormous pressure on social media companies. They have also helped many pro migration NGO:s.
On top of that there are several other lobbying groups that have pushed hard for mass immigration.
functor
8mo ago
The left has become too dogmatic to be appealing. When each comment has to be approved by committee it becomes hard to be adaptive, participate in podcasts or even have humor. There was a post yesterday about how Tucker was talk about UFOs being demons. There are probably lots of people in the left with equally far out ideas but they don't say them because the self censorship is much stronger.
The left not doing long format podcasts isn't just an American phenomenon, it is noticeable here in Europe as well. Their speech is too curated allow effective campaigning. It also makes them rigid and slow to adapt. Boomers with though control won't attract young people.
Obama ran on anti-war, tax payer financed medical care and reduced income inequality. Obama did the exact opposite and the left reinvented itself with woke.
We could see republicans doing the same and forgetting about reducing the deficit, America first, American industrial policy and instead finding an equivalent of the trans issue to channel their energy.
The US people will never be allowed to vote on immigration, billions to Israel, warmongering, Medical insurance companies extracting wealth and the surveillance state. It doesn't matter America elects or what the polls show, those issues are settled by the elite for the elite.
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