functor
10mo 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.
functor
8mo ago
This is a strategy has been standard playbook by the police in Europe. The police let antifa attack right wing protests and harass them. There is no reasonable expectation for a nationalist group to expect the police to effectively defend them. If the nationalists take measures to defend themselves, then they are arrested for rioting, conspiracy and similar crimes.
functor
3mo ago
People only commit crimes due to poverty when they are truly desperate. A person who has no food may steal, even if they are a mentally sound and moral person.
People who commit crimes in welfare states are criminals either because of mental issues such as low Iq, low impulse control and psychopathy, or they want status. The young man who gets into a violent fit of rage and stabs someone when someone cut in front of a line at a night club isn't going to be less violent with more money. The factor that is commonly ignored is social status. A young man with no money, who lives in a ghetto, has poor academic results, has never travelled and doesn't have the looks for instagram is going to be the ultimate low status loser. Imagine using tinder as a cleaner, living with three friends in a dumpy apartment on the wrong side of town. In Sweden, members of this class often have the added disadvantage of being immigrants from countries with an average height well below the average height in Sweden and speaking subpar Swedish. If that guy becomes a gangster, he is a somebody. People will respect him, women will like him, and he will walk past the bouncers who used to reject him.
The welfare state can never give people status. They can give food and some basic entertainment, but it will never make people happy or satisfied. It reduces underclass men to being rescue dogs and ersatz children for middle class girls with sociology degrees. That might be enough for someone who was recently freezing to death on the streets, but it isn't going to satisfy a 24-year-old pizza delivery man.
functor
4mo 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
It takes a whole village to raise a child. The lack of fathers is often talked about but not the lack of grandparents, uncles aunts and cousins. Instead, we in the best case have two parents who work 40 hours + 10 hours of commuting and answering emails at home each totalling at 100 hours combined. Few people can afford good housing without ruining themselves. There are often no other relatives who can baby sit, cook, give second hand clothes and parenting advice.
We have replaced the village with paid services and fertility is low except for poor people with lacking impulse control and the rich who can afford to solve these issues. There is no uncle to take the kids fishing or fix their bike. Their is no aunt who can pick the kids up at school and babysit them. There are no grandparents who can serve as four extra parents. In much of the world grandparents do a lot of the cooking. In the west people eat expensive pre fab food instead.
I do believe the socialization factor that you bring up is a part of it. Children and childhood are so far removed from a 25 year old's life that it is easy to forget about. There can easily be a 35 year gap in a family during which there was no experience with children or childcare. New parents have to learn the skills from scratch, often without a single older adult around to teach them.
functor
4mo ago
The class that is most precarious today are surplus elites. The low income high status people struggling to not fall into the working class. An electrician with a good salary and zero risk of unemployment benefits from low taxes. The sociology major or artist who makes less than an electrician is dependent on state handouts. The class represented by the modern left isn't the working class, it is the state handout class. This can either mean underclass living on welfare or art history major managing a project that is supposed to help the underclass (don't ask for statistical evidence of the efficacy of this project). Canceling student debt and more money for modern art benefits people with upper middle class parents who didn't make it to medical school yet are terrified of becoming a nurse. The modern left is in a conflict with the working class as the working class doesn't want to pay for LGBTQA+ certifications while the downwardly mobile middle class desperately needs it so they don't end up in the working class.
Especially women tend to end up with college degrees that are difficult to find employment for without left wing politics. There would be a lot fewer HR jobs if it wasn't for all the regulations that have been passed. Meanwhile the actual workers find most of the HR-stuff bizarre and alienating.
These social media campaigns work, they provide new jobs for chief diversity officers.
functor
7mo ago
In Sweden woke peaked 9 years ago and has been in steady decline since then. It has been strange to see the anglosphere go woke while watching social media and society in general lurch to the right at home. A leading antifa member in Sweden once said the difference between a green voting liberal feminist and a neo nazi race warrior is a non white mob threatening their condo. The liberal middle class is only liberal and woke until it has consequences. Threaten their property values, and they will often demand whatever it takes to defend their lifestyle.
What happened in Sweden was that middle class areas experienced an increase in crime. Schools in good areas experienced diversity, and the dysfunction caused by hundreds of thousands of migrants entering the medical system started to impact the life of people who used to be woke. Unlike the US that much more urban sprawl, richer people in Sweden often life in downtown areas. When their daughters had to go home at night while Afghan gangs sold heroin in their neighbourhood, the interest for BLM narratives was replaced with enthusiastic support for law and order. Surging electrical prices limited enthusiasm for the anti nuclear left and has caused real economic damage to the Swedish middle class living in large homes that have to be heated in the winter.
Australia probably has gone woke because woke hasn't had a major negative impact on people's lives. You haven't had gun crime increase 1000% in 17 years, you haven't seen your electrical grid become unreliable, posh schools don't have 15 year olds pretending to be twelve causing mayhem in class.
The online right thinks the masses can be inspired by ideas and ideology. Rightwingers tend to have little interest in ideology and are content as long as they can barbecue. Australia will stop going woke when woke has an impact on people's lives.
functor
11mo ago
Will AI bring back beauty?
Looking at midjourney's top pieces of art I am struck by the beauty in them. They contain detail, high degrees of realism even when depicting surrealist themes. They tend to be symmetrical and often portray idealized versions of reality. AI art tends to portray archetypal depicitions of its motifs and often excludes blemmishes, dirt and grime.
Compare it with corporate memphis a primarily human generated art form that has gained significant traction in the public space in the past decade. This is the most expensive painting painted by a living woman.
Compare the buildings drawn by the AI with the best exterior of 2022 in Sweden according to architects.
AI gives people what it gets positive feedback from. It gives people what they want. People want visually stunning rather than the output of the art community.
functor
3mo ago
Counter example: Much of Latin America has had leaders far to the left of what the US has ever had, despite far more diversity.
Looking at IMFs map of government spending as a percent of GDP it is difficult to see a trend. Homogeneous Asian countries are low in government spending. Brazil is high in government spending.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/GBR/SWE/ESP/ITA/ZAF/IND
functor
3mo ago
(who is Jewish and thus smarter than me)
If Ashkenazi in the US have an Iq that is a half standard deviation higher than white people, there would still be far more intelligent white people than jews. There are 31 white Americans for every jew and not all those jews are Ashkenazi. Less than half of all jews are at average Ashkenazi Iq or greater, this is less than 1% of Americans. Roughly 30% of white people have an Iq a half standard deviation above 100 or higher. For every average or higher jew there are 19 white Americans with an Iq equal or greater than the Iq of the average Ashkenazi. Additionally there would be several non white goyim in this Iq range for every jew.
For the 98.8% percentile/2.5 standard deviation Ashkenazi, or about 60 000 people in the US, they are equal to the 3 standard deviation white American. 0.17% of Americans are white Americans in the 3rd standard deviation of Iq. There are about 560 000 white Americans in this age range. Add in some Asians and jews would make up less than 10% of Americas Iq elite.
functor
9mo ago
that the freedom to refuse service will generally amount the freedom to get out-competed.
People pay a fortune to live in an area with "good schools". Groups that are overrepresented in causing trouble can cost far more money than the revenue they bring in. When I worked in a ghetto the gym I went to had outrageous prices on the door, yet offered discounts to almost every pro social group such as students, office workers, retired people. Basically they priced everyone they didn't want out of the gym.
A handful of crazy people can scare away a hundred mild mannered customers.
functor
10mo ago
The main goal at a major company is to not rock the boat. Companies barely have owners, they have managers with poor job security. The "owner" is a collection of pensionfunds who are run by managers who run a double digit risk of getting fired every year. The higher up management of the company also have below average job security compared to most white collar workers. Compentence isn't the most important factor when it comes to getting promoted at big companies, avoiding scandals is.
The people who succceed in politics and in the corporate world are the people who have an excellent talent for feeling which way the wind blows. A car salesmen will act very differently when a sterotypical biker walks through the door compared to when a vegan feminist walks through the door. These people are tremendously skilled at reading the room. The ability to read the room and adjust accordingly is probably the most indispensable skill if one wants to be highly successful.
This leads to people high in anxiety struggling with what to say when simply agreeing with everyone else in the room is no longer an option.
I am actually surprised at how well right leaning military men have cooperated with the system. The war in Afghanistan ended with large numbers of migrants comming to Europe. Afghans are the second most overrepresented minority in crime stats in Sweden. The war flooded Europe with heroin. What exactly was going to be conserved by that war? What socially conservative agenda was ever going to be promoted by that war? Yet, thousands of right leaning white men volunteered to die or get their legs blown off to defend the military industrial complex and globalization. The war in Iraq caused a million migrants to come to Europe and has been a disaster for the Middle East and Europe. I can't see any socially conservative goal ever have been achieved through that war. Yet, thousands of right leaning white men got killed in Iraq in order for their kids to be in a class full of refugees.
Libya ended with a million migrants a year coming to Europe and a jihadist trained by the UK government killing 22 girls at an Ariana Grande concert.
Taiwan is important because the globalists wanted to dump wages by moving electronics production to a lower wage country. If China tries to take Taiwan, the counterattack that gets mowed down will be manned by conservative white men. Towards the end, a few elite forces will walk over the bodies of dead polish Catholics in order to raise the pride flag over reconquered Taiwan. In the movie, the white men will be replaced by women of colour.
Israel/Palestine is a conflict between those who want Arabs to live where their grandparents live and those who want millions of arabs to move. The same conservatives who say they are opposed to arab migrations will be more fanatically zionist than what is allowed on Israeli TV.
I am nor surprised that the western militaries are skeptical of conservative white men. The shocking part is how loyal they have been.
functor
5mo ago
The original case of feminists revolting against the consequences of the sexual revolution was oversexualization. Back in the 90s I remember feminists railing against women feeling pressured to look good and be sexy as one of their main points. The fact that the world is a zero-sum game and women that show more skin get more attention doesn't seem to register with them. They created a world with no norms or rules for dress, and blame patriarchy for women dressing in the polar opposite way of how the patriarchy wants women to dress.
If women can do whatever they want with their appearance some women are going to realize that translucent yoga pants gets them ahead in life compared to dressing modestly. Being super slim, investing heavily in looks and obsessing over one's instagram can be a better ticket up in life for a young woman than a university degree. When one woman wears a thong bikini to the beach, she gets the attention. The other women follow, and soon the women in a bathing suit looks out of place. The sexual revolution created incentives for oversexualizing oneself, and women followed the winning strategy. The women who don't sleep on the third date and don't post sexy pictures or do conture makeup lose in the heightened competition.
Feminists seem to want to abolish competition and thereby the need for competing. Women can dress how they want, post what they want on instagram and sex themselves up as much as they want. Yet they are not going to use this competitively to try to get ahead. The idea seems to be to blame patriarchy. If men just followed women who dressed modestly and didn't have attractive bodies on instagram as much as they like attractive women, then women could dress like they want and not have to compete. If men's attraction for women was random, women could do what they want and still get an equal opportunities dating market. Their fundamental enemy is that men's preferences are not random.
There seems to be a trend among gen z feminists to simply drop out and embrace the fact that they can't win a zero-sum game. They dress like Billie Elish, have short hair and nose rings and seem to proudly state that they are dropping out of the arms race. Meanwhile, the other half of women are trying to outmanoeuvre eachother by wearing increasingly thin gym outfits.
functor
9mo ago
Sweden takes roughly 100 k migrants per year. That is the equivalent of the US taking 3.4 million. We are taking fewer refugees but are being flooded in nearly every other quota. Combine that with almost no migrants getting deported.
The "right wing" economics in Sweden isn't even really right wing, it is kleptocratic. Sweden has extreme taxes on income yet zero inheritance tax, low corporate tax rates and low capital gains tax. We tax productivity to death while rewarding a rentier class. The right wing policy isn't lowering taxes and market solutions. It is to have high taxes on labour so that the government can buy services from companies. So Svensson pays taxes and companies run schools and hospitals, getting paid for each student or treatment. The companies lay off staff, bring in cheap romanian nurses and slash costs. The government bureaucracy is still in control, as it is the government buying the service with a multi-thousand page contract. The public sector is increasingly being managed by venture capital firms that barely pay taxes. Svensson still pays 50+% in taxes. It combines the worst of both systems.
functor
4mo ago
The state has been far less repressive even in Europe. I am active in the nationalist scene and we use government services as much as possible. Trying to book a hotel is impossible if you are hosting an even to the right of mainstream politics. Booking a government facility is often possible. People get deplatformed from all sorts of private companies, nobody has been banned from the medical system, the water company or the post office. The government has been one of the best employers for dissident right wingers as it is really hard to fire a state employee for political engagements in their spare time.
The corporate system isn't one with set processes or rules. There is no set law for what can be on social media, there is no appeal process and there is no trial. Even with banks accounts just disappear. The state at least operates on laws and procedures. Dealing with private companies is anarchy since they just do whatever they feel like today.
For any system to function it has to be predictable. I would rather have a system that is more repressive but predictable than to have a system in which one has no ability to predict outcomes. A bad contract is often better than a user agreement that can be changed at a whim.
It never made sense for right wing voters to support neo conservatism.
Iraq ended up with a flood of migrants to the west. Afghanistan ended up with a heroin epidemic. Libya ended up with a massive migrant crisis and terrorism. Expanding the empire into Asia turned the American heartland into a rust belt with extreme supply chain vulnerabilities. Expanding the empire into Eastern Europe has caused millions of migrants to come into western Europe while it has depopulated Eastern Europe. Now we risk nuclear war over the council of foreign relations crowd wanting to expand their empire into Ukraine. The result is always the same, a massive failure, vast number of dead people and a migrant crisis. Vietnam ended with boat people, Afghanistan ended with planes exceeding their weight limit due to the migrants, and Ukraine has exported a mid-sized European country worth of migrants.
Also, I deeply disagree with the council of foreign relations mission. I don't want Taiwan to have the values of the NYC elite, I don't want western jobs shipped there, and I don't want an elite that I despise to control even more of the planet. I see blackrock, the council of foreign relations and the Washington elite as my enemy. I don't support the NSA, I don't support the financial system that blocks dissidents, I don't support elites that want the world ESG-rated.
Ukraine is the next nation building adventure disaster. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead and wounded and Ukraine is destroyed. Ukraine is ramming through LGBTQA+ stuff because it is now a colony of the US and it will be forced to adopt the values of its imperial master. Europe once again is flooded by migrants and we now have a country in absolute shambles that we are going to have to nation build. Ukraine's military is 1.5 times bigger than the French military, and building and equipping it with western equipment is going to cost tens of billions if not hundreds of billions every year for multiple decades to come. Defence contractors get their billions, you get lack of resources.
The elites are too focused on their global ambitions that they completely neglect their own country. They seem more interested in creating a global liberal hegemony with values that I despise than actually fixing their own country. Right wing voters have signed up to die for these attempts to spread liberalism across the world and got nothing in return. Thousands of republican voters were killed in these foreign fiascos. In return their neighborhood now has central American gangs who came when the US was going to defeat communism by letting wall street contol latin American economies and cause massive exoduses of migrants.
Brand books are influential. Black people are pushed into every element of culture. Diversity doesn't mean mongolians, it means people who look like and are culturally african American. This is becoming a defining feature of culture in which add campaigns in places that barely have black people are full of them.
It's what agencies are all keen to avoid.
Why is it cheezy to show British people living in Britain? Isn't it more absurd to show it as an African nation? Is it cheezy when Eritreans don't have lots of white people in their adds?
because it's a cheesy "too perfect" stock image.
The photo looks like something from your neighbour's facebook page. The family looks average and it isn't an overly set up shot.
functor
10mo ago
The underlining axiom is that humans are free spirits accidentally attached to a body. The goal of the new religion is to liberate the soul from the constraints imposed on it by being attached to a body. Men and women are just spiritual essences that ended up in different bodies. The difference in outcome can never not be explained by oppression, and this problem will never actually be fixed. Most groundbreaking research will be conducted by men for biological reasons, which will ensure that affirmative action will always be required.
Wokeness is the natural conclusion of civil rights, assuming that humans have no innate qualities. During civil rights it was assumed that as long as opportunities are equal outcomes will be equal. When the reality of genetic differences struck they had to debug the problem and find new forms of oppression to explain the differences in outcome.
Money, job and education matter far less for dating than what people think. I know plenty of people with fantastic careers, high levels of education and high income who are reasonably looking and decent people who barely get any dates. Some end up dating women who are clearly unattractive. I have friends who have low paying jobs, failed high school and are broke but date women noticeably more attractive than them.
The factor that correlates the most with dating success for men is being the guy who would be the one who would stand out the most at a party. Not counting clownish behaviour or someone who stands out because they are a freak but stand out in a more positive way. The guy doesn't have to look that good, he just needs to be the center of attention at a party.
A real estate agent with average looks probably has a far hotter wife than a similar looking man with a masters in engineering who makes three times the money.
As long as you aren't completely broke, unemployed or have a terrible job or a hideous face the main correlate of your dating success will be skills most associated with car salesmen. Rich men aren't more successful for being rich, they are successful because they can buy themselves the attention. If the party is on your yacht it is difficult not be the center of attention.
I have seen too many men optimize their career thinking it will give them an attractive wife. It doesn't. They end up being 29 with a masters in statistics/CS and guys with similar backgrounds think they are cool. For women they are just the same guy drinking the same beer. I have asked guys in this scenario what it would take for them to have met a women. No women rejected them on a night out because of their job and few women even know what they do. Getting the next promotion or increasing their salary wouldn't matter since few women even know what they make or what they do. Unless they become spectacularly rich it won't matter. Most women don't know the difference between tech support or graphics engine developer nor do they know how much you make.
functor
9mo ago
The one big advantage that the conservative catholics have is that they are actually becoming priests. There is a sizeable portion of homosexual priests in the catholic church who became priests when being a celibate priest was the alternative to marrying a woman. Today, homosexuals raised catholic aren't really becoming priests. People who want to dedicate their lives to the church are largely deeply conservative. Once the boomer-liberals die off, they are leaving behind liberals who barely go to church. Meanwhile, the actually conservative catholics are tending to have a lot more children and being more engaged in the church.
functor
1yr ago
From a twin study on crime:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25936380/
Results: For all criminal convictions, heritability was estimated at around 45% in both sexes, with the shared environment accounting for 18% of the variance in liability in females and 27% in males. The correlation of these risk factors across sexes was estimated at +0.63. In men, the magnitudes of genetic and environmental influence were similar in the three criminal conviction subtypes. However, for violent and white-collar convictions, nearly half and one-third of the genetic effects were respectively unique to that criminal subtype. About half of the familial environmental effects were unique to property convictions.
Heritability of crime is high. The main benefit of locking people up is that it prevents people with outlier poor mental traits from reproducing. Criminals tend to be psychopathic, lack impulse control, and be low in intelligence. Keeping men with outlier levels of those traits far away from women between 18-and 45 makes sense. The studies he cites are too short term, they don't take multigeneration effects into account.
As for air pollution, reducing crime is an effective way to combat it. Public transit, walkable cities and bicycle commuting become more attractive the fewer criminals are on the streets. If people don't have to live way outside the city to be in an area with low crime, fewer people will drive. Fewer people walk and bicycle and more people will be fat. Crime is a cause of many of the other problems because it creates a low trust society in which people atomize. Cartel-controlled parts of Mexico are not going to have fantastic universities, infrastructure or other institutions since some much energy gets soaked into cartel-wars and their fallout. A well functioning society requires trust, it requires people to feel a sense of common good and to cooperate. Crime and corruption undermine that. A cop taking a bribe is far more damaging than the direct damage caused by the cop not doing his job.
functor
2mo ago
In the non digital world there are a lot more checks and balances. Getting a warrant to search a home is one thing, mass surveillance on millions of users is another. What is happening online is more like the police obtaining a search warrant for every building in a city and sending a robot with drug sniffing capacity into every room in the city. The police may follow a specific suspect around, while the state in many countries forces ISPs to keep a record of all visited websites for millions of people. Governments want to snoop mass amounts of data on cloud servers but don't have the right to routinely search hotel rooms or offices spaces. Why should data on the cloud be less protected than a letter laying on a desk in a hotel? Why can't digital services be as private as a taxi service? If I rent an uber the police can't set up a roadblock and search all documents in every car. So why can they do that for email?
As for GDPR it did make a big difference. In my career as a developer I hear the acronym GDPR on a regular basis, and it has forced companies to be far more careful in how they store and handle data. GDPR put a lot of pressure on companies to think before they acted and made the non-tech portion of companies much more interested in data security. Thanks to GDPR I have had non tech boomers with a business background send long emails asking about how we encrypt data, TLS, when data is deleted and other issues that they never thought about 10 years ago.
functor
9mo ago
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
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.
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