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jake


				

				

				
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jake


				
				
				

				
2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 06 09:42:44 UTC

					

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User ID: 834

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Neither are what I requested, and neither are what are cited in the modern discussion of Israel and Palestine. The modern discussion says specifically there are immediate and frequent examples of Israeli soldiers outright murdering Palestinian civilians. A single example from 20 years ago that resulted in a full investigation and trial is none of these.

As for the other example:

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said troops had opened fire near the village of Nabi Saleh after Palestinian gunmen fired shots towards a guardpost. Tamimi told reporters there had been no other gunfire, and that he had just buckled up his son in order to drive to an uncle’s house when their car was shot at.

A man who had every reason to lie said there had been no other gunfire. Had there been, it absolves the IDF. They would still be wrong to shoot the car, but they shot it because they were under fire and understandably assumed the worst. It's a casualty of war, it happens, it's not wanton murder. And to not make you think I take the IDF at their word, I never do, but they at least check. That article mentions the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, where the IDF admitted one of their soldiers fired at her. How many times has any Palestinian organization admitted a group they first claimed as civilians murdered by the IDF were in fact militants killed fairly? Has it happened a single time ever? If it hasn't, it's not because they've never lied about it.

That's the problem with articles, journalists wrote them. The writer of the second article is a person who is specifically motivated to defend Palestine and criticize Israel. I can't believe them, categorically, and again by the way, same for Haaretz or whatever Israel-favoring publications, I presume every sentence as untrue. This is why I ask for video.

What I am asking for is clear video evidence from the current Gaza War of a civilian being murdered. That they are objectively a civilian, so objectively civilian circumstances (Ideally, anyway, right now can't be held as a standard in Palestine) so a woman who could not possibly be concealing explosives or else couldn't be considered as in a place where that's a reasonable fear, or a child who can on-sight be determined as not carrying explosives--as this discussion can't be held faithfully without acknowledging one side employs women and children as suicide bombers--and that they are then clearly singularly targeted and shot. Ian Carroll, who I've liked clips by him, talks about it, Darryl Cooper, same, talks about it, IDF snipers wantonly dropping civilians, and it is those videos I have never seen, those videos I have looked again and again to find, and all I can ever get is people talking about the supposed incidents, not actually showing them. I don't want to watch them, but I need to know the truth more than I need to avoid the heartsickness from seeing the horror I already know is so much in this world.

and I think his claim to believe in God is one of those useful lies to the voter base rather than anything he sincerely believes in

By the way, and I should have said this back at Christmas, but alas. I'd say the probability of your assessment of Ramaswamy falsely professing belief is very high now. I won't go all the way, not because I mind admitting being wrong, you can treat this as my admission of being on the wrong side of assessing him, but because it's not my place to say on this whether someone believes what they say. "He's given adequate reason to doubt him," yes. I do think one of my arguments holds up, that a more competent actor would have found a way to say it without lying, because he dropped a few poorly chosen words on an issue and got himself banished to Ohio.

I know little on autism diagnoses. I have a cousin who might be autistic, and then also one friend who is autistic, she's a former FTM who transitioned ~2011, married a man at about the same time and they're still together, moved out of the country and detransitioned a few years later. She's appreciably different from any of my other friends, especially compared to the ones who describe themselves as on the spectrum, but she and I mostly swap pictures of our dogs and I've had some burning questions, assuming you don't mind answering:

  1. Did you read much as a child? If so, what?
  2. You mention childhood hallmarks of social issues, did you have few friends? One best friend? Are you friends still? How long have you known your oldest friend?
  3. Are you attracted to the opposite sex? When did you first notice?
  4. And this one's just angled at MLP; have you ever read or watched Japanese shoujo? If yes, had you before MLP?

Guy writes fun short story. "Source?" says one, "What did he mean by this?" says another. It's a joke, c'mon.

Was this meant to be a mean joke? Sorry man, you put in too much effort and snark, so the snark itself came off as in parody and the whole thing came off as decent satire. Well done, I did laugh, you stuck the landing.

You have an obsession with class but you shouldn't. Of the top 1,000 or so achievements of humanity you will find, well down the list of its contributors, maybe one single noble by name of Tycho Brahe. It's Shakespeare, scrutiny on his identity didn't come from a fair evaluation but noble arrogance at the impossibility of a commoner having such a way with words.

I think you approach something truthful here, but only approach. You wrote this (I hope; if it's AI consider me the sad fool), you show your intelligence, you also show how deeply you consider this topic. More than some of these respondents realize, but worse, more than you yourself realize, because I think your obsession with class fogs your mind by forcing you to write off branches in reasoning and take conclusions you otherwise wouldn't. There may be something to be said about the behaviors of large groups of people, and the way that relates with their "class," who they started around, who they are around now, who they will end their lives around. But class as Banana uses it, and as you may have fallen into, is more like a religious belief, something ineffable to which you always reason back. I can assure you the progressive metaphysical beliefs of western Brahmin are just that: without substance. You use them as though they're the map while they're just making it all up.

So why not, just for curiosity's sake, reconsider one of your conclusions? Any, you know this, your subject, your choice, but after shelving class as having explanatory power and instead as detail incidental to the territory you try to see.

It's fair to argue they may not be easily searchable, they shouldn't be, but I'm not only saying I can't find them, I'm also saying I've never seen them in the wild, and I have every reason to think I would have. Darryl Cooper has specifically claimed, on X or Rogan or Tucker, that he has seen multiple videos of Palestinians being shot by snipers. He's former military, he knows people, it could be he's long had access to special channels, but that's not a satisfactory answer as it requires explaining why none have ever "breached containment."

Video is absolutely relevant. You understand this, a graphic video of a civilian murdered, such as a child being shot, would be an unparalleled optics victory for Palestine. I could believe most Palestinians would refuse to use so terrible a death even with what they would gain, but there are Palestinians who wouldn't refuse. Not even cynically, the virtuous who believe the world should know the truth and they show it in hope of preventing future deaths. It would mean convincing me and anyone else who would find video conclusive where words aren't.

My position is simple. Israelis are liars, Palestinians are liars, human rights organizations are liars, journalists are liars. There is total incentive to lie about everything by everyone involved. Israel to cover their ass, Palestine to maintain their existentially-required image of being the victim, orgs to justify their continued work or because they're aligned with Palestine, and journalists because they're journalists.

Palestine, actually, is waging effective fifth-generation warfare, their action is the optics of victimhood. Every civilian death is an attack, every civilian massacre is a major maneuver. This is the case regardless of the truth of their claims, as in if everything they claim is true and they aren't trying to do optics they just get them from their being attacked, it's the case as an emergent property. It's how they have to fight, it's all they have against an actual military. But because it's how they fight, it's exactly how they would lie.

The event mentioned here is the 20-month long Great March of Return.

"Protestors" accepts framing and implies them as the righteous party. Week after week these groups showed up to "demonstrate" and week after week people there got shot and killed. At a certain point it's no longer "protesting," if it ever was, it's about optics, and if it's about optics, well -- TPOASIWID and the purpose of the Friday "protests" was to produce dead Palestinians.

"Gunned down" evokes imagery of incidents of massed concentrated fire at civilians, and that isn't right either. Across those 20 months, Israeli soldiers, I think almost all snipers did fire on Palestinians, totaling 9,204 injured and 223 killed. 46 are listed as "children" but the citation is "minors under the age of 18."

The one claimed definite child was this:

An eight-month-old child, Leila al-Ghandour was widely reported, following an initial statement by the Gaza Health ministry, to have been a victim of tear-gas at the border. The following day, the Gaza Health Ministry announced that it was not certain of the cause of death and two weeks later struck her name off the official list of people killed during the protests. In a court case against a Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades militant, who had been captured on the border, the indictment stated that man in question was a relative of the deceased's parents, and had stated the latter had been paid by Yahya Sinwar, the head of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades in Gaza, about US$2,200 to report to the media that she had died of tear gas inhalation rather than from a pre-existing medical condition.

But even if this had been true, that a baby had died from tear gas inhalation, it wouldn't have been the IDF's fault someone brought a baby.

You will also find this recurrent. Any Palestinian aged 17 years, 364 days or younger is counted as a child. Children can use guns and toss Molotovs. 16-year-olds are not children and if one throws a Molotov at a soldier, whatever they get is what they deserve.

According to the Commission’s data analysis, the Israeli Security Forces injured 6,106 Palestinians with live ammunition at the protest sites during this period.

6,106 opportunities for video, or above, 9,204 total. Where the fuck is it? The absence is deafening. I am told to accept that thousands were unjustly shot and there isn't one single video? Not one single person over 20 months of "protest" thought "I should record this." Why would I accept this? I bet there is video, only it captures what I describe. A Palestinian tossing a Molotov or trying to breach the fence and getting their leg shot off or hit in the gut or groin or chest on a pass-through tumble from a kneecap.

As for that kneecapping, here's an interestingly candid article from Haaretz:

Eden says he broke the “knee record” in the demonstration that took place on the day the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem was inaugurated, on May 14, 2018. He did it jointly: Snipers usually work in pairs – together with a locator, who is also a sniper by training, and whose task is to give his partner precise data (distance from the target, wind direction, etc.).

Eden: “On that day, our pair had the largest number of hits, 42 in all. My locator wasn’t supposed to shoot, but I gave him a break, because we were getting close to the end of our stint, and he didn’t have knees. In the end you want to leave with the feeling that you did something, that you weren’t a sniper during exercises only. So, after I had a few hits, I suggested to him that we switch. He got around 28 knees there, I’d say.”

The sniper shot 42 people in one day, his partner 28. They're boasting or all but about shooting 70 people. I looked for video of this and found one: https://x.com/vic2pal/status/981095851010469888

Gunshot, he instantly falls, couple frames of the wound but it's not graphic. I think you'd have to know it's a gunshot wound to even make sense of it. (And of course you can't actually tell what's going on around him.)

This team in one day produced themselves 70 opportunities for video. Again, boasting or all but, "Yeah sometimes we hit people behind our targets. Bummer." Where's the video? We do know this happened, since both sides say it did. 70 opportunities from one team in one day for video of a bad shot.

Nothing.

From 2015, if something has supposedly happened more than 10,000 times and there isn't video of it, the simplest and only rational explanation is that it didn't happen. The excessively compassionate, I understand how their brains turn off, they just aren't the sort of people who can think past suffering, and that's often good. The inadequately cynical, who talk about how "you think you hate journalists enough but you don't," how much lefties lie, how the crusades were justified and Islam is shit and how much Muslims rape and marry their own cousins, how much human rights organizations are just masks for USAID State Department globohomo/lefty sinecures/looting public coffers, and how the UN is one giant fraud at best or Bilderberg NWO fronting at worst, to have their brains turn off on all of those things they loudly hate because of the word "Jew" is just fucking funny.

But, not an argument, and I'm not saying you're either of these. I'm only saying you should consider if you reached your position from pure reason as applied to evidence, or if you reached it because you read words that aligned with how you already saw things. That you felt convinced by those words when really you were flattered, and you think I might also be convinced. Words won't convince me, I am adequately cynical, I know both sides are nothing but liars, and that's why I want video.

Policy debate, or that's how I got to it, anyway. If you're not familiar or only passingly familiar, critical theory is sometimes (well, sometimes when I was in, probably dominant now) employed in the type of argument called "kritik," or Ks. Capitalism K, Securitization K, Biopower K.

I didn't want to slur all criticism as antisemitism, thus my poor attempt at a novel term.

Thanks for finding that, it is close, but actually that articles contains a link to a separate incident with clearer and potentially closer video. I'm surprised I didn't come across the second video since it contains exact terms I searched: https://www.palestinechronicle.com/israeli-forces-shoot-woman-with-child-holding-white-flag-video/

Priors updated. I'll look harder.

I think I should warn as graphic, in her being shot, falling, and a pool of blood forming, but too far for specific detail. "The fate of the woman is unknown," maybe they say that as a courtesy for hope.

"Now, sure, every time in the last 200 years that a nation declared itself as enlightened atheists guided by pure reason they immediately proceeded with the worst atrocities yet visited upon man, but hey, what's religion got to do with anything?"

You're better than this response, not least of all because your challenges were answered and you missed it in your haste to throw down the "tl;dr lol."

Avarice is self-evidently ruinous. Caprice was explained at the top:

When birthrates decline in an otherwise prosperous nation the cause is always the same: multiple avenues for intrasexual competition where women attain status aside from wifehood and motherhood.

Left to their own devices, the majority will choose serial fleeting satisfactions rather than the long-term happiness that comes in continuing the human race by creating more people. This is capriciousness.

I do agree my jab at the end was hyperbole, but it's because my timeframe is right. Simulacra will reach ubiquity before "Generation Supercritical" reaches the age of majority and adopts them in mass. As for you calling this doomsaying, I'm deathly serious about my concerns, I don't see the flaw and I think about this constantly. If you do, if you think you have a superior understanding, if you see how we get out of this mess of young people seeing no purpose in life, especially when automation comes for everything, I'm all ears. I want to be wrong, I would want you to be right, because then all posterity doesn't hinge on this one achievement.

The Israelis have a habit of shooting Palestinian children in the back

I once again ask that literally anyone provides me with evidence of this. Not bootstrapped citation farming and not faked x-rays. Specific, unambiguous footage of Palestinian civilians being murdered.

https://x.com/search?q=palestinian%20civilian%20shot&src=typed_query&f=media -- you won't find it here. I've looked in darker places and found nothing there, either, but I could have missed it.

What's so galling about this claim is with the volume of media coming from Palestine and the alleged frequency of the outright murder of civilians, there should be at least one glaring example. One I would have heard by specific reference as it made the rounds among judenkritikal lefties and righties alike. Instead it's always the generic, "They're shooting kids," not "They shot this specific child, here's his body, you'll notice the distinct lack of a head."

I don't give a shit about Israel, I don't want a penny going to them if we don't get a dime back and I don't want one single American dying for that flag. I just want the truth, and being told something exists when I would have seen if it did, and when I then look for it and still can't find it, makes me quite certain the videos don't exist, because the deeds they would show haven't happened, because Israel does not indiscriminately murder civilians. They do murder civilians, many civilians, as is the nature of war in casualty of their real targets. It's just that you can't allow your enemy in war to dictate how you fight. If they use human shields thinking it will save them, you shoot the hostage then the soldier, you blow up the apartment building or hospital. If those shields know with certainty they will be killed by Israel, then it's on them to put down the ones who hold them hostage, and if they don't, they get what they deserve.

It's that old chestnut, where the white supremacy of yesteryear emerges in intersectional politics that can't help but treat whites and especially white men as the only beings on this earth with full agency. The Palestinians either have agency or they don't. If they can't see that there is truly no win condition and behave accordingly, Israel should rule them.

Which non-communist countries would these be?

France.

Because I think the single unifying trait you are ignoring here is communism.

Definitionally atheist communism, yes. I observed nothing about China's fall, I said the worst of them all was the nation that never had Christianity to discard. This is a fact. Weimar, and especially Rome, you can't just say "Wrong." Not here.

Sure, but I could name a bunch of other ruinous traits also easily found in most countries in decline. This argument is specifically about whether it's control of women (or lack thereof) that is a unifying thread. You mentioned automation. I could mention that and a host of other economic, technological, and tribal concerns that probably figure much more prominently in any potential societal collapse than the "mistake" of letting women have sexual agency.

What do I make of every one of your responses being a mix of snide quips and "Nuh-uh"? I would make that you have personal and significant emotional investment in my assessment being wrong.

Same, mostly. I would be happy to be wrong. I don't care about these things. I want my mental model of the world to align with with the world. I have no personal investment in the actual "why" of the fall of Rome or Weimar Germany or even the decline of America. I'm American, so it affects me and I am personally invested in it stopping, but I don't attach moral significance to any particular interpretation of the decline. If it turned out the problem was in fact women's liberation not going far enough, then that's the truth. It's what I'd want it to be, mostly, I would have an ethical problem with any attempt to empirically justify abortions, but if "sexual agency" is not just a euphemism for the freedom to make terrible decisions and can actually be quantified as beneficial, then once again, that's the truth, and I'll heed it. I dislike being incorrect, if my paradigm is wrong and my interpretation for why we're in decline is wrong, then I will change them, but you gotta show me why.

I'll go a little more on this in the next paragraph but I want to take a moment to be clear. I'd resent any implication of misogyny, and you haven't done that one bit, but for anyone else reading. I truly love women and I don't mean this as the cad. I'm a guy and there are big expectations on me but none of them will ever be as important as giving birth. The woman has immediate existential value, but in that, she is predefined. She has an easier time of it because, as with almost all of them, the only mark she'll leave on the world is her children. This is true for men but not true in the same way. It's not our bodies getting pregnant, it's not our certainty of pain and risk of injury and death. It's not that the reason we exist might be exactly what kills us. The angst and the implicit body horror must be profound, especially in this paradox of it being bound with the most wonderful and beautiful thing; the maybe singular yet perfect example of something a person can't understand in theory but only if they face it. The ideal would be that sex could just be for fun, that permanent bonding was voluntary, that pregnancies were always safe and could only occur when they were wanted. The ideal would be liberation--what we've done isn't that. What we've done is pretty God-damned far from liberation.

Rome. I may be overemphasizing in saying it was the singular cause, but I am not wrong that it was a major contributing factor. Between the work of Walter Scheidel, Mary Beard, and Kyle Harper the declining birthrate can be concluded as a ranking culprit. Scheidel has the numbers of how high the mortality rates were and how women had to have a lot of children just to keep the population static. Beard, and what I said above I return to here, talks about what it meant to be a woman in Rome, what it meant to become pregnant. Every time she was risking death, and the risk was high. 1 in 50 births overall, for an individual woman, about a 1 in 10 chance she dies during childbirth. Is there any wonder she would want things different?

Harper talks about birth rates, his work is seminal, all future study should incorporate it, as he considers disease and weather. What happens when a population with underdeveloped immune systems gets hit with plague? They die. What happened in Roman history? Plague at three key junctures, or perhaps plague that made three key junctures. Except we know stable societies not only tolerate plagues, they bounce back and flourish. Assuming it doesn't wipe them out as it did in South America, but it didn't in Rome. Unoccupied land there for the taking, the demand for laborers rising and their pay and treatment improving, the political structures weakened and allowing reforms. Renaissance followed the Black Death. Rome wasn't ended by plagues because they were that bad, Rome was already weak and plagues finished them off. What made them weak? Not enough people. Even the authors who know how many mothers died in childbirth fail to observe "Well they had the choice not to, of course they took it; thus went Rome."

I condemn Weimar Germany for their last depravities. I assign no moral condemnation to Rome. Caprice is a charged word so I can't claim I've spoken on this with clinical detachment, but I've tried, and maybe failed anyway, to use language that indicates my slant. I hate the conditions that cause these choices, not the individuals who make them.

A Roman woman who had just one child and didn't want to risk death by having a second, who could find blame in her? Of the civilizations that allow women to make that choice, yes maybe they fall, but isn't that a worthy reason? Said another way, if I'm right about how societies that don't control women -- that don't force women to have babies over and over until they have enough or die -- will inevitably collapse, those societies would be completely right to refuse that control, and noble if they did so knowing what it would cost. Today, today, what do we do about the pandemic today of bastard and layabout men? Who could say today it's worth forcing women to stay with and give a half-dozen kids to men who treat them right at first only to become monsters 5 or 10 years into marriage? It's important to say this is not the rule, it's important to say this is presented as commonplace in no small reason because fearmongering is politically useful, when most men, most people, are good, or good enough. But America alone has more than 350 million people, and a percent of a percent is an unacceptable number. What do we do? The woman can divorce him, then what? Take her kids and carry on with their life-sized baggage? Does she risk that, or does she live the only way she knows, the way society today encourages, periodically coupling, while hoping to find the love of her life, eventually. Of course she'd choose the second! When those are the choices? Shit sucks, it's that simple, it just sucks.

I want this to be the better way, not being cavalier about sex, but at least not rushing to marriage, having several relationships so you can learn, or nowadays, so men and women have enough time to learn the qualities of their partners and what's best for each before they commit to each other for life so they can make more humans. I want it to be, because for the most part, this is the better way. But I can't disregard the facts in front of me just because they would mean the world is a darker place. Whatever kind of world we live in, that is the world, it doesn't change by how we feel about it, it changes when we know the truth, because it's only from the truth that we can do something about it.

You would better serve yourself and your arguments by affirming rather than downplaying their leftism. I'll also here not take the euphemism, socialism is communism's beachhead in capitalism.

Redistribution of wealth is communist. It cuts both ways, your list includes instances where the primary beneficiaries are corporations, the policies remain communist.

I guess this is the issue lol. Point-by-point, why none of this is particularly radical in most societies that people don't consider "socialist":

Communists, as masters of duplicitous rhetoric, have done an expectedly superb job propagandizing leftist policy objectives as "common sense" and especially as "not communist" or "not socialist." They are not considered radical today because it is the way of things, but those fears named in opposition to, e.g. compulsory education, have been justified. We can't go back, so there's not a real use in invoking either their past appraisal as radical or their current view as normal.

But also not specifically socialist, at all. Very much no means of production being seized.

I would agree directionally, in very strict terms. The concept of regulation is not inherently redistributive, and even in practice I don't know that many examples are redistributive, but they do often impair the market from competition and there corporations benefit.

Another exaggeration. The free part is for buses only. As someone who's taken a lot of public transit in many different cities, buses are frequently used by more blue collar / "barista" type workers, whereas light rail is more often used by professionals. It's a pragmatically progressive (in the sense of: tax those who can afford it) solution to the problem of rising fare prices, imo.

Strictly redistributive. Communist.

Obviously an experimental / pilot project. Curious to see if there's a nice food distribution middle ground between "soup kitchen" and "Whole Foods" that a city government can occupy. An ideal implementation of this looks more like a 7-days-a-week farmer's market to me than a crumbling Aldi with yellowed fluorescent lights and grimey 90s tiles.

The experiment was run for decades and it failed. Communist.

Are grade school, middle school, and high school not "free childcare"?

Compulsory education is indeed free childcare, and it is the perfect example of the myriad failures of ideology in communism:

  1. That inequality in outcome can be solved through money; here school funding
  2. That effective systems create effective people; here that good schools make good students
  3. That a bureaucracy can be trusted with considerable power; here that teachers are broadly competent and judicious
  4. That the system will fulfill its primary objective rather than be co-opted or brought to heel by superior agents; here a minor rehashing of #2, but specifically that the school exists to educate

Compulsory education as the public school doesn't actually exist to educate. It educates incidentally, just as a little less incidentally it incorporates students into the cult of the state. Its function is redistributing wealth to the bourgeoise so they don't have to either pay for childcare, accommodate flexible hours for their laborers, or worst of all, have to deal with a 50% smaller workforce and the massive leverage the laborers would gain in negotiations. All to say, the classic example of bad actors prospering from exploiting the system, here capitalism's maybe third-worst practice.

Where I would say today communist ideology has strength is cynicism toward the bourgeoise, where it fails is not showing enough, as even with the means of production seized, the bourgeoise are not made but born, agnostic to actually being of class "bourgeoise," and a communist system will inevitably be controlled by them. The best system accounts for their chronic existence and allows them to flourish in dozens of lanes of competition with each other, while exerting just enough regulation to prevent their exploitation of the commons. Communism reduces that competition to a single lane, and for that it will necessarily and always fail.

Nothing would help the working class more than our economy returning to one where only a single parent needs to draw a salary to support their spouse and children. To that end, anything Mamdani does that increases or keeps static the supply of labor will have harms outweighing all other benefits, and that's even granting that all of his other policies achieve their stated goals.

Rome is the example. It failed to exert sufficient control on male avarice and turned empire. It failed to exert sufficient control on female caprice and its birthrates collapsed. When birthrates decline in an otherwise prosperous nation the cause is always the same: multiple avenues for intrasexual competition where women attain status aside from wifehood and motherhood. This started before Caesar was born as changing laws on land ownership and divorce gave women significant privilege. Come Augustus, he attempted to correct their declining population by laws that incentivized having children, but the target was wrong and the incentives were wrong. Women aren't incentivized to become mothers through extra rights, money, or praise; they're incentivized to become mothers when that's the only thing they can do.

I'm not saying this is good, because it's not, it's terrible, unfortunately it's the truth. If women didn't work, if they couldn't go to college and it was legal to discriminate against them in employment, they would be getting married and having children as soon as they could. They wouldn't have avenues for status in what university they attended and where they worked, but only in their household, in their husband and their children. Again I am not remotely saying "WE MVST RETVRN." I'm observing the facts, women are every bit as competitive as men, and every bit as good at it in their domains of competition. Add to that the broader incentive, good alma mater, good career, husband with a better career, lots of money, of course they'll put off having kids, for the individual it follows a line of perfect reason. They are acting entirely logically, for themselves. Society suffers.

Rome's collapse wasn't even that bad though, at least not compared to Weimar Germany. There, wanton greed and profligacy triple threating with Bolshevism precipitated the Nazis. But you don't need to look at them, either, you can look right now to the American black community. Relative to America as a whole, the black community has enclaves that have all but collapsed, only holding on as ample taxpayer assistance keeps them afloat. Were the assistance citizens of Baltimore received limited to what the city could extract as taxes, it would be a wasteland. What characteristics define the American black community? Male avarice and female caprice.

But even if there were no examples, it's enough to say "This was the practice of every successful group of people in history." When the most contentious and bloodthirsty, divided by mountains and jungles, arrive at a uniform conclusion on one a given subject, it's not "just-so" to point out their practice. Uniform agreement makes it the implicit paradigm and means challengers are presumed false. They didn't agree on their gods, they didn't agree on worship, they didn't agree on how they should go about ruling themselves and what should be done with foreigners, but all of them agreed about women. Note, I also didn't use it to justify the metaphysics of "they all said the gods said so," I said they used religious framing for what they already knew.

What they didn't know was how to perfect it, which Christianity did and does for its inspired understanding of biological realities, of those biotruths. You look back from the top of history and think of the chain of progress as inevitable and so you say I'm post-hoc justifying Christianity as integral, but I'm not because I also am looking at history and I can see all the instances of what happened when it was discarded. The French tried, their streets ran red with blood, and created the pinnacle of hubris Directorate, thus Napoleon. Germany tried, thus Hitler. Russia tried, thus Stalin. China never had it, thus the worst of them all in Mao. The healthiest societies are Christian because Christianity is unique in its ability to produce the greatest share of societal buy-in. Without it, assuming Muhammad still exists, either Islam conquers Europe or we get another Attila or a European Temujin and practically all of Europe is ethnically Norman, or it's German, or it's Anglo.

The Japanese have to be mentioned. They are not as healthy as the healthiest Christian civilizations, but they have the highest buy-in, they're secular and they exert sufficient controls on avarice and caprice. I've said I think they're in the perfect position by temperament and population for the coming age of simulacra, so their low birthrates may prove ideal. This is one group, or maybe almost two given how closely related they are the Koreans, and therein the interesting quality of the Koreans having those occasionally flamboyant moments of personal instability (one presidential crisis after another; also, the DPRK). Thing is, Japan would be on the precipice of a crisis if it weren't for that coming automation, but that crisis would be less than nothing to the Weimar's comparative nothing to what might come in America. White America is holding on by its bleeding fingernails, the scenario I've posted about here twice of us making it through this turmoil specifically requires the appearance and ubiquity of the relation surrogate wife-bot.

You can't have civilization without buy-in and we've pissed it away. Buy-in is the same thing for most men, the everyman who comprises the actual society. It's not money, land, fame or praise; it's children. Us wordcels can jerk ourselves into upholding civilization from pure reason, the normies think about their kids, or the kids they will have, or the kids they wish they could have. That's what makes them care, but the family is at its hardest to obtain for at least the last thousand years, and not for actual economic reasons, not for conflict or disease or famine, but because of the profit that was made in doubling the work force and because of the insatiable lusts of the "elites." We can't unfuck this. The laws and social changes that would be required can't happen without cataclysm, because we rightly don't want to enact such laws and make such changes and would only from existential necessity. That cataclysm is what's looming. If I'm wrong about the timeframe and it would take another 50 years to develop the wifebot, we won't get that far, because given another 25 years of the status quo and America will give rise to a figure who makes Mao look like a reasonable man.

You can't have young men who have no hope for the future. It is the terminal condition for civilization. You can have rampant, gross greed in the acquisition of material wealth. If young men were all still getting married, if they had to grind hard in life, but they had a reasonable domicile and they could provide for their wife and children, that would be enough for their buy-in. They don't even have that. It's what people need to understand, especially the righties who do have superior faculties at assessing danger and keep saying "one of these days, man" while the lefties correctly mock them, just for the wrong reasons. Violence will come if this isn't addressed, but it's not from us, we're not the generations who turn violent, we still have enough buy-in. We're the gap, we are the harbingers, it's the boys being born today who will reach adulthood and see a barren wasteland waiting ahead of them and they will be ready to follow anyone who says "Get your guns, we're burning everything down."

You want evidence of the inevitable end of societies that don't control avarice and caprice. You are living in it.

I meant nobles by birth. Brahe was a born noble, Kelvin was elevated to the peerage for his work. As with Darwin, "Son of a wealthy man" or "Son of a merchant" or especially "Son of a wealthy merchant"/"mother's father was a wealthy merchant" is a common descriptor for many great mathematicians and scientists. There is something to be said of the requirements and traits needed to become and succeed as a merchant. Serfs these were not, but no one in this forum could be said as being of "serf stock," and few if any could be found in most active discussions of politics on the internet. I would guess most people here don't ever interact with them beyond the most basic of retail and service workers.

It's like -- there was this shooting years ago at a Madden tournament. For those surprised that football video games have esports competitions, this was also news to me. It was a small tournament, but still. I knew the games sold well and yet I never actually considered it because it took hearing about that shooting to realize all along this entirely separate and parallel ecosystem existed. Many millions of people play shooters, but there's insignificant overlap between them and the many millions playing sports games.

There's insignificant overlap between people discussing politics online at all strata and the actual "serfs." The actual "serfs" have smart phones because everybody has them, but they're not arguing about human capital. It's what you've said, class as a stick, because this is really intraclass competition in form of those of supposed status sneering. You want to see the actual low class? You already know it, everybody does. YouTube comment sections, that's the parallel ecosystem where the "serfs" roam.

You could see this playing out in modern satire, or satire in modern intrigue fiction. The BBB has sections in it, Stephen Miller's posted on this, expanding the authority of the executive in deportations. It would go, the media will care more about the Trump-Elon alliance breaking and Elon's very public tantrum than something dastardly buried in the bill, so fake a fight, and go loud and brash so it's not "insider sources" but the men themselves who force the story. Bill is passed and signed, Trump and Musk post a picture shaking hands with the caption "lol pranked" and the administration proceeds with using whatever new authority they've been granted.

But that is (probably) not how the world works, and I think @nopie has described the truth of it.

I count 3/8 accurate predictions.

Non-meaningful prediction to say Israel would respond to Oct 7

"Solve the Gaza Question"

Non-meaningful prediction to say anti-Zionist militias would continue fighting Zionism

Iran has to would respond, but splitting hairs

Israel, Iran exchange strikes

Would precede (US) strikes on Iran nuclear program

Initiates war between Iran and Israel

US drawn into war

Syrian regime fell, but not as consequence of US-Iran war

Iran regime change†

†Fuentes' predictions conclude it from a US-Iran war; it might happen as a result of the instability from Israel walking all over the nation's ADS and domestic security apparatus.

The meaningful prediction is strikes on Iran's nuclear program, except it was the US and not Israel, and it didn't start a war. Trump's already joking about it, and there's this meme.

I think that’s also a very good counter example to all the people who say that there are no conspiracies because they are impossible to keep secret

MKUltra showed this when a couple dozen universities across the country were dosing unknowing participants with psychoactives and it took congress investigating something else to uncover it. People are in fact so good at collectively shutting up one could wonder if a separate conspiracy had anything to do with the appearance in common wisdom of "number of participants" as a weighty variable in the success of plots.

My concern is that I’ve never really heard of a secular society with those kinds of restrictions on sexuality

Every society everywhere on Earth for all history up to the 20th century exerted sufficient intrasocietal controls on male avarice and female caprice or else it collapsed. Religious language framed what they already knew, now we don't know and today it's framed purely religiously. Christianity has kept record of its inspired line on biotruths and their peculiarities -- non-consanguineous marriage for life with many children -- you'll see certain lifestyles were discussed from frame of their harms being known in common wisdom. The lecher or the whore were already seen as contemptible, moral lessons weren't "It's bad to be a whore," everybody knew that, so they were "Divorcing your wife makes whores of both of you."

Our connection with this common wisdom withered and died in the age of rapid modernization and individualization, so some Christians, already on the fool's errand of attempting to reconcile their faith with society, could only present their opposition in heavily religiously connoting or outright religious terms. It's bad because God says it's bad, true, but that's at the top. At the bottom is "You'll sleep around in your 20s, get married in your thirties, have one kid, maybe two if you're really lucky, not deeply love your husband, divorce him when your kids are out of the house, and every cold night in your lonely bed be unwarmed by the memories of the dalliances of your youth." It will ruin your fucking life, that's why you don't do it.

Secular society moving past these doesn't come from science. If anything the scientific paradigm should be hyperfixated on healthy, responsible human sexuality. Creatures have reproduced sexually for a billion years, mammals diverged 300 million years ago, 100 years of sexual insouciance might as well not exist on the epochal timeframe yet here we are. Looking down from a period of .0000003% of the history of our biological class and with absolute sincerity and absolute lack of any awareness these people say "Yeah sex doesn't mean anything, it can just be for fun." We feel this dissonance cognitively and viscerally, it's part of the constant psychic background radiation driving everyone crazy, we engage in behavior we know instinctively as destructive and then throw cash at our best so they target their tremendous mental faculties at justifying what we can conclude from intuition and pure reason as wrong. I can only wonder what sort of writing Scott would be putting out if he'd moved to a small Jewish community in New England and married a sensible reformed girl who wanted lots of kids. I can only wonder how much of his tremendous brainpower is sequestered in its quiet battle against a billion years of evolution screaming NO NO NO NO NO!

But it's not about science, it's about greed. It's about the money and power drawn from a destabilized society, and you bet your ass it's about top-% men being able to have sex with whichever beautiful commoners they want, using them up and discarding them. I'll use the socialist's most apt phrasing, it's history's true and greatest transfer of wealth, a self-sustaining fire consuming each new generation.