sliders1234
No bio...
User ID: 685
This will probably get some play and is a bit of a different topic. Former CEO of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicicki son died of a drug freshman year of college at Cal.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/former-youtube-ceos-son-found-dead-uc-berkeley-rcna139355
The obvious implications is he took something laced with fentanyl. Culture war wise concerns about fentanyl are red coded though issues with fentanyl seem apparent in both red and blue states and people.
Overall I feel like this issue has lost its place in the news cycle. A quick google overdose deaths topped 112k in 2023 an all-time record. I am seeing a current U.S. population of 334 million. So to put this in perspective 112k multiplied by an average lifespan of 80 years is like 9 million deaths. Or close to 3% of US population at current rates will die by a drug overdose. I think I can fairly say it’s a huge issue even if you disagree with how I’m calculating the average persons risks of OD at around 3% in their lifetime.
Quick analysis of the kid he looks in shape for a 19 year old and was majoring in math so he’s the dream of any parent. Odd thing is he was found unresponsive at 4:23 pm on a Tuesday. That is going to be weird and details will come out as that time frame is more of an addict death. Versus I expected a weekend OD and he did some fentanyl laced coke/Molly during the weekend.
From people I’ve talked to opioids are amazing. I do not know if I’ve ever done them. They have to be if people do them. I’ve done molly/coke/mushrooms in the past. The big thing to me is I’m paranoid I’m doing something laced now and have largely cut out doing anything now.
The midtwit take is that dealers either sell both and cross contaminate or lace other drugs to get people addicted. Personally opinion and perhaps a difference without a difference is it’s probably lacing just so people say it’s the good shit.
Sorry for their loss.
Culture war issues
-
Plays into the immigration debate of not controlling the border
-
Blue states seem to be adopting a let it happen and treat but it doesn’t seem to be working
-
War on drug topics. I don’t think the old war on drugs ever dealt with the death rate we have now but war on drugs doesn’t seem stupid when it’s a 3% population level lifetime death rate which is far higher than COVID and killing people with high life expectancy
-
Other policy considerations. Some would say things like legalize drugs to kill fentanyl and people get “safe” drugs. Some conservative arguments that something’s should just be illegal. Opioids probably are fantastic but the death rate for someone who tries opioids seems extremely high.
My numeracy tells me this is a big problem and I believe an order of magnitude bigger problem than COVID. I don’t think it’s quite as hard coded in culture wars.
Im a little drunk on thanksgiving. Can someone tell me the pope having lunch with transgenders is false.
https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1727444933207056730?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
This was low effort. I think a 7-day ban is too much. But this is still something where as a Catholic you would be like what I’m seeing has to be wrong. I will eat it. This isn’t an unworthy culture war post if it fact checks which from Hannania I assumed he did.
The latest Trump legal woes comes once again from NY where a judge ordered his business dissolved for fraud. Nobody losts money and it came down to some misstatements. I haven’t read the full case, but the judge on a high profile part of the case is completely off. Not even ballpark off.
He valued Mar-a-Lago at 17-25 million. I texted a broker in the area and he told me 100 million for an ocean acre and 25 million for a non-ocean acres. Mar is between 17-20 acres depending where you look online. Palm Beach has gone up a lot since COVID so maybe divide those numbers by 2 since Trump made his filling. He listed the property at 450-650 million. Without doing a full underwriting (maybe zoning issues where it couldn’t be worth the raw land price) it still appears Mar is worth a lot of money.
If you are going to do lawfare shouldn’t you avoid obvious mistakes? It’s easy to see a headline and write this whole case off as political. It weakens public perception of all other cases if you make mistakes that are this stupid.
If I am remembering this case correctly he did likely violate the law and include some statement that were obviously false but in a category that no one besides Donald Trump gets prosecuted for. So the case of Mar-a-Lago violates a principle of maintaining plausible deniability.
Edit: @AshLael looked up the prosecutors brief and it appears they did not use the tax assessment for valuation purposes. Which would negate my main point. The judge has a history of making stuff up against real estate developers and being later reversed. It’s quite possible this judge hates developers and just does stupid things.
https://twitter.com/goodguyguaranty/status/1707232241925910944?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
https://nypost.com/2023/09/27/mar-a-lago-judges-developer-hating-past-is-a-big-win-for-donald-trump/
Which would change the ruling and it’s citations to much more of all developer are bastards story (which is culture war) than my why are you lawfaring stupidly story
Update. Perhaps I should just include it in the thread I created below but I feel like they go dead.
I complained at the Iowa State Fair that Vivek wasn’t taking the mask off. Here he is. Calling transitioning as a child barbaric. Perhaps this is a sign of really good public speaker that he can be aggressive in one venue and come off compassionate in a different venue.
https://twitter.com/vivekgramaswamy/status/1691880080866263319?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Musks also retweeted this speech and I’ll include his summary so you don’t have to click thru.
https://twitter.com/vivekgramaswamy/status/1692267994490060817?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
TRUTH.
- God is real.
- There are two genders.
- Human flourishing requires fossil fuels.
- Reverse racism is racism.
- An open border is no border.
- Parents determine the education of their children.
- The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.
- Capitalism lifts people up from poverty.
- There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four.
- The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.
Strategy interests me. The billionaires who were backing Desantis seem to be looking at Vivek now. They like myself don’t like Trumps persona. I now think Vivek is probably the best salesman for the GOP. Especially if they want to make arguments the PMC will listen to. Desantis I believe is the best get shit done member of the GOP. If you get where I’m going Vivek will make a lot of sense as the frontman President with Desantis as VP. Trump is the best at throwing a raving party and he’s really good at taking punches from the left and keeps moving forward. Which has bought him a lot of trust in the gop.
Strategically the GOP best move is to keep Trump as the poll lead until like March/April. Let them develop their lawfare election strategy. Then slide the nomination to probably Vivek maybe Desantis. The issue with this and one of my biggest problems with Trump is he doesn’t care as much about advancing an agenda as he cares about Trump winning. But for winning an agenda my thoughts today is this would be a very good strategy for winning.
Next thought. Vivek said “God is Real”. I assumed he was Hindu so was trying to figure out what he meant. So I had to go look at his Wikipedia and find out what that meant. He’s a monotheistic Hindu. I don’t know if that’s a true belief or something adopted to be more palatable to the right. Could be something explored in the election that he at some point will likely need to explain.
The other thing I thought of when he said God is Real is Marginal Revolution ran an article on St Thomas preaching the gospel in India. So I thought with him saying God is Real it might mean he was a member of that community. I didn’t even know about old Christian communities in India until yesterday. So perhaps there is a connection between St. Thomas and Monotheistic Hinduism. I do recommend reading the marginal posts as initially they thought St. Thomas wasn’t real but then some archaeologist found some stuff that confirmed a lot of the story.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/no-doubt-saint-thomas-reached-india.html
This is a suicide posts about an entrepreneur who failed and is going thru certain twitter communities.
https://twitter.com/smb_attorney/status/1720486539325587858?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720231141826015303?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720232058109469137?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
A few thoughts.
-
Yes business owners do kill themselves when their business fails. Capitalism does have brutal aspects.
-
I laugh when the one guy posts go talk to a therapists here’s the suicide prevention helpline. When your business is failing your issues are not lefty mental health. Your dealing with a real issue of not being able to provide for your family and seeing all your dreams disappear. It’s one of the most emasculating things that can happen to someone especially someone who is use to being able to handle stuff
-
He shouldn’t have killed himself. I’d assume he could have found some consulting or being an employee for a bit gig.
-
Society has very little tolerance for failed men. After the fact everyone will say he showed some signs and should have helped out. When you are failing you have the stench of failure and people honestly try to run away from you.
-
I know someone whose dad killed themselves so when there business failed. I always thought the lefts argument that rioting and looting isn’t damaging was false. Being able to provide for your family is life and it’s something men take very personality.
-
Females somehow survive with nothing. Not sure how but realistically society is far kinder to widowed mothers.
Since it’s election denialism day. Let’s talk strategy on the Hunter laptop. I believe this is an accepted fact now: The FBI had possession of the laptop a year prior to the election and had verified it while being aware Guiliani and others had a copy. Hunter and Joe also knew he had a copy.
Guiliani’s behavior makes sense to me. You have a bombshell on the opposition so you release it last minute for maximum effect.
But what about the lefts/fbi play? The play they ended up choosing was do nothing until it’s released then claim it’s a Russian plant. Now the fbi ran with something going to happen from Russia that is misinformation to their media and social media partners. Those who did that I guess have plausible deniability they just meant a “general threat” and weren’t aware it was “Hunters verified laptop”. I have my doubts those people hadn’t been read in on the laptop.
My question is why wasn’t this leaked earlier? Prevent the October surprise by getting it out earlier? Ideally even perhaps the primaries so you just didn’t have to deal with Joe. All it would have taken is telling Warren or Sanders about it and then they go get a copy from Isaacs.
Instead the path chosen seems to have been let’s run a psy-op to protect Biden. It just seems like frequently when given choices people seem to be choosing let’s just lie to them.
I guess the conclusion I can come up with is the people with access to the laptop were not fans of a lot of the Democratic Party and weren’t fans of Trump.
I know the Sanders people have long thought the official DNC was against them. And I’m no Sanders fan. But the fact no one tipped them off to the laptop when it could have been used seems interesting. Along with what felt like a successful media-op which I guess was organized by the FBI.
Alternative strategy Guiliani actually have played it wrong and should have released it earlier to let it get digested instead of late to swing a few voters. And Isaac perhaps was more partisan since he didn’t get a copy to the left.
sliders1234
8mo ago
Hannania, Iowa State Fair, and Vivek. Vivek’s response to LGBTQ made the rounds on twitter mostly with positive support on how it can be handled.
https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1690890371398836224?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Vivek says a lot of words but if I had to summarize it’s basically libertarianism for adults - you can do what you want - but no pride for kids and restrictions on female sports and bathroom usage.
I use to share these type of opinions and perhaps I still do. But I no longer find these as stable positions. It comes down to well why don’t you want pride in schools? It’s because I believe in social contagion (and the broad right) that pride is bad and I don’t want the next generation of children to be more gay and transexual. Basically I don’t want grooming for those lifestyles. I think the left knows this. And won’t settle for the right thinking pride is bad. And then it’s well your a homophobe/transphobe. Masks off yea I am. That is why I don’t want pride in school because I think it’s bad for people.
Of course I think the same problem exists with Hannania’s new position on race. Treat everyone the same. Be tough on crime. Do I think being colorblind will be accepted by the left when it ends up with whites always on top and blacks on the bottom with a lot of black men in prison? No.
I feel like we have discussed these issues a lot. Even a mod thru in a post on why can’t we just be colorblind (perhaps bad summary from memory). I think it’s interesting seeing the third leading GOP candidate making similar arguments. And in all honesty my guess is Vivek’s position is likely the preferred position of mosts on the Motte. None of the pride everywhere but adults can do as they please. The race issues I think perhaps we could get back to the old equilibrium of ignoring disparate outcomes and just treating blacks as if they are white. But I doubt it. The Pride issues I think are harder because not wanting children exposed more directly says we think it’s bad and don’t want our children taught this stuff. The positions I’m laying out are likely the preferred position of most of the GOP establishment. I think Desantis would even accept these positions if offered. I don’t expect the left to offer these compromises because they are true believers that disparate outcomes are proof of racism or because a lot of supporters find the moral superiority of getting to call red tribe “your a racists/transphobe” etc enjoyable so no reason to stop.
While I think these positions are unstable I’m not sure the right could move the country to the stable positions. Which would be widespread knowledge that a great deal of disparate outcome is from hbd and on pride matters getting the country to agree that lgbtq lifestyles are not desirable (which was the world pre-2008). As it is the current positions seem unstable to me and easily attacked by the left and to a great extent makes the right look like hypocrites afraid to say the quiet part out loud.
Also, might be a good place for anyone to posts anything they found interesting at the Iowa State Fair.
sliders1234
7mo ago
Inside Disney and internal corporate boardroom drama. Iger appointed Chapek as his successor but ended up decided coming back. It touches on the fight with Desantis, the prior generation deciding not to retire, internal power struggles, managing a business where no one has the skillset for all of the businesses (creative, running parks, international, finance, sports, launching a streaming business). About a 15-20 min. Iger seems more interested in the Desantis fight than Chapek who just wanted to play nice.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/09/06/disney-succession-mess-iger-chapek.html
There is something I really like in this Ygeslias article. Whatever is causing more partisan politics it’s not the economy. We’ve done well the past few years.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-obama-and-trump-and-biden-beat
-
Macroeconomic management has been actually really good the last 15 years. Someone can argue we could have had a few million more people employed between 2010-1016, but that’s like 2% of gdp. Trump did close that gap and I’m not sure if he was brilliant or lucky but he yelled at the Fed for being too hawkish.
-
I like how he led with the shale Revolution. I’ve been saying this for years. Tech gets all the fan fare but if Tech was the Jordan of the economy American energy independence over this time frame was the Scottie Pippen in creating wealth for America. I think part of the reason it doesn’t get the fanfare is because it doesn’t create 12 figure networth people. Its a constant costs business versus moat building business. Of course if the businesses are not as profitable then the surplus value went to consumers in the form of lower energy costs versus companies having high margins. Also likely led to America not needing to write giant checks to the Saudis which meant our trade deficit could fund other things and those depend more on price leading to the strong dollar. People working in constant-costs businesses (farming, manufacturing, energy) tend to vote red; people working in wide moat with ability to extract economic rents or winner take all markets tend to vote blue. Someday I should write a long article on this because I have not seen anyone write about it. But the split in voting patterns makes a lot of sense based on the economics of their business. It would even make sense to have different tax regimes for these businesses but would be impossibly hard to execute. As a driver of political views it seems as powerful as male-female splits which seems a lot more talked about.
-
I think maga and the left like to cite American wealth not making it to the middle class etc. But honestly this much wealth creation can’t just be consumed by the 1% it pretty much has to flow to others. Perhaps, the middle class isn’t doing as well as we want them to be doing but the counter factual (Europe) would be poorer than what we got.
-
The GDP numbers are more pronounced because we calculate things in currencies and the cited figures were when the dollar was weak. The gap has definitely shifted in favor of the US but I do think this overstates the change.
-
The Tea Party seems underrated to me. They put a halt to more government spending. Less fiscal policy meant the fed could keep rates lower which basically crowded-in private investment in tech and shale and a host of things with cheap money. The current situation is the opposite of this where we increased federal spending from about 20.5% last decade to 24% now. And that’s caused a massive change in rates to get inflation close to target.
-
Culture Wars seem to have little to do with economic mismanagement by either side. I think the right is correct that the fall of small towns is bad but I think that largely came from economic forces (like productivity) gains that couldn’t be prevented. And there small towns have also been hurt by the people (probably like myself) who would be logical local elites moving away.
-
As much as national divorce or something always sound appealing it’s just going to make us all poorer. To break up economic integration would make our economy much more like Europe. We would run into something like Brussels that is ineffective at macro management and lose the economy of scale.
1460 SAT and rejected at Cornell has been trending on Twitter the last few days.
https://twitter.com/maiab/status/1736766407348814091?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
A lot of the takes were about him being rejected because he is white. The thing I find interesting is the condensing of the top 1-5% of scores into a smaller score range over time. My guess since the score differences look smaller it lets schools select more for other characteristics rather than pure mental horsepower. Getting a perfect score today or something that looks similar 1550 plus will not differentiate people as much.
Elon Musks apparently had a 1400 SAT. Bill Gates a 1590. Obviously they are both smart but I feel fairly confident Bill Gates is significantly higher pure IQ. With the way normal distributions operate I feel confident saying there is a big intelligence difference between the two but on the current system Musks would probably get 1580 and Gates 1600.
Digging thru SAT history there have been a few key years where the test had significant changes.
1993/1995 - some test changes but the big thing was a recentering to get scores back to about 1000 from 900. Before this update a median score at HYPS would have been 1370-1400 area. Bill Gates 1590 would have really stood out and guaranteed alone admittance to Harvard.
2005 - attempts to move the test closer to high school curriculum and eliminated analogies and quant comparisons. My guess is this made the test less of a pure intelligence test and closed gaps between highest performers and mid range.
2016 - more I guess dumbing down and trying to make the test more like what they did in high school. Multiple choice questions went from 5 options to 4 options and wrong answers no longer carried a penalty. This would make educated guessing far better.
Here is the current percentile for different scores.
https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-percentiles-and-score-rankings
1500 is now solidly top 2%. 1450 is top 4%.
Here is the data from 2003
https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-historical-percentiles-for-2005-2004-2003
1490-1600 was solidly differentiating between the top 1%.
I believe the new scoring significantly hurts the outliers at standing out from the test. And likely hurts the highest performing white, Asian, and Jewish males at getting into the most selective schools since the difference between a 1530 and 1600 SAT score just doesn’t seem that big statistically. It feels to me that studying for the new exam and learning test taking skills are more important today. Perhaps, you think this isn’t a big deal that the raw mental abilities of the top 1.2% and .3% of the population isn’t important and allowing schools to select more on other criteria is more important. My opinion for the very top programs finding the Bill Gates level intelligence matters. Men also have different intelligence bell curves (more people on the extremes) therefore on net I believe it hurts males.
I am also curious how someone who is really good at math could stand out in today’s environment. The SAT and a few good AP math scores wouldn’t seem to be enough. Do you need to have the opportunity to compete in high-end math tournaments?
Personally, the new testing I believe would have significantly effected my life. Coming from a lower class white family being able to crush the SAT gave me a way to stand out for a relatively cheap costs.
I am seeing a median SAT score of 1520 at Harvard and a median of 1440 at UMICH. My guess is back in the day that gap was much higher.
sliders1234
7mo ago
Not all humans have 135 IQ (supposedly the average here). The people joining the union just want good wages and benefits to have a family. They don’t think like us here who want routes to be rich.
(And I hate unions but I think this is a good understanding of what their people want)
sliders1234
7mo ago
End of day unions steal from other workers. They only have market power if there is a bottleneck. Longer term you can just hirer other people. But in a constant cost business they just drive up prices for everyone else.
Or since this is the auto industry and exposed to free trade they end up bankrupting their firm and everyone just buys a cheaper Japanese car.
sliders1234
1mo ago
Trump case out on him being an insurrectionists.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-719_19m2.pdf
Compared to the Reddit debates and how the SC would prevent this as a non-lawyer I thought the opinion was fairly basic and simple. It seems to me that they just declared it a Feds power in Federal elections and the States don’t get a say. Personally, I did come to a belief that it was self-executing.
I think they avoided really touching on all the novel legal theories both ways going around on Reddit or twitter.
It came down to what I believe was one of my original views that letting States have any say in declaring someone an insurrectionists would be a complete clusterfuck and basically turn into state legislatures electing Presidents. Therefore they declared it a federal power.
I would call this pragmatic versus legally correct in my opinion. They avoided 100 page treatise on whether the President is an office holder.
I predicted something between 7-2 and 9-0. 9-0 seems better for the nation.
sliders1234
8mo ago
https://twitter.com/vivekgramaswamy/status/1696234841249857658?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
He’s now posting for physical fitness test for colleges in order to help black people get into college.
There probably is an edge for blacks at the extreme of the spectrum but I’m also a believer intelligence and athleticism aren’t anti-correlated. You would end up getting the superstar athletes who are 1100 SAT scores. But those guys don’t want to go to Harvard they rightfully view football as their payday and want to play in the SEC. The 1300 SAT score tennis player is likely already getting into Harvard.
Ramsy does have this popular mid-twit sounds good at first thought messenging.
I would be down with getting every kid to do a 6-ish minute mile. Upper class and wealthy people already are skinny. Obesity is one of those things I see in statistics but I know fairly close to zero people with the issue.
sliders1234
5mo ago
Nah man. Jews are Americans and semi-western. Geopolitical allies. As much as I hate Jews for being the leaders of anti-white bigotry at the end of the day I still have their back. The international arena does matter. An attack on their people is an attack on me. They are part of the civilized world and I will defend them from barbarism.
In an ideal world we would deport the food cart guy. He clearly doesn’t share our values.
My issue with Jews are basically mistake theory. My issue with Isis and Hamas and those organizations is conflict theory.
Suella Bravermans Tory conference speech caught my attention as it seems to more bluntly come out anti-immigration and she specifically says don’t be afraid of being called racists. Here is the key quote with a lot of other red meat in the speech.
'The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the 20th century was a mere gust compared to the hurricane that is coming.'
As far as I can tell Sunak did not slam immigration as much. He did have one-nanny state policy of banning cigarettes (which I sort of support) but was also very clear on gender ideology (a man is a man a women is a women parts). A politician would not have those two policies in America.
Back to Braverman there are a few things I find interesting. The specific phrase “hurricane” seems to have far more meaning to my long term views on Europe and immigration. Along with her using the term economic migrants. Africa’s population is the one place in the world with absolutely booming population. In the next 50 or so years the amount of people acting in their own best interest and economically migrating should absolutely boom. There will be a hurricane of migrants.
The issue for Europe and I do believe in HBD is the desire to economically migrate won’t disappear because the economic gaps between Europe and Africa won’t disappear. And while some of these people will end up being quite smart and successful there will be an addition of a large low hbd population.
The end result of this would be a South Africanization of Europe. If my view of this is correct and I do think demographics are destiny then I expect as time goes by and the negatives of mass immigration become more apparent that eventually Europe will fully adopt Bravermans views. The question is will they realize this before it’s too late. Europe already has their right wing political parties gaining support all thru Europe.
I do not see the same sort of risks for the US. South Americas population doesn’t have the same boom dynamics. And the US has shown an ability to partially integrate Hispanic communities into US society. The data I’ve seen in the past has the Hispanic community eventually reaching mean white criminality levels of the US but with far lower educational attainment. I believe we should reduce illegal immigration but I don’t see the same fears of immigration as I would have if I lived in Europe.
The other thing I find interesting is the rise of Indian voices in right wing voices. Sunak, Braverman, Ramaswamy. I have my theories on this - one is a fluke, two is a coincidence, 3 is a pattern.
Article includes video of the key quotes https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/suella-braverman-andrew-boff-home-secretary-labour-tories-b1111176.html
Completely unrelated and not worth it’s own post this caught my eye today as I have no idea what it means. El Chapo’s son bans any fentanyl in northern Mexico https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/el-chapos-sons-allegedly-ban-fentanyl-production-northern-mexico
Could be nothing. Could indicate a CIA/Sinaloa deal.
Edit: wouldn’t be surprised if people find the fentanyl stuff more interesting. It seems this was the catalyst.
https://insightcrime.org/news/extradition-fentanyl-prohibition-mexico-tries-counterdrug-reset/
The post below seems correct that you can always find a person in a group with wrong opinions to smear.
That being said I never once wavered on BLM is not good even when that was a heretic position. The group always lacked numeracy. There just isn’t enough unarmed black man dying. It’s a small issue compared with more important things like figuring out how to reduce prison populations. Besides they always had vibes of trying to use racism for back door Marxism. Which has always been apparent in their writings. They would always take the Palestinian side because they are the side Russia took under Marxism.
sliders1234
11mo ago
Newsom basically calling for a boycot of Target.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/did-governor-newsom-spark-target-boycott-among-liberals
So he’s not too happy that red tribe has learned how to cancel something. I think we are approaching a day where you have to declare your allegiance. Red or blue.
I usually don’t like Balaji and think he’s a smarter hack who knows how to grift, but I think he’s right in this thread
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1659094966671425536?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
And Scott had a thread about how pride is just like every other cities holiday posted recently. I can’t find it.
America seems to be in a religious war between two cultures now. A couple years ago red tribe didn’t know how to wield power. Desantis has done that highlighted by his war on Disney and grassroots red tribe found their first success with Budweiser. Twitter going Musks was an obvious red tribe move. Jan 6 and Trump overall was a movement that hadn’t found their real leaders who could use power.
I don’t think religion is that strong anymore on the right. I say this because there is a lot of tolerance for Trump being not a Christian. He bangs hookers. So red tribe has an internal sub-war between their traditional alpha male and their good Christian Desantis.
I do like Scott’s metaphor of this being a time like when Christianity took over the Roman Empire. No one believed in the old pagan gods anymore. And I think blue tribe would have won this but they made two crucial mistakes:
-
The movement doesn’t have a great place for males. Who have always dominated every society.
-
The trans movement has a lot of vibes of backward religions. Getting kids to cut themselves up and change their bodies has a lot of vibes of practices we long since banished.
sliders1234
11mo ago
I follow Razib Khan on twitter who mostly writes about where different ethnicities came from.Which I do find fascinating.Anyway he has a long post on Ashkenzi Jews - who have had a huge impact on 20th century history - but were a footnote before.And thinking about it I don’t know another “people” who never had their own land in history with an army protecting it and all that. As far as culture war goes I feel like Jewish history fits but I’ve never discussed it or read much more than Nazis kills a bunch of them.Here’s the post:
How and when did the Ashkenazim come to be?
Sometime after the year 1000 AD, a group of Jews began migrating eastward across Europe, into the principalities of Germany and the kingdom of Poland, attracted by the combination of religious tolerance and economic opportunity. These territories were beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire; they were lands that Jews had traditionally not occupied. By the time these pioneers arrived in the small towns of Germany and the hamlets of Poland, Jewish communities had already been established in Persia and Egypt for 1,500 years.
For the next 800 years, these Jews waxed in numbers due to their essential economic position in the developing lands of Eastern Europe, but unlike the Hebrews of antiquity, they became culturally invisible to their gentile neighbors, quietly navigating a closed social universe organized around adherence to their own laws and focused on their own texts. Their ultimate origins were a mystery to the gentiles around them, and indeed became forgotten even to themselves. Were they the descendants of the ancient Hebrews, converts to the religion, or a mix of both? These possibilities were hidden from the Jews of Eastern Europe as their memory of their past faded and their written culture focused purely on matters of religion.
This curiosity is worth pausing over. Ashkenazi Jewish luminaries have recorded such outsized contributions to every aspect of human output in culture and knowledge over the past two centuries, it’s natural to assume that the familiar intellectual restlessness and insatiable curiosity of the community’s standouts have deep cultural roots. But if the textual record is anything to go by, nothing could be further from the truth. Hunting for attested evidence of Ashkenazi Jewish passage from antiquity to the 19th century is like trying to catch a glimpse of a secretive nocturnal creature. Not only did Jews receive unhelpfully scant coverage from gentile chroniclers, but the community itself also appears to have trained its considerable literacy and intellectual power solely on matters Talmudic, to the complete exclusion of any historical records of the various communities.
And yet, it was these people that flourished in the unknown and wild lands of Eastern Europe who would go on to beget 80% of the modern Jewish diaspora, and join the mainstream of Western civilization after 1800. These are the more than ten million Ashkenazim, whose members have left indelible marks on world history and culture so far out of proportion to their numbers, from Karl Marx to Albert Einstein, since their reintegration into the stream of Western civilization after the Enlightenment.
In the Bible, Ashkenaz is one of the descendants of Noah, and Jewish scholars associated his scions with various points north, initially Scythia, but eventually Germany. So the Ashkenazim were the Jews of Ashkenaz, of Germany and parts east, and their native language, Yiddish, was a dialect of German. The Jews of Spain and Portugal, the Sephardim, loomed large during the medieval period between 1000 and 1500 AD, producing the great rabbi Moses Maimonides and polymath Judah Halevi, and persisting in prominence into early modernity, with philosophers like Baruch de Spinoza. It was only in the 19th and 20th centuries that the history of Jewish prominence and cultural achievement became so disproportionately the story of the Ashkenazim, who were 92% of the world’s Jews in 1930, and have shared in fully 20% of all Nobel Prizes awarded.
And yet, though the Jews are a people whose history is extensively documented, from the Bible to Josephus’ Roman-era The Jewish Wars, the origins of the Ashkenazim remain a bit of an enigma. In 1096 AD, Christian crusaders infamously massacred Jews in the German Rhineland as warm-up for the slaughter they would inflict upon people in the Middle East, and the German-speaking lands saw widespread pogroms in the mid-14th century, at the height of the Black Death. But in comparison to their ubiquity in the 19th century, the Ashkenazim are mentioned only glancingly in the histories of this earlier period. They came to be notable only with their demographic ascendence in the massive dominion of Poland-Lithuania, as the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance 500 years ago. Not to mention in their later cultural explosion in the modern world.
Given Ashkenazi Jews’ newfound prominence and mysterious origins, in the late 19th century, European intellectuals began to explore the “Khazar hypothesis” for the origin of the Ashkenazim: the strange idea that Eastern European Jews descended from an ancient Turkic steppe confederacy destroyed by Kievan Rus 1,000 years ago. The Khazars are notable because much of their elite reputedly converted to Judaism while other groups were adopting Christianity or Islam. The Khazar hypothesis’ argument was that the Ashkenazim descended from the scattering of Khazar Jews westward into Europe. It is only with genetics in the 21st century that this theory has been able to be tested, and ultimately found wanting. The Ashkenazim are the synthesis of ancient Levantine Jews and various Mediterranean European populations with whom the former mixed. Their origins date back to the fall of Rome, not the fall of Khazaria.
In the intersection
To understand when and where the Ashkenazim come from, it is important to understand what they were before they became the distinctive people we know from history and fiction. The ancient King David was a simple shepherd, while the Babylonian Talmud outlines how farmers must maintain adherence to the laws of the Torah despite the agricultural season’s cycles. 2,000 years ago, the Jews were both pedestrian and unique. Pedestrian in that they were a nation of farmers and shepherds, as extensively documented in the Bible. Yes, large communities of urban Jews flourished in Alexandria, Rome and other large cities, but on balance, the Jews were not particularly urban. Like the Jews, Greeks outside of their homeland tended to be urban as well, but the average Greek was still a farmer or a shepherd, as were the vast majority of humans in the ancient world (not to mention, incidentally in the world as a whole until the 20th century). The ancient Jews were tillers of the soil and drivers of flocks, like all their contemporaries.
Where the Jews were unique was their strict adherence to a set of laws handed down to them by a god whom they held to be the one true god above all others. The Jews were zealous in their religious particularity, a reality which led to a war of liberation against the Greeks in 167 BC, where they rebelled against the imposition of pagan syncretism by raising an altar to Zeus in the Jewish Temple. Today we know of this war mostly through its commemoration at Hanukkah. Once Rome rose and conquered the Eastern Mediterranean, the Jews rebelled twice against the Roman imperium, once in the first century AD and once in the second. Again, the cause of their rebellion was the fact that they chafed at the rule of the religiously tolerant but unabashedly polytheistic Romans. The first rebellion was triggered by riots that erupted in 66 AD when pagan Greeks provocatively sacrificed birds in front of a synagogue, an act of sacrilege in Jewish eyes meant to inflame tensions in Jerusalem. The first rebellion ended a period when Jews were prominent in Roman elite circles, particularly due to the Judaean client king Herod Agrippa’s friendship with the Roman Emperor Caligula. From then on, Jews were tolerated, but seen to be different: a people apart.
The Jewish farmers and warriors who characterized the nation in the first centuries of the Common Era would eventually fade from living history, recalled only as legends in scripture and oral tradition. By the time European Jews became more than marginal curiosities in early modernity, pure subsistence agriculture and a martial ethos had become wholly alien to the Jewish mode of existence for the urban and small-town Ashkenazim. The Zionist movement made explicit efforts to synthetically re-install the ethos in the new settlers of Palestine. Zionism emerged from socialism and 19th-century nationalism and imagined a robust patriotic citizenry working the land on collective farms, the kibbutzim, at the ready to rise as a nation and take up arms against enemies near and far. Set against this future ideal was the contemporary bourgeois life that was aspiration and reality for many of the European Ashkenazim, who had already made the comfortable transition to material security in the wake of the piecemeal Jewish emancipation that swept the continent over the course of the 19th century.
But these assimilated Ashkenazim still came from an earlier regime, where Jews were set apart from the nations among whom they dwelt. Whereas their biblical ancestors had been farmers, pastoralists and warriors, the Ashkenazim known from later medieval and early modern history occupy professions avoided by Christians. The more modest members of the community were peddlers and artisans serving rural villages, while the Jewish elite were money-lenders and tax-farmers, intermediaries between the aristocracy that ruled much of Europe and the peasants whom they exploited. The enmity toward the Ashkenazim pervasive across much of Europe in the early modern period derived from this experience, as the dirty work of wringing tax
Denying I don’t believe will work. He either needs to say nothing and hope this doesn’t catch on or needs to say it was him. Denial just seems like too obvious of a lie. As a summary of the article it’s a lot of words that says two things
- Hannania believes in HBD.
- He was a fan of eugenics for low IQ people which is a more difficult position
This is becoming a bit of a problem for the intellectual right. The thing is racial differences are real. But admitting it and trying to form policy that opens you up to your a racist attacks. A lot of good policy like let the whites have most governing positions in S Africa and just ignore blacks being at the bottom rest on that. And everyone of all races benefits from that policy. But it looks bad when the 8% white population controls 95% of leadership positions.
I’m a believer that ignorance is bliss on these issues. But that becomes a very difficult position to hold if the left wants to expose that noble lie. Because the intellectual argument and reality is replying that blacks are heavily low IQ and not capable of competing at executive levels especially at anything close to equal representation.
My guess is he just never responds to the HuffPost piece.
This issue shows up in a lot of culture war stuff. The right tries to talk about children etc when debate pride/gender ideology. But really we just don’t believe those are good things that should be promoted in society and people are better off if they are fringe ideologies.
Touhy/Oher reports seems to touch on a lot of culture war issues. Though it could just be a family feud.
-
They only became a part of his life when he was 17/18. But I guess they decided to become a forever family then. Photos for the next 6-8 years looks like a happy family. They put him in conservatorship at 18 instead of adopting. It gave them a bunch of legal rights over him. Sounds a little bad since he was an adult but it did make a formal tie. And let’s be honest a normal 18 year old often needs adults in the room. An 18 year old who never had a family life definitely needs it. Sort of gets down to whether they were acting in good faith or using him. I lean on good faith.
-
The movie I believe portrayed him as a little dumb. His childhood issues probably did limit him. By the time he got to the nfl he scored a 19 on the wonderlich. Which when I’ve looked it up before is like American average IQ and around 100. So not dumb just average.
-
He apparently wants more money now. The family and the author Michael Lewis seem to indicate that they never made much in the movie. Like $700k between all of them. While Oher indicates they got bank. Lewis says this just means Hollywood bad and writers aren’t getting paid. Fwiw Oher never got paid a lot in the nfl. As a first round pick he got 5 years 13.8. For nfl contracts I’d do a simple formula of guessing you get about half after taxes and agent fees. The big money in the nfl is from free agency contracts. He signed two. First one he didn’t finish but was $5/year and played one year. Then signed elsewhere at $3. He played well so they extended him immediately but he got hurt mid year and cut with 9.5 guaranteed. Lifetime earnings probably around $30-35. 15 after taxes and fees. If your life story become a movie that grossed $300 million I think it would be reasonable to think it could boost those earnings and would be meaningful.
-
The white savior storyline. I’m curious how much current politics could have soured what was a happy relationship. The family no doubt used him some and loved the having a football star in the family thing and doing things like getting draft picks taken together. From my own background I saw the same storyline as my football coach adopted a black kid who was a great athlete (I played midgets football with him and high school basketball). Would have been a Catholic version of the same story. Curious if current politics are ruining these types of relationships.
Slightly different topic but I tend to think the people who make it to play pro sports are significantly above group level IQ. Like Oher being 100 IQ. I just can’t see a 70-80 IQ functioning well enough to understand pro-sports concepts or being capable of training themselves to get there.
A few tweets are catching my eye on college education today.
Seems like a lot of low IQ people are getting college degrees. IQ<90. Let’s be serious those people can’t do intellectual work. I actually think the modern world would be very confusing for people with an IQ well above there let alone doing intellectual work.
https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1679712417419341827?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
There is a big discrepancy in repaying student loans between males and females. Being that the gap begins immediately I assume it has nothing to do with child birth. Perhaps hoping to marry a guy who will buy them out? Females do have more pressure to entering the dating market earlier versus developing personal finance.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1679787590680031232?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Hannania had some affirmative action takes lately. Here’s one on mainstream conservative embracing hbd.
https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1679861286392434688?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Maybe it’s low effort to post a bunch of tweets but I’m noticing a trend here of the Supreme Court ruling getting people talking about issues in higher education and attacking it. These all seem to be attacking in slightly different directions but it seems a debate has been started on the right.
IMO Hannania keeps saying Musks buyout of twitter has helped the right a lot with activision. Protests work now. Lack of censorship helps them get there more intellectual debates out there which they couldn’t before.
sliders1234
5mo ago
No interest in accepting Gazan refugees into the west. The Arab world can take them. They don’t fit the values of the western world. And yes I see the issue that the Arabs don’t want them either. But they are there people. Nobody wants them until they give up death cult.
sliders1234
8mo ago
First punishing recividism more seems silly. Because a lot of people do age out of crime. Though we should do more small and frequent busts.
The bigger issue is Democracy. I have solutions to these problems. It’s probably something like making POTUS the head of the Mormon church. Requiring daily mass attendance or you I guess go to jail. I’d probably put homosexuals in jail. And of course trans wouldn’t exists. I’d ban birth control and abortion. And yes I think enforcing this strict cultural package from our past would solve a lot of these issues. While still keeping modern capitalism.
It does seem to me that religious societies don’t have the social ills you speak of so it seems to work. But I’m fairly certain I am not going to be allowed to do it. But yes I no longer think liberalism works for people who aren’t in the higher IQ parts of society and most would benefit for earlier cultural packages.
If we are talking about rehabilitative justice then it’s probably too late. Just give people a cultural package from the start they can succeed with.
But like I said Democracy. I don’t think I have any chance at enacting this. My theocracy i believe would work. DeBoer seems to be advocating for a statism I think would be awful. But it seems the key thing both have is forcing their plan on others. And I’m willing to give up my plan if I don’t have to risks their plan.
The Proud Boy sentences being quite severe is on my mind today. 22 years for Tarrio who was not there on Jan 6. He does have text saying it was them who did it. A few others got in the high teens sentences who were there.
I will admit I respect the Proud Boys and agree with a lot of their statements. I do believe the 2020 election was stolen. The lack of a secret ballot thru mass mail-in voting violates every principle of Democracy. Without violating the secret ballot Trump would have easily won in my opinion. The Proud Boys official position from memory was a desire for a new election following Democratic principles. Seems fair to me. So I feel they are directionally correct even if they took things too far.
The right won’t get equal treatment in the court. It seems like the key courts are in cities that are going to have unsympathetic juries and judges. If you flip these courts to rural areas then my guess antifa types are getting 20 years and Proud Boys 2 years. In rural areas they would have judges very sympathetic that the election wasn’t proper and their anger was justified in the same way BLM protestors get courts sympathetic that America is a racists nation.
I think the left is making a mistake with these massive sentences. If they gave them a couple years I would feel it was fair as they went too far. But now I want them pardoned. If Trump pardons them as he should then it’s a slap in the face of the court decision. Delegitimizes the court to have the court decide these are really bad people deserving long sentences for overturning Democracy but then have the next guy release them. It feels very third worldish to me. With other lawfare attempts it seems as though any future POTUS should do mass pardons. I’m not sure how balance of powers can survive this.
The punishment for Proud Boys seems to have some connection to the debates and Biden declaring them “white supremacists” and Trump telling them to “stand by and stand down” (which felt coded). It made it important these guys got long sentences to confirm that they are the bad guys because then a court confirmed what they told you. Same thing with Floyd officers and long sentences which confirmed that they were bad murderous cops. A jury convicted therefore we know it’s true.
It’s another example of punishment for exercising your right to a jury trial.
I agree with Garrett Jones books “10% Less Democracy” and America would be better with less activision and less voting. But America looks more and more like a third word spoils system. Win you get the spoils, lose you go to jail. Which makes elections far more important.
Links aren’t important just sometimes people asks for articles.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1172530436/proud-boys-jan-6-sedition-trial-verdict
https://apnews.com/article/enrique-tarrio-capitol-riot-seditious-conspiracy-sentencing-da60222b3e1e54902db2bbbb219dc3fb#:~:text=WASHINGTON%20(AP)%20—%20Former%20Proud,for%20the%20U.S.%20Capitol%20attack.
https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/1503603571
https://reason.com/2023/09/06/with-22-year-sentence-ex-proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-pays-hefty-trial-penalty/
Edit: Focus on the punishments and any results from the severity. I used a certain frame to put it in their view. We don’t need to discuss election legitimacy again.
More options
Context Copy link