Tractatus
12d ago
Given King's online behavior, I wouldn't be surprised at all if these changes were at his suggestion and/or insistance. For that matter, I'd be surprised if Hammil wasn't trying to cram in as many Trumpisms into his performance as he could.
I've only read The Long Walk once, as part of a paperback collecting four stories written under the Richard Bachman alias, called "The Bachman Books." I remember being amused by the blurb on the back that proclaimed that the writing was "unmistakably Steven King," as I was comparing them to It and The Stand, and thinking these tightly-written stories couldn't be further from the King I was familiar with. I didn't pick up on the themes of young masculine aggressiveness in The Long Walk that you did, but I probably just wasn't mature enough at the time. I didn't dislike it, but didn't find it as enjoyable as the other books in the collection; Rage, Roadwork, and The Running Man, each of which have interesting readings (to me, at least) in light of the modern culture war.
Rage, famously, was intentionally allowed to fall out of print by King after a school shooting, which seemed to foreshadow the modern refusal to believe that depiction != endorsement, as well as cries that "You Missed the Point" when villains with sympathetic elements, well, elicit sympathy. In interviews at the time, King seemed to want it both ways, both wanting his book pulled for fear of it inspiring others, while simultaneously insisting authors have the right to publish works like this. It seems he (and the left as a whole) have backed away from the latter.
Roadwork is a more grounded version of the Joel Schumacker's Falling Down, and like that film, if it were more well-known, I would anticipate a "critical re-evaluation," reframing story as one about the horrors of White Male Rage. For those not familiar, in the story, the protoganist's entire neighborhood, as well as his employer, is being demolished to make way for highway expansion that will benefit nobody in the community; it exists solely to ensure continued eligibility for Federal Highway funding. Having lost his son to cancer some years prior, the man is too emotionally tied to his home to just walk away, setting him on a collision course with the government. The story bounces back and forth between the beginnings of his and his wife's relationship, and their current situation; doubtless Red Pillers would pick up on the wife's filing of divorce, and in particular, her claiming that she "feels like I was raped" when the husband admits he refused the emminant domain offer, as yet more evidence that all women are devious, but imo this is just King's clunky writing. The revelation after the man's death, that this whole scheme by the state was just to ensure continued access to Federal Highway funding, along with the theme of local government seeing the citizens not as the people that they serve, but obstacles to work around, or run over, as necessary, resonates profoundly with the modern right-wing populist movement
The Running Man, most famous for the "adaptation" starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (Deeper than you might think. Maybe.), is an example of one of the biggest flips between the left and the right in modern America i personally experienced. Growing up, left wing media I consumed would always present techno-dystopias, where the corporations and government worked hand-in-glove with each other, as an existential threat. I can't imagine post-Watergate through late 90's sci-fi cheering on government attempts to quash anonymous dissent; for that matter, i couldn't imagine those same leftists cheering on corporate pandering towards minorities as anything other than cynical manipulation, as opposed to modern idpol demands that the slop have "people that look like me." Post 9-11, I'd always figure that this story could never be adapted to film, but apparently it's happening. I wonder if they'll keep in the bit where the government sells worthless masks to the hoi polloi to combat the pervasive air pollution (while keeping the absurdly expensive masks that actually work to themselves), or if the writers will get worried MAGA types will think that's a reference to COVID vaccines. For that matter, no way Ben Richard's wife being reduced to turning tricks to support their family is presented as shameful as it is in the story; "sex work is real work!" after all.
Tractatus
19d ago
"America, like most other advanced economies, has functionally full employment and a lot of blue collar jobs left unfilled. Japan, Poland, etc are doing the same thing."
A blatant lie, easily disproven merely by opening one's eyes. One does not get the millions of fentanyl deaths, the hollowed out Rust Belt, nor the millions upon millions drowning in debt because they literally can't make enough. Nor, for that matter, would you see the H1B shenanigans as employers post tech jobs exclusively in foreign papers, to try and find a loophole around posting requirements.
Good joke putting Japan in there, btw. A nation with employment stats more fraudulent than the US is hard to find, but Japan is up to the challenge, just straight up defining homelessness out of existence. Sorry, but no amount of sophistry is going to get me to pretend that a girl turning tricks to earn enough money to stay at an internet cafe for the night is not, in fact, homeless.
Tractatus
27d ago
Calling this a favorite of the reactionary is a bit rich; from my first steps on the internet over 25 years ago, lefties were throwing around "Poe's Law Strikes Again!" when discovered that what they were saying about righties weren't correct, but it didn't matter because righties were so bad you could totally believe that completely made up thing.
Tractatus
28d ago
If one "needs" a pronoun for indeterminate gender, the problem is not with the language, the problem is with the people. In the past, one either assumed the gender, or asked out of politeness, and that was that. If anyone would have been offended at either, they would most assuredly not have been satisfied with the use of the indeterminate, and would likely have been angrier than had the speaker mearly guessed wrong. If a foreign merchant, seeking permission to do business in the kingdom, facing, say, a particularly butch queen, or incredibly effeminate prince, tried to assure them that his goods were of the highest quality, "as They can see for Themself;" well, I can't say as I see that going over well.
Tractatus
1mo ago
This seems plausible from a kitchen table evo psych point of view: in the ancestral environment, all things being equal, the man who jumped at a chance to have no-strings-attached sex had a greater inclusive genetic fitness than the man who did not.
If this counts as "plausible" according to evo-psych, then evo-psych is even more of a joke than I already thought (I did not hold the field in high esteem as-is). No, a casual fling would not have been an advantage in the ancestral environment, because one or both would have been killed by the rest of the tribe, and they sure as hell wouldn't have pitched in to raise the kid.
A wise man once warned of crafting just-so stories, never do we ask "What does the world look like if this is true?" We can also ask "So, does the world look like that?" Our ancestral environment was not one in which Single Female Lawyers could get knocked up, yet remain sexy and self reliant; it was one in which chid rearing was insanely hard, and required the support of the tribe, who had no incentive to aid someone who couldn't be bothered to stay loyal to tribal hierarchy. It was also one in which the sexes were segregated, meeting the needs of the tribe as their sex allowed. Opportunities for surreptious coupling would be few and far between; a man and woman - who the tribe did not already recognize as coupled - would have arroused suspicions.
All this talk of evo-psych as applied to modern (emphasis on "modern" as opposed to "traditional") mating practises sounds like nothing so much as the never-ending attempts to square the absurdly high rates of obligate homosexuality in humans with basic evolutionary theory; perfunctory just-so stories that fall apart under the slightest investigation (something something "reasoning from first principles doesn't work for human interaction"). We know what kind of animal selects for female preference, and it doesn't look anything like human social organization. Even more, if we evolved for female preference, then why the hell is it failing so badly on the one metric that counts, human reproduction?
It should be blindingly obvious that humans short-circuited mating by means of social mediation, much like our simian relatives. This is far from uncommon in the animal kingdom; on the one hand, I can click on a Youtube video and watch the larva of a parasitoid wasp that has evolved an insanely specific method of feeding that allows it, without anything that could justify being called intelligence, to carefully eat only the parts of its host to provide nourishment without killing the host as long as possible. Then I can click on my "recommended" list and see a cheetah mother trapping a helpless foal, and spend hours watching her dumb-as-shit cubs play with said foal, lacking even the basic instinct to hunt. They literally didn't evolve the basic senses necessary to get food, they have to learn it from observation and trial-and-error, is it really so hard to imagine that humans didn't evolve mate selection, it's just something that has been passed down from generation to generation (see also farming, which isn't an evolved instinct in any human observed)?
Tractatus
1mo ago
"The doctors did the right thing in helping a 29 year old woman with depression kill herself" is quite literally the slippery slope. That's what we're talking about when we call something a slippery slope, that social norms will change so radically, and people will just be all "actually, that's a good thing we changed that!"
Tractatus
1mo ago
No, this is not Bullverism, which is not a logical fallacy, either, not even one of the bs "informal fallacies" (a categorically invalid concept, made up whole-cloth by rhetoricians to steal valor from logic.)
Freddie is not in a moderated debate; he is not required to relitigate the arguments on AI from scratch in every single article he writes, before he's allowed to wonder what's wrong with the people that (in his light) insist on believing provably wrong things. He is a writer, and is free to let the gallons of ink spilled on the matter speak for itself. To qualify as Bullverism, he - and more importantly, his side - have to have never engaged with the merits in the first place. For that matter, you, and any AI doomers, are perfectly entitled to accuse Freddie of having his head in the sand, without the need to prove Skynet is coming any day now every time you do so.
Tractatus
1mo ago
This is the polar opposite of an "effort-post;" this might actually be the Platonic ideal of "Reasoning From First Principles" being nothing more than Rationalists making wildly invalid assumptions, insisting they're the only logical position to have, and adamantly refusing to verify if the conclusions accurately reflect reality.
The notion that intelligence agencies would ever say "why bother, these guys are already in the bag?" is profoundly stupid; even if one's only experience with intelligence is exclusively through fiction, one would not say something so incredibly clueless, yet hewre we're holding it up as proof "Epstein was Intelligence" is tinfoil-hat territory?
For decades, some of the most successful (and aggressive) intelligence operations against the US are run by our allies; Japan, South Korea, France, Israel, and Taiwan in particular have consistently been labeled as tops threats by the U.S. National Counter Intelligence Center. Most of these efforts are focused on obtaining business, industrial, and technological secrets, but no small amount also goes into gauging just how sincere America's commitment is to our alliances. Anyone raising their hand and saying "why worry about blackmailing this rich and powerful man, he's already on our side?" would be quitely assigned to work nothing of any importance, with "advise" to their immediate supervisors to find any pretext to fire them, that wouldn't result in any problems.
you'd target rich Chinese, Indians, gentile Russians, and above all rich Sunni Muslims
Not if you wanted any chance of your intelligence operation working.
Epstein bragged about working for intelligence agencies; that is the one thing you don't want your agent of blackmail to be doing.
Again, "Reasoning From First Principles" being utter nonsense. Yeah, you'd like them to not do that, but if they're successful - and it is a known-fact that Epstein was named as a middleman for various African and Middle Eastern deals - you're gonna ignore that problem, until such time as you no longer can. "I can't believe X would do Y, because that would be stupid" should not ever be something that occurs to you.
Tractatus
1mo ago
Why? This seems to be myopically focused on the 1st Amendment, while ignoring the Congress' clearly delineated plenary authority to regulate immigration. The 1st Amendment should not even come into discussion - Congress is perfectly free to impose any limits on non-citizens to enter/remain on American soil, and eject them for any - or even no - reason.
Tractatus
1mo ago
Nicolae Ceaușescu would dispute this. So would Stalin, for that matter; unless we're going to reduce the claim to a tautology, that the fact that all movements have leaders makes those leaders by definition "elevated factions" renders the possibility of an "uprising of the masses" defnitionally impossible.
The elite do not enforce their will by their own hand; that is done by the security state, whose ranks are filled from the very masses whose necks they are stepping on, and who stay loyal so long as they have faith that backing the elite is a better deal than the alternative. No amount of in-group cohesion will save the ruling elite if and when they decide "hey, why do we need all these lessers around," or elite incompetence erodes the secuirty apparatus' faith in the elite.
Tractatus
1mo ago
Right; "Revealed Preference" only counts when the goods are a) equally available, and, more importantly b) have the same effective "cost." This is never the case with marriage.
The first strike against this article is that it's only counting already-married men; we wouldn't rebut the assertion that women, in the main, don't "marry down" by pretending all the women loudly claiming they'd rather be single than marry "a loser" don't exist, and we should do the same for men.
Further, the data only shows men tend to marry within the same general socio-economic status, and just assumes that this must be by choice (women have no agency in the matter, I suppose). It ignores opportunity, propinquity, peer pressure effects (just how many men can truly ignore everyone in their social circle calling them a creep for chasing a girl half their age? This article isn't going to even bother asking the question, let alone tell us the answer).
Hilariously, it acknowledges that men prefer stay-at-home wives, and immediately claims that this is actually proof that men prefer ambitious girlbosses. This is RadFemHitler levels of copium huffing. Trash article is trash.
Tractatus
1mo ago
American soldiers wouldn't be shooting innocent civilians, especially unarmed children in the process of trying to obtain food; were they to do so, the backlash would make "Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" look positively quaint.
If Andrew Anglin and his ilk want to convince the normies that Jews are all ethno-chauvinists who will excuse any atrocity committed by their co-ethnics, they'd just point to this thread, where Mottizens hilariously (and mendaciously) insist that shooting kids at aid stations trying to obtain food is completely justified because Israel isn't required to feed Gazans (wtf?!?!?! how does this even make sense to you?)
Tractatus
3mo ago
"This is a just so story." It isn't, and I propose a moratorium on this type of argumentation. The community loves replying to complicated arguments by pointing at a handy buzzword* and dismissing them accordingly, and it obstructs good-faith debate. Note how the poster actually references how societies gave concrete examples of why their strictures were necessary, yet you reply with dismissive references to superstition, as though you didn't even read the post you're replying to deep enough to see that societies provided concrete arguments for sexual control, not myths.
*see also the love of "informal" fallacies, a categorically invalid concept, created entirely because "I respectfully disagree" doesn't carry as much weight as getting to claim an argument is logically flawed.
Tractatus
3mo ago
How is this not equally applicable to literally every other politician that has been term-limited out of office? Of all the Presidents to serve two full terms - and thus, their "careers in politics were over either way" - while Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid existed, which of them fell on their sword and cut those programs in their 2nd term? The answer is none, not Reagan, not GWB, not Obama. Singling out Trump for political cowardice on the matter amounts to special pleading; no politician intends to retire with the mantle of "single person who was responsible for their political party's complete collapse."
Tractatus
5mo ago
"3. 10% tariffs (the absolute floor, or Trump's idea of a sweetheart deal) on such interesting nations as Tuvalu (with that sweet sweet .tv license) and the Heard and McDonald islands, which are uninhabited."
This has become a hot meme, but the reality is just mundane - as territories, Australian business could just "incorporate" in Heard or McDonald, and completely bypass the tariffs levied against Australia, were this not done.
Tractatus
5mo ago
I think you're completely misreading Hanania's argument. "The problem with a less educated support base is that it simply has a less accurate understanding of the world. In fact, I think the problem is much worse than a simple analysis of voting patterns by educational attainment would suggest. Populists not only often fail to appeal to college graduates as a broad class..." This is, flipping the subject/object, literally a word for word critique of the ruling class - that they are out of touch, live in an ideological bubble that insulates them from reality, that they are incapable of appealing to the populace at large (and do not appear to care to do so), etc.
Otherwise, is Hanania suggesting that the post-WWII elite consesus was populist in nature? Because we've been living in a kakistocracy since then (realistically, we can go back even further).
"...but perhaps the Trump administration will just continue to tariff manufacturing inputs while claiming to be protecting manufacturing..."
You mean, exactly like every other country in history did with tariffs, and currently still doing so? Of all the rebuttals to Trump's tariffs, this is the one most disconnected with historical reality.
Tractatus
6mo ago
All of the points are rather weak: "He likes big real estate deals?" (and therefore, we must assume that he wants to annex every other nation on Earth, since what could be a bigger real estate deal that the US taking over everyone!) "Canada says he's serious" (and if we know anything about the Canadian elite, it's that they're honor-bound not to take cheap shots at a person not well-liked by their populace)
This is all so, so tiresome. Nothing presented rises above vague platitudes that, if we accept as true, would allow us to preemptively accuse Trump of any nefarious schemes our minds can imagine, with no need to worry about the messy process of determining if they represent reality or not. Anyone convinced by this had, quite frankly, already made up their mind, and were looking for any rhetorical cover to justify themselves.
Tractatus
6mo ago
You are replying to a comment that specifically states "Canada and Europe are not his allies. These places are ruled by his enemies. "Canada and Europe are not the enemies of the United States" is a complete non-sequitor. Of course, your next paragraph explains why you did so; a bad-faith implication that Trump is a petty dictator.
This is all pointless, however, since Nations are not individuals with agency, and cannot have "allies" and "enemies;" nations have leaders, every single one of whom makes decisions on behalf of the country that satisfy their desires; the world is incapable of producing another Cincinnatus, and has been that way for some time.
Tractatus
6mo ago
The rebuttal is just insisting that transness is not really about being in the wrong body, but a deeper issue that wouldn't be resolved by giving the trans person what they think they want. The more analogous to "treating" schizophrenia by staging "arrests" of their "gang stalkers," or performing "surgeries" to remove the "tracking devices" they're convinced have been installed in them, and expecting this to work out.
Tractatus
6mo ago
A sexually-reproducing non-eusocial species has 25% of it's population "gay" and we just didn't know it the whole time? At some point, one has to realize one is just engaging in creating "just-so" stories to justify an unjustifiable belief.
Tractatus
6mo ago
I'm just going to declare this whole exchange the greatest comment thread in the illustrious history of the Motte.
Dudes stay rockin'!
Tractatus
7mo ago
'Trump's Definition of "Male," "Female" Criticized by Medical and Legal Experts' is just "Trump Being Obtuse," laundered through the priestly class. It's the same playbook as the shift to "Born This Way" for the Gay acceptance movement; have an ideologically captured cohort insist a blatant falsehood is actually true by playing that most tired of games, the language game. Nothing about the existence of Kleinfelter's implies that we logically must accept Trans as an identity for anyone willing to claim it (note that the Trans movement itself vehemently rejects any argument that medical diagnosis be a requirement for acceptance), any more than fuzziness over exactly what age a child is no longer a baby but is now a toddler forces us to accept a 46 year old man's claim to actually be a 6 year old girl.
Tractatus
7mo ago
NATO came about because:
- Everyone understood that the Soviet Union had designs on all of Europe; they were not going to mind their own business and co-exist with the West
- It was not in the interest of the United States to have a Soviet-domniated Europe
- Europe had no hope of resisting a Soviet invasion, individually, or collectively
This is why the US had bases, and large numbers of forces, stationed throughout Europe. This is why the OPLANS all have the US being in command of the combined militaries, and why they assume the US would be providing the lion's share of forces in the event of a Soviet invasion. This is why everyone and their mother noted the irony that the one time Article 5 got invoked, it was because the US was attacked; this wasn't what NATO was created for, everyone knew what was supposed to happen was the US coming to Europe's aid when the Soviets finally came a knockin'.
This doesn't look anything like Dean's suggestion of Europe as a "mercenary" between the Soviet Union and the US; mercenaries are otherwise uninterested parties that you have to pay to fight for you, not people you promise to defend and you spend a fortune stationing your troops in their territory to do so.
...European and British troops came along with us Americans to go push North Korea's shit in for a little while, AIUI.
Allied contributions to the Korean War effort were around 10% of the total manpower, and the casualties are even more lopsided towards the Americans. The allied contingent was there for political purposes, to keep up the pretense that this was not just the US vs. the Commies, but the "whole world" versus a belligerent state. Any effort in "pushing North Korea's shit in" provided by the Commonwealth nations was just gravy, and appreciated, but it wasn't the point.
Tractatus
7mo ago
if I was to characterize the transatlantic alliance from 1975, it would be something along the lines of 'the Americans bribed the Europeans to be the front line fodder in a war with the Soviet Union.' Yes, it was in the Americans own interest to fight with the Europeans to prevent Soviet domination of Eurasia, but the Americans were paying for strategic deference (such as via the Marshal Plan and establishing favorable trade flows / market access for the Europeans), and the Europeans were the ones who would be the front line shield
I think one would be hard-pressed to come up with a more absurd characterization of the NATO alliance, at any point from April 4th, 1949 until now, as "Europeans were going to be the front line shield, and Americans were going to bribe them to do so," implying that the entire European continent wasn't a target of Soviet expansion from the second Berlin fell, and that Europeans would otherwise had the option of sitting out the Cold War, were it not for Americans sweetening the deal.
We were always going to be the shield to protect Europe from being overrun by the Soviets, and at most, we planned for some material support from our allies, but there was never, at any point, a belief that Europeans would be doing the heavy lifting. None.
If you think the consequences only showed up in the last 10-15 years, you are necessarily insisting that the sky-high divorce rates of the 60s-80s, the latchkey kids of the 80s-90s, raised on "the electric babysitter" and Nintendo (who emphatically did not turn out "ok"), the rise of hookup culture and dating apps, and so on, were actually Good Things. I don't know what to tell you, other than that you're being incredibly myopic. Great evidence for Chesterton's quip about the whole world being nothing but Progressives who go about ruining the world, and Conservatives who insist you cannot undo what the Progressives have done, because they have already adopted those changes as "tradition," as being Gospel truth.
The modern buzzword du joure "Parasocial Relationship" was coined not in 2020, but in 1955; much different than the modern use (which is just describing a dysfunctional form of propinquity; if I didn't know any better, I'd suspect the definitional drift was deliberate), it described disconnected housewives who legitimately behaved as though the fictional characters on the soap operas were really their friends. The standard description was "newlywed leaves her family ties, moves out to the suburbs, doesn't really gel with the neighbors, and, with entirely too much time on her hands due to kids and school, along with modern conveniences making housework take up much less of her day, vegs out in front of the boob tube and goes haywire." This was not treated seriously because this extreme was so rare, and the solution was to get the women involved in the community; after all, it was the 1950's, everyone was having 2.5 kids and making good money, so it could not possibly be the case that cookouts with the HOA, bowling leagues, Avon parties, et al, were actually not viable long-term replacements for blood-and-soil family ties. In fact, other than Christopher Lasch, I don't know anyone that even thought to connect the dots.
This new paradigm, that you must leave behind your family, you must "find someone that's right for you" (no-one ever seems to notice the narcissism inherent in such a statement), that the friends you choose are more important than the family you had no say in, these all moulded the Baby Boomers; it should be no shock to us when the Boomers had half the kids their parents did; that they slapped bumper stickers on their overpriced RVs, proudly proclaiming how they weren't going to leave a dime to their kids, spending it all on themselves, and eagerly consumed media praising them for this choice ("It will teach them to earn it on their own, like I did!" >conveniently forgets all the bailouts his parents and/or grandparents gave the Boomer after every fuck-up); nor should it be any shock to us that they would ultimately decide that "find someone that's right for you" necessirly implies "and if this person no longer feels right for you, or if you meet someone new who feels "more right" for you, well, it's time to blow up the marriage. It'll be hard on the kids, sure, but if they loved you, they would want you to be happy."
No, inceldom is not some wholely new phenomenon that can only be attributed to technological changes, it is just the next stop on the slippery slope of the radical change to the family that has been ongoing such Industrialization. It isn't even new; mass societies destroying families is so common across history that Spengler includes it - in the form of his comparison of the City versus the Country - in The Decline of the West and that was published in 1917, long before Tiktok, Youtube brainrot, and AI slop was even a twinkle in anyone's eye
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