2rafa
2d ago
All demographic groups (including whites, including Anglo-Saxon whites) have much lower homicide rates in England than they do in America, which is usually the point the gun control advocates were making, no?
2rafa
2d ago
Fuentes has a much younger audience, but even among media figures Bannon has a huge audience on his podcast, it’s just mostly boomers.
2rafa
3d ago
The public aren’t interested in the nuance of trade policy. Vance can be pro-tariff in the primaries and then after taking office sign various “incredible deals” that lower rates.
2rafa
3d ago
Perhaps he hopes viewers will become better informed about trade, to dissuade them from voting for the presumptive GOP nominee, that being JD Vance, who supports tariffs?
I don’t think tariffs are a central Vance belief at all. If you oppose them it would be easier to lobby him personally in 2028 as presumptive Republican nominee than to convince people to oppose any Republican candidate on that basis.
My guess is that this is an entirely personal project in which Ballmer, who is a centrist liberal, wants to ‘make an impact’ for the usual combination of civic and personal pride reasons, and has possibly been conned by one of the usual media grifter types into pouring a huge amount of money into it (but a pittance for him). The producers or other organization producing these can claim a comfortable $250k salary for “video production” or whatever, which Ballmer personally probably doesn’t know or care about, and do some light work and get taken out to lunch and invited to parties by cool ad agency people who want the spend.
The videos also star him personally, which again is less “influence operation” and more “I want the people to know who I am and feel like I’m sharing my wisdom with the world”.
World of Warcraft is bound up in so many memories of my young childhood, friends I used to have, playing with my dad, my brother, returning to it feels like going back to a city long after everyone you knew there moved out or passed away. And Classic feels (or at least did at the start) like you’re surrounded by so many other people for whom the same is true, trying to get back something that time has taken from them, irreversibly.
Still a great game though.
2rafa
6d ago
As I recall he sold it well below what he’d have received in an open bidding process because thought Disney and Iger would be better stewards of the brand.
2rafa
6d ago
In 2020 there were reports that they were making $3bn a year in Star Wars retail merchandise, and plastic toys, T-shirts etc are an ultra-high margin business. They were making 25% of revenue from licensed games, and in 2021 EA suggested that had been $2bn between 2019 and 2021 alone, and that’s pure margin. They spent $2bn on the Star Wars parks but parks revenue has grown since 2021 (or 2019) even if it slowed recently. Money was very cheap through the 2010s, so they may well have made out fine.
2rafa
10d ago
This has clearly been done with MAGA, and Vance is their candidate.
Vance’s central supporter is Thiel, who is gentile German. Thiel seems broadly sympathetic to zionism (hardly uncommon) but is more of a libertarian and was apparently pushing Trump against involvement in the Iran Israel flare up a few months ago.
2rafa
10d ago
Not really. Assuming the maximalist realistic interpretations of both events are true, there is:
-
Epstein was part of an Israeli kompromat operation targeting powerful people that was covered up by the US government / CIA etc.
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A senior Israeli official was caught in a sting operation and avoided a lengthy jail sentence because the US government let him go home under pressure from Israel.
It is doubtful that the sting op targeting some (other than this guy) randoms in Nevada involved targeting part of the same kind of operation as that alleged to be run by Epstein, although I suppose more will be revealed.
The second is a diplomatic incident where a senior foreign official is caught and then allowed to leave (like the Harry Dunn killing case), the first is an allegation about a blackmail scheme run by someone supposedly working for the government that employed the official in the second allegation. That they both involve sex crimes doesn’t really link them together.
2rafa
10d ago
tl;dr: his posited comparison is that in both cases, the USG had a tradeoff between "help Israeli intel" and "prosecute pedos" and chose the former.
Only if the former case was Israeli intel, which is the point under discussion.
2rafa
11d ago
To be fair that is a particularly grim example. There are people who travel for work in finance who mainly shuttle between 5* hotels in London, NYC, Hong Kong. There are people in marketing, media, fashion, conferences who mainly travel to luxury resorts to attend events where they mostly stand around. There are people who do go to more boring places but who travel mainly locally, 1-3 hours by plane or train from where they live. And besides, even if you’re in manufacturing going to Shenzhen every month for a few days, you can go Monday-Friday and “work” a grand total of 15 hours over the week with the rest spent travelling, in hotels watching TV, or drinking with your coworkers which, while work, is something a lot of people find more enjoyable than Excel or writing emails.
In my experience travelling for work is something naturally conscientious people struggle with and naturally lazy people love.
2rafa
11d ago
It’s disappointing now that every time I write something interesting at work my coworkers ask if it was written by ChatGPT.
There is currently a big push by Nick Fuentes against a rising JD Vance on the accusation that the MAGA movement has been compromised and appropriated by Israeli influence.
Fuentes pushed voting for Kamala (on some kind of nebulous basis that she was anti-Israel) and the Groypers are now spamming pictures of Gavin Newsom’s blonde family compared to Vance’s “brown” family (and pictures of both men as teenagers) and declaring their intention to vote for Newsom in 2027. Amusingly, libleft Ezra Klein / Destiny fan types post the same comparisons regularly too, albeit without the overt racial angle. You might also mention the Loomer - MTG court harem bitchfight, which while vaguely related to Israel is more longstanding than that and primarily revolves around two aging whores insulting each other on social media while claiming they alone represent the true will of the leader, who should immediately stop listening to the other woman.
The whole thing has taken on an increasingly ridiculous energy, like when Vance’s supporters responded to the Newsom groypers by saying that Newsom’s wife was was actually Jewish (as far as I know she isn’t). The Groypers, in turn, said that no, because Newsom’s wife was allegedly raped by Harvey Weinstein she surely actually disliked Jews more than most, and was therefore likely basedTM.
If 2rafa were right, I think the feds would to a damn good job proving it to the entire world.
Why? This seems like a pretty random comparison. Your theory for Epstein is that his operation was an Israeli intelligence plot to gain kompromat. What does that have to do with an Israeli official getting arrested in a sex sting (with 7 other people, who have a mix of Anglo, Hispanic and South Asian names) unless you’re suggesting that the sting was also an Israeli intelligence plot (in which case why was he arrested and his arrest publicly announced)? The Israeli government obviously used diplomatic pressure for his release since a senior intelligence official under serious felony charge is highly vulnerable to interrogation, not only by the US but by anyone else who can get to him in jail or on bail. They may have traded something, they may not, but Shaun King certainly doesn’t know.
2rafa
11d ago
If some French cyber chief were in America on a non-diplomatic visa yes I think he would be in jail.
What if the head of the French DGSE was on a recreational / personal visit to the US on a non-diplomatic visa? I have no doubt he would quickly be allowed to return to France under significant diplomatic pressure. Why? Because the leverage of going to US jail as a foreign sex predator is enough to get almost anyone to say anything, and he would know a lot of things, and everybody knows it.
It's obviously deeper than that and completely unlike the relationship of the US to any other ally.
How is this different (in fact it’s far smaller scale) than senior Saudi royals and those affiliated with the bin Ladens being allowed to leave the US immediately after 9/11 while US airspace was closed to all commercial air traffic and almost all private traffic? You will say they weren’t charged with a crime, but given the circumstances involved that is a largely circular argument.
2rafa
11d ago
I’m not predicting a permanent or final collapse, although it’s a tail risk. But I think a lot of people will rush for the exits if only because a lot of their other assets will have plummeted in value, they may have lost a job or other additional income and need to liquidate, and if you’re one of those people you may end up selling at the trough.
2rafa
11d ago
The big problem for now is some form of data validation. There are a lot of customer support jobs that can be 99.9% done by AI, but aren’t because of the tail risk that some combination of words will reveal the wrong customer’s information, will allow someone into the account without the right checks, etc, plus general reputational risk like the fact that countries and states are now accusing Facebook LLMs of flirting with minors or whatever. All the stuff that LLM red-teaming groups or ChatGPT jailbreak communities do, essentially. You can fire a bad employee as legal liability, but if its your LLM and the foundation model provider has a big fat liability disclaimer in its contract (which it will), you’re more fucked than you’d be if an employee had just gone rogue.
The eventual solution to this - as with self-driving cars - is to improve accuracy and consistency (by running things through multiple LLMs, including prompt security ones like those slowly coming online through Amazon bedrock and other platforms) until the risks are negligible and therefore insurance costs fall below the $50m a year a big corporation is paying for call centers.
But it will take a few more months, maybe a couple of years, sure.
2rafa
12d ago
This is pretty normal in the third world, and in the places that are becoming it. Street sellers in Paris and Barcelona, open air markets in Brussels. In the US pretty much all are illegal migrants, maybe a few are just soli citizens but certainly very few. The clothes are sourced from others in the community, maybe a couple of whom acquire big volume discount merchandise from discount store closings, perhaps wholesale outlets etc, then sell them on.
The object is really just to make a few extra dollars a day, by ‘hourly wage’ these people are making far below even minimum wage (let alone the average unskilled wage somewhere like LA). You will notice almost all the sellers are women, maybe with a few children / teenagers, and some men incapable of hard manual labor. These are people who can’t find other employment due to lack of documentation, language or any other skills.
Their husbands, brothers or other male family members may be day laborers waiting for clients in the home depot parking lot. The rest of their income will be charity, handouts, soup kitchens, church programs etc. Their objective is just to make a tiny bit of extra money, anything is fine, since they have nothing else to do. 8 hours standing by the side of the road to make $10 vs 8 hours at home making $0 is the calculation.
In economic terms, they are prevented from starving (by family, by charity, by the state, or by some combination of the three) but their labor has no real market value. Industrial modernity has also created an extreme surplus of cheaply produced material goods (like clothing). The consequence is this kind of retail.
2rafa
12d ago
Thus far bitcoin has largely tracked US equities with higher beta. Given that bitcoin shares an investor base with leveraged magnificent 7 etfs, with many day traders, growth funds, FAANG gamblers and venture capitalists, the expectation would be that in the next financial crisis and stock market collapse that it would suffer a great fall in value. There has never been a prolonged global financial crisis in bitcoin’s existence.
2rafa
12d ago
Thank you, that was interesting. One thing:
Jesus would not have loudly cried and pleaded for salvation from death while on earth if he was certain he would be saved; and the passage indicates that he saved because of this plea.
Even if he knew he was going to be saved / go to heaven, he might still have loudly cried and pleaded for salvation. Firstly, because it drew attention to him, and his mission was ultimately the salvation of mankind through following him, and secondly because we plead for relief from pain even when we know it is good for us (life-saving surgery in the time before anaesthetic, for example).
Is your contention that Jesus, in mortal life, understood he was special but not that he was, in a way, God?
2rafa
12d ago
What’s the general consensus among your kind of Christian on Jesus’ theory of mind on this? Since he knew he was divine, the Son, part of the trinity, was he not simply fulfilling his destiny, living out an inevitability of which he was fully and consciously aware the entire time, an actor in a play whose audience were mankind - for the benefit of their own salvation?
It is clearly, completely and permanently over for Canada. It’s interesting that there was a huge drama in Britain a few months ago over the possibility that certain kinds of sentencing impact reports (which were non-binding but could theoretically play on the emotions of a judge) would be granted automatically for non-whites, LGBT and women but not automatically for straight white men. The (Labour) government threatened to abolish the commission that determines this kind of thing and then forced them into repealing that guidance.
Meanwhile Canada has been officially and openly granting huge sentence reductions on the basis of race for years. The left just won another majority. Even the Canadian right is less anti-immigration than Keir Starmer. Canada’s constitutional system and political deadlock make major reform of human rights law that would allow for mass deportations (which would require packing the Supreme Court, which has rules about who can be elevated that limit it to the almost entirely progressive judiciary) effectively impossible.
Canada and Belgium are the two western countries that are furthest gone with regards to mass immigration, and the two for which I would argue recovery is categorically impossible1, without any likely or reasonably viable routes. Both share the misfortune of having developed as multi-national states with little shared loyalty or national character, making them perhaps uniquely incapable of articulating any kind of anti-immigration position. Maybe the numbers will wane a little, but nobody already there (now getting citizenship and permanent residency by the hundreds of thousands a year) is going home.
1 it is probably also over in The Netherlands, England and Wales, Ireland and Sweden. Weird and unpredictable things will happen in France, although I think hardcore republican assimilationism is more likely than remigration. I think the far right will come to power in Germany, Austria or both. Spain and Portugal will become Latin American countries with large African diasporas. The rest is harder to predict.
2rafa
13d ago
The kneecap thing was a hardcore Irish republican activist with a name that directly referenced the IRA telling (if insincerely) a large audience to kill their MP. He could be credibly accused of more than hate speech.
2rafa
14d ago
Yeah, with the exception of people who get extreme leeway after long, successful careers (Nolan) or who can cast whoever they want because all actors want to work with them (Wes Anderson) I think it’s usually the studio and/or major financial backers who have the say on casting. In romance/romcoms especially the only way to make profitability even somewhat likely over the last fifteen years since the bottom fell out of the genre has been to cast famous people, whether it’s Fanning/Hemsworth/Pascal in this, Roberts and Clooney in that one a couple of years ago etc.
The union has a veto over the style guide that no doubt mandates specific pronouns (or at least a big say in it), and I highly doubt the style guide has carve-outs for sufficiently evil criminals.
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