This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Folklore for White Folk: stories for wypipo to meet the world?
Humans are driven by stories. Stories establish the legitimacy of rulers when hearkened back to legend, they establish sympathy with average voters via fictionalized humble origins, they motivate soldiers to fight against impossible odds and bind solitary faces into a single fasces. No nation or people have ever been able to cooperate or dominate without apportioning huge sums to the Storyteller Class: poets, priests, historians, dramatists, civic artists, on and on. The wars going on in the world today show the necessity of storytelling. When the Russian president had time to propagandize to the American public in his Tucker interview, he starts with half an hour of storytelling, selecting an arrangement of events to best suit his purpose. When the Ukrainians needed to motivate their countrymen to fight, they recruit the cosmic Star Wars actors to drench themselves in meaning. In the Holy Land, stories and religion meld together to incentivize soldiers and martyrs.
Stories legitimize and empower a group’s existence, and not just their present existence but their future. The Arab world, the Chinese and Japanese nations, the African tribes, the Native Americans, the Black Americans, the Mexicans — every group uses stories. There is no need for them to justify their use. So what of the children of Europe? What should we make of their folklore today?
The white story today is the one told in the classrooms of the elites, found in the the popular books and documentaries, and hawked by the newspapers. There is no need to overwrite and overwrought what has been written for years: slavery, colonization, oppression, and unearned privilege characterize the relationship between white people and others in the mainstream view. (Every story defines the relationship between the group and those outside of it. To the Romans, the others were barbarians in need of subjugation and command; to the Ancient Jews, the "nations" were in need of a light to enlighten them on G-dly matters. To the Chinese today, the Chinese are particularly ancient with superior cultural developments.) The white story is the only story in history which both subjugates a people to an eternally lesser reputation and yet believed by those it subjugates. It is an anomalously demotivating story.
But can we say that the white story transformed into something more global? Can’t the white American story, for example, just be the American story? Nope. If you relinquish the use of a powerful tool while the other groups around you continue to use the tool, you have permanently reduced your ability at a pure loss to yourself. Wokism has died down in public discourse, but it has not diminished its institutional potency, and there’s no guarantee it will not return in double force. There are still hundreds, thousands, of ethnocentric advocacy groups which promote their own empowering story from middle school to the halls of FAANG. Relinquishing your power can work when everyone else is on board, like with nuclear weapons, but it does not work when others are writing you in as the bad guy in their book. Black Americans will continue their storywriting, new Indian managers may continue to favor their own caste, the decades of liberal Reform Judaism are coming to an end, and China will continue trying to influence the Chinese Western population.
Relinquishing your power as a white person isn’t a noble deed when virtue is written by stories and you have burned down your library. No one will remember or care for your innoble sacrifice — certainly not God, the great storyteller who commands his children to write the best stories, even sacrificing their own children in the process. Neither will your non-white great grandchild care, who will despise you because of a story they read, and who — like the Brazilian — may have their craniums measured to see if they are non-white enough to secure a university spot. You may identify yourself as “merely American” or “merely a man”, but the Americans around you do not feel that way and neither do the mass of man on earth. Show me a successful nation in history filled with men — there is none, only those filled with particular peoples with particular stories.
Failing to establish a story means that white children will be passed up for jobs by both non-white and white employers. It means that the person who judges his college application will deduce points in favor of (perhaps) a wealthy Nigerian scion. It means that he will be disinherited even from “secular” storytelling institutions, as we see with the recent Disney leak by Project Veritas. If your kin happens to be trapped in a warzone, a Sikh leader of your country may direct the military to save foreign Sikhs rather than his own countrymen, as we read in Canada today. The stakes are significant and concrete.
“Isn’t it sufficient to dispel the bad stories?”, it may be asked, and the answer is a clear negative. Which restaurant would you patronize, the one which shows you its great features, or the one that stammers about how the rumors of rat infestation and food poisoning are exaggerated? Who would you rather go on a date with, the one who presents their best self or the one who tells you that they certainly don’t have AIDS? Even to attempt to dispel a bad story puts you in a significantly worse position than before. This is a dark art of discourse, typified in the old question asked of politicians: “how often do you beat your wife?”. Attaching a bad story to a person’s connotation, even when obviously false, harms the connotation. There’s a whole world of irrational but potent emotional alchemy that occurs when one stimuli is associated with a different stimuli of positive or negative valence. If I have you smell lavender and then scream at you, you now slightly dislike lavender even if you don’t realize it. If I do this repeatedly, you will learn to hate lavender. You say “white people were not the only slavers”, your children hear “white people as a conceptual space are associated with oppression and are implicitly negatively evaluated”. If you don’t believe me, tell your girlfriend “you do not look fat and disgusting” whenever she wears her favorite dress.
Whypeople
The cure for this social disease is for whites to rediscover their birthright as storytellers: to write their why, proudly and independently. Storytelling is their manifest destiny, a great continent that awaits their traversal. It is territory uncharted, constellations yet connected. It’s the plot to reality’s RPG and your bloodline’s DnD campaign. It’s the story old men tell their children as a sense of security and motivation shines from their face. “What is the story that most motivates my kin” is the story that must be told, for no other reasons than that it can be, because others do their own, because now it’s a competition, and because it’s ultimately fun.
The best story, IMO, wouldn’t focus on the deeds of white folk. Claims of having written the best literature or music, or having erected the greatest architecture, did not stop the Romans from asserting superiority over Greeks while appropriating all of their own inventions. Wars and conquest are also insufficient grounds for a story. The best story is captivating and shows the protagonist overcoming adversity to secure something they rightfully deserve. There are a number of ways to weave a purely secular story for the children of Europe. Does the European first domesticating dogs show his unwavering loyalty to his brethren? I don’t know, but it is pleasant to imagine. Did White people flee Africa because of oppression only to bear with the brutal cold and develop a unique nature through overcoming nature herself? It’s something you can imagine. Does their ability to drink milk show their unusual innocence and love for women? Sure, why not. Have white people the spotless reputation that has been wrongfully blackened by corrupt and wicked people? These are ingredients, I am not a chef. But any positive story — no matter how insane — is better than a lack of story and certainly better than a negative story. All of the peoples of the world when saying their own name feel a sense of pride, and it’s absurd to imagine that there should be an exception to that rule.
I feel like I’m a broken record- whites are not a monolithic group. I don’t have much in common with the blue tribe, I have less in common with Finns or Greeks.
My own kind of white people have positive stories. It matters not to me that my outgroup whites don’t.
This is I think the biggest issue white nationalists face. Why did Polish white nationalists get booed by the BNP and English Defence League they came to support? Because it's not just about being white.
I am white but I prefer my own culture to French white culture or Spanish and the like. And that is before we look at sub-groups.
Black Americans have a much more unified culture because it was built from scratch fairly recently and then migrated around the nation, cobbled together from white Southern culture, whatever remnants of scraps they had from prior cultures and mashed together. They didn't choose to be monolithized as you put it, it was a side effect of losing.
That isn't the case for white people, even restricting it just to white Americans. WASPs and Cajuns, Mid-westerners and East Coasters, Texans and New Yorkers. Rural and Urban. Red and Blue.
If you want to build a unified white identity, one of them first has to actually be picked as the one to coalesce around. And the problem with that is no-one wants to lose their existing identity for that to happen. Having your culture being monolithized with others is seen as a loss, not as a positive. Sunni and Shi'ite, Protestant and Catholic, so on and so forth. Everyone wants their version to be the one that wins. But for the union you speak of to happen, lots and lots of white identities would have to lose and be subsumed into the white collective.
Ironically enough perhaps, the one that is closest to being culturally dominant is the generic Blue tribe, so if you do want a single white identity, any time soon, you might have to throw in with them.
The red tribe is beginning to coalesce around a red/heartland identity, much of it white southern in character.
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t think this thesis pans out empirically. White Americans were quite fine with the idea of a unique white people and civilization pretty much from the get-go, so for hundreds of years, even while they retained their own special affinity to their unique ethnicities. When Europeans discussed colonization and their own continent in the 18th through early 20th century, they were always clear to bind Europeans together into a whole, separated from others. They may at times have placed special “powers” upon the Germany-derived (Saxons), but when speaking about the world they always divided white from other groups. All of this happened organically, which signals that there is an organic delineation that is intuitively obvious when comparing global populations. You simply don’t see an organic other-ization of whites until you get to edge cases like the most Africanized area of Sicily or the North Africa.
Your example of sunni and shia don’t make sense in the context of America where there are hundreds of Arab-specific or Muslim-specific advocacy groups with storytellers. Of course they have serious infighting between them, as does even the most unified people like Israel today with the Haredi. But when it comes to establishing a powerbase in America, they unify and unify their stories. You see the same when it comes to anti-Israelism in the Middle East: Hamas is Sunni, funded by the Shia stronghold. Even the Jewish people were once and still are different tribes, the Cohen tribe or the Ashkenazi/Sephardic division. Asians in America have Asian organizations like AAAJ with revenue in millions and they have a truly fictitious category, combining Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, and Arabs.
So it’s just a mistake to confuse ethnicity with race here. Europeans have always defined themselves as a single people against the other peoples of the world, and this does not exclude predilection to unique identifiers. What it comes down to is the consequence you want. Do you think it is the optimal strategy to cling to a British identity and exclude your cousins, when the other peoples of the world are binding together all of their cousins to position themselves better in the longrun? Alliances are as old as time.
My point is that observably other people in the world are not doing that by choice. One identity has to win over the others. Even within Britain, the English identity being the dominant one is still not a settled issue. and then even within England the dominance of the South over the North is a live issue. So expecting it will be throughout Europe is just not going to happen.
Why are you so against keeping the unique identities of Europe and replacing it with some homogeneity? Within the US it may make sense for some kind of shared American identity to form, but America is so big, what you instead get are groupings that are very different from one another, I simply do not see that as a model for some kind of shared whiteness. I identify somewhat with the Appalachian borderers being as my family is Ulster-Scots and I identify somewhat with WASPs because another part of my family is English Protestants. And indeed within the black community, I can see the strand of where they inherited some of that borderer honor culture. My wife's uncles and my uncles have some very similar points of view despite being from different continents and being different races (both disowning gay sons!). I have more in common sometimes with those black firefighters than I do with my white Blue Tribe colleagues.
Alliances are a very different thing than identity. It's absolutely fine to have alliances over political needs, and desires, but that doesn't mean you have a shared identity. Alliances are practical and can shift and change depending on circumstances.
I’m not sure what you mean by “it isn’t a choice, one identity has to win out.” I’m trying to think of an example of what you mean but I only find counterexamples in the context of enlarged group dynamics. Someone could grow up in Pakistan where tribes matter, and then move to America and join the Desi student organization or a Southeast Asian networking society, while internalizing a story about colonialism and racism (anti-white) that may no even apply to their tribe. This example can just as well apply to a Native American who usefully identifies as “indigenous”, or a Saudi tribal member who begins to identify as Arab, or any other group. Even Korean descendants in America may cease to hate Japan and affiliate with Asian Umbrella organizations from middle school even to their job at Google, where they may advocate for more Asian employees without regard for Koreans specifically. All of this is volitional and the choice is informed by an intuitive allegiant identity, an organic understanding that you and your kin are better positioned by combining together related groups. This is, in fact, the very story of Europe until 21st century philosophers desperately tried to revise it. Your “English” identity came about through a useful amalgamation, but of course, Cornwall will always be unique culturally right? But if you had British members stationed in India in 1910, the obvious group dynamic would be that the Welsh and Scottish and British are one group — even if at home they have separate interests.
Is that not immaterial? Even within my household the dominance of the Apple TV between me and my sibling was a live issue. Even within my grandparents’ progeny the dominance over a house may be a live issue. This can apply in infinitely large or infinitely small directions, but whenever we look at group dynamics we clearly see the allegiant identities I mention above. Eg, where India is concerned, the petty squabbles of Pakistani tribes no longer matter.
Keep them until they get boring, it doesn’t matter, but
is absolutely essential unless you want zero power, demotivated children and probable replacement. In other words, if you genuinely love your unique identity, you must understand that it’s a small branch of a larger tree, and there is already someone with an axe trying at the trunk beneath you.
I disagree, even the earliest identity in Europe was the conscious decision by an old tribal leader, and even the identity “Welsh” or “Scottish” is the consequence of an old alliance. And Anglo-Saxon and all the other hyphenated-Brits… The clearest example of an allegiant identity is maybe Italian, which had different languages and customs at the time of its unification. Really I think it’s some sort of intuitive utilitarian formula. You can interbreed your identity but it will eventually become irrelevant, or you can combine it prudently and have a defensible identity, not unlike a country — or a union of “Greek” states.
But that is just temporary. Take them back home and they split. That is my point, it's an alliance not an erasure of the identity in the first place. If there were one identity. they would all just be British.
Temporary alliance based upon the situation is an entirely different animal than having one singular identity as you claim they must if they are to survive. The Scot and the Welshmen may then ally against the Englishmen in other situations. Temporary alliances based upon the situation seem to provide the benefit you want, without having to set aside the unique identities.
And in some circumstances perhaps the Scot and a Frenchman would ally against the Englishman, or a Jamaican and an Irishman against the Englishmen. (There is perhaps a pattern here.)
Keeping your options open as to which group is best to ally with, seems much the best choice, because it may not be those physically closest to you, or even culturally so, dependent on the situation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It doesn’t bother you that your children and great grandchildren will face a worsened quality of life as a result? They will be confronted with their “character” written in the stories of others and, consciously or unconsciously, lose motivation. Their social and career outcomes will be worse. Other groups have perceived the vast benefit of monolithizing related tribes into one single group, and there are no signs of this slowing down.
I would also say: it’s dubious that humans can even replace a positive tribal story with something else. This seems ingrained in the same way that belonging to a tribe is ingrained. “Being really good at math” is not a sufficient plotline to make up for an empowering origin and destiny.
Blue tribers(or damnyankees) shooting themselves in the foot out of neurosis doesn’t matter very much to me. I don’t like them very much.
And I would posit that the red tribe is undergoing that process of monolithizing. My children and grandchildren will have positive and empowering tribal stories, some of them made up and some of them true- c’est la vie. Some of those stories will come from me, or directly from their maternal grandparents; others will be in the red tribe water. But I have no desire for them to go the way of damyankees and carpetbaggers; those are my enemies, not minorities(who are, after all, just perfectly sensibly trying to take care of them and theirs). Seeing them hang themselves is schadenfreudelicious(it is to a word, I just invented it).
I see where you come from, but how can you devise a captivating and holistic identity which specifically excludes red tribe? And while you may not like them now, perhaps you would like red tribe if they stopped behaving self-destructively?
You perhaps misunderstand me. I don't like the blue tribe and am perfectly happy to require at least some assimilation to red norms for a captivating and holistic identity. The blue tribe behaves self destructively from a group cohesion perspective, and this does not move me to pity or frustration. They are my enemies. I feel bad for some of the innocents caught up in it(trans kids most especially), but there's not a lot to be done about it.
When Jonah was commanded to preach at Nineveh to achieve the conversion of the Assyrians, lest they be destroyed in God's wrath, he refused until swallowed by a whale for the reason that he did not actually want the Assyrians to avoid destruction. I find this highly relatable.
Alright, but what I am trying to get at is what you intend your story to be. Is this a single-family story? Do you intend to somehow keep your ethnic-specific identity eg as an Irishman?
The red tribe seems to be broadly coalescing into a big tent story about heartlanders in the same boat. This narrative takes strong historical liberties- my ancestors would not have gotten along with midwestern Germans, for example- but it is a narrative and doesn't overtax the assimilative capacity of anyone like me.
I am a Cajun and Cajuns are historically quite good at keeping a distinctive identity even when part of a broader whole. I also have many family stories of overcoming hardship. None of this places me or mine outside of a heartlander identity but cements the state of belonging within it.
As is probably well known, I have a strong religious identity and strong religious identity can often partially substitute for lack of ethnic ties. I don't expect this latter property to be necessary in twenty years, but it is another reason why me and mine will do OK.
I understand why dissident blue tribers consider it a crisis that there is a lack of positive stories about white people as a class. The solution for them is to join the red tribe, which regards its own ancestors positively. Honestly I'm not sure why people like me would want to establish an overarching 'white' identity in coalition with the mainstream blue tribe; as far as I can tell, deep reds can manage our own relations with the blacks and hispanics just fine, the mainstream blues won't stop trying to make our lives harder for no reason and bailing them out from their self inflicted wounds is just stupid.
I have never heard of “heartlander identity”. What are its stories and who are its writers? Who are the big historical heroes? Are you sure you have enough manpower to lobby for your interests if the American upper class becomes less amenable to “heartlanders”? As a Cajun, you don’t want any unity with the French who share your heritage? How can your story be written so as to exclude the vast flood of central and south American migrants, or do you not care?
IMO this is a losing strategy. Take the Quebecoise — cool, they have their own unique post-French identity in a location they have control over (for now). What are their plans for the massive increase in Canadian Indians who may not relinquish their identity and who will control their parent-territory? They will go the way of the Samaritans who refused to unite with the twelve tribes. They will be a relic of the demographic museum like white south afrikkaners, with a timetable for their replacement. It’ll be like that Nazi cartoon of the last French white people. You’ll be the Kalash of Pakistan, temporarily tolerated by the unified Pashtun all around them.
I think this will happen to any small ethnicity which fails to adapt to global reality. Adaption is a reality of history which is why there was even a French people to begin with — a combined group of Frankish Germans, Celts, Roman ancestry. Imagine how silly you would be if you were the last remaining “heartlander” Celt in France, while Charlemagne rewrites the glory of your adapted relatives.
More options
Context Copy link
In order to do that, I have to voluntarily embrace yet another vision of the world in which my ancestors were the bad guys. One of the core tenets of the “heartlanders of the world, unite” narrative is that the residents of large cities have always been snooty, effete, degenerate bullies, using their unfair control of media and industry to push never-ending cycles of hateful ideas and corrupting technology on the honest and hard-working people of the hinterlands. The immense scientific, cultural, and industrial achievements of the major urban centers? Yeah, those were bad actually.
The hallmarks of the urban elite’s artistic output - say, classical music, or Renaissance painting and sculpture - are actually just hoity-toity status-grubbing frivolities that snobs pretend to like in order to impress their college classmates. Science and technology promised to uplift humanity, but actually just divorced us from our natural God-given productive capacities and started our perilous descent toward transhuman abominations.
I understand that you specifically might not believe all of these things, or at least not fully. However, these are all claims I see made explicitly all the time, even by people whose entire lives and livelihoods are only possible because of the products of urbanite intellectual genius. Hell, much of the South’s financial life during its antebellum heyday was entirely dependent on the inventions of Yankees like Eli Whitney and Robert Fulton. (And much of its later financial life has depended on the inventions of different Yankees, like Henry Ford.) Heartlanders like to see themselves as the ones who actually make stuff, without whom the whole operation of society would crash down because urban degenerates are incapable of producing anything worthwhile. This narrative bears little resemblance to real life, either historically or currently.
I don’t say any of this to double down on the other extreme - the sneering, self-absorbed contempt that people such as yourself correctly perceive as emanating from some parts of “Blue Tribe” culture. (I’ve put “Blue Tribe” in quotations because, like “Red Tribe”, it’s a largely illusory, Frankesteinesque conglomeration of disparate elements; in other words, fake and gay.)
I’m in that rapidly-shrinking category of Americans who can legitimately trace their ancestry to all of David Hackett Fisher’s “founding American ethnicities”. My dad’s bloodline includes Mayflower Yankees and Cavalier potentates, including several notable early slave-owning politicians. My mom’s ancestry is deep Borderer through her maternal line - my maternal great-grandmother and her husband were hicks through-and-through, from a podunk Arkansas town. I have family in the heartland, and they’re great people; I wouldn’t want to disrupt their way of life, and I find there’s a lot to be said for it.
However, what you’re asking me to do is to relinquish my sense of pride in the very impressive accomplishments of the parts of my heritage that, in my opinion, truly made America great - the Yankee industrialists and inventors and thinkers - and to embrace an identity of defiance and resentment toward them, in favor of throwing my lot in with the Americans who have, for one reason or another, contributed arguably the least to America’s greatness, with the exception of the military sphere. This is quite a tall ask, and I would like to see Southern/Midwestern whites exercise some level of empathy and grace toward it, rather than the scorn and derision you’ve consistently demonstrated. There is still the possibility of a reconstituted White American identity that recognizes in equal parts the contributions of America’s various white ancestral groups, but I fear that people such as yourself are actually one of the largest obstacles to that project.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a little more exhortative than analysis or discussion.
Is this place supposed to be a recruiting ground for 'wy' Nats?
More options
Context Copy link
Absolutely.
Certainly. We must craft stories that not only define but elevate us. This isn't just a dark art of discourse. There's something more fundamental to it. Negative examples alone are insufficient to specify reality- because the state space of potential behaviors and beliefs is too vast. Even AI exhibit this limitation. AI or human, you have to have a positive narrative. Even a vastly wrong narrative is more actionable, more powerful, than no framework at all. General intelligences thrive on positive exemplars that embody what to emulate. I might append to your claims ever so slightly, to say that the most impactful stories aren’t merely about reclaiming something presumed rightfully ours but demonstrating through our narratives why and how such claims are justified through actions and transformations witnessed within the stories themselves.
However- your focus on race rubs me the wrong way... the crux of your argument- seems to be that we are in a narrative war. And maybe we are. And maybe that does necessitate justifying European heritage on those terms. But this weapon of war... isn't the true justification of my heritage. The true justification is our focus on love & transcendence & curiosity & inner and outer peace & communion- in and of themselves.
The stories that truly empower and transform us are those that transcend mere racial or cultural identities to promote understanding and empathy across all forms of life. The acts of domesticating animals or engaging in interracial relationships were and are profound opportunities to connect deeply with 'the other'. To embrace it, to permit it to transform us and become More. Our narratives, My narratives- as an American of European descent- are about the celebration of cooperation. They are about the rewards intrinsic in actively dissolving the boundaries that divide us, be they between races, species, or differing forms of consciousness. This is about more than overcoming external adversities; it's about internal transformations akin to Scrooge’s journey or the redemption arcs in Hazbin Hotel, where characters find salvation through love and mutual understanding. A narrative through-line of fighting to change ourselves and battling our own demons for the sake of those that we cherish.
I champion narratives that do not prioritize one race or group but rather focus on the universal essence of love and the potential for transcendence. If the narrative of any group, including those with European heritage, can contribute positively to this broader vision, it merits recognition. Yet, the ultimate aim is to move beyond all restrictive identities. We strive for a narrative where love serves not to reinforce divisions but to transcend them, ensuring that the legacy we pass on is imbued with a memogenetics of empathy and unity. This narrative of transcendent connection is what will truly sustain us, not the preservation of physical or cultural purity, but the cultivation of deep, empathetic links that span all imaginable divides.
That's my story. That's my heritage. That's my family. If you really want me to 'rediscover my birthright as a storyteller' to 'write my why, proudly and independently' ... That's the story you're going to get.
More options
Context Copy link
Thx.
Along similar lines, I was thinking about using my newfound hobby of generative AI, mostly used for ..the usual, to make some incredibly crude propaganda.
Namely, fake photos of a 'good ending' humanity.
No ugly architecture, no ugly or stupid people, no weak people..contrasted with some extrapolation of what we have now.
South Africanized Europe, Berlin dilapidated and looking like Joburg..
More options
Context Copy link
Why do you exhort against acts and tales of greatness, the fuel of millennia of glories passed? Why do you suggest (fetishize) victimhood? Domesticating the dog is great, other animals too. Milk... Eh.
The greatest things Man's done:
These are transcendent acts, overcoming our animal nature, becoming something greater. You can disagree, find others etc. but arguing the Romans conquered the Greeks ignores that the Greeks colonized the Romans' minds. We remember them for their works, not their pointless civil wars and petty treasures. As Caesar said, describing Cicero:
You can’t make a captivating story out of just that. A truly captivating story needs a protagonist who suffers, especially unjustly. All of the most powerful social-organizing stories have this component. You read it in Exodus, the Gospel, in French revolutionary literature, in both communism and nazism (not that these are good but they were powerful movements), in China’s century of humiliation.
Victimhood is a key element to any group’s story because it increases intragroup ties, it inoculates against catastrophe (you won’t always be great), and it prevents emotions from being taken advantage of by outside forces. You have to still have an element of greatness and destiny, but a victimhood and overcoming component is essential.
I think a 40% infant mortality rate would fill that criterion....
But that applies to everyone. A group story needs to make the group’s struggles out as special. I think every non-white group in America has a story that is utilized by the competitive PMC class, even great oppressors in history (the Arabs) can complain about the history of colonialism and even complain about post-9/11 discrimination. High-caste Indians in the UK may complain about colonialism. Etc.
These are highly motivating: “I have been unjustly oppressed and attacked by you — I am a moral sympathetic character whom God likes more than you — and yet here I am succeeding wildly in spite of this, with my guiltless and pure repute. [Implied: you must really suck, white folks, because not only did you take my wealth and abuse me, but I perform better than you in spite of your corrupt advantage]”.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What is the nature of power?
I don't really know. I'm asking because I want ideas and reading material. To add some meat to this request, here are some ideas and definitions I have encountered or pondered over:
All of these are relevant only between sovereign actors capable of acting and thinking themselves. Their power's a function of what benefit they offer other actors (either directly, or by mobilizing non-actors' into productive power.) I've read Kelsen, Grotius, de Vattel, Austin, Scott, Luttwak et al. and have built thriving and productive things. Yet I crave further understanding. Perhaps, I but yearn for a simpler, faded time, while today's structures impersonally placate the governed (placate, not wield, as (western) state(s') power's collapsed along with the social contract), or perhaps more accurate possessed both the governed and the governing ("they drank their own cool aide" and trying to understand this, my tools fail.
...does anyone understand how hyper cycles work (not just their contours like Gartner but e.g. how currents/egregores pick a specific avatar or specific areas of concern to battle over?
This series is a pretty off-beat musing on Power and Tyranny.
They distinguish between two forms of power: Non-Tyrannical power which is rule for the common good, and Tyrannical power, which is rule for private gain. Tyrannical power requires using others for the use of the master's end. Non-Tyrannical power is used for the good of the one on whom it is wielded.
People give up power to masters because when they believe that this giving up of power contributes to their own good. In a non-Tyranny, people cooperate together to do more things than they could have accomplished individually, and this belief is justified. In a Tyranny, often there are true believers who think they are serving the common good, while they are really being exploited. Other times, in a Tyranny people give up power by seeking their own good to protect them from a sense of danger the Tyrant has caused.
One video goes into how Bureaucracy is a requirement for a Tyranny, because it is a means by which a Tyrant is able to enact their will on a wider scale.
The series is done by a couple of Catholics and occasionally they mention Church things, but I think the series is worth listening to even if that is off putting at first.
More options
Context Copy link
I think "power" is overbroad. When we talk about power in a grand society context, it's kind of like talking about money in an economic context! We can distill some principles from smaller examples, and even identify some broad rules, but at the end of the day, just like economics, we aren't exactly sure if the model is correct. There are a number of different schools of thought, many considered legitimate, and many contradictory. Unfortunately, the problem is of sufficient complexity that being entirely sure about it is hard, if not impossible. So in many ways, "macro power" has to have a similar treatment and caveats as economics.
If we're talking smaller groups of individuals interacting, or even one or at most two organizations, things are a lot more easy and fruitful to work through. Interpersonal power is probably distilled in a half dozen key aspects (one example) Even some trickier questions can still be answered and thought through productively, like: "you're the CEO of a midsize company, how do you wield your own power and where do you take no action?" A complicated question that involves both the mechanics of power, organizational behavior, and moral questions. It's answerable I think, with some good effort, and can yield some useful and intellectually interesting conclusions. But it seems you're wondering more about broader forces. To which I think the best we can do is to carefully and thoughtfully study history itself, rather than spend time explicitly philosophizing.
More options
Context Copy link
Starting from “the ability to influence important things” we can see why poets in the past were powerful (consider Muhammad), singers, writers. Harari talks about stories as the primary driver of civilizational power (3:28).
More options
Context Copy link
Power is a +8 racial bonus to listen checks
More options
Context Copy link
The subject of power fascinates me too and over the years I have gotten some understanding of it. I think you are over complicating your understanding by looking at the complex power systems, it is much more simpler than that. The most basic and simple definition of power might as well be "ability to impose your will on other", whether it be through institutional authority, manipulation, persuasion, threats or money etc. This simple definition gets complicated by the fact that both "ability" and "will" changes on the context we are in. What that essentially means is power is extremely sensitive to change and does not remain static. Either you are gaining power or losing power, there's no maintaining power.
From what I understand, modern political institutions are like pipelines of power. They "regulate" the ebb and flow of power to be channelized in a bounded area, so as to prevent someone from exercising power in ways that are undesirable(what is and what is not desirable is another debate). But the power they have is "authority power" or sometimes "money power" too but that is subject to circumstance. In addition to having already institutional power, they also derive power from representatives, who have come to position of authority within the institute by virtue of people vesting their power in them. A politician would be a simple example, directly elected by people. People directly vest the power they derived from the institutes in form of votes to put the politician in a position to wield institutional authority. Another simple example would be a Hedge fund manager, who have been vested with power because they provide value by increasing their power.
A young journalist observing that the state is trying to build a bridge across a body of water was concerned. The bridge would have required piers so large as to disrupt tidal flows in the sound, among other problems. Having the will to prevent that, he wrote a detailed and scathing criticism of the project. His writing and passion was so powerful that even the Governor of the state agreed that it was a bad idea. Now that's pretty much how power should work in a democratic state, and how journalist can influence the Institutional power to do good. Then he saw the state's Assembly vote overwhelmingly to pass a preliminary measure for the bridge. Why? What happened? Apparently the governor wasn't the most powerful person in the state, it was lowly civil servant in Public Works Department who trumped the whole system upside down to have his way.
The journalist, Robert Caro, then researched and wrote a book on how this civil servant, Robert Moses, acquired and wielded the power. His books, both the biography of Robert Moses and the cult classic biographical series of books on Lyndon B Johnson are masterclasses in the nature of power. I would highly recommend you to read that.
More options
Context Copy link
I know George R. R. Martin gets a lot of flack now as being Reddit trash for midwits, but I think his parable of the sellsword is a really excellent and pithy little exploration of the nature of power and political legitimacy. I will post a variation of it below:
That's why stratocracy (the army is the government) is the only sane form of government, I think.
We could fix the problem of democracy (ostensible rulers are people elected on basis of popularity) but bureaucracy/NGOs actually running things by instituting a cooperative/competitive meaningful state-wide MMO wargame simulating industrial warfare, and people who do really well in it can be voted in into representative positions..
E.g. you start playing as a kid riding in a virtual tank or sailing a boat, shooting other kids doing the same, obeying orders from someone older,. Or for girls, running an open pit mine, taking care of a cotton farm or clearing out ancient bunkers looking for valuable trash or keeping a small refinery or factory running. All these are fun computer games requiring thought.
As people get older they take on more responsible tasks in the game, leaders get voted in. Running a war is one of the hardest tasks out there, and although the stakes are low (how +-5% much tax you pay next year as adult), pocket money as kids, so I'd expect after someone has taken parts in dozens of virtual campaigns you're going to end up with some pretty smart people in the more complex parts of the game - unit command, industrial coordination, strategy, logistics etc..
This (reality based learning and selection through mmo) is a really fun idea. Has this been described further elsewhere I could I nerdsnipe you into more detail?
Banks, Iain M. 1988. The Player of Games.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is called "capitalism", and that effect is why the most capitalist countries have been the most powerful ever since it was invented (pre-empire Romans, Dutch, English, Americans). The accumulation of capital is fundamentally the accumulation of power; when people pay you to do something they want, that is them casting their vote to a much larger degree than their actual vote in a ballot box is.
Because capitalism directly rewards people for serving others in the most advanced way they can, it is only natural that those who cannot or will not serve seek to destroy it (forced redistributionism and creating an artificial scarcity of resources are the two most popular ways); it also runs into a problem where automation can obsolete (and thus bankrupt) so many people at the same time that a socialist revolution occurs in lieu of civil war (US, 1934).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Those bullet points are too abstract, too many inferences away from a useful definition of power. Power is the ability to change others, nature, or one's self, and also the ability to resist changes to one's self.
You might laugh and say I'm just repurposing the classic elementary-school-level framework for talking about literature ("man versus man/nature/self"), but it's a firm foundation for thinking about power and I doubt you'll find anything better.
More options
Context Copy link
Power is the ability to tell other people what to do and have them do it. Either because you’ll hurt them for not doing it, or because they want to follow you.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Thursday's Presidential debate revealed to the world that President Biden is mentally incompetent and that an unelected and unaccountable group of people is running the country, and likely has been running the country for some time. This unavoidable truth has likely doomed Biden's 2024 campaign. However, it has likely also struck a crippling blow against the Democrat Party's primary value proposition: "Democracy."
The Democrat's have made "Democracy" the party's core identity, its primary rhetoric, and indeed, its very reason for being. The Democrats insist that the right to vote for one's representatives is sacrosanct, that voting is "Democracy," that the country is "Democracy," and that the Democrats are "Democracy." Directly or indirectly preventing or diminishing the right to vote for the representative of one's own choosing is, according to the party, fundamentally anti-democratic. Moreover, they loudly and repeatedly insist that a vote for the Republicans is a vote "against Democracy" and will "end Democracy" in the United States. The rhetoric is existential, black and white, and leaves no room for maneuver.
Thursday's debate transformed the party's "Democracy" rhetoric into a mortal wound. If Joe Biden is mentally incompetent, then the only value of his candidacy lies in the proposition that the party will wield Biden's executive power without his knowledge or control. But, according to the Democrats, being forced to vote for an unnamed, unelected cabal of unaccountable lobbyists, bureaucrats, and special interests is no vote at all. Indeed, it is anti-democratic according to the party's own terms.
The Democrat's only argument is that "if we don't run the country anti-democratically, it will be the end of Democracy!" This is rhetorical checkmate. The Republicans and left-leaning, dissident democrats will turn the Democrat Party's super-weapon against them and there will be no escape. By jettisoning every other value but "Democracy" from the party, the Democrats have left themselves nowhere to retreat. The Republicans will use the last decade of the Democrat's own histrionic statements against them, rightly painting them as tyrants perpetrating a coup. Dissident, left-leaning Democrats will do the same, and claim the mantle of genuine "Democracy" for themselves.
Its actually, literally Joever.
I doubt it. The central thrust of the "Donald Trump wants to destroy democracy" critique is that Donald Trump tried to seize power when he lost in 2020, and nothing has changed on that front.
Can we please stop with this? This type of claim is just absurdly bad faith.
Trump attempted to use some esoteric lawfare to force a debate about the merits of election interference claims.
The esoteric legal theories were one thing.
The actual evacuation of Congress during the process was another, and you can't possibly call that lawfare.
Notably J6 harmed his esoteric legal theories. Now maybe you think Trump is a dumb dumb. But if his lawfare had any chance of working, J6 riot killed it.
More options
Context Copy link
Trump had literally nothing to do with that.
More options
Context Copy link
That's the other half of the statement: I can very easily deny that "Donald Trump tried..." to do that.
He's not a charismatic genius that can manipulate a crowd into doing his bidding with veiled statements and subtle insinuations. He didn't ask for people to storm the capital, so I have a hard time believing that he tried to get people to storm the capital.
Oh I agree. I don't think he asked for anyone to storm the capital.
Then again, Biden and Bernie didn't ask anyone to try to torch a Federal Courthouse.
I happen to think we ought to hold we hold political leaders responsible for their factions. It is their job not only to represent, but also to channel and restrain, their supporters. And I think the left should have done much more do during BLM and the right should have done much more so than 1/6.
That all said, a consistent belief that political leaders aren't responsible in such a way is palatable too. But after all all the ink spilled on why the Dems wouldn't take responsible for BLM, I'm skeptical.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'd say the real intent on J6 was to deliberately engineer a constitutional crisis, the Capitol mob was just a convenient, possibly useful tool Trump didn't intend (but also didn't have strong feelings about, thus sitting back and letting it play out until it failed). The original effort, we must recall, was this: pressure directly from Trump and abetted by what courts have determined to be lies, onto Mike Pence, to take what scholars also consider a plainly illegal action, which pressure was cynical and self-serving. For what it's worth, I happen to think that this effort would fail. Most Dems seem to think that the SC would obviously side with Trump, against the law, simply because they were selected by him, but I don't think this would have been the case. However, triggering a constitutional crisis on purpose is, in a word, bad. Especially the reason why. It was not some big important issue worth fighting for... it was just self-interest, pure and unadulterated.
But yes, Democrats making it about "democracy" is also a little bit cynical, and a bit misleading. The core message is actually "We can't trust Trump's morality with power". Said morality might threaten democracy. Probably does. Just not as directly. The other parallel that needs to be mentioning is the view that Republicans have been trying to subvert the actual election mechanics as well, via gerrymandering, VRA-violating discriminatory efforts, and general denialism to question turnout. I think the objective record of Republicans on this front is mixed. I don't think it's an existential-type threat.
Thus, the calculation to call it an attack on democracy itself is a political ploy, and somewhat dangerous. On balance, I'd rate it as less dangerous than election denialism (one of the worst poison pills), but still dangerous in practice to the stated goal of actually preserving democracy. Now, part of this rests on a key assumption: Would the SC actually have sided with Trump? If yes, the concern is at least logical/understandable but you can also see how the seeds of devaluing the system in a misguided attempt to defend it are laid.
Indeed, the supreme court chose not to when Trump's favorite state AG sued Pennsylvania over allegations they were certifying a fraudulent election.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You can describe almost any attempt to seize power this way. The Reichstag Fire Decree was just some esoteric lawfare to force a debate about the dangers of communists. Nobody thought the 12th amendment was vague prior to 2020.
You can go both ways. My tax deductions are an attempt to topple the united states government by depriving them of necessary capital to fund the work they are doing.
Driving to the grocery store in my ICE vehicle is an attempt to melt the polar ice caps and flood the coastal cities and cause massive deaths.
Golf is me trying to kill all of the bald eagles by hitting them with golf balls.
etc.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He was aiming for more than a debate, I think. He wanted to overturn the election because he thought it was stolen from him. If it was, that is a reasonable position to hold!
But saying he just wanted to force a debate seems to ignore his own words. That's not how Trump operates. He is pretty straightforward on things like this. Thats why he put pressure on Georgia and Pence. To recognize the election was stolen and act accordingly.
Calling him a danger to democracy is hyperbole, but claiming he just wanted to force a debate on the merits, seems plainly wrong. He didn't want a debate, he wanted action.
The difference between “Jack slandered Jill” and “Jack warned the community about Jill” is evidence of Jill’s misdeeds.
The difference between “Don stole the election” and “Don rescued the rigged election” is evidence that the election was rigged.
Claiming the election had been stolen would’ve been reasonable if there’d been compelling evidence for it. Doing so without evidence is the same thing as trying to stealing the election. If Trump had succeeded in overturning the election, it would’ve been stolen. Like if Jack’s convinced everyone that Jill is wicked without evidence, he’s slandered her.
Sure, I don't believe Trump is correct. Which is why I said "if it was".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Until such time as Trump's supporters unstorm the capitol and Trump didn't try to have his VP declare him the winner despite losing, it seems entirely reasonable to say that Trump tried to seize power. "It was to force a debate" is just another flavor of Trumpist cope deploy to reconcile the gap between their self-image as patriotic Americans and the reality that they prioritize loyalty to their wannabe caudillo.
Trump did not try to have Pence declare him the winner.
John Eastman may have suggested to Pence that he had the authority to do this (although as far as I can tell this is hearsay), but the plan was to have Pence reject some of the electoral slates, and force a debate within the house over the merits of the fraud claims.
It has been nearly FOUR YEARS since this happened. The evidence for this is well documented, and the plan has internal coherence.
Please just spend a few minutes reading about this and try to read it with the context that the people involved aren’t stupid, and their plan wasn’t lifted from a children’s cartoon.
If the election is thrown into the House because neither side gets a majority in the Electoral College, that is the opposite of "forcing a debate over the merits of the fraud claims". The process for forcing a debate over the fraud claims is an objection to a State certificate under the rules set out in the Electoral Count Act. Such objections were made, in the cases of AZ and PA debated, and rejected in Congress on January 6/7 2021. (It was during the AZ debate that the rioters entered the Capitol building and forced an adjournment.)
The contingent election that Eastman was trying to use isn't a procedure for debating who won the Electoral College vote - it is an alternative procedure specified by the Constitution for use when it is clear that no-one won the Electoral College vote. Consistently with most of Trump's strategy, it isn't an attempt to litigate the counting of the votes cast in November, it is an attempt to throw them all out and decide the election without reference to them. (In this case, a party-line House vote with unequal weighting of votes). In fact, the simple, obvious reading of the Constitution is that it doesn't even allow a debate - the Constitution says that the House should vote "immediately".
More options
Context Copy link
What should I read?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, Trump hasn't, but the alternative to him at least somewhat has. Trump did lawfare to try to overturn an election. Colorado did lawfare to try to fix an election. So, well, okay, Trump wants to destroy democracy*, but if the alternative to him also wants to destroy democracy*, that's not really much incentive to vote against Trump, is it? It's just, shit, guess democracy's getting destroyed.
*Both Trump and the Democrats legitimately believe their antidemocratic actions are justified attempts to save democracy. They are both wrong. I wouldn't use the phrase "wants to destroy democracy" to describe that state of mind, but I'll echo your word choice for now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, yes, obviously. But so what? In a weeks time everyone will have selective amnesia about what they saw. Come November there will have been enough sparse yet selective Biden encounters where he appears at least as lucid as he has minus the debate that people will find convenient rationales to ignore it. There have been dozens of "surely normies and partisans will wake up now" moments in the last 7 years, and yet nothing ever changes. The crimes against our republic, our nation, and our civilization which the uniparty has wraught are too terrifying to contemplate. So they largely continue with broad support.
I'm not so sure. The NYT editorial board has pulled out the knives.
And next month those editors could have lost their jobs for their hateful and agist rhetoric. Thats what happened after an editor was foolish enough to publish the Tom Cotton piece. Or they could recant and grovel and publish 3x the editorials about how wrong they were.
Happy to make a bet if you really think that checks notes the entire editorial board of the NYT is going to lose their jobs over writing this editorial.
Why would i take that bet when my assertion wasn't that some specific event would happen, but that a multitude of possible events could rendering this "normies wake up" editorial utterly meaningless.
Happy to make a bet about the NYT editorial board recanting this oped as well.
The bet I would make is that come November Biden is the nominee, and the New York Times is full throatedly endorsing him. I won't bet on the specific events or causes between here and there, because the whole point of my post is that anything could happen, but that is the destination. I don't know how we get there, but there is where I am sure we are heading.
If he's the nominee, obviously they're going to endorse him. It's not much of a prediction to say that the nyt will not endorse the orange man.
I do expect them to say something like "despite biden's cognitive blah blah orange man is worse".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The entire editorial board?
Probably not, but they could pick a scapegoat. I suspect more likely that if Biden isn't replaced they'll just pretend it never happened, when they endorse him.
For once I agree with you- the NYT editorial board in October will endorse Biden on the groups of Trump being the kind of maniac he wasn't last election.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree that Biden’s in no shape to be president, but you’re catastrophizing. The “unelected and unaccountable group of people running the country” are the west wing staff, same as always. Staffs are elected and accountable as extensions of their respective candidates. Like in this election it’s looking like voters will boot Biden and his people.
More options
Context Copy link
I find it odd how reluctant Democrats are to defend the concept of democracy. Of course they say how important democracy is, but do they ever explain why? Their rhetoric assumes the correctness of democracy, as though it is an end in itself and not simply a means to an end.
Is this cope? Crimestop? Much like other taboo topics, thinking too hard about the issue leads to the possibility that deeply-held convictions could be wrong. You can't build your argument for democracy out of the wisdom of crowds. Half of the population will demonstrably vote for Donald Trump. Either you're wrong about the wisdom of crowds, or you're wrong about Trump. You can make an argument that democracy is good. You can make an argument that Donald Trump is bad. But it is quite hard to make an argument that democracy is good and that Donald Trump is bad at the same time.
It really isn't. Democracy is about letting people have a say. They may be wrong, they may vote for candidates I think are stupid. They may hold ideas I think are harmful. But democracy isn't about making the best decisions. There is no wisdom of crowds in this situation. Thats not why democracy is good.
It's about ensuring everyone has a buy in and a stake in society. Their choices may well be awful. Doesn't matter in the slightest. IQ 90 voters get just as much say as IQ 140 voters. Because they have to live in society too. And giving them a say in how it is run helps societal stability. Whether their choices are good or bad is orthogonal to the value of democracy.
Now I don't think Trump is all that bad really. But even if he were, the fact many people would vote for him doesn't mean democracy is bad. People should be allowed to make bad choices, and those choices should impact the society they live in, if enough people make the same one. If everyone wants to ban cars, we should ban cars, even if objectively it's a stupid idea. We get to decide what is important to us. That is the value of democracy.
That's one way of defining democracy. But it's very different from the Rousseauan view (particularly the Jacobin variety), wherein "democracy" becomes about government acting in accord with Rousseau's "General Will" — which is not the same thing as the will of the majority. As you note, the latter can be wrong, while the former is always correct by definition.
Yes but Rousseau seems to be entirely incorrect. His claim basically is that individual men of simplicity will by deliberation in small groups find that the common good will be so obvious that only common sense is required to identify it. Likewise he believes that such simple folk cannot be fooled or confused by stratagems.
Looking around I see that conception to not actually tally with reality. So whether there is such a general will may be irrelevant, even in small groups making the right choices is not clearly obvious. And even if it were it only applies in small groups (groups of peasants making decisions around an oak tree being his rather picturesque vision), given that is not the type of democracy we are operating in even Rousseau wouldn't think it could apply here. The General will is simply not available to us at this scale.
I agree, but it doesn't stop people from invoking concepts from his work… or, more specifically, Jacobin-derived interpretations thereof.
Here, the people I've read break from Rousseau, in that it's not the simple peasants who identify the common good. Instead, it is only elite technocratic experts who have the right mix of talent and education to work out the correct choices, and it is by "deliberation in small groups" of these rare people that the General Will can be divined. And thus, "democracy" is when these experts become the intellectual vanguard of the ruling elite, and the greatest threat to "democracy" is the "populist" who would unseat them by appealing to the superstitions and prejudices of the less-enlightened masses.
We're a representative democracy, and the elected officials are to represent the people. Well, to quote from a previous comment of mine:
Generally, it seems to me like many have come to hold two apparently contradictory propositions:
Liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government. Our governments are democracies, and it is from this that they draw their legitimacy.
The masses are too ignorant, misinformed, bigoted, and superstitious to generally know what's in their own best interest; nor to determine which potential representative would be most skilled at determining what that societal best interest is; and thus the government cannot afford to allow their input much weight on how it governs them.
One way to square these is to simply ditch #1 — this is the Moldbug "formalist" position. Tell people our "Brahmin/Elf" elite caste are legitimate rulers not because of "consent of the governed," but because they're literally the only people with the smarts and know-how to be capable of governing a complex modern society.
Of course, this runs against centuries of deeply-ingrained cultural mythology, particularly in the US. I mean, we're coming up on the 4th of July. Freedom, democracy, the Founding Fathers standing up to King George, et cetera. Many wouldn't take such an ideological u-turn very well (hence Yarvin's cryptographic weapon locks, VR, and so on).
But then, we notice that #1 and #2 are only actually incompatible if we define "democracy" in #1 to mean something that includes "the masses having significant input on how they are governed." And, like Carroll's Humpty-Dumpty noted, definitions are flexible; modern academia has made an artform of playing games with the definitions of words. Thus, one can resolve the paradox by adopting a definition of "democracy" wherein the influence of the electorate plays little role, a “stage managed” “defensive democracy” where the voters are free to choose… among a strictly-limited menu of elite-acceptable choices. And if you look at the methodologies used by many of the "democracy indices" that purport to measure how "democratic" various countries are, you'll see something that puts a lot more weight on 'does it have these various things left-leaning technocrats like?' and less on 'how responsive to the electorate is it?'
In short, we're definitely still a democracy… where "democracy" means whatever our unaccountable elites say it does.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I can see, perhaps, an argument for benefit to social stability by everyone having buy in. "Stupid, terrible things will happen if enough people can be convinced they should happen, and that's the value of democracy," seems like the strongest argument against democracy.
That being said, it seems like the trend line for social stability is pointed in only one direction, so the argument that we should have democracy to keep things stable is looking pretty weak these days as well.
Contrarily of course, "Amazing, great things will happen if enough people can be convinced they should happen" would then be the strongest argument for democracy no?
And whatever the trend line of democracies might be, communism, feudalism and the like appear to be worse. We are not in a vacuum here, some kind of method of governance will be in place.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What's disturbing me is that the conversation around this isn't "is Biden fit to lead" it's "does Biden look presidential enough?" Competence at the top of a ticket should pale in comparison to competence as President. The country should be considering the 25th Amendment, not just the ballot. The punditry seems more concerned with the appearance of the thing than the thing itself, and that thing is that Biden maybe shouldn't continue to serve in the current moment - far less the next four years.
What constitutes "competence" for a president? How much does he need? How much "competence" does King Charles III need to do his job?
Why not? He seems to be doing his job quite well — said job being a powerless figurehead while the unelected "deep state" permanent bureaucracy does all the actual governing.
More than you’d think. We’ve had bad kings before. Bad princes too (looking at you, Harry).
Sure, but how much more power did the monarch wield back then?
I was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdication_of_Edward_VIII
Who was basically forced to resign (so not much power) but like Harry was incapable of keeping it in his pants when confronted with beautiful American divorcees.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ironically, the ability to convince people that he's in charge even though he is not.
The kayfabe is the thing in itself.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I see people saying this, but I don't see it. I don't get why this really makes much of a difference; many of the scenarios I see circulated and speculated about in many of the other places I frequent are of the sort that won't be affected by this.
Except, as I've noted before, many on that side tend to define "Democracy" rather differently than what you imply. The people voting for whatever representative they want — whether approved by elites or not — is "populism," which is the greatest threat to Our Democracy; "Democracy" meaning rule by an intellectual vanguard party of elite technocrats who are the only people with the smarts to enact the Rousseauan "general will," which is what the masses would vote for were they all properly educated and enlightened enough to know what's truly good for them, instead of being loaded down with ignorant bigots and bitter clingers, vulnerable to exploitation by the next Hitlerian populist demagogue.
Do you have a citation for this, because I've only seen the reverse — people on the left arguing that "being forced to vote for an unnamed, unelected cabal of unaccountable lobbyists, bureaucrats, and special interests" is the very definition of Democracy.
Yes, which, via redefinitions of "Democracy" along the lines of places ranging from Germany to Ukraine to China, will work just fine — because "if we don't run the country
anti-democraticallyinsulated from people who vote wrong, it will be the end ofDemocracyrule by those who know best."(I can't find it via a quick search, but I remember back in 2016 over at the subreddit linking to a professor who argued for stripping the franchise from Trump voters, on the grounds that it's legitimate — the right thing for democracy, even — to remove the vote from those who've demonstrated that they will misuse it by supporting an unacceptable candidate.)
Again, we saw once and for allwhat happens when you let the people vote for whoever they want — instead of from a carefully-curated menu of elite-acceptable figureheads for the "unnamed, unelected cabal of unaccountable lobbyists, bureaucrats, and special interests" — and let said representatives have actual power… in 1930s Germany. "Never again" means never again.
There are things like that:
https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2024/01/states-are-well-within-their-rights-to-take-trump-off-ballots/
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The whole defending democracy meme is both an incredibly potent and incredibly sad choice of strategy for Dems. In this age of partisanship, it was entirely predicable that if the Dems become the party of democracy, people on the other side will reflexively drift toward being explicitly against democracy. I find myself going that direction. If the current establishment is synonymous with our new definition of democracy, well, I’m not for that.
Democracy isn’t fundamental to the USA. “Western Liberal Democracy” is only 30 years old. The postwar system is only 70ish years old. And universal sufferage only 100 years old.
They couldn’t resist using it though. And as I said, it seems potent with a certain type of person. I agree with comments here that say that reelecting Biden despite any handicap is consistent with their definition of democracy. They’ve totally redefined the term to be consistent with rule by the “adults in the room”.
Suffrage without respect to class is significantly older in this country and glimmers of it date back through initial settlement.
More options
Context Copy link
I've said multiple times on here and the old site that "democracy" is best understood as rule by the managerial elite - if Trump won with a majority of the popular vote, then got disqualified and replaced with the Clinton caretaker government by the CIA, that would count as a victory for democracy as the term is used.
Exactly the same point I keep making as well.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's kind of like the difference between equality and equity isn't it. Whereas equality means "equality of opportunity", equity means "equality of outcome".
In the current progressive mindset, democracy doesn't necessarily mean every citizen gets a vote and we determine the winner. It means getting the correct result at the end of the process. Voting for Trump is "undemocratic" and therefore unelected leaders must deny people the ability to vote for him by taking him off the ballot.
To be fair, the only time Trump has accepted the outcome of an election he was involved in was when the election went in his favor. Say what you will about HRC, but she did not contest the outcome of the election for the next four years.
I think keeping Trump of the ballot is bad because one of the advantages of democratic elections is that they are a means of avoiding armed confrontations within a country. The deal with democracy is that everyone gets to vote for their guy, and if your guy did not win this time, the best path forward is to try to convince more people of your point of view next time. If your guy is not on the ballot, you might decide that the best way forward is armed resistance, and get utterly crushed by the federal government.
There are situations where it is a good idea to keep an enemy of democracy off the ballot. Kicking the NSDAP off the ballot in 1933 would have been worth however many shootouts with their Sturmabteilung that would have resulted in, because the Weimar republic was fragile, with a lot of the government apparatus not sold on democracy and very willing to help Hitler along.
But Trump 2024 is not Hitler 1933. If he is elected and has a majority in Congress, he will still not be able to transform the US into a Fuehrerstaat. The SCOTUS may be friendly to him, but they are not his minions. And unlike Weimar, the US is full of bureaucrats who are very invested in the status quo. They might gerrymander a bit here and leak a bit of embarrassing info there for partisan reasons, but they will not dismantle democracy.
This is probably excessively pedantic, but despite winning several states, he withdrew from the Reform Party primary for president in 2000 with a fair amount of drama, but not denying the outcome of the elections.
More options
Context Copy link
Well, Hillary never stormed the capitol with her army of fanatical HillDawgs(tm), but she (and the mainstream media) did spend four years strongly implying that Russia had rigged the elections in Trump’s favor. An argument that they kept on using until about a day after Biden’s victory in 2020, after which the argument that any American election had ever been stolen immediately became a laughable conspiracy theory. Twenty years of carping about dimpled chads in Miami Dade county also suddenly went down the memory hole.
The inauguration riots (DisruptJ20, not HillDawgs) have been memory holed by the media.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Rhetorically, this might be true, but if you look at the actual comments on the issues, "democracy" seems to get quickly pushed aside in almost every instance I can think of where a democratic vote doesn't lead to the "correct" outcome. Look at the reaction to California's Proposition 8 in 2008 where the state voted to ban same-sex marriage: did Democrats adhere to the will of the people expressed at the ballot box? Or the reaction to Dobbs, which wasn't rallying the democratically-elected (blue!) majority in Congress to pass an abortion rights bill, but to largely rally around the idea that such rights are absolute and don't even deserve codification by the legislature. Or the entire Russia-gate thing, which seems to have been largely based on the idea that a bunch of questionably-funded internet ads might sway naive voters to the extent that we should question the validity of their counted ballots.
But I think it's really only true rhetorically: in practice it seems to be far more pragmatic questions of what power can let them get away with.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The stock market doesn't seem to think China will ever take Taiwan.
By many measures, the stock market is valued more richly than at any time in history except 1999 and 1929. Yet a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would cripple the world economy and send stocks plummeting.
There is an argument to be made that any war with China would lead to massive money printing and so, in dollar-denominated terms, stocks could thrive.
But this doesn't explain the stock markets blasé attitude. In the event of a Taiwanese invasion, some companies would be affected more than others. Apple would be crippled by the loss of its supply chain. But oil and steel companies would presumably profit greatly. This is of course not reflected in the stock prices. Apple is worth $3 trillion while U.S. Steel trades at a paltry $8 billion.
IMHO, the reality of Taiwan being invaded and/or blockaded and reintegrated into China is so nightmarish, everyone is instinctively recoiling from thinking seriously about it at all. Some people are probably just ignorant at how crucial TSMC is to the global economy, but everyone else is just sleepwalking or engaging in magical thinking. There is no world that exist where China doesn't at least try to assert control over Taiwan in the next 10 years. And the trying will likely be disastrous for industry as well.
I mean, why'd Chinese blow TSMC up ? By that point they'll have a better chip industry of their own, probably somewhat closer to state of the art than now but, but are unlikely to have caught up.
Americans would be due to massive loss of prestige probably unable to stop TSMC's non-US suppliers for working with it. And I don't think Chinese are the kind of die-hard scorched earth fanatics that they'd destroy TSMC rather than go on grinding out chips as before, with a new set of bosses.
Because China doesn't give a fuck about wrecking the world economy. I know a lot of people have selective amnesia about the COVID times, but come on.
They, and reportedly Xi in particular, care about correcting the historical wrong of a divided China. If there is a "short term" global economic crash and the semiconductor industry gets set back a decade, so be it. It's better than allowing a part of China to continue down the path of developing a unique, non-Chinese identity, which is a harder thing to undo.
Not every ruling power worships making numbers go up.
More options
Context Copy link
Unless China takes over without a fight, TSMC seems certain to be damaged in the fighting.
Why?
I mean, Taiwan has a couple of weeks of fuel for its power plants. A naval blockade would be the simplest task. Taiwanese navy isn't up to deterring it, and it could be enforced purely by airpower if needed anyway.
I really don't see Taiwanese as doing a Japanese-style doomed last stand. Totally different culture, ethos and all that.
Taiwan is full of Chinese spies, US humint is rather dismal - e.g. CIA lost their entire network in China a few years back when they told them to use some stupid webpage and Chinese spooks figured it out.
So who'd do it? US cruise missile attack?
The Dutch suppliers can remotely disable it.
More options
Context Copy link
They actually figured this out? I was under the impression it was from Clinton's email server, I hadn't heard of any actual confirmation for this one.
Yeah, I read about it.
CIA was so clever they had some special secure web page agents could use to report. They were using this in the middle east, it was okay.
Someone decided people in China should also to this. Chinese roll up the entire network, probably dozens of dead-
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communications-system-helped-blow-cover-chinese-agents-intelligence/
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Bloomberg: ASML and TSMC Can Disable Chip Machines If China Invades Taiwan
It's unclear how irreversably they can remotely disable the machines, but they are by all accounts extremely delicate (as expected for something operating on a nanometer scale) so it's possible they would be difficult or impossible to repair. Spare parts for the machines, like the machines themselves, are only manufactured in the Netherlands.
They would also be trivial to destroy for those on-site of course - I saw a suggestion that spraying them with a powder fire-extinguisher would do it, as would a bit of smashing stuff with a heavy object. Even if Taiwan gives up without a fight, and TSMC doesn't decide to destroy them, and ASML in the Netherlands can't or won't do it remotely, and the U.S. decides not to do it openly, and none of the TSMC employees decide to do it on their own, U.S. intelligence might have at least one TSMC employee ready with a plan on how best to destroy them before fleeing. And even undamaged they require the expertise of TSMC employees who might flee the country, and a whole supply chain reliant on various western countries.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying that Chinese are generally pragmatic people who wouldn't cause billions of $ of damage, for what? To spite other Chinese, on behalf of a foreign country that doesn't give a fuck about them because they're 'functionally' whites ?
ASML is Dutch, not Chinese. Though I guess if TSMC higher-ups were sufficiently dedicated to protecting the machinery in case of invasion (contrary to their public statements) they might decide to cut them off from the internet before ASML decides to trigger the remote killswitch.
If a minority of people are capable of doing something, "generally" isn't good enough to ensure it doesn't happen. We're talking equipment so delicate that 1 TSMC employee with physical access could do hundreds of millions of dollars of damages in a matter of seconds, and many billions in a matter of minutes. If one or more employees flip out and the reason the others don't is because of "pragmatism", are they willing to get hit by a fire-extinguisher for the sake of limiting the damage? There's presumably also plenty of stuff they could do more covertly by messing with configurations.
Even without anyone deciding to do it organically, given the known geopolitical importance the U.S. could easily be paying a couple TSMC employees in case of such an eventuality. Or some random guys who live in the area and have guns stashed away. I remember when the invasion of Ukraine started Russia had people planting devices that shot green lasers at the sky to help with targeting. It doesn't seem like a stretch that even if the U.S. was completely unwilling to confront China openly, it could easily destroy the fabs covertly and blame Taiwanese patriots deciding to do it on their own. The Nord Stream pipelines weren't even being used and they still got sabotaged.
Even completely intact equipment is reliant on a complicated supply chain scattered across western countries that would be near-impossible to replicate in case of sanctions. The machines themselves and their spare parts from the Netherlands, ultra-pure quartz that is nearly all from Spruce Pine, North Carolina, etc.
I know. But ASML is prevented from doing business with Chinese on order of the US.
Chinese people aren't stupid, I presume they're very tightly keeping people to the stuff they know because if you're dealing with a highly delicate process you don't want anyone poking without asking. It's also a military-style management culture.
Yeah, and how do these employees expect to ..leave Taiwan to collect their bribe for betraying the rest of the company?
Yeah, sure. You can work around these things, Chinese are doing it since they were cut off from western suppliers. And guess what - people can reverse engineer and learn to make do. It gave a big boost to Chinese chip industry startups. Which, in many cases, have TSMC veterans working in them, because it's easier to fly high in a new company.
see this interview: https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/huawei-and-the-us-china-chip-war-44/transcript
Chinese have a higher supply of STEM grads of the appropriate intellectual level than the entire West, so 'catching up' for them is only a matter of will and investment. I mean, they'd even without the spying.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I was very confident that Russia would not invade Ukraine beyond taking the Donbas region, so what do I know? But I will once again register high confidence that China will not invade Taiwan. If Taiwan has any will to fight, then an invasion would be devastating. If Taiwan does not have the will to fight, then China can take its time and accomplish its ends with soft power.
Also, let me take this moment to say that this is the fault of midwit foreign policy strategic ambiguity. As the Good Book states: "let your yes be yes and your no be no."
It’s really the fault of those self absorbed dumbasses Nixon and Kissinger that left us with a hundred year ticking time bomb of a diplomatic deal.
Taiwan’s willingness might actually be a non issue if they don’t have capability. Their military is laughably under-supplied and incompetent, their reservists almost completely untrained (and that was before they entirely nuked conscription which will take years to start back up), and all their money goes into fancy toys that would almost certainly be wiped out in the first wave.
I have previously disparaged the Chinese capabilities for amphibious landings, and I stand by my assessment for Chinese inadequacy for air assault or amphibious operations. However, the Taiwanese are the worst conscripts I have ever met, uniquely lacking capability, willingness and mass. Most conscript armies have at least mass on their side, but the Taiwanese are hollowed out root to branch. The Taiwanese seemed to be stuck in a 1980s mentality where their western wunderwaffen outclassed anything China had to a significant degree, but have been simultaneously complacent and dismissive since then. I did an assessment once and was shocked to discover the lack of investment in airbases on the eastern side of the island, with a significant percentage of inventory stationed in western bases exposed to direct SSM assault. They may have shifted assets to the Eastern bases since, but the standing assumption at the time seemed to be 'air force will contest directly and establish air superiority over the Taiwan strait'. A tragic reliance on wunderwaffen, a paraplegic domestic army and a population only supportive of the government because of hatred for West Taiwan... If China ever lands, say, 10k boots on the ground (I doubt that), Taiwan cannot resist at all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with you. I think that if China takes Taiwan it will be without firing a shot after they achieve naval and trade dominance. Think 10+ years in the future.
Non-sequitur: One thing that's been overlooked recently is that Chinese chip production is actually getting pretty good. Shanghai-based SMIC is making 5nm chips now. Within 5 years, they could be competitive with TSMC. We might soon live in a world where China is banning chip exports to the U.S., not the other way around.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, not in the near future. Further out is uncertain enough to be discounted. Xi could die and a less-belligerent leader could run China. TSMC could be overtaken by a competitor, or could diversify more geographically. China could fail to build up their navy sufficiently.
China is a net importer of oil, and it seems likely the US would attempt to cut them off, so I expect oil companies would not profit.
More options
Context Copy link
Some of this is quantity of investable assets versus investable ideas.
There is always some big bad hanging over the market. Pre-1990 you have nuclear annihilation etc. It was only 1990-2020 when we lacked these risks.
One could also argue AI isn’t fully priced in. It could be anything. It could be a dud. The market is somewhat slow at pricing these type of things in. Covid was priced in slowly then all at once. The average person isn’t thinking about China risks. They need to make their nut today. If war happens we are all somewhat in trouble. Apple though will find a new way to produce so it’s only a temporary set back of a few years of Taiwan is invaded.
Chinese tech though does have quite large discounts.
There's no alpha in betting on global thermonuclear war, though. More limited conflicts you could theoretically profit from.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
But compare to TSMC. There's a good argument that it's undervalued (at least based on its customers' valuations), and the usual response is geopolitical risk.
I don't think there's a coherent argument for why TSMC has risk while downstream companies don't, but at least some parts of the market do seem like they think there is a risk China will invade Taiwan.
More options
Context Copy link
Stock markets don't know all that much, that's why volatility exists. There was about a monthlong period where the Chinese locked down 100 million people over a virus and the market was barely affected. It doesn't take a genius to perceive that COVID was a big deal in early 2020, before the March panic.
Nor did it take a genius to perceive that the new AI techniques were a big deal back in 2020 or 2021. The GPT-3 paper was out then, people like Gwern were showing the vast possibilities. And nobody really noticed until ChatGPT several years later when it became blindingly obvious what was going on.
Are you a billionaire?
Because if you knew Covid was a big deal in early 2020 you could have made tens of millions easily. But I am guessing you are not.
So saying “it doesn’t take a genius” when you easily could have made 100x on knowing what to come feels off. If the thing where everything in the past looks like it was obvious but yet almost all very smart people got it wrong.
I am not a billionaire because I did not have high starting capital. And I make mistakes like everyone does, I did not anticipate the massive money-printing resurgence after March and missed out a bit there. You might say 'just use 10x leverage' and I assure you that is the surest route to disaster. There is nothing more dangerous than leverage. Nevertheless, I have made significantly greater returns than the market average. Something like 40-50% annualized? I can't calculate it out properly because I put more money in over time.
In February 2020 we had this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8004055/THE-REUTERS-GRAPHIC-Under-Chinas-coronavirus-lockdown-millions-go.html
But markets didn't react until March! Isn't that insane? China is the factory of the world and they're locking down, where are goods going to come from? What does that say about the rest of the world?
There are loads of smart people who made a tonne of money beating the market. If you're early on the right companies you can make a lot of money. What about the Bitcoin maxis from 2012 or even 2014? They're living in Lambo land right now. I got into crypto much later and still got a couple of 10xes. Or early Nvidia buyers. I bought some Nvidia before ChatGPT and got a 10x there. None of this is terribly hard. There's room for error so long as you work out the broad trends, take things slow and don't leverage up.
I don't understand why AGI-pilled, scaling-pilled people didn't make as much or more than me. I think a lot of people can't be bothered to put in the effort, fill in the forms and stomach that gut feeling of dread when you lose a lot of money.
Alright, so looking at the market today, what broad trends do you see? What are you long?
AI followed by crypto and aerospace/defence (which has been dragging down my portfolio tbh). https://www.themotte.org/post/948/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-7/205716?context=8#context
Recently I've been trying to get more into the software side of AI, Microsoft as well as Nvidia. As much as I dislike the company's practices, they do have a pretty good business position. And I still think AGIX is a no-brainer. It's a shitcoin with a perfect name and smallish marketcap. We have AGI development, it moons.
https://www.themotte.org/post/381/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/68701?context=8#context
If you'd bought it back in Feb 2023 when I shilled it even after it went up 150%, you'd have made a cool 50-70% by now. Sure, I should've sold at 1.20 rather than waiting for it to fall back to the 0.70 range. I make no claim to perfectly timing the market. But I feel fine playing the long game here, I got in way lower. That's not so great compared to NVIDA but it still beats the index funds.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A lot of smart people don’t care that much to be rich. They’re happy as tenured academics making $120k a year, can buy everything they want to buy, and don’t have a strong desire to make more money. Some may be socialists or very religious people for whom wealth accumulation is also less important. ‘If you’re so smart why aren’t you rich’ is a fair argument in some cases, but there are nuances.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm in a similar boat to you. From my perspective the last 5 years has been the easiest time to significantly beat the market in the last 40 years by a large margin. Events you can see coming from outer space and almost risk free investments that take advantage of them (if you manage small amounts of money).
But knowing events are very likely going to happen and that they'll impact the stock market doesn't equal certainty of how exactly they're going to impact the stock market and for how long. Seeing the way the wind was blowing though? Easy.
Still, my investment portfolio is up some 10x the last 5years from relatively risk free investment after a preceeding period of 10 years where I barely beat the market. It would have been great if I had bought a house after this period and not just right before...
Now things seem more uncertain to me and I'm pivoting to index funds. I don't feel confident making any time sensitive (or even general) predictions.
As for why smart people aren't making (more) money, around me the smartest people have more or less given up on investing. They focus on their career+family and put excess money in some kind of portfolio of different index funds. They were kind similar to me but making slightly better bets but then they checked out before things got predictable.
Now I don't think they particularly care, they have more than enough money to meet all their needs so whether the excess money makes a larger or smaller return is pretty uninteresting. Why not rather focus on that next golf trip?
I agree with you. Everyone has repeated "you can't beat the market! Just vanguard and chill!" For so long that it's become practically an article of faith. And, to be sure, that's good advice for the typical investor. But passive index fund investing has become so popular that we forgot you do need someone to actively pick stocks in order for the market to work, and that's left some low hanging fruit on the trees.
People might object, "but what about the pros on wall street! Surely you can't beat them!" well...
a) like @100ProofTollBooth said, hedge funds aren't really trying to beat the market. They're more interested in making safe, consistent returns, not looking to take a risk to find the next 10-bagger.
b) the quant funds, as I understand it, are mostly doing market making and/or looking for arbitrage opportunities. They're not looking to "invest" at all, they just want to get in and get out for fast, risk-free profit.
c) the typical retail financial advisor is... just not that smart? He might pick some stocks, but he's not trying that hard. He's more like a financial therapist, convincing his clients to invest and not sell no matter what. He wins as long as they stay invested with him, he doesn't need to beat the market or even come close.
All this, combined with the frenzy for crypto and meme stocks, has led to an environment where it's surprisingly easy to beat the market, as long as you're willing to take some (reasonable) risks.
stuff that I did which paid off big time for me:
Right now I am modestly into bonds, nvdia, and short bitcoin. I am toying with the idea of getting out of stocks all together, or even puying some bearish puts, as I am increasingly of the opinion that the whole market is simply overvalued: https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc240623/ . Bonds, and maybe foreign stocks, look like the best opportunity right now.
More options
Context Copy link
I have seen similar smug attitudes during COVID, people who raked in cash when stocks plummeted between January and March 2020 by almost 25% were patting themselves on the back how smart they are and laughed at other people. And they knew that the worst is only ahead of us: lockdowns, supply chain issues and all that. Only for the market returning to previous heights by September, followed by huge surge up until January 2022. Many people who doubled down on bearish prediction in March not only lost all their gains from early 2020, but lost everything in that gamble.
Just give me a break, streets are lined up with homeless market gurus like you who just know how to beat the market.
I benefited from stock market plunge during covid.
It was very clear that the covid panic was overblown. I couldn't predict how long the lockdowns would last but it was clear that deep pessimism was not justified. If the stocks didn't rise in September 2020, they would by 2024 for sure. So, I bought them when they were low.
And then all extra cash we couldn't spend in lockdowns got invested in stock market and it caused a small bubble of its own but it was still worth to invest for most people.
The funny thing is that I based all this on a simple fact: people get cold virus infections up to 10 times per year and it trains our immunity. We cannot meaningfully stop them, not with our current tech. A new virus will cause more problems because we have no previous immunity. And yet, with covid the risk increased exponentially by age.
Thus my prediction was: eventually everyone will get it regardless what we do. Most people will be fine, elderly will experience higher mortality as in an unusually nasty flu season and that's it. It happened exactly like that.
And yet, so many still refuse to face this reality, still argue that “covid is different” or that “people should wear masks during flu/covid season”.
It is sad to live in among such pessimists but at least I can solace myself with a lifetime chance to win on the stock market. The world should have followed Tegnell's recommendations instead of calling him nazi.
It wasn't a chance that I made the correct prediction. It was rather a chance that I got necessary education in this field and see other experts that reasoned exactly in this same way and being correct in their general predictions.
It is somewhat similar to beliefs about Havana syndrome. One doesn't need to be a genius to understand that no sonic weapons of such impact exist. People just want to believe in them for various reasons. Except that it is a small localized event that never had any impact on stock market.
More options
Context Copy link
Perhaps I'm being unclear. I'm not claiming to have figured out some grand way to beat the market. I'm claiming that the market has been acting predictably irrationally (or more accurately just very slowly) for the last 5 years in response to major events and that I've made some money making relatively low risk investments with this in mind.
I didn't make one risky bet. I made a series of low risk bets in different directions over a half decade.
Its not like I've made massive amounts either. $40k is now ~$400k, which isn't enough to pay off even half of our remaining mortgage. I'm not getting rich here, especially since don't know where to put my money going forward.
Have I done everything perfectly, obviously not. Just going all in on Nvidia 1.5 years ago would have had better returns than what I've been doing over 5 years, or going all in on Tesla or w/e. I've acted on the same general trends, I've just done so cautiously and ineptly.
The data is pretty clear that almost all day traders (which admittedly encompasses many different kinds of amateur investor) lose money. That’s true whether they’re mere stockpickers or WSB derivatives gamblers, and it’s also true even for well above average high IQ people.
In fact, even many star traders at big funds would struggle on their own without access to the costly and expensive resources (some of it provided in-house, some bought or licensed, processed by teams of analysts for trade suggestions etc) of their employers, simply because they have an information advantage that even a very smart day trader adept at risk taking can’t match.
Another reason some smart people don’t bet like this is that their job prohibits it. Almost every job in finance prohibits personal trading in most or all derivatives, mandates very long minimum holding periods for financial instruments including equities and so on. The requirements are even tighter for the front office jobs that pay the most, including employer and regulator monitoring of all personal financial activity and pre-approval by compliance and reporting of even long term personal trades. If you really plan to hold Apple for 5 years and believe it’ll hugely outperform the market it’s doable, but for most people the compliance hassle isn’t worth it and they just put their money in an index fund.
Refraining from stock picking and market timing as a retail investor because you’ve read the literature and have a deep-seated conviction about markets being pretty much efficient :drake_no:
Refraining from stock picking and market timing as a retail investor because you’re too lazy to deal wtih compliance :drake_yes:
But indeed, it’s unclear if even star traders actually have some skill that allows them to deliver above market returns for their employers or if they’re just lucky, unless the “information advantage” is something insider information-adjacent rather than baller information-processing. And it’s also unclear if alternatives like hedge funds and private equity deliver above market returns adjusted for risk, especially after fees.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm determined not to miss the next big obvious thing.
I almost bought Novo Nordisk in 2022, saw that it was already overvalued and that they would have plenty of competition before they could make mega-profits. So I didn't buy. It's up more than 100% since then. I still think my thesis is correct, but the market cares about hype not profits.
I was a user of GPT-3, saw it's potential, but figured I was already late to the game. Two years later, the market bids up anything with AI attached to it.
The one success I had was buying airline puts in February 2020. I did get a 50x return on those, but the position size was small.
Of course, it's easier to see these things in hindsight. I have no idea what the next big thing will be. The rationalist community was very early on semaglutide, GPTs, and Covid. But there doesn't seem to be anything comparable today.
And for the record, I don't think China will invade Taiwan, but we are all a little too comfortable with the fact that everything is made in China. At some point this is going to cause major disruptions.
Common mistake, it seems. The market moves slower than we think. Yes, you will always be behind the insiders and a few very sharp movers for entry, but for the masses of normies to enter, that takes weeks, months or even years.
More options
Context Copy link
I did some soul searching after largely missing the AI opportunities. Conclusion: pretend chart spans higher than 2 years do not exist, or greed for reasonable prices will prevent you from buying anything at all.
More options
Context Copy link
I made the same “mistake” on novo nordisk and passed it up for the same reasons
On March 9th I posted a comment talking about how I had in the past prematurely dismissed the remaining upside on Nvidia.
Ironically if I had just bought some the very next Monday I'd be up 48% right now in under 4 months. Hindsight eh.
Exactly what happened to me. Always painful, but you never know. Still don't, really, it could all come crashing down and the guys all-in on colloidal silver and bullets will be laughing at us.
I put every penny of this year's 401k contributions into a short term Treasury ETF anticipating pre-election rate-cuts, only for it to stay flat as my existing holdings gained 20%.
Flat? Short term treasuries are still over 5%, which isn't large but is better than flat. I've been keeping (non-tax-advantaged) cash in them because they're state tax free.
I know you're the wrong guy to ask with where you live, but I actually need to find a "Treasury-like" option for people without state income tax.
It's kind of a waste having your yield driven down by people who are benefitting from the tax reduction.
Honestly I'm just holding new money in a 5% money market fund now.
I buy them non-competitively, so don't blame me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's maddening how taking a pure 'value driven' approach to buying stocks does in fact lead you to ignore hype cycles and their somewhat predictable impact on particular stocks or classes of stocks, such that you feel like you genuinely left wads of cash lying on the pavement because you didn't believe your eyes when you saw them.
ON THE OTHER HAND, the markets also briefly went crazy for NFTs, and "The Metaverse" (actually amazed how little came of that), and of course you could have bought into Gamestop during that crazy era, and ended up with almost nothing to show for it. It was as obvious to me that NFTs were going to eventually implode as it was to me that NVIDIA would take off. Hence why I avoided NFTs and bought NVIDIA and told friends to buy NVIDIA, but didn't go in nearly as aggressively as I could have. Because I severely underestimated the effect of the crowd of people who'd rush in about three steps behind me.
Having operated in the cryptospace through the first decade of its existence (2017 was a CRAZY time) I've learned that its almost always the stuff you DON'T see that will get you. Maybe you make a fortune on altcoins but... your holdings were in FTX (or one of the other failed/fraudulent/hacked exchanges), or you fell for a phishing scam. So I learned that A) trying to time market swings is a fools errand, and B) focusing too much on making good trades and NOT thinking about and protecting against ways you can lose your bags due to factors beyond your control has a small but real chance of wiping you out without warning.
I will never, at this stage in my life, feel regret about not yoloing into Bitcoin in 2013. I bought modest amounts back then (and have the Blockchain transactions to prove it) and sold almost all of them over the years, particularly in order to put a down payment on a house. The stress reduction alone was worth the price. I'd have had to bought a ton of them and held through insane market swings to get truly life-changing wealth out of it.
Hmm. The longevity/anti-aging space is making some rumblings. There's a possibility AI will fuel rapid advancement there, and with the boomers retiring there's obvious demand. No obvious plays that I can see, though.
"Legitimate" and regulated prediction markets are VERY early on the scene but seem to be gaining traction. In a sense they're just another form of gambling, but if they gain real attention they could explode overnight. They could disrupt the insurance industry in a good way
And the one that I think COULD turn into something huge are industries enabled by Starship. Yes, many people (I won't say MOST!) are aware that SpaceX is testing a FUCKHUGE rocket. I doubt any are thinking one or two steps ahead as to what having cheap and plentiful launch capacity will mean. Spot any players that might be onto the killer use for copious amounts of low-earth-orbit capacity.
See, I bet you beat the market too. Not lambo-land but you're better off than index funds.
Yeah NFTs were a bit of a dud. I think the idea was good (I never wanted any and didn't buy any) but everyone hates them for some reason. Aren't they strictly better forms of digital cosmetic items? Why are CS:GO knives worth more than jpegs on the internet? Wouldn't it be good for artists if they got some set% of the resale value of their art? I don't think I've ever been more isolated and alone in defending NFTs though, pedophilia seems more popular.
No, I don't think it would be good to create a new class of rentseeking. I consider this question as part of the background to led to copyright extensions of lifetime of the author + 70 years, total travesty of the system that should never have been considered.
More options
Context Copy link
Because NFT space was filled with lies, fraud, scams etc.
I hate digital cosmetics items
How NFT would even help here or enforce it?
Because it's a programmable contract. You can set it to do whatever automatically.
I don't even know how you can have NFT fraud. It's not like you're being sold a promise of future dev work, only for the devs to disappear. What you buy is what you get. Some people spent about $180 on gas for an NFT which just said how much gas they paid (which is pretty funny tbh). I have screenshots from the discord of this guy offering a bounty for the location of the devs: 'what will happen to them is none of your concern'. It's their own fault for buying stuff they don't need. If you do some basic checks it's very unlikely you'll be scammed.
And "if they got some set% of the resale value of their art?" is impossible as NFT cannot control what happens outside its blockchain
For example, people promising that NFT can enforce revenue share for artist. Like you just did.
People were selling NFT with promises of riskfree earnings. And other typical get-rich-quick scams. Googling NFT fraud will give you parade of examples.
That's not how it works. They stay on Eth or Sol or whatever chain they're on, that's the whole point. You can only deal with them through the chain they're on.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That was not the reason. NFT hatred was a thing on day 1 of NFTs reaching public consciousness, before there was time for any scams to even theoretically be exposed.
Because scams happened before NFTs reaching public consciousness.
More options
Context Copy link
NFT hatred was a thing on day 1 because people accurately predicted that the NFT space would become full of lies, fraud, scams etc.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I 'beat the market' but I didn't leverage up or otherwise really demonstrate the courage of my convictions. So my returns were modest in the grand scheme. I was a HODLer more than anything. I was overly sensitive to getting wiped out. That said, I've seen so many people get wiped out I suspect I would have come out behind had I been willing to take bigger risks in crypto.
That is, if you're the type of person who will leverage their bets and accept more extreme risk/reward ratios, you're probably not the type to have sensible exit strategies. Or, you're the type to abandon those sensible exit strategies when you smell more profits, until you eventually overextend.
So I'd guess I'm just not 'built for' that type of behavior, although I think I'm better for it.
Because they're attached to a popular game, and the items can be used to show off status in the popular game. Not vice-versa, where people think that the item itself, rather than the social status, is the point. NFTs never quite got popular enough to confer actual social status outside the NFT sphere, and trying to export status from the NFT world to the real world works about as well as trying to export status from, say, an MMORPG to the real world.
It really came down to the attempt to shove NFT items in many, many places where they didn't really add much, and to 'force' people to get familiar with blockchain tech, which already had a shoddy reputation elsewhere.
I think the one cool use case for NFTs might have been to allow you, the player, to carry NFT cosmetics between games, which is to say you could have a unique outfit, or item, or vehicle, or whatever, and it is tied to your identity in an 'immutable' way, so you can import it to a new game and immediately have access to it, which is to say, add some 'permanence' to your digital property.
For example, I play racing games of various types, and I have a couple cars that I favor and I have some livery designs that I like to recreate in each new game. If I could get an NFT for the cars and liveries that allow me to import those cars from Forza Horizon to Need for Speed to Gran Turismo, and be assured that I would immediately have access to them in future games, I would be enticed to do so.
That would have required significant coordination between different game devs, which seems improbable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
We were hanging out in the same places back then and I feel the same. The best cast scenario where I had followed through and found a way to get my money into Mt. Gox when they changed their rules as I was waiting for my money to clear Dwolla and ended up with 30 coins for $150. There's no world where I hold them and sell for $2 million. I was going to pay off my house no matter what. My regret is I planned to drop some money every month after I sold but was lazy... that was dumb.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are serious efforts to get cutting edge domestic chip production up and running in the US, the EU, Japan, and South Korea. I'm not too optimistic about the US (cost disease, overregulation), but it'll likely happen in at least one of those countries in the next 3-5 years, and it's all the same to US multinationals. China may be willing to wait for this precisely so the US is less motivated to defend Taiwan.
Separately, I think we're rather clearly entering a period of disruption with respect to military tech and tactics. Why fight a 20th century war against the 20th century's most powerful military, if you can wait a bit and, I don't know, sneak a million drones into the skies over Taipei from submersible launch platforms?
I'm not sure it's clear if drones/AI shifts the scales in favor of the larger military or not. Houthi's and Ukraine seem to be using drones to punch above their weight for now while Hamas doesn't seem to have been able to do practically anything against S tier military tech.
Houthis are punching above their weight against mostly India, though, right? Like the USA has a carrier there but it’s mostly playing city worker.
Drones are a force multiplier against big middle income country armies like Russia, Ukraine, India, but aren’t helpful against absolutely top tier forces like Israel or the U.S. would be a reasonable conclusion, it seems.
They're making life far more inconvenient for the USA than they have any right to, and gaining major credibility among global jihadis for themselves and Iran in the process.
Sure, but the American navy could turn them into chunky salsa. It’s not doing that for whatever reason, but drones probably aren’t that reason.
The "whatever reason" is all the stuff Israel is experiencing trying to turn Hamas into chunky salsa.
International opprobrium isn't something that can just be written off.
They'd accrue less opprobrium when they're doing it for a clear goal (restore international shipping) rather than without a clearer objective than retaliation. And, I'm sure the countries wouldn't mind lower shipping costs too much.
More options
Context Copy link
Eh, Putin can, and he's in a much worse situation. The US could handle a lot more opprobrium than it gets without much material damage. And did, during the Trump years, just because Trump. It's the USs image of itself (or Biden's image of the US) that's holding us back, that and Biden's (IMO reasonable) desire not to get into a long war in Yemen right after getting out of Afghanistan.
The US really wouldn't suffer much in the way of PR if we got a LOT more aggressive with the Houthis, at least if it was effective. It's not like they're particularly well-loved.
I'd like the "series of massive punitive raids" strategy tried out. I think it could have done the job in Afghanistan, and will work with the Houthis. They fire on shipping, the US kills everyone it can find involved in that operation. All the way to the top. Eventually someone will come to power who doesn't fire on shipping.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Right now drones (military ones that are not super-cheap but cheaper than airplanes... or missiles, not the science-fiction swarms of ultra-cheap quadcopters) give an advantage to the aggressor, since they're expensive to shoot down and cheap to use. I expect we will see development of anti-drone technology which will negate this at some point. And then drone advancement to reinstate it, naturally.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If China invaded Taiwan we’ll have months of notice: the movement of men and material needed for an invasion is not hard to spot, and it hasn’t happened yet. Current stock prices tell us that the market thinks an invasion is unlikely in the near future, if China starts mobilizing for invasion you’ll see the market react accordingly. In the meantime you’d be foolish to short the market in the hopes that China will make a move soon.
More options
Context Copy link
The stock market also thought that Enron was a legitimate enterprise.
Look, there's some predictive value in the aggregated market of capital. I'm not denying it. But it suffers the oracle problem in that it can only evaluate the value of publically available information. It can't take into account what is secret and undisclosed.
Like, say, for instance, the movement and intent of state militaries.
If Taiwan is being invaded and cruise missiles are being flung at aircraft carriers, we have a lot more to worry about then our 401ks tanking. A new world war would be a more pressing matter: the economic impact of a global depression would probably be less than a shift to a war economy.
More options
Context Copy link
The only reason Xi invades Taiwan is if he feels like he’ll be overthrown by CCP hardliners who oppose any accommodation with the West, many of whom have been purged, or by young Chinese very online ultranationalists (or some combination of the above two), unless he does it. Since neither of those groups seem remotely close to achieving power in China it appears very unlikely an invasion will happen soon.
If anything, as @KolmogorovComplicity suggests, the chip situation is a distraction; China is likely more than willing to delay its plans until the US sphere has cutting edge production ready so that Taiwan is no longer so geopolitically critical to American interests. CCP ambitions regarding Taiwan have literally nothing to do with chips at all, they predate the modern Taiwanese semiconductor industry by many years. When TSMC is no longer critical, the US will be much more amenable to a slow program of pressuring Taiwan into integration with China.
Seems like a solid point. If the CCP/Xi feels that they can wait out the situation and eventually take Taiwan with lower casualties (and higher chance of taking the chip fabs intact) then they assuredly will.
So eyes should be out for factors, in addition to those you mention, that might push them to take action sooner rather than later.
More options
Context Copy link
Frankly this seems to me to be a fundamental misreading of the situation. China has said repeatedly and loudly that Taiwan coming under their control is practically an existential question. That it is non negotiable. And under Xi this has only grown louder. They can’t change their mind without self-humiliation. They also have a surplus of jobless young men with radicalized ideas and a desire to distract the populace from an economy in trouble - literally the classic case of “civilization goes to war”
I haven’t detected any shift in urgency. There’s a nightly show on CCTV where talking heads prattle about Taiwan, but apparently they have been doing this show for thirty years.
The message is still “Taiwan is a part of China,” same as it ever was. I guess there might be a bit more accusations of American meddling, but that may just be reflecting reality and not designed to escalate.
They also don’t have timelines driven by elections, and have no problem waiting until reintegration is a foregone conclusion.
More options
Context Copy link
I’m not saying that China doesn’t want Taiwan. They do want it and they shall have it. I’m saying that the urgency about “muh chips” is fiction invented by American journalists, Chinese ambitions over Taiwan have nothing to do with semiconductors and everything to do with national identity and myth.
It therefore makes sense for the CCP to wait until the West is no longer committed to defend TSMC (which should be no longer than a decade at the most because of large efforts to scale up production in the US and Europe), especially given advances in Chinese chip production, and then to continue with the long term plan of pressure.
The main reason that the United States and China both want Taiwan is that Taiwan is what allows the US to potentially bottle up the Chinese navy and keep them out of the South China Sea. It’s primarily important as a naval asset. Almost no one talks about this. China has to get Taiwan back if it ever wants to be a great naval power. If China gets Taiwan back as a smoking ruin, without TSMC, without the economy, without the people, it would still be worth it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The US has been pro-Taiwan since the CCP took over the mainland. What would happen if the PRC invaded a couple small islands was a phony controversy in the 1960 election. Semiconductors may be cover for the US position now, but if that cover goes away due to alternative sources I doubt the US would change positions; there are strong geopolitical motives for an independent Taiwan. That being said, I don't think China plans to invade any time soon.
I’m not reading it the same way.
First of all, we’ve had decades since Mao to recognize Taiwan’s independence. We haven’t, and in fact more states recognize Palestine than Taiwan. When people make the mistake of calling Taiwan a state China will force them to humiliate themselves and publicly disavow Taiwan as a state in order to sell there — the USA doesn’t interfere at all in this ritual. When Taiwan sends its Olympic delegation to France this year, it will be called Chinese Taipei, not Taiwa. None of this signals strong enough support for Taiwan’s independence to risk American blood or treasure on liberating it.
Second, we’re already bleeding hardware and equipment to Ukraine. This limits our options in other areas at least until we stop doing that. Our military supplies are not infinite and if we’re sending weapons systems to Ukraine to fight Russia, starting another war is not going to be easy.
Third, if the chip factory goes away as an issue (which we’re working on), the public case for war is weak. It’s not a strong ally of any sort, it holds little strategic value other than the chip plants, and the cost to defend it is going to be pretty high. This isn’t Iraq that we’ll conquer in a week while Bagdad Bob goes on TV to say there are no tanks in Iraq. China has a pretty strong military, and decent equipment. It’s probably a multi year war
Don't forget that the US is also going to be bleeding hardware, equipment and troops to Israel and the Middle East in short order as well.
Actually, I think the war would be pretty quick - if China and the USA go to war what actually happens is that the entire world burns in nuclear fire and then we have a really tough winter while the survivors try and put civilization back together.
More options
Context Copy link
How's that going for Palestine?
The US and the West in general doesn't officially recognize Taiwan because getting into a war with China over appearances isn't worth it. But it's just appearances. When China bitched about Pelosi going to Taiwan, Pelosi went to Taiwan anyway. When President-Elect Trump talked to the Taiwanese President, China and the US press went apeshit. Trump said the US didn't necessarily have to uphold the One China policy. China did, as they could, nothing. The US is walking a bit of a tightrope -- on the one hand keeping up appearances enough that China doesn't get too offended and do something stupid, and on the other making sure China knows the US is only keeping up appearances so China doesn't think they have carte blanche to do something stupid. But that's been true for decades and it hasn't changed.
The Seventh Fleet likely has rather different needs than Ukraine.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A couple of culture war threads ago, I complained about the badly written background politics and geopolitics in films like Captain America: Civil War. Having binged more MCU and thought more about how forgettable many of the plots are since, I've come to the conclusion that I'm being unfair to the writers: they are absolutely not hacks, given I think they generally do a great job of writing dialogue and capturing nuances in human relationships; if they suck at framing the broader story in a plausible and logical manner, that's because producers/critics/the public don't want them to try.
In other words, everything is superheroes nowadays not just because people pay to watch IP, but because writers then get to have their heroes fight imaginary supervillains instead of real-world problems, which come with ideological blowback. Did you really think there are producers willing to front $100mm to make a movie about Gaza, inflation, illegal migrants, Trump, covid, BLM, metoo, or climate change? OK, maybe Don't Look Up is a weak example, but it's still just an allegory. Make a $100mm sequel that explicitly has a team of plucky heroes go blow up the HQ of an oil major and poison those bloated cows and fat farmers in Nebraska and I'll eat my hat.
Even if movies are primarily entertainment, I think most people derive significant utility from the belief that they can learn from them. It's nifty to be exposed to military jargon and special ops tactics, or detectives picking up psychological clues, or a fictional couple sorting out conflicts that can serve as a blueprint for how we navigate our own romance. Except ideological blowback has emptied this utility bucket for films that cannot risk turning off "either side" to recuperate their ridiculous budgets--sorry, you won't actually learn anything about Russia's actual red line when it comes to NATO expansion or China's red line when it comes to Taiwanese independence in Avengers 5 or Top Gun 3. And don't count on Spider-Man 4 to explore "anti-Asian hate" or school choice in NYC, or Captain America 4 to beat up the national debt. If there is ever to be a climactic scene in a new major picture where the hero kills the militants hiding behind civilian human shields, I can be absolutely certain that a) the militants won't be ambiguously underage, b) the civilian won't be portrayed as possibly supportive of the militant cause, c) the hero will have her (or their) cake and eat it too, and manages to defeat the baddies without accepting any collateral damage, because movie writers don't ever humor trolley problems.
As I noted at the start, don't hate the player, hate the game. No movie writer will be able to sell a script depicting a truly realistically powerful antagonist who's not a fanatical space Nazi because the culture war has made it impossible for moviegoers to be actually terrified while watching an expensively produced drama, because anything that's ever actually kept anyone up at night--Gaza, inflation, illegal migrants, Trump, covid, BLM, metoo, or climate change--is completely commercially taboo once the budget exceeds $100mm.
Then doubt crept in. In case I'm just as full of shit, I thought, what if an eccentric billionaire gave me $100mm to shoot a movie? What's the scariest yet logically coherent and real-life-plausible premise I can think of? A quick and dirty answer--a shadowy and nominally decentralized crypto organization becomes the fourth branch of U.S. government when it methodically incentivizes low level violence/terror against ideological enemies, thus ushering in massive, visible change on the ground.
Depending on which party is in power in the US, this group can be far left or far right; but seeing most institutions are captured by the left regardless of electoral outcomes, this movie probably works better if it featured a far right terror group. Ergo, the group recognizes the strange phenomenon of climate change protesters seemingly only blocking roads in first world countries within sight of police protection rather than lie down in neighborhoods belonging to street gangs or drug cartels. It thus decides to impose a real cost on the previously free virtue signaling. The next time pro-Palestine students and faculty camp out at an Ivy League lawn, it issues a crypto fatwa and bounty. An impressionable young man with low inhibition who didn't need much excuse to commit violence executes a drive by shooting. Then the group releases the name, photo, and middle school address of a child of a university president who's too tolerant of the encampments. Ben & Jerry founders speak out again? Fatwa, and some crazy adherent drives a truck into an ice cream store. Do this a few times, and even if few people actually die, all of a sudden, there is a ton of pressure on the encampments to get shut down if only "for the students' own safety," and maybe the ice cream's X account goes dark "for the staff's own safety."
What's the story, exactly? We could introduce the hero initially as one of these disaffected and troubled hired hands, and maybe he partially succeeds in an act of terror, and that causes him to snap out of a dark spiral, and he resolves to make things right by trying to uncover who's behind this shadowy group. I've got a natural sequel, too, where the opposite ideological camp sees how effective this is and decides to take up arms and form its own underground militant wing and starts shooting up megachurches or something. I don't know. I've thought about this for the run time of a movie. I'm sure you can think of a much better plot, but my point is, at least this premise is more interesting than the twelfth iteration of evil space Nazis. I argue it's scarier too because it's far more plausible, which brings me to my question--sorry for burying the lede.
Is it actually plausible? Why don't we see this play out in real life? America has plenty of violent crime, but it's all unorganized violent crime, which doesn't translate to power. With all the technology and guns and tribalism, why is there so little organized political or ideological violence (people getting shoved or pepper sprayed don't count)? Is literally everyone north of Mexico just larping? I get that if you're about to graduate from Columbia and take up a $200k job at Goldman Sachs, that it won't be worth going to prison for a decade to make the protesters pay, but surely there is one terminally ill billionaire who's got like three years left to live who has enough executive functioning and megalomania to be the shadowy prophet and at least attempt something as radical? With all the technology available today, you don't even need to be a billionaire, really. Probably something like $50mm is good enough to seed a sufficient number of "fatwas" to be a highly effective terrorist that changes the behavior of the masses. So what gives?
To preempt a few responses, it doesn't seem persuasive to argue the US has a strong justice system. After all, crime is illegal, yet we get plenty of those. The premise here is a determined leader exploits the distributed nature of unorganized crime to make stopping it impossible. I also don't think executing this is particularly difficult; you don't need to be Russia, you just need to be Hamas, and a handful of low-tech sporadic episodes of violence is enough to change behavior for the masses, because the number of people actually willing to risk death for their beliefs is a lot smaller than the rest; sure, maybe 5% of the protesters don't care about getting shot at, but five tents is a lot less politically salient than one hundred.
I'm curious to see how Coppola's new film Megalopolis comes out, especially as he's sinking so much of his own money in it. Not curious enough to try to find someone to watch my kids, probably, but in other circumstances I would actually go to the theaters for it, something I haven't done for about 8 years.
My girlfriend normally would never go see a science fiction film, but she loves classic directors so I’m hoping I can rope her into seeing this one with the Coppola name as the draw.
I'm not a film guy, but is Coppola a ladies-famous director? Apocalypse Now, Patton, American Graffiti, a biography of Yukio Mishima...
If she'd find that list appealing, why the hell is she still your girlfriend instead of your wife?
She likes Oscar-bait that’s actually good, that’s the only way I can describe it. She really likes dark movies with moral complexity. She liked The Godfather. Her favorite directors are Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. She loved Taxi Driver, Wolf of Wall Street, and Shutter Island. We watched American Graffiti and we both thought it was interesting although obviously not a plot-filled movie. She loved Goodfellas and insisted on seeing Once Upon A Time In Hollywood in theaters.
She also likes chick films, Titanic was her favorite movie. And she definitely reads chick-lit, albeit literary chick-lit. Though she does complain that publishers aren't printing anything for men and that's weird.
But I don’t know, she just has a thing for dark films from directors who are very passionate about their work. She watches cast interviews for the films she likes and thinks about the directoral choices.
Inception got the closest to science fiction that she'd go, she has never liked spaceships or aliens or wizards or anything like that. Just not really her thing. She likes realistic fiction. And Inception, apparently. She's expressed admiration for Coppola before, so that's why I think it might be a draw.
She will be.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You can just buy outcomes with money rather than mucking about with violence. Take Soros. He finances candidates for office, high and low. He funds NGOs that train up ideological cadres and create a bunch of agitators and activists. I don't know, maybe Soros dips his toe into violence from time to time. But the vast majority of his effort is peaceful, putting end results to one side.
There's no opposition like there would be for violence. Post 1945 Liberal democracies have zero defence mechanism against this kind of nudge-nudge bribe-bribe mobilize-cadres sort of thing. If you do this in China, the state will harass you and make your life miserable. See the Beijing LGBT center, the police kept messing with them until they gave up and closed down.
Of course, it's a very different story for the right. They're not civil society groups or reformers, they spread dangerous misinformation or are far-right extremist radicals. AFD experiences similar kinds of suppression. Trump is being suppressed. There are voices ready to tell them 'no!' whereas the left gets to act more freely.
The left doesn't need violence to get what they want (though they can use it to a certain extent), the right can't afford to use it for much the same reasons that political violence doesn't happen in China. It makes more sense to spend time and effort building up cadres, though this is somewhat harder for them.
More options
Context Copy link
I'd count Logan as being about illegal immigration.
These damn mutants seeking entry into CANADA!
Logan is the best of all superhero movies, and it had plenty of bog standard leftist agitprop (capitalism, mental health, racism, eugenics) but honestly illegal immigration is a bit of a stretch. The mexican nurse is only at the beginning, and has little direct involvement. And Logan is a US citizen so bim crossing the border isn't an issue.
Heres hoping Deadpool 3 has lots of jokes about each dimension traveller being an illegal alien. Looking forward to that.
Wolverine wasn't the illegal immigrant standin. The mutant farm was in Mexico and Laura spoke mostly Spanish.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
When District 9 came out in 2009 it wasn't 100% clear if it was supposed to be about apartheid or about illegal immigration. (South Africa was having a problem at the time with illegal immigration from Zimbabwe). It was a critical and commercial success.
IIRC the vox pop shots at the beginning with the people complaining about the “aliens” was repurposed real news footage of interviews with people from Joburg talking about the immigration crisis.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Has there ever been a movie about inflation that isn't a documentary?
You might actually consider Parasite here. In fact I’m astonished it hasn’t been mentioned. Sure, not Hollywood. But it was popular and did have Western distribution.
More options
Context Copy link
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the reason few to no people do this is because it would be ineffective. Political violence in modern society benefits the other side. Israel was popular on 10/8, it gets less popular with every day it continues its counter terrorism campaign. Jan 6 is the primary thing keeping the Democratic party viable. Kent State is still trumpeted by the hippies. If anything, this plan would work best if you executed a bunch of false flag attacks and somehow werent caught out. One could argue that is what the FBI did with the Whitmer "Kidnapping attack", and that was used as a successful talking point until it collapsed. If you wanted Joe Biden re-elected probably the best thing to happen would be a failed assassination attack on him by someone wearing a MAGA hat and Alex Jones brand cowboy boots.* The problem with the false flag plan, is it only works if you dont get caught. And you probably would. Because the only kind of dumbass who takes $50k to assassinate Joe Biden wearing a MAGA hat is too dumb to not get caught, and not nearly loyal enough to not tell the investigators that he was told to wear the MAGA hat by the guy on the internet. And at that point your whole strategy is about the authorities intentionally covering up your scheme until after election day. Which they might, because they do probably lean Biden. But as the Hillary emails situation demonstrated, it only takes a few principled leakers to blow up LE's plan to cover something up until after election day.
So no, these scemes require the participation of true believers. Like Hamas, where the soldiers know they are going to die (and so do the women and children) and they understand that their deaths are a propaganda victory. Similar to how machine politics works in cities to manufacture grey and illegal votes. Its all loyal insiders who sometimes, yes, are financially rewarded, but the other motivations are stronger.
*Disclaimer, I do not know if this product exists.
I’d say rather that political violence only ever benefits the Left. Feminists bombed the Capitol building, Puerto Rican nationalists shot up Congress, the Weathermen and black nationalists conducted terror campaigns, Black Lives Matter protestors burned down and looted major cities, but none of these seem to do or have done anything to tamper enthusiasm for their respective causes.
Historically, leftist violence translates into rightist takeovers. Either an authoritarian faction within the left (Stalin within the Bolsheviks) or a rightist ally backstabs (mullahs and Muslim Brotherhood against Arab socialists) or a conservative swoops in to reign over the ashes of the Left (Franco? Fujimori? probably other examples).
Political violence benefits the left only if we view the effect of violence as 'no consequences'. In terms of achieving practical results, it needs a rightist element to coopt the cause of, or exploit the damage caused by, the leftist violence. At no point do the organizers of leftist violence seem to have achieved their stated objectives.
Leftist violence currently is temporary chaos, violence that flares which can be cleaned up. Chavez and Stalin draped themselves in leftist skinsuits but were able to wield the power of a state to effect real change (damage).
The left is insidious, but the right is where true power will be exercised. And the left is blind to wolves amongst its flock.
[Population-level observation ahead]
Leftist violence is female-coded, and rightist violence is male-coded, almost like they're the same thing and always have been. You see the same shit in abusive marriages; the woman throws shit and has tantrums, might slap or hit the man, but none of her goals are accomplished unless the man gives in (this is ignoring "split up" as an option).
This is why men, as a general rule, don't hit women- because their superpower is that they're the only ones with actual power. So they'll bear the occasional slap and punch and thrown vase from their wives when she doesn't get her way, but at the end of the day he's the one who decides which checks get written. As such, this violence is the 'no consequences, or results in token concessions' type.
But if a man discovers that he can use [individually impotent but] violent women to abuse other men on his behalf (which is how the Inner and Outer Parties of 1984 function), then things get a lot more interesting. Which is why authoritarian movements tend to use female-coded language- "equity" and "safety" are the two popular ones- so that the men who would normally and trivially resist simply fail to show up, making the opposition easier to rout.
This is Genesis 1 stuff. The serpent must corrupt the woman in order for the man to eat the fruit.
It's hard for me to see why these words are "female-coded". For example, they were explicitly two of the main reasons for the founding fathers of the US to launch their revolution, and I don't know anyone who sees the founding fathers as female-coded figures.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You could also point to Trump's ascendancy first over DeSantis and then Biden as a backlash to the lawfare. But I think this theory is inherently a bit contradictory and will fail when taken too far, since it essentially presumes all victories to be pyrrhic. There are plenty of examples where wins are in fact wins: CCP did not fall after crushing student protesters in 1989, Iran did not liberalize after women revolted, and Russia does not appear to be heading to strategic defeat in Ukraine. In the movie premise I hypothesized, I think "victory" is plausible for the shadowy prophet if he defines end goals as eliminating campus encampments and corporate wokeposting--changing visible behavior given the newly introduced cost of violence seems a lot more achievable than actually changing minds, which may be "good enough."
Well the caveat to the theory appears to be whether the post WWII American public's opinion is relevant to your particular political question. And I suppose precluding a total victory ala CCP 1989.
I will not discount the reality that if January 6th was the JANUARY 6TH! that Democrats pretend it to be, and thousands of armed MAGA men showed up to the Capitol, sacked it, beheaded a bunch of Democrats, proclaimed Trump God-Emperor, and the local national guard rolled in having their back, that would be actually effective street violence.
I just dont think that is something a shadowy right wing billionaire could fund and achieve. Heck, I don't think a cabal of 25 billionaires could.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've actually wondered about this off and on. There seems to be remarkably little organized political violence in America despite the high cultural and political tensions. There have been many times and places where such tensions would have resulted in hot Civil War. I'm defining organized violence as multiple people actively planning to commit some specific act of violence in advance, so showing up to a protest, even with weapons and armor, but without any plans for specific acts of violence, doesn't count.
I'd also note that substantial terrorist / insurgent violence has happened many times in many countries, and it seems the source is very rarely a particularly wealthy individual.
My best guess is that FBI undercover sting operations have done a tremendous job of poisoning the well against any significant group turning to violence. Run a countless stream of undercovers and CIs pushing violent plans so that you can bust anyone who follows along, in every group for every ideology. Make sure you publish all of the details about it every time. Pretty soon, anyone who proposes any type of violence will be suspected of being a Fed infiltrator, or somebody recently turned by them for some reason.
This is probably a good thing if you actually don't want lots of violence, the chaos of a failed state, etc. But it does make you wonder exactly what happens if the tensions just keep rising, but nobody ever does any real violence.
Which does bring us back to - you can write a movie or book about anything. But if we're talking about reality, or concerned about being realistic, how does our generic eccentric billionaire find people who aren't total losers to commit violence? Anyone with any clue would suspect they're being set up. Maybe you can find some of those losers, but they usually don't seem to be that good at working in teams or following instructions.
More options
Context Copy link
For the most part, at least for now, none of the problems being discussed affect those fighting them (or their families) personally. In most serious wars the stakes are much higher. It’s not “some school a thousand miles away teaching kids things I hate,” it’s your kids school and his teacher. It’s not flags and rainbows in business, it’s toe the line or go to jail. When it’s coming with a heavy cost to people, they’ll be much more likely to fight in Ernest than if it remains mostly a theoretical harm that you actually don’t even have to care about.
More options
Context Copy link
Several of these predate some of the modern culture wars. Several of them you may not have heard of - or if you have heard of them, you may not understand how they pertain to the items on your list. Only one was a major financial hit, and two made a loss. These three points probably illustrate the point you're trying to make quite well.
Good examples. I probably should have excluded climate change, because I guess it really isn't all that politically salient, not even breaking into the top 10 of most important voter issues for the 2004 election or 2020 (when ranking by extremely + very important), and this probably makes making an expensive movie about it less risky.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Want to make your theoretical movie even more interesting? Make two versions of the movie and release them simultaneously. In one the extremists are right wing and the government is left wing. In the other, the extremists are left wing and the government is right wing . Create a realistic portrayal of both sides, not cartoon villainy, and see how they both do.
More options
Context Copy link
West World season 3 started with such a doordash for crime app, doing nothing with it. Search "RICO app". The big bad is actually using it to eliminate opponents or aberrations. (N.b. the show's not very good, I didn't finish.)
Someone else here (my notes summarize it without a source) once mentioned Schmidt's Theory of the Partisan which describes mob violence as the regime's political force. The liberal total state features the state restraining or permitting violence, where state violence against dissidents occurs through the criminal underclass whom the state chooses not to persecute (for gang violence, muggings etc.) Party NGOs enable street thugs and doxxing groups.
Westworld season 1 is maybe my favorite piece of television of all time. Season 2 was pretty interesting. Season 3 was awful.
More options
Context Copy link
Someone remembered that post!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link