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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   33491 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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Despite finding Richard Hanania annoying and personally repelling, I must admit his general worldview never stops being validated.

Regarding the situation in Britain, the State, and the Elite Human Capital behind it, was simply never going to be outmaneuvered by a bunch of fat, drunk, working class louts. Initially caught out by surprise, the phenomenal organizational skill involved in diffusing, and then directly infiltrating and countering the protesting groups was a real masterclass.

What's striking is that there wasn't a single moment of "we feel your pain" attempted compromise. They just came down like a hammer. If anything, these events have left the UK powers that be in a stronger position in regards to immigration as they now effectively have a mandate to flood the country. Dissenting voices will be even quieter than before.

Elite Human Capital. They never lose.

As I've said before, the problem is the core of the anti-immigration people aren't willing to give up some of their other right-wing policy goals.

Meloni in Italy seems to be doing fine, if not doing as much as perhaps she promised (like all politicians), but there's no deep state plot to remove her or whatever people claim about anti-immigration politicians, because she's pro-NATO and acts like a normal politician within the Overton Window of Italian politics.

But also, there was a super anti-immigration party on the ballot for the UK. Eighty six percent of the population chose somebody else. That 14% doesn't get veto power via rioting, and that's why you see strong support among the populace for harsh measures for the rioters.

I mean, maybe in Europe because they can't appear to assimilate people moving to their country that hasn't been their for 300 years, but in America at least, Muslim's are more liberal than evangelical Christian's on most social issues.

Is that actually true?

Muslims in America seem to genuinely be more socially conservative than the norm. Like, America in the 90’s level, sure, not like middle eastern level, but I have a hard time buying that they’re more liberal than evangelicals.

https://www.newsweek.com/muslim-white-evangelical-gay-marriage-907627

"Muslims, by a margin of 51 percent to 34 percent, favor same-sex marriage, compared to just four years ago when a majority, 51 percent, were opposed. There were similar results for black Protestants, with 54 percent opposing gay marriage in PRRI's 2014 American Values Atlas, compared with 43 percent in the latest findings.

Indeed, opposition to same-sex marriage is now limited almost entirely to white conservative Christians. Fifty-eight percent of white evangelical Christians and 53 percent of Mormons—an overwhelming majority of whom are white—are opposed to allowing gay couples to marry."

This is from 2018, but there's polling show even black Protestant's have become more socially liberal (as seen here on abortion - https://x.com/ryanburge/status/1817372877538074993).

Now, maybe there's some backlash on this in recent years, but that means there's also been some on the evangelical side as well. Plus, on other social issues such as abortion, abortion is just a generally less important thing even in conservative Islamic law, from what I know.

Even then, I'd argue American Muslim's are closer to black Protestants than white evanglicals, in that even if they're socially conservative, they're largely not voting on it.

OTOH, to be fair, Gretchen Whitmer lost support in the Dearborn area of Michigan (about 30 points), even as she increased her overall support in her re-election bid for Governor.

Again, Europe is different, but I've seen no real evidence of the same issues w/ second or third generation Muslim immigrants as Europe is having.

How much of this is simply the result of selection? Muslims that make it to America are more educated, wealthier and probably more inclined towards typical Western sentiments to begin with than those that go to Europe. The ability of America to assimilate would have to be tested with, say, the unorganized crossing of several millions of Syrians through the Mexican border to make an accurate comparison.

Europe fails to assimilate, yes, but there's also major selection effect due to the Atlantic. Most American Muslims (ie, non-refugees) are heavily selected for wealth, education, and other liberal tendencies.

That said, the first and possibly only Muslim-majority city in the US rather famously banned pride flags on government property. The liberalism of American Muslims may be overstated and contingent.

I've been starting to think Nybbler is right about everything so here's why that might not work.

There will be a two-tier system where Muslims are allowed their traditions, but non-Muslims are still forced to endure gay and trans propaganda. And Muslims will be just fine with that as it weakens their enemies who live in the House of War.

Even if Islamic states are eventually established in Europe, they will still allow LGBTQ for non-Muslims so long as they pay the Jizya.

Actually existing examples of Muslims with political power in the west have been largely hostile to LGBT unless political coalitions required them to shut up about it.

Even if Islamic states are eventually established in Europe, they will still allow LGBTQ for non-Muslims so long as they pay the Jizya.

Muslim states only allow Dhimmitude for Christians and Jews, and the LGBTQ crowd are definitely not (practicing) either.

The muslims enjoy a remarkable protected status for now because they are losers who continue exploiting the meta. Nigerians and Hindus in the Uk are starting to wise up to the meta too. The coming brown vs brown conflicts will melt the minds of progressives.

This will definitely happen. But the only group that has pro-outgroup bias (White Britons) will just continue to lose and lose.

The pro-outgroup white elites consider their own kin the enemy, and no small amount consider themselves part of the enemy. Their own cultural suicide is advertised as a net benefit for society.

Part of this is because only whites have a culture of self-criticism, usually because the objective is to tear down the proximate enemy. The reason for this meta being exploited seems to have gotten muddled of late, and now whites are the only ones who actively self-flagellate as a signal. The problem is that, since blacks and muslims and other cultures NEVER admit having done any fault for anything they have ever done, white people are the only ones who have a written record of saying 'we did bad things'. If I got an AI to teach 'who did bad things in the past' only white people will have written evidence of having done bad.

In this sociopolitical meta, only the highest skill players know that the self flagellation is only performative. I do not trust that new entrants into the cultural messaging will realize the game, and white men will cleave into blackpills or cucks exclusively.

The muslims enjoy a remarkable protected status for now because they are losers who continue exploiting the meta.

If it's stupid and it works it's not stupid.

Even if Islamic states are eventually established in Europe, they will still allow LGBTQ for non-Muslims so long as they pay the Jizya.

I love how people are blackpilling and still believe something like this.

Christians at least have the People of the Book thing going for them. Religious Muslims think the gays are degenerates. Even worse than degenerates: contagious degenerates. Hypocritical, contagious degenerates. The same people who yell about freedom and letting a thousand flowers bloom immediately went to trying to enforce their doctrine on people's kids, including yelling and abusing them for not buying in.. This is not 7th century Islam; it's been shaped by ressentiment at how it feels the West treats it.

They tolerate it because they have to. If the time ever comes when they don't have to, all of this shit is going. And it almost certainly won't go quietly so prepare for mutually radicalizing strife.

For the saddest words of tongue or pen, that handily beats "nybbler was right again"

There's already active fights in the UK over mandatory LGBTQBBQ lessons in Muslim (and Jewish) religious schools.
The most cynical interpretation is that eternal conflict between these groups is fuel for the expansion of the administrative state. It won't ever be settled one way or another, but each fight will chip away at the freedom offered by unprincipled exceptions like "illegal hate speech in the privacy of your own home is not yet a crime"

Neither the Ts nor the Muslims will be allowed to win, because using incompatible groups to keep eachother down is a key tactic of the old empire brought home for domestic use. Same with the Ts and actual women, Indians and Muslims, etc.
The UK regime is much more self-aware and doesn't have the American issue of the latest radical group seizing the wheel of the Democratic party every few years. Everything they do is much more calculated.

Yeah, in retrospect it was pretty autistic to deep dive in post-modernist Critical X Theory texts in hopes of "cracking the code", when the whole thing is an opportunistic deployment of one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Did Meloni actually do much about immigration to Italy, though?

I agree with other posters. This win to me feels more like a "win" when during the pandemic the governments got away with almost all they wanted to do including complete lockdowns. The problem here is that while it was a formidable show of combination soft and hard power, it did not actually deal with the underlying issue of the pandemic. And this show of power came at the cost of further degradation in their perceived legitimacy. It ultimately won them nothing even mid-term.

Does anybody think that by jailing some twitter commenters, the underlying conflict on the ground will get any better? That there will be no more stabbings, terrorist plots and more of the low-level simmering race and religious war? The show of force is the show of weakness.

Yeah, I think this is pretty spot on.

Pretty much every time the "underdogs" won in history it was because the ruling class decided to let them win as a virtue signal.

When the ruling class has utter contempt for their inferiors (as they do in the UK) they always win. It's a boot stomping on a human face forever, or at least until they are disrupted by outside forces.

Or, in other words, the bums always lose Lebowski.

Pretty much every time the "underdogs" won in history it was because the ruling class decided to let them win as a virtue signal.

It helps a lot if you can get help from the ruling class of a different country. EG: the US Patriots getting help from the French monarchy, or the Russian Revolution succeeding in the aftermath of WW1.

is there a foreign power (or even just, rich guys with money and media) who can support the chavs in England? Maybe Elon Musk? Or one of the new Chinese billionaires?

is there a foreign power (or even just, rich guys with money and media) who can support the chavs in England? Maybe Elon Musk? Or one of the new Chinese billionaires?

Probably not. Elon Musk is essentially powerless and the regime will get him someday, probably soon.

And if the Chinese win, they will gladly use and abuse all non-Han equally. But they will probably take an interest in the quaint customs of small European countries and preserve some of their customs in a hilarious, Sinicized manner. In this scenario, legacy Britons will have higher prestige than bearded Muslims, because they actually created art and culture once. But it will be a rare Chinese person who takes an interest in the cultural legacy of the Chavs.

Probably not. Elon Musk is essentially powerless and the regime will get him someday, probably soon.

How is Twitter's debt situation looking? That might get him first.

Non-factor probably. Twitter's traffic is at all-time highs and costs are majorly reduced from the publicly traded days. And Elon Musk's net worth is up above $200 billion as bubble stocks continue to bubble.

While he cut 80% of the workforce, resulting in massive cost savings, the ad revenue apparently also dropped by 90%. Tesla isn't looking much better. In my opinion dude's sitting on a house of cards.

I do see a lot of blue checks now, that must be some revenue, right?

That's a good point, I didn't think of that.

There is something really dispiriting about the death grip of advertising (or its lack thereof) and the way it is cynically wielded. X would be a prime spot to pump your ads, but we are told to believe that the general population would find it unacceptable to hawk your wares on a site that occasionally has a user say 'nigger'. Outside of vocal minorities, I absolutely don't believe the average person would care, and would generally be able to discern that the ads hovering around any given tweet have nothing to do with its content - just like I know an ad for Liberty Mutual has nothing to do with the 3-hour RPG retrospective it's interrupting. I've rambled before about this kind of 'fake free market' where companies are claiming their customers are literally begging them to remove a product or cut off a platform, and said company is just respecting their wishes.

If people really can't disassociate the served-up ads from the content they hover around, you would think the healthy thing to do would be to encourage some maturation on this matter instead of indulging these fainting couch sensibilities. But as I said - I dont believe this is really the case. It has nothing to do with people finding offense and everything to do with boxing out political opponents. Even normal people I know who support the ad bocott against X eventually give this away, but still suggest nothing fucky is happening.

but we are told to believe that the general population would find it unacceptable to hawk your wares on a site that occasionally has a user say 'nigger'.

Wasn't there a huge scandal because Janet Jackson's tit was out on TV? It doesn't matter if most people found it funny or harmless. Enough went the other way that it has its own wikipedia page.

I think all that happened is that the internet became TV. For a lot of us, it was an irreverent place and you just dealt with nerds twisting any public poll to reference Hitler or rampant misogyny (playful or not). But things moved from self-contained forums to much larger social media sites that functioned more like broadcast TV. A lot of normies would be fine living by early video game chat rules too. But for enough people Nazi jokes are right out. So it became safe and companies became risk averse.

The media absolutely does exploit this to try to cause things like an advertiser exodus from Twitter , but it seems almost inevitable.

Wasn't there a huge scandal because Janet Jackson's tit was out on TV?

Nobody avoided buying products advertised at said Superbowl as a result.

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Wasn't there a huge scandal because Janet Jackson's tit was out on TV?

Yes, Super Bowl ad sales just kept increasing every year. Advertisers are boycotting Twitter because they are fighting a political war against Elon Musk, not because of anything being posted n Twitter.

Yeah, I don't believe the whole "they're just doing it because they're afraid it will hurt their profit" thing either. I've never seen actually go out and back it with evidence, and the whole idea makes as much sense to me as insisting that all organisms are trying to survive because "muh natural selection" even as you're staring at the corpse of someone who committed suicide.

"All organisms are generally trying to survive because muh natural selection, and Suicide Georg is an outlier who does not make a significant impact on the survival of the species and should not be counted (and indeed isn't)" makes enough sense to me. Are you denying the existence of natural selection itself, or just the notion that it applies in 100% of the cases to 100% of organisms?

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You're right that the public don't care, but journalists desperate for scandal will write articles are how shocked, shocked they are that an insurance company advert is appearing next to an ISIS beheading video or whatever. Those articles are what the companies react to. My guess is that in the risk-averse world of marketing/PR, it's safer to pull ads than run them and risk your boss yelling at you because his press summary included a few articles like that.

Absolutely that's a part of it. However, when it comes to a company like Disney I think it's just pure flex.

every time the "underdogs" won in history it was because the ruling class decided to let them win as a virtue signal.

Untrue. There are occurrences where they were made to "win" by another ruling class ascendant. We call these revolutions.

Sure, the bums only get to have any sort of power by appealing to one elite or another, but it's not bad or wrong, it's just how the world works. As soon as you accept that and move on instead of dwelling on the injustice of not everybody being the best, you can actually start doing politics.

In this case, the native britons need to shop around for someone they can be a client to. Find whomever holds a stick large enough to displace their tyrants and "liberate" them and make constant appeals and displays of loyalty to that someone.

Sure the list of candidates isn't long but at least they still have a king, don't they?

The elite fight among themselves. The losers there take over when someone else has finished storming the palace. In this current moment we see this happening with Bangladesh, and failing to happen with Venezuela. You must always have a new elite ready in the wings after a revolution.

For the native britons who hate their pussified PMC Oxford elite, they should look to an unassailable conservative ally. Someone the PMC will have difficulty attacking on racial grounds and whose antithetical values will be protected by their foreign ways.

Basically, bring forth the Suella Braverman or Kemi Badenoch leadership.

This has been tried, but the Tories are the most disloyal bunch of scoundrels ever to grace politics, so loyalty to them is completely wasted.

I don't think liberal democracy has the capability to solve this without an actual circulation of elites.

Uh, how has the elite human capital won, here? They’ve convinced huge chunks of Britain they’re the enemy. And it doesn’t seem like they’ve regained control of the country.

The protests are over, and the Right suitably cowed.

Cowed in what way? The protests happening in the first place is an expression of power.

Lots more people know each other's names now.

Dude, they were too busy being pummeled by riot police and antifa to take down any names.

The instant, multiyear sentencing of people for relatively minor actions also calmed the Right down pretty quick.

To paraphrase Phyrrus, "If the elite are victorious in one more battle with the commoners, they shall be utterly ruined."

All the British political parties are in hot water right now. Granted, the elections aren't for another 5 years, but this was a warning shot to Labour not to get too comfortable in power. The electorate just threw out their last government in a pretty dramatic and coordinated way. They're entirely capable of throwing this one out, too, if it doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

The danger was never that the angry mob would overthrow the government. The danger is that the current anger will persist for long enough to have electoral consequences. The government has 5 years to improve the situation. If the British are still this mad when the next general election rolls around then the Labour regime might turn out to be very short lived.

This was not the kind of victory the government wants on its record.

It's interesting to note that despite their huge majority, Labour this time didn't win many votes - less, in fact, than five years ago under the controversial Jeremy Corbyn. There's a big hole in the electorate, in other words, waiting to be filled.

Yes, but that’s because they turned into a campaigns built around fear/love of Corbyn and Brexit and so, under FPTP, all minority parties, certainly in England, did extremely poorly. This election was more a return to the pre-2017 situation.

No, there genuinely has been a decay in trust. Starmer's Labour didn't crack ten million votes, which puts him well behind Cameron's 2010 and 15 performances. And it's true that some of that is driven by third parties, but those third parties didn't drop out of the sky. They're winning votes because there's dissatisfaction with the main parties that didn't exist in 2010.

It is that but also deliberate strategy by Starmer's Labour – they allowed base support to drop off in order to win over more conservative voters in contested constituencies. This has dampened enthusiasm and let votes split off to third parties, which I think is a slightly different phenomenon to mainstream parties losing trust.

I've been following the BBC and noticed themes from the govt's pre-planned counter-terrorist response to civil unrest throughout their reporting. The fix is in.

Please allow me to roll my eyes: the weather changes every day. Hanania is wrong routinely, and taking one twist in the story as vindication is spending too much time on the scroll. The Greeks will never break the Trojan Walls, and the Optimates win again.

This is exactly what happened in Canada during the trucker protests, and to some degree what has been happening to American conservatives since Trump was elected.

While memes aren’t explicitly illegal in the US yet, we have thrown at least one meme artist in prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglass_Mackey

I suspect that one of the reasons that the right isn’t memeing as well as they were in 2016 is because of this.

I also wonder if the person who started the JD Vance couch meme will go to prison or not (I doubt it).

The truckers accomplished their actual goals. That’s a victory.

No, their goals were reached independently of anything they did. They didn't accomplish anything.

To be fair, Mackey's appeal was successful last week, and his case has been directed back to trial courts with orders to dismiss the case.

(Albeit for technical reasons related to trial proof, rather than the obvious first amendment problems.)

While memes aren’t explicitly illegal in the US yet, we have thrown at least one meme artist in prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglass_Mackey

Holy crap, from his wikipedia page:

Vaughn and others promoted the #DraftOurDaughters hashtag falsely implying that Clinton would draft women into the military, when her position was that women should be required to register for the draft but not that the draft should be activated

I get more radicalized every day. How long can this go on?

Longer than you can stay solvent, as they say.

So what happens when Elite Human Capital find that they need the consent and willing support of the masses - if say a war happens and they need to Defend Our Values in less hospitable places than Rotherham or Blackpool?

Who is going to fight for them and why? Are they going to offer loot like the armies of old? Are they going to appeal to Our Values? Are they going to appeal to the loyalty of newly imported foreigners - will they fight and die for their new country? Evidence suggests no, roughly as many British Muslims went off to fight for ISIS as joined the British Army.

Elite Human Capital is picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. The materiel superiority they rely upon has been greatly eroded, as shown by a series of failed wars against third rate powers in the Middle East and most recently the Houthis. China and Russia are on a whole other level, they will definitely require a massive effort to defeat. A massive effort requires people who are highly motivated and united with their government whether by nationalism or religion. Thanks to the sublime diplomatic manoeuvres of Elite Human Capital, we will probably have to face both Russia and China plus Iran and North Korea.

Who is going to fight for them and why?

This is not the position of strength you imagine it to be. In fact, threatening non-participation is a lose-lose-lose position for anyone not absolutely and forever essential - which is almost everyone.

Imagine that young natives don’t join up the fight, but young immigrants do. Now you have immigrants taking over your armed forces from the bottom. Whichever amount of immigrants die in war is replaced by more immigration. Natives lose.

Now imagine that neither natives nor immigrants join. The natives will be forcibly drafted, since they obviously won’t organize as a community to resist a draft. The immigrants will organize and not be drafted. Natives die off in war and their relative numbers further decline. As draftees they are ejected back at the end of the war, worse off than before. Natives lose again.

If only natives join up and immigrants don’t, then the threat is seen for the bluff that it was and the natives earn nothing but death at the front lines. Natives lose.

The natives will be forcibly drafted, since they obviously won’t organize as a community to resist a draft. The immigrants will organize and not be drafted. Natives die off in war and their relative numbers further decline. As draftees they are ejected back at the end of the war, worse off than before. Natives lose again.

Drafts are theoretically compulsory but realistically if people don't want to fight that still makes a big difference. For a lot of reasons.

The natives will be forcibly drafted

By who? The Ukrainian 'drag them into the van' approach works because they've been pumping out nationalist and anti-Russian sentiment for years and years, plus they have a very clear threat and plenty of useful history to draw upon. And it only works in that the country hasn't yet collapsed. Huge numbers of people have already fled, they don't want to die for Zelensky.

Trying forcible conscription in a country like America today would be a courageous decision, both amongst politicians and draft officers. The US military was thoroughly demoralized in Vietnam, they could not adequately motivate the troops. A world war against multiple great powers is a much bigger stress-test.

Non-participation is already happening. All across the West, nobody is joining the military. Despite all this geopolitical tension and war propaganda, our armies and fleets are actively shrinking. Elite Human Capital cannot find anyone to die for them, they are lowering physical and mental standards and still falling short as the white population opts out. Qualitative and quantitative decline is already locked in. That's the force that we go to war with, the hard core that the conscripts are supposed to support.

Unwilling soldiers are not very effective in combat and neither are most immigrants (on both HBD and motivation grounds). We are set to lose and lose badly, which is bad for everyone but especially troublesome for the reigning political elite.

By who?

By the same mechanisms that makes native populations generally law abiding as is. Social shaming, an internal drive to be pro-social, and a few resistors being made example of.

Ukraine

Ukraine is a losing position for the natives. The men are dying, the women are fleeing and marrying foreigners. Their culture is suffering greatly. Their only hope is that they won’t let in migrants post-war, so that they may slowly rebuild. Otherwise they may forever lose their civilization.

We are set to lose and lose badly

Another lose condition for your culture, then. I didn’t intend to catasrophize like this, but obviously literally losing to a foreign power is a lose condition.

The intended win condition should have been “natives threaten non-participation and earn concessions from the elites”, and I intended to show that it’s unrealistic and empirically isn’t happening.

Another lose condition for your culture, then. I didn’t intend to catasrophize like this, but obviously literally losing to a foreign power is a lose condition.

So we go from western hegemony to a multipolar world (we are actually already there but many still haven’t woken up to that fact). I’m not miffed. Western hegemony has unleashed stagnation and decadence. Conflict breeds innovation and potentiates natural selection, important forces for revitalizing humanity

Where is the part where you, your children and your culture flourish? You won’t get there by losing a war to China, of all things.

What does it benefit me for Taiwan to remain free? Why should I sacrifice my brother, my son; or my life for some Taiwanese and the EHC that hates me?

It benefits you to be hegemon, and it benefits your camp to be in the institutions of hegemony. It doesn’t matter if the fighting happens in Taiwan, Korea, or the Department of Education

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I point out that you won't be doing well in a world where the US takes a major loss. Assuming that you're Israeli based on the hebrew and 'your culture' remark, there will be all kinds of problems coming your way. China might like a bit of Israeli technology but they're ideologically and historically committed to the other side of the Middle East struggle, they've been working with Iran for some time now. It'll be back to '67 borders for you and that's a best-case scenario.

Social shaming, an internal drive to be pro-social

That stuff works in a disciplined, united society where men are actually moved if they get a white feather. It doesn't work today, especially amongst young people from Western Europe and its offshoots where nationalism has been all but stamped out and individualism is the order of the day. Nobody is going to get blown up by a drone so that Taiwan can have gay pride parades, only a small fraction truly believe.

obviously literally losing to a foreign power is a lose condition

China is far away. The biggest effects will be political and economic. Ukraine and Asia excepted, we are not looking at annexations. People are already fed up with how government is run, losing a big war will be the end for Elite Human Capital.

I point out that you won't be doing well in a world where the US takes a major loss.

I don’t want you to lose. I want the part of American culture that’s aligned with my values to participate in America’s institutions. I want you to flourish, but you won’t get there by lying down! You need to pick yourself up and rediscover civic duty!

China

China is no friend of ours, I agree.

That stuff works in a disciplined, united society where men are actually moved if they get a white feather. It doesn't work today, especially amongst young people from Western Europe and its offshoots where nationalism has been all but stamped out and individualism is the order of the day. Nobody is going to get blown up by a drone so that Taiwan can have gay pride parades, only a small fraction truly believe.

That’s a bad thing, that you shouldn’t accept. If native Americans / Brits don’t participate, either someone else will or your entire nation will suffer. That is my point.

China is far away. The biggest effects will be political and economic.

Those effects are terrible! Besides the fact that I don’t believe there will be a hot war between the US and China, and that I don’t think you’ll lose if there is one, if you do lose a hot war to China the implications are huge. I’m not sure if you know how rich the US is today thanks to your world hegemony, which implies how far you could sink. Don’t downplay it, there are only bad outcomes that can come from a free society losing to the world’s biggest fascist state.

Edit, forgot to answer this:

Assuming that you're Israeli

Correct. I used to think the pfp gave it up, but I guess Shabbat candles aren’t as obvious reference as I thought.

That’s a bad thing, that you shouldn’t accept. If native Americans / Brits don’t participate, either someone else will or your entire nation will suffer. That is my point.

Would you tell this to jews who were offered the choice to collaborate with nazis?

Jews were a minority barred from participating in the public institutions of Nazi Germany, so it’s not a good parallel to the natives majorities who are willingly giving up their places and power. If Jews could e.g. join the SS, I would absolutely think it was a good idea for them to join en-mass and change it from within.

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This is some fun fictional thought experiments but remember Vietnam? Remember fragging? I’m a millennial but even I know how bad things can get

Is that supposed to be a counter example? If so, please explain who threatened non-participation and gained something for it.

I would argue blacks fought hard against being forced to enlist, saying “why should we fight for a country that hates us? No viet cong ever called me nigger” and therefore benefited greatly in their fight for greater social privileges

Did they benefit because they threatened not to go to war and gained their rights before enlisting, or because they did actually go to war?

The went to war because they were drafted but they rioted heavily as a result

No Russian ever called me privileged cis-hetero white male.

Ranger, you’re not anywhere near cynical enough. All it took was 9/11 and the plebs in middle America were lining up outside every army recruitment center. You’re kidding yourself if you don’t think patriotism for a war against China can’t be easily manufactured.

All it took was 9/11 and the plebs in middle America were lining up outside every army recruitment center.

And all it would take today is Donald Trump (Jr.) saying 'Fuck China boys, they stole your jobs, grab your rifles and let's go.' If the war starts during a democratic administration, on the other hand...

If the war starts during a democratic administration, on the other hand...

"Fuck the Dems, they stole the election and are tied up with China RN"?

The rest could stay the same ;)

The difference here is that the proles think the elites hate the country the proles are fighting for, much less the proles themselves. Proles fight for a country that their kin can succeed in, even if some haliburton exec profits more. Proles will not fight for a country that actively sneers and spits on them. White americans still have suburbs wherein the dream of an america that fights for them lives large, the modern scouser thinks Labour will sell his daughters for ISIS votes.

Eh, I’m more embedded in the bubble of people actually enlist and like half of them now root for Iran in international sporting events. The chuds will never be pro-China, but ‘let’s you and him fight, I ain’t joining the 7th fleet’ is entirely plausible.

Right wingers root for Iran in international sporting events? What bubble are you talking about?

You’re kidding yourself if you don’t think patriotism for a war against China can’t be easily manufactured.

I mean, this is how it's going to go: "Wait, so those coastals in their faggoty white collars are now going to be forced, from their Harvard mouths, to extend us some fucking courtesy, and this is a bad thing... why?"

All it took was 9/11 and the plebs in middle America were lining up outside every army recruitment center.

US was significantly less divided in 2001 than now. Also,

You’re kidding yourself if you don’t think patriotism for a war against China can’t be easily manufactured.

Any more or less than it was for Vietnam?

Are you implying that consent will be manufactured by "extending the plebs courtesy"?

US was significantly less divided in 2001 than now.

By what metric? US dividedness could well be argued to have the Shepard tone nature. Also, it might be worth noting that we are talking about the UK here.

To begin with, if anything the level of division regarding US adversaries seems to be lower now. Back during the cold war, it's widely known that Western societies were suffused with Soviet sympathisers. Nowadays, even on a contrarian forum like this one, the vast majority of people is enthusiastically aligned with the establishment position on Russia and China to the point that disagreeing will get you a wall of downvotes and actual social censure.

Vietnam

Wasn't the dissent there carried by a faction of elites, rather than plebs? They've learned their lesson; Harvard kids will probably not get drafted again.

disagreeing will get you a wall of downvotes and actual social censure.

I routinely and vociferously disagree with the elite consensus on these issues, but based on the number of downvotes it seems like there are more people opposed to criticism of nuclear power.

Wasn't the dissent there carried by a faction of elites, rather than plebs? They've learned their lesson; Harvard kids will probably not get drafted agai

Selective service just got expanded ro include women.

if you think the draft was unpopular when it was men coming back in body bags, then you haven’t seen anything yet

Yep, the actual plebs beat up anti war protestors.

Are you implying that consent will be manufactured by "extending the plebs courtesy"?

No, I'm implying that any consent that can be manufactured is going to be very limited. The entire reason the elite has hollowed out the military is because expanding the military (and the manufacturing base needed to support it) also necessarily expands the middle class, which since they'll ultimately use some of that money to enact politics the elite doesn't like is obviously a challenge to their power.

Thus I predict a reaction of "oh look at that, all of a sudden you do need us after all; well, we don't come cheap any more, cost of living has risen mainly because of you so there will be no more of that and the F-15s you would want to use to force us to go anyway seem to be occupied at the moment". I don't think they'd sign up for the wages they pay now and, while a massive salary for a private [more for officers] that far outstrips what Buc-Ees can offer would fix that problem real quick, that puts the elite in a tough spot as far as what they want to fund: their foreign policy goals, or their domestic ones.

I don't believe that, in the 1970s, the urban power bases were even capable of outright saying they wanted to wage war on the half of the nation they don't like because they don't share the same aesthetics. By contrast the sitting President today has said outright that this would be desirable.

The aftermath of 9/11 by itself irreversibly damaged to middle class' willingness to sacrifice themselves for their country, and this is without touching the cultural humiliation during the 2 decades since. If you think anyone is signing up to fight for you, you're in for a surprise.

“Irreversibly damaged” like Vietnam, of course? We shall see. As this post itself discusses, the value of propaganda is hard to underestimate, many men have fought far more bravely for far less and with far less reason to want to do so in the past. If men are necessary to fight China, they can be made to want to do so, and there is very little anyone can do to stop that.

Those men of years past didn’t have twitter.

Elite human capitals propaganda is garbage these days. Haven’t you noticed? “The left can’t meme” is a truism for a reason

“Republicans are weird” seems to be working.

It’s increased military enlistment amongst whites? That’s strange

Does ‘the left can’t meme’ only apply to memes targeting white men?

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It's a forced meme followed by another forced meme that it's working. What I heard about Vance this morning from the mainstream was about him pouncing on Walz for claiming to have carried a gun in a war zone.

Not that I've seen.

If there's any reaction, I'd likely chalk it up to being stunned and confused at the blatant astroturfing or utter hypocrisy, as the political side that's been using the term 'Weird' as a badge of pride for decades has now turned around and used it as an insult.

In what context?

It does seem to be a popular meme on reddit, where literally anything critical of Republicans has had a solid chance of becoming a popular meme for approaching twenty years.

If men are necessary to fight China, they can be made to want to do so

Those men couldn't even stop their countrymen from rioting 4 years ago. What makes you think they're going to fight an enemy that actually shoots back?

The GWOT was a tempest in a teacup compared to any war with China. Bush didn't draft civilians, didn't mobilize industry, he and his successors funded the whole thing with debt. One could calculate that going off to fight was relatively low-risk - you have all the equipment, training, fire support and medivac on your side. You go on patrols and come back to a nice base somewhere fortified. The other guy has an AK, maybe an RPG and some dodgy roadside bombs.

China is a completely different story. That's America's biggest trading partner, Australia's, the EU's. Suddenly stores are empty of all kinds of things. People who thought they were comfortably retired wake up and see that their portfolio is down 30-40% and that the government has taken over much of the economy to regulate prices. Even the US Air Force relies on Chinese parts for its air to ground weapons, everyone else is going to run into massive supply chain problems.

Fighting China and Russia won't be like the wars in the Middle East, it will be absolute carnage. Massive swarms of drones hunting people down day and night, constant shelling, digging trenches, a 'safe' base getting hammered by missiles from thousands of kilometres away. There is no medivac, the other guy has the same tools as you do. One sunk destroyer = one year of Afghanistan deaths. It will be a real test of endurance on both sides even at the conventional level.

A short term burst of patriotic enthusiasm will dry up very quickly when people realize how many casualties are being taken and appreciate that conscription isn't just a joking matter. It won't be happening to other people, it'll be happening to us. All of this pain needs some kind of justification, leaders need to credibly explain why victory must be achieved at any cost.

China

Another counterpoint. Mao is famously one of the few people who can be said to have more or less exterminated an entire country's elite human capital. The tatter remains of those bloodlines never really recovered (they are only 17% or so richer than average)

Yeah, it's not so much elite human capital.

It's more just naked power, and the will to use it. If you hate the people you're oppressing you can accomplish a lot even if they are smarter than you.

Though to be fair a good chunk of those fled to Hong Kong, Taiwan, immigrated to the US, etc. Anecdotally I have a friend of Chinese descent whose grandfather was a banker (and a personal friend of Chiang Kai-shek). He supposedly escaped on a fishing boat to Hong Kong under a pile of dead fish.

Fair, but most of them did not escape and those that did are not even in the zipcode of political power in China right now.

Unfortunately China has failed to stop a new elite technocratic class from fermenting in the trash heap. A new crop of economic elites has supplanted the old legacy that indeed fled to San Francisco, Sydney and Vancouver via Hong Kong, and this new crop is dabbing their toes in both the China and Western economic elite. The new moneyed Chinese are not climbing the ranks of coroporate america, but indtead forming medium sized enterprises cornering all manner of small import export goods no one thinks about. Your costco crab chunks may come from Alaskan fishermen, but they are processed by some Chinese-owned slave factories in Thailand.

A highly substantial part of the urban elite in China did escape, actually, to Taiwan or Hong Kong or Singapore (or in some cases to the West). It took about 8-10 years for capitalism to be abolished fully in all of China, there was actually plenty of time for much of the elite in Shanghai and elsewhere to leave after the war ended. If you were 99.9th percentile wealth in China in 1947 (and therefore likely in the intellectual elite), you probably did leave.

Wasn't Xi Jingping's father purged by Mao? Somehow he weaseled back.

According to Wikipedia, yeah his father was purged during the Cultural Revolution. Not that I'm a fan of Pooh-bear, but it makes me kind of happy in the schadenfreude sense to learn that. Mao was an utter shit-bag, and I am amused by imagining how mad he would be if he found out that the son of the guy he purged is now running the country.

Mao would either be ashamed by history proving him a monstrous fool or in denial about that. Whether his cognitive dissonance would take the form of anger or unearned pride/boastfulness is an open question.

"What, is the North going to fill their armies with Irish immigrants who have no reason to risk their lives for the Union?" -Confederates, 1861.

I think the envisioned future is the EU as a patchwork of federated states ruling over the end of history. Each has its own elite class which sends representatives to the superstate bureaucracy while ruling over its ethnically fragmented domestic underclass through anarcho-tyranny and therapeutic authoritarian institutions.

In this scenario the armed forces are only used for domestic repression. Foreign relations are carried out entirely through financial manipulation and funding mercenary armies (a continuation of England's foreign policy of the last five centuries).
The limited loyalty needed for its janissary soldiers can be guaranteed by allowing them to rape and loot the natives with impunity, while offering some limited protection to whichever native groups give most support to the regime; an all-pay auction that maximizes their exploitation.

At least this is the vision of steady-state tyranny you can see e.g. Burdensome salivating over. If history doesn't end as planned such a regime probably wouldn't be capable of surviving perpetually, but the Ottomans lasted centuries with that kind of system until events caught up with them.

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Chuck him out, the brute!" But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;

Not really a new concern, though, is it?

That poem is reflecting the elite/prole equilibrium in a high-trust, high-cohesiveness, homogenous society with decent state capacity, to name a few of the variables that no longer obtain. Applying it to societies with enough trust that credit cards work is unwise.

One thing to note is that the british officer class did/does have a sense of noblesse obligee, with higher casualty rates in officers than in men for WW1 and WW2, and even now I hear less grousing from tommies about their officers than other countries (to be fair I haven't spoken to infantry for a decade, so I might be missing something there). Again, the homogenous culture of US and UK militarIES has a flattening effect, and the british especially seemed to reserve racialized denigration of their soldiers to dismissal of foreign levies especially the sepoys/rajputs (though Gurkhas and sikhs enjoy consistent appreciation among British commanders). Modern western societies are fractured enough for this to largely no longer hold, and frankly we saw the first iteration of this crack during Vietnam where an unfit officer class rushed through low quality command school earned the ire of black and white grunts alike.

For those wondering this is from a poem called “Tommy” by Rudyard Kipling:

(This link has better formatting: https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_tommy.htm)

I went into a public 'ouse to get a pint o' beer, The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here." The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die, I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I: O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away"; But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins," when the band begins to play The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play, O it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins," when the band begins to play.

I went into a theatre as sober as could be, They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me; They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls, But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls! For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, wait outside"; But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide, O it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide.

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap. An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit. Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?" But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll, O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes," when the drums begin to roll.

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too, But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you; An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints, Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints; While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Tommy, fall be'ind," But it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind, O it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind.

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all: We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational. Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace. For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Chuck him out, the brute!" But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot; An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please; An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool - you bet that Tommy sees!

To make a line break in markdown you must type two spaces at the end of each line. This will allow you to correctly format poems and lyrics.

I went into a public 'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins," when the band begins to play
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins," when the band begins to play.

I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls,
But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, wait outside";
But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide
The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,
O it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide.

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap.
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes," when the drums begin to roll.

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Tommy, fall be'ind,"
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind.

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool - you bet that Tommy sees!

It's a weird thing to say, but the more I read him, the more I come to the conclusion that Kipling is remarkably underrated and underappreciated, and that's even taking into account the modern climate and improvements in cultural tolerance.

He’s quite skilled at producing delicious, dense verse. It’s very evocative of sentiments which are occasionally unpopular but never really go out of the public consciousness. That’s the problem—he was too consistent. One can take any single verse from his poetry and tell exactly what the rest of the poem is about and how one is supposed to feel in response. Sometimes one doesn’t even need a line. Anathema to anyone trying to make a career out of study.

Of course, actually needing to make a career out of studying a poet indicates he should either speak more clearly or shut his mouth.

He's my favourite poet, constant bangers. 'The Beginnings' is still politically relevant today, in certain circles anyway. Gods of the Copybook Headings, The Hymn of Breaking Strain...

It became mandatory to savage Kipling (I think) after WW1, and by the 30s he was just the dead horse you ritually beat to show you had Correct politics in the English department: "Kipling is a Jingo Imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting... It is no use pretending that Kipling's view of life can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person" etc. etc.

His reputation never really recovered, and it wasn't anything to do with the quality of his work.

Well, I like him.

So what happens when Elite Human Capital find that they need the consent and willing support of the masses?

If only we had some sort of clue.

Western Elite Human Capital can't maintain their superiority unless they can hand out white feathers to young men. But the EHC has been loudly seeking the abolishment of those men for the last hundred years, and they've been succeeding for the last 50.

At that point, how are they different from my foreign enemy? Sure, my foreign enemy won't let me have the human rights or standards of living I want, but my domestic enemy is already busy denying me those things with the approval of their consciences, so why the fuck should I risk my life and limb defending these assholes if all I have do to conduct a purge of them is to do nothing?

I think the EHC expects 1984 to be non-fiction, where collusion between the powerful in Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia generates a meta-stable system of global oppression, but I'm not convinced it's going to play out that way.

The EHC thinks that they can replace the uncooperative local peasants with pliant foreign serfs. I think the democrats especially are realizing that the foreign serfs turn out to have more in common with the local peasants, and that the appeal of living under the auspices of the EHC is not the opportunity to shine the shoes of the EHC but the opportunity to live like the local peasants. The democratic EHC is still overestimating its appeal and thinks commandments from on high are diktats the local peasants will suck up, enforced by new serfs imported at EHC request.

I maintain that the new EHC of feminized wokescolds maintained a surprisingly long period of visibility because it was filled with attractive college women and men who wanted to fuck them. As these women aged and the new college women abandon femininity and attractiveness, the actual mass of simps hoping to score has diminished, and this will result in a consequent reduction in democratic EHC power for reasons that will be unfathomable to the EHC.

It was never democratic. There's always been resistance to "wokeness" and immigration and so on. When I showed up Canada was still (at least visibly) in an incredibly smug, happy place about multiculturalism and even back then there was resistance to migration. When people learned how many people Canada was taking in under Harper they wanted it to take smaller numbers. No one cared is all.

The female "wokescolds" didn't win because they were hot. They won because you'd get fired if you went too far and the culture-makers listened to them. Anita Sarkeesian was hot and faced significant backlash before she won. Why? Because anonymous nerds online can be brave. But she won where it counted, in the real world, and now companies pay danegeld to avoid being considered sexist.

The elites just won too hard and are now suffering from success.

Precisely because a lot of their power isn't democratic, they were able to radicalize further and further (which may cause more of the performative ugliness). This led to an elite religion that is not only highly divergent from what many proles, brown or white, want, but actively hostile to us. This has simply gotten worse as time has gone on, and so more and more proles are being turned off.

But they're getting more turned off because elites are successfully enforcing this across many fields. More migrants are coming in now, the state is passing laws that let it undermine the family more in the name of LGBT rights and there's a corresponding push to control social media to prevent any counter-narrative.

I'm surprised China in particular isn't making better use of the internal division in the West. Russia is far better at it, despite having some deep comparative disadvantages (it's much harder to pitch Russia as the model of an advanced society than China, for example). I'm sure there are many disaffected people in the West with declining loyalty to the state who would be very happy to work with China for minimal perks, or even just the joy of sticking it to the man. This was a critical element of Soviet soft power during the Cold War, and if China was smarter they'd be exploiting it now.

I'm surprised China in particular isn't making better use of the internal division in the West

Were Harris to win in November, the probability of China taking Taiwan would increase. But they don't need to rush to exploiting the division when their plans mean benefitting long-term. Yeah, I've heard "The Chinese economy is about to crash" for at least 10 years, but the tiger stands. It might be paper, but the eagle might be a puff of smoke. If Europe and the US keep declining, then on the timeframe China works at, soon nobody will be able to stop them when they make open moves to devour Africa's resources. That's their actual goal, and if Western decline reaches that point, who gives a shit about chip backdoors?

That said, China is helping sow the division. The whining about Russia for 8 years involved a mountain of stuff Russia was not doing, but China was doing, and at a far greater scale and efficacy. Russia wasn't on Reddit while China has been prolific at shaping narrative on the site. China had orders-of-magnitude more impact on Twitter, and yet decades more potent an impact still with TikTok. The Chinese hand on the scale has massively inflated the apparent size of the online left while also increasing its actual numbers. Whether they controlled trends directly or quickly passed it off to non-ideologically-aligned-as-such American subordinates, the result is the same. This "backfired" in congress forcing divestiture, but what makes TikTok beneficial to the Chinese will largely remain.

Declining loyalty to the state is right coded and the right wing hates China. They’re an explicitly anti-Christian communist society which has practiced population control in the recent past. Throw in some stuff about race(it’s just very easy to make them seem like the other- and everyone knows they’re racist too).

YouTube is full of videos of Americans who moved to some Russian village with their families to "escape wokeness", but the only living-in-China videos I see are from young high-openness singles. I imagine that to be a dissident on behalf of some folk, you must want to or at least be okay with taking on its folkways, and in terms of those Russia is seen as much closer and more compatible with Western sensibilities than China.

There's the obvious ethnic issue there. There are a lot more white people in the US than Han, and China is far more ethnically homogenous than Russia.

I think that’s all on the money, but China wouldn’t need to transplant dissident Americans to Shanghai in order to make mutually beneficial trades with Western dissidents (if anything, that would rather defeat the point). I’m thinking instead of actions like, eg, creating or funding thinktanks and NGOs across Europe and the US that champion ideas like civilisational states, the danger of radical Islam, the importance of assertive state-led assimilation of minorities to the dominant culture, etc.. Basically turn Chinese state capitalism into a more general ideological package that can be pitted against the perceived failures and weaknesses of current liberalism, and use Western dissidents to promote it, as the Soviet Union did with Communism. Could be some very substantial geopolitical gains for minimal costs.

creating or funding thinktanks and NGOs across Europe and the US

The Confucius Institutes were an early version of this, but they all closed. They'd have to be more circumspect a second time around.

Right, but I think the reluctance of Westerners (at least those past their rumspringa stage) also hints at a general sense that Chinese people are so alien that what works for them will not work for Westerners. China could of course campaign to dispel this sense, but this might be a two-edged sword. If Chinese and Westerners are sufficiently similar that PRC governance working for the Chinese is evidence that PRC governance would work for Westerners, then the converse inference that Western governance would work for the Chinese is not far away, and conventional wisdom holds that they are very concerned about that notion catching on.

What would this even look like?

Plus, why interrupt your opponent when they're making a mistake? China doesn't need the US to fall into civil war. It just needs us to let our military slowly lose its edge, our industrial supply chains wither on the vine, and our people lose interest in contesting Taiwan. All of those trend lines except the last are pretty much baked into the cake for the next decade, and probably having domestic issues displace foreign issues in American public opinion is the easiest way to get the last (and much easier than nurturing a domestic fifth column).

I'm surprised China in particular isn't making better use of the internal division in the West. Russia is far better at it, despite having some deep comparative disadvantages (it's much harder to pitch Russia as the model of an advanced society than China, for example)

Russia is way more familiar with Western culture, and I don't know how seriously I should take Yuri Bezmenov, but apparently an argument can be made that the current internal divisions is just what they sowed back in the Soviet days bearing fruit now. In any case they probably have some cultural infrastructure left over from back then.

It would make sense. If the social discord was sownin the 1970s, then the first generation raised with it would be late gen X in the 1979s and 1980s. Those people are parents of high school and college kids now. So that means that only those in the boomer and early gen X era can even vaguely remember a time when racial politics and class/race resentment weren’t prominent parts of the political and social landscape. Most people under 60 or so think those things are normal.

And Russia has an advantage of being fairly culturally similar to the West to be able to talk in their language. They’re Orthodox Christians, which gives them an understanding of the foundation of Western religion. They’re shaped by Greco-Roman cultural norms, including individualism and guilt over shame. China has none of that. China was its own civilization for millennia. It’s influenced by Taoism, Confucius, and Buddhism. They emphasize conformity and respect for the elites instead of individual self expression and individual rights and liberties. As such, even though China has become a sort of city on a hill, it can’t really communicate it’s values because of the lack of commonality,

That seems dubious given the current Labor government is a clear refutation of that thesis (at least in the short term).

The elite human capital, the demonstrably competent people, the dreaded technocrats in the bowels of the deep state. They would have dealt with this crisis a lot better. And those people, including Tony Blair himself, are currently being snubbed by the Starmer administration.

Elite human capital doesn't give a shit about lower class hooligans rioting over who gets to stab whom. They're busy trying to get billions to fund AI so Britain isn't actually irrelevant in a few years.

Tone would have the basic political sense to know that coming down like a hammer is stupid and a waste of ressources. The opposite of what you're saying is happening. People who feel like they're backed in a corner and that the state is their total enemy will fight to the death. These protests, and subsequent imprisonments, have created radicals that will be a thorn in the side of British state for years.

All when you could just have held a vigil, pretended to care while still saying "don't look back in anger" and bought yourself space to actually move the needle politically instead of having to handle chaos and international embarrassment.

Keir is in a worse position now than he was before this. The British state could have used this to grab more power without showing weakness, and more importantly without drawing the ire of the richest man in the world.

By no metric is this a win.

All when you could just have held a vigil, pretended to care while still saying "don't look back in anger" and bought yourself space to actually move the needle politically instead of having to handle chaos and international embarrassment.

The media could also have contributed to this by factually mentioning that he's a second-generation immigrant (so not a "refugee" or even an immigrant) and his ancestors are from Rwanda (i.e. not Muslims). It'd have also been possible from the beginning to make the whole issue about his mental illness.

the Elite Human Capital […] was simply never going to be outmaneuvered by a bunch of fat, drunk, working class louts

Counterpoint: didn’t the IRA cause something to the tune of one billion in damage in a single event? In the middle of London? And that led directly to negotiations. So there’s a history of this happening, although obviously the context and populations are different today.

I still have no idea how serious these protests have been because so much online is junk — is there some authoritative breakdown floating around?

Counterpoint: didn’t the IRA cause something to the tune of one billion in damage in a single event? In the middle of London? And that led directly to negotiations.

Ahh no, remember the UK government had been willing to negotiate as far back as Sunningdale in the 70's. The IRA made several mis-steps (killings kids and OAP's in Warrington and Enniskillen) which cost them significant support in Catholic communities. Which is why they ended up accepting a deal very similar to one they were offered at Sunningdale 25 years before. The Major government at the time of the Canary Wharf bombing was being propped up by Unionist votes which is why he was being forced temporarily to take a hard line towards the IRA, but that wasn't indicative of previous UK government approaches. In essence the bombing (or actually the end of the IRA ceasefire which had held prior to that for over a year) gave Major the excuse he needed to ignore the Unionists who were propping up his government and go back to the status quo of negotiation which he was already in favor of. Given the majority Starmer has I don't think the situation is going to be similar there.

The current protests are certainly when compared to the Troubles pretty tame. Burning a few buses is nearly a Northern Irish past time at this point though, so my calibration may be different than the average person.

The IRA weren’t all fat, drunk, stupid louts though. There were some highly smart and capable people in there too.

And also a lot of untouchable US funding and arms shipments (until October 2001). The IRA wouldn't have lasted without US bomb-making supplies and armalites.

Getting a UK expat community over here would be a handy first step in liberating the place, although you couldn't start active operations until toppling the regime aligned with the US govt's interests for a few years. Which is a much greater obstacle than the IRA faced in exploiting an existing US policy of causing unrest in European colonies.

There's already a lot of extremely wealthy tax-dodgers from the UK. A hardcore dissident group in control of the 2nd generation expat community could exploit that money the same way the IRA exploited the nostalgia and desire for ethnic identity of quadroon quadmick "St. Paddy Americans"

I don't precisely know where Elon lands in the Motte's situation evaluation of the Culture War at present, but I think I've got an example than can be used as a lense beyond The MuskATeer himself.

This is a very recent (x)weet from Elon. If you really, carefully parse it with your far less powerful brain (than Elon's, that is) you might be able to understand that - this is just basic macroeconomic understanding. Holy shit this is fucking Econ 101

But, as I've said before, Elon has adopted just enough PodCaster Bro aesthetics to know that slight rephrasings of 1+1=2 obvious insights, combined with "thoughtful" pauses and idiosyncratic speech patterns can make you look deep to the midwits. I am convinced this is also 90% of Sam Altman's playbook.

Business-eese and consulting speaking get a lot of flak for being made up pseudo-languages that exist to further unearned vibes of authority and experience on the part of the speaker. It's fun to point and laugh that it's all either nonsense or very obvious truths dressed up in jargon.

I think the cycle is repeating itself with many different sides of the AI wars. Connor Leahy is even more egregious than Musk, and also triples down by trying (and mostly failing) to pin people down with gotcha hypotheticals that are worded to sounded apocalyptic in their profundity.

I think a good heuristic for valid expertise in a subject is the degree to which it gets a little boring. Scott Alexander's posts often veer into "holy shit, get to the point, dude!" territory. Many posts related to SCOTUS here on The Motte (of which I am thankful for, please keep them going!) often get just a little tedious - not because of jargony pablum, but because the authors generally really know what they're talking about and go multiple layers deep in reference and citation.

I'm someone who's been in the Tech industry (or, maybe more accurately, technology focused parts of several industries) for my entire career. At least at the start, "tech" was looked at as a weird subculture - the bosses knew they needed it, but it wasn't the show. In the middle 2010s, that started to change as the FAANGs became the largest and richest companies on the planet. Now that we are at peak AI hullabaloo, not only do you see people with zero technical capability presenting themselves as experts, you have an entire aesthetic-cultural superstructure. I think Musk is not only part of it, but one of those who built it. Altman as well. If you peer into their backgrounds, their techincal bonafides are questionable at best. Musk seems like a hacker level dev who brute forced his way into PayPal (and was then brute forced out). His claims about being deeply involved in engineering to this day have to be impossible (SpaceX, Tesla, and Xwitter couldn't run if so much was contingent on him). It's more likely he injects himself into meetings and initiatives here and there and mostly serves as a slight derailing force to otherwise normal activities. Altman seems to have zero background and is perhaps the poster boy for weird SF striver life.

I seek the opinions of the Mottizen community.

Scott Alexander's posts often veer into "holy shit, get to the point, dude!" territory

They do?

Reddit commenters and other slave moralists love to sneer at Elon because they have no idea what leadership is (and if they did, they're repelled by it). Leadership, in their heads, is mindlessly executing the agenda of the secret kings like them, which so happen to coincidentally align with a progressive agenda. Softheaded wannabe intelligentsia and open source communists who want the world to be run like a university.

Fuck them.

All the certificates and university degrees and soy can't make up for a lack of vision and a absence of testicles. If you gave a billion dollars to one hundred Silicon Valley alumni, ninety-nine of them would be overrun instantly by blaqq kweens and transsexual gooners because guileless, naive autists have no social defenses against San Francisco grifters.

Musk isn't perfect. But he has a spine, and he has vision, and in our degenerate age that makes him stand a giant in an era of dwarfs. No amount of technical ability can protect you from the culture war, just ask Stallman.

I find your post to be low content, low effort, and mostly a screed against your preferred outgroups. I do not see how it adds anything of substance to this conversation.

This is a distilled snarl at everyone you hate, conveying no argument or information or anything to engage with. It's just a free-form stream of invective and buzzwords cribbed from your favorite alt-right shitposters, and it's pure culture warring.

It's been a while since your last ban, but when you get wound up, you really get wound up. Banned for three days.

You can still ban the poster, but there was clearly an argument. You even accepted as much when you responded to Walter that the problem was the sneering. We should try to be precise in our wording.

No amount of technical ability can protect you from the culture war, just ask Stallman.

I mean, you're not wrong. Stallman got ousted from MIT after the progressive/techno-libertarian split of the mid 2010s, it was only a matter of time.

But he ended up back on the board of the FSF. I think you're also ignoring that it's entirely possible to create parallel institutions that are resistant to this stuff. Especially for weird nerds with technical ability

Contra @Amadan and @100ProofTollBooth, I'll say that I pretty much agree with the core of this post and I don't think it's content-free. The invective is obviously way too far over the top for this forum, but yeah, there really is a serious problem with the HRization of everything under the sun from people that have absolutely no experience with ever building anything, leading anything, or even producing anything that people would purchase of their own free will. We can see this everywhere from politics to corporations, where people earnestly believe that the relevant criteria for rising ranks is checking a bunch of boxes for titles held, HR style, rather than having actually accomplished anything of note. Having people that have never risked a penny of their own money rise to the top of the power structure isn't just accepted, it's outright lauded by people that see their own personal failures as indications of good moral character.

Sohrab Ahmari, a guy that a lot of people on the right respect as an intellectual, believes things like this:

Thinking of Galbraith’s line about how painful it is that men who made a few good financial bets are assumed to know what they’re talking about on everything else.

And how their wealth means the rest of us can’t avoid their inane views.

The absolute conceit that people who have accomplished so much less than a guy like Musk to just blithely refer to building empires of productivity and innovation as "a few good financial bets" demonstrates to me that these guys have absolutely no concept of what it takes to build a company. They're pampered, spoiled brats that truly believe that their academic credentials and journalistic output aren't just as good as actually creating value, they're better. They have fastidiously avoided taking any meaningful personal risks and have managed to imbue that cowardice with an air of smug superiority because they didn't make their money doing something as vulgar as making "a few good financial bets".

Contra @Amadan and @100ProofTollBooth, I'll say that I pretty much agree with the core of this post and I don't think it's content-free. The invective is obviously way too far over the top for this forum, but yeah, there really is a serious problem with the HRization of everything under the sun from people that have absolutely no experience with ever building anything, leading anything, or even producing anything that people would purchase of their own free will.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with your post expressing that idea.

Rewritten without all the "fuck you" snarling at gooners and blaqq keweens and soy autists, he could have said what you did. Some people just can't express themselves without spraying spittle and loogies, and this place isn't for that.

Yeah, to be clear, I'm not arguing with the ban, just the assessment that there wasn't any underlying content. There is an argument embedded in there! Frankly, I even agree with the level of contempt expressed for the commentariat and academic classes, but also agree that it's just not appropriate here.

Contra @Amadan and @100ProofTollBooth, I'll say that I pretty much agree with the core of this post and I don't think it's content-free.

I can't deny that this video of Kara Swisher writing off Elon for moral reasons before being reminded that Elon actually does try to build things that matter to actual people immediately came to my mind reading that post. It's definitely a thing, though the level of generalization and invective may be against Motte rules.

I would be forced to agree as well. Leadership is a skill set. And it takes an intuitive understanding of a whole system of psychology and power-wielding and strategy and understanding how to work with incomplete information. I think of running a company being a lot like a combination of poker and chess. Chess because it’s a game of strategy using your pieces to work to attack and defend. Poker because you actually don’t know where the other side is on the board. You can’t play a standard set of moves because you can be attacked by a piece you don’t even know you need to defend against.

The absolute conceit that people who have accomplished so much less than a guy like Musk to just blithely refer to building empires of productivity and innovation as "a few good financial bets" demonstrates to me that these guys have absolutely no concept of what it takes to build a company.

They don't, but that's not the point. The distinction is just friend and enemy, as usual. They'll absolutely gush over Warren Buffett who is a lot closer to having made his money through "a few financial bets" than Musk (though to give the devil his due, it's still quite unfair to Buffett). Or Bill Gates, who for all his sins did build Microsoft. Because they're friends and will push for lefty policies, and Musk is an enemy who won't.

I’ll certainly agree with you in one place: Elon Musk, along with essentially everyone else expressing an opinion on inflation, has a lot of unearned confidence. Macroeconomics, and inflation specifically, is an area that brings out a lot of people fitting lines to past data and absolutely sure of causality. In reality, there is a wide range of opinions in macroeconomics on the relationship between fiscal and monetary theory and price levels, all held by PhDs genuinely trying to figure out what's going on. All those people in 2021 calling inflation “transitory” genuinely had thought hard about their predictions and genuinely were wrong. See Figure 1 here, where traders with money on the line completely missed their bets on CPI paths.

I’ll take a moment to share my personal hobby horse, John Cochrane’s fiscal theory of the price level. It predicts that inflation is caused when people expect the government to repay its debt by printing money in the future instead of responsibly running a fiscal surplus. Deficits in response to crisis are fine as long as you can credibly pay them back, but our recent government has shown absolutely no plans to do so. Regarding valid expertise, Cochrane pleasantly obliges by providing media anywhere from engaging (Podcasts! Sound effects!) to unintelligible without an econ degree (Calculus¡ Terrifying¡).

At least on this topic, I don’t think Musk is worse than anyone else. Everybody (including me) wants to say they have a handle of what causes inflation; we probably don’t, and will get to partake in the classic human experience of being completely wrong about the future of the macroeconomy.

In reality, there is a wide range of opinions in macroeconomics on the relationship between fiscal and monetary theory and price levels, all held by PhDs genuinely trying to figure out what's going on. All those people in 2021 calling inflation “transitory” genuinely had thought hard about their predictions and genuinely were wrong.

Between the end of 2019 and the end of 2023, the money supply M2 grew 40%. The economy grew 19%. There was no reason to believe there was some long-term change in the velocity of money. Just from these numbers alone you can expect about 18% inflation. And, sure enough, the price level increased by about 20%.

You can repeat this for other countries. The UK money supply M2 grew 24%. The economy did not grow at all. Expectation: 24% increase in price level. Reality: 24% increase in price level.

Denying that increasing the money supply as was done in 2020 would cause inflation, or that it would be "transitory", comes from the same motivated reasoning that applied to the entire era of covid policy. Criticizing a heavy-handed response made you persona non grata in professional circles, so you didn't. As for placing bets on it to make money, the risk is not the existing consequences of government policy, but that you're betting on how deranged your local government is. Inflation is not the only consideration in such a circumstance, so it's no surprise that even people putting their money where there mouth is were bad sources of predictions.

I think there's a bit of a talking-past-each-other thing with "transitory" inflation. The pro-transitory argument is we pumped a ton of money into the system during covid, but then we stopped pumping money in at that elevated rate, so once all the price gains from that bump in the money supply bubble through the economy we go back to the same moderate inflation rate we had before. And that case is basically true and has been borne out.

The anti-transitory argument is hey we got this massive jump in prices and then the prices never went back down. Which is also true. Of course, that's not strictly speaking an inflation problem anymore. Now it's a cost of living issue.

The assumption that once the price rises slowed down everyone would be happy again was the problem. Absolute levels matter as well as the rate of change!

To be clear we aren’t back to normal. We have hovered about a fifty percent above the recent norm.

Yeah that's fair. I'll concede the point, I guess I was forgetting how strong the "transitory" claims were.

All those people in 2021 calling inflation “transitory” genuinely had thought hard about their predictions and genuinely were wrong.

Smart people are best able to rationalize away their personal biases, or cloak their disingenuous wishcasting in plausible-sounding theoreticals. Assuming good faith in all cases is naive, as is assuming that good faith isn't polluted by, e.g. political incentives.

On the other hand he's talking about monetary incentive. These people thought interest rates were going to drop by 2023 and staked their money on it.

Bad faith would have been talking publicly about how inflation is temporary/imaginary while dumping overpriced 5yr bonds, like the Vox staff stockpiling n95 masks.

(Actually I'm terrible with bonds, what's the strategy for profiting on rising rates with them? Treasury futures? Can you exploit a too-low TIPS spread when rates are rising? I have no clue)

One set of people got the non-transitory nature right without using any sophisticated modeling or "genuinely trying to figure out what's going on". The other set got it wrong while using sophisticated modeling and "genuinely trying to figure out what's going on". This did not lead me to conclude that causes of inflation post-2020 were hopelessly complex, but that people exercised motivated reasoning and recruited a bunch of pointless complexity rather than just acknowledge the obvious conclusion in front of them.

The whole thing feels like the midwit meme brought to life.

You're claiming that the traders mentioned in the previous post were giving away money? If so, could you elaborate on what you think the cause of error was, since I rather like it when non-me people distribute free cash.

The error is motivated reasoning due to being unwilling to criticize heavy-handed covid-excused policy. The downside is that this is hard to cash in on because it's not a bet on just inflation, but also on how deranged the government is - predicting higher inflation also means predicting a more insane government, which reduces the value of any rewards of predicting correctly.

For the sake of example to illustrate that government insanity matters for economic bets, consider 2 people betting on whether the government will rob them and take half their money. The actual chance of this happening is 50%. But if the bet is even, the payoff matrix looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/HQ1PibN.png. Therefore it's actually beneficial to bet that the government will do nothing.

Edit: It now occurs to me that this might be a novel contribution to game theory and therefore is a bit too much of a reach to be a point of evidence here.

Edit: It now occurs to me that this might be a novel contribution to game theor

Maybe to economics or betting but surely not game theory

In Physics 101, there's a class of problems where there are multiple ways to figure out the answer. One is through difficult integration of force and velocity equations. The other is noting that energy is conserved and you can figure it out through simple algebra that way. There's another class of problems where one thing absolutely dominates -- one hard SF author posed the problem in a short story about a spaceship moving through the solar system at 0.25g constant acceleration. Yes, it's a ridiculously multi-body problem, but you can basically ignore all the smaller influences because 0.25g swamps them.

These economic questions tend to be like those problems. Yes, there's a way to make it complicated, but there's also a simple "energy" (money supply/spending) argument. And yes, there's a bunch of other factors, but when you throw around trillions of dollars, they're swamped.

Musk is pretty intelligent. I’m sure there are many people here who are higher IQ. Of course, that isn’t really the main ingredient for making huge amounts of money beyond a certain threshold. The average billionaire is probably 98th or 99th percentile, but their percentile intelligence certainly doesn’t equal their percentile wealth.

It's also just absolutely pathetic to go through life with such smug pride in talent level that hasn't actually been expressed with any particular accomplishments to be proud of. Gloating about having a higher IQ or more academic credentials than Musk is the equivalent of someone saying they have a higher VO2max than the Tour de France champion. OK, good for you when you look at the number on your phone, but Tadej Pogacar is a multimillionaire cycling champion with a beautiful girlfriend and you're proud that you can consume a lot of oxygen. I don't even like Musk, but he's obviously just done more than almost every single human being alive.

Completely, I don’t think it’s really a useful way of ranking yourself or others. Still, I wouldn’t take lessons on macroeconomics from Musk, whereas I might read what Scott has to say, even if he’s wrong, because he’s smarter.

Is he smarter? Are you sure? Scott has said some really dumb things. Hasn’t really accomplished a lot outside of becoming somewhat internet famous.

Tons of smart people believe very dumb things, certainly if you’re a conservative (most of the very smartest people in the west are pretty mainstream neolibs). I think Scott is pretty smart based on his writing ability and skill at synthesising information in his reviews etc, which I think correlates highly with intelligence.

Do you realize that Elon Musk has absolute domain expertise in several, unrelated engineering disciplines (aerospace, rocket engine design, electric vehicle design and integration, and manufacturing for all of these), and that before he got started in his current arc he had domain expertise in several other unrelated engineering and regulatory disciples (software and banking regulation)?

But that doesn’t mean “he is smarter than Musk.”

Sure building a company isn’t solely based on IQ. But building technically difficult companies across multiple domains suggests some pretty strong intelligence, especially compared to someone who is basically a glorified essayist.

I don't even like Musk, but he's obviously just done more than almost every single human being alive.

When you're used to discounting building companies because that requires investment of money and/or people being willing to follow you (as opposed to personal physical/mental labor), this is not obvious. The intuitive response to "look at how much Musk built" is "he didn't build all 'at".

The intuitive response to "look at how much Musk built" is "he didn't build all 'at".

How many of the projects he's working on would exist without him? Yeah, the natural resources and people would still exist and presumably be put towards some kind of productive goal but consider the positive and negative effects of his competitors on the world. On the one end, you have things that are objectively bad like gambling. I would say Elon's current projects are pretty close to the polar opposite; that is to say, objectively good. Curing paralysis, colonizing the solar system, the HUGE push towards making electric vehicles the norm and more recently, major advances in AI.

And that’s just silly. Building companies are crazy hard. Which is why it is so well remunerated. Musk shows an almost unparalleled ability to build companies.

Ehhhhhh. Building companies is hard, and building companies is well remunerated, but being hard is not why building companies is well remunerated.

Building companies is well remunerated because capital enjoys systemic leverage over labour and is able to claim more of the rewards from their cooperation for itself. When capital and labour work together both parties are better off (otherwise they wouldn't do it), but capital gets more of the reward because unemployed capital is much less miserable than unemployed labour. So the worker is paid in wages, while the investor is paid in profits.

If building companies was easy, then there would be a lot more people doing it. If there were a lot more people doing it, then the labor they provide (ie in the form of equity) would be much smaller compared to the amount of equity that capital takes.

Market history suggests the dear thing isn’t capital but skill in building large scalable companies. Capital is common and cheap in comparison.

Musk surely isn't doing huge chunks of the engineering by himself. But he clearly is good at hiring the right people. You can only do that if you can tell whether someone knows what they're doing or not. He also seems to have a special talent at making those people work harder, motivating people. Based on the biography I read he has strong engineering skills and takes important high-level decisions about how the companies should move forward.

I suspect that Altman is similar. He may not be the greatest coder in the world but he's clearly a master schemer, outmaneuvering the OpenAI board and tapping Microsoft's nigh-limitless resources on generous terms.

I think a lot of it is getting middle management out of the way to allow the doers to do.

Kevin Durant is an all time great NBA player. He's a multi time NBA MVP, has won NBA championships and came a shoe size from another. He's worth $170mm, and he's in Paris surrounded by hot athletic people. He just starred in an all time great Olympic basketball game, coming back from 15 points down in the fourth against Serbia (a game which proved American racism!) and he's going to star in the gold medal game against France tomorrow.

And he was up at 5am Paris time shit posting against his haters on Twitter. He's got things to do, and if he didn't he could eat at any restaurant or go to any theater or get tickets to any Olympic event or find a groupie or hire the highest end prostitute. But there he is, fighting on Twitter.

Durant, and musk, and bill ackman, prove that shit posting is one of life's great joys. It is something Foucault would have written about (the way he wrote about fisting) as a truly new modern form of joy. And even when you're rich and important and famous you can't resist it. It's too fun. Isn't it magical that we can all access this kind of joy that Elon, who can do whatever he wants, still finds irresistible?

Elon on Twitter is just another guy on Twitter. And for the most part his tweets should be treated as though he's a JAG. That means both not giving him too much extra credibility, and also giving him grace. We're all wrong on here all the time, but nobody cares. And we all love to do 101 econ or history or bio. Give the man the same mercy, that's the level he's playing at.

all time great Olympic basketball game, coming back from 15 points down in the fourth against Serbia (a game which proved American racism!)

One of the amusing quirks of history is the breakup of Yugoslavia allowing greater pro-black propaganda by way of US basketball.

For example, a hypothetical Yugoslavia team this Olympics would have featured Doncic alongside Jokic, and Yugoslavia would have had the two best players between it and the US (especially with Embiid ill? injured? not that Embiid should be playing for the US instead of France, or more like Cameroon).

But yes, Durant is an all-time great NBA player, whose reputation was unfortunately tarnished by getting caught Tweeting on burner accounts, e.g., “KD can’t win a championship with those cats.” And the whole GSW Hardest Road situation. Then Brooklyn, then Phoenix.

Much of the intersection between US basketball simps and Durant-haters begrudgingly admits that Durant is likely the greatest basketball Olympian of all time.

Embiid is not one of the best players in the world in this context, no regular season. Doncic unquestionably would be worth the deficit.

Durant will always be better than he is beloved? The opposite of a Derek Jeter or a Nick foles.

Count me as doubtful to whether Yugoslavia would beat the US. It's very unclear if a Doncic/Jokic combo is better than Jokic alone.

Anyone would acknowledge that the US has far better talent than Serbia. Yet the game was close. So basketball isn't about simply adding talent on top of talent. You need to have team chemistry as well. Doncic is a bit of a team killer who would likely make Jokic worse. On the US side, Embiid is similarly a black hole with negative intangibles.

On the other hand, players like Lebron, Curry, and Jokic make their teammates better and that's what makes them all-time greats.

Durant, and musk, and bill ackman, prove that shit posting is one of life's great joys.

I actually think it is less one of life's great joys more than a modern drug; and like most drugs you build up a tolerance the more you use it and it will turn you into a real bastard and husk of a man if you let it.

Nerd wrangling is a specific skill. There are common patterns for failure for large engineering teams. Being able to recognize these and correct them is important.

Human behaviour inevitably means that organizations will be run by ambitions and internal alliances unless something stops it. Managers want to build their resumes by running ambitious projects. They often like or dislike ideas based on how much they like the individual who brought it up.

A tech leader needs to be able to bust things up a bit when they aren't functioning. That's why Musk is often described as being unstable and disruptive by existing management in the company. It's also why he has such a strong history of success at coming in as a new CEO.

Musk isn't deeply involved in developing tech, but when he gets a message from an employee about a problem and a response from the higher ups, he can tell if the higher ups are bullshitting him.

For that he does need significant tech skills, but doesn't need to be a specialist in any of the products.

Altman seems similar to me.

As for the tweet, general political commentary on twitter doesn't usually involve deep thoughts. He's stating a clear rebuttal that midwit followers can use in political discussions in their daily lives. The fact that a statement from the VP running for President can be rebutted with econ 101 says more about the state of the country than Musk.

Yeah. Musk’s job is to basically decide who gets resources and how to remove roadblocks. He has shown an uncanny talent for both. To do that well, he needs to know enough (even if not an expert level) to cut through normal corporate BS.

If you really, carefully parse it with your far less powerful brain (than Elon's, that is) you might be able to understand that - this is just basic macroeconomic understanding. Holy shit this is fucking Econ 101

Elon has 200 000 000 followers. How many of them didn't take econ 101? And this is especially in the context of chasing price gouging where it doesn't exist promised from presidential candidate (also she is literally vice president now - why is she not bringing prices down now if she knows how). Not saying that government shouldn't mess with prices but do it the right way - either destroy demand or increase supply or both. The program of paying farmers not to produce on their land to stabilize the price of wheat and the government rations of gasoline (on which secondary market was allowed - so it put some income in the families that didn't drive) are the two programs that I think yielded good results.

Government bringing the price down of good in demand is one of the bad ideas. Its problem is that it is unobvious bad idea for a lot of people. Even though wherever it has been tried - from NYC rents trough soviet car industry all the way to Zimbabwe supermarkets it has failed miserably. So probably a good chunk of Elon's audience actually doesn't know it is a bad idea. There is nothing wrong in people from time to time to explain the basics again.

His claims about being deeply involved in engineering to this day have to be impossible (SpaceX, Tesla, and Xwitter couldn't run if so much was contingent on him). It's more likely he injects himself into meetings and initiatives here and there and mostly serves as a slight derailing force to otherwise normal activities.

I have been in tech also all my life. I never felt good deep in the theory, but I always exceled at jury rigging very innovative solutions out of existing stuff. I think that Elon has similar talent - he knows the stuff that his companies do well enough and the tech there, but his real talent is to have instinctive knack where the limits are and to push the people that really dig deep to them.

I don't understand aerospace much - but the fact that we react to falcon boosters landing the same way Lila from futurama reacted to going to the moon - says quite a lot that the guy knows how to assemble amazing engineering teams and is enough of an engineer to be able to work with them and steer them.

Not saying that government shouldn't mess with prices but do it the right way - either destroy demand or increase supply or both. The program of paying farmers not to produce on their land to stabilize the price of wheat ... yielded good results.

This program is destroying supply.

Yes. There was overproduction of grain at the time and the prices were collapsing. So the government needed to bump them up a bit IIRC

There was general deflation at the time. The program was nonsensical, as was usual for a lot of New Deal programs.

Explaining fucking econ 101 to the hoi polloi seems like an entirely appropriate thing to do in an environment where the Leaders of the Free World are attempting to invoke various mumbo-jumbo and/or voodoo to explain why their pumping of the money supply while simultaneously outlawing demand for the produce of about half of the economy is totally not responsible for the inflation we've all been experiencing?

I agree with you, jkf

At the risk of being rude, I kinda wonder if 100P is thinking about things in terms of status games in a way that doesn't make sense.

The majority of people don't understand economics and finance and wouldn't be able to if you tried.

I really, really wish I was wrong about that. But when you have a practicing medical doctor having to wrestle with money management, you start to realize really quickly that there's a broad spread of intelligence types and not everyone is good at everything.

I’ve met some very high verbal IQ people who are terrible at math and I’m extremely unconvinced it’s actually genetic or unchangeable. I think it’s usually that they displayed great verbal ability at a young age, didn’t care about math, then never really cared to learn because they could always coast on their writing/verbal ability. If they truly needed it they could probably quickly become competent with a few hours a day of high-intensity tutoring for a short period.

For real life math applications - probably less than a day. Learn to know exponential functions, positive and negative feedback, some statistics and probability theory - that's it. All of those take one or two hours to grok at basic level. And with them you will be able to build useful mental model of almost anything.

I think it’s usually that they displayed great verbal ability at a young age, didn’t care about math, then never really cared to learn because they could always coast on their writing/verbal ability.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

While I think some people are limited in some fashion, I also think basic math is just taught in a horrible fashion.

The contrast between my econ and finance courses and the math courses I was required to take were like night and day.

Which is why explaining the basic concepts in an authoritative way that is easy for anyone to understand has value!

I don't really understand. It may be an obvious econ 51 point, but it clearly needs to be stated when the current regime is talking about imposing price controls on food, opening state-run grocery stores because the private ones have been driven out of business, and all kinds of absurd (power-seeking) economic policies.

Musk fits an extremely profitable niche of being competent enough in different areas to coordinate investors with management with engineers.
Again, this may seem like a simple "business 101" thing, but you just have to look at his competitors like Boeing to see how neglecting it causes horrifically embarrassing failures again and again.
The ongoing Starliner Titanic disaster with astronauts stranded on the space station couldn't be a better example. It's not that Boeing engineers are retarded, and it's not that they've been given an impossible task. It's not even that the Boeing CEO is a mad scientist imprisoning people in space to torture them with terrible movies: it's that basic management practices are being ignored.

Most of the dysfunction in this country is due to neglecting very, very basic truths, and the people in charge clearly aren't capable of acknowledging them, let alone dealing with them.
Musk and the rest of the PayPal mafia somehow can see what needs to be done and do it, which is apparently a superpower in this world of Pump Six (and other stories)

Most of the dysfunction in this country is due to neglecting very, very basic truths, and the people in charge clearly aren't capable of acknowledging them, let alone dealing with them.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,

I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

The ongoing Starliner Titanic disaster with astronauts stranded on the space station couldn't be a better example.

That one's been pretty fun to watch. I'm pretty anti-Elon, and follow some amount of anti-Elon accounts, and when that thing launched you could watch them going from "wooow, look at them making a rocket on their first attempt, without blowing anything up through 'iterative design'", to "so what it sprung a few leaks?", to getting awfully quiet as the magnitude of the disaster unfolded. Props to the people running the simulation, I couldn't write a better story.

But, as I've said before, Elon has adopted just enough PodCaster Bro aesthetics to know that slight rephrasings of 1+1=2 obvious insights, combined with "thoughtful" pauses and idiosyncratic speech patterns can make you look deep to the midwits.

I don't get that impression from Elon's tweet. There's nothing deep or novel there, you're right -- he's regurgitating standard economic dogma. But stating something that is both true and obvious is not, at least in my worldview, somehow a knock against the person saying it -- particularly when it actually is a controversial statement among laymen: something like half the country supports rent control (varies from poll to poll). Maybe if he was phrasing it as if he was some kind of gigabrain genius and these were wholly original thoughts, I'd have a more negative reaction, but I didn't parse it that way.

I think I'm probably more pro-Elon than most people here, though I'm quite bearish on Tesla in particular wrt. their ability to deliver on their self-driving promises, SpaceX is just so impressive it kind of washes away those sins. Rocket companies are hard, Carmack couldn't build one, Bezos' Blue Origin is far from competitive, ULA is basically a joke, etc. I mean just look at this graph: https://x.com/FutureJurvetson/status/1792672666316665198/photo/1

Now, how much of SpaceX's success is due to Musk is a totally reasonable discussion to have, but even in the most cynical case, he at least hired the best people and set strategic objectives that led directly to capturing the overwhelming majority of the launch market and drove costs down an order of magnitude. And this is before Starship.

X/Twitter might be circling the drain and have no clear path to sustainability (let alone profitability) but some of my favorite poasters have been unbanned and I think you could argue his acquisition dragged the Overton window to the right, so I'm giving him a pass there as well. And there's something ironic about the legacy media claiming it's dead/dying when Biden announced his resignation on X/Twitter first.

With regards to Altman, he comes across as basically a grifter and technically unsophisticated, no disagreements there. I am not at all impressed by his leadership.

Can't stop laughing that twitter is glitching so badly I can't see the graph of his other company's performance

(Edit: now I can for five seconds until the page reloads with "something went wrong, don't worry it's not your fault")

Probably something in your browser settings (i.e. it is your fault); I get the same thing, but Nitter works fine which implies Twitter is working properly.

No, something went very weird for about 20 minutes: everyone was posting about it. Cleared up though.

No, something went very weird for about 20 minutes

I wonder if things blowing up take ~20-30 minutes to work their way through whatever cache system twitter has in place (ok, really more of a CDN system with multiple places all over the globe, but still). A throttling system were if something is throttled for 15 minutes, it starts getting replicated seems like an 80/20 solution to the kind of traffic spikes twitter gets.

It is ALWAYS DNS, always.

X/Twitter might be circling the drain and have no clear path to sustainability (let alone profitability)

You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... sixty years.

I mean just look at this graph:

Wow. The launch industry divides pretty evenly 9 ways now, huh? There's "everybody else in the world combined", there's China, then there's "SpaceX on Sundays", "SpaceX on Mondays", and so on.


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