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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20464 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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It's been a bit since we've check in the election. How are things going?

You might not know it, but Donald Trump's chances have had a bit of a resurgence lately. Nate Silver's model has him at a 61% chance to win the election. Polymarket has him at 51%.

I think the error bars are pretty wide here. A lot of things are going to come into play. Small decisions in swing states (such as absentee ballot policies) could decide the election. Another factor is how much the "Shy Tory" effect still matters. Exactly who are the people that answer for the phone for pollsters anyway?

The economy appears to be crashing at exactly the wrong time for Kamala. Prices have been increasing faster than wages, and the customer is "tapped out". The stock prices of many consumer-facing companies like DollarTree, Starbucks, Lululemon, and Nike have cratered along with sales projections.

All of this might force Kamala Harris to actually say or do something. For those following along she has made only one unscripted appearance since becoming the heir-apparent. It was an 18 minute interview (cut from 41 minutes) with a friendly interviewer and her running mate present as a chaperone. For comparison, here is the same interviewer with J.D. Vance.

But maybe staying hidden is still a good policy. The one time the Harris campaign did propose something, it was an appalling series of tax increases including an unrealized capital gains tax. If the polls stay close, Harris will probably stay hidden.

On the other hand, the Trump campaign seems to be very different than previous ones. He's not gotten nearly as much media coverage, either because he's not saying outrageous things anymore, or everyone is bored with it. He's done some decent long-form interviews with podcasts such as Lex Friedman, Theo Von, and All-in. But these are just reaching his core audience of bros. Meanwhile, and uncharacteristic for him, he's spent a lot of time playing defense, having to counter the lie that he will ban abortion nationwide. Perhaps it is ironic that a politician who built his political career on a vicious lie (birthergate) will ultimately be undone by one.

As for myself, I will be voting for Trump even though I think he's a bad person. I prefer a bad person to bad policies. And I think Harris represents everything I hate about the Democratic party: racial grievances, suppression of speech, strident militarism abroad, and increased regulation and taxation. But in the end, I'm not sure how much this election will matter. Both candidates are so unpopular the backlash may outweigh the value of having the Presidency.

So... who are you voting for?

All of this might force Kamala Harris to actually say or do something. For those following along she has made only one unscripted appearance since becoming the heir-apparent. It was an 18 minute interview (cut from 41 minutes) with a friendly interviewer and her running mate present as a chaperone.

The Kier Starmer approach of staying out of the media and just not being the other guy(s). No positive vision or policy, just "not the other guy".

I wonder if this will become a trend and keep happening on the left the world over?

I feel like Trump is just too old and tired now. Not as much as Biden, but he's clearly lost a step compared to what he had before. There's no energy, no zingers, no new ideas, nothing but repeats of his old slogans.

On the other hand Harris is also just... a shockingly bad candidate. She was terrible in the 2020 primary debates. She didn't understand the issues, she didn't have any charisma, and her most memorable moment was... attacking Biden for being racist. I couldn't believe that he still chose her after that, and then now basically gave her the nomination. She would have been destroyed in a proper primary.

So this is a weird election where most of the focus is on the VP picks, because they're a lot more articulate than the actual presidential candidates. I guess the strategy will be for both candidates to just limit their appearances as much as possible. Very odd.

I won't vote because I hate the stupid charade that my one vote is supposed to matter, and because politics is the mind killer, so not voting keeps me sane. But if you put a gun to my head and forced me to choose one of them I'd pick Trump.

I expect Trump to lose, but then again that Harris CNN interview (despite the sympathetic interviewer and Walz chaperone) is…really bad. She truly does sound like she’s on strong downers, struggling through the haze. She has negative charisma. She slurs. She can’t really answer questions. She might actually be completely destroyed in the debate this week.

So I’d say my current prediction would be that Harris has the slight edge but that a Trump win would be unsurprising, which in the end means I’m saying nothing at all.

I vote in Manhattan, so my vote is worthless at every level of government (perhaps except to some extent in the DA primary race, but that’s not happening this year).

Another factor is how much the "Shy Tory" effect still matters.

Polling institutes in Sweden have had pretty severe issues with the "shy Tory" effect the past few elections concerning SD, the anti-immigration populist mildly reactionary party, not the traditional right wing.

In the elections in 2010 and 2014 (first time they made it into the Parliament) they were pretty severely underestimated, by as much as 20-30% (easier when their total vote share is relatively small). The pollsters were heavily criticised and even accused of partisanship for this with many people asked how they could possibly have made such big errors and if their methods really lead to representative results.

Then in 2018 they ended up actually overestimating SD by about 10%. Everyone were equally as surprised by this polling result as they were the previous two, but none more than the some of the representatives from SD in TV panels, who strongly believed in getting as much of an overperformance as previously.

Then in the latest election in 2022 SD were as accurately polled as anyone else.

My point is that I don't think its wise to rely on or expect a shy Tory effect because polling institutes can adjust and so can the population.

So, will Trump be underestimated or overestimated in this election? Are people outside of blue strongholds actually still "shy"? I have no idea, but I do think it's questionable to continually rely on this polling pattern over time when making predictions. Polarisation surrounding a candidate should probably be treated more like a thing that increases the margin of error of polling, especially when the worst of the hysteria seems to have died down.

Polls in 2016 and 2020 had Trump ten points behind. He wasn't. Now polls have him tied or ahead. He's going to win.

Kamala is abad candidate. Her early stage momentum is over. There will probably be new twists and astroturfs and a few October Surprises. It's hard to predict exactly what's going to happen. But two months ago Democrats felt terrible about Kamala becoming the nominee, and I suspect that's the baseline to which they will return.

Also I don't think Trump is playing defense. The man does not stop. He was hit in the head with a bullet and then started a fight chant. He allied with RFK the day after Kamala's speech at the convention. To the extent the secret service will let him he's still giving packed rallies promising mass deportations. Meanwhile they're trying and failing to put this man in jail. Nothing has stopped him. Abortion is a speed-bump and if the media isn't talking about him it's because they're trying a new way to beat him. It won't work.

I'm voting Trump and I'm having fun.

Trump, even if the only thing he achieves is stacking every level of the federal judiciary with a cadre of reactionary counter-revolutionaries who will do everything in their power to destroy civil rights law, root and branch, and comprehensively overturn as much of the Warren Court’s jurisprudence as humanly possible.

So... who are you voting for?

Is it too late to get Biden back?

It would be pretty funny if he got more write-ins than Kamala.

Meanwhile, and uncharacteristic for him, he's spent a lot of time playing defense, having to counter the lie that he will ban abortion nationwide.

Yeah, that's going to be permanent, if the politics in the country to the US' immediate north are any indication.

Actually, the politicking seems to be somewhat of a version of this; Conservatives here have figured out that you just shut up and rely on people knowing what to expect (to be anti-bureaucracy is to be anti-welfare; the bureaucratic state and the expansion thereof is welfare, though few fully recognize it as such) as your campaign message.

It's a more diffuse version of abusing the fact the media can't help but fellate the righteousness of their preferred candidate, and polarization doing the rest. Which is also why Harris, and the party of a moral majority far overdrawn on social credit, don't want to campaign.

I have a neighbor I like that is running for city council, so I feel obligated to go vote. Usually I prefer to stay home. There is a weird civic pride and happiness at polling places that I stridently hate. Old people handing out "I voted" stickers. Kids waving flags and handing out pamphlets. People smiling. Ugh.

I'm usually not a party pooper in my day to day life. But I'm libertarian, so when it comes to politics I absolutely am a party pooper.

Every time I go to the polls I am reminded that I strongly want a "none of the above" option, or more accurately "I hate all of these people". Something that just consistently says I disapprove of this circus. I don't care too much what they do in case a "none of the above" wins. Endless re-elections, a term with no one taking the position, etc. As it is I mostly just vote libertarian ticket if there is one available, since that feels like the closest option to me saying "none of the above".

I don't want to have to care about these elections. In some sense they kind of matter. They give a sort of mandate that pushes things one direction for a few years. In other important senses they don't matter, bother major parties seem equally capable of implementing policies that fuck my life up with me barely being aware that they've done it. Latest example is a Trump era tax cut and a change to how software development is amortized that has basically tanked the software dev job market and left me stuck at a job that is boring.

My hope is for deadlocked and unproductive government.

Trump era tax cut and a change to how software development is amortized that has basically tanked the software dev job market

Last I checked the market tanked in 2023-2023.

That's when the tax change came into effect.

The market tanked because there was an insane VC bubble that deployed trillions of dollars of QE money into unprofitable software companies. The federal reserve (and every other central bank) directly subsidized software jobs for 12 years and then it stopped.

That's simplistic. Yes, the techo ecosystem was largely a money incinerator with even the biggest companies (e.g. Uber) burning billions a year. But they could do that because they weren't taxed on those losses. For a personal example (I disbanded a company because of this), 17 million in, 22 million out = no tax. 25 million in, 28 million out = 33.5 million out (5.5 million in taxes, some coming back along 5 or 15 years (as interest free loans to the government)) We went from (hopefully) burning 3 million to 8.5 million, almost triple projected costs (and backwards from 5.)

This came into effect in 2022 before the first interest hike in March. (The equity correction started at new years, coincidence but not related.)

I’m not disputing that these tax changes may have made a difference, your example is pretty clear. But at the same time from a finance perspective it also seems like what’s happening with software jobs is an exaggerated version of what’s happening in other industries that relied heavily on low rates and easy money, just in a more exaggerated way because tech benefited more than anyone.

The economy appears to be crashing at exactly the wrong time for Kamala.

The economy has been soft for quite a while, though the same people who were trying to sell Joe Biden's competency were (and are) trying to convince people otherwise. We had a LOT of inflation, which has gone down but remains at levels significantly higher than under Trump, and the job market is generally weak. There was recently a huge correction in the government "jobs created" figure, and just this week a private report claimed 99,000 new private jobs for August, which is quite low. It's not a matter of timing; the economy has never completely recovered from government reaction to COVID.

Real wages are essentially flat, though it feels worse because food-at-home and energy (some of the most visible and volatile expenses) have been higher than general inflation.

I will be voting for Trump, though New Jersey is solid (D) unless Kamala does something galactically stupid like go full Hamas. His policies this time seem worse than last time, but the bar set by Kamala is subterranean. And of course there's the whole identity politics thing.

I will cast a blank ballot. (not in a swing state)

The Capitol protest and the Gaza War are the deciding factors. My previous record is Obama, Trump, Trump.

I interpret that as you being against Trump's actions regarding the election/validity thereof, and also against the Biden/Harris lack of support for Israel? Or am I inverted?

There's a bunch of handwringing downthread about how the real problem with low TFR is dysgenics and not shrinking populations. I've got some data to push back on that: https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-relationship-between-income-fertility

The US is a meritocracy, which means that income and IQ are correlated- and we see a dysgenic fertility for native blacks(but they're shrinking as a percent of population and not that high of one to begin with) and a eugenic fertility for native whites. The latter statistic is interesting because we know that the conservative white fertility rate is higher than the liberal white fertility rate, while incomes run in reverse- which indicates either east asia tier fertility for lower middle income blue tribers or african tier fertility for wealthy red tribers(and no, from 10,000 feet red tribe and conservative/blue tribe and liberal are not different things, even if they might be in individual cases. At least not post-Trump). Hispanics look like they have a dysgenic fertility pattern, but anecdotally they do lots of tax fraud so the income statistics might be off, and also I'm guessing recency of arrival leads to a looser income/IQ correlation. Still, it might be dysgenic. Asian fertility is low but broadly eugenic.

That gives an overall picture which is actually relatively encouraging- the largest group has a eugenic fertility pattern, people that are hard to categorize have a eugenic fertility pattern, and two poor minority groups have dysgenic looking patterns, but one of them might not actually be dysgenic.

Realistically concern about dysgenics is concern about either a) the browning of America or b) the likelihood of a majority black world. And I'm not claiming either to be unconcerning, but upwards mobility still exists in Latin America. Latin America manages to filter its higher IQ individuals into roles that are necessary to the functioning of society. There is an industrial society south of the border. It's poorer, produces less innovation, and has higher crime rates, but life is OK by global standards. It sucks a lot worse for an untalented individual to live in Brazil than in the US, that's true. But it is very much not a third world country with third world problems. The browning of America is manageable, and the effect is overstated anyways because blacks(who have the lowest IQ) aren't growing as a percentage of the population.

A majority black world, on the other hand, is likely, but immigration enforcement is getting harsher and Africa is hard to get out of. This is, in other words, likely a mostly African problem- and Africa's fertility is still declining. Particularly if the breeder hypothesis(and Lyman Stone's simulation suggests it tops out at 33% of population- still enough to strongly influence societal direction) turns out to be true, the concern in 2100 will be less about enormous numbers of black migrants reaching Europe and more about the Dutch Calvinists getting enough votes to institute a theocracy. It's true that random African peasants don't contribute much to civilization but keeping them in Africa is eminently doable.

Dysgenics is an overhyped problem, just like overpopulation was in the seventies. The real problem? Pensions, tax receipts, instability in central and west african shitholes that have a surplus of young males and no ability to manage agricultural production, general population contraction.

It sucks a lot worse for an untalented individual to live in Brazil than in the US, that's true. But it is very much not a third world country with third world problems.

They've got more murders there than in the entire rich world + China, Russia, Indonesia and North Africa: https://old.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fp1vrd7wr6dy81.jpg

Mostly these are low-lives killing eachother. But I don't want to live in a country full of murders. Even the US murder rate is too high. We should be aiming for perfection, not a bare-minimum. What about Japan or pre-2010s Sweden or Iceland?

I think you are massively over-interpreting the data.

  • There is some correlation between income and IQ (which is in turn correlated with genetics). Likely, there are different effects at play here: Rich caretakers will invest more in educating which will lead both to higher IQ and better paying jobs, but of course a lot of high-paying jobs (STEM, law, medicine, etc) also have some implicit IQ requirements.

  • There is at least some correlation to number of children between generations, parts of it purely cultural. Kids who grew up in large families are more likely to have many children themselves. On the other hand, a significant part of incomes are from inheritance. Most people living in cities spend a huge fraction of their income on rent, and most landlords did not earn their properties through the work of their hands but through inheritance. It stands to reason that a single child whose mother was 40 when she gave birth will on average inherit more money than one born to a five-kids family whose mother gave births between 20 and 35, even if either ones parents owned exactly the same amount.

  • You look at the income to fertility curve of blacks in the US and conclude that they true for blacks in Africa. If the relationship between IQ and fertility in each ethnicity was constant, then 10k years (perhaps 400 generations) ago blacks should have been very smart and whites really dumb given that today their intelligence is roughly similar. This is nonsense.

  • The source in the plot is cited as "American Community Survey". I am not sure if they are affiliated with the IRS and telling them their income is a bad idea if you are cheating on taxes. Just dismissing Hispanics because "anecdotally they do lots of tax fraud" feels epistemically bad, if you believe that tax fraud is significantly affecting the data, then your data is useless, unless you have statistics showing that 99% of the Hispanics cheat on taxes and only 1% of the non-Hispanics.

  • I disagree with your value-loaded adjectives 'dysgenic' and 'eugenic'. All things being equal, a person with a higher IQ is probably more beneficial to society than one with lower IQ in most scenarios. But what you are actually measuring is parental income, which is somewhat correlated to IQ, which then has a strong genetic component. As you use these adjectives, the implications are that a successful drug dealer reproducing is good while a person working an unglamorous job (such as a truck driver) is bad.

As this is the CW thread, we should also discuss how Dobbs will affect this curve. My prediction is that it will mainly increase the fertility of the lower income population. We are selecting not only for parents who were not able to use birth control successfully, but also for people who lack the resources or executive function to travel to another state to terminate their pregnancy. If the IQ 135 math student gets pregnant by accident (not terribly likely, imho), her professor parents will pay for a trip to another state. If the IQ 90 high school dropout raised by a single mom with a substance problem, who discovered sex and booze when she was 14 finally gets pregnant (a more likely scenario), she might not have the financial and executive resources to go on a trip to a blue state.

Your graph shows that non-Hispanic whites don’t have replacement level fertility until the 99th percentile. Meanwhile we are bringing into the country millions of random immigrants, illegal and illegal. This is an apocalyptic case of dysgenics. The dysgenics Black / immigrants will also affect the whites over generations into the future through interbreeding.

The browning of America is manageable

What is manageable? Your grand grandchild will have a very high chance of marrying a “dysgenic” Central American due to the numbers. It is manageable in the sense that you will still be alive but in a less competitive country irrelevant on the world stage?

immigration enforcement is getting harsher

Not sufficiently so, and neither is white racism sufficiently high that you can rest assured that your future ancestors will not be dysgenic. Who did Jeb Bush marry? Your future great grandsons will have the Faustian dilemma of thick latinas or high IQs, to be sure.

You think Jeb Bush's marriage is dysgenic?

Jeb is the son of an elite American political dynasty. His wife is the daughter of a rural Mexican migrant worker he met doing charity work at 17. This is dysgenic if you care about intelligence and eugenic if you favor cute latinas.

Is Mitch McConnell's marriage eugenic because he married an east Asian? Assuming they had chosen to have children.

Is the ultimate hypothetical eugenic melange a mix of the smarter sort of whites, east Asians and Jews?

Is the ultimate hypothetical eugenic melange a mix of the smarter sort of whites, east Asians and Jews?

Unquestionably, yes.

She might be an exception to the averages. It makes no sense to be convinced that the marriage is dysgenic from an intelligence point of view unless you know something about what her individual intelligence is actually like.

It’s possible that the rural Mexican woman that Jeb met as a 17yo is actually a genius. It’s incredibly unlikely, given the information we know about her and the fact that Jeb selected her from a low number of women in the exact town he was performing charity work in. We can make reasonable assumptions here. As /u/AhhhTheFrench fails to point out, Jeb was honor roll at a prestigious high school, magna cum laude at Yale, then became enormously wealthy as partner of a top real estate firm. His wife’s bio details are just the basic “wife of politician” charity stuff.

Don't bring a knife facts to a gunfight race war! I'm joking about that @coffee_enjoyer, but I see no evidence of JEB! being particularly bright. I'm reading his bio here and it seems like a life of tryhard failing up. The man almost got expelled at the finishing school Andover (repeating 9th grade!) due to bad grades. I did summer soccer camps and stayed in the dorms with Andover kids, not a hard school to stay in... parents tend to send their less exceptional kids there to polish them up a bit, or to get better at a sport with a super senior year and not waste their eligibility years.

Meanwhile Coumba Bush managed to marry into one of the most powerful families in the world while coming from basically nothing, has managed to avoid the pitfalls that can come with that, and now has three children that seem smarter than JEB! Who is the dysgenic one here?

White red tribe TFR is roughly stable at replacement; that’s a 98 IQ population not going anywhere. Conversely the Hispanic population tends to see declining fertility with time in country.

Whites will decline as a percentage of population, but not by that much.

Very true, but to counter the black pill I will point out it is absolutely possible for even a small minority to retain and improve itself and be relevant on the world stage. But it requires an actual ideology or religion to orchestrate the behavior. Maybe 90% of whites go down the Jeb Bush genetic route over the next several generations. But if 10% don't, because their behavior is coordinated by a unifying ideology or identity, then that is all that would be needed to avoid the Bad Ending.

That's to say- the situation is dire but we are still at an extremely high altitude before impact. There is plenty of time to figure things out but they have to be figured out ASAP.

Your graph shows that non-Hispanic whites don’t have replacement level fertility until the 99th percentile.

which might be still dysgenic, as difference between 99th income percentile and 98th percentile might be luck and not IQ (or whatever we are concerned about).

illegal and illegal

I don't know why but that typo cracks me up. I'm imagining a buddy comedy about a Mexican who gets caught up in the weird intricacies of the American immigration system and his childhood friend who just walked in without a care in the world.

Work permits? I just work at the korean restaraunt.

As someone that lives in Brazil I wouldn't wish the world to become more like it at all. Yes we somehow manage to go on and not utterly fail (we still fail) at civilization like certain places in Africa or Middle East (for now, because dysgenic trends also keep going on here), but it involves an insane level of subsidy to lower IQ groups and therefore high taxation that lowers life quality for the middle and upper middle class. It's easy to see how deep the subsidizing goes in Brazil because we've a visible ethnic spectrum going from North-to-South (less euro/more euro), and this is the result (the ridiculous mere 10% return to São Paulo is partially because of how our tax system works but you get the idea, you should expect less than half of what your group pays to return to you, sometimes even as low as 25% or 10%, some northern states literally turn into Africa if we stop sending them free money).

This free money subsidy is repaid with crime, hate, jealousy, etc. I severely doubt that by this point any lower IQ group will simply come to accept that they're getting a bad deal in life because of biological determinism rather than a conspiracy of some other groups keeping them down, even whites aren't that different in this aspect when it comes to the "Jewish Question". No group wants to accept a perceived "inferiority" unless reality kicks them in the face as it happened during the colonization period.

Brazil (especially some parts of it) could be a much better place if we dropped democracy and were tough on crime in similar style to Singapore or El Salvador, along with a new moral system that stops the "everyone is equal" noble lie and lowering the amount of subsidy we engage in, but until then it's nightmare fuel honestly.

At the very least you should assume that if the average IQ decreases, even if assertive mating preserves higher IQ groups, it's a society with a big IQ-gap which will create huge inequality and therefore make democracy pretty much non-viable in the way we do it now (I can see how decentralized democracy could still work but that's a different topic).

Was the situation markedly better during the military dictatorship?

Safety-wise? As far as my parents and older people tell me, yes. Economy-wise? Not really, because the military dictatorship still consisted of a bunch of midwits. Good warriors aren't necessarily good kings.

They were still doing pretty okay until the 1973 oil crisis though (that fucked up the economy).

You would need something more like a deeply patriotic high IQ aristocracy with a good ideology for the country to not only function but substantially improve over time...more or less a return to Monarchy or a Technocracy imo. Every improvement would come with great sacrifice though, such is life ever since we were unicellular organisms.

and Africa's fertility is still declining

This is the big question, how quickly is this happening.

The MICS-2021 survey in Nigeria showed TFR falling from 5.8 to 4.6 in only five years. The 2021 USAID survey showed a drop from 6.1 to 4.8 in ten years. If the MICS trend holds, Nigeria could be below replacement fertility in only ten years.

Combine this with a hypothesised fertility rebound due to Darwinian selection, and the fertilty map 20 years from now could look very different indeed (although obviously massive amounts of fertility will already be baked in, with young populations in Africa and extremely old populations in countries like Korea).

Not directly responding to your point, but it really feels like 2024 is the year that concern about birth rates and pronatalism broke into the mainstream. Looking at Google trends, it looks like news searches for 'birth rate' have increased pretty massively in the past ten years. Web searches for pronatalism have also increased a lot in the last two years.

Is it simply that birth rates have finally dropped so much that more governments are taking notice (outside of Eastern Europe and East Asia)? Is it that future-thinking intellectuals picked it up and the rest of the world is following? Did these guys make it happen?

Maybe fertility doomerism will become the right-wing version of left-wing climate doomerism?

I think this is a case of a very niche interest becoming slightly less niche, but still staying very niche. The vast majority of people do not care in the least bit about the fertility rates of societies.

These surveys suggest that this is changing. I think you're right that it's still pretty low, but the Google Trends links I posted do suggest that awareness is growing, and we can only expect that to increase as birth rates continue to decline and governments become even more panicked.

To your basic question of "why specifically this year", the answer is probably "Elon Musk bought Twitter and this is one of the fruits". Prior to that, this was a banned opinion in mainstream venues, so of course the mainstream didn't hear it much.

I think it's pretty simple, back somewhere in the 70-00s we profited from a short-term demographic dividend as we could forego spending on children, which we could invest in other things (in practice mostly hedonistic endeavours). Now we're starting to see the long-term effects, which is a never-before seen crunch on retirement. As somebody else put it, "now that it's time to reap, I wish I had sown more".

How much of that is reproduction rates and how much of that is the combination of the elderly living longer than ever before + costing significantly more than ever before.

Have life expectancies really improved much, if at all, since 2000? I see headlines suggesting that they've actually regressed in the US fairly often, largely due to obesity more than countering anti-smoking efforts and such.

Have life expectancies really improved much, if at all, since 2000?

A little, not much. From 2000–2019 there was a slight increase from 76.7 to 79.1. (Note: more recent data is still screwed up because of bad Covid-19 assumptions).

https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

I think that lower smoking rates have played a big part in the increase. If so, health care costs would have increased as well, since lung cancer kills people relatively cheaply compared to, say, Alzheimers.

Prediction: Life expectancy will increase considerably in the next 10 years due to GLP-1 drugs.

The concern over dysgenic spiral isn't the within-group correlation between income and TFR, it's the two things you mentioned: replacement migration and higher TFR of foreign groups in Europe and the United States, and the African population bomb.

Realistically concern about dysgenics is concern about either a) the browning of America or b) the likelihood of a majority black world. And I'm not claiming either to be unconcerning, but upwards mobility still exists in Latin America. Latin America manages to filter its higher IQ individuals into roles that are necessary to the functioning of society.

The problem isn't having a lack of people with an IQ to fill the seat of a middling bureaucrat, or having a high-enough pool of IQ to keep the lights on, it's recognition that the tail ends are sensitive to small shifts in the mean. The high quality leaders, innovators, geniuses, and heroes who have directed Civilization will simply not exist any longer with modest changes in the population-average of these traits. And we will see large growth of the problematic elements on the lowest end of the distribution which, causes decay as well.

Dysgenics is an overhyped problem, just like overpopulation was in the seventies. The real problem? Pensions, tax receipts, instability in central and west african shitholes that have a surplus of young males and no ability to manage agricultural production, general population contraction.

It is exactly the reverse. Dysgenics is an underhyped problem because recognition of HBD is a dependency for assessing the threat. The vast majority of scholars, politicians, and policy-makers don't accept HBD so they have nothing to fear, inherently, from demographic change. Let's say, hypothetically, 100% European admixture no longer exists, and everyone on the continent has a minimum 25% ME and 25% African admixture. You can't recover from that. It's gone forever, and human history is full of many many such cases. You can recover from a tax shortfall.

You might say "that will never happen." But look at how fast demographic change happened in the US, and how you are actually a political pariah if you oppose it! You can't take for granted that Europe will have the resolve to resist migration from the African population bomb, or to even slow down present demographic change of Arab Muslims throughout Europe.

The problem isn't having a lack of people with an IQ to fill the seat of a middling bureaucrat, or having a high-enough pool of IQ to keep the lights on, it's recognition that the tail ends are sensitive to small shifts in the mean. The high quality leaders, innovators, geniuses, and heroes who have directed Civilization will simply not exist any longer with modest changes in the population-average of these traits. And we will see large growth of the problematic elements on the lowest end of the distribution which, causes decay as well.

Replying a second time because it's a totally separate topic.

Assortive mating solves this. Or, more specifically, the US has a repository of high IQ Jews with an ultra high fertility rate. It's likely there are more IQ 160 people in Kiryas Joel than in most African countries.

Assuming that some percentage of these Hassidim secularize each generation, we'll have a reliable supply of new Einsteins.

Of course, this has its own peculiarities. But I have a feeling that other high IQ clusters exist in a less dramatic fashion.

Ashkenazi high IQ genetic stock will continue to exist thanks to ultra-orthodoxy, but the ultra orthodox ain’t gonna be keeping the lights on. They don’t teach their children how to speak English, let alone algebra or any of the million things needed to be competitive in the us economy.

Oh definitely. But what percent of them leak out to the normal community eventually? I don't know that answer, but I think it matters.

An ultra-orthodox apostate is not ready for college, he’s probably not ready for a trade either. He lacks the skills needed to take care of himself in a modern economy and will probably be a charity case until he dies alone.

Haven't you seen Tarzan? You can learn that other stuff quickly as long as you have the genetic substrate.

Really, the more important point is that IQ is not the only cognitive trait that matters. Civilizational achievement of various empires: Rome, Greece, Persia, the British Empire, the American Empire, and so on was a function of much more than the IQ of the ruling elite, but on other qualities which are equally or more important when all taken together. The common ancestry of the Founders of all those Empires points towards a civilizational-bearing cognitive composition that goes beyond IQ alone. In practice, think something like the innate desire of many Europeans to leave their modern, metropolitan cities to settle the American frontier. That quality is not driven by IQ alone.

It also raises the stakes of dysgenic spiral when you accept that IQ is not the only cognitive trait that matters here.

The ultra-orthodox may have the IQ, but do they have the other qualities which would lead towards the thriving of civilization if they were in charge? I certainly don't think so, with Israel being absolute proof of that.

The ultra orthodox are just stuck in a failure mode for civilization. It’s a rare (although I’m not sure if it’s unique) failure mode relative to the usual kind, but it is a failure nonetheless. I’m reminded of our discussion a few months ago on how awful South Korean society seems from the inside, an endless awful, grinding rat race where children are forced to study into the night for endless tests, parents pour all their resources into a single child etc even though all of this is completely unnecessary for the functioning of a country of smart, relatively wealthy people. But they can’t get out of it, seemingly, by themselves.

Similarly, the deep and enduring ugliness and squalor of Chareidi society is impossible to ignore. The ugly, colorless clothes. The lack of concern for architecture, for style, and for art. The adherence to the (secular) styles of dress and music that just happened to exist in Poland 150 years ago for no real reason other than inertia and a lack of care to change. The rejection of material comfort and prosperity, of science. The refusal to fight for their own people and homeland. The parasitic tendency to do whatever it takes to minimize the amount of productive labor done so that they can maximize the amount of pointless, regurgitated religious commentary produced while they wait endlessly for the messiah to come.

The Amish, at least, have a certain (sometimes overstated) folksy, pastoral charm. Squint and - divorced from the fact that they ultimately rely on the world’s most powerful and advanced nation to defend them - they live well, or at least fine. The Chareidim do not. Whatever happens in the current conflict, Israel will either forcibly secularize them or it is doomed, likely the latter. Fecundity aside, they have dug themselves into an aesthetic pit they can’t get out of. If Jewish civilization has any hope of further greatness, and I hope that it does, it must deal with them in the harshest way.

it must deal with them in the harshest way.

Israel is going to be country #110 isn't it.

Expulsion wouldn’t work (they have nowhere to go) and would be unnecessary. The ultra-orthodox just need to be forcibly secularized, which is likely possible (mandating IDF service for all young men and women at gunpoint, closing all kollels, ending all welfare, banning Yiddish in schools, forcibly enrolling them in secular education, killing or imprisoning their leaders if and when they try to rebel, banning their style of dress). It would be spicy, but it’s technically possible, not that it will happen (sadly).

The Amish do fine when the government doesn’t protect them- there are flourishing Amish communities in cartel controlled Mexico. They have to pay taxes to the cartels, sure, but it turns out the things they produce are easy to sell and very fungible, and the cartels literally recruit Mexican soldiers by promising better rations so they can use agricultural products to begin with.

‘Farmer’ is a job that’s literally never going away. Subsistence farming communities aren’t dependent on an industrial civilization having an inexplicable soft spot for them- everyone needs food, and very few people particularly want to grow it themselves because it’s a lot of hard work. They can trade for outside inputs in any conceivable threat environment pretty easily because, again, there is no one on earth who doesn’t need what they produce.

Their society can’t make microchips, but the things they do make are infinitely fungible so it doesn’t matter. If they for whatever reason need microchips the people who do make them need what the Amish have to sell.

I don’t think you know a lot about Kiryas Joel. First, they are not actual members of your country. They are their own nation. They barely pay taxes. They do not share their wealth with outsiders. Nothing positive that happens to them translates into something positive to you. Kiryas Joel was nominally the poorest town in America because of their tax schemes, they were given a state funded fertility clinic, but had the highest fertility. In cities in the US they don’t even use the state emergency* services but have their own. When they gain power in your town they cut all education spending and take over councils with block votes. You will never be able to join them if you are not Jewish. You are essentially writing, “I feel safe about America because of a totally alien and sovereign nation within its borders whose numbers are increasing at an extreme rate”. You might as well request China to conquer you as that would be better for your interests.

But you’re also confusing Haredi with Europe’s pedigreed assimilated Jewish families. Haredi IQ in America has never been studied. The Haredi do not have a fertility rate that highly favors their rabbis like the historically high class rabbinical families of Europe where a Rabbi may be selected based off meritocracy and have the highest fertility. Instead, all Haredi have a lot of children, including the dysgenic ones.

“I am going to sell out my entire people for an alien group 100% against my interests because of a non-evidenced belief that they may make Einsteins” is not persuasive. We have India and China for recruiting new Einsteins anyway, and they will actually assimilate instead of literally 2000 years of hating assimilation.

But you’re also confusing Haredi with Europe’s pedigreed assimilated Jewish families. Haredi IQ in America has never been studied. The Haredi do not have a fertility rate that highly favors their rabbis like the historically high class rabbinical families of Europe where a Rabbi may be selected based off meritocracy and have the highest fertility. Instead, all Haredi have a lot of children, including the dysgenic ones.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the people living in KJ have the same genetic stock as a typical Ashkenazi Jew and would (it stands to reason) have a similarly high IQ. The selection process which led to this result was in the past.

I never claimed that places like KJ are continuing to select for high IQ people. But neither are they selecting for low IQ people. The overall genetic potential within the community stays constant.

"I am going to sell out my entire people for an alien group 100% against my interests because of a non-evidenced belief that they may make Einsteins” is not persuasive.

This is extra low charity. I mentioned KJ as a counter to the idea that the whole population will become so genetically mixed that high IQ outliers can't exist. Clearly this isn't true. Even ignoring isolated religious communities, smart people marry other smart people and have smart children.

I’m pretty sure Hasidim began as a folk religion among the poorer rural Eastern European Jews. It was detested by the leading educated Rabbis. I don’t think it is correct to say that they are the same genetic stock of a typical Ashkenazi Jew. Assimilated Ashkenazi Jews came from intelligent rabbinical-finance families, whereas many of the starting Hasidic families were the poorest and least educated Jews.

smart people marry other smart people and have smart children

Maybe 80% of the time, which means every generation they will be 20% worse off

I’m pretty sure Hasidim began as a folk religion among the poorer rural Eastern European Jews. It was detested by the leading educated Rabbis. I don’t think it is correct to say that they are the same genetic stock of a typical Ashkenazi Jew.

That depends on the founding stock. Many of the smartest and most successful American secularized Jews of the early-late 20th century were of poor shtetl stock rather than bourgeois Western (eg German) Ashkenazi stock. The insane IQ stats found amongst Jewish kids in Brooklyn schools a century ago were likewise largely capturing Ostjuden rather than more-established Yekkes.

In addition, the founding population of modern Chareidim weren’t necessarily rural peasants, they were often communities that surrounded the few yeshivot whose members survived the war, including the extended families of the leading rabbis, many in the Baltics. They weren’t representative of the most common rural Jewish inhabitants of the pale of settlement.

More testing is needed, I agree, to be sure about the quality of Chareidim. But I’d say the evidence suggests their modern founding population (especially given it was highly selected for the few smart enough to escape the war in time) was probably on par with Ashkenazim in general at that time. Even if the extreme selection that produced the high IQ average then stopped (because as you say they all have 8 kids now), that would not necessarily lead to a strong decline in intellectual performance in the medium term, only maintenance.

In commodities, particularly the wackier side of mining, there are quite a few interesting ultra-orthodox businessmen (perhaps due to longstanding involvement with gemstones etc). Some of their stories are insane, essentially uneducated (formally, at least in the secular sense) men raising a small sums of money from within the community and making some very smart bets that pan out very well, bets hedge funds staffed by great traders and PMs with smart analysts with PhDs in mining engineering or whatever for speculative analysis of exploratory sites would love to make.

I therefore suspect they are indeed very smart, especially when considering that these guys are typically the failed students who get told to spend less time on Talmudic commentary because their analysis isn’t as good as the next guy’s. That they choose to waste their best resources on what is essentially Bible study is, of course, a grander tragedy.

Maybe 80% of the time, which means every generation they will be 20% worse off

I don't think so. Sometimes, by random chance people are smarter than both parents. These people will tend to marry other outliers and concentrate that intelligence. The forces of assortive mating are much stronger than in the past, given that so many highly intelligent people move from all over the world to work at US universities and tech companies.

Over time, I'd expect the number of extremely high IQ people to increase even as the overall IQ decreases.

Does anyone have a link to something explaining how communities like Kiryas Joel and various Amish / Mennonite towns exist in a legal sense?

It seems to me that they would be in constant violation of eveything from the mundane - say, fire code in buildings - to the serious - unreported child abuse etc.

They are in violation of these things and you could write several pages of all their infractions. Everything from declaring a personal dwelling a religious building (a Chabad rabbi does this in my own town and probably your town if you live in NJ, check the property records), to violating agreements on utilities, to simply not teaching English in schools. In Kiryas Joel (“low income”) they have their own private security that will illegally attempt to stop you if you walk through their town as a woman without the proper attire… welfare schemes involving Haredi usually result in sweetheart deals with no jail time…

there’s not really an explanation beyond “Haredi block vote and block-lobby and use all of their money to ensure the illegal flourishing of their group”

A google search on the FLDS would inform you that doing this is a more general habit of cults, and getting away with it is more a matter of general internal cohesion than block voting.

Of course, I don’t disagree. But FLDS is 6k unsophisticated people in the middle of nowhere, and the Hasidic community in Jersey/NY is perhaps ~250k quite sophisticated people who have ties of advocacy to a larger community of fellow travelers. I just looked it up and I see I have been misusing the term “block vote” (I wonder if it morphed into a different colloquial meaning around here) but the Hasidic leaders effectively tell their members who to vote for.

but the Hasidic leaders effectively tell their members who to vote for.

This Is Not Uncommon

The FLDS basically gets away with it- with even other Mormon polygamist groups advocating against them. Geographic distance is probably part of it but it’s also just hard to police groups that don’t want to be.

The Amish are actually exempted from quite a few laws in the parts of Pennsylvania they're in. The Haredi generally take over the government of the towns they dominate; it's good to be the king mayor.

Being exempted from laws because of an adherence to a particular faith seems to be exactly what the constitution wanted to prevent.

I'm not trying to be combative here. I just think it's wild that the US essentially tolerates a few mini-cults within our own borders because ... quilts?

Being exempted from laws because of an adherence to a particular faith seems to be exactly what the constitution wanted to prevent.

You agree with Justice Scalia circa 1990 on this, but it's a nuanced issue that has been going the other way in recent years.

Basically there's tension between the Free Exercise clause, the Establishment clause, and the all-encompassing state. When a general law steps all over a religious practice, it's hard to decide whether exempting the religion violates Establishment, or not exempting them violates Free Exercise.

Yes, actually? The First Amendment is often seen to cut both ways: it prevents the establishment of religion, but also prohibits enforcing secularism on the public.

It was broadly seen to include religious exemptions to generally applicable laws until Employment Division v. Smith in 1990, at which point Congress passed the RFRA near-unanimously, saying "actually, we meant to apply strict scrutiny to laws burdening the practice of religion". At its core, allowing Native Americans to use peyote for their religion, or the Amish to opt out of Social Security (some groups even object to the assignment of SSNs to people!), or Sikh soldiers to grow beards.

In practice, some of the Internet atheism crowd chafe at Christians taking advantage of the RFRA, but I'd say it's general use cases are fairly popular. But it also swings close to self-contradiction in legal arguments, like Trinity Lutheran: the state can't prevent churches from applying to generally available playground improvement funding.

They control the towns they’re in, local government has a lot of power in the US, and statehouses are extremely easily corrupted given most politicians are small-time local people who are never subject to much scrutiny.

If I call a county Sheriff to a home in Kryas Joel, do they have the same authorities they would elsewhere? Can they arrest people, can they enter premises with probably cause / warrant etc?

If the answer is, "Yes", then my assumption would be this doesn't happen much because of the immense social pressure in these communities to not call the police. Would that be accurate?

The FLDS is definitely subject to secular jurisdiction and has had specific laws passed in states they live in to make it easier for law enforcement to obtain probable cause on them. Still doesn’t work because of internal cohesion to not involve the police.

For sure, I think it’s a perennial feature of all highly insular religious communities that they’re suspicious of police and that they tell children from an extremely young age never to involve secular authorities. Even if they knew how, doing so would destroy their entire lives; they don’t even speak English as a first language, they would find it hard to exist in the secular world.

If I call a county Sheriff to a home in Kryas Joel, do they have the same authorities they would elsewhere? Can they arrest people, can they enter premises with probably cause / warrant etc?

Yes, Kryas Joel is not literally an autonomous state immune to US law. Just like the FLDS and Amish communities are not exempt from US laws. In practice, local law enforcement prefers to leave them alone and avoid political shitstorms unless they absolutely have to step in.

99.9% of the population is a nearly identical mixture of African, European, Middle Eastern, and Hispanic and you have 0.001% population of 100% Hassidim that forms the ruling elite. Sounds like hell on earth.

Cool. What should we do about it? You seem to have lots of complaints but few solutions.

Prevent demographic change, promote eugenic mate selection. Deportations, endogamy... There are levers. Those things are going to require some non-conservative ideology that motivates people deeply. That's what Religion does.

What is that ideology/Religion? I don't know, it doesn't exist yet, but it needs to inspire people to do those things. It's not Christianity. It's not Conservatism.

Completely uninvited, I will offer my theory of everything.

What is good: Direct relationships between people

What is bad: Relationships between people and the state, or mediated by the state

With stronger family and community relations, eugenic mate selection will happen on its own. In terms of a direct policy prescription.. school vouchers seem like a good start. And since we can't cut spending, we need to "starve the beast" via tax cuts whenever possible.

That would be the ultimate plot twist, if the thing that ended up saving the white race was.... small gubment and tax cuts. But like I said, conservatives do not have the solution.

The concern over dysgenic spiral isn't the within-group correlation between income and TFR, it's the two things you mentioned: replacement migration and higher TFR of foreign groups in Europe and the United States, and the African population bomb.

Yep. Even if the evolution within each group is eugenic, the overall effect is dysgenic. This is Simpson's Paradox in a nutshell.

At the risk of gatekeeping, this should be table stakes in this forum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

breeder hypothesis

What is that?

Tangentially related, but I have helped Asian immigrants with their businesses and there was definitely tax fraud. Chinese women dividing stacks of cash and accounting software that tracks credit card purchases.

Once I went to a newly opened Chinese restraunt (a real Chinese restaurant meant for Chinese people, not that gross American "Chinese" food.). They gave a nearly 10% discount for paying cash. They wrote down two numbers on the bill. Saving on credit card fees and illegally undereporting income.

Chinese Asset in NY State Government

Linda Sun was born in China, moved to the US with her parents at the age of five, and later became a US citizen. She rose up to become the Deputy Chief of Staff for the governor. I know plenty of folks who maintain dual citizenship with other countries, but I don't know how serious the USG was/is about making Chinese nationals "really" renounce their Chinese citizenship in order to become US citizens, nor do I have any idea if Sun did/did not.

She was a subject of interest starting in at least 2020, when she was interviewed by the FBI about her trip to China. While not knowing whether she's categorized a dual citizen (which I do know, for many purposes, the security apparatus of the USG treats as synonymous with "foreign national" for many purposes) or simply a former Chinese citizen with Chinese heritage, I also don't know what the state of these sorts of FBI inquiries are. Have they become a more routine/random matter, where they just occasionally drag some folks in this category in to question them and see if anything comes up? Or did they already have some reason to be suspicious of her in 2020? Her recent indictment acting as a foreign agent, visa fraud, alien smuggling, and money laundering conspiracy includes events going back to 2015 (quite a few in the 2018-2019 years), but it's not clear at what point the FBI or anyone else became aware of any of them or to what extent they motivated the 2020 interview. NYT describes it as "questions were repeatedly raised".

This took years and a significant quantity of behavior bubbling up to get to the point where she was finally fired (March 2023). I can't currently find any details of the firing, but the NY governor's press secretary said that she was fired for "misconduct". Another year and a half, and we got an indictment. This may all be a very plausible timeline for how these sorts of things generally go.

So. Paul Manafort. He joined Donald Trump's campaign in March 2016 (when they were likely scrambling to get any sort of organization going), was promoted to campaign manager three months later in June, then fired two months after that in August, essentially immediately after Trump received his first security briefing.

To this day, there are still people (some even in TheMotte) who think that Paul Manafort is the smoking gun of Trump's culpability with Russia. That Trump obviously must be guilty for having that guy on his campaign. That it proves that "Trump's campaign" was working with Russia, and that it's Trump's personal fault.

On the other side, I personally believe that Paul Manafort and his Russian collaborators made a victim out of Donald Trump, and I can remain perfectly consistent in saying that I think that Linda Sun and her Chinese collaborators made a victim out of the NYS governments that employed her.

I think someone could make a plausible argument that both Trump and specific folks in the NYS gov't were culpable, though I probably would be pretty skeptical; as I said, I think the timeline in the Sun case is plausibly fine. But I would need an absolutely phenominal argument to support the proposition that Trump was personally culpable for Manafort, but that individuals in the NYS government were not culpable for Sun... otherwise, frankly, I would have to chalk such a position up to pure partisanship.

I find the timing of this alongside the Russia Today fake indictments of Russians who will never face a real trial to be suspicious. The DOJ has lost its presumption of objectivity, and it really feels like they are trying to say, "pay no attention to the fact that the DNC of our second largest state was severely compromised by the PRC. A few right leaning youtubers got paid a few million dollars by a media company secretly financed by Russia!"

Frankly, one interpretation of this whole affair is that Lauren Chen and her husband were scamming the Russians, because the Russians don't seem to have got anything they wanted out of this. They paid a lot for very little. Still, it would be a foolish thing for Chen to do.

These influencers are mostly just regular conservative culture warriors, and half of them are only reluctantly voting Trump. They're not especially pro-Russia, although they're not especially keen on the US's role in the conflict either. They mostly don't talk about it. Matt Christiansen, in particular, strikes me as a relatively fair-minded and moderately conservative libertarian type--no rabble-rouser by any means. The views these people express seem relatively normal among online right-wingers, the kind of people and views which are being systemically excluded from mainstream channels and outlets. While I don't expect it to be part of Russia's intent, I am reminded of how Western governments have in the past funded outside or underground media organizations to counter state-controlled media in foreign dictatorships.

I wonder if the reason the Russians targeted these influencers is because they actually believed the left-wing claims about all the right-wing grifters being pro-Russian, and so they decided to capitalize on that by actually funding them. They then discovered that the influencers weren't really all that pro-Russian at all, and then they felt like they had been cheated (and maybe they were?). However, the whole funding scheme is then exposed, and it has now seemingly confirmed the original left-wing claims that these right-wing influencers were all just pro-Russian grifters. Ironies abound.

Of course, if it was more like a scam to take Russian money but then just do whatever, then it has now backfired quite badly on them.

Maybe its 4D decision theory chess?

Now that people know that it is Russian policy to throw large amounts of money to vaguely pro-Russian influencers with no-strings attached, people with large platforms will be more willing to sprinkle in anti-interventionist rhetoric in the hopes of getting that sweet sweet kremlin money.

Frankly, one interpretation of this whole affair is that Lauren Chen and her husband were scamming the Russians, because the Russians don't seem to have got anything they wanted out of this.

I think this is pretty common in intelligence work, the CIA routinely pays huge sums to large numbers of people who provide shitty, fake or useless information in the hope that some day, one of them might be in a position to hear something or accidentally find themselves in a useful role. It was the same in the Cold War (on all sides).

A few billion a year on human intelligence that is 99% useless is chump change.

I guess $10 million sounds like a lot, but it's not really in this context, especially if they were spending $100,000-$400,000 per month on multiple influencers for a handful of hours content that didn't really include anything in the way of Kremlin propaganda. It sounds like the Russian agents were none too happy with how things were going. Is that because Chen was just bad at her job or did she just not care? Of course, it gave those agents blackmail power over Chen and perhaps others, but what good is that? These are quite marginalized figures who have little or no instituational knowledge or pull to do anything for Russia. It all seems so absurd. But you're right, governments piss away money like this all the time.

Of course, I presume there are similar shenanigans going on elsewhere, but the DoJ likely has less interest in exposing them. These influencers are politically safe targets, but that just makes the Russians even more incompetent.

I'm curious to see how this plays out.

As of now Pool seems to be turning on his handlers

I know nothing about the guy, what's his deal?

As of now Pool seems to be turning on his handlers

Is he though? Russia doesn't give a shit if we think they suck donkey balls or that Putin is a scumbag. They care that we keep funding Ukraine and sanctioning their economy.

what's his deal?

It's a long story but basically: street journalist millennial covers Occupy Wall Street, gets into the burgeoning journo outlets of the era (Vice when they were hot shit) doing real investigative journalism, leaves them exactly as they go woke because he can see the writing on the wall, plays the youtube game hard (and I do mean hard, the guy used to publish news videos every day essentially by himself) at the right time. Makes a ton of money by catering to disaffected liberals, libertarians and other people thrown out of the left wing that aren't straight unadulterated MAGA and ends up at the head of his own small media empire, which includes his own news website and a couple of podcasts.

It's surprisingly not that uncommon a route, in retrospect I can think of two other guys who fit the bill. But Tim's special sauce is that he's a shrewd businessman from the school of hard knocks. He's got the most boring inoffensive content relative to how political commentators usually are but he knows how to position and market it very well.

This makes this particular thing a bit surprising because if there's anyone I would expect to properly vet funding sources it's him. He's been cultivating his reputation over the years to appeal to a particular demographic and he had some run ins with shady people in the past (who can forget the Jack Murphy drama?).

You can see him in this tweet executing a very competent defense in my opinion, but someone in his org fucked up, this is going to do permanent damage to his brand.

As for whether he's bought and paid for, I doubt it. Tim isn't the sort of person you can buy with money. You can fund him because he's useful for you to be around and you can nudge him towards particular things because he will follow algorithmic trends and rabbit holes of conspiracy theories and propaganda, but the guy that sacrificed his entire career to build his own thing for independence's sake isn't going to so directly sell out.

I used to like his street journalist content a long time ago, but he turned into the single worst thing you find on Youtube outside of Elsa/Spiderman content: "read alongs" w/ commentary on news articles. Louis Rossman also turned to the same, to my chagrin. I imagine it's a steady source of easy and cheap content that can be churned out daily, but my god does it feel dumb and insulting to me. It reminds me of school and reading along a text with the teacher.

The sirens of slop are hard to resist. He got from living in a van to owning a compound out of it, so while I do find the click bait titles cringe and his commentary and guests mediocre, it's easy to understand why he did it. You can't really fight the algorithm if you want to make money.

I do miss the old YouTube free for all where people tried the wildest things just to see what sticks.

Remember that one girl that did reply videos to every single popular thing with barely any other content than her cleavage in the thumbnail? People look dumber playing NPCs on TikTok but the game was rigged from the start.

The reply girls are arguably a big part of the reason why modern YouTube isn't what it used to be--the company changed the algorithm to punish reply girls, but it also punished non-garbage content in the process.

I don't exactly respect Tim Pool's political commentary, but I respect him a lot as a person and take this as a demonstration of how easy it is to be caught up in accusations of foreign influence, spying, etc.

Yeah, I know nothing about him. I'm just surprised to see an apology so fast, when anyone familiar with the dynamics here knows that denial is typically the dominant strategy.

I don't think "You can eat my Irish ass" is really an apology.

Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims. I cannot speak for anyone else at the company as to what they do or to what they are instructed.

I guess apology might not be the correct term, but he's not denying that it happened, merely that it influenced him in any way. Nowhere in there does he actually deny that it happened, he throws his handlers under the bus.

So yes, he's an edgy boy using naughty language against journalists. But he starts by basically admitting the allegations before backtracking to say that they're just allegations. He doesn't defend against them or deny or go on the attack.

My first thought was that the funding probably didn't have that much influence on the content produced (certainly it resulted in more videos and podcasts, but this doesn't nessesarily imply coercive editorial influence), but this clip from Tim Pool seems well beyond typical America-first isolationism. Does anyone know if there is context I am missing?

The rest of the program is the context. It's easy to clip out Tim shouting impotently at Ukraine being a slavic shithole of money laundering for his political enemies and say that he's a Russia shill, but he shits on Russia and China too. They're just not involved in the conspiracy narrative of red tribe.

It is in fact really just America-first isolationism. I'm sure you can find Alex Jones doing the same rant about how [country the US funds who lobbies for it] is actually an enemy of the American people. Be it Ukraine, Israel, or what have you.

Yeah. Given how many prominent Democrats still believe in and repeat false assertions about Russia-gate, my capacity for caring is very low.

But it is a valuable NPC detector.

If the Trump–Russia allegations were limited to Manafort and only Manafort, then you might have an argument. But there were several more people in Trump's circle who were indicted in connection with the Mueller investigation, and several more who were implicated due to having ties with Russia but committed no actual crimes. There ended up not being any fire, but there sure was a lot of smoke; it's certainly unusual for so many people in a presidential campaign to have connections to a country the US isn't exactly on great terms with. Combine that with Trump making statements about Russia that weren't exactly in line with what anyone on either side of the political aisle was saying at the time, and suspicion is understandable. If there were evidence that the conduct in question went beyond Sun and deeper into the Governor's office, I would expect there to be an investigation.

otherwise, frankly, I would have to chalk such a position up to pure partisanship.

I don't think Democrats have any qualms about hanging even more shit on Andrew Cuomo.

I’ve never seen anything that points directly to Trump knowing about these things. When the Russian hacks were happening in 2016, it was clear that Russia had state security reasons to not want Hillary in office. And for that matter pushing any division they could to weaken an adversary. But what never seems to materialize is a direct link to specifically Trump. Putin never seemed to talk to Trump, they had aligned interests perhaps, but it’s odd to me that the entirety of “Trump colluded with Russia” stories hinge on one off the cuff joke made when he was asked about it — and anyone watching knew he was joking. But he “asked Russia to hack”. It was sarcasm deliberately turned into evidence.

I would expect there to be an investigation

It appears from the following comments that most of this paragraph is tilting at windmills and, frankly, seems to be fundamentally about partisan misdirection. It's hard to understand how any of it is relevant to the comment I made. Are you literally just trying to completely change the topic to be something about whether there should have been any investigation whatsoever? That seems like a silly thing to do, because not only is it completely unrelated to my comment, but if you had bothered to ask what I think about whether there should have been any investigation at all about certain things, you'd have discovered that I agree that some sort of investigation should have happened (and reasonable people can obviously quibble as to what that investigation should have looked like). Instead, this is presented as some sort of gotcha, that I apparently "don't have an argument" at all, which is pretty bizarre, because you've completely avoided saying a single thing about the argument I made. It's entirely avoidant misdirection, and I'd appreciate it if you spoke plainly about the actual thing I focused on - do you think that Trump was personally culpable for Russia's actions taken against the United States (including their collaboration with Manafort, who was their agent for purposes of FARA), or do you think that Trump was a victim of such?

several more who were implicated due to having ties with Russia but committed no actual crimes

So nothing at all for these ones? You are allowed to "have ties" with a country. And Russia being our enemy is a matter under some contention.

You're allowed to have ties. You just can't be surprised when someone wants to look into them. Russia may not be our enemy, but our relationship with the Putin government circa 2016 wasn't the best.

This is a pretty weak justification for what turned out to be a total media fantasy and witchhunt.

but the whole thing is insane. if you apply this algorithm to any other politician then you will find matches. what about hilllary and the uranium one stuff or anyone that was part of the hillary campaign. the trump-russia thing was the IC community fucking over the president. if you check all the fucking idiots that have interacted with your target then you will find some of them are doing dodgy shit with foreign actors. there is literally no way you can prevent this because people are fucktards and you need to interact with people in order to have a presidential campaign. but it is even more insane because if you look beyond manifort who was a fucktard you are left with carter page who is basically an idiot. it wasn't enough for the IC community to bring attention to the fact that manifort was a fucktard they also needed to take advantage of the fact that page was an idiot then exploit him to make more noise. but don't worry spygate was a conspiracy according to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spygate_(conspiracy_theory))

what about hilllary and the uranium one stuff or anyone that was part of the hillary campaign.

Um, the Justice Department spent 2 years investigating this. I don't remember anyone on the left saying they shouldn't; hell, even Trump seemed like he forgot about it by the time it wrapped up. Of course, no one cares about an investigation into a private citizen.

but don't worry spygate was a conspiracy according to wikipedia

Why would I care about Wikipedia's assessment of the issue?

Because Wikipedia is usually the first search result for any random thing any random person wants to research on the internet.

And that person would do well to look elsewhere.

I mean, sure, but we're talking about the average person, who is always going to take the path of least resistance. So it should concern us that said path is heavily tilted toward one worldview.

Name names

Do you seriously not know, or are you just looking for me to name the usual suspects so you can tell me why they were totally railroaded and did nothing wrong, or at least why they weren't Russian agents? Because that's not my argument. I'm not saying that there was any Trump–Russia connection, or that Trump himself did anything his critics accused him of, simply that the information available at the time warranted opening an investigation. If we had a tradition of strict standards regarding these kinds of things I could understand arguments to the contrary, but the Republicans had just spend 2 and a half years looking into Obama's comments after the Benghazi attack. The fact that people who seemed passionate about that at the time couldn't even adequately explain to me what the scandal even was tells you all you need to know. If anyone wants to investigate the New York State government further for possible CCP influence, I'm not going to complain.

but the Republicans had just spend 2 and a half years looking into Obama's comments after the Benghazi attack. The fact that people who seemed passionate about that at the time couldn't even adequately explain to me what the scandal even was tells you all you need to know.

Americans working at the Libyan embassy died after it was invaded by a crazed mob. Turns out the Obama administration had advanced notice this was possible, but chose not to increase security. After the incident, to cover their asses, they framed the maker of an unrelated anti-Islam documentary for inciting the mob, and prosecuted him. Then, in the years that followed, they all insisted that nothing untoward had happened whatsoever, and it was all a case of "Republicans pounced". A microcosm of Obama's (Hillary's) Libya policy, which replaced a dictator with a broke country that has become a civil war, an open-air slave market, and a transit hub for migrants into Europe. "We came, we saw, he died." Now, ten years on, Democrats have successfully convinced themselves that nothing happened and talking about Benghazi is proof that the speaker is some Republican crank who probably tends toward conspirwcy theories.

but I don't know how serious the USG was/is about making Chinese nationals "really" renounce their Chinese citizenship in order to become US citizens,

USG doesn't recognize dual citizenship and doesn't care if you renounce or not. It's China's policy to disown any citizens who naturalize in any other country. Under Chinese law she automatically lost her Chinese citizenship the moment she gained American citizenship.

Article 9

Any Chinese national who has settled abroad and who has been naturalized as a foreign national or has acquired foreign nationality of his own free will shall automatically lose Chinese nationality.

http://www.china.org.cn/english/LivinginChina/184710.htm

第九条　定居外国的中国公民，自愿加入或取得外国国籍的，即自动丧失中国国籍。

https://www.nia.gov.cn/n741440/n741547/c1013967/content.html

Edit: It seems that children under 18 can be naturalized in a foreign country without losing Chinese citizenship. I'm not sure of the legal reasoning but I guess it's probably considered that it's not fully of their own free will.

Any Chinese national who has settled abroad and who has been naturalized as a foreign national or has acquired foreign nationality of his own free will shall automatically lose Chinese nationality.

There's probably another exemption for Chinese sleeper agents?