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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Dan Bilzerian, former playboy went on (Piers Morgan)[https://youtube.com/watch?v=KICYv4O03CA] did his anti jeiwhs bit and I could not dp anything but laugh because of how absurd it was. Him saying the things he said and Nick Fuentes acting like a diva on his stream and twitter is poisonous for anything good.

You never want to play the villain, Moldbugs insights back in 2008 still stand. Anyone sane would look at both these things and be turned off unless its thier first time seeing these people whilst also being in on the jokes. Even then, playing a caricature is a good way to repel everyone. Nick who talked about optics back in 2018 to the point where he called Richard Spencer a wignat who was bad for the "movement". Nick is ofc most likely working with the FBI as he was a key member on ground on Jan 6 where he did get people to storm the capitol, many of whom got arrested whereas his primary issues were being on a no fly list.

Similarly, Dan going out there and denying holocaust numbers does not sit well with anyone. You can criticise Jewish people or israel in a sane way. Claiming that they are responsible for everything bad is either dishonest or low iq since progressivism did mutate from Christianity. Simply pointing out how you are against the treatment of gazans and the impact israel has on public policies being linked to out and out holocaust revisionism is a terrible look. His argument about the numbers of the holocaust by the end came off more as a nutcase bitchute tier video than an earnest analysis. Jared Taylor does not get invited due to his calmness during interviews. Many on the right disagree with him, including [spandrell] (https://x.com/spandrell4/status/1854433166561554534) though his conduct is alright.

My ethnicity has little to no problems with either euros or Ashkenazis, I just find the stuff being done by both Nick and Dan as something that would make you laugh for 30 seconds and stay as a disgrace for a few decades. Playing the villain is always bad.

There's a simpler problem here: who cares what a himbo like Dan Bilzerian thinks? He got big playing Hugh Hefner without the articles. This is the guy we're going to for geopolitics or a discussion of the mechanics of cremating millions of people?

I tried to listen to it and realized that I was just tired. Israel-Palestine is tiring enough when it's someone whose opinion we're supposed to take seriously. How many people that were previously reachable by Dan Bilzerian care now that he's flirting with Islam and Holocaust denial (I think the Muslim fanbase is an underrated explanation for the derangement of certain figures)?

There's a sort of weird overlap between "manosphere" figures and antisemites like Fuentes but I don't see how anything will come of it given they don't have that much in common, any sort of stable ideological core and inevitably fly too close to the sun with some bullshit and end up getting burned a la Fresh and Fit.

I honestly regret any time I spent knowing all of these people, they're fringe and Dan is past it now that he isn't Instagram hugh hef, still this is a bad look because people will bunch people together.

I tell people that there are fairly many ethnic groups in my nation, doesn't mean it's the same genetic distance as that of a sub saharan and a nord in terms of ancestry but there still are some differences, even if they might not be explicitly physical but the average person will only listen to the word Indian and bunch 2 billion people together.

Fuentes is a fed so his motives are muddy. The Muslim fanbase indeed is the reason lol, since you can't criticise Muslims because of bioleninism. Same happened with Islam is right about women, feminists knew the posters were offensive but couldn't word it out because they knew that would be heretic lol.

There's a sort of weird overlap between "manosphere" figures and antisemites like Fuentes

I don't think there's anything weird about it. The ideas in the manosphere (men and women are different and those differences reach the level of psychology and not just anatomy) are in the same category of unmentionable/cancellable beliefs that holocaust denial and regular old racism are in. If you're someone in the manosphere who wants to talk about those ideas seriously, the only places you'll be able to actually have that conversation is in the same places that let other unmentionable beliefs be discussed. I personally think that this is actually one of the reasons behind the rise in antisemitism and racism - if a young guy wants to learn how to actually have sex with women, he's getting a full course of banned and disreputable ideas.

It's weird because a lot of the manosphere is black. Especially in the post-Kevin Samuels era.

They have zero interest in HBD on race (though they are quite fine with male-female differences and questions that could be considered racist if asked of them like "name 10 female inventors").

In some cases these black redpillers have larger platforms than people like Fuentes they're platforming. Fresh and Fit was making a ludicrous amount of money bashing Miami women and lost it to platform antisemites whose beef with the Jews is that they let in black migrants as "biological weapons" as they put it.

It's weird because a lot of the manosphere is black. Especially in the post-Kevin Samuels era.

This is actually a surprise to me - I haven't been spending much time in the manosphere since Heartiste went down, so my knowledge might be a bit out of date. I recall even the black people in the manosphere generally accepted the premises of HBD back then, given that if what you're caring about is being able to have sex with lots of women being black doesn't really handicap you there.

The relationship between optics and efficacy isn’t clear for the “alt right”. Nick Fuentes’ extremist rant led him to collaborate with Adin Ross and debate Destiny; Adin Ross was mentioned by name during Trump’s victory speech, and Trump was interviewed by Ross under the influence of Barron. Andrew Tate gained influence solely due to his outrageous takes. Trump’s early outrageous remarks are what led 4chan to back him deadly in his first election.

The alt right is increasingly influential and popular; if optics are so important then how did that happen? Maybe it comes down to a “great man theory” of political persuasion, with Elon and Tucker responsible for the big cultural change, I don’t know.

His movement was technically groypers, so alt right but more religious and slightly less woke on racial issues. Whereas Spencer who coined the term or co opted (maybe both) alt right dreamt of a pan European empire with US as it's beacon.

Spencer was a relatively decently educated guy who'd do neo kazi things in a sophisticated fashion, rile up people and ultimately had to become a fed like milo due to the issues he faced. His audience was way worse than him whereas nick from the outset aimed for a young college audience that was like Richard. Both fought over this as Nick didn't like Spencer's direction but would eventually fucking say the same things.

Spencer never saw the effects of live streaming, nick has been streaming since 2018 maybe, YouTube, dlive, cozy (his own service) etc. Now I'm certain he too is a fed as he did rule up people for Jan 6th, both are suspected of being homosexual with nick being caught having Trans porn on his computer and famously having never touched a girl.

So in essence you have a fast talking 120 iq volcel who can't keep his low brow racial views down fighting with a richer, more educated 125 iq man who was not that different.

I mention this because the only guy who actually didn't act out with similar views but a higher iq is Jared Taylor, lo and behold he's still banned despite never crashing college campuses or raising nazi salutes even as a joke.

The great man theory would be represented by someone like Yarvin or his NRx buddies far more because they give a good model of the world and what's wrong. You can send a well meaning progressive an open letter to an open minded progressive and he'd not think you're off the rocker. Nick famously disses Moldbug and every other reactionary because he can't read much and thinks anyone doing well in life is a CIA op, whilst being a fed.

4chan was instrumental, I'm certain nick or Spencer or tate aren't people who fulfill the great man prophecy. You have to know what reality is, why it's the way it is and a path forward that's different from what we had bbfore and what we have now. Then acting upon that, this is a huge ordeal as then you have to convince others who represent the best of humanity around you to follow suit, not all but far more than what we have right now.

Ultimately Trump isn't this reactionary God emperor, his people are certainly not either of those things and the rot in the US or other places isn't easy to thwart. Calling women fat isn't the same as making nazi jokes.

I say this because another youtube guy tired this and failed, Sargon of Akkad, but in the flipside, nick isn't going for elections, so if he acts as a gateway to reactionary or neoreactionary people then it isn't that bad, though these optics are certainly terrible. I should writ a short history in this guy lol, too long of a comment, others may like it.

Edit: Ya'll a bunch of fucking cowards downvoting while not defending your beliefs.

In 2020, Biden got 2,473,633 votes in Georgia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United _States_presidential_election_in_Georgia

In 2024, Harris got 2,548,014 votes in Georgia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election_in_Georgia

I hear that Republicans stopped the democrats from stealing the election again with their superior election observation efforts this year.

But how come we haven't seen any evidence of the fraud Harris had to perpetuate to maintain and improve on Biden's 2020 numbers in Georgia?

I assume the question here has an intended answer (there wasn't much fraud).

Anyway, asking anyone who does think the 2020 election was stolen, do you have any examples of things that seem like obvious problems or evidence of substantial fraud? I'm currently inclined to think that there wasn't anything of that sort, but a lot of people seem really firmly convinced, so I'd be interested in seeing the evidence.

Yes, that's the answer I understand.

But I also understand people here to still believe there was fraud in 2020. And that doesn't seem easily reconcilable woth what happened in 2024 and Trump's people being "on guard".

It’s not reconcilable with what happened in 2020. And that is because there was no election fraud. Those who believe there was have been duped.

Ballot counting stopped in Fulton County on election night 2020 because of claims of a burst pipe that later turned out to be false. But after poll watchers went home ballot counting continued and the next morning the largest pro-Biden ballot drop of the entire election was delivered.

Fake news as usual, unless you believe the AP or those they interviewed are in on it.

The report went out that a water pipe burst. This caused people to change their behavior. The fact that it wasn't real is even more suspicious. How did this story get out there? Poll watcher went home!

I haven’t done a deep dive, but there exists this website to compile evidence:

https://hereistheevidence.com/

That lists the 2020 election as an "open case" but not 2024.

I suppose it will be updated, it was sections for Jan 6 and Covid. 2024 tomfoolery as seen by the right focused on down ballot.

Page was created from scratch on Nov 16 2020. I wouldn't bet on a 2024 update.

My personal belief is that the election was "stolen" but I take a very limited perspective that I don't think really provides the information you're looking for - I think that the amount of actual electoral fraud wasn't that much greater or smaller than what is normal for American elections, but the "steal" largely happened when the intelligence community knowingly lied to the public about the provenance of the Hunter Biden laptop. There have been studies done which plausibly make the case that this actually tipped the election towards Biden, and it isn't really something that anyone on either side of politics tries to disagree with.

If we're going down that road of calling things stolen you can call any election stolen if you were so inclined. 2016 was stolen by Comey reopening the emails investigation, 2004 was stolen by the swiftboat lies (ok that one probably didn't tip the balance but probably neither did the Hunter Biden laptop), 1856 was stolen by Democrats claiming Fremont was a Catholic and would a lead a slave rebellion, etc. etc. 'Stolen' is a pretty extreme word that I think in common parlance would only apply if you thought there was something nefarious about the election/voting process itself.

Sure, I definitely think that people were manipulating the public in this way, and that there's a decently high chance that that could have been the difference.

Ballot counting stopped in Fulton County on election night 2020 because of claims of a burst pipe that later turned out to be false. But after poll watchers went home ballot counting continued and the next morning the largest pro-Biden ballot drop of the entire election was delivered.

And if you believe that this event was used to squeeze a substantial sum of ballots into the count, how did Harris similarily squeeze a substantial sum of ballots into the count in 2024 without anyone noticing? She did better than Biden by 75k votes.

Your question is a non-sequitur: why do I have to prove anything more? There is clear irregularity in 2020, either give an innocuous explanation for the counting stopped over a water pipe, or concede.

There could be all sorts of trivial reasons why Harris would grow from Biden:

  • They learned how to cheat better
  • Population Growth
  • Demographic Change
  • Georgia flipping blue in 2020 excited more blue voters to vote in 2024

Comparing two different numbers from two different moments in time without any context is, pardon, complete apples to oranges.

Georgia flipping blue in 2020 excited more blue voters to vote in 2024

Why don't you put forth a hypothesis that you personally take seriously.

They learned to cheat better than in 2020, but not good enough to win.

They didn't cheat THIS time, but Harris excited GA voters s o mich that she made up all the 2020 cheating and then 75k more.

These hypotheses are laughable. I don't see any that make sense, but I don't believe in 2020 Fraud.

If you believe in 2020 Fraud, you should be able to offer a coherent explanation.

I offered one: vote counting stopped simultaneously across several swing states, poll watchers were sent home, then huge pro-Biden ballot drops were delivered. If you can't respond to that, this is not an argument, this is just two people posting text.

Again: comparing two numbers from two different events without any context is apples-to-oranges. Harris got more votes in Fulton County than Biden did: ok, what does that mean? How do we sort out confounding variables? I weighed 100 pounds four years and 150 pounds today, I must be getting fat! (I was 8 then and 12 now, I've put on one and a half feet and I'm junior varsity swim.)

I offered one: vote counting stopped simultaneously across several swing states, poll watchers were sent home, then huge pro-Biden ballot drops were delivered. If you can't respond to that, this is not an argument, this is just two people posting text.

That's not an explanation for how Kamala managed to get more votes without being caught in similar fraud.

I'm honestly not sure what you even want me to respond to. I am not saying that nothing sketchy happened in 2020. I'm saying how is fraud in 2020 and fraud in 2024 consistent. Your response of "but 2020!" is a literal non-sequitor.

Again: comparing two numbers from two different events without any context is apples-to-oranges. Harris got more votes in Fulton County than Biden did: ok, what does that mean? How do we sort out confounding variables? I weighed 100 pounds four years and 150 pounds today, I must be getting fat! (I was 8 then and 12 now, I've put on one and a half feet and I'm junior varsity swim.)

This looks like sophism because you don't have a coherent narrative. You know people will laugh at the idea that Georgians were earnestly more excited about Harris than Biden. You know that "they got better at fraud" makes no sense with them 1) losing and 2) Trump's people being on guard for fraud. You decline to provide an explanation because you have none that are credible, and hence: "like, apples and oranges, man...".

Same state. 4 years apart. Same office. One candidate the same, the other previously on the ticket.

It's Gala vs Red Delcious. And if that distinction is relevant, you ought to be able to explain why, rather than vaguely complain about the difference.

The post I replied to originally said there was no proof of fraud in 2020. I provided some. I can't make you argue that, but I don't see why you would want to join this thread if not to respond to that specific point.

You know people will laugh at the idea that Georgians were earnestly more excited about Harris than Biden.

This isn't even an argument, this is just shaming a plausible idea as a priori ridiculous so you can assume me of some sort of bad faith or sophism. If you think 2020 and 2024 were both legitimate, isn't Georgians being more excited about Harris imminently plausible? Ok, yeah, I guess you can keep claiming to have never seen a good argument when you reject mine out of hand.

More comments

Your question is a non-sequitur: why do I have to prove anything more? There is clear irregularity in 2020, either give an innocuous explanation for the counting stopped over a water pipe, or concede.

I don't see why a claim of a burst pipe that turned out to be false is proof of fraud? Why should AppleyOrange need to concede anything? There might be many explanations for concerns about a burst water pipe other than deliberate malfeasance. A single bad actor might submit a false report about a burst pipe. A good faith error might have occurred. There might have been a real but small leak that was exaggerated. There are too many possibilities to reasonably jump from a report of a burst pipe to fraud.

But suppose we grant that there was a suspicious irregularity in 2020 worthy of investigation. It's not proof of fraud, but maybe it's something people should look into. Sure.

I think the point about 2024 holds up?

Let's grant hypothetically that large voter fraud in Georgia in 2020 delivered the state to Biden. Let's also grant that Harris outperformed Biden in 2024. There are two possibilities here - either Harris also committed fraud, or she didn't.

If Harris also committed voter fraud, then we should reasonably expect to find evidence of that fraud. Maybe they did it better, sure, but a large-scale operation like state-wide voter fraud ought to leave some evidence. We might also be inclined to ask why, if Harris' campaign is capable of successfully rigging an election in Georgia so professionally, Trump still won Georgia by a decent margin, and why they apparently failed to rig elections in other states, including much more significant swing states.

If Harris didn't commit any kind of fraud, then we'd seem to have to conclude that her performance in the state in 2024 is not prima facie suspicious. If so, then we have a strange question to ask ourselves - why, after rigging it in 2020, would they not bother to rig it in 2024? Moreover, if the Democrats performed better when they weren't rigging it to when they were... that seems strange? That seems like Dick Dastardly stopping to cheat? If Harris didn't cheat in '24, it seems like it just makes more sense if Biden didn't cheat in '20.

Let's consider the four possibilities here: 1) Biden cheats in 2020, Harris cheats in 2024, 2) Biden cheats in 2020, Harris doesn't cheat in 2024, 3) Biden doesn't cheat in 2020, Harris cheats in 2024, 4) Biden doesn't cheat in 2020, Harris doesn't cheat in 2024. It seems like option four just... makes the most sense of the observed data.

Jesus, you made my point far better than I could. Thank you.

There are too many possibilities to reasonably jump from a report of a burst pipe to fraud.

I was talking with a local friend who works elections in [red state] and apparently at the end of the night they loaded the local machine-counted sums for the precinct into the back of a personal vehicle (in tamper-sealed boxes) and drove them to the county central counting facility to hand them off. Apparently last time it was just the driver, and this year they were instructed to at least drive together in pairs, potentially followed by the poll watchers.

My thoughts were roughly (1) I think I mostly trust these folks to do the right thing, but (2) it'd be really easy for anything dramatic here to make national headlines, and I'm kind of surprised it hasn't. I guess you have burst pipes as an example, but "DC ballots stolen when election worker gets carjacked on the way to deliver results" seems quite plausible as a random happenstance but also looks a lot like deliberate election fraud. We're IMO lucky that doesn't seem to have happened.

Also that securing a distributed secret ballot is a fundamentally harder problem than most would give credit for.

The burst pipe was media confusion, not lies by the county. There had been a burst pipe in the morning in a different part of the building which delayed the opening of postal votes. The delay in the counting was an administrative screw-up. [As far as I can see, staff opening postal votes who had been working since the morning were allowed to go home at 1030pm. Some staff counting who were supposed to work overnight if necessary also left, and the party poll-watchers left with them, but the SecState office ordered them back to work after a short delay.]

I think the suspect counties still generated about the same number they always do. Slightly less probably than 2020 because that was the easiest its ever been, but sometimes 100k doesn't cut it. See, e.g. the 1980 and 1984 IL presidential elections.

So you're saying the same amount of fraud happened as in 2020, but there's no evidence this time despite Trump's people watching diligently?

Nothing changed.

So why didn't Trump find evidence of it in 2024?

Nothing changed.

So you believe there was fraud in 2020 and 2024, but no evidence of fraud in either years?

There is plenty of evidence. Just not evidence that fits into the special box that people ask for which is "cannot be explained innocently for other reasons". Look at the PA senate race now. The steal is being attempted, it may or may not prevail.

The only way to find definitive proof of fraud, given our current system, is sting operations. A thing the current DOJ refuses to implement, and which they would also put you in prison for life if you attempted.

Georgia. 2024.

Give me a link.

I'm not expecting anything conclusive. But Trump's poll watchers and attorneys don't seem to be claiming there was any fraud in Georgia, and the various fraud proponent parasites don't seem to be interested.

So I'm not asking for evidence.

Where's the rank speculation of vote fraud in 2024 Georgia?

Because I don’t honestly think she was cheating. There just aren’t any statistical red flags of cheating that I’m aware of in any direction. There are no wild swings that don’t match the polling data, there aren’t any places with oddly high turnout. Even in the other direction, the places she lost match perfectly with the places with high Pro-Palestinian sentiment who might well have chosen not to vote for her out of anger over her tepid support of Israel. Those numbers are pretty consistent with ordinary population growth.

Conspiracy theories, startups and skepticism

tl;dr read some stuff , i am kinda skpetical of outlier startup founders being totally honest, but still will pursue this path lol

For the longest time, I have simply laughed at people like Alex Jones or David Icke because the Lizard and male supplements are obvious telltales of something being off. Something changed recently thanks to Twitter.

Ryan Breslow was one of the youngest billionaires. Stanford dropout started bolt, on the surface he sounds like the ideal YC candidate because no matter what Paul Graham may tell you, they absolutely care about your uni, especially Stanford, a cs undergrad dropout from there is about as blue chip a prospect you can be. Yet he never got in. Bolt was worth billions in 2022 and Ryan was doing well, one day he probably took more drugs than usual and went on a tirade against VCs. Pointing out how YC and Paul Graham (PG) wronged him as Bolt would go against Stripe run by Pauls golden boys. He also pointed out the Instacart incident where the VC firm Sequioa got Instacarts CFO as a partner so that he could make a report nitpicking the firms issue which would help them oust their founder and CEO as sequioa wanted them to IPO but the CEO did not. Well the dude got replaced and instacart IPOd.

Here is the interesting part, Ryan later nuked all of this. His allegations about VCs and the startup world being cliques came true because not only did he "leave" bolt but he got lawsuits and is worth way less than a billion now. The strange thing is, there are zero articles, videos, discussions, HN comments or even tweets about this. At first, I was fairly convinced that this is because Ryan is not important but Bolt is worth more than Mistral or every single LLM wrapper put together. PG does have favorites who are objectively bad people. Austen Allred of Sigma Bloom formerly known as Lambda School lied about everything until his firm blew up and PG still defends him.

Here is where the conspiracies start, I read some stuff on chuckstack.com which prompted this thread. Charles C. Johnson is not a very good source of news which should not discourage us from throwing out everything he says. He gets a lot wrong but he clearly gets stuff right too. His posts on Thiel having worked for the FBI and how he stopped donating money the moment one of his boyfriends died under mysterious circumstances raise good points. He is also the first to mention the ties Andreesen Horowitz have to Saudis for raising money.

Edit - i could not find his post so posting the source he cited here

Now I am a middling or below middling wannabe tech startup guy in case you guys did not follow my previous accounts (u/practical_romantic being the latest before this one). My reason for pointing this out is to not be that one guy who blames everyone else for not succeeding, plenty of people do make a fuck ton of money despite zero help of any kind. I simply wish to put these as an example of the fact that there is a good possibility of there being far more happening at the very top of the VC/ founder space that we are totally in the dark about.

Human beings innately desire heroes in some capacity, Achilles in the Iliad is seen as a martyr however Aidan Maclear has a different reading where he points out that in the Odyssey, Achilles tells Odysseus that he regretted dying in the war for the higher good, thus him being a martyr is an incomplete reading as martyrs see their sacrifice as an honourable thing. My people have for the longest time considered Martyrdom or Veergati (our word for it) as the highest deed one can do besides ofc winning the war. Similarly, I used to see Peter Thiel as someone who embodied values I admire but the information about him from Charles completely breaks that for me.

My relatives who work in politics and intelligence agencies share a similar nihilistic view towards the world and how most of what we see, believe and hear about is in fact mostly fabricated. The impression people have of Indian politics is that BJP is some hyper-casteist political party that wants to impose Hindu and caste supremacy on the world whereas the BJP is hyper-leftist, the first people or party to actively promote BR Ambedkar as a pan-national icon and pay people of lower castes to marry into higher castes. No publication that is popular or any public intellectual pieces this together. Nearly 100 percent of all Indians cannot see reality this way but it is pretty obvious when you take an objective look at things from a detached perspective.

Same goes for electoral politics. The average election has had enough booth capturing and suspect things happening that it would be considered rigged by Western standards yet you cannot prove it empirically. The west is not third world so me being skeptical may only make sense here but the underlying skepticism makes me not take anything at face value. Its not that you cant rig elections because of values but its always a question of how much you can get away with. How much of what is true, I am not sure, I just wanted to ask you guys for an honest opinion.

The strange thing is, there are zero articles, videos, discussions, HN comments or even tweets about this.

I think the real question you need to be asking yourself is why do you find this "strange".

Or more pointedly what specific facet of your current worldview/model is it that this particular fact seems to invalidate or contradict?

My previous understanding was that people who build large firms do so entirely on their own fighting impossible odds and are helped by fellow founders, that unlike academia, there is zero corruption here, no scope for dishonest people to survive, those at the very edge are people who are not only competent but just better people.

Reading this breaks that, how can you trust anything? Thiel was a legit FBI guy for a year and there is zero mention of it by anyone anywhere and this is not because of Palantir being related to him either. Similarly, Marc Andreessen is seen as this American patriot, /ourguy/ but a VC whereas his firm has taken money from Saudi Arabia and likely China too, how can you not have a conflict of interest then?

I used to take everything at face value before, I think I will probably lean towards believing things that I have seen as true instead of taking everyone else word for it.

there is zero corruption here, no scope for dishonest people to survive, those at the very edge are people who are not only competent but just better people

This is the most shocking thing I've read in months. No wonder I didn't understand what the conspiracy was. Surely you did school projects and saw people do little getting a lot of credit, surely you've heard of Enron, Theranos and thousands of other companies...? How could you suspend such a thought for so long? How did this Bolt guy of all things break the glass?

All I hear is how every founder who made it is an angel who is just better than everyone else, how all of them did it because you can too. Even here, I cannot fully say that I suspect that there is some chance that a lot of new-age tech firms likely cut deals with governments that we have zero clue about and how many of them can be astroturfed.

I did not want to believe it because I started reading PGs essays and thought that startups were the only fair thing in the world, how you cannot get ahead here without being super honest about everything, how everyone else is that way, how these are the saviours of humanity. Saying that Musk or Gates or Jobs may have actually done a whole bunch of shady shit that we conveniently wish to pretend could not have happened was my frame. I will get downvoted and get called a frustrated negative loser here, even though I hope Charles is incorrect. The idea that a lot of them happen to have fairly rich families that somehow did have connections with various agencies or services adjacent to them does seem fishy. Alexey Guzey made a post about Nobel prize winners and all their parents mostly worked white collar jobs like academics, engineers and maybe business owners but very few were active in politics.

Even in the case of Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos ran for years with VCs head of national agencies in the board and somehow never asked for a working white paper or patent, or how Adam Neumann raised money from a16z despite causing a lot of loss to people with his wework stuff. PG lies to people about how uni does not matter yet YC favors your undergrad and past experiences a lot more than most jobs do. Adam Neumann fucked innocent people over who lost money and jobs because of weworkm somehow he is still a better person than everyone else.

Last week on a thread before the elections got over I joked about voter fraud at which point I got a reply from a guy asking for substantial proof. This is the same thing as casting couches, if you actually investigate this stuff, it is very hard to prove as defection means punishment, with the P Diddy stuff, many who got raped by him will likely never come and accept it. How is it that most large crypto projects (exchanges) somehow have extensive money laundering issues to the point where if you run one, you likely fail jail sentences because you implictly either helped or rugpulled people

I don't want to be a conspiracy nut who thinks CIA or aliens or "the jews" run the world and do everything good or bad. The idea that there is still far more corruption in everything, especially startups, where the extent of the rot is sealed pretty well behind the personalities of founders and VCs who LARP as thought leaders whilst writing blogs that would make my incoherent ramblings look sane should make you suspcious.

In the case of Elizabeth Holmes, I think people were desperate for a female Steve Jobs. Don’t forget she never got significant amounts of VC money; she got the funds from blinding politicians and supermarket CEOs with science.

Great point, andreessen did support her but never invested money. Regardless, it's strange to raise 100s of millions without a working prototype for a single valuable feature for a firm that existed for close to a decade.

Wework, broadcast.com, ftx are some high profile blow ups but mostly VCs don't invest like dumbasses. Even if I were to believe that openai or something has obvious shady ties and origins and or founders of their backstories etc, they still made a ton of money. Not alleging that but I mean to say that even in such conditions, most people make money at least via valuations or exits and that most founders aren't scheming people, just that the probability of top top dogs doing this stuff seems high to me.

Oh, I’m sure the backstage can be pretty grim, I’ve heard bad things about VCs.

Regardless, it's strange to raise 100s of millions without a working prototype for a single valuable feature for a firm that existed for close to a decade.

They had a prototype that seemed to work (with faked results) and legitimately did work for a few tests. Holmes’ genius was getting stuffy septuagenarians into such a bidding war that they overruled their own analysts who said the prototypes were insufficient and urged caution.

Were there shenanigans behind that? I don’t know. Possibly. But I think it would have come up in the investigation along with all the other criminal stuff that was going on. Did you read Bad Blood? It’s a fantastic book.

I think it's worth pointing out that the companies you named aren't exactly comparable. Taking them one by one:

  • Theranos was a fraudulent company that made an ineffective product, lied about its effectiveness, faked demonstrations and test results, and not only parlayed that into a ton of VC funding. The weird thing about it is that they nonetheless plowed forward by entering into contracts with large retailers that they couldn't possibly deliver on, and the whole operation was soon revealed as a sham.

  • FTX was a legitimate investment firm that fraudulently mishandled client funds. Years ago, my grandparents were victims of a similar fraud when their investment manager was telling them he was investing their money in the market but was really using it to make loans to his son's woodworking business. When the woodworking business couldn't cover the loans, he didn't have the money for investors withdrawing funds, eventually someone called the DA's office, and the guy was convicted and died in prison. This guy was a legitimate locally trusted investment manager that normal people used, not some obvious fraudster. When rumors started circulating that he was crooked, a lot of people, including my parents, pulled their money out, but my grandparents had been investing with him for years and said they trusted the guy.

  • WeWork was a legitimate company that was able to hype itself into a valuation so high it defied common sense. It was effectively a commercial real estate company that marketed itself as a tech company. The estimated valuation was so high leading up to the IPO that investors realized there was no real room for growth, not to mention that they were losing more money than could be reasonably explained. There were some questionable valuation processes (e.g. counting every desk job in a city where they were operating as a potential customer rather than a more reasoned analysis of the market for ad hoc office space), but none of this was exactly secret.

  • Broadcast.com was a successful company that Yahoo ran into the ground after acquiring it for a lot of money. I don't even know why it's included here because it was well past the VC stage at the time of purchase and it's just another failed acquisition.

So of the four companies, Theranos was the only one that engaged in fraud to attract VC money. FTX engaged in fraud to prop up another business. WeWork used non-fruadulent puffery to attract investment, and Broadcast was badly managed by a corporate giant.

Tbh that does sound incredibly naive. The start-up scene, or more generally capitalism, isn't good bc everyone involved is a perfect angel. It's because the competitiveness forces you to develop a good product that people actually want to buy, and to cut the slack and produce it reasonably cheaply. That's it. Worse yet, there are many tricks how people try to get around the competition with backhanded, negative-sum strategies, and you have to account for them & stop it. The problem with everything else, such as bureaucratic institutions, is that they often don't even attempt to account for these strategies so they run even wilder. Or worse yet they naturally incorporate the opposite.

It's douchebag who needs to please you vs douchebag you need to please. Nothing more, nothing less.

Kind of which is why I did thnk chuck was being too tin foily

My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls. Might not make everything false, but you might as well read chicken entrails if you want something specific enough to actually say.

Austen Allred of Sigma Bloom formerly known as Lambda School lied about everything until his firm blew up and PG still defends him.

There's probably a steelman of that Allred piece -- heaven knows Lambda's collapse has a lot to be embarrassed about -- but it has such a scattered grab-bag of every disagreement possible that it's a little hard to take at face value. The clear illegality of operating as an unregistered school is damning, and then it's undercut by the 'oh and the legislature had to update the law later to make clear it was really-illegal not just I-want-it-to-be illegal'. Allred's homelessness was a lie, because he could have gone back to his parent's spare bedroom, as evidenced by this example of a guy who... was homeless until he made calls and went to a friend's spare bedroom. He did that incredibly dumb Sample Size of One Gimmick, but he also considers a court holding an arbitration clause intact as winning (spoiler: yes) and ran a pretty stupid 500 USD hustle to try to promote a YouTube channel (congrats, you've found an influencer). He's made three references to Elon Musk, which is tots a sign of delusion, and not just having different political aspirations, which is near-certainly what really set Sandusky off. There's some serious criticisms of Lamda excluding 'no-longer-searching' students that weren't searching because Lambda left them with no change or dropouts that Lamda went after for pennies, and also here's a claim of 27% job placement that's behind a paywall, which, once you roll the rock aside depends on interpretations of a leaked slide deck that, afaict, isn't anywhere online and allegedly is disputed by third-party auditors.

Which is probably is big difference. Graham's definitely got some serious faults here, and that he's not more critical where Lamda has fucked up says a lot about whether he's on the outside pissing in or the inside pissing out. But his sort of people have an answer about an indefensible fellow insider: they never mention them again. That's what you're seeing with Breslow -- Bolt faltered like most companies trying to upscale too fast in a highly competitive field (albeit with some hilarity when the pivot to profit collapsed, which isn't especially interesting, but that he dissed them and no one cares enough to accuse Breslow of eating faces means you couldn't get Graham et all to mention his name without a set of pliers.

Graham doesn't damnae memoria Allred not because of some complex conspiracy, but because he thinks there's some defensible variant of Lamda's goal that the school simply missed (and to be fair, I could be persuaded!), and at a more importantly, because so many criticisms of Allred were and are somewhere between exaggerated and junk.

My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls. Might not make everything false, but you might as well read chicken entrails if you want something specific enough to actually say.

That is fair but having a little more skepticism about the consensus on topics that you see in the startup sphere would serve all of us well. Johnson is incorrect about a lot but he is right about some stuff too, enough to warrant one to read and judge for themselves, I can point out for instance that his stuff about Yarvin and anything related to Indonesia is totally wrong but he is correct in pointing out that you have quite a lot of charlatans here.

He wrote pieces on lex friedman and eric weinstein where he at least did point out that both these people were immediately thrust into the limelight, how manufactured it all was and the ways they used credentials to later justify them being astroturfed. Lex went on JRE for the first time when he did not even have a podcast, even the views he got on his obviously incorrect tesla videos were very less. At that time, if you looked his name up (which I did) the first result was his BJJ match against Garry tonon. He would talk about MIT despite only being a post doc who spent little time there and had academic output that was about as good as Amy Chuas which zero.

Eric somehow got a job at Thiel Capital doing god knows what, claiming that his wife and he were noble science-winning minds or close to it and would throw fights whenever he was asked about his time spent in Jerusalem after his PhD and how somehow he has no output from that duration. For someone who worked as a managing director at Thiel Capital, I have never once heard him say anything about startups or investing at all that would indicate much interest or experience.

Chuck is the wrong to point this stuff out as he is not trustworthy and has a personal axe to grind.

Graham doesn't damnae memoria Allred not because of some complex conspiracy, but because he thinks there's some defensible variant of Lamda's goal that the school simply missed

Perfectly reasonable take. I guess I reacted fairly harshly to knowing this stuff and finding out that people who LARP as the bastions of everything good with the modern day world are well LARPers. In PGs case, he absolutely has favorites, no matter what bolt did later, them not selecting them seems fairly unreasonable. Adam Neumann of wework also somehow managaed to get another firm started post wework issues and still could raise money so people certainly have some form of strong preferences here.

The post I made here was somewaht difficult to write for me, I wish to be as good as one can be at what I want to do despite having been a total failure till now due to well just bieng lazy. In the case where I make an argument for favoritisim and other issues whihc for sure have to exist if you have money on the line, I kinda feel that I am making exuses but at the same time we all know that we are lied to on the regular about important things.

You cannot read the New York Times every day and not be a liberal

in my case here it would be

You cannot follow tech stuff every day and not believe that PG et all are heroes

And that is hard to swallow. I have a hard time fathoming that Elon can work 4 jobs on his own and still be more onlline than me because time is limited, even if yu have all other attributes working for you, or how somehow the most important man in AI is sam altman even though he did not write down the code for the LLMs they use which use a combination of Transformers (Google) and Transfer learning stuff Jeremy Howard talked about in ULMFiT. Eric Schmiddts mistress, Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Fried were mytholgical figures. I remember very clearly how much literally everyone, even the people over at ssc liked Sam becuase he would comment there occasionaly. If you told people that the same guy would end up in jail because of being incompetent and hiring an even more incompetent Stanford grad, no onew would have belieaved it. I personally would not have. I thought CZ was clean till he himself got sent to jail.

I hope I make sense. i dont want to end up on the same path as conspiracy theorists or make myself believe that you can onlly do well if you are a crook wokring for something or in the cabal but I just want to know what reality is. Obviously I know I will do well if I do things right but the mythos around it shaky at best.

My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls.

I think my grandparent's called that paranoid schizophrenia. Everything is connected, if you are mentally ill enough.

This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence :)

I think he would call themotte a cia psyop if he got to hear about it.

Quite possibly! It’s actually a quote from Scott’s web novel ‘Unsong’, which I recommend if you haven’t read it. It’s a bit clever-clever in places but pretty good and genuinely intelligent for the most part.

The VC scene has been shady and two-faced forever. Graham is bad, so are the rest of them. Johnson has an extreme axe to grind and is a fabulist of hilarious proportions, but like you say he’s never entirely wrong. He’s basically an extremely autistic compulsive liar with a huge axe to grind.

The impression people have of Indian politics is that BJP is some hyper-casteist political party that wants to impose Hindu and caste supremacy on the world

I think it’s more that there’s a clear delineation between caste supremacy and Hindu nationalism. The latter can’t be too casteist because most Hindus are of either middling caste or casteless. For the same reason a British nativist might be hard-pressed making the argument that the aristocracy should be put back in charge of everything after the revolution.

I used to see Peter Thiel as someone who embodied values I admire but the information about him from Charles completely breaks that for me.

The boyfriend died shortly after he showed up unannounced at Thiel and his husband’s Christmas party and apparently made a big scene. (Classic case of a mistress with unwarranted confidence). Was he killed? Hard to say, but probably not. Thiel stayed out of this election to hedge his bet, he still needed all those contracts for Palantir etc if Harris won, and Vance is his guy so he doesn’t need to suck up to the Trump campaign.

I think it’s more that there’s a clear delineation between caste supremacy and Hindu nationalism. The latter can’t be too casteist because most Hindus are of either middling caste or casteless. For the same reason a British nativist might be hard-pressed making the argument that the aristocracy should be put back in charge of everything after the revolution.

Most of modern-day urban India is mostly leaning towards the casteless future BJP imagines or Congress did before it. There is no caste supremacy, arranged marriages exist a relic, and people who are living in urban centres and not poor don't really care as much about who they marry. BJP is not and never reactionary even when it first started out. They follow Arya Samaj which makes corrections to the Vedas to justify annihilating castes. Savarkar in his texts very directly talked about this. BJP has to appeal to upper castes because they vote for BJP in unison.

You cannot discuss any of this here publicly nor point out the HBD implications of castes, how brahmins in various parts Sanskritized people for money or how every single scripture is explicitly in favor of having castes and varnas. Indus Valley civilisation had a concept of caste despite not being aryan and the Aryans who came from the Eurasian steppes had Varnas, two are different but nearly identical in most cases now. I am not some caste obsessed lunatic, I have to mention all of this since it gives a complete model for understanding religion, denying birth-based varnas is not far from denying the divinity of Christ. Anyone who does that is calling scriptures wrong, and not the fake new ones but the Vedas which are the equivalent of the bible in Hinduism. Again I am not asking for people to follow it, its just that you cannot believe in the Vedas, call them divine and then go against things they explicitly tell you to not do.

The reality of being poor plus having stark contrast with people who live beside you who not only inherit everything good but also were responsible for everything bad done to you and have slightly different ancestry is a recipe for disaster. Also why they push against Aryan Invasion Theory as it makes things even worse. On the flip side, most upper castes are people who got Sanskritised in that fold, their y haplogroups don't match those of others so there are no good outcomes.

What do you make of the old anthropologist’s argument that the varnas are sublimated remnants of an ancient, long forgotten cow/bull sacrificial cult, with the Brahmins and accordant ritual purity taking the role of the bovine? (Sam Kriss is awful, but he has a brief summary here)

Incorrect, varnas are from Aryans, jati or caste from IVC, other Aryans and their descendants also had it, Scythians, Germanics etc. There is very little out there is honest about it though Razib Khab is pretty good.

Ancient germanics had a distinction between Noblemen and commoners, with nobles having priestly privileges, just like Ancient Rome. There’s no evidence for some kind of hardcoded up and down social hierarchy like the Indian caste system.

Survive the Jive (Tom Rowsell) would disagree. Germanics and Scythians especially had some kinds of castes not too far from the normal aryan way. He unlisted a few videos recently Aryans and their descendants absolutely had castes which did inspire even the Japanese later on.

Indus Valley civilisation had a concept of caste despite not being aryan and the Aryans who came from the Eurasian steppes had Varnas, two are different but nearly identical in most cases now.

Eh? I'm not aware of any reason to think the IVC had a caste system, and I couldn't find a reputable source that says so. We know fuck all about them really, their language is undeciphered, and their cities show only the same kind of social stratification that most civilizations do, in other words the elite living in the nicer places.

There is no caste supremacy, arranged marriages exist a relic, and people who are living in urban centres and not poor don't really care as much about who they marry.

I don't know about you, but arranged marriages are very much a thing and far from deprecated. The BBC says that in 2018, 93% of all marriages in the country were arranged. That hasn't changed noticeably in the last 6 years.

IVC did have jatis, jati or castes and varnas are different things, I heard Razib speak on this on clubhouse, but will need time to find some sources

It is not very common among the urban white-collar crowd to marry people of other castes. People still have caste based identity because of religion, poverty and the general state of bioleninism here.

My point about religion and caste still stands, hardcoding it in the vedas means that people intially will be against this, it would have worked to dissolve castes before but doing it now does not favor the OBC or below population as they get free things from castes existing.

The BBC says that in 2018, 93% of all marriages in the country were arranged.

Wow. I knew arranged marriages were a thing, but I didn't know they were that ubiquitous. With that many marriages being arranged, are the handful of people who don't go that route looked down upon as weirdos or anything?

Not really. For the middle class and above, nobody would really bat an eye unless the proposed spouse was otherwise socially undesirable.

If we're talking the lower class, it's still largely acceptance, albeit the picture becomes more murky when you consider the variation inevitable in such a large country.

The biggest issue is avoiding falling in love with the wrong person, defined as probably being poorer, in a bad job, wrong caste (which matters far less than it used to) and so on.

Even then, arranged marriages are nowhere near the popular misconception where the bride and groom only get to see each other before marriage (in most of the country). It's far closer to family-mediated speed dating, as opposed to having friends introduce prospective singles as is more common in the West (until dating apps steamrolled everything else).

Ever since you reach a Certain Age, your family, including bored aunts-twice-removed, begin putting out feelers or become more receptive to the same. Or they make a profile on a matrimonial site I guess. Then comes the carousel of cups of tea in living rooms, families and prospects vetting each other. Assuming both sides like what they see, the couple is encouraged to become familiar with each other, often unsupervised (or at least nobody in the living room) and them genuinely falling for each other, while not strictly necessary, is a welcome outcome. I'd be so bold as to claim the would be partners have veto rights throughout the process.

When everyone is happy and no skeletons or jilted lovers have turned up, then it's time for a big fat Indian wedding.

This isn't particularly different from a modal love marriage either! You take your partner home one day, introduce them, and then both families nigh inevitably begin giving each other a closer look. Objections may or may not be raised, but there's still a lot of reconciliation to do. You marry not just a person but their family, after all.

It's a pretty reasonable system, and God knows that there would be fewer NEETs and incels if more families in the West took hints from Indian mothers exasperated that their kids took their advice to ignore relationships and study for the NEET a little too seriously and need coaxing to produce grandkids eventually.

Uh, westerners trying to do the rough equivalent has mostly not worked very well, although the neuroses of fundamentalist Christianity may be a major explanatory factor there.

It's a civilizational issue. Westerners have this combination of individualism and guilt based moralism that prevents this sort of rigged-for-your-own-good type of institution from lasting in the face of principle.

If you want to make this idiotic romanticism manifest, try to argue openly that Romeo and Juliet are evil for engaging in a wholly destructive act of lust that shirks all their duties, and see people jump to defend vehemently characters whose ostensible fate is death.

This particular mode of being is not without its virtues, but we can plainly see the limitations of it now that it's been pushed to its logical conclusion.

try to argue openly that Romeo and Juliet are evil for engaging in a wholly destructive act of lust that shirks all their duties, and see people jump to defend vehemently characters whose ostensible fate is death.

You've baited me here. Romeo and Juliet have, even in death, done a great deal towards mending a wholly destructive blood feud between their families; if Shakespeare wasn't writing a tragedy of errors they would have been successful. What good would their duties have done?

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Book of pook, a pre manosphere red pill sorta book was written by this Shakespeare but who argued the same, that romance is a sin that makes men less manly and cites romeo and Juliet as an example with verses.

The VC scene has been shady and two-faced forever. Graham is bad, so are the rest of them. Johnson has an extreme axe to grind and is a fabulist of hilarious proportions, but like you say he’s never entirely wrong. He’s basically an extremely autistic compulsive liar with a huge axe to grind.

I do wish to know more about this, there are barely any accounts on any of this at all but people on the inside are extremely tight. For instance, I do not know how Elon Musk can tweet at all hours of the day, play video games and still be involved in various firms, even part-time involvement in 4 different firms is enough to chew you out completely even if you work more than the hard-working Investment Banking guy. He probably is passive in what he does because I don't know how else you can do all that and still spend so much time online. These are not agencies that outsource Web Jobs to Indians, they are hard-tech firms, even if you spend 25 hours a week on one, you still get 48 hours for the rest of your week where you have to eat 21 times, meet your dozen kids, play your video game, tweet at all hours, go on podcasts and now work with the government.

I bring this up because I am certain that a lot of what we are told has pr spin on it combined with our innate desire to have heroes. You would rather want to believe that he does this and more than be told that a lot of what we are told is given charitable spins for preserivng ones image. He is certainly fairly capable, beyond what most people can comprehend but I doubt he is newton, far from it.

The boyfriend died shortly after he showed up unannounced at Thiel and his husband’s Christmas party and apparently made a big scene. (Classic case of a mistress with unwarranted confidence). Was he killed? Hard to say, but probably not. Thiel stayed out of this election to hedge his bet, he still needed all those contracts for Palantir etc if Harris won, and Vance is his guy so he doesn’t need to suck up to the Trump campaign.

Apparently, he has quite a few more of them with him, his mistress (feel weird using it for a guy) did tell people that he was under threat a few days before his demise. Thiel got contracts even after 2020, donatng this time around would most certainly been helpful.

The boyfriend died shortly after he showed up unannounced at Thiel and his husband’s Christmas party and apparently made a big scene. (Classic case of a mistress with unwarranted confidence).

Do you know anything about the personality this guy had? Stories like this almost always pattern match to certain kinds of mental illness (in this case maybe Borderline Personality Disorder).

Unstable relationships, attractive and likely to get in a superficial relationship, aggressive and maybe suicidal when spurned, possibly paranoid...

Likely someone who knows the people involved would be like "oh yeah that checks out he was crazy."

But outside looking in it isn't as obvious and these other explanations pop up.

most of what we see, believe and hear about is in fact mostly fabricated

Yes, but I'm not sure what the conspiracy theory is. It seems like a paragraph or two was lost before the edit.

Not really, I mostly meant to state that I do not believe fully that all the super mega corps that are being run are completely clean entities that represent everything good about the world. Charles Johnson is a nutcase in many cases, the cases he makes for most of VC stuff being for show, where you do have mostly legit companies but the super mega corps most likely have fishy connections, motives and backstories is more believable than I was previously led to believe.

Nuclear technology did get stolen, most of what intelligence agencies do is classified and not reported on much universally in most nations. My theory is that a lot of what we are told about how the absolute outliers came about obfuscates a lot of things and there is a good chance that they are complicit in doing things with either domestic or foreign regimes for their own gain, where the incentives are far higher than what we can think.

Hollywood has casting couches, we know this, most of us know that if you are an actress, you very likely did have to sleep with some sleazy guy. Harvey Weinstein was caught but he was one of likely hundreds of thousands alive who did it. It still is happening and no one talks about it. In many cases, the people who later get hired by the actresses or their friends and families are unaware too. In such a scenario can it not be possible that there is quite a bit that happens inside Silicon Valley that we don't know about because none of us are founders of firms that are extreme outliers?

I do not believe fully that all the super mega corps that are being run are completely clean entities that represent everything good about the world

? that is widely shared knowledge...

Someone believing that they are unfairly persecuted would be a conspiracy theory.

Are you serious with this and https://www.themotte.org/post/1252/wellness-wednesday-for-november-13-2024/268562?context=8#context comment? Because both takes are just weirdly bad.

Those are his not mine lol. I have never been in a relationship, I simply wanted to know what you guys thought, universally panned 🤣

Your conspiracy theory is… big business probably has some skeletons in its closet?

Yep, a whole cemetery I guess and most new big businesses as opposed to old ones.

Hell, Wells Fargo Bank got caught knowingly laundering money for the cartel, and they only got a slap on the wrist. I would not be surprised if all manner of shady business is occurring in lots of other industries and companies.

WASHINGTON - President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz as the next U.S. Attorney General.

Trump announced his latest cabinet appointment Wednesday afternoon. Gaetz has been a long-time Trump supporter and is a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus in the House.

"Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney, trained at the William & Mary College of Law, who has distinguished himself in Congress through his focus on achieving desperately needed reform at the Department of Justice. Few issues in America are more important than ending the partisan Weaponization of our Justice System. Matt will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department," Trump said in a statement.

Gaetz represents Florida's District 1.

Trump has announced a flurry of nominations in the week since his election. Earlier on Wednesday, he selected Sen. Marco Rubio to serve as his Secretary of State.

He should be just trolling I think ...

Tulsi Gabbard got Director of National Intelligence. Rubio is still twisting in the wind waiting for his position to become official. I wonder if Trump is just doing his ritual humiliation ceremony, same as he did with Chris Christy.

Gaetz immediately resigned from his house seat...maybe this is a bureaucratic poisoned chalice for the senate, which has the choice of either confirming Gaetz as AG or facing a potential appointment of Gaetz to Rubio's vacant seat?

I do think that we need some bulls in china shop in washington if the western civilization is to be ok in the next century. So Tulsi is a good pick. But gaetz is not qualified I think and probably couldn't pick up to speed fast enough.

Gaetz is funny enough to be trolling, but more likely Trump just wants someone willing to be enough of a hatchetman. Be interesting to see how much of the confirmation fight circles around his actual philosophy, rather than around how oily he is (spoiler: yes) or the reputed and increasingly dubious allegations of the most sexual impropriety.

More effort than this, please.

We are a discussion site, not a link aggregator. Or, uh, a quote aggregator.

Can someone explain to me why is everyone freaking out about this guy? I pick up a fair amount of American politics by osmosis in places like this, and the name does sound familiar, but I have no idea why everybody is losing their damn mind.

He's an idealogue who tracks further to the right of most conservatives, essentialy a slightly more credible version of Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor-Greene. He's known for making intentionally provocative statements that his colleagues don't even try to defend, as well as engaging in stupid publicity stunts. After the GOP took the House in 2022, he insinuated that they should put policy-making on hold and focus on investigating and impeaching Democrats they didn't like. He was the ringleader of Kevin McCarthy's ouster as speaker, earning him a lot of enemies in his own party. He's also a sleazeball, having been accused of sexual misconduct, illegal drug use, showing other members of congress nude photos of women he'd slept with, misappropriating campaign funds for personal use, and accepting impermissible gifts. The centerpiece of all of this is a sex trafficking investigation he got roped into. A close associate of his pleaded guilty and while the evidence didn't support an indictment for any of the crimes that were being investigated, it's pretty clear that Gaetz was partying with this guy and paying him for prostitutes. It didn't help that Gaetz was the only member of congress to vote against a sex trafficking bill. He topped it all off by asking Trump for a blanket pardon for any crimes he may have committed.

While he is a barred attorney, his legal career isn't one typically befitting of an Attorney General. The sum total of his legal experience is a few years as a junior associate at a small law firm, where he handles pennyante matters like debt collection, a dispute over a volleyball net, and a stolen boat. He owes his entire political career to his father, a successful Florida politician who bankrolled his first run for office. the only conceivable reason Trump would nominate him for AG are his personal loyalty (he supported Trump from the beginning and hasn't wavered) and his zeal for going after political enemies. Gaetz resigned from the House after being named as AG; the mainstream view is that he was under investigation for numerous ethics violations and used the nomination as cover to avoid the issuance of the report, now that the House Ethics Committee no longer has jurisdiction. It seems unlikely, however, that Gaetz will ever actually be AG. No Democrat will vote for his confirmation, and only 4 Republicans would need to oppose him to block his nomination. Susan Collins of Maine has already suggested that he's unacceptable, and the guy has enough enemies within his own party that it shouldn't be too hard to find three more (Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell are almost certain nos, and one more wouldn't be hard to find). Any confirmation hearing would air all this dirty laundry publicly in a way that hasn't been done yet. To this point, news of his improprieties has been of the continuing story nature where information comes out in dribs and drabs over the course of years. The only people who can tell you all the ins and outs are the kinds of political junkies who follow scandals involving minor figures. Given the increased scrutiny that's already being given, I'd be surprised if this nomination isn't withdrawn before we even get to the confirmation stage.

So he's scandalous and unqualified? Again, why is everyone losing their shit?

https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/26/the-fbis-matt-gaetz-operation-sidelined-an-effective-republican-voice-at-a-crucial-time-that-was-the-point/

He was one of the more effective pro Trump voices in congress after 2021, and it looks like the DOJ took a run at him.

What they had on him was a crypto guy invited Gaetz on his yacht, afterwards Gaetz venmo'd him $900 and the crypto guy venmo'd two women who were there the $900 split between them. The problem was they couldn't turn that into a federal crime. Even as a state crime they couldn't prove the women were prostitutes or that Gaetz knew the money was for them.

Sending a friend money to cover party expenses isn't a crime. Sending money to a girl you just had sex with to buy herself a present isn't even a crime. It's a bit sleazy but pretty common among the party yacht crowd in Florida. The crypto bro was being threatened with charges and would have been useless as a witness.

So the DOJ leaks facts about the case to the press along with rumours that the girls were underage. They were published March 30, 2021.

Shortly after Gaetz is approached by an ex-military type who claims he can make the charges go away with a donation to a "veterans group". The guy was probably a fed and paying him off would have created federal charges that the DOJ could prosecute. However Gaetz reported it to someone he knew at the FBI instead so that went nowhere.

Basically the DOJ was leaking rumours for 18 months until they admitted there would be no charges. The press is still running with innuendo about it.

But we're approaching 4 years and it seems like the put up or shut up point has passed.

DOJ staff are typically institutionalists and will always circle the wagons to protect the DOJ.

But Gaetz would come in with a personal interest in investigating bad behaviour by the DOJ. They wouldn't be able to try to shame him into hiding things to protect the institution.

For Trumpists that's his big selling point. He's not likely to be highly effective in getting things done at the DOJ but he'll be eager to fire problem people even if it nets him bad headlines from the NYT.

For anti-Trumpists who support the shadier things the DOJ has been doing he's a nightmare.

For people who don't believe the DOJ does anything shady, he just looks like a poor candidate and they want someone more dignified.

Gaetz rubs a lot of people the wrong way because he looks like the rich kid villain from an 80s movie. That's probably not too far off the mark, only as an adult he went to DC and found out people there love to shit on his hometown. So he basically had a heel-face turn where he wants to defend the people of his city against DC.

He's a Republican, he has troll energy, and he has Matt Gaetz's face.

That last one is a little jokey, but I do think that's what tilts it into a furor relative to any average Republican the left hates. He has a supremely punchable face that screams "douchebag", even to me. And I think he even knows it.

Surely these picks are a smokescreen. I bet JD Vance is huddling with Yarvin, Musk, and Thiel in a smoke-filled room right now discussing which anon Twitter accounts and Mottizens will get the call to serve in the shadow cabinet. They must be cross-referencing the Gray Mirror Substack subscriber list to make sure they don’t accidentally double-count any alts.

No, they’re not, there are upper and upper mid level officials in the Texas and Florida governments who will get drafted instead.

You laugh, but Yarvin himself has been very strongly opining that Nothing Ever Happens and any Trumpian hopes were likely to crash on the shores of redtape.

I'm willing to bet that Musk and Thiel will get what they wanted out of the admin (i.e.: the feds stop putting roadblocks in front of them), but twitter anon dreams of power because they are mutuals with Vance were delusional.

feds stop putting roadblocks in front of them

If/When the Dems regain power, especially if MAGA dies fully with Trump, what do you think is going to happen to them long term? My guess is imprisonment or just thrown off a building depending on the fallout of a Trump administration.

I'm quite certain this is why they've been angling to purge all the people who won't leave them alone.

There are large parts of the deep state that understand that their work is needed for America to keep its military edge. It's not clear to me that the people who want to fuck with that are the most senior or the most powerful.

They'll do what filthy rich billionaires did before them : Donate = Bribe = Lobby.

Now that Elon & Thiel are Texans, the state should offer them plenty of protection even after Trump goes away.

Musk joked that either Trump would win or Musk would be imprisoned. It's a joke. But novel legal theories worked once to secure dozens of felony convictions. Why not a second pass?

That was in no way a joke. He was already facing down a prosecution for not employing enough illegal immigrants for a job that has requirements which can only be met by legitimate citizens, his compensation payout being declared too high, etc. The lawfare was already happening, and I think there's a very good chance he would have been extradited abroad and prosecuted for misinformation/hate speech if Trump didn't win.

I wouldn't recommend throwing Musk off a building; he'd probably shoot flames out of his ass and land safely.

I would imagine they think by the time the Dems regain power, the impossible-to-work-with faction will have been soundly defeated and whoever takes over will only be a drag on their businesses, not anything worse. I don't believe that, but Musk, at least, is an optimist.

Vivek Ramaswamy gave an interesting talk at Yale's Buckley institute a few days after the election. What I specifically want to focus on is the part starting at 34:35, where he describes what he thinks is a divide in the Republican party between two different notions of American national identity. The first is that being American is about following a common set of values---meritocracy, free speech, self-governance, etc. The second (starting 39:12) is that being American is about having deep, ancestral ties to a particular piece of land---"blood and soil". He sees the coming years as an almost factional fight within the Republican party between these two notions of identity.

This topic is very close to my heart---I think the majority of my interaction with this forum has been very unsuccessfully arguing in favor of the ideals-based notion of identity. Ramaswamy fervently supports the same and I hope hearing his much better-argued case (from a much more authoritative source) is far more compelling than anything I've tried to say.

However, what I'm actually interested in is what people here think the outcome of the factional fight is going to be. What do you see in Trump's choices of appointees? Is Ramaswamy going to be pushed out or is he going to be an influential figure moving forward? Which side do you think various major figures in the Republican party land on?

Just to put my cards on the table, I personally think Ramaswamy is delusional that it's even a fight and that the Republican party is fully dominated by the blood-and-soil side. This is in fact the main reason I vote Democrat and if I believed the ideals side was going to win, I would immediately become a die-hard Trump supporter. I believe that if you actually hold the ideals-based notion of identity, then the Matt Yglesias/Noah Smith-wing of the Democratic party is the right political home for you. As for why I believe this, I always thought that support for legal, skilled immigration was the best litmus test for this divide---if you are on the ideals side, then it is a no-brainer win-win and if you're on the blood-and-soil side, then it is very dangerous. Both what happened in the last Trump administration and experience talking to right-wingers here seemed to very strongly demonstrate that US Republicans are very against skilled immigration.

At the end of the day, the number of Americans with deep (white) nationalist convictions is much smaller than the number that will gravitate towards arguments couched in blood and soil because they are angry about something else, usually crime, and can be placated by increased policing and a reduction in public disorder, regardless of the actual demographics of their community. Even if Trump succeeds at deporting 15 million illegal immigrants and ending birthright citizenship, which is unlikely to say the least, that still leaves tens of millions of legal immigrants, many of whom have just started voting for Republican candidates because of the Democrats' mishandling of identity politics and will be key to winning future elections.

I think there's also the question of which set of ideals were talking about. Are they the ideals of the Founding Fathers, which presupposed a European/Christian worldview and a virtuous populace? Or are they the ideals of the Civil Rights Neoconstitution that is IMO essentially a pro-globalist anti-identity? If it's the former, I might be okay with supporting the civnats, but it's the latter, I'm going to reluctantly support the blood-and-soil people.

If you are in favor of ideals then Republican immigration policy sounds like it would be a better fit for you. In order for American Ideals to continue to be American Ideals we need to assimilate immigrants into them, and that means taking in a manageable flow, and preferably from all sorts of places. Too large a flow and the existing culture and ideals get diluted too quickly. Too much from a single source means they form enclaves which makes assimilation harder (I am especially thinking of the majority muslim areas of Michigan here). Republican policy preferences are the ones that will meet this goal the best.

The thing is, you assume that 'ideals-based identity' and 'ancestral identity' are separate and orthogonal to one another. But even if we put aside tribal allegiance, it's pretty clear that emotional predispositions (openness, authoritarianism, neuroticism, etc.) are at least partially genetic. And this is going to correlate somewhat with race, because most places have had fairly stable demographics for hundreds or thousands of years.

The ideal of "free speech" is going to look very different in a country of high-openness, high-extroversion people vs high-neuroticism, low-openness. Likewise "self-governance". Moved from one country that considers itself meritocratic, self-governing and devoted to free speech to a very ethnically-different country with the same ideals really drove that home for me.

American notions of what their founding ideals mean has already shifted pretty clearly since the country was founded, and I doubt that's independent of the demographic changes that America has been through since the founding. Anyone who wants to preserve modern American values has to consider the demographics of the population upholding those values and passing them down to their children.

(Look at how much work it took for Roosevelt et al to get federal jobs allocated by exam scores not patronage. Both factions considered themselves thoroughly American, but one defined 'merit' as 'decades of loyal service' and the other as 'intelligence and diligence").

it's pretty clear that emotional predispositions (openness, authoritarianism, neuroticism, etc.) are at least partially genetic

There's a standard counterargument here: even accepting this, ancestry is at most weak proxy for values---the distributions always have significant overlap. Using the weak proxy instead of more direct measures of values is silly. I bet even English proficiency and being able to pass a civics test gives more information on acceptance of the current American values than ancestry. I'm not going to complain if this picks out different proportions of different ancestry groups---just don't prejudge anyone based on very weak correlates when there's a better way!

Sounds nice but in practice it doesn’t produce good results:

  1. Reversion to the mean - just as geniuses tend not to produce genius children, the disposition of your cohort is a better predictor of your lineage’s behaviour than your personal values. Especially when that cohort forms ethnic enclaves on arrival.
  2. Passing a civics test != sharing your values. Trying to prevent an ethical project from being infiltrated by people who make the right mouth noises is an ancient problem faced by religions, charities, and NGOs, and it’s almost unsolvable. The two most reliable ways are requiring personal recommendations for membership, or limiting it to a specific ancestral group like the Hasidics or the Amish. I assume that neither appeal to you.

Seriously, I’m not trying to gotcha you with clever arguments. One of the reasons I moved towards an ancestral-based understanding of Britishness was watching all the immigrants who’d taken the mandatory civics test on ‘British values’ turn around and condemn those values the moment they got their visa. We wanted skilled immigrants who would uphold our values too, who doesn’t? But in general that’s not what we got, and the children are worse.

if I believed the ideals side was going to win, I would immediately become a die-hard Trump supporter.

That's interesting. So what are the things you love about Trump so much that would make you a die-hard supporter, if his (or the Republicans') stance on immigration wasn't an issue?

I believe that if you actually hold the ideals-based notion of identity, then the Matt Yglesias/Noah Smith-wing of the Democratic party is the right political home for you.

A single tweet / substack in the wake of a lost election doesn't make for a good argument that an ideals-based identity person belongs in that wing. Particularly when one of these is written by mr. "I want wrong right-wing ideas to be discredited, while wrong left-wing ideas gain power".

I also don't understand why Trump(ist)'s stance on immigration is enough to turn you off from otherwise die-hard support, but you are apparently able to tolerate the Democrat's constant abuse of the very notion of meritocracy.

I always thought that support for legal, skilled immigration was the best litmus test for this divide---if you are on the ideals side, then it is a no-brainer win-win and if you're on the blood-and-soil side, then it is very dangerous.

I don't think it's dangerous (let alone very), I even agree it's a clear win, given the benefits and the small schale of that particular form of immigration, but if you can't think of literally any risk or downside, I'd say you lack imagination.

That aside, I'd say most people are skeptical of skilled immigration, because they see it as a foot-in-the door for mass immigration (no one said how high the skills have to be to count as "skilled").

So what are the things you love about Trump so much that would make you a die-hard supporter, if his (or the Republicans') stance on immigration wasn't an issue?

It's more that I agree with you that the Democrat's stance on American identity isn't ideal. I would become a die hard supporter despite everything else I don't like because then the Republican party and Trump would be the best instruments to make the stance on identity I like dominant---I'm basically a single-issue voter on this issue of identity.

Democrat's constant abuse of the very notion of meritocracy.

Despite also being bad on this issue, the Democrats at least have a wing that supports meritocracy. This wing can actually win primaries/elections in very left-leaning areas; for example, they are going to be running San Francisco as of the recent election. On the other hand, the anti-hereditarian meritocrats on the Republican party, like Ramaswamy, seem to get slaughtered in primaries. Whatever Trump actually believes, meritocracy is something he's very willing to sacrifice when it comes to actual policy decisions. Stephen Miller is still going to be the most influential immigration policy advisor!

no one said how high the skills have to be to count as "skilled"

I'll give a line: better for the country than the median citizen in some measure combining ability to assimilate and ability to contribute. Given how dominant US culture and values are globally, it shouldn't be very hard to find a huge number of people making this cut.

I'm basically a single-issue voter on this issue of identity.

Fair enough, there are issues that move me this way too. But I think it's important to recognize there are valid reasons why either side won't drop everything to get your support. It's a very limited set of circumstances where a one-issue voter gets to exercise influence.

This wing can actually win primaries/elections in very left-leaning areas; for example, they are going to be running San Francisco as of the recent election

I don't think I heard of this. Who won, and what are they planning to do for meritocracy?

On the other hand, the anti-hereditarian meritocrats on the Republican party, like Ramaswamy, seem to get slaughtered in primaries.

And then they get appointed to high positions by people who win them... what's the problem?

I'll give a line: better for the country than the median citizen in some measure combining ability to assimilate and ability to contribute.

I don't think it's the ability to assimilate that's the problem, because that's actually pretty high for most people. The problem is that there is next to no pressure to assimilate anymore, the very idea of putting such pressure is seen as deplorable, and higher immigration will necessarily lower that pressure even more.

Given how dominant US culture and values are globally, it shouldn't be very hard to find a huge number of people making this cut.

It would still imply mass deportations, wouldn't it?

Demographics is destiny to a degree so it's been over for the racists for a long time. They can join the tent and extract some concessions, but not at the expense of the rest of the coalition.

I always thought that support for legal, skilled immigration was the best litmus test for this divide

Why? Importing high gdp people will make number go up, but it won't provide any support for your values of "meritocracy, free speech, self-governance, etc." If you import a million high iq gay race communists, that will actually destroy your American values faster than importing a million freeloaders will.

The problem with the values side is the values aren't really verifiable. The homeland of a people side feels under threat in large part because many of the people coming in aren't expected to believe in meritocracy, free speech, or any of that.

Take the example of Judge Chutkan. Her parents left Jamaica and brought her to the US because they were too hardline communist for the communists of Jamaica.

The Dems appointed her to be a DC judge precisely because she has weak cultural ties to the US and can't be shamed into following traditional American legal norms. Appeals to democratic traditions and rights just fall flat on her, she just hates her political enemies.

Republican voters see her in charge of the DC Trump trial and loose all faith in values based immigration.

Oh and it's a big lie that H1-Bs go to "highly educated foreign professionals". Sure decent chunk do. But they are randomly selected from the pool of applicants that have the correct paperwork, so there are significant abuses.

For instance here are H1Bs granted to a hog farming company: https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=murphy-brown+llc&job=&city=&year= Median Salary is $40768.

For H1Bs you need to match the prevailing local wage, so a lot of shops set up in a poor city, and pay their employees well below the normal national wages.

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=wipro+limited&job=&city=&year=all+years

Sort by salary low to high.

As a fix for H1Bs I've long argued that they should award them based on base salary instead of the current random. It'd fix problems.

The problem with the values side is the values aren't really verifiable.

This, but there's also another problem: changes in values can go either way. If anyone can become American by adopting "American values"… what if they change their mind about said values? What about natural-born citizens who stop believing in those American values? Do they lose their citizenship?

Of course not, for several reasons, one of which is the difficulty of verification you note. But notice that this creates a ratchet — there are multiple ways to become an American, but far narrower paths to cease being one. (AIUI, renouncing American citizenship is actually very difficult.)

(One might draw a comparison here to how an atheist (ethnic) Jew and a gentile convert to Judaism are still both Jewish.)

meritocracy

Oh god, please don't bring up this word with OP, we're about to get a lecture about how meritocracy necessarily means open borders to high-talent immigrants, even if it means economic ruin for existing residents...

For what it's worth, I was raised by Republican parents who listened to Conservative Talk Radio and watched Fox News. Growing up I listened to Michael Medved, Glen Beck, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Rush Limbaugh, and Micheal Savage in the car. I still follow some of these personalities on X. I feel like I am tuned into normie conservative sentiment. And the Normie Conservative Sentiment is that America is a values-based society. Immigration is great if someone is willing to work hard, not take handouts, assimilate, and parent their kids to do the same.

I only see the "Blood and Soil" types in fringe online groups. The vast majority of American conservatives are not like that, and if you think that the "Values-Based" Americanism is losing I don't know what to say. I don't even know where the fight is taking place - YouTube comment sections?

I say this as someone who thinks it will be very sad if France is not majority French people, Italy not majority Italians, etc. In my heart I almost see Europe as a museum and I will be sad to see that go away. But America is multi-racial and I see that as a good thing.

That being said, seeing America as a Values-Based Society requires limited immigration. To explain, let's say that we brought in 300 million immigrants next year from all over the globe. 50% of Americans would be immigrants, 50% would be born in the USA. Let's ignore the economic pressure that would create, housing and job crises, and just focus on culture. If the population of foreign-born Americans was 50%, would we be able to pass along American values and culture?

I asked my siblings this question once and they said, "Of course, why not?" I think they were pretty stupid for thinking so. If American norms and values were so easily acquired and distributed throughout the globe, why would people need to move to America? They could just turn their existing countries into America themselves.

Instead, we find in immigration-heavy states like California that new structures that resemble the bribery, nepotism, and corruption of immigrant's home countries.

Obviously 50% of foreign-born people residing in the United States would be too big a shift for us to properly integrate them into our culture. But what is the correct percentage? Immigrants today account for 14.3% of the U.S. population. I think this is an under-count, because they list only 11 million "unauthorized" immigrants, when other independent studies have found closer to 20 million..

Is 14.3% of foriegn-born people the sweet spot? I don't think so. At times of greatest stability in America, that number was between 5-10%.

America was a leftist project which got started by Anglo puritans, it was never supposed to be this way and having more people is a sure shot way of causing conflict.

If america were to raid India or China or Israel, will people of the respective ethnicities not have a very high chance of siding with nations they come from?

Demographics matter, they matter as much as policy or maybe far more or less. America is it's people.

If america were to raid India or China or Israel, will people of the respective ethnicities not have a very high chance of siding with nations they come from?

This has been a concern throughout American history and there have been some level of sabatuar and unrest during wars from time to time. But most Americans, especially immigrants who choose to assimilate, side with America. People who drop everything with the dream of Being American, a sovereign in themselves, with unalienable rights and infinite opportunity, don't defect so easily. At least not when selected carefully.