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Notes -
Is there an option to download the conversation? I know when Claude's ressponses show up in the code area, they're in markdown, so you can just copy or download them and get the same formatting here. Not sure about the main convo.
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What on Earth is this post supposed to be?
Firstly, we expect a decent amount of effort in top level comments in the CWR thread.
Second, if there's a CW element here, I can't for the life of me see it, unless you're trying to stretch our tolerance for LLM-posting, which is low as is.
Then on top of that, it's a raw, unformatted conversation dump, you haven't even made it clear what it is we're supposed to be engaging with.
I'm removing this and warning you, but I'm leaving it in the hands of the other mods if they'd like to hit you with a ban. Don't do this.
My apologies, late night intoxication
It's alright. I feel a warning that goes on your permanent record was too harsh, so it won't stick.
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I really don't think a ban is warranted. I mean, I don't think a warning is warranted either, but a ban would be outrageous. Nwallins is mostly a very good poster, he said the post was an experiment and he wasn't sure if it would interest others the way it interested him, I think you would have gotten the point across if you had only posted your last sentence and nothing else. And then you wouldn't be further increasing the negative opportunity cost of posting an op to the thread.
If enforcing our rules has a negative opportunity cost, then it's one we must pay.
A warning is just that, a warning, and in the absence of further transgressions, won't have longterm ramifications. I didn't think a ban was warranted myself, but that note was for any other admins who'd wish to act, letting them know I have no strong feelings either way.
If you strongly suspect, as he made clear himself, that something about your post is objectionable (he chose to highlight the lack of formatting), then that's all the more reason to take proactive action and fix the issue. As is, he's getting off with a slap on the wrist.
Of course it is necessary to enforce the rules despite negative consequences. But man that's shortcut thinking regarding warnings - a warning is not just a warning, it is also used to determine the severity of future punishment. In practice unless you guys are familiar with the poster you usually just add infractions and aaqcs together to determine the poster's merit to trouble ratio. And the system doesn't distinguish between types of warnings like "bad formatting" vs "being a shithead on purpose" - even if a poster successfully gets a mod action reversed it is still counted against them the next time they transgress. That is the reality of mod actions as it is internalised by both the users and the mods - as you can see when someone gets a long ban, their recorded actions are weighed and listed to justify the severity.
It would be unreasonable to expect you guys to go through all of a user's history before modding them, especially since you usually do a great job with the system as it is, and I understand the boundaries are in place for a reason and a heavy hand is necessary when the heat gets too high, but with ops I'm just saying I think you should go for a lighter touch if someone tries something different and there's no apparent culture warring.
It does do that. We have notes on the warnings that can be general or specific, and can mention extenuating or aggravating factors.
Ah, maybe I was thinking of times back on reddit but I recall seeing administrative errors and reversed mod actions used to calculate the merit to trouble ratio so I assumed it didn't clarify.
I think the rest of my argument still makes sense, a warning is not just a warning. Nothing is just what it is.
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RLAIF is the next frontier in DL.
Challenge: get Claude to say any idea is stupid or off base.
I have been saying for a while that if LLMs are going to replace a single employee who is of any use to me, it's going to have to have a bullshit detector. I can't have it just repeating the bullshit claims in papers that everything is totally novel and innovative... and of course, obviously technically and conceptually sound. It's gotta be appropriately critical. I sort of doubt that RLAIF is going to be the only ingredient needed to accomplish that.
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Why... did you post this? I am somewhat interested in seeing other people's dialogues with models. But maybe they should just be linked to...
I'm not sure how to engage with something like this here on the Motte in the middle of the culture war roundup?
Should I engage with your thoughts or analyze the chat as a whole? Also did a chunk of this get chopped off? ... Did you post by mistake?
There is an IKEA effect when it comes to LLMs, where people find the text that they prompted to be fascinating, and the text that others prompted to be boring.
I do think it's interesting. But ultimately this... now removed conversation was only the "bouncing ideas off of a rubber duck" phase of making a well directed point or refining an insight.
I think that part of what makes the LLMs so attractive is their ability and infinite willingness to listen to and expand one's own thoughts. It feels good because the ideas flow more smoothly. You have a social interface to lean them on and reify/refine them with, and of course, these models are usually intoxicatingly positive too.
When you write something for an audience, you have to be attentive to how you are directing the audience's attention, who the audience is. What concepts they are aware of, and how to move their attention cleanly from idea to idea with minimal friction. In the case of this post, even just a preface introducing the context of the chat to us would have been a nice improvement (though I still think any full convos should be linked and then discussed rather than hard posted in a top comment). LLMs talking just to you can be writing for an audience of just you, referencing priors and ideas that the LLM inferred would click with you. And using interaction modes that you told them to use to optimally interface with you.
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Why is that called an IKEA effect?
I think there's more to it than the IKEA effect. But, the IKEA effect is a cognitive bias or quirk where people value things they assembled themselves more than things built by someone else. It is named after the store IKEA which sells furniture that you must self-assemble.
From wikipedia
I'm not sure this is really a bias in all cases. Having built something develops virtue and having that memory triggered when you see the object cements that virtue. But when the IKEA effect shows up in the context of assessing whether something is a good deal based on its actual cost of production- or estimating something's value to others- it can definitely be a bias in that context and lead to overestimating things you made.
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I'd call it the vacation picture effect!
I like that!
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The WHIMs on Earth are less fertile than average in a country already experiencing sub-replacement fertility. How does a Mars colony deal with that?
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Does this' anonymous shitposter John Carter' fella, also go by Unshacked sometimes?
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Whether or not settling Mars is practically possible is beyond my wheelhouse.
But one thing I'm sure of is that it won't be our best and brightest. I'm pretty sure the bulk of people who would sign up to go and live on Mars would be those who haven't been able to make satisfactory lives for themselves on earth. Something between Victorian convicts sent to Australia and modern day boat-people. I can't imagine any women willingly making the trip, so good luck breeding a race of superhumans.
My first thought was along your lines, since pretty much all previous colonizations followed a similar pattern.
However, 3-5 years in a spaceship to land on a barren wasteland is vastly different. The voyage of the Mayflower was 2 months across the Atlantic to a land of unmatched natural bounty. The migrants floating across the Mediterranean only have to stomach a couple of days before landing on a rich, permissive welfare state with prebuilt infrastructure. Even with SpaceX bringing back indentured servitude to cover travel costs, the first folks landing on Mars will be a different breed than previous colonists. It's going to be much more like Antarctica, which, from what I understand, is generally an elite crew compared to the rest of humanity.
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He is essentially describing the European settlement of the USA, but moreso. The people striking the earth then were either like the Puritans (high social trust, virtuous, extremely educated, high IQ) or like the borderers (intrepid, enterprising, indomitable, competitive), both bootstrapping civilization in hostile environments, alone. So, 'elite human capital'. This is unlike the South American/Mexican example where heavily armed free companies set themselves up as feudal lords over extractive slave empires.
North America's competitive advantage lasted for its first few centuries, and the USA really became something of a City on the Hill institutionally. But this advantage has evaporated with its advantage in human capital (and no, I don't just mean IQ), along with the inevitable loss of virtue and social cohesion that comes with prosperity. America's supposedly amazing new institutions are sagging under the stress. (You'll notice that its genius constitution flops when you try to govern Liberia with it.) My prediction is that liberal democracy as the default political model will not survive the century. We will retvrn to, if not the old ways, something that tastes of the old ways.
So with the Mars colonies, if they even happen. There's nothing new under Sol.
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This is an interesting discussion but clean up your AI slop. Literally just delete most of the content.
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My LLM-sense is tingling, but let's leave that aside.
As a work of futurism, this sucks. Bold statement, yes, but it seems to belong to the category of prediction that goes:
It's the equivalent of writing The Martian exactly as-is after SpaceX announces and test flies Starship.
What are the cardinal sins? Well, it seems to assume that over the course of several decades or millennia (long enough for sub-speciation!):
No significant advancements in AI or robotics, which would obviate the need for a very skilled, astronaut-tier colonist pool. Assuming there's demand for meat and bones humans at all.
No genetic or cybernetic enhancement that would directly address many of the consequences of Martian existence, or that would simply allow useful traits to rapidly flow through the gene pool.
You can already deal with some of the downsides of low gravity by embedding centrifuges on the Martian surface so everyone can get in some single g time.
Further ink spilled on the new Martian Ubermensch is a complete waste of time, and that's coming from someone who advocates for space colonization, and Mars as low hanging fruit, even if we really ought to be aiming at asteroids as well (it'll happen anyway, if launch costs keep dropping).
Even leaving aside my previous concerns and my own interest in space colonization, the odds of Mars brain-draining Earth are... low. It is rather unlikely that we have millions of people clamoring to move there, or that losing them makes any damn difference. Mars is not a very attractive place to live, we'll go there despite that inconvenient fact, not because of the excellent sea-side views in the Hellas Basin.
Agree with you on all points. But I'd also add that the original premise is probably wrong, I'm guessing the main selection effect for moving to Mars will be a willingness to leave Earth entirely behind.
The first few hundred or few thousand might be WHIMs, but the first million will merely be those who are willing to leave Earth behind. And the individual reasons why people are willing to do that won't always be good or even neutral. The anti-social, the misfits, the failures, and the criminals will all end up in the mix at some point.
I think there might be maybe a few thousand people who meet the definition of WHIM who would be willing to pay for the privilege of moving to Mars (let's say in the first two decades since the first colonists land with permanent intent). I think to get significantly more people there, especially talented or motivated people, you'll have to subsidize them or outright pay them to be there.
I personally doubt that the intersection of people willing to go to Mars and those who can do something useful there isn't very large!
I'm all for Mars colonization, but even I acknowledge that it's a rather miserable place to be. For most intents and purposes, it's an actually worse lifestyle than permanent Antarctic habitation (you won't die from asphyxiation if something goes wrong, and you get decent ping on the internet). If someone is inclined to argue that antarctic colonization is restricted by treaty, how many people are running off to Siberia or northern Canada and Greenland?
What sells Mars is the romance. And it's not a novel. By the time technology advances enough that living on Mars is as comfortable as living here, there will be little intrinsic reason to. Not x-risk, not the pay, little but because you want to be on the human frontier. I might pay to visit Mars once, but you'll have to pay me a pretty good premium to live and work there longterm. And I suspect the economic incentive to employ people there isn't going to be very large, but might be brute-forceable. And I personally expect that human presence won't be economically compelling by the time we have regular Starship fleets.
It doesn't seem like we're in a space opera future where humans spread through the cosmos because we have no alternative. It seems that if we're going to have large numbers of people off world anytime soon, it's by paying them to be there or them paying for it, all off the backs of taxing far more economical machines. Robots will take over from humans as the most useful entities to have on Mars, and it remains to be seen if we even get there in time.
Which is fine by me, if I'm chilling in an O'Neill cylinder, I'm not fussed about the fact that I'm not employed there. I want to be in space because it's cool! With creature comforts not found on rusty iceballs!
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Willing to leave Earth behind, and also able to afford to leave Earth behind. Musk thinks that Starship can get Mars one-way-ticket prices down to $500K in the medium term and $100K in the long term. I'd append another zero to those numbers (and I'm a huge SpaceX fan! others may prefer larger grains of salt still!), but even if I don't, it's hard to see the most anti-social/failure/criminal element ever managing to front the dough. Some of the misfits will (I'm also a huge capitalism fan in general) but I'd bet the net selection effect is still not in their favor.
Also @self_made_human - some more ellaboration on what I meant:
I was imagining white collar criminals, fraudsters, or illicit business men. They would have the cash, but be in danger of losing it if they remained on Earth. They'd be willing to tolerate the risks, and have specific reasons for getting off of Earth. The criminals.
There are people with engineering and technical talent that don't fit in well on Earth, I've worked with plenty of engineers like this. They might get it in their heads that being on a different planet would somehow change their social skills. The anti-social.
There are people that are for various reasons largely unattached. Maybe their families have died or they've cut each other off. They aren't interested or good at dating, so they avoid it. They can still work and make money, but without family or social connection they simple accrue the money without much way to spend it. The misfits.
There are people that dun goofed. Had a good family, and a great life, but they got caught cheating with their secretary. Now they are divorced, hated by their family, fired from their job, and generally a pariah to all their former friends. Maybe they embezzled from their business, did a brief stint in Jail, but the family and money are all gone. They went big and lost it all, but they still have a bit stashed away. The failures.
I would suspect that these gentlemen are more likely to end up sipping Mai Thais on the beach in the seedier parts of southeast Asia than end up on Mars haha.
Could you cobble up a few thousand disaffected but reasonably wealthy men if you tried hard enough? Eh, probably, but you'd have to be quite lax in terms of screening. I'm not sure Musk wants his colonies to have that particular make, but I suppose he's going to have to compromise somewhere.
My contention is that the number of people who are driven enough to want to settle Mars at a quality of life reasonable in the next few decades of colonial tech are very few, at least if they're paying for the privilege. Larger if you pay them, but then the question arises, what are you paying them for? They're unlikely to be financial positive, but of course, we must account for the fact that the biggest backer here is distinctly uninterested in an ROI (my Twitter has been bombarded with people arguing that point, but it seems clear to me money is far from Musk's primary motivator for Mars).
Maybe for the criminals, but I think the world will be shrinking in the future. Fewer places to hide and disappear.
Beyond a thousand participants its unlikely musk will be personally interviewing anyone for the project. To some extent I'm assuming organization success for him. That this project actually gets off the ground and there is a reproductive and successful group of humans on Mars. If it is successful at all, then at some point it will turn into something that not one single human can manage.
I like your contentions. But you are stopping at a few thousand. And I don't think the OP is stopping at a few thousand. Break ten thousand and I feel that things change significantly. Above ten thousand you go from some chance of managed by a single person to zero chance.
I do believe Musk in what he says he wants. Which is a multi planet species. And I think he is working as hard as he can to get there. I do think there is a limitation of wealth and resources at our current level. Right now he can support a few people on mars. In a decade when he makes things cheaper it might be up to 100 people. In two decades when he continues making things cheaper and maybe grows his wealth a bunch its 1000 people.
I don't think this project can solely rely on Musk to break 10k people on Mars. And when that limitation strikes, I think the groups I have outlined are the colonists available.
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That’s a quote from the new Taylor Sheridan series Landman. It’s about an oil boom town in Texas, but it would fit the pattern of New World settlement, and probably the settlement of any new world. There’s 8 billion people on the planet, I doubt Musk or anyone else would have trouble finding a few thousand fit, motivated, high IQ people who would be willing to truck out to Mars. If the deadbeats and the penal colonists and the political refugees ever show up it probably won’t be until quite a while later
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Oof, yeah. The overuse of adverbs and adjectives as color and the lofty but imprecise language which avoids making a directly controversial point.
Hate to say it if this is a poster's own hand writing, but that's a lot of words to poorly explain the real essay.
I'm not particularly anti-LLM, but my opinion is that if I can tell, you've largely wasted my time, and probably used a bad model or prompted poorly. (This is not Official Motte Policy, I have my mod hat off, and some people use LLMs solely to be obnoxious).
At the very least, proofread and exercise some editorial discretion! Their summary adds absolutely nothing to the original essay, which I've read halfway, and sells it short. It certainly makes the mistakes I mention, but at least it mentions that the author has a "we'll wait and see" approach to AI, as opposed to skipping it outright and just regurgitating things uncritically.
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Ah, this is basically the setting for The Expanse series of books and the show.
Mars got colonized and colonists are in the process of terraforming it, and eventually traded some of their advanced tech for their independence. Despite vastly lower population, their people are cream of the crop, their ships are therefore top of the line, and their population is ideologically aligned. Earth is using aging tech, its people are demotivated (some huge portion of them are on UBI handouts), and of course would have had the disadvantage of fighting an expeditionary war.
Mars has a HUGE chip on their shoulder, and its military wing is so Jingoistic that there are some whisperings of invading earth if they ever have to fight it out.
So Mars is basically optimized for churning out elite soldiers and navy, and elite scientists. They'd much rather churn out scientists but they can't ignore the fact that earth has sheer numbers on them, and earth has strong economic motivation to bring them to heel.
The books also have a third 'faction' from those who colonized the asteroid belt, who are looked down upon by both Earth and Mars and who really hates both of them.
Anyhow, pulling on that thread a bit, my one objection is that its not necessarily the case that extreme selective pressure will produce an all-around superior specimen. It seems just as likely to produce a specimen that is hyperspecialized for a particular niche but pretty useless outside that. I'm thinking, for example, of creatures that live in deep caves and thus don't have eyes because they'd be a waste of energy. Intelligence is obviously important for survival on Mars, but it wouldn't be the end-all be-all, and thus those who are the most fit for survival might not exemplify all the traits the essay is suggesting will be necessary for that first wave of colonists.
It'd also assume that Mars wasn't an IQ shredder of massive proportions where the colonists are so zeroed in on survival that reproduction is fully secondary concern, and they count on a continuing supply of mental elites to keep emigrating. Even in The Expanse it becomes clear that Martian society is actually harsh on its citizens because it has to squeeze resources into both military defense and terraforming, and any projects aside those two get ignored as a waste, and any person who can't contribute to one or both projects is also ignored, as a waste. So Mars doesn't have much in the way of an arts scene and despite all its great technology can't really provide prosperity for its people because they have no 'spare' resources to dole out.
I dunno, I do want to travel to Mars to be part of a permanent colony, but I do want to hedge against being too idealistic about what that will mean for the quality of the people there. I can't think of any previous examples of a colony that, subject to the pressures of survival, managed to outperform its home country in a few generations merely by dint of attracting a far more talented population.
Even the United States had to get a boost from France to actually beat England off.
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AI slop detected. A human would get bored meticulously laying out the same obvious ideas over and over and assume the reader can draw a conclusion or two. The next step in LLMs will be them being able to pretend to get bored with things instead of being eternally patient and obsequious.
Also, couldn't conditions of extreme danger and tightness of resources create a society of extreme communalism where no one's allowed to do anything without group approval?
Or a society trained to military order. Maybe Fremen would be a better model than an IQ-jerkoff fantasy.
I think the early founding of America is on-point here. It seems quite possible that such a society would be individualistic (in the sense of having high standards and expectations for each individual and rewarding individual prowess and merit) but I also expect that it would be much less liberal. (The military might be a good idea of what that might look like.) Antisocial behaviors have always negatively impacted the community, but on Mars things like "not working" mean you're putting the entire colony in danger by consuming valuable resources that you are not helping to produce, not that you're consuming a fractional amount of tax dollars or irritating passers-by in the street.
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I have removed this post and permabanned the poster, because it is pretty obviously a copy/paste from an LLM, from a user account with no history. I don't know if it is Substack spam or what, and I don't mind if people want to talk about colonizing Mars, but this is not a place for dumping LLM posts.
Thank you - good call!
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New Turing Test - get a 100% AI-written post into Quality Contributions.
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Rationalists are much crazier than you might guess. I would describe Michael Vasser as a cult leader. My impression is his followers believe in all sorts of total insanity. I have recently observed Vasserite insanity going real bad.
Mike Vasser followers practice intentionally inducing psychosis via psychedelic drugs. Inducing psychosis is a verbatim self report of what they are doing. I would say they practice drug induced brain washing. TBC they would dispute the term brain washing and probably would not like the term 'followers' but I think the terms are accurate and they are certainly his intellectual descendants.
Several people have had quite severe adverse reactions (as observed by me). For example rapidly developing serious literal schizophrenia. Schizophrenia in the very literal sense of paranoid delusions and conspiratorial interpretations of other people's behavior. The local Vasserite who did the 'therapy'/'brainwashing' seems completely unbothered by this literal schizophrenia. You can imagine I am being unfair but if someone develops schizophrenia because of your methods, and you consider this a positive development, then you deserve negative language.
As you can imagine this behavior can cause substantial social disruption. Especially since the Vasserite's don't exactly believe in social harmony. Local Vasserite did a lot of yelling at people and what point described the social situation as a chess game with herself as Queen. This is not subtle brilliance at work. This has all precipitated serious mental health events in many other parties. Though they are less obviously serious than "they are clinically schizophrenic now". But that is a high bar.
I should note I am by no means a normie. I in fact think many illegal chemicals are probably underused, though far from all of them. I am most confident in Testosterone and Ketamine. I am a heavy psychedellics user though I do not know how people can benefit from them. But rationalists take these guys and go full on 'cult brainwashing is great'. At some point you aren't open minded you are suicidal.
I am not going to leak personal info. But I have observed this insanity fairly directly. Any remotely functional group would have kicked out this insane cult long ago. But maybe I give people too much credit. A different insane cult apparently was in some level of control of Japanese politics for a long time.
Does anyone have a theory on how these completely obviously terrible ideas get people to do them. Perhaps I am just as bad. But I simply do not think using testosterone or psychedelics in a relatively safe way is the same as submitting to cult brainwashing while high.
I mean, there's an argument to be made that this is a heavily-precedented and positive mode of human society. Note that many prehistoric cultures (including recent prehistoric cultures such as Native Americans) have made heavy use of psychedelics to produce strong tribal bonds. Presumably, this is because it is a winning strategy in the EEA by increasing within-group altruism, and from a hedonic perspective it's not obviously bad either. See Haidt in The Righteous Mind for some more discussion of this.
There is a major caveat attached to this, though, which is that using brainwashing to remodel people's minds is only arguably-prosocial and/or plausibly-worth-it-for-the-subject for certain values of the output (note here that while we got a look at a lot of cultures that do this during colonisation, we did not get to see the full evolution of these techniques including false starts and unrefined forms, only the final forms that were selected for); from my (extremely fragmentary) knowledge the Vassarites' methods seem to produce a lot of murderous and/or suicidal people, which seems extremely maladaptive and a bad deal by almost any measure.
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I don't live near many rationalists, but I have had several phone conversations with Vasser, and have not observed this. He seems sane to me. We had normal (for nerds) conversations.
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Humas seem wired for such entrapment. It pattern matches pretty well to various cults, especially those that grew out of EST Training and its numerous offshoots. A charismatic visionary puts a new skin on old ideas, finds seekers, cordons them off, messes with their brain chemistry (though drugs, fasting, sleep deprivation, conflict, sex) Intragroup adherence is amplified though group activities, financial and relationship ties (which are sometimes totalizing). This pattern pervades Scientology, EST, The Landmark Institute, Osho, original Bikram Yoga, the Peoples Temple, Nexium; probably some companies, families, and churches. Landmark (which grew out of EST), appears to have found a stable payoff matrix. Good for them. As a rule of thumb, if you're invited to The Esalen Institute, you're 1% more likely to be joining a cult. If you hear the word ayahuasca weekly, 2%. If you're suddenly contemplating whether water has a memory, the importance of Ley lines, or past life regression, 50%. If half your discretionary incomes goes to this new group, 200%. When the leader is fucking your wife, you're probably in a cult.
What are your broad thoughts on testosterone? I've long been curious for various reasons. It seems to me like a reasonable tradeoff to a healthy, ageing person, but I haven't looked into it too much.
If you want to avoid a cult and want to do X then don't do X with a bunch of other people in an organized way.
An underdiscussed downside of the renaming of Twitter to X is the added mental difficulty of interpreting sentences where “X” is used as a variable, like this one
It is incredibly annoying, which is why I call it Twitter.
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Half-way between 'Humans' and 'Hamas', reminding us that the potential for cultish fanaticism resides in all of us. I like it, very resonant with your text.
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Huh. Do I know you? I feel like I know you...
Though rat-adj with BPD was like half the community when I was in the bay area so- Ah well. Probably best not to try to disambiguate you anyway.
But yeah... Vassar- just had that cult leader energy. Everyone who met him knew that much. The act of talking with him would give people a contact high.
-- Scott Alexander
-- Alicorn
I was around when people were elevating Vassar's sexual misconduct on social media...
Many wispy memories of drama from the old discords and tumblrs bringing me back... Memories of friends of friends having psychotic breaks... Memories of jailbreaking our minds...
I wonder if HasturTimesThree is still out there... or Alice Monday... Listen. We were all crazy, and looking for something, anything to render us sane. The ratsphere selects for people that are seeking sanity after all.
Vassar's energy? His confidence? It enables him to attract people with that need.
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I have no idea who Michael Vasser is and you allude to “local Vasserite” without ever explaining the situation in a coherent way. It sounds like you are trying to describe fights within your local friend group.
I think I've heard the name a time or two, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you anything about him.
There is probably a good discussion to be had about cult dynamics in Bay Area rationalism, but this doesn't seem to be it.
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Here's Scott Siskind on him.
One of Vassar's (ex-)disciples was Jack LaSota a.k.a. Ziz, whom you can read more about here.
I have no direct knowledge of any of these events.
Ive been gone for a while, has something changed in how we act around His name?
I was going to say wbbtw
Wbbtw?
Welcome back, by the way. He hasn't posted in a year
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Yeah he's gone public with his name after the whole NYT doxxing thing and the shift to substack.
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Quoth the man himself:
I was around for that, it just... didnt seem like people started using the real name after? ACX isnt even a google result for "Scott Siskind", just secondary sources.
I mean, most of them didn't, but I find referring to someone by first+middle name distasteful.
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Same here! And then the sibling comment is „oh I talk with Visser regularly“ and I guess this board is for some people the local (Bay Area?) friend group?
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Same. No idea what's going on or how this is relevant.
Okay. And he likes psychedelics too much allegedly? I'm missing so much context here.
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The alt-lite is not alright
tl;dr Nick Fuentes and Lauren Southern are at points where their careers look far less promising now, some words on that
The alt lite was a catch-all term of sorts at a point during the peak of the alt-right which came crashing down post-Charlotessville in 2017. The alt-lite included people who would wilfully ignore the idea of Western identitarianism on the basis of ethnicity and support every other position or offshoots around it. So the kinda folks who would talk about "Western Civilization", "Western values" whilst being more tolerant of the actual alt-right than neocons. The prime example of an alt-lite figure being milo, others included Mike Cernovich, Lauren Southern, and Lauren Chen to name a few. There are two people who I will focus on today, both were not explicitly alt-right, in fact were known for fighting with the alt-right.
Nick Fuentes for now being made into a caricature of what the average person thinks is an alt-righter and Lauren Southern who unlike the other members of the alt-lite or alt-right forgot to become a fed, allegedly.
Nick is the leader of a paleoconservative movement named America First which is defined by these values which can be summed as retvrn to 1950s if you want a briefer version. He began streaming around 2015 and was his views crystallised around 2017 where he would argue with people in and around the internet bloodsport. He has been caught with trans pornography opened on his browswer a few times alongside texts and interactions with trans girls. This is well known among his former allies and was brought to light by chris brunet recently in a series of rants against him. This was further compounded by the recent leaks of streamer Destiny being caught on camera sucking a guy off. Destiny is also our bridge to the other character at play here. Again the person in the leaks is obviously not Nick but his previous acts of cozying upto Catboy Kami, watching trans porn, being a literal incel etc dont help his case at all.
Lauren Southern was a big alt-lite figure, she recently worked with Tenet Media which was taking money from Russia, the people working also included Tim Pool though the primary media person involved with the financial side was another alt-lite Canadian Lauren, Lauren Chen. Lauren Southern was down, she had been divorced from her Asian husband who she had a kid with, said husband also turned out to be a literal fed. She was doing fairly well until her hiatus. She made a comeback after her hiatus and it went badly on both personal and professional levels. For starters, she was summoned alongside Lauren Chen and testified in person. The most interesting reaction towards this was by Richard Spencer who like Milo has been outed as being a fed in public court documents. If the threat of jail time is not enough, she also wrecked whatever goodwill she had by having had an affair with the same man Nick Fuentes was being rumored with, Destiny. The leaks are painful to read.
I bring these incidents up not to gossip about two people. People yearn for ideals to strive towards, heroes of sorts. Those studying music look up to Mozart rightfully and would be visibly disgusted upon finding out about his scat fetish accusations. E celebs are considerably dumber and likely worse people than Mozart. Both Lauren and Nick are people who played a game of Motte and Bailey, Nick far more than Lauren, both have had run-ins with the government (Nick was an agitator during jan 6 who was on a no fly list but never tried, whilst people who followed his orders were, go figure) and are terrible people in their personal lives.
The "online right" is being allowed to torch people slightly on its left and it seems to be working. The consequences of being an e-celeb are not for the faint-hearted, most of them end up hiding their issues well. It is also a good reminder as to why putting the weight of your entire "movement" on one man is risky. Nick during 2019 effectively made Turning Point USA shift their opinions slightly to the right after constant harassment via his followers in college campuses during Charlie Kirks speaking tours, his low-status behavior ultimately came through. Marx despite being outed as a person with multiple character flaws did not dent marxism very much as ultimately his ideas were enough to the point where people did champion them in the 20th century. America First lacks any sort of intellectual rigor is simply MAGA but how bad faith actors want you think it is.
I wanted to write at length about the crashing and burning of various e celebs from the post gamergate era yet there is not much to be gained from it. Most if not all of them only served as introductions to the various factions of "the right". The recurring themes were fairly apparent, being an online personality will eventually cause real world harm as you care about what others think online, many people actively run gay ops just to screw you over. Political actions have always had consequences, lowering the barrier to entry does not shield you from them, you won't get crushed by a dictator for being a dissenter but you will get hurt and see people you call "normies" doing better in life, which still hurts a lot. A lust for validation thwarts your internal psyche too. Nick for instance really is not all that different from the alt right and is by all accounts far less aware of his own religious beliefs than atheist Richard Spencer, in some ways he succeeded in hiding his similarities to other identitarians long enough by being fine with current American demographics but his position is built on shaky grounds given birth rates as of this year. Lauren who publicly talked about family values at the time ended up having affairs with many on the right if you go by the words of her ex-colleagues and was cheating on her husband with a streamer. Both of these people would have been better off had they never turned to the internet for validation.
Hmm. This sentence clings to me. What's going on here... lets see... yes. This sentence was just an aside. An example to further your point. Really a completely irrelevant thing to make my response about.
However to me it was a discontinuity. A confusion. The above sentence is treated like a "as we all know". But I totally missed the memo.
Why would those studying music be disgusted by their idol having gross kinks? I can see how you could likely elicit that disgust with any unsolicited claim of "Famous_Name has a scat fetish"- to someone that themselves is not into scat. But then- it wouldn't be about their Hero it would just be about the scat.
A good chunk of people absolutely search for heroes who are larger than life, perhaps my expereinces are far more normie coded. Growing up I kinda knew that even those who do good things are kinda fucked up like others but others attachted religous fervor to this sorta stuff.
Look at how doping gets treated, we all know that evey guy who competes in any sport is not just doping but doping a lot. Kids, ppeople playing the sport, the vast majority of those who watch them not only dont care but will actively not believe you when you present them with evidence.
This is what happened with many on the internet political thing. If you preach certain vaules daily, you talk about normies being unwashed masses and then you end up doing things far worse than them and its public, your stock will fall. Hero worship, the cult of a hero is a very real thing that grips most people who consume things with a passion.
That makes sense.
I think it's also difficult for me to conceive of enjoying the smell of farts or unveiling one's inner truth as vices. I think that's the oft discussed purity / exploration divide.
Plus something aesthetic relating to my existence as a Golgari mage. Shoveling shit is clean honest work. That requires a bath afterwards.
What?
The term comes from Magic The Gathering lore and color pie philosophy. In mtg circles people will sometimes identify themselves by a color or color combination. Either due to liking the gameplay of that combo, or liking its aesthetics or personally vibing with the actual ideology.
Golgari is Black/Green. Life and death. The growth and decay of all things. Rot and Compost. One organism's bloated corpse is another organism's egg laying site. The mode of thinking that believes that the most respectful way to treat the dead crewmate is to return them to the ship's biomass recycler. This is the circle of life. This is the essence of Golgari.
"They say nothing lasts forever. I say everything lasts forever, just not in the form you may be accustomed to."
-- Deathsprout flavor text.
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Maybe a better example is "Isaac Newton was a genius about physics and calculus but a complete crank about everything else"? Though I guess that's a bad example too, being a crank is kind of a sign of genius to me
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There's no real risk of jail time. SDNY filed an indictment against two RT employees in Russia. They notably didn't even charge RT, which is an important tell. The corporation could have sent lawyers to fight the charges without sending anyone who could actually be arrested. So the DOJ is carefully avoiding being put in a position to prove the charges in court.
To put Southern in jail they'd have to go to a Canadian court first with all of the documentation proving the full money trail as well as an explanation of how Southern specifically broke both US and Canadian law to extradite her.
Even Chen is at little risk, as the trial would be in Middle District of Tennessee and those courts aren't as rubber stampy as SDNY is.
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Ecelebs seem to reach a certain level of fame and just become a reality show of incestuous dating, relationships and breakups. Like Sam Hyde after losing his Adult Swim show has since retreated to "Fishtank Live" which as far as I can tell is a literal eceleb reality dating show and he routinely makes videos featuring has-beens like Star Wars Fatty and iDubbbz and attempting to "call out" others like Hasan.
My last post was on fishtank, fishtank is simply him housing people with issues and fucking with them instead of dating. It is not a dating show lol but I get what you mean. His schtick is meta irony, amazing in short doses.
Lauren apparently left a 1488 bracelet with Paul Joseph Watson after spending a night at his place according to milo. Why do you think it becomes incestuous though? Some suspect that dudes who are higher status would seem more attractive to the girl which would make them attractive but destiny is a literal poly guy whose wife left him.
When you decide you are more important than your stories - usually because a bunch of people are telling you that - you inevitably start avoiding and being avoided by the people who put the story first (they don't like you because they can't trust you) and self ghetto with the other self obsessed, who will help you prop yourself up in exchange for the same. Then you have basically turned your news outfits into a distributed soap opera where you and your friends generate stories for people that may also mention current events.
All media becomes incestuous when it becomes self obsessed, and all media eventually becomes self obsessed. But these motherfuckers started off that way.
That might explain the weird vibes on the Wicked press tour...
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I’m not sure I buy this, and it seems like an isolated demand for purity. If I’m basing my political beliefs on you, the only part that matters is whether or not you are consistent and correct on that thing. If it’s music, I don’t care about your personal life as long as the music is good. I think unless what you’re talking about is a serious felony, personal conduct outside of your own domain is irrelevant. I’m into Elon Musk because he’s building cool rocket ships and internet satellites. Do I really care if he’s banging a trans chick while hanging from a trapeze? No. It has absolutely nothing to do with Space X or Tesla.
I’ll also note here that from my point of view, only the right is really expected to have these high hills of purity to climb. I’ve never heard anyone rag on the leaders of left leaning people over their impurities. And some of them are much more connected to the issues at hand. BLM leadership siphoning money from donations is directly related to whether or not they’re good leaders. Fuentes banging a hooker doesn’t connect to anything else he’s talking about. Fuentes fans are supposed to drop him over porn. BLM supporters are not supposed to care how much money the founders are paying themselves.
The right plays second fiddle to the left so has to be the moral side so that they can call the outgroup for "hypocrisy" which is utterly spineless since only the powerful can be hypocritical.
To get what I mean, imagine if you woke up and realised that Musk was just a front used to pump up the value of the various firms he is in and is closer to Elizabeth Holmes than to steve jobs, that he literally does nothing at his day job and just larps, purely hypotehtical scenario. In that case, it would sour how you view some things. People who are attached to movements that are defined by a person feel that way when any kind of moral rot is found as it obviously matters. The political sphere is very vengeful and zero-sum, everybody dogpiles and doxxes others, it is done many times for personal reasons, so to them it is akin to seeing an elder turning out to be a duplicitous purpose.
I do not feel that way at all, I have never had issues with homosexuality or any values that go against Christianity not just because I am not a Christian but because I do not believe the cover story or the idea of a hero to begin with but many buy into that.
See, I kinda see it differently. The demands of non-hypocrisy and morals are much less important if you’re the weaker party. The thing that the underdog must do is get sufficient numbers and popularity to be a credible threat. You can’t do that if you’re throwing potential allies away for reasons that have nothing to do with the issues at hand. Numbers matter if the goal is power. That’s why the Left loves to pound the right on hypocrisy especially hypocrisy they’d never hold their own side to. It’s an easy way to limit the power of conservatives, as they’re having to throw away good Allie’s all the time for whatever reason the left starts pointing them out. And as such, you end up with fewer people fighting for power
I think the causality is backwards — the left is powerful because they are willing to be hypocritical, they’re willing to be accused of being a crime-thinker. The right has less power because the accusations of hypocrisy and thought crime still bother them enough to make them embarrassed. A lefty accused of being socialist or progressive doesn’t get kicked out. A rightist will be, to the point that even the accusation is too much.
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If anything its the opposite. The left plays second fiddle to the right as the left defines itself in its opposition. The right erects structures that the left then subverts and destroys.
Lenin was wrong though, hypocrisy has nothing to do with being strong or weak, it is the price paid for having principles that go beyond political expediancy.
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He claims to be a Catholic Integralist. If you're going to say that people should be held by the state to religious standards of behavior, you damn well better be sure you're following them yourself.
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I recall one of our old conservative grandees, from before the move to reddit, either BarnabyCajones, Hlynka, or FacelessCraven making the case that these "high hills of purity" were what distinguished the right from the left. A man on the left is allowed to have "no enemies to the left" and no values beyond the pursuit of politics. But a man on the right expects, and is expected, to be judged against some higher power or virtue. Some of more vocal NRX and Alt-Rightist(Alt-Litists?) In the comment section like E. Harding, Vox Day, and The Dreaded Jim felt they had been called out and caused something of a furor.
Sadly (for archival purposes) Scott appears to have memory-holed many of the old culture war conversations from those days, but i also can't say that i blame him. The original discussion leading up to and surrounding, The "You're Still Crying Wolf" "This Blog Endorses Anyone but Trump" posts got pretty heated.
That would definately not have been me. Probably Hlynka or Barnaby.
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I mean, in large part that's because my tribe cares. We can overlook some spousal infidelity on the basis of 'politicians aren't often good people', but homosexuality is a bridge too far.
I posit that there are things liberals/progressives could be caught doing which would impede their credibility for moral reasons. Everyone has ritual purity standards. I don't know what would be a serious violation of them in a progressive- trying to pray away the gay? Marrying a teenager? But I am confident that they exist.
Now I've never been a Nick Fuentes fan. But among IRL people with actually far-right beliefs, being gay is disqualifying from having an opinion.
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Fuentes is not alt-lite, the alt-lite is not alright because alt-right talking points are now fairly ubiquitous on X. Things like remigration and "Great Replacement" and "anti-white" are all essentially mainstream. The alt-lite doesn't have a market anymore because the alt right is going mainstream, and that was the entire purpose of the alt-lite, to try to grift on the parts of the alt-right that were congruent enough with the mainstream to not get banned.
I'm not sure if you're just gullible, but it's absolutely not Nick Fuentes in that Destiny leak. That is a claim which has been made mostly by the "Dissident Right" figures surrounding the BAP/Peter Thiel network who all hate Fuentes because Fuentes calls them out as crypto-Jewish dissemblers who adopt an Aryan Twitter aesthetic and then try to orient the Alt-Right in a pro-Israel, Kosher direction. So they have no problem lying, I guess, to hurt Fuentes in a scandal he's not involved in whatsoever.
The online DR is as fractured as ever, as someone on DR twitter yesterday made an apt comparison to Gangs of New York. But the "rumor" about Fuentes and Destiny is just a lie perpeatured by the left-wing and especially BAP factions of X, who are knowingly lying. But burning their credibility to get at Fuentes is worth it for them, I guess?
I say this as someone who doesn't like the Christian Nationalist project of Fuentes, for basically the reasons given by Richard Spencer.
It is not nick, I never claimed it was and I was and my title is iron since nick crusaded against spencer and the likes and southern is alt lite. Nick did get called an optics cuck during his Internet Bloodsport days for being against the messaging offered by the alt right but ultimately ended up becoming a political pariah anyway who drove out half his inner circle.
My issue with Fuentes is not him having trans porn on his browser and a slew of wierd texts sent to pariah doll on twitter, if you ignore the Jan 6 issues. I simply wanted to point out that e celebs end up worse due to the lust for fame as taking them down becomes a fixation point for many. Most people end up in believing in things far more than they would have had they not set out on this path in the first place. I have no issues with thiel being gay and same for fuentes or bap or mishima, its that nick has basically built this ideological purity spiral where even if he were to be only suspected of that thing, his stock falls as purity spiralling is a big part of his own "movement"
But Nick's "stock" isn't falling (if that's even true) because of purity spiraling, it's because some people who hate him are just lying about him being part of a scandal he has no relation to... that's not purity spiraling it's just a vendetta.
It is completely unclear in your post that you were aware the "rumors" are just blatantly false claims with no basis in truth. You pass them along as "rumored to be" without disclosing that you know they are false.
I'm not even opposed to punching right. I wouldn't mind seeing Nick's movement fail because I don't think Christian Nationalism is the answer for the Right. I'm in general in favor of the divisiveness to some extent, high-variance communities and hopefully everything evolves in a more constructive way. But just lying about this and then coming here and saying "there's this rumor going around!" when you know it's not true is really stupid and does make me more sympathetic to Nick relative to the people who are knowingly spreading a false claim.
No, his stock has been falling since it peaked in 2019 and when people found him consuming trans porn, being there on jan 6 and being a whiny person online whose movements run out of ideas leading him to pick fights. X is now not ban hammer happy so his ideas look tame compared to what others post so a lot of his could-be followers are drawn there.
I am completely aware and will reword my post to be more chartiable but the doubts about his own orientation are very pertinent. Here is a guy who is 26, watches trans porn, hangs out with Catboy Kami, a guy whose house got raided for child porn, speaks with trans groypers. The leaked video is obviously not him but the doubts still remain, the only video of him with a girl irl is one kissing him on his cheek where he looks super awkward. The right has plenty of gay dudes. Alt hype, Thiel, BAP, Mishima etc so I have no issues with that.
It never was, religioisity cannot answer ethnic questions. Hinduism tried it and it ended in a disaster with the priests making new scriptures to accommodate new demographics that later led to everything vdeic being phased out
Religiosity is the answer to the most pertinent racial questions, just ask the Jewish people. That's why it can't be Christian Nationalism.
Judaism is an ethnic religion. The issue most have is of demographics down the line which cannot be addressed by Christianity, I do want to hear out what you mean and what your suggestions are so that there is no miscommunication here.
If you convert the Rotherham grooming culprits and they end up attending the church of England, the crimes will not change by much if at all.
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I agree that Christianity is inherently a multiethnic religion and any attempts to introduce racial supremacist ideas to it leads to heresy and perversion. But I think you may be conflating Christian Nationalism with Christian Dominionism.
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Are we sure they are lying though? Both BAP and Fuentes are pretty queer-coded and, as the old saw goes, it takes one to know one.
BAP is in his mid forties, no kids, unmarried and posts half naked dudes on his timeline with a mishima obsession. Leftists have started picking up on it too. In Nicks case catholicism saves it but no sane person hangs out with catboys and trans females as regularly if they are apparently a part of the hard right.
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I’m probably going to regret asking this, but how is he not part of the scandal? I thought the whole thing was he’s been caught on video having gay sex.
Nope, that didn't happen, the leak was of Destiny and a bunch of Nick's enemies on Twitter all claimed it was him. Although they were knowingly lying. It's interesting how a scandal around Destiny was psyopped into a Nick scandal, literally every comment in the Reddit thread that hit the front page about this was about Nick even though he was uninvolved.
It's not a Destiny scandal because Destiny's whole brand is being a degenerate (in the eyes of anyone who would care about Nick Fuentes' good name).
Like, the guy has already been memed for being a literal cuck and his audience doesn't give a damn. There's no juice in that orange anymore.
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What are his reasons/where to read them?
His substack has a lot of free posts, alexandria archives, in a few of them he criticises Nicks movement, Christianity and abortion multiple times whilst also making cases against watching watching football, college football and obsession with hbd.
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Yeah. Going mainstream as a part of the platform of people devoted to preserving American power so it can protect Israeli interests.
Musk's photo-op in Israel after he said something stupid? Him now being close advisor to Trump, the guy with a record-breaking amount of Jewish family for a non-Jew?
I'm not that happy with that term either but it does fits: it's the capable parts of the US deep state, Silicon Valley which can sell them toys and new industrialists who will want those weapons contract to keep the world safe for Israel and democracy. After all, legacy arms industry is almost completely fucked and blinkered, so if US wants a prayer of a chance to win against Chinese, they'll have to do everything right.
What more do people want? A reasonable government and a chance to bend their backs in service to a monumental, meaningful task -saving the planet from Han domination, just as their grandfathers bent their backs and took over the world so communists couldn't do it.
I'm thinking that that won't make you very happy. The Rufo-Reich. It won't make Holocaust denial socially acceptable, though it might successfully clamp down on public black dysfunction.
Most people will be pretty happy with it, I believe.
Which is only a problem if you explicitly believe the replacement and opposition to whites is happening because of Jewish influence, instead of being done by elite progressive white people who hate their co-ethnics.
Can't it be both?
Sure, I don't doubt that there are a lot of Jews in powerful positions who agree with the point of view and have pushed it along. But my belief is this is due to their eliteness, not their Jewishness.
And I believe the same thing would be happening if there were no Jews in positions of power whatsoever. I believe elite Jews are mostly indistinguishable from elite gentiles in the west in terms of their worldview; they're mostly atheists with vaguely-to-decidedly progressive beliefs, just with a somewhat more intense radar for antisemitism.
This is likely true now. The eliteness of the premoden elites appears less Jewish.
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I actually think it's entirely possible that the Zionists aligned with Silicon Valley and Musk/Trump are also going to adopt a nearly-alt right stance on immigration and remigration and race writ-large. Mostly because they are seeing with their own eyes the impact of diversity on their cultural and geopolitical interests. I do expect they are going to slow down or even reverse the overt anti-white hatred. It's already happening. They are going to just hand us most of what the "alt right" has been asking for, or at least enough of a veneer to satisfy or even deradicalize people. It's one of the downsides of Trump winning, I wish this chaotic "Dissident Right" sphere had 10 more years to incubate and evolve but I think they are going to be placated by the major pivot that is going to happen away from wokeness and open borders.
I would bet against that, every single VC types supporting trump wants more migration and Trump publicly said he wants to attach green cards to diplomas. This is simply left wing, illegal immigration is a far better choice as then at least your kids dont have to face exponentially more issues competing with Asians who build their life around gaming tests. India is included here too since they do the same and abuse the h1b more than any other people
This is a temporary sigh of relief the leftist march will continue and anti-white hatred will not stop.
Illegal immigration is not a choice. It's imposed by law-breakers and political enemies via ad hoc processes, based on their own desires.
Like, if you really cared about "white genocide" or whatever, that alone makes a Canada-style migration system the lesser of two evils
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Come on, no serious credibility is on the line here. When I bullied the autistic kid in high school was I seriously asserting he was homosexual? No, it was fun because it caused him to sperg out.
I think the credibility is fairly serious, they may have bullied Nick Fuentes but they have also made fools of all their followers who believed them. I don't like Nick but the gayops are offputting. Some liberal progressive like Destiny gets involved in a pretty big scandal and that sphere of Twitter makes it all about a false accusation towards Fuentes? Seems pretty stupid.
Chris Brunet and others just want to dig pile on him whilst they can. They don't care whether it's real or not.
They always knew destiny was a bisexual lib, accusing nick at least gets them somewhere in their heads. There's little he can say that's helpful as any amount of denial will just be considered a cope.
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Explain like I am a 55 year old non-American non-4Chan non-always-online person?
I think I know who Southern Lauren is back from Gamergate (but searching her I find a video that she fled a tradwife life because of her horrible husband?), and I sometimes hear about this Destiny guy (why is it noteworthy that he is gay?), but I have no idea what he is or for what politics he has (was he some StarCraft streamer?) and Nick Fuentes seems to be some rightwingnut troll? What does it mean “to be a fed”? Is this just a diss or a really serious allegation?
I think there should be a more extensive KnowYourMeme or outOfTheLoop explanation?
Yes, he was, years and years and years ago. He streamed League of Legends, too, for years after leaving Starcraft. He's been doing political debate (talk-radio, basically) for quite some time and has made that his main content focus.
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Lauren Southern and Nick Fuentes are both minor celebrities (for a given definition of "celebrity") who made thier bones out of trolling the woke. While both try to paint themselves as very trad, both come fom very liberal "blue" backgrounds.
The accusation of being "a fed" comes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's known habit of using honey-pots, entrapment, and controlled opposition to target would-be dissidents/criminals. That Fuentes seems to be able to publicly advocate for an engage in illegal and anti-social behavior without suffering negative consequences has resulted in suggestions that he must at least have "friends" in FBI, or amongst the wider powers that be, if he isn't actually working for them directly.
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Destiny is a fast-talking lib who would debate anyone and everyone exept for people who talk about hbd. He routinely gets his ass handed to him by actual experts and looked silly when he debated mister metokur 8 years ago. He recently got dumped by his wife and overall you are better off not knowing him.
The term fed is used for federal agents or for people who act for federal authorities as a bargain to avoid charges. Milo and Richard both helped out various intelligence agencies and the guy Lauren Southern married was one of these people. Another term used for this is glowie, sometimes snitch and you would find plenty of examples of it being used online. This is why you have so many people telling younger dissidents to avoid anyone who is online and telling them to pick up arms for a revolution from a righ wing perspective as it is either an asset or an undercover agent.
I apologise for the lack of documentation, many here are familiar with the lingo and it was pretty late so I did not add it but will add Urban Dictionary and other links tomorrow.
The nick allegation is very serious since he was on a loudspeaker inciting people on jan 6, there are people from his audience who served jail time including his former friends like Baked Alaska, he was on the no fly list but never had to show up to courts for even a day which is wierd. Anyone who is cooperating with the agencies will never publicly say that as that is a violation of their agreement. Nick also runs or ran cozy.tv which has the info of his followers so if people think that anyone subscribed to his ideology is up to no good, you have a lot of names and personal info which people think is private afterall.
Nick also happens to be prone to hurt his side of politics at the most convenient of times, often flying in the face of his own stated ideology. And he is always named and promoted as the face of the far right by mainstream figures whilst rarely facing the same level of persecution as more directionally accurate but less well known dissidents.
There is no definitive proof but a suspicious amount of circumstance points towards him being part of some intelligence operation.
No doubt. His side somehow seems to not only start fights but also is doxx happy, especially when it comes to other people on the dissident side. Him running cozy is a major red flag too.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
Basically that.
"I like our political advocacy group, but what if we also committed violent crimes? In fact I have some bombs. Let's start bombing." <- That person is a fed.
"you're going to spy on your neighbors for us or we'll throw you in prison for sawing the barrel off of this here shotgun, don't resist or we'll kill your wife in front of your kids"
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"A fed" is someone working for the federal government. In this context, it's an accusation either of being a federal informant or a federal agent, most likely the former, and is an allegation being made seriously.
I wonder if we'll ever get an "FBI files" similar to the "Twitter files" when Elon aired all of Twitter's dirty laundry?
Probably not because they'll classify everything, but I really hope so.
No if they're any competent. Spook agencies have shredders for reasons.
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"What is the weirdest American tradition?"
"The secret police regularly declassifies a bunch of documents proving that yes they were up to all that no good shit that you suspected all those years ago and nobody can or will do a damn thing about it."
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To add some more context in right wing circles (I would also assert this) many of the most prominent "kinetic" actions of extreme right wingers seem to be full of "feds" if not majority feds. Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping both probably started with more feds than not. Similar with a lot of the Islamic terrorist plots that the FBI "foiled".
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