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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   32386 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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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.

But rationalists take these guys and go full on 'cult brainwashing is great'.

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.

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.

Vassar, before I came to Berkeley, someone warned me "Vassar is kind of crazy and it's impossible to have a normal conversation with him". As a result, I spent several months avoiding you. Then I finally got to meet you and I realized I had made a huge mistake. I mean, you are crazy, and it is is impossible to have a normal conversation with you. But normal conversation is incredibly over-rated compared to whatever the heck you call the thing that interaction with you involves. I regret that we didn't get more of a chance to talk about stuff and I hope to solve that sometime in the future.

-- Scott Alexander

You listen to Michael Vassar. You don't remember traveling to this party or sitting on this beanbag. You don't remember when he began to speak. He is still speaking. He sounds like madness and glory given lisping poetry, and you want to obey.

-- 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.

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.

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.

Humas

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.

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.

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

Yeah he's gone public with his name after the whole NYT doxxing thing and the shift to substack.

Quoth the man himself:

So I've taken the steps I need to in order to feel comfortable revealing my real name online. I talked to an aggressively unhelpful police officer about my personal security. I got advice from people who are more famous than I am, who have allayed some fears and offered some suggestions. Some of the steps they take seem extreme - the Internet is a scarier place than I thought - but I've taken some of what they said to heart, rejected the rest in a calculated way, and realized realistically I was never that protected anyhow. So here we are.

And I left my job. They were very nice about it, they were tentatively willing to try to make it work. But I just don't think I can do psychotherapy very well while I'm also a public figure, plus people were already calling them trying to get me fired and I didn't want to make them deal with more of that.

[...]

My name is Scott Siskind, and I love all of you so, so much.

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.

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?

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.

Same. No idea what's going on or how this is relevant.

MICHAEL VASSAR is an American futurist, activist, and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and chief science officer of MetaMed Research. He was president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute until January 2012. Vassar advocates safe development of new technologies for the benefit of humankind.

"I'm a founder and chief science officer for a medical company called BayesCraft."

Okay. And he likes psychedelics too much allegedly? I'm missing so much context here.

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.

Those studying music look up to Mozart rightfully and would be visibly disgusted upon finding out about his scat fetish accusations.

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.

Plus something aesthetic relating to my existence as a Golgari mage.

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.

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

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.

Things like remigration and "Great Replacement" and "anti-white" are all essentially mainstream.

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.

Yeah. Going mainstream as a part of the platform of people devoted to preserving American power so it can protect Israeli interests.

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.

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.

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

But burning their credibility to get at Fuentes is worth it for them, I guess?

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.

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.

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

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

It never was, religioisity cannot answer ethnic questions.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

doesn't like the Christian Nationalist project of Fuentes, for basically the reasons given by Richard Spencer

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.

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?

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.

was he some StarCraft streamer?

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.

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.

What does it mean “to be a fed”?

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"

What does it mean “to be a fed”? Is this just a diss or a serious allegation?

"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.

"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."

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".

If the threat of jail time is not enough,

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.

Fuentes is and was always controlled opposition, I suspect originally introduced to disrupt Turning Point USA. He wasn't supposed to have staying power.

nice username. Fuentes was never deplatformed for his unite the right shenanigans and never faced jailtime which are two giant red flags, that alongwith him never having even kissed a girl. How can you be touching late 20s and never had any encounters with girls without being an incel. Do you think he is propped up by the feds or what?

alongwith him never having even kissed a girl. How can you be touching late 20s and never had any encounters with girls without being an incel.

Easily?

I'm beginning to wonder if the FBI is turning into a big pyramid scheme.

Easily?

I doubt it, he is not strapped for cash, socially obtuse and very clearly talks about wanting a lot of kids which requires you to marry early. People around him are married or have girlfriends yet he is the odd one out.

I'm beginning to wonder if the FBI is turning into a big pyramid scheme.

This has to be the funniest thing I have read this week lol.

He could simply be socially awkward+not trying very hard. This isn’t India where your extended family will just make you get married.

And yet he's extroverted enough to stand publicly for taboo topics?

Yes. Entirely possible.

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.

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.

All media becomes incestuous when it becomes self obsessed

That might explain the weird vibes on the Wicked press tour...

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.

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.

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.

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.

only the powerful can be hypocritical.

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.

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 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.

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.

Fuentes banging a hooker doesn’t connect to anything else he’s talking about. Fuentes fans are supposed to drop him over porn.

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.

I heard of Nick Fuentes, and only barely saw scattered video with Lauren Southern. She was young, cute, and over reacted to everything. I remember she went to some protest in the UK in 2014-2015ish, and started screaming for her life the moment things got mildly impolite by UK standards.

But it is remarkable the intellectual shredder e-celebrity is. For the longest time I attempted to have a carefully curated diet of center left and center right media. Maybe a skosh further right than left. Over time every center left person I enjoyed "drifted" right and wound up, if not endorsing Trump, screaming from the rooftops that the Democrats were not the lesser of two evils. Many straight up lost their mind.

I enjoyed Tim Pool doing on location reporting. Now he has a doomsday bunker in West Virginia and just does lame news reaction podcast. I enjoyed Crowder for ostensibly being a topical comedy show. His incessant need to center himself as a victim in every story, talk about himself over his guest, and act like he was filming in a doomsday bunker in Texas pushed it beyond all watchability. I enjoyed Dave Rubin circa 2014ish as a reasonable center left voice, and sometime around 2017 he went full "Trump is the answer to all things", which was just repetitive and boring. I don't know if he got a doomsday bunker in Florida. Once upon a time I enjoyed the Breaking Points team, Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball. Saagar brought a Realpolitik perspective to the chaos of the Trump campaign and then admin, and Krystal was able to criticize Trump's policies without lapsing into Trump tourette syndrome where every segment begins with the verbal ticks of "racist, sexist, xenophobic". Saagar is hanging in there, but Krystal has lapsed into far worse verbal ticks, just haphazardly throwing out "convicted felon, Arnold Palmer's dick, Elon Musk, island of trash" no matter the topic at hand. The show borders on unwatchable.

Joe Rogan is still keeping it real. Although he does have a doomsday bunker in Austin... I've been enjoying Triggernometry, but this election pushed them firmly from centrist to "The Democrats are not fit for purpose", almost their exact words. I don't think you are allowed to have a doomsday bunker in the UK, so I look forward to them emigrating somewhere that does. I've enjoyed Bridget Phetasy, and I'd hope someone with her sort of lived experience proves a bit more resilient than your run of the mill 20 something e-celebrity. I hope her sobriety is rock solid though.

I guess if I've noticed a trend, it's that reasonable centrist condemn the DNC as the greatest threat to America, go insane, and buy doomsday bunkers. I'm not really aware of a single centrist that drifted left versus right. Which more or less matches those charts we see of how insanely far left the DNC has gone.

There would seem to be lots of people who might qualify as "center-left" nowadays that haven't drifted right. They are perhaps more willing to share heterodox takes today than in the bad old days.

Some examples: Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, Noah Smith, etc...

I haven't seen it personally, but I could see how one would become captured by his audience. Until recently, there was a shortage of any content that was not rubber-stamped by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. So posting anything with even a tinge of red was a great way to build an audience (if you didn't get canceled first). Of course, the redder your posts, the more engagement you got! And so it would be easy to drift in that direction.

In any case, I don't know why we talk about Nick Fuentes, Milo whatever his name is, or all the other obvious grifters that the terminally online seem obsessed with. It's trashy.

Yeah, the 'reasonable centrist' or 'sane rightie' niche seems to eat people's personalities alive. Mentally, you probably get pulled in so many directions that eventually you'll suffer a break in some direction or other. Every person you mentioned is somebody that I enjoyed listening to at some point or another, but over time lost the qualities that actually made the stand out as notable.

ShoeOnHead seems to have avoided the worst possible outcomes.

You know, I forgot about ShoeOnHead. I think a credible argument could be made that she drifted left, even if she harbors a hatred and disrespect for the DNC. Bitching about RINO's doesn't disqualify someone from being on the right after all.

She did get married and have a kid though, so we'll see how well that leftward shift holds up.

I'm not even sure Shoe ever "drifted" left, she was a Bernie supporter and complained about the "Liberal Voltron" formed to block him in 2020.

I decided long ago that you should never meet your heroes or role models.

They won't live up to the hype, and they'll inevitably let you down with their behavior.

So mostly glad that I only ever stayed on the periphery of the alternative/indie media scene. Never followed any of them too closely, picked and chose who I thought was actually trustworthy, and certainly never financially supported any of them. I turned out to be consistently right on the money.

As much as I think legacy and mainstream media is corrupt, the problem with independent media tends to be incompetence. They don't have the experience or connections to maintain a positive public image in a high profile environment, so they have to make things up as they go along, and any missteps could blow up in their face. If they didn't have their life together when they became famous, an injection of fame surely wouldn't help them get it together.

So, so many 'prominent' internet personalities from the early 2010's/Post-gamergate era turned into or just turned out to be horrible people. Not worthy to be looked up to as leaders, but somehow given outsize influence over their little corner of the culture. The lucky ones just slowly fade into irrelevance, their content getting <1% of the attention it used to, but still churned out with some regularity.

Except PewDiePie, somehow that dude made his money, found his girl, and got out without nuking his reputation or sending his life into a tailspin. Also JonTron seems to have hit a point in his career where he can spit out a video every few months to a million or so views, and just live his life the rest of the time.

I suspect that the nature of the internet, which is able to bestow some random citizen with more attention and fame than literal emperors in olden times would have gotten, out of the blue (think Hawk Tuah girl, for sure) and most are just not psychologically trained to handle that with grace. Eventually they'll choose to indulge whatever their worst impulses are, and usually their fans will cheer them on because they're just there for the drama. Then its either a slow descent into degeneracy, or possibly a rapid unplanned disassembly. Or, perhaps, the better interpretation is they go through the same sort of travails that most 'normal' people experience, but being broadcast to an audience of hundreds of thousands kind of raises the stakes.

The sort of people who seek to be 'pundits' or leaders of political movements are probably predisposed to be sociopaths or narcissists who will eventually abuse their influence.

There are some exceptions. I really enjoy the Indie Scifi Book Series written by Travis J.I. Corcoran, and I got to spend some time around him and he... is exactly what he represents himself as. Curmudgeonly as all hell, but also unwilling to compromise on truth and is charming in his way.

I also briefly met Larry Correia and he's pretty cool.

The only decent person I can name from the top of my head from the Gamergate saga who was not an out out shill, incompetent person, moron, bad faith actor or a complete weirdo would be Mister Metokur. He was disgusted by this new class of anti-SJW bros back in 2014-15 itself as they were simply trying to compete with ign instead of actually fixing anything and had dubious morals. Many just became leftists after getting their ass handed to them by actual dissident right wingers. Plenty of people did that, h3h3 and kraut and tea being two examples.

If you are a low-status person and hit a nerve on the internet, you will never leave as we all instintively know what our position in society is so the internet is this prallle world where you can kinda lie to yourself which fuels most of these people. The internet is not stable though and these firms demand you to churn out stuff to stay relevant and its a bad cycle.

I have never met anyone I really look upto since I dont look upto anyone. Indie artists are better than more popular ones since they don't have much in the way of pr. I will look up the books now since you brought them up.

The only decent person I can name from the top of my head from the Gamergate saga who was not an out out shill, incompetent person, moron, bad faith actor or a complete weirdo would be Mister Metokur. He was disgusted by this new class of anti-SJW bros back in 2014-15 itself as they were simply trying to compete with ign instead of actually fixing anything and had dubious morals.

I dunno. His whole shtick ended up coming off as fiddling as Rome burns, and I'm not sure how much I buy his moral disgust, when he explicitly promoted some of these personalities in what seems like an attempt to get at people he considered "cringe".

His whole shtick ended up coming off as fiddling as Rome burns

Completely fair, although I am surprised that people here even know of him or the entire post-Gameergate saga. Small world. I guess Faith Goldy did alright now that she is just a regular suburban canadian mom and Pewdiepie is a regular Swedish dad.

I don't think Pewdiepie deserves to be lumped in with these people. He was (maybe is? I have no idea) way more famous, and way less political, he just got targeted because he was non-woke in a then very liberal ecosystem.

How much do you think is were horrible people or were marginal people that got the chance to turn into horrible people. For a brief possibly closed window fairly normal people could luck there way into a bit of fame with few guard rails. For males easy money and easy sex are hard to pass up.

I'd go out on a limb and say its 60-40, 60% good people getting compromised because they are suddenly gifted fame and fortune and happen to fall into some vice or other, and 40% grifters who were ALWAYS in it for the money and fame, and had no morals before getting them.

Milo Yiannopoulos had a seemingly meteoric rise and fall in a fairly short period, he's probably the most obvious of the grifters.

The other amazing thing is how these types will often lash out and drag others down with them when they sense they're about to lose everything. I think that's perhaps the one way you can tell who was ever a good, honorable person. If they quietly accept their fate and remove themselves from the limelight without trying to blow everything up on their way out, vs. pull a straight up face/heel turn and lean into the controversy, desperately trying to stay relevant by picking fights and destroying others reputations in the process.

Milo also recently started taking more alt right type positions given X is less ban happy. Most of this has been grifts unfortunately. Baked Alaska is a funny case study in e celeb culture, guy went from normie lib to nearly alt right to back again and then whatever nick fuentes does.

Milo Yiannopoulos had a seemingly meteoric rise and fall in a fairly short period, he's probably the most obvious of the grifters.

The funny thing is: Milo seems to have been destroyed the one time he seemed to be totally sincere.

There was no reason for a gay guy trying to redpill millennials and conservatives to talk positively about pederasty. No reason to do it more than once. He dropped the glib act for a few minutes and picked about the worst thing to be honest about/rationalize.

Yep. It was interesting that what nuked him was giving his honest opinion on something that he had actually experienced and wasn't doing it to insult any given target or to troll.

One wonders if he responded by going SO DEEP into his act that he'll never resurface again.

and wasn't doing it to insult any given target

Sure, but even reactionaries are alienated by naked displays of atheism, and that blasphemy not only denies the three most powerful goddesses in the Western pantheon at the same time (safety, equality, and consent), but is fundamentally incompatible with whatever [G/g]od his viewers would have replaced those with.

I don't think it's a surprise he lost his reach after revealing he stood for something truly alien. How could anyone trust he was a voice on their side after that?

and that blasphemy not only denies the three most powerful goddesses in the Western pantheon at the same time (safety, equality, and consent)

Its not the blasphemy that was the problem. It was the inadvertent support for the blood libel. Milo was the victim. Ordinarily you get some leeway. No perfect victims and all that. If anything could be excused as rationalization...

Homosexuality and pederasty is something LGBT activists fought very hard to decouple in the public mind.

Having a gay guy not only say it happens but talking about it in plural, as a good (ish) thing?

Everyone said fuck that. The gays said a hearty fuck that. Conservatives that were opening up to a flamboyant provocateur immediately turned around upon seeing him validate the worst stereotypes. I'm sure gay conservatives were doubly incensed.

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?

Anyone else dream of colonizing Mars? In The WHIMS of Mars, anonymous shitposter John Carter outlines what it might look like. ... [snip]...

Does this' anonymous shitposter John Carter' fella, also go by Unshacked sometimes?

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.

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.

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.

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.

A man's body is his own; his water belongs to the tribe.

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?

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.

This is an interesting discussion but clean up your AI slop. Literally just delete most of the content.

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:

"1 (ONE) major thing changes in the course of technological advancement, nothing else is allowed to significantly advance, nope, not even when we've got clear evidence of it happening or you should at least muster good evidence of why you don't think it's relevant"

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!):

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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!

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).

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.

Maybe for the criminals, but I think the world will be shrinking in the future. Fewer places to hide and disappear.

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.

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.

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).

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.

We ain’t any different than Tombstone or Dodge City or San Francisco. First come the dreamers. Then the bankers. Then the salesmen. Then the sharks. Then the desperate. And then the thieves.

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

My LLM-sense is tingling

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.

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!

New Turing Test - get a 100% AI-written post into Quality Contributions.

Cthulhu always swims right.

A common argument that pops up from time to time is that history generally moves in one direction. One prominent example of this historically has been Whig history, which has a narrative of human society generally moving from a barbaric past to an enlightened present. People like MLK Jr. have implicitly endorsed this view with the quote "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice". It's a nice idea... but it's clearly wrong when you bother to think about it. People believe their current values are where true justice lies, and their current values are highly predicated on their environment whenever they grew up. Nobody can look into the future, so we look to the past instead, and it's a story of people gradually becoming closer and closer to our present selves. But if we had the capability to look into the future, there's a good chance that we'd be shocked or horrified about where we eventually end up. People in 2000 BCE would probably think our present world in 2024 CE is terrible in a number of ways. Neither side is correct or incorrect, it's just a difference in the baseline.

Given the negativity bias of the internet, more recent takes on "history generally moves in one direction" can mostly be summarized as "[thing] generally gets [worse]". One example is conservatives telling you how progressives always eventually win on basically everything. One popularization of this idea is "Cthulhu always swims left", which people have claimed on this site many times, example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, etc. If you’ve been on this site for long, then you’ve almost certainly encountered this idea at least once. This rebuttal is a better critique than I could ever give. The gist is that things only look like this if you gerrymander history in a pessimistically partisan way. Yes, progressives always win if you only include their wins and exclude all of their losses… duh? But that’s a goofy way to cut history. Conservatives might then try to come up with reasons to handwave away any progressive losses, either as trivial (“they lose the small things but win where it counts”) or as simply delayed (“they haven’t won… yet!”). But these are never particularly convincing to an unbiased observer. History really doesn’t move consistently in any direction but the most vague and basic ones, and trying to force it into this box or that serves as little more than a glimpse into that person’s pessimism.

Freddie deBoer posted an article today that espoused that idea that “Cthulhu always swims left”, but flipped so that, effectively, “Cthulhu always swims right”. He doesn’t say those exact words, but that’s his general conclusion. In the aftermath of Harris’ defeat, many in the Democratic party are claiming that the party needs to move to the center after being too far left for many years. Americans mostly agree with this idea, but the remaining leftists like FdB are horrified at that conclusion. To people like them, Harris basically ran as a Republican, and so saying that the party needs to go even further right is anathema. If this all sounds utterly ridiculous… I wouldn’t disagree with you. Saying the country always moves right shares all the flaws as those saying it always moves left. I explicitly disagree with this piece, but I still think it serves as a useful example of what it’s like when the sides are reversed.

There is one and only one political dynamic that matters in modern American politics, and it is the same dynamic that was in place when I was born in 1981: the Republican party is a right-wing party that works relentlessly to advance right-wing ends; the Democratic party is a centrist party that only sometimes tries to mildly slow the country’s drift to the right; the result is a country that moves right regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats win. People like to dismiss this with references to meaningless cultural politics, elite liberal language games and Pride flags flying outside of Raytheon and the like, but such symbols are just that, meaningless. In terms of policy we have two right-wing parties of varying extremity and so even modest center-left policy wins become impossible. And neither Matt Yglesias nor Jon Chait nor Kevin Drum nor Ezra Klein nor Josh Marshall nor Joan Walsh nor any of the rest of them have ever been able to articulate a remotely convincing explanation of how this scenario can result in anything but a right-wing drift.

…

It’s worth saying that the Republicans are a more effective political party because this whole dynamic would simply never happen within the GOP. Ezra Klein would not have a big national interview with (say) Lincoln Chafee, treating him as a person of influence within the Republican party, because moderate guys like Chafee can’t become people of influence in the Republican party. If he did, that interview would not be treated as a big deal among conservatives in politics and media, and whoever the lefty analog of Bret Stephens might be would not then write a column extolling Chafee’s push to move the Republican party to the left. That column would not then spark tons of discussion within the Republican party about whether it’s time to head hard left. That wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen; the conservative movement have inoculated themselves against that. And the inevitable result of a Republican party that rigidly adheres to a right-wing ideology and a Democratic party that constantly shuns left-wing ideology is a profoundly right-wing country. This is, again, not complicated.

I think the Cthulhu meme only really works short term. He seems to be pretty cyclical over longer periods of time. In times and places where this are stable and prosperous, he goes culturally left and economically right. In bad times, he reverses course moving right culturally and left economically as people seek relief in traditional beliefs and habits while demanding economic relief from the wider society. Current trends only really apply to the relative quite of the 1990s to 2010s or so when outside of 9/11 really most of our society is pretty stable. There wasn’t a huge war like WW2, there wasn’t a huge Great Depression that lasted for years, it was pretty much a time when it became possible to allow greater social freedom because why not?

This is, I fear, a great misunderstanding.

First of all, this is all a question of timescale. When Moldbug brings up the phrase, he is talking about modern history, of everything since the French Revolution.

Here we are talking about a few measly decades. Barely a century. It would have been similarly easy to say that right wing victory is inevitable during the Thermidorian Reaction. And yet Moldbug's point is that even that was ultimately advancing the leftist agenda. Napoleon the monarch did more to liquidate monarchy in Europe than anybody.

And yet, even this view is itself a narrow trend in the whole of history.

Spengler, Vico and all the theorists of cyclical history whom Moldbug is very obviously cribbing from, would instead argue that history repeats itself. That it has seasons. That right wing victories are the stuff of certain periods, whilst left wing victories are the stuff of others. Both causing each other.

And this brings me to my second point, which is that understanding Moldbug to say "the left" in the common sense of the word is a mistake.

The man has an explicit definition he goes by in this context: the left-right axis is that of nomos, of either increasing or decreasing the formalism and bondedness of a society.

This is what leads him to state the aphorism about the w-force. That definition of the axis and the oft remarked upon shape of history as short periods of creation followed by long periods of decay. To Moldbug, the "left" is simply the party of decay. You'll notice that when he means "democrat" he usually uses the word "blue" instead.

This leads to unintuitive conclusions that blow up direct comparison between this contemporary lament and his broader historical point.

For instance, FDR, which is very obviously left wing (or rather, blue), is viewed by Moldbug in this context as a right wing figure. He is after all, a monarch, who reshaped and reconstituted the US government after a period of decay. An American Napoleon.

Moldbug's point here is really better stated formally by Nick Land and the Deleuzian concept of reterritorialization: that the forces of history (capital) work through destructive transformation cycles that will take a concept and its connections (territory) and destroy those connections (deterritorialization) and then take that now meaningless disconnected concept and reconnect and recontextualize it in a way that makes it mean something entirely different (reterritorialization).

Cthulhu swims left means that the process of recontextualization actually helps to destroy the original meaning of the concept. That Reaction in the simple sense or a want to return to a past state of things is a vain process because doing so only helps to destroy the past.

First of all, this is all a question of timescale. When Moldbug brings up the phrase, he is talking about modern history, of everything since the French Revolution.

First, this isn't how people often use the phrase on this site or others. When they speak of Cthulhu, they're often referring to things happening on the scale of decades or years, and sometimes even less.

And second, while MM may want to relitigate enlightenment ideas broadly, in this case he uses examples that are a few decades apart:

But no. Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn’t that interesting?

In the history of American democracy, if you take the mainstream political position (Overton Window, if you care) at time T1, and place it on the map at a later time T2, T1 is always way to the right, near the fringe or outside it. So, for instance, if you take the average segregationist voter of 1963 and let him vote in the 2008 election, he will be way out on the wacky right wing. Cthulhu has passed him by.

which is that understanding Moldbug to say "the left" in the common sense of the word is a mistake.

On this part I agree. MM does that obnoxious thing SJW's did by redefining commonly used words to suit his political purposes. Like the left redefining "racism", MM redefines "left" to be basically "everything bad":

First, we need to define left and right. In my opinion, obviously a controversial one, the explanation for this mysterious asymmetric dimension is easy: it is political entropy. Right represents peace, order and security; left represents war, anarchy and crime. Because values are inherently subjective, it is possible to argue that left can be good and right can be bad. For example, you can say that the Civil War was good — the North needed to conquer the South and free the slaves. On the other hand, it is also quite easy to construct a very clean value system in which order is simply good, and chaos is simply evil. I have chosen this path. It leaves quite a capacious cavity in the back of my skull, and allows me to call myself a reactionary. To you, perhaps, it is the dark side. But this is only because the treatment is not yet complete.

It's a big sneer at the outgroup. MM dislikes where society has headed, so he puts everything he hates in a big bucket, calls it the "left" and says it always wins. It's pure gerrymandering.

If this is an accurate gloss of Moldbug's perspective, "Cthulhu always swims left" doesn't sound merely trite (according to the stipulative defintion of "left" that Moldbug's using) but actually tautological. If you believe that things used to be good, but now they're bad, it logically follows that they became bad in the interim. Like, duh.

If you use the common definition of "left", as most people implicitly do when using the phrase "Cthulhu always swims left", then the phrase is simply wrong for the reasons I described in the original post.

On the other hand if you accept MM's vague redefinition of "left", then "Cthulhu always swims left" is basically tautological as you say, but you're smuggling in the ideology with the silly definition.

First, this isn't how people often use the phrase on this site or others. When they speak of Cthulhu, they're often referring to things happening on the scale of decades or years, and sometimes even less.

This doesn't match my experience. This phrase is so niche that I don't often run into it, but my memory of it is that decades is roughly the minimum timescale involved, i.e. they're talking about decades or perhaps even centuries, not decades or years, and certainly not even less than years. Timescales of under a decade - or even a handful of decades - are so short that extreme, unsustainable things can win out - and often do, akin to a last-place team beating the first-place team in one of their dozen match-ups during an MLB season - such that people seem to believe that they shouldn't talk about them in such grand, sweeping outside-view terms, but rather with the actual inside-view specific factors.

I've seen Cthulhu mentioned in reference to Trans topics, which haven't been relevant for very long, certainly less long than multiple decades.

Someone will post a headline of the woke left winning some minor flavor-of-the-month battle, then someone will chime in with "Cthulhu always swims left" as a stand-in for "[things] always get [worse]" and "the left always wins".

Trans topics haven't been mainstream for a long time, but they've certainly been a part of the progressive movement for a long time, at least decades. It's merely another instantiation of the concept of equal rights being expanded to cover minorities, following the success of the gay rights/gay marriage movements of a couple decades ago. Heck, the mere existence of trans topics as a mainstream political/ideological topic over the past decade or so is an example of swimming leftward.

I'm more generous about redefining words because any serious attempt at philosophy has to do this and in this particular case, he is actually using the historical meaning from the French Revolution rather than the colloquial one. Arguably his definition has more historical legs than the economic ideology classification from the cold war.

In any case, "left" and "right" are such diluted words and he's open enough about his definitions that I find it hard to argue that it is, in fact, malicious. A malicious actor wouldn't hold to using red and blue as alternatives.

Philosophy can be done well enough by using existing words as they currently are. If that's unfashionable, pompous philosophers usually invent new words rather than redefine old ones. Hijacking existing words is almost always a bad idea if the point is clear communication. It's outright deceitful in many cases by seeking to harness the pre-existing emotional valence of words for different ends, e.g. "racism = power + privilege". Alternatively, it's used to wobble between the real definition and the made-up definition at will to confuse people and claim "you just don't get it". I'm not sure if MM himself does this, but people who quote his work certainly do!

In any case, "left" and "right" are such diluted words and he's open enough about his definitions

You could say the same thing about leftists redefining "racism". They were quite open about their definitions, often giving them to you unprompted!

I notice you don't address the historical precedence argument. Anybody who uses the term "right" to mean anything but loyalty to the King is guilty by your standard are they not?

Terms do shift meaning, and that change can be used as a political tactic. I don't think that condemns any such change or attempt by nature. And in fact I find that organically promoting memes is a lot more faithful of a technique than prescriptivism.

The word didn't change vis-a-vis monarchism so much as the underlying conditions did. Monarchism became functionally irrelevant.

It's like how "living animals" once included dodos, until dodos went extinct, and then it didn't. The definition of "living animal" didn't change, yet one morning dodos were no longer included.

I don't disagree that words can change, but change usually happens gradually and organically.

And pray tell, what is the mechanism for this gradual and organic change, if not intellectual discourse and its fashions?

Why do people use "gender" to mean something else than category? Why do people use "democracy" to mean something else than mob rule? Why do people use "well regulated" to mean something else than in good working order?

we have two right-wing parties of varying extremity

I hate it when anyone says this and it is a dead giveaway they are a completely dishonest extremist. You could equally accurately say we have two left-wing parties of varying extremity because neither party supports slavery.

Both parties are anti-monarchist, so by a literal definition they’re both liberal parties. Freddy is an actual Marxist repeating the actual Marxist claim that anybody who isn’t a socialist is a right winger.

Freddie deBoer posted an article today that espoused that idea that “Cthulhu always swims left”, but flipped so that, effectively, “Cthulhu always swims right”. He doesn’t say those exact words, but that’s his general conclusion. In the aftermath of Harris’ defeat, many in the Democratic party are claiming that the party needs to move to the center after being too far left for many years. Americans mostly agree with this idea, but the remaining leftists like FdB are horrified at that conclusion. To people like them, Harris basically ran as a Republican, and so saying that the party needs to go even further right is anathema. If this all sounds utterly ridiculous… I wouldn’t disagree with you. Saying the country always moves right shares all the flaws as those saying it always moves left. I explicitly disagree with this piece, but I still think it serves as a useful example of what it’s like when the sides are reversed.

FDB although he makes many good points, like about IQ and education, does not really have a consistent worldview. I have seen him make the argument that the Democrats going too far to the left like on defund the police, or education policy, or social justice, also has hurt them, so...The dems lost because they didn't have good candidates, having put all their eggs in the Biden basket. They need seething closer to Obama or Bill Clinton , which Kamala didn't fit the bill.

“Cthulhu always swims right”.

This shows the limitation of memes, as only approximations of reality. I would say American society has moved right in some ways, leftward in others. It's not that useful of a framework for understanding society even by meme standards, imho

I would say American society has moved right in some ways, leftward in others. It's not that useful of a framework for understanding society even by meme standards, imho

It partly depends on personal perspective too. If you are left you might see Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr joining Trump as proof they shifted right, whereas if you are right leaning you might see it as Trump moving the party left. Who is correct?

Those aren't contradictory views, both those things can be true. They could have met in the middle.

Lol that is similar to how I described that merge to my ma, I said they were putting America before politics. I was adding another reason that framework isn't particularly useful - it depends on your perspective aligning with the speaker's.

Neither - it is a realignment on a pro/anti establishment axis instead of a left/right one.

MAGA is anti-establishment right, and now control the Republican Party. Corporate America and the shooty bits of the Deep State are pro-establishment right. The crowning heights of academia, the MSM, the non-shooty bits of the Deep State, and the Democratic Party are pro-establishment left. The anti-establishment left currently control no important centres of power, although they have burrowed into less-important parts of academia like English departments.

If you are on the anti-establishment left and your pet issue is something other than economic inequality or wokism (foreign policy for Gabbard, medical quackery for RFK Jr) then you are now closer to the anti-establishment right than the pro-establishment left. Something similar was going on with pro-Palestinian activists. (Particularly the ones who mean it, see the election results in Dearborn). On the other side of the fence, the pro-establishment right is mostly NeverTrump (even if they end up holding their noses and voting for tax cuts).

People like to dismiss this with references to meaningless cultural politics

Sorry to dismiss a high-effort argument with a one-liner, but: so "meaningless" that he'll fight to the death for (at least one of) them, and literally ban all discussion of them on his Substack because his audience refuses to agree with him.

My offer to these "the culture war is distraction" people is always the same: you get the economy, or whatever else you find "meaningful", I get total uncontested control over culture - deal?

My offer to these "the culture war is distraction" people is always the same: you get the economy, or whatever else you find "meaningful", I get total uncontested control over culture - deal?

I think the biggest problem with this proposal is that I don't think there are easy levers to just control culture. That, plus the fact that some cultures might not be able to support some kinds of economic systems. Like can a trad maximalist culture really support a globalist socialist economy, for example?

It's a fantasy scenario for sure, but Arjin's point is sound - hell I'd say he doesn't go far enough. They don't get the economy or something else, they can have everything else - the economy, the administration, the military, healthcare, the media, education - if someone else controls culture you are going to be swimming up a waterfall.

I mean, the the logistics of this fantasy scenario are hard to imagine. Is a genie just snapping their fingers here, or do we actually have to think about the logistics of how a society could sustainably keep Culture A with Economic System B, given some starting point close to contemporary American politics?

I'd be happy enough to use a genie, but it is an interesting thought experiment so I started considering how you'd go about it - and instantly realised we already have an example - The West. The US has controlled the culture of the West for the past century, particularly through television and music, and the rest of the west has been becoming more American as a result. That's why everywhere in the west outside of the US has a national media arm producing local content - without it their national myths and memes get replaced with those of the dominant culture (which is also why those media organs have channels or carve outs for their native populations).

I think the biggest problem with this proposal is that I don't think there are easy levers to just control culture.

If we're entering this politically impossible situation where @ArjinFerman gets these powers, it's fairly easy. Does he want to reverse the sexual revolution, as a random example? Illegalize over-the-counter contraceptives and abortion clinics. Mandate >90% male:female ratio in colleges and technical schools. Remove mandatory maternity leave and allow discrimination against female hires. End no fault divorce. Lower welfare benefits for single people (Edit: Perhaps this falls under 'economy', so nix this.) Done and dusted.

The CRA is a fairly modest law that radically reshaped American culture over time. With a literal culture czar, you could steer the country at least that effectively.

But will the people accept that? When I say there's no easy levers, I'm thinking about how hard it would be to enforce some of these things in practice.

The US struggles to stop illegal drugs from coming over the border from Mexico. How would we stop oral arbortifacients and condoms from coming over the Southern border? How would we stop women from making intellectual salons for teaching college and technical topics - and stop employers from letting these qualified women work for them? How would we stop women from poisoning husbands they can't divorce?

I'm not saying it's absolutely impossible to be brutal and efficient here, but I'm not actually sure the state capacity to do all of this actually exists.

How would we stop women from making intellectual salons for teaching college and technical topics

LOL. With the full power of the culture (and a not-insubstantial portion of law) pushing women into technical subjects, engineering and computer science remains skewed 4:1 male. Take that away, and you will be able to maintain 9:1 ratios with no problem at all.

I'm not talking about STEM. I'm talking about all of college and technical/trade schools.

If the people want to resist your lawful efforts to change the culture, how do you stop women and sympathetic men from creating university alternatives where women are trained in a field and then hired even without a degree? Like, how do you actually put the genie back in the bottle here?

How do you stop people from creating samizdat, and passing down trades within their familes and a dozen other things that people who remember the old regime will want to do?

how do you stop women and sympathetic men from creating university alternatives where women are trained in a field and then hired even without a degree?

The idea of society organizing bottom-up in such a manner, on a scale that is any kind of threat, is kind of dubious to start with. The way universities work and what they teach has lots of detractors too nowadays, they even have dedicated alternatives, but none of it adds up to anything.

How do you stop people from creating samizdat

STEM education is difficult and people who are doing it are too busy to teach it; this also applies to trades, and they have other requirements anyway.

As the jobs become less technical, the advantage yielded by those who could train their children is correspondingly diminished.

how do you stop women and sympathetic men from creating university alternatives where women are trained in a field and then hired even without a degree?

Market forces. Because the credential spiral is mostly fake, and there's nothing of significance that separates a worker with an Arts degree from one that only graduated high school, this will impose a ceiling on the price of labor for those with a fake degree.

As far as "training in a field and then hired without a degree", this is another way to state that they're receiving the level of education that much more closely matches the demands of the job; this is better for the students, and it's better for the part of society that isn't employed in academia. It's a good thing that academia did not spend 50 years agitating for a destruction of wages for those without degrees or anything like that, or they could be in real trouble.

technical/trade schools

Trades are already captured by licensing boards and apprenticeship requirements. Some of what they teach is fake, but not to anywhere near the same degree as academia in general, and you get paid which offsets some of the cost.

Umm, how many of the women in non-STEM college majors are there to study and how many of them are taking a vacation for four years? It certainly seems like very high percentages of the latter.

Of course the real problem is that for non-underclass women, there is no alternative to a college degree. You don’t see female plumbers and cops and infantrymen and the most reliable route to being a housewife is… through college.

I think the biggest problem with this proposal is that I don't think there are easy levers to just control culture.

The short answer to that is "you go take care of the economy, I'll worry about the culture". I think deBoer's economic ideas are pretty much a pipedream too, but I think it would be absurd for me to demand that as a part of this compromise he convinces me that he can implement his ideas.

The slightly longer answer is that a lot of the damage can be undone just by removing funding from people pushing the culture in it's current direction, and granting it to people who will move it away, and doing the same things with various forms of accreditation and licensing. I imagine that in deBoers socialist economy using carrots and stick will be even easier.

That, plus the fact that some cultures might not be able to support some kinds of economic systems. Like can a trad maximalist culture really support a globalist socialist economy, for example?

Yes. A fun fact that Westerners have little appreciation of: Eastern European communism was pretty trad as far as culture goes. A part of it was that they had to deal with a trad population after they took over, but another part of it was Stalin realizing the post-revolution cultural reforms are ripping society apart, and hitting CTRL+Z on them pretty hard.

The biggest controllers of culture are education and the media. Both have been captured by blues for decades, and thus the average American is inundated with blue cultural messaging from the time they enter school, and the media is available to people 24 hours a day, every day. So the culture is constantly pushed in those directions: statism, atheism, pro-LGBTQ, DEI/woke. In other countries, you’ll find these same institutions pointing in other directions. In places like Iran, it pushes religion, which is why that news media seems so weird to us. We generally don’t see religion displayed as a prominent part of people’s lives, people making references to holy books, praying, etc. religion isn’t taught as true in public schools, at best you’ll find them having passages from different holy books in a literature class and taught as literature.

I think Freddy's argument here, and the cthulu swims left meme are both examples of extending the left/right political model way beyond its usefulness (to the extent that it is ever useful in the first place). Reducing all of politics to a single axis in modern times is already suspect, but the model only gets worse in the past. If we're only talking about social issues, maybe you can define "right" as adherence to traditional values and "left" as rebellion against those values, but when the values completely change multiple times over, that doesn't really mean anything. Today, traditionalist christians might be considered right wing, but in the Roman empire they were the weird commie leftists who wanted womens' rights and equality under god. But is that inherently more right wing or left wing than paganism? Is banning abortion right wing because it upholds the sanctity of life, or is it left wing because it's dysgenic? The "left" and "right" have flip-flopped on this even in the last 50 years, let alone centuries.

Is banning abortion right wing because it upholds the sanctity of life, or is it left wing because it's dysgenic? The "left" and "right" have flip-flopped on this even in the last 50 years, let alone centuries.

Right wingers in the seventies were not generally pro-abortion, and eugenics being associated with the right is itself Cthulhu swimming left. In point of fact views on eugenics in 1930 are more predictive of current-day views on abortion than views on abortion in 1930.

eugenics being associated with the right is itself Cthulhu swimming left

because cthulu swam past eugenics and now it's toward the right? Or are you saying that doing more eugenics is directionally leftward?

Maybe it's because swimming only left means you swim in a circle.

On a minor note, I find it somewhat irritating that Freddie dismisses all cultural politics as meaningless, and then, barely a breath later, says that he dislikes or opposes Clinton due to him taking right-wing positions on cultural issues.

It can't be the case that simultaneously gay marriage in the 2010s wasn't a real win for the left, and that DOMA in the 90s was a real win for the right. If gay marriage was meaningless in the 10s, then surely opposing gay marriage was meaningless in the 90s. You can't have it both ways. Either cultural politics matter, or they don't.

On a minor note, I find it somewhat irritating that Freddie dismisses all cultural politics as meaningless, and then, barely a breath later, says that he dislikes or opposes Clinton due to him taking right-wing positions on cultural issues.

Yeah, I came in prepared to defend FdB because he's an actual Marxist and from that PoV he does actually have a point. But then he brings in culture and hahahahaha what. I suspect he may be dissembling to appeal to Democrats.

It can't be the case that simultaneously gay marriage in the 2010s wasn't a real win for the left, and that DOMA in the 90s wasn't a real win for the right.

I think you mean "DOMA in the 90s was a real win for the right".

Oops, fixed. Thanks.

At some point in the last two years, I read an article which charted how self-identified Republicans and Democrats responded to Gallup questions on a range of social and economic issues over a significant period of time, maybe 30-40 years. It argued, contra the standard woke narrative, that the polling data clearly indicate that Republicans have been remarkably consistent in their responses to questions about a range of issues during the period, while self-identified Democrats have grown increasingly radical. The only social issue on which the median Republican in 2024 would give a significantly different response to his equivalent in 1990 is gay rights.

If you're in the Motte, you're reading all of the above and thinking "well, duh". But it's remarkable how durable this idea is, that the Republicans have slowly drifted into becoming a far-right party while the Democrats are the ones who've stayed in place (Know Your Meme has a catalogue of these comics which starts with the opposite framing in which Democrats became progressively more radical while the Republicans stayed in place, but my recollection is that that comic was itself a reaction to a comic arguing the reverse). After all, endorsing the Democrat policy package just means "being a decent person", and surely the definition of what a "decent person" looks like can't have changed much in the space of a mere thirty years, can it? The eagerness to maintain this façade is probably a significant motivating factor behind woke people's propensity to rewrite the past and pretend that we've always been at war with Eastasia e.g. paraphrasing a 1993 RBG quote to make it seem more trans-inclusive than it really was. Hell, you don't even have to go back as far as that: you can make some Democrats uncomfortable simply by quoting Obama's speeches concerning immigration circa 2008, and the "what is a woman" gotcha question with which to embarrass Democrats simply didn't exist thirty years, twenty or even fifteen years ago. It'd be interesting to play a clip of one of Bob Dole's 1996 campaign speeches for a group of self-identified Republicans and see how they react, and specifically to observe the ratio of "spluttering, appalled disbelief":"embarrassed agreement":"YesChad".

From Freddie's perspective, if the median Democrat became increasingly radical on a range of economic and social issues in the last ten years, but the Democratic party did not fully embrace this shift and instead remained stubbornly committed to being boring centrists with some woke window dressing (preferred pronouns, land acknowledgements) - it's easy to understand how this could feel like Freddie and his ilk are demanding the same things they've always demanded and the Democrats are shifting further and further right. Someone once compared it to parallax, or the illusion of relative motion: without optical frames of reference, it's difficult for humans to tell the difference between "I am stationary and that object is moving away from me" vs. "that object is stationary and I am moving away from it".* Freddie might even be a special case, in that I get the impression that, owing to his politically engaged parents, he was significantly more radical than the median Democrat in the nineties and 2000s. It might be literally true that Freddie and his immediate social circle have been demanding the same package of policy proposals since he was in high school, but the DNC have only had to sit up and take notice of their growing far-left faction (if only to fob them off) in the last ten years, as those policy proposals shifted into the Overton window as a result of Occupy Wall Street and the Great Awokening. I imagine Freddie must have found the last ten years quite confusing, as the cool kids started expressing some of the same opinions he's professed for most of his adult life, but he still isn't allowed to sit at the cool kids' table.

I think Freddie is correct that Al Gore's campaign was essentially "Clintonism minus Clinton", and which clearly exposed that Clinton's personal charisma was necessary to sell the whole package. In fact, I'd go even further than that: the package was largely irrelevant. Clinton was so charming that he probably could have run on a bizarro world mirror image of the package he actually ran under (protectionist, openly pro-gay marriage, doveish on the international stage etc., unlike the real Clinton) and would still have won a first or even second term.

The parallels are obvious in explaining why I think Hanania is dead right that we're unlikely to ever see a DeSantis presidency. Anyone arguing that "DeSantis is offering Trumpism without all the grandstanding and narcissism; and he's actually competent and focused so he can get policies passed rather than wasting time getting into fights on Twitter" is fundamentally misunderstanding how the median voter thinks. Trump being shameless, grandiose and larger-than-life is half of what makes him likeable to ordinary people. The fact that he spends so much time shitposting on Twitter is part of his charm: it makes him seem human and down to earth, unlike career politicians who are obsessively focused on "optics" and whose every lawyerly, carefully worded public announcement might as well have been generated by ChatGPT for all the passion and colour it conveys. Even if DeSantis spent 20% more time getting into pissing contests on Twitter, voters would be able to tell that that was something he'd been focus-grouped into doing, not something he was doing because he wanted to. Voters like Trump: they grudgingly tolerate DeSantis as one of their teammates, but they aren't shy about telling him "Governor, you're no Teflon Don Ron".

Before the election, my uncle who lives in Massachusetts was visiting. If anyone can legitimately be said to suffer from TDS, it's him (at one point before dinner he even raised his glass to toast to "our next President Kamala" - brrr). Over dinner, he was making another of his interminable rants about how he simply couldn't understand how Republicans could just overlook how nasty and dysfunctional Trump was, just because he endorsed many of the policies they wanted. I pushed back on this, and said - of course you can understand it. Clinton was probably the sleaziest POTUS the office has ever seen (as big of philanderers as JFK or indeed LBJ were, I'm not aware of them being accused of rape - or if they were, Clinton surely bested them in terms of sheer number of accusations). You ignored this, because he was charming and he was on your team.

What I was most surprised by was that my uncle actually conceded the point, and unlike many people to whom I've made a comparable argument (about Clinton or other Democrats), he did not play the "no that's totally different, all those women who accused Clinton were vindictive liars/Russian assets" card.

*Does anyone know if there's a term in psychology for this specific cognitive bias, wherein the default is for people to believe that what they currently believe is what they've always believed? [EDIT: Someone DM'd me to say I'm thinking of consistency bias: "Incorrectly remembering one's past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour."]

It really does seem to be something that people actually believe, rather than something they're knowingly lying about. I know that my opinions on a range of political issues have changed over time, and acknowledging this in any particular case only sometimes makes me uncomfortable, but a lot of people I know get very defensive when you point out that they used to believe something other than what they currently do.

I think Freddie is correct that Al Gore's campaign was essentially "Clintonism minus Clinton", and which clearly exposed that Clinton's personal charisma was necessary to sell the whole package. In fact, I'd go even further than that: the package was largely irrelevant. Clinton was so charming that he probably could have run on a bizarro world mirror image of the package he actually ran under (protectionist, openly pro-gay marriage, doveish on the international stage etc., unlike the real Clinton) and would still have won a first or even second term.

Al Gore won the popular vote and lost the electoral college over a microscopic margin in Florida. That’s not ‘Clinton’s personal charisma is a necessary part of the deal’ that’s ‘bad luck is bad luck’.

Wouldn't have come down to a microscopic margin in Florida if he'd won his own home state of Tennessee or Clinton's Arkansas.

Or is it bad luck in all the other places he didn't win by a wider margin?

Sure, he wasn't as good a candidate as Clinton(Bill, that is). But a hair's breadth of winning in an era when elections generally were not close is evidence that the party is competitive.

Clinton was so charming that he probably could have run on a bizarro world mirror image of the package he actually ran under (protectionist, openly pro-gay marriage, doveish on the international stage etc., unlike the real Clinton) and would still have won a first or even second term.

I think this is off base. Clinton was charming, but he won his first term with a plurality because Ross Perot won 19% of the vote. And immediately he had to govern far to teh right of how he campaigned. All that "Triangulation" stuff was Clinton being a shrewd political operator and figuring out that the country didn't want his ideas, they just wanted his face and interpretations on a Republican policy platform.

The Democrats got smashed in the '94 elections (where Joe Scarborough got his start as a firebreathing Republican). Clinton made political hay out of the defeat, and it won him re-election. Welfare reform, the '94 crime bill (notice that year?) etc.

But no, there is no way in hell the people who were in power and voting back in the '90s were in any mood for very liberal policies except perhaps a narrow range of gay rights and general fun-having. If you think liberal criminal justice policies were popular the year murder peaked in the US, you didn't observe it up close.

We'd just won the Cold War, had the Gulf War and no one wanted the stern Republican daddies in charge anymore, but they certainly didn't want the policies of the seventies back. And marginal Republicans weren't as worried about the existential nuclear threat and ideological superstruggle anymore, and were willing to vote on other issues. Hence, Perot picked up a lot of people from both sides who were looking for an option to the old ideologies. Clinton was the one who wound up seizing the moment to change the policies and interest groups of the left-wing coalition, which is what is being reacted to with the current re-alignment.

Only this time it is Trump who is doing the moving around, liberalizing the old Republican doctrines that no longer serve their new political base.

I can very definitely tell that Freddy is an actual Marxist communist when he rights ‘America has two right wing parties’. Both parties are, by global standards, pretty centrist, progressive on social issues(one of them only moderately so), pro-business capitalist(one of them only lukewarmly), moderately nationalist, anti-isolationist, and liberal. The GOP is well to the left of major right wing parties like Likud and PiS on social issues; the DNC is well to the right of major left wing parties like die Linke on economics. By global standards, our parties are pretty compressed on a spectrum.

If you take the USA as a wealthier Latin American country, we ‘should’ have a have-not party which claims to be socialist but is actually more interested in corruption, and a party of the haves which is anti communist and tough on crime, and a populist far-right party which openly praises the idea of becoming a fascist dictatorship. If you take the US as an eccentric European country, we ‘should’ have a socialist party, a Green Party, two centrist right wing parties, and a far right party. In reality we have two centrist parties.

And while ‘Cthulhu always swims left’ is an oversimplification to the point of inaccuracy, ‘Cthulhu swims right’ is true only in stupid definitional games.

If you look at the US political spectrum through a lens of economics and authoritarianism, both parties do look pretty far right compared to most of Europe: European-level levels of tax and social benefits are well outside your Overton window, most pro-corporate policies like Citizens United and the DMCA have strong bipartisan support, both parties are in favour of prison terms and conditions that would make the eyes of Europeans water, and both parties are in favour of foreign interventions and maintaining the size of your military-industrial apparatus.

In Europe, support for US-style business-friendly policies exists but generally feels pretty artificial (backed by politicians recognized to be US plants and understood as the cost of doing business with the US), US levels of taxation and benefits are not backed by any serious party, US-style punishment is sometimes advocated for particular cases by tabloids but I have not seen it as a general platform, and support for militarization has only noticeably crept up since about 2014 (Ukraine) or perhaps 2016 (Trump's first term).

If you look at the US political spectrum through a lens of economics and authoritarianism, both parties do look pretty far right compared to most of Europe.…

On economics, I buy it. But authoritarianism is slipperier. On issues of speech, religious freedom, gun rights, or search and seizure, the U.S. is far from perfect but far better than most of Europe – certainly than the European countries most visible from this side of the pond: the U.K., France, and Germany.

'Authoritarianism' is equivocal. Sometimes it means a strong executive leader overruling the bureaucracy and consensus-making institutions to implement policy. (This sense usually comes from the blue tribe.) Other times it refers to a reduction in civil rights for private citizens. (This sense is used by everyone, but different sides disagree about which rights to complain about.)

A good example: 2020 Republicans decrying the 'authoritarianism' of government Covid policy, while 2020 Democrats were decrying the 'authoritarianism' of Trump trying to interfere with government agencies implementing Covid policy.

A good example 2020 Republicans decrying the 'authoritarianism' of government Covid policy while 2020 Democrats decried the 'authoritarianism' of Trump trying to interfere with government agencies implementing Covid policy.

"Authoritarianism" isn't equivocal; the Democrats were just wrong.

"Authoritarianism" isn't equivocal; the Democrats were just wrong.

Perhaps StoneToss demonstrates the difference a bit clearer.

A common meme in the western world is that a strong leader not bound by constitutional/bureaucratic restraints and low personal freedom go together. They share the same word: it is all 'authoritarianism'. Whereas it is clear to me that oppression of personal freedoms is a possible for every node within the Polybius cycle, and if anything democracy tends to more restrictions and a more ant-farm-like society.

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and authoritarianism

US-style punishment is sometimes advocated for particular cases by tabloids but I have not seen it as a general platform

I watched non-authoritarian Europe beating elderly people bloody when they protested against strict lockdown policies. And then I watch as they imprison thousands for rather mundane political speech on social media platforms.

Is there a single party in all of Europe who supports free speech as a principle? Or gun rights? Or religious freedom? Or education freedom? What about one which didn't wholesale endorse vast totalitarianism over its population and lock them indoors for over a year in some places?

As far as I can tell, this sort of frame is impervious to any experience. I regularly see boomers in the US talk about their guns being important if authoritarianism ever really showed up and yet they were few and far between when US sheriffs were arresting priests for holding church services, an act which has been constitutionally protected conduct at the federal and state level for hundreds of years.

It's like a security blanket: at some point in the future, when "authoritarianism" happens, they'll be ready. Just like we still have Europeans who are ready to criticize the "authoritarianism" of the US while they cheered police beating the elderly for violating totalitarian public health mandates for years. Surely. they'll also oppose it when "authoritarianism" ever makes it to the shores of the old continent.

What does "authoritarianism" even mean if it doesn't include the years of ridiculous behavior during the covid hysteria? Europeans will cheer authoritarianism whenever they think they need it to accomplish their bureaucratic meddling in every part of life and it's mostly by chance it hasn't more often. Europeans don't have militaries because they're satropies of the United States and expect its military's protection. If they thought they needed it, we would see vans going street by street and kidnapping military aged males just like we see it in Ukraine. And I bet I would still see Europeans talking about "authoritarian" United States, as opposed to Europe.

You raise a good point that it's at least not so clear-cut regarding authoritarianism, because each side weighs and interprets the freedoms they have or don't so differently. Through my Euro eyes, US prison terms and the circumstance (responding more to @Hieronymus's point) that police turning up to perform a search in the US are likely to shoot me without asking questions if they are having a bad day and don't like how I move my hand weigh a lot more than the right to have guns (especially considering that the possibility of me having guns in the US is what creates the near-necessity of police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building), or that the US has some more arcane rules that may restrict when and what police can search a wee bit more. Our absence of "education"/"religious freedom" reads as freedom from the ability of having one's life ruined by crazy parents. I will grant the superiority of the US free speech principle, but that flags me as an unusual European; most people would say that things such as a "right to be forgotten" and protections against libel and slander actually make the individual more free from the tyranny of the masses.

On COVID, neither side has made a good showing, but I actually get the sense that the intensity of the response in Europe was nontrivially fuelled by imported TDS.

Through my Euro eyes, US prison terms and the circumstance (responding more to @Hieronymus's point) that police turning up to perform a search in the US are likely to shoot me without asking questions if they are having a bad day and don't like how I move my hand

Do you genuinely believe this is an accurate description of reality? What percentage of interactions between police and the public in the United States do you believe result in the use of deadly force?

Others have compiled stats on the number of injuries and deadly shootings, but note that I was talking about searches, not all interactions. It seems that there are on the order of 2000 federal searches a year, but I can't find either data on how many of those resulted in discharge of a firearm or how many search warrants were issued to non-federal police, so I guess the only thing I can say is "up to 25% deadly and 100% attempted" for searches. My somewhat arbitrary guess would be that it's about 2% in reality for searches where the target individual is present.

so I guess the only thing I can say is "up to 25% deadly and 100% attempted" for searches. My somewhat arbitrary guess would be that it's about 2% in reality for searches where the target individual is present.

Im having trouble deciphering what your claim is. Are you saying that 2% of federal searches result in a deadly shooting? Or are you saying that 25% of them do?

Also, why are “federal searches” - a vanishingly small percentage of the total interactions between law enforcement and the public - an issue that weighs seriously on your perception of law enforcement practices in the United States? The vast majority of policing in this country is done at the local level, and to a lesser extent at the state level. Federal law enforcement is a tiny segment of American policing.

It was an example. As I said in response to your other post, in every easily-delineated scenario where there is evidence that can be compared, US police look worse. To try to rebut this by dismissing each easily-delineated scenario as an irrelevant small sample seems like a god-of-the-gaps argument to me - "surely in some other domain that we just so don't happen to have good data on, US police are actually nicer and more professional than European police! What, they're also hostile and violent in this one? Guess they must be nicer and more professional in one of the many others!"

I said that I think that 2% do, but based on the data I could find the only thing that can be proved is that there is an upper bound of about 25% (about 600 total killings, of which an unknown percentage happened during federal searches, vs. ~2000 federal searches).

It's really hard to communicate to Europeans just how manipulated their perspective on America really is because their news sources are typically worse, at least with respect to American news, than the worst of American media. I admit my experience is rather limited to a couple years in a few Western European counties, but their media is like if a person with MSNBC proclivities and bias only watched MSNBC for all their news and then crafted it for a European audience. Many of the worst things about American society is imported to Europe through this process. Perhaps that is unfair for the rest of Europe. My friends and their experience are also confined to those places. For e.g.,

that police turning up to perform a search in the US are likely to shoot me without asking questions if they are having a bad day and don't like how I move my hand weigh a lot more than the right to have guns (especially considering that the possibility of me having guns in the US is what creates the near-necessity of police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building

Without looking it up, how many people do you think are shot by police in the US, a country of 330,000,000?

Without looking it up, how many times do you think police engage in "police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building"?

For Europeans I've had this discussion with, they vastly overestimate this by multiple magnitudes. Americans also vastly overestimate these things, but not as badly. Both are the result of the journalist class who are simply awful, but Americans have real life experience which serves as an anchor to prevent believing more ridiculous things. Or at least that's how I've rationalized the difference.

I don't think there is much for either of us to convince the other w/re policing; my experience with European police is rather limited and my experience with American police is extensive. In general, I find American police to be more friendly and less aggressive, but that may be the perspective of a foreigner/native in both situations.

Our absence of "education"/"religious freedom" reads as freedom from the ability of having one's life ruined by crazy parents.

As you said, Europeans and Americans have very different perspectives. Americans would characterize this as state ownership of children and very authoritarian. Individuals being prohibited the ability to act on the world and forcing them to outsource it to the state is authoritarian. Addressing every societal ill from the perspective of the bureaucratic state is authoritarian, but it a common European perspective.

When Europeans call America authoritarian, it comes off as preposterous to us. Putting people in jail for mild social criticism is nuts and authoritarian and has nothing to do with "libel and slander." It's a fundamental antipathy for individuals' ability to speak their thoughts into the world. Americans react in disgust to state censorship, Europeans broadly agree with it. There is a long list of ways Europeans act far more authoritarian than Americans and expect obedience as part of their culture.

Beyond these differing perspectives, we can see which society is "authoritarian" based on how they respond and enable state policy. Covid gave us a frontrow seat:

On COVID

Having lived in the worst places in the US and their covid hysteria at least part of the time, it was still never as bad as places like the UK, Spain, Germany, or Italy, and not as long either. Neither side made a good showing, but Europe was worse and more authoritarian in pretty much every aspect with the lone country of Sweden being significantly different and getting ridiculed for being right the entire time.

It's hard for me to swallow the "Europeans aren't authoritarian like the US argument, look at how their police behave" when we saw how Europe behaved when significant portions of their populations didn't obey. Authoritarian cults don't look authoritarian when all their members go along with their dictates, the authoritarianism only becomes evident when people don't.

Without looking it up, how many people do you think are shot by police in the US, a country of 330,000,000?

Unfortunately looked this up already in the context of the argument earlier, I think it was 600.

Without looking it up, how many times do you think police engage in "police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building"?

I would guess significantly more - if we make it something well-defined like SWAT dispatches, perhaps on the order of 100k? Is that data collected anywhere or is it another thing where you could only find local data and not everywhere due to how fragmented the police force is?

As you said, Europeans and Americans have very different perspectives. Americans would characterize this as state ownership of children and very authoritarian.

I think there's a general theme that relative to Europeans, Americans are more concerned with impositions by the state but much less concerned with impositions by non-state actors, even though from the perspective of an average citizen the two might not be readily distinguishable as lofty authorities. As a caricature, we figure that an American would get very upset by the government banning him from soapboxing for some political position, but would see nothing wrong with it if a corporation bought up all roads and public squares in his city and instituted a ban against voicing the same position on company property (along with a host of other house rules). Moreover, if someone then proposed to force the company to surrender roads or parks to the public hand, or circumscribed its right to enforce rules of its choosing on it, the American might be up in arms about that being an intrusion upon the company's free speech.

When Europeans call America authoritarian, it comes off as preposterous to us. Putting people in jail for mild social criticism is nuts and authoritarian and has nothing to do with "libel and slander."

Right, and putting people in jail for 25 years to life for all sorts of one-off transgressions comes off as nuts and authoritarian to us, as to million-dollar fines and jail terms for software piracy (...).

Is that data collected anywhere or is it another thing where you could only find local data and not everywhere due to how fragmented the police force is?

I'm unsure where Radley Balko got his data and I'm not sure where my copy is, but my memory of his book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, claims the figure in 2013 to be around 50,000 annually, although whether or not each of these raids where SWAT teams are used can be correctly characterized as "police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building" is another question.

but would see nothing wrong with it if a corporation bought up all roads and public squares in his city and instituted a ban against voicing the same position on company property (along with a host of other house rules)

it turns out this has happened, or something akin to it, and the public was broadly against it and resulted in multiple SCOTUS decisions prohibiting that activity; the first examples were "company towns" (Marsh v. Alabama) and another more recent example was malls (Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robinson)

the state didn't propose to force the companies to surrender property to the public hand, they forced the companies to be restricted in similar ways to the state when it comes to first amendment protections; I am unsure about the public's response to the SCOTUS decisions

and putting people in jail for 25 years to life for all sorts of one-off transgressions comes off as nuts and authoritarian to us, as to million-dollar fines and jail terms for software piracy (...)

unless you're talking about "one-off transgressions" like premeditated or felony murder, this doesn't really happen

million dollar fines and jail terms for piracy, like when the Pirate Bay founders were imprisoned for a year and had to pay $1m fines? or the kino.to guy who got like a 4 year sentence? I agree the US gives stiffer prison terms and fines for piracy, but let's not go overboard here.

Through my Euro eyes, US prison terms and the circumstance that police turning up to perform a search in the US are likely to shoot me without asking questions if they are having a bad day and don't like how I move my hand

Please don't attribute your views to all / most Europeans. There's nothing wrong with their prison system, and the last time I interacted with them, their police force was way friendlier and more professional than any I saw in Europe.

Huh, where are you from? My very first impressions of US police (when I came for the first time as a tourist) consisted of a border guard interrogating me for half an hour because he wasn't convinced I would not illegally enroll to study without authorisation on my one-week trip to visit a friend at MIT, and two NYC cops getting into a fighting posture when I asked them for directions before settling down and merely staring at me like I am insane, and finally barking a useless answer. I have never been to a place in Europe where you couldn't ask police for directions and get a helpful and detailed answer.

I'm sure there are exceptions to the view I described, but I stand by most. It also is to be expected that exceptions would be highly overrepresented on a right-leaning American politics forum.

So, you’ve had a grand total of two interactions with American police - at least one of which seems like you just getting unlucky with two local beat cops whom you may have caught off-guard or who may have been occupied by something else when you approached them - and you’ve used these two interactions to form, and double down on, a perception of American policing which even you seem to acknowledge diverges wildly from the available statistical data?

No, I never said those were the only two...? Those were just on my first visit to the US. I later came back to spend several years there, which involved a few more interactions of my own that were mostly not any better, and many stories from people I knew personally that were significantly worse.

which even you seem to acknowledge diverges wildly from the available statistical data?

Huh? Germany continues having <20 people killed annually by police. That's <1/30 the killings, at ~1/4 the population. I'm not going to try to dig up statistics to compare every single detailed scenario, because where comparable statistics are easy to find it clearly backs up my narrative - for just about any possible hostile/violent action by police, US police do it at a higher rate than European police. I'm completely sympathetic to explanations along the lines of this being inevitable/justified because the population being policed is much more dangerous and unruly, but this does not mean you have to deny the basic discrepancy of symptoms

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Huh, where are you from?

I won't get specific, but I'm from Eastern Europe, and currently living in the west.

My very first impressions of US police (when I came for the first time as a tourist) consisted of a border guard interrogating

Ok, I didn't like the border guys either, but it's easy to not have a bad impression of their European counterparts when you're essentially out of their jurisdiction in the overwhelming majority of the continent.

and two NYC cops getting into a fighting posture when I asked them for directions before settling down and merely staring at me like I am insane, and finally barking a useless answer.

New Jersey cops would make small talk, and I'd shoot the shit with them every once in a while. Once I wanted to go for a walk on the beach and it looked like they were blocking the entrance, it turned out they weren't it's just a spot they picked to stand around on patrol, and when I asked if I can cross they were almost apologetic. I was in NYC too, and might have interacted with cops there too, but I don't really remember.

I have never been to a place in Europe where you couldn't ask police for directions and get a helpful and detailed answer.

Police in Europe tends to be cold and distant, and gives off a strong "don't question my authoritah" vibe. If you argue with them they'll fuck with you just to prove who's boss, though that may be a universal thing in any country. One time when I had a minor car accident and the other guy decided to call the cops, I was put through some bizarre shakedown at the hands of a sargent trying to impress 2 new trainees for absolutely no reason, since I freely admitted my culpability. Another time my car had an oil leak that I dutifully reported the moment it happened, and the cops decided to pay me a visit at 6AM on a weekend morning to interrogate me, trying to pin on me a completely different leak that happened a few streets away.

Europeans don't have militaries because they're satropies of the United States and expect its military's protection.

I see this talking point a lot and it always irritates me. Britain has 200 H-bombs. France has about 200 H-bombs. The European half of NATO has about 1.5 million professional soldiers, several carrier squadrons, huge numbers of tanks, aircraft and submarines... They have BAE, Rheinmetall, Eurofighters. They have 450 million people! It does not matter whether they spend 2% of GDP or 3% or 1%, what matters is the actual balance of capabilities.

How does Russia threaten Europe? This isn't 1978. Russian conventional forces are outmatched and pure demography is massively against them. There's no way 140 million people conquer 450 million when tech and wealth leans vaguely towards the latter.

The only thing the Russians have that Europe does not is a much larger nuclear arsenal and large-scale munitions production. The notion that Europe is somehow leeching off the US makes zero sense. They already have broad conventional superiority. Even with higher munitions output Russia is not capable of rushing through to Warsaw, let alone Berlin and wouldn't take such risks anyway. Why would they get into a war with several nuclear powers?

The US is actually a major threat to Europe, causing retarded wars in the Middle East with damaging flow-on effects into Europe. Or their rather successful gambit to split Russia from Europe. No more cheap energy from Russia, get excited about expensive energy from America! Of course the Europeans bear much of the blame for passively sitting back and letting the US protect them from competitive energy prices and homogenous, high-trust society. Nevertheless, the US is ultimately at fault.

The US's real dependants are in the Pacific - Australia, Japan, South Korea. They actually face an industrially, demographically, militarily potent foe in China.

What do you mean by ‘authoritarianism’? From my POV as an American I am much freer than a typical European, because Europeans don’t have any of the bill of rights. I have protections from search and seizure, protections in my speech and religious expression(and my religion is genuinely unpopular among some segments of society, which are disproportionately elite segments), can own a gun(although I get the sense that in large chunks of Europe I could own a gun with significantly more paperwork- still, not having to pay for a gun club membership because that’s what France requires is a benefit), and have expansive rights to defend myself and my property against criminals(which Europe drastically limits). That’s before getting into parental rights, or other merely customary legal differences.

The UK has more people in legal trouble over speech than Russia; these are not merely theoretical differences.


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