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Just when I thought lawfare was out, they pull me back in.
So.. a Delaware judge has once again unilaterally decided to void Elon Musk's $50 billion pay package.
For those following along, the timeline goes something like this. The exact details may be a bit fuzzy, but I think I have the broad strokes correct:
Elon Musk and the board of Tesla sign a compensation agreement where if Tesla stock goes up by some outrageous amount, Elon Musk will get an enormous reward. But it it doesn't, Elon will get very little.
People laugh (ha!) because the targets are so outlandish that there is no way in a million years that Tesla could ever...
Tesla stock meets and exceeds the targets
Some asshat with like 8 shares of Tesla sues, claiming that the pay package harmed him even though the price of Tesla stock has gone up like 1000%.
A Delaware judge sides with the asshat and voids the compensation agreement.
Elon asks for a shareholder vote on the pay package and wins with 72% of the vote despite a politically motivated campaign to pressure big funds to vote against it.
It goes back to the judge who says, nope, still doesn't count.
The judge awards the lawyers for the plaintiffs $345 million
Basically what this means is that, if you register your company in Delaware, a judge can prevent you from making legally binding contracts. If you make the wrong enemies, your shares in a company can be stripped from you. The lawyers who sue you will make a fortune.
There's a folk belief in the United States that companies register in Delaware to avoid taxes somehow. I thought this myself, but when it came time to register my own company, I learned that this is not accurate. Registering in Delaware doesn't save you any money and actually costs you quite a bit ranging from maybe $300/year for a small corporation to perhaps $100,000 for large one. People register their companies in Delaware because there is the perception that there is a large body of case law that protects companies against frivolous lawsuits.
Obviously, this is over now. You'd be a fool to register a company in Delaware. To quote Paul Graham:
The one thing I will mention is that companies historically preferred Delaware's Chancery court because there was no chance of a jury trial (most states allow either side to demand and get a jury). The fact it would be a unilateral decision was the selling point, as that is thought to be much lower variance than a jury. I.e. you can predict what each judge is likely to decide based upon case law and their previous decisions. Even if their decisions are not what you want, the fact they are more predictable than a jury trial is valuable.
So this really should only be a problem if this is not consistently followed. But given expert lawyers in Delaware were predicting the outcome prior to the original trial probably indicates that Tesla should have been able to predict this and take steps accordingly (structure the deal differently, have more independence between the people putting together the deal and Musk etc.).
Texas I think does allow jury trials for their Business court, so whether that is going to be better may be a gamble.
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Your (3) and (4) are (chronologically speaking) in the wrong order. The award was granted in Jan 2018 and the lawsuit was filed in June 2018, long before the performance targets were hit. The lawsuit has taken a long time to resolve in part because shareholder suits like this in Delaware put a heavy burden on plaintiffs looking to reverse corporate decisions.
I hate to break it to you but this is every jurisdiction in the nation depending on the terms of the contract and (crucially for this case) how they were reached.
Fair enough. I guess the difference is the quality of the judges.
As someone pointed out recently, the Constitution was seen as a work of genius when applied to the United States. When essentially the same constitution was applied to Liberia, the results were quite different.
There is no law written so well that it can't be bent to any purpose. Roe v. Wade stood for nearly 50 years and was based on almost nothing but the desire of the Supreme Court to have abortion legal. Here in Washington State the Supreme Court ruled that a capital gains tax was not an "income tax". I'm sure they wrote pages and pages of legal justifications.
Well, no, it's not about the quality of the judges. The entire concept of a corporation is underpinned by the idea that the corporation exists as an independent entity from the owners, and that the owners, in turn, have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the corporation. If this concept didn't exist then there would effectively be no corporations at all. Consider the following example: The founders of a company want to expand, and raise money by selling 49% of the company's stock and retaining a controlling interest among themselves. The founders hold key executive positions and the majority of the board seats. The stock sale raises 20 million dollars of investor money. Instead of investing it in the company, however, they split the 20 million among themselves as bonuses. Then, they go even further and vote to liquidate the company's assets and use the proceeds to pay themselves bonuses.
Obviously, if companies could do this nobody would invest in them. The Tesla situation isn't this egregious but the circumstances were enough to trigger additional court scrutiny. It isn't controversial to suggest that Musk has a disproportionate influence over Tesla; no judge is buying the "I just work here" argument. and the amount of the bonus was far, far beyond anything within the realm of what could be considered reasonable. It's easy to lose sight of thing when the numbers get this big and we're talking about the superwealthy, but 54 billion is a lot of money. It's about 25% larger than Ford's total market cap. It's in the neighborhood of the market caps of major companies like Allstate, Target, and Phillips 66. You can understand why the court might be concerned that paying an amount of money that could be used to create a Fortune 500 company from scratch as a bonus might not be in the best interest of the company, and why there might have been a bit of self-dealing involved.
It didn't end there, though. Musk still could have won the suit had he simply disclosed his relationship with certain key players, but he didn't, which raised the question of whether the shareholders were sufficiently informed, and was enough to void the transaction. The fact that the shareholders voted to uphold the deal at a later date is irrelevant, because there's no mechanism in the law for it.
I don't think there's an argument that the judge viewed the $56 billion compensation as too large due too its absolute size.
Why? Because if we're using the absolute size of the reward as the metric (and not relative size) then the same logic must apply to the plaintiff's lawyers. But it clearly didn't as they stand to be so enriched by this lawsuit that it will rank among the largest awards ever given to a legal team. (Possibly even the highest payment ever for a non class-action suit). Clearly, the judge is not against gigantic rewards in principle.
Nor should she be. The market cap of a dying company like Ford has little bearing on the market cap of Tesla. There's little doubt that Tesla's market cap is almost entirely dependent on Musk's involvement with the company. Getting 5% of the market cap gains for himself does not seem unreasonable.
I grant that there are legal peculiarities here that make the judge's ruling sensible on some level. But, on another level, it's clearly a miscarriage of justice since there was no harm done to shareholders (in fact, they have done extremely well) and the reward was also clearly what the shareholders wanted (having voted on it).
I suppose we can debate the twists and turns that led to this decision (and the monstrous reward given to the lawyers) but the end result is still the same: it's the wrong result. It doesn't fill me with confidence in the supposedly great legal environment of Delaware. Although I do agree with a different poster that a judge trial, even in deep blue Delaware, is likely to have a better result than a jury trial in a case like this.
The judge did apply the same logic to the attorney's fees. The Plaintiffs were originally asking for a contingency fee based on 11% of the amount of money they saved the shareholders, which came out close to 7 billion. It should be noted that they were already applying a significant discount factor to the 33% they would be entitled to under the standard formula. The judge knocked this amount down even further, precisely for the reason that the total dollar amount was so high, even if what they were asking for wasn't a lot in comparison to the total amount at issue. She went on to explain that while courts have adopted various guidelines to determine reasonable compensation, the judge has the ultimate authority to make that determination. She then adopts the alternative valuation formula that Tesla asked for.
The court doesn't doubt this, but the defendants made this argument, and it was rejected nonetheless. The problem the court noted was the absence of any element of bargain from the transaction. In a typical executive compensation package, the idea is that you want the CEO or whoever to have some skin in the game, and at the same time you don't want to lose him to another company, so you offer a compensation package wherein he gets stock options commensurate with increases in the company's valuation. the shareholders benefit because the CEO has skin in the game and they won't lose a good CEO to a better offer. The record in this case doesn't support the contention that that was an issue. The first thing they noted was that since Musk already had a 20% stake in the company, he already had sufficient incentive to meet the benchmarks. But beyond that, he never gave any indication that he'd leave the company or dedicate less time to it without additional compensation. The defense tried to argue that the additional compensation was needed to keep Musk from getting distracted by other ventures, but Musk himself testified that the package had no influence on how much time he spent working on Tesla. The court also noted the absence of any concurrent obligation for him to dedicate any amount of time to Tesla.
Beyond that, though, the biggest problem the court seemed to have with the package is that there was no real negotiation. From the record, it looks like Musk decided what he wanted, drew up the terms for it, asked the board for it, and got it without any pushback. No one on the Compensation Committee ever offered any counterproposals or questioned any of the terms. Musk himself made several changes backing off the amount of compensation, but he admitted that these were of his own volition and not because anyone at the company suggested that his initial proposal was too rich. When you admit that you were "negotiating with yourself" in court, it doesn't create the impression of an arms-length transaction.
The defense tried to make this argument, too, and it failed, for reasons related to those above. The fact that the shareholders have done well is irrelevant to the argument since the defense failed to show that the compensation agreement had anything to do with the increase in share price. Musk wasn't even working at the company full-time throughout the relevant time period. If the shareholders would have got rich anyway, then the harm is that 55 billion that could be invested into the company is going to one person who can do whatever he wants with it. As for the stockholder vote, you need to understand the posture of the case:
If this is a normal company where the CEO and board are independent and no one person holds a disproportionate amount of stock, the deal is going to be presumed valid so long as there is a reasonable business justification. In this case, though, it was clear that everyone in the company was more or less subordinate to Musk, as was evidenced by numerous examples presented in the record. Since he had so much influence, the court has to exercise a heightened standard of scrutiny where it determines if the deal was fair.
The burden of proving the deal was fair initially rests on the defendant, but it can shift that burden to the plaintiff if it can show that the shareholders approved the deal. This is what Tesla tried to do. The problem was that the company didn't disclose all of the inherent conflicts to the shareholders. This may seem like a petty, technical argument, but the court makes it clear that this isn't some kind of gotcha where they forgot to list one thing and their whole case goes to shit. It finds that there were numerous, material failures to disclose serious conflicts.
Since they failed to make the required disclosures, the stockholder vote was rendered meaningless, and the defendants retained the burden of having to independently prove that this was a fair business deal. Since, for the reasons stated above, they couldn't do that, they lost the case.
You need to get the idea out of your head that there's some sort of tribal component to this and that the judge just ignored the law to spite Elon Musk. Corporate law is incredibly complicated and can't be boiled down to a few common sense rules like "if there was a vote then it should stand", because that's not how it works. This level of complexity is precisely why companies choose to not only incorporate in Delaware but usually specify in the corporate bylaws that the Delaware Chancery Court has exclusive jurisdiction over claims arising thereunder, and why they will continue doing so. Yes, you can incorporate in other states, and for smaller companies it makes sense to just incorporate where you do most of your business. But if you get past a certain size or plan on going public then it makes sense to incorporate in Delaware, for the simple reason that the law there is well-developed and the Chancery Court is experienced in handling complex corporate cases. Say you incorporate in Pennsylvania. Venue rules are pretty loose here, and there's a decent chance that that derivative suit will be filed in a remote county and heard by a hick judge who's never handled a corporate case involving a public company before.
In this situation, there's a good chance that he's going to be 100% relying on the information presented in your briefs to educate him on what the law is, and there's a 50% chance that he doesn't actually read them and just asks the lawyers to explain everything to him in open court. If it's filed in a big city then you might get a judge with some corporate experience but just enough to think he doesn't have to read the briefs. He'll also have 7,000 cases on his docket and he'll repeatedly tell you to work something out among yourselves, and in the event the case actually goes to trial he'll ask you if you're going to be finished soon five minutes into your opening statement. I exaggerate, of course, but these are both very different environments than working in a court with a limited docket that handles corporate cases almost exclusively. This case generated a 200 page post-trial opinion. File in state court and you'll get "I rule in favor of the plaintiff" and maybe a brief explanation from the bench if you're lucky. In the rare event that the judge feels the need to issue a written opinion it will be a few double-spaced pages that offer only the barest legal analysis.
As far as Musk is concerned, Texas has tried to remedy this with the Texas Business Court, a similar court that is limited to high-value corporate cases and keeps a light docket, but they just started hearing cases in September and it remains to be seen whether it will develop similarly to the Delaware Chancery Court. The enabling legislation doesn't limit jurisdiction to corporate cases, but to any litigation where the amount in dispute is more than 5 million, so it could certainly become a hellhole for mass torts, but maybe that was the intention. And while you mention that a judge is better than a jury, it's worth pointing out that juries are never used in these types of cases. There are technically two types of courts: Courts of law and courts of equity. Courts of law have judges and juries and the only remedy it can impose is money damages. At common law, courts could only award damages, so if you wanted to force someone to do something (or refrain from doing something), it required an order from the king. Kings delegated this authority to chancellors, who established chancery courts who could do things like issue injunctions, orders for specific performance of a contract, and other so-called "equitable remedies". Most jurisdictions have merged these two courts, but Delaware retains the distinction for some purposes. Given that the remedy sought in this case, recission, is equitable rather than legal, only a judge could award it.
During the relevant time period Tesla nearly went bankrupt, they had massive production delays and had set up assembly lines in tents, and Musk was sleeping in the factory. He could have been working at his other companies, namely SpaceX and OpenAI.
Sure, after that things were smooth sailing. But he could have spent his time on other stuff. If this ruling holds, Musk's current 17 or so percent of Tesla is worth about as much as his 40 percent stake in SpaceX given the current evaluation of >350 billion. There was a massive opportunity cost in spending that time at Tesla. Around that time he co-founded OpenAI, perhaps if he had more time to spend on OpenAI it would have been a better use of his time. Since the first ruling he founded a new AI startup that is currently worth over 50 billion dollars. In a very real sense, Musk could have created that much value in numerous other ways, his wealth wasn't necessarily as tied to Tesla as you might think.
More than that, it's unjust. When he made the contract it seemed absurd. He would take this horrible company and get rewarded for every 50 billion dollars he added to the market cap. It was a tremendous deal to the share holders, 1% of the company each time he increases it's starting value by over 100%. We know the opportunity cost of Musk's time. His other companies at the time included openAI, and SpaceX. There was in fact a massive opportunity cost, which is further demonstrated by xAI.
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Heading off on a bit of a tangent, why the fuck are the courts giving legal advantages to fickle mercenaries? The last thing I'd want to do if I was creating a legal system is punish people for being dependable and committed, but here we are: Musk was dependable and committed, therefore he didn't have the right to as much compensation as an outsider would have.
It's because of the rule that for-profit corporations are supposed to
be maximally evilwork only for the profit of their shareholders.This rule is there because without it, there's a major principal-agent problem with executives looting a company and stiffing the shareholders, or abusing company resources for personal/ideological projects (e.g. ESG), and that problem strongly discourages investment which slows down the capitalist engine by a lot. It's a shitty solution, but the other solutions are also shitty (the most-popular alternative is some form of socialism or fascism where private capital doing what it wants is not a thing).
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Isn't Tesla's registration moving to Texas for exactly that reason?
Yes. The bigger problem for Delaware, of course, is the future companies that won't register in Delaware.
Delaware's state budget is around $6 billion. There are 2 million companies registered there. It's quite possible that a large percentage of the state budget is paid for by franchise and registration fees.
Personally, I found the whole rationale for registering in Delaware pretty facile in the first place. You already have to register in the state in which you have your physical headquarters. So there's little reason to add a second state into the mix, exposing you to additional risk.
This one judge will likely cost the state billions in future revenue because of Elon Derangement Syndrome.
The reason that Delaware was the home for most publicly traded companies is that the state was one of the first to enact business-friendly structured corporate governance statutes, giving companies a predictable legal environment to work with. This also let Delaware develop a more mature tapestry of corporate caselaw earlier than other states, lending even more legal predictability. And once everyone started registering in Delaware, it was seen as displaying a lack of corporate sophistication to register in some backwater, lawless jurisdiction like New York or California.
Having anti-business, activist judges making these kinds of decisions is not great for Delaware’s reputatio , but how many executive comp packages are or ever will be even remotely close to this kind of absurd number. I would be surprised if this fact pattern ever reappears. Musk will get his payout under the Texas reorganization, so this is a relatively hollow victory for everyone except Plaintiffs’ counsel.
None, presumably. But Delaware's friendly case law reputation is now shattered. I'll posit that it was never real. Companies registered in Delaware because that's what other companies did. It was always bullshit.
The opposite now. But registering in NY or CA would be foolish as well, for obvious reasons. Small red states like Wyoming and South Dakota will replace Delaware as the go-to place for corporate registrations and have a much more credible case as defenders of the rule of law.
I create corporations from time to time and know others who do as well, and yeah, South Dakota is apparently hot right now.
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The fact pattern may not recur with those numbers, but it will recur with ever smaller numbers being seen as out of bounds.
Which honestly it should. Elon is a bad example in that Tesla wouldn't be where it is today without him, it's overvalued because of his perceived genius.
But look at GM and Ford! Tesla's direct competitors! Each CEO makes over $28mm, while they ceded the American passenger car market entirely to Honda and Toyota (among others). Honda and Toyota paid their CEOs $3mm and $6mm.
US executive pay is off the charts level of crazy. UK and European companies have CEOs rarely being paid more than $5 million or so and I don't think the quality of the people who become CEOs themselves is significantly better over the pond than here.
Fun fact: British American Tobacco (BAT), a large FTSE 100 company has an American Subsidary called Reynolds. The Finance Director of Reynolds, never mind the CEO, gets paid more than the global CEO of BAT based in London...
I'll try to steelman the high pay.
Let's take Musk. In the counterfactual where he leaves Tesla in 2018, the stock is down at least 95% from its current levels. So he gets paid $56 billion for generating something like $950 billion in shareholder value. I think that's fair.
What's the situation like in Europe? Well, it's grim. Twitter search sucks, but I saw a graphic comparing new companies started after 1980 in the US vs Europe. The US has huge numbers of huge new companies. The EU has only a handful of new companies that have reached a market cap of $10 billion. The US has something like 50 times as many, and the ones that do exist are much larger.
Edit: Found the chart
There's no reason to give a European CEO high pay. They are mere shopminders who are so hamstrung by regulations they can't build a big company anyway. You can't grow a redwood in barren soil.
What I can't steelman is high CEO pay for people like Mary Barra or Marissa Mayer who do an awful job as CEO, do real damage to their companies, and still get paid hundreds of millions of dollars.
Aren’t most CEOs compensated in equity/options, precisely to align their incentives with those of their shareholders? A CEO who is paid in shares, or in at-the-money call options struck at the beginning of her tenure will, by definition, stand to make no money by tanking her company’s share price.
I don’t know the details of the two cases you mentioned, but potentially the steelman is that from the perspective of shareholders/the board of directors/whoever decides executive comp, hiring these folks was a positive EV bet ex ante, which turned out to be a dud ex post. That a given instance of a positive EV bet pays out negative is not evidence that taking the bet was a bad decision.
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I don't understand it! Especially where foreign companies are clearly outperforming American companies, why wouldn't GM target a rising Toyota exec and offer him twice what a Toyota CEO would make but half what the incompetent GM CEO makes?
You could even try to poach the literal Toyota CEO with twice his current salary... Even if he's meh at GM you've still destabilised your competition somewhat by taking away their sitting CEO. That alone is probably worth it.
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You're assuming that CEO competence is unlimited in its range and potential. It could be that decisions CEOs make are fairly obvious and simple ones, that their skillsets are only somewhat more demanding than those of any other top tier professional, and that a lot of the variance of outcomes between companies comes down to more structural matters than whose at the helm. If business churn is more about structuralism than great man theory, then there are diminishing returns for attempting to poach talent.
No, I'm assuming the opposite!
I'm saying that there's no way Mary Barra is worth four times as much as Toyota's CEO.
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Isn't Toyota still family-run?
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It's totally plausible that Musk will ask for another similar contract. I think he's mentioned that. Getting from 50 billion to 1 trillion is much bigger deal than getting it from 1 trillion to say 5 trillion. He could reaosnably request a new contract where he's rewarded with options equal to 1% of the company for every 250 billion he adds to the market cap. It's more plausible than his last contract. He merges xAI with Tesla, gets Tesla's GPU business going, FSD seems to be making massive improvements in the past months, maybe robotics and boom, your at 5 trillion, it certainly more plausible than getting Tesla from 47 billion (which was seen as overvalued) to 1 trillion. So another contract like this is totally plausible.
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Yes, but in today's money talk, Matt Levine spoke about the tax implications of a new contract in Texas. In short, a new contract in Texas will have massively negative tax implications.
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Does he have any appeals left and is he taking them?
Quoth the NYT:
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Why did the plaintiffs' lawyers get so much money?
The judge "saved" Tesla shareholders $50 billion so $345 million is just a small amount of that.
Presumably many lawyers could have done that. Wouldn't it make more sense to pay them for the time and effort expended?
Lawyers (at least by their own reckoning) are difficult to bill. If they spend 2 hours writing a letter that convinces the opposition to give up a case worth $50bn, but they say they spent 200 hours researching in preparation, do you bill them for the time spent writing or the time spent researching, and how do you get proof of the latter?
In practice, corporate lawyers tend to be paid per job and per concrete action, but they charge huge amounts for those to offset the intangible/unprovable work done. The amount is basically a function of how much money is floating around the case.
Thus $50 billion turns into $300 million, of which the majority will go to the partners of the firm, and then to the taxman (at least in the UK) before it reaches the individual lawyers involved in the case. Still a very nice payout though.
I read read somewhere that it works out to about $17,000 an hour.
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Yes, of course. Welcome to the American legal system.
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Wait til you hear about real estate agents.
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I commented about this above, but to reiterate: The lawyers accepted the case on a contingency basis. Since the lawyers take on a considerable amount of risk by working on contingency, they're entitled to compensation beyond what they would get for time and effort expended, defined in terms of a percentage of the settlement. Delaware law provides guidelines for how attorney's fees are to be calculated in these kinds of cases, but attorney's fees are always subject to court approval for reasonableness. A strict reading of one test entitles the attorneys to get (roughly, I'm going from memory) 10% of the amount saved if the case is settled early, 20% if the case is settled after discovery, and the full third if the case goes to trial. By that test, the attorneys in this case would theoretically be entitled to something like 18 billion, but they knew there was no way in hell the judge would ever agree to that, so instead they asked for something like 6 billion, based on some byzantine calculation where they used various discount rates to claim they were entitled to 11% of the total. The judge still disagreed, saying they were nuts to assume that kind of windfall based solely on the unusually high value of the case. The judge did agree that the number was going to be high: She pointed to the fact that the litigation took 6 years and was disrupted numerous times (most notably by COVID and Musk's acquisition of Twitter), that they billed 20,000 hours, that numerous experts were required, numerous people had to be deposed, an inordinate amount of records had to be examined, and the issues involved were incredibly complicated. She then looked at the counterproposal from the defendants, which suggested that they should instead get 15% of some lower number I'm not entirely sure how they arrived that. The judge accepted that proposal.
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That the decision looks "boring" on some level says nothing about the motivation for it. It is not uncommon for arbitrary authority to cloak itself in the trappings of inevitable procedure... even when another authority could have come to a completely opposite decision based on the same procedure.
Anyway, it's $55B, not $10B, and if they'd awarded him a new grant there would have been various negaive accounting and tax consequences and in any case, there would immediately be a second shareholder lawsuit on the grounds that since the company had no obligation to pay Musk anything at all, the new grant constituted a gift to him and a violation of Tesla's fiduciary duty to its shareholders.
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This surprises me because Tesla clearly believed that the shareholder vote meant something. Are they idiots? I doubt it.
But even if this appeal was decided on boring procedural grounds, the original decision was very much about a woke judge sticking it to Musk.
And the judge could have at least limited the lawyers fees to something reasonable to prevent moral hazard.
If your read the opinion from the judge it's clear that, yes, Tesla was dumb in the way they went about it. If Tesla had done a shareholder vote at any point in the five years this lawsuit was ongoing, that could have ratified the package. Instead Tesla waited until they had lost and then did the shareholder vote to try and get the judge to reverse her decision. She also points out independent reasons why the shareholder vote wouldn't have the ratifying effect Tesla wants, including that the proxy statement for it contains material and misleading statements.
I mean.. maybe. But why would they do a shareholder vote to immunize themselves against a frivolous, politically-motivated lawsuit filed by a guy who had 8 shares of Tesla? Shareholder votes are not free.
And would the judge have really listened to the vote anyway? It's easy for her to say now. I'll admit I really don't have a lot of patience for the legal details when it seems that judges just use them as justifications for doing the things they were going to do anyway.
What is the evidence that the plaintiff of judge are politically motivated? "Company fails to take lawsuit seriously, gets wrecked" does not sound like a crazy thing? I would probably describe the Hogan-Gawker lawsuit similarly.
It's not just the judge saying this, she cites a bunch of Delaware precedent that votes during litigation can function as ratification for the corporate acts in question. Tesla (for obvious reasons) cannot find a single precedent that post-judgement shareholder votes can serve as a basis for overturning that judgement.
Yes, by begging the question and assuming that the judge is correct on all aspects, then clearly Tesla is in the wrong here.
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The evidence is that it’s absurd to bring a lawsuit against a company that made you a ton of money?
That hadn't happened when the lawsuit was filed. OP gets the order of events wrong. The lawsuit was filed 5 months after the package was awarded, well before performance targets were hit.
It's even more absurd to bring a lawsuit against a company for either making you a ton of money (if targets, which included market cap, are hit) or getting its CEO to work for you for free (if they aren't).
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The opinion is monumentally dumb, departing from the three prior rulings which wisely declined not to tread in this shaky ground and "going boldly where no man has gone before" to absolutely violate the fuck out of federal labor law. The judge flat out admits this rescission leaves Musk uncompensated for five years of labor, cloaking it in the fig leave of "well he made a bunch of money on the stock he already owned." That's not how employment law works- employees, including CEOs, must be compensated for their labor, this is a bedrock principle of America, we even have a fucking constitutional ammendment about it.
The judge can rule it was an unfair agreement, but to abrogate responsibility to determine fairness (with a piss-poor cite to another case about bonus claw backs where employees were still paid salaries) and simply say "nope, actually slavery is fine" because she didn't like how Tesla argued the case is gross misconduct.
I get that Musk is not a sympathetic plaintiff, and I get that Tesla didnt take this seriously, but the fact that a judge can rescind a mutually agreed upon contract and leave an employee with zero dollars for five years of work and no one is making a bigger deal of it is fucking mind blowing to me. This is the kind of precedent that kills democracy. At the very least, Deleware suddenly became a very unattractive state to incorporate in.
I mean, it becomes a very unattractive state to any company that doesn't obey the party. If they can keep alternatives from developing, this is just another win win for them.
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Huge tax implications for Musk, also a large short term accounting hit to Tesla.
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=8NLzc9kobDk
Milei on a podcast with Lex Fridman. Fridman is a bit of an empty head but Milei is great. Previously I read this summary of Milei by Scott Alexander, as well as several Economist articles on him, and all that information seems accurate from Milei describing himself. But the podcast also gives some new stuff I hadn't heard before.
a) He considers Ireland's market reforms a model and wants to go even farther, so that Argentina's the freeest country in the world. But he also spent a long time criticizing libertarians who criticized him, emphasizing that he had to live in reality and not put Argentinians through too much short term pain or Peronists would sweep him.
b) The economic statistics pre-Milei, as terrible as they were, were still cooked a bit because there were lots of price controls. But it doesn't matter if bread is cheap if there isn't actually any bread to buy. So removing price controls made inflation shoot up but also let people actually buy shit.
c) He's a big fan of the Austrian school and Mises, Hayek, Rothbard. Not a surprise, but I guess it confirms he prefers it over Chicago school. Personally I don't really understand the difference anyway.
d) He eliminated a system where there were middle managers handing out welfare payments, which was both a gross source of inefficiency, and allowed those middle managers to turn out the people they give payments to for large protests. This both freed up a bunch of money and got rid of a lot of stupid protests. According to Milei, shortly after he did that there was a protest organized against him that was expected to get 50 000 - 100 000 people, but only turned out 3 000.
e) He really, really hates socialism and loves freedom. He also doesn't like wokism and modern feminism, but his primary hate is socialism/communism. He also really does like Jews, he dropped in a few references to Egypt enslaving Jews and how he supports Israel today. He also really loves his dogs.
f) He recommends Trump/Musk move fast and get to cutting regulations as his #1 tip for DOGE.
g) He mentioned that Trump was "unfairly accused of protectionism" which is kinda funny to me. You can like or hate protectionism, but you can't really deny that Trump is a protectionist. Unless you're Milei I guess.
Protectionism in Argentina is off the charts. Maybe it doesn’t register as such by their standards.
Goes for other countries around there, too. I regularly read complaints from Brasilians that buying tech there is insanely expensive due to tariffs.
That particular price warp had them become a haven for retro gaming because everybody still used old consoles and arcades for a very long time.
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Yeah, for just one example, Argentina has a weird law on the books that requires smartphones sold in Argentina to be made at great expense in the remote Tierra del Fuego region. Xiaomi has set up a factory there.
Obviously there is a huge black market in iPhones.
Maybe it's all for the best when we factor in the immense social harms caused by smart phone use.
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This is fascinating, did he mention which specific reforms he was referring to?
He didn't, and I don't know much about Ireland, but my casual awareness is that they have extremely low corporate tax and have become an international tax haven. So I guess Milei wants to make Argentina a tax haven too.
Ah, correct on both counts: probably the main reason that so many tech companies (Google, Meta etc.) have their EU headquarters in Dublin (along with the English-speaking populace). Interesting.
For details, see leprechaun economics.
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[Apologies in advance for bringing up an old story, but I couldn't find any record of discussion of it]
Deep downthread in the election megathread @Folamh3 linked to a wonderful article you might all enjoy, but that's really beside the point. I want to talk about something mentioned within the article, namely a commercial. I'll copy the article's description here:
Here is the commercial in question that seems to have been almost entirely scrubbed from Youtube.. This kicked off a series of only vaguely connected thoughts I lack the ability to synthesize, but perhaps you all can put it together more successfully than me.
Burgers?
Of course there's a certain element of "Burgers?" to a commercial about suicide for an upscale department store. But I feel a few other elements of the commercial are curious to me. Take this screenshot from the ad, does this not look like a scene from Midsommar? Why are all the participants women? Why are they all White? This seems to frame the euthanasia as some sort of White feminist religious ritual, possibly connected with nature worship.
Suicide Girls
I'll note that the euthanized woman was described as having Ehlers Danlos. Anyone that has casually explored "SickTok" in the past few years will have surely heard of this condition. While I'm sure it's a real disease in some cases, there is undeniably a trend among young women sharing this concept with each other. I actually first encountered this disease when exploring the twitter of a porn model (so sue me) at least a dozen or more years ago. It struck me at the time as an obviously invented attention-seeking condition that allowed her to post hospital selfies every few weeks and be continually weak and bedridden with no obvious externally visible symptoms.
My second encounter with this disease was my cousin. My cousin is a few years younger than me and fifteen years ago was a sufferer of gluten sensitivity of one form or another (when it was popular for everyone to be suffering from it). About three years ago I heard she was now suffering from Ehlers Danlos.
It strikes me as telling I first encountered this in a porn model as I now consider them to be sort of canaries-in-the-coalmine for female neuroses and social messaging, obviously being more susceptible than most to these things.
Appropriately I just saw this going viral on twitter yesterday with the infamous Taylor Lorenz catastrophizing about her long COVID
Antinatalism, Environmentalism, Suicidality and Leftism
Here I'm just going to wave my hands in the general direction of The Socialist Phenomenon with its lengthy sections relating the running theme of suicide pervading socialist movements (Christian and otherwise) throughout human history. If you ever visit the /r/antinatalism subreddit you'll notice the distinctly leftist and often environmentalist concerns of its posts. In contrast, as pessimistic and addicted-to-doomposting as the far right can be I've never detected a major suicidal or antinatalist current on /pol/ for example. As an aside, see the movie First Reformed, it's horrible.
So what to make of this? I don't know exactly how to piece it together but there is some common through-line that connects feminism, White people, desire to be ill, environmentalism and suicide. Just wanted to hear whatever thoughts this commercial might spark in you all, as I don't really know how to connect the dots myself in a satisfactory way. Apologies if this is not coherent or focused enough for a top-level post.
If someone showed me this ad context-free, I'd believe it if they told me that it's AI-generated right-wing propaganda intending to illustrate, in a Straussian manner, that white woman feminism is a meme/cult that only leads to mass cultural and biological suicide (with Midsommar, Sphere, and Aniara somewhere in the prompt). There's even a random exposed tattoo parlor in the forest, with a woman getting her skin scribbled (the main character?).
Esoteric right-wing propaganda makes more ex-ante sense than a fashion retailer making a commercial glorifying assisted suicde.
This reminds me of a thread we had discussing an outdoor anti-natalist ad, where someone Noticed that, when it comes to anti-natalist messaging, the usually diversity-loving (where diverse mostly just means black—and to a lesser extent, brown) corporations, governments, NGOs, and activists are suddenly more than okay with only having white people depicted. It might had been the same thread where someone remarked that any messaging that contains just a single white man will typically be gay-related.
Aren't the ads saying that euthanasia is positive, though?
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I watched two close relatives die of dementia after long periods with the disease. They turned not merely into shells of themselves but into violent, nasty, angry, monsters who disgraced both memories of them in the eyes of others and the dignified and honorable lives they had led.
The great tragedy is that you don’t feel your own memory slipping away until you’re past the point where you can truly choose to die (you do feel it, and many dementia patients have early moments of extreme frustration as they feel their short and medium term memories vanishing). If I should be unlucky enough to have the same condition in my old age, should I make it that long, I want to be killed at the point shortly after my memory goes and I forget the everyday things necessary to lead life well. I want to be killed, I want it to be fast.
All I want is some kind of process whereby I can sign over my life to some moderately respectable panel of doctors who can choose to have me killed at that point. I am willing to accept the risks, I have seen too much to want otherwise.
There’s r9k for that and plenty of overlap between posters on all major 4chan boards.
My plan, in younger years, was twenty pounds of dynamite on a 24-hour timer, secreted in the mattress under my pillow. The day I grew too far gone to remember to reset the timer would be the end of my troubles.
The people in the apartment next door must love you.
Maybe buy them a gigantic, ornate gong and insist they keep it just against that wall.
Solutions! ...But actually the plan was to be living as a hermit in the country by that point. I have a family now, so other solutions will need to be found. Maybe I'll take up wingsuiting.
Had a physical chemistry prof that tried wingsuiting once, and after that one time settled for watching videos of others. Hearing "Sail" by AWOLNATION always reminds me of him talking about Dwain Weston.
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You also lose the cognitive ability to enact a successful plan for ending your own life. This is an incredibly frustrating paradox.
Also - I am with you. I do not want to be around with dementia. Please. Use morphine to "manage" things, or some other kind of sedative, and make me comfort care only. Let an infection take me out and cremate me. Scatter my ashes in the woods...I always loved nature.
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My thoughts are that this stems directly from their view of the world. To them America and the West are a dystopian nightmare.
White Guilt, and present militarism
In Liberal circles, white people, and particularly white Americans, are racist, militaristic, and colonial. They also perceive that none of it is changing even a little bit. We support Israel which is racist and genocidal, we hold down minorities, and enrich ourselves at the expense of the non-whites of the world. And they see it as nobody aside from them actually caring.
Environment
Liberals believe that Earth will be literally uninhabitable within their lifetime. The air will be choked with pollution, the rivers poisoned, global warming creating deserts and rain forests and making things too hot. Nobody wants to do enough to fix it, and quite often want to go in the other direction. They see that nobody aside from them cares.
Capitalism
The rich run the world for the rich and everyone else suffers. Poverty is common, and all the things that should be free are instead not free. College costs too much. Health care costs too much. And again, none of this is noticed by anyone else, so nothing will change.
Trump
You might not notice, but we elected Literally Hitler in November. He’s going to build work camps. He’s going to round people up and either imprison them or deport them. The Handmaid’s Tale is going to happen. Again, nobody notices or cares and worse, half the country likes it. Which proves that white people are evil.
All of this is a profoundly negative world view. Dystopian even. Everything is terrible, and at best going to stay terrible forever, and very likely to get worse. If this is how you really see the world, obviously that’s going to give you anxiety and depression, especially if you’re hanging around others who share this view, and have few or no outside interests.
Are they really anti militarism? They have fanatically cheered on WWIII in Ukraine with maximalist war aims and a black and white view of the war. Obama, Clinton and Biden have been long term enthusiasts of pretty much every neocolonial project. I would say their worldview is a crusader mentality in which the world can be divided up into believers and heathens and the believers have a duty to crusade against the believers. Their worldview seems to be that there will be heaven on Earth once the entire planet has been converted. Since the heathens are fighting against heaven on Earth they are fundamentally evil and have no legitimacy.
Spending 2 trillion on a crusade for feminism in Afghanistan was hardly western civilization, it was a crusade for an ideology deeply opposed to western values. The left was opposed to militarism when they saw the Soviet union as a better representative of woke than the US. Today Russia is an Orthodox christian fascist state stopping the values of Netflix from being the global religion.
The left-liberals in the West are surely not pacifist, but those in charge like Biden have not "fanatically cheered on WWIII" and have, if anything, been criticized a fair bit recently for taking a long time to do things like allowing long-range missile strikes and other similar decisions by the actual war fanatics.
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Letting Russia conquer Ukraine unopposed is pro-war, not anti-war.
How about demanding a negotiated settlement instead of keeping the meat grinder going? Is that pro or anti?
Would Putin accept any settlement short of "I get some of what I want now, and come back for the rest later."?
If he wanted war why did he push for negotiations for 8 years after the coup? Even in 2022 the goal wasn't to take Ukraine, it was to get Ukraine to accept a peace agreament that was almost the same as Zelensky's election platform.
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He's not even going to accept that - he's either getting everything he wants or nothing. He's currently winning the war (in the sense of winning the fight) and momentum is on his side. What possible motivation does he have to stop and leave Ukraine a frozen conflict that will be a continual thorn in his side? There's nothing the west can actually offer that's worth the continued existence of Ukraine as a problem for Russia when he can just finish the job and get everything he wants anyway.
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NATO expansionism into every last corner of the map is pro-war. Russia wanted to negotiate over and over again. Zelensky's election platform wasn't that different than the Minsk agreements.
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War is peace.
TIL being anti-war means you must instantly roll over for anyone.
3 years is instantly? But I'll expand on my unnecessarily snarky comment.
Let's say you are anti-murder. Surely, a nice thing to be. But now you see someone about to blow up a bomb in a market so you shoot them dead. Are you still anti-murder? Probably yes, because you saved many people from being murdered at the cost of one.
Since you are a good utilitarian you decide, like Dexter, to start murdering serial killers. You kill 10 people who you are pretty sure would have killed more than 10 others. Are you still anti-murder? Probably... Except remember that time that Dexter killed an innocent person to keep from getting caught. You do it too. Are you you still anti-murder? After all, your expected value is still positive. At least, I think... What if you kill 5 people to save 6? What if you kill a guy who has a 20% chance of being a terrorist?
The point I'm trying to make is that politicians always try to justify the current war as an exception to the general principle of "no war". And these politicians are almost always wrong. Their complicated strategic calculations fall apart the instant they come into contact with reality. Simple heuristics are best. Military conflict begets more military conflict, and wars almost always cost more than people think (Hofstadler: this is true even when you take this into account).
When you're doing utilitarian calculations that involve the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, make sure your calculations are correct, and give yourself a wide latitude for the chance they might not be. While the initial defense of Ukraine was a good thing, continuing to spend the lives of innocent Ukrainian and Russian men in this conflict is not. And escalation is practically a crime against humanity.
If you want to wear the mantle of peace, you need to have a strong pro-peace bias, even if that means you aren't always a pacificist. And there is no way you could possibly characterize the actions of the U.S. blob in that light.
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In Us American writings about the Pacific War, the term "pro peace faction" is used to denote a clique of Japanese leaders who supported, after less than four years of war with the USA, terms of surrender much harsher than ones offered by Putin to Ukraine.
This term is also used as a label of the collaborationist faction (Wang Jingwe's regime) of Chinese during the Second Sino-Chinese War.
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There are still a substantial number of anti-war leftists. In any case those liberals who are pro-Ukraine see it more about funding the brave independent freedom fighters, the rebels, against the evil fascist Russian Empire that wants to occupy their land and destroy their culture. They map it onto the standard post/anti-colonialist framework in which they supported the natives against the French in Algeria, the natives against the Portuguese in Angola, the natives against the Dutch in Indonesia and so on, and in which they support them against the French in New Caledonia, against the whites in Hawaii etc. That the Ukrainian natives are huwhite doesn’t change that (even if the Russian army is more diverse) because Russia is fascist and evil blah blah blah.
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I agree that liberals and the left fit into parts of what you describe above but there is also a part of the establishment left that is somewhat different.
We could consider the left to also include the:
Pro war left.
Pro Israel left.
Pro rich woke left. Indeed, rich people who want cheap labor might be more sympathetic to multiculturalism.
Pro technology under their control left.
Pro intelligence services/FBI left.
and a left that sees the current west and finds plenty to like in the status quo and desires to push things even further.
Kamala Harris actually gained voters from Biden with voters that had incomes above 100,000. This could include some of the above categories of voters.
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The through-line is the conception of guilt and the utility of victimhood.
Only white people are sincerely interested in whether they are or are not 'guilty', whether their actions are 'just' in some universal sense. The Mongols don't torture themselves over Genghis Khan, the Turks take the attitude of 'it never happened and it was good that it did, Armenians are scum' when it comes to their misdeeds. Arabs will complain about the West but happily smash the Kurds. They don't think there was anything wrong with going around raiding and brutally enslaving southern Europeans, they haven't apologized for it. There's a reason Slav and Slave sound so similar - Turkey is sublimely indifferent to their role in the slave trade. Only whites think they have some need to correct for past wrongs they've inflicted on other peoples. So in our culture being wronged can be helpful, victimhood can be a useful status.
By and large, all other populations are immersed in Schmittian friend-enemy logic. It's still pretty hard to coax apologies and guilt out of Japan and they've been heavily immersed in white culture and norms for many years now. And before we messed with Japan, they were totally Schmitt-pilled, they were the archetypal 'white people are terrible oppressors and we're liberators (We shall do worse)' faction.
Environmentalism is another angle of being guilty, this time in crimes against the planet.
Antinatalism is an expression of an overwhelming sense of guilt. 'Being ill' is a way of being a victim and getting sympathy from others.
Feminism requires a sense of guilt and restraint in men to have much relevance. Afghan women might be super-feminist, that doesn't change their conditions. It's a little like anti-colonialism in that it requires the occupying power to feel ashamed and hold back their full power. The British could have (and did) smash colonial uprisings in Malaya and elsewhere - even then they reserved their full energy for killing Germans. If the British decided that they weren't going to give up India or Africa, there's nothing their subjects could've done against the enormous fleets, bomber wings, toxic gas and tanks (foreign intervention complicates this but it would mainly be an expression of broader white opinion)... But instead there were 'winds of change'.
Likewise, if men wanted it, feminism would be gone tomorrow. And so we see feminism has its fullest expression in white countries, followed by countries heavily influenced by whites.
If you have to claim it never happened I think it does demonstrate that on some level you're either aware it's morally indefensible and do feel guilty over it, or you at least know it would look really bad if you tried to defend it as justified. Even if in the next breath you go on to imply the targeted group were scum who would've deserved it anyway, people are quite capable of this sort of doublethink. I definitely think this is what's happening in most cases of people denying atrocities, whether it be the Holocaust, Holodomor, Armenian genocide or Japanese war crimes: they know they can't defend those things so they deny or downplay them instead. Obviously you have some non-white/Western examples there.
So, I don't think it's true that non-white people just don't care about whether they're morally culpable for various atrocities groups they identify with have committed, because if they didn't care they wouldn't feel the need to deny or downplay them. They would either defend them or simply shrug.
Wikipedia:
That's basically 'it never happened and it was good that it did'.
I'm surprised that the Turkish foreign ministry can't string together an English sentence but this does seem like an official website: https://www.mfa.gov.tr/the-armenian-allegation-of-genocide-the-issue-and-the-facts.en.mfa
They're just playing games, if you try hard enough you can produce mountains of proof in favour of the most ridiculous nonsense. As long as big players care about right and wrong, countries will produce all kinds of arguments for why they're in the right. And everyone does this stuff for propaganda reasons anyway.
Furthermore, unlike with the Holocaust, Turkey isn't going to apologize. They won't pay reparations. They won't write it in their textbooks that this was a terrible shame on their civilization - they say that patriotic Turks need to be vigilant against all national security threats. There is no 'never again'. Only whites do this. The substantive differences are more important than the rhetorical differences. Talk is cheap, actions are costly. And it's only white countries that take costly actions to uphold concepts of guilt and moral virtue - consider the British anti-slavery work amongst other things. Nobody else would even consider 'giving back' the Elgin Marbles.
I'm not saying that all genocides and atrocities are committed by non-whites, it's that only whites show any significant guilt or shame.
Only some whites do this.
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I wasn't accusing you of saying all atrocities are committed by non-whites. Anyway, fair, there is a distinction in how white/Western countries respond to accusations of having committed atrocities and how non-white/Western countries do, whether that be due to the influence of the Enlightenment or Christianity or post-WWII guilt or whatever it may be, and it does have important implications for culture and politics.
I still think the distinction isn't a result of non-whites not feeling guilty over their actions, though, it's just a different and more covert way of dealing with guilt. Rather than accept the framing of these actions as evil and apologise, sometimes to the point of exaggerating the harm or self-flagellating, non-white countries engage in downplaying and denials, and the fact they do this indicates they do feel their actions are difficult to morally defend. If Japan for example said the Rape of Nanjing did happen and comfort women were coerced and abused, just the way Western or Chinese historians claim, but that it was either good or at least justified in service to the larger national wartime goals, this would indicate a genuine lack of guilt and shame.
When they instead deflect and say Nanjing was exaggerated, or the atrocities weren't authorised, and anyway the other armies were just as bad, and the comfort women were mostly just normal prostitutes, it shows they know they can't convincingly claim those events as described by mainstream historians were morally acceptable, so they have to twist and distort the facts. Unless it were the case that the Japanese accounts were actually more accurate, I suppose.
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This seems just a difference in coping mechanisms. When the whites do something bad, they realize it will reflect poorly on them, and then try to correct it. When the Turks act impulsively and do something bad, they also wake up sober the next morning and realize it will reflect poorly on them, but instead of correcting things they somewhat immaturely retreat into a fantasy where it never happened and it also happened and was completely justified, which is a very obvious sign of guilt and shame to any intelligent observer.
If they truly felt guilty, then wouldn't they stop beating up Armenia? They've continued doing it to this day, they were helping Azerbaijan against Armenia in the recent war.
Turkey (as a collective) doesn't feel guilty any more than the serial armed burglar feels guilty for his victims who he thrashes and loots. The armed burglar might say (if dragged into court or questioned by some third party) that of course he feels guilty and ashamed and it was society's fault and he was underage at the time and his friends made him do it and they had it coming anyway... But there is no sincerity in his words. He might be sad that he got caught or that his actions have consequences, he doesn't really feel guilty or want to make amends.
If you think Turkey feels guilt, then do you also think the burglar feels guilt?
No. Feeling a certain way does not lead to the same behaviour in all cases. The feeling is an unpleasant stimulus and the behaviour it leads to depends on how you have learned to manage such unpleasant stimuli. Having a neighbour that constantly triggers the unpleasant feeling just by existing might well lead to holding a grudge for over a 100 years, if you are sufficiently immature as to being unable to see past the present moment. A more mature approach might be to realize that asking and receiving forgiveness resolves the issue now and forever and frees precious resources for something more useful.
If the Turks genuinely did not feel guilt they would say they drove away the Armenians and established a Turkish ethnostate, and are proud that they did, and not continue with obviously contradictory denials.
Perhaps you yourself have a somewhat immature point of view, as if playing a game of Sims or something. If the burglar says that they feel guilty, ashamed, are sorry and promise to not do it again, there is no sincer-o-meter that reveals if they "really" and "truly" mean it.
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As long as they're not firmly on the other side of the friend-enemy divide to the West they do need a fig leaf, as flimsy as it is, so that it doesn't become untenable for the West to be on friendly term with them, especially since it was sold to the western public after WW2 that a country committing a genocide or other atrocities is all you need to justify war with them. (I mean, there were complex reasons for WW2, but if you asked the average person, they'll say it's because of the genocide, even if it doesn't make sense chronologically).
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That’s absurd.
Every major belief system uses guilt as its feedback mechanism. The unusual thing about white people is that we’re running a system derived from Christianity. That tells us to feel guilty about a broader circle of concern. But if all the Christian guilt in the world circa 1700 didn’t stop white people from dominating, it can’t be the deciding factor now. Something else has changed the cost/benefit analysis.
IMO, what changed is anti-colonialism, enabled by increased European weakness after they got themselves into two unnecessary massive wars from which the Americans had to rescue them and into which they dragged, well, the world.
Europe basically destroyed itself, and because it became weak, it was unable to culturally or militarily resist anti-colonial actions. The US pushed that process along by endorsing anti-colonialism.
To maintain relations with the now fracturing empires, upon which they were economically dependent, Europeans were forced to become apologetic and humble. And like the Japanese after WWII, they complied with this necessity.
So then generations of European elites were raised in a milleu of anti-colonial apology, which destroyed any sense among Europeans that they were good, or moral, or valuable, or net-positive in the world, unless they were steadfastly repentant and self-abnegating.
And because American elites have always obsessed with being accepted by Europeans (who look down on them), where European elites go, American elites follow. This has only somewhat reversed with American social leftism being exported to Europe, but Europe was already fertile ground for such things and the critical and postmodern theories that enabled their rise in the academy originated in continental philosophy. People, including themselves, like to see the postmodernists as these great contrarian rebels, but really they were just providing intellectual explanations of the prevailing social winds on the continent the same way medieval theologians were providing intellectual explanations of the teachings of the Church.
I'm of the opinion that Adolf Hitler was the worst thing to happen to Europe since the plague. The death of half the population would have been less terrible than the humiliation they've undergone.
Something like that, yeah.
The Industrial Revolution gave unprecedented firepower to European empires. As it continued, that power was steadily diluted to their subjects. By WWII’s end, we’ve got the Maxim gun, but they have, too, not to mention the improvised explosives. The balance tips. Maintaining a garrison rapidly gets more expensive. Colonial policy has to tread ever more carefully. At a certain point, it’s no longer cost-effective to play at empire. Only the biggest can keep trying, and they’re usually pretty unhappy with the process.
So yeah, social pressure shies away from traditional colonialism. It’s expensive and keeps generating ugly pictures for our mass media. Every time someone bucks the trend, they take a bunch of casualties and then get accused of being fascists. Far better to find a reason to give up that imperial ambition.
Two years after the maxim gun had been developed, well before it had reached wide acceptance:
Arguably it was never cost effective.
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It wasn't fully expressed back then, people had ways to rationalize it 'oh these natives are savages we can do as we please' or similar. Or 'we're colonizing them for their own good' - which was often true, or at least they thought they were doing that at times. Spreading Christianity was a major part of the colonial mission, from day 1.
Back in the 1600s, back at the beginning of the colonial story in North America the native Americans managed to get several devastating sneak-attack raids off on the English because the latter stupidly decided to be friends:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_massacre_of_1622
They did the same thing again in 1644 and managed to kill another few hundred people! It took enormous amounts of experience before whites worked out that they weren't friends with the native americans, that their interests were opposed. And this was quickly unlearnt after the latter were thoroughly beaten, now there are land acknowledgements and so on.
There's no cost-benefit analysis that says men gain by giving women much more power in society (thereby losing power themselves). It can only be a moral, justice-based approach.
That particular massacre was less than 10 years after open English raids on the Powhatan. They clearly knew how to fight, even though they fell for the ploy.
Guilt is a luxury. The West is unusually luxurious. This dwarfs racial makeup when predicting the popularity of guilt-based policies.
Look, I happen to believe it’s moral and just to give women power, too. It still didn’t happen without struggle. Nearly bloodless, mind you, because we actually like women and want them to like us in turn. That’s the cost-benefit.
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The desire to be ill connection is just women wanting a socially validated way to make others pay attention to them and take care of them. Imaginary gluten allergies or whatever other munchausen makes the group center your needs.
As far as the rest of it, far left ideas of the progressive variety are connected to suicide mostly because progressivism is basically about freedom from the things that make life meaningful. No God, no family, no role in society. All of these things are normie or conservative. And this sense of alienation is what causes suicide, over and over again. It’s simply inhuman to live without obligation, alone and unbound.
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The wages of success are that people with no physical wants often find life unfulfilling. Some subset of those people will externalize that inner psychic pain as various vague illnesses or socially-advantageous identities, some will choose eschatological fantasies to give their nihilism meaning.
Global Warming hysteria is just christian The End Is Nigh catastrophizing with extra steps. The bitter middle-class spinsters that would have become religious nuns five hundred years ago are now "transmasc". The Jain invocation that the most moral thing you could do is starve yourself to death without producing children or harming even a gnat is funneled into dietary restrictions, assisted suicide, and various anti-fun groups. It's all luxury beliefs, and it's why poorer countries are often much happier than richer ones. Struggle gives meaning, need creates community, which gives meaning. Only in rich countries are we comfortable enough to pretend a disability.
Underlying it all is a fundamentally pessimistic worldview that sees existence as not being worth the trouble. "That burden my father gave to me, but which I gave to no man". You see this on the internet with people talking about how they didn't ask to be born etc.
Camus said the fundamental philosophical question was whether or not to keep living. I tend to agree.
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Isn't the through-line that connects these things together just good, old-fashioned Gnosticism? The religious view that the material world is evil and that the subjective relgious experience is primary is all that is needed for to connect propensity to suicide, disgust with the material world, obsession with purity and disease, and antinatalism.
There might be some psychological root to that as well, given that it seems to pop up many times through history, or some kind of philosophical prion that warps the perception of reality of anyone who comprehends it.
There's a reason that particular type of heresy keeps on appearing on Christianity.
I think it's down to the fact that Christianity lays out the right philosophical substrate for it by venerating the immaterial and rejecting material urges. And there's a set of mindsets and incentives that can make this grow quickly and escape control before it collapses in on itself.
All ideologies have failure modes like this, and a lot look like that kind of mass psychosis. Usually the long lasting ones have institutional mechanisms to prevent those failure modes from capturing people.
The thing is we don't really have those anymore.
CS Lewis mentions the paradox of how Christianity is not only more spiritual than any Greek philosophy, it’s more carnal than any pagan religion: blood, perfectly pure God in farting, belching human flesh, a real human sacrifice to trade for your life, insistence that certain bodily acts stain the soul, and so on.
The Gnostics lose sight of the carnality of Christianity because of the ick factor, or as Lewis put it, “repellent doctrines.”
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I think that the tendency you are describing has to go back at least to Plato, well before Christianity entered the scene. If anything, Christianity opposes that trend by making the bodily resurrection a key element of its theology and affirming that the material world was good when it was originally created. Of course many influential Christian theologians have been influenced by (neo-)Platonism, so there is plenty of Christian theology out there that is susceptible to this heresy, but I am pretty sure its origins in Western thought is Platonism rather than Christianity.
And within Christianity Gnosticism seems to always come from the east, with more platonic theology.
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Plato's a good suspect. And in a sense the inquisition was Aristotelians crushing Platonist revolts. But I'm not convinced it started with him. You can see things that look like this in pre-socratics like Pythagoras.
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In the Middle Ages, it was supposedly not uncommon for rich people to spend the end of their lives in a small cell in a monastery, forgoing all Earthly pleasures for the promise of redemption.
And while there's probably not much loss to society in retiring a few old lions early, lots of young fertile people entered monasteries and convents, forgoing any chance of having a family line. These people didn't have any personal assets, but their institutions become incredibly wealthy. By the time of Henry VIII, the monasteries supposedly owned 1/3rd of the land in England. Shutting them down unlocked massive gains in prosperity.
And the priesthood likely acted as an IQ shedder as well.
The fact that Europe rose relentlessly despite a large percentage of its population being devoted to heavenly pursuits is really remarkable.
I suppose the problem with today's ascetics is they don't exist within the fabric of a vibrant, growing, pro-natal society.
An institution that collects knowledge and spurs technological growth but also hoards societal wealth and prevents all its high-IQ members from ever reproducing? We have that today, it’s called “Silicon Valley”
Monasteries seemed to take mostly younger children of the nobility which society had no good answer for anyways.
Nobles usually endowed a monastery with some land in exchange for taking in their runts. I reckon the kids would have been fine spending the cash squeezed from the starving peasantry on hookers and blow directly instead of having to re-earn it through prayer.
Who would advance civilization and pray for the salvation of humanity if they did that though?
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They also would take in retirement age nobility as well. Genius solution if you're an earl or duke stuck with a harridan MIL.
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Is it possible that the two are related?
Cistercian monasteries spread new technologies through high and late medieval Europe much faster than the historical norm.
Yes, and I think that aligns with the point @TitaniumButterfly was making.
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How many is "lots" here? We talk about this every so often here and I've never gotten a good idea.
I think estimates for the monastic population in Europe in the period 1200 to 1500 vary wildly by country, time and methodology (a lot of extrapolation from census estimates by historic demographers coupled with estimates of average monastic population multiplied by the total number of monasteries in a province, which were often somewhat well recorded). Figures online seem to cluster around the 0.4% to 2% range for the total of all clergy.
Thanks. That range seems high, higher than I assumed, but not high enough for many of the theories about the problems caused by their absence (e.g. monasteries as release valve/containment zone for autists and other types)
They could have been a decent release valve for the biggest autist or something in the village...the 1/1000 village autist who might have a bad temper or something.
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According to Perplexity about 2% of the population of England were under holy orders at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries.
Probably higher among the upper classes.
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Wouldn't Buddhism be the motherlode of such ideas, then?
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See this Quillette article on how the symptoms of "long Covid" are so variegated that people who claim(ed) to have been suffering from it may have simply been using a topical buzzword to describe the ordinary ennui, malaise, tedium and frustration attendant to modern life. It has not escaped my notice that the demographics most likely to claim to suffer from long Covid are the same demographics most likely to
I'm being a bit cheeky here, because on both occasions I had Covid, I uncontroversially had long Covid symptoms: in the first instance a persistent sore throat, in the second instance an extremely phlegmy cough, both of which persisted for months after the acute symptoms went away. But the key differences are a) my initial dose of Covid (and I think also my second) was confirmed via antigen test; b) the symptoms I was reporting were extremely specific (as opposed to impossibly vague constructions like "fatigue") and c) the second instance of long Covid went away after a GP prescribed me an inhaler and a course of antibiotics.
I had a persistent (dry) cough for half a year after a non-COVID respiratory illness, and such a thing was never too uncommon among people I knew as they grew older. If after COVID this counts as "long COVID", then long COVID is not as unique or novel a threat as it is made out to be.
I don't think there's anything remotely unique, novel or threatening about long Covid. Sequelae for the flu were known to be a thing for decades before Covid. It's just a rhetorical tool pro-lockdowners only invoke while moving the goalposts when the more relevant metrics aren't producing the desired results.
It's one thing that really annoyed me when arguing with people who were in favour of prolonging lockdowns indefinitely. When Covid death rates started to decline, pro-lockdowners would inevitably resort to "but what about muh long Covid???"
Having gone through it twice now, my response to that is "yeah, it's a bit annoying. Is preventing it worth shutting down the entire country and throwing thousands of people out of work indefinitely? No, obviously not." (Even assuming that NPIs which throw thousands of people out of work indefinitely are even effective at preventing it.)
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My perception was that people thought that the fairly severe post viral disorders that we already know can occur after infections might have had a higher incidence rate for Covid, especially pre-omicron, but the definition got so ridiculously widened so that it included pretty much every person with any kind of lingering effect, if thats a cough, lessened smell or being so debilitated that they can't stand up.
This lead to sinulatanous claims of long covid occuring after something like 5-40% of COVID infections and that it's extremely severe, when in reality it's only that severe in some fraction of a percent of cases and likely isn't meaningfully more common than for other viral infections or the flu.
So did COVID cause a higher rate of post viral disorders or not? Was there anything novel about those disorders? Did some variants cause more severe issues than others? We have fucking idea because all the stats are so thoroughly contaminated that you can't discern anything at all with them being close to 100% noise.
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Interesting choice to reference Lorenz here, since she is against assisted suicide and its legalization, and has been posting a fair bit in Twitter (and presumably Bluesky) about the recent British legalization of assisted suicide (see eg. this tweet and this tweet).
Of course, this isn't particularly surprising if you consider that both Lorenz's COVID diehard soapboxing and this sort of opposition to assisted suicide spring from same source, or are at least justified with references to same rhetoric - disability activism and ableism. There's been quite a fracas in left-wing Twitter generally since the election about whether left-wing movements should continue with COVID precautions like masking (see comments and retweets to this tweet, for instance), with the masking advocates (who are considerably in the minority, to be noted) primarily justifying the practice as a way of solidarity towards disabled people and COVID risk groups.
The same anti-ableism advocates have been also generally very critical of euthanasia and the burgeoning euthanasia culture including, presumably, ads like the one linked. This is probably a large reason why the recently passed assisted British law had a considerable contigent of left-wingers voting against it in the Parliament (147 against 234 within Labour), with - as far as I know - specifically the left wing of Labour being more likely to vote against it.
Ah, so that’s why covidian lol cows have been getting retweeted into my feed.
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I do find it very frustrating that before assisted suicide has even been legalized for terminal cancer, we're already talking about 30 year old women with psychosomatic illnesses. I think assisted suicide is obviously a good thing, because nobody should be forced to endure the last 3 months of a terminal illness if they don't want to. We can immediately recognize that it's cruel to let a dog suffer until the bitter end, but we can't extend that compassion to 90 year old humans in excruciating pain?
If the anti-suicide people are responsible for steering the debate away from the situations where euthanasia is obviously good and just, and toward the most ridiculously favorable ground for their side, I have to tip my cap to their genius. It's some kind of reverse Motte and Bailey that seems to happen with a lot of social issues. Moderates support allowing adults to be transgender if they want to, and then suddenly we're arguing about womens' sports and 9 year olds transitioning, and the moderates are stuck either defending indefensible and irrelevant nonsense or being called bigots by the radicals on their side.
You say this like it’s the anti-euthanasia and anti-trans people who decided to start pushing for ridiculous outcomes in order to bolster their side. But in every case, it’s the proponents who have no sense of moderation.
Edit: On reflection, your second paragraph is basically just “Republicans pounce,” except with other groups subbed in for Republicans.
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This is why I just gave up and started voting straight-ticket Republican. It's all delusional weird guys with no social skills who collapse whenever anyone comes at them for real. You realize the Democratic party has nothing to do with you in real life, right?
"Enlightenment liberals" are over and dancing with a corpse.
Three strikes, you’re out.
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Everyone's black in advert land, unless the advert is for suicide.
I saw a billboard the other day featuring a black woman with big hair and a giant, genuine white smile, head tilted back slightly, eyes shut in pleasure brought about by her use of the product.
I've been seeing the same billboard for the last two decades. The product changes often. The model changes also. But it's always the same thing. The hair never changes. The facial expression never changes. The skin color never changes.
You'll see her everywhere too, now, if you hadn't before.
Do you remember what was the product or service being advertised?
In this case a handbag.
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Oh, where's that old SSC post about all the "weird" things that seem to disproportionately attract white people? Cycling, bird watching, cosplay, whatever the examples were. Special interests in general seem to be an inherently "white" thing.
The creativity of the European mind means it's also more creative in finding new ways to destroy itself. (Although of course the generalized culture of anti-whiteness we have in the West today isn't helping.)
Fittingly, the ad itself gives me strong Midjourney/Sora vibes. Lots of disjointed static shots with minimal action.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/11/black-people-less-likely/
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Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is absolutely real, and monogenic in many cases which provides a clear, objective diagnosis. Then there is a bucket of patients with hypermobile joints, issues with their digestive tract and random pain/other things. That being said, seeing someone flex their pinky backwards past 90 degrees, or their thumb way down to their wrist is profoundly disconcerting and also somewhat objective.
You’ll forgive my skepticism if I say that this sounds like a fully generic set of symptoms for a disease spread by social contagion rather than by actually existing.
If you see someone on tiktok who never shows you concrete evidence of any of the symptoms above and claims to have EDS, be skeptical and say social contagion.
If I can show you that loss-of-function mutations in collagen or collagen-related genes lead to a syndrome characterized by defects in collagen (i.e. joint hypermobility, esophageal issues, frequent dislocations, weaker blood vessels and organ tearing) with a very high penetrance and that tracks in families, if I can compare mutant and wild-type forms of those proteins in in vitro functional assays and show a difference, if I can either knock those genes out or induce the same mutations in various animal models and show the same syndrome and you're still skeptical of the existence of EDS I'd say you're an [expletive redacted].
If I can't show you a genetic mutation for a subset of patients that still have many of the symptoms above, well, sure, some people may be lying. But...you understand this is true of many diseases, right? Like, do you not believe in lupus? Clinical depression? Rheumatoid arthritis? Many (possibly the majority, or all) diseases have extreme monogenic forms and milder polygenic (we assume) forms. Similar to Alzheimer's patients with mutations in PSEN, APP, etc. who get an aggressive, familial form of the disease in their 30s versus most Alzheimer's patients who show up ~60-75.
Except you haven’t shown me any of these things. I’m prepared to take your word for there being a gene mutation which causes those symptoms, in this specific instance going by the name EDS. But ‘some attention-whoring women with poor mental health claiming the disease exists because of a set of symptoms nearly all attention whoring women with poor mental health exhibit’ was the evidence presented, and it is indeed a valid criticism that that’s the same thing as transgenderism, anorexia, non-celiac gluten intolerance, etc.
Do you want papers?
I can't and am not trying to tell you that everyone on SickTok is sick. All I'm saying is that EDS is almost certainly a real disease, and not even as ambiguous a diagnosis as some other things that are less controversial.
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How exactly do you pick up joint hypermobility via social contagion? I'm willing to believe your argument (and I'm sure there are other mysterious syndromes which are actually just social contagion) but in this case there's an actual physiological difference that seems beyond the ability of the human body to fake. Joints normally can't bend that way and I don't think reading a bunch of tumblr posts can really change that.
Devil's advocate that these people are all doing yoga or something and so becoming very flexible. On the other hand, how's that making their skin stretchy?
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I mean, this does exist. I'm non-celiac but I can't consume gluten.
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Official government webpage https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ehlers-danlos-syndromes/
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You should see my skin, i can do pretty good Dilophosaurus impression.
Both me and my mother have Ehler-Danlos but only I have had any (non-cosmetic)issues. Those have thankfully been pretty minor and have responded well to medication.
We used to have our more clinically-focused research meeting Monday mornings. Everyone would rotate through every few months, and people seemed to think the best way to show off the importance of their research was to present graphic images of their patients suffering. One doctor studied some immunodeficient patients, and insisted on showing this one woman's vagina exploding with genital herpes Every. Goddamn. Time.
The EDS guy always showed his patients bending their thumb down to touch their forearm, which was disquieting in it's own way.
There are also a BUNCH of people who have mild EDS and are lucky/managing it well and are therefore more or less asymptomatic. The person I knew who painlessly dislocated her own elbows every time she made her bed thought she was normal and didn't have any pain or symptoms. Unfortunately she got got by an autoimmune disease but mostly recovered. Same with the flexible guy I knew that fell off his bike and went to the doctor, where he learned he had mild EDS.
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Something to keep in mind with EDS is that their are a number of subtypes, and "surprisingly" the one we see in these types is the one with least ability to be objectively assessed.
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Ehlers-Danlos syndrome seems like a very strange choice for the latest brand of anxiety-like illness. Unlike all the others, it's an existing disease with diagnostic criteria, symptoms that are pretty exclusive to it, and a suspected genetic cause. Are people now claiming to have Ehlers-Danlos despite lacking connective tissue symptoms?
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So far as I'm aware, every prominent recent example of a person openly identifying as transracial or being exposed as a racial charlatan (in the sense of trying to pass themselves off as a member of an ethnic group they're not, by subterfuge) has been a white person. The canonical example is of a white female academic, activist or politician who presents herself as Latina, Native American or more rarely black, in order to secure a job which is explicitly or implicitly ringfenced for members of such groups. But they don't seem to be doing this cynically, as an expression of their contempt for subaltern ethnic groups. In essentially all cases of note, the person in question seems so socially progressive and steeped in post-colonial theory that they almost seem to wish they really were members of these ethnic groups, and so they're playing an elaborate game of Butlerian performative declaration (clap your hands if you believe): announcing that they are members of these ethnic groups makes them so.
Is there a corresponding trend, for non-white people to identify as white, or try to deceitfully pass themselves off as such? And I'm not talking about implicitly (e.g. Indian women using skin-lightening creams), but explicitly the way white progressives do.
Back in the 19th century, it wasn't uncommon for a black person, or especially a mixed person, to try to pass as white.
There's also the classic Eddie Murphy SNL skit where he goes about a day of his life in whiteface (White Like Me), though viewers seeing it as absurdist might be taken as a sign that it wasn't common.
Yes, I'm familiar with the phenomenon you're describing, and the fact that at least some white people in certain industries think their careers would stand to benefit by attempting to pass themselves off as non-white people shows how far the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. More recently, Philip Roth wrote a novel about a black man whose career in academia can be at least partly attributed to successfully passing himself off as Jewish, which was widely (and apparently erroneously) believed to have been inspired by Anatole Broyard, a mixed-race writer and critic who died in 1990 and who passed himself off as white.
I'm curious if the phenomenon still exists in the "non-white -> white" direction, as opposed to its modern incarnation of "white -> non-white". Given the online circles in which I move, I hear about just about every example of a white academic or activist who gets exposed for pretending to be non-white, or a white teenager who "identifies as" trans-Korean or similar. It's possible that the reverse case may be equally common, but I just haven't heard of it because I'm in an echo chamber.
The politician Geert Wilders in the Netherlands is actually 1/4-Indonesian but dyes his hair blonde and wears blue contacts in order to be a credible anti-immigration candidate. (I don't really think rounding up 75% to 100% is that big a deal but the aesthetics of looking dutch are probably pretty important to him.)
Fascinating, I always thought his skin tone was noticeably darker than the typical Dutchman.
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He doesn't wear blue contacts. You can see that he has blue eyes in images of him as a pubescent youngster.
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Skin-lightening products are a gigantic industry. Just who do you think is buying them(well, yes, women, but what kind of woman)?
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"Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" by James Weldon Johnson is a great book-length example of that.
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Mindy Kaling’s brother (Tamil) famously passed himself off as black when applying for college iirc.
I initially thought this might not actually be a lie in the strict sense, because Kaling’s family may have lived in East Africa prior to immigrating (like the family of Rishi Sunak, for instance). This would make Kaling and her brother “African-American” in the same sense as Elon Musk.
But nope, turns out the Chokalingams came straight to America from India, no politically-expedient stopover in Africa involved. Which makes Mindy’s brother an out-and-out liar.
Wolbachia is a bacterial parasite that affects, among other things, malaria carrying mosquitos. Despite it being a quintessential parasite, because it feeds on something that hurts us it is on net a benefit to humanity. Same with Mindy's brother who fed on the woke spoils system. I hope he drained it as much as possible for himself.
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It’s called ‘passing’ and it’s so unremarkable as to be cliche.
But is there a prominent recent example of it?
Prominent? Not really, no, it’s a dog bites man story.
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You've been rather confrontational with me recently, and I don't know why.
I'm aware that "passing" was a thing in the past. My question was whether it's still a thing, in light of a significant body of evidence suggesting that "reverse passing" is on the rise i.e. that in many fields and social circles, a mixed-race person has more to gain by knowingly playing up their non-white ancestry (or inventing it entirely, in the event of a person lacking any such ancestry). I think it was perfectly clear from my comment that this was the information I was looking for.
Among Hispanics, yes, although it’s not the sort of thing that is newsworthy because it’s done by not-newsworthy people.
Being white is perhaps a detriment to upper-unremarkable people trying to become remarkable, but Jose six pack understands that going by ‘Joe’ and pretending he learned Spanish in school is of great help to a career repairing cars or whatever. I won’t comment on the accuracy of that belief, but there is a saying ‘Black is beautiful and tan is grand, but White is the color of the big boss man’, and for light-ish Hispanics that makes the course of events obvious. Grow facial hair that pure Indios can’t, speak English whenever possible, stay out of the sun, anglicize your name.
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Bobby Fischer emphatically denied his own jewishness towards the end of his life, but he didn't get any financial benefit from doing that, it was done as a performative political gesture.
By "denied his own Jewishness" do you mean "renounced his faith" or "denied having any Ashkenazi ethnic background"?
The second, he emphatically denied something that was objectively true. There's several letters to publications he wrote where he "corrected their mistake", and he's on camera doing it in an interview at some point.
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It would be interesting to see diagnoses of munchausen syndrome over time against the backdrop of the rise of social media. It wouldn't surprise me if this syndrome was also somehow related to the need to identify as a minority for certain types of people.
There's also been a fair bit of speculation that munchausen by proxy could be contributing to the increased prevalence of trans and non-binary identification of children by their parents.
I'm sick > attention is kind of wired into us all to a greater or lesser degree since we were babies. Not sure what the answer is, but trying to take the attention away is a bit like putting the genie back into the bottle at this stage.
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Perhaps related, the NHS reports that the two demographics most likely to present with Munchausen's syndrome are women aged 20-40 (often with a background in healthcare) and unmarried men aged 30-50: https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/munchausen-syndrome/overview/
WebMD reports that it's more common in men than women, but doesn't provide a source: https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/munchausen-syndrome
An interesting journal article about malingering, Munchausen's syndrome, Munchausen's by proxy and Munchausen's by internet: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3510683/
I can't help but notice that these are roughly the ages when women and men (respectively) would be married and raising their children, in a society where such things haven't fallen out of favour.
Searching for meaning indeed.
Well, do these stats break out into Munchausens and Munchausen's by proxy? Because you might have it exactly backwards, and the reason it's so common in these groups is that they're doing it to their children.
The NHS have a separate article about Munchausen's by proxy (here referred to as "fabricated or induced illness"): https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/fabricated-or-induced-illness/overview/
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I prefer to describe these as anxiety-like illnesses, since they're all co-morbid with each other and with anxiety, and share demographics. Yes, that includes hysteria.
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Christian folkways, especially of the New England Puritan kind? It's all there: the meddling, purity spirals and slave morality, the ethnic association, the extending circles of care, the glorification of restraint, acts of penitence and self-denial. Christian devotional hypochondria has a long tradition, and if you go further back there is plenty of antinatalism (monks) and suicide-adjacent practices (martyrs, anchorites) only tempered by a prohibition against explicit suicide.
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Non-Extremely Online person here; is “SickTok” at all related to
Spoonerspoonie-ism? (It’s all a lack of pies, I tell you)More online than I'd like but not up to date with the latest online trends here - sick-tock is probably people moaning about their illnesses, largely for grift or attention, on the popular zoomer media platform ticktock.
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I wonder if this has anything to do with slave morality as described by Scott: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean
If Scott is correct that slave morality ultimately derives from Christianity, then perhaps the phenomena you're describing (pathological guilt, scrupulosity, fetishization of victimhood) are common to any culture in which Christianity is or was the dominant ideology for some sufficiently long period of time. This would have predictable effects: maybe if we compare countries which were forcibly converted to Christianity within the last two hundred years vs. countries which have been Christian for over five hundred years, we would see higher support for antinatalism, higher support for radical environmentalism, higher incidence of "contested illnesses" like Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic Lyme disease and similar.
From a cursory inspection, most of the countries in which literal self-flagellation is still practised seem to be in Asia, regardless of whether the practitioners are Christian or Muslim. This suggests that local factors (i.e. culture-bound syndromes) might play a larger role than religion.
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Was it Larkin Love?
ETA: FWIW, I did know someone online about as long ago, who did have EDS, and she was wheelchair-bound, and she could do that eyebrow-raising hyperextension it apparently causes.
Holy shit, it wasn’t So this goes even deeper than I imagined. How many are there?
Edit: Upon reflection the naming of “Suicide Girls” is just too wonderful and appropriate to my post. God smiles on me
IMO, I believe the most likely reasons women become porn models are being the victim of childhood sexual abuse, or having severe problems with depression, anxiety, and self-esteem, which is satiated by having so much attention by people who think you’re hot that they’re willing to pay you. Both conditions are heavily associated with suicidality.
Typically there’s a period of just promiscuity first, followed by exhibitionism, and then monetization of that exhibitionism. The depressed-pick-me-to-OF-model pathway is well-trod.
Do you have a source for this? Like I would assume women who enter sex work of any sort have basically the same story- poor, cute, and without options.
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Now that's a blast from the past.
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I thought the commercial was supposed to be a professional recording of her actual friend group. Is it so shocking that her friends (at least those willing to be on camera for this kind of thing) were exclusively white women?
(I remember seeing that commercial on TV for the first time - had a definite "WTF am I watching?" moment.)
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I mean - Ehlers-Danlos syndrome comes with a number of hard to fake symptoms such as unusually stretchy skin. Someone who was mentally ill or something might manage to systematically injure joints and make them unstable. You have autoimmune disorders, EDS, depression, autism, ADHD, anxiety, gender fluidity/queerness, and possibly high IQ/intelligence linked together.
For what it's worth, I am backing the RCCX-theory horse here.
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First Reformed was brilliant.
I enjoyed it immensely as well. Glad to see others defending it.
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So apparently Syria is collapsing. Jihadists are near the capital and Assad is nowhere to be found. It looks to be so over for the Assad region.
Since this is the culture war thread, here's what Donald Trump had to say on X.
Cicero he ain't but I'm glad that this viewpoint represents the new foreign policy thinking. The U.S. doesn't need to have a finger in every pie. The international reputation of the United States was never higher than before WWII when we were mostly an isolationist country. In the decades since, we've spent trillions on our foreign misadventures and have only enmity to show for it. The Middle East is not "strategically important" anymore either, and we don't need to "contain" Russia or Iran in that area. Most countries are neither our friends nor our enemies so we should just stay out of their affairs.
Likelihood of genocide towards the mostly Assad-supporting minority groups? Alawites and Christians seem very vulnerable to militants with a serious chip on their shoulder.
Why is it America's responsibility to protect these groups?
You know what? Just once, I'd like to see Germany or France have a go at it.
Since that will never happen, more optimistically I'd hope the Alawites and Kurds can coordinate for their own defense in areas where they have a demographic plurality. Not sure about the Christians...
American government supported the "moderate" head-chopper rebels, so responsibility would be under "you broke it, you bought it" clause.
No. Syrians have agency and are responsible for their own country.
This blinkered thinking would lead to permanent US involvement in Syria.
More importantly, the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics is evil and you should be feel bad for espousing it.
It's "blinkered thinking" to think that a country has responsibility to limit damage it causes abroad? Nobody made US get involved under Obama but it did.
It is when you project damage it didn't cause onto the tab out of American ethnocentricism and a dismissal of the agency and ability of other actors.
It may be self-validating in a way to believe American power is central to the cause and outcomes in other conflicts, but the Americans were never the biggest player in the Syrian civil war, or the most decisive, or the most responsible. Americans are not the hyperagent of the Syrian Civil War. Americans were never the hyperagent of the Syrian Civil War.
'You broke it, you bought it' depends on 'you' actually being the agent to break it. 'You' did not.
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We limit damage by staying out.
You are justifying involvement today because of involvement (however minor) that occurred a decade ago. The same logic could be used to justify more involvement a decade from now, etc...''.
It didn't just occur a decade ago. US aircraft were even bombing Syrian army after Allepo was taken over.
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What did I say that sounded like ‘it’s America’s responsibility to intervene for humanitarian reasons’?
Not sure about them, but I read your comment as a rhetorical question, not a request for information. My reading was:
leap_to_conclusion_mat.gif
Sorry, I can't tell what you're trying to say. Your link appears to be broken, therefore I couldn't possibly draw any conclusions about your intentions.
Could you clearly and explicitly lay out every step of your reasoning, as is the standard in every discussion?
I think they meant to reference this https://tenor.com/bj47U.gif In the yeschad.jpg style to humorously say you shouldn't jump to conclusions, because they thought you were jumping to conclusions. Their mistakes were map instead of mat and confusing interpretation with jumping to conclusions.
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You’ve been warned five times for this lazy chan impression. Stop it.
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On Wikipedia (for what that's worth) the page for HTS says they've made some gestures towards tolerance for Christians and Druze.
If you can't trust those guys, whom can you trust?
Putin? ISIS? Bill Clinton?
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I will be very surprised if there are any non-Sunni groups left in parts where they aren’t a solid demographic majority. And even in those areas they will survive likely only due to the communities organising for self-defence and Turkey’s control over the new Syrian government.
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Current sentiment online seems to be positive- Kurds and Christians seem generally pleased with the current shakeup, reports of minor rapport-building.
At this point, it seems to be a waiting game.
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I have traveled to a lot of places across the globe and the overwhelming sentiment I've received is "America fuck yeah". Whatever enmity there is seems largely restricted to either cultural/political (relative-)elites and some parts of the Arab world over Israel.
Moreover, the meme of widespread animosity against America is the indirect product of anti-American cultural project. The US remains one of the most sought after places to immigrate.
I do actually want to agree that from a practical perspective many of these misadventures were totally useless! But that's just on a geopolitical plane. We spent trillions (and our own soldier's blood) for nothing. But don't get sucked into the "America bad hurf" meme on the side.
The sentiment among Christian Syrians when I visited a decade ago was "we're worried America will get in solved and make things even worse." They seem to have been more correct than not.
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Thank you, USA.
Based.
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US is prosperous, prosperity is desirable, hardly a reason to pat yourself on the back. If you blur the distinction between the country and the empire, of course the enmity will be diluted.
Prosperity is downstream of what I'm talking about here.
Could you elaborate on what you are talking about?
US prosperity is downstream from the cultural and social mores that much of the world widely admires.
That’s one hypothesis. The other, less flattering hypothesis, is that US prosperity is downstream of your ancestors conquering a massive continent full of natural resources, plus being the one left standing when your rivals annihilated each other in two world wars.
Either is possible, but it seems wise to beware the flattering option precisely because it’s more seductive.
In particular, it leads to the conclusion that foreigners and immigrants admire you for your culture and wish to uphold it. Europe fell for the same trap - people don’t come to Britain because they admire British Values, they come because they want a share of Britain’s prosperity relative to the third world.
That’s clearly part of it but America also has an entrepreneurial spirit that Europe does not. By 1990, Europe had almost caught up to the United States. But since then the US has grown and grown while Europe has stagnated. That has nothing to do with WWII and everything to do with Europe’s self destructive socialist tendencies.
Wholly willing to believe that culture has an effect, or that culture and prosperity can interact in positive or negative loops.
But I think the point still stands that people are willing to imitate American culture for precisely as long as they think it will make them rich, and that the ‘liberalism reliably causes prosperity’ thesis is not as strong as people sometimes make it out to be.
On a separate point, Britain still has a pretty entrepreneurial culture - we make lots of startups. But almost all of them go to the USA. Partly because of regulation, but also because that’s where all the investor funding is. Prosperity begets prosperity. Poverty begets cautiousness.
On a separate, separate note I think Europe’s 1990s prosperity was a dead cat bounce, caused by opening the country up to wild financialism and selling off everything to wealthy foreign buyers. Not all of it - beating socialism and the unions clearly had an effect. But not nearly enough to become America.
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I'm perfectly willing to blame at least half of that stagnation on US foreign policy specifically. Not just because the American defense umbrella allows for shambolic spending on social concerns instead of industrial and research concerns, but primarily because they engaged in very specific direct and indirect actions to prevent European economic activity outpacing that of the USA. And they did so in conjunction with the USSR, ironically enough.
I don't blame the Americans for wanting to stay on top, nor am I deluded enough to think that Europeans are blameless, but the idea that Europe's incapable of embracing entrepreneurship is silly given that it was the literal birthplace of the industrial revolution.
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It’s kinda both though. Just being the owner of land with resources doesn’t make you a rich country. And being on land that doesn’t have those resources doesn’t make you poor. Russia has a lot of oil and mineral wealth. Nobody wants to live there. Hong Kong and Taiwan are both pretty small countries, but they’re wealthy. Thus I submit to you that America is not successful just because of our land. A good bit of our success is due to our people and the values they hold. Things like productivity and meritocracy, traditional morality, innovation and adoption of technology, freedom from government interference.
It also probably doesn't help that Russia is really fucking cold.
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Wrong, I'd like to live in both Moscow or Sankt Petersburg, and probably wouldn't mind many other places.
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Canada and Mexico have many of those same advantages but are still less prosperous than the US.
Maybe. My impression is that Canada is colder, more impassable and has less resources than its more prosperous cousin, but is still reasonably ok. And that Mexico is largely arid and not over blessed with natural resources. Someone with more geographic knowledge is welcome to jump in.
But look at Britain or Western Europe. You can say that they fell into disrepair as they became less liberal, or you could say that people were less willing to tolerate a liberal culture as they became less prosperous.
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Natural resources are not a primary or even secondary predictor of national production. This is a silly leftist meme.
National resources aren't the most important thing but they're certainly important. It doesn't hurt that Saudi Arabia has a gazillion barrels of crude. Back in the 1930s they were almost totally irrelevant, oil put them on the map. Nor is the US disadvantaged by having enormous reserves of oil, coal, iron and fertile soil.
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Per OEC, the US's largest commodity export sector is "mineral resources", almost entirely in energy (oil, coal, etc.). The US is underperforming as a primary producer for regulatory reasons, but there isn't much under the ground that can't be found in North America.
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I don't see how natural resources can be as unimportant as you're claiming. You need something to work with in order for your nation to produce shit. That means either you need the materials yourself, or some other resource you can trade to those who do have the materials. Of course natural resources can't be the only factor, history shows that sometimes people with more resources wind up losing. But to say it isn't an important factor at all ("not a primary or even secondary predictor") seems like it's going too far in the other direction.
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Or perhaps you should beware the option that flatters your ideological commitments. It's equally as convenient/inconvenient to admit that America really does do things well, it just depends where you're standing.
It's very convenient for Americans to pretend that we're successful because of our unique national ideals and character. And it's very convenient for Europeans to pretend that it's all just a historical accident.
Fair, but at least I have been an economic liberal. My current ideological commitments come in large part from observing that economic liberalism != prosperity. At best, it’s a prerequisite.
And going back to the original point, it’s important to realise that most pro-Americans don’t believe it. I’ve known some immigrants who were very pro free market but most are not. They want American power and prosperity not American values. Nobody gave a damn about British values once we lost the empire. Likewise people only started treating China and Japan with respect when they became rich.
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Is it realistic to hope that this can/will open a path to the repatriation of Syrian refugees/“refugees” currently in Europe? Like presumably a great many Syrians who fled the country did so because they were either direct opponents of the Assad regime or were otherwise threatened by Assad’s rule specifically. With a rebel Sunni-led government transitioning into power, will this be seen as plausibly obviating those asylees’ original claims?
Obviously no because the Syrian refugees in Europe are economic migrants. European countries are not even deporting rapists and other criminals. Why would they deport people because of a regime change in their home country? Those Syrian refugees and their descendants are there for good. Future anthropologists will study the demographic transition which is very similar to how Corded Ware culture replaced Bell Beaker culture - except that this latest demographic replacement happened more quickly.
Asylum was just a fig leaf in the first place. Refugees are supposed to go to the first safe country, not the place with the most generous welfare benefits and strongest pro-outgroup bias.
The more relevant migrant flows wouldn't be from Europe to Syria, but Turkey to Syria, in turn enabling Europe to Turkey (which already occurs in substantial amounts).
Turkey not only has the far greater number of Syrian refugees, but those who did just go to the first safe country. These are a electoral burden, and facilitating their return was a policy goal of Turkish-Syrian relations for a good part of the last year, and Assad's refusal to engage on that was part of the Turkish support for the coalition that just took most of the major cities in Syria.
If/when Turkey pressures its recent partners to accept back Turkish-based refugees in exchange for continued reconstruction / reconsolidation / resist-other-rivals aid, that will create two opportunities for the Europeans. One is leverage the opening for their own aid-for-reacceptance bargains (as countries being willing to accept deportees is one of the big obstacles Europe has to deportation), and another is to make renewed deals with the Turks to accept the European-reached migrants, a deal more possible when Turkey has reduced its own refugee burden.
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To be fair the vast majority did go to Turkey.
...and those that left for Europe have demonstrated that they don't respect the law.
Countries can set whatever immigration/refugee targets they want, but their selection procedure shouldn't be "whoever is most willing to lie and cheat". They may not have written that policy down anywhere, but that's what happens when you don't enforce the rules.
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Is this actually a law or part of a treaty?
No. The system that the 1951/1967 Refugee Convention was supposed to be setting up was one where refugees were registered in the first safe country they reached, and then where they ended up was determined by negotiation between the UNHCR and the receiving countries.
"Refugees are supposed to stay in the first safe country" is not law - it is arguably implied by the clauses in the convention saying that refugees can't be prosecuted for illegal immigration when they cross from a dangerous country to the first safe country.
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Yes.
Conditional on there being relative stability in any of the major cities (Aleppo down through Damascus), there is a non-trivial chance that an aid-for-acceptance swap will occur, in which external backers (Turkey / the EU) offer much needed financial / civil governance assistance in exchange for whoever is holding the area to accept returnees. The benefit to the local authorities is not only the assistance in rebuilding what they'd want to rebuild anyway (including housing to absorb more than just the returnees), but the 'import' of a tax and recruit base.
This will be less viable in the areas where there is significant fighting, but with the collapse of the Assad government it's uncertain how much Iran can, or will try, to force a fight. Beyond that, the actual ability of internecine militant conflict is unclear.
The factors that enabled internecine fighting between militant groups in the civil war phase were the presence of a unifying opponent to justify mobilization in general and tactical alliances in particular (Assad as the unifying enemy), the inflow of resources to fight and compete over (foreign aid to groups opposing Assad), and the lack of clear leading groups (mutual relative weakness supporting existential struggles). The later in particular was a goal / function of Russian airpower, which prioritized consolidating / less radical power groups in order to keep the rest fragmented and present Assad as the only alternative to ISIS.
With Assad's fall, those factors have substantially changed. There isn't a single unifying interest to drive mass mobilization, the interest external states have for flooding the anti-Assad movement with weapons has changed now that there is no Assad, there are indeed dominant groups whose clear strength facilitates detente rather than existential struggle, and there isn't likely to be a Russian (or American) air campaign deliberately trying to crack coalitions.
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Turkish government has immediately made announcements to the effect but I have dim hopes of even Syrians in Turkey leaving. The ones in Europe look basically impossible without a very radical shift
It would be politically interesting to show that look, even if their home country stabilizes, these “refugees” will never ever leave once they are here
I think we always knew that. The anti- side knew that they would become a permanent welfare underclass, and the pro-side thought they would become vibrant and diverse 'new-Europeans'.
It's so insane. It's like the European elites looked at all the problems America has with its black underclass and thought to themselves "I gotta get one of those".
The American elites don't have to deal with the problems of a black underclass. On the other side in the ledger, empires as far back as the Babylonians realized that ethnically divided provinces were easier to rule.
Clearly elites are protected from the worst results of their bad decisions, but I don't think it's some conspiracy to divide the working class.
A better explanation is that it comes from social signalling, where high status people can signal their abundance by not being concerned with petty things like crime and taxes.
As societal wealth gets higher and higher, the signalling required to separate oneself from the commoners gets more expensive. A high end watch is not going to cut it. You need luxury beliefs, the more extreme the better. Among these luxury beliefs, one of the most common is a hatred for white people and the belief that countries need to be reformed by importing large numbers of non-whites. If they are criminals and layabouts, it's actually better because it destroys the existing society more effectively. The signal is clear: "You worry about crime and your community all you want. Your worries are low status. I have so many resources I'll be fine whatever happens."
I've been meaning to write a post about the irony of dirt-poor post-grad white men being the most motivated regime propagandists on Twitter; compensating for lack of real status by signalling luxury beliefs as hard as possible.
The guys who were sneering hardest at every concern about inflation, crime, and woke discrimination were the ones getting mugged on their way to teach a graduate seminar in European history for $14.50/hr, because they'd watched all the tenured positions go to Queer Black History profs.
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I'd imagine that only applied to remote parts of the empire that are ethnically distinct from the heartland. Close to home, I'm pretty sure you'd rather your territory be ethnically unified to lower chances of rebellions/separatism.
Ethnic rebellion and separatism are rare. The Ottomans successfully played divide and rule for centuries.
The more members of the ruling ethnicity are around, the more credible competitors there are.
This is the problem a lot of ethnonationalist philosophy suffers from, it starts from the assumption that ethnos is primary. If I'm the Ottoman emperor, am I making moves to maximize the odds the empire stays together, the odds a Turk is on the throne, the odds a member of the dynasty is on the throne, or the odds that I and my immediate descendants remain on the throne? All can be in conflict on the margins.
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Uh, elites are largely unaware of the problems of the black underclass aside from poverty porn handwringing about the pernicious effects of racism on the community.
Yeah, if they are aware of problems with blacks, european elites chalk them up to the legacy of slavery, american racism, lack of welfare, excessive police and carceral state – all mistakes they could never make. Their superiority complex is hilariously mirrored in american elites view of the european muslim and roma underclass – the europeans obviously don’t know how to integrate people, they don’t have the wonderful american civic tradition, they lack the welcoming culture and ritual turkey-killing, etc.
I have never met an American who had anything nice to say about gypsies if they knew what gypsies were. Ironically I've heard more eastern euros come to their defense than Americans.
American elites, or at least blue tribe elites, do seem to legitimately actually believe that Arabs could be integrated if Europeans were more welcoming. To be fair, there's also a huge contingent of Americans who believe 'what do you expect? Muslims are violent savages' and while there's not a ton of true elites in that category, it gets surprisingly close thereto.
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But when they do have this tradition, they can be blamed because their tradition is more aggressive and assimilationist than the US, so maybe that's causing the backlash
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If they do not know the problems of the black underclass, then how do they know what to censor? Like the man inventing excuses for the dragon in his garage, they must have a model of black dysfunction hidden somewhere in their brains; otherwise, would not know which thoughts are dangerous. Hence "the woke are more correct than the mainstream"; when a progressive complains that coming down on crime will affect black people the hardest, it is because he realizes on some level that blacks are much more criminal than whites.
From 1984 by George Orwell:
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Europeans are a conquered people (their massive civil wars in the first half of the 20th century saw to that) and naturally align themselves with Imperial aesthetics. Sure, there's the whole power dynamic divide and conquer thing, but that's downstream of there being no real European elite other than that which is legitimized by the Americans.
I think greentexting like that is kind of confusing and the same point could be made without it.
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Blame Disney. Making Gypsies hot exotic innocents who deserve pity made all criticism of domestic underclasses impossible to maintain without cries of 'racism', a charge that magnified its weight from the 1960s till now. Guy Ritchie making Travellers hot probably didn't help either.
On a more serious note, the Europeans successfully kicking Irish Travellers and Gypsies out of cultural capitals and into third rate cities (Marseille always had a reputation and right now Malmo is its own meme) probably had a great deal to do with the acceptability of a postracial European polity. Out of sight, out of mind. Some places being perennial shitholes regardless of foreigner presence probably contributed greatly to the presumption that shitheads are race-agnostic, blinding polite society to the racialized nature of shitheads till it became too late.
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People who fear their neighbour are wont to beg for the elites to protect them from him.
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The EU could come to a deal to return them, but it would undoubtedly be blocked by the ECHR. The ECHR ruled that deportation to a country where any part is unsafe (construed extremely broadly, including for ‘human rights’ reasons) is illegal. They’re not going to allow deportation to Syria in any case, and wouldn’t whether under Assad or HTS or (likely) anyone else.
In addition, many Syrian migrants in Western Europe have already received asylum / permanent residency, many are already citizens.
What prevents the EU from just ignoring ECHR if enough countries wants it?
The entire European project is based on obeying signed treaties, protocols and contracts. There's little concrete beyond this mutual structure to hold it together (after all, it doesn't have a military). If countries start to renege on them, the fear is that the whole project starts crashing.
ECHR is however, obviously destructive and acting against interests of particular countries and Europe as a whole. If European politicians can't perform one act of statesmanship and dissolve it, what then ?
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The constitutions of many EU countries and established law. Of course every law can be overturned and countries can withdraw or simply ignore the ECHR, but domestic courts (eg in Italy) can prevent or stymie this. It turns into a long, protracted legal battle that outlasts any rightist government.
And herein lies the problem. Courts in Western EU countries are more loyal to Brussels-aligned worldview than anything else (ETA; anything else includes, the intent and letter of laws and treaties). During nearly all of the post-Lisbon treaty years, until 2020, everyone understood that the EU treaties did not permit the EU bonds. In one night, powers that be noticed the treaties are only worth the paper they written on, as nobody really understands what is written on them [1]. Consequently, they could re-interpret them as they pleased, and the EU "recovery" package (NextGenerationEU) was born. Some legal crickets remain, and are loudly ignored ("it does not appear completely implausible that the measure could be based on Art. 311(2) TFEU", the great legal standard of constitutional thought in Germany as it relates to the EU law.)
Similar re-interpretations of treaties have not proven possible (and I predict, will not prove possible) against mass migration. By iron law of bureaucracy, the EU bureaucracy exists only to make the EU bureaucracy more powerful, and by extension, serve interest of the social class of people who fill its ranks. For this class, mass migration is not a concern. Their vision of EU is a multicultural, multiethnicity realm. Import of new peoples is not at odds with the vision, and along the way found a way to make Bertold Brecht poem true -- with mass migration, the government may have found a way to dissolve the people and elect another.
[1] Unlike the US constitution, which generally defines the institutions and their powers, the EU treaties are written in vague legalese fluff. Compare:
Art 311 of TFEU
The US constitution grants the Congress power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to borrow money on the credit, and so forth. TFEU grants a "system of own resources of the Union" "without prejudice to other revenue" and way to establish a new categories of them, which apparently also included ability to borrow money on the credit of the European Union.
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Very very loud leftist politicians.
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In all likelihood, Syria will be a complete mess, so no hope of that from me.
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There's a mention within the webpage for this study (the study itself does not give definite total numbers) saying that 'As of December 2022, approximately five million Iraqi nationals have returned from abroad', though that may include refugees from near abroad (other Middle Eastern countries, that is), and some number of them have probably emigrated again.
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What are the likely consequences re: Israel should the Assad regime collapse?
For all his faults, at least Assad has refrained from mounting direct military attacks against Israel; moreover, unlike Lebanon, Syria TTBOMK does not harbor quasi-state paramilitaries that attack Israel. And all this is despite the cozy relationship between Assad and Iran, and the Golan Heights hatchet remaining pointedly un-buried!
Do we know anything about which rebel group is likely to end up on top if Assad gets the boot? I could imagine the US foreign policy blob backing “moderate rebels” in order to win some leverage over them and their Israel policy if and when they take control of Syria (because that’s worked out so well for us before). But I am extremely skeptical that any new regime can keep as tight a lid on anti-Israel kinetic actions as Assad has.
The Israelis had a pretty cordial relationship with ISIS, see https://www.newsweek.com/israeli-defense-minister-i-prefer-isis-iran-our-borders-417726
The love-in was reciprocated, I don't recall any ISIS attacks against Israel.
They want anyone but Assad and thus Iran. And they mean anyone. Assad also wanted the Golan Heights back, as would most strong Syrian governments regardless of who is in charge. So a weak and divided Syria is what Israel wants to see.
The monkey’s paw, the devil you know, etc. etc. Though since we’re talking about Israel, perhaps the parable of the golem is more apropos.
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The successor regime, assuming there is one and it’s not just a Libya-style power vacuum, will have much bigger problems to worry about than Israel(as Assad did).
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It could go either way, depending on the new management. Assad is friendly with Iran and he has allowed Iran’s paramilitary proxies to roam free throughout the country. Getting rid of Assad in favor of Sunni rebels will sever Iran’s access. Even if the rebels are jihadists there’s a good chance they decide that they have enough on their plate already, and avoid antagonizing Israel permanently, or at least for the next five years or so. That’s the approach ISIS took, so it’s not an absurd idea that the Syrian rebels might do that too.
We should be thankfull that Iran has helped Syrians defend themsleves and that we haven't gotten a complete genocide of Christians and others who represent the last vestigates of Greek civilization in the middle east. Iran has been hugely beneficial in Iraq where they helped the Iraqis end the occupation and then fight ISIS. In Syria they helped fight off jihadists attacking Syria for years.
The stability that Syria provided for the past 8 or so years has been highly beneficial and it is a great shame that we are losing it.
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This is true, but AFAIK no Iranian proxies have staged attacks on Israel from within Syria, right?
That would be incorrect.
Iran has been running supplies to Hezbollah in Lebanon through Syria, with Syrian locations serving as the operational stockpiles and planning centers. This was the key supply route for the Hezbollah rocket campaign that led to the recent Hesbollah-Israel conflict.
Huh, I didn’t know that, but it makes geographic sense. Thanks for explaining
No problem.
For elaboration- most weapon shipments go by sea due to the bulk shipping costs, and Syria was a preferable point unloading to Lebanon for a variety of reasons. In addition to the increased difficulty of smuggling through Lebanese ports where non-Hezbollah factions (such as Israel) would increase the risk of exposure compared to the more supportive Assad, the 2020 Beirut port explosion (where a warehouse of amonium nitrate created a city-shaking explosion) made arms shipments through such ports politically risky as well. One of the theories of the amonium nitrate explosion is that it was part of a Hezbollah stockpile, and while Hezbollah has denied that, being caught with major weapon shipments through ports would have been a significant risk.
As a result, post-2020, Iran relied more on the Syrian route.
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Not directly, but most of Hezbollah’s arms shipments have to go through Syria to get to Lebanon.
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Well it's certainly yet another challenge for Israel to worry about.
But if the Syrian jihadis enjoy living they'd be smart to consolidate their gains. Israel was able to surgically eliminate almost all of Hezbollah's leadership and I expect they'd do the same to the Syrians should they get feisty.
I worry more for the Alawites in Syria who will be at the mercy of these barbarians from the East. Perhaps they will be able to coordinate defense, I don't know. I assume other religious minorities have already fled, but any that remain would also be in harm's way.
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US obviously is involved, has been for more than a decade. The proxies are remote enough for this to be an opportunity to throw a bone to the part of his base that wants less adventurism/imperialism. Trump is still a philosemite and for hostilities with Iran.
This current offensive doesn’t seem US-driven. Turkey has some involvement but even they appear surprised at the pace. It seems Assadist morale has been totally hollowed out and the SAA’s mostly Sunni fighters (Alawite men having suffered insanely high casualty rates over the last 14 years) didn’t care to fight.
The offensive is Turkish driven in the sense that Turkey facilitated the initial setup and possibly the timing. What seems to have surprised everyone was the shock and military collapse on the Syrians.
The best I can figure, the shock-effect of significant UAV use in Aleppo sparked a disorganized retreat to Hama that led to significant vehicle losses (something like 150 vehicles, including tanks, running out of gas), which weakened the Syrian forces enough to more or less keep retreating and not contest Hama. This and some other optics led to a doom loop of non-resistance, which led the Aleppo offensive to gain momentum rather than use up its resources and culminate.
The current questionmark is Homs, which controls access to Damascus and could functionally bisect the Assad regime.
What’s Turkey’s beef that led to them playing chicken (by proxy) against the SAA? Pure Sunni vs. Shi’a/Alawite sectarianism, or does it go deeper than that?
Deeper.
Part of it is Sunni vs Shia split. The Syrian civil war was mostly a Sunni uprising, because the Assad dynasty survived by brutal suppression of the Sunni majority. This dynamic was made worse by the Iranian intervention, and efforts of the Iranians to proselytize and establish Shia communities in/as regime strongholds.
Part of it is Erdogan's Arab Spring-era desire to be a middle eastern leader of religious-democracy. Erdogan was a rare supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt when it was a thing, and had ambitions of a sort-of raising Turkey as a middle eastern leader through blending Islamic democracy. This didn't really last, but it was active nearer the start.
Part of it is Turkey's Kurdish concerns. Syria's north and east is highly Kurdish, with groups there supporting Kurdish sectarian terrorists who attack into Turkey proper. The lack of Syrian prevention was always something of a sore / a leverage point of Assad against Turkey, but the de facto autonomous states the Kurds secured during the civil war has been a significant Turkish concern.
Part of it is refugee resettlement politics. Many of the refugees who fled Syria stayed in Turkey, where they became substantial burdens far in excess of what the Europeans politically buckled under. The Turkish desire is to return Syrian refugees back to Syria, and this may have been an objective / hope of the Aleppo offensive. Turkey had desired Assad to take them back after the 2020 ceasefire, but Assad basically refused because he wanted them to be Turkey's problem rather than his own.
Part of it is regional power politics. The Turks are one of the regional major powers, but their presence and influence in the middle east has long been limited by Syria. Not because Syria is itself a major power, but because Assad invites in the Iranians (who are a regional power rival) and Russia (who is a different sort of regional power rival) in part to counter Turkey.
Part of it is Russian strategic competition. While Russia helps Assad, Turkey supporting the anti-Assad forces is a way it can indirectly poke the Russians and remind them that their interests need to be taken seriously, and not just the Syrian interests either. Regulating support for the militants is thus a form of leverage vis-a-vis Russia.
There are more, but this should be demonstrative.
This is pretty accurate in general but I also want to note that Turkish foreign policy was controlled by different groups back when we got so deeply entangled in the civil war (ie former PM Ahmet Davutoğlu and very CIA-aligned Gülen movement). There was a strong expectation of West getting directly involved and Assad collapsing very soon. This pretty much only didn’t happen because Obama
I’m not sure the current Erdoğan government members would have acted the same way 10 years ago when the uprising started. But they inherited the situation and need to continue state policy.
This is a fair enough point. Erdogan himself hardly inherited, but there was substantial government composition evolution (including his own viewpoints, informed by the previous eras) that I agree he probably wouldn't make the same policy decisions as awhile ago.
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The pro-russian military OSINT bloggers/shills complain about this retreat that every Arab army sucks. This is probably not wrong though.
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Marco Rubio who is the new foreign policy minister doesn't really represent something new.
If you look at Trump's appointments and their rhetoric it is more like he is putting a MAGA lipstick on the same old neocon zionist policy. I don't see any indication that Trump's agenda will be to abandon the middle east.
Also, Trump's rhetoric on Syria have been quite contradictory. Both talking about the red line and in the past blaming Obama for the rebels. The USA, turkey and Israel supported and are to blame for the civil war in Syria. The Turks did it to gain mercenary forces, to fight the Kurds and to gain more land. The Israelis did it to weaken Iran allies and to gain more land. There were also other parties involved like Quatar which also helped the rebels and coincently the Qatar Turkey pipeline that Assad rejected would pass through Syria.
So why is the USA doing regime change in the middle east? It is mainly in service of expanding the power and influence of Israel and maybe some part of it has to do with weakening Russia and possible friendly countries. At least with Syria. There has definitely been a march on institutions of Zionists and pro Israel extremists and the Jewish lobby which includes both donors and organizations is powerful and American politicians are even transparently ridiculously servile to Israel in their over the top rhetoric. In a manner that exceeds say the Reagan administration under which Netanyahou also thought the Israel lobby was powerful.
Trump is just rhetorically all over the place, but it seems that for the most part he aligns with the neocon agenda even if sometimes his rhetoric was against them when he criticized them. Now, I would prefer he wouldn't align with the neocons but I have to call it as I see it.
Suffice to say letting the Jihadis loose, allowing Erdogan to expand his empire, and use mercenaries which he also used on Armenia and might also use against other countries in the future, and all of Israel's conduct, new land grabs, and the whole Syria, Libya and Iraq policy, cannot at all be defended from an ethical point of view. Even from a sheer benefit point of view for the USA, it is significantly questionable. But American + others aligning with it involvement in the middle east has been one of the biggest crimes in the 21st century so far. What has transpired has destroyed very large number of lives, leads to significant reduction of Christian communities, has costed enormous amount of money and played its role in large migration waves that have been destructive to european countries.
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Says the president-elect of a country whose air-force has been flying air missions in Syria in support of groups on its own terror list.
As in, you can't claim bombing missions against Syrian Arab Army and its allies while it's fighting Al-Qaeda remnants are anything else but actually air support for those terror groups, nasty resistance fighters, whatever. Flying CAS for headchoppers.
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It's still possible that Assad can pull off a rabbit from the hat and save his skin, but I just have to say that this whole process makes the whole "Lion of Damascus / Can't Mossad the Assad / Curse of Assad" memery seem, after the fact, rather cringe and, dare I say, Reddit (sure, a lot of it was jokes, but a lot of it wasn't). The great opthalmologist of Syria was, after all, just a paper tiger with little evident support beyond the minority demographics, if that, and a modest amount of pressure from a faction led by a guy who (unconvincigly) refers to Acemoglu on media makes the whole apparatus collapse like a house of cards.
Doesn't really look very good for the general pro-Russian camp that a major ally/prop of Russia would go out ingnomiously like this - kind of like Yanokovych, in the ends, forgotten by everyone basically the moment he left Ukraine, without support even among the antimaidan militants that Strelkov would later use as tinder for his Greater-Russia project.
Good point, although that memery has outlived its usefulness/relevance for years at this point, as Kamala lost the election, Biden is a lame duck and Trump isn't an interventonist. If the regime does indeed fall in the near future, it'll happen with negligible input from the US or Israel or the UK.
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Hey hey, Yanukovych got a last gasp of almost-relevance when he was staged to swoop into Kyiv in the initial Russian invasion as a new government.
Assad is considerably less likely to be relevant like that, though. His minority power base is even smaller, and he doesn't have the narrative impetus of reversing an American effort.
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Did anyone other than Erdoğan (and Netanyahu) politically survive Assad from his original set of enemies though?
The guy who was VP of the United States when the Syrian civil war started is still (just) alive and still (technically) in high political office.
Perhaps the unexpected Zerg rush of HTS was all Biden’s doing to beat the curse
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The dictator and the guy who's been in and out of power since the nineties. Obama wasn't removed politically; he was term limited out and if he had been able to run in 2016 he would have stood a very good chance of winning.
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Pretty big achievement for any leader to survive politically for 13 years, no?
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The same happens to America's puppets like South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. If they aren't themselves chased out, the moment they turn their backs it all collapses like a house of cards.
One of these things is not like the others.
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Israel is invading Syria through the Golan heights "to establish a buffer zone", so far unopposed (?).
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So like, what happens to Syria once Assad is gone?
Sunshine punctuated by light showers of
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More civil war.
He's not even the last Syrian party standing, let alone the last party altogether.
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Who knows. It's probably not good but there's no clear path to a good outcome that can be reached via more U.S. involvement.
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Last war ended with 12 million refugees and over a million comming to Europe. The wave of jihadism that came with a country in the vicinity of Europe becoming a terrorist haven also created massive blow back. There is some chance that Europe simply won't let the jihadists take over this time. Assad is hugely beneficial for Europe.
Quite the opposite. Under Assad, the Islamists and broader Sunni population fled to Europe. If the West had helped the Islamists win, it would be the Christians and Alawites who would have fled to Europe.
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I had the thought that maybe the US should back Assad militarily in exchange for kicking out Russia and Iran and recognizing Israel. Who says no to that arrangement?
Countries don't generally pull 180° switcheroos like that simply because it would make all their other allies go "Hey, wait a minute...", especially when it would mean backing a losing horse like here.
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The Iranians had IRGC stationed throughout his country including in Damascus, he wasn’t in a position to tell them to leave.
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What’s the steelman for why the US historically was against Assad?
Assad was an enemy of Israel and the Gulf Arabs, and a friend of Iran. The US is an ally of Israel and the Gulf Arabs, and an enemy of Iran.
[edited to past tense. Welcome to the dustbin of history, Assad]
Perhaps but in a material way? Is he really worse compared to the new regime?
In the limited way relevant to US interests, very much so. In the language of the Cold War, Assad is their son-of-a-bitch, whereas the factions taking over are our sons of bitches. (I do not claim that the new regime is better than Assad for the civilian population of Syria, although it could be).
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I think they have a lot of faith in democracy solving problems, and the new state more accurately reflects the makeup of the people.
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Geopolitical strategy. The US has Israel and Saudi Arabia as it's dominant regional allies.
Supporting the Sunni rebels is popular with Saudi Arabia, both it's government and it's people.
Syria was USSR aligned during the cold war and kept up Russian connections after.
The Ba'ath parties that ruled Syria and Iraq started out as the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, which wanted to set up a Soviet aligned mega state in the Middle East. That didn't pan out.
Basically Syria has always ended up on the other side of US alliances in the Middle East.
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Divide and conquer. The US has a long history of supporting jihadists and trying to undermine stable states in the region. The Iraq war wasn't nation building, it was nation wrecking. The goal was to turn the middle east into a buch of small clan structures consistently stuck in internal fighting. Assad provided a stable state which was difficult to dominate. Now we get the destruction of christian culture in the region and a flood of migrant to Europe.
That isn’t a steelman. That’s basically “the US is dumb” which I agree but trying to see the other side.
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Alternatively, the US stops occupying Syria's oil and minds its own buisness.
The US produces 130x as much oil as Syria.
No one cares about Syrian oil. If their production went to zero tomorrow the oil price wouldn’t even go up.
It matters because it is one of Syria's main revenue sources. Losing it puts Syria in a permanent state of crisis.
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