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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30938 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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It's hard for me to take Yarvin seriously after the whole Dark elf thing.

Because of the idea itself, or because of the cheesy Tolkien metaphor he wrapped it in?

I didn't like it because he clearly isn't actually very familiar with Tolkien but insisted on making a tortured analogy put of it anyways. "Dark elves" are a Norse mythology thing, not a Tolkien thing.

Tolkien doesn't use the term "dark elf" from what I recall, but he has plenty of morally dark, morally ambiguous, and/or rebellious elf characters who could be characterized as "dark elves". In Tolkien, there is no race of dark elves, but then, in Yarvin's metaphor there also isn't. When he talks about "dark elves", he more or less means elites who defect from the blue tribe consensus, he's not talking about a race or ethnic group.

He does. There is a single character, Eöl, who is known as the Dark Elf, and a broader category, the Moriquendi (lit. 'Elves of Darkness' or 'Dark Elves').

In neither case does Tolkien mean anything like Dark Elves or Drow in the modern, D&D-influenced sense. The Moriquendi are merely those elves who never went to Valinor and saw the light of the Two Trees. (Those are the Calaquendi, or Elves of Light.) But there is no implied biological distinction, and certainly no moral distinction. For instance, Legolas is a Moriquendi, despite being probably the most famous example of the later Wood Elf archetype. The vast majority of elves are Moriquendi.

I wouldn't say Tolkien has Dark Elves in the D&D sense of an elven kindred who are evil. Tolkien is generally quite careful to avoid elves like that - there are plenty of morally flawed elves, but elves never side with Morgoth or Sauron, ever.

At any rate, none of this makes Yarvin's fantasy metaphor any less cringeworthy, though I suppose that is an aesthetic judgement, so make of it what you will.

elves never side with Morgoth

I mean, there was Maeglin, son of Eol, but he was also horribly tortured to encourage his betrayal, so I suppose that could be considered a bit of an extenuating circumstance.

Okay, fair. I'll qualify that to elves never voluntarily side with Morgoth or Sauron.

I kneel before superior Tolkien knowledge.

Speaking of Tolkien knowledge, I find it interesting that /r/tolkienfans is one of the few subreddits I can think of that is relatively free from Reddit-ism. Perhaps in some way, one can give partial credit to the old Professor for that.

I don’t think he was attempting to channel Tolkien with that; I think he was going more for Dungeons & Dragons, which notably has an iconic faction of dark (in both the physical and moral senses) elves. Although, as others have pointed out, the metaphor still wouldn’t work in D&D, as the Drow are not some secret subversive faction exerting influence on the high elves behind the scenes; they’re a totally separate culture, who live underground and kidnap people (including other elves) to feed to their spider goddess.

Taken as its own metaphor shorn of any attempt to fit it into another mythos, though, I think Yarvin’s dark elf thing is evocative and effective enough.

In D&D, drow are evil by culture anyway, not inherently evil. Good drow were prominent as far back as Drizz'zt was introduced, which is 1988.

Would any Yarvin fans mind sharing a favorite series of paragraphs that really exemplify his work? I could never get into him.

Political problems and division arises from insufficient concentration of political power, not too much of it.

Very Confucian -- the emperor exists to have all the political power not to actually exercise it but to permanently put to rest all power disputes.

He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.

-The Analects, Book 1, Part 2

Very symbolic.

Yeah, in a nutshell. The emperor has all the power, but he also, because he has all the power and because the position is hereditary, has the incentives pointed squarely in the direction of keeping the nation in good shape. A peaceful and prosperous empire makes the imperial family rich and secures their positions. Looting the country, imposing bad ideas on the citizens, destroying the commons, etc. would tend to reduce the peace and prosperity, make the imperial family worse off, and put them in a precarious position because if things get bad enough, there will be a revolution.

I think this is probably where Yarvin and Confucianism part ways a bit. Yarvin is very much power for functional sake: his monarch does things. Confucius was more symbolic -- the emperor sits on the throne just to sit on it, he's not meant to actively do things.

I don’t think Confucius is “anti-power-use”. The system works by those above treating those below as beloved children, while those below treat those above like loving parents. It’s a reciprocal approach to human society that recognizes the natural hierarchical nature of human society and uses it to promote harmony. I owe the emperor my loyalty, he owes me to think about the welfare of us peasants when making decisions. Of course all of this would mean nothing if the only decisions made are symbolic. If the prince im to obey only chooses between Yellow robes or blue robes, there’s no reason not to obey. Obeying decisions that you agree with or that don’t matter, I’d hardly think it matters. Why would you need to focus obedience around a system where no one makes consequential decisions? Obedience is easy when the decisions don’t matter. When the decisions do matter, that’s where obedience counts for something. If you decide to force people to move, that takes obedience. Telling you to paint th3 houses green less so.

I dunno why people say he's so verbose. He's really not except for a few of his essays. The amount of writing he does is less than required of a typical humanities undergrad ; same for the amount of effort to read him compared to college assigned reading. The verbosity of the prose itself is not that much different from other writing in an academic setting or even many op-eds, such as from the New Yorker. I think so many people's attention spans are fried.

Academic writing is fucking terrible. It's like they are trying to be as dry and boring as possible on purpose to signal how serious and high-status they are. Compare the writing in your average prestigious journal paper to a good popular science book like The Selfish Gene or Pale Blue Dot.

Moldbug's writing is terrible in a different way; overtly obscurantist and meandering. It's intentional, but I don't like it. The Dreaded Jim describes it thus:

I say things in the crudest and most direct possible way, a full frontal assault on crimestop, while Moldbug liked, and Namefag Yarvin likes, to use long winded circumlocution, so that people likely to crimestop out what he is saying will have an easy time crimestopping thoughts they do not want to hear.

It's not about length; I can read long texts, if written well. I don't balk at reading a 10k-word blog post by Scott Alexander.

Jim is merely performatively a villain, playing a character (real or not) devoid of any empathy or humanity, an outrage machine, a shit poster extraordinaire, an asshole with a few truths. Moldbug writes in the fuller sense of the term, there’s more of him in his work, he engages with critics, he has empathy in a way Jim’s selfish character never could.

It is an acquired taste, I guess, or most people skim rather than read his posts. Judging by his huge huge subscriber count and fame, evidently, this style worked for him.

Yarvin is basically a historian and has a lot of interesting insights on the past. He also turns his analysis on the present and comes up with interesting ideas there as well.

However he often veers into recommendations on how to fix things, and I think he's less qualified on that point.

He also grew up as a State Department brat, which gives him a lot of knowledge about how things actually operate in high level government.

I think that "castes of the united states" and "the bdh-ov conflict" represent a decent model for understanding the current political conflicts in the US. In a better world undergrad polsci students would be expected to read them.

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/castes-of-united-states/

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/bdh-ov-conflict_07/

Also he's much less verbose in interviews. I'd suggest watching his interviews with Michael Malice, but that's a decent time commitment.

From "A Formalist Manifesto":

In my experience, most sensible people consider themselves “moderate,” “centrist,” “independent,” “unideological,” “pragmatic,” “apolitical,” etc. Considering the vast tragedies wrought by 20th-century politics, this attitude is quite understandable. It is also, in my opinion, responsible for most of the death and destruction in the world today.

Moderation is not an ideology. It is not an opinion. It is not a thought. It is an absence of thought. If you believe the status quo of 2007 is basically righteous, then you should believe the same thing if a time machine transported you to Vienna in 1907. But if you went around Vienna in 1907 saying that there should be a European Union, that Africans and Arabs should rule their own countries and even colonize Europe, that any form of government except parliamentary democracy is evil, that paper money is good for business, that all doctors should work for the State, etc., etc.—well, you could probably find people who agreed with you. They wouldn’t call themselves “moderates,” and nor would anyone else.

No, if you were a moderate in Vienna in 1907, you thought Franz Josef I was the greatest thing since sliced bread. So which is it? Hapsburgs, or Eurocrats? Pretty hard to split the difference on that one.

In other words, the problem with moderation is that the “center” is not fixed. It moves. And since it moves, and people being people, people will try to move it. This creates an incentive for violence—something we formalists try to avoid.

From "Castes of the United States":

Here’s my taxonomy of American castes. I’ve picked names from various historical cultures, hopefully without strong emotional associations for modern readers, for these castes. The implicit analogies these names create should be roughly accurate, but certainly not precise. I have ordered them alphabetically to avoid any implicit ranking.

In the Brahmin caste, status among both men and women is defined by scholarly achievement, success in an intellectual profession, or position of civic responsibility. The highest-status Brahmins are artists and scientists, but Brahmins can also be doctors or lawyers, although it is much better to be a doctor than a lawyer, and much better to be a lawyer than a dentist (a trade which was perhaps once Brahmin, but is now definitely Vaisya). Ideally, as a Brahmin, if you are a doctor you should be primarily concerned with caring for the poor; if you are a lawyer, your practice should focus on civil liberties and social justice—cardiology and corporate law are slightly de trop. An increasing number of young Brahmins consider themselves “activists” and work for “nonprofits” or “NGOs,” lending some credence to the theory that the Brahmins are our ruling or governing caste. Entry into the Brahmin caste is conferred almost entirely by first-tier university admissions, although getting into Harvard doesn’t mean you don’t still need to make something of yourself.

In the Dalit caste, status among men is defined by power, wealth and sexual success, among women by attractiveness and popularity. The favored occupation of Dalit men is crime, preferably of the organized variety. However, Dalit criminals are not generally psychopathic; they perceive crime as guerrilla warfare against an unjust society. Dalit women may support themselves by crime, welfare (which they consider a right), or payments from men. Both male and female Dalits may occasionally support themselves by conventional employment, but this is usually in jobs that other castes (except Helots) would consider demeaning, and Dalits share this association. The Dalit caste is not monolithic; it is divided into a number of ethnic subcastes, such as African-American, Mexican, etc. A few white Dalits exist, notably in the Appalachians. There is little or no solidarity between the various Dalit ethnicities.

The Helot caste is an imported peasant caste, originating primarily in rural Central America. Status among Helot men is conferred primarily by hard work, money and power. Status among Helot women is conferred by attractiveness, motherhood, and association with successful men. The Helot value system does not seem to be sustainable in the US, and the children of Helots tend to grow up as Dalits. New Helots, however, can always be imported to replace them.

The Optimate caste has to be mentioned, because it was until quite recently the US’s ruling caste. It is not clear, however, that the Optimate value system still exists in any meaningful sense, and if it does it is decaying rapidly, with most young Optimates becoming Brahmins. However, status among any men and women who do still follow the Optimate way is conferred by birth, breeding and personal character, with wealth serving as a prerequisite but not a mark of actual distinction. The Bible of the Optimate caste is, of course, the Social Register.

The Vaisya caste is the most difficult to define. It’s tempting to say that a Vaisya is anyone who is not a Brahmin, Dalit, Helot or Optimate. Status among Vaisya men is conferred by productive employment, generally defined in monetary terms; by a successful family life; and by participation in church or other formal social groups. Status among Vaisya women is conferred by attractiveness, motherhood, and social participation, with an increasing number of Vaisya women entering the labor force, typically in unintellectual white-collar jobs.

From "The Magic of Symmetric Sovereignty":

However, one way to evaluate a political design is to consider its worst possible result. The worst possible result of symmetric (“totalitarian”) sovereignty is an evil dictator who takes over the world and decides to torture and murder everyone in it, replacing us with his gesticulating, mustachioed clones.

Okay. I’ll admit that this is not a desirable result (unless I get to be the evil dictator, in which case I at least need to start working on my mustache). So let’s modify this slightly and instead look for the worst possible rational result. That is, let’s assume that the dictator is not evil but simply amoral, omnipotent, and avaricious.

One easy way to construct this thought-experiment is to imagine the dictator isn’t even human. He is an alien. His name is Fnargl. Fnargl came to Earth for one thing: gold. His goal is to dominate the planet for a thousand years, the so-called “Thousand-Year Fnarg,” and then depart in his Fnargship with as much gold as possible. Other than this Fnargl has no other feelings. He’s concerned with humans about the way you and I are concerned with bacteria.

You might think we humans, a plucky bunch, would say “screw you, Fnargl!” and not give him any gold at all. But there are two problems with this. One, Fnargl is invulnerable—he cannot be harmed by any human weapon. Two, he has the power to kill any human or humans, anywhere at any time, just by snapping his fingers.

Other than this he has no other powers. He can’t even walk—he needs to be carried, as if he was the Empress of India. (Fnargl actually has a striking physical resemblance to Jabba the Hutt.) But with invulnerability and the power of death, it’s a pretty simple matter for Fnargl to get himself set up as Secretary-General of the United Nations. And in the Thousand-Year Fnarg, the UN is no mere sinecure for alcoholic African kleptocrats. It is an absolute global superstate. Its only purpose is Fnargl’s goal—gold. And lots of it.

In other words, Fnargl is a revenue maximizer. The question is: what are his policies? What does he order us, his loyal subjects, to do?

The obvious option is to make us all slaves in the gold mines. Otherwise—blam. Instant death. Slacking off, I see? That’s a demerit. Another four and you know what happens. Now dig! Dig! (Perhaps some readers have seen Blazing Saddles.)

But wait: this can’t be right. Even mine slaves need to eat. Someone needs to make our porridge. And our shovels. And, actually, we’ll be a lot more productive if instead of shovels, we use backhoes. And who makes those? And…

We quickly realize that the best way for Fnargl to maximize gold production is simply to run a normal human economy, and tax it (in gold, natch). In other words, Fnargl has exactly the same goal as most human governments in history. His prosperity is the amount of gold he collects in tax, which has to be exacted in some way from the human economy. Taxation must depend in some way on the ability to pay, so the more prosperous we are, the more prosperous Fnargl is.

Fnargl’s interests, in fact, turn out to be oddly well-aligned with ours. Anything that makes Fnargl richer has to make us richer, and vice versa.

For example, it’s in Fnargl’s interest to run a fair and effective legal system, because humans are more productive when their energies aren’t going into squabbling with each other. It’s even in Fnargl’s interest to have a fair legal process that defines exactly when he will snap his fingers and stop your heart, because humans are more productive when they’re not worried about dropping dead.

And it is in his interest to run an orderly taxation system in which tax rates are known in advance, and Fnargl doesn’t just seize whatever, whenever, to feed his prodigious gold jones. Because humans are more productive when they can plan for the future, etc. Of course, toward the end of the Thousand-Year Fnarg, this incentive will begin to diminish—ha ha. But let’s assume Fnargl has only just arrived.

Other questions are easy to answer. For example, will Fnargl allow freedom of the press? But why wouldn’t he? What can the press do to Fnargl? As Bismarck put it: “they say what they want, I do what I want.” But Bismarck didn’t really mean it. Fnargl does.

In general, Fnargl has no reason at all to impose any artificial restriction on his subjects. He will impose laws only in order to prevent violence, which reduces gold production. He has no interest at all in “victimless crimes.” Since he can define failure to pay one’s tax as theft from him, Fnargl, the Vast And Pungent One, it turns out that he operates a very normal system of law.

It turns out that, except for the 30–40% of our economic output that disappears into his gold stash, Fnargl is actually an ideal ruler. Far from being “totalitarian,” the Fnargocracy is if anything remarkably libertarian. Does Fnargl mind if you light up a jay? Not in the slightest.

From "Friction in Theory and Practice":

Conflict exists whenever two men (or women) want the same thing, but only one can have it. Economists call this a scarce resource. Scarce resources are everywhere. My car, for example, is a scarce resource.

Uncertainty exists whenever it is difficult to predict the outcome of a conflict. For example, you might want my car. (This is only because you haven’t seen it.) But it has an ignition lock and I have the title, and the full military power of the United States is on my side. (This is only because it doesn’t know me.) So it’s easy for both of us to predict that your chance of obtaining my car without my consent is quite small.

But if we lived in, say, Gaza City, things might be different. For example, suppose you were an adherent of the People’s Front of Gaza, an extremist terrorist gang, whereas I paid dues only to the peaceful, moderate and democratic Gazan Popular Front. If the former rose up and drove the latter into the sea, it’s certainly possible that there might be someone you could speak to on the subject of “my” car.

And it’s quite possible that I would feel the need to accept this fait accompli. In which case, although there was friction between the PFG and the GPF, there is none between us. The car is now yours, as once it was mine. Nothing says we can’t be perfectly civil about it.

However, it’s also possible that I might have a cousin—or two—in the PFG. And if any such uncertainty exists, the result is friction: we both expend effort toward resolving the conflict in our respective directions. We may expend some ammunition as well. Or we may just expend time, vocal cords, bribes, and innumerable cups of tea. In any case, this labor is unproductive by any conceivable definition of productivity.

In theory, it’s important to distinguish between uncertainty, which is incalculable risk, and probability, which is calculable. For example, if both of us could agree on a probability of the car’s eventual disposition—let’s say 70% for me, 30% for you—we’d find it easy to compromise. 30% of a car is not so useful, but we could agree to have it appraised and I could give you 30% of the market price. (Of course, this would be a contribution to the victorious people of Gaza, not a mere bribe, kickback or shakedown.)

But calculable probabilities are pretty rare in practice. (Prediction markets can help with this, but bear in mind that a market price is just an average opinion, not a magic 8-ball. Nonetheless, I always wonder why some brave soul hasn’t set up prediction markets for judicial decisions.)

In a frictional conflict, both sides may estimate a probability. But since uncertainty exists, there is no reason for their calculations to match, and so no reason for their respective estimates of success to sum to 100%. It’s only human nature to overstate one’s own chances. And in conflicts between organizations—such as states, companies, or even People’s Fronts—it is almost inevitable. So the joint expected value can be, and typically is, 150%, 180%, etc. Leaving a lot of room for noble sacrifice.

From "Democracy as a Historical Phenomenon":

Under legarchy, the sovorg exercises internal control as an extension of the judicial system which keeps residents secure from each other. It simply adds a class of offenses which are crimes against the sovorg itself, without any other direct victim. For example, you may not train your paramilitary militia in the Sierras. You may not keep a cache of automatic weapons in your basement. If you are in a crowd and the police order you to disperse, you must do so.

Violating any of these restrictions cannot be described as a tort against any person. They are pure infringements on your personal freedom. They may even be arbitrary and inexplicable. However, as long as they are at least predictable, their impact on a reasonable customer is minimal. Every city in the world has the death penalty for stepping in front of a bus. How do we live with this draconian, irrational, and instantly enforced rule? By not violating it. Most of us never give the matter a second thought.

From An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, Chapter 3:

Let’s start with the obvious. A reactionary—i.e., a right-winger—is someone who believes in order, stability, and security. All of which he treats as synonyms.

Think, as a progressive, about the simplicity of this proposition. It is so stupid as to be almost mindless. What is the purpose of government? Why do we have government, rather than nothing? Because the alternative is Corner Man.

Note that Corner Man has his own philosophy of government. He exercises sovereignty. That’s his corner. (“Metro [the Las Vegas PD] can’t even get me off this ---- corner.”) Indeed, he has much the same relationship to the government that you and I know and love, that Henry VIII had to the Pope. And how did he acquire his corner? “I’ve been on this ---- corner for ten ---- years.” In legal theory this is called adverse possession, which is more or less how the Tudors acquired their little island.

Of course, we reactionaries are not fans of Corner Man, largely because his claim to the corner is contested by a superior authority which will prevail in any serious conflict. Why does he attack the blue PT Cruiser? Is it because he’s on crack? Perhaps, but perhaps it’s also because the driver owes allegiance to the other side of the conflict—“Metro”—and neither has nor would acknowledge Corner Man’s authority. For example, she has not paid him any taxes, fees, or rents for the privilege of positioning her vehicle on his (so-called) territory.

One synonym for reactionary is legitimist. When the legitimist asks whether Corner Man really owns his corner, he is not asking whether Corner Man should own his corner. He asks whether Corner Man does own his corner. And his answer is “no.” He prefers the claim of “Metro,” not (or not just) because “Metro” is not in the habit of getting loaded and bashing the holy heck out of random peoples’ cars, but because “Metro” and Corner Man have conflicting claims, and in the end, the former is almost certain to win.

And when he asks whether the Bourbons are the legitimate rulers of France or the Stuarts of England, he is not asking whether (a) the Bourbon or Stuart family has some hereditary biological property that makes their scions ideal for the job (midichlorians, perhaps), or (b) the Bourbon or Stuart will suffer intolerably as a result of being deprived of the throne, or even (c) the Bourbon or Stuart families obtained their original claims fairly and squarely. At least, not if he has any sense. None of these arguments is even close to viable.

Thus, the order that the rational reactionary seeks to preserve and/or restore is arbitrary. Perhaps it can be justified on some moral basis. But probably not. It is good simply because it is order, and the alternative to order is violence at worst and politics at best. If the Bourbons do not rule France, someone will—Robespierre, or Napoleon, or Corner Man.

And from An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, Chapter 10:

In fact, let’s whale on UR’s favorite crash-test dummy, Professor Burke, for a little while here. As I’ve said, this man (an assistant professor at Swarthmore) is my current case study for the fundamentally and irreparably evil character of the Cathedral. He comes across as a perfectly nice guy, of course, and I suspect that’s exactly what he is. So was Albert Speer, who once wrote that you can’t expect to recognize the Devil when he puts his hand on your shoulder.

You probably think it’s excessive to compare Burke to Speer. Oh, no. Think again:

The really major thing, I think, is that the Soweto uprising of 1976 and subsequent campaigns to make South Africa’s townships “ungovernable” put the apartheid regime under what proved to be unbearable pressure, largely on the pure grounds of resource limitations. The apartheid state simply couldn’t cope in the end with the demands that ungovernability put upon it, even when it put up a pretty good show of having everything under a tight authoritarian lid. Few of us saw this clearly in 1986–87 precisely because the state was putting on such a good performance, but underneath, the leadership was increasingly seeing collapse as inevitable.

Let’s review what led to ungovernability. The vast majority of the population without any vote or democratic outlet. An authoritarian state that legally defined almost all dissent as terrorism and gave itself entitlement to retaliate against dissent with imprisonment, torture, and murder. A state which routinely censored all media. A state which ignored property rights of most of its citizens. In short, a state which was in every respect the antithesis of liberalism, in which there was literally no avenue for democratic or liberal protest for the vast majority of its citizens.

Let’s review what ungovernability consisted of. Refusal to cooperate with any institution controlled directly or indirectly by the national government. So leaving school, refusing to pay any rents or fees assessed by governmental bodies, refusal to comply with orders from authorities no matter how routine those orders might be, and an embrace of violent resistance to the state and any perceived agents of the state. Making large areas of the country “no-go” areas for civil authorities unless they were accompanied by strong military forces. Murder or threat of murder of suspected collaborators.

As I said, I think it worked. I think it was justified not just because it worked but because there were no other alternatives. The apartheid state and the National Party spent twenty years steadily crushing all other avenues for political change and rewriting the laws and constitution of South Africa so as to define itself as the permanent and unchanging ruler of South Africa.

That’s right. Our sweet, jocular D&D-playing history professor has just endorsed the practice of putting car tires full of gasoline around his fellow humans’ necks, then lighting them afire. I wonder how many d6 of damage that attack does?

It’s tempting to say that a Vaisya is anyone who is not a Brahmin, Dalit, Helot or Optimate.

So I suppose the notion that America has her own Kshatriya caste is something he neglects to even mention?

A world where the natural warrior-elite of the USA (whoever that is, and even if it even exists) re-emerges and becomes a functioning warrior-elite would not be a world a Jewish nerd like Yarvin wants to live in.

One thing I noticed about reading the "American Castes" essay when it first came out is that it was an obvious oversimplification (in the same way that the 4+1 caste model of the original Hindu caste system is a massive oversimplification of the various jatis and varnas). There are a number of groups that don't fit into Yarvin's 5 castes, and the career military (and in particular people from multi-generational military families) - as opposed to people doing a short stint and expecting to get out after 4-8 years, who remain in their original caste - is one of the more obvious ones (unless they are Optimates by birth). There is definitely a hereditary officer corps in the American military, but it isn't where most officers come from. I don't know enough to comment on whether it could be a functioning warrior-elite in the future.

A world where the natural warrior-elite of the USA (whoever that is, and even if it even exists) re-emerges and becomes a functioning warrior-elite would not be a world a Jewish nerd like Yarvin wants to live in.

Why not? Are you assuming he has direct political ambitions?

I am noticing that Yarvin has achieved high social status by being good at being a Jewish nerd in a society run by philosemitic merchant elites, and that warrior elites are generally unsympathetic to nerds and Jews.

warrior elites are generally unsympathetic to nerds and Jews.

The most common predictors of hardcore antisemitism in the 21st century are (1) religion (particularly Islam but to some extent traditionalist Catholicism) and (2) political opinions on Israel/Palestine (strongly tied to 1) and - among whites - white nationalism, neither of which have much to do with whether someone is a ‘warrior elite’.

Jewish far rightists have always had to contend with the fact that there are many antisemites on the far right. Nevertheless, they are not required to be performatively anti-Jewish or opposed to Jewish identity the way that Jewish devout pro-Palestinian activists have to. With the exception of Unz, who really does hate himself, most far-right Jews aren’t antisemitic, and most (BAP and Moldbug includes) are quietly proud of being of Jewish descent.

So what, specifically, do you expect them to do? Take away his IT loicense? His blogging loicense?

I am not a Yarvin fan, but I'd offer this:

It’s not news that I believe the Cathedral is evil. And since it’s 2008, you’d expect evil to have not only a name, but a blog. And sure enough it does. Evil’s name is Timothy Burke, he is a professor of history (specializing in southern Africa) at Swarthmore, and his blog is Easily Distracted.

The great thing about Professor Burke is that he appears to have a conscience. Almost every post in his blog can be understood as a kind of rhetorical struggle to repress some inner pang of doubt. He is the Good German par excellence. When people of this mindset found themselves in the Third Reich, they were “moderate Nazis.” In Czechoslovakia or Poland they “worked within the system.” Professor Burke is nowhere near being a dissident, but there is a dissident inside him. He doesn’t like it, not at all. He stabs it with his steely knives. He can check out any time. But he can never leave. His position is a high one, and not easy to get.

The entire blog is characterized—indeed it could serve as a type specimen for—the quality that Nabokov called poshlost. Simply an embarrassment of riches. I am saddened by the fact that, as a new parent, I cannot devour the whole thing. But as a case study, I have selected this. The whole post is a treat, but I am especially tickled by the line:

I am drawn to procedural liberalism because I live in worlds that are highly procedural and my skills and training are adapted to manipulating procedural outcomes.

“Manipulating procedural outcomes.” My entire post—maybe even my entire blog—reduced to three words. If you want to know how you are governed, this is it: you are governed by manipulating procedural outcomes. It’s perfect. It belongs on someone’s tomb.

That was, to me, a penetrating insight and an encapsulation of exceptional utility.

Here's the link to Yarvin in NYT.

This interviewer is intolerable. He keeps trying to make these sortof "dunks" or sarcastic remarks, but he just comes across as annoying.

Even if you're not interested in Moldbug, or listening to him, just seeing how bad this interview is is impressive.

The interviewer sounds too dumb for this but I wonder if it's performative, in an attempt to identify with the more typical NYT reader/listener who (e.g.) can't believe sacred cows are being questioned.

But I also realize Yarvin doesn't make his points too well, and this is also actually my normal experience with his writing? He mostly throws out controversial claims and only weakly justifies them. That makes him a fairly normal intellectual in that sense, though not what you expect from rat thinkers who argue against themselves to elucidate their points more.

Still, I had this sense he's doing a Motte and Bailey. He throws out a sensational claim like democracy sucks and dictatorships are effective but waters it down considerably when pushed a bit? Sure FDR asked for a ton of power but he still asked and he presumably got it within the framework of the democracy. Like, fine, but not exactly where I thought he was going with this.

This again may be the interviewers fault, though I think I am not alone in being frustrated by his writing in a way that I don't feel frustrated by the median rat writer.

I had a listen to the interview and didn't find myself feeling particularly illuminated - the interviewer in particular struck me as inadequate for this particular task.

There's a tension between two responsibilities an interviewer has, to be fair to him. On the one hand, an interviewer ought to invite their subject to articulate and reveal their perspective as clearly as possible. On the other hand, an interviewer ought to provoke and hold to account - an interviewer shouldn't be a pushover, but should judiciously apply pressure to draw out the challenges and contradictions of the subject's worldview.

Marchese, here, seemed inadequate to either task. He was unable to meaningfully engage with or critique much of what Yarvin said, and evidently was not familiar with the history Yarvin regularly alluded to, and rather than either get Yarvin to expand on genuinely interesting subjects or challenge Yarvin where his viewpoint is weak, Marchese came off as flailing around for attack lines. Several times, I thought, just as the conversation might be getting interesting, Marchese realised he was on weak ground and tried to pivot to a subject where he thought he could gotcha Yarvin.

It all just came off as very superficial to me. Marchese did not understand Yarvin's ideas very well and struggled to engage with them, especially when his prepared gotchas didn't land.

I'm not particularly on Yarvin's side as an intellectual, and there are plenty of effective ways to criticise him, but Marchese was just, well, bad.

When I saw that this interview happened, I expected it to be strong evidence in favor of the “vibe shift”. However, it’s clear that interviewer did not want this to be a neutral way to showcase Yarvin’s ideas for the audience to weigh dispassionately.

He is clearly made psychologically uncomfortable by being asked to step outside of the progressive liberal frame, even as a thought experiment; he says more than once, “I can’t believe I’m even arguing this…” He also seems determined to smear Yarvin with the taint of racism and sexism; he brings up out-of-context quotes about slavery from over a decade ago, which have nothing to do with the supposed focus of the interview.

He also appears to have been instructed to optimize for brevity and for saving the reader from having to do any homework; any time Yarvin tries to go on one of his deep history tangents to support his argument, the interviewer accuses him of obfuscating. This means that the reader learns very little about Yarvin’s actual reasons for believing what he does. (The interviewer even at one point attempts to insinuate that Yarvin’s whole ideology is simply a manifestation of his insecure personality.)

I think this interview is a huge waste, and is only interesting insofar as it’s a small step in the right direction that the NYT even published it at all.

I agree with you that it's annoying how the interviewer acts like certain political positions are obviously right rather than being willing to engage in a more dispassionate debate about them. To be fair, though, Yarvin frequently does the same thing in his writing and speaking. Indeed, part of why he is popular is because he uses many effective emotional and stylistic rhetorical techniques instead of just writing dull dry dissertations. And part of why he is often criticized even by people who are sympathetic to his worldview is that all too often, he jumps from one statement to another one that does not necessarily follow from what he said before and uses rhetorical flourishes to cover up the non-sequitur.

Also, to be fair to the interviewer, if you come into the interview knowing nothing about Yarvin's thought, I would say that Yarvin's views on slavery from years ago are actually pretty useful to know about. For one thing, they are one of the aspects of his thought that is most different from the typical NYT reader's thought, so it is worthwhile to draw attention to the issue so that the reader has a rough idea of what Yarvin is about. For another thing, claiming that the black slaves were better off under slavery is one of the easiest Yarvin ideas to critique even from a purely logical point of view, so critiquing it is a good way to show an example of some of the strengths and weaknesses of Yarvin's worldview in general. Do I think that Yarvin genuinely believes that the blacks were better under slavery? Not really. And I say this as someone who has read probably more than half of everything that he has ever written for public consumption. I think he believes that it is somewhat true that blacks were better off, in some ways, under slavery, but he does not really believe deep down that they were better off. When he claims that they were, it is because he wants to do a bit of very typical Yarvin trolling, plus he wants to poke at conventional wisdom in order to get people thinking more deeply. I think it would be fair to believe that when Yarvin says that blacks were better off under slavery, this is just a bit of a rhetorical flourish which covers the fact that he what he really probably thinks is that whites were better off when blacks were in slavery.

That said, all this doesn't mean that I think this is a good interview. I am referring to the printed version, I have not seen any video of it. The interviewer either deliberately or accidentally fails to talk to Yarvin in depth about the actually most interesting and useful aspects of Yarvin's thought.

In a sense this is just the continuation of his normalization after he got on Tucker's show (back when that was part of Fox News). I wouldn't read too much into it.

What's interesting is how past NRX the right wing is today. Most dissident rightists accept much of what Moldbug says, and it's even accepted dogma up to the vice president elect, but almost none of them consider themselves part of a NRX movement or anything like that. And most of the ones that did at any point have since moved on.

Yarvin has managed to become a sort of instrumental toolbox of ideas lying around waiting to be picked up by any would be counter-elite, and this seemed to have worked. And yet very few of the people who did pick up his toolbox take him seriously, despite using the tools.

He reminds me of Julius Evola in that way.

My grandfather used to say that there's no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care about getting the credit.

How would he know?

He's the guy who actually discovered nuclear fission. But you probably haven't heard of him.

Yarvin, for all his faults, at least doesn't base his thought on always telling people what they want to hear. Some of his ideas, such as 1) Trump probably won't accomplish much, 2) the system is more likely to be changed by blue/gray tribe elites defecting than by populist right-wing revolution, and 3) even if the right wins, they should forgive the left and treat them decently rather than trying to seek vengeance... make him unpalatable to the more passionate and radical type of modern right-wing intellectual who believes in a glorious right-wing uprising that sweeps all before it.

I haven't caught up with him in a while -- do you have link for (3)?

I don't have a single specific link for (3). It's scattered over a number of his essays and interviews, from what I recall. His basic point, as best as I can phrase it, is that the left is largely just normies who have been doing what normies always do, which is to follow the dictates of whatever regime is currently in power. The key is that Yarvin doesn't view this as a bad thing. After all, as a monarchist, he on some level likes the idea of normies following whatever regime is currently in power. Hence his politics is focused on a revolution among the elites, rather than on a populist revolution. He doesn't really want the masses to rise up, and he probably doesn't think that they are capable of it in any case. He is more focused on getting the masses a new set of masters. He thinks that if a new regime takes power, it should make sure to lock the previous regime out of any important positions of political influence, but other than that it should also treat the previous regime's foot-soldiers decently and not try to get revenge on them. He often brings up the example of the Allied de-Nazification of Germany. Basically, the Allies made it illegal to be a Nazi, but for the most part they did not persecute minor Nazi officials, they kind of just let them continue to be part of society, they just made sure that they could not reconstitute something like Nazism. Yarvin has a similar vision for if a regime that is different from today's regime takes power in the US. He would take political action to prevent the former regime from reconstituting itself, but for the most part he would not persecute the former regime's foot soldiers.

Note: I do not agree with all of Yarvin's points, I am just trying to do as best of a job as I can to present his thoughts accurately.

Yep. From chapter 8: a reset is not a revolution

First, the existing government must be thoroughly lustrated. There is no point in trying to debug or reform it. There is certainly no need for individual purges, McCarthy-style, or for Fragebogen and Persilscheine à la 1945. Except for the security forces and essential technical personnel, all employees should be thanked for their service, asked to submit contact information so that they can be hired as temporary consultants if the new administration finds it necessary, and discharged with no hard feelings, an amnesty for any crimes they may have committed in government service, and a pension sufficient to retire.

The whole chapter is good. I forgot the feeling of reading the original UR posts, like a breath mint for the brain.

There is a lot of talk right now about whether the Israel-Hamas ceasefire / hostage release deal is a good thing or not.

One thing I don't see brought up is that maybe the best thing for Israel to do would be to sign the deal, get the hostages back, and then immediately just ignore the deal and spend the next couple of years killing every Hamas member on the face of the planet.

I don't really see much downside. What would people do in the future as a result? Not trust Israel as a deal-maker? By and large, groups that would be in the position to sign a deal with Israel already either don't trust Israel or have no choice because Israel has overwhelming military force. Political entities generally do not sign peace agreements because they trust each other, they sign peace agreements because they view doing so as being better than the alternatives.

Another possible downside would be that in the future, groups would just kill Israelis instead of taking any hostages... but again, would this really be that bad for Israel? Would 10/7 have been much worse for Israel if Hamas had killed every single person that they ended up taking hostage immediately instead of taking them hostage? Well yes, for the few currently surviving hostages it would have been worse, but I figure that overall probably more Israeli lives would be saved by Israel making it clear that hostage taking is an ineffective approach than by Israel right now signing a deal that effectively signals that taking Israeli hostages has some degree of effectiveness.

Certainly a good thing for Israel. They would prefer an ethnic cleansing fully realized, but a sea of ruins, 100k-200k dead and maimed, Hamas and allies crippled, with US support unwavering, is still satisfying, I imagine. I wonder if they will make serious efforts to keep the conditions in the area abysmal, and try to push the locals to emigrate, or take a different approach.

I hope they do. The frustration of the whole thing is that because Hamas survived and is getting a deal, they’re going to use this plan again. It essentially worked. They’re getting their prisoners released, most of who, are members of Hamas, the Strip will be rebuilt, and they not only get to keep power, but because they have the sympathy of the Arab world, can rearm easily.

At the same time, Israel has essentially capitulated. They get nothing except the hostages. They are also much more hamstrung as to what kinds of action can be taken when Hamas rearms for another round. The propaganda networks are in place, and the Palestinians have learned to play PR rope a dope by making sure that anything Israel does is seen as genocide.

The propaganda networks are in place, and the Palestinians have learned to play PR rope a dope by making sure that anything Israel does is seen as genocide.

They don't actually need to "play PR rope a dope" - what Israel is doing is nakedly and obviously an attempt at ethnic cleansing and genocide, to the point that high-ranking officials admit it and are currently wailing and moaning that they won't be able to continue the genocide due to the hostages being returned. When Israel starts talking about concentration camps and preparing settlers for the parts of Gaza they flattened and bulldozed, people don't need Yahya Sinwar whispering in their ears that something is wrong in order for them to correctly and accurately label something an attempted genocide. The majority of the civilised world can just look at the footage and evidence of what's happening in Gaza and call it what it is, and they would still have been able to do so even if all the Palestinian journalists had been killed.

  • -11

I mean, during the US Civil War you had Union leaders talking about sending Northerners to take the land and houses of people in the South, but that didn't make it a campaign of genocide.

Yes, and that means they met one part of the definition - but not the rest. If there's historical evidence of an actual attempt to ethnically cleanse the south and replace them with yankees, it would be news to me.

I mean both sides were playing the media game. Palestine did it much better. There were numerous times when the media was shown images of “good Palestinians who just wanted to help”, except that they were often actually active members of Hamas. There were also faked reports where they’d claim freezing conditions when the actual weather in the region was in the 70s.

I mean both sides were playing the media game. Palestine did it much better.

To my knowledge, most of the "playing the media game" Palestinians did was sharing clips of what Israel had actually done to them on tiktok and other non-western social media. Have you seen the clip of the man carrying his child's headless body? Visuals like that are extremely confronting, even if the Israelis insist that the four year old was an enemy combatant. It wasn't some Palestinian marketing masterstroke that made Hind Rajab a household name, but the brutality and cruelty involved in her death and foiled rescue attempt.

I dont know if the Palestinians necessarily played the game better. I think it's more likely that they were simply working with a massive headstart, given the general anti-west/third-world ideology if western elites.

Palestinians played the game badly, but they are a useful player for antiwest types to cheerlead, and thats where the Palestinian momentum comes from. Jews have been a lousy cause to advance, because they are actually winning. They achieve on their own merit, so there is no glory to share. By contrast the Palestinians, should they win and kill every Jew, will OBVIOUSLY credit the brave warriors of the Columbia BDS executive committee for achieving such a great victory, letting these children bask in the glow of their participation trophy.

even if all the Palestinian journalists had been killed

It really was extraordinary just how many “Palestinian journalists” were killed. How many there were in general, even. There appeared to be more “Palestinian journalists” in Gaza than American journalists in NYC, which is quite impressive given that there are likely more in NYC than in any other Western city. Every third man in Gaza appears to have been a Palestinian journalist.

I mean the bigger deal is that Journalist is now a protected class on the same order of Doctors, Clergy and Messengers. It is definitely just a coincidence that the moral case for this class upgrade was promulgated by journalists themselves.

Its the same as Women and Children. Given the footage of fi refights, it seems that Gaza has speedrun progressivism by allowing gender conversions for its fighters, and even age conversion for its grown men to suddenly be 'children'.

Its the same as Women and Children. Given the footage of fi refights, it seems that Gaza has speedrun progressivism by allowing gender conversions for its fighters, and even age conversion for its grown men to suddenly be 'children'.

Hind Rajab's death was reported on CNN as "the death of a Palestinian woman" despite her being five years old. In the mainstream media at least the opposite of this was true, but I'm very willing to believe that it was the case on social media.

Hamas leaders have a lot of skin in the game. They will think twice before trying this again because at a minimum it will lead to their own deaths.

Israel has proven that they can get to anyone. They executed Hamas's top leader. They destroyed nearly the entire leadership of Hezbollah.

"But they're religious zealots who will gladly die for the cause!"

I don't think so. Would a religious zealot steal hundreds of millions of dollars from his people to live in luxury in Qatar like Khaled Mashal did? These are corrupt, evil people who don't want to get their crotch blown off by a cell phone.

Nothing can bring back the dead hostages. Nothing can undo the rapes and beatings they suffered at the hands of evil men. Sometimes, the only thing one can do is exact revenge. And Israel's revenge has been terrible. It's time now for peace.

These are corrupt, evil people who don't want to get their crotch blown off by a cell phone.

If this was the case the October 6th status quo was perfect for Hamas. And yet...

Yeah, eventually Gaza will forget what happened and the cycle will begin again.

But that's not a reason for a forever war.

The ideal solution in the eyes of the western left is the complete Israeli capitulation and return of the holyland to the muslims as part of the wider "decolonization" movement. The the muslims are themselves conquerers and colonists is conviently ignored.

The ideal solution in the eyes of the western right is the final destruction of Hamas, Hezbollah, Et Al. At the hands of the IDF through a combination of support for a long-term ally and a sentiment of "rabid dogs get put down".

Forever war is the compromise position.

Yeah, eventually Gaza will forget what happened and the cycle will begin again.

There's no reason to frame what happened as Gaza forgetting (as opposed to jihadis simply trying again), except that it undermines your point. People who continually talk about overturning or avenging a crime done against them almost a hundred years ago are not suffering some sort of cyclical memory wipe.

There's strong evidence that both Jews and Palestinians can hold on to a grudge and ruminate on past injustices. And understand basic cause and effect.

Please be clear about what you are advocating for.

What would you do if you were Israel right now?

As a civilian or soldier I'd want my people back so we can go lick our wounds and hope the next cycle is after I'm dead or past conscription age. As a leader...I don't know. Stay, kill more, try to suffocate Hamas as much as possible.

People who continually talk about overturning or avenging a crime done against them almost a hundred years ago are not suffering some sort of cyclical memory wipe.

What they are forgetting is not the offense, but how badly they got whipped last time they tried "avenging" it.

The Looney Tunes theory of the Israel-Palestine conflict?

Seems like they are more focused on carving off pieces of Lebanon and Syria now anyways so I don't see why they wouldn't take the deal to keep in Trump's good graces.

What are they carving off of Lebanon?

Yeah, I mean it’s a good deal for Israel and probably got delayed for political reasons.

We'll see. There has been a lot of talk over the last year and a quarter of ceasefire / hostage release deals, and while I wouldn't be surprised if Hamas were to time a deal with the US presidential transition, I also don't believe that the American politics angle is the most relevant to either Hamas or its key foreign enablers, some of whom have more FU-feelings for the incoming Trump administration than the outgoing Biden administration.

Is this a Nixon Goes To China moment? Hamas/Qatar thinks they could extract more from vulnerable Democrats, but Trump will order the Sixth to just slave all munitions to Israeli fire control and at least give some kill marks to the US. If Trump is known to be maximally unsympathetic, then rushing a sellable victory is more important than holding out for Harris breaking with the Israelis.

I doubt it, though that may just be me fixating on the metaphor.

Israel-Hamas ceasefire / hostage release deal is a good thing or not.

Yeah, it's a good deal.

War is heavily negative sum which is why both sides usually lose. Unless victory is assured, it almost always makes sense to stop fighting rather than to pursue maximal war aims.

This is a particularly bad war. Neither side is able to win. Israel can't defeat all its enemies because whenever enemy deaths get too high, Israel loses the support of Europe and the US. And of course the Iran/Palestine coalition can't win either due to ineptness.

So without a negotiated peace, the war would just go on and on forever with Israel killing lots of its enemies but never enough to achieve victory.

Is it perfect? Is it permanent? No, of course not. But it is net positive.

This is a particularly bad war. Neither side is able to win. Israel can't defeat all its enemies because whenever enemy deaths get too high, Israel loses the support of Europe and the US.

This situation will only get worse due to demographics. Makes it hard to see postponing the war as a good thing.

Not totally sure what you mean by “get worse” here; you mean both sides will only continue to experience more and more casualties in future, because of their above-replacement TFR resulting in net positive population growth?

American and Western public opinion of Israel will get worse due to a growing Muslim population and an anti-racist younger generation.

And the fact that Israel is costing a ton of money, genoiciding christians and filling Europe with migrants. We have 250 000 Syrians in Sweden and now the country has been taken over by jihadists with fancy foreign weapons who got air support.

Israel is not genociding anybody, but the behaviors which are worst are aimed at Muslims. Israel soft-supported the Maronites in the Lebanese civil war and Israeli Christians are a model minority.

Israel didn’t force Sweden to let in Syrians though. That’s a self own.

Doctors and engineers are a valued commodity, so the trick is to redefine every military aged male who declared their intent to be an aspiring rapper. From aspiring rapper to charity case thinking about turning his life around, this refugee will surely accrue positive value for Sweden in n=ERROR years.

The just push migrants to Europe while helping them cross the Mediterranean while their NGOs are the biggest lobbying groups for mass immigration.

Even the white and right leaning younger people in the west aren't as fond of Israel since they are either more isolationist or further right are more ethnonationalist and so oppose helping non-whites.

I think a permanent peace, even if it means being a temporary pariah state works better. The constant cycle of terrorism->Israel bombs the shit out of Gaza/West Bank -> temporary truce while militants rearm and reorganize -> terrorism -> repeat cycle serves no one. It’s not even really peace. Peace would mean that Israel could more or less stand down, and not need to put in all the apartheid regime stuff that it does because Palestinians are no longer a potential threat. Palestine could rebuild itself and either become part of a federated state within Israel or a small state perhaps in West Bank that would not be bombed every 5-10 years.

This is where Western interference is causing the problem. Because the Hamas/Fatah movements are never completely defeated, they simply call for ceasefire, and in some future time it starts again. Probably with better weapons and with the lessons learned from this round.

If they become a pariah state they lose their peace with Jordan and Egypt, so that doesn't help.

Jordan and Egypt at war with Israel is a massive loss for those 2 countries. The inertia of peace keeps them from rattling the sabres to sate domestic bloodlust. Being in a belligerent state makes obvious the precarity of their domestic military and economic capabilities, exposing the regime to internal threats that are much more willing and capable of stringing the existing leaders up from lampposts. Its better for Sisi and Hussein to shrug their shoulders and say 'the US is forcing this peace on us' than to actually mobilize and expose how weak they really are.

Once Israel is a 'pariah state', 'the US is forcing this peace on us' is no longer usable.

It was a bad war, but what other choice did Israel have? Not retaliating or trying to get the hostages would have been politically untenable. Immediately entering negotiations for the return of the hostages would have had the effect of legitimizing hostage taking as a means of diplomacy. the only real option was to invade and hope that Hamas kept the hostages alive for leverage and wait until Hamas was sufficiently weakened to be in a position to make a deal. And that's just a deal, not necessarily a good deal.

It was a bad war, but what other choice did Israel have?

Other choice? Accept the deal and do a prisoner exchange in return for the hostages. No war, no ICC prosecutions, no IDF members committing suicide due to the depravity of their actions, Israelis would be able to travel/holiday without worrying about getting convicted for crimes against humanity/genocide, no Hezbollah rocket campaign destroying their economy, no Houthi rocket campaign making their ports go bankrupt...

Israel refused to take the hostages back multiple times because they preferred to go in and wipe out Gaza in order to try and ethnically cleanse and then settle the territory. Itamar Ben Gvir said multiple times that he had made sure to sink any deal involving the hostages being returned, and there's a decent chance that Smotrich resigns from government because getting the hostages back isn't worth not being able to murder more Palestinians and steal their territory.

  • -10

Your beliefs seem to be:

  1. That Israel should have taken no action after October 7 accept to comply with Hamas's demands for the return of the hostages.

  2. That Israel wants to kill or remove all 2 million people from Gaza and settle the area themselves.

Would this be accurate?

My personal belief is that Israel should adopt a single-state solution with full democracy and franchise for everyone within the borders of Israel and Palestine. As for number 1... yes, I would prefer if they negotiated a return of the hostages. It might seem like a bit of a weak response if you hatched out of an egg on October 6th and have no prior knowledge of the region, but Israel has done far more and far worse to the Palestinians in the past. It would have been better to bury the hatchet and sue for peace on October 6th, but... well, 2 is accurate. I don't think there's any real arguments against this claim given that it is the official position of many members of the Israeli government. Not only do they want to do this, they have sunk multiple deals to return the hostages in order to keep the violence and ethnic cleansing going.

And the Palestinians would promptly elect a government that at least attempts to do far worse to the Israelis than the Israelis are doing or have done to Palestinians.

I don't believe that would be the case if there was a legitimate, good-faith effort to bring the two populations together and live in peace. It'd be a complicated process that required a lot of time and effort, as well as participation from the international community - you would of course have to have protections against retributive genocide. It wouldn't be easy or free of complications, but I think it'd be much better than the current apartheid situation.

protections against retributive genocide

This is incongruent with the population of Gaza being given political power. Even if Israel for the last 50 years had engaged in solely defensive actions, accepted mass bombings as a thing that happens, and never did any counterstrikes, the Arab Palestinians would still try to genocide them.

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In a federated system, I’m not sure how much it matters. If three states in the southwest USA voted for the Nazi party, the entire government doesn’t go along with it.

Honestly, I think something like the American Indian reservation system might work. A disarmed population with reasonable control of its own territory might be a decent option.

Maybe the ADL can explain to its home country that such conspiracies are racist and that social media companies should ban people who spread such hate.

But why would Israel take that deal? You want one side (the stronger side) to just give the other side everything it wants, and in fact, to do so after an incident in which thousands of its citizens were killed, tortured, and raped in the most horrific ways possible.

This would be true Christlike turning of the other cheek from Israel.

But in the real world, that never works. To fail to defend yourself only invites contempt and more aggression, which applies as much in international politics as it does on the school play yard. If Israel did what you said, they would inevitably lose their country. And I would say they deserved it. Nothing is so contemptible as a person who doesn't defend their rights.

But why would Israel take that deal?

To save the lives of the hostages. They've given up and lost far more than they would have if they simply accepted the first deal that was offered to them - this is a worse outcome from any perspective other than "we need to wipe out the Palestinians for more lebensraum", and even that's debatable. Look at the big list of negative consequences from my earlier post and remember that none of this would happen if Israel just took the first deal.

But in the real world, that never works. To fail to defend yourself only invites contempt and more aggression, which applies as much in international politics as it does on the school play yard. If Israel did what you said, they would inevitably lose their country. And I would say they deserved it. Nothing is so contemptible as a person who doesn't defend their rights.

Actually, in the real world, when you ethnically cleanse undesirable populations for having the wrong religion you engender disgust and hatred in the majority of the rest of the world. Germany would have been better off if they simply gave the Jews the ability to vote and lived together with them - but they took your suggested course of action instead, and now Nazi Germany has been consigned to the dustbin of history. We're already seeing Israeli war criminals fleeing to Argentina to escape prosecution, but it is an open question as to whether or not history finishes the rhyme.

The Jews of Germany were not trying to kill every ethnic German they could get their hands on.

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Actually, in the real world, when you ethnically cleanse undesirable populations for having the wrong religion you engender disgust and hatred in the majority of the rest of the world.

Ah yes, this is why Azerbaijan is having so much trouble selling their oil, considering their behavior towards Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh.

And why the world NGO-cracy condemned any attempts to help the Hutu genocidaire refugees in Congo, considering how they kept going after any Tutsis they could get their hands on.

It also explains why Turkey's continued repression of the Kurds got them kicked out of NATO, and why there's massive protests on every college campus about the genocidal atrocities being committed by the Sudanese Arabs towards the Christian and animist black Africans of South Sudan.

/sarcasm.

Turn the other cheek when there is a promise of heavenly rewards. In real life continued cooperation in the face of defection just makes you a chump ripe for the taking.

The Palestinians have played the game right. Continued defection when cooperation is externally imposed by greater powers, promising violence in arabic and pleading innocence in english, lying to internal stakeholders to keep momentum going.

There are plenty of well meaning Israelis who believed that defense is itself an aggressive proposition, that opening their homes and businesses to Gazans would foster cooperation and love. Those people set up open air festivals and farming villages next to Gaza to facilitate such endeavors. For their efforts they were slaughtered and raped on livestream, to the cheering delight of the very Gazans they tried to help.

The Palestinians have played the game right. Continued defection when cooperation is externally imposed by greater powers, promising violence in arabic and pleading innocence in english, lying to internal stakeholders to keep momentum going.

Let's grant their strategy has worked. What I'm then curious about is: why wouldn't it have been better to go even farther? Take whatever deal Clinton was trying to organize and then defect later from a stronger position?

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single-state solution with full democracy and franchise for everyone

I like this, but only as a Christian state. The best outcome would be for the conversion of all involved parties to Christianity and the removal of others from the holy lands.

The failure of all parties involved to acknowledge the 1099 borders, under which Jerusalem clearly belongs to the Holy See, has brought untold death and destruction on the region for centuries.

/s

Yes, I'd also be happy to see the region returned to Rome.

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Enemy kills 1200 people and takes 200 hostages?

Just make peace with them in exchange for getting the 200 back.

It's the perfect solution!

Israel was engaging in acts of war against Palestine. They bombed Gaza before october 7th, they had killed hundreds of Palestinians earlier in 2023, they were engaging in an illegal blockade and stealing land.

I again remind you that Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2004, evicting Israeli settlers from the strip. Then the gazans elect Hamas and start bombing Israel, after which Israel blockades Gaza. A blockade is completely reasonable in response to such an act of war from the gazans.

This statement becomes a lot less pithy when you factor in the actual history of the region. I may as well talk about how Israel brutally and evilly attacked Palestine for no reason on October 8 - you can make either side look good by arbitrarily choosing the moment at which you start counting the trading of blows.

My headcanon about this is that there's a secret agreement between Bibi and the Don about how the Israelis can play nice until they get their people back (or whatever's left of them), and immediately following that they have America's blessing to glass gaza entirely.

Obviously not going to happen.

More likely they play nice until Hamas's sudden but inevitable betrayal.

You forgot "utterly unexpectable".

It's a Firefly reference.

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It was a bad war, but what other choice did Israel have?

None. Revenge was the best option, IMO.

Sometimes the least bad outcome is the best one, and I think that's what Israel settled for. They have acted rationally throughout this conflict, IMO.

Agreed. I think this war becomes a lot easier to understand when you take the frame that there are no good guys, and this is just the latest iteration of same 3000+ year old conflict that has infested Judea since Old Testament times.

I don't see any peaceful resolution that will be permanent, and in the final calculus, I'd prefer the genocidal IDF to a genocidal Hamas.

The only difference is that the Jews finally managed to organize into a cohesive unit as opposed to a billion squabbling factions and their enemies have somehow gotten even stupider than they were in the past. The only smart thing Israels enemies did was cut loose the most worthless dead weight. Jordan and Egypt both refusing to return to the 1966 borders where West Bank and Gaza were not under Israeli occupation is the singular political masterstroke that has made all their military defeats worth it.

Indeed. Pan-Arabism was well towards dying at that point, but it's hard to find a better case of screwing over one's co-ethnic co-religionists for the sake of national interest.

One thing I don't see brought up is that maybe the best thing for Israel to do would be to sign the deal, get the hostages back, and then immediately just ignore the deal and spend the next couple of years killing every Hamas member on the face of the planet.

I mean, the current deal doesn't get all the hostages back. It merely sets up future negotiations over getting them returned. There's still several dozen (living and dead) remaining with Hamas for the near future, if not longer. Everyone calling this a "win for Israel" seems to be ignoring/accepting that.

Bibi needed an excuse to do a deal (which the IDF and Mossad and wider Israeli secular-ish establishment, including the banks and anyone remotely interested in the Israeli economy sorely wanted) over the heads of the Kahanists like Ben-Gvir and other extremist religious Zionists.

Witkoff (by all accounts a relatively zionist person himself) being “tough” provides Bibi with the excuse needed to throw up his hands and say “look, we have to do it, we don’t have a choice, it’s going to happen” and accept the deal that most of the Israeli establishment wanted anyway. It had to be Trump’s man because if it was Biden’s guy, the Kahanists would demand to wait until Trump’s guy was in in the hope that he would offer a better deal.

This concisely explains the situation. In the end this is the best deal, the IDF didn’t want to spend years mired in Gaza which would be terrible for morale, Hamas was always going to reform and - with Hezbollah severely weakened, a much stronger border and Iranian foreign policy in shambles - Hamas is less of a risk now anyway. Its full destruction was impossible without permanently destroying the ongoing lucrative reconciliation process with the Gulf Arabs, which can now slowly resume.

I don't really see why the IDF spending years in Gaza would be bad for morale. After 10/7, it's hard for me to imagine any Israeli soldier not being happy to spend a few months patrolling an occupied Gaza, especially given that now that Hamas' military strength is mostly broken, an Israeli soldier would be unlikely to die over there. But then, I'm neither an Israeli nor a soldier. I guess in practice, it would not be that great. For one thing, it probably does sap morale for most non-insane people to patrol an occupied population.

I'm surprised that the IDF and Mossad would want a peace deal. My mental model of both those groups is that they are controlled by hard-liners who want to destroy their opponents. But I don't know much about the inner politics of Israel and I'm pretty sure that you know much more about it than I do.

The situation with the Gulf states is one that I probably didn't spend too much time thinking about when I made my original post. I did think of them, but my initial thought was that pretty much no matter what Israel did short of an actual genocide, they would figure out how to spin it to their populations as being close enough to a draw that they would not face any major unrest, and even if they did face unrest as the result of such an outcome, they would not be seriously threatened. But when I think over it again, I can see how maybe an Israel that does a deal with Hamas that leaves Hamas effectively destroyed for the near future is better for the region's stability than Israel going all-out to destroy its enemies. After all, Israel has in the last year shown that it is not a country that you want to fuck with if you have the typical second/third world minor country type of corrupt, ineffective, and technologically/organizationally relatively primitive military.

Hamas' military strength is mostly broken, an Israeli soldier would be unlikely to die over there. But then, I'm neither an Israeli nor a soldier.

There are enough handgrenades left and little kids to carry them to the soldiers.

After all, Israel has in the last year shown that it is not a country that you want to fuck with if you have the typical second/third world minor country type of corrupt, ineffective, and technologically/organizationally relatively primitive military.

I wish this were true. Military leaders may recognize that their corrupt inept armies cannot take on Israel at all, but there are plenty of stupid jihadis on their private telegrams who celebrate having defeated Israel comprehensively in every engagement. In these telegrams and social media the Israelis have retreated in shame from every battle, having lost thousands of soldiers who spontaneously disapparate to spare the jews the shame of having dead soldiers paraded before the victorious Palestinians. Palestinians keep crowing about their indomitable will and ingenuity coming up with novel solutions to defeat the Israelis and western sympathists are eager to signal boost the victories of the underdog because victory=moral support. In this information environment, the Palestinians do not think they have lost anything. So long as a single Palestinian is alive, the Jew is defeated, and the Jew being defeated means the Palestinians have won every battle. The logical order does not follow, but Palestinians and their supporters are uninterested in using logic, much less understanding it.

In these telegrams and social media the Israelis have retreated in shame from every battle, having lost thousands of soldiers who spontaneously disapparate to spare the jews the shame of having dead soldiers paraded before the victorious Palestinians.

I believe this is the same phenomena playing out on Wikipedia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_engagements_during_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war

Oh, it's been changed since I last saw it. It previously had a result column that listed Hamas as the victor to most engagements. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_military_engagements_during_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war&oldid=1265753911

Wikipedia is particularly captured. Source pollution and semantic abuse have allowed pro-Palestinians to cite dubious sources as fact instead of opinion. The page you cite already stares Oct 7 is a tactical Hamas victory, and on its Oct & attack page it cites a Haaretz article for the IDF being responsible for killing its own people oer the Hannibal Doctrine, conveniently locking the Haaretz article behind a paywall.

There is endless denial by Palestinian supporters that there was any crime committed by Hamas, and that if Hamas did do it then that it was glorious and the Jews deserved it anyways. Bafflingly the most prominent apologists are privileged western (including Israeli* like Haaretz journalists who write for leftist publications such as Vox or Jacobin) activists who do all the intellectual laundering to sanewash Palestinian objectives. A cursory glance of what the Palestinians themselves say they want - mass extermination of Israelis as per the Hamas charter, repeats of Oct 7 as often as possible - is ignored in favor of paeans to theoretical harmony that would exist the moment Israel lays down its arms. This utopianism flies in the face of reality for a theoretical unified Palestinian state, for the Palestinians have been engaged in Fatah-Hamas civil wars since... pretty much the beginning of the PLO.

A charitable interpretation is that underdog support blinds pro-Palestinians to the genocidal intent stated by the Palestinians themselves, using evolving language of 'trauma' to whitewash such language as temporary maledictions brought about by (maximally traumatizing) ongoing Israeli actions. Such an interpretation required willful self deception regarding what the Palestinians themselves openly celebrate and have done to great glee.

I'm surprised that the IDF and Mossad would want a peace deal. My mental model of both those groups is that they are controlled by hard-liners who want to destroy their opponents

IIRC the IDF is one of the few militaries that sits(very slightly) to the left of Israeli society as a whole, because everyone serves except the most hardline conservatives.

Wouldn’t that get balanced by the lack of conscription for Israeli Arabs?

Israel’s economy and security situation can’t afford a permanent occupation of Gaza. Israel would need to keep 250,000 reservists mobilized, a significant proportion of their reserve force. Those guys all have day jobs, participating in the economy. The occupation force would be taking a small amount of casualties, every month, for as long as it was there. And it would leave the IDF badly undermanned in the event of any of the many, many other nightmare scenarios, like a full uprising in the West Bank, a major flareup by Hezbollah in Lebanon, an invasion by a neighbor, or a major civil conflict.

I suspect you’re wildly underestimating how much it sucks to spend months in a combat zone, regardless of how often someone you know dies.

Most of those arguments applied equally well in spring 2003. 15 years later, people were a lot less enthusiastic.

For the connoisseurs of online drama, there is newly created single-article substack making anonymous allegations against some user being a sock puppet of another user on both Wikipedia and something called RationalWiki and using his accounts to discredit people doing intelligence research.

The article was voiced by askwhocastsai, therefore the source must be credible. This is likely published by someone who is not a neutral party with a pathological interest into pathological wiki people, but rather someone who has been feuding with the subject of the article, personally, so one should probably take it with a grain of salt, for all I know this Smith guy is a fabrication and the sock puppet owner wrote the article to deflect attention away from him.

Anyways, the alleged subject of the article is said to be a former neo-Nazi who has reformed and is now using sock puppets to write hit piece articles about academics who research the genetics of intelligence on RationalWiki, which per WP 'is an online wiki which is written from a scientific skeptic, secular, and progressive perspective.' (It likely shares some ancient history with the ratsphere in that both movements precursors include the atheism wars, but they did not update on the cowpox of doubt.) His other alleged hobby is to sue people (representing himself) who write about him doing that. The article claims that most people who he sues actually tend to settle and remove their articles even though he would be unlikely to win in court. Per the article, substack managed to get a case kicked out of court when he sued them.

The articles claims that his tactics include getting articles on him deleted by personally editing them, adding info which is clearly slander, and then proceed with his legal actions, which seems like a neat if evil trick if you get away with it.

Generally, the claim that a select few who have the time to maintain one or more online personas have an exaggerated influence on how members of the public who are somewhat noteworthy (but not very noteworthy) are perceived through a google search seems worrisome. (Nor do I expect the LLMs bound to replace google to be better here, mostly.)

Personally, I am also fascinated by how much dedication and time some people on the internet have. Despite not being overworked, I write perhaps four comments on LW, ACX or the motte per week in total. Seeing someone who manages to run dozens of sock puppets, or painstakingly unearths sock puppetry going years back, or (as the alternative) invents whole complex allegations of sock puppetry has me amazed.

I'm amazed at the effort some people still put into sockpuppets and trolling just here on the Motte.

I think some people get infested by brainworms once they've been balked, just once, and cannot let go of the idea that they have to "win" and "show them."

RationalWiki has to be one of the most cringeworthy sites around.

Everything is written with the kind of contemptuous, snarky tone that you see on the incels.wiki page for 'femoids'. At least the incels are succinct.

For instance, on the Vladimir Putin page for instance they have "Reality-defying good stuff?" and "And the reality-returning bad stuff" as sections. 'Elderly imperialist Elmer Fudd and Daniel Craig’s evil twin.' is not an appropriate subtitle for an image.

It's so bad. I don't know why Google points to it so willingly.

Please ignore the context of this tweet (Elon reXt it, so it is CW fire): https://x.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1879273049075458217

What I instead found curious was the usage of "GM (Global Majority) formerly known as BAME (Black, Asian, Middle East)" which I had never read before. But I am not British. Wiki has a short article about the term, maybe it will be longer in future:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Global_majority&oldid=1257733067

The term was used as early as 2003 as a way to challenge the normativity of a white majority or Eurocentric perspective […]
In 2020, the Church of England created an Archbishops' Anti-Racism Taskforce … "United Kingdom Minority Ethnic/Global Majority Heritage" (UKME/GMH) as more appropriate than BAME.[16] The language of "Global Majority Heritage" is seen as a reminder that minorities often come from a majority culture before migrating to the UK.
In November 2022, the Labour-run Westminster City Council committed to replace BAME with "global majority."

It seems to still be fringe/local use, but I wonder if it will be the new preferred term. Being part of a minority sounds small/miserable, you are an outsider. But being part of the global majority, now that sounds grand and legitimate, you are the demos.

What a stupid, self-abrogating way to discuss something.

It was suggested in a reply that part of the switch is that Minority Ethnic will fall out of usage because White British are a minority ethnic when distinguished from the overarching "White" category in City of London and City of Westminster. Still the plurality, though.

Which led me down the Wikipedia hole. The UK Other White population pyramids are pretty fascinating, there's almost no male surplus at any age across any subpopulation. Noticeable female surplus of White Germans and White North Americans at almost every age. White New Zealander/Australian is less symmetric and "smooth" than the rest.

Which led me down the Wikipedia hole. The UK Other White population pyramids are pretty fascinating, there's almost no male surplus at any age across any subpopulation. Noticeable female surplus of White Germans and White North Americans at almost every age. White New Zealander/Australian is less symmetric and "smooth" than the rest.

European women, like in the Anglosphere, are more likely to go to college and emigrate than the men. The men stay behind. The same thing happens within-country. There are more East German women in Hamburg and Munich than East German men. There are more rust belt women in NYC than rust belt men. So it goes.

I believe you, but this is counterintuitive to me and I really want some theories about why it happens that way. Simply college statistics? Or do women believe they have more to gain from moving than men do?

Language courses are overwhelmingly female, even compared with the overall college population. And they usually include a year abroad which is a big driver of moving abroad more permanently.

Fred Pearce's Peoplequake wrote about rural-to-urban migration as a majority-female phenomenon almost everywhere in 2011. As well as pull factors (modern low-end manufacturing is pink-collar work, cities have more mid-level administrative jobs) there is the important push factor that some women are fleeing patriarchal rural and small-town communities for the obvious feminist reasons. Most women really don't want to end up as a farmer's wife*. And if you are betraying your religious parents by moving to the city and adopting a feminist lifestyle then the marginal cost (pre-Brexit, at least) of moving to London over Frankfurt is low.

Most of the young German women I meet in London are Bavarians from conservative CSU-voting families. (Though I suspect the real skew there may still be post-WW2 occupation era war brides.) Most of the educated Polish women I meet in London are running away from social conservatives in rural and small-town Poland.

* The Instragram tradwife trend isn't about being a farmer's wife - it is about being the wife of a man rich enough to buy you a hobby "farm".

Status and college, basically. Why women are more likely to go to college is pretty simple- there is no other acceptable life path for a middle class(the majority in western countries) woman than one in which she has a college degree. Even housewives are expected to have bachelors degrees these days.

The job itself seems like a sinecure and I expect any candidate - GM or otherwise - applying would be disappointed. £65,000 for a secretary in the UK is an extremely high wage unless they’re literally the personal assistant to the CEO of a FTSE 100 or something. They already have someone in mind.

That was my first reaction to that as well. I'm always surprised by how low UK wages are, and that seemed exorbitant. I thought maybe there was some translation effect and that role was much more important than it sounds from the title.

The salary advertised here is at the grade for entry (or occasionally mid) level management roles, on the central London local govt pay scale. The Head of CEx office position (usual "right hand man" role) will be paid £70-£90k at WCC, and would be this person's line manager. Usually an EA role at Westminster Council would be paid £35-45k. This post will almost certainly be at the bottom of the payscale advertised (standard way it works in local govt. with roles at this level) and £54k for the CEx EA starts to sound more reasonable.

The DEI stuff is standard boilerplate WCC use on all their adverts (still a bit mad). I'd be very surprised if it was sinecured, more likely a way for the CEx to get someone with a bit of brains into his office by using a budgeted role who can fill in with doing some other stuff. Worth remembering too that WCC is the richest council by far and can afford to do this type of thing easily.

"Head of Office" is used in the UK where Americans would use "Chief of Staff".

Chief Executive of a British council is equivalent to a US city manager - they are a permanent employee who runs the city under the direction of the majority leadership of the elected council. Total population of the City of Westminster is 211 thousand.

So in US terms the position being advertised is deputy chief of staff to the city manager of a municipality with a population (within municipal borders) of c.200k in the core of a large metro area, with the appropriate pay adjustment for a high cost of living area.

It’s not really deputy chief of staff, that’s a completely different hiring track. This pay band is like a mid-level fast-tracked civil servant’s pay for an executive assistant job title working 36 hours a week (ie much, much less than the example of the FTSE 100 C-level EA, who might be on £90-100k but is also working 60+ hours and travelling). Chief of Staffs don’t do scheduling or hiring (they have their own teams / assistants to do that), this person is going to be bringing in cups of tea and biscuits when the CEO of the council meets with politicians and business leaders.

Nah this won't be a teas and biscuits job, they have separate staff for that, the catering team are usually at the beck and call of senior civil servants at City Hall.

You're right that this isn't a "deputy chief of staff", but I'd be pretty sure they'll be doing slightly more challenging work than pure diary management - the casework part in the ad gives a clue. Still overpaid vs. standard EA at Westminster though.

Sure, but it is still technically a secretarial role that is being advertised at about a 25-50% premium compared to the other secretaries in the same organisation. However, secretaries at the top of government bureaucracies don't necessarily function the same as secretaries lower down, or in private businesses. Basically agreeing with you that the pay is more reasonable than it seems given context but also a little eye brow raising.

I don’t think this term will catch on because it’s too anti-white

I don’t think this term will catch on because it’s too pro-white, insofar as fifty years of argument-by-connotation has given us the meme of “Minorities good, majorities bad”, and therefore calling nonwhites the majority and whites the minority is not a linguistic change that the Cathedral is going to condone.

Well, just on its own merits it's hopelessly arbitrary, right? 'Global majority' just means 'non-X'. Non-whites are a global majority compared to whites, yes, but then... so what? Non-blacks are also a global majority compared to blacks. No racial or cultural group constitutes a majority by itself.

(Unless you count 'Asians' as a single group. If you count South, Southeast, and East Asians as the same group, combined they do form a majority. However, I'd argue that any scheme that says that Indians and Chinese are the same race is badly flawed.)

I'd say they should just say 'non-white', 'non-European', or 'non-native-British', but perhaps that makes it too clear what the intent is.

Funnily enough, I had the exact opposite impression: I rather wonder whether this will be picked up by the far right as a way to legitimize opposition to immigration, in normie eyes: “Real diversity” means preserving the native people and culture of $WHITE_WESTERN_COUNTRY, who are a tiny, beleaguered minority in global terms.

One man’s modus ponens and all that.

You can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.

But actually you can. The tools used to build a house could very much be used to destroy it.

I think the important part of the metaphor is that this isn't just any old set of tools, they belong to someone called "the master." He might lend them to you for a specific purpose like doing housework, but if you start trying to destroy his house, he will instantly call down the thunder on you. The only way to really destroy his house is to forcibly take away his power.

It's a bad metaphor. There's a house, a master, his tools, and the objective of dismantling. Whatever those stand for either the tools are powerful enough to produce a house and defend it from attacks to unseat its master and dismantle it, or they're not. Metaphors-lawyering about which bits are powerful and pertinent or not, and when, and how, for who, all just undermines the metaphor.

It's a counterculture koan. It's purpose is to make you think about The System and sound wise while doing it.

It's ironic that by analysing the phrasing we can neutralise the text. The very tools that the writer used to build this house...

A compromise - it's a bad metaphor if you refuse to consider the second order effects of your actions

In any war both sides use plenty of similar tools against each other because they work. You don't see a war when one side is capable but decides to not use bullets, missiles, tanks, artillery, air force.

Promoting sympathy for X by portraying them as a minority group under threat is a tool that seems like it would work. X is treated with less sympathy because of rhetoric promoting sympathy for Z as a minority under threat and X as the threat. There isn't any logic to why this won't work if you potray different groups with sympathy and others as threatening them.

Throughout history different tribes promoted narratives that were pro their tribe and antagonistic to other tribes, which worked better than if they did nothing.

One can say that going too far with tribalism might lead to backlash, or can be detrimental in how other tribes are treated. But not going far enough is guaranteed to be detrimental and never lead to any dismantling or weakening of ideology against the group that is adviced not to use the master's tools. So it is a bad advice for the side that has been under siege to avoid using any of the tools of their more tribalist opposition. From a general ethical viewpoint, what in excess is immoral and in too little quantity is bad, in the right amount can be the right thing to do. Beyond just effectiveness.

Slavery itself was ended through force and so it was ended by the tool that maintained it. Rhetoric advocating for and against slavery was another rhetoric used by both sides. Both sides even used the bible. Supporters of slavery might have thought of their own political influence and opponents might have thought of their declining political influence and rise of influence of slave states. Economic interests that relate to slavery and then to those whose under industrial revolution and their different societal organization they didn't benefit with slavery as much and might saw such areas as antagonistic, might had been a factor. Both enslaved who opposed slavery and slave owners where thinking of their interests in opposing each other.

This idea that X group unlike Z group should not pursue their own interests and promote rhetoric framing things in defense of themselves because in doing so they will lose, is not only false but very counter intuitively false.

I’m sorry, did you mean “main’s house with the main’s tools”?

—GitHub, probably

I never understood why this aphorism is a thing. It seems wrong both literally (in what setting that is not a video game do tools come with friendly fire proofing?) and as a metaphor (almost every successful revolution co-opts components nurtured by the system it overthrows). Are there reasons to keep it alive beyond some sort of postmodern appeal (it sneaks in the assumption that your opposition are akin to slaveholders, and appears to say authoritatively that you should reject "tools" on association with the enemy rather than on merit)?

They don't have to be akin to slaveholders, they just have to be in charge of a corrupt process.

I’m sure it’s as falsifiable as any other absolute, but it’s not a bad heuristic. The master of the house has a head start. Better to deny him his tools than to try and catch up.

Like others have said, it's a useful heuristic. I'd say that's because it connects to the same idea as "set a thief to catch a thief," and black hat hackers becoming top security consultants. Who knows better how to defend against a tactic than those expert in it's use? If you want to know how to build the strongest safe, ask the world's best safecracker.

This is why I get frustrated with fellows on the right who make arguments like 'well, if the left took over all these institutions via an entryist "long march," why don't we just do our own "long march" infiltration to take them back?" or 'since the left so effectively weaponized demographic change against us (via mass immigration), we'll easily be able to weaponize it right back (via birth rates).' It misses that in the past cases, the right was not on guard against these tactics from the left, but the left, being intimately familiar with them, will see them coming and be prepared to shut them down. No institution is better protected against entryists attempting to infiltrate than one which has already been taken by entryists. (Again, who knows better how to stop and catch a burglar than a better, more experienced burglar.) And just because the right mostly stood by and did little when the left used mass immigration, does not mean the left will stand by and let right-wingers outbreed them. If anything, it means the opposite: they'll be watching demographics closely, on watch for the slightest sign of reversal, and ready to use any and all means at their disposal to shut down any attempt from the start.

It's not about 'rejecting "tools" on association with the enemy' (I personally hate that argument), it's about classic, pragmatic strategy, going all the way back to Sun-Tsu, about not fighting battles that inherently favor the enemy.

Because it rings true. The contents of Lourde's essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House" are largely postmodern garbage, but the title is clearly getting at something. The methods those in power used to construct the institutions they use to exercise power can only build those institutions. You can't build a hereditary monarchy by voting, and the divine right of kings will never get you a democracy.

To use a left-wing example (since the anti-colonialist movement influenced a lot of the rhetoric): you don't want to be playing into ethnic competition that allowed divide and rule since it won't work for you the way it worked for the white man.

This is basically what Lourde seems to be drawing on to justify claiming that treating groups like black lesbians as non-central is some great betrayal of feminism. This argument is much less unconvincing on its face when applied to some state trying to maintain a hierarchy of ethnic groups.

but the title is clearly getting at something

I find it interesting that my primary take at the title is that anyone that finds themselves with the power (tools) to dismantle the system has enough power that merely taking over the system (house) becomes much easier and more enjoyable. And I think that bears out: quite a few "freedom fighters" have really just ended with taking the throne for themselves. The (rare) principled exceptions to that seem IMO to prove the rule.

...but Germans voted in Hitler, and Juan Carlos I sort of ordained a transition to democracy in Spain after Franco (if you squint). Outside of the low-N domain that is the political system of a country, there are even more examples of a house being dismantled using its master's tools, first and foremost the progressive takeover of positivist academia. What is entryism, even, if not an attempt to seize the Master's tools to have a go at the house?

(On the meta level, as a right-winger who is adopting this catchphrase, are you not also aiming to use the postmodernist Master's tool against his house - directly, and one step up the meta ladder in that you are in fact even copying the strategy of claiming that "the master's tools will never..." while aiming to employ the master's tools to that end yourself?)

but Germans voted in Hitler

Did they? My understanding was that the Nazis got much less than a majority, but the votes led to a plurality Nazi bloc in the legislature, and in the hopes of throwing them a bone in order to control them and assuage street violence, the President offered the chancellorship to Hitler as part of a theoretical pseudo-coalition. Then Hitler used the chancellorship to orchestrate extraconstitutional "emergency" power-grabs after the Reichstag fire, enabled through threats of violence to Reichstag members.

This would of course not be the last time someone thought "let's just give Adolf what he wants to satisfy him." But I would not describe what happened as "the German people decisively voted that they wanted the Nazis to have full control over society and Hitler to be a dictator." It's much more like a large group of Germans, some out of passionate love for Nazism and some out of desperation amid economic crisis, voted for the Nazi party, and then they used the first tiny, slight grip on power to establish a dictatorship through violence.

I thought the story was that the broad establishment coalition(conservative dominated but included everyone except Nazis and actual communists) needed either Nazi or commie votes to form a government, and picked Hitler over Stalin.

Either way, it remains true that Hitler did not win a democratic mandate.

"Proportional Representation: Literally Hitler"!

The progressives did NOT dismantle the house; they skin-suited it. This may be almost as good or even better politically, but it's not the same as bringing on their postmodern utopia.

A lot of hereditary monarchies start by winning a vote (Hugh Capet, or the old greek cycle where democracy devolves into tyranny) .

the divine right of kings will never get you a democracy

Divine Right of Kings => Mandate of Heaven => Popular Sovereignty imbued by the Creator.

The old Greek cycle almost never resulted in a hereditary monarchy- a series of dictatorships usually had their succession dealt with through power struggles.

Cypselus was the first tyrant of Corinth in the 7th century BC. Like the signori of late medieval and Renaissance Italy, the tyrants usually seized power at the head of some popular support. As in Renaissance Italy, a cult of personality naturally substituted for the divine right of the former legitimate royal house. He ruled for thirty years and in 627 BC was succeeded as tyrant by his son Periander, who was considered one of the Seven Sages of Greece.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypselus

According to Polyaenus, Syloson was a general of the Samians who was believed to have democratic leanings. He suggests that Syloson was the founder of a tyrannical dynasty which ruled Samos for most of the sixth century BC, being succeeded first by Aeaces and then by Polycrates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syloson_(son_of_Calliteles)

Pisistratus  was a politician in ancient Athens, ruling as tyrant in the late 560s, the early 550s and from 546 BC until his death.  Pisistratus' championing of the lower class of Athens is an early example of populism. Pisistratids is the common family or clan name for the three tyrants, who ruled in Athens from 546 to 510 BC, referring to Pisistratus and his two sons, Hipparchus and Hippias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisistratus

This already is one of the main arguments used by white identitarians. It has been for decades. “We must jealously guard what remains of the European genetic legacy; we will be overwhelmed by replacement migration and our genes will be diluted beyond recognition, as we simply are not numerous enough (nor fertile enough) to remain genetically separate under those conditions.” The whole “global majority” gloating has been in use for at least a few years now, and many figures on the online right have noticed it.

"We must jealously guard what remains of the European genetic legacy; we will be overwhelmed by replacement migration and our genes will be diluted beyond recognition, as we simply are not numerous enough (nor fertile enough) to remain genetically separate under those conditions.”

What's sad to me is that these people rarely understand why that's cause for concern besides the cosmetic aspect. Even (by modern standards) extremist racists have only the vaguest notion of how phenomenologically-different we all are.

Lmao, this sounds like a parody of what right wingers believe about leftist tactics: From "we are a tiny wittle minority, uguu, you have to wespect our wights" to "We are the majority of the world, we get to say how things are done"

For this reason, I don't think it'll have much staying power.


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