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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3828 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Trump, breaking with Netanyahu, acknowledges ‘real starvation’ in Gaza. Reddit discussion.

This makes him the first right winger I've seen say anything about starvation after something happened recently that made lots of places start talking about it, maybe the move to GHF food distribution? I can't really trust the UN when they talk about it, since they may have been still pissed that Israel cut UNRWA out, plus I heard it was only two dedicated Gaza writers putting out statements of that kind. I can't really trust leftists when they post about it, because they fail to show me their homework and seem to argue a very motivated stance. But Trump talking about it... I don't know about that either. He has spoken off the cuff before. But it brings me to ask: how bad is it? What footage did he see and is it reflected in the data?

Supposing that there is starvation: is that Israel's intention? What is Israel's strategy going forward? I thought that making camps to move civilians into was a good idea, and then once everyone's out, painstakingly clear the whole place, but I think that the international community wouldn't accept that because it's technically ethnic cleansing. There isn't actually anything the international community would be satisfied by except for total ceasefire and return to October 6th. But I don't actually know what the intention is, is the intention to draw Hamas out of hiding to get to the food somehow? I have a hard time discerning what is true about the war and what isn't.

Eh, they're not "release the hostages" starving yet.

About as insightful a comment as "Eh, they are not 'free Palestine' raped yet" would have been about Oct 7th.

There are several parallel subthreads already discussing to what extent the starvation actually affects Hamas, and you choose to ignore them and instead post this Twitter-level dunk.

"Eh, they are not 'free Palestine' raped yet"

If Hamas had the military power to actually accomplish this, that would make their actions less pointlessly evil. The fact that Hamas' power is limited to terrorizing a few unarmed civilians and then scampering away in impotent terror when the real soldiers show up is, itself, the problem. The fact that they're too weak to have any chance of victory is the reason why their futile war crimes are so heinous. It's one thing to commit a necessary evil in order to liberate your people from oppression. It's another, much worse thing to commit a pointless evil just for the sake of doing it.

As Talleyrand once said of another act of self-destructive violence against civilians: "It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake."

Notice the discontinuity with your comparison.

Hamas invaded Israel, committed a bunch of war crimes, and now has no method nor seemingly intention of feeding their own people. Which apparently is Israel's fault?

You're comparing Hamas' crimes to their incompetence, and in so doing illustrating my point.

Hamas invaded Israel, committed a bunch of war crimes, and now has no method nor seemingly intention of feeding their own people. Which apparently is Israel's fault?

Israel was blocking the delivery of aid, and after begrudgingly letting some through they were shooting at people going from and to the distribution points. Yes, both of those are their fault.

If you think the two cases are asymmetric, the better difference to observe is perhaps that the Israeli government routinely engages in war crimes against Palestinians, whose relation with Hamas is between hostile and resigned for lack of better options, while Hamas routinely engages in war crimes against Israelis, who have a broadly voluntary and enthusiastic relation with their government. The average Israeli seems to deserve suffering for the Israeli government's crimes a lot more than the average Palestinian deserves suffering for Hamas's.

(And lest we go there, history did not start on Oct 7 2023.)

I don't think you know what a war crime is.

Palestinians, whose relation with Hamas is between hostile and resigned for lack of better options... Israelis, who have a broadly voluntary and enthusiastic relation with their government

According to polls of Palestinians conducted between October 31st and November 7th, 2023, support for Hamas stood at 76%; for the Al Aqsa Briagades at 80%; for Palestinian Islamic Jihad at 84%; and for the Al Qassam Brigades at 89%. In 2023, Netanyahu's approval rating among Israelis stood at 47%.

Israel had 86.5% favourability for the IDF last year, seemingly up to 93% now but I'm only finding paywalled articles. Unfortunately there are rarely polls that measure trust in the system of government modulo the parts that it allows the public to influence (since favourability for the Netanyahu administration would more accurately correspond to something like favourability of the current Hamas leadership).

That's a fair point.

  1. No nation at war has ever been required to feed the opposing army's solders (obviously if taken POW, not the central case) or allow the opposing army's soldiers to be supplied with food by a third party
  2. The enemy army controls the area in which the populace lives
  3. The enemy army will seize the lion's share of food aid for their own soldiers, even if requires shooting their own people to get it

That's pretty much it. You can spend hours looking up historical practice around sieges, I don't know what else you expect to find.

Amazingly enough, what is permissible conduct in wartime has varied greatly based on tech levels. "So after we won, we killed all the males and forced the women into marriages with us" was SOP a few thousand years ago, yet today it would be considered a war crime. For millennia, the sacking of cities involved the looting, murder and rape of civilians for the crime of living in a city which had not surrendered.

Before railroads were a thing, food logistics were often a big operational factor. The only way to move a large army to the land without them starving was to "forage", which meant sending out looting parties to nearby civilian settlements to steal their grain supplies and likely condemn them to starvation. Sieges fall into the same time.

But civilization marches on. Wartime rape is considered a war crime. Food logistics are not a big issue in most contexts. International humanitarian law recognizes that starvation is no longer a valid weapon of war.

Most damningly, just about nobody believes that starvation is effective against Hamas. If for every kid which starved to death, a Hamas militant also starved to death, I would grudgingly grant you that this might be a better way to defeat them than bombs. Instead, Hamas is not affected by starvation at all, because where they are in control they will obviously take what food they want. "Join Hamas, feed your family" is probably a great recruiting tool. Assuming they have food stashes, you would have to starve most of Gaza to death before the shortages will really affect them.

Starvation is a bit like firing a machine gun towards a Hamas militant hiding behind dozens of rows of Gazan kids. While you might claim that the actual goal is to hit the Hamas guy, it is very predictable that all your bullets will hit the kids and be stopped long before they reach the baddie.

If it is damning of anyone it is damning of the Hamas militant. I do not recall any Western warrior mythos that would permit a warrior to hide behind children. At most it would happen once before the warrior realizes that the enemy is actually not bluffing, and then comes out to fight.

It isn't necessary to starve Hamas, merely to deprive them of money. Hamas's allies in the various NGOs and aid organizations help them steal most of the food that comes into Gaza, far more than they can eat themselves. They then sell that food to the starving civilians at high prices, which nets them millions of dollars to fund their war effort.

Israel is under no obligation to help the UN finance a terrorist organization.

Instead, Hamas is not affected by starvation at all, because where they are in control they will obviously take what food they want.

That's exactly why Israel needs to do it: it is impossible to prevent civilians from starving because Hamas takes all the food. Israel taking the food affects only Hamas (although there are plenty of civilians to point to, who will be starved regardless of what Israel does but who can be blamed on Israel.)

Starvation is a bit like firing a machine gun towards a Hamas militant hiding behind dozens of rows of Gazan kids

Which you may have to do (at least to the extent of getting blamed for killing them). Hamas hiding behind civilians and forcing Israel to kill them, or to look like they're trying to kill them, has been a ubiquitous tactic already.

In a coincidence of timing, I've spent much of the day going through the telegram channel "Palestine English News Updates" (gazaenglishupdates) in another round of my continuing effort to locate video of the alleged mass murder of civilians. Content in the channel is only very rarely blurred, so if any of you plan on opening it, be warned: it contains extremely graphic images and video. I found a single video of the moment an individual was shot, and none depicting the moment where a group was shot at or attacked with explosives, but I relied entirely on search terms, and in a channel going back to Oct 23 that has 10K images and 20K videos, that's plenty of chances for me to miss one or several hundred.

What I didn't miss is the plentiful video and images of starving children. While the cause might be up for debate, that children are starving isn't. It's intuitive anyway: not easy to feed people in a warzone, the only food is coming in from the outside, people and especially children are going to die from malnutrition and starvation.

Israel might not "intend" (apply as heavy caveat to that as you wish) for civilians to starve, but starvation walks hand in hand with war and death. They knew it would result from the start, and it is strictly true that if the IDF stood down and withdrew, fewer people would starve. Should they? Good luck finding an impartial answer to that.

Whenever I try to figure out how mad I should be about this I do my best to translate it to a local Western frame.

If Canadian native peoples crossed the border, raped and murdered a bunch of US civilians at Burning Man, dragged hostages back to Vancouver and the Canadian government was like "lol get fukt America u r settler colonialists" I would absolutely support blowing the shit out of them until every native was dead or captured and every hostage was returned. If every Canadian starves to death as a result, well that sucks but they should consider revolting against their own government if they have a problem with that.

We're responsible for our people and I will be furious if we fuck around at all with bringing them home.

Looking at it this way makes me sympathize with Israel so much more.

Israel may do what it pleases (as is the right of a sovereign state) but it doesn't necessarily follow that Israel should be given tens of billions in supplementary US military aid, on top of already existing military aid. I don't accuse you of calling for this but Israeli strategy can only sensibly be considered in context, just like how one can't look at Hamas or the Houthis as sole actors. $18 billion in just one year, more since then. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-military-aid-for-israel-tops-17-9-billion-since-last-oct-7

America and to a lesser extent Britain are enabling Israeli strategic incoherence, providing air cover and munitions. If it weren't for US munitions the Israelis would need to wrap things up quickly because they would not be able to prosecute this extended, bizarre campaign.

What is this military aid buying? It's buying enemies in the Islamic world, it's depleting Western arsenals of air defence missiles. Years of THAAD and SM-3 production down the drain defending Israel. In the short term these air defence missiles are priceless, there's no capacity to quickly ramp up production.

It makes no sense to send aid to Gaza so they can survive and send munitions to Israel so they can kill them. Better to do nothing at all.

America and to a lesser extent Britain are enabling Israeli strategic incoherence, providing air cover.

If such aid was not given and this was signaled well in advance, do you still think they would need to wrap up quickly, or could they just have spent more on military and gotten the same result?

Israel is a small country, and they can only afford spending this much of their economic power on military before they would start looking like North Korea. This whole narrative that the aid isn't actually necessary because our allies are strong and can win on their own just fine (but we must urgently Do The Right Thing and send more of it!), seen also in the context of Ukraine, is among the more intellectually galling aspects of Western propaganda.

I was saying this in December of 2023. If the Mexican cartels breached the San Diego/Tijuana border, killed 40,000 people and kidnapped 8,000, the United States Military would be boots-on-the-ground occupying Baja California, Sonora, and probably Chihuahua within a month, if not 2 weeks.

and if the Mexican government objected, it'd probably only take us another 2 weeks to be in Mexico City.

American soldiers wouldn't be shooting innocent civilians, especially unarmed children in the process of trying to obtain food; were they to do so, the backlash would make "Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" look positively quaint.

If Andrew Anglin and his ilk want to convince the normies that Jews are all ethno-chauvinists who will excuse any atrocity committed by their co-ethnics, they'd just point to this thread, where Mottizens hilariously (and mendaciously) insist that shooting kids at aid stations trying to obtain food is completely justified because Israel isn't required to feed Gazans (wtf?!?!?! how does this even make sense to you?)

I would absolutely support blowing the shit out of them until every native was dead or captured and every hostage was returned. If every Canadian starves to death as a result, well that sucks but they should consider revolting against their own government if they have a problem with that.

We're not going to get to verify this, but I'd be willing to bet this is absolutely not how it would play out. The response would be police, not military, and you'd be called racist for saying that the larger group is responsible for the actions of their people.

This hugely depends on the degree of association between the group messing with Americans and the government of the territory they operate off. The Taliban were clearly happy to host Osama Bin Laden and the Al-Quaeda training camps and they got regime changed, but the US was never willing to engage in total war against Afghanistan. Mohammed Atta actually planned 9-11 out of Germany, but nobody supported punitive operations against Germany because he was very obviously operating without the support of the German government and people.

The 7th October attackers were not uniformed Hamas soldiers, but only because they were perfidiously fighting out of uniform. Hamas publicly praised the attacks and boasted about its responsibility for them. That level of involvement is closer to "Japan did Pearl Harbor" than "Afghanistan did 9-11." And the US was absolutely up for total war against Japan after Pearl Harbor.

The default assumption at this point is that Israel is waging a cargo-cult war. They're shooting people, and blockading checkpoints, and bombing suspected targets, but they don't seem to have any coherent goal beyond, "do war stuff to bad guys". They know cutting off supplies to the enemy is good, but they're also scared of the mass starvation that would ensue if they won too much.

If we take as an assumption that Israel knows what they're doing, then it sort of looks like their strategy is to technically let in enough food to feed the population of Gaza, but simultaneously to destroy the institutional infrastructure that would enable actual distribution. That way they can go, "see, we gave them enough food, Hamas was just too evil to give it to their people. They ethnically cleansed themselves," as if effectively rationing supplies to an entire population is no big deal.

That doesn't look like it to me, so why would it be the default assumption?

What it looks like to me is Israel is fighting with two hands tied behind its back. What they, IMO correctly, perceive is that most of "the international community" doesn't want them to win, nor would it tolerate them using META strategies in furtherance of an Israeli victory. So what they end up doing, and we end up observing, is a bunch of tiny motions in the direction of victory that advance the goals of Israel a little bit at a time, while mostly carefully avoiding any dramatic moves in that direction, which would have a high likelihood of generating massive blow-back, even if there was no alternative plausible avenue to generating whatever that strategic gain is/was.

Why is Palestine entitled to Israeli food? They can't pay for it, and actively stymie distribution of any food that arrives onshore. Thefts are unattributable because Hamas keeps its uniforms only for parades not for enforcement or fighting Israel - which it has largely stopped doing only because its proximate threat is the Gaza clans that now have a chance of fighting for their own slice of the narrow pies.

However you slice it, the governing body of the Gaza refuses surrender yet demands food for its own people from the Israelis it swears to destroy. When Armenia held Nagarno it supplied the enclave, not the Azerbaijanis. Israel ceded occupying power decades ago, yet the Gazans have expected Israeli water food and electricity without any expectation of paying for it even when waging war. If Gazans want to not starve perhaps kicking Hamas out might help.

Why is Palestine entitled to Israeli food?

Well, human rights come to mind. Rather, they're the reason individual Palestinians are entitled to food generally, whatever it takes to get it to them - not Palestine as a political entity, and not Israeli food in particular.

The strategy seems to be based on eroding the power base of Hamas, possibly with a side of forcing Gazans to confront the reality of their situation and their complete military defeat.

Apparently Hamas had previously been seizing food and using it to maintain power and influence by controlling who got what, which the new system pushed by Israel and the US is designed to thwart. This makes sense and seems like it would be effective, so I wouldn't be surprised if Hamas and those aligned with them would do a great deal to try and undermine that effort.

If your military victory left you a completely unruly population that you can't control outside of genociding them and you can't completely genocide them without compromising your military victory then I'm not sure you have a military victory.

Israel feeding Gazan children will create Gazan men and women. Those men and women are raised with a strong sense of having more Gazan children. To that extent I'm not sure if claims by either side of who is trying to starve who are in any way sensical.

The "completely unruly" part is doing the heavy lifting here. The only reason Hamas and the broader Palestinian movement keeps waging its pointless self-destructive war against Israel is because of its quixotic belief that Israel could ever be defeated militarily. As Richard Hanania argues, Israel must crush Palestinian hopes. If the current generation of Palestinian children are raised under the understanding that Israel will never be defeated (and hence they might as well learn to play nice with them and stop being completely unruly), that serves everyone's interests. If Israel can achieve a durable peace in the region without having to resort to genocide or ethnic cleansing, I'm sure they'd vastly prefer that over the alternative.

Then your definition of victory is narrow and unsuited to this conflict, or any other of the many interminable conflicts that clutter up the history books, there are kinds of victory other than those which are absolute or permanent.

Degrading or destroying Hamas reduces the danger posed by Gaza substantially, the remaining population can be as unruly as they like, if they lack the equipment, networks or know-how of how to turn ther discontent into military force then they simply are not a threat, not in the short to medium term at least. Sure they might eventually overcome these shortcomings and become an actual threat again in the long term, but in the meantime Israel can enjoy peace and security, which is absolutely a win.

This all assumes that the Gazans decide that yes, they really are going to learn nothing from this whole experience and just repeat the exact same mistakes that lead to them being bombed flat for 0 gain, which I really don't think is guaranteed. Yes the Gazans aren't going to come out of this experience overflowing with love for Israel, but I can't imagine they'll be very happy with Hamas either, or anyone who has the really bright idea of triggering an unwinnable war over what amounted to a very violent PR stunt. By all accounts Palestinians before the war had a delusional perspective on the conflict and their chances of victory against Israel, vastly overestimating their own population and vastly underestimating that of the Israelis, there is a chance that this conflict might knock some sense into them.

If you need to broaden the definition of victory to include whatever short term gain you allege Israel has now and preclude any longer term concerns then I'm not sure my definitions are the problem.

I mean, the peace and security Israel bought for itself seems extremely hard fought and eerily similar to what they had before. Outside of the Oct.7 attack, which was a defensive blunder, is all the manpower and material spent on this battle justifiable in any sense if we are comparing before and after?

In 2021, there was a singular combat casualty for the IDF. And of the 54 attempted significant terror attacks, there were 3 deaths and 34 wounded. And 2021 seems to be on the lower end of average.

I stand thoroughly unconvinced.

Outside of the Oct.7 attack, which was a defensive blunder, is all the manpower and material spent on this battle justifiable in any sense if we are comparing before and after?

If they didn't fight, it would be October 7 constantly. You are saying that there's no danger, so the military operation isn't needed. But there's no danger only because of the military operation.

If they didn't fight, it would be October 7 constantly.

Well, that's the question. Hamas would certainly attempt October 7 constantly. But "Oct 7 was a fluke caused by an unforced error in the Israeli defense strategy, Hamas did not have the capacity to achieve regular Oct 7-level attacks and Oct 7 itself could easily have failed if Israel had put in a bit more effort" is a reasonable claim.

It sets up strong push pressure for their upcoming "voluntary migration" plans.

Migrating where? Which country would take 2.1 million refugees?

I don't think that is Israel's intention to starve civilians to death, but marely a consequences of how Hamas blatantly ignore international convention of war leading to a lose lose situation for IDF/Gazan civilians, where IDF need to be accused of commiting war crime en masse, and Gazan civilians being stave to death.

While Israel had been criticized for their dubious non-humane military tactics, they seems to still put certain restraint on themselves when it comes to civilians. IDF don't kill civilians for fun, at least not openly.

I think the starvation here, if real, is an unintended consequences of international humanitarian organizations did not put effort to protect their humanitarian resources, leading to Hamas siphoning military resources for free practically.

An Indian Abroad: London 2, Electric Boogaloo

Three years ago, I wrote about my experiences as a foreign visitor navigating British culture. Today I want to revisit that theme, but with the additional data point of having lived in the UK for almost exactly one year. This gives me what economists might call a "natural experiment" - the same observer, examining the same phenomenon, but with different baseline expectations.

Despite extended residence here, my mental map of the country has embarrassingly large blank spots. There’s a pin for Aberdeen (work), a few for Edinburgh (pleasure, ACX meetups), and a recent one for Manchester (visiting a cousin). That’s about it, at least if restricting myself to places a non-British person might have heard of. My last trip to London was three years ago, a time that now feels like a different geological epoch.

I ended up there this time, as I end up in many situations, through a self-inflicted logistical failure. Some circuit in my brain responsible for booking travel fried itself, and I reserved a flight a full week before I was meant to meet an old friend. My first inkling of this error came when I was already approaching Tottenham via the train, from my friend’s utterly bewildered text messages, which made it clear he couldn’t just drop everything to accommodate my sudden appearance in his timeline.

This, combined with a fresh and painful re-confirmation that Ryanair’s reputation is entirely earned - they’d put Ozempic in the tap water and perform pro-bono liposuction to reduce fuel expenses - left me stranded in Tottenham, asking the internet for advice. The consensus was that nothing of note was going to happen in Tottenham. I could have gone bird-watching in the nearby marshes, but I wasn't dressed for it, and the local hobos seemed to have cornered the market. One of them was having such an intense conversation with a musical passerine outside a Greggs' that I decided to cede the territory.

My search for coffee was its own little microcosm of London social strata. I always end up forgetting what Pret a Manger is like, and each time, I'm dismayed to discover that it's clearly for Instagram fitness influencers who are best described as having a ‘complicated’ relationship with food. The calorie counts suggested their target demographic subsists on positive affirmations and wifi. It's a good place to set up an eating disorder clinic, I need to put a pin in it.

The Starbucks was instantly overrun by a swarm of high-school students and their harried teacher on a field trip. I quickly became aware that they'd probably graduate and enter the work force before I could get a coffee. I ended up back outside Greggs, where a pretty girl in a hijab sold me a bacon roll, a tableau I filed away for future reference. Having eaten, I decided the only way out was downstream. I made for Central London.

London, upon initial re-acquaintance after a three-year hiatus, appeared largely unchanged. It remains the physical embodiment of a certain kind of Britishness, a dense, chaotic, and relentlessly cosmopolitan metropolis. It has more Mirpuris than Mirpur, and more Bengalis than Bangladesh. I'm allowed to say this, both because of the color of my skin, and because I'm technically half-Pakistani.

I'm aware that my presence here makes it another, infinitesmally darker shade. Alas, it can't be helped, in much the same manner that a Western anthropolist studying the reaction of a previously uncontacted tribe is partially responsible for the change he observes. I'll be gone soon enough.

The most salient difference was not in the city's character, but in its price level.

Three years ago, London registered as “ludicrously expensive.” Back then, my ex and I had work, not pleasure on our minds. I'm still mildly traumatized that a mere two months’ stay wiped out an entire year of my Indian savings. But this was against a baseline of Indian purchasing power, a notoriously poor benchmark for G7 capital cities. I have since spent a year recalibrating my internal price-sensitivity models against the economies of various Scottish towns and cities. Aberdeen. Edinburgh. I thought I had a decent map of the territory.

The map was wrong. The territory had shifted.

A more sophisticated economist would have a basket of goods to gauge inflation. My own benchmark is to use the price of a pint of beer:

As of the middle of 2025, a man can expect that a pint will set him back £3 in a rural pub. £4 where I'm currently at, at least in the seedier establishments I frequent. Edinburgh pushes 6, and I consider that exorbitant.

To my great dismay, London had breached the seven-pound barrier and was often sighted well north of eight. This is a price point at which the utility of purchasing a hip flask and a bottle of inexpensive whiskey begins to rise dramatically.

My understanding is that this is not a Pigouvian tax, just market forces at play. Perhaps this will turn out to cure alcoholism, the government has quite successfully priced cigarettes out of reach for most.

This price anomaly extended to most consumables, which seemed to be 50-80% more expensive than my last visit. I briefly considered the food stalls at Borough Market, it was very pretty, a perfect backdrop for carefully curated social media posts; but the place presented two problems. First, the prices were high enough to trigger my cheapskate heuristics. Second, a significant portion of the market is dedicated to the open-air sale of fish. The olfactory input was overwhelming. My brain, after being short-circuited with sheer sensory overwhelm, voted with my feet.

I eventually found a steak and a beer further afield, which stabilized my blood sugar but further depleted my finances. The situation was grim, but then a message arrived: my friend would be free that evening. I had a place to stay. This was excellent news. I now had a bounded problem: kill six hours without spending a fortune.

The obvious answer was a museum. They are large, climate-controlled, and, crucially, free.

The Tate Modern, Or, A Case Study In Emperor's New Clothes

The Tate Modern is an imposing brutalist structure which promises a certain gravitas. This promise is, to put it mildly, not consistently fulfilled by its contents.

I decided to work my way down, beginning my survey on the fourth floor. The first exhibit was a circle of rocks. Or maybe styrofoam painted to look like rocks; I was genuinely unsure. The wall text explained that the artist was part of a movement promoting the use of cheap, accessible materials. This is a laudable goal, I suppose, though it feels like a post-hoc justification for not learning to sculpt. The same artist also created art by going for long walks and plotting them on maps, a practice now democratized and arguably perfected by the app Strava. It is unclear if Strava users can apply for arts grants.

The next room contained another circle, this one of driftwood and other detritus, credited to twenty-five artists. This suggests either a radical commitment to egalitarianism in art or a form of credential-laundering not dissimilar to adding everyone in the lab to a scientific paper.

My own contribution to the art world was inadvertent. While walking down a corridor, I stopped to admire a large, textured piece that beautifully framed a doorway. It had depth, a compelling pattern of decay, and a certain raw honesty. It turned out to be peeling paint on a wall leading to a gallery closed for renovation. This is not a joke, I'm actually being deathly serious for once. As a certain psychologist once said, there are cathedrals everywhere for those who have eyes, and modern art where one might expect flies.

The next gallery featured a bizarre, Dali-esque trumpet suspended from the ceiling. Below it, people lay on a circular mat, listening to a low, interminable drone which, according to a placard, was the “sonic signature of the building itself.” I sincerely hope they invested in acoustic dampeners or earthquake mitigation in the future.

My legs and back ached from walking and the abysmal flight. The floor looked comfortable. De-coupling the supposed artistic merit from the clear utilitarian benefit of a padded surface, I laid down. It was surprisingly soothing, if not exactly art. My presence seemed to act as social proof. Was it the fact that I'm brown (and thus an authority) and was clearly enjoying the relief?

The mat quickly filled with people, jostling for a spot to be droned at. For a moment, I considered taking off my shoes and striking a yoga pose, just to see if it would catch on. My internal betting market put the odds at 70:30 that it would.

Then I found a small cinema with a sign warning of "sexual/pornographic content." Now we're talking. The film was called Pteridophilia. The description was, and I am quoting what I found online later, precisely what I read:

Pteridophilia I is the first in a series of five single-channel videos shot by artist Zheng Bo in a forest on the edge of Taipei, Taiwan. As suggested by the titular neologism (from the Greek pteris, or ‘fern’), the seventeen-minute work depicts naked queer men engaging in intimate acts with ferns, pushing past standard notions of human-plant relations to explore a radical potential for erotic interspecies intimacy.

The reality was less a radical exploration and more a deeply awkward spectacle. A series of nearly identical hairless Asian twinks (a statement I make with full awareness of cross-race effect) performed acts of frottage upon foliage, primarily various ferns and other plant life. The camerawork was the highlight, it was technically competent, always ensuring a leaf or branch was tastefully positioned to obscure the most explicit details. This statement doesn't apply to the few minutes (which feel far longer) when well-plucked ass-crack is on full display.

The primary utility of Pteridophilia, however, was not its content but its setting. The screening room was dark and furnished with numerous beanbags and mattresses. I found a corner and while sleep eluded me, I spent the next two hours in a state of semi-rest, lulled by the ambient jungle sounds and the occasional moan. The film looped several times. I cannot say I understood it better on the third viewing, but I can report that my back felt significantly better.

I noted that half the audience seemed to be giving it their rapt attention, beady eyes turned to jade by the gentle bloom, while the other half were like me, either on their phone or giggling away.

(If Pteridophilia I is so good, why isn't there a Pteridophilia II? Oh fuck, wait a second..)

The Tate Modern is free, which is its best feature. It's a great place to kill a few hours and use the loo, but I doubt I'll be back. The entire field of modern art seems to have achieved a stable, self-satirizing orbit.

The Bromley Tourism Board Presents:

I eventually caught a train to Bromley, one of the many towns swallowed by London’s inexorable expansion. Some urban planners and amateur astronomers joke that at this rate, the city will be a Dyson Sphere by 2100, and the ring road, a ring world. That's probably for the best; if the whole solar system has a London postal code, maybe people will stop paying half their salary for one.

My friend met me outside the station, fresh from the gym, as befits such a fitness freak. He also seems to be an amateur realtor, as he insisted on taking my sorry ass on a walking tour of what felt like the entire neighborhood.

The first stop was his previous residence. A nice enough house, which he'd been renting with his sister. Unfortunately, the lady had been wiser than us, opting for a career in finance. She'd recently moved to Canary Wharf, and begun dating the VP of one of the big-name finance firms. I must admit this makes me very jealous, stupid decisions have meant that I'm locked into the far less lucrative profession of psychiatry, and I lack the looks to sell myself as a trophy husband.

My friend thus had to rapidly downsize, finding new digs where he had his own bedroom and toilet, but had to share everything else with two housemates. He spends double what I do on rent, and I only have the one.

(Even without trying very hard, I've saved 40% of my psychiatry trainee salary by living where I do. I can't see myself doing much more than holding my head above water in London. The "London banding" pay increase for my profession (a mere 10%) seems like a rounding error against the cliff-face of London's cost of living. Why do you think the doctors are striking right now?)

Bromley gave me the impression of a reasonably stable mix of working-class and more affluent yuppie populations. My friend provided the baseline prior: Bromley is a high-trust, low-crime environment. The universe, in its occasional capacity for providing surprisingly clear experimental results, then presented a powerful piece of evidence. A young woman was jogging alone, apparently unconcerned by the encroaching darkness. Her path took her directly past us, two tall men of South Asian extraction dressed in black, who were at that moment pointing at houses and loudly discussing their market price, an activity that in a less secure context might be interpreted as casing. She seemed utterly unfazed.

I did appreciate my friend trying to clue his almost fresh-off-the-Boeing buddy into a better understanding of how London worked, but I must admit that my primary takeaway was a creeping sense of financial insecurity and existential dread.

Eventually, my legs threatened to give out, and the uppers (coffee) and downers (beer) that I'd been running on no longer sufficed. My friend reluctantly agreed to take us back home, and we discussed professional examinations till our eyelids drooped shut. I really should have considered finance.

The next day, we visited Canary Wharf. It feels like a different city-state entirely, a Singaporean financial district teleported into the Docklands, only missing a statue of Lee Kuan Yew. Central London? Rich, but visibly old money. The air in the Wharf was almost electric with the odor of money changing hands. Or perhaps Revolut were cutting corners with their HVAC systems, I'm no expert.

The Wharf is clean, modern, and efficient. I'm still not very good at assessing social class at a glance with my too-Indian eyes, but even I could tell the people here were posher, and the birds fitter (I'm not talking about the paddling ducks).

It is also, paradoxically, cheaper for many consumer goods than Central London. A pint of Asahi that cost £8 near the tourist centers was a more reasonable £5.75 here. I'm inclined to attribute this to stiff competition for the local office workers, who are repeat customers and thus more price-sensitive than tourists. This seems plausible. Tourists are a captive audience with poor information, ripe for exploitation. Office workers will simply go to the cheaper place next door, and if they're finance workers on top, they're both very mercenary and have a keen eye for arbitrage.

We observed the strange outcome of a government policy decision: an attempt to convert a luxury hotel in the heart of the Wharf into a center for asylum seekers. Leaving aside the political firestorm, the pure economic logic is baffling. It seems like an attempt to solve a problem using the most expensive possible tool, a phenomenon I've noticed governments are particularly prone to.

The approach to the hotel itself was cordoned off. Rumor has it that a Pakistani finance-bro finally broke under the strain of counting all his money, and ran amok. Last I heard, he'd racked up so many confirmed kills of the local white underclass that it was almost too burdensome to count, and now, was in a tense stand-off with police snipers while his own asylum application processed. I didn't have the guts to get any closer, I'm still rather unsure of whether or not I'm sufficiently high value human capital. Out of fear and a desire for self-preservation, we made our exit and went west.

In my first London travelogue, I'd noted how empty the city felt, at least for someone used to Indian metropoles (I prefer the Latin plural, rolls off the keyboard better). The city must have been personally affronted, because it was positively packed that Sunday. Hordes of tourists flocked and gawked, not that I'm any different myself.

We arrived at Covent Garden, which was standing room only. Camden, Borough - they're all tourist traps. So is the Garden, but they're all pleasant enough nonetheless. I got myself a bagel and some dessert, and bid adieu to my friend after accompanying him to Victoria station. I had, following his suggestion, decided to go visit the Natural History Museum. After taking the Tube the wrong way for a single stop, I figured out my bearings and successfully made my way there.

The Natural History Museum represents peak Victorian institutional design - it looks exactly like a museum should look. Unfortunately, it also maintains Victorian climate control, creating an interior temperature that could charitably be described as "surface of Mercury, and not the side facing away from the sun.” The museum is aware of this failing, apologizing through signage, but the large fans in strategic corners really don't make a dent.

I'm enough of an omnivorous nerd that most of the facts and factoids the average museum is eager to dispense aren't new to me. And I was a bit annoyed by some of my prior experiences with museums in the UK, be it the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, or the Tate. Still, I had higher hopes for this one.

My time there didn't dash them, the museum had a standard but decent set of exhibits, and most importantly, it had dinosaurs. You really can't go wrong with dinosaurs; they appeal to all age groups from infants to those who remember them flourishing in their distant youth. If I were Tsar, every museum would be legally obliged to at least keep some chicken bones in a cage, and every zoo a cassowary on a leash.

A relative highlight would be the animatronic T-Rex. Alas, it won't be winning any awards, and is no match for Rexie from Jurassic Park. I felt that they'd undersized this specimen; charitably, it might be a sub-adult. Not to my taste, give me Sue or Stan proportions or I'll sue. Anything less is blatant disrespect for the Tyrant Lizard King.

The low point was watching a grown woman confidently identify a woolly mammoth as a dinosaur on an interactive display. I felt a pang of sympathy for her school teachers. At least she was in the right place to correct such serious deficiencies.

(I must confess that I get minimal marginal utility from museums these days, in the age of Wikipedia. The awe of seeing a coelacanth specimen is lessened when I have already seen high-resolution photos and watched a dozen documentaries about it. The museum's primary function shifts from information dispensary to a kind of physical proof-of-existence.)

Eventually, the museum closed, but not before I got to enjoy the plight of an unfortunate cyclist. He'd been turned away from the exit at one end by a member of staff, and as he approached the other one, he was informed that it was closed and he needed to go the other away. To add insult to injury, he'd been told that his electric bike was allowed if he dismounted and walked it, but was now being threatened with vague but dire consequences by this other gent. I left him desperately trying to get these two employees to talk to one another, or at least let him out of the grounds. My schadenfreude was well sated, but I was bone tired and unwilling to venture further afield.

I parked myself at the Wetherspoons in Victoria station, and then the one in Bromley, to kill time till my friend was home and also kill my liver. Ah, I've come to appreciate Wetherspoons. The prices are distinctly lower than the London average, and seem consistent across locations. When you factor in the deals on meals, with a drink being heavily subsidized in combination, can you not afford to wine and dine there?

My extended family, a product of pre-1960s Indian birth rates, came in clutch. I have a sort of uncle who is a more successful version of me. He’s a distinguished consultant psychiatrist who aced the best med school, has more published papers to his name than I have pubic hair, and lives down in England. My only advantages are my youth and a much better-styled beard, and arguably a better love life.

My uncle, much like his nephew, had decided to take up exercise to compensate for an exceedingly sedentary lifestyle. This went south when he pulled his back while deadlifting and was entirely bed-bound for a good month. His octogenarian father had to fly in from India to help, as my uncle had no close friends nearby able or willing to do him a solid, and his ex wife probably burns voodoo dolls of him to this day. An opportunity to pay my dues to both an uncle and great-uncle? I couldn't turn down the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, and even I believe that social ties need occasional lubrication.

I'd remembered their existence the night before, and reached out, truthfully telling them that I had screwed up and was in London far longer than I'd planned for, and my buddy was politely hinting that he'd prefer if I found other accommodations for the week. This was surprisingly well received, and to my surprise, I found out that they lived barely the next town over.

I didn't want to go empty handed, I'm not that uncouth, especially when they're offering to let me stay nigh indefinitely in his very nice house. My friend softened the eviction notice by taking me to a nearby café, and then to the local Marks and Spencer.

I was unfamiliar with that chain. Before I'd first come to this country, my ex and I had been trying to make every penny count. We'd done our research and discovered that M&S and Waitrose were for the affluent or aspirational bourgeoisie. I have stubbornly resisted lifestyle creep and stuck to my Tesco/Lidl/Aldi triumvirate. Not to mention that the two premium chains didn't consider my home city worthy of being graced by their presence.

I was blown away. M&S was clearly a cut above the rest, but the sticker shock I was dreading didn't materialize. I don't know if it was aggressive angling of their store brand products (which were very comprehensive), but the price differential was far from obvious. I made the most of it, and loaded myself up with sweets and savouries meant to pay my way. Clean, better lit, more pleasant staff, what's not to love?

The journey to my family's place was uneventful. I've come to appreciate London's public transport all the more after discovering first hand how abysmal it can be in the less urban parts of Scotland.

Evidently, decades of working for the NHS does lead to the accumulation of modest wealth. My uncle might let out parts of the house on an irregular basis, but as he told me, it's less for the money than it is to have people around and looking after the property while he's on vacation. I suppose that's another thing distinguishing the two of us, I'm a couch potato, the man can't stay put in the country for longer than two weeks.

Shortly after settling in, I ended up accompanying my grand-uncle to the shops. Might as well put those muscles to work, and demonstrate respect for my elders while I'm at it. On the search for cauliflowers (the supermarket had none, just broccoli), he had me tagging along on the local promenade. Further augmenting every existing replication of stereotype accuracy, he was attracted by the display of copious amounts of gold on display outside a combination goldsmith/pawn shop.

I followed him inside, mildly curious. I've never bought a gram of gold in my life, and had no reason to be in such a fine establishment. The first thing I saw was a tearful lady with a baby in the stroller, asking how much she'd get for a ring she pulled off her finger. The figure quoted wasn't to her taste, and she stormed off - or at least left as aggressively as feasible with a baby in the basket.

It’s easy to feel sorry for yourself when you screw up your travel plans and have to sleep on beanbags in a fern-porn cinema. And then you see something like that, and you remember that some people are navigating much harder problems. I hope she found a better price for her ring.

At the time of writing, I'm back at their place, enjoying a rare opportunity for leisure. I'm likely going to be here till the end of the week, using the opportunity to expend what's left of my annual leave. Further updates may or may not follow.

I'm further out from central London than Canary Wharf but closer than Bromley and pints where I live will typically cost £6-7. £5.75 sounds like a great price for Canary Wharf. I think I've seen pints for less than £2 in Wetherspoons. Wetherspoons also has a crazy large food menu and prices seem cheaper compared to similar pubs. But I've never eaten in Wetherspoons so I'm not sure about how the quality.

Fun writeup. One note.

The first stop was his previous residence. A nice enough house, which he'd been renting with his sister. Unfortunately, the lady had been wiser than us, opting for a career in finance. She'd recently moved to Canary Wharf, and begun dating the VP of one of the big-name finance firms. I must admit this makes me very jealous, stupid decisions have meant that I'm locked into the far less lucrative profession of psychiatry, and I lack the looks to sell myself as a trophy husband.

This is endlessly confusing to be people outside of finance but it's almost certainly not THE VP but A VP. VP is like a middle manager rank, one step above associate, and something your average striver should reach by their early thirties if they just follow a standard track. I don't know London pay scales but as someone angling to be a VP next year married to someone job shopping for a psychiatry job I can say the pay is comparable with maybe advantage to the doctor.

I don't know London pay scales but as someone angling to be a VP next year married to someone job shopping for a psychiatry job I can say the pay is comparable with maybe advantage to the doctor.

The absolute minimum for a VP in a first-tier London investment bank would be £100k including bonus, and that is in non-revenue-generating roles (quant, risk, IT etc.). Corporate financiers or traders are usually going to be earning £150-200k at the point of promotion from associate to VP. In both cases compensation will be rising fast if they continue to perform.

Compare a newly-promoted NHS consultant on £108k including a small London allowance, with no possibility of a large payrise for 3-4 years after that.

Both the newly-promoted VP and the newly-promoted consultant are going to be about 30 if they are on the standard high-performer career track.

Interestingly, a quick Google suggests that a newly-promoted attending in the US would be on an about $170k, which I would say is also at the low end for a newly-promoted bulge bracket VP - the difference is that the US doctor has much more upside potential and can reasonably expect their income to rise to the attending average of c.$300k after a few years. Still not as much upside as the banker, of course.

I do actually know that there isn't just one VP haha, but yeah, that could be better phrased.

I can say the pay is comparable with maybe advantage to the doctor.

Really? My friend claimed that his sister, who isn't a VP yet, makes ~75k, I'd assume the guy would make significantly more. I make closer to two-thirds of that, and so would most psych residents.

I looked up figures for actual VPs, and the range seemed to be well north of 85k and if in investment banking, >165k! (not to mention bonuses greater than 225k)

Even accounting for COL, that beats me or most doctors senior to me.

I don't recall if you're British, or living there, so trust me, doctors here absolutely do not make as much as their peers in the States :(

Medicine payscales in England are between half and a quarter of what they are in the states. Finance is usually between 70 and 90% of stateside equivalents. I can pretty much guarantee all but the most senior consultants (What the UK calls fully qualified docs, basically post residency/post fellowship) in the UK are nowhere close to what a VP in finance is pulling in.

Asahi

It might only be a small thing, but I have to break it to you. Asahi anywhere outside Japan is simply low-quality Italian Peroni beer made in Italy and with the Asahi logo slapped on it. It tastes absolutely nothing like Japanese Asahi beer and imo is a waste of money. I hear Britain has alot of domestic beer options but idk shrug.

Ironically "Peroni" sold in the USA is actually domestic Coors labelled as Peroni, while "Asahi" sold in the USA is actually Peroni made in Italy. So "Asahi" in USA is actually the Peroniest beer even more than the stuff that says Peroni on the label. Anyways I hate how trademarks can simply be bought and sold and slapped on whatever as long as the money grubbing conglomerates can make a quick buck. Imo trademarks should exist to protect consumers not corporations, so this should be illegal. See also: "Yashica" Y35.

Asahi in the UK is actually brewed at what was/is the Fuller's Brewery site in West London. Now I thought that Peroni that we got in the UK is imported from Italy directly, although I've seen some conflicting information that it might be brewed in Scotland. Regardless, I don't think that the Asahi-Peroni identity holds true in Britain at least. All the other "foreign" supermarket lagers (except some of the Czech ones) are brewed in the UK, mostly up near Stoke and in the North West.

I've got no strong feelings about Asahi, it's alright. I only chose it because it's the only beer I had twice this trip, and thus noted the price. I think the British version is okay, nothing to write home about.

I normally drink Tennent's, or ciders, but I'm really not picky about my liquor.

Is this actually true? I thought it tasted different in the UK but I assumed it was just a vibe thing.

No jokes in this post unfortunately. Around 10 years ago Asahi beer was still imported to the US for certain sizes (1L and 2L cans, interestingly enough), tasting it side by side with the US brewed licensed swill gave an insanely obvious difference. The Italy-made swill isn't like old US-licensed swill, but similarly it's not at all like Japanese Asahi.

The level of difference is like the difference between Bud Light -> Guinness - it's not even the same category of beer.

We observed the strange outcome of a government policy decision: an attempt to convert a luxury hotel in the heart of the Wharf into a center for asylum seekers. Leaving aside the political firestorm, the pure economic logic is baffling. It seems like an attempt to solve a problem using the most expensive possible tool, a phenomenon I've noticed governments are particularly prone to.

To tug on this particular culture war thread, I also don't understand why anyone would agree to this. Even if your only allegiance were to the asylum seekers, you could house more asylum seekers with the same funding in cheaper real-estate on the outskirts of the city. See also: homeless shelters, rehab centers, halfway houses, etc.

Homeless shelters are often located at the center of the city because that is where the people who need their services mostly are.

Remember that one culture-war flashpoint is the fact that the vast majority of asylum seekers are getting sent to the places that are too poor and too lacking in political power to refuse them. People are pissed. If there's one thing the English still believe in, it's in everyone doing their part.

I also rarely see a mob of investment bankers torching a hotel.

The 'charitable' explanation seems to be utter bureaucratic incompetence. The cynical one would be that said bureaucrats are trying to prove a point, getting one over the financiers too big for their britches.

Ahem. Bureaucrats are unlikely to have made this decision. Politicians probably did (or at least decided the guidelines) so that the impact of housing asylum seekers was disseminated across differing communities. (Which might also involve getting one over on financiers, or charitably ensuring that the wealthy have some skin in the game (or even more cynically "See we're not JUST putting them in poor communities")). The bureaucrats just implement largely. This is Home Office funded so the decisions will have been made at a pretty high level.

I'm glad you enjoyed your weekend, and this is an excellent write-up. You have a good eye and have now possibly seen more of 2025 London than I have.

I think a huge amount of the cost growth in central London is due to non-doms on semi-annual migration paths. For complicated reasons I am staying in a nice block of flats there temporarily and I check the parcel collection regularly for a delivery that I am expecting; I have never seen an English or even a European name on the parcels.

I suspect also that there was a pent-up suspicion that London could tolerate higher prices and that COVID provided the excuse to let 'er rip and see the limits of what the market would tolerate. As a result locals seem to have mostly accepted that pubs and meals out are a treat and not a lifestyle, and go maybe once a week while penny-pinching the rest of the time. This may skew prices and (God I hope) they may come down as the market decides it prefers regular attendance to spiky high profits.

I've come to appreciate Wetherspoons

I love Wetherspoons. It's got a reputation for being uncouth but a pub is somewhere you go to eat, drink, and have fun with friends. Why argue when someone wants to make that as cheap and pleasant and convenient as possible? Plus they buy a lot of surprisingly nice buildings to put their pubs in.

I'm glad you enjoyed your weekend, and this is an excellent write-up. You have a good eye and have now possibly seen more of 2025 London than I have.

Thank you, I appreciate the timely advice given to me as I was adrift in Tottenham. Helped me get my bearings right quick.

I think a huge amount of the cost growth in central London is due to non-doms on semi-annual migration paths

I'm not sure I follow? Are they working seasonally?

For complicated reasons I am staying in a nice block of flats there temporarily and I check the parcel collection regularly for a delivery that I am expecting; I have never seen an English or even a European name on the parcels.

What's that about? Tax fraud? BTW, if you're ever free, I would love to catch up over drinks. Presuming it's not a place where the drinks are even more ludicrously priced than average, they're on me. It sounds like we can both agree on Wetherspoons haha.

I suspect also that there was a pent-up suspicion that London could tolerate higher prices and that COVID provided the excuse to let 'er rip and see the limits of what the market would tolerate. As a result locals seem to have mostly accepted that pubs and meals out are a treat and not a lifestyle, and go maybe once a week while penny-pinching the rest of the time. This may skew prices and (God I hope) they may come down as the market decides it prefers regular attendance to spiky high profits.

It does seem to be tolerated. At the end of the day, the bare minimum for human habitation is subsistence, and it takes a lot to make people truly give up and flee their homes. And there's no shortage of people hypnotized by the London Dream, not to mention a steady influx of tourists. Of course, I wouldn't have met the people who decided that London was too rich for their blood and fled. Anyone there is there by choice, or simply has none.

My area is broadly split between the locals who bought houses before the price jumped and the non-doms who bought the houses with oil money. The non-doms follow rhythms I don’t quite know but I believe they aren’t here all the time, they come for the fashionable seasons.

This particular block of apartments is aimed at upper-level workers seconded for a few months from places like Dubai. English people wouldn’t and couldn’t pay the premium, they’d either buy or go somewhere more affordable.

I would love to get a drink if you’re up for it. Possibly other Motte Londoners might be interested, or they might prefer to preserve OpSec. Let’s PM to arrange?

DM'd!

Rumor has it that a Pakistani finance-bro finally broke under the strain of counting all his money, and ran amok. Last I heard, he'd racked up so many confirmed kills of the local white underclass that it was almost too burdensome to count, and now, was in a tense stand-off with police snipers while his own asylum application processed.

Very good

I'm almost tempted to unblock Count so he can get back to me on that.

Well maybe when he gets back from his ban...

I got a good chuckle out of that one, too.

I think it was a couple BC bans ago that got me thinking about alternatives to the tempban. I thought, “when he does one inflammatory post, it’s interesting. It’s when he follows up that people start to insist he’s a troll.” How could we get the compelling conversation starters from some of our most divisive posters while making it clear that their behavior was still against the rules?

Once your 60- or 90-day tempban expires, you can post or comment again whenever you like. But it starts a timer leading to an automatic follow-up tempban. We like hearing from you, but you don’t get to stay.

Since it was BurdensomeCount, I thought about calling it the Motte Travel Visa. Or maybe it would be less controversial to call it resurrection and ascension?

I'm registering my support for a 'smoke the whole pack' rule- a rule that particularly inflammatory posts by users who make a habit of it are required to respond in depth to every argument, no matter how banal or trite.

Can I make a suggestion as someone who is likely to get a travel visa?

I've grown to understand that I'm going to get muzzled in the culture war thread. Just how it's gonna be. But I'd appreciate still being able to participate in the other threads, I do enjoy the community of them.

To be clear, there are no plans to adopt something like this.

But you also make a good point. I’m amenable to the idea of some bans just being for the CW thread. I wonder if that’s feasible.

Would mod notes allow this, wouldn't otherwise need anything technical?

"Informed user they were on thin ice and needed to stay out of the culture war thread until 9/1, if caught posting in CW thread give a 6 month ban."

Person would need to remember not to post, but if they do and it leads to mod action....off with their head. If they forget and post in the CW thread and nobody notices, well not the end of the world anyway.

I felt like this was an allusion to something I didn't understand.

Shots fired at BurdensomeCount?

My assumption

Mr. BurdensomeCount, who is currently banned. Famous for his loathing of the British underclass and well-padded opinion of himself.

My assumption. Bad form to hit at someone not present to defend himself.

My model of Count says he finds this about as funny as I do. If I were less shameless, I'd probably have asked if he could spare 10 minutes (£30 at his hourly rate) to say hi while I was in the area.

The first he will gladly tell you about at length and the second is not something he cares to hide.

Indeed. I suppose I'm just averse to talking behind backs, as it were. A lesson learned the hard way, along with "do what you say you're going to do." (Which is irrelevant here but a lesson I learned nonetheless.)

It's not something I make a habit of. I felt the information was broadly public knowledge.

I do not understand the point of this post in the “culture war roundup” thread.

This just reads like a travel blog. What are you getting at here? This seems like a lot of words to say: “I am Indian. I went to London and it was more expensive than last time. There are fewer English people here than last time I was here.”

What would your ideal follow up comment to this look like?

My follow up comment would simply be "I am appalled that you sat through the plant-fucking thing three times."

Just three? I was there for several hours, and if the blurb was accurate, the damn thing looped every 17 minutes.

Rest assured I quickly stopped paying much attention.

The south Asian presence, The art show, the price jumps, and the juxtaposition of a closed Canary Wharf hotel hosting asylum seekers jumped out at me. That said, it didn't read like the culture war was central, but rather the backdrop for a humorous post about someone's trip to London.

The olfactory input was overwhelming.

I laughed at this. It reminds me of when people used to comment "Imagine the smell." when looking a certain images, and then others would get creative and say the same thing but use different sentences like, "Contemplate the aroma."

One is also reminded of the increasingly-roundabout euphemisms for a second American civil war: it started with “the Boogaloo”, then moved on to near-homophones like “big luau” and “big igloo” before metastasizing into convoluted synonyms for the latter (cf. “ice housing of tremendous proportions”, “absolutely mammoth Polynesian festivities”)

Really? If you insist, I can actually mug someone in Bromley, a racially-motivated hate crime will, I hope, count as CW.

I think you're missing several clear culture war elements that run throughout the post. Let me point out what I see, I have an advantage courtesy of writing this post, and also having functional, albeit myopic eyeballs:

The observations about London's demographic transformation ("It has more Mirpuris than Mirpur, and more Bengalis than Bangladesh") directly engages with ongoing debates about immigration and cultural change in Britain. I acknowledge my 'privilege' in being able to say it so bluntly at all.

Critiques of modern art or post-modernism in general are hardly new, but they're still entirely relevant. I went into detail on how the Tate is the best parody of itself that one could hope for.

The economic observations about London pricing aren't just complaints from an inept tourist, can't you see the link topolitical debates about housing costs, wage stagnation, and quality of life? When noting that doctors are striking and that London's pay premium doesn't match its cost of living, that's quite explicitly touching on healthcare policy, the failures of the NHS and urban planning issues that are very much culture war.

The asylum seeker hotel conversion mentioned is an explicitly political topic that's been contentious in British politics. The speculation about it connects to real debates about immigration policy and resource allocation. I can only repeat that people are rioting over this as I speak.

Even the class observations throughout - from Bromley's safety to Canary Wharf's demographics to the woman pawning her ring - what do you think they say about inequality, social mobility, and economic stratification that frequently appear in culture war contexts?

It's both travelogue and cultural commentary precisely because I'm observing British society through the lens of someone who's both insider and outsider, which gives it analytical value beyond mere tourism reporting. The culture war elements are everywhere, interspersed with what I deem to be illuminating (or at least funny) experiences, and I don't see how one can miss them.

If this wasn't enough, the CWR thread also, at least from established precedent, allows just about anything that is high effort. If I'm in violation, I'll turn myself in to the other mods and await sentencing. If I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath.

There are fewer English people here than last time I was here.”

I never made such a claim, because whatever demographic change happened in a mere three years wouldn't be obvious just by looking.

Edit:

You asked what an ideal follow-up comment would look like. I suppose it would be someone engaging with one of those specific threads. For instance:

  • Someone arguing that my take on the Tate is philistine and I'm missing the point of conceptual art. I would be very skeptical of such a claim, but I'd engage with it.

  • Someone offering a counter-narrative on social trust in a neighborhood like Bromley. We've got plenty of Londoners on this site, and in this thread.

  • Someone with more economic expertise explaining why my "pint index" is a flawed metric or offering a better explanation for the price discrepancies. This has at least partially happened already.

  • Someone sharing their own experience of the "vibe shift" in London over the last few years.

If I'm wrong about anything, I seek to be corrected. I'm not wrong about this being CW, at the very least.

The rules for what's allowed in the CW thread have always been extremely loose.

It would probably be good to encourage people to create more threads outside of the CW though, because then people might actually start looking at the non-CW threads more often!

Great writing as per usual, although I'm not too sure what's the culture war angle here.

Your tidbit about inflation has left me wondering. How exaggerated is the purported social and economic decay in the UK? The impression I'm getting from abroad is some of the lowest wages in Western Europe coupled with extremely high cost of living. The salaries for some professionals are comparable to Eastern Europe even before purchasing power parity. Underfunded everything from education to the NHS. Yet somehow the price of goods and rent keeps climbing, especially in London.

Thank you, though once again I'm confused if someone doesn't see the CW here! You can see my reply downthread about that.

I haven't been in the UK very long, so take my takes with a NICE-approved amount of salt. The UK was doing well, or at least okay, until the middle 2000s. It was growing at a rate somewhat comparable to the US, or at least other Commonwealth Anglosphere nations. A British person could, with a straight face, claim to have a comparable standard of living.

Since then, it's been a story of stagnation. The economy has hardly grown at all, per capita productivity is down due to a significantly larger unproductive class subsisting on welfare (a lot of them immigrants).

In the places where the COL is lower, so are the incomes. Doctors are a rare exception, we make roughly the same wage everywhere in the country (largely because the allowances for living in a HCOL area are ridiculous). There are very few skilled jobs, manufacturing is as good as dead, and finance is great at inflating GDP, but little else. Energy prices are through the roof, and very little is being built, and hardly maintained.

Social cohesion, while not entirely dissolved, is at a nadir. Nobody is actually starving, but the young despair when it comes to achieving the same standard of living as their parents. People will claim that even in objectively wealthy nations like the States that have their economic engines firing on all cylinders, but it's actually true here.

The UK was doing well, or at least okay, until the middle 2000s. It was growing at a rate somewhat comparable to the US, or at least other Commonwealth Anglosphere nations. A British person could, with a straight face, claim to have a comparable standard of living.

Britain was exceeding the US standard of living in the middle 2000s. This was largely an artefact of exchange rates and over financialisaton but it was common place for middle class families to not just holiday in the US but specifically go there for shopping trips. Semi-regular trips to Florida, shopping in New York and so on was within reach for swathes of the PMC and even upper-blue collar workers as the exchange rate was 2:1. I distinctly remember video games that would cost £30 costing $30 (and thus being half price). This era, combined with the standard "free healthcare and no shootings" mantra that Europeans love, meant we could genuinely argue for a better standard of living than our cousins over the pond. This all collapsed from 2007-2009 and never recovered. Obviously it was an unsustainable period in retrospect, fuelled by sell offs and credit, but you didn't hear of people leaving to go to Australia and such in that New Labour era. Now that world seems a million miles away.

The UK was doing well, or at least okay, until the middle 2000s.

Auspicious timing, I just started watching Top Gear from the beginning and early in the second series (which would be 2003?) they have a bit on the Humber Bridge and the decline of British efficacy, engineering, and manufacturing.

It sounded like the kinda thing you'd see in the news in the US or Uk today but over 20 years ago.

I think someone on the left might point to that and indicate that the fears are overblown but I'm more concerned about how far we've fallen and how much further we may yet fall.

I mean, Trump looks likely to send out 'doge rebate checks' or something similar in september of '26. Peronism, here we come.

Ah, you did get to my old neck of the woods. I took my first steps as a baby in the Natural History Museum.

There's a big price differential between the markup on pints/meals and supermarket stuff in London, for obvious reasons - those pints and meals have to be served to you by people who live in London. Personally, I find that Waitrose is comparable in price to non-Aldi/Costco US grocery stores for much higher quality.

I suppose one can definitely cut down on costs by avoiding eateries, pubs and clubs. As far as I can tell, that also removes the onus that draws most people to the city!

It's not just the restaurants and pubs, but the rent, desirable amenities like car ownership, and so on.

I'll keep an eye open for a Waitrose, I suspect there's one nearby, and if not, there must be a couple lurking even in my end of Scotland.

Yeah everything in London is super expensive, some things are just more ridiculous than others (rent being number one).

If you can't stay in the UK, have you looked into whether you can immigrate to the US?

I'm in the UK because I can't go to the US, at least as a doctor. If you want to know the underlying cause, it's to do with an issue with my med school. It needs a very specific form of certification, and both the Indian government and the NGO that provides it (American) have been of minimal help. I wasn't able to get the ball rolling while I was in India, and eventually decided that instead of wasting time, I might as well apply to the UK. If that hurdle is solved by the time I'm done with my current program, you bet I'm trying to leave.

Until then, I've mostly made my peace with the UK. It's far from the worst place to live!

If you get to immigrate one day, DM me, I'll take you to an off the beaten path place for brisket. And shooting.

Appreciate it. I might be doing a decently long vacation there this year, a dear friend of mine is getting married in Texas. I hope to make the most of it, and visit as much of the country as finances or time allows. I'll hit you up when I have things more set in stone!

I see. Well, I for one would welcome you to America.

Thank you. If the stars align, and I'm there, I'll buy you a beer.

As a matter of fact, I'm likely going there this December for a wedding, and unless you're in Alaska, I might still be able to!

See past discussion here.

Boys don't like girls, boys like postgrad housewives

What does the man with a lot of romantic options want?

Does he want a beautiful young trophy wife? Does he want a high-earning girlboss?

The answer, according to Lyman Stone, is neither. What he wants (according to the data) is a woman around his age, with the same academic qualifications. Men with younger (and indeed, older) wives are the ones earning less money. What rich men want, it seems, is a (cultural, educational) peer.

With earnings is becomes a bit more complicated. As a man's income goes up, so does the income of his wife. But richer men earn a larger proportion of household income, and the women married to these men are the most likely to not work at all.

So what's going on here? The Red Pill explanation of men preferring younger women doesn't seem to fit, since the men with the most options (high earning ones) are more like to choose women the same age. However, these couples also choose housewifery at the highest rate. My interpretation of this is that the more money a man earns, the more secure in their class position the couple can be. Therefore, they can afford to have the wife give up work without losing their place in the class hierarchy.

The bitter professional woman explanation (men are intimidated by my qualifications and high salary) doesn't seem to work either. Sure, wives of rich men are the least likely to work, but those that do work are also the highest earners among women. A more parsimonious explanation seems to be that high earning women want higher earning men, and they (mostly) get them.

High earning men seem to want class peers. A woman's qualifications are a marker for class, and a woman's high salary is a manifestation of her class. Of course, once married, they can afford for her to stay home more easily than poorer families.

The thing that surprises me most is that you don't see richer men marrying younger women, as all of the older-younger pairings I've seen in real life have involved high-earning men. It might be that richer men marry younger, and therefore there is simply less scope for large age gaps. Or it might be that richer men are more sensitive to judgement from their peers, who would disapprove of larger age gaps.

Not sure if I can get behind this message hypothesized here. Whilst I can understand that the Anti-Red pill crowd is desperate for something to chew on, this is a stretch.

Sure, the data is there, but it says nothing about what men want, as there is no causal direction implied anywhere outside of editorialized headlines. It does, however, fit the Red Pill box of women 'rejecting' men they see as lesser than them and instead looking for men who make at the very least equal. To that extent it isn't rich men choosing rich women, it's rich women hunting down every single rich man they can. And when they get him they predictably, according to TRP philosophy and this data, stop working and start making a family. 'Because that's what women actually want.' (Italics read in the voice of Nick Fuentes)

To that extent the data fits that red pill 'truth' and the general red pill assertion that dating is a different market for men as they get older.

Right; "Revealed Preference" only counts when the goods are a) equally available, and, more importantly b) have the same effective "cost." This is never the case with marriage.

The first strike against this article is that it's only counting already-married men; we wouldn't rebut the assertion that women, in the main, don't "marry down" by pretending all the women loudly claiming they'd rather be single than marry "a loser" don't exist, and we should do the same for men.

Further, the data only shows men tend to marry within the same general socio-economic status, and just assumes that this must be by choice (women have no agency in the matter, I suppose). It ignores opportunity, propinquity, peer pressure effects (just how many men can truly ignore everyone in their social circle calling them a creep for chasing a girl half their age? This article isn't going to even bother asking the question, let alone tell us the answer).

Hilariously, it acknowledges that men prefer stay-at-home wives, and immediately claims that this is actually proof that men prefer ambitious girlbosses. This is RadFemHitler levels of copium huffing. Trash article is trash.

They want peers who can fit in with their social and work circle and who will advance alongside them. Younger wives might not be as clued-in, so unless it's a second marriage it's not going to work as well. Her career is in the home supporting his career; making sure the dinner parties are hosted, the right people invited, remembering when to send cards and gifts for special occasions to business contacts, helping him navigate the web of relationships, turning up at the right events looking suitable on his arm, and so forth. His suits are pressed and ready for him, the home looks as it should, the exact balance of good taste and understated wealth on display to help him get promotions and move on up in the world. Everything running smoothly in the support system to his career so he can concentrate on work and not on "are the kids going to piano lessons or horse riding after school today? who is going to pick them up? mom is in the hospital, is everything okay on that end?"

OK, horse riding codes rural in America more than upper class. At least in Texas. And upper class housewives do not iron their husband's suit, they take it to the dry cleaners.

Upper class housewives pay(as in enter the credit card number) for private school, they manage IRA contributions, they maximize tax exemptions, they pay the contractors. They host dinner parties. What they don't do is, uh, housework. There's Mexicans for that, as in the Georgian era there were the lower classes for it. It has always been thus.

OK, horse riding codes rural in America more than upper class.

Definitely depends on the location, but it makes sense to me that Texas would see it as more rural than wealthy in comparison with say, the North East.

They want peers who can fit in with their social and work circle and who will advance alongside them.

Don't marry her unless she can secure an alliance with the Burgundians.

Its a cute picture, but I suspect it was true of old people when you where young, more so than it is now. Im from a relatively well-off family, and the only part of this that seems true to live for them and their friends is the last sentence.

People fall for specific individual people more than they fall for hypothetical lists of attractive traits. So the women rich men are interested in are often just the ones they happen to have contact with. Statistical differences between groups can't be assumed to reflect the preferences of those groups, they can also reflect who they have contact with in the first place.

Notice how even when they aren't peers they're often stuff like Arnold Schwarzenegger cheating on his wife with his housekeeper, rather than with some beautiful model. That's not "rich celebrities prefer housekeepers", he didn't cheat with some random woman employed as a housekeeper to someone else, he cheated with a woman he was actually in contact with. It reminds me of when people were questioning Jeff Bezos's marriage recently - sure he could theoretically pick between a lot of women, but she was the one he actually met via work.

Personal antecedent; A friend of mine(who eventually married) confided to me part of the issue with dating he had was potential gold-diggers who were more interested in his and his family's wealth than an honest relationship.

Another personal antecedent; The same friend finally married a nice brain surgeon who's the only one I've seen capable of keeping up with said friend in all areas, and once she got settled into her job, her paycheck meant they could indulge in all their hobbies.

I think there's a hidden factor not accounted for; that rich, successful men don't have options - not really. That if they're trying to build a family, that their options are actually very limited - someone with a similar outlook, ideas for the lifestyle they want to lead, with a pleasant(or at least compatible) personality. So, while the data is interesting(and I'm not disagreeing with it), I think the host of assumptions are off and thus make things skewed when trying to apply it to the real world.

It would seem like the "millionaire next door" approach would work plausibly for rich guys not quite rich enough to be public figures. Maybe that happens often enough (has golden handcuffs from startup acquisition, still drives a Prius), but I've never seen it explicitly called out as a strategy. If you're rich enough and a public figure such that Google knows who you are (doctors, lawyers), that seems harder.

Uh, does this distinguish between kinds of rich men? I know a master plumber who founded a construction company with some big contracts. Four ex wives.

There's definitely some other studies showing that graduate women are marrying high-earning non-graduate men, like your plumber friend. That explains how graduate women have been able to maintain their high marriage rate despite a lack of graduate men to go around.

How did the wives of your friend compare to him in terms of age and educational credentials?

They were definitely younger. About half of them had worked as teachers(so better educated than a high school dropout who managed to become a master plumber, at minimum), none of them worked again after marrying him. Each got a Carribbean condo as part of the divorce. Only three had kids.

Might one of them have been a grad student who had sex with a fat old plumber for a few years for a condo in Belize and a check? Uh, maybe but they didn't strike me as the type.

This is interesting. I think this might be very much a US phenomenon. It would be even more interesting to look at how this varies between cultures and between countries.

In the US cultural context, rich men usually got rich by either having upper-class connections or by being workaholics. In the former case, they are beholden to upper-class cultural norms, which condition a certain status and social acceptability with a similar-age bride from a family of similar class. This might make the young bride less attractive even to this subset of the rich.

Among the US nouveau riche, social skill development is stunted by workaholism, and this probably limits their ability to date young upper class woman. The young upper-class American women I have met recently seem to have their creep detector tuned up to 11 and to habitually present an attitude of cynicism. Which is to say that they will probably make an older man really work for it while they are young, go single for a long time, and not marry until they are late in fertility, starting to get desperate, and cannot afford to be so bitchy.

In the US, there is also a lot of financial risk to marrying young women. Younger women are generally more likely to lose interest in their partner after the first few years, and the loss of 50% of assets during no-fault divorce makes their departure really expensive to rich men.

But thinking of other countries I'm familiar with, it seems that even where 50% split of assets during divorce is not common, compensating social dynamics exist which make the rich man/young woman pairing less common than one would expect. Korea completely lacks the financial divorce risk, but makes up for it with increased social pressure and higher standards for social acceptability, which pushes all relationships (and especially marriages) into similar age brackets.

Perhaps a good experimental counterexample for my explanation would be China, which has low divorce risk and fewer social norms. I think women there get very very picky about their partners' finances, which would predict that rich men there will skew toward younger women and middle-class men there go unmarried until later in life.

I suspect China's relationship dynamics are more related to gender asymmetry than divorce laws. Or at least it's a huge confounder that merits consideration.

High earning men seem to want class peers.

Well. That's who they want on their arm when they're seen in public. Certainly selection bias in terms of what we actually see.

My inherent issue with this is its not differentiating between what they chase as sexual partners vs. what they might actually settle in for a long term relationship.

So what's going on here? The Red Pill explanation of men preferring younger women doesn't seem to fit,

Red Pill would suggest that a wealthy man can and would keep a soft harem of younger women, discarding them as needed, which isn't really refuted by the data here.

Or it might be that richer men are more sensitive to judgement from their peers, who would disapprove of larger age gaps.

Possible. I'll also throw out that younger women are a little less likely to successfully keep up the right appearances and are probably somewhat more likely to do something that is blatantly embarrassing to you either intentionally or unintentionally.

So even if your peers 'approve' of large age gaps, you're still risking reputational damage if the woman you choose is actually immature.

The thing that surprises me most is that you don't see richer men marrying younger women

There's the key word. Marry. Leo DiCaprio has gone through 12 younger women in the last 20 years alone (is he an outlier? Probably, but not by much). No wedding in sight.

Broaden the question to more general 'relationships' and I'd imagine age gaps are more prevalent.

So yeah, is there anything in the data to suggest that rich men wouldn't pump and dump as many young women as they can (Elon sure goes that route) and only marry one that actually matches his personal status more closely?

I'm genuinely not trying to be contrarian, I'm just put off when I see a claim like this, backed up by a narrowly-defined set of data that purports to refute an idea that is making a substantially different claim.

Red Pill would suggest that a wealthy man can and would keep a soft harem of younger women, discarding them as needed, which isn't really refuted by the data here.

I’d guess actual billionaires (like Hollywood stars, whose indiscretions are more public) have a higher rate of infidelity than average, but do male investment bankers have a higher rate of infidelity than male bartenders, tattoo artists, taxi drivers or nurses? I doubt it. Polling shows that male infidelity stays pretty similar controlling for education and most non-religious class background.

The idea that every rich man who can afford to is secretly fucking hot teens or young women seems like more of a prurient fantasy than anything else. Some do, just like plenty of married cops and truckers fuck hookers. But most? I doubt it.

If I had to pick high rates of infidelity by profession, I would put bartenders, tattoo artists, and taxi drivers towards the top, and male nurses solidly above average just due to gender ratios in their field.

I would agree that working class men in male dominated but lucrative(by working class standards) professions are much more likely than average to see sex workers of any description, regardless of marital status. I would also say that fucking teens is either weirdo coded or solidly working class(in the not particularly high income sense) in American culture. But bartenders and tattoo artists cheating on their wives is mostly shocking in the sense that they got married in the first place; these are (relatively)high income men surrounded by easy(relatively) women.

Question is a bit fraught.

I'd absolutely bet that historically and recently, it was more likely that wealthier men had higher infidelity rates simply because it would be relatively easy for them to find attractive affair partners.

If nothing else, they can afford to pick a high-end escort for a night.

The idea that every rich man who can afford to is secretly fucking hot teens or young women seems like more of a prurient fantasy than anything else.

Invert it. Consider that young women are actively pursuing the rich men (if you're on dating apps, this is effectively explicit) and are much, much quicker to put out for them.

On balance, what effect would we expect this to have? Rich guys getting laid a lot, and very few of these women getting wifed up by said rich man. He can wait for the 'ideal' match, hopefully one that isn't so naive as to bang the nearest rich dude without much discretion.

I've talked to death about the lack of actual long-term relationships forming among the current crop of young women, I think the point that's relevant to this discussion is that there's a class of men who have their pick of women, and actually DO get to have it both ways. Bang the nubile ones for fun and then eventually find one worth marrying.

So what these men are marrying isn't quite revealing what they're actually pursuing, sexually.

I would imagine rich men getting married (relatively) earlier, as it used to be (and maybe still is) that settling down and getting married was seen as a sign of mature stability that proved you were ready for greater responsibility and promotion up the ladder. So marrying someone of a similar background and age who knows how to navigate the work and social circles where you'll be networking your little heart out is an advantage; you can always have a discreet affair with a hot young thing from the secretarial pool later on once you're established.

I'm not sure that's as true now, marriage rates being lower and median age at first marriage are creeping up.

But maybe. "Early" being early-mid 20's still leaves time to screw around a bit in college, find a girl by Junior year, lock her down, and get married and established early enough to start social climbing.

I'd guess that flings with younger staff are actually less common in the post Me-too era, but its genuinely a target-rich environment to find single women in any corporate environment.

If nothing else, they can afford to pick a high-end escort for a night.

1% is the general number for American men using escorts or prostitutes in the past year, and the highest estimates are only two and a half percent. It's also negatively correlated with income in general.

Just not a real thing people do at a level where it would impact these numbers.

It's also negatively correlated with income in general.

I don't know, man...

There are only about 2,000 men at Davos, only about 500 of them American. It wouldn't seriously impact the chart drawn above if every single one of them was balls deep in a hooker every night after the conference.

After reading the whole article:

In 2020, an investigation by The Times found at least 100 prostitutes travel to Davos for the summit according to a Swiss police officer.

Well, I guess this makes you right about both the rate, and the correlation with income. Though I suppose we'd need to know the native population of Davos prostitutes to know for sure...

Not just the rich guys at Davos, though, is it? It's the support staff around them, and all the journalists reporting on it, etc. Plenty of transient custom to be worth importing some short-term workers for.

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It's more just a data thing, the men are sorted by income percentile. There are around one million men in the top 1% of income, and because it's not weighted by income Elon Musk counts the same as my local Nissan Dealership owner or any law partner at a big firm. If it were the case that Davos type masters of the universe frequent prozzies, there just aren't enough of them to move the needle on what we're looking at, even within the pool of the 1%.

I'd add that everyone I know who has (admitted to) paying for sex was lower or working class, so it lines up with my experience. I'd imagine there are a few marginal cases I'm missing though.

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Yes, we've all recently learned that the multimillionaire CEO of a tech company will risk it all to have an affair with the head of HR at said company.

I'd agree escorts aren't the MODAL case here, for sure.

But for most guys, a night with a decent escort is not likely in the budget, so he's likely to throw money at strippers or somesuch.

Rich guy has that fallback, but is not necessarily going to need it.

I suppose the availability can have an impact on the market even if they aren't used. Like the Marxian theory that the unemployed are the Reserve Army of Labor, driving down wages by fear of competition. And I suppose the same goes for young floozies: my wife sees a 20 year old woman admiring me and knows she has to compete, and chooses to be better? I don't know.

I just don't think it's the case that there's some secret activity that proves that men don't really want the things they are visibly pursuing.

Eh, its the same as how we crave unhealthy junk food but can restrict ourselves to eating the healthier (but still flavorful) options over the long term.

I think guys have their horny brain which will screw almost any living thing, and then the post-coitus clarity brain that knows they need to find someone stable.

Guys have the things they want when they are mostly aiming to get their rocks off, then the things they want when they consider what kind of kids they'll have, who will help raise them, and what type of person would they tolerate sticking around AFTER they've had sex with them.

Rich guys presumably have the same urges, I'm just suggesting they have more options on the table to chase some strange if they can't keep the urges in check.

I don't disagree, but at some level...call me old fashioned, but marrying the rich guy is generally how we define winning for a woman. No one is disputing that rich men can find poor women attractive, but if they aren't marrying them, then it's sort of irrelevant to the outcome of the match.

Saying that rich men are really attracted to something other than what they're marrying is just kind of a misunderstanding of terms in my mind. Like saying that the team that is losing baseball games is better at baseball than the team that is winning baseball games. Or, to mix sports metaphors, it brings to mind the classic Sampaoli quote on possession in soccer:

“One night, I went to a bar; I was with a woman. We talked all night. We laughed, we flirted, I paid for several drinks of hers. At around 5 am, a guy came in, grabbed her by the arm and took her to the bathroom. He made love to her and she left with him. That doesn’t matter, because I had most of the possession on that night.”

For a woman trying to net a rich husband, it doesn't really matter if he stares at the big-titted waitress at the bar, it barely matters if he bangs her on occasion. It matters who he marries, who he supports financially, who has the children he raises and supports. Those are the goals, the sex is just passing the ball(s) around.

((That said, when you talk about "soft harems" I think we're mixing up what the data here is about. The granularity on income stops at percentile. The top 1% of income is "only" about $400k/yr. While I suppose, with some cleverness, you could manage to squirrel enough away to spend enough to keep a glamour girl on the side off that, you're not keeping a harem. DiCaprio or Trump, ultra wealthy celebrities, are in another stratosphere from the data on record here.))

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The Red Pill explanation of men preferring younger women doesn't seem to fit, since the men with the most options (high earning ones) are more like to choose women the same age.

TRP has a tremendously difficult time conceiving of women as individual humans who have their own desires, interests, and other properties that aren't fully exhausted by their status as women, so that can help explain their blind spot in regards to this issue.

The guy I know who's really into TRP is always saying, "I don't care if she's into what I'm into, I don't care if she's good conversation, I don't care about any of that. I have male friends for that. Why would I go to a woman to socialize?"

Obviously you tend to share more in common with people who are of a similar age and education level to you. And, surprise surprise, the majority of men do want to be able to have reasonable social interactions with the person they're going to be spending the rest of their lives with, funny how that works out.

High earning men seem to want class peers. A woman's qualifications are a marker for class, and a woman's high salary is a manifestation of her class. Of course, once married, they can afford for her to stay home more easily than poorer families.

The thing that surprises me most is that you don't see richer men marrying younger women, as all of the older-younger pairings I've seen in real life have involved high-earning men. It might be that richer men marry younger, and therefore there is simply less scope for large age gaps. Or it might be that richer men are more sensitive to judgement from their peers, who would disapprove of larger age gaps.

Princeton Mom strikes again. College is the place to meet your partner.

I read The Original Preppy Handbook from the 1980s recently, my wife loved it and wanted me to read it. The whole book is built around a guide to being part of the preppy, mostly Northeastern, old money upper class. And the majority of the book is built around the social life of educational institutions: you go to this school, not so much to learn as to learn who to talk to. You meet people at your prep school, or your undergrad, or one of the sister/brother institutions to those schools, and those are pretty much your friends for life.

That's a fantasy of a past subculture that maybe never quite existed, but it does reflect the centrality of education to the modern American upper class. A young lawyer who goes K-JD is in full time schooling until they are 25 or 26, and basically that entire time their peer group is age-gated such that they have neither opportunity nor reason to get to know people much older or younger than they are. The median age at first marriage is around 30, and the median couple knows each other for a little over three years before getting engaged, followed by a year long engagement before they get married. So a huge number of our young professionals barely form a peer group or life outside of school before they meet their future mate.

That said, I definitely see some problems with their method.

What he wants (according to the data) is a woman around his age, with the same academic qualifications. Men with younger (and indeed, older) wives are the ones earning less money. What rich men want, it seems, is a (cultural, educational) peer.

With earnings is becomes a bit more complicated. As a man's income goes up, so does the income of his wife. But richer men earn a larger proportion of household income, and the women married to these men are the most likely to not work at all.

My own wife had an easier time getting her degree because she was married to me, I helped support her through school. She probably earns more money as a result of the family connections we have in the area. She would have been successful on all those things on her own, but...lots of people don't finish their degrees because they can't afford it. She is very smart and very good at her job, but being Mrs. FiveHour has helped her a bit at times. And in turn, being her husband has started to help me in business, people know her and like her and that helps me get my foot in the door.

A rich man might marry a woman who is on her own a well-educated high earner; but it's also a lot easier to get educated and to become a high earner if you're married to a wealthy man. Connections, support, sinecures. A rich wife can choose to continue her education, and if she wants a job it's easy to secure a highly paid one through her husband.

Slowly over the last 150 years (the roots predate the Victorian era but it was cemented in it, long before most wealthy women worked much outside the home) the primary purpose of marriage moved from children to romantic companionship. This was to some extent true even when upper class Victorians were having 6 kids each. You can trace in literature, the press and so on the concept of a ‘love match’. And then, in accelerated form since the 1970s, married men and women began spending much more time together. The world of a century ago had fraternal and women’s organizations.

A husband and wife would live together but often sleep in separate beds (if they could afford it) and would spend perhaps every evening of the week doing different things. A married man would be at the pub, at an organization like the Freemasons, at a men’s political meeting, whatever. A married woman would be with the children, often with other women in the community and extended family around her, and in free time (or more regularly if she had money for a governess, maid, nanny) at what were effectively sororal (if often more informal) gatherings, lunches, meetings and so on.

The family might be together at church, but that was it.

As Coming Apart narrates to some extent, the rise of suburbanization, the small nuclear rather than multigenerational extended family and then the slow withering of both male fraternal organizations and extended familial/communal women’s groups of the kind that existed in the Victorian city and town ended much of that.

Today, married couples spend an amount of time together, alone (by which I mean with only each other and possibly children for company) that would have been hard to fathom for most of our ancestors in recent centuries. That means that the personality and interests of a spouse are much more important. Money is more important now that women work too, but it isn’t the only central thing about the enterprise.

It reminds me of (I think @Gaashk) the recent discussion on Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez. Why divorce and remarry to a woman your age when he is surely wealthy enough to enjoy the company of endless 20 year old models? I suspect because he enjoys her company and they have fun together, and in the modern age (when even most billionaires spend a lot of time with their spouses, at dinners, events, other gatherings and so on) that is the most important thing.

I mean, this is true, but also the, say, Georgian, upper crust did not get to marry the most attractive woman catching their eye, either. Part of marrying an upper class man has always been being an upper class woman.

In our society upper class men are marked by high salaries and upper class women by extensive education. They marry each other because they’re expected to marry class peers, not because those things are overwhelmingly important in themselves.

This sounds very likely.

Why divorce and remarry to a woman your age when he is surely wealthy enough to enjoy the company of endless 20 year old models? I suspect because he enjoys her company and they have fun together

And it's probably bloody difficult for a billionaire to find someone they feel genuinely comfortable with.

Rich men do indeed tend to marry same class women, but who do they fuck around with? How many of those marriages are faithful?

I remember that the site AshleyMadisons most frequent occupations of the users was physician, second highest? Lawyer….

I remember that the site AshleyMadisons most frequent occupations of the users was physician, second highest? Lawyer….

A website well known for its users' strong commitment to honesty.

Like SeekingArrangement, AshleyMadison was low key just a prostitution site on which more expensive ‘escorts’ found clients and vice versa. Most women who desperately want an affair don’t need a dating site to find a partner. Poor johns are of no interest to self-respecting and moderately expensive escorts who do even the most basic background checks.

I presume that poor men who want to cheat do so with women in their social circles, on hookup apps (they’re usually higher time preference and from families with more divorce so care less about the consequences of being found out) and with cheap street walker or truck stop prostitutes.

Ashley Madison was a scam site populated with almost exclusively female bots. Pretty sure there was a data dump that confirmed this, there were no women, not even prostitutes

How does Israel make Jews safe?

I've seen it suggested that having a Jewish state creates a refuge that isn't dependent on the goodwill of non-Jews. Yet the past several years have demonstrated that Israel isn't actually self sufficient and that it is, in fact, totally dependent on trade with Europe and aid from America for it's continued existence. Israeli Jews would hardly be any safer than American Jews in a scenario where their primary patron went anti-semitic.

Yet even in a world where America does unconditionally support Israel I can't help but think of anyone who takes Aliyah as a certified moron. Modern Israel is not a safe place for Jews, it's a place where thousands of Jews can be killed or maimed in a day and hundreds kidnapped. If you are kidnapped, the "Jewish State" will not pull all the stops to save your life but will instead attempt to murder you to prevent you from being used as a bargaining chip. If you survive that then your best hope is that public pressure will eventually force Israel to free some mass killing gigaterrorists in exchange for your life, since Israel has demonstrated that it is incapable of rescuing hostages by force after more than 2 years of intense combat against the weakest militia on it's border.

All this for the low, low price of North Korean taxes, mandatory conscription, reserve service, and getting arrested if you choose to vacation anywhere outside of the US

Even for non-Israeli Jews who don't care about Israel either way, the brutal yet failed campaign to destroy Hamas is a giant anti-semitism producing machine. If the ghost of Hitler possessed Netanyahu with the goal of empowering a new generation of anti-semites then he could hardly have done better. Before 10/7, the slightest hint of anti-semitism was instantly denounced. Today, when the giga-normie Nelk Boys interview Bibi the next day they're forced to go on an apology tour with all the big name internet anti-semites like Nick Fuentes and Sneako. The shift in the public perception of Israelis and Jews is so downright seismic and probably couldn't be replicated in a world without a "Jewish state" soaking up bad press.

Yet even in a world where America does unconditionally support Israel I can't help but think of anyone who takes Aliyah as a certified moron.

Do you think we live in such a world? I am American and can assure you we do not. We are the primary constraint on Israel's conduct during this war. Without American restraint there already would be no one alive in the Gaza strip and the annexation of all the land towards the Jordan would have begun. And it would have been done with fewer Israeli casualties than the current war, and it would probably have been over 3 decades ago.

Modern Israel is not a safe place for Jews, it's a place where thousands of Jews can be killed or maimed in a day and hundreds kidnapped.

Yes indeed, as a result of "humanitarian" causes the US and Europe impose on Israel.

If you are kidnapped, the "Jewish State" will not pull all the stops to save your life but will instead attempt to murder you to prevent you from being used as a bargaining chip. If you survive that then your best hope is that public pressure will eventually force Israel to free some mass killing gigaterrorists in exchange for your life, since Israel has demonstrated that it is incapable of rescuing hostages by force after more than 2 years of intense combat against the weakest militia on it's border

The post 10-7 war can hardly be described as intense combat. Kid gloves at best.

the brutal yet failed campaign to destroy Hamas is a giant anti-semitism producing machine.

Lack of punctuation aside, this is just incorrect. All that antisemitism already existed. I knew about it on 10-6, we saw it on 10-7 before they launched a single counter-attack.

Yeah, that's the bet all western jews are making. They think Israel is going to fall someday, and their political opinions are often a sublimation of that basic choice. Some take it one way, some take it the other, but it's just pre-survivor's guilt.

This is how the jewish people have survived thousands of years without a country.

Yeah, that's the bet all western jews are making. They think Israel is going to fall someday

While I am sure that there are some Jews who carefully select their country of residence based on minimizing the chances of being genocided, I am positive that for many, other factors (employments, economics, existing relationships) play a more crucial role.

My subjective mental model of the median US Jew is not "these fools in Israel will get themselves murdered again" but "having a state which is guaranteed to accept Jewish immigrants in a world where countries sometimes expel their Jewish citizens is a nice fallback solution, and we should support Israel for that reason even if we do not have a compelling reason to move there."

I don't know any Jews well but those that I'm acquainted with are very concerned about escaping the genocide that is just around the corner despite all evidence. Maybe Jewish history has naturally selected for having a backup plan.

I know a Jewish family that has carefully acquired and maintained multiple passports across generations rather openly based on the lived experience of their parents (and grandparents, and great grandparents) during WWII. The cynics would say "rootless cosmopolitans" here (and maybe there is an element of that), but having heard their Holocaust stories second-hand, I see why they care so much.

WW2 affected more people than just jews.

This brings up feelings similar to when I see news stories from Ukraine of all their African migrants fleeing the country. A bunch of brown fighting age men who suddenly aren't Ukrainian like the others. All rhetoric of unity and shared humanity thrown out the window for a train ticket out of there. So they can, presumably, do the same song and diversity dance someplace else.

Are you suggesting German Jews should have proven their loyalty by fighting for the Reich? That wasn't really on the table for them.

They weren't migrants, they were German citizens, until they weren't, and they weren't given the option of proving how German they were.

No. How did you reach that? The point where jews could make inroads with Germans had long passed them by.

I'm suggesting that Russians, Lithuanians, Poles, Latvians and Ukrainians for example, don't carry 12 different passports in case of another war, despite being victims of WW2.

There are no "inroads" they could have made with people who hate Jews for being Jews. You are implying there was a rational reason for Germans to hate them and want them removed or exterminated.

I'm suggesting that Russians, Lithuanians, Poles, Latvians and Ukrainians for example, don't carry 12 different passports in case of another war, despite being victims of WW2.

That's because they have a country that isn't going to suddenly decide they don't belong there.

A convincing case has yet to be made that Jews are simultaneously unreasonably paranoid, disloyal, and also do not deserve to be considered fellow citizens and got what was coming to them.

That's because they have a country that isn't going to suddenly decide they don't belong there.

Except, you know, that millions of eastern Europeans literally did find themselves in that situation at various times between the end of WWI and 2022.

I get what you're trying to say but altered borders so that Russians find themselves outside Russia, or Poles outside Poland, has been a pretty constant problem.

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You are implying the people in question were simply deranged and hated jews for being jews. Which is a sort of backhanded otherization rhetoric that would not fly in any other context. Most principally for being an obvious lie. But also for just being silly. Denying others a theory of mind to make your case just means you don't have a case.

That's because they have a country that isn't going to suddenly decide they don't belong there.

Historically, this is just not true. And more pertinent to the topic, sometimes it's not their own nation that's doing the deciding. Acting like the predicament many jews found themselves in during WW2 is any worse than that of many civilians in the aforementioned nations is invalid.

A convincing case has yet to be made that Jews are simultaneously unreasonably paranoid, disloyal, and also do not deserve to be considered fellow citizens and got what was coming to them.

You can't both be a citizen and also exempt from service to the nation if the concept of a national is supposed to hold any relevance. This rings especially loud after decades of diversity propaganda where everyone is touted as an equal national. If your alleged co-nationals are hoarding passports they certainly do have a different view on the nation and their membership. If you want to verbalize recognition for that fact using hyperbolic thought ending rhetoric... fine. But you are certainly not looking for rational discourse when doing so.

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That's because they have a country that isn't going to suddenly decide they don't belong there.

For one, citation needed. Eastern Europe might be behind the current trend, but the current trend definitely is that Europeans have no particular claim to Europe and deserve less rights than immigrants.

For another, this reminds me of the claim that gay men are so prone to promiscuity because they've been denied marriage, and that giving it to them will moderate their behavior. Hasn't worked out for gay men, and the results for Jewish people are kinda mixed. I don't think Israel as a country or Israelis as a group, on average, can reasonably be described as "not paranoid".

NGOs like ADL are also not helping the perception about Jewish people living in other parts of the world. Admittedly this skews results quite a bit, since normal Jewish people aren't going to open an NGO devoted to showing how normal they are, and how they just want to get in with their life. Either way I don't see it as straightforward as you're describing it.

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"Israel actually makes Jews less safe!" as a statement by itself is almost always concern trolling, and the rest of your comment basically confirms that's what you're doing. But for what it's worth, here's why this is straightforwardly incorrect:

1/ There were hundreds of thousands of Jews living in mandatory Palestine prior to Israel's war of independence that the Arabs tried to slaughter as soon as the Brits moved out. Establishing the state of Israel was the process of not allowing this to happen. On a pure lives saved vs lost basis, this by itself justifies the existence of Israel even considering all Jews killed worldwide since then.

2/ Israel makes Jews unpopular, but Jews have always been unpopular, so once again this is concern trolling. The idea that Jews might have reacted to the holocaust by thinking "maybe we shouldn't establish a sovereign state, because then people will really not like us" is hard to entertain with a straight face.

The idea that the only choices were "no sovereign Jewish state" and "sovereign Jewish state that is approximately akin to the present-day institution", which seems to be the premise of your second point's interpretation, is a false dichotomy.

By 1945, about any land suitable for human settlement had a local population, including Madagascar. British Palestine still had a rather low population density (1922: 30/km^2, contrast with Germany 1925 @ 133/km^2). Seasteading just was not an option.

The area around Jerusalem was an obvious Schelling point. Picking another place would have meant splitting the project of a Jewish state into two, because some were likely determined to settle in their ancestral homelands or die trying.

The other alternative would have been North America, but I do not think that a truly sovereign state would have been in the cards there. Even if they had convinced the USG to sell them land, they would still have depended on having good relations with them because the US could have invaded them at leisure at any time.

I think the actual best option, with the benefit of hindsight, would have been to carve out a New Israel US state somewhere around Nevada (1920 population density: 0.27/km^2) or New Mexico. I think the only point where a Jewish state would really require sovereignty by design would be to allow Jewish immigrants from all over the world in, which in the US would be a federal matter. Something along the lines of "Jewish migration is unrestricted, but the migrants will not become full US citizens and are restricted to their state (with birthright citizenship still in effect)", would alleviate most of the concerns the rest of the US might have with allowing immigrants in while also being sufficient to allow refugees shelter.

In short, some similar deal to what the Mormons have in the form of Utah.

Sure, New Israel would have had to keep on the good side of the US for survival. But this is not very different from present day Israel. Only that it is much more popular for the US to leave a desert state like New Israel or Utah to its own devices and rather unpopular to send Israel tons of military aid.

I have argued before that the morally obvious solution after WWII would have been to create the state on the territory of the Axis powers. The Gdansk/NE German corner would have been the obvious choice given how much of a Jewish homeland the South Baltic already had been, and the German population was already getting purged from there either way, but if Soviet buy-in could not be obtained, then Holstein (putting them on the bloc border as a tripwire) or even Swabia (putting them next to neutral Switzerland) would also have been a reasonable option.

(I know @Southkraut hates this idea for obvious reasons, but there is a causal path from Israel in its current borders to US Middle East policy to refugees being generated and from insufficient direct German atonement after WWII to German self-loathing to refugees being accepted. Would giving some clay to the Jews back then really have been worse than slowly giving all the clay to the Arabs now?)

Besides, even for broadly the current location, there would have been better solutions (proper ethnic cleansing followed by the establishment of a firm border, not the current slowly expanding blob with partially incorporated territories).

(Also @ZanarkandAbesFan)

Honestly, if we had just donated Berlin or, fuck it, all of Germany north-east of and including Berlin to the Jews and considered ourselves quit of any debt after that, sure, fine, that'd have been a good enough deal in retrospect. Better than the near-century of guilt-mongering we had instead. But I doubt it. The propaganda game has taken on a life of its own even as far back as WW1, and Germany was going to be the villain for some time yet no matter what. With the Soviet propaganda and infiltration machine doing its thing during the cold war on top of the earlier propaganda, the WW2 propaganda, the holocaust narrative and the profound jewish self-interest in maintaining Germany as obliged to pay infinite reparations forever, there was no way in hell Germans could have gotten off with paying no matter how high a one-time price. Too many parties did too much to ensure that we would not be left off the hook. And, yeah, okay, I can kinda see their reasons for it too.

But in the end I stand by this: Giving away German clay to no matter who wasn't worth it, because Land - they're not making it anymore. And once you sell, you're never getting it back. And Germany wasn't going to be buying its way out of German Guilt in any event.

Even if the guilt tripping had happened either way, I think it is plausible that it would not have translated into so many Middle Eastern refugees - both because American entanglement in the region would have been lower, and because admitting them is now also seen as part of our duty towards Israel (I have seen multiple instances of "Israel should expel the Palestinians and we should take them all in" in the deep-green comment sections of German papers at this point).

Also, under some versions of the idea, not that much clay would even have to be taken from Germany - Poland was already shifted far more west than it had to be, at the expense of Germany. It's counterintuitive from a modern perspective just how Jewish the Bloodlands used to be - percentages in the typical larger city ranged from 10 to 40.

I think the actual best option, with the benefit of hindsight, would have been to carve out a New Israel US state somewhere around Nevada (1920 population density: 0.27/km^2) or New Mexico.

Or Sonora, per the Cooper Plan?

Thanks for getting me to ask ChatGPT, "how many Jews could survive on South Georgia Island?" which definitely didn't put me on a list somewhere. (The answer is 5-10 thousand btw)

I feel like this is missing some obvious "thirteenth tribe" joke, maybe in reference to the great Mormon work of literature Battlestar Galactica.

Not really, unless you want to broaden the scope of the debate to include possibilities that I doubt OP had in mind like the Jews having a sovereign state in Madagascar (which I do think would have been preferable but has not been a viable choice for about a century).

Antisemitism was always extremely high in the Muslim world (moreso since 1947) and was rising in the West long before October 7.

Charlottesville with the ‘Jews Will Not Replace Us’ chant was in 2017. Online antisemitism exploded after 2015/6, although it was growing on /pol/ and in conspiracist parts of YouTube many years before then. Polling suggested rising antisemitism too.

I think the response to the war in Gaza accelerated things, but it was very clear things were heading in this direction long before then. A combination of a new reactionary right and mass immigration from the third world (the latter accelerating the former) meant a renewed antisemitism was long inevitable. Maybe if October 7th had never happened (or had been thwarted in advance) things might be 3-5 years behind.

Charlottesville with the ‘Jews Will Not Replace Us’ chant was in 2017.

The chant is "you will not replace us"; you can hear it very clearly on video. "Jews will not replace us" was made up by the media.

Who were they claiming wanted to replace them?

This sounds like "Jews will not replace us".

The two are, notably, similar sounding. Like all of the vowels are the same, 80% of the consonants are identical, and the initial consonants are both palatal.

Yeah, I listened several times, but to me there's an unmistakable "sss" sound at the end of the first word.

I mean to make things even more complicated, youz/youse is recognizable as a slang term for 'yall' even if it isn't totally normal.

I don't think it's unreasonable to think that there were more than one group of people saying more than one phrase. It was called the "Unite the Right" rally, there had to be different groups there.

What I think happened, just personally, is that someone started a "You Will Not Replace Us!" chant, someone heard the 'Jews' version and started chanting their version. Or vice versa, although I don't think even at that point someone would be ballsy enough to start with the Judenhass-version. Once they thought they heard someone else say it, sure, but not out of the gate.

Because those guys in the first video were definitely saying 'You', and the second post was, I think pretty clearly, 'Jews'.

I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but I don't see a real or workable idea that results in the dissolution of Israel for those reasons.

A significant portion of Israel's population, along with its ruling class, seem to me to fully embrace tribalism to an extent that the Western mind can barely comprehend anymore, let alone embrace. What's fair or beneficial in the grand scheme of things is secondary to their survival. Israel clearly demonstrates this over and over, and so many Westerners (having had their tribalistic instincts redirected to focus on things like social, gender, or racial power dynamics and "fairness") are just completely baffled by it.

From what I can see, it's not about them being the most safe place, or the most fair, or making the rest of the world as prosperous as it can be. It's about Israelis' survival instincts being far more easily triggered than most Westerners can begin to imagine, and thus anything that can even be perceived as being a threat to that survival is dealt with, harshly.

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with it. Israel has clearly engaged in disgusting tactics, acts of violence, manipulation, etc. I guess what I'm saying, or rather asking is "What is your realistic alternative?"

The State of Israel makes it safe for Jews to live in the Land of Israel. That is the whole point. Living as a Jew in Jerusalem is a higher level of Jewishness than living as a Jew in Brooklyn. It just is. Yahweh did not promise Abraham and his descendants that they would live in New York. You cannot analyze the Israeli conflict from a purely secular lens. Both sides are fighting for the same magic dirt.

Strangely, it looks to me like very few early Zionists seemingly actually justified Zionism in Palestine in terms of Yahwe and high level of Jewishness etc. These were mainly secular socialist/liberal/masonic people. Yet the emotional pull of the religious land seems to have had overridden any cerebral secularism.

it is, in fact, totally dependent on trade with Europe and aid from America for it's continued existence.

That's true for most countries. But as long as you have friends somewhere and don't become a pariah state, you'll be able to continue existing.

Even "pariah states" have friends somewhere; e.g. North Korea and the PRC.

North Korea is backed by two giant nuclear superpowers directly bordering it. Its main adversary is literally at the other end of the globe. Israel is in quite a different situation

Israel has(unofficially) quite good relations with Jordan and Egypt, and its main adversary is Iran.

Israel has good relations with the current dictators of Jordan and Egypt, both held in place by enormous American aid and effort so that they would keep having good relations with Israel. It always has to face the possibility that in an Arab-spring like event or a US withdrawal from Middle East, it will be once again bordered by very hostile governments.

Unless I've been reading maps really wrong up to this point, North Koreas main adversary is immediately to its south and connected by a land border.

Yet the past several years have demonstrated that Israel isn't actually self sufficient and that it is, in fact, totally dependent on trade with Europe and aid from America for it's continued existence.

Is Israel anymore dependent on trade than other developed nations? My understanding is that its economy is quite diverse and ranks very high in innovation. As for US aid, it's not insignificant, but Israel would still be wealthy – it's the 16th largest economy by GDP per capita – without any aid at all. It seems like a stretch to say that Israel is "totally dependent" on the US to survive. Certainly this isn't the case for its economic survival.

The more relevant question is how Israel would fare in a region-wide war against it if the US suspended all military support. I don't know enough to say.

big name internet anti-semites like Nick Fuentes and Sneako.

I'm very skeptical that online anti-Semitism has or will translate into real-world (right-wing) anti-Semitism in the US. X has created the impression that there are millions of Nazis actively living among us, but the vast majority of the public are and will remain normies. However, the emergence of a legitimate anti-Israel bloc in the Democratic Party is a real possibility.

The shift in the public perception of Israelis and Jews is so downright seismic and probably couldn't be replicated in a world without a "Jewish state" soaking up bad press.

Of course it could be replicated; anti-Semitism was far more visceral and violent before Israel existed. But the justifications for hating Jews in the past – they control the banking industry, they're culturally incompatible, they're communists – are no longer salient in the West, or really most places in the world. For example, Europe is far more "degenerate" now than it was when it had way more Jews.

I'm very skeptical that online anti-Semitism has or will translate into real-world (right-wing) anti-Semitism in the US. X has created the impression that there are millions of Nazis actively living among us, but the vast majority of the public are and will remain normies.

Look, I live among the offline hardline right wing in the US. Trust me when I say Israel and Jews in general have seen a giant decrease in popularity over the past year and a half or so. It's one of those huge increase over a trivial base things but it's real.

I wouldn't say it's over Gaza- all of these people think Mohammedans deserve it- the media person who thinks Russians are inferior savages, Israel is proving that 'judeo-christian' was a lie, and the nineteenth amendment was a mistake is more upset over Israel manipulating us to not pay its own bills. But right wing antisemitism went from a twitterati thing to a real thing during the time period.

I'm not totally following. I get the anti-Israel sentiment, but what exactly are they angry at American Jews for? Because this

more upset over Israel manipulating us to not pay its own bills

is just as readily a left-wing complaint.

I'm saying these people who hate Russia on barely-concealed-racial grounds, think Mohammedans can't not deserve something(and have trouble feeling sorry even for the children), are upset about Jewish manipulation to spend money on Israel(which after all is a wealthy country that could just pay for its weapons) are often enough the same people.

Wall Street Journal literally 2 days ago:

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/washington-struggles-to-rein-in-an-emboldened-israel-14fa3a74

A senior administration official said the White House coordinates closely with Israel and has considerable influence over Netanyahu because the prime minister knows that “the United States literally is the sole reason the state of Israel exists.”

The idea that the US assistance is not crucial because Israel is a high income country on paper is either extremely motivated reasoning or just an indication of knowing pretty much nothing about the situation.

Before 10/7, the slightest hint of anti-semitism was instantly denounced.

I don't know what world you were living in before 10/7, but it seems to be a very different one from the world I was living in.

the "Jewish State" will not pull all the stops to save your life but will instead attempt to murder you to prevent you from being used as a bargaining chip

I've seen countless crypto-Hamas supporters citing the existence of something called the Hannibal Directive as if they're masterfully laying down a trump card; in some cases, explicitly claiming that Hamas killed literally zero civilians on October 7th, and that 100% of the Israeli civilians massacred on that day were in fact killed by the IDF. These people seem to be engaged in a kind of curious doublethink: on the one hand, they want to express their support for Hamas and the broader Palestinian cause - but on the other hand, on some level they're aware that this means tacitly endorsing some rather monstrous and brutal tactics. The "solution" they've hit on is to assert that Hamas is entitled to fight back against oppression and colonialism, up to and including murdering unarmed Israeli civilians - but in point of fact, 100% of the unarmed Israeli civilians in question were actually murdered by the IDF themselves! How convenient - for a moment there I was worried I might have to confront legitimate moral ambiguity, acknowledge that this conflict isn't as black-and-white as I would like to pretend, or do something facially grotesque like actively endorsing the slaughter of music festival attendees. What a relief that I can instead fall back into the warm, comforting embrace of that isn't happening, and it's good that it is. (See also "Denial by a thousand cuts".)

But for all that such people are keen to cite the existence of the Hannibal Directive, they are generally strangely reluctant to cite specific cases in which they believe it was actually used by the IDF. The intention seems to be to conjure up a free-floating miasma in which all claims of Israeli suffering are responded to with reflexive suspicion, a permanent asterisk over any and all Israeli casualties in this conflict, while being careful to avoid specific (and hence falsifiable) assertions that this specific Israeli was in fact killed by the IDF. "Yes, yes, Israeli civilians being murdered is bad - but hey, did you know there's this thing called the Hannibal Directive? Sure is interesting, huh? Now, I'm not saying the IDF intentionally murdered their own people and then Mossad created some AI-generated footage to frame Hamas for the massacre as a casus belli - but I'm not not saying that. At the end of the day, I'm Just Asking Questions."

You seem to be claiming that Hannibal directive (or more broadly an IDF strategy of killing hostages if necessary to stop hostage taking situations) isn’t real but then instead of explaining yourself you just prose about some crypto Hamas supporters.

When I talked to Israelis about this topic pretty much all seemed to take the existence of such a strategy as given and necessary because Middle East. Do you have any evidence that this is a made up conspiracy?

I'm not saying the Hannibal directive isn't real. I'm saying I find it very suspicious that the primary context in which it's brought up is to reflexively dismiss any and all claims that certain groups have mistreated the Israelis. I'm sure if you look at the ratio of "Israeli civilians killed by groups which are hostile to Israel" vs. "Israeli civilians who were intentionally killed by the IDF as part of the Hannibal directive", it would be extraordinarily lopsided - maybe 9:1 or higher. But critics of Israel seem to have decided that, because the Hannibal directive exists and has ever been employed, therefore they can dismiss all claims that Hamas or whoever murdered Israeli civilians by saying "eh, they probably did it to themselves". But of course, they're aware that this looks really bad, unserious and conspiratorial (perhaps even bearing a family resemblance to that great woke sin, "victim-blaming"), so rather than explicitly asserting "I believe that Israel is lying when they claim that Hamas killed these Israeli civilians, and they were in fact deliberately killed by the IDF", they'll just wave their hands and say "Hannibal directive, look it up", hoping the reader will join the dots themselves.

It's a cowardly, dishonest style of argumentation. If you believe in conspiracy theories, at least have the balls to be upfront about it.

That’s a lot of words for saying “I don’t like the people who mention bad thing so I will make up an imaginary argument in my head and win it”. Congratulations I guess.

The OP uses the Hannibal directive as an example of how Jews are very unsafe in modern Israel in a way they aren’t in pretty much any other modern country. This is trivially true no matter how much you foam about the true intentions of the people who mention this uncomfortable fact.

The OP uses the Hannibal directive as an example of how Jews are very unsafe

Even saying "very unsafe" is an example of exactly the kind of thing I'm complaining about. In an actuarial table of how Israelis met their ends since the founding of the state, would "being intentionally killed by the IDF to prevent them from being taken hostage by groups hostile to Israel" even crack the top hundred most common causes of death? The top five hundred? The top thousand? No, obviously not. And yet critics of Israel have this obsessive fixation on the Hannibal directive as evidence of how uniquely barbarous the nation is - when in reality, a counterfactual world in which the Hannibal directive didn't exist would only mean a tiny handful of Israelis would still be alive.

Let me put this in terms that you might find more agreeable: being shot dead by a police officer is a live possibility for black Americans in a way it isn't for black Britons, or indeed black citizens of just about any European country. But if you were investigating the causes of the reduced life expectancy among black Americans relative to other ethnic groups, "risk of being shot dead by police officers" shouldn't even enter into the equation. It's evidence of a mindset warped by political partisanship.

This is nonsense in the same way that people argue terrorism kills less westerners than sharks or lightning strikes and therefore caring about terrorism exposes some bias or ignorance. With your same logic, one can show that traffic accidents or obesity is much more dangerous to average Israeli than any hostile action as well. What are you arguing about then? Let’s get cutting the IDF budget for healthy eating campaigns.

But of course this is all atrocious nonsense. Just like how you should of course care many orders of magnitude more about a sentient adversary trying to kill you compared to random accidents, your own state security forces murdering you knowingly to avoid an awkward situation for the politicians is something again many orders of magnitude worse and more troublesome.

your own state security forces murdering you knowingly to avoid an awkward situation for the politicians is something again many orders of magnitude worse and more troublesome.

Sure, it's more troublesome. But as I've gone to great lengths to argue and contrary to your and the OP's framing, Israelis are not "very unsafe" because of the existence of the Hannibal directive. Ostensibly, this thread isn't about how "troublesome" the Israeli government is, but how safe Israelis are relative to peer nations.

Is the Hannibal directive a troublesome policy for which the Israeli government ought to face criticism? Of course, I've never suggested otherwise. Should it factor into any honest, disinterested discussion of how safe Israelis are relative to peer nations? No, obviously not. Surely no one would dispute that a random Israeli civilian is orders of magnitude less likely to die violently than a randomly selected civilian of any other Middle Eastern country - and none of those countries, to my knowledge, have any official policy analogous to the Hannibal directive. I'd even go so far to say that, given the rate of civil war, ethnic cleansing and political repression, a randomly selected civilian in any other Middle Eastern country is vastly more likely to die at the hands of that country's security forces than a randomly selected Israeli civilian is.

Israel is not supposed to be “a Middle Eastern country”. It’s supposed to be a European colony situated by historical coincidence in Middle East, offering safety to a minority religious group of Europeans who deemed themselves too vulnerable in Europe. If the best you can say in favour of this country that it offers its citizens better survival rates than the civil war Iraq or Syria, then it’s quite a failed project. This is of course not a fringe remark, there is a reason why vastly more Ashkenazim live in the US than in Israel and Israel is turning into a madhouse of the most lunatic religious Ashkenazim and low human capital Mizrahi Jews.

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Israel is a first world nation trying to survive in the third world. There have been a smattering of experiments in this regard, South Africa, Rhodesia, maybe others I'm not aware of. To maintain first world standards of civilization, they more or less all had to resort to the same methods of keeping the savages out, and disenfranchising as many of those that made it "in" as they could. Also violence. Lots and lots of violence. Because violence truly is the universal language, no matter what anyone tells you.

It's a shame South Africa and Rhodesia didn't have a Jeffrey Epstein to take whatever measures were necessary to make sure they maintained the support of their essential trade partners and patrons in the face of global disgust at how the third world behaves, and the measure that are required to survive in the face of it. I suppose Jews don't have higher measured IQ's for nothing.

Jeffrey Epstein

I am of the opinion that as far as securing the US support for Israel, Epstein is not even in the top ten, and possibly not in the top 100.

Most politicians have a thing were they accept campaign donations from special interest groups in exchange of political consideration. Some US Jews are very rich. At the risk of sounding like an antisemitic conspiracy nut, I think political donations are the main way that the US position towards Israel is influenced. (For the record, there is also Christian Zionism to consider, as well as the fact that Israel sometimes just is a good ally to the US.)

Nor is it only Jews who can lobby. United Fruits certainly influenced US policy, for example.

By contrast, blackmailing politicians with videos of them fucking underage girls is much riskier. If such an operation was traced back to Mossad, it would create an existential threat for Israel. And even then, a politician bound to your will through blackmail will likely resent you and try to undermine your cause, while a politician who sees you as a big donor will proactively try to keep you happy.

When Epstein was active, few people cared really about Palestinians. "No political donation could convince me to send bombs to Israel, but faced with the threat of the blackmail material being revealed, I am willing to kill a few Palestinian kids" was very much not the stance.

And even if Mossad had wanted to blackmail senators, having a single "Pedophile (sic!) Island" seems a strange way to go about it. Once you reveal the first bit of footage and the first senator 'fesses up, the cat is out of the bag and Epstein is implicated. What you would want to do instead is to target the politicians independently, so you can reveal any slice of evidence without compromising your whole operation.

Mohammedan nations have spent and spend far more on lobbying than Israel. This is of necessity a crude measurement, but it's also necessarily as close to objective as you're going to get.

Israel treats its non-Jewish citizens and residents far better than South Africa treated its black citizens.

But they exercise a great deal of authority over Gaza and the West Bank, and treat those people far worse. Israel exercises all the power over Palestinians that a national government would, but denies them any representation in that government.

Just off the top of my head, they perform law enforcement, control trade and the flow of goods (including a naval blockade of the Gaza strip), control the movement of people, collect taxes... All the traditional responsibilities of a state.

Uh, how do you think the national party treated Bophuthatswana?

Israel's relationship to the West Bank is that of a military occupier. Gaza is largely occupied now, but from 2005 until 10/7 was not occupied. A blockade is not occupation.

The shift in the public perception of Israelis and Jews is so downright seismic and probably couldn't be replicated in a world without a "Jewish state" soaking up bad press.

Yet it's happened hundreds of times for thousands of years across different civilizations, cultures, eras of technological progress. These are the fruits of the Jewish state and Jewish civilization, and nobody can say it's unfair to identify Israel as such.


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