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Not a good day for Mr. Tate Andrew Tate, Brother Tristan arrested amid human trafficking probe
I am skeptical. This does not make sense from a risk vs. reward perspective. Presumably their hustler university program and other businesses provide plenty of legal revenue; why engage in such unnecessary risk? Romania's criminal justice system probably does not have the same requirement of burden of proof as in the US.
One thing that proponents of noble lies like the falsehood of HBD or Healthy at an size seem to never account for is that by publicly denouncing the truth and harshly punishing any deviation they are feeding credibility directly into the kind of people who shouldn't have any. If you're a young man today and all you see from the mainstream is easily debunkable nonsense and thinly veiled contempt for you and what you see on the fringe is people comprehensively calling out those plain lies, coupled with their own nonsense but at the same time clearly not holding you in contempt then... I mean it's not convincing to those of us who contrarian enough to assume everyone involved in probably wrong but we're a rare breed. To many others even if they don't internalize it this is just as simple as siding with the liars who pander to you over the liars who demonize you. The solution is to stop. fucking. lying. so. god. damned. much. But this isn't going to change for many depressing reasons.
I just want to second this. I'm a little bit unique on the motte in not having a college degree and working in skilled labor instead, and my secular peer group reflects mostly young(as in not close to retirement, not as in "under thirty/forty"), working class males(skilled labor jobs are gender segregated, deal with it).
And the thing is, they know they're being lied to constantly. Just all the time, by every source they're being taught to regard as trustworthy. They know that being fat isn't healthy, and those black women in the sports illustrated swimsuit edition need to hit the gym and should stick the the watermelon over the fried chicken for the sake of their health. And they know that the people claiming it's healthy and beautiful are influential people they're supposed to regard as more trustworthy than their lying eyes. They don't know why- it's pretty difficult to imagine that someone actually cares that much about fat women qua fat women to try to lie about health at any size or whatever, and anyway it doesn't seem like the actually kind thing to do to tell them to go ahead and get seconds because stupid bullshit about exercise being white supremacy- so they believe people who tell them why and don't have obvious motives to want them to believe mistruths. This source is usually Alex Jones or someone similar, not Andrew Tate, but it isn't hard for me to imagine Andrew Tate being extremely popular among a different set of young males. Not in skilled labor- he mostly comes off as pretty toxic to people who emphasize the "working" part of "working class", but it seems immediately apparent to me that he has a lot of appeal among young males who want to get rich and laid and don't want to work for it. And most of them have some sense that "the government and media and major corporations are constantly lying to us all the time, for no apparent reason", and also some sense that it wasn't always like this. That latter part is obviously BS; the government has been lying to the public for longer than any of us has been alive, and the media is about as bad. But the sense that a different way, where society's establishment is honest(I don't believe this has ever, in the history of the human race, happened since the garden of Eden) makes it even harder to convince them not to pay attention to Alex Jones or his black equivalent telling them the government and media are spouting BS deliberately to make them sick/weak/poor/sterile/whatever. And that tends to make Alex Jones a much more credible source of information, because, well, the government doing sandy hook doesn't seem totally implausible in the same way that "that man is actually a woman, and fat is healthy" does. Even when Alex Jones is pushing whatever bullshit about things that have nothing to do with the government lying.
I mean obviously you have a similar process going on with other groups, where- as I've written before- climate change skeptics and young earth creationists have a better, not worse, understanding of those theories than average. Why? Because they know enough to follow creationist or climate change skeptical arguments, but not enough to directly compare them with their opposites, and, well, creation scientists and climate change skeptics are a lot less likely to serve some agenda that's obvious, blatant lies to their in group. Creation scientists and climate change skeptical scientists simply tell fewer blatant lies than the scientific establishment tends to, and the actual way to distinguish the truth of the debate would be to get an advanced degree in those subjects and compare them at the nitty gritty technical details. Ain't nobody got time for that. We all have to pick which set of elites we want to listen to, and the ones that constantly and obviously lie to serve an agenda they have no apparent reason(of course the actual reason is the cathedral, even if it doesn't work the way Mr Moldbug describes the shoe still fits) for supporting seem like a bad bet. Even if we know the other guy is misrepresenting things to serve his agenda too, as long as that agenda makes sense for him to hold, it's epistemologically safer to believe the expert telling you that fossil fuel emissions are good for the environment because he's getting paid by Exxon, at least about other things, than it is the expert telling you that exercise is actually bad for you in a way fried chicken isn't.
In conclusion, if you want people to believe you, stop lying about so many obvious things.
I'd say creation scientists and climate skeptics are pretty obviously wrong in a way that pretty obviously serves their interests, even if I'd believe they aren't consciously lying. And yeah the scientific establishment would probably be better served if they held to the pure truth even more strictly than they have, but over all I think they've done pretty well on those issues, as shown by how evolution/climate change are both pretty well regarded as "True." these days by most people. Now all that's debated about climate change is its exact severity/the best policies to mitigate it, as it should be.
I think it's not a good idea to model this as narrowly as scientists vs laymen. The actually place the rubber meets the road is media vs layman. And in a lot of ways this explains much of the problem. The media took a shortcut on at least the climate science area and tried to brow beat people into accepting it rather than genuinely convince and engage with pushback. I mean "an inconvenient truth" made actual real predictions that mostly been wrong and it's widely agree Gore exaggerated to shock people into action. In other words he lied. Those of us who can engage with the science despite the media know that Global warming continues as an important to address phenomenon because we can grok the actual mechanisms and see the measures. Those who only engage with the media version see that they were lied to and have reacted by hardening against further lies in that direction. Even Evolution probably suffered by being weaponized by people more interested in taking down religion than spreading knowledge in good faith.
That well read people mostly accept these things as true is the faintest possible praise for theories that are this legible.
Or, you're being fooled by a more sophisticated lie.
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