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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   44901 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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When the Luigi news first broke, it wasn't clear why he even did what he did. Luigi didn't seem to have much of any passion for politics or even any discernible political affinity, and yet... clearly his action was political and extreme.

To recap for anyone who didn't read the psychoanalysis I never wrote, what actually happened--you'll pardon my pretense in mind-reading--is that Luigi had a bad experience with health insurance that led him to personally believe that the Health Insurance Bad narrative was vindicated. He had a spinal injury which caused him chronic pain, had The System tell him "nope, there's no cure for this, we won't help you." He researched the issue for himself, concluded "um, yes, there absolutely is", told them, was explicitly denied coverage because "it won't work", then somehow got the treatment without his insurance, and it totally worked and he felt great with all the chronic pain gone. This experience led him to conclude that yes, The System is indeed following bullshit financial incentives that have nothing to do with patient welfare, and thus The System is in need of a good burning.

So, to our latest incident: Tyler Robinson. Like Luigi, he's from a fairly high-tier background, has excellent test scores, has little discernible affiliation or concern for politics at all, and yet, like Luigi, he seems to have committed one of the most extreme political acts one can do. What's going on?

Well, if you listen to Twitter (never, ever listen to Twitter), what happened is some evil Antifa activist group Radicalized (TM) The Shooter using Internet Technologies like Reddit and Discord. Or maybe it wasn't Antifa, it was actually the University System -- in this particular case, the radical leftist institution of Utah State, which he attended for, uh, one semester in 2021. Look, feelings don't care about your facts, sweetie, the point is Leftists indoctrinated him and we need to crucify all leftists so they stop indoctrinating us.

Ahem.

Alright, so what really happened? The thing that puzzled me at first--my thoughts polluted by the above nonsense--was why Charlie Kirk? Surely there are better targets. Like... well, ok, I'm not going to put myself on a list by naming names, but I'm sure you can think of them. Kirk was basically just Bill O'Reilly for zoomers. He's not really a thinker or anything, just some rhetorician funded by establishment right-wing money to publish zingers on TikTok. Why would he be the target of choice?

Well, as we learned today, Tyler may have had some, uh, lapses in his Mormon Orthodoxy. Nothing big like drinking coffee or anything; just having a roommate that was trans. If you've seen the photos, the roommate isn't exactly attractive, like a Furby, and he seems to just sit at home playing video games all day. Moreover, far from the Twitter narrative, he seems to be fully cooperating with the investigation and doesn't appear to be any sort of mastermind or ideological zealot at all.

When the news about the roommate/boyfriend broke, I joked in our group chat "imagine your boyfren blasting a public figure for badmouthing your cute lil bussy. now that's true love". But the more I thought about it, this explanation made a lot more sense than any of the narrative silliness from Twitter. Unlike Fuentes or Trump or the Mormon Church or most other right-wing figures, Charlie Kirk uniquely comes across as scornful and mocking, especially with respect to this particular issue of trans people. (If you've never watched Kirk before his death, you may not understand this properly, as obviously only the clips that make him look like a saint are shown now). Of course, I'm sure the Mormon Church and Fuentes wouldn't condone trans stuff, but they'd have the standard tradcon view of being sincere and gracious and wishing you'd see the light. Trump and Vance probably don't care at all, with Trump being a NYC billionaire and Vance being a rat-adjacent. But Kirk goes out of his way to be an ass here, to pander to low-class right-wing bigotry.

Not convinced? Okay, notice when the shot happened: Tyler specifically waited for Kirk to badmouth transpeople before firing his shot. In fact, I'll go so far as to speculate that if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all. The audience member at the mic presumably tries to make a point that transpeople are not statistically prone to violence by starting with the question "Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?", and instead of replying "I don't know", Kirk replies with the deflective and maximally-inflammatory "Too many." The shot came a few seconds later, but I think this was when the shooter decided to aim carefully and fire. Kirk demonstrated he had no interest in discussing actual numbers that might fail to make transpeople look bad, he just wanted to play rhetorical judo and try to find his dunk.

Now, make no mistake, I'm not contending any of this was remotely justified, or that Kirk was right or wrong, or whatever. My contention is the shooter perceived Kirk as someone interested in making transpeople look as bad as possible, regardless of whether that was even justified by data or not, and that infuriated him, because his Furby little roommate was not like that. It's not merely a disagreement about trans stuff, it's "You are full of shit, and you are touching the apple of my eye." And, well, love can drive a man to mad decisions - a tale as old as time itself.

So that's my explanation of what actually happened. It has nothing to do with being "radicalized at university" or being in some antifa group or whatever.

Of course, nobody cares what actually happened. We want our culture war, and by golly if this will fuel it, pour it on the dumpster fire!

  • -25

Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?", and instead of replying "I don't know", Kirk replies with the deflective and maximally-inflammatory "Too many." The shot came a few seconds later, but I think this was when the shooter decided to aim carefully and fire. Kirk demonstrated he had no interest in discussing actual numbers that might fail to make transpeople look bad, he just wanted to play rhetorical judo and try to find his dunk.

Political assassination is bad and I don't condone it, of course, but even in condemning the killer, as a Mottizen I appreciate the artistry involved in waiting for Kirk to resort to paltering before killing him. Un bacione, addio!

Isn't the limited data on MtF trans violence disproportionately high, inline with males who suffer from mental illness?

If this killing turns out to be "trans related," it wouldn't be coded as having been done by a trans person, obviously.

There is tons of evidence of premeditation and careful planning put into this. No post hoc justification for Charlie mentioning the issue for which he was apparently killed. Maybe the person heard it and timed it I guess, but this comes some two weeks after a similar belief system mass shooting in recent memory (and a third a few months ago). I agree that transgender rights are centered around the issue - but it’s become clear that there is some loose association between transgender supportive online groups and radical left politics. Doesn’t really matter how he talked about the issue either - the implication is that people against this issue are putting themselves in danger of future violence by speaking their minds.

This forum has a certain leaning to it - moving off reddit naturally attracts more dissident and people here lean relatively rightward (ignoring lineage of SSC first etc).

Reddit is the most mainstream network and can get towards radical politics, but it’s usually attention seeking and inauthentic (North Korea stans etc). X pretty similar.

Discord, 4chan, probably telegram - these are places where small groups of people are communicating radical ideas in a more personal forum. It’s what the classified info poster used as well. I think it’s more inviting to total ideological capture and feeling ‘rewarded’ by those you know for dedicating yourself to the cause.

The ‘terminally online’ behavior others are mentioning here has been a reoccurrence with people that have committed mass violence this year (don’t forget that there have been HISTORIC level of political violence over the last year). I would bet that there is a significant effort going into threat assessments and online surveillance into continued violence from online communities with radical trans acceptance politics, among other groups

I’m going to highlight what I think is interesting and valuable about this comment, which I see being totally lost in the outrage in other replies. Forgive me if this isn’t original, OP.

Mangione’s motive - and potentially this other shooter’s motive, too - was not the strategic implementation of political principle. It was extremely personal, and the personal elements are what actually drove the murder. This is similar to past assassinations, like the schizo in Minnesota who believed he was personally carrying out Walz’s will on Earth.

But the murder, which was to the killer personal, became public. And when it became public, the public used it for their own purposes. The personal element was consumed by the strategic implementation of other people’s political principles. Kirk’s death may (let’s accept OP’s premise) have been just the expression of a personal idea, intent, purpose, but that’s gone now. All that remains is politics.

Or, in the words of someone far wiser than I:

But none of these templates are true, in the sense that there's no causality. They are merely post hoc descriptive. And since dead men tell no tales, you can pretty much describe one any way you want, for your own purposes.

If Joe Stack had reflected on that, he would never have hit the ignition.

Okay, notice when the shot happened: Tyler specifically waited for Kirk to badmouth transpeople before firing his shot.

As Brendan O'Neill pointed out, Robinson was 200 yards from Kirk. It's profoundly unlikely he was able to hear what Kirk was saying.

He did have his phone with him, and was even using it (why on earth an assassin would do that in the post-Snowden era is beyond me. Zoomers...). But yeah, if we assume for whatever reason he couldn't hear what was going on, this does render the timing of the shot insignificant, which would weaken my narrative.

We have two instances of the trans-identifying carrying out mass shootings against Christian schoolchildren. Saying "one is too many" is smug; two is too many, two is pattern. The idea has been seeded, people are considering it. It will not be allowed to keep happening.

There is something intriguing from civilization's standpoint, how there aren't examples of men murdering their ex-wives and judges in instances where those men have been prohibited from interfering in hormonal treatments their child is receiving. I wonder if it's that there's something inherent to the men, both in what led them to pairing with the mothers of their children, and to their children undergoing such hormonal therapies. Meaning, that there are plenty of men who would kill their ex-wives and/or judges in those situations, but such men never find themselves in those situations.

The segue here is Tyler Robinson, it's loosely relevant for Luigi Mangione, and then relevant again for the past two trans-identifying school shooters, and for any other perpetrators of that sort of random violence. I think it must be concluded that radical rhetoric cannot bend a healthy mind to violence, I think if it could, we would have seen it far more often, left and right, and we haven't. That it takes an already unhealthy mind with a preexisting murderous disposition to move to violence. This does not absolve, it reinforces the culpability on that rhetoric, because it takes such people and gives them a target, a target who often throws gasoline on the fire of politics.

I recall someone wondering about something like this with people who would have been serial killers instead carrying out mass shootings. So maybe it is worth contemplating that Tyler Robinson maybe wasn't twisted out of normalcy by the internet but rather by some event, perhaps some trauma in his life, and that he would have murdered someone else, or multiple people, or tried to, if not Charlie Kirk. But equally, that a murderer chose Charlie Kirk because of leftist rhetoric.

I think part of this ties into the contagiousness of mental pathologies. Scott discusses how in countries that have never heard of depression, nobody has depression. Before Columbine, nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, so nobody did school shootings (and even today, outside America, nobody does them).

I think it must be concluded that radical rhetoric cannot bend a healthy mind to violence, I think if it could, we would have seen it far more often, left and right, and we haven't. That it takes an already unhealthy mind with a preexisting murderous disposition to move to violence.

This is basically Calvinism if you squint at it, which is basically self-selection when you scrub away all the fluff. People tune into signals that fit their cognitive state, and tune out signals that do not. People who like math naturally tune into math channels. People who have an urge to violence naturally seek out a signal to justify why committing violence is akshually okay.

I don't think this is quite what happened to either Luigi or Tyler, though. Especially in Luigi's case, in which I'm a bit more confident in my analysis, I think it's clear his own personal experience with The System convinced him that yes, the system really is full of shit and angered him to violence. I don't think it was tuning into any sort of external rhetorical signal at all. The underlying impetus is actually justice, although obviously external observers do not perceive it this way. When you see something that doesn't work because people are stupid or misguided or confused or lazy, none of that really motivates you to violence; but when you see something not working because you outright believe someone is lying to benefit themselves, well... I do think that arouses an urge to violence in any sensible man.

I think part of this ties into the contagiousness of mental pathologies. Scott discusses how in countries that have never heard of depression, nobody has depression. Before Columbine, nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, so nobody did school shootings (and even today, outside America, nobody does them).

I know people have harped on this already, but being that the Westside Elementary Massacre happened in the school district next to mine before Columbine, and family and friends were there at the time, I feel the need to contradict the point. How much people get away with terroristic threats always feels similar to all the people getting away with larceny to me, because immediately after Westside, we got authority figures drilling home that terroristic threats would no longer be tolerated, period.

Before Columbine, nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, so nobody did school shootings

Charles Whitman shot and killed 15 people (and injured 31 others) at the University of Texas in 1966. Surprisingly, it was not the only notable school shooting that year. I think part of the reason Columbine sticks out for us as being "the first of its kind" is because there is video footage of them murdering their classmates.

Of note - Whitman had a significant organic brain injury (a tumor) in a location that could feasibly cause violent impulses.

Before Columbine, nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, so nobody did school shootings (and even today, outside America, nobody does them).

This is, of course, plainly false. Here’s a list of school shootings in Europe, another list from Canada, and one from Brazil. Russia alone has had a number of notable school shootings, including the Kerch Polytechnic shooting and the Kazan school shooting/bombing.

It isn't, though. Just look at the content of those lists instead of Googling for gotchas and pasting them. Most of the incidents are just accidents or personal beefs that happened to take place at a school.

The "bring a gun to school to shoot as many people as possible" thing was rare pre-Columbine, precisely because it did not exist in the popular memeplex.

  • -10

Just to emphasise that school shootings were very much a "thing" prior to Columbine and not limited to the US:

There were plenty I omitted because of low body counts, and the majority in that article took place post-Columbine (it's plausible that some, but far from all, were copycat massacres directly inspired by Columbine itself). I found your claim that "nobody" commits school shootings outside of the US particularly galling in light of the Dunblane massacre, easily one of the most notorious British crimes of the twentieth century (ranking up there with Rosemary & Fred West, Ian Brady & Myra Hindley, and the Yorkshire Ripper) and which was the direct impetus for sweeping gun legislation.

No one disputes that the Columbine massacre is the most infamous school shooting since the concept came into existence (in spite of its paltry body count, less than half of the Virginia Tech shooting), that it inspired numerous copycat crimes, or that it created a "script" for such massacres that many copycats have been following (consciously or unconsciously) to this day. But the concept of a school shooting did exist prior to Columbine. As to the question of their relative frequency within the US vs. without, they're so rare in absolute terms that the difference between the US and other industrialised regions is nowhere near as dramatic as the availability heuristic would have you believe. For example, there have only been two school shootings in the US so far this year, from a population of 330m, which gives us a per capita rate of 0.00061/100k. The total population of Europe is more than double the population of the US at 751 million. With exactly the same rate of school shootings in the US as in Europe, we would expect 5 school shootings to take place in Europe this year. Instead, there have been two school shootings with a combined body count of 21, along with a third in which one person was wounded but no one killed (and a fourth which Wikipedia classifies as a school shooting but really looks more like a political assassination which incidentally happened to take place at a school). Only counting the first two incidents, Europe's school shooting rate this year is 0.000266/100k; including the third, 0.000399/100k. Ergo, the US's school shooting rate is anywhere from 1.5 to 2.3 times more frequent than Europe's: a significant difference, but the idea that school shootings are some crazy phenomenon completely unique to the US and unheard of elsewhere is not borne out by the evidence.

I found this comment while trying to find another one via the search function. I just want to add that I did some reading out of curiosity and I think I have to nitpick a bit.

Eppstein (Germany, 1983; 6 killed incl. perpetrator) - committed by an adult

Sofia University (Bulgaria, 1974; 8 killed) - committed in a university dormitory, not a school

For these reasons I'd argue these weren't school shootings in the everyday sense of the word.

This seems like splitting hairs on two fronts. Some of the most infamous "canonical" school shootings were committed by adults: Sandy Hook, Parkland High, Uvalde, Columbine (Eric Harris turned 18 a week before the shooting; Dylan Klebold was 17). The category "school shooting" is generally taken to include shootings which take place at universities, hence why Virginia Tech is usually considered the bloodiest school shooting in American history. The idea that "school shootings" only refers to mass shootings committed by minors at primary or secondary (but not post-secondary) educational institutions seems like a stipulative definition that doesn't reflect common usage.

My assumption is that widespread cable TV coverage and peculiar interpretations of the ‘classic’ US school shootings of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s compelled normies to put these in a different mental bucket as a particular phenomenon different from spree killings or ‘mass shootings’ in general.

The common characteristics are:

• The horror of ‘kids killing kids’ (of course, many ghetto shootings technically fall into the same category, but again, normies generally ignore those altogether or at least put them in a different mental bucket), college students and recent graduates who are technically already adults also being “just kids” in this context

• If the killer happens to be an adult, he’s a young adult who attended the school in question and is motivated by vengeance; otherwise adult killers are largely uninteresting and thus fall into a different mental category

• The killer is not mentally ill in the technical sense of the word (which is another reason I argue the Bulgarian case does not count) but is driven crazy through addiction to violent FPS games and metal music, by a deep dive into various weird-ass online subcultures or due to sexual frustration

• The massacre is happening strictly on school premises, with the killer hunting his victims indoors like prey

• Neither the killer nor the victims are nonwhite criminal or criminal-adjacent ghetto-dwellers; this needs to be stressed because it’s a big aspect making the whole incident a case of incomprehensible horror

• The shooting is interpreted as a sad commentary on the decadence of modern society and kids these days just being all screwed up

More comments

I did read the contents. There are many of the Columbine-style mass shootings nestled in there among the personal beefs. Again, do you acknowledge that things like Kerch Polytechnic, Kazan, and Izhevsk (just to name three from Russia alone) are Columbine-style school shootings?

How about the École Polytechnic shooting in Montreal, which happened before Columbine? Or the Dawson College shooting, also in Montreal? Or the La Loche shootings in Saskatchewan?

Bro, what are you even trying to say? Do you think Scott was actually saying there were literally 0 people in the continent of Africa with depression until whites brought the concept there? Obviously not. Obviously the contention is the prevalence skyrocketed once the concept became a "thing" in the collective mindscape.

Come on, man, what are we even doing here.

  • -29

You made an over-broad claim, I countered it with actual evidence, and now you’re acting flabbergasted that I took your claim seriously enough to refute it, instead of treating it like the empty bluster it apparently was.

I said it directly adjacent to the Scott reference on depression in Africa. Come on man, stop conflating pedantry for insight. I don't care about gotchas; I care about understanding stuff.

If you want a zingers and gotchas, there's... well, Charlie Kirk's TikToks.

  • -27
More comments

And moreover mass casualty attacks are a known problem with a long history in Asia, with 'running amok' or Chinese mass-hacking attacks.

And moreover, Columbine wasn't the first school shooting.

I'm only aware of one such case (the very recent one); could you name them both, please? I remember multiple cases where it was suspected the shooter was trans-identifying but it turned out to be bad early intel.

The Annunciation shooting in Minneapolis last month and the Covenant School shooting in Nashville in 2023.

Ah, I'd mentally filed away the latter as an unrelated case because it was an FTM and most of the concern is about MTFs.

Tyler specifically waited for Kirk to badmouth transpeople before firing his shot. In fact, I'll go so far as to speculate that if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all.

Uh, weren’t Kirk’s last words about gun violence in the US, not trans people?

Also, how exactly do you think Robinson was able to hear what Kirk was saying from ~200m away? Even though Kirk had a mic and amplification, it didn’t look like there were speakers set up within earshot of Robinson’s vantage point. Are you suggesting that he was watching the livestream on his phone, just before picking up his rifle and assassinating Kirk?

Uh, weren’t Kirk’s last words about gun violence in the US, not trans people?

Come on, do you guys even check before posting? I haven't hung around here much for years, but every reply I'm getting is like... multiple standard deviations below my expectations. This place is a hollow husk of its former self.

The questioner started with "Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?" to establish the first data point, then followed with "Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?" to establish the second. The questioner was obviously attempting to make a point about the rate of transpeople committing violence vs the overall expected rate.

  • -25

To be fair, I’m avoiding checking the source in this case due to the gruesome nature of it. I think in this situation folks can be excused a bit for not actually watching the clip.

I just took the questions from an article I found by Googling "Charlie Kirk last words." Took 5 seconds.

Touche.

He gave an interview where he goes over what he was trying to say and you are mostly correct.

I think that's a valid clarification from "The shot came a few seconds later, but I think...". If you're going to place relevance on his last words, then it makes sense to pay attention to his last words, even if it's to dismiss them.

I think your theory makes as much sense as any other about the timing (e.g. about gun violence in general, or random because he was too far to hear), but the one extra answer should be addressed more explicitly than "a few seconds later" IMO.

The conversation is interrupted right in the middle. It's basically just "How many trans shooters?" "too many" "5" "How many regular shooters?" "with or without gang violence?" bang

Yup. It doesn't take much to clear up that you're talking about the last two sentences he said, instead of simply eliding the last one.

I haven't hung around here much for years, but every reply I'm getting is like... multiple standard deviations below my expectations

You’re the one claiming he had no discernible political motivations despite inscribing multiple antifascist slogans on his bullets and his family describing his fervent devotion to politics. You’re also the idiot claiming that a sniper would have packed up and left without taking a shot if he just avoided making any trans-related statement. Frankly these are just idiotic comments

You’re also the idiot

Even if you're responding to someone being antagonistic, do not reply with personal attacks.

Ok, so? The statement Kirk made immediately preceding his shooting still wasn't trans-related, if anything, it was a black-on-black crime dogwhistle.

I also find it somewhat rich to claim that Kirk saying there had been "too many" trans school shooters was "maximally-inflammatory" - I feel like "too many" would be a normal, even standard answer to literally any question relating to the amount of school shootings committed by whatever demographic group. You've been on the internet in the past 10 years, presumably - you should know what it sounds like when someone really wants to denigrate transgenderism and its acolytes, since it can get considerably more inflammatory than what Kirk said. He didn't even deny their "identity" or disagree with any of the fundamentals of trans ideology - just said too many of them had been school shooters.

I also find it somewhat rich to claim that Kirk saying there had been "too many" trans school shooters was "maximally-inflammatory" - I feel like "too many" would be a normal, even standard answer to literally any question relating to the amount of school shootings committed by whatever demographic group.

To me it feels quite clear that he knows the commenter is going to make a probably-valid or at least not-off-the-cuff-easy-to-refute claim about transpeople not actually being statistically dangerous and is seeking to derail that any way he can. Which, yes, is epistemically dishonest (although par for the course for verbal debate, especially of the rhetorical judo style geared for TikTok clips he does).

  • -12

This place is a hollow husk of its former self.

We're so sorry we fail to meet your expectations. But be less antagonistic.

Let me be clear: the permabanning of interesting, intelligent posters over petty rule violations was a bad decision and has steadily made the place worse. You absolutely need to rethink this policy, because it is sending a once-beautiful community into chronic decay.

I am serious about this. Do better, or find someone to replace you who can.

  • -30

Blame the "interesting, intelligent" posters who got themselves permabanned because they just couldn't help making everyone else's experience worse. The rules aren't arbitrary or hard to follow.

Thank you for your input.

Be less antagonistic.

Stop trying to justify murder. Kirk could be ungracious in talking about trans people. There is a trans problem (and indeed trans is an incoherent absurd belief). But even if you disagree, killing isn’t the way to do it.

I’m sure you’ll protest “but I’m not excusing the murder.” Yet you said you believe Kirk would be alive if he had been more gracious. Quoting for the full paragraph.

“Not convinced? Okay, notice when the shot happened: Tyler specifically waited for Kirk to badmouth transpeople before firing his shot. In fact, I'll go so far as to speculate that if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all.”

In fact, I'll go so far as to speculate that if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all.

Yeah, right is the only response to this. "Darn it, I carved the mottoes into my ammo, I changed my clothes, I came all this way and the guy is just talking about who's gonna win the next Superbowl? Well that was a waste of my day!"

I can appreciate being on the edge of killing the guy and giving him one last chance to redeem himself (in the killer's mind). Or alternatively, putting an exclamation mark on something he thought was especially shitty.

I don't think it could be that fine-tuned, was he even able to hear what Kirk was saying from where he was on the roof? I think it was more "get in position, get ready, take the shot, get out". I don't think what Kirk was saying at that precise second mattered. Did it matter what Trump was saying when his assassination attempt happened?

That's a long comment to say "Kirk was asking for it".

Also, we don't know the guy's motives yet, so all the speculation is just that.

Also also, I've seen it bruited about that Kirk's last words were in response to a question on gun violence, not trans issues, unless that's what you mean by "trans shooters".

I don't think Robinson would have gone there all tooled up, positioned himself on the roof, waited for Kirk to say something mean about the trans, then packed up and gone home if "Oh, okay, he didn't say anything". He was going to shoot no matter if Kirk had been saying "my favourite soda is Classic Coke".

But Kirk goes out of his way to be an ass here, to pander to low-class right-wing bigotry.

This sounds like any old way a tribalist would perceive any polite disagreement. I could just as easily say your comment is a long-winded effort at shaming people for being against murder.

I mean, let me be clear, I think the assassination was a bad idea; and even if I weren't, I think there were far better targets if you wanted to throw your life away on that.

My comment is an attempt to explain why the shooter did what he did, not to justify why it was morally or strategically correct.

I mean, let me be clear, I think the assassination was a bad idea; and even if I weren't, I think there were far better targets if you wanted to throw your life away on that.

How many were in Utah? Proximity likely played a large role.

It has nothing to do with being "radicalized at university" or being in some antifa group or whatever.

Eh, if your assessment is correct, I'd say it's probably a mix of everything. There's levels in between from being raised in a conservative mormon family to shooting a right wing political influencer because he's good at ragebait. Grows up conservative, finally moves out from family home, attends university and gets exposed to liberal ideas, perhaps gets some liberal leaning friends/roommates, has tiktok algorithm change to political slop, successfully gets ragebaited by the slop clips --> "omg charlie kirk is licherally killing my innocent trans boyfriend-roommate-friend with his words" --> takes matters into his own hands.

So university may have been a stepping stone, the algo did most of the heavy lifting and some mental deviations made him unable to handle the slop.

I think this is a reasonable assessment.

has little discernible affiliation or concern for politics at all

Based on what? He shot a political figure, he wrote "Hey fascist! Catch!" and "Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao" on the bullet casings (the latter being a WW2 anti-fascist song often used by left-wing activists in general and antifa in particular, it also concluded the manifesto of the guy who attacked an ICE facility in 2019), and apparently he was telling his family about how Charlie Kirk was spreading hate. All of those seem pretty political to me, and conversely the evidence of him being apolitical is that...he didn't have a party registration? And that he also put some jokes on his bullet casings instead of making them all political slogans? Sometimes people engaging in political violence are just insane or have incoherent politics, but so far there's no evidence of that, his views seem pretty straightforward.

Well, if you listen to Twitter (never, ever listen to Twitter), what happened is some evil Antifa activist group Radicalized (TM) The Shooter using Internet Technologies like Reddit and Discord.

Well yeah, both of the political statements on the casings seem antifa associated. That doesn't mean he was radicalized by a specifically antifa group, "Charlie Kirk was a fascist and deserved death" is an opinion held more widely than that. Nor does it mean he was involved with any sort of formal political group rather than just browsing the internet. But it does seem likely he picked up his political opinions online, that's pretty much the default assumption nowadays, especially for someone writing internet memes on bullet casings and called a "Reddit kid" by a schoolmate. You're acting superior to those idiots on Twitter but "antifa views he picked up online" is better supported by the evidence than "little concern for politics" is.

Luigi didn't seem to have much of any passion for politics or even any discernible political affinity, and yet... clearly his action was political and extreme.

He didn't seem apolitical to me, it's just that his public political affiliation was vaguely technocratic centrism. (A dumb version of technocratic centrism that didn't really understand the healthcare industry, but that's common enough.) He frequently commented on politics on Twitter, just not in a heavily partisan way. (Also I vaguely remember an account that in his personal life he he expressed pretty different and more extreme views?)

To recap for anyone who didn't read the psychoanalysis I never wrote, what actually happened--you'll pardon my pretense in mind-reading--is that Luigi had a bad experience with health insurance that led him to personally believe that the Health Insurance Bad narrative was vindicated.

Note that he wrote a short manifesto which didn't mention this.

But Kirk goes out of his way to be an ass here, to pander to low-class right-wing bigotry.

Could you point to … several of these instances?

Kirk is like the polite Ben Shapiro.

He got a boyfriend and radicalized himself online and took out the biggest target he had available.

Lack of mystery to me.

‘ look at me dad ‘ x100

I wanted to upvote this post, but you're making so many bad faith obfuscations and undue leaps in logic that, by the end, it barely reads as a coherent statement anymore - how you could possibly say "if Kirk had been gracious in his response, then Tyler may not have even shot at all" in regards to a clearly premeditated shooting is just beyond me. You actually mean to tell us the gunman brought a disassembled gun to the campus, painstakingly avoided cameras identifying his face on his way up to the roof, assembled the gun once there, scoped out Kirk, and then waited patiently just in case he would make a statement that concerned trans people, lest he pack up and go home peacefully? I'm quite certain you yourself don't actually believe that - because it's so obviously delusional. Furthermore, Kirk was very much NOT shot right after making a remark about trans people, he was killed just as he was hinting at how school shooting statistics are distorted by gang violence.

The "noble lover" angle you're trying to spin of course doesn't hold up to the evidence regarding the bullet casings being marked with discord memes and boilerplate far-left slogans - not a single mention of love or partnership, just sneering sarcasm and ideological self-righteousness, right down to the tired "bella ciao" song that self-styled antifascists have considered their own informal anthem since generations.

Why would he be the target of choice?

You're pretending like this is some weird mystery, when Charlie Kirk was one of the most visible and mainstreamed normie-facing avatars of the right-wing shift among young people/young men, and something of a herald of the inevitable backlash against the excesses of wokeness in campus life. He was an opportunist and a MAGA mouthpiece with little doctrine or taste-making of his own - he truly isn't a Bannon, nor a Yarvin, nor a Fuentes - but he was a famous and prolific Trump supporter for the past decade and had - at least based on MAGA propaganda - a close relationship to and influence on Trump himself (I personally doubt this heavily, but it's the way he styled himself and the way mainstream journalism covered him).

For a left-winger who truly, unironically believes that Trump is a capital F Fascist, Charlie Kirk becomes a Goebbels or Streicher-type, someone highly responsible for the rightward shift in society who furnishes a constant stream of rhetorical and mediatic ammo to be used against the opressed. Obviously he's a justified target if one thinks under those lines.

Also - Luigi wasn't apolitical in the slightest, his digital footprint shows a young man deeply invested in policy discussions and poli-sci/statecraft literature. He just, it would seem, happened to be more of an enlightened centrist wonk type than a clear blue tribe/red tribe partisan, which is indeed interesting and unexpected, but not apolitical.

Kirk was very much NOT shot right after making a remark about trans people, he was killed just as he was hinting at how school shooting statistics are distorted by gang violence.

Another commenter not even bothering to take 10 seconds to Google the context, which yes, as I've demonstrated multiple times now, explicitly does make this about comparison of rates of trans violence.

I will not engage with this epistemic sloppiness and dishonesty. This place used to be LessWrong and SSC. Now it's just fricken' Twitter transformed with a GPT politeness filter.

You're pretending like this is some weird mystery

It is a mystery, because Fuentes is the obvious, obvious target if you're actually concerned about The Rise of Far Right Fascism. He's an actual thinker, he will not be immediately replaced if you knock him off the board, and he has a growing audience. Charlie Kirk is like Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck or any other of the zillion establishment mouthpieces for big moneyed interests. He'll just be immediately replaced the moment you get rid of him and nothing will change.

The entire point of my post is that an external, chessboard-style political analysis of "where would be the most efficient place to put my bullet?" does not explain what happened here, just as it does not explain what Luigi did. What does explain it is an internal psychological narrative where the shooter is responding to his own perceptions and experiences and rationalizing what is obviously a poor decision by external standards. How people here are so illiterate as to read this as "ARE YOU ENDORSING LE CHARGLIE KURK MURDER?" is beyond me. This was clearly a mistaken endeavor.

  • -27

I think this is misstating the motives of left-wing radicalism. Like, yeah, they call the GOP racist. But that's basically a snarl word. They call right wingers antisemitic but that's also a snarl word, and it's not as if they have a revealed preference for actually caring. It's pretty easy to find antisemites they're pretty cool with.

What left-wing radicals are actually upset about is sexual conservatism. Trans, yes, but also abortion, LGBT, support for abstinence.

Just spitballing here, but might it be that Kirk was simply a much softer target and more available to the shooter than Fuentes?

I do think Kirk coming to him played a big part, yes. I think if the visit hadn’t been scheduled so close, it’s likely the shooter would have not attempted kill anyone.

Why? The simple fact that he could have killed Kirk earlier, but never bothered until he happened to show up nearby.

It just worked this time, it's not for lack of trying.

He [Fuentes] is an actual thinker,

I think we're done here, lol -- are you serious?

In the context of political media figures, I mean. Obviously he's not a thinker compared to John Locke or something

But compared to any other political commentator of similar size in visual media? Absolutely. He is by far the most intelligent and most original thinker. He is not just spouting a list of talking points given to him by a sponsoring organization.

  • -15

He is by far the most intelligent and most original thinker.

Name one single original idea that was developed by Nick Fuentes - I'm extremely curious. Every time I see an extrait of his streams, he's just ranting in a vaguely comedic tone about jews.

That’s not really what I meant. I mean his responses to content placed in front of him are much more intelligent and coherent than what you’d see from, say, Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens. He never falls for the egregious plebe stuff like “wow, could Ivermectin really help with cancer?” or “Is Macron’s wife a transsexual? 😱”

I realize this sounds like a painfully low bar but… I mean, that is in fact where the bar is. News commentators in visual media really are functionally retarded by our standards. All intelligent discourse takes place through textual media.

It is a mystery, because Fuentes is the obvious, obvious target if you're actually concerned about The Rise of Far Right Fascism.

Fuentes has nowhere near the scope of name recognition and credentials that Kirk did, and your refined analysis bears no relation to how a self-radicalized leftist distinguishes between a MAGA think tank guy and an actual Fascist, which is to say, not at all. You don't have a good theory of mind for the current generation of left-wingers, who aren't the theory-reading pedants of the last century, but more often than not are driven by an impulsive and anti-intellectual tendency to essentialise their entire political opposition into one monolithic force of evil. Kirk was literally speaking to a crowd of thousands - Fuentes sits alone in his room streaming. To someone who thinks virtually everyone even in proximity of Trump is just another tentacle of the Fascist Kraken, Kirk obviously is the more attractive target. (Besides the basic fact that Kirk's career and output is exponentially more public-facing than Fuentes', which makes his assassination an event one can plan and premeditate).

How people here are so illiterate as to read this as "ARE YOU ENDORSING LE CHARGLIE KURK MURDER?" is beyond me.

Why are you accusing me of lowering the bar and level of quality around here if you're just going to then engage in completely absurd straw-manning? I said nothing of the sort, so why are you including it in your answer to my comment? Why don't you address the less low-hanging fruit of my reply to your original statement, i.e. the obvious political content inscribed on the bullet casings? Don't you see how transparent this cherry-picked and histrionic reaction is to everyone reading it?

I really don't think you're in any position to look down on others engaging with your arguments politely and offering fair rebuttals, even if some are less strong than others. Your tone and defensiveness is clearly coming from an emotional place and takes us away from getting anywhere in this discussion, which is a loss.

Fuentes has nowhere near the scope of name recognition and credentials that Kirk did

Kirk is a college dropout. I’m not sure what you mean here.

Obviously Kirk has broader reach, but it has nothing to do with Kirk’s superiority; he has reach for the same reason Miley Cyrus did: he’s backed by big money. Fuentes is not backed by any mainstream organization. In fact, quite the opposite: they’ve gone to great lengths to outright suppress him, and have still failed.

You don't have a good theory of mind for the current generation of left-wingers, who aren't the theory-reading pedants of the last century, but more often than not are driven by an impulsive and anti-intellectual tendency to essentialise their entire political opposition into one monolithic force of evil.

I mean, this guy had a Harvard-tier ACT score. He shouldn’t be completely retarded. Then again, he performed a high-profile assassination while chatting with his friends on Discord, so maybe +2 SD doesn’t even render one out of the “meat comes from the supermarket”-tier zone for Zoomers. Honestly, if this is the case, you’re correct, I really have no theory of mind for people that retarded, and my psychoanalysis is better reduced to “guess it was a chimp-out, skibidi.” I mean come on, how does someone not know to not take their cell phone with them on this little excursion? Snowden was 10 years ago, and even without that, you’d still have cell blocks and SIM tracking.

Why don't you address the less low-hanging fruit of my reply to your original statement, i.e. the obvious political content inscribed on the bullet casings?

Isn’t it just memes from a video game? I mean, yes, technically Helldivers 2 does have political content, but given the level of cognitive ability we’re dealing with here, I’m not going to do some Elden Ring-tier deep-dive into the game’s themes and symbolism to figure out what the shooter was trying to say. He’s just saying stupid zoomer nonsense.

  • -18

Isn’t it just memes from a video game?

No, as pointed out here.

https://www.themotte.org/post/3128/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/365897?context=8#context

I’m sorry but none of this strikes me as serious or meaningful except the fact that he specifically mentioned disliking Charlie Kirk to his family, which is in harmony with my thesis anyway.

Let me clarify what I mean by he doesn’t seem political: he doesn’t seem to have ever gone to any sort of political rally or activist event for any party, he hasn’t made any sort of public statements on social media accounts about this or that politician, etc. His voter registration is explicitly “No Party.” And perhaps most importantly, he didn’t leave a manifesto to tell us why he did what he did. Even Luigi half-assed a few paragraphs for us. Uncle Ted wrote us a proper epistle. I’m genuinely not trying to cover up for some pet left-wing beliefs of mine or something. I don’t live in Burgerstan, I honestly don’t care that much about your dumpster fire either way. I’m saying I think the shooter was basically non-political because I actually believe he was basically non-political. You’re free to disagree.

I simply do not see any evidence that he cared about politics at all beyond this one act. Which is why my analysis is what it is in my original post.

EDIT: for what it’s worth, the Dramatards have found evidence he was on LoveForLandlords (a popular rdrama psyop back in the day), which is an explicitly satirical subreddit of left-wing causes (mocking the working class and mocking LGBT)

  • -18

Let me clarify what I mean by he doesn’t seem political: he doesn’t seem to have ever gone to any sort of political rally or activist event for any party, he hasn’t made any sort of public statements on social media accounts about this or that politician, etc.

As far as I know we don't know any of his social media accounts besides his Steam account and a blank FurAffinity account. A lot of people with strong political views don't attend rallies or protests, and we could easily not know if he had. So this is meaningless in judging whether he cared about politics and we're once again left with the fact he assassinated a political figure, the two political inscriptions on the casings, and the statement from his family.

EDIT: for what it’s worth, the Dramatards have found evidence he was on LoveForLandlords (a popular rdrama psyop back in the day), which is an explicitly satirical subreddit of left-wing causes (mocking the working class and mocking LGBT)

No, that was his transgender romantic partner Lance Twiggs. While I do not browse LoveForLandlords I don't know of it "mocking LGBT" or even really mocking "workers", just commies who get mad about landlords online (and according to someone on rdrama it was taken over by the people being mocked at some point so maybe not even that). Twiggs also posted on /r/4tran and unsurprisingly seemed anti-Trump.

As far as I know we don't know any of his social media accounts besides his Steam account and a blank FurAffinity account.

That’s kind of my point. Where’s his Reddit account ranting about the evils of capitalism? Where’s his #girlsforkamala posts on Instagram?

The entire internet is scouring for this stuff, and we’re simply not finding anything. We’re finding less on his politics over his entire life than you’d find about mine in the past 3 hours of my posts.

I’m going to call that a non-political person, I’m sorry. The replies I’m getting just reek of wanting him to be Political so you can say he was radicalized by le evil leftists and start your Long March through their institutions. I don’t need to come here to get that analysis. It’s already all over Twitter. Just go play over there, that’s where your friends are.

  • -20
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I'm sorry but none of this strikes me as serious or meaningful

That's fine, though the fact that the ide he would have packed up and left, if Kirk hadn't mentioned trans people, does strike you as serious, shows your analytical skills aren't particulrly reliable in matters related to this case.

Hah, alright big-brain, let’s play:

Has there ever been a shooter who got cold feet at the last minute, decided not to pull the trigger, and went home quietly?

Come on, show me your epistemic prowess. Impress me.

  • -29
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Kirk is a college dropout. I’m not sure what you mean here.

This shows how out of touch your argument is. If someone took up palantir’s offer to skip college and that person kicked ass, I would say their credential (ie palantir’s stamp of approval) is a better credential compared to say Harvard.

Likewise, Charlie had the credential of running what seems to be an effective organization. The fact you only think in terms of degrees as credentials yet slam others for epistemological sloppiness…my god you cite LessWrong. Do you know about Big Yud?

You’re the one who brought up credentials. I’m the one who judges them by what I’ve heard them say (which, to be fair, is minimal; I don’t listen, I read). And by my judgment, Fuentes was more impressive.

I frankly don’t give a rat’s ass what moneyed interests think is impressive. They think Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow are great. I think these people are useless and ignore them.

  • -11

Learn to read — I didn’t bring up credentials. I’m an interlocutor.

Also moneyed interest thinks Harvard is impressive. You seem to crave that? Finally, Kirk built something at scale whereas Fuentes has not. That is more impressive. Your standards are weak.

I’m an interlocutor

I noticed that after my comment, yes. My apologies.

Also moneyed interest thinks Harvard is impressive. You seem to crave that?

Not really. I’m pretty dismissive of American universities in general. You have people like Peter Navarro or Eric Weinstein getting doctorates from Harvard. Not only do I think these people aren’t particular bright, I think they’re downright fraudulent.

In contrast, take someone like Grant of 3B1B. I’m sure he has credentials of some sort, but I don’t know or care what they are. I consider him very high human capital because of the quality of his work.

Finally, Kirk built something at scale whereas Fuentes has not.

With big money behind you, everything is at scale. You can take almost anyone and make them a celebrity by throwing enough money at them.

Fuentes has centralized power actively opposing him, booting him off every major platform, and yet he still thrives.

I’m sorry but I don’t know what sort of epistemic model you come from where a plant given water and fertiliser in a climate-conditioned greenhouse is somehow more impressive to you than one tossed into the desert that manages to take root and grow anyway.

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Of course, I'm sure the Mormon Church and Fuentes wouldn't condone trans stuff, but they'd have the standard tradcon view of being sincere and gracious and wishing you'd see the light.

The clips I've seen of Kirk have him doing exactly that - expressing compassion towards the trans person, but suggesting counseling over transitioning. Are there examples otherwise? I'm sure the grave dancers can provide you with plenty, assuming the exist.

But I'd like to take this opporunity to sketch out a story. Imagine you're a smart kid, smart enough to figure out that you're smarter than your parents, and you might even be right about that. Your family might be Republicans, but you swing leftward, because a cursory glance at the culture bombards you like Hiro-fucking-shima with the idea that this is what All The Smart People do.

Then you go to college, first step of being a Professional Smart Person Who Is Obviously Left and you bomb out in one semester. You spend a few years pickling in existential crisis, gripping harder and deeper onto things that let you externalize the sense of failure. Radicalized by the university? What is this, the 60s? Wake up grandpa, it's the Roaring 20's, and we can mainline weapons-grade radicalism 24/7 from the box that lives in our pocket, and Discord is full of leftists that make Bill Ayers look like Mr. Rogers, and the ideology is basically designed to foster an external locus of control and shift blame for personal failings.

You tell your family that you're going to be an electrician because that's something they'll find respectable enough to get off your back, and it's one of the more intellectual blue collar trades, so it offends your sensibilities less.

Eventually the identity crisis stabilizes, but it settles into a horrible valley. You conclude that you're cooked, that you'll never be a real intellectual, and eventually you're going to have to actually become a tradesman or deal with your family. But you still think you're smart - smart enough to see what could and should be done. And you're basically expendable, right? What's a human life worth, really? Maybe you quote Che's final words to yourself.

Why not trade that horrifyingly mediocre future to eliminate a major node of enemy coordination and memetic production? Why, it's practically the most valuable thing you could possibly do with yourself! And the target in question isn't 110% pro-affirmation for trans people, which is Doing A Genocide, so it's basically self-defense even!

Based on currently available info, my best guess is something vaguely along these lines. Bro failed out of college, had an identity crisis, latched onto extremist politics to cope, went full hicklib, and then suffered a tragic outbreak of agency.

Thank you for the good engagement!

Then you go to college, first step of being a Professional Smart Person Who Is Obviously Left and you bomb out in one semester.

I don't think this is what happened. The guy had what, a 34 on the ACT? That's a very high score. Like, Harvard-tier. If he bombed out, it certainly wasn't for lack of ability.

But yes, clearly something odd happened, because he did drop out. Maybe he just didn't get along with the people there. Whatever it was, some sort of internal crisis of the sort you describe makes more sense to me than the simplistic "he fell for a bunch of libtard indoctrination."

That story had elements of "there but for the grace of God..." I had a near-perfect SAT and it wasn't enough to help me when my spectacular test-taking started writing checks that my work ethic and discipline couldn't cash. The fact that he had such high ability is exactly why failing would cause a personal identity bluescreen.

simplistic "he fell for a bunch of libtard indoctrination."

My hypothesis is more that he needed some kind of answer for the crisis, and he already leaned pretty left (purportedly), so it was easier to slide down the slippery slope of that brand of radicalization. Abundance Dems don't have a thalamic answer to that crisis. Far-leftists do, i.e. "Of course you were hampered by the buzzwords we live under! Once we destroy The System, then your genius will have a chance to flourish!"

I have spent the past 5 months traveling between the US Midwest, California, Japan and Thailand. I believe the economies of the US and Japan (along with the bulk of the other “rich” countries) are very dysfunctional compared even to poor countries like Thailand.

I. Food and Services

Food in Thailand is extremely delicious, healthy, and very cheap. I am sure the average Thai person eats a healthier diet than the average Japanese. Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.) Thai foods feature a great variety of vegetables, fruits, meats and seafoods. Before I visited Thailand, I imagined that maybe they would be behind on trends or stuck in the past, since they are poor, but the opposite is true. You can find the trendiest foods in Bangkok- anything from the latest Korean baked craze, to Dubai chocolate bars and parfaits and ice cream cones, to Burmese tea leaf salad. They have it, and you can have it delivered within an hour for pennies.

Why is Thailand so trendy compared to Japan or the US? Basically, it is too expensive to take risks in rich countries. Thailand is a poor country but their economy feels incredibly healthy. Their money converts to pennies outside the country, but inside money trades hands so easily that anything feels possible. Food delivery and rideshares are so cheap because housing is so affordable that they can afford to live on such little money. Cab rides in rich countries are very expensive, because we have to pay for insurance, the pensions of drivers, and so on.

The quality of hotels has declined drastically in the US. I typically stay at mid-range hotels and rarely do I find that maid service is provided more often than once every three days. Hotels that charge $20 a night in Thailand provide maid service every single day. Why can’t Americans afford to pay someone to clean a room?

Airbnbs in Japan, fraught with regulation, are so bad. The apartments are old and cramped and dark and expensive. I am currently paying about $50 a night for an old build in a random part of a random city, and while the host is very kind, talkative, and helpful, it is also twice as expensive as the luxury airbnb I stayed at in Bangkok a month ago with a chic pool, gym, library, and dirt cheap food within walking distance. By the way, airbnbs and hotels in the midwest are incredibly expensive lately- why is it cheaper to stay in a room in a literal castle in Europe than a crappy hotel room that smells like weed in Ohio?

II. Airline Flight

I hate the cramped cheap seats on long flights. This time I flew from California to Japan and upgraded to a full-flat seat on Zipair, a low cost Japanese airline owned by JAL (Japan Airlines.) This 11 hour flight cost me $1515. I am not really going to complain, because it was great to have the extra room and I managed to sleep a bit. But the amenities on Zipair are shockingly meager. I asked for water early in the flight and she told me I had to order a bottle from the in flight service on my phone which they didn’t make available for another hour or so. There was no food provided, your only option was to order a few packaged snacks like Pringles from your phone.

A month later I flew Tokyo to Bangkok on Thai Airways. This 7 hour flight cost me only $301. I sat in the cheap seats in the back, but it was an empty enough flight that I had an entire row to myself. They provided multiple delicious meals and snacks throughout the flight. It felt significantly less cheap than the Zipair experience.

By the way, I am concerned that the cost of international airline flight is far too cheap. The first time I traveled internationally was when I was in middle school around 2001. I believe my round trip flight between the US and London was about $1200 at that time. The inflation calculator I just checked said that’s the equivalent of $2190 today. I just checked google flights and the same round trip costs only around $491 today. The incredibly cheap barrier to entry of international flights seems like an obvious problem leading to more illegal immigration and erosion of local culture than I’ve ever seen anyone point out before.

III. Conclusion

You may be thinking- ok, this guy is rich in Thailand and poor in the US, of course he is going to have a merrier view of the Thai economy. But when I look at charts like this I am in the 95th percentile of wealth for my age, in the US. I am frugal with my money, yes, but I would like to be able to afford a life on par with or better than that of my father at the same age, and I’m not sure I can.

————

I have to add a caveat. Whenever I am in Thailand I can never quite shake the feeling I’m about to get sick or get in some terrible accident. I don’t feel unsafe: people are very kind, and it’s not the same kind of fear that I feel in, say, the ghettoes of the US, which are truly scary. But buildings in Thailand don’t seem up to code, food safety is sometimes lacking (at least enough to fuel a constant anxiety in me) and my experience with the health care system (after passing out in a northern Thai hospital a few years ago) makes me know I must acknowledge the downsides to the “healthy economy” I admire in Thailand and be somewhat grateful for the safety standards and tradeoffs we make in rich countries. But I can only imagine that as the rest of the world catches up, the decline of the post WWII rich economies will continue to progress.

Maybe if we didn’t keep increasing the minimum wage and other benefits to workers, we could have nice things. That’s the price we pay for equality. Although people will still complain.

America’s recent rise in blue collar wages is not driven by government fiat or by unions, the other usual culprit. It’s pure market economics- mostly the response to high inflation.

I'm a bit confused by this post; you open by stating that

I believe the economies of the US and Japan (along with the bulk of the other “rich” countries) are very dysfunctional compared even to poor countries like Thailand

but your evidence just appears to be that mid range hotels are better than low cost hotels, and national carriers are better than low cost carriers.

You do realise that Thailand also has low-cost airlines that nickel and dime you for everything and provide a very basic service? And high income countries all have airlines providing similar service to Thai airlines at similar prices?

It's the same with hotels. Your $20 a night hotel in Thailand is mid range but you can easily find much more basic hotels with similar service to the low end hotels you use in the US. The US is just a more expensive country, and prices reflect that.

Hotels that charge $20 a night in Thailand provide maid service every single day. Why can’t Americans afford to pay someone to clean a room?

Americans are so wildly successful that their time is worth far more than the entire $20 just to clean a room. This is not a sign of failure, it's quite the opposite.

This 7 hour flight cost me only $301. I sat in the cheap seats in the back, but it was an empty enough flight that I had an entire row to myself.

This just means the data science guys messed up and over-specified the flight. The airline likely lost money on it, it's not sustainable to run an airplane at less than 70-80% utilization (paging /u/madmonzer to fact check me).

[ As an aside, there might be different accounting when the airline has to run a money-losing connection in order to capture the profitable long-haul international seats. Still, better to run it on a smaller plane rather than leaving an empty. ]

Hey, wait a minute, this is the second post you've made that attacks Japan and praises South Korea and Thailand! I thought it sounded familiar.

It's okay to dislike Japan, but I think you might have a bit of a narrow perspective here. Japan is like, twice as big as South Korea and seems to be doing pretty well for itself, lots of cultural output, okay wages, but an aging populace, an awful work culture, an awful face culture, and horrendous urbanization. South Korea... also has an aging populace, an awful work culture, an awful face culture, and horrendous urbanization, but it takes certain things to the extreme. Feminists have gone crazy over there and there is an absolutely wild gender war. The birth rate is 60% of what Japan's is, which is already pretty low. If you ask me, South Korea is doing a lot worse, regardless of how one might perceive their technology level and with-it-ness. Perhaps they are more open with you because they are more western, more international, and more feminist-inclined to the point where they view westerners as more feminist just because they're western. Japan is known for its racism and its insulated nature.

As for Thailand, I can't say much on it, never been there and I never hear any news from there. However, I have been talking to some Chinese people recently, and one of them went there and seems to think it's pretty dangerous and scary. Here are her words:

他们有枪击案，绑架要赎金，打你抓你去电信诈骗，或者将手脚砍掉卖艺之类的…..今年都有中国的小明星被骗去那里差点回不来。

还有一些是说当女生独自去更衣间或者卫生间的时候，里面其实有一个暗门，直接将你抓走。

但我们当时没有去芭提雅那些比较乱的地方，而且比较多人去就还好

但我们不小心住在了酒吧街，街边一排全是站着的女性和变性人

They have shootings, kidnappings for ransom, and scams where they hit you and take you to a place for telecommunication fraud, or cut off your limbs to make you a street performer... This year, even some minor Chinese celebrities were tricked into going there and almost couldn't come back.

There are also some stories about how when a girl goes to a changing room or a restroom by herself, there's actually a secret door inside and they just take you away.

But we didn't go to places like Pattaya that are more chaotic. Plus, since there were a lot of people there, it was okay.

But we accidentally stayed on a street with a lot of bars. The street was lined with women and transgender people standing along the side.

I think it's interesting that all around the world, upper-class women like to travel. I think China's youth is more liberal than many people think... Well, the ones I talk to, anyway.

Edit: Looks like the case she was talking about might be this one. Perhaps we can draw a comparison between Thailand and Mexico. Thailand is doing well for Southeast Asia, maybe the best, but still a not-so-nice neighboring country. Mexico, similarly, is one of the best Latin American countries. However, it has many faults, obviously.

The economics of air travel are not immediately obvious. It’s not just distance/duration. Route availability and the density of the endpoints are even more important because airplanes and their infrastructure are so expensive. I wouldn’t think this is a particular Thai advantage.

Though it is funny to see bitching about airline prices followed by a complaint that it’s too cheap. And you’re not even worried that it’s a bubble or something—no, you’re scared of visa jumpers? That’s less credible than the traditional complaints about tourists. I feel confident that the US-UK routes are not a significant contribution to either country’s illegal immigrants.

Your story makes me think of the stereotypical “gap year” amongst privileged college students. Only in that case, any insights about America’s bizarre economy are far more likely to grant an affinity for socialism. It’s enough to make me wonder how your policy prescription looks.

I think its more that about the Eternal September of international travel driven by price and accessibility. In the old times they were sending their best for work and tourism. Now, not so much.

/pol/ was making a lot of hay about Thailand and more recently Philippines allowing 'short term' visa free entry from India for example.

I do find it interesting how as international tourism gets more accessible to upwardly mobile developing nations their tourists tend to catch a lot of flak for visibility and doing undesired things. Chinese arguably got the most 20 years ago (though as somebody who travels a lot I think they've worked out most of the rough edges now), then Indians now since there's such a large mostly-affluent population. Even in my own experience I find that rich Africans (from Africa) tend to be some of the absolute worst in terms of obnoxiousness and interactions with service staff, but I assume that's downstream of the Nigerians I see being 1%ers in their own country and that being their typical cultural modus operandi around service staff.

I too remember the wave of Chinese mainlanders popping across to Hong Kong and the locals' reactions to young ladies wearing $10k+ outfits encouraging their toddlers to defecate out on the street.

Yeah like I'm not saying Africans are at some particular personal civility deficit but I feel like they're currently in the spot of just now being affluent enough and having enough of an upper class that you'll notice them. Give it another 20-30 years and it'll probably normalize.

I think most of this can be explained by the fact that Thailand is a country who's economy is heavily dependent on tourism. When that's the case, they will optimize to make tourists happy over other concerns.

This may feel like a 'healthier' economy to you as a tourist, but I don't think it means the economy is healthier in any other meaningful sense.

I am a digital nomad, so I guess the line between whether I'm a tourist or not is sort of blurred, but I feel like my Thai friends born and raised in Thailand are happier and more content with their lives than my American friends born and raised in America, so I don't think it's totally the tourism effect. Thai people also seem to have a greater satisfaction with their hard work, have more to show for it- my partner is Thai and he can afford a car and a motorbike, an apartment in Bangkok, trips out of town several times a month, and so on, meanwhile my friends in the midwest well into their 30s are still living with family members or barely scraping by and have much more pessimistic outlooks on things

Fair, I can’t necessarily comment on the life satisfaction. I do believe that industrialization and modernization tend to crater general happiness levels so I’m not arguing on that front.

You were making an economic argument above though!

The world after modernization moves so much faster and is far more competitive than the world before it. Makes sense why people are so mentally drained, tired and stressed out. You have to grow up with a lot of grit and be used to difficult environments to live there and be truly happy as opposed to surviving and being content at best.

If the old people I spent my childhood and youth with (them born in the 1930s) are to be trusted, and given what I could observe of their habits and expectations, then the farmers who lived off of unmechanized agriculture, above all, hustled. They hustled every day, to make ends meet and to make sure that ends would continue to meet for another year. They hustled to make sure their fields yielded as much crop as possible, to make sure they got as much as possible out of their animals, and then they side-hustled to improve their social standing, to earn some money directly, to improve their working relationships with their neighbors and field-neighbors and craftsmen who provided them with tools and services, and to keep their houses from falling in on them. Theirs were lives of constant activity and an abyss of true abject poverty and physical deprivation and social sanction yawning left and right of the straight and narrow path. Even well into their 80s, these people remained as active as their bodies would permit, constantly hustling to save a few cents here or to make some improvement to their garden there or to socialize a little more.

They're practically a different species from the moderns who complain about working 40 hours a week, retreat into their little black boxes at every chance, spend extravagantly on a dazzling variety of luxuries, and who can rely on public welfare to catch them when they can't be assed to take care of their own affairs. Yes I know, old man yelling at clouds, "früher war alles besser". I'm a modern too, I know what I'm talking about.

People nowadays are mentallly drained, tired and stressed out? Maybe. Blame it on alienation, atomization, and in no small part on their brains being fried by a constant excess of sugar, screens and dopamine by any means. But it's not because they actually need to do more than peasants.

I also think working with your hands can be a lot more satisfying it's what we designed to do after all. Sure a lot of farming is backbreaking especially during harvest season. But crafting, sewing, woodworking, fishing? These are all things people do voluntarily in their free time.

The hobby version of these activities removes both the pressure and most of the worst parts of them.

People also farm in their free time. They call it gardening.

I agree with you, mind. Humans are bodies as well as minds. Just using one and not the other isn't just a waste; it's an impoverished form of existence.

In the world before modernization you got up before the sun, worked your ass off until it set, and hoped nothing bad happened that meant you didn't survive anyway.

Based.

Also, you did approximately nothing all winter.

Also, you did approximately nothing all winter.

Still had to take care of the animals. Keep the fires going. Make any necessary repairs. Do all the household tasks.

I thought that the hard working life of peasants was a bit overblown, that they would take long breaks, day drink, and get about half the year off. Based of vague half remembered scholarship, maybe Juliet Schor?

This is based on a never-published paper which was wrong. If you want a deep dive, see https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/

Tolstoy had the following to say about the peak of the peasant work year.

The day on which Sergey Ivanovitch came to Pokrovskoe was one of Levin’s most painful days. It was the very busiest working time, when all the peasantry show an extraordinary intensity of self-sacrifice in labor, such as is never shown in any other conditions of life, and would be highly esteemed if the men who showed these qualities themselves thought highly of them, and if it were not repeated every year, and if the results of this intense labor were not so simple.

To reap and bind the rye and oats and to carry it, to mow the meadows, turn over the fallows, thrash the seed and sow the winter corn—all this seems so simple and ordinary; but to succeed in getting through it all everyone in the village, from the old man to the young child, must toil incessantly for three or four weeks, three times as hard as usual, living on rye-beer, onions, and black bread, thrashing and carrying the sheaves at night, and not giving more than two or three hours in the twenty-four to sleep. And every year this is done all over Russia.

yeschad.jpg

Although I have no idea what they are doing at night that would so disrupt their sleep, light is expensive.

Edit - I guess threshing, shouldn't skim so much.

'Medieval peasants got half the year off' is a misconception based on the religious calendar of the medieval church, which allowed agricultural labor monday-saturday, less major feasts(impossible to estimate exactly how many but 36 is a normal median estimate from religious scholars- you could probably add a few more for feasts of local importance, and of course statistically 1/7 would happen on a Sunday anyways). This adds up to slightly more working days per year than the modern M-F minus a half dozen holidays workweek. Those days were, of course, much longer.

As for winter, in climates where you can't do agriculture in the winter you have 'not freezing to death' work tasks to do instead like chopping wood.

As for winter, in climates where you can't do agriculture in the winter you have 'not freezing to death' work tasks to do instead like chopping wood.

And repairing your plough, your harrow, your cart and so on.

Sounds like most of what people complain about in the modern western world today.

If you mean people didn’t have modern concepts of leisure and recreation that’s true. The world they also had to concern themselves with was a lot smaller.

Sounds like most of what people complain about in the modern western world today.

Inaccurately.

And debt collectors would beg to differ.

This wildly underestimates the amount of labor and stress involved in subsistence agriculture.

Did you know that the a bunch of historical measurement units were traditionally defined in terms of ploughing speed? One furlong for an eight-ox team to plough until they needed a break. Use that time to set up for the next furrow. Repeat for an entire day and you have an acre. Repeat for an entire ploughing season and you have your effective limits on land.

Do this twice a year if you don’t want to starve. Spend the rest planting, weeding, foraging, harvesting, haymaking, shearing, milking, breeding, slaughtering, repairing, digging, building, etc., or you’ll still starve. Have your crops pillaged by a passing army and starve anyway.

And God forbid you’re a woman. You avoid some of those backbreaking tasks, but get your own set instead. Not to mention the joys of giving birth in the era before anesthetics or antibiotics.

Seriously. The past was much harsher than you’re imagining.

Premodern childbirth is less dangerous than is popularly imagined(although still much more dangerous than modern hospital births). Informed people might trot out the 1-2% per birth statistic but this is almost certainly an overestimate because it's calculated based off of recorded births, which were mostly of aristocrats, who started giving birth much younger than peasant girls.

…but had better access to nutrition, sanitation and medicine. I think data is all over the place. Even 1% per birth adds up over a life with 5-8 births!

More to the point, I don’t think a woman has to die in childbirth for it to make her life much more difficult. Assuming that the past was so much easier is hopelessly naive.

I keep reading your references to Bangkok, but Bangkok is not really representative of all Thailand. Surely this is something you are accounting for?

Self report life satisfaction is very similar between Thailand and the US and is slightly higher in the US.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder?tab=line&country=THA~USA

I wonder with life satisfaction if the USA might be weird in terms of age cohorts, where old people are happy and young people are unhappy. A young person in another country with a more even distribution might then find that their fellow young people seem more satisfied. Total speculation on my part though.

Yeah I've moved from Australia to Malaysia with admittedly a decent amount of accumulated savings and it's crazy how I can carve out essentially the same existence here for a third of what it'd cost in Australia to get anything barring tech items. Plus the upper-middle class cohort of high school/university friends I had in Australia is very decidedly not buying property or reproducing whilst my wife's about-equivalent cohort has a bunch of property and children at the same age.

I’m curious, how do you make a living over there?

I hit a pretty solid exit from a tech company a couple years ago so day to day expenses are well within passive income. Also some occasional remote consulting if opportunities pop up since my ex-field is still very much in the 'sell pickaxes to hopeful VCs' space.

Genuinely it doesn't take much to exist in Malaysia, though. I don't really track spending religiously but I'm living a very nice upper-middle class life for maybe 1.5k USD a month inclusive of a bunch of regional travel.

I think most of this can be explained by the fact that Thailand is a country who's economy is heavily dependent on tourism. When that's the case, they will optimize to make tourists happy over other concerns.

Shouldn't this be the opposite? The place that's massively dependent on tourism with no real domestic economy should be rorting the fuck out of Rich Westerners whilst the place that actually has a diversifed economy should just have more of a fair market price for things?

Florida would be a relevant comparison in this context. A huge pillar of its domestic economy is tourism.

No, because “no real domestic economy” means cheap labor supply means more competition for tourist dollars.

Ripping off rich westerners by local standards can still be very cheap by rich westerner standards if you’re a poor country dependent on tourism.

Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.)

On personal anecdote this feels kind of more of an indictment of the modern Western nutrition and food knowhow, whatever that consists of. I spent an year there, and basic Japanese university cafeteria chow + restaurant food had me lose 15kg, going from overweight to borderline normal, in a few months, without any special effort on my part. Like, a bowl of rice + some toppings would have me totally lose any sense of hunger for the rest of the day while keeping me energetic and alert (and doing more exercise than ever since), and I'd have to consciously try and eat more than that. Seems to work fine on the native population too.

I don't have a strong position on this so random thoughts:

  • Japan makes you walk. I regularly travel between countries and when I look at my health app on my phone I can see exactly when I arrive and leave Japan because the steps taken in Japan are significantly higher than any other country I spend time in. The cities are set up such that you must walk far and wide. Train stations are large and mazelike. (This may not apply if you have a car in Japan- I have never driven in Asia.)
  • Japan is the most difficult country I've visited to eat healthy in. Fresh fruits and vegetables are very expensive. (Yes there's cheap fruit/veggie stores but you have to seek them out.) It is the hardest country to find roasted meats without added fats in. Cuts of meat that are popular are very fatty. If you like seafood you will have a much easier time eating healthy (though you'll still be dodging breading and mayo.) I have struggled with my weight my whole life, the endless bowls of pasta and sandos and uber processed snacks everywhere are hard for me to resist.
  • Asian food in general tends to be less calorically dense than western foods, and spiciness has a mild laxative effect that reduces calories slightly as well. I think these two are slightly less applicable to Japanese food vs. Chinese or Thai cuisines, but the effect is still there if you're comparing rice to baguette or more calorically dense western foods.
  • I believe there's a social effect on people's sizes as well. I had a black friend in America who is overweight, lose quite a bit of weight, and then she said she felt like people could beat her up. She's since gained weight back. I don't really blame her. Being around bigger people does make me want to be a bigger person, while being around smaller people in Asia makes me feel like I don't need to eat as much. People in america in the 50s and 60s were much smaller as well, the fattening of america was a sort of arms race, and why I don't think ozempic is going to be as influential as people believe- some people want extra weight to throw around in their lives. In some places you don't need it.

TBF it probably helped I was in a provincial university in the boondocks, a ways from the city center, so it was a hassle to go there on bicycle, narrowing down the food options. Like, the nearby options for anything with fries or bread or pasta were mostly famiresu chains that are sort of a weird uncanny valley imitation of some American diner. There was IIRC way more pasta and sandos in Tokyo. Going to the city center there was the best pasta I'd tasted to date but I wouldn't burn an hour+ of a day on the bicycle too often to get there :P. And I was on budget, which would bias me toward the school cafeteria or cheapo rice bowl places like Sukiya that didn't really give an urge to have the meal with extra everything. Going to visit as a grown up tourist with techie salary I engorge myself way more on the good stuff, so I guess moving there wouldn't have the same salutary effect anymore, unless I simultaneously went broke.

The implied proposition that raw/fresh plant-based food = healthy seems suspect to me. Several human populations historically either had no such foods available to them at all, or only seasonally (note that the overwhelming majority of our edible plants are, in evolutionary terms, very recent creations); it would be strange, and does not seem apparent from real-world evidence, if their health suffered for it.

If you are not dead set on raw vegetables, I found it quite easy everywhere I went in Japan to find teishoku places that would give you half a dozen small plates of stewed or pickled mystery sansai with your rice and tiny portion of grilled fish.

For your other examples - Thailand/SEA are among the few regions that have a long-standing native traditions of eating copious amounts of raw or minimally-cooked vegetables, Korea is just extremely far up America's memetic colon (while their native food culture is all carbs, fermented foods and meat), and if you ask for raw vegetables in China people (locals and me both) will still look at you like you have a death wish.

while their native food culture is all carbs, fermented foods and meat

And pollock!

I mean, I eat Cajun(basically meat- usually cheap, fatty cuts- and rice slathered in fatty sauce) food with French and Mexican influences. But my portion sizes are normal, so I stay at a normal weight.

I’ve heard about Japanese portion sizes, I suspect this is what happens there as well.

I love Cajun food. I used to have a Cajun stepdad, he sucked but his cooking was the best. Thai people remind me so much of Cajuns.

Standard Japanese portion sizes are smaller than Western portions, typically, but it's very easy to add extra rice, extra noodles, extra fried chicken, extra broth, extra eggs, extra whatever you want, at every restaurant.........

I've posted about this before but I firmly believe that the answer to this is the lithium/chemical hunger hypothesis. I experienced the same thing when I was in Japan, but I was eating incredibly rich gourmet beef ramen for breakfast and washing it down with a sweet pastry. Still lost vast amounts of weight.

So you miss cheap servants? I suggest relocating full time to South Africa or Brazil or something. Rich countries pay their service workers well enough for it to be out of reach of the upper middle class, except maybe as an occasional splurge.

Yes, actually that was a point I wanted to make and forgot about. The cost of labor is so high in rich countries that the quality of life for the middle class and the rich are degraded. The luxury of having freshly prepared food made with complicated processes that are ubiquitous in Thailand- affordable even to the people who make this food themselves!- is lacking in today's rich countries.

You put it a bit more uncharitably, I don't think there's anything wrong with people being able to afford to live cheaply if they want. In America we prop this lifestyle up with welfare schemes- why is that more dignified?

Yes, actually that was a point I wanted to make and forgot about. The cost of labor is so high in rich countries that the quality of life for the middle class and the rich are degraded

This is my hope for an AI scenario: the downward pressure on labor cost should make services all around so much better. Of course, this really would only be good overall if the deflationary effects made up for it in total purchasing power.

God I don't even want to think about what AI-induced deflation would do to the financial system. Luckily the AIs will all be hyper-optimized to get consumers to spend money instead of saving it.

IMO the horror stories of deflation seem oversold for modest values of deflation (let's say low single digit percentages). I understand the theory, but there have been market sectors with drastic deflation in the last few decades (computers!) where you really could defer a purchase 12 months for a drastically better product, and yet they still sold like hotcakes and the market was considered "booming".

Oh yeah, certainly, sector-specific deflation is usually good, because it means that real productivity/quality gains are happening. It's generalized deflation which kills the economy, I believe, because it kills the availability of credit and the velocity of the money supply. Even if there's an increase in general productivity, the effects on the financial system would be extremely dire. But I'm not sold on AI causing deflation - if anything, if AI creates a strong deflationary pressure, then it makes sense for the government to print money to pay for debt/entitlements.

The issue is nominal deflation and that has not happened with computers, there has been inflation.

If you're talking about compute specifically then that is true in a sense but cheaper computers aren't really available and it's not really an option to buy them from a user perspective anyway because hardware requirements rise just in line with hardware improvements. I was fine with 2013s smartphones and I'm using them identically today, but those aren't available anymore and even if they were they'd probably not be usable anyway.

The issue is nominal deflation and that has not happened with computers, there has been inflation.

This can't be true, right? The original 8GB iPhone was $600 at the time. The 128GB Pixel 9a launched at $500.

And the equivalent to the pixel 9a in 2013 was the nexus 5 that cost 350$.

I can not get a phone that works similarly well today for 350$, regardless of what the system specs say, the software requirements for the same programs with the same functions are higher for no goddamn reason.

but cheaper computers aren't really available and

My cheap Chromebook (under $200 in 2024 dollars) is a much more capable machine than any of the machines in this Gateway 2000 catalog from 1995 that started at $1799 in 1995 dollars (75MHz Pentium, lol). It lacks a CD and 3.5" floppy drive, but supports WiFi and Bluetooth and has a comparably sized display. It's almost certainly faster emulating that Pentium than the original.

The luxury of having freshly prepared food made with complicated processes that are ubiquitous in Thailand- affordable even to the people who make this food themselves!- is lacking in today's rich countries.

This is partially due to density and economies of scale making operating costs lower. You still get this in richer places like Singapore and to a lesser extent in most of East Asia. There's a culture of having shops with 2-3 unique items, each with some minor variations, on the menu and high throughput.

The west has many places like this- fried chicken places, for example, often serve fried chicken and fries with only portion sizes differentiating the different option, maybe one is served as a sandwich.

The degree to which this is the case in East Asia is like, at least 5 times more than in the west. Any random food court in Thailand has probably 12 to 20 highly specialized food places that are all cheap and fresh, you're lucky if a random mall in the US has 8 food establishments in business, let alone cheap and fresh ones... Your average major mall in Thailand probably has 30-40 businesses just for food, not even counting the special booths that usually pop up for limited events that expand the count by another 20 or more. Truly blew my mind the first time I was in Thailand

Are we talking about outside of Bangkok?

Yeah, I went to Chiang Mai and Pattaya and it's the same way, we took a boat to a random island in the gulf and there were dozens of food vendors in the port, a beach on the coast we went to had endless food stalls. The density and variety of food options are staggering, you can't walk down a street without some woman cooking the best basil pork or whatever you've ever tried

Chiang Mai, Pattaya, Bangkok, these are all heavily touristed areas, which I would argue give a different picture of Thailand than you would get from a more local experience.

I don’t think the western model of debt for DoorDash is good; I think below-market housing should be more available.

At the same time, the native poor living better lives is good. They notice the improvement far more than the upper middle class notice getting to eat out more and better. Social equality is neither an idol nor a particularly bad thing.

Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest.

What the heck is your definition of healthy????? Do you just think that being "trendy" means it's better in health and taste? Japanese food is amazing. You are probably the only person to visit Japan and say the food is shit. I mean it's not to everyone's personal tastes but how can you honestly call it bad?

South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.

Korean food is amazong too, but the korean food I know is cooled by grannys and old men in tiny restaraunts. I see nothing modern about that. And I also fail to see how it's any healthier than Japanese food.

In Japan, the food that many people eat every day is shit. It's very high in low quality carbs, grease, and salt. Most of the vegetables are fried, pickled, or otherwise covered in oil or salt. It really is as OP says, it's stuck in nutritional trends from decades ago, probably because the average age is quite high.

I'm not attacking Japanese food. It's delicious. And there are healthy meals like kaiseki, kaisendon, sushi, etc. but those are not things Japanese people eat regularly. The regular diet here is not great.

I suspect OP is American and that this comment was specifically centered on the rarity and high cost of fresh fruits and vegetables, at least when compared to the US, Taiwan, Singapore, or any of the Southeast Asian countries.

I will go to my grave believing that US food quality is absolute trash tier to anyone who's ever eaten abroad. Asian cuisines in general do a much better job of incorporating vegetables into their dishes instead of relegating them into a bland, boiled mush to be tolerated rather than enjoyed. The only solution Americans seem to have found is to throw them raw into a bowl and coat them in syrup. The salad has thus become the central example of "healthy" food in the minds of Americans, because its competition is the grease soaked slop that comprises the bulk of the American diet.

There are other elements that go into a "healthy" meal, but if your definition is built on the common US conception of healthy = raw greens and fruits, that's not something you'll find in Japan. SE Asia will have more of that for climate/agricultural reasons and Koreans have a toxic culture of tripping over each other to be the first to chase after whatever could be the next trend (the constant boom-bust cycles of trendy specialty shops are a meme there; the movie Parasite had a reference to this with a character having lost money on a Taiwanese cake shop that likely went over a lot of heads abroad) so there are probably more "modern" and salad style shops there. Korean meals also tend to be served with an array of side dishes that often include raw vegetables.

Fruits and vegetables are cheap here in America too. We call it “shoplifting.”

Food anywhere else is surely more healthy than ours. But I find American food is more tasty and agreeable to my palette than a lot of other ethnic foods simply because I was raised on it. Chinese and Mexican food I have a very weak spot for. But I have idea who the hell coats raw vegetables in syrup. That sounds disgusting.

Even without shoplifting, fresh fruits and vegetables are generally more affordable and easily available in the US compared to Japan.

Syrup was an (in my opinion, mild) exaggeration in reference to the dressings I've seen people use for their salads.

I was partially referring to the ingredient quality in the US as well. I don't know enough about the food industry to have a definitive explanation for why (I suspect it has to do with optimization for mass production and shelf stability over flavor), but when I compare eating almost anything in the US to its equivalent in Italy, Japan, etc., all of the food feels somehow flattened or hollowed out. It's very difficult to describe, but I've spoken to many people from other countries across Europe and Asia who agree that there's something very "off" about the food here. I think this is most obvious with breads and meats. The US tries to compensate by setting sugar, fat, and salt settings to 11, which only makes the experience worse.

US produce is harvested underripe to give it maximum shelf life.

Who the hell steals vegetables?

Statistics are predictably elusive, but all I could find indicated that meat, cheese, and infant formula were the most popular stolen foods. Excluding alcohol, that is.

I also object to the idea that vulnerability to theft makes anything cheap, but I recognize that was tongue in cheek.

Who the hell steals vegetables?

You’d be surprised.

I also object to the idea that vulnerability to theft makes anything cheap, but I recognize that was tongue in cheek.

Thanks for noticing. Lol. A friend of mine impressed it upon me once: “you know if you shoplift you don’t pay taxes right?”

"you know if you shoplift you don’t pay taxes right?"

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the IRS expects you to declare the value of stolen goods (not returned within the calendar year) as income.

I hear that’s how they got Al Capone.

Statistics are predictably elusive, but all I could find indicated that meat, cheese, and infant formula were the most popular stolen foods. Excluding alcohol, that is.

Meat theft is a big enough deal in my (Canadian) corner of the world that some of the grocery stores were hiring extra security to watch over the meat section for a while there. I happened to see displays in the staff areas of one of these stores listing the most commonly stolen items and the other things mentioned here (and yes, laundry detergent too) were all on there. As for alcohol, you have to show ID through a secure window to even be let into the liquor stores.

By comparison they couldn't possibly care less about theft in the produce section.

Around here it seems to be laundry detergent for some reason. Don't ask me why, but every store has Tide locked up so that you have to get an employee to get it out for you.

What a coincidence. Detergent is locked up where I live also.

I went to Home Depot recently. I hadn't been in a while. Shocking how much was locked up. The installed metal gates across many shelves. For the most part not even that expensive of stuff. But I know that the organized shoplifting gangs target them in particular, do they're presumably responding sensibly.

If I were going to steal from Home Depot I wouldn't go for the power tools, I'd go for boxes of screws. That crap is expensive.

Crackheads being paid in drugs are, unsurprisingly, not the best planners. Plus power tools are probably easier to fence because they’re the responsibility of the individual workers, rather than purchased by the company on an account- it’s pretty easy to just take it out of the box and call it ‘gently used’.

Same reason as cigarettes in prison. It fulfills all the criteria for money; nonperishable store of value, fungible, everyone uses it, solves the coincidence of wants problem, easy to transport, etc.

Laundry detergent, razor blades, and baby formula are the big three of ghetto currency.

But I have idea who the hell coats raw vegetables in syrup. That sounds disgusting.

I believe that was intended to be a disparaging euphemism for salad dressings.

When you know people that put ketchup on burritos, this one doesn’t come far out of left field.

Definitely had me fooled.

disparaging euphemism

Fun fact, the little-used word for this is a “dysphemism”

American fruits and vegetables are really bad. I'd say that it's because they're selected for what they look like on a shelf and for how well they store in a warehouse or refrigerated truck. But that's the case in other countries too. And in my experience even locally grown "straight from the farm to the market" fruits and vegetables in America tend to taste flat and empty. So I don't know what really is the problem.

It's no wonder that Americans stereotypically dislike fruits and vegetables. The fruits and vegetables here tend to taste like mildly flavored water. I have a strong hunch that the lack of taste correlates with a lack of nutritional value.

I've eaten abroad, in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, Beijing, Stockholm, Paris, Berlin, London, and quite a few other smaller cities in the respective countries listed. From home cooking to street vendors to Michelin-star restaurants, American food is great.

China was the big standout, with a very strange food culture. Every other restaurant has the exact same menu, and it was also the only place where I felt food quality was noticeably worse, especially the meat. Other than that, the big difference is that everyone else makes sugar-free desserts. I think the very light use of sugar in desserts and baking is probably the single biggest culinary divide between the U.S. and the rest of the world.

It is also always strange when I see discussions like this, because cuisine is so global now. It feels like something straight out of a time capsule from 30 years ago, and even then the person expressing it was visiting Illinois or something. That one restaurant that made up half the restaurants in Beijing, we have them here in the U.S. as well, and have for years. You might have to get a table at the back of an Asian market, but it is the exact same food, prepared the same way. And conversely, the best meat I had the whole time I was in China was at a Texan BBQ joint that was positively delicious.

While the above is mostly about restaurants, I stayed in all these places (except Taiwan) long enough to do a fair deal of grocery shopping and home cooking as well. H-E-B is the best grocery store I have ever been in, anywhere in the world, and their produce is fantastic.

Eh. I agree you can mostly get great foreign food in the handful of comparatively cosmopolitan coastal cities in the US (with exceptions: nowhere I went was it possible to get half-decent Moroccan or Iranian food, nor is there anything that even beats the rock bottom tier of German bread in Germany), but compared to almost every other country there is still some strange probability, of maybe 20%, that you eat something that tastes perfectly average and leaves you feeling diffusely sick for the next day like someone force-fed you a liter of gutter oil. With "American cuisine" (burgers, fries, chicken wings), this probability goes up to something like 40%. The only exception seems to be the corner around New Orleans, which has a genuine homegrown cuisine that deserves the name. Away from the coasts, in my experience, it rapidly devolves to near-British conditions - I spent a few days in Chicago once, and was sort of astonished how highly-rated restaurants (I remember trying one each of Chinese, Japanese and Italian) consistently turned out to be dying mall food court tier.

China was the big standout, with a very strange food culture. Every other restaurant has the exact same menu (...)

Where in China did you go? I haven't been to Beijing, but at least in the general area of Shanghai every larger town would at least have instances of the different major Chinese cuisines, which are fairly disjoint. There is a thing where every generic "premium mediocre" restaurant will offer a bad version of squirrel fish or whatever, but that's no different from how every such restaurant in a Western country will have a rump steak option priced at ~2x the median main.

nowhere I went was it possible to get half-decent Moroccan or Iranian food, nor is there anything that even beats the rock bottom tier of German bread in Germany

Interesting - I live near a little Persian exclave. There’s a few Persian restaurants down the way. Guess they’re hard to find, though.

For bread, there’s a half-decent place I know of, but for anything good I’d recommend Wisconsin. It’s technically coastal.

but compared to almost every other country there is still some strange probability, of maybe 20%, that you eat something that tastes perfectly average and leaves you feeling diffusely sick for the next day like someone force-fed you a liter of gutter oil.

If this is happening to you the issue is likely something along the lines of too much fat or too much salt for your digestive system.

It's relatively common in America for Americans to have that problem with salt in Americanized Chinese food for instance.

I lived in Beijing for a year. It could just be that my Chinese friends loved Sichuan, but outside of the foreign quarter I would constantly get taken to different Sichuan restaurants that all had basically the exact same menu. And for Breakfast I must have gone to twenty different places that all served zhou, Baozi and Youtiao.

Sichuanese has definitely taken off hard in the last decade or two, though having just been to Beijing I'd say there's a decent diversity available. Personally I just assume Hot Pot margins must be insane.

Ah. Yeah, Sichuanese food seems rather overrepresented (I'd intuitively chalk it up to it having become the default hotpot flavour, and hotpot being the default social activity - the same "hotpotty" spice mix is also exceedingly good at masking bad flavours, compared to most other Chinese flavouring templates).

And for Breakfast I must have gone to twenty different places that all served zhou, Baozi and Youtiao.

Breakfast food is pretty standardised in every culture though. Go to the UK and complain about twenty different places all serving sausages and baked beans.

In the week I spent around Shanghai most recently, as far as I can remember I didn't touch anything Sichuan at all, without actively trying to - from what I can still recall, the things I had were either local to the areas I went (neither Shanghai's blanched seafoods, nor the fungal wastes of Anhui, nor the kind of rich pickle stuff in the middle of the two were at all similar to what you describe) or some variant or another of Northern (copious amounts of yang rou chuanr, a pretty good "Lanzhou hong shao" noodle bowl, the ongoing fad that is biangbiangmian).

Yeah I was just in Beijing. Definitely a trend towards Biang Biang/Shaanxi places lately.

American food is great.

It is if you look hard enough, it is, and you don't have to look too hard, but you have to admit that walking into a restaurant aimed at an American audience (so, including Asian and other ethnic cuisines) is a crapshoot in at least the "incorporating vegetables into their dishes" category. These days "bland, boiled mush" is rare, but "steamed, with butter and salt" might be the median and "your meat and starch comes with so few veggies they're practically just a garnish" is way more common than it should be.

H-E-B is the best grocery store I have ever been in, anywhere in the world,

Have you been to Central Market? That upscale subsidiary is the H-E-B of H-E-Bs (except that ordinary H-E-B stores somehow accomplish high quality without high prices, while Central Market ... does not). When their grandmother last visited and wanted to spoil my kids, my son lobbied for (and got) a grocery shopping trip there, I guess on the theory that he had enough entertainment to last until Christmas but who knows when he'd next get let loose in an aisle with four or five hundred (not hyperbole) different kinds of gourmet cheese.

and their produce is fantastic.

You do still want to get there early and shop in person for the best selection. I usually order online for pickup, and that's still great for most fruits and veggies, but there are a few (fresh okra!) that are a crapshoot unless you pick your own.

H-E-B is also decent with charity and famous for disaster relief efforts. "Better than the government of Texas" isn't as high a bar as it should be in that case, admittedly, but it's still impressive that they clear it.

and even then the person expressing it was visiting Illinois or something.

I mean, sure, you can get some authentic, quality food in NYC or LA where there's enough of a market for them to import key ingredients directly, but the vast majority of America doesn't have these options. Illinois is far closer to a central example of the American dining experience.

it is the exact same food, prepared the same way.

I'll have to disagree here. I don't know the exact reasons (dilution of expertise, ingredient quality, market forces of a primarily American palate), but flavors and textures are noticeably worse in the US. I've spent a decent chunk of time in multiple American metro areas that claim to have top-tier food scenes (by American standards). Outside of NYC/LA, it is a rarity for me to encounter a restaurant that would surpass median standards in their country of origin. The quality distribution is so heavily left shifted.

Agreed, I almost didn't believe what I was reading. I've been to dozens of countries, and none of them hold a candle to Japan when it comes to food quality. I can't speak about outside of Tokyo, but even the random meals I had at random (what in any other country would be "hole in the wall") restaurants were phenomenal.

What the heck is your definition of healthy????? Do you just think that being "trendy" means it's better in health and taste?

It's always strange when I meet people like this. Theres a certain kind of person that fixates on a particular diet and reasons about how healthy food is by how closely it follows their chosen diet. It's hard for me to get into the head of people who are just completely immune to any actual examination of the outcomes of various diets and insists their diet is healthy. Someone downthread points out OPs supposedly healthier national diets have significantly worse outcomes than the supposedly unhealthy japanese diet and OP basically ignores it. I do know people like this IRL but they're all boomers probably basing their ideas off a debunked paper that was widely reported in the 70s or something. People have some utterly bizarre ideas about what food is healthy and I don't understand why theres so much intransience on this particular topic.

Same reason there’s a lot of intransigence on politics and religion: it’s a moral issue. It’s also closely linked to questions of willpower and akrasia for a lot of people, which is a particularly touchy subject. “The only reason you want to promote food X is because it aligns with your sinful and gluttonous lifestyle. I on the other hand am able to control my baser impulses, which is why I walk the path of true righteousness and eat food Y.”

A month later I flew Tokyo to Bangkok on Thai Airways. This 7 hour flight cost me only $301. I sat in the cheap seats in the back, but it was an empty enough flight that I had an entire row to myself.

I'm not familiar with Thai Airways specifically, but a number of national state-owned airlines are run at a financial loss as a prestige effort. It's easy to have empty rows on new-ish planes when you don't care about making money but do care about the appearance of being a "modern country" with the airlines that entails.

I haven't heard that before but that makes sense. I've noticed poorer countries will often have nice, clean airports to give a good impression as well.

Food in Thailand is extremely delicious, healthy, and very cheap. I am sure the average Thai person eats a healthier diet than the average Japanese. Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.) Thai foods feature a great variety of vegetables, fruits, meats and seafoods. Before I visited Thailand, I imagined that maybe they would be behind on trends or stuck in the past, since they are poor, but the opposite is true. You can find the trendiest foods in Bangkok- anything from the latest Korean baked craze, to Dubai chocolate bars and parfaits and ice cream cones, to Burmese tea leaf salad. They have it, and you can have it delivered within an hour for pennies.

SK has a 50% higher obesity rate than Japan, and Thailand a fully 100% higher obesity rate.

Clearly they're doing something quite a bit better than the nations you profess are clearly superior. It's fine to say that you prefer Thai food to Japanese food, I certainly do, but I don't really believe it's healthier. For instance, it might not be immediately obvious but thai cooking uses a lot for sugar.

You may be thinking- ok, this guy is rich in Thailand and poor in the US, of course he is going to have a merrier view of the Thai economy. But when I look at charts like this I am in the 95th percentile of wealth for my age, in the US. I am frugal with my money, yes, but I would like to be able to afford a life on par with or better than that of my father at the same age, and I’m not sure I can.

Congrats, you've discovered that the housing market is very dysfunctional. That tells us very little about the productivity of society in general, just that it extracts money from young people and gives it to old people. It might even be that having a dysfunctional housing market makes the economy more productive because it forces young people to work more. If a house cost 300k rather than 1.5m then people with decent salaries might very well choose to work less.

You also have to realise that this situation is even worse in Thailand, with housing affordability and household debt a far higher than in the US.

the nations you profess are clearly superior

I'm not really making a value judgment on the superiority of any nation really, just trying to point out how things are counterintuitive to common assumptions among most people from rich countries and how things I've noticed have changed my perception

Congrats, you've discovered that the housing market is very dysfunctional[...]

Great, my post was meant to be pointing at dysfunction, so I guess you got my point...

I'm not really making a value judgment on the superiority of any nation really

Yes, you are.

Great, my post was meant to be pointing at dysfunction, so I guess you got my point...

And yet you fail to see the even greater dysfunction in the places you visit. You're just richer there man. Your analysis of the places you visit is just plain wrong, egregiously so.

What conclusions can we draw from your post? It's nice to be rich and the housing market is fucked.

SK has a 50% higher obesity rate than Japan, and Thailand a fully 100% higher obesity rate.

For all of the comments about carbs being unhealthy for the last decade, I often think of how Japan, generally considered to have a healthy populace, must have a distinct lack of rice and noodles in the local cuisine.

/s if unclear.

ETA: Also a glut of cheap local produce.

In postwar South Africa and Rhodesia, it was often noted by visitors that the (white) working class lived better lives than even the upper-middle class in Europe and North America. Even a mailman had a pool, a gardener/pool boy, a nanny, a maid. You would walk down a jacaranda-lined street in Salisbury, immaculately swept, the kind of place that would house doctors and bankers anywhere else, and the average resident would be like a high school teacher or the guy calling out departures at the railroad station.

Of course the foundation of that material affluence was cheap black labor. And it was that very labor that prevented - when the time came - white South Africans from migrating to the Western Cape (where they might have been a permanent supermajority). After all, in that scenario, they’d live just like other Europeans in European-majority countries, and to have a maid and a pool boy and a nanny in Denmark you need to be (well into, the threshold won’t cut it) the 99th percentile of income.

The Thais, of course, don’t have that specific racial hierarchy (although the Chinese, like everywhere in SEA, are still a market dominant minority), and so labor costs are mediated by actual supply and demand without artificial restriction. The best way to think of the Thai economy is as a highly unequal middle income country in which the top 5% are relatively affluent and everyone else is relatively poor. In a way, that makes it like Brazil but with a lower crime rate (for the usual reasons). Things are cheap in Thailand because labor costs are low. The rest of the story has been discussed elsewhere below.

There's also substantial movement inside the region so it's not purely a matter of Thai labor being cheaper. It's very likely supplemented with Cambodians, Indonesians etcetera so that even the Thai locals find the privileges surprisingly affordable.

Apparently one main reason for white affluence in Rhodesia was that even when blacks and whites were paid the same, social obligations to family members caused problems for blacks. If people who make money have to give it to their relatives, wealth becomes useless and it's impossible to save or invest for the future.

Same with indigenous Australians. Demand sharing from family and friends is speculated to have roots in hunter gatherer societies.

I'm of Anglo descent, my father was born in a pretty grim part of Northern UK just after WW2 and managed to get out of 'the poverty trap' via joining the army, getting a skilled trade and then heading overseas. But in his description the culture of poor Northern English households was pretty similar to the African and Indigenous mindset. He's one of 7 siblings, and whilst he was still domiciled anywhere near his mother he was expected to send about half of his post-tax wages back home to support the broader family.

Maybe less 'random cousin Igwe jumps out of a bush' than some of the African examples but a lot of this stuff is just downstream of being poor and having large families. It's always going to be difficult to be the first one trying to better yourself if the clan assumes that wins are socialized.

Demand sharing is a terrible crab bucket that stops people from reaching escape velocity from an underprivileged life. I really sympathise for people that start out on hard mode. Many never had a chance.

It doesn't feel right to me that demand sharing is only a black/brown person thing. I've seen it growing up in white communities too.

Yeah I find my father's example interesting since paradoxically the fishermen were actually paid pretty well by general English working class standards.

But generally their lives would be spent half at sea in the middle of the Atlantic for weeks at a time, and then shore leave where they'd give over 85% of their pay packet to the wife/extended family and then drink the remainder. Made even worse by failing to do either usually marking you as a social outcast and meaning you weren't going to be invited back out on the ships for the next fishing run.

The missing part of all of these stories, IMO, is: where does the shared money go? If all the men in the family work and all the women are married and raising children, then communalizing wealth to handle the elderly, a widow and orphans, and hard-to-finance large one-off expenses seems like a fairly unobjectionable practice. In larger society we leave that to the government, or at least a local church, at significantly higher graft than my hypothetical, and someone trying to “make it on his own” is an obvious tax evader.

But I expect this isn’t the whole story, and the reality is an excess of men who don’t work or women who aren’t married or an unusual quantity of drink for the amount of money earned. That’s what’s really wrong: the family exerts authority to tax, but not authority to force good behavior. That is, this isn’t a criticism of the “demand sharing” family, it’s a criticism of an undemanding welfare state that lets he who does not work to eat.

But I’d be interested in the specifics. The above is largely prejudice.

If all the men in the family work and all the women are married and raising children, then communalizing wealth to handle the elderly, a widow and orphans, and hard-to-finance large one-off expenses seems like a fairly unobjectionable practice.

It also depends on how much is communalized. Even if it just goes to the needy, any poor community is going to have enough needy that you could easily take away every penny that someone earns, give it to the needy, and still have needy. And the community isn't going to say "well, the needy already got 30% of his income, we'll let him keep the rest".

That is, this isn’t a criticism of the “demand sharing” family, it’s a criticism of an undemanding welfare state that lets he who does not work to eat.

It's the same phenomenon.

Based on my dad's telling, it was a combination of drink, gambling, covering for injured/elderly men and women, covering pawn shop debts since frequently the money would run low just before the husbands returned from the sea. There was also an expectation of low-grade neighborhood socialism and enough men died or were injured on the boats that there was a pretty constant flow of widows, orphans and the like. Also my dad was there for essentially a very particular social moment between the Second World War (half the town was still ruins from the Blitz for his childhood) and the obsolescence of the Northern fishing communities for a plethora of reasons a few decades later. Which also increased the pressure on neighborhood charity networks since there were less boats and therefore less men going out on them and making great money for the time and place.

I haven't made a deep sociological inquiry of it, and my dad first left the fishing town at 14 to go to military school and then completely left the country at about 30 without spending all that much time actually living there.

Yes, when young Africans talk about this they often call it the "Black Tax". It makes the kind of low-level capital accumulation necessary for growing a black middle class almost impossible, outside of people willing to move to the city or to a different country and cut ties with their family - a very difficult and painful thing to do in any culture, but particularly in African cultures. On the other hand, it's good for Malthusian survival.

It used to be the norm in Europe as well, back when subsistence farming was the default occupation.

Yeah my dad was born into a poor family in a fishing-dominated area of Northern England and prettymuch had to bail to Australia to get his family's hands out of his pockets.


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