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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30186 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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So Peter Thiel, the SV investor, has recently given four lectures about the antichrist to a very select audience. While recording was apparently forbidden, someone recorded his lectures (or generated plausible recordings with AI) and sent them to the Guardian, which decided to quote extensively from them.

From my armchair atheist perspective, he does not seem very coherent.

It’s because the antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know world war three will be an unjust war, that pushes us. We’re going hard towards peace at any price." What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don’t think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It’s peace and safety, sort of the unjust peace.

I am not sure I follow. WW3 will be unjust, but trying to avoid it will lead to an unjust peace? (Given later quotes, that is the gist of it.) Of course, the only one who talks about Armageddon in 1 Thes 5 is Paul (in the previous verse), a figure which is traditionally not identified with the antichrist in Christianity.

He continues more coherently:

Let me conclude on this choice of antichrist or Armageddon. And again, in some ways the stagnation and the existential risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it.

For someone who is skeptical of x-risk, he seems to be rather scared of nukes:

I think we can say that if you had an all-out world war three or war between nuclear powers involving nuclear weapons, it would simply be an unjust war. A total catastrophe, possibly literal Armageddon, the end of the world.

First, IIRC, recent research has not been kind to the nuclear winter x-risk hypothesis. Depopulating most of North America would be bad, but not literally the end of the world. If only some people in Madagascar survive, then they can in principle build the next technological civilization over the next 1000 years or so.

Also, is Armageddon not a required part of the apocalypse and thus a good thing?

From the article:

As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon.

They quote him:

I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. [...] I wonder if the Churchill [approach] would have actually been healthier than the [Nuremberg trials].

Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.

This out of the way, we can focus on the important stuff, like "which person could be the antichrist?"

My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science.

Here he loses coherence again. The figure of Dr. Strangelove was a former Nazi working for the US government (think von Braun) who was also an enthusiastic developer of nuclear weapons (think Teller) around 1964. Isekaing him to the age of Galileo and Newton (when science worked very differently than under the DoE) seems like a strange proposition to make. Like describing someone as the Eisenhower of the antebellum South.

In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta [Thunberg] or Eliezer [Yudkowsky].

It’s not [Mark] Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular.

That are leading figures of the climate movement, rationality/AI safety, and e/acc. Now, I may not be very up to date with e/acc, but lumping Andreessen with the "luddites" seems a questionable choice. But then, characterizing Greta or Eliezer as "wanting to stop all science" is almost as ridiculous. The Greta generation likes their technology. While there are certainly proponents of de-growth, for the most part they seem to be arguing for greener alternatives (e.g. solar power), not for getting rid of the benefits of industrialization and plowing the fields by teams of oxen. Realistically, this means researching green technologies. Eliezer wants to shut down AI capabilities research which would push the frontier towards AGI, sure. But apart from that one, fairly narrow subject, his writings suggest that he is very much for pushing the borders of knowledge.

Notably missing among the horsemen of anti-science are the anti-vaxxers (like RFK) and the Christian right who oppose stem cell research and CRISPRing fetuses.

Anyone missing? Well, so far he has not shat on EA.

One of my friends was telling me that I should not pass up on the opportunity to tell those people in San Francisco that Bill Gates is the antichrist. I will concede that he is certainly a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-type character. The public Mr Rogers, the neighborhood character. I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on.

He’s not a political leader, he’s not broadly popular, and again, perhaps to Gates’s credit, he’s still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible.

Full disclosure: if you had asked me in 2000 if I thought that Bill Gates was the antichrist, I might not have rejected that possibility out of hand, given Microsoft. But he is not talking about Microsoft, but about the stuff which Gates does with his ill-gotten money, like fighting infectious diseases in developing countries. You know, the Disney villain stuff.

Claiming that science and atheism are incompatible is kind of a big thing to claim to make. I am as convinced an atheist as anyone, but I would still not call science and theism fundamentally incompatible. Having beliefs that do not pay rent in the anticipation of evidence seems bad epistemic practice, but as long as you limit yourself to unfalsifiable claims (e.g. of the 'not even wrong' kind), you can add whatever you want to the scientific world view. (Nor do I believe that being a theist makes you evil, per se. Theism increases the risk of some moral failings and perhaps lowers the risk of others, but the correlation is not so robust that I would really care about it.)

Of course, claiming that Dawkins and Gates are atheists stuck in the 18th century is very ahistoric. Almost nobody was openly atheist in 18th century Europe. The real blow to the theist world view came in the 19th century, with the origin of species. All the scientific discoveries of the 20th century were did not help religion, either, steadily pushing back the areas of human uncertainty which are the natural habitat of the priest.

The guardian also quotes him on Musk and Trump and Vance, but I think my post is long enough as it is.

As with Musk, the remaining question is did he turn weird, or was he always weird?

I can't believe I used to like Thiel. Thinly insinuating that you yourself are the antichrist here to cleanse the world and bring about literal heaven hell on earth isn't going to win you any friends at all, or at least it shouldn't in a sane world, which who knows about anymore...

This really looks like the old movie trope about how the evil genius spends a lot of time explaining in detail exactly how evil and clever he is which then turns out to be his undoing as he's too caught up with his own evilness and cleverness to notice the foil making its entrance. You'd expect the quasi evil geniuses of our world would have learned to keep their maw shut but again, who knows with this world...

I personally suspect he seems himself as more of a Leto II character, from Dune.

The Thiel quotes in OP are giving me professor Weston from the C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy, specifically in Perelandra where Weston mixes his previous scientism with "spiritualism" in obfuscatory vaguely religious monologues trying to appeal to Christians (and turns out to have been possessed by a demon).

A conversation leaked by someone who doesn't like Thiel won't be a representative sample of what he says. It'll be disproportionately likely to sound bad and accordingly, the fact that it reminds you of a speech by a demon should lead you to update much less than if his speeches typically sound like they are made by demons.

Also, beware fictional evidence.

Indeed, but the quotes in OP are not that far off from what he sounds like in this hour long interview with Ross Douthat. My pattern matching him to the demon possessed Weston from Lewis' novel is more of a rough vibe based thing, rather than a precise analogue, so the claim of similarity should not be taken too seriously. I am just rereading the novels in question and noticing similarities with somebody like Thiel who merges some sort of scientism and techno-optimism with religious or spiritual language. Lewis himself was of course a bit of a luddite (as am I, I must confess), so it should be no surprise that the syncretism between transhumanism and spirituality is evaluated rather negatively.

If the quotes are not very far from what he said in public, the leaks should be a non-story because they would amount to "Thiel says a slightly different version of the same thing he's said a dozen times in public already".

They can't be both shocking revelations and just more of the same old thing.

I agree. Having listened to the Ross Douthat interview, I don't understand why these leaks are presented as a shocking revelation. It is well known that Thiel has these sorts of ideas. I remember listening years ago to some sort of discussion between Thiel and N.T. Wright (a prominent Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar) where he already had some weird idiosyncratic takes mixing Christianity and transhumanism.

The one I can't get over is Sam Altman going "Yeah, this is probably going to destroy the world, but in the meantime there's going to be some great companies!"

Bro, this is Captain Planet villain rhetoric.

Better death at the hands of an American God than life at the feet of a Chinese one. Onward to ruin.

Notably missing among the horsemen of anti-science are ...the Christian right who oppose stem cell research"

Embryonic stem cell research yes, adult stem cell no.

"and CRISPRing fetuses."

Oooh, ooooh! That are me? Me am Antichrist? Yay! Fame at last!

still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible ...Almost nobody was openly atheist in 18th century Europe."

I would like to see more development of this point. I think he's referring to The Enlightenment when open atheism did become a thing, that's when we get a lot of writings by revolutionaries and radicals (see Shelley, though that's early 19th century, and of course Voltaire with his "is he/isn't he" flirting at least with atheism). So I would be interested for his reasons as to why he thinks science and atheism are not compatible.

Theism increases the risk of some moral failings and perhaps lowers the risk of others, but the correlation is not so robust that I would really care about it"

Would you care to expand on that? Seeing as I'm in the running for Antichrist due to my retrograde religious views, I need moral guidance from those of superior virtue (that is only half-sarcastic; an outside view is always useful and I would like to see if your notion of the theistic vices line up with what I think you would say are the theistic vices).

As with Musk, the remaining question is did he turn weird, or was he always weird?

From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile

Although Yarvin tried to be discreet, he mentioned that Thiel has a bit of a “weirdo edge” and described Andreessen, the venture capitalist, as someone who, “apart from the bizarre and possibly even nonhuman shape of his head, would seem much more normal than Peter.

When Moldbug calls you weird, that is saying something,

Being far from Moldbug doesn't imply being far from a normal person.

I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on.

I'm surprised that Thiel claims to have just found this out. It was practically an open secret that bill gates was an excitable genius with a short temper.

But he is not talking about Microsoft, but about the stuff which Gates does with his ill-gotten money

From all anecdotes that I hear, he became a lot less 'nonstop' post-microsoft. He was an angry/passionate dude in the 90s and early 2000s. Calmed down after.

If Peter Thiel is doing theology, I hope he does one on homosexuality?

You know this has lead me to an important realization. If it came down to it, I would choose to be ruled by the wokest HR lady on Earth before this guy. As much as wokeness disgusts me it doesn’t really scare me, it doesn’t strike me as outright evil or insane. I’m switching teams as of now.

Welcome to the Good Side. I've been feeling like effing von Papen these past 9 months...

  • -10

Papen in which year?

Like 1934 maybe, not the later years when he decided to willingly collaborate with the Nazis anyways despite his reservations.

I'm always surprised he survived the Night of the Long Knives. Von Schleicher didn't, so Hitler wasn't afraid of killing off Hindenberg's buddies.

I kind of like Thiel, but you have a point. If it came out in five years that Peter Thiel had been abducting wayward teenage boys and keeping them in a lovingly accurate recreation of a 13th-century Burgundian dungeon under his mansion, I’d be mildly surprised but not shocked.

Can’t imagine a woke HR overlady doing that.

You're clearly grappling with the way his (uninhibited by resource scarcity) gayness makes you feel. I don't disagree, but if that's how it is we should probably be more willing to generalize.

I was riffing off the blood boys thing primarily!

The "blood boys thing" was just him investing in longevity research companies looking into the thing where mice given blood transfusions from younger mice are seemingly rejuvenated. That got media outlets that hated him running sensationalist titles about him being a vampire and the TV show Silicon Valley taking inspiration from them. I think investing in medical research is good and not an indication of being a serial killer, especially longevity research which seems badly neglected.

Incidentally last I heard there was some research on the subject indicating it also works with saline + 5% albumin instead of young blood, but that's from 2020 and I don't know what the current state of the research is. A quick search finds this 2025 study claiming it's about "diluting age-elevated proteins as the way to re-calibrate systemic proteome to its younger state" but I don't know if that's the mainstream view. I don't know whether any of this is close to applications in humans.

I'm aware. I still don't think it's all that unfair to have fun with "blood boys" imagery when we're talking about the guy who sounds like a Metal Gear Solid villain.

Again, I say this as someone who kind of likes him! I'd actually like to have thought of half of the cyberpunk things he's invested in, or had my shit together enough to apply to be a Thiel fellow.

Can’t imagine a woke HR overlady doing that.

Yeah, her dungeon would be extremely inauthentic.

Yes, I'd like to be plowed by billionaire cock in the much more authentic BDSM dungeon.

Wokeness isn’t insane? Do you want examples?

Not the OP, but it's insane to me in a way that I can understand, unlike The Reptile, whom I don't understand.

It's just a question of higher familiarity then.

If you think there isn't weird satanic shit over on the woke side, you don't know Marina Abramaovic.

Marina Abramaovic

She's mostly pre-woke, isn't she?

Sure, she's still alive, but her heyday and peak relevancy are long behind her. Now she's just one of those old ladies that gets trotted out whenever there is a slow news week and people need to be reminded of what a Legendary and Influential Artistᵀᴹ she is.

She's been around forever, but was still having major exhibitions last year. Her connection to woke/leftism is mostly through her association with Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.

I always sort of wonder what functions as the katechon in the world after 1945. This is Schmitt’s 1947 diary. ‘I believe in the katechons, for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and find it meaningful. The katechon needs to be named for every epoch for the past 1948 years.’ The way I interpret this is that sotto voce, Schmitt is saying he has no idea what the katechon is. And maybe, the New Dealers are running the whole planet. Then of course, 1949 the Soviets get the bomb, and my sort of provisional answer is that the katechon for 40 years, from ’49 to ’89, is anti-communism. Which is in some ways is somewhat violent, not purely Christian but very, very powerful. I’ve argued that the katechon, or something like this, is necessary but not sufficient. And I want to finish by stressing where one goes wrong with it. If we forget its essential role, which is to restrain the antichrist, the antichrist might even present himself or itself or herself as the katechon, or hijack the katechon. This is almost a memetic version. A similarity between the antichrist and the katechon, they’re both sort of political figures. The katechon is tied in with empire and politics. If the antichrist is going to take over the world, you need something very powerful to stop it.

The katechon, the restrainer of the antichrist, must be both really powerful to prevent the antichrist, but that means there is also the danger that it IS the antichrist. I have a soft spot for theology and think it is fun to think about such mindbenders and finding real world examples. I guess Thiel was nerd sniped here.

The general point seems to be that Thiel would like to avoid anything which is too powerful, which is a globalist one-world-government. Which makes sense in a not-all-eggs-in-one-basket way.

I laughed about the juxtaposition of Francis Bacon and juvenile japanese Manga:

In his second lecture, Thiel also explores the idea of the antichrist through four works of literature – Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel and Eiichiro Oda’s manga series One Piece.

I laughed out loud about this:

Thiel says he is “very pro-JD Vance”. But he has some concerns about his allegiance to the pope. “The place that I would worry about is that he’s too close to the pope. And so we have all these reports of fights between him and the pope. I hope there are a lot more. It’s the Caesar-Papist fusion that I always worry about. By the way, I’ve given him this feedback over time.

I don’t know how wooey Vance is, he comes off as relatively grounded, but Thiel giving the unsolicited advice to not get too close to the pope must have been an absurd scene (and suspiciously what I would have expected the antichrist to say).

I going to say, 99.9% joking, that Thiel may be WELS-Lutheran. My wife was raised in the WELS, and the latter believe that — not the individual — but the seat of the Pope is the Antichrist.

(The WELS are also exceedingly unecumenical, and are instructed not to pray with anyone outside their synod.)

Yeah, ELCA is the most liberal, LCMS is more conservative than that, and WELS is the most conservative, right?

If he's German-American I could see some variety of Lutheran background and of course even a liberal Lutheran probably isn't all that fond of the papacy. Still makes me laugh that he's warning Vance off; seems like the new Pope should be warned off Vance ("Careful, your Holiness, your predecessor died the day after meeting him!") 🤣

Wikipedia isn't very helpful, German Evangelicalism is probably different from the American version:

"Thiel is a self-described Christian and a promoter of René Girard's Christian anthropology. He grew up in an evangelical household but, as of 2011, described his religious beliefs as "somewhat heterodox".

This could be his parents' background:

The Evangelical Church in Germany is a federation of twenty Lutheran, Reformed, and United Protestant regional Churches in Germany, collectively encompassing the vast majority of the country's Protestants. It calls itself the Protestant Church in Germany in English. In 2024, the EKD had a membership of 17,979,849 members, or 21.5% of the German population. It constitutes one of the largest Protestant bodies in the world. Church offices managing the federation are located in Herrenhausen, Hanover, Lower Saxony. Many of its members consider themselves Lutherans."

Or they could be Evangelical in the American sense:

Despite their many similarities, evangelicals are not a homogenous group. In the German-speaking world, they can be roughly divided into three main denominations:

  • Confessing Evangelicals, who value the authority of traditional church confessions , are found in conservative circles within regional churches, for example, in the No Other Gospel confessional movement and the Conference of Confessing Communities .
  • The charismatic evangelicals, mainly in charismatic circles of the regional churches and in the congregations of the Pentecostal movement .
  • The Evangelicals in the Pietistic tradition, mainly in the Pietism of the regional churches, in traditional free churches and in the Mennonite Brethren congregations , which were often founded by Russian-German emigrants .

He was born in Hesse, so his family could be these:

Open Evangelicals or Neo-Evangelicals: This movement takes a distanced stance towards biblical criticism but is willing to accept certain of its findings. It is found particularly among evangelicals in the regional churches. This largely includes regional church Pietism with its regional focuses in Baden-Württemberg , Hesse and Saxony and the Protestant Community Movement and its educational institutions such as the Albrecht Bengel House , the Evangelical Tabor University in Marburg, the Liebenzell International University in Bad Liebenzell , the Johanneum or the Paulinum . In the free churches they are particularly represented among the Old Lutherans such as the Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church , among the Mennonites and Methodists , although there are also "non-evangelical" Christians among these, and in the more liberal wings of other free churches.

Since we don't know, it's difficult to speculate about his childhood religious influences. Possibly Pietist-influenced Lutherans?

It's been described to me by a lutheran friend like this: ELCA are just autistic Episcopalians(with the variance, and age, that you'd expect), LCMS are conventionally conservative, WELS are so fundamentalist they rival tradcaths and quiverfulls.

That seems, broadly speaking, accurate.

I was raised ELCA. My best friend from high school is now an LCMS pastor, and my wife was raised WELS.

I don’t think the ELCA is quite what’s described above. The Lutherans, even the ELCA, at least started from a comparably-confident theology. The ELCA still includes the Book of Concord as one of its guiding texts and creeds. And the ELCA still holds the most stereotypical Lutheran theological belief: real presence (say it with me: “IS MEANS IS!”).

My wife and I are church shopping and are having a heck of a time. We both feel too conservative for liberal churches and too liberal for conservative churches.

One really sad thing is that there are cultural trends not inherently and inseparably wed to any theological difference that shape liberal and conservative Protestant denominations.

Namely, the median conservative Protestant (and not just Lutheran) church uses contemporary worship music that, for us, turns a Sunday into an aesthetic ordeal.

And particularly so having been raised Lutheran. Bach, Handel and Mendelssohn were all devout. Some of Bach’s works are deliberately Protestant in composition, designed to allow his congregation to sing simple lines that combine to create complex harmonies. Per capita, Lutherans are the undisputed champions of worship music.

Which is why the number of acoustic guitars and tambourines found in LCMS churches hurts.

The WELS are one of the rare exceptions, anywhere in American Protestantism, of very conservative churches who still insist upon traditional worship music. It remains as a part of their insularity. Also as they’re not on trend as a conservative Protestant church, their numbers are declining.

Conversely, and even aside from theological disagreements, the depth of theology found in the sermons of ELCA (and other liberal mainline churches) sermons, in the aggregate, is wanting. I agree it is wonderful God sent Christ to die for our sins, and that I should be kind to others. Hearing not too much more than that in almost every sermon doesn’t really help me, as a layman, grow in my faith.

My wife is a hard no on returning to the WELS, as the church she grew up in dealt… less than honestly… with one of her elderly relatives in convincing the latter to make a sizable bequest. She also attended a private WELS school which didn’t prohibit non-WELS children from attending, as this is a big source of revenue for the WELS. A high school classmate and friend of hers who wasn’t WELS died, suddenly, of a heart problem. And her school pulled all its students together to remind them they were not to pray at the subsequent funeral.

The LCMS (and even the smaller LCMC which sits ideologically in between the LCMS and ELCA) churches in our area all make use of drum sets, guitars and keyboards. Plus we both disagree with the LCMS on young-earth creationism.

And our local ELCA churches have followed the national organization’s postmodern, progressive tendencies, and offer shallow, redundant services.

We’ve branched out and are currently, desperately searching for a church among other Protestant denominations, even if it is an outlier in relation to the views of its national organization, that has traditional music and theological depth in its sermons.

We were very impressed by the pastor at a PCA church we visited, but infinitely less-so by the cajón behind him. And, there were no bibles in the pews at this church — some things even if we leave for another denomination, having been both raised Lutheran, we just can’t accept.

The search goes on…

Going off on a tangent, I saw that Katie Porter, running for governor of California and currently blowing up in the news for blowing up her campaign, is (according to Wikipedia) an Episcopalian.

And I had to laugh, because that's just so perfect. Of course she would be. Though I don't know if the Episcopalians want to be linked to someone trending right now for being an absolute bitch to her staff, amongst other things. Allegedly she fired a staff member for giving her Covid, because said staff member didn't mask while in her house, even though the staff member explained that was because she was upset about learning a friend had been murdered (and also supposedly Porter had been vaccinated previously). So yeah, charming lady, totally who you would want governing you.

Evidence in favor of Thiel being sane: He can't resist getting in a dig in on Andreesen.

Evidence against: Everything else

Yeah, dude's losing it.

I think Scott raised a very valid point on Antichrist ID 101: They're supposed to have "Antichrist" literally spelled out on their forehead. Do we really know why Yudkowsky always wears his fedora? On the other hand, Andreesen and Greta have fiveheads, but in 2025, cosmetic surgery or makeup can do wonders.

I think Scott raised a very valid point on Antichrist ID 101: They're supposed to have "Antichrist" literally spelled out on their forehead.

Where was this?

It was either his Twitter or a Substack note. I'd look it up if it wasn't 3 am on a Monday :(

I’ll just pick on the first “rebuttal.” Thiel is making a Type I v Type II error point. Yes WW3 would be unjust. But so too will be the efforts by those saying “be afraid of WW3–give us these powers to prevent it.”

He then points to Thessalonians. In it, Paul is not saying he is proclaiming “peace.” Instead, Paul is quite literally saying TPTB will be saying “peace.” That is, it’s a prophecy. Thiel is saying the Antichrist will use the yearning for peace to usher in a fate worse than war.

fate worse than war.

Someone who starts Palantir (amazing how people tell you who they are) seems to be projecting when talking about antichrists and coming evils in peacetime.

…Thiel is telling you he is Feanor?

Is it not clear that everything he’s saying is a metaphor and it’s being quoted/framed in the most uncharitable possible way by a hostile source?

Thiel may not be a believer, but he clearly regards organized Christianity positively. It’s not a surprise that when he’s trying to make a point thats where he’s reaching, although he doesn’t hit the trad Catholic end times prophecies well, so he’s at least not just cribbing those.

Sure, the source is hostile.

But as @FiveHourMarathon points out, he self-identifies as a Christian. 14% of US adults believe that we are living in the "end-times" and that Jesus will return to Earth.

If someone was arguing for "punching Nazis", the motte would not give him a pass because he only meant that figuratively and is obviously not in favor of punching any real people, unless he provided context which made this very plain, because there is a background of a culture which believes that literally punching Nazis is a fine thing to do.

If Thiel had called Greta Sauron, priors would strongly indicate that he is very unlikely to believe that she is really the Maia who had the one ring forged. By contrast, if he speculates about her being the antichrist, and one in seven or so Americans would entertain the possibility that a human being living today could be the antichrist, it seems much more plausible that he is being literal.

Again, I lack the context, perhaps his four lectures on the antichrist were really only using theology as a metaphor to make a point about worldly technological progress. It would still feel like Jesus packing his parable of the sower into a four-part lecture series called Agriculture 101, but it is possible.

one in seven or so Americans would entertain the possibility that a human being living today could be the antichrist

This is so insane

Explains so much about contemporary western society though

To be fair, this was just a Fermi estimate on my part, I simply assumed that the number of people who believe in The Omen are roughly the 14% who believe that the second coming of Christ is near.

Replace "antichrist" with "literally Hitler" (meaning: "not literally Hitler but morally Hitler-equivalent") and see what numbers that gives you.

Which is also... incredibly stupid

The median Westen voter is a moron, the older I get the worse it's revealed to be.

Your argument hinges on a rigid set of stereotypes - a sincere believer must be a rural fundamentalist, and a tech billionaire must be a secular rationalist. But in the big tent you don't have the luxury of enforcing ideological conformity.

It doesn't matter if Thiel believes in the Antichrist the same way I do, or as strongly as I do or as literally as I do, what matters is that I know what he means and those who don't can easily find out. This series of lectures basically says 'there is something wrong with the world, and I think we should call that wrong thing the Antichrist, and here's why.'

This works well as a cultural touchstone for red tribe for several reasons - a) historical precedence - Christianity has long been at home in the red tribe. At the same time, Thiel is a student of Rene Girard, who used the Antichrist to refer to the secular perversion of Christian ideals leading to mimetic crisis and the failure of scapegoating mechanisms, bringing chaos marketed as order. I assume Thiel is using the term with that intellectual framework in mind, making it both a populist shibboleth and a high-concept philosophical argument, meaning it b) both uses and reinforces the current resurgence of Christianity in the red tribe by embracing a low status red tribe marker (distinguishing Thiel from the typical conception of the billionaire) and legitimising it amongst tech bro types (who have always been susceptible to esoteric and fantastical mythologies aesthetically) and also c) it upsets people who don't get the shibboleths, who, because they don't get the shibboleths, are forced to interpret it through their typical understanding of the world where it just sounds insane.

Your argument hinges on a rigid set of stereotypes - a sincere believer must be a rural fundamentalist, and a tech billionaire must be a secular rationalist.

My experience is that people who talk about the devil and the antichrist a lot are very likely to be fundamentalists.

I was raised Catholic-lite, I went to Church twice a year and attended one or two hours a week of Catholic education in German public school, before I opted out in favor of a non-religious ethics class (which was more interesting in the topics it covered) at age 14. This forms the baseline of my model of liberal (but not necessarily insincere!) Christianity. I think the devil only appeared as tempting Jesus in the desert, and even there was interpreted more like an inner drive than as an external, rational agent. We did not cover Revelations at all. There was no preaching of fire and brimstone, sex was not a topic. There was certainly no mixing of religion and politics, the god of my childhood did not endorse any candidates.

Rene Girard, who used the Antichrist to refer to the secular perversion of Christian ideals leading to mimetic crisis and the failure of scapegoating mechanisms, bringing chaos marketed as order.

You mean like a critique of Marxism as "the communists took the Christian idea of heaven and tried to make it a reality on Earth, which thus failed terribly?" I certainly had a (Catholic) history teacher who expressed such an opinion. Personally, I found it always rich that a religious institution which had been a steadfast ally of the ruling classes for most of its existence thought it had any moral standing to criticize people who thought that changing the organization of society might alleviate suffering (and were correct in the case of social democrats and terribly wrong in the case of communists).

I am still unsure what point you think Thiel is making when he speculates about Greta Thunberg being the antichrist, and if it is a purely theological point (which might be beyond an atheist such as myself) or a sociological point dressed in the language of Christianity. From the "secular perversion of Christian ideals" angle, I would imagine something like "Friday For Future takes the Christian ideal of humans being good stewards of creation and strips it from its Christian roots." But without the basis of Christianity, this idea becomes unsound?

It is my firm belief that human virtue significantly predates any religion known today, and that Christianity has no intellectual property rights on caring about the natural world (FFF) or trying to alleviate the suffering on Earth (EA) or equality (SJ) or trying to avoid bad consequences of technology-driven change (AI safety).

This series of lectures basically says 'there is something wrong with the world, and I think we should call that wrong thing the Antichrist, and here's why.'

I agree that there is something wrong with the world, actually. Personally I would mention negative externalities (the driving force of both climate change and AI x-risk) first and foremost. Then there is the increasing spread between capital and income, and the related rise of real estate prices, global poverty, and an increase of anti-liberal patterns both on the left and on the right, the related demolition of the concept of truth, social media induced loneliness, a military conflict in Europe and the total clusterfuck of the Middle East, to mention but a few. Interestingly enough, a lot of these are things in which Thiel is either in the position to alleviate the problem and does not or in which he is actively profiting from being part of the problem.

Frankly, if Thiel wants to make the point that Greta or Eliezer exemplify what is wrong with our world, I would probably give him two paragraphs of moderate length to convince me that he is making an interesting argument. I am much less inclined to spend the resources to try decipher a deliberately obfuscated argument on the off chance that it holds some insight instead of him being a MAGA weirdo who has found a new favorite thing to call his political enemies.

You mean like a critique of Marxism as "the communists took the Christian idea of heaven and tried to make it a reality on Earth, which thus failed terribly?"

Critiques like that of Marxism are a subset of the anthropological phenomenon Girard is describing. Girard's point isn't limited to a single political ideology. It's a critique of the entire modern mindset, and the desire to 'build a better world' on the back of a designated enemy. He saw this pattern repeating everywhere, from the French Revolution to modern social justice movements. The Antichrist is the principle that weaponizes compassion for victims to create an engine of perpetual conflict. It's a critique of secular humanism and its endless quest for new victims and new oppressors, a quest which leads to a permanent state of social conflict - the 'chaos marketed as order' I mentioned.

Personally, I found it always rich that a religious institution which had been a steadfast ally of the ruling classes for most of its existence thought it had any moral standing to criticize people

Then you don't understand religion. A religious institution without a belief in its moral standing is a social club. A religious institution derives its morality from divine authority. You are judging it on criteria it doesn't care about, you can't then be flummoxed that it doesn't care about your judgement.

I am still unsure what point you think Thiel is making when he speculates about Greta Thunberg being the antichrist, and if it is a purely theological point (which might be beyond an atheist such as myself) or a sociological point dressed in the language of Christianity. From the "secular perversion of Christian ideals" angle, I would imagine something like "Friday For Future takes the Christian ideal of humans being good stewards of creation and strips it from its Christian roots." But without the basis of Christianity, this idea becomes unsound?

Thunberg is a shibboleth. She is just a good representative of the secular doomsday cult, she's a child prophet.

Regarding Stewardship you are missing the point entirely, deliberately it seems? Or was that Marxist line literally all the thought you put into understanding Girard's thesis? The idea doesn't become unsound, it becomes dangerous. We don't understand all the ways certain sociological concepts interact, which ones affect which. Compassion is good, but decoupled from religion, from a framework of original sin, grace, transcendence, and forgiveness, it turns suicidal. It gets coopted by grifters, narcissists, psychopaths. Perhaps that is what Thiel is doing! If it is, it would have been a lot harder to figure out without Girard's Antichrist.

It is my firm belief that human virtue significantly predates any religion known today, and that Christianity has no intellectual property rights on caring about the natural world (FFF) or trying to alleviate the suffering on Earth (EA) or equality (SJ) or trying to avoid bad consequences of technology-driven change (AI safety).

Do you similarly believe Christianity has no ip rights on the development of everything you just mentioned? Because I see a pretty direct (straightforwardly direct in the case of social justice) through line from Christianity to them. They aren't just virtuous, they are virtuous according to the tenets of Christianity and built on a bedrock of assumptions that most other cultures in history found bizarre.

I agree that there is something wrong with the world, actually. Personally I would mention negative externalities (the driving force of both climate change and AI x-risk) first and foremost. Then there is the increasing spread between capital and income, and the related rise of real estate prices, global poverty, and an increase of anti-liberal patterns both on the left and on the right, the related demolition of the concept of truth, social media induced loneliness, a military conflict in Europe and the total clusterfuck of the Middle East, to mention but a few. Interestingly enough, a lot of these are things in which Thiel is either in the position to alleviate the problem and does not or in which he is actively profiting from being part of the problem.

What are you arguing now? That Thiel sees different problems to you? Actually most of those things, I'm pretty sure, Thiel would argue are symptoms of... You guessed it, the Antichrist. In the Girard sense. Dismissing his position as 'deliberately obfuscated' would carry more weight if you hadn't already admitted you have no idea what Girard said or any interest in finding out.

The entire point is that the quasi-religious framework he's using explains the rise of things like the 'demolition of truth' and the 'anti liberal patterns' you mentioned. And that by tying the religious and secular conceptions of the Antichrist together Thiel provides a way two disparate groups he belongs to - Christians who believe the bible is true if not necessarily 100% accurate and tech bros - can share culture.

  1. Since he said it in private, it's inherently not going to include caveats and explanations that let you understand it, so you should grant a lot more charity to interpret it than you would anything said in public, like 99% of the cases of "punch a Nazi". This is doubly so if it was selected specifically because it sounds bad (and it was), because that ruins your priors.

  2. People won't give a pass for punching Nazis because punching Nazis is an act which can be done by a vigilante or a mob. Thiel isn't going to be doing anything to the Antichrist.

  3. As others have pointed out here, your interpretation is wrong. He did not actually mean what you think he meant.

Since he said it in private

He gave a bloody lecture in front of a couple of hundreds of people. This is very different from having a private dinner with a couple of friends which was bugged by the guardian.

Thiel isn't going to be doing anything to the Antichrist.

There is a reason that western culture has evolved an allergic reaction to Christians accusing others of either being in league with the devil or the antichrist. The reason is that historically, most religiously motivated violence committed by Christians were preceded by such accusations.

If Thiel was giving lectures about the Eucharist and the guardian tried to spin this into "well obviously he is advocating for cannibalism", nobody would buy it, because while Christian beliefs about transubstantiation are definitely weird, Christianity also has an excellent track record as far as avoiding actual cannibalism goes.

From a stochastical terrorism perspective (which I personally do not like much), saying "X is the/an antichrist" is the right-wing version of saying "X is literally Hitler". Either has a mild priming effect on people who have a psychotic break and decide to murder someone, I would guess.

Suppose that instead of the antichrist, he gave a lecture on jihad. Would you go well, there is no way that a Western Muslim in 2025 would actually advocate for violence. Actually, what he really means is jihad in the sense of an inner struggle which brings you closer to god.

The reason is that historically, most religiously motivated violence committed by Christians were preceded by such accusations.

The word "historically" is doing a lot of work here. If it happened ten years ago, you might have a point. But Christian violence against accused antichrists has been pretty much nonexistent for 80 years. (This is not so for violent jihads, of course.)

Thiel has stated that he is a "small o orthodox" Christian.

Okay, who is his bishop?

Non-proper noun, that’s a claim of adherence to basic, fundamental Christian beliefs; not membership in a proper-noun Orthodox church.

I guess if you wanted to grill him, you could ask whether or not he believes in the Apostles’ Creed, and whether or not he believes the filioque clause belongs in the Nicene Creed.

It doesn't nessesarily imply big-O Eastern Orthodoxy, but it does imply adherence to small-o Nicene orthodoxy, which nessesitates an organized church under a valid bishop.

I'm not sure what point you're making. Thiel's religious beliefs must be idiosyncratic to contain his lifestyle, but he does consider himself a believer, contra hydro's saying this is all just a metaphor.

(I am not the one to whom you are responding but)

The point being made here is, what exactly does Thiel mean by “small-o orthodox”? Presumably he doesn’t mean Eastern Orthodox, else he wouldn’t have qualified with “small-o”. But then he must have in mind some other notion of “correct belief” (literally, ortho + doxia), and given his, shall we say, (in)famously libertine lifestyle, it’s not at all obvious what that “correct belief” is, nor how it accords with any conventional benchmarks of correct Christian belief, such as the aforementioned Nicene Creed.

Or maybe Thiel was just making a nerdy joke about how his Christianity is growing much faster than Orthodox Christianity.

I agree with you that's a really interesting and important question, especially for Christians who want to welcome the gay moneychanger as a fellow traveler.

The term usually includes mainline and most disorganized protestants, who may or may not have bishops.

Sure, but his speculations on the antichrist don't correspond well to actual Christian apocalyptic prophecy. I can see the guy being methodist or episcopalian or something where you believe Jesus Christ was God, died for our sins, and was resurrected, but not necessarily a whole lot else. On the other hand he's pretty clearly not a Catholic or Orthodox, and the kind of protestants who take this stuff literally won't have him.

First, IIRC, recent research has not been kind to the nuclear winter x-risk hypothesis. Depopulating most of North America would be bad, but not literally the end of the world. If only some people in Madagascar survive, then they can in principle build the next technological civilization over the next 1000 years or so.

Throwaway for limited OPSEC

You're right here, though maybe with a few interesting caveats that others might find interesting from the (very niche) field.

Classic nuclear winter (everyone dies on snowball earth) was fairly quickly ruled out, and the worst case scenarios of present day teams most concerned on the issue seem unlikely. For example, the 150 Tg (a Tg being a million tonnes of soot in the stratosphere, where it persists) requires 4,400 unique (non overlapping) detonations over the most dense cities in the list, all of which make a firestorm. That's more than the total strategic arsenals available, some of which will be destroyed, fired at targets not in cities or held back, targeting is heavily duplicated in nuclear planning to ensure kills and not every urban detonation will cause a firestorm.

However, nuclear winter is unfortunately still possible, or at least the National Academy of Sciences is concerned enough not to rule it out at all and more research is being funded: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/27515/potential-environmental-effects-of-nuclear-war. Models which exclude the possibility of stratospheric injection don't include latent heating (a huge deal) - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022JD036667 and you only need ~400 firestorms injecting soot to take out something like 30-50% of global crop yields via 47 Tg, depending on how well you adapt agriculture https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395439565_Strategic_crop_relocation_could_substantially_mitigate_nuclear_winter_yield_losses .

Add in losing agricultural inputs, access to mechanization in fields and mass logistics should the war also seriously disrupt global industry and civilizational complexity, and you have the conditions for a lot of mortality (that's actually true even without the winter, it just makes it much worse). This isn't certain, but it's really risky, and deaths in non target countries could be in the billions.

Like you say, it's hard to go from that to human extinction, and I don't personally think it's too plausible myself, but we have never run the experiment of putting our society in a situation where 80% are likely to die (absolute worst case following big rearmament, I would guess). Catastrophes can spiral, people could take risky actions as a result that contain x risks, maybe we cannot recover, it's full of unknown unknowns to quote the man who actually did the most for disarmament arguably in living memory.

If Thiel is worried about a one-world state, I find it rather strange that he has worked closely with the US national security / intelligence apparatus, which out of all currently existing political entities is probably the one that is most likely to bring about a one-world state and indeed is constantly working to extend Washington DC's domination to every corner of a planet. Not that I think that the US national security / intelligence apparatus has any serious chance of bringing about a one-world state, but it's more likely to do it than any other political entity I can think of. Does Thiel think that he can get on this giant tiger's back and steer its direction?

As for science and atheism being incompatible, it really depends on what Thiel means by atheism. Science is certainly not incompatible with rejection of organized religions like Christianity and Islam. But one could make an argument that, because of the hard problem of consciousness, science is incompatible with dogmatic materialism/physicalism.

I wish I could see a full transcript, it's hard to come to any conclusions without one.

But one could make an argument that, because of the hard problem of consciousness, science is incompatible with dogmatic materialism/physicalism.

I am unconvinced of that. First, the hard problem of consciousness is much more a thing among philosophers than among the relevant domain experts (neuro-scientists).

Secondly, even if I grant you that people have souls which give them qualia, unlikely as that seems, there is no reason to suppose that they are forever beyond the reach of physics. If your conscious mind can interact with the real world, then whatever it is must couple to the matter in your brain. I am not saying that the obvious approach of accelerating conscious beings to near the speed of light and having them hit each other would necessarily yield results, but it also seems premature to say that it would not. After all, a few centuries ago, we had no idea how life worked on a physics basis either, and today we have a pretty good picture.

In short, one of the following must be true. Either the qualia proponents make no falsifiable predictions, in which case their claims are completely orthogonal to science, or they make falsifiable predictions, in which case these predictions can be tested and incorporated into a materialist view of the world. If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.

I am unconvinced of that. First, the hard problem of consciousness is much more a thing among philosophers than among the relevant domain experts (neuro-scientists).

So, do you deny that the hard problem exists and is indeed a problem? Because from a straightforward logical point of view, it's one of the most impossible gaps for materialism to cover. How do we perceive or think at all, if we're fully material?

Secondly, even if I grant you that people have souls which give them qualia, unlikely as that seems, there is no reason to suppose that they are forever beyond the reach of physics.

There is even less reason to think that "souls" or a non-material substrate is in reach of our physics. Also, even if we could find a definitive physical cause for consciousness, that still would not mean materialism is true! As David Bentley Hart says...

One of the deep prejudices that the age of mechanism instilled in our culture, and that infects our religious and materialist fundamentalisms alike, is a version of the so-called genetic fallacy: to wit, the mistake of thinking that to have described a thing’s material history or physical origins is to have explained that thing exhaustively. We tend to presume that if one can discover the temporally prior physical causes of some object—the world, an organism, a behavior, a religion, a mental event, an experience, or anything else—one has thereby eliminated all other possible causal explanations of that object. But this is a principle that is true only if materialism is true, and materialism is true only if this principle is true, and logical circles should not set the rules for our thinking.

Paging @FCfromSSC if he wants to go more deeply into the arguments against materialism. Here is an example of him arguing about free will, for instance.

So, do you deny that the hard problem exists and is indeed a problem? Because from a straightforward logical point of view, it's one of the most impossible gaps for materialism to cover. How do we perceive or think at all, if we're fully material?

Excuse my ignorance of the subject, but why should perception or thinking be impossible for a material creature?

For a purely material creature. Because perception and thinking are non-material things.

Are they? Why? What makes them so? Base matter seems sufficient for perception and thinking. I'm not saying there is no non-material aspect to life, but the "things" you named...seem doable by material means.

Imagination works fundamentally unconstrained from physical reality, for a start. We can 'imagine' and see things like numbers, that have basically no real physical basis, and change the world from them. The list goes on and on.

If you're genuinely curious about this, I recommend the book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss.

Materialist explanations are sufficient to explain how an entity can react to the environment and think, but it is not clear that they can explain subjective experience.

Neuroscience doesn’t cover qualia. The hard problem is that there is no known mechanism for material reality to interact with or produce subjective thought and experience. To produce specific neural patterns, yes, but not to produce subjective experience.

Lots of materialists attempt to resolve this by saying that neural patterns are subjective experience, but this doesn’t actual solve the problem, it just declares it not to exist. Humans clearly do have subjective experience and we have no idea how that might relate to electricity produced by bags of salty water (cells). The fact that altering the cells changes the subjective experience still doesn’t tell you the mechanism by which one produces the other.

If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.

I think you are confusing empiricism and materialism. If angels exist then materialism - the idea that physical particles and waves are the only phenomena in the universe - is wrong. You might or might not be able to make empirical predictions about how angels and ‘spiritual matter’ behaves, but that is not materialism or physics. And there is no guarantee that spirit would be amenable to this approach - ‘social science’ has broadly failed because human behaviour at scale is not a phenomenon that yields well to empiricism, being non-consistent over both time and space.

Science is naturalist, rather than materialist. To a naturalist, the existence of non-material entities or phenomena does not invalidate science. There might still be laws that govern those entities; independently of our ability to learn those laws.

Science appears materialistic because of a desire for parsimony and the extraordinary success of materialist theories. But the principles of science do not depend on a materialist world.

Agreed. Materialism is a prescriptive hypothesis about how the world is that can be disproven without invalidating the empirical process. Indeed, materialism as conceived in the 19th century has taken a certain number of knocks in the last hundred years with the discovery that the universe has a specific start point and that the location and behaviour of particles and waves is fundamentally undeterministic.

Lots of materialists attempt to resolve this by saying that neural patterns are subjective experience, but this doesn’t actual solve the problem, it just declares it not to exist.

I think there's a symmetry here. One side just declares a problem to exist without any convincing argument other than "it seems so to me" and the other declares it not to exist without any convincing argument other than "it seems so to me". (I'm with the eliminativists, btw.)

Granted, but it does seem so to me. I observe that my consciousness exists, and that nobody can tell me how this is so. 'It's just a property of complex systems' seems like a non-answer to me, spoken in a very confident tone of voice, and being entirely too vague to be useful. How do complex systems produce this property? Does it only happen if those patterns are in a meat brain? Are AIs conscious? PCs observing themselves via their antivirus software? Rocks?

It's like Sophism. Yes, we cannot prove that the world exists. But it seems to me that it does. Likewise the assertion that humans beings don't have free will, to which I can only note that for all intents and purposes I seem to. Assertions to the contrary seem essentially to be faith-based to shore up a particular conceptual model and don't really help at all to make sense of the world. Even the people who claim to have become enlightened by discovering that their own ego doesn't exist just act just like everybody else, right down to the sexual harrassment scandals. At least if we discovered that the entirety of human consciousness was powered by fairy farts we might be able to get somewhere new with that.

If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.

And the theologians will go "Hi, glad to see you, and it only took you eight centuries to catch up with us!" 😁

Depends on whether souls, angels and demons end up coming from an existing theological practice.

Yeah you'd think he'd defect to the Russians or something then. The worry about the UN creating a one world government seems incredibly naive for someone as plugged in as him. The idea of the UN being more than a discussion forum and aid distribution force of the great powers is fanciful.

...Unless he knows something we don't.

Of course going off priors we'll discover some drug habits instead.

I don’t know, I think the risks of global totalitarian government are way, way higher if China becomes the premier global power.

I’ll just go ahead and stake out the position which is that the US actually does respect the rights of its citizens more than basically any country in the world (maybe Switzerland or the Nordics are better?) and certainly more than china or any of their allies. In addition to that the us really does try and encourage its allies to democratize. Places like South Korea, are imperfect, but far better than what they were earlier in my lifetime. The whole experience in Iraq (reasonably), makes people suspicious of Americas ability to influence other countries in a positive way, but imo that should be viewed as more of an exception than a rule.

I also believe that the us national security / intelligence apparatus is mostly well intentioned / a good thing. Are they perfect, no, but it seems like they are pretty good at answering the elected president’s political appointees.

The whole experience in Iraq (reasonably), makes people suspicious of Americas ability to influence other countries in a positive way

Even Iraq is probably better off than it was under Saddam. Certainly better off than it would have been under his sons. Afghanistan not so much.

How so? Under Saddam it had less Iranian influence, and it wouldn't have suffered somewhere between a half million and a million unnecessary deaths and a commensurate amount of permanently handicapped.

It's hard to find an equivalent country to look at path of development, Syria is obvious but Syria wouldn't look like it does today absent the Iraq war. Probably Iran is the downside estimate assuming poor governance and continued isolation, and Iran is about as well off as Iraq without the atrocities.

Under Saddam it had less Iranian influence, and it wouldn't have suffered somewhere between a half million and a million unnecessary deaths and a commensurate amount of permanently handicapped.

Why not? Are we supposed to assume that the Americans were the predominant factor of the Arab Spring, and that no such equivalent could or would have happened absent the US invasion of Iraq?

The reason Iraq had less Iranian influence circa 2000 under Saddam was because Iran under Saddam was a roughly 1/3rd Sunni religious minority suppression state artificially holding down the 2/3rd Shia majority. That 1/3rd is a larger fraction than the Syrian state, which was roughly 3/4th Sunni and 1/4th everything else, but it was still a distinct religious minority with deep, deep sectarian grievances that were not only perpetuated, but grown, by the dictatorship's sectarian tendencies and subversion of civil society dynamics that might have created a bond. We know what was liable to happen when the suppression apparatus faltered, which is to say sectarian revenge, and we know this was liable to happen both if the state was compromised by an external invasion (US invasion of Iraq), or by a popular uprising supported by neighbors (Syrian civil war).

Saddam's Iraq was a country surrounded by neighbors who would happily have fueled a Syrian-scale-plus civil war if Saddam faced an Arab Spring-esque Shia uprising. This includes many of the the real-history states who supported the civil war that followed the American invasion, including- or especially- Iran. As much as Americans like to think they dominate other people's considerations, Iran's proxy-and-WMD pursuit up to 2003 were always first and foremost for use against Iraq, and the Iranian Revolutionaries long saw themselves as the eventual liberators / protectors of the regional Shia. Nor would many of Iraq's neighbors- who saw Iraq as a main security threat- have hesitated to drag it down a peg and build their own influence.

Unless you posit that Iran and Iraq, two arch-enemies who not only aimed but used WMD programs against eachother, were on the outbreak of a kumbiyah moment had the US not invaded Iraq, Iraq was a tender box primed for a half million (or far more) casualties if / when the Saddam regime hit a popular uprising. Iran had been preparing to support Shia groups for decades, and would not have stood by quietly.

Most germanic european countries are very conformist societies where state force is used against those who buck the trend. They're just not enforcing the values that people who complain about 'conformity' tend to dislike, they're enforcing a different set.

If there's a country where the average person has more freedom than the US, it's probably some Latin American country where the government has to pick and choose what it uses its state capacity on.

If Thiel is worried about a one-world state,

Naw dog, all states are one-world states, at least so far. He's worried about a one-state world.

Not true; Singapore is a Star Alliance state

This is a very mottizen reading in that I can't tell if it's bad-faith hostile or just so overly literalist it misses point by point and becomes fisking with a mis-sighted gun. A couple points:

Also, is Armageddon not a required part of the apocalypse and thus a good thing?

Armageddon is not the total destruction of human civilization, that's a casual use of the word. Armageddon is a gathering of the world's temporal forces for battle at a central point (Megiddo), at which point things will be Revealed.

Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.

The Nazis would never stop with 50,000 top people, they went root and branch into the population. That's the point of Churchill's approach - you take powerful, symbolic, deadly vengeance against the most responsible, and from then the stain is cleansed and you don't create a machine of eternal revenge that locks up nonagenarians to this day. It's a Girardian end-the-cycle-of-violence thing.

The Dr Strangelove thing is an odd choice, but if you're familiar with the literature of the time, it seems to me that Thiel is referring (with an esoteric joke?) to the Faust myth and similar stories, which begins with the Protestant Reformation and culminates at the end of the 18th Century with Goethe. Goethe made Faust the paradigmatic literary figure of modernity in his time for a reason.

That are leading figures of the climate movement, rationality/AI safety, and e/acc. Now, I may not be very up to date with e/acc, but lumping Andreessen with the "luddites" seems a questionable choice.

This is just reading comprehension. Thiel is not saying all three are luddites, he's saying that the reason Marc Andreesen cannot be the Antichrist is because he's not popular like the luddites are.

Thiel is not saying all three are luddites, he's saying that the reason Marc Andreesen cannot be the Antichrist is because he's not popular like the luddites are.

Speaking of which, why is Marc Andreseen in the running to be the Antichrist again? I feel like I missed something. If you asked me to list the top 1000 people who might be the Antichrist...

If you asked me to list the top 1000 people who might be the Antichrist...

Larry Ellison is at least 4 of the top 10, right?

Yes.

Yeah, as I said in my comment below the OP here is doing a sort of maximally uncharitable reading. From subsequent responses, he clearly has contempt for Christianity and Thiel so, not shocking.

It’s not [Mark] Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular.

God damn.

I'm very confused about this speech and Peter Thiel's religious beliefs. Because as far as I can tell he doesn't practice Christianity in his daily life the only Christian denominations that would accept him being a homosexual are very liberal and don't care about Armageddon. And I can't see him being an Episcopalian. It just doesn't fit my mental model of him at all and I don't understand how a gay German techlord is giving talks like an Evangelical preacher?

Unless it's some kind of Jordan Peterson metaphor thing? But it doesn't appear to be. Can anyone explain where this came from?

I wondered if he might have swerved towards some branch of Orthodoxy, given his use of Greek theological terms, but as you say the gay thing does rule against it. Plus the warning about Caesaropapism, given that the prime example of that was the Byzantine church and the Eastern Churches in general don't think that Councils can be called without the authority of the Emperor (who is no more, unless we all accept Trump as the new Emperor?)

Warning Vance against the pope is very funny and possibly tongue-in-cheek, given the memes about pope Francis' death very soon after meeting Vance.

My personal theory is that it got to Thiel how often people accuse him of being the Antichrist and he wanted to deflect.

I saw a tweet that read,

Beyoncé released a song called "Bodyguard" to hide the Google search results about her yearlong affair with her bodyguard. Same thing is happening here with "Peter Thiel antichrist"

It doesn’t seem too far-fetched.

Writers on this show suck ass now dude, can't even keep character motives straight. No respect for the source material.

I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. [...] I wonder if the Churchill [approach] would have actually been healthier than the [Nuremberg trials].

Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.

Quite the opposite, really. Churchill of course wanted those involved in the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes tried and executed, but he was very hostile to any sort of indiscriminate mass revenge against senior German officers and officials.

In fact there was an episode during the Tehran Conference in November 1943 where Stalin made a "joke" about how they could just kill 50-100,000 of the most senior German leaders to prevent another war, and FDR responded (in a more humourous tone) that maybe 49,000 would be enough. Churchill, knowing of the Katyn massacre and much more cynical towards Stalin than the somewhat naïve FDR, stormed out and had to be convinced to come back and resume the conference.

This seems to be a very bad misreading of Thiel from my perspective, it seems obvious you just don't like him, or don't understand the religious themes he's pointing at, or both. I should say that I don't necessarily love Thiel, I disagree with him on many things, but I'm familiar with his overall line of argumentation.

Theil's whole shtick is that he's using the narrative and mythopoetic archetype of the antichrist as a sort of lens to understand the dangers of the modern world. I actually think he's quite right that the sort of eschatological reasoning and arguments that many technologists make around AI map quite well onto Christian apocalypse narratives, and combining these two lenses can open up a greater understanding of how these narratives of the end of the world can hijack our thinking.

The overall argument he makes is that while WW3 would indeed be horrible, the destruction may lead to a renewal down the road whereas the antichrist would lead to a permanent stagnation and total surveillance state, which could perpetuate unfathomably long amounts of time or perhaps eternally. In his view the latter is a far worse outcome, and I tend to agree.

As for the Dr. Strangelove piece, it's obvious he's just referencing Dr. Strangelove as a sort of archetype of the crazy scientist as well. This is an incredibly minor nitpick.

With regards to 'ending all technology,' Thiel has argued at length along with others that the stagnation hypothesis is real, in that technology has already been massively stagnating by a number of metrics including total factor production, and that if we stymie technology anymore it will basically end technological society as we know it. Or, at the very least stop progress.

I think overall the problem here, and with the Guardian article in general, is that you aren't very familiar with Thiel's overall thought and so do not understand the points he is making in their broader context. Perhaps part of why he tried to ban recording of his talks...

Theil's whole shtick is that he's using the narrative and mythopoetic archetype of the antichrist as a sort of lens to understand the dangers of the modern world. I actually think he's quite right that the sort of eschatological reasoning and arguments that many technologists make around AI map quite well onto Christian apocalypse narratives, and combining these two lenses can open up a greater understanding of how these narratives of the end of the world can hijack our thinking.

I mean, the criticism that ASI believers are just reinventing either god or the devil is not exactly new. In a way, it is pure Bulverism, "Eliezer has simply translated the ancient myth of the apocalypse for the technological age". It does not engage with his arguments at all.

I will grant you that once you have accepted that the AI safety people are just a silly doomsday cult, you can compare and contrast them with other silly doomsday cults such as early Christianity.

Yes, I have just the quotes without the broader context, for all I know, Thiel's lectures could not be on theology any more than Jesus' parable of the sower is about agriculture. Still, I think that if the antichrist is just a metaphor, he goes into incredible detail about the specifics. For example, he points out that the antichrist does not necessarily have to be a Jew -- which would be silly if there already was a common understanding with his audience that it is all just a metaphor, and no real person can be the antichrist.

Basically, if I read a version of the parable of the sower where Jesus goes into detail about soil acidity, bound nitrogen, rainfall and temperature patterns, and fertilizers, at some point I give up on trying to understand what the equivalent of the soil pH in the heart of man might be and conclude that he is talking about agriculture, after all.

With regards to 'ending all technology,' Thiel has argued at length along with others that the stagnation hypothesis is real, in that technology has already been massively stagnating by a number of metrics including total factor production, and that if we stymie technology anymore it will basically end technological society as we know it. Or, at the very least stop progress.

I think that compared to the 1970s, technological progress has slowed down a lot. But the cause is mostly diminishing returns. Moore's law only kinda keeps holding because the market exploded between the 8086 and today, so you can recoup your R&D costs from more customers. The discovery of the Higgs boson was immensely more expensive than that of the W and Z bosons. AI companies are burning through huge stacks of investor money to get moderate increases in model performance.

Technology stagnating will not mean the end of technological society. The fall of West Rome did not mean that people went back the the bronze age, after all. If technology stagnates to the point where kids will use the same computers as their parents used when they were kids, that is bad news for investors like Thiel, who depend on exponential growth (which in reality is often really and S-curve whose tail you have not reached).

Greta is not about stopping the research of new technologies, but about building more instances of very mature tech which work by burning fossil fuels. Eliezer is against frontier AI capability research until we make progress with alignment, which might take a few decades. However, in all the worlds where the current LLM paradigm will plateau soon, the costs are rather small, because current LLMs will not overcome the diminishing returns of most research fields. Without alignment, any AI which would be smart enough to overcome the general trend of stagnation would also be a potential x-risk for humans.

I will grant you that once you have accepted that the AI safety people are just a silly doomsday cult, you can compare and contrast them with other silly doomsday cults such as early Christianity.

Ahh, so from this statement if I'm being honest, you come off as having these views and sort of faking incredulity when in reality you simply have disdain for Christianity and aren't really interesting in seriously understanding Thiel's points.

Still, I think that if the antichrist is just a metaphor, he goes into incredible detail about the specifics.

Thiel is positing potential ways in which the antichrist could manifest into our world, not giving actual specifics he's more exploring the problem. Again, I'm not a Thiel-stan I don't agree with his theology, but given the follow up to this sentence, you're very much pattern matching a snarky atheist here lol. I'm not surprised you're not engaging with his metaphor, because from my perspective you're basically reading "antichrist" and going "oh this guy is just another religious idiot, anything he says must be bunk."

For instance, Jesus does indeed go into many specifics in his parables, calling out specific groups like the Pharisees, Samaritans, etc etc. For the parable of the mustard seed, He even goes into specifics of soil quality! Metaphors often employ specifics that are relevant to the audience.

Technology stagnating will not mean the end of technological society. The fall of West Rome did not mean that people went back the the bronze age, after all. If technology stagnates to the point where kids will use the same computers as their parents used when they were kids, that is bad news for investors like Thiel, who depend on exponential growth (which in reality is often really and S-curve whose tail you have not reached).

The general argument from stagnationists is something like, technological progress and increase in wealth keep the hoi polloi happy and sedate, if they stop getting their increase in goodies and wealth they will become angry, and eventually revolt. This revolt will effectively destroy technological society and take a while to build back up, if ever.

I'm not particularly convinced by it, but there is a logic there.

Ahh, so from this statement if I'm being honest, you come off as having these views and sort of faking incredulity when in reality you simply have disdain for Christianity and aren't really interesting in seriously understanding Thiel's points.

I agree that I was a bit uncharitable. That being said, I am unconvinced that I am entirely wrong. For example, calling Catholicism a doomsday cult would be silly. From my very laymen understanding, Early Christianity did have a bit of an apocalyptic streak (e.g. Book of Revelations, ca. 95 CE).

The general argument from stagnationists is something like, technological progress and increase in wealth keep the hoi polloi happy and sedate, if they stop getting their increase in goodies and wealth they will become angry, and eventually revolt. This revolt will effectively destroy technological society and take a while to build back up, if ever.

I guess his fears make more sense from the perspective of a billionaire. The current Gini index is only stable in periods of exponential growth. As long as every generation has a life substantially better than their parents, few care too much if the billionaires are owning more and more. One the cake stops growing, they will likely have strong opinions on its current distribution ratio, which might easily end the billionaire class and thus, civilization, from their point of view. ('Humans might survive, but without private helicopters and space tourism, as mere animals nesting in suburban homes' or something along the lines.)

I will grant you that the reading "perpetual technological growth is the only way to keep the present society stable, so anyone who threatens that (i.e. Greta, Eliezer) are agents of chaos, i.e. the antichrist." would be a self-consistent philosophical position.

Of course, the god of perpetual exponential growth is likely not Jesus Christ (who did not die on the cross to maximize shareholder value). For most of Christianity, technological progress was glacial slow. On the other hand, calling Greta the antimammon does not really have the same ring to it.

Good points, thanks for coming back around to this.

I agree that early Christianity was apocalyptic! Obviously not as apocalyptic as the insane cults we've seen throughout history, since they survived and spread incredibly well, but there was a strong bent towards it for sure.

the hoi polloi

Not to be all snooty and everything but following the original it's "hoi polloi", not "the hoi polloi". The phrase is a direct transliteration from ancient Greek of "οἱ πολλοί". In Greek οἱ is the nominative masculine plural definite article meaning "the" and πολλοί means "many". Saying "the hoi polloi" is like saying "the the masses", the first word is redundant.

It's a very minor thing and you can argue that English as a language has evolved and developed to the point where "the hoi polloi" is now grammatically correct (I'd even agree) but you gave me a chance to show off so of course I'm going to take it.

Thank you for clarifying! The Greeks at my church would be aghast at my ignorance of the language. Alas, I am part of hoi polloi after all.

Ancient Greek as a language is very different from modern Greek (more so than Chaucer is distinct from modern English), I don't know the first thing about modern Greek so please do your own research on how modern Greeks speak.

Hah well we do the Liturgy and such in ancient Greek so, they'd still be disappointed.

but you gave me a chance to show off so of course I'm going to take it.

It is a good way to distinguish yourself from the hoi polloi after all.

Indeed, finally all those Classics lessons paying off. I knew one day they'd come in useful. Perhaps in a different life I'd have read Greats at Balliol, but in this one at least I still get to use the bits and bobs I've picked up from here and there.

Yeah it's very true... not sure what Thiel's endgame is. He's quite obviously very Straussian so, he could just have layers of obfuscation around his "real" plan, who knows.

Yep that's the West today, two different cultures that hate each other and don't understand each other's mythology (not implying symmetrical ignorance, because one side understands the other a lot better than the other way around, but broadly speaking) laughing at how stupid each other is.

Which side understands the other better, do you think? I'm guessing the right understands the left better heh.

But yeah, it is a very common thing. I'm not trying to laugh at OP though, just pointing out that his tone of confused smug questioning is coming from an uninformed place.

Yeah the right understands the left better than the other way around. That might change in the near future though, because the right understand the left better out of necessity - it is more important to understand your opponent's theory of mind when you are weaker than them than when you are stronger than them.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/democrats-want-reach-young-male-voters-how-get-them-is-up-debate-2025-10-06/

Reports like these have been an almost weekly occurrence all year. To state the obvious that none of these articles include: The Democratic Party and liberals engage in bulverism and bulverism alienates people. But is the problem purely liberals alienating young men or are conservatives also successfully courting them?

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/democrats-want-reach-young-male-voters-how-get-them-is-up-debate-2025-10-06/

Reports like these have been an almost weekly occurrence all year. To state the obvious that none of these articles include: The Democratic Party and liberals engage in bulverism and bulverism alienates people. But is the problem purely liberals alienating young men or are conservatives also successfully courting them?

For a top level post on a fresh CW thread, I find this seems a bit lacking. While this would make a very civilized tweet, and you did include a few sentences of commentary, I think we should aim higher here.

If these have been weekly reports all year, you might want to include more than just one. Note that you can use the [link-name](http://link-target.example) syntax to format links. Lines starting with > introduce quotes, you can use that to give the audience the money quote.

--

Bulverism means that rather proving the claims of your opponent wrong, you find some evil reason why your opponent would believe them. In the context of SJ, I think a prime example would be 'obviously anyone who notices that the murder rate among Blacks is higher is incredibly racist'.

A decade ago, SJ was very popular among young people. My gut feeling is that SJ was always a bit more female than male leaning, but I also think that any political movement which is popular among 22yo female college students will also have male followers due to sex related reasons, if nothing else. A cishet man in college in 2016 wearing a MAGA hat would probably not have gotten laid a lot. So a related question would be if the young women today care less about politics, or if people just stopped having sex.

So one question would be what has changed about the young women.

It could be that as the median SJ proponent grew older, the next generation simply found them incredibly cringe, as younger people often find older people.

Or it could be that the change of medium. SJ thrived on tumblr, which was text-based. I am given to understand that kids these days mostly use short video platforms, perhaps this organically emphasizes different content.

I still don't understand this past-tense attitude, but in the wild I mostly see young women socializing around gay men and trannies if they're interacting with anyone other than another young woman.

The Democratic Party and liberals engage in bulverism

There's no shortage of right wing (various flavors) psychoanalyzing liberals and progressives. I've seen some of it on this very site.

And while it does alienate some people, the prevalence of Bulverism suggests that it must be useful for something. If I had to pin it down, I would say it's a sophisticated way of booing the outgroup and maintaining an epistemic seal against them.

Still not really hitting the level of effort expected for a top-level. This is not a link-aggregating site; it’s a discussion forum. Start the discussion!

Modhat off:

Wait, is this supposed to be ironic? Assume your opponents are bulverizing, then explain their error?

The whole point of the article, weak as it is, is that conservatives are also alienating young men…but not via idpol. Their leadership is every bit as geriatric and their flagship policy is more interesting to blue-collar boomers than to 20-somethings. And, of course, there’s the economy, which just sort of shambles along.

Democrats are trying a shotgun approach to find out which of these critiques actually hits. I think that’s normal for this point in an election cycle. But it’s also probably a moot point.

The whole point of the article, weak as it is, is that conservatives reformers are also alienating young men…but not via idpol. Their leadership is every bit as geriatric and their flagship policy is more interesting to blue-collar boomers than to 20-somethings. And, of course, there’s the economy, which just sort of shambles along.

Which is logical, because geriatric blue-collar boomers currently hold the balance of power in the US.

If you fail to get them on side or otherwise demoralize them (perhaps if an external threat is trumped up), reform just straight up loses- that's what happened in 2020 in the US. A similar dynamic contributed significantly to (if not the main reason for) a reform defeat in Canada a few months ago- just appealing to future generations' interests is not sufficient.

Trump manages to thread this needle in a way other politicians are unable; of course, being associated with blue-collar workers and the way they function and think, and having been embedded into their consciousness in the early '00s, is a massive advantage in this regard.

Seeing the many replies downthread, I'm reminded of two video clips I saw on Youtube sometime back.

One was one of several "highlight reel" compilations of Nov. 2024 election night coverage by various left-wing outlets (watching them go from confidence to doubt to cope to crashing out is hilarious), this one an all-black online show. At one point, the low performance of Dems with young men comes up, and one of the older women points out "Well, what do we have to offer them, except increased economic opportunity for everyone who isn't them?" (IIRC, the response was a half-hearted 'well, the other side is so evil we shouldn't have to earn anyone's vote'-type argument.)

The other was a short clip Shoe0nHead played from a left-wing Youtuber. This was a skinny, very gay young white man, and he was stumbling over his words trying to assert, in the most unobtrusive way possible, that there's actually something to the "male loneliness epidemic" — at one point he says "I'm trying to think of how to say this so my own side won't murder me" — and then his female guest (it might have been Taylor Lorenz) responds with "Well, the whole problem with the 'male loneliness epidemic' [eyeroll] idea is that it's an idea that centers men and men's problems."

(I also recall other lefty streamers making post-election comments about how, if you're a straight white male, that yes, the Left hates you; yes, Dem policies probably hurt you; yes, you'll probably do better with Trump in office than you would with Harris… but none of that matters, you have to vote D anyway. The Left don't have to earn your vote, they don't have to do anything for you — they are the Good Guys, and thus entitled to your vote. You have a moral duty to 'vote blue, no matter who.' When people aren't voting for the Democrats, that's not the fault of the party, it's the fault of the electorate; the party doesn't need to change, the voters do.)

You would think that gay men would have a better grasp of straight men, of the internal theory of mind of their fellows. But that doesn't happen. Why?

One obvious potential explanation: Gay men don't have to care about what women think of them.

(Source: some shit I saw on twitter but don't remember the exact account anymore)

I saw someone float the idea that gays now understand straight men much less well since it's easy to be out. A lot of gay men who work in Democratic politics have probably grown up in costal cities where being out has always been ok among everyone they interact with, and their social circles are either progressive men or other gay men. It seems fairly plausible at a glance but I wouldn't have much input beyond that.

The gays that won't just go along with the ideology are themselves being pushed out/see no reason to participate anymore?

Some Democrats have explicitly said they don't want black faces that don't want to toe the line. Why would gay men be any different?

I'm not seeing it. If the democrats could field another Obama the Republicans would get annihilated. If it wasn't for huge blunders like Harris and Hillary, and Trump being a lightning in a bottle candidate.

When push comes to shove, most young people in the western world are loaded up with liberal/leftist/progressive priors. You just need to properly activate them. To that extent Trump doesn't even represent a real world right wing movement. It's just soft liberalism with a lot of bloviating.

To top it all off, the only youth demographic that isn't completely in the tank for democrats is shrinking. Ethnic replacement was a winning strategy and the only thing Democrats need to do is wait.

[The Trump movement is] just soft liberalism with a lot of bloviating

Trump is neither an economic liberal (i.e., a libertarian), as he has a raging boner for tariffs, nor a social liberal, as he cuts down medicare and the like.

Even previous Republicans with impeccable right-wing credentials like George 'Waterboarder' Bush have refrained of sending the national guard into cities which had dared to vote against them.

Ethnic replacement was a winning strategy and the only the Democrats need to do is wait.

Yes, not only are They doing the Great Replacement, but also they have picked immigrants which will reliably vote for the Democrats for the next 1000 years. Everyone knows that Latinos have the commie gene, after all.

In the real world, things are different. Latinos are often strongly Catholic and have views on abortion which are roughly compatible with the Evangelicals. And Muslims are likewise sex-restrictive. If not for some ancient beef with the Christians (and the ME conflict), they would vote for whatever party proposes porn bans, which tend to be R.

Also, in a two-party system, both parties will adapt until they are seen as a viable alternative by the median voter. For example, neither party is campaigning on repealing the 19th because that would be immensely unpopular.

When you look at the tenets of Liberalism you can see Trump is a liberal. A soft one, but one none the less. George Bush was also a liberal to a large extent.

Yes, not only are They doing the Great Replacement, but also they have picked immigrants which will reliably vote for the Democrats for the next 1000 years. Everyone knows that Latinos have the commie gene, after all.

Yeah, maybe in a 1000 years democrats will have figured out how to reach the youth? I mean, apologies for the snark but I'd argue that it's our more immediate circumstance that make this topic relevant. Also, as an edited side note, the genetic impact on political ideals relating to collectivism and individualism is very real.

In the real world, things are different.

How? The brown youth consistently vote democrat regardless. That cold hard election data year in year out, ongoing for what, decades?. On top of that, Middle Easterners who vote for a 'right wing' authoritarian in their own country vote left in the country they migrated to.

So yeah, maybe in a 1000 years, when the last white man in the world is dead and buried and can no longer act as the evil boogeyman, the brown folks, being unburdened by his white supremacy, can finally act in accordance with their true faith?

Also, in a two-party system, both parties will adapt until they are seen as a viable alternative by the median voter. For example, neither party is campaigning on repealing the 19th because that would be immensely unpopular.

Right, but considering our usage of ideological terminology like 'right wing' what does that mean? The republicans will need to appeal to the ever more brown voting base that wants things the democrats are promising them. So what will become of the Republican party? How can it pretend to be 'right wing' at that point?

I feel like this only underscores how ethnic replacement has been a winning democrat strategy.

If it wasn't for huge blunders like Harris and Hillary

Harris was a blunder? I distinctly remember posters here telling me how great she is. How she broght on the vibe shift, how optimistic everyone is thanks to her, how all the kids are sending each other coconut memes. LANDSLIDE ENERGY!

2016 was a while back, but the only people I recall dooming about Hillary were the Bernie Bros.

If the democrats could field another Obama

They can't. Even if Obama could run for a third term he would just end up becomming as insufferable as Harris. This is what the Blue Tribe is now.

I distinctly remember posters here telling me how great she is.

Receipts please. This really does not mesh with my memory of the period; are you sure it was not just one stray poster somewhere leaving an outsize memory because you found what they said so outrageous?

Receipts please.

Even Ulyssessword came up with several as he was disproving me.

This really does not mesh with my memory of the period;

That's always how it works, doesn't it?

Even Ulyssessword came up with several as he was disproving me.

You and I clearly have a very different idea for what counts as "great". Those are the most lukewarm "great" takes I've seen in a long while.

Fine, let's say I overstated. How many pro-Democrat posters can you find that called her a "blunder"?

Even if Harris was a bad candidate, the blunder wasn't choosing her - it was allowing Biden to stay in the race for so long that there wasn't time to run a primary campaign and unite the party around a better candidate. At the point where Biden drops out, Harris is the least bad option.

I have a super liberal friend who told me, "If Biden had dropped out earlier and they'd had a real primary, and Kamala had won, I think I would have voted for her."

More comments

I distinctly remember posters here telling me how great she is.

I found it! Perhaps the only comment on the entire Motte that is unequivocably pro-Harris. Oh wait, I found one more, and a third that might count.

I suppose the plural is valid, but I expected a lot more than that when I skimmed through the entirety of those two threads.

Even Naraburns thought she would win IIRC, and I remember Netstack's top level comment how the vibe shift even affected his parents. I think there were two posts about kids sending memes (I didn't make thisbshit up, dude), but one of them was deleted shortly after it was posted. I think Netstack can confirm it's existence, because I asked him about it once (mods can see deleted posts), though I guess if it was deleted ao quickly, it couls have been some astroturf op.

I'll look for this stuff later (am on mobile now), but it's insane we're pretending that there wasn't a fever of pro-Kamala sentiment.

For the record, I put money on Trump as soon as he survived the assassination attempt.

I wrote that comment to wade into the ongoing “astroturf” debate. Given our userbase, there was a lot of countersignaling insistence that any positive coverage had been bought. No one could actually like Harris that much.

While I wouldn’t have called her “great,” she was so much more credible than mecha-Biden. Trump fans might not remember how absolutely miserable Democrats had been over the preceding month or so. I suspect this was enough for most of them to feel a rush of relief.

My mom still has a painted Harris/Walz rock (?) in her back garden.

My mom still has a painted Harris/Walz rock (?) in her back garden.

My stepmother named a beloved houseplant "Kamala".

I remember Netstack's top level comment how the vibe shift even affected his parents.

Here

And that wasn't about how great she is. It's about how great other people find her (and yes, how she brought the vibe shift). There were a couple real examples downthread from that, but the overall sentiment in that thread is still negative.

I think you're presenting a fringe opinion (on the motte, not in the States as a whole) as a consensus, or at least a major fraction. The threads I saw were overall negative on Harris, though some comments did contain more equivocation than I remembered.

I think you're presenting a fringe opinion (on the motte, not in the States as a whole) as a consensus, or at least a major fraction.

Ok, hold on, this is likely poor communication on my part. I didn't mean to say or imply that, because the majority of people here rooted for the other side. I mean of the people who rooted for the Democrats, the majority thought Kamala was pretty good. Maybe "great" was an overstatent, but even that is a far better portrayal of the sentiment than "blunder".

I didn't want to chime in originally because I didn't know what comments you were seeing. From my end I generally thought the sentiment was, "Kamala is not a great candidate but Biden is clearly done for so maybe we have a chance. Trump is pretty widely disliked after all." The excitement was more from Biden dropping out than enthusiasm for Harris.

I think "good" or "great" is asking the wrong question. The emotions Democrats and friends were feeling in summer 2024 was driven by "Much better than 2024-vintage Biden" and, to a lesser extent "Much better than Hilary Clinton". Also the campaign was basically competent (as demonstrated by the Dems doing better in swing states where there was a lot of campaigning than they did in deep red or blue states where there wasn't), which was a pleasant surprise.

There are basically two Kamala-sympathetic stories about 2024:

  1. The Democrats lost the election on the state of the economy, and Harris did surprisingly well to keep the election close. People who support this view like to compare the Democrats' performance in 2024 to other incumbent parties in rich democracies, who mostly lost by landslides.
  2. 2024-vintage Kamala was an okay (not great - nobody ever thought she was great as far as I can see) candidate but the 2020 primary campaign had been so crazy that she had "had" to say a bunch of discrediting stuff that she didn't manage to run away from, with free sex changes for trans illegal immigrant criminals the headliner.

The result of a close election is almost always multi-causal, but I think the economic competence story holds together best. 2024 wasn't a base mobilisation election - both campaigns got their respective bases out and were always going to. The election was decided by swing voters. And when people spoke to swing voters what they heard was "The prices are too #!@# high and the Democrats don't seem to care." There were some obvious-in-hindsight unforced errors by the Biden administration which made the prices higher than they needed to be - the too-big stimulus in 2021 and the big infrastructure bill which spent a lot of money without building any infrastructure.

I distinctly remember posters here telling me how great she is. How she brought on the vibe shift, how optimistic everyone is thanks to her, how all the kids are sending each other coconut memes.

Press X to doubt. Harris's online presence was so fake it was pathetic. Not even the usual shills showed any enthusiasm, (ignoring the Eglin Air Force Base glowies on reddit)

It's hard to remember because for some reason there really was a major loss of memory once Trump was elected. I'm not blaming anyone, and I'm not being sarcastic; it was true. I remember the day before, almost everyone in the Motte lamenting that Harris was going to win, and the day after everyone taking about how Harris sucked and Trump's win was inevitable, and conservatives were in such a strong position in the culture war. I'm not sure how it happened like this, and I don't think it was exclusive to the Motte, either, but I'm not certain about that. But it's a really strange phenomenon.

I think the turning point for conservatives was actually the first assassination attempt, not the election itself.

Maybe. I remember some talk here about how the attempt won Trump the election, but I remember that being short lived, maybe a week or a weekend. I distinctly remember in this forum people being very fatalistic about Harris's victory up until the night of the election.

A significant percentage of people really believed the soft or hard version of the stolen election theory, such that they didn't believe Harris could lose. Similar to how many if not most Eagles fans thought the Chiefs couldn't lose in the super bowl, even when neutral analysts would give them the advantage at every position but kicker and QB. Some percentage of Harris belief was really "the election is fake" belief.

I thought Harris was playing for an honorable second from the assassination on. She didn't manage it.

I dunno, yeah I saw people calling the election the moment it happened, but it sure didn't feel so certain to me.

I'm yet another commenter who remembers the 107 days very differently wrt to the enthusiasm around Harris by many Dem-leaning posters on this forum. I distinctly remember multiple regular such commenters explicitly talking positively about how different and positive this "vibe shift" was on the ground towards Harris, especially about the "weird" attack that Walz & she were pushing heavily about JD Vance (and conservatives in general).

Of course, this was mocked just as heavily here and in other places. One rather common response I recall was a meme format on /r/stupidpol (subreddit focused on Marxism/socialism/leftism with an explicit disdain and rejection of identity politics) where people would make up fake anecdotes about going to the local "McSchlucks" to hang out with "the boys" where tough blue collar workers were all gushing over how they were a little skeptical about this fancy-schmancy lawyer Harris lady, but after looking a bit deep into her policies and considering the kinds of things Trump has done, they feel like she's really the one that speaks to them, their values, for what's good for their daughters and wives and sisters, etc. Basically the "Man Enough for Harris" advertisement in text form, as parody, before the ad was ever created.

Now, I did fully expect most mainstream Subreddits and news outlets to buy in hook-line-sinker to Harris's message and to push it as pure true believers, and that was indeed what happened, but I admit to being surprised by seeing the sheer volume of that here at the Motte. I consider The Motte good not only for providing a space for people with non-mainstream opinions to present, argue, and discuss their cases, but also for being a space where people with mainstream opinions tend to hold themselves up to higher standards, and seeing this was a disappointment to me that challenged this belief.

but I admit to being surprised by seeing the sheer volume of that here at the Motte.

You're just making stuff up dude.

I was over at my dads house today helping with some household chores. He lives in a very rural area of a very red state. At the end of the work we went to one of the nearby country bars. It’s the kind of place that farmers, truckers, legit cowboy boot wearers and the working class go to unwind with a cold one.

Vice President Harris was on the TV and the local gun store owner said to his auto mechanic (friends since high school),

“You know what? She ain’t so bad. The economy is recovering, nobody’s rioting, and we’re standing up on the world stage again. Can’t believe I’m saying this but Ol’ Oakland Kam’s got my vote this year.”

I looked around and all I saw were heads nodding in agreement. I heard a few calls of “Yes sir” and “Damn Straight” from the men around me. Even saw the lonely ball cap wearing farmer in the corner raise his drink with a nod.

Is this a quote, or an anecdote?

Edited to remove unnecessary antagonism.

To be fair to yourself, the antagonism may not have been entirely unwarranted since I just kinda dropped this without elaborating. Sorry. RoyGBivens is correct, it's a copypasta from shortly after Biden dropped out and Harris took over the nomination.

I intended this to be another example of what 07mk was talking about on /r/stupidpol.

It's a copypasta from July 2024.

Intellectuals are more capable than the hoi polloi of elaborate self-deception. I suspect that at least some of us here are immersed in the New York Times reading, granola-eating, NOVA-commuting segment of the American population where things like seeing Kamela Harris as a viable candidate are in vogue.

Intellectuals are more capable than the hoi polloi of elaborate self-deception.

To get on my favorite tangent, even though I have high skepticism of most social science, I do believe that the best evidence right now indicates that this is true. As such, intellectuals have no excuse for being unaware that they themselves are more susceptible to self-deception than the hoi polloi. And if they choose not to take extra steps - more than they expect a typical layman to take - to guard against the possibility of them deceiving themselves, they are admitting that they prioritize their own biases over truth.

Which is all well and good, but I just wish people who did this would be open about it instead of deceiving others about their embrace of self-deception over truth.

Which is all well and good, but I just wish people who did this would be open about it instead of deceiving others about their embrace of self-deception over truth.

one of their self delusions is that they are unbiased of course. Rationalism isn't about rational thought but rationalizing our own biases.

One of the posters here (I think his name is Anti Populist now) posted the Seltzer poll. I, among others, pointed out how absurd the cross sectionals were and how inconsistent it was with prior polls. He kept on ignoring it predicting a Harris victory right up until she lost.

I rubbed his nose in it because when people make predictions on vibes while ignoring the obvious holes they should be reminded to improve their thought processes going forward. He then blocked me. So yeah, people here were gung ho on harris until she lost.

Harris's online presence was so fake it was pathetic. Not even the usual shills showed any enthusiasm

I agree with the first sentence and disagree with the second. It absolutely was fake, but every left-winger was going along with it.

I suppose they were just hail marying their last and only hope of stopping Trump 2 though. You can easily see she wasn't regarded as a great candidate before she was anointed.

Even if Obama could run for a third term he would just end up becomming as insufferable as Harris.

I am absolutely convinced that Obama would win a third term if he was able to run. Polling reflects that as far as I know, by a substantial margin. Not only is he uniquely good for black turnout but he could run on a unity message to appeal to enough suburban whites, and he wouldn’t need that many, to win.

Obama’s almost unique strength was that he could be a lot of things to a lot of people in a different way than a ‘classical’ superstar politician - like Margaret Thatcher or Donald Trump - can. The latter have different audiences who interpret their personalities and political identities in different ways, but their actual brands were relatively consistent.

Obama actually didn’t have a consistent brand. He meticulously (perhaps as a consequence of his own unusual and fractured identity) cultivated multiple distinct personalities. Obama the hero for millennials, the reformer, the “change” candidate against tired old Hillary and McCain, the candidates of the financial crisis and the Iraq war. Obama the devout Black Christian initially skeptical of gay marriage who, unlike so many other successful black men, married a (dark skin) black woman, had a beautiful family, put on that slight southern accent with more than a hint of AAVE when speaking to black churches in Georgia and Alabama. Obama the technocrat, the Yale lawyer, the internationalist, the son of a diplomat, who hired all the bright young things out of Harvard and Georgetown and governed a cabinet of experts, the European Obama.

In what way are the multiple interpretations of Obama different than the multiple interpretations of Trump? It was a pretty similar phenomenon.

Obama said Gay Marriage couldn't work because when a man and a woman get married "God is in the mix." Dan Savage told me, a faithful reader of his column in the back of The Onion, that Obama didn't really mean it, he was just saying that to get elected. We should vote for Obama to advance Gay Rights. Trump waves a pride flag and has famous trans friends. Evangelicals tell me he doesn't really mean it, he was just saying that to get elected. We should vote for Trump to roll back the Gay Agenda.

Obama said he was going to end wars. He didn't really mean it. Trump said he was going to end wars. He didn't really mean it.

Obama talked a lot of trash about corporations. He didn't really mean it, unless they broke woke taboos. Trump talks a lot of trash about corporations. He didn't really mean it, unless they annoy him personally.

Obama and Trump both had cults of personality in which what they said was what their fans believed, regardless of any past statements.

There isn’t a there in the article. It mentions podcasts, the price of beer, and ads, including a new one about republicans literally abducting your immigrant girlfriend… but not changes in policy, just different messaging. This is the problem, right?

This is the problem, right?

Maybe? Democrat messaging is really, really, really, abysamally, unfathomably bad. It is so bad that getting back at the people responsible for terrible Democrat messaging is a substantive policy position of the Republicans.

I mean, just look at this shit. Marginal improvements won't fix this, but a complete paragidm shift might.

but not changes in policy, just different messaging. This is the problem, right?

It depends on your perspective. If you're a true blue Democrat, then your fundamental belief is that your party's platform is fantastic. If somebody doesn't like your party or its platform, then the problem can't be that your platform is lacking - it can only be that the person is unaware of how fantastic your platform really is. If that's the case, then messaging is really the only thing that should change.

If somebody doesn't like your party or its platform, then the problem can't be that your platform is lacking - it can only be that the person is unaware of how fantastic your platform really is.

Or, alternately, that the person is an evil Fascist bigot who hates all good things because they're so evil and hateful.

The Democrats lost young men to the party of, “hold still for your mugshot before you watch Riley Reid take her clothes off.”

It’s easy to get bogged-down in policy minutia here. Normies don’t care about that stuff, even if they say they do. Democrats lose because they are lame. Voting for Trump is fun. It’s thrilling. It feels like raiding a WOW dungeon with 77 million of your best buds. Voting Democrat feels like going to church, except you know that God isn’t real.

There is no reason to think that this is a permanent or even semipermanent phenomenon. All it takes is for a populist upstart to sweep the 2028 Dem primary by steamrolling the wokescolds and pro-Israel donors.

Democrats lose because they are lame.

This – perceived lameness – is pervasive across the west. The sad thing (for democrats in the US, or progressives or liberals or lefties or whatever they’re called elsewhere) is that in general they are compassionate people, with empathy towards others, especially those who have fallen through the cracks, and they’re interested more in civic society than in individual gain, but online media has no proven way of effectively showing the OTHERS whom they have compassion for. Which makes them look lame. Whether they are or not is largely irrelevant because perception creates reality.

In contrast, online media does a great job of showcasing and promoting individual gain, thereby attracting all those who are primarily driven by it.

But even more importantly, because all humans are a jigsaw of mismatching parts, and nobody is either 100% compassionate or 100% individualistic, this means you get the strange phenomenon that even people who are 25% individualistic, say, are exposed to a lot more content (and a lot more compelling content) that is individualist in nature, and so the prevailing wind is that those people gravitate slowly from “left” (compassionate) to “right” (individualistic) by dint of the air they’re breathing in online settings much more than carefully thought out worldviews and philosophies.

TLDR - liberals look lame online, therefore they are lame, therefore most people gravitate towards conservatives over time.

The compassion is typically abstract and superficial.

but online media has no proven way of effectively showing the OTHERS whom they have compassion for.

The social media is very effective in showing the others they have compassion for, which is why people are drifting away from them - the tent cities and open drug markets, the all male boats docking at the shores of Europe, the torrent of people through the border, the sheer foreignness of London, the pride parades, the MtF trans that look creepy at best, the scars from top surgery, the women that brag about having an abortion, the cohort of trans children in Hollywood.

The same way Syrskyi is the best performing general in the war on the Russians' side, the suicidal empathy of the left is the best ad for repubicans. At least our crazies are crazy in mostly comprehensible way (except abortion)

A saw a twitter post responding to some leftwinger who was failing to comprehend why people cared that Charlie Kirk was murdered. The clapback went something like "Imagine this happened to someone you actually feel empathy for, like a black rapist".

A core part of the problem that @WhiningCoil was posting about downthread is that if the Democrat Party as a whole got the Biblical choice to spare my white/Jewish teenage daughter, or the non-white career criminal who would otherwise rape and kill her, I would bet they'd save the criminal. Maybe that's a false perspective based on their fringe. The odds are definitely not 10-0, but maybe it's below 5-5, maybe 2-8.

But with the Republicans it's 0-10, no matter the race or Islamicity of the criminal. Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, and some people have been openly reveling in cruelty for 5+ years.

This – perceived lameness – is pervasive across the west. The sad thing (for democrats in the US, or progressives or liberals or lefties or whatever they’re called elsewhere) is that in general they are compassionate people, with empathy towards others, especially those who have fallen through the cracks, and they’re interested more in civic society than in individual gain, but online media has no proven way of effectively showing the OTHERS whom they have compassion for.

No, they aren't. That's their self-image, and their advertisement of themselves. But their compassion is very selective. They feel for the criminal, but not really the victim. They feel even less for the would-be victim who defends himself. They are willing to let civic society fall apart rather than harm the wretched who are actively destroying it. They feel for the member of some designated oppressed group, but not for the member of some designated oppressor group. Even when a member of that oppressor group is in fact being harmed, and begs for their compassion, they will tell them that they are the oppressors and deserve what they were getting. I've seen that happen, and be widely supported, in a progressive mileu.

The populists ARE the wokescolds. Most of the politically active base of the democrats loathe them for being neo-liberal/not-socialists.

I might be in a horrible filter bubble, but I encounter obnoxious leftists IRL several times a week and they seem pretty "popular"

The local base of the democrats, in the sense of actual party members, have a pretty serious case of Old. Statistically the party is run by old black people with surprisingly moderate opinions.

All it takes is for a populist upstart to sweep the 2028 Dem primary by steamrolling the wokescolds and pro-Israel donors.

That’s the whole problem though, Democrat Party bylaws and primary structure make it much more resistant to any kind of populist takeover. The leadership can jam the throttle and point the plane right at a mountain and there’s not much the rank and file can do to stop them.

there’s not much the rank and file can do to stop them.

All they have to do is check the box labeled “Ocasio-Cortez”. That’s it. Nothing can stop them if they decide to check the box.

AoC is very much a wokescold.

How is AOC not a wokescold?

All they have to do is check the box labeled “Ocasio-Cortez”. That’s it. Nothing can stop them if they decide to check the box.

That is the establishment. Has been for many years. There's nothing she says that Pelosi and Schumer do not, or isn't gospel at Harvard.

I you want actual left-populism you'd need Fetterman to make a magic-level recovery (likely he needs to be smarter and a better communicator than pre-stroke) and his wife to die in a mysterious boating accident. AOC is many things, she used to be hot, which was rare for a politician. She is loud in a fun way, which was rare for a politician before. But she has always marched lockstep with the establishment. Her primary challenge to Schumer, if it materializes, will be a "50 Stalins" primary, not an anti-establishment one. The critique will be that he is insufficiently Democrat, and of course it will not be true, but that is what it will be.

All it takes is for a populist upstart to sweep the 2028 Dem primary by steamrolling the wokescolds and pro-Israel donors.

The democrats are doing their darndest to not make that happen. Their progressive wing has dug in and doubles down. I wonder if it will manage to cost them third presidency in a row.

Somehow this post feels nearly maximally uncharitable to both parties and young men. Have Democrats become too conformist to be cool? I suppose. Are Republicans a party with an excess of unconstrained young male energy? I suppose. Do young men need an outlet for their energy? Yes.

But its not like the Democrats stumbled into being "lame" (your word). It was part of a calculated electoral strategy that prioritized other things, and necessarily excluded male interests, particularly those of noncriminal working males. That left the GOP with an opening that they seized on and since libertarianism has always been unpopular with voters since the franchise was expanded beyond a few landowning men in New England, discarding that in favor of a little paternalism that sounds more masculine was a winning message.

They aren’t just conformists, in many cases they’re the old church ladies telling you anything you find fun is somehow wrong. You can’t enjoy foreign food, clothing, or music. You can’t like your own either, you can’t like traditionally masculine things, or traditional things in general. It’s just a narrow rather boring and uninteresting slice of things that democrats think are okay to like unironically.

There's also just a lot of hypocrisy. I can't know for sure but I suspect things would be better if the same people wagging their finger didn't support their favored groups being assholes all the time in the exact ways they attack. The system might have at least been stable without that.

It's less a church lady enforcing the rules with an iron fist on everyone and more that teacher who clearly has a favorite and is doing such a bad job hiding it that they've emboldened their worst instincts.

Democrats don't want people to enjoy foreign food? Any time I go to DC all I get is swamped with claims that the locals (all Dems) know the best Ethiopian place in the world (of course all these places inevitably suck because they pick them based on it being a unique choice rather than good).

No no.

There is something I think that is adjacent to what you are talking about which is cultural appropriation, which is frowned upon. But that is basically me, a white guy, starting an Ethiopian food restaurant that is actually good and making profits from it. That is what would be frowned upon.

Calling them old church ladies is pretty unkind to old church ladies. My grandma is an old church lady. She frowns upon premarital sex and excessive drinking. I have found no real evidence that either of those activities are good in the long term. A progressive scold, from my perspective, is a sort of double negative. They frown upon scorning bad things, but rarely have strong opinions on what is actually good. An example is that they might be fit themselves, but are not open to criticizing fat people for being fat. Or they don't steal from retail establishments, but think criminal prosecution of retail theft is wrong.

I said “church lady” in the sense of the 1990s Dana Carvey sketch. The idea being basically “you can’t enjoy things normal people like, because Satan.” And that’s kind of the read I get on a lot of Woke is exactly that — everything normal people like or believe in is flawed, wrong, sinful, and “good people” don’t do those things.

The Democrats lost young men to the party of, “hold still for your mugshot before you watch Riley Reid take her clothes off.”

Alternately, young men have been using VPNs to protect their identity from liberal attempts to make their life worse for so long, the fact that now VPNs are useful to get around conservative porn blocks is a non-issue. The friction was caused under the far left cancellation hysteria.

Did any young man actually save their professional life by buying a VPN? Unlikely. But lots of the advertising catered to that fear, and thus they were purchased with that in mind.

Alternately, young men have been using VPNs to protect their identity from liberal attempts to make their life worse for so long

Basically nobody does this outside of persecution fantasies.

Most people are lurkers and not posters to begin with. What exactly is the threat model for a lurker reading some chud website like TheMotte dot org? The site gets hacked an every IP that ever visited is released?

The Internet use patterns that 90% of young men want to keep private involve cooming rather than intellectual heresy.

Even posters have more to fear from revealing too many details about themselves voluntarily than from attackers. And no VPN is going to save you there.

The Internet use patterns that 90% of young men want to keep private involve cooming rather than intellectual heresy.

Most people are lurkers and not posters to begin with. What exactly is the threat model for a lurker reading some chud website like TheMotte dot org?

Funny you should mention that!.

This is posting rather than lurking and on top of that these true brexit geezers used their personal email addresses.

Among the donors were several associated with email addresses traceable to police and other public officials.

If you're donating to the Rittenhouse Foundation under, essentially, your real name, you are wasting money on that VPN subscription.

From 'persecution fantasies' to 'well they should have better opsec' is a hell of a redirect.

I should be clear that the persecution fantasy here is specifically that young men are at risk of having their IP addresses traced by a visual basic GUI written by The Liberals unless they use a VPN (which they are all doing), hence why I quoted "young men have been using VPNs to protect their identity from liberal attempts to make their life worse for so long."

I don't argue that doing stuff you don't want people to find out about under your real name is inadvisable. It's just that VPNs are neither necessary or sufficient to avoid this situation.

The Democrats lost young men to the party of, “hold still for your mugshot before you watch Riley Reid take her clothes off.”

Defending porn would actually be a good issue for Democrats to take up if they had any hope to be credible about it. The problem is that there's too much history of feminists attacking porn (don't bring up sex positive feminists, the difference between them is that sex negatives are against making porn and sex positives are against men watching porn), too much history (10 years plus) of left wingers agitating against busty women in videogames and too much history of democrats loving heavy handed content moderation.

Pornhub lost mastercard and visa in 2020 due to an article written by a journalist who wanted to use that as a springboard for his gubernatorial run, as a democrat.

I have seen a few ads out there recently that are clearly right-coded and anti-porn, usually treating it as a personal failing (addiction). I don't think there are that many "porn is a great thing, actually" advocates out there, and most that exist are probably left-of-center by a decent margin.

I could see the median male voter being both a consumer of the, uh, content, but also thinking it should be less accessible. Not high confidence in that, though.

I would prefer there to be less goonslop in mainstream purely based on aesthetics. It's like the reverse of the "characters must be shapeless agender blobs" trend, and the reverse of the bad thing is not always the good thing.

No, Hestia does not have to be a generic big titty asian girl.

No, Hestia does not have to be a generic big titty asian girl.

Agreed. Small tits are underrated!

I think you're blundering straight into the greatest problem with anti-porn sentiment (though this is probably more of a problem with anti-porn sentiment from the left than anti-porn sentiment from the right): its bleedover into censorship of non-porn. Non-porn has a much harder time adapting to the conditions of porn censorship than porn does.

Hestia does not have to be a generic big titty asian girl.

But it's so nice that she is ;-)

Yeah, but I would rather her be that than the other alternative.

Disagreed. Not every character has to be eye candy. Or white.

  • -10

They do if you want to make money.

If you believe whites have all the money and you believe Representation Matters, then naturally if you want to make money they need to be eye candy and white.

I don't believe representation matters, personally, but hey, given how much people seem to care about it then that's the argument. And people like eye candy more than eye ugly.

"Not every room in my house needs to be aesthetically pleasing! Where's the variety? Where's the tension? If every room in my house is painted pleasant colours, I will take aesthetic pleasure for granted and I won't appreciate those rooms as much! That's why I painted my living room traffic cone orange with bright pink molding."

Also I don't know why you would assume a Japanese production with Japanese artists working in a Japanese style would make a white character, but they didn't. She's mukokuseki.

Edit: lol that was you calling her a big tiddy Asian girl, so I think even you know you're being reductive.

There's a difference between being aesthetically pleasing and everything made out of diamond blocks or the equivalent. There is nuance between making everyone the same hot woman with minor variations and making everyone blobs. For the record, I think Hades II achieves that nuance decently.

Hyperpalatable aesthetics is the mcdonalds of art. I like some mcdonalds every once in a while, I don't want to eat it all the time. And not just because it's unhealthy.

mukokuseki

TIL the word for "basically white, or close enough that dark skin-fearing consumers won't raise a fuss".

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"Not every room in my house needs to be aesthetically pleasing! Where's the variety? Where's the tension? If every room in my house is painted pleasant colours, I will take aesthetic pleasure for granted and I won't appreciate those rooms as much! That's why I painted my living room traffic cone orange with bright pink molding."

The thing that strikes me about your friend’s building — if I understood you correctly — is that somehow in some intentional way it is not harmonious. That is, Moneo intentionally wants to produce an effect of disharmony. Maybe even of incongruity. I find that incomprehensible. I find it very irresponsible. I find it nutty. I feel sorry for the man. I also feel incredibly angry because he is fucking up the world.

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I don't think there are that many "porn is a great thing, actually" advocates out there, and most that exist are probably left-of-center by a decent margin.

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

There's something special about using a phrase coined for people who are never nude to describe porn advocates.

Yep. I was gonna go with one of the casual exhibitionists to really nail down (hurr hurr) the disjunction, but most of them are either relatively apolitical or overtly lefties.

I don't think there are that many "porn is a great thing, actually" advocates out there, and most that exist are probably left-of-center by a decent margin.

Yes, but if the Democrats wantes to capitalize on porn, that would be the position they would have to take. 'We know you're pigs, we want to let you' as summarized by hydroacetylene loses even to 'That stuff is disgusting and we're going to make you stop'

What young, working class males- most of them nontraditional Republican voters- have told me about why they're voting for Trump now:

  1. He's not afraid to offend people, and sometimes that's what stops politicians from getting stuff done. This is, essentially, just true, even if you can argue that Trump isn't a solution.
  2. No tax on overtime/tips. This is, in a lot of the working class's view, the first thing the government has ever done to make their lives easier*. And young men are not generally beneficiaries of welfare, so in their specific case this is literally the first cash handout they've ever been promised in exchange for their vote.
  3. He's not beholden to Israel- while he's less pro-Israel than I would have thought he was going to be this time last year, I admit I'm pretty baffled by this one.
  4. Kamala this that and the other. Fact remains, democrats can't seem to stop and consider 'this chick is an awful screaming karen who can't even speak coherently' as a reason not to make her a party frontman.
  5. LGBT, especially the T. Most of these guys are 'pro gay rights', even if they maybe think 'little fags' are just wrong. They're upset about pushing LGBT indoctrination everywhere, and they don't like trans.

*There's also a tendency to identify Trump with stimmy checks or extra unemployment for laid-off blue collar workers- even if these people understand that these policies were bad for the economy, 'the government was just gonna give it to rich people anyways'.

What about their opinion on the Israel situation do you find baffling in particular?

Trump being anything other than pro-israel?

Oh of course. Your mention of this time last year made me think there was something election related involved and I got lost in trying to remember what the youths were saying back then.

The democrats lost young men when they stopped staffing young men. The democratic party is split between the faces (who're men) and the staffers (no straight men). The party, from 2nd in command to bottom, is run by women and feminine (I don't mean this as an insult) men. The party talks to men as the 'other' because they are the 'other'.

It's clear that the democratic party would rather see Newsom and Buttigieg fall into a ditch once an electable woman shows up. Unfortunately for them, they can't get a woman elected, so the 2 of them are tolerated. A conventional straight man is only welcomed into the democratic fold if they are muslim or black (and usually communist + nepo baby to boot). Zohran and Hasan being the canonical examples.

In 2022-23, the tech industry cleared itself of the woke scolds. People were fired, replaced and sidelined. Companies rebranded, some quietly some loudly. There has been no such reckoning within the democratic party. We might be seeing the first signs of it, with Bari Weiss taking over CBS. But for the most part, the internal rhetoric of the democratic party is stuck in the last decade. The only outreach they're capable of doing is to the left of them. And that's why the AOC/DSA wing is ascendant.

Today, I can see that milquetoast commentators such as Ezra Klien and Derek Thompson sustain an uncomfortable alliance with the democratic party. I can't imagine how the average young man (who is definitely to the right of them, more patriarchal and more traditionally masculine) could feel welcome in the same democratic party.

You are aware that the DNC chair is a white man and 5 of the 11 board seats are also men, 7 of 13 if you include the ranking House and Senate leaders who serve on the board? You are also aware that local Democratic committees are composed of 1 man and 1 woman per precinct by rule? And I don't expect you to be aware of this, but in Allegheny County at least, the local board is mostly straight, white men. Are you also aware that these positions are elected and there are usually plenty of vacancies due to lack of interest and unwillingness to actually put the work in, and that it's not that hard to get on the ballot? Do you really think that men are turning away from the Democratic Party because they can't get work with them?

Looking at the DNC leadership page, Jason Rae is gay. Stuart Appelbaum and Chuck Schumer are Jews. Only Ken Martin and Chris Korge appear to be straight, white men.

Jews are white.

Only until the time comes to denounce the whites.

Stuart Applebaum looks white as all, what are you on about?

Stuart Applebaum

He looks jewish to me, not white.

Berg, Witz, Baum, Stein,

I'll leave off the rest of the chant.

I'm speaking of young men aged 18-35. My opinions are colored by personal anecdotes from deep-blue cities.

I haven't met a non-communist straight man who has 'volunteered for the democrats' or 'worked on the campaign'. On the other hand, I know multiple women and LGBT men who have done so. I am the eldest of a family of male cousins. The college aged (18-25) cousins only express positive emotions about democrats when around women their age (reasons obvious).

I could be in an echo chamber. But, it sure feels like the truth.

You are also aware that local Democratic committees are composed of 1 man and 1 woman per precinct by rule?

I was not aware of this. Good rule. I went back and looked at the numbers. Now seems as good as time as any to be a young man in democratic party. A healthy number (~50%) of the young democratic leaders (major mayors, house reps, senators) are under 45 men. Try as I may, the real numbers don't match my intuitions.

I still have my suspicions. But, I stand corrected.

Why would any of them want to be around young politically-active democrats? They'll have to grin through a bunch of "straight white men, amirite?" Comments, every conversation about media will inevitably turn into how queer something is or how problematic it is for being from the wrong era. They'll be asked their pronouns as a social formality. All the women who don't have dicks will be they/thems in an open demi-asexual polycule, and while walking to wherever it is they're volunteering, the female volunteers will notice that a man is walking in the same direction as them and be performatively afraid. And whatever they're volunteering for, it'll be to do with People of Color somehow.

I don't see the appeal. Leftist Activism is a subculture/social scene larping as a political movement, full of utterly insufferable people.

I could be in an echo chamber. But, it sure feels like the truth.

Surely all echo chambers feel like the truth? That's the function of an echo chamber.

I haven't met a non-communist straight man who has 'volunteered for the democrats' or 'worked on the campaign'.

As a (admittedly bi, but married to a woman) man in a deep blue city, I'll raise my hand. A half lifetime ago, I spent several years getting my paychecks from Democratic campaigns and the DNC (depending on when in the cycle we were).

Thinking about my ex-coworkers (who were mostly male) I've stayed in touch with, I'd say a third to a half are now thoroughly disenchanted with the Democratic Party, with the turn toward identity-based politics being a repeated, major point brought up by them.

Though none of us have voted Republican, AFAIK.

I have some family and friends who work in DC as part of national Democrat political strategy.

They are comically far left, woke, and every extreme stereotype.

Outright caricatures who literally run out of the room if you push back against their political positions in the most mild way.

We might be seeing the first signs of it, with Bari Weiss taking over CBS.

This has nothing at all to do with woke - this is very explicitly to deal with growing anti-Israel sentiment rather than the culture war.

But for the most part, the internal rhetoric of the democratic party is stuck in the last decade. The only outreach they're capable of doing is to the left of them. And that's why the AOC/DSA wing is ascendant.

Well, they did drum out a sizable fraction of the jews, which is an enormous self-own for human capital. Especially given the range of folks replacing them.

But is the problem purely liberals alienating young men or are conservatives also successfully courting them?

Probably more the former. Team Red isn't offering that much, but at least they aren't broadcasting their disdain at every opportunity.

Disclaimer: I'm middle-aged and not terribly in contact with the yutes. But as a straight white male with a job, I occasionally wonder what exactly Team Blue could ever do to entice me to vote for them in a national election (short of entirely abandoning 75%+ of their policies).

But as a straight white male with a job, I occasionally wonder what exactly Team Blue could ever do to entice me to vote for them in a national election (short of entirely abandoning 75%+ of their policies).

I’ve often wondered this myself and I’m not sure I’ve ever come up with a good answer. I wonder what other Motte users would say for this question

I occasionally wonder what exactly Team Blue could ever do to entice me to vote for them in a national election

Get a biological woman to go on a date with me with a positive, collaborative attitude and not talk about Gaza.

Get a biological woman to go on a date with me with a positive, collaborative attitude and not talk about Gaza.

In any college-educated/mostly Blue Tribe milieu, that last requirement is going to be a killer. A genuine Red Tribe setting (i.e. some churches) might be okay.

Why is it considered mandatory to moralize about a cause they only found out about last week on a date? I'm not interested in talking to brainworms. Or in being verbally bludgeoned with emotionally-loaded words.

I don't want to hear about Jesus either.

It's considered mandatory, because the woke worldview is totalizing and impenetrable. That is, it is always relevant to every single aspect of life (i.e. "everything is political," "the personal is political"), and it's hardened against traditional, conservative forms of modification for better conforming to truth and facts such as logic and evidence. Whether you learned of this yesterday or 2 decades ago, the fundamental Correctness of this belief doesn't change, nor does your responsibility as a member of someone on the Right Side of History to immanentize the eschaton by preaching to your significant other.

After that, it's basic market forces; the types of women you are talking about are high in demand, low in supply, so they get to set the terms of these relationships. At least, unless you fit into a category that's even higher in demand/lower in supply.

They could win me over by actually delivering the public works improvements they campaign on and use to justify tax increases. When they can't or won't, the choice between simply not getting the improvements and getting taxed a bunch of money and still not getting improvements seems obvious. If Democrats in California had actually delivered a well-performing high-speed railroad by now, on time and on budget, I would probably be pretty stoked about voting for that on a national level. But they failed, and in a way that made it seem like they didn't even care whether they succeeded or not.

Well, one thing the democrats could do to better earn my vote is stop publicizing how they hate me and hold me in utter contempt but will pretend otherwise just long enough to get my vote.

In all these inside baseball articles it's never that dems hate white men that's the issue. The issue is merely that white men (ew) have picked up on it and (ugh) are still allowed to vote (gross). "And anyway, we need to figure out how to lie most effectively to convince those 'people' that we don't hate them."

I mean, even if they went full court press tomorrow, White Boy Fall, do they really think anyone would believe it? No amount of cauc worship will help if I know from your own fucking articles that you're completely disingenuous.

The answer is as simple as it is impossible for the current left to even fake.

They have to value real, actual masculinity.

The answer is as simple as it is impossible for the current left to even fake.

Stop using the term "white dudes" -> 50 state sweep.

I'm only half-joking. Why is it always "white dudes"?

The one theory that resonates with me is the left has used the word "men" in so much negative context that it is now stigmatic. So they needed some other synonym to denote benign men without the negative associations.

So they needed some other synonym to denote benign men

Which they immediately ruined by adding "white", which gained stigma through the same process.

"White" and "man" are our words now. They've lost the social license to say them, and this is the Progressive version of the "we're not using the hard-R" dynamic.

If so, it didn't work. "Dudes" is just as negative with the addition of dismissal-as-nonserious.

This seems like pretty standard euphemism treadmilling. As long as the core sense of considering men as being worthy of derision exists, it doesn't matter if the Dems call them "men," "dudes," or "florks." It's that core sense that needs to be changed if the Dems want to call men by a term that isn't derogatory.

Disagree. Look at the various identity groups ________ for Harris. I see: Black Men, South Asian Men, Latino Men, Native Men and AANHPI Men. Literally only whites are given an alternative word other than “men”. IMO “dudes” is infantilizing, it evokes frat idiocy, stoners etc. Every other group is entitled to the pride of thinking of themselves as men, white men alone are denied it. It’s essentially like black men in the south 100 years ago being referred to as “boy” regardless of age

Yes you can be right. It's also possible that "white men" specifically has especially negative connotations in progressive circles, enough to make the democratic decision-makers use a different label for the "good ones".

These are just theories after all, and we are just engaging in bulverism without having a real progressive here to defend their ideology.

The word 'men' conveys inherent dignity, and even saying the words 'white men' has become right-coded. That's why when the Harris campaign decided to make a Zoom call for every race/gender combo, the names were Black Men for Harris but White Dudes for Harris. Calling the white dudes 'men' would be too respectful in the mind of the politics-brained consultant who came up with it. They flinch back from it, even subconsciously.

Some day I will write an essay on the psychological fuckedupedness that the Western left has towards men.

It is like they are trying to somehow say "white dudes" with a Hard-R if you know what I mean. On paper it sounds neutral, but they way they say it...

I don't see it as directly insulting as the hard R so much as...patronizing? Juvenile?

It's just a weird way for supposedly adult political consultants to talk consistently about a group they need to pander to. Trying to think of a parallel and blanking.

Seems more like a soft R? Or no R. It's patronizing and disconnected but still offensive in a similar way that going up to a bunch of black guys and calling them "my nigga". Because that's what they call each other, right? Right? Probably maybe? Vote for me my niggas!

Vote for me my niggas!

Head of State isn't a great movie, but it is a decently funny artifact of a different time in US politics and culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_of_State_(2003_film)

I'd say it's sort of like the way women sometimes talk to their friends. Talking about their "girlfriends," "gal pals," and "hey it's your girl x here..." It's fine when they do it between friends, it shows intimacy and comfort. But it's considered impolite when an adult man talks to them like "hello girl," or calls them his girlfriend when they're just a regular friend. It shows too much intimacy.

Modern American English tends to be pretty casual, we don't have like a formal "you" the way some foreign languages do. And we tend to call everyone by their first name with no title. But when random news media or campaign strategists start calling me "dude" it feels like going a little too casual, it makes me want to push back and be like "um you don't know me well enough to call me that."

This feels like the right take. "How do you do, fellow kids white dudes?"

For all the talk about "permission structures" as a joke, I think the Democrats lack such a permission structure among themselves to talk to men, especially white men, qua men. The idea of such an affinity group seems anathema to them --- although to be honest I have no desire to join such a group, and they're not completely wrong that such affinity groups have done, uh, some bad stuff in the last couple centuries. "White dudes" seems about the least threatening way to identify them, but nobody asked how they feel about the label.

It might be easier to turn down the volume of the affinity group messaging altogether, rather than grapple about how to accept perceived "majority" affinity groups, but that would be a pretty big course change for the party. But I'll note this plan also flatters my personal "post-racial society" sensibilities from growing up in the 80s and 90s. Ultimately it feels like they've put a lot of effort into advertising what they aren't, but that's a set they seem to think includes me.

It's less that I think "White Dudes" or variations there-of are in any way equivalent to dropping a hard-R gamer word. It's more, I sometimes can't believe the amount of hate and vitriol leftist are able to pour into their enunciation of that word. On paper you'd never imagine it's possible.

I'm reminded of a joke from 30 Rock like 15 years ago - so at the beginning of the recent "awokening," or possibly before it - where one of the writers is forced to go to sensitivity training. The instructor asks about offensive terms you can use to call minorities, and he responds by saying, "PERSON of COLOR," putting emphasis on the all-capped words, and the instructor says, "Well, if you say it like that, sure," or something like that. This was around the time when "POC" was becoming more and more mainstream as a generic term to refer to "people of races we've deemed as oppressed," and one could probably describe the way he said it as "Saying 'person of color' with a Hard R."

They also appear not to have considered that if they want young men to vote for them (especially young white and Asian men), they should probably offer them something other than scorn. Which, as far as the culture war goes, they do not. Even when the Republicans express their disgust for young men watching porn, that's better than being disgusted with young men for being men.

disgust for young men watching porn

It is disgusting and harms them.

I'm sympathetic to your argument, but even if porn is disgusting that doesn't mean one should show disgust for the young men who watch it. You need to show them compassion to get them to change, not go "ewww" as so many tend to do.

It is disgusting and harms them.

Yes, that is an objectively correct characterization of how my outgroup works in relation to me.

Women making porn is disgusting and harms them, but the Left messaging on that is not ‘You’re pigs, we want to let you’ but ‘You are beautifully expressing your sexuality and simultaneously a victim of the patriarchy, men are disgusting and we want to destigmatise you’, which is the kind of double standard that men might noootice.

Even when the Republicans express their disgust for young men watching porn, that's better than being disgusted with young men for being men.

I mean, have you seen the dem ads on the subject? 'We know you're pigs, we want to let you'. People don't really like that.

Democrats are getting it wrong, mostly. It's not about policy or marketing (though the idea that they just need to hire more pro-Democratic TikTok influencers to shill for them reveals a deep and amusing disconnect). It's about the casual contempt they show for men.

For instance, AOC today, saying Miller is a short troll:

[while knitting a shirt] Stephen Miller is a clown! I’ve never seen that guy in real life, but he looks like he’s, like, 4′ 10″... Like, laugh at them! Laugh at them... insecure masculinity. This is what this is about... One of the best way to dismantle a movement of insecure men is by making fun of them... I'm not here to make fun of anyone's anything, but the way people overcompensate...

So, it's not quite that she's insulting him, which is fine. Trump does similar stuff all the time, although in a funnier way. The difference is the double standard. Say what you will about him, but Trump is equal opportunity: he'll nastily insult anyone he doesn't like. There are no sacred cows. But you will never see AOC calling a woman an obese smelly pig, or implying that a female opponent holds her positions because she needs a good dicking down. And, even if she did, Democratic and liberal antibodies would attack her in retaliation: awhile back when one Democrat called MTG a butch lesbian, there was a lot of pushback for transphobia.

It's not any one individual event, but a pervasive attitude that men and masculinity are worthy of contempt, while everyone else needs to be protected from being triggered. If you're trying to appeal to men, probably encouraging a norm of a free-for-all is better than one of an HR lady who polices everyone, but the worst of all places to be--and this is where Democrats find themselves--is saying that every identity needs to be protected, except for men, who are always fair game to identity-based attacks.

What sucks is when the hot fashionable women are the ones saying these things and the frumpy ones are not, and even defend men.

Given men's nature, it's hard to know which way to cut.

There are many video compilations arguing otherwise. I actually think it's at least partially causal - the less attractive women can get a septum piercing and a few other disfigurements and start openly hating men as a way of protecting the ego.

I would say hot and frumpy women both attack and defend men, without a strong trend. The bigger difference is that men don't value the defenses offered by the frumpy women, while they excuse the attacks of the hot women. So the frumpy women get more of the blame for misandry, while the hot women remain simped for.

Talk is cheap. I've seen way more performative fear of men from frumpy women than hot women.

Hm. That's definitely part of it. But I don't think it's the whole thing.

When the rule was compassion and conversation, I supported the dems as a matter of principle. I didn't personally benefit from most of the work. When the rule became "actually, it's okay to hate people for being born with the wrong immutable characteristics," I just supported whoever was in my own interest. "Do as the Romans do."

I'm not convinced that's a reversible transition. Maybe it's minority enough to say "irrelevant."

It becomes hard when people begin to worry that your kindness is really about giving yourself license to attack the people you claim are stopping you from being kind.

I think part of the problem is that the pro-illegal lean of the party leads to them treating all citizens the way they treated Republicans who complained about being kind and nobody much liked it. The stories of Chicago and NY spending on migrants and the general "deal with it" attitude seemed to trigger black Democrats just as welfare queen stories triggered others.

Ezra Klein has been making this point in his interviews recently although phrased more like "It doesn't matter what our policies are if people think we don't like them and I think we've been sending out the message that we don't like a lot of people". He seems to have been doing a lot of soul searching since the loss in 24.

As an unrelated aside, it's very interesting to see Klein and especially Yglesias struggle with '24. They both recognize there are real issues in the Democratic Party now, beyond bad marketing and the failure of the deplorable electorate not seeing its obvious superiority. But even they have to carefully avoid triggering those same antibodies I mentioned earlier. I think there's a reasonable chance Yglesias eventually steps on a mine and gets fully excommunicated.

That's already happened. If you go to his subreddit, it's full of people who do nothing but hate him, like Joe Rogan. I think Reddit is a pretty good barometer as to one's current bona fides in the Democrat party.

Why would Reddit be a good barometer?

As a self-admitted partisan, Reddit is a pretty accurate source for what the liberals are currently believing and narrativizing about, ever since Twitter went down. Bluesky is too crazy, Threads is barren, Facebook is full of boomers, Instagram and Tiktok too noisy. Anything else is too small to be relevant.

Reddit is the largest online collection of Democrat partisans online: it's something they're proud of. It didn't use to be that way but it is now firmly enemy territory.

Plausible, I guess.

But something can be wildly biased without being representative. Outside of the Squad, how many members of Congress really care about it?

This is a genuine question.

The backlash being faced by Klien, Derek, Yglesias and Buttigieg is baffling. Everything they've said has been polite, non-accusatory and measured. Yet, they're being treated like Nazis by left social-media.

I don't have a read on how radicalized the younger democrats are. But, looking at reddit, bluesky or the youtube ...... they're being dogpiled.

Buttigieg

Out of the loop: What beef have dems with Buttigieg?

He was literally a Notre Dame-adjacent mayor. /s

Too gay but also not gay enough.

That's not entirely a joke but I think the current issue is some post-Kirk comments that weren't entirely mealymouthed and immediately walked back. Could be wrong though.

It's honestly bizarre to me how much Klein is hated - people here and on the right loathe him, and anyone vaguely left or progressive loathes him, and all he's doing is sitting in the middle politely saying that Trump is bad and maybe Democrats would do better if they were less crazy and built more stuff.

I suppose he's positioned himself somewhere that picks a fight with both the loudest tribe on the right and the loudest tribe on the left.

Is this the same Klein who supported (and probably still supports) the Californian YMY / affirmative consent law? Because yeah, it doesn't seem so bizarre to me.

Journo List and this would be where I'd start to understand the reaction from Reds.

I am not convinced that right-wingers responding to Klein are today are thinking about, or even necessarily aware of, a Vox column he wrote eleven years ago. I agree that the position in that column is, at best, completely daft, but I also don't think that column is likely to be motivating outside a small, highly atypical tribe of politics-obsessed weirdos. My guess is that @crushedoranges is more correct - it's not this or that column from over a decade ago, it's the way that Klein in general, in his politics and more importantly in his whole affect, symbolises a type of holier-than-thou policy wonk who calmly explains why you're wrong about everything, why your values suck, and why it all needs to be bulldozed.

That would make it very hard for them to take him seriously when he says, "Seriously, we do need to moderate and focus on practical outcomes that will benefit every American". They already think he's a liar.

More comments

I hate him for being a blue-tribe brahmin who believes in the progressive shibboleths: the left hates him for not being maximally accelerationist revolutionary Che Guevara. The magnitude of dislike is not equal.

When he goes 'trans issues are not tactically wise for politics, we should get into power and then implement them', I think, 'oh, he's a liar.' They go, 'oh, he's a HERETIC!'

It doesn't seem baffling to me. The message from Klein, Thompson and Dunkleman is that an entire branch of left-wing progressivism ( the side whose instinct to devolve responsibility and attack concentrations of power like corporations as opposed to the equally progressive tendency to make them partners in regulation and social engineering) didn't just fail, it won and then failed and is costing Democrats.

Their general argument is that systems in place that, for example, allow left-wing advocacy groups to sue and stop nearly all infrastructure or home building, are bad. Obviously some people like those systems and consider them a triumph of leftism (cynically: since they know how to use them better than the people who don't have houses or aren't educated enough to use environmental protection law to their advantage)

It's a clear broadside against an entire set of Democratic anti-monopoly, anti-government, pro-lawsuit activists.

Finally, all wordcels have is how many people value what they say. Klein is the Drake of the Democratic party: a whole bunch of people believe "They" made him successful because he's a capitalist bootlicker because it's easier than admitting that people simply prefer him. There seems to be a clear element of professional envy here. If the Zephyr Teachouts of the world were actually indigent, they'd have an incentive to listen to a criticism of their policies. But they aren't so it's all status games. It's just rappers jumping on a more successful rapper in the hopes of getting their name out/taking their place.

The backlash being faced by Klien, Derek, Yglesias and Buttigieg is baffling. Everything they've said has been polite, non-accusatory and measured. Yet, they're being treated like Nazis by left social-media.

I'm not sure how this is baffling given the behavior of the "progressive left" over the past 15 years. Responding polite, non-accusatory, and measured constructive criticism for the purpose of self-improvement from their less extreme allies as if they were Nazis has been standard operating procedure for about that long.

The surprising thing to me now is that Klein actually decided to meaningfully criticize them, given how hard he was supporting them until very recently, even while some of his peers like Yglesias had already started doing so years ago. The stuff around Klein and Weiss recently are the only signals I've seen that indicates that the failures of the progressive left to actually support progress is actually facing meaningful backlash.

I thought Klein had it mostly right there, and it reminds me of something Dean said on this site a while back, albeit about fictional characters. Do so-and-so feel like they want people like me in their lives? Not just tolerate me, not be civil or 'inclusive', but genuinely want people like me to be happy? Do they want me around?

It's a piece of advice that I would actually generalise to all people. Be the kind of person who is interested in other people. Be the kind of person who wants other people in his life. As this applies to gender, I'm reminded of Eneasz Brodski writing about the same - be the kind of man who genuinely likes women, and look for the kind of woman who genuinely likes men. That doesn't necessarily mean sexually or romantically (here I like Dean's examples of celibate or homosexual women who clearly care deeply about white men in their lives), but you need to like other people.

Obviously policy matters and this is not the one weird trick that will fix all the Democrats' problems, but insofar as attitude or culture can help, I would advise them to start by trying to like - to genuinely like and appreciate - the kind of people they want to vote for them. You cannot say, or even imply, "vote for me you pond scum". Start by training yourself to like them. It's possible. Openness and affection for people is something that can be practiced.

I think this is key. As a young libertarian raised on punk rock and anti-Iraq-War memes, I could have gone either way upon entering adulthood. The conservatives accepted me, and despite my godless libertinism, never once made me feel judged. Meanwhile the progressives expressed casual contempt of me at every opportunity. The people absolutely convinced I am condemned to eternal damnation were happy to welcome me and look for common ground, while the ones who prided themselves on tolerance and empathy openly fantasized about my death because of my opinion on Obamacare.

The Republicans really are terrible in a lot of ways. Trump is legit a narcissistic charlatan manifestly unfit for high office. But his party doesn't hate me. They don't attempt to shame or silence me when I disagree with them. Policy is almost irrelevant to my political leanings at this point. I'm just sick of people I thought were my friends calling me a fascist pig.

There is a very large percentage of the Republican base who identify as Christian but don’t go to church or make any attempt to follow Christian morality- Christianity is something they’ll do when they’re old and have to worry about it soon.

These people will not judge you for pot, cohabitation, whatever.

I'm not as positive about the right or as tribal as some, and I still hold back from identifying as conservative, but I would say that my experiences with online leftists and rightists in the late 2010s and early 2020s had two common themes.

The first is, as you say, the right was usually more accepting. There's that Hanania line - "the left looks for heretics, and right looks for converts" - and it is basically right. My experience of the time was that the left was looking for differences in order to exclude people from their coalition, and the right was looking for similarities in order to include people. If I disagreed with leftists on one issue, they badgered and hectored me, seeking conformity; if I disagreed with rightists on one issue, they'd probably call me an idiot and then laugh and say that we're still basically on the same team. The only one sort-of-exception to this was Trump. I generally ran into people who were happy to say, "okay, fine, you don't like him, we can still hang out and be friends", but at the time I was conscious of traditional conservatives (e.g. David French or Jonah Goldberg, Dispatch types) being intensely vilified, as far as I can tell only for being anti-Trump. But that one specific issue aside, they were more willing to accept diversity of thought. Notably they were fine if you were pro-choice or pro-gun-control or whatever and could work with you on other issues, whereas admitting to being pro-life or pro-gun-rights in a left-wing crowd was just asking for a bullying.

The second is that the right tended to be more honest and direct. This may be just as simple as having a more masculine communicative culture, but I remember being struck very strongly that, if people on the right disagreed with me, they told me that I was wrong and stupid, and we had it out fiercely in an argument, and then we went right back to being friends. We had the fight and then got on with our lives. On the left, there was much less direct aggression, but a lot more passive-aggression and shunning. It wasn't the stereotype of the blue-haired leftist screaming at me - it was more like the way that a stereotypical clique of popular girls shuns people? I felt like the way they handled disagreement was to go "ew" and then disgust and ostracism did the rest. The times we did have debates there was a lot more pre-emptive dismissal.

I don't mean that in general the right was wonderful and the left was terrible. I am stereotyping large crowds. The worst of the left were conformist bees angrily shunning anyone who doesn't fall into line, and the worst of the right were rage-obsessed idiots fed on a constant diet of grifting misrepresentations. What I did in the end, of course, was make friends with the people I liked most in both camps and spent my time with them, though to my great and lasting unhappiness, many of those people, though friends with me, find it impossible to tolerate each other. Even with close friends, though, I look out for certain kinds of failure mode? With people on the right the failure is "oh no, don't mention X, he'll go off on another rant". With people on the left, I can almost see the ideological blinders descend in real time, as the brain turns off and they go back to smug slogans. I'll spare you any examples. Suffice to say I do find, in a quite immediate sense, that the right's sin is anger or rage, and the left's sin is contempt or pride. The right's response to disagreement is to pick a fight. The left's response to disagreement is to pretend that the fight has already happened, you lost, and now all you need to do is fall into line. I find the latter much more annoying than the former.

So what you're saying is the (current) left is female coded and the right is male coded?

I don't think he's done any soul searching, he's done whatever is intended to get people like yourself to think he's done a soul searching.

This is the fellow who ran the Journo-List after all. You should require extensive and overwhelming evidence to convince you that he is not a malicious actor, he has not provided such evidence.

Instead, he has a shtick, which is talking in PBS voice, which makes him sound reasonable as he says unreasonable things. The most recent example I am aware of is his podcast episode entitled something like "Trump's Blue Scare". In said episode he scares his listeners into thinking Trump is going to use Charlie Kirk's death to fire half the federal work force for being Democrats, round a bunch of people into cages, etc. What happened after Ezra recorded that pod? Jimmy Kimell got back on air, and ICE facilities were attacked by sniper fire. Basically the opposite of what he predicted. He's completely disconnected from reality in a way that makes me suspect everything he says is simply an attempt to cynically convince suburbanites that the Democrats are worth voting for.

I do think he's definitely a bell weather more than anything but a bell weather does show you which way the wind is blowing.

It's 'bellwether' and has nothing to do with the way the wind is blowing. The bellwether is the lead sheep of a flock ("wether" being the ovine equivalent of "steer"), so named because the shepherd attaches a bell to him.

neat

I think the phrase he was looking for was "wether vein", the metaphor about how you can tell a sheep is getting ready to follow the flock when its heart starts pumping harder.

Weather Vane.

The word vane comes from the Old English word fana, meaning "flag".

A weather vane points which way the wind blows. It moves to face the wind.

Crucially, the bellwether precedes the flock, while the weather vane follows the wind. Slight differences.

I think you're replying to a joke.

I don't think he's done any soul searching, he's done whatever is intended to get people like yourself to think he's done a soul searching.

This seems likely to be correct - I'd certainly bet on it if it were possible to rule on it fairly. But it also raises the question, what would Klein need to do to convince people like you or me that he's done a soul searching?

I don't follow Klein enough to say definitively, but I'd say that something that explicitly disavows identity politics as having negative value both for humanity and for the Democrats, while explicitly praising enemies on the right such as Trump for helping to fight against it, in a way that shows that he believes that right-wing electoral gain is a worthy cost to pay for excising this cancer from the left-wing - even when some (or a lot) of the healthy cells around the cancer are excised - would probably meet the bar for me. I don't expect him to meet this bar.

However, I consider his cynical ploy to convince some people in the middle/right that he has done some soul searching on this to be a step in the right direction, instead of the deflection/rationalization game he and people like him have played wrt their more extreme ideological allies.

I don't follow Klein enough to say definitively, but I'd say that something that explicitly disavows identity politics as having negative value both for humanity and for the Democrats, while explicitly praising enemies on the right such as Trump for helping to fight against it, in a way that shows that he believes that right-wing electoral gain is a worthy cost to pay for excising this cancer from the left-wing - even when some (or a lot) of the healthy cells around the cancer are excised - would probably meet the bar for me.

Just for the record, this is actually my personal position - though I'd actually go further. Yes, Trump destroying the flows of government money that propped up "left wing" activists might impact dems at the polling booth, but it is ultimately better for the left wing that all this propaganda is shut down. The left wing that USAID/NED/USGOV money has created and fed is choking out the birth of an actual authentic left political movement. Trump, to the extent that he is destroying the DNC and the infrastructure that keeps bloated slugs like Pelosi and Schumer well fed with donor/insider trading money, is doing actual left wing politics a service.

When is the last time, genuinely, you've seen any article published in any mainstream new media that was written from the perspective of a disaffected male where he was able to express what his perceived grievances were, and explain what he might want from a political party?

Or even something less direct: what about an article that takes men's complaints in good faith, listens to them, doesn't immediately blame them on the men in question, and considers that they're actually being honest about what they want and that we should devote some resources to addressing their concerns.

I've seen like a dozen from the past few months where a woman tries to explain why she thinks men have gone missing, or entreats them to 'come back' (here's a hint, don't publish it in the 'style' section), or an explicitly female perspective on how male's politics are concerning. Literally, read the article about how women having the desire to be with men at all makes her the actual victim.

Oh, remember that controversy over the "Tea" app that would let women anonymously report on alleged male misbehavior. Women of course were the victim of male rage in that whole debacle.

And we intermittently see articles like this, written by "Helen Coster" that handwrings over it as if its an intractable problem that we simply lack the technology to understand let alone address. But at least notes (correctly) that this is going to be catastrophic for Dems over the longer term.

Here's the only recent article I could find that even tries to consider the male perspective (and written by a dude) but it stops very short of elevating any possible proposals and of course balances the male perspective with the female.

I'm so. so. SO tired of there being literally only ONE side on the microphone, screaming the same 3ish complaints and then trying to entice men into solving the problem by compromising on everything they actually want and voting Democrat against their own instincts.

I'd say this is all proof by demonstration that the Democrats don't actually want to reach young men. It would be trivial to give them a platform to explain what they're actually looking for, to publish their words directly, rather than a third party puzzling about their internal processes and proposing half-baked 'solutions' that don't actually cede anything.

But they do not give men such a platform. The implication as I read it is that they really want men to just shut up and follow 'instructions' rather than voice concerns that, from the Dems perspective, don't matter, aren't actually concerns, and would require compromising on their various policy goals (and rouse the ire of their other interest groups) to actually address.

And this is all you would need to realize they will never, EVER actually make traction with the men, so place your bets for future political outcomes on that assumption. Also notice how J.D. Vance is quite adept plugging in to male cultural touchstones and echoing certain male concerns in a way that encourages them to engage with the GOP politically. CUE THE HANDWRINGING. Don't listen to J.D. Vance, the guy with the wife, kids, whose whole life is basically a male-coded success story. Listen to "Leila Atassi" instead, she sounds like an ideal commentator on masculinity.

When is the last time, genuinely, you've seen any article published in any mainstream new media that was written from the perspective of a disaffected male where he was able to express what his perceived grievances were, and explain what he might want from a political party?

This doesn't happen because to express one's grievances as a male is to invite ridicule from all (except a small group of other aggrieved), not just Democrats. Part of "traditional masculinity" is to not make such grievances. This of course leaves men at a severe disadvantage, politically -- it's fine to be a Stoic when you're the Emperor of Rome, not so much when you don't have the power to solve your problems yourself.

Surely there is some guy, somewhere, who is already in a position of high status, who can act as the mouthpiece or advocate for disaffected males without implicating any individual man as the complainant. Someone who can beseach the egregore on behalf of his brethren by amplifying the words they are individually scared to mouth.

Just one dude, somewhere, who has the necessary 'clout' to say "no, many men are suffering under current norms and these norms should shift, and men should demand much, much better treatment (while still being worthy of it)."

Oh wait. That's Andrew Tate.

Once again I point out that the fact that Tradcons have largely failed to provide the men they want to step up and "lead" with either a viable path to becoming worthy, or a proper incentive (i.e. an appealing pool of marriageable women) for doing so. They could at least provide a realistic and admirable role model to provide the inspiration and advocacy men crave.

Oh wait, that was Charlie Kirk.

In principle I agree with your point entirely.

In fact, I think this dynamic, mixed with the fact that the internet grants a massive advantage to those who are able to freely type out their complaints and form (the appearance of) a massive public consensus by finding other people who are also typing out their similar complaints and then form an 'interest group' that types out their complaints en masse to ultimately steer the debate to their preferred outcome.

i.e. we get dozens of articles from women discussing womens' grievances, whereas men are mostly commiserating amongst themselves, so on a social level the average normie assumes women's complaints are much more important because they're that much more salient.

And this dynamic is amplified by the fact that the internet rewards grievance and rage farming with more attention.

So basically because men aren't rewarded at all for speaking out about their struggles, especially in the medium-form article format, and women not only find that format more intuitive they are continually rewarded with attention for raising it, the feedback loop is pretty predictable from there.

Surely there is some guy, somewhere, who is already in a position of high status, who can act as the mouthpiece or advocate for disaffected males without implicating any individual man as the complainant. Someone who can beseach the egregore on behalf of his brethren by amplifying the words they are individually scared to mouth.

No, there isn't. It's not just that making the complaint implicates the complainer. It's that the complaint itself is invalid by the standards of traditional masculinity. Portraying men as somehow in opposition to women already takes you out of the traditional Overton Window.

Never said they had to frame it as opposition to women.

Andrew Tate surely doesn't. He frames it as opposition to "The Matrix."

What is a young man supposed to do when he's hobbled from the start by educational programs that favor women, college admissions that favor women, jobs programs and diversity mandates that favor women, and a general social environment that favors women?

He doesn't have to say women are the problem, if the problem is in fact the policies that create the outcomes he experiences.

If those policies don't change, he's at a disadvantage for life. One that he's forced to pay taxes to support, no less.

Who can point out that this is an obstacle that one can't solve by 'self improvement' alone, and demand policy change?

If there is no such person, where do we think this ends up?

What is a young man supposed to do when he's hobbled from the start by educational programs that favor women, college admissions that favor women, jobs programs and diversity mandates that favor women, and a general social environment that favors women?

"Man up" and overcome all the challenges that face him through masculine vigor and endurance, all with an uncomplaining stoic demeanor, or die trying? Recognize that he is the "disposable sex" who has to earn his personhood through deeds and through suffering?

And what happens when the rewards for all that effort are, rationally, not worth the effort and expense?

More to the point, after a guy goes through the painful efforts of making himself better, can he expect to achieve a loving marriage, have a kid or two with a loyal wife, and see these kids to adulthood in an intact home?

The stats on that are bleak, as of now.

If not, then what, truly, is the point? Why does he do what he does if not to preserve his status and pass on his genes?

The answer the "Traditionalist" view, which I've outlined above, gives to these questions is perhaps best exemplified in comments by Fox News talking head Tomi Lahren, as covered in this Shoe0nHead video, particularly the bit she said on Piers Morgan's show, on the topic of what women owe men in return for their efforts (at about 15:17 in the linked video):

Tomi Lahren: And as a woman, I want a strong man who is a protector and a provider; that will go to war if need be; that will protect me, protect my family; make money.

But I don't think a man needs to "get something out of it" to be a manly man, a protector and a provider. If you think you—

Andrew Wilson [over her]: So, nothing. So you've got nothing.

Lahren: —need to get something out of it, I, quite frankly, don't consider you a real man.

It is your born duty as a male to work, suffer, and sacrifice for women, children, and society with absolutely no expectation of reward for it, simply because it's part of being a man, and if you don't do it, you're not a man.

In asserting this duty, Western traditions will tend to emphasize it being the will of God, or some such; East Asian ones will tend to put a bit more emphasis on owing it to the spirits of your ancestors. But in the end, they all reject the liberal/libertarian "pure individual," atomized and unbound by any obligation or duty not freely chosen. Instead, you are born in a particular place, a particular time, to a particular family, in a particular class, a particular nation, and, yes, with a particular sex. This unchosen role into which you are born comes with equally-unchosen duties and obligations to which one is bound. (Like the "filial piety" owed to your parents — even if you didn't choose them, and didn't choose to be born — recognized by pretty much every culture save the Modern West. Note, after all, that the first of the Ten Commandments involving one's duties to fellow human beings, as opposed to the earlier commandments covering one's duties to God and the sacred, is "honor thy father and thy mother.")

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