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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24145 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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There was a shooting at Brown University yesterday. Two people were killed. This is of course a tragedy, the kind of tragedy that has been well-litigated both here and everywhere else on the internet.

Brown decided to follow this up with another tragedy: canceling all outstanding exams and operations for the remainder of 2025.

"Given these deeply tragic events, all remaining undergraduate, graduate and medical classes, exams, and papers or projects for the Fall 2025 semester will not take place as scheduled. This choice was made out of our profound concern for all students, faculty and staff. In the immediate aftermath of these devastating events, we recognize that learning and assessment are significantly hindered in the short term and that many students and others will wish to depart campus. We know there will be many academic concerns about the implications of not holding classes and exams as scheduled, and we will follow up to provide students with more information in the coming days."

One of the issues with our education system is that it is fundamentally unserious. Final exams are, or ought to be, a big fucking deal. Ten thousand of our supposedly best and brightest students will now pass an entire semester of advanced classes without a comprehensive examination of their skills and capabilities. Medical classes. I hope the physician you visit to get your unusually yellow skin checked out didn't take hepatology at Brown University in Fall 2025.

I mean I get what you’re saying, in that maybe it would have made more sense to do it case by case rather than a blanket pronouncement, but there’s really not much time (in fact it’s the 12-20th so they were ongoing) so there’s not a very fair way to handle it in nearly any direction, and I think you are weighting things wrong. Feels callous. It’s not like everyone will be getting A’s - almost definitely just whatever grade they have had through the other x-1 weeks of class (they aren’t even missing class, so they’ve mostly already learned what they set out to learn, and it’s strange you jumped to an “everyone will pass” conclusion). All in all I fail to see anything even slightly resembling “unseriousness”. Wrong battle, dude.

I find it kind of disappointing how reliable this board has gotten for discussing culture war events. This guy appears to be a woke gender equity guy, he was a former soldier, he attacked the class of a Jewish professor who taught about Judaism and US/Israeli relations… There are many CW angles here.

We talked for so many years about the culture war turning into real violence. Now it’s happening and we want to talk about education? It’s a fair angle but it shouldn’t be the only thing being discussed here.

Edit: And here’s the real juice: one of the victims was prominent campus conservative Ella Cook, and some believe she was the target. If leftwing extremists have truly graduated from assassinating not just Trump or famous right wing voices like Charlie Kirk, but to beautiful young not-famous white women with the “wrong” views, this would be a quite significant development and escalation.

McLuhan's famous adage, "the medium is the message" applies in this case. We've moved beyond the information era into the narrative era supported by a vast and all-encompassing media blanket. You literally cannot belive anything because everything is the story that someone wants to tell. Actual facts and information are at an extreme premium. That's the real tragedy.

The concept of political violence has historically remained largely an academic discourse, yet recent developments suggest it is increasingly entering mainstream consideration.

Historical precedents demonstrate instances where the execution of heads of state preceded significant national advancements. For example:.

King Louis XVI in France.

Charles the 1st in the UK.

Anastasia Somoza Debayle in Nicaragua

Here’s an example of a violent act that could change the course of our country. Before the Dobbs decision, there was a leak of a draft version and it showed the votes were 5-4. Now a crazy guy drove across the country with a gun but was apprehended on Kavanaughs street. Had he prepared better and accomplished his goal, it would’ve fucked Dobbs. If Kav dies before final ruling then he doesn’t count and that abortion ruling gets stuck at 4-4. There’s no mechanism for him to vote in any other way such as the grave or his clerks.

Individuals often sacrifice their lives for various causes, ranging from personal grievances to ideological pursuits. The prospect of achieving political impact through such an act could appeal to those seeking recognition or purpose. As an African proverb states: “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

That guy was a person of interest but he’s subsequently been released. The shooter is still at large.

The identity of the shooter was hidden by media and LE up until after this OP was posted, at least as far as I can see. There were several RW people doing the usual "haha this guy is obviously a leftie or a Muslim" thing for a significant period of time up until the ID was released for that exact reason. However, "woke leftie attacks other woke lefties on a woke leftie campus in perhaps an old school leftist's classroom" doesn't have the culture war salience this would have if he was a Muslim in a Synagogue. That the professor is Jewish and teaches Israeli relations just means he is basically Brown's Chuck Schumer or the like.

Both my comment and your comment aged poorly, in that 1) the person of interest was released, and 2) one of the victims was a prominent campus conservative, and there are reasons to believe that she was the target. Culture war juice still available.

University Administrator Try-Not-to-Find-An-Excuse-to-Avoid-Upholding-Academic-Standards Challenge: Impossible

Ten thousand of our supposedly best and brightest students will now pass an entire semester of advanced classes without a comprehensive examination of their skills and capabilities.

Feature, not a bug for most at Brown.

This is like an inverse-9/11 for those at Brown who weren't friends or family with the two deceased and the nine injured (and you know, and the deceased and injured themselves). For students, especially the weaker ones, this means getting past a semester without the toughest stretch of papers, projects, and exams. For academic faculty, this means time and energy that would had been spent teaching, grading, and fending off grade grubbers can now be applied toward research. For administrators, fewer students around means less work to do—plus this is good for Equity, as canceling the semester's remaining papers, projects, and exams means reducing some of the dispersion in grades and graduation rates between Asians, whites, latinos, and blacks that would had otherwise occurred.

The biggest victims (other than the deceased and injured, and their friends and family) are academically strong students in easy/gen pop. courses, who are now deprived of an opportunity to further improve their relative GPA positioning against their peers, as I imagine it'll be likely that (whether by university/school decree or Professorial discretion) everyone just gets 100% for the canceled papers, projects, and exams, especially in easy/gen pop. courses. Or some high X%, where X% can help but not hinder a student's grade in that course.

This happened in my neighborhood. The streets are empty and dead. People are scared.

I wonder if this shooting is connected to the one that happened in Australia this morning. The timing seems suspicious and we haven’t heard anything about the Rhode Island suspect.

The attack in Bondi seems to have been father/son and all about killing Jews. Regarding the shootings at Brown, don't have a lot of faith in US media to not immediately cloud over actual motives, so at this point, it's still hard to say. Probably just coincidental.

Medical classes.

Well don't worry about that, Christmas vacation is one of the few times off that Medical Students get, so they won't be missing too many classes. Additionally exams will be actively rescheduled or effectively rescheduled (students will need to learn independently for the boards).

Clinical rotations are long enough (usually, 4,6,8,10 weeks) that it won't make a difference. Some schools will have a student miss out on scheduled elective time but that's a meh.

In terms of missed coursework...actual classes have been functionally replaced by professional teaching resources that the students pay for separately.

professional teaching resources that the students pay for separately

What are these? Does this mean there are no teachers teaching in med school?

The preclinical (academic classroom instead of clinical rotation) portion of U.S. medical education involves getting together a knowledge base for several very very large all encompassing standardized exams in which ANYTHING is fair game (and a mix of non-core learning things like group activities, cultural competency building and kinds of other stuff that is a mix of reasonable and bullshit).

Just like many academic professors in less specific institutions are often better at research or writing than teaching, many teachers in medical education are more researchers or clinical staff. Historically they were also quite bad about adding useless details about their specific research into the curriculum.

For this reason students have switched to high quality, battle tested, well taught and high yield online materials.

These are so good that some of them have near 100% utilization rate by U.S. MDs and for some schools its possible to never look at your school's course materials and still get a great outcome of school.

The teachers are still there though, and they are annoyed at being replaced which has resulted in things like an increase in problem/case/team based learning.

Before this recent bump in those modalities it would not be uncommon for literally zero students to show up to lecture, the forward thinking schools have stopped standard lecture and just provided online lectures.

One of the really serious structural issues with universities is that they are primarily research institutions. Academic staff didn't come to teach, hate doing it, and are actively incentivised not to do it because it takes up time you need for grinding papers and citations. Exams are a massive nuisance that come every year and all the people nominally in charge of them desperately wish someone would cancel them.

Don't they replace finals with essays as often as they can get away with?

Depends on the institution and the degree. The courses I was involved with (on both sides) were >70% finals.

It’s official. Hitler had a micropenis. Furthermore, Nick Fuentes is either a closeted homosexual or a 30 year old virgin.

I’m wondering to what extent far right political worldviews are influenced by the denial of sexual malformations or shortcomings. I decided that this forum would be a good place to explore the extent of this and perhaps collect more data on the phenomenon.

If any posters here at the motte would like to participate in an anonymous questionnaire, please DM me.

  • -53

It's about as official as any of those "tomb of Jesus discovered" documentaries that were all the rage on the Discovery Channel years back. Possible blood sample taken from "I cut off this piece of material from the sofa in Hitler's bunker" eighty years ago, not stored in any way you could consider preservative of DNA samples, for clickbait documentary hosted by TV pop-sci host who apparently will appear for the opening of an envelope.

Yes, I'm convinced!

The tomb of Jesus has been known for well over a thousand years.

Not relevant to your broader point, but you can literally go visit the tomb of Jesus. There's a church there; the Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Armenian Orthodox are forced to split it by the civil authorities in Israel(and before that were forced to split it by the Ottoman authorities). Ditto for the manger; Catholics get the midnight service on Christmas(in Latin).

The tomb of Jesus has been known for well over a thousand years.

Yes, both of them in fact.

Is this a reference to the tomb of Jesus in northern Japan?

I was thinking about the Garden Tomb.

The Garden Tomb was only identified a couple hundred years ago; there's no ancient tradition there.

Or possibly the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, depending on which one you were thinking of.

Ah, but that's the fake tomb, you know? Not the real family tomb with the bones and His wife and kids and third cousins and aunts by marriage all with the names graven on the ossuary! The one good thing about the Avatar movies is that they distracted James Cameron from making more of these "really true truly real" documentaries.

Fuentes likely has a girlfriend (if not multiple) but hides this to prevent their doxxing. He has a loyal female fanbase that calls themselves groypettes and they pay to have their superchat messages read on his livestream, where he unceremoniously declines their advances.

On a more interesting note, sex-based insults are so common because they work. Vance and the couch for instance. Humans really are that base. I recall reading that the 12th century Peter Abelard couldn’t be promoted at his monastery because he was castrated and thus deemed unmanly. That’s a monastery, in the Middle Ages. And the recent insult that Trump fellated Bill Clinton is no different than when they called Caesar “Queen of Bithynia” per the accusation that he slept with Nicomedes IV of Bithynia in his youth. Something that annoyed me with Kamala Harris is that he have actual evidence that she behaved in such a prostitutional way, as she was the girlfriend of Willy Brown at 29 while he was 60 and he proceeded to hand her a comfy no-show political job. This was so ripe for insults — the guy’s name is literally Brown Willy — but no one was willing to stoop low for it, though they were all on board with the Russia prostitute stuff. I think the reason for this is man’s innate philogyny, and IMO is why politics must be restricted to only men.

Dude is also a devout Roman Catholic. Trying to shame him for being a virgin is probably not the best avenue of attack.

On a more interesting note, sex-based insults are so common because they work.

I'm reminded of the suffragettes who would purposely wear white to their protests in order to emphasise their chastity, because their critics (evidently somewhat successfully) been calling them a bunch of sluts.

Between him being Catholic, being pals with homosexuals like Ali Alexander, it seems likely he is a homosexual too.

There's even video of him performing fellatio, isn't there?

There's even video of him performing fellatio, isn't there?

Can't believe how many times I've seen this question litigated given that I don't care about the guy at all and don't seek out information related to him.

There's even video of him performing fellatio, isn't there?

No, that's fake and wrong. First of all the video you are thinking about would be of Destiny sucking dick and the theory that would be that the dick belonged to Fuentes, i.e. a video of him receiving fellation (from a man). But even so, it's all made up.

However.

There's the date with catboy kamikaze. There's that one time in 2024 when he was flirting with some zoomer kick livestreamers outside an in-n-out late at night in early 2024. Or that his favorite evangelion character is Kaworu Nagisa and his favorite show is Euphoria. Or how two prominent members of AF were homosexuals named Ali (Jamal and Alexander). Or that one time he accidentally tweeted a video that showed he was watching tranny porno. Or how AF members look like a "type". Or when Jaden (ex treasurer) left and he was heartbroken. And the Jaden said about living in Nick's basement. Or that time he said he thinks sex is disgusting (the other time, not the famous one when he said sex with women is gay).

But it's all gossip, the proof is all buried in kino casino and metokur streams, all stuff without any credibility, from years ago and it's all plausibly deniable anyway. So he isn't officially gay until he goes on the coming out podcast tour. For all we know he might have an harem. A super secret harem of women who don't mind being in a harem, don't regret it afterwards and don't use the fact of having been in one to cloutchase.

There is a way to test this, though I'm not sure he would submit to it: https://reactionaryblog.substack.com/p/using-fmri-to-remove-gays-and-paedophiles

A positive hit on an fMRI would a) not indicate whether practicing or non-practicing, and more seriously b) have an 8% error rate, and thus remain less powerful a predictive tool than Kaworu fandom.

The video is of Destiny performing fellatio on an unknown man, which was claimed to be Fuentes when the video leaked.

and IMO is why politics must be restricted to only men

I am always amused at the creative ways obsessives wedge their weird obsessions into every thread.

As for Fuentes- if there is ever someone about whom accusations of being a closet case were believable, it's him. But there is a certain category of straight dude who really, truly hates women and resents that he's sexually attracted to them (and really resents that he needs their permission to stick his dick in them).

Fuentes obviously possesses a seething hatred of women, not just a tradcon belief that they should stay in their assigned roles (and not vote), but he seems to be viscerally disgusted by females. That's either a guy frantically trying to compensate for his sublimated lust for dick, or a guy who has a pathological level of misogyny--either way, someone whose own desires repulse him.

The notion that Fuentes is actually keeping a secret harem is some serious copium.

On a more interesting note, sex-based insults are so common because they work

Something that annoyed me with Kamala Harris is that he have actual evidence that she behaved in such a prostitutional way, as she was the girlfriend of Willy Brown at 29 while he was 60 and he proceeded to hand her a comfy no-show political job. This was so ripe for insults — the guy’s name is literally Brown Willy — but no one was willing to stoop low for it, though they were all on board with the Russia prostitute stuff. I think the reason for this is man’s innate philogyny, and IMO is why politics must be restricted to only men.

Sex-based insults work when directed at men, that is.

Both sides of the aisle agree on women’s Wonderfulness and the usual Who? Whom?

Sex or gender-related insults—or negative observations in general—directed at men are far more acceptable than they are directed at women, especially by a man.

Calling a man gay, small-dick, a couchfucker, a pedophile, a John, a rapist, a virgin, or an incel, regardless of its veracity :drake_yes:

Calling out a woman for riding the casting couch :drake_no:

In the former, it doesn’t necessarily matter whether a specific accusation is true, what’s important is that it’s all in good fun and good faith to hold shitty men accountable for the vibes they project.

The latter is bad faith misogynistic slut-shaming and victim blaming.

Fat/body-shaming by the Left when applied to somebody who's an 'acceptable target' has always struck me as kinda hilarious.

Absolutely sacrosanct taboo to go for random obese women/'healthy at every size' then lowest common denominator fat jokes about ideological enemies.

Yeah, even normies have Noticed the “body positivity for me but not for thee” double standards. Although perhaps not specifically about ideological enemies, an example meme would be “Empowering” vs. “Put on a shirt nigga.”

One predictable perpetrator of this was Jimmy Kimmel during the manufactured outrage around the death of Cecil the Lion.

Abelard was castrated because he fucked around (literally, he got her pregnant) with the niece of a Very Important Guy who didn't appreciate that kind of hands-on approach to tutoring (today Abelard would be criticised for power imbalance, grooming, age gap - he was 36, she was 15-17 years of age, of his pupil). They engaged in a secret marriage in order to satisfy her uncle but kept it secret because if Abelard wanted to become a priest (to have a career in the church) clerical celibacy was becoming necessary.

Uncle was not happy about all this and took action:

Fulbert, infuriated that Heloise had been taken from his house and possibly believing that Abelard had disposed of her at Argenteuil in order to be rid of her, arranged for a band of men to break into Abelard's room one night and castrate him. In legal retribution for this vigilante attack, members of the band were punished, and Fulbert, scorned by the public, took temporary leave of his canon duties (he does not appear again in the Paris cartularies for several years).

End result is that Héloïse ends up in a convent and Abelard remains a monk, but cannot be ordained to the priesthood if he is castrated (there are rubrics around bastardy etc. and what disqualifies someone from the priesthood, including being a eunuch). This doesn't mean he can't continue to be wellknown, he already had a reputation as a theologian and was famous and continued to be, but since he couldn't be a priest this disbarred him from advancement to such offices as bishop, etc. but he did become abbot of a monastery, though his career continued to be controversial due to his alleged heretical teachings.

Truly a case of "fuck around and find out".

As for Kamala, certainly stories about her past were floating around for a long time (e.g. I saw it mentioned online that her nickname had been "Heels Up Harris") and it came to the point that Willie Brown had to issue a denial that he promoted her only because she was his girlfriend (and indeed, later she allegedly warned him off*). Being fair to Willy, yeah he pretty much did promote her because she was his girlfriend and that got her the start in political career, but he also promoted guys as well for being loyal to him. Old-school politician who rewarded his allies and loyalists when the fat spoils were to be divided upon gaining power.

I think the reason it didn't get play this time was (1) it was old news (2) the media and online media were working hard to squash any such distasteful racist and sexist attacks upon the Democratic Saviour From Evil Trump (remember all the havering over "how very dare you say she was border czar, she was no such thing, the Republicans are lying when they call her that"?)

*"Brown's romantic relationship with Alameda County deputy district attorney Kamala Harris preceded his appointment of Harris to two California state commissions in the mid-1990s. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission patronage positions. When the appointments became a political issue in Harris's 2003 race for District Attorney, she responded: "Whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work". Brown's relationship with Harris gained renewed attention in early 2019 after she had become a U.S. senator and ran for president. Brown addressed the questions by publishing a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle titled "Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?" He wrote that he may have "influenced" her career by appointing her to boards and supporting her run for District Attorney, but added that he had also influenced the careers of other politicians. Brown noted that the difference between Harris and other politicians he had helped was that "Harris is the only one who, after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I 'so much as jaywalked' while she was D.A. That's politics for ya."

Rich hot straight guys with big dicks think world's perfectly fine as is, news at 11

I laughed out loud on the train, thanks.

This is trolling and it's not even funny trolling.

Now you know what women have to put up with. For all you guys complaining about women not responding on dating apps, imagine our friend above times a hundred.

  • -17

Now you know what women have to put up with.

Apparently not much, if things like this mild troll post elicit a comment like this.

For all you guys complaining about women not responding on dating apps, imagine our friend above times a hundred.

Who cares? You can still scroll past the dongs and go on a date. Or, if you really think "no responses" is a preferable state of affairs compared to having see random dicks, you can always just... not use it.

Sorry guys, I do have to laugh at all the complaints about how easy women have it and how unfair it is that you (singular or plural) can't get your dicks wet.

It's not women's fault male sexuality is so easy (boobs! ass! young!), blame evolution or whatever is the current favourite punching bag.

I don't have to imagine, I see the mod queue. And I would never want to be a woman on modern dating apps. (For that matter, neither would I want to be a man on modern dating apps.)

Please post real examples of the above type of posting directed at women on dating apps (or elsewhere).

Or he's trying to get some dick pics.

I propose a Peocracy: rule by whomever has the biggest penis. Mandatory physicals every 4 years replace elections.

Ron Jeremy, winner of the 2028 erection.

This could have been an interesting post with more effort.

Fuentes is almost certainly a closeted homosexual, who like many closeted homosexuals strongly disliked women. This likely somewhat informs his misogyny.

You go to war with the generals you have, not with the generals you wish you had.

Yes, Nick Fuentes is most likely a homosexual, practicing or otherwise. But he is also one of the most promising young leaders the alt-right has. As long as he keeps it on the down low, we can look the other way.

From "On Homosexuality And Uranus" by AntiDem:

Anime homosexuals are carefully portrayed as not representing a threat to the prevailing cisheteronormist order. Let us take consider an early example, Sailors Uranus and Neptune from Sailor Moon. Though obviously (and yet never quite explicitly) a lesbian couple, one of whom has some prominent transgender (or at least highly androgynous) qualities, they never really make any demands for accommodation on the world that surrounds them. Sailor Uranus does not wish to upend the society around her in order to gain the validation involved in having her lifestyle redefined as normal; she only desires to be left in peace to discreetly live as she wishes. She doesn’t want to change marriage laws, get you fired for saying that you don’t like her, or tear down the faith of the polis.

And it is because of this that she can safely be left alone by the larger society around her. She is not a threat, so she can be treated as a curiosity – liked by some, disliked by others, but simply not worth bothering with on a societal level. The implicit, unspoken bargain that she makes with the larger society is both reasonable and humane – she gains a strong measure of security through obscurity, and the mores of the society around her remain secure. That is largely how it is in Japan, and how it largely used to be in the West as well. Laws against homosexuality in the West existed, but were essentially a hedge against precisely what has happened now that they have been removed – open, politicized homosexuality becoming a serious threat to the existing order. As for the discreet, private practice of homosexuality, laws against it are and always were virtually unenforceable (for many reasons, including the general disinterest of Westerners in taking any great pains to enforce them against those who kept their proclivities private), and when they were on the books they remained virtually unenforced.

To mix fictional metaphors a bit, I am reminded of the Borg from the Star Trek franchise. In one episode of, I believe, The Next Generation, several members of the crew find that they can, if they are discreet and quiet, move unmolested through a Borg ship, though they are in plain view of numerous Borg drones. The Borg, it turns out, are interested in assimilation at a civilizational level, not an individual level. Thus, if an individual, or even a very small group, moves through their ship and seems to present no threat, they are ignored. Below a certain level of prominence, they are simply not worth doing anything about.

The ironic thing is that Western man requires misogyny, because women lack constructive political instincts and need to be sidelined from politics if the polity is to survive.

And we're only getting it from Fuentes, a person so untrustworthy as to be practically utterly useless.

edit after I got the 30 day ban, I thought everyone knew that women weren't selected for being able to cooperate effectively in large groups?

Politics in mankind's very, very long pre-civilized past was typically war or war-related organisation like alliances and as war has always been and still is an exclusive domain of men(e.g. consider which sex has a shoulder adapted for throwing or what's the sex breakdown of war corpses in Ukraine ), from that it follows that men were way more selected for being able to cooperate constructively and effectively for survival purposes and selected for the ability to put away all of their petty feuds and differences in the face of greater threats.

Because in case of military defeat, they were basically dead re: posterity (dead and slaves don't procreate - American black slaves were an exception) and women were generally -outside of nomad cultures- still valuable as slaves or second wives so whatever happened, they were not doomed.

Ugh.

I could imagine a well-argued version of this, but I’m no longer expecting to see it from you. This comment looks like a strict downgrade from last week, perhaps a return to form.

Thirty days this time.

Men on the far right are disproportionately gay and men on the far left are disproportionately (heterosexual) sexual predators. This has always been true. The Nazis and Italian fascists were pretty gay, the 1968ers rioted at the Sorbonne over getting access to the girls’ dorms overnight. Why? Because straight pervs go where the women are (the left), and gay ones fetishize masculinity, maleness, and in particular often sexually fixate on male ‘brotherhood’ in the army, navy, male organizations, which fascist groups usually are.

Hold up. Both the girls and the rioters in question were college students. How is that a case of sexual predation? I doubt rape was their intent.

Also, early Nazi and fascist groups usually formed among veterans of the world war; in other words, all of them were men and most of them were young. To state that they were disproportionately gay isn’t exactly saying much.

Hold up. Both the girls and the rioters in question were college students. How is that a case of sexual predation?

Also, early nazi and fascist groups usually formed among veterans of the world war; in other words, all of them were men and most of them were young. To state that they were disproportionately gay isn’t exactly saying much.

Not disputing far left males being disproportionately likely to be sexual predators, but weren't women actually underrepresented on the political left until the eighties at the earliest?

Favorite example of this is Jack Donovan. To his credit, he doesn't call himself "gay" because he hates the modern Gay/LGBTQ culture. He calls himself "androphyllic."

That Wiki photo. God bless.

Nazis weren't disproportionately gay.

Apart from Roehm, who else was a homosexual?

The SA which was by far the most classically fascist ideologically was pretty gay. Once a totalitarian party cements itself fully in the governance of the nation anyone ambitious joins, so the fact that few leading German political figures in terms of power in that era were actually gay is true but irrelevant.

The SA was rightly sidelined by a party that wanted to run a country, which requires more than streetfighters and the vastly more selective SS which replaced it wasn't noticeably gay. So calling the regime itself to have been disproportionately homosexual on the basis of one of its precursors, that got sidelined, is pretty odd and not valid.

The SA wasn't so much sidelined as buried.

Roehm's boyfriends.

I'm still giggling from William Shearer describing the early SA as subject to the kind of dramatic internecine squabbles only possible between homosexuals.

Specifically,

Many of its top leaders, beginning with its chief, Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts. Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich S.A., was not only a homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of others quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can. (Page 120)

Shirer was one of the earlier and more vocal authors to claim that the Nazis were disproportionately gay, but my understanding is that that claim has been considered discredited since the 1960s. Obviously some were, but there’s no evidence the percentage was higher than that of the general population.

By the mid 1930s it had transitioned into a party of government and so serious people of all sexual persuasions wanted to climb to the top. It’s like if you suddenly put the Catholic Church or Church of England in charge of all politics the proportion of gay priests would fall quite rapidly.

It seems you're right.

Funny how that makes the far-right look actually better, as men who fetishize masculinity and brotherhood(but not homosexuality itself) due to a developmental quirk are somewhat more sympathetic than psychopaths and sexual predators into politics to gain power by exploiting man's egalitarian impulses.

My new theory is that self-accepting gays and sexually malformed people become the far left whereas self-denying members of those categories become the far right.

Since Biblical times, true engine of history has been and will remain the queers.

  • -12

The engine of history is that Adams [right/trad] follow Eves [left/prog] follow Snakes [classic/liberal].

It's popular to pretend Eve/prog and Snake/liberal are the same thing, especially if you're Adam/trad trying desperately to react to something Eve is doing. But if you equate them, you will fail just like everyone else in the past 50 years that tried.

Are radical centrists then those who accept but still hate themselves?

Yawn

I understand that these may be uncomfortable thoughts to consider.

However, I would just like to reiterate that if anyone is suffering in this way, please come forward privately.

With better data on this phenomenon, we might be able to improve outcomes for a generation of sufferers through evidence based practice.

  • -26

imagine the smell

If any of you are on the tech/ai/startup side of x (which I imagine is everybody here), you probably saw the following exchange:

  1. A guy working as 'head of AI' for a company called Cline commented "Imagine the smell" under a photo of a hackathon.

  2. Indians assumed that somebody commenting on the smellyness of a hackathon (I've been to many hackathons, and nerds smell) must be commenting on Indians, and thus freaked out.

  3. The guy who made the comment replied to some of them saying that no, actually, he was just making a common internetism, and generally speaking to the smell of a bunch of guys in a packed room.

  4. The guy's boss gets involved, surely due to the campaign by online Indians to get him fired, saying that he wouldn't be firing anybody.

  5. Enough pressure happened that the guy's boss recanted, and fired the guy.

  6. Now the internet is imagining a lot of smells, cline has earned a ton of bad will, and the general dislike of Indians in the tech community has grown.

Here are some thoughts on this:

  • I'm increasingly of the opinion that people should be able to filter the internet by country. I don't care what people from 9000 miles away, from a totally different culture, who have no investment or stake in my society have to say about it. I don't want to interact with these people. My life and my world is not a place for them to wage petty dramas and entertain themselves by harassing people here.

  • Indians specifically (and I say this as somebody who has spent a considerable amount of time in India, consuming indian culturalisms, and interacting with Indians) seem to have a particular penchant for online drama. There seems to be a particular focus on people saving or losing some form of "face", although that isn't exactly it. It's similar to honor culture you find in other societies, but maybe just its own Indian brand of it. I think what we're seeing here are two cultures which should be separated by 10,000 miles of ocean running into each other on the internet; the clash should not be unexpected.

  • "Imagine the smell" is not an anti-Indian slur, or at least it wasn't. It comes from image boards, and gets said under almost any moderately interesting photo of people. However, I think the massive freak out over this has turned it into one. Interdesting.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that people should be able to filter the internet by country. I don't care what people from 9000 miles away, from a totally different culture, who have no investment or stake in my society have to say about it. I don't want to interact with these people. My life and my world is not a place for them to wage petty dramas and entertain themselves by harassing people here.

You already can filter the internet by county. Just go to a German-language forum, it'll be almost purely Germans, Austrians and the Swiss posting there.

Oh, wait, English. Yeah.

A guy working as 'head of AI' for a company called Cline

Based on priors, that sounds like a bullshit job. Charitably, it means "this company needs investors who want some technobabble about AI", less charitably, it could also reflect on the company as a whole.

Now, there are some jobs with the title 'head of AI' which are possibly not bullshit. FAANG-level companies can have serious AI departments without being AI companies. Given that Cline does not have a WP page, I am inclined to believe they are probably slightly smaller than Google.

Basically, if your job is to be the poster boy for some startup which needs to fool investors into thinking they are innovating AI stuff, you probably want to be careful about what you say online under your real name, because you are easily replaced.

By contrast, if you are an engineer who is deeply involved in what the company is doing, your company likely has some reason to not fire you when the first angry mail comes in -- always depending on the size and culture, of course.

Important context that OP did not include and relevant for this comment: Cline's product is an AI coding assistant, similar to Microsoft's Github Copilot. My understanding is they don't develop any AI models themselves, their bot is a layer on top of various other AI models. I'm not entirely sure what "head of AI" means at a company like Cline but I doubt it is a trivial role, given the product.

Head of AI will mean developing lots of smaller models that are needed to accurately make the base LLMs work - smaller agents for interrogating the codebase, embedding models for condensing the code in a vector database, etc. Plus of course prompting experimentation to make the base LLM maximally correct while using minimal tokens.

Some time ago I posted about the absurd arrest of Graham Linehan upon his return to the UK from the states. One of the tweets which prompted his arrest was a photo of a trans activist protest accompanied by the caption "a photo you can smell".

I think national identification should be opt-in. This seems to me to be straightforwardly the best possible world. It would protect online anonymity for those who want to preserve it at maximum capacity, short-circuit bad faith "doxxing" objections, and allow those who wish to pass themselves off as belonging to a particular nationality to prove it.

If someone want to present themselves as American, I'm pretty sure replying to their post with "nationality kept private" on their profile would pack about 90% of the same rhetorical punch as the actual information being there, while carrying almost 0% of the downsides.

Sure, my country might have been founded by anonpoasters, but due to technological limitations, those reading The Federalist could at least be reasonably certain that they were American anonpoasters.

None of this would ever have happened in a non-At Will jurisdiction. The mob could howl as much as they wanted and the boss would just go "Sorry, the laws of this country prevent me from firing this person without good cause, if you don't like it vote to change things" and this would suddenly blow over.

There's a reason all this "firing" people for saying bad things stuff seems to be localized to the US (on both sides of the aisle).

  • -14

Having just this year had to squeeze two maliciously incompetent employees out of my department, I have a new and deep appreciation for at-will employment. Like most of our worst laws, we have at-will employment because the worst 5% of the population ruins it for everyone.

Anecdote: The unionized civil-engineering office in which I worked had a complement of around half a dozen surveyors. Most of them were industrious, but one was lazy and a troublemaker.

  • The survey coordinator (engineer in charge of the surveyors) had to constantly check on this surveyor to make sure that she was actually doing her assigned work in an industrious manner.

  • One of my engineer coworkers warned me that I should never trust this surveyor because the surveyor once told the coworker that getting in a minor crash with an office car was an easy way to get out of work.

  • After the survey coordinator gave her a bad performance review, she filed an HR complaint accusing him of threatening her with violence during the performance review's closed-door face-to-face meeting. It was totally frivolous, since the boss of the office was in the same meeting and could vouch for the survey coordinator's innocence! But the investigation still dragged on for many months. IIRC, I once overheard the survey coordinator discussing with the office boss how the surveyor's union-assigned lawyer would even commiserate over the phone with the survey coordinator about how the surveyor couldn't even keep her story straight.

  • She had a reputation for treating her two subordinate surveyors poorly. I wasn't too aware of the details, but I overheard the survey coordinator discussing with the office boss how he would look out the office window into the parking lot and see her subordinate surveyors running to the survey van in order to avoid being late.

  • Once I even overheard her loudly joke in the office's coffee area, "I like my coffee like I like my men—hot and black", which I as a nigger easily could have reported her to HR for (and maybe should have).

She was finally forced to resign (not even fired!) when, during the pandemic, she coughed into her hand and intentionally used the same hand to smack one of her subordinate surveyors on the back, after which the subordinate (who IIRC had a wife with a compromised immune system of some kind) filed an HR complaint and threatened to report her assault to the police on top of that.

which I as a nigger

TIL.

Americans do not want to end at will employment because they quite reasonably think it will make it harder to get hired.

They also don’t want to take up the slack of the inevitable abuses.

There are reasonable pros and cons. The reason Americans are paid more than the French (size of the economy, labor pool, lower taxes, more natural resources, bigger domestic market, more capital, better entrepreneurial culture, despite the origin of that word) isn’t primarily due to labor laws. The Scandinavian countries have very restrictive labor laws and low unemployment, for example, while other countries have high unemployment even with loose laws.

I can't speak for continental Europe, but a public communication like that would be easy grounds for gross misconduct in the UK, so wouldn't make much difference

The process in the UK would be very different and there would be an investigation during a suspension and then likely a tribunal. The defendant could make the very reasonable case that this was a joke about 24 hour hackathons being sweaty and that no offense to Indians was plausibly implied, nor was this in any way a malicious or specifically targeted communication, and might well win. Unless they were contractually prohibited from any comment on social media (and even then it’s very unclear that that kind of thing would be enforceable in most cases) they would have an OK case.

Sure, if there's some sort of clause in the contract or disciplinary policy saying you must not do anything bringing the company into disrepute (which yes, most well drafted contracts and disciplinary policies will contain). Equally, even if so the requirement for procedural fairness will mean the person would first have to be suspended then a hearing would have to be arranged and held which all takes time during which the mob will move onto the next issue du jour meaning they won't get their blood when they are baying for it regardless which acts as a factor discouraging such mobs from forming in the first place.

The idea of having to run to the state and make my case for why I don’t want to work professionally with someone anymore is bizarre to me. For it to be illegal by default to simply cease sending paychecks to someone unless I write down magic words so the bureaucrats won’t come after me is so offensive I can’t but sputter when confronted by the fact that this is not only law in much of Europe, but a popular law, apparently.

Yes this was a horseshit firing but it should absolutely not be a matter of government policy no matter the political valence. It would have blown over anyway.

If you want that in Europe, you hire a contractor. If you are unhappy with your plumber or gardener or sex worker, you can just hire a different company for the next job. Likewise, if you want to lease your property to tenants without being bound by too many legal safeguards, lease office space to companies.

But where humans are concerned, most societies recognize that just allowing total freedom of contract will lead to bad outcomes, because very often one human party will have a significant disadvantage during negotiations. In most places, selling your kidney or signing a contract which will put you into debt slavery if certain conditions are met is simply legally void, because if it was not there would be desperate people signing such contracts and ending up enslaved. Likewise, it is very rare that a prospective tenant can write the terms of a rental contract, because the landlord likely has a dozen alternatives lined up, while the tenant does not. The same goes for employment contracts.

And it is not like the US is some anarcho-libertarian utopia for employment, either. There are plenty of rules and regulations. You can't just put into contract that higher exposure limits for carbon monoxide will apply. You can't -- at least in theory -- fire an employee for not giving you a blowjob. Or fire all of your employees matching some protected characteristic. I imagine many states would forbid you from firing women for becoming pregnant, too.

The main difference is the burden of proof. In Europe, we have a whitelist of reasons to fire someone, while the US has a blacklist blocklist of reasons for which you can not be fired.

Now, I am sympathetic to arguments that these rules have adverse side effects. But simply arguing how unfair it is that you have some obligations towards someone with whom you have traded paychecks for labor for a decade is not going to convince anyone.

It's all perspective, right? Your right to stop sending paychecks to someone at will == their right to be thrown away like garbage by their liege whenever convenient.

Appeal to the majority is a logical fallacy but nevertheless I think it says something that in almost all societies those higher in society have obligations of loyalty to their underlings (which must be reciprocated of course).

You can either have freedom of association or you can have the State.

For a while. In the end, there is only the State.

Order and Chaos continue their eternal dance as mutual progenitors.

There's a reason all this "firing" people for saying bad things stuff seems to be localized to the US (on both sides of the aisle).

Yeah, in Europe we just arrest them.

A wrongful arrest can be expunged and removed from your record quite quickly and if handled fast can have much less of an impact on your life and career trajectory than a wrongful firing.

  • -14

And if the law is so restrictive that the arrest isn't legally wrongful?

England would jail you for that comment.

Just checked, I'm still not in jail. I'll update tomorrow and let you know if I've been detained.

EDIT: Still not detained, the bobbies really need to up their game...

Do you live in the UK?

He does, but he's on the proper tier.

Yes he does

The guy's boss gets involved, surely due to the campaign by online Indians to get him fired, saying that he wouldn't be firing anybody.

Enough pressure happened that the guy's boss recanted, and fired the guy.

Very curious what specifically happened for the boss, who this deep into the phenomenon of Twitter cancel culture and it's inherent ephemeral nature (i.e. we all know in 2 weeks this will be forgotten) actually cracked. Weak move tbh. Why stand up then fold? Lame.

Many people view themselves highly until they actually have to do something.

Now we can't even joke (and it's ha-ha-only-serious) about the smell of a room of presumably-unwashed nerds? That joke is older than image boards, and older than the era of infinite Indians.

The CS building on my college campus genuinely smelled of unwashed nerds, and was semi-infamous for it. This is "a thing" if ever there was a thing.

Me think she doth protest too much.

Indians specifically seem to have a particular penchant for online drama.

This is wild speculation on my part, but I would hasard a guess that it might be because Indians on average don't particularly look big or imposing compared to others, and thus feel like they are often disrespected in person. But online, theoretically, no one knows what you look like, so they inflate their online egos to compensate.

It could also be that when Arjuna was on the battlefront of Kurukshetra, facing his own kin on the other side, and thus began to question his moral duty, it was at this very moment that Lord Krishna lowered his disguise and revealed himself as an incarnation of Vishnu, and lectured him specifically that his dharmic duty was indeed not to back down from the battlefield, but rather to stand and fight, which was in fact a manifestation of his divine duty and even of the selfless love (karma yoga) that he was incarnated to embody, and that Arjuna, upon hearing this and understanding the truth of the eternal nature of existence, took up his bow and began to fight.

  • -10

That's definitely a possibility too!

I'm increasingly of the opinion that people should be able to filter the internet by country. I don't care what people from 9000 miles away, from a totally different culture, who have no investment or stake in my society have to say about it. I don't want to interact with these people. My life and my world is not a place for them to wage petty dramas and entertain themselves by harassing people here.

I feel that way not infrequently on the internet. There are times when I really don't want to hear the opinions of people who aren't American about American politics, or even the opinions from those outside of Pennsylvania. I feel like I'm getting opinions from a low-level LLM, foreigners have half-absorbed cliches about party primary politics from reading reddit, but have never actually voted in an American primary election. People who have never been to my town feel confident to tell me what life in my town is like.

I'm increasingly blackpilled about what actual internet discourse would look like if we excluded all the foreigners from talking about American elections. But would there be any internet left?

There are times when I really don't want to hear the opinions of people who aren't American about American politics

Those times are days ending in Y.

Okay, perhaps not quite that extreme. But there are an awful lot of conversations where I want to turn into a Rock Flag and Eagle hyper-caricature when being lectured by someone who's never lived in flyover America.

or even the opinions from those outside of Pennsylvania.

You stay on yours side of the Mason-Dixon IHOP-Waffle House line, and I'll stay on mine, you damn Yankee.

I live in Denver, and we have both IHOP and Waffle House. What does that mean for me?

Means I don't trust trans-Mississippi uplanders.

Y'all are just some hippy-dippy Horse Mormons as far as I'm concerned.

The unending torture of being surrounded by wannabe wonks who need to have an opinion on everything.

... or even the opinions from those outside of Pennsylvania.

Time for the Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch subforum. It's the only way to be sure. I assume, of course, that a LLM will slip into Hochdeutsch if you let them go on long enough, since that probably dominates the training sample.

People who have never been to my town feel confident to tell me what life in my town is like.

Oh, very much so. Perhaps Americans can also deign to stop trying to talk about how bad things are like in the UK without having a shred of lived experience (much as I dislike that phrase) of the place. Saying that the UK is a country where people regularly get arrested for saying mean things online is like saying the US is a country where schools regularly get shot up. It's misleading at best and outright false at worst.

  • -14

What is the quantitative amount of UK lived experience required to be permitted to talk about how bad things are in the UK?

Is there a recency requirement or any sort of continuing education requirements?

I have a non-rhetorical question:

Suppose that

(1) a person in the UK posts an anti-immigration statement on social media, something like "I'm sick and tired of our government letting in people from third-world sh*tholes, they tend to commit a lot of crime, consume lots of welfare benefits, and don't add much of value to the country."; and

(2) another person complains about this post to the local authorities.

What is likely to happen?

And by the way, as an American I don't object to non-Americans commenting on our politics provided they make it clear that they are outsiders.

Based on what I read in the newspapers lately:

  • If that literal tweet were reported to the police, probably nothing.
  • If reported to their employer, maybe they would be disciplined or fired, depending on their job.
  • If the tweet were different and contained a slur or a call to action, then arrested, especially if the authorities are feeling sensitive. For example, an ex-Royal Marine was arrested and held for 20 days in jail for making a video two days after the knife murder of three little girls by Axel Rudakabana:

He told GB News that his duty solicitor informed him he “would have been fine” had he said the same thing a few months prior.

The revelation left him exasperated as he questioned “what’s the difference?” because the laws surrounding free speech had not changed.

The 46-year-old posted the 12-minute video in which he said illegal immigrants have “the numbers to take over” the country.

He also used the words “scumbags” and “psychopaths” and warned the country was “under attack”.

Michael said on GB News that words had been scrutinised in isolation and the targets for his criticism had been Rudakubana and “illegal, unchecked or radicalised immigrants”.

He was found 'not guilty' by a jury after 17 minutes but he was up on terror charges with a maximum sentence of 7 years.

A nurse who tweeted that she didn't care if people burned down the asylum hotels was advised to plead guilty and got several years in jail.

I agree with @Crowstep:

for most people, most of the time, the state is nothing to be feared. But that's also true in literal dictatorships.

Saying that the UK is a country where people regularly get arrested for saying mean things online is like saying the US is a country where schools regularly get shot up. It's misleading at best and outright false at worst.

I kind of agree with you, in the sense that for most people, most of the time, the state is nothing to be feared. But that's also true in literal dictatorships.

At the same time, we can't base our model of the world on what we experience ourselves. If I did that, I would assume that everyone in the UK is gainfully employed (because these are the people I associate with). But I also know that something like 25% of the working age population are on unemployment/disability/sickness benefits.

In terms of speech crimes, there were about 12,000 arrested last year (only 8% leading to convictions). For comparison, there were about 15,000 arrests for robbery.

Am I the only one who thinks 80% as many arrests for speech crimes as there are for robbery is less than ideal?

It’s also worth taking into account the other poster by his own admission hates white people and is from the subcontinent. The free speech debate is directly tied to the immigrant debate. OP benefits from quashing the immigrant debate but knows free speech is broadly popular and therefore prefers to downplay the assault on free speech.

The OP also confuses state actors with private actors; one is stochastic and the other systemic. Even if the rate of being arrested is similar to the rate of being at a school with a shooting, it doesn’t mean the felt effect of the two would be similar.

Your "lived experience" of the UK is also a tremendously narrow sliver, and trying to style on the burgers with it is unimpressive.

As I'm sure you're painfully aware, we Americans are almost categorically unashamed to boldly declare our nationality to anyone who will listen. It's a complaint I hear a lot of.

So, per the original complaint, you're unlikely to have unidentified foreign influence contaminating your information space, at least from Americans.

Oh, I agree it's not unidentified. It's loud and proud foreign influence...

Well, the good news is that if you'd like to stop hearing what Americans think of you, you'll have no problems curating an accurate block list. What's stopping you?

I want to stop hearing what Americans think in certain but not all areas, much like how I might like to listen to a rock band during a concert but not if they're playing at full blast at 11PM on a Wednesday in my neighboring apartment while I am trying to go to sleep.

Americans are not a curated performance designed for the consumption of a particular audience. I've heard this isn't a flaw unique to my people.

Neither are thunderstorms, but I find them quite welcome when they're part of the monsoon after two months of the hot season and very unwelcome when I have to bike through them in January in the UK.

More comments

outright false at worst.

Are you saying that people in the UK don't get arrsted for sending mean tweets? Can you explain it more clearly?

The mean tweets definitely play a part in people getting arrested but almost always there's more to the story and when there's not in the unlikely event of an arrest it (eventually) gets classed as a miscarriage of justice (see how Northamtonshire Police was recently forced to pay a £50k fine for a wrongful arrest of someone for just "mean tweets", not to mention their legal costs and damages to the person who was wrongfully arrested).

  • -18

see how Northamtonshire Police was recently forced to pay a £50k fine for a wrongful arrest of someone for just "mean tweets"

Are you referring to this? If so, that’s a completely false description of the incident. The police were forced to pay the fine for repeatedly and deliberately failing to hand over video clips of the arrest despite several court orders, after the detainee alleged officers physically assaulted her during her arrest. The fine was not because the arrest itself was deemed unlawful.

Yep, I'm talking about that. I would say that's not a completely false description, the whole reason this kerfuffle started in the first place was that the claimant got arrested for saying mean things online about some people who had said mean things about her online and she took the force to court over the wrongful arrest and then the force started prevaricating and delaying but now the truth has come out about how this was indeed a wrongful arrest where unnecessary physical force was used.

  • -11

As far as I can tell, your expanded description still isn’t accurate, as no court has ruled that the arrest itself was wrongful. The only thing the police are in trouble for is repeatedly defying court orders requiring them to hand over evidence of physical abuse during the arrest. Certainly the arrest itself has not been ruled as a miscarriage of justice, as your original comment claimed.

The mean tweets definitely play a part in people getting arrested but almost always there's more to the story

We've just been through this conversation...

Ok, fine. The UK isn't a place where people get arrested for saying perfectly innocent things online. It's a place where underage girls are regularly raped by gangs of Pakistanis who kidnap and imprison them. Is that acceptable? Or would you say that is misleading, as well?

Don't play games with language. If something that shouldn't happens happens with a frequency of more than once per year, it's fine to call it 'regularly'. If I came to your house and shot your in the foot on your birthday every year, people would say that it is a regular occurrence, and wouldn't equivocate to 'misleading' or 'outright false'. I either shot your foot, or I didn't. It's not something you can smear with a narrative slight of hand.

It's a place where underage girls are regularly raped by gangs of Pakistanis who kidnap and imprison them. Is that acceptable?

Nope, that's misleading as well, in the same sense that saying the US is a place where innocent Black people regularly get killed by the police is misleading. That also happens more than once a year in the US.

  • -17

Would you tell me your date of birth and your real life location, so I may mislead and deceive the public into the regular occurance of me shooting your foot?

Yes, I know you're being sarcastic, but don't test "How close can I get to actually threatening people?"

This is an obvious rhetorical flourish, nowhere even close to an actual threat.

Yes, I am aware that crushedoranges was not literally threatening to shoot BC in the foot. If I said I would like to come to your house and punch you in the face as a "rhetorical flourish," you'd be the first to report it.

Birthday: October 9, 1,830,656 BC

Location: Just behind the third cobweb after you turn right down the landing of the entrance of the CvC castle.

What are you doing to that cobweb?

Hey, we all have our needs you know...

It has been a while since we have had a Ukraine thread, and I thought this time it might be worth crossing the aisle from what is happening (our typical topic) to what we would prefer to see as an outcome – our oughts.

As Hume argued we can’t get from a stack of “is” statements to an ought, and that often leaves our ought assumptions being left implicit rather than discussed when we focus on what is happening day to day. I think one of the really interesting things about this conflict is that it reveals a lot of different ground level preferences and assumptions, and while the war itself is largely limited to Russia fighting in Europe’s eastern fringes it has serious worldwide geopolitical implications.

Imagine it is mid 2026 and you wake up to a final victory by one side or the other, say in the top 90% percentile plus of favourability, however you wish to define it.

For example, on one hand perhaps something like Russia breaks through the Ukrainian lines, takes all four oblasts that it claims (or even up to Lviv, if that’s your expectation), sanctions are rolled back and Russia has arguably gained from the war. NATO is shown to be divided, America is unwilling or unable to intervene in such conflicts and Russia has a clear sphere of influence where it has veto that is starting to put pressure on eastern members of NATO, if it wishes. Meanwhile for Ukraine, it might be Russia being forced back to prewar borders, maybe even Crimea is on the path to being returned conditional on lifting sanctions, on the road to the EU and with clear NATO security guarantees, whatever you want to add or take out for either as their ideal goals.

How would you feel in each of these scenarios: which one would you prefer and thinks leads to a better world on balance?

I’m certainly not saying either of these extremes are equally likely – or even likely at all. If you feel like I’m being unfair or trying to trap you just talk about one or the other for sure, but I think the exercise might show something interesting.

For me, I personally sympathize with the Ukrainians and think that their quality of life will be better should they win, but that’s only a small part of the picture for why I think the Ukrainian victory scenario is pretty much all upside, and the Russian one a serious blow to global flourishing. I worry about a world where wars of aggression are seen to be net positive, and if small countries look upon this and see that the past promises of allies aren’t worth nearly as much as they were expecting they may well scramble for nuclear weapons or launch arms races. Taiwan, South Korea and even Japan might be in this category, and South East Asia may well follow. Should China wish to act on Taiwan, it might both be emboldened by the US pulling back support/western sanctions being weak + transitory and see its window before nuclear weapons are in the picture closing, leading to further conflicts that could go very wrong.

However, many people outside of Russia hope for a Russian victory, and not only bots for sure. Some may simply be pro Russia in the sense of wanting Russia to do well as a terminal end in itself, but that is far from the central reason: a lot of the MAGA/Vance position seems to be something like hoping to get America out of forever wars by showing countries that they can’t use the US as backstop of treasure to unpin their security. A world where America won’t back them up or push them to do so leads to less money spent and be positive for America, either preserving its power for the key fights or stopping the need for it to get entangled abroad altogether, Russia clearly winning can be positive for those advocating this vision. Meanwhile, those who dislike the west itself or its efforts to project its liberal views worldwide might see NATO/the US being shown as unable to win proxy wars or being weaker/more divided than the alliance hopes is a good in itself. I also know some commenters here think that Ukraine was basically pushed into conflict and then left to die by the US establishment/deep state. Maybe a clear Russian victory would make others in future not fall for this and avoid all the pain of further invasions, those in the sphere of Russia and China will have to accept their sovereignty has more asterisks than others and this is clearly better as an equilibrium.

I’m really interested in what others have to say on this though, have I got the “pro” Russia position roughly right for example? Or have I missed something else fairly fundamental that someone wants to add to the ought framing?

I much prefer an ukrainian victory. The most likely scenario for that is simply that putin dies. I don't think his replacement will make anything resembling putin's demands for a ceasefire. I think his demands are literally insane and this isn't discussed enough.

Forget the ukrainians, the europeans, the americans, morality, who did the thing first, the day-to-day osint chatter, saint Olga, and everything else. Bird's eye view, long term. It's been years. Hundreds of thousands dead, economy cut off and re-tooled. Every month thousands more dead. The russians are fighting a war on the scale of world war I for ... some benefit most Russians, I'm sure, couldn't articulate.

You really have to discard the value of russian lives to almost nothing, and think you're in an existential war with the west, to continue this.

I worry about a world where wars of aggression are seen to be net positive, and if small countries look upon this and see that the past promises of allies aren’t worth nearly as much as they were expecting they may well scramble for nuclear weapons or launch arms races.

You best start believing in a world of international anarchy and self-help, you're living in it.

The US went in on Iraq. The US and NATO went in on Serbia and Libya, the US seems to be moving on Venezuela any minute now. I don't mean this in a whataboutist 'it's not fair!!!' sense, I mean this in a descriptive sense, this is just what strong powers do. This is what they've always done. Russia and China are not uniquely peaceful countries with a deep-seated love of international law only for the big mean US to bully them into being aggressive. Russia has interests, America has interests, China has interests. No country can get such huge amounts of land, wealth and power peacefully.

They're biding their time, prioritizing, calculating, scheming, plotting, building up, saber-rattling and then drawing their swords for a fight. They don't necessarily want to fight, certainly not against strong opponents. But they will do so if they think that's their strongest strategy. The US likes fighting most because America's become accustomed to weak opposition since the end of the Cold War, China will be as or more aggressive if they find themselves almost unchallenged.

China and Russia aren't going to 'play by the rules' if some random bureaucrat in the EU or State Department gets to write the rules and introduce new ideas all the time like 'responsibility to protect' and then interpret the rules to his advantage. The rules are made up, they're a facade resting on top of a skewed balance of power. The 'rules' didn't even work during the Cold War when there was a vaguely objective system with each great power getting a veto in the UN security council. The UNSC did not stop fairly large wars between the power blocs then. A vague and unspecified, infinitely flexible 'rules based international order' certainly isn't going to now.

Wars of aggression are always going to be calculated according to the balance of power, risk and reward. Then some diplomats will produce evidence, justifications and rhetoric to show they're the good guys, the baddies started it, we're defending ourselves. That's just how the world is. The real danger is from the dud schools of international relations, the people who kept calling for spreading liberalism all around the world at the point of a JDAM. This behaviour has consequences, it makes the Western bloc more threatening. It makes other countries suspicious of our motives and intentions, it makes us look crazed or rabid and to some extent we are, fighting irrational conflicts for the sake of liberalism.

Or the people who said 'serious warfare is such a 20th century thing, let's do more damage to our military industry than all the chaos of post-Soviet Russia could inflict on Russia.' Joe Biden literally laughed at the prospect of Russia-China-Iran cooperation in the 1990s. John Kerry said regarding Ukraine "You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests," he said it was 19th century behaviour. No, it's eternal behaviour. The US does it, everyone can and will do it. Only some in the US got pretty arrogant and lacked both self-awareness and awareness of the power-balance. Thus they made a bunch of strategic errors.

Ukraine is done for, regardless of whether they lose less or lose more the country is wrecked. The Ukrainian leadership did not perceive the gravity of the situation and operated under a world of vibes and ideology when they needed to be considering the balance of power. They just aren't going to be beating a bigger power with more men, materiel and nukes, when said power is determined to win. That doesn't happen in industrial warfare. If a great power truly wants to beat a secondary power, it will win. All moments of luck, all tactical excellence, all fleeting technological advantages are eventually erased by weight of numbers, weight of industrial output, weight of firepower.

If Korea and Japan wake up and think seriously about their situation and whether they need nukes, that's a good thing. The highway is no place for sleeping drivers, the world is no place for sleeping, or even drowsy, countries. Taiwan needs to think very carefully about their position. Can they fight China? They're an island totally reliant on external food and energy. If they fight China and China doesn't get knocked out of the war fast, Taiwan loses. There's nothing Taiwan can do to change this, they can't develop nukes now, it's too late. The US was the one who shut down the Taiwanese nuclear program (twice), they thought they knew better about Taiwanese security than Taiwan did. Same happened in Australia albeit less dramatically. Vibe-based nuclear non-proliferation would never work on the big powers, the US isn't going to disarm and nor is Russia. You can see this in the tragicomedic 'disarmament' aspect of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Under Article VI of the NPT, all Parties undertake to pursue good-faith negotiations on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race, to nuclear disarmament, and to general and complete disarmament

If this seems unrealistic to you, trying to cancel aggressive war is the same kind of thing.

I don't think the core of what you have said is "wrong" and it aligns fine with my text you quoted - it's just a fair chunk of it is obviously true ground level cynicism and missing the higher level logic that actually makes things interesting.

Interstate anarchy is a baseline factor for all relations but it clearly waxes and wanes, pointing to it is not enough - for example the actual cost/benefit calculation of taking territory has moved sharply post industrialization (I actually think this random review of Vicky II is a fairly good overview of some of that in the context of a game's mechanics). My point is that should such wars be seen as more likely to be net positive for one party again we are going to end up with far more stupid expensive wars. WW1 for sure and WW2 in part happened because states (mainly but not just Germany) were assuming that their limited and focused wars could come out as solidly net positive, and led to utter ruin that they did not predict as their assumptions were totally off. That is my ought - it would be good for human flourishing if countries expected wars of aggression to not be net positive at the margin, maybe even for NATO/the US that would be a good lesson too. We ought to avoid making it more positive at the margin.

I also think there's a clear ought with the nuclear dynamics here, which is perhaps easy to miss at the level of "countries will always bully each other, nukes exist, and the tech isn't going away". Schelling was right and a non nuclear world seems impossible without a fundamentally different political reality, but that's the start point of the conversation, not the end. Proliferation fraying and breaking might be inevitable at the margin, but it's still bad for several reasons, and it would be a real failure of the US to prioritize its own selfish long term interests if it accidentally or knowingly creates a nuclear arms race across Asia and the Middle East. The arms control treaties in effect have reduced weapons totals massively, lowering the probability of an accidental launch and limiting the impact of a war should it occur. Conversely, any event that pushes countries to scramble for weapons at short notice creates bad dynamics, and ought to be avoided if possible.

We can chat about the ground level realities, and no "ought" chat in the end can avoid them, but I would be really interested in who you think "ought" to win, who would you prefer, based on what you have written above? Russia, because the liberal order needs to realize that other powers can have preferences and it can't always win?

That is my ought - it would be good for human flourishing if countries expected wars of aggression to not be net positive at the margin

Well to really achieve this, you need true world hegemony where one power is so strong that it can rule the world and prevent any shift in the balance of power. China's plan is to become so strong that they can trounce the US and allies directly. No amount of credibility or 'resolve' can compensate for outright weakness.

Alternately, widescale nuclear proliferation. The non-proliferation treaty is another example where the natural defensive tendencies of various powers have been suppressed by a world of vibes and theory. As the balance of power shifts, states are inevitably going to nuclearize and probably in a more dangerous and chaotic way than if the natural course of affairs developed.

I think people are too fixated on the status quo of the past 20 or 30 years, where the US could wreck weak countries at will while the strong countries were mostly independent inside their borders. It's not natural for only America to have a foreign policy, for American wars to be 'counter-terrorism' or 'police action' or 'pre-emptive strikes' while other people's wars are 'illegal invasions'. All great powers will have their own foreign policies, that's how it works. There is nothing that can be done to persuade China to accept an international system where they can't invade or install friendly govts where they like but the US can. China has armies and fleets, nukes and tech, they are made to be used.

I would be really interested in who you think "ought" to win, who would you prefer, based on what you have written above?

I'm sympathetic to Russia taking Russian-majority parts of Ukraine in abstract but I also think this war is net-negative for Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the Western bloc. We in the West could've and should've resolved it before it happened by making credible promises about our intentions for Russia and Ukraine, by doing nothing with Ukraine, pretending it didn't exist rather than waving a red flag to a bull. In RAND reports from before the war they talk about ways to put pressure on Russia by arming and getting closer with Ukraine, you can sense that it's about point-scoring in Syria and Libya, imposing costs on Russia like they're a naughty schoolboy. We're not in school, there is no police to call and routinely attacking an

I don't think putting pressure on Russia is a good idea, it just pushes them closer to China. Russia can do all kinds of things to impose costs on us if they want.

We should've been wooing Russia away from China. What ought to have happened is that our statesmen should've displayed elementary diplomacy and grand strategy, stopped huffing vibes about Euro-Atlantic integration and the open-door policy, learnt to prioritize and delay gratification.

I don't see any good ending now, only bad and worse endings. The key lesson is to break out of the stultifying prison of vibes that we're still immersed in.

WW1 for sure and WW2 in part happened because states (mainly but not just Germany) were assuming that their limited and focused wars could come out as solidly net positive

WW2 was as bad as it was due to a conflict between vibes-based and realist strategic thought. The UK and France decided to declare war on Germany in 1939 for the sake of Poland, who they had no plan or hope of defending but guaranteed anyway. It makes zero sense to do this. Hitler, quite reasonably, did not expect this insane behaviour. If Chaimberlain understood what he was doing, was prepared to prioritize and strategize, WW2 would've been a quick and easy victory. He could've made an alliance with Germany against Russia, then perhaps betrayed Germany. He could've allied with Russia against Germany, at the cost of Poland. He could've just done nothing, rearmed at home and waited for a better opportunity. He could've worked with Italy if it weren't for some idiot journalists revealing the partition plan for Ethiopia and wrecking the Stresa front (this was before Chaimberlain got into office tbf).

Anything would've been better than 'diplomacy so shit that Russia and Germany (who deeply hate eachother) ally against us' and 'military so weak we can't attack while Germany is conquering Poland' and 'declare war on Germany anyway.'

But Chaimberlain was entranced by vibes and bungled so badly the world's greatest empire was destroyed. And Poland was absolutely wrecked. Another massive failure for the vibes-based school of international relations, which they somehow repackage as proof that you need 'resolve' and not to 'appease'. No, countries need to think strategically and pick between a range of options based on the situation and their capabilities.

I may be the rare example of a European who wants Russia to win, and even though I can't shake off the suspicion of having motivated thinking due to having Russian roots and family, my motivation is really that I think that this outcome would be better for the modal European, too. (Matter of fact, I have left Russia long ago and do not regret my loss of any ties to it.)

Bluntly speaking, the only way to ever get a ruling class to make concessions to their powerless subjects is for those subjects to be able to credibly threaten betraying the rulers for another. This is how Bismarck was forced to install one of the first systems of social security and workers' rights over his own ideological disgust (lest the workers become communist), the US mellowed out its capitalism and the USSR mellowed out its communism during the cold war (lest the populace sympathise too much with the other), and Europe got flooded with free American money and support (lest it too develop Russian sympathies), not too mention all the free shit China, Russia and the US throw at third world countries routinely to get them to vote in some way in the UN.

The 1990-2008 era was a tragedy for Europe as we got one thing after the other rammed down our throats (DMCA analogues, deregulating trade treaties...), even being forced to go to war for the US and eat the terrorist backlash, because what were we going to do, declare allegiance to the ghost of the Soviets? There's nowhere to defect to anymore!

I don't want this to continue, and for that, Russia and/or China being strong is necessary. (...and the two are unfortunately entangled) When each of them and the US fears nothing more than that we might fully side with the other, they will once again have to buy our loyalty.

(Unless you are a senator or SV millionaire, the same reasoning applies for Americans too. The threat of Soviet subversion is surely nontrivially part of why you were not forced to go die in Vietnam etc.)

I worry about a world where wars of aggression are seen to be net positive

There are very few, if not zero, feasible victory scenarios for Russia that are net positive at this point

I do agree, but my set of "ought" assumptions and values means that is a very good to thing to me, while others seem to both assume that Russia has actually carried out a real geopolitical coup here, and that's a very good thing.

I certainly noticed I was confused, hence this post. Focusing in on the ought is part of that - there's some kind of halo effect where the is and the ought are pretty highly correlated, even where that seems not required, and I was curious about the opposing position.

Samuel Huntington wrote in the mid-90's about Ukraine, Russia and the Crimea during the period where the recent status quo was negotiated. He was saying back then that the natural opposition of civilizational forces was going to result in the reabsorption of Ukraine into Russia, or else the amputation of the Crimea and the related areas which were heavily Russian ethnically. This is just another one of those colonial states that didn't get partitioned correctly when the empire pulled out.

This was always in the cards, as is the natural tendency for locally dominant military powers to seek to control/influence the countries that border them. The US has an interest in who is in charge of Canada and Mexico. If the government is objectionable (or impotent) enough, we send troops in.

None of this justifies Russia abrogating its treaty and invading their former colony. It reinforces the bad lessons we're teaching about nonproliferation. If Ukraine hadn't given up their nukes for a pinkie promise from the Russians and the US, they might have had more options. But we deal with the world as it is.

The best case scenario for Europe is that Ukraine and Russia hammer out an ugly peace, Trump takes the blame, Russia takes the eastern third of Ukraine, NATO pushes to the borders of Russia itself, completing the European wall and saddling Putin with a festering international relations problem about the annexed provinces. This is also IMO the most likely scenario.

This is a bad outcome for Ukraine and the US, but far from the worst. Ukraine will have to become a de-facto dictatorship and military speed bump for Russia's next try. Or it could just collapse internally and become a semi-failed state.

The real winner in the whole idiotic project is China, who isn't involved and is able to test all their new gadgets while getting Russian oil at pennies on the dollar and turning the Russian economy into a Chinese fief. The days when a rapproachment between the US and Russia could counterweight China in Asia are over, China has secured their only big land border with an indebted and politically isolated Russia.

Russia, to my mind, has won the most pyrrhic of victories. Yes, in a decade they've been able to detach a few provinces from a weak and hilariously corrupt Ukraine, provinces that were 75% Russian to start with. And in return, they're going to get Nato up on their borders, their natural resources are in hock to the Chinese, the Europeans are scared shitless and looking for someone to surrender to, and it's probably going to be Trump.

The US position is getting better in Europe and worse in asia/Africa. It is unlikely we can stop China from expanding their asian hegemony. But with this Ukraine gambit, a lighter version of the Iron Curtain will be re-established, this time not in central Germany, but right up to the Russian and Belorussian borders.

I mean, personally, I want Russia to get a major victory soon so the war ends. I supported Ukraine in early 22, when it looked like Ukraine might be able to win. I think you're missing this large segment of the population that just wants the war to end and doesn't care about eastern european ethnic politics in your 'pro-Russian' steelman.

Out of interest does that mean you're indifferent to Russia and Ukraine winning, whichever is more likely, just that it is over?

I am essentially indifferent to who controls the Donbass, yes, although I have some sympathies for Galicians. Russia isn't going to conquer Galicia and even the Russians know that.

I supported Ukraine in early 22, when it looked like Ukraine might be able to win.

As someone who was never really of the belief that the Ukraine could win - what evidence were you relying on for this belief? This is a sincere question, I've never heard anything that overcame my belief in the difference between population sizes, so I'm very curious why it felt winnable for Ukraine for you.

I remember when this sentiment was prevailing.I think it was mostly based on the recent memory of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, both of whom were willing to surrender (in effect) territories in exchange for (in effect) bribes. It was probably tempting to believe that some new version of them will step up and carry out a successful palace coup. People were also forgetting that an armed force that stumbles and bumbles may later actually learn and adapt. There was also wishful thinking that the Ukrainians will receive and learn to master Western wonder weapons that will sweep the orcs away.

I still think Ukraine can "win" for given value - as in its resistance has led to a far better outcome for the country than unconditional capitulation in 2022, but these conversations are what we have been having here for years to little effect. We simply have to wait for the dust to settle to be sure, and then perhaps a decade or two. Dean's comment that won a quality contribution is probably the gold standard here.

Personally, the bit where Ukraine routed and broke 90% of the fighting power of the 1st Guards Tank Army in 22 was the evidence for me that these boys could fight and Russia was really fucking up hugely - I love the saying "Hard pounding this gentlemen, let us see who pounds the longest" in relation to this war but that day had other good quotes, such as: "The Guard retreats. Save yourself if you can!”. But now we're back stuck with "is" statements.

This makes sense to me - so it's not so much "Ukraine wins" as it is "Russia loses," which I can see.

TheMotte is super slow for me now, so I'll look at Dean's submission as soon as it finishes loading - thanks!

The extremely poor performance of the Russian army for the first couple of months, basically.

I am pro Russia for several reasons.

  1. The fundamental debate regarding what the west is. The globalists want to see a gobalist, universalist empire. I want the west to focus on itself. We shouldn't be fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine or Venezuela. Even if these wars went well I don't want a global empire. They are inherently multicultural, require a police state and tie our fate to people we have nothing in common with. I support all groups fighting the globalists. The refugee and heroin flows from Afghanistan stopped when the globalists were physically kicked out of the country by the Afghan people. The Iraqis kicked the globalists out of most of their country as well. Hopefully people fighting for Keir Starmer and Macron get kicked out of Ukraine as well. These wars end up with us footing the bill while we get swamped with migrants. Then we need more government control to stop whatever evil cartoon character the media is trying to scare us with this time.

  2. Being sucked into the west would wreck Ukraine. Their culture would get replaced by America ghetto culture, their cities would fill with migrants and they would get all the same cultural bagage that saddles the rest of Europe. I have visited Kiev and it was a beautiful city with minimal third world migration, few tattooed fat women with nose rings. The last thing they need is an EU/Soros cultural program.

  3. It is bad enough that we northern Europeans have to be in the EU with Greeks and Romanians. Now we are going to add Ukraine into this mess? We are going to end up paying to be in a brutally corrupt and inefficient EU.

  4. The Eurocrats aren't even trying to hide that they are trying to bring down Russia. What they want to replace it with is woke vassal states. I see it is positive that Russia is Europe's largest country and is free and independent.

  5. All empires need Limes. The idea that the woke globalist order is going to stretch to Eastern Ukraine and to the Chinese border will put us in a constant state of semi war. It is much easier to have large buffer zones between us and other civilizations. Pushing right up against them creates conflict that we don't need. I don't want to get nuked for transgender story hour in Taiwan, Tehran or Kharkiv.

  6. We have two competing world orders. The BRICS world order is based around civilizational states that make deals with each other. The other competing globalist world order is based upon forcing a world view on the entire planet and defining all decent as evil that has no legitimacy. This world view is fundamentally opposed to states being sovereign as the global order is supposed to stand above the nation state.

  7. The idea that Europe is about to be steamrolled by Russia stands in contrast to the other narrative that Russia is a collapsing gas station. Which one is it? Is Russia about to collapse or are they about to conquer Europe? If Germany is going to be steamrolled by Russia it says more about their current civilizational incompetence than anything else. The German diplomat who cried at the Munich security council meeting after JD Vance said that European countries have to protect themselves reveals a lot about the incompetence of our current ruling class.

2] Being sucked into the west would wreck Ukraine. Their culture would get replaced by America ghetto culture, their cities would fill with migrants and they would get all the same cultural bagage that saddles the rest of Europe. I have visited Kiev and it was a beautiful city with minimal third world migration, few tattooed fat women with nose rings. The last thing they need is an EU/Soros cultural program.

3] It is bad enough that we northern Europeans have to be in the EU with Greeks and Romanians. Now we are going to add Ukraine into this mess? We are going to end up paying to be in a brutally corrupt and inefficient EU.

I can understand both these positions, but I don't understand how you can hold them simultaneously. Either Ukraine's local culture is good and deserves better than to be subsumed by the standard Westernized global culture, or Ukraine is a shithole and adding it to the EU will further dilute European greatness in the same way as adding Turkey would have done; but I don't see how both can be true at the same time.

Though speaking of questionable dichotomies,

The idea that Europe is about to be steamrolled by Russia stands in contrast to the other narrative that Russia is a collapsing gas station. Which one is it? Is Russia about to collapse or are they about to conquer Europe?

while I've had this thought before, I think a reasonable steelman is "Russia is collapsing but hasn't collapsed yet; we're still in the danger zone; that's why it's important to keep it quarantined long enough for it to completely fall apart". A wounded bear that hasn't stopped fighting yet is a dangerous thing.

You can think there are good aspects of Ukrainian culture that need not be tainted while also thinking you don't want the bad aspects of Ukrainian culture like the corruption.

Say you value a jar of Northern Europe at 100, Ukraine at 50 and migrants at 10. Mixing Europe and Ukraine worsens Europe. Mixing migrants and Ukraine worsens Ukraine. I bet he'd prefer to replace all third world migrants with Ukrainians if that was somehow possible.

It should be mentioned here that, for one, the Galician minority in Ukraine is culturally closer to the Poles than to the Russians.

Ukrainian culture is a mixed bag. They have a far worse corruption problem than western Europeans and would drag us down with that. They are also poor and will be an endless black hole for money.

On the flip side they have a lot of positive qualities as well. However, those qualities are less likely to impact us through the EU.

It's very strange to try and portray one nation conquering and subsuming another as the pro-sovereignty position. Ukraine was the buffer zone, Russia is the one shrinking the size of the buffer here. Accusing the EU of wanting vassal states in opposition to russia which operates on the model of creating actual vassal states borders on absurd. BRICS does not exist, it's a joke, the two largest "members" of BRICS have a current live territorial dispute.

Imagine it is mid 2026 and you wake up to a final victory by one side or the other, say in the top 90% percentile plus of favourability, however you wish to define it.

Total Ukraine Victory or Total Russian Victory?

As you said, both options are unlikely, but one (TUV) is by several magnitudes more unlikely than the other. Realistic end of war, that could be predicted when the three day special operation failed (and was predicted by sharp observers), is permanent cease fire and permanent DMZ around the current front line.

Best solution for Earth, imagine 1500-2000 km long and 20-50 km wide ruined and abandoned zone that will revert to nature and becomes wildlife paradise.

Now, back to your question: TRV or TUV, what one should we prefer?

It depends how you feel about Global American Empire of Rules Based Order.

In TRV world, GAERBO is defeated and thoroughly humiliated. In TUV world, GAERBO is strenghtened and emboldened to do whatever it wants.

Whatever was the war about in the beginning, it is now whether GAERBO is still the biggest, strongest and sharpest shooting cowboy on the corral.

Total Ukraine Victory or Total Russian Victory?

Your choice, whatever is more interesting.

My interest in writing this post is that we spend so long arguing over which is more likely (which is a very important question) that we don't get into the reasons why one person or the other on this forum hopes for an opposite outcome. Like you say, it ties a lot into your views on the American Empire, but that itself opens up a load of questions and interesting points on what outcomes people actually prefer. For example, Vance, does he want to pivot to China, genuinely dislikes Europe, hates Zelensky, thinks this is hopeless, or something else? I struggle to accurately model and therefore predict his preferences on Ukraine and therefore a lot of other things.

It depends how you feel about Global American Empire of Rules Based Order.

This seems an oversimplification. In my mind, a rule-based international order became beneficial around World War one, when it became apparent that large-scale conflicts between industrial powers were now massively net negative.

The US co-opted that concept in their hegemony. Never completely, as the Western hegemon there was always an element of "rules for thee, not for me". Still, the US empire was build partly from soft power (with some chunks of colonial conquests, of course). But at least in Europe and parts of Asia, the deal that they offered (free trade, at least some token effort towards democracy, refraining from breaking the pax Americana and accepting McDonalds) was pretty sweet compared to what other superpowers had offered, historically.

I like the concept of a RBO. It tremendously improved the quality of life in Europe, compared to what we had before. I see the US as a somewhat ambiguous ally to the RBO, though. In Europe, they did good, elsewhere they often made big messes by ignoring the principles of the RBO (say, GWB in Iraq). My overall impression is that most of their gambles to ignore the RBO did not pay off. The key allies of the US are for the most part not countries they conquered and turned into colonial puppet regimes, but countries whose alliance they secured through a soft power approach (which includes the former Axis powers, of course).

I would like to see a future where wars of conquest do not pay for themselves, neither for the US, nor for anyone else. One way to punish defectors is to arm their victims, so that they will not gain a quick, painless victory. From this (admittedly cynical) perspective, the Ukraine war has been a great success: Putin's "special military operation" has been turned into a long war of attrition, caused a depletion of his Soviet stockpiles and so on.

Isn't Japan the clear former Axis power who got "conquered and turned into colonial puppet regimes"? "Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers" is a dictatorial position held by American, basically a colonial governor

I think the framing is slightly incomplete. It wasn’t that Russia simply out of the blue decided to invade Ukraine. The relevant areas have been essentially disputed for a decade with low level attacks against Russians in the relevant provinces and Russian agitation in the same. You have the color revolution in 2014. The whole thing was messy and then Russia decided to turn it up to 11.

Also re nuclear weapons Qaddafi was the impetus.

Sure, but I would put all your statements there in the "is" aisle, the history is central to all of this but has been the topic of a lot of past threads - what might be interesting is what this implies in your view, alongside everything else, for what "ought" to be the outcome? What would you like to see as the outcome as best for the world?

I dont think ought is all that interesting. Or rather, I think focusing on oughts lead to utopian thinking which lead to disaster. Much rather have some basic ideas of the good while focusing on marginal improvements of “is”

The Nick Fuentes interview with Piers Morgan was a good demonstration of how boomers do not understand Gen Z rhetorical tactics at all. One example is the “agree-and-amplify” strategy.

This strategy came from The Red Pill/PUA community. The idea is that girls will try to throw you off your game by making some unfounded criticism, to test how secure/powerful you are as a man. It’s called a “shit test.”

The “agree-and-amplify” strategy says the best approach is to do exact that. Example: Girl says “Wow that’s a big truck, are compensating for something?”

Loser response (no getting laid): “No, my penis is slightly above average! I just like trucks!”

Agree-and-amplify: “Hahah yeah, micropene. 1 inch. It’ll have you screaming tho.”

The latter projects confidence, she knows your joking of if she believes you, you can neg her about it. She made it sexual and gave you an opening. Etc. All in good fun.

Fuentes did the same thing repeatedly, and Morgan just does not grasp it at all.

For example, paraphrasing:

Morgan: “Are you racist?”

Loser response: No, I have friends who are black! I just think [crime statistics]!

Morgan: Sounds like you’re racist.

Game, set, march. Better is the Fuentes agree-and-amplify:

Fuentes : “Haha yeah. I don’t want any black people around”

Morgan: [clutches pearls]

Fuentes: I have black friends though. They are also concerned about [crime statistics]

Morgan: But you said you were racist!

It makes it feel like Morgan is not in on the joke. It denies his moral frame that any hint of racism = bad. He needs to come up with a more concrete argument. When he instead tries fails to re-establish the frame through repetition, it doesn’t land.

I was reminded in a way of the classic Charlie Kirk owning libs on campus. The key is that the libs did not really come into the bait understanding Kirk’s beliefs or tactics, but Kirk understood theirs inside and out. This let Kirk win easily every time.

Morgan is a wiley veteran and won some parts of the interview. But overall he did not know how to handle Nick’s tactics at all.

In the end, it is turning into a debacle for Piers Morgan. As the dust settles, he comes across as the evil defender of a decrepit regime going after some dude’s dad. He was forced to pretend to not understand basic statistics, causing him to appear either stupid or malicious, depending on your gullibility. In many ways, he was the perfect heel employing dirty tactics to get an edge.

And to make matters worse, his decision to focus on the Catholic Nick’s virginity has backfired horribly, with everyone learning about his wife cheating on him with everyone from internet randos to the literal pool boy. How true are these accusations? I honestly don’t know, but they are already cemented into the hivemind’s collective beliefs.

I could really never stand the rambling nature of Nick’s show and never watched more than five minutes, but I agree with most of what he said on Tucker and Piers. On my scorecard, total groyper victory. Curious if others agree.

Everyone understands sarcasm. Zoomers didn't invent it.

The problem is that Piers Morgan sees himself not just as vastly intellectually superior to Nick Fuentes, but in a completely different league. He underestimated Fuentes so much, he didn't even see the need to listen to him. He thought all he had to do is research, present the evidence, and it would be an automatic win. That's why he didn't even consider the possibility that Fuentes was being sarcastic.

Just consider the moment when Fuentes said the number of Jews that died in the Holocaust could have been 7, 6, 8 million... maybe 100 times more. If Morgan paused for a second to listen to what Fuentes just said, he would realize he was being trolled, but he didn't, because the possibility that he was going to be intellectually outmatched wasn't on his bingo card.

There were around 500k Jewish people in Germany at the time, so how could the number of dead be 600k?

I've seen this happen countless times. For example when Paul Krugman commented on a post by Scott Adams, underestimating Adams' intellect and not even considering the possibility that he was being trolled.

Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer. Zoomers are just taking advantage of the Boomers' overconfidence, and having a laugh about how stupid it makes them look.

I think this is the result of different strategies that Morgan and Fuentes had with this interview. Fuentes came there with his bloodsport debate style, which is about listening to your opponent and constructing arguments. Morgan came there with tabloid style gotcha questions, moralizing and shaming/guilting - complete with random segues and topic switching whenever he thinks that he got what he wanted.

It was also seen specifically with the part you mentioned, when Fuentes obviously sarcastically admitted that he is "Holocaust maximalist". Morgan did not listen to Fuentes in order to form his own counterargument, he jumped into a gotcha of we know how many Jews were slaughtered. It's at least 6 million. Uh, what's interesting to me is that you appear to now concede that. Which may be news to your regular viewers. So again, even if Morgan thought that Fuentes offered a concession, he immediately went on attack satisfied that he proved Fuentes as a liar for his viewers. It is a different style of discussion, not a debate.

In a sense it was a battle of styles with each side utilizing different tactics, it was almost like a parallel streams with little to no substantive engagement from any side.

Yeah, but the problem is that Fuentes' style does require listening, so he was responding to what Morgan actually said. The audience is also listening to both. Morgan is the only one that wasn't.

That's why the little jabs that Fuentes did proved to the audience that Morgan wasn't listening, because he didn't respond or engage, he just continued with his script.

There's a reason why in 2025 people prefer the long-form podcast style: because it's harder to fake.

At the end of the day Fuentes' style feels much more authentic. Nobody likes Morgan's style anymore.

I wholeheartedly agree, although even this may be a different game. There is a strategy of clip farming, where you may look like a moron in a debate, but as long as you can produce couple of viral 20 second clips, you may have been successful in your mission when it comes to certain audience. Here it would be something like Fuentes admitting that he is a racist or whatever.

Like Fuentes said, Morgan is tabloid journalist. All he needs is to create controversy and produce some smears and he may be "successful" in this specific subgame despite losing the overall 2 hour debate. If it is a viable long-term strategy is questionable, but at least it worked for years when it comes to Fuentes alone.

The effectiveness of agree-and-amplify is context dependent though. It makes sense in dating because the two of you are not discussing the merits of whatever insult the woman throws at you. You are either showing how you handle a curveball, or you are simply both joking around and having fun by making absurd statements.

I would argue it makes a lot less sense when one party is entirely serious about the insult. If the girl genuinely believes that big truck = small dick, agreeing and amplifying will just make her think she is correct.

A debate setting is serious, and it is expected that both parties argue in good faith. In that situation, agree and amplify will either convince the viewers that the accusations are correct or show them that you do not care about the rules of the debate. If one party defects this way, then the intellectual value is pretty much lost. From my perspective, either Nick Fuentes is an actual racist or he is so obtuse that I cannot know what his views are, because at any point he might be joking.

So the only thing he manages to do is show of his authority or his frame, by showing the viewers that he is composed even when under pressure while managing to throw off the frame of his opponent. I admit this is a good goal to have in a debate, but it doesn't do much for me personally when he otherwise comes off as either racist or untrustworthy.

A more charitable read would be that by blithely denying the label and then agreeing dismissively and moving on he demonstrates a level of disdain/apathy for the label. He doesn't care whether he technically meets the dictionary definition of the word "racist". It's a word. He cares about [crime statistics] and object level concerns. Having the confidence to take one for the team and say "if you're going to derail the object level debate and go on some unimportant tangent about whether I'm a "racist" then fine, I'll let you win this point, since I don't expect any of my audience to care anyway, so we can move on to something worth talking about."

He's not taking it seriously, but in 2025 taking a debate about whether someone is "racist" or not seriously is pointless. Everyone just uses it to mean people they don't like. I would argue that Morgan defected first by bringing it up in the first place, so a sarcastic dismissive reply to that particular point and then a transition back to something that actually matters is an appropriate debate tactic that doesn't make me trust him less.

finally got around to watching the interview. On balance I think Fuentes out performed but made a lot of errors. On the school shooting thing I think he needed to explain the per capita thing, when the fact check came back from Morgan and he said they both do school shootings at about the same rate he should have said "so your example of whites misbehaving is the one area the behave as poorly as blacks" I was baffled by him not making the point.

I do not know what else should he do especially in the face of "school shooter" argument being such a tangent. Fuentes wanted to say that his argument of 5% blacks being murderers is vastly larger than whatever proportion of whites are mass shooters, which supported his earlier argument of how white people should avoid black people or whatever. Fuentes explained himself clearly at least twice: first by saying that it is something like 0,0000001% and second by literally asking Morgan to calculate "number of all white people as a denominator vs number of white school shooters as numerator". Morgan did not understand what was asked of him.

Maybe this is too mathy language for some people to get, but it was as easy as elementary statistics goes.

It's just rare to be able to slay someone in their motte and Piers had exposed the soft underbelly of his motte.

You don't understand reaction strategy. Nick Fuentes doesn't need to explain anything, he just needs to say something provocative for other people to react. And that's exactly what happened.

If you watch reaction videos, pretty much everyone is saying the same thing: 1 in 100 is still pretty bad.

It's exactly the same when somebody makes a typo in a title. It's engagement baiting. "Oh, you got me, I'm so bad at spelling".

No, you just don't understand the moves that are happening.

I was shocked he didn't know the black vs white homicide rates off the top of his head. Any self-respecting internet racist should.

You can't just say the words "per capita" and act like it resolves the question. You need to say the actual per capita numbers. That is what resolves the discussion.

In some parts he had clever prepared responses and seemed to navigate the conversation pretty well, but that's such a basic thing. It's like watching someone sink tons of three pointers but can't even dribble.

It's like watching someone sink tons of three pointers but can't even dribble.

Which in turn feeds the narrative regarding Fuentes being a "Fed"/"Trojan Horse"/"Controlled Opposition" that you'll see in more conservative aligned spaces. The fact that this interview is coming from a nakedly progressive partisan like Piers Morgan only fans those flames.

Is piers Morgan a nakedly progressive partisan? My understanding is that he's what passes for a respectable centrist type in bonger land.

I don't know what he was like before coming to the US but my understanding is that he's a normal establishment progressive by the standards of Europe which puts him well into "far left" territory by the standards of US Politics.

I first became aware of him during the the 2012 election while he was at CNN where he described Mitt Romney as a dangerous far right authoritarian and claimed that the republicans were going end women's suffrage if they won. He was a outspoken supporter of woke cancel mobs and social media censorship through Obama's second and Trump's first terms, and nothing I've seen from him to date has made me think that he doesn't still hew to those views.

Piers Morgan is a little bit complicated. He's middle-class, but not really upper middle-class. He's not as posh as he sounds, turns out he's half-Irish (so ironically both he and Fuentes were raised Catholic, at this stage I am starting to believe in the Papist World Domination Plot given how many in the public eye turn out unexpectedly to be "yeah Catholic background/raised Catholic") and only gets the double-barrelled name from his stepfather, who was a pub landlord:

Piers Morgan was born as Piers Stefan O'Meara in Guildford, Surrey, on 30 March 1965, the son of Vincent Eamonn O'Meara, an Irish dentist, and Gabrielle Georgina Sybille (née Oliver), an English woman who raised Morgan as a Catholic. A few months after his birth, the family moved to Newick, East Sussex. His father died when Morgan was 11 months old; his mother later married Glynne Pughe-Morgan, a Welsh pub landlord who later worked in the meat distribution business, and he took his stepfather's surname.

So while "Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan" sounds rather posh, he's not really. He's probably personally a liberal, but he worked for the Murdoch newspapers so publicly he pushed a somewhat down-market pro-Tory line and mostly adopts whatever will grab headlines, so that means controversial/clickbait takes, be that very to the left or very to the right, whichever sells best at the moment. Here's a typical example of him talking out of both sides of his mouth:

Morgan identified as a supporter of the Conservative Party in a 1994 interview, saying he was "still basically a Tory", but expressed admiration for the recently elected Labour Party leader Tony Blair, saying "he's not radical, speaks well and makes sense".

Seemingly he's voted for both Conservatives and Labour candidates, depending on whatever the phase of the moon at the time was (or something):

Morgan voted for the Animal Welfare Party in the 2015 general election due to his low opinion of all the main party leaders. He voted against Brexit in the 2016 EU referendum but voted for the Kensington Conservative candidate in the 2019 general election because of Boris Johnson's commitment to honour the result of the referendum. Morgan has also previously voted for the Labour Party. Following Labour's victory in the 2024 general election, he called leader Keir Starmer "a good, decent, hard-working, self-made man". In November 2024, he identified as a centrist, adding "woke liberals are too loony-left for me".

So he started his career in journalism working for the Murdoch press, which is working-class/down-market pro-Tory right-wing. The News of the World was a pure scandal sheet, in my childhood during the late 60s/70s it was vaguely disreputable, racy type of paper you wouldn't admit to reading but bought on Sundays for all the scandal-mongering:

The News of the World concentrated in particular on celebrity scoops, gossip and populist news. Its somewhat prurient focus on sex scandals gained it the nickname Screws of the World. In its last decade it had a reputation for exposing celebrities' drug use, sexual peccadilloes, or criminal acts, by using insiders and journalists in disguise to provide video or photographic evidence, and covert phone hacking in ongoing police investigations.

Morgan began to work as a freelance at The Sun in 1988, at this point dropping his double-barrelled name. He told Hunter Davies in December 1994 that he was personally recruited by Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie to work on the newspaper's show business column "Bizarre", his first high-profile post. Although he was not a fan of pop music, he was considered skilled at self-publicity and became the column's main writer.

...In January 1994, he became editor of the News of the World after being appointed to the job by Rupert Murdoch. ...In this period, the newspaper led with a series of scoops for which Morgan credited a highly efficient newsdesk and publicist Max Clifford.

Morgan then leaves the centre-right paper for a centre-left paper, claiming he resigned of his own accord but more a case of "jump before he was pushed":

Morgan left this post in 1995 ...The incident was reported to have contributed to Morgan's decision to leave for the Daily Mirror editorship.. Morgan's autobiography The Insider states that he left the News of the World for the Mirror of his own choice. It asserts he was an admirer of former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for most of her period of office, making the appointment surprising as the Mirror is a Labour-supporting title.

...[Is involved in several mini-scandals, including allegedly profiting from insider trading stock tips from business journalists for the Mirror, then] In the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, Morgan was sacked as editor of the Daily Mirror "with immediate effect" on 14 May 2004, after refusing to apologise to Sly Bailey, then head of Trinity Mirror, for authorising the newspaper's publication of fake photographs.

He moved into television presenting, and has continued his chameleon-like style of being friends with/never heard of them (according as the wind blows) regarding various celebrities and public figures, e.g. "Morgan was briefly a friend of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex before she became the Duchess of Sussex, but said she cut him off early in her relationship with Prince Harry. He has been a regular critic of the couple since then, alleging they are hypocrites and claiming the Duchess is a social climber."

He wore out his welcome in UK media circles, hence the move to the USA. Mostly he has a good nose for controversy and isn't afraid (whether deliberately or not) to look like an idiot in his pursuit of headlines. Because he is such a chameleon, I would say not to take very seriously any stance he holds on any topic, since give him ten minutes and he'll swing to the opposite position if that's more tenable for public interest/attention.

Piers Morgan's a leftist, but not a progressive partisan. Like Bill Maher, he's very critical of the excesses of the far left (anti-white racism, misandry, trans women in sports, etc.).

That's implausible because the two red lines for the feds are... extremely conservative attitudes towards women and antisemitism. Nick is, as far as I can tell, completely genuine- he's an antisemite, closeted homosexual, simply doesn't have the same concern about Hispanic immigration as the far far right(which is often hung up on stupidity like deporting a third of the country anyway).

Each party to the debate is speaking to his own audience. This is often an under-appreciated dynamic in this kind of situation.

The problem is, Piers Morgan’s audience is mostly going to be dead or in nursing homes in five to ten years.

Agree-and-amplify style approaches are much older than Gen Z or pick-up culture. In his Enchiridion, Epictetus says:

33.7. If anyone tells you that such a person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer: "He does not know my other faults, else he would not have mentioned only these."

Part of the secret of ancient Stoic therapeia (midwifery of the soul) is to replace the usual motivations of pro-social actions (like desire for social approval and status anxiety) with the pursuit of virtue in itself, a sense of duty, and a feeling of connection to the cosmopolis (city of the Cosmos.)

I think this is the purpose of a lot of the so-called Stoic paradoxes. In Stoicism, phrases like "all virtues are equal", "all vices are equal", and "only the sage is free" serve a similar psychological role to Christian sayings like, "only God/Jesus is perfect and sinless", "we have all sinned and fall short of God's perfection", and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Properly internalized, both philosophies will make it impossible to feel fundamentally better or worse than anyone else, and changes your point of comparison to a perfect ideal instead of something a mortal human is really capable of achieving in this life.

It makes it feel like Morgan is not in on the joke. It denies his moral frame that any hint of racism = bad. He needs to come up with a more concrete argument. When he instead tries fails to re-establish the frame through repetition, it doesn’t land.

While I hardly think Nick Fuentes is a Stoic sage, I think the power of denying a moral framework is bigger than this. It isn't that you're refusing to be moral, it is that you are refusing to give in to the coercive element of moral socializing, for better or worse. In the best cases, this frees you up to do the right thing in spite of what society's worst impulses might try to get you to do, like when Socrates refused immoral orders while serving the Athenian military under the 30 tyrants, and in the worse cases it enables you do a bad thing in spite of any social censure you might face.

I haven't watched the debate, so take this with a grain of salt.

I think it's easy to rhetorically defeat an opponent whose main argument against you is moral by simply rejecting his moral frame. So if Morgan was unprepared to focus on logical arguments instead of moral ones, that's incompetent of Morgan. I don't have Fuentes' level of quick rhetorical thinking and experience with public speaking, and I think even I could defeat a moralizing opponent in such a situation without too much trouble.

That said, I think that in the long term possible public support of Fuentes has a pretty hard cap, and he will find it difficult to ever truly turn his movement into something mainstream, so I'm not sure that these easy wins really amount to much in the grand scheme of things.

I don't think it's realistically possible to openly say that women should lose the right to vote and ever achieve any sort of dominant position in politics in a Western country. Women's suffrage is, barring a massive civilization-altering catastrophe of some sort or the kind of genuinely total demographic replacement that great replacement theory people worry about, never going to be repealed in the West in any sort of foreseeable future. And if Sharia law supporting Muslims become the majority in the US somehow, they're not going to support Fuentes types either, despite agreeing with them about women and Jews, and white groypers are not going to be happy in such a future.

At best, Fuentes can stay what he is now, a gadfly and proselytizer, maybe a relatively minor player in the entire right-wing coalition, but groyper influence in politics will not grow above a certain threshold.

Fuentes also, despite his quite formidable rhetorical abilities, has plenty of weaknesses that can be exploited by a competent opponent. He just hasn't gone up against one yet on any sort of big stage, at least as far as I know.

Fuentes can stay what he is now, a gadfly and proselytizer ... groyper influence in politics will not grow above a certain threshold

My gut tells me you're right, but these various beliefs of his evidently have massive support among the up and coming, politically active right-wing youngsters, like those that staff congressional offices, think tanks, the White house, regional and university young republican orgs, etc. Claims that these are fringe views and are therefor only held by the fringe look to be untrue. And thus the idea that these views will never achieve escape velocity might have less support than imagined.

It's going to be quite the coup when Fuentes brings all those people over to the Democrats. I don't know why the right falls for this every time.

Or Levin and Shapiro are going to bring their people over to Democrats when their hold over Republican elites is broken, though one wonders how many geriatric followers they could actually flip.

Can't speak for Levin, but if some personal skepticism of zionism was a brightline for Shapiro he wouldn't have hired so many trad Catholics to work for him. Granted, not the crazy antisemitic schizo ones, but still, by all appearances Shapiro is more invested in social conservatism than Israel.

Not everyone he hires is ultra pro-Israel but not one dares cross the line into being anti-Israel and the one who did was famously kicked out.

If Ben Shapiro is more invested in social conservatism than Israel then why is he so much more tolerant of and willing to converse with social liberals, even the most extreme "defend trans kids" types, but he has a total firewall around hiring, debating or publicly interacting with any kind of anti-Zionist? By all indications the former is simply a fig leaf for the latter.

Probably because zionism is more difficult to have a debate about. You can destroy trans narratives with facts and logic pretty easily; zionism is not based on that.

Women's suffrage is, barring a massive civilization-altering catastrophe of some sort or the kind of genuinely total demographic replacement that great replacement theory people worry about, never going to be repealed in the West in any sort of foreseeable future.

To borrow from the Matrix, by the time it becomes feasible to end women's suffrage, it will no longer be necessary.

Fuentes: I have black friends though. They are also concerned about [crime statistics]

Granted, I’m not familiar with Fuentes and I don’t know if he was doing some 5D metairony here, so I may be getting whooshed (what if the boomer is calling from inside the house?!).

However, Fuentes’s statement is A) still buying into the progressive framing that the opinions of non-blacks on racial matters (or perhaps any sort of matters) can only be legitimized (and even then, only partially) to the extent they have black friends. This is also B) still buying into the progressive and mainstream conservative (progressives driving the speed limit) framing that crime is only a problem insofar that blacks are the primary victims of it.

I think not. It's more like challenging the assumptions most progressives have that (a) you cannot be even a little bit racist and still have affection and friendship for members of that race. The whole reason "Some of my best friends are black" became a boomer-cringe punchline is that it was actually true for a lot of people! They did have black friends, and yet they also had racist opinions about blacks in general.

Southerners would often argue that Southerners could be friends with individual blacks but disliked the black race, while Yankees claimed to love the black race but couldn't stand to be friends with blacks, and I think there is truth to that.

See also: "one of the good ones" and "a credit to your race." Obviously most black people are not going to think highly of someone saying, basically, "I think most of your people are trash, but you're okay." But it is in fact possible to believe [crime statistic] and even that this says something about bell curves and HBD, and still think individuals can be fine.

The progressive framing makes that distinction impossible: if you are concerned about [crime statistic] or you believe the Bell Curve is true, then you are a racist and cannot actually like black people, and no black person should trust you, period.

This has often struck me in stories from the way back, early pulp fiction, Victorian, and even medieval tales. You'd have Christians in existential war with Saracens and yet an individual Crusader might make friends with a Moor. They'd be brothers, despite the fact that their entire worldview said the other one was a servant of the Devil. Jews in early literature are often depicted terribly, and yet individual Jewish characters are represented as sympathetic and people who probably think Jews in general are jewy Joos would be their friends. (SS will now come along to rant about how inserting a sympathetic Jewish character in a book is part of the Joo-spiracy, Anthony Trollope was probably ZOGed....)

And pointing out "Black people are also concerned about [crime statistic]" breaks that frame that "Only racists who hate black people talk about that!" Yeah, a lot of black people are concerned about black criminality. They might not agree that this is because black people are congenitally criminal, they might disagree about the cause of the dysfunction in black society that produces these statistics, but it's not wrong to challenge the framing that it's inherently racist to look at facts.

I don't know exactly how Fuentes genuinely feels about blacks. From what I've seen of his speeches, it's something like "Blacks are mostly low-IQ animals and they need to be controlled, but some of them are okay." Which is racist by any reasonable definition. But he's still perturbing Morgan's assumptions by saying (a) no, I don't hate every single black person, and (b) black people can also recognize and be concerned about uncomfortable truths.

I don't like Fuentes (having watched a few of his videos- ye gods is he an annoying, insufferable, smug little prick who looks and sounds like someone who spent his high school career getting swirlies in the boy's bathroom), but I think he understands what he's doing better than you do. I can even somewhat agree with the framing he is trying to break, as I personally believe [crime statistic], Bell Curve, etc., are real things, and yet also we should not be hateful and oppressive to black people as a class. I am pretty sure my conclusions are more charitable and my solutions more generous than what Fuentes would propose, but it's really telling to me that the people who truly, viscerally hate black people and Jews also hate someone as overtly, proudly racist and anti-semitic as Fuentes and even accuse him of being "controlled opposition" because ... he's not racist and anti-semitic enough.

If you're waiting around for a mainstream character who's openly calling for holy war and genocide, well, KulakRevolt is auditioning hard for that role, but I don't see him getting much traction.

I don't know exactly how Fuentes genuinely feels about blacks. From what I've seen of his speeches, it's something like "Blacks are mostly low-IQ animals and they need to be controlled, but some of them are okay." Which is racist by any reasonable definition. But he's still perturbing Morgan's assumptions by saying (a) no, I don't hate every single black person, and (b) black people can also recognize and be concerned about uncomfortable truths.

One way to put it is the difference between patriotism and chauvinism: one is expression of sympathy or love or other positive emotion toward your group, while the other is declaration of superiority. In that sense you just ascribe positive or even negative attributes to your identity which does not preclude doing the same for other groups. You may still like jazz, black basketball players etc. It is just a view from the standpoint of other culture.

From my meager experience with Fuentes during latest slew of interviews, this is what he preaches: Multiculturalism is over. Even the mild one such as "judge based on content of character and not based on your skin". Whites should stick together, foster positive relation toward their white identity and become a tribe. This will be especially important as whites will become minority majority. They do not have to be necessarily hostile to other groups, they can let's say be allies toward East Asians, especially if there is a common interest let's say when it comes to education reforms etc. But they should acknowledge that they are distinct group with their own history, culture, religion etc.

Paradoxically this is what Fuentes also says about other groups, especially blacks and Jews. They are Americans, but they also have their tribal/national identity which enables them to band together and promote these interests. Whites should do the same. In this sense I do understand why people adhering to liberal worldview such as James Lindsay call people like Fuentes as "woke right". Although it is interesting that they do not have the same label for other people such as Ben Shapiro, who is also on the right and who also has tribal identity which is sometimes in conflict with general liberal ethos.

The whole reason "Some of my best friends are black" became a boomer-cringe punchline is that it was actually true for a lot of people! They did have black friends, and yet they also had racist opinions about blacks in general.

Why the past tense?

I think not. It's more like challenging the assumptions most progressives have that (a) you cannot be even a little bit racist and still have affection and friendship for members of that race. The whole reason "Some of my best friends are black" became a boomer-cringe punchline is that it was actually true for a lot of people! They did have black friends, and yet they also had racist opinions about blacks in general.

What progressives ever made that claim? The whole point of "some of my best friend are black" being a punchline is that it's not evidence of not being racist. That is, tokenism is still racist.

Nowadays, saying "Some of my best friends are black" is kind of cringeworthy because it's such a boomer punchline, and it sounds like something Archie Bunker might have said. Of course some people who said that were just trying to deflect from their actually racist beliefs, but some genuinely did not think of themselves as racists and were trying to defend themselves with what seemed like a legitimate point - if I'm a racist, why are some of my best friends black?

Unfortunately, the progressive bailey today is that all white people are racist, anyone who claims not to be racist is in denial about their racism, and mentioning black friends is just proof of how racist you are (because if you weren't racist you'd know you're racist and that having black friends is no defense). It also condenses attitudes into a binary: you are racist or not-racist. (Or "anti-racist" as Ibrim X Kendi would say.) If you are not "anti-racist" then you are racist, no matter how non-racist you think you are and no matter how many black friends you have, and functionally there is no difference between you and Nick Fuentes.

A progressive generally will not actually put it like that, of course, but that is very much what I get from modern progressivism.

Nowadays, saying "Some of my best friends are black" is kind of cringeworthy because it's such a boomer punchline, and it sounds like something Archie Bunker might have said.

Note that Archie was canonically of the WWII generation, two generations older than the boomers.

Everyone older than ~Gen X is a boomer

I look forward to about 10 years from now when 20-something Gen Alphas start calling Gen-X "boomers"

I can't believe I have to explain that I know Archie Bunker the character was not a boomer. Archie Bunker the character was entertainment for boomers. Hence his lines being things Boomers thought were funny.

SS will now come along to rant about how inserting a sympathetic Jewish character in a book is part of the Joo-spiracy, Anthony Trollope was probably ZOGed....)

C'mon, this is uncharitable, isn't it? Shouldn't you know better?

C'mon, this is uncharitable, isn't it? Shouldn't you know better?

Yeah, imagine confusing Trollope with Dickens who was prevailed upon successfully to change his depiction of fictional Jewish characters, from the criminal Fagin in "Oliver Twist" to the saintly Riah in "Our Mutual Friend" after a Jewish lady wrote to him.

I am offended that you would think I don't know Trollope from Dickens!

Perhaps OP meant a different trollop 🤣

My two cents is that this forum isn't really the place for disparaging misspellings of opponents' arguments (da joos, freeze peach, da menz etc), but I've reported it a few times and nothing has come of it, so I guess the mod-team disagree. That's fair.

disparaging misspellings of opponents' arguments

That's not the part I was calling uncharitable. I'm referring to @Amadan dragging @SecureSignals into this — without even having the decency to @ him — to put words into his mouth.

I mean, if in the middle of making some right-leaning argument, I were to drop a parenthetical about how "magicalkittycat will now come along to rant about how un-ironic literal Nazis are everywhere, the GOP will probably declare the Fourth Reich in 2028...", or something like that, I would not at all be surprised to get a mod warning at the least — and deservedly so.

I thought we're supposed to engage with the arguments people actually make, not the arguments we preemptively imagine them making.

Southerners would often argue that Southerners could be friends with individual blacks but disliked the black race, while Yankees claimed to love the black race but couldn't stand to be friends with blacks, and I think there is truth to that.

I’ve heard this phrased: “In the South, the Negro can get as close as he likes, as long as he doesn’t get too high; in the North, the Negro can get as high as he likes, as long as he doesn’t get too close”

Ever-relevant Land:

Consider John Derbyshire’s essay in infamy The Talk: Nonblack Version, focusing initially on its relentless obnoxiousness, and attentive to the negative correlation between sociability and objective reason. As Derbyshire notes elsewhere, people are generally incapable of differentiating themselves from group identities, or properly applying statistical generalizations about groups to individual cases, including their own. A rationally indefensible, but socially inevitable, reification of group profiles is psychologically normal – even ‘human’ – with the result that noisy, non-specific, statistical information is erroneously accepted as a contribution to self-understanding, even when specific information is available.

From the perspective of socially autistic, low-EQ, rational analysis, this is simply mistaken. If an individual has certain characteristics, the fact of belonging to a group that has similar or dissimilar average characteristics is of no relevance whatsoever. Direct and determinate information about the individual is not to any degree enriched by indirect and indeterminate (probabilistic) information about the groups to which the individual belongs. If an individual’s test results are known, for instance, no additional insight is provided by statistical inferences about the test results that might have been expected based on group profiling. An Ashkenazi Jewish moron is no less moronic because he is an Ashkenazi Jew. Elderly Chinese nuns are unlikely to be murderers, but a murderer who happens to be an elderly Chinese nun is neither more nor less murderous than one who is not. This is all extremely obvious, to obnoxious people.

To normal people, however, it is not obvious at all. In part this is because rational intelligence is scarce and abnormal among humans, and in part because social ‘intelligence’ works with what everyone else is thinking, which is to say, with irrational groupish sentiment, meager information, prejudices, stereotypes, and heuristics. Since (almost) everybody else is taking short-cuts, or ‘economizing’ on reason, it is only rational to react defensively to generalizations that are likely to be reified or inappropriately applied — over-riding or substituting for specific perceptions. Anybody who anticipates being pre-defined through a group identity has an expanded ego-investment in that group and the way it is perceived. A generic assessment, however objectively arrived at, will immediately become personal, under (even quite remotely) normal conditions.

Obnoxious reason can stubbornly insist that anything average cannot be about you, but the message will not be generally received. Human social ‘intelligence’ is not built that way. Even supposedly sophisticated commentators blunder repeatedly into the most jarring exhibitions of basic statistical incomprehension without the slightest embarrassment, because embarrassment was designed for something else (and for almost exactly the opposite). The failure to understand stereotypes in their scientific, or probabilistic application, is a functional prerequisite of sociability, since the sole alternative to idiocy in this respect is obnoxiousness.

I’ve always thought of this in terms of the “yes Chad” jpg meme. There’s no caricature or attack that can’t be defeated by more or less saying “yes”.

“You’re a communist who hates America!”

“Yes”

“You’re a holocaust denier who thinks the Jews are running the world”

“Yes”

Etc. etc. It works because we’ve lost consensus about what things we’re supposed to believe as a nation.

Better yet, 'Bring the movies'.

Etc. etc. It works because we’ve lost consensus about what things we’re supposed to believe as a nation.

I don’t think it works because of that, since if anything there I’d say it works because of the consensus that communists and antisemites are bad. It works because it shows social dominance and control of the interaction by calling out bad faith intercolution in an unaffected, playful way, tossing down a reverse uno card to parry and deal 2X damage.

It can also be applied more broadly to deal with rhetorical tricks or attempted gotchas in general, not just American culture war topics (hence the possible origin from dealing with women’s shit-tests). For example, loaded questions:

“Have you stopped beating your wife?”

“No, it’d be cruel to deprive her of the violence she craves.”

I suspect its origins are far older than PUA knowhow, though, even if PUA put a name to it and helped popularize it.

Thanks for teaching me how to deal with culture war shit tests. From now on if anyone asks me if I'm racist I'll reply: "Yeah man I'm racist as fuck. My black friends are hella annoyed by it"

"Yah I'm homophobic as fuck. I get gay panic anxiety every time I come at the gay bath house"

"Yeah I'm islamophobic as fuck..."

My conspiracy take is legacy establishment figures like Tucker and Piers at least to some extent agree with Fuentes's message and are intentionally amplifying it by inviting him on their shows to be slain by him. In the words of Mycroft Holmes (from the British TV series): "This is a battle we must lose, because they are right and we are wrong."

That said, it's kind of a shame that Fuentes is the best the dissident right can produce. He has a lot of problems, certainly not the least of which being that he complains without proposing any serious solutions. Take the illegals question: what is the actual proposal here? There are tens of millions of illegals in the United States, especially if one counts those present on legal but dubious pretense (previous amnesties, asylum, birth to an illegal migrant, etc.), which seems to be the bailey. A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memory (e.g., the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan). It would be a challenge even for Stalin. Or take the Jewish oligarchy Fuentes loves to complain about. What exactly is the proposal? Nationalise Oracle Corporation and boot Larry Ellison off to Israel? Make all the Jews wear gold stars so everybody knows to stop doing business with them? Because apparently saying "They trust me. Dumb fucks." is not a compelling enough signal for the masses to not cede their entire social infrastructure to that person.

My personal take is there is no serious way to solve the problems Fuentes names. For a country that never got itself into these situations in the first place, like Poland, sure. Fuentes's ideology can work. But for countries like the United States or the United Kingdom, this is not feasible. The best they can hope for is a non-bastardised implementation of classical liberalism: maybe actually put the criminals in prison for once, instead of releasing them on some harebrained pretense of "the Pakistanis don't know rape is bad." Bukele, basically. But any notion of "retvrn to ethnostate" is fundamentally non-serious. And I mean that in a deeply practical sense: I don't think any amount of "the secret is just be evil" makes it realistic.

There are tens of millions of illegals in the United States, especially if one counts those present on legal but dubious pretense (previous amnesties, asylum, birth to an illegal migrant, etc.), which seems to be the bailey. A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memory (e.g., the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan). It would be a challenge even for Stalin.

It was Richard Spencer of all people who repeated his view on alt-right podcasts that anything that was done without violence can per definition be undone without violence as well. In other words, illegal immigrants entered the US due to incentives without force; change the incentives, and they will leave peacefully. You don't necessarily have to agree with him of course, but this argument surely has some legs to stand on.

It was Richard Spencer of all people who repeated his view on alt-right podcasts that anything that was done without violence can per definition be undone without violence as well...but this argument surely has some legs to stand on

What? That's obvious nonsense that couldn't stand up to any scrutiny. Either it's using the novel expansive definition of "violence" where it just means "bad actions", or else finding counterexamples is trivial.

  • I can non-violently scramble an egg. Good luck unscrambling it.

  • Libel/slander is not a violent crime, yet the harm is often irreversible and can only be punished and compensated for.

  • Robbery and fraud are often not violent, but recovering stolen goods practically requires the use (or at least threat) of violence.

They might be able to stem the tide without needing any enforcement, but that's a long ways from actually reversing it. I think this is obvious enough that the argument would get shut down before it got any real traction.

Scrambling an egg is technically a violent act because're breaking the egg first, acording to the dictionary definition of the word as well. Also, robbery necessarily entails at least the threat of violence. But anyway, my point is that illegal immigrants didn't appear by forcing their way in, and it's not like they're trying to stay by threatening violence either.

I’ve made this point a million times. Deny all benefits to illegal immigrants. Strictly enforce their inability to work. Tax remittances heavily. Put a harsh jail sentence for catching an illegal. Turn off chain immigration.

Illegals go bye bye.

Unthinkable program in a managerial democracy. All your donors employ illegals or rely on people who do.

You need a coup, or a referendum, which is the same thing.

campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking

The reconquista took > 700 years and then only in retrospect.

Pelagius wasn't 'trusting the plan', as others have said it's incremental improvements

Then as now it will look more random walk than trend at times. You need the macro view to see the arc.

A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memor

"It's hard so we shouldn't even try" is a pretty common rhetorical tactic that I see on this topic, and I'm going to take this opportunity to address it.

It's a pernicious mindset that argues that there is no value in incremental improvement. It's akin to saying that since you can't shove an entire cheeseburger down your gullet in one bite, you might as well curl up in the fetal position and starve to death. To quote Barack Obama, it's letting "the perfect be the enemy of the good".

The Trump administration, for all its flaws, allegedly managed to deport 605,000 people who were not legally residing in the US in 2025 alone. This does not count individuals who returned to their home country without any state interaction. These 605,000 individuals were deported over the strident objections of institutions all across the country, which attempted to use legal strategies and manufactured public sentiment to stymie those deportations to the fullest extent possible.

You can argue that those 605,000 deportations were bad on the grounds of morality or realpolitik, but it's difficult to argue that they are not happening. You can say that you would like them to happen faster, but you cannot argue that 605,000 is orders of magnitude larger than what had happened from 2020 - 2024.

It's fairly clear that the US has the state capacity to do something here, because they're doing it.

"It's hard so we shouldn't even try" is a pretty common rhetorical tactic that I see on this topic

I don't do rhetorical tactics. I'm not a streamer, I have no fanbase or audience to pander to. I'm not going to lose my ad revenue if I say an oopsie.

I say it's not realistic because it isn't. To engage in the deportations of 15+ million people is ludicrous, and as I mentioned, that's not even the bailey: the bailey is a white ethnostate, which would require 40+ million deportations. That's either a chart-topper in all world history or very close, in terms of quantity of people relocated by a government. The notion that the United States, in anything like its current incarnation, could engage in 1930s Stalin-level population migration is not realistic. You would need a Julius Caesar-tier figure, and that's not the sort of political personnel you can pick up the phone and order from CATO.

And to the perfect being the enemy of the good: I'm not sure "good" is the word to use here, so let's use the word "partial": does reducing the quantity of non-whites by, say, 3 million, change anything at all about the trajectory of the country? Not really. You still have tens of millions of non-whites. All you've done is inflame a bunch of racial animosity among the still-very-much-muilticolored demographics of the country. And make no mistake, these people aren't just going to sit there and let you do this: if millions of coloured people actually believe they're under serious threat of deportation, you will have major political instability--not the BLM sort, the full-scale civil war sort. And you still have sub-replacement white fertility and a massive generation of retiring boomers.

Further, I don't trust the Trump administration's numbers on deportations, mostly because I don't trust them on anything else. They seem to be outright fabricating economic numbers (with the not-so-subtle intent to bully their own central bank), so I'm certainly not going to trust their remigration numbers.

In my estimation, there are only two realistic routes to a white ethnostate for Americans: major economic collapse, which might shake things up enough that large numbers of people who don't have some connection to agriculture (which is mostly white) flee the country as refugees, then hope the Mormons and Amish can form new state(s) and rebuild everything. Or you try the Israel tactic, of gathering some sort of white identity community, flying off to a hopefully-not-already-inhabited piece of land somewhere (cough), and make your ethnostate from scratch. Both of these are extremely uncomfortable, but the former is something that occasionally happens even without anyone trying to make it happen, and the latter is quite literally how the United States was founded.

With this sort of thing in mind, how many voters would choose any of the above over Gavin Newsom and AOC running in 3 years, promising a return to the regular old world of 2013?

Semi-Forced remigration via economic and legal means is the only way to make this happen at a large enough scale. And is definitely possible. It’s what the right should be aiming for.

The thing is you have to force economic conditions that are worse than the place they came from -- sufficiently worse to overcome the activation energy to get up and move again, at an older age than they did the first time!

In some sense, South Park had it right decades ago: the solution to all the Latin American migrants is to make Latin America less bad, so nobody will bother migrating in the first place. But the time to do that was decades ago, back when.. US policy was quite literally the opposite, creating the infamous Banana Republics.

Now, for Europe, which has a much smaller share of migrants, and many of them are on welfare, this is a much easier matter.

No you have to force economic conditions to suck for immigrants. Strictly enforce e verify. Heavily tax remittances. Harshly restrict benefits to immigrants. Turn off chain migration.

In some sense, South Park had it right decades ago: the solution to all the Latin American migrants is to make Latin America less bad, so nobody will bother migrating in the first place.

No one knows how to do that. I mean, if Trump really does get rid of Maduro that will likely help, but only a little bit.

It's tricky, but the premise does seem to hold: checking out the El Salvador emigration data, we can see it's 5x lower than it used to be. And it dropped by a factor of 2 the moment Bukele took office!

Now that Bukele has shown that you can, in fact, just put the violent criminals in prison, maybe others will give it a shot.

I mean I'm given to understand that tattooing 'I am evil' on your face is pretty specific to el salvadorean gangs and so it's a lot harder to replicate that strategy elsewhere.

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No one knows how to do that.

Oh no, the US has Manifest Destiny, but their founding myth also kind of involves them not being an empire so they don't want to. Plus, the pro-Empire faction is too busy trying to establish a domestic successor empire to bother with taking over other countries in this way.

Now, for Europe, which has a much smaller share of migrants

Europe is in a much, much worse position when you consider the ages involved. The Muslims are disproportionately young adults and children, and the middle aged and elderly dying people are disproportionately white.

The thing is the US is already so non-white. Whites account for around 50% of US births, which is pretty bad compared to most of Europe, as far as I can tell, although it's a bit tricky to compare numbers due to how data is collected and classified.

And Eastern Europe is mostly okay (I mean, they still have cratering fertility. But at least it's not buoyed by third-world migrant births).

Sure, but the different non white groups may not like whites, but they hate each other. The blacks meeting an indian(or oriental, but that's a lot less likely) boss will beg for the klan to come be in charge again. The Hispanics often won't accept a black manager. Etc, etc.

But in America, the different ethnic groups are held in tension with one another. In Europe there’s one mostly contiguous ethno-religious block waiting in the wings to seize power.

US policy was quite literally the opposite, creating the infamous Banana Republics.

Sure, but without US intervention Latin America would have instituted Communism in a bunch of places, and it's extremely difficult to imagine they would have been any more economically prosperous under Communism.

There are tens of millions of illegals in the United States, especially if one counts those present on legal but dubious pretense (previous amnesties, asylum, birth to an illegal migrant, etc.), which seems to be the bailey. A campaign to expel them all would be a monumental geopolitical undertaking, dwarfing anything in recent US memory (e.g., the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan). It would be a challenge even for Stalin.

Maybe, but there are a lot of potentially-billion-dollar-bills laying on the sidewalk which the US political system won't pick up for various reasons.

  • highly taxing/regulating remittances
  • vigorous enforcement of H1B and other educational/employment visa requirements
  • ramp up of enforcement of existing Orders of Removal / hiring more IJs to help clear the case backlog
  • increasing workplace audits/lawsuits against bad actors in immigrant-heavy employment sectors (agriculture, food processing, construction, hospitality).

Or take the Jewish oligarchy Fuentes loves to complain about. What exactly is the proposal? Nationalise Oracle Corporation and boot Larry Ellison off to Israel? Make all the Jews wear gold stars so everybody knows to stop doing business with them?

Moving against dual-citizenship would seem to be effective, as well as just a general grass-roots push against the more obnoxiously-obsequious Israel focus. Barring that, just wait a generation - most of the well-assimilated liberal ashkenazi will just die off or fully submerge into the general population through intermarriage without any/many kids in a generation or two anyway.

Moving against dual-citizenship would seem to be effective

As Randy Fine noted in response to Fuentes a couple of months ago on this subject, to his knowledge (and I think he’s probably more accurate than not) no Jewish congresspeople are Israeli citizens. In the same way, very few Jewish American billionaires or otherwise powerful figures are Israeli citizens. Zuckerberg, Ellison, Altman, Iger, none of these people have Israeli passports in all likelihood (I say because it’s possible they do in secret, but it’s very unlikely - there is no reason for them to).

Technically speaking, all Jews are Israeli citizens, no? It's kinda meaningless when you haven't gotten an Israeli passport, but it's a handy piece of antisemitic rhetoric.

It's worth noting this isn't unique to Jews; a surprisingly high percentage of native born Americans are technically citizens of a foreign country(I would imagine Italy is slightly ahead of Israel here) through descent.

The of return is an application rather than an entitlement, it's subject to the whims of the Israeli state and can be denied for many reasons at the relatively arbitrary whim of the state. Israel doesn't consider non-Israeli Jews to be, legally, citizens. In that case it's closer to 'ancestry visas' for e.g., great grandchildren in countries that support them, like Portugal, England and others. Italian hereditary citizenship (until earlier this year) was automatic for subsequent generations, you applied for recognition of citizenship, not for citizenship or a visa itself.

There was a weird interview with Bernie Sanders years ago. A journalist asserted he was an Israeli dual citizen in lead up to a question. He cut in and said he is not an Israeli citizen. The journalist pushed on reiterating that he is a dual citizen and tried again to ask Bernie about his foreign loyalties. He couldn't answer and just repeated that he is not an Israeli. Such an awkward exchange.

The demand for 'ZOG' exceeds the supply. People want an explanations such as dual citizens with divided loyalties composing a significant portion of Congress. That's not true in a factual sense, but it feels right to them.

The demand for 'ZOG' exceeds the supply. People want an explanations such as dual citizens with divided loyalties composing a significant portion of Congress. That's not true in a factual sense, but it feels right to them.

Only the most unsophisticated of ...zog-demanders? would actually claim that the reason for Congress' divided loyalties is due solely to a large proportion of dual citizens. The actual claim on the part of people who believe in ZOG is that Congress is thoroughly corrupt and gridlocked, which grants AIPAC incredible undue influence over American politics. One of the primary examples these people point to is Ted Cruz, who openly stated that he went into office for the sole purpose of serving Israel - despite not being an Israeli citizen himself. These people are very obviously correct, which is why you have to twist their argument into something like "it is solely the Israeli dual citizens that are the problem" before you can actually defeat it.

Then I guess I'm confused about who Fuentes is talking about....because a lot of the most obnoxious pro-Israel activists, even to me, a Zionist-sympathetic secular half-Jew, either have dual citizenship themselves or have close family who does who they talk about incessantly. I'm thinking of chattering class people like John Podhoretz, etc. I didn't realize that Iger, Altman, etc. were viewed as being particularly Zionist.

I think even if all these were implemented tomorrow, the US would not look meaningfully different in 20 years.

That said, it's kind of a shame that Fuentes is the best the dissident right can produce.

Why? The best the left can produce is Hasan Piker, and the best the neoliberal center can produce is Destiny. Seems like everyone's roughly on par.

The best the left can produce is Hasan Piker

Zohran Mamdani got elected Mayor of New York on a DSA/third-worldist platform. Hasan is just modern-day left wing Bill O'Reilly. AOC, KBJ, Randi Weingarten, Brandon Johnson - all of these people hold significant office and/or policy influence.

To be clear, I don't actually think either of the people I or Soteriologian mentioned are "the best X can produce", that was kinda my point. Sorry for the snark, but I didn't appreciate someone from the other side declaring who is supposed to be my champion.

Understood. Sorry for not reading the room. Lol.

Maybe they're all feds from the same school.

Or if rumors and videos about Fuentes and Destiny are true, the same bathhouse.

Take Contrapoints, for example. Beneath the tongue-in-cheek pizzazz and glamour, and modulo the enormous blindspot of his/her own sexuality, there really is a person who has deep affection for western philosophy and art. Almost scholarly. There is nobody remotely comparable on the dissident right.

There’s a strong case to be made that Contrapoints to some extent agrees with core aspects of the Blanchardian hypothesis. Not in its entirety, but they understand that they approach life in a certain context as a performance and that gender is part of that.

There are trans forums where they dislike Wynn for this reason, because they understand that there’s an acknowledgement, on some level, that it’s drag.

Yeah, the reason I call it a blind spot is how unable to acknowledge the traditional roles (s)he is: as soon as you open your analysis to timescales longer than a human lifespan, the tradcon worldview makes a lot of sense. It's not arbitrary. It's not silly mysticism on par with a shaman performing rain dance.

Even if you find the traditional arrangement infuriating, at least have the basic intellectual honesty to acknowledge that this is how humans reproduce, and you need both pieces for this to work. In the words of Augustus:

If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance; but since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way without them, we must plan for our lasting preservation rather than for our temporary pleasure.

Today, one might label him gay (although I don't like applying modern labels to ancients), but the point is he's at least clearheaded enough to acknowledge the underlying mechanics of why society is the way it is, rather than gaslight himself and everyone else into thinking some weird degen lifestyle is totally equal to traditional marraige.

Lomez has an entire company dedicated to publishing abandoned books, and manages to do so without pizzas, glamour, or talking about his sexuality. Next!

Destiny is also left. You could call him neoliberal left, I suppose, but there's nothing center about him.

In the end, it is turning into a debacle for Piers Morgan. As the dust settles, he comes across as the evil defender of a decrepit regime going after some dude’s dad. He was forced to pretend to not understand basic statistics, causing him to appear either stupid or malicious, depending on your gullibility. In many ways, he was the perfect heel employing dirty tactics to get an edge.

Yea, imagine some Soviet apparatchik in late stage of really existing socialism defending the system in open, unscripted debate with dissident, even crazy one (or just ordinary disgruntled citizen).

For long time, failures of the system were masked by fact that Western world was legitimately the only game on the planet, the best place to be despite all faults. If USSR liberated the workers of the whole world and imposed its system everywhere, it could also easily swat away any criticism "What are you complaining about? You live far better than medieval serfs!".

Not any more.

Now you can ask: "Why in Dubai or Shanghai people have the same wealth and comfort as in Western cities, and in addition complete safety, where they can walk the streets at any time unmolested and being stabbed or shot by deranged drug addict is as thinkable as being eaten by tiger. Why can't we have it too?" And the system has no answer than "But we have democracy and human rights!" (not much talk about "freedom" these days)

Shanghai people have the same wealth and comfort as in Western cities

I worked there for a bit. No they don't.

and in addition complete safety

One of my coworkers got robbed in Shanghai.

Points well taken about the lack of drug addicts wandering around.

And I'm way, way freer than them. Let's have some perspective here.

Why in Dubai or Shanghai people have the same wealth and comfort as in Western cities

You picked the wrong examples. Dubai is a soulless worthless hellhole. Shanghai is a nice place in many ways, but it's quite poor, crowded, and not very comfortable compared to many western cities.

Maybe so, but that’s not the impression many Americans get through social media (only a tiny minority will ever visit in person).

Just to nitpick: the Red Pill/PUA community, to the extent that it actually existed*, was pretty much a GenX phenomenon, and a ‘90s/’00s phenomenon in particular. All the prominent PUAs are GenXers. I’d be surprised to learn that there are any GenZers out there with any familiarity with it. According to Wikipedia, Morgan was born in 1965, so he’s more of a GenXer than a Boomer. I’d guess he’s more likely to be aware of Red Pill stuff than a young homosexual like Fuentes.

*In a practical sense it’s dead. I discussed it here.

Morgan is British, and no, "everyone in the world born between the years X and Y, so Piers Morgan is GenX by virtue of being born in 1965" is not a meaningful criteria for a cohort. Morgan would only recognize Gen X culture in an academic sense (and probably not much even in that sense). Meanwhile, Fuentes, by virtue of being chronically online, almost certainly is more familiar with Red Pill discourse than Morgan.

Britain had its own baby boom, but it was bifurcated into a wave in the late 40s and one in the early 60s, with an era of postwar austerity in the lean 50s in-between. America had more of a consistent boom.

Just to nitpick: the Red Pill/PUA community, to the extent that it actually existed*, was pretty much a GenX phenomenon, and a ‘90s/’00s phenomenon in particular. All the prominent PUAs are GenXers.

I don't think so. All of these things existed before. For instance the PUA community has perfect overlap with rockstar or yuppie lifestyle from 1970s and 1980s. And of course the archetype is way older than that such as a dashing American soldier picking up young desperate girls in occupied Germany using chewing gum, can of beans and coffee, or even in 19th century literature where young noble or soldier picks up local village girls doing the deed in haystack, and leaving them with bastard babies.

Or you can go even earlier with literature of conquistadors and pirates and sailors having harem of wives and lovers in every port - the OG "passport bros", such as no other than Hernán Cortés who allegedly killed his own Spanish wife for nagging him about his harem of lovers and concubines, and for being too low status as an official wife for his elevated position. Andrew Tate is just a pale image of this Chad. It is all over the literature either as a cautionary tale, but also as a tale of promise for young brave men.

It still is structurally quite different. PUA is based on the idea of a stranger seducting women entirely with social trickery. This wouldn't have worked historically; Men in a social group generally guarded the women against strangers, and the women themselves were often even more wary of strangers. Inside a social group where everyone knows everyone else already, PUA falls apart as well.

The examples you cite have primarily two mechanisms they used: Actual status, and (the threat of) violence. As a peasant, you couldn't openly dismiss a noble unless he very blatantly broke with established rules, the way you would with a stranger. The social status itself also, of course, made the nobles more alluring for the women, and peasant men that would otherwise guard them also might try to curry favor with the noble instead. Not to mention that more critical literature of these individuals often strongly insinuates that their allegedly awesome powers of seduction was to a large part just plain prostitution. This is proven at least partially true by what frequently followed; A peasant women with an accepted noble bastard child would usually get an alimony that far outstrips any other stream of income usually available to her. But also for sex more generally, if a noble offers a women coin upfront, and the sexual encounter is revealed against their wish & expectation, both parties can save face by claiming that it actually just was a seduction. The women becomes a hapless victim, the men an awesome seductor. Much better than a whore & john.

For the soldiers/conquistadors/pirates etc. taking advantage of their physical power, almost everything above holds true as well, just that the arrangement is usually less voluntary in nature.

I agree on 70/80 rockstar/yuppie life. Male hippies, even if they have a different political connotation, behaved in practice quite similar as well. It's all imo quite evidently downstream of the sexual revolution. PUA simply couldn't exist without it.

There was also a rather banal and evident factor at play. In the old days the average young woman was either pregnant or caring for small children. Both situations render her vulnerable and dependent. For the man that is her provider, this makes Game unnecessary and for other men it makes it ineffective. Game is basically a modern response to female infertility.

It still is structurally quite different. PUA is based on the idea of a stranger seducting women entirely with social trickery. This wouldn't have worked historically; Men in a social group generally guarded the women against strangers, and the women themselves were often even more wary of strangers. Inside a social group where everyone knows everyone else already, PUA falls apart as well.

What a silly thing to say, as if people in the past were so different from people now. Let me introduce to one of the OG pickup artists, one young Venetian commoner, son of two actors back then when the word actress was a synonym for a whore: Giacomo Casanova. In his memoirs he named 100+ women that he slept with in 18th century, ranging from commoner farm girls or courtesans, nuns, through daughters of merchants and patricians to high nobles such as Madame d’Urfé - who was probably not right in her head as she was obsessed with occult and other weird shit, something like modern liberal Wiccan widow of deceased startup entrepreneur.

He beguiled them all using wide range of PUA strategies, which were then rigorously employed by his fans, while retaining his head on his shoulders from vindicative male relatives and rivals. If anything, he played the PUA game on Nightmare mode and "won" by that metric, living to age 73 in comfort and fame. Many other examples like that.

Difference is, if you read anything by Casanova, he seems to genuinely have liked women. The famous Don Juan, by contrast, in his fictional portrayal seems to have treated women as notches on his bedpost and to have regarded them with contempt.

Being able to end on friendly terms with your exes will save you from a lot of "they then went to their male relations and claimed he had violated them" vindictiveness, hence why he was able to live to be 73 😁

Yes, he was such a genuine "liker" of women, like when he knowingly slept with his own daughter Leonilda in threesome with her mother, who was his previous lover. Excuse me if I do not share this vision of love and respect for the gentle sex. If anything, it is vastly more degenerate than that of Don Juan.

Now you're talking about someone entirely different than you did before, though. I was talking about the people you yourself mentioned: Aristocrats, soldiers, pirates etc.

Secondly, Casanova is someone with a high enough social standing & wealth that his family could afford to send him to study law at a university, at a time when such education was extremely rare. That tells you a lot more about his background than just saying his parents were "two actors". He also is a classic general-purpose con artist, as evidenced by the wikipedia entry you cite yourself. He not only regularly, successfully impersonated aristocracry, he also directly tricked aristocrats themselves. And he evidently was genuinely rich, even if it was ill-gotten & regularly frivolled away. Obviously, such a person can take advantage of a similar playbook as the actual aristocrats.

He didn't walk into a bar at night negging unaccompanied women until they sleep with him. He publicly displayed his wealth and status to the entire greater circle of people around the women, would woo the men around her as well, often played a long game over months that included ripping off entire social groups for money by claiming access to secret, useful knowledge. It's certainly more similar to PUA than the classic, far more common aristocrat, in that it includes social trickery aimed at women, but yet again structurally very different and far more complicated.

And also I have to mention again we're talking about the personal memoirs of a self-admitted con artist. That's really not something I'd take at face value.

Edit: And to make my own position very clear: Solely beguiling women without also having access to some genuine advantages such as high social standing, wealth or power was near-impossible before the sexual revolution due to guarding behaviour by males in her social circles. You had to successfully trick those men as well to even just get access to the women. Casanova does not disprove this position in any way whatsoever; He had a genuinely high social standing, genuine wealth, genuine education, and then also tricked entire social circles.

After the sexual revolution, women would start to regularly go unattended to parties & festivities, which made (a percentage of) them easy prey for the first generations of tricksters in the hippy movement. Since women aren't stupid, this caused a backlash quite fast and they became more wary again, which necessitated the more elaborate trickery employed by PUA. However since it's a formalized movement it's easy to recognize once you know what you have to look for, so it died in the span of just a few years again. But more generally, there still just aren't as many safeguards nowadays; Obviously, tricking an entire social group, including both men and women, over long spans of time is much, much harder than tricking a (necessarily single-sex) lone individual over short spans of time. So the general style of social trickery as employed by PUA artists is still mostly viable.

It's important to differentiate trickery from fraud here. PUAs never promoted such illegal acts.

Gonna be real here and say that this sounds like saying that feminists never promoted misandry. I'm sure many PUAs said that they didn't promote that, and most of them probably even meant it, but that's not the same thing as a perfect or even very good track record for a large and loose movement, even if we're being generous.

I'm pretty sure that no, actually not one PUA ever promoted acts that legally count as fraud.

Secondly, Casanova is someone with a high enough social standing & wealth that his family could afford to send him to study law at a university, at a time when such education was extremely rare. That tells you a lot more about his background than just saying his parents were "two actors". He also is a classic general-purpose con artist, as evidenced by the wikipedia entry you cite yourself. He not only regularly, successfully impersonated aristocracry, he also directly tricked aristocrats themselves. And he evidently was genuinely rich, even if it was ill-gotten & regularly frivolled away. Obviously, such a person can take advantage of a similar playbook as the actual aristocrats.

What? Casanova was as poor as it gets at least in Venetia. He got his degree thanks to a priest who noticed him at age 9 in poor boarding school while his widowed mother was "acting" somewhere in Russia. He showed enough aptitude for Latin and other subjects to pass for priesthood education at age 12. He received his degree at age 15, not at all anything special - something like degree from some degree mill, such as University of Phoenix today.

Nevertheless I agree with the statement that he was well "educated" by experience for life as a con artist, ranging from his actor parents through talking his way through life hardship in his early teens which translated later to his life. Which is exactly what PUA lifestyle is about, isn't it?

He didn't walk into a bar at night negging unaccompanied women until they sleep with him. He publicly displayed his wealth and status to the entire greater circle of people around the women, would woo the men around her as well, often played a long game over months that included ripping off entire social groups for money by claiming access to secret, useful knowledge. It's certainly more similar to PUA than the classic, far more common aristocrat, in that it includes social trickery aimed at women, but yet again structurally very different and far more complicated.

No, he applied wide range of PUA strategies. When he wanted to bang nuns, he applied his meager theological knowledge. When he wanted to bang Madame d’Urfé and get her money, he pretended to be an occult master. He was exactly what you in your original reply mentioned as:

PUA is based on the idea of a stranger seducting women entirely with social trickery.

Anyways, the point is that PUA is nothing new. You discarded pirates, conquistatdors, minor nobles and other players as somehow unfairly using status and violence to bang hundreds of women in order to be "true" PUA artists. Now you discard Casanova and his ilk for applying social trickery and beguiling his victims from being the same. So what is PUA artist? Only those who fail in life or in seduction of women using their perceived status, money, power, social wit and any other trick that can get them to score? It does not make any sense.

Anyways, the point is that PUA is nothing new. You discarded pirates, conquistatdors, minor nobles and other players as somehow unfairly using status and violence to bang hundreds of women in order to be "true" PUA artists. Now you discard Casanova and his ilk for applying social trickery and beguiling his victims from being the same. So what is PUA artist? Only those who fail in life or in seduction of women using their perceived status, money, power, social wit and any other trick? It does not make any sense.

I added my position in an edit since I didn't expect you to answer so fast, so sorry for that. But I think my position is pretty clear:

Edit: And to make my own position very clear: Solely beguiling women without also having access to some genuine advantages such as high social standing, wealth or power was near-impossible before the sexual revolution due to guarding behaviour by males in her social circles. You had to successfully trick those men as well to even just get access to the women. Casanova does not disprove this position in any way whatsoever; He had a genuinely high social standing, genuine wealth, genuine education, and then also tricked entire social circles.

After the sexual revolution, women would start to regularly go unattended to parties & festivities, which made (a percentage of) them easy prey for the first generations of tricksters in the hippy movement. Since women aren't stupid, this caused a backlash quite fast and they became more wary again, which necessitated the more elaborate trickery employed by PUA. However since it's a formalized movement it's easy to recognize once you know what you have to look for, so it died in the span of just a few years again. But more generally, there still just aren't as many safeguards nowadays; Obviously, tricking an entire social group, including both men and women, over long spans of time is much, much harder than tricking a (necessarily single-sex) lone individual over short spans of time. So the general style of social trickery as employed by PUA artists is still mostly viable, but was not in the past.

Solely beguiling women without also having access to some genuine advantages such as high social standing, wealth or power was near-impossible before the sexual revolution due to guarding behaviour by males in her social circles.

Pickup artists are predators. They do not have to go after the most secure and difficult prey. While in the past it may be so that women had in general more protection from their families, they were also more gullible in absence of internet and other channels. There were widows, women with sick parents etc. In addition even if men held dominion over their women, then the path led through those. You could just get into a good grace of dominant men in order to get to women in their care.

Plus again, you have a very self-defeating definition of Pickup Artist. It seems to exclude any man who either starts or during his life gains status, wealth, social trickery or any other resource. What is your stance then? That "true" pickup artists are only losers who never start or end with money and status and who never get laid?

So again - who is PUA artist in your eyes? I just googled for the list of most famous modern Pickup Artists, not that I know any of them:

  • Julien Blanc

  • Ross Jeffries

  • Mark Manson

  • Erik von Markovik

  • Neil Strauss

  • Roosh V

  • Eric Weber

According to AI, the average net worth of all of those is in range of millions of dollars, often due to their courses etc. Are they by your definition not Pickup Artists - because the can get to fuck women solely based on their fame and wealth?

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Thanks for the reply; I was about to make largely the same points but you were faster.

For the soldiers/conquistadors/pirates etc. taking advantage of their physical power, almost everything above holds true as well, just that the arrangement is usually less voluntary in nature.

The explanation is much more mundane, I think. "American soldier picking up young desperate girls in occupied Germany using chewing gum, can of beans and coffee"? Well, yeah. This was happening during a famine. Elaborate pick-up skills weren't exactly needed.

Rockstars? A very tiny minority of the male population. Nothing to conclude about it in particular. There will always be men who stand out of the crowd for whatever reason, and will thus command a disproportionate amount of female attention. Nothing new about it.

The yuppies, as far as I know, were also a strictly GenX phenomenon, by and large. No argument about that on my part.

PUA is based on the idea of a stranger seducting women entirely with social trickery.

I'd add two more caveats. PUA as a phenomenon specifically entails men codifying pick-up artistry and teaching it to other men.

PUA as a phenomenon specifically entails men codifying pick-up artistry and teaching it to other men.

Sure. Let me know what you think about OG PUA master named Giacomo Casanova I mentioned in my other reply. Does he fit your criteria of womanizing teacher?

Plus how does picking and fucking desperate girls not fit the disgusting PUA style? I know of a guy who back in oughts created a bot contacting all the women on dating platform with a rude message akin to - hey do you want to fuck - as an experiment. He had maybe 1 in a 1000 response, some of them even from very attractive girls, although I'd wager they were all crazy. Maybe in their manic phase of BPD or some other shit. I know of a guy from the West who rented an expensive car back in early 1990s, and who went on fucking spree in Eastern Europe for pennies, and he even evaded having his teeth kicked in by local village heroes, mostly by copious amount of bribes and rounds paid. But hey, what works works - right?

How does any of this equal paying for sex with canned beans and coffee in a famine?

In the same way inviting some local girl for a drink while flashing you borrowed Omega watches and designer cloths bought on credit works right now in a bar. A promise of stability and bright future of plenty of money/food if only they fuck you, and then discarding them like a dirty rag.

By the way, this whole PUA topic is disgusting to me as I am Christian. But there has to be some reality check.

Stability and bright future of plenty of money/food as opposed to not starving to death. Got it.

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Its not just tactics that Fuentes won on. He won by focusing on topics that he is strongest on and emphasizing facts that support his position. I only have watched the first 20 minutes or so, but the Chicago Mag Mile shooting anecdote + black crime statistics combo that Fuentes pulled out as a response to Piers accusing him of being racist and accusing his dad of being racist was both rhetorically skilled, and appeals to people's common sense. What he does is paint a picture of black youth as out of control, shows an example, then gives backup stats.

This is not just tactics, its just how actual debates are supposed to work. Fuentes has the upper hand, and Piers thinks he has an upper hand, but is actually bluffing (he just doesn't know it). Fuentes has facts and anecdotes that are proximate in time; Piers has what he thinks is a super power word "racist", and the former disarms the latter easily when the former is allowed to speak at all. This is why the left hates Joe Rogan, despite him being on the left, and hates "platforming" on podcasts and podcast-like content, and desperately clings to things like 4 v 1 "moderated" CNN panels where everyone is allowed 30 seconds and the "neutral" host gets the last word. The modern leftist intellectual doesn't have any knowledge about why they think what they think. This wasn't some Harvard professor dressing down a freshman, or even a Steven Crowder embarrassing a campus kid, it was one media figure against another, and the leftist media figure was given a significant handicap, its his own show, he picks the topics, he plays whatever clip he wants, and he's just flailing.

This isn't an isolated incident, its a common occurrence. A realization I frequently share is that, if modern progressives were swapped with 1850s/60s abolitionists, we'd still have slavery today. In fact, they might have made the people of the 1860s pass a second constitutional amendment wherein anyone advocating for abolitionist views without deportation of freed slaves a capital offense. That is simply how bad the arguments around race are coming from that side.

The modern leftist intellectual doesn't have any knowledge about why they think what they think

Modern intellectual leftists (the ones who get repeatedly booked anyway) often have a very elaborate theory of why they believe what they believe. Maybe it doesn't hold up but they can spin those assumptions out enough to fill up the time in a debate. And they'll at least have a set of anecdotes about why black people commit crime or the Middle East is a basket case because of the US. They'll at least have a filibuster. Piers sat around pretending to not get per capita.

I don't know if he's even a leftist, I think Piers is just a boomer from a genteel time when We Don't Discuss These Things (and, from his perspective, they weren't really major problems yet). And not a particularly smart or reflective one. My understanding is that his main talents are shamelessness and social climbing. Things have gone well for him, so why would he really think too hard about anything?

Piers is an entertainer. He's not that smart, but that works because the audience isn't. He's plays a normal person's caricature of a smart person. His main appeal is he's non-threatening.

In the UK we would think of him as leaning a bit right wing, not a leftist (and not an intellectual either, he's more of a morning TV show host, though he has edited newspapers and is influential in the media industry).

he's more of a morning TV show host

Yes, he was! You just reminded me of this excruciating clip.

I'm doubling down on my "just a bit thick" diagnosis.

I suppose you meant to write 'advantage' instead of 'handicap'?

They are synonyms in this context.

Being given a handicap is the same thing as being given an advantage. It might be some British vs. American peculiarity, but I'm pretty sure it's valid.

In a betting parlance I'd agree that 'Giving the Dallas Cowboys a 4-point handicap' implies +4 and therefore an advantage but I've prettymuch never run into giving a handicap in a positive framing outside of that.

It's also used in chess. "X gave Y a knight handicap" means that X, being the stronger player, agreed to play against Y without a knight to even the odds.

I see. Thanks to you all for clearing that up.

in golf, giving another player a handicap means you're giving them an advantage in your game

the higher the handicap, the more strokes you need to beat them by in order to win

This is in fact the older meaning, an advantage given to someone in a sport or game in order to level the playing field when the players are not of equal skill. The sense of 'disability' came out of that.

going after some dude’s dad

I don't know, I thought Fuentes was doing the pearl clutching here. All the "low blow" faux-offense. Nick never gave a straight answer.

I think the interview made it clear that Fuentes is, well, actually racist. I think most normies will be turned off. But maybe GenZ really is that different.

There's subtlety: the big appeal isn't that he is a racist/antisemite; it's that he refuses to lend moral authority to these labels in the first place.

His "anti-black racism" mostly just boils down to "put the criminals in prison," which is not actually racist by any sensible definition.

What answer is there? That a Chicago working class guy tells his son, that his family is not going to eat "black fare" and this is some sign of extreme racism? This is right in the alley of your mildly racist uncle ranting about how terrible black music is during a family dinner. Exactly as Fuentes mentioned, Morgan tried to use this anecdote to paint the villain story of how Fuentes's dad is some sort of white supremacist doctor Frankenstein, who created some sort of superracist. It is absolutely ridiculous.

Fuentes did not reply, because he did not want to drag his father into this. He did not want to apologize or even explain his fathers behavior, because frankly it is none of Morgan's business. Absolutely rational response from Fuentes.

Fuentes did not reply, because he did not want to drag his father into this. He did not want to apologize or even explain his fathers behavior, because frankly it is none of Morgan's business.

Fuentes made it Morgan's business by putting it out there. Sorry, he pussied out. This was, to use OP's language, a shit-test where he didn't agree and amplify or even deflect, he just got angry and all of that Zoomer irony and unapologetic energy fell away.

Morgan did more harm to his cause than if he was muted but it's kind of absurd to think that we can't question a man who admits he's racist about potentially racist statements his dad made that he publicized and how that might have shaped his worldview from the start.

Fuentes made it Morgan's business by putting it out there.

Also around year ago there was a crazy guy who showed up in front of Fuentes's house with a gun. After the police was called, the guy was shot to death in Fuentes's backyard only to be found, that he actually murdered his roommate in other city before appearing at Fuentes's doorstep . Yeah, it is a complete mystery why Fuentes wants to keep his father's name out, when there are literal crazies looking for victims.

By the way Piers Morgan also mentioned his wife Celia Walden numerous times on his show. He literally mentioned his sons during this show, showcasing how empathetic and upright they are. Does this mean that Morgan's family is now fair game for any future discussion with him? Anybody can now demand Morgan to explain unempathetic behavior of his sons, dig up their racist tweets, or maybe showing how one of them visited a strip club or something like that, they are now cleaned for the chopping block - right?

Oh an it is not to get under Morgan's skin, it is just to have an honest discussion about what he said and an opportunity for Morgan to expand on hist stance. He may be asked about his wife or sons and their misdeeds five times in one interview even if he is visibly uncomfortable. In the end it is he who brought up his sons and wife into public spotlight.

By the way Piers Morgan also mentioned his wife Celia Walden numerous times on his show. He literally mentioned his sons during this show, showcasing how empathetic and upright they are. Does this mean that Morgan's family is now fair game for any future discussion with him?

The behavior of his wife is literally one of the main rebuttals being used by Fuentes fans right now.

And? Are you for or against that? I'd wager by your logic Celia Walden is now a fair game for all crazy groypers now, and it is all Morgan's fault for bringing her up in the past. In my eyes it is a low blow.

Obviously no one should go to her house but it's not that hard a case. They're both public figures. He spouted off at the mouth, she did so too, multiple times. I don't know that anyone outside of groypers care but you can obviously bring up the state of his marriage if he's bringing it up and putting others down.

His sons are what would give me pause but I can't recall what context they were brought up in. I'd hope young kids could be kept out of it.

Assume Nick Fuentes was some rando leftist, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, would it be fair to bring up things his dad said about politics when asking about his own left radical views?

His sons are what would give me pause but I can't recall what context they were brought up in. I'd hope young kids could be kept out of it.

The context was Morgan saying how Fuentes was antisemite, Fuentes said it was because Morgan is a boomer and he is representing a new young wave. Morgan then said that his sons are around Fuentes's age, and that they are empathetic and good people very unlike Fuentes. So now I guess it would be fine to have Morgan's sons under microscope and digging up any potential problematic antisemitic, misogynistic and racist behavior if they are such exemplars of uprightness. From now on to forever.

Assume Nick Fuentes was some rando leftist, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, would it be fair to bring up things his dad said about politics when asking about his own left radical views?

No. I think that it is a distraction and a low blow. I think it is a normal gentlemen's agreement not to bring family into such a debate, even if people brought their family up before themselves. Morgan himself said that he has literally thousands of interviews. Fuentes has thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of hours of his show. It may be that both of them mentioned their family at some point, but still it should be a taboo. Maybe it is my sensibility here, but coming after someone's family to win debate points is absolutely vile tactics.

Especially here, Morgan got what he wanted, which was Fuentes admitting that he is a racist. Morgan just wanted to go one step further somehow proving that Funetes's dad is racist based on this one clip. It is such a stupid shit to pull off - maybe Fuentes hates his father and he would gladly smear him. His father was not there to defend himself about such a wild speculation and accusation. It is just not right.

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It's conceivable that the woke Left has burned up so much social capital that we're at a point where even a significant segment (but not yet majority) of normies aren't that bothered by racism anymore.

It may be better to say the accusation of racism, and thus its ability to decide arguments over things like micro-aggressions which had to be defined below the level of 'typical' racism in the first place.

I think most normies will be turned off.

I think most conservatives will be turned off, conservatives gonna conservative after all. They're the faction that can afford to be snooty; it's a purity thing (per Haidt).

actually racist

People who are fed up with conservatives redefining this word to privilege themselves are ambivalent at worst and positive to "racists" at best. This is why conservatives like Morgan, and his age cohort more generally, pearl-clutch about this.

Nick never gave a straight answer.

I think the interview made it clear that Fuentes is, well, actually racist

Whatever gave you that idea? Was it Fuentes saying "I am racist"? How is that not a straight answer?

I mean on the dad question in particular, which something to the effect of "did you grow up with racism in your household and if so, do you think it affected your current outlook." (That's not actually a quote, just my remembered paraphrase.)

The idea is that conservatives (progressives) will try to throw you off your game by making some unfounded criticism, to test how secure/powerful you are as a (classical) liberal. It’s called a “shit test.”

I have no further comment.

And to make matters worse, his decision to focus on the Catholic Nick’s virginity has backfired horribly

This makes me an out of touch old person, but I was under the impression that Nick Fuentes is gay.

If that is not the case, I wonder how I absorbed it out of the noosphere.

The chad gay virgin.

If it makes you feel any better, he could be a virgin and gay.

If he's a Catholic gay virgin and refraining from sex to be celibate and chaste in line with church teaching, you have now made my opinion of this person (whom I know nothing about) zoom way up.

By contrast, all I know of Pierce Morgan is that he well deserves the Private Eye nickname of Piers Moron and I am surprised anyone is watching/listening to his shows.

The balance of evidence suggests that Fuentes is a closeted active homosexual. He has been warned by his bishop and is likely to be subject to church discipline in the medium term future due to his political activities.

Interesting. I've been exposed to this character only recently with his media blitz. He gives me ace vibes. Would one be exposed to the "balance of evidence" for his active gay lifestyle by watching his daily show?

Probably not, but there's been some high profile clips of him acting in very, uh, non-het ways with other men.

That he's even got a bishop involved is still a lot more attachment to the church than I would have expected. Imagine (let me pull someone's name out of thin air) Gavin Newsom getting a rap on the knuckles from his local bishop; although Gav was allegedly raised Catholic, I don't think I've heard bishops rapping Gav over the knuckles even the way Pelosi was rapped.


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