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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27473 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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What will come after post-modernity? From my perspective we are already seeing the postmodern lens break down a bit, as religion is getting a bit of a upswing, and many leading intellectuals are turning away from the post modern lens, or rather incorporating it into their thoughts. Examples here are John Vervaeke, Charles Taylor, Jordan Hall, David Chapman, and many others.

In addition, there seems to be a tacit admission amongst the secular humanist crowd that their worldview no longer has the appeal or swing it once did. Tyler Cowen and Steven Pinker, in a recent podcast discussion, went over how humanism seems to be somewhat dead and there aren’t many bright young humanists out there. Cowen also said the same thing about young liberal thinkers with another podcast guest recently, Cass Sunstein.

If you look at the death of the effective altruism movement, and the shift from rationalist to post rationalist, I believe there’s a similar trend.

To me the question becomes less “will old school meta-narratives” return, and more: what will be the ground of future exploration?

Will we adopt “metamodern” stances as they become useful and abandon them just as quickly, as Chapman suggests? Or instead will we rescue the transcendentals, and understand classical theism & morality through a more relational and dynamic lens, as Vervaeke and others are working on?

While the modern chaos can be exhausting at times, it’s also a moment of great opportunity. I’m interested to see what comes next.

Is religion really getting an upswing? Every statistic I've seen suggests a huge drop in the number of practicing religious people in most developed nations in the last decade. There seems to be a small number of right-wing young men going back to church, but it's not large enough to counteract the overall decrease in religiosity, which is especially pronounced in women and people left of centre. I've personally seen more an increase in a sort of generic spirituality than organised religion.

To clarify, I’m looking more at the leading edge of academia / the intelligentsia as a whole. Overall population numbers with religion are extremely sketchy, especially given that many people will nominally identify as religious while not holding genuine belief. I may be in a bubble regarding the intelligentsia as a whole, but this still seems to be the case. Let me know if you think I’m wrong.

However FWIW, I have read from Ryan Burges who specializes in this field that the falling numbers of religious identification have been arrested, while trans identification is sharply down in the last few years. Again I wouldn’t update too far on these major pop numbers but it’s something to go on I suppose.

The rise and fall of trans self-ID was a phenomenon that happened entirely within the subset of the Blue Tribe who might use tumblr to share something other than cat pictures or pr0n. I don't think these people have gone away, I just think a lot of them are identifying as something other than trans. In the educated British circles I move in, "neurospicy" people (and particularly "neurospicy" people with vaginas - noughties autism advocacy was a bit boy-centric) can now identify with and be proud of their "disability" without needing to question their gender identity.

[The more cynical would say that this is because the Yookay will give you a subsidised Motability car for having a mild mental illness but not for being transgender, but as far as I can see the same vibe shift is happening among people who wouldn't think of rorting Motability]

Religion seems largely stabilized by generational cohort overall in the US- but plenty of churches are still dying. Gen Z isn’t any less religious than millennials, but they’re both less religious than their silent gen great grandparents. As older people die off congregations shrink, but they’re stabilizing at a lower level.

Theres also denominational shuffling, where some groups gain at the expense of others.

Btw theres not really a good way to get actual church attendance rates- surveys are biased upwards and cell phone tracking is biased downwards(phones ping more often when people are on them). Internal records from churches are probably pretty close to accurate but can only tell you absolute numbers, not rates.

I think you may be using the term "post-modern" in a nonstandard/confusing way. AIUI postmodernism is specifically a rejection of the "modernist" ideology that flourished in the early part of the 20th century. We can vaguely gesture at some word associations:

  • Modern: science, reason, secularism, progress, legibility, imperialism, hegemony, technocracy, evenly-spaced rectangular grids, communism, capitalism, centralization, globalization
  • Postmodern: mysticism, ways-of-knowing, holistic, degrowth, localism, populism, -core/-punk, stuff like this, decolonization, marginalized voices, identity politics

So it seems what you're gesturing at is more accurately binned with the "modern -> postmodern" transition, which has been going on for a while now. Or do you claim we're entering a new stage, of "post-post-modernity"?

I am referring to postmodernity as basically, the falling away of beliefs and overarching, meta narratives and more broadly the idea that there is any sort of objective truth. Another way to put this is the turn away from cultural relativism, identitarianism esp wrt trans, etc is what I’m broadly referring to. I could be more precise.

The first sentence contradicts the second - cultural relativism and identitarianism assert that we are inescapably bound to the particularities of who we are, and are therefore precisely a rejection of overarching metanarratives and objective truth. So it's not clear what stage in the process you think we're undergoing now.

Well yes, much of the postmodern corpus is inherently contradictory and illogical. That’s a part of the whole thing. Didn’t stop it from dominating higher levels of the academy and culture for much of the last few decades.

I am referring to postmodernity as basically, the falling away of beliefs and overarching, meta narratives and more broadly the idea that there is any sort of objective truth

I think this never existed. There was an academic project for this in the 60s but practically nobody bought in and its immediate successors constructed their own overarching metanarratives (identity politics, gender, decolonization, etc). People sometimes call this postmodernism, because it refuses to give itself a name, and I'm fine with doing that as long as one doesn't also bring up the core tenets of "real" postmodernism, as you do here.

My opinion is that postmodernism instantly died because it's an unserious intellectual exercise. It's woke descendent isn't postmodern, it's pre-modern, specifically it's christianity without the bible, it's "we can be more pious without the bible".

as religion is getting a bit of a upswing

Not a thing, source 1 source 2 source 3. At most you could say that the decline has levelled off by some metrics, but statistics keep showing that the importance of religion in peoples' lives is slowly but monotonically going nowhere but down.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "postmodern" here other than as a vague gesture at a blob of liberalism-wokism-rationality etc. Perhaps the Right will come to dominate. Currently, the Right is dominated by conspiracists like Candace Owens, Just Asking Questions connoisseurs like Tucker Carlson, and shitposters like Catturd. As bad as it is right now, I have faith that it will eventually be replaced by something even worse.

The spike in religion-talk seems to be coming from the small subset of already-religious (in a very meticulous, autistic way) men talking more about it, plus aesthetic posturing about Based-ness. So, the talk is all talk.

Compare red-pill Islam- that's just peddling redpills to the existing Muslim online young men.

Yeah as far as I can tell based on statistics. The increasing popularity of religion online in certain spaces hasn't had much real world effect.

What will come after post-modernity?

We first have to answer what comes after Capitalism. Capitalism is universal solvent, it slowly melted through every ethnic or ideological or traditional or religious barrier that tried to hold it back. It ate ethnicity, it ate religion, it ate nationalism, it ate gender, it ate the narrative of progress itself.

It will not be possible for a new narrative to assert itself until it first slays Capitalism.

And even within our science fiction, we can imagine the end of the world more easily than the end of Capitalism.

Yeah fair points. Capitalism is indeed a mighty beast, slouching towards Bethlehem. Sigh.

While Capitalism is in the causal chain that ate those things it is the massive amounts of wealth created by capitalism that actually eats everything.

It depends on what you mean by Capitalism. I heard Marxists excusing failure of Stalinists planned economy, because it was actually a state Capitalism and thus not true Socialism.

To me the word Capitalism is often used as anything opposing to fabled Socialism so that Socialism does not have to be defined, it is something like a unicorn. Funnily enough, it is a very postmodern way of looking at things - socialism and capitalism are Hegelian opposites and they need to be abolished in order to usher an era of communism. Which I think is a very unhelpful way of looking at things. It would be like adopting some heretical doctrine of Heaven on Earth (Communism) as some ultimate utopia, and then declaring everything else as Hell on Earth (Capitalism), until we come to finally immanentize the eschaton in some Gnostic way. Just a bunch of nonsense.

If in order to discuss Capitalism I'm going to have to defend the most ignorant thing you've ever seen on Twitter referring to Capitalism, we're already lost.

Capitalism as a system is defined economically by the investment profit motive, by taking investment capital and putting it to work to earn more capital, which will be invested again to earn more capital, and so on and so forth to eternity.

This is distinct from Feudalism, from Mecantilism, etc.

Until we can successfully imagine something beyond Capitalism, there is no way to imagine a worldview that privileges other terminal values than profit.

Capitalism as a system is defined economically by the investment profit motive, by taking investment capital and putting it to work to earn more capital, which will be invested again to earn more capital, and so on and so forth to eternity.

Absolutely unhelpful definition. A peasant under feudal lord can set aside and sell surplus of his harvest in order to purchase a cow or a new plough, which will bring him more profit next season. Stalin also invested into steel and concrete production in order to produce dams and other infrastructural investments.

Investment and profit are innate to social structure, they existed in all forms of government.

Man, what the fuck is water?

Water is H2O. Or wait, maybe it is a capitalist scam. Who knows, right?

Rather than sprouting from an intellectual movement, I could imagine the next meaning making system arising from something like Crossfit tacking on a thin mindfulness/wisdom/virtue ethics layer. It can offer community, identity, practice, and status hierarchy without weird metaphysical baggage or violations of current cultural taboos. It hasn't taken off yet, but I can imagine a turbulent AI future producing a more fertile ground.

"After" Postmodernism is a little difficult, as can be inferred from the name (and the many gravestones with stuff like "postpostmodern", "metamodernism", "new sincerity", etc. written on them). A very simple definition would go something like this: Modernism was the initial recognition that all the grand narratives of the old world have been smashed to pieces by technology and the War, Postmodernism is living in that "heap of broken images" and trying to have fun throwing the pieces around, and the "post-Postmodern" movements since then have been trying to will a grand narrative back into being. I see the modern rise of intellectual religiosity as fitting in just fine with the Postmodern schema, in that none of these movements have any chance to take over society, but recreate grand narratives for individuals that give them real existential satisfaction (I like Justin Murphy's term for these movements: "Reality Entrepreneurs"). The key is that it doesn't change the wider narrative anarchy, and doesn't salve the pain for people who feel the need for a societally-shared grand narrative, but constructs a refuge within that anarchy. So I wouldn't call it truly post-Postmodern, more a way of living within Postmodern anarchy.

To address @FiveHourMarathon 's point about capitalism, I believe that this was all downstream of modern technology, and that whatever comes next will probably be determined by the development of technology - currently, it looks like AI will be the decisive change, if there is one coming. The only post-capitalist future which is not a return to 20th Century totalitarianism/hellwars is some kind of AI future. Intelligence begins in humans, leaps off into technocapital, and then discards that inefficient substrate to become truly disembodied. Once intelligence is autonomous and ahuman, and we no longer have the historical task of being its bootloader, what do we do? That's the sort of question that can reignite a grand narrative, perhaps.

A very simple definition would go something like this: Modernism was the initial recognition that all the grand narratives of the old world have been smashed to pieces by technology and the War, Postmodernism is living in that "heap of broken images" and trying to have fun throwing the pieces around, and the "post-Postmodern" movements since then have been trying to will a grand narrative back into being.

Modernism drew deep on the coffers of civilizational history and set out to build a glorious cultural edifice.

Postmodernism noted that the work was not going well, but assumed that we might draw deep again so that the work might continue and something like the original goal might be reached.

We now recognize that the coffers are empty and that the work has failed, that the creditors are beating on the door and that there is nothing with which we might pay them.

Put another way, it seems to me that one of the notable features of Postmodernism was that, for all its critiquing, it appears to have assumed that the conditions in which it was born would obtain indefinitely, that the cultural assumptions and material realities it framed itself would ensure its own relevance. One might say that it did not take its own arguments seriously enough.

Modernism drew deep on the coffers of civilizational history and set out to build a glorious cultural edifice.

Ehhh I mostly agree with you on that but I would say "rebuild". The Modernists had great educations from the old world, and remembered glorious culture, but they were also deeply conscious that modernity and the War had changed things forever, and what they built would have to be built anew.

On Postmodernism, I think much of Postmodernism abandons that Modernist goal as unworkable. Hence you get, for instance, the work of art as a joke. The Postmodernists who didn't abandon the Modernist dream tended to reach for some sort of post-Postmodern thing (the Oulipo, imo, was the first of these, and the most understudied inspiration for DFW, New Sincerity, etc.).

Put another way, it seems to me that one of the notable features of Postmodernism was that, for all its critiquing, it appears to have assumed that the conditions in which it was born would obtain indefinitely, that the cultural assumptions and material realities it framed itself would ensure its own relevance. One might say that it did not take its own arguments seriously enough.

I think about this a lot reading Deleuze and Guattari. They were prophesying the great crack-up, but now that crack-up has happened some of their work reads very differently, and I can see how it births figures like Land once it's no longer in the rigid context of Trente Glorieuses France.

Contra Nick Fuentes, Hitler, Nazis on Antisemitism: An essay from a strongly-Zionist authright.

Over the past several years I’ve come to terms with accepting the reality of HBD and its implications on my political views. Put simply, HBD is the most straightforward way to explain the vast differences in societal development we see at a global level: Countries with lots of White people in them seem to usually be pretty nice places to live. Countries with lots of Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great. Countries with lots of Muslims and Blacks tend to be hellscapes with horrific amounts of violence, corruption, nonsensical cruelty, incest, pedophilia, poverty, genocides and immense institutional dysfunction.

The left-leaning, mainstream-media-liberal explanation for these observations in the disparity between group outcomes seem to… not notice it at all. When mainstream media liberals are reluctantly forced to explain these differences in outcomes they will blame a “bad environment” or blame white people for the legacy of colonialism. These hypotheses both reject the agency that minorities have over their own wellbeing and ignore the vast amount of data in intelligence research and group differences in psychology that predict the bad outcomes that we observe.

I think that understanding HBD just means that you realize that bad people CAUSE bad environments, not the other way around. The implications of HBD on immigration politics is undeniable: If you value living in a low-crime society with a high standard of living for the middle class, you don’t want Blacks/Muslims/Indians in your country. And you should support policies that send blacks/muslims/Indians who are already here back to their country of origin.

While it’s obviously social, romantic, and career suicide for any individual to openly admit that they understand HBD (i.e. admit that they’re racist), the Right at the very least tends to adopts policies that people who are openly racist would support. The right tends to support stricter immigration laws, harsher penalties for violent criminals, and to support law enforcement in their goals of catching and deporting people who are here illegally. As a HBD understander, I like these policies.

While many metrics paint the western world as the most divided it has ever been, there is something that the right and left both seem to find agreement on recently: hating Jews. Young people in particular and especially in academia are supporting antisemitic beliefs in America at record rates probably not seen since 1930’s - not only about Israel the state but also about Jews the people.

If you couldn’t tell from the title of the post: I like the Jews. They’re intelligent, hardworking people who are high in conscientiousness and very low in violent crime. I believe that western society has benefited tremendously over the last several hundred years from the millions of Jewish entrepreneurs, scientists, and researchers living among us. Ashkenazi Jews have disproportionately high IQ, and everyone in a society benefits when there are more smart people in that society. Smart Jews make more money than goys, and pay more in taxes as a result. Jewish-owned businesses make lots of great middle class jobs for the rest of us. The tax revenue from those high earning Jews can go to investing in roads, schools, healthcare, food stamps, social security, public housing, and other government benefits that make Western countries so great to live in. I want to live in places with lots of Jews, and I think that you should too.

Quite frankly, I don’t really respect the opinions of the modern liberal when it comes to social issues. Once you understand HBD, liberals become obviously wrong on most every social issue, and (when it comes to immigration) they’re wrong in ways that are fundamentally undermining the ability of every western civilization to continue to exist 30 years from now. So it isn’t surprising to me to see that Antisemitism is rising on the political left - The left is “wrong about every social issue” so of course they’re wrong about hating the Jews, too.

But the right also has alarmingly high rates of antisemitism. And this makes me especially sad because I would otherwise call the political right my ideological allies on every other issue. The rising popularity of Nick Fuentes obviously is the most noteworthy example, and of course being an intellectually curious person I have listened to several hours of Nick talk about Jews. His main criticisms seem to be over the US’s support of Israel, as well as the undue influence that Jews have over US policymaking. And most critically, Nick believes that the Jews are using that influence to try to tear down the West.

My criticism of Nick Fuentes starts thusly: Nick’s beliefs don’t have internal consistency. If Nick is correct that the status-quo of Western Institutions is to be extremely pro-Israel and Pro-Jewish, then why would the Jews want to destroy those western institutions?? Why would the Jews want to replace the pro-Jewish status quo with a “from the river to the sea” Pro-Palestinian one? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Moreover, Nick’s opinions about Jews make testable predictions: if you suspect that Jews are secretly hoping for a Muslim takeover in America, you could actually, you know, check the voting records. Even in heavily-democrat NYC, only 33% of Jews voted for the democratic candidate Mamdani. If Fuentes were right about Jews, this number should be much much higher.

Re: Fuentes on Israel: If you look at the data since 1947, the US has in fact given more money to Israel than any other country to the tune of $300 billion (as measured on 2024 dollars) over the past 79 years. This averages to $3.8billion per year on average. That sounds like a lot, but honestly it’s small potatoes compared to our current annual defense spending of $850 billion. $3.8 billion a year so that the US can test our weapons systems in actual warzones and maintain the stability of our only ally in the Middle East seems like a worthwhile investment to me. I personally hope Israel uses that money to turn Palestine into a parking lot.

For the most part, I agree with Nick’s “America First” agenda. So you could convince me to axe the “give free stuff to Israel” from the US’s budget. But Nick getting so nonsensically angry over such a small line item on our nation’s balance sheet is just wildly disproportionate. I don’t really care about giving a small amount of money to Israel.

What I do care about is that the government of every Western country is stealing money from the productive White/Asian/Jewish middle class (via tax dollars) only to give that money to dozens of immigration non-profits. These nonprofits use this money to import hundreds of thousands of people from the most dangerous, violent, and backwards countries in the world. When those room-temperature-IQ people move into your neighborhoods, they are given free cars, free food, free housing, which the “refugees” then use to commit fraud, steal, and continue to be the violent, stabby creatures that they are. Our governments are forcing the productive middle class to pay for 3rd worlders to come and rape our women, and Nick Fuentes is mad about some random $4 billion/yr going to Israel?? Who gives a shit about Israel, Nick.

Nick, of course, blames the hoard of third world migrants on the Jews that are living in Western countries. The evidence for this is that there’s a disproportionate number of Jews that work for the institutions that are destroying this country. As an HBDer, this is easy to explain: there exists group differences in intelligence between the races, and Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is very high. So you should expect Jews to be overrepresented in all positions of economic, scientific, or political prestige - even overrepresented within the institutions that are doing work that you hate.

The most plausible explanation for the vast amount of cultural decline in our country over the past 15 years is NOT some secret cabal of Jews conspiring to destroy the countries that they share with us. It seems much more likely that outside actors who actually have a vested interest in watching the US and Europe collapse are to blame: the Qatari, Saudi, Emirati oil money are buying their way into influencing Western academic, political, and social capital in a way that undermines Western values and promotes Islamic ones. Likewise, the Chinese Communists are no doubt using all of the psychological warfare tools at their disposal to accelerate the collapse of the American Empire. The Chinese definitely want to see America be as multicultural as possible and promote identity politics to create more divisions within us.

Islam is at war with the West, and they have been for thousands of years. The difference is now the West is losing this war, and we are losing badly. If Western Civilization can muster the courage to actually declare war against Islam, as they have declared war on us, the Jews will be overrepresented in the political, military and cultural institutions that are fighting for western civilization. The Jews helped us beat Hitler. The Jews helped us beat the Soviet Union. The Jews can help us beat China. The Jews can help us beat Islam, too.

Tl;dr: Nick Fuentes is wrong. Happy Hanukkah. Be nice to Jews, and definitely don’t put them in gas chambers.

Yeah this is the line @2rafa has argued often in the past, quite convincingly. I agree that Jews in general are some of, if not the most, single strongest genetic group in terms of IQ and other desirable traits.

I do wish Fuentes and others would work more on getting Jews aligned with the general nativist agenda as opposed to re igniting blood libel. Unfortunately they feel betrayed because Jews have admittedly been huge pushing the overall progressive consensus after the Holocaust. It’s a tricky subject, but I’m much more on the side of converting Jews instead of kicking them all out or murdering them.

Ah sorry if this subject is well-worn territory. I haven't been as active of a Motte-izen to keep up with the conversational metagame here.

No worries. It can be good to go back through old topics anyway, not a problem at all.

Israel has low PISA scores

A handful of studies showing marginal gains in IQ by measuring elite jews in NYC doesn't say much. If arab IQ was measured by testing in fancy parts of Dubai their scores would be impressive as well. Try Iq testing some west bank settlers for different results.

Wow, that's a solid stat pull. I'm genuinely surprised by it.

Ashkenazim are a minority in Israël, and are outperformed by the local Arab Christians(who also probably have high average IQ).

Israel has low PISA scores

That's not too surprising. It is 20% Arab, and of the (school-age) Jewish population, most are Sephardi, and of the (more intelligent) Ashkenazi, a large chunk are Haredi, who do poorly on PISA because they reject secular education, not because they're stupid.

When people talk about Jewish intelligence, they're talking about the Ashkenazi Jews, because they make up about 80% of global Jewry, and almost 100% in western countries.

The interesting question is what happens when the Haredi take over the land between the River and Sea demographically. They're smart, but a population where the men spend most of their time studying the Torah and refuse military service is gonna struggle surrounded by hostile neighbours and dwindling global support. Israel needs to work out how to keep the Haredi pumping out children while putting them to more productive use.

I’m much more on the side of converting Jews instead of kicking them all out or murdering them.

Is there any evidence they want to convert? More or less their entire history is them resisting assimilation. They are a self proclaimed diaspora people. At any time they could (and some have) stopped and assimilated into a host nation. There remains a dedicated group that do not want to assimilate and instead want to pursue their own interests.

They don't need to be kicked out or murdered in America. They need to be removed from power because they're using that power to further causes that harm Americans.

Put simply, HBD is the most straightforward way to explain the vast differences in societal development we see at a global level:

Countries with lots of Muslims and Blacks tend to be hellscapes with ...

I agree with you that Muslim-majority countries usually underperform non-Muslim countries with similar biological stock (North Africa vs Southern Europe, Muslim Africa vs Christian Africa, Pakistan vs India, Iran vs Indian Parsis), but critically Muslims are not a biological group and "Muslim-majority countries underperform" is a cultural explanation, not an HBD one.

"Muslim-majority countries underperform" is a cultural explanation, not an HBD one.

Yeah but when the religious-culture doesn't really permit an easy offramp due to actually taking anti-blasphemy and people leaving the faith somewhat seriously, the two become very tightly linked.

Islamic genetic potential tends to be worse than for their Christian neighbors, though. Often because Muslims marry their cousins at crazy high rates.

Muslims are not a biological group and "Muslim-majority countries underperform" is a cultural explanation, not an HBD one.

It's true that Muslims are not a racial group, and so the label isn't a biological one.

But 'people who marry their cousins and so suffer from inbreeding-related mental retardation' is a biological category, and well...

Funny thing about inbreeding is that unlike protracted heavy inbreeding (where a family has no new blood for an extended period), protracted mild inbreeding (lots of cousin marriages but not systematic) will eventually tend to weed out most of the alleles responsible for inbreeding problems (as it exposes them to much-stronger natural selection).

Do also remember that if someone heavily inbred marries someone else heavily inbred - but unrelated - the offspring are not inbred at all.

Islamic cousin marriage tends to be much more systematic than cousin marriage outside Islam.

To be clear, by "systematic" I mean like nearly 100% endogamy (I haven't run the numbers, but I suspect 85% still wouldn't be enough) in a moderately-sized clan, like the actual Habsburgs, so that you get a pile of allele-fixing and increased consanguinity. Are there a lot of families that do that in the Muslim world?

Countries with lots of White people in them seem to usually be pretty nice places to live. Countries with lots of Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great. Countries with lots of Muslims and Blacks tend to be hellscapes with horrific amounts of violence, corruption, nonsensical cruelty, incest, pedophilia, poverty, genocides and immense institutional dysfunction.

You can't claim to be a HBD understander and then confuse ethnicity and religion, then merge together hundreds of different ethnic groups in single categories. C'mon, bringing up Islam in that way is literally contradicting yourself. Bosnian Muslims, Iranians, Senegalese people and Indonesians are all Muslim and all have completely different genetic backgrounds. And it's not like there's a sharp distinction between "White" and "Middle-Eastern". People from the Levant can be whiter than many Southern Europeans.

Or if you talk about Jews, again, that's not a single ethnicity. Israel is a melting pot of Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, etc, while the majority of Palestinians are Jews that converted to Islam centuries ago.

The implications of HBD on immigration politics is undeniable: If you value living in a low-crime society with a high standard of living for the middle class, you don’t want Blacks/Muslims/Indians in your country. And you should support policies that send blacks/muslims/Indians who are already here back to their country of origin.

If you actually believed in HBD, you would be pro-immigration of Igbo, Iranians and Brahmins elites, who have lower crime rates, higher educational achievement and financial success than White Americans.

Nick, of course, blames the hoard of third world migrants on the Jews that are living in Western countries. The evidence for this is that there’s a disproportionate number of Jews that work for the institutions that are destroying this country. As an HBDer, this is easy to explain: there exists group differences in intelligence between the races, and Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is very high. So you should expect Jews to be overrepresented in all positions of economic, scientific, or political prestige - even overrepresented within the institutions that are doing work that you hate.

Rather, jews do not like living in homogeneous states. They don't want to live in societies with strong cultural and norms that don't include them and prefer cosmopolitan rootless cultures. Jews don't want to be the only visible minority in an area. At the same time they don't have the same affinity to the local culture and people as gentiles in the same area. Multiculturalism is required to have another culture, aka jews there. Therefore jews promote multiculturalism.

Throw in a jewish hatred for Rome, Christianity, many Eastern European ethnic groups etc and it isnt surprising that jews are overrepresented in promoting mass migration.

Throw in wars for Israel that end up swamping Europe with migrants and the jewish problem becomes evident.

If you couldn’t tell from the title of the post: I like the Jews. They’re intelligent, hardworking people who are high in conscientiousness and very low in violent crime. I believe that western society has benefited tremendously over the last several hundred years from the millions of Jewish entrepreneurs, scientists, and researchers living among us. Ashkenazi Jews have disproportionately high IQ, and everyone in a society benefits when there are more smart people in that society. Smart Jews make more money than goys, and pay more in taxes as a result. Jewish-owned businesses make lots of great middle class jobs for the rest of us.

Bari Weiss isn't the head of CBS because of her great charisma, intelligence or talent but because she's Jewish and she's willing to unconditionally do the bidding of a Jewish billionaire. Jeffrey Epstein wasn't wealthy because he was an intelligent, hardworking person high in conscientiousness (his emails make that clear enough!), he was wealthy because he had no ethical limits whatsoever. Les Wexner and Henry Ford might both be rich entrepreneurs who pay lots of taxes but the latter was unfathomably more beneficial to his society and the world at large than the former. Whether Jews are actually significantly more intelligent is debatable; some would argue Jewish overrepresentation in positions of wealth and influence actually has more to do with nepotism, corruption and a total lack of moral inhibitions.

I want to live in places with lots of Jews, and I think that you should too.

Like Berlin, 1925?

Quite frankly, I don’t really respect the opinions of the modern liberal when it comes to social issues. Once you understand HBD, liberals become obviously wrong on most every social issue, and (when it comes to immigration) they’re wrong in ways that are fundamentally undermining the ability of every western civilization to continue to exist 30 years from now. So it isn’t surprising to me to see that Antisemitism is rising on the political left - The left is “wrong about every social issue” so of course they’re wrong about hating the Jews, too.

Of course, one could just as easily say "the left is wrong about every social issue, so of course they're wrong about Hitler" and come to the exact opposite conclusion.

My criticism of Nick Fuentes starts thusly: Nick’s beliefs don’t have internal consistency. If Nick is correct that the status-quo of Western Institutions is to be extremely pro-Israel and Pro-Jewish, then why would the Jews want to destroy those western institutions?? Why would the Jews want to replace the pro-Jewish status quo with a “from the river to the sea” Pro-Palestinian one? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Moreover, Nick’s opinions about Jews make testable predictions: if you suspect that Jews are secretly hoping for a Muslim takeover in America, you could actually, you know, check the voting records. Even in heavily-democrat NYC, only 33% of Jews voted for the democratic candidate Mamdani. If Fuentes were right about Jews, this number should be much much higher.

This isn't what Fuentes actually says.

What he actually said was: Jews wanted to replace the previously (relatively) anti-Jewish Anglo-American order with a new one, only to discover that their new left wing allies apply the exact same logic to Jews, causing Jews to switch to backing the right instead. He never claimed Jews are "secretly hoping for a Muslim takeover of America", he's actually said that Jews intentionally inflame bonehead counter-jihad type politics for their own benefit. If you wanted a testable prediction, his pre-election prediction that Trump was going to be dragged into conflict with Iran would be a pretty clear example of Trump acting against his political interests on behalf of a powerful foreign lobby.

Re: Fuentes on Israel: If you look at the data since 1947, the US has in fact given more money to Israel than any other country to the tune of $300 billion (as measured on 2024 dollars) over the past 79 years. This averages to $3.8billion per year on average. That sounds like a lot, but honestly it’s small potatoes compared to our current annual defense spending of $850 billion. $3.8 billion a year so that the US can test our weapons systems in actual warzones and maintain the stability of our only ally in the Middle East seems like a worthwhile investment to me. I personally hope Israel uses that money to turn Palestine into a parking lot.

That's only counting direct subsidies. If you were to count missile interceptions (the "12 Day War" cost a quarter of the global interceptor stockpile!!!), the cost of constantly moving carrier groups to defend them, protection money for their neighbors, wars fought on their explicit behalf ("Prosperity Guardian"), wars fought on their behalf implicitly (most sandbox wars), soldiers killed by them directly (USS Liberty), soldiers killed on their explicit behalf (Beirut barracks bombings)...

For all that accumulated cost, it would have been far more cost efficient had America turned Israel into a parking lot back in 1948, then America might have some allies besides Israel. It certainly would have cost far less than $300 billion. Or, of course, America could simply stay out of the sandbox entirely, as it did for the overwhelming majority of it's existence.

These nonprofits use this money to import hundreds of thousands of people from the most dangerous, violent, and backwards countries in the world. When those room-temperature-IQ people move into your neighborhoods, they are given free cars, free food, free housing, which the “refugees” then use to commit fraud, steal, and continue to be the violent, stabby creatures that they are. Our governments are forcing the productive middle class to pay for 3rd worlders to come and rape our women, and Nick Fuentes is mad about some random $4 billion/yr going to Israel?? Who gives a shit about Israel, Nick.

Perhaps there wouldn't be so many Syrian refugees if the US didn't bomb the shit out of Syria on Israel's behalf and then put al Qaeda in charge. Perhaps fewer sub-Saharan Africans would flow through Libya into Europe if the US didn't overthrow Gaddafi for Israel's benefit and create a power vacuum. One directly leads into the other. That's why people give a shit about Israel, actually; because it destabilizes all of its neighbors as a matter of policy and leaves its "allies" (read: dupes) to pick up the mess.

The Jews helped us beat Hitler.

Correction: we helped the Jews beat Hitler. Every single Jew could have dropped dead spontaneously in 1939 and America would have still had basically the exact same capabilities to beat Hitler.

The Jews helped us beat the Soviet Union.

Pollard sold the Soviets American secrets and then was given refuge in Israel, they played both sides and could just as easily have claimed to have helped the Soviet Union beat America had it gone the other way.

The Jews can help us beat China.

In reality, the Jews sell American military secrets to China, much as they sold American secrets to the Soviets.

The Jews can help us beat Islam, too.

Correction: the Jews want "us" to fight their enemies for them, again. America doesn't need to "beat Islam", it simply needs to stay out of the sandbox and reject their migrants.

Correction: the Jews want "us" to fight their enemies for them, again. America doesn't need to "beat Islam", it simply needs to stay out of the sandbox

Interestingly "the Jews" (Ariel Sharon, then Israeli PM) warned Bush about getting stuck in the sandbox.

They did phrase it as "why are you going after Iraq, Iran is who you should be going after" though, which paints a slightly different picture.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2007/08/29/israel-warned-us-not-invade-iraq-after-911

And you should support policies that send blacks/muslims/Indians who are already here back to their country of origin.

I shall support no such thing, because "living in a low crime society" is not the whole of my utility function. In fact, there were plenty of dystopian low-crime societies.

Anyone with two brain cells to rub together should realize that @FireRises' version of the Madagascar Plan will not end with the deportation ships (or chimneys) being dismantled once the last Black US citizen is deported to the general area from which his ancestors were kidnapped. Because once we have accepted that it is moral to get rid of undesirables who are statistically more likely to commit crimes, there is no reason not to apply the same standard to Whites, after all, HBD applies to them as well. Probably a White guy with a close relative with a history of violence is more likely to commit violence than your average US Black, so we should surely get rid of him as well. Low education attainment is probably correlated with a genetic predisposition, do we really want to keep such suboptimal citizens in our brave new world? And in the long term, East Asians have great work ethics and are a lot less unruly than Whites often are.

Liberal Jews have long recognized that the best way to safeguard their safety in the West is to support a general principle of tolerance, rather than relying on the public perception of them being a net positive minority, which can always flip with another Epstein or SBF.

Likewise, the Chinese Communists are no doubt using all of the psychological warfare tools at their disposal to accelerate the collapse of the American Empire.

Why do you think that is a bad thing? After all, the PRC has plenty of advantages from your perspective. A clearly dominant culture, fewer ethnically undesirables, no woke snowflakes crying genocide when you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette, strong leaders making decisions with the long term interests of the state in mind rather than trying to win the next election. The PRC conquering the US, wiping out the present population and settling Han Chinese there is perhaps the likeliest way to end multiculturalism in the US.

An essay from a strongly-Zionist authright

While you might be 'strongly-Zionist', this seems orthogonal to your argument, which is mainly about Jewish minorities in gentile countries being net-positive.

While you might be 'strongly-Zionist', this seems orthogonal to your argument, which is mainly about Jewish minorities in gentile countries being net-positive.

@FireRises I'd go further and say "opposed"; if you want to keep Jews in the West, you don't want them to "go home" to Eretz Yisrael.

I don't think you have grounds to deport the ancestors of slaves, but you do have grounds to deport recent immigrants who were brought in under cynical circumstances or who have stronger allegiances to foreign governments/populations than they do their new nation.

You don't need to eliminate the burden. You simply need to manage its size.

I just had this thought of moving to China one day to get away from Brazil like conditions and getting bullied by Chinese for being from a retard nation that destroyed itself with immigration.

@FireRises' version of the Madagascar Plan will not end with the deportation ships (or chimneys) being dismantled once the last Black US citizen is deported to the general area from which his ancestors were kidnapped. Because once we have accepted that it is moral to get rid of undesirables who are statistically more likely to commit crimes, there is no reason not to apply the same standard to Whites, after all, HBD applies to them as well.

I definitely understand this point, but I'm kind of ambivalent toward it. If one were to argue like this, you could also argue against special education in schools because once we've put away a certain percentage of students with the lowest ability, we will just have to do the same thing again with the remaining students, infinitely, until there are no students left.

The issue is that most people have a specific threshold. There is a specific threshold of a student's ability that we can accept in schools, just like there is a specific threshold of crime that we cannot tolerate. This is particularly significant in some Eastern Asian countries where crime rates are effectively at zero (where you can leave your laptop on the street overnight without it being stolen, for example). If an effect of having third-world immigrants in your country is that an effectively zero crime rate society is now a society with a significantly noticeable crime rate, you have a problem. It's worth solving that problem, and you wouldn't need to repeat that process once you've come to the level of having an effectively negligible crime rate.

A lot of the hate for Jews comes from the following areas:

  1. Genuine (stupid) Neo Nazis that hate Jews for little reason other than because Hitler hated them 80 years ago. Some people want to keep up the LARP.
  2. Disgruntlement that the US has acted like an arm of Israeli foreign policy with almost no pushback for peoples' entire lives.
  3. Jewish domination of culture relative to their population count, and their pushing of leftist propaganda from their positions of power. Jews are overrepresented due to their high verbal IQ, and this has given them quite a bit of clout. Dumb rightists have hallucinated a coordinated attempt to destroy America, when the reality is much simpler: smart people are just overwhelmingly liberal no matter where you go. There was also extra incentive for Jews to push for leftism since they perceived the Right as their main threat for a long time and many probably thought that an America that was dedicated to multiculturalism was the best defense against anti-Semitism.

I personally agree that Jews are pretty great overall, and it seems like they've been having a slow-motion awakening on the threats of mass-migration. A good chunk of them are becoming socially conservative, but are leaning towards a more intelligent conservatism rather than the conspiratorial populist rightism. Maybe they'll be the ones to eventually salvage the Republican party, doing the job that the tech-right was supposed to do but utterly failed at.

The liberalism of Jews is an interesting connection, because is it their will-to-power driving them towards the dominant ideology like other elites (in which sense they are captured) or is it because they support liberalism because it promotes Jewish interests (much easier to compete in a society as a Jew if you don't have compete with White enthnonats coordinating against you)?

I think in the Palestinian question, liberalism hurts them as they are simply another Right wing apartheid state that progressives want to crush (continue the march of Unitarianism). White enthnonats would not much care if they seized all Palestinian territory and paid them to leave (might trigger a local Middle Eastern war, I know). Conflicting incentives all round.

Nick Fuentes's ideas have zero intellectual worth. He is a mega-church pastor for the religion of inceldom. Incoherence is key to his movement. At least Candace Owens is schizophrenic. What's Fuentes' excuse ?

Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great

I'm not convinced that average-IQ is singularly responsible for societal-IQ. They're related, sure. But, IQ differentials have existed for millennia. If the correlation was so direct, then high IQ nations would've achieved insurmountable gaps between them and other nations. This hasn't been the case. Japan, South Korea and Scandinavia are high-IQ regions today. But, they were relatively backwards throughout history. That there is flux implies that IQ is not the primary factor in creating stable and flourishing societies.

Smart Jews make more money than goys

Can't read goy without replaying the meme of a rabbi crashing out at Barney the dinosaur.

you don’t want Blacks/Muslims/Indians in your country

This is anti-HBD. Between Muslims, Blacks and Indians (presumably you mean south asians), you're looking at 4 billion people. Say their average IQ is 90. Let's call them group A. Let's say group B constitutes non-chinese desirable immigrant groups with an IQ of ~105. (I'm assuming most western Europeans do not want to immigrate to the US and Chinese are the rival civilization). Group B will have around 500 million people at best.

Doing some ChatGPT math, Group A has around 90 million people above IQ 120, and group B has about 80 million people above IQ 120. IQ is measurable and group A is more strongly motivated to immigrate. Therefore, if IQ = HBD and HBD = societal destiny, then the US will end up importing a very large number of blacks, south asians and muslims.

Personally, I believe cultural compatibility is just as important as the intelligence of the people you're importing. But, if HBD becomes the primary driver of immigration policy, then it will inevitably sample the cream of the largest (4 billion strong and growing) cohort.

Once you understand HBD, liberals become obviously wrong on most every social issue

No. I increasingly believe that liberal policy is a direct result of deeply internalizing HBD. (By liberal, I mean the American center-left, neo-libs, academic elites and NYT types. Not the communists). You can't tip-toe around landmines this effectively unless you know their precise location. I don't want to derail the discussion, but IMO, American liberals are the result of trying to reconcile protestant ideology with the realities of group IQ.

American Protestantism ties a person's self-worth to their economic productivity. It claims that people are created equal, and given equal opportunity, the hardest working will be the most productive and most moral. Working hard (sanctity of work) reflects good moral character, and the primary observable metric of hard work is economic productivity.

If IQ is real, heritable and puts a ceiling on an individual's productivity, then the whole moral framework stops working. Corporate America stops working. It's impossible to motivate hustlers, aspiring grinders and temporarily embarrassed millionaires if IQ is the primary contributor to outcomes.

If the smarter kid will always do better, then why work harder ? Why put in effort ? If you'll never be able to intellectually compete with the nerds, then why play their game at all ? Why be a peaceful participant of a system that guarantees your loss ? Better to bring it down instead. The natural conclusion is to use populism & violence to reclaim power and set up a tribal society instead.

Liberals need the lower class to believe that they can make it if they try hard enough. So, they set aside a few visible roles for all races, so that everyone keeps believing in protestant morals. They know that in the absence of a 'DEI', the elite will look so different from the base population, that a revolution is inevitable. Liberals want to set up socialist safety nets, because they understand that low-IQ people can't lift themselves up by their bootstraps.

Liberal policy is an uncomfortable compromise of believing in both HBD and protestant values. The resulting cognitive dissonance is why even the smartest liberal suddenly loses 50 IQ points when talking about certain issues.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary identity depends on his not understanding it."

If the smarter kid will always do better, then why work harder ? Why put in effort ?

"Success" is generally a function of both effort and talent. Anecdotally, I'm aware of lots of cases and situations where "smarter" isn't enough alone, and often loses to someone willing to work harder. The folks at the very top have both, and outcomes generally scale with effort at all levels of talent, although there are levels where "have you considered trying something else?" becomes a reasonable question.

Nick Fuentes's ideas have zero intellectual worth. He is a mega-church pastor for the religion of inceldom. Incoherence is key to his movement. At least Candace Owens is schizophrenic. What's Fuentes' excuse ?

He's a fed.

Doing some ChatGPT math, Group A has around 90 million people above IQ 120, and group B has about 80 million people above IQ 120. IQ is measurable and group A is more strongly motivated to immigrate. Therefore, if IQ = HBD and HBD = societal destiny, then the US will end up importing a very large number of blacks, south asians and muslims.

I think the traditional counterargument is "regression to the mean". If you randomly import smart Africans that pass your IQ test, there's no guarantee that their children will maintain the same level of IQ. You need to look at multigenerational IQ, ideally looking for specific groups that are identified as unusually smart in their host countries. Not every smart Israeli, but Ashkenazim, not every smart Indian, but Tamil Brahmins, not every smart Nigerian, but Igbo.

Is there an ELI5 on regression to the mean? How do a 150 IQ person's genes know whether to regress to 120 or to 90?

I'll take a wild guess and say it's random chance, and the mean of the population has the highest chance of manifesting in the individual.

It's not an ELI5, but Emil Kirkegaard has a neat "contra unbounded regression towards the mean" article. https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/selective-migration-and-regression

I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig headed fool.

I notice, you are prejudiced, he is acting out his insecurities through violent bigotry.

I'm going to register that I think this is a troll post, the quality is so low that I have trouble believing in it. Numbers pop up only for one side, ethnicity and religion are conflated in different ways for different groups, hatreds are elided at random.

There is a sense of victory in that, even in a troll post, people have to quite accurately reflect our views.

Yeah, I think its just a jew post wearing a semite-phile skin suit.

If Nick is correct that the status-quo of Western Institutions is to be extremely pro-Israel and Pro-Jewish, then why would the Jews want to destroy those western institutions??

"Destroy" seems like a bailey to a motte of "exploit"/"keep from realising their full potential", to which this objection does not apply. Compare "if slavery abolitionists are correct that slaves are slaving away for their masters, then why would the masters want to [do bad things] to those slaves?"

I'm also no enemy of the jews but I don't think you're really engaging with fuentes.

I think the Fuentes position is more that he thinks a strong nationalist country is the ideal and that "World Jewery" has had preventing the rise of a strong nationalist country at the very top of their priority list since the holocaust. He sees members of this class to have a strong influence on national politics. That in pursuing the prevention of a strong nationalist country forming they supported immigration on the grounds that it would water down any singular racial element taking control could cause problems if certain immigrant groups had their own antisemitic problems is just the classic golem attacking its master trope. He, probably correctly, thinks that if he worked with the Jews to get rid of the muslims then the jews would return to undermining his project at every turn.

The problem is that this whole «human capital» philosophy that treats humans as interchangeable stuffing of different grades in the American pie is premised on some extremely degenerate assumptions about human nature at this point.

The most plausible explanation for the vast amount of cultural decline in our country over the past 15 years is NOT some secret cabal of Jews conspiring to destroy the countries that they share with us. It seems much more likely that outside actors who actually have a vested interest in watching the US and Europe collapse are to blame: the Qatari, Saudi, Emirati oil money are buying their way into influencing Western academic, political, and social capital in a way that undermines Western values and promotes Islamic ones. Likewise, the Chinese Communists are no doubt using all of the psychological warfare tools at their disposal to accelerate the collapse of the American Empire. The Chinese definitely want to see America be as multicultural as possible and promote identity politics to create more divisions within us.

Islam is at war with the West, and they have been for thousands of years. The difference is now the West is losing this war, and we are losing badly. If Western Civilization can muster the courage to actually declare war against Islam, as they have declared war on us, the Jews will be overrepresented in the political, military and cultural institutions that are fighting for western civilization. The Jews helped us beat Hitler. The Jews helped us beat the Soviet Union. The Jews can help us beat China. The Jews can help us beat Islam, too.

I notice you don't mention China except as something to beat, while extolling «Japanese», «Taiwanese» and «Asians». It's peculiar because of course Taiwanese are Chinese, most American [East] Asians are Chinese, and indeed, they're doing very well! Low crime, high SAT, sizable tax contribution, and as I've said in my last long post, when an American Jew (Zuckerberg) wants to build an American Superintelligence Lab, 20 out of 30 research scientists turn out to be Han Chinese. In fact, 18 of them even hold PRC citizenship. This is about how it looked at the absolute peak of Jewish dominance in the American cognitive elite.

And yet, and yet – the US is having a decade-long meltdown about strategic competition with China. Even these researchers are suspected as potential spies who'll leak our precious inventions (their own work, largely) to the Red Dragon. There's a lot of vitriol directed at the Chinese, smoothed over with unconvincing noises to the effect of «no no I don't hate Han people, love my Hapa children, much beautiful ancient culture, wow very friendly very nice, I hate the CCP [also nuke three gorges dam]». Well, but the CCP is made of 100 million Chinese people, it has a sky-high approval rating (no it's not fake), and it genuinely represents their collective will to be a successful race, a superpower with hegemonic potential, rather than an assembly floor and source of high-skilled labor for Americans (including Jews).

White people like (presumably) you, people who buy into this «human capital» doctrine, are simply people. Chinese and Jewish people are a people, and in their own cultural frame even the People – a distinction which is a bit better articulated than in many other cultures, but in no way an abnormal way of thinking. They are ethnocentric. Goys and barbarians are not part of the people, and the people will coordinate to achieve collective gain in zero-sum games with barbarians and goys. That's table stakes for a self-aware successful culture.

What kind of war against Islam are you envisioning? It's pretty funny because militarily, Islam is not a threat to the West at all and has no potential to become a threat. It is, of course, a moderate but real threat to Israel, which is why pro-Israeli actors will hype up the Islamic threat to try and have you fight their wars. The Saudi money works, if it does, because your ruling class is hilariously corrupt and disinterested in the long-term prosperity of the populace. The main danger scenario is illustrated by the case of the UK, with slow population replacement by a mix of different immigrant groups and the low-status people (low human capital, so much less interesting for «the UK» than Jews or Asians) converting to Islam out of desperation. To stop this, you don't really need high-IQ Jewish generals and nuclear scientists, you need to learn to think of yourselves as «a people» that have intrinsic worth not denominated in tax returns or exam scores. But that's at odds with those very «values» you hope to have the Jews protect for you.

All of this is very mush-headed. There's no need to antagonize any ethnic group or reject cooperation, but there is a necessity to acknowledge that major nations represent essentially ethnic interests that are partially shared by their diasporas, and there is not a single non-Western nation that is straight up invested in propping up the West for «values» or whatever. Including Israel. All alliances will be alliances of convenience.

White people like (presumably) you, people who buy into this «human capital» doctrine, are simply people. Chinese and Jewish people are a people, and in their own cultural frame even the People – a distinction which is a bit better articulated than in many other cultures, but in no way an abnormal way of thinking. They are ethnocentric. Goys and barbarians are not part of the people, and the people will coordinate to achieve collective gain in zero-sum games with barbarians and goys. That's table stakes for a self-aware successful culture.

Maybe it's downstream of deep Christian roots but this is not how we, the liberals, want things to be. There is no contradiction between liking chinese people and disliking one institution that they are currently forming(of course as you note the CCP isn't even the only largely Han Chinese ethnic government), any more than there would be with liking German people and opposing the Nazis. The Chinese people have had previous governments, and so have us westerns. Not only are there obviously previous American presidencies that I oppose, in many ways I oppose the current one. And yet I love my people, I love America and Americans. I love our optimism, the puritan work ethic, the celebration of success. Many of these same great qualities I recognize in the Chinese people I have met.

To the degree that Fuentes strikes a cord against Israeli/Jewish influence it's because it's deep in our marrow that ethnocentrism is evil. And that's why he will ultimately fail. He makes Americans feel uncomfortable dissonance about their gut deep opposition to ethnic centrism and the obvious ethnocentrism of israel, Israel itself being made up of the world's most famous victims of ethnocentrism, But that same energy he's using to drum up resentment of israeli influence is what he opposes. It's why he has to ride the line of praising the jews for serving their ethnic interests as he opposes them. In his preferred world view there is absolutely nothing wrong with scheming in your ethnic interest. I don't think he will be able to turn the Americans in this way, I don't think that's in our souls.

All of this is very mush-headed. There's no need to antagonize any ethnic group or reject cooperation, but there is a necessity to acknowledge that major nations represent essentially ethnic interests that are partially shared by their diasporas, and there is not a single non-Western nation that is straight up invested in propping up the West for «values» or whatever. Including Israel. All alliances will be alliances of convenience.

Your post is passive just descriptive. Do you endorse ethno nationalism or just observe it? In my favorite post of yours you once said

I wear my sympathies on my sleeve. I have little sympathy for the Chinese regime and understand its faults, but I side with it (to the extent that this matters) as part of a gamble unlikely to pay off, but the only one left to me and my people to check the tumorous growth of the monster you happy lot sustain with the sweat of your brow.

What is that monster we sustain? What is it that you hope to see vanquish it and take its place? Could it truly be this cynical ethno nationalist? And if not what?

To the degree that Fuentes strikes a cord against Israeli/Jewish influence it's because it's deep in our marrow that ethnocentrism is evil.

I really don't think this is true of a great deal of American conservatives. The fact that Japan, say, prioritizes the ethnic Japanese does not seem to be a moral problem at all for an awful lot of people, which is why I think online edgelords have latched on to it as a useful argument. America can't really be that kind of country, of course, because of its actual settler+immigrant history means we've always been a mess of different fractious groups from the very beginning, but the fact that other nations have other ways of organizing their borders seems pretty unobjectionable.

From that perspective, though, the problem with Israeli influence is that Jewish people are being very normal about their enthocentrism (which is a default almost everywhere around the globe, and will return to being more apparently as America and the West become relatively weaker compared to everyone else), and current American liberalism rules it entirely out-of-bounds to name it and respond appropriately to it, because saying that groups exist and fight for their own (entirely sensible, but also entirely non-universal) interests, sounds a great deal like what has been defined as antisemitism in this case... To that conservative perspective, someone Jewish being a partisan for Israel and Jewish people is totally normal and sensible, but the fact that the American government refuses to likewise be a partisan for Americans and American people (and the boundary here is certainly complicated) is the actual glaring problem, especially in a case like this where (so the claim goes) these Jewish interests are being especially sharp elbowed as the expense of a lot of Americans.

That's at least something like the kind of perspective I come across, at any rate.

Your post is passive just descriptive. Do you endorse ethno nationalism or just observe it?

I will answer thusly.

My default moral intuitions aren't that different from modal American ones 50 or so years ago. Russia is a multiethnic society, clearly defined by one ethnos and culture (mine, to a first approximation), which does not possess the instinct or inclination for clannish diasporic behavior. We are more ethnocentric than modern Westerners but not by far. We assimilate easily in Western societies, find them an upgrade to our own, and generally agree with the way of the West, whereas the ways of The Rest are seen as unfair and backward, if demonstrably adaptive on the personal and sometimes collective level. Ethnocentrism specifically has been investigated in a toy model I like, by one Artem Kaznatcheev and friends, in Canada in 2013, and the conclusion was that it “…eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates”. Intellectually, then, it appears necessary to develop a system that can defend that superior humanitarian way, and the unpalatable conclusion is that in practice it amounts to something not unlike ethnocentrism – aggressive policing of defectors, attention to proxy metrics of defection, operational presumption of non-assimilation, and rejection of comforting lies about universality and natural attractiveness of preferred values. Western experiment with mass immigration and “race-blind meritocracy” is clearly a cheap hack motivated by Western cognitive biases, myopic financial considerations and such, not any concern for long-term preservation of the Way. Similar thoughts are common for sympathetic peoples on the periphery of Western civilization, which is why we see Slavs, assimilated Jews, Moldovans and so on disproportionately represented among the European right.

On a more philosophical level, I don't know. Ethnocentrism is a crude but effective means to preserve the intrinsic direction of a people, it increases the activation energy for changing course, and lets the direction be explored further. Moral intuitions aside, I'm not convinced that the Western direction is truly superior; it would be premature to say so.

I'm pretty open to the idea that diversity is good — real diversity, not this consumerist Western appreciation of cuisines, not the lukewarm respect for ethnic varieties of ideas the West already accepts. Why is diversity good? I consider great men of history to be scientists, and civilizations to be ongoing longitudinal natural experiments – about the limits of human nature, society, what kinds of minds should be incentivized to develop, what notions of goodness are viable and lead to more adaptive behavior, better instrumental outcomes and, in the limit, to greater collective and individual flourishing. Some experiments achieve negative results, invalidating the hypothesis for observers, but it's always a pity if this happens for contingent reasons like a natural disaster, or an opportunistic alliance, or luck of the draw in relative timing of access to some preexisting technology. I am distraught at being unable to know how failed civilizations could have developed to their “mature” stage, given a couple more millennia of literacy and a handful of extra IQ points, or passing a good reform, or contacting a powerful idea earlier; where would they have met their ceiling. When possible, one should run experiments in controlled conditions, after all.
The West is a beautiful experiment, plausibly the most successful that has ever been proposed. Its core thesis, stripped of the ever-changing scaffolding, is something like “human nature inherently has the spark of God's love and wisdom, therefore individual freedom is good and barriers to its realization are at worst prejudices, at best training wheels and must be systematically removed”. It's been working very well. But this near-genocidal desire to universalize the way smells less and less like sincere proselytism, and more like anxiety, fear of the hypothesis getting falsified. The truth is, the West has no clue as to what made or makes it work, beyond currently-commoditized pieces like capitalism (but whence capitalism? If “because freedom”, why does it port to societies that don't adopt the rest of the package?) Americans sometimes boast of “nation-building” Germany and Japan, developing “institutions”, and that reveals the hollowness and vulgarity of the doctrine. Germany and Japan, seriously? Japan got destroyed in the first place precisely because it got competitive, while remaining philosophically largely alien; Germany was actively advancing a divergent branch of the Western thesis. And today, both these nations are deeply troubled. Nation-building in less performant societies has a dismal track record. The West doesn't really know what to teach others so that it sticks. Really, what made the West into what it is, what was the generative function behind those generically adaptive innovations? Christendom (adopted Middle Eastern teaching, effectively dead now)? “HBD” in the sense of high IQ and conscientiousness – OK but why did it happen, just deep time migration patterns, cold winters, founder effects? What's the lesson here, pray to RNG? Galton-style Social Darwinism, Gregory Clark's Anglo class eugenics (grotesquely replaced with education-mediated assortative mating, also largely dead, and their practical implications made taboo in the resultant society)? “High trust” and non-kin cooperation by default (as covered here, a giant exploit for people who practice kin cooperation, and thus a mere bootstrap phase)? Science? Everyone above 95-ish median IQ can do science. The discovery was invaluable, but can “the West” come up with anything of that caliber ever again? Rather, can you even do what you used to do? We seem to be near the end of the session. Do you even know if you want to live? When you have full automation, will you put forward an argument for not just exercising your freedom to pass away replacing yourselves with machines, like you're currently doing with immigrants? Of what nature will that argument be?

China is another large old civilization. They've been running their own experiments. Their most enduring research program is Confucian. At the risk of butchering it, Confucianism says something like “humans aren't very good and are prone to self-interested behavior. Individual humans are not even human, they can only be elevated from monkeys via social context, and even then they default to barbarianism. But if compelled to cultivate “virtue”, starting on the mundane level of filial piety, hierarchical propriety and standardized ritual, escalating to mental discipline and scholarship, if rewarded with reproductive opportunity for utmost compliance, if the peace is maintained for many generations – they can build hierarchical societies of unbounded scale and splendor; and eventually, more of them become Superior Persons capable of and entitled to correct independent moral reasoning, and those will ennoble everyone else”.
It is debatable how seriously that has been pursued, but I'd say at least as seriously as the Christian/Western program. Both have undergone course corrections that arguably reflect growing out of their scaffolding and purify the original strategy. The West going from theism to deism to non-superstitious interest in the Universe, generalizing the validity of “love” and “freedom” beyond traditional norms. The East purging “thieves of virtue” along with ossified ritual and adopting a more common-sensical epistemology. To an extent this can be decried as trivialization and loss of function on both sides. There's been substantial convergence, but the divergent bits are what's at stake. Right now, I think the Eastern project is showing more promise, and the West is no longer in a position to lecture them on how to steer it. They're more ethnocentric? Less individualistic? They're authoritarian? Their society feels wrong? OK, I hear you. But they're solving social trust, they're solving – in their own way, less charismatic and more transactional – international relations, they're even solving creative expression, while having solved long-term large-scale coordination to a greater extent. And crucially, this isn't their first rodeo, they've had massive collapses and comebacks, they're the only major player that has a sophisticated applied discourse about civilizational recovery. Isn't it saying something that they've fallen behind, failed catastrophically, but have recovered, denied you the option of converting them, and are again pursuing their own program? Isn't it exciting that another solution can exist? Aren't you curious of where it will peak? Of course, they're doing well enough that another questions, for example “how much of the light cone will we be able to claim at this rate” are becoming salient for savvy observers. So it is necessary that they be treated as competitors, not just an interesting alternative path.

Jews, likewise, are a unique research program. They have an insular doctrine of their exceptionalism and special nature of themselves as “the people of God”, their moral obligation to biologically and culturally perpetuate themselves, a very long story of surviving and adapting, institutions built for venerating and reproductively rewarding exceptional individuals who have superior insight into God's will, they're punching so far above their weight that it's almost comical… and all of that hinges on extreme, almost naive ethnocentrism. They've mixed with Western peoples, experienced some assimilation, and now we're watching them return to a more traditional (indeed, exxageratedly traditional) form, with large Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox subpopulations having a vast fertility advantage over secular ones which, so long as they exist, provide a bridge to Western decisionmaking, invent spins like “Judeo-Christian liberal democratic values” and “our common Islamic/Communist/Han enemy”, and generally add confusion (partially their own). It doesn't take a genius to recognize that this research program, while fascinating on its own, can derail the Western one, and on top of your own dysfunction and anxious miscalculations it can create very ugly outcomes. We've seen trial runs in the Middle East, and the worst part is that you can barely articulate that it was mostly about them, not your “strategic interest” or oil or some other bullshit. So they, too, ought to be treated as competitors. It's okay, they can take it.

That's pretty much all relevant live players; smaller or less coherent players, who have a latent opportunity to expand their niche, are also more ethnocentric. The West is uniquely non-ethnocentric and has unique moral narcissism about this fact, largely owed to successes of the last several centuries. I think the jury is out on whether this system is sustainable or has the highest ceiling, and you're not entitled to try and “enlighten” others, but you're clearly valuable enough to think of how you can preserve and improve your program in a world of ethnocentrists, and that's what you should be doing now.

Spawn a great man or something, I don't know.

There's a lot here, thank you for the reply. Your analysis of the various 'peoples' is interesting. I find a lot of it compelling but, as a true believer in my people's experiment - and how lost I'd be if I weren't, I suppose this is how a practicing and believing christian must feel when they are baffled by how atheists can function without god - I do find things to disagree on. I'll have to digest it before that pushback can come up in some future engagement.

Yeah I noticed that as well with separating out Taiwanese.

The thing about all this is even the Jews themselves don't believe it. They watch It's a Wonderful Life or Harry Potter or Star Wars, and see characters like Potter and the goblins and Watto and say "That's me! Yes, they're not technically Jewish, but it's an antisemitic stereotype!" You literally cannot put a greedy, sleazy character in a story without the Jews saying you must be talking about them. Why do the Jews never look at George Bailey or Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker and say "That's me! Yes, he may not be canonically Jewish, but he's obviously just a stand-in for a Jew in this fictional setting."

For what it's worth, they're hardly alone in this. The Russians watch LotR and see the orcs and say "That's me!" They even play horde in WoW.

Not everyone wants to be a hero. Heck, I myself play Diablo, see Zoltun Kulle, and say "That's me!"

Why do the Jews never look at George Bailey or Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker and say "That's me! Yes, he may not be canonically Jewish, but he's obviously just a stand-in for a Jew in this fictional setting."

They do, however, say that about Superman, who's the furthest thing from those stereotypes.

I don't think the fictional characters you identify with really say that much about you. At most it says how you'd like to be perceived, or how you fear others do perceive you. Wasn't there a thread a week or two ago about how real identity comes from what you do, not how you feel?

The Superman/Moses thing is pretty obvious right off the bat, and Superman's creators were Jewish.

Jews are the ones correctly interpreting these things in both cases. The Harry Potter goblins were a representation of Jews written by a Gentile. Superman is a representation and self-conception of a Jew written by Jews.

The Grinch and Scrooge are metaphors for Jews written by Christians telling a story of their Conversion to Christianity through Christmas.

Fictional characters you identify with say a lot about you, and they also say a lot about how you perceive your outgroup. The "Dumb Blonde" stereotype has no basis in reality, it's a Hollywood trope written from an adversarial perspective. The "Jock vs Nerd" trope, in which the socially maladjusted Nerd always wins, is telling a similar story.

Jews have a fine-tuned sensitivity, and mastery, over writing and interpreting these characters. They are very good at using them to criticize their outgroup, and they are very good at detecting when fictional characters are being used to criticize them (and most of the time they are not being paranoid they are correct). Whites are not very good at detecting when a fictional character was written in order to criticize themselves from an adversarial perspective. Jews are very good at detecting that.

The Harry Potter goblins were a representation of Jews written by a Gentile.

The Harry Potter goblins are the gnomes of Zurich. I'm equally fed-up with people pointing and yelling about anti-Semitism because they so desperately want to be offended and wrap themselves in the mantle of persecuted martyrdom, or they so desperately need caricatures to feed the conspiracy theory about Jewish World Domination Plot.

The Grinch and Scrooge are metaphors for Jews written by Christians telling a story of their Conversion to Christianity through Christmas.

Scrooge is a metaphor for Christianity. This is so wildly off the bat that you must never have read the book. Dickens popularised the secular Christmas. The three Ghosts are not Christian saints or representative figures, Scrooge never darkens the door of a church, and secular charity is about as religious as this new festive feasting and partying Christmastide gets. Tell me Mr. Fezziwig's ball is in fact midnight Mass, I dare you.

Dickens wrote Jewish characters who were offensive to Jewish readers. Scrooge is not Jewish.

Central to Scrooge's hatred of Christmas is being stuck in school with his books while his peers are out celebrating Christmas. This was a common-enough Jewish experience that Hannukah was elevated to its current status to precisely solve this problem for Jewish children. Mr. Fezziwig's ball represents Scrooge being pulled into the tradition as a "Christmas convert" just like the Grinch. They are both isolated figures, outsiders, resentful of the Holiday, but then they are won over. Ebeneezer is a Hebrew name, while it wasn't that uncommon for Christians, his business partner Jacob Marley had a fully Jewish name. Fagin is Jewish in Dicken's Oliver Twist although Dickens edited out direct reference to Fagin as a Jew.

The point isn't "Scrooge was Jewish" it's that these stories were created to represent cultural "victory of the Christmas Spirit" over the "anti-Christmas spirit." It's a mode of propagating culture, to craft fictional characters that resist it (and are inspired by prevailing stereotypes of non-Christians) but then they end up converting in the end. It moralizes Christmas and demoralizes outsiders who would oppose it, because if they do they are a Scrooge or a Grinch- someone who has not accepted a conversion necessary for their very soul.

Superman is not literally a Jew, he's a Kryptonian, but what the character represents is a different question entirely.

There is an alternative reading where Scrooge represents Puritan austerity (which was specifically opposed to the secular aspects of Christmas celebrations, with Cromwell's major-generals sending their most pious soldiers out to confiscate overly-rich Christmas dinners) and the Weberian "Protestant work ethic". The arguments Scrooge uses on the pleasant portly gentlemen were real political positions used by real right-liberals as the basis for important legislation at the time Dickens was writing, and the real people saying these things saw themselves as pious Protestants and justified their positions in Weberian terms.

Given the social context Dickens was writing in, the anti-Weberian reading seems more plausible than the antisemitic reading, although the nature of great fiction is that both are present in the text, and it is almost certain that both were present in Dickens' brain.

I'm looking up the novel right now, and the very ending does have some religious references (Scrooge invokes Heaven, goes to church, etc.) but it's very non-denominational, if I may put it that way. "Heaven" but not God and certainly not Jesus. Church, but it's more the ringing of the church bells, and going to church is part of his entire procedure of reformed behaviour, not a particularly conversion experience:

He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk—that anything—could give him so much happiness. In the afternoon he turned his steps towards his nephew’s house.

Dickens invented modern Christmas, more or less, and it was a majorly secular one right from the start. Yes, generosity, charity, reconciliation with your family, becoming involved with your fellows - but nothing there that couldn't have the very light coat of religious reference sanded off and still be relevant to the 'spiritual but not religious' or modern lay person who observes Christmas as a time for getting drunk, partying, having the big family gathering, and spending a ton of money.

I never knew Marley was a Jewish name. So what nationality or ethnic stereotype does the Dickensian name "M'Choakumchild" represent? If you need to point out to the audience for anti-Semitic stereotypes "No, look, this guy is meant to be Jewish, here's how and why", I think the stereotyping is not working - or maybe you might be wrong.

M'Choakumchild

Sounds Bantu to me.

I never knew Marley was a Jewish name.

One of Bob Marley's kids married a Jewish-descended woman; do she and their kids count?

"Marley" usually comes from Old English, occasionally as an Anglicization of Irish.

"Jacob" is Biblical, so it is a common Jewish name, but it's also the middle name of one of the most famous Protestant Christians of Dickens' time, John Jacob Astor, possibly the wealthiest businessmen in the world when A Christmas Carol was written.

or maybe you might be wrong.

Yup. The most relevant etymology here is that of "Secure Signals". A Holocaust denier who named himself after the SS might not be the best source for objective discussion of antisemitism.

Jews are the ones correctly interpreting these things in both cases. The Harry Potter goblins were a representation of Jews written by a Gentile.

There's a certain strain of leftist that strains to attach antisemitism to Rowling, but her depiction of goblins was straight out of folklore, not Rowling expressing her covert Jew-hatred. Or are you going to adopt the leftist frame that akshually, goblins were metaphors for Jews even in the Dark Ages?

(No, they were not. Metaphors for many other things, but not Jews.)

The Grinch and Scrooge are metaphors for Jews written by Christians telling a story of their Conversion to Christianity through Christmas.

... have you even read Dickens or Doctor Seuss?

Is your theory that every gentile who writes about an ugly, greedy monster is actually writing about Jews, even if subconsciously? That says more about you than some hypothetical ur-Jew floating in the collective gentile consciousness.

It's possible to see the Grinch as a Jewish-to-Christian conversion story, I suppose. But A Christmas Carol is certainly a story of a Christian redemption, no Jews involved.

Or are you going to adopt the leftist frame that akshually, goblins were metaphors for Jews even in the Dark Ages?

I've seen someone unironically assert this on Tumblr, in the context of calling the anime Goblin Slayer antisemitic. Because goblins are always and everywhere an antisemitic caricature, a deliberate stand-in for Jews, and always have been, thus anyone who uses goblins as an antagonist element is a deliberate antisemite.

I've seen this claim too, but I don't remember ever seeing it before Rowling became a bete noire and people were trying to pin antisemitism and racism et al on her.

I once got lectured by a Jewish person that "lizard people" (i.e., the myth about secret aliens controlling the world) is an antisemitic meme. And I'm like... do you really want to insist on that association?

I think Jews see all conspiracy theories as latently antisemitic because of bitter experience - most conspiracy theorists and conspiracy-focused political movements will eventually graduate to Jewish conspiracies and old-fashioned anti-semitism. This process appears to be happening to Zoomer MAGA as we speak.

I once got lectured by a Jewish person that "lizard people" (i.e., the myth about secret aliens controlling the world) is an antisemitic meme. And I'm like... do you really want to insist on that association?

Yeah, the tendency to reflexively react to criticism of "elites" — open, secret, or alien — controlling the world with "You mean the Jews, right? You're totally talking about us Jews!" isn't a good look. When you can watch someone put a standard lefty "eat the rich" rant on Tumblr, and immediately get piled on as a "Nazi" who wants to genocide all Jews because, between ranting about Musk, Bezos, and Klaus Schwab, they dared bring up George Soros; because the only reason anyone would ever mention Soros in a negative context is entirely because Soros is Jewish and they hate him because he's Jewish, because they must be an antisemite who hates all Jews — well, it's hard not to think this probably fuels at least a little antisemitism.

And back on the earlier point, it's not just goblins and reptilian aliens, either. How about the claim that the tengu of Japanese folklore are an antisemitic caricature? I mean, just look at those noses. I, mean, sure, the conventional explanation is as a more humanized form of their older depiction as bird-men:

The tengu in art appears in a variety of shapes. It usually falls somewhere in between a large, monstrous bird and a wholly anthropomorphized being, often with a red face or an unusually large or long nose. Early depictions of tengu show them as kite-like beings who can take a human-like form, often retaining avian wings, heads, or beaks. The tengu's long nose seems to have been conceived in the 14th century, likely as a humanization of the original bird's bill.

But, no, that doesn't stop people from claiming, like on Twitter here: https://nitter.poast.org/nerdtechgasm/status/1931926279106036079 that "it's not a theory" at all that the tengu are antisemitic depictions of a group of Jews who arrived in Japan in the 3rd Century and became the Hata clan.

They do, however, say that about Superman

Well, they say a lot of things about that movie, especially in response to what everyone else thinks the movie was about

They've said that about the comics for the better part of a century. It's not exclusively about the movie.

For what it's worth, they're hardly alone in this. The Russians watch LotR and see the orcs and say "That's me!" They even play horde in WoW.

Everyone who's anyone plays horde in WoW. Come on now.

It's kinda amusing--my innate distaste for Orcs was so strong that when I played Warcraft 3 as a youngster, I was annoyed that I couldn't skip the Orc campaign, so I just stopped playing the campaign entirely. (Which was ridiculous, since as it turns out, the Orc campaign is really good!).

What was always especially odd to me is that as I've grown up and encountered people who identify as orcs (nobody in my circles growing up did), they're not people I'd have identified as orc-ish at all. Like Russians do not look anything like orcs to me, and I found it astonishing they would interpret Lord of the Rings as such. Maybe the very lower class, prison sort kinda look like orcs, but one could say that just as well of the British lower class, or probably any lower class. And Grubby was (and still is) one of my favorite pro gamers, and he's the Warcraft 3 Orc God. Grubby looks about as opposite of an orc as a human could possibly look.

As an adult, the whole theme has become even more amusing: Warcraft 3 obviously got the term "orc" from Tolkien, but Tolkien wasn't the first to use the term, either! The first, to my knowledge, to use it was William Blake, who used it in a similar but slightly different sense: Orc is not what we'd call the orcs themselves, but is rather a spirit of destructive rebellion that possesses humans. He uses it to refer to the Americans in America, A Prophecy, where he gives um... a very unflattering description of Americans, basically burning down everything beautiful in the world and infesting it with fire and plagues in their war against the angel Albion.

To get back to Tolkien, here is his explanation of where the word came from and early thoughts on The Problem of Orcs:

(1) Various letters of 1954

Orcs (the word is as far as I am concerned actually derived from Old English orc ‘demon’, but only because of its phonetic suitability) are nowhere clearly stated to be of any particular origin. But since they are servants of the Dark Power, and later of Sauron, neither of whom could, or would, produce living things, they must be ‘corruptions’. They are not based on direct experience of mine; but owe, I suppose, a good deal to the goblin tradition (goblin is used as a translation in The Hobbit, where orc only occurs once, I think), especially as it appears in George MacDonald, except for the soft feet which I never believed in. The name has the form orch (pl. yrch) in Sindarin and uruk in the Black Speech.

(2)

Your preference of goblins to orcs involves a large question and a matter of taste, and perhaps historical pedantry on my part. Personally I prefer Orcs (since these creatures are not ‘goblins’, not even the goblins of George MacDonald, which they do to some extent resemble). Also I now deeply regret having used Elves, though this is a word in ancestry and original meaning suitable enough. But the disastrous debasement of this word, in which Shakespeare played an unforgiveable part, has really overloaded it with regrettable tones, which are too much to overcome. I hope in the Appendices to Vol. III to be able to include a note ‘On translation’ in which the matter of equivalences and my uses may be made clearly. My difficulty has been that, since I have tried to present a kind of legendary and history of a ‘forgotten epoch’, all the specific terms were in a foreign language, and no precise equivalents exist in English

(3) Draft of unsent letter

Treebeard does not say that the Dark Lord ‘created’ Trolls and Orcs. He says he ‘made’ them in counterfeit of certain creatures pre-existing. There is, to me, a wide gulf between the two statements, so wide that Treebeard’s statement could (in my world) have possibly been true. It is not true actually of the Orcs – who are fundamentally a race of ‘rational incarnate’ creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today. ...But if they ‘fell’, as the Diabolus Morgoth did, and started making things ‘for himself, to be their Lord’, these would then ‘be’, even if Morgoth broke the supreme ban against making other ‘rational’ creatures like Elves or Men. They would at least ‘be’ real physical realities in the physical world, however evil they might prove, even ‘mocking’ the Children of God. They would be Morgoth’s greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote ‘irredeemably bad’; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God’s and ultimately good.) But whether they could have ‘souls’ or ‘spirits’ seems a different question; and since in my myth at any rate I do not conceive of the making of souls or spirits, things of an equal order if not an equal power to the Valar, as a possible ‘delegation’, I have represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodelling and corrupting them, not making them. That God would ‘tolerate’ that, seems no worse theology than the toleration of the calculated dehumanizing of Men by tyrants that goes on today.

(4)

Some reviewers have called the whole thing simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil, with all the good just good, and the bad just bad. ...But in any case this is a tale about a war, and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other. Not that I have made even this issue quite so simple: there are Saruman, and Denethor, and Boromir; and there are treacheries and strife even among the Orcs.

(5) Notes on 1956 review by Auden of LOTR

Denethor despised lesser men, and one may be sure did not distinguish between orcs and the allies of Mordor. If he had survived as victor, even without use of the Ring, he would have taken a long stride towards becoming himself a tyrant, and the terms and treatment he accorded to the deluded peoples of east and south would have been cruel and vengeful.

(6) Letter of 1957

There is no ‘symbolism’ or conscious allegory in my story. Allegory of the sort ‘five wizards = five senses’ is wholly foreign to my way of thinking. There were five wizards and that is just a unique part of history. To ask if the Orcs ‘are’ Communists is to me as sensible as asking if Communists are Orcs.

And this is where we get the "racist Tolkien!" stuff from:

(7) 1958 letter to Forrest Ackerman about his proposed film treatment of LOTR (I will never not be tickled by the idea that Forry and his entourage turned up on Tolkien's doorstep full of misguided enthusiasm to do an animated version)

Why does Z put beaks and feathers on Orcs!? (Orcs is not a form of Auks.) The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the ‘human’ form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.

(Z is screenwriter Morton Grady Zimmerman. And Tolkien's criticisms of him seem even more applicable to McKay and Payne)

(8) Draft of unsent letter, 1958

The Fall or corruption, therefore, of all things in it and all inhabitants of it, was a possibility if not inevitable. Trees may ‘go bad’ as in the Old Forest; Elves may turn into Orcs, and if this required the special perversive malice of Morgoth, still Elves themselves could do evil deeds.

(9) Letter of 1965

[Auden had asked Tolkien if the notion of the Orcs, an entire race that was irredeemably wicked, was not heretical.] With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don’t feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190, where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sorts and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable

Bonus note on origin of "warg": (10) Letter to Gene Wolfe (yes, that Gene Wolfe) 1966

Orc I derived from Anglo-Saxon, a word meaning a demon, usually supposed to be derived from the Latin Orcus – Hell. But I doubt this, though the matter is too involved to set out here. Warg is simple. It is an old word for wolf, which also had the sense of an outlaw or hunted criminal. This is its usual sense in surviving texts. I adopted the word had a good sound for the meaning, as a name for this particular brand of demonic wolf in the story.

I have to give his description of Forry turning up, it's too good to leave out:

(11) Letter of 1957:

It may amuse you to hear that (unsolicited) I suddenly found myself the winner of the International Fantasy Award, presented (as it says) ‘as a fitting climax to the Fifteenth World Science Fiction Convention’. What it boiled down to was a lunch at the Criterion yesterday with speeches, and the handing over of an absurd ‘trophy’. A massive metal ‘model’ of an upended Space-rocket (combined with a Ronson lighter). But the speeches were far more intelligent, especially that of the introducer: Clemence Dane, a massive woman of almost Sitwellian presence. Sir Stanley himself was present. Not having any immediate use for the trophy (save publicity=sales=cash) I deposited it in the window of 40 Museum Street. A back-wash from the Convention was a visit from an American film-agent (one of the adjudicating panel) who drove out all the way in a taxi from London to see me last week, filling 76 S[andfield] with strange men and stranger women – I thought the taxi would never stop disgorging. But this Mr Ackerman brought some really astonishingly good pictures (Rackham rather than Disney) and some remarkable colour photographs. They have apparently toured America shooting mountain and desert scenes that seem to fit the story. The Story Line or Scenario was, however, on a lower level. In fact bad. But it looks as if business might be done. Stanley U. & I have agreed on our policy: Art or Cash. Either very profitable terms indeed; or absolute author’s veto on objectionable features or alterations.

(12) Letter of 1957

I have today been visited by a Mr (Forrest J.) Ackerman, acting as an agent for three persons interested in filming The Lord of the Rings. In this work they have apparently been engaged for some six months … I have seen the specimen drawings of the artist (a Mr Cobb) and consider them admirable … I have with me the Story Line, which I will send you (on Friday I hope), when I have properly considered it. At a glance it shows a great deal more feeling for the story (in the terms of this sort of thing) than anything the BBC contrived.

("Cobb" was Roy Cobb, 19 year old cartoonist who was a junior artist at Walt Disney Studios)

Seeing as I'm off on a Tolkien tangent, and with the third season of Rings of Power lurking out there in post-production, here are some of his comments about the proposed film version of LOTR:

1957 letters to Rayner Unwin

(1)

You will receive on Monday the copy of the ‘Story Line’ or synopsis of the proposed film version of The Lord of the Rings. I could not get it off yesterday …

The ‘Story Line’ is (as might be expected) on a much lower level of art and perceptiveness than the pictorial material. It is in some points bad, and unacceptable, but is not irremediable, if the author of it (a certain Morton Grady Zimmerman) is open to criticism and direction. The ending is badly muffed. Though a lot of time is said to have gone into it, it reads like a production of haste, after a single reading, & without further reference to text. (My criticisms are not directed to the orc-idiom in which it is written, but to the effect which, it appears to me, the directions would have in a visual presentation – not to mention dialogue.) Mr Ackerman’s line of talk was that a big object to the group was ‘pleasing the author’. I have indicated to him that will not be easy.

Quite crudely: displeasing the author requires a cash equivalent! Only the prospect of a very large financial profit would make me swallow some of the things in this script! But I had the impression that there is not much ‘money’ in this proposition. In that case they had better be a bit more artistic!

An abridgement by selection with some good picture-work would be pleasant, & perhaps worth a good deal in publicity; but the present script is rather a compression with resultant over-crowding and confusion, blurring of climaxes, and general degradation: a pull-back towards more conventional ‘fairy-stories’. People gallop about on Eagles at the least provocation; Lórien becomes a fairycastle with ‘delicate minarets’, and all that sort of thing.

But I am quite prepared to play ball, if they are open to advice – and if you decide that the thing is genuine, and worthwhile.

(2)

Ackerman. What a letter! Just like the man, when I met him. But I came to the conclusion then that he was, in spite of his style, a genuine enthusiast … Cobb and Lackey obviously have real talent … and the comparison of Cobb with Rackham is just. Also Cobb’s taste and style seems on the whole to fit the L. R. better than I should have thought possible. I should say that he can be sinister without great distortions. He is certain to prove less good on anything noble or admirable (we all are, and Americans specially). But in any case, the visual art is not of such a superlative order that it could carry the stupidities and vulgarities of the script. And I am afraid we must take a stand there, as you have very clearly indicated: either the script-writer must be humble and co-operative, or his ‘visual’ colleagues must go unpublished.

...My chief criticism of the project, so far, is this. There is an internal dislocation. The chief and special talent of the group obviously lies, and will lie, in the scenic, & pictorial. The script-writer should consider this. On the contrary, he wants feverish action, and simply cuts out parts in which climate and scenery are the chief interest, such as ‘The Ring goes South’ or ‘The Great River’. Whereas the distant view and approach of the 3 sinister mountains, or the unrolling of the Anduin, would be just the things this group would do admirably.

However, we shall see. Grateful as I am, & should be, for the abundance of people who profess enjoyment of The Lord of the Rings, I wish that the commonest reaction of admirers was not the desire to tinker with it! However, a good deal of alteration is inevitable in a change of medium. But the Zimmerman alterations are the wrong way round. In a visual form marvels, like flying on eagles, want reducing not increasing.

(3) 1958 letter

Of course, I will get busy on this at once, now that Easter is over, and the Dutch incense is dissipated. Thank you for the copy of the Story-line, which I will go through again.

I am entirely ignorant of the process of producing an ‘animated picture’ from a book, and of the jargon connected with it. Could you let me know exactly what is a ‘story-line’, and its function in the process?

It is not necessary (or advisable) for me to waste time on mere expressions if these are simply directions to picture-producers. But this document, as it stands, is sufficient to give me grave anxiety about the actual dialogue that (I suppose) will be used. I should say Zimmerman, the constructor of this s-l, is quite incapable of excerpting or adapting the ‘spoken words’ of the book. He is hasty, insensitive, and impertinent.

He does not read books. It seems to me evident that he has skimmed through the L.R. at a great pace, and then constructed his s.l. from partly confused memories, and with the minimum of references back to the original. Thus he gets most of the names wrong in form – not occasionally by casual error but fixedly (always Borimor for Boromir); or he misapplies them: Radagast becomes an Eagle. The introduction of characters and the indications of what they are to say have little or no reference to the book. Bombadil comes in with ‘a gentle laugh’! …

I feel very unhappy about the extreme silliness and incompetence of Z and his complete lack of respect for the original (it seems wilfully wrong without discernible technical reasons at nearly every point). But I need, and shall soon need very much indeed, money, and I am conscious of your rights and interests; so that I shall endeavour to restrain myself, and avoid all avoidable offence. I will send you my remarks, particular and general, as soon as I can; and of course nothing will go to Ackerman except through you and with at least your assent.

(4) 1958 letter to Forrest Ackerman with commentary on the film treatment

If Z and/or others do so, they may be irritated or aggrieved by the tone of many of my criticisms. If so, I am sorry (though not surprised). But I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about …

The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.

Z … has intruded a ‘fairy castle’ and a great many Eagles, not to mention incantations, blue lights, and some irrelevant magic (such as the floating body of Faramir). He has cut the parts of the story upon which its characteristic and peculiar tone principally depends, showing a preference for fights; and he has made no serious attempt to represent the heart of the tale adequately: the journey of the Ringbearers. The last and most important part of this has, and it is not too strong a word, simply been murdered.

Bonus "why didn't the Eagles just fly the company to Mordor?" answer

Here we meet the first intrusion of the Eagles. I think they are a major mistake of Z, and without warrant.

The Eagles are a dangerous ‘machine’. I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness. The alighting of a Great Eagle of the Misty Mountains in the Shire is absurd; it also makes the later capture of G. by Saruman incredible, and spoils the account of his escape. (One of Z’s chief faults is his tendency to anticipate scenes or devices used later, thereby flattening the tale out.) Radagast is not an Eaglename, but a wizard’s name; several eagle-names are supplied in the book. These points are to me important.

...At the bottom of the page, the Eagles are again introduced. I feel this to be a wholly unacceptable tampering with the tale. ‘Nine Walkers’ and they immediately go up in the air! The intrusion achieves nothing but incredibility, and the staling of the device of the Eagles when at last they are really needed. It is well within the powers of pictures to suggest, relatively briefly, a long and arduous journey, in secrecy, on foot, with the three ominous mountains getting nearer.

Just imagine what he would have thought of McKay and Payne's shrunken distances so Khazad-dum is only a stroll away from Eregion! Or the magic teleporting so people cover vast distances in hours not days! Or, of course, the layout of the Numenorean ships where they can stow all the horses, troops, supplies, etc. below in the vast, TARDIS like holds.

It's always amusing to me to hear Tolkien talk of his own work. He does not seem entirely self-aware of what he's doing, in contrast to Blake, who, despite being less intelligent, is in some sense much more clearheaded. I know that sounds rich given Blake's galaxy-brain prophecies, but he at least is under no delusion that he is discussing archetypes which do have some degree of correspondence with real-world thoughts and behaviors, and is not ashamed to make those connections explicit, rather than try to waffle around with "Oh no, I never do symbolism or allegory! I think that's so crass" like Tolkien does.

Like there's this interview I watched recently where Tolkien is disavowing symbolism and the interviewer is like "Come on, man, the Tree of Gondor is so obviously symbolic of the state of Gondor" and Tolkien's like "oh, well, yeah, obviously, but I didn't mean symbolism like that." Ok, well what do you think symbolism is, man? If I had to read between the lines, I think he had unpleasant interactions with not-particularly-intelligent fans trying to read his work like Pilgrim's Progress or something ("by Orcs, did you mean the Russian communists?!"), which he found so off-putting that he overcorrected in disavowing the notion entirely.

There's a difference between "the bald-headed eagle is a symbol of the American nation" and "the Ferengi symbolise Yankee traders". I'm with Tolkien in that interview: no duh the White Tree symbolises Gondor, the way the Union Jack symbolises Great Britain or Uncle Sam symbolises America. That's straightforward representation.

Symbolism of the type he meant is different, it is that "The five wizards are the five senses" and then everyone argues over is Gandalf sight or hearing. That's not what he meant, and if the interviewer thought he was being ever so clever, I have to say no he wasn't.

People were going "well obviously the One Ring is the atomic bomb" and he had to explain "I invented this before ever anyone even heard of atomic bombs". That's the facile, surface reading of "symbolism" that he hated. Lewis meant Aslan to symbolise Jesus in a direct parallel, but Tolkien (despite earnest commentators) did not mean "Gandalf is Jesus, they both died and were resurrected".

no duh the White Tree symbolises Gondor, the way the Union Jack symbolises Great Britain or Uncle Sam symbolises America.

Oh, come on, it's much more than that. It's not merely a crest. In the books, the White Tree is dead, and no sapling of it was found. When Aragorn returns and ascends to the throne, he is led by Gandalf to find a lost sapling of the dead tree, which he returns to the courtyard and plants, where it grows and blooms. This clearly symbolic of the loss and restoration of the line of kings.

It's not just the football logo for Team Gondor.

It is more than just a dead tree, but it's not some kind of "and by putting in a tree, it really means that the British Empire will continue to survive into the future" symbolism, either. Tolkien liked trees so he put in trees. What are the seven stars a symbol of, then? What are the seven stones? Remember the rhyme:

Tall ships and tall kings
Three times three.
What brought they from the foundered land
Over the flowing sea?
Seven stars and seven stones
And one white tree.

Tolkien explains in notes what they were, and it's not this kind of facile but dumb explanation here:

The seven stars and seven stones are symbols of the Valar, the gods of Tolkien's universe, who guided the Numenoreans to their new home.

Tolkien doesn't put symbolism of that type in, he puts prophecy in: "the hands of the king are the hands of a healer", and so forth. This is how Aragorn establishes that he is the rightful heir and king (and that is what the split between Gondor and Arnor started with, the denial by Gondor that descendants of the Arnorian line had any inheritance rights on the throne).

There isn't any symbolism of "by X you meant the Tories/the Communists/the Joos, just say it, we all know you really mean it, it's Da Joos isn't it???" kind.

I think you are slightly but not significantly confused.

  1. On HBD, you seem to attribute state success to National IQ: "Countries with lots of Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great." Were you to look at most of these Asian Nations in the early 20th century, you would have seen extreme poverty, floundering industry (lots of rice farmers paying taxes in-kind), and lower IQs than the West [1]. Given that the Flynn effect was much higher for these countries during their period of industrialized, urbanized, and instituted public education[1], one must wonder what it would look like if the same policies were successfully carried out in some of your less desirable countries.

Note that this doesn't conflict with the larger point about immigration: the Flynn effect works over generational time, and I will not dispute that emmigrants from war torn states where blood feuds over cows have been evolved into law[2] are less likely to contribute to the success of recieving nation than emmigrants from industrial states who are leaving their homes because starting engineers in the US make 2~3x (PPP)[3], and I do find it plausible that Western nations will be more successful if they focus on importing engineers rather than carving out asylum categories for people who are fleeing blood feuds [4].

  1. On global competition, the Jews will be important, but I think that the differential success of the West is less about their Jewishness, and more about how their home countries showed intellectual elites the door. I have heard WWII summarized as "our Germans were better than their Germans", and a history of the Cold War would not be complete without a history of the soviet diaspora to Israel. It seems likely the West will pull the same gambit in the 21st century, and "our Chinese" will be "better than their Chinese". Accepting refugees turned out well for the West when the principal victims of our geopolitical enemies were the elite and well-educated with high-class values. It will continue to work well for the West as long as totalitarian societies continue to alienate their intellectual elites (i.e. China enforcing capital controls) ... but it might also reverse if, say, European online speech controls become implemented across the West.

[1] The Flynn effect in Korea: large gains. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.03.022 [2] The Evolution of Blood-Money for Homicide in Somalia, by Paolo Contini. Journal of African Law, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1971), pp. 77-84. https://www.jstor.org/stable/744600. See also https://www.academia.edu/25376232/EARLY_LEGAL_SYSTEMS_IN_SOMALIA. [3] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-level/locations/korea-south [4] https://www.euaa.europa.eu/coi/somalia/2025/country-focus/1-profiles/15-individuals-involved-blood-feudsclan-disputes-and-other-clan-issues

If Mearsheimer is correct that Jewish groups were essential in bringing America to war with Iraq (let’s say they were half the cause), then they are responsible for half of the 3 trillion dollar cost of the war plus 2,250 American lives. This should factor into your ad hoc economic calculation regarding the value of our alliance with Israel or the Jewish people. You mention Qatar as “undermining Western values” and promoting our collapse, but Qatar has pledged 1 trillion dollars to America and Israel has pledged 0 dollars. I do not see a rise in Islamic influence in America, which is regrettable because I think conservative fashion norms are good for society. We also have more immigrants who come in from Israel than we do from Qatar, by like, a factor of 100. It’s our own lack of nationalism and in-group preference that has caused us to bring in low-performing immigrants, and Qataris deserve no blame for that, as they had no influence in America when this occurred.

I would say the blame for the 2nd Iraq war lies squarely with the US electorate who voted for GWB because they were fed up with Clinton getting BJs.

Of course, I also reject the OP's framing that one should consider the net worth of each minority and get rid of the ones who turn out negative. Presumably, most of the Motte would consider it deeply unfair if someone opined that it is fine to treat men as violent criminals, because the vast majority of violent criminals are men. Likewise, the fact that most of the people who lobby for Nethanyahu's vision of a Greater Israel are Jews does not mean that we should oppose Jews because they are Jews.

Of course, I also reject the OP's framing that one should consider the net worth of each minority and get rid of the ones who turn out negative. Presumably, most of the Motte would consider it deeply unfair if someone opined that it is fine to treat men as violent criminals, because the vast majority of violent criminals are men.

Your position is enlightened, self-consistent and humane. It is also turning my country into an alien hellscape.

I'm not even being sarcastic, but this isn't working. Enlightened humanism with respect to immigration has been a slow-rolling disaster for Europe, as well as for the principles that you appeal to.

There were many Jews who opposed the Iraq war, and indeed the polling showed they were more likely to oppose it than the average American. But the issue remains that within the group are a wealthy and influential block who rally around being Jewish, recruit within the Jewish general population, and tie their religious identity to defending the “Jewish State”. For decades they have accused anti-Zionists of anti-semitism because of course criticizing Israel is criticizing the Jews. These bad apples have hidden themselves amongst an orchard of perfectly good apples, using them as human shields, and if current standards of warfare apply to the culture war, then it is acceptable to malign 15 innocents if it leads to successfully critiquing 1 bad actor.

Male testosterone is necessary for warmaking capacity, entrepreneurial culture, and keeping totalitarianism in check. It brings many positive advantages that more than outweigh its negative ones. The problem with high crime, low IQ populations is that they do not provide very many benefits, but bring great costs.

If men got Thanos-snapped away, it’d be quite difficult for women to survive for more than a few days/weeks.

If blacks and/or Arab Muslims got Thanos-snapped away, it’d be an immediate improvement in quality of life for the rest of the world.

I think the way to thread the needle is that we can eject people who are net negative, and who had to opt-in to our society. Because of the way that our governments are currently set up, being in a governments territory requires that you pay taxes and follow their laws; you can't decide that you do not wish for the government's services in exchange for not being subject to its rules (or rather, you can try, at which point armed men come from the government to put you in a small room until you agree to follow the rules once more).

Immigrants of all flavours (by definition) come from another country; they choose to proclaim that they will follow the government's rules; they are choosing to follow the rules of that government, rather than being stuck with them.

This kind of plays into the idea of noblesse oblige - if you are demanding the loyalty of a group, you owe them your loyalty in return. In the military, it's very common that the front-line troops always eat first; the officers can order them into situations where they are almost guaranteed to die, so the officers owe it to them to see that they are treated as well as possible. The same applies to governments; the government can enlist citizens to die, claim an increasing portion of their wealth, and take their freedom or their life for crimes against it. The least the government can do is put the people who are obligated to support it first; if they aren't, that becomes a problem that the people have the right to seek redress against (and if they don't have the right, the next step is often them clearing out space for someone who will give them that right).

If we followed this chain of logic:

  1. If wealthy Jewish people were involved in getting the country into the war in the middle east (by wanting intervention on behalf of a foreign nation), and they were citizens of a foreign nation, we should kick them out (preferably of an airlock, but failing that, at least out of the country).
  2. If wealthy Jewish people were involved in getting the country into the war in the middle east (by wanting intervention on behalf of a foreign nation), but were citizens of the United States, we should consider them to be in violation of the societal contract (in the same way we would a fraudster or scam artist); they should serve appropriate jail time, and be removed from any levers of power that they may be attached to, and forbidden from interacting with them again.
  3. If wealthy non-Jewish citizens of the United States were involved in getting the country into the war in the middle east (by wanting intervention on behalf of a foreign nation), we should consider them to be in violation of the societal contract (in the same way we would a fraudster or scam artist); they should serve appropriate jail time, and be removed from any levers of power that they may be attached to, and forbidden from interacting with them again.
  4. Once we are doing #1, #2, and #3 reliably, we can determine whether Jewish people are considered to be high-risk in the same way Chinese researchers are (in which case, we can decide to heavily restrict them from positions in which it is an issue, in the same way we do with Chinese researchers), or we can determine if its just a few bad apples.

Either way, we shouldn't ignore the issue; we currently screen men more heavily than women when they want to be involved with children because a large number of men who want to work with children have pedophiliac tendencies. It sucks if you're just a guy who enjoys spending time with kids, but it has proven enough of an issue that we put boundaries on it. Likewise, if you're an earnest student of Chinese origin who wants to fully embrace the greatness of the USA, it sucks that you may be barred from positions that require a security clearance; but again, we've seen that this is a large enough issue to society that collectively we have to stop it.

If wealthy Jewish socialites are disproportionately favouring other countries above the US, we may need to put additional screening on them being permitted to be government lobbyists or owning media platforms. Which again, isn't fair to the people who don't do this, and don't desire to do this - but if it's consistently a problem, we can treat it in the same way men or Chinese students are already being treated.

One thing that I want to make clear is that despite this screed, I don't actually think that the Jews are secretly or openly advocating on behalf of Israel; I think there are a lot of people who are determined to make the Jews the source of all evil, and they are looking for a justification to hunt them down. That being said, we don't have the data; it's verboten to actually go after the people who are favouring other countries above their own citizens. We need to actually start treating it as a crime so we can see if there is a "Jewish Problem" or simply a "leader problem."

Even if you have both number 2 and 3 together so that you are not applying double standards to Jews, this amounts to "someone who supports politics that I don't like should be put in jail and forcibly removed from power". "Getting the country into a war" is not special; in a democracy, people are permitted to advocate for policies that you consider harmful.

I mean, I'm perfectly happy if we decide that no, we're not going to punish people for wrongthink anywhere; if we insist on it, it should also include those at the highest echelons of power.

Except that GWB wasn't campaigning as an interventionist and a neocon in 2000, he was doing the opposite.

From "Stop Voting For Nincompoops" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

In 2000, the comic Melonpool showed a character pondering, “Bush or Gore… Bush or Gore… it’s like flipping a two-headed coin.” Well, how were they supposed to know? In 2000, based on history, it seemed to me that the Republicans were generally less interventionist and therefore less harmful than the Democrats, so I pondered whether to vote for Bush to prevent Gore from getting in. Yet it seemed to me that the barriers to keep out third parties were a raw power grab, and that I was therefore obliged to vote for third parties wherever possible, to penalize the Republicrats for getting grabby. And so I voted Libertarian, though I don’t consider myself one (at least not with a big “L”). I’m glad I didn’t do the “sensible” thing. Less blood on my hands.

Don't forget the cost of aid to Egypt, the cost of the failed military operation in Yemen, the bombing of Iran and the conflict in Syria!

Bari Weiss was near center of a huge media controversy at Columbia, in which a group of Jewish students organized under "The David Project" and demanded the firing of a Palestinian Professor Joseph Massad. Bari Weiss and Bronze Age Pervert (yes that BAP) were peers and part of the David Project group writing articles to the Columbia Spectator calling for Massad to be fired and reforming the Middle East Studied department against the Palestinian perspective.

After Columbia, Weiss went to Israel where she did an internship under Yoram Hazony at the Shalem Center, a right-wing Zionist think tank in Jerusalem, and she worked for Haaretz and The Jewish Daily Forward. She then wrote for the Wall Street Journal and under Bret Stephens, who is now the inaugural editor-in-chief of SAPIR: A Journal of Jewish Conversations.

When Bret Stephens left for the NYT he took Weiss with him. Then Weiss resigns from NYT in 2020 to start The Free Press, which only in October of this year was acquired by Paramount Sykdance, owned by the Ellison family, for $150 million, and she was named editor-in-chief of CBS News.

The Ellison family has extremely close connections with Israel and Netanyahu personally, as friends and financiers and business partners.

This brings us to the question of how did Weiss become the editor-in-chief of CBS News? Did she win the meritocratic contest for this position owing to her outstanding Jewish verbal IQ? Or is her promotion to this position of power an example of Jews colluding to acquire power over and steer the national narrative in favor of their own interests?

At the risk of consensus-building, from the perspective of anyone aligned with Fuentes on the JQ it is so obviously the latter. And I am very curious what somebody, like you, who opposes Fuente's anti-semitism would say about this? Either you insist Weiss's career was propelled by her merit and IQ, or you acknowledge that her most important credential that earned her station was being a Jew connected to other Jews who was perceived as the best fit for pivoting the network to steer the national narrative in favor of Jews. So it's "meritocratic" in the sense that she was judged to be the best person for this job, "the job" being steer the national narrative in the interest of Jews.

If you insist the former, she has control over CBS news because of her IQ, you are just living in a different world from the "anti-semites" and your critique of their perspective will fall on deaf ears because, from their perspective, you are ignoring plain reality. The idea that Weiss has editorial control over CBS news because of her merit, I don't see how anyone could believe that. But if you admit that the elevation of Bari Weiss is an example of Jews engaging in the behavior that "anti-Semites" accuse them of, then you have a harder task of conceding some ground, which never happens in any mainstream criticism of Nick's Anti-semitism but still explaining why he's wrong.

Saying "Bari Weiss being promoted to this position of power is an example of Jews colluding to steer the national narrative in favor of Jewish interests" will get you called an Anti-Semite, it will get you fired if you say it out loud, but it's also true. That's the strength of Nick's appeal, it's not because of the economy or housing market or dating market. It's because we all see this thing that is happening with Ellison, CBS, Bari Weiss, and our interpretations of what is happening are true. That is the strength of the appeal.

The Weiss question is interesting because, in my view, it's an area where even those who criticize Fuente's anti-semitism should concede some ground and admit there's some truth there. But will they? I don't think so, and giving Nick that sort of monopoly over true and important interpretations of political and cultural developments is what is empowering him most of all.

Funny anecdote reported by WSJ:

According to executives familiar with the plans, foreign correspondent Chris Livesay was among the staffers who were going to be let go as part of companywide layoffs in the works before Weiss's arrival.

In an email to Weiss, he spoke of affinity for Israel and suggested he was being "bullied" and isolated for his views, according to a person familiar with the matter. Weiss weighed in on the layoffs and spared Livesay, people familiar with the move said.

Other CBS News correspondents say that Livesay wasn't bullied for having pro-Israel views.

I wonder why Nick is so popular when he is the only prominent media figure directly naming the elephant in the room! Acknowledging this stuff isn't just being edgy, or being hateful, it is fundamentally required for understanding ongoing political and cultural conflict in the US.

Bari Weiss’ father was a regional head of AIPAC and nationally-influential Zionist. After Ellison’s takeover, all four major CBS hires have been Jewish, which is statistically improbable even if Jews are 10x over-represented in the field: a 0.3% probability, assuming such an over-representation. (Weiss, Gutman, Weinstein, Dokoupil). If you include Ellison himself in the list, it’s about a 1 out of 1000 chance that all five key positions just happen to be Jewish. (Again assuming 10x over-rep, otherwise it’s like 1 out of 100 million chance)

I have complained myself, as a former Free Press subscriber, about Bari Weiss's editorial direction. You are not wrong that she obviously sees herself as a defender of Jewish and Israeli interests (and she equates the two when it's convenient and differentiates when it's not). That said:

Either you insist Weiss's career was propelled by her merit and IQ, or you acknowledge that her most important credential that earned her station was being a Jew connected to other Jews who was perceived as the best fit for pivoting the network to steer the national narrative in favor of Jews.

Your problem, as someone more obsessed with Jews than Jews are, is that you seek simple and totalizing answers ("Jews!") to everything.

Certainly when looking for a new CBS editor in chief, Ellison was going to pick someone with pro-Israel credentials, and almost certainly someone Jewish. But he was also looking for someone aligned with the new (Trump) regime yet not in obvious bootlicking way. Weiss's Free Press had over the past few years earned a reputation for delivering good journalism that was critical of liberal orthodoxy and "wokeness" (i.e., had a bit of a following on the right) without being an outright MAGA publication. And putting Weiss in charge after her unceremonious ejection (technically she resigned, but) from the NYT was putting a thumb right in the eye of people both Ellison and Weiss despised.

So the answer is yes, Jews, but that's not the whole story. You would hardly expect Ellison to put a pro-Palestinian leftist in charge, would you? That actually excludes a pretty good chunk of the media elite. Weiss was probably on the short list for a number of reasons, Jewish being just one of them.

Ellison was going to pick someone with pro-Israel credentials, and almost certainly someone Jewish.

Why is this almost certain? There's no shortage of Christians with pro-Israel credentials.

I think the Venn diagram of successful non-jews in the media with pro-Israel stances is pretty small. I can't think of many.

Another point in Weiss's favor is that she courts controversy -- and this being media, that's usually a good thing. Hell, when was the last time anyone talked about CBS this much? I'm not seeing a lot of downsides (yet) to Ellison's choice.

Weiss' resume isn't that deep, in terms of running a major television news corp. For comparison, the equivalent guy at Fox News started on O'Reilly before Weiss was out of college. She had a roughly ten year career in print journalism, and founded a modestly successful substack. By that standard, she's about as qualified as Scott Alexander to run CBS news. There's a ton of gentiles with resumes that stack up against hers. And frankly if there aren't, that seems to be giving the game away to SS to begin with, doesn't it?

Another point in Weiss's favor is that she courts controversy -- and this being media, that's usually a good thing. Hell, when was the last time anyone talked about CBS this much?

CBS news affiliates mostly cover local news. Becoming purely ideological may or may not be a good approach there.

That seems to broadly concede the point, doesn't it?

Imagine, say, the NYT was taken over by a Norwegian billionaire who had really strong opinions on what should be done with Norway's national fund. It's kind of a regional issue that most non-Norwegians don't have much of a stake in and he therefore carefully vets his hires for top editorial positions to make sure they have the correct stance and strong ties to his faction. Naturally, this means that they are all Norwegian.

Probably these picks have strengths beyond being Norwegian! They write well, they're bright, they're personable. Some of them have a good reputation and industry awards. You can't get a job in the new NYT just by being Norwegian, and being Norwegian is only one of the reasons they were on the short list.

But when you get right down to it, the editorial team got hired because they were Norwegian.

It seems to me that those of us who are not Norwegian have a right to ask whether this counts as illegal discrimination, and if not why not. We also have a right to ask clearly, in public, what it means for our information ecosystem that one of the main sources of information is now being run largely by and for Norwegians, without getting fired for anti-Norwegianism. Yes, it's more complicated than that, but that doesn't mean you can't draw a pretty clear conclusion.

(Apologies if it turns out we are in heated agreement.)

Right, I don't disagree that rich Jews tend to stick together. I am not surprised Ellison hired a Jew. Obviously if he explicitly stated "I'm not considering any non-Jews" that would be illegal, but--he probably would consider a small handful of non-Jews.

In your Norwegian example, I would find the choice of a Norwegian unsurprising, and while I guess if I were in the industry I'd grumble about it, I wouldn't be overly exercised about it if non-Norwegians weren't being shut out.

Unless, of course, I subscribe to some dark conspiracy theory that, since the cold dark days of å dra på viking, Norwegians have been ever raiding and warring against Europeans and to this day seeking to undermine the purity of Anglo-Saxon stock.

Then maybe I'd be obsessed with posting about Da Noorse.

Isn't there a reasonable spectrum in between? Like, you're really not supposed to act like this, not in the West. If everyone I hired was a white English national I'd get it in the neck for God's sake, we've had decades of trying to root out any in-group preference at this point, with massive collateral damage in the process. You don't have to be a dark conspiracy theorist to object to someone buying a major news organ and stuffing it with their co-ethnics to influence public opinion towards their ethnostate, you just have to be a regular person. And if you're a would-be journalist with all the same talents or better but you're shut out purely because you don't give a shit about the Norse it's even worse!

There's also the issue that this kind of thing is literally what dark conspiracies are. "Norwegians are buying major newspapers to control the coverage of Norwegian issues" is a conspiracy theory in its own right, even if NOG never comes into the story once. Again, there are points on the spectrum in between 'this is ok' and 'Vikings have been ruling over us for a thousand years, ever since Harard secretly conquered Britain in 1065'.

Yes. If a Jew hires only Jews, I would expect him to be sued for discrimination. But the fact that a lot of Jews rise to elite ranks doesn't require more than the usual amount of networking between people who know each other (we talk a lot here about Jews and Indians helping each other network, but I've seen Mormons, Catholics, and evangelicals do the same thing), and Jewish success being disproportionate for reasons we've also discussed.

What I expect is that Ellison was inevitably going to hire some strongly pro-Israel, which made it highly probable it would be someone Jewish.

We do seem to be in furious agreement, right up to the bit where your train of logic ends: 'and therefore it's annoying but basically fine'. I get that you can't make an 'ought' from an 'is' but I don't want to be ruled over and shut out of good positions by a cabal of people who don't like me much, especially when nobody else gets to play the same game.

(Yes, it happens to some degree with other groups too but a) rarely quite with such chutzpah and shamelessness, and b) if you make up a big majority of the local population then at least your news output or whatever is aligned with them and not so many people are getting shut out).

I mean, ideally I'd like everyone to abandon tribal identity and self-interest. I just do not agree with SS that Jews doing it is more harmful to me than anyone else.

especially when nobody else gets to play the same game.

Didn't Trump just roll back disparate impact protections?

More comments

but I don't want to be ruled over and shut out of good positions by a cabal of people who don't like me much, especially when nobody else gets to play the same game.

I mean, some UK MPs have Jewish backgrounds but I don't see them advocating for particularly ethnocentric positions. The highest profile Jewish MP, Zack Polanski, is an example of the opposite.

Regarding getting shut out of good positions, if that's been your professional experience then I can't say otherwise, but I've literally never heard of this happening in the UK (not to say it's never happened, but I would think it's exceptionally rare). There simply aren't enough Jews for them to be regularly hiring each other over everyone else.

I seriously don't see how that addresses anything @SecureSignals has said. Like, yes, Bari Weiss is more than just «a Jew», she's a specific person, with individual connections, traits, skills and credentials that have differentiated her in the pool of admissible candidates. Certainly she couldn't be substituted with someone like Norman Finkelstein on the mere account of his ethnicity. The issue here isn't even Bari per se, it's the criteria defining the nature of the pool. It's the same issue as the negatively-defined criteria of DEI preferential treatment, which people are much more comfortable rejecting.

The issue here isn't even Bari per se, it's the criteria defining the nature of the pool.

I wouldn't count "critical of wokeness without being outright MAGA" as a problem with the nature of the pool, in the sense you seem to mean. That's probably going to be the best you'll get if you're going through journalists--exactly what should the pool have been instead?

This is correct. Jews do what Whites are culturally not allowed to do: leverage their ingroup bias to help one another in society. You can understand why they do this but this is going to make them unpopular.

Any acknowledgement of this begs the question: should Whites be doing the same? Obviously Jews don't want this and progressives don't want this understood as a (justifiable) tit-for-tat behaviour.

White people were doing that, then stopped because they established a successful high-trustsociety, but noticed how everyone else was struggling to keep up. So they stopped. Maybe the implicit rule is that whoever's on top can't have in-group bias, but everyone else can? But then you get into the argument over whether Jews are on top or oppressed, and the answer seems to be based entirely on who the answerer is most pissed at this week.

Problem, of course, is that the high-trust society is over, because everyone burned through the surplus trust faster than it could regenerate. There's a Socialism analogy in there, somewhere, but probably pointless.

I'd like to write a more substantive response to your post, but I have a question first.

Once you understand HBD, liberals become obviously wrong on most every social issue,

Are you sure about this? I am not entirely sure your understanding of HBD is the same as mine. While I don't mean to attack you, your post doesn't really seem to show any understanding of HBD beyond the idea that IQ exists and has measurable differences on outcomes. What, exactly, does HBD mean to you?

Islam is at war with the West, and they have been for thousands of years. The difference is now the West is losing this war, and we are losing badly. If Western Civilization can muster the courage to actually declare war against Islam, as they have declared war on us,

What would the West "actually declaring war against Islam" actually look like? and how is "Islam" at war with the West? I'm not disputing that Islamic terrorism is a problem and that poorly integrated migrants is a very bad idea. But the majority of the Arab world is aligned with the US and has armies supplied by the US. Even the largest Arab county in opposition Algeria is because of secular socialism. Other powerful Islamic countries like Turkey and Indonesia are hardly enemies of the West and full of Western tourists, that doesn't look like a war to me. If it's because of migration, I agree Europe's policies are horrible but they invited the migrants that's hardly a war.

So why do you think Islam is at war with the west and what policies do you think we should pursue when you say we should "muster the courage to declare war on Islam?"

I don't want Western governments to actually invade any desert countries. I'm not an idiot, I don't want another war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Nobody wants that except for Northrup Grumman shareholders.

I want my government to forcibly expel people from the countries who are a net liability to every country that they enter (See the chart on page 21 of this pdf if you want to see the data). This means ZERO muslim refugees from Africa and the Middle east. It means deporting blacks/muslims who are already here by the millions. It means giving ICE a blank check to arrest violent Hispanics and send them back to El Salvador. Seriously, give ICE almost unlimited money. Each minority deported will save the American taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars, and their children/descendents even moreso. Unquantifiable amounts of damage letting muslims reproduce in our country. Give ICE 10x their current budget. It's the best investment this country can make. This means shutting down all of the non-profits I hinted at in my original post. It means revoking millions of H1B VISA's and other refugee VISAs. It means arresting philanthropists who are attempting to bring in these undesirables and hold them accountable for the damage that they are causing to the country.

When I say "declare war on islam" I mean actually designing our immigration infrastructure to keep and acquire people who are capable of contributing to a safe, stable western society. Muslims have proven over and over again they're incapable of this.

These are normal authright opinions, I think.

/images/17658588701348522.webp

So "declare war on Islam" means treating Muslims roughly the same way you want to treat all nonwhite immigrants in the US? That isn't a standard sense of the term "war".

I don't disagree with most of that (unless be deporting people already here you mean stripping people of citizenship). But I wouldn't describe it as declaring war just enforcing immigration law.

It's interesting that, throughout your (well-written) essay, you consistently refer to Jews as being an entirely separate ethnic group from Whites. This is not how they're treated in mainstream discourse, or in most Jewish writing. Officially it's a religion, not an ethnic group, but generally they're seen as a type of White people, at least in modern mainstream western society. (Other societies of course had different rules)

My opinion is that Jews are a sort of "Schrodinger's race" in modern American society. Sometimes they're a separate ethnic group, sometimes they're not. Conviently, it seems to go back and forth depending on whichever interpretation is the best for them. When it's time for the special ethnic groups to get their own special recognition, they of course deserve deep honor and respect for their unique history and culture- they're not one of those shitty bland stale whites who have no culture. But when it comes to break out statistics by ethnic group, they usually blend in with the general "white" category. It would make organizations like the Ivy League or Big Finance look absolutely ridiculous if they had to disclose how importunately higher they were hiring Jews than any other ethnic group.

My opinion is that... it's a bit of both. To some extent, it's like you say, they just have high IQ because of HBD reasons. I also think that, some extent, they have a great culture which emphasizes education and family in a very positive way. I admire and respect their accomplishments.

On the other hand... they are also clearly a culture that "takes care of their own, first" and is not shy to throw elbows when necessary. In medieval Europe, that meant taking on the niche of moneylenders when that was a major religious taboo for everyone else, and pretending not to understand why that made them hated. In modern Israel, it means taking advantage of the war in Gaza to accelerate land grabs in the West Bank, which seems to have no end accept to take all Palestinian land and create a Jewish ethno-state. In the US, it means families network together at synagogues, then use extreme measures to help each other get into prestigious colleges and high-paying jobs. That is not just "having a higher IQ," that's pure cronyism and nepotism.

As a generic White person, I feel like my people were taken advantage of in our naivety and gullibility. It's time for us to wake up and embrace ethnic tribalism just like everyone else is. Seeing the numbers for how disproportionately Jewish some of the more important job sectors are should ring massive alarm bells in everyone else.

On the other hand... they are also clearly a culture that "takes care of their own, first" and is not shy to throw elbows when necessary.

Every ethnic group and every culture does this. Hell, every individual does this. Humans as a species like being around people that a similar to each other. This is a human thing, not a Jewish thing. Surely many Christians are set up with work opportunities, internships due a "a friend your dad knows from Church". But the difference is that only Jews get vilified for this behavior.

I'm not sure I buy the hypothesis that Jews are tend to lend themselves to cronyism or nepotism than average. I think that both Cronyism and Nepotism imply that the people who are benefiting from those "-ism's" aren't otherwise qualified for the opportunity that they're being given. In a community of Jews, the average IQ is 115+. There's going to be a lot of people in this community who actually are extremely qualified to work in a variety of complex jobs.

As a generic White person, I feel like my people were taken advantage of in our naivety and gullibility. It's time for us to wake up and embrace ethnic tribalism just like everyone else is.

If there were a "Society for White Engineers", I would definitely also join it :)

well, part of my post was that generic White people don't do this, at least not in modern times. Do you disagree with that? It's also laid out in the article linked in the comment above yours. The older White guys in management positions are patting themselves on the back for "doing their part" by hiring other ethnicities over their own. And there is no "White person church."

This ties into the Nick Fuentes issue where he is crudely outlining these sorts of arguments. In addition to the lack of (or deliberate multi-generational suppression of) ingroup ethnic solidarity, White men in positions of seniority have pulled a 'Fuck you, got mine' and pulled the ladder up behind them, leaving the field to 'minorities' (a group that includes women somehow). Basically, throwing the next generation of young white men to the wolves in order to ensure that their own positions are unchallenged until retirement.

Its not fair competition, its DEI discrimination, combined with 'you need to compete with the best from the entire world'.

Edit: More fuel for the theory that JD Vance reads this forum here.

In practice, there are many churches for high status white people. They’re just boomerlibs.

My opinion is that Jews are a sort of "Schrodinger's race" in modern American society. Sometimes they're a separate ethnic group, sometimes they're not.

This "schrodingerism" goes even deeper. At face value, Israel is absolutely an archetype of your cookie-cutter ethnonationalist state. Their declaration of independence from 1948 officially calls it as a Jewish state. It also gives a lot of authority to religions, for instance Israel does not recognize secular marriage, thus effectively banning any gay marriage- as no faith in Israel officiates such unions. And on the other hand you have your modern leftist progressives shilling for it anyways.

In a sense this is remarkable achievement of Jews and their version of nationalism - Zionism. Their early leaders ranged from your cookie-cutter 19h century progressives like Theodore Herzl, socialists like David Ben Gurion, as well as "fascists" - or ultranationalists if you will - like Menachim Begin, a proud member of Irgun and youth leader of Betar movement. And yet the latter two both served as prime ministers of Israel. Despite ideological differences, all of them were able to work together toward the national project of Israel: Herzl was an example of your educated international elite, making diplomatic deals with power brokers of his time. Ben Gurion was your charismatic labor leader organizing Jews all around the world. Not many of Jewish refugees and young settlers had any experience with agriculture and hard labor, and yet Ben Gurion motivated them toward creating Jewish working class in order to form a complete nation - as opposed to some sort of Oligarchy like South Africa, where elite Jews rule over native Arabs in some sort of apartheid - with his slogan of one more acre, one more goat. And of course Begin was your enforcer, willing to do the dirty work during wars and times of conflict.

As I said, the whole thing is remarkable example of modern ethnogenesis and state building, that puts all other romantic national awakenings in 19th century Europe to shame - including reviving liturgical Hebrew as an official modern language by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and of course carving patch of foreign land as their own. It would be as if some forgotten tribe of Romans in Romania and Greece created a modern Roman Republic somewhere south of Rome in Italy, using Latin as their official language.

As with many other things, there is a lot of admiration even when it comes to enemies of Zionism, Israel and Jews. They really achieved something unique, including ability to unite disparate ideologies that ultimately ended up benefiting their national cause. I'd say that people like Fuentes would salivate if they could create something like US version of Christian nationalism akin to Zionism.

It also gives a lot of authority to religions, for instance Israel does not recognize secular marriage, thus effectively banning any gay marriage- as no faith in Israel officiates such unions.

Israel recognizes foreign marriages, including gay marriages.

Yes, but they do not perform them in their land as marriages in Israel are officiated by religious authorities. A very ingenious way to solve the problem if you ask me.

Most Israelis marrying outside Israel are heterosexual secular Jews who don't want a religious marriage for one of any number of good and sufficient reasons, or who the official Rabbinate refuses to marry for reasons which I am sure the Rabbis find very persuasive. I have met multiple couples in such marriages, including one case where the Israeli Rabbinate considered a British-born Reform Rabbi insufficiently Jewish to marry an Israeli Jew.

That Israel recognises foreign marriages, including foreign marriages between Israeli Jews, and therefore including same-sex marriages, is a load-bearing part of the social contract between secular and religious Jews in Israel.

The very successful American Jews are mostly non-practicing; they’re probably not any more liberal than non-practicing urban Christians on the east coast, but they’re definitely not networking at the synagogue.

My opinion is that Jews are a sort of "Schrodinger's race" in modern American society. Sometimes they're a separate ethnic group, sometimes they're not. Conviently, it seems to go back and forth depending on whichever interpretation is the best for them. When it's time for the special ethnic groups to get their own special recognition, they of course deserve deep honor and respect for their unique history and culture- they're not one of those shitty bland stale whites who have no culture. But when it comes to break out statistics by ethnic group, they usually blend in with the general "white" category. It would make organizations like the Ivy League or Big Finance look absolutely ridiculous if they had to disclose how importunately higher they were hiring Jews than any other ethnic group.

I was thinking of this reading the WSJ this morning. In the Op-Ed section under Notable and Quotable they cited a Manhattan Institute Poll showing a purported rise in right wing antisemitism:

...A meaningful minority -- 17% -- meets our definition of Anti-Jewish Republicans. A respondent falls into this category if they 1) self-identify as both racist and antisemitic and express Holocaust Denial or describe Israel as a colonial state, or 2) do not self-identify that way but nevertheless hold both of those extreme positions.

The confusing nature of their definition (what purpose does self identification have if it can be skipped?), is used to smuggle in a mild definition to the major heresies. Colonial is at most a totally mild critique of Israel actually. It's mostly a neutral, factual description of the country's history: Israel is a country that grew out of a colonial project. I would actually expect that the word Colonial, a pejorative in leftist faculty circles, is fairly neutral in conversation for a lot of Red Tribers. It mostly has positive associations in New England, the Colonial militias fighting the redcoats, various high school mascots and college sports conferences are the Colonial so and so, the Colonial Inn or the Colonial Diner is just an early American theme restaurant.

I could maybe see saying calling Israel an apartheid state is anti-Israel, though I would still bristle at calling it anti-semitic. But Colonial is a totally neutral definition to most Republicans. Trying to portray that statement as anti-semitic is clearly trying to massage the statistics.

Yeah that's weird. It's like they're combining a far-left and far-right criticism of Israel. Maybe it's something like:

  1. the person self-identifies as racist/antisemitic and [Holocaust Denial or Colonial State]
  2. not self-identifies that way, but [Holocaust Denial and Colonial State]

Either way seems like they're trying to brand leftist anti-Israeli types as being right-wing anti-Semites

The more I think about it, it's probably a cultural failure, the Manhattan institute is a conservative think tank, but its workers and interns are still blue tribe college graduates, who understand that the statement "Israel is a colonial state" is associated with leftist critiques of Israel, which I don't think most normies would understand that way.

I actually think you could use a much more inclusive definition, like some that I'd fail, that I'd agree with more. Like "Imagine a woman close to you was dating a man and considering marrying him, and came to you for advice. Would your advice change if he were Jewish?"

But the right also has alarmingly high rates of antisemitism

Because Jews tend to push multiculturalism and communism. George Soros infamously uses his high IQ and great abilities to create an 'open society' - more blacks and browns, get criminals out of prison, basically eroding nation-states, including Israel tbh.

Jews certainly are quite clever and capable. The polio vaccine for instance is a Jewish innovation.

But just being clever and capable isn't always a good thing, it only shows a capacity to do good things. They can use their wits for bad ends. They can invent communism (Marx), push communism (Trotsky and many others), leak nuclear secrets to the communists because they sympathize with communism (Goldbergs), invent and push anti-racism. Who was the main proponent of blank-slatism? Franz Boas, Jewish. White anthropologists and political theorists generally tended to have a balance between scientific racism and antiracism, political left and right. Jewish intellectuals, financiers and so on lean heavily to the left. It's not just 'overrepresentation' but a clear political slant, like blacks have a clear slant. There's no similar Jewish overrepresentation pushing right wing ideas, opposing diversity, pushing back on excessive tolerance - there's Stephen Miller and that's about it. If only Jews voted in the US, Democrats would win every time. Even in 2024, a full year after October 7th, Jews still voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris over Donald 'Grand Marshal of the Salute to Israel, bomb the shit out of them, block immigration from Muslim countries' Trump.

Mariana Pfaelzer, Jewish, strikes down California's Proposition 187 that sought to discourage illegal immigration. Noel Ignatiev, Jewish, makes a whole career about abolishing whiteness (and Israel too). Horace Meyer Kallen writes books against the idea of the melting pot, he's one of the earliest proponents of multiculturalism. Just the other day, we had a Jewish US senator, Sarah Stalker, talking about how she feels bad for being white, wants white kids (and especially white men) to feel bad for their privilege in society.

See also my post about the 2020 election donors and their general leanings - Jews to the left, or Jews to Israel, whites tending more towards small-government or right-wing values: https://www.themotte.org/post/205/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/37000?context=8#context

There's no monolithic bloc here, there's a smaller pro-Israel faction and a larger pro-diversity/LGBT/communism faction that are in a partial conflict.

Qatari, Saudi, Emirati oil money are buying their way into influencing Western academic, political, and social capital in a way that undermines Western values and promotes Islamic ones

Does anyone really believe this? Is it hip to wear a burka? Do we see the power of Allah valorized in the media? What about those blockbuster anti-Shiite films that show Sunnism as the true path? Where is the US's Islamophobia czar to match the antisemitism czar? Where is Biden's personal imam? Are Trump's children marrying sheikhs? Is the US giving Saudi Arabia billions in military aid every year? Are US states legislating against BDS of Islamic countries?

The oily lands are just doing garden-variety corruption, not full-scale cognitive warfare. Islam is only really prominent in the US because of the 1965 immigration law, Hart-Celler... you guessed it! Celler's Jewish while Hart is white.

In contrast, what we get is Holocaust education, Biden's personal rabbi, Trump's children marrying Jews, endless film/game/book franchises about evil Nazis.

We've got the US secretary of state, Pompeo, saying: "There is no more important task of the Secretary of State than standing for Israel and there is no more important ally to the United States than Israel. There is much more work to do."

We've got Nancy Pelosi saying things like: "If this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid…and I don’t even call it aid…our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are"

Nobody says this about the Arabs! AIPAC is enormously more powerful and influential than Qatar or the UAE. It's easy to see how Israel might exploit the US with leadership this suffocatingly lovesick.

$3.8 billion a year so that the US can test our weapons systems in actual warzones and maintain the stability of our only ally in the Middle East seems like a worthwhile investment to me

The Israelis notoriously sell US tech to China, they never show up to help the US in any US wars, yet they receive US Patriot batteries and air cover to defend them from those in the Middle East who hate them. They send fake intelligence about Iraqi WMDs to motivate the US into destroying their enemies. The first Twin Towers bombing was motivated by anti-Israel sentiment, as was Osama Bin Laden to a large extent.

Israel has done more damage to US interests than any other ally, yet they get the best treatment of any US ally. The US should just test its weapons at home! 'Testing' US weapons against incompetents in MENA is only going to provoke dangerous overconfidence when it comes to fighting whites or East Asians.

Islam is at war with the West, and they have been for thousands of years. The difference is now the West is losing this war, and we are losing badly.

No, Islam is militarily very weak. US nuclear forces could reduce the Islamic world to ash within half an hour. A tiny force of Wagner can easily coup a few weak Muslim African countries and take the gold. Only politically is Islam capable of harming the West, they're terrible at fighting with their armies and have no navies to speak of. Only via political means do they show up, take up space, go around forming rape gangs, being criminal, abusing welfare, reproducing at speed, starting terror attacks. You don't NEED terrorism if you are good with armies.

Only because of political ideas like tolerance and antiracism and white guilt that Jews tend to push (often honestly and without regard for the interests of their coethnics) is this political mismatch possible. We could just take a leaf out of Algeria's book and send the Muslims back, whether they grew up here or not, what are they going to do about it in the face of total military inferiority? The answer is not to rely on Jews to get us out of a problem that Jews got us into. For whatever reason they tend to come up with and promote many terrible ideas in the political and economic spheres, the answer is to direct them to STEM only and out of politics.

Because Jews tend to push multiculturalism and communism.

America is not the only country.

American Jews support the American left (for now, although they are shifting right). Jews everywhere else are right wing. Especially the Israeli Jews. Of course, even that is overstating the Jewish influence. Wokeness was an invention of Anglo-Americans, primarily. American Jews vote left because they associated the American right with Jim Crow and segregation, with its obvious parallels to the way Jews were treated in Europe before and during WW2, plus the fact that they are a highly educated, urban population. Not because they have a sinister plan to undermine western civilisation.

You can't blame the pathological altruism of the Anglosphere on such a tiny group. We did this.

American Jews support the American left (for now, although they are shifting right). Jews everywhere else are right wing. Especially the Israeli Jews.

Secular, Conservative and Reform Jews support the left. Modern Orthodox Jews support the right, although they only do so noisily in Israel. Haredi and Hasidic Jews support whoever the Rebbe sells their votes to, which in both the US and Israel in 2025 is mostly the right. (In 20th century Israel the auction was more blatant and sometimes the left was the high bidder).

The reason why American Jews are left-wing is that they are less likely to be Orthodox. I rounded up some statistics here.

If this is true, then why did Nietzsche blame the jews for wokism in the 1800s?

He blames the jews for the reversal of moral values. "Might makes right" is now entirely alien to us. All modern virtue has become the opposite of that which, biologically, leads to health. The victim mentality has become a social strategy. People now compete in who can make themselves out to be the most oppressed, and this behaviour is rewarded. There's no participation trophies because we no longer have the heart to say that somebody won, and to them imply that somebody else must have lost. If somebody is offended by words, we no longer feel disgust at the offended party (as we used to!), but instead blame the stronger party, the person who doesn't suffer from mental breakdowns due to mere words. This reversal, which attributes the highest value to the low and meek, is "wokeness". When Nietzsche criticizes morality in "The will to power", and in "The geneology of morals" which I'm quoting below, it sounds like a modern critique of the feminine values which have taken over society.

"Let’s bow to the facts: the people have won – or “the slaves”, the “plebeians”, “the herd”, or whatever you want to call them – if the Jews made this come about, good for them! No people ever had a more world-historic mission.“The Masters” are deposed; the morality of the common people has triumphed. You might take this victory for blood-poisoning (it did mix the races up) – I do not deny it; but undoubtedly this intoxication has succeeded.The “salvation” of the human race (I mean, from “the Masters”) is well on course; everything is being made appreciably Jewish, Christian or plebeian (never mind the words!)"

We domesticated ourselves too much, and now we, like dogs, have something like Williams syndrome. Most of our "barbaric" traits have been pruned from the gene pool, but as a result, strong men are lacking, masculinity is lacking. And the jews helped bring this about, even if a development like this was inevitable.

It's not just America, Jews in Europe routinely call for migrants to be accepted and tolerated more. The Bonnier Group media in Sweden fulfills a similar kind of role to the NYT in America, pushing multiculturalism and social justice issues.

We have these quotes from Jews like Barbara Spectre: "Europe is not going to be the monolithic societies they once were in the last century. Jews are going to be at the centre of that. It’s a huge transformation for Europe to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode and Jews will be resented because of our leading role."

She says it, I believe her. In the UK https://www.jcore.org.uk/, 'supporting refugees, led by Jewish values'. Where are the rabbis and Jewish NGOs against mass immigration? Jews are not right-wing in that sense. They might prefer the mass-immigration Tories to the mass-immigration, vaguely anti-semitic Labour. But they don't actually agitate against mass immigration at any considerable scale.

Wokeness was invented by Jews, they came up with blankslatism and antiracism and they pushed hard for civil rights, whereas whites were divided. It was whites who enforced Jim Crow and segregation when they were around, while Jews like Levison were advising MLK. Obviously whites are more right-wing than Jews, they were right wing in the past too.

The Anglosphere has not displayed pathological altruism across history. Robert Clive, not an altruist. Francis Drake, not known for niceness. Those people flinging smallpox ridden cloth over at the native americans, not altruistic. The Duke of Marlborough was a pretty tough guy, not to mention Wellington. You don't conquer huge swathes of land by being nice and welcoming to others. Only recently has the Anglosphere and Europe decided that their destiny was not to rule the world but to help disadvantaged communities and become majority non-white. Previously, there was the White Australia Policy, Asian Exclusion Acts, immigration restriction and white supremacy. In WW2 John Curtin of Australia spoke openly about this:

This nation will remain for ever the home of the sons of Britishers who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race. Our laws have proclaimed the standard of a White Australia. We did not intend it to be and it never was an affront to other races.

Pathological altruism is a recent phenomenon. It had roots in a more-benign than usual kind of imperialism certainly. But there is a qualitative difference between 'lets build some railways in India' and 'let's cover up these Pakistani grooming gangs in our country raping white girls because we don't want to look racist or prejudiced.'

It makes zero sense for the people with all the wealth and power to decide, unprompted and without external influence, to start giving away wealth and power to other peoples, invite other peoples in and give them preferential treatment. Only once you add a group with notoriously high verbal IQ does this story start to become more believable.

leak nuclear secrets to the communists because they sympathize with communism (Goldbergs)

You mean the Rosenbergs? I remember reading about them in a social studies textbook in school. It used true facts to portray them as victims of the red scare and antisemitism, and conveniently left out the part where they were, you know, guilty.

Yes, whoops, my mistake there.

You could equally say white Anglos love to promote multiculturalism and Communism and if we want to break it down by religion Episcopalians and Unitarians probably do so at higher rates than Jews.

Anglos don't promote multiculturalism or communism with anything near the fervour or effectiveness of Jews. Anglos are notoriously anti-communist, led the anti-communist bloc and were never at any major risk of communist takeover unlike France or Italy.

The Episcopalian church is a fairly progressive institution, not an ethnic group. It's expected that progressive churches will have a high proportion of progressive members. But alongside the Episcopalians and other progressive organizations, you have immigration-restrictionist movements, you have right-wing churches, rightist institutions. Anglos are diverse.

Where are the right-wing Jewish movements? In Israel building settlements or supporting Israel from abroad.

As an HBDer, this is easy to explain: there exists group differences in intelligence between the races, and Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is very high. So you should expect Jews to be overrepresented in all positions of economic, scientific, or political prestige - even overrepresented within the institutions that are doing work that you hate.

This looks plausible when youre only looking at that one question, less so otherwise. For example, the pattern of jewish overrepresentation in certain jobs and the majority getting mad at it is found broadly in space and time, which cant be explained by Ashkenazi selection in the middle ages. And the state of Israel, while certainly better than its neighbours, doesnt seem especially impressive compared to other western countries.

For example, the pattern of jewish overrepresentation in certain jobs and the majority getting mad at it is found broadly in space and time, which cant be explained by Ashkenazi selection in the middle ages.

Arab Jews have the same relative advantage in the Middle East that European Jews did in European lands. 95 IQ in a land of 84s is as much an advantage as 112 is in a land of 100s.

For a contemporary example, see the Lebanese who dominate commercial life in large parts of West Africa. In much of the West (outside of America which got the most elite Maronites), these are not hugely impressive immigrants - in Australia many are considered a underclass! - but in West Africa they are a market dominant minority, sometimes to a scarcely believable extent in places like Liberia, but to a great extent even in the larger nations.

Sephardic Jewry’s outperformance in European lands (where the differential was less) was more contingent. They did well enough for a time under the Arabs as a middle man minority, and restrictions on usury meant many adopted roles in finance / lending too, and therefore were early to the shipping and capital markets boom in the mercantile age in Amsterdam, but the advantage was less than it was in either Ashkenazi or Mizrachi lands.

In a way, that arguably led to less antisemitism, which while certainly prevalent in the inquisition etc, was probably still substantially less violent than the Jewish experience during the crusades in Western and Central Europe or in Eastern Europe later in the millennium, or the Jewish experience in Persia, which alternated between semi-tolerance and what European Jewish visitors in the 17th and 18th centuries often considered the worst persecution they had encountered.

Fair, for some reason the other jews are usually compared to western populations also. Still, the versions of selection Ive heard for central/eastern europe kick in late relative to the history of persecution - often, with parts of that persecution as a cause. And I would guess the MENA version went similarly.

This looks plausible when youre only looking at that one question, less so otherwise. For example, the pattern of jewish overrepresentation in certain jobs and the majority getting mad at it is found broadly in space and time, which cant be explained by Ashkenazi selection in the middle ages.

Jews were barred (by Christians!) from a whole bunch of things in the past. That means they'd have to be over-represented in other things. Christians also barred themselves for some things, which left Jews over-represented there.

And the state of Israel, while certainly better than its neighbours, doesnt seem especially impressive compared to other western countries.

Its per-capita GDP (nominal) puts it between Finland and Germany, #12 and #11 in Europe. Above the UK, France, Italy, and Spain. Pretty good for having the handicap of being located in the Middle East. And having all those non-Ashkenazim around too.

The phenomenon is not limited to christian lands. And many peoples have been barred from many things; most of them do not become the jews.

It also seems like you agree with me that the early versions of the pattern where not caused by intelligence; I think this suggests the later versions, seemingly following a very similar script, also werent. You seems to think youve countered my argument if the jews werent at fault, thats not the point.

Pretty good for having the handicap of being located in the Middle East. And having all those non-Ashkenazim around too.

Yeah, I dont think it works like that. For all the attention given to their security issues, they seem to have it pretty well under control, and money spent on it counts to GDP anyway. And the rest of the West has plenty bad demographics at this point, and the non-ashkenazi jews are still comparable to europeans. This should be more or less proportional. You can also see it in other measures, eg nobel prices to diaspora vs israelis vs born israelis - which would even be less affected by the lower percentiles, still collapse.

It also seems like you agree with me that the early versions of the pattern where not caused by intelligence

Early versions of the pattern were part of what resulted in selecting for intelligence.

I think this suggests the later versions, seemingly following a very similar script, also werent.

They do not follow a similar script. The Christians who wouldn't engage in moneylending might well have hated the Jews for being moneylenders (especially if they were in debt), but they didn't hate them because they were somehow preventing Christians from being moneylenders.

but they didn't hate them because they were somehow preventing Christians from being moneylenders

I dont think that plays such a role in the latter ones either. I think very few of the people complaining about (((bankers))) and (((Hollywood))) where interested in careers there. And even if it did play a role, they are still clearly similar to each other relative to the full range of prosecutions experienced by ethnic groups in general, and the breadth in time and space of those prosecutions remains unusual. It would be a strange coincidence for these not to have a common mechanism, and just proposing that the first mechanism caused the second does not by itself reduce the coincidence. The evidential bar for this is a lot higher than "can tell a reasonable just so story", and data on jewish intelligence only supports one step.

Also, as a general rule, "Were worse off because were better than everyone else" is copium, doubly so if its "better" in a pragmatic sense.

If Nick is correct that the status-quo of Western Institutions is to be extremely pro-Israel and Pro-Jewish, then why would the Jews want to destroy those western institutions?

The jews are not a monolith. Some of them like these institutions, many with money and power don't. They want to reshape these institutions into ones that are more friendly to jews, regardless of how it affects Americans.

Why would the Jews want to replace the pro-Jewish status quo with a “from the river to the sea” Pro-Palestinian one?

Again, they're not a monolith. Secular, diaspora jews aren't super happy with the animosity Israel is generating. The Zionist jews would prefer jews moved to Israel, so they're ok with it. Regardless, this debate is happening without any regard for Americans (outside of how impacts on Americans might impact jews).

if you suspect that Jews are secretly hoping for a Muslim takeover in America, you could actually, you know, check the voting records. Even in heavily-democrat NYC, only 33% of Jews voted for the democratic candidate Mamdani. If Fuentes were right about Jews, this number should be much much higher.

Does anyone suspect jews want a Muslim takeover? I've never heard that from Fuentes or any others. They want diversity not homogeneity.

That sounds like a lot, but honestly it’s small potatoes compared to our current annual defense spending of $850 billion

Fuentes has said nearly verbatim this line here. If you listened further, he explains that there are other costs that don't show up on a budget sheet. Financial costs, as well as social costs when you have "I personally hope Israel uses that money to turn Palestine into a parking lot." kind of attitudes. Mass death is morally reprehensible and weakens our stature on the global stage.

Our governments are forcing the productive middle class to pay for 3rd worlders to come and rape our women, and Nick Fuentes is mad about some random $4 billion/yr going to Israel??

He's mad about this too. Ultimately it's the same root problem. The elites in our society do not put Americans first. It happens that a large number of elites (by count and certainly by power) are Jewish, and pursue Jewish interests - be that Israel's defense or ensuring a diverse society so diaspora jews can thrive. Neither of which any sane person could say is putting American's first. Like you'd see viewing a flamegraph of American sovereignty problems, the biggest bang for our buck right now is focusing on Jewish power. There are many other problems, but this one is the most glaring.

The most plausible explanation for the vast amount of cultural decline in our country over the past 15 years

This has been going on heavy since the 60's and before that to lesser degrees. Kevin MacDonald has some books on this, though the physical copies are rather expensive these days. It's a pretty nuanced issue - especially with the years of cultural conditioning most of us have to unwind. The American Pravda series by Ron Unz (quarter Jewish) is a great intro, though you really need to read the source literature as well if you want to effectively understand these positions.

Islam is at war with the West, and they have been for thousands of years

Not really. We were in a good position post ww2 to move towards peaceful coexistence but giving Israel the land it has now really threw a wrench in that.

Compact published a quite thorough analysis of the discrimination millennial white men have faced since the mid-2010s, focusing on the liberal arts and cultural sectors. It does a good job of illustrating the similar dynamics at play in fields including journalism, screenwriting, and academia, interviewing a number of men who found their careers either dead on arrival or stagnating due to their race and gender. It's a bit long, but quite normie-friendly, with plenty of stats to back up the personal anecdotes. It also does a good job of illustrating the generational dynamics at play, where older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions.

A great quote from near the end of the piece that sums it up:

But for younger white men, any professional success was fundamentally a problem for institutions to solve.

And solve it they did.

Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines.

Edit: typo

The cohort-based analysis is a really important point that not many people raise. Institutions almost never reach diversity goals by laying off existing employees, they only do it by applying pressure to the hiring and promotion pipelines. So what looks like a small difference in the total composition of employees can be the result of a titanic shift in the composition of incoming cohorts, which did happen in many institutions around 2014, as Savage pointed out.

Its frustrating when older white men in powerful positions in institutions enthusiastically support policies that would have prevented themselves from being successful, had the policies been in place when they were younger…

Its frustrating when older white men in powerful positions in institutions enthusiastically support policies that would have prevented themselves from being successful, had the policies been in place when they were younger…

It really grinds my gears as well. I had a conversation with an older white male physics prof at a social event a while ago, and he was giving this rather sanctimonious monologue about all the work they were doing to make the field more "diverse", and how they were rectifying the issues that led to women being excluded from the field. Of course he isn't giving up his job to a 60 year old women who was passed over for tenure in the '80s - but he apparently thought it was perfectly reasonable to have a lab with exactly one token white guy. It's just perpetuating the same problem on another generation, with different victims.

Getting cynical, there's another reason old men might prefer hiring young women to hiring young men.

Sexual harassment lawsuits?

Can you blame them though? That's just the power of mass-media in action: the media told them something was true, therefore it was. People do not believe an idea is true because they've done a calm, rational analysis of the facts of the matter; they believe something is true because it has to be true according to their world-view, which is given to them by their "community."* After-school specials and sitcoms about how racism is bad (and that white people are responsible for it all), while holding up only the most contemptible examples of contrary belief as representatives of the whole, completely conquered the Western mind. They have no choice but to support DEI, how could they not?

It was ever thus; it took DeBeers less than 20 years to convince virtually every American that a proposal was not legitimate if you did not buy a diamond ring (that they would be the supplier for). Think about this; people of all walks of life:

  • Saw an advertisement that told them something completely at odds with what they knew
  • Knew consciously that this was an advertisement
  • That, as an advertisement, its sole purpose was sell them something they did not need

And yet, believed the advertisement was gospel truth! This included people that had lived their entire lives without this "rule," not merely those who had grown up with the campaign. This belief is so internalized that even bringing up "Hey, did you know diamond engagement rings was all a marketing ploy by DeBeers" will get you attacked as an incel or mysogynist; even when the nature of marketting is acknowledged, "the message" will still be defended as it is unassailable.

Tangential, but while browsing this thread, I opened Twitter, and in what I'm sure is just coincidence, and not pernicious data surveilance, my For You is literally this post, commenting on this article. I remember this event, and laughing at the frumpy Asian girl's insistence that White men simply surrender to their own genocide. That's crazy, right? Your whole strategy is demanding your enemy not fighting back, and them just complying? Wait, that's literally what happened!?

*Of all the Great Lies of modern society, possibly the most pernicious is the insistance that children, upon reaching adulthood, must leave their familial community behind and find out "who they are." Your identity will always be given to you, and if it is not by a community you have roots in, and is invested in your success, it will be by mass culture, which is not; in fact, it wants to exploit you.

DeBeers may have popularised the idea of "you too can and should buy her a diamond ring" but they did not invent engagement rings:

Engagement rings have been common in Western countries since at least the time of the Roman Empire. They began to feature diamonds during the Renaissance, and became especially closely associated with diamonds after a marketing campaign by the De Beers Group between 1939 and 1979.

Sure, not everybody had a diamond engagement ring, but there were betrothal rings and other items used/given as tokens of "now we are a couple who intend to marry and are not free to mess around with other people".

The DeBeers campaign was aspirational and worked on that, when people were all rising to the middle-class and expectations were rising with that. "Now you, too, can have some at least of the trappings of the rich and high-class! Demonstrate your success in life and how you're making it!"

Gender reveal parties are probably the modern equivalent of this, I'm still baffled by them. Baby showers were an exotic enough notion to me, now there's this new trend and of course, like all trends, it has ballooned into bigger, better, flashier showing-off.

That doesn't mean babies are a bad thing, and "DeBeers sold you on the idea of diamonds mean love and diamonds are forever, you poor boob, you sap, you credulous mark, you" does not mean getting engaged and married is a bad thing, either.

The point is that DeBeers has increased the price of a "valid" engagement ring by getting people to insist on diamond, while driving up the price above that of rubies and sapphires via cartel behaviour.

(NB: I am not going to give, and would prefer not to receive, a diamond engagement ring. Rubies and sapphires are a hell of a lot more "forever" than diamonds; they aren't combustible, for one thing.)

He's right about what's happening. He's wrong that there was anything special about that year. The villain origin story for cartoonist Scott Adams (a boomer) is that he was passed over for promotion, twice, once at a bank and once at PacBell because they were looking to promote women and minorities instead. Maybe it's been exponentially increasing -- the exponential curve is self-similar, it looks like it's getting worse and worse no matter where you are on it.

This is genuinely the other side of the coin for all the gender/dating wars discourse. All the pressure is being put on the men to improve and jump through whatever hoops women require in order to get one... and every avenue for improvement is being cut off and the hoops have been set on fire, lifted 500 feet in the air, and suspended over a pit full of poisoned spikes. And men are told "just jump higher, it is still doable!"

The whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, nobody is coming to save you, life doesn't owe you anything" mindset/'advice' that gets handed down to young men is blatantly contradicted by the fact that the entire social, legal, and political fabric is arrayed against them achieving the most reliable, rewarding paths to long-term success. On the margins, a lot of these guys will be completely wrecked because they followed the standard advice to a tee and had their path blocked anyway, leading them into a depression spiral.

And so when similar advice comes down with regard to the dating market, "Become worthy of women, nobody will set you up but you, women don't owe you anything" and men notice that they are in fact being selected against based on factors they can't control it starkly informs them that literally nobody is on their side, they have no 'allies.' And so older guys giving such advice will sort themselves into the 'enemy' category for simply failing to see that the situation is now actively intolerable to anyone trying to follow the standard advice.

And this wouldn't be quite so utterly intolerable if it weren't for the fact that these same dudes are going to be paying most of the taxes and will be expected to continue to be productive so as to subsidize their own disenfranchisement and replacement. They can't even really say "screw you, I'm taking my ball and playing somewhere else" because they will be compelled to pay into the system regardless.

On the one hand, you've got women who are increasingly rejecting settling for men and claiming its because they fail to measure up to said women's standards. Standards which have drastically inflated in recent times, whilst the standards women apply to themselves have basically evaporated. She can literally be an active prostitute for the entirety of her twenties and then 'expect' to settle down for a guy who will care for her (whether she gives him kids or not) in her 30's.

Then on the other, men are getting actively nerfed in their ability to advance their careers and they see additional competition is introduced from foreigners and their competitors are getting subsidized meanwhile Old Boomers are squatting in the seats of real wealth and power (and deflecting blame) and adding to the criticism of these young men. Oh, and some old wealthy boomers are also directly snatching up eligible women in their twenties and directly contributing to the aforementioned sky-high standards without a hint of irony. So young men notice that going for absolute degenerate crypto gambling and harebrained startup schemes are the only 'hack' to get yourself out of this rat race that aren't completely stacked against you. Its still gambling, but at least chaos is fair. (Note, I don't actually believe that, but I see the reason it would be preferable.)

And every step of the way, from every angle (except guys like Andrew Tate) they're informed that they are the problem. And if they crash out over this, that is seen as proof positive that they're the problem. In England, apparently, they can get literally jailed for complaining about some of this.

Whatever arguments you want to make about the improvement in material conditions for young men over the past couple decades, their social standing has been eroded to the point they can't actually use that material wealth to satisify their actual desires (marriage, kids, respect, social esteem, and purpose) and are constantly, CONSTANTLY at risk of losing that wealth for making the sort of misstep that today can get you arrested but in the Boomers' day would have been the subject of a classic comedy film.

And this wouldn't be quite so utterly intolerable if it weren't for the fact that these same dudes are going to be paying most of the taxes and will be expected to continue to be productive so as to subsidize their own disenfranchisement and replacement. They can't even really say "screw you, I'm taking my ball and playing somewhere else" because they will be compelled to pay into the system regardless.

Naa, if they don't get good jobs they won't be paying most of the taxes. They'll just be eeking out a marginal existence or dying on the streets (because of course social welfare programs are not for able bodied young males)

I know a white guy milked the shit out of his disability payments after a minor injury working in a warehouse. The welfare state's disinterest in austerity - its soft budget constraints - is why white able-bodied men can benefit too.

As I said, "social welfare programs are not for able bodied young males". Fraud -- claiming to not be able bodied -- is a different issue.

Then lie about it.

My read is that systematic abuse of disability programs (i.e. everyone in the system knows and does not care that the people getting the bennies are not as disabled as they are claiming to be) by white men between 50 and retirement age, particularly in poorer areas, is widespread and unofficially tolerated in many countries, including the US. In the UK this has been the case since the mid-1980's - despite multiple ineffective government crackdowns.

I agree that social welfare programs are not for able-bodied young males.

I'd argue that the are available (look up Veterans using and abusing VA disability status, for example) but men are shamed for using them in ways that single moms and minorities of course are not.

No such thing as a welfare program designated specifically for them, however.

Whatever arguments you want to make about the improvement in material conditions for young men over the past couple decades

Which are mostly BS anyway, if we want to be honest.

Well, its pretty clear that you'd prefer to live in this era in terms of the sheer abundance of any goods you could want, and the technology available.

But the inability to parlay that into a meaningful life is... problematic.

I'd argue that no, it's actually not pretty clear, and I also don't believe that the material condition of the average young man factually improved in the past couple of decades.

The whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, nobody is coming to save you, life doesn't owe you anything" mindset/'advice' that gets handed down to young men is blatantly contradicted by the fact that the entire social, legal, and political fabric is arrayed against them achieving the most reliable, rewarding paths to long-term success.

Where's the contradiction? Both of these things can be true:

  1. The institutions are hostile to you
  2. Nobody is coming to save you, you need to be responsible for yourself.

In fact, I would argue that 1 leads into 2. If the institutions are hostile to white men, then obviously no institution is going to come in and save you.

The "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" narrative is of civic nationalist, conservative / Red Tribe origin and presupposes a society that is at least neutral but definitely not hostile towards white men on an identitarian basis, is based on meritocracy and promotes masculine virtues. I guess this is what the OP is referring to.

I'm not the biggest fan of Rand as a writer, but Atlas Shrugged and friends are generally considered right-wing and at least consider the idea of active hostility.

Yes, and Rand's only solution is to come up with a way to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Good luck with that.

The contradiction is "you cannot save yourself from a literal systemic issue, coordinated action is necessary."

The point that needs to come across is "everyone else is coordinating with others to your disadvantage, you need to coordinate with others to prevail."

Boomer advice that ignores this sets people up for failure.

The institutions being hostile demonstrates that you cannot, in fact, save yourself without defeating those institutions. You cannot defeat those institutions by following the advice of going it alone. Its a contradiction in terms when you acknowledge the underlying fact.

The problem is that there's often an unspoken third item:

  • Don't be angry or upset about it, or move to organize against it. That's gay.

In recent years, a different third term has been fully spoken.

    3. You deserve it.

There’s a 5 that combines @HighResolutionSleep’s 3 and what I’ll re-number as your 4: To the extent that you Notice the hostility, much less oppose or organize against it, it only further demonstrates the necessity of said hostility and how you deserve it.

Thus, the Hock: step one. In ages past, men used to have to kill LIONS, 1v1, one teenage boy vs. one 400lb apex predator.

The teenage boys usually won.

The strong survive; the weak perish...

And his examples are: TV writing, editorial staff of swanky East Coast publications, and tenure track humanities professors at Ivy League schools (not just tenure track professors at Ivy League schools; tenure track humanities professors). I'm sorry, but if your professional success rides on getting any of these positions, you need to reevaluate how realistic your goals are. These are high-paying positions in competitive fields; there's a good chance that you're not getting the job regardless of what the DEI policies of the employer are. Why doesn't he talk about budget analysts for a regional logistics company, or Civil Engineer II at a national contractor that mostly does electric transmission infrastructure, or purchasing agent for a company that manufactures forklift parts? You know, the kinds of jobs that most people apply for with a realistic chance of getting.

  • -20

These are high-paying positions in competitive fields

Yeah, why would people be upset about getting shut out of those?

Forgive my sarcasm, but really. Even putting aside the problem of 'as above, so below' and 'writer of international essays writes what he knows', would you say to a reasonably talented black man, "look, high-paying prestigious jobs are in very heavy demand and they don't like blacks, have you considered being a shoe-shiner?".

older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions

And frankly your post is the kind of thing they say. It's not that it's untrue, it's that it's only said to young white men, and it's so often said by people actively making it harder for those young men to get good jobs even as they sympathetically advise them to aim elsewhere.

Pretty sure it's not just those, also generic govt office jobs and generic white collar jobs at PWC or similar.

Key findings include:

52% believe their company practices “reverse discrimination” in hiring

1 in 6 have been asked to deprioritize hiring white men

48% have been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications

53% believe their job will be in danger if they don’t hire enough diverse employees

70% believe their company has DEI initiatives for appearances’ sake

Once we get to 40-50% then it's more than just prestigious university jobs? For clarity, I'm quoting another report not OP.

Looking at the actual survey:

This survey was commissioned by ResumeBuilder.com and conducted online by the survey platform Pollfish on November 2, 2022. In total, 1,000 participants in the U.S. were surveyed. All participants had to pass through demographic filters to ensure they were age 18 or older, currently employed for wages or self-employed, and manage at least 25% of the hiring at their workplace.

Pollfish is a site that pays people ridiculously small amounts of money to take commissioned surveys. The way it works is that the kind of people who are induced by exchanging 5 minutes of their time for 25 cents will take the survey and are then asked questions at the end to do the demographic filtering. If they don't meet the demographic criteria they don't get paid, but from what I can tell a lot of these people just take the survey again and answer the demographic questions differently. In other words, what happened here is Resume Builder paid Pollfish to conduct a 1,000 person survey. Rather than polling known hiring managers at random, they put the poll on their website for people to opt into and did no meaningful verification that these were actual hiring managers. When they got 1,000 responses they closed the poll. I wouldn't take the results too seriously.

Yes, and relatedly, if you believe a growing economy helps more slots proliferate overall, you're not as bothered. There is no steady state, evenly rotating economy of prestige. You can knock down walls and create new shit entirely.

Even if you write off the harm of discrimination to the people being discriminated against, all of those positions (except TV writing) rely on status and prestige to accomplish their social roles. If the bulk of people come to assume that anyone who works at a university or in journalism is either a nepo-baby or an identity hire as opposed to someone hired by a more broadly accepted measure of merit, those professions lose credibility and support. And without that, they're nothing.

Of course the author will focus on the institutions with the most cultural prestige and influence - they are the tastemakers that set the bounds of appropriate conduct for everyone else. If Ivy League colleges are discriminating against white men, guess where administrations at less prestigious colleges will take their cues from? And guess who built the ideological framework that the HR lady at that forklift company will use to implement a DEI policy to discriminate against white men? Like with the Harvard racial bias in admissions case, tactically it makes the most sense to try to make an example out of the most prominent offender.

Also when writing for a national audience, you need a topic and subjects of national relevance. Ivy League colleges and the media conglomerates that decide what you see on TV are household names across the country, random small businesses are not.

Why doesn't he talk about budget analysts for a regional logistics company, or Civil Engineer II at a national contractor that mostly does electric transmission infrastructure, or purchasing agent for a company that manufactures forklift parts?

You have no idea how pozzed the hiring process is for these jobs at any globohomo megacorporation. The black lesbian candidates have all of the advantages handed to them at every step of the process.

Spoke with a recruiter for Boeing back in about 2013 and she told me that the recruiting process was already super biased and discriminatory by that point (she was opposed to it but the pressure to do it this way was coming from higher ups)

You know, usually I appreciate you pushing back against the righties here, but this is weak.

The argument is not that high-paying and prestigious positions are now stacked against white men (although even if it was "just" those positions, how is that comforting?). The argument is that there are industry-wide trends in this direction.

Speaking as someone closer to those lower-level positions you mentioned, I can say that the government and many private companies definitely (at least until 2024) had "diversity" as a major element in hiring and promotion decisions, and to some degree still do. Does that mean a white guy had no shot at a budget analyst or a Civil Engineer II position? No, but it meant if you were competing against a "diverse" candidate, everyone knew who would get preferential consideration. It's not like it's an automatic "the black guy gets the job," we just all know in some departments that there is a certain Way Things Are...

Civil Engineer II at a national contractor

I work for a company that takes federal contracts. I've been involved in multiple interviews in the last four years.

I can't give you exact numbers, but I can tell you that less than one candidate in 20 who makes it through the HR filter is a white guy.

I was running grad hiring for a gambling company of all the things with a 95% male application rate and still got substantial pressure to hire a 50-50 gender split

I read things like this and remain grounded by the successful young white men in my family buying homes and having kids. Are they in prestige jobs? Partly. One is a corporate lawyer in San Francisco. Blonde, blue-eyed. He hasn't been shut out. My other brethren aren't working in anything prestigious, but they're doing something even better: starting families.

  • -10

"I read things like how cigarettes cause cancer and remain grounded by my family's good health. None of the smokers in my family have gotten lung cancer. Even my grandfather, who smoked a pack a day, didn't die of any smoking related causes."

I read things like this and remain grounded by the successful young white men in my family buying homes and having kids. Are they in prestige jobs? Partly. One is a corporate lawyer in San Francisco. Blonde, blue-eyed. He hasn't been shut out. My other brethren aren't working in anything prestigious, but they're doing something even better: starting families.

I would agree that at an individual level, there are still plenty of opportunities for young white men, perhaps more than ever before. At a societal level, though, this sort of discrimination is both counterproductive and wrong.

At any rate, I would definitely advise young white men in the US to avoid career paths such as academia where it's impossible to get ahead without being dependent on large institutions.

At a societal level, though, this sort of discrimination is both counterproductive and wrong.

This article reinforces one of the theses I encountered on Red Pill sites. Namely: if you elevate the relative social status of young hetero single men, it’ll incentivize them to pair-bond, marry and have children. Thus the marriage rate and the birthrate will grow, the average age of both men and women at first marriage will drop, and men will become more economically productive on average. This is what happened in the US after WW2, for example. If you do the opposite, you’ll get the opposite of all of this, which is what we’ve been seeing throughout the West for decades.

Exactly. Delaying graduates getting their first meaningful job is liable to snowball

As is the overall delay of parenthood.

Namely: if you elevate the relative social status of young hetero single men, it’ll incentivize them to pair-bond, marry and have children.

For me (as a conservative) that's one of those claims that's "too good to check." i.e. I really would like to believe it.

That being said, I agree that there is a decent amount of evidence to support this, for example:

  1. The Swedish lottery study, which apparently found that when a man wins the lottery, he is more likely to get married and stay married; when a woman wins the lottery she is more likely to divorce.

  2. Ultra-Orthodox religious groups in the US, such as Haredi Jews and the Amish. In both of those groups, young men have a good path to obtain social status (in Judaism, by means of religious study; among the Amish, by working the land).

  3. The evidence is pretty good that when seeking a long-term partner, most women have a strong instinct to "marry up," i.e. to prefer someone of higher status than themselves.

So yeah, I could definitely see that (1) taking traditionally male pathways to social status and opening them up to women; and (2) substantially closing those pathways to a lot of men by giving women preferential treatment would have a negative impact on birth rates and such. How big of a factor it is, I don't know. But I do think that the kind of society which is wise enough to avoid getting caught up in runaway gynocentrism would be a much better place for everyone, male and female.

Namely: if you elevate the relative social status of young hetero single men, it’ll incentivize them to pair-bond, marry and have children.

We really do need a proper survey done of 20-25 year old men asking them "so, do you want to get a job, settle down, marry one woman and have three kids with her, I mean right now, not in ten or fifteen years time?"

Shakespeare for one didn't think the young hetero single men of his day were eager to settle down to domestic responsibility the very first chance they got:

I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest, for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting—Hark you now. Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather? They have scared away two of my best sheep, which I fear the wolf will sooner find than the master.

Shakespeare has been dead for almost 510 years; I doubt he knows much about the modern situation. Anyway, it's certainly not clear that the particular cantankerous character you quote represented Shakespeare's views. He has young men who do want to (or do) get married.

500 years ago they were getting the wenches with child but not marrying said wenches; today they don't have to get them with child because contraception and abortion.

Most young men want to have fun, sow their wild oats, and then settle down. Even in the 19th century, they didn't want to be tied down, and ironically often those who did want to marry had to wait a long time for economic stability to do so, or even that their employers discouraged marriage as taking their attention away from the job.

Even Shakespeare's cantankerous shepherd put the end of that period at 23. Anyway, in practice leaving bastards all over the country was a privilege of the aristocracy.

This is classic apex fallacy. You are looking at the tiny slice of men who were some combination of rich, powerful, and charming enough to sow their wild oats, and completely ignoring the huge mass of men for whom marriage was their only chance at getting regular sex.

Do not make me go dig out mediaeval illegitimacy and prostitution rates.

Okay, early modern period, which is very roughly 16th-18th century. Someone has done work on that, and probably plenty more as well. But if you are trying to tell me the vast majority of men, historically, have been doomed to die kissless virgins if they could not find a wife... then we must have the heavens full of saints in spite of themselves!

In the Late Middle Ages, a third of the population was probably born extramaritally. From 1400 to 1600, the illegitimacy ratio dropped markedly, but from 1650 to 1850, it seems to have gradually risen from around 5 to 9% in most European states.

"A third of the population" would cover "had the baby first then the wedding" as well as "never got married", but one third? That's a heck of a lot of men not getting regular sex if they didn't have wives yet managing to father children!

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Whether very early twenties men want to do this or not, it does demonstrably work- the military achieves a very high marriage and fertility rate with its population of, mostly, extremely young males from working class backgrounds.

The military achieves a high marriage rate by legislating benefits for married servicemen.

And these marriages are attractive to local women because the status of soldiers is boosted.

I'm not sure that's true. I don't think soldiers have a higher rate of being paired off than guys the same age that work at Wal Mart, but Walmart doesn't instantly pay their young male workers thousands of dollars extra for getting married.

Soldiers also have higher divorce rates than civilians.

If we made it a national policy to pay everyone thousands extra for getting married, instantly, we'd raise the marriage rate. I'm not sure that's increasing the status of young men, exactly, just paying people to get married.

Most businesses tend to give better benefits towards men who are married, even if it isn't explicit. This can involve promotions or better opportunities (as married men tend to be seen as more stable or more reliable), better financial compensation (as the man is "providing for a family"), or better work-life balance (the number of times I've been asked to work late or on holidays while my married coworkers get to go home early is way too high).

In terms of fuckoverability when it comes to work-life balance (e.g., dumping an urgent task on someone and wrecking their night or weekend)—or fuckoverability in general—the rank-order I’ve seen over the years, holding seniority/age equal:

  1. Single man. He likely has nothing better to do and if he does have plans who cares, so fuck him. If anything, he should be grateful for the extra opportunity to contribute.

  2. Married man, no children. The victim here is the poor wife who may have her plans disrupted.

  3. Married man with children. We’re basically doing him a favor by giving him an excuse to be out of the house. The victim here is the poor wife who has to perform even more childcare-related physical and Emotional Labor.

  4. Single woman. What kind of jerk would be so MEAN as to disrupt the FUN that she has planned? We should find someone else who better has the bandwidth to take this on.

  5. Married woman, no children. Similar to 4. We should find someone else who better has the bandwidth to take this on.

  6. Married woman with children. What kind of monster would interfere with a brave working mother’s work-life balance? We should find someone else who better has the bandwidth to take this on.

Where the biggest gap between contiguous ranks is that between 3. and 4. The smallest one, to the extent it exists, is between 4. and 5. and the rank-order there can arguably be even inverted.

Those are unspoken or indirect or accrue over time, the military gives benefits immediately upon marriage for the act of marriage.

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The same working class background that a certain commentator likes to sneer about. And that our society has spent a lot of time over the past decades trying to shift the culture to "we're all middle-class now", and which has been successfully gutted so that the vices, but damn few of the virtues, of that background survive.

I'm constantly astounded by how much I find myself agreeing with Shoe0nhead, even when I disagree very strongly with other beliefs of hers; see this recent video, where she talks about how she grew up and now how her kids will grow up, starting at 17.01 here.

I think you know that surveys don't mean a thing in this context, at least not in the way you imagine. The current feminized world is all that 20-25 year old men - or their fathers, for that matter - have ever known and most of them cannot imagine any other, they don't grok what it'd mean. Either way, you as a woman(?) are probably also affected by the apex fallacy, which is why you'd probably be surprised by many of the answers to that survey.

Ah, well. I guess there's nothing to be done. Men too awful. Good for nothing. Never did well. How could we ever hope to build a demographically stable future while carrying such worthless dead weight?

Hey, good reason to go for broke with longevity right? Maybe I can find support here for my $100T regenerative medicine campaign. Men being impossible isn't a problem if they're unnecessary for securing the future.

Chin up, if AI works out as everyone is hoping, we're all unnecessary for securing the future, the transhumanists who are happy to be replaced by our superior silicon descendants will win, and neither men, women, nor others will survive the Great Robot Purge.

  1. You're all making it too complicated. Do you agree that the status of young women relative to young men is higher than it ever was? How's the fertility? I'm not saying correlation is causation, but it's certainly worth a shot.

  2. Men's 'domesticity' (ie, money they give women, some help) is not actually necessary for reproduction in our age of abundance. Not that it matters, because

  3. What men want is irrelevant, since women control the reproductive bottleneck both legally and biologically. So the whole TFR debate is just a woman-convincing enterprise. And I think it would help fertility to convince them they are not God's gift to humanity, and no, the teacher's praise, and the AA spots they snag are not actual proof they are as wonderful as they think they are. It seems obvious to me. What's the alternative? I don't know how much more praise we can heap onto women, and contempt onto men. Have you looked at Hollywood lately? But does anyone believe that more of this effusive praise will make them reproduce?

What men want is irrelevant, since women control the reproductive bottleneck both legally and biologically.

Women who have less kids than they claim to want say the thing stopping them reproducing is a lack of male investment. (I am including "started too late because I married late" as lack of male investment even though the proximate cause of not having more kids is age-related infertility.)

As a matter of physical reality, your point 2 is correct - women can reproduce without male investment. But to do so is very low status, just as it always has been. In practice, it is also dependent on a system of government transfers - raising kids in third-world poverty is illegal for good reasons, and you can't raise kids in first-world poverty as a single mother on a lower-middle-class salary without supplementing it with child support or government bennies.

I note that the political faction that is most worried about falling fertility wants to dismantle the public subsidies for single mothers and reinforce the systems that make them low-status. Nobody who thinks low fertility is a problem thinks encouraging single women to pop out more bastards is the solution.

I do, if they are of sufficient quality. You heard the hubbub about chinese millionaires paying dozens of american models to give birth to their kids? Those smart, rich, handsome kids have great net expected value to the state and to existing americans.

The problem with single moms is not that they're single moms; it's that they're poor and stupid, and their kids will be poor and stupid. The single mom who takes care of a millionaire's kid is fine.

Women who have less kids than they claim to want say the thing stopping them reproducing is a lack of male investment.

Yes, obviously they want more money, like the lawyer in Idiocracy. We have given them an awful lot already (legal and economic protections up the wazoo, free pointless education so they can have fun, free sinecures that look like prestigious jobs, 24/7 cultural programming blasting their awesomeness, etc), more than anyone ever had, and in return they have produced less and less children. When you're in a hole, stop digging.

But to do so is very low status, just as it always has been.

Right, it's more of a psychological problem that women have to overcome, nothing to do with resources. Certainly, giving women in general more status, like we've been doing, is not going to help, since status is relative. I am fine with raising the status of single moms who produce quality citizens, and its corollary, diminishing the status of voluntarily barren women. Although I'm not a big believer in 'changing status' solutions. I want laws changed, to be less (unfairly!) favourable to women.

If the single professional woman gets less goodies, the married and single mom will get more (relatively), creating an incentive to pair-up, because it's still easier to do the mom thing with dad help. I know the pro-fertility position gets caricatured as 'forcing women to breed' or something, but all I want is to take our hand off the scale favouring women, and let women freely choose from the fallen chips.

Let's try to make it simple: Women have three choices:

  1. professional childless woman

  2. single mother

  3. married mother

There are easy, cheap and fair ways to encourage option 3.

Cut off AA, scholarships, anti-discrimination law, free college, that encourage 1.

Make divorce fairer to the working partner by making the default 50/50 custody, no alimony etc , to encourage women to stay married.

You could limit welfare to single moms more, to get them from 2 to 3 - That's the idea of conservatives you criticize, although I personally I prefer outcome 2 to 1, so I'm not really on board.

The problem with single moms is not that they're single moms; it's that they're poor and stupid, and their kids will be poor and stupid. The single mom who takes care of a millionaire's kid is fine.

You're missing another failure mode, one very much inherent in single parenting and in some ways worsened by social justice.

Specifically, that there's no easy way to spot abuse in a single parent. There's by definition no other adult in the household, and abused kids have trouble noticing that their parent is a psycho because they have little basis of comparison and are highly susceptible to frame control (the single parent does, after all, have a very-large degree of control over the kid's environment and can argue circles around him/her).

I say that this is in some ways worsened by social justice because, well, social justice feminism does not exactly teach mothers not to abuse their sons, and it does tend to try to direct the police at the wrong target if and when they do become involved, complicating the issue even after official attention is drawn.

(I was starved as a teenager for the "sexist abuse" of "standing over" my foot-shorter mum. Eventually I went stark raving mad and started threatening to topple bookcases, she started dialing the police, I wrestled the phone away from her in a panic, she fled, and of course eventually she made it to a phone and the police reduced me to tears with a lecture about how I was going to grow up into a wifebeater and they expected most of my life to be spent in prisons and halfway houses (well, after making me put on underpants; I wasn't kidding about "stark"). Now, the fallout of that was actually mostly good - specifically, it was enough of a blowup that everybody working my case switched from "keep things from exploding" mode to "find me somewhere else to live" mode, and I wasn't actually arrested - and it's hard to blame the police given she wasn't lying (just delusional) and I was badly brainwashed to the point that I thought I was at least in large part in the wrong; spotting that in a short encounter is not actually trivial. But, y'know, I'd rather not make that situation, or that bad call by the police, happen more than necessary.)

I am including "started too late because I married late" as lack of male investment

On what basis, may I ask?

If a woman planning to get married and have children eventually ends up with fewer children than she wants because she marries late and ages out of her fertility window, then the ultimate cause of having too few children is failure to marry younger. In other words she was unable or unwilling to secure the necessary male investment at a time when it would have made more difference.

The point I am making is that, assuming you accept that women are at least directionally truthful about how many children they actually want and why they didn't have that many, is that the problem lies in the relationship between men and women, not the behaviour of women in isolation. While true as a matter of biology, @Tintin's point that women don't need anything valuable from men (sperm is cheap) to reproduce is irrelevant in practice given that respectable working class and above women don't reproduce without male investment, and society doesn't want them to.

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Men ran away as fast as they could from marriage and child-rearing during the Sexual Revolution. So this is reaping what was sowed - oh, women are now on the Pill and other contraceptive devices and don't have to get pregnant if they engage in sex outside of marriage, and indeed we WANT women to engage in sex outside of marriage because then they're not baby-trapping men and tying them down?

Well, here come consequences, boys.

Do you have anything besides blaming men for everything and women for nothing, based on your personal feeling? You're not even presenting some solution, you're just gloating about things being shit. For everyone. Haha I burned the house down.

I've long concluded that it's largely impossible to have a clear-headed, rational conversation about these issues with women.

Men ran away as fast as they could from marriage and child-rearing during the Sexual Revolution.

Where's the evidence for this? For your argument to be true, stats would have to prove that men were filing the majority of divorces and were the ones driving the overall delay of marriage and parenthood. As far as I can tell, the opposite of this is actually true.

"I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon."

I'm surely less successful than almost everyone here. I make 16 an hour part time (and even that's going away in two weeks), childless, single, in my 40s. And yet I'm less doomer than the lot o' ya

It's amazing how bad humans are at understanding probabilities. The existence of some successful white men doesn't mean there is no widespread discrimination against white men, any more than the existence of successful black women tells us that racism against blacks is fake.

Affirmative action's impact is by its nature stochastic, but as the old Democratic campaign line goes when you are out of work the unemployment rate is 100% for you. It's not that every white man makes 20% less, it's that some percentage of white men will be unable to get a job or a promotion or a project completed, while the rest move through their lives normally. If I'm at a law firm that commits itself to diversity in the partner ranks, it's not that I'll be paid less because I'm white when I'm an associate, or paid less if I make partner, it's that when I come up for partner I might draw the short straw and be up as the same time as a black guy or an Asian girl and get shafted.

Sure, but no white man is all white men simultaneously. Additionally, people getting blackpilled reading this kind of shit need to keep things in perspective.

  • -10

Do you expect arguments against discrimination to ever hold water in any context, ever again?

Sure. Here's an example: I bring home a non-white girlfriend, dad is apoplectic. I say chill out, race doesn't matter.

There goes "any context"

Let me attempt to be more precise, then. Do you expect arguments against societal-level discrimination to continue to hold water?

Perhaps not. I'm a small man, and I keep my identity small. I only think in terms of very direct and overt discrimination, of the everyman sort, hence "dad won't let my black girlfriend come to dinner."

Would it surprise you to learn that arguments about discrimination, concern over those arguments, and actions taken to address those concerns have been a notable driver of sociopolitical change in our society for at least the last century?

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These are fully generalisable arguments against ever caring about anything ever, though.

Holocaust? Well, the Jews in Israel are fine.

Rwanda? Some of them make it, no Tutsi can be all Tutsis.

Fired without cause? Well, my brother still has a job.

The whole point of the article is that actually a lot of people are having serious difficulties. You can decide how much you personally care, and to be glad for your own good fortune, but you are not rescuing people by persuading them that their troubles don't exist. There is a spectrum between 'full blackpill' and 'this is fine', and the clear proof for massive discrimination at all levels really ought to be nudging you a bit further along IMO. I have personally seen people I care about fail to launch because of exactly this kind of stuff.

"Massive discrimination at all levels."

But it's not all levels. I don't think that for the vast majority of people these troubles do exist. And it certainly doesn't involve MURDER per your examples, where it does. Most of us are exposed to non-prestigious jobs where actual merit does in fact apply. Got a clean driving record? Voila, you're a pizza dude. It's a big, complicated, growing, non-zero sum economy where there's lots of opportunity.

I think my lack of professional success - or even much caring about it - is why I'm less bitter than the software engineers on this site who feel hectored by women of color with soft degrees.

But it's not all levels. I don't think that for the vast majority of people these troubles do exist.

I don't get how you can think that unless you ignore every single official pronouncement about how hard they're working to employ 'diverse' candidates, the massively changing demographics of your society as foreigners are bussed in to drive down wages, being told by practically every single person here that they've seen this stuff...

Some blackpills are very definitely up for interpretation: for example the people worried about the covid vaccine have to interpret certain things about the evidence, how pharma works, how vaccines work, etc. to come to the conclusions they have. Anti-white discrimination is different. They boast about it on every channel possible! People can't wait to tell you how hard they're discriminating against white men! I can't help thinking you are so keen not to be blackpilled that you're putting your fingers in your ears.

Beyond that, let's say you're right. Maybe the pizza dudes are fine. (I doubt it, I've seen the demographics.) It still means that white people are being given an incredibly hard time in better paying areas. Personally, I worked very hard to get into a good school, and then very hard to get into a good university, and then very hard to get into a good PhD and then very hard to get a good job. And at every stage, they clearly and loudly said that it was a shame they had so many white men, and they discussed what could be done to make sure that people like me weren't doing the kind of stuff I'm doing. You couldn’t see the noticeboards under signs about women’s mentorship groups and women’s leadership groups and female-only funding opportunities.

All indications are that it’s starting to work. My friends and colleagues are really struggling to get new jobs. The cohort under me, including my own relations, are having huge trouble and some of them are failing to launch completely. Good for you if you’ve found another way to live your life, but ‘just deliver pizza, bro, it’s not hard,’ frankly isn’t good enough.

Personally, I worked very hard to get into a good school, and then very hard to get into a good university, and then very hard to get into a good PhD and then very hard to get a good job.

Yea, see, I didn't. I'm not of that class, so I don't see what you're talking about. It's been a unified front of multiracial peons railing against a multiracial management my whole life, in jobs that are easy to get, for anyone, and easy to dispose of. Or put it another way: the generalized shitty, Kafkaesque labor experience from behind a colorblind Rawlsian veil is far, far more salient for me as I suspect is for most.

I don't find this an impossible to understand perspective, I do find it a rather odd perspective for someone hanging around this place to have. If you truly can't be bothered about systemic discrimination against your racial group then I'm tempted to say "don't worry about it kitten". Like what are you even doing here? Go have a slice and a brew and let the rest of us sort the big problems out.

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That's a fantastic article, thanks for sharing.

It really does feel like an inflection point was crossed then- there was always affirmative action and PC stuff, but suddenly a huge cohort of people in power were aggressively pushing queer women of color at the expense of white males. You might say "this won't affect you if you don't work in the liberal arts" but it does, because it then affects all culture everywhere. And yes, for a long time it was like we couldn't talk about it for fear of retribution. Hell, it's telling that all of his sources still want to stay anonymous, even when they've moved on to other industries. It must have been a huge effort to find any real data and sources for all this stuff.

It's funny. They always said that they "wanted to start a national conversation about diversity." Well, now they're getting it... I just don't think it's the one they wanted. I feel like there's a sea change where even the most clueless white guys are starting to wake up and realize that woke liberals are a danger to them. And we're all becoming hyper-conscious of our race in a way that would have been unimaginable to me as a 90s kid.

I still feel genuinely uncomfortable being super-sensitive to racial politics even as I realize "huh, I guess a lot of people do despise me just because I'm white."

Like, to the extent almost every other ethnic group has massive bias toward people who share their genetic makeup, the only viable strategy in response is to assume any individual of said group I encounter is biased against me until proven otherwise. It feels like I'm sitting there thinking "Okay, I know what stereotypes I'm expecting you to conform to... please please please don't confirm them."

After a certain point, the heuristics just prove too useful to ignore.

They always said that they "wanted to start a national conversation about diversity."

This is a completely BS term just like the one about needing to start a "conversation about race [i.e. blackness]". What is promoted is not conversation but exhortation and secular evangelisation.

You might say "this won't affect you if you don't work in the liberal arts" but it does, because it then affects all culture everywhere. And yes, for a long time it was like we couldn't talk about it for fear of retribution. Hell, it's telling that all of his sources still want to stay anonymous, even when they've moved on to other industries. It must have been a huge effort to find any real data and sources for all this stuff.

I agree. One example is that as of 2025 Hollywood experienced the lowest grossing October since 1997. And that is in nominal dollar terms not counting for inflation. And even that is worsened by the phenomenon of runaway production, where a lot of movies are produced outside of LA and California and it is even worse for other productions such as TV shows. This is the result of years of bad movies, which has huge impacts for other professions - stuntmen, people constructing sets, technicians and thousands of other people completely outside of Culture War origin of the current malaise in Hollywood.

a lot of movies are produced outside of LA and California

Isn't that just a simple case of corporate outsourcing?

Sure, you can put it into the general deindustrialization narrative where corporations outsource their work. But the difference is, that there is a danger even for domestic corporations. One huge canary in the coalmine is the current state of gaming industry, where large woke studios such as Ubisoft experienced similar decline in sales often attributed to "woke" influences. As a result we see a lot of foreign studios such as Chinese giant Tencent producing successful games replacing these domestic behemoths. One other example is Japanese studio Square Enix axing their western branches lately.

So my argument is that overall "get woke go broke" narrative pushed by executives and other managers can have rippling effects for general more conservative workforce let's say.

This looks more like a covid effect than anything else.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-box-office-gross-revenue-since-1980/?srsltid=AfmBOor6tecObPA5tRc_JKDIPNPgPpqw1hZkfT697In9AZWdB5RYJdJL

He said October 2025, that's not included on your chart. How is covid supposed to affect that anyway?

Box office revenues have been dropping since covid (as seen on the chart). Assuming the trend continues past 2024, it's hardly surprising that one month would turn out abnormally bad and be the worst such month for a long time.

How does covid affect box office revenues? I don't know man, the last movie I saw in a theater was Oppenheimer. Perhaps people, having not gone to the movies during lockdown, simply decided that it's overrated.

In any case, I don't think that a priori you would expect that Hollywood's wokeness would only catch up to it only in 2020, although I'm sure a sufficiently motivated reasoner could make the case.

Looking at netflix subscriber numbers, there is no drop like we see in box office sales despite the median Netflix release generally being way more shitty and pozzed than the median theatre movie. So I really don't think this is a story of "get woke go broke" at all.

In any case, I don't think that a priori you would expect that Hollywood's wokeness would only catch up to it only in 2020, although I'm sure a sufficiently motivated reasoner could make the case.

There was a massive acceleration of wokeness in 2020, related to George Floyd. You don't need much motivation to see that.

I included the next paragraph to (futilely) head off such sufficiently motivated reasoners.

Looking at netflix subscriber numbers, there is no drop like we see in box office sales despite the median Netflix release generally being way more shitty and pozzed than the median theatre movie.

Somehow, the theory is that people are disgusted by wokeslop in theatres, but happy to gulp it down at home. Perhaps the counterclaim will be that people pay for Netflix but don't watch it, or only watch it in the background.

People watch a lot of stuff on netflix besides their bespoke wokeslop. Box office numbers are entirely dependent on their new releases.

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Netflix has a lot of eg older shows people bingewatch, or dirt-cheap apolitical 'reality' brainrot that premiered on boomer cable networks to fill airtime. And, demonstrably, people like that stuff.

I don’t think the main reason for Hollywood’s decline is bad movies, but rather the fact that it now has to compete with streaming, YouTube, TikTok, etc.

What’s the point of going out of your way to the cinema when already you have more movies than you could ever watch available at home, and whatever’s playing in theatres will be available online in 4K HDR whatever in a few weeks anyway?

I have trouble sympathizing with any of this. An institution's prestige comes from the people that compose it. If you're competent, the institution doesn't grant you prestige, it leeches off you to obtain prestige. If you're useless, it is the institution that grants you prestige (at the expense of its own reputation).

Take James Watson. He recently had all his stickers revoked by the "status-granting institutions" he was a member of for being a bad man and saying mean things. Guess what? I cannot name a single one of those institutions off the top of my head. But you know what name I do remember? James Watson.

The way you respond to an institution not accepting you or granting you status is just to go succeed anyway. Then the institution will suffer the reputational damage of looking like a clown for rejecting you. What you definitely should not do is fail at life and then cry publicly that the institution rejected you, because that vindicates their rejection! You are literally granting status to the institution by telling everyone they correctly rejected a failure! If you fail, at least be quiet about it, so the institution doesn't get the status boost.

This is especially accented when you consider how many successful people abandon status-granting institutions of their own will. Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard, and apparently thought it was a waste of time, so he left. This makes Harvard suffer reputational damage (though I suppose they get credit for accepting him in the first place. But still, it's at least nominally supposed to be a school, which, ya know, is supposed to be telling you the Secrets of the Universe you need to succeed. If you just leave and succeed anyway, obviously none of those secrets were necessary). Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were also dropouts.

"Oh, well you're just choosing S-tier examples," you retort. "For regular humans, the world doesn't work like this." Ah, but check this out:

For men, the team found one correlation with GRE scores: men who scored in the top 25% of the GRE’s quantitative section were more likely to leave graduate school without a degree than men who scored in the lowest 25%.

So no, it's not just S-tier exceptions. Competent people do not need institutional blessing. Only the incompetent do.

This even plays out in the finances of institutions. If you're smart, you get scholarships to attend university--they pay you to go there! Why would someone pay you to teach you the secrets of the universe? Well, they're not. They anticipate you're going to be successful anyway, and so they pay you a bribe to waste some time with them so they can act like they took some part in it. For all the people that they don't anticipate will be successful, they charge tuition. This reputational laundering is, quite literally, the business model.

This is true, but goes too far. Watson did his actual research i.e. his succeeding in the university, because that's where the equipment, the mentorship and the funding was. You cannot strike out and make it on your own as a particle physicist.

It is the case though that pushing people out of the high-status established sinecures can lead to good results in the long term, as long as the new shoots are allowed to grow.

Watson did his actual research i.e. his succeeding in the university, because that's where the equipment, the mentorship and the funding was. You cannot strike out and make it on your own as a particle physicist.

This is true, but the institution also wasn't averse to competent people at that time. If it were, he probably would have left and gone somewhere else, as many competent people have done recently.

And yes, I do concede that universities have access to funding. But as the Trump administration is showing, you can just... not fund them anymore if you think they're full of nonsense. Plus, private funding is abundant these days, and hungry for talent. There's far more money than there is talent. Thiel himself just threw a bunch of money at a chip startup that was a complete scam (and should have been transparently so from the outset): he clearly wants to given money to talented people, there just aren't enough of them in his contact list.

But as the Trump administration is showing, you can just... not fund them anymore if you think they're full of nonsense.

Funny you mention that:

Defendants are ENJOINED and/or STAYED from refusing to grant, non-renewing, withholding, freezing, suspending, terminating, conditioning, or otherwise restricting use of federal funds, or threatening to do so, to the University of California (“UC”), defined to include any of its campuses, laboratories, and affiliated medical centers...

courtlistener here.

Plus, private funding is abundant these days, and hungry for talent. Thiel himself just threw a bunch of money at a chip startup that was a complete scam (and should have been transparently so from the outset): he clearly wants to given money to talented people, there just aren't enough of them in his contact list.

The advantage of the conventional educational system, and of government grants in general, is just how damn much money is thrown out there, while its results and evaluations are monitored only on the largest scales at any politically responsive level.

UC, as a specific example, gets several billion, as in starting with a B dollars in federal funding per year for research alone. When UC throws money at a complete scam, or has its staff or students commit overt fraud, these are genuinely nutpicks.

By contrast, Peter Thiel could, if he liquidated his entire fortune, do that perhaps for four years. Not, you know, in reality, but if we replace economics with a frictionless spherical cow, it's kinda close.

In the real world, his foundation gives out less than five million per year, and I don't say that as a criticism. I couldn't quickly find out his stake in Substrate, the chip scam you mention, but it's probably not a large portion of the 100m USD that Substrate has been dick-waving as its seed fund. This is Thiel's Solyndra, perhaps! (Wasn't Solyndra 500m+ USD in government-supported loans?) This is Thiel's A123 Systems!

Actually, it's worse than even that: a lot of the evaluation protocols have been absolutely braincored themselves. I can't give the full rant without self-doxxing, but suffice it to say actually interesting with these groups seriously will turn your stomach.

So the real answer is that a successful buyer must have a solution to reliably cut through all of this mess and evaluate decisions several orders of magnitude more reliably than government funding, or a successful seller have so clear a product and vision - and marketing capabilities and acceptable presentation and everything else - as to resolve all of those issues for them.

Otherwise, it's a game of dice.

The advantage of the conventional educational system, and of government grants in general, is just how damn much money is thrown out there

I guess, but in a world of technology, even a tiny amount of empowered talent can compete with an ocean of well-funded incompetence. Telegram famously has like 30 employees, and it's one of the largest social platforms on the planet.

Regarding Thiel & co, it's honestly kinda baffling to me how much worse they've gotten with selecting people to fund in recent years. They used to be much better at identifying talent. Take Vitalik Buterin. We can debate whether Ethereum is a scam or not, but it is certainly extremely successful, and Vitalik himself is not a grifter: he is very gifted technically. He has good knowledge of cryptography, and has written extensively on it.

Similarly, take this recent tweet by Paul Graham. I agree with him, but it's a frankly baffling admission: are you seriously conceding that none of the people in charge of distributing large amounts of money know anything about how technology actually works? You don't think, maybe, you could get some actual electrical engineers and high-tier software developers on your staff instead of a bunch of socialites and wordcels? It legit boggles my mind.

Then again, the website I'm typing this on barely loads half of the time I try to visit, so apparently running a small forum requires S-tier talent these days.

This is true, but the institution also wasn't averse to competent people at that time. If it were, he probably would have left and gone somewhere else, as many competent people have done recently.

The fact that an institution (namely King's) was averse to competent women at the time was utterly fundamental to the story of DNA. Franklin was in the process of winding up her research on DNA and moving to Birckbeck at the time Watson and Crick made their discovery, which was a clear downgrade in institution quality and a move she would not have made if she had felt welcome at King's. It isn't clear how much the issue was pervasive sexism vs. pervasive anti-semitism.

It should be dead obvious that being supported by the institutions of your field is better than being opposed by them. Yes, there are some people who succeed outside, but it's a much harder road they have to be that much better. And of course others fail with such opposition where they would have succeeded with support or just neutral treatment.

For men, the team found one correlation with GRE scores: men who scored in the top 25% of the GRE’s quantitative section

An interesting find, but the upshot of the article is "We should get rid of the GRE because men have an advantage in quantitative scores but no advantage in actually getting degrees". (Which I suspect is because of discrimination against them in the grad programs.) It's a call for even more enshittification of academia, and in an engineering publication no less.

ETA: He actually addresses this argument in an interview about an earlier article about white writers:

Oliver goes on to helpfully suggest that younger white men, if indeed they face institutionalized discrimination, should self-publish. Who cares about the New Yorker? A Naomi Kanakia in every kitchen, a John Pistelli in every garage!

This is just wild. Can you imagine giving that advice to any other group of people?

There's this magical idea among the Substack literati, who all appear to be deranged graphomaniacs themselves, that a True Artist will always produce work regardless of material circumstances. But do you really think Philip Roth or John Updike or Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith would have published dozens of novels between them if they couldn't make a living at it? And while we're here: if Tony Tulathimutte, whose writing both Henry Oliver and I both adore, hadn't been able to publish Private Citizens with William Morrow in 2016 — what would have happened? If he'd found himself ever-so-slightly further offsides the Maginot line of identity and a mainstream publisher hadn't picked up his début, do you really think we'd all have read Rejection in 2024?

Which I suspect is because of discrimination against them in the grad programs.

Uh, does it control for degree program? Lower-scoring individuals are usually less likely to go into difficult programs, and thus finish.

There's this magical idea among the Substack literati, who all appear to be deranged graphomaniacs themselves, that a True Artist will always produce work regardless of material circumstances. But do you really think Philip Roth or John Updike or Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith would have published dozens of novels between them if they couldn't make a living at it?

I don´t mean to be overly hyperbolic, of course. But even back in Ye Olden Days, yeah, great writers were often persecuted. John Locke fled England on fear of his life. John Bunyan wrote much of Pilgrim's Progress from prison.

Today, with the advent of the internet, it's much easier. Fuentes had his bank accounts and credit cards locked, was put on a no-fly list, and booted from every major social media platform. Has that stopped him?

Or take all the AAA video game producers that have been ideologically captured. So what? Just make your own studio! Clair Obscur just won game of the year! And the runners up were like... Hollow Knight: Silksong (produced by a grand total of 3 people, if my knowledge serves me right) and Hades 2. You really can just Do Things, and out-play people with orders of magnitude more institutional privilege.

Anyway, the other thing I wanted to highlight with my post is that complaining about institutional capture is a really bad battle tactic. I won't contend that fighting to retake institutions is a bad idea (though it's not the sort of thing that inspires anything in me personally). It's probably a good idea. But complaining that you don't like the status-granting institutions lends them more status, because it looks like they correctly kept all the losers out. For anyone seeking to go on their own Long March to retake the institutions, you need a more compelling battle cry than "No, no, you can't refuse to accept me, my test scores were good!" I propose something akin to Harry Potter's line when he retook Hogwarts: "How dare you stand where he stood!"

This is a level of indifference that would never be applied to any other group in a modern context. "Oh, you think blacks are discriminated against in publishing? Well MLK Jr and Nelson Mandela wrote from jail, why can't you succeed? You think women are discriminated against? Jane Austen made it in a man's world. Gay people are getting the short end? Oscar Wilde did fine and Alan Turing made a name for himself even while being chemically castrated".

We really need to do a "you halves he picks" analysis on these types of proposals. You guys define just how hard the millstone of racial and sexual discrimination grinds on the have-nots, but I get to pick who they are. If it's truly no big deal, you won't mind it pressing down on women and minorities, right?

Every so often, someone rediscovers the original position.

I was going to reply to Soteriologian with somewhat similar. The right phrases it to sometimes sound like a white man will never be hired again. The left will claim this is all made up and point to some really specific stats like programming being overwhelmingly men (women don't even try to go into programming at nearly the same levels) or X% of a field is still white men (even though many got the job before DEI initiatives ramped up). But there definitely is a finger on the scales towards non white man. Success is a spectrum, not a binary. The geniuses of any generation can succeed against a headwind. But for those who are around average talent to somewhat above average, having the resources to get off the ground can be huge. Hollow Knight was made by a handful of people, but in order to do that they need a stable job with time to spare to work on personal projects.

People respond this way because they are white supremacists, they just aren't conscious of it.

Sure. You can just do things works well for selecting the super agentic out of a large population reservoir. But not having email jobs available for the population reservoir over a generation or two destroys the population reservoir.

When we put a man on the moon maybe there were 10 kings and a thousand perfect math SAT white dudes doing the calculations by hand. The next generation kings probably see 1 king from the prior 10 kings and 9 kings from the 1000 white dudes just showing up to work everyday.

Like the double edged sword of the Internet more broadly --- the crushing dichotomy of endless slop and almost the complete collective knowledge of mankind at your fingertips --- the tools are there for you and a couple friends to go produce, say, movies with effects that surpass Kubrick's with a much larger budget. Blender is free (and Academy Award winning!). Camera equipment is smaller and lighter and cheaper. LED lighting can run on batteries.

And yet, nobody that I've found is producing well-written, compelling movies on shoestring budgets that actually get eyes, while Netflix keeps churning out heaps of slop with the odd gem tossed in (KPop Demon Hunters was enjoyable). I'm really not sure what to make of it: maybe there is a stochastic element of movie magic that requires the stars to align for a good product and lots projects to produce a hit, or maybe it takes the collective will to power and collective experience of something like the Hollywood juggernauts to push to finish projects well. Or maybe it's happening, but not in genres I follow: are we in a low-budget horror Renaissance? Or it's a change in dynamic to creators of short-form videos?

And the same is true of other mainstream media. I suppose there are a few breakout hits on Substack or various podcasts, so maybe it's happening and we're just not noticing.

Because the larger organizations are on watch for such and will likely move to crush them.

Astartes sits in my mind as an example of this. It was a single person passion project that blew people away for how good it was and got more people interested in Warhammer 40K than anything Games Workshop ever did. So what did GW do? Bought the guy out and basically hid him away from doing anything.

Taking out competition is trivial when you have the resources and advantages to do it.

Movies in particular, no, but there's an enormous amount of quality video content produced on shoestring budgets on YouTube. NileRed, 3Blue1Brown, Adam Ragusea, Practical Engineering etc.. It's not just a handful of people: there are many channels on a myriad of topics, produced by people who as far as I can tell have no major studio backing. It's just regular people with cameras, doing stuff they find interesting and showing other people.

I'd wager this "industry" already dwarfs legacy producers of similar content.

I don't think there's anything stopping people from producing movies, the will just isn't there for whatever reason. But It's been done before: The Blair Witch Project was a successful low-budget film, and it managed to achieve fame even without the help of internet video distribution!

As for writing, there's SlateStarCodex, which was just a guy who decided to make a website to publish his writings. It was pretty big once upon a time, so I hear. He wrote a book, too!

The Blair Witch Project was a successful low-budget film, and it managed to achieve fame even without the help of internet video distribution!

The Blair Witch Project is a special case because being low budget is inherently part of the story, which alleviates most of the problems caused by having to be low budget. This doesn't generalize.

Cool, so it's okay if we took these policies and turned them on their heads? DEI for white guys? I mean, truly talented women, blacks, and browns can just succeed anyway. No biggie, right?

Savage frames this as generation warfare rather than the racial/feminist Culture War. He and his sources cannot bring themselves to blame the women and minorities (he said he used to); no it has to be the old (Boomer/Gen X) white men who are keeping him out, and he says he doesn't even blame them any more. He has not yet learned to properly hate.

Yeah, that was definitely a weak point in the piece. Minorities and women clearly benefit from these discriminatory hiring practices and are often fervent advocates for their continuation and expansion, they share at least some responsibility for this situation. Old white men didn't just suddenly wake up one day and decide to throw young white men under the bus for no reason at all.

The fever pitched he described in the media rooms to hire not white men was coming from the women and minorities they hired because in part the women and minorities understand they were hired because they are women and minorities.

But it explains why these institutions are failing hard.

Indeed. He claims that them merely making use of new opportunities available to them is their only role in this whole thing, which is clearly not the case.

There was actually one part of the piece where he mentions it in passing:

So it came as a bit of a shock when David Austin Walsh, a Yale postdoc and left-wing Twitter personality, decided to detonate any chance he had at a career with a single tweet.

“I’m 35 years old, I’m 4+ years post-Ph.D, and—quite frankly—I’m also a white dude,” he wrote on X. “Combine those factors together and I’m for all intents and purposes unemployable as a 20th-century American historian.”

The pile-on was swift and vicious. “You are all just laughable,” wrote The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Have you seen the data on professorships?” “White males are 30 percent of the US population but nearly 40 percent of faculty,” tweeted a tenured professor at GWU. “Hard to make the case for systemic discrimination.”

So maybe there is some space to hate Nikole Hannah-Joneses of this world, who adopt sneering and mocking attitude toward plight of straight white millennial men? It was probably the closest the author came to blaming somebody other than Boomer/Gen X executives implementing these DEI policies.

Also I can somewhat respect self interest from the actually diverse, but few found themselves in positions of actual genuine power so the whole thing has to be facilitated by senior white males.

Imo he basically has to frame it this way to make it fit for public consumption. The normies aren't ready to turn against females and minorities, but this will shift the Overton window.

It'll shift the lines towards Millennials v. Xers (and Boomer remnants). So it'll be white male Millennials and younger plus all women and ethnic minorities working to get rid of the remaining old white guys (who will mostly be called "boomers" even if Savage is more precise). This won't work out well for the younger white guys of course, but maybe it'll be satisfying to Savage.

I actually do think there is significant room to blame white stakeholders for pulling up the ladder behind them. The most significant part of the support for affirmative action has always been from existing stakeholders, who want to reduce competition.

A lot of online rightists find it insane that any white people support affirmative action. White students are evenly split on affirmative action, despite being its putative victims. This support only increases as one reaches more selective schools, where affirmative action is harshest in action. Why is this? Because a liberal white student at Harvard Law, like the Manson family, believes so firmly and mystically in his own superiority that no white loss in a racial conflict can rattle him. He believes in his superiority as a talented white kid as firmly as he believes in gravity. He is one of the Great and the Good, his talent got him here, giving tithes to those inferior to him will only enhance his stature. After all, if I'm a white kid with a 165 LSAT who can't get into a T14, every 160 LSAT Black kid who gets in is a spot that could have been mine, I coulda been a contenda if only things were different. But if I already got in, if I'm confident that my 179 LSAT is such that I always will get in to whatever I want, then I'd rather a less qualified kid got in than a more qualified one. If you're trying to get into a class of 800, ever non-merit spot is a spot you lose, I go from having 800 chances to get in to 600 chances to get in. If I'm already in a class of 800, every non-merit spot is a kid who isn't competing with me anymore for the top spot, I go from competing to be 1/800 to competing to be 1/600. Let the Blacks push out the whites and the Asians, the Blacks won't be able to compete with me anyway. If we're all at a firm together, my pedigree and my talent are worth more the fewer people exist with my pedigree and my talent. Affirmative action at top schools is a way to narrow the field of actual competitors from that school.

Imagine as a model an elite selective law school where 800 new students are admitted every year. First 400 students are admitted on "pure merit" for LSAT scores, the top scorers are brought in automatically. Then those 400 students vote on the rules used to choose the other 400 students. The 400 students admitted on merit have no real interest in the other 400 students being admitted on merit. The kid with a 179 LSAT doesn't benefit from making sure that the kid with a 172 LSAT makes it in. The kid with a 172 is quite likely to compete with him in class for the top spots, the gap in ability isn't that large. But if he votes to admit kids on affirmative action grounds with a 160 LSAT, those kids aren't likely to compete with him. The same applies for any situation where incumbents are choosing the rules for those coming after him.

For a young white man applying to school, trying to get a job, trying to make partner, affirmative action harms him. For an old white man who already made partner, affirmative action helps him maintain his power, no young up-and-comers are coming for his crown because he makes sure that the lower levels are full of undeserving sycophantic incompetents. As corrupt leaders choose unqualified lackeys and promote them above their competence level, knowing that the lackeys will be forced to remain loyal to the leader because they can't survive on their own, so incumbents elevate diversity picks knowing that they won't threaten the current leadership, and will remain loyal to the institutions, because they owe their success to those leaders and institutions and values.

We saw this dynamic play out in the Democratic party over the past ten years. An emphasis on affirmative action in their choice of candidates left them with a thin bench, and allowed Joe Biden to become President. Joe Biden was always incompetent, but he had tenure, and by supporting minority candidates he protected himself against the rise of anyone ambitious and competent enough to supplant him. We didn't see ambitious young whites rising in the Democratic party, we saw affirmative action picks everywhere, and as a result in 2020 we wound up with the only half-competent white guy in the race winning, despite his being older than cable television. Nor would Joe have lasted as long as he did in the presidency with a competent vice president breathing down his neck.

Stunting the rise of competent competitors benefits boomer incumbents, protects them from being pushed out on an ice floe when they should be.

The 400 students admitted on merit have no real interest in the other 400 students being admitted on merit.

That's fine, so long as it stays "a few kids on college campuses". Let them vote on a single set of criteria for admission, scholarships, hiring, and promotion, and I bet they'd change their tune real quick.

The same process that puts racially-preferred students will be used again in hiring, and the top merit-based grad will be placed at the same level as the top diversity-based grad (or more likely: The top pure-merit grad will simply lose out to the top combined-merit-and-racial-preference grad). And again when it comes to promotion time: The top performer will be placed at the same level as the top racially-preferred worker.

It might be beneficial to pull the ladder up behind you, but I'd be very, very wary of doing it, even as a maximally-cynical move. The people ahead of me might start getting ideas and pull the ladder up behind them, and I'd be left behind if I can't climb faster than the trend spreads.

In this case, I think you're correct, and the bulk of the energy behind these particular movements comes from their beneficiaries.

But it occurs to me that this isn't always true, and some movements are made up almost entirely of "allies," with the beneficiaries playing a very small role. At the extreme, if some much-needed infrastructure project is canceled due to its potential impact on the habitat of the Desert Tortoise, this clearly isn't a power-grab by the tortoises.

The particular case I'm thinking of is the trans movement, which some (mainly feminist) opponents think is powered primarily by the force of will of XY-chromosomed trans people, when from my perspective, the main energy comes from (mostly XX-chromosomed) allies.

I'd suppose that, the fewer or less-capable the beneficiaries are, the more a movement is likely to be primarily driven by allies: I'd posit the order of some examples to go (from most beneficiary-driven to most ally-driven) feminism -> anti-racism -> gay rights -> trans rights -> animal rights/pro-life.

“What troubles me is that a lot of thriving white millennial men have had to follow the Josh Hawley path, where you have to leave liberal America,” an old friend, the father of two biracial children, told me. “I don't want to do that. Liberal America is my home. But if everyone says, this is not the place for you, what are you supposed to do?”

Can anyone clarify this part please? I don't know who that Hawley guy is, and according to Wikipedia, he was never a liberal.

I even asked the allknowing AI, but it also didn’t know and rambled about him being probably used symbolically, as he was in an Ivy League but did not pursue an academic career?

From Wikipedia:

Hawley studied history at Stanford University, where his mother was an alumna. He graduated in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa membership.

From the viewpoint of white liberals, I guess this means he was evidently supposed to become one of them.

Apparently Josh Hawley wrote a book called Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. According to AI, in this book Hawley extols more conservative path for men, rejecting "epicurean liberalism" and embracing masculine roles and archetypes such as builder, warrior, father etc. So I think it is a lament that liberals reject men and masculinity, and thus shove men toward more conservative path in order to succeed.

It seems likely.

I don't think "liberalism" (here being used to refer to the prevailing value system of the pro-establishment left in the early 21st century Anglosphere) rejects the masculine virtues. The problem is that "liberalism" has decided that it needs to focus on promoting the masculine virtues in women through "Lean in" culture, physically badass women in popular entertainment etc.

The strong form of this claim is that liberalism hasn't rejected men or masculinity, but it has rejected masculinity in men.

The weaker form of this claim is that the culture-directing institutions of liberalism don't actually reject masculinity in men, but it has decided that it doesn't have the bandwidth to promote it given the dire need to create more girlbosses and warrior women.

The problem is that "liberalism" has decided that it needs to focus on promoting the masculine virtues in women through "Lean in" culture, physically badass women in popular entertainment etc.

This is actually a good point, although I think about it a little bit differently. There is only one set of virtues for both sexes - be it stoic virtues like wisdom, courage, justice and temperance or Christian heavenly virtues (the opposite of deadly sins) like humility, chastity, temperance, charity, kindness, patience and diligence.

Some of these virtues are gender coded, because they are more important for a given sex. For instance if large majority of women lost courage, it would be bad but manageable. But if most men lost their courage, it could be disastrous as they would fail in their role as protectors. The same let's say with kindness for women in their role of mothers and nurturers etc. But it does not mean that men should not be kind or that women should not be courageous.

What I actually think is that leftism completely warped the notion of virtues, and promotes sins instead. It literally promotes for mothers to kill their unborn babies, it promotes pride for gays, it promotes lust as a new norm and it promotes racial revenge and anger, it promotes stupidity as opposed to wisdom where women cannot be given any advise also called as mansplaining. The same goes for "boss babe" narrative - if she was a man, he would be seen as an unhinged petty tyrant, not as a brave man tempered by patience and wisdom worthy to be followed. So "epicurean liberalism" produces emasculated and emotional men as well as toxically masculine women.

In a sense it is inevitable result of leftist analysis of reducing everything to power struggle. If feminists view masculinity as strong and oppressive, while femininity was historically weak and unable to resist, they just want to flip the script, and thus they embody their warped sense of masculinity as source of power. I found this always as a weak point of many of the leftist narratives. For instance - if you are a black woman who believes that white people have privilege, does it not mean that from a pragmatic standpoint you should strive to marry a white husband, so your children can partake in power of whiteness, while black husband will only cause them more misery and adversity? It is self-defeating in that way.

warrior

Semi off-topic (but CW):

The word 'warrior' to refer to a member of the armed forces of a democratic state is, as kids say these days, Problematic.

ACOUP:

a warrior is an individual who wars, because it is their foundational vocation, an irremovable part of their identity and social position, pursued for those private ends (status, wealth, place in society). So the core of what it is to be a warrior is that it is an element of personal identity and also fundamentally individualistic [...].
[...] So the core of what it is to be a soldier is that it is a not-necessarily-permanent employment and fundamentally about being both in and in service to a group.

Angry staff officer:

Warriors came from a specific class of people, those whose lives were dedicated to violence – not violence for a specific end, but often just violence for violence’s sake. Warrior classes were – and are – often propped up on the backs of the people, the people they are supposed to be serving. They are supported by the state, segregated into a specific class, and essentially become diametrically opposed to a democracy – since democracies do not easily finance the exorbitant cost of keeping up a bunch of entitled elites.

The closest we have to a separate warrior class -- people who see themselves as permanently apart from the broader society, for whom to engage in violence is a fundamental part of their identity -- these days are probably criminal gangs (or especially corrupt police departments, if there is a difference).

This is a very strange word use problem that I suspect stems from the stick up the arse of the USMC. US Marines are not an elite amphibious expeditionary force like the modern Royal Marines, or seaborne troops who specialise in boarding actions like the OG marines. (In so far as that latter expertise still exists, it sits in the law enforcement function of the Coast Guard). US Marines are, in fact, soldiers in the traditional English meaning of the word, which is the sense that Dr Deveraux of ACOUP and the Angry Staff Officer are using. But as part of their effort to maintain a distinctive culture, mission etc. from the army the USMC profoundly object to being called "soldiers".

My guess is that someone sympathetic to the USMC started using "warrior" as a general term for soldiers and marines and it stuck, rather than someone deliberately trying to end up on the wrong side of the soldier/warrior distinction.

When British politicians want to talk about soldiers in a way which includes things like the Royal Marines and the RAF Regiment, they tend to say "troops".

The word 'warrior' to refer to a member of the armed forces of a democratic state is, as kids say these days, Problematic

Agreed, which kind of makes the point. You may aspire to be let's say a warrior of Christ despite degenerate "epicurean liberal" consensus. I think it captures the ethos of masculinity - to be disagreeable toward degenerate ideas despite it being unpopular to an extent, where you are willing to be martyred for it. It does not mean that you will commit violent acts of terrorism of course, but some bravery and confidence in righteousness of your worldview is commendable. You can maybe start with unabashedly saying blessings before eating your lunch in Google canteen. Very warrior like behavior.

Agreed, which kind of makes the point. You may aspire to be let's say a warrior of Christ despite degenerate "epicurean liberal" consensus. I think it captures the ethos of masculinity - to be disagreeable toward degenerate ideas despite it being unpopular to an extent, where you are willing to be martyred for it. It does not mean that you will commit violent acts of terrorism of course, but some bravery and confidence in righteousness of your worldview is commendable. You can maybe start with unabashedly saying blessings before eating your lunch in Google canteen. Very warrior like behavior.

Priests and warriors are not the same thing. Both are traditionally masculine roles, particularly in the Christian West, and both are supposed to cultivate the kind of moral and religious basedness you are talking about here. But the warrior isn't supposed to be martyred - he's supposed to send the infidel to his "martyrdom". From a warrior's perspective, saying blessings unabashedly while undercover in enemy territory doesn't make you badass, it makes you an idiot.

In the context of this sub-thread, "warrior" isn't a metaphor for someone who tries to achieve something against determined opposition - it is a reference to people who make actual, real-world physical violence a way of life. Warrior-elites in this strict sense are a key feature of most societies. The taming of warrior elites into aristocracies who only fight the enemy, not among themselves, is part of the transition from barbarism into civilisation.

I don't really get quibbling over definitions, Warrior isn't bad because it's fascist, it's bad because it's cringe. "I'm a warrior because I pray in the company cafeteria" is cringey, dude no one cares.

Erasing the warrior-soldier distinction is bad because it makes it harder to talk accurately and precisely about violence professionals, and in particular to call out certain failure modes in civil-military relations.

Erasing the warrior-curmudgeon distinction is bad for the same reasons.

Doesn't forcing a warrior-soldier conflation also cause inaccuracy? A drone operator, artilleryman, submarine sailor or even an infantryman who never saw combat is hardly a warrior in the same sense as somali pirate or a mujihadeen suicide-bomber or an apache brave or a spartiate. The term "warrior" seems more misleading than not, for most roles in a modern military, in a way that "soldier" does not. There is some overlap, I grant, but it's hardly universal anymore.

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Welcome the euphemism treadmill. Erasing the moron-retard distinction is bad because it makes it harder to talk accurately and precisely about intellectual capabilities.

Warrior euphemism talk started, as I recall seeing it, with the cringey Wounded Warrior Project stuff, though I'm sure it has earlier roots.

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Our conception of deep evil was some grainy photo of 'no blacks or irish need apply' while our job portals said 'no white men need apply'. People will soon forget, like they always do. "It was just a few seminars, and I was largely against it". If they let you have a job at all, they demanded these professions of faith where you had to confess to being a worm. No humiliation was seemingly enough. I'll remember how brazen they were.

I hold women responsible for this. Even those who did not actively support it. It's not morally neutral to accept a promotion someone else was blatantly, unfairly shut out of. Part of my disagreement with the far right on female promiscuity, aside that I fundamentally don't care about it, is that it enshrines a woman's sex life as the only expression of her morality. The far right/trad right is completely helpless because women have all this power now, and rightists have no way to acknowledge it and hold them accountable. "they're ..they're.. sluts.. and the perverted men make them do things.. they're having sex and..." I'm sure that's it, buddy.

I'm not sure what you would expect a woman getting a promotion in that instance to do. Are you expecting them to take a principled stance and deny a better livelihood for themselves for cultural reasons? They'll just hire the next woman in line.

Ah yes, the classic cafeteria tray argument that if they refuse to do the evil thing, the next guy would do it (or girl in this instance). I gotta say, I've always been schocked by the near-complete refusal of people here or in /r/slatestarcodex to sacrifice a single dollar for morality ( 'cultural reasons', lmao) . Maybe they deserved to crawl for their DEI masters. Yes, I expect them to turn it down.

Usually promotions come with a multiple dollar increase, not just a single dollar.

Yes, I expect them to turn it down.

For what reason?

I was in a Ph.D program in 2014, hoping to go into academia, and I ended up dropping out because I could see that there was no way forward. I know it's a tournament profession and my odds were never good, but once I was inside it became apparent that it was in fact literally hopeless.

I ended up going into technology, because it was the only sufficiently merit-based thing I could find in which I could sort of force open the door. Even there, I think I got a senior role just in time, as I hear the entry level is very very bad these days. I've had conversations with my wife about what we might advise our future children to do with their lives, and I've mentally prepared to tell them that certain dreams are just impossible, and some things can only ever be a hobby for us - even though there are other people who will be able to dedicate their whole lives to them. Maybe it's been a good thing, in that I was forced to keep some things I love as just a hobby, and so I never got burnt out on them by trying to make them a career.

I was in a Ph.D program in 2014, hoping to go into academia, and I ended up dropping out because I could see that there was no way forward. I know it's a tournament profession and my odds were never good, but once I was inside it became apparent that it was in fact literally hopeless.

Yeah I had a similar path, wanted to go for a history PhD but all my professors told me it was hopeless as a white man. I also went into a tech startup, and we crushed it, then I got fired two weeks before my equity would've vested despite far surpassing all the goals in my initial contract.

I try to keep the light in my heart alive, stay focused on Christ, etc, but damn I am fucking angry. I have to say. I wish there was a more constructive movement to end this shit, very sad to see that so much of the dissident right is just pure vitriol.

very sad to see that so much of the dissident right is just pure vitriol.

There needs to be more vitriol. You can't just ask nicely not to be ethnically cleansed. The people you are up against have recently and openly learned they can just murder you, your children, and your representatives and suffer virtually no political consequences.

Vitriol is a start to what you need to do.

Yes but this sort of hate-fueled rhetoric is just inaccurate which turns a ton of people off. Democrats lawmakers/elites are not openly murdering conservatives, poorly adjusted criminals and depressed schizos are. I understand that there's a strong argument to be made that the Democratic governance LEADS to these murders, but you have to actually make that argument!!

When you say things like

they can just murder you, your children, and your representatives and suffer virtually no political consequences.

This loses you the moral high ground, and the fight when it comes to normies. You're being taken in by your rage and making strategic mistakes. It's not just that it's factually wrong it's that it's a losing strategy.

Look up Jay Jones again.

You are point of fact wrong on every point.

Let me put that another way. Ten years ago everyone knew white males were being discriminated against. Say it then and people like you would accuse me of "giving into hate and losing the normies". Now that it's fait accompli, all the institutions have been lost, white family formation is in the toilet, and our country is lost, people are coming out of the woodwork admitting "Yeah, we did that shit". Articles like the above are allowed to be published. But it's too late, there is no reversing it.

And I'm sure in 10 years time, there will be another slate of late admissions "Yeah, we did permit the ethnic cleansing of white people. Oh well!". And when the actions required to make the survivors whole are proposed, people like you will once again wring their hands going "Woah, woah, that's too scary, you'll lose the normies!"

The normies need to be radicalized. And attempts must be made 24/7 to see that they are brought on board with saving themselves. If you are afraid of losing them, you are failing in your moral duty to save them.

You're not wrong, but what use is it to have a bunch of radicalized red tribers if there is no plan for them to fight back? As far as I can tell, the "The Republican Party is Doomed" article still holds true today. Without control of any important institutions, there's not a lot you can do.

You're not wrong, but what use is it to have a bunch of radicalized red tribers if there is no plan for them to fight back?

There was no plan, and Charlie Kirk is still dead, the power he wielded in life shattered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the four winds.

You can make a pretty big impact without a "plan".

You can make a pretty big impact without a "plan".

You can if you you have the tacit, hidden backing of a vast, powerful, organized apparatus behind you. If you don't have that, though…

"The Republican Party is Doomed" is still written by a man that conflates certification with education with job security with meaningful skills, and who today has yet to confront or recognize a very simple flaw downstream of what that means:

There is not some deep physical law that educated young professionals are the source of administrative or executive power in this world. They have been favored for the last seventy years because (outside of academic-enforced Curleyism) they were competent, not just in systems that they created, but in their ability to manage and adapt to the world.

The average college graduate today struggles to use a screwdriver, and increasing numbers struggle to write or comprehend an essay; a far broader group have actively rejected even the ideals of meaningful understanding of reality. Teacher's unions have begged and striked to require increasing levels of education that you and I know does absolutely shit for their actual capability, and they're unusual for anyone studying it, rather than it being a problem. If you throw the mandate of heaven in the trash, it ends up in the trash.

That's not necessarily a good thing! Obviously there's the big grifter problem, where once you realize that the TV-show grifter and the PhD are equally unknowledgable about 1800s history, you have the problem of distinguishing what randos do have anything. There's a lot of infrastructure and cash that's hard to replicate outside of academic or industrial settings, and the resulting processes not getting done because those settings are so hostile to you they'd rather burn cash and credibility, and just no one trying, doesn't change much.

More broadly, there are still places that have keep some undercurrent of adherence to actual skill or knowledge that's hard to develop elsewhere, with some interest in actual capability, whether or not they've been skinsuited by politics. There's a far broader scope where the things they teach aren't deep knowledge or skills, but they're the teacher's passwords necessary to get anywhere today. FCFromSSC-style "iterated harm-seeking" is going to be very interesting in the !!bad!! sort of ways, when applied here.

I don't think you can avoid plans happening, as people get radicalized, as someone who has even an inkling of what that could looks like, and very many good reasons to wish it wouldn't happen.

More seriously, there's a lot of options radicals have, many of which do not require vast planning or coordination, only common knowledge.

Some of those options aren't bad. If, as a completely random example, the left will be murdering political enemies with impunity or the police and prosecutors will just look the other way when someone on the right gets his or her face punched in... well, I was on team Pink Pistols when gay guys getting bashed was a non-zero risk. I'm not abandoning that because some people insist it'd be better if I were beaten than their brownshits shot, and if they've never said the name "Paul Kessler", I'm not going to even care. There's a functional moral and legal principle, here.

But the majority of options are bad, and they're still going to happen. There's some subtle stuff, like what happens when we it becomes common knowledge the Civil Rights Act doesn't and hasn't realled since its inception, and every jury the least competent lawyer in a red or purple state can manage will nullo your prosecutions, and any lawyer slightly above that Platkins out any attempt to Uno Reverso by getting jurisdiction in a blue state first.

And then there's an actual horror stories.

Remember Malheur? Two years ago, if it happened again, common knowledge had already become that people committing actual terrorist arson against federal police didn't get a 'mandatory' terrorism enhancement. Today, there is basically nothing the nuBundies could say that would cost them political support, and until and unless they literally shot -- not shot at -- federal officers, they'd still have behaved better than anti-ICE groups. That includes literally dropping heavy rocks onto the front windshields of fast-moving cars and people, or running for a national office with a nazi tattoo.

But don't worry, without a college diploma, Red Tribers won't drop rocks. That's a fancy-boy edujumacated physics problem. Electricians, machinists, plumbers, gun nuts, maintenance employees, firefights, construction workers, no possible relevant domain expertise. or at least none I'm willing to discuss publicly

Remember when FEMA decided that they weren't going to provide support to houses with Trump political signs? Ah, without the proper cred-en-tialis there's no way some Red Triber would end up walking door to door or considering neighborhoods dangerous based on matters tangentially related to politics. They'll just be a ton of people doing work requiring hands-on expertise, to serve people they hate and know hate them, with ready and long awareness of normal and subtle failure modes. No way they might be in evacuated neighborhoods before most residents return, with easy arguments to defend any place they could be at all.

Remember some of the California trans sanctuary laws? What do you think happens when the mainstream news reports a father just now kidnapping his son, the federal marshals heroically rip a long-pregnant early teenager from their parent's arms the next week, and no one can talk about what the kid's current gender presentation or who assaulted him to start with? Do you think there's anyone who can argue Loudon County a success case for gradual stepwise moderation? Do you think people need a medical doctorate to notice the difference between a week and twenty-one weeks? A historian's degree find every single person with their name on public record for those orders?

These don't require a plan. Many of them don't even require explicit coordination beyond listening to the news, sometimes even only listening to news reporters biased against them. They're not even indicia I think are particularly likely -- since I don't want this to happen, I'm not going to meme my way into disaster.

But think for five minutes, hard, about what thirty unrelated bad actors might individually want to do, just repeating the greatest hits of the last five years.

Then consider how much post-Civil Rights Act civility may have depended on how difficult it was to ensure an attack would hit the 'guilty' and not hit the 'innocent' -- as the charcoal briquettes rant highlighted, the Oklahoma City Bomber very specifically choose to burn children to death among others -- and what signal hearing "Kirk deserved it" jokes and 'jokes' from their neighbors have sent.

I would like it to not be this way. I don't see many people actually arguing it isn't. Only that it shouldn't be.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but think this is over-optimistic nonsense.

I don't think you can avoid plans happening, as people get radicalized, as someone who has even an inkling of what that could looks like, and very many good reasons to wish it wouldn't happen.

“Plans” will happen, sure. Lots of stupid, counterproductive “plans” by idiotic “lone-wolf” actors — a large fraction probably egged on and guided by undercover Feds into the least effective courses possible.

More seriously, there's a lot of options radicals have, many of which do not require vast planning or coordination, only common knowledge.

Not effective ones. This is an illusion created by the apparent effectiveness of left-wing supposed “lone-wolf” radicals. who are really just the visible end of a vast, less visible organized apparatus — read David Hines, or Curtis Yarvin.

Some of those options aren't bad. If, as a completely random example, the left will be murdering political enemies with impunity or the police and prosecutors will just look the other way when someone on the right gets his or her face punched in... well, I was on team Pink Pistols when gay guys getting bashed was a non-zero risk. I'm not abandoning that because some people insist it'd be better if I were beaten than their brownshits shot, and if they've never said the name "Paul Kessler", I'm not going to even care.

Sure, you can say “better to be judged by twelve that carried by six” or such, but when the choices are:

  1. Take a beating from the “brownshirts,” and maybe get crippled or killed, or

  2. Shoot one or more of them… and get tried in Federal court for murder and “hate crimes,” inevitably convicted and sent to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for, if not life, then decades; where the guards, having been informed that you’re an evil racist homophobic transphobic white supremacist Nazi Klansman who should die behind bars, pass this on to every non-white gang in the prison, at which point you eventually end up getting shanked to death if you’re lucky, but more likely cornered, repeatedly violated, and then beaten to death (just like you were trying to avoid to begin with); all while the guards look the other way.

How many people do you think will really pick option 2?

But the majority of options are bad, and they're still going to happen.

Mostly when the state allows them to happen, because it’s convenient to let them happen as an excuse to crack down further.

There's some subtle stuff, like what happens when we it becomes common knowledge the Civil Rights Act doesn't and hasn't realled since its inception, and every jury the least competent lawyer in a red or purple state can manage will nullo your prosecutions, and any lawyer slightly above that Platkins out any attempt to Uno Reverso by getting jurisdiction in a blue state first.

This is unintelligible. Beyond the grammar errors — “when we it becomes”? — I have no idea what this means.

Today, there is basically nothing the nuBundies could say that would cost them political support

And that “political support” is useless.

they'd still have behaved better than anti-ICE groups. That includes literally dropping heavy rocks onto the front windshields of fast-moving cars and people, or running for a national office with a nazi tattoo.

It doesn’t matter how much right-wing radicals have “behaved better than” various leftist groups, because what decides punishment is not the level of “bad behavior,” but “who, whom?” Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi, as the Romans said.

Left-wingers can drop rocks. Red-tribers can’t and won’t, not because it’s “a fancy-boy edujumacated physics problem,” but because they’ll be destroyed if they try. They won’t get away with it like the other side does. Anyone on the right who so much as tries will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Their “associates” — their friends and family — could be prosecuted too; or failing that, cancelled, fired, blacklisted, debanked, attacked by “brownshirts,” burned out of their homes, etc.

If your “people doing work requiring hands-on expertise” try anything, they’ll be caught by the omnipresent surveillance we live under, and completely crushed by the invincible Leviathan of the state.

Remember some of the California trans sanctuary laws? What do you think happens when the mainstream news reports a father just now kidnapping his son, the federal marshals heroically rip a long-pregnant early teenager from their parent's arms the next week, and no one can talk about what the kid's current gender presentation or who assaulted him to start with?

I’m not clear on the scenario you’re vaguely gesturing toward here, but the answer to “what do you think happens?” is “nothing,” because nothing ever happens. Red tribes grumble, and mutter “somebody aught to…” and “next time, we’ll…” and then roll over and take it. I’ve watched my parents, my friends, my neighbors do exactly this my entire life.

Do you think there's anyone who can argue Loudon County a success case for gradual stepwise moderation? Do you think people need a medical doctorate to notice the difference between a week and twenty-one weeks? A historian's degree find every single person with their name on public record for those orders?

What difference does any of this make?

But think for five minutes, hard, about what thirty unrelated bad actors might individually want to do, just repeating the greatest hits of the last five years.

First, there’s what these bad actors might want to do, and then there’s the separate question of whether they’ll actually try to do it. Very unlikely, I say. Too comfortable, too much to lose — and smart enough to see that their odds of getting away with it are too low. Then, even if they try, there’s the odds they get away with it. Which, again, one can see are abysmally low.

It’s not “right-wingers are too stupid and lack the edujumacation and proper cred-en-tials to strike back” — it’s that we’re too weak and disorganized, and the enemy too strong and organized, for any of this sort of thing to ever work (that is, at anything but being counterproductive).

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You can always destroy those institutions instead of trying to control them. Those can be rebuilt later according to different designs.

Just a reminder that whites have the stablest TFR in the US, it's actually slightly ahead of the black TFR, that US immigration is more white than black, and that whites of any age are the most likely to be married. Your blackpill on white people is not true, although white demographic decline is still likely.

US immigration is more white than black

Are you sure about that?

This is way too defeatist my friend. While we yet draw breath there is hope. We absolutely can and will reverse this evil and corruption. Far mightier empires have fallen throughout history. It may seem impossible now, but things change gradually then all at once.

I've been seeing the normies get more and more radicalized my entire life. I think we're on a good trajectory.

This is way too defeatist my friend. While we yet draw breath there is hope. We absolutely can and will reverse this evil and corruption. Far mightier empires have fallen throughout history. It may seem impossible now, but things change gradually then all at once.

There is nothing actionable here.

I've been seeing the normies get more and more radicalized my entire life. I think we're on a good trajectory.

The normies have indeed become more radicalized. For the left, as we saw in the Great Awokening of 2020. Every once in a while they get a good look at their destination (e.g. Sam Brinton transing their kids) and recoil, but then they go right back. And the "adults" on the right preach doing nothing, and when the more action-oriented on the right start acting, said "adults" are more horrified by them than by their leftist counterparts.

Yes but this sort of hate-fueled rhetoric is just inaccurate which turns a ton of people off.

Democrats have been almost pure delusional hate-fueled rhetoric for most of my adult life, intensifying into cancerous ferocity over the last decade, and it doesn't seem to have turned anyone off on general principles.

This loses you the moral high ground, and the fight when it comes to normies.

No, it seems like that's just media dominance and message control. If you refuse to ever tolerate or acknowledge validity of criticism of your own extremists, you apparently can just brazen out the moral high ground.

The rhetoric of pro-Israel politicians is a great example of this point. Randy Fine can talk about how beautiful it is to see dead babies and call for the extermination of Palestinian children all he wants and the DNC aren't even willing to mildly chastise him, let alone pass a condemnation of him like they did for Nick Fuentes.

Democrats have been almost pure delusional hate-fueled rhetoric for most of my adult life, intensifying into cancerous ferocity over the last decade, and it doesn't seem to have turned anyone off on general principles.

Trumpism, and Musk becoming pissed off enough to buy Twitter, seem the obvious examples. Well, no, the more relevant examples; the most obvious example, in context, is this board.

This loses you the moral high ground

How so?

Have you read Howard Thurman? I think his brand of nonviolence and his take on the "hounds of Hell" might interest you.

I'd agree that OP is indeed incorrect. The corrected statement should be this: they can just advocate for murdering you, your children, and your representatives and suffer virtually no political consequences.

The guy who killed Charlie Kirk is suffering the consequences. He will likely be executed. What more do you want? Random innocent people to be punished as vengeance? People getting shot by random crazies is a fact of life in a free society, and the only person responsible is the killer.

Yes, the left traded a pawn for a knight or a bishop. Maybe even a queen. They don't seem too upset about that trade, and in the meantime they are winning elections, and their base is crying out for more political murders.

"Oh" you might say "But after Charlie Kirk was killed, thousands of chapters of Turning Point USA were founded!"

First, we'll see how that pans out, and second, the left decided they can murder those too.

Meanwhile almost every single popular conservative is afraid to appear in public because the left will murder them. The right has almost zero ground game because the left will murder them if they do.

It's a winning strategy, and I think we need more of it. Making journalist, judges, legislators and administrators fear for their life in public is a proven strategy.

There is no "strategy", it was one guy. If polemicists weren't taking security precautions for their public appearances until now, that's on them. Democrats had a Minnesota state rep shot and you don't hear us complaining about stochastic terrorism or whatever. That risk is part of being a public figure, especially in highly tense political times like we're in now.

Nah, there are some people explicitly and publically advocating more of this - Destiny's "you need conservatives to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events", for instance. I'd call that a strategy. It's not a strategy "the left" as a whole is pursuing, though (the Democratic Party certainly came out against it).

Can we please wait until there's at least a suspect in custody before using the Brown shooting to support your narrative?

The right has almost zero ground game because the left will murder them if they do.

It's a winning strategy, and I think we need more of it. Making journalist, judges, legislators and administrators fear for their life in public is a proven strategy.

This looks like fedposting. I get that it is mostly a criticism of the left for actually engaging in political violence, and I'm hoping that there is a degree of sarcasm in it. 3 day ban.

Last time (7 months ago) you got a short ban for something that looked like fedposting you insisted it wasn't fedposting. We gave you a light one day ban at the time. Back then I wrote this in the thread:

As far as I am concerned fedposting is one of the few existential threats that this board faces. The other two are zorba kicking the bucket and a democrat party crackdown on free speech on the web.

One day bans are minor and basically nothing. That is us saying "yes really, this is a rule we will enforce, don't do it". For anything resembling fed posting I'm also willing to hand out bans like candy. Don't fucking do it. We can choose to be lenient when it is just the rules we care about enforcing. But this is a rule that the world will enforce upon us if we don't self police. Be annoyingly verbose and add a bunch of disclaimers if you insist on doing it. We still might ban you, because again we aren't really the ones making the rule on this. Sorry it sucks, I don't like it anymore than you do.

So to reiterate: do not fedpost. Do not jokingly fedpost. Do not look like you might be fedposting.

He will likely be executed.

That is very far-fetched.

I am also of the vitriolic right, but IMO it behooves us to keep in mind that yours is the exact same rhetoric used by the left to valorize rioting negroes and palestinian combatants and all manner of domestic terrorism and social engineering.

"Our enemies are maximally evil and we must therefore maximize our aggression against them.", right or wrong, cements the conflict as absolute. It paints a glowing red target on you in the eyes of all who previously were only leery of you. It is exactly why the woke left has passed its peak and people are now waking up to the facts that no, western civilization wasn't a sexist racist theocracy and needn't have destroyed itself through mass immigration from the 3rd world, even as it is too late.

I'm not saying there's no conflict. I am myself strongly in favor of punishing my political enemies no matter what breaks in the process. But for anyone who still believes in saving, protecting or building anything - infinite vitriol is poison, and will destroy your cause.

I am also of the vitriolic right, but IMO it behooves us to keep in mind that yours is the exact same rhetoric used by the left to valorize rioting negroes and palestinian combatants and all manner of domestic terrorism and social engineering.

All that worked for them. It's still working for them. The woke left hasn't passed its peak; it's just currently in a tactical retreat. In 2028 the Democrats will have a trifecta and their woke vanguard will bring everything back on Day 1, because they have no scruples about the procedural and institutional barriers they use to stop their opponents. They'll "just do things" and there will be no Chicago judge to stop them, nor would they stop if they were told. And if there is resistance, the riot machine gets turned back on.

We'll see. Maybe in America. I expect some changes have already commenced that will manifest over the coming decades, and the political divides of those will not map cleanly to those of the past decades. Demographics remains destiny, and destiny is already happening. There will be a successor ideology to "woke", but it won't be the same - the causes the "woke" were married to are largely discredited in Europe, even as the old guard sticks to them. The young ones have seen them fail. Lockdowns, maximized mass immigration, feminism, tolerance, democracy. The generations growing up right now will find different causes, any alliances with old "woke" will be of convenience rather than conviction. And the biggest bloc of all in Europe will be Muslims - we'll see how that changes the political landscapes. At least that's my prediction.

So, back to America. Maybe it'll be as you say. Maybe a hot culture war or the ethnic cleansing of red-blooded Americans is inevitable. We'll see.

Saving, protecting or building should only come after the enemy is defeated though, through vitriol and aggression. Otherwise they might destroy what you were building and protecting.

Ah yes, once the final victory has been won and the spectre of the enemy ideology is banished forever from the world. Once every actual enemy has been killed and every potential enemy lobotomized and all information pertaining to the enemy ideology has been scoured.

You know, it would be so inconvenient if the enemy were made of the same stuff as us, from the same peoples and families, and a straightforward victory weren't possible. Good thing the enemy is easily identifiable and irredeemable monsters who are completely separate from us.

Seriously though, what would a defeat of the enemy look like, to you?

Seriously though, what would a defeat of the enemy look like, to you?

I can name some examples now that you asked. For one, violent criminal “refugees” from the MENA region getting arrested and deported. Not being “ordered to be deported”, which is very obviously a BS measure intended to deceive NPCs, but getting deported i.e. physically removed. Or cutting aid to Ukraine. Or not suppressing the fact that COVID “vaccines” have caused a massive number of early deaths. Should any of those actually happen, I’d be saying that roughly 30% of the work is done.

Good thing the enemy is easily identifiable and irredeemable monsters who are completely separate from us.

Most of them have in fact made themselves easily visually identifiable already, through public statements and also forms of body modification typical of leftist 'spiteful mutants' (h/t to the Jolly Heretic).

the fact that COVID “vaccines” have caused a massive number of early deaths.

Do you have solid sources backing up this claim?

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If it helps, I do think that there's a lot of angry underemployed highly skilled men floating around right now, just waiting for a chance to do something. Trump is old and there's no clear successor, so there's a big power vacuum right now. X is a great organizational space. It feels like we've got the chance to do something now. I just don't know what.

My personal push would be to form a unified group that pledges simply to withhold tax payments while this particular discrimination regime is allowed to continue.

Needs to be enough buy-in that "they can't prosecute all of us" is a legitimate factor. And ideally pool funds to pay for attorneys for those who do get tried.

Yes, there's like a dozen ways the state can crack down on this, but that would actually force them to cross those lines OR negotiate.

It's harder to disrupt or de-legitimize such a group compared to one that threatens violent martial resistance. Hence why this approach would probably beat forming an informal militia.

What does this look like? W2 income is already automatically taxed for e.g. FICA and to some extent income tax. And the government has plenty of well-exercised sticks to get compliance from both employers and employees.

The only way I can plausibly imagine this working is men going NEET en masse, and that may arguably already be happening. But it's unclear to me what change an army of NEETs can effect.

The only way I can plausibly imagine this working is men going NEET en masse, and that may arguably already be happening. But it's unclear to me what change an army of NEETs can effect.

Yeah this is the "lying flat" movement in China, which is spiritually corrupt imo.

Personally I prefer a strategy of working a low-effort job, enduring relative material poverty, and putting more effort/energy into building social capital, virtue, and an awareness of the problems.

I think you'll find that it's quite easy for the IRS to take your tax money. They don't even need to win a trial, they can just take it directly from your bank with a tax lien and force you to contest it. Unless you're talking about money laundering, but then that's a lot more complicated and a serious felony.

Not more serious than armed insurrection, of course.

This is nuts! Law fare is the tried and true way of damaging US institutions to effect change.

Who is going to pay for the lawfare?

Peter Thiel of course! There is always some rich white guy with an axe to grind in practice.

Some form of DOGE would be a good thing to do. Given how fast it was crushed, there are a lot of money (tens of billions at least, maybe more) that basically are stolen from the budget, and it enables huge number of people to do damaging activism full time, without any resource constraints, while the opposing side has to balance having day job and family and mortgage and all the normal dependencies and vulnerabilities. That's like fighting a professional boxer while trying to cook a meal and care for an infant at the same time. No way you wouldn't lose badly. Disrupting this process would make a huge impact. Even just revealing the details of this - and consistently making it the focus of the discussion - would make an impact, most normies have absolutely no idea how much of the crap they are paying for from their own pockets. A lot of this information is out there, just buried in terabytes of forms and reports. Some of it is non-public, but can be revealed if there's sufficient energy dedicated to it. But except for a handful of people, not a lot of politicians, even from the conservative side, take any interest in that. Partially because they have their own, smaller, grifts, which could be disrupted by revealing and stopping all the massive grifts.

My impression is that the federal government is actually reasonably efficient, at least in the sense that the money goes to the thing it's labelled for, which is why DOGE failed. What we really need is 50+ DOGEs for every state and local government, that's where the real waste is. See for example: the latest scandal with food benefits in Minnesota.

in the sense that the money goes to the thing it's labelled for,

Only in a very broad sense, e.g. if the money is labeled "covid subsidies", it is going to somebody who claimed they need a subsidy because of COVID. But whether they actually need that subsidy, whether they should be in the front of the line for that subsidy, and whether their claim has any relation to reality, and whether they are actually going to spent the money to the cause they promised to spend - all this is controlled very weakly. And the leech networks have long adapted to the weak controls and learned to extract money by saying the correct "open Sesame" phrases, after which they get access to streams of money.

That said, I absolutely agree that state and local money need the same treatment.

It's what Paul Krugman called "An insurance company with an army". So outside medicare, medicaid, social security, defense, and interest payments, there's just not much left to cut. All those individual fed programs that sound suspicious like "covid subsidies" just don't amount to much in the grand scheme of things.

Medicare, medicaid and SS also give some opportunity for grift, and so does defense budget (I mean, if climate change is a threat to national security, we can finance climate change projects through defense budget, right? And if racism is a public health issue, we can finance DEI programs via healthcare budgets as well) we still have almost a trillion dollars in discretionary non-defense spending. It is true that solving the budget balance without addressing mandatory spending is not possible. But I am not talking about solving the budget yet, I am just talking about cutting off the most aggressive leeches, and thus forcing them to at least play on equal footing. My point is not about solving the budget - that can come later - but about denying the enemy the resources which should be either deployed to more worthy causes or returned to (or not taken from) the taxpayers. If the Left wants to donate to their favorite causes, they are welcome to, but without the help of the IRS.

And even Krugman (who one can usually rely on distorting the reality as much as possible to benefit The Party) admits this:

Oh, and the federal government has been providing aid to state and local governments, largely to limit layoffs of schoolteachers.

The schoolteachers part is most likely a lie (I didn't check but I know who Krugman is) but the preceding part is true - significant chunk of federal money goes as "aid" to local budgets, where it is rerouted - either directly, or through a basic fungibility trick - to various pet causes. Establishing transparency and control over this would do the conservative cause a lot of good - but they are doing virtually nothing about it.

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I always find myself thinking about how people in our position handled this drastic narrowing of our scope of opportunities. I was very influenced by Rod Dreher's Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies, as well as Aaron Renn's The Negative World, which, rather than addressing the racial and gender aspects of this, deal with the anti-Christian nature of the current cultural moment; all of these books, in different ways, basically advise you to focus hyper-locally, to keep your internal locus of control alive, and build what you can in the little domain that you are actually able to influence. So I've done that. I've just been elected to a two-year term on my church's leadership board; I managed to get published in a little local history anthology by a small press; I settled down, bought a house in the Midwest and am trying to start a family.

Still - it's painful that we'll never know what we could have done if we were born into a different reality. I had dreams of being a popular novelist. I probably don't have the ability, but because of the cultural headwinds, I also gave up on that before I tried to reach my maximum potential. You might have been a great professor, or maybe you would not have; but people like us, with even greater ability than us, also got pushed into paths where their potentialities are never realized. I am reminded of Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk, a mid-century novel about a girl who dreams of becoming an actress, and ends up shattered by the experience of continual failure. (And of course by encounters with an infamous cad.) Her outcome: a quiet, happy suburban life, but one in which her initial dreams are forgotten. She makes her peace with that, and I've mostly made my peace with what I couldn't do, and of course I can console myself by saying, "Well, that was just my attempt to be special, and I probably wasn't special anyway in the end." There are failures and mediocrities in every generation, but I would've at least liked to try on a more level playing field. Part of this is just growing up, but obviously part of it is that we were frankly cheated out of a fair shot; and it's only so much compensation to say, "Well, I made a great network engineer."

Indeed, you get it my friend. I also just took on a leadership position at my local parish, and am volunteering in a broader capacity with my larger church body.

I think that the best we can do is simply bide our time, spread awareness, and grow our social capital, our virtue, while supporting our side of the culture war here and there. Store up treasures in heaven, where moths can't destroy and thieves can't steal.

Still - it's painful that we'll never know what we could have done if we were born into a different reality.

I thought about this phrase a lot, and in the end, this is yet another poisonous secular idea seeped in the water you drink. In Christianity there is no such a thing like being born as some other person - as other gender, in other time or other place. You were created as a unique soul by God and it is what it is. It reminds me of the conversation penned by Tolkien where Frodo laments:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

If you don't like Tolien, then look at the Book of Job. In a strange sense Christians are more grounded in here and now, and secularists are more entangled in strange mysticism. Be it Rawlsian idea of how everybody is an immortal soul flying around the Earth waiting to be materialized, presupposing the moral structure from this mystical tought experiment. Or transhumanists raving about uploading their soul and making themselves immortal, or of course transgender activists who literally claim that their souls were materialized in wrong body. All of that is nonsense.

That's because liberal secularization peddled self-actualization as the goal of existence. It was super easy to sell, because everyone dreams of better. "Sometimes you just suck and sucks to suck" isn't a great sales pitch.

Hey friend, just wanted to stop in and say I'm doing the same thing. In my twenties I had the dream of being 'significant', but have realized just how much pride was caught up in that. Much more healthy and virtuous is to be a part of your community first, and then if you do good there perhaps you will have expanding influence as a result. To that end I've abandoned my goal of being some kind of auteur, and instead got married, just become a deacon at my church, and am currently working on starting a local small business.

I also went into a tech startup, and we crushed it, then I got fired two weeks before my equity would've vested despite far surpassing all the goals in my initial contract.

I try to keep the light in my heart alive, stay focused on Christ, etc, but damn I am fucking angry

Bruh, you basically got Saverin-adjacented. I think Jesus would understand if you considered pursuing legal action or going on a revenge arc.

I ended up fighting for a decent settlement that was close to a year's income. Probably the better option all things being equal given that the CEO is insanely paranoid and pushed out everyone that did real work in the company. The CTO had it worse than I did but can't talk about that publicly.

Either way, given your posting history on here you're not exactly someone I'd ever look to for moral advice, tyvm.

I didn’t say anything about “moral advice” or advice in general.

For in general, when it comes to advice, I prefer giving, receiving, or neutrally reading effective rather than “moral” advice, whatever “moral” advice may be. Come to think of it, people who immediately reach for phrases such as “moral advice” or “stay[ing] focused on Christ” tend to have a pretty good track record in recent times of losing gracefully. A follower of my posting history might be aware of examples such as forgiving one’s son’s murderer, washing the feet of those who hate you, conceding the supposed non-negotiability of marriage being between a man and a woman.

I’m glad you were able to at least partially subvert the track record and recoup some of your deferred compensation; ywvm.

Indeed, we have very different views of virtue. You're rather Neitzschean I suppose. It's a shame, you could be quite a force if you used your powers for good.... ;P

some things can only ever be a hobby for us - even though there are other people who will be able to dedicate their whole lives to them

This has always been true. If you really want to make a career out of something like painting, this has been true for basically all of history.

Basically most art and artisanal crafting (woodworking, etc) falls into this bucket

Edit: to be clear I'm not denying the rest of this, I'm just saying I grew up knowing that a significant number of interesting career paths were cut off due to lack of strong economic viability, thats not a new issue

Professional painters exist, and I don’t even mean housepainters(which anyone who isn’t visibly high when inquiring can get). Portrait artists have no control of the creativity of their profession, is all.

I don't dispute that, but it also doesn't engage with the article's thesis: that there was a window that was previously open for white men to participate in these culture-making activities, which has been closed artificially. Of course it was never the case that everyone could e.g. write for The New Yorker - there were always too many people who would like to. But the premise before, and the ideal for which we should aim, was that whoever could do it best could get the role, regardless of their identity; and now identity is an impassable barrier.

Previously, the parental advice would have been: "It's great if you want to try and become a journalist, but try and build some hard skills as a fallback plan because it's hard to get a job in that." Now it's, "Don't try to become a journalist at all, the field is actually closed to you."

Ding ding ding.

And then there's the added problem of "oh, and any other field you might want to try could arbitrarily be closed off to you if it ever becomes lucrative and high-status enough for entryists to target."

The piece addressed this point as well. Based on the stats white men did not migrate into other high-status fields like medicine, law, and tech, likely because of the same discriminatory hiring practices.

The white men shut out of the culture industries didn’t surge into other high-status fields. They didn’t suddenly flood advertising, law, or medicine, which are all less white and significantly less male than they were a decade ago. White men dropped from 31.2 percent of law school matriculants in 2016 to 25.7 percent in 2024.

The shift in medicine has been even more dramatic. In 2014, white men were 31 percent of American medical students. By 2025, they were just 20.5 percent—a ten-percentage-point drop in barely over a decade. “At every step there’s some form of selection,” a millennial oncologist told me. “Medical school admissions, residency programs, chief resident positions, fellowships—each stage tilts away from white men or white-adjacent men… The white guy is now the token.”

Nor was tech much of a refuge. At Google, white men went from nearly half the workforce in 2014 to less than a third by 2024—a 34 percent decline. In 2014, at Amazon, entry-level “professionals”—college graduates just starting out—were 42.3 percent white male. These were the employees who, if they’d advanced normally over the next decade, would be the mid-level managers of today. But mid-level Amazon managers fell from 55.8 percent white male in 2014 to just 33.8 percent in 2024—a decline of nearly 40 percent.

I don't dispute that, but it also doesn't engage with the article's thesis

So fair, I was really just commenting on that isolated thought

I think the article fails to bring up the most important factor: journalism, screenwriting and academia are all incredibly oversaturated and the number of people wanting to go into those fields massively outstrips the demand, and on top of that, the first two are rapidly shrinking fields, while academia is producing more new grads than ever competing for the same few spots. The old GenX/Boomers at the top are obviously going to want to hold on to their share of a shrinking pie, and let's not kid ourselves, merit was never the primary consideration when it came to hiring writers before either.

I agree with @FiveHourMarathon below. The reality is that many of the prime drivers of racial and gender affirmative action were old, largely white, men in positions of economic and in some cases political power in many of these institutions. There was some pressure around board seats or gender reporting, particularly in parts of Europe. But the majority was not forced.

There are two motives here, both obvious.

To a smart old man, a young, highly ambitious man is competition in a way a young, even highly ambitious woman is not. The woman probably won’t make it to the top; even today, when big law new hires are gender equal and have had many women for a long time, 75% of new partners are men. In finance, probably 75% of new managing directors this year are men, too, (apparently 73% at Goldman), more at some places. Race is an additional variable; because of longstanding stereotypes eg. about how personable Asian applicants are, or implicit beliefs in other details, Mr Editor in Chief might not see James Wong or James Chukwu as as much competition as James Williams or James Goldstein (and make no mistake, in publishing/media/film/arts, a lot of the ‘white men’ shut out over the past decade who would previously have found a place in the business were Jewish). The boss may well be wrong. But his belief is there nevertheless. Creative businesses are those in which youth is often prioritized; a senior director in advertising has seen 28 year old guys replace 55 year olds because they have better ideas, are younger, hotter, and cheaper, before.

The second motive is sex. Well, not necessarily sex, but men enjoy and have always enjoyed the company of pretty younger women. In 1975 you had to deal with the sweaty young men who worked for you because that was who the firm hired. In 2020 you could become ‘executive mentor’ to a bunch of pretty, 28-32 year old Asian, Indian and white women under the guise of “equity and inclusion” and be praised for it. What’s more, none of them had the chutzpah to book coffee with the head of division and pitch that they can do your job for half the pay.

An underhanded competition between old men in power and younger versions of themselves isn’t the only story of the woke era, but it is one of them.

The reality is that many of the prime drivers of racial and gender affirmative action were old, largely white, men in positions of economic and in some cases political power in many of these institutions.

Most feminists are not men. Most race-hustlers are not white. These are just-so stories which just happen to place all the blame (and all the agency) on the designated enemy... old white men.

No, but in 2016 when woke started, most executives in American companies (probably at least at 70% of them) were white men.

Woke did not start in 2016, though it may have adopted that name at that time.

I'm pretty sure most executives were white men prior to 2016 too.

Also even with the current filters on straight white men, the ones that have the right combination of connections and genuine merit to actually get through the adverse hiring are likely going to be flat better than their competition.

I have thought on the hypothesis that Older males are acting in ways that inhibit up and coming young bucks because they instinctively(?) view them as competition for resources and, yes, mates that could unseat them from positions they very much feel they have earned and are entitled to keep.

Is it purposeful but maybe not 'intentional' behavior, throwing up obstacles for up-and-comers, giving them half-baked or outdated advice, and gleefully implementing social policies that systemically exclude such men under the veneer of 'equality', all in the name of keeping those possible competitors from threatening their current grasp on power.

I can think of multiple events in the Bible, for instance, where an older male in power seeks to inhibit or literally kill a younger upstart 'rival' to keep him from unseating him. You know why Saul wanted David (i.e. the dude who slew Goliath) dead? There was a literal prophesy that David would be king. And Saul wanted his son to be King. Even though his son liked David. Oh, keeping things relevant to the season, Jesus' birth caused King Herod to slay every single male under age two in Jerusalem for fear of being unseated decades later.

I could see this dynamic playing out writ large on the civilizational scale.

But there's little research on this point, and I don't think anyone has admitted to feeling this way or using this to guide their decisions, so I don't feel I can prove this with any strength.

Part of the evidence I've seen in favor of this hypothesis is that nepotism is still clearly a way to get ahead for white males. Note that I do not consider nepotism inherently a bad thing. That is, older men still clearly favor their progeny for advancement, they aren't throwing their own sons to the wolves... but it would then stand to reason that they are being much more suspicious of males they aren't related to and would feel fewer qualms about kicking out the ladder that those kids might use to advance.

Being a little bit petty, notice that Alexander Soros gets to be the heir apparent of his father's massive empire. The same father who has spent B-I-L-L-I-O-N-S of dollars implementing the exact policies and pushing the exact ideas that led to the issue the OP article identified.

It would stand to complete reason that George Soros might elevate a proud woman of color to take over his empire. But he chose his own male child, and said son, despite claiming to share his father's priorities, happily accepts. WHAT GIVES? (This is not an antisemetic dogwhistle, for those who have already instantly thought along those lines.)

So yeah, there's the real possibility this is all just an evolutionary arms race with the genes that favor their own kin implementing a cultural superweapon to generate an advantage in the great game of environmental fitness.

In 1975 you had to deal with the sweaty young men who worked for you because that was who the firm hired. In 2020 you could become ‘executive mentor’ to a bunch of pretty, 28-32 year old Asian, Indian and white women under the guise of “equity and inclusion” and be praised for it.

Just had to watch out for MeToo accusations. I noted that some evidence against my hypothesis is that older men were still getting sniped with being sex pests, and no matter how much power they had this was often enough to get them removed and unable to return to their former glory.

You can ascribe some of that to intra-elite competition.

Plenty of young dudes caught up in it as well, but if this were an 'intentional' play by older males to thin out the competition, it surely backfired on many of them, and hurt their overall ability to use their own power to procure sex from young women, which they certainly would not prefer to happen.

This likely also plays into the whole Epstein debacle, but I will leave that aside.

Those blaming old white men or women have lost the plot IMO. For around a decade, anyone consuming the news was exposed to stories designed to increase concern and love for minorities while increasing only disgust and anger at White men. This was done through daily news consumption which acted as a series of repeated trials, not dissimilar to how a psychologist can train a reflexive emotional behavior in an animal when a neutral stimuli is repeatedly paired with a conditioning stimuli. These repeated trials or iterations were variably scheduled and cross-contextual, by changing the subjects and locations but retaining the same desired response, to maximize the strength of the reflexive behavior. They used emotionally-potent stories to enhance this response, because the pitiable and unusual increases the strength of the memory. They also, perhaps unknowingly or perhaps knowingly, structured these trials like the “misinformation effect” studies, where a person who remembers an event in detail before learning new information about the event will have his memory of the event altered to encode the new information over the old. This was done using the typical format of “you might have heard… here’s why you’re wrong”, and “the rumor… debunked”.

The people who ran the news at this time, and organizations like the SPLC and the ADL who policed the news, effectively brainwashed the public into hating White people and loving minorities. Brainwashing is a real thing. It’s not just a movie trope, it’s an actual phenomenon. If you were to enter North Korea, the citizen’s reflexive response to hearing about America or capitalism may be the same as a 2016 liberal girl’s response to hearing about White men, and this was inculcated in the same exact way, which is repeated trials where something is paired with an emotionally potent “conditioned stimuli”. Except actually, the 2016 person’s response would be stronger because they received more trials.

You wouldn’t blame your sheep if they were eaten by wolves, because they are sheep, they can’t help it. Similarly you shouldn’t blame the average American for falling victim to a highly sophisticated decades-long propaganda operation by those they were supposed to trust. If you always saw through it, congratulations, you’re a news-obsessive or an autist or really neurotic or are just built different. But the average person isn’t like you, they conform to their social superiors. This is the usual mode of human living. You cannot change the fact that most people are conformist, you need to make sure that the people who control how the public is molded are not evil or stupid.

you need to make sure that the people who control how the public is molded are not evil or stupid.

The question is how? And don't say "vote".

The answer is "Vote, but do it like they voted for Mussolini and for Hitler.". Which is to say: With a well-coordinated mass movement that actually represents the immediate political will of a vocal plurality of the people.

If that is no longer possible, then the people are indeed no longer fit to be the sovereign but simply the substrate of the state. A democracy or republic in name only; in truth an oligarchy or, if not even that, then some novel entity guided entirely by impersonal processes rather than any individual or collective human will.

To me at least, that's what it felt like we were doing during the three Trump campaigns. Never in my life did I expect to be involved in such a polarizing political environment, but the cause felt worthy enough that I made sacrifices to endorse it. I'm sure others experienced the fractured relationships, social ostracization, and professional hazards that came along with supporting the man who seemed to be the only one willing to stand up against the zeitgeist.

And then you get stuff like this and you just kinda throw up your hands and realize you've probably been duped once again.

You can plan ways to influence billionaires who will go on to buy platforms and pay for influencers; Elon’s purchase of x demonstrates the efficacy of this strategy. That is the only “mainstream” solution because everything in culture is ultimately decided by a billionaire. You actually need one of your billionaires to own a platform before you can even create counter-propaganda, because as we saw in the 10’s, anyone trying to combat left wing propaganda with their own propaganda would be banned upon getting too popular. And it really is just a propaganda war, because (1) the activist Left’s insistence on highlighting their views from the PoV of a pitiable minority is indistinguishable from the conscious development of propaganda, because it’s just as predicated on influence eg exaggeration and sympathy; and (2) the effective way to combat propaganda isn’t “telling the truth”, as that doesn’t lead to engagement and influence, but actual propaganda or counter-propaganda, otherwise you just lose. You might say, “but can’t you still boycott?”, but no, because the only place people find out about boycotts and are reinforced to boycott is on social media. Which is owned by a billionaire. Even if you have a zealot running social media, as in the case of Gab, no one is going to join it unless they see reason to join it which again requires propaganda in the dominant social media ecosystem.

What I think is the more resilient longterm solution, though it would require decades of development, is the formation of a parallel culture built upon rituals and stories of allegiance which create an abiding in-group preference. This would just be taking the most powerful civic and religious rituals of Western history and tailoring them so that they create a in-group preference among adherents whilst inoculating them against those myths of progressivism that inevitably lead to ruin (“everyone is the same”, colonialism, racism, slavery, stolen land — these need to be reproved before someone starts hearing about it in their teens). Only this is enough to combat the influence of algorithms and social media. Theoretically with the right “cultural-ritual infrastructure” you can develop a perfectly fine parallel community which will run on indefinitely.

I don’t think there’s another solution.

I agree it is racist. I agree there is rank hypocrisy. I agree DEI aware hiring is tantamount to gay/race grifting.

But isn't the fully based response that, ideally, you actually want shamelessly sexist/racist hiring in humanities jobs that produce cultural products for the US and for the world? You want people who intimately understand the demographics you're selling to. A team of 99% white male writers is probably not the best way to go if there are black women who might buy your product. It might not even be the best way to go at 50% male writers.

As long as you're not hiring less qualified people to meet a DEI quota, this is the right move.

Also, isn't there so much insane overproduction of talent in the humanities already? I fully believe you can limit yourself to black lesbian female artists and writers only for a wide breadth of jobs and ship. You'll explode spectacularly if you try that in a hard science, but humanities? Probably fine.

A team of 99% white male writers is probably not the best way to go if there are black women who might buy your product.

Why do we keep getting teams of trans lesbians of color then? They represent a very tiny slice of the public. And honestly, Don Draper or any of his real-life pasty-white 1950s counterparts could sell to black women better than they could.

Also, isn't there so much insane overproduction of talent in the humanities already?

There's overproduction of something. I wouldn't call it talent.

Why do we keep getting teams of trans lesbians of color then?

Because of the gay/race grifting I talked about earlier.

Why do we keep getting teams of trans lesbians of color then?

Because there are lots of all-male teams by default, and the ones which self-define as trans lesbians don't get cancelled for being all-male?

But isn't the fully based response that, ideally, you actually want shamelessly sexist/racist hiring in humanities jobs that produce cultural products for the US and for the world? You want people who intimately understand the demographics you're selling to. A team of 99% white male writers is probably not the best way to go if there are black women who might buy your product.

Japan seems to get by with many 100% Japanese writing teams for works that are internationally popular, including with American blacks they should be even more distant from.

And by contrast, the sexist/racist hiring for production of cultural products in the US has resulted in an astonishingly massive drop in content quality across the entire entertainment sector, and several of the most notable entertainment disasters ever seen.

What do you have in mind? What exemplifies this massive drop in quality?

I don't consume much movies/tv shows/pop culture these days because most of it doesn't appeal to me but I figured that was mostly a result of my own aging out of the main age demographic.

Concord is the example currently passing from myth into legend. A reported development cost of $400 million and most of a decade in development. The result:

Upon release, Concord failed to exceed 700 simultaneous players on Steam. Will Nelson of PCGamesN noted that compared to Helldivers 2, a multiplayer game released by Sony in the same year, Concord's player count was much lower than the 400,000 Steam players Helldivers 2 attracted at launch. Nelson attributed Concord's poor performance to a lack of uniqueness and a high price while competing in a heavily saturated market dominated by free-to-play games like Overwatch 2 and Valorant. One week after launch, on August 29, the game had 162 simultaneous players on Steam. It was estimated that less than a week after release, the game had sold a total of around 25,000 units, with sales of 10,000 on Steam and 15,000 on PlayStation.

Due to the magnitude of its commercial failure, it is cited by various publications, including The Guardian, PC Gamer, ComicBook.com, and Insider Gaming, as one of the biggest failures in video game history.

There's been a fair amount of competition for that title in the triple-A games market.

More generally, pick a popular media franchise and check how it's done over the last decade. The Witcher, Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Marvel, DC, superhero media generally. Willow got a revival as a streaming show that did so bad it's been literally scrubbed off the internet. Aliens, predator, terminator are in a bad way. Arguments over whether woke media were the future or a dead-end used to be quite frequent here, with reds generally arguing "get woke, go broke" and blues arguing "this is what modern audiences want". It seems to me that we don't have those discussions any more because the observed market outcomes have more or less settled the question. In fact, I would argue that the drop in quality has become so egregious and so widespread that it has had a measurable impact on customer behavior across the media landscape, with customers becoming significantly more reluctant to give new content a chance.

Arguments over whether woke media were the future or a dead-end used to be quite frequent here, with reds generally arguing "get woke, go broke" and blues arguing "this is what modern audiences want". It seems to me that we don't have those discussions any more because the observed market outcomes have more or less settled the question.

Okay, Concord is one among several examples of the super-woke productions crashing and burning.

But the market has more or less said, as far as I have seen, that it tolerates a lot of blue/woke design choices though? "Body type" instead of sex in character creators, a strange amount of lgbt and dark skinned and girlboss characters, etc. You don't see many categorically 'based' games getting major budgets or publication, unless they all just escape my attention. Most forums and games journalists are pretty much onboard with the US Democrat/progressive tenets, even outside the US. Yes, there's the chud gamer stereotype who is not entirely unfairly labeled misogynist etc, but they don't get to do the decision making at the top or anything.

As for customers not buying a lot of new games or consoles anymore, that's gotta be partly down to the economy and due to publishers playing it too safe instead of creating anything very creative most of the time? They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.

But the market has more or less said, as far as I have seen, that it tolerates a lot of blue/woke design choices though?

You cite a bunch of correlated factors on the production end, all of which are accurate. It is indeed true that if all the major studios and all the major media outlets all adopt an ideological tack in the same direction, the industry as a whole will indeed move in that direction.

But then, consequences.

As for customers not buying a lot of new games or consoles anymore, that's gotta be partly down to the economy and due to publishers playing it too safe instead of creating anything very creative most of the time? They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.

There will always be excuses for why failure is the fault of nebulous outside forces and not the deliberate decisions of those in positions of authority. These excuses are not going to get Doctor Who another season. Take Star Wars in particular; they've just had a major triple-A game release within the last year or so. Searching for "star wars outlaws sales" gives me the following summary:

Star Wars Outlaws has sold approximately 1 million units since its release in August 2024, but it underperformed compared to Ubisoft's expectations. Despite receiving generally positive reviews, the game struggled in a competitive market and faced challenges related to the Star Wars brand's current popularity.

...Why would it face challenges related to the Star Wars brand's current popularity? Isn't the whole point of the Star Wars brand that it's about as close to universally-popular as you can get? Well, not any more, apparently.

They've been re-heating old formulas for too long.

Marvel released 21 movies leading up to Endgame, and I watched most of them. I watched I think two movies post-endgame. I'll never watch another marvel production again. I do not appear to be alone in this decision. Why is it that 21 movies = massive success, but 23 = dismal failure?

Is fairgames a reheated formula? New IP, in a genre that's not too overdeveloped. Obviously they had enough faith in it to invest in that trailer. How's it doing? Not so good.

Bungie made a money printer with Destiny and Destiny 2. It's now in serious trouble. Destiny 2 is my hole, it was made for me! I got in as free-to-play, spent increasing amounts of money on DLC, evangelized the game to other players. When the Lightfall DLC dropped, I went all-in and paid a hundred bucks to pre-order the whole expansion package. How'd that go? ...I quit Destiny for good. A lot of other people did too. Bungie's done massive layoffs, game quality has dropped into the toilet with tons of bugs and bad design choices.

But it's cool, they've got a new game coming, a revival of their classic Marathon IP. It's now been delayed, its lunch has been pretty thoroughly eaten by Arc Raiders, and its current trajectory is pretty clearly toward total failure. Sony paid 3 billion for this company, right about the time their output turned to literal shit.

More broadly, was Tolkien overdone? Was Wheel of Time overdone? You're telling me there wasn't actually a market for big-budget fantasy TV, after the dismal collapse of Game of Thrones? Witcher was shaping up to be a hit; why did it implode?

If tentpole IP is a bad investment, why did everyone invest so hard into it, and where's the better path forward that they're missing?

You have good points.

I'm just wondering when all this customer/sales feedback will result in actual changes for the better in what output we get from the corps/devs. They should have received the message by now, right? That's why I'm not very optimistic.

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Is fairgames a reheated formula? New IP, in a genre that's not too overdeveloped. Obviously they had enough faith in it to invest in that trailer. How's it doing? Not so good.

I'm not sure they thought through the economics of anyone who would approve of this trailer likely being a proud pirate.

But isn't the fully based response that, ideally, you actually want shamelessly sexist/racist hiring in humanities jobs that produce cultural products for the US and for the world?

If they can make the case that there's a bona fide occupational qualification to be a certain race/sex/etc., then they can get their exception to civil rights laws, just like anybody else can. Actually, race can almost never be used in that way (the exception is for actors). Also, customer satisfaction doesn't count.

I'd sure like it if they took the fully-based approach. It would have stalled them for a decade or so as they tried to get new legislation passed, and optimistically we could have had a clear public debate about the merits of sex- and race-based discrimination.

A team of 99% white male writers is probably not the best way to go if there are black women who might buy your product.

Not the first time I've seen this claim, and my response is the same. If you think white males have a lot of money, you're going to tailor your product to them.

The alternative is that you think there are a lot of suspiciously wealthy black women, in which case this argument might hold water and it's worth throwing away the white male audience to cater to black female money.

Does it 1:1 trade white men in the audience for black and female audience though? Some of the white men may complain about the black elves and all of the girlbosses in Starfleet command but they still buy it.

Nothing in sales is ever 1:1. However, ask Jaguar how their rebrand went.

Counterpoint: people have been complaining about woke garbage and DEI and ESG capturing corporate America for at least a decade now but the S&P 500 has been racking up ATHs the entire way.

(I would love to see a counter-factual world where there was no DEI and ESG and press play and compare the S&P 500 in that world to this one though)

I too would love to have a Multiverse Viewer, but I don't think the stock market is a particularly good measure of economic performance.

Black americans are a tiny portion of the global population and black americans are not going to appeal better to Indians, Philipinoes, Egyptians or Romanians. If anything they will do worse.

JD Vance has retweeted it. Looks like this essay will really go viral.

A response from Jeremy Carl on his substack The Course of Empire.

Skipping to the conclusion:

There are many good things in Savage’s article, and I always welcome it when anyone shines a fresh spotlight on the discrimination against White men that has been going on for years. And to the extent he opens up some eyes that are not already opened as to the reality of the discrimination that young White men are facing in 2025, I give a hearty two cheers for him. But neither Savage nor his piece are yet deserving of a third.

The establishment that denied opportunities to Savage and his millennial and Gen Z White male cohort are not, as Savage seemingly implies, basically good people who unfortunately had the single moral or intellectual flaw that they happened to discriminate against White men. They are horrible people, people who are totally unworthy of controlling the commanding heights of our society. They are moral monsters, racists, sexists, and intellectual cowards. And they, and the corrupt institutions that they have run for decades, must be either reformed completely with their incumbent leadership ousted—or else destroyed.

Savage has done a real service by thoroughly documenting, with the latest data, just how detestably hostile to young White men our so-called “elite” institutions have become. But until he and the fellow White male “moderates” and IDW camp followers he profiles rid themselves of their deadly desire to make excuses for their abusers, they will unfortunately be of limited help in solving the problems Savage so ably outlines.

Facts and data are wonderful things, but courage and conviction are more important still.

And even his the article’s final sentences are timid questions rather than confident declarations.

So there is some vitriol out there.


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