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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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I suspect Vladimir Putin is dead. I think the man in charge of the country is a double. World leaders are known to have body doubles, often multiples. For clarity, I'm going to introduce "Vlad", a person who resembles Putin and was recruited into performing as a double, likely after some cosmetic surgeries to tighten up the image. Putin has reportedly had some nasty health problems over the last 3 years or so, and I have seen multiple articles suspecting a double acting in certain capacities, with side by sides of Putin and "Vlad". I found this reporting credibly speculative, and I felt that I could reliably and consistently distinguish "Vlad" from Putin, particularly over time.

There is a problem of course: if "Vlad" exists, how can we be sure any particular Putin photo is actually of Putin?

Here is some evidence I've found, and I did not look very hard. I was reading https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12231813/Prepare-deeply-dangerous-unpredictable-Russia-Putin-replaced-says-security-expert.html and happened to notice "Vlad", and scrolled down further to find what appeared to be an older photo of Putin.

"Vlad": https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/06/25/15/72511321-12231813-Russian_President_Vladimir_Putin_on_state_television_today_said_-a-9_1687704720258.jpg

Putin: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/06/25/15/72483879-12231813-Out_of_jail_and_free_to_run_his_large_mercenary_army_Prigozhin_l-a-16_1687704764143.jpg

Note, I am not saying that these are great examples. If someone looked much harder, they could make a stronger case. "Vlad" to me looks softer and smoother, without the hardness or sharpness that I've come to associate with Putin's gaze.

My best guess at a narrative, if Vladimir Putin is in fact dead at this moment:

Putin probably has a double even before he gets sick. This may or may not be the current "Vlad". I think Putin realizes he has a likely terminal disease before the Ukraine invasion. As he gets sicker, the need for the double increases, both in terms of scheduling around illness and heightened scrutiny. Perhaps there is additional recruitment or cosmetic procedures. Putin invades Ukraine. Perhaps within a year of the invasion, he becomes incapacitated, and the double takes over, likely with the assistance of high level FSB.

  • -11

This conspiracy theory is very popular in Russia. In fact, it posits not that there is a single double, but that there are several: "The banqueting one" ("Банкетный"), "the Udmurt", "the Talking One" ("Говорун"). It's a fun theory, but the Western intelligence services would have known (as they knew about Prigozhin preparing his putsch even though Russian services completely missed it). And they would have leaked this, I think.

Putin taking a break from the public isn't actually new. IIRC when other members of his inner circle had issues with Kadyrov (who then fled went to Dubai for a bit) he took his sweet time coming out despite Kadyrov clearly trying to feel him out and get his attention via social media.

It has precedent.

EDIT: Looked it up to confirm I wasn't crazy, it was in 2015 after the murder of Nemtsov.

So…how does this make any more sense? Looks like a bunch of extra complexity—coordination, secrecy, motivation—for no actual benefit. It doesn’t explain any of Wagner’s actions, let alone the MoD.

It's unmistakeable, Vlad has less hair, and it's almost completely grey, that's sloppy doublesmanship.... Another hypothesis would be that Vlad is merely an older incarnation of the entity previously known as Putin, which itself once appeared as Vova, a cute child full of life. Are you the same person you were yesterday?

Also, a double doesn't make sense. If Putin is alive, he can credibly threaten, as well as lead, his inner circle. A double can't, while still making negotiations with the west much more difficult.

No, sorry. You can't simulate the voice and little mannerisms he had and still has, quite clearly. Maybe it's not as clear if you don't speak russian natively, but he has quite a distinctive voice and the way of speaking. And I don't have any internal protests against discussing this theory seriously even though it sounds ridiculous. It is in fact ridiculous unfortunately.

Not even arguing about his doubles, it's irrelevant.

I don't think Putin is dead and has a body double, but ML could simulate those voices and mannerisms (certainly in audio, video is harder). Compare to the tom cruise lookalike who used ML to make it more convincing. edit: Yeah, I agree with below comment, also I'm pretty sure there are things like phone camera recordings of him

I'm sure it can be done, but his talks aren't rare and often they're taken with other people in various natural situations. So while it's not completely eliminating the scenario the op is talking about, it reduces the plausibility of that theory to something similar to the flat earth.

Worth noting that the body double theory is much more plausible, not to the level when I personally think it's likely, but there's a lot of "research" done there by various autistic people (anons mostly to my knowledge, also by Ukrainian low-iq propaganda outlets understandably).

something similar to the flat earth.

This theory is orders of magnitudes more probable than the flat earth, there is no comparison.

In fact, Putin himself said they considered to use doubles at the start of his presidency:

https://meduza.io/short/2020/02/27/putin-skazal-chto-on-nastoyaschiy-udmurta-i-banketnogo-ne-suschestvuet

something similar to the flat earth.

I was saying that about the theory that the real Putin is dead. The theory that Putin has doubles is indeed much more plausible, as i was saying.

I think storytellers in general have always been very fond of “the king is actually dead” tropes (list) because they serve to make things interesting, but real life examples are very much rare.

The big problem is that the inner circle who actually do encounter and know the leader personally (and who would therefore know he was dead) also stand to benefit the most from his death, and so are the least likely to maintain the veil of secrecy.

Putin’s death is a great opportunity for Medvedev or whoever else to clean house, declare the invasion a mistake made by idiots, and to focus on the old pastime of personal enrichment and kleptocracy. For nobody in the inner circle to do it would take the genuine and sincere ideological commitment to the Ukrainian war as a national project that I suspect is lacking in the Kremlin.

VisionOS and the Future of Input


Ever since the computer first arrived, keyboard and mouse has been the standard. You have a flat surface with raised little squares that you smack with your fingers. You have another little rounded shape with a flat bottom you move around, and click with.

This awkward, clunky interface has significant culture war elements, in that an entire class of powerful people arose - specifically people who didn't have traditional status markers like height, strength, or indomitable physical presence. Instead these 'nerds' or 'geeks' or whatever you want to call them specialized themselves in the digital realm. Now, the Zuckerburgs and Musks of the prior generation rule the world. Or if they don't, they soon will.

These outdated interfaces seem perfectly normal to everyone who has only used them. Sure many people have used a controller for video games, and may think that controllers are superior for some cases, but not others. Keyboard and mouse is the only way to operate when it comes to a computer, most people surely imagine.

That being said, it's actually quite easy to dip your toes into alternate input methods. Talon is a system that utilizes voice to let you do practically anything on a computer. You can move the mouse, click on any object on your screen, dictate, edit text, and you can even code quite well. Talon's system even supports mapping operations, sometimes very complex ones, to custom noises you record on your own.

On top of that you can integrate eye tracking, using a relatively inexpensive device. If you've ever used voice control combined with eye tracking, you can operate around as fast as someone who is decent at using a keyboard and mouse.

If you have ever used these systems, you probably know that because most digital setups are built for keyboard and mouse, it's not necessarily perfect. Keyboard and mouse still hold the crown.

But. There is a certain magic to controlling a computer through your voice, or your eyes. It begins to open your mind to new possibilities, the idea that there are better, faster, easier, more natural ways of interfacing with a computer than the defaults we have been stuck with.


Enter Apple's VisionOS.

If you haven't seen the recent demo of Apple's new VisionOS they're breaking brand new ground. The entire OS is built around looking at things, and making minute hand motions to control the icons you're looking at. There are no controllers, no physical interfaces whatsoever besides your eyes and your hands. It's breathtaking to watch.

In a review from John Gruber, a well respected old head in the VR space and a creator of markdown, the possibilities behind this new technology are apparent. Gruber describes how

First: the overall technology is extraordinary, and far better than I expected. And like my friend and Dithering co-host Ben Thompson, my expectations were high. Apple exceeded them. Vision Pro and VisionOS feel like they’ve been pulled forward in time from the future. I haven’t had that feeling about a new product since the original iPhone in 2007. There are several aspects of the experience that felt impossible.

Now Apple does tend to get a ton of hype, but this reaction of being amazed by the experience is surprisingly common among earlier reviewers:

Similarly, Apple’s ability to do mixed reality is seriously impressive. At one point in a full VR Avatar demo I raised my hands to gesture at something, and the headset automatically detected my hands and overlaid them on the screen, then noticed I was talking to someone and had them appear as well. Reader, I gasped.

The implications of this 'spatial operating system' are varied and multitudinous, of course. There will be all sorts of productivity gains, and new ways of interacting with the digital world, and fun new apps. However I'm most interested in how this innovation could shift the balance of power back to the strong and physically capable, away from the nerds.

No longer will clunky interfaces make sense - instead computers will be optimized around healthy, fully functional humans. Ideally the most intuitive and common control schemes will reward physical fitness and coordination. Traits which nerds lack in droves.

Will we see a reversal of the popularity that being a nerd or geek has gained in the past few decades? Only time will tell.

Microsoft demonstrated the same capabilities with Hololens several years ago, so this is not technically groundbreaking. I think Apple will need its usual refinement but also to reduce the cost by about an order of magnitude for this to be a world changing product.

No, Hololens seems positively quaint in comparison to the Vision Pro.

Most damningly, it had a projected FOV of 52 degrees diagonally.

That's like trying to use a large living room TV as a window into the interface, as opposed to Apple who are around 110 degrees from what I've heard.

I suspect the UX is significantly better for Apple, even if both have eye and hand tracking.

I do agree that the price needs to drop, by at least 2/3rds before it becomes a common sight.

I didn't dispute it was better. Hololens 2 was like 5 years ago. I'm just saying it's not groundbreaking, it's Apple doing what they do, letting groundbreaking technology mature and then refining it.

Ever since the computer first arrived, keyboard and mouse has been the standard. You have a flat surface with raised little squares that you smack with your fingers. You have another little rounded shape with a flat bottom you move around, and click with.

my fingers are not exactly small, and this has not been a problem. every few years a company tries to reinvent the keyboard and mouse, and it never catches on. the Logitech trackball mouse is one such example. or ergonomic non-QUERTY keyboards, Wacom tablets, or touchpads (except for laptops).

If you haven't seen the recent demo of Apple's new VisionOS they're breaking brand new ground. The entire OS is built around looking at things, and making minute hand motions to control the icons you're looking at. There are no controllers, no physical interfaces whatsoever besides your eyes and your hands. It's breathtaking to watch.

for one, it costs a lot. Full-immersion headsets have been around for decades and never caught on due to causing nausea or other problems.

This awkward, clunky interface has significant culture war elements, in that an entire class of powerful people arose - specifically people who didn't have traditional status markers like height, strength, or indomitable physical presence. Instead these 'nerds' or 'geeks' or whatever you want to call them specialized themselves in the digital realm. Now, the Zuckerburgs and Musks of the prior generation rule the world. Or if they don't, they soon will.

i dunno where this notion of high-iq people or 'nerds' being small and diminutive came from. it's not backed by evidence either scientific or empirical. given the positive correlation between IQ and height ,we would expect the opposite --for smarter people to be taller, bigger, and heavier. Zuck is short, but Elon and Marc Andreessen are 6'2 and 6'4 respectively. . when i am walking down the street, the people doing construction/road work, by in large, are really short but stocky, but shorter and lighter than businessmen for sure, who i can presume to be higher IQ . same for people at cashiers or other retail or homeless or mentally ill people.

or ergonomic non-QUERTY keyboards, Wacom tablets, or touchpads (except for laptops).

Ahh I forgot to mention this - the QWERTY keyboard is a perfect example of pointless and inefficient input tech.

Can you please stop just saying ridiculous shit without even attempting to justify it?

I realize that I may be outside of the context window of the Motte on this post. I thought folks here would be more familiar with keyboard/mouse history, I was wrong.

Here's a decent writeup of how QWERTY is essentially an anachronistic mistake.

Familiarity with the topic doesn't make it more relevant to your thesis. Dvorak is exactly as arbitrary and hard to learn as Qwerty. The relative efficiency of touch-typing english text matters when you're already doing 100+ wpm and type regularly as part of your job or something. Most people don't touch type, a different layout wouldn't help them any.

Of course, I don't think your thesis has any basis in reality anyway. The average person these days is quite proficient with phone onscreen keyboards, which are vastly worse interfaces than physical keyboards.

And, as with dictation, if you want to do your text input with eyetracking, you've been able to do that on existing computers for years. People keep using keyboards because they are in fact quite good at what they do.

Okay, this is one I’ll back up. I thought it was commonly accepted.

The QWERTY design was intended to minimize typewriter jams. Hitting two adjacent keys too fast tended to jam, because each letter swung a tiny arm. So the design placed common consonant pairs fair apart, maximizing clearance.

In grade school, this was glossed as “intentionally arranged to slow the user down.” I don’t think this is accurate. But there are definitely some features that come straight from the 1870s. Without tiny arms to jam, they’re pure, “pointless” technical debt.

On the other hand, the evidence for any particular replacement isn’t very good. A skilled typist works around the nonsense just fine. So the “inefficiency” is minimal at best. It certainly doesn’t favor nerds! Still, we could in theory benefit more from a different standard.

It isn't efficient (although as you say, it's not less efficient than most other keyboard layouts we've tried) and if he'd just said that I wouldn't have said anything. But calling it pointless is just wrong - there was a point to its design, and the point to it now is that all of the world's fastest typists are fluent in it and converting them would be a monumental task.

That said, we could definitely do better if we could start over. There was a keyboard design for thumbsticks I used to have on the psp that I reached 68wpm on after only a month's usage for example.

Full-immersion headsets have been around for decades and never caught on due to causing nausea or other problems

To put it bluntly, full immersion VR headsets from before the Oculus era (circa 2013) were rather shite.

They had poor software support, terrible displays, and overall were useful for very little indeed.

The hardware has massively improved, especially for any given price point.

i dunno where this notion of high-iq people or 'nerds' being small and diminutive came from. it's not backed by evidence either scientific or empirical. given the positive correlation between IQ and height ,we would expect the opposite --for smarter people to be taller, bigger, and heavier. Zuck is short, but Elon and Marc Andreessen are 6'2 and 6'4 respectively.

Some combination of latent Just World and egalitarian fallacy, that individuals have the same amount of attribute points, just distributed differently.

It’s also sad and darkly hilarious how men can’t escape their height. Men like Cruise and Zuckerberg will forever get clowned for being short, regardless of how rich, famous, and successful they are.

Law of the jungle. You can look at a guy and tell with 90% confidence whether you can kick his ass or not. At some point in prehistory, this mattered a lot. The alpha chimp in "Chimp Empire" had 8 biological children.

Height is one of the biggest factors in this ass-kicking calculation. If I look at a guy like Zuckerburg, my gut says I could kick his ass and steal his girlfriend. (Note: my gut is wrong in this case).

Men will never escape their height. Women will never escape their youth.

Outside of competitive e-sports, I struggle to see how physical fitness would come to play a significant role in outcomes.

Even in VR/AR, the best way to input text is either speech or typing on a virtual keyboard, or even a real one if the system supports it.

Add in eventual brain-machine interfaces and you won't even need to do anything at all beyond think.

If the latter sounds speculative, the Vision Pro is already a crude BCI, its developers have boasted about being able to track dozens of metrics through cameras and other sensors, especially the anticipatory dilation of the pupil, to predict user input before it's made. It literally reads your mind, albeit imperfectly.

And then there's more explicit stuff that Valve is cooking in the oven, I suspect the successor to the Index will display some.

At any rate, Apple is one of the few companies capable of dragging the future into existence, kicking and screaming in the process, and with a massive price tag attached. Nobody else had the chutzpah to offer a mass market product at 3.5k, even if mainly for businesses and developers, and know the latter are immediately preparing for the consumer version that's going to come out in a year or two. The Hololens never stood a chance, it was born too early with too little to show for it.

Now, I've gone from being a massive VR enthusiast, from the old Oculus prototype days, to being mildly jaded about VR as it currently stands.

I bought a Quest 2, and use it primarily tethered, and have found it's a fun toy worth using for maybe an hour at a stretch before it becomes uncomfortable. In fact, I mainly play a single video game, H3VR, and leave a dozen titles I picked up on sale languishing there because I simply can't be arsed.

I have discovered I am simply too lazy to enjoy most VR, and I prefer playing seated when possible.

In order for me to invest further into the tech, the optics need to get a lot better and the headsets a lot lighter. Perhaps some advancement in peripherals, in addition to hand tracking.

I am aware that most of those things exist, but not all once in a convenient form factor.

In this sense, Apple's product is heartening for the slumbering evangelist in me, as it shows that we'll get there sooner or later. Of course, I'm still terminally lazy, so I'm hoping for BCIs to just let me play by thinking instead of something so quaint as physical motion. Still 5 or 6 years away from that at a minimum.

Add in eventual brain-machine interfaces and you won't even need to do anything at all beyond think.

If the latter sounds speculative, the Vision Pro is already a crude BCI, its developers have boasted about being able to track dozens of metrics through cameras and other sensors, especially the anticipatory dilation of the pupil, to predict user input before it's made. It literally reads your mind, albeit imperfectly.

Yep I strongly agree with this, I see the VisionOS as the first step in the move towards BCI. I just think we already have the technology to at least augment KB+M input in specific areas, so I'm excited to see it happening.

In this sense, Apple's product is heartening for the slumbering evangelist in me, as it shows that we'll get there sooner or later. Of course, I'm still terminally lazy, so I'm hoping for BCIs to just let me play by thinking instead of something so quaint as physical motion. Still 5 or 6 years away from that at a minimum.

Keep that sleeping evangelist alive! If anyone can do it, it's Apple.

Apple only does (good) things years after they've been done by others. They still don't have a foldable, for example. They will not be the ones to first do BCI, if they ever do it.

Nerds have become common enough that they are no longer relegated to the fat out of shape basement dwellers of lore. Plenty of them are health obsessed or in shape. Zuckerberg is an example of this. I think if this interface change happens it will not impact their social status.

I also find it interesting that you claim eye tracking will benefit the in shape people. Do you know where this technology was originally developed? For helping paraplegics interface with computers.

I think this technology will find some traction. There has been a trend towards minimizing movement and effort to get more out of our computer interactions. However it's only going to be a temporary stop. The end goal is direct brain to computer interfaces. Why fire signals to tell your body to do something that tells a computer to do something? Why not just fire signals to tell the computer directly to do the thing? Elon Musk is trying to skip to that end goal with neuralink.

However I'm most interested in how this innovation could shift the balance of power back to the strong and physically capable, away from the nerds.

There's been some amount of this in VR already: BeatSaber is one of the more famous VR games as a whole and can be surprisingly calisthenic (cw: flashing colors), and games like Rumble take that further to a point that can interact with your proprioception.

But there are ultimately games. There are definite advantages to Apple's handsetless approach -- dumbest side, you actually do lose track of where your real hands are when using a lot of VR handsets! ((Though I'm not sure handsetless is the right answer. Lucas's LucidVR tech has that bulky jank only DIY can provide, but cheap haptic feedback allows a lot of things that handsetless can't.)) But it's not immediately obvious that these would have any implications on a 'balance of power' any deeper than the next generation of MMORPGs, or perhaps some corny Pokemon Go-style things.

It's imaginable to see something with broader implications. You don't need to be physically strong to build a house in Minecraft, and you're not doing much more to build a house in VR-Minecraft (though your noodly arms will get a workout!), but there's at least a plausible scenario where XR/AR-HouseBuilding Assistant ends up being a thing. Given the current state of recruiting for the trades (and the people who are recruited often doing awful at it) that's potentially a pretty lucrative design space.

But the reason Software Ate The World isn't that it was something you did with computers; it's that it's something you did once and it applied ten thousand or ten million times without having to redo each one. There are a few places where that matters with just physical strength or dexterity, but most of those spaces are very well-explored.

But if you suppose that a lot of the reason past-gen tech focused on us noodly-armed people was because the active and energetic don't enjoy sitting down at a computer when thinking hard, then maybe that's a different matter.

Fascinating tech.

I'll take your bet on the "balance of power," though. Why would you think having a better OS would punish the physically weak?

Actually, what is it about current interfaces that you think favors the unhealthy or the dysfunctional? Nerds aren't weedy as an adaptation to crawling around in the code mines. They're spending time hacking and playing video games instead of working out. Or sitting at a desk instead of lifting boxes. Augmented reality isn't going to bridge that gap any more than standing desks.

No longer will clunky interfaces make sense - instead computers will be optimized around healthy, fully functional humans. Ideally the most intuitive and common control schemes will reward physical fitness and coordination. Traits which nerds lack in droves.

Have you ever watched a high-level FPS tournament? I'm a weakling but I swear I can type circles around most bodybuilders and sportsmen, much less normies. "We" are going to have significant advantages if the system rewards precision and reflexes.

Unless we integrate force-feedback exoskeletons into this visionOS, the death of the nerd's advantage is not yet neigh.

I’m willing to bet that precision and reflexes are heavily correlated with grip strength.

I think there might be a major confounder there. Drop that one and I'd guess the correlation is far less clear.

To clarify, is the confounder sex differences in reflexes and grip strength?

EG: the best esports players are almost all AMAB.

Yes.

Most of what you're saying is a nonsensical reach; a sci-fi user interface with gestures and blink-clicking doesn't favor anyone in particular. Mouse and keyboard wasn't invented to bypass jock physical superiority.

I've messed about with Windows Mixed Reality, doing basic computer tasks in VR, and it's kinda fun for the novelty, and allows for as many monitors as you want, but the idea that it will give jocks an advantage is (thanks for giving me an opportunity to use this word) Asinine.

No longer will clunky interfaces make sense… Ideally the most intuitive and common control schemes will reward physical fitness and coordination.

Do you have any examples that you could share? It’s hard for me to visualize what you’re thinking of here.

I think existing computer interfaces are pretty good. I wouldn’t call them clunky. The vast majority of what most people do with computers involves reading and writing text, and watching video. It seems to me that those interfaces are already pretty optimized and there isn’t much more utility that you could squeeze out of them. I don’t think people think “this is clunky” when they’re reading (old.) reddit or watching youtube.

The vast majority of what most people do with computers involves reading and writing text, and watching video.

Thinking about my own habits, this is true for me. I consume a lot of text. That process includes a lot of detailed reading, skimming, and skipping over sections. The pace at which I scroll is highly variable, depending on the source material and the layout of the site/document in question. To me, I think the key question would be the extent to which I can replicate this process (to at least make VisionOS not worse) or somehow improve upon it.

I'm breaking my self-imposed Motte break to link this Ross Scott video about OS GUI design. We could already improve regular "flatscreen"/"pancake" UI without needing to go all-in on AR/VR, though I suppose the temptation of Apple is "why not go all the way?"

I'm not seeing this at all. First off, while the VisionOS sounds really cool, fundamentally it sounds pretty similar to the iPad - a device for consuming content, not creating it. Sure the interface is cool, movies look nice, and properly recorded immersive experiences are super awesome. But I don't see how it's a significant advantage in any type of content creation. For writing text and creating graphics, it's pretty much the same interface you can use now, except with a bigger virtual screen. You're going to be entering text by typing on a real or virtual keyboard I guess, or maybe speaking, either of which you can already do. If you want to do something more technical like writing code or system admin, it doesn't seem super well suited to the precision required. Sure it can do it, but it'll be emulating a conventional 2D UI with keyboard, so not really doing anything that you couldn't already do with any regular computer.

I guess you could also code by voice, per the video. But 1. I don't get that at all. Maybe you can type up some basic code if you know the special words and phrases, but it doesn't seem very practical to me to maintain or debug a large complex program. And 2. even if you could, you can already do that with a regular computer with a microphone and that software.

I don't see the supposed culture war impact at all either. First, I don't buy that "nerds" / tech workers are significantly less fit as a whole than the general population. I'm a developer and have worked with hundreds of others, they seem pretty average to me - a few are more muscular or athletic than usual, most have pretty standard office worker physique, a relative few look a bit more like the stereotypical nerd but are still perfectly capable physically. Next, even if that was the case, I don't see what VisionOS and related technologies would have to do with it - nothing about it is more physically intense than walking around a room. The number of people of all walks of life who would find anything about it the least bit physically challenging is probably effectively zero. Finally, as far as physical prowess being less important for societal status, that goes back at least to the start of the Industrial Revolution, if not further. Blame the backhoe, not the PC. A new user interface for PCs that may or may not make any difference in how they're effectively used won't make any difference at all.

I'm not seeing this at all. First off, while the VisionOS sounds really cool, fundamentally it sounds pretty similar to the iPad - a device for consuming content, not creating it

Do you not think people could dictate essays, draw with their hands, edit music, etc with this tool? Why does this entire OS seem fundamentally based on consumption to you?

Next, even if that was the case, I don't see what VisionOS and related technologies would have to do with it - nothing about it is more physically intense than walking around a room. The number of people of all walks of life who would find anything about it the least bit physically challenging is probably effectively zero.

It's not necessarily about physical intensity - it's about ease of use. Clearly I could expand on this point since many others seem confused as well. I'm betting that right now many people who would otherwise be more economically useful are not because they don't have the temperament, ability, or inclination to learn how to type quickly or move a mouse around quickly. With VisionOS and later generations, we'll see much more 'natural' inputs, or at least have a lower barrier to entry than, say, learning to type at 100 wpm.

Do you not think people could dictate essays, draw with their hands, edit music, etc with this tool? Why does this entire OS seem fundamentally based on consumption to you?

Sure, you could do that, but what's the advantage over conventional hardware? I can do all of those things just fine with any ordinary computer and off-the-shelf accessories and software that has been available for years. The only really new thing that this device has is the immersive VR experience. That's cool, but I don't see how that gets you anything for creating content.

I'm betting that right now many people who would otherwise be more economically useful are not because they don't have the temperament, ability, or inclination to learn how to type quickly or move a mouse around quickly. With VisionOS and later generations, we'll see much more 'natural' inputs, or at least have a lower barrier to entry than, say, learning to type at 100 wpm.

I don't think that's the case. Keyboards and mice have been dominant because they are very easy to use. Sure, it's not easy to type 100wpm with good accuracy, but pretty much everyone can type 10wpm. Typing 100wpm isn't that useful outside of stenography anyways. Typically the limiting factor is how fast you can think of more meaningful words of text or working lines of code to type, not how fast you can physically type them. In fact, I'd bet that whatever the solution VisionOS uses for typing (we haven't seen that yet, gee I wonder why that is, you'd think if they have an awesome solution to getting text from the user's mind to the device they'd have shown us), it's less intuitive than a keyboard. How much skill does it take to get 10 correct wpm into a VisionOS document versus a regular computer with a regular keyboard?

And that's before we get into things like, how easy is it to read text or data off of a physical page while typing it or something loosely based on it into a VisionOS document?

First off, you're massively overstating the unnaturalness of the mouse. It's already fully proportional movement pointing, with the added advantages of not obstructing your view with your own hand and being able to rest your hand on a supporting surface instead of having to flail around.

Second, you can already dictate essays, most people don't do that because it's a pain in the ass compared to typing. Drawing is either highly technical detail work which massively benefits from the exact precision inputs of a mouse, or largely about muscle memory which is why artists already draw on high precision pressure sensitive tablets, benefiting from practice in drawing on paper. You're proposing they remove the tablets for no real benefit.

Third, music editing, like programming, if fundamentally a fiddly task requiring talent, practice and an understanding of the field. Both already have a billion different approaches available, someone will probably hack something together for this and someone else will have it as their favorite editor. But on the margin it will turn out that no, in fact there wasn't a massive pool people who are naturals at programming or editing except for the pesky detail of having to learn one of the billion existing options.

I guess you could also code by voice, per the video.

The reason people don't code by voice is that it sucks so many levels of hell. Siri (and other voice recognition agents) can't even get normal text 100% correct right now, what makes them think that shitty voice recognition is going to work properly when I tell it to open and close 5 levels of brackets, use a bunch of non-words like 'var', 'const', 'LazyVStack', 'NSString', and expressions that have non-letter characters in them like '@escaping' and '$0'? Imagine trying to make a regular expression in that and trying to read in "^(+\d{1,2}\s)?(?\d{3})?[\s.-]\d{3}[\s.-]\d{4}$" over voice, or trying to browse the method names in a file like you do with the arrow keys when you briefly forgot what that call and its arguments were (again). Fuck no.

Even that Talon example sounds as incomprehensible as the mouth noises a Vim user emits when they try to describe how having to make 10 different keystrokes is clearly better and so much faster than just selecting the text with the mouse.

Now, this isn't to say that you couldn't do an IDE in VR- in fact, having infinite screen real estate means that you can more easily trace a program's logic down 5 levels where with standard monitors you can only fit 2 or 3 at the same time and the Vision Pro's ability to actually display readable text (I still question that they've actually succeeded- all other headsets except maybe the PiMax just don't have the resolution to do this because a combination of head tilt + low resolution per eye means that text is fundamentally unreadable unless it's so large as to be pointless- so I'd have to see a physical demo of it to fully understand its liimtations).

But considering just how much Vision Pro depends on being a bigger screen with a couple of interesting telepresence applications baked in I really don't think this is going to be as transformative as some might otherwise think, but industry and military applications where you need to keep track of a bunch of interacting systems at once are going to be interested in where this goes since this is kind of just a better Hololens (and those customers are who MS was actually marketing that thing to). I could see a store using these things for "where's this item on the shelf?", an factory providing an auditable inspection pipeline for guaranteeing the condition of a product before it leaves (provided they're dirt cheap to make and replace), and so on and so forth.

Humorously, this is also going to be a test of how well AI does when it comes to adopting a new language- yeah, Swift has some existing support, but the toolkits for visionOS and its UI/UX paradigms sure don't! I guess developers will be learning this one the old fashioned way.

keyboard and mouse ... This awkward, clunky interface ... These outdated interfaces

This is an interesting opinion. One I certainly don't agree with and seems in need of justification.

Mouse and keyboard work great. For getting work done they are vastly superior to xbox controllers and Wii style motion controllers. The mouse gives extremely rapid pixel precise selection and movement of graphical objects.

This new Apple tech needs to be jaw droppingly amazing to stand up to the extremely capable mouse and keyboard.

Ever since the computer first arrived, keyboard and mouse has been the standard. You have a flat surface with raised little squares that you smack with your fingers. You have another little rounded shape with a flat bottom you move around, and click with.

I mean... no? The first computer was the ENIAC, and it didn't even have programmable memory, it has to be hard-wired and manually changed every time you want it to do something different. You didn't interact via keyboard, you interacted via pulling wires.

And the mouse isn't until ~20 years later in the mid 60s. So far as I'm aware, it's first demo'd publicly during the mother of all demos

I mean... no? The first computer was the ENIAC, and it didn't even have programmable memory, it has to be hard-wired and manually changed every time you want it to do something different. You didn't interact via keyboard, you interacted via pulling wires.

Ok fair, this was a bit sloppy I'll admit.

If I wanted to talk to my goddamn machinery, I'd have a microphone. I don't. I don't want to tell the computer "move here, do that, turn on this, type out the other thing". I can do that quicker with my fingers, and I can type and think at the same time, rather than having to stop and work out what I want the thing to do.

Eye movement control sounds even more hideous: so blink at the wrong time, and you just deleted all that hour's work.

fun new apps

KILL IT WITH FIRE is my immediate reaction. I don't want "fun new apps", I want the apps I'm already using to work for me, not for the company using them to data scrape every millisecond of my life.

If you haven't seen the recent demo of Apple's new VisionOS they're breaking brand new ground. The entire OS is built around looking at things, and making minute hand motions to control the icons you're looking at

And how do they pick up on the "minute hand motions"? I am always sceptical of demos because they are so curated and cherrypicked and then polished up later to produce the best looking experience (that may not be the correct one; how many hours of messing around with the headset did they edit down to that ten minute demo?)

If I'm wearing only a headset and "navigating with my eyes", how does the headset pick up that I'm pinching my fingers? I get the impression that you have to hold your hand in a particular way in a particular field of motion or else it won't work. I'm dubious. EDIT: Ah right, the thing is ringed with cameras that can see all. Now I'm even more dubious about what those cameras are looking at and recording and sending back to Apple when I'm wearing my snazzy headset so I can work on a spreadsheet without typing, just pinching my finger and thumb like crab claws.

Now if all you have to work with is your voice and/or eyes, sure, this is great, now you can use the computer. But I'm going to dinosaur on with my keyboard for now.

No longer will clunky interfaces make sense - instead computers will be optimized around healthy, fully functional humans.

Not necessarily, both reviews mentioned that the person wears glasses/uses contact lenses, so the headset was calibrated with their prescription (since you can't wear glasses and the headset at once). So they're already accommodating people with less than perfect eyesight, and if you have some mobility problem that you can't pinch your fingers, they'll probably invent something to adjust for that as well.

Eye movement control sounds even more hideous: so blink at the wrong time, and you just deleted all that hour's work.

Hah, this is so hidebound and backward I can't tell if you're being serious. I could just as easily say "click at the wrong time, you just deleted an hours work!" Get real.

KILL IT WITH FIRE is my immediate reaction. I don't want "fun new apps", I want the apps I'm already using to work for me, not for the company using them to data scrape every millisecond of my life.

Unfortunately technology doesn't sit stagnant for long, as much as you want it to. Sorry to break it to you friend.

And how do they pick up on the "minute hand motions"? I am always sceptical of demos because they are so curated and cherrypicked and then polished up later to produce the best looking experience

Not sure, but I linked two in-depth reviews from fairly popular writers that gush over it. There are far more people who have used it and find the control scheme incredibly intuitive and easy to pick up. That's with usually 30min - 1 hour demos.

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I could just as easily say "click at the wrong time, you just deleted an hours work!" Get real.

Bunky, I just deleted a long-ass comment elsewhere because I hit the wrong key by accident. I am not going to rely on "move your left pupil a nanometer to the left" as a control function and be confident "oh crap, I moved two nanometers and that is the delete!" won't happen.

They do gush over it, they also mention that the headset was personalised to them by a person measuring and fitting it and tutoring them in how to use it, that one of the control features was disabled, and that the entire experience took place in the setting provided by and set up by Apple.

How the kit works in the wild when it's your sitting room and you're trying to follow along to a Youtube tutorial is a different kettle of fish.

Hah, this is so hidebound and backward I can't tell if you're being serious. I could just as easily say "click at the wrong time, you just deleted an hours work!" Get real.

You aren't forced to twitch your finger regularly. Get real. Sorry to break it to you friend.

Hah, this is so hidebound and backward I can't tell if you're being serious. I could just as easily say "click at the wrong time, you just deleted an hours work!" Get real.

The difference is that in one case there's a bright line distinction between when you are and are not using the interface. Which becomes more pronounced in real world use vs tech demos. A gesture system that's comfortable when it's what you're focusing on can become much less so when you're casually using it and want to combine it with eating, drinking or just scratching your nose without accidentally triggering a gesture.

I could just as easily say "click at the wrong time, you just deleted an hours work!"

There are clear and obvious differences between "blink" and "click".

FWIW most vision based interfaces (including Apple's new headset) still use clicking precisely because of that reason, touch is much more intentional.

I'm not saying it won't augment the current toolset in new ways I can't well predict. But, the nice thing about mice and keyboards is that, when I want the computer to respond, I touch them. When I'm not touching them, the computer isn't responding. I can do whatever I want with my hands and eyes, and they computer isn't trying to figure out whether I'm asking something of it. There's an inherent limitation with asking the entire attention of your eyes and hands or trying to constantly double task the input devices.

There an analogy with voice-to-text on phones. It may be easier or more convenient at times, but when you are also using your mouth to have an in-person conversation, it's worse.

While I appreciate a top-level post talking about VisionOS, you seem to be claiming that keyboard/mouse is the moat around high-income tech jobs that keeps out "the strong and physically capable", which seems crazy to me.

Typing speed doesn't meaningfully affect an engineer's productivity (except maybe in the low-complexity world of undergraduate projects). A new operating system isn't going to increase the percent of people who can use threads.

What stops more people from becoming software engineers is that it's hard.

Keyboard and mouse still hold the crown.

It’s shocking to you and me, but most people spend more time using a touch screen than using a mouse and keyboard. Modern UX prioritizes mobile experiences over mouse/keyboard.

What stops more people from becoming software engineers is that it's hard.

Specifically, it's not ability to type, it's having the vision and creativity to actually know how to conceive of something in the first place that most people lack. And neither AI nor fancy headsets can really help with this. Yes, the AI can write code for you, but you need to know what to tell it to write first. You still need to spot pitfalls with its interconnectivity with other parts of the project and know how to smooth them out. Typing faster similarly won't help you if you don't know what you should be typing in the first place.

A machine can assemble a car. But humans still design the cars.

Typing speed doesn't meaningfully affect an engineer's productivity (except maybe in the low-complexity world of undergraduate projects). A new operating system isn't going to increase the percent of people who can use threads.

I don't have research or anything on this, but I'd be willing to bet it's a massive barrier to entry. In programming yes, but most jobs are 'email jobs' where a ton of what you're doing is tying natural language sentences to other people. In those jobs, and pretty much any white collar job that requires communicating, typing speed is important.

Not just typing speed, but the ability to quickly and easily synthesize and write down a chain of thought. I know many people who can speak brilliantly and eloquently, but when it comes to writing or typing down their insights they struggle mightily. Here on the Motte I'd imagine we're heavily biased towards typists and writecels.

Typing speed doesn't meaningfully affect an engineer's productivity

Past some threshold, no. But low typing speed (slower than even your system 2 thinking) certainly impedes productivity. I have a junior in my team who drives me up the wall during 1:1s with her typing speed or rather lack thereof.

I sit on the couch. There's a glass of tea (yes, a glass) to the left; hopefully I won't hit it with my elbow and send into the stone floor again. Not wearing a blindfold certainly helps in this regard. I put laptop on, well, my lap, open The Motte, scroll to the end of your post, think a second, click «reply».

What, if anything, in all of this could have been improved by Vision Pro? Adding a dancing Mickey Mouse (partnership with Disney, wooo!) to the periphery? Fitting the website into a circular window superimposed on the room? Strapping the same laptop's motherboard to my forehead? Replacing touch typing with tiny finger gestures that are picked up by the IR sensor array under my nose?

Actually there are some ideas here. I expect great things to come of augmented reality. I envision a future of uncompromising transparency and sovereignty, with tastefully minimal HUDs and AI digital assistants that stay well out of the way while brutally suppressing incoming noise; athletic young people with 20/20 vision and perfect innocence about «dark patterns» who walk in the sunlight and look with concern and pity at hunchbacked millenials and zoomers squinting into their pocket surveillance devices. This can be done. Contra Strugatsky brothers, we don't need communism to get to see the brightest parts of the Noon.

But as roon convincingly argues, text is the universal interface and it is primarily the inherent power of text, not technical limits of the age, that decided the shape of The Mother of All Demos and the hardware paradigm that we're still living in. Why do you think large language models get almost no benefit from multimodality? Because nothing has more meaningful dimensions than a text string. Tablets and smartphones, this great civilizational achievement of Apple, offer a strictly lesser channel than text – beloved by people who'd never have a clue what to do with CLI. Now, I suppose there are designers and architects, and surgeons and such, and all those colorful applications from WWDC will truly shine. But… rotating a 3D model of a Zahi Hadid-esque building in a teleconference? Is this what the digital era is about? I guess PowerPoint will add some zany VR features soon and they'll be adored by the same type of person who inserted WordArt into business presentations in the 90s, but… really?

This reminds me again of that epiphany I had while watching Alita: Battle Angel, particularly the scene where Alita dodges an aesthetic chain attack (admittedly, under a certain influence that brings out visual elaboration): What waste! The CG artists could have gone so much wilder, added complex patterns of acceleration and inertia and homing; but viewers won't perceive such detail. We're long in the regime where our tools let us depict actions of posthumans, but our merely human brains make that power sterile.

It is a nontrivial undertaking to find a paradigm that in practice does better than an IDE, or CLI, or even the humble chat window – when you're limited by the user on the other side. Almost everything of worth that we do is text and ways to manipulate and chain and condition its blocks on different scales. Skeuomorphic gimmicks, graphs, trees, mindmaps, desks with sticky notes, kanbans – frankly, all either collapses into unwieldy mess while text keeps going, or is as close to vanilla text in spirit as to make no difference and not benefit from new peripherals whatsoever. Many have tried. Yet here we still are. When some of us will get Vision Pros and ability to render arbitrary shapes, they'll still be peering into a rectangular website with an input box and a button to send comment.

I hope people with better imaginations than mine will prove me wrong. I'm pretty fed up with our interfaces, as well as with the human condition in general. But gimmicks and fetishes, exciting and novel as they can be, are no more the answer than frivolous surgery. Another, genuinely superior way has to be found and explored.

Strapping the same laptop's motherboard to my forehead?

This would be amusing at least...

Replacing touch typing with tiny finger gestures that are picked up by the IR sensor array under my nose?

Yes, this is actually incredibly useful. For instance even with a limited interface like Talon, I will map certain phrases or words I use frequently in my job to a keyboard shortcut, or a noise. This mapping means that I save probably ~5 minutes of work per day. Over time if we can map more of these things to even more minute/simple actions, we are looking at serious efficiency gains.

When some of us will get Vision Pros and ability to render arbitrary shapes, they'll still be peering into a rectangular website with an input box and a button to send comment.

I disagree here, it may be a while coming but I do think we're in for a paradigm shift with regards to input.

Yes, this is actually incredibly useful. For instance even with a limited interface like Talon, I will map certain phrases or words I use frequently in my job to a keyboard shortcut, or a noise. This mapping means that I save probably ~5 minutes of work per day. Over time if we can map more of these things to even more minute/simple actions, we are looking at serious efficiency gains.

Not only is this something you can do right now on existing computers, it's much easier to do than with a noise/gesture system where the need for disambiguation makes custom definitions a much harder proposition.

Unless you're the sort of person who already has a bunch of autohotkey scripts for those tasks set up, you sure as hell aren't going to do that in a worse interface.

text is the universal interface

I have often assumed that you are the reincarnation of Erik Naggum:

The natural urge of people is to point, the mouse is the interaction tool that allows the user to do this.

do you actually believe this "natural urge" stuff? my "natural urge" (if I have any that exceed sex and hunger in complexity) is to speak or write. [...]

you live in your graphical user interface world with colors and idiots for users. I prefer people who can communicate and think in words. I have been to France once (Aix-en-Provence, a lovely little town, and Marseilles, a not so lovely city). I had to point at things because my French wasn't up to speed. I made an intense effort to learn to speak French, and after two weeks, I could speak it well enough to discuss the best packaging to send home a bunch of books I had bought in one of the excellent bookstores in Aix, after having spent a day in delighted (albeit patient) discussion with the bookstore owner. the thrill of being able to speak a new language was just exhilarating. unfortunately, I can't speak French, I can't even write French, anymore, but I can still read French, and I read German, as well. reduced to pointing, I feel like an illiterate moron. that feeling carries over into computing. pointing is for people who have yet to discover thought. in my view. you obviously disagree, but you won't see me agree to your "natural urge" bullshit any time sooner than you stop universalizing that bullshit to include me and millions of other people who feel disenfranchised by the now point-and-click "interaction" you want to make the universal mode of communication with a computer.

this has nothing to do with any Emacsen, anymore, but I just want you (and others) to know your "natural urge" nonsense is disputed by individuals who don't actually like your "interaction for dummies". and for those who are inclined to point and not think: this is an example of how one person (namely, I) think and have preferences, not a universalizable argument about what Emacs users prefer over what XEmacs users prefer. however, I'm still inclined to believe that XEmacs users (not the least after reviewing the comments I have received), are less verbal and more visual than Emacs users, are less interested in studying manuals and learning languages (case in point: XEmacs calls its Lisp an "API", Emacs calls its Lisp a programming language). David Hughes felt insulted by this, for God knows what reason. observation it is, and it has been confirmed by this debate, and in no way disputed.

a word says more than a thousand images.

exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate "appreciation", "humor", "software", "education", "inalienable rights", "elegance", "fact".

(Er, well the timeline doesn't match up at all for you to be his reincarnation, but you could be his brother or something.)

This strikes me as yet more technology for the "smart home enthusiast" type of person.

I look down on such people who fawn over their nonsense gadgets and have the gall to call themselves "tech people". All that rubbish does is introduce many more points of failure (both human, in the case of Amazon destroying a guy's smart home for an imagined slur, and technological) for extremely minor or questionable fringe benefits. Great, I can pre-heat my oven remotely on my way back from work, but it can also sometimes also decide to blaze to 400 degrees F in the middle of the night on its own.

Technophiles have all the latest privacy invading smart home rubbish that will brick itself within a year when the company either goes bust or decides to start charging you for features that previously were standard.

People who actually understand and work in technology have exactly one mid-2000s printer.

Technology is like karate; you ideally want to use it as little as possible. Over-engineered smartrubbish either breaks, bricks or takes 2 hours on the phone to tech support to make work in the first place... before it breaks or bricks anyway.

Technology is like karate; you ideally want to use it as little as possible.

I like this take. That being said, without the crazy technophiles how would boundaries be broken? How would we advance the state of the art, to let people like you get even more out of your tiny piece of technology?

I suppose in that sense they do serve a purpose.

See also: Hypebeasts as Honeybees, a post exploring the topic of bleeding-edge adoption, albeit from the firearms-and-accessories perspective.

What are you even on about with this nerds vs jocks schtik. Anything that gives you "power over the digital realm" is not limited by your physical prowess or lack of it. Its limited primarily by your brain !!!

Nerds are high status (the ones that make bank) not for knowing how to use keyboards, but for knowing what to write!!

Its the artists hand that has the magic, not the paintbrush.

Come back when a UI comes out that... doesnt reward higher IQ.

New from today: "A response to the controversy about me"

I've followed the guy on Twitter - I could not care less about this, and Breitbart should be shamed and cast out of the right wing media for this outrageous use of left-wing boogeymen to attack a solid rightist.

Breitbart should be shamed and cast out of the right wing media for this outrageous use of left-wing boogeymen to attack a solid rightist.

Breitbart was founded in Jerusalem by a cast of mostly Jewish individuals. There's even a photo of the founding group with Bibi Netanyahu from the early years. Of course they are going to police people on the right for antisemitism, just as Israeli-American Yoram Hazony tried to resuscitate Reaganism and pull the right away from blood-and-soil nationalism with his "national conservatism" rebrand.

There's a lot you can say about Jews but one thing you can't say is that they are idiots or politically uninterested. They are very good at policing both the right and the left (Corbyn) to weed out people who aren't seen to be in their favour. In the case of Corbyn, they were helped by the fact that he was also distrusted by the wider business and security elites in the UK.

It's funny reading Pedro's texts in the hit piece where he references Buchanan. If memory serves, Buchanan spoke about being purged by neo-con Jews which he served with under the Reagan admin. He noted that many never had a bad word to say about him during that time, but when he started to criticise the war plans against Iraq, suddenly they started to shout that he was a racist and various left-wing Jews picked it up in the media and ran with it. That's also how Sobran and others got purged.

I suspect this might be a reason why some on the right tend to view Jews as a unified bloc who work together across ideological lines whereas whites tend to actually put their ideology first and foremost rather than their ethnic interest. It's debatable which strategy is best.

pull the right away from blood-and-soil nationalism

When has the right touched blood and soil nationalism this century?

This has been quite an interesting story to follow. Gonzalez, like you say, isn’t purely dissident right, he’s straddled the tripartite border between them, the ‘intellectual new right’ of the Claremont and First Things variety, and then the mainstream nationalist right that incorporates certain hardcore Trump and DeSantis supporters, some actual politicians, Tucker Carlson and so on. Even though DeSantis isn’t “dissident right”, he’s sympathetic to the Claremont position and so I’d say broadly the dissident/alt-right position on Twitter is to support him, if tentatively, just because if you’re obsessed with demographics then the number one immediate priority is getting into power and reducing immigration - legal and illegal - as much as possible, and DeSantis has displayed some competence in office and some zeal for the anti-immigration position. This annoys hardcore MAGA stans for whom Donald is a messianic figure, especially because in the last few months more and more DeSantis supporting Twitter rightists have essentially said “yeah, fuck it, Trump deserves to go to jail” (if not for the crimes he is alleged to have committed by prosecutors then for his betrayal of the right, his utter incompetence in office and so on, or just to get him out of the picture).

Clearly this has now escalated into outright warfare as the primaries approach. To be honest, as an actual thing connected to real-world politics, the attacks on DeSantis’ supporters are irrelevant; Trump will very likely win the primaries anyway and it will have nothing to do with conservative Twitter. But symbolically they represent an inevitable split on the internet right as the Trump personality cult meets people who care more about policy.

As for Gonzalez, the Anglosphere right has a complicated relationship with antisemites. Taki, founder of TakiMag, erstwhile employee of Richard Spencer and famously antisemitic in his own right, remains in good graces with The Spectator, the singular bastion of establishment British conservatism (former editor-in-chief: Boris Johnson) as a columnist. As I understand it, this is largely because he’s considered part of the institution, and because he has many Jewish friends and so everything is in good humor. That said, The Spectator also apparently banned him from writing about Jews. On the other hand, the (US) National Review did purge Brimelow and others back in the day, and Buchanan received pushback for sympathizing with the Germans in WW2 and opposing the US’ entry in the war. I think, though, that a lot of those were because they didn’t apologize or deny they still had those views.

In Gonzalez’ case, he has two things in his favor. Firstly, he effectively apologized and said he no longer holds the views in question (I doubt this, but optics obviously matter). Secondly, he’s Hispanic, and just as black antisemites can be welcomed back into the progressive fold after only the most minor contrition (if any), him being a minority in the right (even if he identifies as white, which he seems to oscillate between doing and not doing) will increase the likelihood of his being forgiven.

I think the more interesting question is whether it is or isn’t good for the dissident right if the mainstream accepts their return to the fold provided they disavow their previous opinions. This was a major debate on the western far left in the 1970s and 1980s.

If someone has an obviously Hispanic name like "Pedro Gonzales" and the media reports statements about "whites" by him, I'm going to wonder exactly what the media has left out. Is this another example of the "white Hispanic"?

The article is pretty comprehensive with screenshots and commentary. What piece would they be leaving out?

It’s not uncommon for Latinos to adopt an expansive definition of “white” that includes themselves. It’s an old meme at this point that most /pol/ posters are Latino.

I’m curious what is considered to be “true white” and not “expanded” white which specific barbarian tribe you needed to descend from. English seem to be true white and they are it seems 30-40% anglos today, Hispanics had a lot of Visigoths and Franks in the reconquista. I believe it’s the Germanic tribes that are linked to “true white”.

Obviously a lot of Hispanics today aren’t even related to the reconquista but some are.

I’m curious to be “true white” and not “expanded” white which specific barbarian tribe you needed to descend from

Why the scare quotes? Is it really that strange to suggest that some people are white and others are not?

"White" means "people of European descent". The majority of South Americans are of mixed European and Native American descent.

For what it's worth, I'd be fine with just getting rid of the word white and using a term like European-American instead (or whatever hyphenated neologism is appropriate to your locale).

Just wanted to highlight what I was contrasting. Honestly not sure how many Hispanics are intermixed. Mexico did try to maintain one people as Mexican. But I assume the elites were largely pure Spanish and the it does seem like GOP elites are closer to pure Spanish like Rubio.

There are in fact many Hispanic people who are phenotypically white even with a tan, and a smaller number who are phenotypically Northern European looking.

Most American Hispanics ID as white. (Also, actual Spanish people and their descendants exist.)

Why is white Hispanic in scare quotes? Most Latin American countries conceive themselves internally as having white people, in addition to Black and indigenous people.

It's not scare quotes, it's actual quotes. It refers to the media using the term when spinning the George Zimmerman shooting.

Ok, I guess I just see that as a general usage term rather than tied to any particular moment in history.

Update to the Juan De Oñate Statue shooting (as requested by @FCfromSSC):

A man charged in connection with a shooting that took place during a volatile protest in Old Town in the summer of 2020 pleaded guilty to several charges and is facing up to two years in prison. Steven Ray Baca, 34, on Friday pleaded no contest to aggravated battery and guilty to battery and unlawful carrying of a deadly weapon. He was originally charged with aggravated battery great bodily harm, two counts of battery and unlawful carrying of a deadly weapon. He is facing up to two years in prison or could be sentenced to probation, according to the plea agreement. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for September in front of District Judge Brett Loveless...

On Friday, Baca pleaded guilty to battery charges against Julie Harris and Vivian Norman. Both women said that Baca flung them hard to the ground during the protest. Baca's attorney, Deigo Esquibel, could not be reached for comment on Monday. Special Prosecutor David Foster also couldn't be reached for comment.

I've not been able to find any copies of the plea deal document itself, but the case lookup site points to 30-3-5, 30-3-4, and 30-7-2 & 31-19-1. The max estimated jail sentence looks like it's produced by throwing together all of the normal max sentences together, which isn't likely since the man's previous offenses seem limited to some minor traffic stuff, but that’s media coverage. Some of the plea may not be factually possible -- in particular, where New Mexico draws the line from concealed to open carry leaves 30-7-2 as less a slam dunk that it might seem at first glance -- but it's unlikely anyone's going to try to argue the matter.

Separately, the "New Mexico Civil Guard" group has had interesting legal battle charging them as impersonating peace officers](https://law.justia.com/codes/new-mexico/2018/chapter-30/article-27/section-30-27-2.1/), filled with increasingly harebrained legal tactics and having been targeted by an early injunction prohibiting the group from being a civil guard. Some of this has been reported as ‘disbanding’ the group, though the final consent decrees and judgements are hard to access to find out how literal that was. On the other hand, in case the behavior seemed particularly doomed or quixotic, six members (somehow!) were awarded a collective 300k payout from the state to settle likely public records request delays, which doesn't necessarily indicate specifically bad behavior or hilariously explosive text messages being covered up (or even if the money actually got to them; the org was severely sanctioned over the deposition misconduct), but must have been a very interesting meeting when deciding if dealing with these guys were worth 300k of other people's money. Baca is largely described as 'not apparently a member'.

I've not been able to find any assault or battery charges placed against any of the protestors opposed to the De Oñate statue, though the records are a bit of a pain to search.

The Albuquerque Oñate statue was removed in June 2020; the last mainstream reporting I've been able to find was limbo in 2021, shortly followed by an op-ed proposed splitting the baby by putting the statute in a museum and establishing a Truth and Reconciliation committee, which afaict has gone nowhere.

Neat.

Even after reading about the incident, it’s hard to tell what anyone involved wanted to accomplish.

Do you think Baca had any chance of winning if he went to trial?

Even after reading about the incident, it’s hard to tell what anyone involved wanted to accomplish.

Right before the confrontation and shooting, it's pretty clear the anti-Juan De Oñate protestors wanted to topple the statue and very likely destroy it; they literally had a chain wrapped around the thing and people trying to pull it over, a complete idiot who didn't know how to use a pickaxe, a guy waving around a "We don't ask permission" sign, so on. There's a lot to be written on the exact tactics, here, and watching the video closely shows a lot of roles spread across this group -- actors, observers, blockers -- but ultimately the point is to achieve a public and, if symbolic, concrete goal, usually as part of an approach to freezing and making the villain a target.

But ultimately the point is that there's a procedure and politics involved in doing this sort of thing above-board, and not everyone wants to wait for that when they've got a bunch of strongarms sitting around. Either because the government doesn't actually own the piece in question, or because it's politically complex to actually hold a vote, sometimes because there isn't as much public support to take down a statue as to just not put one back up, and probably at some points to make clear that they can. Sometimes this connection to local politicians is pretty overt, and you have State Senators telling protestors to vandalize statues and telling police they can't arrest the vandals mere hours before someone gets squished by falling rocks (the police chief to file charges was placed on administrative leave immediately after, and the charges dismissed by the state). But unless someone gets hit in the head with a rock fist, most of the time they're just an undistinguished mass of manpower; not only do these groups not face serious investigation, in some cases the state or city won't even bother listing it as a crime on open data sources.

The Civil Guard morons thought this was their time to shine! The police were demonstrably not actually upholding the law or protecting people or property, and they stopped Baca and provided first aid to the man Baca shot. They probably thought they'd be thanked -- not, you know, by the protestors, but the whole general 'silent majority' who don't like deaths at protests -- right up until the guys in full-body camo slapped them straight onto the ground.

Baca thought he'd stop people from doing something he didn't want them to do, and didn't think hard enough about what each specific escalation meant, objectively, til long after he'd either grabbed someone's shoulder out of nowhere or shoved someone who shoved him. Not much fancy going on there.

The state... I don't know. The Civil Guard wants to draw the anti-Onate protestors as the state gov's brownshirts and the police's shitty response to obviously criminal behavior at protests as an attempt to produce a scenario to legally destroy the NMCG directly, but while the public records request settlement raises some eyebrows, it's still a pretty complex conspiracy theory. Hanlon's Razor has the state leaving the protestors a free leash to avoid expensive lawsuits and bad publicity from lot of concentrated political alliances, and then trying to hammer everybody not in the group after things go tango uniform, but that doesn't exactly look great either.

Do you think Baca had any chance of winning if he went to trial?

Dunno. It's not the best set of facts for a self-defense case and far from the most sympathetic defendant -- the point of blockers as a role is to have people counter-protestors or even police can't touch without touching the (often photogenic and sympathetic-sounding) blameless -- but New Mexico's self-defense law doesn't actually rely on "first aggressor" like the prosecutor wished, and there's a lot of reporting suggesting that the prosecution was having a hell of a time getting witness statements. But I can definitely see why he wouldn't want to roll the dice.

It's nice to see things tied up at last, but it seems to me the general pattern was well-established more or less at the time and we've just watched it play out. Every high-profile incident where people tried to defend themselves from rioters resulted in significant effort being made by the state to punish them as harshly as possible. These prosecutions clearly had nothing at all to do with the facts at hand, and everything to do with the demands of the mob.

Rittenhouse was subjected to a malicious murder prosecution in the face of multiple-angle video evidence showing his attempts to retreat from his attackers. His attackers were not charged in any way, despite solid evidence that they had broken the law.

The McCloskeys were charged with felonies for defending their home from a criminal mob, but managed to mostly defend themselves from the worst consequences.

Gardner was hounded to suicide with the able assistance of his local and state governments.

Bacca pleads guilty and will go to prison.

Daniel Perry has been sentenced to 25 years, but might get a pardon.

On the other side:

The CHAZ gunmen were allowed to slip away unmolested after one murder and an unknown number of attempted murders, with the implicit cooperation of local government.

Reinoehl committed cold-blooded murder, on camera, which was then publicly celebrated by his allies, again on camera. He died shortly after in a shootout with federal law enforcement, which the press spent some time spinning conspiracy theories about.

Dolloff shot a man to death for, at most, punching and pepper-spraying him, and witnesses were uncertain even of that much. The authorities declined to prosecute him, instead punishing his employers while he walked free.

...There's more, but I have better things to do this morning.

Some takeaways:

Masks work. Anonymity works. Not just for the basic reasons of making a positive ID harder, but because it makes every effort to cover for you by your allies downstream in the press, the activist scene and in government easier as well. It widens every subsequent zone of plausible deniability, lends credibility to every argument about why there's just nothing to be done about your exercise of coordinated political violence.

Institutional support is crucial for control of the streets, and thus the public. What these people did can't be done without a cooperative press and local government, and especially a firm handle on the police. Again, plausible deniability is key.

Manipulation of procedural outcomes is the name of the game, surfing that line between clearly communicating that you are above the law, and exposing yourself to real backlash and severe consequences. Making it clear that your side will tend to walk even when you murder, while the other side will be prosecuted even for defending themselves from you is an integral part of the strategy. Remember, even if it takes a while, even if the hit-rate is not 100%, your opponents are risk-averse and have a whole lot to lose, so it doesn't take much to shift the calculus. You or your allies need to control interpretation and implementation of the procedures. All else flows from that point.

For Reds specifically:

Don't live among Blues. Armed self-defense, in the lawful sense, assumes an impartial legal structure. That is not a supportable assumption anywhere Blues control. It doesn't matter what the laws say; they will interpret, ignore and adjudicate as necessary to secure their desired outcomes. If you cross them, they will find a way to fuck you. Not every time, but often enough that it's not worth the risk.

Stop pretending that the outcomes of orderly systems can be trusted. Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process. Findings and verdicts and rulings do not settle a matter if the outcome is not just. Demand Just outcomes, and never, ever let an unjust outcome rest.

A literally incredible turn of events in the Jonathan Majors case.

His accuser, no doubt taking note from her many predecessors, had attempted a tamed rewrite of her accusations, reducing battery and restraint to Majors having “pushed her into a taxi” and “pulled her middle finger.”

Predictably, the NYPD soon thereafter uncovered solid evidence that she was, in fact, not only the perpetrator of the abuse, but a kleptomaniac to boot, taking souvenirs from Majors’ apartment after he had enjoyed her services as a (ahem) “dancer”* movement coaching.

One wonders if, among the few patches of the populace where the light of this truth will break through, there might be a few unexpected corners noticing (weaponized term intentionally deployed) this cascade of catty copyists. But the chances of even a hundred more such cases causing so much as a hint of open skepticism in the Dominant Cultural Ideology? Methinks the lady doth be wonderful too much.

*@ecgtheow rightly points out that this is the rare tabloid case where The New York Times is obligated to use a favorite euphemism for its literal definition.

Majors has a longstanding reputation, it’s not like Ansel Elgort or something where it genuinely was just one person saying stupid shit about him. His college classmates said and say very similar things, for example.

Where people are cancelled and then not uncancelled for spurious allegations, it’s usually for this reason (Chris Avellone was in a similar place in the games business). Everybody in the business knows they’re a scumbag, regardless of the veracity of the one claim a would-be victim makes public.

No director or executive is going to hire somebody where three months into production on a $200m picture another set of similar allegations everybody thinks are waiting in the wings might come out.

Avellone won a 7 figure settlement in a defamation suit against his accusers. That's not exactly encouraging, really.

No director or executive is going to hire somebody where three months into production on a $200m picture another set of similar allegations everybody thinks are waiting in the wings might come out.

They seem to be holding on to Ezra Miller as The Flash despite his (their?) recent colourful history. Now, given that the movie seems to be flopping financially, it may be less likely to produce a sequel, but the studio (at least in public) was not dropping him or even quietly shoving him out the door while recasting went on, unlike Henry Cavill.

People (especially women being egged on by their friends) have easily-altered memories when they are either 1) socially pressured or 2) socially incentivized to reinterpret events they barely recall and barely care about outside of group status. Majors’ accusers, like many cascades of catty copyists before them, all suddenly remembered him being a very bad boy the second they saw another woman gain social status and the potential for a financial windfall from doing so. Majors’ “long-standing reputation” did not exist at all until our “dancer”* movement coach decided to create it, after which many women who had most likely bragged to their friends about having once known him (probably some, to be fair, in the biblical sense) turned toward the other endzone and joined the dogpile.

*see top post

I heard stories about Majors 3+ years ago from people who had been at college with him. I think they had little reason to lie in the way you suggest since he was at the time a hot new star being praised by Obama and everyone else for The Last Black Man in San Francisco. I have to say it would be quite interesting if conservatives went all-in defending a black guy from sexual assault allegations by largely white women.

The twitterati are not representative and most conservatives are genuinely not very racist.

Of course, he's still fired.

has he been fired? they've taken him off promotional material but nothing official.

Maybe they're waiting to see how the dust settles before making a decision. There's probably all sorts of casting contingencies being developed at the same time.

It wouldn't surprise me if they hired some sort of investigation service to do the equivalent of 'opposition research' on their lead actors in situations like this (Edit: Make that before they're ever selected). Regardless of how this particular incident plays out in the courts, if I was a producer I would want to know if he's likely to do it again and implode a production worth millions.

Given most/all big productions are insured I imagine the insurance companies do this kind of investigation of the director and star cast.

Cash/Fame grabs in some form or another have been directed against celebrities for a long time and are par for the course. I'm pretty sure there are high-end ultra discreet escort services that are recommended amongst the celeb crowd. It's really only when you go slumming that you end up with these problems I would guess.

I usually take the side of the celebrity in most of these sorts of accusations, but if someone doesn't learn there lesson and consistently gets involved in say.. domestic violence allegations, then there might be a bit of substance to the story.

Paywalled article so I didn't read.

If you regularly dabble with "dancers" and sometimes invite a "dancer" into your place, you're assuming a certain degree of risk. "Dancers" will take your money and belongings; water is wet.

“pulled her middle finger.”

Is this whole thing a grade-school short story?

I assume you're implying she's some sort of sex worker by calling her a "dancer" which would normally be a reasonable assumption but the article says they met when she was a movement coach on one of his movies. Do Hollywood production companies hire sex workers as coaches for their actors often?

You're right; that's a misleading sentence. I've edited it.

I was genuinely asking, she might still be a sex-workers I don't know how Hollywood works. I do think it's probably a lower probability if she has a specified role then if she's a nonspecific dancer though.

Do Hollywood production companies hire sex workers as coaches for their actors often?

Of course not, and colleges never pair star athletes with their sluttiest "tutors" in the hopes that nature will take its course and they won't have officially, technically booked a hooker.

I've never heard of that. Is that actually common?

If you've heard of an athlete, and they went to college, this happened.

Wouldn't say so much tutors, but recruiting tours with this kind of stuff are very common.

Usually they just set up a meeting with an alumni booster, who then books the hooker.

I had a conversation about the Majors accusations a few months ago, with some hyper-progressive and movie-obsessed friends. One of them, a black guy who recently broke into Hollywood himself by landing a decent-sized role on a new TV series, seemed utterly shattered by the situation. (I’ll call him Desmond from here on in.) He is strongly invested in the success and public image of black male celebrities, and though he can generally be counted on to ostentatiously take the wokest imaginable position on any given topic, he seemed to be feigning exasperation as a way to avoid having to express a definitive opinion on the veracity of the accusations. Meanwhile, my other friends - one female, and one physically male but spiritually an AWFL in every way - took Majors’ guilt as an absolute given, and were utterly stunned when I expressed even the slightest amount of doubt. (As you all can probably imagine, I generally do not reveal even a microscopic fraction of my actual worldview to any of my IRL friends.)

I brought up several recent examples of accusations, made against notable public figures, which had turned out to be totally fabricated by vindictive, insane, and/or greedy women. I drew special attention to the case of a star college athlete, with whom all of us are familiar, who, right after being drafted into the NFL, had his career completely exploded by a rape accusation which later turned out to be false. Of course, all three of them had piled on invective at that man when the accusations came out, certain he was guilty and gleefully celebrating his downfall. I reminded them of this, and also lamented that Marvel had so quickly jumped the gun on distancing themselves from Majors, given that they had previously erred in prematurely jettisoning James Gunn as a result of flimsy and overblown accusations made during a period of social hysteria.

Desmond seemed quietly relieved to have been presented with an “out” to be able to safely express some level of skepticism toward the accusations, while the two goodwhites were adamant about pushing ahead with certainty about Majors’ guilt. They gave me some paper-thin justifications for why the Majors situation is different from the examples I’d brought up. The progressive coalition has done a ton of work, in the decades since the OJ Simpson trial, to desperately paper over the faultlines between the sensibilities of black men - who are naturally inclined to treat criminal allegations against prominent black male celebrities with severe skepticism - and those of white female liberals - who are deeply invested in the narrative of pervasive sexual impropriety committed by (racially-unspecified) powerful men.

Interestingly, this same faultline around the issue of whether or not to believe accusations against black male celebrities exists on the Dissident Right. Many DR commenters were eager to point-and-laugh at yet another apparent example of black male sexual misbehavior; other commenters pushed back, expressing doubts of the “bitches always be lyin’” variety. Personally, I fell into the latter camp; I’ve just seen too many of these sexual misconduct/abuse allegations against rich and powerful men turn out to be nonsense. The fact that Majors is black could credibly be used to slightly adjust one’s priors toward assuming his guilt, but I just didn’t feel that it was remotely enough to overcome my instinctive mistrust toward these kinds of situations.

I am interested to see what kind of interesting discourse will take place in progressive spaces now that the accusations appear to have been debunked. Will there be articles titled “America needs to have an uncomfortable conversation about why we were so ready to believe Jonathan Majors, a black man, was guilty” competing with articles about how “Why is America so ready to let Jonathan Majors, a rich male sexual abuser off the hook?” Whose umbrage will be taken more seriously? Will anyone learn anything at all from this?

Porque no los dos? In such cases, I'm open to "she's trying a cash grab" and "he's a bit slimy" when it comes to celebs. Some people, yeah, you'll go "come off it, he/she is not that type of person" but others it'll be "okay, I could see this happening".

Oh certainly, my larger take during that conversation was “Everyone in Hollywood is a scumbag, I’m sure Jonathan Majors is involved in all sorts of grimy shit, and I wasn’t going to watch his stupid movies either way.” It’s obviously tawdry that a man with his level of resources and opportunities, someone who had the pinnacle of career success at his fingertips, threw it all away because he couldn’t restrain himself from getting involved in shameful affairs with loose women. (Many such cases.) I just don’t think he’s guilty of the particularly lurid allegations that were leveled against him. Not like I’m invested in this because “Phew, now I can be a Jonathan Majors fan again.” I hadn’t even heard of the guy before the allegations came out, because due to my intimate experiences with them, I fucking hate actors.

The "Porque no los dos?" position amounts to washing your hands of the facts of the matter and treating both positions as equally valid. Which is equivalent to supporting the least-just position. Majors may or may not be a bit slimy, but he apparently not only didn't do what he was accused of, but was wronged himself (besides the false accusation) by the woman in question. Taking the position that the consequences he suffered as a result of these false accusations are OK because "he's a bit slimy" is not some middle high ground, but siding with injustice.

If he didn't do it then he should not be punished. But in a "he said, she said" situation where I don't know either party and there are allegations about both sides being less than great, I'm not going to pick a side and jump on it - see Amber Heard versus Johnny Depp. If I don't know enough, I will entertain "maybe he is a slimeball" and "maybe she's a gold-digger" as potential explanations until more information to settle the question one way or the other comes out.

And it is possible "he's a slimeball, but he didn't do this" or "she's a gold-digger, but it did happen that way" are true.

I mean, it seems like ‘bitches be Lyin’ is a thing that happens in a breakup- I wouldn’t trust a guy’s ex claiming he misbehaved if the story had a hole or two, but what motivation does she really have to lie? Women aren’t just inherently evil- when they do bad things they have motivations behind them.

Women aren’t just inherently evil

<.<

We are all inherently evil.

In a bad break-up, I don't trust any account of it that is not from a third-party neutral source. The parties involved have self-interest in portraying themselves as the victim and the other person as the bad guy; friends and families are picking sides, and so on.

Right, my skepticism about sexual abuse allegations isn’t generalized toward all women; specifically, it’s about women making allegations about rich and powerful public figures. In that scenario, the incentive to lie, and the rewards that can redound to a woman who successfully deploys such allegations, is too obvious to ignore.

This comment made me realize that we really are moving to a world where, in order to decide whether some action is bad or not, you have to first figure out whether the victim is "good" or "bad". I noticed this a while back in prominent hacking cases. If the victim was sympathetic to the current political fashions, it's a horrible crime. If the victim, for any reason at all, might not be the most shining example of idealism, at best indifference, at worst "fuck 'em". For example, the discussion around the Ashley Madison hack wasn't, "Hacking is bad, end of story." It was, "Ha! Fuckin' cheaters get hacked. Plus, some of them were government employees, so extra fuck 'em!" "...Uh, hello! Some good, brave, possible minorities, might have good reasons to use a site like Ashley Madison. Maybe hacking is not so good." And so on.

There is likely some amount of pre-judging the alleged perpetrator, too, but I first noticed it in hacking crimes with mostly faceless/unknown perpetrators.

I guess, weirdly, I had previously thought, "Hacking/digital stuff is still a new area; we don't have developed norms yet; given that, there's going to be more 'who, whom' than normal, but once we flesh out some norms, we should head toward more consistency." And now, I, uh, probably think that less. Not sure it makes me more conflict theory-y, but at the very least, I feel more inclined to think that many other people are, in a deeply rooted way, more conflict theory-y than I had previously hoped.

Again, re: Ashley Madison, I'm both "hacking personal and private details is bad" and "wanting to play away if you're married/partnered, serves you right slimeball". If you want to be young, free and single and ready to mingle, get divorced or work it out with your spouse that you're opening your marriage. Trying to eat your cake and have it is the worst of both worlds. It's going to come out eventually, or your mistress/sugar baby will want to take things official and you'll either have a messy divorce or dump the side-piece and then she'll go to some social media site to cry over how she wasted years on your dumb ass.

Everyone is missing the best part of the Ashley Madison hack. There is effectively 0 chance of a married man initiating an affair with a woman on Ashley Madison as there are effectively 0 actual women on the site.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ashley-madison-almost-no-women-2015-8

The article links to two Gizmodo articles that go into more detail. The short version is there is a 333-1 male/female ratio of the accounts, and the majority of the female accounts are bots or are controlled by Ashley Madison staff.

"Ashley Madison is a site where tens of millions of men write mail, chat, and spend money for women who aren't there."

That's what makes the Schadenfreude even tastier. They're well-off enough to spend money looking to cheat with 'high class' young women, and they're being swindled. But they have no moral leg to stand on: wannabe cheaters being cheated by cheaters is poetic justice.

Same with most of online dating. Completely cancerous gender ratio and thats before the well is poisoned by bots and bad actors.

The destruction of universalism by postmodernism and class warfare (and its proxies) has some pretty huge downsides for society.

Republicans are 'wannabe' whites, Democrats are 'wannabe' POC

Inspired by @ymeskhout 's thread below

The culture war in America is less religious, or even strictly ethnic, and more about whether a given group ‘identifies’ as white.

In America the GOP is the white party. That doesn’t mean it’s actually the ‘white party’ in some absolute anthropological sense, it’s entirely possible that largely native third-generation Central Americans might one day ‘identify as’ huwhite for the purposes of political alignment (cf Amerimutt memes). But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white, whether one is Scots-Irish, Italian, Cuban, Mayan, WASP, Jewish, Armenian or whatever else. Even black Republicans, even if they won’t overtly admit it, identify as white; Tim Scott was effectively raised by a neighborhood white businessman who owned the local Chick-fil-A franchise, Candace Owens is married to an English hedge fund manager and son of a peer, Clarence Thomas has a white wife etc. In several generations the modal black Republican with a white spouse will have white descendants.

Conversely, white progressives, even if they are literally as Nordic huwhite as it is possible to be under a Madison Grant-esque racial designation from 1890, do not ‘identify as’ white. Sure, they’ll tick white on a checkbox so they don’t get made fun of, Rachel Dolezal style, by their peers, but in the traditional, tribal sense they aren’t white. As the famous chart shows, white progressives are the only demographic in the entire western world (possibly the entire world) with out-group bias. Even if they would never admit it, they are transracial. Some part of Robin DiAngelo believes that, even if she knows she isn’t ‘black’ per se, she is on the PoC team in a tribal sense, just like Candace Owens, in marrying an Englishman, has declared her lineage to be ‘white’.

My grandfather, born in the 1920s, would never describe himself as a Jew, even though he, his parents, his wife, his children and (some of) his grandchildren were of course Jews. He would only describe himself as a “man of the Jewish religion”. He was a socialist in his youth, then became a Republican in the 50s and, in his final years on this earth, a devout Trump supporter. Before 9/11, when as is often stated, Muslims voted largely for the GOP (and pre-9/11 American Muslims were more Levantine/North African than they are today), they too identified as ‘white’, like my grandfather.

The political division in the US is and will remain between groups who ‘identify as’ white and those who do not, regardless of their actual ethnic origin. Religion won’t really come into it.

In America the GOP is the white party ... But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white,

Dunno about that. Most white nationalists/strongly identified white people I know consider the Republican party as too philosemitic to be the party for Whites.

it’s entirely possible that largely native third-generation Central Americans might one day ‘identify as’ huwhite for the purposes of political alignment

Yeah, but they won't be White.

But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white, whether one is Scots-Irish,

White.

Italian

White

Cuban, Mayan,

Not White.

WASP

White!

Jewish, Armenian

Not White.

or whatever else.

White means European derived people. Everyone knows what it means. It doesn't matter if you identify as being European derived if you aren't. You won't be white.

Tim Scott was effectively raised by a neighborhood white businessman who owned the local Chick-fil-A franchise, Candace Owens is married to an English hedge fund manager and son of a peer, Clarence Thomas has a white wife etc

If your ancestry can be (reasonably recently) traced to a black person, you aren't White.

Conversely, white progressives, even if they are literally as Nordic huwhite as it is possible to be under a Madison Grant-esque racial designation from 1890, do not ‘identify as’ white.

Well, they are.

My grandfather, born in the 1920s, would never describe himself as a Jew

Well, he is.

Muslims voted largely for the GOP (and pre-9/11 American Muslims were more Levantine/North African than they are today), they too identified as ‘white’, like my grandfather.

That was a misleading lie. They aren't white. It's a shame people feel the need to lie on census forms.

Man, I could do this all day. White: Overwhelmingly genotypically European, overwhelmingly phenotypically European. Everyone else ain't it.

This is low effort, consensus-enforcing, and a bit antagonistic. Don't post like this.

Cuban

Not White.

Ok, so I understand the rest of these. I disagree with some of them, but I understand.

But do you think people born in a place colonized by the Spanish won't have a bunch of European genes floating around in their system?

So, as one of the most vocally white-identitarian (I don’t use the self-descriptor “white nationalist”) posters here, you might imagine that I agree with your simple “white=European ancestry” model, but I actually believe it’s woefully limited and does not capture the complexities of the world as it is rapidly becoming.

I have laid out my expansive concentric-circles model of whiteness before, and as far as I’m concerned, several of the groups you ruled out as absolutely-not-white are, in actuality, either already white - at least conditionally/contextually so - or are approaching the transition to whiteness.

For example, you state definitively that both Jews and Armenians are non-white, but I don’t think that actually captures the way that the vast majority of Jews and Armenians are perceived. After all, Scarlett Johansson is fully 50% Ashkenazi, and it’s the correct (maternal) half to be considered halachically Jewish. Not a single person on Earth does not believe that Scarlett Johansson is white. Johansson’s ancestry is fairly bog-standard for the Jewish diaspora, and as non-Orthodox non-Israeli Jews continue their massive levels of out-marriage, the gentile percentage of their ancestry will only continue to cascade upward until more and more Jews look every bit as pale and indistinguishable-from-gentiles as Scarlett Johansson does. Similarly, Shavo Odadjian, bassist for System Of A Down, is fully ethnically-Armenian and was born in Armenia, yet his skin and (beard) hair are lighter than mine!

I’m slightly more sympathetic toward your stance that someone cannot be white if they have a black ancestor - I’ve commented elsewhere on this site (it already took me forever to find my past comment that I linked to, and I’m not going to go searching again for this one) that the ultimate criterion for Whiteness in the future will be “people who have no significant African/Negrito ancestry” - but I do think you’re not taking seriously enough the complicated question of just how significant and how recent the black ancestry needs to be. For example, during the Obama presidency, amusing commentary was made about the fact that Obama was, contrary to popular perception, descended from at least one American slave, but it was through his white mother’s side! Apparently she had some black ancestor 150+ years back. Again, not a single person would clock her as anything but fully white, and this obscure revelation about her distant ancestor does absolutely nothing to change that.

So, given that basically everybody accepts that if the black ancestry is far enough back that your phenotype doesn’t show any signs of it - and after all, all of us have African ancestry if you go far enough back, assuming that the Out-Of-Africa theory is in fact true - at this point we’re haggling over the definition of how to define the cut-off. I can easily imagine a Castizo Futurism that embraces people with 25% black ancestry as white, provided that such an individual also accepts and embraces that identification. And such a model could even embrace people of 100% East Asian descent as white, like I did in my concentric-circles model. This model of whiteness might strike you as eccentric and far-fetched now, but you may want to consider that things might like very different in even less than a century.

It's rather weird that you can't decide whether a person is white or not just by looking at his photo. You need to know his genealogy in some cases, and it's not even about mixed race people. Muricans!

Pretty much everyone who hasn't specifically convinced themselves otherwise is going to look at, say, Mark Zuckerberg and go "he's white" on the basis of a basic "just look at that guy" test.

Also, even elsewhere within my example, there are plenty of unambiguously white Cubans.

If largely genotypically and phenotypically European counts as white then many Ashkenazi Jews are white unless you take a one-drop rule perspective for haplogroups.

I am not so sure if it is simply a binary of "White" vs "Non-White".

I believe this is more akin to a Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe scuffle, as Scott commonly mentions. It is more of difference in which "type" of White person one is. Red Tribers, especially White Red Tribers, are depicted as having higher in-group biases shown through racism and discrimination, along with a host of other traits ascribed to your typical "back-country, red-neck" Republican. On the other hand, Blue Tribers are depicted conversely as understanding the history of racism and discrimination, and are accommodating in terms of cultural and ethnic acceptance, often to the point of their own self-detriment. These stereotypes are reified both in the media and in daily conversations, if one notices the subtle undertones of many people's speech.

While they may be just stereotypes, they still do have real cultural foundations and implications. An aversion towards racism, whether it be innate or learned, could steer White people towards the Blue Tribe because of these archetypes. Personally, I have witnessed in many peers and friends, either through direct mention of the unsavory stereotypes towards White Republicans, or through indirect methods such as jokes or sarcasm. This is used as a device to increase their status by showing moral superiority over the ignorant White Republicans/Red Tribers. A gander at current media and their attitudes towards Red Tribers should make it obvious that it is a low status identity, in certain areas at least.

This desire to gain status ultimately drives the now Blue Tribe members to convey values or even culture converse to the Red Tribers, effectively showing their membership to the group. However, much of culture ascribed to Red Tribers is traditional "White Culture". Whether it be Country music, Christianity, Meritocracy, and various forms of art, these cultural identifies must be rejected to not be mistaken as a Red Triber. Other cultural ideas must be used instead, especially those without the baggage of Colonialism, slavery, or other discrimination. Consequently, by identifying and pursing these cultural ideas and values leads the Blue Triber to feel closer to Non-Whites, since to the Blue Triber culture is a much stronger glue than race.

Another angle is that the moral significance of being White may be too much for some Blue Tribers to bear. Books such as "White Fragility" state that racism is the White man's original sin, unable to be saved from. The White Blue Triber may attempt to relieve some of the pent up guilt by loosening attachment to White culture.

The last angle I can think of comes from the stereotype that White people are uncool. This theory goes along with the first as they both use status to explain the repulsion from the White identity. In popular media, White people have been portrayed as less cool than their melanated brethren. An explain could be the reaction to White rappers, where many were said to be "corny". That is changing in the current atmosphere, but some of the sentiment is still alive. This reaction to the perceived lack of coolness from Whites could explain the motivations of the less politically active segment of Blue Tribers who are less likely to identify with their ethnicity.

On the other hand, this schism in White identity sort of strengthens the Red Tribers perceived Whiteness. A common theme among White Republican, whether view from the lens of someone like Trump or even red-necks, is the rejection of what the mainstreams prescribes for polite society and replacing it with a rebellion from those values. The sentiment, "You can't tell me what to do!" and then doing the action, even to self-detriment, encapsulates this phenomena. In the face of being told they are wrong, they do the opposite, many times in accordance to their in-group, as seem with "ugly" fashion styles such as mullets, camo, or even raised pick-ups. If sufficient push is given, many Red Tribers are likely to have this approach to race and become more White-centric.

TLDR:

White Liberals are trying to either:

  1. Gain status from identifying opposite of White Republicans.

  2. Escape the perceived shame and guilt from being White that surrounds racial politics.

  3. Gain status from popularity, or from being seen as cool.

White Conservatives may form more White identity to gain status from their in-group, which sometimes defines itself counter to the prevalent liberal norms.

This framing describes pretty well how many American liberals see things, but my understanding of the conservative point of view is that the division is between those who wish to be "colorblind" and resent being categorized in racial terms at all, and those who embrace racial identity politics as a way to gain power. To them, what the woke left would call "white" characteristics are simply aspects of American culture that do not belong to any particular race. This is of course different from the typical dissident right/white nationalist framing, which is to just take the woke liberal framing, invert it, and make it even more restrictive.

Literally everything is about race! (C) the pinnacle of American political thought, 2023.

Stop making low effort comments that add nothing.

I wouldn't say that the GOP is so much the "white" party as the "settler" party. This is to say that if your ancestors were around to fight the Civil War on either side, you're a lot more likely to vote GOP. One could argue that this is a distinction without a difference (and I believe that liberals mean "settlers" when they think of "white", and that settlers are most strongly conflated with Southerners because they most strongly embraced that identity/were late to urbanize) given that the settlers were white and that Yankee descendants of settlers are well represented in the liberal camp, but roughly speaking I suspect that this is A. true, and B. most of the culture war in American today, aka. a contest between two blocs of whites with highly divergent views as to what the founding was and what the country should aspire to in the present. White liberals are a minority of white Americans, but white settlers struggle to gain support of non-whites. Hispanic Americans can be either one (given that most are descended from both natives and white settlers), and the black American experience can likewise be viewed from either lens. The latter is especially true given that in the liberal north/west, black Americans arguably were immigrants, with mostly black Southerners having served as a substitute for immigrants from the 1920s-1960s (The white Southern Great Migrants were more likely to move west, as settlers.).

Conveniently, this is something agreed upon by both the woke left and paleoconservative right, the only bone of contention being whether the settlers were good or bad/whether they have a unique claim of ownership upon America and what it means to be an American, and perhaps a secondary front concerning which groups of Ellis Islanders have more room to claim credit for civil rights or dodge guilt concerning the white supremacy question. Broadly speaking, "but my ancestors were Irish or Italian, not those damned Southerners" doesn't count for much these days, and being Jewish comes with more flexibility in that regard.

White descendants of settlers (This is something of a choice of identity, most strongly espoused by those white Americans who put their ethnicity as "American" on the census.) would be the ones who don't share negative in-group bias with white liberals. Much of their gnashing of teeth as of late has come from the belated realization on their part that they themselves are a minority among the American populace (albeit the largest plurality), and while the white settler ethos has historically had high capacity to assimilate non-English settlers (see the Germans of Cullman, Alabama ) this ability has declined along with rural America's cultural power. While not all descendants of settlers are rural/exurban/suburban, the more rural in America one goes the more likely it is that the entire population consists of settlers (some of them of Mexican descent in places like rural Texas). Given their limited ability to court outsiders into their coalition, their future consists of being the largest but continually shrinking plurality with limited elite patronage and ever-growing political irrelevance.

They (and Republican Party officials, stuck with being the settler party in most of the country whether they like it or not) may cope about Hispanics turning right, or even more fantastically toward the prospect of flipping the black vote, but I have my doubts. The GOP may convert enough settler-adjacent Hispanics in places like Texas along with Cubans in Florida to hang on in those states, but results elsewhere (the west coast and southwest in particular) have been discouraging. It's very hard to assimilate new voters into your party when it doesn't even win with the local whites, and the GOP's high water mark with the Hispanic vote, W '04, was still a 9 point loss. Other relatively pro-immigration Republican tickets fared even worse, as did Bush in 2000. Reagan '84 lost Hispanics by 32 points and Bush '88 by 40. Trump 2020 was the usual over 30 point loss.

Relating to your frame of identifying as white, the number of Hispanics and Asians who identify as white (the latter likely for college admissions purposes) will be outnumbered by the number of mostly white Americans who discover some non-white heritage, and the latter will be wealthier and more important than the former.

I think the settler and immigrant distinction is still not precise enough in this instance. The descendants of New England Puritans and of Southern Cavaliers have been on opposite sides of pretty much every single political dispute in this country since its founding, which splits the settler population right down the middle. White immigrant groups are also split between those that embrace a liberal, socialist ethos (e.g. Scandinavians in the upper Midwest) and those more amenable to conservatism (e.g. the more devout Catholics among the Irish, Italian, Polish, and most recently Cubans and other white Hispanics).

As the famous chart shows, white progressives are the only demographic in the entire western world (possibly the entire world) with out-group bias.

This has always struck me as heroically missing the point. white progressives are simply prioritizing the progressive identity over the white identity. White progressives are the only group whose co-ethnics are more-likely-than-not to have voted differently from them in the 2020 election. Every other ethnic group is most likely to find someone who shares their political beliefs by finding someone who shares their skin color, except white progressives.

We can argue chicken or the egg about it, I guess. But it seems like the skin color bias is downstream from the politics, that the ethnic nationalism game is a card trick to try to cover up the far more important economic/religious/political/cultural lines at play here. A white Biden-Voter walking down the street in a purple state who sees a white person and a black person, all else being equal, the black person is more likely to have voted the same way in the 2020 election. A white Trump-Voter, walking down the street will obviously be more likely to find someone who voted the same way by picking the white person.

Which brings up the obvious failing of the "famous chart;" THEY DIDN'T BREAK DOWN OTHER ETHNICITIES BY POLITICAL PERSUASION. So when we get the take over and over that "White Liberals are the only group, maybe in all of human history, to prefer their out-group..."; well yeah, we didn't fucking check the other groups.

How did Asian conservatives do? A lot of Asian liberals, both at home and abroad in places like Singapore, will accuse Asian conservatives of White-Worship. How do our Uncle Toms view their own race versus whites? If we break out Hispanic Republicans from the group, are we just getting white Hispanic immigrants who hated blacks in Cuba and Venezuela before moving to America and keeping right on hating them? Hispanics almost universally come from countries with racial politics that, besides a sometimes larger admixture of indigenous bloodlines, more or less exactly resemble the USA, only to be amalgamated from David Ortiz to Messi as "Hispanic."

I strongly predict that subsets of ethnic groups that vote against the majority of their ethnic group will all show the same "out-group bias" that is seen as such a shocking fact of American liberalism.

White progressives are the only group whose co-ethnics are more-likely-than-not to have voted differently from them in the 2020 election. Every other ethnic group is most likely to find someone who shares their political beliefs by finding someone who shares their skin color, except white progressives.

I'm very confused. You can't say "every other racial group" when talking about white progressives (who are not a racial group). Otherwise I can say this:

White progressives Black conservatives are the only group whose co-ethnics are more-likely-than-not to have voted differently from them in the 2020 election. Every other ethnic group is most likely to find someone who shares their political beliefs by finding someone who shares their skin color, except white progressives black conservatives.

You're making hay over a semantic difference but my reading is that FiveHourMarathon is predicting your second paragraph is true. The point is that they didn't split up black liberals and black conservatives on the ingroup/outgroup preference test. We don't know if black conservatives might exhibit anti-black sentiment against those still trapped on the "Democrat plantations" and a pro-white outgroup bias because the authors didn't test for that.

For Hispanics specifically, Hispanics and red tribers get along quite well culturally and it’s extremely plausible that your local Mexican prefers pickup truck driving gringos to same ethnicity Hispanics(the Mexican/Caribbean vs centraco feud is near-legendary) with Priuses(I guess that’s teslas now, but whatever), even when they vote differently.

Large percentages of the Hispanic population, when they assimilate, assimilate into red tribe culture. It’s very probable that their children will eventually start voting like it.

Every other ethnic group is most likely to find someone who shares their political beliefs by finding someone who shares their skin color, except white progressives.

This isn't true. What about black trump supporters? For every ethnic group it is true that if you choose the minority political orientation for that group members of the intersection of the ethnic group and minority political orientation wil be more likely to find people politically aligned with them in other ethnic groups.

So what exactly is the relationship between this notion of "white" and skin colour or Caucasian lineage? Is it purely cultural continuity (like how Left and Right may become unrecognisable to historical users eventually), an aesthetic thing (your "white" := positive affect towards bio-"white") or really something like the progressive sex/gender distinction (which I guess raises similar uncomfortable questions about whether the identity's features are supposed to be based on some biological reality and, if not, why the homonymy)?

It’s neither strictly biological nor strictly civic, it’s a more traditional identity that incorporates aspects of both civic and lineal identity into an ethnos with room for personal or familial identification . So certainly, Rachel Dolezal had her children with black men and Candace Owens has her children with a white man, but at the same time a swarthier Guatemalan might well still see fit to check the ‘white hispanic’ box on the census, just as someone of half-white, half-light-skinned-Pakistani descent with light brown hair and green eyes indistinguishable from many a European might identify as POC.

But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white, whether one is Scots-Irish, Italian, Cuban, Mayan, WASP, Jewish, Armenian or whatever else.

How do you disentangle self-identification from social treatment? Do people come to believe they are white and so vote Republican, or are they treated as whites and so believe their interests are served by the same party as white people? My sense is that back when there was more discrimination against Italians and the Irish they formed distinct voting blocs and now they mostly vote according to age, educational characteristics and urban/rural split. Is this a product of Irish people self-identifying as white, or is it a product of society treating them differently as they assimilated?

Scotts-Irish & Italians are European descended and assimilated a generation or more ago. Cubans in general are 72% European descended and the upper class fleeing a communist revolution is probably more European descended than average. Vietnamese are also refugees from a Communist revolution and they are the only Republican-leaning asian ethnicity despite not being white. Jews may be white but they don't vote Republican, I couldn't find polling on how Armenian descended Americans vote.

Age, educational attainment and evangelical Christianity are big drivers of Republican voting even among Asian and Hispanic voters. I would chalk this up to the salience of various identities rising and falling rather than transracial identification. It's not that they identify as white and vote for white interests, it's that they identify as evangelicals, small business owners, or cultural traditionalists and vote accordingly.

(1) I think you mean "White" versus "white". Years back an online (what would now be termed) progressive lassie, who by her photo was as milky white as me, was claiming not to be white (in the White) sense because of some attentuated Jewish ancestry way back

(2) No more clickbait about "Them versus Us what do you think, fellow rats?" from anyone, please! Race is about the one thing I'm not fighting about yet, and I'd like to keep it that way.

I don’t think it’s “them” versus “us” at all, I think it’s an interesting look at the way that ethnic identification in American society is often rather arbitrary in an absolute sense, because it relies on a strange internal logic of its own.

Is "ethnic identification" really the right way of framing it though?

The progressive white may not be happy about the fact that he's white, but he nonetheless acknowledges that he is white. In fact it's a crucial tenet of the progressive religion that whites acknowledge their original sin of whiteness and atone for it. A white person who tried to evade their responsibility by claiming to "not really" be white would, like advocates of "colorblindness", actually just be reinforcing the existing racist hierarchies.

Similarly the progressive man may like to think that he doesn't really take part in "toxic masculinity", but he nonetheless acknowledges the fact that he is male.

"Not Like Other X" is an interesting self-description though. Are you saying "I'm one of [group], but different" or are you saying "I may look like [group], but I'm actually [other group]"?

When a woman says “I’m not like the other girls”, she’s not saying that she’s actually a man.

She’s not saying she’s a man exactly, but she’s also not making a purely biological comment. “I may appear to you as just another woman, but in fact in my head I am better in [this] way”.

I don’t think this is true. The basic thesis of Anglo sphere conservatism is that if you(individual) make good decisions, you’ll(individual) have good outcomes. Wokes declaring whiteness the devil is just them realizing that by describing whiteness they’ve described what their political opponents think is best for everybody.

I was in policy debate before woke declared whiteness axiomatically evil, I remember this. I mean I still thought it was offensive in a particularly retarded way, but I saw this shit forming and ‘evil whities’ was a later import.

I fail to see what the galaxy-brained take here is. It's not wrong, but it's a repackage of two, not one, not three ideas that are already well established among those of us who observe the CW with a rationalist? lense.

  1. The famous bar chart.

  2. "White" is actually proxy for "Classical Liberalism" or more accurately "PoC" is proxy for Leftism && NOT ClassicalLiberalism. You need to get the sub/super sets right here.

    I have noted in the past that even though I am not white, I still have a vested interest that there not be any "white genocide or replacement or whatever". Because of the people who share my ideologies in the utility and superiority of free speech, free markets, or free anything at all && meritocracy, lack of identity politics, and rationalism; are all white.

    Now you take the complement of all of the beliefs I listed out you get wokism. It's adherents are not all PoC, but the adherents of its complement are practically all white. And since the woke really have a fetish for placing an infinite weightage on race as an attribute... you can see how the "white" vs "poc" distinction materializes.

The "Conservatives" who try to be more "white" are playing into the enemies framing and are idiots. But that's a different story, I think the ship of conservatives not being idiots in the CW or actually introducing their own framing/narratives has long sailed.

"White" is actually proxy for "Classical Liberalism" or more accurately "PoC" is proxy for Leftism && NOT ClassicalLiberalism. You need to get the sub/super sets right here.

The dominant "White"* political factions are religious conservatives and protectionists. "Classical liberals" (i.e. libertarians) are a rounding error in a breakdown of American political views.

*scare quotes are necessary because I think 2rafa's paradigm is wrong. Firstly because it places too much emphasis on "overly online" weirdos who are not representative of the average normie democrat (or republican) voter. Secondly because I think it overestimates the importance of White Identity to conservatives/Republicans (especially outside of the South). Most white Americans will affirm they are white if asked, but it doesn't really mean anything to them. Even fairly racist white people will generally balk at explicitly white nationalism/white supremacism and are more likely to resent being racialized than they are to embrace white identity. One could more appropriately call it a metropolitan/non-metropolitan division or a merchant/professional division.

Can you link to the famous bar chart.

Otherwise I agree with this.

Its from the OP

https://cdn.sanity.io/images/z2aip6ei/production/883104fdaad1810c8dbbb2a6df5a4b6ed7d5036f-2560x1138.jpg

In another edition of the woke are more correct than the mainstream, I have to admit that slavery really was America's original sin and there is nothing we can do to cleanse it. To be fair, the whole black-white thing wasn't really that much of a thing in the North until the Great Migration ensued and the conflicts were more along traditional ethnic lines, but once black Southerners moved North, the eternal American racial conflict was fully metastasized and shows no signs of slowing down. Nearly every political issue I can think of includes at least some gesture in the direction of racial justice. Even the conservatives feel the need to do it - abortion isn't just bad because they think it's genociding tens of millions of infants, it's especially bad because Margaret Sanger was a racist or something.

Even the conservatives feel the need to do it - abortion isn't just bad because they think it's genociding tens of millions of infants, it's especially bad because Margaret Sanger was a racist or something.

I always assumed this was a failed attempt by conservatives to use a lefty weapon against lefties. Master's tools, master's house and all that.

I think you are trying to be more provocative by using the term “white” as some sort of pure German/English bloodied white when the term you are looking for is supporters of western civ. And in America and the last carrier dominant strain of that outside of America was the English. Other European powers played that game and its lineage dates all the way back Egypt, Greece, and Rome. All threw up some bricks for the building you are calling “white”.

It breaks down to “the culture developed in Europe is better than all other cultures”. Which I agree with. There are different specific ethnicities that carried western civ at different times.

Breaking this down as a “race” thing seems to be to accept the lefts terminology. When it’s never been a race other than this thing being born on Mediterranean and hence mostly people with white skin.

Terming it “white” also poorly explains the Jews who were a bit like occasional consultants to western civ who currently exists outside the “white” you describe and historically maintained their own culture and existed within and outside both culturally and geographically of western civ. This also explains Russians who you didn’t claim as a people that try to be white as their civ development has never been a full card carrying member of western civ but had a much different development path despite being often fully visually white. Versus Hispanics and Cubans who fully participated in western civ.

The Proud Boys get it right when they call themselves a pro-western drinking club. It seems almost like a slur to describe people in a way that they don’t want to call themselves especially when a better more accurate word exists.

It’s a cultural package of western civ that is being fought over. Most whites do trace their lineage in western civ but some don’t like Jews and Russians. Some non-whites bought into the cultural package.

I mean... maybe. But only because woke types have decided "Whiteness" has nothing to do with skin color, and everything to do with encouraging pro social norms like stable marriages, property rights, staying healthy, rational thinking, etc. Which means "Blackness" is left representing anti-social norms that are being "oppressed" by causality "Whiteness".

When such a framing of race is being forced on the discourse from nearly all institutional mouthpieces, if you are still capable of forming a coherent thought in your head, it's probably gonna be "Well, I guess I want to be white then."

staying healthy

I need to nitpick this slightly, because I think the NYPost is being deliberately dishonest in their framing. Yes, there's some wokeish language in the body of the AMA report they're referencing and mocking, but that really isn't the punchline. Here's their actual conclusion:

  • This report evaluates the problematic history of BMI and explores other alternatives to BMI. It outlines the harms and benefits to using BMI and points out that BMI is inaccurate in measuring body fat in multiple groups because it does not account for the heterogeneity across race/ethnic groups, sexes, and age-span. The recommendations recognize the issues with the use of BMI clinically, and highlights the need to use other methods. This report also acknowledges that AMA did not participate in the development of the “Indications for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery” guidelines and therefore cannot endorse these guidelines. recognize the significant limitations and potential harms associated with the widespread use of body mass index (BMI) in clinical settings and supports its use only in a limited screening capacity when used in conjunction with other more valid measures of health and wellness; and support the use of validated, easily obtained alternatives to BMI (such as relative fat mass, body adiposity index, and the body volume index) for estimating risk of weight-related disease; and amend policy H-440.866...

Go read the whole thing for both the woke nonsense, but more importantly to get the sense that woke nonsense is emphatically not what they're hitting on, and they're especially not saying that it's racist to consider obesity a health risk. I've defended BMI as a decent enough starting metric, but more fine-grained distinction of looking at body-fat and other metrics really are superior, and there really is considerable heterogeneity across height, gender, and ethnicity.

That said, I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of more extreme people claiming that health is just a social construct promoting whiteness, since I've read such ridiculousness myself, but I find this example to be pretty weak.

Ok, how about this clip covering a woman of color, and equity director, who does not believe obesity has any health consequences, or that nutrition is real at all, to the Nutrition Council?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cd-VnRofGcU

Far-right parties on the rise across Europe.

That's a headline we've all read many times in the past decade, is now really different? There are many clips around the internet of the race riots in France, with this Reddit thread showing a compilation of some. It's hard to gauge how serious the riots are, or if it's relatively isolated to a few blocks in a couple cities and these compilations make the situation appear worse than it actually is. The words of Eric Zemmour paint a dire picture:

We are in the early stages of a civil war. It’s an ethnic war. We can see clearly that it’s a race war. We see what forces are involved. We need someone determined and firm. … The problem, above all, is the number [of immigrants].

The reason I think the BBC article is noteworthy, most of all, is because it observes that contrary to the previous bouts of nationalistic populism that inspired Brexit and Euroskepticism, this surge in far-right political support seems to be dovetailing with support for the EU:

While at the same time, a number of far-right parties in Europe have intentionally moved more towards the political centre, hoping to entice more centrist voters.

Mark Leonard cites far-right relations with the EU as another example of their 'centrification'.

You may remember, after the UK's Brexit vote in 2016 that Brussels feared a domino effect - Frexit (France leaving the EU), Dexit (Denmark leaving the EU), Italexit (Italy leaving the EU) and more.

Many European countries had deeply Eurosceptic populist parties doing well at the time but over the years those parties have felt obliged to stop agitating to leave the EU or even its euro currency.

That seemed too radical for a lot of European voters...

Polls suggest the EU is more popular amongst Europeans at the moment than it has been for years.

And so far right parties now speak about reforming the EU, rather than leaving it. And they're predicted to perform strongly in next year's elections for the European parliament.

Paris-based Director of Institut Montaigne's Europe Programme Georgina Wright told me she believes the far-right renaissance in Europe is largely down to dissatisfaction with the political mainstream. Currently in Germany, 1 in 5 voters say they're unhappy with their coalition government, for example.

Wright said many voters in Europe are attracted by the outspokenness of parties on the far-right and there's tangible frustration that traditional politicians don't appear to have clear answers in 3 key areas of life:

  1. Issues linked to identity - a fear of open borders and an erosion of national identity and traditional values
  1. Economics - a rejection of globalisation and resentment that children and grandchildren aren't assured a better future
  1. Social justice - a feeling that national governments are not in control of the rules that govern the lives of citizens

I do not agree with Mark Leonard that far-right relations with the EU are an example of the centrification of the far-right, it rather represents a change in strategy.

I've seen it asked here, what would be the pathway for political or cultural victory of the radical right? This is it- these energies being transformed into a positive and ambitious political project that surfs the wave of globalization and European integration. In hindsight it seems like such a bad strategy for the far right to advocate stepping away from a project like this, and the failure of Brexit to produce any meaningful change is, along with Trumpism, proof of the failure of petty nationalistic populism. If you blame the EU for immigration you don't leave the EU, you go for European parliament.

Journalists have spent many years hand-wringing over the Euroskepticism being influenced by right-wing politics, but I think they will find the prospect of the EU being reformed by a pro-EU radical right to be much more worrisome- and effective at bringing real change.

Edit: Police Unions are also describing the situation as dire:

Faced with these savage hordes, asking for calm doesn’t go far enough. It must be imposed.

Re-establishing order in the republic and putting those arrested somewhere they can do no harm must be the only political signals to send out.

Our colleagues, like the majority of the public, can no longer have the law laid down to them by a violent minority.

This is not the time for industrial action, but for fighting against these ‘vermin’. To submit, to capitulate, and to give them pleasure by laying down weapons are not solutions, given the gravity of the situation.

They said: “Today, police officers are at the frontline because we are at war.” And they warned the government that, unless officers are given yet greater legal protections and more resources in the future, “tomorrow, we will be in resistance”.

When it comes to Finland's right-wing populists, discussed below, their current stance on EU is a rather confused one - their programs still formally state that they support a Fixit and a withdrawal from Euro, but when asked about this during the election, they said that these are "long-term goals" and that they wouldn't push for them in the government.

In general, the Finnish relationship to EU is very pragmatic; the Union itself enjoys wide support and quitting it (or the Euro) is unpopular as an idea, but there's also a constant fear that Finland is putting in more money than it gets or that the EU is about to pass, in particular, environmental legislation that would be harmful to Finland, such as the recently shot-down proposal for Nature Restoration Law. You don't get Brexiteer-style agitation, but Remainer-style fervent expressed love for the EU is not that common, either. It's just a fact of political life.

One of the main reasons why right-wing forces are advancing in many countries generally is opposition to high fuel prices or various proposed environmental laws. My understanding is that AfD is zooming up because of their opposition to this plan to ban oil and gas heating of homes in Germany. The Finns Party campaigned heavily on enacting whatever policies are necessary to bring down the fuel prices, which have, at least at times, been the highest in Europe in Finland.

The question Western/European civilization now needs to answer is at what point migrant camps / ghettos / unassimilated population centers / banlieues / HLMs become colonies in the colonial sense.

Native America was overtaken by European colonies, and the most famous was Plymouth, refugees who broke from England’s church but stayed tied to England politically.

One other thing scares me: France is a nuclear-armed power; imagine if the Conquistadors had found natives’ nukes and given them to the 17th century Vatican.

One other thing scares me: France is a nuclear-armed power; imagine if the Conquistadors had found natives’ nukes and given them to the 17th century Vatican.

When South African whites had to hand over power to the black majority they wisely destroyed their nukes rather than give them to the ANC.

at what point migrant camps / ghettos / unassimilated population centers / banlieues / HLMs become colonies in the colonial sense.

When the government lacks the power to do anything about them even if it wanted to. As long as European countries have the theoretical state capacity to eject the migrants then it's a matter of domestic policy rather than one of necessity imposed from overseas. It may be very bad domestic policy, but African countries aren't threatening to impoverish or take military action against France if it stops taking in their overflow.

The only groups who can externally constrain Western countries this way are the US and supranational organisations like the EU, and you do sometimes see the rhetoric of colonisation used by their opponents.

Belarus and Turkey with migrant warfare got closest. Belarus got walled, Turkey extracted significant bribes from EU and continues to use migrants as a threat.

One other thing scares me: France is a nuclear-armed power; imagine if the Conquistadors had found natives’ nukes and given them to the 17th century Vatican.

I do not for a second believe the French troops that are guarding nuclear depots would hesitate to fire on intruders.

They have one job, and one job only. Their entire training must be based around protecting unauthorised access to nuclear weapons, as any failure to do so can cause tens of thousands of deaths.

Their entire training must be based around protecting unauthorised access to nuclear weapons

Until the accusations of racism start flowing in, and some government official or other mandates diversity indoctrination and hiring quotas...

I think it’s a positive sign for the European far right, but a big part of the problem for them is what happens when they win. There isn’t really a plan for what to do with the banlieues. Repatriation still seems incomprehensibly beyond the pale, even Zemmour wouldn’t dare go beyond suggesting possibly deporting some relatively small number of non-citizen foreigners.

deporting some relatively small number of non-citizen foreigners

There's a "Zero to One" sort of effect here, though: once you have a legal mechanism in place to effect something like this, expanding the program looks like a small tweak to an accepted policy instead of a radical shift.

In Ireland's case the legal mechanism is there and plenty of deportation orders are given out. Very few of them are ever enforced.

They already have mechanisms to deport non-citizens, even those with residency in certain cases (just like the US does). Mechanisms to deport citizens are much more radical, especially those that would strip them of citizenship based on origin.

There's a whole raft of powerful policies waiting beyond the Overton Window, e.g., making eligibility for government benefits or government housing dependent on having at least 1 French grandparent. As long as one is willing to address the charge of "second-class citizenship" with 'yes, and so what?', then France can quickly make itself intolerable for its own immigrant underclass.

That would mean changing the constitution, since it would create two classes of citizen. That’s kind of the problem for them, under the law almost all the rioters etc are citizens.

Make revocation of citizenship for crime relatively easy?

I hear far-right commentators excited about revocation of citizenship as if it's the easiest thing when it actually seems like the hardest and most fraught option. Even without the concrete issue of venerable and widely respected international agreements specifically against it, producing an appreciable number of stateless individuals - especially a particularly criminal and undesirable sample of stateless individuals - would be seen as shitting on the international commons. It's not like people on your territory would magically disappear if you revoke their citizenship, and so all you would actually be doing - assuming you don't keep them firmly locked up yourself after revoking their citizenship - is that you would be telling other countries that you will refuse to take responsibility for them or take them back if they somehow make their way into those countries. Doing this would quickly turn you into a pariah state in a way in which no amount of concentration camps, draconian laws or firing squads, targeted against your own, would.

I understand some proponents' attitude towards that would amount to a "so what, sending a big fuck you to the rest of the world is a feature, not a bug"/"if everyone hates us that means more jobs for our people and military", but it seems that many others instead subscribe to a fantasy where if France revokes the citizenship of an nth-generation criminal African then after much wailing and gnashing of teeth some African country nobody can point out on a map will step up and admit that the individual in question is actually theirs (or perhaps that they can run a country-level paternity test that will identify some Equatorial Guinea as on the hook for child support in best reality TV fashion).

International agreements of the 'humanitarian' kind only matter to western nations in any meaningful sense. If they go far right, and it would only take two of the big ones, I don't think anyone will care enough or afford to uphold them.

To that end there would be no problem with France sorting the good from the bad in their society, relegating the bad to some purpose built prison hole in Djibouti.

The point is that it's only superficially about humanitarianism and actually largely about forswearing a type of aggression between roughly equal nation-states that is annoying to defend against.

Who is going to operate the prison hole in Djibouti you are talking about? The Djiboutians would neither be efficient nor incentivised to keep the people in, and would demand a lot of money for it if their internal politics don't randomly whiplash against operating it for any price; for the French running a prison in Djibouti - assuming they can rent the land or muscle themselves into it, which is not so clear - might turn out more expensive than running the same prison in France. (I haven't looked up the operational costs, direct and indirect, of Guantanamo Bay which seems to be the closest equivalent of what you are proposing, but I doubt it's cheaper than your run-of-the-mill federal supermax.)

If the humanitarianism is superficial then what problem are we facing? By the sound of things many on the far right in Europe are not against the EU per se. I don't see why, if we're not maintaining some facade of treating native first worlders and foreign third worlders the same, that the sky will fall as a consequence. European nations can continue working together despite that.

As for Djibouti, the French already have a military base there. Which they could run with an additional prison complex for as cheap as the French can run things overseas given they have the French Foreign Legion stationed there. It would be much less Guantanamo Bay and much more refugee camp you can't leave.

But that's kind of besides the point. I'm not attached to any one mechanism for doing things like that. I mentioned it more in passing than anything. The third world manages to house their criminals. I don't see the task as being impossible or even that hard for France. Nor why it would end up being prohibitively expensive.

If France had third worlders with no land to call home that commit crime, ship 'em out to prisonland.

Yeah, people also don’t realize just how much many people don’t want to go ‘home’. You’re not going to move to the Ivory Coast or Mali even if stripped of welfare rights. Mild pressure wouldn’t do it.

The UK did recently strip the citizenship of a woman (who joined ISIS) on the basis that she was entitled by ancestry to Bangladeshi citizenship, leaving her arguably stateless in a refugee camp. But doing it on a large scale would be quite different.

It presents a concrete political objective. A pan-European radical right movement to reform the EU constitution to actually serve European people would have to aim high and dream big.

I mean we’re on the fifth republic already. It’s not hard to imagine a sixth.

There's a lot of superstructure now that is intended to prevent further such changeovers...

While in the US, the country will whiten over the medium-long term if immigration can be cut off, is that the case in France? I mean payments to ethnic French to have more babies probably won’t work, you’d have to rely on natively high fertility rates, and it seems like once you exclude the Muslims and tradcaths France has typical-euro fertility.

If you break it down further, the white Republican TFR is replacement, while the native black TFR is much lower than the overall black TFR, and the Hispanic TFR is mostly declining. So over the long term assuming no immigration, the red tribe expands demographically while other groups shrink, which looks like a whitening country. The non-white groups having a higher TFR is mostly due to 1st gen immigrants.

Also, when hispanics assimilate they tend to do so into the red tribe- so they identify as white once they’re white passing.

All true, but a key component is net "conversion" from red tribe to blue tribe. The size of red tribe whites is shrinking as some portion of their children become blue tribers and move to cities. The rural stock of conservative whites doesn't have sufficiently high fertility to offset this drain. Red-tribe whites are at about 2.0 TFR and blue-tribe whites are 1.3. This assimilation dynamic means there is no rebounding effect on overall white TFR unless the acculturation/assimilation dynamic stops or reverses.

I see little chance of that happening at present.

The red tribe seems to be slowly getting better at dealing with the assimilation effect, and in any case the assimilation of Hispanics is probably able to at least partially offset it.

Remember that pickup trucks and country music are booming businesses, and that’s probably the best vibes based indicator of the relative strength of red tribe cultural power.

I believe, and I think a substantial portion of the right does as well, that the presence and resource cost imposition of all these immigrants is having a serious depressive effect on birthrates and family formation. The resources being used to subsidise the reproduction and immigration of all these new muslims are resources that are actually adding to the competition faced by ethnic natives who are in many cases generating these resource surpluses, not just being removed from them!. When I talk to people in western countries who would like to have children but are currently not, the manifestations of these costs loom extremely large in their mind. I actually think that the impact of diversity in this regard is even more pernicious than just the numbers would suggest - does it really seem plausible that events like the Rotherham cases had no impact on the life-trajectory and family formation of the individuals involved?

I’m not sure any of that it possible unless all of Europe does the same. Europe has free transit across borders, so immigrants can get citizenship at the easiest point, then cross borders until they end up in a rich European country. The US has the same problem— a state refusing immigrants would be forced to accept them because California does and the lack of borders between states means a sort of race to the bottom.

I’m not sure any of that it possible unless all of Europe does the same.

From the point of view of the European populist right, yeschad.jpg. The European Parliament effectively forces political movements to organise at a pan-EU level, and the populist right is getting better at it. The bottom-up movement to curtail Muslim immigration is inherently pan-EU.

Also, the problem as perceived by the marginal right-populist voter is irregular immigration, and a lot of work on that issue (border policing, asylum reform, doing deals with transit countries to push "refugees" back) can and should be done at EU level, and increasingly is. Contrary to the "woke EU" memes spread by the Brexit campaign, the EU institutions have proved themselves perfectly willing to actually do anti-immigrant things where the member states let them. The EU (largely under the influence of Eastern European conservatives) has produced

  • A public statement by the Commission President (effectively the head of the EU executive branch) that countries deliberately facilitating the transit of unwanted immigrants are engaged in a "hybrid attack" on the EU.

  • A uniformed EU border corps (Frontex). Frontex also has a coast guard that actually turn migrant boats round and send them back (see wokist wailing and gnashing of teeth), rather than acting as a water taxi service. This Samo Burja briefing (unfortunately behind an expensive paywall) provides confirmation that Frontex is for real from a non-establishment source.

  • The Dublin agreement to stop asylum shopping. (Leaving the Dublin agreement as a side effect of Brexit is why the UK now has a "small boat" immigration crisis that we didn't when we were in the EU)

  • A deal with Turkey to return Syrian refugees who settled in Turkey before illegally immigrating to Europe.

  • The only reason why the EU isn't funding border fences is tit-for-tat budget politics.

"If we want to keep the infidel out of Europe, we need to work together" has been a truism of European politics for almost 1000 years by now.

The reason I think the BBC article is noteworthy, most of all, is because it observes that contrary to the previous bouts of nationalistic populism that inspired Brexit and Euroscepticism, this surge in far-right political support seems to be dovetailing with support for the EU:

The fundamental issue that the EU had in England was that it lacked legitimacy. What's more, it never attempted to build any legitimacy, it always held the England in disdain. Therfore English populists (and the far right) would rage against a government that they felt was imposed on them. Notably, pro EU people in England don't express themselves in favour of the EU, but against England. You would find it difficult to find one who could name the European commissioner.

Continentals don't have that issue. The EU was started, for Germany, to allow themselves back into the European community, for France, to rebuild and continue the French power in Europe stretching back centuries, and for the Netherlands, Belgium, etc, to stop (excessive) domination by another country.

It makes sense that European populism and far right movements would fit more neatly into the European Union.

The fundamental issue that the EU had in England was that it lacked legitimacy.

This is dubious - there was a 2/3 supermajority for membership in the 1975 referendum, and zero sign of meaningful public support for changing this until UKIP get 16% of the vote on a 38% turnout in the 2004 European Parliament elections. Eurosceptic parties do embarassingly badly in Westminster elections until 2015, by which time UKIP have learned that they need to headline a populist domestic programme - Brexit is relegated to an appendix in their <a href = "https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/ukipdev/pages/1103/attachments/original/1429295050/UKIPManifesto2015.pdf"manifesto.

Notably, pro EU people in England don't express themselves in favour of the EU, but against England.

This is simply false. It is true that "I see myself as more British than English" is the best predictor of remain-voting (better than age or education) and that the patriotic section of the pro-EU movement used British rather than English symbols. But the anti-patriotism wing of the British left is anti-British (mostly anti-Empire) at least as much as it is anti-English. The only people who are noisily anti-English in British politics are the SNP.

The main reason why pro-EU people in the UK are pro-EU is that we believe (correctly) that EU membership is in the national interest - Dominic Cummings' focus groups confirmed this. Our support for the EU is a fundamentally pro-British position. (And therefore, indirectly, pro-English). There is a minority of fanatical pro-Europeans who would support EU membership if it wasn't in the national interest - they express this support by waving the EU flag and singing the Ode to Joy, not through being anti-English (which, as I have said, would just make them look like angry Scots).

The driving force behind right-populism in the UK is (similarly to other countries) a combination of:

  • General Boomer nostalgia

  • Vibes-based beefs about the economy, which mostly appeal to a generation of pensioners who are nevertheless enjoying an unprecedented level of affluence in retirement.

  • Opposition to Muslim immigration, which has very little to do with the EU.

The fact that this expressed itself through opposition to the EU, rather than opposition to the UK domestic policies which caused the problems, is a mistake on the part of right-populist voters - the Brexit we are getting is, as promised by the Johnson wing of the Tories, leading to increases in non-EU legal migration and is also leading to increases in illegal migration. And the Brexit-supporting faction of the Conservative party that supported Johnson, although not Johnson himself, are committed to the "Thatcherite" domestic-policy agenda that is what the people beefing about the economy are beefing against. So the interesting question is why the nascent right-populist movement in the UK self-sabotaged by focussing on Brexit. The question of why right-populists in the rest of the EU are not making the same mistake is easy - because they can see what happened in the UK.

Some of this is bottom-up (the age group that is most susceptible to right-populism is also the cohort group that has always been the most anti-EU, going back to the 1975 referendum). But a lot of it is top-down:

  • Pre-Farage, Euroscepticism is mostly a libertarian-adjacent project which although deeply unpopular with the voters, is well-funded and backed to the hilt by powerful foreign-owned media. So the right-populist movement that looks most likely to deliver Brexit and then cuck (i.e. UKIP vs the BNP/EDL/English Democrats) is the one that gets the cash and favourable media coverage. And even the existence of this movement is somewhat contingent - if Margaret Thatcher's senile dementia progresses differently then the bizarre idea that the true Thatcherite position on the EU is the direct opposite of Margaret Thatcher's approach to the EEC as Prime Minister may not get off the ground.

  • Cameron promises the Brexit referendum because of internal Conservative party politics, not because of any public pressure for it. (Remember how pathetic UKIP are in Westminster elections). FWIW Cummings says that promising the referendum did not help the Tories in the 2015 election, mostly because the promise was not believed.

  • If you look at the leave campaign messaging, both Vote Leave (Cummings) and Leave.EU (Farage) made blaming the EU for Muslim immigration a core part of their campaign. Vote Leave mostly do this using the "Turkey is joining the EU" lie - which only sticks because Cameron personally supported Turkish EU membership back in the pre-Erdogan era when it was a live political issue. Farage focusses on the 2015 Mediterranean migrant crisis (which was technically Merkel's fault, not the EUs, but the politics didn't reflect this) - which is taking advantage of a piece of good luck. But critically, neither campaign makes migration of EU citizens a core issue, because opposing the immigration of hard-working law-abiding culturally-Christian immigrants was not a vote winner.

I remember reading a pamphlet by Tommi Uschanov (a Finnish equivalent of Matt Yglesias - can't offer a better description) that argued that all the complicated, cultural/historical explanations of Brexit are false (referring to things like the 1975 pro-EU referendum etc) and essentially the sole explanation for Brexit was Thatcher deciding to go anti-EU during her waning years and this then becoming a litmus test for being a true "dry" Tory and things snowballing from there. Not sure if I buy that thesis fully, but there's also something a bit exhilirating reading someone give a very simple explanation hinging on one particular point in history for an ostensibly complex topic.

This is dubious - there was a 2/3 supermajority for membership in the 1975 referendum, and zero sign of meaningful public support for changing this until UKIP get 16% of the vote on a 38% turnout in the 2004 European Parliament elections.

The EEC and the EU are not the same thing. 2004 was the year Blair opened the borders to Eastern Europe which had a major effect on the lives of the English working class.

Does a 38% turnout not indicate a lack of legitimacy?

This is simply false. It is true that "I see myself as more British than English" is the best predictor of remain-voting (better than age or education) and that the patriotic section of the pro-EU movement used British rather than English symbols.

I'm not sure i've ever met anybody who is pratriotic and Pro-EU.

The only people who are noisily anti-English in British politics are the SNP.

I would argue new labour were fairly anti-English.

Opposition to Muslim immigration, which has very little to do with the EU.

Agreed, up until the the EU allowed millions of people to march in through schengen.

hard-working law-abiding culturally-Christian immigrants was not a vote winner.

First of all, the reputation of the Poles and other Eastern Europeans as hard working the is completely overblown and is a good indication that they have never worked in industry in England. Anecdotally, the major difference between a Polish forklift driver and an English one is the Polish ones don't look back when they're reversing. And when you get to the other Europeans (Romanians, Bulgarians, etc), trying to get any work out of them at all is difficult, often they will pretend they don't speak English, even when you have had a conversation with them before.

Second of all, law abiding? ehhhh, maybe. They don't tend to commit too much violent crime, and most of it is "mutual combat".

Third of all, White working class people don't care if the people who are replacing them are culturally Christian.

How does your model account for Eastern Europe, where the countries in the EU were no founders, and where it is a deeply popular institution anyhow?

Eastern Europe gets a significant amount of cash and market access out of the EU.

Protection from, and recovering from, the Soviet (Russian) Empire. I don't think it's controverisal to say that the idea of, and reaction to, the EU is different in the east and the west.

It‘s main goal (and legitimacy derived from it) was the prevention of war between france and germany (something benelux had a vested interested in) by combining war-making materials markets. Just because it‘s taught in school doesn‘t mean it‘s naive nonsense.

Since the EU is a rather invisible, undefined blob otherwise, it is what you need it to be. The extremes find it convenient to assign it to the outgroup. When you‘re crafting dodgy underdog stories about constantly losing to flawed assholes despite having the support of the people, a supranational supernatural entity putting its thumb on the scale is a useful scapegoat.

The EU didn‘t fill Birmingham with pakistanis, Nanterre with algerians , and Malmö with syrians. London, Paris and Stockholm did. Maybe secede from them? And when you‘ve finally declared the independence of podunkville, you‘ll find your neighbour was the problem all along.

It‘s main goal (and legitimacy derived from it) was the prevention of war between france and germany (something benelux had a vested interested in) by combining war-making materials markets. Just because it‘s taught in school doesn‘t mean it‘s naive nonsense.

The US and Soviet troops secured the European peace after the war.

Since the EU is a rather invisible, undefined blob otherwise, it is what you need it to be.

I agree. One of the funny things about Brexit is that the EU became everything to everybody.

The EU didn‘t fill Birmingham with pakistanis

True.

Nanterre with algerians

True.

Malmö with syrians

False. They allowed them to march through the Schengen area.

Maybe secede from them

I would if I could.

Frankly, I'm deeply pessimistic on the migration question. Yes, the overton window has moved to the right in the sense that it is now possible to harshly criticize mass migration in public now, but anything that would actually solve it is still completely politically impossible. What would be the bare minimum a serious program intending to stop Europe's demographic shift look like? Step 1 would obviously be to stop new arrivals, i.e a complete halt of non-EU migration, or at the very least African and Middle Eastern migration.

The issue here is that in Europe this is impossible to do on the national level anymore. Even if a far-right party can take power in any given European country, and even if they sincerely want to halt migration, there is an entire European judiciary that has decided that the right of muslims to come here en masse is a human right, but Europeans not having their cities being made unlivable by them and their progeny is not a human right. As such, any serious attempt to stop migration is stillborn. To actually solve the issue, you would need either a very throughout rework or abolition of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. But even admitting this out loud is still completely outside of the overton window. It is a political impossibility.

It is tragic, but the well-intended reaction to world war 2 will prove to be Western Europe's doom.

anything that would actually solve it is still completely politically impossible

Poland and other countries bordering with Belarus build wall there. (as in, actually build it and stopped uncontrolled migration, not like that Trump wall comedy)

anything that would actually solve it

Where does 'Marshall-Plan class program to bring the Third World Global South up to standard so that the inhabitants won't feel the need to move' fit in this?

That belongs in the same category as the "use technology from the Roswell crash site to end energy scarcity" or "Construct a fake airport out of sticks to summon great cargo from the land of the ancestors" approaches.

Up to what standard? I had understood that residents of impoverished countries actually become more likely to emigrate as the countries become wealthier.

It seems pretty clear the idea is to improve them up to a near-western standard so the incentive to move isn't there.

I doubt it's the poverty that keeps Germans from moving to Bulgaria en-masse.

Right, if that's the idea, the proponent should do the budget math to figure out what it would cost to raise the entire rest of the world up to first-world standards, because it's obviously a fantasy even if you assume that wealth can be delivered via wire transfer irrespective of the human capital in the recipient country.

I'm all for it in theory. In practice, I look at the giant money pit that was Afghanistan, and worry that any such Marshall Plan would meet a similar fate.

The Marshall Plan is absurdly overrated. Europe recovered from the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars and WW1 without any Marshall Plan just fine. It was European institutions and human capital that allowed the recovery. Things you can't create in the Global South with piles of money.

Observationally, nation building failed completely in Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan alone received something like 10x more money than Europe did on a per capita basis. All that money was set on fire and accomplished nothing.

The issue here is that in Europe this is impossible to do on the national level anymore.

Not true. Denmark's Social Democrats, of all people, pulled it off.

Talk about channeling Nixon going to China.

Have they though? I know the socdems there have been making a lot of noise about halting mass migration, but to which extent have the actually succeeded? Mind, I'm not trying to say you're wrong here, I'm genuinely curious. if this site is to be believed, the Denmark's net migration rate has barely budged since 2019, but net migration rate isn't the stat I'm interested in as it includes inter-EU migration.

If they've succeeded, what's been their secret sauce? How have they managed to get out of getting flooded with refugees without getting slapped down by some EU court? Is what they've been doing scalable to the rest of the EU, or are they basically just pushing the problem to other EU countries?

I've spent some time now looking for the data, and it's quite a lot harder to parse than I expected. There's undeniably been a huge drop in the asylum flow, but the effects of the 2019 socdem crackdown are obscured by the natural drop from the absurd mid-2010s highs, Covid, and now Ukraine. Although it's striking to me that even with Ukraine, the acceptance rates dropped from 85% in 2015 to 59% in 2022.

As for the secret sauce... my pet theory is that when the socdem's focus shifted leading up to 2019, they were uniquely positioned as having neither the ideology nor the monetary incentives (socdems are generally not liked in the circles that benefit from cheap labor) propping up the migration-friendly stance of their government.

Although it's striking to me that even with Ukraine, the acceptance rates dropped from 85% in 2015 to 59% in 2022.

Apparently most Ukrainians are not even applying for asylum: "as of 25 March 28 000 people have arrived from Ukraine and registered in Denmark. 2 000 of these have applied for asylum and are now accommodated in asylum centres". It seems like this is the result of a special law which grants them work, schooling and welfare rights without the need to gain citizenship through the asylum process.

Indeed, IIRC lots of euro countries declared that they would allow Ukrainians to move to their countries, no questions asked, and that they didn’t need to apply for asylum.

Currently in Germany, 1 in 5 voters say they're unhappy with their coalition government, for example.

Is this considered bad in Germany? 20% are unhappy? (I checked and its not a typo the article says the same thing)

Seems like politicians anywhere else would be overjoyed to poll that well.

It's really not, and I have no idea why it was toted out as an example either.

It's likely that the author of the article misread the original study. Here's the source the article was referencing probably, it's the bar chart titled "Zufriedenheit mit der Bundesregierung". 20% are happy or very happy with the current government, the rest is not.

Wright said many voters in Europe are attracted by the outspokenness of parties on the far-right...

I personally think this is the result of the kind of soft censorship progressives are using right now. The Overton window has been pushed to the point where there are some mainstream opinions get you labeled a bigot. So the only people representing those views are the far right; The very people who are not afraid of those labels.


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