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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27147 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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In last week’s thread there was extensive discussion on the retirement home employee shortage in the US. It made me ask myself: is it fair to say that elderly care in the US and Western countries in general is based on the unstated rule that you as a frail and elderly person pretty much only deserve to have a quality of life worth a damn if you have loving, caring children and grandchildren living nearby, visiting you regularly and looking after you if needed? That is, whatever system of care that is set up is not designed and should not be designed to basically prop you up and coddle you otherwise? It may sound cynical or too far-fetched to say it out loud, but looking at this issue from the outside, it’d explain many things. I imagine this is a general rule most Boomers also take as given, as they grew up in an age when childlessness and family dissolution/dislocation was much less normal than today.

It made me ask myself: is it fair to say that elderly care in the US and Western countries in general is based on the unstated rule that you as a frail and elderly person pretty much only deserve to have a quality of life worth a damn if you have loving, caring children and grandchildren living nearby, visiting you regularly and looking after you if needed?

On the contrary, I think you're building a big assumption in here, that countries could simply provide "quality of life worth a damn" to everyone living under their umbrella and are electing not to out of spite. Instead, as that thread covered, even providing a low-quality of life for someone that can't fully care for themselves is incredibly expensive and a massive burden on nations that are dealing with inverted population pyramids. I see this sort of thinking with regard to various supposed positive "rights" and it just seems utterly fantastical to me to think that there is sufficient state capacity to give everyone a nice life if only the affirmative choice were made.

As a practical matter, it is true that the main way for someone to have a quality of life that's worth a damn if they grow feeble is to have loving, caring children and grandchildren nearby. That this won't happen for everyone is a reminder that aging is cruel.

I see this sort of thinking with regard to various supposed positive "rights" and it just seems utterly fantastical to me to think that there is sufficient state capacity to give everyone a nice life if only the affirmative choice were made.

Unfortunately, the reasoning is very simple. Look at the group that is sympathetic and is suffering. Then look around and find another group that is less sympathetic and thriving. Well, obviously, you can solve the problem by taking from the second group and giving to the first. This works as long as there are less sympathetic people who are thriving.

While I agree with your point and generally am opposed to simply handwaving away all the details on how exactly we will par for things, I think the USA might actually be an example where this is true.

The state has immense resources at it's disposal, and almost certainly could give a comfortable life to everyone if it tried to do so without raising taxes or the like.. Of course, this would require cutting costs in other areas, and more importantly it would require cutting cost disease and corruption. Tough to provide for your citizens when the budget is stretched to its limit on $200 aspirins and $100,000 sinecures.

Of course, this would require cutting costs in other areas, and more importantly it would require cutting cost disease and corruption. Tough to provide for your citizens when the budget is stretched to its limit on $200 aspirins and $100,000 sinecures.

Isn't cost disease and corruption literally the hardest thing to cut in a democracy?

It feels like we'd need a crisis on the order of WWII to meaningfully move the needle on these things. Even then, I'm not hopeful. The last crisis (Covid) seemed to accelerate this form of corruption.

Covid wasn't on the order of WW2. It was very overblown, it was presented as a disaster when it was really almost a nothingburger. That kind of thing just lets the bureaucracy grab more power.

A true life-or-death situation like WW2, for all its awfulness, demands that you shape up. Look at the Soviet Union for example, after a few humiliating defeats, Stalin threw out almost all the ideology that had so dominated the 1930s. Poverty was no problem, even famines were no problem, ideology came first, but once the Nazis were threatening to conquer the whole mess, it really was a matter of survival, and Stalin stopped caring about ideology, only about what worked.

That said, you don't want such desperate circumstances instead of what we have now.

In a democracy generally? I don't think so. In our current state? Probably yeah.

I guess I just don't move problems that are in the "We could solve this if the leadership actually attempted to solve it" bin over to the "Literally impossible to solve" bin just because there's currently no political will to solve it.

COVID didn't work because it didn't really threaten the people who mattered. There was a small chance of dying for many of them, sure, but no chance of losing their high positions (which is far worse.) A proper war would do it I think, or a real severe resource shortage. Maybe a civil war even.

It’s simply not a solveable problem in aggregate to provide a comfortable life for everyone.

You can provide a comfortable life for everyone who didn’t defect plus the wealthiest 1-2% who did. But lots of people hit defect, including in ways that seem sympathetic, and getting them to a comfortable life uses more resources than they generate. And the more comfortable everyone’s life is, the more resources it uses.

Let’s take the hypothetical childless septuagenarian moving into a nursing home. If he can’t afford the platinum plan, you can’t make him comfortable. And it’s worth noting that the platinum plan’s cost has as its main input the cost of low/semi skill labor- the more comfortable CNA’s are, the more it costs to keep our septuagenarian comfortable. There’s discussion on the tyranny of the rocket equation, but this is the tyranny of the diaper-changing equation.

I like the comparison to the rocket equation, but I still think the US is wealthy enough to make it work. US GDP works out to around 70k per person per year, which means it's a distribution and priority problem. The reality of the modern world is that one person putting in the effort can generate the resources to provide for 100 who hit defect. Is the problem easy to solve? No, but it's definitely possible (okay fine, maybe not to 100% completion, but 90% even would be fine.)

I would argue it shouldn't be solved, but that's a different matter.

It's only a "distribution and priority problem" if you assume doing the redistribution doesn't change the total. it does.

On the contrary, I think you're building a big assumption in here, that countries could simply provide "quality of life worth a damn" to everyone living under their umbrella and are electing not to out of spite. Instead, as that thread covered, even providing a low-quality of life for someone that can't fully care for themselves is incredibly expensive and a massive burden on nations that are dealing with inverted population pyramids.

I haven't really had a chance to rigorously think through this, but I've occasionally had an economics thought experiment involving total economic output being measured in working hours, rather than hard currency: given that the law demands specific caregiver-to-resident ratios for these communities (the reasons for which are not unreasonable, in my opinion), we can quantify what fraction of our cumulative efforts goes into providing for our elderly and infirm. It seems reasonable that a society that spends more of its time this way isn't spending it on, say, fundamental research and technology. Ultimately it seems like technology is, other than demographics, our only way to improve this number in the long run.

On the other hand, that presupposes that research and invention is a better use of our time, which quite possibly isn't always the case: would you trade grandma for yet another cryptocurrency startup? So maybe this is just a derivative "increasing GDP doesn't reflect improving my societal preferences" complaint.

It seems reasonable that a society that spends more of its time this way isn't spending it on, say, fundamental research and technology.

It isn't really. Fundamental research and technology is hard, and almost nobody can actually meaningfully contribute to it. It's only getting harder as progressively higher-hanging fruit is picked. Meanwhile, almost everyone can help the infirm. It's just manual labour. As long as you're not a psychopath and not disabled, you can do it.

countries could simply provide "quality of life worth a damn" to everyone living under their umbrella and are electing not to out of spite.

That ingrained assumption completely blew my suspension of disbelief in Neill Blomkamp's Elysium.

Sure, medical care doesn't actually cost anything!! It's just the fault of the nasty bad evil rich capitalists who are selfishly refusing to treat every little twinge and hangnail of ten billion people!!

I felt dirty after having watched that.

I would expect that people who blame the evil ascended upper class of Elysium should in theory fully accept the repugnant conclusion, but I find that very few of them actually do.

I'm grateful that India has largely avoided the dissolution of the extended family and the associated problems that Westerners have been grappling with for the past, let's say 70 years or so.

It's not that it isn't happening, far from it, but most parents and grandparents can trust that they'll likely have a home with their children when they're too old to take care of themselves. In turn, obnoxious practises like kicking your kid out of the house when they turn 18 to fend for themselves would be considered scandalous here, you're expected to support your children till they have completed the lengthy period of schooling and higher education required for them to maximize their potential productivity (not that I don't think parents shouldn't have the right to do so, I simply think that's a terrible idea that should deserve scorn).

Of course, every week I encounter an elderly person wasting away, their children having abandoned the nest and flown off to fairer shores, worst case leaving this benighted land for the West. It's still not the expected outcome by an means. Even then, at least low skilled labor is cheap enough that most of them can afford attendants or caretakers.

Personally, while I come across as unabashedly pro-West in most regards, I find myself bound to criticize the most pernicious practises. Living with a large family can be stifling, but it has great benefit in terms of pure peace of mind. If you need to leave your kids at home, they usually have an uncle or aunt to keep an eye on them, often a grandparent or two, and cousins their own age to keep them company. If you fall sick, or lose your job, you know your kin will bat for you. Then you save money on buying a house, since a sufficiently large one can have room for an extended family to shack up together, though that's getting rarer as home ownership is increasingly a sign of personal status. (Once again, I'm not claiming any of this is utterly foreign in the West).

My grandpa, as healthy as can be possible at the ripe young age of 95, has been immensely lucky to have his kids and grandkids living with him for most of his life, despite the usual expectation that both of his daughters would eventually marry and move out to live independently if not with their husbands. I can't imagine he'd have lived this long if that wasn't the case, little can be more corrosive than loneliness. This is still unusual, it required son-in-laws who are uncommonly accepting of living somewhere where they're not the nominal head of household, even if nobody has ever brought that up as a negative where I've heard it. Maybe it was more uncommon a decade or two back.

Even as I prepare to leave myself, it eases my pain to know that my parents, while not as healthy as can be desired (mom's liver is on the way out, and I pray the sheer horror that is a liver transplant doesn't make me shy away if I'm the one who needs to donate)*, they're well educated doctors who can look after themselves for the next decade or two without me needing to lose sleep over them.

On the other hand, rearing kids as two working professionals in the UK fills me with a different kind of dread, and I have jokingly suggest that I drop them off shortly after birth with my Indian family until they're semi-autonomous. How the fuck do people manage that? I'm willing to take the blow in terms of lifestyle and free time that having kids requires, even two or three of them, but it's still daunting to the max. Oh well, at least I know I don't need to save for their college fund..

At any rate, this is all temporary. Our medicine is at an awkward stage where we can treat or mitigate many individual illnesses that would once have shuffled the elderly off this mortal coil, without being able to fix the underlying problem of aging. This has always been a doomed endeavor, akin to never doing preventive maintenance on an old beater and then replacing parts as they fail. Eventually it all catches up and the whole thing falls apart no matter how many times you change out the oil and put on a coat of paint.

I doubt we're solving aging in the remaining time till superhuman AGI, which ought to solve that problem shortly, even if only by killing everyone so there's no one around to grow old and decrepit, but steady advances in consumer robotics suggests that in a counterfactual world where we don't have a full blown Singularity in a decade or two, we're likely still not going to have the shortfall of people willing to accept shit wages for a shit job. Maybe we'll find other ways of improving the QOL of the elderly short of reversing their age, but I'm confident this state of affairs won't last, even if it's only going to get worse over the next few years.

*Scott's donation of a kidney appears trivial next to that, the odds of death are uncomfortably high, as are the sequelae, despite the liver being the only major organ that regenerate

and I have jokingly suggest that I drop them off shortly after birth with my Indian family until they're semi-autonomous.

This isn't the literal worst idea. If they are UK citizens and you don't want to pay extra to live near a good school it makes sense to send them back home to live with your parents for their primary education once they hit the age of 5 or so. Your parents would probably be made very happy to have little children running around the house they can play with. And this way you also avoid all the woke BS being spoonfed to your children in schools in the west.

Hence half jokingly! It might even be the best decision at the time, but it's hard to be sure until I'm a wage slave in the NHS. Childcare costs are exorbitant, until it's factored in from schooling.

While my parents currently declare (performatively) that I and my brother were enough to handle and they won't be saddled with more, well, evolution will have the last word when they're cooing and cawing over the grandkids haha. I just hope they're healthy enough that they can feasibly take that on.

The system isn't built this way, it just evolved. The idea that the state, not your children, would take care of you in your dotage would have seemed farcical not too long ago.

Nevertheless, I think the evolved system is a feature, not a bug. There are few incentives to have children. The birth rate has plummeted. The desire to be taken care of in one's old age is one of the few reasons that people can still give for having children.

For a society to spend a huge percentage of GDP to take care of its oldest and least productive citizens seems the epitome of decline. Payments and health care for seniors already represents by far the largest share of the federal budget.

With the exception of the infertile (or those whose spouse is infertile) and extremely ugly, I really don’t have much sympathy for people who don’t have children.

The assumption should be that unless you either have children (plural) and raise them well enough that they care about you, or you’re rich enough to get the platinum plan, $40k a month type nursing home, you’re going to have an awful end of life situation. But a lot of people are scared of bringing out the stick when it comes to raising birth rates.

The assumption should be that unless you either have children (plural) and raise them well enough that they care about you, or you’re rich enough to get the platinum plan, $40k a month type nursing home, you’re going to have an awful end of life situation.

Everything before "you’re going to have an awful end of life situation" is superfluous. Like how are a few kids who occasionally come and pity you, going to make the slow decay and daily pain of old age that much more bearable? It could be worse, they could take care of you, and you'll die knowing you ruined a portion of life of a still functioning human you love. When my grandma was in a retirement home, we made sure never to tell her that the value of her modest house had long ago been consumed by the cost, or she would have eaten the pills.

Why? I enjoyed hanging out with older relatives almost every week until they died, many people in traditional communities actually incorporate the elderly into daily life, they’re at the dinner table, at the park, in the garden, at the tavern having a beer with everyone else. They’re looking after grandchildren, they’re providing sage advice, they’re part of the family and community. I’m not talking about the last six months on your deathbed, I’m talking about what in many cases is the last decade or more of life.

If they're still in good shape, the childless can keep doing what they'd been doing the previous 70 years of their life. I'm talking about the time where they can't look after themselves, let alone grandchildren. When they become a burden, the fact that they can have their children share that burden is not really a plus. Maybe you haven’t experienced old age dementia. People who can’t walk ten paces unassisted without falling, who have no idea what you’re talking about most of the time, and who linger for years in pain and confusion.

If they're still in good shape, the childless can keep doing what they'd been doing the previous 70 years of their life.

Unfortunately the childless complain if you tell them that they can't retire from their job, and without the money coming in from their job they can't keep doing what they've been doing for the past 70 years of thier life. There is also a period of time where people are perfectly capable of living a decent life in good shape but they wouldn't be able to work their full time jobs any more. This leads to them making less money that needs to be made up from somewhere, and that somewhere in western countries is by and large the state for most people becuase they don't have a proper culture of filial responsibility or didn't have children or even worse (this one boggles me), despite fully knowing they won't have anyone to take care of them in their old age, made absolutely zero efforts to save up extra money to build a buffer to live off of when they are retired.

When they become a burden, the fact that they can have their children share that burden is not really a plus.

And when you were a little child, you too were a burden, nothing more than a little shit machine, yet your parents elected to take it on instead of handing you over to CPS so the government could take it instead. In their old age it is now time for you to take care of them, doesn't have to be physically if you can't handle it (like advanced dementia, I wouldn't wish caring for a parent with that onto anyone), you can make monetary contributions to their care too (even in my homeland we do have specialised homes for the small fraction of people who become so senile they need a minder all day instead of dying earlier of the far bigger killers of heart disease and cancer).

Only a small proportion (rising, but still small) of people make it to that age where dementia makes taking care of them a huge burden on their children and our specialist care homes can handle it in the cases where things get to that point (of course how much you are willing to pay influences how good this specialist care home gets, from the most basic fully paid for government shit that probably takes a few years off your already dwindling future life expectancy up to and including having your own private trained servants take care of you in your own home, a distant relative of mine over 90 is getting this treatment right now). However in the large majority of other cases your children can easily take care of your needs at home until you're within a few months of death, at which point most of your costs are to do with the medical system rather than the social care system anyways.

And when you were a little child, you too were a burden, nothing more than a little shit machine, yet your parents elected to take it on instead of handing you over to CPS so the government could take it instead.

Or they handed you over to the kindergarten and then elementary school + after-school, which is basically the equivalent to the elderly being handed over to retirement homes. And this has been the social norm for many decades.

This is another weird thing about the western schooling system. Back home school ends at around 1pm for elementary+middle years and around 3pm for secondary school. After school activities exist but are rare and only take place a few days a week.

Regardless, even this this handing over of children is only for a few hours each day, in the end the children still live with their parents and spend more time with their parents than anyone else. That's absolutely not true for retirement homes, indeed I wouldn't call a situation where an elderly person was spending more time daily in the care of their children than with professionals to be anything like them being placed in a retirement home.

Placing you in a retirement home is more akin to handing you over to CPS with your parents giving you a visit for a few hours every other week.

As @BurdensomeCount says, in many cases (especially those that don’t involve dementia) there’s a long, slow decline between being old enough to retire, old enough to be elderly, old enough to maybe no longer be fully entirely independent (but also not useless or a vegetable) and old enough to need round the clock care.

‘Assisted living facilities’ in the US (etc) are full of people who could continue to play important, valuable and prosocial roles in their communities and families. That’s obvious in as much as these homes are often full of their own kind of communities, which the elderly recreate after being abandoned by their families.

I find your present idyllic view of our elders difficult to reconcile with your callousness towards them during covid, which was basically, why should society care at all about the economically unproductive?

My view of them during Covid was that sacrificing the entire economy to protect them was both futile and stupid, not that individual families (or nursing homes etc) couldn’t take steps to protect them. Firstly, most elderly people easily survived Covid, including nonagenarians and centenarians. Secondly, to me, life extension (past a point) is less important than quality of life. The failure state isn’t grandma dying during a global pandemic, sad as that is, it’s grandma spending the last decade of her life separated from her family and community. And most old people are pretty reasonable in my experience, they don’t want to see their children and grandchildren suffer to slightly increase their chance of living another handful of years.

I'd argue that lockdowns, in the way they were designed and enforced, didn't even end up protecting the elderly.

The typical case for a whole lot of my relatives seems to be that they just stop doing much of anything. During their working years they worked and watched TV. Once social security kicks in they have enough resources to survive and entertain themselves mostly with TV, and that's what they do. If they wind up in a nursing home, they just have a smaller TV, possibly with headphones so they don't disturb a roommate.

I would like that vibrant multi-generational life, but it's not all up to me. Luckily my wife's family is the complete opposite of this.

You're describing those elderly that are still in good health, can still walk, have clear and intact minds etc. They aren't really relevant to this discussion. There's a large spectrum between being completely healthy and being on your deathbed.

Please also spare a thought for those who want children, but so far have failed to find a compatible romantic partner.

Please also spare a thought for those who want children, but so far have failed to find a compatible romantic partner.

Why? After all, given how often we're told how easy that task is to accomplish "if you really want it," then consider how much must be terribly, utterly wrong with those of us who consistently fail at it? So why spare any concern for such contemptible, defective losers. Who do we think we are, to think we're entitled to the spare thoughts of others, rather than deserving only their contempt for being so contemptible?

This but unironically.

If a low iq dude with a fucked up spine wants a middle class lifestyle and gets told "sucks to suck", why shouldn't that attitude extended to all of human existence? This is capitalist realism land, my dudes.

If you don't have something you want, by the dictates of the efficient market it can only be because you don't deserve to have it.

If you don't have something you want, by the dictates of the efficient market it can only be because you don't deserve to have it.

The Market provideth. Interesting way to cut this Gordian knot here.

It’s not that I disagree with that assumption. But the (supposedly severe) shortage of retirement home staff in the US surely isn’t affecting just the childless, the careless and the unserious, the unconcerned etc. The current social reality is atomization and geographical family dislocation/dissolution. We can decry it as degenerate and harmful etc., but it’ll still be the social reality for many people in the future. You can be a loving, responsible mother and grandmother, and still you’re likely to end up in a situation where your children and grandchildren are unable to look after you regularly even if they want to, for whatever reason.

With the exception of the infertile (or those whose spouse is infertile) and extremely ugly, I really don’t have much sympathy for people who don’t have children.

Hate to be hopping back on the hobbyhorse again. No, it's not the Hock. It's this:

Most people, except those who work in the healthcare industry or are connected to it in some way, simply do not understand that ~5% of the population are poor candidates for marriage and children. If you're looking at people from 18 to 45, most of that isn't because they wound up being burned in a house fire but are otherwise healthy and mostly functional. No. It's health problems that make people unattractive; you don't see them because they don't get out much. Two percent of people are intellectually disabled, one percent of people are schizophrenic, add in other physical disabilities, autoimmune conditions, and "is just a giant raging asshole" to the mix, and you have your five percent. Most of these people don't get out much.

As for the end of life situation: my parents have made it very clear to me and my younger sibling that they did not want us to spend time and energy taking care of them but rather that they wanted to go into a nursing home. I'd think that in a modern society we'd just adapt to increasing lifespan (but not similarly increased healthspan) by having essentially assisted suicide as more of a live option. I might drink hemlock if I couldn't wipe my own ass anymore.

it fair to say that elderly care in the US and Western countries in general is based on the unstated rule that you as a frail and elderly person pretty much only deserve to have a quality of life worth a damn if you have loving, caring children and grandchildren living nearby, visiting you regularly and looking after you if needed

I would say it's the exact opposite of what you're saying that is happening in western countries. They are places where you can spend all that wealth you earn with your DINK lifestyle on yourself during your 20s,30s and 40s without raising future taxpayers and still expect in your old age to be funded by the surplus generated by the children of those who sacrifised their own enjoyment for the next generation.

South Korea and Japan are the right way we should be treating old people who never had kids, not the west.

I doubt the problems with elderly care are that much different between the US or South Korea / Japan.

SK and Japan don't spend inordinate amounts of government money per capita on old people. South Korea's basic pension that everyone is entitled to is less than $3,000 a year, Japan's is less than $6,000. Here in the UK your basic pension is around £12,000 so over $14,000 per person. All three countries have similar costs of living. People's children are expected to care for them in old age, and if you didn't have children or they abandoned their filial responsibility then tough; there are extra programs to top up your income but they are deliberately kept at a basic enough standard that nobody would voluntarily put themselves or their parents through them if they didn't have to.

If you want a nice cushy retirement then you are free to save up for it yourself or have children who will take care of you in old age. Now they may very well screw you over in your dotage/your investments get wiped out in a recession but that's a risk you have to take, no different from the risk of being run over by a bus every time you go to work, and just as how you can mitigate bus run over accident risk you can mitigate this risk as well (have more children and instill proper filial values in them, invest more conservatively in a more diversified worldwide portfolio etc).

These things allow SK/Japan to keep thier welfare spend in check, SK spent 1/4th of the median OECD country as a percentage of GDP on pension benefits in 2007 according to Wikipedia and things haven't changed much since then. As a result SK/Japan are free to keep immigration levels low to preserve their native culture because they don't need more and more productive people to produce stuff that can be taken and given to the old, which is not a luxury westerners have.

The long term cost of the western welfare system will be the utter and complete replacement of the culture that gave rise to it in the first place. It's basically cultural darwinism in action and honestly a fascinating thing to watch play out in real time (see the recent straight up calls for violence in London in pro-Palestinian protests by the ascendent Muslim community and the lackluster governmental response because the government knows there is nothing it can do long term and it's best to not agitate these people in the first place). I for one am glad I get to experience it (on the right side).

You would expect the Asian norm of kids looking after you in retirement vs Western welfare state would lead to them having higher birthrates than us, but those societies have some of the lowest TFRs on earth.

Sure, you might well expect that but as we see it isn't true. Modernity of all stripes, even conservative modernity, really kills birth rates like nothing else. What is true though is that the lack of a welfare state allows them to continue functioning decently with low birth rates and low immigration rates in a way that is not possible for western countries that depend on immigrants propping up its welfare state.

rule that you as a frail and elderly person pretty much only deserve to have a quality of life worth a damn

Outside of individuals who should be sentenced to life in prison, is there anyone not entitled to an upper-middle-class life, regardless of their life choices?

You need to define what "worth a damn" means. I haven't compiled what I usually see from leftists regarding what the elderly are entitled to, but once listed out, I'm guessing it's an upper-middle-class standard if you want to live in flyover country or a wealthy one if you want to live in an Alpha++ city.

For younger people, I see:

  • Unlimited world-class healthcare.
  • At least 40 hours of childcare per week.
  • No more than two children per bedroom, and older children should not have to share a room for as many children as you can have.
  • A safe, walkable neighborhood within biking distance of the downtown core.
  • A workweek of less than 40 hours, although I observe that this number is constantly decreasing. Let's be honest, jobs are optional because means testing is not allowed.
  • If you do want a job, then more than 6 weeks of paid vacation.
  • At least 3 months of paid parental leave (I've seen people advocating for a year).
  • If you do need a vehicle, it should not be a beater.
  • High-speed internet.
  • A smartphone.
  • Free college (should any education be paid for out of pocket?)

Considering that jobs are optional, it seems that everyone is entitled to the life of a trust fund kid.

This is caused by the transition from the left being the party of workers against bosses, to being the party of students against workers.

The western college experience is that you move out of your parents house to a 1-star resort where your immediate needs have no short term sticker price, and you can get a stipend to live off of. This is treated as an entitlement by the people doing it and it’s perfectly reasonable on an individual/class level to advocate for the thing to which you’re already entitled to become higher quality/bigger. And it’s also perfectly reasonable to lobby for the entitlement to not end.

I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s obviously wrong.

Workers in my experience both as a union member and rep are quite fond of not having to pay for healthcare, having more vacation, childcare availability, time to spend with their kids, adequate pay for better housing and lifestyle, shorter hours, and getting free education. They fight quite hard to try and get such benefits in their contracts. Go back to before the majority of the populace went to college and you'll still find social democratic, labor and socialist parties with such demands in their party platforms.

Life in a social democracy with more robust social services, in other words. Sounds great to me.

The problem is that eventually you run out of other people's money.

That's not really in evidence. The Nordic social democracies that are held up as exemplars may not be entirely what some of their external fans believe they are (in particular, they still have poor people, you still have to go to work, and they have high taxes on everyone, not just the rich), but they're not in danger of running out of money.

Do the Nordic social democracies provide to everyone:

  • Unlimited world class healthcare
  • 40 hours of (free) childcare a week
  • No more than two children per bedroom, and older children should not have to share a room for as many children as you can have

As far as I can tell the answer is "no" to all three. I assume the answer is the same for the rest of the list.

I'm middle-income in Finland, and we currently have two kids who both have their own bedroom and get 30 hours of free childcare for the older one per week. (Could be more but my wife doesn't want it, and wants to keep the younger one completely at home for a bit longer.) I'm not sure what "unlimited" means regarding health care in this context.

Do unemployed people also have 3+ bedroom apartments within biking distance of downtown?

There is a world of difference between your strawman and real existing social democracy societies to which many younger people in the us aspire to. And you can easily have tens of thousands affordable 3+ bedroom apartments near the downtown. You just need to accept the glory of the commie block! Or at least, it's variation more palatable to the western tastes.

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Yes, yes, and within reason.

This is very easily googleable or verifiable by either going there or asking anyone from those places.

That last one is iffy though; I was told (in Oslo, at least) that if you want a big house for any amount of money you are gonna have to be willing to move outside the metro area.

Unlimited healthcare? Any procedure you want, the government will cover 100%?

40 hours of free childcare a week does not appear to exist, but maybe I missed it.

Last one is just totally false as far as I can tell. If you make enough money, sure.

I don’t know about the others, but unlimited world class healthcare is not unlimited healthcare to the maximal extent possible.

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You need to define what "worth a damn" means.

Not having to lie in bed for hours waiting for the Filipino nurse to come and wash you after soiling yourself. Not lying on the cold floor at an isolated part of the retirement home after accidentally tripping and falling, because nobody comes to help. Not going hungry all the time when you're so frail lying in bed that you cannot sit up and eat, because nobody helps out by feeding you. Not living in complete solitude and social isolation. I'm referring to this sort of stuff, just off the top of my head.

I'm inspired by Who By Very Slow Decay: I honestly think that modern societies are going to go the MAiD/Athenian route, more or less. As I understand it, any Athenian citizen could request a lethal dose of hemlock poison; permission had to be granted by the Athenian Assembly. It could be that elderly people with no children or grandchildren sometimes ask for their hemlock from the government.

Why were things different in the past?

  1. Closer families and more family support.

  2. Modern medicine. The frail elderly who would've been killed by pneumonia or a heart attack or stroke 100 or 200 years ago now are able to survive and as such more time and effort is spent taking care of them.

No, they’re based on the unstated rule behind most of our institutions: “out of sight, out of mind.”

Just desserts don’t really come into it any more than they do for, say, natural disasters. If you think that’s unfair and irrational, I’ve got a bed net to sell you.

I don’t think deserve is the word here. It’s simply not possible to have strangers care enough about an unproductive human being they are not related to in the same way that person’s own family would. And even in allocating resources by the government, there’s a push to austerity in care for unproductive people simply because there are always competing priorities for resources and QOL is expensive for relatively little real gain, doubly so if those benefitting cannot somehow reciprocate. And so with resources limited, and care provided for the least money you can get away with, you’re probably going to at best achieve a Soviet working class level existence— everything sort of minimally works, but tos not fancy and generally sort of works but not well.

Are we going to see the far right attempt to form an alliance with the left in the hopes that their shared antisemitism will be sufficient to gain political power?

No. Progressive beliefs are fundamentally an attempt to signal status. Affiliating with the lowest people on the status hierarchy (alt-right, rural, white) defeats the whole purpose.

Communists don't pal around with fascists even though horseshoe theory means they end up having more in common with each other than with a centrist.

Progressive beliefs are fundamentally an attempt to signal status.

They're more than that. Progressivism is not simply a social signaling game, but rather is a coherent worldview.

Communists don't pal around with fascists even though horseshoe theory means they end up having more in common with each other than with a centrist.

Communists frequently don't pal around with other communists either, so this proves nothing. Likewise, if you look at clan-based societies like those found in Afghanistan or the Caucuses, you see a lot of vicious blood feuds. This isn't because the local population is wildly different, it's because they're fundamentally the same, and their shared nature encourages blood feuds.

Progressivism is not simply a social signaling game, but rather is a coherent worldview.

I'm assuming that the worldview you are referring to is that there are "oppressors and oppressed" and society should enforce rules (even unfair ones) to help the oppressed at the expense of the oppressors.

While this might be a coherent world view, it is not a stable one.

If followed strictly, it would lead to the oppressed classes rising up and becoming the new rulers in a constant cycle of upheaval. (Mao came closest to stating this as an explicit goal).

Of course, in real life, this doesn't happen. Instead, it leads to the powerful adopting a cloak of righteousness as they put the boot on the necks of their social inferiors. As progressivism is mostly just Christianity minus God, it reminds me of nothing so much a pious Christian Crusader praying with true and genuine feeling before going into battle and slaughtering his enemies. This is the social signalling I'm referring to. You can do whatever you want as long as you are a "good" person according to the religion of the day.

I'm assuming that the worldview you are referring to is that there are "oppressors and oppressed" and society should enforce rules (even unfair ones) to help the oppressed at the expense of the oppressors.

Beneath that, it's the belief that we know how to solve all our problems, and so that if a problem isn't solved, it's because someone is preventing the proper solution for their own selfish benefit. This, notably, is not similar to Christianity, and is why Progressivism creates problems that Christianity did not. Even Crusaders could negotiate truces in good faith on occasion, show mercy, limit conflict.

You can do whatever you want as long as you are a "good" person according to the religion of the day.

Specifically, you can do it to the Bad People getting in the way of the solutions: wreckers, kulaks, antisocial elements, reactionaries, racists, bigots, whatever the label may be.

I'd agree that it's not stable, in the sense that it doesn't deliver peace and prosperity, but only conflict and stagnation. But it is stable in the sense that itoffers coherent answers to most object-level questions, resists most naïve attempts at falsification, and can perpetuate itself longer than the average human lifespan.

While this might be a coherent world view, it is not a stable one.

If followed strictly, it would lead to the oppressed classes rising up and becoming the new rulers in a constant cycle of upheaval. (Mao came closest to stating this as an explicit goal).

Interestingly, I encountered a point somewhat like this in a podcast discussion of the current AI debates, arguing that of the major competing views today, the oppressors-and-oppressed DEI worldview is the one that most calls for automation. Specifically, that providing properly equitable compensation for inequities that doesn't overcompensate and produce these cycles and metaphorical pendulum-swings; and which doesn't oversimplify, but instead is sufficiently granular and "intersectional," requires vastly superhuman computational ability and a lack of human partiality and self-interest that would be best met by something like AGI. That perhaps the most stable end-goal for this system is The Computer going "today, this person suffered three microaggressions of severity X, and will receive three micro-transfers of size Y in equitable compensation" across all individuals in society, continuously. Fully Automated DEI Communism.

Just to be clear, would you say that most/all ideological clusters are signaling, or just progressives?

I would argue that extremists don’t cooperate because of their acceptance of violence. Getting one side into power is liable to earn the others one-way helicopter rides or trains to the gulag. Whereas cooperating with centrists means you get more of whatever you had going on already. I’d predict that states where centrism gets radical—where the center pushes hard against opposition wings—you wouldn’t see much palling around at all. This would be…maybe Singapore? Turkey? The more secular oil states? Maybe I just don’t know enough about their history.

Turkey comes to mind as having centrists uniquely willing to use violence, yes. You could also point to Lebanon, where more or less everyone uses or has used political violence quite freely. Also IIRC both mainstream Irish political parties are centrists who descend from armed wings in their civil war.

Of course Lebanon’s politics are currently defined by coalitions, one of which is literally led by Hezbollah.

Just to be clear, would you say that most/all ideological clusters are signaling, or just progressives?

Not at all. Many ideological clusters are genuinely pursuing their stated ends. Hamas isn't signalling.

Progressives, being rich and powerful, have the ability to signal luxury beliefs while still being secure in their high status. A lower class person who gets some money buys an Escalade. Larry David doesn't need people to know he's rich so he counter-signals by driving a Prius instead.

You might as well say they’re comfortable expressing genuine beliefs while still feeling secure. The barber pole theory of class just says what’s off-limits, not what people actually want.

More importantly, that’s not what keeps people from reaching across the horseshoe. Being wealthy or powerful enough to tolerate—or at least use—the outgroup is an old signal indeed.

I think the ultimate test of whether someone is just signaling is down to watching what they do not what they say, and ignore anything they claim that they can claim without cost. If they’re saying they’re for cutting services from the government, are they taking money from the government? If they’re saying they’re pro life, are they so even though getting pregnant and having a baby would impact them personally? They probably really believe that. If the person saying it has nothing to lose or has something to gain, it’s not a good signal.

This is a bad test. Imagine hypothetically that everyone who advocated X was 100% sincere. A certain percentage of them will be making claims without cost just by chance, because people are in different circumstances and some wouldn't meet your criteria. So you get false positives.

In general, far right allegations of Jewish control of America are highly exaggerated. While Jews are unsurprisingly overrepresented in every important industry, most powerful figures in finance, law, tech, politics, consumer goods, energy, even journalism aren’t Jewish. The only industry that can really be described as primarily Jewish at the most senior levels was Hollywood, and even that’s changing with streaming, the most powerful man in the business is Reed Hastings now, and he’s an old school WASP of impeccable Boston Brahmin pedigree.

KMac is unusual even for far right academics in that he thinks the enlightenment was a good thing and (in the case of the Scottish Enlightenment obviously) Scotland’s great contribution to the world (this was the subject of some of his early work before he started writing only of Jews). He is to some extent the epitome of the ‘racist liberal’ epithet sometimes levied at the erstwhile alt right by neoreactionaries, although in recent years he’s become somewhat more trad, perhaps under the influence of writers he’s hired for TOO.

Since the enlightenment was a primarily gentile project (Spinoza, whose role is often overstated, aside), this puts him in a bind because the traditional tradcath argument (repurposed by Strauss and then later by Moldbug, along with Deneen and others) essentially says that there’s a pretty linear trajectory from the enlightenment to the present, and that while Jews embraced modernity for obvious reasons, they didn’t invent it as part of a ‘group evolutionary strategy’. So MacDonald really has to stick with this argument that It Was A Good Thing Actually, but the juice corrupted/twisted/manipulated/etc society in a way that results in all the things he doesn’t like about modernity.

In a way, MacDonald’s ideology has led him down this dead-end route to extreme antisemitism, it can’t accommodate any alternative explanations.

I’ve met Jewish reactionaries at NYU in the early 2010s, sure. Maybe not exactly with this guy’s ideas, idk.

How are Jews responsible for Sweden's immigration policies and hate speech laws?

How are Jews responsible for the conclusion of WW2?

That is, MacDonald claims that the West would be markedly different if not for Jewish influence, but Europe, which lost nearly its entire Jewish population following WWII, has been on essentially the same trajectory as the United States for the last 80 years.

Sweden operates in a global economy, plugged-in worldwide telecommunications and global media. Sweden only dubs children shows. 86% of the Swedish population speaks English. They get American media, which sometimes means Jewish-influenced media.

Aside from that, I don't disagree that Europeans might just go that way no matter what.

Perhaps the natural, inescapable conclusion of European civilization is some kind of glorious fiery, but mostly peaceful protest.

I disagree with this guy. If Israel can't defend themselves from what he calls 'the third world' (Israel is not located in subsaharian Africa), then why should anybody else defend them? Why do they need our money?

Let these Israelis figure out a way to survive without begging, without running intense propaganda campaigns on Westerners. Get creative for once. Idk, offer some training, weapons and land to disillusioned Western youth similarly to ISIS?

Let's see an Israeli Roterham before we talk about Israel being the bulwark of the West. At least Israel has walls all around it.

'the third world' (Israel is not located in subsaharian Africa),

Neither is the whole third world.

How are Jews responsible for the conclusion of WW2?

Mostly through their work on the Manhattan Project.

Let these Israelis figure out a way to survive without begging, without running intense propaganda campaigns on Westerners. Get creative for once. Idk, offer some training, weapons and land to disillusioned Western youth similarly to ISIS?

It is happening. The dirty secret is that many West Bank settlers are people with minimal Jewish ancestry or just plain converts, often from unexpected places.

It is not official policy, but you want to make it one, you want Israeli government official outreach program to promote and evangelize Judaism and offer Israeli citizenship (with free sand and rock) to prospective converts?

Program racially limited to whites (I presume that by "Western" you mean White) to avoid recruits like this?

Well, if you want to make Middle Eastern situation more heated and volatile, this will work.

It is not official policy, but you want to make it one, you want Israeli government official outreach program to promote and evangelize Judaism and offer Israeli citizenship (with free sand and rock) to prospective converts?

I really don't care about the ethnic make-up or the future of Israel as a country.

Israel doesn't seem to mind taking American money from non-Jews, so why would the would-be settlers need to be converts?

Program racially limited to whites (I presume that by "Western" you mean White) to avoid recruits like this?

No, I think limiting the offers to people within a certain measure of competence would do roughly the same job. There are also plenty of low-quality White people that they probably would not want on their side.

It is happening. The dirty secret is that many West Bank settlers are people with minimal Jewish ancestry or just plain converts, often from unexpected places.

But the West Bank does not seem to be where the civilians are actually fighting back. This appears to me to be explicitly displacing civilians and stealing land, not 'fighting back against Hamas terrorism' or whatever thinnest veneer of justification Israelis claim for their bombing of Gaza.

There may be strategic justifications for that that I ignore, but again, this is all pretty removed from what that edgy guy writes about Israel being a prototype for Europe's ongoing invasions. Quite the contrary, Israel does not appear to be under invasion, it seems to be the one invading and expanding (in the West Bank at least).

I really don't care about the ethnic make-up or the future of Israel as a country.

You should. If Israel fails, Israelis will flee and settle in your country. I presume you are not very fond of Jews and are not eager to welcome Jewish refugees.

Israel doesn't seem to mind taking American money from non-Jews

Some Israelis do mind a lot.

so why would the would-be settlers need to be converts?

Because it would nullify the whole point of Israel (national home and place of refuge for Jews)

No, I think limiting the offers to people within a certain measure of competence would do roughly the same job. There are also plenty of low-quality White people that they probably would not want on their side.

People with "measure of competence" (living in developed countries OFC) have more options and opportunities than ever before. What could Israel offer them? Why would competent person want to live in trailer in the desert among people who really do not want him there?

Anyway, Israel is not lacking people with guns, Israel is not afraid of being overrun by mighty Arab armies.

Israel is afraid of being declared racist, fascist and white supremacist country and sanctioned like old South Africa. To avoid this, Israel needs to gain hearts and minds of people (elite human capital OFC, the masses will follow) in the Western countries and needs advocates, propagandists and tiktok influencers.

edit: more links added

Old South Africa probably could have made it had they oppressed women harder. It fell because differing fertility rates by race turned the dominant minority into a small minority, international pressure was mostly an excuse.

If Israel fails, Israelis will flee and settle in your country.

Ok they can join the Somalis, the Iraqis, etc... Get in line.

I presume you are not very fond of Jews and are not eager to welcome Jewish refugees.

On one hand I have Jews who take my money and pollute my media, that I can't do anything about, on the other hand I have hypothetical Jews moving in my neighborhood I can actually shake down if I felt so inclined...
With the way European governments have been treating anti-Israel protests in the past few weeks (heavy-handedly compared to other similar protests/riots imo), perhaps if Israeli refugees arrived there, EU governments would start the serious crackdown on Islamic immigrants that is decades overdue?

Some Israelis do mind a lot.

One X frogposter. One. Also points out that US taxpayer money is given to all kind of Middle-Eastern countries that would be irrelevant if the US dropped 'the only democracy in the Middle-East' like the hot potato that it is. They actually agree with me. Good.

Why would competent person want to live in trailer in the desert among people who really do not want him there?

You're saying Israelis are incompetent? Perhaps the US really should drop them then.

Anyway, Israel is not lacking people with guns, Israel is not afraid of being overrun by mighty Arab armies.

Alright let's cut them off then. If Ukraine is so strongly winning the war, they don't need our money and ammo, do they?

Israel is afraid of being declared racist, fascist and white supremacist country and sanctioned like old South Africa. To avoid this, Israel needs to gain hearts and minds of people (elite human capital OFC, the masses will follow) in the Western countries and needs advocates, propagandists and tiktok influencers.

Israel needs to start aggressively platforming Steve Sailer, Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer, Nick Fuentes, Andrew Anglin, Ron Unz...

Ok they can join the Somalis, the Iraqis, etc... Get in line.

What is the percentage of Israelis who have dual passports?

Jews’ reverse immigration from Israel is on the rise

They would not be refugees, but citizens legally returning to their countries. Jews of Ashkenazi origin in Israel (these are the Jews everyone fears, no one is concerned about Arab and Ethiopian Jews) do have US or EU citizenship or are eligible for one.

European countries rules for citizenship by descent are more generous you would imagine.

"Second passport" is class marker in Israel. See the family in the link from my previous reply - they had US passports and could easily move to US with intent to "stay forever".

...

One X frogposter. One.

BK is good representative of settler mindset.

...

You're saying Israelis are incompetent? Perhaps the US really should drop them then.

People from first world countries who move to Israel do not come for prosperity, opportunity, safety or great life in general. They come because they want to live in holy land.

You proposed that Israel shall recruit "compentent" non-Jews who do not want to become Jewish. You need to answer what could Israel offer them.

...

Israel needs to start aggressively platforming Steve Sailer, Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer, Nick Fuentes, Andrew Anglin, Ron Unz...

To make racism, colonialism and white supremacy popular and cool again? The last time when it was the case it was not so good for the Jews.

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The overlying question surrounding Hlynka's hypothesis is "does the reasoning matter if the end result is the same?" and can be applied to many horseshoe arguments made - be it segregation, racism, economics theory, etc.

There probably needs to be continuing questioning along the lines of "if you could press a button and both sides would immediately ceasefire, would you?". For example, I think an alt right person probably would choose continuing conflict to instead of any sort of peace or cease fire, while a far left person would probably support any sort of ceasefire, even if they perceive the opponent as 'evil'.

a far left person would probably support any sort of ceasefire, even if they perceive the opponent as 'evil'

That’s certainly not what far left people believe lol.

Well, it seems you sympathize with the far left by potraying them as people supporting a ceasefire. This is part of the problem of this horseshoe framing. The establishment is today comprised to a significant part by the far left. The assault in the culture war is mainly made by sides that fit with establishment. It is false that this establishment is accepting a ceasefire, to the contrary the opposition being false and full of appeasers have not appeased them to stop. So commonly we get far leftists talk about moderates winning. Which moderates? The reality is rather than the threat of the far right boogieman, people who falsely like to see themselves as moderates have abadoned so much right wing and moderate and reasonable ground that they associated themselves with far right extremism, that they joined sufficiently the other extreme. If a horseshoe exists, they are part of it, and not the people in the middle which encompasses more than that but also encompasses politically incorrect views associated with far right extremsim. Precisely because the left wing framing has been adopted.

Its people afraid of being called names, and being considered right wing extremists who fail to have an even handed position on these issues but adopt a position biased on the identity left wing direction.

Reasonable right wingers wouldn't choose cease fire because the current status quo represents a victory for the far left and also is not a stable status quo but part of its dna are changes bringing things further left direction, although in a manner that can prove unstable for the left and its identities based alliance/coalition. I would argue even moderates wouldn't.

Also, "ceasefire" is a totalitarian anti democratic anti political notion that is greatly destructive to society and a rather extreme way to base society about. The point of politics is retaining what is good and changing what is bad. Of course it is convenient to frame the right existing and trying to change things as making war and refusing to make peace, but this isn't a fair way to analyze politics. It is a way to justify the left dominating since they are so magnanimous they are willing to make peace with the right but the right is unwilling.

When I say this is a totalitarian notion, I am not kidding by the way. Hlynka's way of thinking too directly leads to authoritarianism to enforce collectivism of individualism and disallow his outgroups to express politically what he finds disgusting. I am not against enforcing an overton window but we need to be careful to allow plenty of freedom and choose one that works. Hlynka's overton window is one rather far to the left and much more dangerous and extreme than how politics operate in much of the world.

In many ways he shares ground with the agenda of the establishment in various western countries. Obsession about disallowing native identity sentiment is in line with the agenda of left and it isn't part of moderation. And in practice as it expressed it targets the left's outgroups as threatening with much more fervor than other groups.

The left motte and baily would be at the moment looking for a ceasefire but in reality wanting Palestinians to destroy Israel for some reason. I believe I agree your notion that the 'far left' and the 'establishment' are so intermingled it's hard to separate the real ideas of the two as they often align for whatever political motivation they push the Overton window.

In the 1930s, a rabbi in Germany was reading the Nazi paper called Der Stürmer. A congregant came up to him, astonished, and said, “Rabbi, how can you be reading that Nazi rag, filled with libels of the worst kind. Are you some kind of masochist, or, God forbid, a self-hating Jew?” “On the contrary,” the rabbi responded, “When I used to read the Jewish papers, all I learned about were pogroms, riots in Palestine, and assimilation in America. But now that I read Der Stürmer, I see that the Jews control all the banks, we pull all the strings in the art world and cinema, and that we’re on the verge of taking over the entire world. You know – it makes me feel a whole lot better!”

So is Hlynka right? Are we going to see the far right attempt to form an alliance with the left in the hopes that their shared antisemitism will be sufficient to gain political power?

No, I think you’re confusing antisemitism on the left(which is not otherwise particularly progressive and is mostly an ethnic thing) with anti-Israel sentiment that is not otherwise particularly antisemitic, and which is motivated by naivety, anti whiteness, and general moonbattish opposition to US aligned militaries. They’re currently very closely aligned, but that isn’t a given for the future.

This is the best image I've seen to understand the symmetry of the woke left and Trump-right when it comes to foreign affairs. Partisans are willing to jam round pegs into square holes, and so leftists squint and see the Israel vs Palestine conflict as white colonizers vs oppressed brown natives. This worldview is incoherent when you do deeper analysis, but it has sufficient surface level appeal to rip left coalitions apart in circular firing squads around the world. The right (ala Trump) is steadfast in its support of Israel apart from the unironically antisemitic fringe who'll end up throwing in their lot with Trump anyways as part of the coalition process.

Hlynka's analysis is basically just that the woke left and Trump right both want change and are willing to flirt with authoritarianism to get it. There's some stuff about Locke vs Hobbes in there but that's just intellectual salad dressing for the previous sentence. If status quo bias and democracy vs authoritarianism are the only thing you care about, then yeah the two sides probably look pretty similar. But go beyond those and the differences are massive.

So is Hlynka right? Are we going to see the far right attempt to form an alliance with the left in the hopes that their shared antisemitism will be sufficient to gain political power?

No lol. If anything, expect Israel vs Palestine to simply become more partisan. As leftists become more flippantly pro-Palestine, expect the right to use this as ammo to justify tacking towards Israel to an even greater degree. Public polling backs this up.

I don’t understand that guy’s categories. Cutting out the Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine labels,

  1. … they are soviet sympathizers and love guerilla-style resistance
  2. … your classic liberal left, they mostly care about oppression and the optics around it
  3. … centrists [who] mostly care about democracy and western civilisation triumphing
  4. … the new right movement and most of the trumpists
  5. … they hate western civilization because of wokeness or whatever, and they dislike jews so by process of elimination palestine is left

These don’t look like the normal political spectrum. Maybe that’s because I’m used to seeing the two-axis compass version? Squishing it down to one axis requires putting the command-economy tankies in the same blob as the libleft CHAZ anarchists. That’s a little weird, and I suspect this horseshoe goes away if you control for authoritarianism.

The far left is very heterogenous, but the US's automatic coalition progress means communist tankies and anarchists are indeed lumped together. They'll both either vote for the Democrats, or waste their votes by staying home or voting for a fringe leftist.

Yeah, but then it’s not surprising when those fringes don’t cooperate. The horseshoe has much less significance than the big tents.

To be clear, I’m not disagreeing with you about the horseshoe. I think people tweeting about it are giving it too much credit.

Public polling backs this up.

Expect that poll was from March, and newest polling sees a heavy swing towards a pro-Israel position by all three main US political camps, including the Dems, and negligible sympathy for the actual pro-Palestinian position (instead of "I support neither") among any of them.

The polling following the immediate aftermath of Hamas' attacks was done with the slaughter of over a thousand Israelis fresh in mind. That turn towards Israel will not hold over the long term for the D side.

I'm not so sure about that. Anecdotally, it seems to me that the pro-Palestine protests have shifted normie opinions as much or more than the attack itself.

The fact that they started before Israel even retaliated, and that we've seen big crowds in major western cities chanting things like "gas the jews" and "long live the intifada" is making people realize that peace with Hamas is not possible.

Depends on what you mean by "normie" here. If it's "centrist", then perhaps. If it's the median Democrat, though, that's much more questionable. Remember that normies naturally gravitate towards news orgs that flatter their preconceptions, so they're much more likely to see crying Palestinian children than deranged leftists holding "gas the Jews" signs.

"Independents" aren't really a political camp; they're a combination of people with no lean, people who don't want to admit their lean to the pollster, and people with an unusual lean (e.g. Bernie supporters might not say "Democratic").

There's considerable support for the pro-Palestinian position among the Democratic vanguard -- the "few college kids on campus" -- which the past has demonstrated have an influence all out of proportion to their numbers.

Technically Hlynka's salad also lumps in all of the center, social democrats, neoliberals, classical liberals, in with the wokes and reactionaries. Basically it's just him, the ghost of hobbes, and the soul of america, versus everyone else.

How would you not see "white colonizers vs oppressed brown natives", even without squinting?

For starters, colonialism has two major cleavages: settler-colonies (e.g. USA, Canada, Australia, etc.) and old-fashioned imperialism (e.g. most of Africa, Latin America). Most criticism of colonialism is of the latter portion, whereas Israel more closely resembles the former. Settler colonies are harder to criticize because they've tended to have fairly good outcomes. At most you could criticize what they did to the natives they displaced decades/centuries ago, but few people argue that the USA should "give back the land" to the natives, which is functionally what Palestinians are demanding in Israel's case.

Second, while many Jews have white skin, most people would say they're culturally and obviously religiously distinct from whites in a number of ways.

I would go into more detail, but looking at your posting history I'm not sure it's justified. I'm happy to dive in more if you respond though!

We have seen plenty of cancelling by Neocons now and pre Trump. Woke left is also the Democratic establishment at the very least and part of republican establishment as well. The new republican speaker of the house is at least somewhat woke on race, talking about how his black son will have to deal with disadvantages for being black while his white son wouldn't have said problems.

The dialectic of bad left vs bad right and us good in the middle misses the boat greatly. To the extend the neocon-ish people fit somewhere it isn't a moderate side, just cause they have differences with both some on the left and some on the right.

There aren't really sizable factions with anti-authoritarian bona fides and when one criticises the supposed woke left and Trumpian right, what remains and is implied are are mostly the neocons like Nikki Haley who are more authoritarian than MAGA. Although MAGA politicians including Trump seems to be going back to more neocon direction in recent time.

There isn't any sizable faction of moderates around in the establishment. There isn't a sizable faction of moderates among rationalists and associated people neither who mostly seem to fit somewhere between the woke democrat establishment and neocon agendas. Although some people here don't fit into the rationalist associated tribes.

Also, there is some attempt to associate limitless Jewish tribalism (which is blatantly racist) with moderation. Being very pro Jewish does not make you a moderate neither. Being more pro Jewish to someone who is abusing Jews might make you moderate perhaps. But you can be so pro Jewish that you are an extremist and racist against non Jews.

Someone who is supporting attrocities, rejecting nuance, supporting cancelling any speech that is critical of Jews and promoting hate speech laws, slandering anyone opposing their country from funding Israel and its conduct. Plus there is also the extreme element of corruption and influence of foreign lobbies.

On Jewish influence, the moderates are those who have a negative opinion of this pro Jewish racism without going too far to the other side of the extreme. Although, hate begets hate, and to oppose movements you need determination and a will to not be politically correct. There is a certain proportionality necessary when dealing with the extremism of the woke and neocon factions, but one must still try to retain certain principles in opposing them which is about what end goal you are trying to reach.

I admire the people that in opposing the more pervasive bad faction of our time with all the slander, all this hateful provocative rhetoric and all the consistent false framing manage to deal with these issues without accepting to play the role of the villain and reject this false dialectic.

Are we going to see the far right attempt to form an alliance with the left in the hopes that their shared antisemitism will be sufficient to gain political power?

No. The psychological similarities of people with radical beliefs may facilitate some damascene conversions, but their disagreements are far too fundamental and anti-semitism is too marginal a motivation for the far right and left to form a political alliance.

The left and the right have issues with Israel for reasons that are diametrically opposed and difficult to reconcile. The right views Jews as an insidious influence on European society (including Euro-derived societies like America, Canada, Australia etc.) because of their community's left-wing advocacy at the heights of politics and culture. The left views Jews and Israel as an extension of European civilization, which is automatically presumed to be wrong in any conflict with non-European cultures. You're always going to find a few weirdos like Nick Fuentes and his supporters who will make opportunistic cause with "based Muslims", but by and large these two sides are not going to see eye to eye.

Ackmans recent letter to Harvard sounds like a lot of what rural white or ethnic white people would say about the place. They are excluded. And low social status in the elite hiearchy.

https://twitter.com/billackman/status/1720987581549080965?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

I don't believe Jews have been the sine qua non for these sorts of policies and beliefs to spread in former WASP bastions, but there's no denying that they've played a significant role and have been stalwart supporters. A lot of Jews were all-in for these reflexively anti-white norms until it became clear that a special exception wasn't going to be carved out for them. So my sympathy is limited, even though I wouldn't bat an eye if everyone in Gaza died under IDF fire. The main reason you'll never see a "white and Jewish alliance" as the OP described it is that Jews will gladly burn that bridge for the dream of a pat on the head from a dark-skinned hand.

Jews will gladly burn that bridge for the dream of a pat on the head from a dark-skinned hand.

Wait, I thought the refrain from the far right was the Jews were the ones controlling the dark skins to go and pillage white lands instead of the other way around?

Nobody cares about Jewish approval in progressive circles. You demonstrate your credentials there by having the darkest person you can find certify that you are One Of The Good Ones. The far-right believes Jews manipulate immigration policy to marginalize white people and force multiculturalism so that the resulting societies will be too disunited and incoherent to form a new Reich, and while this is true in extremely broad strokes (the truth is probably closer to what Jamie Kirchick said about supporting mass immigration because of the belief that diverse societies will be more tolerant to religious minorities like Jews), progressive societies nearly everywhere in the world revolve around this kind of racial fetishism and hierarchy, with or without Jewish input. Its purest expression is the ubiquitous negrolatry of America and the UK, but in a pinch any dark-skinned group will suffice.

negrolatry

LMAO. I am adding this word to my vocabulary. Just need to make sure I never utter it in polite company.

I’ve heard the more (if only slightly more) polite word “Afrolatry” substituted when the speaker wants to be a bit less spicy. “Negrolatry” is certainly my go-to, though. That or the even more incisive “autonegrophilia”, in which white progressives desperately wish to be culturally black or to be perceived as culturally black.

negrolatry

It beggars belief that this is a real word.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/negrolatry

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/negrolatry_n

Are we going to see the far right attempt to form an alliance with the left in the hopes that their shared antisemitism will be sufficient to gain political power?

No, the two groups have diametrically opposed positions on domestic policy questions and their convergence on a single foreign policy issue isn't going to be enough to bridge that gap. You may see their congresscritters vote the same way on Israel-related bills, but there won't be greater cooperation beyond that. This is a case where the enemy of your enemy is your enemy's enemy, no more, no less.

I think ultimately, Israel and Palestine is such a scissor statement that I don’t think there’s much chance of finding a middle ground. I think at this point, whether we admit it openly or not, the crisis is down to which country will exist. Either the Jewish State of Israel will control all the land or the Arab state of Palestine will. Both sides and their supporters understand this because there has never been a long term real peace. The ceasefires have mostly ended up being the time when everyone reloads and upgrades their weapons.

The degree to which this realigns American or Western European politics depends mostly on how important and long lasting the current war becomes in the West. If this is a minor blip on the road to Jewish conquest of Gaza and the West Bank, then I think it’s going to be hard to unite people around hating the Jews. If it becomes a potential flashpoint leading to wider conflict, I expect it to be something that overshadows other points. If the biggest issue in the next two election cycles are economic, or law and order, or similar, I don’t see Jews being a trump card simply because most people will be worried about food costs or safety or things like that to worry about Jews fighting in a tiny corner of the globe that has few natural resources, and unlikely to ever affect them personally.

If this becomes a Left Thing like South Africa was in the West, I think the Jews are screwed long term in Israel. Once it basically becomes a meme they all support, it's hard to stop them because they are so relentless about it plus they have the whole Muslim world on their side too.

The question is will that actually happen. I don’t see how it does, because at the end of the day, there’s a contradiction in the sense that on the one hand never again and on the other is from the river to the sea (code for eradication of Jews in Israel). You cannot both say that the holocaust was Terrible when Germany did it and then repeat the exact same things the Germans did and calling for the death of Jews with intellectual integrity. The difference at least in Israel is that this time the people calling for the death of Jews are unwilling to do the deed themselves and thus will sadly shake their head as they die at the hands of people that the West refused to let them fight back against.

You cannot both say that the holocaust was Terrible when Germany did it and then repeat the exact same things the Germans did and calling for the death of Jews with intellectual integrity.

Sure you can, if your intellectual basis is "oppressor-oppressed dynamics." Just argue that in the Holocaust, Germany was the oppressor and Jews the oppressed, but here, Jews are the oppressor and Palestinians the oppressed; that the relative position is the moral factor. That the point of comparison for "calling for the death of Jews" now isn't "calling for the death of Jews" then, but "calling for the death of Nazis" then, because both are calling for violence against "the oppressor" in the name of defending "the oppressed." (I did once, back in college, have a conversation with someone whose position on death camps and genocide was "no bad tactics, only bad targets," and that whether such things are immoral — or not — depends entirely on who is using them against whom and whether or not the latter group "deserves it.")

I don't agree with this view and its "more oppressed than thou" hierarchy, but at can, at least sometimes, be a consistent one.

I did once, back in college, have a conversation with someone whose position on death camps and genocide was "no bad tactics, only bad targets," and that whether such things are immoral — or not — depends entirely on who is using them against whom and whether or not the latter group "deserves it."

Out of morbid curiosity, who, in this someone’s mind, “deserves it”?

who, in this someone’s mind, “deserves it”?

In short? Right wingers.

It's darkly funny that we are going to get to see an empirical test of the power over narrative-shaping that the Jews have been accused of having by the far right.

Apartheid didn’t fall because of sanctions and international pressure, it fell because of terrorism(which Israel has) combined with a demographic reality(which Israel does not have) whereby the dominant group was a steadily shrinking slice of the pie.

A significant part of the far left is pro Jewish, so it is an abuse of language to pretend otherwise. The far left here includes fake conservatives who support progressive stack, hate speech laws in line of progressive stack and the general narrative of who are the oppressors and oppressed and apply massive doulbe standards on identity politics, is pro migration.

The genuine right does have a common interest against Jewish supremacists with leftists who also oppose them. But some of these same leftists share parts of the agenda of said Jewish supremacists against western countries.

Fundamentally you will get some leftists with ADL like agenda but being pro Palestinian. However this doesn't change the far left nature with those who are zionists and converge with ADL's agenda. What they aren't is moderate. Nor are hate speech laws for a foreign country or the rise of totalitarianism in such direction an example of moderation.

It is generally better for various factions to exist rather than ADL types to dominate and get their way. It is good for the contradictions of different extremists to come with consequences. Rather than the plan of ADL types to unite everyone against Palestinians and their right wing and white and christian outgroups, suceeding in promoting a hateful caste tyranical society.

While a general negative view of the behavior of Jews as a pattern is accurate, fair and antiracist while the opposite is racist in favor of Jews and against non Jews, the term antisemitism carries connotations of prejudice and is a dishonest term. It is both justice and in the interests of various non Jews and of western right to oppose massively pro Jewish racism which is both immoral and at the expense of their people.

Other than that, the category antisemitism as it is used and this vile term that is usually abused usually includes in where it is applied opposing the racism of Jews and promoting moderation and self defense against said behavior which is good. It is a vile term since it is used to legitimize Jewish racism and delegitimize truth and opposition to racism in favor of the Jews.

I don't think it is necessary or is the realistic scenario to talk about genuine mistreatment of Jews, but I don't think the right should have said goal. But perfectly fine to stop and punish the behavior of the worst racist Jews who are Jewish supremacists and to delegitimzie this ideology wherever it can be found. I don't see any positive purpose in treating Jews minding their own business and respecting the rights of others badly. Even though the fact that the weight of their ethnic group's influence on politics falls in the other direction matters and it means that if they side with that they are siding with injustice against others.

To be clear though mistreatment is one thing, promoting a positive general view of the Jews and their behavior is another. It is a behavior which on average is too racist against others, especially when it comes to those with political influence.

Both moderates and right wingers and leftists, opposing the massive atrocities done by Israel in Gaza is a way to both support what is just and in opposing this evil done to the oppressed and murdered Palestinians to delegitimize an evil that is an enemy of your people too. There is a common interest basically, beyond just a partisan sectarian right wing interest for Jewish supremacist ideology to be defeated which benefits the people of the world.

Jews themselves who can coexist with non Jews happily without the specter of conflict and the bad blood done by racist mistreatment of non Jews by Jews, also benefit. But the biggest benefit from less Jewish racism for humanity arises of course through non Jews who are no longer being mistreated. Another element of this is those Jews are more moderate and non Jews who are hardcore racists in favor of Jews. So the more moderate Jews don't have to deal with backlash.

Also seeking an end that doesn't tolerate self serving one sided very racist for the Jews narratives is the only way for political power, since if your view of power is subservient to those of others, and especially those rather racist against you, and authoritarian to boot, you will never get anywhere. Obviously ADL types can not be appeased and are acting based on their own resentments and from a view of dominating all their outgroups. So it is a non starter for the right and everyone really, not to compromise with anti-native, anti non jewish groups and in west in particular anti-white Jewish supremacists. Are there factions of which compromises could be reached? Possibly. Can there be Jews among them? Yes. But the faction that at all converges with ADL which includes plenty of neocons if not most of them, are not compromising people in good faith. It isn't in the interest of the right to open borders to Palestinian or muslim migration or direct influence though. It is again both ethical in general and a good strategy to hold Israel accountable and harm the claims of moral legitimacy of Jewish supremacists by being critical of it for their treatment of the Palestinians, as the world is watching the huge numbers of deaths in Gaza.

First of all, there's really no such thing as the alt-right. The alt-right is not something you can join or really be a part of unlike the woke left. There are actual organizations that you can join that are explicitly woke-left, including in Congress.

That being said, Hlynka is correct that they are more or less drawing from the same pool of people, which are not traditionally Red Tribe type people. They are extremely online Blue or Grey tribe weirdos like Nick Fuentes who Hlynka is also correct that most working class Catholics or Red Tribers would probably hate.

That being said, he applies this theory way too far back and it falls apart pretty quickly.

Steven Crowder has leaked portions of the Nashville shooter's "manifesto": https://nitter.cz/scrowder/status/1721545965402726734

I put manifesto in scare quotes because the leaked portions seem to more part of a "schizo mass shooting planning diary" as opposed to "schizo essay on motivations for the shooting." That said, the leaked pages do reveal some insight into the shooter's motivation. The biggest surprise to me is that it doesn't really mention being discriminated against for being trans. Instead it focuses on the shooter's perceived perpetrators being rich privileged white kids with daddy's money. Basically the lyrics to The Dead Kennedys's song Holiday in Cambodia if they were written by a mass shooter. Also semi-surprising to me is their repeated use of the word "faggot" as an insult. I wouldn't have been surprised to see this in a mtf trans shooter's diary, but it's a bit surprising to see from ftm trans. Maybe some sort of performative masculinity?

In any case, the documents appear to be genuine though they haven't been 100% confirmed. Currently there's a lot of hubbub over whether or not they were appropriate to leak in the first place, but I see very little questioning of their authenticity. What are your thoughts?

A number of DR figures were 100% certain that this manifesto was being intentionally concealed by The Powers That Be because it would reveal that the shooter hated Christians and committed the shooting as an act of trans rebellion against oppressive Christian conservatism. I am very interested to see if those same commentators will insist that they were basically correct, even though the manifesto as released does not seem to bear much resemblance to that at all.

Frankly, much like any other mass shooter, Audrey Hale appears to have been a garden-variety retarded angry kid, whose motivations were muddled, irrational, and incoherent. Hale was white, so the potshots at white people make no sense, and are merely expressions of untargeted contrarian edgelord rage. Honestly not that interesting, and doesn’t teach us anything of value about “what the trans movement wants to do to every conservative Christian” or “what the left wants to do to white people” or anything like that. Just the sad ranting of a useless retard.

Hale was white, so the potshots at white people make no sense

Where have you been this past decade? There’s been a whole cohort of young white people raised to hate white culture and white people because of propaganda that depicts them as stained with the sins of oppression and racism. This is called “white privilege” discourse. The shooter specifies white privilege as one of her motivations for the shooting. The motivation is not muddled. She absorbed far left propaganda to hate her race and she lashed out violently as a result. She mentions white privileged, khakis, fancy schools and “Daddy’s money” because these are the ideological memes that she came in contact with.

Obviously I am intimately familiar with that discourse, but when you are talking about literally wanting to personally kill white people because they’re white, that is not something I believe we’ve ever witnessed a white terrorist or mass shooter do. (Plenty of non-white killers have done so, but not whites as far as I know.)

White progressives who claim to hate white people usually advocate a variety of policies and cultural changes that would adversely affect white people if enacted. These changes would lower whites’ quality of life, deny them opportunities, punish expressions of their culture, dispossess them of the wealth of their ancestors, etc. But believing that it would be a good thing if currently-living white people were violently killed is something that only an extremely tiny fringe of white individuals do. The vast majority of white progressives, deluded as they may be about other things, are perfectly able to recognize the blatant self-destructive insanity of believing “somebody ought to murder me for being white!”. For Hale to believe white people should be murdered, despite being white her/himself, is a pretty clear sign of a deeply distorted and incoherent mind.

This relates to something I've seen referred to as "generational loss of hypocrisy." The first "generation" who put out some bit of hyperbolic, extreme rhetoric may not really believe it, nor live by it. They might quietly carve out unprincipled exceptions for themselves in practice, or acknowledge the performativity of it all in private among themselves.

But if, when "in public," they keep preaching the message consistently, for long enough, then at least some of the next "generation" who absorb it will end up taking it seriously.

There's someone I've interacted with a bit online who, since at least a few years ago, repeatedly raised the issue of the extreme nature and implications of much of academic "decolonization" discourse, especially the bits about being "unconcerned with settler futurity." The common rejoinder to these was always that nobody actually takes any of that stuff literally, or would ever actually follow through to the terrible-yet-logical conclusions implied…

…and yet, now we are seeing that, no, quite a few people do indeed take all that seriously.

A cult leader may have been a conman who made it all up as a grift, but if the group manages to persist long enough after his death, it will probably end up made of true believers.

I see this as greasing the slope while complaining about the slippery slope fallacy. The slippery slope is, of course, a fallacious argument made against people wanting to push forward things like the whole "white privilege" discourse; the fallacy is in that moving away from the status quo to some position X doesn't necessarily imply that we'll go to 2X or 4X or 10X or whatever if given time. We're trying to nail the exact correct height to land at here, and it happens to be lower than where we are right now, and we will engineer society to nail that exact correct height, not an inch lower, and we don't deserve an iota of responsibility for the people who have decided that they want to push it lower the slope. Those are different people, not us.

But it turns out that the method we use to reach that precise lower place on the slope matters, and if that involves pouring grease on the slope so we can more easily go lower, then we don't get to claim innocence (we might be able to claim ignorance, although ignorance would be more damning, not less, in the context of engineering social norms) when people slide down the slope far beneath that precise spot we intended to nail, and in fact we are responsible for that phenomenon. I think this has clearly happened and is clearly happening with the "white privilege" discourse openly attacking things like empirical measurements and logic and discouraging criticism and scrutiny on the basis of "solidarity" and similar concepts.

Based on these notebooks, we're not looking at another Unabomber. "Retarded Angry Kid" seems correct. Extremist rhetoric sometimes trickles down to these types and has tragic results. Various shootings have been done by Alt-Right Retarded Angry Kids in recent years.

I believe the phrase they usually like to use is "stochastic terrorism". At least, they like to use it when it can be used against their enemies.

If you haven't read this article, I think you will enjoy it: https://drrollergator.substack.com/p/stochastic-terrorism-a-game-of-rhetorical

What are your thoughts?

Sounds like 90% of Reddit TBH

More effort than this, please.

Also semi-surprising to me is their repeated use of the word "faggot" as an insult. I wouldn't have been surprised to see this in a mtf trans shooter's diary, but it's a bit surprising to see from ftm trans. Maybe some sort of performative masculinity?

Just 4chan shit, I think.

What are your thoughts?

Mainly that it's a perfect example of how "X% of political violence is right-wing" is pretty much always just a lie.

Just 4chan shit, I think.

Sure, but 4chan is probably like 95% male and the female 5% are probably almost all ethots on the webcam board

Some of them go right for whatever insult they feel like screaming, like this person who thinks they've been misgendered, tries misgendering of their own and when that doesn't work goes right for the screaming racial slurs.

I'm not a huge fan of putting shooters (or other attention-seeking violent criminals) on blast, both for to avoid bad incentives and because of contagion risks. It's a good part of why I don't engage with the Unabomber fetishism here, even if there's some philosophically interesting points on the broader anarchoprim stuff. That said, I'm a pretty far outlier, and it had long gone from unusual to noteworthy how long it'd taken for these to be released or leaked, to the point where I was skeptical that they'd ever be released. The religious motivation seemed pretty obvious and just as obviously ignored, so I dunno what the point would have been.

There was a lot of speculation among more marginal left-wing spheres that the shooter was 'really' motivated by speculated physical abuse from the school (possibly sexual), and that was why a lot of the writings haven't been divulged yet; it's possible there's some details in other pages Crowder didn't publish, but what's present so far makes that look like a dud (and the refusal to publish them earlier a bad one, given how it let that speculation florish).

I wouldn't have been surprised to see this in a mtf trans shooter's diary, but it's a bit surprising to see from ftm trans. Maybe some sort of performative masculinity?

The f-word has a weird place inside internal LGBT discourse: there are major factions fighting over the extent the term can or should be reclaimed or turned against their enemies, where it's appropriate or inappropriate to use, and what it even means. This clearly isn't the reclamation side of things, and I'm not really familiar enough with the redirect side to speak on it in too much detail, but from the outside my impression is that it's less gendered and more about confrontation.

I think discussing any of these morons’ manifestos is counterproductive and in poor taste.

The biggest surprise to me is that it doesn't really mention being discriminated against for being trans.

Steven Crowder released it, so a possibility is that there are 100 pages and he only released the 3 that indicate anti-white and anti-Christian bigotry. Of course all of this can be resolved by making the diaries public.

Also semi-surprising to me is their repeated use of the word "faggot" as an insult.

This makes me believe it's real. If someone forged this to make a trans shooter look bad, an anti-gay slur is the last thing they would think of. It's bizarre and seemingly out of place, which puts it in "schizo ramblings" territory.

It's bizarre and seemingly out of place, which puts it in "schizo ramblings" territory.

It also pattern matches to the FTMs I've known in real life, depending on the circumstances some of them practically used it as punctuation.

Seeing that it reads as a diary moreso than a manifesto had me, for a moment, believing in the possibility that trans women are indeed real women and this is the evidence. Then I realized it was a FTM.

Biology is inescapable.

But then again, mass shootings take balls so there might be something honorary in it for her.

Biology might be inescapable, but when you introduce testosterone into a system that may not have been designed to handle it, it's not that surprising that something like this happens a certain percentage of the time (no claims on what percentage).

But, like, testosterone is rough to deal with even for people who were introduced to it in the way nature intended.

Well, the hand writing certainly looks like it was written by a boy…

Uh, does it? I thought the only way it could have looked more feminine is if the Is were dotted with little hearts and the whole thing was in a Hello Kitty diary.

Most of it looks like chicken scratches. Would 100% earn “you’ll be a doctor someday” jokes. I’ve met very few women with handwriting that shit. For a guy it’s not the worst in the world, my hand writing is way worse, I’d say it’s just a bit below average for boy handwriting.

Or am I out of touch and all teenagers have garbage handwriting now?

It all looks extremely legible and vaguely feminine to me. Perhaps my standards are far too low (re. legibility).

Look at the note where she's calling her targets faggots. The handwriting is all over the place. The letter formation isn't consistent from one word to the next, let alone inside words that have multiple of the same letter. The letters that stick up or go below the line are often smushed to the point of looking like a completely different letter.

It's legible enough to understand if you slow down a bit. You can still tell what's being said due to context. But in no way would I call it neat, especially for a girl. Girl handwriting can get almost font like. As I said, my handwriting is way worse, but I have appalling handwriting even for a guy. My handwriting is often not legible to anyone but myself unless I slow down to an impractical pace.

I only glanced at it, and I assume these entries, like many diary entries, weren't meant with a future audience in mind necessarily, but for the writer to essentially vomit thoughts onto the page. I've read many, many handwritten pages throughout my teaching career and I'd have thought girl looking at these. Not girlie girl, but female.

That doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong, it's just what I thought and still think. You have a point that some sections are far less legible.

Agreed. It's nowhere near typical "good girl" handwriting (the valedictorian in my high school had handwriting that looked not just like a font, but like a cursive typewriter) but it's very legible and has some obviously feminine features (like the heart).

Also, it's not a manifesto, it's a diary or journal (or two), which strikes me as more feminine (this is obviously culturally mediated, diaries weren't always female coded, but they are now)

Well most teenagers barely write anything anymore outside of sometimes at school, they type it.

Something about the clearly formed loops in letters looks very feminine to me. It's not the ultra neat penmanship you'd expect of a grade A student, but that's not who this was, this was a deeply mentally unwell girl who thought she was a boy. As far as tomboy writings go, it matches up well. The handwriting is inconsistent in places, I assume, because she was undergoing a continuous mental breakdown.

I’ve met very few women with handwriting that shit.

Just an anecdotal aside, but my mom's handwriting has always been pretty terrible (and now that she's in her 60s, it's approaching illegibility).

Or am I out of touch and all teenagers have garbage handwriting now?

That's been my, admittedly limited, experience. For that matter, I think it was when I reached 5th grade (1992-1993) that they stopped teaching us handwriting in school and had us start submitting all reports (and generally anything not a "fill-in-the-blank" worksheet) as typed up on computer and printed out. With modern electronic communications, do they even do the "print out a physical copy on paper" step anymore?

The word "home" is encircled by a love heart. I've never even met a gay man who'd do something like that.

That's not what I'm referring to. I'm talking about how the letters are formed and how consistent they are. Look at the note where she's calling her targets faggots. It's all over the place. The letter formation isn't consistent from one word to the next, let alone inside words that have multiple of the same letter. The letters that stick up or go below the line are often smushed to the point of looking like a completely different letter.

None of this makes it completely illegible. You can still tell what letters they are based on context. But that doesn't mean it's neat. Girl handwriting is almost always clean and consistent. Their neatest handwriting gets close to looking like a font.

I agree a lot of women have very neat penmanship, but I wouldn't say neatness is synonymous with femininity. The handwriting in Hale's manifesto/diary/whatever looks broadly similar to this, and both look distinctly feminine to me, even though the latter example is far from consistent (although certainly neater than Hale's penmanship). It's hard to pinpoint exactly what makes penmanship look "feminine", but for me it's something to do with the broadness and roundedness of the characters: the lowercase As are much larger and rounder than I would write mine. It's referred to here as "bubble" handwriting which I think is an apt description. I think men, regardless of whether their penmanship is neat or messy, generally have a preference for narrower and straighter characters.

I shouldn't even be surprised that (like vocal pitch or gait), this is a trait that transgender people are aware is gendered and go out of their way to train themselves into doing.

While I'd hum and haw a bit about "girls and boys have different writing styles", I can see why the transgender lobby is so desperate that "biology not real". The amount of determinism there about gender roles based on biology, that there really is rigidly a gender binary and two sexes, so that your real sex will show up in the tiniest ways does mean that if you genuinely feel you are the wrong sex (because by now 'sex' and 'gender' have become interchangeable terms and people seem to have ditched 'being transgender is only about the gender you express, not your biological sex' talk) then you have to insist on advanced biology in order to argue that no, this is not a disorder or mental illness, it's totally natural, look earthworms are hermaphrodite!

Your advanced biology link leads to a thread about Lady Gaga having a funny hat. It seems to happen every time someone shares an old.reddit link. The exact same thing happened to me this morning.

It looks like a user-side problem with the Old Reddit Redirect extension:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/164uqjg/why_do_ireddit_image_links_go_to_that_ancient/
https://old.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/15p1ctt/why_does_clicking_any_image_on_reddit_open_the/

https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect/issues/99

Developer says it's fixed but as suggested on the Github page I removed and reinstalled the already updated addon and still have the problem.

Well now that's odd.

Have we considered ‘uh, she was mentally ill’? I believe inconsistent handwriting is literally a symptom of schizophrenia; it’s certainly a stereotype.

There's also some probably-subclinical things that might make someone's handwriting mediocre or average instead of excellent. Hypermobility is one of them, and trans people are disproportionately hypermobile. Same for autism and the sensory bullshit and weirdness that goes with that. Including, say, mild dyspraxia or clumsiness.

TL;DR trans, a bit more likely to be loose-jointed and a bit clumsy.

This is a girls' handwriting if I've ever seen one. How bad can you be at recognizing gendered writing not to see this.

Literally this: https://br.ifunny.co/picture/matty-mashhhuu-professor-ok-for-the-first-day-i-m-LjLCPKxF8

?

To me, the handwriting looks practically indistinguishable from how the archetypal basic white girl would take lecture notes.

And that is represented by Lady gaga wearing an orrery or by some redditor saying nice hat?

Sorry, it was pointing to the wrong link for some reason. I meant to link this: https://br.ifunny.co/picture/matty-mashhhuu-professor-ok-for-the-first-day-i-m-LjLCPKxF8

Weirdly enough exactly the same thing happened the other week: https://www.themotte.org/post/728/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/152420?context=8#context

I remember, because I was just as baffled then.

That link lands on a removed commment under a photo of Lady Gaga wearing an orrery as a hat.

Ugh for fuck's sake, thanks for letting me know.

Weirdly enough exactly the same thing happened the other week: https://www.themotte.org/post/728/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/152420?context=8#context

Sorry, I meant to link to this: https://br.ifunny.co/picture/matty-mashhhuu-professor-ok-for-the-first-day-i-m-LjLCPKxF8

If I see a guy using !!! in any context, I'm going to rip off his pants to see if he has any balls underneath them.

As for the handwriting, it looks pretty gender neutral to me, but I am a doctor, so maybe I have brain damage from reading notes left by consultants who should have retired after their cerebral palsy got this bad..

On a side note, I occasionally visit /r/GoodNotes, a sub for discussion regarding said note taking software which I rely on heavily myself, even if I'm using the obsolete 5 after the 6th version moved to an abominable subscription service. It's 80% women shilling Etsy sticker packs of ridiculous ornamentation and others posting "aesthetic" notes showing off their handwriting or typography. I am forced to retreat in confusion, given that my use case is purely agglomeration and annotating the terabytes of medical notes I need for yet more exams.

If I see a guy using !!! in any context, I'm going to rip off his pants to see if he has any balls underneath them.

I have to admit I have written notes with !!! to indicate important developments or other critical issues…

You're a pigeon, in your case a cloaca is entirely normal haha

But then again, mass shootings take balls so there might be something honorary in it for her.

First mass shooter, or school shooter, I ever heard of was the girl who inspired The Boomtown Rats' I Don't Like Mondays:

The Cleveland Elementary School shooting was a school shooting that took place on January 29, 1979, at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California, United States. The principal and a custodian were killed; eight children and police officer Robert Robb were injured. A 16-year-old girl, Brenda Spencer, who lived in a house across the street from the school, was convicted of the shootings. Charged as an adult, she pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon, resulting in her being sentenced to life in prison with a chance of parole after 25 years. As of 2023, she is still in prison.

A reporter reached Spencer by phone while she was still in the house after the shooting, and asked her why she committed the crime. She reportedly answered: "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day", which inspired Bob Geldof and Johnnie Fingers to write the Boomtown Rats song "I Don't Like Mondays".

So despite it being perceived as male-dominated or even male-only, sisters have been doing it for themselves too.

God, how I loathe that song. Has Bob Geldof written anything good?

Ah now, Rat Trap is good to sing along to when you're at that perfect age of teenage angst 😁

Why suppress this? I can understand suppressing such writings generally, but AFAIK this is the first time such a thing has actually been kept under wraps for any length of time.

I doubt anyone would be inspired by it, and it's certainly not going to spark a movement or any kind of adoration for the shooter like we saw with Elliott Rodger.

Maybe Crowder isn't printing a genius rhetorical flourish, but I really doubt it given the kind of thinking on display.

i think giving any kind of attention to the shooters increases the probability of future shootings. i think there is very strong evidence that a similar thing happens with suicides. i'm not sure how big of an impact it is or if its worth the trade off to suppress such things but in a free society it is difficult to suppress such things.

but in a free society it is difficult to suppress such things

Well, that and mass shootings have political benefits to the side the media is on.
Which is why the ones that aren't the demographics they want to tar and feather get dropped relatively quickly compared to the "white men" ones.

What I've read of Elliott Rodger's writings makes me go "I completely understand why you couldn't get a girlfriend". He's genuinely hurt about it, but he's also genuinely an entitled, whiny, pain in the ass. Not alone does he expect girls to fall at his feet in adoration simply because he's a handsome gentleman, he's nasty to those he considers his social inferiors (parts about turning up with his family at red carpet events where he writes abusively about the staff simply doing their jobs; just because your dad is currently an important director doesn't mean you have any clout or importance of your own).

Part of that was probably the usual adolescent turmoil, but again were I a sixteen or seventeen year old girl at that time I wouldn't have wanted to go out with a perpetually scowling guy who thought the sun shone out of his own backside and who would probably not been concerned with my feelings or wants.

Ah yes they must have sensed it. It’s the old vaginatron morality detector versus women like assholes theory. I will say that nastyness towards social inferiors is not disqualifying men as sexual partners. I think both sides overrate morality as a factor in sexual success.

Most people aren't perfect at code switching between "want to abuse janitor" and "want to impress chick" personality. Also, not all social inferiors are socially inferior in the same way. I've heard of guys being popular because they mogged on some guy in their social group or fended off a bum, not so much for yelling at a girl behind the counter in McDonalds.

In short, when angry guys in the manosphere observe that women don't like them even though they like other assholes just fine, they often fail to observe that they're not the correct sort of asshole.

Sometimes, often, they genuinely aren't assholes though. It's just that their way of not being assholes is not attractive. And that's okay. It's not women's responsibility, anyone's responsibility, to reward kind unassuming people with sex. But from a just world theory standpoint you can’t say that, so the demonizing and counter-demonizing follows.

Yeah, but also when they do try to be assholes their way of being assholes isn't attractive either.

There's also something to be said for not mistaking "kind" for "refraining from being unkind because you'd be bad at it".

I do not blame women from assuming the worst of those guys, really, because I've seen enough to believe that women do really have to deal, or in best case to expect to deal, with a whole lot of repulsive men.

They generally don’t go out, be assholes, and then come back saying that being an asshole doesn’t work. They just stew in the belief that they would be successful if they were assholes. And I have to defend their view again a bit here.

To be successful, they’d have to play the social game, which is essentially zero sum. So they’d have to step on a few toes, clip a few wings on their way to the social middle. Very social, inherently high status people can get to and maintain their righteous place in the social hierarchy with minimal breakage, but that’s not in the cards for the bitter rejects we’re talking about here. They’d have to crudely beat up on some other losers and social inferiors just to get to the social center.

That's just how the game is played, you have to say 'me first' a little.

If I had to generally say what most (straight) dudes I know who have no troubles with constantly getting women have in common, it would probably be that they are funny guys who are generally fun to hang out even if you're a (straight) guy yourself. Rodger, by no account, was one. You can of course be a dick towards some people, like the staff, and still be gregarious with your friends, but Rodger just seems like a boiling cauldron of loathing towards everyone.

I didn't get the impression that @FarNearEverywhere was arguing that all incels are assholes. I think almost everyone on this board would agree that there are plenty of pleasant, well-meaning people who are lonely and romantically/sexually frustrated through no fault of their own, purely as a result of being unattractive or socially awkward.

But Elliot Rodger was a grumpy dickhead, long before he committed his murder spree. Perhaps being a grumpy dickhead wasn't the only or primary reason that he was lonely and romantically frustrated, but I'd be very surprised if it helped.

Look, you read anything by Rodgers, and it's a constant torrent of "Waaah! I'm rich, I'm handsome, I'm well-bred, I'm desirable, why doesn't anyone want to go out with me? Waaaah! Also fuck those low-class serfs who only exist to cater to the whims of their natural superiors like me, and why can my sister get a boyfriend and I can't get anyone? And why are my friends all going off with girls instead of hanging round with me? I DESERVE HOT CHICKS BECAUSE I'M THAT GREAT!"

You can feel sorry for him feeling isolated and frustrated, and want to give him a good kick up the backside for being so self-involved. His family do seem to have tried to help him, but he was too stuck in his own spiral of "it's not fair, it's not right, I should get what I want because I'm so great" and not willing to look at "maybe being unpleasant to be around has something to do with why people don't want to be around me?"

Of course he was extremely unpleasant generally, but I felt you were kinda reducing it to: he wasn’t showing the girls proper consideration, therefore he couldn’t get laid, as if that was the true measure and cause of all things.

It's not about morality, it's about the fact that being pissy and whiny is hugely unsexy.

I think both sides overrate morality as a factor in sexual success.

Maybe Mr. Rogers was an asshole. However, he also sucked at being an asshole. Before the murders, he had managed to engage in some low-level assholery, spraying orange juice at passing couples and trying to throw someone off a balcony before being beaten and thrown off himself. He was unable to recruit allies and was a less effective asshole than your local drunken brawler.

I'm not a woman but what I read of his manifesto made it abundantly clear why he had no success with women or men. This isn't some kind of secret vagina-based loser-detection system - his attitudes and beliefs were obvious from his writing and videos alone, and you don't even need to be a woman to find someone like that creepy and off-putting. His incredibly poor social skills were absolutely a massive turn-off to women, but it isn't like men particularly enjoy the company of bitter, resentful and entitled narcissists either. There's no moral condemnation here at all - women (though maybe not consciously) are looking at a man with terrible social skills and correctly deducing that he'd be awful to spend extended periods of time with, and furthermore, that his children would also likely be creepy weirdos who have great difficulty reproducing. I agree that morality isn't really a huge factor in sexual success - but it wasn't the Supreme Gentleman's moral failings that prevented him from getting laid (hell, just look at how many marriage proposals convicted murderers get). It was the fact that he was an off-putting loser with terrible social skills that prevented him from getting any action.

It took me some time to understand your joke. Then, I tried uncensored gpt-3 and chatGPT explain it, to see how far could they, and results are poor.

You seem to assume he was walking broadcasting this sentiment 24/7. In long relationship, a woman would likely gain knowledge about his attitudes (but many people successfully hide parts of their personality for long time) but this doesn't explain short-term failures. The text is written after years on unsuccessful attempts, so maybe he was different when he started trying pursuing relationships.

Why suppress this? I can understand suppressing such writings generally, but AFAIK this is the first time such a thing has actually been kept under wraps for any length of time.

The manifesto directly makes reference to the kind of white privilege rhetoric the president of the US has spoken about and endorsed as a reason for the shooting. By the left's own standards, this would implicate Joe Biden as a stochastic terrorist.

This kind of thing is the predictable endgame of the dehumanising white-hating rhetoric like privilege theory that a lot of us have been warning about for years.

People are going to run amok; when they do so they're going to pick up whatever's floating around in their society. Centuries ago, it might've been motivated and couched in religious or supernatural terms; in other times and places, it might be due to real or imagined grievances against other individuals or groups.

In general we shouldn’t publicize mass shootings because the biggest cause of mass shootings is social contagion.

I am going to assume everything in the manifesto is the white hate I expected. It’s useful to publicize this for political gain but it’s also likely to lead to more mass shootings. It would be better not publicize the crazies.

Out of all the publicly released shooter manifestos, this document is so inane and thoughtless, so silly on its face (were it not backed up by devastating horrific actions) that I’d think it less likely to compel imitation than a well-written thesis on fallen glory or overwhelming oppression.

…However, a small part of me fears that this document was suppressed precisely because the suppressors believe such speech is all it would take to turn loose a flood of school shooters — either because they’re out of touch and don’t understand that such speech can be found in every corner of the Internet, or because they themselves felt a compelling need to go out and shoot them some crackers too after reading it.

Possibly because (1) the parents of the dead wanted it suppressed and (2) it doesn't do the transgender movement any favours (I'm wondering if Hale is getting the 'No True Scotsman' treatment because even NBC news is deadnaming and ABC is misgendering with references not to "Aiden" and "he" but "Audrey" and "she").

This person killed young children, so can't be defended on grounds of "they were bullied into it by the victims!" and can't be presented as a victim themselves (unlike the usual narrative around transgender people), and the 'manifesto' reads more like the stereotypical 'incel rant'. So if presented as a transgender he/him man, it looks bad. But if it's a crazy Christian gun-clutching family who drove their daughter nuts, well - that's different, isn't it?

Is it legit? I've seen some later comments that this isn't the real thing but a fake or troll.

As to "faggot", yeah. Funny how a lot of progressive-aligned online types immediately reach for that as an insult when arguing with others.

Apparently it's been verified as legit.

The National Desk has verified the authenticity of the leaked images through its Nashville affiliate, FOX 17 News.

Initial impressions- this is just schizo rambling combined with adolescent angst the shooter is too old for(wasn’t she like 23?), so why suppress it? I don’t see an explanation beyond trying to bolster the ‘white privilege’ narrative and cover for genuinely anti white people in the progressive midst. Not that I think these are the majority, mind- I think most progressives, like most conservatives, simply don’t think very much about the implications of their beliefs, if nothing else- but providing cover for them shows at least some degree of acknowledgement and unwillingness to oppose anti-white sentiment, like we saw with the Sarah Jeong case.


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