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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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The 1950s and 1980s were different eras, and you haven’t argued at all why we should see them as identical to today. Americans, even the progressive ones, used to have a healthy amount of trust in white identity and white civilization. Post-2010 progressivism does not. I mean assuming we are conflating liberalism with progressivism as everyone does today, then —

Liberalism is [akin to] a hamfisted fable about Anglo-Saxons perfecting the universe by killing off fascists and commies in outer space while flying starships staffed by every race and nation in the galaxy

is incorrect. There is nothing the modern liberal hates more than the neutered ghost of WASPs and their perceived control over institutions which, statistically, does not exist. The current liberal fable is more like: Anglo-Saxons have ruined the country that black slaves mostly created, are predisposed to racism, and they will be saved by people of every race and nation unless we happen to stop liking Asians.

The new fable of the white Liberal is born from the same impulse that birthed the old ones. They just periodically update the flavor text to maintain social respectability. White liberals still believe that they are needed to save the world. The utopian ideal for a white liberal is a world ruled by POC that happens to conform to every single preference the white liberal has. They can't help it.

Anglo-Saxons have ruined the country that black slaves mostly created, are predisposed to racism, and they will be saved by people of every race and nation unless we happen to stop liking Asians.

How is this not a typical white liberal daydream? They believe they have the answer to save the world. A multi race coalition. They imagine how it will function, what race will be the captain of the ship so on.(hint: it's a black woman with vitiligo) They get deep emotional glee from imagining themselves as a slightly lower rank person within a multi racial hierarchy. An advisor who, in the coalitions time of need, is the only one the captain can trust... or something.

I don’t think this makes sense when you factor in the confession of privilege, the insulting and denigrating of the privileged, and the guilt that the white liberal possesses. If the white liberal were motivated by status seeking and dominance, they would not accept being lowered in status and denigrated for their characteristics. This literally loses them social points, opportunities, resources, accolades. You would also, then, see more men rather than women become liberal, because men more than women are motivated by the pursuit of dominance.

And the explanation also doesn’t make sense because “self-aggrandizing fantasy” applies even more so to the conservative worldview. Conservatism in America boosts white status simply by not denigrating them. The only way to salvage the argument would be to claim that the white liberal is actually competing in status against the white conservative, but this is definitely not the case on college campuses where white liberalism flourishes. They are competing, in essence, against non-white liberals.

I find a much better explanation in, “they have genuinely been conditioned to dislike themselves because of incessant repeated negative association involving their characteristics”. This also explains why the “group favorability” survey shows that white liberals rate white people lower than other races. Then it explains why Jews are resilient to this, because so much of their religion is about ethnic pride and ethnic resilience.

I dispute your first point. The white liberal is still motivated by status seeking and dominance, but within their own ingroup. They are seeking status and dominance amongst other white liberals. They're not surrounded by non-whites and they see those people as powerless, what's the loss in status? As far as they're concerned, non-whites aren't even at the table, and they don't engage with them anyway so what's the point.

You can see this same phenomenon among Catholic flagellates who see it as a demonstration of piety and it was called out as status-seeking behavior among Jews in the Bible (Matt 6:2 - "when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so they may be seen by men").

White liberals self-select. Go to any woke convention or conference and it's as white as the driven snow - this is especially ironic when comparing to the rainbow of diversity seen at /pol/ meetups.

Men more than women are motivated by the pursuit of dominance, true. But social dominance is, and has been, historically the arena of women.

To an extent, every subculture’s members compete over status and social dominance, even if they are at the lowest rung of society. Prisoners after all continue to compete over status. So while white liberals will compete amongst each other over who is more virtuous in relation to their ideology, it is still possible that the origin point of their ideology is informed more by actual belief rather than dominance. They belong to a subculture based upon a belief and “compete” over how well they measure up against each other. But what informs the belief first?

You see such a dynamic play out in the royal courts of kings. Those of lower rank compete against each other over approval by the higher rank. But they are not trying to dismantle the higher rank, and neither did they instantiate the higher rank themselves. In cases of extreme white progressivism, whites see themselves as eternally at a lower rank, similar to an ancient class system involving kings or nobles; they have internalized this, and now they compete for favorability. So they donate their money away, they will step down from their position if it means a minority can take their place (or they won’t accept it), they lobby against their own interests, they want their leaders to be non-white including in their own organizations.

As far as they're concerned, non-whites aren't even at the table

They believe that white racism needs to be over-corrected, possibly forever. Minorities at the table aren’t enough.

demonstration of piety and it was called out as status-seeking behavior

Right but for another Catholic example, the social competition in the religion is over humility re God. (“The least among you shall be the greatest.”) In antiquity, those who were considered the most humble were seen as holy and praiseworthy, and martyrs (the most self-denying of the community) were said to have a “crown of victory” and were immortalized forever. This is a good demonstration of the complexity at play in ideological belief and peer conpetition. Humans cannot help but to pursue status because it’s in their deepest evolutionary nature, but they can also adapt their status-seeking according to an ideological framework which actually denies them power. For early Christians, the highest status in the community was the least status in the “world” (power, riches in the world). For white progressives, the highest status is to be a self-denying white and to promote minorities. That earns them status in their peer group, but the ideological presuppositions are motivated via indoctrination rather than status seeking (similar to religious indoctrination, just with the rigorous conception of the Good).

As others have pointed out, depending on the author, it either tends to follow a White Man's Burden playbook or Tikkun Olam, either way it's usually pitted against some representation of the forces of Fascism, which often tends to be represented in a way that is aesthetically very compelling and resonates with the audience. This is not only sci-fi, but also comic book heroes and basically every Hollywood genre.

Classical progressivism (which encompasses both ideologies we’d consider leftist today and some most people wouldn’t, like much of the early eugenics movement) has been described as ‘white supremacist’ because it assumes that every man (and woman, to some extent) is a white man on the inside.

The third worldist movement and some decolonial / anti-colonialist movement writers have long made that assertion. But whether the assumption is racist or anti-racist is a more difficult question to answer. At times I think it has been both, and so has its inverse.

traditionally a domain of White Protestants with progressivist ideals,

looks at long list of Golden Age SF Jewish authors

Ultimately, the White Liberal perspective is fundamentally ‘supremacist.’

You're simply restating Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" and Kipling wasn't a modern liberal.

Ellison, Asimov, and...?

Not Clark or Heinlein or Howard or Le Guin or Bradbury or Dick or Vonnegut or Bradley or Zelazny or Herbert.

Silverberg? Bester? Hugo Gernsback himself? Sheckley?

Yes, some of those aren't 50s writers. But if at least one of the Really Big Names is Jewish, that undercuts "SF is White Protestant writing". I think Deep Space Nine had an episode about this 😀

Hugo Gernsback was "pulp era" or "Silver Age" rather than "Golden Age", but certainly counts as "traditionally".

Alfred Bester and Cyril Kornbluth should count. Robert Silverberg and Harry Harrison may be a bit too late to qualify as "Golden Age", but by that criterion I wouldn't count Le Guin or Zelazny either.

its a hamfisted fable about Anglo-Saxons perfecting the universe by killing off fascists and commies in outer space while flying starships staffed by every race and nation in the galaxy.

I've had an ongoing frustration with my favorite space operas about how they portray humanity relative to other species in the galaxy, until I realized, embarrassingly recently, how every single sci-fi story I enjoyed is just Americans talking about how they see their place in the world.

Berman Trek gets embarrassing about this when Sisko/Picard are drawn into helping vaguely pro democracy dissidents from the Romans and Cardassians or dealing with terrorists. Cold War never changes, I guess.

And Mass Effect is very, very early 2000s America

Except Mass Effect, where humans are the Canadians.

It is very American 😀 In Deep Space Nine, we see Sisko rejuvenating baseball, which has fallen out of favour as a national pastime. They go up against a Vulcan team (and of course beat them). Personally, I have no idea why an Irish guy like Miles O'Brien would bother with baseball, but it's an American show for majority American viewers, so we're going to see American culture represented there.

I think they might have had some self-realisation about this, with the root beer scene.

Didn't they lose and then troll the Vulcan team into oblivion anyway? I remember their victory being that they successfully pissed off a bunch of guys who aren't supposed to show emotions.

Yeah they get hammered 10-1, but "win" because Sisko realized his competitiveness was getting in the way of actually playing the game for fun which is the most important thing, and lets their worst player in (who then scores them their only run by accident), and then their celebrations annoy the Vulcans.

I'm more concerned about why O'Brien was infusing the gum with Scotch and not Irish whiskey...

they get hammered 10-1

In basketball? That's an improbably bordering on impossibly low score, even if everyone's just learning. Getting shut out except for one free throw (the only way you could get exactly one point) is particularly weird.

Baseball not basketball. So more understandable.

FarNearEverywhere’s original comment said “baseball”.

It's more the "Humanity just showed up on the scene, they barely have history relative to the other species, but are surprisingly resourceful, which is how they are making a such splash, punching above their weight. Due to that, to other species sometimes they come off as admirable, sometimes as arrogant, sometimes as dangerous" that bothered me. Star Trek, Mass Effect, Star Control... take your pick. Baseball, root beer, and other American cultural artifacts are presented as American cultural artifacts, so they don't bother me at all. Kinda implying that America represents the spirit of humanity, does.

Americans thought that America represented the spirit of humanity long before they were plausibly correct to do so. Novus Ordo Seclorum is definitely making that claim. Arguably Americans thought that America represented the spirit of humanity long before there was an America - John Winthrop's City upon a hill speech is arguably making the claim in 1630.

Well then, that does explain the kind of art they create, but as much as I can appreciate the American spirit as long as it stays in America, I resent the claim that it represents me.

It's more the "Humanity just showed up on the scene, they barely have history relative to the other species, but are surprisingly resourceful, which is how they are making a such splash, punching above their weight. Due to that, to other species sometimes they come off as admirable, sometimes as arrogant, sometimes as dangerous" that bothered me.

It's the approach that is the most conducive to telling a story with some action.

  • "Humanity has showed up on the scene, and everyone else is still learning how to make stone tools." What's the point of doing this story in space? Set it in the Andamans.
  • "Humanity has showed up on the scene, and they are so far behind that other civilizations find them quaint and appropriate human culture in various offensive ways if they don't simply squash them like cockroaches." Cool idea, but not an action movie. Also, Liu Cixin had already written that.
  • "Humanity has showed up on the scene, and everyone else is at about the same level of development despite being spacefaring civilizations for thousands of years." Requires quite a bit of handwaving, Fifth Element was like that, but they just intoned the MST3K mantra. People who like worldbuilding will loudly complain.

Trying to come up with a counter-example I end up refuting my previous claim that this characterizes all American stories, but another one of Roddenberry's creations - Earth: The Final Conflict - has humanity in a position that gives off the same vibes living at the American periphery does. At least that's how I remember it, it's been ages since I watched it.

Also, it's not like we absolutely need to have stories where we just showed up at the scene. Set it in the year 10K like Herbert. I don't know the first thing about Warhammer, but I assume 40K also comes from the approximate date?

40k, yes, it is often referred to as the 41st Millennium for that reason.

Set it in the year 10K like Herbert.

IIRC that's 10K their calendar, something more like 20k ours.

Even ‘right-wing’ sci-fi has this motif. The heroes in ‘Starship Troopers’ are two White men leading the multicultural coalition of Earth against the brutalistic ‘bugs’

In the Heinlein novel, Johnny Rico is explicitly stated to have a Filipino background.

The heroes in ‘Starship Troopers’ are two White men leading the multicultural coalition of Earth against the brutalistic ‘bugs’

I read Starship Troopers. It is 100% from the point of view of the protagonist Juan Rico who is from the Philippines. He mumbles something in tagalog at one point and a non-Filipino character asks him what language that is.

At the same time, if he were John Rich from Indiana instead, would the novel be any different?

Not really. But the fact that he was, generations before it became trendy, is an interesting datapoint.

An important distinction needs to be made between the film "Starship Troopers" and the novel "Starship Troopers" that it's inspired-by/parodying. Given that the director did not actually read the novel, absolute despised fascism, and set about parodying and mocking the original story, they are clearly distinct stories in a way that most adaptations are not.

I'm assuming /u/bearmarket is referring to the film, whose main character "John Rico" is white. But if so, this undercuts his actual point, since this is a parody attempting to demonstrate how this white imperialism is BAD, not celebrating it.

I've read the book and seen the movie, and while they're very different, it's still not clear to me in which sense the Starship Troopers movie is a parody, except that the director claimed it was. It seems to me that this is just a fig leaf to justify having directed an effectively pro-fascism movie.

It's been a while since I've seen it, but I think the main clue is the over-the-top propaganda commercials in it. The tone makes it clear that the director does not intend the audience to believe it or take it seriously.

Aside from that, the horrible meat-grinder of combat and disregard for the lives of the troops makes it clear that the human army is not a desirable place to be and the higher ups do not respect their troops. Also the literal child soldiers.

If it was a pro-fascist movie, the human government would be portrayed a lot more competently.

I saw the film probably in my late pre-teens before ever being aware of the conversation around it. It struck me immediately as parody and/or satire. The opening of the film has a grinning child soldier with that old-timey propaganda feel that even a middle schooler would detect as an intentional riff on grandpappy's jingoism. Then a minute later you're watching men scream as they're haplessly ripped apart. I even had the sense that everybody in the movie was too good looking to take seriously. And I remember feeling bad for the Brain Bug when it was getting that painful looking device shoved into it at the end, and I felt instinctually that this was intended, at least in an "oh that's awful..." morbid gag kind of way. My reception of it as satire was more visceral than intellectual.

If you're looking for something in the literal text of the script to show it's hand, I'm not sure how well that would fare. To me, there's just so much artificiality in the world and people who inhabit it that it's hard for me to see it as anything other than an extended pisstake.

That makes sense, but I saw it as a teen and didn't think that the good-looking actors were any indication of satire. After all, Melrose Place, and pretty much all Hollywood movies, have ridiculously good-looking leads without being satires. And it's played straight that the bugs are, in fact, in total war with humans.

White Protestants

The two top SF authors of all time are arguably Jules Verne, Catholic-raised deist, and Isaac Asimov, Jewish-raised atheist.

two White men

Juan Rico and his girlfriend Carmen Ibanez?

Also H.G. Wells, raised by a Protestant mother and a "freethinker" father, ultimately became an atheist, with a failed attempt at playing L. Ron Hubbard in the middle. Robert Heinlein was agnostic, and also inventor of a religion. Arthur C. Clarke, gay atheist. Samuel L. Delaney, gay black atheist. Andre Norton and Ursula K. LeGuin.

Does being atheist really preclude being culturally Protestant? The momentum still carries you even if the engine has been turned off to use a metaphor, it takes a lot of work to actually change direction towards morals which are alien to the Christian.

You are correct. These men may have been atheists, but it was the Christain god they disbelieved, not any Hindu god or Allah, which are just superstitions anyway.

It's like the old Irish quip: are you Catholic or Protestant? Neither, I'm atheist. Yeah, but Catholic atheist or Protestant atheist?

Wells, at least, disbelieved in Allah as well.

Not to mention that Mormons are way overrepresented among sci-fi authors today.

And Heinlein messed with readers until the last page or two of the book, making you think Rico was Hispanic the whole time only to reveal that he's Filipino.

An obscure figure from the old Alt Right takes the Hanania Pill.

The main reason I am posting this is not that, but to highlight his insider's history of the 2015-2017 era Alt Right which makes up much of an accompanying article.

1: Hanania's apparent survival of cancellation for past extremism via telling his story and disavowing his most extreme past views may have been quietly influential. This is the 2nd guy I've seen do it without even being forced to by exposure.

2: This guy claims to have been a quietly very influential figure and tells a story where his actions had a very outsized effect on the world. Maybe truly, maybe not. But his general account of events besides his own part in them is an insider's history of that much-mythologized period of the Alt Right, which was very influential and did have have a very outsized effect on the world, and his account seems to be a reasonably well-calibrated explanation of how their influence rippled into events.

Was in agreement with the author until this:

sustained immigration of high IQ and ethnically nepotist immigrants from India into highly paid tech jobs, blocking the sons of the American middle class from the possibility of upward social advancement and leaving them stranded in five figure wagecuck hell

I am reminded of the quote misattributed to Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”

We have reached the stage where right wing westerners are fighting against us after not caring about us and then laughing at us. But we are no laughing matter as the more astute westerners are now seeing. We will be taken seriously. By simple virtue of being better than them we will eventually win if given a level playing field. I agree ethnic nepotism is bad and should be discouraged, but more high IQ people is straight up good. The US can extend its worldwide hegemony by another two generations if it just replaced its immigration criteria with an IQ test where anybody IQ 125+ was welcomed.

All we want is the same thing that you want: better living standards for us and ours.

if given a level playing field

There are entire government agencies that exist to give preference to 'socially disadvantaged' Americans - it basically assumes everyone from Asia, Africa and Latin America is disadvantaged by default. There's a wide-ranging diversity apparatus devoted to elevating non-whites and reducing white employment in hiring and promotions.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-13/chapter-I/part-124

https://www.resumebuilder.com/1-in-6-hiring-managers-have-been-told-to-stop-hiring-white-men/

You may not want a level playing field as much as you think.

Look at the Harvard lawsuit. AA penalized East Asians and Indians even more than whites (the men, anyway).

True. Then they (Asians) attacked that and got it formally fixed.

Meanwhile in hiring... https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-recruiting-service-institutes-diversity-targets-for-usaf/

No of course it's not reverse discrimination we're just setting targets that people have incentives to meet if they want to maximize chances of being promoted in this huge bureaucratic organization

Or on company boards: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/esg/contested-nasdaq-board-diversity-rules-take-effect-explained

Or in film (OK technically film awards but my point stands): https://www.oscars.org/awards/representation-and-inclusion-standards

Companies must have a woman, “underrepresented minority” or LGBTQ+ board member or report in their proxy statements or on their websites why they’re unable to comply.

Since you are not an American I cannot blame you for being unfamiliar with American HR-sprache. "Underrepresented minority" (or "URM") is code for "not white, Asian, or Indian". Nobody is going to get points for having a bunch of Tamil Brahmin guys on the board, because not only are they not underrepresented, in fact they are overrepresented, as a million WhatsApp memes will demonstrate.

Asian grifters have gotten some status in Hollywood awards due to #stopasianhate, but it's anyone's guess how long this will continue (and I doubt the Count cares about the Oscars anyway). Federal hiring is its own shit show, but it doesn't even pretend to be meritocratic, and again, I doubt that this is what the Count is talking about.

It literally says you need an underrepresented minority and defines it:

Underrepresented minorities are individuals who are “Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Asian, Native American or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or Two or More Races or Ethnicities,” according to Nasdaq.

If you want to go deeper into the definition of Asian, I have another link: https://listingcenter.nasdaq.com/assets/Board%20Diversity%20Disclosure%20Matrix.pdf

Asian means Asian: Chinese and Indian.

In the link I posted earlier about subsidies for non-white businesses, it includes Chinese, Hong Kong, Japan, Indians...

There is the rule as written, and then there is the rule as the HR caste understands it. Simply watch and see what happens.

I am watching and seeing what happens.

The company where I work is hiring a lot of Indians for very senior management positions right now (including C-suite).

The last round of layoffs got rid of a lot of blacks, whites, and Chinese from middle management… but all the Indians got to keep their jobs.

If Indians “aren’t worth any points”, then plainly my company doesn’t care.

More comments

The US can extend its worldwide hegemony by another two generations if it just replaced its immigration criteria with an IQ test where anybody IQ 125+ was welcomed.

Remember Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

I think it's strange that people accuse Hanania of shifting his views to avoid cancellation. His views are still much more extreme and controversial than are acceptable to pretty much anybody left-of-center. In any case, what would the cancellation of Richard Hanania consist of? It's not like he's an actor or a politician or somebody. His public-facing activity consists of posting on twitter. Musk owns twitter now, and you can be a full-on Nazi on there now, let alone whatever Hanania is. The most parsimonious explanation for Hanania's shift is that his views actually changed.

On another note, I wrote the above before actually clicking the link and seeing who this guy was. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time lmao. I'll never forget his racist cover of "On The Open Road" from A Goofy Movie ("the left are the real racists, to Mexicans they lie/'cause family values cross the Rio Grande! (¡Hola!)/you'll still get on a hate list, let's go to NPI/stop burying your heads into the sand!") 2016 really was a hell of a ride.

Unfortunately Walt was a terrible singer.

EDIT: Also the "Be Prepared" parody where Scar is an Elder of Zion and the hyenas are blacks and browns ("Be prepared for the end of the white man!/Be prepared for his daughters and wealth!")

EDIT 2: now that I've actually read it, extremely funny that the primary impetus for Walt's ceasing to identify as a WN was that he moved to the midwest, and got so annoyed that midwesterners refused to be as based and redpilled as he expected that he decided they were a race of servile undermen.

His views are still much more extreme and controversial than are acceptable to pretty much anybody right-of-center.

Did you say "right" when you meant "left"? Or possibly omit a "not" or similar word?

I meant "left"

Even funnier, it reads like the real impetus was that the local girls - sorry, local quality girls - wouldn't date him and the rest of the locals weren't impressed by him being a city slicker 🤣

Trace posted this on twitter and got a bunch of comments. Although the comments mostly remind me of why I dislike twitter. Not that I'm going to stop using twitter.

+2 upvotes on TheMotte -> 4.5M views on Twitter

That's the pipeline for you. I was surprised it went quite that far, but it's a good story!

I think he seems to have realized a terrible truth for a lot of WNs who are deeply used to their particular kind of persecution complex and enemy hierarchy, which is that much of the state of the modern west is a direct product of the ‘white temperament’ and white population preferences, possibly on a genetic level.

Someone posted a Twitter video of a Fox News interview with locals in Seattle or Portland or something during the (ongoing) violent crime wave in reply to my Seattle post last month. It’s become a popular online meme because it’s all these very annoying looking white people saying it’s not a problem at all, they don’t notice an increase in crime, ‘what, do YOU pussies have a problem with homeless people now, does it bother you, bitch?’ aggressiveness to the reporter. Just the most annoying kind of stubborn middle aged person, and I would add white because for all the many, many, in most cases worse flaws of other groups I’ve never seen their peoples behave like this, the grandiosity, “no u”-ness, general pigheadedness of their denial is on another level. For all their varied and whacky politics, many Jews I’ve met in NYC would press the button to delete the homeless if they could, and wouldn’t think twice about it. I couldn’t say the same for many Northern European whites. They don’t have it in them, until they do, and then they’re just as pigheaded and stubborn in the other direction.

It reminds me of real life conversations I’ve had with white English people, intelligent, center-right conservative types, about groups, identity, mass immigration, genetics, civilization, and they just shut down. I don’t mean that they shut down the debate, they’re usually polite enough and I wouldn’t discuss ‘edgy’ things with people I didn’t trust anyway, but they shut down internally. They display the exact pigheaded stubbornness that the Seattle video interviewees do, the strange combination of [post] Christian guilt complex and superiority complex and absolute, ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ type emphasis on propriety above policy. Like a Church of England relic unable to deal with the fact that the church becoming a retirement camp for delusional elderly middle-class hippies could be a reason why attendance is down 90% in 50 years or whatever. Some (politically involved people, one a former MP) will even admit the current levels of immigration are a catastrophe, but then suggest in the same breath that what happens will happen, and that above all the focus should be on preventing the far right from making too much hay of the situation and “destabilizing” things. What can you do with such people?

I find @BurdensomeCount’s occasional gloating at whites unbecoming, but when you live here you understand it. Oh, how I have been lectured about tolerance by people who are actively destroying their own country. Oh, the sanctimoniousness I have sat through. Gradually, I began to feel a pull towards a certain contempt for some of the English, for they were destroying not only their own civilization but that of their greater ancestors, and their unborn and innocent descendants, and even that of those various non-Anglo hangers on who had, like myself, found themselves as productive and (mostly) happy guests in their society. They did not understand how precious what they had created was.

What can you do about such a people? They have no will to power, no will to survive. Whatever vitality they once had, they lost. I would gladly sacrifice Israel for a Britain that was both tolerant of Jews and actively pursuing the greatness of its own once-proud civilization, that’s how much I like it here. But I may be faced with no choice but to cast my lot in with my ancestral homeland (real or imagined) because these people have given up, and they’re proud of it.

As the saying goes, you can’t respect people who don’t respect themselves.

For completeness’ sake, I’ll paste my reply from when you DM’d me this comment earlier:

My problem with mass immigration is democracy, rather than anything else. Consider the recent statistic that more than 50% of those living in social housing in London weren’t even born in the UK; it is predominantly the British who are subsidizing a vast imported welfare class.

If immigration to the West was handled like the Saudis or Emiratis handle their immigrants, I would have no issue with it.

And did you not make some top level post not that long ago about how the new POC British aristocracy is no different than its white counterpart? I didn’t say ‘no different’, rather I suggested that the British elite don’t seem to care whether the underclass they rule over is imported or native. I think in the end that they will be surprised to find out that there may well be a difference, but still.

To me immigration is more just an example of an area in which policy follows some kind of bland, stubborn moral imperative combined with zero willpower to question anything or to do anything differently, it just happens, and everyone shrugs, and then it was a good thing anyway.

My own policy preferences are driven by a fundamental desire to live in a safe, rich, orderly, clean, functioning society in which people behave and in which prosocial behavior is rewarded and antisocial behavior harshly punished.

A million things. London, as it is, is being strangled by a hideous combination of sky high rents, high taxes, and a glutted labour market. That it manages any prosperity at all is a marvel - that what prosperity it enjoys is sapped to support housing prices (and atop it, a rentier class of whitehairs) and an underclass of semi employed immigrants. The rest is pure consumption.

This is how despite inviting vast numbers of immigrants, Britain remains poor and is not likely to change it.

In the spirit of Norm McDonald, I'll say that while some lament the civilizational change that Muslims have brought to England, I think the worst part is all the rape.

Tacitly ignoring Muslim rape gangs for fear of being called racist seems like a pretty good example of losing spirit as a civilization capable of greatness as well.

If I can quote a speech from everyone’s least favorite 20th century antisemite, not to be edgy but to demonstrate three separate points:

The Jew, who is himself a nationalist more than any other nation, who through millennia did not mix with any other race […] this same Jew preaches every day with thousands of tongues, from 19,000 papers in Germany alone, that all nations on Earth are equal, that international solidarity should bind all the peoples, that no people can lay a claim to a special status etc., and, above all, that no nation has a reason to be proud of anything that is called or is national. What a nation means, he, who himself never dreams of climbing down to those to whom he preaches internationalism, knows well.

This speech was made in 1920, two years after Hitler received his “punch a Nazi” treatment for giving a similar speech on German nationalism by a crowd disgusted by his extremism. The history of “white identiarianism” or whatever we wish to call it is not linear. Americans as late as 1960 overwhelmingly believed that “white” was a primary identity marker and wanted a white majority in their country. Yet Germany went through a period of progressivism in which German national identity was attacked, only to swing the complete opposite way, only to swing again in the complete opposite — and today it may be swinging once more with the rise of the AfD. Russians, too, went from nationalism to internationalism and back to nationalism. I think this precludes any possibility of a genetic explanation and instead shows that ideology and culture are what shapes these things. And I think this is also an antitode to doomerism because we can’t predict the future based on the past.

The content of the speech is interesting because it highlights the disconnect between American Jews and white American gentiles. I would argue that Jews are the most nationalist people on earth today. They engage in ancestor worship on a weekly basis, they are obsessed with bloodlines, they unite Race and Religion together and choose the former whenever questions of membership arise, their very nation bans religious intermarriage and protects the priestly bloodlines even from the (rare) convert. They put barriers in the way of orthodox conversion yet welcome any “born Jew” with ease. Secular Jewish culture has cross-pollination with religious Jews, and so secular Jews receive an implicit influence of positive racial identity.

As such, it may be hard for even a secular Jew to imagine what it is like growing up in a culture with no such positive identity indoctrination. A white gentile can’t get a free meal at his local university Chabad house where a racial leader talks about how important their DNA is and how the universe has specifically chosen their race to lead the world. He doesn’t go to a church that talks positively about the history of his people. And the stories told in school are not about the triumphs and glories of “the whites”, as a Jewish school teaches about the great Jewish sages and advisers. While his school does teach about great American figures without mention of race, when race is mentioned he learns that his are the villains, the enslavers and the oppressors. The Jews, of course, believe that they were the slaves and the oppressed, in Egypt before God freed them, in the Middle Ages despite opulent wealth, and in the holocaust, that “burnt offering” which established the state of Israel.

Now, to disagree with Adolf Hitler, I do not think that most of the Jewish internationalist voices both a century ago and today are involved in an explicit conspiracy to aid their race by reducing the solidarity of other races (although they would have every motive to do this, it would be morally permissible in their religion and perhaps even morally obligatory given that it helps Jews). Instead, I think it’s easy to push for greater immigration when you know that your host country is not your real home — your real home is every Jewish community and Israel. The Jew’s neighbor is never going to be the new Guatemalan, because the Talmud specifies that “love your neighbor” means only other Jews. So these voices don’t realize that they are blinded to many of the drawbacks of immigration, because their implicit or explicit identity protects them from ever considering the prospect of assimilation with potentially deleterious low-culture migrants. Dan Gertler may fund the Chabad House of Central Africa, indeed he may siphon off their blood diamonds and become a billionaire in doing so, but never in a million years would he consider assimilating there. And the wealthiest billionaire gentile families who push immigration for profit have a similar bias because they know full well that their childrens’ elite boarding school is far from Haitian gangs and Honduran cartels.

Finally, to answer the main question: why do the whites harm themselves? Because they are indoctrinated at a young age from the propaganda which (ironically) the arch-villains of the 20th century warned against. The neural circuitry of in-group preference is the same as familial love: you need to raise children up with positive identity, otherwise they will never truly establish the communal bond. It’s like how an abused child that doesn’t form a bond with his parents will grow up to be avoidant of relationships; even if he rationally understands that his impulses are illogical, they are still there. This is why — as you write — even the conservative Brits are too polite. They logically know something, but the instinct is not developed in the heart. Identity is not primarily rational but instinctive and emotional. And the religious Jews know this, so they fiercely protect their right to indoctrinate their children, such as by launching an international legal effort when Sweden wanted a Rabbi’s children enrolled in a public school.

screed

This is my favorite thought-stopping word. It gives me some nostalgia for when it used to appear all the time in progressive editorials. It doesn’t really signify anything except that the reader was insulted by the writing (which also doesn’t signify anything).

intermarriage

This is complicated:

  • the influential and regenerative kernel of Judaism is the orthodox/conservative, their billionaire funders, their political influences, their attachment to Israel. This cohort creates all the rabbis and most of the leaders of the Jewish community, eg run all the Chabad houses. Orthodox Jews do not intermarry, I think like 1% do. They have the highest birth rate and are inheriting Judaism. There’s lots of articles on this.

  • It’s true that reform intermarry, but the data is still more complicated, because what counts for “intermarry” may be Jewish+JewishAtheist. I have yet to find data on the number of Jewish+OtherReligion marriages but maybe someone smarter can find that. From Tablet: “The Pew study offered respondents who were parents a wider range of possible responses. Among respondents with a non-Jewish spouse [[61% as of 2020, 53% when this article was written]], 20 percent were raising their children Jewish by religion, 25 percent partly Jewish by religion, 16 percent Jewish not-by-religion, and 37 percent not Jewish.” So 37% of 61% are being raised without Jewish affiliation, or about 22%. I would like more clarity by demographers on what the intermarriage rate is for “Jewish+non-Jewish-ancestry”, as this gives us a better picture on intermarriage given how many non-religious but self-identifying Jews there are. The question the polls ask is “do you have a Jewish spouse” which doesn’t really tell us the future of Jewish affiliation. From Tablet again: “Admittedly, the secret of Jewish survival may be the propensity to panic about our fate. The grim predictions made in the 1990s may have proved wrong because Jewish organizations, federations, and private foundations did what they needed to do to turn the tide. They funded massive new investment in Jewish summer camps, Hillels, Taglit-Birthright Israel, and innovative startups—all programs that reach a fairly wide spectrum of Jewish children and young adults”.

tell me you don't know anything about Judaism

Everything I have read indicates that the Orthodox love to convert by-birth-Jews into their conservative flock. This is why they do the man on the street interviews Jewish outreach campaign by asking Jewish-looking people if they are Jewish. Heck, this is why they fund Chabad centers all over the world.

It varies, to some extent the ultra orthodox are more tolerant of sincere orthodox converts of other races than liberal Jews for whom it’s more of an ethnic and cultural identity rather than a religious one.

Re the spouse thing, your ‘37% of 61%’ only seems to encompass those Jewish parents raising children of actively another religion, since one imagines atheists would pick category 2 and those raising their kids with a mix of, say, Jewish and Christian holidays would pick 1.

Most secular Jews still identify as Jewish, and certainly their religiously-identifying-as Jewish spouse would likely identify them as being Jewish in that case, so I’d guess only a very, very tiny percentage of ‘intermarriage’ figures capture unions between religious Jews and atheist Jews. I don’t know any Jew who would describe that as an intermarriage on a census form or in a survey.

I think it’s quite strong evidence, honestly. Other tight-knit groups like Pakistanis in Britain, Copts in Egypt, many of those tiny Christian sects that survive in the Middle East, all have very low intermarriage rates compared to Jews. The supposed lack of orthodox intermarriage is overstated since Orthodox Jews who marry unconverted gentiles just become reform or secular Jews.

Finally, to answer the main question: why do the whites harm themselves? Because they are indoctrinated at a young age

Sure, but they are indoctrinated predominantly by their own people, who truly believe in their ideology and who in substantial part invented that ideology and its ideological foundations.

But it’s not just that, because as I think anyone would admit, whites hardly have the monopoly on believing in stupid shit bad memes. Every people has its bad memes and sometimes those memes are so catastrophic they result in the actual extinction of a civilization, fine.

This isn’t really a complaint about that. It’s about the idea that there might be something specific in the (especially Northern) European mind that leads to this inanity, this combination of blasé arrogance and naïveté. I always think back to something I recall @DaseindustriesLtd saying once about Germans. How the brazen, ironclad stubbornness in their refusal to admit that importing a million Syrian men might be a bad idea really wasn’t actually that different from the brazen, ironclad stubbornness in refusing to admit that killing millions of Jews wasn’t actually necessary to avoid the victory of Bolshevism or whatever even as they were losing the war. You even saw it in the way that the DDR was the most zealous communist state in embracing mass surveillance, the most resistant to implementing Gorbachev’s reforms, the harshest in just subtly ruining the life trajectory of people who disagreed too hard. Whatever feeds the machine, 150% compliance, ideology irrelevant.

The scots-irish are also northern European.

A piece about the alt right that doesn't mention Yannapoulos, Bokhari and the wider anti-sjw sphere looks completely delusional to me. It's true that there is a real distinction between the Alt Right™, led by Richard Spencer, and the wider anti-sjw movement of the late 2010s that got lumped in as "alt right", sometimes without even being on the right. However the former was basically along for the ride, Richard Spencer was a marginal figure in his own heyday.

PS. someone referencing himself as a "young buck" is probably the cringiest thing I've seen this year so far.

I've never heard of this guy before so I can't say much. but I'm laughing my head off at his description of the Midwest:

To be sure, the Midwest met my expectations of being safer, more affordable, and less degenerate than the coastal Sun Belt. But it turns out this was a bad thing for my temperament!

It turns out safety is mostly achieved by cultivating a boring and risk-averse culture optimized to meet the needs of smallminded and gossipy people who get don’t get excited about much other than college sports and weddings. If you’re a contrarian novelty-seeker you will quickly get ostracized in an environment like this because people like you are a genuine threat to the social order. You can make friends with 95th percentile openness people who see you as a curiosity, but when push comes to shove they will never choose you over the Shire.

As someone who grew up in the Midwest, moved away, but occasionally still visits.. yes. yes to all of this. The main risk to your safety in the Midwest is suicidal levels of boredom. It's amazingly hard to get people to open up about any conversation that isn't college sports or local gossip.

It's amazingly hard to get people to open up about any conversation that isn't college sports or local gossip.

That's small town society everywhere, in Ireland it was lambasted as The Valley of the Squinting Windows. People don't talk to you about their interior lives because that's the one thing they can keep private, and besides the neighbours probably have a good guess about it anyway. When you're living in such a place, as the saying goes, they know you "seed, breed and generation" and "all belonging to you". Scandals and family history are known, even if not talked about - I remember years and years back, my mother talking about a visit with the 'old people' (elderly family members) and among those discussions of local gossip, coming to know that a certain man was not the grandson of who he thought he was, and he didn't know because his father didn't know this man was not his real father. The local squire got a tenant girl pregnant*, married her off with a share of land as her dowry, and the guy who married her raised the subsequent baby the same as his own children, so there was never any suspicion on the man's part that he wasn't the son of his reputed father.

But certain of the neighbours knew, anyway. That's why people don't open up and spill their guts; if you're local, you know all there is to know anyway, and if you don't know, it's the one scrap of privacy they can have. Very especially if you're a blow-in or incomer, you'll be a stranger pretty much all your life and they may like you, but they won't trust you with the same level of "everyone is connected" knowledge.

*Apparently he had a habit of doing this, which was one reason the estate dwindled away.

When you're living in such a place, as the saying goes, they know you "seed, breed and generation" and "all belonging to you"

Paddy’s Seed and Breed (formerly Seamus’s)

Hey @ZorbaTHut @cjet79, I've got an idea -- instead of banning Hylnka, why don't you make him a mod again? (see parent)

I don't get the joke, what letters are you supposed to replace and where to make it funny?

It isn't a proper snowclone of the original, though I guess there's an alternate interpretation where the local squire's name was Seamus and the pregnant tenant girl went on to marry a Paddy

Sneed's Feed and Seed (Formerly Chuck's)

Yes, I know that, but how does that apply to Paddy's Seed and Breed, what does it make? Seamus's Seamus and Breamus?

I was thinking the opposite. I don't expect them to dish up all their dirty little secrets, but they seem happy to talk about how their cousin or whatever is getting married. They just don't want to talk about anything that happens outside of town.

That's the downside, of course. Their focus is on their own little world, so what happens five miles outside the radius isn't something they pay attention to. There is a point to it; why do I care about what happens in San Francisco, when it has nothing to do with me and affects my life not at all? But at the same time, you can't just bury your head in the sand.

I grew up elsewhere, moved to the Midwest, and this "boring" nature is pretty much exactly why I like it here. It turns out that I am not a thrill-seeking adventurist that delights in the revolution or tolerates being surrounded by vagrants, I just want my nice city with nice parks and nice people to have a nice beer with while watching a nice Big Ten game. I can get about as much novelty as I want during travel, keeping my home the opposite of novel is my preference.

Ultimately, the author appears most affected by how his hopes/expectations wrote a check that reality couldn’t cash when it comes to living in red-state country, especially for dating. This is something often seen in men who travel abroad looking for love/sex, but leaving disappointed that they only seem to attract bargirls and prostitutes—or nothing at all (or worse, they leave blissfully unaware that their “girlfriend” is but a bargirl or prostitute).

Sure, your greater wealth, worldliness, credentials, and especially height (in the international traveling case) will give you a leg-up upon the local men when it comes to female hypergamy and polygyny. Your status as an outsider might even stir up some additional curiosity and intrigue. However, girls will be coy and passive regardless of locale, so you must put in the… leg-work. The local girls, particularly the attractive ones, much less the ones who are both attractive and chaste, will hardly line-up to suck your dick and join your harem upon your arrival like a more explicit Axe commercial.

However, I give props to the author for putting his money where his mouth was, and giving it a go at living in red state country (at least for two years). Some other thoughts:

We’ve also passed Peak Woke, and cancel culture is on its last legs.

Yes, and Hunter/Trump will surely go to prison this time.

It turns out safety is mostly achieved by cultivating a boring and risk-averse culture optimized to meet the needs of smallminded and gossipy people who get don’t get excited about much other than college sports and weddings.

Former White Nationalist reinvents the hustle and bustle meme.

And the people who rise to the top of the food chain are never quite as inspirational as they are in places where things are actually happening. They stop being sharp or hungry really early on in life—it’s like they universally have “big fish in a small pond” energy. They work hard until they can coast off a sinecure, at which point they become totally unremarkable and function on autopilot for the rest of their life.

Well yeah, working hard until one can coast off a sinecure is a large motivation for working hard in the first place. Hence #fatFIRE, #chubbyFIRE and whatnot, all the way down to #leanFIRE and/or gasp a normal retirement (the horror).

Of course this revelation won’t come easy to an inexperienced young buck who’s only been with a handful of women. That hipster chick’s tattoos or stripper past or body count of 17 will likely intimidate you. But once you’re nearing 30 and have come into your own as a man, the same girl will seem an ingenue compared to your own triple digit past, while the churchy trad girls you once idealized as innocent little angels will instead seem like frigid judgmental viragoes who could never understand you.

This reeks like cope. Or perhaps: as you amass more sexual and life experiences, you cherish and appreciate the churchy trad girls all the more, and the thought of wifing up a tattoo’d hipster, former stripper, or a girl with a body count of 17 fills you with all the more disgust as your options widen and your desperation decreases.

In fact, many of them seemed hostile toward the very idea of someone moving around in the first place. When I first arrived a lot of people were genuinely incredulous that someone from another state would ever choose to live there, and thus regarded me with suspicion. Midwesterners seem not to like people who move. Many of my new social circle had never lived outside their immediate area and still were geographically very close to their parents.

*shocked pikachu*. People who are self-selected temperamentally and/or perhaps genetically to prefer their way of life and staying amongst themselves, and regard interloping outsiders with suspicion. Someone hasn’t read their Cochran and Harpending on the Amish.

To put it bluntly, most of my White neighbors and coworkers basically resembled hobbits. They had no ambition to them, nor any aspirations of greatness. Nor did they think about the world in a dynamic way—the more educated among them certainly stayed informed about the wider world, but they largely took it for granted that their immediate universe was a static place where nothing would ever happen.

Don’t these stupid midwestern hobbits know how much better life would be with elves telling them what to do and orcs providing some vibrancy?

Agreed, though, that a lot of white Americans are kind of like hobbits, in their lack of antibodies against general blank slatism, outgroup preferences, and progressive American culture. They might make a stink face at the young white male cosmopolitan who arrives in town for an extended study abroad program, but will root for outsiders and people that hate them when it comes to college football/basketball, the NFL, the NBA. Quokka would be the rationalist sphere term of art, here. “Cucks” might even apply. Relatedly, this has been touched upon in the Norf FC series of memes with regard to whites on the other side of the pond.

This is something often seen in men who travel abroad looking for love/sex, but leaving disappointed that they only seem to attract bargirls and prostitutes—or nothing at all

Another black pill; if you can't make it "here" (wherever that is), you can't make it anywhere; moving or traveling just means your failures move or travel with you.

Lol too true. The complaints seem universal. There is also very little more low status than having a mail order bride. At least in my circles. But it is very waspy stuff and apparently doesn't apply if you're Trump (like most things).

Trump is low status in his own circles and always was, but he doesn’t really care, which is kind of his superpower.

Trump didn't mail-order any of his brides. Both Ivana and Melania met Trump in the US; Marla Maples was born in Georgia (the state, not the country).

Most mail order brides meet their husbands in the us.

This is true to an extent but sometimes it really is just the place. Personally every big move in my life has changed things up a lot (sometimes better sometimes worse).

I do think most young Western men, ranging from the sexually unsuccessful to the already successful, can (further) improve their lot—even substantially for some—by moving/traveling. However, expectations need to be managed and some work may be required to adapt to a new environment, such as learning the language.

the same girl will seem an ingenue compared to your own triple digit past

I think this is the salient bit here; oh sure, when you were green and just starting out on your sexual odyssey with more experienced girls, you thought 17 was a lot. But (worldly chuckle here) when you're an International Man of Mystery at age 30, you'll have racked up so much poontang that those girls will be like innocent fawns next to your sexual kill-list.

I cannot roll my eyes hard enough at this because they'll bounce off the floorboards, but sheesh. Worst of both worlds: you want to boast that you can hit that stripper who begged you to do her, and you want to come away with a (relatively) fresh woman when you're ready to start thinking about marriage and a family. Meanwhile, the girls who correctly pegged you as a wannabe man-whore are all frigid prudish bitches. Uh-huh.

Can you please do some kind of summary, commentary or other type of contextualization? Why should I even care about this? I'm not saying that to be antagonistic, I would latch on to the most flimsy reason available.

Editing to add

To put it bluntly, most of my White neighbors and coworkers basically resembled hobbits. They had no ambition to them, nor any aspirations of greatness. Nor did they think about the world in a dynamic way—the more educated among them certainly stayed informed about the wider world, but they largely took it for granted that their immediate universe was a static place where nothing would ever happen.

And the horrifying thing is that’s how they liked it.

I quickly discovered that Midwesterners had no sense of imperial destiny and “right to rule” like you see in New Yorkers, Texans, or Californians. They had nothing like the feisty Faustian individualism of Floridians or “fuck you” pride of Appalachians. They didn’t even have the air of faded glory and gothic tragedy you see in the Deep South. It was nothing but aggressively bland conformity everywhere you looked.

As someone that has adopted the Midwest as home, I'm glad that it's so bad for this guy that it twisted his political views and forced him to leave. Yes, we are basically hobbits, content to live in nice towns with little in the way of crime and no real desire to seek power over others. Yes, the "elites" in the small-city Midwest are less Machiavellian lunatics seeking power at all costs and more boring bureaucrats that just want the buses to run on time. No, this sort of community building doesn't manifest any sort of whites-only ethnic unity; Hmong, Indian, and other populations that would have been exotic here a century ago show up, adopt the culture, and basically wind up seeming about the same as other Midwesterners in a couple generations. That this part of the country remains relatively naturally egalitarian, welcoming, and so godawful boring for a status-seeking, power-hungry lunatic is exactly why I am much happier here than in a genuine power center of the empire.

There's also something that's just genuinely funny to see this guy finding out that Whiteopia isn't actually what he dreamed of and having that curdle into animosity towards the Whiteopian residents that don't even engage in serious racial introspection like residents of Diversitopias.

Excuse me rolling on the floor at this bit:

It turns out that a cultural ecology where most quality women get married early on in life—either in college or immediately thereafter—is really bad for the dating prospects of a 25 year old man. In practice a society that encourages late marriage is actually much better for more bookish eccentric guys, who tend to be late bloomers in developing their masculinity and ability to seduce women.

Dude, pal, mate: the reason the local gals didn't date you is because you didn't seem like marriage material, and the reason you didn't seem like marriage material is that their parents (especially their mothers) didn't know you, where you worked, how much you made, where your family came from, where your father worked, how much he made, etc.

If you want a culture of "quality" (and that term alone lets me know there were plenty of women who would date a 25 year old incomer, but they didn't meet his criteria) women who will also date promiscuously, then you want a culture of promiscuous women. And I'm betting those were the women you wouldn't date in that Midwest town.

Do you really think twenty-two year old Joe from down the street has a "developed masculinity and ability to seduce women" and that's why he's dating twenty year old Mary-Lou who's in her second year of college? The same Mary-Lou who won't give you the time of day? No, it's because their families know each other, they grew up beside each other, they went to the same high school. They have connections and roots.

I nearly feel sorry for the poor bastard, if ever there was a case of "be careful what you wish for, you may get it", this is it. He wants trad women who don't sleep around and marry early, and turns out he's the kind of guy their mothers tell them not to get involved with. Also probably because these stolid, cow-like Midwesterners can tell when someone is strutting around with a superiority complex about "I know what a bodega is, I've eaten Thai food (as you get it in an American restaurant), and your elites are vastly less impressive" and so they don't want to bother with someone who will spend 80% of the time looking down his nose at them, their town, their families, etc.

Talk about sour grapes!

Ironically enough, if you are the sort of extremely online neurotic weirdo intellectual who gravitates to “trad” ideology as a young man, you probably aren’t temperamentally suited to dating normie conservative church girls who organically live that way. They much prefer unreflective stoic chudbots with rough hands and smooth brains; to these women any kind of emotional expression is coded as womanly. After you date around for a few years you’ll quickly discover that you are a lot more attractive to the bohemian art hoe daughters of the coastal elite.

Uh-huh. It was your giant throbbing... intellect that turned them off, and your being in touch with your emotions. The coastal elite art hoes may date you (read: sleep around with you) but when it comes to marriage, their parents will be every bit as picky as the Midwesterners.

Of course this revelation won’t come easy to an inexperienced young buck who’s only been with a handful of women. That hipster chick’s tattoos or stripper past or body count of 17 will likely intimidate you. But once you’re nearing 30 and have come into your own as a man, the same girl will seem an ingenue compared to your own triple digit past, while the churchy trad girls you once idealized as innocent little angels will instead seem like frigid judgmental viragoes who could never understand you.

Triple-digit camgirls he's jerked off to, is it? 🤣 Let's break this down: so take it that Big Boy is 30 years of age and started dating at 16. That's 30-16 = 14 years to bang a gong, get it on. As for triple digits, let's be very conservative here. 100 is triple digits. 100/14 = 7 girls a year, which comes down to a new girl every 7 weeks. Well, that's doable, he never has a relationship lasting longer than two months, he can rack up 100 girls over 14 years.

I'm thinking the frigid judgmental viragoes understand you just fine, Big Boy. Like every cheating husband that ever said "my wife doesn't understand me".

Largely agree although I’d add that it’s also that all the pretty midwestern blondes who want to date nebbish [pseudo]intellectual guys who talk about French cinema move to NYC or LA pretty soon, if you move in at 25 you’re meeting who’s left, and they will be by nature small-c conservative.

That's exactly it. The girls who stay behind are the ones who like the small town life, or haven't the opportunity to go to the city university, and they probably have local boyfriends. Moving in as a stranger makes it harder to meet anyone, and if you want 'quality' girls who like scrawny intellectuals, you haven't a great selection to choose from.

Good point. If a local girl doesn't particularly want to a) get married b) enter an exclusive long-term relationship straight out of high school, there are multiple incentives pushing her from her hometown and towards the big city.

Dude, pal, mate: the reason the local gals didn't date you is because you didn't seem like marriage material, and the reason you didn't seem like marriage material is that their parents (especially their mothers) didn't know you, where you worked, how much you made, where your family came from, where your father worked, how much he made, etc.

And thus you demonstrate a fatal flaw with such places. If you can't be accepted in such places for several generations, and there won't be several generations because you not being accepted means no offspring, then these towns cannot get new people. Any people (especially men) they lose to the wicked outside world cannot be replaced.

Few towns are happy with wandering single men moving in, they’d probably be much more accepting of a young couple or an already-extant family unit.

This. They're happy to have new families come in. Enroll your kids at the local public school, and they'll all want to talk to you at school functions or whatever. There just isn't going to be a hot spot for singles to hook up for casual sex.

There just isn't going to be a hot spot for singles to hook up for casual sex.

Or if there is, 25 year old him will be too old for it, since it'll be a bunch of 17 and 18 year olds doing underage drinking and fumbling around while they try to get some privacy away from their parents.

Not to be gross, but uh... there's a lot of places where the age of consent is 16, and a lot of 25 yr olds guys wouldn't mind taking advantage of a 17 yr old who wants to experiment with an older boyfriend. But like you said, those teens are looking for privacy, so it's hard for a newcomer to come to town and meet them. Probably a good thing overall!

If he can get over himself, integrate into the local community, and make the effort, he can find a local bride. Or heck, he can marry an outsider woman and go settle down in the town. Their kids will be more accepted because they were born and grew up there, and they'll be able to marry local girls and boys if they want, and the grandkids will be well-integrated.

It's the "I'm an outsider, I'm better than you, and you rubes aren't good enough for me" attitude that means local people won't want to be any closer to him than they need to be. The guy who strolls in to the local pub, club or church expecting the nice girls to be fields of wheat to fall at his scythe (to make a metaphor) with no effort on his part isn't going to get any dates or chances of marriage, particularly when it's "where are you from?" and his answer is "nowhere in particular". If you have no roots to speak of, what parent can be sure that you won't dump their daughter and move on after a few years? Even if he was "I'm from Florida", that's better than nothing, but he's "my parents don't come from anywhere, their parents don't come from anywhere, I go where the money is" talk.

There are shortcuts. Come in with a membership transfer from your local church, Masonic temple, Elks lodge, or the like, and you’ll be accepted and welcomed like some long-lost relative. Get involved in the local community and demonstrate that you’re hard-working, reliable, and not a complete ass, and within a couple of years (or sooner), you’ll have people trying to set you up with their female friends and relations.

Come in with a membership transfer from your local church, Masonic temple, Elks lodge, or the like

The chance of anyone trying to leave Blue-tribistan being a Mason, an Elk, a Moose, or a Water Buffalo is pretty much nil; a local church not much better.

Joining the elks or becoming active in a church is a possibility, this guy just didn't want to do it.

@Lewis2 suggested you had to be active in the Elks or a church before attempting to move. Which, like I said, isn't too likely for the latter and has pretty much probability zero for the former. If you're in Blue and don't like the way Blue is going, well, tough shit buddy; you can't retreat to Red because Red don't want you. If you don't count your ancestors among those who founded the town, you're an untrusted newcomer, not fit to date the local women. "Stick to your own kind", they say.

You can join the elks or a church in NYC or Chicago or whatever, and people who want to live a flyover lifestyle but are obliged by circumstances to live in those places do exactly that.

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To an extent conservative Red tribers would not be conservative Red tribers if they welcomed people unlike themselves with open arms no? Just as coastal Blue tribers wouldn't be them if they weren't more welcoming to the other. Having said that, having been a Brit moving to a Red American town, I found as long as I signaled the right way (went to Church, didn't mention i was an atheist, etc.), that while I was not regarded as local, no one treated me particularly badly. It was a little while before I was able to embed myself in the social fabric (particularly because I didn't work locally), but I was still invited to bbqs and functions out of politeness if nothing else, and within 6 months or so, I was much more embedded socially, so I don't think it is massively difficult. Just like with any society, you need to make an effort to fit in, if you want the locals to actually take to you.

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As I said, coming in as a card-carrying member of whatever organization you prefer is a shortcut. You can still get many of the same benefits by joining up once you move to a new location, but it’ll take longer since you’ll have to prove yourself; you won’t come in pre-vetted, as it were.

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I think my problem with the hobbit mindset is that Hobbiton will not be left alone. Hanania seems to have a deep-seated disdain for mundane domesticity and, as the Zoomers say, "vibing". I just don't believe the hobbits will be allowed to vibe. If the ring doesn't get to Mordor, the Shire will be perfected by Sauron; if it does, the Shire will still be scoured. The hobbits' complacency only allows Saruman to sweep in and turn it into a police state virtually unopposed — and I don't believe for a second Tolkien didn't have an allegory in mind when he was writing that.

and I don't believe for a second Tolkien didn't have an allegory in mind when he was writing that.

The place where that became unrealistic to me was how stupidly Saruman behaved after he got news the ring had been destroyed. The Shire under his control, like everywhere else in Middle Earth, would have felt the reverberations from the destruction of the ring and the fall of Sauron. Saruman would absolutely have known that the Fellowship hobbits were going to return back home soon (knowing their temprament and desire for domestic life) and would fight him for control there.

The very first thing a smart Saruman would have done would have been to completely ethnically cleanse the entire Shire of hobbits by genociding them all (and we know that by this point he was evil enough to do so) and replacing them with Uruk-Hai, so that when the inevetable battle happened at least the locals would side with him instead of against him. And if you read the chapter you'd quickly realise that the fellowship hobbits wouldn't have been able to muster their successful rebellion had there been no more living local hobbits left.

For whatever reason Tolkien didn't write the chapter in this way though... Perhaps it would have been even more anticlimatic than The Scouring of the Shire is on its own, but it would definitely have been more realistic.

Not really more realistic. Saruman's goal was never to depopulate and replace the hobbits, it was to enslave them. And the timing: the whole time period under discussion only lasts about seven months. Saruman wouldn't have had time to ethnically cleanse the Shire.

The very first thing a smart Saruman would have done would have been to completely ethnically cleanse the entire Shire of hobbits by genociding them all (and we know that by this point he was evil enough to do so) and replacing them with Uruk-Hai, so that when the inevetable battle happened at least the locals would side with him instead of against him. And if you read the chapter you'd quickly realise that the fellowship hobbits wouldn't have been able to muster their successful rebellion had there been no more living local hobbits left.

Smart saruman would guilt trip the hobbits for colonizing traditional elf lands and tell them that not accepting their uruk-hai migrants into the shire would not be very nice.

"Today we meet to acknowledge that the Shire occupies a portion of the unceded ancestral lands of the Laiquendi branch of the Nandorin Elves, who were displaced by the colonizers from Númenor*" 😀

*After a long chain of natural and unnatural disasters

Saruman was ruined at that point, and all that was left to him was petty revenge. He no longer had the power, much less the wisdom, to carry out his plans about cosying up to Sauron and getting a place at his right hand, and when Sauron fell that was it, game over.

But he could still do something in a mean way, and even if he knew the survivors were coming back to the Shire eventually (and he may have gambled that the destruction of the Ring would also mean the deaths of Frodo and any others with him, or that the Hobbits would have been killed in the fighting even before the fall of Sauron), he still had time to get there first and spoil as much as he could.

Merry looked round in dismay and disgust. ‘Let’s get out!’ he said. ‘If I had known all the mischief he had caused, I should have stuffed my pouch down Saruman’s throat.’

‘No doubt, no doubt! But you did not, and so I am able to welcome you home.’ There standing at the door was Saruman himself, looking well-fed and well-pleased; his eyes gleamed with malice and amusement.

A sudden light broke on Frodo. ‘Sharkey!’ he cried.

Saruman laughed. ‘So you have heard the name, have you? All my people used to call me that in Isengard, I believe. A sign of affection, possibly. But evidently you did not expect to see me here.’

‘I did not,’ said Frodo. ‘But I might have guessed. A little mischief in a mean way: Gandalf warned me that you were still capable of it.’

‘Quite capable,’ said Saruman, ‘and more than a little. You made me laugh, you hobbit-lordlings, riding along with all those great people, so secure and so pleased with your little selves. You thought you had done very well out of it all, and could now just amble back and have a nice quiet time in the country. Saruman’s home could be all wrecked, and he could be turned out, but no one could touch yours. Oh no! Gandalf would look after your affairs.’

Saruman laughed again. ‘Not he! When his tools have done their task he drops them. But you must go dangling after him, dawdling and talking, and riding round twice as far as you needed. “Well,” thought I, “if they’re such fools, I will get ahead of them and teach them a lesson. One ill turn deserves another.” It would have been a sharper lesson, if only you had given me a little more time and more Men. Still I have already done much that you will find it hard to mend or undo in your lives. And it will be pleasant to think of that and set it against my injuries.’

Saruman didn't send an occupation force into the Shire because he didn't have one to spare; all the efforts were concentrated on the great final push against Gondor and Rohan, and in the aftermath of victory, he presumed, then he could put in his claim to be overlord of the Shire for Sauron. He didn't much care about it except as a way to poke Gandalf in the eye, it was too unimportant without anything there of interest for him. A slave-land filled with slave-Hobbits was enough for him after the dust had settled, but as it fell out, he couldn't even get that much, though he was able to gather together a rag-tag bunch of bandits to help him take over, with Lotho at first as his puppet quisling face of authority.

And they didn't have it all their own way, even from the first:

‘Have they got any weapons?’ asked Merry.

‘Whips, knives, and clubs, enough for their dirty work: that’s all they’ve showed so far,’ said Cotton. ‘But I dare say they’ve got other gear, if it comes to fighting. Some have bows, anyway. They’ve shot one or two of our folk.’

‘There you are, Frodo!’ said Merry. ‘I knew we should have to fight. Well, they started the killing.’

‘Not exactly,’ said Cotton. ‘Leastways not the shooting. Tooks started that. You see, your dad, Mr. Peregrin, he’s never had no truck with this Lotho, not from the beginning: said that if anyone was going to play the chief at this time of day, it would be the right Thain of the Shire and no upstart. And when Lotho sent his Men they got no change out of him. Tooks are lucky, they’ve got those deep holes in the Green Hills, the Great Smials and all, and the ruffians can’t come at ’em; and they won’t let the ruffians come on their land. If they do, Tooks hunt ’em. Tooks shot three for prowling and robbing. After that the ruffians turned nastier. And they keep a pretty close watch on Tookland. No one gets in nor out of it now.’

I think Tolkien was more interested in showing internal corruption; the Shire is not an earthly paradise, even if it is a good place to live. The dealings with the Sackville-Bagginses, where Lotho has his authority go to his head, and he is enriched by trading with Saruman, and hence gives Saruman a foothold in the Shire, and the co-operation of the likes of Ted Sandyman who are all too happy to help with 'progress' (but really wrecking and pulling down things), all done at first under the guise of working with the local authorities (i.e. Lotho) - that, as much as the unpreparedness of the Hobbits for an outside invasion force, is what lets Saruman establish control there.

An invasion force of Uruk-Hai that wiped out all the Shire Hobbits won't give you that, or the warning that you can't safely and smugly assume all the 'bad things' are out there, away over yonder, and not lurking at your own fireside.

by genociding them all (and we know that by this point he was evil enough to do so) and replacing them with Uruk-Hai

With what forces? Saruman was not keeping spare army in case he would lose.

And when Lotho sent his Men they got no change out of him. Tooks are lucky, they’ve got those deep holes in the Green Hills, the Great Smials and all, and the ruffians can’t come at ’em; and they won’t let the ruffians come on their land. If they do, Tooks hunt ’em. Tooks shot three for prowling and robbing. After that the ruffians turned nastier. And they keep a pretty close watch on Tookland. No one gets in nor out of it now.’

Yeah, when Saruman had power and was building up his forces, his immediate aims were to get Rohan under control (and he did that by using Grima to undermine Theoden, not by marching in a conquering force) and then move on to Gondor, all the while sucking up to Sauron who, justifiably, didn't trust him not to be planning some backstabbing of his own if he ever got his hands on the One Ring.

Even if he had wanted to, he couldn't move his own Uruk-Hai army into the Shire without Sauron's knowledge and permission, which I doubt he would have obtained as Sauron would have seen this (again, correctly) as Saruman trying to build up his own base of power.

Besides, Saruman wasn't planning for "what happens after Sauron is defeated", his entire rationale for throwing in with Sauron was that he was convinced he was going to come out the winner, and Saruman wanted to be on the winning side. He had lost all his wisdom, and wasn't capable of foreseeing that the Hobbits would survive and come out the victors and he would therefore need to be three moves ahead in destroying their homeland. He didn't see this because he didn't want to see this, he wanted the position as trusted viceroy after the victory of Sauron.

When he was overthrown, and therefore wanted revenge, he had lost all his powers. Gandalf had stripped him of everything, so that all that remained to him was the ability to persuade others, and to pick up what shreds of control that remained to him. Due to using Lotho as a catspaw, he was able to introduce his band of Ruffians into the Shire first under the guise of 'post-war reconstruction' and then, as he tightened his grip on power there, to do away with Lotho altogether:

Wormtongue halted and looked back at him, half prepared to stay. Saruman turned. ‘No evil?’ he cackled. ‘Oh no! Even when he sneaks out at night it is only to look at the stars. But did I hear someone ask where poor Lotho is hiding? You know, don’t you, Worm? Will you tell them?’

Wormtongue cowered down and whimpered: ‘No, no!’

‘Then I will,’ said Saruman. ‘Worm killed your Chief, poor little fellow, your nice little Boss. Didn’t you, Worm? Stabbed him in his sleep, I believe. Buried him, I hope; though Worm has been very hungry lately. No, Worm is not really nice. You had better leave him to me.’

A look of wild hatred came into Wormtongue’s red eyes. ‘You told me to; you made me do it,’ he hissed.

EDIT: As an aside, this bit always kills me, Saruman just casually throwing it out there that there may not even be a body to bury because Wormtongue cannabalised Lotho: Buried him, I hope; though Worm has been very hungry lately. And people say there's nothing dark in Tolkien, it's just simple Good Guys versus Bad Guys (and racially-coded bad guys, if we go with the progressive critiques).

Saruman had been much more occupied with foiling Gandalf, who even as far back as the events of "The Hobbit" (as retconned) was worried about the return of Sauron, and Saruman had to work in secret there since suddenly popping up with an Uruk-Hai army would have revealed all too early. There were other reasons that Saruman couldn't simply march an Orc army into the Shire, thanks to the restoration of the Kingdom under the Mountain and the Dale men:

From Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth, Part III: The Third Age, III: The Quest of Erebor:

"I was very troubled at that time," he said, "for Saruman was hindering all my plans. I knew that Sauron had arisen again and would soon declare himself, and I knew that he was preparing for a great war. How would he begin? Would he try first to re-occupy Mordor, or would he first attack the chief strongholds of his enemies? I thought then, and I am sure now, that to attack Lórien and Rivendell, as soon as he was strong enough was his original plan. It would have been a much better plan for him, and much worse for us.

"You may think that Rivendell was out of his reach, but I did not think so. The state of things in the North was very bad. The Kingdom under the Mountain and the strong Men of Dale were no more. To resist any force that Sauron might send to regain the northern passes in the mountains and the old lands of Angmar there were only the Dwarves of the Iron Hills, and behind them lay a desolation and a Dragon. The Dragon Sauron might use with terrible effect. Often I said to myself: "I must find some means of dealing with Smaug. But a direct stroke against Dol Guldur is needed still more. We must disturb Sauron's plans. I must make the Council see that.'

..."That is true," said Gandalf. "Poor Thorin! He was a great Dwarf of a great House, whatever his faults; and though he fell at the end of the journey, it was largely due to him that the Kingdom under the Mountain was restored, as I desired. But Dáin Ironfoot was a worthy successor. And now we hear that he fell fighting before Erebor again, even while we fought here. I should call it a heavy loss, if it was not a wonder rather that in his great age he could still wield his axe as mightily as they say he did, standing over the body of King Brand before the Gate of Erebor until the darkness fell.

"It might all have gone very differently indeed. The main attack was diverted southwards, it is true; and yet even so with his farstretched right hand Sauron could have done terrible harm in the North, while he defended Gondor, if King Brand and King Dáin had not stood in his path. When you think of the great Battle of Pelennor, do not forget the Battle of Dale. Think of what might have been. Dragon-fire and savage swords in Eriador! There might be no Queen in Gondor. We might now only hope to return from the victory here to ruin and ash. But that has been averted – because I met Thorin Oakenshield one evening on the edge of spring not far from Bree. A chance-meeting, as we say in Middle-earth."

As an aside, this bit always kills me, Saruman just casually throwing it out there that there may not even be a body to bury because Wormtongue cannabalised Lotho

Also, Saruman is running on pure spite toward everyone - including some of his actual followers. And ends paying price for that soon after.

That's part of his fall; he always did think he was better than anyone else, but now he's reduced to this miserable ball of spite and hatred and mostly impotent anger. Wandering in rags like a beggar, where he had hoped to be one of the lords of the earth (and was in his origins indeed one of the lords of the universe).

And people say there's nothing dark in Tolkien

Of all things that you could claim/invent/legitimately have a point... Some people went with this one? Really? Really?

Maybe Book of Mazarbul was to subtle for them? ("The Watcher in the Water took Óin — we cannot get out. The end comes soon. We hear drums, drums in the deep.")

What about literal genocide? Poisoned and ruined land of Mordor and Marshes? Multiple characters with severe mental illness (and well depicted one)? Mind control and possession? Horrific death in multiple varieties? Story of Entwifes?

WTF they want? Explicitly described rape scenes were one of few actually missing things.

(I am being charitable and limiting things to LOTR and Hobbit, if people are going to claim that there's nothing dark in Silmarilion, then I can only assume trolling or some deep confusion)

Explicitly described rape scene

I think it's the lack of explicit description that makes people think this; Tolkien knew about bad things happening, he didn't feel the need to put the gory details down on the page. Just because he didn't write ten pages describing Celebrian's torture at the hands of the Orcs doesn't mean he had no clue about evil.

He did speak about this in a 1956 letter:

So I feel that the fiddle-faddle in reviews, and correspondence about them, as to whether my 'good people' were kind and merciful and gave quarter (in fact they do), or not, is quite beside the point. Some critics seem determined to represent me as a simple-minded adolescent, inspired with, say, a With-the-flag-to-Pretoria spirit, and wilfully distort what is said in my tale. I have not that spirit, and it does not appear in the story. The figure of Denethor alone is enough to show this; but I have not made any of the peoples on the 'right' side, Hobbits, Rohirrim, Men of Dale or of Gondor, any better than men have been or are, or can be. Mine is not an 'imaginary' world, but an imaginary historical moment on 'Middle-earth' – which is our habitation.

Besides, Saruman wasn't planning for "what happens after Sauron is defeated", his entire rationale for throwing in with Sauron was that he was convinced he was going to come out the winner, and Saruman wanted to be on the winning side. He had lost all his wisdom, and wasn't capable of foreseeing that the Hobbits would survive and come out the victors and he would therefore need to be three moves ahead in destroying their homeland. He didn't see this because he didn't want to see this, he wanted the position as trusted viceroy after the victory of Sauron.

This isn't my reading. By the time the Fellowship reach Rohan, Saruman has already attempted to double-cross Sauron (by attacking the Fellowship at Rauros with the intention of stealing the Ring and taking it to Isengard). See this Brett Devereaux post for why Saruman's plan was very unlikely to work. My understanding is that the Unfinished Tales confirm this reading, and that Saruman had been actively concealing the likely location of the Ring (which he had guessed based on Gandalf's excessive interest in the Shire) from Sauron several years before the events of LOTR - with the implication that the offer made to Gandalf before imprisoning him (to join in a Saruman-led scheme to use the Ring to defeat Sauron and seize power for themselves) was sincere.

Isn't Saruman at lower level of divine pyramid (or how it's called?) than Sauron and cannot defeat him in any case?

and cannot defeat him in any case

This is proved wrong by Sauron being defeated (ok, it is heavily implied that God was meddling in it but still it shows that Sauron being more powerful than any of Istari is not unsolvable)

Both are Maiar. Sauron is clearly more powerful (both in various mundane ways like army size and territory controlled, and through his power over the Rings), but they are at the same level of the divine pyramid.

Saruman believes that he can master the Ring, and that if he does he will be stronger than Sauron. There are strong hints that he is wrong about this, but the matter is never settled as his orcs grab the wrong hobbits and Frodo escapes across Anduin with the Ring.

I believe Sauron, Sarumon, and Gandalf were all Istari and one step below the Valar (who were second to Erú Illuvatar himself); Sauron worked directly for Morgoth, and the Istari worked for the other Valar.

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Saruman absolutely intended to backstab Sauron, and Sauron was well-aware of this. But I think Saruman concentrated more on the problems on his immediate doorstep (Rohan) and left the Shire to be dealt with at his convenience. Sending his own forces off to occupy and ethnically cleanse the Shire would have been wasteful, he would expend resources that he needed to take on Rohan/Gondor and then later Sauron. What is Saruman going to do, with his army sitting there in the Shire twiddling their thumbs waiting for any fleeing Hobbits to come back, all the while the action is diverted South and Sauron versus Gondor is going on? Whoever comes out the winner of that, they're not likely to be friendly to Saruman, and unless he's planning to flee to the Shire himself sans Ring and make some kind of fortified land on the edge of the immediate concerns of the victor, dividing his attention like that isn't sensible.

If he'd stopped playing silly buggers and had genuinely thrown in with Sauron, then sending his force North to aid in the Battle of Dale might have turned the tide for the Mordor forces and the bad outcome Gandalf feared could have come true:

Think of what might have been. Dragon-fire and savage swords in Eriador! There might be no Queen in Gondor. We might now only hope to return from the victory here to ruin and ash.

I think Saruman suspected Gandalf's interest in the Shire because he couldn't imagine that one of the Istari would like the Hobbits for their own sake. There had to be an ulterior motive. It was just a lucky coincidence that he guessed right about where the Ring had finally turned up. His offer to Gandalf may have been sincere, but Gandalf was right that only one person could wield the Ring and the second Saruman got his hands on it, that would be the end of their 'partnership' and the end of Gandalf, too.

I am sympathetic to the Auron MacIntyre framing that the side that wants to win always beats the side that wants to be left alone. At present, I don't have a well-constructed ideological vision for how to maintain Hobbiton indefinitely, but I think I can trivially observe that the power-seekers lauded in the original blogpost have utterly failed to do anything constructive in the places of conflict (California, New York, DC). The lack of a good solution for the dissolution of high-trust communities by bad actors doesn't really get to me a place of actively preferring a conflict-zone of racial animosity.

Their complacency only allows Saruman to sweep in and turn it into a police state virtually unopposed

But the Hobbits did resist in quiet ways, and once they had leaders they turned the tables quickly. It's the great powers underestimating the Hobbits all the time that brings about their own downfall. Our friend here sneering at the Hobbits seems to have turned tail and run back to the big city, he didn't stick around and by virtue of his superior crinkled brain, get-up-and-go, and sharp, hungry, novelty-seeking contrarianism rise to the top of the heap and become cock of the walk round them there parts. The sleepy stodgy Hobbits ran him off because he couldn't deal with them.

The guy just does not understand people:

Both of my parents came from vastly different regions of the country, and had themselves been raised in itinerant families that regularly relocated to where the money was. To me moving all the time is just something that normal responsible middle class people do to achieve prosperity, but in many parts of the agricultural Midwest there appears to be something of a stigma to it.

You know who moves around all the time going to where the money is? Beggars. Tramps. Hoboes. The Joads moving to California out of necessity, not choice. People who are the new serfs, being moved around by their bosses at the convenience of the business (move to the new plant/office three hundred miles away, uproot your family). Itinerant farm workers, seasonal workers like the immigrant labour brown people he probably wouldn't like being compared to.

By contrast, having something you own that is yours, where you can tell those who would move you around like a chesspiece to go to hell, is valuable. For all his talk about the bovine Bavarians versus the proud and fierce Ulster Irish, he has no realisation that the Scots-Irish also would tell him to go to hell if he tried moving them off the plot of land that is now theirs, and no landlord can evict them or make them shift.

You're not an entrepreneurial adventurer, Big Boy; you're a tumbleweed who goes with the wind, a servant like those of the Centurion who says "And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” You have no roots and nothing to fall back on against those who have power over you to say "come here, go there, do it now!"

Where do you come from? The Sun Belt? The various states your parents grew up in and moved to with their itinerant families? Where do you belong? Where are the graves of your ancestors, or do you even know that much? You're a disposable, replaceable cog in the economic machinery who will be discarded the second you can't "move to where the money is".

It is fascinating and dare I say even hilarious and satisfying to read a man discovering that the whole culture he made up, projected on to people, and invested in was in fact made up.

Why no, it turns out that most white people are not wannabe-Nietzschean-hustlers, and instead just want to find a nice partner, a nice job, and settle down to a quiet life and find meaning in family and friendship. The horror!

Yes, we are basically hobbits, content to live in nice towns with little in the way of crime and no real desire to seek power over others.

I remember reading Lord of the Rings growing up and thinking the Shire sounded like paradise. I'm not exactly surprised to find people who don't think so exist -- I knew this, there are people who like the city --, but finding that there are people who think of the Shire as an example of a bad thing is a little funny.

I live across a river from the hospital I was born in, five miles from the house I grew up in (well, one of them, anyway -- we moved a lot when I was young, but always in the same county. My father chased the housing bubble upwards), and, while the old rural character of the place is mostly gone and paved over by suburbia, enough of it is left that I love it here and have no desire to ever leave. I've married a girl I met in college, most of my immediate family lives within a 45 minutes drive, and I pretty consciously chase stable, salaried employment that provides dependable income and doesn't ask too much as far as travel or flexibility.

The funny thing is that I'm actually from an area of the country that is otherwise very much like the 'coastal elitopia' the guy found out he prefers, just far enough out on (what used to be) the edges of the suburbs that you can still see the shimmer of the rural past in the ponds and the creeks. The small towns are still small (even if they're expensive and trendy and surrounded by miles of SFH neighborhoods), the parks are still pristine (even if the bike trails are getting more defined and nature outside those parks is disappearing, at least in this part of the county), and the job market is healthy enough that I don't think I'll ever even have to leave (even if my wife wants to move to Europe someday -- we both want something like Bavaria, which is pretty much exactly like here but with less tract housing and better beer).

Lord of the Rings growing up and thinking the Shire sounded like paradise.

Really? Even if you ignore Aman completely I would say Rivendell and its environs were more of a paradise than the Shire ever could be.

Depends what you want. Rivendell was a refuge, and a temporary one; now it has faded with the passing of the Rings. The description in the appendices of Arwen coming to Lothlorien after Aragorn's death is heart-breaking, because it says so much with so little: she came to the silent land and dwelt there alone under the fading trees, since both Galadriel and Celeborn had left, until winter came and she laid herself to rest on the green mound while the mallorn leaves were falling.

If you're looking for 'paradise' in this world, then the Shire is the nearest you will get.

Yeah, there's that, too. We are not Elves and we cannot have their life. We are Men and the fading of the world of Elves leaves us to build our own paradises.

Rivendell is temporary only from a terribly alien worldview - it has lasted thousands of years. That is, of course, insufficient from the perspective of an Elf, but should satisfy any mortal human.

The Shire, of course, is clearly idealised by Tolkien, but anyone who thinks it to be paradise is wrong. Tolkien himself clearly grasped the drawbacks of such a society - petty, parochial, ignorant, and dependent on the goodwill of greater civilizations.

Rivendell is a redoubt, it's a place of refuge because it's hidden away, not easily accessible, and Elrond can control who gets there. It's been sheltering the shattered line of the Northern kings since Arnor was destroyed, and it's filled with war survivor Elves from the last time Sauron kicked off and the time before that when Melkor was the Big Bad.

And all this depends on the power of one of the Three Rings to maintain that air of timelessness. Which is precarious, as we see with the destruction of the One Ring. Even with that, though, the age of Men is coming and the fate of the Elves is fading if they remain (until, in Tolkien's very oldest original mythos, they dwindle down into the 'fairies' of our/Victorian day) or to pass overseas and leave behind all that they tried to build in Middle-earth.

And even Rivendell is not immune to the depredations of the outer world, see the fate of Celebrian.

It's not a place for mortals, apart from a time where they need shelter and healing, or are coming to the end of their journey through life.

Tolkien's presentation of Minas Tirith is similarly idealised, but nobody writes about Tolkien as a promoter of classical (or any other) principles of urban planning. Tolkien clearly did have an idealised view of a traditional English rural life which was being rendered obsolete by industrialisation, but when he tries to put it on the page he falls into the classical historical-nostalgist trap of writing out the reality of peasant life. The only working-class hobbits we see are the two Gamgees (and we don't see much of the old Gaffer), who enjoyed the favour of their aristocratic patron. If I use race as a metaphor to explain the English class system to Americans*, this is like writing the Antebellum South from the perspective of three planters and a house slave, which is what Gone With the Wind does, and is widely panned for in the current year.

In the world we live in, the dominant demographic trend of the last 250 years (in England - it is more recent in other places) is people voluntarily and knowingly moving from the Shire to Minas Tirith for a better life.

In so far as the Shire is paradise, it is because it (for reasons not explained) remains rightly-governed and unaffected by the rising Dark despite Arnor falling around it. (Rivendell and Lorien are similar, although the reasons that they are unaffected are more obvious) The implication of the appendices is that once Aragorn (and his heir Eldarion) consolidated the Reunited Kingdom, the whole Kingdom enjoyed this level of peace and prosperity.

* Something I feel entirely justified in doing given that the traditional English class system is fundamentally about oppression of the indigenous population by Norman settler-colonialists.

I think if you're likening Gaffer Gamgee and Sam to house slaves, you're wading into deep waters. That is completely not the parallel, even if we take the view that this is about the landed gentry. Think more the idealised image of the 'old family retainer' rather than 'chattel slave of a different race'.

Though I think, given your analysis of Norman colonialism, you are somewhat tongue-in-cheek about this whole topic.

There's a chapter in Anna Karenina where Levin, the lovesick landowner and sometime friend of Anna's brother, returns to his estate after trying and failing to win the heart of Kitty, a young woman who is still too caught up in the thrills of court life to take him seriously. While there, there is a scene where he assists his tenants with harvesting the grain, spending most of a day just working side by side with them. Tolstoy describes this experience like next to nothing else he describes in the whole book, lauding it in a way that almost feels utopian. You can feel Tolstoy's agrarianism shine right through.

I've never found the idea that paradise involves no work very convincing.

Reminds me of Alexander Pope:

Happy the man, whose wish and care 
A few paternal acres bound, 
Content to breathe his native air, 
     In his own ground. 

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread, 
Whose flocks supply him with attire, 
Whose trees in summer yield him shade, 
     In winter fire. 

Blest, who can unconcernedly find 
Hours, days, and years slide soft away, 
In health of body, peace of mind, 
     Quiet by day, 

Sound sleep by night; study and ease, 
Together mixed; sweet recreation; 
And innocence, which most does please, 
     With meditation. 

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; 
Thus unlamented let me die; 
Steal from the world, and not a stone 
     Tell where I lie.

I have no idea who this bloke is and I don't much care. I doubt he had anay influence at all, other than in his own tiny set of like-minded, which he now declares he has left behind.

But I had to laugh at his pissiness over "I moved to my ideal place and got treated like a blow-in". Yeah, funny that: strangers with different views move in and want to change things to how they want it, locals don't go along with that? Isn't that what your White Nationalism was all about in the first place?

Every homogenous community in the world behaves like that; if he moved to his feisty Florida, proud Appalachia or gothic South, those local communities would treat him the same way for the next twenty or so years. He doesn't understand what he claims to be representing.

As to his Hobbits and the Shire metaphors, clearly he doesn't understand Hobbits or the Shire. Tolkien was aware of the downsides, but this guy doesn't appreciate the upsides.

Whew, you hit the nail on the head here. People generally like the way things are where they live, or they would move somewhere else (means available). Outsiders that want to come and fuck up the good thing they have going are going to be shunned, as they should be. The lack of awareness present in this fellow is staggering.

In the Midwest I encountered a different kind of White person that honestly seemed quasi-Asian to me. They had no will to power. They were not Romans. They seemed more like the Chinese of the Ming era, or like modern Europeans. But there wasn’t a Faustian spirit to be found anywhere [...]

Compared to my early 20s self, I am a lot less prone to ingrouping with the kind of White people who deliberately shut themselves off from the world by retreating to the ‘burbs—people who just want to be comfortable and don’t have a burning desire to change the world. I’ve also lost any protective instinct toward people who stay in a shitty poor area with no opportunities just because they have a sentimental attachment to their podunk hometown. My experiences have taught me that these people want nothing to do with my vision for the world and aren’t my volk in any meaningful sense.

They have no destiny except under the [boot].

The Hanania pill seems to consist of arrogant shitstirrers realising that they loathe most white people just like they loathe everyone else.

They seemed more like ... modern Europeans.

God forbid.

This thing sounds like something that could be written by a leftist, with just a few words changed. I mean, imagine something like this:

Compared to my early 20s self, I am a lot less prone to ingrouping with the kind of Liberal people who deliberately shut themselves off from the world by retreating to the ‘burbs—people who just want to be comfortable and don’t have a burning desire to change the world. I’ve also lost any protective instinct toward people who stay in a shitty poor area with no opportunities just because they have a sentimental attachment to their ghetto hometown. My experiences have taught me that these people want nothing to do with my vision for the world and aren’t my comrades in any meaningful sense.

Actually, this sounds more believable than the original text. It's certainly more likely to be somewhere in ChatGPT's training corpus.

It's no wonder this man hates the Midwest -- he's basically a progressive activist, just with one or two ideas swapped around! The actual conservatism (and the pragmatism and realism he labels as "smallmindedness") he found there is as alien to him as it is to the woke moralist, and he rejects them for the same reason. They, in turn, reject his utopian vision -- because they're stupid and reactionary and the world is going to leave them behind. They're not on the right side of history. Don't they realize how much work there's been in academia right-wing internet forums about the systemic racism against Black people White people deeply ingrained in American society? Just do another search-and-replace of "smallminded" and put in "prejudiced."

@FiveHourMarathon and I have gotten into arguments in the past about the nature of conservatism, but regardless of where one draws the line between conservative and reactionary, this guy is on the other side of it. This is not the writing of a conservative, desiring to hold on to the lasting traditions that have been gifted to him by his upbringing. This is an ideologue, a radical, someone animated by the same spirit of the age that motivates the Communist revolutionary or the social justice activist. And he has the same smug self-assurance that, if empowered, would drown his neighbors in a lake and call it baptism.

Everything this guy writes is just a massive argument for Hlynka's position -- the strong form, not the way-too-far version he started saying later on -- that white identitarians are schismatic progressives, not really conservatives. I know he made some very strong and silly claims that extrapolated too far from the connection he saw. But guys, this right here is exhibit A.

Right. I've got into arguments with people that I considered to be too conservative, on the basis that the world is changing without their permission and if they actually liked World State A then they may need to do something new in order to prevent us from moving further and further away from it. But this guy has exactly the same "the new world requires new people" energy as any Stalinist.

A reactionary is just a conservative after the society they want to preserve has been destroyed.

A (constitutional) monarchist in Britain may be a conservative. A monarchist in France is a reactionary.

There are (a few)monarchists in France, but my understanding is that they’re basically all neoabsolutist fringe groups- which would also be quite reactionary in Britain or Spain or other countries where monarchism is a normal part of the center right.

I don't think that "there's two camps: people who want to change the world, and people who want to hold onto tradition" is a good criteria for classifying political ideologies, because that would cause our judgements about which ideologies are really "the same" to become too relativized to the contingent circumstances that an individual person happens to find themselves in.

Suppose that Hlynka, a classic American liberal, finds himself transported to a Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist regime that has existed for around say, 100 years. I stipulate the timeline only so that we can see that this regime has existed long enough that its principles have become ossified as "traditional".

The question is: in this situation, is Hlynka a Red (wants to preserve tradition) or a Blue (wants to change the world)?

If Hlynka would change his ideological commitments and become a communist because "Reds uphold the social order, that's what Reds do" then I think that's simply a contingent personality trait of Hlynka's; it's not an inherent property of any particular ideology. If you just change your mind based on what everyone around you thinks, then that doesn't reveal any deep ideological commitments on your part. That's just a non-ideology.

If you try to bite the bullet and say "yes, Hlynka wants to change his society now, so he's now a Blue", then that seems to lead to a lot of problems. Is Hlynka now "the same" as the progressives and white identitarians that he spent so much time lambasting? We can also imagine that Hlynka is magically transported back and forth on a weekly basis between actual 2024 America and our hypothetical Communistan - is he "the same" as a progressive when he's in Communistan, and "not the same" as a progressive when he's in America? It's an absurd conclusion.

You could also try something like "yes, Hlynka now disagrees with the prevailing ideology of his society, but he won't actually try that hard to change it, because he knows how to make peace with the social order, and therefore he's still a Red". But again, this seems to me to be a personality trait, rather than an actual ideological principle. If you have two classical liberals, and one is really proactive about trying to take society in a more classically liberal direction and the other takes a more guarded "wait and see, everything in its time" approach, do they really have "different" ideologies now? I think we should just do the obvious thing and classify ideologies based on their stated principles, rather than the degree of ferocity with which their adherents are willing to fight for them.

TL;DR your ability to support "tradition" depends on the degree to which that tradition supports you. You could just be the kind of person who's happy anywhere. But that says more about you than it does about systems of governance.

I think this ignores the big gap between utopia and tradition. If you can point to a time when things were good, and say that you want to recreate those conditions as closely as you can, that might require considerable social change but I would still count it as 'traditional'. You can use 'reactionary' if you prefer.

Alternatively, if you have a vision for humanity that has never yet been properly realised, I think of that as being 'progressive' or 'utopian'. Utopia, of course, famously means 'nowhere'.

If you look at it like this, you have two axes: complacency vs revolutionary; and traditional vs utopian.

So I would be a revolutionary traditionalist; @2rafa's political friends would be complacent traditionalists, and Walt is a revolutionary utopian.

Conservative is non fiction, Reactionary is historical fantasy, Progressive is Science Fiction. At some level of remove, we don't really know what went on historically.

If you look at it like this, you have two axes: complacency vs revolutionary; and traditional vs utopian.

Now add the traditional left/right division as a Z-axis and you've got a cube. We can call it the Corvos Cube and develop an insular and baffling lingo surrounding it.

So I would be a revolutionary traditionalist; @2rafa's political friends would be complacent traditionalists, and Walt is a revolutionary utopian.

Entirely too legible. I'd rather say that someone is "in the upper lefthand back corner of the purple sector of the Corvos Cube."

That could certainly be an interesting thing to know about a political ideology - whether there are any actually existing historical examples of it being implemented. I'm not discounting that. But I don't think that property is relevant to establishing the identity of two ideologies (or their identity modulo one or two specific principles - the core claim I'm concerned with is "progressivism and white nationalism are just the same thing with the races switched").

One person's utopia could be fully automated luxury gay space communism with full dive VR available to everyone. Another person's utopia could be enslaving all of humanity in the service of building statues of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and outlawing anything that isn't directly relevant to achieving that goal. The fact that neither of their utopias have actually existed before is irrelevant in this case. There's no meaningful sense in which they have the same ideology. They're different.

regardless of where one draws the line between conservative and reactionary, this guy is on the other side of it.

He's a Cecil Rhodes Imperialist, and the problem with Cecil Rhodes Imperialism is that it's all about the Empire and nothing about the homeland. It very easily devolves into this guy's brand of "I don't care about the Whiteness as such anymore, I care about the money and success" version of Empire, jeering at attachment to a local plot of land. Chesterton mocked such sentiments a lot, as in pointing out how Empire Day was the brainchild of Canadians, and it has since been watered down to Commonwealth Day as the Empire has fallen apart.

(Warning for what may be perceived as anti-Semitism)

From "Songs of Education":

II. GEOGRAPHY
Form 17955301, Sub-Section Z

The earth is a place on which England is found,
And you find it however you twirl the globe round;
For the spots are all red and the rest is all grey,
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.

Gibraltar's a rock that you see very plain,
And attached to its base is the district of Spain.
And the island of Malta is marked further on,
Where some natives were known as the Knights of St. John.

Then Cyprus, and east to the Suez Canal,
That was conquered by Dizzy and Rothschild his pal
With the Sword of the Lord in the old English way:
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.

Our principal imports come far as Cape Horn;
For necessities, cocoa; for luxuries, corn;
Thus Brahmins are born for the rice-field, and thus,
The Gods made the Greeks to grow currants for us;
Of earth's other tributes are plenty to choose,
Tobacco and petrol and Jazzing and Jews:
The Jazzing will pass but the Jews they will stay;
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.

Our principle exports, all labelled and packed,
At the ends of the earth are delivered intact:
Our soap or our salmon can travel in tins
Between the two poles and as like as two pins;
So that Lancashire merchants whenever they like
Can water the beer of a man in Klondike
Or poison the meat of a man in Bombay;
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.

The day of St. George is a musty affair
Which Russians and Greeks are permitted to share;
The day of Trafalgar is Spanish in name
And the Spaniards refuse to pronounce it the same;
But the day of the Empire from Canada came
With Morden and Borden and Beaverbrook's fame
And saintly seraphical souls such as they:
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.

Chesterton was bitter because he saw that a certain traditional Englishness was subsumed by Empire. But the joke was always on him; most of that ‘traditional Englishness’ was itself less than a century old and the product of the first age of mass media in the early 19th century, before which much of rural Britain practiced an ancient, barely-ritualized, quasi-pagan kind of Christianity about as far as its possible to get from the orthodox Roman Catholicism Chesterton ultimately adopted. The Canadians who invented Empire Day were, in large part, ethnic Britons. It was conceived by one Thomas Robinson, likely of British extraction, in Winnipeg. The Lancashire merchants were ethnic English. Chesterton’s distaste for Jews like Disraeli and the Rothschilds obscured how profitable the Suez Canal was for Britain; it was India alone that was the whetstone around the empire’s neck, and if India had been jettisoned after the mutiny the entire enterprise would have been largely self-sustaining moving forward.

A century on, we can see that his distaste for empire was flawed. In truth, Britain is no worse off than those other Northern European countries that never pursued far flung imperialism, like Sweden. England’s cultural and civilizational decline is therefore likely unrelated to empire.

Cecil Rhodes was prescient. The only hope for Britain’s economy in the long is ultimately full economic union with the United States, and this has been clear since the 1890s. Of course, the less Anglo America gets, the harder it will be to convince them to let the British in.

I assume you're referring to the mutiny of 1857-58. Why exactly would jettisoning India have been a good idea in your view? I'd guess that anything that can reasonably be called a problem stemming from holding onto India could have been averted simply by turning it into a dominion, as the independence movement leaders wanted.

He has no idea that those white Midwesterners have won. Why are their towns so homogeneous? Why are they all the same type of person, with the same type of culture? Why are they not Diverse?

He wants the hustle'n'bustle of the coastal cities, where he will triumph in competition as iron sharpens iron, but he also wants to be protected from competition for his labour by H1B immigrants. Well, are those Midwesterners worried about "sustained immigration of high IQ and ethnically nepotist immigrants from India into highly paid tech jobs, blocking the sons of the American middle class from the possibility of upward social advancement and leaving them stranded in five figure wagecuck hell"? I'm getting the impression that the answer there is "no".

This guy wants to be pampered, but also have the illusion that he's a rough-n-tough descendant of adventurers who dukes it out with equals and wins by virtue of his bigger brain. He has no idea where those "adventurer" ancestors come from, he doesn't want the actual adversity of fighting for a job against cheaper labour which is where the self-interest of the business owners leads them, but he still thinks that the five contradictory viewpoints he espouses can be reconciled, as long as he always comes out on top of the pile.

If a midwestern town is homogenous it's for the same reason that rural areas are homogenous anywhere in the western world: they are poor and isolated enough that migrants don't want to move there. The great cities that midwesterners built (St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago etc.) have been handed over to outsiders where they now have some of the highest murder rates in the developed world.

Yes, and in general the depiction of small town midwestern USA as some kind of paradise is ridiculous. Stripmallville with a dying main street, Applebees as the best restaurant, no organic spontaneous community because you have to drive everywhere (even to somewhere a half mile away because there’s either no sidewalk or you’re separated by an interstate that goes right through the middle of town), no beautiful architecture, and the same slowly declining social trends (birthrates, single motherhood, drug addiction) as the rest of the country, just 20 years behind is not some bucolic garden of eden.

Indeed, if one lived in the Midwest and actually wanted the kind of comfortable, pastoral, low risk existence @Walterodim described they’d be best off getting their proof of German ancestry in order, applying for a visa and moving to some little village in Bavaria or Baden Württemberg with zero immigrants; at least there the scenery is much better, the architecture is better, the schools are probably better, the buses are both more frequent and more timely and you’re actually in (or nearer to, certainly) the homeland of your ancestors.

Your portrayal of most American small towns is at least 10 years out of date.

I’ve been to many wonderful small towns in the US, but they were all in New England or in the outer suburbs of wealthy cities and the residents all had some source of external wealth, either from commuting into highly-paid PMC jobs in the nearest major city or from tourism. And again, if it’s a low variance rural lifestyle in a pretty, walkable, homogenous locale, much of Western Europe easily vastly outdoes the US and the US’ advantages (like much higher salaries) are less necessary.

Idk, what actually rural small Midwestern towns very far from the nearest major city are you thinking of? Happy to take a look on Streetview.

For nice, liveable midwestern towns I would put Madison IN, Granville OH and Bardstown KY as examples. Not saying they beat western Europe for the small town lifestyle, but I think they'd be perfectly fine places to live. The problem isn't so much that they look like Mordor it's just that they have no real economy or job opportunities beyond providing services for retirees to spend their social security on, stuff like insurance agent, nurse at the local clinic, auto mechanic etc. I assume that's probably similar in Europe but idk.

My deep experience is admittedly more in northern Appalachia than in the plains, but right off the bat:

-- Any market big enough to support an Applebee's has at least three (3) microbreweries/distilleries run by local boys. I grew up on road trips, and time was that you really did have the choice of stopping at Cracker Barrel or playing roadside diner roulette. In the age of Yelp and the Smartphone with Data Connection, you can find an interesting high-effort place to eat in some real tiny places. When I go on a trip to a tiny rust-belt town four hours from a major city and get local pickle-beer and pick from a well considered menu, it's such a sea-change from when I was a kid.

-- I drove through three towns, admittedly not that far from a major city, over the weekend where I saw ~1500sqft row homes available under $200k, reasonably walkable to a bar, a church, an elementary school, and a convenience store (in addition, of course, to many other homes). You will need a car to go to work, in all likelihood, or to most other places. You're never going to get the walkable variety you do in the big city, it's not a big city, you're going to get one bar and two churches.

-- RE: spontaneous community, I grew up in a small town exurb to a small city, geographically the very last place on the East Coast before the Midwest starts. I've since moved back after wandering around a bit. Most of my high achieving friends from the local high school couldn't wait to leave, and most of us did, some of us stayed, some of us came back. The proverb I've proved from reunions is this: only boring people are bored. The high schoolers who used to bitch about how much our town sucked and how there was nothing to do and how they couldn't wait to move to NYC/LA/Paris/Tokyo where Real Life was going on, well a lot of them moved to NYC/LA/Paris/Tokyo (or at least Chicago or Boston or SF) and now they bitch about how they can't afford to do anything and really the scene is dead for years and how the neighborhoods are either too gentrified or too dangerous or too touristy and there's nothing fun to do here anymore and the rent is too high and they work too much and they never get out and do anything. The people who used to drag me to sit on old couches and watch Noise Punk shows in the basement of a warehouse at Jeff the Pigeon's, who tried to put together abortive little local art shows and gave terrible slam poetry, who knew whenever a decent band was within an hour's drive and wanted to drive out to see it together, who threw barn parties and bonfires and smoked weed and read Ginsberg and Kerouac, who had tons of fun in our little town, some of them moved away, and some of them stayed, but they're all still doing cool things somewhere. Only boring people are bored, and only losers lack friends, wherever they are. There can be value in moving to shake up a hierarchy or to pursue a professional opportunity, but people are the same wherever you put them.

So when I read the OP article saying

But these Midwesterners aren’t descended from entrepreneurial adventurers like the rest of us. Their forebears were conflict averse and probably low testosterone German Catholics who fled Bismarck’s kulturkampf to acquire cheap land under the Homestead Act. These people mostly settled areas where aggro Scotch Irish types had driven off the Injun decades ago, so they never had to embrace the risk-tolerant, enterprising, itinerant mindset that had once fueled Manifest Destiny. Instead they produced families that became weirdly attached to their generic little plot of fungible prairie dirt, and as a result we now have huge pockets of the country full of overcivilized and effete Teutons with no conquering spirit who treat outsiders like shit.

These people think of themselves as “Real America”, but they are in fact the least American in their outlook of all the country’s regions. They are the least individualistic, the least ambitious, the most inclined to prioritize comfort and safety over everything else in life. America has left barely any mark on them—in temperament they’re just a bunch of stodgy Rhinelanders.

It's really easy to diagnose the problem: the dude sounds like a fucking asshole. Just an absolute prick, dripping with disdain and a superiority complex. He didn't make a ton of friends in the midwest, but I'd bet he wouldn't make any friends anywhere you dropped him. Who would want to be his friend? He couldn't manage to get a date in the midwest, but I doubt he's much in the city either, outside of low-commitment trickery-based hookup culture.

A lot of people dream of living in a different context, but absent a causal mechanism for why they'd be better off I tend towards: it'll be the same for you.

Indeed, if one lived in the Midwest and actually wanted the kind of comfortable, pastoral, low risk existence @Walterodim described they’d be best off getting their proof of German ancestry in order, applying for a visa and moving to some little village in Bavaria or Baden Württemberg with zero immigrants...

To be clear, this is not my personal preference. I live in a small Midwestern city with around 250,000 people, it's 80% white but has a large university with the expected immigrant population associated with it. Having traveled in Europe, I vastly prefer living in the United States due to the much higher standard of living. Also, at the end of the day, I'm not actually a German no matter how high of a percentage my ancestry German is, and it's really obvious when I visit Germany. I'm an Amerikaner with Amerikaner preferences, which includes my distinctly non-white wife. The city I settled in offers a balance of comfortable, low-risk community with city amenities that I really do consider just about unbeatable anywhere in the world. I don't expect others to have the same preferences - that's fine!

I am a lot less prone to ingrouping with the kind of White people who deliberately shut themselves off from the world by retreating to the ‘burbs

"It turns out I was the rootless cosmopolitan all along. :'("

Trans/queer; the new punk

A plague is corrupting the youth of Athens. Men dress like women, sport long, dyed hair and refuse to wrestle in the coliseum or participate in polite society. Women dress like men. Both mutilate their bodies to the consternation of their elders and abscond from their parents homes in droves.

I am, of course, talking about punks. And emos, goths and metalheads if I can lump everyone into the same bucket to make my life easier.

Having a fluorescent blue footlong mohawk, tattoos, piercings and a leather jacket made you eminently unemployable outside of menial service jobs and was the fashion equivalent of telling the world to go fuck itself. ‘Posers’ would get a tiny tattoo on their ankle or something and listen to the wrong music, then cover it up for their day job. Plenty of people will be nonbinary on the weekend and just pass as whatever gender they were assigned at birth Monday-Friday. 15 years ago, the mainstream was sharing cringe videos of emos and goths instead of the ‘it is ma’am’ person.

I believe that there are genuine trans people in the world who have always felt uncomfortable in their body. Numerous posts here have already described the rapid rise in trans youth so I won’t belabor the point, but my thesis (which will no doubt tank my career when this account is doxxed) is that a large fraction of these youth are protesting the gender binary and heteronormativity rather than experiencing a true, deep-seated gender identity different from what they were assigned at birth. A man wearing a dress, long hair or makeup is rebelling against arbitrary norms around clothing/fashion that evolved for a vastly different society with different needs. Spend some time on Feeld, okcupid or other dating apps (especially within the poly community), and you’ll see many people who identify as trans or queer and aren’t so much trying to pass as telling the system to go fuck itself by refusing to conform to gender norms.

Boomers and Gen Xers decrying trans youth and trans culture are Barbara Streisanding the phenomenon; the fact that you hate it is what makes it appealing to many kids in the first place! In the same way that being a punk is a nonissue today, the future of trans is becoming a minority of the population who wear the clothes that they want, use the bathrooms they want and nobody cares. Meanwhile, we’ll all be losing our minds about otherkin or pluralkin. Or maybe this guy. This isn’t to dismiss the harms that punks and anarchists may have caused in their time; I can think of a couple small-scale riots and businesses burned in my hometown during Mostly Peaceful demonstrations that got out of hand. The trans movement undoubtedly isn’t an unalloyed good and criticism will likely be valuable to reign in the excesses as it evolves into whatever the endgame is.

History may rhyme, but it’s true that it never directly repeats itself. The punk community, obviously, placed a large emphasis on music and art. While queercore is a thing, as was PWR BTTM pre-cancellation, the trans movement clearly isn’t centered on music in the same way. This could just be a shift in protest/underground culture, as neither punk nor metal carry the same bite that they used to - I saw Rancid about 10-15 years ago and even then no amount of cocaine could give them the energy they had in the 90s. Napalm Death was a hell of a time, but it hits a bit different when the entire crowd is in their 30s-50s instead of their teens. Kids are on their phones instead of listening to the radio, hanging out at the skate park and going to punk shows - as a result, protest culture just looks different than it used to, but I believe the trans movement are the ideological inheritors of the punk movement.

The other major difference, and one place where I expect the most pushback, is that punk was anti-authoritarian, anarchist and explicitly ungovernable. On the other hand, major media outlets, schools and ‘The Cathedral’ are explicitly pro-trans. I would argue that while the progressive activists are genuine they are vastly in the minority, and opposed by an equally loud minority with inverted views if not quite the same institutional reach. The majority in the center make pro-trans noises, but at the end of the day they aren’t going to date a trans person or wear clothes that don’t match their gender.

As an aside, if I can ramble for a bit - the corollary to Cthulhu swimming left is that youth crave rebellion and transgression, only to grow up and normalize whatever was shocking to their elders. Septum piercings and tattoos were ‘big deals’ growing up, whereas I have friends who are academics in good standing with visible tattoos and piercings. Going way back, lindy hop in the Savoy ballroom 12 was viewed as scandalous, whereas now it’s largely practiced by white retirees in their 60s-70s and millenial STEMlords who like dancing predetermined patterns. Elvis shocked the nation with gyrating hips in a performance tamer than 99% of the content on instagram. Punk and metal have vastly less appeal for Zoomers in the same way that the Beatniks and Hippies held no sway over the Millenials; each generation of youth pushes for progress and wants to do something transgressive. I’ll leave it to someone smarter than I to make the case that this freedom and spirit of rebellion is core to what makes America and the West great, but I do genuinely believe it.

Anyways. I, for one, can’t wait to see 60-70 year old millennials trying to dance like this. See you all grinding on the nursing home stripper poles in a couple decades.

Obligatory statement to head off some remarks: minors being able to medically transition against the wishes of their parents makes me deeply uncomfortable. I don’t support public school children being forced to attend drag queen story hour, but have no problem with people who want to bring their own children. Most other trans-associated culture war topics (pronouns, bathrooms, clothes, whatever) I'm fine with.

No, if there's a new punk (and there isn't), it's "straight white male". Punk was counterculture. Trans/queer is culture. As you said, "Having a fluorescent blue footlong mohawk, tattoos, piercings and a leather jacket made you eminently unemployable outside of menial service jobs". Declare yourself trans/queer and you'll have affinity groups supporting you at high-status jobs. Trans/queer isn't rebellion; it's following fashion.

Declare yourself trans/queer and you'll have affinity groups supporting you at high-status jobs.

Trans individuals earn significantly less than their non-trans peers and are more likely to work low-status jobs in food service or retail.

That doesn't mean he's wrong, if you are already working in a highly paid industry, and declare yourself tans.

Aren’t they also more likely to be unemployed, as well?

Yes until recently an extremely high percentage of transwomen were prostitutes and/or homeless. It’s not a high status population unless you transition once already upper middle class at least.

Can you provide a source for this claim? I don't find it hard to believe, but it warrants a lot more context than a single-sentence drive-by.

This feels familiar to the gender wage gap discussions: one side alleges their fact demonstrates prejudice and burden, the other side alleges an assortment of methodological trickery and revealed preferences...

And on the gripping hand, every major company in the US has several outreach/scholarship/early acceptance pipelines explicitly for promising young women and virtually zero such aid explicitly for men across all of them combined. I don't think there's any question that trans advocacy and institutional support exists within companies for transgender individuals - if not at all major companies, certainly at least at "high-status" ones.

Supposing you're correct that a substantial achievement gap exists between trans and non-trans individuals, this makes it all the more appealing to portray oneself as trans for all the usual affirmative action reasons, with the added bonus that, unlike pretending to be a different ethnicity, your transgender portrayal is fundamentally unfalsifiable: there is (to date) no biological evaluation that can be conducted to verify "transness." If you're a smart, talented, conscientious youth in the US, but you have trouble standing out against your enormous pool of peers and you have no affirmative action points in your favor, and you discover that you can pretend to be unfalsifiably, invisibly, inconsequentially victimized by your own body in order to cash in on a sudden surplus of free pity points (almost as good as affirmative action points, definitely better than nothing)... Even if you have to dress up, run a few circles around a shrink once a week, and pretend to be mad when people use the "wrong" pronoun, it doesn't sound all that demanding compared to what it already takes to break into a high-status job without knowing the right people. To be clear, it's not One Neat Trick to get a job or anything, it's just something that might improve your odds.

I've been begging the question, so I'll hold myself to account: what about the majority of transgender who are underperforming? Are they all faking it to stand out too? I suspect not, and I'd suggest that there's probably some social contagion and autism spectrum comorbidity effects at play, but my thinking here is underdeveloped. I have several years worth of direct evidence at my employer suggesting there exists a performatively transgender grifter class that isn't completely inept; and I think there's at least an order of magnitude more transgender people I'll never encounter who couldn't make it past the phone screening - I don't think they could keep up the grift, much less benefit from it. But even without having a very articulate theory of what's going on with the underperforming majority, I think both you and nybbler can be right at the same time, and that you're talking about two (at least, maybe more) very different cohorts, unfortunately captured under the same label.

Can you provide a source for this claim? I don't find it hard to believe, but it warrants a lot more context than a single-sentence drive-by.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4072893& https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/being-transgender-at-work

If you want to, you can dig around and find more. Many are the product of explicit trans advocacy, so your mileage may vary, but I haven't been able to find any sources that make the counter-case.

it doesn't sound all that demanding compared to what it already takes to break into a high-status job without knowing the right people.

I'm sure someone, somewhere has done this. I also find it believable that per OracleOutlook's example, coming out as trans (spuriously or not) could get you a stay of execution as HR makes sure it has all its ducks in a row before pulling the trigger to avoid a lawsuit. Nevertheless, I raise two points:

a) I've seen this theory suggested before (for other categories as well), and I think the people advancing it are underestimating the difficulty of faking your identity for the purposes of exploiting affirmative action-type programs. Especially given that a lot of high status jobs aren't real big on work-life balance, you never get to take off the mask, ever. It's not just putting on a pantsuit for work. Also, frankly, if you're not queer you're probably going to have a hard time faking to other queer people in particular. You're not going to speak their language or understand their in-group norms, and the consequences of being outed as a faker are generally disastrous.

b) I think in general conservatives vastly overestimate the benefits to be gained by posing as trans (or most marginalized groups) and underestimate the costs. Even in nominally trans-tolerance spaces, you're often trading minor procedural benefits for a slew of implicit social disadvantages (in some cases, more than an actual trans person, since they're more likely to be making a serious effort as passing whereas you're going to be a dude named Elizabeth). And the tolerance can be extremely nominal (e.g. I work with feds and contractors in a milieu when managers putting pronouns in their email signatures coexists alongside regular anti-trans jokes).

I know anecdotes aren't data but there are two people I know:

  1. A software developer at my company was on a performance plan for poor quality of work and poor communication with others. Also, the thing he excelled at and the reason he was hired, web development, was no longer a thing our company needed, so he was stuck doing something he wasn't interested in. People throughout the organization constantly complained that the tools he built were terrible. His bosses were discussing firing him for years and were about to pull the trigger.

    Then he transitioned, divorced his wife, left his kids behind, and told everyone he was a woman. Suddenly she was untouchable for six months. No one dared criticize her or her work for a while. Then eventually the effect wore off and she was fired about a year after transitioning.

  2. Someone who transitioned as a teen who then worked odd jobs but had poor attendance due to the side effects of her medication. At one point she was my kids babysitter, but she would have to leave the baby alone for 30 minutes at a time while she processed her bowel movements. After she left us, she went to work for a major tech company as a game tester, where she was let go a month later due to poor attendance.

Did anyone ever ran that study controlling for other mental issues, which iirc are highly comorbid?

Indeed… “counter-culture” nowadays is basically being a white- or Asian-adjacent heterosexual male without tattoos (or at least, minimal tattoos), unapologetic and unashamed of who you are.

(Pop-) punk bands, to the extent they were famous in the 90s-10s, have their views well-represented in academia, government, and Hollywood. It’s like the Babylon Bee headline: “Man Who Agrees With The Media, Universities, Corporations, And Hollywood Thinks He's Part Of The Resistance.”

If you’re salary-grinding at XYZ Corp, it’d be far less controversial or eyebrow-raising to say to your coworkers that you’re a fan of Good Charlotte or NOFX, than to say you were a fan of Paulo Costa, Tyson Fury, or Nikola Jokic.

I guess Paola Costa got accused of battery once and Tyson Fury said some anti-gay things, but as far as I know Nikola Jokic has never been involved in any controversies other than a rough foul against one player while on the court and a retaliatory shove against another. You'd have to work at the very most extreme of extremely SJW companies for you being a fan of either of the former two men to cause you any difficulties, and as for Jokic, I can't imagine being a fan of him causing problems at literally any company in the US. The Nuggets don't even have any long-term rivalries with any other teams that could cause a problem.

As mentioned, it’s relative to (pop-) punk bands like Good Charlotte or NOFX.

We’re barely or not even a year removed from when the race-card was (successfully) played to agitate for Embiid getting the MVP instead of Jokic, to essentially zero pushback on the idpol front.

True, but that MVP decision has been widely mocked and considered a mistake by basketball fans even on Reddit. I also am not sure that it really had so much to do with race as with a reluctance by voters to give a third consecutive MVP to a guy who had, at that point, never won a championship.

You are right that being a fan of a punk band would be absolutely no problem in any corporation in the West that I can imagine, unless maybe it was Nazi punk or something. More mainstream punk is not politically controversial, although there are probably still very many workplaces where dressing like a punk would seriously impact one's ability to get hired. Modern society might be nearly completely fine with the punk movement but still, generally speaking probably most people would feel nervous if a surgeon or an airline pilot was rocking a giant blue mohawk.

that MVP decision has been widely mocked and considered a mistake by basketball fans even on Reddit.

Only ex-post at best, as Redditors fence-sat and waited tentatively to see that the coast was clear, especially since the Nuggets won the 2023 championship. "I'm one of the good ones, but DAE think that Jokic should had won his third MVP instead of Embiid?"

I also am not sure that it really had so much to do with race as with a reluctance by voters to give a third consecutive MVP to a guy who had, at that point, never won a championship.

Yet, for much of the 2022-2023 season, including up through at least the midseason, Jokic was the favourite to win his third NBA MVP. In another words, at least until then and more, markets expected that voters were more than fine with rewarding Jokic his third consecutive MVP. The race-card playing that began a few weeks later corresponded to a drastic decrease in his chances.

To be fair, Embiid was on fire the last couple months of the season last year, and the race baiting wouldn't have worked if it wasn't at least a close race.

I don't think simply being uncool equals punk, though. Punk is being counter-cultural plus being dramatic about it in a somewhat stylish way. Someone like Sam Hyde is punk, but your run-of-the-mill white guy isn't punk, he's just not considered fashionable by anyone.

Which is why I said there isn't a new punk.

I guess I broadly agree, but I think reducing queer to punk ellides some of the most important differences between them. Punk never demanded anything of society, like the sweeping political movements of trans. There was no imperative that I, personally, needed to change my behavior because punk exists. I was never accused of participating in a genocide against punk. And knowing something about women, I'm severely skeptical that one day soon trans will get to use all their bathrooms and no one will care.

As for the rest, I agree that trans is a sort of youth rebellion, or at least a subculture that can pretend to itself that that's what it's doing.

I'm old enough to remember when punk happened, and society was not pushing punk the way trans issues are getting pushed now. Nobody was doing the equivalent of "everyone share your pronouns".

Trans is not punk (heck, punk is not punk anymore either, it's become a fossilised little niche, and I mean in particular the American love of creating sub-sub-divisions of everything and listing off a tick-box checklist of what each involves; this is why you guys created a magic system for DnD after all and why Brandon Blinkin' Sanderson is so praised because he has a meticulous baseball average worked out magic set of rules and by-laws in his writing).

See you all grinding on the nursing home stripper poles in a couple decades.

Going by the STD rates in old age homes, I would strongly advise you pack wet wipes and start prophylactic antibiotics for your UTI.

Is there any truth to the "retirement homes are STD hotspots" meme?

It sounds like one of those facts that's too good to check. My bullshit detector blares loudly whenever I hear it.

Here's what I found after a quick look

https://www.forbes.com/sites/claryestes/2020/02/26/historic-high-rates-of-stis-among-older-americans/?sh=4a2b7c884c39

https://nursinghomesabuse.org/nursing-home-injuries/infections/stds/

I haven't chased all the inner links down myself. The former claims increased rates in Americans over the 55, the other claims to be corroborated by the CDC.

At any rate, I stand by what I said, if you're gyrating on poles at that age, you likely already have a UTI and don't want it getting aggravated.

I remain skeptical as this information seems low quality, but...

While seniors are much less sexually than young people, their risk per encounter is much higher as the risk of nearly all diseases skyrockets with age. So maybe 1/10th the rate of sexual activity leads to the same rate of STDs.

Equally likely, grandma getting chlamydia is a "man bites dog" story that is remarkable due to its rarity, and is therefore amplified in people's minds.

We probably agree about all this.

I'm no expert on STD rates in American care homes. I do know they have a similar reputation in the UK, and in India, ain't nobody getting poon at any age.

I agree it's low quality evidence, but it was a lead up for a low effort joke heh.

Transgenderism was less popular when it was more counterculture and rose in popularity after being promoted by elites.

The narrative of current progressive movements representing a reaction against a stiffing conservative order is not true. It rose after the liberal institutions promoted much more aggressively in the 2010s such agendas that they have been promoting in a weaker fashion before. They especially did this for the trans issue where there has been a bigger disparity in the fervor in 2010s and how they promoted it previously. And it rose in an age that wasn't conservative except by the standards of the progressive movement. Where conservative appeasement has been a reason for things turning in a progressive direction and not the solution. Conservatives compromising with progressives will not lead to progressives to back down, but to double down. This doesn't mean that conservatives should be purity spiraling, but they should refuse to compromise in many issues of principle and maintain wise standards.

Without such elite push, youthful transgression energy would focus on something less harmful. To the extend it is true that there is a social contagion, this is an argument that favors the conservative side in the trans debate. Even if as you argue there are also many that aren't going to seriously live the trans life. Better for people who had such inclinations for transgression, to be something like goth, punk, etc. Or even for their transgression to be limited to rebelling against illegitimate authority, like corrupt power abusing political factions, or warmongering.

An escalation of transgression isn't something that must be respected as a law of the universe when the consequences are severe enough.

To give another example. Lets say that to an extend there has been a fad of anorexia among teenage girls, or even of self harm which also relate with transgression having an appeal. Someone could claim that many of those affected might not kill themselves, or get over it. And yet it is still harmful, and more decisively harmful for a part of those affected. This kind of transgression is the kind that should be suppressed and not encouraged.

Trump opposes TikTok divestiture

We may be seeing the GOP becoming pro-China in real time.

Recently there’s been a bill advancing through Congress that would force a divestiture of TikTok from its Chinese parent to some sort of Western company. Many are abbreviating this as a “TikTok ban”, but that’s not accurate. It’s more of a forced severing of the app from ByteDance in particular, although the precise details following the bills passage remain to be seen.

The TikTok Question

You could list all the typical issues that social media creates and they’d almost certainly be true for TikTok like they are for Facebook or X. But in addition to this, TikTok has two unique issues from being beholden to the CCP.

The first, less pressing issue is data security. China has a law that allows their government to require any Chinese company to give them any personal information they request. ByteDance has been caught a number of times doing bad things with American users’ data. They spied on journalists who criticized the company. The American arm forwarded data to the Chinese arm, which forwarded it to the Chinese government.

The second, bigger issue is of propaganda. Nearly a third of Americans age 18-29 regularly get news from TikTok. This news is subtly and invisibly controlled by a foreign adversary government. Noah Smith summarizes the broader implications:

There’s a concern that through subtle manipulation of the algorithm, TikTok can steer Americans away from topics of discussion that are sensitive to the CCP, and toward CCP-approved points of view.

A new study by the Network Contagion Research Institute confirms that this is already happening, in a very substantial way. By comparing the hashtags of short videos on Instagram and TikTok, they can get an idea of which topics the TikTok algorithm is encouraging or suppressing.

The results are highly unsurprising for anyone who’s familiar with CCP information suppression. Hashtags dealing with general political topics (BLM, Trump, abortion, etc.) are about 38% as popular on TikTok as on Instagram. But hashtags on topics sensitive to the CCP — the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Hong Kong protests and crackdown, etc. — are only 1% as prevalent on Tiktok as on Instagram.

For some of these topics, differences in the user bases of the two apps might account for these differences — for example, TikTok is banned in India, meaning the topic of Kashmir is unlikely to be discussed on the app. But overall, the pattern is unmistakable — every single topic that the CCP doesn’t want people to talk about is getting suppressed on TikTok.

Even if you’re skeptical of circumstantial evidence like this, there are leaked documents that prove the company has done exactly the kind of censoring that the study found:

TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong, according to leaked documents detailing the site’s moderation guidelines.

So why does this matter? Suppressing Americans’ access to videos about Tiananmen Square might or might not sound like that big of a deal, but consider what TikTok would be able to do in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The U.S. would have to make a very rapid, highly consequential decision about whether to come to Taiwan’s aid. Imagine anti-Taiwan videos flooding TikTok, threatening to send the President’s poll numbers plunging. Imagine the U.S. government hesitating in the face of that concerted flood of manipulated public opinion, and thus losing a critical confrontation with its most powerful foreign adversary.

Trump Opposes Divestiture

As a result of the above issues, forcing ByteDance to sell the app to a Western company is one of the few issues that has broad bipartisan support. Well, it did have bipartisan support until Trump did a 180 and suddenly opposed the bill. This was after Trump met a wealthy TikTok investor who promised to support his campaign.

Now, a politician changing his views wouldn’t normally be that much of big deal. After all, voters generally choose people whose views align with theirs, so for a normal issue Trump would usually either be forced back to his initial position or risk a fall in the polls. We recently saw this with his Social Security reform proposals. However, foreign policy is unique in that the public largely takes its cues from trusted partisan elites. This is a broadly replicated finding that basically translates to “the people are sheep”. Most individuals know that foreign policy is really important, but it doesn’t affect their lives that much, so it’s harder for them to get an intuitive understanding of how things are going compared to something like, say, the economy. Thus, they look to people they trust to get their views, and then say they formed their views by “looking at the evidence”.

An example of this is Russia. There has been a pro-Russian undercurrent in the GOP for the past decade or so, but it was mostly limited to a few fringe individuals. It started becoming more mainstream when Trump feted Putin during his presidency, and then it became even more pronounced in 2023 when Trump used Ukraine aid as a cudgel against Biden. Republicans were quite hawkish towards Russia as recently as the 2012 election when Obama told Romney that “the 80’s called, they want their foreign policy back”. Now here we are a decade later, with Tucker Carlson sniffing chocolate cake in a Moscow parking lot to prove the superiority of the Russian political system and how it’s a “bastion of conservative values”. Russian propaganda about the villainy of NATO is repeated as mainstream conservative talking points, and the Republican base largely goes along with it.

Could the same happen vis-à-vis China? I don’t see why not. Granted, it wouldn’t happen all at once, but I believe a gradual shift in that direction is certainly possible. China is an orderly society with a strongman leader. It doesn’t recognize same-sex unions. As an opponent of America, it could be presented as an opponent of vaguely defined “globohomo”. Simply ctrl+c, ctrl+v the standard talking points used for Russia, as most of them fit just as well if not better for China.

Trump has been hot or cold on China just like he was on Russia. He criticized both countries if he thought the democratic president was doing something that “made us look weak”. But then he quickly changed his tune after having a few inconsequential meetings with Putin/Xi. Eventually, the forces of negative partisanship pushed him to become clearly pro-Russia, and presumably it could happen with China as well. Trump’s clout means much of the Republican elites are following him:

• Tucker Carlson has long been against anything that would hurt TikTok, and could very well be where Trump is getting his views.

• Marjorie Taylor Greene is against the bill.

• Elon Musk is against the bill.

• Kim Dotcom is against the bill, and repeats much of the “America is bad” rhetoric previously seen in pro-Russian arguments.

From this, we’re starting to see the base’s opinions change. For instance, a UCLA Republicans group posted a picture of Trump, Xi, and Putin together, praising them as “three conservative patriots”. Something like this being posted unironically would have been a fever dream 10 years ago. The ironic force would have been so strong that it would have reanimated Reagan as a zombie, given him strength to hunt down whoever made it and punch them in the face.

There's an argument that this divestiture/ban/whatever is bad because we should focus on strong universal data privacy and the like, something that targets all social media and doesn't single out TikTok. I agree with that, but nonetheless, I think I'm on Noah's side with this, that we are in another Cold War and smacking an arm of the CCP on their little pizza hands is worth the questionable struggle presented by the bill.

Edit to add: This all being said, I suppose this will be the first real test of the right-wing theory about the power of the Cathedral. Will Yass's billions and Trump's bluster be able to make the Deep State blink, or will Yass find himself regretting getting on the Trump Train? Will Team Blue get what it wants regarding China, or is the American public too wedded to their social media to take this sitting down?

ETA2: I'm also not unsympathetic to a common thread in the replies here and to Noah: that it seems hypocritical and pointless of us to be so concerned about Chinese surveillance and control, about illiberalism from abroad, when we still have to deal with the same things at home. But I'd argue that it is precisely why we must take a stand against this. If we cannot stand up for ourselves against an outside enemy, we will never be able to stand up for ourselves against an inside enemy. "My brother and I against the clan, my clan and I against the world" and all that.

I think your thinking is choked with lazy cliches that prevent me from respecting it seriously.

There has been a pro-Russian undercurrent in the GOP for the past decade or so, but it was mostly limited to a few fringe individuals. It started becoming more mainstream when Trump feted Putin during his presidency

Trump did what, some diplomatic niceties? Said nice things about Putin personally? This is one of Trump's strengths, actually: he doesn't bloviate party line formulas, instead keeping his options open. This is in fact what forcing a TikTok sale is, a meaningless culture war distraction for the politicians to hage something to yell about to the base. (Who will buy TikTok? Probably another social media franchise that will procede to manipulate our discourse by algorithm.)

I accept that many posters will perhaps laugh at my characterization ofTrump:

Now here we are a decade later, with Tucker Carlson sniffing chocolate cake in a Moscow parking lot to prove the superiority of the Russian political system and how it’s a “bastion of conservative values”

Saying nice things about Russia isn't "proving the superiority of the Russian political system" to anybody. This is a low-effort bad-faith slur to avoid having to think about anything Tucker says. Chocolate cake in a parking lot? That's not disqualifying to anybody who can entertain an idea without accepting it. "Bastion of conservative values"? Is that a direct quote?

Kim Dotcom is against the bill, and repeats much of the “America is bad” rhetoric

If you can't refute or even summarize his arguments why are you bringing him up at all?

I think your thinking is choked with lazy cliches that prevent me from respecting it seriously.

Right back at you.

This is in fact what forcing a TikTok sale is, a meaningless culture war distraction

It'd be a pretty consequential action in the US-China rivalry given how important tech companies are these days. There's a reason CCP propaganda mouthpieces are trying so hard to stop it: because having an easy way to reach US voters is a tremendous asset in sabotaging an adversary, or otherwise getting them to do what you want.

Saying nice things about Russia isn't "proving the superiority of the Russian political system" to anybody. This is a low-effort bad-faith slur to avoid having to think about anything Tucker says.

That's absolutely what Tucker is doing. Going around trying to prove how great Russia is, often with disparaging remarks towards the state of the US. The obvious implicit follow-up is that we should be more like them, i.e. we should emulate their acidic form of conservatism and likely their authoritarianism as well.

You support the west becoming more authoritarian to combat Russia/China in the neocon/cultural left direction and Tucker opposes that and been critical of western authoritarianism and western cultural far left extremism.

This idea that you represent the less authoritarian option here over Tucker is making black into white.

The reality is that those who are dealing with authoritarians who use permanent war and demonization of other countries abroad to justify their anti conservative, anti-its own people authoritarian empire, are going to show some sympathy to eastasia. They are not going to buy into the narrative of demonizing the foreign empire to justify the repressive rule of their own rulers.

There isn't any moral legitimacy but more in line with the most sinister similiar historical ambitions, of American imperialists desiring to subjucate the whole world.

I would suggest to make America good again in home, worth supporting for conservatives and moderates which would have to mean that neocons are kept out and down and also that isn't to justify an American imperialist agenda. It is legitimate to oppose America as the warmonger/bad actor, contributing to conflict in places like Ukraine or middle east. America as in the people and the empire are not the same, and Americans benefit from some pax americana but not with beligerent american imperialism which comes with imperial overreach, and is directed by people who don't have any loyalty to the American people.

In regards to conservatism, a moderate age that produces good outcomes requires a healthy level of conservatism, and its absence, is precisely an aspect of the many bad outcomes and social disintegration that western world suffers from. What this means is a society of healthy nuclear families as an ideal, promoting the history of its people, and celebrating and continuing the heritage, being patriotic but ideally not disrespectfully imperialist against other people. Now, a mixture between conservative norms and some norms that could be associated with liberalism but the liberal tribe is about a more hardcore ideology than that, is more in line with what Tucker has in mind and personally my preference. Ironically, excessive social liberalism and fanaticism against moderates as you also illustrate goes against having freedom, since it results in bans of platforms that allow valuable speech.

I agree with a poster bellow that part of the reason they are trying to ban ticktock is because it has content that is critical of Israel.

The totalitarian, ironically extremely racist, "anti racist", "our democracies" type of vision is promoting something destructive and incredibly ugly.

The rise of new power block is incredibly dangerous time for the world as the old one often tries to stop this through conflict. Last thing the world needs is going closer to world war situation because certain extremist imperialists can't deal with the fact that countries like Russia and China are going to be influential too, and in fact plenty of countries are very willing to cooperate with them and even trade without using the dollar. Rather than beligerence, coexistence and trading with both China and USA and being more favorable towards USA because dealing with them would be more pleasurable and prefferable in that manner than dealing with the Chinese, should be what USA offers.

I reject the notion that the US is an "empire", at least since the winding down of the Iraq war. US allies are free to end their associations with the US (like NATO) without fear of getting invaded by the US. The same was not true of conventional empires.

I would suggest to make America good again in home, worth supporting for conservatives and moderates

I broadly support this, but the best way to do this is by winning the battle for public opinion on things like rejecting blank-slatism, postmodernism, and the corrupt implementation of the Civil Rights Acts. Instead, US conservatives have gone from the party of endless occupations in the Middle East ~20 years ago to rejecting democracy (or at least the results of democratic elections) and allying with America's enemies today.

Last thing the world needs is going closer to world war situation because certain extremist imperialists can't deal with the fact that countries like Russia and China are going to be influential too

The issue isn't that Russia and China are going to be influential. That's bad given their repugnant authoritarianism, but it's nothing that would merit more than a Cold War 2 style competition. The main issue is that both have made clear they want to conquer their neighbors by force. That principle has been one of the best things to come out of Pax Americana barring the mistake of the '03 Iraq invasion. Reverting the world to the pre 1945 days where strong nations annexed weaker ones would be terrible for lots of reasons.

There's a reason CCP propaganda mouthpieces are trying so hard to stop it: because having an easy way to reach US voters is a tremendous asset in sabotaging an adversary, or otherwise getting them to do what you want.

Or they might just be concerned about the economical impact this would have on them?

There would be a bidding war for TikTok that would likely approach its current legitimate valuation.

Firstly, this seems to be proving too much - if being forced to sell has no cost, why would anyone hold (especially once you consider risk and concave value functions)? Secondly, there are surely indirect economic impacts too - this sort of measure would open up the Overton window to other protectionist measures against Chinese corporations, including ones that can't be so easily sold or spun out.

often with disparaging remarks towards the state of the US

Is there not a lot to criticize? Only in a very binary thinking is criticizing the US some nefarious act and proof of bad will. Or maybe it's just bad when Tucker does it, and if you feel like criticizing Russia that's fine. Let's work out the Russell conjugation: I offer good-faith criticisms of the United States, you disparage America as part of a project to prove how great Russia is.

To anyone who can walk and chew gum at the same time, it's possible to say something nice about how Moscow runs the Metro without also calling for American dictatorship. Or whatever exactly you're alleging: you seem to have smuggled in a lot of unstated assumptions about all sorts of things.

This is exactly the kind of lazy logic lazy politicians love to run on, and is why they're all-in on TikTok. Instead of running on anything concrete (why is the Moscow Metro nicer than New York's?), they can bulldoze through lazy speeches about American Values, Democracy Abroad, Standing Up For What We Believe In. China is bad, and I did something about China by [selling TikTok to a consortium of Facebook, Saudi princes, Australian moguls, and a tech CEO from Thailand]. But Donald Trump isn't strong on China, because he said Kung Pao Chicken is delicious. This November, vote for someone who will take the Chinese threat swriously -- see, the best part is that by running on foreign policy, politicians don't have to concede any messy realities to real political actors, although mass immigration is making sure that every tribe in the worls eventually becomes a key American voting bloc.

Is there not a lot to criticize? Only in a very binary thinking is criticizing the US some nefarious act and proof of bad will.

I feel like you're being deliberately obtuse here. Of course you can criticize the US or the way that things are done here. But you don't have to go to an adversary country to do that, nor hold them up as an example of where it's supposedly done better. Tucker's examples were bad for other reasons, e.g. cherrypicking and just being wrong about basic facts like Russian inflation being less than the US's. But beyond that, Tucker has had a pro-Russian bent for a long time, so it's a motte-and-bailey to say there was nothing else going on there. He could have taken examples from friendly countries like Japan or Europe, but he didn't. He also could have added caveats explaining how he didn't think the US should be like Russia in most ways but that clean subways were an exception, but he didn't. His entire trip was done to delegitimize the West and hold up Russia as a better alternative. It's why he went and asked softball questions to Putin, giving the leader of an enemy country a high-profile platform to say whatever he wanted to Western audiences.

He also could have added caveats explaining how he didn't think the US should be like Russia in most ways

As a thinking adult, I don't actually need public figures to tediously signpost everything they say so I don't assume they mean something they never said. I can actually conclude, by myself, without anybody holding my hand, that when Tucker Carlson is praising the Moscow Metro, he is not simultaneously saying that the US should become exactly like Russia in every way. This is especially tedious on your part because Tucker actually does proffer all of the caveats you're asking for, and then describes how Singapore, Tokyo, Abu Dhabi, etc., are also all nicer than America. For example, check 1:38 in the following:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hrE3yr4ss8U

If you really want to argue this point, I suggest you quote Tucker specifically and make your case. Because, otherwise, I suspect that you waltzed into some lazy narrative about how "Tucker has had a pro-Russian bent for a long time" without particular basis, don't want to admit you were wrong, and that this in fact characterizes the majority of your post above.

you don't have to go to an adversary country to do that

You actually do have to go to Russia if you want to conclude that (some of) Russia is nicer than the US. And this argument doesn't become radically different if you replace "Russia" with "Bosnia" or "France". There's no secret dogwhistle where Tucker visiting Russia to interview Vladimir Putin is the secret additional context that finally unlocks the true meaning that Tucker really wants to impose Russian-style dictatorship on the West.

giving the leader of an enemy country a high-profile platform to say whatever he wanted to Western audiences.

This is childish thinking. Why is it a bad thing to let Putin speak? When journalists lie and tell you they are safeguarding democracy by not platforming certain ideas, the power fantasy is for the people doing the gatekeeping, not you in the audience! Vladimir Putin is a global figure, he has a "high-profile platform" already. He can say "whatever he wants to Western audiences" all the time. He frequently does!

I could do a response here but:

As a thinking adult

This is especially tedious on your part

This is childish thinking

you waltzed into some lazy narrative

etc.

Being maximally antagonistic while still staying just within rules to not get modded is still annoying, and my past experience on this site has proven time and again that these discussions are almost always unproductive. For the record, I probably shouldn't have done the "right back at you" or the "you're being obtuse" parts above. I probably should have just not responded at all when you led with "choked with lazy cliches", although to be fair the rest of your first comment was fine and it's only down here in the replies that you have obnoxious stuff in almost every paragraph.

I mean to be antagonistic, within the rules. I think your frame of the issues is infaltalizing, and I want to call that out. It's not personal, I don't want to be simply mean, and I appreciate your graciousness in conceding a few flaws. For my part I thought my first post was phrased in an unnecessary way, especially my opening sentence But I enjoyed the work of putting my later objections down and I was too busy that day to write a nicer head. So if there's any bad-feeling here that's my fault.

I mean to be antagonistic, within the rules.

Don't.

It's going to be interesting to see which way the culture war swings on this one. On the one hand, I've seen a lot of rumblings because Tiktok is (generally) pro-Palestine. On the other hand, Trump.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that your comment completely ignores the lobbying by Jewish groups to ban the platform due to the presence of anti-semitism and support for Palestine:

Jewish Federations of North America, representing hundreds of organized Jewish communities, said its support for the bill is rooted in concerns about antisemitism on the platform.

One of the most prominent Jewish groups in the country has thrown its support behind a fast-advancing bill that could lead to the massively popular video app TikTok being banned in the United States...

Jewish Federations of North America, representing hundreds of organized Jewish communities, said its support for the bill is rooted in concerns about antisemitism on the platform. The Jewish Federations and the Anti-Defamation League have accused TikTok of allowing antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment to run rampant.

“The single most important issue to our Jewish communities today is the dramatic rise in antisemitism,” JFNA wrote in an official letter to Congress. “Our community understands that social media is a major driver of the drive in antisemitism and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.”

If you think bipartisan support for this bill is about hypothetical scenarios involving the invasion of Taiwan and public exposure to TikToks about the Tiananmen Square I have a bridge to sell you...

This is also coming off the heels of a leaked audio of ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt in panic proclaiming "We have a major Tiktok problem" and saying that they have to work together to solve the problem... which they now are doing...

Obviously Musk is going to oppose the bill, because it's half a step beneath banning a social media company for allowing anti-Semitism.

It's about Israel/Palestine, not Tiananmen Square. The Chinese dimension to it makes it an easy target, but it's being targeted because of antisemitism, and X could be next.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised your comment completely ignores the history of attempted Tik-Tok bans in favor of once again blaming the Jews. There was a measure floated in March 2023 on a Tik-Tok ban. It was banned from all US government devices in 2022. Mike Gallagher was pushing for a complete ban in 2022. Trump tried to ban Tik-Tok in 2021. The Jews probably aren't the deciding factor here.

ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt was heard on leaked call demanding something must be done about TikTok due to declining support for Israel among young people, hundreds of Jewish organizations throw their weight behind a Tik Tok ban, a week ago Time publishes in article by Anthony Goldbloom titled Why TikTok Needs to be Sold or Banned Before the 2024 Election which hardly mentions anything about some national security threat from CCP, and instead under the heading "Why it Matters" complains about the portion of pro-Palestinian hashtags on the platform and the spread of antisemitism...

TikTok says users decide whether to post and engage with content on #FreePalestine rather than #StandWithIsrael. But, content moderation decides what posts stay up, what gets taken down, and what accounts get banned from the platform. And it’s TikTok’s algorithm that decides what circulates and what doesn’t.

For anyone who doubts the causal link between TikTok and the rise in antisemitic incidents we’ve seen on U.S. campuses: a November 2023 study conducted by Generation Lab, which I helped to organize, showed that people who spend 30 minutes per day on TikTok are 17% more likely to agree with anti-semitic statements like "Jewish people chase money more than other people do."

They want control over the moderation and algo, as ADL has control over the moderation of Reddit and nearly every platform except X only since Musk's takeover.

And still, in a thread where @Ben___Garrison is lobbing accusations of foreign influence against the GOP by CCP and Russia he doesn't even breath a whisper about Zionist influence. It is obvious that Zionist influence is at play here, and the fact you can pontificate about the lack of Tiananmen Square videos while ignoring the planning and lobbying by Zionists to force a divestment on behalf of Israel and to combat antisemitism, despite their explicit plans laying out their objective and motivation, says it all really.

Edit: And news that is now just breaking, looks like Jewish Zionist Steven Mnuchin is angling to buy TikTok after the bill is passed.

From CNBC:

“I think the legislation should pass and I think it should be sold,” Mnuchin, who leads Liberty Strategic Capital, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday. “It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.”

There is common ground between Liberty and ByteDance. Masa Son’s SoftBank Vision Fund invested in ByteDance in 2018, and is also a limited partner in Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic.

The bill is now headed to the Senate, where its future is uncertain, though President Joe Biden has said that he will sign the legislation if reaches his desk.

"This should be owned by U.S. businesses. There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a U.S. company own something like this in China,” Mnuchin said.

From the JPost article earlier this year about the Liberty Strategic Capital:

Mnuchin came to Israel on a business trip for the first time since the October 7 massacre with his business partner, former US ambassador David Friedman. The two men, who served under former US president Donald Trump, started the Liberty Strategic Investment Fund in 2021 and have an office in Tel Aviv.

The fund is worth $3 billion, of which it has invested 30% so far, Mnuchin said. He said he is in Israel to put more money into Israeli tech.

It should also be noted that David Friedman, Mnuchin's business partner who co-founded Liberty Strategic Capital which is angling to buy Tik Tok, is also a Jewish Zionist and former US ambassador to Israel.

And yet if the plan to force ByteDance to sell is a "Jewish Zionist" one:

  1. Why did noted right-wing Zionist, Bibi fan, ByteDance investor, settlement supporter and GOP donor Jeff Yass personally convince Donald Trump to completely reverse his position on TikTok, allegedly in advance of a major donation? Was he not informed of the Jewish Zionist position in advance? Would he really screw over his entire tribe just to make a quick buck? If he did defect in such a clear and destructive way, that would be a strong refutation of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy hypothesis advanced by eg. MacDonald and others.

  2. Where's the evidence that TikTok has remained unbowed by eg. the ADL's pressure? A large majority (more than 60%) of TikTok's parent, ByteDance, is owned by global institutional investors. Many of these investors, from Yass (who owns 15% of the company, almost as much as the cofounders), to Yuri Milner, to other large institutional investors like Blackrock, to venture capitalists like Sequioa that have major stakes, are owned, operated or led by prominent Jews, pretty much all of them Zionists, several actual Israelis. If TikTok's investors wanted to pressure TikTok into pro-Israeli positions, why wouldn't they be able to? In addition, TikTok's western moderation is all handled from the US and performed by Americans and their contractors. No policy in China, likely not even any Chinese executives, would need to be involved in such an effort. And indeed TikTok has already thoroughly supported and joined the global pro-woke content policy movement in the US and Western Europe. The only reason this wouldn't work is if the CCP exerted political pressure on TikTok to specifically avoid kowtowing to these prominent investors. But then...

  3. Why would China be opposed to censoring pro-Palestinian views? In addition to China's own troubles with Islamism, China has a long and productive relationship with Israel. Israelis and Jews are generally liked in China, indeed you yourself have accused Israel of repeatedly selling the Chinese 'top secret' American technology. China has resisted any full-throated condemnation of Israel beyond the boilerplate ICJ statement against colonialism, and certainly has resisted the idea of any sanctions or restrictions on trade with Israel. The pan-Islamist sentiment often promoted by Palestinian boosters is itself a threat to Chinese minorities living in Muslim lands like Malaysia and Indonesia, where ethnic Chinese (whom the CCP has previously tried to protect from native depradation) have been arrested for publicly opposing some anti-Israel policies. Radicalizing Muslims populations in an explicitly Islamic fervor for Palestine does not serve Chinese foreign policy goals, especially when Israel is increasingly neutral on the US-China question.

In summary, the argument that this censorship is about Israel-Palestine doesn't really make sense. It misunderstands ByteDance's own corporate structure, TikTok's management and political stance (if any) and China's relationship to Israel, which is largely friendly and no more hostile than that of, say, Macron's France. Israel itself has not protested TikTok's moderation with China, and therefore the support of some American Jewish groups for the ban is more about jumping on a general societal bandwagon and flailing around because they're supposed to be 'opposing antisemitism' and don't really know how.

Obviously, that one Jewish investor opposes it (as far as we know) due to his own bottom line. You are continuing the time-honored tradition of "You can't relate something to Jewish influence unless literally every single Jew is involved" even though that standard is never held in analysis of other group-organized activist behavior.

We have ADL, Jewish Federations of North America, media pieces like Goldbloom's and others advocating for the forced divestment because of antisemitism and not because of CCP security concerns. This includes various stories pointing out that the antisemitism and Israeli concerns are what has united what have been previously failed efforts. But you'll point to one Jew with a financial stake. And the sourcing of that entire story is extremely thin, there is no chance we have any idea what conversations are happening between closed doors with Jeff Yass and potential buyers. The entire basis for your claim is this fact: "According to Politico, Trump praised the investor at a Club for Growth retreat at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida." That's it.

Where's the evidence that TikTok has remained unbowed by eg. the ADL's pressure?

Did you not listen to the leaked audio of Greenblatt I linked from November? How is that not evidence when it is coming right from the horse's mouth?

We REALLY have a Tik-Tok problem, the Gen-Z problem that our community needs to put... our energy towards this like fast.

How is this not evidence?

Why would China be opposed to censoring pro-Palestinian views?

Tik-Tok is not censoring pro-Palestinian views. So the ADL wants to change management.

The story broke this morning that Steven Mnuchin is looking to lead a purchase of Tik Tok through his investment group, which has an office in Tel Aviv, and co-founded by the former ambassador to Israel.

It's amazing how this entire constellation of evidence, including a comically on-the-nose detail like Tik Tok being potentially purchased by an investment group with an office in Tel Aviv and co-founded by the former US ambassador to Israel, and you still deny what is happening, all because Yass gave $16 million to the Club for Growth action which is defending Tik Tok.

TikTok’s original Western investors were, as I noted, substantially Jewish. Milner, Moritz, Yass and others all were/are. And again, frankly, even if TikTok had nothing whatsoever to do with anything related to Israel, a group of private equity investors looking to buy a media business is probably going to be pretty Jewish anyway, so Mnuchin’s involvement (what, could he not call Trump to support the bill last week?) isn’t surprising.

What annoys me is that in any other case, the fact that Trump happened to speak to a well-known billionaire Jewish Zionist and campaign donor before making a radical policy u-turn would be a big deal to you and you’d no doubt speculate as to what influence the Jews continued to bring to bear over him and US politics in general. But because Yass’ actions are a strong indication that the TikTok sale isn’t solely or primarily the product of organized Zionist activism and that this wouldn’t even be necessary to algorithmically censor anti-Israel content on TikTok, it’s just some minor, barely relevant single-case anecdote.

Did you not listen to the leaked audio of Greenblatt I linked from November? How is that not evidence when it is coming right from the horse's mouth?

Yes indeed, look at the quote itself:

We REALLY have a Tik-Tok problem, the Gen-Z problem

Greenblatt is transparently talking about the “TikTok generation” ie Zoomers, which is why he literally clarifies that he means “Gen Z” immediately after saying TikTok. The ADL has criticized all social media since 7/10, and again this entire theory relies on the suggestion that TikTok is actually being less harsh on pro-Palestine content than Instagram, for which there’s no evidence (any discrepancy is most likely just the result of demographic differences in userbase).

You are continuing the time-honored tradition of "You can't relate something to Jewish influence unless literally every single Jew is involved"

No. Yass isn’t just ‘a Jew’; now that Adelson is dead he might well be the most prominent Zionist donors in American politics, perhaps even the most prominent. He’s closely related to the ‘entire constellation’ of Zionist lobbying in the US - including to Mnuchin and Friedman. Why are you even taking this position, when you could just as easily argue that the effort to prevent a TikTok ban is the result of Jewish-Zionist lobbying in concert with the CCP to destabilize American state control over the media its people consume and so Jewish investors and venture capitalists can extract themselves at higher profitability after the inevitable IPO? There is the same volume of evidence in that direction too, and it might even be the argument you’d make if the attacks on Israel hadn’t happened last year.

Tik-Tok is not censoring pro-Palestinian views. So the ADL wants to change management.

Why do you assume that powerful Zionists (who are both friends of China and substantial shareholders in TikTok) need it to be banned or transferred to US ownership in order to pressure it into censoring pro-Palestinian views?

The more likely option is that the Palestinian content was just another argument used by China hawks to persuade more congressmen to support the bill, and that a few major Jewish American organizations signed on because its literally a letter and they need to justify their funding.

The whole TikTok ban debate is actually between China hawks and longstanding PE/VC investors who want to cash out on one of the (very) few winning lottery tickets the tech market has printed in the last few years and will be damned if Joe Biden prevents them from doing so. Everything else is kayfabe and/or whatever argument looks good at the time.

I'm sorry, but I just find your response completely absurd. We have leaked audio, we have Jewish journalists putting pen-to-paper identifying why they support the divestment, and it's because of antisemitism and not concern over CCP national security, we have Jewish lobbyists representing hundreds of Jewish groups explicitly saying they support the divestment because of antisemitism, we have other journalists openly admitting that Jewish lobbying over antisemitism concerns which has brought unity and priority to this issue whereas it stalled before Oct. 7, it comes out that two Jewish Zionists including former US Ambassador to Israel are lobbying to purchase it, and you are still trying to cast doubt over the motives that they are completely open about. I don't know what else to say, why don't you believe them when they say what they are lobbying for and why they are doing it? Why don't you believe the journalists who are publishing pieces supporting it because of antisemitism and admitting that this issue has changed the political landscape of the topic?

But because Yass’ actions are a strong indication that the TikTok sale isn’t solely or primarily the product of organized Zionist activism and that this wouldn’t even be necessary to algorithmically censor anti-Israel content on TikTok, it’s just some minor, barely relevant single-case anecdote.

Yes, the consensus and prioritization of this issue is primarily the product of organized Zionist activism. A single investor who is lobbying based off his financial interests does not change this fact. I will again point out you are engaging in an isolated demand for rigor with your "you can't identify something as group activism unless literally every single member of that group is on board", like we can't attribute BLM to organized black activism because of Candace Owens or something. This is something you and everyone always does when Jewish group activism is identified.

Greenblatt is transparently talking about the “TikTok generation” ie Zoomers, which is why he literally clarifies that he means “Gen Z” immediately after saying TikTok.

Come on, 2rafa, he is talking about Tik Tok, there he is calling it "Al Jazeera on steroids, amplifying and intensifying antisemitism, anti-Zionism with no reprecussions."

You have the ADL, you have Jews in the media apparatus, you have Jewish Federations of North America, you have Jewish Zionists including former US ambassador to Israel lobbying for a purchase at a discount, don't tell me this is about Taiwan or CCP influence in the GOP.

So when Yass, who isn’t a ‘random Jew’ but an extremely prominent lobbyist (“organized activist” in your language) for Zionist causes, lobbies against the ban, he’s just doing it for the money. But when Friedman and Mnuchin, who has decades of experience as a private equity investor in media, gear up to bid for TikTok’s US operation and lobby for a sale it’s definitely not just about the money and must be about them bravely and nobly sacrificing their own wealth so that they can make adjustments to TikTok moderation policy?

We can attribute the timing of the ban to China hawks in Congress using some neuroticism by some Jewish organizations (often themselves influenced by reports from neocon China hawks in foreign policy and geopolitical lobbying groups) about Chinese gommunists pushing pro-Hamas material on the youth to get enough of their fellow reps on both the right and left to get the previously stalled bill across the line. The Jewish organizations are just happy to be seen doing something in front of their donors that might supposedly reduce antisemitism by whatever convoluted logic. But I don’t think this means that most powerful Zionist lobbyists in the US consider an ownership transfer of TikTok away from the Chinese in any sense a major policy priority for them.

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I'm gonna regret asking this, but when you keep pointing to Jew Conspiracy Theories because Jewish groups are generally against anti-Semitism, is it not possible that this is because... people generally don't like movements that are directed specifically against them? And have rational reasons to oppose them?

Your take is obviously that Jews really are a malignant coordinated network of bad actors acting against non-Jews and that we should Name the Jew whenever possible, and that Jews complaining about this are just Jews upset at being caught being Jews. But for people who don't see Jews as an existential threat, yes, pushing anti-Jewish propaganda does look like a threat to Jews, it should hardly be surprising that rich Jews and Jewish organizations oppose anti-semitism. Even excluding the Holocaust there is plenty of historical evidence of Jews having good reason to consider themselves actually under threat of violence. If there were a large movement of people trying to convince the world that Chinese people are evil bugmen we should view as an existential threat, I would expect Chinese organizations and rich Chinese to have an interest in opposing these groups.

None of this is to say I personally think TikTok should be banned because it allows anti-Semitic content. But you don't need sinister conspiracies of Jews trying to keep the goyim from Noticing to explain why they have a problem with it.

Obviously I accept Jewish neuroticism and paranoia over antisemitism as axiomatic, not something that is a "conspiracy," and I have never related that as a conspiracy. But that neuroticism and paranoia expresses as group-organized behavior in culture, academia, social media.

I have a problem with it, obviously, because it affects me and my nation. That group-organized behavior is used to direct public consensus in a way that is favorable towards Jews and unfavorable towards non-Jews, with stifling criticism of Israel being one example. Another example of course is the question of White identity politics, which has always most vehemently been opposed by organized Jewish behavior precisely because they are afraid of antisemitism.

Jewish groups are at the forefront of fighting any sort of political rhetoric that is oppositional to demographic change, associating "Racism" with antisemitism.

So they get identity politics, White people do not, and Jews use their power in various cultural institutions for their own benefit, often at the expense of White people.

I do not think it's a "Jew Conspiracy Theory" that Jews oppose antisemitism. But their behavior in using their influence to direct public perception and stifle, using increasingly authoritarian tactics, criticism of themselves is what I take issue with. Do you see the distinction?

So the Jewish lobby is trying to ban or force divestment of TikTok to further stifle criticism of their behavior, obviously I don't take issue with that because I think it's illogical for them to oppose antisemitism. I take issue with it because it's hostile to non-Jews by stifling the speech of non-Jews and not allowing them to express their own ethnic interests which is something Jews do vehemetly. I also think the criticisms being made on platforms like TikTok are valid and important for the public to hear.

You think it's understandable for Jews to signal-boost complaints about antisemitism (re: the behavior of non-Jews as it relates to Jews), can't you understand why I believe it's important for non-Jews to be able to express and signal-boost valid, true complaints about Jewish behavior (re: the behavior of Jews as it relates to non-Jews)? And why I would oppose the efforts by Jews to outlaw any expression of the latter in all arenas of the public square while demanding the former is held as sacred in all those spaces? I understand why they are doing it all too well, it doesn't mean I can't oppose it.

You think it's understandable for Jews to signal-boost complaints about antisemitism, can't you understand why I believe it's important for non-Jews to be able to express and signal-boost valid, true complaints about Jewish behavior?

Only if I agreed with you that "Jewish behavior" means the same thing as "Anti-white behavior," which I do not. Your argument is basically that antisemitism is rational because Jews are our enemies so we should be "antisemitic." Obviously I don't expect to change your mind on this, but this being the Motte, you should at least entertain the possibility that you are wrong, and that Jews oppose antisemitism because they genuinely would prefer not be targeted for harm as a race, and not because it's a cynical move to control the discourse in an anti-white race war.

More comments

Yes, I looked at the Twitter post of the Greenblatt phone call the first time you posted it. Who's he on the phone to? What demands is he making? The closest thing to a demand in the excerpt you linked to is "Our community needs to put the same brains...towards this like fast", which is frankly a pretty anodyne call to action.

Goldbloom's editorial was published March 7th. H.R.7521 was introduced March 5th. Mike Gallagher, the sponsoring legislator, is the head of the chair of the House Committee on The Chinese Communist Party. He put a version of this bill forward in 2022. He's been gunning for Tik-Tok and anything CCP-related for a while. This isn't new, he's been pretty vocal about it. I've heard concerns about Tik-Tok from other members of Congress and from national security pundits and think-tanks for a while.

ADL has control over the moderation of Reddit

Huh? What's your evidence?

It is obvious that Zionist influence is at play here

There's a version of your claim in which Jewish support is enough to push things over the line and Gallagher finally gets his bill, then sure, there's probably some truth to that. However, that's a far cry from your original claim that "[Tik-Tok is] being targeted because of antisemitism".

I'm cognizant of the fact that the Jewish lobby has a tremendous amount of power in the US, and that it's generally not a good thing considering the US-Israel alliance is pretty lopsided and parasitic, where the US gives lots of aid and spends huge amounts of diplomatic capital for dubious returns.

That said, I don't think an argument that's essentially "the jews want you to do this, therefore you shouldn't do it" is particularly persuasive. The reasons I listed in the first comment are still valid. We shouldn't allow a corporation from an enemy country that's beholden to said country's government to have unrestricted access to the domestic information sphere, especially after they've proven multiple times that they're willing to abuse it.

X could be next

This is just a slippery slope unless you're willing to go into a lot more detail on how force-divesting a Chinese company for things specifically related to Chinese manipulation in the context of wider geopolitical competition with them, could directly lead to the government using that power randomly on anyone and everyone. The bill specifically mentions control by a hostile foreign power (currently limited to just 4 nations), so the brightline is pretty clear.

We shouldn't allow a corporation from an enemy country that's beholden to said country's government to have unrestricted access to the domestic information sphere, especially after they've proven multiple times that they're willing to abuse it.

Then Israel should be added to the list of hostile nations, and any media apparatus with significant ownership by any Zionist should be forcefully divested. It doesn't even take an act of Congress to do that after this bill is signed into law.

That said, I don't think an argument that's essentially "the jews want you to do this, therefore you shouldn't do it"

The Jews want to censor criticism of Jews and Israel as they've managed to do on every other major platform except X after Musk's takeover (proving the extreme importance of corporate ownership to bottom-line content that is censored or boosted). That can be opposed in its own right, I don't oppose that simply because Jews are trying to do it.

Israel should be added to the list of hostile nations,

Israel isn't hostile in the same way that Russia or China are though. I'd argue they're highly overrated, but they're not trying to destroy the influence of the US as an end-goal, they're just getting way more out of the relationship than they're putting in.

The Jews want to censor criticism of Jews and Israel

That can be opposed in its own right

So force a TikTok divestiture for censoring anti-China views, then fight against pro-Israel censorship on other platforms.

You do realize that the very billionaire investor who successfully lobbied Trump into opposing the TikTok ban (and by far his biggest donor in the 2024 cycle so far):

As a result of the above issues, forcing ByteDance to sell the app to a Western company is one of the few issues that has broad bipartisan support. Well, it did have bipartisan support until Trump did a 180 and suddenly opposed the bill. This was after Trump met a wealthy TikTok investor who promised to support his campaign.

…is noted Jewish Zionist Jeff Yass, right?

One would hope that if there really was a Zionist plot against TikTok that they would manage to avoid a right-wing billionaire who is perhaps the largest donor to pro-settler religious Zionist think tanks in Israel torpedoing that effort to make a few bucks.

Just to add to my other reply:

WSJ:

It was slow going until Oct. 7... People who historically hadn't taken a position on TikTok became concerned with how Israel was portrayed in the videos and what they saw as an increase in antisemitic content posted to the app...

Anthony Goldbloom... started analyzing data TikTok published in its dashboard for ad buyers... He found far more views for videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags than those with pro-Israel hashtags. While the ratio fluctuated, he found that at times it ran 69 to 1 in favor of videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags.

Economist:

The proposal gained momentum partly as a result of disquiet over the app's handling of misinformation and antisemitic content followign Hamas's attack on Israel in October...

So previous efforts failed, but all of a sudden in a divided Congress we get a consensus on forcing a divestment after this push by the Jewish lobby... and as mentioned in my other reply it seems an investment fund founded by two Jewish Zionists, including the former US Treasury Secretary and former US ambassador to Israel, are angling to purchase it.

But yeah, the real problem is Taiwan and Tiananmen Square and CCP influence in the GOP, right...

I'm somewhat torn on this, but ultimately I'm in favor of the bill as written. My libertarian priors make me nervous about the government having a say in what apps people can install on their phones, but I'm also nervous about the massive soft (or not-so-soft) power that China is able to exert around the world, which is an equal if not greater threat to free speech. I also just think that centralized social media apps are a bad thing anyway, and I'd prefer a return to the more decentralized internet of the 00s, so that's not helping TikTok's case.

If anything, Trump's position pushes me further in the direction of a full ban (not just divestment), because I can use it as evidence that I'm a free thinker and not just a Trump cultist.

Is it not the same bill as the last one ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RESTRICT_Act

That one was basically laying a legal framework for complete state censorship, any platform with 1mm users or even the slightest bit (1 share) of foreigh ownership was deemed okay to be censored.

This bill requires at least 20% ownership by Chinese, Russian, North Korean or Iranian entities.

Or for the company to be subject to the direction of a foreign entity, which is left to the President to determine.

It also bans distribution of source code of banned apps, which in any sane interpretation would violate the first amendment.

Or anyone in management "controlled" by any adversary country.

Adversary country list can be amended in 30 days.

what count as 'controlled' is up to some D.C. circuit court. Is Elon Musk 'controlled' by Russian if he keeps posting what people call "russian propaganda" on twitter?

US courts could easily argue he is, seems to me.

How are Putin and Xi not conservatives and patriots? Putin goes on and on about traditional, religious family life. He outlaws gay propaganda and sends the degen nudist partygoers off to prison.

Xi wants the youth to be manly, vigorous nationalists. He shut down the Beijing LGBT centre.

Trump is the least conservative of all of them! I don't recall Putin waving a rainbow flag spontaneously at a rally.

Seriously, it's not hard to explain why US conservatives are moving towards Russia and China. They see their 'conservative' leaders function as doormats for the progressive left - tax cuts are not sufficient weapons for a culture war. They want to see their views aggressively advanced like how progressives do. They want their enemies at home crushed. They see people who know how to crush - Orban, Putin and Xi as a model for how to really get things done.

Strategically of course, Russia and China are US rivals. Russia plays up its cultural conservatism to appeal to the US right, they want to sow division in their primary adversary. Why wouldn't they want to throw a wrench in the gears of the State department/deep state machine? But for many Americans, the strategic threat is quite distant. I reckon many American conservatives see Taiwan as yet another progressive-occupied country (like Ukraine) whose semiconductor exports are most important for Big Tech polycule enjoyers who are busy erasing white men from history and funding progressive causes with their gigabucks. It makes little sense to hand Tiktok's market share from the distant enemy to the near enemy - Big Tech will quickly take over Tiktok if it's taken from Chinese control.

Why would they want to get vaporized by missiles so some soy-sipping effeminate male can preserve his lavish lifestyle as a Vice Assistant Product Manager? Why would they think that the wars they're expected to fight are for their values when the military and state department goes out of its way to cater to progressivism - DEI, LGBT, walk a mile in her shoes... They spent many years reflexively supporting expensive, useless neocon wars in the Middle East, they're now very suspicious of foreign engagements. This is partially behind the recruiting crisis, some conservatives have started attacking the US military in rhetoric. They don't want to tag along with deep state foreign policy goals anymore.

I'm not saying that what they think is the whole story. Losing Taiwan will put a dent in the lifestyles of all Americans, not just big tech.

How are Putin and Xi not conservatives and patriots?

I think it's probably more that slotting your favored presidential candidate in alongside a pair of dictators is a weird look, especially when you're also calling your opponents of being hysterical for accusing you of backing a wannabe dictator.

Taiwan as yet another progressive-occupied country (like Ukraine

Ukraine is not progressive nor progressive occupied. Regardless of US involvement in the coup, it simply isn’t- it’s a dirt poor ex-Soviet mafia state where actual literal Nazis are an important political faction.

How are Putin and Xi not conservatives and patriots?

You can be completely annihilated as a principled conservative patriot in a conflict against another principled conservative patriot. Many leaders in Israel and Hamas are principled conservative patriots for their respective nations. Many, perhaps even most major wars in history have been fought between principled, conservative patriots.

And Xi’s occasional gestures to the Chinese equivalent of the online right are as halfhearted and largely ineffective as they seem - just like his policy on birthrates. Putin, meanwhile, single-handedly destroyed the Russian dissident right and even assassinated several of its key figures as Dase documented, so again this is hard to describe as a great victory for reaction.

you think Random meant that they were reactionary conservatives instead of only conservatives?

I recall when the United States would criticize other governments for trying to force-nationalize foreign companies, so this is rather ironic.

Personally I would rather have the Chinese government spy on my data than have the US government spy on it, for the simple reason that because I live in the United States, I have more to worry about from the US government spying on me than from the Chinese spying on me. This might change if I become, say, a rich businessman or politician whom the Chinese wish to influence. But for now it is as I have said.

In general I am against this bill simply because giving the US government more power to censor information is against my interests. China is not my friend, and I would not wish to live there because it is authoritarian. However, given my pro-free-speech attitude, it seems to me that TikTok's political opponents in the US are largely also my political opponents.

I had to look up Yass again to figure out why he was so involved in Tik-Tok being that I knew he was already rich from SIG. Turns out he has $7 billion from SIG but Tik-Tok is another $21 billion so I can see why he’s fighting for it.

I lean towards banning Tik-Tok but admittedly haven’t made up my mind.

I have an acquaintance who was sued by SIG when he left. I’ve read the lawsuit and it’s basically they put Nasdaq/SP500 on a tablet and used it trading on the floor. Sounds so basic now.

I would just like to note that 30 minutes after this post went up I looked for the UCLA Republican group on Twitter and the account had been canceled. I have no idea what this means but just putting it up for reference.

I should note that the actual Twitter referenced above was posted 28 hours ago but it’s just a image not a retweet.

The bill should pass, even though I’m generally very pro-China, don’t care about Taiwan and think the CCP are fine for now.

It’s just ridiculous to allow the clear imbalance of rules that American companies have to face in China while allowing the Chinese free rein in all but the most security-critical (and even then…) parts of the US economy.

If TikTok can operate in the US under Chinese ownership, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter must be allowed to operate in China on exactly the same terms.

We may be seeing the GOP becoming pro-China in real time.

We may be seeing the US becoming Brezhnev time Soviet Union in real time.

Remember when American culture ruled supreme, when other countries banned American movies, music and other cultural artefacts, including blue jeans? Remember when other countries tried at enormous expense stop American cultural influence?

And remember when the bans were not respected by anyone and widely disobeyed?

Now the shoe is on the other foot.

DO YOU WANT OUR YOUNG PEOPLE LISTEN TO FILTHY CAPITALIST RADIO? ARE YOU A TRAITOR TO OUR GLORIOUS WORKER COUNTRY?

What you want is immaterial. Young people want their TikTok and will do what it takes to get it, including installing and configuring VPN. Yes, only minority is going to do it, but active minority is what always mattered.

Again, this isn't a TikTok ban, it's divestiture.

And this isn't quite like US cultural clout in the 80s. This is like if the Soviet Union owned CBS and used it to influence the news Americans received.

Young people want their TikTok and will do what it takes to get it, including installing and configuring VPN. Yes, only minority is going to do it, but active minority is what always mattered.

Leaving aside the apparent assumption that there is a strong correlation between “know how and is willing to pay for and download a vpn” and “politically active”, how is going from from 30% MAUs to (eg) 3% MAUs immaterial?

Young people want their TikTok and will do what it takes to get it, including installing and configuring VPN.

Social media platforms are entirely different than fashion. If 1% of kids have black market jeans, they are fashion trendsetters. If 1% of kids install a VPN to watch videos, they are dorks. Think about it. Are 4Chan users considered cool?

The second that installing TikTok isn't as easy as clicking a button on the App Store, usage falls to near zero. Network effects work both ways.

And yet every Russian videoblogger keeps mentioning their Instagram despite Meta being banned in Russia as extremists and available via VPN. Not that their followers access any other info via this VPN.

It's true. Never underestimate the power of laziness.

Stefan Molyneux's videos get something like, 99% less views on bitchute than they did on youtube? Maybe even 99.9% less. All because his audience couldn't be bothered to type a different url into their browsers. And this was a group of people who were already primed to seek out "controversial" material from alternative sources.

4chan isn't cool but it has been influential. A lot of the memes (in a broader sense than just image macros) that end up on Reddit or Facebook started on 4chan.

I'm skeptical of anything that requires Trump to stay bought, even if he's getting paid repeatedly, and it's not clear he is or will be.

Suppressing Americans’ access to videos about Tiananmen Square might or might not sound like that big of a deal, but consider what TikTok would be able to do in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The U.S. would have to make a very rapid, highly consequential decision about whether to come to Taiwan’s aid.

There are some opposing parades of horribles. It's not hard to imagine a federal government that pressures Western service providers to shove away disliked positions until their best or only remaining choices are foreign-owned, and then make a lot of hay over them being foreign-owned. There's a plausible argument that already happened with ARFCOM.

In practice, TikTok's current security and privacy issues are bad enough (even compared to the already-miserable standard set by western-owned social media corps) that I'm not convinced that's a wrong risk to take here, but the law doesn't just apply here.

For instance, a UCLA Republicans group posted a picture of Trump, Xi, and Putin together, praising them as “three conservative patriots”. Something like this being posted unironically would have been a fever dream 10 years ago.

The BruinGOP group has been weirdly BAPist as far as I've been aware of it; I'd be very cautious about taking much signal out what may well be intentional trolling.

I think the bill as written is bad. If the problem is data collection, them change the rules on data collection. If it’s about the things allowed on TikTok, then deal with that. Banning a single platform doesn’t make sense. If that ha, it’s easy to get around and in a years or two we’d be having the same serious discussion about toktik or something.

I do think a debate about how these companies collect data and their moderation policies is warranted. I just think that the rules should be changed rather than individual debates about the scandal du jour as it hits the news.

If the problem is data collection, them change the rules on data collection.

You're not going to be able to walk into a company office in China and look at the private books of Tiktok to confirm exactly how much data collection they're doing. Changing the rules for data collection and confirming obedience is impossible.

Like last year's anti-tiktok bill, this one is a deceptive. Although not as horrible at quick glance.

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1767525209064558954

It'd allow executive impose incredible civil penalties ($5000 times monthly user) on all websites and apps excepts places like Yelp (primarily reviews) if they have at least a 20% stake owned by someone from an 'adversary country' (at present Russia, China, Iran, N.Korea). (1)

Or if I'm reading it correctly, any company whose management includes someone who is 'controlled' by any entity that falls under (1)

Note that list of 'adversary countries' is determined by secretary of state.

https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20240311/HR%207521%20Updated.pdf

Once again, it's kinda bullshit.

What's wrong with that? All four of those countries are pretty anti-USA.

Isn't that penalty specifically for failing to release user data to the respective users before the app is banned?

edit: nevermind, there's another one for failing to stop distribution.

Insane to think that we've been discussing this 4 years ago.

God I was funnier back then.


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