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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25500 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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The causes of inflation

Having recently finished Cochrane's Fiscal Theory of the Price Level, I was primarily struck by how contrived all modern macro-economic models are, whether Monetarist, New Keynesian, or Fiscal. New Keynesian models, for example, imply bizarre outcomes such as spiraling deflation when interest rates are at or near zero, yet rather than discarding the model economists instead warn of spiraling deflation at the zero bound. From a methodological standpoint, there appears to be a tradition of "fixing" a model by declaring a variable to be stochastic or subject to regime-change; yet without going back and re-deriving the model with these additional assumptions. Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models jointly estimate macro-economic variables and policy parameters, despite policies being a choice; rendering predictions of potential policy impact on relevant economic variables futile.

Indeed, I posit that all three frameworks are missing a key element that drives inflation: the fact that the representative inter-temporal discount factor is non-constant, and that the discount factor is directly impacted by fiscal policy.

Background

First, some background. The representative agent (let's say me) prefers consumption now than consumption in the future. There are many philosophical reasons that this may be so, but the existence of debt appears to be ample empirical evidence for this assumption. The amount by which I prefer current consumption to future consumption is called the "discount factor", and can be modeled in a variety of ways. In discrete time, it is often symbolized using the Greek letter "beta" (not to be confused with the CAPM beta) and is typically somewhat less than 1 (perhaps in the .85-.99 range). Micro-economic models call the rate at which I prefer current consumption to future consumption the "elasticity of inter-temporal substitution", and typically model the impact of interest rates on this inter-temporal substitution effect. In equilibrium, the interest rate is directional proportional the negative log of the discount factor: r = a - log(beta), or if beta is modeled as exp(-delta), r = a + delta.

In a simple economic model with no government spending, no Federal Reserve, and no banks (frictionless financial markets) (and oh, to live in such a world!), the discount factor is directly related to the savings rate and amount of investment in "physical" (though intangible in the case of software and innovation) capital. Having a long term view implies a high savings rate. Savings are invested in capital. Capital is the primary driver of long-term economic growth, as it allows economies to produce more goods with greater efficiency. If the aggregate discount factor is at .95, then any capital investment with a (risk-adjusted) return greater than 5% would be financed, leading to more economic growth than if only capital investments with returns greater than 10% were financed.

Government spending, a central bank, and retail banks throw this simple model into flux. Unlike mutual funds, which act as a true intermediary by taking investors money and directly putting the money into portfolios of stocks and bonds, retail banks lend "safe" and thus cheap deposits. This cash has to go somewhere, and eventually makes its way back to a bank as a deposit...which is then lent out again. This cheap borrowing, and subsequent rise in the broad deposit base, artificially lowers the lending rate. Austrian economics correctly states that this leads to over-investment: investment is unbacked by corresponding saving, causing a bubble and mis-allocation of economic resources. A much more economically straightforward approach (and one also suggested by Cochrane) is for banks to be financed entirely by equity: investors can buy stocks in a bank, who then uses the money raised by an equity issuance to fund lending. This approach would let retail banks truly act as intermediaries, being rewarded for expertise in credit risk management and identification of wise investments, without introducing investment distortions.

Government spending is also a distortion. The government has to spend on something: either they hire private companies (a form of consumption or investment, depending on the nature of the spending) or directly create consumer or investment goods. Since this investment is also not tied to savings, distortion is introduced (Ricardian equivalence not-withstanding).

Finally, central banks control the interest rate either via the rate at which they allow retail banks to borrow or by directly creating money and purchasing government bonds on the open market. Purchasing government bonds increases the demand for bonds directly, giving the government more capacity to borrow and spend and facilitating more distortion.

Mainstream theories

Monetarists, New Keynesians, and Fiscal theories are aware of all the above, yet don't directly introduce these facts into their canonical models. Loosely speaking, Monetarists consider inflation to be driven in the long run by changes in the money supply: "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" according to Friedman. Mathematically, MV = PY, where Y is economic output, P is the price level, M is the money supply, and V is the velocity of money (how frequently it changes hands). Under the assumption that V is a stationary process (conceptually, mean reverting) and that Y is long-run exogenous, the only impact on P comes from M. Unfortunately, M is not well defined, especially, as Cochrane correctly points out, in the presence of increasing financial innovation and removal of financial frictions. If I can purchase a television by an immediate transfer from my investment portfolio with no conversion to cash, then M is not only all cash and deposits, but also all bonds and stocks. Central bank open market operations, where money is created to purchase bonds, then has no impact on the money supply. Cash is created, but bonds are removed from the market, which is net-neutral for the money supply.

New Keynesians, in the tradition of the original Keynesians, consider inflation to be caused by excess demand. This is explicit in their canonical models, where the inflation rate is a function of the output gap and expected future inflation. New Keynesian theories struggle to explain the lack of inflation from 2009 to 2020, where fiscal and monetary policy were both accommodating, but in which inflation stayed stubbornly low.

Finally, Fiscal Theorists consider inflation to be the result of government deficits that are not backed by corresponding future surpluses. In this theory, government debt is valued by the present value of future primary surpluses (cash flows excluding interest expenditure). Government can either credibly promise to pay back new debt (in which case the current value of debt remains constant), or the price level will increase to deflate the current level of debt. This theory is relatively simple and has many advantages that Cochrane articulates in detail. My biggest issue with the theory is that the mechanism for inflation is opaque. The government can issue debt and promise future surpluses, leading to Ricardian equivalence. But if the government doesn't promise future surpluses, people are free to spend the money, driving up the price level. This theory does not, to my knowledge, tie consumer behavior back to the representative agent's utility function.

What about the discount factor?

And now I can finally get back to my own theory. Each of the three theories posited above assumes that the discount factor is constant. I believe that the discount factor is dynamic and that this dynamism directly leads to inflation. Fiscal policy can directly impact the discount factor, while monetary policies can stimulate inflation by decoupling interest rates from the discount factor.

An immediate shift to higher discount rates (lower discount factor) will cause immediate price level increases. As I now prefer current consumption even more over future consumption, I will spend more today and save less for tomorrow. Since higher discount rates lead to less economic growth, there is less room for supply side easing of inflationary pressure. Populations that have higher discount rates will also tend to vote in myopic governments who focus on short-term benefits while ignoring long-term structural and financial concerns.

Expansionary fiscal policy puts additional cash in consumers or investors hands. The presence and continued growth of additional cash will have an impact on savings rates: why should I bother to save if I will simply receive more government cash in the future? The discount rate will rise as a result. Cochrane does have a point: debt that is backed by future surpluses will not have the same impact on the discount rate, since eventually the gravy train will stop. However, Cochrane does not allow discount rates to change, robbing the model of a key mechanism for inducing inflation.

Expansionary monetary policy does not necessarily impact the discount rate. While in a frictionless society with no government, an interest rate decline can only happen when discount rates also decline, in an expansionary monetary episode lower interest rates can lead to higher “real” discount rates. The availability of cheap money relative to discount rates leads to increases in borrowing and current consumption which leads to demand-side inflation. This is a standard Keynesian argument, but I go one step further: long periods of low interest rates can lead to a lethargic population that assumes that money will always be free. How this manifests in a utility function is ambiguous: it could be that this actually lowers the discount rate in the long run (raises the discount factor). If this is the case, then a sudden interest and fiscal shock to the system can causes an even larger increase in the discount rate.

2021 was a time of fiscal excess, supply shortages, and post-pandemic YOLOing. Discount rates shot through the roof, as evidenced by both heightened consumption and declines in workforce participation, hitting both the demand and supply side of the economy, funded by accommodating fiscal policy. It is a testament to the American people that we seem to a large extent to have come back to our senses. Despite continued deficits, inflation has come down as the discount rate has dropped to near previous levels. However, it is clear how easy it would be to devolve into a South American-style economy, characterized by short-termism and fiscal irresponsibility at both the individual and government levels.

Why is this culture war material?

To what degree are low discount rates driven by culture? Americans were originally positively selected for long-termism. By definition, they had an unusually high capacity for adventure, exploration, hard work, and desire to create a better world for their descendants. Most of the immigrants to the United States since have had similar positive selection. Even the Irish and African populations, who may have been negatively selected on certain attributes (by the potato famine and by defeat/capture by rival tribes respectively), there isn't anything to suggest that their discount rate was negatively selected for. When America was a melting pot, they were assimilated into a culture that favored long-termism.

When considering modern immigrants in light of discount rates, I come to a surprising conclusion. Whatever issues illegal immigrants have (and I have many concerns!), they may well be positively selected on discount rate. They risk danger and uncertainty for a better and brighter long-term future. On the other hand, while seemingly the most successful immigrants, Indians could very well be negatively selected on discount rate. Rather than stay in India and help transform it into a fully developed nation, they come to the United States to enjoy immediate success. Indians (Brahmins) have administrative and managerial talents that often far outpace the mean American and they enjoy great success navigating the PMC (the growth of which could also be a consequence of higher discount rates). Yet in my experience, these high-capacity Brahmins do not actually drive innovation or change. If I'm correct about this, the current surfeit of Indian executive talent could contribute to American economic stagnation.

I want to congratulate you on writing one of the greatest motteposts of all time. 2000 word summary of different economic schools of thought, mostly correct (econ major, can confirm, though your notion that discount factors are assumed constant is not necessarily so in the schools you ascribe it to), followed by 500 words of "Actually, Scientific Racism would explain this better".

Truly an quintessential example of a mottepost. Showcasing that you've done the work to at least try to understand modern scholarship, but discarding it in favor of whatever flavour of phrenology is in this week.

I can't imagine a better example of a mottepost.

  • -10

I can't imagine a better example of a mottepost.

Then read some of the better ones. I could as easily say your post is a classic sneerclub post: full of sneering condescension that exhibits a surface-level appreciation of someone's point but then reduces it to an uncharitable straw man.

It's been 11 months since you caught your last ban. Maybe you've been on vacation since then, but if you haven't mellowed after all, then just to let you know, if you decide you're going to flame out in one last hurrah, I will not only ban you permanently, as I promised, but I will take the rare step of deleting your post to deny you the satisfaction of getting your last digs in.

Or, you know, you could try participating in good faith. Just a suggestion.

I don't think that it's fair to describe the whole post as racism. There is more of general conservative vibe to it(the past was better and you should invest in your country). And also obviously Austrian school signs all over it.

See, to me this feels odd because it leaves out one crucial point. People being primarily motivated by social status. It's not, why should I bother to save if government money is coming in the future? It's why should I bother to save if I'm going to take a significant hit to my social status and image today? Lockdown and stimulus basically served as a sort of supercharger for this competition. People are not going to like the solution however, which is essentially that the middle class/upper middle class has too much discernable income, and probably should be taxed significantly more.

That was Robert H. Frank's argument for a steeply progressive consumption tax. It would reduce zero sum status competition while keeping savings/investment high.

I was primarily struck by how contrived all modern macro-economic models are

1000 times yes. I have a BS in economics. Macro still seems like voodoo magic to me. The only model I sort of like is the "sustainable patterns of specialization and trade" kind of model.

[discount rate]

Do you not think the discount rate stuff was sorta covered by the OG Keynesian "animal spirits"?

I get the sense that they kind of figured this out, but economists just really don't like having an unmeasurable thing in their models. Much of the modern profession is filled with math nerds who earned their PhD by doing some fancy math manipulations on theoretical and completely impractical models. The economists that prefer to actually model the real economy get paid the big bucks on wall-street.

I don’t think Wall-Street hirers those guys anymore. Maybe a Bill Gross or Gundlach but to be honest those guys spend probably more time think about small market structure edge to squeeze an extra 20 bps versus absolutely hammering the economic outlook right and getting 10 year up or down right.

The big macro funds are going to be thinking about a lot of other things too than getting the macro call right. The guys in those shops getting the economy right just isn’t that important when your levered and have risks limits on everything. Pays much better just figuring out a sentiment shift or a trigger for a price (like at etf entrance or some quant allocation that will happen).

Any macro interview is going to start with returns and Sharpe ratio stuff not whether your calls are right. Getting calls right is just too volatile.

One example I would use is when oil when -50 (and an extreme example) it only traded negative for like 90 minutes and the entire next day was positive entire day. Even if you knew the price next day and traded that you wouldn’t make money because is in between for those 90 minutes a nice security guard came to your desks and escorted you out. What happened is some Chinese banks were long some derivatives linked to that days oil close and blasted it negative (probably illegally) causing billions of losses on those banks. But if you had mapped out all the fundamentals and macro and absolutely nailed the value of a barrel of oil you would in fact not be rich.

The only place I think kind of sometimes takes a big macro swing (usually on bearish side) is Bridgewater but they overall haven’t had great performance but somehow are a marketing powerhouse.

On the mainstream theories

I don't see how the Monetarist model can be seen as contrived. It is the simplest model and the one most in line with standard economic principles without bells and whistles. All prices are relative and we can think of the "price" of money relative to other goods. Money is a (durable) good with well-defined demand and supply. (Sure, the demand and supply functions must be described in "real" rather than "nominal" terms, because dollars are valued according to what they can buy not just for themselves). Demand and supply determine the relative price of money. If supply is increasing relative to demand—a monetary expansion— the price of money will be going down and we have inflation. Granted, there are a lot of important details: what should count as money, how substitutable bank deposits and cash are, how should we aggregate them into a single composite measure of total money; but the core of the framework is just that. Just basic supply and demand analysis.

The New Keynesian model recognizes this, but it gets hidden in their "cashless limit" so that the standard textbook version has no mention of money quantities at all. But it is there in the background. The contrived parts of the New Keynesian model comes from their decision to select and rule out certain types of equilibria and not being careful with working directly with the limit version of the model rather than solving the model first and taking the limit later.

On the discount rate

The fact that the discount rate matters for saving decisions does not mean that the discount rate changes with the environment. If the government has some expansionary fiscal policy, my budget constraints will change and I might substitute consumption intertemporally even if my discount rate is the same.

In the theory of (consumption-based) asset pricing, economists generally talk about the stochastic discount factor which takes into account the marginal utility in the future (in the different possible futures, hence stochastic). For instance, changes in this stochastic discount factor are used to explain the changes in the value of the stock market. But the idea there is that my rate of time preference between 1 utility unit today and 1 utility unit tomorrow remains the same, I just have a different rate of preference between 1 unit of consumption today and 1 unit of consumption tomorrow. If this is your point, then it makes sense. But it is not a point that is missed by the mainstream theories, it is literally taught in the first-year classes of any mainstream school.

Austrian economics correctly states that this leads to over-investment: investment is unbacked by corresponding saving, causing a bubble and mis-allocation of economic resources.

I was waiting for this. The rest of the post prior has all of those usual """dog-whistles""" that it was like a twist in a movie you can see coming from miles away.

Is it 2008 again? I remember the internet being full of this kind of thing (and being one of the contributors!).

Anyway, it's important to point out that 'full reserve' theorizing is not 'Austrian' economics, it's Rothbardian Austrian economics. The original ABCT doesn't require it to avoid business cycles and Hayek's formulation can be re-cast in essentially monetarist terms as about the interplay of the supply and demand for money without much modification. The supply of loanable funds (a nominal quantity) does not necessarily represent the full production possibilities of the underlying economy (a real one). That is, there are 'real' savings that are not represented by nominal savings at a given price level/quantity of money. The demand for money will be driven, in part, by the investment possibilities created by real savings, so a full reserve banking system will under invest in production, while the fractional reserve system the Rothbardians are against would be able to invest enough for the economy to reach its production possibilities frontier without going beyond it and generating a business cycle.

As to the rest of your post: a lot of what you're talking about with population discount rates would probably be covered in post-war Keynesian literature on the propensity to save/consume. The empirical validity of a lot of it varies, I'm sure, but I can't imagine it's any more questionable than your last two paragraphs.

You are reading too much into what I wrote. I am not Austrian. 100% reserves will not resolve business cycles, nor is that prescription practicable. I think even the New Keynesians have more interesting things to say on economics than Austrians. I happen to work for a large-ish bank that practices fractional reserve banking (as all retail banks do), and I can sleep at night.

I think Cochrane is the closest to being correct of the three that I laid out. I also think his proposal for 100% equity funded banks is both practicable and better aligns savers and borrowers, and will definitively end bank runs. I think all three are closer to being "correct" than the Austrians, whose main claim to fame is thoroughly debunking Marxist economics (admittedly not a high hurdle to clear).

I would love to hear more from you on the post-war Keynesian literature and how it is relevant to the rest of my post; that is the part that actually interests me.

The supply of loanable funds (a nominal quantity) does not necessarily represent the full production possibilities of the underlying economy (a real one). That is, there are 'real' savings that are not represented by nominal savings at a given price level/quantity of money.

From within the Austrian framework, I think this claim does not hold. I think what you are saying—and please correct me if I’m wrong—is that there may exist savings held (e.g.) in the form of dollar bills in a deposit box at a bank. These bills cannot be lent out as part of the bank’s operations, and hence the real wealth which they represent can never participate in the economy as “investment”.

However, an Austrian would say that those dollar bills are not savings in the sense of forming part of the supply of loanable funds. Savings-as-loanable-funds are a subset of savings-as-deferred-consumption; the former entails the assumption of some risk, while the latter (as in the case of bills in a deposit box) need not.

If you like, holding money qua money, rather than allowing it to be lent out for investment purposes, could be called “exercising demand for money” or less charitably, “hoarding money”, as distinguished from “saving”. An Austrian would say that such hoarding is economically no different from exercising demand in any other way (e.g., through consumption of real goods/services).

The TikTok Ban, Male Role Models, the New Punk, and the Right to be Cool in American Society

TLDR: We're increasingly seeing an urge to regulate media consumption, social media moderation, and public speech along the lines of an ersatz "equal time" doctrine, in which users must both view and affirm one's viewpoints. People don't just want the right to free speech, they want the right to be cool, to speak and be heard and enjoyed and honored.

A theme running through a few different recent threads on here is an urge by different societal movements to seize the mantle of “cool,” to be hip, to be fun, to be interesting.

The people trying to ban TikTok have cited over and over the differential between Israeli and Palestinian content.

Now, critics allege that TikTok is using its influence to push content that is pro-Palestinian and contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests. The claims about TikTok’s promotion of pro-Palestinian content are anecdotal, and they have been bubbling up on the social media platform X, in statements to the media and on conservative media outlet. TikTok said the allegations of bias are baseless.

The underlying assumption by Pro-Israeli voices is that it is impossible for Pro-Israeli content to simply be unpopular. It is impossible that the Israelis are simply bad at memes. There is no actual evidence of bias produced, no evidence of suppression of Israeli creators or boosting of Hamas hashtags, the assumption is that this bias must exist in order for consumers to make the choices they made.

Meanwhile the primary effort I see in the Anti-Anti-Semitism space is the #StandUpToJewishHate campaign, which is so confusingly bad I literally think it is its opposite every time I see it. I see the ads, and I read it naturally as Stand Up to Hatred (by) Jews rather than Stand Up To Hatred (of) Jews. ADL content is lame, bad, boring. Pro-Palestinian content is simply better and put together by better creators.

Just accept not being cool! Did you know: what only number one hit in the 1960s was explicitly about the Vietnam war? Ballad of the Green Berets. Go figure. You want to compete with better memes, produce your own. While we associate the 1960s music scene with the antiwar movement, there were significant patriotic songs produced too. Fighting Side of Me, Okie from Muskogee, the patriotic hits of the era were huge. You compete with memes with better memes. Banning tiktok will not save Israel.

We see the same dynamic with astroturfed “Positive” male role models. Male role models who are nothing interesting, simply because TPTB don’t like the ones that are actually current and good. We see the same dynamic with everyone claiming to be the new punk. This poem circulated on twitter as the worst poem ever written and I tend to agree, but the sheer weirdness of the idea that being a revolutionary is congruent with following public health theater and taking antidepressants just floors me. Everyone wants to be cool and rebellious and also in power and also secretly the choice of the grill pilled normies and the proletariat and the artists and the one true source of loving families that produce children. They want to be James Dean and Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver. They want to be both the enemies in the culture war at the same time.

This comes back to the debate about freedom of speech vs freedom of reach, right? How do you create the right to equal time in a world where people are picking among free choices with their eyeballs? How far does this go? If people buy books that are on one end of a conflict, must publishers and libraries fart out books for the other side? It was possible in a more centralized era for governments to force limited broadcast stations to cover sides evenly, but in the era of consumer choice, even if you force content creators to put out pro-Israel movies Netflix and Youtube customers don’t have to click on them. You can’t force eyeballs onto content anymore. To what extent is the effort to force advertising into these platforms in part an effort to force content consumers to get exposed to these messages whether they like it or not? Once people can choose their own content, they might not pick your content, and that can’t be allowed.

I don't think this is a TikTok problem per se. I think the question is, why is the strict Oppressor/Oppressed dichotomy so hip and cool? Speaking as someone who is totally against that model. Why does opposing these models make you look so....nerdy, if not outright vile? I still maintain the reason is because the strict Oppressor/Oppressed dichotomy freezes out other facets of power, privilege and bias which actually serve to build/maintain power for influencer types. It serves the tribal in-group vs. out-group thinking. In short, it feels good and it's actually of little cost, because you're not actually expected to apply it to yourself or the people around you. It's OK to just apply it to the other.

Why does opposing these models make you look so....nerdy, if not outright vile?

Firstly, because arguing for nuance is almost always going to come across as nerdy. Secondly, because opposition frequently takes the form of apologia for vile actions and it's difficult to avoid the attendant guilt by association even if you're making good arguments. For every person arguing that the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy is reductive and harmful, there will be someone saying that actually the Kulaks/Croats/Queers/[Insert Object of Hate Here] deserved it (or at the very least that it wasn't a big deal and they should get over it).

It serves the tribal in-group vs. out-group thinking. In short, it feels good and it's actually of little cost, because you're not actually expected to apply it to yourself or the people around you. It's OK to just apply it to the other.

This is true, but it's a general feature of dichotomous political thinking, whether it's oppressor/oppressed, fat cat/little guy, lowlife/upstanding citizen, or foreigner/native. It's all just a gloss on Us (people who deserve dignity and moral consideration) vs Them (people who don't). An explanation of why this in particular has cachet needs more explanation.

It's in peoples' rational self-interest to stand up for victims because being a victim could happen to anyone and the costs for the victim are often greater than the benefits for the abuser. Same reason why torture is usually outlawed the moment democracy is implemented: the benefits of torture are small, the costs great, so people outlaw it as they themselves don't think the costs of foregoing torture outweigh the benefits of never having to be a potential recipient of it.

That this reasoning sometimes errs is because the analysis of who constitutes a victim/abuser is, like all other democratic analyses, based on outward optics and scant information. It's the satellite view of a conflict and so misses all of the nitty-gritty. So only a rough approximation of the matter is made. The roles, only vaguely educed.

And there are also perverse incentives that the average human holds. There's the Harrison Bergeron impulse on the part of the mediocre multitude to hold down and discredit the talented few. Retarded, violent populations are not as maligned as they perhaps should be following utilitarian calculations, as the average citizen to some extent identifies with them or else narcissistically considers themselves to be a savior. So populations like the Palestinians earn protected status, while their haughty superiors are brought low, but it all follows from the base self-interest of the demos, those muddled idiots who wish to protect themselves...

why is the strict Oppressor/Oppressed dichotomy so hip and cool? Speaking as someone who is totally against that model. Why does opposing these models make you look so....nerdy,

I think it's the female frame. Women tend to be less aggressive and more caring. In the past men had exclusive control of politics, foreign policy and so on - and conducted things with an emphasis on aggression, violence, honour and logic. Realism/realpolitik dictates that you court the strong and use the weak as pawns. Now women are involved and try to do things their way, care for the weak and hector villains. Thus we have a huge proliferation of 'caring' diplomacy. In the past we just had realist models of international relations with an emphasis on strength and logic, now there are liberal and constructivist schools of thought focusing on institutions and vibes, respectively.

On twitter these women are getting excited about the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. There's an entire parallel universe where this treaty isn't a massive joke, where these lawyers and academics are doing real and meaningful work: https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1770863175937708279

They have a fundamentally different mindset to realists. If you skim the wikipedia page of neorealism, all the thinkers are male. Look through constructivism and there are loads of women. Conceiving of the universe as ruled by mutable ideas and social constructs is a naturally female perspective, just as men are more interested in game theory and structural, abstract rules.

Because the female frame has taken on such influence, opposing it has become unfashionable.

I don’t think that’s it. Most of these movements are punching down in a way that looks like punching up. The out groups tend to look like the powerful, but without any actual power of their own. DEI ostensibly hurts white men. But it doesn’t really affect powerful white men. The guys graduating from elite colleges, the ones whose parents run a business and can shuffle their son into the C suites aren’t harmed by DEI. Unconnected white men, men who lack the connections, generational wealth or parents business to bypass the cattle call of the job market, they are the ones losing out. So it has two groups who benefit and only one relatively unpopular group that doesn’t. The elites love DEI as a way to kneecap their competitors. Make it difficult for a white male computer programmer to move up and you don’t have to worry about him founding the next big company. Women and minorities love DEI because they get cherry positions in big companies and get their names and faces out there.

Even Israel Palestine tends to run along these lines. Jews look white enough that they can be white when the narrative calls for it. Then you can oppose the white colonialism without having to oppose the elites doing so. America has been pretty active in imposing its will on the world. We overthrow governments all the time, and have absolutely no problem with bombing the shiitake out of anyone we consider our enemies. We have absolutely no problem with imposing draconian sanctions on countries we don’t like. Israel was at least attacked by the country it’s at war with, Iraq never attacked us and got shock and awed and then occupied.

I think that dynamic— look like the powerful but be much weaker makes any group a good target for those involved in the oppression matrix line of thinking. Attacking someone obviously not like the elites invokes racism-sneers. It’s too obviously punching down to be effective. But if you punch down on someone who looks like you not only will that not look racist, but the victim cannot really defend himself. After all, to outsiders he looks like the people punching him. And so defending himself looks like privilege. How dare this guy object to black people getting the job over him? Doesn’t he know about oppression?

Yes, this is the point. The archetypical male tyrant rules with an iron fist and emphasizes his own power. He is a major douchebag and his rule is only stable through the excessive application of force to make the opposition cower in fear.

The archetypical female tyrant rules through deception and manipulation. She rules by pitting everyone against everyone else, and then playing the "neutral" arbiter who just wants everyone to get along, you know? She sets up a moralist framework that just-so happens to benefit her (ideally with some mystical source of knowledge that only she has access to), and that is vague enough so that she can switch positions whenever it suits her. She avoids formal positions of power and rules by committee, and so on. The Oppressor/Opressed framework is basically tailor-made for this purpose. The same guy can be an oppressed black body if he is on your side, or a toxic male oppressor if he isn't.

Of course, both of these are a bit too extreme to be practical, real life stable systems seem to mostly coalesce into a small elite group of men wielding the highest explicit/formal power backed up by a moralist framework that is primarily enforced through a much larger group of women, with both of these groups worst tendencies being kept in check by the other. Without that enforced moralist framework societies tend to devolve into chaos and warlordism, while societies without the men tend to simply get conquered by foreign men. But the locus of power can move between these two groups, and currently almost nobody is disputing that women are more powerful than they've ever been - the main discussion is on whether we've not gone far enough on one side or that the pendulum has swung in the other direction on the other side.

Yeah, I think this is right, or at least it's my point. I actually think people hold on to dear life to the Oppressor/Oppressed frame so we don't break this image, lest we start questioning the connections and the generational wealth. The one thing I believe strongly, is we don't have the stomach for actual socioeconomic decline. Even the most Progressive of the Progressives will balk at this when it comes to they and theirs. It's OK when it's just "Billionaires", but when it comes down to specifics that are in the in-group? Nah. Not an option.

The big threat that comes from heterodox thinking on this, I think, is that we add connections to the DEI anti-list, I.E. things that will be counted in a negative sense. In that, it's not the unconnected white men that will lose out...it's the connected ones. You best be coming with your DEI proposal, a plan for your eventual exit. I think there's a reason why people go nuclear on heterodox thinking on these matters, things outside the Progressive vs. Reactionary binary, that all this stuff presents itself as a very real threat to not just the powers in a big sense, but your place and power in a more local sense.

I came to much the same conclusions a long time ago when I noticed that wealth, connections, and even geographical proximity to seats of power were never actually a part of any meaningful conversation on privilege. Which ultimately is nonsense — not because there’s no such things as racism and sexism, but that the oppression created by those things pales in comparison to wealth. And I think it can be pointed out quite simply by pointing to the minority or female children of rich adults. I think it’s actually easier to find success as the son of a black rich and famous person than it would be to find success as a working class white guy from Georgia.

And it really shows up in all sorts of ways. The “right” schools on your resume. The “right” sorts of clubs and experiences and volunteer opportunities. The right sorts of unpaid internships. And access to those things are almost always behind steep paywalls. Volunteering especially the kind that high end colleges seem to like (starting a charity yourself or going abroad) tend to be both time and money intensive. If you have to work as a teen for any reason, your application is not the right kind for elite schools. Likewise sports. The number of children in the pay for play college scandal who were given scholarships for obscure sports that really only the rich actually play was ridiculous. The median student has never been on a rowing team. Even after getting into school, having a good resume means study abroad programs and unpaid internships. Except those can be hard for students who cannot afford to not work while at school. So it’s like the joke about underpasses — yes it’s equally illegal for Elon Musk and a homeless guy to sleep under a bridge. But Elon musk doesn’t sleep under bridges. It’s equally important for both of us to getting into high paying jobs that we spend our time building a resume and reputation and network, but I need to work my way through school and you don’t. Well, who’s going to have an easier time making it?

Everything in America from health, to opportunities, to education and a million other things are dependent on having money. And it’s the one privilege that’s carefully rendered invisible under a deluge of talk about race, gender, and sexuality.

I came to much the same conclusions a long time ago when I noticed that wealth, connections, and even geographical proximity to seats of power were never actually a part of any meaningful conversation on privilege.

Don't they? I feel like they talk about it a lot. A lot of the people talking about privilege are also ardent socialists. At least in the sense of being a Limousine liberal, so maybe they don't do anything about it, but they certainly talk about the power of money.

Certainly people talk about "Billionaires" all the time. But below that? Not so much. And yeah, sometimes you'll see it targeted specifically at certain (usually outgroup) people...but generally this isn't something that's challenged, outside of an extreme minority of targets. I don't think this has always been the case, or is always the case, but I think there's a lack of awareness that the socialism different people envision might not be the same thing. Some people might truly envision a prioritizing of the working class, while others see shifting power and control to the managerial/professional classes.

This poem circulated on twitter as the worst poem ever written

What's the poem? Twitter stopped showing any responses/in-thread posts to users who are not logged in, and I can't find a working nitter instance anymore.

I can't find a working nitter instance anymore.

There is still at least one, though I'm not sure that I want to spread it everywhere in case extra traffic kills it.

Self-hosting is pretty easy, and it can run on a single burner account if you're just using it for yourself.

Twitter shut down the "disposable account" mechanism that Nitter instances used. Thirty days afterwards, the last Nitter account stopped working.

there's laundry to do and a genocide to stop

Some people sure have gone big on long COVID. At this point I don't think it exists in anything more than the trivial sense that being sick makes you generally weaker for a bit.

This is a poem? I thought poems at least had to have multiple lines, even if we've jettisoned rhyme and meter?

It looks like a random text. Or something. I don’t get it.

"""Poetic""" psuedo-stream-of-consiousness from a particular sort of progressive.

That's only one of the cases where it's claimed they've interfered. There are others. Hong Kong. Uyghurs. Taiwan. Tiananmen. Tibet.

Granting arguendo that this one is nonsense and/or not a concern (and you might be right), TikTok as controlled by ByteDance still has to go. Don't overfocus on this detail to the point that you miss the big picture; sort-by-controversial is a thing that happens, but it's not correct in how much it prioritises things.

Also, we could be going to war with the PRC in the next couple of years. Do you really think that ByteDance wouldn't go along if the CPC told them to fill their site and app with malware in order to break the Western Internet? Hint: ByteDance is a mainland Chinese company, and in mainland China if you defy the CPC they chop you up for your organs like that scene out of Repo.

To be clear: no one is banning tiktok. They may force ByteDance to divest from the American form of tiktok. ByteDance can then sell it to non-Chinese owners. Or take their ball and go home. Their choice.

The arguments I've heard in favor of this involve the CCP controlling Chinese companies and the American form of tiktok being a horrible antisocial negative version but the Chinese version being a prosocial positive version. Which would be the CCP messing with our youth. And the black box hand-modified algorithm promoting content is not an even-handed arbiter of memetic popularity. Neither in China nor the US.

Anecdotally my Chinese American in-laws and wife agree that the Chinese version of tiktok is superior. And they use Chinese mainland Apple accounts to load it on their phones because it is the "good" version. So when some Congressman claims that, I accept it.

To be clear, the bills that are supposed to 'ban tiktok' would also enable regulation of any other media simply by claiming that managers or owners of said media are 'rival influenced'. So you could go after Twitter e.g. because Musk posted unflattering claims about Ukrainian war and the only reason for that is that he's Russian influenced. The bill said "owned or controlled, directly or indirectly". That seems incredibly broad to be honest.

You'd only be able to challenge this law in a specific D.C. Court. Good luck!

So you could go after Twitter e.g. because Musk posted unflattering claims about Ukrainian war and the only reason for that is that he's Russian influenced.

I really doubt that is what 'rival influenced' means. "We sold it to one of our other subsidiaries or partners, so it isn't us technically doing it" has to be banned for this to be sensible.

Not to mention going after Twitter for foreign policy views is a glaring 1st Ammendment issue. I think this is a fantasy.

Not to mention going after Twitter for foreign policy views is a glaring 1st Ammendment issue. I think this is a fantasy.

Haven't you been paying attention, at all, to what the state is doing? E.g. the Biden laptop suppressed using national security excuse, which turned out to be a lie.

The end run over 1st amendment by making their proxies in Brussels pass a law that'd require censorship of global networks and set the default. etc.

The bill said "owned or controlled, directly or indirectly". That seems incredibly broad to be honest.

Here's the whole of the relevant section of the law, so people can judge for themselves how broad it is:

(g) Definitions

In this section:

(1) Controlled by a foreign adversary

The term controlled by a foreign adversary means, with respect to a covered company or other entity, that such company or other entity is—

(A) a foreign person that is domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of a foreign adversary country;

(B) an entity with respect to which a foreign person or combination of foreign persons described in subparagraph (A) directly or indirectly own at least a 20 percent stake; or

(C) a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity described in subparagraph (A) or (B).

(2) Covered company

(A) In general

The term covered company means an entity that operates, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that—

 (i) permits a user to create an account or profile to generate, share, and view text, images, videos, real-time communications, or similar content;

 (ii) has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users with respect to at least 2 of the 3 months preceding the date on which a relevant determination of the President is made pursuant to paragraph (3)(B);

 (iii) enables 1 or more users to generate or distribute content that can be viewed by other users of the website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application; and

 (iv) enables 1 or more users to view content generated by other users of the website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application.

(B) Exclusion

The term covered company does not include an entity that operates a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application whose primary purpose is to allow users to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel information and reviews.

(3) Foreign adversary controlled application

The term foreign adversary controlled application means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by—

(A) any of—

 (i) ByteDance, Ltd.;

 (ii) TikTok;

 (iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or

 (iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or

(B) a covered company that—

 (i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and

 (ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—

   (I) a public notice proposing such determination; and

   (II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.

(4) Foreign adversary country

The term foreign adversary country means a country specified in section 4872(d)(2) of title 10, United States Code.

And here's the relevant, referenced section from subsection 4 above:

section 4872(d)(2):

(2) Covered nation.—The term “covered nation” means—

(A) the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea;

(B) the People’s Republic of China;

(C) the Russian Federation; and

(D) the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It's all honestly really quite narrow. It could not be applied to Twitter because Elon isn't 'domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of' 'the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea...the People's Republic of China...the Russian Federation...[or] the Islamic Republic of Iran', nor is Twitter 'directly or indirectly own[ed]' by someone with 'at least a 20 percent stake' who is domiciled, headquartered, doing business in, or organized under the laws of the preceding four countries.

If, someday, we added Saudi Arabia to that list (not something I would put past the left of the Democratic party, a portion of which will never get over Khashoggi), Twitter might be in trouble. Until then, this law would not apply.

The law is quite short. It's also pretty free of the kind of cross-references and surgical edits that make reading many other bills so confusing. Just make sure to understand that most things in the law are defined somewhere.

The concerning part is that the president can make a private classified notice that someone is a foreign adversary that only congress gets to see and then FBI/CIA/Secret Service action can be taken against the corporation without anyone know that its 'legalized' by this bill and by the private notice to congress.

a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity described in subparagraph (A) or (B).

Reminder that they stole $500 million from Trump for the crime of possibly exaggerating the value of his Florida club, which they valued at $18 million dubiously and then turned around and declared that the club if seized is suddenly worth hundreds of millions for the purpose of paying off the fine.

Direction and control seems extremely broad statements, so unless you can provide some legal definition for that, it's rather sinister..

It looks like 'direction or control' usually means some sort of formal relationship. So, a contract that gives voting power over a company or something like that.

Why does this remind me of a completely other unrelated bill during 9/11 that allows for student loan forgiveness basically referring to 9/11 related stuff but 20+ years later was used for student loan forgiveness on things not like 9/11.

I don’t even want to blame congress for this because I think writing laws is hard when you want them to do one thing specifically but have some flexibility so congress doesn’t need to write a new law every time $5k is spent.

The law is much less over-reaching than no_one (and most of the bill's critics) is making it out to be.

Interesting to hear your family's experience. Isn't it the case that Chinese tiktok is superior because the government leans heavily on them to remove dopamine sinks and encourage prosocial behaviour? If anything, perhaps we should be outsourcing moderation to China across the board.

More seriously, there is an inherent tension between wanting a "prosocial positive" tiktok, and an "even-handed arbiter of memetic popularity". That's the case for all social media whether American or Chinese-owned. Either (1) you prevent people from seeing antisocial content that they might enjoy or (2) you allow people to view that content and risk wireheading them or (3) we live in the best of all possible worlds and people naturally choose prosocial content where possible.

To be clear: no one is banning tiktok. They may force ByteDance to divest from the American form of tiktok. ByteDance can then sell it to non-Chinese owners. Or take their ball and go home. Their choice.

I generally agree with people that describe "Do X, or else we'll do Y" as "plans/threats to do Y". In this case, I have zero problem describing "divest from the app, or else it will be banned" as "...planning to ban tiktok".

It would be like arguing "the mobster isn't threatening to break your kneecaps. You can pay back your debts, or else... It's entirely your choice."

Argument by analogy is always flawed. So of course your analogy is not relevant to the matter at hand.

No Chinese company has a right to own anything in the US. They have previously been forced to divest or blocked from purchasing things in the US. I do not accept TicTok refusing to sell a subsidiary to non-Chinese owners as a ban. If they'd rather shut it down than divest, that is entirely on them. In every way unlike a mobster giving me the choice to pay him or to have him cripple me.

Tiktok is getting pushback because the parent company is controlled by China. That is all you need to know, and that's the only bit that matters. Anti-semitism and Gaza are excuses. 'Think of the kids' is an excuse and so are accusations of 'Tiktok killing attention'.

Don't get me wrong, Tiktok performs badly on all of those accusations. But, it is just the latest in a long line of social media companies that all transformed the youth along similar lines.

The US will go to any length to control the global narrative of 'freedom'. Tiktok is the greatest deepest invasion on American soil since communisms capture of academia, and the US is woefully underequipped to push it back. The US uses Israel to complain about Tiktok, because if they revealed the real reason, then it would correctly show the US for the paper tiger it has now become. The US is still the most powerful country in the world. But Pax-Americana is over.

the sheer weirdness of the idea that being a revolutionary is congruent with following public health theater

Freddie deBoer referred to the strange phenomenon of self-professed anarchists protesting in favour of mask mandates as "definitional collapse". See also all the stick that Rage Against the Machine got for requiring proof of vaccination to attend their shows. "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" indeed.

That’s because anarchism is a collectivist economic system. If the anarchist commune votes to make masks mandatory, that isn’t really a contradiction of anarchism.

These were self-identified anarchists protesting in favour of a public mask mandate enforced by the state, not a commune.

True, but as long as they believe the people would vote for it it’s no more of a contradiction than any policy by the bourgeois capitalist state is. For example they probably support gender self-ID or trans bathroom laws because they believe firmly that these would be policy in the revolutionary anarchist commune, even if the laws are implemented and enforced by the hated bourgeois neoliberal capitalist state.

Anarchism seems to have about as consistently applied of a definition as old-school fascism did. Whatever is deemed "good for the people" can be anarchism according to anarchists, with that whim changing on a dime. There are many fewer principled, anti-authoritarian anarchists than there are leftist fantasists with oppositional defiant disorder a la Zack de la Rocha.

Isn't deboer a "Marxist of an old-school variety"?" https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/about He is sort of right about the anarchists but doesn't the same apply to him?

My view is that the claimed utopian intentions of anarchocommunists is less relevant than their behavior while in power, or what they support politically. It is still ironic for an old school marxist to be a critic of anarchists for supporting state repression, when the same contradiction exists in old school marxism.

DeBoer is a strange bird. Yes, he calls himself a Marxist, and has become rather defensive when people ask him to explain the contradictions (in fairness, because he's probably sick of hearing the same questions over and over). But his role as "anti-woke leftist who's a bonafide Marxist but has a ton of right-wing readers" puts him in a weird niche.

My take on him has always been that he's an anarcho-socialist who understands the dangers of the managerial state. There is a theoretical model to thread that needle. I've always said I like anarcho-socialists, but I don't see how you actually thread that needle, how you bring that into practice. How do you defang the managerial state, and how you deal with people who are simply not "wired" for living with the necessary personal aesthetics for anarcho-socialism? (I.E. very concerned with relative status and power games)

He describes himself as such. Other people have referred to him as "post-Marxist" or similar. I don't know enough about Marxism or socialism to know which characterisation is accurate.

I do remember people in the ratsphere saying during the Trump years that a realignment in both political parties was underway, so perhaps the definitional collapse is a necessary ingredient of that.

The underlying assumption by Pro-Israeli voices is that it is impossible for Pro-Israeli content to simply be unpopular. It is impossible that the Israelis are simply bad at memes. There is no actual evidence of bias produced, no evidence of suppression of Israeli creators or boosting of Hamas hashtags, the assumption is that this bias must exist in order for consumers to make the choices they made.

I suppose the evidence would be that we have strong evidence that TikTok is willing to censor/promote/bury certain topics, as that's far more plausible than TikTokkers just not caring about Hong Kong compared to other platforms and causes. We also know that TikTokkers are more antisemitic than other platforms. Correlation does not equal causation (it's possible that anti-semites just prefer TikTok over Instagram for other reasons), hence why I said weak evidence.

To quote Nate Silver,

TikTok’s users are young, and young people are comparatively more sympathetic to Palestine than older ones — but not by the roughly 80:1 ratio that you see in the hashtag distribution. I would not treat this data as dispositive — expression on social media can be contagious and overstate the degree of consensus. But this matches a pattern in other TikTok content that is sensitive to China, such as tags critiquing its policy toward Hong Kong.

But does China care about that patch of middle eastern desert and who controls it, like at all?

Oh they do, and they care a LOT.

Here are the countries that explicitly avoided signing up for any Belt-and-road deals. That list of QUAD countries (US-Aus-Japan-India) and Israel.

Israel and Israel-Saudi relations are the center of how the next generation of trade routes to the west pan out. On one hand you have the West-Israel-Saudi-India corridor. West friendly nations with a poor endpoint in India, but all of Israelis, Saudis & Indians are economically ascendant. On the other hand, you have the Belt-and-road initiative that goes China-Pakistan-Iran-Iraq-Turkey-West.

The Iran-Iraq-Turkey corridor looks comically unrealistic, but if Israel becomes a no-go zone and Saudis pull out then the competitor wins by default. If the Houthis can keep the Suez Canal unstable, then China suddenly finds itself in control of how the next generation of trade routes pan out. If Hamas loses, then Saudi-Israel relations normalize, Houthis become irrelevant and now China is left holding the worst option with B&R.

The Iran-Iraq-Turkey corridor looks comically unrealistic, but if Israel becomes a no-go zone and Saudis pull out then the competitor wins by default. If the Houthis can keep the Suez Canal unstable, then China suddenly finds itself in control of how the next generation of trade routes pan out. If Hamas loses, then Saudi-Israel relations normalize, Houthis become irrelevant and now China is left holding the worst option with B&R.

Is Iran-Iraq-Turkey corridor having any chance to win with sea route around Africa?

The sea route around Africa is already being used because of Suez instability.....and it is already a massive pain in the ass. Shipping companies to the US are preferring to go through the Pacific and Panama rather than go through Africa. Africa is a lot bigger than the maps indicate, and re-entering the mediterrainean from the south-west for European shipping is prohibilively expensive.

To be fair, Victoria (the reddest state in Australia, and around here that still means "leftist" as a holdover from the Cold War) did actually try to get in on that sweet Chinese cash until the federal government said "WTF are you doing, you don't get to negotiate agreements with hostile foreign powers".

I'll say that I don't actually think Labour's in Beijing's pocket. Yeah, they've had a Senator get outed as being bought and paid for, and yeah they're notably soft on China because military's a RW issue, but I don't think it's a full-blown party of traitors, just a bit naïve and/or pandering to their naïve base.

I'll say that I don't actually think Labour's in Beijing's pocket.

I think that Labour is absolutely in Beijing's pocket, but the coalition is also in Beijing's pocket. Australian politics are shockingly corrupt, but the nation itself is so small that keeping our politicians bribed and compliant would be a rounding error on the Chinese diplomacy budget. The bigger restraining factor is the influence of the US - we're still effectively a US vassal state (see the blatantly forced submarine deal), so the major political parties being in the bag for Beijing doesn't mean as much as it would elsewhere.

Bribed or not, they're sure not very compliant. What, are you saying the 14 demands were a fake-out? Beijing is not very good at subtlety and WEIRD politics; people that are doing their bidding tend to act like Sam Dastyari, and most of our politicians don't.

It's not like the USA could actually force us into AUKUS without our agreement; more relevant IMO is our voting public which likes the USA and doesn't like the PRC. And yeah, sure, if the populace did like the PRC I'm sure a lot more politicians would start dancing to Beijing's tune, but that's a counterfactual.

Bribed or not, they're sure not very compliant.

I can't really think of much else that Beijing could really get from them that they aren't already. Political leaders being corrupt doesn't mean they'll do things which get them voted out of office or thrown in jail unless they're not smart enough to see that as the most likely consequence.

It's not like the USA could actually force us into AUKUS without our agreement; more relevant IMO is our voting public which likes the USA and doesn't like the PRC.

The last time the voting public wanted to have a look at our relationship with the US, they elected Gough Whitlam. The message that got sent there was pretty clear to anyone paying attention. Kevin Rudd went through the same thing when he tried to pivot to China - something that the media didn't pay much attention to was the fact that the major players in his leadership spill were all US informants, and we only know that thanks to Julian Assange.

They're mildly pro-Palestinian politically/rhetorically, China is the country that invented thirdworldism after all. But that won't stop them trading with Israel on weapons technology.

See Russia and China's veto of the recent US ceasefire proposal and the US veto of other ceasefire proposals.

The popularity of pro-Palestine content on TikTok is primarily due to the fact that Anglo media is increasingly internationalized. Previous generations of social media content saw very little overlap between culturally distinct communities; sometimes American memes would filter down, but memes from the periphery almost never flowed up to the Anglo metropole. With the third generation of social media and TikTok/Reels that has changed, core Anglo users now often see algorithmically successful content from the Spanish, continental European, Arab and South and Southeast Asian spheres if it goes very viral. Some domains like beauty and fashion (where content is primarily visual) are even more diverse.

The Muslim world is almost a quarter of the world’s population. It’s increasingly middle or upper income, increasingly online, increasingly Anglophone. Many influencers who do well in the West are partly or wholly or Arab descent. Major nations like Indonesia and Malaysia are now pretty much full on social media, and their most viral content often makes it to the West, it’s not siloed. The only thing that unites plebs across the entire Muslim world is contempt for Israel. The degree of hostility usually varies, but because many global Muslims have a simp complex around Arabs (eg replacing local dress with hijab and niqab, or thawb for scholars) there is a special race to prove just how pro-Palestinian you are for peripheral (eg. Malay, black African, Bangladeshi) Muslims groups far from the Arabian peninsula. Witness that Malaysia is for example much more anti-Zionist than Saudi Arabia or the UAE, even though Israel and Palestine are on the other side of the world and are inhabited by people ethnically and culturally very distinct from Southeast Asia(ns). But if you speak to Muslim Malays, they see it as their big and noble duty to the Muslim world to be anti-Israel, serving in this sense a function like a crusade.

Helped along by a rapidly growing and ever more powerful Muslim population in the West, plus some good memes, the Palestine complex seamlessly inserted itself into the generic DEI memeplex that already dominates on these apps. This has been a long time coming and has been obviously on its way since at least 2009, maybe earlier. 18 million Jews, as funny as they may be, can’t out-meme two billion Muslims, especially in the current DEI climate in the Anglosphere. The cultural and commercial energy is with them.

It’s interesting to look at this in the wider context of Zionism, because of course the greatest mistake the Zionists made was believing that the Holy Land could be held by the Jews easily and forever onward. But you have to understand that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many bourgeois Jews and gentiles in Europe considered the Muslim world to be a largely passive, defeated people. By the end of World War 1 pretty much every single Muslim country in the entire world was subordinate - whether under colonial rule or indirect suzerainty - to a European empire of one kind or another (the UK, France, Soviet Union) all led by non-Muslims. The young elite of the Muslim world were secularizing, Europeanizing, going to private schools run by French missionaries, urbanization seemed to see declines in religiosity. Many early Zionists, especially on the Anglo-French side, expected that Europeans would rule over the Arab world, including the Levant, forever. After all, the Ottoman Empire was over, the region was largely scarcely populated, local rulers were most fine with serving European foreign policy. Revolts were regular but mostly easily put down by modest European forces. Neither Arab nationalism nor Islamism were yet major forces to threaten Israeli dominance of Judea and Samaria. Israel had a bright future as an informal outpost of empire surrounded by the statelets of various other client peoples.

They did not predict how much the world would change, and now it seems hopelessly naive to imagine it would not. In hindsight it was very stupid to pick a fight with that many people.

Witness that Malaysia is for example much more anti-Zionist than Saudi Arabia or the UAE, even though Israel and Palestine are on the other side of the world and are inhabited by people ethnically and culturally very distinct from Southeast Asia(ns). But if you speak to Muslim Malays, they see it as their big and noble duty to the Muslim world to be anti-Israel, serving in this sense a function like a crusade.

It would not surprise me if proximity makes a huge difference here.

It's not exactly true that all Muslims coo over Arab culture and Arab states - ask some Iranians how they feel about Arabs one day - but at any rate, it also strikes me as noticeably the case that neighbouring Arab states are quite cool on the Palestinians. They tend to hate Israel (though are periodically willing to do deals with it for advantage), and in that regard are happy to use the Palestinians as a club against Israel, but they don't seem to care about the Palestinians as such. If you look at Egyptian or Jordanian or Lebanese policy towards the Palestinians, sure, none of them like Israel, but none of them like the Palestinians very much either, and they tend to be extremely opposed to letting Palestinians in to their countries or giving them aid. This is not helped by the fact that when they have let Palestinians in it has gone very badly - people still remember Black September.

If you're Malaysian, you are never going to have to deal with Palestinians yourself. Pragmatism doesn't come into it, since neither Israel nor Palestine matter much or you in material terms. So you're free to adopt this worldview where Palestinians are a nation of martyrs for Islam and Israelis are merely monsters. You can support Palestine-as-symbol in isolation from any real people.

I think that the average Egyptian is probably very strongly pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, but Egypt is a military/security forces dictatorship and the leadership views Palestinians as a threat for the same reason as why they view the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat. They don't like large groups of angry, militant people, like Palestinians, whose politics are likely to shake up the status quo and endanger the dictatorship's ability to just peacefully steal public resources and live in luxury. And anyway, Egypt is in no position to help the Palestinians even if the government wanted to. Its economy is doing poorly right now. There is also the related factor that the pro-Palestinian Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea are cutting into Egypt's Suez Canal transit revenues.

Supporting Palestine and hating Palestinians aren't mutually exclusive positions. If I was Egypt and I hated Palestinians I would very much be pro Palestine because that means the Palestinians stay the fuck away and you have somewhere to expel palestinians in your land to.

This is correct. Supporting Palestine is a separate question to that of one's affection for Palestinian people.

And I would also try to distinguish between support for Palestine as a symbol and support for Palestine in the sense of actually wanting to help Palestinian people in concrete terms. In the Arab world there is very high symbolic support for Palestine, but relatively little practical support for materially aiding them. If you ask the average Egyptian on the street whether the government should do something to help Palestinians, they will probably say yes - but I think the Egyptian people overall are unlikely to put much pressure on the government to that effect, and the government certainly doesn't want to.

It’s interesting to look at this in the wider context of Zionism, because of course the greatest mistake the Zionists made was believing that the Holy Land could be held by the Jews easily and forever onward. But you have to understand that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many bourgeois Jews and gentiles in Europe considered the Muslim world to be a largely passive, defeated people. By the end of World War 1 pretty much every single Muslim country in the entire world was subordinate - whether under colonial rule or indirect suzerainty - to a European empire of one kind or another (the UK, France, Soviet Union) all led by non-Muslims. The young elite of the Muslim world were secularizing, Europeanizing, going to private schools run by French missionaries, urbanization seemed to see declines in religiosity. Many early Zionists, especially on the Anglo-French side, expected that Europeans would rule over the Arab world, including the Levant, forever. After all, the Ottoman Empire was over, the region was largely scarcely populated, local rulers were most fine with serving European foreign policy. Revolts were regular but mostly easily put down by modest European forces. Neither Arab nationalism nor Islamism were yet major forces to threaten Israeli dominance of Judea and Samaria. Israel had a bright future as an informal outpost of empire surrounded by the statelets of various other client peoples.

To be fair, at the time nearly everywhere on earth was under the thumb of a European empire(or the USA or Japan). South Africa made the same mistake because the continued dominance of Europeans over the black and brown masses seemed as obvious as day and night to everyone at the time.

They did not predict how much the world would change, and now it seems hopelessly naive to imagine it would not. In hindsight it was very stupid to pick a fight with that many people.

Except Jews have a local majority, and, significantly, are winning. Perhaps not in the court of public opinion, but Israel is essentially getting what it wants.

South Africa made the same mistake because the continued dominance of Europeans over the black and brown masses seemed as obvious as day and night to everyone at the time.

I'm still trying to figure out what changed.

In South Africa specifically, it was a numbers game. A South Africa which banned contraception among the white population in the 70s might still be under minority rule.

Globally, that’s part of it, but part of it is also catch up growth. Europeans are generally better at things which actually matter than Africans and Indians, but not by a factor of 25 or so. Just because Britain got there before India doesn’t mean India won’t eventually get a lot closer- and there’s a lot more Indians than britons. Add to that that European countries are very, very tired.

In terms of the main empires, Britain and Russia lost theirs due to debt related structural problems(Russia’s being caused by structural issues with their economy, Britain’s by war). Germany lost a war. The US decided it preferred economic domination. That leaves France, which had some insurgencies to deal with but largely withdrew of its own accord.

A South Africa which banned contraception among the white population in the 70s might still be under minority rule.

The South Africa birthrates situation is interesting but I doubt this would be the case. Even when whites had relatively high birthrates (3+ tfr), the black population were at 6+ tfr. Today they’re converging and both white and black South Africans have pretty low birthrates, but without mass immigration from Europe the Boers would have had to have Amish-tier tfr to maintain their demographic position. I think the main issue for them was that they largely opposed non-Boer European immigration pretty much from the 1880s onward and - certainly after home rule was substantially granted in 1910 - acted consistently to block the settlement of other Europeans in South Africa to preserve the Afrikaner position. If they had allowed millions of poor Europeans to settle in SA in the early 20th century, the situation there would be very different today.

Romania managed to double it's TFR through decree 770. It's not totally implausible that white South Africans could have had a 5+ birthrate with similar policies- it was higher than Romania's in the mid 60's, which is probably high enough to make the bantustan plan work.

Of course the South African white population weren't going to undergo decree 770, Romania did it because it was a dictatorship. But sudden very large increases in TFR are what happens when you ban contraceptives. Wiki says that the white South African fertility rate was 3.1 in 1970, which if banning contraception had the same effect as decree 770 would give a fertility rate above 6. Of course contraception was probably somewhat less prevalent to begin with because of an already high fertility rate, so the effect would probably be more mild, but even a tfr of 4-5 would give a lot of breathing room for the Boers to figure out how to adjust their population to increase the white percentage.

As an aside, it's interesting how the apartheid government never even tried to adjust population. Not through white immigration, not through population control programs for blacks, not through attempts to boost the native white fertility rate. Obviously it's a hard problem, but it's interesting that they didn't even try.

As an aside, it's interesting how the apartheid government never even tried to adjust population. Not through white immigration, not through population control programs for blacks, not through attempts to boost the native white fertility rate. Obviously it's a hard problem, but it's interesting that they didn't even try.

It seems like governments mostly focus on solving acute problems rather than long-term progressive ones. The payoff for fixing birthrates wouldn't come for at least twenty years after the fact, only once the added batches of children begin reaching maturity, while the costs would begin immediately. Governments are typically run by people who only expect to be in power for short durations, so for them it's better to deal with staving off coups and electoral defeats. That means focusing on who gets the $$$ and making the right noises.

There's also a weird tendency for normies to deny all matters pertaining to biology in pretty much any context. Possibly, this due to narcisism. Or maybe it's about optimizing for personal social advancement over coordinating against civilization threats. It is as though they sit at the very precipice of oblivion maintaining attitudes of perfect nonchalance. As long as they do not fall in, they are content; and those who do fall in do not have the luxury of further action. That's essentially what happened to the white South Africans, and probably all other fallen societies.

The apartheid government did try to limit birthrates through population planning policy from 1974. But attempts were mainly messaging; my suspicion is that many Afrikaner leaders were deeply religious Protestants and would have resisted more radical methods to limit black fertility. Promoting white fertility would have also been tough, because the country had pretty porous borders and contraception would also presumably still be available to the black population, who could obviously sell it.

I’m also very skeptical of the decree 770 approach, birth rates began falling again soon after as people began circumventing restrictions and altering behavior. Also I think incentives are very different in a communist society, if the state strongly recommends you do something it’s the singular route to professional/social advancement. The threats the state can levy are typically weaker in a capitalist society.

In terms of big mistakes for the Boers, first place is not being in favor of more European immigration even if it meant diluting Afrikaner power and second place is probably not retreating to the Western Cape en masse from the late 1960s. What white South Africans needed to pursue was a two state solution on non-bantustan terms. Hand over the majority of the country, retreat to Western cape, sign single market and economic integration. This would probably have been internationally acceptable until the mid/late-1970s. I agree that by the time the serious anti-apartheid movement reached its height in the late 1980s there was pretty much no alternative course. The problem was they were an agrarian people and didn’t want to leave all that good land in the rest of the country.

Well yes, I don’t think decree 770 would have worked as well in South Africa as it did in Romania, but given that apartheid fell apart when it did due to a demographic time bomb for a regime that did, at the end of the day, have moral scruples, a rise in birthrate could have bought the Afrikaners enough time to find a third option between ‘let the kafirs in charge’ and ‘cartoonishly evil enough to make us blanch’. And banning contraception probably would raise the birthrate enough to make a difference. Ultimately communist Romania is our only datapoint for direct comparison, and that’s unfortunate because it’s apples to oranges for a variety of reasons. But the large birthrate decline over the course of the seventies among SA whites is probably due almost entirely to contraception becoming more widely available, and IIRC the example of similarly-low-state-capacity Latin America shows that legal restrictions on contraception really affect how quickly it penetrates the population, so I think at the very least a South African decree 770 for whites would have kept Afrikaner birthrates above 3 for much longer, and in a best case scenario for continued boer dominance results in a baby boom over the seventies that allows apartheid to find a third option when it becomes clear it’s not a tenable long term system in the eighties.

Some possibilities:

  1. West went through demographic transition first. Not enough warm bodies (and fewer top-tier people) to hold up the economy and preserve the West's lead.
  2. The military gap still exists, but it's smaller, or just different. It's no longer Maxim guns against spears, it's missiles against AKs and IEDs, and that makes it harder to hold large amounts of territory.
  3. Social structures and memeplexes evolved to resist white colonisation. I think that one of our Indian regulars made the point once that the Westerners who went to the third world a hundred years ago were usually from our top 25% or so. They were handpicked administrators, adventurers, traders and soldiers. Which made Westerners seem more impressive and intimidating, and harder to resist. As colonies persisted, and especially now with the internet, people from the Third World had more contact with Westerners and more opportunities to find effective methods of resistance.
  4. Two world wars sapped the West's resources (excluding America) and made most Westerners very cynical about their own right to rule; the USSR also supported anti-Western movements and ideologies.

There's a model of Biden foreign policy that's very simple and predictive. I will present it in full.

"The foreign policy of the Biden administration is whatever will make the price of gasoline go down before the election."

It's super effective!

For example, what is Biden's policy towards Venezuela, a brutal dictatorship which is responsible for a large chunk of the U.S. border crisis, and which has threatened to seize the territory of neighboring Guyana? Why, ease the sanctions, of course.

What about Biden's position on Iran, a country which funds terror throughout the world, supports the Houthis in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and is rapidly progressing on its goal to build nuclear weapons? Why, ease the sanctions, of course.

But surely Russia, the Greatest Threat to Democracy Since Hitler, will feel the wrath of U.S. sanctions. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting them in Ukraine. We help send hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men into the meat grinder to die. Because it's worth it. With stakes this high, there's no way that Biden would let his lust for cheap gasoline affect the conflict. Right, Anakin, right?

Today, Biden has urged Ukraine to stop its strikes on Russian oil infrastructure. It was causing gasoline futures to increase.

That's it boys. We've found the red line that Ukraine musn't cross. Biden is not very bright, and he's certainly lost a step. But an old dog still knows some tricks and he knows one. If you want to get re-elected you need cheap gas. As usual, the U.S. will support pretty much any tinpot dictator as long as they have oil. Sometimes, it really is that stupid.

Feels like a rather isolated demand for rigor, no?

I’m thinking along the same lines as @Walterodim here. We attribute anything that remotely involves the executive branch to Biden’s personal action. In reality, the branch is a nebulous blob, one under pressure from every friendly and hostile interest. Sometimes you get a compromise—Bush Sr. did end up signing a tax increase. The ACA is a mess, but it still hasn’t been repealed. That border wall is still looking pretty rough. We can’t always get what we want.

Biden is not very bright, and he's certainly lost a step

Biden is not in charge of Biden's foreign policy. Biden is not in charge of much of anything anymore.

For example, what is Biden's policy towards Venezuela, a brutal dictatorship which is responsible for a large chunk of the U.S. border crisis,

When Ukraine is everything but democratic because they are in a state of war it is excused. Yet, those under threat from the US are supposed to be completely democratic despite America's long history of sponoring terrorist groups, assassinating leaders and trying to colour revolution countries. If Venezuela didn't hold a tight ship they would have ended up like Iraq, Syria, or Libya. Putting countries in a state of perpetual state of semi war in order to destabilize them increases migration. The US has sanctioned Venezuela, funded an armed coup attempt and continuously worked to undermine the country. As with most of America's foreign policy misadventures it ends up with a massive flood of migrants. The best way to stop the migrant flow is to stop the aggressive posturing. Stealing Venezuelan assets makes the situation in Venezuela worse which encourages emigration.

What about Biden's position on Iran, a country which funds terror throughout the world,

When Ukraine gets invaded we all have to help them. When Iraq gets invaded, Iran is supposedly supposed to just quietly accept it. Why would they? It is a neighbouring country with deep cultural ties to Iran. Of course they are going to help them defend themselves. Iran has given support to groups under direct military threat. Destablizing Iran would mean another giant refugee crisis. Iranians are the most similar people to westerners in that part of the world and if anything they should be our natural allies. Stealing their assets is not only immoral and absurd, it is directly damaging to Europe. When Hillary Clinton was sponsoring Jihadists in Syria which flooded Europe with migrants Iran was helping Syria stay together. We should thank Iran for their support against ISIS.

American policy has been aggressively attacking countries that aren't subservient to the United States and causing continuous blowback.

It is a neighbouring country with deep cultural ties to Iran. Of course they are going to help them defend themselves.

"Funding terrorist networks to destabilize the government" is a funny way to phrase "help them defend themselves."

@Dean's takedown of your understanding of Venezuelan history is pretty thorough, but this is a truly impressive howler. Iran hates Iraq. It's not just Sunni vs. Shia (though that is a huge source of animosity.) The Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s began with Iraq's invasion of Iran.

Iranians are the most similar people to westerners in that part of the world and if anything they should be our natural allies.

... Yeah, Iran used to be a Western ally. We propped up the Shah for that reason, and you may recall, there was a revolution. Which is where we are now, with an implacably hostile religious theocracy in charge as a result of our earlier "alliance" with them.

You seem to have a thesis ("American imperialism is the root of all evil") to which you are attempting to fit every conflict in the world. Believe it or not, other countries are quite capable of starting armed conflicts, suffering coups and instability, and turning themselves into economic basket cases, without America being behind it.

Iran hates Iraq

Iran has good relations with Iraq's shia population and has offered Iraq both help with rebuilding and military aid. Iranians definitely don't get along with Baathist and the Sunnis, but there are strong ties to groups living near Iran. Parts of Iraq are ethnically similar to Iran and the current Iraqi government enjoys good relations with Iran. Regardless, when Iran's neighbour is attacked by an aggressive power that could very well invade Iran it makes sense for Iran to offer support.

there was a revolution. Which is where we are now, with an implacably hostile religious theocracy in charge as a result of our earlier "alliance" with them.

I wonder why the Iranians revolted against a corrupt foreign puppet who siphoned off natural resources to British petroleum. British petroleum was the most profitable British company in the beginning of the 1900s. Iran had been invaded in 1941 and then had a dictator installed in 1953. There was good reason for supporting revolution. Despite sanctions and despite living in a continuous state of semi war Iran has managed to create a stable state that produces few refugees.

You seem to have a thesis ("American imperialism is the root of all evil") to which you are attempting to fit every conflict in the world.

Americans have an exceptional ability to get involved in every corner of the planet. If there is a village in Afghanistan that isn't ruled by them, they will bomb it for 20+ years. The US is in a league of its own when it comes to starting wars and meddling in other countries. Not all problems are caused by the US but the US is a driving force behind instability.

Actually quite a large percentage of illegals migrants to the UK crossing on small boats are Iranians. They certainly do produce refugees.

Americans have an exceptional ability to get involved in every corner of the planet.

This is the motte, and yet not the same as an implicit claim that the Americans are exceptionally involved in every corner of the planet, let alone in every administrative decision of the planet, let alone vis-a-vis the ability of local actors.

That the Americans have more ability to project power to distant corners than others is quite different than that Americans have more ability to be involved than local powers who may not be able to project far, but are actually local.

Given that the exceptional US ability to get involved in every corner of the planet is dependent on having allies and partners in every corner of the planet able or willing to facilitate their involvement, the ability of the US to effectively influence needs to be compared to places where it lacks critical enablers- and thus who they are.

If there is a village in Afghanistan that isn't ruled by them, they will bomb it for 20+ years.

Interesting claim. Identify the villages, please, and why the bombings were on grounds of not being ruled by the Americans, as opposed to other reasons that other non-US powers wouldn't emulate if placed in equivalent contexts.

The US is in a league of its own when it comes to starting wars and meddling in other countries.

Are we conflating wars and meddling as the same category, and are we comparing to historical trends?

If it's just in terms of starting wars, the US is unexceptional in historical terms. The only interesting point in relative terms is its relative ability in the Pax Americana, which is notable for being one of the most peaceful periods in human history precisely because the US had- and exercised- unique ability to pick conflicts.

If the argument is simply in ability to meddle in non-war-instigating forms, this is a reflection of evolving technology and economic growth over time, which the American system coincided with and encouraged, but which is not a uniquely American pathology in nature. The Americans certainly conduct more cyber-espionage than the colonial empires of old ever did- this is because the colonial empires lacked computer networks to spy on, not the willingness.

If the argument is simply about the size and capability of the US, because it's big, that's neither an argument of moral inclination nor an argument that the size and capability actually have been disproportionate in starting wars and meddling relative to the size and capability of other actors.

Not all problems are caused by the US but the US is a driving force behind instability.

'Driving force' is a meaningless term bar a relative comparison of forces, which you have not and consistently do not provide comparisons to.

The Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s began with Iraq's invasion of Iran.

I feel like this is often just a footnote for Americans, particularly those of us that are millennial or younger, but it's worth noting that this wasn't some mild skirmish or even a moderately large war, it is one of the largest, deadliest wars of the past 75 years. While other civil and intrastate conflicts rival or exceed it, Iran-Iraq is probably the most deadly post-WW2 interstate conflict. The use of chemical weapons and prolonged exchanges give it a WW1 vibe, but with the addition of cruise missiles and attacks on nuclear facilities.

The post-Saddam era has thawed those old hatreds, but referring to these nations as having "deep cultural ties" is quite the turn of phrase to use.

It's also the origin point of suicide bombing as an accepted technique of islamic terrorism according to some. Curtis makes this point in Hypernormalization.

Iran's culture of martyrdom combined with war propaganda and mechanized warfare created an islamic equivalent to the kamikaze phenomenon (complete with pilots crashing their planes into targets), and its exportation to sunni radical groups has unfortunately shaped much of the XXIst century.

The post-Saddam era has thawed those old hatreds, but referring to these nations as having "deep cultural ties" is quite the turn of phrase to use.

Depends on the parts you are talking about. The shia in Iraq hated Saddam and didn't want a war with Iran. Iraq is a highly diverse country, and Iran's ties to the different groups aren't uniform. There are groups that Iran has strong ties to and there are groups that Iran has strong hatred for.

It's a pretty common thesis, but one mostly associated with the left and Noam Chomsky in particular. It's weird seeing it coming from the right.

What is weird is to see an attempt to go back to the neocon consensus when part of Trump's appeal was to criticize their failures, including their over the top hostility towards other great powers.

I don't think being a fanboy of Russia, China, Iran is the way to go, but it is healthy in general, including for the right wing in particular to be skeptical of American imperialism. Especially since modern American militarism is of a woke empire that is increasingly hostile to right wingers.

If some people on the right have a more mature take after decades of neocon failures that they have experienced, and also due to that hostility then that is a good thing.

And of course, from the time of George Washington to today, it is a legitimate and correct agenda to not want your country subordinate to foreign lobbies. This is an aspect of American involvement in foreign conflicts. Imperial overreach and war with Iran is not in the interest of the American people.

From a broader perspective than just American interest, I prefer the time Russians and other Europeans traded with each other, over the current situation and while sane protectionism, or reacting to harmful trading and other practices against you is fine, I am skeptical of what I see as the sentiment of cutting off other powers. Or plans that lead us into war.

It is better for the world to try to work with them, than escalate things into conflict and topple heir countries. This isn't just a right wing take, but it is certainly the case that right wingers in western countries should not let themselves be sacrificed for a global empire that is against them both ideologically and even as ethnic groups. Plus, pragmatically there isn't an existential threat from Russia, nor China, and certainly not from Iran and warmongering raises risks.

Deescalation and an attempt of a modus vivendi between different power blocks is the better idea. Especially in the current circumstances. Part of that does include having a capable military incidentally. Being strong while choosing a good deal over both one sided appeasement nor trying to topple other countries and their leadership is the better alternative than what American elites did, especially when looking at China. Which is to be pro China as China was growing in power, and turn against it when it had already exceeded USA in productive capacity and became the richest country when accounting for purchasing power parity.

Would you agree that Russia invading other countries is, in a vacuum, bad?

And that an invasion is less likely to happen if the invader expects an economic and human bloodbath?

Because it sounds like you’re arguing against continued U.S. support. But that’s an incredibly perverse incentive for Russia. To any would-be invader, really.

Yes for the first question.

To see things only from the perspective of dissuading Russian aggression and not American aggression against other countries is flawed and usually comes from bias.

Because it sounds like you’re arguing against continued U.S. support. But that’s an incredibly perverse incentive for Russia. To any would-be invader, really.

It doesn't sound like I am arguing about either more or less US support actually. What I am arguing is that American foreign policy is not about dissuading aggression but machiavelian and willing to both invade countries, commit coups, and also instigate proxy wars.

I do believe that supporting a negotiated peace is the better alternative than the continued meat grinder. American influence over Ukraine is such to be able to push things in that direction and in fact it seems that it was the UK (likely acting with USA support) that stopped the real possibility of a peace between Ukraine and Russia.

It is in fact a perverse incentive to focus only on Russian aggression and excuse American aggression. American behavior is going to affect the behavior of countries like Russia too.

In general, I don't see only dangers from American imperialism but also from China and Russia becoming more beligerent. My preference and advice for trying to deescalate is therefore not only directed towards the USA. Although certainly I am going to focus more about where there is more pushback and what is more relevant to the audience I am talking to. There aren't here any sizable number of Chinese imperialists arguing that China should invade Taiwan because of getting revenge over century of humiliation or by promoting only America bad narrative while pretending that Chinese imperialism would be no problem. Or arguing for China to invade multiple of its neighbors because they are in an American led coalition to destroy China. The bad behavior of each power also affect each other, just like a willingness to not push past certain red lines and having trade which is consistent with some protectionism and showing some willingness to compromise which can also incentivize more pro cooperation behavior.

Ultimately, the faction of American imperialists are not out to dissuade imperialism but themselves are a threat to world peace, and additionally to the rights of peoples under their rule. To only focus on Russia, and not acknowledge the problem of American foreign policy in terms of destructive coups, color revolutions, including what resulted in aggressive moves including shelling of more Russian areas in Ukraine and in theaters such as Iraq, Syria, Lybia, Israel, with promises of further escalation in places like Iran, is not how you avoid moral hazard but how you ensure it remains there. Both in terms of American bad behavior, and encouraging other countries. Especially when the rhetoric of escalation building towards a situation closer to WW3 is there. This isn't Iraq where the destructive incompetence of belligerent tunnel vision is important but still lower stakes. The stakes, especially when one also considers nukes, couldn't be higher.

It is better for the world to try to work with them, than escalate things into conflict and topple heir countries.

And this is all fine rhetoric if you believe in the Chomskyite "everything is the USs fault" point of view. But looking at how things actually happened instead, we note that it was not the US or the West that tried to topple Russia, but Russia which tried to topple Ukraine.

I don't believe everything is the US fault, but I do believe neocon agenda USA is a bad actor that holds zero respect for international law and doesn't even respect its own people. That the neocon faction acts in an obviously machiavelian manner and even promotes such arguments from a might is right perspective then plays a motte and bailey with moralism.

Whether in Iraq, Syria, Libya, or wanting to bomb Iran, Israel, or yes Ukraine as well, the American foreign policy has been a destructive one that shows little respect to international law.

It isn't the only bad actor. Actually one of the problem with being maximally beligerent is that is infectious, and gives others the excuse to act likewise. In my ideal world great powers would try to constrain each other bad behavior and also due to their own interest oppose each others imperialistic tyrannical behavior against other countries. While cooperating in win win ways.

but Russia which tried to topple Ukraine.

You are forgetting the color revolution in Ukraine with American participation, and Ukrainian shelling of Russian areas and laws against Russian language. While the USA has been training Ukrainians and Ukraine have been having their Azov regiments. There is also American support for removing Assad, and toppling Gaddafi, Saddam, talking of bombing Iran and a big history of warmongering and regime change worldwide. And the rhetoric about removing Putin and supporting opposition. Then there are the coups of the CIA worldwide, of which Putin is especially aware of.

People are not going to be gullible and not take this in mind just because it would be in the interest of neocons to do so.

Also, the extreme far leftist agendas promoted by the USA that relate to their hatred of Putin for not going along, and to an extend to his opposition to them. Not to mention the fact that some of the oligarchs that looted Russia that left from Putin, fled to the USA and have been advocating for regime change.

Of course Russia and China have their own belligerence and imperialistic agendas. Russians are responsible for their invasion and previously supporting rebels. If China invades Taiwan they would be responsible for that as they have their responsibility for the bullying of their neighbors in terms of fishing rights and more.

This still doesn't make American imperialists any less bad. Nor does it make sense to support them under the guise of pro west sentiment.

Importantly, in addition to their other sins, neocon elites are people who aren't at all respecting national self determination and dislike the people they rule. They don't respect freedoms neither and are supportive of cancel culture and authoritarianism at home while pretending to be bringing liberation abroad when they bomb other countries or try to escalate conflicts. They don't value the interests of the people they rule as a group and try to enforce national self hatred and prioritization of foreign immigrants, and are following tyrannical policies that lead to the destruction of european ethnic groups.

the West

The neocon agenda sharers are fundamentally anti west. In that they and Dugin, or Chomsky are all in the same side. They only differ on the type of tyrant they want the west to be ruled by, and maybe in regards to some of the details about which groups should be on top. But neither are for the west as a civilization and western peoples. Nor do they respect their rights.

They are further from being the west, than the Communists were Russia/Ukraine and all other countries under their rule.

I see a lot of rhetoric here, but nothing about the facts on the ground that no Western country invaded Russia, but Russia invaded Ukraine.

It is quite possible to have a more nuanced position than the extremely simplistic way you paint things

Often times, "nuance" is a way to attempt to use small second, third, and fourth order effects as an excuse to ignore enormous first-order effects.

Unlike you who want an one sided perspective, I am not going to defend the Russian invasion. I am just going to condemn American imperialists for invading multiple countries and trying to engineer proxy war and overstep deliberately on the red line of countries like Russia, knowing this would cause war. And even justifying it after the fact as a worthy investment since they see the meat grinder as good if Russians are dying.

Also the rhetoric about toppling Putin and dismantling Russia, which when it comes from GAE that has done this throughout the world, it has teeth.

Although Russia has become more militarily capable and built further its industry and their alliance with China and economic ties grew, and moreover multiple other countries have started increasingly trading without using the dollar.

It is anti-neocon not Pro China invading Taiwan or Russia invading Ukraine. In fact i would rather that China avoids invading Taiwan in the future and would consider that a world destabilizing move. One that should be dissuaded.

It is your perspective that tries to create a simplistic Russia bad, GAE good here.

Often times, "nuance" is a way to attempt to use small second, third, and fourth order effects as an excuse to ignore enormous first-order effects.

You have been consistently ignoring American invasions of various countries, color revolutions, and American attempts to engineer the conflict that happened.

The reality is that neocon USA is not the defender of world peace against the evil Chinese and Russians but a menace in its own right. One that had been a bigger menace after fall of soviet union than the other two, although that is also because of the weaker position of Russia and China. And that also also encourages the elites of such countries to act in a similar manner, bringing things closer to WW3. One could also argue that further imperialism by China or Russia, also encourages more bad American behavior.

The correct take is to favor elites that see their interest in undermining each others warmongering and also see some value in cooperation. Things were closer in that direction in regards to Russian, American and Chinese relationship at one point. And it wasn't the Russian invasion that started changing this. This came after the color revolution in Ukraine and after the destruction of various countries and after rise of rhetoric about bringing the same recipe to China and Russia. Of course the rise of China has played its role too.

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If Chomsky emerged into the public sphere now with the set of views that he holds, chances are good that he would quickly be branded right-wing.

Isn't he still around?

Yeah, but he's barely active anymore and really seemed to be at death's door in his most recent appearances. I imagine he gets a pass because of that and because how much of a childhood idol he was for many elites.

I believe in the milder claim that sometimes American adventure abroad is negative sum leading to bad results in local countries but not all bad things come from American adventure (and sometimes American adventure does good things though less often).

That's a MUCH milder claim than the kind of analysis which looks at a problem, finds a way America (or some other Western power) affected one of the parties in the past, and places the blame there.

There are good reasons for leftists and rightists to share the belief that third-worlders don't have moral agency.

The US has sanctioned Venezuela, funded an armed coup attempt and continuously worked to undermine the country. As with most of America's foreign policy misadventures it ends up with a massive flood of migrants.

Venezuelans are fleeing because 25 years of catastrophic socialist policies have completely destroyed the economy. Leaving the current government in power is the single biggest cause of migrant outflows, and they will continue as long as the Chavistas are in control.

And how do you think running Venezuela into the ground by sanctioning them will impact migrant flows? Migrants flee Venezuela because it is bad, so making it worse should lead to more migrants. Clearly, the US hasn't been able to topple Venezuela's government, and the US has made it worse in Venezuela. In other words, foreign meddling once again lead to a migrant crisis.

The US has a long history of backing coups in Latin America, funding militias and creating banana republics. This has made the region less stable and created more incentives for people to leave.

I would agree that the current US approach to Venezuela isn't working, and sanctions rarely do work (see Cuba, Spain, Iran, Russia, so on). But the US is entitled to refuse to trade with anyone it feels like. Maybe if Venezuelans were actually starving and dying in large numbers, there might be an obligation to send food, but AFAIK things aren't that bad in VZ.

But the US is entitled to refuse to trade with anyone it feels like

Maybe it is, but it shouldn't be.

Why you think so?

There is an argument that, as the de facto economic hegemon, the US should let as many people as possible come to the table to deal, but at the same time, as expressed elsewhere, there are fairly valid reasons for why the US has done the economic-warfare things it has done.

The US has a long history of backing coups in Latin America, funding militias and creating banana republics. This has made the region less stable and created more incentives for people to leave.

American involvement also helped produce the two most stable, productive South American countries in Chile and Uruguay. I have plenty of negative things to say about the CIA, but backing the guys that throw communists out of helicopters is actually a good solution to communist rule. Not good for the communists, of course, but it's in everyone's long-run interest to remove communists from governance.

The most stable and productive Latin American country is Costa Rica, which has a nice business allowing upper-middle class boomers to retire in luxury. Anti-communist but not due to US coups.

American involvement also helped produce the two most stable, productive South American countries in Chile and Uruguay.

Defining "stable" and "productive" is a headache all by itself, but even if I assume you mean "political stability" and "economic prosperity", I think that thanking the USA for those in the two countries you mentioned makes little sense.

What happened in Chile was a series of quasi-fortunate events. Unlike leftists would like you to believe, Pinochet began his regime being just as much socialist as Allende; the CIA trusted him merely because he hated commies, but that's about it; he had no economic ideas for the country at all, so basically continued doing the same as his predecesor but with an CIA stamp of approval (he even met with Fidel Castro! Seriously!). The only reason why things took a free market turn was due to Milton Friedman (who at that time was advising Xiaoping's China to end communism there) meeting with Pinochet once and writing him a letter explaining what he should to turn things around. That's it. Never did the CIA or the Pentagon had anything to do with the so-called "Chilean Miracle". If it wasn't for that visit and the involvement of the Chicago Boys (José Piñera, Hernán Büchi, etc.) in Pinochet's rule, the CIA would've merrily go along with whatever crap Pinochet would've thought that made things better as long as he continued throwning tankies off helicopters.

While I myself consider the Chilean model to be a very good example of how to achieve economic well-being, there's no doubt it that caused signifcant social unrest that climaxed in the 2019 protests, and even if you consider to be the protests to be unworthy of merit (just because people dislike economic policies doesn't necesarily mean they're bad, even if legitimitate concerns like the massive unemployement in the just-out-of-college-with-student-debt demographic and the privileges the goverment continued to hand over to the military elite where there), it shows there are consequences that go beyond economics to take into consideration when a country formulates policies.

I can't comment much on the country's political stability, and it's true that there wasn't any dictatorship after Pinochet, but social unrest, justified or not, is never a sign of it, and even if we assume stopping communism justifies a strongman with an iron fist, I don't think the 3000 people killed during his regime were all a threat to the country.

Regarding Uruguay, as someone who was born and lives there...please. First of all, lumping those two countries together makes it sound that the CIA was also involved in the country's military junta rule, and it wasn't at all. It's true that they collaborated with the democratically elected National Party goverment of the sixties and the following presidency of Jorge Pacheco Areco's as part of the Condor Plan by training our military and police forces in counter-subversion techniques including torture (one of the most famous murders carried out by left-wing guerillas in that turmoil of an period was of a CIA operative named Dan Mitrone, who had also worked in Brazil with the military junta that was there at the time), but by the time the tanks rolled in 1973 and the dictatorship started, the buck had already ended for the US; the left wing guerrillas were completely defeated, and the military junta began its rule with no foreign involvement of any kind (why it happened deserves a post of it's own).

So why is Uruguay so politically stable? We...just sort of are that way, I guess? Democracy and the rule of law is in our DNA: the military junta was an anomaly, and in 200 years there were only two other dictatorships in the country, which were resolved as peacefully as the last one and which shed little blood. Our parties institutional resilience is both a cause and proof of this: of the four major political parties in the country, just one (CA) started recently; Broad Front, the main left-wing coalition, started over 50 years ago, while both the aforementioned National Party and Colorado Party have been around ever since the country's beginnings. There are cracks which are starting to show however; ever since the end of the pandemic, the tripartite coaltion led by the NP, which won in no small part due to several corruption scandals by the Broad Front, has been mired on scandals of its own which are arguably worse, one of which involves a very important Senator who has been prosectued for a long history of sexual assault of minors, while the Colorado Party, which once was pretty much the country's dominant party, has become a shell of its former self and lives off its memories, has plenty of candidates for their next primary but no leadership (their leader shockingly resigned and left politics during the pandemic due to disagremeents with the goverment, which considering the guy's reputation I suppose had much to do with its lack of care for accountability and transparency). Add the fact that we have become more polarized, and yeah, we got problems.

As for "productive", we're like the third world that everyone would like to live in if they had to live anywhere in the third word, but that's it; our economy isn't doing horribly but it isn't doing that great either. The fact that we're considered both one of the most "stable" and "productive" countries in Latin America speaks little of us and volumes of how fucked up the region is.

Thanks for this, I appreciate the corrective effort, particularly regarding Uruguay. Duly noted and internalized.

Venezuela’s situation is due to it being run by socialists, not due to to American sanctions. While Venezuela may not be literally communist in the sense of Eastern block collective farms and shit, they’re making the kind of constant macroeconomic mistakes you would associate with having leaders who studied Marxist economics and ruined their own economy that way, combined with a healthy dose of short-sighted populism.

The counter factual to ‘Venezuela, but competently governed’ is Iran, which is also an oppressive petrostate heavily sanctioned by the USA, and it’s in much better shape than Venezuela even if it’s not quite as nice a country to live in as the US or Western Europe(notably few Iranians decide to try to walk to the EU the way Venezuelans walk to America, after all).

Venezuela’s collapse since 2014 has very little to do with US sanctions. At high oil prices, the socialist system implemented by Maduro could just about function due to oil exports. After prices crashed in 2014, Venezuela’s shitty, hard to refine oil became much less valuable (much like Canada’s tar sands).

Again, US policy had very little to do with it. Refugee outflows from Venezuela will continue until the socialist system is dismantled. That is not necessarily an argument for forced regime change, only an observation as to the reality of migrant dynamics.

And how do you think running Venezuela into the ground by sanctioning them will impact migrant flows?

Why should anyone believe that US sanctions are 'running Venezuela into the ground' relative to the effect of the Venezuelan governance?

The Venezuelan government even 20 years ago was led by a clique who struggled with basic concepts like 'if you dictate that private businesses sell items at or below cost of procurement, private businesses will stop stocking items' or 'if you send people with guns to take over specialized businesses, the business people with specialized knowledge will leave.' It instituted a deliberate system of personality cult, attacks (literal and legal) on opposition actors and political opponents, and cultivating gangs as a national security strategy who then went on create a domestic security climate on par with Iraq. It routinely picked diplomatic and economic fights with its biggest trading partners while willfully and eagerly trying to align with countries less known for their quality of governance and far more known for their police states and party-empowering corruption. These were all chosen through the agency of Venezuela's own governmental leaders, for two arguably three political generations now. The same general clique of incompetents is still in power, and has been for long enough for an entire demographic cohort to have grown up under their management.

By contrast, you believe the relative impact of the US sanctions is...?

(This is a direct question, by the way.)

For all that you regularly like to cite US malfeasance as the cause of whatever cause of whatever blowback of the hour, I don't believe I've ever seen you actually provide a position of relative blame of US actions vis-a-vis other actors. Without any sense of relative allocation of input to output, this is just the cliche hyperagency/hypoagency paradigm that leaves agency with the US while everyone else is a passive recipient of their will, where even their own policy decisions are forced upon them by the US rather than, well, chosen both in response to and to shape US policy themselves.

While this is certainly flattering to US prowess in the same way that anti-semetic propaganda is empowering for the mythical Jew, it's not particularly well informed, and rather patronizing to the many invested and career anti-american politicians around the world who work hard to make their own policy disasters with hefty externalities but do so without American direction or demands. Give them their credit!

The sanction argument often comes up with Cuba (ie Cuba’s communism would be successful but for the sanctions). I always find this argument funny because it is saying “if communism could participate in the capitalist system it would be better proving communism works!”

It’s a valid critique. Protestantism didn’t do so well in 1700s France, either, but not because Protestantism isn’t a viable culture; but because the surrounding system intentionally prevented it from functioning.

If capitalists don’t care to distinguish between “we actively sabotaged your system” and “your system doesn’t work”, perhaps by a tacit appeal to social Darwinism, then sure, I’ll accept that; but by the same token, I’ll point to the birth rates and say “just wait.”

I’ll point to the birth rates and say “just wait.”

African subsistence farmers have the superior system?

I don’t think the appeal to Protestantism is the same. It is like saying “Protestantism would’ve succeed in France if the Protestants agreed to recognize the supremacy of the Pope”

There are three general sets of US sanctions / trade restrictions on Cuba, which for political convenience/tradition are often grouped together under the misnomer of 'blockade.'

Group one, and the longest and the original source of the blockade moniker, is the Embargo. The Embargo restricts US citizens, companies, and foreign subsidiaries of US companies from doing trade with Cuba outside of specific Humanitarian niches (i.e. food). The Embargo doesn't legally stop others from doing so, and while there have been arguments to the effect that it was a soft-ban- mainly because of past US threats to stop giving foreign aid to countries that did non-food business to Cuba- this is neither a blockade nor an obstacle to those who saw greater value from business with Cuba than in aid from the US. Foreign companies, including European ones integrated with (and thus at risk to) the US economy can and have done trade with Cuba without sanctions retaliation, especially in the last 3 decades since the Cold War. Rather, the reason the Europeans and Chinese and others don't invest much in the Cuban is that Cuba is notoriously bad at paying back its loans, and has been since the cold war when it was a regular frustration of the Soviets, and the early-2000s belief that foreign companies could get into the Cuban market before the American companies did but reap the American money flowing into Cuba weren't worth the steady losses. The countries continuing to offer Cuba loans or sell things in exchange things for IOUs are typically doing so for ideological interests / strategic concessions (Venezuela, Russia, China), rather than economic.

Group two, and sometimes cited but rarely carried further on inspection, are the more targeted sanctions, typically on senior leaders and for humanitarian abuses. These are not massive impacts on the broader economy, but do limit the ability of Cuban party elites and security officials to establish themselves as Russian-style oligarchs in the international system, as they become non-viable business interests even as they monopolize business opportunities at scale, but few people seriously argue that a Venezuela or Russian oligarchic model is some moral imperative as a step forward and that non-sanctioning these people would create some significant material change for the population.

Group three, and the one that modern Cuba actually would have the most grounds on saying impacts them but which is the furthest from the traditional Embargo rhetoric, is Cuba's status as a state sponsor of terrorism under post-9-11 counter-terrorism-finance legislation. For those unaware, that's the actual and wide-reaching legislation which unlike the Embargo isn't just for US-actors, but very much an international 'if you want to do business with or through the US, you won't with the countries on this list' dynamic. No one actually denies that Cuba's Cold War history of waging revolution would qualify, or that Cuba hosts people or groups that qualify for the list, there's just irregular (and usually weak) pressure that it just shouldn't matter that much / that Cuba is really hosting them to facilitate peace. Cuba was on the list pretty much from the start of the post-9-11 changes, but since the state list is as much a political tool as anything else, Obama dropped Cuba in 2015 when it was pursuing normalization with the expectation of a Hillary hand-off (which, implicitly, would have meant an election win where the Cuban vote in Florida didn't derail the Democrats), but Trump won and... didn't actually re-apply it until 2021, right before leaving office, and the Biden administration has maintained the same core assessment for upholding it that Cuba wasn't cooperating to general expectations. So not actually a partisan wedge issue, and not a 'anything but the predecessor' American policy decision.

Overall, the US Embargo had an effect but was mostly a propaganda deflection for the Communist system, general sanctions aren't particularly relevant, but the state sponsor of terrorism restrictions have real teeth... but, of course, have to compete with the point that Cuba is still run by the same sort of people who believe state control of the economy is a moral as well as strategic security for the party-state.

No one actually denies that Cuba's Cold War history of waging revolution would qualify, or that Cuba hosts people or groups that qualify for the list,

For those who don't know- Cuba doesn't just host the odd American criminal who can mouth far left ideology(Asata Shakur). It literally hosts a Hezbollah base, among other features in a collection of not really caring about the past history of people who show up making anti-American noises.

What is US supposed to do to get Maduro out of power that would work better than what it hasn't done already and wouldn't leave to a huge amount of migrants? Because to me all it seems there's left would be either an invasion or endless Cuba-style "well, if we keep the sanctions on a bit longer then surely they'll work this time".

Coup the country and replace him with a friendly dictator with a lighter hand?

Not that I support more adventurism. But keep in mind, this is Venezuela we're talking about, having less people try to escape the country than at present isn't as high a bar as in many places.

That’s already been tried, and it didn’t work.

I don't remember them trying. Unless that one dude and his handful of mercenaries were actually CIA, but it seemed far fetched. Did I miss a larger effort?

They briefly tried soon after Chavez was first elected but it failed pretty quickly.

If Biden wanted to reduce petrol prices, he wouldn't have banned keystone XL on day 1. January 20th, the first thing he did was block a pipeline. Then he put a moratorium on exploration in public lands. Just recently he froze export permits for natural gas (imagine being European at this point, trusting in an 'ally' that behaves like this).

Trump was genuinely pro-oil and gas, thus US oil production reached record highs under Biden due to delayed-action investment. But Biden has been relatively anti-fossil fuel.

Trump was genuinely pro-oil and gas, thus US oil production reached record highs under Biden due to delayed-action investment.

That's not at all evident in the data. It looks like we need to thank Obama for the upward trend in US oil production. That or people are overcrediting their favorite president for trends that are mostly driven by things other than US executive policy.

Hmm, on balance it looks like a rather complicated story of leases v permits by each president. There are of course non-executive factors involved, the fracking boom for one.

However, I maintain that Trump was more pro-fossil fuel than Biden. Oil companies voted with their pockets:

Little wonder that Trump Victory, the joint fundraising committee of Trump’s campaign and the RNC, has raked in $9.3m from fossil fuel donors in 2019-2020, while its counterpart Biden Victory has raised a meager $40,465 from fossil fuel donors in the same period, according to Open Secrets.

Bill Miller, a major industry lobbyist and consultant in Austin, told the Associated Press that while many fossil fuel companies were hurt by the pandemic, parts of the industry had begun to recover. “It’s the kind of industry that remembers their friends through thick and thin, and Trump is their friend.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/09/big-oil-trump-campaign-donations-fossil-fuel-industry

Biden's environmental and foreign policy goals are entirely subservient to the price of gasoline.

For example, in 2022, when oil was over $100/barrel the Biden administration was chiding U.S. producers for not drilling more. That's when the administration decided to sell about 50% of the strategic petroleum reserve to lower prices before the midterms.

On the other hand, it's unclear if Keystone would lower U.S. pump prices at all. It was mostly designed to connect Canadian production with U.S. Gulf Coast ports.

Just recently he froze export permits for natural gas

This is a great example that demonstrates my model. Freezing exports lowers U.S. natural gas prices, prioritizing cheap energy for U.S. voters at the cost of foreign relations with allies. U.S. natural gas is the cheapest it has ever been.

Note that none of this makes Biden "pro oil and gas". He doesn't want energy producers making money. He just wants cheap gas before the election, whether it comes from Russia, Venezuela, Iran, or the Permian.

Use my model and U.S. foreign policy makes a lot more sense.

That's when the administration decided to sell about 50% of the strategic petroleum reserve to lower prices before the midterms.

To be fair to Biden, this was actually a good use of reserves as he sold high and then refilled it at a lower price

At the very least, this is a case of a stopped clock being right once

EDIT: I accept the correction below.

To be fair to Biden, this was actually a good use of reserves as he sold high and then refilled it at a lower price.

That's fake news unfortunately.

The SPR has NOT been refilled. There were some trivial purchases but you can barely seem them on the graph: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcsstus1&f=m

The major sales came to a conclusion after the midterms, but they were still draining the SPR until May of 2023, with prices below $80/barrel.

It’s also possible that supporting a small increase in the price of gas is political digestible but having gas prices get back to 4 dollars a gallon is it

Note that blocking Keystone was explicitly about getting Americans to stop using oil:

(d) The Keystone XL pipeline disserves the U.S. national interest. The United States and the world face a climate crisis. That crisis must be met with action on a scale and at a speed commensurate with the need to avoid setting the world on a dangerous, potentially catastrophic, climate trajectory. At home, we will combat the crisis with an ambitious plan to build back better, designed to both reduce harmful emissions and create good clean-energy jobs. Our domestic efforts must go hand in hand with U.S. diplomatic engagement. Because most greenhouse gas emissions originate beyond our borders, such engagement is more necessary and urgent than ever. The United States must be in a position to exercise vigorous climate leadership in order to achieve a significant increase in global climate action and put the world on a sustainable climate pathway. Leaving the Keystone XL pipeline permit in place would not be consistent with my Administration's economic and climate imperatives.

More recently, he celebrated blocking Russian oil as part of an overarching strategy to force people to stop using oil:

Biden added, though, that the crisis "should motivate" the United States to "accelerate the transition to clean energy." For American families, though, Biden admitted investments in clean energy "will not lower energy prices for families," but said that transforming the economy to "run on electric vehicles powered by clean energy with tax credits to help American families winterize their homes, and use less energy, that will help." "If we do what we can, it will mean that no one has to worry about the price of gas in the future," Biden said.

The administration has been very clear that it is important to get Americans to stop using so much oil and one of the ways to do that is to constrict the supply. You probably won't hear this rhetoric much during the election, but it's not exactly been some secret plot.

Yes, I agree that his rhetoric and actions don't match up. That's kind of my point.

Keep in mind that Russian oil isn't blocked, nor is the U.S. trying to block it. They are trying to "price cap" Russian oil - allowing Russia to sell it but hopefully make less money. Success has been mixed at best. Oil and gasoline are fungible and globally traded. So even if we don't buy Russian oil directly it keeps prices low.

And how would you explain Biden telling Ukraine to stop bombing refineries?

There are certain actions, like massive subsidies for EV's, can achieve Biden's decarbonization goal while ALSO lowering gas prices. This is fully compatible with my model. I believe that Biden does care somewhat about the environment and foreign relations.

But when the administration must choose, they choose lower gas prices every time.

They choose lower gas prices in proximity to elections, sure. It's a cynical strategy, but a common one.

Note that both of us are using "they" in a fashion that isn't actually how these things work. When we talk about "the Biden Administration", this shorthand misses that there are actors with conflicting interests in the administration. Without even being overly cynical about Biden's current mental capacity, there's just no way for a President to be personally invested in the details of every policy that they're signing off on. Adding this internal conflict into the picture explains why there are policies that are clearly intended (and even stated!) to be kneecapping American energy production while other policies try to create short-run stopgaps that avoid Americans getting too wound up about $5/gallon gas.

The export permits for natural gas thing was retaliation for Texas’s defiance at the border, and the rest of it was before the rise in oil prices.

When Biden entered office in January 2021, oil prices were like $50/bbl, historically cheap and well below the point at which you might lose an election because of expensive oil. Dems don’t - as you note wrt the change under Trump - always prioritize oil price, and will push through environmentalist policies where they can. But if oil is at $90/bbl after having been low for a while, for the politically capable ones (and Biden is or was such an operator), cheaper oil temporarily overtakes global warming in priority since it might prevent an actual election defeat.

And to steelman Biden here, there's an argument that goes something like this:

"I want to help the environment, but I can't do that if I lose the election, therefore I have to hurt the environment temporarily to win the election".

Taken to its logical conclusion, this argument is a fully generalizable superweapon to anything you want. But in this case, it's probably fair enough.

Sure which is pretty shitty. Pretend to be for A to trick the voters so you can do B.

I do not think it is particularly shitty. If Biden was making campaign promises of keeping the price of gas low, with no intend to keep them, that would be shitty. Instead, this is just an election gift targeting that part of the population which is still undecided. My model of the world says "At least 90% of the US voters are aware of the fact that Trump is more pro oil than Biden". But most voters are not perfectly rational beings who carefully consider the terms of slowing climate change with having to pay more for gas in their utility and then vote for whomever is more likely to satisfy their preferences over the next term.

It is common knowledge that advertisements use hot people because they make ads work better than ads with median people in them. In a perfectly rational world, everyone would adjust for that whenever they see an ad with a hot person in it and there would be no advantage left to such ads. This is not the world we live in because most people don't work that way.

Yes. Environmental goals come with serious tradeoffs. The path to decarbonization will be difficult and make us poorer. The climate activists understand that and are fine with that. But most voters are not.

There is a propaganda effort to make it seem that there are no tradeoffs, that EV's and solar panels will make use richer and Create Jobs. It's simply not true.

Ah yes, as opposed to the neocon rallying cry of "kick their ass and take their gas" or those stupid stickers that rednecks were putting on gas pumps when gas got to 5 dollars a gallon with biden saying "I did this!"

Speak plainly. What is the point of this post? Is it just to point out some realpolitik? Because America always watches out for some oil interests. Regardless of which party is in power.

This is also the classic... our enemies are stupid and weak and ugly but also smart, tricky and strong.

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or those stupid stickers that rednecks were putting on gas pumps when gas got to 5 dollars a gallon with biden saying "I did this!"

Those were pretty funny, you have to admit.

This is what my boomer relatives used to say to me when I pointed out fake news or forwards they used to post and send me. "I don't care, it is funny anyway", "I agree with what they are trying to say even if this is a lie (boo outgroup)".

It's a classic, but it's also wrong, and I'm tired of seeing it repeated as an aphorism.

Take Einstein, who is good at physics but bad at designing refrigerators and being President of Israel. If you care about keeping your food cold and being an effective advocate for Israeli interests, he'd seem pretty stupid to you. If you judged a doctor on his handwriting or a parapalegic on his ability to run, they'd seem stupid, too.

Outside of partisan politics, it is indeed possible for someone to be incredibly stupid in something and incredibly smart in another. Linus Pauling recommending superdoses of vitamin C. Noam Chomsky in anything that has to do with politics. Ben Carson in literally every category but neurosurgery. We know that these contradictions exist in real life, that these nuances do happen, not just with people, but with groups.

But then the quippy liberal says 'fascists blah blah, weak and strong', as if it means anything, if it isn't just them quoting something trite and banal and passing it off as wisdom if you don't think about it for more than a minute.

Why is it a "quippy liberal"? Do conservatives care not about doublethink? I hold quite a few beliefs that would be marked conservative. Conservatives will point out the same kind of thing is happening when liberals trot out narratives that trump is too stupid to run a casino yet also somehow the greatest threat to democracy the world has ever seen.

It isn't a trite and banal one off. It is a pretty effective test to notice when a piece of media is propagandizing for one side or another.

I wouldn't say mentioning it is inherently pointing to fascism, although reductio ad hitlerum has clearly linked it in many people's minds. That and being on Umberto Eco's list, but basically all political discourse is on that list. So I would discount that entirely.

I'm also confused as to your conflation of this particular bon mot with domain specific expertise. That is not what it is trying to point out at all.

international happenings:

-princess Kate announced that she has cancer. for some reason it was such an important secret that she first released a doctored photo of her with her kids which only fed the rumor mill. kind of a letdown from the batshit crazy conspiracies the internet was cooking up

-after vetoing a bunch of gaza ceasefire proposals at the UN, the US finally put forward one of its own, and China and Russia promptly vetoed it back.

-mass shooting in a Russian concert hall. the US embassy was warning about an attack a couple of weeks ago. ukrainians, islamists, false flag, some other mystery group?

princess Kate announced that she has cancer. for some reason it was such an important secret that she first released a doctored photo of her with her kids

God I hate celebrity gossip. Imagine not knowing how tell your kids you have cancer while your 10-year-old reads rumors that his dad is having an affair, that his parents are getting divorced, and that his mom has an eating disorder.

mass shooting in a Russian concert hall. the US embassy was warning about an attack a couple of weeks ago. ukrainians, islamists, false flag, some other mystery group?

The Islamic State claimed responsibility and US intelligence confirmed it.

The Islamic State claimed responsibility and US intelligence confirmed it.

The Russians just confirmed they had contacts on the Ukrainian side. They were caught trying to escape to Ukraine.

just confirmed

Both you and the parent comment keep using this word. I am not a native speaker, but for me, 'to confirm' has somewhat of a connotation of "to establish a claim as a truth by a trustworthy authority".

Given that this the actors in question are notoriously unreliable, I would prefer to use the verb 'to claim' instead.

Given that this the actors in question are notoriously unreliable,

There's nothing wrong with claiming that the Russian government is notoriously unreliable, but not in the context of competing claims between them and the US government. If I listed out all the fraudulent and fake news stories that had members of the US intelligence community as sources I'd be here all week.

Kind of indicative they didn't have meaningful contacts in Ukraine.

If you're on the run from Russian authorities, trying to flee across the most militarized part of the Russian border with the most civilian control points, an occupation state apparatus tailored to identifying and mitigating dissident mobilization and ability to move, entire deployed military formations with contiguous trench fortifications, a country-wide mine field, and then rushing the armed defenders with standing 'shoot on sight' orders is...

...well it's a bold strategy, but not a particularly intelligent one when the country in question has demonstrated the ability to covertly operate well within Russian territory for extended periods of time.

If you’d just killed hundred of Russian civilians, where would you go?

Finland? If we're limited to countries sharing land borders with Russia

Aside from the border being closed, I would assume that Finland takes a dim attitude towards mass murderers, even if they're mass murderers of Russians. Ukraine, on the other hand, is a barely-functional society for which "hating Russia" is a number one priority, and trying to lay low in Ukraine for long enough to figure out how to get to IS controlled territory in some shithole in the caucuses or central asia is a plan that's at least a plausible level of dumb.

Aside from the border being closed, I would assume that Finland takes a dim attitude towards mass murderers, even if they're mass murderers of Russians.

Finland has one of the largest unmonitored borders in the region, as only the SE-most is actually populated and monitored. You could literally walk across most of it and the only thing to notice would be if your vehicle was obviously abandoned near the road. The first the Finns would really be aware of is if you walked into their cities... which might get you turned over, or maybe not, but if you can stage the weapons and such to conduct a major terrorist attack, you can stash the hiking gear and supplies to go cross-country.

Ukraine, on the other hand, is a barely-functional society for which "hating Russia" is a number one priority, and trying to lay low in Ukraine for long enough to figure out how to get to IS controlled territory in some shithole in the caucuses or central asia is a plan that's at least a plausible level of dumb.

To get to Ukraine from Russia, you have to go through mutliple no-civilian zones, drive through a papers-please occupational region, and go through two generally parallel trench systems with a minefield inbetween.

The far, far simpler option than either of these is, of course, to go through the caucuses or central asia, or just hide in rural russia for awhile.

The far, far simpler option than either of these is, of course, to go through the caucuses or central asia, or just hide in rural russia for awhile.

Yeah but a lot of those countries are on pretty good terms with Russia and would actively aid in a manhunt if pressured. I imagine Finland would if they knew you were in their country, but I picked Finland because if you keep your head down and avoid notice you can easily slip away to anywhere else in the EU.

That the country governments are on good terms with Russia and would actively aid in a manhunt is less relevant than the fact that those countries- and borders- have less state capacity to launch an effective manhunt in a time-relevant manner.

If you're willing to walk for a few days, most borders in the world remain largely unmonitored and easy to bypass. Border crossings are (relatively) heavily monitored, but going 10 miles away where there are no roads will generally be lucky to have a fence, if that. After that, basic identity-tied document swap faciltiation (new IDs, credit cards, cell phones, and someone with a truck waiting for you) and you can generally drop off the net more effectively than in Europe.

The Finnish-Russian land border is completely closed at the moment.

The border crossings are completely closed. The border is a completely different question, especially for the sort of people who might not want to go through the publicly monitored entrance/exit.

Well, yes, if you're motivated enough then you can go just about anywhere, I guess, but the border closure makes Finland a particularly pointless choice.

Actually, the Finnish government might have considered such an attempt a jackpot, since it would have meant that their plan for formalizing pushbacks as policy would have received a major boost and it would have been very difficult for the opposition to block it from being passed in expedited bill processing.

This kind of comment would be perfect for the Transnational Thursday thread.

I will expand a bit on that and say that the OP is not a good top level culture war post.

First, it raises three different items of news whose only connection to each other is that they happened on the same day. This makes a bad experience for readers with selective interests because they can not selectively skip all that boring geopolitics to gossip about the royals or whatever.

Second, none of them qualify as CW stories as posted, IMO.

If some prominent woke groups were calling the reporting on Kate a distraction from the fact that a lot of non-white, less privileged women also have cancer, that would be a culture war story.

The UN vote on Gaza is probably a CW story, but it would require a bit more fleshing out. How did the proposals differ? What is the narrative from either side? Did the US put forward a resolution which it knew would be vetoed?

The concert hall section is probably the best part of the submission, with the caveat that not much is certain at this stage. Still a bit more substance would be helpful. (Why would Daesh hate Russia? Putin's support of Assad, perhaps? Of course, Putin is suspected to have orchestrated terror attacks before.)

I've noticed an increasing amount of chatter from both sides about dropping out of society -- to build a homestead, or to buy a house in some foreign, isolated part of the planet. Of course, "I want to live rural!" guys have been around for years, and actually living rural in 2024 is a pretty raw deal for most. But it's telling so many have made the leap from, "I want to live small", to "I want to live completely alone (with spouse/kid/dog)". I'm sure much of this springs from a genuine love for sustainable living, the quiet life, the country and all of its joys. But the vibe I get is a subtle rising tide of misanthropy, of decreasing faith in the common man possibly regardless of one's leaning. As someone else put it,

the extremist american patriot dream is to aquire assets that allow them to live independently from the country they "love" away from all society and culture on a metaphorical if not literal island

My question is: Have you noticed this too? Maybe my circle's blowing this out of proportion, but maybe not.

If so, what's going on here?

I've got a personal theory for what's happening. See, I'm not much of a gamer, but I play two games regularly: Fortnite and PUBG. Really they're just for stimulation while I chill out and listen to music/podcasts, but something pretty damn annoying happens almost every time. I'll be relaxing in-game, looking for loot at a calm pace, when some absolute beast of a player flies in out of nowhere and shreds my health before I can blink. Every time it feels like bullshit because I'm not even trying to compete at that level. All multiplayer games have separate queues for "casual" and "ranked", but inescapably there's a handful of sweat lords who've memorized the meta, who know exactly where the best guns and vehicles are, who throw their weight around in casual games and ruin the experience for everyone else.

And when this happens, my natural reaction isn't "This game's matchmaking has failed", it's "I'm tired of these dickheads, I should play single player games instead". In other words, this is an organizational failure. Humans are naturally excellent at organizing themselves into the right groups -- you throw hundreds of kids into the same school, and very quickly the correct circles will form. There's bound to be a lot of kids with nothing in common, but this is obvious to both parties, so they simply avoid interaction. All groups are autonomous and self-organized, and it works really well.

Online groups in 2024 are algorithm-organized. The internet has taken on a kind of 1800s-Manchester-factory-worker housing feel where everyone's crammed into the same tiny spaces despite our differences. We are now constantly aware of how the other half lives, what they are saying. It's like your teacher forcing you to let the annoying kid play kickball with your group, to sit at your lunch table, etc. Going online feels abrasive in a way it really didn't back then. In 2009 you'd hop on some forum and it felt exactly like hanging out with friends, a 100% positive and chill experience. Going online now is like hanging out with everybody. Sometimes it's good, but a lot of the time it sucks. I don't want to know what the guys I hated in high school think of politics, or movies, or anything. But now I'm going to hear it, over and over and over.

Maybe I'm nostalgic, right? 2009 was a long time ago, I was basically a kid...

But probably not. Because I have a solid point of comparison: I understand Japanese, and spend a ton of time on the Japanese web. What inspired this post is actually a single website, which is 5channel. It's the largest anonymous bulletin board on earth, but more accurately it's a collection of around 1000 bulletin boards with virtually zero moderation. You can post wherever you want, say whatever you want, and... it works. Not because the Japanese are polite or something -- they can get wild -- but because if you just let humans organize themselves, things work out. This echoes my own time as an internet moderator, where I first believed that I could shape the board through my actions, but later realized the board's quality was beyond my control, it's an autonomous process that you have little say in.

I pay $4 a month to post on 5channel. I've made hundreds of posts there, and yet no one's realized I'm a white foreigner. Despite the language barrier, I post there because it's sorta like the English web was back in 2009. There's none of the bullshit, it's a site for nerds to make dumb jokes and chat about nerd stuff. When I browse reddit or twitter or 4chan, there's a lingering unpleasant feeling, but when I go to 5ch it's just dumb fun. It's exactly like the net I grew up with. You compare the two, and the English web just feels... sick.

I'm 100% ready to believe this pessimism in the air comes from our inability to self-organize. We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community and so we live with a slight psychological chip on our shoulder but we're not sure why. What's funny is my narcissistic tendencies fade the more I use 5channel. When you're stuck around people that challenge your identity all the time, you get defensive and sorta retreat back into yourself. But when you're around people who aren't going to constantly irritate you or challenge who you are, you start to relax and open up. You may even turn into a bit of an optimist. Conversely, it's this constant feeling of "Someone's gonna try and screw with me" that sorta defines how English web feels now, why everyone's so antsy and defensive and unwilling to let their irony shield down.

Human groups are naturally pretty small. In nature, whenever any major divide happens, tribes just split off and go separate ways. Being forced into a semi-permanent state of clash really can't be good for us, despite how "normal" this has become.

Can't splinter in the English web? How so Do you feel technically unable to do it, psychologically, or you can't find others who want a smaller community?

I guess the popularity of such trends will inevitably grow when home office work becomes normalized, for example.

Going online now is like hanging out with everybody.

Filter bubbles are still a thing, but they mostly filter by ideology, not by obnoxiousness.

I think a large point of it is that many online interactions are one-off. In the non-iterated prisoner's dilemma, defection is a viable strategy.

If you had a constant group below Dunbar's number, then everyone would learn who the main assholes are and employ any number of strategies (server bans, teaming up vs them, dropping out of games when they join, teamkilling them) against them to effectively push them out of the group.

I predict that for most casual games, there should be an obvious solution: fill the game with bots. Most of the chat is nothing which LLMs could not manage, and training a neural net to play like a noob or mid-level player should not be very hard. Or you could try to use machine learning (or even plain old statistical analysis) to figure out which players are mostly causing others to drop out of the game and then put them into matches with similar players instead.

I predict that for most casual games, there should be an obvious solution: fill the game with bots.

They're already filled with bots. The AI sucks though.

Games like Overwatch 2 are fairly punishing to "toxic" players, and they'll deliver a million slaps on the wrist + an eventual account ban, but this fails to solve the human organization problem here, which is: Assholes deserve to play games too. I don't want to play baseball with someone I hate, but he should still have the freedom to play baseball in his own way -- just with someone who's not me.

Overwatch, League of Legends, CS2, none of these games understand this. They're trying to enforce a universal standard of politeness onto online games, which is ridiculous, because for some people mic spamming and shouting slurs is why it's fun. Society should not be telling us, "If you can't have fun in the exact way I tell you to, you're not allowed to have fun."

CS2 has something called "Trust factor", which is an invisible metric that determines how likely you are to cheat. Matchmaking sorts players by trust factor, so if you have a low trust factor, you're getting a game full of cheaters. The question is -- why don't we do this with "toxic" players? Instead of banning them for using the gamer word, just lower their niceness score and match them into the in-game equivalent of 4chan. We created this problem with algorithms, so let's solve it with them too.

The question is -- why don't we do this with "toxic" players?

Dota 2 already does. There is what's colloquially called "hidden pools". If you get reported for flaming in chat or being obnoxious you start getting preferentially matchmaked with other such people until your hidden metric for obnoxiousness/abuse improves.

I know this because I pretty consistently play in a team with a hothead who just can't help himself but start flaming in all chat, usually the following few games we get matched next are also with people like that. When I que solo, it's fine. When we que together and he has been "a good boy [tm]" the matchmaking is fine also, until he starts talking shit again in all chat. Then it's back to the hidden pool.

I was under the impression that the low priority pool is not "hidden", but very explicit - when you go there, when you're on a premade team with someone who goes there and when your report sends someone there. Or do you mean to claim that there's a separate hidden pool on top of the explicit LP pool? Why'd they do that?

Oh there definitely is an explicit low priority pool, but before you get slapped with that one, you can be assigned a hidden pool where it just ques you with other people who are getting excessive reports be it for verbal abuse or griefing. To this day the hidden pools remain unacknowledged by valve publicly.

While they did say they have "hidden pools" for hackers and voice/text abuse in CSgo/CS2 they have not admitted to the same in Dota2. Both games are running on the same base engine and both games also are part of valve's Overwatch pseudo AI moderation system.

Have you noticed this too?

A little bit, but not undertaken (or even intended, I think) very seriously. There are some families living on a couple of acres, with a goat and a little garden, and the mom staying and homeschooling the kids. But they are not serious about the garden or the goat, they're just kind of a nice hobby to have if you're going to be a housewife in an era full of appliances, and less expensive than other hobbies. They tend to be the same people who go to church a lot, and are part of a small (but sometimes physically distant) church with a reasonable tight community, who kind of want to belong to a more physically close village sort of unit, but not enough to actually make it happen.

I don't know if that kind of thing is more common than when I was a kid. I was homeschooled, and there were a lot of families who liked homesteading aesthetics, raising one livestock animal, once, and reading Little House on the Prairie, and a few families who took that unexpectedly far.

What you've described is unlike my experience of the internet in Current Year. I spend a lot of time here and on DSL, which are highly selected discussion spaces. My Instagram feed is the one clothing brand I chose, three people I know in real life, and art and craft videos for eternity, which I also chose. My Facebook feed is mostly local plants and day trip sort of places, and a little bit people I know. Occasionally a person I know says something political, and then if they do it a few times I unfollow them. My experience of the internet feels very narrow, like I would like to expand it a bit, but am not sure how.

This seems basically unrelated to whether or not I would rather live in a city vs rural area. In rural areas, I'm more likely to interact with people who are unlike me, because they're the only people I can find to interact with. It's interesting, to an extent, I like having an excuse to get to know people unlike myself. There'll be some old person talking about their (literal) dream or somebody's wedding or funeral to go to I don't know that well. In a city, I mostly find people at least as selected for similar interests as I do online, which can be comfortable, but also gets a bit cramped. Whenever I've had an opportunity to interact in a friendly and non-political way with people unlike myself, it has generally been interesting, and I've enjoyed it, at least in retrospect.

I think we’ve lost the ability to self organize to a large degree. There’s a sort of (https://www.adbusters.org/articles-coded/what-is-hypernormalization) hyper normalization that I’m observing in almost every aspect of modern life. It’s like everyone knows that the system doesn’t work anymore that our leaders don’t have any desire to fix things, most of the pre-centralized system institutions are largely withered away, and no one has any inkling of a way to get back to functioning society. We know, they know, they know we know, and none of it gets better because nobody has a vision of the future that doesn’t seem hopelessly naive.

I watch old shows from the past and what strikes me most is the lack of modern nihilism. People seemed to put up leaders who legitimately wanted to solve whatever the problem was, and the writers tended to play that straight up. The person not only wanted to do good, but he was allowed to defeat evil and fix the problems and we actually had a happy ending. Jedi were not opportunistic nihilists in it for themselves. The rebellion wanted a democracy for everyone. There was the sense that people in charge of things were altruistic and not self serving and that problems were fixable. It’s mostly gone. People just sort of default to a grim dark idea of the world in which nothing works, nothing gets fixed, and everyone has an angle.

And I think the nihilist mindset is part of why we no longer make those communities. If everything is unfixable and everyone is on the take, there’s no point in trying. Just get yous,protect yourself and your family, and try to not rely on other people and systems any more than you actually need to.

People seemed to put up leaders who legitimately wanted to solve whatever the problem was, and the writers tended to play that straight up. The person not only wanted to do good, but he was allowed to defeat evil and fix the problems and we actually had a happy ending.

I'm reminded here of a Tanner Greer piece at City Journal I read recently, on the popularity of dystopian YA novels (one of the many pieces drawn upon in an effortpost I'm currently mentally composing, involving Weberian rationalization, software “eating the world,” “computer says ‘no’,” Jonathan Nolan TV series, “Karens” wanting to talk to a manager, the TSA, Benjamin Boyce interviewing Aydin Paladin, and the Butlerian Jihad):

This is the defining feature of the YA fictional society: powerful, inscrutable authorities with a mysterious and obsessive interest in the protagonist. Sometimes the hidden hands of this hidden world are benign. More often, they do evil. But the intentions behind these spying eyes do not much matter. Be they vile or kind, they inevitably create the kind of protagonist about whom twenty-first century America loves to read: a young hero defined by her frustration with, or outright hostility toward, every system of authority that she encounters.

The resonance these stories have with the life of the twenty-first-century American teenager is obvious. The stories are, as perceptive film critic Jonathan McAlmont observes, “very much about living in a world where parents discuss things out of earshot.” The protagonists all struggle “to perform the role that grownups have assigned [them], despite the fact that [they] are still coming to terms” with their own identity and purpose. Teenage frustration with a lack of agency is the fuel that propels Anglophone pop culture. The prewar imagescape of these novels supplies extra emotional resonance, styling the problem of out-of-date authority as a holdover from a stuffier, more restrictive past. For the hero of a YA tale, this general problem would be resolved in the final, climactic battle with the powers that be. In his or her quest for victory, the protagonist would journey from pawn to player. There are few transformations for which the modern teenager yearns more.

And yet, these stories also increasingly resonate with modern adults as well:

This obsession is grounded in experience. It is not just twenty-first-century teenagers who feel buffeted by forces beyond their control. Bearing the brunt of a recession we did not cause, facing disastrous wars the stakes of which were unclear at best, the citizens of the liberal West spent the last two decades nursing the wounds of lost agency. This loss extends past grand politics. A series of studies have traced this process in the United States. Increasingly, Americans “bowl alone”: the social clubs, civic societies, and congregations that once gave normal people meaningful social responsibilities have declined significantly. Most issue-oriented action groups that remain are staffed by professionals who seek only money from their members. As a growing number of Americans live in crowded cities, government becomes more remote and less responsive to any individual’s control—a problem exacerbated by the increasingly national cast of American politics. More important still, one-third of Americans now find themselves employed by corporations made impersonal by their scale. The decisions that determine the daily rounds of the office drone are made in faraway boardrooms—rooms, one might say, “where adults discuss things out of earshot.” What decides the destiny of Western man? Credit scores he has only intermittent access to. Regulations he has not read. HR codes he had no part in writing.

For the most part, the citizens of the West have accepted this. They have learned to comply with expert directives. They have learned to endure by filing complaints. They have learned to ask first when faced with any problem: “Can I speak to the manager?” They have accustomed themselves to life as a data point.

…

Yet if these novels speak to the sum of our anxieties, they are a poor guide to escaping them. In the world of YA speculative fiction, those who possess such power cannot be trusted. Even worse than possessing power is to seek it: our fables teach that to desire responsibility is to be corrupted by it. They depict greatness as a thing to be selected, not striven, for. This fantasy is well fit for an elite class whose standing is decided by admissions boards, but a poor guide for an elite class tasked with actually leading our communities.

The key part that stood out to me was the final two paragraphs:

Yet outside of the modern fairy realm, power is not given, but created. The morality of the twenty-first-century fairy tale is in fact a road map to paralysis. Its heroes begin as the playthings of manipulative and illegitimate authorities, their goodness made clear by their victimhood. But faced with this illicit order, nothing can be done: even rebellion can be trusted only to unwilling rebels. Our fairy tales imagine a world where only those who do not want power are deemed fit to use it. Translate that back to reality, and we are left with a world where all power is, and will always be, deemed illegitimate. No magic curses justify the power of our managerial class; ultimately, their legitimacy rests on how well they wield it.

In the stories of the modern fairy realm we see the seeds of stagnation. Protesters who occupy Zuccotti Park without the faintest notion of what their occupation should accomplish, political parties that seize all branches of the government without a plan for governing, Ivy League students pretending that they are not, in fact, elite—all of this flows from a culture that can articulate the anxieties of the overmanaged but cannot conceive of a healthy model of management. We cannot suffer ourselves to imagine righteous ambition even in our fantasies. Responsible leadership is not possible even in our fairy world. Little wonder so few strive to realize it in the real one.

We seem to have become allergic to the idea of human leadership, of having a person — and not a faceless bureaucracy — actually make decisions, use common sense, exercise personal agency, with "the buck stops here" responsibility for them. And it's the latter that really stands out. It's not just that we seem to fear the idea of having someone else in charge of us — though we submit readily to Hannah Arendt's rule of Nobody, "a tyranny without a tyrant" — but that we're perhaps even more afraid of stepping up and taking charge ourselves, of bearing responsibility for that power and its consequences. We find it better to be a human cog in the machine, able to say "I don't make the rules, I just follow them," than to take ownership of the exercise of power.

(Can you imagine someone in the West writing a story of an orphaned child soldier achieving his lifelong ambition of becoming military dictator, and not having it be played as a tragedy?)

(Can you imagine someone in the West writing a story of an orphaned child soldier achieving his lifelong ambition of becoming military dictator, and not having it be played as a tragedy?)

Dictator? Dictators are a really bad thing.

Leader? I can definitely imagine. I would also happily read it, as long as it is not played as tragedy or playing it as tragedy without realizing it (by whitewashing dictatorship).

We seem to have become allergic to the idea of human leadership, of having a person — and not a faceless bureaucracy — actually make decisions, use common sense, exercise personal agency, with "the buck stops here" responsibility for them.

I work in a startup, and know my CTO and CEO on a personal basis. The problem with personal leadership, as with family-owned restaurants, is that the quality is so variable. We've run through 3 CEOs in the time I've been at the company, each notably flawed in different ways, and my current CTO is a competent but over-promoted nepotist who hoards control and seems to believe that only people who grew up in his particular part of France can be trusted. My current manager is literally his old friend from university. This in an Asian company with employees from all corners of the globe.

Personal venting aside, my point is that although it’s probably better on average to work for someone you know, don’t romanticise a world where your quality of life depends purely on your personal relationships. Especially since we’re all weirdoes ;)

Can you imagine someone in the West writing a story of an orphaned child soldier achieving his lifelong ambition of becoming military dictator, and not having it be played as a tragedy?

1), I’d read the shit out of that book, or watch the movie, whatever. 2), no, although there was a tv series loosely based on a fictionalized account of the life of Bashar Al-Assad which played him sympathetically(this was before the war), although I can’t remember the name of it.

But more to the point, modern literature is allergic to leadership and agency because the protagonists are figures to which things happen, and not figures who make things happen- you said as much- but it’s worth emphasizing that this is a relatively recent change. The Lord of the Rings has its fair share of protagonists going out and shaping the world in which they live. So does other older fantasy like the Belgariad. Compare to Harry Potter and Twilight, where protagonists don’t necessarily do nothing, but neither do they take a particularly active role in shaping the narrative. Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen are content to be manipulated by more powerful figures in a way that Roald Dahl protagonists and the kids of Chronicles of Narnia aren’t.

And this is in part because our society is allergic to leadership. Modern American society- or at least the literati class- don’t want people to stand up, take charge when something needs taking charge, and get stuff done. And that applies to themselves as much as everyone else; the cultural production class is utterly terrified of being in charge.

This is a observation (or complaint?) I've seen about modern literature and particularly comic books and comic book inspired film. There are proactive characters shaping the world according to their will. Those are villains. There are reactive status quo preservers. Those are the protagonists.

1), I’d read the shit out of that book, or watch the movie, whatever.

I was, in fact, referring to a best-selling manga series with this description.

And this is in part because our society is allergic to leadership. Modern American society- or at least the literati class- don’t want people to stand up, take charge when something needs taking charge, and get stuff done. And that applies to themselves as much as everyone else; the cultural production class is utterly terrified of being in charge.

This is exactly my point. And I'd agree that while it's only recently that it's become so widespread, I think there's a case that, per Max Weber, the roots go back over a century, possibly to the "Enlightenment" itself.

I was, in fact, referring to a best-selling manga series with this description.

Naruto is an extremely noncentral example of a child soldier.

Yeah, reading that, my mind went to the Gundam franchise, but I don't think any series from that IP comes close to that description.

Cottagecore and associated cultural trends are 95% LARP. Obviously, there are a few people who really are into it, but my observation so far has been that this is far more likely to mean "I moved to an exurb and picked up a horticulture hobby" than anything remotely resembling actual rural or off-the-grid living. Actually, 95% LARP might be being overly generous; I'm going to guess the conversion rate on people taking the Stardew Valleypill is extremely low. Most people entertaining sanitized fantasies of tradrural lifestyle aren't even going to get as far as the exurban house and gardening hobby.

All of which is to say: I don't think this is a real trend. To the extent that it is a real trend, it is mostly the product of backflow from young professionals crowding into major cities, enabled by the rise of remote work. Social media may be having a corrosive effect on social cohesion, but it's not making people yearn for the pines.

We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community

We can. It's not particularly hard to set up your own forum, and if you're willing to put in a little effort and tolerate some jankiness you don't even need to reply on a 3rd party service to do it. This reminds of third place discourse, where people talk about third places disappearing as if someone came and tore them down, as opposed to that people stopped going to them. You can very easily leave the major social media platforms. We just don't. The problem is

a) these algorithmically driven services may be inferior to organic, homegrown human interaction, but, crucially, they are free and offer a path-of-least-resistance option. You could start your own forum or even go outside and meet people, but Facebook is a click away. Whatever your community of interest is, it probably already exists on reddit.

b) network effects mean there's a lot of value lost in leaving the big platforms for a smaller one. Being the first person to break away from twitter gets you little but a massive improvement in mental health isolation. And, especially for people who view themselves as incumbents, the suggestion that they should leave because of what someone else is doing is deeply irritating - "why should I change, he's the one who sucks". So everyone stays on the big platforms and complains about the moderation policy but never leaves.

the extremist american patriot dream is to aquire assets that allow them to live independently from the country they "love" away from all society and culture on a metaphorical if not literal island

That's more a reflection of how a subset of hardcore American conservative low-key hate America and have despaired of reasserting control by force.

Cottagecore and associated cultural trends are 95% LARP. Obviously, there are a few people who really are into it, but my observation so far has been that this is far more likely to mean "I moved to an exurb and picked up a horticulture hobby" than anything remotely resembling actual rural or off-the-grid living.

I think you're right that the overwhelming majority of people aren't going to seriously take up off-grid living, but I think we are seeing a slow shift in the zeitgeist around the margins. Sure, someone who fills Pinterest boards with cottagecore styles and buys a potted plant isn't personally making a huge shift, but I do think from talking to friends and co-workers that we're seeing a bit of a rebound into, for lack of a better term, touching grass: hobbies, IRL social groups, and such. It's less clear to me whether it's countering the broad, growing online-ness of the last two decades, or more specifically the stark digital isolation of 2020 (likely both), but the social status of "being online" has, to my eyes, peaked as of a year or two ago.

The Internet has completed a full cycle from being the exclusive domain of weird academic types, to primarily high-paying tech workers, to everyone's parents, and I wouldn't be surprised if the median (American) internet addict already has or will soon have a lower income than the average American. Admittedly, that's ill-defined: it's hard to escape the Internet completely, but it feels to me like constantly burying one's nose in a phone playing games or watching videos is becoming a low-status behavior. Less so for email, reading books, or texting friends, but I've seen people engaging in analog activities (writing, drawing, photography) get explicit positive reactions.

That I agree with and think is a more substantial point - pure anecdata, but a huge share of people in my social circle have leaned hard into physical hobbies (woodworking, blacksmithing, gardening, etc...). Notably, things which are kind of difficult and require (or at least benefit a lot from) specialized knowledge and equipment, and which produce some physical proof of effort.

I lived in a rural area for 3 years, not because I was trying to LARP a lifestyle but because I was working in the outdoor industry at the time and that's where I needed to be. I guess I was semi "off the grid" but not in any meaningful sense. I had electricity, but well water and a septic system. No TV or internet and really bad cell service (I left the property if I really needed to make a call, but if I sent a text it would send eventually). My house had an oil stove but it also had a wood burner and I decided to use that thinking it would save money. Well, maybe, a little. First, I had to get a log splitter, and even buying a used one split with two of my buddies was enough money to pay for half a winter's worth of oil. Add in the chainsaw and it became a whole winter. Then, every time someone cuts down a tree you have to be ready to go to their house that Saturday to cut it up and load it, and spend Sunday splitting and stacking it. I also didn't have much to start with so I had to buy a cord to get through the first winter, which was a brutal one. Then, when you go to use it, you have to load the stove up to capacity before bed lest you wake up in the morning freezing, making the house so hot you have to open the windows. You freeze in the morning anyway, and you have to get a fire going again from coals. Trust me, the last thing you want to have to do in the winter at 6 am is build a fire. Repeat the process when you get home from work. In the spring and fall you have to use aux heating anyway because any fire is entirely too hot when you're only trying to warm up from 50 degrees. The amount of time I spent dealing with the thing, had I spent it working, would have more than paid for me to run oil full time, and that's not including the cost of the splitter, chainsaw, blade sharpening, gas to haul all that wood, etc. That being said, nothing beats the feel of a stove going in the dead of winter, and it added a rustic charm, but I could have gotten that with a lot less work if I would have just bought wood and burned occasionally rather than committing to it as a heat source. And this is just one, relatively minor inconvenience that comes with living "off grid". But, I still have access to a log splitter I may decide to use again someday.

Yeah, I've lived in villages that use wood only heating in the winter, and if you want to go to sleep warm, everyone has to move into the main room in the winter.

One of the things that wasn't mentioned much in the discussion about traditional housewife work but is huge in some climates is keeping the fire burning in the winter, and waking it up again from coals before dawn, as the father gets ready for work. In villages without was heat, that's very important, and a fair amount of work. One household I lived in had only daughters at home (I think there was a son, but he was working elsewhere and couldn't return to help), who spent several weeks splitting wood by hand.

This description of heating with wood is giving me flashbacks to a winter I spent in a yurt near the California/Oregon border.

2009 was a long time ago, I was basically a kid...

I can point exactly where I was, online, in 2009: the writing was already on the wall, and it went exactly where I expected it would.

There were better places online, if you looked for them -- this was still before some of the weirder specialty forums got chased out, and I have some fond memories of early therianthropy spheres -- but it was already a long way from the highlights of the early Eternal September era, or especially usenet era. The Scylla and Charbydis of SomethingAwful and corporate monoculture were well and present then.

rpg.net. Sigh. I remember being a regular there once upon a time. Boardgamegeek is headed in the same direction. Writing forums and other places I frequent all doing the same thing. I am normie-presenting enough to usually stay out of trouble, but if there's anything that comes close to blackpilling me it's the sheer smugness of censorious would-be political officers in every hobby space I am part of.

where I expected it would.

That post (?) is hidden behind registration, but I found their logo funny nonetheless.

A Catholic news site I followed kind of posted about the same topic today. Nothign to do with Catholicism, the author is just an Anglophile:

https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/a-perfect-week-ironic-invites-and

There’s scandal in the air in London.

The country’s chief spy, the head of MI6, has found himself front page news, along with the head of the British civil service, who has been hauled before a parliamentary committee to answer questions, under pain of perjury.

The scandal reaches further still into the upper echelons of the establishment, implicating members of the cabinet. Even the King has been named.

Pressure is mounting on those tainted, and the tone in the media is approaching full-blown McCarthyite paranoia.

From the outside looking in, you might well assume a dangerous threat to national security has been unearthed — a spy ring worthy of a le Carré novel, or conspiracy of McCarrick-level proportions. But, at least in the eyes of some, it’s actually worse than that.

All these men, and they are all men, stand accused of belonging to the Garrick, a somewhat famous, and famously men-only, private London club, after the membership rolls were obtained and published by the Guardian newspaper.

The Garrick, founded in 1831, is what in London is commonly called a “gentlemen’s club,” a term which I gather means something rather different and less genteel over here in America.

It’s one of a handful of such places that have survived into the third millennium, long past their heyday of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

They once flourished as places for men (yes, men) of different sections of society to meet, eat, drink, and sleep it all off in town. Each club has (had) its own core constituency, be it the military, the literary set, politics, and so on.

The Garrick has long had social cachet beyond its links to the world of theater and the arts, making it something of a target for fashionable criticism, though it’s not the first such club to come under fierce public scrutiny.

White’s, the club for properly posh chaps, had its turn a few years ago, with then-Prime Minister David Cameron having to resign his long-time membership in shame after being shocked, shocked, to discover they didn’t let ladies in.

After leaving office, “Call Me Dave” — as we used to refer to him in my time at Tory HQ — joined Pratt’s, an even posher club, where all the staff are referred to as “George” by custom. As it happened, Pratt’s let women in a few years after Dave joined, though I assume the members address all the new ladies as “Nanny.”

London men’s clubs are an object of occasional fascination and fury in the U.K.

People, and it should be acknowledged it’s usually a certain kind of lady, get very steamed up about them whenever they remember they still exist.

According to the popular imagination, clubs are dens of quiet power-broking and deal-making, shadowy old-boy networks, wood-paneled venues where favors are exchanged and patronage is doled out.

They are malum in se for their sexist admissions policies, of course, but made even worse because they are locking out ladies from the true corridors of power, where the real decisions are made.

But the sexism charge is silly, really.

That men (and women) behave differently in mixed company, and sometimes like a time and place to socialize among themselves, shouldn’t be controversial. Ladies’ nights out are a social staple for about half the people I know, and if you need convincing that dudes (or chaps) liking to hang out isn’t sinister, I doubt I’m the one to convince you.

More to the point, proper clubs for women exist, too, some of them, like the University Women’s Club, are very nice and just as old as the men’s, and they come under no political scrutiny or media ire.

The real suspicion, and the real anger against the men’s versions, is about power and influence. But that’s nonsense, too.

The reality is that clubs intended to facilitate “networking” and mutual advancement do exist, but they tend to be set up by and for women, as a reactionary move against what they imagine goes on at places like the Garrick. And thus they tend to fail — at least in London.

One such enterprise, Chief, opened a swanky London outpost last year, promising a women-only space for the senior ranks of the sisterhood to meet and mingle with like-minded “executives.” But it had to shut down last month for lack of interest, despite offering the chance to split spritzers with the likes of Amal Clooney and Gloria Estefan — or maybe because of that.

I’m not surprised places like Chief tank, since they are exactly what many people wrongly imagine London men’s clubs to be all about, and they sound awful. Real clubs continue to exist not because the members can use them to “network,” but because they’re some of the last places in Western urban life where “networking” is forbidden.

In fact, all the London men’s clubs I know have actual rules banning business talk. Full disclosure: I am a member of one such club, and used to be a member of another — neither as chic as the Garrick or as well-bred as White’s, though I’ve been a lunch guest at both.

What I love about my club is that, as I’m a socially awkward person by nature, it's a place where I am, as a matter of policy, welcome at any table and in any conversation, and always considered a friend.

While critics like to imagine hushed conversations to stitch up promotions and curry influence, I’ve instantly forgotten what anyone does for a living, if ever they told me. The banter is usually obscure, rather than topical. The finer points of trivia on my true passions, cricket and watches, are common subjects.

You’d struggle to call the atmosphere “conspiratorial,” or even especially dignified.

On one occasion, albeit several years ago, another member challenged me over lunch to recite Edward Lear’s poem “The Owl and the Pussycat” from memory and I had to be gently but insistently reminded by the maître d' not to stand on the dining room furniture, after I got too into my declamation and mounted my chair halfway through the second stanza.

The truth is, the kind of people who like to “network,” rather than socialize, make for terrible company — they instrumentalize human interaction, rather than enjoy it. It makes them insufferable, even to each other.

Those people are why places like Chief fail, and it’s why places like the Garrick and the University Women’s Club won’t let them in. They are, ironically, the very people you join a club to get away from.

And their demands to be let in are probably the single greatest impediment to single-sex clubs changing their rules. It’s not that clubs like mine can’t conceive of female members fitting in around the place — or can’t think of women who’d make good company — but they suspect those aren’t the kind of women who would be applying.

The same sort of people who are offended by the idea of all-male clubs tend to be even more offended by the idea of a club that just doesn’t want them, personally, and the tendency of clubs (like the Garrick) to attract lawsuits if they just think out loud about changing their rules is quite real. Being a single-sex space provides a modicum of legal protection in this regard.

I know some women I’d happily propose for membership, and their capacity for both claret and lyrical verse exceeds my own. But in truth, they’d probably never think of applying.

Groucho Marx famously said he didn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. The best sort of people usually feel that way, male or female. The trouble is that the reverse also tends to be true.

Clubs, really, are for the rest of us — the ones who just want a place that feels like home, safely away from, you know, other people.

Is that so wrong?

Why do you think that the right sort of women would not apply? Would they prefer to be among themselves for that kind of banter?

I didn’t author the opinion, but I think the author’s point is that women who try to integrate men’s only spaces are going to do it for the sake of making them integrated, not because they’re merely looking to socialize.

There’s no shortage of socialization opportunities for women, so to decide you must be socializing at this specific single sex club demonstrates that making it coed is your goal.

I'm reminded of the Californian Bohemian Club (motto "weaving spiders come not here") and accompanying conspiratorial retreats. I find it pretty hard to believe that members of these clubs don't gain any professional benefits at all, but nevertheless I'd probably join a male club with at least a nominal ban on shop talk if there were any anymore for regular guys.

Other behavior at the campground has led to numerous claims and even some parody in popular culture. One example was President Richard Nixon's comments from a May 13, 1971, tape recording talking about upper-class San Franciscans: "The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time—it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd."

My question is: Have you noticed this too? Maybe my circle's blowing this out of proportion, but maybe not.

Hello! I think you are talking about me. I mean, we didn't buy a whole ass farm. But we bought 4 acres, got some backyard chickens that give us all the eggs we need, and a nice garden. We still buy food. Even most of our food. We aren't completely off grid by a wide margin. Although we have stocked up on a growing supply of 25 year shelf life emergency food as well...

There were dozens of reasons we made the decision to do this. The increasing social dysfunction of the Democrat controlled semi-urban core we lived in, as well as the utter fecklessness of Democrats to even acknowledge it exists. All the institutions there-in insisting we mask our then two year old daughter, while turning a complete blind eye towards the "mostly peaceful" protest that caused all the businesses to board up their windows whenever they appeared. The rise in crime, like the guy who got shot in my condo parking lot, that nobody seemed to give a fuck about. The people were wound up so damned tight, taking our newborn daughter for a walk, on our best following all the covid guidelines behavior, people would literally dive into the bushes in a mad panic off the sidewalk to maintain that 6 foot distancing.

After we left, we looked back in horror as the school district double, then tripled down on secretly transitioning children against parents wishes, and keeping pornographic "diverse" books in middle school libraries. Or when we have business there, and we still see people masked, alone in their cars on the highway.

There were affirmative reasons we moved too, as opposed to just fleeing Democrats. I wanted my daughter to have a yard, and woods, and a creek to play in. I wanted to feel safe leaving her relatively unsupervised outside. It was way more affordable.

Sometimes I miss living somewhere walkable. But those thoughts are fleeting compared to all we gained in a deep red county.

Kind of a weird focus on democrats in this post. Plenty of those where I live in a very rural state. We have creeks and woods and safe legal abortion and the lowest crime rate in the country. Democrats are driving crime is a pretty tired narrative. Density + poverty drives most of the type of crime you seem to be concerned about, not who you vote for.

I share your frustrations of the covid overstep and mess. It really turned me off to a lot of institutions. I just don't know that if the republicans had become the covid law and order party and insisted on authoritarian lockdowns for the children, would you have rebelled against them the same way?

It isn't red vs blue, especially here on themotte. Try to see the grey.

My Republican governor was happy to impose onerous Covid restrictions on the state (while of course violating them himself). The rules imposed in my state weren’t as long-lasting as they were in many blue states, but they were still intolerable to me and to many Republicans throughout the state. In response, the Libertarian candidate for governor received a record high number of votes in the following gubernatorial race.

I think you’re seeing party politicization where none exists.

I agree, I was trying to point out that what WhiningCoil was commenting on wasn't necessarily a red vs blue issue like he stated it was.

I just don't know that if the republicans had become the covid law and order party and insisted on authoritarian lockdowns for the children, would you have rebelled against them the same way?

This was never going to happen because the ways in which lockdowns were less than evenhanded were always going to hit the Republican base harder than the democrats.

I am postulating a hypothetical situation here that almost happened. Fear of the wuhan flu was red coded for the first few months if you recall.

I'm 100% ready to believe this pessimism in the air comes from our inability to self-organize. We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community and so we live with a slight psychological chip on our shoulder but we're not sure why.

I get your feeling, and I think the main culprit, the biggest reason the insular internet mostly collapsed is Reddit (and recently Discord). The technical superiority of Reddit when it came out, its ability to spin up new subreddits on any topic and its originally relaxed moderation turned it into a natural Schelling point for any community. Previously if I wanted to find an active community talking about topic_x, I'd google "topic_x forum" and look at some of the results and join a PHPbb (or similar) forum that seemed to have a vibe I liked. Now the first place I, or pretty much everyone, will think about is /r/topic_x. It will be bigger and more active than almost any other community about topic_x.

The only exceptions are going to be existing communities that don't want to be Schelling points that passively attract newcomers (like this place) or people who have an axe to grind against Reddit. And while I do myself have an axe to grind against Reddit, I have to admit I'm in the company of a lot of witches who really just want a place they can spam the n-word, and the communities created by that second group are likely going to suck.

I have to admit I'm in the company of a lot of witches who really just want a place they can spam the n-word, and the communities created by that second group are likely going to suck.

We already know what such a community would look like, it's called 4chan. It's one of the most influential internet communities ever and has been an endless source of entertainment and fascination for me for the past 15 years.

Ah, but 4chan predates reddit, and its community uses the n-word as a way to try (futilely) to keep its community within the bounds of people who don't take words too seriously. If you want, say, a community about biking that isn't a subreddit, you're likelier to end up with a community of people who love saying the n-word and sometimes, rarely, discusses biking. Compare to the subreddit which is going to be mostly about biking, except when progressive politics talking points seep through and you're not allowed to say anything else you'll be either piled on or modded. Normies either agree with the progressive politics, or they don't even notice them as we don't notice the air we breathe, but at least they're probably there to talk on-topic. The alternatives are selecting for people who do notice the air, and they'll be more interested in discussing that than the main topic.

4chan has a few other features, besides just its age and uh, forbidden words:

  • from the name, you know it's japanese influenced. so it will naturally attract people into anime and other japanese net culture stuff.
  • it's an image board. you have to post a picture to start a new thread there. Replies often have images too. That makes it a lot more sillier and meme-based than a text-board like reddit
  • they also allow porn and really gross, disgusting images. Which tends to filter out a lot of normies.
  • it has weird, quirky features that aren't really documented, like how "tbh" gets automatically turned into "desu." A lot of these are really annoying, but it does tend to create a more closed community of people motivated enough to learn how to use it, despite being fully open to the whole internet
  • threads disappear after a while, so there's still that "ephemeral" sense. You can't easily go back and search for old content. This creates a sort of "tribal knowledge" where only the "oldfags" fully know what's going on.
  • mods can and will ban you temporarily, but it's just a slap on the wrist. It can be hard to tell what the rules are, or why any post in particular triggered a ban.

All in all it's a weird, quirky little community. It would be interesting to try and create another community like that, without explicitly copying 4chan. Discord has some of that, but it's just too fast-moving for me or any other normal adult to keep up with.

No offense, but all the posts here seems like they're very touristy views of the site and completely ignore all the numerous downsides of the site.

You can search on 4chan's archives more easily than reddit's. Reddit's search function is worthless and requires you to use google to search site:reddit instead.

One of the worst parts about is that a few shitposters can ruin threads way more easily than anywhere else, like there are /vg/ threads that are unusable because a bot will find them and spam them, there's shitposters that can and will ruin entire boards. It is proof that no moderation, or more like light moderation will certainly not result in better places for discussion.

This is worsened still by the hivemind of 4chan where anything that goes against the common view of the site "Everything is shit" will generally be ignored and be shitposted about. Say you like a book and you wanna make a thread for it? I really doubt you'll find better discussion for it on 4chan vs other sites. Because most people will ignore thread, a few will shitpost, and maybe you'll get one or two replies that are actually relevant to what you want.

And that's not to say that there aren't good sides on it. 4chan/imageboards are really good for the small, niche communities for particular subjects. Like there's a tea thread that's very nice, but anything outside of those niches is generally worse than other sites.

I think there's something to what you're saying. I'm not fluent enough in Japanese to use 5chan, but I do know a little. Everything in Japan seems old-fashioned, like they still pay with cash, still use old BBS boards, and their websites often seem like a mess of old PHP. A lot of services that we'd do with software, like bank transactions, are still done manually with paperwork there.

that might sound bad, but I think it genuinely helps makes sites feel a little more "human." the western web just seems like one giant ocean, connected by omniscient algorithms. the typical user barely creates anything, we just watch shit from "creators" with 10 million followers, then mindlessly repeat their memes. anything "off" gets harassed and downvoted, or just hidden into oblivion. the smaller, clunkier internet forces people to actually create something if they want to be part of it.

One of the reasons I tend conservative is the different views towards exit rights.

For most conservatives, the reaction to liberals who want to go start a communist paradise elsewhere is "Good. Go do it!". This is a sincere wish. The presence of communism elsewhere is the surest bulwark against it happening here. The idea of communism so alluring that we need constant reminders about its failures, which are guaranteed.

But liberals have more of a "yous can't leave" attitude. The grand experiment can only work if everyone is forced to join. If the ants go somewhere else, the grasshoppers won't have any food to eat. Thus, states like California are considering exit taxes to trap the high-performing people in the state. And obviously the Soviets had to keep people inside with barbed wire and guns.

Did you just rewrite atlas shrugged in 2 paragraphs?

I would rebut, and say the issues is socialized losses and costs while privatizing the profits/tragedy of the commons/extraction without due compensation/collusion/fraud/monopoly/rivers on fire/cancer clusters/disgusting food/dangerous drugs/pinkertons/unsafe air travel. To pretend that there are not serious and almost endless downsides to unregulated commerce and exploitation is crazy.

Classically, libertarians always seem to want all the benefits of a stable state with a monopoly on powers, as long as it doesn't realllllllyyyyy apply to them, and they don't have to pay for it. Laws for thee and not for me etc....rich people already kind of live that life, so it is an attractive philosophy for many, I run into them every day.

True believers can always move to the libertarian paradise that is Somalia!

As far as keeping a tax base of people that have immensely benefited from the state apparatus to generate their wealth. It is perfectly fair to incentivise them to keep some of their wealth in the place that helped create it. Again, wanting all of the benefits while shirking the costs.

  • -24

You can always move to the libertarian paradise that is Somalia!

The rest of your post is okay, but this kind of tired, low-effort sneer is not a good faith argument. Stick to your actual disagreements with your opponents and not recycled tropes. (Pointing out that Somalia is, in your opinion, the end state of an actual libertarian society is fine, but using it as a dunk is not.)

Would changing it from "You" to "True believers" work better? jeroboam listed places like soviet russia and california as approaching or end states of communistic collectivist societies full of spendthrift takers or "grasshoppers". I don't think my inclusion of Somalia as a counterpoint is particularly offensive, even if it is cliche. The ant and the grasshopper parable is equally boo outgroup insulting and also a trope at this point. He also is blocking me, so no need to worry about offending him.

Libertarians often want a state powerful enough to create and enforce property rights, and to raise a defensive military when needed, and not really anything else.

This would need taxes, of course, but much less.

Somalia doesn't do a good job with maintaining property rights.

Maybe so. That is a terrible idea. I think I pointed out the pitfalls of a minimalist state pretty well in my previous post.

You did, hence why I'm the other upvote here.

That said, I don't know that I agree that all of those would be serious problems. I'll run through what I think of each.

tragedy of the commons

This is only really a problem when there are commons. With expansive enough property rights, there would not be many commons, and so not much tragedy. That said, some things are hard to keep separate (like air). In such cases, while, strictly speaking, it may be regulated as an infringement on property rights, really it should probably just be treated as a commons with no property rights, and subject to regulation accordingly.

extraction without due compensation

Not really a problem with good property rights, except in cases of bad decision making/desparation (and the market should sort out the latter).

collusion

Yup, this is a problem. It shouldn't get worse than monopoly pricing, but this isn't great, and regulation is probably reasonable here.

fraud

Yeah, I'd want this regulated. But I would assume that many libertarian states (should such exist) would care about things like this? Breaking contracts like this should fall afoul? Maybe violate property rights?

monopoly

Yes, bad, though not always worth getting rid of, if the alternative is worse.

That said, I'm not sure that we'd have more of these. Competition should try to keep these away, and the reduced regulation should lower barriers to entry for competitors.

rivers on fire

See tragedy of the commons.

cancer clusters

The market might sort this out to some extent (in that people won't want to be in harmful situations, and so would have to be compensated accordingly should they know), but yeah, this is a problem.

disgusting food

What? There are no laws requiring that our food, as it exists today, tastes good. It tastes good because they want us to buy it. This wouldn't change.

dangerous drugs

Yup. I'm not a fan. I suppose libertarians could try to regulate nonconsensual use of them as a crime; it would be infringing on the rights of others?

pinkertons

Not okay. The state has the monopoly on violence. That doesn't change.

unsafe air travel

Well, airlines have a pretty strong incentive to make air travel safe: they want people to fly. I don't think this would be too large of a problem.

Overall, I don't think it's nearly as hellish as you suggest to go with the minimalist option, though there are several things that I would prefer be regulated.

Regarding the food, I'm thinking more along the lines of gutter oil and listeria outbreaks. The consumer simply cannot judge if a certain restaurant is safe to eat from, they will never have perfect information. That is the problem with a ton of libertarian policy ideas. LTs have to assume an almost omniscient consumer/citizen for most of their ideas to have even a small chance of working. There isn't enough time,energy, information, or intelligence in anyone's life to make choices like that, we need regulatory bodies of experts with enforcement mechanisms and bureaucracies.

Re: Air travel. The 787 Max kinda disproves your point there. Before regulation basically everyone who flew regularly eventually died flying. We probably shouldn't have to let 100 more planes crash before consumers decide that getting to california for cheap isn't worth going on a certain type of plane. Not to mention the ongoing issues due to regulatory capture and just underregulating/poor oversight that have lead to deaths and serious problems, it is getting so bad that it is undercutting national security and economic progress in a vital industry.

Thanks, those are both good examples.

That Somalia line is a tired cliché that straight up ignores the Hoppean elephant in the room.

Libertarians are fine with authority, actually. So long as it's consensual and not tyrannical. We want our masters to compete to be picked, not ditch them altogether. That's anarchists you're thinking of.

Hoppe is quite fine with feudalism. And in my travels I've found lots of libertarians that actually did go to places like Hong Kong, Prospéra and the UAE that are clearly and obviously ruled by some authority but provide the basic entrepreneurial freedom and reasonable tax rates that are sorely lacking in the West. Better to be ruled by a fair autocrat than tyrannized by the people.

I myself have moved my permanent residence to Galt's Gulch, and it's really just fine living among civilized people that aren't trying to squeeze you for every last cent to give nothing in return under the guise of a social responsibility they abdicate every day. I recommend it.

Ah yes UAE home of literally modern day slavery and modern day monarchy with free money and sinecures for all true citizens and free or subsidized healthcare, education, and housing. An economy based on resource extraction they lucked into. Truly a beacon for humanity.

Hong Kong, a successful trading port run on British principles/laws for 100 years that is now being slowly bogged down by chinese nonsense, but hey you can still score a dog crate apartment (literally) for a reasonable price.

Prospera, I read a few think pieces about it a while ago. Seems like a good place to set up crypto scam companies and stem cell clinics. Also seems like the locals don't like it.

None of these "countries" are driving humanity forward, anywhere is already pretty nice if you're rich, and large stable governments are responsible for almost all recent scientific progress and will continue to be so. These little projects are sideshows at best.

I don't understand your final paragraph. Is there a Galt's Gulch project out there or are you saying you've moved to the UAE? Don't worry, we'll let you back in once the robots do all the work, just nice like that.

Edit: Had to look up recent Prospera stuff, as expected it is basically just a money/drug/crypto laundering scheme. Pretty funny, seems like they are about to be beaten down by the unrelenting might of the honduran government. (words that have never been said before in history)

https://theintercept.com/2024/03/19/honduras-crypto-investors-world-bank-prospera/

large stable governments are responsible for almost all recent scientific progress and will continue to be so

Still waiting on your SLS Block 2 Mr. Big Government, at this point it costs so much they're going to have to turn it over to Boeing. This used to be true, it hasn't been for a while. At best they give some of it back through grants now. The days of long term fundamental research spawning large awe inspiring strategic projects are long gone.

Hell, even military innovation is done by VC backed startups now. Where's the government's Attention Is All You Need?

Deterritorialization has won, as expected.

There are lots of myths in the specific descriptions of these places you pithily give. These are memes, not knowledge. I'm certain you've never actually gone there and checked.

And they're not the real reason you're objecting anyway. If you see any amount of freedom as a laundering scheme and worthless in comparison to such fictions as "progress" we're not going to see eye to eye. I for one do not support tyranny.

Is there a Galt's Gulch project out there

Nice try, but I'm not telling you who John Galt is.

More to my point that you've misconstrued here. Governments have in the past, and continue to, fund and do immense amounts of fundamental research. But that wasn't my argument.

I was attempting to point out that no entity public or private can do the kind of complex research and invention required today without a stable, relatively safe, relatively predictable government in charge that provides basic infrastructure and services. We aren't getting our best (or any) innovations out of Syria or Iraq, or Palestine, or Myanmar, or the or Prospera etc...etc... (these are not examples of gulchs, just unstable regimes.)

I'll be impressed if/when we have an actual libertarian "country" as case study that is outperforming more traditional current governance types. It is also just so damn hard to pin any libertarian minded person down on what exactly they believe and how that would translate into a governing body or country. I don't think I've once gotten a straight answer.

I guess that's fair and we're actually going to see this with Argentina and to some degree El Salvador.

It is also just so damn hard to pin any libertarian minded person down on what exactly they believe and how that would translate into a governing body or country. I don't think I've once gotten a straight answer.

I thought Hoppe was pretty damn clear, open and consistent, actually.

Personally I ideally desire Patchwork, also known as Feudalism, and an efficient and minimal guardian of my natural rights. And I'll settle for a destruction of central orders and a return to smaller and more personal forms of government, inasmuch as is pragmatically possible. You know, like Machiavelli.

This obviously makes us enemies inasmuch as you seem to desire greater levels of centralization and support Administrative States as inherently legitimate sovereigns. But that's what this place is for, right? Talking to people you disagree with.

I've seen some chatter that El Salvador should try to model itself on Singapore. I would say Singapore goes against pretty much every libertarian ethos except for being pro-business. It has about as heavy a hand as you can have as a government controlling society and citizens. Although I wouldn't class the UAE or Hong Kong as particularly libertarian either. So maybe we should start there. Clearly you have an affinity for the ideology, how do you square the circle regarding these regimes and personal freedoms etc...

As I have stated, I've never really nailed down a "libertarian" on what they actually believe and what a real world based on those beliefs would look like, even when I was the treasurer for our college libertarian society wayyyy back in the day (threw some good fundraising poker games). Maybe this is my chance if you're willing to go to bat.

More comments

I'm not a libertarian, personally, but I don't think libertarians have the goal of society of driving humanity forward or progressivism of any sort. Some of them do, but that is adjacent to libertarianism. They just want a government that can defend property rights from outsiders and arbitrate disputes between insiders. You can't make a critique of liberal morality to libertarianism because they consider it in the domain of the individual and not the government.

A libertarian will tell you if you want to change the world, become an angel investor, or if you lack the means, purchase stock in the most forward-thinking companies. Or even better, start your own. Not demand the government to do so. And this is entirely consistent within their world view. Just because you don't like it or clutch your pearls about the second order consequences doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to a libertarian.

That is fine. I just think is is a terrible way to go about governing (or not governing) a large population. No man is an island, we live in a society, there but for the grace of god go I, and the thousand practical benefits of helping and being helped by your fellow humans. yadda yadda yadda....

There also seems to be an expectation that anyone and everyone is perfectly healthy and intelligent and is capable of starting a business or being the locus of their own control, etc...etc... a huge section of humanity isn't cut out for that, and the rest certainly weren't when they were born and won't be when they are old.

Nobody is clutching any pearls, just pointing out some basic stuff.

I have very few thoughts on the actual topic of your post, but as someone who spent more time than was healthy on 4chan a little before 2009, your description of 5channel now sounds similar. As I stopped using 4chan around 2009 and started using other social network sites, I found that the quality of conversation on places like Twitter or Reddit were substantially worse in comparison to 4chan, and it has only gotten worse in the 15 years since. My pet theory is the enforced anonymity and abrasive/offensive social norms helped to keep everyone from taking things too seriously, which in turn helped to keep conversations from getting enflamed. I've heard 4chan also got worse in the meanwhile, so maybe those golden years are forever gone. But if I could wave a magic wand and destroy every social network and replace them with something akin to the mid-late-00s 4chan, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

4chan felt that way once, but those times are long gone. 10+ years ago, each board had a community feel, and the centralizing factor is that everyone was just a nerd with an unusually deep interest in the topic of the board. On /v/, you had guys obsessed with Yume Nikki and E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy and Godhand. On /mu/, you had guys digging through labels to find obscure bands. /lit/ helped popularize eccentrics like Nick Land. At some point, the boards lost this exploratory, communal spirit, and modern 4chan just talks about whatever media product is the most advertised. Old 4chan had this sort of 90's mentality where they worshiped authenticity, weirdness, and indulged in old stuff, but on modern 4chan all those values are pretty much gone.

Waxing poetic about some old site is lame, but it really did have a positive influence on a lot of people. It was a sort of special place, nothing with that combination of optimism and passion is really around nowadays.

Yeah. The fact that one of the threads with the highest number of posts on /lit/, is basically /r9k/(at least it's slightly better than what that board is today, but still), says a lot about the site.

On most of 4chan today, sincerity is despised.

My question is: Have you noticed this too? Maybe my circle's blowing this out of proportion, but maybe not.

I've noticed people saying that they're going to be, but it mostly seems like about as serious of a threat as the people that say if the election doesn't go their way, they're moving to Canada. The United States has continued urbanizing for my entire life and the number of urbanites that actually turn themselves into homesteaders is vanishingly small.

We banned freedom of association in the 60s. It's a legal thing now, not really a cultural thing. If anything the fact that people made so many attempts to still create communities since then shows that westerners are still healthy in that regard. It's just illegal, so inevitably some expansion of inclusion lawfare will torpedo any community you build. If you want to have some semblance of sanity focusing on very small local/extended family social interactions is the socially healthiest choice available.

This doesn’t address a large part of your post, but I think a lot of why people are attempting to live rural now is because they anticipate some kind of collapse of society. Either due to nuclear war, climate change or civil war.

I know this is not your stated belief, but how would climate change lead to the collapse of society in the lifetime of anyone currently living?

Are there any people who believe in climate change so strongly they are willing to move to a rural area?

I know there are many people who say they believe climate change is a serious threat and yet buy expensive oceanfront property.

I know this is not your stated belief, but how would climate change lead to the collapse of society in the lifetime of anyone currently living?

Agriculture. If we can't grow wheat and maize efficient enough we are fucked.

But this isn’t happening. Every year the caloric surplus generated by humanity is greater. The temperature increasing by 2 degrees in one century won’t change that. In fact higher temperatures and more co2 will likely lead to even greater agricultural production. It certainly hasn’t hurt so far. While some regions will suffer it will be made up for (and then some) by gains in other regions.

Despite this, I think climate change is an important problem. To me, the environment matters for its own sake, independent of humans.

I believe climate change will ultimately be solved in the 21st century by carbon removal technology that will cost less than 0.1% of global GDP per year.

The world can ride out one or two bad harvests(although some Africans will be fucked), and wheat and corn both grow well enough under hot conditions. Shifting rain patterns might require some fields to relocate but catastrophism is entirely unfounded; climate change’s impact on agriculture will be more from retarded carbon restrictions than from actual climactic conditions.

There are various potential scenarios for how fast climate change will progress. Some of them involve various tipping points being passed, like AMOC circulation collapse, that could cause rapid changes in climate within 10-40 years. In any case, if it does happen, climate change could cause massive refugee outflows and knock-on political effects that could collapse multiple world governments in short order. Add on to that mega storms and heatwaves battering the less affected regions. Additionally, many people who follow climate change also are concerned about decreased energy return on investment causing at least a partial collapse of industrialized society.

In 1970, the Bhola Cyclone killed at least 300,000 people in Bangladesh. Fortunately, weather-related disasters are getting much less deadly, not more. There's very little reason to think this won't continue.

That said, as global incomes increase, refugee flows will continue to worsen regardless of the weather. Once people escape extreme poverty, they gain the means to emigrate.

Additionally, many people who follow climate change also are concerned about decreased energy return on investment causing at least a partial collapse of industrialized society.

This is a concern. In terms of EROI, renewables suck. My guess is that a lot of the solar being installed in California right now is actually negative EROI. Once you max out on solar, more solar just creates an unusable surplus.

But will this cause governments to collapse? I really doubt it. California can afford to be stupid about energy because they are so incredibly rich. It's true that renewables will make us poorer and more miserable. But governments can and do pivot when things get out of hand. In 2022, Germany started mining lignite again rather than shut down their economy.

The only total collapse climate change scenario I’m familiar with is the ‘methane bomb’ / clathrate gun hypothesis that a huge amount of trapped methane could be released from the ocean which could rapidly kill off sea life (plankton, kelp etc) and spiral into a huge temperature rise in only a few years. I think that’s considered quite unlikely though, the IPCC officially declared it so.

The more obvious point is that if we really end up facing such a disaster, we'll just geoengineer a solution. The only reason we don't pursue it now is piety, but it's hard to imagine billions of people just letting themselves die because the IPCC says it would be wrong to stop climate change.


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