domain:alexberenson.substack.com
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
9m ago
Are you talking about social Darwinism?
Owlify
11m ago
I agree. It shouldn't be too hard with today's technology to build good product/service comparison sites or recommendation systems for what you will like. The issue is that most people are not going to be spending a lot of time or effort on this, and will miss out on products/services they would have liked. Isn't it better that companies spend time and effort to bring their offerings to you and curate the advertisements you receive?
HereAndGone
17m ago
For instance, you could pay someone to actually have sex with you while telling you you're a loser.
I believe that is the sub-type of kink known as humiliation kink? And the ultimate humiliation, I guess, is that you're not even good enough to use as a disposable fuck toy. Look, I dunno, even normal vanilla sex is not my thing so I have no idea how the wiring for the kinky stuff goes. Maybe it's all by degrees: you start off with having sex while being insulted, but after a while that's no longer good enough so you need more.
HereAndGone
20m ago
given how insane of a concept it is to pay a sex worker to aggressively not have sex with you
Kink is not rational insert shrug emoji It's like the old joke:
Masochist: Beat me, beat me!
Sadist: No.
Owlify
20m ago
Why don't you just directly recommend going to therapy for your sisters if you feel like it will help them out? They might not choose to act upon it, but they might still consider it.
HereAndGone
22m ago
Maybe using capitals? anti-Woke Right is different to anti-Woke right? Though I agree, it's confusing all round.
As to the videos - I don't know the guy, it's cheeky of me to put forward opinions on his personal morality, but it's a tough one. The gay acceptance/gay marriage movement pushed hard on mainstreaming as representing "no, all that stuff about gays being degenerate is propaganda, they just want to get married and have kids like you".
And then the guy has his sex tapes released and oops yeah gay widower with kids is engaging in kink with prostitutes. Well, just like straight guys too so I suppose that is true equality!
I have to agree that this particular kink isn't the worst example of perversity that it could be, just second-hand embarrassment for anyone who doesn't share those kinks. I think we as a society probably are gone past any surviving standards of "public figures should behave decorously" never mind "private citizens shouldn't be frequenting prostitutes".
I still don't understand why the hell people make sex tapes (or take nudes for their partners) in the first place, though. We have plenty of examples of how that goes bad - the tapes get leaked, you break up and your ex uses the nudes for revenge porn, or even in the first place while you're still together they're sharing those private images around with their friends.
Frankly both pro-Israel and anti-Israel right-wingers are guilty of this, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Even aside from Israel/Palestine stuff, I’ve heard NRA types go on about how the Nazis confiscated firearms and Ron Paul libertarians draw comparisons between the PATRIOT Act and the Nuremberg laws. If we relax the reference class to include communists as well as Nazis, then basically every strand of the conservative movement from the 1980s onward has had adherents who make such comparisons to their ideological enemies.
On the topic of anti-Israel right-wingers: they come in at least three different varieties, none of which is per se what I would consider “woke right”, exactly:
- Paleoconservatives of Pat Buchanan’s ilk, who are skeptical of foreign entanglements in general and often support for Israel in particular. These types may harbor some negative opinions about Jewish influence in American politics, but don’t make it the center of their political worldview, nor do they generally harbor any animus towards individual Jews or to their religion.
This group may have some overlap with the “woke right” in the sense that they view preserving the historic American “national character”, and perhaps even the specific “founding stock” ethnicity, as an important political goal; as such, they are, for example, opposed to mass immigration. But the overall vibe of paleocons is very different: more patrician, more old-school Ivy League WASP (at least in bearing, if not actual ancestry) rather than Ellis Islander/white ethnic.
- Right(-ish)-of-center contrarians in the vein of Theo Von and Joe Rogan. While open to “questioning the narrative” and “doing their own research” and, indeed, being somewhat prone to conspiracy theorizing in general (e.g. Covid-19 origins, QAnon, 9/11 truth, etc.), these folks mostly seem to have soured on Israel due to (what they perceive as) atrocities committed in the current Gaza conflict. They do not deny the historicity of the Holocaust, though they are increasingly immune to its use as a mystical talisman that renders any criticism of Israel null and void. They likewise do not deny Israel’s right to exist, and, like the paleocons, do not personally hate Jews or Judaism.
These types are furthest from the “woke right” in my view: they genuinely want to go back to 90s-style colorblind meritocracy, with no handouts or special treatment for anyone, white or not.
- Out-and-out Holocaust deniers, who invariably do hate Jews and Judaism. Even when they hide behind “just asking questions” or “look at how much influence AIPAC has” or “anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism”—all of which are in theory positions within the ordinary bounds of political discourse or academic inquiry, _when posed in good faith_—I have literally never once known a Holocaust denier not to loathe Jews on a personal level. IME, Holocaust denial in actual practice is, without exception, an argument-as-soldier, and behind the claims of “the Holocaust never happened”, the undercurrent of “but wouldn’t it be great if it had?” is always palpable.
This view is strictly orthogonal to “woke right”-ism, though I would hazard a guess that it’s more common on the “woke right” than on the “tech right”, if only because the latter (correctly, in my opinion) usually attribute Ashkenazi over-representation mostly to IQ, which rather tends to immunize them against crude conspiracies about Jewish subversion and the attendant animosity towards Jews.
EDIT: perhaps you were gesturing at something like the following syllogism: “woke tactics + right-wing views = ‘woke right’; ~every right-winger compares his opponents to Nazis, which is a woke tactic; ergo the entire right is ‘woke right’”
My claim, on the other hand, is that Nazi comparisons are so ubiquitous (cf. Godwin’s law) that it doesn’t make sense to call it a “woke tactic”; indeed, it precedes wokeism by decades.
Owlify
33m ago
I don't think the girl in question was low information, low intellect and definitely not low agentic. She just seemed fixated on causing chaos, and did everything in her power to do what was "fun" to her.
sun_the_second
33m ago
That's only the motte of advertising's value. I am not under the impression that if there was 10, or hell even 100 times less advertising in our world, people would struggle to find information about new products and services.
Owlify
34m ago
Many people would call people like you, who call for other human beings to be murdered because you perceive them as animals, a psychopath, or someone with anti-social tendencies at the very least.
faceh
37m ago
I'd like a movie where some gigachad Sean Connery secret agent from the 1950s comes forward in time and has to deal with modern norms and lame gadgets, shows all the paper-pushers and pencilnecks what real racism and sexism looks like.
It isn't a perfect fulfillment of the fantasy, but the Sylvester Stallone series Tulsa King has him playing a traditional Italian mafia underboss who gets out of prison after a 25 year stint, and ends up in Oklahoma, and has to adapt his older-generation mobster style, macho braggadocio and all, to modern times and a smaller town.
The general theme is that his brand of realistic common sense, his willingness to use violence, and his tendency to take what he wants is actually extremely useful for achieving success compared to the beta males that modernity has wrought, and this likewise gives him success with ladies.
sun_the_second
41m ago
Thanos is physically very tough, I can understand not trying the portal cut if Strange was reasonably sure it would just tickle him.
I read Loki giving up the cube as a trick to momentarily distract Thanos while Hulk jumps him. The Vision thing is absolutely stupid, though, yes.
Owlify
42m ago
Advertising helps the people learn about what kinds of products and services are available. Outright lying is banned, so it may be a net good.
faceh
47m ago
Oh yeah.
They had to contrive a VERY particular situation where the heroes are on the cusp of winning and somehow, without some crazy deus ex machina, lose and Thanos achieves his objective.
Hell, they showed that Dr. Strange's portals can be used to sever people's arms earlier in the same film, that should have been the thing they tried first.
So they used Quill as a device for Thanos breaking the hypnosis and reclaiming the gauntlet. While it was in-character for Quill, it required a lot of contrivance to get it to happen.
HOWEVER, I do like that one common theme in the film is that the heroes lose b/c they don't have the "will" to make the hard sacrifices, whereas Thanos puts it all on the line to achieve his goal, and so he does.
There are MULTIPLE scenarios where the heroes could have won if they weren't committed to avoiding any real sacrifice.
Big one: they tried to save Vision's life when removing the stone instead of killing him so they could destroy it faster. Vision himself was okay with dying!
Or earlier, Loki gives up the space stone rather than letting Thanos kill Thor.
The heroes, despite the stakes, couldn't bear to accept losses.
faceh
54m ago
Its funny, a couple years back I joked about setting up a GPT3 instance trained on my posts and then just retiring from the internet at large.
I wonder how many people have already done that.
hanikrummihundursvin
57m ago
I think there are too many stupid hobbies and sinful acts that too many people engage in for your point to be of much relevance.
sun_the_second
1hr ago
I specified advertizing because advertizing is explicitly not about leaning down the production to make the products cheaper, but rather at capturing more buyers. For a buyer, it does not matter whether they buy product A or product B if the products are identical but one captures 90% of attentionspace. For companies, it means an order of magnitude in revenue.
Barfknuckle
1hr ago
woke-right is such a misnomer, you can't just use woke- for a generic "hardcore true believer" it waters down the term.
James Lindsay uses it on Twitter as a derogatory term for anti-Jewish right wingers, who then all abuse, ratio, and fart on him in his threads. That's all I know it as.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
but frankly I'd hardly be less skeptical of any mother pushing a ten-year-old into a modeling career.
I am definitely in agreement with that. What I find repugnant is all the cheerleading by the media coverage over it. We have more than enough stories of modelling being a career that can be destructive for adults, but shoving a ten year old into being a LGBT role model in an industry that devours and spits out young hopefuls is meant to be a heart-warming success story and not one of "here's a parent willing to throw their kid into a meat grinder so the parent gets attention and head-pats".
Owlify
1hr ago
Doesn't squeezing each other out mean that they are becoming leaner and more efficient so giving the same products/services at lower cost to society? Can you give me some examples of the sort of jobs you are talking about? I am not sure I understand.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Some eight year olds do. Some learn to do so. Some have parental duties shoved on them. The perversity in that situation was that to avoid pain she had to volunteer for pain.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
It's not conditioning, I understand why she didn't want to go over and be beaten. But she was old enough to figure out "if I hesitate, I'll get beaten again; more beating is worse every time; do relatively small pain now and avoid greater pain later".
That's hard! Of course it's hard! But she's smart, and wasn't stupid as a child, she just was stuck in the moment and it wasn't until her brain shut down that she finally broke the cycle. It was abusive, but people in abusive situations learn to adapt to avoid the worst outcomes. "If I go over I'll be beaten, no no no" is the natural reaction. But it's like the stupid gom-jabbar test in Dune: learn to shut down the animal reaction so you can survive. I think she did learn to do that later. Her father wasn't pointlessly cruel, he stopped beating her as soon as she obeyed (that's deliberate cruelty, I'm not trying to claim it was anything but that). The worst abuser is the one who doesn't need an excuse, one who would have beaten her even if she obeyed. When there are rules in place, you learn to game the rules.
I realise I sound like I'm being very hard on a young child in pain, and that's valid. But I think there's also a real question of nature versus nurture: how much of her current psychology is the result of reaction to the way she was raised, and how much was a very over-sensitive in a pathological way state that would have reacted badly even in conventional parenting situations?
sun_the_second
1hr ago
What does it mean to "believe" in Darwinian evolution?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
That's not how these things work.
You just accumulate material on persons of interest (Greenwald would long have been on many's lists) and whenever they start to say stuff that you don't really want heard you use the stuff you have to derail the conversation.
If you doubt State actors are doing this shit you're just blind. We have endless receipts at this point, and Greenwald himself helped pore through much of them, actually.
Cap is the Marvel version of Superman. The idealism is the point. Whether it's starting out as 40s literal "punch a Nazi" or 60s "Vietnam is not what we're about" or 00s Civil War "this is authoritarianism", or whatever they're currently doing with the character, the ideal of Captain America is what is best about America, its foundational myths, its aspirations, the shining city on the hill.
If you make the character dark'n'gritty Punisher type, you fundamentally misunderstand what it's about and you wreck it, so you either create a new different character to be the new dark'n'gritty pragmatist, or (as the development seems to have been with the John Walker character) retcon the retcon so it fits the ideals better (maybe our current ideals are feminist anti-racist pro-woke Cap, but the character is still a representation of idealism and not 'shoot 'em all, let God sort 'em out' pragmatism and cynicism).
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