domain:alexberenson.substack.com
UnopenedEnvilope
1hr ago
How would, or would you at all, add a differentiation between the state and private organizations pursuing the above?
I would suggest including the practice of jaw boning as an action that is considered done by the state, where a threat from the state suffices. Examples: (1) the Biden administration motivating multiple social media companies — ostensibly competitors — into all suspending the New York Post’s accounts on their platforms within short order of one another, in response to the Post publishing the Hunter Biden laptop story, and (2) the Trump Administration motivating the owners of large numbers of ABC broadcast affiliate stations to pressure the network to bring Kimmel to heel.
gorge
2hr ago
Why defend someone's speech?
- I might agree with the speech, think the speech was necessary and true, and that people should hear it.
- I might disagree with the speech, but think it close enough to something that I could say that I want it defended so that I don't want people overly punished for things said in the heat of the moment
- I might strongly disagree with the speech, it was something I would never say, I think the speech makes the world a worse place, but I am doing my part to defend a general culture of free speech, which is important because only by maintaining a general culture of free speech can we get a full hearing of arguments in order to decide on what is true and how we should run our society.
With the case of Kimmel getting canceled, 1 and 2 do not apply, so only 3 applies. But we do not have that general culture of free speech, and so there is no general principle to defend. Gina Carano never got rehired, the NY Times never apologized to Razib Khan and rehired him, Middlebury never apologized to Charles Murray and never brought him back, etc. etc. Like, if the right had said, "you should not cancel people" and then the Left had said, "You are right, we were wrong, we will rehire those people and stop canceling rightists" and then the right got into power and started canceling leftists ... ok that would be reneging on a deal and hypocritical. But that is not what happened. So what we are left with is that I am happy Kimmel got suspended because what he said was bad. Maybe it wasn't firing worthy, but he should apologize. Lot's of comedians have apologized over the years fro crossing the line. And last I heard the reason for the suspension was that he wanted to double-down instead of apologizing.
So essentially your argument has to come down to that for the right, a strategy of pacifism is better than tit-for-tat; that sticking to the cooperation corner even after the left has defected is ultimately going to be more successful. I don't think that would have worked, but I don't think tit-for-tat is going to work either. I expect things to continue to get worse.
07mk
2hr ago
So all these people subscribing to ASMR content producers must have an unusually wide gap between the threshold of pleasure and the threshold of disgust/pain, just like these people who blanket their food with cayenne powder or subscribe to /r/popping do.
I have similar issues with ticklishness like you described, but I also enjoy ASMR and enjoy blanketing my food with whatever spice I'm into at the moment, so this is probably specific to the stimulus. Never been to /r/popping or know what it's about, but based on context, that sounds disgusting & I'd rather stay away.
LateMechanic
2hr ago
When we're checking for hypocrisy, I think it's important to remember what original 'cancelations' and cancel culture entailed, even if that sometimes comes off as quibbling over degree. Plenty of your post still stands even if we're talking about minor retribution over speech, but some relies on the weight of what we knew as 'cancel culture' that just isn't applicable IMO.
Rather than just being a synonym for 'fired', 'canceled' was instead typified by the twitter phrase "wait, why is this person still being heard from? Didn't we cancel him?" It wasn't just getting someone unemployed from their current job, but instead attempting to actively make them unemployable. A complete salting of the earth by the mob, an ongoing blacklisting from society, kept up by dozens of psychos on twitter keeping tabs on targets for years on end (and rallying the troops if there was a new sighting). If Louis CK or Warren Ellis bounced back with a new sitcom or movie, that company would have been eating a ton of shit and facing boycotts. Pressure was put on their friends, family, and past colleagues to denounce them personally. Ethan Van Sciver was a top artist at DC, but he was openly republican and celebrated trump winning in 2016. For that he was hounded out of DC, and definitely wasn't going to be allowed to jump to Marvel or Image. The SJWs (not really 'woke', which is more of a high society new religion, though we conflate these now) wanted him bagging groceries or working fast food, or preferably just killing himself, and said so. He and some others had to jump to independent crowd-funded comics projects, and then got kicked off Kickstarter from this cancel culture pressure (until finally getting to Indiegogo who held tough).
If Jimmy Kimmel gets a new cable channel show, or tries going independent on Rumble or Substack, and rightwingers follow him around everywhere trying to him fired off those as well ("Do you know what he said about Charlie Kirk in his previous job? He can't be given another platform"), then there's a good case that we've entered right-wing cancel culture. Did people track the Home Depot lady to what job she got next, and go after that one too? Until that point, these seem to be pretty limited acts of retribution, rather than "canceling" people.
samiam
2hr ago
The right-wing website Townhall has a long list of people on the left who advocated cancelling getting cancelled themselves now that the pendulum has swung the other way.
I do not believe any of the people who signed Harper’s Letter back in 2020 during peak left-wing cancel culture have been cancelled for saying inappropriate things about Charlie Kirk, but if anyone has examples, let us know.
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
2hr ago
enforcer-transgressor dichotomy
A thought on this: the definition of 'conservative' is being on the enforcer side (the act of enforcement is tautologically conservative), and then you have the reformers and reactionaries on the other side.
Progressives have been under the pretense that they were in the transgressor role (and to a degree inherit a movement that is axiomatically transgressive, which is why they, and traditionalist-leaning reactionaries, erroneously call them 'liberals'), but transgression and entrenchment are indistinguishable to any faction that depends on entrenchment.
In general, they seem much more inclined to pushing forward a prescriptive vision of American culture than other factions in American politics.
Progressives have had them beat on that front since at least before the Civil War. (Why else do you think the faction opposed to them still uses the stars and bars?)
It is useful to be able to point out that even classical liberals will act like conservatives once they manage to get into power. "Maximally correct" is not a viable political identity because as soon as the conditions are right to enable rent-seeking on what was a mostly correct answer, that is what gets entrenched, and it remains that way until enough social activation energy accumulates such that it is pushed back by a new truth. Which then entrenches, and like the tides, the cycle repeats.
Christians were tolerant, and that's where the social trust came in. They were tolerant of those they still saw as their own. One side decided they weren't Christian anymore, which was one thing. Then they decided they weren't just non-Christian, but anti-Christian. Then they decided that whiteness (not necessarily white people, but kind of) was the problem. A smaller segment wasn't just non-white, but blatantly anti-white. Another small segment wasn't just non-straight, but effectively anti-straight. Then another segment decided they weren't capitalist anymore, but seize the means of production anti-capitalists. The right wing has its fair share of insanity and intolerance, but nearly all of these newly held philosophies on morality and economics and race are all on the Democratic side.
We were a flawed unit that, despite our differences, saw each other as part of the same group because we all basically had the same moral, and somewhat social, and somewhat cultural foundations. That rug was completely ripped out from under our society. We decided to teach our kids critical thinking for years, and boy are they critical now, of everything. They grasp onto ideas over material reality. Hop on over to reddit if you need a reminder of how important critical thinking (critical theory) is to those people.
Blueberry
2hr ago
There is kind of annoying stuff in them, but I liked both books in the trilogy.
There is an internet theory that Patrick Rothfuss "father was his shadow writer. It’s Pats idea and world building, but his dad was the one who actually wrote it. After TNOTW and TWMF, Pat wanted to prove to himself that he could continue to write the books from now on. So he wrote TSROST all by himself. But he knew it wasn’t written the same and as the others. That’s why he says people won’t like the book because he knows it didn’t have the same feel as before."
wemptronics
2hr ago
How long does Catbox keep files for? Forever. If you don't want your file to stick around until the heat death of the universe, use Litterbox.
Nice, this is basically why I asked. I use imgur out of ease of use and habit forum posting, but I'm pretty sure they delete them eventually.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2hr ago
It could be. It could also just be economics and consumer psychology. They have a lot of good will from how high quality Hollow Knight was at $15. If they bumped Silksong up to $30 it might have generated a lot of backlash at the perceived greed of a price doubling, and halved their expected number of sales, especially after factoring in the number of people who are discovering and buying Hollowing Knight for the first time as they see everyone else getting excited about Silksong.
It could also be a combination of both. Maybe they could have had 60% as many sales at double the price and earned 20% more total profit, but didn't care enough to squeeze out that last extra bit.
wemptronics
2hr ago
Next time I get a hankering I intend to look at unique commenters per thread to see something in the shape of weight of regulars over time. I also have a mild curiosity in word count trends per thread, comment, and top levels.
WandererintheWilderness
2hr ago
Having been made unwelcome or outright banned from virtually every hobby space I enjoyed since I was a wee child in the 80s by pure dint of being conservative
Yes, but the Left is universalist. It wishes to push forward a prescriptive vision of Being A Decent Person™ which should apply globally. @Skibboleth was making the point that this is different from the Conservative focus on defining Americanness.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2hr ago
In general, they seem much more inclined to pushing forward a prescriptive vision of American culture than other factions in American politics.
Having been made unwelcome or outright banned from virtually every hobby space I enjoyed since I was a wee child in the 80s by pure dint of being conservative, this is rich. Also requires ignoring Biden's rage speech where he repeatedly described "MAGA" as the greatest threat to America. IMHO describing the opposition party as a threat the nation ranks pretty high above merely describing their policies as unamerican.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
3hr ago
Maelle is a bae, though. She's one of these heroines that promises to marry you when she's a kid and everyone dismisses it as a childhood crush and then she turns legal and proves everyone wrong.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3hr ago
Among other things, but not only that. My observation is that (some) conservatives are much more likely to try and 'gatekeep' Americanness and call things they don't like unamerican (progressives occasionally try, but their heart never seems to be in it); they often frame opposition to wokeness as 'reclaiming' or 'taking back' the country. In general, they seem much more inclined to pushing forward a prescriptive vision of American culture than other factions in American politics.
Some of this I will freely admit is a vibes-based assessment that a lot of conservatives were really disoriented and angered by being on the other side of the enforcer-transgressor dichotomy. By contrast, progressives were also disoriented by the flip, but had previously been quite comfortable in the transgressor role and often seem to prefer it.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3hr ago
The bare-bones Mitsubishi Mirage is only $16,000 (and was $10,000 not that long ago), and it isn't exactly flying off the lot.
incognitomaorach
3hr ago
Dominion is a good read and makes the argument much better than I could. I don't think I agree with you about China though. By secularism I mean both the concept of separation of church and state, but also the general conceptual rendering that comes with "render unto Caesar", that there is a realm of life which isn't governed by the religious. Worth noting of course this has often been ignored by Christian states themselves, but was picked up with more seriousness later down the line. But Chinese emperors and dynasties had the Mandate of Heaven, oracle bones, and neo-Confucianism.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
Cancel culture was always a thing, but it became a Thing with the emergence of a faction of illiberal progressives that had the clout to actually apply pressure and a desire to do so. This inversion of the 'proper' order of things was deeply upsetting to the many conservatives who saw themselves as rightful hegemons of American culture.
I'm curious about this part. What do you mean by "conservatives saw themselves as rightful hegemons of American culture"? Are you talking about things like evangelical dominance during W Bush's administration?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
Bartender_Venator
3hr ago
Conservative groups will support conservative causes on 1A issues, but as far as I can tell there's no right-wing equivalent to the ACLU representing the Nazis
Not in the 1960s, but FIRE today is somewhat right-coded and has taken over the old ACLU's mantle of representing without fear or favour.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3hr ago
LateMechanic
3hr ago
I'd say ASMR is as distinctively clear a feeling as frisson, but yeah, definitely two different things caused by practically opposite stimuli. I feel like I've experienced it my whole life, from being in kindergarten and having the librarian read a story to the class, to sometimes when getting haircuts, to even being stuck on the phone with some customer service person taking too long to work through something (clacking away on a keyboard while verbally stalling). So I pretty much knew instantly what youtubers were going for when I started seeing the videos in like ~2012, even with the ridiculous 'asmr' term someone came up with.
My experience was more of assuming everyone else was lying about not understanding it, out of some embarrassment that it was too weird or was somehow sexual. But it does really seem like many people don't get the 'back of the head tingles' feeling. Not sure if that goes for frisson too - are there many people out there who don't get 'chills' from some epic swelling music moment?
Then the asmr videos are trying to inorganically bottle it as a more 'pure cut' for people chasing the dragon, like epic movie trailers have tried to get a few frisson moments down to a science.
YoungAchamian
3hr ago
This is the post Christian world that the postmodernists wanted
Yes because Christians were famously tolerant of their enemies. Human's have hated their enemies since we had enemies to hate. The thin veneer of civilizing flavor has never been much of an impediment.
This would be a good example of political hypocrisy, thinking that one's side is near blameless and is full of virtue and the other side is daft villains and rapscallions.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3hr ago
you've acknowledged China's demographic issues and your solution to it was essentially ai enabled robotics to handle elderly care in order to keep the ratio of dependents to workers manageable correct? The happy case for China multipolar strength seems to rely on a pretty narrow outcome where AI is powerful enough to do a huge amount of menial labor but not powerful enough to where being ahead a couple years differentiates world power standings.
Americans have invented themselves a lot of cope about China, to the extent they're not paying attention to similar domestic issues.
Right now Mainland Chinese are younger by over 4 years than White Americans (40.1 years in 2025 vs 44.5 in 2020 median). By 2040, they'll become about on par I think (46-47). I don't trust fertility projections after that, we've seen nations rapidly fall into the East Asian model, including throughout South America (Central America for now is holding up admittedly). American solution to American demographic issues is importing assorted Hispanics to take care of white boomers and hoping that Hispanics will somehow also become a replacement for the working population. I don't believe this is happening as far as O-ring economy goes (software, finance, deep tech jobs now ride on adding Indians and Chinese to local numbers; Indians don't have that deep a well of talent and they're having a demographic transition too, especially for higher castes; Chinese net flow is reversing), so in my view your productive working populations are shrinking at a similar pace. After seeing stories of elderly abuse by immigrants in the US, I am positive that robotic caretakers will at least reach parity soon for augmenting blue collar work and and caretaking. Americans are trying to add robots to industrial workforce and will likely begin to automate retirement facilities too, they're not that dumb and there are Western robotic projects clearly aimed at home labor. Robotic mobility is now at this level, and this is a blind policy. Progress in manipulation is similar, China reigns supreme in actuators market and casually make dexterous hands now, it's a very nice fit for their industrial model so they'll only increase their lead there. Robots will suffice for menial labor, both in China and in the US (probably marginally more so in China but it's not a crux). Finally I don't believe in the necessity of unproductive population to "provide consumption", rich people with robot slaves can consume as much and grow GDP as much as multiple poor people. On the whole, I am of the mind that demographic trend difference is a dumb and, again, Zeihanite red herring that ignores medium-term predictable AI progress.
So abstractly, it's not a narrow outcome, because as I've just said, the floor is basically established, and China won't have to make up for a large extra deficiency. The whole question is about those huge gains of productivity on the right tail, it's the US that will have to make up for having fewer and lower IQ people, NIMBYism, alienating allies, degraded supply chains and retarded and worsening political culture with geniuses in a datacenter, by gaining a couple years of edge in AI progress and not fumbling the application of gains (and starting at 7:44 here, Molson gives me a reason to suspect that China will also be better at applying what gains they make with AI throughout the period).
Now, I believe AI is going to be really useful. A review commissioned by DeepMind predicts that at a minimum, 2030 level AI will boost productivity for desk-based research by 10-20%.. That's a lot. All things considered, is this enough to "compound" your way to lasting hegemony after 2030? I wouldn't bet on it, but Americans are Winners by nature, so they might. The upside of hegemony is, in theory, near-infinite. The downside is just having a worse place in the eventual bipolar world. Whether to take this bet depends on the odds (and nuances of the value function). I'd say the US has maybe 25% chance of "winning the race" to hegemonic condition.
This is a very important point now that "Cancel Culture" has become a generic term. Part of the reason, I think, is that the cancelled ecosystem has grown strong enough that it's not as easy to drum people out of society. For a timely example, Blake Neff was canceled and fired from Tucker Carlson's show in 2020, then hired by Charlie Kirk. Of course, there were attempts to keep him canceled, but Kirk didn't care.
Still, even though the situation has improved greatly in the post-covid era, it's important to remember that canceling didn't originally mean punishment, it meant unpersoning. I suppose, too, that the belief of cancelers that they would be able to keep their targets canceled forever was inextricably linked with the Great Awokening belief that their total, eternal cultural victory was inevitable. Whoops.
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