domain:alexberenson.substack.com
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6m ago
How does SG’s healthcare work?
If there’s ever a country I’d expect to have the dreaded “death panels”, it’d be this one, I guess.
stav
13m ago
It's a signal there are too many non-whites (even 1 is too many) and them buying homes in white neighborhoods should be illegal
Thoroughlygruntled
21m ago
Honestly, a deep dive into your struggles sourcing reliable information sounds even more interesting to me than an update on the strategic situation. I would definitely read it.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
24m ago
It's pretty bold to move to a white country and then complain about white people "hogging the accommodations." What are the imputed damages of your homeland being a place that can't accommodate white people because it's such an undesirable place the live?
Folamh3
25m ago
This is part of the spin I see a lot in conjunction with insane conspiracies even in supposedly rational progressive circles - one example being that there was no blood seen at the scene and that people around did not panic, so maybe it was just some stunt. Yes, these things are unironically shared among a lot of pro-opposition people, this is where we are now - in culture war filled disinformation age. When it comes to the assassin then yes, on one side he had photos with pro Russian aligned paramilitary organization Slovenský Branci (although supposedly to convince them to not support Russia as part of his movement against violence) and he also had some rant against Roma/gypsies - BTW not that rare even among progressives in Slovakia. However he also voted for progressive president Zuzana Čaputová, he strongly supported Ukraine in the current war and he participated in anti-government protests that were organized basically since Fico took power as every government action was painted as a huge problem, threat to democracy and all that.
His actions were politically motivated and he decided to assassinate Fico for reasons broadly in line with current opposition rhetoric. I think he really fits the description of "stochastic terrorism" - an unhinged person with fringe views who was sensitive to heightened emotions around the current issue™ and just decided to act extremely on a given day. This gives plausible deniability of any responsibility to any side - look, he is unhinged and we do not bear any responsibility for anything or even pin it on the other side due to cherrypicked issues like that he was racist toward gypsies so he was no true progressive. By the way there was also an interview with his son who said that he was not medicated that he did not have any history of actual mental illness and that nothing suggested that he would do something like that - that is why I use the term unhinged.
And I am not even saying that as some judgement, I just think this is the world we live in. We may see more and more of these types of operations where political violence is used with cloud of plausible deniability that can itself feed into the overall culture war further polarizing everybody into even more insanity. What a world to live in.
NelsonRushton
30m ago
I think a definition of woke which includes practically every political movement ever is not a very useful definition and flies in the face of common usage.
This, partly, was my point. The definition of wokeness I was applying, taken from the Oxford dictionary (explicitly, using the phrase "in the dictionary sense"), does not reflect the common use of the word. If you read carefully, I never said Hitler, Stalin, etc. were woke. I said (1) their propaganda was rife with woke sounding platitudes, and that (2) their stated agendas fit the dictionary definition (but not the actual meaning in common sense) of wokeness.
But the reader shouldn't have to read that carefully to get the message, so I edited the first paragraph as follows to clarify that the dictionary definition of "woke" that I am using here does not reflect the common use of the word:
As of this writing, the Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. The dictionary entry doesn't mention radical progressivism, censorship, collective punishment, or selective enforcement of criminal laws. Indeed, the Oxford definition does not mention, or even suggest, anything actually associated with wokeness, as opposed to non-wokeness, in the sense that the word is actually used. I submit this is because the dictionary's authors are woke (or else pretending to be, in order to avoid censorship and collective punishment).
Stellula
34m ago
Maybe I’m using the term wrong? Low entropy as in: very little actual information. Something that could realistically be summarized in a sentence or two, gets expanded into a giant wall.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
34m ago
This is a wild statement that you need to proportionally support with citations.
It's not wild at all to say that Jews proudly identify as Jewish and frequently engage in pro-Jewish activism, and frequently engage in very public activism against anti-Semitism, including very well-funded campaigns using every avenue of the propaganda apparatus. And then, at the same time, they engage in advocacy against pro-White activism and consider it "hateful" for someone to identify with being white with any of the same feelings they invoke to promote and celebrate Jewish solidarity.
Imagine if White people behaved like Jews, considered themselves a Chosen diaspora among the world, engaged in intense activism for their ethnic interest and used every avenue to criticize, censor, suppress Jewish identity and activism. Jews do not want White people behaving like Jews.
Recursive_Enlightenment
41m ago
One of my crazier ideas is that the US should pay the government of Singapore to run our health care system.
quiet_NaN
44m ago
"Don't hand out recipes for methamphetamine" sounds pretty straightforward and coherent, though, much more than "Don't Murder", which per Wikipedia "is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse committed with the necessary intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisdiction."
I mean, some of the best (worst) CW stories are about a killing where all sides more or less agree on the facts but their interpretation of what they think is (or should be) the law is different.
"Don't kill any humans, directly or indirectly, ever" might be simpler, but to phrase it so that our AI can't lock up people and let them die of thirst without it also being compelled to round up people and force them to take their cancer screenings or stop smoking or whatever will be complicated. There is every reason to believe that our collective ideas about these things is not particularly coherent either.
Thoroughlygruntled
1hr ago
And joined in an unholy bootleggers and baptists coalition with the environmentalists. CEQA might be the most economically destructive law ever written.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
An urban growth boundary would be a terrible thing. Letting people build on farmland they own is no different to letting people build on urban land they own.
But the YIMBYs aren't pushing to let farmland be developed. They don't want greenfield development, they want to be able to densify existing neighborhoods.
You wouldn't get the Kowloon Walled city, you'd get a smooth gradient of housing densities slowly decreasing from urban centres to rural locations.
We have that in much of the United States. It's decried as "sprawl" by urbanists. They don't want that; they say it leads to car dependence, long commutes, ugly parking lots, pollution, high infrastructure costs, gun ownership, and general resistance to dependence on government. They want to preserve undeveloped or agricultural land from the predations of housing developers, while densifying existing cities and suburbs.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1hr ago
You're not wrong, but I feel like his posts started out as pure massive infodumps, then he occasionally started providing his opinions, they subtly but gradually went up in preachiness, and at some point I felt that my main focus became filtering the doom from his posts instead of actually absorbing the content of said posts. Personally I checked out around last year's unrest at OpenAI when I habitually opened his Substack and laid my eyes on a headline reading "You win, or we all die". I think that event legitimately mindbroke him to some extent.
Corvos
1hr ago
Right, that's also a big thing. Seems less prevalent lately: I wonder if it's to prevent accusations of cultural appropriation? Or simply because youtube means that people can watch (and become fans of) the original before the remake is available on television.
It's especially weird that it didn't happen with anime because anime art is actually directly American in origin. Maybe that's why.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1hr ago
And you know what? This will only happen when California's voters are minority white (and when that happens a Prop 13 repeal will follow shortly). Older whites use their entrenched position in western countries to benefit themselves at the expense of more dynamic and younger non-white immigrants, it's a tale as old as mass immigration itself and California is no different to the other places this is happening, see how the UK is using the taxes of the young (disproportionately non-white immigrants) to pay for the social care of the old (disproportionately white "natives", especailly so because non-whites are more likely to believe in filial responsibility and take care of their parents instead of thrusting them upon the state).
Past whites brought about Prop 13, present whites are tacitly voting to continue it but fututre non-whites will be the ones who get rid of it and free California from all the deadweight loss and misery this policy causes each year.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Some comedians were complaining about how the world is impossible to parody nowadays, but this is taking it to a whole new level. I mean... I can keep adding layers, but it's not going to push it from "real news" to satire...
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1hr ago
An urban growth boundary, inside of which there is only high density development, outside of which no one may build at all.
I don't claim to want this at all. An urban growth boundary would be a terrible thing. Letting people build on farmland they own is no different to letting people build on urban land they own. You wouldn't get the Kowloon Walled city, you'd get a smooth gradient of housing densities slowly decreasing from urban centres to rural locations.
A lot of the UK's current housing problems stem from the fact that people can't build on farmland they own.
Culture War nexuses
This isn't exactly some thought-out post, more just a culture war observation. Every now and then there happens an event that feels like a CW "nexus" where it is the intersection of like five different hot topics in one moment. I had this thought while walking yesterday and wondered if someone else had any other examples. Here's two of mine:
A couple of weeks ago in Toronto a group of Indian immigrants, presumably in a gang of some sort, robbed a government-owned liquor store. They pulled a knife on an off-duty cop there. When they left, they were pursued by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and regional cops. In a rented van the thieves went the wrong way down the 401, the busiest highway in the world; the OPP stopped pursuit and told the regional cops to do the same, but they continued to follow. The getaway van hit a car going the opposite way. The other car's inhabitants was also a family of Indian immigrants: new parents, a baby, and their newly-arrived grandparents (via family reunification presumably). The getaway driver, the grandparents, and the baby were killed. The getaway driver was out on bail on weapon's charges, had a suspended license, and was under court order not to drive.
If you've been paying attention to any political issues in Canada you can see how this neatly ties together a bunch of hot topics into one incident. I have another:
In late 2022 a cement mixer in Berlin hit a female cyclist. The driver got out of his truck to check on the cyclist and was stabbed by a mentally ill homeless refugee. An ambulance arrived to transport the critically injured woman to the hospital, but on the way was stopped by climate protestors who had glued themselves to the road. The cyclist died but the truck driver survived.
My explanation for the modern southerners being the intended target:
Most modern southerners are the descendants of Confederate soldiers. They live in the same places, have the same names, sing the same songs and sometimes wave the same flags. Like most people, they generally prefer to venerate their ancestor's impressive deeds whilst downplaying or forgetting the ones they disagree with.
Taking their statues, deliberately mutilating them, and then melting them down can be seen as, and was seen as, an attack on those people. It's saying, "This is what I think of your history, this is what I think of your pride," and it's also saying, "you can't stop me from destroying things that matter to you".
You may think that southerners shouldn't have taken it personally, but they did. And on observing this fact, the Left did not go, "Shit, dude, I'm sorry. I didn't realise this stuff mattered to you." They went, "Ha! Suck it, racists." Which to my mind tells you who they were aiming at.
In other words, it's 1.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1hr ago
They might like their neighbourhood, but they probably like $5 million for their quarter acre a lot more. Then big developers can consolidate and build something that can house more people and sell the units for $1 million each. Everyone wins: the people who sold their house, the developers, the people who now get to live affordably in the bay area, the government (a lot more tax for them) etc. etc.
Only losers are busybodies who want to restrict what others want to do with lan they own.
New housing gets built and rich foreigners like Indians come in and pay 100k over asking
This is a signal that supply nowhere near matches the level of demand. It's a sign we need to build even more, not control building.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1hr ago
Yes. It's not because we hate humor. It's because threads full of people saying "Lol" and "This" are annoying, so we discourage it.
georgioz
2hr ago
The law would apply equally to somebody funded by Russian organization or let's say Misk foundation that is backed by Mohammed bin Salman. I personally think there is a huge difference between let's say Club of Slovak Toursits which private NGO funded by hikers as opposed to organization funded by governments like China or Saudi Arabia or Quatar - it is hard to even call them NGOs in that sense. Was it also not part o the whole controversy of "Russian collusion" where all everybody was up in arms that some foreign player is meddling in domestic politics?
To me this adds transparency to NGO sector, that leftist call it as "chilling effect" or even as you say that it will "shut down" the sector - which is not true at this point is telling. Of course they are arguing from slippery slope and there may be something there, but it is a different argument from what is happening now.
When protestors started using the roads, I came up with the idea of making roads (outside of crosswalks) open range cars. Meaning you can do what you want but if a car hits you not only is the car not liable for any damage done to you are liable for the damage any damage you do to the car. That remains true even if the car speeds up or aims for you. The car has a priority right to use the road, and other users must yield to that right or bear the consequences.
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