domain:alexberenson.substack.com
How could you see this and not be reactionary?
Answer: Boomers.
Boomers don't see it because they are the beneficiaries of it.
Imagine a boomer living in Monterrey. Their house is worth $3 million. They pay almost no tax and in fact receive large checks and free health care from the government. Services are high quality because of an army of low-wage immigrants. The town isn't crowded despite its magnificent natural environment. Nothing has been built in 30 years.
There's an eerie lack of children but that's a small price to pay.
It's like when all the old union workers sign a contract to grandfather in their benefits while screwing the new workers. And it's why the Democratic party is now the party of the old, upper middle class whites. The high/low coalition makes the present comfortable for these wealthy boomers while replacing their society wholesale over time.
stav
32m ago
I grew up in CA. I recently looked up the house my parents bought for under 300k in the 1990’s and it just sold for over 3 million. It used to be almost all white and now it’s just insanely wealthy tech workers who are probably majority Indian and Asian. Nobody I know who grew up there still lives there. Keep in mind this is a 1 story house and is basically 3 bedrooms and an office so by no means a mansion. I essentially don’t have a home town anymore.I see stuff like this and I don’t understand why Trump isn’t more popular. How could you see this and not be reactionary?
To steelman the original case against cultural appropriation, you really have to understand the context in which it appeared. Think back a couple of decades to when America was maximally hegemonic and arrogant. When I was growing up, it was accepted wisdom in Hollywood that any film that adapted British source material had to be set in America with American children, and the source was often mutilated to make that work: see The Seeker (an adaptation of my favourite childhood book) for a particularly egregious example, but they even tried to do it with Harry Potter.
It's not fun to see your culture stolen or made into a theme park version of itself because Hollywood execs didn't believe that their audiences could tolerate anything too exotic. And it's worse knowing that, because American soft power outmatches yours by an order of magnitude, your children will grow up with the American version of your culture as the default while the original dies a slow death. In the same vein, Hallowe'en is now a much bigger deal than Nov 4th in the UK, and spell-check + Grammarly is slowly killing British English. I can imagine it's even worse for smaller, weaker countries and cultures.
Of course, the anti-cultural-appropriation movement overreached, mostly by refusing to see any difference between genuine appreciation and chauvinistic snatching. But in an age of increased migration and greater communication between cultures (via the internet) it's more likely that, say, Arabs will get upset about American girls using their national costume to slut it up.
(Obviously I'm simplifying and cherry-picking, see for example the chinese dress brouhaha where actual Chinese people didn't give a damn. I'm trying to give a sympathetic explanation of one reason why people started pushing back against cultural appropriation. I enjoy dressing up myself.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
38m ago
Write too little, and you get a lot of "This isn't what we like to see from a top level post" mod warnings.
Warnings for effort on top level posts are handed out pretty rarely. I made this very short post about Iran's attack on Israel (over half of it was copy-pasted quotes) and I didn't get modded for that. The bar is pretty low.
In fact, posting virtually any topical bit of news often gets you a "boo outgroup" warning
Going through last week's top level posts, the Eurovision post didn't get modded, the Mike Cernovich post didn't get modded, the summary of Trump's trials didn't get modded, the post about DEI at MIT didn't get modded... there are lots of topical posts that don't get modded.
I definitely don't agree with all the mod decisions here. But it's also false to claim that the mods are paralyzing all discussion, because it's just a fact that the vast majority of posts don't get modded.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
6m ago
Mods here are the final barrier between turning this community into the clone of rightist Twitter(you can also see long posts there sometimes) and they need to go even further. There should be a reasonable requirement for minimum number of words in the top level posts.
jeroboam
42m ago
Attempting to reach this goal by conducting a war of annihilation
I'm going to get accused of being a "Putinist" surely, but Russia is not waging a war of annihilation. They are conspicuously avoiding civilian casualties.
As usual, the worst victims of war are the men actually doing the fighting, whose lives are treated as worthless by basically everyone.
No_one
16m ago
At this point, I don't understand why Ukrainians simply refuse to move when 'recruited'. Unless they start killing them, getting a beating is preferable to getting blown up, and they can't maim recruits because that'd defeat the entire point.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
21m ago
Context. What are you talking about. Helpful to have links or quotes, but not always necessary. "There have been a slew of campus protests about the Israel war lately. They were the worst at [this university] (link to news story)."
Come on man. There is no goddamned way that anyone posting here is unaware of the core of the story.
Opinion. "The protests seem pointless. Israel has not changed its policies at all."
Yeah, they did that - it's right there!
I don't think it's a good post, but it's a fine area of discussion, everyone is already familiar with the basics, and the bar to ride the ride shouldn't be that someone has to personally have a novel take. Adding a paragraph of blather about Columbia or quoting the New York Times would not improve this post.
NelsonRushton
22m ago
A claim that Soviets killed 10-15 million instead of 40-60 million would be an exceedingly odd one from a point of radical leftism, since it's still far too many killed people for communists to be comfortable with it, and anarchists and others would presumably not care that much either way, since they would see Soviet Union as a bad thing either way.
I don't think it's odd at all. They can't completely whitewash the numbers in one generation, but they want an excuse to (1) quibble with anyone who points out the atrocities by disputing their numbers, (2) use that as an excuse not to listen to them, and (3) doctor the numbers so that they can say that Naziism, or the Westward expansion of the United States, or something else besides the philosophy they espouse killed the most people ever.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1hr ago
You literally just need to write one paragraph. Five to six sentences. I have never seen a post that had at least one paragraph of original thought get modded for effort.
jeroboam
24m ago
After nearly a decade of commenting on this sort of stuff, I don't think there's a lot more to be said about any of it.
True. Which is why the people who comment about HBD are also the people who discovered it like last Tuesday and have all of the same bad takes.
Then random people on the other side pop up saying "my dude, all the races have the same IQ, it's science", apparently having missed the entire conversion or feigning ignorance.
It's Eternal September.
So it gets boring. At first HDB felt exciting because it was "forbidden" knowledge. Now, the HBD thesis seems so obvious and settled that it's not really worth debating. But every September more young rationalist will have to make that journey again, walking over well-worn footsteps.
cjet79
44m ago
@Primaprimaprima is correct. Write about a paragraph of original thought and you are fine.
I wrote this up thread:
In general I suggest three things for a decent start at a top level post:
- Context. What are you talking about. Helpful to have links or quotes, but not always necessary. "There have been a slew of campus protests about the Israel war lately. They were the worst at [this university] (link to news story)."
- Interpretation and analysis. Add some of your own interpretation and analysis to these events. "The protests seem to have been treated a bit differently from other protests in recent memory, like the BLM. Police have been called up to break up some of the protests. Donors have threatened to remove funding from universities. Etc"
- Opinion. "The protests seem pointless. Israel has not changed its policies at all."
cjet79
50m ago
For top level posts in the culture war roundup there needs to be more effort and content.
In general I suggest three things for a decent start at a top level post:
- Context. What are you talking about. Helpful to have links or quotes, but not always necessary. "There have been a slew of campus protests about the Israel war lately. They were the worst at [this university] (link to news story)."
- Interpretation and analysis. Add some of your own interpretation and analysis to these events. "The protests seem to have been treated a bit differently from other protests in recent memory, like the BLM. Police have been called up to break up some of the protests. Donors have threatened to remove funding from universities. Etc"
- Opinion. "The protests seem pointless. Israel has not changed its policies at all."
No_one
7m ago
Endgame ?
This or next year, Ukraine folds and accepts territorial loss and permanent neutrality (Finlandisation- no NATO, no EU membership). NATO is ran by idiots simply wasn't able to provide the armaments necessary for victory. Might be some fun (meaning FPVs into NATO political leaders) out of this when Ukrainians with their half million dead are going to be given no rebuilding assistance [1].
EU (specifically the centrist fraction of EU parties) is mulling a union-wide draft law, supposedly voluntary at the start, so recruiting at most 10% of age groups. So there might be remilitarization. It's required in the mid run anyway because America is likely going to go down.
Russia reforms their military procurement in preparation for WW3 (new defense minister looks up to the task) and will probably take over the Baltics out of pure vengeance when US hegemony collapses following the China war. It's nice real estate, but I guess most the young people there will flee and Russian hydrocarbon funds will go to pay for those pensions too.
[1]
"On the question of NATO's role in the reconstruction of Ukraine after the war. The first thing I will say is that first of all, you need to ensure that Ukraine prevails. Because unless Ukraine prevails, there's nothing to reconstruct in a free and independent Ukraine.
We must be able to help Ukraine prevail because it's important for Ukrainians. But also because every day this war drags on, of course, the more destruction and the more expensive, the more resource demanding it will be to do reconstruction afterwards."
Technically this does have points 1, 2 and 3. I get why the mods aim to have an effort filter for top posts but this isn't spicy and seems to have stimulated discussion effectively enough.
Shrike
12m ago
By "war of annihilation" I (perhaps unclearly) meant "destroying all their hardware and killing all their personnel to reduce their ability to fight" not "killing all their civilians."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
15m ago
I think a lot of people are radicalized by being priced out of the place they grew up (I've had coworkers who certainly were) but it's not clear to me how this translates into support for Trump. Mostly I think this translates into support for YIMBYism, which I think is on the rise across the country.
cjet79
18m ago
[2]: Yes cjet as you say every single time anybody complains about this topic there is no length requirement. And yet: yes there is.
Does the NBA have a height requirement? It doesn't but also it does. They have a good at basketball requirement, and height helps a lot. Likewise, we have a 'decent post' requirement and length helps, but I think it helps less than height does in the NBA.
If you held my feet to the fire I could give you a minimum length requirement: three sentences. I just don't often say it, because its not really about the length its about the content. And three sentences doesn't mean you have satisfied the requirements. Its just impossible to have enough content in less than three sentences, and I don't want people pointing to this and saying "hey I wrote three sentences like you asked". Which someone will do, and I will laugh along with them and give them a temp ban for being so funny.
All you need: Context of the thing. Interpretation and analysis of the thing. An opinion on the thing. A very good concise writer could do that in three sentences. It wouldn't be a very good or interesting top level post but it would satisfy my personal "low effort" rule. Five sentences would be safer. One context sentence and then an average of two sentences for the analysis and opinion parts.
If you don't want all three of those parts then about ten sentences is good enough. But these posts tend to get dinged for other problems. An opinion only rant tends to run afoul of boo-outgroup and waging the culture war.
gattsuru
19m ago
Was literally pointing a gun at Rittenhouse, whose friend claimed he said "His only regret was not killing the kid and hesitating to pull the gun before emptying the entire mag into him" (later retracted, tots honest), and who was illegally carrying a concealed weapon after his carry permit had either expired or been revoked.
Yep.
sliders1234
just now
This feels though similar to Americans do not travel to other countries but everyone in Europe does therefore everyone in America are uneducated proles.
The one big city countries all seem to be NOT continent size countries. All of Europe seems to have outsized capital countries, but the countries are probably more comparable to regions of the U.S.
The only of the big Euro countries that might be less capital dominant is maybe Italy? Rome is still dominant for tourists because of history but Milan is only half the size and perhaps more economically important and Naples list a higher population.
KMC
just now
I would like to use this place as the comment section of the articles I find daily (realclearpolitics, for one I don't mind mentioning). But I know better by now.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2m ago
I think the word you were looking for was "attrition".
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5m ago
I think a big reason there aren't posts about these topics is because a lot of people don't want to discuss events in-themselves, they want to connect it to some larger thesis or narrative. For some of these it's not clear what the narrative is. For others it's a narrative that this site has beaten the dead horse of. The latter issue is compounded by the site having a relatively small user base. I think a solid majority of users are people who have been here forever and in some sense "seen it all" so they aren't interested in re-hashing debates that seem futile (this certainly describes me).
Corvos
1hr ago
I can't speak for Korea, but one-major-city countries are pretty common. England is famously lopsided: London is 7/8x the size of the next largest city, and contains almost all of the seriously high-paying jobs. With a few principled holdouts, if someone lives in a city that isn't London it's usually because they can't afford it there.
Singapore is basically a city state. I'm sure there are others.
The California model.
I just got back from a brief trip to California that didn't include the parts where the violent drug zombies live. It was a lovely vacation. California is absolutely beautiful.
Let me introduce the secrets to California's success.
Be blessed with the most amazing geography and weather anywhere in the U.S. and maybe the world
Be the center of the world tech and entertainment industries
Make a deal that baby boomers get to live out their natural lives in splendor and grace while a complete population replacement happens beneath them
As a wealthy tourist, it was all very nice. Whereas the coast of Florida is loaded with aggressive traffic and people, the coast of California is dotted with pleasant beach communities. All the houses cost like $3 million dollars so no one can afford to live there. Despite the best weather and scenery on the planet, the population is going DOWN. People are friendly and nice. The restaurants are full of white retirees, still paying $1000 in annual property tax on their $4 million house they bought for $200,000 in 1981. 95% of the workers are Hispanic. I have no idea where they actually live. But the quality of service was very high and prices were reasonable (at least compared to Seattle).
A quick 5 minute drive from Santa Cruz and you're in a beautiful redwood forest. No houses or people here. Just a beautiful state park with miles of trails. I saw a school group with an earnest white teacher explaining tree rings to a group of about 20 young students. 100% of the students were Hispanic.
People are actually leaving this state, the state that has everything, that was dealt a hand of aces. Productive citizens are taxed at eye-popping rates to prop up the seniors and the underclass. It works for now. It seems kind of similar to what's happening in Europe and where the rest of the U.S. is headed as well.
In any case, I had a wonderful time. I highly recommend California as a tourist destination.
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