domain:alexberenson.substack.com
Still find it hilarious that people went through years of debate over whether antifa/BLM was being treated with kids' gloves as regime foot soldiers. And now the whole thing's been put to rest by a conflict between antifa and a group with even more political power behind them.
The government-backed mob gets to do whatever they want, and the people they do it to get rounded up and arrested. And I say this as someone with literally zero sympathy for the Hamas supporters it's happening to this time: analyzing how "crime" is used as a tool in the total liberal state is more important than arguing for a side.
I should do a book report on Schmidt's Theory of The Partisan, because nobody else has come close to describing how regime-backed mob violence works as a political force.
There's been so many examples in the past month. "Just stop oil" being escorted by police while their victims are arrested, Portland antifa burning a dozen police cars without any sign of an investigation happening (the website they used to claim responsibility is still online!), and now this.
It all reminds me of the old story from the UN human rights investigator in Yugoslavia, hearing stories about how the police would come round to confiscate guns from a town to clear the way for "unaffiliated" militias to commit massacres the next day.
And of course the Existential Comics vision of a "police-free" future ruled by leftist gangs..
Is this the future of ethnic and religious conflict in modern states?
ApplesauceIrishCream
1hr ago
That seems like a perfectly sensible statement to me. The ICC is looking to extend its reach beyond its remit, and is getting slapped down by the US (again). Nothing is new here.
The ICC (International Criminal Court) is a treaty-based organization created by the Rome Statute. The ratifying powers have agreed to submit to the authority of the Court in certain cases, specified by the Statute. Neither the US nor Israel are parties to the Rome Statute, which means that the ICC has no authority over their governments or citizens. The ICC is attempting (again) to go after non-parties, in order to create the precedent that it has powers beyond the text of its treaty--in essence, it's trying to create customary international law using Israel as a point of leverage. The real target is American officials in the future, so current American officials are quite interested in shutting down the ICC's overreach at the outset, as they have many times in the past.
(If you follow the wiki-link to the Rome Statute, you'll see a color-coded map that is less helpful than it appears. Only a state that has ratified a treaty, and not withdrawn that ratification, is a full party to a treaty. A "signatory" is not a party. In the US context, the American President may sign any treaty he likes, but the US is not bound to treat the treaty as law unless and until the Senate ratifies the treaty by a 2/3 vote--one of the very few supermajority votes required by the Constitution itself. Many other countries have similar mechanisms.)
2D3D
7m ago
I don't really have much insight from the black womens perspective, my only real insight is how black men seem to really hold black women in contempt and at no level feel inclined to act in solidarity with black women focused interests. This is getting into too much speculative territory and personal anecdata, so I am not willing to posit too much. Happy to defer to established wisdom that black issues are a variable intersectionalists are aware of but prefer to keep silent on.
2D3D
14m ago
Thanks for the clarification. I didn't really pay attention of the specific spelling. Good catch!
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
5hr ago
Jewish billionaires conspire to change the narrative on the protests. From WaPo. (Archive link)
A group of billionaires and business titans working to shape U.S. public opinion of the war in Gaza privately pressed New York City’s mayor last month to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, according to communications obtained by The Washington Post.
Business executives including Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik and real estate investor Joseph Sitt held a Zoom video call on April 26 with Mayor Eric Adams (D), about a week after the mayor first sent New York police to Columbia’s campus, a log of chat messages shows. During the call, some attendees discussed making political donations to Adams, as well as how the chat group’s members could pressure Columbia’s president and trustees to permit the mayor to send police to the campus to handle protesters, according to chat messages summarizing the conversation.
Some members also offered to pay for private investigators to assist New York police in handling the protests, the chat log shows — an offer a member of the group reported in the chat that Adams accepted
The messages describing the call with Adams were among thousands logged in a WhatsApp chat among some of the nation’s most prominent business leaders and financiers, including former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital [..] The chat was initiated by a staffer for billionaire and real estate magnate Barry Sternlicht[…] In an Oct. 12 message, one of the first sent in the group, the staffer posting on behalf of Sternlicht told the others the goal of the group was to “change the narrative”
The chat group formed shortly after the Oct. 7 attack, and its activism has stretched beyond New York, touching the highest levels of the Israeli government, the U.S. business world and elite universities. Titled “Israel Current Events,” the chat eventually expanded to about 100 members, the chat log shows. More than a dozen members of the group appear on Forbes’s annual list of billionaires; others work in real estate, finance and communications
“He’s open to any ideas we have,” chat member Sitt, founder of retail chain Ashley Stewart and the global real estate company Thor Equities, wrote April 27, the day after the group’s Zoom call with Adams. “As you saw he’s ok if we hire private investigators to then have his police force intel team work with them.”
The mayor’s office did not address it directly, instead sharing a statement from deputy mayor Fabien Levy noting that […] “The insinuation that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations is an all too familiar antisemitic trope that the Washington Post should be ashamed to ask about, let alone normalize in print.”
One member asked if the group could do anything to pressure Columbia trustees to cooperate with the mayor. In reply, former congressman Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), CEO of the American Jewish Committee, shared a PDF of a letter his organization had sent that day to Columbia President Minouche Shafik calling on her to “shut these protests down.”
Usually I wouldn’t post so much from the body of an article, but there’s a lot of information to unpack here. It appears that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations, as well as the highest levels of media and academia. This comes after Mitt Romney admitted the tik tok ban was influenced by the extent of pro-Palestine content. IMO this is going to be used in American discourse about Jewish power for many years to come. You have Jewish billionaires across industries banding together to manipulate the narrative, influence politicians, and “shut it down” — literally a trope of Jewish power. The influence here is, frankly, incredible: a dozen billionaires alone, conspiring with journalists and academics and advocacy group leaders, talking about using black celebrities to push their narrative and applying “leverage” to university presidents. As Cenk Uygur tweeted (no friend of the alt right), “You can't complain about the trope, if you do the trope”.
I kind of wonder if some of this is even illegal. Not that I am naive enough to believe a charge would occur if it were. They are sitting down in briefings with the Israeli government and discussing how to best push their influence machine. Isn’t this lobbying on behalf of a foreign power?
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
That’s why I’ve always thought that the X-Men was a bad metaphor for prejudice. Say what you will about any particular ethnic/social/sexual group, a single one of them can’t usually annihilate an entire city block unaided.
Skulldrinker
2hr ago
At this point, I don't think Wokeism is a revolution against the established order, certainly not to young people and definitely not college students. Wokeism IS the established Order. They're conforming to the social context around them.
(Yes I'm trotting out this meme again, I don't care: I was effectively shunned from an entire community and industry for the crime of politely asking a girl if she wanted to get coffee sometime and I'm still mad about it - anyone saying "just ask her bro, the worst she can say is no" is full of shit.)
Everyone knows women don’t care about looks, but it sounds like her feminine intuition and personality-detector correctly clocked you as the type of bigot who posts in a lair of racists, misogynists, and transphobes. So she bravely and rightfully got you excommunicated from a community and an industry to keep everyone safe *crosses arms and turns away indignantly*.
Yeah, women take it as an insult when a man she views as beneath her shoots his shot at her, as it offends their princess complex. “Ugh, you thought you had a chance with me? Gross.”
Usually (I hope) getting rejected by a girl doesn’t lead to immediate exile from community and industry, but realistically it at least means no other girl in her social circle will want you. And even the guys in your/her social circle will have their priors updated in the direction of you potentially being a social liability. A girl will eagerly spread the word and poison the well after rejecting you.
On the bright side, though, banging a chick greatly increases the chances you’ll bang other chicks in her social circle. Praise be the double-edged sword of female mate-choice copying.
I mentioned to several of the people I interviewed for this piece that I’d met my husband in an elevator, in 2001. (We worked on different floors of the same institution, and over the months that followed struck up many more conversations—in the elevator, in the break room, on the walk to the subway.) I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking. “Anytime we’re in silence, we look at our phones,” explained her friend, nodding. Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore. (She’d be holding a copy of her favorite book. “What’s that book?” he’d say.) But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. “Miranda meets Steve at a bar,” she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.
It amuses me that, even in the showerthoughts, daydreams, and fantasies of presumed PMC(-aspirant) #GirlBosses, such women are comically hypoagentic and can’t muster up a fraction of the courage and initiative that men regularly exhibit. The thought of themselves making The First Move is outside of their personal Overton Window. If a given man doesn’t read her mind and approach her after she performs the physical and emotional labor of sitting, standing, or existing near him…. okay fine whatevas, it’s his loss.
If a man does successfully pick her up in a bar, elevator, bookstore, breakroom, subway, or wherever and a long-term relationship ensues, it’s retrospectively revised on her part to be “omg it just so happened that we met” rather than “he assessed the costs/benefits, initiated the conversation, led the conversation, drove the interaction forward, and I just followed along” such that she can claim that she Did Her Part as an equal partner rather than being a bystander in her own narrative.
bonsaii
1hr ago
It's also somewhat interesting that X-Men is very (US) liberal coded. In contrast to typical US liberal positions favoring collective safety over individual freedom (stronger support for lockdowns, gun control), X-Men is rather explicitly opposed to government infringement on the liberties of mutants to use their powers freely. Ideas like the Mutant Registration Act or mutant power suppressive collars are often cast in a strongly negative light. All while Cyclops sneezing hard enough to drop his glasses is more dangerous than any gun.
jkf
1hr ago
In the past, where would you typically ask out a girl in person?
For many many years the main true answer was "the bar" -- zoomers are too scared to go in those either, and now they are dying.
yellowgreenred
2hr ago
I was expecting it to be big news but apparently it didn't become a huge story.
It has become a big story. I remember it being covered in real-time on CNN, but they've also now published a story that puts the blame on the pro-Israel "counterprotestors". The New York Times has a similar story.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
turned into Phyllis Schafer
Did you mean Phyllis Schlafly here? Because googling "Phyllis Schafer" gives me a landscape painter.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
I've read some of Saberhagen's books. And yeah, before it was "The Dark Forest Hypothesis" it was "The Berzerker Hypothesis" so he should get some credit for coming up with it first. But they're very silly space opera books, lots of action with basically no deep thinking. They're not meant to be taken too seriously, so I can see how people slept on the idea.
Still, as crazy as it sounds, there is a certain elegance to the idea- it solves the "it only takes one" problem. Like, maybe most aliens just don't want to expand, or don't want to build megastructures, or are using tech that is somehow hidden from us. That's all fine, but you'd think there'd be at least one similar to us so that we could detect it easily. But in the same light, maybe 99.99% of aliens are peaceful, but there's just that one group of assholes who built berzerker probes and wiped out everyone else (maybe including themselves).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4hr ago
US leadership has been behaving somewhat hysterically with this latest war, they've been going around threatening the ICC with the gravest consequences if they dare charge Netanyahu:
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000018f-4e0e-d759-a9ff-ff4ee9420000
Issuing arrest warrants for the leaders of Israel would not only be unjustified, it would expose your organization’s hypocrisy and double standards. Your office has not issued arrest warrants for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or any other Iranian official, Syrian President Bashar al Assad or any other Syrian official, or Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh or any other Hamas official. Nor have you issued an arrest warrant for the genocidal General Secretary of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, or any other Chinese official.
Finally, neither Israel nor the United States are members of the ICC and are therefore outside of your organization’s supposed jurisdiction. If you issue a warrant for the arrest of the Israeli leadership, we will interpret this not only as a threat to Israel’s sovereignty but to the sovereignty of the United States. Our country demonstrated in the American Service-Members' Protection Act [also known as the Hague Invasion Act] the lengths to which we will go to protect that sovereignty.
The United States will not tolerate politicized attacks by the ICC on our allies. Target Israel and we will target you. If you move forward with the measures indicated in the report, we will move to end all American support for the ICC, sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States. You have been warned.
How exactly a threat to Israel could be a threat to the sovereignty of the USA is hard to comprehend, though it does explain the stance of the Republican Party.
anti_dan
53m ago
#4 isn't a scalable option, if at all. You'd have to know the person's name and address, which RL would not know when a random group of 10 enters RL. Then you have to have the capacity to file the complaint. The average RL manager might be just competent enough to do that. B serve the defendants (expensive) then you still have to win that case. This takes the time of the manager, plus whatever employee who has to testify. And the employee probably has moved on from the job by then.
Plus cops don't get involved in people not paying small claims fees most of the time. We're at best some sort of hold on a person's bank account, and I suspect most of these red lobster fellows prefer the currency exchange and pillows.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
Yes I am very proud of that move. I am realizing I resemble a lot of people I didn't know were out there. I am about Patton's age apparently.
Skulldrinker
11hr ago
Because every time I tried meeting anyone, I ran into the full Covid gauntlet of Bubbles and Taking It Seriously, stuff that women mysteriously stopped caring about once it stood in the way of fucking him.
And because he had become a hollow skinsuit of upward-mobility who spoke entirely in progressive talking points, to the point where it reminded me of the guy from Nightcrawler. And had a pathetic fucking meltdown where he tried to hold his girlfriend hostage by locking his door with her keys in his room, plus all the emotional abuse before. And he tried to steal the lease out from under his roommates. And he'd poison people against his roomates by calling us racist. And he collaborated with the landlords (to steal the lease), and simped for them massively despite them calling him racial slurs behind his back, which we informed him about in our bid to convince him that they were bad people whom he should not make deals with, especially with him valuing his Blackness so much. So he was a Queer (straight but wants to fuck leftist chicks who hate straight men) Black (ish,) Feminist (who abused women) Communist (who sold out his prole roommates). Eventually he had some sort of psychotic break and attacked me with a fire axe, I maced him and got a restraining order to get him removed from the place. And to this day I have former mutual friends who won't talk to me, because he's Black and Leftist and I'm a straight white male who called the cops on a Person of Color. And wherever he is now, he's undoubtedly balls-deep in some chick he met at a pro-palestine protest, while I still can't get anyone to fucking turn up for fucking coffee after getting my heart mutilated in 2019. Because people are so fucking retarded that they misinterpret me as some kind of monster, while he's the Jesus of their new religion.
That is why I hate the world.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
2hr ago
I was up late watching the unbelievable live footage of the UCLA encampment being violently attacked by a pro-Israel mob. At the time I was 100% certain that this was organized as some sort of op. The counter-protestors were clearly attacking the UCLA students in a coordinated manner, in a way that was so violent it must have been preplanned- for several hours while police did nothing. It was really shocking to watch, I was expecting it to be big news but apparently it didn't become a huge story.
There were several major injuries, the worst was a head injury that, according to CNN, (NSFW) required 14 staples and three stiches. It was actually an antifa account who identified the attacker caught on video here, who is an Israeli apparently associated with the IDF.
Another Israeli who was caught on video pepper spraying and attacking UCLA students was identified by an antifa account. The man is listed as CEO/CFO of five different nonprofit organizations which are all staffed by family, including "Black and Jewish Unity".
After an antifa account identified the second Israeli in a different violence incident, he received phone calls reading out his own address and SSN and threatening his credit score (?) as well as physical violence.
CNN also reported on some of the violent attackers, including an attacker who was revealed by his mother posting on Facebook:
The young man sporting the white mask and a white hoodie in widely shared video clips is Edan On, a local 18-year-old high school senior, his mother confirmed to CNN, though she later said he denies being at UCLA. Video shows On joining the counterprotesters while waving a long white pole. At one point, he strikes a pro-Palestinian protester with the pole, and appears to continue to strike him even when he was down, as fellow counterprotesters piled on.
“Edan went to bully the Palestinian students in the tents at UCLA and played the song that they played to the Nukhba terrorists in prison!” his mother boasted in Hebrew on Facebook, referencing Hamas. She circled an image of him that had been broadcast on the local news.
“He is all over the news channels,” his mother wrote in a now-deleted post.
Yeah, Blockbuster's mutant power to collapse local property values was a little on the nose.
It might be one of the earliest examples of existing franchises cramming left wing politics in for critical acclaim and money from foundations, at the cost of becoming incoherent. Supposedly the mutant adventures thing was floundering before they decided to become a civil rights comic.
I just found the quote I'd misremembered as being by either Niven or Pournelle, but which turns out to be from "The Killing Star".
I won't dump the whole thing because most people will be familiar with it, but it's the one that ends with "There is no policeman. There is no way out. And the night never ends."
You can tell it's from 1995 because the worst imaginable cosmic horror is to be stuck in NYC's Central Park after dark.
So the idea has been bouncing around in science fiction for decades, rather than being slept on.
sliders1234
1hr ago
Don’t know. I think it’s a curious question that no one has written a book on. I mean even the food pyramid seems heavily disagreed with and no one really has a solution on a healthy diet.
Why do people myself included strongly prefer a Chick-fil-a chicken sandwich to a pop-eyes chicken sandwich? I don’t see any fairly evident evolutionary advantage to having that strong of preference but people will drive quite far to get Chick-fil-a versus Popeyes.
It does not seem to me that degree of optimization in our genes makes any sense.
A lot of food adds a status or ritualistic element that has some explanatory power. Like Miami is considered a bad food city but their prices are high and they combine a bit of night club in a lot of them.
This is a good example
https://www.thepoke.com/2024/05/17/1000-dollar-steak-crazy-clip/
But that’s showing your date you have such a degree of resources you can pay 20 other humans to present your food to them.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
I think it says something about us that everyone is so interested in aliens, to the point where any kind of speculative "maybe it's aliens" generates insane media hype. And people are willing to support millions of government research funds for this stuff, even though it's unlikely to ever pay off and has no practical purpose, and most people don't generally support that sort of impractical academic research.
This is not an original idea but- are "aliens" taking the place of religion in our society? It feels more "scientific" even though it's still mostly just faith, and you can choose whatever sort of alien-belief suits you best, and hang out with other believers to create art about it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
It does rather undermine international law if America cheers and applauds when the ICC issues arrest warrants for non members in Russia and calls for arrests against non-members China and Iran, while threatening sanctions and force should Israelis or Americans be targeted. Then they complain about double standards!
jeroboam
6hr ago
Having a Bell Hook$ book on your shelf might help you get laid. Actually reading it will not. Reading it and then trying to discuss it with your date is a major libido killer.
Because nobody actually reads that stuff. Shattering the polite fiction that she reads and cares about literature is an autist move.
You: "What's your favorite part of the book?"
Her: "Um... I guess I just like um.. um... "
You: "Oh, I thought you said you liked this author".
System: Emily has unmatched you.
I think the main thing that boomers and even elder Millenials might be missing is that literally EVERYTHING in Zoomer culture is in a constant state of molochian hypercompetition/red queen races thanks to the influence of social media and algorithmic ranking of every aspect of their performance in life.
I mean this literally. If you grew up playing video games, you probably remember online multiplayer as a casual fun thing to do, where the level of competition varied depending on the server you loaded into.
At some point in the past 15 years, the concept of RANKED MODE was introduced, and now every single player can be aware of their skill level relative to every other player at all times. So if you care about skill level at all, you have to play your hardest at all times to keep your rating up. Casual play is still allowed but you don't get the luxury of just hopping to a different server that's more your speed. People will judge you for your ranking constantly.
Or if you're a streamer, you are fully aware of how many viewers you're attracting at all times. So is everyone else. Only the top 1% break more than a hundred at a time.
Dating with the Apps makes things easy for that top 10-20% of males, and throws challenges to the rest of the men. A man now is judged against every male in a 20 mile radius rather than just the guys in his high school.
Top paying jobs draw applicants from across the entire planet, which means they get Extremely selective and have every more stringent criteria in terms of the degrees, experience, and candidates they accept.
These are sometimes gated by degree requirements, which brings me to the competition to get into these schools.
And of course the rampant cheating and adderal abuse that occurs for those trying to maintain high ranks.
If you go to a good school and get good grades you can walk into one of those top-tier jobs, but this is only applicable to the tippy-top, and everyone is generally aware of their status well before they graduate. If they get the right degree or know the right people they can be basically guaranteed access to elite social circles. Otherwise... may as well resign yourself to lifelong mediocrity.
Power law distributions rule EVERYTHING around you if you're younger and haven't had decades of time to cement your status and build a pile of wealth. And yes, this has almost always been true, but now its simply a known fact of life for the Zoomers. Its the air they breathe, the water they swim in. Every activity they could possibly participate in is subject to a panopticon of algorithms that will rank their performance and often publish it for easy observation, and they are surrounded by peers who are competing as hard as possible to not be left behind.
So perhaps the reason they decline to throw themselves at jobs or dating or developing GRIT is because the entire social environment is simply not conducive to chasing these endeavors unless you are one of those PSYCHOPATHS who doesn't mind abusing stimulants, exploiting every social loophole you can find, committing light fraud, and otherwise sacrificing health and happiness to actually compete for the most desirable positions out there.
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