domain:alexberenson.substack.com
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
20m ago
Why don't travel vlogggers add an overlay on their videos with information such as: Timestamp, GPS coordinates, temperature, Local name of destination, random factoids, etc?
Skibboleth
29m ago
The Powers-That-Be
Can you be more specific?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
30m ago
- Lincoln: plot also targeted Andrew Johnson
- Garfield: “Arthur, a Conkling ally, had been selected as Garfield's running mate to placate the Stalwart faction. As a self-professed Stalwart, Guiteau convinced himself that by removing Garfield, he was striking a blow to unite the two factions of the Republican Party.”
- McKinley: anarchist with no statements on VP
- Roosevelt: nutjob with no opinions on VP
- JFK: sigh
- Reagan: nutjob with no opinions on VP, or even President
So 1 out of 6. And Garfield’s assassin was dealing with an actively fragmented Republican Party with multiple credible candidates. I don’t know what Tim Scott’s deal is, but he looks to be a completely generic Southern Republican. What’s he supposed to bring to the table?
Recursive_Enlightenment
50m ago
The Powers-That-Be will likely be sending Trump to prison if Trump doesn't win in the next election. Don't just look at US history, but all of human history when considering the possibility of the elites killing the guy at the top. The US has been extraordinarily lucky in nearly everything since the Civil War, so expect reversion to the mean and don't consider past US history as a good bases for your Bayesian priors.
WhiningCoil
54m ago
There were, until the issue was federalized. Now I have to flee the country to get away from it. That seems a bit extreme for a pluralistic society, doesn't it?
Recursive_Enlightenment
54m ago
Would be too obvious, and might seriously threaten the stability of the US.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
54m ago
Brazil’s dysfunction is due to a very high black population
Wikipedia says their black population is 10%, i.e. a smaller percentage than what the US has.
We have better institutions
But institutions are made of people. They can only be as good as the individuals that comprise them. There's no magic dirt, no magic paper.
If you import the population of Central/South America wholesale, the people who staff your institutions will increasingly resemble the inhabitants of Central/South America, and they will begin to reproduce Central/South American conditions.
and can function with a lower average IQ than we currently have
But why would we want to?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
57m ago
What are the circumstances such that the "powers that be" would be able to assassinate Trump but not his VP? Especially if Dems take back the House, as predicted. Assassinating both of them would likely mean President Hakeem Jeffries.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
58m ago
I presume that casually dating doesn't count? I'm in between committed relationships right now, especially since I'm leaving the country in 3 months. But it's a refreshing experience after being in committed relationships for 7 years.
I don't think I'd be happy single, or at least celibate. Like any red blooded young man, I do enjoy getting laid, and while seeing several new people every week might be novel, my friends, and internet strangers, assure me that it gets stale eventually. So if I meet the right person, ideally in about 3 to 5 years, I'd strongly prefer to settle down and start a family. Friends and side activities, while something I enjoy, aren't enough.
Ah, women. Can't live with them. Can't live without them. If there was a pill that could harmlessly switch off just libido, I think I'd be happy enough, but it doesn't exist and is have qualms about taking it in the first place.
Skibboleth
1hr ago
I'm beginning to suspect that Powers That Be may not Be all they're cracked up to be. Current track record on presidential assassinations is leaning really heavily in favor of deranged individuals and against the Illuminati.
Recursive_Enlightenment
1hr ago
Because Biden is more likely to beat Trump than the alternatives.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
We haven't begun to fight because we're never going to. Because we're not capable of it.
Speak for yourself. Maybe that is the way you are. Maybe that is the way the people around you are. It is not the way I am, and it is not the way the people around me are. There's a decent argument that Rittenhouse single-handedly ended the Floyd riots, and he survived the Blues' attempts to crush him for it, and the attempts to crush him appear to me to have been costly for the Blues. They attempted to crush Kavanaugh, and failed. Gun owners refuse to comply with state and federal laws, and they get away with it. This is exactly the sort of coordination you and @The_Nybbler consistently claim doesn't exist, because you are both so black-pilled that you refuse to accept contrary evidence.
Because anything more than those random hicks requires levels of organization of which we are not capable.
Abbott defying Biden on the border requires significant organization. Gun owners refusing to comply with registration requires coordination. But in fact, you are fundamentally wrong about the level of coordination required to destroy our present society. The amount of organization required is effectively zero. It can be done with individuals alone.
Who swear that no matter how dire things get, should anyone dare talk to them about organizing or coordinating or fighting together — even if they've been a friend for decades — that automatically makes that person "the Enemy" and they will shoot them dead on the spot.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Red Tribers coordinate on all sorts of things, from defying law to purging the Republican party.
As for your "other vectors," I suspect you're talking about infrastructure vulnerabilities.
Infrastructure vulnerabilities are a significant part of why I think small bands of hicks with rifles have a better chance than you allow. To my knowledge, they never did find the guys who shot up that substation, and that is an example of an attack that can be effectively carried out by one person alone.
In any case, no, I am not talking about infrastructure vulnerabilities.
Yes. At the very least, I want people to accept the war was lost long ago, and there's nothing we can do about it now (if not going further, to "accept we're utterly doomed and LDAR," or even "spare ourselves the worst of the horrors to come by taking The Exit early," but I get that most are too religious to consider that).
This is what I don't get. If we've already lost and the best thing we can do is to kill ourselves and spare ourselves the worst of the horrors to come, why are the horrors to come horrors? You don't appear to believe in God, so once you're dead that's it, and none of this actually matters in the end. Even fighting, it really is not that hard to make sure you aren't taken alive, and then the horror is over. If you're right, we fight and they crush us, and this is worse... why? We're already doomed, no? What benefit is derived from quiet surrender? You already hate your life and want to die; how does surrendering to the blues improve any part of your situation? Why do you care about this question at all?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
V-E…V-J…no, wait. It is V-E, as applied to the Soviet Union. Guess I learned something today.
It’s hard to search for previous Victory day protests. All that I get are Palestine happenings.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
and both Texas and Florida have functioning conservative talent pipelines.
Certainly not ones big enough to replace as much of the Permanent Bureaucracy as would need to be replaced. Assuming, of course, that Trump is even able to actually remove the people currently in place. And assuming he even gets elected.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
Is this or are these interactions where it's all been online in the set-up phase?
Dean
1hr ago
Well, the point is that Russia hasn't had any other context basically throughout the entire thousand years it existed,
Sure it has. It had so in living memory, even. The rise of the Putin personality cult and the decision to murder dissidents abroad was a policy decision, not a pre-existing or unavoidable fact of nature.
Goodguy
1hr ago
If Trump was at any real risk of being assassinated by the kind of people who are rational enough to care about the VP who would become President as a result, then why has he not already been assassinated, at some point between 2015 and now?
Felagund
1hr ago
You keep saying this, and not addressing what I said about the mechanisms of how the US would end up in a situation of scrambling to avoid default.
Which point in that list was wrong (following "that is:")?
What is the actual mechanism by which the US can keep borrowing? Who, specifically, wants US dollars, and will keep buying up our debt indefinitely, even as it continues to grow to be a larger and larger share of US and world GDP?
Instead of just giving a, "we'll be fine, someone will stop it," as you have us sleepwalk into disaster.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
White and mestizo citizens of Brazil are mostly productive. Brazil’s dysfunction is due to a very high black population(the USA’s is shrinking in relative terms) and institutional factors. We have better institutions and can function with a lower average IQ than we currently have because not everyone needs to be a doctor or an engineer.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
Abbott and DeSantis are coordinating open defiance to the bureaucracy. Maybe they'll lose, but they haven't yet.
When they do, will you change your tune?
The Bureaucracy is losing the fight on gun control, and they are losing it permanently.
That's not what the demographic trends say. And what good is the right to own guns, anyway? You talk about it as a "coordination mechanism" — i.e. something like "when they come for your guns, that's when you fight"; but they're never going to actually "come for your guns" openly, are they? They'll salami-slice here and there some. But if they push leftward on everything else but guns while never actually hitting that line in the sand?
And they are destroying those corporations, in a way that's pretty impossible to hide.
Are they? "Companies That Get ‘Woke’ Aren’t Going Broke — They’re More Profitable Than Ever."
They have a scam that works when we endlessly cooperate with it, and that falls apart if we simply and consistently defect.
But we're cooperators. Defecting is what Leftists do, and using Leftist tactics would make us no better, no different from them (as Hlynka insisted more than once). "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world," et cetera. What defines the Right — the only thing that distinguishes us from our enemy — is our willingness to put absolute adherence to principle over worldly victory, unto martyrdom and death, knowing their can be no real victory in this world anyway, and the only reward to be sought is in the next life, which is why all atheists are Leftists by definition, right? (Again, this is from Hlynka.)
If that defiance doesn't keep escalating like you predict, but instead does "all fizzle out," and Red Tribe mostly backs down like Nybbler and I predict, what will you say then?
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
But there was never any announcement of an end to the epidemic. For all I know, it might still be going on!
https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/location/usa/surveillance/wild_animals.html
It is! It got much worse, and now it's back down to 1982 levels.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1hr ago
There was a period of several years where you never saw "Iran" in the news without it being followed by "-Contra."
There's one local example that sticks in my mind, even after all these years. Back in 1982, there was a rabies epidemic. For months, almost every day on the front page of the Fairfax Journal, there were stories about rabid animals (it was almost always raccoons for some reason) being found and euthanized.
Then a while later I realized I wasn't seeing those anymore.
But there was never any announcement of an end to the epidemic. For all I know, it might still be going on!
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
The Bureaucracy is losing the fight on gun control, and they are losing it permanently.
Certainly they are not. There have been some Supreme Court decisions, but the blue states just ignore or even defy ("Spirit of Aloha", "No Second Amendment in New York State") them. And with Rahimi the Court is poised to neuter Bruen. ATF is getting shirty (and shooty) with gun dealers again, not to mention classifying every L-shaped piece of metal a firearm. In New Jersey I still can't buy a gun or carry one if I had one. And even in Virginia, didn't they pass a bunch of new gun control?
Abbott did beat them on the border, I was wrong there. But that's a tiny light in a sea of darkness.
Pynewacket
1hr ago
Wasn't this how Facebook was conceived initially?
I'll say that you were right that non-violent defiance wouldn't work, and that we should escalate. "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul" remains true. It also remains true that keeping one's soul does not appear to require pacifism. Belief in God cuts both ways: it means we see no reason to pursue victory at any cost, but it also means some of those "costs" are in fact acceptable. Faith in God does not preclude prosecuting war, nor inflicting the harms of war. There are no "horrors to come"; pain and death are the inevitable lot of all men, always have been and always will be.
You've mangled the argument rather badly, but sure, close enough for purposes of this discussion. If Blue Tribe hegemony is destroyed, that will not in fact solve anything in any permanent or meaningful sense. Destroying the Third Reich didn't solve anything in any permanent or meaningful sense. Neither did grinding down the Soviet Union. Both were still the right thing to do, and worth the costs required to do them. In the latter case, Von Nuemann was wrong; beating the Soviet Union was not worth a nuclear exchange. We probably should have paid more than we did, but a full-blown nuclear war was not worth it to stop a tyranny that was, in fact, already doomed.
If the defiance accelerates and grows, are you and @TheNybbler going to admit you were wrong?
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