domain:alexberenson.substack.com
Tanista
12m ago
In addition though, I simply think that modern liberty is good. I'm a sort of reluctant conservative I'll admit, but even in the traditional conservative picture of the world, I think that personal freedoms from the state and even to a certain extent within traditional communities are great. To me, the project of the conservative in the modern world is not to sort of force us via governmental apparatus back into some halycon pre-modernity days. Instead, the conservative impulse should be focused towards explaining and convincing people in a deep and genuine way that living in a more traditional way is better for society, and better for people in particular.
This whole thing is based on assumptions I don't think retvrners share.
Not least that liberalism is a debate of values managed by a neutral-ish state (as opposed to an imperialistic one that takes sides and actively destroys social arrangements it doesn't agree with). That there is such a a thing as unproblematic or fixed visions of "modern liberty" (the current version must be unrecognizable to many past liberals) and so on.
If you don't agree with those assumptions all of this is at best naive and at worst a cover.
There's no fair debate when one side has the swords.
FlailingAce
15m ago
I'm with you that having kids can lead to responsibility, in the right circumstances (i.e. where the people involved have the right mentality about it). But I also know a young couple where the woman had a baby with the man (his second) in order to lock him down and maybe grow him up, but he has remained a deadbeat and has also convinced her to quit her own career. They now live in her grandmother's basement and don't pay rent. So I would caution about a blanket recommendation to have kids early - it should be applied to those who are already ideologically and mentally prepared, and those kinds of people will likely be okay with or without the kids.
AugustDeRosa
19m ago
I agree with your point overall, and I think we may live to see peak woke yet, but 2020 was definitely the local maximum, with the aftereffects continuing to ripple on. It would not surprise me if by 2030 we're more woke than we ever were before.
oats_son
22m ago
Hmm, now that you metnion it, Fallout 3 had Chinese soldiers in it that were hostile, and I guess they were kind of caricatures. I might just be entirely wrong, on every front. It happens.
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
23m ago
Right-wing apologetics.
Yeah, uh, just... just sit tight. But yes.
There's got to be a fatal flaw in there somewhere.
This will sound uncharitable, but it is uncharity born of excessive experience with charity: In my experience, the 'fatal flaw' people will claim is that because we can't track every impulse to its absolute roots it is only correct to assume that in every such case it's 'just' culture and not genetics. Which, I am telling you, is insane.
I've intentionally been less than forthcoming about my background but already said that I have an expertise in animal psychology and a lot of practical experience. So let me tell you this: There is nothing like working with two closely-related species and Noticing. I'll have a lot more to say about that in later books. This one is a sort of primer.
oats_son
31m ago
Probably I'm just being uptight and oversensitive, and would have appreciated the movie more if I was a kid or something. I just feel like the movie is a little conflicted in going between "hell yeah, grenades on arrows!" and "Oh my God... racism...". Am I supposed to take it seriously? I thought I wasn't, but in that case, why is a good third of the movie dedicated to showing how bad the British were? But I also take your point, I'm probably overthinking it.
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
37m ago
Fair enough and apologies if that came off as a complaint.
TitaniumButterfly
41m ago
I suppose it would be gracelessly American of me to react in shock at foreigners not recognizing that we have a culture.
hydroacetylene
43m ago
A movie set in Japanese colonies or WWII could easily portray the Japanese that way. Apocalypto portrayed the maya very similarly.
roystgnr
44m ago
I think you can technically do it with ChatGPT/Grok by abusing the Share function and just using that linked conversation as a separate branch
ChatGPT just added a "branch in new chat" option last week.
I'm a little embarrassed to say that I haven't really tried Grok before, despite starting to use (paid) ChatGPT for work, and regularly testing new (free) ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini versions on my own personal benchmark math questions. I should rectify that. On my first try, the free version took nearly 5 minutes thinking, which I was hoping was a good sign - paid ChatGPT will take 3 minutes to answer something that free ChatGPT answers instantly, but the paid answer will be correct and well-sourced or at worst "I don't know" where the free answer will be nonsense that it proceeds to try to gaslight me about if I question it. But the Grok answer after 5 minutes made a sign error of the sort that the other free LLMs stopped falling for several months ago, and when notified it started in on the gaslighting.
hydroacetylene
46m ago
Part of the reason the US assimilates well is that the ‘red’ inscrutable cultural package lifestyle is very appealing to working people the world over- bbq, pickups, guns, etc. The UK doesn’t have any equivalent for non-elites.
DirtyWaterHotDog
47m ago
Naah, we don't realize they're caricatures because they don't get portrayed with the over-the-top characterization that's common in Indian media.
A Hollywood equivalent would be Tarantino. Hanz Landa and Calvin Candie are comically evil. The African warlord in Lord of War is straight out of a caricature. Indian movies definitely portray local (Indian) villains as having a similar level of cruelty. Rocky 4's Ivan Drogo was as much a caricature of communist evil as Rocky was a quintessentially American.
To me, RRR is best understood as a Rocky movie. And it's a damn good one at that.
Now, you may argue that the British were never as evil as the Nazis, Stalinists or African warlords. But, there is little video evidence in support or against.
What we know is that India was a rich nation turned destitute over centuries of colonialism. India suffered from preventable famines that killed millions in a few decades. Famines of magnitudes that the nation hadn't seen for centuries prior. Indians and Hindus were treated as if they were sub-human (though nowhere as bad as chattel slavery). We know that the British decision makers of that time (Churchill, Dyer) are viewed as heroes of their home nation. Add all that up, and you can see how the British could be imagined to be as evil as the Nazis or African warlords.
I don't think the British were as evil as the movies portray them. Not even close. But, I think it's a fair price to pay in exchange for 3 centuries of winning.
Jiro
47m ago
It could be that one is only allowed to caricature that which they understand very well, and due to the West's recent ascent to power, every notable example is white.
Chinese Communists are also known worldwide.
hydroacetylene
50m ago
They were on the slippery slope, just, uh not at the top. Neither were the fifties.
No, that isn't true.
- You have principal/agent problems where the people working for the businesses get a chance to personally gain by promoting their politics, even if it hurts the business.
- It's not true that businesses want to make as much money as possible. Rather, businesses who don't don't compete well and eventually lose. It can take a long time before the business actually goes broke. Disney has lost a lot of money by putting woke in Star Wars and Marvel, but such losses aren't going to drive Disney out of business for the forseeable future.
- Owners spending money on wokeness (and making the business, and indirectly themselves, lose money) is ultimately no different from owners spending money on, say, baseball games and directly losing money on them. The owners gain personally. (Related to #1 and #2, if the business is big.)
Totalitarianit
58m ago
Great post.
The current "best" choice for our young adults from their perspective is the continued liberalism and juvenilization of our society. They're not having to make the same sacrifices, and I understand why, but our society has now been forced to cater to 30 year old juveniles with their juvenile emotional maturity. Video game bars everywhere, bars that are pet friendly, Disney adults, etc. It's bars with games fucking everywhere. Go over to reddit and look at the popularity of subreddits like /r/malelivingspace. A lot of the places are cool looking, but as you would expect they're all clean bachelor pads and/or studios that look like a one man LAN party room. Single men with cool apartments isn't a crime. It's just the romanticization of that lifestyle that's really hard to overlook when the alternative, at least on the surface, is a way more "unnecessary" sacrifice. The dating market is a disaster: the freedom, control, and lack of accountability that society has given to women when it comes to sex, makes modern courting feel like you're walking through a minefield, blindfolded. It's all mostly high risk/low reward tradeoffs. To top it off, a large portion of guys this age have been exposed to porn and many prefer that over the real thing. One can easily understand why having a cool apartment and a terabyte of the porn you like, and being on your own schedule is a "better" option. There's no grief or jealousy that you'll almost certainly have to deal with if you have a young attractive girlfriend. It's an easy choice with consequences that don't directly present themselves until decades after the point of no return.
I wonder about the feasibility of getting people to behave in a more self-sacrificing way without forcing them to do it. My first thought (and something that had drastically impacted my own life) is for people to have and raise children. It's like bootcamp for adulthood. I knew that it would be difficult, but I didn't know in what ways it would be. The amount of daily sacrifice made by my wife and I is something I couldn't have possibly understood by someone trying to explain it, and I think this applies to so many of the things that we try to convey to people through our words and that simply cannot compare when it comes to lived experiences. Having an infant you're raising and protecting grow into a little person before your eyes is a truly wonderful experience. I've posted here before that my kids are not biologically mine, and that we adopted them after them being the foster system. One we picked up directly from the NICU as an infant. When that child was almost 1, I took a picture of them while they were on a swing, and the picture that appeared on my phone just shook me in a way that nothing else ever has. I have deep questions about god and religion, but the way that baby looked at me through that image was the closest thing to a religious experience I have ever felt. It was like God was looking at me through those eyes. So, there is all the sacrifice that comes with this life choice, and it's rough at times, but there is something on the backend of it that cannot be put into words and therefore cannot be argued to the intelligent (often leftist) Westerner who only believes in what is materially achievable.
I don't know how you marry modern living and religion on a broader scale, but the kid trick seems like the most tried and true process. I'd like to hear others, including @TitaniumButterfly's take on the potential of molding these two seemingly incompatible lifestyles into something that might be more workable. Obviously, any "taking away" of rights will bring out the wailing banshees, but even their "argument" about rights is starting to bring consequences to light that people have warned about for ages.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Eh, I've always found SMBC to be a little too self-satisfied. As for memories, how much do you remember from when you were one year old? Or from when you were twelve? Every single day, not just a few highlights? And yet there is continuity of personality here. The idea of reincarnation is that the atman, the eternal part, the 'soul', has all the memories of past lives, it is the incarnation at this particular time does not remember (those past lives are like the early years of childhood).
gattsuru
1hr ago
It depends on the exact implementation, but most frontends have to provide the LLM all or a large subset of the previous conversation as an input for a conversation to meaningfully continue. Where context windows are small, they'll have to truncate early portions, use summarization tricks, or use tricks like rag. Even using those techniques, or for LLMs with very long context windows, an LLM given both 'forks' as an input will usually seem very incoherent very quickly, as it will put information, requests, or status from the 'other' branch -- even the best-case scenario would be much more similar to asking the LLM option A and then option B in sequence, rather than separate branching options.
That said, even LMStudio supports just branching a conversation with a single click. I think you can technically do it with ChatGPT/Grok by abusing the Share function and just using that linked conversation as a separate branch, though it's a little more annoying.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
If they can remove the brain, stick it in a tank, and keep it alive (hello, Mi-Go brain cylinders!) then they can probably transplant the brain into an android body, which gets around the problem of "which is the real person and which is the copy?"
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
None of today’s immigrants even attempt the naturalization test of hunting a mammoth.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1hr ago
how did Muslims conquere the UK?
Canada is a great model to understand this dynamic. Despite being 2% of the population, Sikhs have outsized influence on Canadian political discourse.
If a group is transactional, ghettoized and votes together, then it can single handed swing elections in a divided nation. If 2% of the population can swing elections, then imagine what 7% Muslims can achieve in a significantly more divided nation.
A few factors put UK in a worse position than Canada or Europe.
- UK whites are more divided than European whites. Divided majority = powerful minority.
- Britain (and anglo countries in general) struggles to integrate immigrants into the culture, because Anglo culture is generally under-defined. Having exported its values globally, there is little it can claim exclusive ownership of. Suffering from success. In contrast, the French convert immigrants into french people first and foremost.
- Worse Muslims. Not all Muslims are created equal. UK's Muslims are ultra conservative Pahadis (from Pakistan) and rural Bangladeshis. These groups were ghettoized and under-integrated in their already conservative home countries. Integrating them into UK, is like playing on hard mode. Germany's Turks and France's north-Africans are much easier to deal with. Sweden has been dealt a similarly bad hand, and we can already see how that's going.
- Bad economy. The UK has been going downhill since the global financial crisis. Countries on the up have good optics. The US does this well. Because the American dream pays off, all sorts of misaligned cultures buy into the American dream. Winning is contagious. The UK ain't winning.
UK. I asked in a bit more detail and the matter is broadly evaluated on a spectrum from enthusiast devices (antiques, breech-loading shotguns) on one end to personal security devices (automatic pistols) on the other end:
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Getting antique weapons from > 150 years ago requires no application, nothing.
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Getting a breech-loading shotgun for pheasant or equivalent - easy if you're the right kind of person (rural farmer, country squire) and have no criminal record. You might be asked for a reference. These guys quite often make their own ammunition and there's no problem with that AFAIK. If you live in the city you may get probing questions about when and how you plan to use this thing.
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If it's a rifle you will have to do a lot more work to make the inspectors happy but if you look like a plausible deerstalker you can do it without too much issue. My school had these for training cadets, but we had to count bullets in and out and account for all shells fired.
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My friend knows one person who was allowed to have an automatic pistol. He was a banking family scion who could plausibly argue that he was under serious security risk, and he needed vast amounts of paperwork, checks with the local police, regular medical and psych evaluations, and even then he had to lock up both the pistol and the ammo separately and so it was almost useless to him. He just did it for fun.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Look, as an Irish person, it's very funny to have Alison Doody (Irish actress) playing the evil Englishwoman, and I'm sure she got a kick out of it for the exact same reason: it's the Brits versus the rest of us.
Is the nationalistic Indian movie being even-handed to the former colonial masters? No, you say? Oh let me fall back on my fainting couch in shock. Yeah, no surprise there. It's not a documentary, it's a rousing action-adventure movie that's about as historically sourced as any mid-20th century movie about Davey Crockett or George Washington. The two main characters never met in real life, but why let that get in the way of a good story to get the audience going "hell, yeah!" It's in the same spirit as Mise Éire (except we didn't have tigers).
Julie Davis of "Happy Catholic" gets it: review here, podcast here.
The over-the-top aspect also applies to the depictions of the British Raj which, to be fair, we've seen matches in some other South Indian films. The Raj are usually like the Nazis in our own movies — big, bad, and making you long for their demise.
Enough to produce a cohesive pan-East-Asian political movement that can push strongly for desired outcomes on issues that matter to this new, more cohesive group.
Given that native whites are not allowed to coordinate any political movement that directly represents their own interests, and that these issues whatever they turn out to be are not likely to 100% beautiful win-wins for everyone involved, these are likely to come at some expense to whites.
they form interests group which are detrimental to "native whites"
conspiring to take down the whites
These two things are not the same. The existence and tolerance of non-white racial blocs and only non-white racial blocs can be detrimental to white people without any malice or conspiracy required.
Britain is sending cops at God knows how many people for their tweets but we're supposed to draw the twin conclusions that:
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