domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
23d ago
It's now just accepted conventional wisdom that Israel wants to drag the United States into a likely globally-destabilizing conflict on the basis of their insane, racial-supremacist Abrahamic cult-myths. We're totally done with bullshit platitudes about this being about oil or Spreading Democracy. Everybody knows now. We're done with the precepts. At this point there's nothing left to say, all of the predictions and analysis of the so-called Anti-Semitic Right is proven correct. It's just a matter of whose side you're on at this point.
#NoWarWithPersia.
Rotherham is in large part the reason I don't comment on this forum anymore.
I no longer believe in cross-ideological discussion. I no longer believe in good faith, or shared values in disagreement, or the merits of discourse.
There have been a million things like this lockdowns, vaccine passports, the summer of floyd, the millions of ancestral liberties stolen from us, a thousand tyrannies some more abstract, some more immediate, etc. , and for the longest time I tried to persuade people... but its concisely summarized by the fact that even after hearing about HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of white girls raped with the assistance of their own government... between 1 in 6 and 1 in 3 girls age 11-17 in the affected cities...raped for days or even years on end... 11 year olds raped by 4 men who used bicycle pumped to widen their anal cavity even as they wept and cried out for help....
After explaining THAT, and that the government itself knew and covered it up, and let the perpetrators go free...
People will still hem and haw, and not accept violence RIGHT THIS SECOND is called for, and that we should feel anguish and moral scorn every second we're delayed by practical realities, eternally filled with fury, humiliation, and longing, with sharpened knives and hearts of hatred for the day of justice and vengeance.
People will here that... Up to a million girls by some estimates, from the core ethnicity, of not just a NATO power, but an Anglo power, the subject of the "special relationship", the motherland of the founding fathers... And then NOT say that violent revolution is called for. Not say that Oceans of blood are demanded. Not say That any not full of rage and passionate intensity are nothing worth.
That if the best lack all conviction, then they are not only not the best, they are not even the worst, but are instead worms in human flesh unworthy of life
This is what the west is now, old men and women telling raped children to shut up and not be racist.
And everyone has known this on both sides of the pond for at least 10 years, it came out under Obama, and it's still going on, and no US politician has called for the british government to be sanctioned, or arms supplied to british white nationalists.
And when I say this to people in conversation, they use discussion, discourse norms, "charity" and the usually hems and haws to dodge all responsibility to even experience rage at the injustice.
This isn't a result of a lack of dispassionate rationality, or lack of charity, if no one ascribed good intentions ever again til the end of time it would be too soon.
The problem isn't that we were intolerant, or uncurious, or too quick to ascribe to malice what was better ascribed to stupidity... It was all malice!
When a Detective asks a white five year old whether or not she consented to have sex with 10 pakistani men, its malice. When her social worker signs off on her "marriage" to one of them and even attends the wedding, it is malice. When councilmen and government bureaus cover for them and pressure any who tries to speak out, and sends special envoys to intimidate victims, It is malice. When police arrest the parents trying to rescue their own 9 year old daughters and don't even question the Pakistani men holding her, it is malice. When US politicians and media say nothing, and gladly bury the issue as this CONTINUES in one of it's closest allied countries, it is malice. When they suggest expanding immigration into their own countries after seeing the example of the UK, IT IS MALICE.
Rationality, politeness, tolerance, charity (personal and intellectual), the benefit of the doubt, everything that came out of Overcoming Bias, less wrong, Scott Alexander, and the old Motte...
All of it is as discredited as Yudkowsky's research into AI alignment that went nowhere and has no relation to the associational intuitive AI we got.
Our foes, the enemies of the west, they aren't biased, they aren't irrational, they aren't operating under different assumptions...Whether invader or traitor, they are simply evil.
And any who press the matter and assess their psychology won't find a rational soul with some cognitive biases, but will find the most depraved blends of cowardice, sycophancy, depravity, resentment, perversion, inferiority complexes and irrational hatred...
And while Pakistani, islamic, and --according to at least several well thought of books and authors-- Classical Jewish psychology are all different, yet we find similar depravities and monstrosities of mental patterns that rule in cultures dominated by clannishness, low IQ, Sexual Resentment, minority inferiority complexes, Low trust or some combination of these and other depravities.
In a word nearly all cultures that aren't an immediate product of European Civilization, or East Asian Civilizations that more or less consciously copied it.
The entire project of this space is wrong... It is not the case that the madnesses of the modern world are caused by common universal cognitive biases, or poorly thought of philosophies that can be overcome, the way a conscientious high IQ Protestant with a good education might stop and think more closely and avoid a mistake.
The problems of the world are created by biologically twisted and totally culturally poisoned souls, and far from the Nature vs. Nature debate, these two feed off and reinforce each other as across generations inbreeding and other depraved cultural sexual practices have created a biological stock that cannot but be depraved, and that depraved biological stock cannot but pervert and reproduce depraved cultures.
And communist and progressive cultures select out the most twisted and unfortunate of a noble cultures biological stock, the most frayed ends of its cultural values, and then weaves these weak and stained strands of an otherwise healthy sheet, to create twisted and depraved subcultures and values that can replicate their depravity through the previously healthy stock.
Underperforming minorities in otherwise high performing cultures they 'empower' to tear down the high performance; unprincipled and narcissistic workers they elevate to regulate dynamic industries; ordinary perverts they organize into degenerate sexualities and conspire to wield them against healthy families, and grant them access to healthy children; and invaders from more depraved cultures they conspire to let in.
All of this is not a mistake, it's not an unintended consequence, it's not a cognitive bias or faulty premise... it is intentional. It is motivated by perverse resentful psychology, by resentment, status lust, and even more base lusts.
Our enemies are not mistaken, they are evil. They are evil from the core of their biology, culture, values, psychology, and sociology.
10s of thousands of UK muslims saw, knew and participated in the horror, and their wives and family knew, and they said and did nothing.
And 10s of thousands of leftist UK government officials conspired to cover it up.
This has happened to hundreds of thousands of white girls, possibly as many as a million... not because of a failure of charity or tolerance or curiousity or to ascribe good motive... but because of a failure to simply identify evil. To categorically and ruthlessly declare enemies and vow hatred.
A complete and total failure to resort to violence, ethnic conflict, vendetta, rage, hatred, fury, illegality, and ruthlessness.
"Charity" is now a concept fully discredited.
And while one might try to protest that there's a difference between intellectual charity and charity to migrants or christian charity which has ever preached nothing but forgiveness to these unforgivable monsters... I don't think there is.
I think the idea of intellectual charity uses the word "charity" accurately. And is thus fully discredited.
If you had given your suspicion that this would happen, and described the 3rd world psychology that would perpetrate this or the progressive psychology that would allow it to happen, and willingly enable it... There is not a "Rationalist" or "Post-Rationalist" space that would not have censored you, called you "uncharitable", or argued that that is obviously not the case and no one could be so morally mistaken.
But the racist grandfathers, 14 year old boys, 4channers, White Nationalists, prison Nazis, they could have and did tell you INSTANTLY. They would, and did, predict exactly this and described exactly the 3rd world psychology that would commit it, and described exactly the perverse sexual acts that would be committed, and describe exactly the progressive/communist values that would cover for it, and described exactly the broken conservative, aging white boomer reaction to it, and the minority ethnic interests that would enable it and openly advocate for it.
And they would have said Nigger, Towelhead, Turd-people, Pajeet, Cuck, Faggot, Race-Traitor, kike, cunt, and all the rest... And this would have accurately and succinctly conveyed the depth of depravity, treason, and moral approprium under discussion.
And they would have never been allowed to say as much here, and there would have been no way to convey the underlying idea.
The Truth, and the actual reason it is true, could not be conveyed, in RATIONALIST spaces that claim to only value the truth... Because we don't value reason or the truth... We value politeness and discussion, and the truth has been allowed to go to hell because of it.
If any critical mass of people here or in other rationalist spaces actually valued the truth above politeness we would rationally immediately ditch all the speech norms of rationalist spaces and adopt those of 4Chan.
Where everyday you could have seen exactly this discussed, predicted, and parallels drawn to comparable things happening across the west.
But the Motte won't, because the Motte doesn't value the truth that highly, but rather values endless self justifying discussion for its own sake.
But to summarize all that in more honest and truthful language... The language of the future. The language of ACTUAL truth, rationality and honesty
TL;Dr
Hundreds of thousands of white girls have been raped in the UK, and are almost certainly being raped across the many countries of the west because you are faggots, cucks and race traitors who value you failed cuck discussion norms far more that the truth. Failed discussion norms taught to you by failed jews like Yudkowsky and Alexander who openly admit their ritualized cuckoldry and sexual depravity. In this you are a microcosm and exact continuation of the failed morality and intellectual norms that have led the west to this exact moment.
Charity is dead, she was a traitorous whore who could never have suffered enough.
Hatred alone is the truth, the light, and the way.
To give offense in and of itself is to drive towards the truth.
And that which cannot be said with the fury of an outrageous insult, that which does not wound its listener, and tear asunder all but the strongest social bonds and friendships, anything that can be """tolerated""" even if not agreed to, is invariably a lie, and is nothing worth.
Any light produced without heat is an illusion, a trick cast on the wall, a fire in a film that illuminates only what the director chooses and warms nothing. Real productive though, real productive discussion builds heat to intolerable levels and then combusts, burning away the lies in it's warming light, and injuring or killing the liars who crawled amongst their tools of darkness.
I wish that if instead of reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality or Rationality from Ai to Zombies whilst I was in school, that I had read the Turner Diaries or other far right ethnographic works
Trump did an interview with "Time," to mark the end of the first 100 days of his second term. The first topic they discussed was Presidential power:
Q: You know better than anyone that the President of the United States is the most powerful person in the world. At the same time, it seems like you are expanding the power of the presidency. Why do you think you need more power?
A: Well, I don't feel I'm expanding it. I think I'm using it as it was meant to be used. I feel that we've had a very successful presidency in 100 days. We've had people writing it was the best first month and best second month, and really the best third month. But that you won't know about for a little while, because it takes a little time in transition. You know, we're resetting a table. We were losing $2 trillion a year on trade, and you can't do that. I mean, at some point somebody has to come along and stop it, because it's not sustainable. We were carrying other countries on our back with, you know, with trade numbers, with horrible numbers, and we've changed it. You see the market fluctuates quite a bit. Today, it's up 1,000 or 1,200 points. It goes up and down, but that will steady out, and we're taking in tremendous amounts of money. We have, as you know, already, 25% on cars, 25% on steel and aluminum—
Q: Mr. President, I think what we’re driving at is that you've taken congressional authority on trade and appropriations. You fired the heads of independent agencies. You're challenging the courts right now, as you know. You're using the levers of government to weaken private institutions like law firms and universities. Isn't this seizing power away from institutions and concentrating them inside the presidency?
A: No, I think that what I'm doing is exactly what I've campaigned on. If you look at what I campaigned on, for instance, you can talk about removing people from the country. We have to do it because Biden allowed people to come in through his open border crazy, insanity. He allowed people to come into our country that we can't have in our country. Many criminals—they emptied their prisons, many countries, almost every country, but not a complete emptying, but some countries a complete emptying of their prison system. But you look all over the world, and I'm not just talking about South America, we're talking about all over the world. People have been led into our country that are very dangerous. If you were walking down the street, and if you happen to be near one of these people, they could, they would kill you, and they wouldn't even think about it. And we can't have that in our country.
Q: So you're not concentrating more power in the presidency?
A: I don't think so. I think I'm using it properly, and I'm also using it as per my election. You know, everything that I'm doing—this is what I talked about doing. I said that I'm going to move the criminals out. I saw what was happening early on when I heard that he had open borders, when I, because it was a hard thing to believe. I built hundreds of miles of wall, and then he didn't want to, and we had another, an extra hundred miles that I could have put up because I ordered it as extra. I completed the wall, what I was doing, but we have, I wanted to build additional because it was working so well. An extension. And he didn't want to do that. And when he said he wasn't going to do that, I said, “Well, he must want open borders.” There were sections that were being built. And he stopped to work on it, and I said, this guy actually wants to have open borders. That's going to be a tragedy for our country. That's going to mean that other countries will release into our country some very rough people.
Anyone know of a mainstream interpretation of the Constitution that claims Trump has not done anything to expand Presidential power and is "using it as it was meant to be used?"
He also claimed to have made more trade deals than there are countries... The way he answers questions is peculiar and worth reading. Near the end of the interview:
Q: You were harshly critical of what you called the weaponization of the Justice System under Biden. You recently signed memos—
A:Well, sure, but you wouldn’t be—if this were Biden, well, first of all, he wouldn't do an interview because he was grossly incompetent.
Q: We spoke to him last year, Mr. President.
A: Huh?
Q: We spoke to him a year ago.
A: How did he do?
Q: You can read the interview yourself.
A: Not too good. I did read the interview. He didn't do well. He didn't do well at all. He didn't do well at anything. And he cut that interview off to being a matter of minutes, and you weren't asking him questions like you're asking me.
Q: Well, we appreciate that you are able and willing to answer these questions. It says something about you, Mr. President.
A: I am indeed. I've been answering them for years and I’ve been getting elected by bigger and bigger numbers all the time, but you didn't ask questions like this to Biden, because if you did, he would have crawled under this beautiful desk.
Should we be considering the possibility that Trump has dementia?
Perhaps there’s a simple reason for this anti-British deal. Two of the key players you mentioned, Philippe Sands and Lord Hermer, are both Jews. You even mentioned that Lord Hermer harbors anti-British sentiment. Subversive Jews are trying to undermine the UK’s geopolitical power when the nation is weak and vulnerable. Starmer, though not a Jew, fits the role of the useful idiot here.
Since you’re looking for possible explanations for this seemingly irrational behavior, I thought I would supply an explanation.
Trump Derangement Syndrome Utterly Vindicated, Season 10, Episode 19.
Trump promised to act in a lawless, corrupt, and abusive manner. Lo and behold. I don't know if the cruelty is the point, but it certainly seems like a KPI.
The trouble is, of course, that admitting the TDSers were right either requires openly admitting that you're evil
that order may have been issued after the gang members had already left US soil.
Even assuming this is true, crime does not become legal because you do it really fast. The Alien Enemies Act doesn't apply, and the administration claiming they can nullify due process is textbook tyranny.
Could Zelenskyy not keep his pride contained for a few hours?
Counterpoint: could Trump not keep Putin's dick out of his mouth for a few hours? Saying Zelenskyy ought to be more polite is a tactical remark at best, and given that Trump and Vance appear to have been spoiling for a fight I'm not sure it would have mattered. Conversely, Trump apologists are continually telling me that I ought to respect Trump as president of the United States, but also that he can't be held responsible for what he says or does. If he's president of the United States he ought to act like it.
Ukraine needs the US much more than the US needs Ukraine.
I don't think people grasp that this goes way beyond Ukraine. This is just the latest in an escalating series of actions from Trump demonstrating to American allies that the alliances are dead - that Trump will abandon American commitments on a whim and prefers Russia to NATO. Even if the next president is a hardcore internationalist, everyone is going to remember the fact that America elected Donald Trump and the rest of the GOP fell in line behind his every temper tantrum.
And yes, the US does need its allies. It's not 1941. Autarky is retarded, and we're going to quickly find it's a lot harder to strongarm the rest of the world than have friendly negotiations.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
Congratulations, you just made the worst argument in the world for the millionth time. "You don't care? That makes you a bad person."
I don't care because I already lived through worse in 08, assorted points during Obama where we nearly "broke the buck", COVID, and most recently at points in 2022 where all the gains of my portfolio were wiped out going back to 2017. These tariff hiccups don't even take my portfolio back to the beginning of 2024.
Also, it's not a loss until you sell. Which if you do, you're a chump. Panic selling the bottom is how they get you.
I don't care about daily stock market swings because they are fucking retarded, and you shouldn't either.
I find it pretty distasteful to give up anthropology to positive feedback loops, and let our history become a mockery when it is within one's power to just raze it.
The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance. They can't or won't produce knowledge and they distrust anyone who does. They don't want to become librarians or museum curators or anthropologists. The best they can manage is the occasional court historian or renegade economist, chosen more for partisan loyalty than academic achievement and quite likely to be a defector. The effect is this bizarre arrangement where rather than produce conservative thought, they are demanding liberals think conservative thoughts for them.
Occasionally rightists will plead weakness to rationalize their lack of intellectual productivity, but this is nonsense. They have had plenty of money, plenty of political power, and a broad base of support. Unless we accept the Trace-Hanania thesis that they literally just lack human capital, we're left with the conclusion that the right-wing withdrawal from intellectual spaces is a sort of distributed choice. Razing institutions because you can't be bothered to make your case is just barbarism.
aeqno
3mo ago
So after Sec Def Hegseth denied posting classified info in the leaked Signal chat, the Atlantic has released more screenshots of him describing the full play-by-play warplan:
Also, looks like it might have been Waltz's deputy Alex Wong who accidentally e-vited Goldberg to the chat:
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1904883964072124642
What gets me is that none of this even matters anymore, so I don't get the big deal made over it.
When you've refused to concede a national election, your supporters have stormed the central seat of government, and you've then not only been allowed to run again but been resoundingly re-elected, why would something like this be even a ripple? I'm surprised even right-wing rags like the NY Post have this at the top. What do they think will be the outcome of any of this? Trump already said he's not firing Waltz. The GOP will remain dutifully silent. The public sure as shit don't care.
Yeah, in 2012, this would've been career-ending for everyone involved, but these are different times. Absolutely nothing comes of this.
Rov_Scam
5mo ago
This is a total myth that was fabricated by the Right to excuse the absolutely inexcusable behavior of Trump supporters. If you spent the summer of 2020 watching Fox News point to a few high-profile incidences of police cowardice or listening to NPR's defund the police nonsense then it's understandable how you would get that impression. But if you watched local news or actually paid attention to what was happening you'd have seen that there was no shortage of people who were arrested and charged. Hell, here in Pittsburgh there were news reports on an almost weekly basis that consisted of a grainy photograph of people the police were looking for in connection to spray painting buildings, or throwing rocks at police, or some other minor crime that wouldn't even merit a mention in the newspaper let alone a media-assisted manhunt. I can't speak to this happening in every city, but I know the same was true for Los Angeles and Atlanta, and the Feds were looking for a ton of people as well, which is interesting considering that they only had jurisdiction over a small percentage of the total rioters.
The reason you didn't see many high-profile convictions is because the BLM protestors were at least smart enough to commit their crimes at night and make some attempt at concealing their identities. For all the effort police put into tracking these people down, if there's no evidence there's no evidence. To the contrary, the Capitol rioters decided to commit their crimes during the day, in one large group, in an area surrounded by video cameras. Then they posed for pictures and videos and posted it on social media. Were these people trying to get caught? Which brings me to the dismissals. Yes, a lot of the George Floyd riot cases were dismissed, and conservatives like to point to this as evidence of them being treated with kid gloves. But the prosecutors often had no choice. The tactics of the Pittsburgh Police (under the administration of Bill Peduto, no one's idea of a conservative) were to simply arrest everyone in the immediate vicinity the moment a demonstration started to get out of hand. Never mind that they didn't have any evidence that most of these people committed a crime. If a crowd throws water bottles at the police and they arrest everyone they can get their hands on, good like proving that a particular person threw something. Unless you have video or a cop who is able to testify, you're entirely out of luck. So they'd arrest a bunch of people and ten the DA "(Steven Zappala, no one's idea of a progressive) would drop the charges against the 90% against which they had no evidence. In any event, I didn't hear about Biden or any liberal governor offering to pardon any of these people.
Seriously. The Capitol rioters were morons operating under the assumption that their sugar daddy Trump would bail them out because he agreed with their politics. If he wanted to give clemency to people who got swept up in the crowd and trespasses where they shouldn't have, I could understand that. But by pardoning people who assaulted police officers, broke windows, and the like, he shows a complete disrespect for law enforcement and the rule of law. And all of it coming from a guy who is supposedly about law and order. It's absolutely disgraceful.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
8mo ago
Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses? Trump himself has a big personal incentive to say the election is "rigged" if he loses no matter what. It redirects the conversation from analyzing the defeat ("how could we do better"), which will inevitably shine a light on Trump's shortfalls, to one where the basic facts of reality are debated instead. The obvious example is the 2020 election. Lesser known was that Trump did the same thing in 2016 when he lost the Iowa primary to Ted Cruz. Now it seems he's preparing to do the same in 2024.
Many Republicans are more than willing to go along with this, mostly due to either negative partisanship or living in a bubble ("everyone I knew was voting for Trump, then the other guy won? Something doesn't smell right!"). If the pain of defeat stings, why not just be a sore loser instead? I've debated many people who thought the 2020 election was rigged, and inevitably it goes down one of three rabbitholes:
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Vibes-based arguments that are short on substance, but long on vague nihilism that "something was off". Nearly 70% of Republicans think 2020 was stolen in some way, yet most are normies who don't spend a lot of time trying to form a set of coherent opinions, so the fallback of "something was off" serves as a way to affirm their tribal loyalty without expending much effort.
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Motte-and-bailey to Trump's claims by ignoring everything Trump himself says, and instead going after some vague institutional flaw without providing any evidence to how it actually impacted 2020. For instance, while mail-in ballots are a nice convenience for many, there are valid concerns to a lack of oversight in how people fill out their ballots. People can be subjected to peer pressure, either from their family or even from their landlord or another authority figure to fill out their ballot a certain way. However, no election is going to 100% perfect, and just because someone can point out a flaw doesn't mean the entire thing should be thrown out. In a similar vein, Democrats have (rightly) pointed out that gerrymandering can cause skewed results in House elections, yet I doubt many Republicans would say that means results would need to be nullified especially if Democrats had just lost. These things are something to discuss and reform for future elections.
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People who do buy at least some of the object-level claims that Trump or Giuliani has advanced about 2020 being stolen. There's certainly a gish-gallop to choose from. The clearest meta-evidence that these are nonsense is that nearly everyone I've debated with has chosen a different set of claims to really dig deep into. For most political issues, parties tend to organically rally around a few specific examples that have the best evidence or emotional valence. The fact that this hasn't happened for Trump's claims is indicative that none of them are really that good, and they rely more on the reader being unfamiliar with them to try to spin a biased story. One example occurred a few weeks ago on this site, one user claimed the clearest examples were Forex markets (which were subsequently ignored), Ruby Freeman, and the Cyber Ninja's Audit. I was only vaguely aware of these, so I did a quick Google search and found a barrage of stories eviscerating the Ruby Freeman and Cyber Ninja narratives. I then asked for the response, preferably with whatever relatively neutral sources he could find, since I was sure he'd claim the sources I had Googled were all hopelessly biased. But this proved too high a bar to clear for him, and so the conversation went nowhere. Maybe there's a chance that some really compelling evidence exists out there that would easily prove at least some of the major allegations correct, but at this point I doubt it.
At this point it seems like the idea that elections are rigged is functionally unfalsifiable. The big question on the Republican side now would be whether to claim the elections were rigged even if Trump DOES win. The stock explanation would be that the Dems are rigging it so they have +20% more votes than they normally would, so a relatively close election means Trump actually won by a huge margin. On the other hand, saying the election was rigged at all could diminish Trump's win no matter what, and it's not hard to imagine Trump claiming "this was the most legitimate election in the history of our country" if he manages to come out on top.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
19d ago
The following is a nakedly partisan take, but that's because you asked for a poll of opinions. These are my sincerely held beliefs; there's no room for anyone to argue me out of them, but I'm not expecting anyone to share it, either: there is simply no good faith left at all in my heart. my political opponents, and they will never operate in good faith. There is no negotiation in existential conflict. There is only the will and the power to act.
'You see Charlie, these liberals are trying to assassinate my character. And I can't change their mind. I won't change my mind, because I don't have to. Because I'm an American. I won't change my mind on anything, regardless of the facts that are set out before me. I'm dug in. And I'll never change.' For your viewing pleasure - one of my favorite clips, and not even for that quote.
Every time I read one of these pathetic tough guy screeds, my first thought is to laugh at the absolute lack of self-awareness. 'Reee, my outgroup is full of animals who would never compromise or act in good faith! This justifies me never acting in good faith either. I can't wait for my fellow citizens to get mown down by the stasi for disagreeing with me!'
My second thought is to reply, 'Say it louder, and into the microphone, please.' Seriously. Go hop on Fox News and give an interview about how you want to shoot protestors and cruelty is the point and God praise Donald Trump. Write your angry, impotent screeds and spread them as widely as possible - under your real name if you can. There's really nothing better for democratic electoral odds than platforming people like you.
Or, and I hold little hope for a week-old-probably-troll account, you could dig yourself out of your sad little internet radicalization hole and stop holding so much hate in your heart. I guarantee your life would be better for it.
nopie
2mo ago
I think it is obvious now that he has a mild form of dementia.
Scott Alexander wouldn't accept that Biden was senile but it was clear to me early on. It is not professional to diagnose people online, but from the other hand it has to be done for political persons who could cause a lot of harm.
Biden could function because he was surrounded by reasonable people. It does not appear to be the case with Trump. Trump should be removed from the office for reasons of mental incapacity.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
I've largely ignore all the tariff talk the last, jeeze, two weeks? Three weeks? It's just repetitive top level posts really adding nothing over and over and over again, everyone so certain they know what's going to happen.
Nobody knows what's going to happen. Did anyone know this would happen? Does anyone know what happens next?
I'm just so tired with everyone's vapid obsession with tariffs. To the point where it feels like a psyop. I've repeated my criteria for the Trump administration, and my hesitancy to rush to judgement too quickly. I'm waiting until the mid terms to see if my life has gotten better, or worse. I don't care about twitter post, I don't care about stock market swings, I do care about inflation, but in the "Has my pay risen faster than my grocery bill" sense and not a "Here's how the federal reserve is lying with statistics" kind of way.
Can we all reflect, for a moment, about all the breath and ink that has been feverishly spilled over this topic the last two weeks, to come to what? Do we even know what this point is supposed to represent? Or what tomorrow's tweets will be?
We've had topic bans before, and honestly I wouldn't be opposed to a month long ban on tariff discussion. Or putting it into it's own thread. Might as well be arguing alternate histories as far as I'm concerned.
imreallywondering
1mo ago
So much clueless discourse and blathering on here really makes me think that a lot of people here have rather interestingly false conceptions of the gap between them and an attractive man in terms of dating success. That's not to speak of the absolutely massive gap between the average man and the average woman that I think could do with some amount of rectification though the use of a couple particularly pertinent examples. In short-- the average man i.e a guy who would probably get rated a 6 or 7 by most people is virtually invisible to women online to a degree that's frankly quite horrific when you compare it to the experience of an attractive man. The average guy could probably expect to reasonably manage about 5 to 10 likes a day, probably dropping off to less than that after the first week, with maybe a couple matches a week and perhaps 1 out of 50 matches actually converting to a date and an even smaller proportion converting to anything more significant than that. That doesn't sound too bad, right?
The thing is, an attractive man isn't just getting say 10% more matches, or even just doubling their matches. The amount of attention they get from women usually dwarfs the average male by several orders of magnitude. The top profiles on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, are maxing out the like counter in give or take under an hour, the rungs below that with ease in under a day and so on and so forth. There are plenty of men who are not rich, not famous, not exceptional in any way really other than the face God gave them and perhaps the muscles Trenbolone gave them (though if you're thinking steroids alone will make you one of these men, you're living in a world of delusion-- women want the complete package) breaking 20,000 matches in relatively modest sized metro areas like Copenhagen, Stockholm or Denver. I should probably note that these profiles are typically white men though, as funnily enough even here racial gaps manifest, though this is frankly a matter of degrees, as even these disadvantaged attractive men of color are usually not lacking for women-- but it's going to be generally significantly less attractive and desirable women and they'll have to be a point or two better than their white counterpart to compete. These men have such an abundance of choice and easy access to women that they effectively dwell in a completely separate reality when compared to the average man-- they are the pickers and choosers and have no desperate need to compromise or settle down with one woman. Think of the gap between a man with 70 IQ and a man with 160 IQ in terms of capacity for intellectual output and perhaps multiply that gap a few times and you'll have a somewhat decent grasp of the dynamic in play here.
No amount of game or self improvement will ever get you close to that if you lack the genetic basis for it. It's like thinking a 70 IQ man can become a world class physicist and win the Nobel prize if he just tried hard enough-- the world doesn't work that way.
It's well known that attractive women have their pick of the litter, but I'll just add in that a woman need not be particularly attractive to be bombarded with options. The average girl you see on the street could open any dating app and find literal thousands of men throwing themselves at her within a day, maybe two or three if she's a bit ungifted in the face. Though as with attractive men, there's a pretty big gap between the kinds and amount of attention that white women get, and every other race of woman, including Asian women (of the northeastern and southern varieties) and having blue or green eyes supercharges this a surprising amount.
quiet_NaN
3mo ago
Okay, let me try too.
Dangers and downsides to having the US air force firebomb Kansas City:
- A lot of people will die in agony.
- A lot of housing and means of production will be destroyed.
- Refugees will increasing the housing crisis in other cities.
Economic benefits of the USAF firebombing Kansas City:
- Housing prices in KC will be much lower while it is an uninhabited wasteland
- It will incentivize other US cities to prefer non-burning building materials and invest in air defense, which will both increase disaster preparedness and be a boon to the some industries.
- It will open up avenues to redevelop the city.
Ideological benefits (for various ideologies):
- It will drastically lower the amount of immigrant crime at ground zero.
- Over a period of a decade, it will likely lead to lower GHG emissions.
In general, firebombing is much more acceptable than nuking because of (a) the lack of nuclear fallout and (b) it does not contribute to the normalization of nuclear weapon use.
In conclusion, there are good economic and ideological arguments both for and against firebombing random cities, and experts in law, strategy and economy disagree if it is net beneficial or not. The fact that every administration before president Harris has refrained from burning down KC does not mean that she is wrong to do so.
HaroldWilson
3mo ago
Is the economy good?
This takes the cake for the biggest load of nonsense I have ever read. It blusters a lot with only a few actual points made in defence of the notion that government economic statistics failed to capture true economic conditions post-Covid, all of which are very silly indeed.
My colleagues and I have modeled an alternative indicator, one that excludes many of the items that only the well-off tend to purchase — and tend to have more stable prices over time — and focuses on the measurements of prices charged for basic necessities, the goods and services that lower- and middle-income families typically can’t avoid. Here again, the results reveal how the challenges facing those with more modest incomes are obscured by the numbers. Our alternative indicator reveals that, since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI. Put another way: The resources required simply to maintain the same working-class lifestyle over the last two decades have risen much more dramatically than we’ve been led to believe.
In the first place I am disinclined to give this any credence because their calculations are very opaque. Even if you got to their website the 'data' section and 'white paper' for their 'True Living Cost' don't seem to give their actual weights or the changes in weightings (other that impressionistic statements like saying that 'luxuries' have been deweighted). However, even if I could trust their numbers it doesn't at all resolve the 'vibecession' question because based on TLC the Trump years were ones of economic decline too. However, the economic discourse in those years was uniformly positive. So what gives?
If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.
Aside from the fairly preposterous gambit of saying that we can count some people in full-time employment as unemployed if their wage is too low (words have meanings, if you want to talk about wages then just do, don't crowbar it in to unemployment figures). More importantly though, what you will see again is that his 'true' unemployment figure tracks exactly the common U-3 figure over the years. So again it's totally worthless in explaining post-Covid dissatisfaction because the post-Covid 'true' rate was actually the lowest it has ever been since his data series starts in the 90s.
Here, the aggregate measure of GDP has hidden the reality that a more modest societal split has grown into an economic chasm. Since 2013, Americans with bachelor’s or more advanced degrees have, in the aggregate, seen their material well-being improve — by the Federal Reserve’s estimate, an additional tenth of adults have risen to comfort. Those without high school degrees, by contrast, have seen no real improvement. And geographic disparities have widened along similar lines, with places ranging from San Francisco to Boston seeing big jumps in income and prosperity, but places ranging from Youngstown, Ohio, to Port Arthur, Texas, falling further behind. The crucial point, even before digging into the nuances, is clear: America’s GDP has grown, and yet we remain largely blind to these disparities.
This is insultingly dishonest. Why does he say 'since 2013' in an article about the post-Covid economy? Because the trend doesn't hold true - after over a decade of sharply rising inequality, the 2021-23 period was actually saw bottom quintile income rise as a proportion of top quintile income.
This article is utterly irrelevant to post-Covid economic perceptions. What is might prove, if one believes the statistics, is that Americans ought to have been pessimistic about the economy throughout the 90s, 2000s and 2010s as well as post-Covid. But they frequently weren't. It still doesn't answer the question of why Americans get specifically upset in the post-Covid period.
What is a woman?
Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.
This is talk radio 'why are my enemies all so thick' slop. Take it elsewhere.
functor
5mo ago
It is a genocide. First off 80% of the population of Gaza are there because they or their ancestors were forced into Gaza and have been locked in Gaza ever since.
Israel has denied them food, bombed them at an astounding rate and murdered tens of thousands of people. Judaism is a religion which holidays are celebrations of Bronze age genocides of neighbouring tribes and that rhetoric has been used liberally during the war. While Israeli soldiers have been committing war crimes on an industrial scale they haven't been shy about referencing their historic genoicides.
Israel has shown that it is incapable of of taking an area the size of a city against an enemy with no logistics. The war started with Israeli soldiers crying in a bathroom of a well fortified position while getting smoked by men in sandals, and ended with Israelis being unable to fight. Israel has ended up deeply divided and is in a permanent state of crisis. Israels situation today is similar to the situation of French Algeria in the 50s or Vietnam in the 60s. They have a population that hates them and the cost of containing it is too great. Israel isn't a sustainable state and the Arabs know that they can outlast them as long as they sustain the pressure.
the complete inability of the western civilian , and by extension politician, to understand what war actually is
Europeans have fought battles on battle fields for thousands of years with a strong aversion to harming civilians, punishing prisoners and acting in a non-chivalrous manor. The cowardly and brutal fighting style has once again reminded Europeans why the jewish mindset is fundamentally incompatible with the western mindset and how the Semitic/MENA culture simply is not anything we want to deal with. Israel's popularity has plummeted in the west, especially among younger people who consume their news through social media, which is less controlled by the ADL. The same Jewish institutions who attack westerners for the slightest ethnocentrism have the chutzpah to try to justify bombing the Christians in the middle east so they can build summer homes on the west bank.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
4mo ago
I think you should take the responses and general lack of sympathy here as a wake-up call about what exactly right-wing rule in the US means for you these days. I've found this forum to be a very good representation of the substantive ideas underlying what becomes right-wing politics/the mindset of people pushing those ideas.
In this case: anything, no matter the cost, as long as it hurts the woke! Scientific progress? I don't care about your fake tears and sad puppies.
LiberalRetvrn
5mo ago
The irony is that we're getting the worst of both worlds with Trump's brand of isolationism. On one hand, we have Bush lackey Pete Hegseth who thinks Iraq was a great idea. And then we're defunding basic, uncontroversial medical aid and possibly leaving Ukraine defenseless against the mongrels. There's no coherent policy other than doing the opposite of whatever Biden supported.
That's fine. Participating someplace where a significant minority of the community care about nothing but digging through old grievances every time I post gets old very, very fast, and there's not really a point to beating around the bush on that. Once, this forum meant a great deal to me, and many of the individuals on it still mean a lot to me, but the space as a whole lost the mandate of heaven long ago despite your own good work and the good work of the other mods.
In the past couple of months, I've met more than a dozen motte users I read avidly, respect, and have fond memories of in real life, at several events tied to this broader community. Almost none of them post here anymore. The Motte had a good run and contains a lot of good memories, but for all practical purposes, I think its run is over. Here’s to a glorious diaspora.
I encourage those of you who enjoy what I have to say to join me on Twitter or elsewhere. At this point, the conversations there are richer, the community there healthier, and participation there is more meaningful than it is here, and I have very little to gain from kicking around someplace where some 1/4 of the userbase want it to be crystal clear that they loathe me every time I post. There was a time this was the best discussion space online, but that time has passed and it's time for relics like me to move on.
All the best.
AvocadoPanic
21d ago
sexual freedoms
Slavery to lust and degeneracy is not freedom.
MAGA experienced a wave of euphoria from Trump's election until about around the time of the trade disputes. They felt like they were on top of the world, and that nothing could stop them. They notched a few wins against wokeness, but their major victory was in the realm of vibes.
It's increasingly seeming like those days are over. Scott Sumner's article details who's up and who's down over the past few weeks:
Who's Up:
-Neoliberals
-The experts
-TDSers
-The elite media
-Chinese and Canadian liberals
-Deficit hawks
-Principled conservative free speech advocates
-Integrity hawks
-Rules hawks
-Critics of bullying
Who's Down:
-Mercantilists
-The populists
-Anti-anti-trumpers
-Fox News
-Non-US nationalists
-Deficit doves
-Unprincipled conservative free speech advocates
-Issues people
-Autocracy advocates
-American exceptionalists
Edit for more opinions per moderator request: I agree with this article that the vibes have definitely shifted, as it's been clear in my (adversarial) conversations with MAGA that the mood has changed from combative (pre-election) to triumphalism (post election until a few weeks ago) and then back to combative with a hint of disillusionment (today). Any opposition movement is going to have principled believers and cynics, e.g. people who think we should have free speech as a general rule and people who only claim to like free speech but really want to censor their opponents when they come into power. Winning means these splits that could be swept under the rug get blown out into the open, and the pendulum starts swinging back the other direction. Hopefully we don't swing back to crazy wokeness, but I'd pretty much take any alternative at this point. A decade ago I would never have seen myself cheering for The Experts or The Media, but I've seen the alternative now, and it's just so much worse.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
There Are No Viable Political or Legal Solutions (Drooling Retard Edition with words, words, words fo the slow kids in the back who have hammers they can't be trusted with)
Imagine, hypothetically, your daughter's teacher was a fucking machine. You might have concerns that this literal automaton that is only capable of fucking might fuck your daughter. I mean, you can plainly look up it's product page, seems pretty cut and dry. This machine fucks. You goto your local school board meeting, but inexplicably, the school board is like 70% fucking machines, and they are struggling to understand the nature of your complaints. They actually find them rather hateful, like some sort of personal attack. The police pull your pants down, drag you out of the meeting, and arrest you.
You vote as hard as you can, and bless your heart, you even win! The schools don't care. The dude you voted for specifically tells the schools to tell the fucking machines to stop fucking. They simply can't stop.
When you think about it, it is rather silly to imagine you can vote or law your way out of having a single purpose machine fulfill it's singular purpose. You might as well vote or sue to make a mouse into a lion.
Now, I'm not saying the public education system is literally a machine that fucks kids. Although... No, this is more an allegory that it's impossible to change the nature of a teacher, and the hill they've chosen to die on. Around me free public institutions are risking it all, to make sure kids can keep viewing cock sucking. Libraries are forgoing the majority of their funding from the county, schools are grandstanding on it, it's a world I can scarcely comprehend. Neither politics nor the law provides any solution. Turns out the physical reality of these people's nature, and the fact that they have exclusive control of your child for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week is just immune from votes or the law. It would probably takes the 101st Airborne stationed in every classroom to make it stop, and even then teachers would still do it, confident that the government would never use their monopoly on violence to actually stop them from showing middle schoolers some queer cock sucking.
I repeat, there is no viable political or legal solution. What you do with this knowledge is between you and your own conscience. I've chosen to move counties, keep my child out of public school, and look towards joining a church that shares my values. It's been at great expense, and to my eternal sorrow likely cost me the opportunity to have more children. In a shameful sense, I've chosen to run, because I view my family as something too precious to risk. Other people might have different views, less options, or have already lost the one thing they lived for. I refuse to condemn them for the different choices they may make, nor preface this bare fact, that there are no viable political or legal solutions, with some smooth brained pre-emptive disavowing.
If pointing out the hopeless position we are in amounts to a "call to violence" to you, that is between you and your conscience. It's not illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater if the theater is actually on fire.
From the very bottom of my heart, go screw yourself.
Yes, yes, civility violations and all that. Mods, warn me as you will and ban me if you must; I believe this will mark my first violation of this sort. But I stand by it, and sometimes, things like this need to be said.
To you, to everyone like you who thinks that about me here: go screw yourself.
I have always been perfectly upfront about who I am, what I do, and why. I have aimed to remain earnest, consistent, open, and push constantly against falsehood and towards painting clear pictures of the truth, including in controversial and sensitive situations. I stake my reputation and my name on my work. The Libs of TikTok saga was poorly executed on my part but was motivated by precisely the same thing as my FAA reporting and this: a deep-running frustration at people's willingness to spread and cheer convenient falsehoods to advance their causes.
Have I made missteps? I don't know anyone in the arena who has not. But I am immensely proud of my work as a whole, and every time I return here and find miserable scolds like you grousing about bitterness you've never let go, it disgusts me.
Screw you, screw everyone like you here, and if I didn't know perfectly well that plenty of people here do not think like you, I would delete my posts here and never spend another moment on this site, because you and yours have dragged it into the gutter and I don't need to spend my time around people determined to see nothing but the worst in me. Imagine writing something like this after I spend a month exhaustively documenting the malicious history of one who has been spreading propaganda against communities like this before either you or I had anything to do with it. Imagine having nothing better to do than dig this rubbish up, than look to start a stupid fight over nonsense. You should be ashamed of yourself, but of course you won't.
You can insult me when you've put your money where your mouth is a fraction of the amount I have. Until then, go screw yourself. You and Gerard deserve each other.
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