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I hinted at this with "liberal total state", but I think that this is a new environment of omnipresent state control + supposed "liberal norms" about the use of state power.

Once upon a time a feuding clan could come and kill you and the king couldn't do much about it. Sometime later the king could send his men to kill you and nobody could do much about it.

Now we're at a point where the state has almost total power to restrain or permit violence, but in theory isn't supposed to have you murdered for opposing the state. So state violence against its victims is carried out extrajudicially by a criminal underclass that is allowed to e.g. carry guns in Chicago to do drivebys without being prosecuted. Or antifa thugs in Portland and Seattle that carry around illegal rifles in public to burn police stations. Or leftist hackers allowed to DDOS opposition websites, spam them with child porn uploads, and call in threats to the host/registrar/tier1 networks.
Or, even more hilariously, gangs of IDF-backed Jewish frat boys lol.

The state uses the criminal class as a hands-off weapon of anarcho-tyranny. It's not a subtle tool, and sometimes to their shock it bites the hand that feeds it; as Marion Barry said after being beaten by home invaders who stole his drugs, "I thought they knew I'm on their side"

This is all pretty new and unexpected as far as I can tell. Everyone predicted totalitarian control through a surveillance state and the secret police, not party NGOs raising money for violent street thugs, hacking rings, and doxxing groups.

Based on the steady torrent of Israel-Palestine threads, the general impression I get is that a majority of people here is quite solidly pro-Israel in this conflict. I would like to understand the pro-Israel position better; in particular, I wonder if there are arguments for the Israeli position in the current war that don't mostly rest on one of the following:

  • An arbitrary cutoff of historical reckoning either shortly before the most recent Hamas attack, or else somewhere in the early '90s following the general Western mode of thinking about other geopolitical conflicts. Unilaterally declaring all scores settled is not a persuasive or universalizable moral principle.

  • Invocation of inherent superior qualities of Israeli Jews relative to Palestinians, be it intelligence, education or general "civilizedness". You would almost certainly either need to cut out a very contrived set of conditions to make the principle only apply to this case, or accept some hypothetical corollary you probably don't want that involves similar abuse being heaped on morally/intellectually/civilizationally inferior people that you care about or feel kinship to.

The way I see it, the moral case for Palestine is pretty clear, and unlike some seem to assume does not require you to subscribe to a lot of oppressed-are-always-right slave morality (though you do need to stop short of maximally might-makes-right master morality). The present ruling population of Israel mostly moved to that territory in the late '40s, and from the start has continued violently expelling the ancestors of present Palestinians from their homes to acquire their land for themselves. I do not think that Palestinians' stupidity or backwardness or whatever are so great that they can't be afforded what we otherwise consider basic human rights to property and safety, even if the people who want to take those from them for themselves were all literal Von Neumanns.

I don't think that this original wrong has been made right to the Palestinians, and the argument that some Palestinians submitted and got to live better lives under the Israelis than they would have had in an independent Palestine does not morally convince me either. If Bill Gates steals the plots some rednecks built their houses on, builds a mansion in its place and then offers them lavish jobs as domestic servants, do the ones who don't accept forfeit their right to complain about the theft? Another counterargument seems to rest on something like statute of limitations (like, the Palestinians and Israelis alive nowadays are not the ones who got robbed and their robbers), which would be more persuasive if Israeli settlements were not still expanding, and there weren't still Palestinians who are quite directly being made to suffer at the hands of the Israeli men with guns for no other reason than that they do not accept the "become Bill Gates's domestic servant" deal. It seems pretty clear to me that there is no recourse left to the Palestinians who do not want to to take this deal that preserves their human dignity - their conquerors certainly won't hear them out themselves, and they are backed by the US machine which not only could produce a personal cruise missile for every Palestinian if it put its mind to it but also has enough intellectual and propaganda firepower that they could make even the Palestinians doubt that they are themselves humans with rights.

If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you. To claim otherwise, to me, seems to amount to claiming that you can be absolved for arbitrary wrongs if you just amass enough power to make effective resistance impossible, and I don't like that even before we start taking into the account that the targets of Hamas terror were intended and more often than not happy beneficiaries of the original wrongs committed. (If you have been driven out of your house and into a corner at gunpoint by the mafia, the mafia boss's kid stands by watching the show and mocking you, and, seeing an opening, you shoot the kid, I will find it hard to fault you for the murder even though the kid is technically innocent of the misfortunes that befell you and this did absolutely nothing to help your situation. As a bonus, the corrupt police (my country) is then called in to arrest you, after sharing a smoke with the mafiosi.)

Though I said that the moral case for Palestine is clear, this is emphatically not to say that I rule out the possibility of a clear moral case for Israel existing at the same time. "They're both justified to continue murdering each other" is a sad reality of a lot of tribal conflict. However, in this particular case, I actually do not even see that case, or at least what I have seen seems much weaker to me, given that Israelis still have the option to leave Israel at any time as a large part of the world would welcome them with open arms (while the anti-Palestinians like reiterating that not even other Muslim countries want to take in the Palestinians, as if that helps their case), and even though in some sense they would also then be "driven from their homes" it's not like they are usually unaware of those homes' provenance.

why is this a story at all?

Why was Scott's identity a story at all? Why was Beff Jezos'?

Dissident not only exists but has the impudence of publishing dissident litterature? That gets written because he is now a known quantity to networks of activists that will attempt to make his life and that of his friends hell if tries to get a hold of any power. It's a signal to friends that enemies exist in this particular place and must be destroyed, nothing more.

At best it sounds a little bit absurd because the power of those activists has recently diminished and they're no longer able to cancel people at will, so this type of "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" publications are thankfully impotent complaints.

There is no larger story, no bigger picture, just journalists throwing mud at people they find contemptuous, as is, disgustingly, their job.

As you suspect I am speaking English and it's dubbed in Japanese. There is (or was) a version with just English but I won't search for it for two reasons:

a) They assured me only the dubbed one would be released

b) I just spoke the exact words as written, complete with grammatical errors, so I'm speaking shitty English.

Yes it is a strange place.

What I'm confused about: why is this a story at all? Presumably, the main effects of this are to make him unemployable and perhaps cause some interpersonal issues.

It's a story pour encourager les autres, of course.

I think what gets me is that there's simultaneously an appropriation of victimhood (evil bad guy publishes anonymous essay causing evilness!) combined with an inquisitorial zeal to punish, and apparently the power to do exactly that.

This has always been the case, and is nothing new. The establishment has now styled itself as a revolution against its victims. People who call themselves "punks" enthusiastically sign up to the same stifling speech rules as every HR department in every multinational megacorporation in the western world and excoriate others who deviate.

it would be like if Edison had created the light bulb and physicists had only discovered electricity afterwards to figure out how it works

To be fair it's not like that kind of stuff never happens. A lot of the history of semi-conductors is engineers trying various random things intuitively to get a particular defined effect and only explaining why that worked after the fact.

Are you doing this to get in front of a hostile doxxing from a certain notoriously vindictive group you've upset?

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.)

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.

Recently, the Guardian doxxed Lom3z, the right-wing author best known for What is the Longhouse, based on an unwise registration of a linkable LLC name. As Ahmari points out, he's "an erstwhile Bernie-ish bro who at some point snapped, or became disaffected with the millennial left, and shifted rightward." An MFA holder who was a lecturer at UCI (not tenure track, of course) for a decade, of an unsurprising "off-white" background.

What I'm confused about: why is this a story at all? Presumably, the main effects of this are to make him unemployable and perhaps cause some interpersonal issues. What is a random reader expected to do? Unless you happen to employ him, seemingly nothing. The exposé does detail his sins, which includes publishing ponderous Yarvin tomes and obscure works by Russian White counter-revolutionaries.

And yet it is a story, and a story that gets me emotionally invested, so I suppose my question should really be less why is this a story and more why do I consider this a story? As much as I like the longhouse concept, it's hard to consider Lom3z or his biography at all important; he could die tomorrow, and no one aside from his loved ones would notice.

I think what gets me is that there's simultaneously an appropriation of victimhood (evil bad guy publishes anonymous essay causing evilness!) combined with an inquisitorial zeal to punish, and apparently the power to do exactly that. I just don't see how someone can have both these traits simultaneously, and yet it's depressingly common. I guess I see the doxxing as a distillation of the current zeitgeist of exceptional purity, and that's something to point to when thinking about it.

Another question: what happened to Ahmari? I recall him being on the outs for theoconnery, but now he's publishing snark in the New Statesman about other right-wing writers. Did something change, or did he have some kind of beef with Lom3z?

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 an extrajudicial enforcement tool by 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 closely related Existential Comics vision of a "police-free" society ruled by leftist gangs..
Is this the future of ethnic and religious conflict in modern states?

Don't most of these still require exotic matter? Trading breaking conservation of momentum for negative mass never really sounded to me like a gain in credibility.

It is a bit funny how the US is now on the same side of this issue as Russia.

What was the diplomatic position of the United States about the ICC charging Vladimir Putin?

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?

I have been wondering to what extent anyone with real influence on international relations actually believes in the notion of an "international rules-based order" when they invoke the term, as opposed to considering it as a particularly good tool for gaslighting. (Though perhaps I'm being too autistic in expecting someone operating at that level of social skill to have a single well-defined belief, as opposed to navigating cognitive dissonance as effortlessly as a mathematician switches between equivalent formalisms. Yes, it is a rules-based order with fair customary rules agreed upon by the community of nations; no, claiming that the US might have run afoul of the rules is a category error.)

No country is obligated to join any given treaty; this includes the US. As I explained, the US is not a party to the Rome Statute. When the ICC tries to extend its authority to non-parties, it is the one in violation of an "international rules-based order," not the US, and the US is fully within its rights to defend the current state of international law against the ICC's overreach.

Either you believe in an international rules-based order or you don’t. The fact that America supports international governance when and only when it gets to be in charge makes it look cynical and prevents people cooperating with it.

Yeah, it’s mainly about intra-gender competition which may have at its root some relationship to what men find attractive but which has long since transcended that basis. Same is true for ‘bigorexia’ / body dysmorphia among gym bros, they don’t really think that looking like a roided out human pit bull is attractive to women, they just want to be the biggest guy in the powerlifting gym.

My attempts at intervention for eating-disordered girls high on thinspiration leads me to observe that being attractive to men doesn't even register on why they are deadset on seeing their wristbones. Inclusion into strangely discriminatory female spaces or attaining self control over ones body were the biggest root reasons, nothing to do with trying to get dudes.

Are you speaking in English or Japanese in the commercial? I can’t figure it out! That sounds fun. It seems kind of ridiculous to hire a Japanese speaking foreigner sit on a chair and describe the product only to dub it over with Japanese, but it’s a strange place.

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.

Bearded blond guys with deer horns on their heads must be cleaning up... Hang on, I could be that guy!

Pity the deer around here have even more pitiful racks than the women do. Might have to go on a hunting trip out east.

(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.

Men and women are both interested in politics if you ask about the actual issues in my opinion. But I’d concede that women are much more susceptible to “it’s called being a GOOD PERSON, GET IT?” reasoning. Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas (a man will become a sycophant, will bow to his betters, but internally he is more likely to chafe at this; he won’t do it unless he is certain it’s absolutely necessary).

That’s not surprising since it tracks with extensive research about men much more frequently engaging in almost all riskier behavior. Heterodox politics are part of that.

Black Americans have a distinct sexual dimorphism around weight that isn’t found in other racial groups. The men have approximately the same obesity rate as men of other races (black men actually have very slightly lower obesity rates than white men on some charts, but the difference is negligible), but black women are much more obese than women of other races.

For example white men and white women have an obesity rate of 38%. Black men have an obesity rate of 37%, while black women have an obesity rate of 55%. This also likely explains why black American men date interracially more than black American women.