domain:felipec.substack.com
... while right-wing posters get to regularly accuse people on this forum of being delusional, claim outgroup politicians are "foreign agents", claim that anyone who holds specific positions is "too dumb to vote", etc. without even getting warned most of the time.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
Terrible ban. We get stuff posted here of a similar level of snarling, but pointed at the left, and it regularly doesn't catch these types of bans.
Which of his statements was actually even worthy of the ban here?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Maybe it's cruel, morally, but I fail to see the connection with patriotism at all.
To steal a turn of phrase from someone I spoke to several years ago who was probably quoting someone else without attribution, "the truest form of patriotism is a desire to see your countrymen prosper." A political program which constantly castigates your fellows as parasites, regards their welfare with indifference, incites hate against them, or treats them as means to an end is not, in this paradigm, at all patriotic.
As evidenced by the whole patriotism thing: a Republican is quite literally less likely to listen to you, because they will get the impression that you hate the country and hate their values.
I think this is backwards: American conservatives want to define patriotism as equivalent to conservativism. Patriots must be conservative; conservatives cannot be unpatriotic; liberals are unpatriotic by dint of their politics. This is fundamentally unworkable because it is a paradigm that demands ideological submission as price of entry.
My problem with HBD as it typically discussed in rationalist spaces and especially the Motte is that it is itself a massive Motte and Bailey.
The Motte is that broad differences between racial groups are real/exist.
The Bailey is that the existence of such differences makes racial background the "scientifically correct" means of organizing a society and a key peice of information to be considered when evaluating the individual performance or value of any given person within it.
People who question the Bailey are routinely downvoted to hell and back while being derided as "blank slatists" "denying reality" and having "crippled thinking", yet even if "the motte" is true, its not clear to me that "the baily" follows naturally from this unless someone is already drowning in the woke kool-aid.
You can spongebob meme at me about "dEmoCrAtSaReThErEaLRaCiStS uwu" and call me cringe, but if the truth is "cringe" then cringe i shall be.
As i touched upon below i am increasingly convinced that the reason HBD and other sweeping generalizations about race are so popular amongst priestly caste (academics, politicians, journalists, et al) and on certain parts of Twitter, is that it allows them to absolve themselves of responsibility for the negative consequences of thier policies and behavior. You can't blame me, it is genetics (or some structural "ism") that are the true culprits!
functor
3d ago
What amazes me is the number of people who understand that the Iraq war, Vietnam war and Afghanistan war were spectacular fiascos and the whole establishment lied. But the next time the media sells a war they get all hyped up for it! This time there is a new supervillan who for absolutely no reason and with absolutely no historical context just behaves like a cartoon villian and we have to take him out now!
During Iraq there was at least some critical media and Baghdad bob was at least allowed on CNN. In Ukraine there are now dissenting opinions allowed. The people who spent 120 000 000 000 dollars building a 300 000 man army in Afghanistan and then told us the troops didn't exist yet the spending did, are supposed to be trusted blindly.
One of the main reasons why politicians are so freaked out about Ukraine is that they lied as much about Ukraine as they lied about every other war and they are afraid of the piles of lies being exposed. One day would could have a Ukrainian Ed Snowden or Bradley Manning.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
5d ago
I was judging him by his campaign, not by a speech while he was still in his 20s that I wasn't even aware of. Does seem to be a nice gotcha, though. Kudos.
If he brings up any more seizure rhetoric I'll adjust my priors, but for now I'll file it away in "Young politician says something strategically embarrassing to signal being in-group".
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
5d ago
- Government solves problem
- Rent seekers are inconvenienced, lobbyists are deployed
- Problem comes back with a vengeance
Many such cases.
Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
But he's not accusing anyone specifically of believing the things he's pillorying? He's not claiming all Republicans believe what he said. At worst, maybe you could say his mention of the "Online Right" was overbroad, but the way he capitalized it meant it was different than "anyone online who is right wing". Is the issue that you think no single Republican thinks these things? If that's the case I'm 100% certain you're incorrect.
I don't understand how the use of quotation marks in general would be worthy of a ban, or what you mean by "scare quotes". E.g. writing HBD as "HBD" probably just means he thinks it's a euphemism that he doesn't really agree with, but he's using it here for the sake of clarity as that's what it's often referred to. None of his other use of quotation marks seem bad either.
This seems like a ban based on vibes alone. Here's a post from a year ago that came from a right-wing that IMO is far worse, and yet it didn't get a ban or even a warning. Here's another post that I also think is pretty bad, but is actually classified as an AAQC!
aceventura
1d ago
Immigration is the only thing that matters until immigration is solved (AI matters too, but the state is powerless to stop that march of technological progress).
As I've pointed out elsewhere, nothing is fundamentally changing about immigration.
Maybe deportations will increase, but probably not. It doesn't matter how many "camps" you have because finding illegal immigrants in the US is not logistically feasible in large enough numbers.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
5d ago
If our core criterion for epithets was "one time said something in a speech" then we would be quite exhausted by the amount of "fascist", "Nazi", "communist", "socialist", etc. being thrown around.
Come to think of it, I am quite exhausted by the amount those terms are being thrown around. Maybe we shouldn't use "one time said something in a speech" as a criterion? Maybe we should judge people by what they're campaigning on, and their actions in office?
Edit:
he has called himself a socialist
Does he call himself a socialist now? I see "Democratic Socialist" on his webpage, which is distinct from other types of socialism (e.g. the flavors of authoritarian socialism that are the boogeymen).
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
5d ago
Close enough to socialism.
I guess this is the issue lol. Point-by-point, why none of this is particularly radical in most societies that people don't consider "socialist":
rent freeze
Rent freezes are controversial cart-before-the-horse band-aid solution to a problem that may or may not be caused NIMBYism. The proposed rent freeze is for rent-stabilized tenants, a specific class of asset. So hopefully you weren't trying to paint this as a city-wide rent freeze, which would never pass anyway. But also not specifically socialist, at all. Very much no means of production being seized.
state built housing
Hardly uniquely socialist. They used to be called "projects". Also controversial because it tends to have extremely high per-unit costs vs. market rent ROI, but that may or may not be attributable to not being able to just build housing, and more to needing to be state-of-the-art energy efficient, fully ADA compliant, up-to-code, etc. etc.
Better than "company towns" imo.
free public transport
Another exaggeration. The free part is for buses only. As someone who's taken a lot of public transit in many different cities, buses are frequently used by more blue collar / "barista" type workers, whereas light rail is more often used by professionals. It's a pragmatically progressive (in the sense of: tax those who can afford it) solution to the problem of rising fare prices, imo.
Also: no one bats an eye about free public roads. Damage to roads is quadratic to the weight of the load: we all subsidize the trailer truck shipping industry with our gas prices and taxes that build our roads. This lowers prices at every checkout, at the cost of an anemic rail system.
state owned grocery stores
Obviously an experimental / pilot project. Curious to see if there's a nice food distribution middle ground between "soup kitchen" and "Whole Foods" that a city government can occupy. An ideal implementation of this looks more like a 7-days-a-week farmer's market to me than a crumbling Aldi with yellowed fluorescent lights and grimey 90s tiles.
free childcare
Are grade school, middle school, and high school not "free childcare"?
The most ambitious and least achievable point in his agenda. To someone completely removed from the situation, I think expanding pre-K and early childhood programs is the more pragmatic way to go about effecting change - but that doesn't pop on a web page meant to excite people about an election campaign.
all of this paid by wishful thinking and unicorn dust.
Along with everything else the government has spent money on. At least these things are attempting to have a positive impact on working class families as opposed to ammunition for a genocide on the other side of the world.
aceventura
1d ago
Adds 3 trillion to debt but simultaneously leads to millions losing health insurance.
Doesn't really matter how much money ICE gets because deportations are really hard to do in America, and anyway, immigration inflows, and thus demographic change, will not be altered even if deportations increase.
I apologise for the faux pas but I'm posting two top comments in succession since this one's kinda important and I couldn't find it anywhere on the board.
The death of the hacker ethos -
Three days ago, Suhail Doshi posted a tweet about a programmer named Soham Parekh who was caught doing the most stereotypically Indian thing ever, scamming people, this time, it's young yc founders. Soham is not a great engineer, he is probably good, better than me, at least as I am for now an amateur, though he is not a 10x mythical unicorn, given he resorted to this
Our /r/overemployed king
So for those unfamiliar, tech jobs pay a lot, by tech I mean jobs where you write code for a living, due to the world shifting more towards web apps, people do not need to be in a particular office to test out things on specific machines or OSes the way they did back then since its a web app after all. COVID-19 saw remote jobs boom, a peak that remote job seekers like me can only wish for. Enter Mr Parekh. He optimised the shit out of the interviewing process, and made a fake CV that made him look like an AI slop find since most YC firms now are just terrible. You can go on Hacker News, a board that was started via YC as its literal URL is news.ycomibanator.com, and there are different cases such as pear.ai and most recently glass that would make every sane man question the levels of evil present in the valley. We will return to these in a bit. Back to our scamster.
Now, cheating is not a new thing; over time, society has gotten less strict about deceit in many areas, just ask Zohran Mamdani, who claimed to be black to get into Columbia and is probably going to face zero consequences for it. The first big pro-cheating thing was this startup called Cluely, made by an Ivy dropout asian american, Roy Lee, whose idea was to embed an LLM in your computer so that you can cheat in any interview, as the language model can access both your screen and the speaker. A few days later he got a cool 16 million by a16z, a firm that invests money in startups that explicitly hate cheating and would never want to hire people who would ask a language model to write most of their code. Roy's startups database got leaked a few days later, and ever since, we have had countless cheating-focused startups.
When Sohams thing broke out, people, a large percentage of Indians went to defend him online for explicitly lying. We all have done bad things and I regret the one or two times I did something amoral, in this case, it was similar to a guy sleeping with an entire friend circle, the girls end up liking the guy which is unfortunately what our friends over at silicon valley did after they were done tweeting about ai god and their ai wrapper with 10s of dollars in revenue that justify the millions in investment. It got so bad that the daily news network equivalent of tech news, TBPN, hosted this guy, where he was given softball questions and turned into a hero overnight. "I took all those jobs because I have personal financial issues" to "I do not care about money and only like building" is self-snitching. We know the guy did fuck all for most of his gigs as he kept getting fired within months if not weeks, similarly, he has family in the east coast of the US yet is facing issues he cannot tell others about? Here is the cherry on top of this rotten fruitcake.
The guy got job offers, plenty of job offers, all by ai wrappers, but job offers nonetheless. He chose to go with a firm that makes the same product his last startup made, one he signed a non-compete since he had seen their entire codebase. I asked @FiveHourMarathon as a joke about what levels of scamming is safe in the US. Unfortunately, not only do people not care, but they also respect you if you pull off scams. Y Combinator has been seen as the bastion of hacker founder culture. Paul Graham's essays focus a lot on doing good, being honest, providing values, and other nice things that seem like worthless platitudes, given that the people in his accelerator are not only bad at these things but also lack any sense of honor.
Which brings me back to glass and pear.ai. Pear.ai was one of the worst-received startups of the recent LLM API calls as a startup batch since it literally just forked another repo completely and was touted as the next big thing by Sam Altman's replacement, Garry Tan. Ultimately, after enough hate, they probably changed since the founders are some sort of young e-celeb YouTubers, but it was a divorce from the Aaron Swartz martyr morals. Glass literally forked another cluely clone with the wrong license, slapped a new license and then later claimed ignorance.
Cheating and deceit are bad things; we should be fine with helping those who make mistakes, but these are malicious attempts. John Carmack released his engineers under GNU's public license, today's largest accelerator, where people use him as a PFP do their best to be the opposite of that. We are at this point, encouraging fraud.
edit - will link things in a bit. Apologies for the second top-level comment.
GBRK
1d ago
Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed? I was genuinely surprised to see that no one was posting about it at all in this thread.
I'm broadly against the bill but don't have much of an opinion of the specific provisions. I understand that it's meant to neuter the political power of my ingroup and neargroup and it seems like it's going to be effective at that, so I know I'm going to dislike it regardless of whether it has any actual non-partisan merit. I guess if I had to single out few things in particular, I'm selfishly in favor of renewing the R&D tax writeoffs, but also singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget... It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces. There are... historical parallels. I'm (among other things) brazilian, and I can't help but remember the first republic's antipathy towards and neglect of the navy due to their royalist tendencies.
A regime change operation in Ukraine
As of 2025, the only people trying to change the regime in Ukraine are Russia and some currently-not-in-charge Russophile elements in the Trump administration - even the Ukrainian opposition don't want a change of government under fire. That wouldn't change if it turned out the US was lying about their involvement with the Euromaidan. In any case, there have been two free and fair Presidential elections in Ukraine since the Euromaidan, and Zelenskyy came to power in 2019 by beating the man who Victoria Nuland allegedly installed.
I'm not claiming that the US had clean hands in the Euromaidan (I have no idea if they do or not) - I am claiming that there is nothing within the normal range of US foreign policy lies that could come out about Euromaidan that would affect the moral or political logic of what is happening in Ukraine in 2025. If the crux of our policy disagreement is "As a matter of resource allocation across various theatres in the New Cold War between the US, NATO and other allies on our side and China/Russia/Iran/North Korea on the other side, should the US be sending cash and materiel to Ukraine?" (and it sounds like it is) then discovering the truth about what Victoria Nuland said to Poroshenko doesn't change the calculation.
And now I am going to disagree with you about resource allocation, making arguments based on publicly-avaialable information that work just as well as a matter of strategic logic if Euromaidan had been a CIA plot
the war has gone a lot worse than reported.
Both the position of the front lines and the approximate losses of heavy equipment have been verified by OSINT. The best case for the Russians now is a Pyrrhic victory - which incidentally undermines the norm against aggressive war a lot less than a clean victory would have done (see Iraq). Russophiles claiming to have non-public information that the war is going badly for Ukraine have predicted dozens of the last one (Ukraine being driven out of Kursk oblast) Ukrainian defeats. Ukraine isn't winning, but the MSM aren't claiming otherwise.
equipment that is replacing the stuff sent to Ukraine costs multiples of the equipment sent to Ukraine
Yeah - we are sending borderline-obsolete kit to Ukraine (because it is good enough to kill Russians) and replacing it with new stuff that is hopefully good enough to kill Chinese. Essentially none of the stuff being sent to Ukraine would be used in a mostly-naval war against China. As of now, some air defence equipment promised to Ukraine is being held back in case Israel needs it.
basket case nation
I thought Ukraine was a basket case too, but empirically they are not. If they were, they would have lost by now - you can't prop up a basket case against a peer competitor without boots on the ground.
no arms production
Ukraine is now the third (after China and Turkey) largest producer of military drones - admittedly mostly by after-market modification of Chinese-made civilian drones.
functor
3d ago
A regime change operation in Ukraine with the goal of pushing the US sphere of influence right into Russia's back yard even though they repeatedly warned against it. The US was doing everything it could to get a war and the war has gone a lot worse than reported.
The cost will be in the multiple trillions as interest rates have gone up sharply since the start of the war and the equipment that is replacing the stuff sent to Ukraine costs multiples of the equipment sent to Ukraine. Not to mention that NATO is inheriting a basket case nation that makes nation building in Afghanistan look like a cake walk. NATO now has to finance a military a quarter the size of the US military that is supposed to be capable of fighting a high intensity war in a country that has no arms production and now tax base to support it. Ukraine is going to be an endless foreign aid black hole
Iraq was definitely different. It was a completely unprovoked land grab on the other side of the planet. It wasn't really any different then the Belgians grabbing the Congo. The goal was to occupy and control Iraq while giving them zero legal status within the empire.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
5d ago
Let's talk socialism and the NYC mayoral race. Apparently the All-in podcast people think it's a sweeping wave that will drown out Progress with a capital P. London, Vienna, Chicago, and of course the California cities have already had socialist mayors for a while. Why not New York?
Honestly despite being a "conservative" I am broadly quite sympathetic to socialist arguments. I do think free markets actually kind of suck, inasmuch as we can even have free markets. Personally I think free markets don't really exist when you take into account that power abhors a vacuum, but they are a fiction with extremely high utility to create material goods.
Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class. It's weary writing and thinking about politics when even the best laid plans seem to inevitably just get ground down by the dumbest things. I can completely understand why young folks want to just socialize everything.
Not that I agree with them, but hey, sometimes I wish I were still naive enough to think socialism or any -ism could fix the ills of our society. I sadly am not that optimistic.
That being said, I don't think society is unfixable. I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.
aceventura
3d ago
So, again, let's start with the heart of the issue: why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable?
Obviously can't speak for OP, but for me it's the way that the Online Right talks about non-white people: really distasteful comments about Indians and "third worlders", vulgar anti-Jewish sentiments, calls to denaturalize and deport tens of millions of "browns". The overlap between these people and the "white solidarity" people is nearly 100%.
You can think it's silly because the "Online Right is small and powerless", but they certainly don't see themselves that way, and they're working towards creating a real political movement.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
That argument might make sense if this were like any other wedding where they're essentially relying on the honor system that uninvited guests don't show up, but this wasn't the case. This is a wedding that was held at a secret location that was difficult to get to and guarded by staff checking names. There's no trust involved here. It's also worth mentioning that even though the grooms weren't celebrities, there seems to be an epidemic of celebrities crashing normal people's weddings and other events on the premise that nobody will mind if a celebrity unexpectedly shows up. Bill Murray is notorious for this, but Taylor Swift has been known to do it and even lower tier celebrities like Zach Braff feel entitled to, even though they'd go to extreme measures to prevent normal people from getting anywhere near their weddings.
It should be mentioned as well, that the level of security behind this wedding had less to do with the family involved and more to do with the fact that Lady Gaga was making an appearance. If they had gotten married at a normal venue and held the reception in a hotel ballroom and hired the band fronted by the guy who sings the national anthem at Pens games as entertainment, I doubt they'd attract any more crashers than any other wedding. But when a celebrity of her stature is involved the risk increases greatly, made all the worse by the fact that she was almost certainly staying in the resort hotel and a little detail like that leaking would mean superfans booking rooms there for the sole purpose of trying to get a bit more close than the typical guest who booked a thousand dollar a night room for other reasons. And this just makes the whole mess more complicated because now that they're paying guests you can't just ask them to leave without refunding their money.
Of course, I had no reason to concern myself with this, because I'm not a fan of Lady Gaga, and when you're at a billionaire's wedding a private performance by an A-list celebrity doesn't exactly take you by surprise, and, after all, I'm acting like I'm supposed to be there. Anyway, given that the hosts didn't actually extend any trust that could be taken advantage of, I don't see how my actions erode that trust. And it was only that lack of trust that made the event appealing to crash. If my friend had just said that Joe's grandson was getting married at Nemacolin and he was glad his part in it was over, the idea of crashing it wouldn't have occurred to us. It was only when he got cagey about the details that the whole thing became intriguing, and when he insisted that we couldn't get anywhere near the place, it became a challenge.
iprayiam3
4d ago
Does he have to marry an old fat lady?
No he has to stay married to his wife and the mother of his children
ResoluteRaven
19hr ago
The cuts to science funding seem likely to do major damage to American R&D, cause a mass exodus of skilled workers to Europe, and give China the opportunity to get even farther ahead of us in key fields such as battery development. As an attack on the woke elements of the Academy they seem both disproportionate and poorly targeted, and as an attempt to burn it all to the ground they are clearly insufficient. I'd like to see someone at least propose a new Bell Labs-type enterprise as a replacement for the scientific infrastructure that they're trying to dismantle, if that's the way we're going.
In other news, Elon promised to start a new political party and to primary a bunch of Republican congresscritters if the bill passed. That should be entertaining to watch if he doesn't chicken out.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
Ideological submission as the price of entry is pretty normal in world historical terms
This is a tremendously underwhelming endorsement. Being exploited by brutal overlords who demand sycophantic bootlicking is pretty normal in world historical terms. Being a subsistence farming peasant is pretty normal in world historical terms. Fifty percent child mortality is pretty normal in world historical terms. I have no idea why we would accept "normal in world historical terms" when we're presently doing far better and we know we can do better still.
American conservatism(like most imperial state ideologies) is a big tent that 95% of people can fit into comfortably
In the sense that you can always be a submissive peasant with no rights worth respecting. In the sense that it actually accommodates everyone, no.
WhiningCoil
2d ago
If there was a cost-free way to make bees not suffer at all while farmed, wouldn't you press the button?
Because nothing is cost-free, and it's this sort of magical thinking that walks people straight into the nightmare world.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
3d ago
Yes, discomfort with white solidarity often manifests as labeling it "racism," but it's not clear this can said to be a cause.
An example cause: Historically, white solidarity has lead to genocide, so people are uncomfortable with it.
Nothing that wouldn't make me sound like a broken record: an unparalleled triumph of sycophancy, fiscal conservatism is a scam the barons use to con the peasants, dream of Argentinafication, etc...
I find it largely to defy discussion.
The Trump administration is run by people who are genuinely rabid xenophobes who view Hispanic day laborers as an existential threat, but I suspect this is in the back of their mind as well. Well, less of a military force per se and more of a political gendarmerie. You want someone you can count on to shoot protestors and whose fortune is tied to the regime.
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