domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
24d ago
If you've been on twitter in or around the tpot space the last few days, you may have seen Aella blowing up and deciding to go private. I won't recount the whole story, but it is in screenshots in the link earlier.
Suffice to say, apparently she searched her name and saw a ton of vitriolic attacks and discussions around her online presence. She claims that the worst part is the "overwhelming hate with nobody defending me. People are ashamed publicly to support me, they don't want to be called a simp or cringe."
Long story short she basically said that she is heartbroken, is "so sad the world is shaped this way," and decided to quit twitter and go locked for the foreseeable future.
For some quick background, aella is a prostitute. She is extremely successful, and has built up a huge presence on twitter as well as a cult following in rational spheres. She does data science work as well, and claims to be autistic. She is polyamorous and openly promotes and campaigns for that lifestyle, as well as doing drugs. Some of her stunts include things like tattooing her name on the body of men who have sex with her, having orgies while sharing details of who got to get in, etc.
A few darker claims are that she pushed her two younger sisters into sex work (one of them, by her own admission on twitter, was doing camgirl jobs before she turned 18.) She has also said some... problematic things that are edging around support for pedophilia, although she's canny enough not to come right out and say it.
Now as I'm sure many people here agree with, I don't exactly agree with aella's views or lifestyle. That being said I am still torn, the world is a cruel place. At the same time, aella has probably caused harm to a lot of others with her lifestyle and especially her approach to promoting it online.
This equivocation points to an actual underlying tension/confusion I have around liberal expression. On the one hang I think polyamory, sex work, and some of the.... encouragement aella has around minors watching point &c is quite bad, and should not be allowed to happen in the public square. I think a certain amount of shaming is absolutely good and necessary.
However, perhaps I'm frail hearted or something because it does hurt to see so many attack her so viciously, when they clearly have so much hate in their hearts. Perhaps it's Pollyannaish but I wish that we could do our shaming in a more dignified, and less clearly antagonistic way. It seems that most of the people shaming her, from my read at least, clearly enjoy looking down and judging someone harshly, seeing themselves as better than her. From my perspective, that's not just as bad as what she's doing, but still bad.
I'm wondering, I suppose, whether there's a way we can employ shame in a truly good way as a society? Can we somehow shame people without turning into monsters ourselves, in order to protect our children and especially young girls from (imo) degenerate and overall unhealthy lifestyles?
Shirayuki
20d ago
Why Should I Care?
I recently greatly enjoyed Naraburns' post on the life of Dylan, so I thought I would give back by putting together my thoughts as someone that empathizes greatly with Dylan, and would probably be picking pineapples right next to him if I didn't happen to be born with some aptitude for shape rotation. To provide some context, I've been in a bit of a malaise for the last few days, having had a rough week at work, and I get into a spiral of fantasizing about quitting my job when the thought hits me - why, exactly, do I even care about the job? Why do I actually care about contributing to society?
As any good economist knows, people at scale generally do what they're incentivized to do. Yet from the point of view of a young man it's increasingly harder to get a bite out of carrots historically used to incentivize men to act pro-socially, while simultaneously most of the sticks and fences previously used to corral people's worst impulses have disintegrated. Viewed from a sufficiently cynical lens, it becomes more and more rational from a self-interest perspective to drop out of the system and become a disaffected bum, and indeed this does seem to be reflected in the male labor force participation rate.
The elephant in the room is, of course, dating discourse. It is absolutely true and subject to much discussion amongst these types of circles that relationship formation and TFR is dropping off a cliff in almost all countries on the planet. Everyone has their own hot take as to what's going wrong and who's at fault; personally, I just think it comes down to incentives.
Men no longer need women for sexual gratification [when HD video porn exists] or domestic labor [when household appliances exist], women no longer need men for physical or economic security [when careers and the state will provide] and there's significantly less status or social pressure for either gender to get into and stay in relationships early, unless you run in religious or traditional circles. It's a similar story for having children; most people, if asked, will at least nominally say that they want children, yet revealed preference is for global TFR collapse. In agrarian societies having children isn't a great burden relatively and they become useful quite quickly, whereas in modern societies having child(ren) will result in significant changes to your lifestyle, and impose notable financial burden [less than what most PMC's might think, but certainty an extant one] for at least twenty years for a very uncertain return; it's a hard sell to the modal person to make sacrifices to their quality of life and economic stability for the sake of very expensive pets [from an economic perspective].
As a result, polarization between the sexes is at an all-time high as a result as neither sex really needs the other, and left to their own devices the observed tendency is that they mostly end up self-segregating. For men that do still want a relationship and marriage, this means it's the hardest it's ever been; in-person ways for singles to meet have all but disappeared, dating apps are perhaps the most demonic application of technology ever invented, and the very high amount of options that most women now hold [including that to eschew dating altogether] heavily disincentivizing making any sort of commitment [to be clear, almost all men would and do act in similar ways given the same breadth of options as well].
I don't agree with the blackpillers, in the sense that I think the majority of people could eventually find a partner if they put in enough effort [which might be an incredible amount depending on the starting point!]. However, it is true that we went from a society where the standard life script ended up with everyone except for a few oddballs partnered up, to one where the standard life script results in most men ending up alone unless they spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on dating or are exceptionally [hot/rich/charismatic/lucky] in some way. Most people really just go with the flow, and hence increasingly more people end up alone.
Even for those who do manage to summit the mountain, the returns on entering into a relationship and marriage seem to be diminished for most men. It's likely to be expensive financially [I'm not convinced by Caplan-style arguments that relationships save you money, the most expensive budget items like housing, childcare and healthcare are largely rivalrous or wouldn't otherwise exist, and it's reasonably well studied that relationships where the woman makes more money suffer] and of course there's little to really secure commitment or incentivize sticking it out if something goes wrong; getting divorced is one of the easiest ways to have your life ruined, after all.
At the end of the day, modern relationship formation is less about the practical benefits as was the case for almost all of human history, and almost entirely about self-esteem and self-actualization; hence the rise of incels [who are bereft of the validation of being desired, not the literal act of sex] and romantasy fiction. How much does it validate me that I have a high status / hot / rich partner willing to have sex and be seen in public with me? Have I now truly found my soulmate, the ideal parent for my children? This is, of course, an impossible standard to meet for the vast majority of people and relationships and hence most people who think this way end up dissatisfied and unhappy - and yet without the illusion of self-actualization what else is there really to gain bonding yourself to someone else with a bond that is not a bond?
With all is said and done, as the mountain grows ever-harder to summit and the rewards for reaching the peak become ever-increasingly a mirage, I think it's an increasingly rational choice for many people to decide not to climb and to try and find contentment at the bottom. That's certainly how I've been feeling lately, at the very least.
This brings me to my next point, where if a first world man decides that they no longer want to conquer the mountain, there's not really much else that buying into modern capitalism can offer them in many cases. It is of course a stereotype that men are happy living in squalor, and that women be shopping, but I've found it to be remarkably accurate; women make up something like 70% to 80% of consumer spending, and in general it's motivation to be a provider that drives many men to work as hard as they can, most of whom otherwise are pretty happy living with a mattress and WiFi.
If one's lost the motivation or opportunity to provide, suddenly most of what remains expensive in modern abundant society doesn't really matter; you don't have to spend money on up-keeping a lifestyle and status symbols to attract a mate, and you no longer need to spend most of your life paying off a house in the best school district you can afford to keep the wife happy and the child as advantaged as possible.
Similarly, the stick of impoverishment is no real threat in any rich welfare state; He who does not work, neither shall he eat is now comically false, food [and non-housing living expenses in general] are pretty trivial to cover if you're smart/frugal about it and if you're not the gibs will probably cover them for you anyways. Housing is a real problem that's been exacerbated near-universally across the world, but if you no longer need to provide for a family or make a lot of money there's still plenty of ways to keep a roof over your head without working too hard; living out of a van, moving to somewhere where the jobs aren't great but living is cheap, or the good old solution of failing to launch.
Anecdotally, my college friend group includes a guy who dropped out to live with his parents and do gig work and a high-powered lawyer who inherited a few million, and despite their significantly different socioeconomic classes still live materially similar lives and are still good friends. Sure, the lawyer can afford to live in a massive house, fly business and collect a bunch of expensive trinkets, but when it comes down to it neither of them worry about their basic needs, and spend most of their leisure time doing the same things; working out, playing the same video games, watching the same tv/movies/anime, scrolling too much on social media and going traveling to similar places from time from time.
Of course being wealthier and more powerful gives you more optionality in the face of adversity, and that's great if you're born into wealth or are exceptional/lucky human capital, but honestly the vast majority of people are never going to have enough power or money to matter if anything really goes wrong with their life, even if they spend their entire lives grinding and buying into the system. "Making it" to middle manager at a big firm or owning a small business doesn't save you from targeted lawfare, developing late-stage cancer where the experimental treatment is going to cost a few million out of pocket, or your home burning down and getting denied by insurance. And of course, no amount of money can save you from the true black swans e.g unaligned superintelligence, gain of function^2 electric boogaloo or nuclear war - how many young people in the first world really believe that they'll be taking money out of their retirement fund and living life as normal in 2080?.
So if the dating market is FUBAR and money has questionable marginal utility, what else is left to encourage men to work hard? Well, people will think you're a loser and low status if you don't work or you work a shitty job, maybe that will work? That's true, and historically granting young man status when they do pro-social things has been a pretty effective motivator.
Yet now we live in a highly globalized society for better or worse. No matter how far you are up your chosen totem poles, status has gone global; it's easy to look up, see who's still above you and feel bad about yourself. Chad is probably just a twitter DM away, in fact! Being unemployed or a gig worker might be low status, but even "good" jobs don't feel much higher status either; it's hard to feel the average software engineer or electrician job is particularly high status when constantly inundated with people who are orders of magnitude more successful. To me, it feels like the endgame is SoKo or China; competition for "high status" becomes more and more ludicrous and absurd, and everyone else sits on the sidelines resigned to feeling like a loser even if their lives are materially still great.
Faced with such competitiveness, you can either throw yourself into the maw and try and win an winnable game, or decide to tap out of the game altogether. Sure, there will always be those with immense will to power that will maximize for status, to strive for the stars and win at at all costs, but realistically most people don't have such strength of will. If the only options are play and lose and not play at all, it increasingly feels like the best play is to just drop out of striving for status altogether; it helps if you're no longer invested in dating or careerism, the arenas where status is most instrumental...
This piece ended up being significantly longer than I intended, and really I don't expect any sympathy nor do I have any solutions [much less politically viable and moral ones] to what I see as a deeply society-wide malaise. I have a deep respect for the incredibly autistic open-source emulator developer, the Japanese master sushi chef, and the Amish craftsman, those who still Care about their crafts in the truest sense of the word. Yet one cannot choose to win the lottery of fascinations, one cannot choose to be born into a high-trust society, and one cannot choose to have faith when it does not exist.
At the end of the day, it's hard to argue it's not a triumph of society that the modal first worlder spends most of their time wallowing in comfort and engaging in zero-sum status struggles in a world where so many still suffer. Yet what is great can easily be lost, and modernity as it exists today cannot survive without the buy-in of young men. Maybe it doesn't matter, that in the end us dysgenic neurotics will end up being weeded out of the gene pool, and that future populations will be able to break out of this local minima and take over the world. Perhaps the prayers for the machine god to deliver us salvation will come true and the priests shall finally immanentize the eschaton so that none of this matters.
In some ways it feels like to me that the barbarians are banging on the gates while nobody else notices or cares, as everyone else seems to be whiling away the hours eating bread and going to the circus. But well, if nobody else is manning the walls either, why should I be the one who cares?
The Economist has published an article (paywalled, sorry) on the state of cyclists in New York, which dropped the day I was leaving the city. It was the first time I had visited as an adult. I came away with some respect for it (loved the food, service, and how fast everyone walked). The point of the story is supposedly that cyclists are now being treated unfairly:
The New York Police Department (NYPD) has started issuing criminal summonses for bike riders committing a slew of seemingly low-level fouls. Now, if caught running red lights, stopping in the pedestrian crossing or wearing headphones, wayward cyclists must appear before a judge, even if they are not contesting the fine. If they do not, they risk arrest.
I’m a cycling nut, so the issue is close to my heart. In a T2 city, I feel like our role is that of a scapegoat. People fantasize about killing cyclists pretty regularly, and none of them understand the challenges and tradeoffs we have to deal with. At this point, I've just thrown up my hands in despair at this ever being better, so I just get on the road as little as possible.
The people on two wheels in NYC are a different breed. Each of the longtime residents I asked - 100% - are now more scared of cyclists than cars. My 3 day trip felt the same to me. Every car was attentive and respectful of me as a pedestrian. The cyclists were fast, heavy, and disregarded almost every crosswalk signal or red light, despite having their own lanes. What’s the quantitative danger?
Of the 449 pedestrian deaths in the city between 2020 and 2023, electric bikes, scooters and mopeds led to just eight of them.
Notice the sleight of hand here. What’s included are E-Bikes, scooters, and mopeds - each of these truly motorized vehicles. The number of people killed by analog cyclists nationwide has been, for many years, single digits. This is important. E-bikes allow users to achieve speeds and momentum totally beyond their skill, and are often part of poorly maintained machines that are part of sharing programs. My mind is blown that even 8 people have been killed - that's an enormous number even in a place as dense as NYC. It probably means a huge number of serious injuries as collateral damage.
Cyclists kill between 1-9 people in the US per year. Cars kill 7,000+ Pedestrians (Not to mention other drivers). If you compare lethality on a per-capita basis, it's not even close. Cars are 230x more deadly (Including only pedestrians, not the 40,000 total deaths). Per-person-miles-travelled reduces the disparity a lot. It gets down to where cars are "only" 8.5x more deadly than bikes.
Put simply, the fixie riders racing through the city are psychotic but not dangerous to pedestrians.
As you’d expect, the lede is buried, along with the Culture War. The cyclists zipping through the city on E-bikes are exclusively yapping in a foreign language on speakerphone, with DoorDash bags on the back of their cycles. Nothing should get in the way of private taxis for burritos.
E-bike riders are “one of the top, if not the single, highest generator of complaints” from constituents….Mr Hoylman-Sigal (city senator) supports putting licence-plates on commercial e-bikes, so that violators can be held accountable. But such proposals have gone flat due, in part, to a desire to protect the largely immigrant delivery drivers.
To recap how insane this is:
- The problem is 100% illegal immigrants on E-bikes and mopeds
- No solution to control this will be put forward out of sympathy for the illegal immigrants
- Punishment must be metered out, though, since it’s one of the biggest problems facing the city
- Therefore, the solution is to punish analog cyclists with social security numbers!
It’s so similar to LA, albeit with fewer vehicle fires and bricks on heads. The fix just cannot be the obvious and correct one. Instead, it’s to hop on Reddit to “map police hotspots” or refuse to stop as a way to LARP civil disobedience.
HAPPENING NOW: ISRAEL LAUNCHES MASSIVE ATTACK AGAINST IRANESE NUCLEAR FACILITIES—AIR RAID SIRENS HEARD ALL ACROSS ISRAEL—MASSIVE AIR ACTIVITY OVER IRAQ-SYRIA BORDER—MULTIPLE EXPLOSIONS CONFIRMED IN TEHRAN INCLUDING COLLAPSED BUILDING—IRANIAN FIGHTER JETS SEEN TAKING OFF FROM AIRSTRIPS NEAR TEHRAN—BALLISTIC MISSILE LAUNCHES REPORTED IN IRAN—REPORTS OF EXPLOSIONS AT US BASES IN IRAQ—MULTIPLE EXPLOSIONS HEARD NEAR IRAN’S NATANZ NUCLEAR FACILITY—VIDEO FOOTAGE SHOWING NATANZ NUCLEAR FACILITY BURNING—UNCONFIRMED REPORTS THAT THE CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE IRANIAN MILITARY HAS BEEN KILLED IN A TARGETED STRIKE
—Inb4 source
—Inb4 “low effort post ban” Additional facts and my thoughts will be added as the situation develops
Samizdata
11d ago
Got an interesting article to share, with a goofy-ass twist.
https://farhakhalidi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-male-centered-women?triedRedirect=true
So, my first thought is that it is rare to see a writer lay out so explicitly their hang-ups with sex positivity. She makes the case that heterosexual men exploit the “unwritten rules” of the dating game to string along women for sex, and in doing so, traumatize them through sheer carelessness.
I don’t completely disagree with her assessment of the situation, although I’m confused as to what her policy prescriptions are, and I think she’s in a “Be Careful What You Wish For” scenario.
If you’ll indulge me as I put on my over-analysis hat, the heterosexual dating marketplace can be viewed through an economic lens, with men and women modeled as agents within the marketplace.
The author is making the case that the current status quo privileges men’s interests at the expense of women’s. Even if women would prefer a longer “runway” towards consummating a relationship, it’s the men who get to set the timetable, with their implicit threat of walking away otherwise.
The optimal behavior for women, operating collectively as a self-interested guild within the heterosexual marketplace is to coordinate to demand maximal investment from men in exchange for romantic/sexual relationships. In other words, to collude, act as a monopolistic cartel and engage in price-fixing schemes.
Like every cartel ever, this is hard to enforce because every individual member’s incentive is to undercut the group-set price. It becomes especially hard to enforce in cases of romantic relationships, where people are not fungible economic actors with identical goals of maximizing profits, but flesh-and-blood human beings with radically different goals, desires, and libidos.
The solution that allows women to set a “price floor” for relationships, in spite of both those factors, is to use social technology to align their interests. In this case, that technology would be “slut-shaming”. Any woman who engages in behavior that undermines the interests of Women as a Collective (like being willing to be Chad’s booty call) is declared persona non grata at Mimosa Mondays and banished from the bookclub.
None of this will be new to the average Mottizen, although God knows we never get tired of re-hashing the gender wars. What I find especially interesting in this salvo is the delivery source. In another essay, the author explicitly rejects the patriarchal norms of the conservative community that she grew up in. Despite that, she still converges on advocating for basically traditional conservative sexual morality in women’s dating life.
My concern is that I’ve never really heard of a secular society with those kinds of restrictions on sexuality; the only places that successfully curtail premarital sex do so explicitly through a religious point of view. The Taliban has successfully prevented Afghan women from traumatizing themselves from Hookup Culture, but whether this is better for Women As A Class is left as an exercise for the reader.
The punch line to all this? The author, Farha Khalidi, is an Onlyfans star! She is the bête noire of conservative patriarchs across the globe, and every social system (that I’ve ever heard of) that frowns on premarital sex would consider what she does to be much worse.
So it begs the question: what, exactly, is she advocating for? Quite frankly, I’m not sure. If I had to guess, I think she wants a secular, sexually conservative sororiarchy, where women watch out for their gender’s collective interests and stop each other from undercutting their bids. Either way, an interesting point of view.
theCircusWeakman
8d ago
June is coming to an end, which means all the most controversial SCOTUS opinions are coming out in the traditional big lump. These opinions are sharply divided, often along ideological lines, with lively dissents and concurrences--pretty enjoyable for a law nerd like me. Relevant to this thread, these cases tend to focus on big culture-war topics like abortion and gender stuff. This week saw the following:
Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic - Abortion. Congress requires States who receive Medicaid funds to, among other things, permit patients to obtain medical assistance from "any qualified provider." South Carolina receives federal Medicaid funding, but excludes Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program because state law prohibits using public funds for abortion. Planned Parenthood files a section 1983 claim (this is important, IMO) arguing that it is a "qualified provider" and that Congress's Medicaid statute created a federal right for any qualified provider to receive Medicaid funds. The court, with a 6-3 conservative-liberal split, says "no." Gorsuch writes the majority opinion: the "any-qualified-provider" provision of the federal Medicaid statute does not create a right for medical providers to receive Medicaid funding. All it does is specify a condition with which participating States must "substantially comply" in order to receive federal funding. If South Carolina doesn't want to comply, the feds can kick South Carolina out of the Medicaid program, but that's not the same as creating a "right" to Medicaid funds. Section 1983 is only for vindication of a person's federal rights; there is no right for a provider to receive Medicaid funding from a State, so Planned Parenthood doesn't have a valid 1983 claim. Jackson writes the dissent; I didn't really read it carefully, because the majority seems clearly to have the better argument here. Everyone agrees that South Carolina could, if it wanted to, simply reject federal funding altogether. Then nobody in South Carolina would get Medicaid funding, and South Carolina wouldn't have to abide by any of the provisions of the Medicaid statute. It's hard to say that people have an enforceable federal "right" to receive Medicaid funding from a state, when everyone acknowledges that the state has no obligation to participate in the Medicaid system at all.
Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton - Pornography 6-3 conservative opinion, Thomas. First Amendment does not prohibit Texas from requiring age-verification for pornographic websites. Kagan writes the dissent.
Mahmoud v. Taylor - LGBTQ+ Books and Lessons in Schools 6-3 conservative opinion, Alito. Religious students and parents have a constitutional right, under the free exercise clause, to opt-out of pro-LGBTQ+ curricula in public schools. Thomas writes a concurrence. Sotomayor wrote the dissent.
In my opinion, the biggest case today was:
Trump v. CASA, Inc. - Immigration BUT ACTUALLY Federal Court Procedure (sounds boring but is, IMO, super important) 6-3 conservative opinion, Barrett. 3 concurrences! 2 dissents! This is the "birthright citizenship" case: does the Court agree with the Trump administration that some people born on U.S. soil are nevertheless not American citizens? IDK! Because the Court doesn't answer that question. Instead, it addresses whether the lower federal court had the authority to issue a nationwide injunction against the Trump administration's immigration enforcement proceedings. The Court held it did not have that authority. Federal courts can only determine cases and issue binding decisions as to the parties before them, not the country as a whole. The lower court's national injunction is stayed as to any people not among the parties to the suit.
Some are saying the Court "punted" on the birthright citizenship thing, but I think the Court actually addressed a far more important culture-war issue. "Nationwide" or "universal" injunctions have been part of the playbook for activists' (especially progressive activists) lawfare for a long time. The idea is to find some sympathetic plaintiff who would be affected by a statute or executive action you don't like, shop around the whole country until you find a judge who agrees with you, and then get that judge--before the case has even been tried--to indefinitely prevent the government from applying the challenged law/regulation/action to anyone, anywhere in the country. This opinion represents a potentially huge obstacle to progressive activist's attempts to stymie Trump's immigration agenda.
Less interesting cases, IMO:
Gutierrez v. Saenz - Criminal Procedure. A lurid murder case gives rise to a pretty boring dispute about death-row inmates' standing to request post-conviction testing of DNA evidence. I can't really figure out the nuances of the Texas law at issue or the procedural history, but it looks like the Sotomayor-led majority thinks Gutierrez has standing; he has a Fourteenth Amendment liberty interest in the ability to request post-conviction DNA testing, even though the prosecutor apparently has both the right and the express intention to refuse that request in this case. Barrett concurs but chides the majority for "muddying the waters of standing doctrine." Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, dissents. Thomas, typically, offers a solo dissent on the quixotic ground that the Fourteenth Amendment has been misinterpreted by the Supreme Court since the early twentieth century; in his view, the "liberty" interests protected by the 14A do not include state-created entitlements like Texas' post-conviction DNA testing procedure. My read: SCOTUS lets a death-row inmate file a doomed, pointless post-conviction motion that doesn't have any hope of success but will probably delay his execution for a few more years (Gutierrez was convicted in 1998).
Riley v. Bondi - Immigration/Deportation. Deportation is a hot-button topic right now, but this opinion about filing deadlines and the distinction between claims-processing rules and jurisdictional requirements is too dry for me to get worked up about. Perhaps notable for the fact that Gorsuch broke from the conservative majority to join, in part, Sotomayor's dissent. Pretty boring overall!
There were others, but they don't have as much culture war salience as the above, IMO. I meant to do a longer write-up, a little paragraph for each case, but I'm too tired ... sorry
Latest updates, now that it's spreading around official media outlets: a suspect is wanted, Vance Boelter. He has ties to Tim Walz and the greater Democratic Party. Still no released motive.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/14/democratic-lawmakers-minnesota-shot
A man masquerading as a police officer is shooting politicians in their homes. The why is debatable; the theories I see floating around have to do with these two Democrat's recent voting records, and breaking from Dem consensus to support the Republicans. I don't know if this is true, I didn't check their records -- I share only because it's what I heard.
The why is also, I think, insignificant. There are so many reasons to be violent in modern society, if you're not intrinsically against violence itself -- punishing defectors, rallying your side with a show of force, intimidating people and politicians on the margins. I don't care what specific social ill or rage drove this would-be assassin.
More interesting, to me, is that we're seeing assassinations and their attempts more and more. It seems that way to me, at least -- I'm going off vibes and a gut reckoning with the numbers, not a reasoned analysis. Maybe I'm entirely wrong! But the vibe I get is the willingness to use violence on one's enemies is becoming significantly more normalized by the day, and eventually, I suspect, we're going to hit a turning point where no one pretends they don't want the other side dead and we get to it.
I don't particularly want that end result, but I find it hard to argue against murderous force on principle. The arguments supporting it seem obviously correct; the protests against it seem sincere, well-meaning, and completely wrong.
It makes me think. We're materially better off than ever. We're spiritually dead. We have more freedom than ever. We're trapped in our heads like anxious prisons. We solved hunger, and crippled ourselves with food.
We don't build. We don't conquer. We prosper, sort of, the numbers on the charts go up and the useless shit is really cheap -- but the precious things are rarer than ever.
I dunno. Nobody died this time, I guess that's nice. And the future, rough beast that it is, continues to slouch toward Bethlehem.
edit: scratch that two died, I guess that's less nice. RIP.
After Zizians and the efilist bombing I have tried to pay more attention to the cross section of ethical veganism, rationalists, and nerdy utilitarian blogs.
A Substack titled "Don't Eat Honey" was published. Inside, the argument is made that to buy or consume honey is an unethical act for insect suffering-at-scale reasons. According to the essay, bees, like livestock, suffer quite a lot at the hands of beekeepers. That's a lot of bees. Thus the title: don't eat honey.
The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people. Bees were guessed to be more intensely conscious than salmon!
If we assume conservatively that a bee’s life is 10% as unpleasant as chicken life, and then downweight it by the relative intensity of their suffering, then consuming a kg of honey is over 500 times worse than consuming a kg of chicken! And these estimates were fairly conservative. I think it’s more plausible that eating honey is thousands of times worse than eating comparable amounts of chicken
This particular post is high on assumption and light on rigor. It received outrage. Another post on Bentham's blog on insect suffering I recall as higher quality material for understanding. Did you know that composting is an unethical abomination? I'd never considered it!
'Suffering' presents an incommensurable problem. Suffering is a social construct. Suffering is the number and intensity of firing pain receptors over time. Suffering is how many days in a row I experienced boredom as a teenager. Still, science attempts to define and quantify suffering. An equation works out the math: how conscious a cricket is in relation to man, a cricket's assumed capacity to feel pain, the length of time it spends feeling pain, and so on. My prediction is we will figure out the consciousness part of the equation with stable meaning before we ever do so for suffering.
We will manage to rethink, remeasure, and find additional ways of suffering. People always have. Today, plants do not feel "pain", but tomorrow, pain may not a prerequisite for suffering. Maybe starvation becomes a moral imperative. If the slope sounds too slippery, please consider people have already built a (relatively unpopular) scaffolding to accept and impose costs at the expense of human comfort, life, and survival. Admittedly, that suffering may present an incommensurable problem doesn't negate any imperative to reduce it. Find more suffering? Reduce that, too. It does give me reason to question the limitations and guard rails of the social technology.
According to Wikipedia, negative utilitarians (NU) are sometimes categorized as strong NUs and weak NUs. This differentiates what I'd call fundamentalists --- who follow suffering minimizer logic to whatever ends -- to the milder "weak" utilitarians. The fundamentalist may advocate for suffering reduction at a cost that includes death, your neighbor's dog, or the continued existence of Slovenia-- the honey bee capitol of the world. Our anti-honey, anti-suffering advocate has previously demonstrated he values some positive utility when it comes to natalism, but much of his commenting audience appears more in the fundamentalist category.
One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future. That our great-grandchildren will look backwards and wonder how we ever stooped so low as to tolerate farming practice A or B. I don't doubt we'll find cost effective, technological solutions that will be accepted as moral improvements in the future. I am not opposed to those changes on principle. Increase shrimp welfare if you want, fine.
My vague concern is that this social technology doesn't appear limited to spawning technological or charitable solutions. With things like lab meat showing up more frequently in the culture war I'd expect the social technology to spread. So far, however, vegans remain a stable population in the US. Nerdy utilitarian bloggers are yet to impose their will on me. They just don't think I should eat honey.
HereAndGone
6d ago
So the Bezos-Sanchez wedding took place, and by all accounts it was exactly as overblown, tacky, and vulgar as anyone's little heart could desire. I haven't watched any of it myself, so why am I mentioning it in the Culture War thread?
Well, because Tina Brown commented on it, and it's at least tangential because we've often discussed on here "what do women want/dating apps/men get the rough end of the stick in divorce/other such delightful War of the Sexes fodder".
I get the impression that Tina wasn't on the guest list so there may be an element of sour grapes here, but in general I think I agree. Jeff Bezos, fourth richest man in the world (depending on the day and the ranking) could have pretty much any woman in the world he wanted. So, who did he blow up his marriage for and before we get into the complaining about his wife taking him to the cleaners, it was he who caused the divorce (actually, divorces because his inamorata was also married at the time)?
The woman next door, a triumph of grinding determination to keep her figure through diet, exercise, and plastic surgery. She managed to find a classy wedding dress so kudos for that, as well as showing off the results of all that effort.
Back to Tina's commentary:
Now that the 55- year-old bride Sánchez has proved that landing the fourth richest man in the world requires the permanent display of breasts like genetically modified grapefruit and behemoth buttocks bursting from a leopard-print thong bikini, she’s exuberantly and unapologetically shown that the route to power and glory for women hasn't changed since the first Venetian Republic.
Ouch. But also, yes. What am I trying to say here? Mostly that the next time there's yet another post about reversing the fertility decline by putting obstacles in the way of women going to higher education, steering them to marrying early, and good old traditional 'the man is the head of the house and women should work to please their husband and that includes sex whenever and however he wants it', remember this. Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs (though once again, I have to salute her commitment to starving and exercising in order to keep a taut muscle tone). It's not much good to criticise women for being shallow in the dating market when the fruits of success are to dress like this and hook your own billionaire.
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore. It makes sense. The new narrative on the Online Right is that there's a huge mass of white men without jobs who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China. The unemployment rate is only low because these people are so dispirited that they've given up looking for work. We need to drastically remake our economy to help these unfortunates, who are incapable of helping themselves. This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans. They see whites like people have long seen the American Indians, a "noble" race who ought to "own" the country but who are ill-equipped to deal with the evils of modernity that more advanced peoples have introduced like liquor or fentanyl.[1] But where this worldview makes some sense in the case of the Indians, it is utterly nonsensical to apply it to whites, who all the statistics show have higher incomes, higher IQs, higher educational attainment, and lower unemployment. Even opioid overdose deaths, initially a "white" issue, are now highest for blacks and American Indians, as with most social problems. (Whites do die at higher rates than Hispanics or Asians.) Labor force participation rates have indeed declined, mostly because there are more students and retirees. 89.2% of men aged 25-54 are in the labor force, a figure that is likely higher for whites, and the 11% who aren't include students, prisoners, stay-at-home dads, and those who can't work because of legit disabilities.
The Online Right has often been compared to the woke left. The woke black looks at his race, disproportionately poor, uneducated, and working low-skill jobs, and demands affirmative action so that more blacks can work in medicine, law, business, and politics. The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain. Is that really what you want your political ideology to be?
Now, you may be asking, "what about the real unemployed drug addicts?" For one, this is a disproportionately non-white group. One study found that blacks are 3.5 times more likely to ever be homeless in their lifetimes than whites, while Hispanics are 1.7 times more likely. Still, while not as common as some of you think, they do exist. Tariffs aren't going to help them. Law enforcement, drug treatment, mental health care, and legalizing SROs might, though the real issue is that these people need to help themselves. If I believed, as many of you profess to, that my race was at risk of going extinct, I wouldn't be centering my politics around helping the least capable members of said race who refuse to help themselves. Don't you have bigger problems? It's not like you should feel any "political" loyalty to them, Trump's working-class base work, homeless people rarely vote.
- The "heritage American" label reminds me of this. Like white people are Ford model-Ts, outmoded machines that nevertheless have aesthetic and historical significance.
Why doesn't Ted Cruz know the population of Iran? And what is with him generally? Or the whole upper echelons of the US govt?
I reference a recent Tucker Carlson interview with Cruz, where it turns out he didn't know said population (and has since responded with an AI meme image of Tucker asking Luke the population of the Death Star).
Turns out that the population of Iran is 92 million, I thought it was around 80. 80 would be a fairly reasonable answer. Even Yemen is surprisingly populous, around 41 million. Fun game to try - estimate the population of various countries in these areas.
I thought Ted Cruz was supposed to be super-smart, wouldn't it be natural to read up on Iran? He is on the Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism. It's also relevant to US strategic choices and his particular love of Israel. Knowing about the subpopulations and relative size of the Azeris, Kurds and similar would be relevant to regime change, which is his professed goal:
Senator Ted Cruz has explicitly stated that he wants regime change in Iran. He said on Fox News, “I think it is very much in the interest of America to see regime change,” and that there is “no redeeming the ayatollah” regime. Cruz has called for collapsing the Iranian regime, comparing it to the Cold War-era strategy used against the Soviet Union, and has criticized the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal, pushing for stronger actions against Iran.
To his credit he does know that Iran is Persian and predominantly Shia. And maybe being on a bunch of other subcommittees means he has to divide up his time and energy in all these different areas. But it's not like Tucker is asking really sophisticated questions about the position and integration of Azeri elites in the Tehran power structure. That really should be dealt with by an expert diplomat. But senators are supposed to be making strategic decisions, one has to have some base of knowledge to decide upon different courses of action.
Cruz also thinks that the Bible requires Christians to support the nation of Israel, which is somewhat non-mainstream in theology: "Where does my support for Israel come from, number 1 we're biblically commanded to support Israel". Tucker tries to ask 'do you mean the government of Israel' and Cruz says the nation of Israel, as if to say it's common-sense that the nation of Israel as referred to in the Bible is the same as the state of Israel today. It seems like he's purposely conflating the dual meanings of nation as ethnic group and nation as state, which is a stupid part of English.
Also Cruz said to Tucker "I came into Congress 13 years ago with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States”. How would this help in the context of a hostile interview, does he think that's a helpful thing to say? I can only imagine that Cruz thinks this is a winning issue, he wants to play hard rather than go down the wishy-washy 'Judeo-Christian' values route. Is declaring your devotion to a foreign country really that popular in America?
Trump also posted this somewhat ominous diatribe from Mike Huckabee (pastor and ambassador to Israel) praising Trump's divine prominence, his position similar to 'Truman in 1945' and how he has to listen to god and the angels only... https://x.com/Mondoweiss/status/1934999328583713096/photo/1
This episode reminds me of how George W Bush apparently didn't know of the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam until after deciding to invade, he brought up Gog and Magog when trying to persuade Chirac to join the war. Maybe that's false, some have disputed it. Or how Trump apparently won't read any long extracts of text and demands pictures. Maybe that's also false, lots of stories have been made about Trump policy. It's known that Biden didn't know whether people were alive or dead or what was happening much of the time. Large swathes of the Democrats can't tell the difference between men and women.
Here's another one I just found from another US congressman: https://x.com/VoteRandyFine/status/1839686465820766542
There is a reason the first time I shook @netanyahu‘s hand, I did not wash it until I could touch the heads of my children.
That's just weird!
There are serious structural problems with how America selects its politicians if this is the calibre of talent that's drawn into positions of great power. At the risk of sounding like an edgy atheist fighting a war everyone's tired of and moved on from years ago, surely theology should have no place in grand strategy. It's normal to have colourful characters in politics, some corruption, some old people who don't know what's going on, a certain level of lobbying. But this seems to be on a qualitatively different level, with serious results.
General poll of opinions here, since I don't see much conversation about it - either because of news bubbles or general disinterest in discussing the ugly side of authoritarianism.
Main query: Are the blackbagging tactics of ICE a necessary evil, a dangerous overstep, or some nuanced in-between?
Genuinely, I don't have a steelman for blackbagging tactics. Right now, ICE is targeting a certain type of "undesirable", namely, allegedly undocumented illegal immigrants, and appear to have carte blanche to apprehend anyone who disrupts that process. But the hallmark of authoritarianism is to expand the definition of "undesirable" to include your political opponents - and if blackbagging undesirables is already palatable, then you can blackbag your political opponents. It's a matter of convenience that political enemies are already attempting to disrupt the blackbagging of undocumented illegal immigrants - it makes that leap that much easier were it to happen. How convenient as well that there's now an entire organizational apparatus gaining valuable experience in how to make people disappear on US soil? They may look like mall cops who are dressed for the paintball arena for now, but if they happened to get any of that DoD money...
Blackbagging by ICE seems to be an extrajudicial process by design, as a flex of the unitary executive theory that the judiciary exists only to serve the will of the executive. The judiciary is viewed as uncooperative and painted as obstructive, despite being intentionally hamstrung by the right wing of congress that has refused for several presidential terms to pass any immigration reform despite bipartisan efforts. One doesn't have to look very hard at all to find red tribe voices foaming at the mouth to declare enemies of the state: official mouthpieces of the current administration, senators, congresspeople. History rhymes, and I know enough of the current admin has read Carl Schmitt to recognize the paths that are available to them at this point if they happen to be hungry for power.
Ending query: Assuming (for the sake of this question) that the end goal of this administration is to establish a type of authoritarianism where people are kidnapped and disappeared because of vocal opposition to the regime, what should be the response by the opposition that would want to prevent that? History buffs, what are the best examples of countries barely recovering from the brink of authoritarianism?
Edit: I appreciate the responses, there was actually quite a bit of variety which was nice to read. I came away with a steelman (which I didn't have originally) which is that the theatrics of ICE is meant to intimidate illegal immigrants. In effect, it would seem like that would select for immigrants who are reckless and fearless (yikes), or immigrants who face such extreme danger in their home country that even Twitter videos of brown people being tackled by men in masks doesn't slow them down (these desperate people would probably be considered "authentic" refugees by most leftists, and not just "economic migrants").
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
24d ago
Breaking news: Trump is saying he will not be deporting illegal immigrants who work on Farms and in Hotels.
Gavin Newsom is claiming it for a win for the violent riots that have taken over LA and other major cities.
This is a bit of a let down for Trump Supporters and anyone who wants to take America back from those who were not invited. Especially with Gavin Newsom rubbing it in the public's face. Especially with American Approval of deportation efforts have been increasing.
Trump's rationale appears to be:
-
Hotels/farms are low hanging fruit, it's easy to pick up illegal immigrants from these locations.
-
After swooping these groups first, then the only applicants to these positions (at the wages the farms and hotels are willing to pay) are the criminal illegal immigrants.
-
So focus on criminality first.
Does this mean that, once every last criminal is deported, he will then do sweeps of farms and hotels? Left ambiguous.
One problem is the effect of exploitable labor goes in one way. Over the past 2 decades, Landscaping businesses that employed high school students and ex cons went out of business because they couldn't compete against undocumented workers.
If one farm gets raided, and one farm growing similar things does not get raided for another year, then the first farm needs to hire more expensive people and raise prices while the second farm will still benefit from the lowered wages. The farm that got raided first goes out of business first, the second farm maybe gets to buy up the first farm, then when they are inevitably raided they still stay in business and make more money now.
It's not fair. It's not fair that the government has not enforced its own rules surrounding hiring employees uniformly across industries.
The fair thing would be to deport 100% of everyone deportable all at once. The shock of that will be destructive to every industry that is predominately illegal immigrants.
The next fair thing might be to deport 10% of employees in every business all together, then another 10% later, and so on until the bottom is reached.
Of course, the above two "fair" plans are ridiculous. We do not have the man-power to do it.
Any other fair ideas? Besides Trump's new plan of "Don't try to tackle this right now."
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
17d ago
The abortion debate below brought to mind something I've been thinking about for a while. There's been a convergence of sorts between mainstream Republicans/conservatives and the far-right, but there are still many differences, such as on the Single Mother Question. The far-right (which includes most people on this website) views single mothers negatively, while the mainstream conservative view is very different. For instance, here's what Speaker Mike Johnson said about Medicaid:
Medicaid is for single mothers with small children who are just trying to make it. It's not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couch playing video games. We're going to find those guys, and we will SEND them back to work!
Mainstream conservatives and the far-right agree that the welfare state serves to subsidize single motherhood, but only the latter thinks it's a bad thing. Mainstream conservatives' embrace of single motherhood is connected with abortion politics. One mainstream conservative pundit put it succinctly: "you can't be pro-life and anti-single mom." Many on the far-right responded to her tweet with "just watch me" and others scratched their heads, wondering what she meant. But there's a certain logic to it. Much of the motivation for abortion comes from women not wanting to be single mothers. You can respond to this in two ways:
- Tell them not to have premarital sex.
- Tell them to keep the baby because single motherhood is a heroic thing to do; you're CHOOSING LIFE.
The far-right prefers option 1, I've heard it many times on this website. But do you think it will actually be effective in changing behavior? I personally suspect that given the options of not having sex or having sex at the risk you might have to drive out of state and get an abortion and then get shamed by some online anonymous far-rightists, the latter will be the popular option. Just a vague suspicion I have. So it doesn't surprise me that many conservatives choose option 2. It also harmonizes better with the current conservative political coalition, which is increasingly reliant on the votes of low-class and non-white voters who have higher rates of single-motherhood. We wouldn't want to be elitist, looking down our noses at the salt-of-the-earth working class now would we?
Throwaway05
23d ago
I now interrupt your regularly scheduled WWIII/Nothing Ever Happens to ask a question:
So, the Bike discussion down below generated a lot of angst and heat, so I'd like to poll The Motte on our driving habits a bit (in the CW thread because I do fear we are going to get some strong feelings).
How do we feel about the following:
-
You should turn on your turn signal every time you switch lanes or otherwise would be expected to use it, even if nobody is around.
-
Stop signs and red lights need to be fully stopped at, even if nobody is around and you know there isn't a red light camera.
-
Speed limits should be followed to the letter when possible.
-
The left lane is for passing only, and also, if you are in that lane and not passing and someone cuts you off or rides your bumper, that is fine.
-
If someone does not make room for you and you need to come over (and properly signaled) you can cut them off guilt free.
-
I can break some of these rules (or others) but other drivers should not.
-
Any other possible driving scissor statements?
If you'd like to be mad at me: Yes, Yes, No, Yes with qualification, Yes, No.
Dean
Flairless
12d ago
Looking Forward (In Time) To The Democratic (Midterm) Civil War (And Likely Trump Law Enforcement Accelerant)
/
How about that Democratic National Committee drama last week month, am I right?
This post started being sketched out last month, in expectation of a predictable event just last week. Then the last couple of weeks happened, and what could have been an interesting culture war episode got overshadowed by, well, war-war. Crazy times… but the premise is still relevant in the future, if not now. So, ahem.
Last week’s resolution to some ongoing party drama has implications for the next year or so of American politics. Implications include intended infighting, pessimistic predictions for Senate prospects, and a predictable next escalation enforcement of federal laws that will feed the partisan polemics of dictatorship and whatnot. This is because as the progressives and establishment Democrats begin to position against eachother while trying to use Trump as a foil for their internal party power struggle, the Trump Administration looks to be preparing enforcement action against the professional protest apparatus involved in recent not-entirely-peaceful riots in LA and elsewhere, which both will strike at parts of the Democratic power base but also provide leverage for the Democrat factions to try and use against eachother even as they loudly decry it.
This post is looking to organize thoughts and identify trends that can help predict / make sense of some of the upcoming predictable public drama that will shape American media coverage through 2026. When equally predictable media campaigns follow, you’ll (hopefully) be taken less by surprise, and have an ear open for what may not be said at the time.
/
Part 1: The 2026 Democrat Senate Prospects
Not to put too fine a line on it, but in some respects the 2026 midterms are a lost cause for the Democrats, and some of the ongoing politic are going to be a reflection of that context.
Part of the background of today’s subject really begins five years ago, in the 2020 US election. The same election that brought Biden to the Presidency also got the Democratic Party 50 seats in the US Senate, giving them control of the Senate with the Vice President’s tie-breaking vote.
At the time, this was a great and glorious thing for the Biden Administration, as it was a key part of giving the Democrats the might trifecta, which is to say control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency. As narrow as the Senate margin was, it supported things like appointing judges, budgets via reconciliation, and so on. This was a highwater mark of Democrat institutional power, before last year’s 2024 brought in the current Republican trifecta.
Most people are familiar with this, and are also likely familiar with how the ruling party nearly always looses House of Representative seats in the midterms after an election. Presidential approval drops, the base gets complacent, the opposition gets hungrier / more motivated, all that jazz. The US House changes quickly, as every elected representative is up for re-election every two years.
What people may not realize is that only a third of the Senate is up for re-election every cycle, as the 6-year terms are staggered so that only one third are up for grabs at any given cycle. This means that far less of the currently Republican-dominated Senate is up for re-election. It also means that the seats that are, are the seats that were last voted in 2020.
It also means that senate maps can be deeply uncompetitive. Like how most Republican Senate seats this cycle are in solidly red states, so that there are about two competitive Republican seats, but four competitive Democratic seats.. While there are no guarantees in politics, it is not only plausible/likely for the Republicans to maintain control of the Senate this cycle, but to increase their margin of Senate control. After all, the last cycle these seats were up was 2020 pandemic election, and Biden’s results then were considered an especially good showing.
This is why US political watchers have been warning since the earliest parts of the Trump Administration- before any of the current drama- that the Democrats face a rough wall next year. While the House is often more competitive and up for being flipped, the Senate is much less malleable. And without control of both the House and the Senate, the ability of the opposition party to limit / oppose / impeach the President is relatively limited. (Or rather- they can impeach all they want, but lose in the Senate.)
The lack of formal ability is important. It would mean that even if the Democrats take the House, then they could impeach Trump however many times they want, but not remove him due to a lack of the Senate. It means the House could refuse to pass a funding bill, but they couldn’t use Control of Congress to dictate terms of short-term spending bills to prevent Trump’s options to further gut parts of the federal government during a shutdown. Having one chamber of Congress is better than none, but it makes those leaders relatively impotent.
This is relevant scene setting, because this is a clear and obvious wall that the Democratic Party is heading towards. If they fail, they can take solace in ‘just’ retaking the House, but the worse they do, the more bitter the recriminations. At the same time, while the senate map is daunting, there is also a clear way forward.
If the Democrats want to defeat Trump over all else, they need to (re)build the anti-Trump coalition. Use opposition and public discontent to Trump to turn out their base. If there isn’t enough organically, then manufacture and generate more, using all the levers of influence and political mobilization they can across the institutions they still control. To do as well as they can, they need to work together.
Insert laconic ‘If.’
Alternatively, a dismal year where Senate gains are unrealistic is the best election cycle for internecine conflict over the soul, leadership, and composition of the Democratic Party going into 2028.
/
Part 2: DNC Drama
Insert the multi-month Democratic National Committee drama that resolved last Friday, when Washington State Democratic Party Chair Shasti Conrad won the election for the open vice chair position of the DNC. Shasti Conrad herself is irrelevant to this story, besides that she is an establishment democratic, and onboard with the DNC’s job of helping get Democrats elected across the country.
Why was there an open vice chair of the DNC? Because the Democratic establishment defenestrated the previously elected chair, David Hogg, over his still current intention to primary ‘asleep at the wheel’ sitting elected Democrats with younger (and more progressive) challengers.
Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. No one literally threw David Hogg out a window. He “resigned” before he could be formally removed. And his removal technically wasn’t because he promised to use his DNC position to give $20 million USD to his personal super PAC ‘Leaders We Deserve,’ breaking DNC neutrality to primary his internal-party political opponents. Rather, a DNC subcommittee recommended a redo of the otherwise uncontested DNC election on grounds of procedural issues.
And by procedural issues, the standard media coverage is obviously referring to
In her complaint, shared with Semafor by a Democratic source, Free argued that she lost a “fatally flawed election that violated the DNC Charter and discriminated against three women of color candidates,” and asks for “two new vice chair elections.” In February, after several rounds of voting, the race came down to five candidates – Kenyatta, Hogg, Free, and two other women. Kenyatta and Hogg claimed the open spots.
“By aggregating votes across ballots and failing to distinguish between gender categories in a meaningful way, the DNC’s process violated its own Charter and Bylaws, undermining both fairness and gender diversity,” argued Free, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation.
If that parsed to what you think it parsed to- yes. David Hogg, a young white man whose ascent into progressive politics was based primarily on being a school shooting survivor](https://www.centredaily.com/news/local/education/penn-state/article286954330.html), got out-progressive stacked by a female minority over… a race and gender quota.
Ms. Free filed her objection at the end of February, well before Mr. Hogg was called a Jackass by notable / still influential Democratic strategist James Carville in late April](https://www.drewberquist.com/2025/05/james-carville-calls-out-jackass-david-hogg-directly-to-his-face-watch/). Clearly her action was unmotivated by any desire for personal advancement, and her complaint was not a convenient pretext for senior Democratic party officials like DNC Chair Ken Martin to remove a vocal progressive who sought to style himself as the next AOC.
If it were, though, then it seems the DNC establishment won an important victory. Given the first-past-the-post nature of (most) US elections, primarying your own party is a great way to expose almost-certain-win seats for a Republican upset if the primary dispute bleeds over to the general election. (American politicians are infamous for their magnanimous forgiveness in such things.) Additionally, even though Hogg ‘only’ wanted to primary dems in ‘safe’ seats, that in itself would have represented an attempt to make the permanent / core Democratic party more progressive, and leave the non-Progressives in the unstable / competitive seats. Over time, attrition would ensure that the powerful committees (which tend to go to those with seniority, i.e. safer seats over time) would go to progressives, while the non-progressive Democrats stood to be turned into the next round of Blue Dog Democrats- tolerated to a point, but sacrificed in the name of some policy priority popular with the core but unpalatable to the broader electorate in competitive areas.
Or perhaps the geriatric problem got worse. David Hogg was, after all, supposed to be part of the solution by getting the younger gen-Z into Democratic offices. His earlier PAC efforts of $8 million for young progressives was lauded at the time for getting candidates on the ballot and elected at lower levels in various red states, such as the youngest Texas-Senate senator. This was supposed to be all the more important after Trump made major gains amongst young voters in the 2024 election. David Hogg was (supposed) to be part of the solution for that, hence his relatively meteoric ascent. Even his message on primarying out the old, infirm, and insufficiently progressive resonated- something like 60% of the Democratic party want the leadership who just replaced Hogg to be replaced.
Or perhaps not. James Carville may be one of the louder cranks to publicly claim the Progressive wing is detrimental to the Democratic Party, but he is not the only one by any means. And while Carville has suggested that the party should have an amicable split over pronoun politics with progressives going off their own way, he’s also accused progressive wing leaders like AOC and Bernie Sanders of being more interested in running against Democrats than the Republicans. While Carville makes the motions of a good party man who would come behind the party regardless who wins, there is an awareness that not everyone is interested in the party winning as much as winning the party.
The point of this segment is not (just) to give some context to an American political drama you’d rarely hear about (and probably didn’t given the events of last week). The point is that an institutional power struggle is already underway between the progressive (and often younger) wing of the Democratic Party, and the (older) establishment.
David Hogg was just an iteration of more direct party-on-party fighting. He lost the institutional battle, and his supporters were not influential enough to protect him. At the same time, David Hogg would like you to know he’s not going anywhere. He still intends to primary, or at least threaten to primary, sitting Democrats. Since Trump bombed the Iranian nuclear program over the weekend, Hogg has argued any Democrat who supports Trump on the conflict should be primaried. Now that he is free of the expectation of DNC neutrality, he is free to pick fights with fellow, though rarely progressive, democrats.
For now, though, inter-Democratic competition for influence and future electoral prospects is taking a more amicable, or at least acceptable, turn of targets- who can turn out support for anti-Trump efforts.
Or, to put it another way- the acceptable form of inter-Democrat competition is, for the moment, orienting to who can oppose Trump the best.
/
Part 3: Trump Protest Power
Not to blow anyone’s mind, but Trump is kind of unpopular with Democrats, and they’d really like their elites to fight back.
After a dispirited and divided start to the new administration, where Trump’s 100 Days agenda was dominated by DOGE tearing through the bureaucracy and Senate Minority Leader Schumer avoided a government shutdown to partisan discontent, despite his belief that doing so would have empowered Trump more, early Democratic party polling suggested a desire to on the base for more and more active resistance.
How to fight was up for debate, and rather than a comprehensive strategy something of a spaghetti strategy of ‘throw everything at the wall and see what works’ was pursued. Many of these have been covered in the Motte over the past weeks, from the record-breaking national injunctions, to the media campaigns over the ICE deportations trying to equivocate migrant deportations with citizen exile, to the efforts to stall DOGE and administrative personnel actions. The recent Ivy League struggles by the likes of Yale and Harvard against Trump are also emblematic, as (university) administration have risen and fallen depending on if they are seen as weak against Trump. That’s not to say all these actions have been successful- for every ‘Trump suffers major blow in effort to [X]’ there is often a partially or mostly reversed decision later- but it is popular, and clearly so.
In the last weeks, this has organized to the point where various Democratic media organs are explicitly re-raising the #Resistance moniker, trying to re-build the sort of mass-mobilization efforts that fortified democracy to save the 2020 election. This recently culminated with the mid-June No Kings protest, where various DNC-aligned organizations including MoveOn, the American Civil Liberties Union, American Federation of Teachers and the Communications Workers of America organized nation-wide protests. These protests were meant to eclipse the military parade in D.C. for the 250th anniversary of the US Army (or Trump’s birthday, if you prefer), and called to mind the various early anti-Trump protests of the first administration. These protests demonstrate organizational capacity, coordination efforts, influence with the sort of people to show up, and of course the supporting media coverage to get their message out.
There was just one slight problem for the stage-managed revival of the #Resistance- rioters waving the Mexican Flag over burning cars in Los Angeles, California, beat them to the punch.
While the actual photo was almost certainly one of those naturally occurring protest images, the California protests weren’t (quite). On 6 June, about a week and a half before the No Kings protests for the 14th, hundreds of protestors rallied in downtown Los Angeles to protest various ICE raids that had occurred across the city earlier that day. By the 7th, local riot police and teargas were being used On the 8th, Trump federalized California National Guard over California Governor Newsom’s objection to protect federal property and personnel.
This was an unusual, arguably provocative, decision. In US law, national guard operate under the state governor’s control and are not legally under Presidential or federal control unless done under certain legal authorities. Failure to do so is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, a post-civil-war-reconstruction act making it a crime to use federal forces in law enforcement roles except where authorized by Congress. Trump invoking these authorities- which provide the Congressional authorization criteria- has been the subject of litigation by Governor Newsom, who opposed activation at the time, allegedly on grounds it would inflame the protests- which it arguably did.
Why did Trump do it, besides malicious disregard for the governor? Trump’s decision to do so anyways was likely influenced by the acting ICE director alleging that the LAPD took 2 hours to respond to requests for law enforcement assistance on 6 June despite multiple calls when ICE agents were swarmed by objectors during the 6 June enforcement raids that kickstarted the protests-turned-riots. The LA Police Chief has disputed this, claiming police responded in 38 minutes, citing traffic. (There is a joke to be made about LA traffic and how this is plausible.) The Police Chief also claimed they weren’t informed ahead of time, which is… also quite plausible.
Naturally / inevitably, however, the California protests became at least a short term win for Governor Newsom, whose post-protest Presidential prospects for 2026 seem stronger for having stood up to / opposed Trump. Resistance in this contexts has been more about verbal sparring and legal objections than something more concrete. Less assembling a platoon of people and buying the biggest fireworks possible to attack police, and more name calling, daring the administration to arrest him, and general ‘Trump is acting like a dictator’ themes. You know, the usual things political opponents in dictatorships do. At the same time, Newsom is playing the role of the moderate, and while it’s not like he can take full credit for the work of District Attorneys and such, California is publicizing charging some of the worst protestors in ways that weren’t really publicized during the Trump 1 era left-coded protests.
Except… Newsom isn’t the only winner here. Or necessarily the biggest Democratic power player. That may yet go to another, David Huerta.
If you don’t know who David Heurta is, you are not alone. He is not an elected politician, a party strategist, or elder statesman. He is a union leader. To quote his Biden-era White House bio when he was an honored guest-
David Huerta is President of the Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West (SEIU-USWW) whose members are service workers predominately from the commercial real estate industry. As a labor leader, David has worked to build an immigrant integration program that includes English classes for union members. Under his leadership, hundreds of SEIU-USWW members have become U.S. citizens. In addition, he has advocated for comprehensive immigration reform by empowering SEIU-USWW members to become their own advocates for change.
Or to put it another way- David Huerta is part of the labor union wing of the Democratic party, except his labor union is of the totally-not-illegal-immigrant sort of organized labor. And his role in the party is totally not as part of the labor union mobilization to party member pipeline that organized labor has served in the past.
Mr. Huerta was arrested Friday the 6th of June, which is to say when the protests started, for interfering with ICE operations. His protest seems to have been both non-violent and directly intended to obstruct ICE activities.
According to a Homeland Security Investigation officer's sworn affidavit, Huerta sat down in front of a vehicular gate to a staging ground for ICE operations that were ongoing nearby.
The complaint alleges he yelled to the protestors "stop the vehicles," and "it's a public sidewalk, they can't stop us."
The officer then says he asked Huerta to move from the gate so that cars could get in and out of the facility, and Huerta replied, "What are you going to do? You can't arrest all of us."
Mr. Huerta may well have been correct. Instead of everyone being arrested, Mr. Huerta was arrested. And within 12 hours hundreds of protestors were in downtown LA. Within 36 hours, hundreds grew to thousands and cars had been burned in the streets. Within 48 hours Trump sent in the national guard, clearly taking it seriously.
One on hand, this can be (as the sympathetic media seek to characterize it), a case of a peaceful labor leader being unjustly suppressed, leading to a cycle of provocation due to reckless escalation.
On another hand, this can also look like an excellent example of a union leader’s ability to organize and lead not only anti-Trump/anti-ICE disruption efforts, but force Trump to respond/take him seriously, even as Mr. Huerta’s organizational turnout capacity supported larger protests and greater effect. Sure, some of the protestors got out of hand, but there’s no evidence they were linked to Mr. Huerta… right?
To my knowledge, no. And that’s why I would suggest that Mr. Huerta, not Governor Newsome, may end up being the bigger winner from these protests. A $50,000 bail fee is one of those things that is not exactly going to cripple not only a labor union leader with friends in high places, but someone who has- probably- gotten far, far more popular with the would-be resistance. Willing to fight ICE, protest Trump, and a labor leader?
Mr. Huerta may not be challenging Governor Newsom for the governorship or Presidency any time ever, but Mr. Huerta probably has a good future ahead of himself in the Democratic party… if the glowing editorial linked in that first mention of him wasn’t clue enough that he’s already a significant local power player.
But remember- it’s not just Mr. Huerta.
Mr. Huerta’s glory comes, somewhat, at the expense of Governor Newsom. Media coverage, and public attention, is a 0-sum game. Some elements can reinforce each other, and in this case arguably did, but other elements work against each other.
After all, their glory/prestige/anti-Trump cred comes from the protests that came at the expense of the No King’s protests. Their exposure / attention grabbing was zero-sum between ‘polite, professional’ #Resistance, and a far more immediate, visceral ‘snap’ protests.
And the California protests- where both Huerta and Newsom had their political interest incentives be firmly in the ‘maximally oppose Trump’ side of things- have given Trump and the Republicans the sort of made-for-campaign-add images that only a Mexican flag over burned cars in American cities can.
And this doesn’t count the other people involved, initially or later, and who tried to get in on the action / influence. One man has been charged with trying buy the biggest fireworks he could to arm his ‘platoon’ and shoot at police in the later LA protests. When political fireworks- figurative or literal- are prestigious, bigger demonstrations of ability garner more prestige for more influence for bigger groups.
The LA Protests and the No Kings Protests weren’t formally or even directly at odds. But they were competing in various ways. For public attention, yes, but also for Democrat consideration. The #Resistance revival has, for the moment, failed to take off. Maybe it already would have, but the LA riots stole wind from the sail, to speak. And in turn, the LA riots- despite being vehemently anti-Trump and anti-ICE, two very popular things with the Democratic base- are likely to undercut the Democrat position going into the next election cycle. Now any future No Kings-style mass protests has to either take better care to distance from the more combative, or be tarred with the politically unpalatable for the non-democrats in the electorate.
Which lowers the value (and ability) of a combined effort… but does encourage partisans to do what they can for their own interest, regardless of how it affects the rest of the party. The nature of such publicity-driven contests creates natural incentives for speed (to pre-empt others), high-visibility (to dominate attention), and excess (the rawest form of proof-of-sincerity).
This creates something of a prisoners dilemma where everyone has an incentive to ‘defect’ first by going for their own public display, rather than coordinating. Even if the party, collectively, would perform better if everyone sang from the same sheet of music, any ambitious leader is incentivized to not be part of the choir.
The point here isn’t that these contemporary protests are adversaries. It is that these contemporary incentives are occurring at the same time as the inter-party conflict, where the David Hogg and progressives of the party want more combative responses at the expense of other party members. And if they can do so- and win party acclaim- by pushing protest actions as aggressively as possible against Trump, the acceptable target, rather than against other Democrats…
That’s a risky mix, even before you consider that another key actor has his own agency in this brewing inner-party struggle.
/
Part 4: Trump Can Strike Back (Lawfully)
I’m torn between introducing this section as ‘Trump’s White House is more competent than you may want to believe’ and ‘it’s not legal just because it’s anti-Trump,’ and ‘don’t count on departed friends to protect you.’ All are applicable.
The first is a reminder / warning against those who want to dismiss the Trump administration’s ability for deliberate, even clever, action. Whatever your opinion on Trump himself, he is not an incompetent at everything he does. Nor, more importantly, are the people he’s brought into this administration. There are implications of some exceptionally competent people who understand how the government works at a mechanical level, as demonstrated from the takedown of USAID through dual-hatting, the ongoing efforts to move Executive branch agencies outside of the National Capital Region, and the budget/shutdown politics. I’ve even gone so far as to argue that various policy rollouts like DOGE have been done with the intent of shaping later / future policy efforts. The Project 2025 wishlist may not have been a formal Trump policy plan of everything he’d agreed to, but there are a lot of discrete, actionable items there that have been pursued as able by those willing to work with/for Trump.
The point here isn’t to praise, but to make a point about institutional competence. There are people in the administration who know what they are doing, know what they want, and know how to go about turning that desire into policy. And when they know to expect resistance, they loosely know who and what they need to act against- not least because various parts of the #Resistance wrote extensive tell-all articles last time to take credit for how they worked together to link elected politicians, media, labor organizers, and business interests worked together to manage anti-Trump protests.
When political opponents write a brag sheet of dubiously legal measures they took to defeat you, it doesn’t take the most capable political actor to plan to mitigate it on round two.
It’s not even something that necessarily only started this year. Reaching way back to 2017, you may (not) remember the Dakota Pipeline Protests, which were one of the anti-Trump-coded protests in the early first trump administration. In short, American tribal / environmentalist protests over a pipeline escalated after Trump voiced support, including occupations of work sites, blockades against ground routes to resupply them, and so on. It was framed as ‘Trump against native Americans and environmentalists,’ and the protestors received significant public media support at the time.
Well, after over half a decade in court, Greenpeace has been $660 million in damages for defamation, trespass, nuisance, civil conspiracy and other acts. This may threaten to bankrupt the organization, though it will be years more before it works through the system. The crux of the verdict derives from the tens of thousands of dollars raised to train and send thousands of protestors, along with logistical support, with awareness and sanction at the highest levels of the organization.
Parallels to other mass protest organizers should hopefully be obvious.
This Time Would Be Different even if Trump were not Actually a Dictator this term, but because various factors that the Democratic party and partisans have taken for granted in the past two decades are changing. Various dynamics that let the election fortification of 2020 succeed were based variously on low awareness by the Trump administration of what was going on, having the right friends in the right places to make it work, and reluctance by the government(s) to go after coordinating elements.
As elements of this change, the system gears grind against rather than with each other. And in the sort of decentralized, every-Dem-is-pursuing-their-own-interest protest environment that the No Kings vs. Newsom vs. Huerte anti-Trump protests have been showing, there are probably going to be far more loose threads, and far more willingness to pursue them, going forward.
Take the Justice Department. A good deal of prosecution by any government is discretionary. You only have so many investigators, only so many prosecutors, and more potential crimes than you can handle. You prioritize what to pursue, and drop what you don’t want to. This is how something like 90% to 95% of the 2020 Floyd protest charges were dropped or never pursued in various jurisdictions.
But at the same time, non-prosecution is a choice, not a natural state of a just world. And it is a choice that can be made otherwise if someone wants to. Or if the people who wouldn’t want to depart and are replaced.
For example, the DOJ Civil Rights Division had a reputation for seeking certain types of civil rights cases, and not being as interested in others, such as university admissions discrimination. I say ‘had’ because something like 70% of the DOJ Civil Rights Division has departed since Trump took office. Whatever reputation / expectation you have of the Civil Rights Division, it’s probably not quite what the new DOJ CRD priorities are.
The “Civil Division Enforcement Priorities” memorandum identifies five priorities: (1) combatting discriminatory practices and policies, (2) ending antisemitism, (3) protecting women and children, (4) ending “sanctuary” jurisdictions, and (5) prioritizing denaturalization of naturalized U.S. citizens.
But this is the new institutional direction of the CRD. It still has the legal authorities Congress gave to the ‘old’ CRD. But as the saying goes, “people are policy,” and the people in the CRD have changed. Other people’s expectations just haven’t caught up to, say, the DOJ opening a civil rights case against any state or local officials involved sanctuary city politics that also just-so-happen to overlaps with, say, anti-federal riots.
I raised the fireworks platoon guy earlier, but that is far from the only case that can be pursued. About a week into the protests, a crowd broke into an ICE detention facility, overpowered national guard soldiers, and tried to release the detainees before about 100 law enforcement officers responded. That’s various charges on its own. The FBI is reportedly considering a criminal conspiracy line of effort for any groups involved in organizing the violent protests. The IRS is reportedly reviewing into non-profit and other organizational funding as part of the money flow investigation. Parallel to those parallels, House Republicans are investigating a US billionaire with possible ties to the protests, and the Chinese Communist Party… and Code Pink,an anti-war/social-justice organization.
And this doesn’t include other possible things that could be pursued. Doxing can be a crime… but what if its a municipal mayor who decides to dox ICE agents? When mostly peaceful protests are held outside of hotels suspected of hosting ICE agents, what if / when a not-entirely-peaceful protest occurs outside of a hotel that isn’t? When left-coded social media encourages eachother to follow and record ICE agents at work, what happens if someone ignores the ACLU’s carefully worded advice on dealing with law enforcement, particularly what the agents areallowed to do?
Would arrests and prosecutions be politically motivated? Sure, if you want. When any prosecution is discretionary, all high-profile investigations and prosecutions are arguably motivated. Similarly, a refusal to do so can also be motivated.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything that could be found. It won’t even require ‘three felonies a day’ over-criminalization of anything.
The point I am trying to make here is that there is a greater risk of legal risk to anti-Trump partisans this administration than in the last two, and this is matched by a greater interest in the Trump administration to do so.
This is going to challenge people’s expectations / understanding of what ‘should’ be tolerated / not challenged as illegal, but will be viewed as suspect now. I want to emphasize this even further, since this isn’t ‘merely’ corruption of justice, but an element of generational norms being overturned.
12 of the last 16 years have seen the American federal government under the control of the Democratic party. The Obama and Biden administrations would generally sympathize with, and not be interested in aggressively pursuing, Democrat-coded protestors. Four of the other last 16 years were the resistance phase, where significant parts of the government bureaucracy deliberately stonewalled Trump efforts- and in some cases, in active collusion with protest organizers. Four years before that, the last four years of the Bush administration, were also a period of large-scale and sustained political protest environments as part of the Democratic party apparatus, when the Bush Administration was sensitive to how it could respond due to falling political legitimacy and political norms of the era.
20+ years of established expectations on ‘what you can get away with at a protest’ is a generation. Younger partisans like David Hogg have spent their entire adult / politically-aware lives in that environment. It is a norm to them, the way things have ‘always’ been.
But such norms are not laws, particularly when the norms derive from the discretion of often sympathetic enforcers who are no longer in the position to make the call.
/
Part 5: When a Resistance Devours Itself
This is the final section, and an effort to bring the points above together into a hopefully coherent but non-obvious synthesis.
My forecast prediction is that over the next year, inter-Democrat competition is going to revolve around who can ‘stand up to’ / fight Trump by pressing the limit of the law, but attempts to toe the line are going to overstep changes in enforcement practices. This will fuel anti-Trump sentiment amongst Democrats and accusations of tyranny, but also influence the unfolding of the Democratic internal struggle not only going into 2026, but even into the 2028 election. This will be because the Trump administration will likely go after the ‘connective tissue’ of the Democratic protest-mobilization apparatus where it detects legal risk. This, in turn, can become a tool in the Democratic internal conflict that sub-factions can utilize against each other, because those same mobilization organizations are factional players in the Democratic internal conflict.
In part one, we made a case for why the Senate will be a rough bet for the Democrats at all. While coherent parties can spin a partial failure into a partial success, this will likely hinder the institutional ability of the Democrats to do major limits on the Republican party. This is liable to frustrate partisans, and lead to highly symbolic protests in the institutions, and other actions outside of institutions.
In part two, we raised the ongoing internal conflict within the Democratic party. Significant parts of the Progressive wing have and are making efforts to actively displace non-progressive rivals for control and even composition of the Democratic Party establishment. The non-progressive institutionalists won, but they are facing the challenge of the upcoming mid-terms, even as the progressives are trying to take the mantle of ‘actually fighting Trump.’ Democratic institutions are already being used against each other.
In part three, we raised how ‘actually fighting’ is something of a zero-sum game on the ability of leaders to mobilize protests and take the spotlight. Would-be leaders trying to organize great protests can be pre-empted and upstaged even accidentally by those doing their own thing with more modest means. When paired with the internal party struggle in part two, this creates incentives for would-be leaders of the party to push aggressive protests to the limits of the law.
In part four, we make the point is that the limit of the law is changing, and that this implication is not widely recognized. Between changes in institutional composition that have changed out more sympathetic actors who could have turned a blind eye, increased awareness of how the Democratic protest mobilization structure works, and the improved institutional understanding of the Trump administration on how to shape and act through the bureaucracy, the legal-enforcement environment has changed. When it is noticed, it will be probably be decried as tyranny, but there are non-tyrannical causes.
In part five, I want to make a point that these are not just individual facets that might each be an interesting observation of their own but part of a feedback loop. How the Trump Administration chooses to prosecute law-pressing protests is itself going to be a factor in the internal democratic power struggle in both future elections and the outcome of the Democratic power struggle.
The 2026 election argument is reasoning from (future) public polling. Will Trump and the Republicans be more or less popular if they crack down on lawbreakers involved in protests? If the public supports anti-ICE protestors over Trump, then the more anti-ICE protests, the better the midterm results. As a consequence, internal democratic party logic might be to maximize protests, even if it involves lawbreaking, for a net gain. Especially if/when anger at Trump administration arrest and prosecutions might turn out the base.
But this is an assumption, not a conclusion. While there are parts of the Trump migration policies that are unpopular, there are parts that remain popular. Moreover, prosecutions of protest elements can motivate the Trump base as well, and voter apathy/antipathy could deter Democrat support. It could well be a negative effect. We’ll see which proves right in the midterms.
What is arguably more important, however, is if the organizations that organize and execute start to being targeted, and what that might mean going into 2028.
Organizations that engage in mass protest politics, like Greenpeace, don’t only organize protests against Red Tribe-coded efforts. That money and manpower is put to use in other ways in other contexts. For Democratic party organizations, that includes things like voter mobilization, organizing fundraising, and coordinating communications. These take money and manpower, and when you lack the resources and the unified efforts, you end up like the Florida Democratic Party, which has practically collapsed in the third largest US state.
That is the larger 2028 election implication, if aggressive protest mobilizers in 2025-2026 lead to investigations/prosecutions in 2027-2028 due to the increased willingness to enforce against grey zone activities. The generational expectations of what could/would be prosecuted are shifted, so there’s the risk, and the consequence could be a partial paralysis of the Democratic Party mobilization/organization infrastructure in the next presidential election. Organizations frozen, donors uncertain/afraid to give to who, and so on.
This will obviously, understandably, and predictably alarm Democratic partisans. Condemnations will be demanded and almost certainly provided. However… it will also shape the inter-Democratic conflict as which organizations are affected/investigated first and most will matter.
After all, Democratic organizations don’t only try to help all Democrats get elected. Some, like Leaders We Deserve, would rather some Democrats lose so that a personal faction can get in place instead.
And if, hypothetically, some process error or rules violation were to expose that faction to legal risk- where the big bad Trump administration might act and convenient clear the field…
Well, the surviving winners would certainly happily condemn the Trump administration for doing so. And get the perks with the party base for doing so. But it sure would be convenient, wouldn’t it?
This is the risk of the Democratic civil war quote-unquote “escalating” in the midst of the Trump administration’s willingness to crack down where it can. It’s not just that Democrats are fighting each other, or that Democrats fight Trump. It can be that Democrats use Trump to fight each other as a tool for their internal conflict.
If anyone has studied (or, worse, lived in/through) a country going through a civil war, especially one with a resistance with little formal power but motivated by performative acts of defiance, this should not be surprising. This has been a common / well recorded dynamic where rival insurgent groups are nominally on the same side, but competing with each other, and leverage the hated oppressor as a tool in their conflict.
Sometimes it’s as direct as an anonymous informant dropping a tip, so that a raid can go after a rival. Perhaps that old, establishment incumbent is in the way, but wouldn't be if evidence of patronage-network corruption were passed on to a hostile FBI. Or maybe that young, reckless progressive who didn't learn how to play the limits of the protests of the 70s makes a mistake that could leave them out and unprotected. Action, or inaction, could have similar effects when a hostile administration is looking for something to act on.
Does such feuding it hurt the combined potential of the resistance overall? Sure. Does it improve the hated authority’s position to have one less threat? Also sure. But does it position you better for influence / control of the local resistance networks, i.e. the democratic party?
This is why David Hogg was called a jackass for trying to primary fellow democrats as DNC chair. It was an explicit break from the premise of the DNC as a neutral leadership institution for democrats anywhere. The value of a reputation of neutrality is that people don’t expect neutral actors to be that sort of backstabber, and they don't make plans to backstab the neutral actors either. It reduces internal coalition tensions.
But in making that power play, and then the institutionalist purge of Hogg through totally-not-pretextual means, the Hogg struggle helped reframe the nature of the competition. It is not merely ‘how do the Democrats struggle against Trump?’ It is now, increasingly, ‘how do the Democrats use existing institutions in the struggle against each other?’
And since Trump is still a relevant actor, both as a foil and as an agent in his own right, the emerging Democratic infighting paradigm may well become ‘how do we use Trump in our struggle against each other?’
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
28d ago
What is a woman?
I had an epiphany a while back and it's so obvious in retrospect that I'm mad about it. And I don't have anyone else to talk about it with, so you people can suffer this.
They actually don't know what a woman is.
Not everyone. I'm not saying there aren't any AGPs, or bad actors, or just people with extreme dysphoria. But a significant subset, including among the supporters? They actually just don't know.
Like, literally. They are not dissembling. They are not fucking with you. It's not Kolmgorov Complicity. They actually do not have a mental construct for "woman" that is a distinct referent class from a mental construct labeled "man".
I think this is the intersection of a couple of different things.
First, if a core conservative flaw is Othering, perhaps the core progressive flaw is the Typical Mind Fallacy. Think of the guy who can't even pretend to believe that fetuses have souls. Or the dude who looks at a religious extremist screaming "I love killing women and children in the name of my God!", and thinks "This person would adopt all of my beliefs about queer theory if they were just a bit less poor and uneducated and oppressed." Why on earth would that provincial fool do any better at understanding the alien category of "women"?
Especially with the elephant in the room, feminism, insisting that there are no meaningful between men and women that could justify any discrepancy in representation in any professional field. Women are just like men and want the exact same things, right? So, what exactly are the differences you're allowed to talk about?
(Writing prompt: explain gender variances in readership between romantasy and milscifi... to HR.)
And the cruel irony is that a lot of progressive men can traverse that minefield. Just blame the other men for gatekeeping and emotional immaturity. It's not a fair answer. It's not a true answer. But it threads the needle. There are plenty of people who can accomplish that task, because they have the mental agility and verbal IQ to mouth the platitudes while internally running logic straight out of a Hoe Math video.
It creates this doublethink world where everyone is supposed to know what a woman is and how to treat them differently, but never acknowledge the source of that knowledge, or openly admit to any real world implications. In fact, they have to actually deny that knowledge in a mass gaslighting. Remember Darwin? He was doing that all the time. A critical precursor to this epiphany was that time he pulled the mask down a little bit, and expressed his annoyed bewilderment that the rest of us spectrum-y nerds were taking progressive politics literally, instead of understanding it as a cynical exercise in tricking other men into acting like dumbasses.
Now what about the guys who aren't that mercenary cynical socially adroit? What happens when we combine the preceding socially-required doublethink with the common autistic struggle to model other minds? Remember that autistic-to-trans pipeline? Yeah.
So what the hell even is a woman, if you struggle to understand other people in general, and you don't think you're allowed to notice any impactful differences between men and women and all of the smart and successful people in your (blue) tribe sneer at the idea of any meaningful differences? The resulting rationalization is like a pastiche of the Jack Nicholson line: "I think of a man, and then add some cuteness and whimsey".
Which is, I observe, is exactly what it looks like when a pro-T prog guy tries to write women characters. They write women as men with some shallow "loli Dylan Mulanney" cuteness, because they don't actually have a mental model of "women" as having any differences in mentality, life experiences, preferences, traits, qualities or viewpoints compared to men. "A woman is a dude who spends 12 hours writing spreadsheets about Warhammer 40k battleships and then adds a heart emoji and a tee hee at the end. Don't deadname her, bigot."
And terfy ladies, you didn't just sow the seeds here. You plowed the fields, fertilized them, then set up aggressive arrangements of killbot scarecrows to fend off any threats to the seeds. I'm not sure how you can recover from that without rewriting a significant portion of third wave feminism, but maybe that's a me problem.
How would you explain to an autistic teenage boy the differences between boy people and girl people? In a way that provides useful guidance and doesn't make T seem like a normal thing for any boy who isn't obsessed with sports? In a way that let's them successfully navigate the differences?
How do you teach them to actually understand the difference?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
10d ago
A culture-war-adjacent court opinion that @The_Nybbler may find entertaining:
-
An 80-year-old man applies for a permit to buy a rifle. The permit is denied, solely because he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital for four days forty years ago. He applies for expungement of the records of that commitment, so that he can get the permit.
-
The judge denies the application for expungement.
T.B.'s problematic interaction with LifeStream staff raised questions in the court's mind about T.B.'s "candor to the [c]ourt and fundamental issues that are here."
[T.B.] told the people [at LifeStream] that he was suffering from anxiety and depression. And he said he did that because that’s what he thought he had to say in order to get this appointment so that he could get the evaluation. And a concern to me is that he was not particularly honest with these folks about why he wanted this evaluation.
In that vein, the judge took issue with T.B.'s dismissive characterization of the nature of his hospitalization at Ancora versus the hospital record—namely, that after questioning the staff released him.
In the report it says, "unable to contain on open unit; violent outbursts; threatening; severely agitated; threatening others; yelling; demanding; attempted to strangle his wife at home; violent outbursts; tried to tear side rails off of the [bed]". So, this is not a man who showed up at Ancora mildly agitated or upset, but was described by the doctors down there as threatening behavior, so agitated they couldn't talk to him and violent outbursts towards the people on the staff there.
Regarding his present condition, the court noted that despite the medical reports stating he was stable, T.B. exhibited signs of memory problems and a lack of awareness regarding his own medication regimen.
[T.B.] doesn’t even know what medication he’s taking for his [d]iabetes or for his high cholesterol situation or his [h]yperlipidemia. And that, to me, speaks volumes about not that he’s dangerous to the public safety, but why would we give an 80-year-old man, who can’t even be responsible for his own health, access to a firearm that he wants to use for target practice with his friends. You know, is he going to forget to put the safety on the firearm when he isn’t at the range doing target practice? Is he going to forget to secure it in his home so that people who come to visit don’t have access to it? That’s what’s really of concern to this court.
- The appeals panel affirms. "The trial court reasonably determined that defendant failed to meet his burden to demonstrate the expungement was in the public interest." No second amendment for him!
Nerdy men were the first to get access to internet pornography, and for a while it was associated with them. Now guys in the slums of Nigeria are watching it on smartphones. Nerds were the first to have access to online conspiracy content. Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Beams! Muh Magic Bullet! Now the same conspiracy stuff is hitting young women. From an NYT report about a women's conference:
Rhaelynn Zito is one such conservative convert. Ms. Zito is a 25-year-old nurse who lives in Raleigh, N.C. In 2023, she said she had a real belly flop of a year. She went through a breakup, lost a family member and was searching for purpose outside work. Ms. Zito began listening to Ms. Clark, whose Turning Point USA show is often ranked among the top ten of health podcasts on Spotify.
Listening to Ms. Clark, Ms. Zito said, changed her life. She started a Bible study group, cut down her drinking and stopped dating casually as she focused on finding a husband. She stopped using birth control, taking up a natural family planning method recommended on Ms. Clark's show, and became dubious about abortions and vaccines. She no longer identifies as a feminist.
{sinp}
After the 2024 election, when young men swung markedly to Mr. Trump, pundits and political operatives began a frenzied and almost anthropological analysis of the "manosphere," the ecosystem of podcasters, like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, who nudged young men toward the Republican vote. Less in focus were the young women — a demographic that is still reliably left-leaning, but whose support for Mr. Trump also increased, according to post-election polling. Some were also swayed by what has been labeled a "womanosphere" of uber popular podcasters blending lifestyle advice and political polemics.
Many of the young women at the Turning Point conference were drawn to the event because conservative women influencers had helped them remake their lives: start dating seriously and stop eating ultra-processed foods, start taking supplements and stop using birth control. The Young Women's Leadership Summit, which marked its tenth anniversary, drew its largest numbers yet this year: roughly 3,000 women, up from around 2,000 last year and under 500 in 2015, at its inception. The event, some attendees noted, was light on discussions about policy — immigration raids, trade wars — but heavy on dating, parenting and nutrition advice.
Women are more hostile to COVID vaccination, perhaps reflecting a female urge to make politics revolve around their bodies.
Many people here have been asking about my politics: it's actually remarkably simple: I want the old America back where children were born within marriage, didn't try to change their gender, and got all the vaccines their pediatrician recommended.
To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?
kky
12d ago
If we follow your logic at its word, the natural conclusion would be the total collapse of the Democratic Party.
Right now, the fringe elements of both parties are wildly unpopular. The question for most elections is who comes across as the most repulsive and who successfully tamps down on their extremists in public messaging. Since Democrats are better educated and hooked into their politicians, this has turned into a real advantage for the Republicans. The Democrat extremists are able to effectively pressure and primary politicians into following their worst ideas, which have a lot of salience right now.
So we have a civil war right now, between the Democrats from the Reagan days who want to relive that heady sense of resistance like they were young again and the young progressives who have been educated into mind-meltingly unpopular ideas. Out on the distant fringes are the swing-state Democrats like Fetterman who are effectively untouchable by the party mechanism but equally have no sway over it. Whoever wins is going to win based on their ability to signal #resistance to the equally extreme base, as voters on the edge increasingly disengage with the party. But the party does not compromise on its least popular tenets, and in fact broadcasts them as a matter of principle, and the way things are going, will stand absolutely no chance in upcoming elections (only exception being the presidency if Trump does something dumb like defy the law to run for term 3 and scare the normies way too much).
So we should expect to see evaporative cooling concentrating the heart of the overeducated party, keeping seats where urban Millennials and Xers dominate and hemorrhaging the rest. And then, probably, the Blue Dogs try to create their own party and recapture the many voters who really don’t like Trump but can’t find it in themselves to vote D.
There was a moment, after this election, where I wondered to myself: is this when the Dems will figure out what’s happening? Is this where they Sister Souljah the woke out and start trying to win elections again? But that moment passed in a heartbeat, and the old party mechanisms reasserted their dominance. I think this is a general pattern, not just for democracy but for every kind of human organization, where the mechanisms of power become too cleanly rationalized, too stable, and the possibility of an internal coup vanishes. The existing order loses the possibility of making mistakes and being replaced from within, as they control all the needed feedback mechanisms and are not vulnerable to it. It’s at this moment that the levers of power cease to be representations or formalizations of the real sources of power, and become sources of power in themselves. When that happens, the power structure itself is in dire jeopardy, as it’s lost all connection to reality and has become a sort of ouroborus, swallowing its own tail and growing smaller and smaller.
I suspect that part of this self-consuming behavior is related to class divides like the educational alignment of the parties, but that’s probably enough on this for now.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
20d ago
In my circles on twitter, the Mystical Christianity conversation is cropping up again. It tends to come around every few months, at least for the past year I've been on the site.
Tyler Alterman writes a long post on it that is mostly summed up here:
There’s an emerging branch of mystical Christianity that is very intriguing. I think of it as “Imaginal Christianity” (IC). You could also call it Mythic Christianity or Jungian Christianity
IC’s main selling point is that it’s compatible with a scientific mindset. I list the tenets I’ve observed below. By doing so, I try to document what I see ppl practicing. (I am not an Imaginal Christian.)
God = the ground of being. It is both presence and void, shows its love by embracing all things that exist & affording the path to salvation through communion with it
“The Lord”: a useful anthropomorphism of god. ICs use imagination to turn something incomprehensible (god) into an imaginal presence that we can speak to and which speaks to us through words, silence, and beyond
Jesus of Nazareth: a person who came much closer than most people to theosis – ie embodying how god would behave if it acted in human form with full recognition of its own nature. By doing so, Jesus genuinely did show us a path to salvation. (Although – here’s the heretical part – other people like Gautama Buddha might show us a complementary paths.) Thanks to the degree that Jesus was charismatic and the degree to which his followers admired him, they created and/or realized an imaginal being called Christ
Christ: a mind that continues to guide humans to salvation, directly inspired by Jesus of Nazareth (whose body is now dead). There are many names for the nature of this type of mind: thoughtform, tulpa, egregore, archetype, living symbol, yidam, memetic entity. His metaphysical status is similar to the way Tibetan lamas seem to regard their deities, as manifestations of Mind. This doesn’t make him less divine; he represents a latent divine potential available to all people. We see archetypes similar to Christ manifest across cultures: Osiris, Dionysus, Krishna, etc. However, Christ is is our culture’s instantiation of the archetype – his specific teachings and the story of his life are meaningful to us
Now to broaden this outside of just Christianity, I'm curious what the Motte thinks of symbolism as a whole? I will admit my own path back to religion came via a symbolic pathway, although I believe it goes far deeper than this.
That being said, from my short time here it seems like most of the Christians on this site aren't that into symbolism, and tend to be more "rationalist" and materialist in their worldview. Again, might have a mistaken impression.
I know this is a rationalist offshoot forum so not sure I expect a ton of mystical/symbolic discussion, but I'm kind of surprised by how little there is given how many professed religious folks there are here. And I do think from a Culture War angle, that materialism is definitely losing steam (especially amongst the right) as we see more and more cracks form in the edifice of Expert Scientific Opinion(tm).
On a deeper note, the symbolic worldview is all about seeing the world through the language of God (or meaning if you prefer), in a way that helps people bind together and understand events in the same way. Right now we are in "darkness" symbolically because, well, nobody can interpret events the same way! I personally think a return to the symbolic is inevitable given how confused everything is at the moment, although the transition may not be smooth or easy.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
16d ago
[Note: the following story is fictional. Sort of. Read to the end for an explanation.]
My name is Cynthia Goldblatt. Cynthia Goldblatt. Cynthia Goldblatt. I am this person. I must respond to this name, even a split-second delay could give the game away. No, I thought, I’m worrying too much. If I ever fail to respond to my name, I’ll just laugh and say my brain was fried by watching YouTube shorts.
I had considered dying my hair black to fit better with my obnoxiously Jewish name. But I decided against it, for if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the American far-right, it’s that they have terrible J-dar. If anyone comments on my “Aryan” appearance, I’ll tell them I’m “half-Jewish.” I am the stereotype, a representative of the lying, Jewish-controlled media they don’t trust and are eager to appear in.
I was headed to Butterworth’s Restaurant, which was located blocks away from the Capitol in the heart of D.C. Like other establishments in the area, it was unremarkable up close, for the most powerful area in the world was NIMBY-fied and frozen in time. If you didn’t know where you were, you might guess Erie, Pennsylvania.
Butterworth’s was the hangout spot of choice for young MAGAs in D.C., which was not an accident, as it was created and marketed to be such a place. In a society where the personal was becoming increasingly political, it was a good model for an aspiring businessman to copy. You could even get your local liberal media outlet to give you free advertising if you fabricated some incident of “racism.” The name “Butteworth’s” brought to mind the wholesomeness of old England, the interior brought to mind the Victorian era, with small chandeliers hanging from the and sconce lights mounted on the walls, floral wallpaper, fine rugs, and Queen Anne couches and chairs.
I walked around for a while before I found my target, Natalie Winters, Steve Bannon’s 24-year-old podcast co-host who has worked as a White House correspondent since January 2025. She was wearing a fitted, button-down white mini dress with short sleeves. It was a style she displayed often on her Instagram, professional but not too professional. Sitting with her at the table were three other young women. “Hello,” I said, “I’m Cynthia Goldblatt. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” I hoped I got the tone of I’m-going-through-the-motions-to-pretend-to-respect-you right.
“Same,” Natalie said.
I went through the standard journalistic questions for a few minutes, what are your names, can I quote you on the record, etc. They all told me I could quote them, though only Natalie would allow me to quote her by name. Though I’m not a real journalist, I figure I might as well keep the agreement I made, so I’ll call them the black-haired girl, the redhead, and the not-very-pretty one.
“So what are you women up to tonight?” I asked.
“Girls night out,” Natalie said.
I pretended to be surprised.
“You see, we aren’t so different from you.”
“You’re normal Americans, just with more conservative views.”
“Yes,” Natalie said. “Though I’m more of a Bannonite. That was the case ever since I was a teenager. I just really cared about immigration and I loved the Pepes and the Keks and the memes. I was an autistic teen boy, basically.”
“Are you still an ‘autistic teenage boy?’”
“Everyone matures,” Natalie said. “But my politics are the same. I am a Bannonite, a nationalist. I believe that America is a nation, not a shopping mall. Those stodgy old conservatives, the National Review types, they used to insult us, tell us we’re just teenage nobodies, didn’t seem to get that we wouldn’t be teenagers forever. Or maybe they thought we’d turn into them. But we didn’t. And we’re the future of the American Right. Some people still don’t get it, but nobody under thirty buys into that National Review stuff.”
I intentionally formed a look of mild displeasure, which made the girls smile at one another. A lib unnerved! What they did not know was that I was one of them. I, too, had come of age marinating in 4chan. And I thought that 4channers would grow out of their radical politics because I knew the politics of 4chan were impractical. There would be no “white ethnostate.” There would be no git reverting the sexual revolution. You grow out of it or you remain in your politically isolated ghetto. Either way, the rest of the world goes on oblivious. But it turned out not to matter that the vision was impractical. Walt Bismarck said that “the real ethnostate is the friends we made along the way.” That was a humorously wholesome message about his journey out of white nationalism. But there’s a darker interpretation. The real ethnostate is Butterworth’s. It’s these four young women sitting around a table and giggling and parroting nonsensical slogans about how “America is a nation and not a shopping mall.” And then some schlub in northern Minnesota loses his job because his factory relies on Canadian imports. Then some just-married couple struggles to buy a washing machine because of tariffs. Then some kid gets sickened with preventable disease because his parents don’t trust the vaccine schedule. These chicks were poisoning the blood of America, but they were getting something out of it: friendship and community.
“Are there any elements of this new style of politics that you feel uncomfortable with?” I asked.
Natalie looked hesitant. “Yes,” she said. “The conservative media shilling for Russia unnecessarily is sort of a symptom of the Covid backlash. Because we don’t trust the authority on that, we’re going to not take their words on anything. Do I think Putin’s a great guy? No.”
I got out my pen and paper and wrote down some incomprehensible gibberish, the way I had seen reporters do. The problem with the Young Right is that most of its members are not very bright and don’t know much about the world. They don’t know who Rodzianko was, don’t know about the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, couldn’t tell you where Lviv or Kharkhiv were. And unlike the unwashed masses, who rely on the media to tell them what to think, they have no such institution, so they just bloviate into the ether, retweeting other ignorant social media accounts and calling things “BASED!” This is the movement that even some intelligent people think was gonna save America.
“Do you worry about the next thing?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” asked Natalie.
“The next thing. Maybe Alex Jones decides to rile people up about chlorinated swimming pools, then the New York Times publishes an article debunking his claims, and people respond by saying they don’t trust the media because of COVID so Alex Jones must be correct.”
Natalie looked at me skeptically and I worried it was perhaps not something a mainstream media person, of whom she had much experience, would say. “No comment,” she said.
I decided to move on to a different subject. “You called this ‘girls night out.’ For many women, part of that is looking for romance. Is that the case for some of you?”
“Not ‘romance,’” the black-haired girl said. “We’re looking for husbands.”
“Raise your hand if you’re looking for a husband.”
The black-haired girl and the not-very-pretty one raised their hands. After some hesitation, Natalie raised hers, too. “I’ve already got one,” the redhead said.
I feigned surprise.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m twenty-one-years-old, still in college, and yet I’m already married. That’s the theme of 2025: you can just do things. The mainstream media, no offense to you, has been telling us that women of our class aren’t allowed to get married. Well, I just did it.”
“I don’t recall telling anyone they were not allowed to get married,” I said haughtily.
“You didn’t need to,” the redhead said. “It’s in the message of every film out of a Hollywood that’s controlled by people of your,” she paused, “ideological worldview.” The others eyed her naughtily. “You didn’t need to tell us not to do it because you created a world where it was never done.”
“Maybe it’s as simple as people want to see movies about astronauts, not women nursing infants,” I said.
“But many of us do,” the black-haired girl said. “The tradwives draw large audiences. Social media has removed the gatekeepers. No more can a small elite group tell us what we like.”
“Oh,” I said, pretending to be annoyed. I turned to the black-haired one. “So, how is the husband search going?” I asked.
“I mean, it’s a challenge, nobody said it would be easy. I’ve been hoping to meet more of the techbros, the DOGE-guys, but to my disappointment, they rarely come to places like this.”
“Interesting,” I said. I had heard similar things from others. Many of the “techbros” grew up and went to work in very “blue” environments. They were pushed out of the Left by its hostility to capitalism, local government mismanagement, affirmative action, and (most importantly) #MeToo. They weren’t pleased when they met the Rightists whose passions were calling abortion, IVF, and vaccines Satanic and being so low-class the spacetime continuum bends under the enormous weight of the lack of class. A few walked out in disgust in favor of Hananianism, others embraced rightoid brainworms. More just kept their distance, not being interested in having unvaccinated kids who’d wind up in remedial classes.
I turned to Natalie. “What about you? How’s your husband hunt?”
“I think most men are gay in DC — either out or closeted depending on whether they’re Democrats or Republicans,” she said. “I want to marry someone who allows me to protect feminine energy in a world that is forcing me to be a girl boss because they keep sending Steve to prison. Perhaps I have…” She stopped there.
I burst into laughter. It was just so funny on so many levels. How the Trump movement was a lot like Baltimore – women forced to step into male roles because the men keep getting sent to prison, disproportionate punishment that was always evidence “they” were out to get them and never evidence the ingroup is full of lawbreakers. The four women looked at me with hostility, like I had finally “scored a point” against them.
I decided to explain why I was laughing. “Remember, you agreed I could publish anything said here tonight and attribute it to you.”
“I’m counting on it,” Natalie said.
“You’re not concerned Republican men in D.C. will be insulted by your statement?”
“Won’t be keeping me up at night,” Natalie said.
“Fascinating,” I said. “But it does make sense. Most will see it for what it is. It’s not that you literally believe 90% of men in D.C. are gay. You need an excuse for why you’re not living up to your tradwife ideology and this is what you choose. They can forgive you for that. What they couldn’t forgive you for would be if you acknowledged that there was something wrong with their ideology. Like if you had said, ‘maybe the reason fertility rates are down is because birthing an infant just isn’t that fun compared to the many activities modern society makes available to women like working as White House Press Correspondent.’ Loyalty to the tribe is the supreme value.”
Natalie frowned at me.
“What we’re trying to do here is rebuild social norms from scratch, often with no help from the older generation,” the redhead said. “This is a difficult process, which will have unforeseeable consequences. But we won’t be psy-opped into giving up.”
I turned to Natalie. “I can think of another reason you aren’t married,” I said. “Hypergamy.”
For the first time in the entire conversation, the four women looked shocked at something that had come out of my mouth. Here was the confirmation I was not who I said I was. “Oh, I’m not supposed to know that word, am I? Well, I do. And yes, the concept has been abused by the Andrew Tates of the world, but you really can’t understand modern dating without it. Women will usually phrase it as ‘I want to marry an equal,’ but the problem is only ever with men who rank lower, never with men who rank higher. 80% of the people in the place are men, but the guy who debugs SQL queries for $145,000 a year is not an appropriate match for a woman who’s on TV.”
The redhead and the not-very-pretty one looked confused while the black-haired girl looked angry. She rose to her feet. “Get out of here,” she said to me.
“No,” Natalie said. “I want to know who this person is. Her name isn’t Cynthia Goldblatt.”
“No s***,” I said. “Do I look like a Goldblatt?”
As I was speaking, the power abruptly went out.
I looked around and smiled. “Right on schedule. It’s true what you people like to say. ‘You can just do things.’ For instance, generals can just order the President of the United States to be placed under house arrest. A hundred thousand nude bodybuilders are converging on Washington. No more will we have a democratic system where our trade policy is determined by some obese loser in Wisconsin who’s mad his town got ‘left behind.’ The new era of Friedrich Nietzsche and Bronze Age Pervert begins today, an era defined by strength and virility.” I pulled out my gun.
Okay, I’ll cut it off there. I said at the beginning that this was “sorta” fictional. There are not a hundred thousand nude bodybuilders marching on Washington, but there is a person named Natalie Winters, who really is twenty-four years old and really does work as White House correspondent. She really did say she wants to “marry someone who allows me to protect feminine energy in a world that is forcing me to be a girl boss because they keep sending Steve to prison.” It’s such a clownish statement you would never believe it actually came out of someone’s mouth, but it did. Other statements in this story, such as the ones about Russia and Natalie being an “autistic teenage boy” are also taken from the same interview a journalist did with Winters, which I encourage you to read.
In a country where 38% of liberal women aged 18-29 identify as LGBT, you, dear reader, may find yourself drawn to the “BASED” subculture. I’m not asking you to stay away, just to see it for what it is. It’s not Crémieux, it’s not Razib Khan, it’s not Steve Sailer. It’s people like Natalie Winters, whose response to the Trump-Musk feud was, “this whole thing is proof of why we shouldn’t vaccinate children.”
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
6d 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.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
18d ago
Apparently, the UKGBNI is set to completely decriminalize abortion in England and Wales when performed by the woman (not when performed by a doctor). According to Reuters and BBC, under existing law abortion by a doctor is legal up to 24 weeks and a woman can perform an abortion on herself with prescribed pills up to 10 weeks. In contrast, the new law—approved by 73 percent of the House of Commons—appears to permit abortion right up to the point of birth when it is performed by the woman.
Text of the law (on pages 108–109 of the PDF; part of a much larger bill):
Tonia Antoniazzi, NC1
To move the following Clause—
Removal of women from the criminal law related to abortion
For the purposes of the law related to abortion, including sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929, no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy.
Member's explanatory statement
This new clause would disapply existing criminal law related to abortion from women acting in relation to her own pregnancy at any gestation, removing the threat of investigation, arrest, prosecution, or imprisonment. It would not change any law regarding the provision of abortion services within a healthcare setting, including but not limited to the time limit, telemedicine, the grounds for abortion, or the requirement for two doctors’ approval.
Trump has bombed Iran's nuclear sites, using B2 bombers dropping 30,000-pound massive ordinance penetrators. All aircraft have successfully cleared Iranian airspace, and Trump is claiming that all three nuclear sites were wiped out. No word that I've seen of a counter-attack from Iran, as yet.
AOC has concluded that a president ordering an airstrike without congressional approval is grounds for impeachment. Fetterman thinks it was the right move. Both are, I suppose, on brand.
My feelings are mixed. I absolutely do not want us signing up for another two decades of invading and inviting the middle east, and of all the places I'd pick with a gun to my head, Iran would be dead last. I do not think our military is prepared for a serious conflict at the moment, because I think there's a pretty good likelihood that a lot of our equipment became suddenly obsolete two or three years ago, and also because I'm beginning to strongly suspect that World War 3 has already started and we've all just just been a bit slow catching on. That said, I am really not a fan of Iran, and while I could be persuaded to gamble on Iran actually acquiring nukes, it's still a hell of a gamble, and the Israelis wiping Iran's air defense grid made this about the cheapest alternative imaginable. I have zero confidence that diplomacy was ever going to work; it's pretty clear to me that Iran wanted nukes, and that in the best case this would result in considerable proliferation and upheaval. Now, assuming the strikes worked, that issue appears to be off the table for the short and medium terms. That... seems like a good thing? Maybe?
I'm hoping what appears to me to be fairly intense pressure to avoid an actual invasion keeps American boots of Iranian soil. As with zorching an Iranian general in Iraq during Trump's first term, this seems like a fairly reasonable gamble, but if we get another forever war out of this, that would be unmitigated disaster.
More options
Context Copy link