domain:traditionsofconflict.com
Stellula
1m ago
Epstein was raping 11 year olds (allegedly): https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/1/15/lawsuit-alleges-epstein-trafficked-girls-as-young-as-11
hydroacetylene
3m ago
It's worth noting that Latin American immigration is not universally non-white, has a long history of assimilating pretty well- and generally not to the criminally inclined underclass, the Hispanics and blacks hate each other and the Hispanic underclass is probably not, proportionately, much higher than the white one- and that Hispanic fertility in the US holds up much worse than native white TFR.
There are criticisms of Latin immigration- they're terrible drivers who raise premiums for everyone, they drive down wages for the native lower-working class, etc. But America's underclass is, mostly, black. The non-black underclass has plenty of whites in it, and I wouldn't claim those whites are any better than the blacks. The median Hispanic in the US works as a cook or a mechanic or construction worker, pushes his kids to move up the social ladder but doesn't complain when it's only one rung, and uses no drugs worse than pot. His daughter is likely to marry a white man, give birth to European looking and acting children, and have higher fertility than her peers who marry other Mexicans. His son likely has a better chance of stable and productive employment than his white peers. The developed parts of Latin America with lots of whites are, by the standards of high income inequality middle income countries, the best in the world- much nicer places to live than former soviet countries, South Africa, etc. It's unlikely that Hispanic immigration will raise income inequality or suppress economic growth by enough to reach, say, Chilean levels. Hispanic migration is simply not a crisis to US ability to maintain its functioning civilization.
marinuso
18m ago
I don't know how reliable they ever were. Before the Internet, the traditional mass media were the only media. There were no other voices. They could easily have been as bad as they are now, and nobody would have known. If anything they might've been worse, as they had less scrutiny.
The structure of it alone practically demands an oligopoly. After all, how many people can afford to run a national TV station, and that's before we start talking about licensing and permits. The same goes for large publishing houses.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
20m ago
Very well, since the two of you did speak up for him, I'm going to knock it down to 2 weeks. It'll only get worse if he doesn't get better.
hydroacetylene
20m ago
Nazi Germany mostly inherited the imperial German military system, essentially intact but unused. Reviving it was politically popular and the sort of thing that was inevitable from whoever rose to the top in the Weimar republic. Hitler's main military reforms were either net negatives like the SS or copies of the adaptations other major powers made to the lessons of WWI, coupled with the existing highly-competent Prussian officer corps's adaptations to the lessons of the Spanish civil war.
It's true that Hitler did some common-sense reforms that he can fairly get credit for, but these reforms were, well, commonsense- few of them were unique to Germany.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
21m ago
You can see it, but I think in general deeper messages just don't get though. Heavy-handed moralizing is used because it works.
hydroacetylene
27m ago
This is a generalized woke failure that they just... fail to say anything convincing to anybody not onboard with their program to begin with. They look ridiculous not like 'just decent persons'. Libs of TikTok was successful propaganda by showing wokes explaining their position in their own words.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28m ago
There was a joke repeated in And the band played on from the early days of AIDS:
What's the hardest part of getting AIDS? Convincing your wife you're Haitian.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
29m ago
The US recently changed those policies, and monogamous MSM are allowed to donate blood. If it helps, they shortly afterward also allowed "residents of Europe in the 1990s" as well, because maybe they don't have Mad Cow.
But yes, lots of people died of HIV from tainted blood transfusions in the 80-90s. Isaac Asimov is the famous example that comes to mind, although maybe in some of those cases it was used as a cover story.
hydroacetylene
35m ago
I would like to chime in in Turok's defense- as someone who does not agree with him very much- that he has slightly improved. I agree with goodguy- he is obnoxious but a month is too long.
Heavy-handedness of the message makes it useful vehicle for spreading non-wokist media literacy. When you are watching it together with friends/family (I watched it together with my wife), you can easily point how gratuitous and ridiculous the messaging is. (See how they wrote the Mr Angry Taxpayer as extremely unsympathetic overweight white male? And his complaint that the staff was preferentially taking in non-serious but sympathetic cases was correct.)
Sometimes I wondered - either the writing team was so blinded out by their politics they didn't notice when overtly woke writing was so illogical it got a Straussian reading, or was there someone in scriptwriting team getting non-woke Straussian takes past the radar.
Incel plot-line was the biggest flag here.
The second one was the Two Dads.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
For longer-distance endurance races, men's performance seems to peak around age 33. I would expect an earlier peak for more explosive/fast-twitch dominated events.
Depends heavily on the sport, the individual, and the degree of chemical assistance available.
But I also think high-level athletic research (while still being the only really valid research on the topic) is going to be biased towards people who peak earlier. To become elite at most high end sports, you have to be an elite youth-level competitor by the time you're 20 at the latest. And the flipside to this is that the mileage on the body and the injuries start accumulating earlier. We don't actually have much of a model for what happens if someone starts competing seriously at 25, because to get to the point where they're competing seriously at 25 most people have been competing seriously at 18. A tommy john surgery, or a blown out knee, or accumulating concussions, are going to get you started on your decline even if your athletic peak was still ahead of you.
UFC champions, who have tended to start out in MMA later as they train something different-but-related before switching to MMA professionally, average 33, and fighters typically begin their decline at 34. MLB players peak between 27 and 30, but that curve has moved up a few years after the beginning of steroid testing. MMA is notably poor on testing compared to the other major pro sports, and the individual sports are generally more poorly tested than the major professional team sports where the league has some degree of physical control over the players. Soccer players peak at 27 on average, but speedy wingers peak earlier and decline faster than burly centerbacks. NFL running backs decline almost immediately, while offensive linemen can often stick it out well into their 30s.
All that being said, I'm in the best shape of my life right now, this year, at 33. But I don't disagree with @self_made_human about 25 either: at 25 I had more potential, I could be anything, even if at 33 I currently am more. Athletically, at 25 I could still have runway to develop skills that, at this point, I won't reach. My hair was thicker, I could sleep off a hangover easier, I could eat bad food and worry about it less. I was in my last year of grad school, which is the peak of a certain kind of status for many people: you've accomplished a lot so you have something to stand on when you boast, but you haven't found your level in the professional world yet, so you can talk all the shit you want about what you might do. 25 was a very good year
2rafa
1hr ago
I don’t think we should stop talking about it. I find Epstein fascinating enough that I’ve read almost everything (possibly everything) ever written on him. I think he was a real life example of extraordinarily high verbal intelligence, which is rarer even than the spatial equivalent. I’m talking about political attention. Apologies if that wasn’t clear, I don’t think the discussions we have matter politically, obviously.
We discuss a lot of things ere that aren’t the most important thing in the country, we discuss architecture, obesity drugs, video games, history, whatever.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
They aren't all ruthless realpolitikers, plenty are true believers in socialism as a winning platform and that the DNC only loses elections because they aren't radical enough. That's means and motive.
Consider an alternative possibility, which we've seen demonstrated in public numerous times: The Democratic party lacks balls, has always lacked balls, lacks balls at every level from top to bottom. The strain of trying to pretend to have balls and be a Democrat eventually gave Fetterman a stroke and now he's a blithering retard.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
large scale illegal migration from Central and South America I can’t countenance the wasting of that singular political moment and energy on the irrelevant sexual proclivities of a disgusting but dead man decades ago.
Until mass immigration is solved, this is the absolute political issue, above anything else, beyond everything else. The same is true about other irrelevancies, like Iran, Ukraine, tariffs.
Then don't comment on these threads, or just comment one sentence that you don't care about anything more than you care about Blanqueamiento, and move on.
The motte is for truth seeking, not petty dishonest political persuasion. It probably won't work for the latter anyway, and even if it did the US voting population of the forum might be 50 on a good day, of which I'm not sure you yourself are included.
How am I supposed to trust anything you say about the matter after you tell me that nothing else matters except deporting brown people? Your top level post the other day, do you actually believe that Epstein was just a particularly hot gay hustler, a Gold Digging Hall of Famer, or is that what you determined was the best thing to say to protect Stephen Miller's political project? Is everything you say about all the issues you just told me don't matter to be ignored, just a weather-vane tested method of finding the right piece of whataboutism to get everyone to shut up and give ICE more money?
I just don't understand how one goes on the motte and says "stop talking about X, it doesn't matter compared to Y." Because nothing we talk about on the motte matters; thus the truth is all that matters. And I'm disappointed that you've disavowed it.
2rafa
2hr ago
Another dubious extrapolation - the scale of the gangs we know about increased a lot after 1997 when Blair legalised fetching marriage.
Do you read j’accuse on substack? While I find him histrionic and extremist much of the time (and wouldn’t endorse his politics), he tracked down an extensive list of old newspaper articles about criminal cases that made very clear this was going on in a major way since the mid-1950s, single-digit years or even months after any non-negligible immigration from Pakistan began. Even I was quite surprised at that. There are quotes in many of them from police and others that suggest this was already a widely-known about issue among local police and councils by the mid-1960s at the latest, when pressure began on the left to take action to reduce the chance of race riots in the wake of Powell’s peak popularity.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2hr ago
based on the rates in Rotherham
Most of the other gangs that have been busted were an order of magnitude smaller than Rotherham. The coverup ended a decade ago - we have a pretty good handle on the size of the problem, and we now know that Rotherham and Telford were unusually bad. This wasn't known at the time Sarah Champion took up the issue - so she was making a reasonable guess at the time.
(over the 65 year period of mass immigration from Pakistan)
Another dubious extrapolation - the scale of the gangs we know about increased a lot after 1997 when Blair legalised fetching marriage. Apart from a few places with powerful local ethnic-Pakistani political machines (Bradford/Halifax is the only one of the local grooming gangs where this is a plausible factor) the police would not have gone soft on Pakistani sex offenders until well into the 1990's.
2rafa
2hr ago
There are people (all women I believe) on those prisoner letter writing forums who are in touch with her.
2rafa
2hr ago
Pearson’s method extrapolated from both Rotherham’s population and the rate there and the relatively population and distribution of the Mirpuri/Pakistani community in England.
TowardsPanna
2hr ago
Buddhism isn't really religion. It's psychology. The way out of the cycles of suffering can be reached in this lifetime with correct practice. The Buddha told us how. It was later that people added all sorts of mumbo jumbo around it. I'm well on the way to liberation myself. No other way of life offers a concrete and comprehensive framework for comprehending and working well with the mind. To say that sheer atheism can compete with the buddhadharma is a very silly statement born out of ignorance. No offense.
I’m at most an ambivalent Trump supporter, it’s disingenuous to imply I haven’t criticized him and his more naive fans countless times on this board over the last decade.
This person was always a liar and a scumbag. I remember writing about what he did to the priceless Bonwit Teller sculptures, rare examples of good art deco (along with the rest of the building), his treatment of his business partners, lenders, investors and so on. His treatment of his wives, cheating on pregnant Melania with prostitutes etc.
But when in Stephen Miller and to some extent Homan the US has its best in 30 years and probably final chance to do even a small amount (which will have big effects down the line) about large scale illegal migration from Central and South America I can’t countenance the wasting of that singular political moment and energy on the irrelevant sexual proclivities of a disgusting but dead man decades ago.
I want my children to inherit a functioning country inhabited by civilized people with public services that function and with the smallest possible violent and dysfunctional criminal underclass. Until mass immigration is solved, this is the absolute political issue, above anything else, beyond everything else. The same is true about other irrelevancies, like Iran, Ukraine, tariffs.
Okay, well this is a classic illustration of my frustration. We have some words, hydro above listed some more, but we don't use them. You might as well say they don't exist, at least when we talk race. When I say race, 95% of everyone thinks about the big categories. Ethnicity as I've already said is a better word, even if it's still imprecise. I'm also not saying that no one can tell differences between genetic clusters, or that there aren't a handful of discernable phenotypic differences. It should come as no surprise to anyone that babies can pick out race differences, humans are super-learners after all, and that goes double for facial processing and recognition. (It's also true that even adults suffer difficulties in telling faces apart in other races when less familiar with other races).
But words like "octoroon" actually run contrary to your point: that it was used at all historically actually underscores how race is often a social construct in actual practice (reality). If you're 7/8ths white, you are probably going to pass as white, and probably going to be functionally white. Only a society with major socioeconomic and political hang-ups would ever invent some hyper-specific word to describe someone with 1/8th Black parentage on a particular side of the family, I mean that's pretty self-evident, yes?
The simple math of the matter is that words like "mulatto" and the other "halves" hydro listed are only useful for exactly one generation! That makes their utility highly questionable. What's the daughter of a mulatto and a Hispanic man? etc.
The liberal idea that the "experience" of race matters more than the actual facts of race is taken to the extreme by some loonies, bandwagoners, and idiots... but the idea behind it isn't that wrong actually. Say you are highly embedded in Black culture, maybe you're 3/4 Black, but your skin comes out lighter and you pass as White. Are you Black? Are you treated as Black? Many of them say that they feel like they got the worst of both worlds, others think but don't say that they get the best of both worlds, and the situation gets more complicated if you're raised without Black culture at all, or confounded in either case depending on your economic status. Again, on the spectrum of consistent, useful, biological genetic cluster to somewhat arbitrary, contextually influenced social construct, race seems to fall much more on the social construct side in most of the ways that matter.
popocatepetl
3hr ago
Where the message of 'Patterns of Force' is something like "you can't separate the good from the bad, and the advantages of Nazism cannot outweigh its disadvantages", I think the message you'd get from a modern historian would be that Nazism is just bad overall.
Can modern historians be trusted? The very topic of this thread is that De naziis nil nisi malum in left-leaning circles, of which academia is certainly one. I read Richard Evans' series on the Third Reich and recall reading a lot of stupid policies from the Nazis. Nonetheless, I can't get past — and I can't see how detractors get past — that in twelve years Nazi Germany saw rapid economic growth, and then lost a war against four great powers with only the help of two minor powers. They gave a pretty good fight. Of course, you can say that the insanity of Nazism lead to them starting an unwinnable war, but they must have been doing some good things to even acquit themselves as well as they did.
TowardsPanna
3hr ago
Hmm yeah. That makes sense. Sounds useful actually.
Can you give a concrete example of how the tarot cards were more stimulating than a coin toss would have been? I'm curious.
I dug out a tarot deck that I had collecting dust, no idea when or why it was acquired. Nearly all the cards have obese women. Gee, I wonder what the creator of them looks like. Lol.
You’re wrong. Epsteins schtick was to find young troubled girls as young as 11 or 12. He would even get them to find more girls for him:
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/16/797011139/u-s-virgin-islands-officials-epstein-trafficked-girls-on-private-island-until-20
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