domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
DirtyWaterHotDog
1m ago
Missing Petes - Where are the 30-something liberals?
This write-up was prompted by Zohran Mamdani’s rising popularity in the NYC mayoral race.
Pre-2016, American politics was run by boomers. As the youngest boomer, Obama was expected to pass the baton to the next generation of Democrats. Alas, geriatrics returned with a vengeance, and Gen-X tapped out for good.
Of the dominant American political groups, I'm most sympathetic to neo-libs with a YIMBY flavor. Therefore, I’ve kept an eye out for Millennial newcomers who fit into this mold. 'Left of center with accommodations for changing times' is a tried and tested formula for fresh Democrats. It started off great. Tulsi and Pete had respectable presidential runs for their age.
Then began the woke revolution and the COVID crisis. During this period, I expected radicals to be ascendant, and they were. Progressive Millennial faces were introduced through 'The Squad,' prison abolitionists, and protest movement leaders. All positioned in opposition to the neo-lib incumbents, all terrible policymakers. Thankfully, the progressives haven’t won anything at the national level just yet.
Their mortal enemies, the Boomer neo-libs (Kamala, Biden, Blinken, Pelosi), ran the nation for four years. Most of it was in a post-woke era where the nation was shifting to the right. Yet, we saw no new neo-lib faces during that time. At both the national and local levels, less-progressive democrats like Tulsi and Ann Davidson were pushed out despite their popularity, as proven by their rise in the Republican camp.
Train-man Pete is the obvious exception. But where are the other Petes? If boomer Democrats dislike AOC’s allies, why haven’t they groomed any young leaders of their own? Have boomers reinforced the stereotype by once more pulling up the ladder behind them?
I ask rhetorically, of course. The answer is yes. Boomers crushed the political prospects of an entire generation behind them. Millennials weren't going to have it any easier. The sheer greed of 80-year-old geriatrics is embarrassing. No policy goals left to pursue, just a legacy of corruption and unmet promises.
I dislike Zohran. Among my fellow Indians, he is what we call a 'chutiya' (hard to translate; the closest synonym would be wanker). Yet, I feel dirty saying anything positive about Cuomo. Do the two options have to be a corrupt neo-lib boomer versus a Millennial wanker? As the boomers die off, who will take their place in Democratic power structures? Because from my perspective, all the young leaders are socialist wankers.
So I ask again: Where are the other Petes?
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
14m ago
You do realize that by moderating @Chrisprattalpharaptr while defending @Hadad from push-back you are saying that want more posters like @Hadad (who by your own admission is going for heat over light) and fewer posters like @Chrisprattalpharaptr.
In short you as a moderator are incentivising heat over light.
Shirayuki
16m ago
This kind of reads like a troll post from a new account, but I guess I'll bite.
I've probably been on 250 dates, had sex with 125 women, been in some serious relationships
I hang out with her and her ballet friends. They're top 1% in terms of looks and talent
It's true for the ballerinas and its true for the SF tech girlies and the PE girls and the McKinsey girls and the HR ladies too
If this is all true you're clearly on the very right end of the bell-curve in terms of sexual success and social milieu, it's like a multi-millionaire heir asking why people complain about housing affordability when they were gifted three on their birthday.
I like women, in fact I love women. I love going on dates with them, I love hanging out with them, I love flirting with them, I love hooking up with them, I love dating them
I suppose I can't really relate personally, in the sense that my libido is quite low and I don't have a lot of interest in casual dating or sex.
The median man probably does, in the sense they would mostly like to be Chad and Casanova who can fuck a lot of hot women, but obviously this is out of reach for the vast majority of men even if they work as hard as possible.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
28m ago
Whaaa....? My head just exploded.
ETA: Is she possibly looking for some sort of frothed milk beverage with espresso in it? Because that's the only way I can make sense of those two sentences together.
gattsuru
30m ago
Ar'kendrythist handles power scaling better in the first few books, where there's not merely charged conflict but the protagonist being a pretty severe underdog. Even well after that, there's always a bigger fish until the back half of the second book, and that's the point where the protagonist dying stops mattering and what the villain could do to everybody else becomes more important.
While it's still a little obnoxiously progressive-in-the-inevitability sense even by my standards, that works out pretty well for keeping the tension high; what fixing a wasteland of slavery and infighting even looks like a more interesting question than who's power is more maximum and can blow up a city. The author's also willing to kick out legs under the protagonist often enough that even some situations where it seems like they should be certain to win, a problem will show up and whatever the heroes built collapse. Never quite to the point of being unfair, though it gets a little close at times.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
30m ago
Happy to, conditional on:
- You bothering to write more than lazy, snarky, single sentence replies to minimize the asymmetry of effort between us.
- Define outgroup.
- Define good faith.
whom you depict as passive victims in your narrative
I don't consider myself as a passive victim but it's undeniably true that people as a group are passive victims. Just look at weight loss; everyone knows that eating healthy food in small portions will mean you lose weight, and yet the efficacy of prescribing diet and exercise as a health intervention rounds down to 0%, and almost all people need Ozempic before they actually lose any weight.
Even if you and all the NEETs lived in that world, what's the point of getting married? Of having children, raising them well, working to feed yourself? Why do you bother to call your elderly parents?
Because marrying her makes my life better and allows me to make hers better, isn't that what love is?
Because having children and raising them well makes my life better and I can give them a good life, isn't that what love is?
Because treating my parents well and being loved in return makes my life better, isn't that what love is?
I don't mean to say that we should all be trad rvturners, the idea is silly, and I'm well aware that there was a lot of misery hidden in pre-modernity, and that not all trad marriages were idyllic and happy. I simply mean to say that in the past, working hard, getting hitched, and doing my best to make it work pretty directly correlated with my own incentives, in a way that it's not at all clear whether it does now.
you find something larger than your own ego and physical pleasure to live for
You may call me a cynical bastard for saying this, but if the incentives don't line up for me, saying that I should stop caring about my own ego and pleasure to care about someone else's just sounds like they're trying to figure out the best way to exploit me.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
32m ago
It's true, although if Asmongold hops on the stage at the RNC and says "The more pain and terror inflicted in the process, the greater the psychic wound sustained on the collective consciousness of these illegals and all others interested in following them, the better" to thunderous applause then is deplatforming really the answer to our problems?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
38m ago
So no I don't think that the other side of immigration is doing anything in good faith.
As evidence that your outgroup is acting in bad faith, you bring up legislation from 40 years ago. 2/3rds of those voters are probably dead, while the majority of voters today (myself included) weren't alive or were far too young to vote for your compromise. Your imagined voter who supported amnesty in the 80s knowing that we'd be in the situation we are today as part of some dastardly bad-faith plan to bring in more illegal immigrants is nonexistent.
"But Chris!" you say, scurrying back to your bailey, "I didn't mean voters today are acting in bad faith because of legislation from 40 years ago, I'm saying they push compromises in bad faith knowing that they're meaningless and we'll be back where we started 40 years from now! How could you not parse that from my two sentence effortpost that I worked on meticulously to avoid any ambiguity?"
To which I say, you aren't offering any evidence that these compromises are offered in bad faith, you're pretending to read the minds of your outgroup and ascribe the worst possible impulses to them. I believe that the majority of Americans support a middle path, flanked by people like the one I replied to and open borders folks. Biden, the media, and a majority of voters all knew the administration had a problem with immigration leading up to the election which is why they tried to craft a compromise to address it. You won't get a mea culpa, but it was pretty obvious throughout the summer that the status quo was unsustainable.
Shirayuki
43m ago
convincing rationalist answer for why people should quit or not use destructive drugs
No rationalist or hedonist of even middling intelligence would ever recommend doing destructive drugs unless on your deathbed.
The downsides are obviously much worse than the upsides, drugs will break your body and mind trying to chase the dragon, and you'll likely ruin all your relationships and die early.
I don't think there is a rationalist reason not to be selfish and NEET
Well, that's the point of this post, isn't it? If being selfish and NEET is what society incentivizes, then eventually that's what you'll get. I have a deep respect for the faithful, but clearly religion is no longer a scalable solution for society at large.
Perhaps in a hundred years all us atheists will be dead and we'll be back to Christianity and Islam battling it out for dominance of the planet.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
53m ago
Yeah I found the survey and breakdown by country, but I was hoping there was a breakdown per country.
Edit: never mind, found it - under each country, they just had to get in some paragraphs first, I should have realised.
It’s not some new thing caused by the awfulness of modern women
I tried to make it quite clear that I don't blame women beyond the fact that they are also rationally responding to incentives.
The standard feminist line, that a man must make their life better than the counter-factual, is fundamentally true. The revealed preference of the majority of women is that pregnancy/childbirth/child-rearing is physically unpleasant, they enjoy the economic freedom provided by work, the state and childlessness, and that they disproportionately pursue hypergamy [in the same sense that most men would disproportionately prefer one-sided polygamy if they had the opportunity, it's no great failing].
I cannot blame them for responding to incentives any more than I can be blamed for responding to mine; I merely wish that it didn't have to be this way.
Part of it is that modern society just coddles men more.
There's a good post on the Motte, that I can't seem to find, that pointed out that an increasing amount of skills, from fitness to cooking, are becoming bi-modal. Most people, lacking significant incentive, will let their skills atrophy, and a small subset of people will compete at all costs to take those skills to the very limits.
I think it's a similar dynamic here, where it's indeed true that lots of men get coddled and drop out in the face of adversity, but there will always be strivers who will fight at all costs, and so competing for "prestige" or "status" still becomes ever-increasingly difficult even as more people drop out.
This is pretty much the point of this effortpost; sure, I'm pretty successful relative to the average young person and could grind even harder, but at the end of the day what's actually incentivizing me to try so hard when all the incentives are pointing the other way?
A lot of the boomer success literally does come from being willing to work twelve hour days in travel jobs while sharing bedrooms
My father is the hardest working man I've ever known, who moved heaven and earth to bring himself out of poverty and broke his body to provide for the family. He is and will always be my hero for what he's done for my mother and I, and yet sometimes I look at him and I regret forcing him through so much pain and suffering.
He's never complained once; yet at the end of the day everyone likes to adulate heroes from afar, but how many people want to suffer as a hero does?
or the whole thing is a combination of Oppression Fetishized, and being used to drum up support and donations.
'Follow the money' has been sound advice for generations for deciphering contexts for a reason.
As I said I don’t have any special insight into this sort of thing. If the end is to take over and disappear Americans, I don’t know what would look different.
Media controls, which really means internet controls, which really means social media control.
When states turn to disappearance campaigns, one of the key points is that people, well, disappear. Lose track of them. No one can find them for long, long periods of time. And part of this is that you prevent media from being to follow up- and that the media that try, also disappear. No official, reputable media reports on them, and the absence is what is conspicuous. You can't hide that people disappear, and to a degree you don't want to, but the tactice works by the ambiguity. The ambiguity is provided by the media not providing answers.
The current administration has been more notable for reducing the levers of influence over media reporting than in building the influence apparatus. When Trump feuded with Reuters (or was it AP) over the Gulf of America renaming, his retaliation was to... kick the reporting organization out of the press pool. Access is what is typically used as the influence vector of a government over a reporter / organization, since access in controlled circumstances is what gives the ability to build ties / leverage over others. Separation is distance is a decrease in influence.
Similarly, the Trump administration very quickly took direct steps to dismantle the sort of media-influence apparatus that the Biden administration supported. Trump and Rubio very, very quickly distanced the US- and by distanced I mean shut down the parts of the State Department participating in it- government-supported-by-proxy media-rating and fact-checker-black-lists that were used to support, and penalize, media groups based on their reliability.
If the end was to take over and disappear Americans, this is the sort of institutional capacity you would want to coopt, not dismantle.
You would use the government hand to apply aggressive fact checking to purge the political hyperbolics as misinformation, purge the old regime's supporters from the institution, and then use the misinformation pretext to aggressively go after anyone claiming the government was disappearing Americans. Part of this would be by staging a few false positives- for example, conduct to prompt a social media storm that could be proven false- and then use the false-coverage to start administering sanctions/punishments on misinformation grounds.
Dismantling a tool that could be used for a nefarious purpose isn't proof that a nefarious purpose won't occur, but it's about as good as one can get from inference. Especially given the rather elaborate preparation kabuki sets the Trump administration has demonstrated to date, such as the whole DOGE saga and how it started with the USAID takedown. There was a heck of a lot of choreographing in that, which is about as good an indication of prepatory planning, and the sort of policy-cognizant planning that would recognize tools for a crackdown campaign.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Taiwan is in a position where they can easily bottle up Chinese naval traffic from getting into the South China Sea, and yeet missiles into strategic military and economic targets in the Chinese mainland.
Taiwan would have to be really suicidal to do that. At the end of the day, Mainland China can bring missiles into range a lot more easily than the US can transport them to Taiwan.
I think that the more serious long term threat for the CCP is that Taiwan is a state which has Chinese culture and is not under their control. A successful, capitalist, proof-of-concept minimal version of China could really be a thorn in their side during an economic downturn. If it was just some expats in the West, that would be much easier to downplay. If it was really a distinct nationality, like Koreans, that would also be easier to tolerate.
But a world in which the pinnacle of technological progress, the most advanced microchips in the world, are produced by Chinese but the Chinese who produce them are not actually from the PRC but the descendants of the side which lost the civil war and retreated to Taiwan must be really painful for the CCP narrative.
You are misinformed, the MAGA/Tea-Party Right isn't looking to change existing law, they're looking to enforce the existing laws.
Trying to "make it harder for Dem presidents to not enforce the law" by changing the law is a fool's errand. What is supposed to stop a future Democratic president from just not enforcing the law against not enforcing the law? No, the real way you make it harder for Democratic presidents to not enforce the law is by setting the precedent now that such behavior will come with harsh consequences.
gattsuru
1hr ago
They have wide discretion because most of the INA is subject to "may" clauses instead of "shall" clauses right now.
And this guy has been told, repeatedly, that the very specific law he claims has "may" clauses had "shall" clauses, already; that there was a massive court case over it, and it didn't do jack or shit.
crushedoranges
1hr ago
If we decided immigration policy based on what aesthetically looked good to liberals, we'd have open borders.
I'm reminded of the meme of 'Top Twelve Images That Will Make You Go Fuck Having Borders And Laws', roughly paraphrased, with a picture of a crying brown crudely drawn in fake news article. If you give into emotional blackmail, then every illegal will cry and sob as they're yanked to the border. No one ever goes 'it's a fair cop, guv' and gamely goes back to South America with a cheeky, roguish grin. We're not playing cops and robbers. This is real life.
What you are getting now is the compromise between open borders and putting up guards on the Berlin Wall and ordering them to shoot to kill.
The president has wide discretion
They have wide discretion because most of the INA is subject to "may" clauses instead of "shall" clauses right now. Also, R's are looking to have a durable advantage on court appointments due to Dem weakness in the Senate. The idea that R's auto-lose every court case is just not correct.
We've tried things like this before
I don't see any reason for optimism that the compromise
What things have we tried like this before? And why are you talking about a compromise? R's have a trifecta, and immigration is an animating issue, AND Dems are (or were, before the deportation nonsense started) on the back foot on this topic in public opinion. This would be a diktat, not a negotiation.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
See acoup on strategic airpower.
In general, strategic bombing can mean different things:
- bombing your enemies production centers
- bombing your enemies population to demoralize them
- (nowadays) bombing the enemies leadership to destabilize the country
The first one works somewhat, but historically not very well. It is debatable if better intelligence today might mean that it is more effective today.
Terror bombing, besides being a crime against humanity, is actively counterproductive. It actively strengthens the bond between the government and the civilians who feel that they are all in it together. It worked like that for the Brits and the Nazis. Arguably, a very similar effect could be observed after 9/11 in the US. Ordinary Americans who were leaning Democrat or dovish found themselves supporting Bush's hawkish adventures. (Coming to think of it, rocket attacks might also explain why the Israeli population is voting for right wing parties supporting goals far beyond what is considered normal in other Western countries.)
Targeting the leadership seems like a less bad option. But here the strategic effect is obviously quite limited. The US blew up a lot of weddings in drone strikes in an effort to curb the Taliban. It did little to prevent their rapid rise back to power the minute they left. And the IDF has bombing the shit out of Hamas, accepting high civilian casualties to take out their commanders. So far, this has not caused Hamas to fall apart. In an environment where IDF bombs have deprived most Gazans of homes and extended family members, and where the families of Hamas members are the ones whose food supply is secure, Hamas does not have a recruiting problem.
I will say that targeting the leadership worked better against Hezbollah. The pager bombing allowed them to take out a lot of the mid level management without Gaza-level collateral damage.
The power of the Iranian regime ultimately comes from the military and revolutionary guards. Sure, murdering a general or politician here and there might make it harder for the regime to pursue their objectives, but at the end of the day it is not enough to force a regime change.
First, I think one major problem that we are seeing with a lot of…everything… is that the ability for people to extract more “value” out of the average individual.
You may be interested in the Chinese concept of neijuan.
While I do think free market capitalism is really the only incentive structure that works at scale and we've never found anything better, I find it hard to disagree with the leftist criticism that the drive to optimize everything in sight, abetted by increased technological capacity, significantly eventuates human misery.
You can see similar dynamics everywhere, from college applications, dating and even PVP video games, where the competition is more and more of a red queen's race. Everyone would be better off if we all stepped off the brakes collectively, but of course nobody has any incentive to surrender an advantage and so we all drive off the cliff together.
Which leads me to my second point - I think the unfairness of, well, everything is one of the major drivers towards people being unhappy with buying into the system
I think most people just aren't psychologically equipped to deal with significant differences in the status of those "around" you without any way of being able to climb up. It's one thing if the king is far away, you'll never meet him and you only have to compete for status with your tribe, a whole another thing to feel like you have to compete with status with the entire world, which of course is an impossible fight to win and only the insane would try to joust the windmill.
Is it "fair" that the family of my lawyer friend is ludicrously rich because his grandfather owns a bunch of valuable patents? Objectively his grandfather's provided much more value to the world than I ever have and my friend is a great guy personally, but my monkey brain just isn't happy about it and still makes me miserable from time to time.
The modern liberal ideology of trying to Harrison Bergeron anyone that sticks their head up is of course a ridiculous way of addressing this dynamic, but it is true that free market libertarians have no answer either.
I have no answer to neijuan either unfortunately; I can only wish you the best with your job and partner.
In many ways that the people who predicted East Asia to be the future of the West had the right idea, I can only hope we look more like Japan and less like South Korea.
sun_the_second
1hr ago
Just refuse to pay taxes and see how society reacts to this simple act of peaceful rebellion. If men aren't needed, if women are capable of getting along without them, then things should putter along okay anyway.
It will fail because men in the government want your money, not because women do.
They have all three branches of government and a favorable supreme court. Trump owns the party and can make all the senators and congressmen fall in line. It would be so easy to pass legislation to massively increase state capacity for audits, deportations, expedited court hearings, etc. Well, it would be easy, if the administration had any competency to work with.
But the purpose of this presidency is impotent lashing out at perceived enemies. It's all theatre and grievance politics. There's no intention of executing proper statecraft, of actually doing things. The best you can hope for is wonton destruction. That's what you get when you elect a conman.
So in one sense, no, it isn't necessary -- if they were comptent. But given they aren't, it's the only option they have.
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