domain:alexberenson.substack.com
ThenElection
8m ago
Recently, the Guardian doxxed Lom3z, the right-wing author best known for What is the Longhouse, based on an unwise registration of a linkable LLC name. As Ahmari points out, he's "an erstwhile Bernie-ish bro who at some point snapped, or became disaffected with the millennial left, and shifted rightward." An MFA holder who was a lecturer at UCI (not tenure track, of course) for a decade, of an unsurprising "off-white" background.
What I'm confused about: why is this a story at all? Presumably, the main effects of this are to make him unemployable and perhaps cause some interpersonal issues. What is a random reader expected to do? Unless you happen to employ him, seemingly nothing. The exposé does detail his sins, which includes publishing ponderous Yarvin tomes and obscure works by Russian White counter-revolutionaries.
And yet it is a story, and a story that gets me emotionally invested, so I suppose my question should really be less why is this a story and more why do I consider this a story? As much as I like the longhouse concept, it's hard to consider Lom3z or his biography at all important; he could die tomorrow, and no one aside from his loved ones would notice.
I think what gets me is that there's simultaneously an appropriation of victimhood (evil bad guy publishes anonymous essay causing evilness!) combined with an inquisitorial zeal to punish, and apparently the power to do exactly that. I just don't see how someone can have both these traits simultaneously, and yet it's depressingly common. I guess I see the doxxing as a distillation of the current zeitgeist of exceptional purity, and that's something to point to when thinking about it.
Another question: what happened to Ahmari? I recall him being on the outs for theoconnery, but now he's publishing snark in the New Statesman about other right-wing writers. Did something change, or did he have some kind of beef with Lom3z?
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
9m ago
The neo-pagan revival niche within the DR is also heavily female.
Corvos
26m ago
Either you believe in an international rules-based order or you don’t. The fact that America supports international governance when and only when it gets to be in charge makes it look cynical and prevents people cooperating with it.
2D3D
37m ago
I don't really have much insight from the black womens perspective, my only real insight is how black men seem to really hold black women in contempt and at no level feel inclined to act in solidarity with black women focused interests. This is getting into too much speculative territory and personal anecdata, so I am not willing to posit too much. Happy to defer to established wisdom that black issues are a variable intersectionalists are aware of but prefer to keep silent on.
2D3D
44m ago
Thanks for the clarification. I didn't really pay attention of the specific spelling. Good catch!
faceh
1hr ago
I think the main thing that boomers and even elder Millenials might be missing is that literally EVERYTHING in Zoomer culture is in a constant state of molochian hypercompetition/red queen races thanks to the influence of social media and algorithmic ranking of every aspect of their performance in life.
I mean this literally. If you grew up playing video games, you probably remember online multiplayer as a casual fun thing to do, where the level of competition varied depending on the server you loaded into.
At some point in the past 15 years, the concept of RANKED MODE was introduced, and now every single player can be aware of their skill level relative to every other player at all times. So if you care about skill level at all, you have to play your hardest at all times to keep your rating up. Casual play is still allowed but you don't get the luxury of just hopping to a different server that's more your speed. People will judge you for your ranking constantly.
Or if you're a streamer, you are fully aware of how many viewers you're attracting at all times. So is everyone else. Only the top 1% break more than a hundred at a time.
Dating with the Apps makes things easy for that top 10-20% of males, and throws challenges to the rest of the men. A man now is judged against every male in a 20 mile radius rather than just the guys in his high school.
Top paying jobs draw applicants from across the entire planet, which means they get Extremely selective and have every more stringent criteria in terms of the degrees, experience, and candidates they accept.
These are sometimes gated by degree requirements, which brings me to the competition to get into these schools.
And of course the rampant cheating and adderal abuse that occurs for those trying to maintain high ranks.
If you go to a good school and get good grades you can walk into one of those top-tier jobs, but this is only applicable to the tippy-top, and everyone is generally aware of their status well before they graduate. If they get the right degree or know the right people they can be basically guaranteed access to elite social circles. Otherwise... may as well resign yourself to lifelong mediocrity.
Power law distributions rule EVERYTHING around you if you're younger and haven't had decades of time to cement your status and build a pile of wealth. And yes, this has almost always been true, but now its simply a known fact of life for the Zoomers. Its the air they breathe, the water they swim in. Every activity they could possibly participate in is subject to a panopticon of algorithms that will rank their performance and often publish it for easy observation, and they are surrounded by peers who are competing as hard as possible to not be left behind.
So perhaps the reason they decline to throw themselves at jobs or dating or developing GRIT is because the entire social environment is simply not conducive to chasing these endeavors unless you are one of those PSYCHOPATHS who doesn't mind abusing stimulants, exploiting every social loophole you can find, committing light fraud, and otherwise sacrificing health and happiness to actually compete for the most desirable positions out there.
anti_dan
1hr ago
#4 isn't a scalable option, if at all. You'd have to know the person's name and address, which RL would not know when a random group of 10 enters RL. Then you have to have the capacity to file the complaint. The average RL manager might be just competent enough to do that. B serve the defendants (expensive) then you still have to win that case. This takes the time of the manager, plus whatever employee who has to testify. And the employee probably has moved on from the job by then.
Plus cops don't get involved in people not paying small claims fees most of the time. We're at best some sort of hold on a person's bank account, and I suspect most of these red lobster fellows prefer the currency exchange and pillows.
Yeah, Blockbuster's mutant power to collapse local property values was a little on the nose.
It might be one of the earliest examples of existing franchises cramming left wing politics in for critical acclaim and foundation funding at the cost of becoming incoherent. Supposedly the mutant adventures thing was floundering before they decided to become a civil rights comic.
bonsaii
1hr ago
It's also somewhat interesting that X-Men is very (US) liberal coded. In contrast to typical US liberal positions favoring collective safety over individual freedom (stronger support for lockdowns, gun control), X-Men is rather explicitly opposed to government infringement on the liberties of mutants to use their powers freely. Ideas like the Mutant Registration Act or mutant power suppressive collars are often cast in a strongly negative light. All while Cyclops sneezing hard enough to drop his glasses is more dangerous than any gun.
I just found the quote I'd misremembered as being by either Niven or Pournelle, but which turns out to be from "The Killing Star".
I won't dump the whole thing because most people will be familiar with it, but it's the one that ends with "There is no policeman. There is no way out. And the night never ends."
You can tell it's from 1995 because the worst imaginable cosmic horror is to be stuck in NYC's Central Park after dark.
So the idea has been bouncing around in science fiction for decades, rather than being slept on.
sliders1234
1hr ago
Don’t know. I think it’s a curious question that no one has written a book on. I mean even the food pyramid seems heavily disagreed with and no one really has a solution on a healthy diet.
Why do people myself included strongly prefer a Chick-fil-a chicken sandwich to a pop-eyes chicken sandwich? I don’t see any fairly evident evolutionary advantage to having that strong of preference but people will drive quite far to get Chick-fil-a versus Popeyes.
It does not seem to me that degree of optimization in our genes makes any sense.
A lot of food adds a status or ritualistic element that has some explanatory power. Like Miami is considered a bad food city but their prices are high and they combine a bit of night club in a lot of them.
This is a good example
https://www.thepoke.com/2024/05/17/1000-dollar-steak-crazy-clip/
But that’s showing your date you have such a degree of resources you can pay 20 other humans to present your food to them.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
I think it says something about us that everyone is so interested in aliens, to the point where any kind of speculative "maybe it's aliens" generates insane media hype. And people are willing to support millions of government research funds for this stuff, even though it's unlikely to ever pay off and has no practical purpose, and most people don't generally support that sort of impractical academic research.
This is not an original idea but- are "aliens" taking the place of religion in our society? It feels more "scientific" even though it's still mostly just faith, and you can choose whatever sort of alien-belief suits you best, and hang out with other believers to create art about it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
It does rather undermine international law if America cheers and applauds when the ICC issues arrest warrants for non members in Russia and calls for arrests against non-members China and Iran, while threatening sanctions and force should Israelis or Americans be targeted. Then they complain about double standards!
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
turned into Phyllis Schafer
Did you mean Phyllis Schlafly here? Because googling "Phyllis Schafer" gives me a landscape painter.
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
That’s why I’ve always thought that the X-Men was a bad metaphor for prejudice. Say what you will about any particular ethnic/social/sexual group, a single one of them can’t usually annihilate an entire city block unaided.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
I've read some of Saberhagen's books. And yeah, before it was "The Dark Forest Hypothesis" it was "The Berzerker Hypothesis" so he should get some credit for coming up with it first. But they're very silly space opera books, lots of action with basically no deep thinking. They're not meant to be taken too seriously, so I can see how people slept on the idea.
Still, as crazy as it sounds, there is a certain elegance to the idea- it solves the "it only takes one" problem. Like, maybe most aliens just don't want to expand, or don't want to build megastructures, or are using tech that is somehow hidden from us. That's all fine, but you'd think there'd be at least one similar to us so that we could detect it easily. But in the same light, maybe 99.99% of aliens are peaceful, but there's just that one group of assholes who built berzerker probes and wiped out everyone else (maybe including themselves).
pigeonburger
1hr ago
I don't think it's about shame, but it's absolutely about incentives. In a society that reflects you, where everyone has had a similar upbringing to yours, probably looks somewhat like you, has gone through roughly the same events as you, you can reasonably expect your neighbor to act approximately like you.
So in that kind of society, the incentive to be the kind of person who returns a wallet is that you get to live in a society that would likely return your wallet too.
If your society is not just atomized, but also doesn't reflect you, the link between the action and the incentive is harder to see, and by that token becomes less strong.
jkf
2hr ago
"People don't drink that much anymore" seems like a far more plausible explaination -- tables eating free shrimp all night is no problem if they are also getting hammered on $12 Crantinis or whatnot. I could believe that R.L. was slow to update their business model to take this into account I suppose.
So I've been watching X-Men '97 and started wondering what opinions here would be on how to deal with mutants if those kinds of powers started to show up in random people. Would you support registration? Something more serious? Nothing at all? Is it really ok to let someone with the destructive capabilities of a nuclear bomb just walk around, or board a plane, etc.?
Still find it hilarious that people went through years of debate over whether antifa/BLM was being treated with kids' gloves as regime foot soldiers. And now the whole thing's been put to rest by a conflict between antifa and a group with even more political power behind them.
The government-backed mob gets to do whatever they want, and the people they do it to get rounded up and arrested. And I say this as someone with literally zero sympathy for the Hamas supporters it's happening to this time: analyzing how "crime" is used as an extrajudicial enforcement tool by the total liberal state is more important than arguing for a side.
I should do a book report on Schmidt's Theory of The Partisan, because nobody else has come close to describing how regime-backed mob violence works as a political force.
There's been so many examples in the past month. "Just stop oil" being escorted by police while their victims are arrested, Portland antifa burning a dozen police cars without any sign of an investigation happening (the website they used to claim responsibility is still online!), and now this.
It all reminds me of the old story from the UN human rights investigator in Yugoslavia, hearing stories about how the police would come round to confiscate guns from a town to clear the way for "unaffiliated" militias to commit massacres the next day. And of course the closely related Existential Comics vision of a "police-free" society ruled by leftist gangs..
Is this the future of ethnic and religious conflict in modern states?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
Yes I am very proud of that move. I am realizing I resemble a lot of people I didn't know were out there. I am about Patton's age apparently.
SSCReader
2hr ago
Some black women and black men are in tension but its highly variable. My wife's friends range from those who refuse to date out, to a very small minority who are Black women divest aligned. But that is still very much the minority.
Indeed one of the main arguments of BWD is that most black women are too lenient on and too supportive of black men.
White progressives are in my experience aware of tensions (given feminism they pretty much have to be) between black women and men, they just feel it is not their place to talk about it. That's different than not knowing or caring.
ApplesauceIrishCream
2hr ago
That seems like a perfectly sensible statement to me. The ICC is looking to extend its reach beyond its remit, and is getting slapped down by the US (again). Nothing is new here.
The ICC (International Criminal Court) is a treaty-based organization created by the Rome Statute. The ratifying powers have agreed to submit to the authority of the Court in certain cases, specified by the Statute. Neither the US nor Israel are parties to the Rome Statute, which means that the ICC has no authority over their governments or citizens. The ICC is attempting (again) to go after non-parties, in order to create the precedent that it has powers beyond the text of its treaty--in essence, it's trying to create customary international law using Israel as a point of leverage. The real target is American officials in the future, so current American officials are quite interested in shutting down the ICC's overreach at the outset, as they have many times in the past.
(If you follow the wiki-link to the Rome Statute, you'll see a color-coded map that is less helpful than it appears. Only a state that has ratified a treaty, and not withdrawn that ratification, is a full party to a treaty. A "signatory" is not a party. In the US context, the American President may sign any treaty he likes, but the US is not bound to treat the treaty as law unless and until the Senate ratifies the treaty by a 2/3 vote--one of the very few supermajority votes required by the Constitution itself. Many other countries have similar mechanisms.)
Bearded blond guys with deer horns on their heads must be cleaning up... Hang on, I could be that guy!
Pity the deer around here have even more pitiful racks than the women do. Might have to go on a hunting trip out east.
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