domain:abc.net.au
Today is Eurovision! For you Americans this is like the Super Bowl, only with power ballads, ABBA nostalgia, residuals of nationalism and flamboyant glittery gayness. The European song contest is often watched ironically in a party setting with family or friends, we print out sheets of the participants and give them points and have a competition who can make the most snarky comment, but deep down under the snark, irony and sarcasm we love it!
This year it is sadly very very political, because of the participation of Israel. The songs name was named „October rain“ but had to be changed, together with lyrics, to remove references of the Hamas attack. So there isn’t plausible deniability that it is an unpolitical love song.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/eurovision-israel-eden-golan-protests-gaza-palestine-072826896.html
He said the majority of the crowd were booing and shouting 'free Palestine' with very few people cheering for her. Mina said: "I could see people arguing in the standing section, and people were shouting at others that were booing to shut up."
For television the sound engineers did amplify applause and mute the boos which also gives a nice discussion about truth and Orwell etc. It will be very interesting what sound from the audience will be broadcast at the final show today.
Surprisingly (or not) Israel doesn’t have only haters, their betting odds improved massively, they actually have a chance to win the contest!
https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1788690154133012637
Italian TV accidentally revealed their televoting percentages during tonight's #Eurovision semi-final, according to which the Israeli 🇮🇱 song is leading by 40%, with a huge margin ahead of all others.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
5d ago
Lol now TheMotte is getting into trump assassination territory....Should I stop coming here and start watching fox news?
VinoVeritas
15hr ago
It's like we have become allergic to actual news or something. Why is every topic here now a snoozefest.
Here are a few suggestions. Pick up the ball and go
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Conventional war in Eastern Europe
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Genocide in Middle East
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Unprecedented invasion of America
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Unsustainable price increases in Western world
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Canadian retroactive 'Hate Speech' laws
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Lady flashing her tits at the Times Square portal
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Lomez getting doxxed and turning out to be handsome, but also Jewish
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Milei singing in a superhero costume
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Eurovision being even more Satanic and odd than usual
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Lizzo at the Met gala looking like a chicken nugget and being physically carried around by white attendants
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GME and AMC popped 100% again for some reason
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JK Rowling might get arrested for calling a man a man
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Literally just pick a topic that's not obtuse guys. We're all collectively losing the reason to visit.
laxam
5d ago
It has been quite the journey over the last decade seeing this general space, in its various homes, drift from being a place for a variety of dissenters, idle imaginers, original thinkers, and malcontents to being just another space for Trumpers to get together and gripe about everyone but themselves.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5d ago
I’m gonna agree here. We haven’t had a situation like this since the civil war — both sides absolutely believe that the nation will be in grave danger if their guy doesn’t win. They’re not going to simply cower in the corner and do nothing when they believe that the country’s future is in the balance. There’s a not insignificant number of people on the left who believe that Trump is Hitler with a bad combover, and likewise a substantial number or people on the right who believe that Biden is a Mao or Stalin. Furthermore, the belief on both sides that the election is being manipulated in various ways creates even more tension as the losers can absolutely believe that the president in question cheated.
Botond173
2d ago
Thesis (not a terribly original one, but here it goes) as food for thought / discussion fodder:
The online proliferation of the man vs bear in the woods meme, plus similar earlier social media phenomena with a feminist message are, in reality, generalized and simplified expressions of women's overall frustration and latent anger directed at the loss of manhood initiation rituals that characterizes modern post-patriarchal atomized societies; namely, the current social reality is that adolescent boys and young single men are no longer vetted by fathers, elders, brothers, uncles and other pre-vetted eligible men before they are, in effect, released into their wider social circle from the family environment, which makes it rather difficult and risky for single women to separate eligible men from ineligible men.
The Brooklyn District Attorney's website reports:
“Ghost guns are a threat to New Yorkers everywhere, and my Office is working tirelessly with our partners in law enforcement to stop their proliferation. Today’s sentence should send a message to anyone who, like this defendant, would try to evade critically important background checks and registration requirements to manufacture and stockpile these dangerous weapons. Every ghost gun we take off the street is a win for public safety.”
The District Attorney identified the defendant as Dexter Taylor, 53, of Bushwick, Brooklyn. He was sentenced today by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Abena Darkeh to 10 years in prison. He was convicted of two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon; three counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon; five counts of criminal possession of a firearm; unlawful possession of pistol ammunition; and prohibition on unfinished frames or receivers on April 16, 2024, following a jury trial.
Taylor, also known as CarbonMike, was both a CTRL-Pew 3d printing enthusiast and a New Yorker, a combination that Didn't Go Well.
The specific charges and sentencing are complex, but if I'm reading matters correctly, almost all sentences run concurrently, so the headline charge about ghost guns, like the charges about possession of pistol ammunition and so on, are kinda swamped by a ten-year sentence for 'assault weapons' and for 'owning five firearms'. There are a few border issues on the text of the statutes, but there's not a ton to argue on whether Taylor complied with these statutes.
((Not least of all because many are vague or broad enough that it's very much up to the local DA to make the decision anyway.))
There's a lot to be debated about whether the laws are constitutional, but not much chance that it matters. The New York Assault Weapons Ban has been the target of prolonged lawfare since before Bruen, with the FPC currently supporting Lane after the state was getting good enough reception in Vanchoff v James about lacking credible threats of prosecution, and that's the case with the stance furthest along. Other statutes, like possession of ammunition or "ammunition feeding devices" without a matching pistol permit, are difficult to write cases to challenge before enforcement at all. Even if the statutes for each of the longer sentences are overturned, bail pending appeal is extremely unlikely. Taylor will have served most if not all of his sentence first, especially given the glacial pace that courts have set for these matters (cfe Duncan).
Taylor also makes the argument that he did not have a fair day in court, and while almost every defendant does that to some extent, his argument is unusually compelling. No few gunnies finding a pull quote from the judge allegedly claiming that "Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York." but the gameplay about objections, if honestly stated, is as bad or worse. (I'm unable to find a direct trial transcript.).
Also doesn't matter. There is a right to an impartial judge, but this mostly covers matters like giant campaign donations or hating an entire nationality or literally copying text from a party's submissions, rather than just figuratively being on the prosecutor's side. Even assuming Taylor's (and his lawyer's) summary is accurate and complete, the appeals courts don't care that lower courts hate people accused of making guns.
In some ways, Taylor might be the ideal test case: nothing in the visible court records or DA chest-beating show nefarious intent like violent personal history or planned mass shooting or intent to resell (and New York law places a presumption on multiple possession as for sale), he (was) traditionally employed, he credibly claims that he's never fired a single one of the guns, and at 52, he's aged out of the various high-criminal-risk age brackets. To beat the HBDers to the punch, he's even visibly a minority.
((To beat the HBDers with a stick, if we're framing absolutely everything as part of the progressive stack, I think there's strong evidence that the real top of the stack is whatever matches the politics today in a far more direct manner than mere race.))
Of course, the Brooklyn DA brought the case, knowing that. The judge acted like this, in this case, knowing that. And no matter how dim you might think they are, they're winning, and this know what it takes to win. Whether that's because the courts punt on serious cases because defendants fail to present long evidence of futile requests, because they credibly believe that Taylor's not Perfect Enough for the courts to actually handle or for various gun rights orgs to fund, or because even if they're wrong they'll never suffer for it, doesn't really matter. It's possible that Brooklyn DA took the case because Taylor's social media made it easier to prove, it might be that we're only gonna hear about this case out of many because of said social media, and it doesn't really matter.
There's a lot of ways to snark, in "What's the penalty for being late?" fashion, about how Taylor's non-violent noncompliance with a law has gotten a much longer sentence than nutjobs who were separately violent, or a comparable sentence to a man who literally burned another man to death on the pyre of an Approved Cause. And that's not entirely fair, because the federal system doesn't have parole and New York does, and anyway there's a million different squiggly little variables about the crimes and sentences, and there's nowhere near enough cases to make a deep statistical analysis even if I wanted to try. Gun control advocates will certainly quibble, at the edges, about whether this is really 'non-violent non-violent', since there's always the possibility of later bad acts or theft or loss or mental break.
And Taylor ain't dead yet, despite an (alleged) no-knock raid. The actuarials put decent odds on him even seeing the light of day as a free man again, parole or no. Unlike Mr. Lee, had Taylor expressed his dislike of current law enforcement with a bit what the ATF calls a destructive device through a bit of what I call a broken window, the odds would not be looking so good. But there's no magic court case, here, and no golden BB. This isn't even the strawman of a scifi writer drawing up villains who just want their laws as threats to hang over innocent men. If you are ruled by people who hate you, giving puppy-dog eyes and saying this is just a paperwork crime and no one was hurt won't buy you a cup of coffee before you get absolutely reamed in all the least fun ways, and contra a once-prolific-now-banned poster here, everyone who cares about this stuff is ruled by men who hate them.
This is what table stakes looks like.
Lewis2
5d ago
a substantial number or people on the right who believe that Biden is a Mao or Stalin
Does anyone on the right actually believe that? I only ever hear complaints that Biden is old, senile, and obviously being puppeted around by various other figures in his administration. In other words, he is personally weak and pathetic, something even their worst detractors can’t say about Stalin and Mao.
DradisPing
5d ago
Stalin and Mao are definitely the wrong examples. However he's not acting like a normal democratic leader. Openly launching multiple criminal trials against a political opponent leading up to an election is something even Putin hasn't done.
somedude
5d ago
Imagine what the forum would look like if every progressive who flamed out and tearfully quit after losing an argument didn't do that.
Well that is a pretty uncharitable way to put things. I'm to the right of most of my social circle but I'm to the left of whatever this place is turning into. People just get sick of getting downvoted and unable to post in real time, eventually they say something rude and get banned or they say "fuck it" and leave.
When the conversation turns to being worried about trump picking his VP based on possible assassination, putting guns in holes as a generational family gun stash in your back yard, "powers that be" conspiring to eliminate people like you, heavily downvoting someone pointing out having sex with blackout drunk people is probably wrong, being afraid to leave your red state for fear of being locked up for defending yourself, practicing religion harder being the only answer to societal ills, women only being truly happy barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen....I mean the parody starts to write itself at some point.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
3d ago
Could American social progressivism be (in part) an intelligence operation to create “defense-in-depth” against America’s weak points, akin to the cybersecurity or military strategy?
In cybersecurity, valuable assets are hyper-protected with multiple layers of security, so that if any layer fails the others may still hold. The idea being that the assets are so important to defend and attacks could come at any time (and with novel stratagem), so it is reasonable to over-defend it in many different ways. In the military usage, layers of physical defense are established so that one may retreat into another defense upon an assault, ensuring reduced losses and longer periods of defending. Another somewhat ancillary idea is “fencing the Torah” in Judaism. It is so important not to violate a Torah prohibition that “fences” are established to make even the chance violation impossible. Eg, the the rule to not even pick up a tool lest you accidentally use it which would violate the sabbath prohibition.
America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines. In order to hyper-defend from that risk, you implement a social operation involving defense-in-depth where the majority constituents must necessarily deny their own identity and engage in ritual ”sacrifices” upon the altar of plurality (from Trayvon to George Floyd). This explains even the whitification of Asians: once they become significant enough to possibly lead to Balkan problems, you enforce the same depotentiation. Notably, it is not enough of a social defense to merely pledge allegiance to plurality, as that hardly changes someone’s psychology. You must actually make it a social ideal so that it is promoted and normalized especially among the young potential rebels, and that is in fact what we see — those most at risk for any potential rebellion are coerced into a Kaczynskian “system’s neatest trick” procedure where their very rebellion helps to solidify state security. Why allow “Antifa” their own zone in Portland? Because when they are doing that they are doing nothing serious. Along the same lines, see how valuable transgenders have been as a layer of defense: millions of conservatives hours are spent arguing against something that has a surprising level of state support, and millions of progressive hours are spent defending something that is historically and intuitively off-putting. Those are hours that are not spent on something actually valuable; transgender stuff is simply the most outer layer of defense against a possible Balkan threat, and if conservatives win there’s nothing valuable lost from a state security perspective.
As outlandish as it seems, I think this is possible. It would be par for the course for how intel agencies behaved historically — well before they had enormous databases of information and AI to help them decide state hyper-protection. We could imagine the team of hundreds of some thousands employed toward this objective at some intel agency: “how do we protect against the most cataclysmic threat for America?” They look at the cost and benefit with history in mind, with WWII’s staggering death toll and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in mind.
non_radical_centrist
1d ago
I have a somewhat alternate theory to the standard HBD concept, one that may not be original but I haven't seen before, although I haven't delved the HBD forums much.
The standard HBD argument is that different races have different IQs, and that is the primary factor leads to all sorts of different outcomes. Instead of IQ causing so many differences, which I think might be true but is a lesser factor, I think different races are domesticated to different degrees. I read the book The Goodness Paradox about a year ago, and it was about how while humans kill each other in vastly larger scales than any other animal, we're also much less likely to try to tear each other's faces off in the woods than any other animal. The author first divides violence into two categories: reactive and pre-mediated. Sometimes violence is pre-planned and calculated, like a sniper watching carefully for the moment to take the shot. Other violence is reactive, like someone punches you or even just insults your mother and you hit back before you even think. The author presents a simple answer: That there is a relatively straightforward evolutionary process through which animals are domesticated, and domestication leads to much lower rates of reactive violence. The mechanism is that the animal is essentially forever childlike mentally. But not just mentally, also physically; that's why dogs look like wolf cubs, and domesticated foxes have converged on similar traits like floppy ears.
I think black people are similar, in that they are a more "adult" human. They tend to be physically bigger and stronger. I often see black women called masculine, and that is the explanation for why they're less attractive and do worse on dating apps- but I think it makes more sense to call them more adult(whatever the opposite of neotony is). Black women are well known for large secondary sexual characterics like big ass and breasts, that's hardly masculine. And east Asian women by contrast, a race widely considered more on the high end of genetics by HBDers, tend to be more neotonous, with smaller secondary characteristics and young looking faces. And their men tend to be smaller and less physically strong. So I think it's quite plausible that that domestication mechanism, while probably not the sole factor, is a sizeable one in making black people have such higher rates of crime and east asians such lower rates of crime.
jacksonjules
1d ago
I am a big believer in the idea of revealed preferences—which is fancy econspeak for “Watch what people do, not what they say.”
I also used to be a lurker in various manosphere-adjacent internet subcultures. I just couldn’t help myself: the combination of surprisingly erudite references to Ancient Greek philosophy & evolutionary psychology mixed with highschool-lockerroom levels of pent-up sexual frustration made for some quality threads. And the one thing the manosphere loved to do—above all else—was complain about Western women: how third-wave feminism ruined them, how modern women are masculinized, hypergamous, promiscuous, etc. etc.
Despite all of the complaining, I couldn’t help but notice that the men of the manosphere were devoting the best years of their lives to analyzing how to sleep with the exact people they claimed to despise. They would create Excel spreadsheets for every date that they went on so they could track whether getting the Rocky Road flavor instead of the chocolate correlated with getting to third base at the end of the night. They would write multi-thousand-word “field reports”, detailing in excruciating and anthropological detail, the outcome of their most recent seduction attempt. They would pick up new hobbies, change jobs, buy new clothes—all to get laid.
So on the one hand: their explicit beliefs were that Western women are the worse. But their revealed preferences were that the validation of Western women is the single most important and valuable thing in the world.
Granted, even back then, there were a couple oddballs who would advocate for foreign women, praising their femininity and their “obedience”. There would be a thread like “Struggling with date-closing a flaky HB-9” and a foreign-bro—serene and graceful among the herd of sexually-frustrated chumps—would talk about how stress-free their life was with their Thai wife who cooks and cleans and knows not to talk too much when the Redzone is on. But these men seemed to be a minority. Most of the men of the manosphere were young urban professionals trying to win the affections of their young urban co-eds.
And when I looked at the young couples I knew in real life, most were of similar social class, intelligence, and broad cultural background. They had met in college or on OKCupid or through a friend of a friend. There certainly didn’t seem to be an abundance of men booking roundtrip flights to Caracas to seduce the Latina minx of their dreams.
Maybe all of that talk about “third-wave feminism” was overblown?
But in the past year or so, I’ve been seeing threads pop up on reddit about “passport bros”. A passport bro is a man from a first-world country who goes abroad to look for women, believing foreign women to be more traditional and conservative. It even has a page on Know Your Meme.
Suddenly, the old manosphere advice had become a Discourse-worthy phenomenon.
A lot can be said about the rise of the passport bro: how it's yet another indicator of the decay of our social values, how it represents the arbitraging of sexual market value differentials between Western men and their third-world counterparts, even how passport bros are not something entirely new, going by other names like 'sex tourists' in the past.
But I want to focus on one particular element that has caught my attention: how black the phenomenon of the passport bro is.
An important aspect of the passport bro movement is that not only do they praise foreign women, they dump heavily on black women. From black-manosphere.org:
Ever since going viral at the end of last year, the Passport Bros have become a topic of fierce debate throughout the online Black community… The argument as articulated by my opponent above, is that the Passport Bros, being part and parcel with the Black Manosphere, are dumping on Black women writ large in order to justify their reasoning for leaving the country in search for love.
Before researching for this post, I wasn’t even aware that the Black Manosphere was a thing. Like most Very Online people, if you asked me to draw a caricatured sketch of a denizen of the manosphere, he would invariably be white: perhaps of a Charlottesville, vaguely-Appalachian phenotype. For one, the text-based internet just feels white. Another reason is that the manosphere is closely associated with other rightwing internet subcultures where white nationalism is frequently celebrated by way of dank anuran memes. The surprising diversity of the Internet Right continues.
I’m not interested in wading into the debate about whether or not the passport bros are justified in their behavior. There are many threads about passport bros and all of the arguments are the same. Detractors of passport bros accuse them of being predatory incels who will get scammed out of a green card. Supporters of passport bros call them heroes who are brave for fighting the Leviathan that is third-wave feminism. (The internet is so tiring sometimes.)
But unfortunately, we can’t just ignore the passport bros either. The story of the last sixty years of America is that if you want a glimpse of the future of White America, there is no better place to look than Black America. Starting in the 60s, there were a set of broad changes—both legally and culturally—in American gender relations that are lumped under the umbrella of “second-wave feminism”. As Arctotherium explained in “The Baby Boom”:
[S]econd wave feminism thoroughly redefined marriage. It shifted from a patriarchal institution in which husbands had social (and some legal, though this was mostly dismantled by first wave feminism) power over their wives to one in which wives had effective legal power over the husbands (through the mechanisms of feminist family courts, greatly expanded definitions of abuse, and the replacement of the marriage model of the family with the child support model), and from a lifelong contract to one dissolvable at will (though the institution of no-fault divorce). In JD Unwin’s terms, we shift from a regime of absolute monogamy to one of modified monogamy. This had obvious and immediate consequences on marriage rates.
These changes hit Black America first and hardest. Black people, whose natural inclinations are adverse to lifelong monogamy, quickly devolved back into their ancestral mating patterns when released from the straitjacket of traditional Christian morality. White people, being more “genetically monogamous”, didn’t react immediately to the change in incentive structure. But fastforward to the present and marriage is increasingly less common among the lower classes, now being reserved for upper-middle and upper class families who have the foresight, the ability to delay gratification, and the cultural upbringing to know the importance of raising children in a traditional nuclear family.
It’s interesting that passport bros tend to be black because, theoretically, black men should have an advantage in the dating market. Black men, due to higher muscularity, higher extroversion, and other “traits”, are viewed as the most masculine of the races. This bears out in interracial dating statistics where BMWF couples (excuse the porn-inspired abbreviation—it’s just efficient and I don’t feel like reinventing the wheel here) are well over-represented compared to WMBF couples who are under-represented. And this is not even accounting for the fact that if, instead of looking at stable couples, you look at people’s most recent sexual encounter, the disparity grows even further.
It will be interesting to see if this trend spreads to White America or if it stays confined to Tiktok and Black Twitter.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
Player-Driven Emergence in LLM-Driven Game Narrative (and accompanying discussion on HN):
We explore how interaction with large language models (LLMs) can give rise to emergent behaviors, empowering players to participate in the evolution of game narratives. Our testbed is a text-adventure game in which players attempt to solve a mystery under a fixed narrative premise, but can freely interact with non-player characters generated by GPT-4, a large language model. We recruit 28 gamers to play the game and use GPT-4 to automatically convert the game logs into a node-graph representing the narrative in the player's gameplay. We find that through their interactions with the non-deterministic behavior of the LLM, players are able to discover interesting new emergent nodes that were not a part of the original narrative but have potential for being fun and engaging. Players that created the most emergent nodes tended to be those that often enjoy games that facilitate discovery, exploration and experimentation.
Recently there’s been increasing interest in the integration of LLMs and video games. With currently available models, creating an entire living virtual world with an unlimited number of realistic side quests, characters, and interactions is now a “mere” engineering challenge. No more pre-scripted dialogue trees; instead you can simply converse with NPCs in natural language with no limitations (or at least that’s the promise, as models become increasingly efficient).
This is another step towards what appears to be the natural endpoint of the technological development of video games: the recreation of life in replica, a replica at one’s mercy, an infinite horizon of choice without responsibility or constraint.
For a long time I thought that video games were the necessary next step in a development that could be described as “spiritual”. Games are largely an amalgamation of prior media - literature, painting, music, film - but they do introduce a new element (or at least they develop this element to previously undreamed of heights), and that is the element of interactivity, i.e. the ability to make a choice, to participate as the player in the creation of the art and to make the art be something other than what it would have been in your absence. I conceived of interactivity as the raw material out of which a new aesthetic language would be fashioned which would bring us closer to realizing the promise of art. But I have since begun to grow uneasy with this way of thinking.
In some sense I was too seduced by the possibility of finding something “new”, anything new, to detect the longstanding inconsistencies in my own thought. From a young age I always preferred linear, narrative-driven games as opposed to open world sandboxes. My favorite games were games that were devoid of choice, games that robbed you of the ability to make a choice. I found the idea of multiple endings for a story to be distasteful. Yes, you can choose to save this character or not, you can choose to join the bad guys or not - but now that we’ve had our fun imagining all the what-if scenarios, can you tell me what really happened? Do you have the courage to tell me? Do you have the strength of vision to see the truth, the singular truth?
Choice is antithetical to the aesthetic sacrifice. The artist sacrifices all alternate possibilities to distinguish one thing and one thing alone, to say - this one, and no others! No matter how lowly a thing it is - a dirtied article of clothing (as in Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes), a completely ordinary sequence of events on a day in Dublin in the year 1904 (as in Joyce’s Ulysses) - he is now stuck with it. This is where he signs his name and stakes his wager, for better or worse. It is this seemingly inexplicable devotion to one law, one vision, one truth, that makes possible any kind of experience that may be called aesthetic. An artist who hedges his bets and does not accept the risk that accompanies his act inspires no confidence in us.
The receiver of the message too enters into a sacrifice, insofar as the message may be incomprehensible or even dangerous to him. In this way an oath is forged between artist and audience. The failure to foreclose the horizon of possibility is the deferral of the signing of the bond.
Is there any great work that would be improved by the addition of choice, by the addition of alternate possibilities? Would Plato’s account of the trial and death of Socrates be better if there were a possibility of Socrates simply... not dying? If Callicles’s warning to Socrates, that his devotion to the “effeminate” subject of philosophy would be his downfall, might not come to pass? If Socrates might be able to eloquently defend himself at trial and avoid conviction? If he might escape from prison before his execution?
The deferral of the inevitable here would be nothing more than the refusal to establish the founding myth of philosophy, the myth that links philosophy with the sign of death. The internal law of Plato’s drama is clear (and the law of historical fidelity is irrelevant): Socrates must die. This is not to say that one is forbidden from creating new works in which new possibilities are imagined. Only that the unity of the original work should remain undisturbed in its repose.
Or you can just like, have fun with GTA6 when it integrates LLM-generated missions, I guess. Whatever.
What Big Teeth You Have!
Identity Politics and the Russian Revolution
1. Introduction
The Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. To be woke, by that definition, is to be a noble thing indeed: a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. This is the ethos of a fairy tale hero like Robin Hood, or Prince Charming, or the valiant huntsman who vanquishes the big bad wolf and saves Little Red Riding Hood and her sick, old grandma. Not coincidentally, it has also been the stated agenda of every mass murdering tyrant in modern history.
The propaganda of Soviet communism was rife with woke sounding platitudes. For example,
- Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others. [Stalin: Interview with Roy Howard, 1936]
- The Social Democrats' ideal should [be] the tribune of the people, which is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects. [Lenin (1902): What is to be Done?]
- They [blacks] have the full right to self-determination when they so desire and we will support and defend them with all the means at our disposal in the conquest of this right, the same as we defend all oppressed peoples. [Trotsky (1933): The Negro Question in America]
The problem is that Soviet communism did not really accomplish any of those things. What it did accomplish was to murder some 20 million of people [source], and to terrorize hundreds of millions more over multiple generations. The people of the Russian empire, including many of the soon-to-be victims of Soviet terror, for the most part did not see this coming. As Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote,
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. [The Gulag Archipelago]
I invite you to consider the scenes Solzhenitsyn describes above, imagine them as vividly as you can, and multiply by 20 million. Next, imagine the continuous, lifelong fear that you could be next no matter what you do, and that you will be next if you say publicly certain things that you know to be true; multiply that by 300 million (over three generations), and add to the total. If you can get your head around that quantity of human suffering and loss, then you have grasped the magnitude of the evil of Soviet Communism.
As merciless and malevolent as Soviet communism was, how could the Russian people, especially the intelligentsia, have failed to apprehend its true nature until it was too late? First, the Bolshevik revolutionaries didn't say they were merciless and malevolent; quite the opposite! Who could be against their stated agenda of fighting tyranny no matter what class of the people it affects? or self-determination for historically marginalized peoples? or abolishing oppression of some by others? One of the lessons of the Russian Revolution -- along with the histories of Naziism and of Chinese communism which followed later in the same century -- is that when the leaders of a political movement expound the lofty mission of defending the downtrodden and looking out for the little guy, that may not be what they are actually up to. Often, indeed, they are up to the very opposite, and it is not always easy to tell.
On the other hand, it is not outright impossible to tell. Tyrannical movements may wear sheep's clothing, but they cannot hide their fangs. Hallmarks of tyranny, which are often visible even in the early stages of tyrannical movements, include identity politics, censorship, thuggery, and authoritarianism. Soviet communism exhibited these hallmarks from its beginnings, as did the Naziism in Germany and communism in China. This essay will discuss the visible role of identity politics in the early stages of the communist movement in Russia.
2. Identity Politics in Soviet Russia
Grandmother, what big teeth you have! [Little Red Riding Hood]
The chief intellectual and political leader of the Russian communist revolution was a one Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known today as Vladimir Lenin. Like the thinker Karl Marx before him, the doer Lenin often spoke in terms of "class enemies": not individuals who had exploited other individuals, but kinds of people who had historically exploited other kinds of people. For example, in 1905, closely following the fashion of Marx, Lenin wrote:
Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists. [Lenin (1905): Socialism and Religion]
For Lenin and the Bolshevik party he led, the exploiting class, namely the bourgeoisie, consisted of (1) the aristocracy, (2) kulaks (farmers who owned at least 8 acres of land), (3) industrialists, and (4) ideological enemies -- meaning basically any white-collar worker who was not a communist. Anyone denounced as falling into one of these four categories would eventually be marked for persecution and often death in the USSR, regardless of their personal history as an alleged exploiter.
It is true that working class Russians of Lenin's time often lived in grinding poverty, that many aristocrats and industrialists enriched themselves at the expense of that working class, and that these same aristocrats and industrialists often exhibited depraved indifference to the wellbeing of their fellow men. At the same time, it is true that not all landowners and industrialists were equally exploitative, and that some dealt more honestly and charitably with their fellow men than most workers would have done in the same shoes. Moreover, it is also true, especially of the kulaks (successful peasant farmers), that many earned their way, partly or wholly, into their positions of relative wealth by their own diligence and foresight. But the communist picture of the world washes over the whole story of individual difference in merit, conduct, or culpability. Lenin's narrative of class struggle conveniently drew a circle around everyone who owned land or other valuables, labeling them as "parasites" and "class exploiters". This in turn licensed the indiscriminate looting and confiscation of those valuables -- at first by rioting thugs and later by the communist government -- not only with a clear conscience, but with a pretext of righteous indignation. So one signal that was missed by the Russian intelligentsia was this: when an ideology labels a group of people wholesale as historical class exploiters -- be it the Jews, the Tootsies, or the bourgeoisie -- this telegraphs a predatory intent toward that group, which may remain largely hidden unless and until the predators gather enough strength to act on it.
In 1916, just before coming to power, Lenin's tone was confrontational, but not as overtly malicious as it would later become. On the eve of his successful coup d'etat, Lenin wrote that violence would probably be necessary to bring about the revolution, but that it might not, and that in some sense he hoped it would not:
Peaceful surrender of power by the bourgeoisie is possible, if it is convinced that resistance is hopeless and if it prefers to save its skin. It is much more likely, of course, that even in small states socialism will not be achieved without civil war, and for that reason the only program of international Social-Democracy must be recognition of civil war, though violence is, of course, alien to our ideals. [Lenin (1916): A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism]
In hindsight the last clause (violence is alien to our ideals) was a complete lie. Within two months of assuming to power, Lenin was taking a far more menacing tone:
No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies! All of them are of the same brood—the spawn of capitalism. [Lenin (1917): How to Organize Competition]
We now know that Lenin's talk of war and death was not just talk. After seizing control of the government, the Bolsheviks instituted the Cheka, the first incarnation of the Soviet secret police. The immediate business of the Cheka was to carry out the Red Terror, which would take the lives of tens of thousands of allegedly "bourgeois" Russian civilians. This terror campaign was consciously named and patterned after the infamous Reign of Terror that had followed the French Revolution in the late 18'th century.
As important as the extermination of class enemies (Lenin's word), another job of the Cheka was to systematically confiscate the belongings of all "enemies of the people" -- where an enemy of the people, again, was anyone with enough property to be worth stealing. There were some obstacles to achieving this objective: gold, jewels, and works of art, and other valuables could be carefully hidden and it often were. Indeed, the stories of men, women, and children desperately hiding themselves and anything of owned of value is one of the most poignant chapters in the story of the revolution. But the Cheka soon found a solution to that problem, which became part of their standard playbook: (1) kidnap a member of the bourgeois offender's family, (2) guess how much the family could pay and ask it in ransom, and (3) collect whatever payment the family could come up with, or kill the captive, or both. Thousands of the deaths in the Red Terror were the results of this scheme.
Martin Latsis, one of the men appointed to oversee the Cheka, wrote explicitly of the role of identity politics in the Red Terror:
We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look in materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession. These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror. [Latsis (1918), Red Terror, no 1]
Publicly, Lenin stated that Latsis's methods were excessive and that he talked too much about collective punishment -- but my opinion is that Lenin simply didn't want the quiet part said out loud. Lenin never removed Latsis from his position, and Latsis's views, as reflected in the quotation above, essentially governed the tactics of the Cheka under Lenin's command. The Red Terror was the first modern experiment in social justice -- carried out under the same pretext embraced by the contemporary social justice movement (historical class exploitation), and with indiscriminate cruelty that was scarcely hinted at before the fact.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
I have long said that the eurovision song contest needs to be imported to the USA. We need an outlet for regionalist jingoism and dumb arguing and snark. We need something to get politics notionally out of the news. I need another opportunity to insistently call Taylor Swift 'Travis Kelce's girlfriend' because football is more notable.
Ditto6687
2d ago
I've asked my gf about this.
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Women seem to assume that "in the forest" means "without social consequences, ever". Meaning, they suspect that some significant portion of men do not actually have an innate problem with rape and violence towards women, they simply do not do it most of the time out of fear.
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She claimed that many women who responded with "bear" were victims of violent rape who literally would rather die than be raped.
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She also claimed that most wild animals leave you alone if you are not a threat.
I'm pretty sure (3) does not mean you have a high chance of surviving a bear encounter. I would shit my pants and start running away the moment the bear started approaching me, make myself a threat, and get caught and mauled.
And while this may sound crass, I think getting mauled by a bear is worse than rape. I would rather be raped as a man that get mauled by a bear.
2D3D
2d ago
SEX AND THE BIG CITY
or
THE LAST UNINVADEABLE THIRD SPACE
In the digital age of escorts on demand and cheap flights to indulge in sex tourism, why would adult entertainment venues that offer sex-adjacent services persist, when one can get your rocks off for a much cheaper price? In observed practice within Asia, these venues exist not for booze and girls, but for establishing membership in the brotherhood: you are in our world now, and the initiation is sin.
This came about after I made a post about the adult entertainment scene in Singapore in a necro'ed thread when I saw @Pasha complain about the lack of visible seediness in one of Singapores premier red light districts. Details about the mechanics therein can be found here for context and to provide a primer for my below.
https://www.themotte.org/post/981/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-28/211124?context=8#context
So what is this brotherhood mentioned up top? Basically it can be summed up as 'I need to know you will not fuck me over when push comes to shove'. This is perhaps foreign to professionalised pseudoacademics where people are best experienced as minimizeable windows on a zoom call, but in professions relating to physical goods and services, human trust is a shorthand for task success: better to get shit done with someone you know has your back than to waste tims searching for the MBA approved 'best fit'.
This is not limited to physical tradespeople like laborers and soldiers, but includes B2B sales professionals, commodity traders, shipbrokers, construction/civil engineering. In these environments, decision makers responsible for multi million dollar trades and projects care less about saving a rounding errors worth of marginal savings in favor of knowing who to yell at when shit goes tits up.
In the KTVs and Indian Dance Clubs and Thai Discos in Singapore, the patrons are often groups of men, usually professionals in the same cluster. Oil traders and refinery site managers, construction project managers and engineers with their lawyers and bankers, shipbrokers with agents. The booze and the women show up, the mens wallets open up, but more importantly their mouths open too. Industry gossip is adjacent to insider activity, and being part of these networks gives incredible insight into the movements and activities of not just the people in that group you are with but those groups they are part of as well. By joining or initiating these activities, an opportunity is presented to quickly establish a bond with the other men present, to immediately let it he known that you can be called upon when needed. There is incredible power to be had when you are one of the first names on the tips of powerful peoples fingers, and for many punters a successful night is not when your dick gets wet but when you get the phone number of a useful contact.
So why the sex revue? Well it is because of the steady decline of third spaces that have been invaded by credentialed professionals, especially women, who dislike legacy networks that are impenetrable. There are legit professional reasons for this, such as contravening of KYC protocols or tender processes, but for the most part the dislike of legacy networks stems from jealousy. There are plenty of women who have successfully entered halls of power, especially in Thailand and Hong Kong where female scions are groomed for succession by their fathers, but for the most part a lack of trust in these women to bother with handshake agreements leads to their exclusion from networks of power. Thus, the networks must be dismantled as much as possible, starting with removing the exclusivity of their assembly grounds. Male only social clubs have steadily been eroded to be female inclusive, from the Knights of Columbus to Freemasons, and other threads have highlighted youth organizations being the starting point of this rot, with the Boy Scouts being mixed gender while girl scouts remain female exclusive. Whatever organizational benefit there is to opening up the genders, it does mean there are less third spaces for men to discuss the ongoings of power.
Therefore, the last venue is the strip club, the sauna, the banya, the KTV. The men say they are going there to be sexual degenerates, and many often are purely socially retarded men seeking base human interactions, but the true sustenance of these places is being the third place that women have zero interest in demeaning themselves to enter. That alone will ensure their continued presence even as the world gets continually anonymized into the homogenous digital soup: the last bastions of human connections will concentrate under the pressure, hardening its borders to continual external forces till they are fully impenetrable.
Great post. The simple truth is that unless…
- Trump wins
- The GOP get a trifecta with a very comfortable senate majority
- They abolish the filibuster
- Trump is suddenly hugely more competent at wrangling Congress
…there will be no better deal than this one. That is to say that even if Trump wins, the chance of a better border control bill is minimal at best. If this hill had passed under Trump, he would have signed it. Of course it wouldn’t, because there’s no way Democrats would vote for it in that case.
There is no way this isn’t a mega black pill. But the ultimate black pill is that it’s really all about Trump. There is no ‘national conservative’ movement. There is no ‘Trumpist’ party with a coherent, European-style nationalist policy platform. There’s a Trump personality cult with very little genuine infrastructure behind it, sitting on top of the carcass of the post-Tea Party GOP, which itself is a hollowed-out shell of what it once was even ten years ago. The fact that Trump was personally able to kill this bill is testament to the extent to which service to his personal whims and (perceived) self-interest are now the sole metric by which congressional Republicans are and wish to be judged.
There is no plan, and if there is, Trump doesn’t even seem committed to following it. Sure, I’ll still vote for him, that’s the reality of a two-party system. But no Trump voter should be under any illusions that his second term won’t be him attempting some (likely unsuccessful) crusade against those he believes have wronged him (personally) while behind the scenes very little changes.
“Buh buh buh this doesn’t deport 10/12/15 million illegals”. Yeah, and neither will anything that Donald Trump can, let alone will, accomplish in office. Moreover, if by some stroke of luck this bill had passed and Trump won and decided to become competent, it would afford him MORE power to reduce inflows and impose ZERO meaningful restrictions on additional actions by the president or congress to increase deportations.
Moreover, 50,000 additional immigration visas a year is nothing compared to the current numbers of legal and illegal immigrants, so focusing on this was especially retarded.
Few things make me seethe more than what happened with this bill. As many on the right acknowledge, immigration is the only thing that matters. It is the central issue upon which every other issue ultimately depends. Even a minor shift in the right direction, even something that delays demographic destiny by a few more years buys the right more time. Every single measure that reduces total inflows must pass. Unless, apparently, it might make it a little harder for Donald Trump to win the presidency and accomplish nothing, again.
Recursive_Enlightenment
5d ago
Putting a 77-year-old in prison unjustly (if that is indeed what is being attempted) is on par with assassinating him.
OverexertIvyClosure
2d ago
Has anyone successfully paid a third party to run a dating profile? I really thought this would be a well-established market but I can only find a handful of extremely sketchy looking services I don't trust at all.
I am a loser who photographs poorly and I'm not good at talking to girls online, but I have a fair bit of money, so I'd pretty happily trade someone who's good at this a few hundred dollars per actual date who shows up (subject to sane constraints--no pros, not homeless girls, no one too old to have kids, not morbidly obese, etc.). I'd rather kill myself then ever swipe again, but I tried for six months to meet girls offline and got nowhere...so it's tinder or die alone like a pathetic loser.
Representing Ireland is a (sigh) non-binary singer-songwriter calling herself* (sigh) Bambie Thug. Her decision to participate was controversial, with many figures in Ireland's music scene likening her to a scab worker for not honouring the Eurovision boycott in protest of Israel's participation. She has given multiple interviews defending herself and insisting that she is acting in accordance with her values. I believe I read somewhere that she claimed she was originally planning to wear a dress with the word "ceasefire" or something to that effect emblazoned on it in ogham (am ancient Irish script) but the Eurovision people made her wear something else.
*Don't care.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
6d ago
What are the circumstances such that the "powers that be" would be able to assassinate Trump but not his VP? Especially if Dems take back the House, as predicted. Assassinating both of them would likely mean President Hakeem Jeffries.
Conservative Mike Cernovich (1.2M followers) Tweeted "Trump needs a VP that will make him assassination proof. Anyone saying otherwise has no understanding of the time we are in. Tim Scott as VP? Trump's survivability will drop to zero. It's incredible to me that more don't understand this."
How seriously should Trump take such a threat, and how seriously does Trump take such a threat? Yes, the powers-that-be truly hate Trump and if he became president and had Scott as VP many would rejoice at Trump's death. But by what mechanism might they kill him? Obviously, it creates horrible incentives if Trump believes the threat and it causes him to consider someone such as Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Sarah Palin for his VP nominee. In sort-of support of Cernovich, part of the reason that Biden might be sticking with Harris as VP is to reduce the chances he gets removed from office for senility.
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