domain:alexberenson.substack.com
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
16hr ago
Nit: when did our definition of socialism become so drowned-down? Is anything that's not free (free-as-in-captured) market capitalism now considered socialism? The only "means of production" that Mamdani is suggesting be owned publicly are a few grocery stores, no? That's hardly a "seizure" of means.
Is FoxNews blocking the term DemSoc from taking off in the US?
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
16hr ago
- Government solves problem
- Rent seekers are inconvenienced, lobbyists are deployed
- Problem comes back with a vengeance
Many such cases.
HereAndGone
16hr ago
So the Bezos-Sanchez wedding took place, and by all accounts it was exactly as overblown, tacky, and vulgar as anyone's little heart could desire. I haven't watched any of it myself, so why am I mentioning it in the Culture War thread?
Well, because Tina Brown commented on it, and it's at least tangential because we've often discussed on here "what do women want/dating apps/men get the rough end of the stick in divorce/other such delightful War of the Sexes fodder".
I get the impression that Tina wasn't on the guest list so there may be an element of sour grapes here, but in general I think I agree. Jeff Bezos, fourth richest man in the world (depending on the day and the ranking) could have pretty much any woman in the world he wanted. So, who did he blow up his marriage for and before we get into the complaining about his wife taking him to the cleaners, it was he who caused the divorce (actually, divorces because his inamorata was also married at the time)?
The woman next door, a triumph of grinding determination to keep her figure through diet, exercise, and plastic surgery. She managed to find a classy wedding dress so kudos for that, as well as showing off the results of all that effort.
Back to Tina's commentary:
Now that the 55- year-old bride Sánchez has proved that landing the fourth richest man in the world requires the permanent display of breasts like genetically modified grapefruit and behemoth buttocks bursting from a leopard-print thong bikini, she’s exuberantly and unapologetically shown that the route to power and glory for women hasn't changed since the first Venetian Republic.
Ouch. But also, yes. What am I trying to say here? Mostly that the next time there's yet another post about reversing the fertility decline by putting obstacles in the way of women going to higher education, steering them to marrying early, and good old traditional 'the man is the head of the house and women should work to please their husband and that includes sex whenever and however he wants it', remember this. Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs (though once again, I have to salute her commitment to starving and exercising in order to keep a taut muscle tone). It's not much good to criticise women for being shallow in the dating market when the fruits of success are to dress like this and hook your own billionaire.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
14hr ago
Close enough to socialism.
I guess this is the issue lol. Point-by-point, why none of this is particularly radical in most societies that people don't consider "socialist":
rent freeze
Rent freezes are controversial cart-before-the-horse band-aid solution to a problem that may or may not be caused NIMBYism. The proposed rent freeze is for rent-stabilized tenants, a specific class of asset. So hopefully you weren't trying to paint this as a city-wide rent freeze, which would never pass anyway. But also not specifically socialist, at all. Very much no means of production being seized.
state built housing
Hardly uniquely socialist. They used to be called "projects". Also controversial because it tends to have extremely high per-unit costs vs. market rent ROI, but that may or may not be attributable to not being able to just build housing, and more to needing to be state-of-the-art energy efficient, fully ADA compliant, up-to-code, etc. etc.
Better than "company towns" imo.
free public transport
Another exaggeration. The free part is for buses only. As someone who's taken a lot of public transit in many different cities, buses are frequently used by more blue collar / "barista" type workers, whereas light rail is more often used by professionals. It's a pragmatically progressive (in the sense of: tax those who can afford it) solution to the problem of rising fare prices, imo.
Also: no one bats an eye about free public roads. Damage to roads is quadratic to the weight of the load: we all subsidize the trailer truck shipping industry with our gas prices and taxes that build our roads. This lowers prices at every checkout, at the cost of an anemic rail system.
state owned grocery stores
Obviously an experimental / pilot project. Curious to see if there's a nice food distribution middle ground between "soup kitchen" and "Whole Foods" that a city government can occupy. An ideal implementation of this looks more like a 7-days-a-week farmer's market to me than a crumbling Aldi with yellowed fluorescent lights and grimey 90s tiles.
free childcare
Are grade school, middle school, and high school not "free childcare"?
The most ambitious and least achievable point in his agenda. To someone completely removed from the situation, I think expanding pre-K and early childhood programs is the more pragmatic way to go about effecting change - but that doesn't pop on a web page meant to excite people about an election campaign.
all of this paid by wishful thinking and unicorn dust.
Along with everything else the government has spent money on. At least these things are attempting to have a positive impact on working class families as opposed to ammunition for a genocide on the other side of the world.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
11hr ago
If our core criterion for epithets was "one time said something in a speech" then we would be quite exhausted by the amount of "fascist", "Nazi", "communist", "socialist", etc. being thrown around.
Come to think of it, I am quite exhausted by the amount those terms are being thrown around. Maybe we shouldn't use "one time said something in a speech" as a criterion? Maybe we should judge people by what they're campaigning on, and their actions in office?
Edit:
he has called himself a socialist
Does he call himself a socialist now? I see "Democratic Socialist" on his webpage, which is distinct from other types of socialism (e.g. the flavors of authoritarian socialism that are the boogeymen).
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
15hr ago
Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly bloating the elder care apparatus, whereas socialism at the state + local level mostly means bribing connected nonprofits and unions to provide various crappy services that don't really work.
Neither of these things have anything to do with the ownership of the means of production.
I feel like we've fallen into the trap of using "socialism" as a shorthand for "stupid liberal policy I hate" in the same way the "far right" now means "conservative people with ideas I really dislike"
HaroldWilson
15hr ago
I think it's a perfectly coherent view - the point is that she (Sanchez) is condemning herself (and in a small way all women) to infantilisation. Getting fake tits is essentially indulging and perpetuating male chauvinism - she should be satisfied with her own personhood without having to surgically alter herself in order to please men. The broader point has been a feminist theme for centuries.
Wollstonecraft:
Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. Men have various employments and pursuits which engage their attention, and give a character to the opening mind; but women, confined to one, and having their thoughts constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves, seldom extend their views beyond the triumph of the hour. But were their understanding once emancipated from the slavery to which the pride and sensuality of man and their short-sighted desire, like that of dominion in tyrants, of present sway, has subjected them, we should probably read of their weaknesses with surprise.
You would better serve yourself and your arguments by affirming rather than downplaying their leftism. I'll also here not take the euphemism, socialism is communism's beachhead in capitalism.
Redistribution of wealth is communist. It cuts both ways, your list includes instances where the primary beneficiaries are corporations, the policies remain communist.
I guess this is the issue lol. Point-by-point, why none of this is particularly radical in most societies that people don't consider "socialist":
Communists, as masters of duplicitous rhetoric, have done an expectedly superb job propagandizing leftist policy objectives as "common sense" and especially as "not communist" or "not socialist." They are not considered radical today because it is the way of things, but those fears named in opposition to, e.g. compulsory education, have been justified. We can't go back, so there's not a real use in invoking either their past appraisal as radical or their current view as normal.
But also not specifically socialist, at all. Very much no means of production being seized.
I would agree directionally, in very strict terms. The concept of regulation is not inherently redistributive, and even in practice I don't know that many examples are redistributive, but they do often impair the market from competition and there corporations benefit.
Another exaggeration. The free part is for buses only. As someone who's taken a lot of public transit in many different cities, buses are frequently used by more blue collar / "barista" type workers, whereas light rail is more often used by professionals. It's a pragmatically progressive (in the sense of: tax those who can afford it) solution to the problem of rising fare prices, imo.
Strictly redistributive. Communist.
Obviously an experimental / pilot project. Curious to see if there's a nice food distribution middle ground between "soup kitchen" and "Whole Foods" that a city government can occupy. An ideal implementation of this looks more like a 7-days-a-week farmer's market to me than a crumbling Aldi with yellowed fluorescent lights and grimey 90s tiles.
The experiment was run for decades and it failed. Communist.
Are grade school, middle school, and high school not "free childcare"?
Compulsory education is indeed free childcare, and it is the perfect example of the myriad failures of ideology in communism:
- That inequality in outcome can be solved through money; here school funding
- That effective systems create effective people; here that good schools make good students
- That a bureaucracy can be trusted with considerable power; here that teachers are broadly competent and judicious
- That the system will fulfill its primary objective rather than be co-opted or brought to heel by superior agents; here a minor rehashing of #2, but specifically that the school exists to educate
Compulsory education as the public school doesn't actually exist to educate. It educates incidentally, just as a little less incidentally it incorporates students into the cult of the state. Its function is redistributing wealth to the bourgeoise so they don't have to either pay for childcare, accommodate flexible hours for their laborers, or worst of all, have to deal with a 50% smaller workforce and the massive leverage the laborers would gain in negotiations. All to say, the classic example of bad actors prospering from exploiting the system, here capitalism's maybe third-worst practice.
Where I would say today communist ideology has strength is cynicism toward the bourgeoise, where it fails is not showing enough, as even with the means of production seized, the bourgeoise are not made but born, agnostic to actually being of class "bourgeoise," and a communist system will inevitably be controlled by them. The best system accounts for their chronic existence and allows them to flourish in dozens of lanes of competition with each other, while exerting just enough regulation to prevent their exploitation of the commons. Communism reduces that competition to a single lane, and for that it will necessarily and always fail.
Nothing would help the working class more than our economy returning to one where only a single parent needs to draw a salary to support their spouse and children. To that end, anything Mamdani does that increases or keeps static the supply of labor will have harms outweighing all other benefits, and that's even granting that all of his other policies achieve their stated goals.
hanikrummihundursvin
12hr ago
My recently divorced coworker begs to differ.
HereAndGone
14hr ago
Oh, this is the new Gilded Age. New money and self-made men, and breaking into the upper classes (elite or not, hard to tell) by sheer shedloads of wonga. It's very funny - if these weren't the guys also steering the direction of the global economy and society which affects all the rest of us, and they've got the tastes and inclinations of when they were seventeen and that hot girl in high school didn't even look twice at them. Now Jeff is living the dream of having that hot girl finally on his arm and in his bed.
Forty years too late, maybe, but he went through a transformation in his early fifties so he can afford to buy more than a sports car to fit his new buff image, and the hottie girlfriend and megayacht is all part of that.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
17hr ago
If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution.
Unfortunately, at least in the US, that's not going to work, for 13/52 reasons.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18hr ago
First, will it change the outcome? So you ban the big free-to-view US sites. Does this mean that teens will go back to jerking off to pictures of women in swimsuits, as god intended?
They'll hopefully move onto the boorus or hentai or whatever, where at least no real people suffer. It's not exactly educational content but it doesn't weirdly push incest and it's harder to confuse with reality. As far as I'm concerned, killing pornhub would be an unalloyed good. It's not like there's any prosocial value like Fedex or whoever else.
Furthermore, I've read a fair few stories about their business practices that really do resemble the mustache-twirling villain. The verification system they have from producers doesn't seem very effective. From the NYT:
Indeed, one private memo acknowledged that videos with apparent child sexual abuse had been viewed 684 million times before being removed.
Even though it's not possible to crack down on internet pornography, it is at least possible to wipe out the biggest and most obnoxious offenders and rake in a bit of cash too. You're confusing my 'loot and burn' gunboat action with nation-building.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
9hr ago
As in, "whoa, you're telling me she hasn't had a job since college, AND she never leaves her room, AND she has severe social anxiety? Now that's what I'm talkin' about, I want that".
Translation: she's got a cute face, and while she might be a bit of a fixer-upper that's perfect for someone "gifted" with enough autism/slight sociopathy (which is why it's a 4chan thing) to obviate most of the things that [we believe] would make someone that anxious in the first place. There is an element of "might not be self-aware enough/self-doubting enough to not entirely know her full value/potential, so will be available at bargain-bin social prices", or perhaps a bit of a savior complex, but that's underwritten by the implicit co-operation you get from knowing that their actually leaving their room/inviting you into their room is the hardest step.
Could you imagine any woman saying "you know I really just want an [cute but] unemployed loser, that's what really gets me going"?
This is the cougar effect; women being sexually attracted to men with... uh, growth potential. It's kind of a trans-gender behavior (their occasional pursuit of illegally-young men is too- there's very little biological reason for them to take on that kind of risk, especially compared to men for whom that behavior is evolutionary-biologically imperative), though nobody will ever fully recognize it as such.
hanikrummihundursvin
9hr ago
I understand the point but in relation to Jeff Bezos you are not explaining how having a wife is easier than having paid assistants do all of the things that need to be done.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
13hr ago
I'm not saying he isn't a socialist.
I'm saying "Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly , whereas socialism at the state + local level mostly means ."
Is not a very accurate way to describe socialism.
To add a similar thought, "bloating the elder care apparatus" is pretty much a bi-partisan issue in the West.
Going further, "bribing connected nonprofits and unions to provide various crappy services that don't really work" is very true for liberals, and so is the opposite "bribing connected companies to provide various crappy services that don't really work" for the conservative side.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
17hr ago
It’s not going to work in the US because the ship has simply sailed. We’re in far too deep.
The most we can do is try to give the US a smooth controlled landing and encourage European countries to not go down the same path.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
5hr ago
But the women who have this preference do not subjectively experience it as "I enjoy looking pretty for men." They experience it as a kind of endogenous preference for a certain mode of dress or appearance.
If this is a statement of your interiority, I value your anecdote because I think off-the-cuff anecdotes are often much more valuable than any amount of social “science.”
But if it’s not a description if your interior experience, on what are you basing this statement?
My experience is that women will be generally pretty willing to admit privately, to the right man, that they do enjoy looking pretty not for “men” in general (and perhaps that differentiation between “men” and “some men” is the whole sticking point), but for the sort of man they want to attract. The fact that this generally parses out to her looking pretty to a large majority of men is just one of those things that she mentally glides over.
However, it also seems to be a fairly recent turn of events that there is some mysterious source of social pressure that causes a significant number of women, as a class, to then turn around and publicly deny that they are trying to look pretty for any man at all.
I have personally been in relationships with women who were quite capable of holding both these thoughts in their head and didn’t see them as conflicting, which feels like it’s a point both for and against the vibes-based interiority you are describing. Another point against it might be that women 40, 50, 70 years ago seemed to be much more willing to say that they wanted to look good for a man or their man. Discounting for the moment the idea that women of either era are lying, it seems strange that internal understanding would regress to vibes.
To use a spear counterpart example, men who become absolute freak beasts at the gym are very willing to admit that they are doing it to compete with other men, out of a desire to move up a hierarchical ladder. Past a certain point, looking attractive to women becomes secondary to them. But they are not experiencing an endogenous preference, they are very clear about their actions being driven by a desire to exceed the men they see as their competitors.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7hr ago
He has a space program, I don't believe it's beyond his power to get someone to manage dinner parties easily, or at least more easily than a massive 80 million dollar wedding. If anyone is elite human capital, it's bezos. He can learn!
Nobody goes that far as a matter of convenience. Bezos is not marrying out of convenience, there must be some deeper reason.
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
8hr ago
All wives are trophy wives
hanikrummihundursvin
9hr ago
I don't think men will be eating a lot of take-out sandwiches if they are billionaires and can afford a private chef.
No_one
10hr ago
Mackenzie looks odd. She's got a very long neck, her hips are narrow. If she had a nice figure like Sanchez, even a less bouncy natural one and a proportional neck she'd be pretty attractive, but she's really a scarecrow.
hanikrummihundursvin
12hr ago
I think there are two moving parts here: Jeff's marriage and the average dudes marriage. I don't think these two are comparable. And I doubt Bezos doesn't have a bunch of personal assistants and potentially prostitutes.
To that extent the argument that monogamy is a huge time saver does not apply to someone who is in the position to outsource the work. Nor would it apply to Bezos like it would some average guy.
So I'd agree that the average guy is better of with a wife to the extent he can not achieve his wants without one, but that's not saying much in my mind.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
15hr ago
DemsRRealRacist
It is true that there is a set of people in the United States who believe in inate differences between races and want to see those differences reflected in policy. It is also true that the overlap between that set and the set of people who regularly vote Republican is minimal at best.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
16hr ago
I went to a smaller school that often had take-home essays and even exams (up to the professors, more common in smaller honors classes). While cheating might have happened somewhat, it is possible IMO to instill a culture that expects people to follow the rules even when they aren't being watched closely. But it was occasionally enforced by expelling violators.
Let's talk socialism and the NYC mayoral race. Apparently the All-in podcast people think it's a sweeping wave that will drown out Progress with a capital P. London, Vienna, Chicago, and of course the California cities have already had socialist mayors for a while. Why not New York?
Honestly despite being a "conservative" I am broadly quite sympathetic to socialist arguments. I do think free markets actually kind of suck, inasmuch as we can even have free markets. Personally I think free markets don't really exist when you take into account that power abhors a vacuum, but they are a fiction with extremely high utility to create material goods.
Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class. It's weary writing and thinking about politics when even the best laid plans seem to inevitably just get ground down by the dumbest things. I can completely understand why young folks want to just socialize everything.
Not that I agree with them, but hey, sometimes I wish I were still naive enough to think socialism or any -ism could fix the ills of our society. I sadly am not that optimistic.
That being said, I don't think society is unfixable. I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.
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