domain:alexberenson.substack.com
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
16hr ago
You're not saying anything that hasn't been said for years - since before we left reddit.
The median poster here is not a MAGA Trump supporter, but a disaffected former liberal. Actual MAGAs, or even old-school Republicans/conservatives, are almost certainly a minority, albeit a vocal one. We have some (former) alt-righties and DRs and a few actual fascists, and a few lefties. But most are still somewhere in the center and only appear "right wing" simply because, as others have pointed out, we don't ban people for supporting Trump or preaching white supremacy or complaining about Jews or saying trans women are men, and thus we tend to attract people who really want to talk about those things.
Honestly, what would you like? More left-leaning opinions? Bring in some more (higher quality, non-trollish) left-leaning posters. Maybe you are right and we're doomed to eventually become a Nazi bar. But you aren't helping when most of your contributions read like shitposts too.
By the way, there is quite a dedicated core of left-wing posters who consistently downvote and report every right-wing post, and vice versa. Despite people claiming they don't want an echo chamber, empirically quite a few people do want an echo chamber. So we're always fighting against that too.
There should be a requirement that people who act as if the ruling class is only a useful category when it is legible explain what they think people ought to do in political regimes where the ruling class is incentivized to be as illegible as possible.
Because I don't really see "not talk about the ruling class" as an acceptable answer to that question. And we happen to live in one such illegible regime.
These demands for specificity displace the object level debate into another debate about the true nature of the ruling class, in which dissidents usually disagree with each other, and thus serves the interests of the ruling class by keeping opponents divided. Since that rhetoric serves an interest, I find it suspect.
In a sense it is in effect completely irrelevant what the nature of the ruling class is, what matters is who is their friend, and who is their enemy. And that can be easily divined without needing to elucidate the specifics of who they are down to a list of names.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
17hr ago
I’m not even sure reporting an NDA as a legal expense is misreporting it…
It's ambiguous enough that I feel certain that had Trump declared it as a campaign expense, we'd see the exact same case with the prosecution making the claim that no, paying someone to keep quiet should not be recorded as a campaign expense.
What are you reading? In an effort to improve my German, I'm reading Zweig's 'Die Welt von Gestern', The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European. I rarely read non-fiction, but this book, which is a kind of autobiography but is really a deeply melancholy memory of the collapse of the European civilization that preceded the first world war and its aftermath, is extraordinary. If you have any interest in what Europe was like at the end of the 'long 19th century', in the belle epoque that preceded 1914, you must read it.
Zweig began his life in 1882 as a bourgeois Austrian Jew whose father had made a fortune in textiles. He became one of the most widely-translated authors of the early 20th century. He submitted the draft of this book on the eve of his suicide, in exile in Brazil, some sixty years later, when the second world war seemed like the final end, the stamping out, of the German civilization he had cherished and to which he was devoted.
The book covers the rapid and interesting developments in wealthy Austrian society in the closing decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th. Zweig was well-connected; he meets Herzl as his literary editor at a newspaper, encounters Rathenau in 1922 on the eve of his assassination, petitions (successfully!) Mussolini to spare the life of a close Italian friend. He travels to America and India, but he spends most of his time in the bourgois, cosmopolitan circles of pre- and inter-war Europe, describing extensively the customs, sexual morality, education, worldview and politics of many of the people(s) he meets.
His writing about the rise of Hitler is interesting, how he was largely written off by many people in cultured Viennese circles. And his thoughts on what caused the frantic, bizarre culture deterioriation and degeneracy of postwar urban Germany and Austria, particularly after 1922, have value too. But what sticks with me is something else; Zweig killed himself out of despair (he had money and was famous and safe in exile) for Europe. For the last thirty years of his life he had seen the world he knew get worse, again and again, consistently and almost without respite. He writes about how the quality of products declined, how the train schedules worsened, the quality of everything reduces. How the masses were whipped up into rage. And then you return to the exquisite summer of 1914, where it seemed as if all of that - the nightmare of the following decades - was impossible, because things had been improving for so long.
When I looked up modern Anglophone writing about Zweig I was saddened that there had been some pathetic articles published during the Trump presidency that took his writing about fascism out of context. Zweig was largely apolitical - about politics as diverse as zionism, socialism and fascism - and Hitler himself praised and attended the performance of one of his operas in 1935. The value in his narrative is not about politics, it is about how faint the possibility of the loss of peace and prosperity can seem before it happens, how fragile civilization is, how savage war makes men, how it empties culture, and how things can really get worse, much worse, for a very very long time before they get better.
somedude
20hr 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.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
13hr ago
the people and organizations that wield power are fragmented and frequently at odds
This is entirely compatible with the concept of the ruling class and I should say necessary to understand the reasons of formation and collapse of the category. Everyone is indeed always at odds, a ruling class is a group of people that are sufficiently organized that their internal squabbles don't jeopardize domination of their external enemies.
Let us consider a salient and inarguable example of a ruling class, the Soviet nomenklatura.
No sane student of history would deny that these people had vicious internal fights, often to the death. But then nobody would deny either that they were a ruling class. They formed an organized minority of people who ruled over the majority of Soviet population.
Insofar as they were ready to favor their social circle over the population at large, they held power, and it slipped from their fingers at the precise exact time that their inner divisions became more powerful than the pact they held against the population. In the 1991 Yanayev coup, when fellow party members stopped being friends, and became enemies.
All rhetoric serves an interest.
In some abstract sense, perhaps. And everything is also political in that sense. But it dissolves the category into uselessness. Rather, as I think you're saying, refusing to front a list of names serves the interest of dissidents. Which is also suspect.
Fair enough, but I then don't think we ought to take sides if we want do do a descriptive inquiry. Talking about the ruling class, whatever it is, and the ruling class, a specific one; are both valid and useful in my view.
The motives of the "powers that be" to assassinate Trump are not something anyone can examine because there is no clear reference.
I guess we agree in the sense that we then ought to bring up different models of the establishment and its behavior, and compare them against the situation. I think that's productive and we should cultivate a number of such models if we want to understand the world as it is.
I simply want to prevent us from the demand of fronting a perfect prediction model for something that is desperately trying not to be observed.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
18hr ago
People just get sick of getting downvoted and unable to post in real time
You've been shitposting here from day one, dude.
somedude
16hr ago
You are nowhere near a good enough poster to adopt this tone and be taken seriously.
Case in point, last week you made statements referring to stay-at-home mothers as breeding machines and house servants. It was the kind of thing that would get updoots on most of Reddit, but you were clearly and utterly unprepared for any sort of pushback.
When asked what it was about an average menial job outside the home that elevates a woman from the status of machine or servant you completely imploded. I personally love the upvotes and downvotes here. They tell me interesting things, like how your claim that I was putting words in your mouth persuaded absolutely no one.
You aren't some hero fighting the good fight, you're an /r/atheism midwit who's out of his league.
fishtwanger
19hr ago
This is probably not what you want, but "Remnants of the Precursors" is a MoO1 adaptation with a number of flavor-retaining enhancements. I think the largest galaxy I ever played for a while was something like 50,000 stars and 500 empires, but it's possible to go up to over 500,000 stars. The game interface can be made to work crudely at that scale (but it's open source and allows mods), and at some point your machine may grind to a halt between turns, once there are enough large empires. But it was a fascinating experience.
It felt like I was an orchestra conductor, shifting the pressure and direction of expansion. And it was very much in keeping with the grabby aliens theory: my empire was surrounded by an ever-expanding wave of scouts, followed by a wave of colony ships and guard fleets, and here and there actual battle fleets, all pulsing out from factory worlds on the rim of the developed core, with dozens of turns before they get close enough to the front to even be pointed at an enemy. (The deep core of my empire being too far away, and thus devoted to research and taxation.) I no longer cared about individual ships, it was more about how best to allocate the ones that had arrived at the frontline waypoints this year. When a new serious threat emerged, I had to do some long term balancing, figuring out what technologies and resource base they had, whether my fleets could defeat it in sufficient numbers or if I'd need a new design, which of my existing ship designs could afford to be scrapped, whether all my other ongoing conflicts could stand the loss of a class of ship, and so forth.
Eventually, as I expanded along the spiral arm of a galaxy and into the body and reached the dense core, I found that I was too late. Instead of being 1-2 orders of magnitude more powerful than the empires I'd been encountering, a Meklar empire had taken over the core and had expanded so much that, although I still had a slight tech lead (Psilon pride), my size graphs were indistinguishable from 0. Alas, then the game started taking too long between turns on my 10-year-old laptop. But it's been a number of years, and the game engine has improved substantially since then.
cjet79
23hr ago
I always see these reading threads and think y'all read such heavy stuff. I read for fun. Not a serious book in sight.
I just caught up in Markets and Multiverses. A young lady dies. Her soul gets pulled along in a big soul ocean to a galaxy sized ship floating in the soul ocean. The ship is called "the market". Its a place for re-incarnators to stop by and buy powers between reincarnations. But the ship has been taken over and all the reincarnators seem to have been killed, and the enemies are still lurking around. She meets some new people from different worlds who also just got reincarnated. Together they Reincarnate and try to build up their powers.
I'm currently subscribed to patreons for some stories I enjoy. Like Millennial Mage (A Slice of Life, Progression Fantasy) and The Path of Ascension. I recently got to read the end of Ar'Kendrithyst which is one of the longest completed stories ever at 4.39 million words. I'm also caught up on The Stubborn Skill-Grinder In A Time Loop which is the perfect level of trashy dumb progression fantasy for me. I'm waiting for Chaotic Craftsman Worships The Cube and Unintended Cultivator - A Xianxia-inspired Cultivation Novel to build up more of a chapter backlog for me to start reading them again.
I like action, powerful main characters that kick ass, and fantasy worlds that mostly don't resemble our world at all. I prefer stories with low levels of moral ambiguity. Made up fantasy systems and rules are fun. Betrayal is not fun. Horrors of war are not fun. Politics is boring.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
Judging by precedent, studiously ignoring them seems to be a popular option.
TIRM
12hr ago
Also Hillary funded the Steele dossier and falsely reported it as legal expenses. I notice she wasn't prosecuted in criminal court for doing that.
somedude
16hr ago
Well that is a pretty uncharitable way to put things.
Anyone who's been around long enough could name names. "I lost an argument about HBD and the mods won't ban anyone for it, time to make a dramatic post about how everyone is Nazis and I quit" was a meme for quite a while in the Reddit days.
roystgnr
19hr ago
Or even "anti-a-fraction-of-anti-Trumpers"? I think Trump was a depressingly sub-par president, but I'm still able to appreciate that the right way to beat him is "nominate someone much better", not "insist that prostitute hush money is clearly a campaign expense and prosecute misreporting it".
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
19hr ago
The sentiment you describe reminds me of the Talleyrand quote:
He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life. This is the century that has shaped all the conquering arms against this elusive adversary called boredom. Love, Poetry, Music, Theatre, Painting, Architecture, Court, Salons, Parks and Gardens, Gastronomy, Letters, Arts, Science, all contributed to the satisfaction of physical appetites, intellectual and even moral refinement of all pleasures, all the elegance and all the pleasures. The existence was so well filled that if the seventeenth century was the Great Age of glories, the eighteenth was that of indigestion.
Recursive_Enlightenment
20hr ago
My understanding is that a low level government worker who did what Trump did with classified documents would go to jail, but an important politician (e.g. Hillary, Joe Biden, Sandy Berger) likely wouldn't.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
22hr ago
If you don't like the commentary, yes, go do something else. And I did not read the OP as suggesting or advocating for assassination, which makes your pot-shot seem disingenuous and contrived.
Your constant low-effort sneers and pointless posts (and self-admitted drunkposting) are becoming very annoying, and if you don't stop, you're going to get banned.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
23hr ago
If they've detected specific transaction patterns highly predictive of possible mass shootings, why is it wrong to acknowledge that?
This is facile. There is no specific transaction pattern highly predictive of mass shootings, in that it is both selective and specific; there can't be, because there are way too few mass shootings. The way they get "highly predictive" is by reversing the order and noting things like "gee, looks like nearly all mass shooters purchased guns recently", maybe we should check out anyone who buys a gun?
Felagund
6hr ago
Sorry, I kind of have to agree with ArjinFerman—at least, it would be disastrous for the forum if everyone started adopting your tone and habits of response. You're consistently above-average in antagonism and dismissiveness. And this definitely is one of the factors in you drawing more downvotes—it's often the reason if ever I downvote you. That of course doesn't address the overall problem of voting based on whether people like it driving dissenting views away, but it could make a meaningful difference in your particular case.
So I guess, two.
TIRM
12hr ago
Be the change you want to see: post relevant non-Trump content. Those griping Trumpers can't stop you.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
14hr ago
A number of researchers have commented that hunter-gatherers, in general, are highly practical people, not much given to magic or superstition (e.g. Bird-David, 1992; Thomas, 2006). Shamanic healing might be seen as an exception, but such healing may actually work to the degree that diseases have psychological components. In general, hunter-gatherer religious ceremonies have more to do with embracing reality than with attempting to alter it. As an example, Thomas (2006) describes how the desert-dwelling /Gwi people use their rain dance not to bring on rain but to welcome it joyfully and partake in its power when they see it coming.
The sound of the molimo is deemed sacred, and women are supposed to be frightened of it and to believe that it comes from a terrible animal spirit. According to Turnbull, when he observed the ceremony, the women played their parts well, staying in their huts and acting frightened. But they were not really frightened; they seemed to know perfectly well that this was all a grand game instigated by the men. Other anthropologists have likewise contrasted the playful attitudes of hunter-gatherers toward their deities with the fearful attitudes of neighboring sedentary people (e.g. Endicott, 1979; Tsuru, 1988).
If we think of social life as a grand human game, then the religious beliefs of a society provide a context for understanding the goals and rules of the game and for making decisions. The religious beliefs both reflect and help to support the society's socioeconomic structure. From this point of view it is no surprise that monotheistic religions that blossomed in feudal times portray a hierarchical view of the cosmos, with an all powerful God, "king of kings," at the top, and a storyline focused on requirements of obedience and service to lords and masters. It is also no surprise that hunter-gatherer religions reflect an egalitarian view of the spirit world, populated by a multitude of deities, none of whom has authority over the others or over human beings.
The hunter-gatherer deities themselves are playful and even comical beings, not stern judges. Their interactions with people can most often be described as whimsical. A deity may hurt or help a person just because he or she feels like it, not because the person deserves it, and in that sense, at least, the deities are personifications of natural phenomena such as the weather. A common character in the hunter-gatherer spirit world is what mythologists call the "trickster" (Guenther, 1999).
NullHypothesis
18hr ago
Unfortunate, because while this place rarely bans people and to my knowledge has never does it on the basis of their ideology, most online leftist spaces will ban you for having dissenting opinion (or even centrist opinion, hence that meme about how the centrists of the past are now considered far rightists). That leaves very little space on the internet for debate and discourse between the left and the right.
Bleep
21hr ago
It's telling your standard for an alternative for this terrible bill, which you continue to essentially ignore any specifics of and vaguely handwave that it would reduce immigration or even if it doesn't under a hostile administration it would arm a friendly one to do more than is currently possible without making a specific argument for how it would ever do that, is that:
The only two things that would do “more” than this bill would be a meaningful end to most illegal inflows
it has to "meaningful end to most illegal inflows"? This bill doesn't do any of that. It doesn't get close to that. It doesn't remotely address birth-right citizenship or any of that. It's even easier to legally (even if we assume a hostile admin would follow the law which they have demonstrably not for over 3 decades) release migrants into the US interior and it provides billions in public dollars to help them do it in addition to providing billions to the web of NGOs which facilitate the migrant inflow straight to the US border. It provides money to finish the Border wall, something which Trump made meaningful progress with, but the bill allows border migrants to knock on the door of the wall and be let in the US legally and doesn't even require a hostile admin to build the wall anyway. The bill may as well be called "Pay Democrats to Import Foreigners Act of 2023."
this bill doesn't even sniff the standard you have set out for what Trump? or whoever must deliver for you to even consider it "a plan," and in doing so you're just revealing this is some isolated demand for rigor for Trump, who is like evil and the worst or whatever, or other plans for reasons we're just left to speculate about
as if the GOP for the last 50 years has been even equal let alone better in addressing this issue; the problem was Democrats figured out Republicans are absolute clowns, called their bluff when they realized the GOP isn't actually going to do anything, and so they illegally imported 15m people in <4 years and the GOP couldn't even muster the fortitude to stop funding it; immigration and a wall wouldn't have even been a serious topic of the 2016 election if Trump didn't make it that way
for those who want to reduce immigration, if this bill is "the plan," then they may as well just admit total defeat and slam the acceleration pedal to the floor because this bill is terrible
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.
More options
Context Copy link