2rafa
2mo ago
What gets me about you and your infinite cycle of creating new accounts and then deleting them, new posts and then deleting them is that you never really seem to explain why. You can just be a normal poster here. It’s OK. You’ve posted about a lot of interesting things, you’d fit in. It’s a mostly civilized political discussion forum for nerds. There’s no real malice. Just stop with the dumb routine.
You Did It To Yourself
Again, the endless seething by doctors over their ongoing replacement by “physician associates/assistants” (PAs) and “nurse practitioners” (NPs) rears its head. The many concerns that physicians have about NP/PAs are, of course, entirely valid: they’re often stupid, low-IQ incompetents who have completed the intellectual equivalent of an associates degree and who are now trusted with the lives of people who think they’re being cared for by actual doctors.
Story after story describes the genuinely sad and infuriating consequences of hiring PAs, from grandparents robbed of their final years with their families to actual young people losing 50+ QALYs because some imbecile play-acting at medicine misdiagnoses a blood clot as “anxiety”. Online, doctors rightfully despair about what NPs are doing to patient care and to their own ability to do their jobs.
But there’s a grand irony to the nurse practitioner crisis, which is that it is entirely the making of doctors themselves. If doctors had not established a regulatory cartel governing their own profession, the demand that created the nurse practitioner would not exist. The market provides, and the market demanded healthcare workers who did the job of doctors in numbers greater than doctors themselves were willing to train, educate and (to a significant extent) tolerate due to wage pressure. It is a well-known joke in medical circles that doctors often have a poor knowledge of economics and make poor investment decisions. This is one of them; the market invented the nurse practitioner because it had to. Now all of us face the consequences.
I had multiple friends who attempted to get into medical school. Some succeeded, some failed. All who tried were objectively intelligent (you don’t need to be 130+ IQ to be a doctor, sorry) and hard working. The reason those who failed did so was because they lacked obsessive overachiever extracurriculars, or were outcompeted by those who were unnecessarily smarter than themselves (there is also AA, especially in the US, but that’s a discussion we have often here and I would rather this not get sidetracked).
The problem goes something like this: smart and capable people who just missed out on being doctors (say the 80th to 90th percentile of decent medical school candidates, if the 90th to the 100th percentile are those who are actually admitted) don’t become NPs/PAs. This is because being an NP/PA is considered a low-status job in PMC circles; not merely lower status than being a doctor, but lower status than being an engineer, a lawyer, a banker, a consultant, an accountant, a mid-level federal government employee, a hospital administrator, a B2B tech salesman etc, even if the pay is often similar. To become a PA as a native born member of the middle / upper middle class is to broadcast to the world, to every single person you meet, that you couldn’t become a doctor (this isn’t necessarily true, of course). This means that NPs and PAs aren’t merely doctor-standard people with less training, they’re from a much lower stratum of society, intellectually deficient and completely unsuited to being substitute doctors (the work of whom, again, doesn’t require any kind of exceptional intelligence, but it does require a little). Almost nobody from a good PMC background who fails to get into medical school or, subsequently, residency is going to become a PA/NP for these reasons of social humiliation, even if the pay is good.
Nobody who moves in the kind of circles where they have friends who are real doctors, in other words, wants to introduce themselves as a nurse practitioner or physician associate. A similar situation has happened in nursing more generally. Seventy years ago, smart women from good backgrounds became nurses. Today some of those women become doctors, but most go into the other PMC professions. Nursing became a working class job, and standards slipped. Still, nursing is still often less risky (although there are plenty of deaths caused by nurse mistakes) than the work undertaken by NPs and APs. Nursing became if not low status then mid status, and is now on the level of being a plumber or something - well remunerated, but working class.
The result is a crisis of doctors’ own making. Instead of allowing (as engineers, bankers and lawyers do) a big gradation of physicians, all of whom can call themselves the prestige title doctor but who vary widely in terms of competence, pay and reputation in the profession, doctors have focused on limiting entry, reserving their title for themselves and therefore turning away many decent candidates. (Of course there is a status difference between a rural family doctor and a leading NYC neurosurgeon, but the difference between highs and lows is different to the way it would be if medical school and residency places were doubled overnight.) The karmic consequence of this action is that they are now being replaced by vastly inferior NP/APs who deliver worse care, are worse coworkers and who will ultimately worsen the reputation of the broader medical profession.
What will it take to convince the medical profession, particularly in the US, to fully embrace catering to market demand by working to deliver the number of doctors the market requires, rather than protecting their own pay and prestige from competition in a way that leads to ever more NP/APs and ever worse patient outcomes? The US needs more doctors, especially in disciplines like anaesthesiology, dermatology and so on paid $200k a year (which, much as it might make some surgeons wince, is in fact a very respectable and comfortable income in much of the country). Deliver them, and the NP/AP problem will fade away as quickly as it began.
I think Greer avoids thinking about the clear national distinctions between, say, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games.
The Hunger Games, like the majority of similar American fiction, is a retelling of the popular retelling of the American revolution. This is the ‘one story’ in American fiction. A plucky band of rebels overthrow throw the evil king, whose soldiers have drip. Star Wars is the same thing. The rebels, of disparate origins (Albion’s Seed style) are always scrappy, don’t have lavish bases, struggle to survive, and get a big break because of individual acts of heroism. Every single villain ultimate faction in most American genre fiction is the British Empire. Not British people, really, who Americans usually like, but the British Empire of the Yankee imagination.
Then look at Harry Potter. In Harry Potter institutions are fundamentally good. Hogwarts, the main source of authority, is led by someone who is ultimately a kind, powerful old man trying to do his best for his people. Most people in the Ministry of Magic are good. There may be corruption, subterfuge, individual villainy, but the story literally ends with the hero becoming a magical cop working for the government, where the father of one of the three main characters (who becomes a secondary partial surrogate father to the hero) also works.
The same is true if you compare American spy stories (like Bourne) with British ones (like Bond). James Bond presents MI6 as a positive institution for Britain and the world, staffed mostly by honorable people. The head of MI6, M, is always a good person, even if they make mistakes. Some senior politicians might be villains, but the main source of institutional authority in the fiction is a noble institution, only occasionally infiltrated by villains.
How often, in American spy fiction, is the CIA fundamentally wholesome and good and led by a brave and honorable man or woman? Even American spy fiction by hardcore jingoists like Tom Clancy often relies on either the corrupt agency trope or - at least - the incompetent, out of touch, slow and shitty bureaucratic management trope. Bond is about protecting the system, Bourne is always on the run from the CIA hit squads trying to kill him.
YA fits American fiction so well because the American story is this Star Wars thing, retold for each new generation. I don’t even know if stories about ‘defending’ institutions in America are viable, even Jack Ryan is a liberal at heart. Everything needs to be torn down or at least reformed, all the time, and both the right and the left agree. Every political movement, every successful narrative, must cast itself in the rebel-soldiers-in-1776 mold.
2rafa
4mo ago
Widespread narcan use is surely one of the biggest disasters in the history of modern America.
Imagine if tomorrow, a new medicine called Dementiolab or whatever comes out. It doesn’t prevent or cure Dementia, it doesn’t even slow its progression while someone still has a personality and life to hold on to. But, at the second-to-very-last-stage of the disease, the “giant violent baby” phase, the nightmare phase, Dementiolab prolongs life by 10x, keeping patients alive for many years. American hospitals rush to prescribe this new treatment, after all it literally prolongs the lifespan of dementia patients by a huge amount.
But for insurers, the public purse, families of patients and (I would argue) the patients themselves, it would of course be a disaster. It even further fuels the drug market because when customers don’t die, they come back to buy another day.
Narcan is like this for hard drug addicts. For generations, addicts who got into a really bad way, the kind you can’t really recover from (in 99% of cases), just died. But in Narcan, we invented a Dementiolab, a means to keep people alive in a horrific condition, resurrected again and again to keep suffering, and to keep making everyone else’s life worse.
Humanity, decency, even empathy requires that we stop giving addicts Narcan. If a 7 year old accidentally ingests some fentanyl then sure, otherwise no.
2rafa
4mo ago
Got married a few days ago, which was cool. Post your tips for a happy marriage.
Plane grounded in France over human trafficking fears
A small and largely ignored story from this afternoon (now pushed off the BBC news homepage, and barely reported on in the American press).
A plane carrying 303 Indian passengers has been grounded at an airport in north-eastern France on suspicion of human trafficking, French media report.
The Airbus A340 was flying from the United Arab Emirates to the Nicaraguan capital, Managua.
It was grounded during a technical stopover at the small Vatry airport in Marne department on Thursday after an "anonymous tip-off", prosecutors say.
The official facts, then, are that a chartered Romanian plane flying from the UAE to Nicaragua, but carrying 300 Indians, was grounded en route in France because of an “anonymous tip” about “human trafficking”.
The details of the story raise some interesting questions. There is no Indian community in Nicaragua to speak of; the relationship is so unimportant that neither nation even has an embassy in the other (India’s affairs are handled via their embassy in Panama, Nicaragua’s via their embassy in Tokyo). There is no plausible reason for Indians to be trafficked for labor in Nicaragua, which has a large poor domestic labor pool itself and high unemployment.
So what explains this curious set of affairs? Reading between the lines suggests a different story, one that is barely even hinted at in the plain text.
The Indians on board intended to immigrate illegally to the United States, part of a growing number of migrants from outside the Americas now using the southern route. The plane was chartered by an organization promising to facilitate at least part of that journey, with someone who doesn’t ask questions.
The “anonymous tip” was almost certainly from the United States, which is waging a largely futile war against the above by trying to limit global migrant inflows to Central America. Grounding a foreign plane transiting two other foreign nations is something the US has done before, but would prefer to avoid if possible, hence the “anonymous tip” whose source the French obviously know (grounding a plane merely traversing one’s airspace because of an anonymous tip about some passengers, barring threat of imminent terror attack, isn’t something countries do often) but choose not to share.
As long as birthright citizenship exists, the United States will be uniquely attractive to any would-be illegal migrant. No other major wealthy nation (other than Canada, which almost necessarily requires migrants to traverse the US to reach it) promises the descendants of illegal migrants immediate, guaranteed citizenship.
Market capitalism leads inexorably to ever more socially (although not necessarily economically) progressive politics in Anglo countries because it successfully filters ambitious, right-wing young men, largely by their own choice, into professions where they make money but are not involved in the running of core political, cultural and educational systems, because careers in them almost all pay much less than comparable careers available to men of the same social class and intelligence in other sectors (eg. whether you’re a Yale grad or a community college grad, a job in ‘media’ or ‘education’ is still going to pay less than a career in much of the private sector).
The only time ‘business conservatives’ in an Anglo capitalist society have cared about politics in the last 150 years enough to make a difference is when they perceived there to be imminent threat of ‘actual socialism’ involving, to a greater or lesser extent, some kind of revolution that would actually expropriate them and make their lives, and those of their families, much worse. Not the distant threat that America or England becomes Brazil in 100 years, or that tax rates may rise a little, but the threat that it becomes Lenin’s Russia or the Paris Commune in 5 years.
If you think about it, it really is the perfect scheme. It’s like running Vogue and wanting to ensure your magazine is staffed only with wealthy young women of the right social background, so you decide to preference degrees in History of Art and require a 2 year unpaid internship before any job offer. You will get what you ask for.
If all the smartest young people in a society become quants at Jane Street UNLESS they care a huge deal about leftist politics and have a strong dislike for Wall Street…you get a society that looks a lot like this one. The human capital in conservative politics is dogshit because unless you either host a prime time Fox News show or are senior enough in the congressional GOP to get good kickbacks after you leave office on the corporate circuit, why bother? The remote chance you might possibly maybe have some influence on power some day, if you’re lucky (but will probably just be poor)?
We can look at this very sub, full of very intelligent conservatives. Almost to the man or woman every single one (including, if you’ll stoop to somewhat less intelligent ones, myself) works in tech, in finance, in the corporate world or in the private sector in general to some extent. And high school teachers making $50k a year have a much bigger effect on the politics of the next generation than an investment banking MD making $1m a year, or than almost any FAANG engineer.
But would you rather be the teacher?
2rafa
4mo ago
All I care about is immigration. Am I happy that boorish, poorly dressed morons who don’t know the first thing about chesterton’s fence are now in power unraveling a century of American hegemony for no real reason? No, of course not. But this is only happening because the people who opened the gates and didn’t close them went against the will and welfare of the public for decades too long.
The immigration situation could have been resolved firmly in the mid to late 90s, when even California voted resoundingly for highly punitive measures against illegal migrants and at the height of Pat Buchanan’s popularity and the height of American prosperity and global power. Nobody listened. Now, the idiots are in power, and likely won’t even do anything substantive about the immigration issue, but the lesson for politicians is this - until the immigration situation is fixed, populists who promise to tear down institutions will keep getting elected, endlessly.
I won’t defend this administration, though I voted for Trump (not that my vote matters). But I will hold my nose and vote for the most-electorally-viable anti immigration candidate in every single race, in every single jurisdiction in which I can vote, forever until something is done, come what may.
2rafa
1yr ago
'Eunuch-maker' case: Male escort jailed for removing man's genitals
A male escort who cut off a consenting man's genitals and filmed the procedure for a pay-per-view website has been jailed for five years.
Damien Byrnes, 36, removed Marius Gustavson's penis and testicles with a kitchen knife in February 2017. Byrnes, along with Jacob Crimi-Appleby, 23, and Nathaniel Arnold, 48, pleaded guilty to causing GBH with intent. Crimi-Appleby froze Gustavson's leg in dry ice, leading to its amputation, while Arnold part-removed a nipple.
Crimi-Appleby was jailed for three years and eight months. Arnold was given a two-year suspended prison sentence. The Old Bailey had previously heard the procedure carried out by Byrnes is linked to a subculture where men become "nullos" - short for genital nullification - by having their penis and testicles removed.
Prosecutor Caroline Carberry KC said Byrnes, from Tottenham in north London, was among 10 people charged with taking part in extreme body modifications. She told the court Byrnes was hired by Gustavson, who called himself "the eunuch-maker" and had been involved in "numerous" extreme body-modification procedures including the removal of other men's genitals.
Kate Mulholland, the Crown Prosecution Service specialist prosecutor for London, said: "Consent is not a defence to the illegal surgical procedures the men willingly took part in to remove their ringleader's penis, leg and nipple, in non-sterile and on occasion life-threatening circumstances." [emphasis mine]
To summarize, four gay men are convicted over the illegal surgical removal of one of the men's genitalia, a leg and a nipple. Three were fetishists (including the ringleader, who was the 'victim' of the procedures), one was an escort. The escort subsequently blackmailed the ringleader, and it was this blackmail attempt that resulted in the case coming to the attention of the police and all four men being arrested and charged.
The man who removed the genitals (Byrnes, the escort) was jailed for five years. The man who removed the leg (Crimi-Appleby) was jailed for three years, with his comparatively young (but still adult) age and alleged 'grooming' by the ringleader mitigating factors. The man who removed the nipple (Arnold), and who stole anaesthetic from the hospital where he worked as a nurse, was spared jail with a two-year suspended sentence because his coworkers all agreed he was a really nice guy. The ringleader, Gustavson, the 'victim' of the procedure, will be sentenced in March.
There are a number of interesting CW-related issues in this case.
I. The "nullification" fetish
With the exception of the escort, all the men involved in the case belonged to a niche fetish revolving around becoming eunuchs. Interestingly (and unlike many other niche sexual fetishes, eg. those involving sexual cannibalism), nullification actually spans both gay and trans subcultures and might actually be a predominantly trans subculture. In fact, a moderate number of fetishists I found online appeared to be natal women (ie. FtM), although most who actually carried out illegal body modification are of course men (removing the breasts and the entire vagina/clitoris presumably being beyond the capabilities of backroom amateur surgeons, plus greater male risk-taking etc).
Among trans people, 'nullification' is often the desired goal of non-binary 'truscum' (those who believe that you need to be dysphoric to be trans, but more generally 'hardcore' transgender activists who despise those they consider cis identifying as trans for 'clout'). (Reddit thread) By this logic, while a 'cure' for males who want to be women is vaginoplasty, and for females who want to be men is phalloplasty, for a 'non-binary' dysphoric individual, these are unsuitable, since the whole point is to be 'between' genders. Nullification to Ken Doll status is sometimes seen as a goal. It also isn't actually illegal, and at least some years ago (again, according to reddit) there were American doctors willing to perform it.
In this case, the men involved do not seem to have been trans. Instead, they were participants in the 'eunuch' fetish subculture among gay men, where participants are known as 'eunuchs', 'nullies' or 'smoothies' respectively. Beyond eunuch communities themselves, one of the major sources of information about the subculture comes from TERFs, who are uniquely hostile towards eunuchs among gay men, because they (typically lesbian women) see them as - alongside transwomen - the vanguard of inserting fetishes into the 'LGB' movement they once held dear. Here, for example, is a long takedown of Gustavson by Canadian TERF website Reduxx.
Of course, Gustavson didn't only remove his genitalia but his leg, too, something that would likely classify him as suffering from 'Body integrity disorder', a partially-recognized psychological condition. Again, some patients, even in the UK, have had healthy limbs surgically removed, although this was highly controversial and the practice was largely discontinued. In Australia, a surgeon sought ethical advice about a similar case in 2017; this medical ethics article covers a similar case of a man with a lifelong goal of having a leg amputated, but who was unable to find a doctor willing to perform the surgery.
A core goal of eunuch fetishists is to have their fetish classified as a gender identity, which would allow them much easier access to surgery. It is this that drew the ire of the TERFs, who generally dislike sadomasochistic gay male fetishes but aren't particularly focused upon them. This creates an interesting dynamic - for the TERFs, the association between eunuch fetishists and trans activists allows them to criticize the latter by association, while for Gustavson (who took a leading role in both Norwegian and British pride organizations), association with the 'mainstream' trans movement created the opportunity for a medical embrace of the subculture.
[One last interesting (although less relevant) question remains about the eunuch fetish, namely that nullification would seemingly remove sexual desire, which would seem to be important to a fetishist. This journal article hints at an interesting theory, that gay men live in such a non-monogamous and non-commital romantic landscape that nullification often serves as a fantasy involving the eunuch sacrificing their sexuality to win a dyadic, deep bond with another man (who requests it of them), for life.]
II. Consent and the nature of surgery
The statement by the prosecutor in this case ("consent is not a defence to the illegal surgical procedures the men willingly took part in to remove their ringleader's penis, leg and nipple, in non-sterile and on occasion life-threatening circumstances") is interesting because it does not clearly state whether the issue was the mutilation or the legality thereof. Certainly much of the case appeared reliant on footage (or descriptions of it) of the procedure, the fact that it was sold on a fetish site, and the fact that the participants were physically healthy individuals with no need to perform the procedures. The body horror aspect of the case was a major feature of the prosecution's case, and even the press release seeks to create empathy for the police and prosecutors who had to watch and work with the footage and other evidence.
At the same time, as discussed above, 'body integrity disorder' surgeries have been performed without legal challenge in the UK, gender reassignment is legal, and (as I say) there is some evidence that nullification procedures have been performed legally (in very, very small numbers) by doctors in Anglo countries like the US, UK and Australia. And the statement does leave open the door that the main issue the Crown has is that Gustavson was 'operated' on illegally, not the nature of the operation. One wonders whether the sentences would have been as strict if the participants had been transwomen waiting for a gender reassignment surgery slot, but it is the UK so it's hard to say.
There are arguably legitimate reasons why consent isn't the central factor in whether a surgical procedure is legal. The primary one is, of course, that blanket legalization would lead to the poor or desperate being taken advantage of by untrained surgeons who might mutilate them in horrific and costly ways, perhaps for life. Society has (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-myth-of-consensual-sex)[decided] that the cost of allowing consensual unlicensed surgery is great enough that it ought to be outlawed. The medical profession (or cartel, or guild, depending on perception) is then given a valuable monopoly on licensing surgeons in exchange for minimum standards of training and therefore supposedly quality.
But if a surgeon refuses to perform a nullification surgery on a gay man (for legal or personal reasons) but is happy to perform similarly invasive surgery desired for similar reasons on a transwoman, are we really just saying (as the TERFs argue) that some fetish-driven lobbying campaigns are more successful than others?
III. On the welfare hustle
Man, this case really has it all. Buried in the article is this line:
Crimi-Appleby, 23, from Epsom in Surrey, admitted freezing Gustavson's leg, in February 2019...Gustavson, who now uses a wheelchair, received about £18,000 in benefits payments afterwards, the court heard.
Illegal surgery, especially in a welfare state, is costly. Gustavson went to hospital immediately after each of his major illegal procedures (which he set up and organized), where he required additional treatment (he claimed, it's suggested, that he mutilated himself on these occasions). This was paid for by the state and therefore the taxpayer. The issue of cost (which ultimately falls upon taxpayers or insured people) is also rarely discussed in relation to legal gender reassignment, even though vaginoplasty and phalloplasty require lifelong treatment and upkeep, regular visits with doctors, and (as with transition generally) lifelong use of prescription drugs.
The amputation of the leg, though, adds an additional dimension. When he returned home a disabled man, Gustavson was entitled to disability welfare, which he duly claimed. Few (particularly in a relatively rich country in which jobs are pretty easy to come by) are likely to amputate a limb to claim welfare, but other options (like severe mental illness) are more viable:
I encountered a patient whose medical record revealed that he’d had several hundred prior admissions to psychiatric facilities across the nation. During a 30-minute evaluation, it became clear that the patient was faking an episode of psychosis in order to gain admission to the hospital. When challenged, the patient eventually confessed that he had never suffered from any mental illness. Each month, after exhausting his disability payments, he ate and slept for free on mental health wards, where psychiatrists were afraid to turn away a patient who claimed to be hearing voices and having suicidal thoughts.
Society doesn't seem capable of managing this level of defection (or, alternatively, is just willing to swallow the cost). And while amputating a limb or making up a fake mental illness might be clear-cut, what about other self-inflicted conditions, like smoking or drug related illnesses? Is the purpose of welfare to support the deserving poor (like those born with disabilities through no fault of their own, widows raising children, and perhaps the elderly who never made enough to save for retirement), or is it to provide a minimum standard of living for everyone, no matter how objectionable? When Gustavson is released from his (likely) prison sentence, he will be able to continue claiming disability welfare as a wheelchair-bound person. Is that right?
I often think this. Who is building beautiful things these days in the public realm? Beautiful schools, libraries, railroad stations, hospitals, parks, museums, even apartment buildings? Yes, there are always a handful of examples, sandwiched between generic shitty modern buildings or awful pastiche. But not enough. No one’s thinking big. You have to inspire people.
I was watching some shitty talk show appearance by the astronauts who are supposed to be going to the moon again with NASA next year. The commenters on the YouTube video (who I presume watch a lot of talkshow clips) were saying it was the most applause they’d ever seen on the show, the audience were standing up and hollering and cheering and so on. People want to believe in something real. Yes, a return to religiosity would be a good thing, but there also has to be real progress, real improvement, something in the kingdom of earth or whatever the biblical term is that inspires and drives people, that suggests some kind of civilizational progress. ChatGPT is good, but right now it’s unclear how it’s going to improve most people’s lives and if anything most people who look into LLMs get panicked about becoming permanently unemployed.
If I was president I’d organize a huge World’s Fair for the 250th anniversary of America’s founding in 2026. Host it in New York, in Flushing Meadows park where the last big one was, around that giant sphere that once symbolized all the possibility of the late 20th century. Invite all the great corporations, every state, other countries, to come and present their vision of the future. Make it free to visit. Hire Robert Stern to design it in a vaguely mid-century Americana style. Have all the classics - the house of the future, the car of the future, the plane of the future etc. It wouldn’t solve the country’s problems (“the controversy over drag queen story hour in the California state pavilion continues…”), but I think it would be mostly fun and hopeful.
2rafa
1mo ago
About ten years ago, a new form of cultural criticism emerged on places as diverse as 4Chan’s /tv/, Twitter and Slate Star Codex’s Culture War Roundup thread.
The general message was always the same. An ostensibly mainstream or even outwardly progressive Hollywood movie was secretly Based™️, sometimes supposedly intentionally on the part of a secretly redpilled director or writer, mostly unintentionally by someone who didn’t realize what the implicit narrative of what they were creating actually was.
I’ve written comments like this, I’ve enjoyed comments like this. But you can’t be too serious about them, and in fact you could write a similar narrative about almost any movie or TV show you can think of.
2rafa
2yr ago
You have to understand that in France all public rhetoric is much grander than it is in the Anglosphere, which seemed to have had a self-conscious moment sometime in the 1960s or 1970s after which grandiose speeches were declared eternally "cringe". Even Obama only partially got away with it, and that was mostly when he was quoting MLK or JFK or Lincoln or a founding father. This extends to everything (even corporate memos or emails from the CEO if you've ever worked with the French). By itself it doesn't mean anything. Macron himself makes grandiose speeches all the time about France's civilizational mission blah blah blah and nothing happens.
So when you hear this, and you imagine, like, a prominent police official in the US or UK saying this:
Facing these savage hordes, asking for calm is no longer enough, it must be imposed!
..and it representing this huge moment of change where the wool falls from their eyes and the civilizational meaning of all this becomes clear,
well, you're kind of thinking of it the wrong way. That's just how the French speak, loudly and with a very small stick.
I think he seems to have realized a terrible truth for a lot of WNs who are deeply used to their particular kind of persecution complex and enemy hierarchy, which is that much of the state of the modern west is a direct product of the ‘white temperament’ and white population preferences, possibly on a genetic level.
Someone posted a Twitter video of a Fox News interview with locals in Seattle or Portland or something during the (ongoing) violent crime wave in reply to my Seattle post last month. It’s become a popular online meme because it’s all these very annoying looking white people saying it’s not a problem at all, they don’t notice an increase in crime, ‘what, do YOU pussies have a problem with homeless people now, does it bother you, bitch?’ aggressiveness to the reporter. Just the most annoying kind of stubborn middle aged person, and I would add white because for all the many, many, in most cases worse flaws of other groups I’ve never seen their peoples behave like this, the grandiosity, “no u”-ness, general pigheadedness of their denial is on another level. For all their varied and whacky politics, many Jews I’ve met in NYC would press the button to delete the homeless if they could, and wouldn’t think twice about it. I couldn’t say the same for many Northern European whites. They don’t have it in them, until they do, and then they’re just as pigheaded and stubborn in the other direction.
It reminds me of real life conversations I’ve had with white English people, intelligent, center-right conservative types, about groups, identity, mass immigration, genetics, civilization, and they just shut down. I don’t mean that they shut down the debate, they’re usually polite enough and I wouldn’t discuss ‘edgy’ things with people I didn’t trust anyway, but they shut down internally. They display the exact pigheaded stubbornness that the Seattle video interviewees do, the strange combination of [post] Christian guilt complex and superiority complex and absolute, ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ type emphasis on propriety above policy. Like a Church of England relic unable to deal with the fact that the church becoming a retirement camp for delusional elderly middle-class hippies could be a reason why attendance is down 90% in 50 years or whatever. Some (politically involved people, one a former MP) will even admit the current levels of immigration are a catastrophe, but then suggest in the same breath that what happens will happen, and that above all the focus should be on preventing the far right from making too much hay of the situation and “destabilizing” things. What can you do with such people?
I find @BurdensomeCount’s occasional gloating at whites unbecoming, but when you live here you understand it. Oh, how I have been lectured about tolerance by people who are actively destroying their own country. Oh, the sanctimoniousness I have sat through. Gradually, I began to feel a pull towards a certain contempt for some of the English, for they were destroying not only their own civilization but that of their greater ancestors, and their unborn and innocent descendants, and even that of those various non-Anglo hangers on who had, like myself, found themselves as productive and (mostly) happy guests in their society. They did not understand how precious what they had created was.
What can you do about such a people? They have no will to power, no will to survive. Whatever vitality they once had, they lost. I would gladly sacrifice Israel for a Britain that was both tolerant of Jews and actively pursuing the greatness of its own once-proud civilization, that’s how much I like it here. But I may be faced with no choice but to cast my lot in with my ancestral homeland (real or imagined) because these people have given up, and they’re proud of it.
As the saying goes, you can’t respect people who don’t respect themselves.
The difference is that people don’t really care when gang members in Chicago kill each other, they do care when people uninvolved in crime who live in middle class or wealthy places get killed randomly.
The vast majority of homicides in the US are things you don’t need to worry about as the average middle class white or asian person. Mass shootings of this kind (or school shootings, or the Las Vegas thing, or Islamist terror attacks on office buildings or a marathon finish line or whatever) trigger a fear and panic response because the people affected are not the kind of people who are the victims of regular violent crime very often.
I bet the homicide rate for white Chicagoans who make more than $100,000 a year is not high enough to be concerning.
Fail to listen to the people and you will eventually invite into power someone ambitious, cynical and charismatic enough to ride their rage into power. It turns out that in addition to their political talent, those leaders are also usually extremely greedy and corrupt. Who would have guessed?
Fortunately, any potentially affected country’s political elite can avoid this disappointing outcome with one simple trick. Just end / partially reverse mass immigration and, if you can stretch to two policies, facilitate the construction of huge amounts of cheap, quality housing.
2rafa
3mo ago
Apartheid was a system created to serve the Boer / Afrikaans community at the expense not only of the blacks, but also the Anglo whites, cape coloured, Indians and Chinese.
No other European colony in Africa had a formalized system of racial segregation and internal passporting as developed and extensive as South Africa. Not Rhodesia, not Namibia, not even the Belgian Congo (although violence against the natives there was often more brutal, to be clear). Apartheid served the specific function of providing huge amounts of low cost agrarian labor to serve the pastoral Afrikaner homesteading and farming fantasy. The larger scale and more industrial agriculture seen in what what are today Botswana, Zambia etc (where white farmers are still commonplace) both had less need for laborers and could employ natives at market rates from inside the community.
Apartheid happened as a racial affirmative action movement tied to a specific ethnoreligious tribe who believed they were owed South Africa by God. This is immediately apparent if you read DF Malan and other founding figures in the Purified National Party, hardcore Dutch Reformed Calvinist isolationists who despised the British Empire, involvement in overseas conflicts and who were deeply opposed to industrial capitalism from a socially conservative perspective.
They believed that the nation given to them by God was under hostile foreign occupation, by Anglos, and that they were oppressed domestically by an English, Jewish and Indian mercantile elite that ruled the cities, ran every major newspaper, controlled the stock exchange and ran almost all corporation. Enough Afrikaner elites had previously joined the above group to run the country, but a combination of the depression and rising Afrikaner ethnonationalism eroded their support, leading a substantial fringe (often those most associated with the church itself) to found the breakaway movement that would eventually gain support, merge back with the establishment Afrikaner movement and then implement apartheid in the late 1940s. Malan came at the right time, because the mercantile elite in South Africa had experienced a drastic reversal of fortunes in the depression which crippled almost all export-driven businesses (much of the economy), leaving them vulnerable.
Apartheid was designed to entrench an existing state of affairs that served the Afrikaner population. Urban whites would not compete with urban blacks (who were also migrating rapidly to cities) for jobs, while rural Afrikaners could continue to employ black laborers cheaply because they could no longer take higher paid roles in and around the cities. Lastly, Smuts and his predecessors had presided over the mass immigration of white Anglos and others from the British Empire, who were seen as taking jobs and opportunity away from Afrikaners. An irony of fate is that without the Afrikaner nationalism that produced apartheid, there would likely be many more white South Africans today.
The ‘benefits’ accorded to the white population from apartheid were therefore not evenly realized. Rural and suburban Afrikaners benefited from labor so cheap that even a postal worker could employ a cook, a nanny, a pool boy and live the lifestyle of the American or Australian upper-middle class. But the urban PMC dealt with economic stagnation (apart from a brief period in the late 50s and early 60s), high labor costs, an entrenched Afrikaner elite who cared little for economic progress until the Cold War made it necessary, sclerotic institutions and then, as apartheid became less internationally acceptable, with sanctions, lower quality domestically made goods, and international opprobrium, which the rural Afrikaners in the north couldn’t care less about.
Of course, neither Musk, Sachs nor Thiel are Afrikaners; Musk is Anglo, Sachs presumably Jewish, Thiel German who spent some time in Southern Africa in his youth. But SA political dynamics are still affected by the gulf between Anglos and Afrikaners, and Anglos care little about what happens to random Afrikaner farmers in the north or about ethnonationalist Afrikaner projects like Orania.
2rafa
1yr ago
I think there are two points. Firstly, House was always written as an asshole, and secondly, yes, there was a big shift around 2013 when “punching down” became unacceptable.
You don’t even need to go back to House in 2004 to see it. Modern Family’s run is fascinating from this perspective. The first two seasons (2009-2011) have a huge number of Asian jokes, Hispanic jokes and gay jokes (the Asian woman doctor is a terrible driver which is played for stereotype laughs, the Asian child’s (adoptive) uncle asks “will she even be able to pronounce her own name?” (its ‘Lily’). The show isn’t mean spirited but sometime around Gamergate it became unacceptable to have otherwise ‘good’ characters use ethnic/gender/sexuality based humor.
2rafa
1yr ago
Is Google playing to lose in this antitrust case?
These seem to be the facts: Google pays Apple $10bn a year to be the default search engine on iPhone. This fee amounts to pure rent-seeking behavior on Apple's part - if Google doesn't pay up, they can go to Microsoft (who, even if they're not willing to match Google's fee, will pay something, for reasons outlined below). Google is the most popular search engine, the great majority of users don't really care what the default search engine is anyway, and it costs Apple nothing in engineering, reputation or other costs to make Google the default. Essentially, Apple makes $10bn for nothing.
Why does Google pay? The iPhone search market is extremely important to Google. iPhone users make up the majority of affluent smartphone users in the world's wealthiest countries, which means that they're far more valuable to advertisers, and therefore Google's most valuable users. iOS also has supermajority marketshare among young people in the crucial 18-35 demographic in the US (and is disproportionately owned by affluent young people around the world), considered by far the most valuable to advertisers.
Losing the iPhone demographic to Bing would amount to cutting out the majority of affluent and/or young consumers in Google's key ad sales markets, a blow far more substantial than their percentage of Google's total userbase would suggest. So Google pays $10bn a year because the alternative is the enemy taking the most valuable customers (or customers of the customers, if you want to be pedantic) of their central product.
But this risk only exists if the alternative to Google is Bing. If the alternative to Google is the search engine equivalent of the browser choice screen that appears when you install Windows (after the antitrust trials of the 2000s), the problem is much reduced. The vast majority of Apple users, when presented with a choice at setup between, say, Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo will pick Google, the same way they currently do on PC (for both browser and search engine). A small number of Apple users might switch, but there's every chance these are worth far less to Google than $10bn a year, which Google pays to avoid Bing being the default, not to avoid a choice in which most people will choose them.
The biggest loser if Google loses the antitrust case isn't Google, it's Apple, who miss out on the $10bn. Even for the world's most profitable company, $10bn in pure margin represents 10% of net income in a good year, so that's no small amount. For Google, by contrast, as long as the great majority of iPhone users pick Google over Bing (and there is every indication that they will), they're freed from a $10bn ransom and don't have to hand over all their top users to Microsoft.
More recently, this popped up in an "underground" techno broadcast at Club HÖR https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1794390427388588274
Do you really think the audio recording is actually from Club HÖR? By all means, find it in the original recording, although after watching (an actually pretty decent set of) all 53 minutes, you will find that it does not happen. In fact, the audience doesn't feature in the recording at all. Go back and look at their other livestreams, does it seem realistic to you?
Drukpa is a DR shitposter. In future, trust your instincts with regards to these things. Leftist Berlin hipsters are not singing "Ausländer raus" in techno clubs, please. I'm sure young men are in some of the more extremist burschenschaften, but that's a rather different milieu (and there is, in any case, nothing new about that).
It’s fascinating that even Turkheimer, one of the most prominent anti-HBD academics in this debate (and one of the most prominent academics in the space in general) barely gets 30-40 retweets in his commentary on a huge paper like this. It kind of shows how, even on the anti-hereditarian side, academic opinions don’t really matter. Sure, Vox might quote Turkheimer in an article on why group genetic differences are supposedly bullshit, but his views have nothing to do with why the article was written, they could be omitted or he could have never replied to their email and the article, save for the quote, would have been exactly the same. Turkheimer is useful to bolster the ‘mainstream’ narrative, but his role is narrow.
Arguing for hereditarianism is like being an economist in the Soviet Union in 1950 and arguing, using complex economic models and a lot of math and comparative data, that free markets could be better than centrally planned economies. The amount of data you have is completely irrelevant; your faculty peers of the establishment position might halfheartedly attempt a rebuttal as an intellectual exercise, but in truth everyone knows that the reason your paper isn’t going to lead to any big policy debate is because the Party has its ideology and intends to keep it and, most importantly, does not justify its maintenance of the current system on the grounds of an ongoing scientific enquiry. Marx and Lenin performed the scientific analysis, by definition socialism follows capitalism, by definition a reversal is undesirable and morally and thus politically wrong.
Likewise in this case. The right has the strange idea that progressive universalism, perhaps because the scientific revolution was coterminous with the emergence of many liberal ideas, is grounded in some kind of (flawed or misguided) scientific analysis. Certainly it has aspirations to that effect. But progressivism as ideology was never founded on ‘science’, it was founded on feeling and on sentiment, and so no scientific evidence can challenge it.
Demographics alone are insufficient to explain the status of Baltimore and St Louis. The black populations of these inner cities have by far the highest violent crime rates (outside of actual war zones) of any black population on earth (Cape Town is still lower when controlled for demographics). Higher than any major African city (and yes, there are plenty of Bantu-majority African cities where it’s likely that the majority of violent homicides are captured by publicly recorded data). Higher even than Haiti, which is in many ways literally lawless.
The complete explanation for Baltimore’s poor status includes inertia and options. The US is the wealthiest major country on earth. Anyone in Baltimore who is unhappy with the state of affairs can leave without expending any great effort. There are plentiful jobs almost everywhere else. The city is entirely selected for people who are satisfied with the state of affairs and do not care to change it. There are a lot of people (including rich and powerful people) who have to live in New York. Nobody has to live in Baltimore.
I think it’s very damning when critics-of-critics of the sexual revolution rely on the same flawed arguments.
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“The alternative is women not working or very young marriage (as in 1950s America)”. Countries in Islamic North Africa and - as @self_made_human says below - India have both high numbers of young women working and comparatively much more conservative sexual morality than the West. Women worked in substantial numbers outside the home in Western countries since the middle of the Industrial Revolution, a hundred years before the sexual revolution. The idea that female labor force participation automatically generates liberal sexual mores simply isn’t as obvious as some people seem to think. Similarly, the Saudi birth rate collapse of the 1980s and 1990s happened while native female labor force participation was extremely low (suggesting, again, that women working was not the primary cause of falling birthrates).
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“It’s not that bad”. Yeah, but it’s not that good, either. As I’ve argued before, and as more ‘feminist’ critiques of the sexual revolution by people like Louise Perry discuss, women don’t really get anything out of casual sex. They get neither status nor (in almost all cases) pleasure, so why do they do it? For the same currency (male attention) that women have always received, except previously they didn’t have to put out for it. That, not “women in the workplace”, is the sexual revolution. What benefit did 13 year old girls passed around between adult rockstars as groupies in the 1970s get from this glorious state of affairs? Again, seemingly very little.
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There is something to @BurdensomeCount’s occasional suggestion that some people (typically smarter and higher status than usual, although they are not close to a majority even among that group) are able to successfully decouple sex and relationships. It would be unfair of me not to say that I’ve met women (and of course men) like this. But it’s also clear to me that they’re far from the majority, and policy around vices must take into account how most or many people respond to a thing. There are long term functional heroin users able to maintain some semblance of a ‘normal’ life, but they are in the minority. I won’t speak for men, but most women I know who’ve had lots of casual sex with strangers don’t seem to have benefited from or enjoyed the experience, and many regret it and say they would advise their own daughters against it.
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These don’t seem to be imaginary problems. Data on things like how promiscuity affects relationship success and satisfaction lead detractors of the sexual revolution to often note the fact that many young people today probably would be happier getting married in their mid twenties to an exclusive partner. I think this is what most women want. Men’s desires are more debatable, since a large part of the incel phenomenon is (as you correctly suggest) anguish that they’re not ‘chads’ rather than actual discontent with the dynamics of the wider system. But even many men suffer from the emptiness of single life, and men seem to, as @Questionmark says below, struggle on their own too.
More generally, a lot of modernity serves the interests of a small minority of happily atomized PMC ‘decouplers’ who want to maximize their individual freedom at the expense of the institutions that allow for a more broad-based happiness. “I can gamble without getting addicted, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can smoke mountains of 20%+ thc weed without losing all motivation and sitting on my couch watching SpongeBob all day, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can find meaning and happiness in hedonism, consumption and career success, so why shouldn’t we abandon traditional forms of spirituality? I can have casual sex with many people without any physical harm or psychological damage coming to me, so why shouldn’t I be able to without condemnation?” The problem comes if freeing these people from the chains of tradition and obligation actively damages the lives of many others, and I think it does.
Most people (and yes, I include myself in this) don’t particularly desire a great deal of individual liberty. They want a clear, well-trodden path, a route that works, a comfortable life, ‘traditional’ happiness in the form of a stable community and family. They don’t want to have to set out in the world on their own without a map and to figure out everything for themselves.
Look at the interminable number of TikTok and Instagram gurus. The Tates and the Female Dating Strategists. The Hustle Bros and the Girlbosses. What are their (often very young) audiences looking for? Someone to tell them exactly what to do and how to do it. They represent an organic rejection of personal freedom, of individualism, which is aberrant and dysfunctional.
Have you watched the show Fleabag? One of the reasons it resonated with so many young women is that it’s about this. Of course its creator is a liberal feminist, she doesn’t even really understand the implications and the true theme of her own work (this is not unusual of course). But there’s a scene in the second season where the protagonist, who has wasted her twenties and early thirties doing nothing and having endless casual sex with strangers, is sitting in a confession box at a church begging the priest, begging God, to tell her what to do, to give her a path, to free her from the atomized and empty and depressing nature of her existence. Here’s the monologue.
Of course, the scene is subverted (she later sleeps with the priest); I consider it unlikely the writer even consciously understood the impulse she was describing. But I also think that in the moment it’s so, so real, more than the creator knew while writing it.
“I will accept Russian control of the occupied territories and pledge to block Ukraine’s candidacy for NATO in exchange for Russia exiting its military alliance with China. I will end sanctions and bring Russia back into the world market. In this way, I will elevate Russia as a strategic check on China’s designs in East Asia.”
You don’t have to be a professor of international relations to see why this idea is retarded. So you accept Russian control of Eastern Ukraine and lift all sanctions on Russia, and then Russia has to ‘exit’ (ambiguous) its ‘military alliance’ (something that only partially exists on paper anyway) with China….or else…what? Vivek restores sanctions on Russia for not sufficiently breaking ties with China (pointless, even a temporary break in sanctions will allow for large scale repatriation or transfer of Russian capital in anticipation of future sanctions)? Are you going to trust Putin? How will that be measured? Why wouldn’t cooperation continue in an underhanded way? Once you force a Ukrainian defeat and unilaterally lift sanctions you’re not in a position of strength toward Russia, you’re in one of total weakness. And Vivek can’t threaten Putin with Ukrainian NATO membership because, as Putin knows, there are other member states that would be amenable to vetoing it regardless of what the US says.
And most importantly, Russia can never be a ‘strategic check’ on China’s designs in East Asia. What does Vivek think he can do, get Putin to invade Manchuria in case Gyna threatens to bomb Taiwan? Send Russia’s three remaining seaworthy warships to the South China Sea? And Vivek is an isolationist who only cares about Taiwan until 2028 or whatever anyway (when he believes TSMC will no longer be critical) so why care about a long-term ‘check on China’ at all?
Still, Vivek is a high verbal IQ arch-grifter who has never created a substantial, profitable business, bilked investors out of $400m to buy a $5m failed drug from GSK (and burned through that entire capital in a doomed pivot) and then himself pivoted into politics when the cheap money dried up. He has never accomplished anything that is both impressive and good for society in his entire life. Even Trump is a better businessman, so perhaps this is what America deserves.
2rafa
1yr ago
Judging people entirely by what they wrote years ago is such a weak, modern thing.
Go back a century or two (or even to the middle of the twentieth century) and huge ideological journeys over the course of a lifetime, from left to right, from right to left, back again, across religion and secularism, republicanism and absolutism, liberty and tyranny are commonplace among public intellectuals, writers, politicians and philosophers.
One thing arguably quite unique about progressive cancel culture is its utter resistance to even capitulation or apology. Most historical ideological movements were quite happy to adopt former foes if they agreed to repent. Yes, you had to convert or die, but at least you could convert. This was the normal thing. Often only those who refused out of principle to convert, or (in rarer cases) who were believed to have converted insincerely, were not spared. The CCP famously even spared and converted the last Emperor of China, who was widely considered to have gladly sold out his countrymen to the Japanese (and so was not merely hated for being a monarch).
When the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, Puyi was repatriated to China after negotiations between the Soviet Union and China. Puyi was of considerable value to Mao, as Behr noted: "In the eyes of Mao and other Chinese Communist leaders, Pu Yi, the last Emperor, was the epitome of all that had been evil in old Chinese society. If he could be shown to have undergone sincere, permanent change, what hope was there for the most diehard counter-revolutionary? The more overwhelming the guilt, the more spectacular the redemption-and the greater glory of the Chinese Communist Party"
It speaks to the fear, the emptiness, the hollowness of progressive ideology that they actually don't believe they can facilitate sincere conversions to the faith. 'If you once denounced us, you are an enemy for all time' isn't something that comes from a position of strength but from one of weakness.
A Week On The Worst Coast
It was late morning on a weekday in Seattle, ostensibly one of America's wealthiest major cities and home to an impressive number of globally significant businesses. It was February, but the weather was a comfortable fifty degrees, and it was not raining. I had arrived the previous night from the airport, but as I drew the curtains of the Fairmont (the city's status as a 'Tier 2' North American metropolis in our internal booking system meant the Four Seasons was, alas, out of budget) I noticed something strange. The city was dense, there were cars on the roads, we were surrounded by office buildings which seemed, despite covid, to at least have some tenants, but the streets were almost devoid of pedestrians. Seattle was empty.
I decided to visit the city's major tourist attraction,
the first Starbucks storePike Place Market. The concierge furnished me with the name of a (British themed, amusingly) breakfast place there. Apple Maps said it was a ten-minute walk through the center of downtown, past the art museum and various office towers. The city did not look apocalyptic from above, at least from the Fairmont. It seemed tranquil. But again, foot traffic was eerily light for a major downtown on a weekday morning. Within a minute of my departure a grubby white woman, quite young, ambled-shambled-ran past me, mumbling about something. She was completely naked except for a short tail of toilet paper hanging out of her. This was rare even for Manhattan hobos in broad daylight, at least beyond the usual places. Around another corner a tall black fellow wearing an old bicycle helmet, neon vest and torn sweatpants starting walking up to me. I prepared myself for a quick exit across the street into the symphony orchestra, but he was actually quite polite and asked, shakily, if I might have any money. He was polite and I was apparently still a little freaked out after the naked lady, so I gave him the $10 I had in my pocket. He bowed, walked away, then muttered loudly some slur about 'fucking white people', which seemed uncalled for after what I'd done for him (perhaps he knew I was Jewish?).I continued walking. Three men and a woman in heavy winter coats were engaged in what seemed like haggling over a drugs purchase, or maybe they were just shooting the shit while they shot the shit. Another group of hobos had set up what seemed like a slightly longer-term presence just outside the headquarters of Zillow, which according to Google has never returned to its Seattle offices (though they still seem to own the lease). At this point, after several minutes of walking through downtown Seattle on a weekday mid-morning, I had not encountered a single normal pedestrian. Not a student. Not an office worker in a quarter zip. Not a #girlboss with a coffee in her hand shouting into her AirPods. The city had been ceded.
I expertly dodged a homeless guy wearing what looked like a girl's tank top and board shorts literally foaming at the mouth while gyrating and staggering wildly by the Four Seasons, then arrived by the waterfront. Here there were people, but they were construction workers in great numbers working on some kind of public works project by the park. One stepped over a homeless man lying on the street as if he wasn't there, or rather as if he was some kind of immovable feature of civic life, like a fire hydrant. I arrived at the cafe. The girl serving me told a group of Amazon corporate employees visiting from India ahead of me that they had reduced hours recently, first closing for one day a week, then two, now three or four. There were no longer enough customers to justify opening seven days a week. I ate, then walked past the 'first Starbucks' around the corner. Online tourist guides say you need to get there first thing in the morning or you'll wait for hours, but when I arrived there was no queue (you got me, Brits) at all.
Outside, construction workers continued their labor renovating some part of the market. A hobo shambled next to his cart outside the giant neon Public Market sign and shouted at some tourists who ran into the Target next door. Two brawny construction workers stood by and shrugged. I decided to follow the tourists. The Target had a detachment of a half dozen cops inside of it (I counted). Real police, not security. Given that the Seattle PD has only 940 officers, this amounted to 0.6% of the entire city's police force guarding a single Target outlet. I felt honored. Every single shelf in the cosmetics section was a locked cabinet. I paid, left and decided to head to the Nordstrom flagship store for some shopping, resolving to Uber back to the hotel if I bought anything. Along the way, I passed a city whose commercial life seemed in terminal decline. Empty storefront after empty storefront. Even the big luxury apartment buildings with sea views had huge 'for rent' banners draped across them. In 2016, Seattle had 16 homicides. In 2023, it had 73.
The route was a big mistake. The way from the market to Nordstrom had me turn at 3rd and Pine, home, as I would later find out, to "Crackdonald's". Hopefully you find this generally amusing, but I'll be honest, this part was scary. Among other things I got shouted at, someone tried to grab my (cheap) bag, a woman who was completely out of it stumbled into me, collapsed, then got up. I should have turned around but stupidly continued walking past the (unbelievably still open for business lol) McDonald's when a city employee in some kind of uniform grabbed my wrist and guided me through, then said I didn't look like I was from here and should avoid this intersection at night. I entered Nordstrom, which I assume only remains in business for corporate headquarters reasons, because there were almost no customers inside. The hobos were visible from Chanel, where I was ultimately reminded of the absurd markup European luxury brands charge Americans; the sales assistant sent two security guys from the store to wait with me on the empty sidewalk for my Uber.
On the five minute drive back, I marvelled again at the seemingly extraordinary amount of construction work the city was pursuing downtown. Widening sidewalks, planting trees, resurfacing streets, everywhere the logo of the Downtown Seattle Association and its key partners (Amazon and so on) was visible. A lone open ice cream store sought new workers at $27 an hour, an annual wage 50% higher than the median income in Britain. It was clear that Seattle was a very rich city. Yet it was also clear that it was a lawless shithole, abandoned by all but the hardiest pedestrians for point-to-point car transfers. And even then, they seemingly increasingly avoided the urban core. This is what marks the biggest difference between Seattle and places like Johannesburg; there, in the poor and violent downtown, one can see that the material situation is dire. There is no money. In Seattle, there was money. This was a choice, one unprompted (seemingly) by any major political change as occurred in South Africa. It seemed, inexplicably, as if this was what these wealthy and otherwise productive citizens had chosen for their city, clear-eyed and uncompelled, even as they invested billions in civic improvement most of them would never be able to use. Why were they doing this building? Did they not realize that the reason downtown was doing less well than it has been was not a lack of tree cover in summer or sidewalks that were too narrow for throngs of pedestrians to traffic them simultaneously, but a rather more immediate and pressing issue?
At the same time, it was hard not to participate in a general sense of despair at this pretty and useful city of 800,000 held hostage by, perhaps, a couple thousand psychotic homeless addicts. These were not well armed young men of the kind who create so much trouble in Rio, or in Caracas, or in the worse parts of Mexico. They were big, dumb, lumbering addicts, or skinny little things, out of their minds. They probably weren't going to shoot back, at least not accurately. And it was not lost on me that, in a different kind of society, the small corps of policemen in the Target alone, equipped with enough materiel, could have in a few hours dealt with the issue permanently. It was hard not to want them to, though it wasn't and isn't my call to make.
In the afternoon we went with some of our clients to eat at the University Village, an outdoor mall and dining complex near the city center. As they did in Johannesburg in Sandton, the productive class had built here an enclave, a kind of urban Disneyland guarded by a large cohort of ever-present security staff. But there is a crucial difference between the two: South Africa's transformation, for better or worse, was imposed upon it by the world. Seattle's was enacted by its own people.
The concierge at the hotel said Portland was even worse.
My work almost never brings me home to America (and my family all live on the East Coast), so in my morbid curiosity I jumped at the chance to see for myself how bad things had gotten since 2020. Downtown Los Angeles was a shithole, but it apparently has been since they built the highways (except for that brief 2015-2017 golden age) and I assume they'll try to clean it temporarily for the Olympics. San Francisco, which I had been expecting to be in the condition Fox News promised me, was slightly better than I expected, I must admit. Not that it wasn't a dump, because it was, but it didn't really appear worse than it was before 2020. SF was (laughably) considered a "Tier 1" city (and had a weirdly cheap Four Seasons), so I stayed in the FS by Union Square, famous for shithole status and close proximity to the Tenderloin. Honestly, there were a lot of normal people walking around during the daytime and even in the evening they still outnumbered the hobos. The financial district seemed fine enough, and in general the hobo problem, while worse than Manhattan, was no worse than Boston was late last year, and I thought Boston was still liveable, probably. The signs of decline were around us in the closed businesses and empty offices, but it was Singapore compared to Seattle. The food in San Francisco has seen big declines, though, we ate at well-reviewed / recommended places and what had once been one of the great food cities in the world seems to have lost all its good cooks in the last few years.
More than anything else, though, the trip underscored just how much of a farce the extreme urban decline of West Coast cities has been. Other countries have real problems. When their cities become hellholes, it's because their economies have collapsed, or because they've been taken over by extremely well-organized criminal gangs funded with cartel money in a nation too poor to pay for honest police, or because they're locked in years-long siege situations with militarized gendarmerie, or because they recently imported millions of people from cultures that hate them and don't care about their rules. But on the West Coast the shithole city problem wasn't the fault of any of those things, not even mass immigration (certainly not of the legal kind, although honestly very few of the hobos appeared to be Latino). Nor was it a grand act of clear-headed sadomasochism, amusing as that would be, because I can't really say most of the people I met there were happy about what had happened.
No, in America, the great cities of the West Coast had been destroyed because, like a prison warden deciding one day to become an inmate for no reason at all, their inhabitants had voted to legalize crime and - in so doing - to be held voluntarily, collectively hostage by the dregs of humanity their cities both produced and attracted from elsewhere in the country, bussed to California for the mild climate and pathologically altruistic host population. That the problem could be solved almost immediately by a competent government (even without resorting to the most extreme methods) was perhaps, in fact, the point. Perhaps you are supposed to take the BART with the filth every day, supposed to step over the needles, supposed to fear for your safety every time you walk around after dark, supposed to know just how easily this could be fixed at almost no cost and effort and yet watch powerlessly as it never happens and things just keep getting worse for no real reason at all.
Unrelated side point: holy hell were there an insanely high number of transwomen on the West Coast. I encountered more in that week than I have in my entire life. Two unrelated baristas at two different coffee places in the same morning were both transwomen, then so was the receptionist at the office we visited a half hour later. Wild. I now understand where all the very online trans people actually live.
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