2rafa
maybe it will all turn out fine
User ID: 841
2rafa
4hr ago
Sorry, you signed economic treaty #142495 with the international Fuck You Organization. That's actually illegal. There will be a fifteen-year court case in some international court run by countries that hate you, and in the meantime the bond market has decided you're actually a major lending risk. Look, I'm sure you'd love to manage your own country's economy, but the rest of us have decided that it's not really in our interests for you to do so, so please give control over to our team of experts so they can carve you up and take it all for themselves.
This isn’t actually true, though. Even in cases where, say, the EU and ECHR protect some private property rights (and therefore expropriation without compensation) it’s easy for there to be ways around it. For example, you simply issue a new currency and print money to pay property holders at a laughable official exchange rate, giving them cents on the dollar, then briefly switch to using euros or dollars, then issue a new currency. This would require crashing out of the Euro and possibly EU but this, again, is perfectly legal - Syriza strongly considered it, but decided against it because it meant a lot of economic hardship. You can even do it more easily than this by passing entirely legal laws that make some sectors non-viable commercially, destroying enterprise value, buying them from investors for nothing, then restoring their pricing power - for example - again fully legal under the ECHR as long as you have some kind of environmental or other reasoning. The same goes for defaulting on government debt, which any treasury can do by just…not paying the coupon for a relatively short period after which the markets consider it in default - this doesn’t require any special authority. Now, again, progressive governments might choose not to do it, because a lot of socialist economic policy is actually very very stupid and bad, but they could.
By contrast, stripping say 5 million people of citizenship at once and mass deporting them isn’t possible with a simple majority in most of Europe.
2rafa
4hr ago
Two reasons:
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Even if the Republicans win a legislative / congressional landslide in 2028, it’s very unlikely they’d win back a majority, almost impossible.
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Trump will still be president until 2029, so will remain an unpopular incumbent and ‘in charge’ on Election Day for voters.
It’s already over. Next Democratic administration equipped with a majority will naturalize millions and open the doors to millions of ‘climate refugees’ from Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Refugee numbers are set by the President, he can literally make them five million in a year, ten million even. There is no mandatory cap.
I agree that Brazil is now the best case scenario.
2rafa
7hr ago
Is your impression that the majority would have been retained if this war hadn’t happened?
2rafa
7hr ago
Your Victories are Temporary, Theirs are Permanent
The most important thing lesson reified by recent political events is that while conservatives can win by democratic means, they cannot rule by them.
This is the single absolute lesson of the last fifteen years of democratic populist conservatism, from Meloni to Orban, from Bolsonaro to Trump. Progressive victories are eternal and irreversible, conservative victories are limited and ephemeral.
Understanding why requires only a cursory glance at the underlying constitutional mechanics of every major Western or Western-adjacent democracy (the same also applies in large part to many non-Western democracies, like India, although they have their own local differences).
The 20th century saw the construction of a number of constitutionally protected edifices that make conservative governance effectively impossible. These include, but are not limited to, the ECHR and European Union and the integration of the first or both into the constitutional structures of pretty much all European countries, the CRA in the United States, the emergence of supremely powerful progressive Supreme Courts in Canada, Italy and elsewhere, forms of devolution that strip precisely the powers from national governments required to implement conservative policies, and the emergence of a vast legal sector - particularly in the Anglo countries - designed to stymie policy implementation by using much of the above.
For example, adding a new citizen requires only that a single administration (which probably didn’t win the support of an absolute majority of voters even once, depending on where we’re talking about) admit and naturalize - via work or family visa, refugee status, legalizing illegal migrants, whatever - a single individual. Stripping someone of citizenship almost always requires constitutional change, in some cases unambiguously (eg second gen birthright citizenship in the US) but in many other cases (many EU countries) practically, because appeals to the ECHR, constitutionally enshrined, will almost always be won by appealing parties except in - and sometimes even in - the most egregious cases. This is occasionally possible for actual terrorists but certainly not for large migrant groups. This inherent imbalance - progressives can easily add a million citizens, conservatives can never remove a million citizens - cannot be addressed by democratic means, because national-level extreme supermajorities are very unusual in democracies. It is coup-complete not because reactionaries can never get into power, but because they cannot exercise the power that their democratic majority should rightfully give them.
Even where legislation was passed by the regular process rather than constitutional amendment, the entire construct above allowed for the insertion (as in the CRA) of vast amounts of new and powerful law into the existing constitutional framework in a way that became impossible to reverse. Additionally, longstanding small-c conservative norms like the US senate filibuster, an unwillingness to repeal previous passed laws, the existence of ‘economic conservatives’ who don’t care about culture, crime or safety and so on, prevented the reversal in any case of radical laws passed during times of bizarre, panicked or propagandized national sentiment. Squeamish quasi-conservative politicians winnowed majorities into minorities on any possibly radical piece of legislation that even sought to temporarily or partially reverse anything.
This is the situation Western conservatives find themselves in now. The center-left have established a system where - because of the constitutional, legal and social systems and customs that they created or exploited in the 20th century - any conservative government or administration can play only in a small sandbox, limited in power and with the knowledge that anything they do can be washed away at the next election. Even lightly chipping away at one of the sandbox’s walls requires the legislative energy of an entire term, and all the while they can accomplish nothing else, must contend with moderates in their own faction, and any wider economic, geopolitical etc issues that any government has to manage, and then usually fail at repealing anything anyway.
Sometimes, in countries with systems in which the left has alienated a huge traditional voting bloc for religious-cultural reasons (Turkey and India) an ambitious leader can somewhat accomplish some things democratically, or quasi-democratically by preserving an absolute legislative majority for 10+ years, which is enough to finally hack away at the aforementioned. But the Anglo countries are not Turkey or India (yet anyway), populations are too fickle, they have longer democratic traditions, and the center and left are more powerful.
Future conservative movements must therefore consider very carefully what they can and must do, after winning power legitimately by democratic means, to ensure the neutering of non-compliant institutions and the ability to rapidly consolidate extraconstitutional power to effect significant change, by whatever means.
No Western country (no, certainly not even Denmark) has ever reversed mass immigration in modernity. Why? Because it’s boiling the frog. People get animated about it for a couple of years, then get bored. They start caring more about other things. It doesn’t even matter what those other things are, they could be anything. But they always find something else to care about. At that time, the pro migration side always comes back to power, even if a very faintly anti-immigration side (and it is never more than that) happens to be in power for a brief period.
It is important to understand and accept this. Nothing about the political situation is ever, ever, ever going to get better for conservatives in any Anglo country. At best, you carve out a brief catharsis against history, maybe very slightly and temporarily slow the tide (but deport nobody), accomplish nothing else, then lose. Maybe you get to laugh at a few crying progressives making sad YouTube videos, I guess. The happiest day for any conservative is an election victory, it is downhill from there. It doesn’t matter if Le Pen or the AfD or Farage or One Nation or anybody else wins, you will lose because they will do nothing to reverse the decline.
It is fate that the US midterms happen the day after the British government hands out citizenship to 800,000 poor Boriswave migrants from India, Pakistan and Nigeria, hired on wages of as little as $30,000 a year (many will move onto welfare as soon as they can, and even those who don’t will be net burdens on the state every year of their life), and who can now bring over millions more dependants. You can only lose. They will always win.
One propagandized video of a few border control cops being vaguely mean to a well-meaning liberal or a sympathetic migrant is enough to reverse even a neutered deportation initiative. A dead Kurd on a Mediterranean beach means you have to accept two million more young Afghan and Syrian men, sorry. A Hurricane in Haiti? Well, infinite migration from there can continue indefinitely because of course nobody can go home. Try and deport anybody? Well, you might get a few thousand, but the rest just have to lay low for a while until the opposition came back to power.
All one can hope is that the decline is slow and that the outcome is a society in which civilized people, come what may, can still live in some form of civilization for a time, gated behind walls that keep the tide at bay.
2rafa
2d ago
As far as I know there is zero evidence of this (ie your Sony Bravia parasitically latching onto the neighbors WiFi connection without ever telling you to transmit your data back to the mothership secretly) ever happening with any mainstream TV brand (or indeed any as far as I know). It’s internet hearsay, like claiming Siri or Alexa overheard you talking about your broken vacuum and then Google started showing you ads for a new one. Not only is it rare to find open WiFi networks with no login walls these days, but it would open TV manufacturers to a lot of legal risk.
2rafa
3d ago
I have known a few AMWF Wasians and I think because fathers play a smaller role in childrearing than mothers the consequence is that the place they grow up in makes all the difference. For example, two common AMWF pairings are a pretty Russian woman and an affluent or cool Chinese/Korean man in an East Asian mega city, and a successful professional East Asian man in a big Western city like London or New York or San Francisco and his white wife (disproportionately middle or Northern European if from Europe, generically white if American).
Those who grow up in the West tend to grow up wholly in generic PMC culture, there is pretty much zero chance of them speaking their father’s ancestral language (whether he’s first or subsequent generation). I suspect an additional factor is that the, say, Chinese-American guy with a white wife is probably less interested in cultural continuity, the Chinese language and culture, connection to those traditions than the Chinese American man with a Chinese[-American] wife, for the same reason that would be true of any mixed pairing. Because their white moms will have predominantly white mom friendship groups, it’s likely the children will be in primarily white social circles and will not be in hyper striver extracurricular focused must-go-to-elite-college environments, although it can still happen. While Asian dads are often very ambitious for their kids, my understanding is that the actual ground-level tiger mom stuff is distinctly tiger mom, not dad.
Those who grow up in Asia can be like the above if the mother and father are part of tightly knit European or American expat circles, have no or limited local family etc. But in cases where, say, a Russian woman lives with her Chinese husband and kids in Hong Kong, and his entire extended family is there, and they are not solely international school types (they may still be private school types, but there are private schools that are predominantly expat and those that are predominantly native), it is likely the children will grow up more immersed in the paternal side culture.
There are other popular AMWF categories, I think in Australia the Filipino man - white woman pairing is apparently common. But I’m less familiar with them.
I don’t think open model competition will necessarily stay minor forever. It’s also perhaps more lucrative for surviving independent or semi-independent datacenter operators. Frontier models will be key to things like cybersecurity, its much less clear that running accounts payable for a construction company or handling automated help chat for a video game publisher or writing a mean review of a hotel you just visited on TripAdvisor based on your voice note requires them, and it’s mundane tasks like these that will be the majority of inference tasks if not tokens in relatively short order, if they aren’t already. Even for relatively powerful agentic stacks, it’s my understanding that a lot of consumer and enterprise tools now use cheap open models to triage and then call agents that might themselves call, where deemed necessary, frontier models. Most customers increasingly won’t notice the difference. I also think the position of the datacenter operators is getting increasingly dire and the market seems to agree. Coreweave and Oracle debt with spreads of 400-600+ bps to the treasury curve is ominous, even new issues at like 9% interest, but even if these vendors / providers survive, the margin to pay the coupon has to come from somewhere and with both GPUs and energy completely commoditized, that side of the business essentially relies on compute demand for inference as not only a bottleneck, but one that will experience zero slack as a result of falling token costs, open models and so on.
To believe in the data center narrative (and you have to even if you don’t own Coreweave or Oracle because every other big tech and frontier lab is guaranteeing a lot of that debt one way or another) you have to believe that if, say, inference and training becomes 50% more efficient overnight, that slack is going to be immediately taken up by new demand without any price pressure or panic.
2rafa
3d ago
Clearly this is still a very lucrative business. The threat for shipping firms isn’t really losing the value of a ship, though, it’s that lead time on new tankers is limited, production has been very low since oil prices cratered in 2014, and everybody who still makes them (mainly the Chinese) is at max capacity with no slack for years. Since anybody who has them is printing money right now, there’s also no incentive to sell or lease them to other firms except at prices / rates that negate much of the Hormuz profiteering bonus. So it is still a real gamble - whether or not you have insurance.
The point is that the truth of the claim is far, far narrower than what is suggested.
It’s like a motte and bailey where the motte is “a core foreign policy goal of the CIA was to fracture support for Stalinism in Western European communist student and bohemian art circles, so they funded abstract contemporary art that made the socialist realism promoted as state art in the USSR seem dated, illiberal and boring to this small, niche group of leftists who already hated the United States, capitalism, the wars in Korea and later Vietnam etc” and the bailey is “the CIA deliberately promoted the replacing of traditional classical American styles of art with degenerate, abstract and ugly contemporary art to fracture American society and make us all gay abortionists”.
Actually, none of the art was for ‘fucking with the Soviets’, it was all for shaping the opinion of socialist-adjacent groups, students, professors, artists, hippies, cultural commentators, literary journal contributors and so on in the American sphere who slowly turned against the Soviet Union in the decades leading up to 1990, which was a far greater priority.
2rafa
3d ago
Data for black women is skewed by obesity rates.
Most groups have similar male and female obesity rates, that is to say white women are similarly obese to white men, Asian women are similarly obese to Asian men, etc. There is variation but it is minor.
Black women have obesity rates roughly 2x those of black men. Black men are less obese than men of most other racial groups; black women are more obese than women of other groups.
This is the primary cause, by far, of some of these unusual dynamics, even more than things like college attendance. For example, it explains why black men date out more than black women.
The ‘They/Them’ thing is a very inside baseball SNL style ‘joke’ about the 2024 ‘Kamala is for They/Them. Trump is for you’ ad. I’m sure Cenk found it very funny but no swing voter remembers or cares, and it’s stuffed in a little awkwardly.
I guess this might work on some Michigan Arabs, who are clearly the primary audience.
2rafa
3d ago
Sam Kriss is an interesting but very uneven writer, fond of overlong fictive anecdotes, an obsession with poorly interpreted myth, and - most egregiously - an unwillingness to ever actually argue in favor of anything because an argument you can grasp is one you can criticize. Ideologically, he is an empty pop-philosopher, an inverted Pinker who reifies the kind of reheated 1990s WTO protest Naomi Klein democratic socialism that has no real answers, or even useful questions, about the world we actually live in. If he is defined by anything it is a fear of ever engaging earnestly with the arguments of the political right, and if he is the best Substack has to offer, there are a dozen regulars here who write better both in terms of technical ability (for example conciseness) and content. I won’t name them.
I don’t think this community has earnestly discussed IQ much in years (if it does today, it’s usually only tangentially, for example in relation to the Arday-Cofnas case), it’s a relatively boring and played out topic. I do think this community selects for people who dislike performative vulgarity, value functioning and well-ordered societies, and are probably a little cynical about some of the social changes that have occurred in recent decades, sure. Anti-social and socially unpopular? I’m not so sure, I’d guess that while we have some losers and recluses, we don’t have more than the rest of the internet proportionally, and I would similarly guess that we have many quite normal people with relatively normal social and professional lives, community lives, families and children etc.
2rafa
3d ago
TPO was often obstinate and annoying but, again, he was an interesting writer and original thinker who has clearly had a lot of success on other social media since his departure from this board.
2rafa
5d ago
10 Year Anniversary Celebration (it was actually earlier this year, but we can still call it the ten year I guess) would be fun.
2rafa
5d ago
His AI opinions have not always been on point lol. That is literally impossible given his AI opinions have oscillated between almost every possible opinion on AI and the AI race over the last 4-5 years.
I don’t begrudge people who leave - someone once suggested Kulak was making like $25,000 a year from his Substack which seems crazy me, but good for him - but I have a fundamental difference of opinion with them in that (a) I’m not going to pay for some random Redditor’s political opinions, even if I agree with them and (b) when you start making money - even if it’s just a side hustle - the incentives change in a way that usually makes your writing worse, your reasoning more motivated, etc. It’s like paid mods, I don’t have an issue with them in principle, but I understand why people in the community see them as a cultural problem.
I also don’t understand who is actually paying all these people. I have money, but the idea of spending $300 a month to read a bunch of Motte-or-worse comments seems…bad? I guess people will say they subscribe to newspapers but the good papers actually do original journalism, reporting, have good sources etc and even the opinion columns are usually people who were actually accomplished in their fields, are still well connected, and so can present some analysis and credibility I can’t find on Reddit (or most of Substack).
2rafa
5d ago
Yeah, we had the user viewpoint series a few years ago, but this would be slightly different - do it!
2rafa
5d ago
Most attractive 24 year old women in Miami aren’t dating fifty year old men, or close to it. There is a larger sugar baby / p4p scene in Miami than any other major city in the US adjusted for the population, but it’s still quite limited. I think it’s more likely the circles you’re in. I know a few women with much older parters, but they tend to be average looking women who get out of a long relationship at, say, 32, don’t like the prospects their age, and settle for a much older man with kids already who funds a nice and relaxing rest of their life. A hot 24 year old, in general, knows that a silver fox today is the man whose ass you’re wiping in twenty years, when you’re still in your forties.
2rafa
5d ago
I agree more than disagree, but it was a process with many stops and starts. It began in earnest in the 1880s and 1890s, reached its zenith in the decade after the first world war in certain subcultures of young urban women, then went stagnant (and partially reversed, depending on the exact place and metric) for a while through the late 1950s, then was reignited by the sexual revolution and its immediate precursors and finally - for the first time - filtered out into pretty much the entirety of western society by the late 1970s, which is when the sexual revolution actually reached most normal people.
The ‘weapon’ in the case of opposing socialist policies is that international investors (governments, private asset managers, whatever) might voluntarily choose not to lend to you anymore. The ‘weapon’ in the case of opposing right wing policies is that they just…block you from doing them with no recourse by ruling them illegal.
As you note, they are not the same.
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