Which non-communist countries would these be?
France.
Because I think the single unifying trait you are ignoring here is communism.
Definitionally atheist communism, yes. I observed nothing about China's fall, I said the worst of them all was the nation that never had Christianity to discard. This is a fact. Weimar, and especially Rome, you can't just say "Wrong." Not here.
Sure, but I could name a bunch of other ruinous traits also easily found in most countries in decline. This argument is specifically about whether it's control of women (or lack thereof) that is a unifying thread. You mentioned automation. I could mention that and a host of other economic, technological, and tribal concerns that probably figure much more prominently in any potential societal collapse than the "mistake" of letting women have sexual agency.
What do I make of every one of your responses being a mix of snide quips and "Nuh-uh"? I would make that you have personal and significant emotional investment in my assessment being wrong.
Same, mostly. I would be happy to be wrong. I don't care about these things. I want my mental model of the world to align with with the world. I have no personal investment in the actual "why" of the fall of Rome or Weimar Germany or even the decline of America. I'm American, so it affects me and I am personally invested in it stopping, but I don't attach moral significance to any particular interpretation of the decline. If it turned out the problem was in fact women's liberation not going far enough, then that's the truth. It's what I'd want it to be, mostly, I would have an ethical problem with any attempt to empirically justify abortions, but if "sexual agency" is not just a euphemism for the freedom to make terrible decisions and can actually be quantified as beneficial, then once again, that's the truth, and I'll heed it. I dislike being incorrect, if my paradigm is wrong and my interpretation for why we're in decline is wrong, then I will change them, but you gotta show me why.
I'll go a little more on this in the next paragraph but I want to take a moment to be clear. I'd resent any implication of misogyny, and you haven't done that one bit, but for anyone else reading. I truly love women and I don't mean this as the cad. I'm a guy and there are big expectations on me but none of them will ever be as important as giving birth. The woman has immediate existential value, but in that, she is predefined. She has an easier time of it because, as with almost all of them, the only mark she'll leave on the world is her children. This is true for men but not true in the same way. It's not our bodies getting pregnant, it's not our certainty of pain and risk of injury and death. It's not that the reason we exist might be exactly what kills us. The angst and the implicit body horror must be profound, especially in this paradox of it being bound with the most wonderful and beautiful thing; the maybe singular yet perfect example of something a person can't understand in theory but only if they face it. The ideal would be that sex could just be for fun, that permanent bonding was voluntary, that pregnancies were always safe and could only occur when they were wanted. The ideal would be liberation--what we've done isn't that. What we've done is pretty God-damned far from liberation.
Rome. I may be overemphasizing in saying it was the singular cause, but I am not wrong that it was a major contributing factor. Between the work of Walter Scheidel, Mary Beard, and Kyle Harper the declining birthrate can be concluded as a ranking culprit. Scheidel has the numbers of how high the mortality rates were and how women had to have a lot of children just to keep the population static. Beard, and what I said above I return to here, talks about what it meant to be a woman in Rome, what it meant to become pregnant. Every time she was risking death, and the risk was high. 1 in 50 births overall, for an individual woman, about a 1 in 10 chance she dies during childbirth. Is there any wonder she would want things different?
Harper talks about birth rates, his work is seminal, all future study should incorporate it, as he considers disease and weather. What happens when a population with underdeveloped immune systems gets hit with plague? They die. What happened in Roman history? Plague at three key junctures, or perhaps plague that made three key junctures. Except we know stable societies not only tolerate plagues, they bounce back and flourish. Assuming it doesn't wipe them out as it did in South America, but it didn't in Rome. Unoccupied land there for the taking, the demand for laborers rising and their pay and treatment improving, the political structures weakened and allowing reforms. Renaissance followed the Black Death. Rome wasn't ended by plagues because they were that bad, Rome was already weak and plagues finished them off. What made them weak? Not enough people. Even the authors who know how many mothers died in childbirth fail to observe "Well they had the choice not to, of course they took it; thus went Rome."
I condemn Weimar Germany for their last depravities. I assign no moral condemnation to Rome. Caprice is a charged word so I can't claim I've spoken on this with clinical detachment, but I've tried, and maybe failed anyway, to use language that indicates my slant. I hate the conditions that cause these choices, not the individuals who make them.
A Roman woman who had just one child and didn't want to risk death by having a second, who could find blame in her? Of the civilizations that allow women to make that choice, yes maybe they fall, but isn't that a worthy reason? Said another way, if I'm right about how societies that don't control women -- that don't force women to have babies over and over until they have enough or die -- will inevitably collapse, those societies would be completely right to refuse that control, and noble if they did so knowing what it would cost. Today, today, what do we do about the pandemic today of bastard and layabout men? Who could say today it's worth forcing women to stay with and give a half-dozen kids to men who treat them right at first only to become monsters 5 or 10 years into marriage? It's important to say this is not the rule, it's important to say this is presented as commonplace in no small reason because fearmongering is politically useful, when most men, most people, are good, or good enough. But America alone has more than 350 million people, and a percent of a percent is an unacceptable number. What do we do? The woman can divorce him, then what? Take her kids and carry on with their life-sized baggage? Does she risk that, or does she live the only way she knows, the way society today encourages, periodically coupling, while hoping to find the love of her life, eventually. Of course she'd choose the second! When those are the choices? Shit sucks, it's that simple, it just sucks.
I want this to be the better way, not being cavalier about sex, but at least not rushing to marriage, having several relationships so you can learn, or nowadays, so men and women have enough time to learn the qualities of their partners and what's best for each before they commit to each other for life so they can make more humans. I want it to be, because for the most part, this is the better way. But I can't disregard the facts in front of me just because they would mean the world is a darker place. Whatever kind of world we live in, that is the world, it doesn't change by how we feel about it, it changes when we know the truth, because it's only from the truth that we can do something about it.
jake
2d ago
"Now, sure, every time in the last 200 years that a nation declared itself as enlightened atheists guided by pure reason they immediately proceeded with the worst atrocities yet visited upon man, but hey, what's religion got to do with anything?"
You're better than this response, not least of all because your challenges were answered and you missed it in your haste to throw down the "tl;dr lol."
Avarice is self-evidently ruinous. Caprice was explained at the top:
When birthrates decline in an otherwise prosperous nation the cause is always the same: multiple avenues for intrasexual competition where women attain status aside from wifehood and motherhood.
Left to their own devices, the majority will choose serial fleeting satisfactions rather than the long-term happiness that comes in continuing the human race by creating more people. This is capriciousness.
I do agree my jab at the end was hyperbole, but it's because my timeframe is right. Simulacra will reach ubiquity before "Generation Supercritical" reaches the age of majority and adopts them in mass. As for you calling this doomsaying, I'm deathly serious about my concerns, I don't see the flaw and I think about this constantly. If you do, if you think you have a superior understanding, if you see how we get out of this mess of young people seeing no purpose in life, especially when automation comes for everything, I'm all ears. I want to be wrong, I would want you to be right, because then all posterity doesn't hinge on this one achievement.
jake
2d ago
Rome is the example. It failed to exert sufficient control on male avarice and turned empire. It failed to exert sufficient control on female caprice and its birthrates collapsed. When birthrates decline in an otherwise prosperous nation the cause is always the same: multiple avenues for intrasexual competition where women attain status aside from wifehood and motherhood. This started before Caesar was born as changing laws on land ownership and divorce gave women significant privilege. Come Augustus, he attempted to correct their declining population by laws that incentivized having children, but the target was wrong and the incentives were wrong. Women aren't incentivized to become mothers through extra rights, money, or praise; they're incentivized to become mothers when that's the only thing they can do.
I'm not saying this is good, because it's not, it's terrible, unfortunately it's the truth. If women didn't work, if they couldn't go to college and it was legal to discriminate against them in employment, they would be getting married and having children as soon as they could. They wouldn't have avenues for status in what university they attended and where they worked, but only in their household, in their husband and their children. Again I am not remotely saying "WE MVST RETVRN." I'm observing the facts, women are every bit as competitive as men, and every bit as good at it in their domains of competition. Add to that the broader incentive, good alma mater, good career, husband with a better career, lots of money, of course they'll put off having kids, for the individual it follows a line of perfect reason. They are acting entirely logically, for themselves. Society suffers.
Rome's collapse wasn't even that bad though, at least not compared to Weimar Germany. There, wanton greed and profligacy triple threating with Bolshevism precipitated the Nazis. But you don't need to look at them, either, you can look right now to the American black community. Relative to America as a whole, the black community has enclaves that have all but collapsed, only holding on as ample taxpayer assistance keeps them afloat. Were the assistance citizens of Baltimore received limited to what the city could extract as taxes, it would be a wasteland. What characteristics define the American black community? Male avarice and female caprice.
But even if there were no examples, it's enough to say "This was the practice of every successful group of people in history." When the most contentious and bloodthirsty, divided by mountains and jungles, arrive at a uniform conclusion on one a given subject, it's not "just-so" to point out their practice. Uniform agreement makes it the implicit paradigm and means challengers are presumed false. They didn't agree on their gods, they didn't agree on worship, they didn't agree on how they should go about ruling themselves and what should be done with foreigners, but all of them agreed about women. Note, I also didn't use it to justify the metaphysics of "they all said the gods said so," I said they used religious framing for what they already knew.
What they didn't know was how to perfect it, which Christianity did and does for its inspired understanding of biological realities, of those biotruths. You look back from the top of history and think of the chain of progress as inevitable and so you say I'm post-hoc justifying Christianity as integral, but I'm not because I also am looking at history and I can see all the instances of what happened when it was discarded. The French tried, their streets ran red with blood, and created the pinnacle of hubris Directorate, thus Napoleon. Germany tried, thus Hitler. Russia tried, thus Stalin. China never had it, thus the worst of them all in Mao. The healthiest societies are Christian because Christianity is unique in its ability to produce the greatest share of societal buy-in. Without it, assuming Muhammad still exists, either Islam conquers Europe or we get another Attila or a European Temujin and practically all of Europe is ethnically Norman, or it's German, or it's Anglo.
The Japanese have to be mentioned. They are not as healthy as the healthiest Christian civilizations, but they have the highest buy-in, they're secular and they exert sufficient controls on avarice and caprice. I've said I think they're in the perfect position by temperament and population for the coming age of simulacra, so their low birthrates may prove ideal. This is one group, or maybe almost two given how closely related they are the Koreans, and therein the interesting quality of the Koreans having those occasionally flamboyant moments of personal instability (one presidential crisis after another; also, the DPRK). Thing is, Japan would be on the precipice of a crisis if it weren't for that coming automation, but that crisis would be less than nothing to the Weimar's comparative nothing to what might come in America. White America is holding on by its bleeding fingernails, the scenario I've posted about here twice of us making it through this turmoil specifically requires the appearance and ubiquity of the relation surrogate wife-bot.
You can't have civilization without buy-in and we've pissed it away. Buy-in is the same thing for most men, the everyman who comprises the actual society. It's not money, land, fame or praise; it's children. Us wordcels can jerk ourselves into upholding civilization from pure reason, the normies think about their kids, or the kids they will have, or the kids they wish they could have. That's what makes them care, but the family is at its hardest to obtain for at least the last thousand years, and not for actual economic reasons, not for conflict or disease or famine, but because of the profit that was made in doubling the work force and because of the insatiable lusts of the "elites." We can't unfuck this. The laws and social changes that would be required can't happen without cataclysm, because we rightly don't want to enact such laws and make such changes and would only from existential necessity. That cataclysm is what's looming. If I'm wrong about the timeframe and it would take another 50 years to develop the wifebot, we won't get that far, because given another 25 years of the status quo and America will give rise to a figure who makes Mao look like a reasonable man.
You can't have young men who have no hope for the future. It is the terminal condition for civilization. You can have rampant, gross greed in the acquisition of material wealth. If young men were all still getting married, if they had to grind hard in life, but they had a reasonable domicile and they could provide for their wife and children, that would be enough for their buy-in. They don't even have that. It's what people need to understand, especially the righties who do have superior faculties at assessing danger and keep saying "one of these days, man" while the lefties correctly mock them, just for the wrong reasons. Violence will come if this isn't addressed, but it's not from us, we're not the generations who turn violent, we still have enough buy-in. We're the gap, we are the harbingers, it's the boys being born today who will reach adulthood and see a barren wasteland waiting ahead of them and they will be ready to follow anyone who says "Get your guns, we're burning everything down."
You want evidence of the inevitable end of societies that don't control avarice and caprice. You are living in it.
My concern is that I’ve never really heard of a secular society with those kinds of restrictions on sexuality
Every society everywhere on Earth for all history up to the 20th century exerted sufficient intrasocietal controls on male avarice and female caprice or else it collapsed. Religious language framed what they already knew, now we don't know and today it's framed purely religiously. Christianity has kept record of its inspired line on biotruths and their peculiarities -- non-consanguineous marriage for life with many children -- you'll see certain lifestyles were discussed from frame of their harms being known in common wisdom. The lecher or the whore were already seen as contemptible, moral lessons weren't "It's bad to be a whore," everybody knew that, so they were "Divorcing your wife makes whores of both of you."
Our connection with this common wisdom withered and died in the age of rapid modernization and individualization, so some Christians, already on the fool's errand of attempting to reconcile their faith with society, could only present their opposition in heavily religiously connoting or outright religious terms. It's bad because God says it's bad, true, but that's at the top. At the bottom is "You'll sleep around in your 20s, get married in your thirties, have one kid, maybe two if you're really lucky, not deeply love your husband, divorce him when your kids are out of the house, and every cold night in your lonely bed be unwarmed by the memories of the dalliances of your youth." It will ruin your fucking life, that's why you don't do it.
Secular society moving past these doesn't come from science. If anything the scientific paradigm should be hyperfixated on healthy, responsible human sexuality. Creatures have reproduced sexually for a billion years, mammals diverged 300 million years ago, 100 years of sexual insouciance might as well not exist on the epochal timeframe yet here we are. Looking down from a period of .0000003% of the history of our biological class and with absolute sincerity and absolute lack of any awareness these people say "Yeah sex doesn't mean anything, it can just be for fun." We feel this dissonance cognitively and viscerally, it's part of the constant psychic background radiation driving everyone crazy, we engage in behavior we know instinctively as destructive and then throw cash at our best so they target their tremendous mental faculties at justifying what we can conclude from intuition and pure reason as wrong. I can only wonder what sort of writing Scott would be putting out if he'd moved to a small Jewish community in New England and married a sensible reformed girl who wanted lots of kids. I can only wonder how much of his tremendous brainpower is sequestered in its quiet battle against a billion years of evolution screaming NO NO NO NO NO!
But it's not about science, it's about greed. It's about the money and power drawn from a destabilized society, and you bet your ass it's about top-% men being able to have sex with whichever beautiful commoners they want, using them up and discarding them. I'll use the socialist's most apt phrasing, it's history's true and greatest transfer of wealth, a self-sustaining fire consuming each new generation.
jake
6d ago
I count 3/8 accurate predictions.
◪ Non-meaningful prediction to say Israel would respond to Oct 7
☒ "Solve the Gaza Question"
◪ Non-meaningful prediction to say anti-Zionist militias would continue fighting Zionism
☑ Iran has to would respond, but splitting hairs
☑ Israel, Iran exchange strikes
☑ Would precede (US) strikes on Iran nuclear program
☒ Initiates war between Iran and Israel
☒ US drawn into war
☒ Syrian regime fell, but not as consequence of US-Iran war
☒ Iran regime change†
†Fuentes' predictions conclude it from a US-Iran war; it might happen as a result of the instability from Israel walking all over the nation's ADS and domestic security apparatus.
The meaningful prediction is strikes on Iran's nuclear program, except it was the US and not Israel, and it didn't start a war. Trump's already joking about it, and there's this meme.
jake
10d ago
I meant nobles by birth. Brahe was a born noble, Kelvin was elevated to the peerage for his work. As with Darwin, "Son of a wealthy man" or "Son of a merchant" or especially "Son of a wealthy merchant"/"mother's father was a wealthy merchant" is a common descriptor for many great mathematicians and scientists. There is something to be said of the requirements and traits needed to become and succeed as a merchant. Serfs these were not, but no one in this forum could be said as being of "serf stock," and few if any could be found in most active discussions of politics on the internet. I would guess most people here don't ever interact with them beyond the most basic of retail and service workers.
It's like -- there was this shooting years ago at a Madden tournament. For those surprised that football video games have esports competitions, this was also news to me. It was a small tournament, but still. I knew the games sold well and yet I never actually considered it because it took hearing about that shooting to realize all along this entirely separate and parallel ecosystem existed. Many millions of people play shooters, but there's insignificant overlap between them and the many millions playing sports games.
There's insignificant overlap between people discussing politics online at all strata and the actual "serfs." The actual "serfs" have smart phones because everybody has them, but they're not arguing about human capital. It's what you've said, class as a stick, because this is really intraclass competition in form of those of supposed status sneering. You want to see the actual low class? You already know it, everybody does. YouTube comment sections, that's the parallel ecosystem where the "serfs" roam.
Guy writes fun short story. "Source?" says one, "What did he mean by this?" says another. It's a joke, c'mon.
Was this meant to be a mean joke? Sorry man, you put in too much effort and snark, so the snark itself came off as in parody and the whole thing came off as decent satire. Well done, I did laugh, you stuck the landing.
You have an obsession with class but you shouldn't. Of the top 1,000 or so achievements of humanity you will find, well down the list of its contributors, maybe one single noble by name of Tycho Brahe. It's Shakespeare, scrutiny on his identity didn't come from a fair evaluation but noble arrogance at the impossibility of a commoner having such a way with words.
I think you approach something truthful here, but only approach. You wrote this (I hope; if it's AI consider me the sad fool), you show your intelligence, you also show how deeply you consider this topic. More than some of these respondents realize, but worse, more than you yourself realize, because I think your obsession with class fogs your mind by forcing you to write off branches in reasoning and take conclusions you otherwise wouldn't. There may be something to be said about the behaviors of large groups of people, and the way that relates with their "class," who they started around, who they are around now, who they will end their lives around. But class as Banana uses it, and as you may have fallen into, is more like a religious belief, something ineffable to which you always reason back. I can assure you the progressive metaphysical beliefs of western Brahmin are just that: without substance. You use them as though they're the map while they're just making it all up.
So why not, just for curiosity's sake, reconsider one of your conclusions? Any, you know this, your subject, your choice, but after shelving class as having explanatory power and instead as detail incidental to the territory you try to see.
jake
10d ago
I think that’s also a very good counter example to all the people who say that there are no conspiracies because they are impossible to keep secret
MKUltra showed this when a couple dozen universities across the country were dosing unknowing participants with psychoactives and it took congress investigating something else to uncover it. People are in fact so good at collectively shutting up one could wonder if a separate conspiracy had anything to do with the appearance in common wisdom of "number of participants" as a weighty variable in the success of plots.
jake
13d ago
Thanks for finding that, it is close, but actually that articles contains a link to a separate incident with clearer and potentially closer video. I'm surprised I didn't come across the second video since it contains exact terms I searched: https://www.palestinechronicle.com/israeli-forces-shoot-woman-with-child-holding-white-flag-video/
Priors updated. I'll look harder.
I think I should warn as graphic, in her being shot, falling, and a pool of blood forming, but too far for specific detail. "The fate of the woman is unknown," maybe they say that as a courtesy for hope.
jake
14d ago
It's fair to argue they may not be easily searchable, they shouldn't be, but I'm not only saying I can't find them, I'm also saying I've never seen them in the wild, and I have every reason to think I would have. Darryl Cooper has specifically claimed, on X or Rogan or Tucker, that he has seen multiple videos of Palestinians being shot by snipers. He's former military, he knows people, it could be he's long had access to special channels, but that's not a satisfactory answer as it requires explaining why none have ever "breached containment."
Video is absolutely relevant. You understand this, a graphic video of a civilian murdered, such as a child being shot, would be an unparalleled optics victory for Palestine. I could believe most Palestinians would refuse to use so terrible a death even with what they would gain, but there are Palestinians who wouldn't refuse. Not even cynically, the virtuous who believe the world should know the truth and they show it in hope of preventing future deaths. It would mean convincing me and anyone else who would find video conclusive where words aren't.
My position is simple. Israelis are liars, Palestinians are liars, human rights organizations are liars, journalists are liars. There is total incentive to lie about everything by everyone involved. Israel to cover their ass, Palestine to maintain their existentially-required image of being the victim, orgs to justify their continued work or because they're aligned with Palestine, and journalists because they're journalists.
Palestine, actually, is waging effective fifth-generation warfare, their action is the optics of victimhood. Every civilian death is an attack, every civilian massacre is a major maneuver. This is the case regardless of the truth of their claims, as in if everything they claim is true and they aren't trying to do optics they just get them from their being attacked, it's the case as an emergent property. It's how they have to fight, it's all they have against an actual military. But because it's how they fight, it's exactly how they would lie.
jake
14d ago
The event mentioned here is the 20-month long Great March of Return.
"Protestors" accepts framing and implies them as the righteous party. Week after week these groups showed up to "demonstrate" and week after week people there got shot and killed. At a certain point it's no longer "protesting," if it ever was, it's about optics, and if it's about optics, well -- TPOASIWID and the purpose of the Friday "protests" was to produce dead Palestinians.
"Gunned down" evokes imagery of incidents of massed concentrated fire at civilians, and that isn't right either. Across those 20 months, Israeli soldiers, I think almost all snipers did fire on Palestinians, totaling 9,204 injured and 223 killed. 46 are listed as "children" but the citation is "minors under the age of 18."
The one claimed definite child was this:
An eight-month-old child, Leila al-Ghandour was widely reported, following an initial statement by the Gaza Health ministry, to have been a victim of tear-gas at the border. The following day, the Gaza Health Ministry announced that it was not certain of the cause of death and two weeks later struck her name off the official list of people killed during the protests. In a court case against a Fatah al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades militant, who had been captured on the border, the indictment stated that man in question was a relative of the deceased's parents, and had stated the latter had been paid by Yahya Sinwar, the head of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades in Gaza, about US$2,200 to report to the media that she had died of tear gas inhalation rather than from a pre-existing medical condition.
But even if this had been true, that a baby had died from tear gas inhalation, it wouldn't have been the IDF's fault someone brought a baby.
You will also find this recurrent. Any Palestinian aged 17 years, 364 days or younger is counted as a child. Children can use guns and toss Molotovs. 16-year-olds are not children and if one throws a Molotov at a soldier, whatever they get is what they deserve.
According to the Commission’s data analysis, the Israeli Security Forces injured 6,106 Palestinians with live ammunition at the protest sites during this period.
6,106 opportunities for video, or above, 9,204 total. Where the fuck is it? The absence is deafening. I am told to accept that thousands were unjustly shot and there isn't one single video? Not one single person over 20 months of "protest" thought "I should record this." Why would I accept this? I bet there is video, only it captures what I describe. A Palestinian tossing a Molotov or trying to breach the fence and getting their leg shot off or hit in the gut or groin or chest on a pass-through tumble from a kneecap.
As for that kneecapping, here's an interestingly candid article from Haaretz:
Eden says he broke the “knee record” in the demonstration that took place on the day the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem was inaugurated, on May 14, 2018. He did it jointly: Snipers usually work in pairs – together with a locator, who is also a sniper by training, and whose task is to give his partner precise data (distance from the target, wind direction, etc.).
Eden: “On that day, our pair had the largest number of hits, 42 in all. My locator wasn’t supposed to shoot, but I gave him a break, because we were getting close to the end of our stint, and he didn’t have knees. In the end you want to leave with the feeling that you did something, that you weren’t a sniper during exercises only. So, after I had a few hits, I suggested to him that we switch. He got around 28 knees there, I’d say.”
The sniper shot 42 people in one day, his partner 28. They're boasting or all but about shooting 70 people. I looked for video of this and found one: https://x.com/vic2pal/status/981095851010469888
Gunshot, he instantly falls, couple frames of the wound but it's not graphic. I think you'd have to know it's a gunshot wound to even make sense of it. (And of course you can't actually tell what's going on around him.)
This team in one day produced themselves 70 opportunities for video. Again, boasting or all but, "Yeah sometimes we hit people behind our targets. Bummer." Where's the video? We do know this happened, since both sides say it did. 70 opportunities from one team in one day for video of a bad shot.
Nothing.
From 2015, if something has supposedly happened more than 10,000 times and there isn't video of it, the simplest and only rational explanation is that it didn't happen. The excessively compassionate, I understand how their brains turn off, they just aren't the sort of people who can think past suffering, and that's often good. The inadequately cynical, who talk about how "you think you hate journalists enough but you don't," how much lefties lie, how the crusades were justified and Islam is shit and how much Muslims rape and marry their own cousins, how much human rights organizations are just masks for USAID State Department globohomo/lefty sinecures/looting public coffers, and how the UN is one giant fraud at best or Bilderberg NWO fronting at worst, to have their brains turn off on all of those things they loudly hate because of the word "Jew" is just fucking funny.
But, not an argument, and I'm not saying you're either of these. I'm only saying you should consider if you reached your position from pure reason as applied to evidence, or if you reached it because you read words that aligned with how you already saw things. That you felt convinced by those words when really you were flattered, and you think I might also be convinced. Words won't convince me, I am adequately cynical, I know both sides are nothing but liars, and that's why I want video.
jake
14d ago
Policy debate, or that's how I got to it, anyway. If you're not familiar or only passingly familiar, critical theory is sometimes (well, sometimes when I was in, probably dominant now) employed in the type of argument called "kritik," or Ks. Capitalism K, Securitization K, Biopower K.
jake
15d ago
Neither are what I requested, and neither are what are cited in the modern discussion of Israel and Palestine. The modern discussion says specifically there are immediate and frequent examples of Israeli soldiers outright murdering Palestinian civilians. A single example from 20 years ago that resulted in a full investigation and trial is none of these.
As for the other example:
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said troops had opened fire near the village of Nabi Saleh after Palestinian gunmen fired shots towards a guardpost. Tamimi told reporters there had been no other gunfire, and that he had just buckled up his son in order to drive to an uncle’s house when their car was shot at.
A man who had every reason to lie said there had been no other gunfire. Had there been, it absolves the IDF. They would still be wrong to shoot the car, but they shot it because they were under fire and understandably assumed the worst. It's a casualty of war, it happens, it's not wanton murder. And to not make you think I take the IDF at their word, I never do, but they at least check. That article mentions the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, where the IDF admitted one of their soldiers fired at her. How many times has any Palestinian organization admitted a group they first claimed as civilians murdered by the IDF were in fact militants killed fairly? Has it happened a single time ever? If it hasn't, it's not because they've never lied about it.
That's the problem with articles, journalists wrote them. The writer of the second article is a person who is specifically motivated to defend Palestine and criticize Israel. I can't believe them, categorically, and again by the way, same for Haaretz or whatever Israel-favoring publications, I presume every sentence as untrue. This is why I ask for video.
What I am asking for is clear video evidence from the current Gaza War of a civilian being murdered. That they are objectively a civilian, so objectively civilian circumstances (Ideally, anyway, right now can't be held as a standard in Palestine) so a woman who could not possibly be concealing explosives or else couldn't be considered as in a place where that's a reasonable fear, or a child who can on-sight be determined as not carrying explosives--as this discussion can't be held faithfully without acknowledging one side employs women and children as suicide bombers--and that they are then clearly singularly targeted and shot. Ian Carroll, who I've liked clips by him, talks about it, Darryl Cooper, same, talks about it, IDF snipers wantonly dropping civilians, and it is those videos I have never seen, those videos I have looked again and again to find, and all I can ever get is people talking about the supposed incidents, not actually showing them. I don't want to watch them, but I need to know the truth more than I need to avoid the heartsickness from seeing the horror I already know is so much in this world.
jake
15d ago
I didn't want to slur all criticism as antisemitism, thus my poor attempt at a novel term.
jake
15d ago
The Israelis have a habit of shooting Palestinian children in the back
I once again ask that literally anyone provides me with evidence of this. Not bootstrapped citation farming and not faked x-rays. Specific, unambiguous footage of Palestinian civilians being murdered.
https://x.com/search?q=palestinian%20civilian%20shot&src=typed_query&f=media -- you won't find it here. I've looked in darker places and found nothing there, either, but I could have missed it.
What's so galling about this claim is with the volume of media coming from Palestine and the alleged frequency of the outright murder of civilians, there should be at least one glaring example. One I would have heard by specific reference as it made the rounds among judenkritikal lefties and righties alike. Instead it's always the generic, "They're shooting kids," not "They shot this specific child, here's his body, you'll notice the distinct lack of a head."
I don't give a shit about Israel, I don't want a penny going to them if we don't get a dime back and I don't want one single American dying for that flag. I just want the truth, and being told something exists when I would have seen if it did, and when I then look for it and still can't find it, makes me quite certain the videos don't exist, because the deeds they would show haven't happened, because Israel does not indiscriminately murder civilians. They do murder civilians, many civilians, as is the nature of war in casualty of their real targets. It's just that you can't allow your enemy in war to dictate how you fight. If they use human shields thinking it will save them, you shoot the hostage then the soldier, you blow up the apartment building or hospital. If those shields know with certainty they will be killed by Israel, then it's on them to put down the ones who hold them hostage, and if they don't, they get what they deserve.
It's that old chestnut, where the white supremacy of yesteryear emerges in intersectional politics that can't help but treat whites and especially white men as the only beings on this earth with full agency. The Palestinians either have agency or they don't. If they can't see that there is truly no win condition and behave accordingly, Israel should rule them.
jake
25d ago
You could see this playing out in modern satire, or satire in modern intrigue fiction. The BBB has sections in it, Stephen Miller's posted on this, expanding the authority of the executive in deportations. It would go, the media will care more about the Trump-Elon alliance breaking and Elon's very public tantrum than something dastardly buried in the bill, so fake a fight, and go loud and brash so it's not "insider sources" but the men themselves who force the story. Bill is passed and signed, Trump and Musk post a picture shaking hands with the caption "lol pranked" and the administration proceeds with using whatever new authority they've been granted.
But that is (probably) not how the world works, and I think @nopie has described the truth of it.
Have I read what life was like for the aristocracy? Have I read the sort of fictions I close that comment with criticizing? Would I have been spared your angle of comment had I instead written "dating sucks because of love stories"?
You quote my answer, there were not enough instances and nothing close to enough time to see the skill evolved. Like those noble women whose "myriad" options were noble men, so past number and time the third hindrance was the scope too limited for beneficial selectivity. Beneath the nobles the true stock of humanity experienced life exactly as I described. The fifteenth century peasant girl did not exert a meaningful control on the father of her children; nor for the those girls in sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And whatever controls they may have exerted they were still nothing compared to when the phenomenon of autonomy and variety of selection emerged in full in the twentieth century.
genetic testing has started to indicate that female infidelity is truly a woman’s way to choose when more traditional methods are removed from her
A genetic inclination and justification for infidelity is a very sharp argument. I worry that whatever research comes from highly motivated reasoning.
Why else do you think teenage boys so actively, so instinctively, try to impress the girls around them?
Why do young men jockey for status? We can consider chimps where we understand we're seeing juvenile displays of fitness targeted not really at a particular female but the cohort, or we can consider Alexander, where we understand we're seeing juvenile displays of the coalescing inclination, desire and ability to subjugate.
I need only gesture vaguely at the world to support my thesis, short as it is, as there is no shortage of evidence on the lack of skill in the human female to select good mates. This is a qualitative judgment, the man who propagates has succeeded in the eyes of nature, but this is also a quantitative judgment, evolutionarily a single child is as good as none. I accounted for the potential flaw in my thesis in taking the kindest interpretation for the decline: that men and women equally lack acumen in mate selection, that we are equally to blame and equally blameless. I took this interpretation as acknowledgment of my ignorance, because despite the evidence, I may be wrong, and this is how. It is exactly how, for given all evidence, there is no alternative. Either both sexes lack the skill, or only one, and as the defining graph of post-industrial civilization is female liberation, if it is one, we know which.
I'll finish by speaking to my cohort. The woman who was the queen of my class in my large high school, as lovely a person as she is beautiful to this day, is a single mother with a single son, never married, her bastard's father in the picture briefly. I don't think if she chose better she would have chosen me, I only had eyes for her best friend anyway (who's living her best life with her "roommate"). I have no resentment except a fateful sort about the tragedy that is her life as it could have been. Socially, today, one child is more than good enough, she should have several, and were our world better she would have been swiftly taken with a man of due quality and spent her years since as the happy stay-at-home-mom. Incidentally and I find joyfully, this is exactly what happened with the third in that trio of friends: Queen, Sappho and Blessed. Blessed eloped the summer after we graduated, we now live in the same neighborhood and this time of year I can count on regularly seeing her walking with her growing flock and oh, how she emanates life. That is a woman who could choose a man. If only it were all so easy.
Yeah, what happened in China after that? With all that American-educated Elite Human Capital™ the country must have flourished.
The quasi-westernized person of color raises hackles at the truth because his world swings upon the selective white humility he doesn't recognize as racism. Those WASP "EHCs" are sadistically racist, they're just so good at obfuscating it the person of color, only familiar with the boorish sort of racism from his countrymen, mistakes it for humility. Every measure of their ostensible praise is patronization, you cannot sing in their peculiar timbre the delights of folks of color without feeling to the marrow that infinite satisfaction in certainty of superiority at being born white. The most belligerent Xitter 1488-er can't begin to apprehend such intrinsic belief in white supremacy. I'll hold up my media literacy certificate and put on my serious hat, have you seen the movie Get Out? It's 104 minutes of literally this point. I digress. He knows the boorish racism and he conflates it with what he sees in America, not as substantive argument but as an appeal to aesthetic and a subconscious plea to mother and father WASP EHC to intervene. Unfortunately for him, though fortunately for greater discourse, the surging right no longer cares about being impugned by aesthetic.
I myself, as an enlightened centrist, never cared.
So you bring out the typical and lazy responses. "Cousin Trevor" or "Cousin Billy Bob" no, it's not the pejorative strawmen about people in very blue-collar occupations or the perpetually unemployed indolent who would have a spot at MIT if only they kept out foreigners. It's about what we know for a fact:
-
All compulsory American education is weighted against white male students
-
All non-vocational institutions of higher learning in the US are weighted against white male students
-
All STEM employment in the US is weighted against white male applicants
-
And I'll throw in a corollary #4, US corporations hire vast numbers of Indians because, chiefly, it's the closest thing to legal slavery
Nobody is saying the physics genius with a special understanding of reality is being kept out. Men of such stature are defined by their persistence in the face of adversity, they will get in, whatever it takes. What we are saying is most men don't know their calling, they choose a career and it becomes their calling. There are men who feel no calling to medicine but who would have made superb surgeons, same with civil engineers or simply as research assistants. But they've gone through #1 and they're in the process or they've finished #2 and they see #3 rushing toward them and they choose a field or employer where the hostility of modernity toward them appears least present. 70 years ago a bunch of men weren't doing nothing, "twiddling their thumbs" while they waited for Computer Science to exist. They chose among the options they had, and now there are many options.
Here's a question, how many South and East Asians now work at Microsoft? Here's another question, what's going on with Windows 11?
Fuck me, look at the output of that Elite Human Capital™!
I wonder why white guys might second-guess a job at Microsoft. Aside from knowing they'll have to make it through the gauntlet of interviews where, again, the policy is "Come up with literally any reason possible to not hire white men." In the rarity they do get hired, their reward is working with and for South Asians, Indians, who will only promote other Indians. "They should just deal with it." No, they just take low-visible-prestige jobs in small outfits and regional corporations with comparable compensation given massively lower costs of living and real estate. And some of them are unspecific geniuses, because there are more than 350 million people in this country and even at third sigma above that's quite a few. They didn't all go to Ivies, and they aren't all in STEM.
You know what else? Some of those Americans, all of them not just the geniuses, will have lost spots at universities in favor of Chinese or Indian or whatever other country's nationals, and I can provide you the exact number of acceptable instances for that to happen, the country over, totaling every student at every institution: zero.
America exists for Americans. If a Chinese national good enough on academic merit for Harvard wants to come here, renounce his citizenship, and pledge to help us root out CCP spies, by all means take him. Pay for everything, give him a pile of gold, we want him, he is elite. Objectively, for a university to take a Chinese national over an American and provide them with qualifications they take back home is a cost that will not be recouped. That is the rule, we do benefit from elite talent coming to this country as long as they stay. The experiment of taking in foreign nationals and sending them out with an American education in some hope of our later benefit has been an empiric failure. For decades almost every aspiring Mexican Technocrat got a US education, shall we check in on how we've both benefited?
(I'll let you imagine the cartel-chainsawed corpses.)
I will compliment you, though. By commenting here you prove yourself more astute than Hanania. He is a person who is notable in this sphere solely for being notable. He was relatively early on X, and that is the only compliment he could get from me, because if he fielded his ideas here first they would be trashed, because he did field them here years ago and they were trashed. I would trust him quoting you over you quoting him. The follower count is no endorsement, EHC knows this, many such cases.
jake
1mo ago
If anyone thinks we can win a cold war against China without immigrant brainpower, they are out of their minds.
Depending on the amount of espionage we could in fact and quite confidently say we would win if we blocked Chinese nationals from all US STEM.
Wet streets don't cause rain, and top-ranked schools don't cause good students. If China didn't need our schools, their nationals wouldn't be here. If those Chinese geniuses are making such great contributions, they wouldn't have been let out of the country. There is an alternative explanation, which I'll address in a moment.
There were 76 million people in the US circa 1900 and they were 88% white. The American Empire followed, and it wasn't Chinese students building it. We did have a glut of Jewish talent but if anything the peak of our Empire was smaller than it would have been as their contribution was hastening the inevitable that was American victory.
There are twice as many whites in this country now, so we can also confidently say that just given a larger population there must be far more geniuses and far more overlooked geniuses. This relates to the alternative explanation, which is China does sequester their best and brightest, but they let the lessers attend school in the US because of the most fortuitous consequence of reducing opportunities for Americans.
Anymore, be it either true success from China or paper success, there is no reason for their nationals to be allowed continued participation in US STEM. I do agree this plan will be haphazard and amateurish, but not truly indiscriminate, as their nationals in US STEM should be indiscriminately and unceremoniously expelled to the last. But we could reach a happy medium with reciprocity: they can have, given the difference in populations, 1 student in our schools for every 5 we have in theirs.
jake
1mo ago
Eternal childhood, except ersatz mommy lets you fuck her.
Well said.
If men want the easy girlfriend, why do you think women won't want the easy boyfriend?
Because if women prioritized ease in relationships this thread wouldn't exist.
Time share in a high status guy versus a whole robo-boyfriend? Some women may take that deal, but if you think "little kings" will reign over powerless concubines, I suggest you watch some Chinese harem drama series. Men can and will be subtly manipulated in such situations.
Certainly there will be manipulation and "court drama" but on the country level, look to any Muslim nation that allows harems. It's not that individual women have no power, it's that the group "women" does not comprise a meaningful political bloc. Thus "female sociopolitical power will collapse", not "the wife's sociopolitical power."
If AI is doing all the work and all the thinking and all the research and all the planning and all the productivity, why does it matter if the human in notional charge has XY or XX chromosomes? We won't need "ah, but men are more adventurous, more risk-taking, make the big breakthroughs in science" when the AI is super-intelligent and doing all the research work. Link this in with
This and your point on chaos are very strong observations. It could be that I'm wrong about sex disparity in simulacra interest, and that would significantly change the progression. I could also be wrong about the swiftness of automation and the requirement for human labor. If women are equally interested, all these changes occur so quickly there isn't the span of decades between 2050-2100 where significant amounts of human labor are still required, it would make sense to reduce the male population first. Women are sensible about these things, they'll take quite easily to life in post-scarcity civilization.
But I'm not wrong. The matter of automation isn't one of logistics, it's one of society. We can't flip a switch and become a post-scarcity civilization, we have to prepare for it. We have to draw plans to sunset all those structures based on human labor, and that's all of them. We have to develop the spirit, inculcate to posterity, so they are psychologically prepared for the cessation of the cycle of School -> Career -> Retirement. We have to develop new structures and new politics to accommodate a country where people only work if they want. This means an interim where labor is still required. Some labor automation won't cover for that reason of giving people work, some practical reasons of redundancy, some aesthetic, but wherever there is labor automation can't cover, that is the domain of men.
I'm also not wrong about the sex disparity in use. Clear evidence of biology informing these preferences can be found in the share of US households with children where the mother is the breadwinner and the father is the homemaker: 1% Women don't want to provide, they want to be provided for, deservedly, but this is exactly why simulacra simply cannot offer for women what they can for men. Men aren't attracted to Alexandra Daddario because she's an actress, but we all know why Grace Brassel is with Shane Gillis. It doesn't matter if it's by the time few are working, because attraction isn't really about being provided for either, it's toward the man doing the providing, and how. It's not enough about attentiveness or emotional labor or housework. It's not enough about physical attraction. It is a gestalt thing that a robot cannot achieve with women by fact of its existence. Shall I be more clear? The "relational prostheses" are lesser things, pathetic things, contemptible things women are above, and no enduring attraction may arise from that sort contempt.
In a vacuum, the sex disparity in births could be flipped as you suggest. It makes sense, the inclination to chaos is a powerful argument for reducing the male population. All the way up to when a country that isn't 90% women decides to invade.
I wrote on this about a year ago here, but I was replying to a Friday comment on Sunday and it found few eyes.
I'm reposting it because short of cataclysmic war or calamity, what I describe is exactly what will happen.
What's wrong here is the particular equivocation of politics and war. Politics is not equal with war, politics are meant to avert war, but they are equal in that both are about the transferral of power. If we were to assign a sex polarity to the practices, politics would indeed be the feminine method to the masculine method of war.
Beyond that, I can tell you where this divide ends. We'll pass the core of this turmoil, enough to stabilize us as we move into the approach for the singularity.
Around 2030 we'll see the first examples of convincing human simulacra. These will be proofs of the concept but they won't be largely available until later in the decade. Boston Dynamics maintaining their exact rate of advancement will have robots with convincingly human articulation by the mid-30s, especially with AI improving at helping research.
In the 2040s, simulacra will be able to replace a great deal of labor and production of simulacra will become the national industry of whatever country that perfects them. My bias is Japan: they're most poised with the combination of established acumen, workforce and key socioeconomic factors, namely their inverted population pyramid. Low TFR will be neatly solved by simulacra taking over labor. As so-ordered a nation and people as the Japanese, they will implement the necessary policies to begin the country's move toward quasi-post-scarcity. Those few other similarly ordered nations will likewise swiftly adopt simulacra, and as tens of millions are produced by the year, and only increasing, simulacra will quickly become a reasonable household expenditure. I expect by the end of the '40s they will be ubiquitous in every country where they are legal.
For the price of a mid-range car, households will be able to purchase a lifetime of service from a chef-maid-assistant. So average households will acquire simulacra, further increasing demand, and lonely men will also buy them for all obvious reasons. That motivation for purchase will not end with lonely men. "She's a 10 (she's a hotter-version-of-pick-your-hottest-celebrity), but she's a robot" won't last. One of your friends will get one, and you'll interact with it, and even if you're obstinate about "it," eventually it will be her to your mind, because she talks, she laughs, she appears to think, she in all ways seems the part. You'll only know because you know, that won't be enough. It won't matter how they aren't "real" because they will be real enough. All but indistinguishable for the existential question of soul in the machine, and it won't be long before you're not so sure about that, either.
At ubiquity they will end dating. The bottom third of men who can afford them for a start, to half, to I'd expect a Pareto 80%. The man is accustomed to not having children, it's our evolutionary history, it may bother them, it won't stop them. What women say won't matter, a guy might want what only they can offer, but not at the cost, especially not if they've never had that success, and that already increasing population will represent an even greater percentage of the next generation. To put in such effort to settle for someone less attractive, less responsive, more burdensome, more risky, to settle for something human when he can have something machine-perfect. Work, go home, play games until she has dinner ready, watch a movie, fuck, maybe play more games, go to bed. His friends can and will talk shit, his base urges are satisfied, he won't care enough about what they say. His true needs will go unsatisfied and it will be a lifestyle harmful to his soul, but it will be so much easier.
Some women will have them, not many. I'd rather not invoke inceldom, I find the specific slant to their ideas irrelevant here, but it's true men pursue while women are pursued and that imbalance defines dating. The asymmetric effort of dating as a man versus dating as a woman, again the man pursues, he works, he pays; the woman is pursued, she is worked for, she is cared for. The simulacra will thus be unnatural as a thing women acquire as a relational prosthesis; why would she pay for what, for good reason, she gets free? The simulacra will have no being (or so we'll reassure ourselves), can father no children, can offer no increase, can offer no status. Women will have them as the chef-maid-assistant models, maybe even more sometimes, but they won't replace, not in the way they will replace relationships for men.
Harems will re-emerge, they will be the only option for most women, so they will be easier. Between simulacra and harems, female sociopolitical power will collapse. They will lose too much leverage with too many low-status men, while high-status men will each become a little king with his court of concubines who will certainly have no power.
The 2050s will see human gestation in synthetic environments, so clinic-based artificial wombs. Here I don't think that it will take that long for the breakthroughs in tech, instead it will be the economics and social impacts of simulacra that will give incentive to developing the tech. Again I expect Japan to widely adopt, as their already low TFR falls off a cliff from their herbivore men taking to simulacra. They will have a reduced need for a new generation from so much of their labor being automated but I expect there still to be decades between the ubiquity of simulacra and those simulacra reaching the capacity to automate >90% of all labor. This will also be the first sight of the real benefit to the age of simulacra, the offer of stability in overseeing the drastic reduction in human population.
Starting in the 50s or 60s we'll see government regulation on reproduction. It won't be severe because it won't need to be, so anyone who really wants a big family will be able to have one with minimal structural hindrance. It will be simple incentive-based, I've referred to the policy as the "Half-Right to Reproduction." Systemically its purpose will be to halve the population with each generation, it'll work faster than that. Every person will be bestowed with one half-right they can exercise at age of majority. Would-be parents can combine to a whole-right and exchange it for their child's addition to the government dole, UBI, which will also exist. As AI and simulacra come from almost all labor, the newly jobless will need placation else promiseless young men become bored and at-risk for chaos. AI-managed industry, so all goods, pharmaceuticals, medical care, farming, and also advances in 3D printing, will see the cost of goods plummet while their quality peaks. It will become progressively harder for the government to not adopt major socialist practices as capitalism finally begins to "win" in competing itself out of existence. The population can't keep growing in such a system, at least not until we have FTL and a thousand shipyards in Sol. Assuming FTL is possible, which I don't, but I sure hope it is.
Simulacra will play a critical part in stability in keeping men satisfied. Advancements in entertainment, so another 20-30 years of development in video games, the arrival of UBI and the removal of needing to work to live. The population will need to be distracted until most can die childless but "happy enough." Half-rights help this goal, because people can sell their half-rights or buy other's half-rights, all at government exchanges. The exchanges will always buy half-rights, subject to reversible sterilization. A guy will go to a clinic next door to the exchange, maybe incorporated into the exchange, get whatever implant that stops sperm from working, get the cash to order a simulacra, sail into the sunset. Easy.
I don't expect western nations to swiftly automate labor like Japan. We'll need to acclimatize to the idea, begin the inculcation of no-work-to-live in successive generations so that when they're older, or their kids are older, they'll be prepared for not having jobs. With that and the shrinking population, by the turn of the century Western nations will be ready for post-scarcity life. New generations will still be needed in the interim, artificial gestation is pivotal here for the other paradigmatic social change.
As relationships and childbirth are "solved," as countries most adopting simulacra and bespoke children grown in vats enjoy golden ages while their men break productivity records, why would a country not produce as many sons as possible and as few daughters as necessary? There will be outgroups, so the Amish and the like, potentially a new movement of tech-circa-1999, but they will be small, none meaningful political factions, or where meaningful, supportive of the new power structure. I'd also expect a "reserve" population for practical concerns of catastrophe and ovum stocks, but most women will belong to the elite population. This above all is why we will see minimal and then no opposition to sharp sex-demo disparity with the great decline in the population of the human female: with so few, being a naturally born woman will be a position of immense status, inherently aristocratic. They will necessarily be the best of the best. Those chosen, those expressly wanted few. A new nobility, and it will indeed be so easy.
Women will "benefit" first, eventually men will, as again the purpose will be to shrink the entire population. So each generation will more-than-halve itself until the population is at an "acceptable" – at least stable – level. The sex distribution will once again be at parity, and those naturally born biological males will also be inherently aristocratic, as all civilized humans belong to the new nobility.
And all of this will just work. What I describe will happen because it isn't fighting back, it isn't trying to undo anything, it doesn't require conquest over more than a century of culture, it doesn't require recovery from war or calamity. It will work according to slopes and entropy, it will work in congruence with human nature. It will be the easiest path through, so it will just work.
If it's physically possible we'll break the tyranny of the rocket equation and achieve FTL travel. We'll begin spacefaring regardless and when, in however long, man reaches frontier planets to settle and dominate, they'll return to lifestyles us today find familiar. Those humans will begin the real work, of understanding and healing the light scarring on our gestalt soul from the depravity of human civilization, culminating in what was necessary to pass through the 20th and 21st century – with what was necessary to pass the Great Filter.
It didn't have to be this way, now it has to be this way. Or else we're all fucking dead.
Mr. Trump, the first convicted felon elected president, has erased ethical boundaries and dismantled the instruments of accountability that constrained his predecessors.
Quoted to make clear the journalist behind this article interprets all of Trump's actions in maximally bad faith.
Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket
A documentary made by and about Melania was acquired by Amazon for $40MM, her cut is $28MM. Higher by percent than typical EP share in cinema, but in cinema they profit from tickets.
A business entity tied to the Trumps sits on a large stash of the $TRUMP cryptocurrency and collects fees every time the coins change hands. So far, the coin has generated at least $320 million in fees, which the Trumps share with their business partners, according to Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm.
Extrapolation from trading volume and an assumed fee. Appears correct. As for Smith:
And the crypto people are right that TRUMP and MELANIA just make the whole space look bad
Crypto has required no assistance from Trump to look bad. Smith's scenario is plausible but an extreme reach, at the value and volume it would take tens of millions to move it 10%, and it would have to keep that value until Trump's sons could sell enough to profit the intended amount of the bribe.
I do find it interesting, because I feel a quiet dissonance about Trump having a memecoin beyond the obvious issues. It's something about the aesthetic of it all, cryptocurrency has one kind of griminess to it, while politicians have a different kind of griminess, and to me, these clash. This even despite TRUMP having its namesake as a man who controls aircraft carriers, and thus it carrying more objective value than all other cryptocurrencies combined. Cue obvious issues, in no circumstances should a President profit from alternate fiat currency, and his family shouldn't either, whatever those "ties" are exactly. But if a businessman capitalizing on crypto is the only criticism of merit in this piece, it's nothing, and ultimately, those who lose on crypto get what they deserve.
The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023 accused Mr. Sun of fraud, but after Mr. Trump took over the agency put its lawsuit on hold even as it dropped other crypto investigations.
The SEC under Biden opened an investigation into Sun a year ago after he invested in the Trump-tied WLF. Not difficult to see what happened here.
The luxury jumbo jet from Qatar that has been heavily featured in the news. In what I'm sure was a total coincidence, Trump announced a big AI deal with Qatar, KSA, and UAE that's almost certainly a big net-negative for the USA according to Zvi.
Hollow. They criticize because it went to Trump.
Zvi gets lost in the weeds on deeper AI questions when it's a matter of geopolitics. The oiled Arabs are beyond desperate for diversification, if they attain economic salvation it will be through AI. Terrifically easy and critical win for US diplomacy.
Congressional Republicans spent years investigating Hunter Biden, the son of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., for trading on his family name to make millions of dollars, even labeling the clan the “Biden Crime Family.” But while Hunter Biden’s cash flow was a tiny fraction of that of Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Jared Kushner, Republicans have shown no appetite for looking into the current presidential family’s finances.
Hunter Biden is a fuckup, Trump's kids aren't. Had Trump never entered politics, his eldest sons' dealings would be unsurprising . . . but this isn't a defense, because he did enter politics, and his sons run his organization and are part of his political brand. It caps your list but reading about it makes me feel like you've made an afterthought of the point deserving this entire discussion.
Zach Witkoff, a founder of the Trump family crypto firm World Liberty Financial, and son of Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, announced a $2 billion deal in the United Arab Emirates, just a couple of weeks before his father and Mr. Trump traveled there for a presidential visit.
Sitting in front of a packed auditorium in Dubai, a founder of the Trump family cryptocurrency business made a brief but monumental announcement on Thursday. A fund backed by Abu Dhabi, he said, would be making a $2 billion business deal using the Trump firm’s digital coins.
That transaction would be a major contribution by a foreign government to President Trump’s private venture — one that stands to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family. And it is a public and vivid illustration of the ethical conflicts swirling around Mr. Trump’s crypto firm, which has blurred the boundary between business and government.
Corruption in politics is those three principled civil libertarians who care equally about all corruption and those seven zillion witches taking turns trying to cudgel each other with hypocrite. We know this, no more state of the discourse.
There are clear lines here, and it doesn't matter if it's entirely above board. If a hypothetical business in one of those countries invested two billion in a hypothetical non-political Trump org then he would visit as quickly as possible. For it to happen with the President gives the appearance of impropriety, and for the President, appearing improper is being improper.
Except impropriety isn't a crime, and I'm not sure what crime is supposed as having been committed. Now I did just say appearance alone is a problem, and if say the Soros org gave Trump a large amount of money, even if they loudly proclaimed their opposition and continued to operate antithetically to one another, everybody would be suspicious. Even still, impropriety is not a crime. What's the result? Like we might say it's improper, it is spiritually criminal, for politicians to engage in insider trading, but it's not a crime, and how many traders now profit from the Pelosi Index? It's also only spiritually criminal to lobby for and support politicians who campaign on making a kind of business illegal or regulated into insolvency while shorting those businesses and also investing in alternatives to those businesses. The Green Industry thanks them. Corruption is the game and the rules against are now only used as weapons. I will not hear appeals to convention, against Trump, the left struck first.
A person or organization can bribe a politician. The sheriff is bribed to ignore crime, the judge the same, the city manager bribed to softball a contract. I'm not so sure a country can bribe a politician. Foreigners can, but I just covered this. People who happened to be Ukrainian were bribing the Bidens so their own wealth increased. The governing body of a country? Somewhere on that path it must veer into geopolitics and diplomacy. If an entire country makes it personally worthwhile for the President to pursue better relations, what's the crime? Their accepting of gifts? To what end? Favoring them in policy? If it harmed US companies that would be a crime. If it harmed companies in other countries? I think they should have made a better offer. The President is America, and no length of litany of "incompetence" applies to the man who gains that office. Even if in his later years he sharply deteriorates and someone else holds the pen, he still first made himself electable. I say this because these are men with a special quality of judgment, and an emissary delivering a horde of gold unto the king might make him very interested in that country indeed.
The Bidens saw only money. Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma and the US relationship with Ukraine has brought hell to that country. The real crime of the Bidens' corruption isn't the impropriety of taking money from foreigners. There is a crime, but the rote ho-hum sort, of taxpayer dollars being pilfered out of Ukraine and then funneled into private coffers. Taxpayer dollars are already pilfered into private coffers, so this isn't unusual, just elaborate. Their real crime matches whatever degree of their involvement in the greater machinations behind all those young men dead in holes from kamikaze drones.
What of the Trumps' impropriety? And while one final time it is impropriety by our standards, I'm just not sure it's corrupt. These aren't sinecures for Junior and Eric, these aren't private businessmen buying access in interest of their own wallets. These are governments, who may well have bought access to the President, but who are acting in the interest of their peoples. So it might have also been for Ukraine, sometime, someplace. In theory. But those involved aren't state department spooks running a color revolution. It's Trump walking on stage and talking about his hopes for the region and asserting et refrain their right of self-determination. We're investing, American businesses are investing, Trump's organization is investing in these countries. If economic flourish results, if Trump Tower & Resort Jeddah becomes a beloved destination, where's the grift? If his efforts at enduring peace and prosperity in The Middle East succeed, what will history care if his motivation was personal wealth?
I'm often blinded by my optimism, but I know I see better than Peter Baker here, who is blinded by hate. Or I should hope he is, because I can respect that. If that article came out of pure cynicism, I know as fact I'm right.
A bold response, Jake, "Trump is corrupt but actually that's a good thing."
jake
1mo ago
the law firm Trump sanctioned earlier this year, only to drop all sanctions against them after they eliminated DEI policies and promised to do $40 million of pro bono work for
himWhite House initiatives.
jake
1mo ago
If we ask what most defines the bad governor the singular example is "He has an innocent man put to death." Whatever the truth of Pilate's reasoning, he was in dereliction of his greater duty to good governance. You call to cold practicality. Kill the innocent rebel, end the movement, prevent instability and possibly save many lives. Those bad but "necessary" decisions don't come from nothing, rather they come as the long consequences of earlier bad decisions and failures. How many seemed necessary at the time?
There is also a nice irony to preventing instability. Jesus, who held tremendous draw, offended the elders. They wanted him killed and they were appeased. Bar Kokhba also had draw; thus went Judea.
I know little on autism diagnoses. I have a cousin who might be autistic, and then also one friend who is autistic, she's a former FTM who transitioned ~2011, married a man at about the same time and they're still together, moved out of the country and detransitioned a few years later. She's appreciably different from any of my other friends, especially compared to the ones who describe themselves as on the spectrum, but she and I mostly swap pictures of our dogs and I've had some burning questions, assuming you don't mind answering:
More options
Context Copy link