Lowe did an interview where he called Farage a cult leader, said he didn’t have what it took to be PM. Farage discovered or invented depending on your view some bullying rumors and used them as pretext to remove him. It was during that growing spat that the police were called.
But that only starts at the middle of the story. They’re both big egos and Farage has always been a solo leader.
Most of the stories were previously reported, the new reports are actually quite limited although I appreciated their collation. The report is horrific, although barely more so than many of those published over the last 12 (!) years since the scandal broke. Over that period, of course, net immigration from beyond Europe effectively quintupled, only recently (in the last year) beginning a slow fall, but still far higher than it was in 2014. There is outrage and there is action. Nothing will happen.
Rupert Lowe quit Nigel Farage’s political bloc out of personal disagreement and has now positioned himself to his right. His main effect is that if he can continue to draw 5-7% polling support, then in combination with Farage’s group (~24%), and the Tories who continue to hover around 20-22%, they will split the conservative vote (probably an absolute majority of the voting public) and hand Labour another 5 years in absolute power in 2029.
So we have that to look forward to, which is nice.
2rafa
23hr ago
The only viable option for long term peace with Iran is the slow development of trade and business ties. Even though this was has been a strategic disaster for America and especially Israel, in the long term, interesting things might happen.
Like @hydroacetylene says it was a big expansion in male earnings and rapid improvements in quality of life, but that’s not the whole story. Quality of life and male earnings increased rapidly in countries like Saudi Arabia and Vietnam while birth rates collapsed, for example. Eastern European countries saw small bumps in some cases as the post-1990s recovery went on, but rarely anything spectacular.
I suspect it was in large part suburbanization and pent-up demand. The former had both push and pull factors (like white flight in the former case) but also meant large numbers of white people - especially’ the US where the boom was most pronounced - left fertility shredder cities and moved back out to lower density housing. If going from rural low density environments to squalid tenements kills tfr, then it stands to reason a partial reversal might temporarily boost it. In addition, labor saving devices made domestic work far easier than it had been.
As for pent-up demand, it is an interesting fact that when people from many very poor countries move as refugees / migrants to the West, their fertility rate briefly spikes. For a time (I haven’t checked recently) first generation Libyans, Bangladeshis and other groups actually had higher birth rates in Britain (even adjusted for age of migrants) than in their home countries. These usually come back down in the second generation but there is a built up demand unfulfilled out of extreme poverty that expands into the available prosperity of the new host country, welfare etc.
The move to the suburbs and higher incomes provided this during the baby boom. People who had only two kids in the urban tenements suddenly had three or four because they had the space or money. When their children went back to having two kids, it was cultural, not financial. Either the unfulfilled demand wasn’t the same, or standards had increased. Imagine if everyone in the middle class suddenly attained the material living standard that, say, a successful surgeon has today, and got a big new cheap house. That might cause a tfr rise.
Thats why there aren’t any easy lessons from the baby boom, other than maybe that if every American could afford a 6,000 square foot McMansion, a robot nanny and butler, and could make the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $500k a year forever, they would have more kids. And indeed the higher birth rates we’ve seen among those making more than $800k a year in recent years largely prove this true. When you reduce the lifestyle impact of children to basically frictionless status, people are willing to have unlimited kids. Elon Musk kind of shows this too.
2rafa
1d ago
But that suggests that sharing any communication, even one made completely non-pseudonymously, is doxxing. It obviously isn’t. Receiving a (non-anonymous, signed by them with their full name) letter from someone and publishing it may be rude, depending on its contents or local law it may even be a crime, but it’s not doxxing. Doxxing specifically refers to revealing the identity of a pseudonymous figure.
2rafa
1d ago
It’s my view that while ponytail, ill fitting suit and fedora types probably did think they were cool, this was more to do with a fondness for the jazz age, bogart, Sinatra, Fred and Ginger movies, the late 2000s / early 2010s electroswing caravan palace age (now thankfully forgotten but for a time the favorite music genre of this kind of neckbeard) than a desire to look like a ‘normal’ business man type in a suit.
2rafa
1d ago
Can you give an example of this actually happening?
Give an example of reactionary Twitter trying to cancel someone for anti-white comments?
Portraying "let me know if he ever gets hired, and I will RT" as "publicly critizing" is also not very productive to thr cause of fighting antisemitism.
Why is there an expectation that when engaging in clear attention seeking behavior like telling someone you won’t take their job offer because you refuse to work for a Jew that you won’t get attention for your comment?
Think about it, there’s zero reason for Franco to have ever sent this message (rather than ‘no, sorry’, ‘not interested’, or just ignoring and blocking him) other than to grandstand. I would guess he immediately posted a screenshot of the ‘sent’ message to a friendly Discord, forum, whatever to show how based he was. Now the travesty is that his grandstanding got him the attention he was clearly seeking?
By the way, I agree with you that Jews should try not to draw attention to antisemitism. It is and always has been a losing game. But the actions the DR is criticizing weren’t unreasonable, they would applaud the same done by their perceived in-group, and this drama is just a lot of hypocritical faux outrage on their part.
2rafa
1d ago
I don’t know that Yud really comes across as 3. Some people who wear weird clothes really want attention - but those are precisely the most normal, personable people who dress and act flamboyantly. If your outgoing, socially successful, charismatic friend is wearing something loud, they’re peacocking / attention seeking. If your extremely weird autistic friend does it it’s more likely they’re wearing cat ears to the office because they’re an autist with little understanding of social norms than because they’re looking for attention.
2rafa
1d ago
It’s manifestly hypocritical when
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Some woke biracial girl studying labor relations or whatever refusing an internship by saying “not interested in working for a white person. Thanks” and being doxxed by the would-be employer would be celebrated on the dissident right and MAGA more broadly, and certainly the employer would be applauded for sharing it.
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It would be completely unsurprising, even expected, for “senior members of the administration” - including most likely the second most senior of all, JD Vance - to comment on it publicly and criticize the person in question.
What is the actual objection from the DR here? There isn’t one, really, except to the fact that some guy might suffer career consequences for his comment. All the company did was share a rude and unnecessary message sent under his real name.
2rafa
1d ago
Writing is too subjective and has in any case been better than the average native English speaker since GPT-3, probably 2. It is not going to write Ulysses (yet), but there isn’t much at that quality in the training set and almost nobody would appreciate it if it could. 99.9% of writing in the English language is covered by models that have been available for years. It may be generic, but compared to the writing ability of the average member of the public it’s good enough to write a restaurant menu, an email to a colleague, a press release, a Facebook marketplace ad, a high school essay. We may lament the sad end of the amusing broken English of earlier years, but few will miss it.
2rafa
1d ago
But 7am to 2pm is actually 7 hours of sleep. It’s not a great sleep schedule but it it’s a healthy amount of sleep and you could perform pretty well indefinitely on it.
Is it “doxxing” if you message a Jew on a social media platform under your real name saying you don’t want to work for him because he’s Jewish and he decides to share that with the Jewish community? Thats a very wide definition of doxxing.
Doxxing, classically, would be tracking down the owner of an anonymous account the way that the SPLC and other do and outing the real owner. If John Smith sends an email to a company from johnsmith@gmail.com signed John Smith and the company makes it public that’s not a dox. It might be a violation of privacy, if the email is understood to be in confidence, but that’s a legal question.
It’s very unclear what happened here. As best I can understand, the startup guy tried to recruit him and spammed him with internship offers on some college hiring platform, he refused, and then told the guy it’s because he’s Jewish?
Gabe Einhorn, the 24-year-old chief executive of VryfID, an anti-fraud platform, jumped on X to share the message he received from Franco on the college career platform Handshake.
He included a screenshot of Franco's comments, which read: 'Not interested in working for a Jew. Thanks.'
Even if you have no investment in someone’s views on antisemitism, hiring a guy who instead of a polite refusal and block goes straight for the racial/religious insult when rejecting business or a job / internship offer is surely a pretty dumb move. This is not the behavior of someone agreeable enough for daily workplace life.
It also clearly implies he prefers grandstanding for dissident right Twitter over behaving in a normal way. There are plenty of people I wouldn’t work for, I wouldn’t insult their race to their face.
2rafa
2d ago
Right. So many people have bet against Sam Altman and they always seem to lose. He knows how to play the game. In that way, he’s very similar to Musk, although Musk’s strategy is a form of PR and therefore market sentiment operation while Altman’s is more about adeptly understanding the incentive structures of large organizations.
2rafa
3d ago
Apparently a bunch of art hoes felt "betrayed" by Chalamet's decision to start a relationship with a vapid airheaded bimbo* like Kylie Jenner.
I remember a decade ago when Benedict Cumberbatch, that darling of late 2000s / early 2010s Tumblr fandom, got married, older versions of the same woman were equally if not more despondent. And he got married to a very appropriate and posh intellectual English theater director type in her thirties. So it seems to me it’s really more about the man being off the market than who he’s with.
In a perfectly simulated universe, all decisions are predictable, including any decisions you make after learning the future and learning that you learned the future etc, recursively, forever, blah blah blah. This is not a narratively or philosophically interesting concept. Quantum mechanics aside, ultimate determinism and therefore hypothetical foresight given total information and a fully comprehensive universe model has been the default assumption among most smart people for a long time. Chiang does nothing in the story to say anything interesting about this at all.
2rafa
5d ago
I don’t mean defensively, I mean aggressively. European (and other) platforms can’t easily block Mythos from accessing them, which means true or x type risks remain global.
2rafa
5d ago
I think nobody deserves to make one cent less than the amount they can fairly negotiate. IQ and demographics do not indicate a great superiority for American tech workers. US companies achieved dominant global positions because of larger domestic markets, far more readily available capital, network effects and superior entrepreneurial culture. But none of these suggest US engineers are far better or smarter than their European peers. That would be unlikely.
2rafa
5d ago
If that was the issue for them they’d have fired all the expensive American software engineers making $300k years ago and replaced them with French, British and Germans making a quarter or a third of that.
2rafa
5d ago
Dario is just a very autistic guy who seems to have some California / Obama libleft views on account of having grown up in SF etc, and he can’t mediate them around Trump. If you read / watch interviews with him this is immediately obvious. Musk and even Altman historically were very scared of AGI but around Trump they’ll say it’s amazing and will create millions of jobs and secure American dominance forever. Amodei is the kind of guy who says he’s really afraid of ASI and bores the president by trying to explain foom over a Mar a Lago table.
Altman is clearly a mostly skilled operater who will say what he needs to, Musk is often foolish with his words but the right likes Twitter and Trump respects his wealth, and the other big tech companies have been around long enough to play Washington like you said.
2rafa
5d ago
Not really because American AI can’t be walled off from Europe without (at the very least) shutting down the internet, and probably world trade.
In the original work the idea is that only your perception of time changes, your consciousness can't time travel and everything you do still has to make sense in a linear, causal view of time.
The original work is very interesting although I’m not sure it’s very good. It raises some interesting philosophical questions. The story is probably the best possible story you could write about a form of pseudo-precognition in hindsight that makes immediate, near-term sense to a reader.
But its deliberate ambiguities exist more to paper over the questions than to answer them. Gwern presents the most plausible explanation which is that nothing physically / cosmologically interesting is going on, the protagonist is basically just ‘reflecting’ on her life, in the standard past tense, in a kind of holistic way enabled by the alien language. But that also makes the story a lot less interesting.
Learning the language lets you remember the future just as you remember the past but it also dispels you of the illusion of free will.
I don’t think it even does this. I think it just lets you view your life, in hindsight, in a way that projects memories of the future you actually experienced (in normal linear time, you’re old now) onto your younger self.
2rafa
5d ago
Some Thoughts in a Conversational Style
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“It’s actually quite easy to block or pause AI development because the compute required (as seen in NVIDIA/TSMC/memory manufacturers/etc’ share prices) is so big that you can’t hide training a major frontier model”.
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“So what?”
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“This is actually bullish for humanity because it means some guy in a lab probably can’t build an AI that can destroy the human race without anyone noticing”
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“But wait, Deepseek and other models have shown that within just a few months of a frontier model’s release, vastly cheaper models can be trained to show similar performance. And even if inference is blocked, local models (which will always leak eventually even if they’re trained with a lot of compute) are probably no more than a year or two behind frontier models. So at best this is holding back the tide by what, months?”
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“Yeah, and in the current geopolitical situation, if US businesses complain that Chinese firms have access to more powerful models capable of more efficient and effective work than American businesses, even though America has better frontier labs, because those labs’ models are being blocked from public use by the US government, that will be quickly reversed”.
Men relish competition, hierarchy, inequality and status. For all the discussion of the welfare state, the late 20th century did provide many men with that. At the same time, men like being winners, not losers. Men seek to dominate other men. Men invented communism and socialism, but most modern-day leftists are women.
These statements lay bare a fundamental challenge to any group-based understanding of male identity, which is that for underlying evo-psych reasons, males cannot ever have true gender-based in-group solidarity. For one man to have five exclusive sexual partners, be they wives, side chicks, baby mommas, ‘plates’, other men must go without. Male reproductive success is uncapped. A woman derives no real benefit in most cases from locking down every man, a man does for the inverse. This is why only a small minority of men reproduced historically according to some (disputed) figures. This is why the most male-dominated, masculine, primitive societies that postdated the Neolithic Revolution involved in many cases forms of polygamy. Whether in Utah or the Arabian peninsula or in Elon Musk’s bizarre IVF harem, when the ‘longhouse’ of settled, city-led civilization fractures, men screw each other over to monopolize access to sex and to women.
Young men yearn for high variance life outcome scenarios. They do not want to be average. They want a world split into a small number of winners and a great number of losers and they want to gamble on being in the former category. They may rage against it. They may hate themselves for it. But they want it all the same. They don’t want a world without chads. They want to be chad, fucking some other guy’s girlfriend while he waits for her to come home from the club. This, too, is the fantasy that Clavicular and others offer their viewers.
The sexual revolution can have screwed over most men and yet also still have been a (young to middle aged) male invention. A man can be a loser at life and still want to preserve the hope that an unequal system offers him. The students at the Sorbonne rioting to get access to the girls’ dormitories (one of the seminal events of the sexual revolution and thus of modern sexual history) were not old men. Even Hugh Hefner was not an old man when he got started.
Monogamy was imposed on young men, like every form of welfare, largely by the old of both sexes. It was imposed because of the instability of the alternative, but young men don’t care about that. Young men do better in unstable times than anyone (certainly better than children, than women, than the elderly), even if most still suffer in them. When they cast off its shackles, they set themselves up for their present situation. Why? For the same reason almost all gamblers are men. Because most young men would rather gamble on a 20% chance of dominance (financially, sexually, politically, whatever) than accept a lifetime of being average in a ‘fair’ system.
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