Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
I had an interesting experience this year on the topic. I'd always thought of myself as a Trauma-free guy, I've had a lot of bad shit in life roll right off my back (now, the cringe moments I remember are a different thing - "hey, remember when you mixed up Colin Firth and Colin Farrell in front of your high school crush? Or when you told a table full of people that Wes Anderson directed Trainspotting?"). But at the start of 2025 I slipped in an ice storm, seriously injured myself, and took about six hours to get seen and fentanyl'd by the doctors, would rate it number one most physically painful experience of my life (maybe in top ten most painful experiences if you include women and hangovers). I didn't think much about the incident for quite a while, since I was focused on rehab, but I found that occasionally, when I passed the place in question, walked down dodgy stairs, or when ice came back on the street and I had to cross it, I'd feel an entirely non-voluntary twinge of discomfort/fear/pain. Never more than a twinge, but a very noticeable one precisely because it was so non-voluntary. I can absolutely see how with other personality types, particularly with more serious traumas, this becomes the kernel of some kind of crippling phobia, if you ruminate on it and let it spiral in intensity instead of shrugging it off. Not saying all Trauma is like that, but now I've seen the involuntary mechanism up close it seems to me a fair bit of Trauma is a bad way of responding to something real in the mind rather than a purely constructed narrative.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
they can use a number of other safe techniques for pursuing and arresting them.
Getting in front of the car with a gun is obviously not safe, but nor is a potential high-speed chase or armed standoff at the suspect's destination, both of which often happen in scenarios where the guy gets away (obviously, the last one is much less likely from a liberal woman activist, but happens often enough with regular criminals). To forestall the inevitable, I'm reading your post as making a general point about police work, and I think that training and mindset are relevant to this because it's a matter of split-second decisions, and police work is not generally about dealing with nice liberal women, it's generally about dealing with questionably-sane and questionably-armed people with nothing to lose.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Well, most notably, a person of similar prominence in the private sector (Harvard is not the private sector) would have hired a lawyer day one. Harvard supposedly told Gino she was only allowed two "advocates", and that she was not allowed to recruit anyone else in her defense. Now, this is mostly unenforceable bullshit enabled by the psychological and cultural power universities have over people in their world, but it still works on them. I once had to deal with an academic disciplinary proceeding in my old career (innocent, to be clear, but some people had a grudge and made Complaints), and they made it clear that I could not have a lawyer in the room at any time or it would be considered a violation of the Process, and violation of the Process means they will find a way to find against you - but I could have a family member for 'emotional support'. As soon as they realized my chosen family member was also a lawyer, they adjourned, rang up the university's chief counsel, and went into full cover-their-ass drop-the-charges mode.
The thing is, in industry people get fired all the time, and they go on to the next job with often minimal consequences (I've heard some amusing examples of the extreme circumlocutions employers have to go to in references for fired employees to say someone's a bad apple without being caught doing so. Always liked "You'll be lucky if you can get him to work for you"). In academia, someone getting fired for cause destroys their professional, social, and usually emotional life. Decent chance you'll lose your spouse, if you're married. It's more like being defrocked from the priesthood than losing a job. And the university's facade of being a "court" makes it all the more damning if they find against you. Harvard appears to have done a pretty good job with the investigation, but at least according to Gino's defenders it was not an adversarial process where she had a fair chance to defend herself - the Kafkacrats of the university told her to shut up, did their own thing, and came back with a report over a year later without giving her a fair shake to mount her (admittedly, extremely weak) defense.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Kind of you to say. Other suggestion to understand the modern Left: Foucault is critical, probably Discipline and Punish or History of Sexuality Volume 1. The thing to realize with Foucault is that his work was both a major tool for the leftist project of tearing down old structures of social power, and their blueprint for building their own mechanisms of social control.
I am generally not a fan of reading a lot of stuff about object-level politics, aside from this website, but if you would like magazines, I would say the Claremont Review of Books is the best place to get political theory from the modern intellectual Right. Charles Haywood's book reviews for the extremely online rightist perspective. Left is harder to find a single source, maybe relevant NYRB articles. The Economist or Foreign Policy for the Establishment view (it's easy to get sucked into just following the right/left wing conflict, but ultimately their respective conflicts with the establishment are more important than the beefs they have with each other).
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
"Kind of weird how the US has 196 political parties, and all their platforms are 'give us free shit and support our ethnic grudges/neuroses'. Personally, I'm voting for the Greater Serbian Nation party, I just don't like how the Sorry For Being Swedish party is handling the economy."
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
I don't know when it happened exactly, but, if you look at her current social media posting Britney Spears is clearly clinically mentally ill. The South Park episode is a good summary of what fame did to her. Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez seem like purer examples of the "I'm grown up now, fuck you dad!" type, with triple daddy issues in Cyrus's case.
but the tl;dr is that all child stars go crazy or disappear. Props to Macaulay Culkin for pulling his life back together.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
I don't know whether or not she's a fraud, but she's a social psychologist, so I assume so. What I can point out is that, from a lawyer-side viewpoint, and I mean literal lawyers, the process she went through is so staggeringly unjust that even if she's 100% obviously guilty it will still shock and horrify a lawyer. Universities are allowed to essentially act as courts for their employees and students, with far more power over them than a private-sector employer has in almost any field, and have turned that into running deranged kangaroo courts. It's of a piece with how they handle sexual assault allegations, to give an example with an opposite culture war valence (amusingly, Gino is suing under the same Title IX used to justify those star chambers).
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
It's been very amusing seeing all the speculation in this thread, as a friend of the couple in question. All I'll say is that his wife is a formidable woman - she's a reporter covering energy/space/defense, works hard but doesn't take bullshit, and certainly didn't marry for money.
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
One could sum it up as the two approaches being, respectively, geostrategic and civilizational. The Rubio doctrine seeks a correction of US state policy to respond to a changing environment, the Vance doctrine understands that the fundamental danger to the American people is the regime (not the administration, the permanent regime) and that Europe will be an enemy in that balance until they have their own regime changes. Eh, I like 'em both, and they often work together well - for instance, if you want to make nice with Putin, effortlessly slapping his client states gives him more incentive to respond in kind.
What does interest me is the Helberg quote. Looking at the transcript, he seems to be fumbling to give a non-answer to a question he maybe wasn't prepared for or didn't want to give specifics on (“Has the EU/UK done enough to limit the use of Chinese tech? Will the U.S. respect separate and distinct regulations by the EU/UK of AI and other tech-related activities, including search and so on?”), and when he brings up the National Security Strategy, he justifies it by referring to the previous question, also unrelated (“Would you like any further changes to the EU’s AI Act? If so, can you explain why?”). The sense I get from all of Helberg's responses is that he didn't really want to do a Q&A, he had some talking points about economic growth/deregulation he wanted to make without going into specifics, and the National Security Strategy line was a throwaway. Always a rough day at work first Monday after New Year's, I guess.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Hope you continue and expand posting on this work. We need more investigators and fewer Takes.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Don't know how I misread that from the google results, I even thought to myself "huh, WSJ columnist gets a feature in NYT".
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I can only speak to one part of this, but you don't have to go far in northeast DC to get grungy - you just have to walk around. There are basically two patterns of American urban dysfunction: two sides of the tracks, and block-by-block neighbourhoods. As an example, Chicago is almost entirely side-of-the-tracks, and modern NYC is almost entirely block-by-block. NE DC, you'll be walking through a street of fancy townhomes with Little Free Libraries for five minutes, then you'll be in the hood for three minutes, then you'll be on a nice block again but walking slow because the guy in front of you is cracked out of his head and you don't want to pass him, then you're properly back in In This House We Believe land, then rinse and repeat.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
I agree with this, and I know Justin well enough that I know this was a crafted scissor statement (he even called his shot with the Jake Paul post immediately after).
What gives me whiplash is hearing that Bill Galston wrote an article with the phrase "Husband Material" in the title. Either that was imposed by an NYT editor, or that old Brookings fossil's banging an intern 50 years his junior (or, possibly, it was a common phrase in the 1970s before its recent recurrence in modern gender war discourse).
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Early noises that The Klob will run. Very, very unlikely that the Republicans will challenge, it would take an exceptional candidate.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
Walz is almost certainly guilty of nothing that he was responsible for. That's how modern political machines work - we have advanced beyond the need for brown envelopes.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Kapuscinski is a wonderful writer. Sadly little of the culture of obligation he describes has changed since then, though young people's access to the internet is starting to blunt it. Good for Malthusian survival, bad for capital accumulation.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
Well, as far as "enemy of the US" goes, much of it (e.g. subsidizing Cuba) is standard small-potatoes third-worldoid stuff, but what really grinds Washington's gears (under Biden as well as Trump) is VZ cozying up to China. Maybe they were worried about their military relationship with Russia too, except that we've now seen exactly how effective S-300s are in Bolivarian hands. The Southern Caribbean is seen as a critical security interest for the US and they want China out of there yesterday, see also the Panama stuff.
Also, it seems to me that Trump's understanding of agreements is that there is always one party which gets fucked over by them, and therefore he only agrees to deals which fuck over the other party. I seriously doubt that he is going back to the 50-50 sharing of profits from before the nationalization.
None of this kremlinology is all that relevant to the actual state of the VZ oil industry. As you say, it was nationalized back in the 70s, and basically chugged along until Maduro. Under Chavez, the locals decided that a) they should give a bunch of their oil away for free for political purposes and b) lol who cares about maintenance bro just steal the money for new parts, then Chavez got lucky in dying before the consequences really hit Maduro. It's more Eskom than Mohammad Mosaddegh. So what you have now to make a deal over is a basically defunct industry with $150bn in sovereign debt to deal with before Western experts can get the oil pumping again.
their citizens might start to ask questions about the purpose of having a military.
It's a military kleptocracy, bro, if their citizens were allowed to ask questions Maduro would already be in Nicaragua.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
In the US, where there's relatively extreme weather and fairly bad infrastructure, the optimal strategy would be to get yourself in charge of some kind of disaster preparedness agency, and do the sloppiest, laziest job that you possibly can in preparing for/responding to that disaster. As an example, you could refuse to respond to wildfires because of the risk to plants. The hard part of using this approach to cause mass casualties is that there will be many other people, often with better local political connections, running the exact same life strategy, and they're more fairly described as satisficing for mass casualties.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
I agree with you on the wider thrust, but there is also Nick Land's point about "Dr. Gno" - something along the lines of "with every x years' advance in technology, the IQ required to destroy the world drops by a point". And when you crawl high up enough along the bell curve, you'll find someone who'll do it.
IMO the actual bottleneck is not intelligence but time preference. Someone who can get in the frame of mind to cause the mass death of innocents - unless they're some true sociopath, like Bin Laden, or an academic virologist - wants to do it now, ASAP, let me kill/die now so I don't have to spend any more time like this. Most mass shooters could have 10xed their kill count if they were rationalist killmaxxers, but at that point, thankfullyish, too much of the mind has snapped off into little fragments.
Bartender_Venator
4d ago
From all the Venezuela experts I know, it's incorrect to think of the previous regime as Maduro commanding the loyalty of various power-holders as if he was some Arab dictator. He was an increasingly ineffectual figurehead "in charge" while the real power-holders, mostly in the military, made decisions - the man was a bus driver, not a colonel. These military power-holders don't need to become a puppet of the US to get what they want, just to stop being an enemy of the US. There are many things that could go wrong still but, assuming nobody on either side chimps too hard, realistically the political stuff on the VZ side is a smaller issue than the bond restructuring on the US side.
Seconded. Gurri's book is the book to understand modern populism.
I would also add Leo Strauss's What Is Political Philosophy (essay), Burnham's The Machiavellians, Nick Land's Xenosystems: Fragments (google for pdf), and Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism. Consider Baudrillard as well. The first three will give you a good overview of the stages of political theory leading to the new right, and Fisher is the last leftist theorist of any intellectual note to gain real memetic reach (Zizek is not what you're looking for here lol).
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
Yes, I think this is the obvious play if you are a high-ranking Venezuelan crony right now, particularly in the military rather than the civilian patronage structure.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
You are an american or american-adjacent whose post history is largely getting mad at Trump for cucking to da jooz. The reality is that, yes, capitalism, and specifically Western capital investment into otherwise dysfunctional countries, plus western trade opportunities, does make them richer. Very quickly and effectively. It also has a tendency to make them more functional, at least within the limits of the people you're working with. Now, the US is also very happy to bring aimless neocon foreverwar or lefty post-colonial massacres to third-world countries, and this could certainly degenerate into the former. But there's no particular reason it has to, and if there's one thing that Trump loves, it's making deals.
Bartender_Venator
5d ago
I agree in theory, but the issue is not with information asymmetries, really - that's just how it's sold as 'fairness' to the public. Insider trading is bad because it radically distorts incentives for insiders and encourages all kinds of violations of fiduciary duty.
OK, I see the second sentence wasn't clear enough for you. In these high-pressure situations, you should expect officers to be running off their training and previous experience, and their training is about minimizing risks to themselves and the public across a wide set of situations, many of which are more serious threats than some lady in a car (in fact, the officer had previously been hit and dragged by a suspect in a vehicle). I'll also note that, generally, and though it's off-frame in the shooting videos, a protest in the middle of a residential street generally makes it less "quiet" at the time.
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