MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8hr ago
I am noticing that Yarvin has achieved high social status by being good at being a Jewish nerd in a society run by philosemitic merchant elites, and that warrior elites are generally unsympathetic to nerds and Jews.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8hr ago
A world where the natural warrior-elite of the USA (whoever that is, and even if it even exists) re-emerges and becomes a functioning warrior-elite would not be a world a Jewish nerd like Yarvin wants to live in.
One thing I noticed about reading the "American Castes" essay when it first came out is that it was an obvious oversimplification (in the same way that the 4+1 caste model of the original Hindu caste system is a massive oversimplification of the various jatis and varnas). There are a number of groups that don't fit into Yarvin's 5 castes, and the career military (and in particular people from multi-generational military families) - as opposed to people doing a short stint and expecting to get out after 4-8 years, who remain in their original caste - is one of the more obvious ones (unless they are Optimates by birth). There is definitely a hereditary officer corps in the American military, but it isn't where most officers come from. I don't know enough to comment on whether it could be a functioning warrior-elite in the future.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
Fred Pearce's Peoplequake wrote about rural-to-urban migration as a majority-female phenomenon almost everywhere in 2011. As well as pull factors (modern low-end manufacturing is pink-collar work, cities have more mid-level administrative jobs) there is the important push factor that some women are fleeing patriarchal rural and small-town communities for the obvious feminist reasons. Most women really don't want to end up as a farmer's wife*. And if you are betraying your religious parents by moving to the city and adopting a feminist lifestyle then the marginal cost (pre-Brexit, at least) of moving to London over Frankfurt is low.
Most of the young German women I meet in London are Bavarians from conservative CSU-voting families. (Though I suspect the real skew there may still be post-WW2 occupation era war brides.) Most of the educated Polish women I meet in London are running away from social conservatives in rural and small-town Poland.
* The Instragram tradwife trend isn't about being a farmer's wife - it is about being the wife of a man rich enough to buy you a hobby "farm".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
"Head of Office" is used in the UK where Americans would use "Chief of Staff".
Chief Executive of a British council is equivalent to a US city manager - they are a permanent employee who runs the city under the direction of the majority leadership of the elected council. Total population of the City of Westminster is 211 thousand.
So in US terms the position being advertised is deputy chief of staff to the city manager of a municipality with a population (within municipal borders) of c.200k in the core of a large metro area, with the appropriate pay adjustment for a high cost of living area.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
My impression is that the pathologies of locally high-status men engaging in dubious pussy-chasing are basically the same in other contexts and this isn't specific to conventional celebrities. Gamergate happened because Zoe Quinn looked like she was cheating on her boyfriend with someone locally high-status in the indie game community, and the community seemed to think there was nothing odd about this. This kind of thing is absolutely rife in academia - probably more so than it is in Hollywood, although the press doesn't cover it as much.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
Encourage deviant behavior to the point of basically making it mandatory (you don't have an open relationship? You're not a square are you?), then make it socially and legally risky to engage in outside of party-aligned social institutions.
The actual life path followed by Blue Tribe elites is to fool around a bit in your twenties, then to get married (to someone of your own social class, naturally) and stay married. The idea that polyamory and swinging are standard for married couples in prog circles is absurd if you have spent time with them - this is the whole point behind Charles Murrays "the elite should preach what they practice" thesis in Coming Apart. Even though the official prog position is that there is nothing wrong with swinging if everyone is consenting, it has always been the case that a male public figure who did this kind of thing and got caught was liable to be hauled over the coals by feminists for bullying his wife into it.
Blue Tribe opinion-formers promote sexual deviance because promoting deviance of all kinds feels like rebellion against oppressive authority. But the actual rules enforced by Blue Tribe morality police have included things like "don't engage in drug-addled casual sex" since the feminist backlash against 60's libertinism. And banging women of a significantly lower social class than your own (including whores) has always been mildly low-status behaviour for elite men, even though it is common. If the libertine techbros had thought that drug-fueled orgies were normal for Blue Tribe elites then they were making the classic mistake of believing what the NYT says and not watching what the sort of person who gets published in the NYT does.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
The decline in social connection has happened across the first world, whereas the takeover of public space by derelicts is mostly US-specific. So that is unlikely to be a major contributor.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Why is it wrong to ask for quid pro quo?
Under libertarian ethics, it isn't wrong to hire a sex worker on mutually agreeable terms, but it is wrong (because dishonest) to hire an employee for some other job and then after she has resigned from her previous job, relocated etc. pull a bait-and-switch and tell her she is now your sex worker, and the door is that way if she doesn't want her new job. You can't be a good person if you are going around saying "You fucked up - you trusted me. Learn the lesson and don't trust people like me next time."
It is noteworthy that a lot of right-on-right arguments about whether a woman who is sexually harassed in the workplace is a victim of obnoxious behaviour come down to an argument about whether some particular job counts as sex-work adjacent (such that the implicit employment contract does include putting up with this stuff) or not.
Doing this to your employees is a type of wrongdoing that the US has (unusually from a global perspective) decided is beneath the notice of the law in the case where sex isn't involved, but is tortious when sex is involved.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Ah, the days of TVIX. One of my most interesting experiences in finance was the presentation by the risk manager who had stopped my then-employer from offering a TVIX-equivalent explaining just how XIV and TVIX died.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Agreed. I favour long-drop hanging or firing squads (I would also include the guillotine, except that it's French) on the basis that they kill cleanly and reliably, avoid excessive pain, and make abundantly clear that what we are seeing is authorised violence, which it is.
Capital punishment is not a medical procedure and you shouldn't make it look like one. Capital punishment sometimes is a show, but it shouldn't be optimised for entertainment value.
I never heard of no ‘don’t screw the babysitter’ rule.
I think I may have learned it in the same kind of place I learned "don't use double negatives to express a single negative meaning in formal writing". It was one of the paradigmatic examples of behaviour which, whether or not legal (the minimum age to babysit in those days was about 13 and the age of consent was 16), was beneath contempt in the society I grew up in.
All the effect of these laws, the ‘real’ sexual harassment laws as you term them, is to ‘multiply crime’.
Compared to the previous system that actually works, there is a lot more space for licit sex. So it is only "multiplying crime" relative to a baseline which essentially nobody wants. If we are talking about explicit government prohibition here, and your argument is that historically quid pro quo workplace sexual harassment is the type of behaviour which, while socially unacceptable, is outside the proper scope of government coercion, it is worth noting that government regulations affecting both employer-employee relationships and illicit sex were old hat by the time Hammurabi got down to writing them down.
I have an old school understanding of rape:
The old school understanding of rape related to the subset of illicit sex where the man was wholly guilty and the woman wholly innocent, not to the boundary between licit and illicit sex. (The old school understanding formed at a time when the vast majority of sex was illicit, and most illicit sex was considered to reflect shared fault between both participants.) There has never been a society where the rules were "anything goes except rape strictu senso" and I would eat my hat if there ever was.
victim screams no, immediately goes to the police
So if you are dangerous or powerful enough that someone would reasonably want time to think things over before calling the police on you, you can rape with impunity and it doesn't count? In the instant cases (both "Caroline" and Pavlovich) the woman would have been unemployed and homeless within 24 hours of calling the police on Gaiman - that is something you need to make plans for, and making those plans can take weeks.
I just think women are people, and they have the capacity to say no,
The snarky response to this is that sometimes we decide we need to limit the ability to push the cost of saying "no" repeatedly onto the people saying "no", and that the same argument you are making implies that the laws against spam and telemarketing are illegitimate.
The serious response is that if you are a physical threat to someone (and almost all men are to almost all women in a one-on-one situation), or otherwise in a position to hurt them (let's say your wife, who will predictably take your side in a dispute, is their boss and landlord) it is really easy to make saying "no" difficult. When Luca Brasi asks you if you are going to sign the contract, he shouldn't need to say that "no" implies that your brains will be on the contract instead - under normal circumstances the threat is implicit, and forcing Luca to make it explicit is going to take a zero off the already-below-market price the Corleone organisation is offering you to release Jonny Fontane from his record deal. The same is true in more mundane contexts. If your boss says "Can you run down to Fatbucks and fetch me a coffee-flavoured double sugar-water with extra lard?" then you might be able to give an excuse, but a simple "no" is what Sir Humphrey would call a brave career move. Is it different when your boss asks you "Will you kneel down under the desk and blow me?" How confident in your answer are you, given that the political tradition who thinks we should be libertarian about this also thinks that people who are fired for not blowing the boss should be allowed to starve if they can't find another job quickly enough?
Gaiman had set up an environment where saying no was not just difficult - it was almost maximally dangerous. To say a woman should be able to say "no" is to say that a woman should be able to make a high-stakes judgement call about whether saying "no" will end badly for her - Pavlovich wasn't in a situation where saying "no" at the wrong time could get her killed (although you imply that you have no problem with deliberately creating and taking advantage of such situations) but apart from that the full range of bad outcomes were on the table - physical pain, unemployment, homelessness, community ostracism.
The "solve-for-the-equilibrium" response is to note that people remove themselves from situations where they repeatedly have to say "no" under unpleasant circumstances. Tourists stop going to cities which are full of unpleasant panhandlers. People stop using online services which are full of spam. Women stop going to the bars and clubs where they are pestered by men they don't want. The equilibrium in societies where quid pro quo sexual harassment is a normal incident of being a woman in the workplace is that women with options stop working outside the home.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
I haven't met anyone who favours a more specific definition than "New Englander".
That said, when talking to Americans, I have heard "Yankee" used to refer to a widely-hated baseball team playing in the Bronx and its fans far more often than I have heard it used to refer to New Englanders. Given that the Bronx is not part of New England, I suspect it makes "Northeasterner" the more correct meaning to a descriptivist.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
It isn't a reveal. The same allegations were the subject of a social media happening and discussed extensively on the Motte six months ago.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
If you were as charming, rich and charismatic a sociopath as Gaiman, your wife would be finding girls for you to do the sick stuff with so she didn't have to. About half the girls in the article were procured by Palmer.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
The man is innocent.
At least one of the allegations (Stout saying she didn't want penetrative sex due to a UTI, Gaiman sticking it in anyway) is an absolutely clear case of rape if true. It can't be adjudicated to the criminal standard, but given the pattern of behaviour revealed by the publicly-available information I think it is more likely than not.
The allegations by Pavlovich (again, if true) clearly include criminal sexual assaults. I suppose you can take a maximally pro-Gaiman view and say that all the penetrative sex was consensual on a "silence equals assent" basis, hence no rape strictu sensu, but I don't see why someone who is screwing the babysitter deserves that level of charity.
Even in libertine culture, "don't screw the babysitter" and "if you want to pick up MOTAS for casual BDSM, do it in a BDSM community so you know that they have the necessary skills to protect their own safety" are about as hard as customary rules can get when the mos maiorum isn't written down by the Censors. And Gaiman sailed over those lines on multiple occasions. I am well up for laughing at feminists calling mainstream Western culture a "rape culture" because it isn't one, but the culture that thinks that the behaviour Gaiman is accused of counts as "innocent" is a rape culture. This is a pre-Christ Roosh/Andrew Tate level of behaviour.
I don't have much sympathy for the groupies who chased down Gaiman for sex and ended up having sex they didn't want, and I don't think that adjudicating the difference between "the groupie was miserable the next morning because the popstar performed the consented-to sex act badly" and "the groupie was miserable the next morning because the popstar performed a different sex act to the one consented to" is a good use of police and court time. But "Caroline" and Pavlovich were not groupies - they were brought into Gaiman's orbit as employees, and both were living in de facto tied housing at the time that most of the sex happened. A woman who puts up with a skeevy boss because the alternative is homelessness and finds herself in a situation where homelessness would, with hindsight, have been the better choice is not the same thing as a groupie who gets a dicking other than the one she was cruising for, to use Jim Donald's crass but apt metaphor. If the difference between "I let the skeevy boss kiss me because I really needed the job and eventually we escalated to consensual sex under the same unfortunate terms" and "I let the skeevy boss kiss me because I really needed the job and then he raped me" is too hard to adjudicate, then I would support drawing the bright line rule on the side of "don't fuck employees".
The law agrees with me on this point - even if mostly-consensual, Gaiman's behaviour towards "Caroline" and Pavlovich is illegal (usually a tort rather than a crime, admittedly) as workplace sexual harassment, and not of the bullshit "hostile environment" variety that a lot of people want to legalise. There is a good reason for this - a world where being bait-and-switched into sex work is a normal incident of accepting a job as a nanny is a very bad place for a lot of people, including me as a non-skeevy man who has nannies in the house while I am working from home.
the rag would have printed the lurid details of what they did behind closed doors, people would have felt 'iffy'
Without the employees' stories, there wouldn't have been enough material for the article.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Do the benefits still apply if you drink flouridated tap water or filtered alcoholic beverages? Ripper only drank spring water and pure grain alcohol.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
It's worth noting that the October Revolution in Russia was in effect a military coup, but led by an organised faction within the lower ranks rather than an ambitious colonel. The core Bolshevik constituency was the Petrograd garrison.
The reason why there wasn't a communist takeover in Germany is mostly that the USPD and Spartakists were unable to organise the soldiers the way the Bolsheviks were, so the German army remained under the effective control of their officers and the Ebert government.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
Most HFT shops are mostly doing market making. Market making (i.e. quoting bid and ask prices and making a profit when other people cross your spread) is essential for well-functioning markets, and computers do it better than humans (and have done since shortly after 2000). The problem is the sheer amount of elite human capital going into a competition for speed which is now effectively zero sum because computers are placing and cancelling orders faster than a real-money investor can make decisions. To fix this without chasing away the market makers the markets rely on to function, you would need microstructure-level reform carried out by someone who knows what they are doing.
The most interesting proposals I have seen are:
- All orders entering the market place are held until the end of the second, and then orders arriving in the same second are processed in a random order
- Allow pricing in units of 1/10th of a cent per share (for trades which are not a multiple of 10 shares, the total price is rounded to the nearest cent in favour of the market maker) - this makes it an order of magnitude easier for a later order to outbid an earlier one on price, reducing the incentive to compete on speed.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
From Newsome's executive order suspending CEQA and Coastal Commission review for rebuilding:
\2. Paragraph 1 shall apply only to properties and facilities that are in substantially the same location as, and do not exceed 110% of the footprint and height of, properties and facilities that were legally established and existed immediately before this emergency.
So anything except replacing the McMansions is de facto illegal.
The same executive order extends anti-price-gouging rules on building materials through to January 2026, which may mean that any rebuilding at all turns out to be de facto illegal. But even red state governors do that - the fault is with the voters, not the politicians.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
The historical figures I would most like to see on Rogan are William the Marshal (the first GOAT candidate in combat sports) and Casanova (for obvious bro-shit-shooting reasons).
More generally, I think seeing any of the pre-1800 pioneering scientists and industrialists' reaction to the society they created would be fascinating.
Because of their polymathic tendencies, Frederick the Great and Napoleon would be the most interesting former world leaders.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
Expansion was inevitable. The area covered increased significantly, and so did the charges. Environmentalists used it to enforce a policy of 'no petrol/diesel cars in London'.
The expansion of the actual congestion charging zone was reversed after four years. If you are talking about the ULEZ, you are talking about a zone where the vast majority of journeys are not charged - all petrol cars and vans sold in the UK since 2006 and all diesel cars and vans sold since 2016 meet the ULEZ emissions standards and don't have to pay ULEZ charges. That is not a policy of "no petrol/diesel cars in London". It is a policy of forcing the most polluting 10-20% of vehicles to f*** off to a less densely populated place where they won't poison as many people.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
It's odd, because I don't remember especially strict policing, but people seemed to be on better behavior than usual anyway.
Everything is surveilled by CCTV. With modern face recognition software TfL could flag it every time a person "known to the authorities" uses the system. They don't go that far, but I assume they use all available analysis tools on the pictures they pull after someone commits a serious crime on public transport. The 7/7 bombers were identified within 3 days based on CCTV footage, and the technology has got a lot better since then.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
Out of curiosity, where would you say the appropriate place to protest would have been?
Given that the Constitution requires States to choose their electors and Congress to count the votes of the electors chosen by the States, the appropriate place to protest a choice of electors which does not reflect the popular vote would whatever the usual and customary place for large-scale protest is in the relevant State capital. Given US norms (which are not substantially different to other advanced democracies) I wouldn't have said that protesting on the Capitol lawn was inappropriate, but doing so while openly armed, carrying signs saying "Hang Mike Pence" and erecting a gallows crosses a line even if the building wasn't stormed. (FWIW, I would consider open-carrying at a political process to be per se a threat against government officials and therefore prosecutable, but I am aware that American gun culture sees things differently).
The people absolutely believed that the election has been stolen, and showed up for what was actually an extremely peaceful protest, especially compared to the BLM protests earlier in the year.
The ignorance of Trump's supporters is relevant to their culpability, but not his. Given his access to information, if Trump believed the things he was saying about how he won the election then he is sufficiently delusional that Pence should have invoked the 25th.
There really isn't any set of events that could've led to the January 6 protests having Trump installed in office, short of convincing everyone that the vote had been stolen (in which case, yes, they would've been right to overturn it).
Eastman wrote a memo telling Pence how to install Trump. I don't know what would have happened if Pence had followed the instructions in the memo and declared Trump elected, but it wouldn't have been good whoever ended up being inaugurated. There were at least five obvious ways that the January 6 protests could have "worked" in the sense of using political violence to cause an unnecessary constitutional crisis, although only the first two seem plausible to me:
- Pence, in fear for his physical safety, changes his mind and calls the election for Trump as presiding officer over the joint session using the Eastman memo as a guide.
- Pence is killed/hospitalised/in sufficient danger that he is whisked to a secure location by his Secret Service detail, Chuck Grassley presides over a reconvened joint session as President pro tem of the Senate, and (whether out of personal conviction, political calculation, or fear) calls the election for Trump per the Eastman memo.
- The count is delayed long enough for Team Trump to successfully run one of their other schemes, probably having another go at getting Republican state legislatures in states that voted for Biden to endorse the fake electors.
- The rioters manage to grab the chest containing the physical certificates of vote and burn them, dump them in the Potomac or similar, and an attempt to gather the backup certificates held by federal judges in each state fails, meaning that the electoral count cannot be run in a regular fashion.
- The disorder gives Trump an excuse to replace the Capitol Police with troops loyal to him, who proceed to coerce Congress into upholding challenges to the contentious electoral votes.
Compare and contrast the operative text of these pardons (e.g.):
with the Nixon pardon, (from Ford's online Presidential library):
So this looks like the standard form of pardon for pardoning a pattern of behaviour if you don't know what specific crimes it could be charged with. These pardons are actually narrower than the Nixon pardon, because they are restricted to acts taken in relation to specific offices held. (So if the Trump admin is determined to do that, they could go after Liz Cheyney for campaign finance violations or some other three felonies a day bullshit).
The argument about the political wisdom of the Nixon pardon is a pot-boiler, but AFAIK nobody has ever challenged its constitutional regularity.
In terms of the wisdom of this one, the Fauci pardon seems an obviously good idea - I don't know why the anti-lockdown movement has chosen to make criminal charges against Fauci it's preferred strategy for relitigating COVID, but Fauci didn't commit the substantive crimes - the lockdowns etc. were ordered by other people (mostly at State level). Prosecuting advisors based on technical disagreements over the quality of advice is a bad idea. Prosecuting advisors based on how other people used their scientific advice is a very, very bad idea if you want honest advice. This applies whether Pam Bondi can find a three felonies a day process crime he is actually guilty of or just uses meritless criminal investigations for process-is-the-punishment reasons.
The whole thing about prosecuting the members and staff of the Jan 6th committee is silly, including the pardon, but I think the pardon is reasonable given the Republicans started the silliness. A moron in a hurry can see that the business of the committee is protected from criminal prosecution by the Speech and Debate clause.
The pardon of the witnesses is mildly improper, given that the only crime it could plausibly cover is perjury, which is inexcusable. But no more so than the Iran-Contra or Scooter Libby pardons.
All in all, these seem fairly low down the list of bad pardons.
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