MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
Depends on the route. The easy way is a blackmail op with a professional sex worker doing the seducing and the spy holding the camera. That wouldn't work on Xu Bo because there is nothing to blackmail. But the Huang op looks like a hard mode honeypot where the spy does the seducing and the information you are after leaks via pillow-talk. That works even better on a man like Xu Bo.
I agree with @CertainlyWorse that the reason why the US (or another western country) can't do a hard-mode honeypot is that western culture doesn't allow us to ask a professional-class young lady to do that for her country.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
Yes - there is a period where your wife is overloaded with being a new mum and the only lovable thing about her is that she is the woman nursing your child. I was lucky enough to have three adults in the house for the first two weeks (I had paternity leave and my MIL moved in for the duration) but I can't imagine how tough it is being the second adult (grandparents are absent or acting like entitled Boomers) in a house with a newborn while also working full-time.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
Founder-CEOs are a single point of failure for their companies, and investors like it that way for a good reason. There are controls you could have in place that would detect a compromised CEO, but the type of controls that would prevent an undetected compromised CEO screwing the company/country/investors/future of humanity are not compatible with the benefits of a founder-controlled company.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
Ethnic Arabs/Muslims in greater Detroit voting for Trump over Gaza
I can't find links to regular blue white leftists doing this in the general - Google wants to keep sending me stories about blue white leftists not voting for Biden in the primary. But there are numerous press stories after the election, mostly featuring push polls by pro-Palestinian groups claiming that voters staying home over Palestine cost Harris the election.
Dem post-defeat analysis says Gaza did cause people to stay home
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
2d ago
And notice how the left wingers would never, ever, even once, encourage someone to stay home or vote for a Republican.
Radical pro-Palestinian activists were doing exactly that in 2024. "Genocide Joe" was the meme.
If MTG runs, and I think she will, then she dominates the "right-populist conspiratorial, but thinks Trump is part of the elite conspiracy" lane. I don't think there is room for both a social conservative and a libertarian in that lane, and I think most voters who fit the description would vote for the social conservative other things being equal. In addition, I think MTG beats Massie on online clout and TV charisma, but I am happy to defer to the Motte's actual Republican primary voters on this point.
I do think that the Libertarian Party should snap up Massie if they want to be semi-relevant again.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
3d ago
Although the Nazis did engage in industrial extermination of their own citizens, it was a sideshow - only about 200k Holocaust victims came from Germany proper. The largest groups killed were Polish and Ukrainian Jews.
In other words, the Holocaust was mostly a massacre of conquered populations - something which you suggest is a normal incident of might-makes-right.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
5d ago
Why would Israel choose the daughter of a known Mossad asset
They didn't. If Epstein was Mossad, his initial handler was Les Wexner and not Ghislaine Maxwell. Again assuming the theory is correct, Epstein's network became important enough to have a cabinet level sponsor, who was Ehud Barak.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
5d ago
new cars costing between $40-$70k
US MSRP for a new Toyota Camry (which was the best-selling car in America as late as 2020) is in the 29-36k range depending on trim level.
The reason why new "cars" cost a lot more than they used to is that Americans have normalised buying a light-duty truck as their "car". @Tretiak thinking that "cars" cost 50% more than a Camry and that this is why normie-Americans are feeling the economic pain is evidence for any or all of the standard vibecession theories:
- The economy is fine, kids nowadays just need to learn frugality
- The problem is rising inequality, not stagnant incomes - normie-Americans are hurting because their neighbours can afford pickups.
- Social media is making people more envious because people are more likely to post (and the algorithm is more likely to amplify) their
And for my snarky theory, which is that America is a country where personal physical safety is bought in a zero-sum auction. Elites seem to think this is normal, but it generates permanent economic anxiety among the middle class of a type that doesn't exist in countries with less crime, safer roads etc. "A car large enough to feel safe letting your kids in given that a moron could crash into you any time" is defined relative to the other cars on the road, so the morons being able to buy pickups with 7-year subprime auto leases directly raises your cost of living.
Even if one (or more than one) of these theories is true and the American economy is actually fine (official statistics say it is, and it is definitely doing better than other countries with similar or lower levels of normie economic anger), saying so is of course a voter-hostile position of the type that tanked the Dems in 2024 and the Reps last week.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
5d ago
I agree with you that social contagion (and especially social media contagion during the lockdown) drove the increase in the number of young people self-identifying as trans, and that social media censorship (and selective algorithmic amplification which isn't technically censorship) is a major piece of how the whole trans thing happened. But I don't think control of the White House drives social media censorship as much as you say it does. The big social media censorship scandals, including the trans ones, started during Trump's first term, and the evidence you link to says the trans thing peaked in 2023 when Biden was still in the White House and the Dems were still just about favourites to win in 2024.
In so far as the social media environment has changed in a way which means it no longer artificially boosts transactivists, it has a lot more to do with (in roughly descending order of importance)
- Tumblr (which was always the spiritual home of this stuff) going down the toilet for other reasons, probably the December 2018 porn ban
- Musk buying Twitter and changing censorship policies
- Tiktok taking mindshare from sites moderated by Americans who cared about the American culture war
- The snit over Musk buying Twitter leading to Bluesky acting as a containment vessel for very online left-wing crazies such that the sort of person who would have been a Tumblr transactivist in 2018 was now on a site where transable normies were not.
In 2026, the only site where trannyjannies rule and normies still visit is Reddit. As far as I can see, the only normie-friendly site which might still be run by trannyjannies if Harris had won in 2024 is Facebook, even that feels like a longshot, and in any case I don't think filtering retarded Boomers' social media feeds is a could way of transing teenagers.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
6d ago
The Department of Energy's actual job is to maintain the US stockpile of nuclear warheads.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
6d ago
People involved at the time thought that OWS and the Tea Party (and the rise of Ron Paul libertarianism at roughly the same time) were blue-coded and red-coded wings of the same movement - a bipartisan anarchist/libertarian-coded populist revolt against bank bailouts and the non-punishment of the morons who caused the 2008 crisis. Obviously this ceased to be plausible after the Tea Party became a mostly anti-Obamacare movement.
I don't know if there was a time when this belief was accurate or not. But I don't think it is fair to say that OWS was a reaction against the Tea Party - it was a reaction against the same establishment failure that the Tea Party was reacting against.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
6d ago
"You can't afford beef any more, so don't buy it" is good advice if true. It is also an admission of failure coming from someone whose job it is to ensure that Americans can afford beef.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
6d ago
And the good kind of pain in the arse, in that it is more painful for criminals than for tax evaders and more painful for tax evaders than for law-abiding citizens.
On the other hand, the unspoken contract between foreign criminals and tax evaders and the US Treasury that means most of the world's dirty money is stored in boxes of Benjamins despite 1000 CHF notes having a higher value-weight ratio (and probably lower inflation to boot) is worth something like 5% of US GDP, so it might be a bad idea to rat on it.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
6d ago
Actual deflation would be good for working-class pensioners because most (SS, public-sector or union) pension indexation is upward-only, and the main losers from the resulting recession would be people who lose jobs, and rich pensioners whose main source of income is investment returns. Add in workers who are close to retirement and have recession proof jobs, and it is possible that although deflation would be a disaster, a majority of people who actually vote would vote for it eyes open. See this blog post claiming this already happened in the Great Recession after the 2008 crisis.
The published plan was that the plane would be transferred to the Trump Presidential library (i.e. a non-profit controlled by Trump personally) once the new VC-25B Air Force Ones from Boeing were finally ready. I'm not sure what happens if the VC-25Bs are not ready until after Trump leaves office.
A second-hand 747 is not that big compared to Trump's net worth, but it is an order of magnitude bigger than your standard American corruption scandal. In addition, Qatar reads to midwits as an unfriendly, Iran-aligned country, which makes the scandal worse than taking a similarly-sized gift from a private-sector entity or a friendly country.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
6d ago
Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale in 1985, which was before attitudes to Islam were a Thing in Western politics. (The first big West vs Islam controversy was about the Satanic Verses which was published in 1988).
Even after the Rushdie fatwa, most of the people who take seriously the idea Islam is evil and oppresses women are the same people (i.e. mainstream leftwing feminists like Atwood, but also aggressive atheists like Dawkins) who think that Christianity is evil and oppresses women. The idea that Muslims are a protected group with more oppression points than women is mostly a post-911 thing.
So back in 1985, the way to bet is that
- The Handmaid's Tale was a satire of Christian and Muslim fundamentalism
- Both Atwood and her readers were mostly thinking about Christianity because it was more salient at the time.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
6d ago
That's the point I'm making. Rey's backstory is just bad writing, not woke. But the response to people complaining about it was to attack them as sexist.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
7d ago
One of the problems with trying to run on a low-salience 80-20 issue where you are on the right side is that disagreeing with voters about the salience of an issue is, itself, behaviour that marks you out as out of touch. The only reason Trump got away with it in 2024 was that so many left-aligned groups were helping him make the issue salient.
The classic example in the UK was our relationship with the EU. From the 1990s through to the Brexit referendum in 2016, closer integration of the UK into the EU was spectacularly unpopular, but every time the Tories tried to run a Eurosceptic campaign the median voter punished them for "banging on about Europe" instead of talking about the issues voters cared about.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
7d ago
In a US culture war context, my brain wants to associate it with a magazine and the one annual issue of that magazine that was worth "reading".
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
7d ago
The point isn't to prevent demagoguery, the goal is to prevent winner take all scenarios, which are a bigger-than-usual danger in a historically even Congress. Normally one party dominates so it's not inherently crippling. It forces compromise in that situation.
The problem is that the power Congress gives up by being dysfunctional doesn't disappear - in practice it ends up being fought over by the President and the courts. Turning the Presidency into the elective monarchy that Hamilton wanted and the other framers definitely didn't creates an even bigger winner-takes-all effect.
MadMonzer
If you're talking to me, my preferred pronouns are you/your
7d ago
Interesting. UK media (whether sympathetic to the thing or hostile to the thing) consistently portrays coastal California as the spiritual home of the thing that makes the Blue tribe Blue. Actually you can probably drop "coastal" from that description - I know the Central Valley exists because I drove up it, but I doubt most Brits do.
If "the West" includes western-aligned Asian countries, then 5nm chips.
If "the West" just means the US and western Europe, then a Boeing jet with Rolls-Royce or Safran engines, or an Airbus jet with GE or Pratt & Whitney engines. (Although I notice that the newest variants of the A350 and 777 have only same-side-of-Pond engine options - Rolls-Royce for the A350 and GE for the 777).
There are men who will be mostly honeypot-immune as long as their aging wife remains pleasant to be around, with no government-issue mistress needed. There are also men who will be mostly honeypot-immune as long as they have access to at least one woman who is pleasant enough, hot enough, and appears to be devoted, but are a risk as their wives age. (By all accounts Jensen is in this group). Government-issued mistresses might work for the second group, but given today's sexual morality what is really needed for both groups is government-issued second wives. (Late 20's, 9's, IQ about 10 points below the executive, pleasant and sexually available, give them short-hours NOC jobs in appropriate prestige fields like PR or arts administration).
A true horndog is not going to be kept away from the honeypot by providing alternative women - for this type of guy you can never have too many women. As pointed out elsewhere in the thread, they are probably immune to blackmail, but not to pillowtalk.
As a separate issue, my sources tell me that the training new high-level clearance holders get includes a warning about honeypots, and part of what they say is
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