MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
This is precisely why the focus is on billionaires. The left-wing claim that "there is no just consumption under capitalism" does too much: it breeds either neuroticism or Hasan Piker-style hypocrisy where you justify buying $10,000 watch as if it's the same thing as needing to buy a house or consuming unethically sourced products from some company with monopoly power.
The latter is the whole point. "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" is a way of saying "Don't sweat the ethical implications of your day job in HR at Evilcorp, latte habit, and collection of Apple products - the thing that matters is the work you do to overthrow the system."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
This is the wrong set of numbers. Amazon's net book value is about $400 billion. The extra $2.3 trillion is the market's estimate of the PV of future profits - it is value that can only be realised by selling parts of the company to outside investors, and would be invisible if Amazon was a co-op. Total profit to date is a better metric of what could plausibly have been exploited out of workers, and is somewhat less than $2 trillion. And most of that comes from AWS, so it doesn't come from exploiting the warehouse workers.
If Amazon had been a Mondragon-style co-op, the money available for distribution to workers (including Bezos) would not have included that $2.3 trillion - it would be latent value that would ultimately accrue to future workers when the promised profits were realised. If corporate Amazon has never paid a dividend (it hasn't) or bought back more shares than it issued to fund acquisitions and employee share options (they haven't - shares out increases over time), then it hasn't put cash directly into Bezos' pocket (Bezos' billionaire lifestyle is funded by selling rights to the $2.3 trillion of future profits) and the hypothetical Mondazon could not have distributed more money to workers than it in fact did while still investing in growth like Amazon did.
One of the problems maintaining co-ops which don't have an explicit social mission (such as professional partnerships) or which have de facto lost their social mission and become ordinary commercial businesses (like the UK's building societies) is that turning a co-op into a stockmarket-listed company, or selling it to an existing listed company, allows the current generation of members to monetize that value.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
The people who coined the expression "every billionaire is a policy failure" were claiming that a business which generates enough profit (above a normal return on the actual tangible capital put into it by investors) to make the founder a billionaire is presumptively exploiting market power in an anticompetitive way. For example, in this model Zuckerberg is a billionaire because he has gained enough market power that he can force you to look at adverts in order to communicate with your own friends.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Said takes issue with the framing of Hezbollah as a "terrorist, militant Shi'a group backed by Iran," and says that they are better understood as guerrillas whose purpose was to resist the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
At the time Said was writing, this was straightforwardly correct. (Israel are in belligerent occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982-2000, and Hezbollah was founded to resist that occupation). The morality of what Hezbollah is doing changes after 2000 when it is no longer resisting an ongoing occupation (although the legal status doesn't - they can continue prosecuting their justified war against Israel until a peace treaty is signed and the only legal objection to what they are doing is that they are attacking civilian targets) - and the fact that they did what they did after 2000 allows us to retrospectively reassess their motives from the earlier period.
It doesn't help that many things which have lost some trust with me are cited: Chomsky, United Nations, Amnesty International, etc.
Amnesty was trustworthy up until shortly after the end of the Cold War, and it doesn't become obvious that they have gone full woke until after Said died in 2003. So I wouldn't hold reliance on Amnesty that against him.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
At least in China they have the message discipline to tell people that AI is going to be used to improve people's quality of life, but all SF can do is jerk off about the AI-induced permanent underclass happening any month now and how dangerous AI is is going to be;
I have a snarky Freudian theory that the rise of the tech right and a lot of SV comms missteps have the same root cause - that the founder/VC elite are failing to contain their white-hot rage at having to pay upper-middle class salaries (and extend the respect the upper class traditionally extends to the upper-middle class) to mere codemonkeys who lack upper-middle class social graces.
In this model, the "permanent generational underclass" meme is founders, VCs, and people who see themselves as future founders and VCs expressing glee at the codemonkeys losing undeserved social status. From the point of view of someone who can afford a family-sized house in the Bay Area, nurses, plumbers etc. are already part of the underclass.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
The finance bros who are any good at it tend to prefer a low-drama 8 to a high-drama 11. The only person I worked with who actually dated eastern European models was more of an upjumped computer programmer than an actual finance bro.
The English traditional elite produces a lot of not-too-smart daughters who fit the bill re. looks and drama potential and know that they are at risk of downward mobility if they don't marry money. A lot of my colleagues dated hot primary school teachers. There is some overlap between these groups.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
In the context of disproportionate retaliation for a perceived insult, no.
Nor did the judge, given that Digwa is going to an ordinary prison and not a secure mental hospital.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Cummings' real-world achievements, including leading the successful Vote Leave campaign, are incompatible with being a midwit. What Cummings does appear to be is a high-IQ quokka who sees himself as a political genius because of his proven success in manipulating the great unwashed with carefully A/B tested and focus grouped nuggets of emotional manipulation. But as soon as he tried to be a political player in his own right rather than Michael Gove's henchman, he had to engage in conventional political intrigue, at which he proved to be about as cunning as Baldrick after eating too many turnips.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
If that exact scene were put into a Sopranos style prestige drama, the point of the scene would be to show that the murderer was an unhinged psycho with a pathetic, brittle ego and "random encounter" levels of impulse control.
Apart from the "psycho" part, I would agree with your characterisation. Brittle egos and unhinged responses to perceived minor insults are normative in some barbarous cultures like prisons (because they show you are not a pushover), and deliberately cultivated as necessary survival instincts by non-psychos who spend long enough in such cultures, but unacceptable in civilised cultures.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
The median voter (remembering that the old and rich vote more often than the working-age and poor) likes the consequences of mass immigration, apart from crime. Almost all voters like their noncriminal immigrant friends, neighbours and co-workers and want them to stay. To make mass deportations a winning issue at the ballot box, you need to convince the median voter that the people you are deporting are disproportionally likely to be criminals - which turns out to relatively easy, particularly when they actually are.
Dominic Cummings always said that the idea of competently managed mass immigration (i.e. a Canadian/Australian points system) focus grouped as popular in the UK.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
The essence of populism is that it is popular because it takes the stated concerns of people seriously rather than airily dismissing them.
Although there are popular populists, it isn't necessary for the term to apply. Nigel Farage was still a populist back when UKIP were getting single-digit percentages of the vote.
Even now, populists are generally not popular, in the sense that they tend to lose elections to centrists. (Yes, Trump won. But the Republican theory of the 2024 election is that there was no centrist on the ballot, not that Trump beat a centrist).
No, but it is what the Brexiteers said they were going to do. Vote leave campaigned in existing Commonwealth immigrant communities saying that ending EU freedom of movement would create more space for Commonwealth immigrants, told business leaders that ending EU freedom of movement would create more space for work permit immigrants, and told the electorate that the Australian and Canadian points systems were good models for a post-Brexit immigration policy at a time when Australia and Canada had much higher legal immigration than the UK.
While the Boriswave was happening (but before the small boats became the dominant media narrative around immigration), Dominic Cummings said that the British people were not unhappy with the Boriswave because, unlike immigration of EU citizens under freedom of movement, it was under democratic control. Reader, he was wrong.
Boris was always planning to do a Boriswave, and made no effort to conceal this.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
"Loyalist" in practice means "sympathetic to political violence on the Protestant side of the Troubles". Northern Irish Protestants who make loyalty to the UK central to their political identity but don't support political violence are called "Unionists".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
That is a minor variation on the populist trap. The essence of populism (both left-populism and right-populism) is to channel inchoate anxiety among the populace into hatred of the designated (ideally but not always foreign-coded) scapegoat. The centrist trap @Corvos is referring to is to attempt to dismiss inchoate anger by pointing to a non-existent scapegoat.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
The video shows Nowak calling Digwa a "bad man" repeatedly while filming him shortly before the murder, and continuing to do so when Digwa is walking away from him. That isn't legal provocation, and nobody suggested it was, but it pattern-matches to "two hotheads get into a fight at pub closing time" much more closely than "unprovoked attack by crazed thug from violent foreign culture".
We don't know what happens in between "Digwa is walking away from Nowak, who continues to abuse him verbally" and "Digwa attacks Nowak with a big-ass knife", but "Digwa turns round and demands satisfaction, and a series of mutually escalatory threat displays lead to a fight" is quite plausible, as is "Digwa turns around and chops up the guy who he incorrectly thought was stalking him with no further warning", or anything in between. If we were trying to adjudicate Nowak's Darwin award nomination, the crucial point would be whether Nowak follows Digwa. Following someone while filming them and verbally abusing them is genuinely provocative (though not a provocation in the technical legal sense), and culpably stupid if the guy is visibly armed in a way which means they will win a fight. But the police didn't find any evidence either way on this point, and in any case it is legally irrelevant to Digwa's guilt.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Why would you assume it's about race? There have been minorities in Britain for centuries. There have not been not been horrible and prolific murders and rapes in Britain like this. Nobody cared about minorities when they acted British and identified as British and cared about British people and their values.
The largest immigrant minority in Britain before the Empire Windrush docked in 1948 was the Irish. (They were legally British, but so were the Jamaicans on the Windrush - people who are inclined to racism didn't see either group as remotely British). Moral panics about Irish wickedness were an ongoing feature of 19th and early 20th century British politics. There is also the notorious indigenous minority with their own unique kind of sexual deviance, the Welsh. Anti-Welsh racism has also been an on-and-off feature of British politics, and there was at one point in the 19th century a semi-serious moral panic among a certain type of conservative Anglican about the spread of Welsh-influenced Nonconformism* in England.
The British are less prone to ethnic hatred than most countries, but we are not immune to it. It is just that the ur-racism in England was never about skin colour, and this confuses Americans and lefties raised in the American tradition of anti-racism.
* Nonconformism is a general term historically used in British religious politics for and form of Protestantism that is not Anglican or Scottish Presbyterian (both of which are official state religions in different parts of the UK).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
My point is that it is the constant murders of white people by ethnic minorities that is radicalising whites against ethnic minorities, not the Twitter algorithm.
The safest countries have about one murder per year per 100,000 people. At least a quarter of those will be outrageous enough to make good social media copy. So a group of 5,000,000 people will commit one potentially viral murder per month, if they are as peaceful as the Swiss. And one a week if they are only as peaceful as white Americans or black Britons (both around 4 murders per 100k). Since there are more than 5,000,000 nonwhite people in the UK (and an order of magnitude more than that if you are looking at immigrant crime globally, as most of the Americans poasting about the situation in the UK are), your Twitter feed being full of murders of white people by ethnic minorities could just as easily be caused by the algorithm as by actual crime. If Elon Musk wanted your Twitter feed to be full of white-on-white murders, he could make it so. And if he wanted it to be full of cute cat pictures, he could make that so.
How much do you know or care about white-on-white crime in Belfast? It's a complex issue given the history of the Troubles and the number of ex-paramilitaries hanging around. And yet you feel the need to have an opinion about crime by asylum seekers in Belfast.
There is enough crime in Zurich to fill a tabloid or a social media feed with crime stories. To know whether the constant stream of crime being shoved in your face by people who don't have your own interests at heart (at best they want you to keep staring at the ads between the criminal fnords, and in the case of Twitter coverage of migrant crime in the UK, we know that these posts are being amplified by a foreign billionaire who has made no secret of his desire to foment political violence in the UK and drive the British government out of office) is caused by the people doing the crime or the people doing the shoving, you need to look at statistics. So let's do that.
Murder has dropped since mass immigration started in the UK and continues to fall slowly. Ditto stabbings*. Ditto violent crime where the victim ends up in A&E. Ditto violent crime measured by victim surveys. Ditto property crime measured by victim surveys. There is some evidence that property crimes which mostly target tourists and therefore wouldn't appear in a victim survey have increased, including phone snatching and pickpocketing. Shoplifting (which also doesn't appear in victim surveys because the victims are businesses and not individuals) has definitely increased. Sexual offences by ethnic Pakistanis in the UK were out of control 20 years ago, and these cold cases are being regularly relitigated on social media in a way which suggests to people not paying attention that the crimes are still going on. (I genuinely don't know if they are or not, and the people outrage-poasting about them aren't bothering to check either). Cyber fraud is also rising, but it isn't what right populist agitators or tabloid journalists are talking about when they say that "crime is out of control".
Right now the UK right-populist discourse is dominated by two murders that went viral on social media. One was a case of "two hotheads get into a fight at pub closing time, unfortunately someone is dead because someone else brought a knife to a fistfight". The murder of Henry Nowak is only newsworthy because of the shockingly poor (and probably racially motivated) police response - and yet the social media peanut gallery are calling for penal laws against a demographic who commit less crime than the white British. Nobody has run the numbers, but given the reputation of Sikhs in the UK** it is likely that kirpans prevent more crime than they cause (much like guns carried by CCW permit holders in the US). The other case is a real failure of the UK immigration system - the Belfast attacker was a Sudanese falsely claiming to be a Somali who crossed the open ROI-NI border in order to claim asylum in the UK instead of the EU. But you wouldn't have learned about the difference from social media posts by right-populists.
* Police recorded knife crime is up (but peaked in 2024 and is now falling again), but actual stabbings are down, as measured by NHS administrative data. The most likely reason is that the police have been told to be more careful about checking whether a knife was used in muggings and suchlike where violence is threatened but nobody gets stabbed.
** Singh is the second-most common surname of VC winners, after Smith.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
I think I've seen Americans talking about "stepping on a lego in the night"
But if you are right, "Legos" as a plural-formed mass noun is a weird usage. There are other examples ("clothes" is the most obvious, some people use "cattle" in this way) but they are rare.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
If he is a sufficiently atypical example that his views are not representative even when he thinks they are, that would be stolen valour (which while scurvy, is not moddable) rather than consensus-building.
I take @hydroacetylene's "we" seriously in the absence of evidence that he is not what he claims to be, and I would hope that my "we" is taken similarly seriously when I claim to speak on behalf of British liberals (in the British sense - the word has subtly different meanings in BrE and AmE). Given the unreliability of the MSM, the only ways the Motte gets to benefit from the perspectives of people who are not MAGA-supporting disgruntled grey tribers is to listen to the ones it has.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
"A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!"
That isn't a nice thing to say about Camilla Parker-Bowles.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
As far as I'm aware marriage for love was quite rare in the era before the suffrage.
In cisHajnal societies, middle-class and below young men and women chose their own partners, and presumably took sexual attraction into account when choosing. The date this pattern arises is not clear, but definitely before 1400. Dating pools were much smaller and there was more pressure to settle, but it was closer to the modern system immediately before dating apps than it was to parentally-arranged marriage.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
And they are possibly being outbred by low-IQ women
While the end-Baby-Boom-to-1990s fertility decline was dysgenic, the post-2010 decline in coupling and fertility is eugenic, in that the lower classes are being hit harder than the middle class and above. It is only dysgenic relative to the parts of sub-Saharan Africa where people still use flip phones.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
Consensus building.
Not really. "We" here is a reference to the kind of blue-collar worker @Goodguy was talking about (i.e. someone who puts a lot of their identity into being the kind of person who works hard in a physically demanding job), a demographic which is underrepresented here. If @hydroacetylene's "we" is accurate and he is indeed a regular blue-collar guy, he is providing the Motte with useful information we wouldn't otherwise have access to.
Whenever we say "this thing is sacred, it shall not be traded for profane goods"
People who actually think sex has a sacred element don't just think it should not be traded for profane goods - they think it should not happen outside marriage at all (de jure) or with a narrow exception for relationships where the parties are ready, willing and able to be shotgun married (de facto).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
Interestingly, standard British usage is that "Lego" is a mass noun (like "water") - it is always used in the grammatical singular with non-counting quantifiers like "some Lego" or "$1000 worth of Lego" or no quantifier as in "models built of Lego". We would never say "Legos" and a single brick would be a "piece of Lego" or a "Lego brick". Whereas standard US usage is as a countable noun (like "coin") with each brick being an individual Lego.
Lego Corp want Lego to be an adjective because that makes it easier to protect their trademark. Like Rollerblade wanting their inline skates to be called "Rollerblade skates" and not "Rollerblades", and with about as much chance of success.
I have no idea why BrE and AmE diverge on this point, particularly as neither is following the Lego Corp position.
Satyr, not satire. The words are widely and incorrectly believed to be related, but in fact "satyr" comes from the Greek word for a mythological creature that would fit just fine into modern furry porn* and "satire" comes from the Latin word for a fruit salad.
* Human body, horse ears and tail, unrealistically huge dick
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