MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Unlimited freedom is a frontier society, which certainly isn't always safe, but I wouldn't describe it as hellish and dystopian.
Frontier societies are functional because there isn't enough concentrated wealth to attract predators. Unlimited freedom in an affluent society where the administrative cost of running a complex scam is Nigerian minimum wage plus a smartphone is more like a frontier society subject to constant Indian raids.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Australia and Britain now have age-verification laws which require everyone to submit ID.
A quibble, but most of the big US websites have implemented schemes where you can age-verify an account by logging on from a phone with an obviously-adult (as detected by AI) FaceID. Only babyfaces and newly-minted 18-year-olds need to submit ID.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
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.
This is true at the margin compared to a status quo of feminised welfare-state capitalism. But peace is almost always popular with men who remember war, and the New Deal (and equivalents in other countries) was popular with men who remembered devil-take-the-hindmost libertarianism. Several posters have already mentioned that traditional socialism and communism were very male because they emerged from male-dominated labour movements.
Even MAGA feels more nostalgic for the time when Walter the Schlub could get a $20 an hour union factory job and a 6 who ironed his shirts and didn't get fat than they do for a more mythical past when the top 20% of white American men could crush their enemies, see them driven before them, and hear the lamentations of their women.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
I don't think so. At no point did I claim that the pre-MAGA power structure in the GOP was more entrenched than the Dem equivalent, or that it couldn't be challenged. I was making a comment about where power sits and how it is challenged.
If power sits with formal leadership, you challenge it by voting out the formal leadership. This happened with MAGA. Arguably it also happened with Reagan.
If power sits with "the Groups", you challenge it by setting up a new group and doing enough Group things to earn the capital G. (I am not a Democrat, or American, so I don't know how this works in practice, but it clearly does). This happened with BLM and Sunrise. The Greer post I linked talks about how it happened with the feminists.
In the current year, you can't shift the direction of the Dems by voting in primaries, because whoever wins will do what the Groups want them to do, with Biden as proof of concept. And you can't shift the direction of the GOP by setting up Groups, because elected Republicans will ignore you, grassroots Republicans will laugh at you and the MAGA netroots will ask which Jew is funding your Group.
I think where we disagree is not about how elite factionalism works, it is about the role of the grassroots. In your model, the grassroots have agency, and Trump is proof that the grassroots have a level of power in the GOP that they don't in the Dems. In my model the grassroots as such don't have agency. Individual people - like Charlie Kirk - who organise the grassroots have agency, but once you have organised enough grassroots activists to matter, you, personally, are now a party elite. (Incidentally, Kirk is a point against my thesis - TPUSA is a "Group" in the sense that I am using the term, but I note that TPUSA can't criticise Trump and stay relevant, whereas a left-wing equivalent would be constantly criticising a Dem president.) In my model the GOP grassroots are the terrain elite factions are fighting over - in effect as a source of primary votes and hard-money donations.
Another way of looking at this - was MAGA a top-down or bottom-up phenomenon? The grassroots rage against the GOPe that he took advantage was real, but if Trump doesn't run the angry grassroots cope, seethe, and either stay home or hold their noses and vote for Ted Cruz in the primary (who then loses to Hilary in the general). Trump (or some similar exceptional leader) was a necessary component of the MAGA takeover. It is hard to tell whether Trump is driving the bus with the MAGA base along for the ride, or whether Trump can be forced to dance with the ones that brung him - they don't disagree that often. But where Trump and the base do disagree, Trump normally wins. Iran is the most spectacular example - the MAGA base have totally cucked on this issue and are running around claiming that they always supported the war and Trump has won it.
The idea that young men are somehow financially worse off than they were previously is just dead wrong.
This is true in the US, where economic growth has been fast enough to keep pace with Boomer greed. It isn't true in other first-world countries with slower economic growth and similarly greedy Boomers. The detail is confusing because the relative price of housing has increased so much compared to both other basic necessities like groceries* and minor luxuries like streaming video subscriptions or avocado toast.
This makes the online generational wars very confusing, because people from across the Anglosphere (and from globohomo communities outside it) are posting to the same websites and think they are participating in the same conversation.
* The relative cost of healthcare has also increased, but that isn't a basic necessity for the young men we are talking about.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
But safe returns can also be found in 'house prices up only!' lending, which directly undermines the demographic sustainability of civilization and transfers wealth from young to old. Or SEO/adtech/addictive mobile games.
If you think that middle-class homeownership as the default is a good thing, mortgage lending is the biggest pro-social things banks do*. The transfer from young to old is driven by housing scarcity - generous mortgage finance just determines how it plays out.
If we didn't have a mortgage finance system that allows desperate upper-middle-class youth to somehow-or-other scrape together enough money, then the Boomers would be selling out to investors who would become a new landed aristocracy. Given the less-generous mortgage system in the US post-2008, this is already happening at the low end of the market. (Hence the moral panic about corporate landlords buying SFHs - this is actually less harmful than individual landlords buying them, but easier to demagogue).
* In dollar terms, the mortgage bond market was traditionally bigger than the stock market. The recent run-up in the stock market means this is no longer true in terms of outstanding market cap, although the SpaceX IPO will mark the first and possibly only year when the stock market was bigger in terms of new issuance, which is a better measure of the impact finance is having on the real world.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
Conventional wisdom is that Versailles was so expensive to build and run that it cost the Bourbons their throne and heads when the bill came due. (This is probably false - Louis XIV's wars cost far more than Versailles). Whether this makes it good inspiration for Trump's ballroom or not is left as an exercise to the reader.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
It's interesting to me how women get so upset (seemingly instinctively) about inexpensive male sexual gratification.
Historically, not just women. Men were on board for the Victorian-era campaign against Onanism, for example. Feminism is now the only socially acceptable reason for people to be prudes, but I don't think it is the only (or even the main) reason why people were prudes historically.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
And for those who don't get the joke, the EEA is also the European Economic Area, consisting of the EU, Iceland, Norway and Lichtenstein. EEA countries are part of the EU Single Market.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
Further, most frozen Iranian funds are not frozen under US jurisdiction.
Most frozen Iranian funds outside US jurisdiction are frozen by people who were bullied into it by US secondary sanctions. Both the US and Iran know that they will be unfrozen quickly if the US wants them to be, and are negotiating on that basis.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
they will split the conservative vote (probably an absolute majority of the voting public)
The only general election since WW2 where right-wing parties got a majority of the popular vote was 2015. (They might have done in the 1951 election if every seat in Northern Ireland had been contested). The estimated national vote shares from the 2025 and 2026 local elections don't show a right-wing popular vote majority. (I haven't checked further back). Of the major UK pollsters, only More in Common shows a right-wing polling majority.
So it looks like there is a narrow left-wing majority (split between Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, the Scottish and Welsh nationalists and various minor far-left parties). Not that this matters under FPTP, of course.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
My gut instinct is that the figure of 250 000 sounds higher than I would have thought credible, although this might be wishful thinking. I admit I haven't read the report (this whole matter is so grim that I generally try to steer clear of the details). The fact that this seems to have been going on for decades though does make it more believable.
The figure of 250,000 victims is not credible. The report says it was calculated by extrapolating the victim counts of the Rotherham and Telford gangs to a national scale, but neither the report nor the Reform peer who originally came up with the number shows their working. A more serious problem is that Rotherham was the first Pakistani rape gang to be busted precisely because they were exceptionally prolific - there have now been thorough local investigations into Pakistani grooming gangs in about a dozen towns, and Rotherham and Telford are an order of magnitude worse than the typical case. My back of the envelope estimate is that if you extrapolate from the whole sample of properly investigated cases rather than just the worst two you get a number around 100,000. And if you assume that the convenience sample of "gangs who have been busted" skews more prolific than average (which I think it probably does), then you get an even lower number.
None of this matters to the politics, of course. The median voter is innumerate, the median Reform-curious voter is even less numerate, and caring about factor-of-two errors in political messaging is considered autistic even by numerate people.
It probably is correct to say, though, that the British upper class considers itself distinct from the rest of the population, which it does not care about the welfare of that much,
Part of what happened is that this is true, fractally. Under normal consequences, the white British respectable working/lower-middle class - critically, including the police - hate white British chavs at least as much us toffs do. (All bets are off in the face of a foreign-coded common enemy, or a tabloid-driven moral panic about sex crime) It took two things going wrong to create this crisis - one was a decision to tolerate crime by ethnic Pakistanis to avoid being called racist, and the other was a culture were sexual offences against underage chavettes had been effectively decriminalised regardless of the race of the perpetrators. On an initial skim of the Lowe report, my first reaction was shock at just how many of the girls had been raped by (presumptively white British) family members or "stepfathers" before the Pakistani gangs got to them. Nobody involved with either the official or the Lowe enquiries found those rapes, or the non-prosecution of the perps, surprising or worrying.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
Sometimes the partial toleration of native criminal gangs can reduce the influence of foreign criminal gangs, like the way probiotic bacteria outcompete dangerous bacteria for nutrients.
The British example would be organised football hooliganism. Steven Yaxley-Lemmon isn't a football hooligan, but he chose "Tommy Robinson" as a nom-de-guerre because he wanted people to think he was. There have been multiple cases where have-a-go heroes who took down stabby Muslims in London turned out to have learned to fight with the Millwall Bushwhackers, who also organised a defence of Eltham High Street during the 2011 London riots.
"Why didn't the Millwall Bushwhackers pogrom a Muslim rape gang operating on their turf?" is a question nobody is asking, and possibly should be. In the case of of Millwall specifically, I assume part of the answer is that the the Bangladeshi Muslims in our part of London are an order of magnitude less rapey than the Pakistani Muslims who dominate the cases identified by both the official and Lowe inquiries.
If we leave the natives out of it, tolerating criminal gangs of better-behaved immigrants as a tool against worse-behaved immigrants is something that did happen - Sikh vigilante groups effectively defended their turf against both the 2011 rioters and the Muslim rape gangs, with the authorities being apparently unbothered. (This attitude is part of why much of the British right waited to see which way the political winds were blowing before coming out against kirpans after the Nowak murder).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
With RFK in the administration, vaccine resistance absolutely is now right-wing coded at the level of vibes. It's harder to tell in practice, but Wikipedia lists six measles outbreaks in the US post-COVID, with four of them being in deep red territory (one of those may have started in an FLDS polygynous cult, which shouldn't count against mainstream Republicans), one in a blue county in Florida*, and one is among illegal immigrants in Chicago. That's 3-1 in favour of "vaccine refusal is for Republicans" with two corner cases.
* So blame is presumptively shared between the DeSantis administration policies and the individual choices of Democrat-voting parents
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
Iran’s nuclear weapons program is being destroyed!
The centrifuges we knew about were mostly destroyed in the July 2025 12-day war. I'm not aware of any additional centrifuges being destroyed in the 2026 war. If there are centrifuges we don't know about, the deal doesn't commit to dismantling them. Nor does Iran give up their stockpile of reactor-grade enriched uranium. [Note that enriching reactor-grade uranium to weapons grade is faster and cheaper than enriching natural uranium to reactor-grade, and one of the valid criticisms of JCPOA was that Iran could build a bomb within a year of kicking the inspectors out by further enriching the stockpile of reactor-grade uranium that JCPOA permitted]
The nuclear part of the deal is not fully specified, but it anticipates the supervised downblending of the stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium which is currently buried under the ruins of the Isfahan enrichment facility. Assuming it is downblended to reactor grade, this sets back the Iranian path to a bomb by six months to a year. The sanctions relief and reconstruction funding in the MOU probably moves the date forward by more than this by making it easier for Iran to rebuild the destroyed centrifuges.
constituent interest groups
What are the organised interest groups in the GOP that wield the same level of power that unions, feminists, black urban political machines, or the Ford and Hewlett-funded NGO borgs wield among the Democrats? Alternatively, what are the "otherwise sovereign entities" you mention in your first post? In the Greer/Freeman model the state parties are part of the "formal leadership", not an alternative to it. These are kind of meant to be the same question - you clearly have a model of how power works in the GOP which is something other than "Registered Republicans nominate candidates and elect party bosses, and the electeds and bosses come together to run the GOP roughly according to the rulebook" and I would be interested in knowing what it is.
Formal leadership tried to fight the constituents and formal leadership lost, Decisively.
MAGA is the formal leadership of the GOP and has been for almost a decade, having taken control through the formal democratic processes of the party (in particular, the 2016 primary, which was a genuine act of internal party democracy).
Trump ran the campaigns he wanted to, just as Romney ran the campaign he wanted to. Someone made Biden run like a campus progressive in 2020 even though he is an old-school machine politician. The point I am trying to make is that there is no equivalent of that someone in the GOP.
The application of the Greer/Freeman model to the last decade is that the GOP went MAGA as a result of grassroots Republicans voting in primaries, whereas the Dems went woke-prog as a result of the machinations of the Groups. I think this is obviously correct.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
As for pent-up demand
I've definitely seen the argument that the Baby Boom isn't a real high-fertility period, just catch-up from delayed fertility during the Depression and WW2, with the high measured TFR coming from overlapping generations having kids at the same time. (Because of the way TFR is measured, this leads to a measured TFR that is higher than the experienced fertility of either cohort).
Elon Musk kind of shows this too.
I thought Elon only had two children per woman, which is not going to solve anyone's fertility problems.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
Part of what Nineteen Eighty-Four shows is that the Party spends far more time monitoring its own members than it does monitoring the proles. You don't see the internal politics of the Inner Party "on-screen" (O'Brien is the only Inner Party member we see, and for the first two thirds of the book he is putting on an act to entrap Winston Smith - in particular we know that the telescreen was still recording while "turned off"), so you don't know how the Inner Party monitor each other. But a large part of the book is about how the Inner Party manage the Outer Party (through constant surveillance and loyalty testing) vs the proles (with bread and circuses on one hand and exaggerated foreign and domestic threats on the other).
"The Book" (in-universe title "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism") purports to be written by Emmanuel Goldstein, the leader of the clandestine opposition, but Winston Smith gets it from O'Brien so we don't know who actually wrote it. It functions as an author tract describing the nature of the Party regime, although it is of dubious reliability as a factual description of Oceanian politics. "The Book" says that ambitious, able and demonstrably loyal (with a subtle hint that part of demonstrable loyalty is being an unprincipled sadist) Outer Party members can join the Inner Party by competitive examination, but that most ambitious Outer Party members get wiped out by the Thought Police. Most, but not all, Inner Party members are children of Inner Party members, although this isn't official policy and the authors of "The Book" think that it isn't unofficial Party policy either, just normal nepotism. "The Book" also says nothing about the internal politics of the Inner Party, and is ambiguous about whether Big Brother is actually real (Stalin's dictatorship) or not (Breznhevian oligarchy).
The formal organisation of both main US parties is almost exactly the same - the DNC and RNC are both federations of state parties, the state parties in each state are organised in approximately the same way because of the requirements of state electoral laws, the independent Congressional committees work in the same way etc.
This Tanner Greer post makes the opposite of your argument - Greer is a conservative but he is partially relying on academic research by dissident leftist Jo Freeman. The thesis, which I think is correct, is that the formal leadership of the GOP (including the President when applicable, Congressional leadership, the RNC Chair etc.) matters more than it does in the Dems because the influence of "the Groups" - organised interest groups which are de facto part of the party constitution but operate entirely outside its formal structures - provides an alternative power base in Dem politics which the GOP doesn't have.
My take is that GOP elites see the GOP as the place where America's natural ruling elite come together to justify their existence to the sovereign voters, whereas Dem elites see the Democratic Party as a coalition of disadvantaged groups working together to secure their respective fair shares of the pie. I think this goes all the way back the the Civil War, and predates the GOP being consistently to the right of the Democrats. I'm not sure how much Trump changes this story.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
The nail house phenomenon suggests that relocating the elderly is the one thing that, somewhat bizarrely, Red China won't manage to do.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
Animal Farm and 1984 are not novels; they are documentaries.
Animal Farm was a documentary. Nineteen eighty-four was not - it was a warning, and one that has so far been effective in preventing the thing warned about. The USSR never managed to achieve the level of social control you see in Oceania, and not for want of trying.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
I was taught that "Master + firstname" originated as a way for middle-class teachers (and private tutors) to address upper-class schoolboys that respected both of the opposed social class and authority gradients. But I think this is BS - actual practice at English public schools was to use surnames with no honorific regardless of Daddy's title*. (Brothers were distinguished with suffixes like "Major" and "Minor" though the exact details varied by school).
Interestingly, "Mister" is this trope - it is a corruption of "Master" used (at least as early as the Tudor period) as a respectful form of address by peasants speaking to minor gentry who didn't have a higher title like "Esquire".
* Though children of Dukes and royalty use Daddy's title as a surname instead of the family name. So Prince William was "Wales" at Eton rather than "Mountbatten-Windsor".
And in any case the information on the ID isn't legally sensitive, so BigTechCorp could give itself permission to share with volunteer moderators, and immunise itself against accidental breaches by rogue volunteer moderators, with a one-paragraph change to a clickwrap ToU (in the US) or $20,000 worth of GDPR paperwork (in the EU).
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