MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
23hr ago
There are many cases of American martyrs whose stories are just completely made up, like Matthew Shepherd who died from a meth-related incident.
I think made-up martyr stories are a lot older than that...
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
23hr ago
I'm fully on board with this - I wouldn't accept a small risk of attracting police attention for a fun online hobby either. But that remains a reasonable decision on the part of Zorba even if the risk is very small indeed.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
23hr ago
Prince William's and Princess Katherine's security cost £1.4 million a year back in back in 2010 (the breakdown of Royal security isn't public, but that number leaked), which would be £2.2 million adjusting for inflation. Other full-time working royals who are not the Sovereign probably get something similar. The cost of providing security details to nine living ex-PMs is £13 million pa in direct costs and £24 million pa including a contribution to police overhead. So a cabinet minister/ex-PM/mid-level royal tier security operation costs about £2 million a year. The leader of the official opposition (currently Kemi Badenoch) gets this level of taxpayer-funded protection as a matter of course. Other opposition politicians only get taxpayer-funded security details if there is intelligence of a specific, individualised threat - and "People like to throw milkshakes at me when I go out in public" doesn't qualify.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Modern German military medals look sufficiently similar to the Iron Cross that I am not sure you could tell them apart in the context of a tattoo. Fundamentally, it is a German-coded symbol of martial virtue, and is mildly suspect for the same good reasons that German militarism has been ever since 1945.
In an Anglosphere context, the Iron Cross is a symbol of anti-establishment-coded martial virtue and is used by people like outlaw biker gangs before being adopted by Motorhead and then spreading around heavy metal culture.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I think this is part of a wider pattern. In a world where political violence is not, in fact, acceptable (very much including the one we live in), a ghoulish but rational response to your own ally being assassinated is "Excellent - this is a huge pile of free political capital. Let's celebrate." Letting on in public that this is how you feel means you lose the free political capital you were hoping to celebrate. Erika Kirk's behaviour makes perfect sense if she is rushing to capitalise on the political capital of her husband's death while it is still fresh, which she was. And she wasn't the only Republican who very visibly saw the assassination of Kirk as more of an opportunity than a tragedy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Horst Wessel was killed by members of an organised Communist paramilitary. That is an easy martyrdom story (although Christianity doesn't count soldiers who die due to enemy action as martyrs, so by the Christian rules he wasn't one).
The Republicans failed to make the martyrdom thing work because they didn't convince anyone outside their own filter bubble that Kirk was a victim of organised left-wing political violence. It isn't clear to me whether this is because he obviously wasn't, or if it is because they overreached in the aftermath of his death by trying to claim that school librarians and HR ladies shitposting was political violence.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
If you applied the same lack of charity to Donald Trump's poasting that you need to get to "half of the left wing said it was a good thing", then he would be at the business end of a noose. Trump repeatedly shitposts about beating up demonstraters, molesting teenage girls in locker rooms, suspending the Constitution, celebrating political violence against the Pelosis, deporting US citizens, invading NATO countries, and running for a third term. Fundamental to the case for Trump is that this is just shitposting, and Trump's opponents who take it seriously are either dishonest or mentally ill.
"Every premature death is a tragedy, that of Charlie Kirk less than most" is not a belief I hold (I feel more commonality with people doing the work of politics on the other side of the aisle than I do with my own allies who stick to shitposting) but it is one that is entirely compatible with a commitment to democracy, free speech, the rule of law etc. Unlike the Cult of Luigi, I do not see any comparable sympathy for Tyler Robinson, which is what you would expect to see if large numbers of normies did in fact think the murder was a good thing. Essentially everyone on both sides of the aisle's attitude to Robinson is "please let him not be one of ours." What I saw was a lot of shitposting in violation of de mortuiis nil nisi bonum, which is a rule of etiquette and not of law or custom.
Is the claim here that the President of the United States should be held to a lower standard of public decorum than a classroom assistant in Minneapolis, or is it that it is different when it is our guy doing it?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Moderators here, quite properly, have decided that they don't want fedposting on their forum. Even if it wasn't a legal risk to the mods, tolerating fedposting makes the forum less able to fulfil its stated purpose.
That doesn't mean that the mods receiving a warrant for a common or garden fedpost is particularly likely.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Kirk was both a minor celebrity (because of his "I will debate anyone" college speaker tours) and an important political organiser (because of the work TPUSA did recruiting, training, and placing the next generation of GOP staffers). The work as an organiser was more important, but was not visible outside the organised GOP, so most people think of him as the "debate me" meme guy.
Kirk's opponents hated him because he was a "debate me" bro who expected members of oppressed groups to do the work of countering his hateful message. Kirk's dumb supporters loved him because he was willing to take the core movement-conservative message to a hostile audience. His smart supporters feared and respected him because there were already enough young GOP operatives who owed their career to Kirk to staff a future Kirk for President campaign.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The US navy has something of a record of stupid crashes. The inquiry into the Fitzgerald crash in 2017 came to the conclusion that one of the contributing causes was crew fatigue due to a sustained high operational tempo. The idea that basic safety compliance collapses during combat ops making a technically non-combat crash an order of magnitude more likely seems obviously correct.
That said, if the Iranians had shot the chopper down, the Trump administration would probably lie about it. To those familiar with combat helo flying, how likely is a near miss which does enough damage to render the chopper inoperable (e.g. by taking out the tail rotor) leading to a ditching without blowing it to smithereens in mid-air?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Farage is accused of taking cash gifts from dodgy crypto businessmen in exchange for promises to influence government policy.
Although some of Farage's opponents are muttering about quid pro quo, that isn't really what the argument is about. "The UK should build on our existing strength in financial services by becoming a crypto hub" is obviously correct unless you think that the cryptofinance industry is inherently malignant, so to someone who doesn't already hate Farage it looks like "crypto money finds crypto-friendly politician" rather than "politician becomes crypto-friendly in exchange for crypto money". The argument is (in theory) about transparency and (in practice) about aggravated spivvery.
Newly-elected British MPs are required to declare certain types of payment received in the 12 months before they were elected. Farage didn't. And when caught, rather than trying to spin it as "outsider gets caught on a technicality and is punished overly harshly for a paperwork violation" he tried to double down. First he tried to claim that the gifts were personal and didn't need to be declared*, then he went for the "enforcing generally applicable laws against a Man of the People just proves how much the establishment hates you" approach, and eventually to calling for a criminal investigation into whoever leaked to the media. (Remember that this is information that was supposed to be on the public record anyway).
Farage will be censured when the investigation is complete, because he uncontroversially broke the rules. And given the large amount of money involved (£5 million when the scandal started, now £6-7 million across multiple undeclared donors), he will be suspended from Parliament for long enough to trigger a recall petition. The current by-election automatically suspends the investigation, but it will restart when Farage is re-elected, and there will almost certainly be a second by-election after Farage is censured and recalled.
Even before this became Farage vs Binface, the politics of this don't make sense to me. Calling this by-election means that an what would otherwise have been an inside-baseball funding scandal is going to be the current thing for several months. I can see that the "It's not the £5 million in dodgy overseas** crypto money, it's the persecution" line working in Clacton where 70% of the voters are right-populist, but it isn't going to land with swing voters in the seats Farage needs to win if he wants to be Prime Minister in 2029. It could (low probability, but potential high impact) also sink him if Rupert Lowe finds a good local candidate - something that is more likely now that delaying the process gives Lowe more time to do so. (Restore can land the "I'm work for you, Farage works for foreign billionaires" attack even if the establishment parties can't.) And even if the other parties had run in the by-election and being trounced, "Farage can still win in Clacton" doesn't shift the narrative.
The best theory I am seeing is a Bulverist one, which makes me doubt my own judgement. But "Farage is high on his own supply with the persecution narrative" seems very plausible, because politicians getting high on their own supply happens all the time. Farage says that he is at such high risk of left-wing political violence that he needs a bigger security detail than Prince William***, and that the taxpayer ought to provide it. That he actually thinks this is entirely plausible and the leap to thinking the voters will agree with him is not a large one. If you accept that narrative (and Farage's online supporters do) then "I only needed to take money from foreign crooks and criminals because the police denied me the level of protection I clearly deserve" makes sense.
* This doesn't pass the laugh test. The explanatory notes to the rules say that the exemption for personal gifts is about things like Christmas and birthday presents from family and close friends. This was a £5 million gift where both Farage and the donor have said the money is linked to his political activity.
** The donations aren't legally foreign donations because the people writing the cheques are British citizens living abroad. But the ultimate source of funds is foreign and everyone knows this.
*** The only British public figures who get £5 million in taxpayer-funded security are the King and the Prime Minister.
On a somewhat related note, I remember reading one of Steve Sailer’s posts ages ago in which he made a claim that was only tangentially related to his main argument that the Democrats’ best chance of winning the presidency is by fielding as a candidate an older African American man with a military background who’s from a working class or lower-middle class background and is center-left. If we accept this as valid I guess it means that the main disadvantage Platner has in this case is that he’s white.
Also that he isn't lower-middle class (his father was a lawyer and his grandfather was a starchitect with his own Wikipedia article) and he isn't centre-left (he was explicitly the far-left factional candidate in the primary, supported by the usual suspects). If you think that being uncouth in public makes someone "centre-left" and pro-working class despite their support for open borders and trannies, you don't understand working-class politics.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
"Men will endure bitter poverty, cold isolation, drink piss and eat lichen just for a chance to be free from the tyranny of the United Nations."
This is a purely hypothetical tyranny, of course. The United Nations has less power, and a lower budget per head, than your high school student council.
I also note that the internationally recognised government of Somalia has not controlled its internationally recognised territory for decades, meaning that de facto sovereignty was there for the taking. And the only people to take it were a group of locals who got their act together (Somaliland), pirates, and jihadis. And the pirates and jihadis aren't about freedom, they are about using "borrowed" Somali sovereignty as a base for predation.
I'm happy to concede that Kowloon Walled City prospered as a libertarian loophole, although every account I have written says that it wasn't as libertarian as it looked because the Triads enjoyed de facto sovereignty in the gap between Chinese and British de jure sovereignty.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Interesting. I hadn't seen SpaceX talking about orbits higher than GTO, so I assumed that was as high as they went. If SpaceX is putting the craft in trans-lunar coast, they can definitely claim credit and blame for the lunar mission if they want, but they still don't get to cherrypick.
I'm saying that if Ryanair flies a climber to Chamonix who goes on to climb Mont Blanc, they haven't flown him to the summit of Mont Blanc, and they don't get credit for flying to the summit of Mont Blanc; and that if Ryanair flies a climber to Chamonix who goes on to die on Mont Blanc, they didn't kill him and don't get blame for killing him.
The successful flight to Chamonix counts to Ryanair's safety record of non-mountain flying in either case. Translating back to @pusher_robot's comments about SpaceX, I don't think it makes sense to say that "SpaceX has delivered x successful lunar missions" and include crashes in the total on the basis that SpaceX successfully got them as far as LEO.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
SpaceX are the Ryanair of LEO, which is a perfectly respectable business to be in. If they don't deserve the blame for what a payload does once it goes past LEO, they don't deserve credit either.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
Africa hasn’t been great with Democracy or much of Latam.
Democracy has been less bad for Africa than the actually existing alternatives, which are Soviet-style communism and military juntas. There is an open question about whether British colonialism was better, but it isn't clear if Britain still produces competent colonialists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
A lazy barista is the west making a mediocre cup of coffee in 5 mins which sells for £4 will register as more productive than a highly skilled and experienced coffee guru barista in Istanbul selling premium coffee which he also makes in 5 mins for 50 TRY (around £0.8).
Turkish coffee and espresso-based drinks are very different products with different traditions and are enjoyed by different people with different tastes. The espresso-based coffee in Istanbul is globohomo tier. If PPP is being calculated correctly, a cappuccino in London and a cappuccino in Istanbul are approximately the same product and count approximately the same amount to PPP GDP.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
And can you guess by the color of their skin and their religion which are the most unproductive lower classes and most pandered to?
The most pandered to unproductive class is retired boomers, and particularly retired homeowning boomers. (Landowners who no longer perform the military functions of a traditional warrior elite are the most pandered to unproductive class in almost every society where they exist, of course).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
So ordaining unrepentant sodomites. I agree SSPX isn't into that kind of thing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
You can't be excommunicated if you were never Catholic in the first place. If you are a baptized cradle Catholic who lapsed in young adulthood, you are probably excommunicated latae sententiae for apostasy. But if you are just a rando, the Church doesn't claim any authority over you.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
IQ tests for jobs are legal in the UK and widely used (the civil service is using them less than before because of disparate impact, with the predictable negative effects, but large private sector employers still use them fairly widely). Credential inflation has been less bad than in the US, but not much less bad. So although Griggs v Duke Power doesn't help, I don't think it is the main thing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
The general public, bless their hearts, think an ephebophile is a paedophile with a dictionary. I think an ephebophile is just a man with normal (straight or gay) male sexuality. In both cases, the word is not helpful.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
I would say it is not seen as paedophilic, but widely seen as unwise for other reasons. "Society should discourage an 18year-old bf and a 16-year old gf from having penetrative sex" is just normie.
"The age of consent should be 18" is comfortably inside the Overton window.
GPT-2 cost about $40k of compute to train in 2018. Naively applying Moore's law, that much compute would have cost about 400 times as much in 2005, so someone would have needed to be willing to drop $16 million on a hunch. (What actually happened is that the first deep learning models were used on narrower problems so you could get a higher performance on less training).
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