MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I read Twelve Rules for Life and found it mildly useful. In the political context of the UK at the time, it was possible to recommend it to mentees in a way that it wasn't with other based/red-pilled/right-coded lifestyle advice. Given that I was happily married and professionally successful at the time Peterson went mainstream, I wasn't in the market for a full-on lifestyle guru relationship. But for young people who are looking for a secularish lifestyle guru, Peterson was one of the better options out there.
Even if you don't think the drugs shot Peterson's credibility, they definitely shot his workrate. You have to be prolific to survive in the online lifestyle guru industry.
I think the world would be a mildly better place if Peterson had not got addicted to benzos.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Western European governments have been doing exactly the same things (i.e. too little, too late from a right-populist perspective) over roughly the same timescale. I'm most familiar with the UK, because I live there, and there isn't anyone with a megaphone and an incentive to shout about how small boat immigration is about 50% off the peak or that a brown muslim Labour home secretary has closed the loopholes and abuses that enabled the Boriswave, but I suspect we have made more progress on reducing unwanted immigration than Russia has.
If you accept the far-right paradigm that %white is a key figure of merit for European and Europe-derived societies (or %white British for the UK specifically), then this doesn't matter because that number is still going down and slightly reducing the negative first derivative doesn't change the big picture. And in any case neither the far right nor the centre-right would want to make a Labour government look good. And the pro-establishment centre-left is constitutionally incapable of pointing out good news on unwanted immigration because they are too afraid of being called racist.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Jordan Peterson didn't lose relevancy because of the benzos,
From my personal perspective, Jordan Peterson absolutely did lose relevancy because of the benzos. The core of Petersonism as I understood it was "if you act with agency and responsibility in your personal life, honour your tribe's gods, and display slightly more classical masculine virtue than that is normal for your society, you will be the big lobster." Big lobsters do not get themselves addicted to benzos.
I assume I am not alone in this.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I hope we can all agree that Eliezer Yudkowsky is not the Messiah; he's a very naughty boy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I do not think "black people have lower IQ on average than white people" would land anyone in jail in the UK. In the unlikely event that the police took an interest, the normal life cycle of an "arrested for poasting offensive meme" case is that the police ask the poaster to make arrangements for them to be arrested, booked, and promptly bailed at a mutually convenient time, after which the end result is either charges dropped or a three-digit fine. The cases with multi-month jail sentences for social media posts involved posts which incited specific crimes at specific times and places.
In general, in countries with unfair dismissal protection in the workplace you can't be dismissed for committing a crime unless either the crime or the punishment (jail time, driving ban etc.) is relevant to your ability to do your job.
The basic point you are making is correct - the UK has very weak protections against criminal punishment of speech. But the "12,000 people arrested a year for tweets" statistic is misleading because the Malicious Communications Act covers threats, harassment, cyberstalking etc. as well as mere offensiveness. Based on online and published accounts of day-to-day police work by ex-cops, the vast majority of MCA arrests happen when chavs (or chavettes) make non-credible threats of violence against each other on social media and their parents demand a police response.
I agree with you that c.200 people arrested annually for merely offensive social media posts (which is closer to the real number) is not good and the appropriate number is zero.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
It's illegal to fire PAYE employees for out-of-work political speech in the UK (and almost everywhere apart from the US), the law is enforced, and the norm it implements is generally accepted to the extent that cancel mobs don't even try to get e.g. baristas fired over social media posts. Despite the campaign against him, Cofnas was able to keep his job at Cambridge until his contract expired - and I think we can agree that academia is a leftist industry.
This wouldn't help you in film, because temp and contract work is ubiquitous in that industry and I agree that a known racist who was not already a megastar would not be able to get gigs in the UK - as in the US.
The Maya Forastater case held that views on sexual morality are protected by anti-discrimination laws by analogy with religion, so "Gays will burn in hell" or "Transwomen are actually men" enjoy an even higher level of protection. (Forastater herself sued over the non-renewal of a temporary contract). She was working in a centre-left thinktank, which is another obvious example of a leftist industry.
But the difference that is visceral if you hang out with PMC people on both sides of the pond is the impact of hostile environment law on normie white-collar workplaces. The idea that an employer is expected to be seen to be preventing a very broad range of potentially offensive speech doesn't exist in UK workplaces which are general corporate and not explicitly leftist. In the UK, it is possible to work for a centrist industry like accountancy and poast "black people have lower average IQ" (though incidentally that probably isn't true in the UK) and keep your job. Motteposters who do this in the US have said that they are relying on not getting caught and putting an appropriate level of effort into opsec.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
In the US pro sports is exempt from competition law. US-style drafts would be illegal in Europe, or in any other non-sport context in the US. Imagine the top Wall Street banks drafting the incoming analyst class if you want to think how ridiculous it would be if you weren't accustomed to it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
(keeping in mind that City essentially got away with it for more than a decade, ample time to rack up plenty of positive sports PR)
City were caught in 2018 and have been using expensive lawyers to stall for time ever since. The first serious attempt to punish them was in 2020, before the Saudis bought Newcastle. So the Saudis knew that violating the Financial Fair Play rules meant at best constant litigation, and probably an eventual humiliation of the type we are now seeing at City.
PSG have 100% cheated to a similar scale of City, but they play in France rather than the PL.
Nobody cares about the French league (compared to the Premiership or Serie A). I hadn't realised that Qatar even had that kind of money - apparently their GDP is c. $200 billion nominal or $300 billion PPP, meaning that they control about as much money as Abu Dhabi or Dubai. (The GDP numbers for individual Emirates on Wikipedia don't make sense, but the overall GDP for the Emirates is c. $600 billion nominal or 1 trillion PPP, and Abu Dhabi and Dubai have about 40% each).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I would say that the motivation isn't to maintain competitive balance, it is to maintain the organic link between clubs and their local fanbases. In American sports (with an unprincipled exception for the Green Bay Packers) the league considers a team to be the property of the owner, and an owner moving a team to a different city for commercial reasons is, while rare and unpopular with fans, part of the way the system works. In the culture that is European football, moving a team is a crime against football, and is banned by the leagues except in the most exceptional circumstances.
The politics of sports leagues mean that TV revenue is shared more equally than local fan revenue, so leagues with a stronger culture of hometown fandom (and European football has such a structure) have less revenue equality, and the richest clubs (like Manchester United or the New York Yankees) are the most dependent on gate revenue at the stadium, with the poorer clubs dependent on TV money. Using revenue sharing or similar to maintain competitive balance would mean that clubs are dependent on the league for revenue and not their fan bases, which would move us closer to a US franchise model.
A wealthy superfan who bought a team and spent a lot of his own money driving it up the football pyramid was traditionally considered fine (the owner would be loved by his team's fans and not particularly resented by rival fans) - and indeed Financial Fair Play is not enforced at the levels of the pyramid where that is still plausible. Nobody in Europe is rich enough to buy an EPL/Serie A championship with their own personal cash. But at the level of money going into something like Man City, the money is clearly going in for non-fannish reasons.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Very much agreed. If you are dependent on PAYE/W-2 employment to put food on the table, you de facto have more free speech in the UK than the US, at least if the online accounts of the Great Awokening from non-leftist Americans are accurate.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
IF you are the sort of person who finds powerful people humiliating themselves funny, it was hilarious despite the total lack of real political importance. The comedy is redolent of this incident where the Canadian Parliament accidentally honoured a Ukrainian Nazi.
I think Klobuchar putting the boot in was particularly well-done, and it bothers me that nobody has made the obvious joke and said that Schmitt was Klobbered.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I am familiar with the unit (as of my PhD days it was still the main practical unit among engineers and experimental physicists because the Tesla is so large) but I also read "gauss" as a proper name.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
And of course all the words on the left are scientific and technical terms as well - I would say "shemale" is the closest to a non-technical word on either side.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I get all the left side and about a third of the right. For someone who gets more of them, am I right in thinking that the vast majority of the words on the right (not "doula" or "pessary") are technical terms about textiles?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I would guess Mormons and Jews still have opportunities in this regard. The workplace is largely too risky now but it was possible at one point.
Odds are bad for women among true-believing Mormons - allegedly because the expectation to go on a mission causes a lot more young men than young women to drop out of active Mormonism around age 18.
Odds are also bad for women among high-fertility Jewish sects because Jewish norms are for a moderate (c. 4 years) age gap, and there are significantly more 18-year-old women than 22-year-old men if the population is growing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Don't fly a woman out of a different country and then try to seduce her.
This used to be called "transporting a woman for an immoral purpose" and was illegal in most places into the 1980s.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Yes. My point. Do workers BELIEVE that forcing the boss to give them more pay for fewer hours is in their interests? Usually yes.
The fact that organised violence is needed to prevent scabbing suggests that the answer is "only the workers who are correct to think this do so".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
That's the definition of victory. America is at "pre-war status quo,"
I'd call that a draw, regardless of what happened to the other guy. I don't think the United States of America is in the type of zero-sum competition with Iran where destroying Iran's stuff is per se a victory, particularly given that China exists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
I think Claude is wrong and both polling aggregators like Nate Silver and betting/prediction markets have consistently outperformed elite pundits at election prediction.
These midterms will be a good test - both polls and prediction markets are predicting a landslide, while the pundit consensus is that the Democrats are narrow favourites to win the House and have no chance in the Senate.
Random conservatives on the internet, of whom we have a great many here, are equivalent to a rock with "The polls are rigged, the GOP will win easily." Such a rock would have called two of the last three Presidential elections correctly (but zero of the last three mid-terms), but I don't think that is good evidence that the writing on the rock is causally connected to election results. The rock probably beats elite pundits, but so do tossed coins, psychic octopuses, the hemline rule, astrology and technical analysis.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
As far as I can see the post above doesn't state Iran is winning, only that USA is not winning.
This is the critical point. A drawn war is a bad result for both sides. (The famous example is the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, because Kissinger said "It's a pity both sides can't lose", but the war was indecisive so both sides kind of did).
If this was a Paradox game, the warscore would be something like 20% in favour of the US with no visible path to 100% before the "Vassal levies raised too long" warning was joined by a "There are dangerous factions" warning.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
Iran is a defeated power with no ability to contest the Gulf let alone build nuclear weapons: that is simply not the status quo.
Before the war broke out, if we had predicted the above,
On 1st January 2026, the United States operated a naval base in Bahrain. As long as they remain unable to do so, the Gulf is contested.
On 1st January 2026, the public position of the government of the United States was that the Iran no longer had a functioning nuclear programme - Trump claimed to have destroyed it in 2025. Before Trump started escalating against Iran back in his first term, the agreed position of Iran, the United States, Russia and China was that Iran would not enrich uranium beyond reactor grade, with a verification process in place. I think a non-nuclear-for-now Iran is entirely consistent with status quo ante for various values of status quo ante.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. America has not lost. America has not won. Iran has not lost. Iran has not won. This is what a draw looks like. It is the nature of a drawn war that under all likely scenarios for a negotiated peace before the midterms, both America and Iran are worse off than they would be if they had not fought. This is not a tabletop wargame where you can work out who "won" an indecisive battle by counting up the point values of the destroyed units.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
I think "raping the defeated enemy's women is despicable, even if it is a normal incident of war" is a specifically Christian thing. The Iliad treats the practice as unobjectionable - the driving conflict is over whether the man who captured the girl gets her or his commanding officer does. Islam explicitly condones it, at least according to the simple, obvious reading of the Quran and hadith.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Swedish law makes the distinction between "rape" (defined the way you would expect Swedish feminists to define rape) where the normal sentence on conviction is <5 years, and "assault rape" (defined sensibly) where the normal sentence is 10 years or more.
I'd prefer not to. Look up "math pets" if you must.
Seriously, Eliezer is one of the main people responsible for making ubiquitous normie-unfriendly sexuality a core value of the "rationalist" community, and thus indirectly of parts of "effective altruism" and "AI safety". In British English, "naughty boy" can refer either to a boy who is disobedient to adult authority figures (like Brian) or to a grown man caught in an act of sexual immorality (like Yud). I don't know if this is idiomatic in American English.
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