MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
Even Euro Med Monitor don't suggest that they were trained rape dogs though. That part does appear to come from a small number of former detainees who Kristof quotes uncritically.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
Which he is. LKYism is government by and for Elite Human Capital, with mercenary Gurkha riot police to manage the working class. Whereas General Park in South Korea (which went from third world to first around the same time using a different set of harsh-but-effective methods) was much more friendly to traditional plutocrats.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
That's "Hugo-nominated science fiction author Chuck Tingle" to you, Sir. "Pounded in the Butt by Jewish Space Dogs" would presumably be more entertaining than the NYT article, and, at least as regards the doggy bits, about as accurate.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
10hr ago
I don’t think this is true. Being raped with a carrot is different to being raped by a dog. The latter is infinitely more degrading - it’s being sexually dominated by a far lesser species.
I agree that dogs are worse, which is presumably why Kristof wanted to keep the dogs in the story, but I don't think fine details matter once you cross the moral event horizon.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
11hr ago
So edgy it's banned in the United Kingdom!
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
11hr ago
It is a very broad pattern, with atrocity exaggeration being the most shocking example. Once you have established that your enemies are bad people who deserve harsh punishment, it feels like bearing false witness against them is okay.
In particular, it is why the meaning of words with negative affect like "fascist" or "paedophile" tend to expand over time - to defend the original meanings involves saying "this bad person did bad things, but not this particular bad thing", which is party-pooping when your conversation partners just want to clown on the outgroup.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
11hr ago
We are now in the timeline where the journalistic integrity of the New York Times rests upon whether or not it is physically possible to train a dog to anally rape a human.
I think the reason why what is obviously a piece of reported journalism appears in the "Opinion" section is that the NYT isn't willing to stake its integrity on the existence of trained rape dogs, and the rules of traditional journalism say that blame for factual inaccuracies in opinion pieces lies with the named author and not the newspaper.
If, in fact, such a thing were impossible, then it would prove without doubt that the paper of record recklessly printed unverified falsehoods.
Technically, it didn't. Kristof is careful to distinguish between cases where he has corroborating evidence, and cases where he is recounting uncorroborated allegations from former detainees. If the detainee did accuse the Israelis of using rape dogs (which I assume he did) then the NYT has printed the true statement "He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him." The world would be a better place if journalists didn't act as stenographers for lying sources, but the current rules of journalistic ethics unfortunately say that it is okay as long as you are clear that you are attributing the lies to the source.
So we have another example of where the logic of bounded distrust applies - the NYT has (almost certainly) reprinted a false claim while staying clearly on the right side of the rules of traditional journalism. This is not going to embarrass them with anyone who hasn't already bozo-binned them.
That said, Why?. The NYT and Kristof don't need the dogs to make their point. "Abu Ghraib-style atrocities against Palestinian detainees are ubiquitous in Israeli prisons and even in the rare cases where there is hard evidence the Netanyahu government proudly refuses to prosecute" is a story they do stand up. The only people who think there is an important moral distinction between raping someone with a carrot or a truncheon and raping them with a dog are PETA, and it might be possible to convince them that the dog enthusiastically consented. A high-reporting-effort piece of long-form journalism about serious atrocities, with corroborating evidence that most of the allegations, was relegated to the Opinion section, and then subject to deserved ridicule, because of a throwaway allegation below the fold that was added for meme value despite the implausibility. An editor should have pointed this out, and Kristof should have made the change and thanked them for saving him from embarrassment.
Also, why did Kristof's editor not click the links? There are five links which are inserted with a claim that they corroborate the trained rape dog allegation, but the two that work in the UK don't - they are links to other articles which say that dogs were used (as happened at Abu Ghraib - it is the most obvious thing an evilmaxxing jailer would do to humiliate a Muslim detainee) as part of the sexual humiliation of naked prisoners, but not that the dogs penetrated anyone.
My opinion of the NYT is not revised downwards because they went to the dogs a long time ago and everyone knows it. Kristof and the IDF both had a reputation to lose - one is shamed by the true allegations, the other by the false ones.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
13hr ago
If we are doing constitutional history (as the originalist movement says we should be) this is the key point. The people who wrote the Constitution in 1789 didn't think it needed a Bill of Rights at all because the Constitution didn't grant the federal government the kinds of power that a Bill of Rights was needed to restrict, and the people who ratified the Constitution and Bill of Rights (which they added because they quite properly didn't trust the feds on that point) definitely didn't want the Bill of Rights to be enforceable against the States.
Some of the rights in the Bill of Rights are rights the framers considered fundamental, so as well as putting them in the BoR they also wrote them into their state constitutions. Free speech and criminal juries are the classic examples*. But some of the BoR is about federalism, not fundamental rights. In particular, the Establishment clause was pure federalism (most states had state-level established religions in 1789, although not for long afterwards) and the 2nd amendment was mostly federalism (most states had some kind of RKBA in their state constitutions, but nothing as broad as the right protected against the feds by the 2nd amendment - the framers wanted the states to have the right to regulate their own militias).
The fundamental rights protected by the Bill of Rights should have become enforceable against the States under the Privileges and Immunities clause of the 14th amendment (turned into an inkblot by the Gilded Age SCOTUS in the Slaughterhouse cases) and actually did under civil rights era substantive due process doctrine.
A muscular court would roll it back and return most speech legislation to the states, but it is what it is for now.
That would be dubiously faithful to the Constitutional text given that the 14th amendment exists in a way it didn't at the founding. It would also be lousy policy given the availability of forum-shopped strategic lawsuits against online speech. But the weak version of this claim is correct - a serious originalist Court would need to think about how to mesh the founding-era understanding of the Bill or Rights as a backstop to federalism as much as to fundamental rights with the 14th amendment requirement to protect citizens' rights against overweening state government, and the only justice who has even tried to do that is Thomas in his Establishment clause dissents. The fact that the substantive due process approach to incorporation that the Court had to adopt in order to avoid publicly calling out Slaughterhouse as a Dredd Scott tier mistake is intellectually incoherent doesn't help.
* SCOTUS has never enforced the 7th amendment requirement for civil juries against the states - I'm not sure how this relates to founding-era practice.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Hillary was the strong horse. She ran an extremely close primary in 2008 against Obama,
And then she wasn't the strong horse any more. Strong horses don't lose to 1st-term senators. Hilary should have won the 2008 primary according to the establishment-left and MSM conventional wisdom. It was her first big electoral test - she ended up not facing a serious opponent in the NY senate election after Giuliani pulled out due to a cancer scare. She failed it. And the main reason was fairly obvious as well - she was the public face of the centre-left faction that supported the Iraq debacle (for which she never really repented - this was a key line taken against her by both Bernie and Trump in 2016). Anyone who updated on the 2008 primary knew that Hilary was less electable than the MSM insisted she was. I was around at the time and I remember the difference in tone between the two - the MSM glazing of Obama was (among other things) about him being a once-in-a-generation political talent who could connect with the American people/forge a new centre-left coalition/reconcile black and white Americans. The MSM glazing of Clinton in 2015-6 was about her CV, about how she deserved to win because she was a woman, and about how good a President she would be because of various personal qualities that were not visible to voters. Even Clinton's supporters couldn't say she was unusually popular with a straight face.
Nobody expected Trump to win.
I will give you that - he was an underdog up to and including the eve of poll.
You had to be extremely weird to have considered it.
Trump beating Clinton in the general was a very obvious and visible possibility once he had the nomination. The pundit class refused to consider it, but opinion polls always showed Clinton as a beatable front-runner. Nate Silver had her around an 80-20 favourite for most of the campaign, and about 70-30 on the eve of poll. Hilary's poll lead in 2016 was never as big as Obama's (either time) or Biden's in 2020.
Trump as Republican nominee was obviously possible after New Hampshire, and the most likely outcome after the March 1st SEC primary.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Most Asian countries (including Australia) succeeded pre-omicron with broadly the same set of tactics, which did not include nationwide lockdowns.
The key tactics were:
- Strict border quarantine
- Effective contact tracing, including both COVID-tracking apps on smartphones and calls by human contact tracers
- Enforced, compensated quarantine of identified high-risk contacts
- Temporary, local lockdowns when case counts get high enough to overwhelm the local contact-tracing infrastructure
- Targetted restrictions on the most risky activities (basically large indoor gatherings) - initially bans, but requiring a same-day negative test once cheap lateral flow tests were broadly available.
The big mistake most western countries made was not doing contact tracing - the UK (and, as I understand it, most other western countries) had a smartphone-tracker app which would tell you when to voluntarily self-isolate. In the UK the app generated too many false positives that could be disconfirmed by manual follow-up, but instead led to people simply ignoring requests to self-isolate. The US got worse results than other western countries because they made additional mistakes, like keeping schools closed longer than necessary and botching the rollout of LFTs.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I have occasionally called out Singapore as proof-of-concept that you could do totalitarianism with a neoliberal aesthetic (in the way that Nazism is totalitarianism with a right-wing nationalist aesthetic and Soviet communism is totalitarianism with a socialist aesthetic).
The amount of Singaporean life that is controlled by the state is much higher than the western right-wingers who stan the place for the strong law enforcement and lack of redistribution would accept. As well as things like chewing gum bans, there is:
- Pervasive state ownership of strategic stakes in large for-profit companies
- 37% of your salary goes into a forced savings scheme where it is managed by a state-owned asset manager and can only be spent on state-approved purposes.
- Pervasive public housing with mandatory race-mixing
- Pervasive media censorship
- A peacetime military draft, also with mandatory race-mixing. As part of their ten-year reserve obligation, 30-something Singaporean men can be punished for failing to maintain a BMI below 27.
If we accept the definition of totalitarianism as "nothing outside/against the state" and the existence a sliding scale from liberal pluralism to totalitarianism, I would say that Singapore is the second most totalitarian rich country after Saudi.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
one-and-done software
What is the "one-and-done" software of which you speak? Requirements change over time, those changes need to be understood and converted into code. Most of the work in CRUD-tier software development (including in-house) is understanding the requirements, and so will most of the inference be when the work is done by AI.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
In 2024 the Republican party increased its performance virtually everywhere in America outside Atlanta and Utah. It's been the subject of some very famous maps
That doesn't mean that the Republican party is building a new coalition that makes it competitive everywhere. It means that the swing was more uniform than is historically normal - in other words that the two coalitions look roughly the same in 2020 and 2024 but with Harris doing worse with swing voters than Biden. If part of your raison d'etre as a movement is mouth-foaming hatred of the kind of society represented by the "Gen Z boss and a mini" video, you don't want to be competitive in the parts of the country where those kinds of people live, any more than the Democrats want to be competitive in redneck country.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
It was only in hindsight that everyone declared Hillary a weak candidate. In 2015 everyone in America knew that Hillary was probably the next president.
Everyone in America in 2015 knew that Hillary would be the Democratic candidate because the Clinton machine had stitched up the primary. I don't think Republicans went into the 2016 primary cycle expecting to lose the general - they had a crowded field of superficially-strong candidates and believed (correctly) that Hillary was unpopular with the median voter. The median voter obviously knew this, the Bernie campaign knew it, and the minority of pundits who actually paid attention to public opinion knew it, but couldn't say it without being called sexist by the pro-establishment left peanut gallery.
Hillary then struggled in an uncontested primary, to the point where she ended up shoring up her position by burning the centre-left commons by attacking Bernie from the left on idpol issues (hence the "BernieBro" slur). Apart from the MSM, the main source of left-wing commentary on US politics I was consuming at the time was Crooked Timber which had multiple posts asking the questions "Do Clinton's problems in the primary predict trouble in the general?" and "Just how many voters are there whose top two preferences would be (1) Bernie (2) Trump?"
Counter @Opt-out below, Hillary's defenders repeatedly said that she was the "most qualified candidate" in decades, not that she was the strongest. They knew they were talking about her CV and not her popularity with the voters.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I can't speak for wealthy Virginians explicitly (although Albion's Seed logic suggests they are similar), but traditional elites in the UK have always favoured well-behaved foreigners over our native working class*. Seeing the story hundreds of times just confirms the obvious moral and intellectual superiority of the kind of immigrant who sends their kids to UVA over West Virginian slaughterhouse workers.
* Traditional English left-populism, now defunct, said that this is because the traditional elite were Norman settler-colonialists for whom the native working class were foreigners.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Omicron was more infectious (and less deadly) than wild type/alpha/delta. China had a set of effective controls that could maintain zero COVID with the earlier strains, but failed once omicron reached them. The city-wide lockdowns were trying to suppress omicron by doing the same shit harder, whereas in the West even the zero COVID crowd gave up at that point and pretty much every country except China and New Zealand (which was sufficiently remote that they could contain even omicron at the border) let omicron rip. (It helped that we had a vaccine that mostly worked and the Chinese didn't).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I don't, because that isn't what happened. Certainly, we shouldn't have closed down schools;
I'm not sure when it should have been clear to the authorities that prepubescent children were very low risk, not only for serious illness but also for transmission. By the start of the new school year in autumn 2020, and probably earlier, it was obvious to intelligent onlookers that you could have reopened schools up to age ~14 with negligible additional transmission (and of course high schools should have reopened once the vaccine was available to teachers and pupils who wanted it). But my memory of the public conversation at the time was that people were incapable of grokking that virus spread is based on physiology and that teens are physiological adults, not 'children'. The logic of "15-year-olds can spread the virus (which they could, even if they were not going to get life-threatening symptoms), so 'children' can spread the virus, so we need to lock down 7-year-olds" was irrefutable in both policy-world and normie-world.
The US (though not other countries) did a particularly bizarre thing where many states kept the schools closed long after entertainment venues and suchlike had reopened. Education Realist had some excellent posts on the politics of this - the reason is that it wasn't establishment COVID panicans keeping the schools closed, it was a coalition between the teachers' unions and every parent demographic that didn't trust the government apart from the red tribe COVID minimizers.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Australia is federal and used targetted lockdowns and external and internal border controls to (broadly successfully) maintain zero COVID in unaffected areas - my understanding is that @sarker's comments would be permissible exaggeration in the case of Melbourne but false as applied to almost anywhere else in Australia.
@OliveTapenade - where in Australia were you?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
I don't think the Wife of Bath or the Merry Wives idolise adultery - in so far as Merry Wives of Windsor has a villain, it is Falstaff and he gets his comeuppance in the finale. The point I am making is that they only make sense in a society where middle-class men couldn't lock up their wives the way middle-class Arabs do. Falstaff seducing another man's wife isn't good, but it is possible and Page and Ford have to worry about it, and ultimately given the nature of the society Shakespeare was living in and writing about, they have to rely on their wives' virtue to prevent it.
Early Modern cisHajnal Europe was much closer to your standard of "rather strict about policing women" than post-sexual revolution societies (but everyone agrees those are only able to exist because we have contraceptive tech that the Merry Wives didn't). But by the standards of pre-contraception societies, it was among the loosest.
The evidence of whether the actual nonpaternity rate has increased as a result of the sexual revolution is thin. There are a number of studies estimating Western nonpaternity rates over centuries by linking Y chromosomes to surnames - they all have small samples and large confidence bounds, but they converge on a range of 1-1.5%. Because of the methodology, this counts undocumented adoptions, including informal adoptions by stepfathers*, as nonpaternity but doesn't count cases where one male-line blood relative cucks another. See also this article about a Dutch research group that have reached the same conclusions more recently with a larger sample size and the added advantage of being able to cross-check against birth records rather than relying on surnames. They also cross-checked against a mitochondrial-DNA based estimate of nonmaternity (which you can't do with surnames), and discovered that nonmaternity is, as expected, vanishingly rare. The article says that the nonpaternity rate increased significantly in the 19th century (i.e. long before the sexual revolution) due to urbanisation - they say roughly 6% but don't give the error bars on the subsample.
The really hard part is estimating nonpaternity in the here and now. The taboo against unnecessary paternity tests means that the headline rate of nonpaternity from paternity testing (well north of 10%) is meaningless - it is an intentionally biased sample. To measure nonpaternity rates in cases where there isn't enough pre-existing suspicion for a DNA test to be ordered you need to get permission to test (anonymised, but paired) samples of father-child DNA taken for other reasons, like tracing genetic diseases. As far as I can see from the limited number of papers where people have got permission to do that, you get a nonpaternity rate of about 3% for the population as a whole, and 1.5-2% if you restrict the sample to unsuspicious cases. Which would mean that the sexual revolution reduced nonpaternity (presumably because cheaters use contraception) relative to the industrial-age urban baseline.
* I am aware that the manosphere considers this "pre-cucking", but it doesn't qualify under the conventional definition.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
The revealed preference of Swifties and Arianators implies that miniskirts etc. can be a status performance for other women more than a sexual display for men.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Which is a specific defining feature of all successful civilizations until very recently.
Where "very recently" means the establishment of cisHajnal Europe as a distinct "western" civilisation around 1000AD, not the sexual revolution in the 20th century. Middle-class women having (and needing, to do their share of the work of the society) enough freedom to cheat on their husbands was enough of a thing in pre-modern society that Chaucer and Shakespeare both wrote about it (although it is probably significant that neither the Wife of Bath nor the Merry Wives of Windsor actually do the deed)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Democratic western society has a taboo about talking about unearned wealth, at least at the upper-middle-class level. It developed because inherited wealth is awkward in a nominally-classless society, but the taboo also covers talking about wealth from divorce settlements.
A man living off a divorce settlement is just unexplainedly rich. To ask whether it is an inheritance, a divorce settlement, or crypto profits is to breach the taboo.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
People are willing (though less willing than they used to be) to pay a premium for mediocre chain-restaurant food served in a full-service setting compared to mediocre chain-restaurant food served in a fast-casual setting. At the high end there are a number of elite power-dining restaurants where the food, while good, is not worth the money and the name on the door is a status symbol. I think this is inconsistent with taste being as much as 90% of what normal people care about.
Gove's reforms in England, as well as the recent improvements to reading education in Mississippi and other southern red states copying them suggest that it is less difficult than you would expect.
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