MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
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User ID: 1678
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
The convergence of large social media platforms on similar content moderation rules is less due to shared ideological capture than a combination of legal, financial, and social pressures all pointing in a similar direction.
But these "social pressures", aren't they also a form of ideological capture among the institutions that exert said pressure on social media platforms? I don't have the data on me, but I've seen plenty of evidence that democratic voters form an absolute majority among key institutions (top university faculty, judiciary, media, big tech, federal govt employees etc).
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Of all the major religions they are the only one that doesn’t recruit members
Hinduism? It doesn't strike me as a religion that actively seeks new members, though it is open to converts (just like Judaism). Of course, these converts may or may not always be treated as equal in practice. But that's another topic.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Seems to gel with my impression that a lot of higher-ups in "aid organisations" are complete sociopaths. I recall a top boss in the Red Cross who systematically groomed and later raped refugees. Doing so was easy because they didn't know the language, didn't know people in their new country and many of them were single and teenagers.
The same pattern was found in Haiti. This isn't to say that aid work is inherently suspect. Just that it often provides a perfect cover for sociopaths to exploit victims who rarely can defend themselves. This Ballard character is just the latest example.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Interesting, thanks. I didn't think about it that way but you're probably onto something.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
This is probably also another indication that Westerners - i.e. white people - appear to have higher openness to new experiences. I suspect it may be correlated with greater innovative capacities, which may explain why North-East Asia is not richer than the West despite having higher IQ on average. People who are less likely to try something new are also less likely to invent something new.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Heck, I wonder how many pro gaming champions might have been Elon - or a Fields Medalist - with a slightly different set of priorities.
I am not sure about that. I suspect there are intangible character traits that are probably hardwired to become as driven as someone like Elon. He often comes across as monomaniacal in his world view. That's an extreme type of personality that most people are not comfortable with, let alone can even begin to transform themselves into.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
The highest IQ people in the world are probably disproportionately clustered at top math departments in first-class universities around the world. Most of them are likely not even millionaires. I think raw intellectual ability is important, obviously, but you need a much wider set of talents to be truly astonishingly successful and clearly Elon has them.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
How much of that was organic and how much was driven by elites, particularly in the media? My impression is that the latter had a non-trivial part in the unrest.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Vivek Ramaswamy has written an article on his foreign policy doctrine, focusing on China.
He is squarely taking aim at the "neocons and liberal internationalists", in other words the two main constituents of what Obama referred to as "the Blob" dominating foreign policy in D.C. He is predictably being called an isolationist and WaPo columnists are freaking out.
WaPo columnists themselves are not relevant but they are often mouthpieces for more powerful interests. Trump was hated for many things but one underappreciated aspect of why the Blob hated him was his instinct not to start new wars. In fact, he is one of the few presidents in recent memory who did not start a new war and he tried to get out of Syria - twice - but was undermined by his own bureaucracy.
Vivek is a much smarter guy than Trump, so I wonder if the Blob would be able to run circles around him the way they did around Trump. I doubt it and I suspect they doubt it too, which is why I think a campaign to destroy Vivek is likely to ramp up before too long. Trump couldn't be controlled outright but at least he could be misled.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Hard to feel sympathy for a man forcing himself on a woman who did not consent being kissed. What's shameful here is that it took FIFA externally intervening to get him suspended, as the Spanish federation clearly failed to do so before they did.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
The most open pro-war critics of Putin/Shoigu (well, to the extent that Prigozhin was actually pro-war, which is not completely certain) are vanishing from the Russian political landscape. The anti-war ones already either fled or are keeping silent.
There's a lesson here: never be loyal to a regime that doesn't return the favor. It's ironic that patriots often face harsher crackdowns in Russia under Putin than even leftists now. Also says a lot about the sclerotic state of Russia. The elite doesn't even seem to care about winning so much as about self-preservation.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
God isn't real, of course, and I doubt Vivek thinks so either. Hinduism is remarkably tolerant of atheism.
As a sidenote, I've been impressed by him. I think his willingness to be ruthlessly realistic about limits to America's commitments to Taiwan is a breath of fresh air. Reminds me of 2016 Trump. I still think Ye Olde Orange Man is a clear favorite, but if he gets barred from running due to legal issues, I think Vivek is a top contender. I wouldn't call him very charismatic, but he at least isn't robotic like DeSantis and unlike DeSantis, his campaign feels less controlled by donors and GOPe activists.
I think Trump's secret was that he intuitively understood that GOP conventional wisdom isn't actually that popular among the grassroots and so breaking with it hardly carries punishment with the voters - quite the contrary, in fact. If Vivek grasps the same fundamental truth then he has a very good shot.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
I know of several public examples who dated women from the Caucasus. At least in (Northern) Europe such people are not considered white by the far-right and even implicitly by the mainstream right. Richard Spencer's ex-wife is Georgian if memory serves and she looks the part.
There's also the British far-right streamer "The Ayatollah" who appropriately married an Iranian girl. And Jazzhand McFeels of the neo-Nazi TRS/NJP ecosystem married an Armenian girl. So apparently MENA is not off limits, alongside Asians.
I suspect blacks might be a bridge too far, but I wouldn't be surprised if people would overlook a black mistress. There's a lot of half-joking talk about "bleaching" non-white women in circles like this.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Fallout of the Hanania doxxing. The University of Austin (not to be confused with the public university), which billed itself as a haven of free speech, has now uninvited Hanania after the latest revelations.
I think this says a lot about the "anti-woke right". It's basically just warmed over liberalism from 20 years ago. If you're not willing to cross the rubicon and talk frankly about topics like race and crime, then what's the point of your "heterodox" university anyway? This is why the right keeps losing: it's full of spineless cowards.
People make fun of SJWs but at least they have the courage of their convictions.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
It certainly doesn’t make Hanania a ‘progressive’.
Never claimed Hanania is a progressive. Surely you can do better than arguing against strawmen?
I don’t think he did it as a ‘dash for respectability’, I think he did it because he has a genuine respect for power
Same, same. Respectability is defined by those who have power and not by those who don't.
Also, he seems pretty happy throwing people under busses himself.
This might be what does him in. He's been spending the better part of the recent past praising the liberal establishment and throwing people on the dissident right to the meatgrinder, even condemning them for racism.
In hindsight, it seems obvious he made a dash for respectability by opportunistically burning past bridges. Well, seen in that light, you could say this is karma in a sense. Who will now defend him after he did so much to alienate and even actively disparage those who used to read him?
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Yes, but who is leading who is the question here. The oft-repeated remark that conservatives are just liberals of 20 years ago didn't spring up from nowhere.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Linking your real email adress to accounts commenting on outright white nationalist websites seems like an incredibly low IQ thing to do, and all the more weird for someone as obsessed with IQ as Hanania.
In recent years, he's been explicitly condemning the HBD right, even going on Emil Kirkegaard's blog to trash it to his face. I suspect Hanania probably understood that wignat politics was a dead end, but at the same time he couldn't pretend that HBD was false. So he tried to triangulate into a "moderate centrist" position, but apparently the ruling elite and its attack dogs are never far behind.
This will be an important test for the US right. The history of these doxxing events has shown that the right is all too happy to throw people under the bus for offending liberal sensibilities on issues like race. We'll see if this time is different.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Since talent is partially heritable, if we reward people based on their abilities then people who have been unlucky in the genetic lottery will be left worse off. [...] He seems to have the opinion that it is unjust for luck to play a significant role.
I've often pointed out to HBD promoters who mistakenly assume that if their theories become mainstream then somehow socialism would be less palatable to the wider public. If anything, we would probably see the opposite happening. This is not an argument against HBD, it's just a caution to anyone who believes left-wing thinking would decline.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Putting aside the practicalities of such a plan, how many whites even want one? I suspect the vast majority of whites are in the same category as me: we don't like racism against whites being normalised in the media and in the general culture but we still prefer to live in societies that are classically liberal, with strong rights given to individuals above "collective identities" as the foundation.
It seems to me that most white nationalists simply live in a false, idealised world where all problems would dissipate if there was racial homogeneity. Europe's history prior to WWII was full of internecine warfare and petty tribalism. There is no reason such a "white state" wouldn't eventually fall prey to the same kinds of internal forces even if it became a big success on its own terms (high fertility, strong economy, xenophobic immigration policies).
Ethnogenesis is a constant historical process. "White" identity itself is mostly an answer to racial diversity. In the absence of it, other forms of separatism could well form. What was Southern identity during the 1800s in America? You don't even need a separate language or ethnicity for secessionism! Why do these white nationalists believe that their fantasy state would be any different?
And this all ignores that "white identity" is mostly an overseas Anglosphere thing. In France, Germany or Finland the natives don't perceive themselves as white but rather simply according to ethnicity. So even talking of a broader Western whiteness is a stretch to me.
I think what's really going on here is that the founding Anglos and the later European ethnicities who went to the US, Canada and Australia became victims of their own success in a way. They succeeded far more than anyone could have possibly imagined. They've built the greatest societies on Earth and with English being the lingua franca of ambitious third world elites, it was simply never possible to remain closed. Given that the US can pick the best and the brightest out of 8 billion people, its domestic elites would never choose any other system. They'd be idiots to do so, as being the world's primary human capital magnet accrues compounding advantages over time that are simply irresistible and possibly even insurmountable, as we see now with China's stagnation.
I find these separatist fantasies to be utterly devoid of any contact with reality.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
As for why so many modern white identitarians are pro-Confederacy, I think a large part of that is simply a founder effect: major figures in the racial right in the 90’s and 00’s such as Jared Taylor, Sam Dickson, and Sam Francis, were all Southerners with ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, and for them the issue was acutely personal.
This is a great point which I haven't thought about.
There is also certainly an element of Owning The Libs, associating the Yankee occupying government, which brought (partial) racial integration to the South with the barrel of a gun during Reconstruction, with the later forcible imposition of the Civil Rights Regime a century later, a process which is frankly still ongoing and has expanded to the entire country and even arguably the entire American Empire.
This is actually an area where I feel some sympathy towards Dixie, but they never understand that they created the problem in the first place. So it is hard to sustain it. Besides, they often make the North more liberal than it really was. Lincoln himself wanted to deport all the blacks for much of his life. The hardest fight against desegregation of public schools didn't happen in the South: it was in Boston.
True, but that measurement still doesn't adjust for working hours. Americans work far longer hours than e.g. Germans, Danes, Dutch etc. Once you adjust for both PPP and working hours, the distance between Germanic Europe and America isn't nearly as radical as is often claimed. Also worth noting that Europeans are taxed at higher rates, hence lower disposable income but this means higher education is largely free from out of pocket expenses, healthcare far cheaper etc. It can be debated whether this is ultimately a better social choice, but certainly by some outcomes (e.g. life expectancy) it isn't clear that the US has the better system.
It's different for Southern Europe (stagnation for 20+ years) and EU Eastern Europe (spent half a century behind imposed communism).
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
There are big parts of the Congo that are a shithole but other parts are in fact doing well, GDP growth in 2022 was like 9% In some ways, the DRC might well have a brighter future than South Africa.
TIL: there are two Congos. And the richest one has become radically poorer over the past decade whereas the bottom-ranked one is still so far behind that Pakistan, of all countries, is thrice as rich.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=CG-CD
So you'll excuse my cynicism over your valiant attempts to puff the Congo(s), of all places.
P.S. I wouldn't look at growth rates without looking at the currency movements (3 year average). Turkey is a good example of this. Posting very high growth rates did exactly nothing because the lira has continuously tanked. D.S.
The Aryan Invasion Theory is to Indians what HBD is to Western liberal-leftists. No matter how much data and evidence is served up, many simply refuse to accept the facts, period. Incidentally, I've found Hindu nationalists to be the most strident in their opposition, which goes to show that science denial isn't a left-wing problem alone.
It's mildly amusing to me that the genetic evidence simply piles up ever greater in the West whereas the debate in India becomes ever more disconnected from reality the more the Hindu nationalists start to dominate discourse. Khan's own attempts at watering it down could perhaps be because a significant fraction of his audience and social circle are Indians. It's simply a touchy topic and perhaps he is trying to triangulate. I agree with you that his interpretation is iffy at best.
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