MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
No bio...
User ID: 1678
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
He used to be a white nationalist on Stormfront before flipping to the other extreme and attacking the reputations and destroying the careers of academics by writing defamatory articles under multiple pseudonyms.
LOL, can't make this stuff up. Feel like there's good material for a low-budget indie comedy somewhere in this origin story. Although, weren't the Nazis against IQ? I recall reading it somewhere. So perhaps the jump isn't as extreme as we might think...
He was later banned from RationalWiki for, among other things, writing articles about and doxxing other editors. Although he was easily able to ban evade and continued to use RationalWiki to attack academics.
This overall situation has created a climate of fear among intelligence researchers. Two prominent and tenured academics, who had not previously been attacked by Smith, initially offered to write this article; both later reneged out of concern over what Smith might do to their careers in retaliation.
The sad part is that he seems quite intelligent too. Very determined and resourceful for just one guy. Imagine if he spent all that energy to something actually useful instead of being a menacing supertroll.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Stuff like this is why I'm longterm bullish on platforms like Substack. People ultimately don't care about 538 as an institution. They mostly just cared about Nate Silver's takes. I suspect this is true across many other media orgs. There's typically a few voices who actually matter and the rest are background noise. Paying people directly for their insights is ultimately a better model than subsidising a whole team indirectly, whom you are mostly not interested in.
It's a bit like why cable started to get a lot less interesting to people.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Trying to make a "national IQ" for a fairly homogeneous population like Han Chinese or ethnic Germans makes sense. You get a pretty even distribution.
But India is made up of thousands of separate castes, divided by millennia of endogamous marriage. That is why even if the India average is low-80s, you will have far more people at the high-end of the distribution than you'd expect from a clean bell curve, precisely because of this heterogeneity.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
There was this recent tempest-in-a-teacup when Sam Altman was speaking at a college in India, and a partner at Sequoia's Indian branch asked him if there was a viable route for an Indian ChatGPT competitor on a $10 million budget, friendlier to Indian material conditions. Altman correctly replied that there was no point even trying to compete with OpenAI with those resource constraints, and a lot of Indian nationalists added that to the chip on their shoulder, but he was right - the fact that the question was even asked is something of a testament to how absurd Indian expectations are regarding what research and development looks like, because of course you can't do anything like ChatGPT on a $10 million budget.
This is an example of Indian elites being more closely connected to Anglo-American elites than their own population and its needs. This is true across most domains, not just IT but also economics and even politics.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
There's a lot of hype surrounding India. The US clearly wants to boost the country to provide a Western-oriented alternative to China. No other country has the scale comparable to China and India's demographics are much better (26 million births compared to China's 10). The Indian diaspora is very successful in the US and largely pro-American and anti-China. So what's not to like here?
To India boosters like Noah Smith, there's pretty much nothing to be skeptical of. He sees the emergence of an Indo-US alliance in all but name as a necessity.
For this alignment to make sense, India must actually become a real alternative to China. Is this plausible?
First, India's economic structure is dominated by services and elite services at that (IT exports). Its manufacturing sector has been very weak. Modi tried to change this with his 2014 "Make in India" campaign. We've now gone almost a full decade since then and there's basically been zero movement on this issue. India boosters will claim that this is simply because decoupling never really got serious until now. But the problem with this line of argument is that the rhetoric is changing. Even Raytheon's CEO is claiming decoupling is impossible; the new watchword is "de-risking" which is a tacit admission that China's integration into the world's supply chains is far greater than the Former Soviet Union ever was, which is why the analogies to the Cold War are often misleading at best.
Second, a key part of China'a ascent was built on skilled, but cheap labour. Economists often overstate the importance of labour costs. What matters is productivity. Labour costs can increase as long as productivity increases faster: this is what drives long-term growth.
Nobody is denying that India has cheap labour, but is it skilled? Moving past the rarefied IT, pharma and finance sectors that dominate India's services, we find a much bleaker landscape.
50% of Indian kids are functionally illiterate. Female literacy has actually worsened over time. Though this is partly a function of the school system taking in far more kids than before. Yet Vietnam and Indonesia did the same yet did not notice such a fall. Finally, there's no improvement over the past decade.
We can argue over whether education matters much for simple manufacturing. Economists like the heterodox Ha-Joon Chang of South Korean descent has argued that it really doesn't. Perhaps this was true when SK, JP, TW and other East Asian "tigers" took off in the 1960s. Today, everything is far more digital, even relatively simple manufacturing. Workers need to read basic instructions and should at least be able to operate basic machinery, which in turn requires them to read and operate screens. Being unable to read a simple sentence immediately disqualified half the Indian workforce.
If India were to really become a fully fledged alternative to China, then it means that it would need to scale the value-added ladder the way China has. It can't just produce toys or textiles. It would have to create a fully industrial ecosystem covering the greatest sophistication. Simply put, does India has the human capital base to pull that off? The data seems to draw us to a stark conclusion: not really.
Poverty cannot be an explanation either. Vietnam had a similar per capita GDP to what India has now in the mid-2010s. Yet it did very well in international tests and it has continued to draw in a great number of manufacturing projects in a way that India has been unable to. Some of this may be related to government: Vietnam is a one-party dictatorship like China and can bulldoze through various projects of importance. But a more important explanation is simply that Vietnam has the same combination that China had a generation ago: skilled labour but at cheap rates.
In short, if American elites are now betting big on India supplanting China - or at least becoming a real viable alternative - for manufacturing then it is very likely that they will become disappointed. By the same logic, any talk of decoupling (or "de-risking") is likely to run into the hard wall that the alternatives are either too small (Vietnam) or not up to par (India).
On a sociological note, we should acknowledge that discussions on India are colored by their diaspora in the West, primarily in Anglo countries. This group are an incredibly elite selection, particularly in the US. They come from highly privileged homes with house maids and a cultural aversion to manual labour, and by extension manufacturing. It can hardly be surprising that India was ground zero for fantasies that developing countries can "leap frog" manufacturing into prosperity, despite there being virtually no examples of this in world history (barring petrostates, financial êntrepots like Singapore etc).
I've hoped to convince you of becoming more realistic about India's prospects, even if I support a move to diversify away from China for obvious geopolitical reasons. India's own potential can be hotly debated. Certainly their smart fraction is highly capable and we know that smart fractions are important for driving prosperity. The question before us is if India's much less capable "middle" will prevent it from rapid convergence once the easy gains from growth are gone. East Asia managed to educate the broad masses to fairly decent levels whereas India clearly has not. Should we really expect them to emulate East Asia given these sharp differences? As things stand, the West's current policy completely ignores this question.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
this huge and rapid drop in criminality would seem to me pretty difficult to explain through any framework where criminality is mostly a function of genetics.
Another argument is often the difference between Mexicans living in border towns between the US and Mexico. The same people, culture and genetics yet murder rates are often vastly different.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
The Polish government, despite pretending to be tough on immigration, is charging full steam ahead into the same direction as France. There's also talk of radically loosening visa rules for countries such as Nigeria, Pakistan etc. The logic is simple. It's an aging country with very low unemployment. The voters may not like it, but the business interests don't care and the government listens to the latter. The ruling party in Poland talks a big game about not letting in "illegals" or allowing "EU refugee quotas", but they are importing tons of third worlders legally for work and the pace is just increasing.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
In London, social housing occupied by Somalis sits next to $15m townhouses.
At first blush, this is an absurdity. Then I remember that race relations in the UK are different than in the US, with UK blacks ahead in life expectancy and nearly equal in earnings. I suspect this is largely a selection effect: a much greater share of blacks in the UK are elite immigrants from Africa compared to the US - though perhaps not Somalis.
One can imagine a situation where 60% of the population is still native in 20 years, but 50% or even 55% of fighting-age males are from those communities. At that point, the situation is extremely dicey. The military and police have recruited from diverse communities heavily, there’s no guarantee what side they’d be on in a serious civil conflict.
Guillaume Durocher, a thoughtful French nationalist on Twitter, believes that the most likely scenario in the medium-term is akin to Brasil rather than Lebanon or Yugoslavia. His reasoning is that this underclass has no real political aspirations, let alone organisational skills, and their aims are purely criminal and opportunistically short-termist in nature.
So France will resemble Brasil where a small elite hoard all the wealth and a sizable minority of middle-class whites sit just beneath them. Below those two rungs, crime levels and general dysfunction will proliferate, leading to gated communities etc. We could also see a lessening of France's social model with high taxes as elites will be unwilling to shoulder such a high burden. Given that elite migration will be a very real threat, France's institutions may well oblige.
I guess the only real counter-argument to his view is that race relations in Brasil seem to be more amiable. I know relatively little about either country, but my impression is that the resentment in France (perhaps in part due to the colonial legacy, and partly as a result of ethnic French arrogance) is much greater among the non-white groups. If this is true then your more pessimistic view could well win out.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
The ongoing French riots bring into sharp relief the fantasy that if we just don't talk about race or religion, the issue will disappear. To be clear, I still prefer the French approach because if you don't measure something you can't really do much about it. The main beneficiary of France suddenly going the US/UK route of meticulously collecting racial and religious statistics wouldn't be the far-right but rather the far-left. Racial and possibly religious quotas would soon follow with official state-sanctioned discrimination as the end result.
Yet the rioters clearly view themselves as apart from French society. Even genteel liberal journalists concede as much.
What are the long-term effects going to be? Perhaps I am cynical but I suspect nothing much. France had these kinds of riots in 2005 and they changed nothing.
I remembering reading a lot about Islam and immigration in the 2010-2012 time period, during which many UK conservative personalities were praising the French approach of "aggressive assimiliationism" as opposed to the supposedly feeble multiculturalist approach preferred by the UK. It seems to me that there's no functional difference. The UK had its own riots in 2011. One could plausibly make the case that the BLM riots in the US during 2014 and then 2020 fall under the same rubric.
Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak. The system isn't strong enough to overcome racial and religious differences completely but it's also much stronger than many right-wing doomers seem to think. After the kerfuffle everyone moves on. There's no reason to think it will be different this time.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Yup. Twitter is the "town square" of the internet - or at least it was until these latest disasters. It confers social capital that cannot be measured in a balance sheet to whoever controls it.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Interesting, thanks.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Only a minority of Americans carry student loan debt, so why not bail them out? It’s unfair that a minority of the population gets saddled with student loan debt, especially a minority that’s disproportionately women and BIPOC.
But what about the slave reparations bill? Why settle for disproportionately BIPOC when you can get 100% black? In the current American zeitgeist, blacks are at the top of diversity totem pole. Besides, do we really want to bail out a group (students with debt) which has privileged white women within it, not to mention white men? There's limited resources and limited political capital. The slave reparations bill benefits from being concentrated to a more coherent group which also happens to have social power, which in turn can be leveraged into political capital needed to move the needle.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
If genetic talent will out, as the study purports to show, then if your family is still in the mud they probably deserve it, right?
Alternatively, your riches are not because of hard work or dedication but simply because you won a random genetic lottery... so why do you deserve all these good things in life due to blind luck? It's a case that socialists can make just as well.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
I find it difficult to believe that student loans won't be forgiven eventually once enough boomers are dead
Only 13% of Americans have student debt whereas 87% don't. Obviously the number will be higher once you partial out minors, but we're still talking of a clear minority. In addition, most Americans with student loans have fairly moderate amounts of debt. So I am not sure if this group of debt-distressed individuals is large enough to warrant a bailout.
What about future trends? The papers are full of stories of falling college enrollment and a preference for majors with firmer financial pay-off prospects. So it strikes me as unlikely that past trends will increase as rapidly as they hitherto have.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Asians benefit from AA in areas such as public sector contracts where minority-owned business firms can get preference. But obviously the amount of Asians who can benefit from such largesse is far smaller than at admissions.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Seems eminently fair that people should not be bailed out for their poor life decisions. Hopefully market pressure will simply continue to reduce demand for fluff majors like sociology, gender studies, communication etc.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Breitbart should be shamed and cast out of the right wing media for this outrageous use of left-wing boogeymen to attack a solid rightist.
Breitbart was founded in Jerusalem by a cast of mostly Jewish individuals. There's even a photo of the founding group with Bibi Netanyahu from the early years. Of course they are going to police people on the right for antisemitism, just as Israeli-American Yoram Hazony tried to resuscitate Reaganism and pull the right away from blood-and-soil nationalism with his "national conservatism" rebrand.
There's a lot you can say about Jews but one thing you can't say is that they are idiots or politically uninterested. They are very good at policing both the right and the left (Corbyn) to weed out people who aren't seen to be in their favour. In the case of Corbyn, they were helped by the fact that he was also distrusted by the wider business and security elites in the UK.
It's funny reading Pedro's texts in the hit piece where he references Buchanan. If memory serves, Buchanan spoke about being purged by neo-con Jews which he served with under the Reagan admin. He noted that many never had a bad word to say about him during that time, but when he started to criticise the war plans against Iraq, suddenly they started to shout that he was a racist and various left-wing Jews picked it up in the media and ran with it. That's also how Sobran and others got purged.
I suspect this might be a reason why some on the right tend to view Jews as a unified bloc who work together across ideological lines whereas whites tend to actually put their ideology first and foremost rather than their ethnic interest. It's debatable which strategy is best.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Roberts' poison pill of allowing race to be discussed in personal essays and then allowing universities to take that into account mostly nullified this decision. As others have noted, this tactic has been used by universities in several states like California in previous years.
I would say this is a small and positive step, mostly for normative reasons, but in practical terms it's a whimper rather than a bang.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
The intellectual arguments come first. Everything else follows.
I used to think it was just a matter of reaching enough people, but I've now come to realise that evidence doesn't really matter for a great number people if it interferes with their ideology and/or personal interest.
The amount of people in the West who would be negatively affected if HBD became the dominant intellectual frame of reference is now massive. They have a clear personal stake at never allowing that to happen. Dispassionate scientific inquiry is in fact something very few are interested in. You can show them a thousand papers. It won't matter. They will only use it to indict you for heresy.
As an aside, I find Turchin's theories to be unconvincing. His "overproduction thesis" doesn't explain why the social unrest and "woke explosion" happened in the US during the 2010s but not in, say, Denmark or much of Europe.
I think his main problem is that he's a materialist, like most Marxist intellectuals are. The core issue driving social unrest in the US is race and secondly gender (particularly the trans issue). None of those things have any direct bearing with elites per se in a material sense, but rather about identity. Marxists are notoriously bad at understanding this distinction and frankly so are many right-wingers with their naïve (but admirable) colorblind ideology.
That said, on the trans issue, the right has a much better and clearer understanding of the underlying conflict which is why they are, for once, doing quite well in the culture war in this area. Marxist materialism is simply useless here.
Yeah, I think this is the weakest link of the revisionist claims. I actually do think Hitler wasn't hellbent on "conquering Europe from the getgo" as many Western historians will claim. Plus Poland had its own antisemitic government. Putin got into hot water for pointing out that Josef Beck, Poland's foreign minister, was closely co-operating with Nazi Germany in order to jointly deport a great number of Jews. Hitler attended a special funeral in honor of Poland's strongman leader Pilsudski's when he died.
There's an interesting article focusing on Poland from the point of view of an Palestinian-American, which details a lot of these things that many are unaware of.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-polands-anti-semites-helped-colonise-palestine
Obviously the author has his grievances, but he does stick to the facts. Poland was very enthusiastic in supporting Zionism as a way of getting rid of its Jewish population. It played a key role in training Zionist militias, in particular later Prime Minister Menachem Begin himself. So clearly the Poles weren't the angels we were taught and Nazi Germany was far more pragmatic than we are told in the lead-up to the war. This probably has some parallells to the current UA-RU war, as past UA extremism and intolerance is whitewashed by the Western press.
That said, Hitler's invasion is justified by revisionists on the same flimsy grounds that Russia's is now by its apologists. I am willing to believe that the Poles were mistreating Germans in the "Danzig corridoor", but this was the 1930s. Kristallnacht had just happened. Was Nazi Germany really the "dindu nuffin" that Unz and other revisionists would have us believe? The entire period in question is a stark reminder of how toxic nationalism taken to its fullest extent often is.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Wagner has no chance of doing anything. Russian MoD can easily crush them. Putin used Wagner to avoid mass mobilisation early on but this strategy has now backfired. He also likes playing all sides against each other to keep them on their toes. This includes his own generals.
Prigozhin simply didn't understand he was just a chess piece in a greater game, he thought he was an actual leader. He will learn very shortly who is the real boss. Ultimately he isn't a threat, but this entire situation was allowed to develop because of Putin's inability to call a war what it needs to be called: a war, rather than his SMO bullshit. He should never have allowed these militias to proliferate and should have called up a much bigger mobilisation drive to begin with. But that's water under the bridge. Wagner as a group is now a spent force in Russia. They could survive as mercs in MENA/Africa, going back to their original, smaller roots.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
The merging of right-wing populism with capitalism has usually not ended well in the West. It's instead in places like Denmark where the social democrats have embraced immigration restrictionism that such change has been lasting.
Sooner rather than later the white working class understands they're getting the short end of the stick economically and such a realisation will often make these marriages of convenience between mainstream right-wing parties and the populists shaky at best (Wilders' dalliance with Rutte in the Netherlands is a textbook example but there are many others).
Finland has the fortune that its left-wing parties have been less crazy than those in Sweden, so there may be a zeitgeist change even among them in due time.
I'd just add that I find it somewhat interesting that the Nordics, long a place considered hyperprogressive, is now one of the most restrictionist areas of Europe. Sweden was the final piece and Finland is the hammer to the nail. Of course, the Nordics are still very liberal on things like gender and LGBT. A very curious and non-intuitive mix is emerging.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
I suspect part of homosexual behaviour among men are simply power plays - speaking to your oblique prison rape reference. Is that necessarily an urge born of lust for someone's body... or the desire to degrade them in a show of social domination? The same argument could conceivably be made in terms of the "mentor-youth" relationships in the ancient world. Perhaps it was a way for older men to assert dominance over younger and unruly pupils, or for eager pupils to submit in totality to their masters. Disentangling sex from psychology isn't always straightforward.
Nevertheless, we have more permissive attitudes than ever towards homosexuals in the West and it doesn't appear that most men find it gratifying, given how the overwhelming majority still pursue and bed women. This makes me question claims that homosexuality was widespread in ancient Greece and Rome. Perhaps homosexuals have a tendency to wildly inflate the amount of men who have such inclinations, whether in the past or in the contemporary age.
I think this undersells a deeper structural shift seen in many domains of the US elite (media, tech, even academia). We're seeing a broad pullback from the excesses of the past.
Ultimately, the fact that US elites are overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning is a structural weakness for the US system because the population is much more evenly split. That's why conservatives broke with previous Reaganite dogma about never using the state for their own ideological means. Hence why nobody is now protesting Abbott or DeSantis for using raw state power to enforce ideological norms. Too many members of the "old" conservative establishment, such as David French, essentially became advocates for what can only be termed as "losing beautifully". It's okay if liberals keep winning because at least we're not being statists!
But it's not only the right that changed. I think liberal elites also understood what was happening and that they had to rein in their crazies. That's why the people who manage Biden told him not to stack the court, which enraged the progressive base. But if you're concerned about overall system stability, it was a smart move. If one side just keeps running over the other side, which is largely what happened during the 2010s (even under Trump) then at some point the losing side will simply disengage or even become actively hostile.
That's also why the media has been somewhat restrained in their treatment of the SCOTUS decision, lamenting weakly in what I see as crocodile tears. The right has gotten tougher and the liberals have gotten smarter and it has led us to this moment. If Darwin's maxim about the most adaptable species are those who are fittest to survive is also true of systems, then we must rate the US system highly.
More options
Context Copy link