Goodguy
6d ago
Societies and cultures that don't promote having kids cease to exist.
Not if they are very good at getting other people's kids to join.
Goodguy
6d ago
It is currently the top story in Google News when I look at it in browser incognito mode to prevent it from showing stories tailored for me (to the extent that is possible despite browser fingerprinting).
It is currently the top story in the New York Times' World section.
It is also currently the top story in the Washington Post's World section.
Goodguy
7d ago
Sure, they shouldn't be surprised by it. My point is just that an Iranian attack would not be some Pearl Harbor style surprise attack.
The US unilateral ceasefire is in my opinion meaningless since it seems clear to me that in reality the US reserves the right to bomb Iran whenever it chooses, and if it chooses to do so will just come up with some narrative about how it was justified despite the supposed ceasefire. At most the ceasefire just means that the US would wait a bit between spinning up the narrative and launching the actual attack, in order to make it look as if it had observed the ceasefire.
Goodguy
7d ago
Wait, why would Iran have to declare war for it to not be a perfidious surprise attack? The US government recently bombed Iran, so Iranian retaliation would not be a strike out of the blue.
I think what won't work is to nag or threaten people about it. Only three kinds of people care about fertility rates: people with children, politicians, and (in the West) some political thinkers largely of the highly online "save EVROPA" type.
People with children have already made their choice. It's people who have no children who need to be reached if fertility rates are to go up.
Politicians have tried to fix fertility rates and even in very authoritarian countries have failed.
The political thinkers who care about the issue are very small in number.
Goodguy
11d ago
Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob. People who speak confidently and get political tend to get a lot more attention than people who don't do those things, so generally speaking it seems to me that such people will come to be very over-represented in the average person's idea of what "the science" is saying.
Goodguy
11d ago
There is definitely some reason to think that Epstein was not just some "random rich lech", as @ABigGuy4U phrased it. However, here's what I do not understand about the "Epstein was doing blackmail for an intelligence agency" theory: if he was, why was his spycraft so poor? My understanding is that Ghislaine Maxwell would often approach random teenage girls in public and offer them money for supposed massages. Epstein and Maxwell would even get girls to go recruit other girls for them. If that is indeed how they operated, to me it seems like an incredibly risky way of running a blackmail operation. Surely if you have access to enormous funding there must be safer ways to procure underage girls than to approach random American girls in public locations. And if this wasn't part of the supposed blackmail operation - if Epstein was both running a blackmail operation and occasionally having sex with random American girls just for the fun of it - well, if I was the person ultimately in charge of the operation, I would either get him to stop running these risks or I would shut the whole operation down. There is just no need to pluck American teenage girls off the Florida and NYC streets for a blackmail operation. A wealthy man could surely get all of the underage girls he could possibly need for blackmail from countries where procuring them is less risky. Unless, I suppose, having sex with specifically first-world women was part of his clients' fetish. But even if that was the case, I'm sure that there are safer ways to get American girls than what Ghislaine is said to have been doing.
I noticed this too. Maybe he used good grammar and spelling when writing formal documents to his finance associates and used bad grammar with his friends and cronies. Many people who met him described him as bright and charismatic even back in his younger years before he was famous, so I figure that these emails can't possibly capture the full extent of his communication skills.
Goodguy
18d ago
Got it. I think I misunderstood what you were saying. The way you phrased it, "foreign agents", made me think that you were implying that the protesters are working alongside of or at least furthering the aims of foreign governments. Which would parallel certain accusations against Trump and his people.
Goodguy
19d ago
Insurrection while aligning with foreign agents is generally considered fine for “deserved it”.
Sounds exactly like what many people would say about the January 6, 2021 rioters.
Goodguy
20d ago
Normal people don't have time to do this shit for 20 years.
There are tens of millions of adults in the United States who are either completely unemployed or work part-time, and are not students.
I think that the Twitter poster's use of military jargon is doing a lot of heavy lifting in his argument. Here is his key claim about what the anti-ICE forces are doing:
Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone. Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles. Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery. Vetting processes for new joiners. Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups). Home-base coordination points. Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction—or worse.
Let's break it down:
Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone.
I don't know how Signal works, so I'll leave this one without comment.
Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases
I mean yeah, this is just specialization of labor, well-understood by humans for many thousands of years. Pretty much anyone who has been on a sports team or has had a job understands the idea of having different members of the organization focus on what they're good at.
24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles.
This can just mean "some people are sitting around watching the feds and telling each other online where the feds are and how many of them there are, and there are enough such people that at least some of them are active at any time of day or night".
Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery.
I don't know what a chat rotation is, but regularly deleting your data is the kind of thing that plenty of tech-savvy people would think to do, and would also recommend to others. And there is usually no shortage of tech-savvy people in large political movements in the US.
Vetting processes for new joiners.
I mean, I should hope so. You don't have to be a military professional to figure out that this is a good idea.
Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups).
Well yeah, of course sympathetic locals are going to help. That kind of goes without saying.
Home-base coordination points.
"People meet at each other's houses to discuss what is happening and plan further steps". I mean, yeah? Of course they do.
Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction—or worse.
Yeah, most of them have cars. It's pretty easy for them to get around.
If you wanted to murder ICE agents and film it, you'd want to shoot them from a distance while you or someone else filmed it. You wouldn't want to get into a conversation with them while standing 1-2 feet away from them like in the video I linked. That would make it unnecessarily harder to draw your gun successfully and to escape.
Goodguy
24d ago
If he wanted to massacre ICE agents, it is very strange that he talked to them while holding a cell phone towards them as this video shows. You'd think that he would, you know, keep his distance and just shoot them.
My conclusion is that DHS' explanation is probably nonsense, as is Stephen Miller's description of the situation as "A domestic terrorist tried to assassinate federal law enforcement".
Goodguy
24d ago
I am not saying that people voting for Trump doesn't matter. What I am doing is giving more precise figures. I don't recall having ever claimed that 1/3 of eligible voters voting for a Democrat meant that one of the Democrats' favorite policy stances was supported by half of the country.
This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence? It seems as though a very small contingent of revolutionary communists believe that the answer to this question is no.
A large number of right-wingers also believe that the answer is no. They're just largely keeping quiet about it at the moment because right now it's their opponents who are feeling the violence of the state.
Half the country voted in an almost single issue fashion to have our immigration laws enforced.
I understand your point, but to be precise only about 32% of eligible voters voted for Trump, and that 32% includes some voters (probably not many, but some) whose reasons for voting for Trump did not include immigration.
The real question is: how do you de-escalate from here?
I don't know, but the mainstream media, the alternative media, and social media are not helping much. We are living through years and years of events that act as scissor statements and videos that get analyzed like the Zapruder film, argued endlessly about online even if the events that they capture are statistically quite rare. When Charlie Kirk was killed I pointed out that statistically speaking, assassinations are extremely rare in the US given how angry people are about politics and how many guns are in private hands. But many right-wingers in media made it seem like the killing meant that the cold civil war had gone fully hot and that it was time to prepare to deliver retribution.
Now with these ICE-perpetrated killings, something similar is happening. I am not a fan of what ICE is doing, but to get a clear picture it's probably a good idea to take into account statistics and try to figure out how frequent ICE killing someone is as a fraction of the total number of interactions between ICE and other people. Then one could compare it to how other law enforcement agencies measure up in similar situations or compare it to an ideal but realistic model of how high quality law enforcement would behave - and thus try to figure out whether ICE really are the crude violent bumpkins that their opponents often depict them as. But on social media, which after all rewards engagement more than anything else, too often the discussion is more like "this means fascism has come to America". Meanwhile some people on the other side aren't helping by celebrating the shootings, just as was also the case with the killing of Charlie Kirk.
Almost needless to say, consistent principles other than "my side should win" are rare and both sides flip-flop in their opinions of what the boundaries of proper interactions between law enforcement and "civilians" should be depending on which side currently is in charge of the law enforcement.
Goodguy
24d ago
I think that the question of whether the protests are succeeding will not really be answered until the results of this year and 2028's elections come in.
The protests are not stopping deportations. However, whether or not these shootings were justified, the optics are bad - and that may have important political consequences which might possibly stop deportations a couple of years from now.
Also, a minor note about:
The protestors (from “our” point of view) want violence and want shootings, because they perceive this as a win condition.
I agree that for the protestors this is a good strategy. If law enforcement full-out massacres a dozen or two protestors in a big shooting, this might be one of the best things that could possibly happen "for the cause" of the protestors. However, I don't think that any more than a tiny handful of protestors are actually driven by a desire to pursue this strategy. Some of the organizers might be, but even then I think it's a very rare motivation. I think most of them are genuinely just trying to interfere with ICE, to impede ICE activities. But they are in part following, because it is easier to do what has been done before, the well-worn tracks of decades of leftist tactics - and those tactics have evolved in part in order to create sympathetic media footage in which leftists have violence used against them.
Goodguy
25d ago
The system is much better at preventing Presidential assassinations than it was 100 years ago. There were some weird things about the Butler, PA assassination attempt, but how close it came to success didn't really surprise me. Trump does many more outdoor events than the typical Presidential candidate or President, and given enough exposure even the Secret Service will eventually almost inevitably slip up.
Goodguy
1mo ago
If I understand @DaseindustriesLtd correctly, he's not saying that China will steamroll the world, he's saying that the US will lose its position of clear dominance.
Goodguy
1mo ago
The US is self-sufficient in almost everything. It does not need to trade with China in order to remain a great power.
It has been a long time since I read Nietzsche in length, but from what I recall, I think it's worth noting that Nietzsche's ideas about slave and master morality were complex. On one level he despised slave morality, yet he also clearly saw its strength, its success at shaping values. What he called slave morality is the actual master morality of our time, and he knew it. He admired the power of Christian priests to overthrow the ancient world's moral order, their tremendous ability to transmute values within themselves and dominate the world with their new values like some sort of superhumans from a Dune novel. This somewhat echoes what @functor said below about how slave morality is an elite phenomenon.
The so-called slave morality is completely dominant in our time. I do not know about other parts of the world, but in the West is difficult to find anyone who is not genuinely mentally deranged and/or deeply ostracized by mainstream society who truly believes that it is good for the strong to dominate the weak - truly believes, not just as an fun intellectual exercise, a vice-signalling online grift, or a fetish. So-called slave morality completely penetrates both the left and the right in the West. This is why outside of a few online ranters with Greek statue avatars, who I'm not sure even actually believe in what they say and in real life are probably mostly very nerdy people who are either grifting or desperately trying to compensate for their lack of power in the real world, almost everyone on both the left and the right believes in the vision of the plucky oppressed rebels overthrowing the evil empire. The left and the right just disagree on who the rebels are, and who the empire is.
And this is not surprising. The left and the right grew up on the same movies, and popular movies are about plucky underdogs fighting evil empires. This moral framework has almost completely won. It utterly dominates our civilization, it shapes most people's consciousness on a deep level. The so-called master morality has been driven from the field and only survives as the suppressed shadow of the "slave" morality. The so-called "master" morality survives in hiding in obscure crevices of consciousness and among freaks and obvious sociopaths. It persists psychologically in the great appeal that antihero narratives have for moderns, the sex-and-violence Game of Thrones depictions of lustfully and openly wicked people which serve to still satisfy some of that ancient craving for master morality, a craving that likely cannot go away as long as humans remain human. This is also the reason why sociopathic gangsters are so popular in our media - the mafioso, the inner-city gangbanger, and so on. We still have a need to psychologically engage with "master" morality, but almost none of us actually believe in it on a deep level.
No politician can expect to win more than a small fraction of the public's support by running on a ticket of "it is good and beautiful that the strong dominate the weak". Even Adolf Hitler did not campaign politically on master morality, he campaigned on the notion that Germans were plucky underdogs who should overthrow the supposed oppressive evil empire of the Jews, the French, the British, the Bolsheviks and so on. In other words, even the most prominent far-right politician of the last 100 years ran his politics based on slave morality, on the same script of plucky rebels going up against an evil empire, not based on some sort of "master morality" appeal to the beauty of the savage and dominant aristocrat.
Wokism is a "slave morality" phenomenon, but as Nietzsche would have understood, it is also a master morality: it insists on its values, it revels in dominating its enemies, it seeks to conquer, it seeks to stamp its values on the entire world, it believes utterly in its right to rule and to destroy its enemies. Today's right-wing populism is also almost entirely a "slave morality" phenomenon just as much as wokism is. Outside of some narrow highly online circles, the modern right-wing populist does not believe that he has an aristocratic right to rule through strength and beauty. He believes that evil aristocrats have taken over society and that the "good people" have to fight against the "evil people" to overthrow their domination. Ironically, right-wing populism has not so much that masterful steel in its backbone that wokism does, it is not as much of a master morality. But then, it is young in its current open form. Modern right-wing populism is ideologically almost exactly the same as it was in the 90s, the difference is that now it has breached the containment walls of polite conservatism and escaped the online forums and small clusters of paleoconservative fandom to which it was largely confined in the 90s. So it is possible that right-wing populism, too, will at some point become more psychologically confident in itself. I don't really see it moving in that direction right now, but much can change very rapidly in politics. One thing I'm fairly sure about, though, is that it will not take the form of actual ancient-style master morality. If Hitler's political movement didn't, then it is extremely unlikely that any of today's right-wingers will do it.
Goodguy
2mo ago
My take is that those who don't have to spend 9 months pregnant if they wish to perpetuate the species don't really have much right to complain about low fertility rates.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I haven't watched the debate, so take this with a grain of salt.
I think it's easy to rhetorically defeat an opponent whose main argument against you is moral by simply rejecting his moral frame. So if Morgan was unprepared to focus on logical arguments instead of moral ones, that's incompetent of Morgan. I don't have Fuentes' level of quick rhetorical thinking and experience with public speaking, and I think even I could defeat a moralizing opponent in such a situation without too much trouble.
That said, I think that in the long term possible public support of Fuentes has a pretty hard cap, and he will find it difficult to ever truly turn his movement into something mainstream, so I'm not sure that these easy wins really amount to much in the grand scheme of things.
I don't think it's realistically possible to openly say that women should lose the right to vote and ever achieve any sort of dominant position in politics in a Western country. Women's suffrage is, barring a massive civilization-altering catastrophe of some sort or the kind of genuinely total demographic replacement that great replacement theory people worry about, never going to be repealed in the West in any sort of foreseeable future. And if Sharia law supporting Muslims become the majority in the US somehow, they're not going to support Fuentes types either, despite agreeing with them about women and Jews, and white groypers are not going to be happy in such a future.
At best, Fuentes can stay what he is now, a gadfly and proselytizer, maybe a relatively minor player in the entire right-wing coalition, but groyper influence in politics will not grow above a certain threshold.
Fuentes also, despite his quite formidable rhetorical abilities, has plenty of weaknesses that can be exploited by a competent opponent. He just hasn't gone up against one yet on any sort of big stage, at least as far as I know.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Say what you will about psychology, but if I submitted an essay based on Biblical inerrancy to a geology class, I would justifiably expect a low score.
That said, I haven't read the essay, and I should in order to really judge it based on anything other than what other people say about it. Also, in the context of the humanities at least, a 0 should probably rarely be given out for any essay that actually took effort to write. And the possible bias of the grader does matter.
One of my takeaways from the last few years is that both sides of the American culture war bark a great deal but have very little bite.
At the start of 2021, surely several million Americans, if polled, would have told you that the Presidential election had just been stolen from them by a deep state cabal. What happened as a result? One almost entirely unarmed act of trespassing into the Capitol building. This even though many of those several million were already heavily armed and most of the rest could have easily become heavily armed if they had wanted to.
Now in 2026, several million Americans, if polled, would tell you that Trump is erecting a fascist regime and that ICE are stormtrooper goons who are being turned into Trump's personal army and are waging a racist war against brown people. What has happened so far as a result? One or two incompetent armed attacks on ICE. Zero successful ones, even though it would be easy for most Americans to buy weapons and it's probably not hard to figure out how to kill a few ICE agents.
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