I think of Epstein as a variation of Godwins Law: once an argument invokes Epstein to shut down criticism of a practice it is clear that the practice in question has no defense at all. Especially since tying people to Epstein is so easy yet the details are so scarce. You'd think there'd be more dirt by associating with Palfrey, the DC Madam who trafficked children across state lines into Washington DC itself, but no one seems to give a shit. No Clinton, Trump or Windsor, no news.
If we want to apply a realpolitik lens to this framing, then go full sociopolitical grand theory of the world state. Such a grand theory can be all encompassing to the point of uselessness, but perhaps lets drill down specifically to the aspect directly at play: a pattern of repeated horrific criminality has been committed by the same communities over a long period of time and a wide geographic range. There are more and more instances of this happening, despite nearly a decade of awareness. Why?
The repeated calls for inquiries and fact finding is because all that has been done so far is inadequate to address the civilizationally destructive truth poisoning this global experiment of a unified borderless world we are unwillingly thrust into: people are in fact different , and some people have vastly different decision making heuristics due to inherently different values.
People doing bad things because they have bad information is technically a solvable problem, because they can be rehabilitated or informed enough to remap their payoff matrix to be in line with functioning society. Increase probability of being incarcerated for crime, crime is no longer a payoff. That is technically speaking a solvable social problem.
The problem here is that there is a group of people that keep coming up as a distinct category that explicitly demonstrates a totally different value matrix. The golden path of economic liberalism and maximal freedoms for women is not a paradise to be admired, but a bounty to be plundered. Western society in the 1990s and 2000s was high off winning the cold war, fat on wealth and weak in will, surrendering its children to foreign rapists on the twin altars of multiculturalism and contempt. Sexually libertine children were not viewed as free agents exercising their will in an era of peace, but easy targets for cultures that decidedly calculated the payoff for raping children was so high when the consequences were so insignificant.
These value matrices are not set in stone. But what we have seen is that whatever the western response has been to islamic terrorism and rape, it has been effectively surrender. The borders remain open, the streets remain uncivil, the rapists remain free. These foreigners took advantage of temporary weakness to raid a peaceful community that opened its gates and turned a blind eye to the ongoing pillaging.
The westerners still insist that the rights of the rapists must be protected, that the ECHR is a sacrosanct document, that imprisoning vile rapists is too costly, that denying the continued mass importation of the family of rapists and murderers on the grounds of human rights is impossible to stop because of some document written 70 years ago. The invaders have raided the peaceful village, raping freely and taking their spoils. In response the village has opened its hidden coffers to invite the invaders to change their ways, unbarred its doors to make the invaders feel welcome, castigate its own people for complaining about the predators of the invaders.
The decision making matrix of people are not static, they evolve in response to changing circumstances, and the matrix presented by the west thus far has been to increase its total surrender to invading islamists. In the face of this heuristic, is it not inevitable that the islamists will see fit to continue, if not intensify, what they have done with no expectation of consequence?
To depersonalize Musks own theoretical antipathy to islamic rapists and posit a grander theory of mind would come closer to the above analysis, that there is a civilizational rot occurring and that Musk is leveraging his massive influence to bring attention to and indeed influence a change in the decision matrix. A change not of the islamists, who Musk cares not about because tribal mirpuris are worthless even after multiple generations living in the west, but of the west that opens its gates. Musk may not be able to muster the militia and bar the gates of the village, but he can at least say that continuing to pretend the invaders have the same values is madness. If an inquiry reveals that the invaders fundamentally hold the values of the west in eternal contempt precisely because it is a foreign value irrespective of its theoretical merit and that the west is simply a prize to be plundered repeatedly with such little effort, then it definitively annihilates nearly 50 years of universalist values, and reveals an intransigent terrorist group within the midst of a population. The UK still hasn't addressed the traveler issue, so I don't imagine solving the Tower Hamlets and Birmingham islamist enclaves will be an easier task. But at least exiling them to their own territories and not pretending they're Just Like Us will be a step in the right direction.
Is it possible that Musk simply finds the quiet acceptance of Rotherham rape gangs abominable? I find it so strange that even here people posit some grander scheme at play whereby criticism of children being raped en masse by foreigners is viewed as part of a grand right wing scheme against political opponents. Yes, the left in its utter cowardice and contempt for white people has seen fit to allow thousands of children to be raped and murdered in the name of multiculturalism votes and thus the left should be annihilated, but the moral outrage of foreign criminals on welfare sexually torturing kiss is itself a point of enragement. People hate Swedes prowling for children in Bangkok, why can't here people simply hate Pakistanis for systematically raping white children for the sake of it.
To be honest I dont think the tech right is bending the knee to the traditional right. I see the tech right as breathing free after more than a decade of incessant political correctness that permeated the professional managerial classes, a political correctness enforced by commissars emboldened by the fat of the land being creamed off for the commisars benefit as sinecures to maintain respectability. Remember, till Nov 2024 the popular vote was always Democratic, or Labour+SNP+Green, or whatever other permutation that proved that most people actually were not right wing.
The end of ZIRP means that tech has to pay attention to bottom lines more, conservative wins have shown the unpopularity of pretending political correctness serves a useful social goal, and finally Trumps victory has shattered the myth of minorities and young people being more receptive to equity outcome pandering. With the illusion cast aside, the tech bros, who are still largely anodyne liberal cowards, have firmer footing to raise up Inconvenient Issues at least for consistencies sake.
It used to be Bill Cosby, Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Hassan Yousef, maybe even Maajid Nawaz who were screaming into the void about irredentist minorities who were not obeying the presumed liberal playbook of inevitable assimilation. Instead the 2010s and 2020s were dominated by screeching feminist institutions and race baiters like Gawker, Jezebel, Slate, Salon Vice and Buzzfeed, before they were annihilated by market forces and leaving DiAngelo and Kendi to step in as thought leaders for socially cowardly professionals.
Musks aggressive attack on Starmer may have some other reasons like a personal vendetta against the twitter ban or whatever, but the undeniable fact is that the illusion is shattered and the protected classes no longer enjoy the presumption of mass social acceptance for their Culture. The meta has finally changed. I fully expect a mass blackpilling among normies who finally realize that verbalizing coincidentally racist stereotypes that boomers correctly observed are no longer social suicide.
My entire point is that the western governments, of which the ur example I envisioned in my own case above being the united states, was their own enforcement and military mechanisms. What more powerful institution exists to try and force the US government to actually let in a billion migrants? Inaction is a choice, borne from a collective will to power. And all choices can be exercised.
Shitholes dont need the CIA coming in to force open borders for migrants to enter. Migrants want to pass through Libya and Turkey to reach the promised lands of Europe and USA where borders don't exist and cowards strangle themselves with words printed in a previous age. There is no God forcing the USA to assent to foreign invasion, but for the morals of it's own people. And this moral calculus will change as reality asserts iys inevitability.
I really don't understand why there is handwringing in the west about the inevitability of migrants coming in. At one point someone will say that this web of interdependent problems which all magically converge to the liberals preserved solution can be addressed in isolation. Close the borders, lock up criminals, deny appeals. If liberals continue whining that this goes against some UNDHR or whatever piece of paper that magically confers authority, then just burn the damn thing and form a parallel bilateral arrangement with nations that aren't beholden to some holy writ. Liberals hold no patience with the Bible, why do they slob the knob of some 70 year old text.
These aren't better worlds. Urbanite social activists are unable/unwilling to acknowledge how urban biodiversity is an intense pest and tree management exercise because biological matter generates an ecosystem that interferes with human life. My favourite is the cartoons shared repeatedly about streets lined with fruit trees for the homeless to eat at will or other pastoric idyll guff, or the appeal of 15 minute cities. No consideration for biological realities of bugs and roots, no consideration for antisocial elements or the cost to build and manage all these aspects. Continued self delusions drive people further away from these utopian goals, and it just increases the self righteous ess of the activists.
Intelligent conservatives practice personal environmental discipline to beautify their own immediate environment but are skeptical of legislative attempts to force environmentalism, viewing it (rightfully) as lawfare to disburse sinecures. Stupid conservatives just don't think that this green shit helps, and if prompted will wave at third world shitholes polluting far more than they and their kin do.
The case for environmentalism is that it is the purest manifestation of the tragedy of the commons, but the spoiler fact is that liberals insist on giving third world shitholes unlimited charity while scolding rich countries instead. If people actually cared about environmentalism they'd decry the saudi petroleum industry, but instead criticism is only reserved for useless corporate suits that will make the right groveling pretenses.
I will not tolerate this slander against the sacred numbers. The grand repository of interpersonal relationships curated by the loyal stewarts of pixiv and nhentai have assured me that Arthur and Modred and (insert saberface variation n) all are glorious vanguards with terminal weaknesses against phalli of any sort, especially goblin or orcs or black men (which is its own pathology to be unpacked at another thread). Work that into the Civ 6 leader bonus table, Firaxis.
Ultimately the leaders as representation fails to accommodate their specific (a?)historical perculiarities, instead treating the leaders as avatars of national aspects.
In that vein, I still long for a true age of mythology style approach to a 4X game. Use regional gods and regional aspects as socionational representations, and go ham with it. I want Arminius channeling Wodans +10 Black Forest ambush rolls in his rebellion against Bismarck seizing the +6 cultural stability bonus of King Of Franks from Charlemange who needs that bonus in the campaign against Nelsons +4 global naval bonus. That'll be absolute tits and be much richer than the giggles of seeing Gandhi roflstomp Elizabeth.
As a game they should just do the ultrafictionalized portrayals of ahistorical figures. In Civ Alexander rubs shoulders with Cleopatra and Gilgamesh and whatever other big name just like its right out of Fate Grand Order. In the same vein Civ should not be beholden to true existence or even semirealistic representation. The Japanese turned King Arthur into 6 different versions of big titted blondes, Sid Meier can genderbend MLK into a beyonce lookalike.
Red states are disproportionately black, with blue cities in red states blacker than blue cities in blue states. Everytime liberals (so not specifically referring to you) smugly post that red states are stupider and more criminal than blue states they end up shooting themselves in the foot because it goes back to how large the black population is.
The ultimate test of this experiment will be the outcome of St George county in Louisiana after it split from Baton Rouge county. Richer whiter (but still having black residents) zone splits off from failing black county because the whites wanted better schools. With less whites around will the blacker Baton Rouge be free to prosper and flourish without the evils of racism tainting their progress? I posit no, but the anticipation of the upcoming crash is itself part of the journey.
Looks like Gatwick had no arrests made. I know several authorities globally have used Aeroscope to catch and fine violators for flying near aerodromes, and it is a common enough occurrence that it even showed up in the Aeroscope marketing briefly. Aeroscope was stupidly cheap at less than 10000 US dollars, and had better detection rates than all other much more expensive drone detection systems (typically 30-250000 per unit) that were in the market when Aeroscope was first introduced. That and its low setup cost meant that DJI sold thousands of units all over the world, and would have sold even more until the US DOD banned DJI drones from its inventory due to national security concerns, partially from the prospect that field units using DJI A3 controllers would be detected by aeroscopes obtained by hostile actors. DJI shut down aeroscope in 2023 and a successor is reportedly in the works, but in the meantime anyone flying a DJI drone is near certain to be detected by a system. How the system operators in turn respond to that information is another (very very very funny) problem.
Crime rates are geographically constrained in the USA rather than an everpresent reality. Much ink can be spilled about general observations, but the simple fact is that if you don't live near blacks, crime will be a much lower problem. The USA has enough space for crime-worried californians to flee to economic centers in texas or florida, while economic activity concentrated in only a few cities filled with racialized criminality limits the options for Europeans.
Racialized crime is a solvable problem; black people don't like crime either as clearly evinced by their disapproval of 'defund the police'. The problem is liberals who use disparate impact as a means to castigate their proximate political opponent instead. There is of course the grift of NGOs and the like to extract sympathy from do gooders, but that happens on both sides of the aisle and so its a wash.
Thus the simplest solution to fair-evasion/free-riders (a solution so obvious that only someone very educated or deep in the terminal stages of woke brain-rot could fail to see it) is don't let them get away with it
There is a slow convergent point in most criminal justice studies is that law enforcement works by true arrest rate, not necessarily severity. The problem in the USA and Europe is that the disproportionate arrest rates of minorities is attributed to societal failures that one of the competing dominant political arms can use to attack the other in order to further their own political interests. So long as heterogenous outcomes are treated as failures requiring intervention, the meta will incentivize redefining heterogeneity to maximize resource capture.
The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher utilization rate of commuters when criminal vagrants are no longer an everpresent concern. The ROI of fare enforcement is the lower maintenance costs for repairs and cleanup when mentally ill homeless no longer defecate and trash the public space with the full expectation of someone else cleaning up their mess. The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher communal trust that the MTA will enjoy when it looks to be an organization that can steward its received resources with competence and clarity, instead of burying its head deeper in the sand about extant problems too inconvenient to address openly.
The Shopping Cart Theory is a great first-order test to determine prevalence of antisocial elements. Disproportionate amounts of resources are invested in cleaning up after noncooperatives, and even more are invested in resources to gently nudge them into being cooperative of their own recognizance or accommodating their preferences through rehabilitation and custodial services. Some people get off on being as difficult as possible because they fundamentally hate the people offering them help to begin with, and self-flagellating to absolve the noncooperative of their responsibility does not lead to greater resource utilization efficacy.
Just like how drug-testing welfare recipients does not meaningfully capture significant amounts of drug abusers or signalling immigration crackdowns does not actually catch many illegals, these programs are meant as signals to the noncompliant that mercy is no longer guaranteed. Less fare evaders will use the services on offer to begin with, and that is a perfectly acceptable outcome.
How far away have you actually seen the Mini 4 fly
The mini doesn't fly as far as the air or pro. My own tests in perfect environments get it about 2 miles easily, but RF interference degrades it significantly. Normally at around 0.5m
2.4ghz for the Mavic 3 gets you about 2 miles, 5.8ghz mode in a low-RF saturation environment can push up to 5, 10 with a patch antenna.
All of this ignores 4G/5G teleoperation kits that can be mounted onto even Mavic Pros now, which do exist and can be controlled via a sim card, or full autonomous drones. Range is definitely not the limiting factor for these drone sightings.
The boring answer for the drone sightings is likely mass hysteria and false attribution, since small aircraft are not noticed by people most of the time and when they are now being paid attention to they seem so different from the big liners that they cause confusion. Drone shutting down airports like what happened at Gatwick a few years ago started with dickheads flying a drone for that sweet shot, then general incompetence during the monitoring phase. A common problem is observation drones used by one agency without notifying other agencies, causing other agencies to scramble their own observation drones etc etc etc.
Most LEO have DJI aeroscopes in their inventories, which can track all DJI models up to 2022 that were in the air, and a fair few newer models using legacy firmware. By now someone would have figured if it was a rogue DJI drone in the air. If the flight lights can be seen its a low altitude drone. Its most likely some trolls fucking about and piling on for shits and giggles.
But its much better if its ayys looking for their dropped nuclear fuel. Lets hope the greys land and demand to see the manager here.
I'm normally supportive of the stance that capitalism+innovation converges to most efficient outcomes, but that is true only for local contexts. Bunker fuel is just burnt in international waters and the world collectively shrugs and says 'fuck the fish'. Economics is one thing but absolution of responsibility does exist. The only reason there isnt a floating migrant fleet of slave-labour factories is that efficient capital planning beats out deregulation.
The difference in priming language employed is that the right coopts the new terms created by the left, whereas the left redefines existing words with the necessary moral valence. The right calls things Woke, DEI, Affirmative Action etc as adjectives for leftist programs, the left calls things Genocide to force a false equivalency. Ireland asking the ICJ to redefine genocide just to make sure Israel is convicted of the charge is the clearest sign of terms being degraded and coopted for the existing moral value of the term instead of the acts meeting the standard. Mitt Romney was already fascist in 2012, and that card is already played. Chud is the preferred term of the left now, but literally no one thinks that term has negative connotations because no one actually watched that movie.
Political inefficacy by not having a sweeping unassailable majority is not the win condition, because that is impossible. Focusing on stymieing tactics employed by adversaries is missing the forest for the trees: public official elections are mass referenda of the dominant social mores salient to the population.
The 2016 Resistance insisted that the electoral college was invalid as a referenda because the popular vote was the true means of judging who was actually representing the culture of the nation, as was the 2020 election contestations that sought to delegitimize the results as first principles. In both cases the politicians elected were crippled by the normal morass of government functioning, yet the Culture War - the very title of this forum thread - pays scant attention to inconsequential details like tax policy. Instead, conflict points of salience are debated on moral/intellectual or numbers grounds. No one actually cares about womens sports to care about trans women shitting up the sport, people care about trans women being an exploitation point for bad actors to claim moral unassailability.
The presumption of eventual victory is why Trump 2016 inspired so much more resistance than 2024. Losing the popular vote as well as the electoral college and frankly almost all other down ballots of note is as total a repudiation as can be. Isolated defeats such as prosecutor recalls, no matter how common, can be attributed to tactical failures. There is no intellectual motte to retreat to in this comprehensive defeat, no comforting fact to point at to disclaim the strength of the repudiation. Hell, this election even showed the relief army of minorities turning their banners and joining the enemy enthusiastically.
The democrats basked too long in the glow of Californias massive population inflating the moral merit of their positions. Republicans are used to being told "everyone hates you!", deservedly or not. Democrats have no similar experience, and their fall into infighting to lay claim over the scraps of their coalition is already happening for all to jeer at.
Destiny seems to catch endless flak from Hasan and Vaush for (insert leftist infighting meme). I think its Palestine and Defund The Police that caused the biggest leftist rifts, so off the top of my head I would think that is what catches the ire of leftists.
There is much scorn to be levied at the entire streamer culture and the parasocial relationships engendered with especially pathetic hosts, but Destiny is really mid even by those standards. I love that Breadtube streamer types were convinced that getting Harris on their podcasts would have changed the electoral needle of young men, which is a hilarious lack of awareness of who even ends up listening to their pieces in the first place.
There is already a museum of memes, where a PWC manager is immortalized for all to see. More people have seen this disappointed pakistani man than any religious icon. By kb of digital space, that man is a god alongside dicaprio and harold.
The act of defying Trump publicly was itself a form of ring-kissing. Lips were firmly planted on the O-ring of the presumed actual power brokers, the professional intelligensia of media academia and moneyed professionals that propped up the DEI establishment (its a real thing, I saw the contract for DEI consulting services my company had to engage in order to qualify for ESG benchmarks required to be part of fund portfolios). Trumps capture of the presidency was viewed as an aberration, a confluence of sexism and gerrymandering that caught the true powers off guard. The dominant calculus communicated by media was that Trump was a fluke, and the Resistance was just waiting in the wings to resume its rightful place over Trumps accidental reign.
Honestly, the left had a series of surprisingly good accidental victories from 2018 to 2022, allowing midterm senate correction, covid and Roe overreach to be conflated with the presumption that Trump was a spent force. The end of ZIRP cuts much of the fat that could be showered onto the DEI establishment that propped up the power of The Resistance. With that gone, the shadow of power of DEI has been exposed. Now there is a new ring needing to be kissed, and I do suspect it is less disgraceful for the likes of Altman and Zuckerberg to kiss Trumps ring than subject themselves to Joy Reids screeds.
I really wish latinx was around when I was in college. Id have had so much fun introducing my latino friends as latinx at parties full of white kids. My friends would have to grin and be polite as I wax effusively about their journey to the hallowed shores of america where their latinx identity would be given the respect in this safe space of understanding. It'd be seeing a human pressure cooker in action.
Its the same as Islamic fundamentalism - apostates must be killed because to have read the quran and yet reject it is proof of the foundational incompatibility of the heretic with logical existence.
The difference of course is that I can unironically find at least five jihadis in my 1st order peer group who will take a few weeks break off their comfortable lives to go on a beheading spree throughout the holy land if airfare was covered and their legal immunity upon return was covered. Despite decades studying and working in the educated professional world I cannot think of a SINGLE progressive/leftist who would actually even pull the trigger themselves. The leftists want Someone Else to do the dirty work of executing their intellectual will. The jihadis at least bother to justify within their doctrine why the apostate must be killed. There is nothing in the leftist philosophies that mandate gulags, much less executions.
- Prev
- Next
I managed 6 full books last year, and about 200 'chapters' of works I've read in the past and saw fit to revisit, and maybe 1500+ pages of articles or journals or guides. I realized my lack of completing books cover to cover mirrors my lack of completing TV shows season to season or even video games: I'm old(ish).
Not that age makes me incapable of enjoying the new. More that age makes me have a larger corpus of works to compare new consumed media against, and if a new work fails to hook me I immediately tune out and go for a Greatest Hits run to tickle the nostalgia dopamine of reading that work the first time. New works failing to capture that for me largely stinks of just old age cantankerousness, and the threshold of excitement to breach is not worth the gnawing knowledge that i've read BETTER and this work just doesn't' cut it.
The sole exception is reading new books for my kids. Little shits that they are, they hold no interest for Journey To The West or Water Margin, but for them I can power through my irritation at the archaic prose and tired tropes. Maybe one day I will finally be able to read King Lear without falling asleep, just for their sake.
More options
Context Copy link