sulla
6d ago
The root of it is the recognition on the “young right” of WWII as the founding myth of the modern regime, combined with opposition to said regime. The myth is that Hitler, out of sheer hatred, decided to kill all Jews, and on an unrelated notes, to conquer Europe/the world. The US and the allies, of course, saved the day, and we all learned an important lesson about why right wing politics are evil.
The myth is false and the reality is a bit more complicated, and does not really support the weight of the founding myth upon deep interrogation. So young right wingers rebel against the lies by pretending to be nazis. They embrace the villain in order to deny the myth its power.
In my opinion, it’s not really possible for non-Germanic US citizens in 2025 to be “Nazis.” It’s like if a faction of ethnically Chinese citizens identified as Zionists. It makes absolutely no sense because the ideology is tied to a specific people at a specific time. Even hating Jews doesn’t make you a Nazi. Lots of factions have hated Jews throughout history and most of them have little else in common with Nazis. I also believe in some degree of revisionism, and that we learned many of the wrong lessons from the war.
However, I also think the explicit anti-semitism is quite self-defeating. They take a reasonable premise, that the US spends too much on Israel and hypocritically accepts it as an ethnostate (arguably true), and stretch it to an unreasonable extreme - that almost every conservative politician is thoroughly compromised by the jews and are therefore evil/untrustworthy (schizo). Or that Jews are overrepresented in media (true), therefore media exists to push a Jewish agenda (schizo).
There is a bit too much tolerance for the schizo prediction in some of these groups. The problem is not that it will lead to a second Holocaust, so much as it makes us look insane and unsympathetic. At the same time, the general breakdown of Hitler-as-myth is likely immensely helpful to the modern right-wing cause, and jokes or ironic embrace of Hitler do serve this purpose effectively at times. But it is a delicate line between schizo and funny.
sulla
15d ago
In all seriousness, I have no idea how you'd teach a man more interested in beards and shoulders to love tits and ass instead.
Men are very imprintable sexually, you just need to make then orgasm to the “correct” images, thoughts, and experiences enough times, in addition to removing whatever sexual hangups they have towards women.
With this in mind, it’s pretty obvious why Christian conversion therapy doesn’t work.
sulla
1mo ago
This is not innately a bad way of doing politics. If you have a minority that cares A LOT about something that most people are indifferent towards, it’s actually good for the minority to win, because it helps them more than it hurts the majority. Of course this can be exploited.
sulla
3mo ago
I’m not overweight, but I have an average appetite and need to put effort into not overeating. I would describe it like this:
You have a strong itch. If you are on autopilot, your body will scratch it.With willpower, you might stop yourself from scratching it in the short term. But it doesn’t go away. It’s there every second of every hour of every day, and it is impossible to ignore, constantly demanding your attention.
You might not scratch it for a day. You might not scratch for a month, or even a year. But the thought of never scratching it for the rest of your life makes you want to cry. It feels cruel or unfair. But you know absolute discipline is required or scratching it will quickly become habit again.
But wait! It gets worse. You routinely attend social events where you are expected to scratch it. Everyone around you encourages you to return to your scratching ways.
The itch is unbearable. You decide to introduce “cheat days” where you are allowed to scratch the itch, while giving your body a week to recover. But it only makes it worse. It’s a weekly reminder of the relief that you ate denying yourself.
Eventually, you give in and allow yourself to scratch the itch. Your skin may be ruined but at least you are not subjected to the 24/7 torture if having a powerful itch that you can’t scratch.
Dieting is not scratching. Ozempic removes the itch (for many, at least).
sulla
4mo ago
I don't particularly want that end result, but I find it hard to argue against murderous force on principle. The arguments supporting it seem obviously correct; the protests against it seem sincere, well-meaning, and completely wrong.
Well the Zizians also found it hard to argue against murderous force on principle, and instead ran a nice empirical experiment for us. It turns out it’s a bad idea.
sulla
4mo ago
Well sometimes in traffic the left lane moves slower than the other lanes, even when there is no jam and the cars are just tightly packed.
sulla
4mo ago
- Yes
- No, rolling stop is fine in many cases for stop signs or right turn on red
- No, a large truck and a sports car do not have the same safe operating speed
- No, when there is traffic all lanes should be utilized.
- Not if it’s a safety hazard
- No
- Yes?
sulla
4mo ago
In my opinion this was a disasterclass by Musk and extremely embarrassing for him. He didn’t like the bill… fine. But to completely burn the bridge with Trump after already burning the bridge with all Democrats? Unhinged behavior.
When king/arch-merchant alliances turn sour, the king always wins and the arch-merchant ends up dead or bankrupt. I would have expected Kekius Maximus to remember his Roman history better.
sulla
5mo ago
Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market.
He can’t even into Bayes. There are many thousands of raccoon-dog stalls in China. There was exactly one BSL-3 lab in China. There was exactly one lab studying GoF on human coronaviruses.
sulla
5mo ago
I agree that it is fundamentally just a lazy attempt to apply a negative label to people the users of the term don’t like. It’s like “the left are the real racists.” It’s supposed to be a “gotcha” but it doesn’t really work in practice.
sulla
5mo ago
The problem is Russia feels like it can simply win outright, at this point. Therefore, to achieve a peace that reflects the current EV of the war, Ukraine has to accept a deal that is worse than the current status quo. They will never do this, so the most likely outcome is a complete victory for Russia.
sulla
5mo ago
Eliezer disappeared at the height of his power and influence. He could have been much more impactful on AGI development but he was too tired from writing a fanfic and being a micro-celebrity. He relegated himself to side-character territory at best.
sulla
6mo ago
“The purposes of some systems is what they do” there I fixed it. The slogan is usually used to imply that the nominal purpose of a given system differs from the true intentions of those who design or perpetuate the system. This obviously happens sometimes.
To his point, while it is often a worthwhile hypothesis or heuristic, it is not a self-proving statement. You can’t prove a system is corrupt by design just by observing that it is corrupt.
sulla
7mo ago
I’ve noticed a similar effect among boomer conservatives. Many feel somewhat left behind by the Trump administration. As Trump shows that you can “just do things,” their decades of being “beautiful losers” looks more and more like cowardice and less like principle. Losing is deeply rooting in their identity.
They have a hard time letting go of the idea that the best you can do is ride on top of the train yelling “slow down!” You don’t have to let the liberals drive - you can actually go in any direction that you want.
There is also an aspect that they genuinely believed the post-war consensus/“boomer truth regime.” Now that the right is definitively away from this and winning, they… still believe what they always believed. The fact that they believe this things because they were manipulated and coerced into believing them does not make it easier to change their view.
The Republican Party now belongs to the youth who “get it,” not the boomers who don’t. This is the problem that the Democrats have. Their boomer ideology is in the way out and their youth ideology is an unserious version of communism. They seemingly have no good plays available.
sulla
7mo ago
Hanania wasn't born into wealth the way Musk was
I understand that this line was not core to your point, but to correct the record - Musk’s family was middle class, turbulent, and abusive. His father’s financial success was very up and down, and he is now completely broke (Musk used to support him, but cut him off after he repeated slept with and attempted to sleep with younger family members.)
Musk arrived in Canada at 17 with $2000 to his name and never received substantial financial support from his family after that. His mom would sometimes send him $100 for groceries. There is no evidence that he ever received a large cash infusion from his parents. Of all the excuses for why Musk is more successful than you, “rich parents” has to be the worst.
sulla
7mo ago
Trump’s plan:
- Invoke insurrection act to send troops to the souther border
- Secure the southern border
- ?????
- Hitler: Orange Edition
As usual these fears don’t make any sense. This is not Rome, invoking the Insurrection Act does not confer Trump the title of Dictator. It wouldn’t expand his power beyond the southern border.
sulla
7mo ago
Out of context though. This was supposed to be a friendly press conference, with negotiations to take place in private, but Zelenskyy tried to leverage it as an opportunity to negotiate and lecture Trump and Vance. After 40-ish minutes Vance lost patience with Zelenskyy’s stunt.
I think Trump would have handled it better alone but Zelenskyy sabotaging the press conference was a massive diplomatic mistake.
sulla
7mo ago
The 10 minutes at the end were not the whole meeting. It was 50 minutes of “Putin is a terrorist” and “no concessions to a killer” from Zelenskyy. Trump and Vance’s frustration boiled over in the end, even if it seemed unprovoked in the shortened clip.
I felt after the Lex interview that Ukraine will become part of Russia. Zelenskyy is completely blinded by his hate for Russia and Putin and his desire for revenge, to the point that he cannot accept the reality of Ukraine’s losing position.
Ukraine’s only hope is that Trump is able to break Zelenskyy. Trump claims that Zelenskyy is already begging to be let back in. But I’m not sure it’s possible: Zelenskyy may be too courageous/stupid, which will spell the end of Ukraine.
sulla
8mo ago
Sure, but the Impoundment Act is pretty clearly written and very likely constitutional. It's not a regulation or a norm or a gentlemen's agreement.
The truth is, nobody knows if it’s constitutional. It’s something we’ve agreed not talk to about for the past 50 years. We may get the opportunity to find out.
sulla
8mo ago
In Ben Franklin's 1729 pamphlet A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, he observed that true wealth consists of the ability to command labor. This framing positions wealth as almost inherently a positional good. While it is not true exactly, it is true that currently 100 inch flat screen TVs, infinite food, and dishwashers can't replace the benefits of human laborers to do your building. And clearly, it is impossible for everyone to pay others to do more labor in aggregate than they themselves are doing, as the demand would be eternally greater than the supply.
Humanoid robots have the potential to break this bottleneck for the first time in history. The true promise of industrial society - to eliminate the positional nature of wealth - will become a possibility. It will happen gradually, then all-at once. But above all, it is happening soon and 99% of people are not mentally prepared, or are in denial.
Most commonly they will choose a set of characteristics that describes the modern group they don’t like, but that fails to uniquely describe historical Nazis, or fails to describe the consensus “bad parts” or historical Nazis and instead focuses on the contested parts (Hitler liked dogs, Nazis were pro-family, etc.)
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