MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
40m ago
But there aren't many institutions teaching the old ideas either. And the ones that do are mostly Catholic, not core Red.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
43m ago
White Southerners (including the white Southerners who settled the Mountain West after the Civil War), Appalachian hillbillies, anyone who goes to or pretends to go to a church where those groups dominate, and any non-white or white ethnic who makes a good-faith attempt to assimilate into the traditional culture of the white South or Mountain West. Serious Catholics and Mormons are generally allies of the Red Tribe, but they are not part of it.
My equivalent definition of the Blue Tribe would be New England Yankees, Quakers, pre-Ellis Island era German/Scandinavian immigrants*, descendants of the above who lost religion, and any non-white or white ethnic who makes a good-faith attempt to assimilate into the traditional culture of the Northeast - notably including Conservative/Reform/secular Jews. Unassimilated non-whites are (or were) allies of the Blue Tribe, but not part of it.
* i.e. all Mainline Protestants
Albion's Seed is the definitive book on the origins of the culture war.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
If we are going to assign blame to anyone on the puppy side, I think the problem was Vox Day/Theodore Beale rather than Correia and Torgersen.
Beale is a prime example of why the Red Tribe doesn't produce good cultural products. He first came to my attention for his theology blogging - heresies as interesting as his views on the equal divinity of the Holy Spirit are rare nowadays. The Selenoth books are overly wordy and ultimately I couldn't read them, but they were not written by an idiot. And he has other mid-tier accomplishments in multiple fields (music, video-game development, hardware design etc.) I am happy to call him a genius. But in order to remain relevant, he gradually shifted his blogging output from serious theology and literary criticism to standard-issue midwit Confederate apologia and ultimately to antivax and conspiracy theories. Whatever incentives he was responding to were to be less interesting and less intelligent. Last time I bothered to look into what he was doing, his main project was putting out superhero comics with a crass political message in every panel, which is as unappealing to a normie reader as the left-wing equivalent.
The only one of the Puppies who I found plausibly award-worthy was John C Wright. Correia writes technically competent schlock which plays the same role for his male readership that romance novels do for their female readership. It is valuable work and harder than it looks, and he fully deserves the money he made, but that kind of book has never been supposed to win awards.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
That's bullshit covering for them, because the government actively went after a) anyone who tried to do anything, like the girls' dads, and b) anyone who tried to bring it to public attention.
When we say "the government went after the girls' dads", we are talking about dads who had been kicked out of their daughters' lives for reasons. Sometimes the mundane - there was a messy breakup, Mum got the kids, and Mum doesn't find Dad's continued involvement convenient. Sometime the kids had been taken away because Dad was abusing them too - both Pakistani and white rape gangs preferentially targeted girls in children's homes. But the criminal charge against the fathers was variants on "violating a restraining order" rather than "being a racist".
Pakistani rape gangs did not go after girls with married parents. Even in the UK, the fraction of married fathers whose attitude would be "I'll kill him, go to prison, and expect to have a tolerable time there after the other inmates find out I'm in for murdering a sex offender" is too high to risk. Particularly in the working-class neighbourhoods of Rotherham.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2hr ago
American left-idiotarians were rather noisily campaigning against Biden in the recent elections on the grounds that he was insufficiently pro-Palestinian.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7hr ago
The German Grunen are an electorally serious political party that frequently joins coalition governments (occasionally including ones led by the CDU/CSU) - the sort of animal rights extremist who breaks into a politician's home would consider them contemptible sell-outs.
The coalition isn't going to find an agriculture minister who is acceptable to the eco-loonies - because joining a CDU-led government is unacceptable per se. They are probably going to find an agriculture minister who lives in a more defensible location.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7hr ago
British Steel has announced plans to close its two blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, making Britain the only G7 country unable to manufacture its own steel.
This is technically false - it means that the UK would be the only G7 country unable to manufacture its own pig iron for conversion into steel. And this explains what is going on. Because of our early industrialisation and early deindustrialisation, the UK is the Saudi Arabia of scrap steel.
Mass of available steel decreases very slowly - a bit gets lost to rust, and a bit gets lost to landfill, but most of the steel in a manufactured object or a steel-framed building is available for recycling at the end of its life. The total stock of steel the UK needs is increasing very slowly - the total weight of steel in manufactured goods in the UK has been high for a very long time. (The value-to-weight ratio of manufactured goods continues to increase so a lack of mass growth isn't necessarily a sign of impoverishment) and although I support a big increase in steel-framed building construction, the median voter doesn't. And the rate at which the stock of steel in the UK increases is covered by imports of imbedded steel in manufactured products. So we can meet our domestic needs for steel entirely by recycling scrap in electric arc furnaces.
The physical logic of keeping a blast furnace in the UK is based on us being a net exporter of refined steel products - and in practice those exports had to go to the EU because every country protects its domestic steel industry. So post-Brexit the blast furnaces were on borrowed time - the money for the next needed major renovation was never going to be invested on commercial terms.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Fair enough. It would be more accurate to say that ultimately FDR got the SCOTUS he wanted in a way that was entirely consistent with the American mos maiorum.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
You don't need LLMs or modern AI to flood the world with slop. Recommender algorithms optimised for engagement metrics were developed at a lower tech level, and are quite sufficient to pull the stinkiest, stickiest, sloppiest slop from the collective hivemind that is the Internet and flood our consciousness with it like Vikings singing loudly about a tinned meat product*. Worse still, recommender algorithms incentivise creators to optimise for the algo and find ways to make the slop even sloppier.
“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of slop, constantly increasing and constantly growing sloppier. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of false novelty, the sensation of effortless pleasure, entirely familiar yet entirely new. If you want a picture of the future, imagine MrBeast eating childrens' brains — forever. ”
* SPAM(r) is, FWIW, culinary slop. I'm not cross with Hormel foods - at the time if you were focussed on low cost and long shelf life you probably couldn't do better.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
By the time Wickard v Filburn was decided there were already 7 FDR-appointed justices on the Court, so the threat to appoint more wasn't necessary. Ultimately FDR got the SCOTUS he wanted the legal way.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
FDR had people arrested for selling goods too cheap
Something he was expressly authorised to do by Congress. NIRA was found unconstitutional by SCOTUS on federalism and nondelegation grounds, not on fundamental rights grounds, after which FDR stopped trying to enforce it. Very bad policy, but a long way from arbitrary detention without trial.
Also, this particular line of argument seems irrelevant until Trump starts running for his 3rd term.
KMC, while posting in favour of Trump, compared him to a King and applauded him for punishing lese-majeste in the way a King would. I think that is a problem. You brought up the comparison to FDR, not me. Although if we are going to run with it, I note that if FDR had put out an official portrait of him crowned and enthroned (something Trump did - on @WhiteHouse and not @RealDonaldTrump so it was official government communication) then even his supporters would have objected. If FDR had announced sanctions against law firms who represented his political opponents (which he did not), his supporters should have objected.
FDR's supporters did object to Japanese internment as soon as it was safe to do so. FDR's supporters did object to Court-packing, which is why it didn't happen.
The MAGA base support administrative detention legal immigrants with the wrong tattoos - in peacetime, which makes this worse than FDR. They support various plans to neuter opposition to the administration through the courts. And when Trump talks about running for a third term, they insist he is joking while selling Trump 2028 T-shirts and putting up Trump 2028 banners at CPAC. Trump is already running for a third term in plain sight, or at least maintaining strategic ambiguity about doing so - the correct response from non-fashy Trump supporters would be "This is stupid and I wish he would stop" not "Yay libs so trolled. Trump 2028 for great lulz!!!"
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
I'm also struggling to charitably respond to the assertion that a center-right no longer exists. The neocons don't get to define the center-right, and disagreeing with them doesn't mean you're "far-right".
Common usage of the term "centre-right" is shorthand for "pro-establishment right". We all know what it is, and I think we both agree that it is currently politically irrelevant in the USA. I agree with you that "far-right" is an unhelpful term, but claiming that Trump is "centre-right" is obfuscatory linguistic prescriptivism. This is particularly obvious in countries with more than two political parties - we can argue about what to call parties like Reform UK/Rassemblement Nationale/AfD (I prefer "right-wing populist") but - again, as a matter of common usage - "centre-right" clearly refers to parties like Conservatives/les Republicains/CDU-CSU.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
The liberals supported the 22nd amendment too. "We should never have another FDR" was not a controversial position once the war was over and the Japanese internment camps stopped feeling like a good idea.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
The correlation between weight and purse is 48%, which seems high enough to confirm the theory that heavier is more prestigious. There is also a mild bias in favour of the "classic" weight classes over the more recently added fine-grained ones, although the difference ($7.1M vs $5.6M) may not be statistically significant depending on the number of fights making up the averages.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Or at least they won't be looking at top-tier athletes of both sexes in order to make the comparison.
I seem to remember at least one issue of Sports Illustrated each year being widely purchased by men who were not particularly interested in sports, although I agree not everyone depicted therein (whose musculature would, indeed, be looked at in detail) was a top-tier athlete.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Not necessarily. Even if women were better fighters than men, a nation would still be better off losing 90% of its men than half its women just for the purposes of replacement for future wars. Or similar -- I'm sure someone has done the math on the numbers for a world building scenario if nothing else.
This doesn't apply if you have a strong monogamy norm, which the Christian West does. Even the post-Christian West has a strong norm of monogamy for babymaking relationships. The surplus women in western Europe after WW1 killed off so many young men ended up as childless spinsters, not as fertile sister-wives.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Hm? Circa 2012 a leading candidate / political official's career was notably not ended over a significantly more egregious case,
Benghazi (including the e-mail thing, which at the time was being treated, including by Hilary's opponents, as a process crime covering up Benghazi) was the main story of the last three months of Hilary's tenure as Secretary of State. She held no elected or appointed office between retiring as SoS and running for President, and the e-mail story ended up derailing her Presidential campaign. I think it is fair to say that her career was ended over the issue.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Hilary claimed, and the FBI investigation found insufficient evidence to refute, that she had set up the private e-mail server for her unclassified e-mail and that the small amounts of classified e-mail found on it were inadvertent.
This is inverse TDS. Leaking the time and details of a military strike to a completely random person is bad! The sheer level of incompetence necessary for nobody to have checked that everyone in the chat was who they thought they were before sending the 'strike in two hours' message is insane! This is the kind of behavior that gets military secrets leaked to enemies. Apparently I hold my discord groupchats to a higher standard of security than freaking Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz do.
Even if Signal is a secure app, a chat isn't secure unless you know who everyone in the chat is. There were 20 people in the chat if you count Goldberg, and a lot of them were only identified by initials or first names. Frankly, a chat being labelled as "small group" and having 20 people in it should be a yellow flag - 20 isn't a small group as anyone who has been in a ftf meeting with 20 people in the room would understand.
Hegseth posted nonpublic information about future military operations (I am not going to go into the weeds as to whether it was actually classified under the relevant executive orders - it affects neither the actual severity of the fuckup nor any potential criminal liability under the Espionage Act) to a chat without checking who was in the room. Doing that at a bank would get your bonus docked for a material compliance breach, and would probably be a firing offence if you did it twice.
It feels like this story is bigger than it needs to be because Team Trump keeps saying silly things in an attempt to avoid admitting that Waltz and Hegseth did the dumb. The best defence is "Two new political appointees made an OPSEC mistake due to inexperience. Fortunately Jonah Goldberg handled the situation responsibly and no harm was done. Now let's get back to talking about the American people's priorities."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
The problem is that the people who are extreme are uniformly Democrats, and that gets projected on to the rest of the party. It doesn't help that these people tend to, by their nature, be the most motivated, loudest, and most likely to get signal-boosted by their political opponents.
Trace isn't on the left at all. He is a dissident conservative who is trying to build bridges to the centre-left because the centre-right in the US appears to no longer exist.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Biden pursued a lot of what the left sees as "policies benefitting the common people" (expanded child tax credit, student loan forgiveness, left-friendly reindustialisation like the CHIPS act, big infrastructure bill, a more pro-union NLRB and a more anti-big-business FTC). And this worked - the Biden administration saw the fastest low-end real wage growth, lowest unemployment, and highest employment since the Clinton boom.
Neither the left nor the common people gave him any credit for it. In the case of the left, this was because the American left (apart from AOC) are retarded. In the case of the common people it was because the typical voter (who is increasingly likely to be retired) is more bothered by modest-by-1970's standards inflation than they are by poor labour market performance for people less fortunate than themselves. This 2012 blog post by Steve Randy Waldman was prophetic - when offered a full employment economy, the voters hated it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
It was never that bad in Europe in the first place - primarily because we have both laws and norms against firing an employee based on a social media campaign by their political opponents.
Yes - we don't have as strong protections against government censorship as the US. But a court appearance and three-figure fine (which is what happened to most of the people "arrested for posting memes") is actually less damaging that losing your income and health insurance.
The 2018 study did, as a matter of experimental design, include jumps from a plane in midflight. But the convenience sample of people willing to participate in an RCT of parachutes just happened to consist 100% of people asked while the plane was on the ground.
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