MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Journalists are paid to try and find the ground truth, not to act as stenographers for the two sides.
If we had a decent news media (and I agree we mostly don’t) the whole point of reading the news rather than watching the tendentious blowhards on social media is that the news media do shoe-leather journalism and get information about what is actually happening that I can’t get for myself. “Tendentious blowhard X says that black is white, pointy-headed academic Y disagrees” is low-effort slop, not journalism.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
you may as well give up the entire American project right now
The framers were very clear that the system they were setting up relied on the electors exercising a certain discernment in the choice of President. If mixpap is right about Trump's character, and he is susceptible to low-effort social media campaigns in a way which the vast majority of people who are paying attention and have 90+ IQs are not, then the willingness of the electors to elect a man like that to the highly responsible and sensitive office of President of the United States is a "you may as well give up the entire American project right now" level failure of the system.
there's no hope left, the Russians could hit anyone lower down in the government with the same weapon.
No - the weapon doesn't work close to universally. We know that because Tim Pool and Lauren Southern had to be paid to spout Russian propaganda on Twitter. If Russian social media trolling worked on all MAGA midwits they would have done it for free.
Of course, the alternative hypothesis, that the alternative media and other voices have been correct about the US' pivotal role in starting the Ukraine conflict
I was alive and awake in 2014 and 2022. The troop movements were detectable by satellite - the invasion was definitely coming from Russian-controlled territory and not, say, the United States. The people saying now that the US started it were mostly spending January 2022 insisting that Russia wasn't going to start it, so I don't see why you find them so correct that you would believe them over your lying eyes.
he doesn't actually want the war to continue,
Nobody wants the war to continue. That Trump wants the war to end with a Russian victory is not in doubt - Trump has said it, Lavrov has said it, Trump's opponents have said it. That other people (including sufficiently many Ukrainians to sustain the level of war effort we are seeing) want it to end with a Ukrainian victory is also not in doubt. Russia is not currently open to peace without victory, and Ukraine probably isn't either. The rest of us can either shut up or pick a side. Trump has picked the Russian side, and the rest of us can judge him accordingly.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
The "eventually" here involves Russia removing a large part of the constituency for pro-Russian parties by invading Ukraine and occupying the territory where their voters lived. Yanukovych was a viable candidate in an intact Ukraine (at least until he tore up the EU association agreement that was the only sane economic policy for Ukraine). Zelensky was the least anti-Russian candidate that was viable in a Ukraine that did not include Crimea or the Donbass.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
Part of what happened is that Ukraine did not, in fact, start it. This is not a disputed fact. Trump is just lying.
"Donald Trump today announced that Incanto was a notorious paedophile and had been taken into custody" and "Donald Trump today falsely accused Incanto of being a notorious paedophile and took him into custody" are very different stories. You should respond to them differently. If a newspaper is able to distinguish between them in its reporting, it should.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
At my last job I sat next to and was good friends with our team secretary, who was an avid reader of the British tabloid celeb sections and various gossip magazines / websites. One thing you quickly realized is that most of the women the soccer players and reality TV stars cheated with were much uglier than their wives and girlfriends, often objectively ugly, even. Sexiness isn’t really the point, male sexuality isn’t picky; many men seem to care about relative looks (say, a 7 vs a 10) only because having a hotter girlfriend makes them feel better and confers upon them more status and value as a man, when it comes to sex alone their standards are minimal at best, it’s mainly about convenience.
Old British political joke. "There are only a dozen women* uglier than Hilary Clinton. Do you know how much effort it must have taken for Bill to cheat on her with all of them?"
* Pre-menopausal and not visibly deformed is kind of assumed here.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3d ago
This is a federalism issue, not a citizens' rights issue. The individual "princely" states in the post-Westphalia HRE were pretty absolutist. (Although the Peace of Westphalia included limited protection for religious minorities.)
The way I was taught about it was that there is an ongoing trend from a "medieval" model (strong territorial magnates, levy armies raised locally by said magnates, weak kings, self-governing towns with considerable privileges) to an "early modern" model (strong states, territorial nobility as a rent-drawing fossil, a royal government not run by the territorial nobility but whose members get ennobled and form a new court nobility, standing armies paid out of taxes, general drift towards centralisation and absolutism). The driving force is improvements in siege artillery, which changes the nature of warfare in a way which favours centralisation and professionalism in the military.
This process starts in the second half of the C15, with Edward IV and Henry VII renormalising England after the Wars of the Roses (roughly 1471-1509), Louis XI renormalising France after the French civil war that Henry V of England famously took advantage of to restart the Hundred Years' War, including bringing Burgundy and Brittany under royal control (1461-1483), and Ferdinand and Isabella unifying Spain (1474-1504). There is then a gradual process of consolidation (setting up increasingly bureaucratised royal governments, weeding out remaining territorial magnates who were strong enough in their areas to pose a threat, reforms to military and taxation systems). This process is interrupted by religious conflict during the Reformation (except in Spain which remains unified and Catholic, which is why Spain under the early Habsburgs is dominant despite being, well, Spain - they had higher state capacity) but continues afterwards. The first monarchs to complete this process are Louis XIII after he appoints Richelieu in 1624, Charles I during the personal rule after 1629 (and also Cromwell and his major-generals, after which the English decide to do something else which is not that, with long-term consequences for world history).
When you apply this logic to German-speaking Europe, the key point is that the weakening of the HRE (to the benefit of the major German "princes") is an orthogonal process to this kind of state-formation. The tl;dr is that the key points in the decine of the centralised HRE are the fall of the Hohenstauffen in 1254 and the Golden Bull in 1356 - well before the state-formation process we are talking about. The Henry VII/Louis XI style consolidation happens in the 1400s at the level of individual German states like Austria, Bavaria, the Palatinate, Saxony and Brandenburg. After the 30 Years' War, the second stage development of early modern absolutist states happens at that level as well - mostly in Brandenburg and Austria.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
A smaller country generates fewer viral incidents, and so looks better if your view of Europe is formed by negative incidents that go viral on American social media. Also the anti-establishment right in the Netherlands isn't spicy enough for Musk to promote it on his birdsite.
That said, the Netherlands really is better in the limited sense that the Dutch VVD are no longer lying about their actual position on immigration the way the British Tories and German CDU are.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
My understanding was that people who were susceptible to sinusitis were susceptible to both types, but that viral was much more common. (I had bacterial sinusitis once as a child, but I have viral sinusitis about twice a year)
The problem is that the sequence of mouth noises "freeze peach" has acquired a secondary meaning - when very online people - on either side of the US culture war - hear the noises, they don't point to the concepts traditionally associated with "free speech" (i.e. the ability to say what you want without fear of punishment by people more powerful than you), they point to the anti-establishment wing of the Red side of the US culture war.
More speech is banned on Musk's Twitter than Dorsey's Twitter. (Trivially, because most Twitter censorship is done by non-US governments, and DorseyTwitter consistently resisted foreign censors to the best of its ability whereas Musk rolls over if he finds the government in question friendly.) Musk bans people who annoy him whimsically, most often nominally based on an incredibly-broad "doxxing" policy which covers almost any dissemination of accurate information about an identifiable individual and is selectively enforced. Elon Musk has also threatened, and boasted about his limited success in, lawfare-to-the-death against his critics to punish publication of accurate information about the way he runs X that he considers biased or misleading - this is the least speech-that-is-free thing you can do as a private citizen, but it is very freeze peach because punishing people for calling out anti-establishment-right speakers makes it easier for the anti-establishment right to speak. So when Musk talks about being a "free speech absolutist" despite having multiple outstanding SLAPPs in the federal courts, calling for the reversal of Sullivan, tweeting threats of prosecution against his critics etc, the very online right hear "freeze peach absolutely," agree, and cheer, the very online left hear "freeze peach absolutely," agree, and boo, the few remaining principled liberals hear a censorious asshat claiming to support free speech and try to call out the hypocrisy, and the darkly cynical raise eyebrows and say "this is your brain on ketamine."
If you treat Vance as talking about speech-that-is-free to a European audience, then his comments were mostly false if taken literally, directionally correct but exaggerated if taken seriously-but-not-literally, and bizarre if treated as an attempt to achieve some kind of political goal of US foreign policy*. Everyone in Europe who is sufficiently interested in politics to pay attention to a speech by the US VP already understands the free speech situation in Europe better than Vance does, so the only people who didn't respond by thinking "what a tool" are the ones who live in an anti-establishment right-wing social media filter bubble. Even people like me who think that Europe does have a free speech problem can see that a tendentious intervention by a senior official of an increasingly hostile (based both on the rest of the speech and on Trump admin policy towards the EU) foreign government is going to be counterproductive.
If you treat Vance as talking about freeze peach to the global-but-mostly-American audience of partisans in the US culture war, then everything makes sense including Margaret Brennan's response. It's megaphone diplomacy of a type that often backfires, but that's the way Trump has rolled since before 2016 and it's what his domestic supporters expect. Trump's America does want to see more freeze peach in Europe, whether or not this is actually in the US national interest. Freeze peach (in the sense of differential tolerance of right-wing speech that tests the boundaries of permissible rhetoric vs actual incitement) was one of the tools the Nazis used to take power in Germany, although not the most important.
I was initially concerned by this story because most of the coverage I saw didn't make clear who said the dumb stuff about Germany, and I assumed from the attention the whole thing was getting that it was a German official. That would be worrying. But it is some MSM pretty face with no reason to matter beyond her parents being able to afford out-of-State fees at UVA. Vance talks like a right-wing blowhard when a Bush-era Republican would at least try to be diplomatic. Margaret Brennan's response makes clear she is as dumb as Rachael Maddow. Bear shits in woods. The Pope coming out as Catholic would be more newsworthy.
* Notably, the reaction to Vance's speech has increased the chances of European leaders effectively sabotaging Trump's policy of appeasing Putin in Ukraine from none to slim.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
Most sinusitis cases are viral (I tend to get it when a cold takes hold in my sinuses) so antibiotics aren't a general solution. (A chronic bacterial sinusitis that doesn't get cleared until you finally get it tested during a flare-up, determine it's bacterial, and take antibiotics is pefectly plausible though). If the next sinus infection you get is viral (and it probably will be) you are stuck with strong decongestants (you need something more than phenylephrine, which is a fine placebo when all you need is a placebo, but apparently nothing more than that) and old wives' remedies.
The old wives in the UK recommend steam inhalation, which helps a bit for me. (You can just put a towel over a jug of boiling water and stick your nose under it, but steam inhalers of various levels of complexity exist. You can also put a drop of menthol or similar in the water).
A lot of my friends swear by salt water nasal spray, which appears to work for you, and might work well enough for a future viral sinusitis.
The good news is that if your next sinusitis is viral it will be less serious and should clear up on its own after a couple of weeks, and if it is bacterial you are aware of the possibility and will be able to get antibiotics sooner.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
It sure looks like mid-21st century is mostly about small expendable drones and defending against them. (The Turkisk Bayraktar was effective early on, but you can put >1000 grenades on Home Depot quadcopters for the price of a Bayraktar, and not that many of them are flying any more). Ukraine and Russia have orders of magnitude more experience with this type of war than anyone else, and Ukraine are better at it than Russia.
So the claim that Ukraine currently have the best army in Europe, or even the world, seems plausible, and it will remain that way until the other Great Powers adapt their doctrine, training and equipment to reflect the new reality of drone-primary warfare.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
Ultimately, the tl;dr for why the Tories lost in 2024 is that they were so incompetent in government that you couldn't tell whether they were failing to deliver on a right-wing agenda or failing to deliver on a centrist one.
And part of the reason for the incompetence is that they were high on their own supply over Brexit. The discussions within the Conservative party in 2024 were not about "How do we do the hard work of replacing EU policies on agriculture, immigration, customs administration etc?" (which needed doing, and either wasn't done or was botched with visible consequences), it was "How do we spend the £350 million a week Brexit dividend?" (which was always only £160-180 million because Johnson and Cummings lied about the numbers, and which in any case wasn't available for the first few years because the government negotiated a deal including a divorce payment). A large part of why the Boriswave happened is that Cummings thought (he boasted about this on his blog) that Brexit defused the immigration issue without the need to actually reduce immigration, because we had "taken back control."
Another part is that they chose a leader whose character made him unsuitable for executive leadership because he was able to tell the lies needed to win the Brexit referendum.
And another part is that the purge of people who were insufficiently Brexitty left the incoming Conservative govenment short of talent.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
I'm sorry, but the reason Brexit ended in landslide defeat for the Tories is because the Conservatives removed the shield that had allowed them to lie about wanting to stop immigration, and then tried to keep lying anyway.
That is certainly part of it, but the Conservatives lost as many votes to the left as they did to Reform, and a party which picked up all the Tory and Reform votes* would still not have won a majority. The Conservatives defeat in 2024 was extremely overdetermined, and the fact that they had screwed up everything possible about the implementation of Brexit was most, but not all of it.
* Which they couldn't have done because Reform was mobilising 2019 non-voters with an anti-system message in a way an incumbent party couldn't.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
The 2019 election was before Brexit. The reason why the Tories won in a landslide was because Parliament was seen as holding up Brexit, and the central campaign pledge was to "Get Brexit Done".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
"Dutch" used to describe an Afrikaaner was definitely a slur. They see themselves (in my view, correctly) as having by now become indigenous to South Africa.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
While I agree that the Chagos deal is terrible for the UK, I don't think it is Starmer's folly, and I don't think it is worth trying to psychoanalyse Starmer to understand why it happened. The decision to do the deal stems from the British Deep State. The opening of negotiations was formally announced to Parliament by Tory foreign secretary James Cleverly in November 2022. If you read these columns on conservativehome.com where Deep Stater David Snoxell defends the likely deal to grassroots conservatives (again, while the Conservatives were still in office) you will get the gist. The change of government in the UK does not appear to have affected the progress of negotiations at all.
Tory caterwauling about the deal in opposition is entirely dishonest and opportunistic (I know, politicians. I don't even want to blame them) given that they could have blocked it when in government and didn't. But I think the reason why they didn't is that they didn't care and were letting the Deep State make decisions. So the first interesting question is "why did the British Deep State do such a terrible deal?" And the most obvious answer is that the Americans asked them to. (The British Deep State set a lot of store in maintaining the so-called Special Relationship with the US Deep State).
This David Allen Green post is the best summary of the argument. One piece of evidence he misses out is that Snoxell repeatedly cites to remarks by Blinken praising progress in the negotiations. DAG's key arguments are
- Firstly that (while apologising to the Speaker for making an important but apparently not time-sensitive announcement when Parliament was in recess) the Foreign Secretary said that the timing was forced by a foreign election. Both Mauritius and the US had elections in November 2024, but the negotiations weren't an election issue in Mauritius because both parties supported them. And after the US election, lame-duck Blinken puts a lot of effort into trying to get the deal over the line before inauguration day.
- Secondly that the Biden administration put out an announcement (now taken down by the Trump administration, screencapped in the DAG post) praising the deal sufficiently quickly that it is obvious that they knew about it before it was announced.
The deal failed because the incoming Mauritian government realised that the British (and the lame duck Biden administration) were desperate to seal the deal before Trump came in, thought this gave them leverage to ask for more money, asked for too much, didn't get it, and ran out of time. The deal is now presumably dead unless the US Deep State manages to roll the Trump administration - certainly the Mauritian government says that they are not willing to do a deal that the US don't sign off on.
The second interesting question is "Why does the US Deep State support the deal?" Lawcellism is part of the answer, but the US is not a particularly lawcelled country, and nobody in a position of power is willing in the US is willing to let international law interfere with a vital interest like retaining Diego Garcia. But (unless the US is secretly paying for the lease) the deal isn't that terrible for the US. There are some obvious pragmatic reasons why the US might prefer a Guantanamo Bay-style arrangement where Diego Garcia is nominally Mauritian sovereign territory but US-controlled under a long lease to sharing the island with an ally:
- There is no loss of control - Mauritius has even less ability to assert sovereignty over Diego Garcia than Cuba does over Guantanamo Bay
- There is a potential gain of control in that the UK has a degree of veto power over US operations out of Diego Garcia that Mauritius would not.
- Guantanamo Bay was useful to the US Deep State when they wanted to break their own laws without embarrassing an ally by doing it on their territory. Diego Garcia could serve the same purpose.
- Regularising the status of Diego Garcia would increase the willingness of countries who pretend to take international court rulings seriously to allow the base to be resupplied from their ports or by flights through their airspace. At the moment Diego Garcia is resupplied from Singapore, but India is much closer.
And of course the third question, which is the one which is culture-war salient, is "Why is Starmer still noisily supporting the deal?" The anti-Starmer case has been made ably below. The pro-Starmer answer is that the deal is dead, Starmer knows this, but he wants (mostly for the benefit of elite opinion in relevant neutral countries who pretend to take international court rulings seriously, especially India) to ensure Trump gets the blame. So he is continuing to noisily support the dead deal until Trump unambiguously kills it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
The innate possession instinct only applies to chattels, not land. (And only questionably applies to more chattels than you can carry). Given how much of libertarian dispute resolution comes down to "the landowner decides what to allow on his land", you need to justify property in land to get a workable libertarianism. This is the hard part of libertarian ethics - particularly if (like most libertarians) you are dependent on the goodwill of people who benefit from the existing pattern of land ownership. Our moral instincts about land ownership come from our views on the proper relationship between warrior elites (the original landowners) and peasants.
Locke/Nozick come up with a theory which makes sense, but if taken seriously requires the Norman robbers and their successors in title to give back the stolen land of England, and the parts of the United States where the Indians practiced a minimal level of land stewardship to be returned to the original owners.
If you want to justify your land title based on the lapse of time since the last time the land was stolen, then you have the problem that the State's rights to sovereignty over the land are just as ancient.
Ayn Rand dodges the issue by accepting that moral rights in land stem from the sovereign granting the original land title.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Since when does anglophone society have any tradition of immigrant labour whatsoever? Britain had no significant (relative to population) immigration until the latter half of the 1900s, which coincided with our total collapse as a world power.
If you don't count Irish workers in the mainland as immigrants, this turns into an argument about the definition of "significant" (Hugenots were something like 2% of the population of England in 1700, more in London) - clearly the immigrant percentage now is an order of magnitude higher than any of the precedents wokists love to point to. But if we arguing about the social consequences of immigration, I don't see why the Irish don't count. They had a wildly unpopular foreign religion that made them hard to assimilate, were generally considered to be prone to drunkenness and criminality, and were openly and notoriously used by employers to bid down wages.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
I don't hate him for the signals, I hate him because I think he actually possesses the vices he signals. But the basic point applies - part of Trump's success is being maximally offensive to pretty much everyone outside his base.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
When I went on a student trip to South Africa in the early noughties, there was a visible argument going on about whether "Boer" used while speaking English (in Afrikaans it just means "farmer") should be treated as a punishable racial slur. We were warned that the word could get you beaten up by townies in Stellenbosch.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
In the overwhelming majority of cases
This is only true if you restrict the scope to the West (I suspect the key criterion is "countries formerly but no longer dominated by Abrahamic religion"). Globally, the overwhelming majority of male-male sex happens in the context of machismo-based homosexuality, and the man dicking another man doesn't think dicking men is gay, or at least not in the context he is doing it in.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
I think corruption involving foreign governments is, for good reasons, taken more seriously than corruption involving domestic private-sector crooks. Even Chicago pols don't normally take bribes from foreign governments.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
I'd say it was part of Ukraine's agenda and Hunter Biden's agenda, but Biden was off the Burisma board before Joe Biden became President.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6d ago
Trump would have failed just as every cost-cutting politician I ever voted for failed.
When Congress wants to cut discretionary spending, discretionary spending gets cut. (Obama-era sequestration was the most recent example). Even Moldbug agrees that the bureaucracy is effectively accountable to Congress*, should Congress care to exercise its power. And in the specific context of non-defense discretionary spending, Congress routinely do care to exercise that power. Discretionary spending isn't bankrupting America, entitlements are. See for example the charts in [this report] showing overall discretionary spending growing slower than the economy over decades, and barely keeping pace with inflation in the decade leading up the the pandemic.
The reason why cost-cutting politicians fail is that entitlements (and old-age entitlements in particular) grow faster than they can cut discretionary spending. You don't need shock-and-awe to cut discretionary spending, which is all Musk is doing so far. If Musk makes a serious dent in Medicare fraud (which he hasn't even started trying to yet, and won't be able to do by grepping lists of payees for woke keywords) he will save far more money than he could
Incidentally, in countries that haven't become pensioner-gerontocracies, you can really cut spending (including the equivalent of entitlement spending) the normal way. Canada and Sweden both cut spending by 7% of GDP in the 1990's, in both cases all that was needed was an electorate which cared about deficit reduction (which the US electorate claims to). The problem in the modern day (not just in the US) is that there are a lot of pensioners, and they vote. And the experience of the UK from 2010 through Brexit is that if you try to cut everything else faster than the welfare-state-for-the-old grows due to population aging, things start falling apart.
* In the sense that Congress can control budget, and has the ability to punish individual Deep Staters who defy it in a way the President does not because being criticised by name in a Congressional committee report is career-ending for a senior career civil servant.
To the people who lived through the evils of Nazism, there was no doubt that the worst thing the Nazis did was start the most destructive war in human history (and thereby lead their own country to defeat, conquest, ruin, and misery). "Aggression is the supreme international crime." That is the words of the Nuremberg prosecutors relegating the Holocaust to Hitler's second-worst crime - and this was not controversial at the time, and should not have been given the destructiveness of the rest of WW2. The only country for which a majority of the dead were Holocausted Jews was Czecholslovakia. And it isn't clear why the Holocaust doesn't itself count as an incident of the aggressive war - after all only about 200,000 Holocaust victims were from Germany.
Intelligent people who compare Putin to Hitler are doing it because he is engaged in the violent pursuit of lebensraum, not because he persecutes gypsies and homosexuals.
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