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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27665 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

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It's like we have become allergic to actual news or something. Why is every topic here now a snoozefest.

Here are a few suggestions. Pick up the ball and go

  • Conventional war in Eastern Europe

  • Genocide in Middle East

  • Unprecedented invasion of America

  • Unsustainable price increases in Western world

  • Canadian retroactive 'Hate Speech' laws

  • Lady flashing her tits at the Times Square portal

  • Lomez getting doxxed and turning out to be handsome, but also Jewish

  • Milei singing in a superhero costume

  • Eurovision being even more Satanic and odd than usual

  • Lizzo at the Met gala looking like a chicken nugget and being physically carried around by white attendants

  • GME and AMC popped 100% again for some reason

  • JK Rowling might get arrested for calling a man a man

  • Literally just pick a topic that's not obtuse guys. We're all collectively losing the reason to visit.

  • -15

I've been meaning to write another update on AI but not sure if anyone still cares.

Yes, please.

Your posts are the main thing bringing me back to the site. Too bad you didn't drop your new twitter/substack.

Literally the only reason I still come here.

Your posts are great. They're too advanced for to interact with beyond upvoting or AAQCing, but I love reading them.

Sure. I stopped reading Zvi because his ratio of important information to naked doomposting has gotten too tiresome to parse but I try to keep up with AI happenings outside my degenerate bubble.

I really look forward to Zvi’s AI roundups every week. It’s easy to just skim for the relevant bits and ignore the rest.

You're not wrong, but I feel like his posts started out as pure massive infodumps, then he occasionally started providing his opinions, they subtly but gradually went up in preachiness, and at some point I felt that my main focus became filtering the doom from his posts instead of actually absorbing the content of said posts. Personally I checked out around last year's unrest at OpenAI when I habitually opened his Substack and laid my eyes on a headline reading "You win, or we all die". I think that event legitimately mindbroke him to some extent.

Same. The number of intelligent and informed people who believe we're going to be dead in 15 years due to AI is very depressing. Not because I believe it but because I think they're completely deluded and I don't think I'm capable of breaking Yud's grip on their brains.

You're not going to be dead, you're just going to be extensively controlled.

Dead - that's a few more decades after that. After all when people are no longer indispensable to have around but optional and there are far more useful and reliable laborers and tame thinkers, why'd the people with power keep the riff-raff without power around ?

Some nice memes will be cooked up, screws will be tightened, perhaps a few pandemics. All just do cut down on liabilities.

I definately care. Your AI posts are excellent.

I was going to make one on the Ukraine war, but most of my post would be whining about how hard it is to get good sources and how much I have to rely on either aggregators of semi-unreliable sources (ISW ,War mapper, Task and Purpose youtube) extremely unreliable sources (NYT, Huffpo, ect.) or the primary sources themselves (when you're citing the Russian catgirls telegram you know you're in bad shape)

I could describe how bad my sources are in the post and describe what is probably true from what may or may not be true but that would be a pretty bad post

Honestly, a deep dive into your struggles sourcing reliable information sounds even more interesting to me than an update on the strategic situation. I would definitely read it.

I would still read it.

Be the change you wish to see in the world, I guess.

Personally I find legal discussions to be the most 'valuable' I have no domain knowledge but they seem to consistently get a good back and forth and express opinions that just do not seem to exist outside of this place. Often I wonder if TheMotte could be a better lawyer for Trump than whoever he has hired based on the strength of their arguments. Trumps legal troubles as presented by 99.99% of the internet, he is clearly guilty and wrong and the case against him is iron clad, Trumps legal troubles as presented here, absurd novel legal theory that requires literal time travel to be a crime.

Just, love reading it.

It's interesting how many different types we have here. As a contrast, being a non-American I find the legal discussion to be almost entirely insular and irrelevant, whereas the discussion of social and economic dynamics is universal.

Agreed. There are two core constituencies to the Motte: culture-war connoisseurs and policy wonks.

The former are interested in understanding the culture war, predicting it, if not outright waging it. Topics are valued accordingly. This group tends to like sweeping theories, too. There is a lot of demand for sensemaking. Here’s how ivermectin got right-coded. Here’s why such-and-such is memetically fit.

On the other hand, wonks put a narrow topic first. Any CW angle is secondary. A lot of our most narrative authors in this category, even if they don’t care about a specific policy, because the style is so different. You get a long narrative about life in Japan or a Civil War battle without any expectation of, I dunno, solving TFR.

Law, especially political law, bridges the gap, so it’s usually good stuff.

Hmm... I always felt like the most salient divide was between current events posters and everyone else. Concrete vs abstract, basically. People in both camps could be interested in the culture war to a greater or lesser degree, but the current events camp is more likely to be interested in "let's analyze the most likely outcomes of Greg Abbott's border policy" types of CW talk and the theory building camp is more interested in "let's uncover the general mechanism by which Ivermectin became coded as right-wing".

I think a big reason there aren't posts about these topics is because a lot of people don't want to discuss events in-themselves, they want to connect it to some larger thesis or narrative. For some of these it's not clear what the narrative is. For others it's a narrative that this site has beaten the dead horse of. The latter issue is compounded by the site having a relatively small user base. I think a solid majority of users are people who have been here forever and in some sense "seen it all" so they aren't interested in re-hashing debates that seem futile (this certainly describes me).

It's like we have become allergic to actual news or something.

RIP Bare Link Repository.

Don't you know? We're not allowed to talk about the news, we have to post about it.

This place is best when it is a link aggregator in addition to a discussion site. Unfortunately the mods don't seem to agree with me, and seem to resent it being used as an aggregator.

Hm. Proposal: bare links thread exists, but it's only one bare link per day, first come first served? Small-N bare links per day, first come first served? I don't know how easy bot integration would be so it doesn't weigh down the server.

We're forbidden to talk about anything unless someone writes a 40k word essay about it first. Simple as.

@Primaprimaprima is correct. Write about a paragraph of original thought and you are fine.

I wrote this up thread:

In general I suggest three things for a decent start at a top level post:

  1. Context. What are you talking about. Helpful to have links or quotes, but not always necessary. "There have been a slew of campus protests about the Israel war lately. They were the worst at [this university] (link to news story)."
  2. Interpretation and analysis. Add some of your own interpretation and analysis to these events. "The protests seem to have been treated a bit differently from other protests in recent memory, like the BLM. Police have been called up to break up some of the protests. Donors have threatened to remove funding from universities. Etc"
  3. Opinion. "The protests seem pointless. Israel has not changed its policies at all."

You literally just need to write one paragraph. Five to six sentences. I have never seen a post that had at least one paragraph of original thought get modded for effort.

Kind of, but kind of not.

Write too little, and you get a lot of "This isn't what we like to see from a top level post" mod warnings. Write too much, and you risk showing your power level and getting a mod warning for "Boo outgroup" or "consensus building". In fact, posting virtually any topical bit of news often gets you a "boo outgroup" warning, because it's often your outgroup behaving badly, in a public attention seeking manner, driving national policy, that is the news worth talking about.

I wrote this up thread

In general I suggest three things for a decent start at a top level post:

  1. Context. What are you talking about. Helpful to have links or quotes, but not always necessary. "There have been a slew of campus protests about the Israel war lately. They were the worst at [this university] (link to news story)."
  2. Interpretation and analysis. Add some of your own interpretation and analysis to these events. "The protests seem to have been treated a bit differently from other protests in recent memory, like the BLM. Police have been called up to break up some of the protests. Donors have threatened to remove funding from universities. Etc"
  3. Opinion. "The protests seem pointless. Israel has not changed its policies at all."

There is a definite problem where people skip step 2. And part 3 sounds like "The protestors seem evil, it would be nice if they were shot." Yes that sort of post will get you dinged for boo outgroup.

You keep posting this, but you haven't really added a solution to the problem of missing posts. You can say it's not that hard, but that's belied by evidence that most people don't bother to make posts, and that many of them perceive the barrier to entry to be too high. Saying that they're mistaken, it's really not that high, isn't going to change anyone's mind.

that many of them perceive the barrier to entry to be too high.

Exactly! Its a perception thing, so I am trying to clear it up by changing that perception. WhiningCoil and others are making it more difficult by adding to the false perception. You of course are asking them to stop posting these bad interpretations of the rules, and thus discouraging posting, right?

Saying that they're mistaken, it's really not that high, isn't going to change anyone's mind.

There are different barriers to posting. One of those barriers is being afraid that the mods won't like your post and you'll get banned or in trouble. I can lower that barrier. I can't lower other barriers like "I don't know what to post about", or "I don't really want to talk about anything".

Write too little, and you get a lot of "This isn't what we like to see from a top level post" mod warnings.

Warnings for effort on top level posts are handed out pretty rarely. I made this very short post about Iran's attack on Israel (over half of it was copy-pasted quotes) and I didn't get modded for that. The bar is pretty low.

In fact, posting virtually any topical bit of news often gets you a "boo outgroup" warning

Going through last week's top level posts, the Eurovision post didn't get modded, the Mike Cernovich post didn't get modded, the summary of Trump's trials didn't get modded, the post about DEI at MIT didn't get modded... there are lots of topical posts that don't get modded.

I definitely don't agree with all the mod decisions here. But it's also false to claim that the mods are paralyzing all discussion, because it's just a fact that the vast majority of posts don't get modded.

Warnings for effort on top level posts are handed out pretty rarely.

That's because people avoid making them. Some weeks we go 12 hours without any posts on the new thread at all.

I would like to use this place as the comment section of the articles I find daily (realclearpolitics, for one I don't mind mentioning). But I know better by now.

A lot of the posters here are just very bad communicators who are good at writing gigantic, very low entropy walls of text.[1]

Those walls of text have become semi-required by the moderators[2].

Thus: normal posters don’t post about any of these (interesting almost always fruitful for discussion) topics because they don’t want to get banned. I suspect that most of the interesting people have already left the party, but unfortunately I don’t know where went.

[1]: If you are into cryptocurrency, watch the episode of Alexi Friedman with the founder of Cardano on it. He talks for like 6 hours and says NOTHING. This is a good example of what a 2024 motte poster does in most top level posts.

[2]: Yes cjet as you say every single time anybody complains about this topic there is no length requirement. And yet: yes there is.

very low entropy walls of text

You mean high entropy as in terrible signal to noise ratio?

Information-theoretic entropy is a measurement of how 'surprising' a message is. A low-entropy wall of text is one where, once you see the first sentence or two - or the poster's name - you pretty much know what all the next ten paragraphs will be.

Maybe I’m using the term wrong? Low entropy as in: very little actual information. Something that could realistically be summarized in a sentence or two, gets expanded into a giant wall.

Entropy means disorder, randomness, chaos, and the like, so "low entropy" would refer to something that is well ordered or well structured. I think most people would interpret that in this context as something that has less "noise" compared to the "signal," since "noise" could be considered to add entropy, due to adding content without adding meaning.

I know LLMs are banned here so mods please don’t ban me for this. Here is what I get from chatGPT when I ask “what does it mean for something to be low entropy in the context of the information it contains?”

In the context of information theory, low entropy indicates that the information content is highly predictable and ordered. Entropy, a concept introduced by Claude Shannon, measures the uncertainty or randomness in a set of data. When entropy is low, the data has less randomness and is more structured, meaning that there is less information content or fewer surprises in the data.

For example, a string of repeated characters like "AAAAA" has low entropy because the next character is easily predictable. Conversely, a string of random characters like "G7d2#k9" has high entropy because the next character is unpredictable. In summary, low entropy implies high predictability and low information content.

This is what I mean. Very low information, skimmable (because it’s predictable and repetitive).

I agree that “low information density” would be a better way of phrasing this, it seems like I am using this term wrong. Thank you!

In summary, low entropy implies high predictability and low information content.

...Am I crazy, or is this the exact opposite of how the term is used in physics? Like, heat-death is a high-entropy state, right? it's also highly ordered and predictable, right? Did information theory actually flip the sign on the term?

Heat death is high information density though as a description of the state.

Maybe from an information theory perspective, non-information bits are thought of as cold or empty.

[1]: If you are into cryptocurrency, watch the episode of Alexi Friedman with the founder of Cardano on it. He talks for like 6 hours and says NOTHING. This is a good example of what a 2024 motte poster does in most top level posts.

My favorite part of that interview was him repeatedly saying "normies are too dumb to understand crypto so we can't let them use it. Also, it's very important that everyone uses crypto." He should'e had his wife's boyfriend review his notes.

[2]: Yes cjet as you say every single time anybody complains about this topic there is no length requirement. And yet: yes there is.

There is no requirement for belisarius-level textwalls. You need a paragraph of thine own for each top level post or spicy hot take. That’s a perfectly doable standard and 90% of contributions which don’t rise to it are ones we’re better off without.

Yeah, a top paragraph can be the length of one tweet - I don’t see how people can complain it’s too long. Becoming a news aggregator is a failure state for the board too.

I think it is unlikely that a fear of getting banned is very relevant to this issue. I think that people feel at least a mild incentive to upvotes a top level post where the poster clearly put in effort even if it is not particularly interesting, so most large, well formatted top level posts get at a minimum 20 upvotes and some engagement.

I think it is far more likely (I'm not projecting here honest) that people are worried about making a top level post that sits at 2 upvotes and gets no engagement, rather than a fear of being 'banned' or any other mod action. Honestly, if a modhat came along leaving the only comment saying you didn't try hard enough, ten people would suddenly come in out of nowhere to defend your post even if they would have never engaged with it otherwise.

I think it is far more likely (I'm not projecting here honest) that people are worried about making a top level post that sits at 2 upvotes and gets no engagement, rather than a fear of being 'banned' or any other mod action.

Yeah, I'd say getting modded is rare whereas having proof people aren't really interested in what you have to say is much more intimidating.

so most large, well formatted top level posts get at a minimum 20 upvotes

Actually not true! It's clear that the community favors some long posts over others, they don't just all get automatically upvoted.

I remember trying to read that post and finding it pretty impenetrable, which is also the most upvoted comment on the post. I will try to retreat back to the 'easy to read' component of 'well formatted' here to salvage my position.

[2]: Yes cjet as you say every single time anybody complains about this topic there is no length requirement. And yet: yes there is.

Does the NBA have a height requirement? It doesn't but also it does. They have a good at basketball requirement, and height helps a lot. Likewise, we have a 'decent post' requirement and length helps, but I think it helps less than height does in the NBA.

If you held my feet to the fire I could give you a minimum length requirement: three sentences. I just don't often say it, because its not really about the length its about the content. And three sentences doesn't mean you have satisfied the requirements. Its just impossible to have enough content in less than three sentences, and I don't want people pointing to this and saying "hey I wrote three sentences like you asked". Which someone will do, and I will laugh along with them and give them a temp ban for being so funny.

All you need: Context of the thing. Interpretation and analysis of the thing. An opinion on the thing. A very good concise writer could do that in three sentences. It wouldn't be a very good or interesting top level post but it would satisfy my personal "low effort" rule. Five sentences would be safer. One context sentence and then an average of two sentences for the analysis and opinion parts.

If you don't want all three of those parts then about ten sentences is good enough. But these posts tend to get dinged for other problems. An opinion only rant tends to run afoul of boo-outgroup and waging the culture war.

More or less exactly describes why I don't bother making many top level post.

@somedude @WhiningCoil @Stellula

Tagging all of you due to confusion about the low effort posting.

This is an example of a short post that meets the requirements: https://www.themotte.org/post/1002/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/212011?context=8#context

Context:

So a bit of a time ago there was a discussion here about the gender war, demographic implosion and political male-female divide in South Korea. rokmonster stated that "Seoul is the only city worth living in [there]" as self-evident fact, apparently.

Analysis:

As someone who knows little about Korea, I find this puzzling. Aren't there other large cities there?

Opinion / jumping off point for discussion

I'm sure there are. Are they really that bad? And if yes, what is "that"?

7 sentences, 73 words, 425 characters. That does not seem very long to me. It does not seem like a 40k word essay. It does not seem like a wall of text.

Will we continue to have this discussion again and again every month? It does not make our job easier when you spread inaccurate interpretations of the rules, especially overly hostile interpretations that would scare people off from posting.

I just want to throw in a quick statement of support for the current rule. The rarity of finding free discussion of controversial topics that doesn't immediately devolve into 4chan-level shitposting is the entire reason I'm here. No moderation is ever going to be perfect, but the Motte is one of the best moderated discussion forums I've ever seen. You guys really don't get enough credit for that.

Lady flashing her tits at the Times Square portal

On the Dublin side there was a guy showing photos of 9/11, another guy snorting coke, a guy showing his ass and a homeless woman raving before being taken away by police, it’ll be funny if some tit flashing is what gets remembered as the true scandal.

People don't want to talk about the war because

  1. by and large, the west is losing it because of bad procurement, industrial output and planning

  2. despite their skepticism about particulars -wokism, governance, I'm betting most people here are in favor of US hegemony and see the countries involved as somehow 'theirs' - something like the nationalist delusion. No, they aren't. The countries belong to people who have power and influence in them - and that ain't you unless you're a billionaire with an entire department of lobbyists and a prominent position in CFR etc.

  3. it's a rather gnarly affair, entirely possible there's been up to half a milion dead by now, 3/4 of that Ukrainian. I'm basing that claim on the estimates of amputees being 25-50k according to press quoting charities, and the amputee/KIA ratio being certainly somewhere between 6 (GWOT) to cca 30 (WW1).

So, it's perfectly clear why we aren't talking about it.

That’s not it at all!

The only one of those which even suggests why we’d avoid the subject is 1. I guess some people probably don’t want to talk about a losing team? But I can’t say I ever expected Ukraine to come out on top.

But I can’t say I ever expected Ukraine to come out on top.

Given the pushback I've been getting here over the last years, there's a good few people who expected it. One would think so, except it's apparent the entire military procurement sector in the West is vastly more corrupt than in Russia.

There are lots of reasons to oppose Russia/push back on (perceived) Russia partisans even if one thinks Ukraine is doomed. But you may be right if I’m typical-minding.

Interesting that you blame corruption. My intuition at the start was Russia rolling in and destroying major C&C. Maybe not on Desert Storm level, but something relatively fast. In that case, the industry of either side wouldn’t matter too much. Frankly, I assume that’s what Russia expected, too. If they’d known how much money and experience they’d lose to get this far, I would like to think it wouldn’t have happened.

But given that Ukraine didn’t shatter, and instead got this awful slog—now the production is key. And they sure can’t do it on their own dime. As critics have observed, we dumped most of our old and cheap munitions, and are struggling to spin up new production. So is this failure because of corrupt or incompetent procurement? Or were we just not expecting it to come to this?

I realize this sounds like I’m saying “nah, we’d totally win if we weren’t holding back.” Hubristic, right? But there really is a lack of political will. Our politicians even fought over sending the old stuff to this small, faraway, non-NATO country. If that level of intervention was unpopular, is it so surprising that we haven’t kept up in shell production?

Russians believed defenses were going to crumble because enough people are bribed. They targetted anti-air installations etc but iirc weren't even hitting command posts and definitely not blowing up soldiers in barracks. It was no 'Shock & Awe'.

That changed after it became clear it'll go on. They blew up almost the entire 'International Legion' base, with the exception of one building where both missiles were intercepted and/or failed. It wasn't executed perfectly, the missiles didn't arrive within a brief window so most people got out..

I would like to think it wouldn’t have happened.

Nah. It'd have happened, the difference is they'd not have underestimated it. Russia is a state born in warfare. They're not blessed by protective seas like Americans or Britain. And after WW2, you can hardly blame them wanting to keep neutral states on their border.

Sure, these days you can always just nuke the invaders after they cross the border, and it's not even a big deal contamination wise. But the idea is not instinctively attractive to most people.

So is this failure because of corrupt or incompetent procurement? Or were we just not expecting it to come to this?

Recent funny factoid I learned. The weapon Lancet was inspired with, Israeli Hero-120 was sold to Hungary for $350k per suicide drone. Russian Lancets were on export for $35k. Actual price to build them is almost certainly <$10k even in low series production.

Switchblade 600, an equivalent weapon, costs $120k. These are all electric drones without thermal sights with comparable ranges.

Is this efficiency? Consider anti-missiles and anti-air. US warships defend themselves with some fancy IR seeker missile costing $900k . Russian equivalent has very similar flight characteristics, no seeker, probably cost $10k a pop. It's just a two stage missile with a proximity fuze and command guidance / detonation. Especially at sea, autonomous missile makes little sense. Target can't dip behind terrain.

Russian lancets paired with Orlan-10s are insane cost-effective weapons that are the biggest organic capability that Russians have used to truly wreck Ukrainians, and the Russians deserve every bit of credit for developing an insanely capable platform themselves.

Without getting into too much details, small form factor UAVs are where the west is absolutely fucking smoked. Russia can spit out Orlans at 1/10 the price of a worthless Switchblade, not a single fucker uses the meme level Black Hornet or any other US platform, and thats not even getting into what China is doing. A boeing insitu is like a cool buck and a half, but Chinese WZ are literally 20% of the price and even that is considered way too expensive for the Chinese. Commercial off the shelf parts bought off Taobao are allowing Ukraine to offset Russias immense artillery advantage, and trust me that the Chinese are way fucking ahead of the USA on that. I talked in other threads about air supremacy and I stand by that, but even a hundred F35s can't take out a thousand AV500, let alone 10k jury rigged Mavic 2 EAs.

The gutting of European manufacturing in favor of precision strike capabilities made sense in 2000 to mid 2010s, but the game has changed with small form factor drones. Every unit knows it, but fucking Rheinmetall is still dicking around with maaaybe one composite cabled tether UAV for their new panther while China is integrating drones at 2:1 ratio per combatant. I used to think the only thing that will stop China is their retarded focus on grenade launchers at the squad level, but the fucking drone swarms spat out of flatbed trucks is a goddamn nightmare worse than skynet.

Orlan-10 is more of a long-range long endurance spotter, it has an ICE engine. Lancets are getting targeting data from small electric recon drones with 2-3 hour endurance. We know Orlans can be acquired by stingers- there's even footage of it getting shot down from drone's POV. Electric drones are probably way less conspicuous in IR.

, but the fucking drone swarms spat out of flatbed trucks is a goddamn nightmare worse than skynet.

If you spot the flatbed trucks before they release the drones, you can hit them with PGMs or cluster MLRS strikes. Electric drone range is quite limited..

At this point, anyone who isn't developing autonomous defense drone swarms isn't gonna make it. With AI and terrain following, getting rid of lots of drones is going to be very hard next to impossible. Filling the air with flak fragments gets you only so far. It's strictly line of sight.

Guess what's line of sight: 2 mach ATGMs like the Russians have. So anything exposed is toast. There's also the obvious counterplays, such as drones marking the spot the flak is firing from, sending info back to MLRS and then you have 500 cluster bomblets on that location within a 30 seconds, ideally. Or, you know, a tank firing a HE round from 10 km away.

focus on grenade launchers at the squad level,

I mean, grenade launchers integrated with drone spotting are stuff of nightmares. Unless you're running like a lunatic or under hard cover, you're gonna get blown up. What's wrong there?

Modern warfare makes me wish for a nuclear winter. People getting blown up from 50 km away because a drone spots them, or getting hunted down by FPVs.. bad. It's bleak and only ever going to get more bleak.

I talked in other threads about air supremacy and I stand by that, but even a hundred F35s can't take out a thousand AV500, let alone 10k jury rigged Mavic 2 EAs.

I dunno, but doesn't F-35 have radar guided missiles that can take out the AV500 from outside its range. I presume it can carry some short range IR missiles, right? Are these helis designed to be really cheap ? Can you truly build a cheap helicotper ?

Orlans are the 2-3 hour recon drone you are talking about. Small quads have only a 20 to 30 minute lifespan, meaning they have a range of about 10km (and realistically we are looking at 4-5km) at best, compared with the 40km+ with Orlan and Lancet. The orlan is low observation, deep recon capable, with laser guidance. IR is really shit, the 640x480 sensors don't have digital zoom and drones don't show up on 2015 era IR optics till about 2km away at best, because they are a flat profile from front. Nafo gloats about how its all COTS shit but orlan is damn good and cheap for what it does. Deep recon LO with lasing means the lancets dont need their own onboard guidance, only initial telemetry. The last meter probability kill with Orlan 30 is way above artillery spam and way cheaper than slinging kinzhals or the retarded pitchup rocket spam.

GBAD is basically toast once it lights up against a drone swarm becsuse of dynamic targeting, you dont even need mounted ATGM when the drone is itself the munition. Chinese drone swarms are fire-and-forget with ranges of 30km as they are tube launched winged UAVs, not quadcopters, so the outer radius for them to.be spotted is really large. Trucks are also hard to spot far behind the frontline, as we see the brits use blowpipes off trucks and the HIMARs trucks took like 2 years before they got hit, so killing launchers before they shoot off the payload is really tough.

I dunno, but doesn't F-35 have radar guided missiles that can take out the AV500 from outside its range

Of course, but the AV500 is dirt fucking cheap. Around 40-120k per unit, including munitions, and thats with CAIC markup. China can churn these out by the hundreds per week, and there is no way for NATO air superiority conops to just put enough metal in the air to counter that. Until Skynex, Iron Beam or Loyal Wingman come up at scale, an AV500 or loitering munition swarm of 40 munitions per salvo can get through even a russian Pantsir+Shilka screen. Iron Beam is the best option to kill swarms though, and Rafael says they are a year from deploying it at scale, but you still need to spam Iron Beam units. About 4 seconds on target to kill, and pretty short range.

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FWIW, this isn't why I don't talk about Ukraine. I don't talk about it because it seems like a morass of propaganda to the point where I haven't been willing to try to do the work to understand what's closer to the truth. Maybe I'm wrong and it's actually quite legible if I were to dig in, but right now, it doesn't seem like a good tradeoff for me.

Yes, it's a morass of propaganda. Some things, such as social media casualty counts done by the other side using an open methodology allow us to glimpses of how things are. E.g.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/07/10/bring-out-your-dead

Other things - like pre-war information etc also.

And then you've got the amputee numbers:

https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-war-amputees-wounded-soldiers-e2c5c47ea4b8326d980e630d3df87b77

upwards of 20k. There's another article saying 'around 50k' by some amputee charity person.

That's 200k dead if we assume Ukraine is slightly worse at casualty care than US in GWOT. (~6 KIA per amputee).

Posts about the war in Ukraine consistently get some of the most engagement out of all top level posts. We've had at least two posts in the past month about Ukraine that generated lots of discussion.

There doesn't necessarily need to be a new post about Ukraine every week because most weeks, nothing newsworthy happens.

I, for one, would love to hear from Atlanticists and Putinists as well what they think the endgame is here. No, really. Like, what?

Endgame ?

This or next year, Ukraine folds and accepts territorial loss and permanent neutrality (Finlandisation- no NATO, no EU membership). NATO is ran by idiots simply wasn't able to provide the armaments necessary for victory. Might be some fun (meaning FPVs into NATO political leaders) out of this when Ukrainians with their half million dead are going to be given no rebuilding assistance [1].

EU (specifically the centrist fraction of EU parties) is mulling a union-wide draft law, supposedly voluntary at the start, so recruiting at most 10% of age groups. So there might be remilitarization. It's required in the mid run anyway because America is likely going to go down.

Russia reforms their military procurement in preparation for WW3 (new defense minister looks up to the task) and will probably take over the Baltics out of pure vengeance when US hegemony collapses following the China war. It's nice real estate, but I guess most the young people there will flee and Russian hydrocarbon funds will go to pay for those pensions too.

[1]

"On the question of NATO's role in the reconstruction of Ukraine after the war. The first thing I will say is that first of all, you need to ensure that Ukraine prevails. Because unless Ukraine prevails, there's nothing to reconstruct in a free and independent Ukraine.

We must be able to help Ukraine prevail because it's important for Ukrainians. But also because every day this war drags on, of course, the more destruction and the more expensive, the more resource demanding it will be to do reconstruction afterwards."

I'm not an Atlanticist or a Putinist BUT I have played Paradox games, which gives me an intimate understanding of Putin's motivations and goals.

The endgame is to peel off those sections of Ukraine that Russia thinks are valuable/pro-Russian, and to neutralize what's left of Ukraine, rendering them a permanent non-threat and pliable diplomatically and economically. Russia appears to be (currently) attempting to reach this goal by conducting a war of annihilation, attriting Ukraine's combat personnel and equipment until it either accepts Russia's terms or is unable to resist Russia's de facto imposition of them.

Russia's war against Finland is a good historical example to look towards.

Attempting to reach this goal by conducting a war of annihilation

I'm going to get accused of being a "Putinist" surely, but Russia is not waging a war of annihilation. They are conspicuously avoiding civilian casualties.

As usual, the worst victims of war are the men actually doing the fighting, whose lives are treated as worthless by basically everyone.

I'm going to get accused of being a "Putinist" surely, but Russia is not waging a war of annihilation.

Well, except that they're both losing much of their youth to combat and emigration.

By "war of annihilation" I (perhaps unclearly) meant "destroying all their hardware and killing all their personnel to reduce their ability to fight" not "killing all their civilians."

I think the word you were looking for was "attrition".

Yes, I used that word in explaining what I meant. :)

That makes sense. It's definitely a war of attrition.

A guy in Kiev blews himself and the recruiter guy wrestling with him up with a grenade. It was a homemade one, looks like both survived.

At this point, I don't understand why Ukrainians simply refuse to move when 'recruited'. Unless they start killing them, getting a beating is preferable to getting blown up, and they can't maim recruits because that'd defeat the entire point.

Off the top of my head, I suspect that Ukraine will break eventually, Putin will take over some or all of the country but be unable to enforce particularly high levels of order or get his industrial base high enough for further invasions. Ukraine will be remembered as a pointless tragedy / failure of western will / pyrrhic victory depending on factional allegiance.

Regarding "Genocide" in the middle east. The Palestinians are so notoriously terrible that none of their Muslim neighbors will take them in. When they have allowed large numbers of Palestinian refugees in they have attempted coups and caused mass social unrest.

The whole situation is terrible for the current children and the people that have been brought up in slums with no real education or hope, just indoctrination and hate. Palestine is the Haiti of the Middle East, a failed "state" that produces nothing but chaos and violence. Who's fault is that? I would say at this point it doesn't matter. It is what it is.

The whole conflict has become a blood feud over the last 80 years, "both sides" have committed untold atrocities, it does not seem like accommodation can be found. The Arab Muslims have been trying to destroy the Jewish settlers since they started gathering in the area and forming militias, the problem for them is, the Jews kept winning, and appear to be doing so again.

Any one of the surrounding Arab countries that claim to hate Israel could offer to take them in and end this once and for all, but they are a useful meat shield and prop to help with their goal of wreaking Israel, plus, as I mentioned above, they are terrible guests.

I really wish there just wasn't any oil in the middle east and we not hear about it for decades on end on all news outlets. I'm burnt out on the whole region, forgive my incoming uncouth distain, but all those shithole fanatically religious countries deserve each other after failing to evolve (or devolving) for so long.

The influencer looked hot. Didn’t mind it. I’m sure the Irish didn’t mind it either….

I can work on a post about new compelling evidence implicating Israel in the anthrax attacks of 2001 if that interests anyone

Yes, please.

That sounds interesting. Those anthrax attacks were very odd and in retrospect does seem like an intelligence op. Let’s see what you have.

Everybody talks about Building 7, but the anthrax attacks are the thing that really cannot be explained with anything other than a conspiracy. The fact they happened only a week after 9/11 also suggests a connection between these events which is currently denied by the official investigation. It seems likely that the conspirators who organized the Anthrax attacks were also in the loop for 9/11. The timing is impossible otherwise.

@coffee_enjoyer, that would be cool, I don't have more than basic knowledge of those events and would be interested to know more.

The "connection" is that someone saw the news and thought "That's an idea. Terrorism!"

Yeah that's supposed to be the official explanation, right?

And then within a week planned and carried out a bio-weapons attack? And the Israelis claimed that an Iraqi spy supplied a 9/11 hijacker with anthrax at a meeting in Prague- total fiction. Does not add up at all.

Different people want vastly different things out of TheMotte.

A few times over the years I've seen people share their lists of their all time favorite Motteposters. Some names are expected, other names make me go "...wait, what? That guy? Why?". Sometimes people will list someone who I find to be totally uninteresting and whose posts I skip over as a matter of course, because they write about topics that aren't relevant to me. This doesn't mean that I or them have bad taste. It just means we have different interests and we want different things out of TheMotte.

For my part, I'm not particularly interested in a play-by-play of current events, unless the event is particularly earth-shattering, or the post has a novel theoretical take. I don't really care that Canada introduced new hate speech laws for example, but if you have a new argument I've never heard before for why hate speech laws are actually a good thing, then that could be a post worth reading.

As usual, you are the forum. If people aren't writing the kinds of posts you want to read, then you should write more of the kinds of posts that you want to read.

EDIT: Why do you think the response to your post about abortion was abysmal? I think the response was pretty good. It generated a decent amount of engagement for a top level post and it prompted some interesting replies from @RandomRanger and @self_made_human about transhumanism, so, job well done, mission accomplished.

A few times over the years I've seen people share their lists of their all time favorite Motteposters. Some names are expected, other names make me go "...wait, what? That guy? Why?".

Now I'm interested: who are your top three? (And, anyone else who reads this, yours too.)

I'll go with:

@faul_sname (often does detailed or technical work to figure out what's actually true, which we can always use more of, while still staying easy to read)

@Soriek (for those international posts, once upon a time)

And, ehh, I'll throw in @hydroacetylene because of the high volume of (generally decent) comments and being on the more wholesome Christian side of the forum.

@2rafa, @FarNearEverywhere, @FCfromSSC

@mcjunker and @AshLael come to mind. Others who made the jump to /r/theschism.

/r/theschism

Checking their current discussion thread, the posts for this month are about the role of community and tradition in conservatism, the declining usage of "social construct" language in political debates, furry aesthetics, whether we can really designate some societies as more advanced than others...

Damn, I've been cheerleading for TheMotte this whole thread, but I have to admit they have us beat! I'd love for our CW thread to look like that.

but I have to admit they have us beat!

Well, except in volume. But yeah, if they all moved here, I assume they'd be downvoted heavily, which is a shame.

@DaseindustriesLtd, @self_made_human, and... I'd be tempted to give it to @HlynkaCG if he were still here, but he's not, so, I'll give it to @2rafa.

I don't know if there are any metrics but from what I can tell most conversations and activities happen on the weekend (The number of comments seems to routinely double after Friday from my casual observation). Probably because people have jobs and family and stuff. What a surprise, people with interesting and intelligent takes have real world responsibilities... the Motte isn't a place you can make a living off so, of course, you're not going to have people here full-time to discuss all topics that could be discussed. If you aren't going to engage in the comments you could just wait for the monthly quality posts and save yourself the time and just read those instead. You're going to have more lively conversations on X because of the simple fact of X having a much much larger userbase, to the point where people can make a living just talking about political stuff. It also has a lot of low-take, crap opinions on there.

Personally, I do think there is some merit to having some low-level fruit for discussion, which is why I made a post about the recent viral man versus bear question. In the grand scheme of things this viral question has almost no real-world consequences compared to say half the items on your list but why did that post generate a good amount of discussion and a lot of these you just posted about hasn't (yet)? Because I made a post about the topic. I also took some effort to put a spin to it, did a little bit of research, gave my opinion, posed a question, and gave multiple angles of possible discussion points, and it got a decent amount of conversations going. The more information you give on the topic, the more chance there is something in it that someone might be interested in to respond to.

In general, the posts I've seen get the most responses have one of these things going for them:

  1. There is an opinion/fact that someone disagrees with so they post to argue against it - essentially a controversial opinion. These are the ones that routinely get the deepest conversations because it's an argument/debate. It's also the most difficult to engage in with long term.
  2. There is something in the post that triggers a related topic with a similar line of thinking or a different way to analyze that particular topic
  3. There is a new perspective that is so profound to a reader that they feel obliged to respond to it.
  4. There is a question for people to respond to.

Also there are some guidelines about culture war posts:

Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

I don't think it takes that much work - just post a link to the article with the topic you want to discuss, quote a few relevant lines, then give your opinion and ask a question. If you want a particular type of discussion/insight put in more effort so there is something for people to respond to. What particular about these topics do you want to hear people's take on? High-level discussion requires some effort, otherwise, how would the responses be any different than the average comment on the news site, Reddit, YouTube, X, or any other discussion platform with low-level reactionary comments?

Personally, I'm not interested in philosophical musings, anything about AI, or ratsphere inside-baseball (isuch as anything about Aella), all of which make up a substantial number of each week's postings. I'd love to see more focus on current events to balance the Washington Post and Reddit shoving the woke perspective down people's throats.

How about King Charles's mildly satanic painting?

https://thenightly.com.au/world/uk/reactions-to-king-charles-new-portrait-range-from-bad-to-worse-as-the-king-unveils-first-art-since-coronation-c-14676935

I don't know why you'd make yourself look like you're bathed in blood or wreathed in unholy flame. Rand Al Thor can pull it off but he is the Dragon Reborn, greatest hero of two ages. When King Charles takes a cursed sa'angreal sword from an ancient fortress and faces down the forces of darkness, then he can appropriate fantasy hero aesthetics for official portraits.

I've argued in the past that there is a certain malign or subversive element in some elite art, consider people like Cleon Peterson or the Pope's rather unusual looking sculpture. Apparently that has all this special Christian symbolism - I would've thought that a cross would be more appropriate but what do I know?

There's also this (somewhat nsfw?) painting of a child getting throatfucked which somebody vandalized, much to the displeasure of Macron: https://x.com/Censor__This/status/1658938149844791300/photo/1

I could add in the CIA plot to spread abstract and modern art, though it's only relevant in the broader sense that art is political and related to politics. I don't have much of a thesis aside from 'a lot of modern art is quite disturbing and indicative of cultural trends towards shock value and dubious tolerance'. There's a time and a place for everything and sometimes that place is sites like bestgore, liveleaks or the artistic equivalent of AO3 rather than art galleries, in my mind.

the Pope's rather unusual looking sculpture

Holy Fuck that's fucking metal as shit. Fuckin' Deus Vult, Bro.

As a tradcath (perhaps I need to downgrade myself to aspiring tradcath, thanks, @hydroacetylene) it's important to me that people realize the deep history of badassery present in religious art.

The 1970s Peter-Paul-and-Mary-ization of American Churches and hymns really did far too much to turn the aesthetics fake and gay.

and indicative of cultural trends towards shock value and dubious tolerance

Yeah, tolerance of intentionally ugly and sub-par art. It’s like the glorification of the idea of edge is all that matters rather than actually trying to draw an audience in to engage with the edge by creating a composition that’s visually appealing; the shock value doesn’t come for free. Here, though… this piece is just going through the motions of offensiveness. It’s just another shitty cosplay and nothing of value would be lost without it.

Damn. I’ve seen a couple memes with this painting, and now I know why.

While this portrait is obviously isn't a traditional one, I think it's a great artistic work. You don't need to interpret red as blood, it can be symbol of England, or royalty. To me the main message of the painting is the otherness of Charles, him being more than a human, looking almost like a lovecraftian herald.

Apparently that has all this special Christian symbolism

"Jesus went to Hell" is not really particularly hard to understand.

I keep my phone in black-and-white, so I thought the painting was in green and they were going for a Fisher King sort of aesthetic. With the butterfly it might have worked.

I can't imagine who could have thought that this was a good idea. I suppose they were going for red == regal.

TIL that carbonite comes in strawberry flavor.

That's what I thought too, at least the carbonite reference. It looks as though he's embedded in some substance.

It's like we have become allergic to actual news or something.

Sort of. There's a few reasons for it:

  • Seen it all before.
  • The intro to the thread explicitly discourages "look at what these people did" posts
  • After nearly a decade of commenting on this sort of stuff, I don't think there's a lot more to be said about any of it.

After nearly a decade of commenting on this sort of stuff, I don't think there's a lot more to be said about any of it.

True. Which is why the people who comment about HBD are also the people who discovered it like last Tuesday and have all of the same bad takes.

Then random people on the other side pop up saying "my dude, all the races have the same IQ, it's science", apparently having missed the entire conversion or feigning ignorance.

It's Eternal September.

So it gets boring. At first HBD felt exciting because it was "forbidden" knowledge. Now, the HBD thesis seems so obvious and settled that it's not really worth debating. But every September more young rationalists will have to make that journey again, walking over well-worn footsteps.

Most of those things are discussed pretty regularly here. Others are just uninteresting. Another dissident right personage turns out to be Jewish? At this stage it would be surprising if someone prominent on the DR wasn’t Jewish (Sailer DNA test reveal when). Big price rises in the US, particularly in service (stuff like fast food etc) are just due to labor shortage related pay increases for the poorest workers since 2020, they’re not hugely interesting. Day traders being retarded again? As I recall the statistics showing, something like 95-99% of them lose money in the long term. Eurovision being gay and weird, really? (Also this was literally a discussion last week).

If you have a good idea, make a top-level comment.

At this stage it would be surprising if someone prominent on the DR wasn’t Jewish (Sailer DNA test reveal when).

I know that this is the talking point making the rounds, but the fact is that the DR is self-aware of a large contingent of Jewish so-called "Dissidents" who may profess interest in HBD and "The West" or whatever, but otherwise ignore or actively countersignal the Jewish Question as critiqued from the Dissident Right.

Everybody on the "DR" who ignores or countersignals the Jewish Question is automatically coded as Jewish by the real DR. That's a model with a high sensitivity and lower specificity, but a high-sensitivity model is what you need to countersignal subversives. Many of these figures orbit around the BAP sphere.

The fact is, racist Jews aren't dissidents, just like white racist liberals are not dissidents. They aren't wolves in sheep's clothing, they are sheep in wolve's clothing.

The whole "the entire DR is secretly Jews" thing is not true, but "the anons who claim to be DR because they poast racists memes, but they countersignal the JQ from the rest of the DR, those are all secretly Jewish" is true enough of the time to be a useful model here. The DR is very aware of what is going on here, nobody is surprised.

Why are racist Jews not part of the dissident right? Unless you make the Jewish Question the single thing that matters? This is rather laughable to me.

I don't care about the Jewish Question. Sure, Jews are overrepresented. Sure, there's probably some mild level of in-group preference or elitism somewhere, although much of the overrepresentation is probably just due to high IQ combined with whatever cultural factors lead to more ambition. But, really, why should I care? Whatever's happening is surely not at the scale that it would have much of a concrete effect on my life. I've liked most of the Jews I've met.

(And since you say that everyone who ignores or countersignals the Jewish Question is automatically coded as Jewish, no, I'm not Jewish, though for full disclosure, I think one of my grandparents said I may have had trace levels of Jewish ancestry.)

It’s SecureSignals. The JQ has always been his single thing that matters.

Yeah, that's true. It's just a foreign way of looking at the world to me, I guess.

But, really, why should I care?

For the same reason Jews are concerned with anti-Semitism from non-Jews.

"Dissident Right" describes an inertia towards White identity politics. The old Alt-right had pie-in-the-sky ideas like "The Ethnostate" or stopping immigration, which are never going to happen, and the DR is now more grounded in the emergence of white people learning to behave like minorities among potentially racially-hostile neighbors. I'll even be the first to admit that the essence of the "DR" is basically to get white people to behave more like Jews in certain respects. Look at how important outspoken opposition to antisemitism is to Jewish identity. It's not laughable for white people to also adopt an outspoken opposition those who engage in group-motivated political and cultural hostility.

And if you were to apply even a modicum of the consternation Jews have towards antisemitism from the perspective of a fledgling pro-white movement, it is incredibly obvious that Jewish political and cultural power is a huge obstacle towards those objectives, perhaps the largest. Jews do not want white people behaving like Jews, and they will flex enormous political, economic, and cultural power to stop it from happening. Not out of principle, it's just pure ethno-political and cultural competition.

Then you have a contingent of racist "dissidents" who deny or ignore this fact and try to steer the DR away from anti-semitic critique, but then they often turn out to be Jewish themselves.

Imagine if a gentile adopted a super-Jewish aesthetic and attracted a Jewish audience using super-Jewish memes, but then the kicker is he would countersignal Jewish opposition to anti-Semitism. He would obviously be considered a subversive, not a Jew.

I was following your thought process until this:

Jews do not want white people behaving like Jews, and they will flex enormous political, economic, and cultural power to stop it from happening.

This is a wild statement that you need to proportionally support with citations.

This is a wild statement that you need to proportionally support with citations.

It's not wild at all to say that Jews proudly identify as Jewish and frequently engage in pro-Jewish activism, and frequently engage in very public activism against anti-Semitism, including very well-funded campaigns using every avenue of the propaganda apparatus. And then, at the same time, they engage in advocacy against pro-White activism and consider it "hateful" for someone to identify with being white with any of the same feelings they invoke to promote and celebrate Jewish solidarity.

Imagine if White people behaved like Jews, considered themselves a Chosen diaspora among the world, engaged in intense activism for their ethnic interest and used every avenue to criticize, censor, suppress Jewish identity and activism. Jews do not want White people behaving like Jews.

This is all dependent on the Venn Diagram that constitutes "White People" being what you say it is, and not what other people (including Jews) say it is.

You want White People to identify as a single group - Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, Iberians, Gauls, Germanics, Caucasuses, etc. However, Jews who might occupy or overlap with any of those circles should definitely not be considered part of them. So yes, it's not surprising that when you say "Jews can identify as Jews, and Germans can identify as Germans but also as White, but Jews definitely should not identify as either German or White (because they are the enemy and we hate them)," Jews treat your ideologically-crafted category as a weapon to be used against them, because that's exactly what it is.

"Why, oh why, do the Jews so strongly resist us trying to form an identity movement specifically dedicated to making war against The Jew?" asks the identify movement specifically dedicated to making war against The Jew.

White identity is ideologically-crafted, as opposed to, say, Jewish identity? All identity is ideologically-crafted, and identity is always weaponized against political and cultural opposition.

Do Jews weaponize Jewish identity against white people? The answer to that question is obviously- yes, they do. So you accept the reality of this situation, but you think it's justified because of the "gas chambers" or something. The result is, in your view, White people can't have an identity because they would use it to resist or fight back.

Jewish identity is highly exclusionary. I am not Jewish, I am a gentile or goy. They even have special words to denote me as part of the outgroup. So there's nothing wrong with a Jew telling me I am not one of them, but it's wrong for me to tell a Jew he is not one of us?

My own view on the matter is that European Jews are white, or at least they can become white by forgoing their Jewish identity to the same extent that white people have let go of their former European national allegiances. Some Jews indeed take that path. But for many others they insist on retaining a Jewish identity and special ethnic regard, which they often hold above regard for white people. Forgive me for identifying them as part of my outgroup in no more salacious a manner than they also regard me as part of their outgroup.

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Thanks for expanding that. I see where you're coming from.

"Dissident Right" describes an inertia towards White identity politics.

Ah, I guess you might have a narrower opinion of what Dissident Right refers to than I did, which would explain some of the difference, depending, I suppose, on what exactly you mean by white identity politics. I would have considered HBD-ish views, combined with other edginess (e.g. takes on gender), to be sufficient to be dissident right, even without advocating for a group racial identity.

Personally, I suppose I'm pro-white in the sense that I don't think that we deserve the enmity coming our way, but I do think that the more important unit of opposition isn't really about race but about politics. (In the US. South Africa, for example, may be another story.) I don't think it's healthy to intensify racial division (and Hanania's probably right when he argues that the main impulse behind our current racial tensions is due to black racial grievance), as that leads to more societal dysfunction. That is, I'm in favor of defensive action against anti-white discrimination. I'm neutral about positive racial identity, as a celebration of ancestry, past etc, though I think national pride is probably a healthier way to go about that, if anything. But I'm not in favor of making that anywhere near the key component of identity, nor having tribal-ish racial preferences.

It's not laughable for white people to also adopt an outspoken opposition those who engage in group-motivated political and cultural hostility.

Isn't this already the baseline for politics on the right? Hence the opposition to affirmative action, etc. Can you name a single conservative thinker who is pro-affirmative action?

Again, it would be healthier if this were adopted by being pro-meritocracy, rather than pro-white, although in this case for different reasons. Looking at things in terms of attempting to capture spoils leads to socialism (as the frame is around getting people to give me stuff), whereas we need more of the American focus on excellence and dynamism.

it is incredibly obvious that Jewish political and cultural power is a huge obstacle towards those objectives, perhaps the largest.

Maybe? Although you might rather point to the left in general. But I don't know that I agree with your vision of how society and identity should be shaped anyway, so I suppose I don't see this as a terrible thing.

Jews do not want white people behaving like Jews, and they will flex enormous political, economic, and cultural power to stop it from happening.

When you're obviously racist against Jews, it doesn't surprise me that they're opposed to such behavior. I imagine some events, oh, 80 years ago or so might have had an influence on how they approach such decisions. Do you really think they should be cheering you on as you try to form lines of in-group preference and out-group prejudice with them on the outside?

But in any case, I think your final analogy breaks down somewhat because plenty of people identify as both Jewish and white (indeed, before the recent introduction of the Middle East/North Africa census category, that was the government-approved way for Jews to identify). So then, people having a super-white aesthetic and attracting a white audience using super-white memes could still be Jewish and be doing what they're doing authentically, whereas that isn't possible in your analogy.

Can you name a single conservative thinker who is pro-affirmative action?

No, I can't, and that's the point.

So to summarize:

  • It's not about race, it's about politics.
  • You are against affirmative action in favor of "race-blind meritocracy"
  • You are opposed to being "pro-white" in favor of being "pro-meritocracy"
  • You are in favor of national over racial identity
  • You are an favor of American focus on "dynamism" rather than racial issues

So where's the dissidence? That's just standard boomer conservative. Maybe you believe in race and IQ and hate women, that doesn't make you a dissident it basically just makes you a Republican. A lot of Republicans have low-key or implicit HBD views and similar "edgy" views on gender.

Hence, the sheep in wolves' clothing. These people act all based and red-pilled with edgy memes or greek statue avatars, but at the end of the day they basically just support republican talking points, are highly defensive of Jews, and don't really care for white identity politics.

Do you really think they should be cheering you on as you try to form lines of in-group preference and out-group prejudice with them on the outside?

Yes, actually, I do think they should have fostered a white identity rather than incessantly critiqued and subverted it, but that ship had sailed. White Americans gave fealty to Jews in the 20th century, none was given in return. That's how it's supposed to work, you can't demand fealty and give none in return. But now I just accept they are a political opposition, which is why this is an important issue, and when anon "dissidents" deny that it's an important issue it's a strong tell they are secretly Jewish.

It's not about race, it's about politics.

Well, not primarily, at least.

You are against affirmative action in favor of "race-blind meritocracy"

Of course. I am in favor of prosperity. This is how best to get it. (And in favor of fairness, and of good racial relations. This gives that, too.)

You are opposed to being "pro-white" in favor of being "pro-meritocracy"

Mostly? I'm certainly pro-white in that I want white people to do well, that I think we've been the most successful race on earth to date, and think that there are some domains where we may need more advocacy. I'm not in favor of engaging in a process of racial competition and spoils-dividing instead of prosperity/wealth-producing.

You are in favor of national over racial identity

Mostly. But not out of any special affinity for national identity, but because it gives something to unite around. And not strictly opposed to racial identity either, just heavily cautious.

The proper location for identity is in Jesus Christ, of course.

You are an favor of American focus on "dynamism" rather than racial issues

Yes, I want success, not squabbling.

So where's the dissidence? That's just standard boomer conservative. Maybe you believe in race and IQ and hate women, that doesn't make you a dissident it basically just makes you a Republican. A lot of Republicans have low-key or implicit HBD views and similar "edgy" views on gender.

To disappoint you further, I like women. Sure, you've convinced me that racial views don't suffice to make me especially dissident; I suppose, now, I'd rather not be dissident, that it is wrong and counterproductive.

Who are the jews in the dissident right?

Hence, the sheep in wolves' clothing. These people act all based and red-pilled with edgy memes or greek statue avatars, but at the end of the day they basically just support republican talking points, are highly defensive of Jews, and don't really care for white identity politics.

Okay, then, good.

Yes, actually, I do think they should have fostered a white identity rather than incessantly critiqued and subverted it, but that ship had sailed. White Americans gave fealty to Jews in the 20th century, none was given in return. That's how it's supposed to work, you can't demand fealty and give none in return.

Do you support Jews having a Jewish identity? Is that good?

But now I just accept they are a political opposition, which is why this is an important issue, and when anon "dissidents" deny that it's an important issue it's a strong tell they are secretly Jewish.

If by political opposition, you mean across party lines, this is not necessary. Jews are trending conservative as secular Jews lose their Judaism and religious Jews are bearing more children, and after 10/7, many Jews are more wary of the left than before.

and when anon "dissidents" deny that it's an important issue it's a strong tell they are secretly Jewish.

A strong tell? Really?

But many internet rightists who do address the JQ or are Holocaust deniers are also Jewish. Are they the "true DR"?

There's Ron Unz, also Murray Rothbard, otherwise it just doesn't seem to be the case that Jews are really overrepresented within the anti-Semitic DR. That's not to say these people don't exist. It's to say whenever there's a DR figure who turns out to secretly be Jewish, it's always someone who either ignored the issue or tried to direct the DR writ-large from engaging with it.

My issue with his post was all those issues seem beaten like a dead horse already.

For the DR it’s funny but Milei claims he’s a little Jewish. And seems to have all but officially converted.

I have accepted my Jewish overlords. May they be kind to me.

Day traders being retarded again? As I recall the statistics showing, something like 95-99% of them lose money in the long term.

I consider parting fools from their money to be a service to humanity because that way they are less able to shit up the rest of society with it (e.g. imagine if we didn't just hand every impressionable 17 year old tens of thousands in student loans upon asking; the higher education system would be in a lot better shape today because the incentives wouldn't be so misaligned).

Go right ahead. What's interesting about those topics, where can we hear more about them, and what are your opinions on them?

The last time I made a post it was a nice thoughtful thing about how Trump should change his mind and leave abortion 'to the states' rather than try to come up with a cut-off date

Speaking plainly, the response was abysmal, and, it turned out Trump did what I thought he should anyway. The time spent writing the post had negative value.

But just for good faith efforts sake on point #1 here is our sectary of state playing guitar in Ukraine while the war rages:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/us/politics/blinken-ukraine-guitar.html

I would think this was incredibly humiliating to our people to have our representative act like this, but for the fact we don't really have 'a people' anymore and this is much less humiliating than Biden shaking hands with a ghost or Mitch McConnell having what quite sincerely appeared to be yet another stroke when asked about running for re-election

#2 genocide in Middle East, here is a video of Israeli's destroying aid meant for the millions of people they've made homeless, and are now pushing out of their squalid refugee camps. https://youtube.com/watch?v=3wfQtRgcZ_I

It is unthinkable to me that any adult with full cognitive faculties could think these people were the good guys chosen by God. But, it is not a surprise to me at this point that millions of seemingly adult people are actually functionally children who only do as they're told. The irony that the bible could not be more explicit that Christ-denying Jews were not grafted into the Tree of the Covenant is just the cherry on top

#3 There are 10's of thousands of people crossing the border illegally every day in every western country and nobody seems to care beyond how we're going to raise more taxes to pay for them. Our already destroyed cities are having their dicks ground into the dirt. The tallest highrise in St Louis just sold for like $3 million bucks. Denver is literally broke from it https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/denver-only-has-enough-money-to-fund-migrants-for-two-more-months/ar-BB1hRFYT?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=54d5d35986d04a1ca96ee78f18d7de36&ei=17 (that story was from 3 months ago)

Yes, these takes do come across as fairly "boo outgroup." I can see them not being accepted as top level posts. Perhaps you would enjoy Kiwi Farms?

The irony that the bible could not be more explicit that Christ-denying Jews were not grafted into the Tree of the Covenant is just the cherry on top

This is news to me; in fact I’ve never heard the term “Tree of the Covenant” before. Can you please cite chapter and verse?

Not to answer for @VinoVeritas I suspect he's referring to Romans 11.

What are branches? Some are broken off, others grafted on.

Christ denying jews being outside the covenant is news to you?

Fair enough, I did know that the New Testament claims very explicitly that there is no salvation outside Jesus Christ.

Thanks for the cite.

It's worth noting that the way that this is put in some places (e.g. follow the logic of Gal. 3:10-14) would also imply that those in the old testament would also need Jesus, which makes that particular datum a little less demonstrative.

That said, the conclusion is still correct: people cannot be saved without faith in Christ, and the church is the continuation of Israel as God's people on earth.

"What religious practices do you have to follow to not go to hell? -- Trick question, you are all going to hell unless you accept Christ, who will be born in another few hundred years or so" seems like the kind of shit the old testament god would pull, right.

Well, presumably something more nebulous than that: perhaps trust that God would forgive them, by provision of a substitute, and promises of future blessing.

The settlers are far right religious extremist so I don’t really see much surprising in the video at all. They’re a small portion of the country, but a fairly large part of the Likud Party base. Personally, I think most of the Gaza overkill wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the settlers. They’ve been fairly open about wanting to settle in Gaza, in fact I’ll have to find the interview again but one of the settler leaders was a woman who works in real estate, and obviously stands to make a lot of money once Gaza is open for settlement. Bibi doesn’t go after them because they’re his base.

It is unthinkable to me that any adult with full cognitive faculties could think these people were the good guys chosen by God.

Why? God is ineffable. If he picks some nation as his chosen and lets them get away with treating their neighbors as waste, who are you to say that you are right and God is wrong. He reportedly fucked with the Egyptians, alternating between sending additional plagues and hardening the heart of their pharaoh so that he wouldn't just give up and let the Jews go. Now he's hardening the resolve of the Palestinians, so they don't stop dreaming about their state from the sea to the river, and the Israeli Jews can have an excuse to grind them into dust.

None of what you've written here makes a particularly insightful point except to suggest "Here are things I believe are crazy, how about it?" And the not-veiled implication that only idiots would disagree with you--which hardly invites discussion. There are a great number of older threads worth reading on this site without shit-stirring for the sake of it.

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