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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   18681 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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JD Vance was on the Joe Rogan podcast, and references Scott's Gay Rites are Civil Rites. It happens at 23:45. As TracingWoodgrains says, the Eye of Sauron approaches.

I apologize if I can't add much more insight. Are there going to be left wing smear articles explaining the evil Rationalists that have the ear of JD Vance? Or is there so much chaos right now around the election that this will get passed over, widely unremarked upon?

Threats to our community aside, it's pretty awesome that a VP candidate referenced one of Scott's articles.

Edit: Andy Ngo is boosting this part of the interview, focusing on the trans children discussion, without commenting on the article.

General JD/Rogan comment:

When he heard Trump was shot he took his kids home from mini-golf, loaded his guns and stood sentry at his house. Fuck yeah.

People are denying this happened or saying that if it did happen it's disqualifying. In the absence of influence, I thought it sounded like a reasonable step to take. But does it sound like he's too quick to jump to conclusions and is too paranoid?

When Trump was shot, I found out from The Motte. I read the first sentence and ran and told my husband, "Trump was shot!" He said, "Is it serious?" I replied, "At his age, any shooting is serious."

Turns out, that guess was not correct. A graze in the ear did not set Trump back very far. But I can understand seeing that initial footage, not knowing if he was rushed to a hospital or anything else, and assuming Trump could have been seriously wounded. But I'm not running for VP.

I liked the story. I think it demonstrates a proper, masculine bias towards action and protection. But is that how it will come across to everyone?

Mildly interesting: Tweet from a guy who saw JD Vance rush out of the mini golf course at the time

He says it's actually the Russians funding the German Green party, not even hedging or speculating.

Greens were pushing for no fossil fuels, of which Russia is the default European supplier. Greens were pushing for continued war in Ukraine. These are policies that benefit the US.

Surely he knows this. I can't think of it as anything other than a blatantly dishonest narrative in the usual vein of 'Europeans are incompetent, not pulling their own weight, Russians doing with them as they please, they need a savior, that's us (again!)'. Genuinely infuriating. Sobering, too.

He wasn’t saying they were the sole source of funding.

Moreover, he made the point that the Greens attacked nuclear while trying to replace with wind and solar. But as a result they had a base power problem so turned to natural gas thereby benefiting Russia.

It isn’t quite the Baptist and Bootleggers combo but similar.

Can you explain how the green policy helped the US?

Am I completely wrong in my guess that the Greens don't want nuclear weapons stationed on German soil?

Degrowth Greens are getting absolutely crazy, easily 10x as radical as any far-right European party. More radical than Putin too.

A (biased) source on what one German Greens thought leader wants to see, noting that it isn't all Greens but a formidable brand of Green thought: https://www.eugyppius.com/p/in-which-a-leading-green-intellectual

New construction banned, train travel rationed, 50 sqm living space per person, meat rationed, end of banking (because money is basically worthless since everything is rationed)... This from an apparently respectable political voice, editor of a newspaper, who basically wants to destroy the Western way of life. These people have influence in the real world, their fellow compatriots get into power and start shutting down nuclear plants for no good reason.

It's in the UK too. Some imbeciles passed a law mandating net zero emissions by 2050. A think tank gave serious thought as to what that would actually look like if we take the laws and climate scientists seriously:

https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/api/core/bitstreams/75916920-51f6-4f9c-ade5-52cbf55d5e73/content

TLDR, they conclude that technology is too unreliable, the only path to success is crushing austerity. No air travel for 30 years. No shipping for 30 years. 40% less heating. No meat.

What I find most revealing is the mindset of 'well we don't really have any known methods to get CO2 out of the atmosphere besides planting trees and there's not much space for more trees so let's take a low-risk path to absolute zero, using only known technologies'. And then the low-risk path they propose is shooting yourself in the foot with a 50 cal. No shipping and no air travel ON AN ISLAND? Famine is locked in - they add that 'fertilizer use is greatly reduced'. This mindset is absolutely toxic.

The correct solution to climate change is directly controlling the temperature by releasing sulfate aerosols in the upper atmosphere. At a cost of $5-20 billion per year we can hold temperatures in place or reduce them, even as CO2 levels rise. These people want to destroy industrial civilization over a glorified nothingburger.

And I think Russia might be trying to assist them. These Degrowth Greens can be viewed as purely destructive agents, Stalin's mythic wreckers that were deliberately harming the economy by submitting false instructions or damaging machinery. If you want to induce chaos and dysfunction in Europe, help them out! They might shut down a nuclear plant or commit some other blunder and cause right-thinking people to panic-buy more natural gas or oil (which in a global market will increase Russian income). Russia probably doesn't have much ability to help them and doesn't spend much time doing so but I think it's part of their agenda.

Suffice to say that with no air travel and no shipping, the VDV could probably take over Britain by themselves. Inducing stupidity and self-sabotage in your rivals is usually a good move, even if it hurts you occasionally. Just because Russia exports fossil fuels, it doesn't mean they don't want division and incompetence in their targets. Nuclear power is still the primary threat to their energy exports IMO. Nuclear France produces fewer emissions than 'Green' Germany' per $ of GDP.

My understanding was that the German Green party's core policy objective was to see Germany divest itself of locally produced coal and nuclear power in favor of what was sold as "renewables" on paper but was natural gas supplied by Russia in actual practice.

I also recall reading something back in 2019 (when there was all that talk about Germany wasnt pulling its weight in NATO was in news) about how the German left in general and the Greens in particular was rife with ex-Soviet/DDR apparatchiks and thier kids.

The invasion of Ukraine may have been an inflection point that flipped a bunch of incentives, but it seems to me that the Green Party being a bunch of watermelons (outwardly Green but Reds/Communists under the skin) and the Russians quietly looking to sow political dissent amongs thier nieghbors isn't a crazy conspiracy theory as much as it is a solid prior.

It’s entirely compatible with active measures or just general FUD tactics for a state to fund groups that have multiple ideological goals at odds with their own. And that’s without considering the possibility of miscalculations; the US funded bin Laden for decades, after all.

Isn’t Russian funding for the German Green Party actually literally true, just as it is for most everyone else on a political fringe somewhere?

If the Russians were funding the Greens it would be because they wanted to push for shutting down coal and nuclear power plants which would increase Germany's reliance on natural gas as a way to fill the gap when the baseload becomes more unreliable.

The weird thing is I thought there was a thing about the German secret service infiltrating the Green party due to Russian ties. The problem is I don't know when this happened. In my head this must have happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union because of my age but also in my head my thoughts were 'I hate the Greens. I hate the Communists. But you really shouldn't be doing this in a democracy'. [weirdly enough the USA did the same thing to the Republican party 16 year later]. Also, if I search for the terms 'scandal over germany secret service green party' in Google I can't find it so maybe I'm hallucintating. I asked chat gpt and apparently it happened in 2000 which make sense to me but maybe this is chat gpt hallucinating as well. Chat GPT wouldn't supply me with links and I can't find anything on google in the front page.

this is the closest i could find to what i remember: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/german-spies-target-left-wing-party but that doesn't mention Russia or the Green party. i could have misremembered and thought it was the green party when it was a leftist party.

The greens were hardly pushing against fossil fuels (partly because they overlap with pro-coal labor unions). They were campaigning against nuclear and for vast investments in solar, both of which cripple the German grid and help Russia sell more gas at higher prices in the winter.

I'm not excusing German greens by saying they were just rational foreign agents (because I think they're legitimately insane), but Russian sponsorship of their activism goes back to the anti-nuclear campaigns by communist front orgs in the 60s. Today's senior greens literally had KGB handlers when they were young radicals.

Think you've missed a trick here. The russians did fund the German green movement, and mostly because of the dynamics re imports and exports of energy. If you look at the Petra Kelly/Gert Bastian situation for example, the whole thing glows as bright as the sun. And it doesn't take rocket science to work out why. If you're pro green energy, at least at the time with 90s/00s level tech, then you're going to need (even if you don't acknowledge it) some stable energy source to make up the down periods. And at the time gas was by far the best option other than nuclear. You essentially had a domestic production of nuclear/coal which could be demonised as dirty and possibly even evil. The anti domestic side didn't say "and we'd like russian gas to smooth out the gaps" but this was an inevitability.

Basically yes, Vance is trivially correct that the German greens were funded by the Russians, and for relatively sensible reasons.

Alright, out with it: Which one of you motherfuckers is J.D. Vance? It’s pretty strange to know that the future Vice President of the United States of America may have personally read my shitposts.

I don't think anyone here wouldn't be able to remember Scott's name.

The head canon is that, being a Mottizen, he didn't want to directly attract the eye of Sauron. The article in question is also from July 2019, so unless Thiel-aligned people are dredging Scott's backlog, it's possible he read it at the time of publishing, prior to the injection of Trump and Thiel's connections, which suggests rat-adjacency.

I think there is a very real chance that he knew very well who wrote the article but he didn't mention the name on purpose so as to not bring unwanted focus on Scott who he knew wouldn't want it.

Yeah, that was my thought. Either that, or he didn't want to get too associated with Scott for his own reasons. But the way he made a point of saying he didn't know who wrote it then deliberately fumbling over the title struck me as slightly affected.

Vance follows moldbug, and I believe also BAP on twitter, just for reference.

It's flattering to think that he's involved in the community, but I expect most of these guys read articles that go viral among the VC set. Think this is how most of Scott's famous articles came to be widely known, rather than through dedicated fans.

I don't care if it's not real though because it would be fucking hilarious if it was.

Gay Rites Are Civil Rites is not anywhere near one of his most viral or famous articles, though, is it? That's what makes me think the most like he might not just have found the article in passing.

The funniest answer would be someone like Deisach or Hlynka from the old site.

Or maybe @FiveHourMarathon here, come to think of it, has anyone heard from @JTarrou recently?

Hlynka

Oh shit wasn't Hlynka a southerner and former military member?

My headcannon is now officially that Vance is Hlynka. Too bad he's banned so won't be able to tell me otherwise.

Which one of you motherfuckers

Found JD Vance's grandma.

The motte is the more extreme version of slatestarcodex/astralcodexten. Vance is not based enough to hang out here. He probably hangs out with the normies in the slatestarcodex comments or that other weird vbulletin forum. What you would really hope is Vance is that guy that keeps posting on the reddit split off asking where everyone else is.

Vance is pretty based, and you don’t have to be that based to post here, anyways. I’m convinced that the progressive freak out about him is an instinctive reaction to him hiding his power level.

If you had to be based to post here, I would never have managed to register!

If Vance really does read Curtis Yarvin and Bronze Age Pervert, as has been reported he does, then nothing here on The Motte would bother him much.

It's still a pretty big jump from "has read some posts by Scott" to "reads the Motte", right?

Think we just found Mr Vance

I have to say JD Vance would be my favourite pick for a president, ideal situation is Trump gets elected. Dies soon after (of old age), and JD gets a few years to right the ship. It might be the only way we get someone who is rationalist-adjacent into such a influential position.

It feels wrong to wish death on somebody who has done (almost) nothing (truly) wrong.

It's funny, usually expressing that you hope someone dies at the age of 79 in bed surrounded by loving grandkids is generally a blessing... unless the person is 78.

I’m not wishing it to happen, but saying that would be the best future possible from a political perspective

Agreed. If I could be guaranteed that Trump would be dead within 6 months and Vance would take over, I'd actually consider giving them money.

I might have said this before, but there's no way old age is the death Trump would choose. He'd want a death so dramatic Vance would have to commission a 400' gold statue of him on top of Mt Rushmore, standing above all the other presidents in a heroic pose. He'd want a new Trump House built over the smouldering crater where the White House used to be.
More than anything he'd want good television

I think it's Major Kong riding the nuclear missile in Dr Strangelove or nothing.

I'm trying to come up with a joke about Trump choosing to go out in a "hyperbolic" chamber/suicide pod, but I can't quite get there. "We really have the best pods, don't we, folks? This isn't just ending, it's ending with a flair, with class."

Hyperbaric is like hyperbolic but with more bathos.

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