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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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[Apologies in advance for bringing up an old story, but I couldn't find any record of discussion of it]

Deep downthread in the election megathread @Folamh3 linked to a wonderful article you might all enjoy, but that's really beside the point. I want to talk about something mentioned within the article, namely a commercial. I'll copy the article's description here:

Jennyfer Hatch, thirty-­seven, was euthanized in October 2022, having given up hope of resolving the chronic pain caused by Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. She told friends that she was “falling through the cracks,” unable to access the state support she needed in order to go on living. Her desperate choice to die was glorified in a glossy TV commercial titled “All Is Beauty,” produced by the Canadian fashion retailer Simons. “Last breaths are sacred,” says Hatch in the commercial, released on the day after her death.

Here is the commercial in question that seems to have been almost entirely scrubbed from Youtube.. This kicked off a series of only vaguely connected thoughts I lack the ability to synthesize, but perhaps you all can put it together more successfully than me.

Burgers?

Of course there's a certain element of "Burgers?" to a commercial about suicide for an upscale department store. But I feel a few other elements of the commercial are curious to me. Take this screenshot from the ad, does this not look like a scene from Midsommar? Why are all the participants women? Why are they all White? This seems to frame the euthanasia as some sort of White feminist religious ritual, possibly connected with nature worship.

Suicide Girls

I'll note that the euthanized woman was described as having Ehlers Danlos. Anyone that has casually explored "SickTok" in the past few years will have surely heard of this condition. While I'm sure it's a real disease in some cases, there is undeniably a trend among young women sharing this concept with each other. I actually first encountered this disease when exploring the twitter of a porn model (so sue me) at least a dozen or more years ago. It struck me at the time as an obviously invented attention-seeking condition that allowed her to post hospital selfies every few weeks and be continually weak and bedridden with no obvious externally visible symptoms.

My second encounter with this disease was my cousin. My cousin is a few years younger than me and fifteen years ago was a sufferer of gluten sensitivity of one form or another (when it was popular for everyone to be suffering from it). About three years ago I heard she was now suffering from Ehlers Danlos.

It strikes me as telling I first encountered this in a porn model as I now consider them to be sort of canaries-in-the-coalmine for female neuroses and social messaging, obviously being more susceptible than most to these things.

Appropriately I just saw this going viral on twitter yesterday with the infamous Taylor Lorenz catastrophizing about her long COVID

Antinatalism, Environmentalism, Suicidality and Leftism

Here I'm just going to wave my hands in the general direction of The Socialist Phenomenon with its lengthy sections relating the running theme of suicide pervading socialist movements (Christian and otherwise) throughout human history. If you ever visit the /r/antinatalism subreddit you'll notice the distinctly leftist and often environmentalist concerns of its posts. In contrast, as pessimistic and addicted-to-doomposting as the far right can be I've never detected a major suicidal or antinatalist current on /pol/ for example. As an aside, see the movie First Reformed, it's horrible.

So what to make of this? I don't know exactly how to piece it together but there is some common through-line that connects feminism, White people, desire to be ill, environmentalism and suicide. Just wanted to hear whatever thoughts this commercial might spark in you all, as I don't really know how to connect the dots myself in a satisfactory way. Apologies if this is not coherent or focused enough for a top-level post.

I wonder if this has anything to do with slave morality as described by Scott: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean

If Scott is correct that slave morality ultimately derives from Christianity, then perhaps the phenomena you're describing (pathological guilt, scrupulosity, fetishization of victimhood) are common to any culture in which Christianity is or was the dominant ideology for some sufficiently long period of time. This would have predictable effects: maybe if we compare countries which were forcibly converted to Christianity within the last two hundred years vs. countries which have been Christian for over five hundred years, we would see higher support for antinatalism, higher support for radical environmentalism, higher incidence of "contested illnesses" like Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic Lyme disease and similar.

First Reformed was brilliant.

The through-line is the conception of guilt and the utility of victimhood.

Only white people are sincerely interested in whether they are or are not 'guilty', whether their actions are 'just' in some universal sense. The Mongols don't torture themselves over Genghis Khan, the Turks take the attitude of 'it never happened and it was good that it did, Armenians are scum' when it comes to their misdeeds. Arabs will complain about the West but happily smash the Kurds. They don't think there was anything wrong with going around raiding and brutally enslaving southern Europeans, they haven't apologized for it. There's a reason Slav and Slave sound so similar - Turkey is sublimely indifferent to their role in the slave trade. Only whites think they have some need to correct for past wrongs they've inflicted on other peoples. So in our culture being wronged can be helpful, victimhood can be a useful status.

By and large, all other populations are immersed in Schmittian friend-enemy logic. It's still pretty hard to coax apologies and guilt out of Japan and they've been heavily immersed in white culture and norms for many years now. And before we messed with Japan, they were totally Schmitt-pilled, they were the archetypal 'white people are terrible oppressors and we're liberators (We shall do worse)' faction.

Environmentalism is another angle of being guilty, this time in crimes against the planet.

Antinatalism is an expression of an overwhelming sense of guilt. 'Being ill' is a way of being a victim and getting sympathy from others.

Feminism requires a sense of guilt and restraint in men to have much relevance. Afghan women might be super-feminist, that doesn't change their conditions. It's a little like anti-colonialism in that it requires the occupying power to feel ashamed and hold back their full power. The British could have (and did) smash colonial uprisings in Malaya and elsewhere - even then they reserved their full energy for killing Germans. If the British decided that they weren't going to give up India or Africa, there's nothing their subjects could've done against the enormous fleets, bomber wings, toxic gas and tanks (foreign intervention complicates this but it would mainly be an expression of broader white opinion)... But instead there were 'winds of change'.

Likewise, if men wanted it, feminism would be gone tomorrow. And so we see feminism has its fullest expression in white countries, followed by countries heavily influenced by whites.

It would be interesting to see diagnoses of munchausen syndrome over time against the backdrop of the rise of social media. It wouldn't surprise me if this syndrome was also somehow related to the need to identify as a minority for certain types of people.

There's also been a fair bit of speculation that munchausen by proxy could be contributing to the increased prevalence of trans and non-binary identification of children by their parents.

I'm sick > attention is kind of wired into us all to a greater or lesser degree since we were babies. Not sure what the answer is, but trying to take the attention away is a bit like putting the genie back into the bottle at this stage.

I actually first encountered this disease when exploring the twitter of a porn model (so sue me) at least a dozen or more years ago.

Was it Larkin Love?

ETA: FWIW, I did know someone online about as long ago, who did have EDS, and she was wheelchair-bound, and she could do that eyebrow-raising hyperextension it apparently causes.

Holy shit, it wasn’t So this goes even deeper than I imagined. How many are there?

Edit: Upon reflection the naming of “Suicide Girls” is just too wonderful and appropriate to my post. God smiles on me

some common through-line that connects feminism, White people, desire to be ill, environmentalism and suicide

Christian folkways, especially of the New England Puritan kind? It's all there: the meddling, purity spirals and slave morality, the ethnic association, the extending circles of care, the glorification of restraint, acts of penitence and self-denial. Christian devotional hypochondria has a long tradition, and if you go further back there is plenty of antinatalism (monks) and suicide-adjacent practices (martyrs, anchorites) only tempered by a prohibition against explicit suicide.

Non-Extremely Online person here; is “SickTok” at all related to Spoonerspoonie-ism? (It’s all a lack of pies, I tell you)

The alt-lite is not alright

tl;dr Nick Fuentes and Lauren Southern are at points where their careers look far less promising now, some words on that

The alt lite was a catch-all term of sorts at a point during the peak of the alt-right which came crashing down post-Charlotessville in 2017. The alt-lite included people who would wilfully ignore the idea of Western identitarianism on the basis of ethnicity and support every other position or offshoots around it. So the kinda folks who would talk about "Western Civilization", "Western values" whilst being more tolerant of the actual alt-right than neocons. The prime example of an alt-lite figure being milo, others included Mike Cernovich, Lauren Southern, and Lauren Chen to name a few. There are two people who I will focus on today, both were not explicitly alt-right, in fact were known for fighting with the alt-right.

Nick Fuentes for now being made into a caricature of what the average person thinks is an alt-righter and Lauren Southern who unlike the other members of the alt-lite or alt-right forgot to become a fed, allegedly.

Nick is the leader of a paleoconservative movement named America First which is defined by these values which can be summed as retvrn to 1950s if you want a briefer version. He began streaming around 2015 and was his views crystallised around 2017 where he would argue with people in and around the internet bloodsport. He has been caught with trans pornography opened on his browswer a few times alongside texts and interactions with trans girls. This is well known among his former allies and was brought to light by chris brunet recently in a series of rants against him. This was further compounded by the recent leaks of streamer Destiny being caught on camera sucking a guy off. Destiny is also our bridge to the other character at play here. Again the person in the leaks is obviously not Nick but his previous acts of cozying upto Catboy Kami, watching trans porn, being a literal incel etc dont help his case at all.

Lauren Southern was a big alt-lite figure, she recently worked with Tenet Media which was taking money from Russia, the people working also included Tim Pool though the primary media person involved with the financial side was another alt-lite Canadian Lauren, Lauren Chen. Lauren Southern was down, she had been divorced from her Asian husband who she had a kid with, said husband also turned out to be a literal fed. She was doing fairly well until her hiatus. She made a comeback after her hiatus and it went badly on both personal and professional levels. For starters, she was summoned alongside Lauren Chen and testified in person. The most interesting reaction towards this was by Richard Spencer who like Milo has been outed as being a fed in public court documents. If the threat of jail time is not enough, she also wrecked whatever goodwill she had by having had an affair with the same man Nick Fuentes was being rumored with, Destiny. The leaks are painful to read.

I bring these incidents up not to gossip about two people. People yearn for ideals to strive towards, heroes of sorts. Those studying music look up to Mozart rightfully and would be visibly disgusted upon finding out about his scat fetish accusations. E celebs are considerably dumber and likely worse people than Mozart. Both Lauren and Nick are people who played a game of Motte and Bailey, Nick far more than Lauren, both have had run-ins with the government (Nick was an agitator during jan 6 who was on a no fly list but never tried, whilst people who followed his orders were, go figure) and are terrible people in their personal lives.

The "online right" is being allowed to torch people slightly on its left and it seems to be working. The consequences of being an e-celeb are not for the faint-hearted, most of them end up hiding their issues well. It is also a good reminder as to why putting the weight of your entire "movement" on one man is risky. Nick during 2019 effectively made Turning Point USA shift their opinions slightly to the right after constant harassment via his followers in college campuses during Charlie Kirks speaking tours, his low-status behavior ultimately came through. Marx despite being outed as a person with multiple character flaws did not dent marxism very much as ultimately his ideas were enough to the point where people did champion them in the 20th century. America First lacks any sort of intellectual rigor is simply MAGA but how bad faith actors want you think it is.

I wanted to write at length about the crashing and burning of various e celebs from the post gamergate era yet there is not much to be gained from it. Most if not all of them only served as introductions to the various factions of "the right". The recurring themes were fairly apparent, being an online personality will eventually cause real world harm as you care about what others think online, many people actively run gay ops just to screw you over. Political actions have always had consequences, lowering the barrier to entry does not shield you from them, you won't get crushed by a dictator for being a dissenter but you will get hurt and see people you call "normies" doing better in life, which still hurts a lot. A lust for validation thwarts your internal psyche too. Nick for instance really is not all that different from the alt right and is by all accounts far less aware of his own religious beliefs than atheist Richard Spencer, in some ways he succeeded in hiding his similarities to other identitarians long enough by being fine with current American demographics but his position is built on shaky grounds given birth rates as of this year. Lauren who publicly talked about family values at the time ended up having affairs with many on the right if you go by the words of her ex-colleagues and was cheating on her husband with a streamer. Both of these people would have been better off had they never turned to the internet for validation.

I heard of Nick Fuentes, and only barely saw scattered video with Lauren Southern. She was young, cute, and over reacted to everything. I remember she went to some protest in the UK in 2014-2015ish, and started screaming for her life the moment things got mildly impolite by UK standards.

But it is remarkable the intellectual shredder e-celebrity is. For the longest time I attempted to have a carefully curated diet of center left and center right media. Maybe a skosh further right than left. Over time every center left person I enjoyed "drifted" right and wound up, if not endorsing Trump, screaming from the rooftops that the Democrats were not the lesser of two evils. Many straight up lost their mind.

I enjoyed Tim Pool doing on location reporting. Now he has a doomsday bunker in West Virginia and just does lame news reaction podcast. I enjoyed Crowder for ostensibly being a topical comedy show. His incessant need to center himself as a victim in every story, talk about himself over his guest, and act like he was filming in a doomsday bunker in Texas pushed it beyond all watchability. I enjoyed Dave Rubin circa 2014ish as a reasonable center left voice, and sometime around 2017 he went full "Trump is the answer to all things", which was just repetitive and boring. I don't know if he got a doomsday bunker in Florida. Once upon a time I enjoyed the Breaking Points team, Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball. Saagar brought a Realpolitik perspective to the chaos of the Trump campaign and then admin, and Krystal was able to criticize Trump's policies without lapsing into Trump tourette syndrome where every segment begins with the verbal ticks of "racist, sexist, xenophobic". Saagar is hanging in there, but Krystal has lapsed into far worse verbal ticks, just haphazardly throwing out "convicted felon, Arnold Palmer's dick, Elon Musk, island of trash" no matter the topic at hand. The show borders on unwatchable.

Joe Rogan is still keeping it real. Although he does have a doomsday bunker in Austin... I've been enjoying Triggernometry, but this election pushed them firmly from centrist to "The Democrats are not fit for purpose", almost their exact words. I don't think you are allowed to have a doomsday bunker in the UK, so I look forward to them emigrating somewhere that does. I've enjoyed Bridget Phetasy, and I'd hope someone with her sort of lived experience proves a bit more resilient than your run of the mill 20 something e-celebrity. I hope her sobriety is rock solid though.

I guess if I've noticed a trend, it's that reasonable centrist condemn the DNC as the greatest threat to America, go insane, and buy doomsday bunkers. I'm not really aware of a single centrist that drifted left versus right. Which more or less matches those charts we see of how insanely far left the DNC has gone.

Yeah, the 'reasonable centrist' or 'sane rightie' niche seems to eat people's personalities alive. Mentally, you probably get pulled in so many directions that eventually you'll suffer a break in some direction or other. Every person you mentioned is somebody that I enjoyed listening to at some point or another, but over time lost the qualities that actually made the stand out as notable.

ShoeOnHead seems to have avoided the worst possible outcomes.

There would seem to be lots of people who might qualify as "center-left" nowadays that haven't drifted right. They are perhaps more willing to share heterodox takes today than in the bad old days.

Some examples: Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, Noah Smith, etc...

I haven't seen it personally, but I could see how one would become captured by his audience. Until recently, there was a shortage of any content that was not rubber-stamped by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. So posting anything with even a tinge of red was a great way to build an audience (if you didn't get canceled first). Of course, the redder your posts, the more engagement you got! And so it would be easy to drift in that direction.

In any case, I don't know why we talk about Nick Fuentes, Milo whatever his name is, or all the other obvious grifters that the terminally online seem obsessed with. It's trashy.

Explain like I am a 55 year old non-American non-4Chan non-always-online person?

I think I know who Southern Lauren is back from Gamergate (but searching her I find a video that she fled a tradwife life because of her horrible husband?), and I sometimes hear about this Destiny guy (why is it noteworthy that he is gay?), but I have no idea what he is or for what politics he has (was he some StarCraft streamer?) and Nick Fuentes seems to be some rightwingnut troll? What does it mean “to be a fed”? Is this just a diss or a really serious allegation?

I think there should be a more extensive KnowYourMeme or outOfTheLoop explanation?

Lauren Southern and Nick Fuentes are both minor celebrities (for a given definition of "celebrity") who made thier bones out of trolling the woke. While both try to paint themselves as very trad, both come fom very liberal "blue" backgrounds.

The accusation of being "a fed" comes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's known habit of using honey-pots, entrapment, and controlled opposition to target would-be dissidents/criminals. That Fuentes seems to be able to publicly advocate for an engage in illegal and anti-social behavior without suffering negative consequences has resulted in suggestions that he must at least have "friends" in FBI, or amongst the wider powers that be, if he isn't actually working for them directly.

What does it mean “to be a fed”?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

Basically that.

"I like our political advocacy group, but what if we also committed violent crimes? In fact I have some bombs. Let's start bombing." <- That person is a fed.

Destiny is a fast-talking lib who would debate anyone and everyone exept for people who talk about hbd. He routinely gets his ass handed to him by actual experts and looked silly when he debated mister metokur 8 years ago. He recently got dumped by his wife and overall you are better off not knowing him.

The term fed is used for federal agents or for people who act for federal authorities as a bargain to avoid charges. Milo and Richard both helped out various intelligence agencies and the guy Lauren Southern married was one of these people. Another term used for this is glowie, sometimes snitch and you would find plenty of examples of it being used online. This is why you have so many people telling younger dissidents to avoid anyone who is online and telling them to pick up arms for a revolution from a righ wing perspective as it is either an asset or an undercover agent.

I apologise for the lack of documentation, many here are familiar with the lingo and it was pretty late so I did not add it but will add Urban Dictionary and other links tomorrow.

The nick allegation is very serious since he was on a loudspeaker inciting people on jan 6, there are people from his audience who served jail time including his former friends like Baked Alaska, he was on the no fly list but never had to show up to courts for even a day which is wierd. Anyone who is cooperating with the agencies will never publicly say that as that is a violation of their agreement. Nick also runs or ran cozy.tv which has the info of his followers so if people think that anyone subscribed to his ideology is up to no good, you have a lot of names and personal info which people think is private afterall.

was he some StarCraft streamer?

Yes, he was, years and years and years ago. He streamed League of Legends, too, for years after leaving Starcraft. He's been doing political debate (talk-radio, basically) for quite some time and has made that his main content focus.

What does it mean “to be a fed”? Is this just a diss or a serious allegation?

"A fed" is someone working for the federal government. In this context, it's an accusation either of being a federal informant or a federal agent, most likely the former, and is an allegation being made seriously.

I wonder if we'll ever get an "FBI files" similar to the "Twitter files" when Elon aired all of Twitter's dirty laundry?

Probably not because they'll classify everything, but I really hope so.

No if they're any competent. Spook agencies have shredders for reasons.

To add some more context in right wing circles (I would also assert this) many of the most prominent "kinetic" actions of extreme right wingers seem to be full of "feds" if not majority feds. Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping both probably started with more feds than not. Similar with a lot of the Islamic terrorist plots that the FBI "foiled".

Fuentes is not alt-lite, the alt-lite is not alright because alt-right talking points are now fairly ubiquitous on X. Things like remigration and "Great Replacement" and "anti-white" are all essentially mainstream. The alt-lite doesn't have a market anymore because the alt right is going mainstream, and that was the entire purpose of the alt-lite, to try to grift on the parts of the alt-right that were congruent enough with the mainstream to not get banned.

I'm not sure if you're just gullible, but it's absolutely not Nick Fuentes in that Destiny leak. That is a claim which has been made mostly by the "Dissident Right" figures surrounding the BAP/Peter Thiel network who all hate Fuentes because Fuentes calls them out as crypto-Jewish dissemblers who adopt an Aryan Twitter aesthetic and then try to orient the Alt-Right in a pro-Israel, Kosher direction. So they have no problem lying, I guess, to hurt Fuentes in a scandal he's not involved in whatsoever.

The online DR is as fractured as ever, as someone on DR twitter yesterday made an apt comparison to Gangs of New York. But the "rumor" about Fuentes and Destiny is just a lie perpeatured by the left-wing and especially BAP factions of X, who are knowingly lying. But burning their credibility to get at Fuentes is worth it for them, I guess?

I say this as someone who doesn't like the Christian Nationalist project of Fuentes, for basically the reasons given by Richard Spencer.

doesn't like the Christian Nationalist project of Fuentes, for basically the reasons given by Richard Spencer

What are his reasons/where to read them?

Things like remigration and "Great Replacement" and "anti-white" are all essentially mainstream.

Yeah. Going mainstream as a part of the platform of people devoted to preserving American power so it can protect Israeli interests.

Musk's photo-op in Israel after he said something stupid? Him now being close advisor to Trump, the guy with a record-breaking amount of Jewish family for a non-Jew?

I'm not that happy with that term either but it does fits: it's the capable parts of the US deep state, Silicon Valley which can sell them toys and new industrialists who will want those weapons contract to keep the world safe for Israel and democracy. After all, legacy arms industry is almost completely fucked and blinkered, so if US wants a prayer of a chance to win against Chinese, they'll have to do everything right.

What more do people want? A reasonable government and a chance to bend their backs in service to a monumental, meaningful task -saving the planet from Han domination, just as their grandfathers bent their backs and took over the world so communists couldn't do it.

I'm thinking that that won't make you very happy. The Rufo-Reich. It won't make Holocaust denial socially acceptable, though it might successfully clamp down on public black dysfunction.

Most people will be pretty happy with it, I believe.

I actually think it's entirely possible that the Zionists aligned with Silicon Valley and Musk/Trump are also going to adopt a nearly-alt right stance on immigration and remigration and race writ-large. Mostly because they are seeing with their own eyes the impact of diversity on their cultural and geopolitical interests. I do expect they are going to slow down or even reverse the overt anti-white hatred. It's already happening. They are going to just hand us most of what the "alt right" has been asking for, or at least enough of a veneer to satisfy or even deradicalize people. It's one of the downsides of Trump winning, I wish this chaotic "Dissident Right" sphere had 10 more years to incubate and evolve but I think they are going to be placated by the major pivot that is going to happen away from wokeness and open borders.

It is not nick, I never claimed it was and I was and my title is iron since nick crusaded against spencer and the likes and southern is alt lite. Nick did get called an optics cuck during his Internet Bloodsport days for being against the messaging offered by the alt right but ultimately ended up becoming a political pariah anyway who drove out half his inner circle.

My issue with Fuentes is not him having trans porn on his browser and a slew of wierd texts sent to pariah doll on twitter, if you ignore the Jan 6 issues. I simply wanted to point out that e celebs end up worse due to the lust for fame as taking them down becomes a fixation point for many. Most people end up in believing in things far more than they would have had they not set out on this path in the first place. I have no issues with thiel being gay and same for fuentes or bap or mishima, its that nick has basically built this ideological purity spiral where even if he were to be only suspected of that thing, his stock falls as purity spiralling is a big part of his own "movement"

But Nick's "stock" isn't falling (if that's even true) because of purity spiraling, it's because some people who hate him are just lying about him being part of a scandal he has no relation to... that's not purity spiraling it's just a vendetta.

It is completely unclear in your post that you were aware the "rumors" are just blatantly false claims with no basis in truth. You pass them along as "rumored to be" without disclosing that you know they are false.

I'm not even opposed to punching right. I wouldn't mind seeing Nick's movement fail because I don't think Christian Nationalism is the answer for the Right. I'm in general in favor of the divisiveness to some extent, high-variance communities and hopefully everything evolves in a more constructive way. But just lying about this and then coming here and saying "there's this rumor going around!" when you know it's not true is really stupid and does make me more sympathetic to Nick relative to the people who are knowingly spreading a false claim.

Are we sure they are lying though? Both BAP and Fuentes are pretty queer-coded and, as the old saw goes, it takes one to know one.

But Nick's "stock" isn't falling (if that's even true) because of purity spiraling, it's because some people who hate him are just lying about him being part of a scandal he has no relation to... that's not purity spiraling it's just a vendetta

I’m probably going to regret asking this, but how is he not part of the scandal? I thought the whole thing was he’s been caught on video having gay sex.

Nope, that didn't happen, the leak was of Destiny and a bunch of Nick's enemies on Twitter all claimed it was him. Although they were knowingly lying. It's interesting how a scandal around Destiny was psyopped into a Nick scandal, literally every comment in the Reddit thread that hit the front page about this was about Nick even though he was uninvolved.

No, his stock has been falling since it peaked in 2019 and when people found him consuming trans porn, being there on jan 6 and being a whiny person online whose movements run out of ideas leading him to pick fights. X is now not ban hammer happy so his ideas look tame compared to what others post so a lot of his could-be followers are drawn there.

I am completely aware and will reword my post to be more chartiable but the doubts about his own orientation are very pertinent. Here is a guy who is 26, watches trans porn, hangs out with Catboy Kami, a guy whose house got raided for child porn, speaks with trans groypers. The leaked video is obviously not him but the doubts still remain, the only video of him with a girl irl is one kissing him on his cheek where he looks super awkward. The right has plenty of gay dudes. Alt hype, Thiel, BAP, Mishima etc so I have no issues with that.

I'm not even opposed to punching right. I wouldn't mind seeing Nick's movement fail because I don't think Christian Nationalism is the answer for the Right

It never was, religioisity cannot answer ethnic questions. Hinduism tried it and it ended in a disaster with the priests making new scriptures to accommodate new demographics that later led to everything vdeic being phased out

I agree that Christianity is inherently a multiethnic religion and any attempts to introduce racial supremacist ideas to it leads to heresy and perversion. But I think you may be conflating Christian Nationalism with Christian Dominionism.

It never was, religioisity cannot answer ethnic questions.

Religiosity is the answer to the most pertinent racial questions, just ask the Jewish people. That's why it can't be Christian Nationalism.

Judaism is an ethnic religion. The issue most have is of demographics down the line which cannot be addressed by Christianity, I do want to hear out what you mean and what your suggestions are so that there is no miscommunication here.

If you convert the Rotherham grooming culprits and they end up attending the church of England, the crimes will not change by much if at all.

But burning their credibility to get at Fuentes is worth it for them, I guess?

Come on, no serious credibility is on the line here. When I bullied the autistic kid in high school was I seriously asserting he was homosexual? No, it was fun because it caused him to sperg out.

I think the credibility is fairly serious, they may have bullied Nick Fuentes but they have also made fools of all their followers who believed them. I don't like Nick but the gayops are offputting. Some liberal progressive like Destiny gets involved in a pretty big scandal and that sphere of Twitter makes it all about a false accusation towards Fuentes? Seems pretty stupid.

Chris Brunet and others just want to dig pile on him whilst they can. They don't care whether it's real or not.

They always knew destiny was a bisexual lib, accusing nick at least gets them somewhere in their heads. There's little he can say that's helpful as any amount of denial will just be considered a cope.

bring these incidents up not to gossip about two people. People yearn for ideals to strive towards, heroes of sorts. Those studying music look up to Mozart rightfully and would be visibly disgusted upon finding out about his scat fetish accusations. E celebs are considerably dumber and likely worse people than Mozart. Both Lauren and Nick are people who played a game of Motte and Bailey, Nick far more than Lauren, both have had run-ins with the government (Nick was an agitator during jan 6 who was on a no fly list but never tried, whilst people who followed his orders were, go figure) and are terrible people in their personal lives.

I’m not sure I buy this, and it seems like an isolated demand for purity. If I’m basing my political beliefs on you, the only part that matters is whether or not you are consistent and correct on that thing. If it’s music, I don’t care about your personal life as long as the music is good. I think unless what you’re talking about is a serious felony, personal conduct outside of your own domain is irrelevant. I’m into Elon Musk because he’s building cool rocket ships and internet satellites. Do I really care if he’s banging a trans chick while hanging from a trapeze? No. It has absolutely nothing to do with Space X or Tesla.

I’ll also note here that from my point of view, only the right is really expected to have these high hills of purity to climb. I’ve never heard anyone rag on the leaders of left leaning people over their impurities. And some of them are much more connected to the issues at hand. BLM leadership siphoning money from donations is directly related to whether or not they’re good leaders. Fuentes banging a hooker doesn’t connect to anything else he’s talking about. Fuentes fans are supposed to drop him over porn. BLM supporters are not supposed to care how much money the founders are paying themselves.

I’ll also note here that from my point of view, only the right is really expected to have these high hills of purity to climb

I recall one of our old conservative grandees, from before the move to reddit, either BarnabyCajones, Hlynka, or FacelessCraven making the case that these "high hills of purity" were what distinguished the right from the left. A man on the left is allowed to have "no enemies to the left" and no values beyond the pursuit of politics. But a man on the right expects, and is expected, to be judged against some higher power or virtue. Some of more vocal NRX and Alt-Rightist(Alt-Litists?) In the comment section like E. Harding, Vox Day, and The Dreaded Jim felt they had been called out and caused something of a furor.

Sadly (for archival purposes) Scott appears to have memory-holed many of the old culture war conversations from those days, but i also can't say that i blame him. The original discussion leading up to and surrounding, The "You're Still Crying Wolf" "This Blog Endorses Anyone but Trump" posts got pretty heated.

That would definately not have been me. Probably Hlynka or Barnaby.

I mean, in large part that's because my tribe cares. We can overlook some spousal infidelity on the basis of 'politicians aren't often good people', but homosexuality is a bridge too far.

I posit that there are things liberals/progressives could be caught doing which would impede their credibility for moral reasons. Everyone has ritual purity standards. I don't know what would be a serious violation of them in a progressive- trying to pray away the gay? Marrying a teenager? But I am confident that they exist.

Now I've never been a Nick Fuentes fan. But among IRL people with actually far-right beliefs, being gay is disqualifying from having an opinion.

The right plays second fiddle to the left so has to be the moral side so that they can call the outgroup for "hypocrisy" which is utterly spineless since only the powerful can be hypocritical.

To get what I mean, imagine if you woke up and realised that Musk was just a front used to pump up the value of the various firms he is in and is closer to Elizabeth Holmes than to steve jobs, that he literally does nothing at his day job and just larps, purely hypotehtical scenario. In that case, it would sour how you view some things. People who are attached to movements that are defined by a person feel that way when any kind of moral rot is found as it obviously matters. The political sphere is very vengeful and zero-sum, everybody dogpiles and doxxes others, it is done many times for personal reasons, so to them it is akin to seeing an elder turning out to be a duplicitous purpose.

I do not feel that way at all, I have never had issues with homosexuality or any values that go against Christianity not just because I am not a Christian but because I do not believe the cover story or the idea of a hero to begin with but many buy into that.

The right plays second fiddle to the left so has to be the moral side so that they can call the outgroup for "hypocrisy" which is utterly spineless since only the powerful can be hypocritical.

If anything its the opposite. The left plays second fiddle to the right as the left defines itself in its opposition. The right erects structures that the left then subverts and destroys.

only the powerful can be hypocritical.

Lenin was wrong though, hypocrisy has nothing to do with being strong or weak, it is the price paid for having principles that go beyond political expediancy.

See, I kinda see it differently. The demands of non-hypocrisy and morals are much less important if you’re the weaker party. The thing that the underdog must do is get sufficient numbers and popularity to be a credible threat. You can’t do that if you’re throwing potential allies away for reasons that have nothing to do with the issues at hand. Numbers matter if the goal is power. That’s why the Left loves to pound the right on hypocrisy especially hypocrisy they’d never hold their own side to. It’s an easy way to limit the power of conservatives, as they’re having to throw away good Allie’s all the time for whatever reason the left starts pointing them out. And as such, you end up with fewer people fighting for power

I think the causality is backwards — the left is powerful because they are willing to be hypocritical, they’re willing to be accused of being a crime-thinker. The right has less power because the accusations of hypocrisy and thought crime still bother them enough to make them embarrassed. A lefty accused of being socialist or progressive doesn’t get kicked out. A rightist will be, to the point that even the accusation is too much.

I decided long ago that you should never meet your heroes or role models.

They won't live up to the hype, and they'll inevitably let you down with their behavior.

So mostly glad that I only ever stayed on the periphery of the alternative/indie media scene. Never followed any of them too closely, picked and chose who I thought was actually trustworthy, and certainly never financially supported any of them. I turned out to be consistently right on the money.

As much as I think legacy and mainstream media is corrupt, the problem with independent media tends to be incompetence. They don't have the experience or connections to maintain a positive public image in a high profile environment, so they have to make things up as they go along, and any missteps could blow up in their face. If they didn't have their life together when they became famous, an injection of fame surely wouldn't help them get it together.

So, so many 'prominent' internet personalities from the early 2010's/Post-gamergate era turned into or just turned out to be horrible people. Not worthy to be looked up to as leaders, but somehow given outsize influence over their little corner of the culture. The lucky ones just slowly fade into irrelevance, their content getting <1% of the attention it used to, but still churned out with some regularity.

Except PewDiePie, somehow that dude made his money, found his girl, and got out without nuking his reputation or sending his life into a tailspin. Also JonTron seems to have hit a point in his career where he can spit out a video every few months to a million or so views, and just live his life the rest of the time.

I suspect that the nature of the internet, which is able to bestow some random citizen with more attention and fame than literal emperors in olden times would have gotten, out of the blue (think Hawk Tuah girl, for sure) and most are just not psychologically trained to handle that with grace. Eventually they'll choose to indulge whatever their worst impulses are, and usually their fans will cheer them on because they're just there for the drama. Then its either a slow descent into degeneracy, or possibly a rapid unplanned disassembly. Or, perhaps, the better interpretation is they go through the same sort of travails that most 'normal' people experience, but being broadcast to an audience of hundreds of thousands kind of raises the stakes.

The sort of people who seek to be 'pundits' or leaders of political movements are probably predisposed to be sociopaths or narcissists who will eventually abuse their influence.


There are some exceptions. I really enjoy the Indie Scifi Book Series written by Travis J.I. Corcoran, and I got to spend some time around him and he... is exactly what he represents himself as. Curmudgeonly as all hell, but also unwilling to compromise on truth and is charming in his way.

I also briefly met Larry Correia and he's pretty cool.

The only decent person I can name from the top of my head from the Gamergate saga who was not an out out shill, incompetent person, moron, bad faith actor or a complete weirdo would be Mister Metokur. He was disgusted by this new class of anti-SJW bros back in 2014-15 itself as they were simply trying to compete with ign instead of actually fixing anything and had dubious morals. Many just became leftists after getting their ass handed to them by actual dissident right wingers. Plenty of people did that, h3h3 and kraut and tea being two examples.

If you are a low-status person and hit a nerve on the internet, you will never leave as we all instintively know what our position in society is so the internet is this prallle world where you can kinda lie to yourself which fuels most of these people. The internet is not stable though and these firms demand you to churn out stuff to stay relevant and its a bad cycle.

I have never met anyone I really look upto since I dont look upto anyone. Indie artists are better than more popular ones since they don't have much in the way of pr. I will look up the books now since you brought them up.

How much do you think is were horrible people or were marginal people that got the chance to turn into horrible people. For a brief possibly closed window fairly normal people could luck there way into a bit of fame with few guard rails. For males easy money and easy sex are hard to pass up.

I'd go out on a limb and say its 60-40, 60% good people getting compromised because they are suddenly gifted fame and fortune and happen to fall into some vice or other, and 40% grifters who were ALWAYS in it for the money and fame, and had no morals before getting them.

Milo Yiannopoulos had a seemingly meteoric rise and fall in a fairly short period, he's probably the most obvious of the grifters.

The other amazing thing is how these types will often lash out and drag others down with them when they sense they're about to lose everything. I think that's perhaps the one way you can tell who was ever a good, honorable person. If they quietly accept their fate and remove themselves from the limelight without trying to blow everything up on their way out, vs. pull a straight up face/heel turn and lean into the controversy, desperately trying to stay relevant by picking fights and destroying others reputations in the process.

Those studying music look up to Mozart rightfully and would be visibly disgusted upon finding out about his scat fetish accusations.

Hmm. This sentence clings to me. What's going on here... lets see... yes. This sentence was just an aside. An example to further your point. Really a completely irrelevant thing to make my response about.

However to me it was a discontinuity. A confusion. The above sentence is treated like a "as we all know". But I totally missed the memo.

Why would those studying music be disgusted by their idol having gross kinks? I can see how you could likely elicit that disgust with any unsolicited claim of "Famous_Name has a scat fetish"- to someone that themselves is not into scat. But then- it wouldn't be about their Hero it would just be about the scat.

A good chunk of people absolutely search for heroes who are larger than life, perhaps my expereinces are far more normie coded. Growing up I kinda knew that even those who do good things are kinda fucked up like others but others attachted religous fervor to this sorta stuff.

Look at how doping gets treated, we all know that evey guy who competes in any sport is not just doping but doping a lot. Kids, ppeople playing the sport, the vast majority of those who watch them not only dont care but will actively not believe you when you present them with evidence.

This is what happened with many on the internet political thing. If you preach certain vaules daily, you talk about normies being unwashed masses and then you end up doing things far worse than them and its public, your stock will fall. Hero worship, the cult of a hero is a very real thing that grips most people who consume things with a passion.

That makes sense.

I think it's also difficult for me to conceive of enjoying the smell of farts or unveiling one's inner truth as vices. I think that's the oft discussed purity / exploration divide.

Plus something aesthetic relating to my existence as a Golgari mage. Shoveling shit is clean honest work. That requires a bath afterwards.

Plus something aesthetic relating to my existence as a Golgari mage.

What?

Maybe a better example is "Isaac Newton was a genius about physics and calculus but a complete crank about everything else"? Though I guess that's a bad example too, being a crank is kind of a sign of genius to me

Fuentes is and was always controlled opposition, I suspect originally introduced to disrupt Turning Point USA. He wasn't supposed to have staying power.

nice username. Fuentes was never deplatformed for his unite the right shenanigans and never faced jailtime which are two giant red flags, that alongwith him never having even kissed a girl. How can you be touching late 20s and never had any encounters with girls without being an incel. Do you think he is propped up by the feds or what?

alongwith him never having even kissed a girl. How can you be touching late 20s and never had any encounters with girls without being an incel.

Easily?

I'm beginning to wonder if the FBI is turning into a big pyramid scheme.

Easily?

I doubt it, he is not strapped for cash, socially obtuse and very clearly talks about wanting a lot of kids which requires you to marry early. People around him are married or have girlfriends yet he is the odd one out.

I'm beginning to wonder if the FBI is turning into a big pyramid scheme.

This has to be the funniest thing I have read this week lol.

He could simply be socially awkward+not trying very hard. This isn’t India where your extended family will just make you get married.

If the threat of jail time is not enough, she also wrecked whatever goodwill she had by having had an affair with the same man Nick Fuentes was being rumored with, Destiny.

Ecelebs seem to reach a certain level of fame and just become a reality show of incestuous dating, relationships and breakups. Like Sam Hyde after losing his Adult Swim show has since retreated to "Fishtank Live" which as far as I can tell is a literal eceleb reality dating show and he routinely makes videos featuring has-beens like Star Wars Fatty and iDubbbz and attempting to "call out" others like Hasan.

My last post was on fishtank, fishtank is simply him housing people with issues and fucking with them instead of dating. It is not a dating show lol but I get what you mean. His schtick is meta irony, amazing in short doses.

Lauren apparently left a 1488 bracelet with Paul Joseph Watson after spending a night at his place according to milo. Why do you think it becomes incestuous though? Some suspect that dudes who are higher status would seem more attractive to the girl which would make them attractive but destiny is a literal poly guy whose wife left him.

When you decide you are more important than your stories - usually because a bunch of people are telling you that - you inevitably start avoiding and being avoided by the people who put the story first (they don't like you because they can't trust you) and self ghetto with the other self obsessed, who will help you prop yourself up in exchange for the same. Then you have basically turned your news outfits into a distributed soap opera where you and your friends generate stories for people that may also mention current events.

All media becomes incestuous when it becomes self obsessed, and all media eventually becomes self obsessed. But these motherfuckers started off that way.

There's been a fair amount of discussion about Biden's pardoning of Hunter. There are people here willing to argue that it's a good thing, that it shows humanity on Biden's part to be willing to act as a father rather than as a politician. Others disagree, of course, but while the conversation about the current state has certainly been productive, it seems to me that rationalization on either side is always a failure mode, and the cure is predictions:

Suppose he pardons his brother Jim next? Is that also a good thing? Do you think it will happen, and if it does happen, what does it mean?

If I had the time, I think it would be pretty interesting to write an effort-post detailing how the conversation over the Biden family's alleged corruption has evolved over time, here and in the broader public, and the specific events and disclosures that have shaped that conversation. My perception is that many of the arguments made to defend Biden, his family, and the conduct of the investigations into their activities have aged exceedingly poorly. In particular, it seems to me that this saga has been an excellent example of a common pattern of group behavior wherein the facts, as they emerge, consistently break against the tribal narrative. This pattern seems to me to be a good indicator of entrenched tribalism attempting to deny reality, and likewise a good demonstration of the limits and shortcomings of that tribalism, which should guide us to a better understanding of how the Culture War is likely to play out.

Zooming out a bit, another interesting pattern is, for lack of a better term, "reasoning break points". There's a lot of evidence that Biden's family is corrupt and that Biden himself is involved, but evidently not quite enough evidence for anyone on his own side to do anything about it. Likewise, there's quite a lot of evidence that Biden is meaningfully senile, to the point that his own side forcibly un-nominated him for the presidential race. And yet, somehow, he's not quite senile enough to actually remove from office. One might expect these two issues to compound each other sufficiently to tip the scales on either, but somehow they aren't quite enough even in combination.

It seems to me that the Blue Tribe consensus is that these problems can be managed sufficiently to minimize harm to the cause, separately or even in combination. I perceive this to be a serious error. It seems to me that Blue risk assessments are based on the current state of conversation, and are largely based on the implicit assumption that their tribe has something approximating a veto on what what topics and perspectives that conversation will include. This is a mistake for two reasons: first, because the conversational veto has pretty clearly gone away, and second, because there is no reason to presume that the present set of facts will endure into the future. For the tribe staking their claim to "norms", there seems to be little awareness that the actions they take now are shaping those norms in the future.

Here's a short excerpt of what this looks like in practice:

REPORTER: "He's saying his own Justice Department is broken."

KJP: "He believes in the Justice Department."

REPORTER: "He just said it's infected with politics!"

KJP: [repeats talking points, quotes Biden] ""...even as I've watched my son be selectively and unfairly prosecuted...""

REPORTER: "How many selective prosecutions are there at the DOJ?"

KJP: I can't speak to that.

There's a lot of evidence that Biden's family is corrupt and that Biden himself is involved

Still waiting on someone to give that evidence that Joe himself broke the law. I've only ever seen is arguably unethical actions, innuendo, and guilt-by-association. It's quite symmetrical to Trump's Russia problems, where the people under him were breaking the law, and there was a lot of smoke wafting in the general direction of the president, but there actually was no fire despite a thorough search.

to the point that his own side forcibly un-nominated him for the presidential race. And yet, somehow, he's not quite senile enough to actually remove from office.

There's a big difference between being capable enough to do the job of being president now, and being capable enough to also simultaneously do the job of running for president, and then also actually being president for another 4 years.

Alongside that, I agree with the people below who say the president arguably isn't that important as long as they have good enough deputies. They can be powerful depending on the person, but that isn't always the case. Trump is a great example, as he was effectively little more than the vibesmaxxer-in-chief, spending long hours watching cable news and generally getting distracted by petty squabbling and being unduly influenced by whoever spoke to him last on a topic. Kushner, McConnell, and other lower-level employees effectively ran the country in his absence. That's why he seemed so powerless in the months leading up to and following J6: those people largely abandoned him.

here are people here willing to argue that it's a good thing, that it shows humanity on Biden's part to be willing to act as a father rather than as a politician.

I dunno man, are there people here willing to argue that? Maybe a couple.

I like the idea some have proposed that Biden could have executed a master stroke by pardoning his son and the Jan. 6 protesters. Heads exploding on either side of the aisle.

But more seriously, I wonder if the GOP will make noises about amending the Constitution to abolish the presidential pardon now. Probably not (since they will want Trump to use it), but Biden has done grave damage to the concept of a presidential pardon. I have always thought it was a good thing - even when presidents have used it to pardon friends and cronies, I still like the idea that for grave injustices, there is a last resort if you can just appeal to one man. But like so many "to be used in case of emergency" tools, we risk losing them when they are abused.

I dunno man, are there people here willing to argue that? Maybe a couple.

I've not been able to post much here the last month or so, but I've made the argument as a steelman in other venues, and while I'd prefer some more enlightened form of deescalation on these matters combined with a moderately-embarrassing airing-of-deeds, there's reason that many of those options are either not available (eg, commuting sentences not finalized gets complicated) or not trusted to be available (eg, Biden absolutely wouldn't and probably shouldn't trust Trump to do a pardon exchange).

EDIT : hopefully fixed link.

Is that supposed to go straight to Cooke's Twitter profile? Not logged in ATM, so can't see if his most recent post is an exchange with you or something.

Nope. Sorry, correct link should be this. In case it's not visible for those not logged in:

I think there's a steelman that there's a bunch of widely distributed risks when prosecution of close family of presidents starts being a common thing, in the same way that prosecutions of Presidents would. If we broke down the fence over malum in se conduct, it'd be one thing. But as illegal as many of Hunter and Trump's behaviors may have been, afaict we're looking at malum prohibitum.

When you start opening up potential where the laws and moral get unclear, or enforcement hard, you don't just (or primarily) Get The Bad People. The alternative isn't just these two going to jail; it's opening up a repeat of Ted Stevens every four years, for the highest office in the land.((And, as Trump has demonstrated, sometimes with the opposite effect.))

I think there's some weaknesses even to this steelman: the obvious 'is no one above the law' question, differing feels on inherently immoral, why some offices fall under it and others don't, whether it delays or even discourages the reform that still hasn't happened post-Stevens. But from a 'maybe we don't want to break all these really important institutions' position (albeit as someone who maybe does), there's a not-crazy arg that this cordons off a really bad path.

Of course, even if that covers the breadth, it leaves the 'why pardon instead of commute' problem, especially since Hunter specifically would likely benefit from some time in a halfway house or mandatory detox.

I dunno man, are there people here willing to argue that? Maybe a couple.

Yes.

Zooming out a bit, another interesting pattern is, for lack of a better term, "reasoning break points". There's a lot of evidence that Biden's family is corrupt and that Biden himself is involved, but evidently not quite enough evidence for anyone on his own side to do anything about it. Likewise, there's quite a lot of evidence that Biden is meaningfully senile, to the point that his own side forcibly un-nominated him for the presidential race. And yet, somehow, he's not quite senile enough to actually remove from office. One might expect these two issues to compound each other sufficiently to tip the scales on either, but somehow they aren't quite enough even in combination.

I disagree; I don't think "being his party's nominee for President" and "being President" are meaningfully similar.

Biden's senility is a severe liability as a candidate, because being a candidate involves being the focal point of a large PR campaign centered around one's own speeches, appearances, and general celebrity. You manifestly can't do well at that if you can't speak coherently for more than a few minutes, are visibly shuffling aimlessly around the stage, and are otherwise out of it.

However, Biden's senility is not as severe a liability when it comes to actually being President (at least from the standpoint of the institutional Democratic party). All he needs to do is physically be alive to occupy the office; most of the decisions get made well-downstream from him, and those that require Presidential input can mostly be handled by his kitchen cabinet/advisors a la Edith Wilson. Whether or not he's compos mentis doesn't have any impact on the flow of money and influence to Democrat constituent groups/activists, or the implementation of Democratic policy priorities by Democratic-aligned actors within the bureaucracy.

This is certainly a position one might take. One problem is that it contradicts the tribal narrative that presidential competence is important, which is a narrative that Blue Tribe has invested appreciable cultural capital in over the years, going back at least as far as Reagan. Biden seems much more compromised than Reagan ever was. He's certainly more compromised than W or Trump has ever been, and yet claims of the need of the 25th amendment have, as I mentioned, been a common part of political life for decades now. All of that now overhangs their present and future positions. The most immediate result is a loss of credibility, as people can't sustain the whiplash of "Trump is senile and should be removed / Biden is senile and that's fine." This is probably why Blue Tribe in general is inclined more to try to ignore the problem and hope it goes away. The problem with that strategy is that it won't, in fact, go away. Red Tribe's media machine is smaller and less efficient, but it gets there soon enough.

One problem is that it contradicts the tribal narrative that presidential competence is important, which is a narrative that Blue Tribe has invested appreciable cultural capital in over the years, going back at least as far as Reagan

This is true. However, are the people who create tribal narratives and invest cultural capital the same as those who have an interest in and/or ability to oust POTUS?

while the conversation about the current state has certainly been productive, it seems to me that rationalization on either side is always a failure mode, and the cure is predictions:

Indeed. I've seen you post half a dozen times here something along the lines of (and feel free to correct my paraphrasing): 'My model of the world is that the ingroup will consistently choose to harm the outgroup as much as possible. In 2020, protesters burned down billions of dollars worth of homes/businesses to harm the outgroup. When Red-tribe Kyle Rittenhouse tried to defend innocents he was attacked and then tried by the Blue-tribe Justice system that refused to prosecute the crimes of the rioters.

When the pandemic happened, Blue tribe health officials instituted draconian lockdowns that minimally impacted the white-collar laptop-class but wrecked Red tribe laborers and Red tribe parents.

My model of the world predicts these events perfectly! Do you have a better model, and if so, does it accurately predict the world?'

To which I would say, would your model predict:

  1. Trump wouldn't prosecute Hilary in 2016?
  2. The lack of major civil unrest, stochastic terrorism, or any major backlash to the repeal of Roe v. Wade aside from some Democratic electoral wins in 2022?
  3. The end of vaccine mandates in public and private spheres and the end of lockdowns?
  4. The utter lack of any major protests, civil unrest, or loss of faith in the electoral system after Trump beat Harris? (you want comments that aged like milk - look at the people who were claiming election fraud the morning of November 5th and even through that evening)
  5. The utter defeat of abolish the police and any of the George Floyd era movements?
  6. The lack of significant stochastic terrorism (remember the breathless doomposting about how easy it would be for disaffected lone wolf Red Tribers to blow power substations and other critical infrastructure?) through a year of electoral campaigning and the actual election?

To be clear, I doubt I could have predicted these events with any accuracy. But my observation is that you couldn't have done that either. If you want to prove me wrong, make some concrete predictions about the next four years. Will Trump incarcerate Biden or some other major democrat? Trump assassinated by an activist? Significant uptick in lone wolf attacks? World War III?

The only thing your model has going for it is that nobody pays attention to things that don't happen, even when that's the critical evidence against your argument. But whenever something controversial happens, you pop up and point towards the big flashing sign saying 'EVERYTHING SUCKS.' It's the same sensationalism that governs journalists, wrapped in a Bayesian/rationalist worldview.

Biden family's alleged corruption has evolved over time, here and in the broader public, and the specific events and disclosures that have shaped that conversation. My perception is that many of the arguments made to defend Biden, his family, and the conduct of the investigations into their activities have aged exceedingly poorly.

I admit to being disappointed in Biden, the pardon is deplorable and shouldn't have happened. I remain unconvinced that Joe Biden is particularly corrupt (...pardon notwithstanding), and I'm skeptical that Hunter is particularly corrupt by the standards of DC.

In particular, it seems to me that this saga has been an excellent example of a common pattern of group behavior wherein the facts, as they emerge, consistently break against the tribal narrative. This pattern seems to me to be a good indicator of entrenched tribalism attempting to deny reality, and likewise a good demonstration of the limits and shortcomings of that tribalism, which should guide us to a better understanding of how the Culture War is likely to play out.

One tribal narrative was that Biden was corrupt and abused his office to get rich. The other tribal narrative is...well, that the Bidens aren't particularly corrupt. Setting aside which direction the facts are consistently breaking, one tribal narrative has to be false in order for the other to be true. In your model, since you clearly believe Red Tribers are correct, are entrenched Red Tribalists denying reality?

edit: well, OP changed substantially after I hit post.

https://www.newsweek.com/shadowy-group-janes-revenge-claims-attacks-anti-abortion-organizations-1753992

Literally zero attempts to prosecute them of course, unlike people standing silently across the street from an abortion clinic.

(Edit: actually it looks like Florida got one in jail and fines for a few others! Clever trick, basically forcing the feds to evenly apply the FACE act against abortionist terrorists)

To which I would say, would your model predict:

(1) Trump wouldn't prosecute Hilary in 2016?

"Trump" isn't a unitary figure - the people who would have had to prosecute Hilary were the DOJ, which Trump was embroiled in a...contentious relationship with, given his termination of his first AG (who, incidentally, had a long history with Hilary as colleagues in the Senate), and the role of senior officials at DOJ in promulgating and sustaining the Russian Collusion hoax. Any order Trump gave to try and prosecute her would not have been obeyed.

(2) The lack of major civil unrest, stochastic terrorism, or any major backlash to the repeal of Roe v. Wade aside from some Democratic electoral wins in 2022?

How quickly we forget. There was at least one significant attempt at actual terrorism in the lead up to the Dobbs decision, coupled with strategic DOJ non-enforcement of (and thus tacit condoning of) the laws against harassment of judicial officers. There then followed a propaganda smear campaign designed to gin up impeachment efforts against conservative justices, notwithstanding similar conduct from liberal justices.

There was quite a bit of ‘4 am property damage’ attacks directed against Catholic Churches in the aftermath of dobbs as well, the stuff that could have been prosecuted as a hate crime if the perpetrators weren’t politically sympathetic. A very small number of far left activists attempted to interrupt masses and were physically prevented from doing so, which I suspect had a deterrent effect on confrontational behavior.

edit: well, OP changed substantially after I hit post.

Sorry, it's a bad habit. This still seems like a really good reply, though, and I'll try to get a substantive response.

One note, real quick. The quote is:

The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.

It's like "A Tribe Called Quest", you have to say the whole thing. I try to keep the phrasing as consistent as possible, I've been using it for years now because I think it's a really important insight.

Indeed. I've seen you post half a dozen times here something along the lines of (and feel free to correct my paraphrasing): 'My model of the world is that the ingroup will consistently choose to harm the outgroup as much as possible.

By your reasoning, he should also predict that Biden will put on a vest full of explosives and suicide bomb Donald Trump.

Nobody will choose to harm the outgroup "as much as possible" if that means literally as much as possible regardless of the harm to themselves in the process. What they will do is harm the outgroup as much as they can without too much harm to themselves. That isn't the same thing. They did in fact tried to keep lockdowns going and they did support "abolish the police"; it's just that the political cost of continuing to do so was too great.

You've also thrown a few things in there that don't even harm the outgroup; a January 6 style protest against Trump winning the election wouldn't harm anyone in the outgroup (and the actual January 6 didn't harm anyone either, it was just an excuse for a left-wing crackdown).

Nobody will choose to harm the outgroup "as much as possible" if that means literally as much as possible regardless of the harm to themselves in the process. What they will do is harm the outgroup as much as they can without too much harm to themselves...You've also thrown a few things in there that don't even harm the outgroup; a January 6 style protest against Trump winning the election wouldn't harm anyone in the outgroup (and the actual January 6 didn't harm anyone either, it was just an excuse for a left-wing crackdown).

Okay; explain to me why left-wing protesters can't simply have George Floyd level riots and burn DC, NYC and every other major US city to the ground in response to Trump's election? You believe that sympathetic AGs in all of those very blue districts will fail to prosecute them, correct? What harm will come to stochastic terrorists, when I've been assured that it's very easy to do this kind of damage to infrastructure and hard to track the perpetrators? As far as I'm aware, no public health official has suffered legal other major professional consequences, so what harms did they personally suffer to make them stop pushing lockdowns and vaccines?

Perhaps I'll add, why didn't democrats rig the 2024 election given that nobody suffered consequences for rigging the election in 2020?

When you say 'without too much harm to themselves,' you've essentially watered your argument down to democracy/populism, given that most of your proposed consequences come from the ballot box. Or at least given yourself enough of a loophole to drive a George Floyd-style riot through. At which point, if my model of the world is that elected officials largely try to do things that are popular with the electorate (at least when those actions are legible to the public), and that a majority of Americans aren't particularly motivated by harming the outgroup, please give me concrete examples where our predictions about the world would differ?

Perhaps I'll add, why didn't democrats rig the 2024 election given that nobody suffered consequences for rigging the election in 2020?

Imagine you put a puppet in as president, knowing that he was controllable due to ill health and that your control of mass media could hide and lie about any visible instances of his declining health, which doctors assured you was bad, but currently easy to hide. Imagine that due to circumstances outside your control his condition deteriorates faster than you expect and can manage, such that after a disastrous debate performance (perhaps sabotaged by an alternative faction in your party) power players in your organisation begin publicly demanding he step down. If he steps down however, you will have to return a bunch of money you've already spent and start a brand new presidential campaign 100 days out from the election. Due to your financial situation and because all of the highly ambitious possible alternatives refuse, you have to run a person nobody thinks can win.

Wouldn't you cede that election and put your effort in preparing for the next one? You still have to campaign as hard as possible for the people downticket, but you aren't going to pull out all the tricks to win the presidency. Especially not when your opponents are watching like hawks.

Note in this hypothetical you are the party leaders, I don't mean to imply anything about the average democrat supporter, who I believe aren't especially motivated by harming the outgroup.

Because the people who were organizing them stopped when the post riot life started harming democratic candidates! In other words they were getting into too much trouble so they stopped that particular harm effort.

What is the evidence of this? People here and elsewhere argued that Floyd was a boon for democrats in 2020, and they won fairly convincingly four months later.

Okay; explain to me why left-wing protesters can't simply have George Floyd level riots and burn DC, NYC and every other major US city to the ground in response to Trump's election?

Because Floyd-level riots hurt Democratic-run and Democratic-voting areas (you yourself mention NYC--not a Republican stronghold!) and discredit the Democrats. They have some propaganda value against the right, especially when the media is sympathetic, but they probably hurt the left more than the right. This doesn't depend on prosecutions.

Perhaps I'll add, why didn't democrats rig the 2024 election given that nobody suffered consequences for rigging the election in 2020?

Because their ability to rig elections is not unlimited and they couldn't rig it by enough to push the election to the Democrats.

please give me concrete examples where our predictions about the world would differ?

"They'll allow as many Floyd-style protests as they can get away with, but they will eventually stop" is very different than preventing Floyd-style protests as much as they can. You would predict the latter. Certainly you wouldn't predict prosecutors going easy on protestors.

What did Jim do?

Purportedly, the same sort of things as Hunter, minus the crack and illegal firearms possession.

Presumably, no one is going to make enough ado about it for him to be worth pardoning, because the Biden's are spent. It simply does not matter.

@SSCReader argued the following in the context of a discussion here on the palpable divergence of political views between young men and women, especially young single men and young single women in the US and the West in general a few months ago (emphasis mine):

Lots of things are without historical precedent. It doesn't mean they are actually problems. It's a self correcting issue. Either through assortative mating, or in people who won't reach out across the aisle simply not having relationships while others will find their desires for companionship overcome their political biases, or they don't and simply don't pass on their genetics. There is nothing that needs to be done, a new balance will be found.

In light of the online gender war apparently gaining fresh momentum in the wake of Kamala's election defeat, with a bunch of leftist women declaring support for importing the South Korean 4B Movement to the US and proclaiming a sex strike, and commentators proclaiming toxic male voters to be the decisive electoral force behind Trump etc., and all of this being rather unlikely to just die down with the passing of time, I'm curious if he(?) still holds this view unironically and confidently. To be clear, when he says there's no need to do anything, I'm assuming he doesn't simply mean 'the government shouldn't intervene', I'm also assuming he wouldn't say that the media should try deradicalizing angry right-wing single men, or that moderate feminists should not sympathize with the 4B LARPers.

Right?

To be clear, when he says there's no need to do anything, I'm assuming he doesn't simply mean 'the government shouldn't intervene', I'm also assuming he wouldn't say that the media should try deradicalizing angry right-wing single men, or that moderate feminists should not sympathize with the 4B LARPers.

I generally agree with him, so I can also argue that no, I don't think direct intervention is necessary or likely to be beneficial in the slightest. The future belongs to show who show up. Anyone that prioritizes anything above having kids that have kids loses by default, whatever the cause (e.g. prioritizing career over family, politics over family, media over family, etc.). Over time in terms of generations this problem will simply be selected out of the population, even if "global society" somehow collapses as a result of below replacement TFR. It's a problem with its own inherent solution.

I don't understand the distinction between working on having your own kids versus advocating for policies that'd make it easier for you and yours to have more kids. Surely you'd advocate for a raise to help pay for your own kids? How about for lower taxes at a municipal level? How about per-kid payments at a federal level?

What sex strike? Go to a hundred college sororities across the US, from California and New York to Texas and Alabama over the next month and interview the girls outside, how many would you say have heard of the “4B” movement? How many have sworn off sex with men, not for reasons of chastity or heartbreak, but out of some kind of feminist politics?

Even if you repeated the experiment with the keenest GDI theater kids and socialist club members, my guess is fewer than 2% of women would have knowledge and even fewer would take part. The battle of the Sexes can’t be won because there’s too much fraternising with the enemy etc.

South Korea is a unique situation, but even there people get laid and get into relationships and get married, they just don’t have kids (and when they do, they have 1). The reasons for that are economic and cultural, but have relatively little to do with third-wave feminism and almost nothing to do with the “4B Movement”.

As has been said here before, Western reportage on Korea is overwhelmingly by upper-middle-class foreign correspondents and English-speaking local journalists, both typically of Korean descent, who studied abroad, dislike their home country, have fully adopted Western progressive politics, and are on the hunt for an ‘interesting’ story that foreign audiences will click on to justify their pay.

Maybe sorority thots aren’t going to stop sorority thotting, but marginal effects affect the margins. Maybe the drab psychology major decides dating isn’t worth the hassle and dedicates her attention to social causes instead. Maybe the shy hypochondriac is afraid of health complications of getting pregnant (my god have those been bullhorned lately), and decides to keep to herself instead of downloading a dating app.

Yes, precisely this. Anyone who doesn’t think there’s already a large cohort of late millennial and gen-Z women with no interest in realistic romantic relationships is either wildly out of touch or willfully blind.

Sure, but they were already 4B, I don't think having no romantic relationships, sex, or babies is actually spreading.

I haven't changed my views, if anything I think the election results supported me. The gap between men and women did not change much at all, (11 points in 2016, 12 points in 2020, 10 points in 2024) The 4B thing is just signaling and will pass, I haven't heard a single woman I know in person mention it. Commentators can claim whatever they want, it doesn't mean they were right. Race, education and urban/rural are still much more important factors than gender. A white rural woman is much more similar to a white rural man than to a black urban woman in this regard.

Even among ages 18-29 the gap between men and women was smaller than in 2020. I don't think there is any evidence here that it is becoming more of a problem in other words.

The President of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, has declared a state of martial law, accusing his opposition in parliament of colluding with North Korea and engaging in anti-state activities. Yoon’s party lost in a landslide in the last parliamentary election, and this is likely an attempt to maintain power. Troops have been placed around the parliament building to prevent parliament from convening. Opposition leaders are telling citizens to take to the streets. The parliament has voted unanimously to disband martial law. But the troops in the streets are currently refusing to disband until ordered by the President to do so. My suspicion is that Yoon either planned this with the military beforehand, or he is very incompetent and desperate.

This has significant potential to inflame the Korean peninsula, my understanding is that Yoon is an anti-communist hardliner, and I can’t imagine North Korea reacting well if he manages to seize dictatorial control over the country.

From a culture war perspective, Yoon is an anti-feminist (or at least he’s described as such), and there will likely be much wailing and gnashing of teeth from Western media if succeeds at staying in control.

Edit: unconfirmed reports that opposition party leaders are being arrested.

Edit: 20:05 GMT — Yoon claims he will lift martial law on urging of members of his own party

I just want to add that being President of South Korea is a poisoned chalice. Nearly all of them got couped, assassinated or arrested after they leave office.

Maybe this very silly coup-farce is still rational? From the outside view, Yoon must've known that the end was closing in, so may as well try rolling the dice.

Edit: 20:05 GMT — Yoon claims he will lift martial law on urging of members of his own party

Yep. Like we say: Nothing Ever Happens.

Why on earth would he do this?

The time to have second thoughts about declaring martial law was before declaring martial law and trying to arrest the parliament. He’s now guaranteed a lengthy prison sentence instead of possibly winning, or at least coming close enough to demand concessions.

How legal was this? Did he have the power to do this and if so, what checks are there on this power? Now the the parliament voted to end martial law, is it over? Is that the proper mechanism for ending it? Do they have that power?

or he is very incompetent and desperate

It seems the latter. The Korean sub was for an hour panicking “the sky is falling!” and now they are making fun of him. A dictator not feared is finished:

https://old.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/1h5r8h2/%E3%85%88%E3%85%88_%EC%9E%85%EB%8B%88%EB%8B%A4/

Reddits are unrepresentative of facts on the ground. If the Korea reddit posters could vote (they can't, they are foreigners expats who can't even speak Korean), they would vote wildly to the left of native South Koreans.

Nope, looks as if it is already over. That was really weird. I think the society in South Korea needs to seriously re-think those emergency laws.

A dictator not feared is finished:

If the military stands "behind" him - the real dictator will be some general or cluster of generals. He will be a rubberstamping figurehead.

I think that we people in the west have really forgotten the meaning of Cersei's "Power is power". The reason people don't get disappeared in the streets of Paris and Berlin like in moscow, are not because the government can't, but because they don't want to.

Well, the reason the U.S. President doesn't get disappeared is also not because I can't, but because I don't want to. I expect any reasonably smart and extremely dedicated person could easily assassinate nearly anyone, but that level of dedication is very rare. Most people have split priorities.

Governments are even more this way. To the extent a government can be said to "want" anything, its desires are split between all of the people it comprises, many of whom serve only their own ends or actively disagree with the broader government agenda. I think it's a mistake to separate its capacity from its "desires" because the fundamental nature of government (almost any organization really) involves compromising its capacity by bringing people in who are not fully aligned with its desires.

Also, wow.

Is there any reasonable, by Western classical-liberalism standards, justification for this? Short of an external military crisis, it’s awfully hard for my American mind to think of a reason.

“I am declaring a state of emergency in order to protect the constitutional order based on freedom and eradicate shameful pro-North Korea anti-state groups, that are stealing freedom and happiness of our people,” Yoon said on the country’s YTN news channel. He added that this would protect the country “from the threats of North Korea’s communist forces.”

Yeah, it doesn’t sound like he bothered with an actual excuse. If there was some NK activity or scandal in recent months, it sure didn’t make American news.

More justifiable than Roosevelt's camps. In the past North Korea already managed to conquer all but a tiny sliver of South Korea and there is credible scenario where Seoul is reduced to rubble, with the repeat of the Pusan situation. When Roosevelt carted off every man, woman, and child of the wrong ethnicity into concentration camps, Japan hadn't yet managed to control all the continental US, sans Florida, and only those suffering from war hysteria thought demolition of DC by Japanese forces was within the realm of possibilities.

Yet despite Japan posing a much lesser threat to the US than North Korea does to the South one, enacting policies much more totalitarian than ones enacted by the current South Korean president wasn't enough to make US Americans consider FDR anything but a very examplar of a Western classical-liberal. This is shown by US American experts of US American history (1), holding him in very high regard. Thus not only is FDR loved by experts in the relevent field, he is also loved by the sufficently historically informed supporters of classical-liberalism.

(1) Given that the supporters of the US Democratic Party, the US party of classical-liberalism, are so greatly overrepresented, any ranking by US historians will, unless corrected for as in 1982 Murray–Blessing, inevitably be ranking by classical-liberals, with only token influence of believers in other political ideologies.

Uh…

How does a totalitarian act by an American justify an act by a Korean? They can both be unjustified.

I suppose I’d also expect suspending civilian government to lead to interment, etc., while the converse is less likely.

And “high regard” doesn’t make someone an “exemplar” of something. A lot of those classical liberals probably think Che was pretty cool, too.

Well remember, South Korea has only been a democracy for like 40 years, they had a military dictatorship until the early 1980s.

Thanks, that’s a lot better.

As it is this isn't enough for a top level post.

Some more context and your own opinion would improve the post.

Edit: the additions to the post look good.

If something is self-evidently newsworthy, I don't see why any commentary needs to be included.

Still needs to be included. We aren't trying to break news here, this is a discussion site. So start a discussion.

It’s to avoid situations exactly like this. As of the time of this writing, the happening appears to be over. It’s no longer newsworthy, or at least it’s no longer BREAKING NEWS worthy.

At least if the OP includes some original commentary/analysis instead of just headlines then the post might have more lasting value even if the original situation dissipates.

Agree with a clear breaking news exception if something is the top story on all major outlets.

This happens like once a week. And then we would have to enforce the line of what is major breaking news. The effort to write about a paragraph of text including what happened, the context of the situation, and a personal thought on it is very low. The fixes OP made are more than enough.

I think you should make an exception for important breaking news where the top post is just something like "what's your opinion on X". I like coming here to see what peoples' immediate takes on such news is.

Breaking news happens like once a week. And then we would have to enforce the line of what is major breaking news. The effort to write about a paragraph of text including what happened, the context of the situation, and a personal thought on it is very low. The fixes OP made are more than enough.

Wonder if North Korea is thinking now would be the perfect time to attack.

They really don't need to. South Korea has a TFR of 0.68. Every generation will be approximately 1/4 the prior. North Korea has a TFR of 1.81. Not quite replacement, but pretty close. They wait two more generations and South Korea will beg North Koreans to come across the border to work in their hospices wiping the asses of the last of the South Koreans.

I used to think North Korea was completely insane. And yet...

We’re less than 20 years from the vast majority of labor being automated by AI and robots. A huge proportion of white collar jobs can already be automated by LLMs, SDCs are working fine in San Francisco, warehouse automation is proceeding at pace, in many cases we’re just waiting for regulatory approval, better wrappers and some minor improvements to multimodality in practice.

The problem with low tfr in the West is mass immigration, not labor shortages. If natives in Germany or Sweden stop reproducing, they’re going to end up being 30% of the population by 2100 and they and their descendants will be living in somebody else’s country, forever. Korea and China will likely still be 90%+ Korean and Chinese, there will simply be fewer of them. This is no major issue.

Depopulation itself is completely fine, the US is pretty sparsely populated but Western Europe is very dense and could easily benefit from an 80%+ drop in population over a couple hundred years (deflationary impact can be managed in various ways, including rising consumption). The issue is that if mass immigration continues, the population won’t drop, just change.

You are aware that productive labor depends on people physically doing things? Fancy computer programs cannot do this.

A fancy computer program in a fancy robot might, though.

Well, the fancy robots already exist and are already doing productive labor, the only question is how much productive labor they can do.

We’re less than 20 years from the vast majority of labor being automated by AI and robots.

I beat this drum on occasion but we absolutely aren’t. I’m directly involved with this sort of thing and absent a paradigm-shifting in improvement and robot hardware (possible but far from guaranteed) we cannot practically automate much more than is already automated.

AI is a probabilistic inference machine. It’s not suitable for doing physical tasks with a high degree of accuracy at >99.9% success rate. At 1 part per 6 seconds, even that figure means a line failure every 1000 parts ie. about once every 2 hours.

And robot hardware isn’t up to performing constant physical work with soft bodies like cloth or complex shapes. Anything more complex than a suction gripper or pinching fingers has failed to take off in a factory setting because it’s not reliable enough or because it wears out too quickly.

Starting to see recognition of this in fiction now.

"My God, why can't you just use robots?"
The researcher gave him a puzzled look.
"Humans are much cheaper, of course."

There is no guarantee of this happening. Progress in AI could stagnate. I don't agree that very many jobs can be automated with today's technology. We may be close, but progress is already slowing down. There are a number of problems limiting progress that might not be overcome. Returns to scaling are starting to plateau, we're running out of data, and Moore's Law is coming to an end. It is definitely possible that we will find solutions to these problems and I know some think they've already found them, but nothing is guaranteed.

I don't agree that very many jobs can be automated with today's technology. We may be close, but progress is already slowing down.

I think they can, not in the sense that you can automate away everything a single person does, but rather that you can automate part of what many people do, to the point that you can manage workloads with much smaller teams.

I think the reason that not that much of this automation is happening right now, is that fast progress in the technology means that you might be commiting a ton of capex into a system that might be "obsolete" in a couple of years.

It’s definitely a problem if you need lots and lots of disposable people to stand in a trench and hold rifles.

We’ve barely even entered the drone swarm age where your shielded underground factories can pump out millions of kamikaze drones to blacken the sky and scour trenches to find enemies to kill, all autonomously even if a signal with a base station or satellite is lost.

It remains to be seen whether we can actually bridge the gap between our current situation and that eventuality. It's entirely possible that our current system suffers catastrophic collapse before it achieves full automation. Given the likely outcomes of the sort of future you're describing, such a collapse might even be preferable.

Ah yes, the glorious technocratic future of South Korea where the wasteland is viciously guarded by an autonomous kill swarm. Nobody knows if a single South Korean yet lives. But trapped, deep underground, is one last 300 year old South Korean, asshole destroyed beyond all recognition by the ass wiping robot made to purpose that has desperately needed maintenance the last 78 years. Truly a bright future South Korea has in store for themselves.

The competitive pressures that cause South Koreans to not have any children may well be destroyed by a 50% drop in population or fully automated luxury capitalism.

Maybe, maybe not. What started as competitive pressures could rapidly become cultural or just generalized dysfunction. What happens when a society forgets how to have and raise the next generation of itself? Once that institutional competence is lost, can it be relearned in time? Will anyone even want to?

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Come now, if you know anything about Korean youth culture, surely you must know how enamored they are of broadcasting the most mundane of activities for all the world to see.

If you want a picture of South Korea’s future: I have no ass and I must stream.

Except the remaining 20% would consist of infertile middle-aged and old people who'd also die out in a matter of time. A collapse in fertility, unless reversed, inexorably reaches a certain point where it becomes irreversible.

Maybe, but when most people are unemployed for life I think more will have time for parenting, too.

Uh, isn't the core of SK's low fertility based on competitive pressures to get one of the few socially respected jobs before shacking up? These aren't western trailer trash who will breed on the dole.

Historically depopulation has been a pretty significant problem, and I think it's very likely to continue to be that way unless robot automation leads to such a wealth boom that the population transitioning from net producers into net consumers is alleviated. (Even if that happens, nations with solid birthrates are likely to have a comparative advantage all other things being equal.)

I'm not convinced it's impossible, but I'm not convinced it's a cinch either.

How do you mean?

All the examples that come to mind from the classical period have a ton of confounding factors. Were the Romans out of money because their tax base died of plague, or because they wasted too much on panem et circenses, or because they just had too many enemies?

By the Industrial Revolution, population is definitely less important than development, natural resources, etc. I think this probably dates back to the late medieval period, but I don’t know enough about the history to pick out key trends on graphs like these.

I guess I agree with the “all else equal” statement. It’s just rare.

they just had too many enemies?

Well I mean you are less likely to have too many enemies if you had lots of young people!

By the Industrial Revolution, population is definitely less important than development, natural resources, etc.

I think the experience of France during the World Wars would suggest otherwise (or, at a minimum, it would suggest that more people means you can better develop your natural resources!) France - which had a higher population than Germany and the UK in the middle of the 19th century - had already started suffering from a comparatively low TFR going into the First World War, where they suffered horrific casualties. Their lack of desire to run another meatgrinder the second time around is probably at least somewhat related to their population woes: note by contrast that the Germans suffered higher casualties numerically in the First World War, but were willing to bleed white in a multi-front war. (And for all the talk of GERMAN WONDERWEAPONS, Superior German Technology was more a late-war thing - I don't think it was dispositive in their struggle with the French. In fact, France's biggest mistake may have been failing to substantively attack Germany while the German army was deployed fighting in Poland - the farce of the Saar Offensive makes a lot more sense if you model the French as having a lot of unwillingness to incur casualties.)

I definitely agree that in this case (and most cases where population decline occurs) there are cofounding variables. But an older population makes pretty much all of those problems worse, and more people can be deployed to solve almost any problems (particularly now that agriculture is so efficient!)

The problem with low tfr in the West is mass immigration, not labor shortages. If natives in Germany or Sweden stop reproducing, they’re going to end up being 30% of the population by 2100 and they and their descendants will be living in somebody else’s country, forever. Korea and China will likely still be 90%+ Korean and Chinese, there will simply be fewer of them. This is no major issue.

All the technologies you listed can automate genocide too if push comes to shove

Personally speaking, I oppose genocide, so I hope that doesn’t happen.

It is a blunt, inefficient instrument. I agree.

That... is not the problem with genocide.

What is the problem with genocide?

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Not clear that North Koreans will get to move into the vacuum. Could be that South Korea imports lots of young non-Korean immigrants to take care of their elderly and these immigrants end up taking over.

Well, South Korea flooding their country with 80 IQ third worlders as opposed to allowing their co-ethnics to ease them into the dustbin of history gently as they effectively euthanize themselves as a nation does not really do much to convince me South Korea is smart or that North Korea is stupid or crazy.

The problem isn't South Korea not letting North Koreans in, it's North Korea not letting them out. North Koreans aren't allowed to travel at all. They can't even travel around their own country without a permit, which is not given without a reason (or a bribe). They certainly can't travel abroad. An amount of smuggling into and out of China is generally tolerated to keep the economy going, but that's it.

North Koreans who manage to make it to South Korea somehow are considered traitors and their family is punished in their stead, so if you're going to do that you better take your whole family at once.

Both China and Russia will deport North Korean 'illegal immigrants' back to North Korea, so basically the only way to get out is to travel the length and breadth of China and then sneak into Mongolia or one of the SEA countries from where they'll be 'deported' to South Korea instead.

South Korea already considers them citizens (SK claims the whole peninsula, so does NK.) When they arrive, they're even given some money and an acculturation course. They couldn't really be much more welcoming.

Martial law was lifted by the parliament less than half an hour ago; it seems troops have left the building. Hopefully nothing else bad happens.

The parliament wasn't allowed to meet in the first place, so any declaration by the group of people who were MPs before the declaration of martial law, is invalid.

The BBC reported that a parliamentary majority can lift martial law under Korean law. There may be some circular logic involved, but the vote involved 190 out of 300 MPs, so was a majority.

It depends if the military have appetite to run the country or not. If they decide they want to - whatever parliament does is void.

I just don't understand Asian politics.

It's kinda like those bizarre scenes in Taiwan where all the lawmakers are fighting over a pen or trying to run away with the text of the legislation to prevent it being signed.

You would expect in a place with essentially no crime people would be civil all the time, but it's really hard to predict how Western institutions play out when they are transplanted into Asia.

I mean, we have quorum busts and filibusters, ‘odd’ is in the eye of the beholder.

In the UK they had someone try to walk off with the magic mace.

A people can adopt surface-level aspects of a foreign culture, even ones with huge effects on quality of life (like Marxism-Leninism, liberalism, democracy, the sexual revolution, Christianity) quickly, but deeply held underlying population traits will remain unaffected for much longer. Eventually cultural belief does change a people (hajnal line etc), but it’s slow.

Any Seoulologists want to chime in about whether this was somehow telegraphed? Seems out of left field to this casual observer, although I am dimly aware of the parade of high level political scandals in Korea recently.

For what it's worth, reporting claims members of the President's own party were blindsided by this. Rumor mongering is afoot; I've heard in a streamer's chat that the current rumor is that the Minister of National Defense, Shin Won-shik, suggested this course of action, but take that with boulders of salt.

I guess we’ll see what happens next, so far panic appears to be limited and it’s not clear how much of the military he has on his side.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has published its final report on the results of their investigation (dated from December 4th for some reason). It's quite the whopper at 520 pages and I'm only starting to read through the thing, but they tackle one of the big scissor issues of the issue - the origin of the virus - right at the start so there is a good hook right away. I have not read the Fauci emails so some of this might be old news, but some of those include rather damning excerpts.

According to the report, what would eventually become Proximal Origin started on Feb 1 with a write-up by Kristian Andersen who has Noticed™ some concerning biological properties of the virus which did not strike him as natural. He contacted Jeremy Farrar over this, who acknowledged his concerns and referred him to Fauci; Fauci was appropriately alarmed and shortly arranged a conference call to discuss the findings. Andersen mentions that the talk they had before the call was his first time talking to Fauci, and that he "specifically suggests that if [Andersen] thinks this came from the lab, [he] should consider writing a scientific paper on it."

So he does - apparently encountering inconvenient difficulties along the way. Feb 8, in an internal email from Andersen (p.24):

A lot of good discussion here, so I just wanted to add a couple of things for context that I think are important - and why what we're considering is far from "another conspiracy theory", but rather is taking a valid scientific approach to a question that is increasingly being asked by the public, media, scientists, and politicians (e.g. I have been contacted by Science, NYT, and many other news outlets over the last couple of days about this exact question).

<...> Our main work over the past couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered. <...>

Feb 20, in another email from Andersen as the work continues (p.25):

<...> just one more thing though, reviewer 2 is unfortunately wrong about "Once the authors publish their new pangolin sequences, a lab origin will be extremely unlikely". Had that been the case, we would of course have included that - but the more sequences we see from pangolins (and we have been analyzing/discussing these very carefully) the more unlikely it seems that they're intermediate hosts. They definitely harbor SARS-CoV-like viruses, no doubt, but it's unlikely they have a direct connection to the COVID-19 epidemic.

Unfortunately none of this helps refute a lab origin and the possibility must be considered as a serious scientific theory (which is what we do) and not dismissed out of hand as another ‘conspiracy’ theory. We all really, really wish that we could do that (that’s how this got started), but unfortunately it’s just not possible given the data.

Emphasis mine. There are already hints of a foregone conclusion, but it doesn't seem bad yet - however Jeremy Farrar, who referred Andersen to Fauci earlier, seems to have different concerns. Same page, email from Farrar (emphasis mine):

I hope there is a paper/letter ready this week to go to Nature (and WHO) which effectively puts to bed the issue of the origin of the virus.

I do think [it's] important to get ahead of even more discussion on this, which may well come if this spreads more to US and elsewhere, and other "respected" scientists publish something more inflammatory.

He later gets notified via email that "rumors of bioweaponeering are now circulating in China", to which his response is:

Yes I know and in US - why so keen to push out ASAP. I will push Nature

Same page, another email from Farrar to Andersen reviewing (some version of) the draft:

Sorry to micro-manage/microedit!

But would you be willing to change one sentence?

From "It is unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of an existing SARS-related coronavirus."

To "It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of an existing SARS-related coronavirus."

That's... certainly one sentence, I suppose.

I'm still reading but from a cursory glance the report tackles many topics, including the government response, the lockdowns, economic impacts, etc. I think many people will find their hobby horse something of interest in here. Discussion thread go.

There has been a significant decline in students’ academic performance because of pandemic-era school closure policies. Standardized test scores show that children lost decades worth of academic progress.The performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading declined to levels recorded two decades ago, and the average composite score for the ACT by high school graduates dropped below 20 for the first time since The students whose classes were less disrupted in the 2020-2021 school year lost about 20 percent of math learning compared to losses of 50 percent for students who did not have access to in-person instruction.

According to Eric Hanushek, an economist at the Hoover Institution, pandemic-era students could lose an estimated $70,000 in lifetime income.These losses are estimated to be two to nine percent of lifetime earnings, depending on the state they live and the severity of school closures.

Does this make sense? I had the misfortune to do some university during the pandemic, I can confirm that very little was learnt. Zoom is not conducive to paying attention, there was a perfect storm of technical problems, bad mics, and alt-tab is seductive. My teacher friends tell me there was a noticeable quality decline in this period, from an already low baseline. So the story they're telling is quite reasonable. The pandemic also probably has an enduring effect in blackpilling people on education, it makes it feel like even more of an arbitrary mess to be gamed and engineered.

But do children learn anything in school anyway? You can graduate from high school and then get a degree without knowing much of anything. I don't know if I learnt that much from the unaffected parts of my degree, as compared to reading a few books or doing my own independent research or working. Newton got a lot of great work done during his pandemic lockdown period.

But do children learn anything in school anyway? You can graduate from high school and then get a degree without knowing much of anything.

Surprisingly, some students do indeed learn in school. It happens to some students, on some days, and in some classes, when the perceived norms for students is to pay attention and do the work. When those norms are gone, those students who would have learned something are not paying attention and miss the opportunity, or they are paying attention but have not done the work and are thus unprepared for the moment.

This is not the most efficient way to learn. But it does happen, just not often and not to everyone.

I worked with high-school and college students before, during, and after the pandemic. The holes even in their elementary-school math (like fractions and decimals) are so much larger now than before. But what's really impressive is the holes in their expectations for what the school norms ought to be. No, the fact that you showed up doesn't mean that you will pass the class. No, the fact that you wrote 'idk' as your answer does not earn you partial credit. Yes, we are going to have an in-class exam, and no you can't use your laptop or phone, and no you can't work in groups. How were you supposed to know how to answer this question, you ask? Do you observe this section in your textbook that you were required to read, with a very similar example worked out in detail? Do you remember these two similar problems we have done in class? Do you recall these three similar problems on the homework, which I see by your turned-in work you have done correctly? Was that perhaps not your work?

Rant over; I am just so happy I have retired.

The pandemic also probably has an enduring effect in blackpilling people on education, it makes it feel like even more of an arbitrary mess to be gamed and engineered.

My understanding is that a bunch of forms of mild noncompliance increased since the pandemic. Education, unregistered vehicles and the like. Polite society lost the mandate of heaven in enough eyes.

How do we distinguish the effects of COVID from the effects of the anti-standards and anti-law-enforcement movement born out of BLM?

To be blunt, by who’s doing the noncomplying. Rednecks- it was from Covid. Blacks- it was from BLM. Everyone else is just copying one of the two(or possibly both).

I don’t think you can. One of the most “institutions are untrustworthy” moments was public health telling us that gathering in the thousands to protest for racial justice was okay because racism was more pernicious to public health than COVID.

But if we weren’t protesting for racial justice then we had to stay home, not visit our dying relatives or attend their funerals, and certainly not gather for mere socialization.

I'd say almost all of the incalculable long-term damage that was done to our civilization by the lockdowns is irreversible.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8NLzc9kobDk

Milei on a podcast with Lex Fridman. Fridman is a bit of an empty head but Milei is great. Previously I read this summary of Milei by Scott Alexander, as well as several Economist articles on him, and all that information seems accurate from Milei describing himself. But the podcast also gives some new stuff I hadn't heard before.

a) He considers Ireland's market reforms a model and wants to go even farther, so that Argentina's the freeest country in the world. But he also spent a long time criticizing libertarians who criticized him, emphasizing that he had to live in reality and not put Argentinians through too much short term pain or Peronists would sweep him.

b) The economic statistics pre-Milei, as terrible as they were, were still cooked a bit because there were lots of price controls. But it doesn't matter if bread is cheap if there isn't actually any bread to buy. So removing price controls made inflation shoot up but also let people actually buy shit.

c) He's a big fan of the Austrian school and Mises, Hayek, Rothbard. Not a surprise, but I guess it confirms he prefers it over Chicago school. Personally I don't really understand the difference anyway.

d) He eliminated a system where there were middle managers handing out welfare payments, which was both a gross source of inefficiency, and allowed those middle managers to turn out the people they give payments to for large protests. This both freed up a bunch of money and got rid of a lot of stupid protests. According to Milei, shortly after he did that there was a protest organized against him that was expected to get 50 000 - 100 000 people, but only turned out 3 000.

e) He really, really hates socialism and loves freedom. He also doesn't like wokism and modern feminism, but his primary hate is socialism/communism. He also really does like Jews, he dropped in a few references to Egypt enslaving Jews and how he supports Israel today. He also really loves his dogs.

f) He recommends Trump/Musk move fast and get to cutting regulations as his #1 tip for DOGE.

g) He mentioned that Trump was "unfairly accused of protectionism" which is kinda funny to me. You can like or hate protectionism, but you can't really deny that Trump is a protectionist. Unless you're Milei I guess.

He considers Ireland's market reforms a model and wants to go even farther, so that Argentina's the freeest country in the world.

This is fascinating, did he mention which specific reforms he was referring to?

He didn't, and I don't know much about Ireland, but my casual awareness is that they have extremely low corporate tax and have become an international tax haven. So I guess Milei wants to make Argentina a tax haven too.

Ah, correct on both counts: probably the main reason that so many tech companies (Google, Meta etc.) have their EU headquarters in Dublin (along with the English-speaking populace). Interesting.

For details, see leprechaun economics.

Protectionism in Argentina is off the charts. Maybe it doesn’t register as such by their standards.

Yeah, for just one example, Argentina has a weird law on the books that requires smartphones sold in Argentina to be made at great expense in the remote Tierra del Fuego region. Xiaomi has set up a factory there.

Obviously there is a huge black market in iPhones.

Maybe it's all for the best when we factor in the immense social harms caused by smart phone use.

Goes for other countries around there, too. I regularly read complaints from Brasilians that buying tech there is insanely expensive due to tariffs.

That particular price warp had them become a haven for retro gaming because everybody still used old consoles and arcades for a very long time.

Just when I thought lawfare was out, they pull me back in.

So.. a Delaware judge has once again unilaterally decided to void Elon Musk's $50 billion pay package.

For those following along, the timeline goes something like this. The exact details may be a bit fuzzy, but I think I have the broad strokes correct:

  1. Elon Musk and the board of Tesla sign a compensation agreement where if Tesla stock goes up by some outrageous amount, Elon Musk will get an enormous reward. But it it doesn't, Elon will get very little.

  2. People laugh (ha!) because the targets are so outlandish that there is no way in a million years that Tesla could ever...

  3. Tesla stock meets and exceeds the targets

  4. Some asshat with like 8 shares of Tesla sues, claiming that the pay package harmed him even though the price of Tesla stock has gone up like 1000%.

  5. A Delaware judge sides with the asshat and voids the compensation agreement.

  6. Elon asks for a shareholder vote on the pay package and wins with 72% of the vote despite a politically motivated campaign to pressure big funds to vote against it.

  7. It goes back to the judge who says, nope, still doesn't count.

  8. The judge awards the lawyers for the plaintiffs $345 million

Basically what this means is that, if you register your company in Delaware, a judge can prevent you from making legally binding contracts. If you make the wrong enemies, your shares in a company can be stripped from you. The lawyers who sue you will make a fortune.

There's a folk belief in the United States that companies register in Delaware to avoid taxes somehow. I thought this myself, but when it came time to register my own company, I learned that this is not accurate. Registering in Delaware doesn't save you any money and actually costs you quite a bit ranging from maybe $300/year for a small corporation to perhaps $100,000 for large one. People register their companies in Delaware because there is the perception that there is a large body of case law that protects companies against frivolous lawsuits.

Obviously, this is over now. You'd be a fool to register a company in Delaware. To quote Paul Graham:

It used to be automatic for startups to incorporate in Delaware. That will stop being the case if activist judges start overruling shareholders.

So.. a Delaware judge has once again unilaterally decided to void Elon Musk's $50 billion pay package.

The one thing I will mention is that companies historically preferred Delaware's Chancery court because there was no chance of a jury trial (most states allow either side to demand and get a jury). The fact it would be a unilateral decision was the selling point, as that is thought to be much lower variance than a jury. I.e. you can predict what each judge is likely to decide based upon case law and their previous decisions. Even if their decisions are not what you want, the fact they are more predictable than a jury trial is valuable.

So this really should only be a problem if this is not consistently followed. But given expert lawyers in Delaware were predicting the outcome prior to the original trial probably indicates that Tesla should have been able to predict this and take steps accordingly (structure the deal differently, have more independence between the people putting together the deal and Musk etc.).

Texas I think does allow jury trials for their Business court, so whether that is going to be better may be a gamble.

Your (3) and (4) are (chronologically speaking) in the wrong order. The award was granted in Jan 2018 and the lawsuit was filed in June 2018, long before the performance targets were hit. The lawsuit has taken a long time to resolve in part because shareholder suits like this in Delaware put a heavy burden on plaintiffs looking to reverse corporate decisions.

Basically what this means is that, if you register your company in Delaware, a judge can prevent you from making legally binding contracts

I hate to break it to you but this is every jurisdiction in the nation depending on the terms of the contract and (crucially for this case) how they were reached.

I hate to break it to you but this is every jurisdiction in the nation depending on the terms of the contract and (crucially for this case) how they were reached.

Fair enough. I guess the difference is the quality of the judges.

As someone pointed out recently, the Constitution was seen as a work of genius when applied to the United States. When essentially the same constitution was applied to Liberia, the results were quite different.

There is no law written so well that it can't be bent to any purpose. Roe v. Wade stood for nearly 50 years and was based on almost nothing but the desire of the Supreme Court to have abortion legal. Here in Washington State the Supreme Court ruled that a capital gains tax was not an "income tax". I'm sure they wrote pages and pages of legal justifications.

Well, no, it's not about the quality of the judges. The entire concept of a corporation is underpinned by the idea that the corporation exists as an independent entity from the owners, and that the owners, in turn, have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the corporation. If this concept didn't exist then there would effectively be no corporations at all. Consider the following example: The founders of a company want to expand, and raise money by selling 49% of the company's stock and retaining a controlling interest among themselves. The founders hold key executive positions and the majority of the board seats. The stock sale raises 20 million dollars of investor money. Instead of investing it in the company, however, they split the 20 million among themselves as bonuses. Then, they go even further and vote to liquidate the company's assets and use the proceeds to pay themselves bonuses.

Obviously, if companies could do this nobody would invest in them. The Tesla situation isn't this egregious but the circumstances were enough to trigger additional court scrutiny. It isn't controversial to suggest that Musk has a disproportionate influence over Tesla; no judge is buying the "I just work here" argument. and the amount of the bonus was far, far beyond anything within the realm of what could be considered reasonable. It's easy to lose sight of thing when the numbers get this big and we're talking about the superwealthy, but 54 billion is a lot of money. It's about 25% larger than Ford's total market cap. It's in the neighborhood of the market caps of major companies like Allstate, Target, and Phillips 66. You can understand why the court might be concerned that paying an amount of money that could be used to create a Fortune 500 company from scratch as a bonus might not be in the best interest of the company, and why there might have been a bit of self-dealing involved.

It didn't end there, though. Musk still could have won the suit had he simply disclosed his relationship with certain key players, but he didn't, which raised the question of whether the shareholders were sufficiently informed, and was enough to void the transaction. The fact that the shareholders voted to uphold the deal at a later date is irrelevant, because there's no mechanism in the law for it.

I don't think there's an argument that the judge viewed the $56 billion compensation as too large due too its absolute size.

Why? Because if we're using the absolute size of the reward as the metric (and not relative size) then the same logic must apply to the plaintiff's lawyers. But it clearly didn't as they stand to be so enriched by this lawsuit that it will rank among the largest awards ever given to a legal team. (Possibly even the highest payment ever for a non class-action suit). Clearly, the judge is not against gigantic rewards in principle.

Nor should she be. The market cap of a dying company like Ford has little bearing on the market cap of Tesla. There's little doubt that Tesla's market cap is almost entirely dependent on Musk's involvement with the company. Getting 5% of the market cap gains for himself does not seem unreasonable.

I grant that there are legal peculiarities here that make the judge's ruling sensible on some level. But, on another level, it's clearly a miscarriage of justice since there was no harm done to shareholders (in fact, they have done extremely well) and the reward was also clearly what the shareholders wanted (having voted on it).

I suppose we can debate the twists and turns that led to this decision (and the monstrous reward given to the lawyers) but the end result is still the same: it's the wrong result. It doesn't fill me with confidence in the supposedly great legal environment of Delaware. Although I do agree with a different poster that a judge trial, even in deep blue Delaware, is likely to have a better result than a jury trial in a case like this.

Why? Because if we're using the absolute size of the reward as the metric (and not relative size) then the same logic must apply to the plaintiff's lawyers. But it clearly didn't as they stand to be so enriched by this lawsuit that it will rank among the largest awards ever given to a legal team. (Possibly even the highest payment ever for a non class-action suit). Clearly, the judge is not against gigantic rewards in principle.

The judge did apply the same logic to the attorney's fees. The Plaintiffs were originally asking for a contingency fee based on 11% of the amount of money they saved the shareholders, which came out close to 7 billion. It should be noted that they were already applying a significant discount factor to the 33% they would be entitled to under the standard formula. The judge knocked this amount down even further, precisely for the reason that the total dollar amount was so high, even if what they were asking for wasn't a lot in comparison to the total amount at issue. She went on to explain that while courts have adopted various guidelines to determine reasonable compensation, the judge has the ultimate authority to make that determination. She then adopts the alternative valuation formula that Tesla asked for.

There's little doubt that Tesla's market cap is almost entirely dependent on Musk's involvement with the company. Getting 5% of the market cap gains for himself does not seem unreasonable.

The court doesn't doubt this, but the defendants made this argument, and it was rejected nonetheless. The problem the court noted was the absence of any element of bargain from the transaction. In a typical executive compensation package, the idea is that you want the CEO or whoever to have some skin in the game, and at the same time you don't want to lose him to another company, so you offer a compensation package wherein he gets stock options commensurate with increases in the company's valuation. the shareholders benefit because the CEO has skin in the game and they won't lose a good CEO to a better offer. The record in this case doesn't support the contention that that was an issue. The first thing they noted was that since Musk already had a 20% stake in the company, he already had sufficient incentive to meet the benchmarks. But beyond that, he never gave any indication that he'd leave the company or dedicate less time to it without additional compensation. The defense tried to argue that the additional compensation was needed to keep Musk from getting distracted by other ventures, but Musk himself testified that the package had no influence on how much time he spent working on Tesla. The court also noted the absence of any concurrent obligation for him to dedicate any amount of time to Tesla.

Beyond that, though, the biggest problem the court seemed to have with the package is that there was no real negotiation. From the record, it looks like Musk decided what he wanted, drew up the terms for it, asked the board for it, and got it without any pushback. No one on the Compensation Committee ever offered any counterproposals or questioned any of the terms. Musk himself made several changes backing off the amount of compensation, but he admitted that these were of his own volition and not because anyone at the company suggested that his initial proposal was too rich. When you admit that you were "negotiating with yourself" in court, it doesn't create the impression of an arms-length transaction.

But, on another level, it's clearly a miscarriage of justice since there was no harm done to shareholders (in fact, they have done extremely well) and the reward was also clearly what the shareholders wanted (having voted on it).

The defense tried to make this argument, too, and it failed, for reasons related to those above. The fact that the shareholders have done well is irrelevant to the argument since the defense failed to show that the compensation agreement had anything to do with the increase in share price. Musk wasn't even working at the company full-time throughout the relevant time period. If the shareholders would have got rich anyway, then the harm is that 55 billion that could be invested into the company is going to one person who can do whatever he wants with it. As for the stockholder vote, you need to understand the posture of the case:

  1. If this is a normal company where the CEO and board are independent and no one person holds a disproportionate amount of stock, the deal is going to be presumed valid so long as there is a reasonable business justification. In this case, though, it was clear that everyone in the company was more or less subordinate to Musk, as was evidenced by numerous examples presented in the record. Since he had so much influence, the court has to exercise a heightened standard of scrutiny where it determines if the deal was fair.

  2. The burden of proving the deal was fair initially rests on the defendant, but it can shift that burden to the plaintiff if it can show that the shareholders approved the deal. This is what Tesla tried to do. The problem was that the company didn't disclose all of the inherent conflicts to the shareholders. This may seem like a petty, technical argument, but the court makes it clear that this isn't some kind of gotcha where they forgot to list one thing and their whole case goes to shit. It finds that there were numerous, material failures to disclose serious conflicts.

  3. Since they failed to make the required disclosures, the stockholder vote was rendered meaningless, and the defendants retained the burden of having to independently prove that this was a fair business deal. Since, for the reasons stated above, they couldn't do that, they lost the case.

It doesn't fill me with confidence in the supposedly great legal environment of Delaware. Although I do agree with a different poster that a judge trial, even in deep blue Delaware, is likely to have a better result than a jury trial in a case like this.

You need to get the idea out of your head that there's some sort of tribal component to this and that the judge just ignored the law to spite Elon Musk. Corporate law is incredibly complicated and can't be boiled down to a few common sense rules like "if there was a vote then it should stand", because that's not how it works. This level of complexity is precisely why companies choose to not only incorporate in Delaware but usually specify in the corporate bylaws that the Delaware Chancery Court has exclusive jurisdiction over claims arising thereunder, and why they will continue doing so. Yes, you can incorporate in other states, and for smaller companies it makes sense to just incorporate where you do most of your business. But if you get past a certain size or plan on going public then it makes sense to incorporate in Delaware, for the simple reason that the law there is well-developed and the Chancery Court is experienced in handling complex corporate cases. Say you incorporate in Pennsylvania. Venue rules are pretty loose here, and there's a decent chance that that derivative suit will be filed in a remote county and heard by a hick judge who's never handled a corporate case involving a public company before.

In this situation, there's a good chance that he's going to be 100% relying on the information presented in your briefs to educate him on what the law is, and there's a 50% chance that he doesn't actually read them and just asks the lawyers to explain everything to him in open court. If it's filed in a big city then you might get a judge with some corporate experience but just enough to think he doesn't have to read the briefs. He'll also have 7,000 cases on his docket and he'll repeatedly tell you to work something out among yourselves, and in the event the case actually goes to trial he'll ask you if you're going to be finished soon five minutes into your opening statement. I exaggerate, of course, but these are both very different environments than working in a court with a limited docket that handles corporate cases almost exclusively. This case generated a 200 page post-trial opinion. File in state court and you'll get "I rule in favor of the plaintiff" and maybe a brief explanation from the bench if you're lucky. In the rare event that the judge feels the need to issue a written opinion it will be a few double-spaced pages that offer only the barest legal analysis.

As far as Musk is concerned, Texas has tried to remedy this with the Texas Business Court, a similar court that is limited to high-value corporate cases and keeps a light docket, but they just started hearing cases in September and it remains to be seen whether it will develop similarly to the Delaware Chancery Court. The enabling legislation doesn't limit jurisdiction to corporate cases, but to any litigation where the amount in dispute is more than 5 million, so it could certainly become a hellhole for mass torts, but maybe that was the intention. And while you mention that a judge is better than a jury, it's worth pointing out that juries are never used in these types of cases. There are technically two types of courts: Courts of law and courts of equity. Courts of law have judges and juries and the only remedy it can impose is money damages. At common law, courts could only award damages, so if you wanted to force someone to do something (or refrain from doing something), it required an order from the king. Kings delegated this authority to chancellors, who established chancery courts who could do things like issue injunctions, orders for specific performance of a contract, and other so-called "equitable remedies". Most jurisdictions have merged these two courts, but Delaware retains the distinction for some purposes. Given that the remedy sought in this case, recission, is equitable rather than legal, only a judge could award it.

since Musk already had a 20% stake in the company, he already had sufficient incentive to meet the benchmarks. But beyond that, he never gave any indication that he'd leave the company or dedicate less time to it without additional compensation.

Heading off on a bit of a tangent, why the fuck are the courts giving legal advantages to fickle mercenaries? The last thing I'd want to do if I was creating a legal system is punish people for being dependable and committed, but here we are: Musk was dependable and committed, therefore he didn't have the right to as much compensation as an outsider would have.

Does he have any appeals left and is he taking them?

Quoth the NYT:

Tesla said on X, the social media site that Mr. Musk owns, that it would appeal the decision.

“A Delaware judge just overruled a supermajority of shareholders who own Tesla and who voted twice to pay @elonmusk what he’s worth,” the company said on its corporate account. “This ruling, if not overturned, means that judges and plaintiffs’ lawyers run Delaware.”

  • it was on boring procedural grounds. as much as your reddit-esque editorializing would like to portray it as such, i don't think this is a case of woke activist judge vs. based roarkian capitalist
  • the shareholders could have elected to award him the $10B in a new grant instead of trying to retroactively approve the original package. they could have avoided this whole thing, so why didn't they?
  • the delaware supreme court can't decline appeals, so they might overturn it anyway
  • companies incorporate in delware because they are boring and procedural

That the decision looks "boring" on some level says nothing about the motivation for it. It is not uncommon for arbitrary authority to cloak itself in the trappings of inevitable procedure... even when another authority could have come to a completely opposite decision based on the same procedure.

Anyway, it's $55B, not $10B, and if they'd awarded him a new grant there would have been various negaive accounting and tax consequences and in any case, there would immediately be a second shareholder lawsuit on the grounds that since the company had no obligation to pay Musk anything at all, the new grant constituted a gift to him and a violation of Tesla's fiduciary duty to its shareholders.

This surprises me because Tesla clearly believed that the shareholder vote meant something. Are they idiots? I doubt it.

But even if this appeal was decided on boring procedural grounds, the original decision was very much about a woke judge sticking it to Musk.

And the judge could have at least limited the lawyers fees to something reasonable to prevent moral hazard.

If your read the opinion from the judge it's clear that, yes, Tesla was dumb in the way they went about it. If Tesla had done a shareholder vote at any point in the five years this lawsuit was ongoing, that could have ratified the package. Instead Tesla waited until they had lost and then did the shareholder vote to try and get the judge to reverse her decision. She also points out independent reasons why the shareholder vote wouldn't have the ratifying effect Tesla wants, including that the proxy statement for it contains material and misleading statements.

The opinion is monumentally dumb, departing from the three prior rulings which wisely declined not to tread in this shaky ground and "going boldly where no man has gone before" to absolutely violate the fuck out of federal labor law. The judge flat out admits this rescission leaves Musk uncompensated for five years of labor, cloaking it in the fig leave of "well he made a bunch of money on the stock he already owned." That's not how employment law works- employees, including CEOs, must be compensated for their labor, this is a bedrock principle of America, we even have a fucking constitutional ammendment about it.

The judge can rule it was an unfair agreement, but to abrogate responsibility to determine fairness (with a piss-poor cite to another case about bonus claw backs where employees were still paid salaries) and simply say "nope, actually slavery is fine" because she didn't like how Tesla argued the case is gross misconduct.

I get that Musk is not a sympathetic plaintiff, and I get that Tesla didnt take this seriously, but the fact that a judge can rescind a mutually agreed upon contract and leave an employee with zero dollars for five years of work and no one is making a bigger deal of it is fucking mind blowing to me. This is the kind of precedent that kills democracy. At the very least, Deleware suddenly became a very unattractive state to incorporate in.

I mean, it becomes a very unattractive state to any company that doesn't obey the party. If they can keep alternatives from developing, this is just another win win for them.

I mean.. maybe. But why would they do a shareholder vote to immunize themselves against a frivolous, politically-motivated lawsuit filed by a guy who had 8 shares of Tesla? Shareholder votes are not free.

And would the judge have really listened to the vote anyway? It's easy for her to say now. I'll admit I really don't have a lot of patience for the legal details when it seems that judges just use them as justifications for doing the things they were going to do anyway.

What is the evidence that the plaintiff of judge are politically motivated? "Company fails to take lawsuit seriously, gets wrecked" does not sound like a crazy thing? I would probably describe the Hogan-Gawker lawsuit similarly.

It's not just the judge saying this, she cites a bunch of Delaware precedent that votes during litigation can function as ratification for the corporate acts in question. Tesla (for obvious reasons) cannot find a single precedent that post-judgement shareholder votes can serve as a basis for overturning that judgement.

Yes, by begging the question and assuming that the judge is correct on all aspects, then clearly Tesla is in the wrong here.

The evidence is that it’s absurd to bring a lawsuit against a company that made you a ton of money?

That hadn't happened when the lawsuit was filed. OP gets the order of events wrong. The lawsuit was filed 5 months after the package was awarded, well before performance targets were hit.

It's even more absurd to bring a lawsuit against a company for either making you a ton of money (if targets, which included market cap, are hit) or getting its CEO to work for you for free (if they aren't).

More comments

Why did the plaintiffs' lawyers get so much money?

The judge "saved" Tesla shareholders $50 billion so $345 million is just a small amount of that.

Presumably many lawyers could have done that. Wouldn't it make more sense to pay them for the time and effort expended?

I commented about this above, but to reiterate: The lawyers accepted the case on a contingency basis. Since the lawyers take on a considerable amount of risk by working on contingency, they're entitled to compensation beyond what they would get for time and effort expended, defined in terms of a percentage of the settlement. Delaware law provides guidelines for how attorney's fees are to be calculated in these kinds of cases, but attorney's fees are always subject to court approval for reasonableness. A strict reading of one test entitles the attorneys to get (roughly, I'm going from memory) 10% of the amount saved if the case is settled early, 20% if the case is settled after discovery, and the full third if the case goes to trial. By that test, the attorneys in this case would theoretically be entitled to something like 18 billion, but they knew there was no way in hell the judge would ever agree to that, so instead they asked for something like 6 billion, based on some byzantine calculation where they used various discount rates to claim they were entitled to 11% of the total. The judge still disagreed, saying they were nuts to assume that kind of windfall based solely on the unusually high value of the case. The judge did agree that the number was going to be high: She pointed to the fact that the litigation took 6 years and was disrupted numerous times (most notably by COVID and Musk's acquisition of Twitter), that they billed 20,000 hours, that numerous experts were required, numerous people had to be deposed, an inordinate amount of records had to be examined, and the issues involved were incredibly complicated. She then looked at the counterproposal from the defendants, which suggested that they should instead get 15% of some lower number I'm not entirely sure how they arrived that. The judge accepted that proposal.

Lawyers (at least by their own reckoning) are difficult to bill. If they spend 2 hours writing a letter that convinces the opposition to give up a case worth $50bn, but they say they spent 200 hours researching in preparation, do you bill them for the time spent writing or the time spent researching, and how do you get proof of the latter?

In practice, corporate lawyers tend to be paid per job and per concrete action, but they charge huge amounts for those to offset the intangible/unprovable work done. The amount is basically a function of how much money is floating around the case.

Thus $50 billion turns into $300 million, of which the majority will go to the partners of the firm, and then to the taxman (at least in the UK) before it reaches the individual lawyers involved in the case. Still a very nice payout though.

I read read somewhere that it works out to about $17,000 an hour.

Wait til you hear about real estate agents.

Yes, of course. Welcome to the American legal system.

Isn't Tesla's registration moving to Texas for exactly that reason?

Yes. The bigger problem for Delaware, of course, is the future companies that won't register in Delaware.

Delaware's state budget is around $6 billion. There are 2 million companies registered there. It's quite possible that a large percentage of the state budget is paid for by franchise and registration fees.

Personally, I found the whole rationale for registering in Delaware pretty facile in the first place. You already have to register in the state in which you have your physical headquarters. So there's little reason to add a second state into the mix, exposing you to additional risk.

This one judge will likely cost the state billions in future revenue because of Elon Derangement Syndrome.

The reason that Delaware was the home for most publicly traded companies is that the state was one of the first to enact business-friendly structured corporate governance statutes, giving companies a predictable legal environment to work with. This also let Delaware develop a more mature tapestry of corporate caselaw earlier than other states, lending even more legal predictability. And once everyone started registering in Delaware, it was seen as displaying a lack of corporate sophistication to register in some backwater, lawless jurisdiction like New York or California.

Having anti-business, activist judges making these kinds of decisions is not great for Delaware’s reputatio , but how many executive comp packages are or ever will be even remotely close to this kind of absurd number. I would be surprised if this fact pattern ever reappears. Musk will get his payout under the Texas reorganization, so this is a relatively hollow victory for everyone except Plaintiffs’ counsel.

The fact pattern may not recur with those numbers, but it will recur with ever smaller numbers being seen as out of bounds.

Which honestly it should. Elon is a bad example in that Tesla wouldn't be where it is today without him, it's overvalued because of his perceived genius.

But look at GM and Ford! Tesla's direct competitors! Each CEO makes over $28mm, while they ceded the American passenger car market entirely to Honda and Toyota (among others). Honda and Toyota paid their CEOs $3mm and $6mm.

US executive pay is off the charts level of crazy. UK and European companies have CEOs rarely being paid more than $5 million or so and I don't think the quality of the people who become CEOs themselves is significantly better over the pond than here.

Fun fact: British American Tobacco (BAT), a large FTSE 100 company has an American Subsidary called Reynolds. The Finance Director of Reynolds, never mind the CEO, gets paid more than the global CEO of BAT based in London...

I'll try to steelman the high pay.

Let's take Musk. In the counterfactual where he leaves Tesla in 2018, the stock is down at least 95% from its current levels. So he gets paid $56 billion for generating something like $950 billion in shareholder value. I think that's fair.

What's the situation like in Europe? Well, it's grim. Twitter search sucks, but I saw a graphic comparing new companies started after 1980 in the US vs Europe. The US has huge numbers of huge new companies. The EU has only a handful of new companies that have reached a market cap of $10 billion. The US has something like 50 times as many, and the ones that do exist are much larger.

Edit: Found the chart

There's no reason to give a European CEO high pay. They are mere shopminders who are so hamstrung by regulations they can't build a big company anyway. You can't grow a redwood in barren soil.

What I can't steelman is high CEO pay for people like Mary Barra or Marissa Mayer who do an awful job as CEO, do real damage to their companies, and still get paid hundreds of millions of dollars.

What I can't steelman is high CEO pay for people like Mary Barra or Marissa Mayer who do an awful job as CEO, do real damage to their companies, and still get paid hundreds of millions of dollars.

Aren’t most CEOs compensated in equity/options, precisely to align their incentives with those of their shareholders? A CEO who is paid in shares, or in at-the-money call options struck at the beginning of her tenure will, by definition, stand to make no money by tanking her company’s share price.

I don’t know the details of the two cases you mentioned, but potentially the steelman is that from the perspective of shareholders/the board of directors/whoever decides executive comp, hiring these folks was a positive EV bet ex ante, which turned out to be a dud ex post. That a given instance of a positive EV bet pays out negative is not evidence that taking the bet was a bad decision.

I don't understand it! Especially where foreign companies are clearly outperforming American companies, why wouldn't GM target a rising Toyota exec and offer him twice what a Toyota CEO would make but half what the incompetent GM CEO makes?

Isn't Toyota still family-run?

You could even try to poach the literal Toyota CEO with twice his current salary... Even if he's meh at GM you've still destabilised your competition somewhat by taking away their sitting CEO. That alone is probably worth it.

Having anti-business, activist judges making these kinds of decisions is not great for Delaware’s reputatio , but how many executive comp packages are or ever will be even remotely close to this kind of absurd number.

None, presumably. But Delaware's friendly case law reputation is now shattered. I'll posit that it was never real. Companies registered in Delaware because that's what other companies did. It was always bullshit.

And once everyone started registering in Delaware, it was seen as displaying a lack of corporate sophistication to register in some backwater, lawless jurisdiction like New York or California.

The opposite now. But registering in NY or CA would be foolish as well, for obvious reasons. Small red states like Wyoming and South Dakota will replace Delaware as the go-to place for corporate registrations and have a much more credible case as defenders of the rule of law.

I create corporations from time to time and know others who do as well, and yeah, South Dakota is apparently hot right now.