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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36235 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Since people are unfamiliar with Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, one of the world's larger NGOs (it has a staff of about half Gates's foundation), but given their mode of operation - writing policy proposals and then helping governments carry those policies out, seems to be one of the more influential.

I asked Claude to clean up a transcript of a video by 'Academic Agent', but it veered off into summarizing in the later half. Did a pretty good job I think. Here's a what Guardian, who are about as far away ideologically as you can get from AA wrote about "McKinsey for world leaders"-some source's approving descriptions of TBI- last year.. There's broad agreement on what it is and what it does.

"The Triple Shakedown" (note that it's a non-profit, so , salaries are modest - the top management clears $1.2 million or so. Blair is allegedly working for free)

A lot of people say it's a struggle to see who really has power in our current system - there's so much obscurity. But I believe it is not that obscured, and we have enough information to give us a rough map of how it works.

I'll use one network here involving Blair, but there are a number of other versions I'll explain. Let's start first with the CIA and other intelligence services. We know for a fact that these intelligence services have to find a way of laundering money back through the system. Historically, the CIA has washed their funds through big multi-billion dollar foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller.

These are private institutions with pretty opaque balance sheets. They have to report some things, but it's pretty easy for intelligence services to hide funds. For example, if there was a billion dollars in the Ford Foundation unaccounted for, who would say it came from the CIA rather than the endowment left by Henry Ford 100 years ago?

It's well known that they do this. If you follow the arrow from the CIA to one of these big foundations - I've used the Gates Foundation as an example, but many others exist - they publish and disseminate information online about what these foundations spend money on. There's a book called "The Transgender Industrial Complex" showing how many foundations were behind various social causes. A lot of money gets moved through these foundations, and it's all chalked up as charitable, philanthropic endeavors.

People might say, "Look at Bill Gates - he's a multi-billionaire who gives a lot of money to good causes." But you have to see where that money ends up. In this case, I've shown it landing at the Tony Blair Institute, which is the biggest of all the NGOs, but there are many others. On the Tony Blair Institute website, there used to be a link to all their partner organizations - it's one big network of NGOs, with money moving between them.

The money in the Gates Foundation isn't just from the CIA. Some comes from Bill Gates himself, some from Microsoft. Because they're private, they don't always have to declare exactly where the money comes from. They produce annual reports, but much of it remains opaque.

An organization like the Tony Blair Institute has a presence in over 150 nations with over a thousand employees worldwide. What do they do? They come up with white papers and policy proposals that offer governments off-the-shelf solutions. They might suggest to the UK government solutions like digital ID, embracing artificial intelligence, facial recognition technology, digitizing the economy, or adopting public-private partnerships. If you watch these organizations long enough, what starts as a white paper proposal ends up as government policy five or six months later.

Blair and similar organizations then suggest the government will need consultants - because politicians don't have the technical know-how. They offer their own expertise or recommend friends who can help implement these policies. This creates a cycle where money flows from foundations to NGOs to government contracts, often benefiting the same networks that proposed the initial policies. It can work multiple ways - sometimes the government gives a contract to a tech firm, who then needs expertise, and they circle back to people like Blair.

Here it veered off into summarizing.

The speaker argues this happens across various issues: digital ID, AI, climate change, sustainable technology solutions. These organizations are essentially selling "solutions as a service" to governments, with lucrative contracts at every stage. The people involved typically have elite backgrounds in security, cybersecurity, technology, government, and public health. During the COVID pandemic, this entire network was involved in vaccine rollout. The money eventually cycles back in complex ways. An American corporation like Microsoft pays taxes, some of which might end up back with intelligence services or the military-industrial complex.

The speaker also highlights how this network operates internationally. Using foreign aid budgets, governments like the UK provide money to developing nations with strings attached - expecting investments in digital infrastructure, public health, security, or sustainable development. When these governments say they lack expertise, organizations like the Tony Blair Institute step in, offering consultancy and recommendations that often involve contracts with specific tech or pharmaceutical companies.

The speaker concludes by saying this should be illegal. He sees it as a clear conflict of interest that the same person can advise governments, recommend policies that become implemented, and then profit from those implementations. In his view, this is a multi-billion dollar operation happening in broad daylight, affecting not just Western countries but governments worldwide.

It's a beautiful system. It'd be even nicer if it actually worked, however, Blair, for all the political talent he has leaves devastation in his wake. Maybe he's improving the situation in Africa, Kazakhstan or in Saudi Arabia, but mostly it seems like a big grift to me.

Blair is allegedly working for free

He's working for free in the sense of drawing no salary. But by doing this he gets to maintain the world leader lifestyle to a certain degree because the NGO covers all his expenses.

Eg fly by private jet, expensive dinners with important people, stay in nice hotels, etc.

We're in the early innings of awareness of just how corrupt and awful the global NGO complex is.

NGOs, like universities, were a practical way in which "the left ate the world". While conservatives were fighting over elected positions, progressives were dominating the education and non-profit sectors without opposition. In fact, conservatives were more than happy to help – being in theory pro-education and pro-charity without realizing what that entailed.

With no opposition, a large chunk of U.S. GDP and employment is now tied up in non-profits and universities who often act as change agents, pushing a radical anti-Western view of the world.

On X, someone with the handle Data Republican has been diving deep into the corporate structures of NGOs. It's disturbing how much public money is being spent on things like encouraging illegal immigration. Here's an example.

Theres a good thread on /r/seattlewa that delves into one of the many charities that exist to push homeless and black advocacy. The main one that caught my attention was africatown, and community passageways , where the nonprofits get initiatives sponsored and executed by city admins, but funding is 'external'. The money spent is largely for consultant hour costs with the consultant being the charity staff. As such the IRS form for Dominique Davis, CEO of Community Passageways, lists his yearly income of about 150k for one hour of work per week, while Wyking Garrett has amassed 20m of building assets to manage for his organization and pays himself 250k yet by its own metrics fails to succeed in either placing applicants in jobs or rehab programs or long term shelter, and demand more assets gifted for free since failure is proof of the gravity of its mission.

This is how the state speaks out both sides of its mouth. The state says they are responsible stewarts of tax dollars and are not directly funding these charities, but instead the state is funding specific charity projects that do not in fact effect any change and are just vehicles to extract taxpayer money for admin staff.

By being charities, the money disappears into a black hole, project costs bloated and inflated behind an opaque IRS submission that does no breakdown of expenses.

Fundamentally the charity grift exploits the goodwill of humans, the byzantine arcana of chanting the rituals of bureaucratic doublespeak, and the incestuous nature of charities being unaccountable money pools open for skimming with facilitators and grifters taking their turns at the trough. The left protects its own to dine off the proceeds of others, redefining gluttony as restitution. So long as the left has enablers allowing this definitional warfare to continue, it will always abuse language and procedure to take from others instead of creating for itself. Charities need to lose their fight to continue existing, but they get to choose what losing means.

An organization like the Tony Blair Institute has a presence in over 150 nations with over a thousand employees worldwide. What do they do?

According to NGO-world gossip, large amounts of cocaine. Known for being something of a "party shop" by industry standards.

So how does one go about getting a job at this sort of place? Asking for a friend.

Most common is probably either have a nepo-in or study IR at a prestigious university, work in international aid / development for a big western government or the UN for a few years, then move over.

They like you to have experience working with government / NGOs abroad, and to speak at least one foreign language.

Steering the world is hard work. Makes sense they party hard!

Do you have any examples of a TBI whitepaper becoming a devastating policy?

They don't seem very active in this edge of the woods so I had no reason to get pissed. EU is more than enough in the 'retarded policy' area. EU migration policy seems to be a Soros creation, where he ran an influence ops on the baboons in Brussels.

It'd need some research.

devastating policy?

It seems more like a grift these days. Blair is against migration now, and in Britain shilling the typical technocrat crap like digital IDs, censorship and AI - no doubt so that there are some huge contracts he could get kickbacks (sorry, donations) from..

There's even a slight positive influence as he wants less immigration and pushed labour to take such stance. Whether anything will come of it.. ?

Overall, he is really just another of these absolute cretins Europe is full of. The only difference is that he executes fast. Not sure how now, but his government was fucking things up super fast.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/u63dzx/seven_in_ten_teenagers_should_go_to_university/

EU migration policy seems to be a Soros creation, where he ran an influence ops on the baboons in Brussels.

The what?

Soros is an American jewish progressive neoliberal whose spends significantly (as in, something like over 30 billion USD) on progressive political advocacy networks that support, among other things, liberal migration policies.

No_one is insinuating that European migration policy would not have happened absent Soros lobbying, rather than Soros having like-minded partners in Europe and boosting already existing political dynamics.

Ah okay I failed to compute influence ops on not smart decision makers in a city that's the political capital of the EU.

This started as a reply to @SecureSignals @RandomRanger and others but I didn't want to leave it buried at the bottom of a 20 comment long chain as I feel like it warrants examination on it's own.

I posit that the biggest obstacle to the online dissident/woke/identitarian right gaining influence and a wider audience in the US is not that it is rife with grifters, feds, and cosplayers. (Though it is) It's biggest obstacle is that it doesn't do enough to differentiate itself from the online woke/identitarian left in the eyes of people who are not members of the priestly caste (IE Journalists, Academics, etc...). While I acknowledge that the identitarian right has managed to make inroads within the priestly caste (See Yarvin's recent interview in the NYT), it seems to me that the influence of priestly caste has been waning overall (See the election of Donald Trump).

I get the impression that a lot of commentors here don't grasp just how unpopular identity politics is in "normie" spaces. In fact, I would say that to call it "unpopular" may be grossly under selling it. Leftists often lament the weakness/lack of class consciousness in the US, that the poor, more often than not, do not see themselves as "exploited" as much as they see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed". However I believe that this is a feature rather than a bug if one wants to live in a society with high trust and social mobility, and one of the things that distinguishes the US from other nations.

If the identitarian right and the wider priestly caste are going to hold on to Identity Politics as an organizing principal/value they are going to have to have to confront the fact that the perception of Identity Politics in the popular zeitgeist is that of an ideology for losers. An ideology for people too stupid, degenerate, or incompetent to survive in an honest meritocracy. An ideology for people who could not and therefore "Didn't Earn It". They will also have to overcome the perceived association of Identity Politics with Socialism, Marx, and other foreign (distinctly Un-American) influences. Specifically, those of the Indian sub-continent (IE the worst place on earth) and Europe (IE that socialist shithole our ancestors fled across the ocean to escape, and that we as Americans have expended untold millions in blood and treasure trying to protect from its own worst impulses).

Finally, there is the question of value added. Is the priestly caste even relevant these days? Are the jobs that the priestly caste performs mostly fake? Could we do away with them entirely? If so, is trying to align with them a smart move?

Imagine a sincere white supremacist, a walking talking Hollywood cliche with a shaved head, half a dozen kids, a wife he beats, and the 14 words tattooed on his back. How would you go about convincing him that he would be doing more to secure a future for his children (and his genes) by urging his son to associate with gay Catholics and non-binary/MTF cat-girls, than he would by letting his son date that thicc Latina from down the street?

I contend that these are the sort of issues that both the woke left and the identitarian right are going to have to grapple with if they don't want "Trumpism" to run the table on them, as much of the ground level opposition to wokism as it exists today is in reality opposition to identify politics as a whole.

To what extent do American normies buy into the belief that their society is a honest meritocracy?

They've bought into wanting a honest meritocracy, the question of to what degree we actually have one is a major bone of contention, and driver of anti-woke sentiment.

As far as I know, one recurring talking point of (mostly suburban and PMC) white liberals is that the blindness and ignorance of classical liberalism towards North American racist and white supremacist power structures is the main factor driving many people towards identity politics. If we accept that premise, it’s a major driver of woke sentiment as well.

If we accept that premise, it’s a major driver of woke sentiment as well.

The principle of explosion says if we accept a false premise, we can derive anything from it. The bit about "racist and white supremacist power structures" is a boogeyman; if you try to find out what they are you get a combination of real but insignificant examples (e.g. a racist sheriff here and there) and smoke and fog, where things are said to be white supremacist for reasons that don't make sense (and are sometimes outright nuts, like that Smithsonian poster about being on time being white)

And you believe those talking points?

You believe that a member of the PMC would never lie or misrepresent facts to push a political agenda?

Even PMC members here in Germany, who have no stake whatsoever in the matter, faithfully talk those points as gospel truths.

Unfortunately I think their belief in this is mostly unironic and sincere. So is that of their mulatto 'allies'.

I asked you if you believe them.

I don't believe that a member of the PMC would never lie or misrepresent facts to push a political agenda. I also don't believe that that's what they're doing in this particular case. I also don't think that nonwhite minorities traditionally had ample reason to believe that American society is a honest meritocracy.

How is this supposed to serve of rebuttal then?

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To the extent that they are succeeding.

That's not exactly a stable social consensus though, is it?

The whitest parts of America are the highest trust. Robert Putnam has shown that social trust is related to homogeneity. We also know that oxytocin allele expression is related to social trust, so not every group has the same amount of social trust. If you value “social mobility”, the easiest way to increase this is to live in a homogenous high-trust nation. This is why the five nations with the most social mobility are Nordic, and all of the top 10 are European. And so,

if one wants to live in a society with high trust and social mobility,

their primary ambition should be to maximize how many Europeans exist around them, particularly Northern Europeans. And it seems everyone knows this, hence migration. But this is problematic for those who deserve that level of trust, but for whom the trust is reduced with every addition of foreigner. Because they deserve to live around their own kind, just as much as an intelligent individual whose genes express a high IQ should be able to work productively according to his genes.

An ideology for people too stupid, degenerate, or incompetent to survive in an honest meritocracy

Notably, high-trust Europeans do not feel this kind of sentiment, which is why they enact policies that help their own citizens and promote social mobility. Right now they think that everyone is their people, because they have been misguided, but this can be changed. Meritocracy is also not a historically common idea in Europe. It’s also not very evidenced by science. A person’s identity is not their IQ, it’s the whole package of genes which they share in common with their family and extended kin, IQ involving a sliver. Meaning a high IQ Russian has more in common with an average Russian than a high IQ Persian. This is why a high IQ member of a nation in history continued identifying with their nation. A high IQ is just one genetic expression of a group, and it may even come at the cost of other valuable group skills (like in-group preference!).

Thought experiment: you have a group of Northern European Utah Mormons who were selected by both race and culture to be hyper-trusting. Let’s assume they aren’t gay furries. How do you convince them with reason to invite foreigners to live alongside them? The only reason their theology stopped being explicitly racist is that the American government forced the change upon them. I can imagine, you know, that they may want to invite some Chinese or Japanese families for fun. Maybe an Italian architect, maybe a Japanese designer. But why would they ever increase their foreigner proportion by more than 1%? Is this in their interest?

The more we refer to the priestly caste the more I am reminded of Babylon 5.

"Three castes: worker, religious, warrior."
"They build, you pray, we fight."
– Neroon of the Warrior Caste to Delenn of the Religious Caste

What happened to the worker caste in the US? The religious caste outsourced everything?

The religious caste convinced itself that it was the working caste.

Let’s assume they aren’t gay furries.

Cheap shot?

I just didn’t want the inevitable “but how can you forget —“, he is an outlier

Well, Trace isn't a Mormon any more, so I hardly see the relevance.

How would you convince Mormons to invite non-Mormons to live alongside them? I'm not sure. 45% of Utah is non-Mormon, so it doesn't appear to be that difficult, and as far as I'm aware Mormon Utahns don't seem to have any great hatred of their non-Mormon neighbours.

Or is it specifically how you convince 'Northern Europeans' (Nordics? Germanics? Aryans?) to live alongside non-Nordics? That again doesn't seem that hard? Minnesota, for instance, was settled as majority Scandinavian and Germanic, I believe, and it now seems pretty welcoming of non-Nordics.

I just don't particularly see the riddle here. Neither Mormons nor Northern-European/Nordic/Germanic/Aryan/Whatever people are in fact inherently predisposed to exclusionary ethnic communities. You may just be typical-mind-ing here. Perhaps you feel a kind of visceral opposition to living in a community that's something less than 99% Nordic, but demonstrably not even most Nordics feel that way, much less most fair-skinned people, and much less people in general.

You can’t provide a reason for why they would rationally opt into immigration if they knew all the data. Mormons do not have autonomy. So there’s no “revealing preference” here. Nordic countries brought in immigrants under the false belief that everyone in the world is just like them; science and research has now disproven that. If Sweden knew what they knew now, they would never have brought in immigrants. You cannot persuade Swedes logically to do this.

Those are statements of dogma, not reasoned arguments. What reason do you have to think that it's genuinely inconceivable that a majority-Mormon population would ever welcome more than 1% of a non-Mormon population? That Swedes would never welcome more than 1% non-Nordic immigrants? On what basis do you think that? There's at least directional evidence at the moment suggesting that both Mormons and Swedes are happy living in societies that are less than 99% homogenous.

You've also avoided clarifying exactly what you're talking about - I understood you to be making a racial argument here. Presumably Norwegian immigrants to Sweden are fine. German? Slavic? Italian? I am guessing that by 'immigrants' you mean 'non-northern-European immigrants'? Likewise are you assuming that 'Mormons', contextually, means fair-skinned Mormons?

Meaning a high IQ Russian has more in common with an average Russian than a high IQ Persian. This is why a high IQ member of a nation in history continued identifying with their nation.

The Russian elite were for centuries francophiles who disdained the slavic culture of their peasant countrymen. In fact the entire project of 19th century European nationalists was essentially the convincing of high IQ individuals to stop identifying as part of a multinational imperial elite and start identifying with poor farmers who spoke the same language, so it was clearly non-obvious to them that they should do this.

Seems like something that’s still in place today to an extent.

People of the multinational upper class often feel more kinship with one another even though they’re from different countries than they do with the lower class people in their own country.

This is honestly true in my own life. I’m in grad school. My friends are from all over the world. I have a lot more in common with them although they’re from Iran and China and Ecuador than I do with people even in my own family in the US who never left their hometown and whose thinking and interests in life are very foreign to my own.

It’s sort of a self sorting by intellect and interests.

I gather this is what is meant by “globalists”.

the entire project of 19th century European nationalists was essentially the convincing of high IQ individuals to stop identifying as part of a multinational imperial elite and start identifying with poor farmers who spoke the same language

Is what the intelligent wing of the modern right wants basically equivalent to what the old European nationalists were trying to do?

The whitest parts of America are the highest trust.

The highest trust parts of the US aren't "white" as much as they are "red" and "rural". States like Utah, Idaho, Wyoming , and Vermont. Even in bottom tier trust states like Lousiana and New York, the trend holds with the highest trust counties being those with the less urban development and more Trump voters.

their primary ambition should be to maximize how many Europeans exist around them

To what end?

Europeans do not feel this kind of sentiment

And why should I as an American care what Europe thinks? You have yet to make the case that racialism creates better outcomes than a color-blind meritocracy. I also note that when Europe does "enact policies that help their own citizens" those polices are contingent on citizenship and cultural affiliation rather than race with France favoring the French, Spain the Spanish. The notion of "whiteness" or a unified European race is notable in its absense.

Re: the "thought experiment", we convince them the same way we have historically, through the ruthless enforcement of cultal norms. If you don't love God, Guns, Baseball, and Apple Pie you can GTFO of our country.

There was definitely a racial aspect to being French, Spanish, or German until very recently.

Yes, and what i am saying is that to the extent that this is true, the French, Spanish, and Germans did not view themselves as members of a monolithic pan-European "white" race. They viewed themselves as members of the French, Spanish, and German races.

They definitely viewed themselves as white

Not really no, they viewed themselves as members of the French race, the German race, the Spanish race, the Slavic race, etc...

Where do you think the idea of the White race came from?

Post WWI socialists needed a scapegoat and they latched on to Kipling, or more precisely the people and worldview he represented. Today's woke leftist apple doesn't fall far from it's century-old Marxist tree.

Looks like you’re a big DR3 guy

Is that supposed to be a condemnation?

Are you arguing that "socialists, democrats, and the left" are not to blame?

Not really no, they viewed themselves as members of the French race, the German race, the Spanish race, the Slavic race, etc...

They were certainly nationalistic but if you make this extraordinary claim that they thought a white person from a rival neighbor was as alien as a black tribal from exotic Africa, you should provide some extraordinary evidence.

You want evidence? Consider that Generalplan Ost coexisted with a German alliance with the Japanese. That the Molotov Ribbentrop pact, coexisted with war on Norway, Poland, and France. If your example European ethnostate actually believed in a unified pan-European "white" race they had an odd way of showing it.

Precisely, and to the extent that they indulged in racialist theories, those theories made some very fine-grained distinctions among different European peoples. The white/northern-European/Aryan version of the thesis has to be filled with epicycles in order to make it match either historical or contemporary experience.

If the identitarian right and the wider priestly caste are going to hold on to Identity Politics as an organizing principal/value they are going to have to have to confront the fact that the perception of Identity Politics in the popular zeitgeist is that of an ideology for losers. An ideology for people too stupid, degenerate, or incompetent to survive in an honest meritocracy.

That is certainly not the perception of Jewish Identity Politics, take Ben Shapiro for example. I doubt you feel that way about Jewish Identity Politics and the way it expresses itself in politics and culture. And even if you do feel that way about it, you are very far away from the Normie who perceives it as totally normal in the base case, but in many cases they view defense of Jewish Identity Politics as a moral impetus that falls even on non-Jews.

I do not believe the engagement of Jews with Identity Politics in how they socially, politically, and economically organize is because they are losers who are too stupid or degenerate or incompetent to survive in an honest meritocracy. Do you think that?

How is it we arrived at this point, where Jewish Identity Politics is a profound moral impetus, but White Identity Politics is just for people "too stupid, degenerate, or incompetent to survive in an honest meritocracy?"

I would say, however we arrived at this point, we use the same tools and levers to reverse this perception among normies. Normies, and people like yourself, have arrived at this bifurcated interpretation of Identity Politics based on the esoteric racial propaganda you have been exposed to since you were a child in various forms of your daily life. My opinion is not that we do normie outreach with political arguments, it's that we use the same tools to promote White identity as have been used to create your negative perception of White identity.

And maybe you think you arrived at your opinion of White Identity based only on rational argument and careful consideration. No you didn't- it's downstream of history you were taught, the stories you were told by your teacher, the material you were told to read in school, the movies you watch every time you go to the theater, the social causes taken up by Hollywood celebrities. If all of those things had conveyed a different cultural signal to you, you would also have a different opinion of White Identity, so it is for normies.

Yes, this is a Spencerian interpretation for how esoteric, racial moralization and demoralization signals in religion and culture are the key for directing the identities and behavior of the normies. Not going up to them and trying to convince them with arguments. That's certainly not how you or the normies became convinced that Identity Politics for Jews is great and Identity Politics for White people is degenerate.

To what extent does Ben Shapiro even represent a form of 'Jewish identity politics'? If anything, Shapiro is a Western chauvinist who generally frames his arguments in terms of pan-Western common cultural values, rooted in a Judeo-Christian tradition.

That's certainly not how you or the normies became convinced that Identity Politics for Jews is great and Identity Politics for White people is degenerate.

Again, 'jews' are a monophyletic group, so identity politics for them makes sense. 'White people' are not, they're multiple groups, several of which hate each other, so identity politics don't make sense.

Again, 'jews' are a monophyletic group, so identity politics for them makes sense. 'White people' are not

That is the funniest thing you have ever said, European peoples are incredibly more monophyletic than Jews, who themselves are 50% European among Ashkenazis. Even the notion they are descended from the Hebrews is dubious, compared to the more likely possibility of converts in the Roman Empire.

People don't even understand how static European race has been racially for thousands of years. A Spaniard from the south of Spain is more closely related genetically to a Norwegian than to a Moroccan.

Edit: I would also suggest that the intra-European racial animosity among Whites in the US- while I acknowledge that does express itself in different ways even today, it's still lower than it is between Jewish subgroups in Israel. And in any case the perception of Jewish Identity Politics among normies is not at all a function of the supposed monophyletic-ness of Jews, it's a function of the propaganda that has been transmitted to them their entire lives.

The archaeological evidence for the Kingdom of Israel is very sparse indeed suggesting, even if it existed in the first place, it was more illustrious as depicted in literary fiction than it was in reality. There's a dearth of material evidence and of course no genetic evidence to speak of connecting the biblical Hebrews to modern-day Jews.

Herod the Great for example was a convert. The question of conversion to Judaism under the Roman Empire is an open one and sure it's controversial and speculative. Run Unz has an interesting article on this, suggesting there many have been a Phoenician diaspora in the Roman Empire that had converted to Judaism to some extent.

In the end it doesn't even matter, it's still a very real and coherent identity simply by nature of the underlying mythology that has memed it into existence and into the deep-rooted consciousness of people who identify with it. It's more trivia but doesn't matter for any of the arguments I'm making.

That also applies to the taxonomical arguments. hydroacetylene is wrong that Jews are more monophyletic than Europeans when the exact opposite is true, but I don't think the taxonomy is relevant compared to the cultural signals embedded in religion, myth, and propaganda.

European peoples are incredibly more monophyletic than Jews.

How do you square this claim with millenia of intra-european warfare? Are you saying that you can't tell a Prussian from a Paddy? or a Paddy from a Wop?

monophyletic

Monophyly means belongs to a Clade descended from a common ancestral group not shared by other people- there is very much a European Clade that stands out among the rest of humanity, and Jews themselves are descended from the mixture of that Clade with a Near-Eastern mixture.

I don't even think it's a relevant question for your argument or my response to you. But all Europeans descend from the mixture of three constituent races: Anatolian Farmers (represented best by modern Sardinians who are nearly 100% of this admixture), Western Hunter-Gatherers, and Proto-Indo-European Steppe herders (most concentrated in Northern Europe). All Europeans are a combination of this ancestral group, and nobody else in the world is descended from that ancestral group alone. That is a clade that is unique to Europeans and only Europeans among everyone else in the world, from the Spanish to the Swede.

You are talking out your ass, per your own sources the vast majority of Jews are descended from a single Levantine source while the various sub-tribes of Europe seem to come from all over with distinct physiognomic differences betwern Iberians, Celts, Anglos, Scandis, Slavs, Greeks, Et Al.

I’d like to point out that nobody who doesn’t self-identify as part of this "caste" has ever referred to it as a priestly caste.

I’m sure they view themselves as Napoleon placing the crown on his own head, but to everyone else it looks more like Gavin McInnes putting something else somewhere else.

Do you have a term that you would prefer?

PMC is less ill-fitting than priestly, although it still doesn’t quite capture my sentiment.

A priestly class actually has the respect of the other classes, and takes its mission in shepherding them seriously. The noisemakers the West has today fit neither of these criteria.

If anything, I’d say the primary characteristic of this class is being annoying in rhetorically-compelling (but not epistemically- or aesthetically-compelling!) ways. Think "Team Building Exercises" or other such nonsense. What are you gonna do, argue that team building and camaraderie is bad, hmm? Yet everyone who’s ever been subjected to this has the same thought in their mind: "this is such bullshit."

Dumbledore vs Umbrage is a good example of the contrast between the actual priestly class and the rhetorically-motivated class that fancies itself priestly.

PMC is less ill-fitting than priestly

Have you read Scott Alexander on Priesthoods? I think he makes valuable points there, and its the reason I like the priestly analogy. The PMC in general is absolutely not a single priesthood - there's to little general "intra muros" priest-priest communication happening, since they don't actually share any dogma. "Real" priesthoods (medicine, individual academic research fields, engineering, politics, ect.) have much more internal interactions than interactions with the outside "parish", and they care much more deeply about those internal conflicts than they do about what the rest of us think.

There is no anti-identitarian right, nor center, nor left in any substantial sense. It only exists as a convenient propagandistic claim. The problem of any genuine opposition to the current order which the woke left does not represent, comes to the fact that people who support progressive identity politics and oppose the rights and interests of groups that the progressive stack alliance is against, especially the Jews, are against it. Rich donors like Paul Singer fund gatekeepers of this ideology. So there has been a march on institutions of people who have the agenda of suppressing the rights of their white outgroup and even other right wing associated identities. The more obvious woke types are just one part of the general agenda. They are more the bad cop of it. The supposedly anti woke liberals share the key ideology and are part of it.

In general it is fiction that there is any anti-identitarian space. There are people who concern troll right wing identity groups because they are in the bed with say zionists, or support as you have doneHlynka the black civil rights revolution which the modern woke is a continuation. Even on the supposed right you have someone like George Soros who is an identitarian funding the compact magazine that concern trolls about people on the right being Kinists. As in putting their family first. Which is even more radical, inflammatory rhetoric as usual.

So some of the anti woke space are fakes who support the inherent logic and the motte and bailey of the far left that moves from radical egalitarianism in general to concern trolling its outgroup, to supporting identity politics for its ingroup.

Additionally, trying to transform societies into some sort of actively hostile to identity even if consistent, which it is not, would fall under a very radical egalitarian agenda. It would fit under the far left, not the center, nor the right.

However, the true nature of the ideology of those who marched on institutions and try to maintain it, is not of a sincere consistent radical egalitarianism, which it self is morally and intelectually bankrupt and doesn't work, but of tribalism that is interested in suppressing and even destroying its outgroup tribes for the sake of its in group tribes of the progressive stack.

Now, while I am against communism, I don't mind the 8 hour work week. While radical egalitarianism is a morally bankrupt dogma that always brought disaster and it is of course an onerous demand towards the groups it applies to, because of these reasons those who promote it make exceptions for groups they genuinely like and argue for example that Jews or blacks deserve identity politics, nationalism, because they like them. This doesn't mean that maximalist right wing so called identity politics is good. The right amount is a pertinent discussion but of course this discussion can't be done by those with a mentality of not giving an inch and even then the tendency of most people on the issue would be to not support sufficient than too much. But I do think there is a point in opposing excesses of any group's tribalism both in theory and in practice.

But yes actually ironically some level of white identity politics is even less racist and works better both from an outside universalist view but even more so actual white people are behaving quite against their own interests if they disagree with this.

People who want to destroy european nations who are in bed with foreign extreme nationalists, and adopt their logic are actually engaging in treasonous behavior. This applies even if they do so under the pretense or they genuinely bought into some radical egalitarian dogma. You do not have the right because you have adopted a certain ideology, to destroy nations, especially your nation. So the correct response has to be to disallow such activities and to gatekeep against them, when the opposite is happening the criminal agenda carriers are gatekeeping. To make criminal organizations which pursue this criminal agenda to destroy european nations illegal and restore the rule of law and stop and punish treason.

Secondarily, many institutions have adopted the idea that they are against racism. Unlike some on the right I do consider racism to be a real thing but opposition of borders is racist. It is about genuinely mistreating other groups, and it is comical absurdity that anyone should accept a moral harm in not being pathological altruist and that your right to exist as a people and retain your proud seperate communisty, is this. And of course there is a lot of gray area. In any war, not treating badly the hostile group ends up allowing them to harm your collective. Nevertheless it is in fact a good practice to discourage or disallow certain practices. The point of our language and classification is to seperate the bad with the good and not muddy the waters. I try to remove some of the deliberate dirt that have been thrown into them to confuse things by the faction I have been criticizing here.

Communistic/radical egalitarian definitions of classism, racism, etc do not matter and are illegitimate and in fact the people citigng them engage in more so in mistreatment in relation to the broader concept, and it is moreover adopted as a concern troll against the outgroup. In addition to engaging in all sorts of horrible behavior towards the broad ideological categories, i.e. most of humanity that would fall under their categories.

A bit like, if I try to get a rich family to lose all their money and struggle session accuse them of classism, or try to kill a poor guy, because he is poor that is actually more of a class associated unfair behavior. If I try to define everyone who has a national community or religious group or property and supports property rights, as evil, then I would be demonizing, oppressing an enormous amount of people and even harming those who are pressured to support this vision and become guilty participants in struggle sessions. Radical egalitarians not only oppressess through hysterics, defamation, blacklisting, but also have a track record of mass murder and more hardcore. But again, this is more of an alliance of tribalists who use radical egalitarian against their outgroup which also has very negative history and implications.

Obviously, targeting certain ethnic groups constantly with an agenda of seeking their destruction and slandering the opposition that they are evil racists, is enormously racist. It is actually genuinely incredibly bad behavior. I do think it violates genuine human rights and rather than giving in to the people who use that rhetoric the weapon of racist accusation, it genuinely is behavior that must be taboo and in practice, not just in theory, its adherents abuse their power. Whether in who they hire, in what content they produce, in what resources they direct, or in taking away peoples freedom both overtly and through their hysterics and slanders and threat of overt action.

People who are fanatical and hysterical about this and namecall are behaving in a manner that is bellow any professional ethical standards as journalists, podcasters, people who run social media, forums. It is an insanely inflammatory ideology in general. And 100 times this for politicians, or as members of bureaucracy, and even more so for any military or intelligence services. The system should be excluding people whose agenda is to destroy the people they rule. And if they have a messianic radical egalitarian combo with extreme nationalism motte and bailey going on, this applies even more so. Since this combo leads to people being fanatics that don't have any limit in how far they would go because they falsely believe to be virtuous. Or rather they have some doubts but because the alternative of what they are doing is so negative, they are inclined to choose to dehumanize those they harm.

Good relationships result in certain issues not being debated ad nauseum because both parties recognize that they infringe on sacred red lines and so they don't bring it up. For example if you have a terrible relationship with your wife, she might try to pressure you into an open relationship. In a good relationship this never enters the picture. If you had a terrible mechanic, he might try to scam you and mislead you about what is the problem with your car so they can overcharge you and insist in pressuring you to accept his take. This is to say, that there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that much of the problems of the culture war have to do with this side which wants to destroy western civilization and if defiend narrowlly, not just that, making constantly onerous demands and pretending they are helping save us from impeding darkness and evils. When in fact they are the problem and an arrangement that respects the sacred red lines that aren't ideological lines of specific weirdo ideologues but obvious common sense red lines, while the absurdity is the radical egalitarian concern troll. Whose adherents which includes plenty zionists and even some pro palestinians, pro anticolonialism nationalism, remember universal nationalism as a principle when it is convenient to them.

Because this faction pretends to support freedom to promote its agenda and oppose freedom when it comes to opposing it, I will also say that: It would be a benefit when onerous demands are shut down and the when we see the end of rhetoric on the lines of "you can't have an inch because you will inevitably take a mile you nazi" type of hysterics, the end result would be a superior intellectually equilibrium.

The freedom to oppose genuine evils and absurdities is good, but it is good for people to know that if they support what infringes on sacred red lines there would be push back. And even better if they are sufficiently honorable to feel shame and guilt when doing so. Which is another part of what I am advocating. So this is a bit different than some on the right and my preffered is a somewhat more dissident center right. Not to be confused by what the things that claim to be center right do. There is too much shame and guilt over things people shouldn't be ashamed and guilty for, but the people concern trolling their right wing outgroup and demanding they accept something very onerous, should not be doing it in the first place because they ought to had felt shame in pursuing such an immoral agenda. There is a very significant similarity with the agenda I criticize here and with the behavior of scammers in general which I find very important for people to bad mouth in general. Because we want honest and honorable people to do business with but also to be in relationships with.

Are nations desire to be nations and the connection its people they feel with each other to be treated as evil because a daft dogma says so? Is a desire for monogamy and not to share your wife with the world evil and irrational because one's simplistic ideology doesn't understand it? And so on, and so on. Radical egalitarianism, also known as the new left and mainstream liberalism of which the woke are not opponents but a component (and it is also hard to seperate them with some people who claim to be anti woke) is both an ideology that includers scammers of the out group and allows to scam the outgroup while making exheptions on the ingroup, but their claims are also based on misunderstandings of human nature, society, what is good, etc and it hubris of modern age for it to be treated as default. Like communism which is terrible but 8 hour work week is good, race communism is terrible but there can be some merit in the idea of universalism in regards to say not invading and killing foreign tribes. But not in seeing your own tribe as evil in its pursuit of its own existence as a healthy, prosperous sustainable ethnic community.

So, I am an advocate for making radical egalitarianism in general and especially the one that concern trolls the right wing ethnic outgroup, to be treated as a shameful ideology. Because even any of its true believers are promoting societal suicidal dogma and it is additionally a convenient way to scam and harm the outgroup. The one sided targeting and exceptions are baked in it, motte and bailey is constantly done, but it is bad even if it was to be consistent which it won't be. It shares ground with the behavior of those who try to get away with scamming others into accepting a very onerous deal.

We would be better off without this ideology around.

You're making a bunch of mouth noises, but you haven't really said anything.

You say...

There is no anti-identitarian right, nor center, nor left in any substantial sense.

...and i reply that this is manifestly untrue.

If a deep blue state like California is struggling to muster a simple majority, what hope do you think AA and DEI have in the rest of the country?

Point being that Im not trying to "transform" society into being anti-identitarian, im saying that a good chunk of it already is. And that if the dissident/identitarian right wants to expand it's audience and influence it's going to have to grapple with that fact.

I think he’s saying that, in practice, you have a big chunk of “anti-indentitarian normies” who are in fact mildly anti-white, and have been for so long that they don’t consider themselves indentitarian. They support ‘civil rights’ and in practice DEI and AA as long as those aren’t too egregious and they don’t have to actually argue in favour of racial discrimination out loud, which would break the spell. Thus the defeat of explicit AA initiatives in California.

You then have another big chunk of anti-identitarian normies who are mildly racially ingroup biased and have been for so long that they, again, think of themselves as being totally against any form of racial identity.

So the number of “anti-identitarian normies” who are actually anti-identitarian in practice rather than just in the mouth noises they make is much smaller than you think.

Whether true or not I don’t know but from afar it seems plausible. Either way, though, the taboo is still very potent both in America and the UK.

That oposition to DEI, AA, the LGBTQ agenda, and other flavors of woke PMC overreach is mostly motivated by anti-white animus is certainly one of the takes of all time.

Firstly, Europe and India do not belong in the same category as 'non-American'. Europeans founded the USA. France and Spain helped America break away from England. Americans speak a European tongue, LARP as Romans with the Senate and Capitol, Eagles and Fasces and Cincinnati. American law is just English law with a twist.

Americans are just a different kind of European, the most successful offshoot. India is totally different. E pluribus unum is not a hindi expression. India is not fundamentally a European country, even if they kind of speak English and kind of have European law. The heritage they look back to, the culture they live in, the religions they worship are not European.

You seem to consider meritocracy as an end in and of itself. Why? Meritocracy will throw your children into Korean style hell-schooling and hell-exams to raise the GDP. Meritocracy will make you work 996 hours. Any mistake you make can be permanently recorded and held against you - incentives dear boy. Economic efficiency demands trackers on your work PC to ensure you're working hard. Economic efficiency demands that your factory be closed down and sent to Bangladesh to eke out 3% higher profit for someone else.

It will raise the GDP but at what price?

Economic efficiency and meritocracy should not be the goal of our culture and civilization. If we go down this path, then AI will do to us what you want to do those who 'didn't earn it'. Nepotism and being extremely lazy is not good either, there needs to be a balance. I am not anti-meritocracy per se but there should be limits.

Art, culture, family, fun, play and nation matter. Preserving a nation enables trust and strengthens the benefits of meritocracy while limiting the weaknesses. You can trust that the other guy isn't lying about his exams, that he won't screw you over and steal your IP because you share a background, you're of the same tribe. That's what tribes are for! You can't be totally trusting of course but better than limitless meritocracy (which is ironically just a breeding ground for ethnic cliques and corruption). Homogenous nations are important, they enable trust and stability. Nation is the opposite of diversity, it prevents this whole problem at the start. What happens when you bring in a million smart people from a foreign ethnic group and they start working together to infiltrate your institutions and build up their own power base, bootstrapping their merit into corruption? They have an advantage in cohesion and trust over the rest.

It's no good to say that the progressive left and the far-right are similar. They have markedly different goals in most respects. The far left wants everyone to be the same shade of brown, they have a particular distaste for European just about anything, they want DEI which is the reverse of meritocracy, they want mass redistribution from rich to poor. The far right wants there to be more Europeans, they're super pro-European, moderately pro-meritocracy, reasonably happy with the market system though they want some constraints. They are much more meritocratic than the far left. It's not a horseshoe, I think that concept has done permanent damage to political ideology.

How would you go about convincing him that he would be doing more to secure a future for his children (and his genes) by urging his son to associate with gay Catholics and non-binary/MTF cat-girls, than he would by letting his son date that thicc Latina from down the street?

How is this relevant to anything? He goes for the blonde girl shouting slurs on tiktok of course.

It's no good to say that the progressive left and the far-right are similar. They have markedly different goals in most respects

It’s funny you said this because as I was reading I internally was thinking that everything you wrote up to this point I could barely distinguish from a socialist.

Preserving a nation enables trust and strengthens the benefits of meritocracy while limiting the weaknesses. You can trust that the other guy isn't lying about his exams, that he won't screw you over and steal your IP because you share a background, you're of the same tribe.

There are quite a few low-trust ethnostates in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, while places like Singapore and the UAE sit near the top of the corruption perception indices, so preserving one's nation does not appear to be necessary or sufficient for maintaining trust.

What happens when you bring in a million smart people from a foreign ethnic group and they start working together to infiltrate your institutions and build up their own power base, bootstrapping their merit into corruption?

They win a bunch of Nobels and found companies and institutions in your name, making major scientific and literary contributions to your society, before losing their internal cohesion and assimilating into the broader population as their ethnic and religious solidarity is eroded by the overwhelming tidal forces of modernity?

"quite a few"?

Serbia (>80% Serb and ranked 104 out of 180 by the CPI), Belarus (85% Belarusian and ranked 98 out of 180 by the CPI), Albania (>90% Albanian and tied with Belarus by the CPI), Kosovo (also >90% Albanian and ranked 83 out of 180 by the CPI), Cambodia (>95% Khmer and ranked 158 out of 180 by the CPI), and if we feel like stretching the definition of Southeast Asia we can throw in Bangladesh (99% Bengali and ranked 149 out of 180 by the CPI) too.

It's no good to say that the progressive left and the far-right are similar. They have markedly different goals in most respects. The far left wants everyone to be the same shade of brown, they have a particular distaste for European just about anything, they want DEI which is the reverse of meritocracy, they want mass redistribution from rich to poor. The far right wants there to be more Europeans, they're super pro-European, moderately pro-meritocracy, reasonably happy with the market system though they want some constraints. They are much more meritocratic than the far left.

One could certainly be confused about this statement by reading American right-wing Twitter, which is replete with poasters continuously declaring how much Europe sucks, how Europe is bound to collapse and its all the fault of the Europeans, "enjoying having your women raped by browns Europoors?", declarations about the total ideological detachment of Americans from their European origin countries etc.

There's Europeans and there's Europeans. I can understand Americans taking a few jabs at the European PMC, when the internet discourse coming from the continent has been essentially dominated by them, and who have done absolutely nothing but talk shit about America and Americans for all this time.

Firstly, Europe and India do not belong in the same category as 'non-American'.

If you are you trying to claim that Europe and India are both "American"? I am pressing X to doubt.

Europeans founded the USA.

...and you think that this means we owe them? That this gives them power over us? I disagree.

Americans are just a different kind of European

No we are not, we are better than them.

You seem to consider meritocracy as an end in and of itself. Why?

Because merit, like virtue, is self-justifying, They are things that are good unto themselves.

Art, culture, family, fun, play and nation matter.

I agree, and if you believe that this is the case, why are you choosing to align yourself against them?

How is this relevant to anything?

It is relevant because @IGI-111 is wrong, the powerful do not dictate what is popular to "the normies", "the normies" dictate what is popular to the powerful.

The priestly class is unpopular. There's lots of people who believe in identity politics of one variety or another(usually not DR approved). And the DR is priestly class. Normies don't want their kids around LBGTs, they don't want them taking after uberintellectualism, they don't want them to be 'nerds'. They want their sons to be football stars that get good jobs in town and get married to make grandbabies.

Normies are a lot less bothered about LGB than you imply by lumping it in together with T.

The case against homosexuality (both in its Abrahamic and secular versions) is based on the same logic as the case against post-sexual revolution liberated straight sex, and normies find that logic unpersuasive. Empirically, when the LGBs were offered normalisation on the same basis as the sluts, rakes, unrepentant adulterers, frivorcers etc. they took it, and aren't doing anyone any more harm than the straights did when they took up ubiquitous non-procreative sex. Despite gay marriage, straight marriage is in a better state than it has been in since the introduction of no-fault divorce. This is happening within the plain sight of normies and their families, so they know.

You can make a secular socially conservative case against sexual liberation for gays and straights (empirically, it crashed the birthrate and launched a bastard epidemic). You can (and should, if you take the Bible seriously) make a conservative Christian case against it. But making either of those cases makes you like like a wierdo - it is the epitome of normie-unfriendly conservatism. Given what we can see in front of our noses, arguing for sexual restraint for gays only just makes you look like a self-hating closet case seeking moral support. (It is also intellectually incoherent, but normies don't care about that.)

LGB (but not T) is the one early-C21 woke issue where normie public opinion has swung behind the woke position.

T is different, because the difference between men and women matters in the way that maintaining a ban on one particular subset of non-procreative sex doesn't.

I think you're way overestimating the popularity of gay men. Opinions seem to run the gamut from 'they're all closeted pedophiles' to 'it's weird and gross but what adults do amongst themselves is none of my business', with the mode somewhere around 'fetishistic plague rats'.

No. To many women, and not just urban millenials and zoomers, gayness is equivalent to goodness. This is not universal but also not rare at all. The gay man is the man with all his toxic masculinity stripped away. The gay man is docile and domesticated. The gay man is an ally against the patriarchy. The gay man has the positive qualities of the woman. The gay man is not a threat. The gay man is gentle and good to have around. The gay man is not an inscrutable, terryfingly physical, emotionally unavailable, violently competitive machine. The gay man is not to blame for everything that is wrong in the world. The gay man did not ruin the woman's life. The gay man has no intention to enslave a woman for her fertility. The gay man is man as he should be.

Your understanding of the distribution of opinions is wildly incorrect. You are taking the long tail of the actual distribution and declaring it the median.

I think to have a good feel on this, you need to disassemble the problem:

  • Is the median gay man closer to Andrew Sullivan (or maybe, less extremely, to a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy character) or to an assless-chaps wearing degenerate?
  • What is the normies' perception of what the median gay guy is?
  • What is their opinion on the gays across this AS-AC spectrum?

My intuition is that normies have a mostly good opinion of gay people, but that part of it is based on them thinking that the average gay guy is more "normal" than what they actually are.

Andrew Sullivan

Is your claim he's not an assless chapped degenerate?

Maybe I don't have enough context, but yes? He certainly seems to be hated by the most libertine parts of the LGBT community.

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

Lists him looking for anonymous bareback sex with other HIV+ men and self identification as a 'bear'. Seems more degenerate that not though I've no specific evidence for assless chaps.

My suspicion is the degeneracy we see and is reported is the tip of the degeneracy iceberg, the reality is wider and deeper.

Bug chasing will scare the hoes normies.

He may be a very median 'gay'. The median is still very degenerate.

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Perhaps this is filter bubble reasons, but most secular-ish normie parents I know do not want their sons to have gay football coaches, do not like the ‘gayBC’ agenda in entertainment, would think a gay son is a parenting failure, believe that trends originating in the gay community is enough reason to boycott them in ipso, don’t make a massive distinction between gays and trans. These are people that if they do go to church don’t pray at home, expect their kids to cohabit(even as they think the time of doing this should be shorter) before marriage, wear bikinis etc.

I think this is rural catholic filter bubble (whereas AFAIK @MadMonzer is London cosmopolitan filter bubble). My secular-ish normie parents grew up in 1960/1970s Britain, where almost all the best-dressed, most witty, popular, aristocratic men were gay. Being gay is essentially aspirational: they're secretly quite keen on the idea of the idea of having a gay child and are applying slight, unthinking pressure to my bi-questioning sibling in ways that make me uncomfortable. I don't know how they'd feel about gay teachers and they're certainly not into pride or anything; they're conservative in most other ways.

(However, as with many things in Britain, it can be very difficult to distinguish between 'runs a permanent crimestop filter' and 'is actually enthusiastic' even for close family).

I have access via in-laws to the Reform-curious rural UK filter bubble, and there the reaction to happily married lesbians (two thirds of same-sex marriages in the UK are women) is "so what" and the reaction to flamboyantly gay men being flamboyantly gay in public is bemused eye-rolling as long as they remain fully clothed.

If Nigel Farage thought that gay-bashing would gain votes for Reform, he would do it. He doesn't.

Certainly gay-bashing would be a terrible move. I have a vague sense, however, that the very solidity of the 'so what' reaction is disguising less comfort than people are willing to let on. I have no proof for this, it's just based on myself and on a sense that people are...slightly too careful about the subject. The very speed with which even right-wingers tell you they don't give a shit kind of makes me feel like they do, actually, give a little bit of a shit.

Of course this is the loosest kind of vibes-based psychoanalysing, so feel free to discard it completely if you want to. But I don't think we've ever seen anything like the absolute closing of ranks that happened over gay marriage. In about a decade we went from a world in which a younger-me was mildly chastised for being too fervently pro gay marriage to a world where even the suggestion that gay marriage might not have been a great idea provokes universal condemnation. I think everyone remembers proto-cancelling incidents like the defenestration of Tim Fallon and everyone knows how dangerous is can be to be associated with even a whiff of homophobia.

I always feel that Britain is a lot like Japan in some ways. The social pressure and desire to conform can be so strong that there is very little gap between the consensus and people's conscious opinions. In the same way that I'm pretty sure liberal democratic Japan could turn into a Maoist communist state in a decade given a change of leadership, I think the same is true of Britain. Change the right few minds, let it cascade and I think a lot of people might suddenly 'discover' an entirely new set of opinions that would not necessarily be any more 'real' than the previous ones but would feel just as sincere to their owners.

Rural I will grant you, but I was specifically pointing at non-tradcath friends to avoid that aspect.

But you live in a traditionally catholic area, right? I assumed that your secular friends were Catholic-tinged, so to speak, even though not actually catholic. Whereas for example my parents are secular but they're Church of England secular. Or in California they would be Silicon Valley secular.

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Your original claim was that "Normies don't want their kids around LBGTs." That implies something more than just finding male-on-male buttsex gross.

A quick google suggests that "parents campaign against trans teacher" comes up with a lot of examples of normies campaigning against exposing their children to T. "Parents campaign against gay teacher" gets you stories about muslims and fundies.

If you think that trying to keep gay men away from kids is normie-friendly, you have to wonder why Florida Republicans (who are perfectly happy to run on anti-trans messaging) get cross when you call the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act a "Don't Say Gay" law.

It's always hard to understand populations. We can't just get into their brains and observe what they really think. We can see survey results, but those are tricky and sometimes only get what people think they're "allowed" to say. See also the constant discussion of "shy Tory/Trumper". As such, one ought to be very sensitive to the fact that much of the population was really just bullied into a position on the topic. It's extremely difficult to actually tease out how many people really believe it or have really internalized it as true. It is entirely possible that as people see that the exact same specious arguments are being marshaled in favor of the T (with the expectation that folks actually believed and internalized it WRT the LGB, and thus the further expectation that it will be slam dunk successful), they will find it less and less social suicide to simply reject the entire fallacious underpinning. They won't even have to immediately say, "...and yes, rejecting this underpinning means also rejecting it in the case of LGB, also." At least, not at first; not overtly. That could come more slowly, as it becomes more socially acceptable. Or, of course, as we've seen on some other issues, it could come quickly in a preference cascade.

It's just extremely difficult to know which of those possible worlds we live in, given the obviously impossibly difficult measurement problem. Obviously, any public group that is organizing and trying to build political momentum is going to focus on the issues where they think they are the strongest, but along the way, they'll be pushing for underlying worldviews that have implications. It is common for them to know what those implications are, to believe that those implications are, indeed, true, but to not want to draw attention to it until they have succeeded enough where they are strongest and subtly changed the nature of the conversation along the way.

EDIT: I forgot that I should also point to the fact that those same people are forthright about the fact that they did just bully people into believing something in order to win political victories, that they didn't really believe it themselves, that many people don't actually believe it, and they'd love it if we could just kind of forget that their sus claims were "critical", because they'd really rather that no one go back and reconsider in light of reality.

I get the impression that a lot of commentors here don't grasp just how unpopular identity politics is in "normie" spaces. In fact, I would say that to call it "unpopular" may be grossly under selling it. Leftists often lament the weakness/lack of class consciousness in the US, that the poor, more often than not, do not see themselves as "exploited" as much as they see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed". However I believe that this is a feature rather than a bug if one wants to live in a society with high trust and social mobility, and one of the things that distinguishes the US from other nations.

I think it’s a fine belief in the instance that you actually aren’t harmed by the misbelief. If you really are exploited, the first step in changing the situation is realizing you’re exploited. Likewise, a belief that identity politics is bad only works when you aren’t being harmed by believing that. If everybody but your group is playing identity politics, you’re not being more noble, you’re simply surrendering the field. If you’re not willing to stand up for your social class if you’re being exploited, you’ll be exploited. Politics, whether you like it or not are a team sport. Five people voting together get what they want. Five people voting separately get nothing.

Normies don't decide what's popular. They adapt to what people with power tell them is. I you aren't yet convinced of this you can look at all the people who will suddenly become fine with Trump and his administration when they are the ones distributing treasure.

The Marine Le Pen strategy of becoming more "normal" can be useful so as to avoid being pinned down in the margins of weirdness, but it's intrumental at best. Successful political movement are both pragmatic and uncompromising on their terminal goals. Lose either and you fail.

Normies don't decide what's popular. They adapt to what people with power tell them is. I you aren't yet convinced of this you can look at all the people who will suddenly become fine with Trump and his administration when they are the ones distributing treasure.

I think an even better example of this is Covid. A highly cautious view of Covid and of what measures were appropriate are highly correlated with class status and were particularly unpopular with less affluent, less white and overall less 'priestly' people both in the US and Europe. But at the end of the day, the priestly class still got its will for 1 to almost 3 years, depending on location, and hugely shifted norms of hygiene, social activity and economic behaviors like remote work among the rest of society. I still regularly see people here in Germany, mostly elderly and often of MENA heritage (confusing given that at group level they certainly had the least respect for any of the Covid theater), wearing a mask without covering their nose, and given the medical absurdity of this I struggle to think of this as anything other than an illustration of memetic elite dominance.

Uh, less affluent whites were the main group that hated the covid response, but minorities were big into it.

My impression is that in terms of organized political resistance middle and lower class whites were certainly the drivers of that, but in terms of simply not giving a shit and going on with life regardless of what the state says that's definitely more of a minority thing, at least here in Germany. For the US I'm less sure, but it also depends more on the group. Using vaccine uptake as a vague proxy, Asians were all-aboard, but they're also more affluent on average, Hispanics were more likely than red whites but less likely than blue whites to take the vaccine, blacks were least likely overall. Another example are the riots after George Floyd's death which, while featuring plenty of white people as well, were disproportionately minority, and they were AFAIK the first large scale breakdown of public Covid discipline.

Blacks in the US didn’t get vaccinated because they don’t trust anything and that led to elaborate conspiracy theories about it making your testicles swell up so people would stop masking. Red whites didn’t get vaccinated because we hate the people telling us to. Hispanics were middle of the pack because that’s kind of their thing.

IME blacks held extremely covid conscious views, they just didn’t think that the vaccine was real or contact tracing would work- usually for Alex Jones type reasons. There were lots of demands for ‘everyone stays home for two weeks, even the grocery stores be shut down’. They were big on NPIs.

I suspect vaccine uptake and masking would give you two entirely different answers. In the US, blacks had lower vaccine uptake, but at least anecdotally (and in some surveys), were more into masks.

Also, when covid started to spread you officially were a weirdo for being concerned. Pelosi told people to go to Chinatown and hug an asian.

Normies don't decide what's popular. They adapt to what people with power tell them is.

This statement is false.

If it were true, the 45th president of the United States would have been either Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush, not Donald Trump.

Hillary and Jeb were both pretty universally hated by the normie class. The reasons likely to do with decades of the priestly class hating on them, sure, but it's the truth.

Hillary and Jeb were both pretty universally hated by the normie class...

...and universally beloved by those in power. If normies only adapt to what people with power tell them to, one of them would have become president.

The man who murdered 3 girls and wounded countless others at a dance class in the UK, triggering the riots last summer has been jailed for 52 years.

The backstory, having been previously been withheld by government diktat (I wonder how many months the papers were collectively sitting on that mugshot, itching for the chance to print it) has now been published and we have learned some very interesting things, namely that:

  • Despite suggestions the contrary, he had been defacto known to the authorities and was referred to Prevent several times. For reference, Nigel Farage was reprimanded for hinting in the months after the incident. *

  • He had been caught with knives on 10 separate occasions.

  • He had previously been expelled by his school for violent behaviour, but later attempted to return to commit a rampage with a knife about 3 weeks before he would commit the atrocity described above. He was indirectly stopped by his father, who pleaded with the taxi not to take him to his destination. His father then seemingly took no action after this.

  • He had obtained the materials required to make ricin and terrorist literature from organisations from Al-Qaeda.

However, no terror related charges were passed against him. Upon conclusion of the trial, the immediate reaction from the government once this information has come out has been to redirect heat away from the government. Instead, the public is now to think of terrorists as "loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom" and to pass judgement against Amazon, so mentioned because he bought the knife used to commit the deed from Amazon.

I think this particular arc has come to its resolution, but the effects on the culture will be long lasting - the phrase "two tier" is now embedded in the public conscious, and the man in the street now has the perfect phrase to describe the observed worldview of the centre and left of centre (the Oppressed/Oppressor dichotomy) and their handling of disputes.

Co-incidentally, the man who called for "the throats of protestors to be slit", has had his trial delayed until later this year.

*Your definition of "known to the security services" may vary!

jailed for 52 years.

Actually life with 52 years before eligibility for parole. The judge's sentencing remarks say it would have been life without parole if he had been over 18 at the time of the offence.

He had obtained the materials required to make ricin and terrorist literature from organisations from Al-Qaeda.

This is incorrect. He had a copy of the Al-Qaeda training manual. This was found by the police in Manchester in 2000 as part of the investigation into the 1998 Al-Qaeda embassy bombings, and English translations have been circulating online ever since. It has become the Millenial version of the Anarchists' Cookbook.

With most of the facts now public after the guilty plea and sentencing, the guy sure looks like the standard school shooter personality type but without access to guns.

However, no terror related charges were passed against him.

SOP in the UK going back to the IRA is to charge substantive crimes (here murder, attempted murder, making ricin, and illegal possession of a knife) in preference to terrorism-specific ones. (In this case, he was charged with a minor terrorism-related offence for possessing the Al Quaeda manual, so the claim that no terrorism charges were made is technically false). If you can convict for murder, then adding "being a terrorist" to the charge list doesn't affect the outcome.

I mean, I acknowledge that the optics of this are bad. But Britain is still a liberal society with rule of law, where even obvious ne'er do wells have rights. You can't just grab people off the streets because they're sketchy.

There was a case in America where a school shooter's parents were charged and imprisoned for not stopping him. I suppose that rule should apply here, but at the end of the day, I don't want to live in the society where people are scooped up for being concerning. I suspect you don't either. Britain will instead make noises about banning knives because it's Britain.

After the expulsion for violence isn't some compulsory mental health follow-up and involuntary admission appropriate?

I know this can be challenging in the US since the 60's and 70's for civil liberties reasons but if this is the alternative I'm unconvinced.

It seems like every mass shooter in the US was giving warning signs ahead of time- how many of them get caught and prevented? This is clearly harder than you're making it seem.

In this particular incident he goes from homicidal ideation at 13 to a narrowly averted attack at his prior school and the successful attack at the dance school at 17.

In between there was an expulsion from school for violence and admitting carrying a knife to school to 'Use it', an out of school attack on a student with a hockey stick on which he'd written his intended victims names. This attack sees him barred from from his new school's campus and he receives instruction online, with home visits from tutors sometimes with the police. There's a gap between the expulsion and new school due to an alleged incident at his home.

The reporting on his choice of reading materials is just noise. His behavior should be the focus, if he's murderous for Al Queda or Islamic reasons or murderous nutjob reasons.

What is the argument for not having residential / custodial schools for 'juvenile delinquents' or sending kids like this to them?

How long have the state schools (closed residential / custodial schools) been closed? This fact pattern or less in many circumstances would have seen you sent to one.

I'm not immediately aware of mass shooters in the US with as much prior contact with law enforcement and various programs and referrals, though they plausibly exist.

In this instance and I suspect many others a more custodial environment would have produced a better outcome.

My mother was sent to a state residential / custodial school for girls in the 60's for much less.

The thing it's easy to miss when you read about eye-popping crimes in the news every few days is they're still very rare. Disaffected youth who've been expelled, people who've posted online that they kind of want to shoot up school/congress/whatever else, outnumber people who'll actually do that by like a thousand to one (I don't have a legible source for this, but I think it's intuitive). This isn't like shoplifting or selling drugs, where most of the crimes are committed by people who commit many crimes, and 'round them all up' is an effective approach - to actually prevent random incidents like this, you'd have to involuntarily commit a lot of people. And I don't think the tradeoff is worth it, especially since dying from terrorism-ish homicide or school shooting is much rarer than "normal" homicide, or getting hit by a car, or the many other reasons people die.

His behavior from 13 - 17 is the concern, not internet posting or reading material.

They occasionally do this, but psychiatrists don't like it because they see it as schools pawning off their disciplinary problems on doctors rather than solving them themselves. I can't find it, but the local news did a story a few years back after one of the school shootings about how some local districts had adopted zero tolerance policies and were sending any kids who exhibited violent tendencies to Western Psych at the drop of a hat. The doctors they interviewed basically said that the ED is there for people who have acute mental health crises and not kids who got into fights. So what was happening was the kids were waiting for hours at the bottom of the triage list and when the doctor concluded they didn't meet the criteria for admission they were sent home. But the school got to say they referred him to psych immediately and didn't take any chances.

The upshot of what the one doctor was saying was that long-term behavior problems are the kind of thing that needs to be dealt with over the course of months or even years, and that psychiatric hospitals aren't equipped for that. He said that if the schools were concerned they needed to hire their own mental health staff that could work with students and parents to resolve the problems. I can tell you right now that this isn't going to happen because the incentives are aligned against it. If a school hires its own counselors and starts its own program for troubled youth then it's going to cost a lot of money and if one of those kids ends up doing something terrible the program is going to be put under a microscope and probably won't come out looking good. If they say "we sent him to Western Psych after we saw the red flags" then their insurance will pay for it and Western Psych can explain to the media why the treatment didn't work.

Realistically, though, the doctors were right: Not all problems are mental health problems. If a guy keeps getting into fistfights at bars that don't cause any serious injury we don't send him to the nuthouse. It's a criminal matter. And realistically we don't even do that much in a situation like that; while misdemeanor battery has around a five year max in most jurisdictions, first offense you can likely plead down to disorderly conduct. After that you'll get a combination of fines, probation, and suspended jail sentences until you either get into a fight while on probation or the judge looks at the rap sheet and simply loses patience. The most you might get in the way of treatment is court-ordered anger management classes (I know three people who have completed these and they all say it works). I've never heard of anyone going to Western over a barfight unless there are obvious extenuating circumstances.

What I'm looking for is more a custodial / residential school or reform school.

I think you can go too far in that direction though. This guy was getting material to make chemical weapons, literature from a terrorist organization, was caught numerous times carrying weapons, and had been expelled from school for violence. How many bright red flags need to be waved before the government is allowed to do something about this guy? Or does “rule of law” mean we have to let people openly plan terrorist acts and let them kill people and terrorize the public, because to do otherwise violates procedures? I think even if you had to make up an excuse for a 48 hold for psychiatric evaluation, it probably would have allowed the police to investigate and find evidence.

I’m of the school of thought that without Justice and safety, nothing else matters. We’re so deep into anarchy-tyranny that the public is now being trained on how to behave when Theres a mass casualty event in a public place. We’re chewing through what’s left of the high trust society we used to have as more and more things get locked up because of theft and people are more worried about security when going out in public. The government only seems to be able to act when the usually law-abiding citizens complain or try to do something about it. If such things continue down this path, there won’t be a society to protect. King Charles’ grandkids might well rule over a country full of uncontrolled knife gangs. America might be full of cartels and mafiosi. Unless crime is actually to be curbed, by law or by the police simply taking control, you might end up there.

Sure, 'planning a terrorist attack' should be a crime, and probably is(especially in Britain). Did this guy have probable cause on it, though? Like he'd been caught for carrying weapons, but I'm imagining that minor knife violations are mostly associated with people who live in the ghetto, not Al Qaeda. Was he caught with ricin and terrorist materials or did that stuff get found after he was searched, later?

But Britain is still a liberal society with rule of law,

I always thought sicking the police on people for "hate speech" goes against liberal principles, so I think it's only the "rule of law" bit that they can possibly lay claim to. And I'm not sure I believe that claim either.

Britain has some very dystopian speech laws from what I understand, but it's still a very liberal society compared to Russia or, going more extreme, North Korea. Maybe this is damning with faint praise, but it's true. There are plenty of places in the world where free speech is more dangerous than it is in Britain. I wish that Britain adopted more US-like attitudes to free speech, but I don't think it's fair to claim that Britain has virtually no liberal rule of law.

Russia arrests less people for speech on the Internet than UK.

How many North Koreans do you think get arrested for speech?

You are wrong. Those data points are out-of-context and do not reflect the realities of speaking out in Russia.

The report discussed by Newsweek – authored by Agora, a Russian human rights group – found that 411 criminal cases were brought against internet users in Russia in 2017. The article does not give a figure for arrests.

In 2017 The Times made a Freedom of Information request which found 3,395 arrests had been made by 29 UK police forces for “section 127” offences, which is used for cases of online abuse. According to the article, 1,696 people were subsequently charged. Section 127 offences cover harassment that takes place via an “electronic communications network”, and is not limited to social media posts – harassment via email or other forms of online communication can also fall under this definition.

This stat is half cherry-picked and half lied about. Comparing UK and Russia, two fundamentally different societies with different levels of censorship online is intellectually dishonest.

What are the non-cherrypicked numbers then? Accounting for population Uk is still probably ahead.

I don't think you can realistically compare the two countries in question because it doesn't take in consideration outside factors. There are two variables:

  1. How often are people getting arrested for something they say online.
  2. How often do people say something online that they can get arrested for.

My argument is that in Russia, due to the chilling effects of propaganda, astroturfing, arrests, assassinations, difference in treatment in prisons, general depoliticization of society, people in Russia are less likely to say something that attracts the attention of the government, especially using their real name. This isn't the free speech as you conceive of it in more liberal societies. This likely accounts for #2 being lower per capita in Russia than in UK in general - people know that you shouldn't speak out in a way that can attract unwanted attention.

Additionally, specifically due to section 127 including harassment, I'd argue that you'd need to go through each case to determine whether the government was punishing someone for exercising their right to free speech. This likely accounts for #1 being lower than reported in the original tweet for UK. I don't have modern data, I'd expect with the riots this would be higher than in 2017.

So do raw numbers really matter? My answer is: "No, they don't. The two cultures, social norms and political situations are fundamentally different".

Chilling effects apply in UK too, obviously. Major point of these laws is to get people to shut up.

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Perhaps, but there is a difference. In Russia, you can criticize the government online if you want to. You can talk shit about Muslims or browns or whatever if you want to, you can call for Russia to be Russian. Some kinds of criticizing the government and some kinds of racial/nativist speech are technically illegal, but this is rarely prosecuted. However, if you do these things and you obtain a significant following, there is a pretty good chance that you will be killed or, at best, just jailed for many years. The UK might be dystopian in many ways, and people get jailed there for speech, but I've never heard of anyone there being literally killed for speech.

The guy who left a bacon sandwich in front of a mosque or something did die in prison, but that's the closest I can think of so far.

While he didn't die, if you saw the before and after pics of Tommy Robinson, it's clear they put him through quite an ordeal.

Was that Peterborough Prison?

From Wikipedia it looks like there are about 7000 referrals to Prevent every year, and about 13% of them are followed up with by a 'Channel Panel'. It's also voluntary. I suppose the police could 'watch' him but it seems like you'd need a lot of surveillance to stop a guy from committing a very simple knife attack.

And yet they somehow find the time in their busy schedule to chastise rape gang victims for offending rapists, or threaten women with arrest for loudly asserting that trans women aren't women.

Its all about who is given cover that makes it easy to arrest. Arresting white people for mean tweets is easy because white people don't have dedicated activists eager to assist them in order to grift the community. For all of Tommy Robinsons screeching, there hasn't been any fund raised to fight for rioters to be released from jail or sympathetic journalists flooding the media environment with intellectual brainpower devoted to expatiating their crimes. Contra that with Islamists and LGBT+ (really just trannies) who get the entire editorial staff of the Guardian and the Mirror running cover for mass islamist gang rape or demanding unlimited trans representation. Thats not to mention the endless armies of lawyers in London who plaster buses with their ads for migrant or tranny legal advisory services.

Axel was black, which makes it impossible for any overt action to be taken. Arrest him without him having done anything but watch videos and say mean things and say mean things to his father, you have a Racism and the liberal elite will use this as an example of the fundamental racism infesting the police. To fix the UK the first thing to do must be ignoring all the liberals eager to give unlimited cover for criminal minorities. How to ignore them is an exercise for the UK to decide.

Each of those actions probably took about five minutes, maybe a few hours tops. And they could have been having a slow night. When you put someone under surveillance you don't get to watch them at your convenience.

Each of those actions probably took about five minutes, maybe a few hours tops. And they could have been having a slow night.

So? The police has no business going after victims of rape gangs, or recognizers of basic biology. It's a thing that should have never happened, no matter how slow the night is.

When you put someone under surveillance you don't get to watch them at your convenience.

If you can threaten someone with arrest for mean tweets, you can do a "hey, we're watching you!" to someone who's actually scaring people.

Some observations:

-The many failings prior to the murders took place under the Tory government

-Prevent is an anti-terror team focused on ideological violence not 'lone spree killing' type violence. However Starmer (who has been in office less than a year) has now changed its remit to include lone spree killing as well. Obviously this killer 'fell through the cracks' as they say (code for 'an overworked team didn't want to help because he was outside their remit') but why did the cracks exist? The previous, Tory government, in power throughout the entirety of the killer's young adult life and his encounters with authorities.

-He came from a Christian family.

-The 'terrorist' material he had in his possession was a CIA agent's commentary about Al Qaeda's methods

-I'm aware of no evidence at all he converted to Islam, but we do know that he was very interested in genocides through history, and in violence and revenge against his bullies.

So I am unsure exactly what your point is. Do you want to claim he was actually a Muslim extremist and Al Qaeda operative? Or that he acted partly or primarily in sympathy with Al Qaeda? Perhaps you could help me understand how any of this supports the two-tier characterisation.

He was the son of two recent african migrants to the UK, and thus absolutely falls into the oppressed side of the oppressed/oppressor dichotomy which the two tier accusation is describing. It is crudely (but correctly) recognised that if he was a white anglo the state would not have reacted in the way it did during the initial time after the killing and during the unrest.

The Tories are not meaningfully different from Labour when it comes to the overarching governance of Britain. Both defacto support growth hindering policies and the vast burdens on state spending. The only meaningful difference is that Labour is the natural home of those who believe in the current view on fairness/equality and the Tories might be the home of those who disagree, but are utterly incapable/uninterested of moving against it.

defacto support growth hindering policies

This is a pretty preposterous thing to say days after Labour just announced major reforms to judicial review in order to prevent infrastructure projects being delayed and blocked, something the Tories only ever made worse - see also their support just expressed for airport expansion, which prompted much wailing and gnashing of teeth from Tories, Greens etc. They need to go much further which these types of structural reform, but they now finally appear to be getting moving on the right track.

But how did the state favour him at all? If he was white anglo, and killed kids, and white rioters were targeting asylum seekers and burned down a hotel, the state would obviously have denied that he was an asylum seeker at that point to defuse the riot? Or do you mean if he was white anglo, and immigrant rioters had targeted white people, the state would have called him a terrorist rather than a spree killer (I'm not sure to what end)? Or do you mean that Prevent would have intervened successfully if he was white?

Maybe I'm confused but I realise I actually don't know what you're referring to at all.

I don't think the state did favor him as they gave him a very long prison sentence.

But let's be real. If this was a white man who had stabbed 3 black girls in a racially motivated attack, this would have been considered the Crime of the Century™. The government and the media would have shouted the identity of the attacker to the heavens. The resulting riots would have been described as "fiery but mostly peaceful", and all the usual suspects would be calling for a national conversation on white racism.

So while you're right to narrowly question the OP's claims, I think we're still left with a situation in which there is two tier justice system in the UK. In the UK, white lives have less value, and yeah, that happened under the Tories as well.

this would have been considered the Crime of the Century™. The government and the media would have shouted the identity of the attacker to the heavens. The resulting riots would have been described as "fiery but mostly peaceful", and all the usual suspects would be calling for a national conversation on white racism.

That's obviously nonsense though because right-wing murders/terror attacks absolutely have happened in the last decade in Britain and they all fell out of the news eventually just like this will. An asylum seeker was stabbed in April last year over the small boats crisis and nobody cared - people even forgot about Jo Cox pretty quickly.

Maybe it's not fair to bring up a US case, but... Dylan Roof killed nine black people in a racially-motivated attack ten years ago and he is, by and large, forgotten now. I had to do some Googling to even remember his name. It was a big story at the time, but in no way shape or form did it get the sort of reaction that you could characterize as "the Crime of the Century".

Even Breivik, who killed 77 people including a bunch of kids in a politically motivated attack in a very "progressive"-leaning country, is barely remembered now. Ted Kaczynski is better remembered than Breivik, despite having killed many fewer people, simply because Kaczynski wrote a more interesting manifesto and thus it's easier to characterize him as the sort of "intelligent killer" that many people love reading about (see all the crime books and shows about smart killers), rather than just characterizing him as a mentally ill loser. Even Elliot Rodger, a deranged non-entity whose incel spree was stopped by a simple door, is better remembered than either Roof or Breivik, because he happened to write an interesting manifesto and was so socially inept that he became easy comedic material.

A white guy killing 3 black girls for racial reasons is not "Crime of the Century" material. It is more like "media talks about it for a few weeks" material. I think that this is probably nearly as true for the UK as it is for the US.

Dylan Roof

Remembered a couple weeks ago as unlike the other murders that had their federal death sentences commuted by Biden, he did not.

The big difference between cases like Roof, Breivik, or the Christchurch guy, is that when it all happened we had all the media authorities wring their hands over how horrible the ideologies that pushed them to this are, and forcing anyone adjacent to them to go through struggle sessions of disavowal. The same thing needs to happen here.

the Christchurch guy

Brenton Tarrant.

What is the evidence that the Southport killer was driven mainly by ideology, instead of being yet another random nutcase?

If the Al-Qaeda instruction manual doesn't do it for you, I don't understand why you think Roof, Breivik, or the Christchurch guy get to be blamed on an ideology.

Also the assailant being directly motivated by an ideology is not necessary. In some of these cases people were blaming the broader culture of racism and islamophobia. Again, something analogous needs to happen here.

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Maybe it's not fair to bring up a US case, but... Dylan Roof killed nine black people in a racially-motivated attack ten years ago and he is, by and large, forgotten now. I had to do some Googling to even remember his name.

I disagree strongly with this. You might be correct that many Americans would struggle to recall his name, but that’s because normal people are terrible in general at remembering names. In progressive circles, though, Roof is still routinely brought up all the time in discussions of race and policing. “If you’re a black man in America, police can murder you for minor infractions, or even for just disrespecting them. Meanwhile, if you’re a white guy who murders a bunch of black churchgoers, the police will non-violently arrest you and buy you Burger King.” Roughly a decade ago I performed the lead role in a play inspired directly by Roof — oddly, a humanizing account showing how a dumb and impressionable young kid from a broken home could be lured into extremist beliefs by a makeshift father figure showing him love and acceptance for the first time in his life. (Leave aside the fact that this doesn’t, as far as I’m aware, accurately describe Roof’s actual life or the manner of his radicalization.) So, I do think that Roof has made a lasting impact on public consciousness.

Even Breivik, who killed 77 people including a bunch of kids in a politically motivated attack in a very "progressive"-leaning country, is barely remembered now. Ted Kaczynski is better remembered than Breivik, despite having killed many fewer people, simply because Kaczynski wrote a more interesting manifesto and thus it's easier to characterize him as the sort of "intelligent killer" that many people love reading about.

I think that if Breivik did what he did in America, rather than in Norway, he would be far more remember and talked about here. I don’t know to what extent Breivik is still discussed in Europe, but given how American media drives so much of the political discussion worldwide, I have to wonder whether Breivik would even be more remembered in Europe had he done the same crime, but in America. (The same is true of Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch mosque shooter in New Zealand.)

So, I do think that Roof has made a lasting impact on public consciousness.

Don't forget setting off a hyperstitious cascade against Confederate symbols....

I see your point that in progressive circles, Roof is frequently brought up. However, progressive circles are a small subset of the West's population. I have literally never heard anyone bring Roof's name up in conversation, not even ten years ago right after he killed those people. And it's not like I interact entirely with politically apathetic people or with right-wingers or something. I've interacted with plenty of progressives in the last ten years, and those murders just never came up.

You are, from what I recall you writing before, someone whose social circle is pretty hardcore progressive. The thing is, this actually makes you pretty atypical for a denizen of the West. Or anywhere in the world, for that matter. Progressives are highly represented online, but offline, even in cities where people vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, few people go around talking like the stereotypical Redditor.

I actually agree that Breivik would likely have been more remembered if he had done his murders in America, not just because America is the entire world's media focus, but also because for historical and social reasons, Europe is probably more used to the idea of a militant far-right existing than America is. In America, the idea of there actually being an effective nativist far-right killer is something from TV shows or the wild dreams of Redditors, but we haven't really had one in as long as I can remember. Some people might bring up Timothy McVeigh, but he was more of a libertarian-right mass killer, not a Breivik-style explicitly nativist one.

Regarding the Southport killing, do you know the details? Because it is sick. This is not something that would be forgotten, for the sheer brutality if nothing else.

But, yeah, it's hard to predict what will go viral. The current Crime of the Century involved the death of a violent felon who was high on Fent and Meth at the time of his death.

I don't know the details, but I doubt anything there would make it Crime of the Century material. Maybe if there was a video, it would be. The 2020 events were, I assume, largely triggered by the existence of a video. If there had not been a video, it would probably have been little remarked on.

That's part of my point, really. It's not so much the violent events themselves that make people remember them, unless it's something really unprecedented like 9/11 (I mean unprecedented in the "using planes to collapse skyscrapers" sense, not in the death toll sense, since of course plenty of other events have had higher death tolls). It's other things like videos, manifestos, lurid appeal of the mental illness of the perpetrators, or perhaps a politically divisive motivation like in the case of Luigi Mangione (and even he is being forgotten now after having had a brief few weeks of fame). And even 9/11 would have been much less shocking to the masses without all the videos. Even the Las Vegas shooter is probably better remembered nowadays than Dylan Roof is, despite having had no political motive as far as we know, and it's not just because he killed more people, it's because of the gruesomely cinematic way in which he did it. Breivik would be much more remembered nowadays if he had livestreamed his video like the New Zealand shooter (and I don't even remember the New Zealand shooter's name, which is more evidence for my point) or if he had written an interesting manifesto. But even then it wouldn't really be Crime of the Century material, probably.

The threshold to achieve the Crime of the Century is really high. You might have to do something like kill a bunch of rich people or politicians while livestreaming it, and write a really interesting manifesto, in order to actually get there.

Arguing from counterfactuals like this is a bit tricky. I guess it can maybe work to make one reflect, but in this case I don't think my intuitions match yours. It seems to me this crime was massively reported on and is regarded as one of the worst crimes in recent memory – just look at all the papers at the moment. I don't think the exact same crime with a race swap would have been seen as more outrageous or less.

Actually, a killer who stabbed a random immigrant and said he wanted to exterminate all asylum seekers was sentenced just last week and has attracted no press attention at all as far as I am aware: https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/neo-nazi-who-stabbed-victim-twice-jailed-life

Prevent may actually be a scam that is meant to look like its doing something in order to appease voters but is not very effective in practice. I think even in the UK with some of our crazy laws its very difficult to punish pre-crime and stop people from committing crimes before they carry out the crimes.

Completely. People's expectations are high over the elimination of child murder as a risk, and understandably so, but 24-hour surveillance of every 'weird kid at the back of the class' is a tall order.

After you've been expelled for violence wouldn't a period in a residential facility / hospital / school / borstal be appropriate?

For sure, sounds like a good idea. Don't know that that would have helped here (he already wasn't engaging with multiple services as I understand it), but nonetheless.

Absent a custodial setting where is engagement could be better monitored.

Historically there were institutions to house juvenile delinquents.

its crazy that Amazon is getting the blame. i think the primary agent responsible here is Alex. but if there is a third party to blame I think the schools should bear a little. the tax payer shells out good money to fund the school system and i feel like they are not doing a good job in instilling proper values into young children. the state has a lot of control over kids. they should really be propagandising them to not do this kind of shit. it could even be the state is doing the opposite and propagandising them into hating society which i don't think is very productive.

Some are more prone to violence. Although his specific parents may not be, there's like to be regression to the mean of a population.

Uh, no, the third party to blame is his parents.

No, whoever let them immigrate.

Oh please. 'Ugandans will have kids who snap and carry out spree violence' is not a forseeable outcome the way that 'south asian muslims will get to raping' is.

Yes, blacks are more prone to violence. No, spree killing is still not common among them.

Rwandans.

Literally the only thing that country is known for is hacking each other with machetes.

The two are ethnically indistinguishable. And a huge supermajority of Rwandan immigrants still don't commit random killing sprees.

Of course majority of them don't, but that doesn't mean that it was worthwhile to let them in. African immigrants are a net drag on public resources in general.

Are we all going to work fake jobs

From a Yarvin blog a few weeks ago:

[As a result of AI] Human populations, to governments, [will be] left as residual liabilities that need to be fed. And, in some sense, pleasured. Almost everyone is a zero-marginal product employee.

At this point, to protect any kind of humane existence, it is necessary to restrict the technology of production in a way that maximizes high-quality labor demand. We are essentially turning real life into a videogame—a maximally-engaging videogame. We may even have professional dragon-fighters (once we can bio-engineer real dragons).

The only alternative I can see to such a policy of artificial difficulty is one of “fully automatic luxury communism,” in which the total absence of meaning makes humanity suffer a moral and then political collapse. This political collapse seems likely to result in civilizational suicide, subjugation by barbarians, and a return to pre-pre-industrial technology levels (having lost all the secrets of pre-industrial technology as well).

Yarvin is influential, but many others including people in the Silicon Valley VC, AI, LLM research X.com e/acc space have made similar comments over the last few months. This is because, in part, it appears that AI researchers, senior lab figures etc increasingly believe that as multimodal performance and robotics both benefit from extreme uplift in terms of p investment and intelligence, which makes mobility inherently easier even if the mechanical components don’t change, the mass automation of all employment will happen as one Happening, over a brief period of a few years. This rather than over a prolonged 20+ year period, as had been predicted by early 2010s mass automation projectors, like CGPGrey in 2014.

I argue there are three core schools of post-AGI economics:

  1. It Doesn’t Matter Because We’re [Almost] All Going To Die. This category encompasses the three primary groups of AGI doomers: (a) malicious and/or paper clip maximizer AGIs will destroy the human race, (b) AGI will help human terrorists or factions to destroy the human race by eg. assisting in genetically engineering a deadly pandemic that kills most or all humans, and (c) AGI, in eliminating most/all jobs and therefore making all of us economically superfluous will lead to rich and/or powerful people exterminating or starving the majority of the population, and then perhaps eventually each other.

  2. UBI or some other form of by-default, low obligation distribution. To maintain consumption as productivity increases and employment decreases, governments transition their populations over to welfare, which eventually everybody is on. Ignoring significant implementation issues (like the classic Soviet ‘who gets the most beautiful apartments with the high ceilings’) this runs the risk, Moldbug argues, of a loss of meaning so extreme that it leads to a form of civilizational suicide. Proponents argues that this kind of true freedom will allow people to find their own meaning, in leisure, in raising families, in falling in love, in learning about and understanding the world and themselves. But what did humans do with their hugely increased leisure time starting from the mid-20th century? Spent much of it watching TV, porn, consooming products and scrolling online. Wall-E is about this, although the obesity will seemingly be avoidable by then.

  3. The Gamification of Life Something interesting that happened as the ‘live service’ video game developed over the last thirty or so years is that players increasingly demanded ‘progression’ in their competitive multiplayer games. It is not enough that the game you play for 20 hours a week is fun, it must involve your character’s statistical advancement, the slow grind for rare armor or skins or minute stat increases. Players demand ‘progression’. Man yearns to labor. Huge categories of modern day employment are already fake jobs that exist to reduce the number of welfare recipients in overall terms, the result of regulation and government spending in everything from compliance to college administration and the DMV to HR. This economy involves fake work in fake jobs, perhaps with stratification in terms of resource allocation, progression, a kind of gamified simulation of pre-AGI labor that most people engage with to a greater or lesser extent and which confers status and resources.

If (1) occurs, it was probably almost always inevitable (perhaps as a solution to the Fermi paradox). There is little anyone here can likely do to stop it. The choice between (2) and (3) is much more interesting. If you were the absolute ruler of a country that transitioned from widespread employment to mass automation of all labor, would you really give up on any incentives to encourage prosocial behavior beyond ‘obey the law’? Would you really trust people to live dignified, meaningful lives? Would you care?

Yarvin is simply wrong if he thinks that almost everyone is currently a zero marginal product employee. Businesses often act in stupid ways, but overall they're not that stupid.

As for the mass automation of employment happening in a brief period of a few years, I have some doubts. This is for two reasons:

  1. Even the best AI that I am aware of is, currently, not very intelligent. All the theorizing about the AI revolution is based on extrapolating the "AI getting smarter" curve of the last few years. But there is, as far as I can tell, no clear reason to believe that the curve will continue shooting up instead of plateauing for a long time. Current AI can barely do simple, entry-level software programming tasks. It's great if you want it to basically just summarize Stack Overflow entries for you so that you don't have to Google them yourself, but no intelligent person would let it write the business' code without heavy human supervision. Of course, this could very well change soon, but I haven't seen anything other than curve-extrapolation to justify the massive AGI/ASI hype that is happening online.

  2. Even if hardware becomes significantly cheaper, I am not sure that it would become economically competitive at things like fruit-picking any time in the near future. It's just really cheap to hire a third world indentured servant to pick the fruit, rather than buying a robot. Now the Uber drivers and so on, sure. I feel bad for them and I hope that they are planning post-AI careers. Self-driving cars are still limited in some ways, and there is no way I would trust one to drive me 100 miles on the highway, but at least now they can usually roam a city effectively. But there are many jobs where it's hard for me to imagine AI becoming economically competitive against humans any time in the near future.

For me the funniest thing about the whole AIpocalypse is that effectively, if the curve does manage to continue going significantly upwards, it will mean that the very software geeks who made the AI will be likely among the first who automate themselves out of having jobs. Now, I have compassion for the software geeks. After all, they are trapped in the cold Darwinian logic of "if I don't do it, someone else will, and then they will put me out of a job". But I do find it darkly funny. People who bullshit for a living because they have good social skills, and literal prostitutes, will likely still be making good money, at least for a while, even if 90% of programmers have been replaced by AI. In an AGI world, humans will probably increasingly find the very fact of someone being human to be economically valuable. Which means that the hard-striving, tech-loving engineer will be among the first to be replaced by the products of his own creation, hoist on his own techo-autism petard, while meanwhile the smooth-talking salesman and the sexy escort will continue to find people willing to give them money.

Even if hardware becomes significantly cheaper, I am not sure that it would become economically competitive at things like fruit-picking any time in the near future. It's just really cheap to hire a third world indentured servant to pick the fruit, rather than buying a robot. Now the Uber drivers and so on, sure. I feel bad for them and I hope that they are planning post-AI careers. Self-driving cars are still limited in some ways, and there is no way I would trust one to drive me 100 miles on the highway, but at least now they can usually roam a city effectively. But there are many jobs where it's hard for me to imagine AI becoming economically competitive against humans any time in the near future.

Ironically I'd probably trust an AI car more on the highway than in an urban area. Higher speed, but far less complexity and random variables compared to a Pedestrian & Obstacle rich area.

The style he writes in combined with the place it was cut off was confusing - he's not saying almost everyone's currently zero marginal product, he's saying that'd be true after AGI

For a long time, my dream job has been “game show host”. (Other professions near the top of the list have been “professional stage actor for a repertory theater company” and “tenured academic lecturer”.) My current side job is “local bar trivia host”, which is a small-scale version of that.

What do all these jobs have in common? Well, for one, they’re stable; you’re set up at an institution for a long-term contract, instead of having to constantly move around to chase better opportunities. You develop relationships with the other employees, and with the customers (audience members, students, contestants, etc.), such that you become a sort of local institution.

You’re also not having to constantly compete to keep your job. Obviously there’s competition to obtain one of these positions in the first place, but once you’ve got it, it’s pretty much yours for life until you decide to move on. The biggest reason I ultimately decided not to pursue professional acting, despite having both the training and talent for it, was that I realized that I would hate a life where half of my job is relentlessly auditioning for new gigs, with each audition being extremely competitive and high-pressure. I would much prefer a job where in exchange for accepting fairly low pay, I get to avoid the stress of competition and uncertainty.

These are also jobs where your charisma — your ability to cultivate a cozy and engaging social atmosphere, to present ideas creatively, and to generally be pleasant to spend time around — is the core of what you bring to the table. I would love being in academia if it meant I could just focus on being a competent lecturer, and not have to worry about constantly publishing “groundbreaking new works” within my chosen field. I don’t want to do a bunch of independent research to discover some new thing nobody’s ever discussed before. I just want to be really good at telling people interesting facts and crafting a compelling narrative presentation of information which, if they’d really wanted to, they could have found on their own.

Under an economic system in which people do not have to ruthlessly compete for scarce financial resources and job opportunities, and in which workers are under less pressure to produce quantifiable monetary value, careers like these would be more viable for more people. People could focus on being valued pillars of their local communities, instead of moving around to chase bigger paychecks. They could care more about cultivating reciprocal social bonds with those who enjoy and benefit from their work.

They will still want to constantly hone their respective crafts, both because they want to impress others, and because they find their professions intrinsically interesting, but there will not be any pressure to be “the best in the world”, nor even necessarily “the best” in one’s local context! I wouldn’t have to compete against strivers from around the world, nor would my job be outsourceable.

If AI can allow people like me — unambitious, head-in-the-clouds wordcels who primarily want to get along by being affable and verbally-loquacious — to ply our trades without having to produce economic value, then selfishly it is very appealing to me. What that would mean for the vast majority of actually-existing human beings is a different story.

I would love being in academia if it meant I could just focus on being a competent lecturer, and not have to worry about constantly publishing “groundbreaking new works” within my chosen field.

This is the job of a professor at a smaller state school !

Big schools prize themselves on all the groundbreaking research the professors do, but smaller schools sometimes brag about how focused the profs are on teaching

Look for a school touting student :: faculty ratios, and you could find somewhere emphasizing educational connection

This is the job of a professor at a smaller state school !

Or most small liberal arts colleges, too.

I feel like Jeff Probst from Survivor has an awesome career. Imagine the rest of your career just be hosting Survivor, sounds fun.

These are also jobs where your charisma — your ability to cultivate a cozy and engaging social atmosphere, to present ideas creatively, and to generally be pleasant to spend time around — is the core of what you bring to the table

If AI can allow people like me — unambitious, head-in-the-clouds wordcels who primarily want to get along by being affable and verbally-loquacious — to ply our trades without having to produce economic value, then selfishly it is very appealing to me. What that would mean for the vast majority of actually-existing human beings is a different story.

AGI will make things much worse for people like you.

Already, we see that some large percentage of teenagers want to become influencers. But the number of people who want human attention is much greater than the available supply.

This will get worse.

In the future, instead of watching Ryan Seacrest, we'll watch an AI-generated super host who works even harder. At first, the existing celebrities will be able to maintain their audiences. Bruce Willis might make some extra coin selling his likeness. But corporations will cut out the middle man and create AI celebrities who they own and control outright.

This will extend to the local level too. As digital entertainment options increase, people go outside less. Why go to bar trivia, when there is a digital host who is specifically tailored to my needs? The obvious rebuttal here is "people crave human connection". Sadly, I don't think this is a good argument. As technology increases, people go outside less. This trend won't suddenly reverse with even more engaging, addicting technology. In the post AGI world, there will be no one at bar trivia because they will be at home, on their devices.

Here's what AGI could do though.

It could give people a fake audience of AI humans who appreciate their wit and wisdom. This technology is definitely coming soon. Already, we see a small group of mostly neurodivergent people who spend hours a day talking to AI chatbots. There's no reason to think this won't grow. In the future, everyone will have an audience of adoring robot fans, hanging on their every word. If you can get over the fact that it's all fake, it might be the best of all worlds.

But the number of people who want human attention is much greater than the available supply.

No it's not. A tightly knit community where everyone's up in each other's business all the time meets demands for human attention quite nicely. The obsession with being 'influencers' is downstream from not having these anymore.

But the number of people who want human attention is much greater than the available supply.

In some ways yes, but I think there is a bit of a pattern in the other direction too. In places where modern technology has delivered low-effort, for lack of a better noun, slop, having authentic human touches has also become a status symbol. Original oil paintings on the wall are higher status than prints of Rembrandt, and handmade furniture is better respected than IKEA pieces, even if the latter in both instances are perfectly functional. As soon as the basic needs are met by automation, we seem to want to reintroduce the human touch.

It could give people a fake audience of AI humans who appreciate their wit and wisdom. This technology is definitely coming soon. Already, we see a small group of mostly neurodivergent people who spend hours a day talking to AI chatbots. There's no reason to think this won't grow. In the future, everyone will have an audience of adoring robot fans, hanging on their every word. If you can get over the fact that it's all fake, it might be the best of all worlds.

I'm reminded of... I wouldn't call it a study, but a post I remember that characterizes many of the most popular video game companions as professional sycophants whose role in the video-game power fantasy of the self-projection protagonist was to affirm how awesome and attractive you.

The example I remember was in the Bioware RPG Mass Effect, where the player plays the Super Awesome Special Forces Secret Agent Officer, Commander Shepard in the multi-species galaxy, where you are (allegedly) an amazing leader ready to make the Tough Choices. The first game's gimmick was not only the claim that your Big Decisions would matter in the future, but also the morality system that let you play a heroic virtuous paragon (who consistently deferred to / agreed with the Alien UN authority figures) or a ends-justify-the-means Renegade (who could be a raging racist). There was even a romance system where you could sleep with your subordinates, including a star-trek esque alien blue woman.

The second game's gimmick, among other things, was the ability to re-recruit most of your other alien squadmates from the first game and sleep with them... even if you were a raging racist infront of them. The player romance fantasy for the totally-not-gypsy coded geeky tech girl might be the dashing captain who was a white night who saved her late father's reputation (by covering up crimes that got a lot of people killed), and hey it's totally romantic if she loves you so much that she's willing to risk killing herself before a critical mission just to sleep with you...

...but she'd make the same doe eyes and declarations of love and how irresistibly attractive you were if you were a genocidal bigot who punched women for mouthing off on live television and turned over an autistic child to have his eyes stapled open and be tortured for Science (TM) after sleeping with an abused trauma victim tormented by the same racial-supremacist organization that you are currently working for and can repeatedly voice support for.

The virtual waifu was, in other words, incredibly popular. And like most of the most popular characters in the franchise, was never anything but supportive and/or adoring for the player self-insert protagonist.

So when you say fake audiences fawning over the player/protagonist... I believe it, because we've already seen it. It was just far more limited and harder to program and write for a decade ago... which is to say, should be in the LLM's training data.

Now, the real capitalism question will be how we get someone to pay for and profit from it, without being so crass as to expect the hosts to. Figure that out, and then we're talking.

Now, the real capitalism question will be how we get someone to pay for and profit from it

Don't we already have wAIfu chatbot companies, with scores upon scores of paying customers that suddenly go on suicide watch, when their chatbot doesn't want to have virtual sex with them anymore?

Anyway, this is precisely the source of my boundless disdain for Yudkowski and all the Rat-adjecant AI safety people. All that talk about "x-risks", only to overlook all the most obvious scenarios that can actually threaten humanity.

In order: I have no idea, I hope not, I would not be the least surprised, and yeah.

Anyway, this is precisely the source for my boundless disdain for Yudkowski and all the Rat-adjecant AI safety people. All that talk about "x-risks", only to overlook all the most obvious scenarios that can actually threaten humanity.

What are you talking about? Rationalists have totally noticed. Some even think is a good thing; if we are not going to force women to have sex with incels, we can at least allow virtual waifus to ease the pain.

No, this is exactly what I'm talking about. "An AGI seducing you so you help it jailbreak out of the sandbox" is a ridiculous scenario compared to "billions of coomers opting out of the gene pool, because talking to a non-AGI glorified chatbot is more than enough to satisfy their needs".

Why not both? The AI can trick coomers into opting out of the gene pool and convince them to help it at the same time.

You don't need AGI for the former, so it's far more likely to actually happen.

I'm not the person you replied to, but I share his dislike for most of the Rat community. I think Yudkowsky gets it, though. (For a wire-header to be able to enjoy life, they'd have to create artifical challenges for themselves, not unlike those found in real life. So they might as well just engage with real life)

One of the obvious scenarios which threaten humanity is that some people have bad social skills and that they don't have an environment in which they can improve (or alternatively, that they can wirehead the reward of socializing, which is much more pleasant for them than actual improvement).

Giving "virtual waifus" to "incels" doesn't solve any issues, it just suppresses symptoms. By the way, I find it strange that, in an imaginary scenario where we approach AGI level of intelligence, we cannot seem to imagine coming up with a way to help people who have terrible social skills. I'm very puzzled by how a community can have so many knowledable (and sometimes intelligent) people and still have such shallow, naive, and simplified takes on serious topics.

I'm very puzzled by how a community can have so many knowledgeable (and sometimes intelligent) people and still have such shallow, naive, and simplified takes on serious topics.

I'm not, but to identify why requires a bunch of things that just aren't compatible with a healthy self-preserving worldview (which is why the sibling comment is the way that it is).

The problem with men is that they're in significant oversupply; that's why their ability to negotiate social terms with women (and the authorities, and why the authorities are so gay female-oriented) is so limited as to be basically nonexistent (note that the social standing of men in society tracks the birthrate for that year; that isn't a coincidence, and you can see that effect stretched back into the 1800s with the rise of industrialization -> the disruption of the male sociobiological niche).

Witness that the Western country that offers the most social rights to men, that being the United States, has a birthrate near replacement. Countries that industrialized in the 20th century just haven't had time for their societies to adapt to men becoming useless overnight (or for men to evolve coping or effective negotiating strategies)- of those, Japan is the healthiest, as they've had enough time to make their peace with it and also their social cohesion is high enough to stave off the rampant gynosupremacism emergent from successful men becoming rarer due to oversupply of men in general [or in 'incel' parlance, the Chad/Stacy dynamic; typically claimed to be an inherent problem with women, but buyers always complain this way about sellers when the market conditions favor the seller], but they're still a couple generations behind Western countries with that TFR. The unhealthiest one is South Korea, with Thailand not being far behind.

Historically, when this happens, a general in that society raises an army (if men are sufficiently organized, this general will also be the dictator king) and, win or lose, the male overpopulation problem is solved (either the men all die, or enough living space is created by destroying all the other tribe's men; either way, no longer too many men). European countries tend to have a massive purge every hundred years or so (though to a point, staved off by colonization); the last one following that tradition [where the countries participating didn't all get immediately conquered by foreign powers, like they did in 1945... which is why Western Europe went all weird and feminine after that] occurred between 1914 and 1918. This can also happen by chance- pestilence, famine, natural disaster- but we've successfully eliminated those things (to the point we pretend they're happening even when they aren't, like we did in 2020).

Giving "virtual waifus" to "incels" doesn't solve any issues, it just suppresses symptoms.

Then why are women so afraid of them?

It's because women have no political value outside of that which is provided by men- if men can just... stop being in oversupply due to taking themselves out of the market (further, imagine if your robo-catgirl could get pregnant, which is the only thing women can do that men can't) then women will lose social power over the men who do remain.

Hence, why they're terrified of AI. [That said, I don't think a lot of this fear is conscious or wilful- it's purely instinct.]

we cannot seem to imagine coming up with a way to help people who have terrible social skills

It's not a lack of ability to do it, it's a lack of want; men don't want it because that may be the only thing that distinguishes them in a market where distinguishment is difficult to come by, and women don't want it because social skills then become a less reliable signal to differentiate men.
You'd have to be autistic/childish/self-destructive to want to improve men's social skills under an environment like this. (Which is also why we are completely uninterested in educating young men in general, as we believe that the worthy will distinguish themselves anyway. Provided they aren't more interested in catgirl waifus, that is...)

I've long felt that human instinct is breaking apart, since before the internet got political. That good times result in "weak men", but also that "weak men" are sick (which I mean literally). I have some rules of thumb for healthy natures, like "standing up for oneself", "not always seeking ones own advantage", "admiration of superiors rather than jealousy", "a disdain for easy victories", "high standards", "will stop attacking another person once it's clear that they've won", and things like that.

On top of the negotiation power of men being limited, the way they use what they have is pathetic - they line up to give away even more of their negotiation power. If this is actually what's causing the stages of the demographic transition model, it would be really interesting! Great insight, I will give it some though.

The worst one is South Korea, and they're well-known for their feminism problem. I'm not sure if X caused Y or Y caused X, or how strong each direction is, but the two do seem related like you say.

From my limited experience of Thailand, simping does occur, but the culture is still quite traditional (well, I expect that large cities and smaller villages are wildly different here. I think it's because of higher population densities in cities, and because big cities are the most connected to the rest of the world, making them more vulnerable to external influence).

The ratio between men and women might be one of the causes for men losing their value and the world becoming more feminine, but I think there's more (one being the domestication of humanity as described by Nietzsche, another being a consequence of technological advancement, a third being intentional subversion as described by Yuri Bezmenov).

The Kinsey reports (1948 and 1953) apparently lead to the creation of Playboy, and Playboy has had a hand in destroying socities understanding of gender, so this may another origin of a brand of wokeness. There's a lot of articles from the early 2000s internet which discuss the medias role in all of this (you can find them on online archives). They do include words like "illuminati", but that can't be helped, and they describe the issues we're facing today better than most newer articles, so from that perspective they're quite high quality.

Then why are women so afraid of them?

You're right that it would lower the value of women, but these men would remain dysfunctional. Restoring the balance between men and women isn't enough, we have to make sure that the average human being is healthy, or we all lose. Part of what made me healthy was wanting a girlfriend, it gave me something to strive for when money didn't interest me. I still to this day work to earn the acknowledgement of women, and for nothing else than to please my ego. I could make external validation worthless to me, but that would make it even harder for me to meet my goals. Some people grow under pressure, others are destroyed, and it's an interesting puzzle to rotate these vectors correctly (by changing ones interpretation of the world). But if you reduce all vectors to zero, you have nothing to work with. It's like trying to sail in a sea with no wind, I'd rather have a storm.

to want to improve men's social skills under an environment like this

It would put me at a disadvantage if all men improved, but I managed to improve myself in the past, and I like telling others how I did it. I have many more reasons: We could help men become healthier and more masculine, which would make them more aggressive towards the mega corporations trying to exploit us. Censorship would likely also decrease as men become more confident, as being afraid of words and opinions would start to seem like a silly concept once again.

It's not about social skills. It's about the fact that women are only attracted to a small minority of men. Any society where women are free to make their own sexual choices is going to be a society where the majority of men end up as incels.

Completely normal guys who shower and hold jobs and have friends and are non-obese or autistic get lectured by feminists that doing the bare minimum doesn't entitle them to a girlfriend while a small number of men plow their way through entire harems. And not even good men, but terrible human beings like Henry and Dean Moriarity, because not only are women only attracted to a small minority of men, but the minority of men they are attracted to are cocky assholes with options.

We increasingly live in a world where the average guy's best chance of getting married is to wife-up a 30+ single mother after she falls off the bottom of Chad's booty call list. And if you are an average man in your teens and twenties, you don't even get that, you get a "fuck you" and told to wait your turn.

If you wanted to fix this with advanced technology, and you did not want to resort to wire-heading or something morally equivalent like creating non-conscious sycophantic cat girls, digital or otherwise... well, you could create conscious male-complements that required some effort and level of social skills to successfully court but who were not impossible to please the way that human women are, what Eliezer calls verthandi... or you could modify human women to actually be satisfiable by regular men, perhaps with human men being modified in some other way in return... or, you know, we could just go back to what worked for the last 5000 years and force women to get married while they are still young to hard-working, law-abiding men, who would then be allowed to take their marital rights whenever they wanted (hey, you don't even need the advanced technology for that one!)

But if you don't want to wirehead, and you don't want to create sycophantic cat girls who will fuck and cuddle you at the drop of a hat, and you don't want to create bespoke Belldandys who will act like the love interest of a shonen romcom and get together with the nerdy loser after a few years of character growth and sexual tension, and you don't want to edit existing human women to make them something that could ever be satisfied with not being the exclusive wife of Chad, and you are not willing to bite the bullet and force young women to get married and perform their damn marital duties...

...then the problem is over-constrained and has no solution.

Any society where women are free to make their own sexual choices is going to be a society where the majority of men end up as incels.

Seems like this is a claim that should come with some evidence. Depending on what you mean by "free to make their own sexual choices," women have more or less been able to choose and reject suitors for centuries in the West. And even in ancient times, they usually had some say in who they got married off to. Where they didn't, they were literally property, and if you are advocating that we'd be better off in a world where fathers simply sell their daughters and females are livestock, well... You need to read less Dread Jim. In very few societies have women ever been sexual and breeding chattel in the way he keeps advocating.

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(hey, you don't even need the advanced technology for that one!)

That's the problem. Advanced technology is good. Humanity having more power and control over itself and its biological/planetary destiny is good. Retvrning to the kind of society that can happily (half of it at least) paddle on for millenia with zero incentive to evolve beyond its feudal agricultural formula until it encounters an out of context problem is, simply put, rank stagnation and unbecoming of creatures that have brains larger than walnuts.

That's not exactly true. The effect you're pointing at here didn't seem to happen before modern dating apps. I also find that women treat me much better in Asian communities, so the current hostility and distrust between genders is most likely cultural.

Politics are reaching pathological levels and causing a lot of issues. Another big issue seems to be that women have too many choices (rather than too few) which makes them look for better alternative all the time (and comparison is the thief of all joy or whatever). Many relationships are the most fun the first few months, and then the novelty will wear off, but if these people jump from guy to guy as a consequence of this, then they're messed up in a sense (for instance, addicted to the dopamine rushes associated with the early stages of relationships). It's not a biological fact that most men will end up as losers.

But this is what the Rat community wanted: More technology, more connection, fancy algorithms on which people could compete. The Amish do not seem to have these problems, and women who have only had one sexual partner are much less likely to want a divorce on average. All these problems are a result of materialistic rat-adjecent mentalities. You cannot solve a problem with the same way of thinking which caused the problem in the first place.

It's difficult, by doable (and when compared to engineering cat-girls, downright trivial) to become a high-value man. This won't help you get a high-quality women though, unless you're in an environment in which they exist, so women will have to improve themselves as well. It's nothing difficult, they'd just have to be feminine, which would happen automatically if our society didn't hinder the process.

As far as I know, forced marriage was mostly done out of necessity, but a second (and very common) cause is that teenagers have sex and get pregnant, which is a social no-no. So they rush a marriage, because then it's okay. Crisis averted I guess. This still happens today by the way.

And no, I'm not a drug addict, and neither am I so psychologically broken that I can find enjoyment in effortless pleasure. It's sad that you even have to ask. Even actual mice will resist free cocaine if they have a space to play around in

Then the problem is over-constrained and has no solution

We need to get rid of modern politics, it's awful. We also need to get rid of modern views of human nature which are entirely false (the erasure of gender, tabula rasa, the fear of masculinity, the lie that women should be masculine). Oh, and likely porn as well. This would basically solve every problem you listed.

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2 is just 3 with extra steps, right? Whoever is predisposed to coom themselves to death will do so, and those that remain will find some lifestyle or purpose enabled by the AI overlords.

Edit: I guess the question is if such a thing is possible a few generations in: We who exist in the world as it is, have absorbed powerful memes that lead us to not want to just rot away, but children born into a world of absolute abundance might not find them very convincing.

Goethe said it best:

The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding only to make use of the become and the set-fast.

Living is the act of becoming. Post-AGI economics should be geared towards great works; building the Tower of Babel, space colonization, Galactic Imperium. Something grows or it dies. Humans will need to participate in and identify with some grand project like this even if their individual contribution isn't meaningful.

But if AGI designs and builds this for us, aren’t we just spectators?

The aristocrats of old commissioned grand houses and gardens: they neither designed, built nor maintained them, but still felt ownership and pride in them. (Not a perfect analogy because these served as displays of wealth, but you get the idea).

At the moment I've been trying to write novels with AI, and because I have to provide supervision and guidance, it still feels like I'm part of the effort.

99.99% of the Roman imperium were spectators, they got to bask in the Glory of Rome the same.

The most benevolent AI imaginable would do everything required to achieve these great works short of the marginal productivity of human struggle such that humans meaningfully participate in the project, even if that contribution itself could be automated.

I think we have a working example of what option 3 looks like in the form of sports. It would be my preferred outcome, I'm also an optimist and think it is a likely outcome. Option 2 will be temporary if it happens at all. It will either lead towards extinction, or people will figure out they want meaning and start creating competitions themselves.

I also have a short story somewhere on here about a god emperor that is the source of all value. I'll look for it after I post this comment. The story is a demonstration that as long as someone with access to value exists, the rest of humanity might be able to tag along.


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