domain:alexberenson.substack.com
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8m ago
I mean even in your own home away from home, there are plans to just get rid of Women's prison.
The rise in MTF transsexualism is partially explained by utter humiliations such as this.
ControlsFreak
8m ago
Oh, well then this is just the standard, all-too-common, strawman. You're responding to a figment of your imagination, not anything I've written.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9m ago
I assume so? I used to think this, but have come around to agreeing this isn't true.
We ban more rightists than leftists. Rightists are more numerous, and thus when someone flies off the handle or starts insulting people or posting about how much he hates his enemies, it's more likely to be a rightist.
This of course has resulted in rightists claiming that we don't ban leftists enough.
wayfarer
12m ago
Is the point of your analogy that the endeavor of developing military doctrine is simply fallacious from the get-go?
no, it is that obvious solution like "just eat less" or "just militarily destroy enemy" are both true, and often not sufficient in practice as achieving them may be hard/nearly impossible
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19m ago
It's a lot easier to win environmental lawsuits if you bring them as administrative law cases saying that not enough people were consulted, so people do that.
WhiningCoil
19m ago
Now, the biggest hurdle holding back the poor family in the story I've linked to is a simple one: the Overton Window. If, for some unfortunate reason, the number of women crazy enough to act that way rose significantly, society would probably develop memetic antibodies or legal solutions. This might, sometimes, become strong enough to overcome the "women are wonderful" effect, if such women are obviously being the opposite.
Ah ahahahahahah.
Hah.
Oh man, that's a good one. That's a really good one. You really aren't from around here. Our society's worship of women is downright pathological at this point. They can do almost anything and it's excused. I mean even in your own home away from home, there are plans to just get rid of Women's prison. Women are too good to spend time in jail for their crimes you see? In fact, their reasoning is that since more women are being sent to jail, something must be wrong with the legal system, since women are wonderful obviously. So we'd better start shutting down the women's jails so they can't be sent there.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
23m ago
I don't think this is about the merits of corporal vs non-corporal punishment. If the tiny number of women who are currently jailed for child endangerment were judicially caned instead, it wouldn't noticeably affect the incentives for a moron like Mrs DaveyJBro.
This is about the merits of informal punishment by a local authority figure (or mob, as you discuss in your pickpocketing post) vs judicial punishment following due process of law. If DaveyJBro had the socially recognised right to take his wife's phone away for irresponsible use, he probably wouldn't need to escalate to beatings.
Almost everyone agrees that informal punishment is necessary to keep children in line. It is constitutive of a "free society" that mature adult citizens in free societies are not subject to informal punishment. The grey area in between is large, but empirically the Venn diagram of people with the practical wisdom to understand why Lenore Skenazy is a mature adult and Mrs DaveyJBro is not and people willing to administer casual beatings over this kind of thing looks like a pair of spectacles.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
28m ago
I think they're mostly wrong. There's some truth in that the knowledge of an idea can spread due to the idea being publicized. Obviously the knowledge of the idea is a prerequisite of the belief in the veracity of the idea, so if you squint you can see the truth of it, but the modeling of the belief in the veracity of the idea being helplessly thrust upon someone like a cold virus is far less useful than the one involving treating ideas like things that people can and do accept and reject. Not always based on reason and logic - not often based on reason and logic, even - but not helplessly.
The sharing of an idea is usually a prerequisite for its spread though, unless it's a particularly obvious idea.
quiet_NaN
28m ago
The insane thing is that they imagined that cop killing would be a step towards defeating ICE. That firmly places them in the bottom political intelligence percentile of the broader SJ movement.
It should obvious to anyone that the US in 2025 is not China ca. 1930. It is very much not like there are millions of wokes just waiting for a signal to put down their pumpkin spice lattes and pick up their assault weapons and wage a civil war against the USG. They don't have the guns, they don't have the training, they don't have the stomach and I would argue that most of them do not have the ideological radicalism which enabled Mao's troops to win through atrocities. Sure, they might cheer on Hamas, but they would likely shy away from Hamas-level violence in the US. The slogan of the BLM riots was "defund the police", which misguided as it is, is notably different from "shoot the pigs".
It is obvious that the less violent resistance to ICE seen in California is a much less suicidal way to express their dissatisfaction with Trump's policies. If this is successful in affecting policy remains to be seen, the way I see it, Trump can use the publicity to highlight how he keeps his campaign promises, and he does not really care how much it will cost to continue the deportations despite widespread disruptions, it is not like he is fiscally responsible or anything.
But escalating to a firefight with the feds is terminally stupid.
Also, the group managed to have an excellent gender balance for a terrorist cell (four cis-women, two trans-women, four men, presumably cis), but their racial composition is Problematic. One of the women might be Asian, but all the rest is White. Let us hope that they were not shooting Black cops from their position of privilege.
Also, why post a picture of one of the guy's Mexican wife? That guy just tried to murder cops, he could be in a polycule with bearded North Koreans and it would not be relevant. Put the picture of his wife in once she is wanted or charged with anything.
07mk
38m ago
Yes, but are they really all that wrong to model them — or at least some ideas — that way?
I think they're mostly wrong. There's some truth in that the knowledge of an idea can spread due to the idea being publicized. Obviously the knowledge of the idea is a prerequisite of the belief in the veracity of the idea, so if you squint you can see the truth of it, but the modeling of the belief in the veracity of the idea being helplessly thrust upon someone like a cold virus is far less useful than the one involving treating ideas like things that people can and do accept and reject. Not always based on reason and logic - not often based on reason and logic, even - but not helplessly.
I mean, isn't this a key part of why, traditionally, heresy was considered such a serious matter?
I think the belief that ideas spread that way is a key part of why, traditionally, heresy was considered such a serious matter. There are many things that people have done traditionally based on the belief that something is true.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
42m ago
Despite what Western media reporting might have you believe, the rate of petty crime in India is surprisingly low. People rarely get pick-pocketed or robbed. Do you know why?
With the greatest possible respect, how would you know how low the rate of petty crime in India is?
If crime is as low as western Europe, or 1st-world Asia, or America outside a few black ghettos, then "nobody in my social circle is a recent victim of crime" doesn't imply a large enough sample size. Police-recorded crime statistics are notoriously bogus everywhere, and Indian ones are going to be more so than most. And you yourself are pointing out (correctly) that media coverage of crime is mostly sensationalist lies.
There is, for good reasons, a standing State Department advisory warning US travellers about pickpockets in London. The risk of being pickpocketed if you do not look or act like a tourist is indistinguishable from zero. I assume the same is true of India, although the wording of the respective warnings implies that State considers the problem to be worse in India than it is here. I do not think the informal enforcement you praise protects tourists, and the absence of pickpocketing against non-tourists proves its effectiveness in the same way that the lack of yeti sightings proves the effectiveness of yeti repellent.
ControlsFreak
44m ago
What I'm saying is that advising lifestyle changes rarely works. I don't have firm figures at hand, but I suspect that the number of people I've recommended such eminently sensible things like losing weight, stopping smoking and going to gym grossly outweigh (pun not intended) the number who actually did anything about it.
This is much more circumspect than your original comment. The problem of advice-giving is significantly different in nature, and it has significant dependency on a wide variety of external, contingent factors that are not-necessarily related to the typical time-independent, mechanistic processes that the biological and medical sciences study. If you would please kindly continue to be this circumspect in future comments, that would be appreciated.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
48m ago
· Edited 33m ago
For example, how would this situation be handled in India? [...]
Firstly, the extended family would have much more power. This is the rare case where both the husband's side and the wife's own family would probably agree that something needs to be done, the latter for reputational reasons as well as concern for the kids. She'd probably end up committed, if she wasn't beaten up or ostracized to hell and back. The police would turn a blind eye, should she choose to complain, they'd be profoundly sympathetic to the family's plight and refuse to act against them.
When dealing with questions of punishment, we always have to confront the problem of how the authority figure's prosocial motivations can be disentangled from the pleasure he gets from enacting the punishment itself. Can they even be disentangled? Is it possible that they're always one and the same?
For the suburban Karen who calls CPS because her neighbors let their son ride his bike without a helmet, the wellbeing of the child is of secondary importance at best. Her primary motivation is the feeling of power she derives from being able to commandeer an instrument of state violence.
In your case, the violence is not even mediated through the state, but is dished out by the man's own hands, "with a good conscience" -- this makes the charm all the more seductive. Are we to suppose that the man is not secretly, or not-so-secretly, hoping that his wife will someday commit a transgression which merits some familial intervention? An "evolutionary genealogy" of such a system might reveal that its primary and originary purpose was as a system of ritualized violence, with its usage as an instrument of "justice" being vestigial or epiphenomenal.
There are no pure assertions of "negative" restrictions on rights -- there are only positive assertions of rights. "You should not have the right to do X" can be rewritten as "I should have the right to punish you for doing X". Or, more explicitly: "I want the right to punish you for doing X".
And people still wonder why feminists get up in arms over the concept of "traditional family structures". In the system thus described, is it ever the wife who beats the husband for his transgressions? She can try, and she may even have the support of the community on her side, but due to physical asymmetry, it's unlikely to end well for her. She can get male relatives to do it for her; but the prerogative of deriving full enjoyment from the act of punishment remains with the man. That hardly seems fair.
ControlsFreak
50m ago
Maybe "But don't tell people that utterly destroying enemy doesn't work, because it does." would be better?
I don't know how this analogy is supposed to work. The point of the development of military doctrine is to build up a body of professional knowledge, generally to the purpose of, indeed, destroying the enemy (though there are sometimes tweaks for political constraints or other political objectives). This is, indeed, intended to be "what works".
Is the point of your analogy that the endeavor of developing military doctrine is simply fallacious from the get-go? This has other implications that I can think of. For example, rather than moving TRADOC, as Trump did, I think this point of view says that he should have simply eliminated it altogether. Of course, I think you can tell that I don't think that this is the point of the analogy, but I'm kind of struggling to see what the point is.
Maybe, on the other end, it's something along the lines of, "It's not terribly helpful to be a 400lb guy in a bed who just writes somewhere on the internet, 'Hurr durr, have you tried killing the bad guys?'"? I mean, sure? Yeah, I just don't get what you're going for, and I don't get how it's relevant to what I've said.
trying to not overeat vs extreme marketing of hyperpalatable foods is an adversarial process
Mathematically speaking, I would distinguish the two. This may be a complicated and difficult environment, but it is not an adversarial one. There are deep mathematical differences between the two.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
55m ago
Law, and insurance.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I think in many cases the West has over-emphasized laws to the point where almost every other option for enforcing order. The shopkeepers don’t think about protecting their property because the law is almost certainly going to slam them for defending their property. But it’s a double bind because the same law is unlikely to catch the thief and if they do, the property won’t be restored and the thief gets little punishment for stealing. And so on down the line of crimes. We think “let the law deal with it” and it rarely works.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1hr ago
While I agree with you, for the most part:
This is bullshit. Especially as the beatings would likely be administered by the husband with no judicial oversight. I mean, sure, if the husband had beaten his wife for no reason on the general principle that she should live in terror of him, it would have been very likely that she would not have picked up her hobby of sexting convicts. But this is like suggesting that cobalt bombs are a good way to stop wildfires in California: while technically correct, the cure would be worse than the disease.
Despite what Western media reporting might have you believe, the rate of petty crime in India is surprisingly low. People rarely get pick-pocketed or robbed. Do you know why?
Because if caught in the act, the perpetrator would be rather unceremoniously beaten to a pulp, both by whoever caught them, and any civic minded individuals present. You can get a nice crowd going, it's fun for the whole family.
This is of course, strictly speaking, illegal. Yet any police officer, if asked to intervene, would laugh, shake their head and say the criminal deserved it. If the crook had the temerity to file charges, he'd probably be taken out back and given a second helping to change his mind.
As far as I'm concerned, this is strictly superior to prevailing Western attitudes regarding property crimes or theft. A shopkeeper who discovers someone shoplifting has very little legal recourse, the police rarely do any more than file a report and then give up on pursuing the matter. Giving them the de-facto right to take matters into their own hand and recover their property? The shopkeeper wins. Polite society wins, the only loser is the thief, and in this case the process is quite literally the desired punishment.
Before you ask, the number of false positives is negligible. I've never heard of anyone being falsely accused in this manner (at least with accusations of theft), and I've never had to have that particular fear myself.
I am, in general, against husbands beating their wives. Yet, in this specific scenario, I could hardly fault the poor chap should he be forced to resort to such methods to protect his own family. At the very least, I'd vote to acquit. It's a bit moot, because with prevailing Western norms, he likely didn't even consider a haymaker as a solution to his problems. In general, that's a good thing.
Tree
1hr ago
I don't think budget daycare is serious abuse, though. That is within that western context where my statement holds and parenting does not matter.
wayfarer
1hr ago
OK, I got confused given that it was in thread about serious abuse (or maybe serious abuse).
wayfarer
1hr ago
I guess that separate accounts and being rich may be enough to explain this.
Still, for Twitter/Reddit tales I would assume that all are faked, unless proof exists.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
I do not think this should be a criminal matter. There is plenty of fucked-up shit which is enough to lose you custody of your kids without landing you in jail.
If the reporting is accurate, then I would expect family court to completely cut her from her kids. If that was not enough to act as an disincentive, sending her to prison would not have made a difference either.
From my reading of the text, the main problem was that she was doing this in secret. Once she was discovered, the repercussions (divorce, loss of custody) were likely swift to follow. I do not think that another society would have dealt much better with this. Even in Saudi Arabia, though there might be norms where a husband is checking his wive's phone, she might have another phone for sexting convicts.
As a wise mullah once said: "What is the cure for such disorders? Beatings."
This is bullshit. Especially as the beatings would likely be administered by the husband with no judicial oversight. I mean, sure, if the husband had beaten his wife for no reason on the general principle that she should live in terror of him, it would have been very likely that she would not have picked up her hobby of sexting convicts. But this is like suggesting that cobalt bombs are a good way to stop wildfires in California: while technically correct, the cure would be worse than the disease.
not sticking your dick in crazy.
If people only have sex with people proven sane beyond all reasonable doubt, humanity would die out in a few generations. From the reaction of the husband, it seems that he was surprised by her behavior. We do not have the context to say if he should have seen this coming, and what his other options for a spouse were when he decided to marry and have kids.
wayfarer
1hr ago
In this case it seems particularly evident that the issue with drugs that trick you into not feeling hunger at your normal rate is that it becomes that much harder to operate normally without them.
well, the problem here is that people in the first place were unable to operate normally without them, so it is not making worse
Unlike OP, I think a world where people can only solve their problems by becoming addicted to complex and expensive drugs is a bad one.
I agree, but superior over one where the same problems are unsolvable
When people call something "a crutch" they refer to the specific chronic problems they cause in long term use, and in particular that you can get habituated to them in a way that stops you from taking the harder steps required to get back to walking normally.
which is quite idiotic phrase, given that crutches are not causing this at all AFAIK
Tree
1hr ago
Sure, my statement is implicitly limited to the context of the modern western parenting debate.
wayfarer
1hr ago
Sorry, what? You're just off the mark.
Maybe "But don't tell people that utterly destroying enemy doesn't work, because it does." would be better?
Aside from the inherent differences between adversarial processes and other dynamic processes.
trying to not overeat vs extreme marketing of hyperpalatable foods is an adversarial process
As much as I hate to intrude on another's discussion, I'm simply going to point at my own experience in terms of weight loss and shrug helplessly.
Like you, I was of a similar attitude. Like you, I felt the majority of weight-gain and weight-loss issues was a matter of people simply not wanting to put in the effort. I still do, to a point - too many people think a diet is like an on-off switch, when I've found it really boils down to actively changing how and what you eat - it's a lifestyle shift, not something you do for a month to fit into your summer bikini. And why not? I did exactly that. I lost 70 pounds from strict CICO and modifying my diet.
However.
I'm not going to go more indepth into my own history of weight loss and weight gain. Instead, I'm going to point to my brother, who has also done the entire weight-loss via keto. And while he was able to lose the weight, there was a plateau, a wall in terms of weight loss he was unable to get past before he simply gave up - the juice wasn't worth the squeeze in terms of the effort he was putting in.
Full disclaimer, he's never been an obese-looking butterball or as heavy as I am, though I'm sure if you put in his BMI stats he'd be labeled as obese.
On semaglutide, he blew through that wall in a few short months and is still loosing weight. He's currently at the weight he was in high school, and hasn't hit a plateau. If things continue as is, both he and I will be at weights we've never been before, ever, and have no idea what we will look like.
I'm no doctor, no medical expert or scientist. I am but a dabbling amateur, stumbling around and trying to piece together a picture of the world. And as time has gone by, I'm becoming more and more convinced that our modern diet has done extreme damage to our bodies, damage that some can adapt to and overcome, and others can't. That we are subject to the cruel tyranny of the flesh that our minds are unable to overcome, even when we fervently wish otherwise. We've learned our lesson, burned our fingers and become wise, but we still carry the scars that we can't fix by ourselves no matter how we wish otherwise.
So we use drugs. Problem solved.
...now, on the gripping hand, I also have experience similar to self_made_human where getting people to loose weight forces you to do the equivalent of making a recalcitrant dog take their medicine, no matter how much they hate it, cause, y'know, they'll die otherwise, but such is life.
More options
Context Copy link