domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
___
4hr ago
There's a widespread belief held by urban Jews that rural whites areas are heavily anti-Semitic (which is untrue), I would guess that it's probably related.
If the Russians were funding the Greens it would be because they wanted to push for shutting down coal and nuclear power plants which would increase Germany's reliance on natural gas as a way to fill the gap when the baseload becomes more unreliable.
The weird thing is I thought there was a thing about the German secret service infiltrating the Green party due to Russian ties. The problem is I don't know when this happened. In my head this must have happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union because of my age but also in my head my thoughts were 'I hate the Greens. I hate the Communists. But you really shouldn't be doing this in a democracy'. [weirdly enough the USA did the same thing to the Republican party 16 year later]. Also, if I search for the terms 'scandal over germany secret service green party' in Google I can't find it so maybe I'm hallucintating. I asked chat gpt and apparently it happened in 2000 which make sense to me but maybe this is chat gpt hallucinating as well. Chat GPT wouldn't supply me with links and I can't find anything on google in the front page.
this is the closest i could find to what i remember: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/german-spies-target-left-wing-party but that doesn't mention Russia or the Green party. i could have misremembered and thought it was the green party when it was a leftist party.
wingdingspringking
4hr ago
Agreed. If I could be guaranteed that Trump would be dead within 6 months and Vance would take over, I'd actually consider giving them money.
zeke5123a
4hr ago
We’ve actually seen Polymarket front run the polls; not the other way around. My guess is there was a reaction to that polling but many other polls came out at the same time with Trump leading so hard to make heads or tails.
roystgnr
4hr ago
Citation?
Steve Sailer is the one who keeps harping on the vaccine delay most, including a retrospective recently. Not the most persuasive source to cite, but he does cite his own sources and doesn't seem to be making up any facts, just adding speculative but more-plausible-than-the-official motives. The official story is that pharma companies did hold back the analysis of their vaccines until right after the election, but only because it's okay to violate experiment protocols when you're kinda feeling super nervous.
I thought the bottleneck was FDA approval, with mass production starting alongside Phase 2 success.
Pfizer announced 90% effectivity in a preliminary analysis of their Phase 3 trials on November 9, announced the analysis was finished on November 18, applied for FDA approval on November 20, and got the Emergency Use Authorization on December 11.
Certainly the FDA taking 3 weeks to approve was as unhelpful than Pfizer delaying for 2 weeks, but both decisions probably killed thousands in the end.
Of course, the real bottleneck was the FDA, because we could have saved tens or hundreds of thousands more lives if not for decisions like "Forbidding the human challenge trials we could have done in April", "Not jailing the people who did the forbidding and then doing human challenge trials in May", etc. But letting people die in large numbers because of mindless authoritarianism is part and parcel of modern society, whereas letting people die in less-large numbers because you want to hide information from voters feels like a new low.
zeke5123a
5hr ago
Yeah agreed. To me polymarket seemed a bit too bullish on Trump. Again, I think Trump is the comfortable favorite but wouldn’t be shocking for Harris to win.
zoink
5hr ago
COVID-19 vaccines: history of the pandemic’s great scientific success and flawed policy implementation The FDA and companies delay vaccine trial until after the US election
Further discussion 25:35 from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the Covid Vaccine (with Vinay Prasad)
Following that /r/SSC link was depressing. I hadn't realized how Reddit they'd gone, with /r/transdiy leftists berating walls of <deleted> comments.
Guess that's what "no culture war" really means. Just one hivemind's boot doing all the stomping
MotteInTheEye
5hr ago
There's a knock on effect of execution for murder or attempted murder on how expensive and awful prisons are. Gangs thrive in prison because the guards are not able to maintain a monopoly on violence, which is partly because many prisoners have nothing left to lose.
Edit: forgot to make the full connection to the current topic, which is that policing minor offenders like shoplifting would still get a lot easier with the consistent application of the death penalty even if they aren't the ones getting executed.
sapph
5hr ago
I have a very good record of betting on prediciton markets and crypto. Turned an ~70K bankroll into a few million. That is not some Lebron level performance but its very good in my opinion. The motte isn't going to want to hear this but...
'Things the right wants to be true' are systematically overpriced. This has been true for years and it is probably still true this cycle. That doesn't mean Trump wont win or wont win in a landslide. But systematically the 'pro-rightwing' outcomes tend to be overpriced. I would not place a bet on any outcome where Trump wins unless you have a very good reason. I think trump is favored but the bets tend to be overpriced.
I will say there is one piece of counterevidence recently that seems important to my personal estimation. Prediction markets were way ahead of other sources in predicting that Joe Biden would step down. Places like Metaculus which are usually reasonably trustworthy (despite minimal monetary incentives) were hilariously overconfident. But I am skeptical of most 'trump wins X' bets from a financial point of view.
The greens were hardly pushing against fossil fuels (partly because they overlap with pro-coal labor unions). They were campaigning against nuclear and for vast investments in solar, both of which cripple the German grid and help Russia sell more gas at higher prices in the winter.
I'm not excusing German greens by saying they were just rational foreign agents (because I think they're legitimately insane), but Russian sponsorship of their activism goes back to the anti-nuclear campaigns by communist front orgs in the 60s. Today's senior greens literally had KGB handlers when they were young radicals.
This is not at all surprising (though the people over at /r/slatestarcodex seem to be surprised), given his association with Peter Thiel, whom he met in 2011 and has worked with/for over the years. Thiel played an important role in Vance's political career, donating $15 million to his successful Senate campaign. Thiel also helped "smooth over" JD Vance's relationship with Donald Trump in 2021, according to the New York Times
Even without this obvious connection to Thiel, I think it should be pretty evident from how he talks and conducts himself. He's young, smart, and went to a good school, is right-leaning and somewhat of a contrarian—why wouldn't he be aware of Scott's blog?
I mean, has mentioned Curtis Yarvin before on Jack Murphy's (cuck) podcast back in 2021:
"So there's this guy Curtis Yarvin..."
It's actually quite funny how easily you can spot other "rat-adjacent" people in the wild nowadays. I've met a few at a completely unrelated event. This didn't use to happen before. But, now, I could tell from just a few words into our conversation. So maybe the event wasn't all that unrelated, after all. Apparently, there's demographic overlap between these seemingly disparate interests. I don’t know if I like that there are others like me.
To Scott Alexander's credit, he has had an outsized influence on intellectual discourse online, which is now beginning to spill into real life. Looking at Google Trends, the search volume for "Effective Altruism" peaked in 2021-2022. This matches my perception of TheMotte's popularity at the time. But that peak might've only been the beginning.
The growth of the "gray tribe" in that period, whether they (you?) like it or not, follows a tangible "vibe shift" in culture. As Curtis Yarvin is quoted musing in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, the liberal regime will being to fall when the "cool kids" abandon its values and worldview. We've seen it already. A pretty funny example is Red Scare, who, following the winds of culture, went all the way from Sailor Socialism to larping Tradcath aesthetics. And with JD as VP, maybe it'll go truly mainstream.
I have felt the effects of internet gentrification and cultural appropriation over the years, as different obscure niches have gone similarly mainstream. I feel validation but also resentment and frustration at the loss of exclusivity and ownership.
"Everyone dresses like a duck hunter now [in 2022]."
But also Brandy Melville is in, Ozempic is in, being thin and pretty is back in fashion. Thanks, I guess? I like it (I like pretty, thin women), but I also hate it (I hate the lack of edge).
Terms that were popular only in small, socially ostracized circles of internet weirdos and incels are now mainstream. "Looksmaxxing" no longer scares the hoes away—it's all over TikTok. Why did people have to learn what the maxilla is?
I feel robbed.
I need to find something new. I am obsessed with trend forecasting. I need to find a niche to gatekeep.
Any suggestions?
MotteInTheEye
5hr ago
It's still a pretty big jump from "has read some posts by Scott" to "reads the Motte", right?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
5hr ago
Sure an inquisition isn’t a great system for a modern functioning state.
Why not?
It’s not something that’s compatible with civil rights as we know them.
Why is this a problem?
crushedoranges
5hr ago
I'm pretty sure those are outliers. At least, if you subtract the partisan reasoning, the entire industry is converging on even stevens. If Harris was suddenly doing landslide numbers it'd have been factored in already, no?
roystgnr
5hr ago
Consider getting checked out for hayfever/allergies.
I took way too long to do this after moving to a new house and subsequently turning into a mouth breather, because I never thought of myself as a person with allergies. It turned out that, although I wasn't allergic to the oak pollen that would fall like yellow snow around my previous home, I was very allergic to the relatively invisible wild grass pollens at the new place. A year or so of allergy shots cleared it up.
Are the Nasonex sprays okay for indefinite use? I was prescribed Flonase nasal spray (way back when it was still prescription-only) as a temporary fix while the shots were doing their thing, and I was warned at the time that some of the OTC options let you build up a tolerance if you used them too frequently and would then have withdrawal issues afterwards.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5hr ago
Just to steelman this, unless the people guilty of stealing have reason to fear getting punished, the law against stealing is basically dead. There are large portions of most major cities where these kinds of situations exist. The laws against stealing, drug dealing, and murder are not enforced consistently. The results are not freer people unconcerned about crime, in fact it’s the opposite. In those areas, since the cops can’t (often because of government policies) deter crime or reliably enforce the laws, the people who can’t afford to leave take the job of self protection on themselves. Bars go over windows, people carry weapons, and gangs take over to protect criminals from other criminals. It’s basically a post collapse society on display in the middle of downtown Chicago or St. Louis.
Sure an inquisition isn’t a great system for a modern functioning state. It’s not something that’s compatible with civil rights as we know them. But the other side is that the alternative is also terrible for civil rights. You have a right to private property. Sure, but what good is it when the cops for lack of proper paperwork and prosecutorial authority simply shrug as local thugs help themselves to anything not physically impossible to steal? What good is it to be protected from the cops detaining you when you and your family are prisoners in your own homes behind barred windows because your neighborhood is to unsafe to be outside in? What good is it to say “I am safe from the cops shooting me” when you have to worry about getting caught in a drive by shooting? Freedom isn’t just freedom from the state, but the presence of law, order and justice. If you don’t have the ability to come and go as you please without fear of the Cripps, it’s not far off from not being able to come and go for fear of the cops.
diabetous
5hr ago
Norway uniquely jails speeders who reoffend far less than a normal which is discussed further down the piece bringing the gap to 25% vs 28%.
The gap is so small that imo default should be incapacitation is not rehabilitory. Maybe not so much in that its so ironclad to be true, but because it would shift the idea that it where innovation in the justice system has potential.
Your points about parole theoretically much better potential seems drastically underexplored compared to prison.
incognitomaorach
5hr ago
Think you've missed a trick here. The russians did fund the German green movement, and mostly because of the dynamics re imports and exports of energy. If you look at the Petra Kelly/Gert Bastian situation for example, the whole thing glows as bright as the sun. And it doesn't take rocket science to work out why. If you're pro green energy, at least at the time with 90s/00s level tech, then you're going to need (even if you don't acknowledge it) some stable energy source to make up the down periods. And at the time gas was by far the best option other than nuclear. You essentially had a domestic production of nuclear/coal which could be demonised as dirty and possibly even evil. The anti domestic side didn't say "and we'd like russian gas to smooth out the gaps" but this was an inevitability.
Basically yes, Vance is trivially correct that the German greens were funded by the Russians, and for relatively sensible reasons.
mildly_benis
5hr ago
He says it's actually the Russians funding the German Green party, not even hedging or speculating.
Greens were pushing for no fossil fuels, of which Russia is the default European supplier. Greens were pushing for continued war in Ukraine. These are policies that benefit the US.
Surely he knows this. I can't think of it as anything other than a blatantly dishonest narrative in the usual vein of 'Europeans are incompetent, not pulling their own weight, Russians doing with them as they please, they need a savior, that's us (again!)'. Genuinely infuriating. Sobering, too.
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
5hr ago
I think it's Major Kong riding the nuclear missile in Dr Strangelove or nothing.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5hr ago
Thanks, fixed. (Like Hakan Rotmwrt said, "High-quality racism is extraordinarily hard work.")
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
6hr ago
Alright, out with it: Which one of you motherfuckers is J.D. Vance? It’s pretty strange to know that the future Vice President of the United States of America may have personally read my shitposts.
It feels wrong to wish death on somebody who has done (almost) nothing (truly) wrong.
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