domain:questioner.substack.com
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
12m ago
I'm being serious, what part of having to be constantly looking over your shoulder and being unable to trust even your closest relatives sound appealing to you.
Power is a curse, all those who actually tasted it will tell you. It eats at all of your life until nothing is left, and for what? In the end you only can make the decisions that allow you to maintain your station.
History is full of men who wanted nothing to do with it. And rightfully so.
It's only redeeming quality is that in the hands of your enemies, it is even more terrible than in yours.
But what has humanity ever hoped for if not for someone else to deal with anarchy? Entire societies built just so we don't have to do this dirty work ourselves. Whole religions spent on dreaming someone is doing it for us when we are too weak.
aldomilyar
17m ago
Atleast that person stands for something and has a sense of gravity about the occasion, though.
I might not want to hang out with a Yakuza but I respect their commitment to their lifestyle more than I do 'oh I've got Milhouse smoking weed'
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
32m ago
absolute bunker-buster of a post from Big Yud himself.
Hey! I was looking for an excuse to post that pic 😡
(I really can't get enough of the WS hate. I barely know what the guy did to become a lolcow, but I'm munching popcorn nonetheless)
Bartender_Venator
32m ago
I notice a strong correlation between sleeve tattoos and any particularly high-octane occupation - military, police, fire, EMS, extreme sports, etc. Part macho, part masochism.
aqouta
32m ago
Turok has a public Twitter account. Many of the people he responds to and interacts with on Twitter would be part of the "online racialist Right"
Here I think is the rub. I've personally gotten more familiar with the twitter/x sphere since the musk takeover. There is a common dynamic that happens there, where someone responds exclusively to the people they most disagree with in order to argue, a natural enough behavior. This however creates a kind of reverse echo chamber where the algorithm feeds them an overwhelming amount of exactly that type of person. I personally have frequently found my feed overwhelmed with Chinese Maoists regularly with only the occasional response to their nonsense. I know that Chinese Maoists are actually pretty rare so I've found it pretty easy to not assume that this is actually the mainstream belief but if you are responding to extreme racialists I can see how one could convince themselves that this is a major opinion of the online right. But what is really is is a kind of shadow of the poster's opinion, everything they most disagree with, because the algo accurately assumes it's what drives engagement.
This dynamic, where I see Chinese Maoists, confrontational conservatives there see idiotic leftists and @AlexanderTurok sees moronic Trumpists causes each of us to have a distorted vision of our opposition. Turok makes the mistake of then coming to this forum of actual thoughtful people and assuming the conservatives here need to answer for the worst Trumpists the engineers of X can serve. The conservatives here don't recognize themselves in the criticisms he levels at them and drama ensues.
This is all very understandable, but also very silly and avoidable. In fact the rules of this forum can and should correct for it But it's much more satisfying to assuming all of our enemies are as dumb as the dumbest people the algo of X can serve us. It's a very satisfying kind of assumption. It's just too bad that anyone who falls for it is going to spend the rest of their days tilting at windmills.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
36m ago
In the same way that when I buy a Costco box of cookies I've burdened myself with eating them.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
41m ago
why hasn't anyone else already done this where labor is expensive
They have, Japan is famous for its strict immigration policy, expensive labor and high productivity from extreme levels of automation, including entirely automated farms that would be uneconomical in most other countries.
I appreciate the irony of saying this as they're experiencing rice shortages, but as far as I understand that's weather related.
cjet79
44m ago
I've thought about this a decent amount. I rebelled against the norms around me in highschool and became a libertarian, but I often wondered if I was just an accidental encounter away from going the other direction and becoming communist or something.
Its easy to notice that many young men rebel against the norms around them, and it seems to drive their political, social, and cultural views. But this "rebellion narrative" has a glaring set of problems: it assigns little or no agency to the individuals involved, it ignores the power of ideas, and thus it lacks any explanatory power for why people rebel into a particular set of ideas.
Instead I think it is just that failures that are happening in the here and now are easier to notice than all of the successes happening, or the bad things that aren't happening. A political entity that is clearly in charge gets blamed for all those problems. People go looking for answers. Since we are in a two party system they often just go to the other side. But not always! The two party system isn't a rule of reality, just a quirk of how our system is arranged so people can and do find their ways elsewhere.
Zephyr
1hr ago
A lot of pro choicers also call it a “clump of cells,” not a baby.
If you want to bite the bullet and say that abortion is ending the life of a baby, go ahead, otherwise this false on the face of it.
anon_
1hr ago
Not to re-litigate a worn out topic, but "kicked from the inside" -- aka quickening was historically (as in Colonial America) the point after which abortion was a crime.
Your great great grandmother probably had the same intuition embedded in Common Law.
anon_
1hr ago
By being a right-wing convert in a liberal environment, you’re joining a counterculture, you’re adopting certain views because they’re cool, edgy, based, provocative, you want to tear down the system
Indeed. I'm always reminded of the evergreen Fukuyama quote:
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.
I think this is probably an underexplored dimension of political belief: there are people that want a struggle and there are those that want to grill.
No_one
1hr ago
"stupid burger country intentionally screws up procurement" story.
What else was M14 but a bad idea? Why didn't use adopt MG42 in 30-06, which, I recall, was attempted but somehow failed. Intentionality or not, screw-ups in weapons procurement abounded and proliferated ever more so. Today it's more of an exception than the norm for procurement to be basically fine.
aqouta
1hr ago
JP Morgan has facilities in Israel and is one of the most important banks in the world. The idea that they needed a mossed connection to have some of their executives meet with the prime minister of Israel is just kind of silly. Jaime himself could have easily facilitated the connection. If it was with some lower level executive then you really shouldn't invoke the JPM name because lower level execs are just normal people with limited influence. I've met a number of executives of this level and if they were interested in this type of connection it'd just be mundane "can we cut the red tape on the construction of this thing we are underwriting the loan on" type of stuff, not insidious geopolitical shenanigans.
that's a local minimum of negative outcome
I think it's interesting that you think negative outcomes is the natural function to look at. I'd be willing to bet you have some attachment to "harm reduction" as a concept.
But isn't it more natural to view the opposite or some sense of self actualization as a more natural metric of well, health?
Age doesn't make an argument correct
Sure, but it makes it mighty tricky for it to be "novel".
an appeal to an obscure academic
Ellul is one of the most influential philosophers of the 90s, I'm not sure what you're on about.
You lament the "complex drug" that relies on global supply chains while typing your screed on a device whose complexity makes a vial of semaglutide look like a sharpened stick. This isn't a coherent critique of "technique"; it's just selective, convenient moralizing.
Is this really your argument? That technology is immune to criticism so long as its critics use any of it?
I give you my blessing to assume that I'm not just a computer user but also a semaglutide user and even the most egregious of hypocrites if that makes you happy.
Now can we actually talk about implications of altering one's senses on willpower and liberty or was semantics and grandstanding the whole of what you had to say?
You say weaning off the drug should be the goal to avoid "slavery." For many, the alternative isn't freedom; it's a return to the biological slavery of a body screaming for food, a slavery that leads to diabetes, liver failure, and an early grave.
The caveat seems to agree with my contention insofar as for the few, it is strictly better to be freed both from natural cravings and from taking a drug their whole lives.
Now of course the real question is which is best if you absolutely have to choose between battling your urges constantly or being addicted, sorry, tied, to a drug forever.
Your contention appears to be that that this is a straightforward choice and that reflection on this matter is the domain of ivory tower intellectuals.
I disagree. I believe that these two situations offer tradeoffs that will appeal differently to the individual and that different lifestyles or ethics will demand different choices on this matter.
For instance, I have a relative whose nationality and living arrangements make it tricky for her to obtain medical treatments regularly, and that has influenced her choices on such matters. Assuming supply chains and the money to buy drugs will be there for all you need for the rest of your life may be reasonable to assume for many, but not for everyone.
Moreover, and in line again with historical criticism of modernity, I am weary of how the availability of yet another therapeutic will affect the selection pressures of humanity in a way that may be pathological or detrimental to the freedom of the individual in the long term.
I don't know what he thinks because I've never seen him try to articulate it instead of making snippy comments at people who are trying to understand. At this point I don't really care what he thinks and frankly I interpret any apparent effort on his part as likely to be a trolling operation.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
This is also dragging in another one of my hobbyhorses: "whaaat's the haaarm in a few druuuugs, bitta fun, should be legaaaal". Well, maybe legal drugs in this instance would indeed have kept the man from getting killed by the paranoid, possibly high, 'friend' who was claiming he owed a huge drug debt.
But the problem is the 'friend'. A junkie who was doing some minor dealing, probably dipping into his own supply, probably being leaned on by his suppliers (who are not nice people who think drugs are wonderful and everyone should have free access to them so we'll supply them) for the missing money, getting paranoid and trying in turn to lean on his customers with claims that they owed more money than they did. This was not somebody doing 'few druuuugs, bitta fuuuuun'. Drugs and guys like this don't mix well (neither does alcohol, I'll freely admit that). The drugs legalisers seem to push the idea that drugs are just harmless party fun and if legal nobody would ever have any bad outcomes.
This is just not the right case to be making this claim. If drugs were legal, this guy would probably not be a drug dealer (because pharma companies have standards) and wouldn't be being leaned on by his suppliers to such an extent (because pharma companies that threaten to kill people stop being legal in a hurry).
The cases that actually do still arise from legal drugs are "addict (i.e. end-user) runs out of money and becomes a career criminal to get his fix" and "stimulant-induced mania/psychosis". These are cases which are unambiguously "this is not due to prohibition; this is just due to drugs being available at all". This is why I'm against legalising meth, for instance, despite being generally in favour of legalisation, because it's fucking notorious for doing the latter (the former is somewhat more tractable in other ways). But this case is not actually one of them, and you do your position a disservice by trying to cram it into that mould.
You're ignoring his memoirs and remarks made long after the alleged torture session, which itself was reported in his memoir. If he were a compelled witness, this is a very strange way to go about it.
In revisionist Carlo Mattogno's work on Hoess's confessions the torture of Hoess was attested to by people involved in the interrogation:
“Mr Ken Jones was then a private with the Fifth Royal Horse Artillery stationed at Heidi [sic] in Schleswig Holstein. ‘They brought him to us when he refused to co-operate over questioning about his activities during the war. He came in the winter of 1945/46 and was put in a small cell in the barracks,’ recalls Mr Jones. Two other soldiers were detailed with Mr Jones to join Hoss [sic] in his cell to help break him down for interrogation. ‘We sat in the cell with him, night and day, armed with axe handles. Our job was to prod him every time he fell asleep to help break down his resistance,’ said Mr Jones. When Hoss was taken out for exercise, he was made to wear only jeans and a thin cotton shirt in the bitter cold. After three days and nights without sleep, Hoss finally broke down and made a full confession to the authorities.”
The "confession" consists of interrogation minutes signed by Hoess on March 14, 1946. You are correct that Hoess reported on his own torture, but you left out the fact that Hoess claimed to not even know what was in the interrogation protocol he signed that constituted his confession.
“I was arrested on 11 March 1946 (at 11 pm). My phial of poison had been broken two days before. When I was aroused from sleep, I thought at first, I was being attacked by robbers, for many robberies were taking place at that time. That was how they managed to arrest me. I was maltreated by the Field Security Police. I was dragged to Heide where I was put in those very barracks from which I had been released by the British eight months earlier. At my first interrogation, evidence was obtained by beating me. I do not know what is in the protocol, although I signed it. Alcohol and the whip were too much for me. The whip was my own, which by chance had gotten into my wife’s luggage. It had hardly ever touched my horse, far less the prisoners. Nevertheless, one of my interrogators was convinced that I had perpetually used it for flogging the prisoners.
This was his first "confession", and he was tortured into signing it even though he did not even know what was in it.
You can say that later iterations of the confessions, in which the fact pattern of those confessions so happened to evolve with the knowledge of his various interrogators (Mattogno documents this very well), were not extracted from torture but that's not saying much at all. It's built on a foundation of sand, there are many reasons why someone who was tortured into a false confession would maintain a confession later without actually being tortured.
Hoess was captured because his wife was threatened with having her and her children turned over to the Russians:
No physical violence was used on the family: it was scarcely necessary. Wife and children were separated and guarded. Clarke’s tone was deliberately lowkey and conversational.
He began mildly: ‘I understand your husband came to see you as recently as last night.’
Frau Hoess merely replied: ‘I haven’t seen him since he absconded months ago.’
Clarke tried once more, saying gently but with a tone of reproach: ‘You know that isn’t true.’ Then all at once his manner his changed and he was shouting: ‘If you don’t tell us we’ll turn you over to the Russians and they’ll put you before a firing-squad. Your son will go to Siberia.’
It proved more than enough. Eventually, a broken Frau Hoess betrayed the whereabouts of the former Auschwitz Kommandant, the man who now called himself Franz Lang. Suitable intimidation of the son and daughter produced precisely identical information.
A Nuremberg witness described a conversation he had with Hoess during the proceedings, from Mattogno's work:
At Nuremberg, von Schirmeister was a witness for the defense and was about to be released soon. In the car carrying him, he sat in the backseat together with Höss, with whom he could speak freely during transit; in particular, he remembered Höss’s following outburst (see Document 3):
“On the things he is accused of, he told me: ‘Certainly, I signed a statement that I killed two and a half million Jews. But I could just as well have said that it was five million Jews. There are certain methods by which any confession can be obtained, whether it is true or not.’”
Von Schirmeister wrote that Höss thought it was his duty to help his “comrades” by testifying during the Nuremberg trial that only “very few knew about certain events,” but added that the future of his wife and children “was the only thing that worried him.” Although Höss was “treated well” in Nuremberg, meaning that he was no longer subjected to physical abuse, the threat that his wife and children would be handed over to the Soviets, which the British may have arranged already, “proved more than enough.”
And this is on top of all of the known falsities and contradictions laden in these "confessions." But as I've already explained, the biggest problem of all is the lack of corroboration of these claims in the body of documentary or physical evidence.
If you think about it, the fact the excavation pulled out tiles that matched eyewitness accounts is a little too convenient, right?
This is funny, the tiles did not match witness accounts and the manufacturers logo would have been installed facing the structure, not installed with the logo facing outwards. But this is a good time to consider how far the mainstream has to reach to substantiate their outrageous claims. They claim 800,000 people were killed at the location they "investigate" but instead of excavating mass graves they find a clay tile and claim they have proven everything, while demonstrating their eagerness to overfit on the data by falsely interpreting a manufacturer's logo.
Revisionists claim that there were real sanitary facilities constructed in Treblinka II. This is supported by budget documents which explicitly have a line item for sanitation facilities to be constructed in TII. So a clay tile is also consistent with the Revisionist theory that this camp featured real sanitation facilities that were falsely claimed to be homicidal gas chambers.
Also, using ashes for fertilizer, dumping them in rivers, or any number of reported ways to hide them would seemingly explain this problem away quite easily.
Ah yes, using ashes to fertilize cabbage was one of the claims. It sounds diabolical doesn't it? But human ash is toxic to plant life due to the high amount of sodium in human cremains. They have various claims for where the ashes were dumped, what they don't have is any physical evidence the remains were dumped where claimed.
At Treblinka II it's claimed the ashes were all buried on site. But they've never been excavated. Colls found a clay tile though! It gets more absurd the more you think about it. One funny anecdote from Colls scientific excavation is that she found a fossilized shark teeth from when Poland was a seabed millions of years ago! But if the cremated remains of 900,000 people were on that site, and each victim had an average of say 28 teeth, there would be over 25 million human teeth buried in this small area where she found fossilized shark teeth.
Instead what Colls did was excavate a small number of bones in a marked Christian gravesite south of Treblinka I (i.e. not where 900,000 Jews are claimed to be buried) and claimed to have found a mass grave.
No wonder people believe the Holocaust narrative so easily, right?
People believe the Holocaust narrative because of the media transmitted in popular culture and what they are told in school. The "Final Solution" was the deportation of the Jews to Palestine, Madagascar, or territory in what was supposed to be conquered Russian territory. Not gas chamber extermination. This is laid out in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, which was a 90-minute meeting of mid-level officials. It's the mainstream that claims the minutes of the meeting were forged to camouflage the undocumented discussion of some grand extermination conspiracy. The Revisionists claim the minutes of the Wannsee Conference are representative of the policy, it's the mainstream that disputes their authenticity because it contradicts their narrative of the German policy.
One might imagine we have wanted to compensate for that guilt a bit as time went on.
Yes, the Holocuast is used to force guilt onto gentiles and subsequent "compensation" in various forms. But it's based on a lie.
phailyoor
1hr ago
Am I understanding this correctly?
Alex believes that the first world is better than the third world. And actually the racists who want to deport all the immigrants from the third world are somehow actually the ones making the first world into the third world? Meanwhile unlimited immigration from the third world is no big deal?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1hr ago
I often see right-wingers online virtue signalling about women with tattoos. They'll see a photo of a hot woman who has tattoos and start posting stuff like "eww disgusting" or "why did she ruin her body with that". I am convinced that 99% of these guys would fuck the hot woman without any hesitation if they had a chance, tattoos or not. It's just a big virtue signalling LARP to pretend to other guys that they care more about tattoos than they actually do.
"Ugly" doesn't mean "total deal-breaker". I've been in relationships when the woman got a thing for tats. I didn't care for them, but I wasn't going to end a relationship over it. The associated decline in decision-making quality... not that was something to walk away over.
I took my daughter to a concert this weekend, and there were a ton of women with tattoos. The daughter has been expressing some interest, and I got to point out to how crappy almost all of them looked, even using the "like a toddler slapped stickers all over you" line. We had some good laughs on the way home about some of the... bold fashion choices on display.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1hr ago
So far the only theory I've heard that makes sense is that important US interests are presently depending on the kompromat and none of this can see the light of day for reasons Trump wasn't privy to when campaigning or when he was president.
I'm leaning towards "any relevant evidence was destroyed by someone years ago". If there was damning evidence about Trump, I'm 99.999% certain it would have been "leaked". And if there still existed any damning evidence, I don't think Team Trump has the unified discipline to not have any actual leaks.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
I know at least one doctor with full-sleeves, they were perfectly normal and worked in emergency medicine (which does have a bit of a reputation for wildcards).
I've got a single tattoo, that's usually covered up. It's really not a big deal.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1hr ago
The "Grok wants to rape Will Stancil" thing is still ongoing. Will even went on the local news about it. The memes and jokes are just spectacular. This is the funniest fucking thing that's happened on the internet since Trump put all the libtards in crystals.
But the thing that pushed me to share the unhinged, surrealist joy of the Dankest Timeline was this absolute bunker-buster of a post from Big Yud himself.
Goodguy
1hr ago
Then, once in power, if it turns out there are reasons to not release that information, just do a 180 with no explanation and brazen out the short term consequences because they don’t matter in the long run.
He's not even doing this, though. A few days ago, he got really testy with a reporter who asked him about Epstein, and earlier today he went online and wrote a whole paragraph rant about Epstein totally unprompted. He could just lay low and let the whole thing blow over, but for some reason he keeps getting openly emotional about it.
I'm equally baffled by Trump's 180, and for the same reason. The best answer I can come up with is that Trump isn't on the list, but someone who is on the list has something on him.
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