In addition to NYers fun site design/cute artwork, this stood out:
"Two colleges in Pyongyang..often outperform American and Chinese colleges in the International Collegiate Programming Contest—a festival of **unsurpassed and joyful nerdery**."
there is a baseline of quantitative/logical knowhow that separates cognitively gifted people from the average—and a degree of grit, the ability to suffer with a purpose...and a canny, cunning nature, that separates the merely academically competent from real *killers*.
None of us are going to stop North Korea's cyber hackers. Again, ignore the news for what it is/The USA is over, etc. but look at this;
If you're an American nationalist (tough break, kid) or just want to do right by some swathe of people:
Universities are hugely discredited, but still the default as a route to traditional routes of employment particularly outside of non-licensed medical work
mechanistically;
There's no good reward function for huge, huge groups of American youth who could apply themselves
- money (which can also confer;)
- social esteem (which can come from;)
- provision for a family
- role in a bigger community
We could create that, couldn't we?
aren't the PMC/McKinsey types absolutely loathesome? right now, they have all of the prestige, money, and social pull—but how long? even The Economist knows it is not long for this world
I have previously offered my thoughts on how we should conceive of, and measure the success of, social and institutional alternatives to the mainstream culture and educational regimes:
Here is another schematic, which I hope captures what I am talking about in the concept above. You may notice these ideas actually link up in a kind of 'grand cycle', where one generation's production generatively produces another generation. We may call this "reproduction":
We'll hear coping just like after the "red wave" failed in 2022 or the "stop the steal" coping in 2020 - MAGA has its head in the sand about THREE things:
1. Trump won in 2016 with tiny margins of victory in Michigina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania - among non-college educated (working but often middle class) exurban whites: a lot of people who were union workers or would have been non-voters showed up.
But did Trump 'win whites'?
Trump actually won fewer (slightly; 1% less) white voters than Mitt Romney got in 2012.
Did you know that? Among whom do you think Trump did worse on net? It's important he picked up voters in the right electoral college *shape* to win, but also that he did overall lose whites.
They could openly admit firing only white people in the name of “retention equity”
The only way it ever stops is if white people politically organize to pursue their material self-interest *as* white people, which is literal white nationalism, which you’d reject
What do all of these new prominent right wingers expect? Why is anyone surprised about this? What do they think opposition to the Civil Rights Act was about? Why do they think the Southern states fought integration, or why middle America opposed forced bussing? Etc, etc, etc.
Explicit penalization for being white is routine in America.
If you want that to stop, @libsoftiktok , then you have to commit to white nationalism, you have to commit to the political pursuit of white self-interest.
The Tucker Carlson in Russia critiques are true:
Yes, it's just Moscow center
Yes, the groceries are expensive
Yes, Putin killed Navalny
But Tucker has NEVER seen such a modern city, with SO many white people, where public culture is *assertively* hetero and nominally Christian
Tucker is a child of the Cold War; this is shocking to him.
All the dismissals he grew up with about Russia as Godless, as poor, as corrupt - these were results of the *Communists* whose spiritual descendants Tucker feels he battles daily in America:
I was in Kiev (and Nikolaev) in November of 2021, just before the war. I'd lived for a decade before in NYC, and I experienced what I'm sure Tucker is going through; amazement at *large* modern city defined by white people yet with very little 'gayness':
But they wouldn't, and won't, as that would mean at least implicitly repudiating transgenderism by accepting their (former) customers' moral framework as the right one, which says transgenderism is wrong. So they try this stuff:
Shane Gillis and Donald Trump endorse transgenderism.
If Bud Light partnered with someone who said "I want to gas Jews because I'm a Nazi", and Bud Light never actually apologized but said stuff like 'Third, to all our valued consumers, we hear you.' in a 'move on statement',
We would understand Bud Light did not view being a Nazi who wants to gas Jews as a bad thing in itself, merely unpopular with customers, and didn't accept it had morally transgressed. We'd understand Shane Gillis and Trump's endorsement of Bud Light as endorsement of Nazism.