🧵1/
Americans don't understand class. American socialists especially

Every week i hear: "How can Trump be considered anti-elite? He's a billionaire!?"

This fundamentally misunderstands class. its not how much you have, its how you make it.

And Trump definitely ain't elite Image
2/
Classic Marxist economics divides class via the individual's means of securing resources.

The proletariat trade their labour to employers for wages.

The bourgeoise use their ownership of the means of production to extract surplus value from the proletarian laborer, etc. Image
3/
Sure this usually resulted in the bourgeoise being wealthier than the proles.. but not always. Some decayed bourgeoise barely made more than proles, while many successful skilled proles earned as much as lower tier bourgeoise.

These were dubbed the labour aristocracy Image
4/
there was an intensive debate amongst socialists in Russia as to freed serfs, many of whom owned their own land (and owed a mortgage to their former masters), and whether or not these former serfs should be considered Proles or Bourgeoise.

Thus the peasant/kulak distinction Image
5/
The important thing to understand about the American Class system and the rise of "The Elite" as opposed to "the Bourgeoise" or "the Aristocracy"

Is the rise of prestige-generating institutions and their integration with governments. Image
6/
Universities, thinktanks, government departments, prestige media, NGOs, and non-revenue generating segments of fortune 500s have exploded in the past 50 years

All targeted at controlling political and regulatory outcomes via manipulation of institutional and social prestige Image
7/
A typical career for the modern elite is to do a master's or PhD at an elite university, a postdoc or internship at a thinktank, a few years at a media firm, get hired at a government department

then bounce back and forth between the government and the companies they regulate Image
8/
At every stage in their career their wealth is generated either by their attachment to institutions the government funds, or by their perceived ability to manipulate regulatory outcomes...

Trump by contrast is a classic American huckster who attracts hostile regulators Image
9/
Trump's career could not be more different than the modern American elite.

He generates his wealth through a blend of family business ties, real "free" market activity, and his extreme bravado-infused brand.

He's a man who sells board games of himself Image
10/
His entire brand is a crass rejection of the prestige elite. every effort they've put into seeming thoughtful, measured, or respectable he rejects

Trump is the Grifter's grifter... the Petite bourgeoise's ideals made flesh.

There's a reason rappers reference him so often Image
11/
Even his book "Art of the Deal" is infused with an ethos of getting away with something, of going into a negotiation and winning.

Any of these "thoughtful" "measured" "girl-bosses" would have written "The Dream of Compromise"
Image
Image
12/
But the economics of class are the real division.

The American elite almost never ventures outside of government-funded institutions except to collect tribute from the corporations they regulate. Image
13/
Trump by contrast is an old-school capitalist.

Sure a capitalist in the corrupt field of New York real estate... but a more or less productive person who had to make bribes to government officials... not a leech who sat back a collected bribes Image
14/
Notably, Trump is the only president in the past 40 years who will not be offered a teaching position at a university, nor be invited to the board of think tanks or Fortune 500s.

Unlike Obama he will not receive Wall Street speaking fees into the hundreds of thousands Image
15/
Trump is a man with more negative prestige than almost anyone else in US history. his currency amongst the governing elite approaches negative infinity.. yet he is one of the most potent political forces in America today.

This is not just a culture war, it is a class war. Image

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More from @FromKulak

Nov 15
Why would Hamas use a pre-existing/known tunnel network as their primary Command bunker in Gaza City?

Obvious that Israel will use it as an excuse and justification for their brutality, knowing its there...

But Anyone who's studied Vietnam knows you can't cripple an tunnelled in insurgency... certainly not in fewer than 5 weeks .. US couldn't in 5 years.
The Cu Chi tunnels of Vietnam were 75 miles.

Hamas has 300+ miles of tunnels.

Even Adjusting to population 2 million Gazans vs 7 million Israeli jews, is very close to Vietnam vs US ratios.

This is analogous, indeed the US was better positioned to win in Vietnam
Read 6 tweets
Oct 28
🧵1/
It's hard to grasp Nietzschean Master morality. In our sickly guilt-poisoned era the instinctual values of healthy ubermenchean man are almost entirely Alien

However, shockingly, America has produced a perfect artifact of healthy noble natural values:

The Disney Princess. Image
2/

The Disney Princess is the perfect archetype of easy natural inherent nobility and morality.

She is an artifact of inborn virtue, a born noble, irrespective of parentage.

With the naive careless values that come from an easy mastery of her domain Image
3/
From this metaphysical nobility (occasionally paired with political nobility) she is reduced to the lowest station, a servant, a wanderer, a cripple, an enlistee

Only for her innate nobility to reveal itself and for her to win her rightful station and an apex man with it Image
Read 19 tweets
Oct 24
🧵Why no one wants to Join the Military🧵

I've been reading "The Second World War" by Sandhurst military Historian John Keegan...

It explained a ton about 19th century/early 20th century military culture I didn't get.

The Edwardians were patriotic as hell. the Military was massively popular.

The Average person ate 1200 calories a day, whereas soldiers in Garrison ate 1400 and higher quality food at that, it was a massive education and networking opportunity for people of all classes, and produced bonds that would be necessary for social advancement.

Conscription was massively popular and demanded from the population during peacetime, less because they wanted to make sure no one was shirking, and more because they didn't want lower class people left behind and all the opportunity in the army horded by the connected who'd be able to get into a volunteer force.

In Britain which had always abhorred conscription and had Whig (proto-libertarian) objections to it... the populace practically rebelled and formed illegal regiments and militias and drilled to participate in martial life... this was a phenomenon across europe and after the treaty of Versailles restricting Germany to a scant 100,000 strong army, the country was flooded with Freikrops, non-government paramilitaries and militias to either advance some political movement or just be part of militiary life.

This was after WW1! Millions of young men had just died as part of regiments many little different than this. And yet there was this much demand from young men to be part of the martial world.

This is because the Military and military life was ACTUALLY a good career move, and ACTUALLY formed life long bonds in the early 20th century.

Amidst the population boom of the early 20th century and all the excess young men with little inheritance... the military and militia life was a major vehicle for social mobility and aspiration and forming social connections...

.

So what changed? Why is it almost completely the opposite in early 21st century America?

These attitudes survived the world wars, even the western front of WW1...

But they were devoured by Vietnam and the Civil Rights era.

Implicit in a lot of 19th and 20th century militarism was the vision of "Every Soldier a Citizen, Every Citizen a Soldier" this ethos was first expressed during the french revolution... It was aspirational. The subjects divorced from the state and military were now armed and able to participate in civic and military life, they were now citizens... of course by the early 20th century this sounds very menacing... Soldiers must obey orders, every day... if every citizen is a soldier, and bound to obey, on pain of death, that's Totalitarianism.

Indeed a friend recently said "You know the Weimar Republic may have been the only true democracy in history. We talk about how your vote matters and you're deciding your government, but really the public has little say. Barrack Obama vs. John McCain was literally the option presented to America, that was their spectrum of options... whereas Weimar Germany? They had Monachism, Liberalism, Communism, Fascism All RIGHT THERE on the Ballot, and any of them could win! And one of them did"

It wasn't a coincidence that this seeming pinnacle of democracy, exactly coincided with, and produced, the era when the most men were in uniform (and many women in Auxillaries)

The ethos of universal suffrage and universal conscription went hand in hand... with the contradiction it implies: Are you master of your country? Or is every other person in your country now master of you? Are you empowered with your rife to move the politics of europe? Or have you been enslaved to your state, people, and their fate?

One might think this is the source of the disillusionment, but America had conscription and its 1940s martial ethos through the 50s and into the 60s...

But of course there's a contradiction between UNIVERSAL suffrage and this masculine martial conception of the citizen... Why is the vote of a woman or disabled man who've never served equivalent to a man who's been taxed years of his life and often extraordinary risk and effort? How exactly does racial equality work when some groups are underrepresented in military life, or are perceived to be underrepresented in the most dangerous roles?

These Questions were papered over with discrimination.

"What did you do during the war?" was an interview question that made or broke your entire economic life in a world where a massive percentage of people had served... This was a massive inducement to do so, and indeed you could still hear concerns about "missing" a war in the 50s and being shut out of the aspirations and opportunities available to other "Luckier" cohorts of young men. Obviously even though there was little legal barrier to women fulfilling most corporate and professional roles, this fact of life was a massive barrier.

But then the 64 Civil Rights Act was passed and the logic of it necessitated Affirmative action to women, and underrepresented minorities, whilst at the same time a new generation of upper-middle-class young men, insulated by one of the most abundant and forgiving economies in world history were encouraged by family and friends to either avoid the draft with bogus medical excuses , hide out in university, or indeed dip out of the country for a spell...

And far from suffering a fatal blow to their career and social prospect for, what previous generation would have called, Cowardice... they were rewarded.

Military service became increasingly a marker of the lower class... and the Liberal Educated non-serving class, already critical of the war out of self-serving concern to not be draft... Latched onto tales of war crimes in Vietnam, often going so far as insulting and aspitting (literally or figuratively) on returning soldiers not wealthy enough to dip into university. There were no return parades, GI benefits were often non-existent (with some unable to healthcare for even Malaria (a disease a new yorker probably didn't catch at home))... And not only were they not given priority in employment, lacking both the right ethnicity and the university degrees which are the only qualifications protected from a disparate impact assessment... many fell to the bottom of the economic ladder.

America's Recruitment Capacity really has never recovered. Total US military personnel shrank from 3.5 in 1969, to 2 million in 1985 to 1.3 million today, even as the US population has increased from 200 million to 330 million.

America has gone from over 1% of the population actively serving at any one time to nearly a third of that.

The "Professionalization" of the US military to an "All Volunteer force" has in effect just been a cover for this collapse in recruiting capacity.

America's military isn't significantly structurally different. These aren't really professionals.

Your average 3 year contract private isn't making some obscene Yuppie amount of money for his ambitious professional commitment. A private makes under 30k a year. A Second Lieutenant, with a university degree and years of professional development, who may have had to plan out his career from 16 years old getting a Congressman's letter of recommendation to attend West Point or another service academy... Makes 40-60k a year.

US GDP per capita is 72k. If that Lieutenant had gone to a second tier school and gotten a Computer Science degree he'd be making 6 figures and have vastly more control over his life.

It's not a good career move, in the 1780s or 1900s and ambitious scion of a decayed noble family desiring to conquer the world might want to become an artillery officer... Today he wants to work on wall street or at Google.

Even if you're starting out from a very rough place there ar almost certainly a dozen better things you could do to advance yourself faster, for better money, and with less effort than joining the Military.

The only appeal of the US military, for decades now, has been to people who really want to escape their situation, who really felt they needed to hard reboot their life, or who are really drawn to military life out of sheer love of it.

And then the Army went woke.

Wokeness is toxic to the Army not just because of the values clash with most ordinary recruits... but it places front and center the entire dynamic that makes the military such an awful career path.

Not only are young men not enticed to join the military out of the knowledge that they're wasting years not getting a university degree, or that their Gender, skin colour, and sexual orientation are still going to count against them even once they're out... They're now having it declared to them that they'll suffer that distain and discrimination even in the military, incvariably by some fat university educated minority woman brought in to give a diversity lecture.

Even whilst you're serving the US government its going to rub your face in the fact that it's undermining you and your career... And it's somehow a mystery the army can't recruit?

The US Military is taking close to half of the people it took in the 1980s... and it still can't find anyone.

Meanwhile its not uncommon to hear in various forums open talk from active military that if the US military were used in an internat war against dissent by the Trumpenproletariat... They'd desert. Indeed Anonymous leaked US military wargaming projects something close to a 50% desertion rate in any major civil conflict.

And there's nothing to be done to save it. There's no will to double or triple pays to reflect GDP or what similar effort could get a person in the US economy (don't enlist, go Fracking or Alaskan crab Fishing) there's no political will to undo the bizarre system of racial and sexual patronage that benefits everyone except the productive class that drives the US economy... and there's no way any of the elite would recreate a world where military service was a better guarantee of job prospects and financial security than a university degree.

So America's effective recruitment capacity and civic feeling will continue to collapse even as Americans hate each other and their government even more.

You think recruit capacity is bad now? Wait til we have another war in te middle east.

At the Height of the Iraq war the US had to resort to "Stop-Loss" measures to keep soldiers in the service longer than their 3-4 year active contract window, and and stretch it out through their reserve status...

This "backdoor draft" not only zapped morale it immediately became a cause Celebre and a major motivator to not join the military and certainly to reconsider any desire to join the combat arms who were getting multiple deployments past the date they were supposed to be discharged, whilst many in less intensive occupations were getting out on time.

America was already in a perfect storm of demoralization... Imagine what it'll be in a years time after another war and another 2-3 trials of Trump
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Hey give me a follow.

My trafifc's been heavily supressed lately so you probably won't see anything from me unless you do
Oh correction:

The era when Civilians got 1200 calories a day vs. soldiers 1400, was at the bottom of the French revolution during the food shortages (1791-96) when this spirit began.

Not during the Edwardian period as I implied.
Read 4 tweets
Oct 9
🧵Ok Israel might actually be screwed.

Artillery is 90% of all effective firepower. Airborne munitions can't cycle through endless tons of explosive the way arty can, and they cost vastly more.

If this is true and Israel has only 20% its arty stockpile, then Hamas isn't suiciding Gaza on pyre of defiance like people think. They timed this perfectly to lure Israel into writing cheques they can't cash in the hopes Israel will invade Gaza with infantry at which point they can grind them down endlessly with basically unending Arab volunteers in brutal urban warfare... where most of their technological advantage is gone and they won't have the most important 1/3rd of combined arms warfare.

This also would explain the brutality and the focus on taking as many civilian hostages as they can, since Israel can't just leave hundreds of Israeli civilians in Gaza and declare they aren't going to get them back... They're pretty much trapped fighting a ground war with what little artillery they have.

If the 300,000 rounds the US took from Israeli stockpiles to give to Ukraine corresponds to that 80% that Israel's supposedly down then they basically can't sustain combined armed warfare, since the 2014 Gaza war took 34,000 rounds of artillery alone.

Even if they have hundreds of thousands left, they can only use a fraction of them on Gaza since they need enough that they could fight a high intensity war with Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon if they intervene... let alone if Iran and Iraq start sending forces (US invasion handed Iraq to the Shia majority who align with Iran)

So even if they have another 300k artillery shells lying around, at most that'd be tens of thousand of available to actually use on Gaza without risk of being drowned by its rivalled arab neighbors in a multi-nation war.

That means the fighting to "open the gates of hell" or "wipe Gaza off the map" as some commentators are calling for will have to be done by air assets which can't realistically deliver the tonnage, and ground troops who would be dying at horrific ratios as urban settings negate most of the advantage of military tech.

Israel's active duty force only has 20ish thousand infantry in active force, even activating the 400k reserves you can only use a portion since there's the constant threat of a multinational war breaking out, Hezbollah in the north, and the entire west bank that could pop off...

So they have to punish Gaza, extract the hostages or their bodies, and achieve enough objectives to declare victory... against a population of 4 million! +Every radical fighter in the middle-east from Afghanistan to Aberdeen chomping at the bit to get in there... and they'll have to do it with... maybe 10k full time infantry? Maybe 20-30k counting the reservists?

In urban warfare? With limited artillery?

Hamas might actually have them...

They might have actually played their cards right to create the conditions for a Vietnam in the holy lands.

Remember Israel's active force of 169,000 is both genders and conscripts... You start losing a lot of people or start having to reassign 19 year old girls who never wanted to hold a rifle to infantry. that will grind down morale damned fast and tear open Israel's social divisions.. Not least between liberal secular jews who actually serve and the conservative orthodox who dodge the draft through "religious study"
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P.S

Read my piece on the possibility of conscription in the US and why it'd be imperial suicide:

anarchonomicon.com/p/a-draft-woul…
No official # to what extent Israel's own stockpiles were tapped as part of the official move of US stockpiles.

80% could be right off, but it's very doubtful they kept their word and sent none of their own with the 300k US rounds. US played every game to tap allied stockpiles Image
Read 8 tweets
Sep 27
🧵Abolish Section 8

Americans debate housing like mad and wring their hands at young people unable to afford or even rent in major, economically relevant metro areas...

Yet they don't talk about the program systematically destroying neighborhoods, rendering vast swathes of those metros unlivable, and consuming vast amounts of housing that could be occupied by hard working productive young people... but is instead being occupied by criminals, drug dealers, and people who sexually abuse their children and those of others.

Section 8 housing.

Every major American cities, even the most expensive, have massive sacrifice zones where housing and rents collapse in value, little circles of what on a map might look like affordability, but in reality are hellish neighborhoods filled with people who disproportionately don't work and bounce in and out of prison and hospital consuming massive amounts of tax payer resources and rendering massive areas around wherever they are unlivable for normal descent human life.

Families, young women, even men of a suitably unfrightening demeanor cannot live in these neighborhoods, in what should be some of the most expensive real estate in the world in easy access to major metro areas, often walking distance to important downtowns and job opportunities...

Once upon a time these were some of the most important neighborhoods in some of the most important cities in the US... But now massive wastes lie within single-digit miles, easy bicycling if not walking distance... Because of US government-backed ethnic cleansing of productive communities in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

.

Why do Americans tolerate this!?

Why should productive middle-class Americans, struggling to afford a house or apartment be paying taxes to subsidize the unproductive and criminal to price them out of housing, and render what should be desirable neighborhoods, in good locations, often with nice natural features and ammentiies... completely hostile death traps where no parent would want their young daughter being raised and where anyone would be horrified to find out their adult daughter or son is living.

Does a society exist to protect its productive citizens and enable them to prosper? or does it exist to feed and fund its criminal class in their sickness?

Abolish section 8 housing. The productive struggling to house themselves should not be paying for unemployed criminals to be housed in better accommodations.

I hate criminals, layabouts, and leaches. and I hate them as individuals for their actions.

If 1% of a given ethnic, religious, or sexual minority are leeches who destroy neighborhoods, I want them driven onto the streets where they can decide to become productive, or they can decide to starve.

And That logic does not change if it is 25%, 50%, or 99%... as indeed it might be in the very worst subsets of some migrant communities.

My care and concern must be earned via productive living. And the very fact someone has received many of these subsidies shows to me that they have failed to pass that lowest of bars.

the right is divided between on the one hand, closet progressives who preach color-blindness and "Classical Liberal tolerance" whilst on the backend massaging and subsidizing any number of tests, metrics, and outcomes to try and achieve an "Equality of Outcomes", even as they lie to your face and talk about "Equality of Opportunity".

And on the other hand there are "Race realists" who preach ethnic preference and conflict... citing, what are admittedly, quite damning crime and other statistics.

What no one is advocating, is what both, in their omissions, and rhetorical maneuvers, tacitly admit is morally correct:

Colorblindness, applied with the ruthlessness and finality of an ancient conqueror.

The moral clarity of the equal standard justifying any and all results that might come about, no matter how horrifying.

.

And taxing productive Americans who struggle to house themselves, so you can house criminals and leaches closer to urban cores where they don't even work... that certainly isn't it.

Image
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P.S.

FOLLOW ME

Twitter gets upset and starts unfollowing people at random form me whenever I start getting edgy, I suspect my dms will fill up with people who thought they were following me but now aren't... suspiciously.
I also write a blog

Check out my long read on America, Islam, vigilantism, and the things that really preserve the honor and freedom of a people:

"Teach a Man to Revolt"

tinyurl.com/TeachAManToRev…
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Read 4 tweets
Sep 26
Thanks to boomer-funded feminism and employment law, white women are now at the point where they have to approach men and live through the hell of dating as sales...

Or they'll die alone after their ovaries explode into dust.

Sounds drastic but there's basically no societal way out of it now that white men approaching women is treated on a par with a criminal sex offense by 10-15% of the population.

.

Also ditch your fat feminist friends, they're trying to ensure you die alone so they'll have company for the last hellish 50 years of their life.
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Like seriously where do women think men will approach them?

I frequent used bookstores... these are kind of uncommon... A guy can't approach me at a used bookstore lest I turn out to be a feminist, make a scene/they side with the screeching woman and ban him, and now he has to drive another 40 min to the nearest used book store... FOREVER!

Do you think a guy's cute that you see at your favourite coffee shop every day?

Guess what, it's his favorite coffee shop too! He might actively dream about you, but not want to ask you out lest you screech and now he's lost his favorite coffee shop!

This is why men pick up women at bars! There are hundreds of them!

it doesn't matter if a woman has moment, worse case some white knight punches him in the face and he looks kinda chadly next time he asks
Image
Read 5 tweets

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