Yarvin's no Lenin and his view of American history is mostly wrong, but he's right about the transience of vibe shifts. The New Left collapsed w/ Reagan, but their 1963-73 projects still define the US today. Likewise with 90s PC. Question is if woke will be the same.
The demographic, moral, and political rot unleashed by the '60s New Leftists *which was never undone* has degraded America massively. There's a lot of ruin in a nation, and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions are still going, but every year the situation gets worse.
Yarvin's, I think correct, point is that Trump is on track to just stop the worst excesses while enshrining the important parts, as previous right-wing reactions in the US (Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich) have done and that this is totally inappropriate given how late the hour is.
I think most of Yarvin's views are wrong, but he has one huge achievement: mainstreaming right-wing politics for Silicon Valley, the big new power center of the 21st century. Even if it's not a very good variety of such. Can't take that away from him.
Trump is also doing a bunch of non-ideological semi-random corruption (TrumpCoin) and retardation (Liberation Day). And that's terrible.
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Thread with excerpts from Richard Pipes' Property and Freedom (1999). Pipes is a historian of Russia, and the thesis of the book is that private property, as something distinct and protected from public power and sovereignty, is indispensable to human freedom.
One of the fundamental differences between Russia and the rest of Europe lay in the weak development of private property; one of the major themes of Western philosophical history is the benefits and drawbacks of private property; Russian philosophers unanimously condemn it.
Freedom, as used by Pipes, includes political freedom, legal freedom, economic freedom, and personal rights. It does not include the right to public support ("freedom from want"); such 'rights' are at best a moral claim and at worst an unearned privilege.
Red state pension funds tend to vote with management if management is providing good returns (ie, doing their job); blue state pension funds tend to vote with management if the company does leftist things (ie, ESG, or not paying CEOs very much).
This reflects a general difference in attitude towards institutions; rightists prefer institutions do what they were created for (eg police should fight crime, the military should fight wars, companies should make money doing their business, schools should teach)...
...while left-wingers want every institution to have pushing the Party Line as its #1 priority (extremely totalitarian in that regard). The formers produces a better society, the latter is more politically powerful but destroys everything in the long run.
Training an LLM to be more politically evenhanded (as opposed to left-wing, as almost all LLMs are - so more right-wing) makes it more egalitarian in how it values the lives of people of different races without training to do so. PCT = Political Consistency Training.
LLMs trained in this way also value members of different religions, political creeds, and public figures coded left vs right more equally.
Almost all notable LLMs except Grok are left-wing on the US political spectrum, but in a very particular way, sort of like a superhumanly-knowledgeable Redditor or Wikipedia editor from the year 2018.
Since 2009, medical schools have had to prove they sufficiently discriminate against white men ("achieve mission-appropriate diversity outcomes") to get accredited.
White men are now significantly underrepresented among med school students.
Fortunately, competence isn't that important in doctors, so purging white men in favor of "underrepresented minorities" (blacks, LatinX) who can't pass clinical exams shouldn't matter.
European IQ's rising due to natural selection (as measured by PGS) continuing into the modern era whereas it stalled in East Asia could have been predicted from Gregory Clark's genealogical studies in both regions.
Clark found that "survival of the richest" was the rule in England from 1300-1880 or so, with huge differences in surviving offspring by class and this was much weaker in Qing China because higher class women didn't have more kids due to elite polygamy.
(IQ is not the only trait that goes into income or wealth, of course, so selection for wealth is only indirectly selection for IQ and also selects for a package of other traits, some of which are collective goods like IQ and some of which are not.)
The Bancroft Prize (one of the most prestigious history awards, given by a panel of historians for works on diplomacy or the history of the Americas) was given in 2000 to someone claiming guns were really rare in colonial America (he committed fraud by changing quotes).
This should have been obvious nonsense to anyone who knows anything at all about colonial America, of course, and yet a panel of professional historians thought it was work at the pinnacle of the field until some random blogger pointed out all the fraud.