Listening to Harris postmortem podcast now - one interesting point Harris flaks raise is they knew they needed to pivot to the center on several issues, but they judged attempting wouldn’t be credible, would only draw attention to how leftwing her actual policy commitments are
Plouffe says the top five people on the Harris campaign spend hundreds(??) of hours trying to decide how to respond to the they/them ad
Oct 29 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
I think it’s a little different. The main issue is elite consensus. Between roughly 1976 and 2016 there was a large (and gradually growing) list of issues where 70% of Americans felt one way, and 95% of people working in politics and media, and their donors, felt the opposite
It was ALWAYS the case, from the 1890s if not earlier, that leftists were traitors, transgressives, bomb-throwers and were happy to violate social and political norms to score points, or even for its own sake. That has been a political constant for over a century
Oct 14 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
More to the point, the original definition of “the Dark Age” was the age for which (medieval) historians knew of very few events per year, few names and associated with those events, and little else about the people those names belonged to. That is the *definition*!
Any argument about these periods needs to take that as its starting point, and argue about how bad it “really” was substantively, and/or how bad the long term consequences were
Aug 15 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
The POW/MIA issue is one of the most shameful episodes in American history.
1. There were 1200 American POWs in Vietnam at the time of the Paris accords. We know this bc Vietnamese negotiators told Soviet counterparts this, and the Soviet archives were opened 30 years later
2. The Vietnamese intended to tie US POWs to issue of reparations/ransom. We know this bc they told the Soviets, they told the Americans, and they successfully held POWs for ransom after French withdrawal decades earlier
Aug 4 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
If your white, English daughter was in Rotherham during the years the grooming gangs were active, there was a 1 in 3 chance she would be gang-raped by Pakistani men, in some cases repeatedly for months - see next tweet for numbers (which I know, seem insane)
Numbers are from a few years later but population structure didn’t change much. The victims were clustered in an age-cohort of about 4 years: about 5,500 girls that age in all Rotherham. Victims all English, who are only 75% of the population. So … (cont’d)
Jul 17 • 22 tweets • 6 min read
Since everyone seems to have a take: if leftist poors can openly call for assassinations but all other poors can get fired for very milquetoast observations, it creates the impression leftism is legally mandatory. Thus leftist poors must be persecuted to protect the others (1/2)
However this is a dishonorable job and I suggest anyone with self-respect leave hunting cashiers and the like to bottom-feeding grifters who will gladly smear themselves in muck for attention.(2/2)
Mar 5 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
This is a fairly unpopular position on the dissident/intellectual right, but the climate change policy agenda is an obvious scam and the proof is what do people who claim to fear climate change DO? Do they maximize production of goods in Europe + embargo China and India? No, lol
Remember, in a free market if you make it harder/costlier to produce in UK, the same good can be produced elsewhere and sold to UK. So to a first approximation it makes sense to consider total global product demand as fixed, and ask where the products are manufactured
Feb 2 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The “authentic cuisine” thing is incomprehensible outside of American class dynamics. Let me explain…
Typically when foreign cuisine moves to a new country it takes on local touches. It appeals to the local tastes and uses fresher local ingredients. Then, upper class people flex about how they food they had in (Paris/Rome/Beijing) was so much better
Jul 22, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
There are plenty of men in the West who, sadly, have already resigned themselves to being single, childless, impoverished, unimportant and forgettable. This thread, far from being a persuasive explanation of the gender gap, hints at spiritual blindness
Modernity has brought forth many ills, but you can’t deny it has as a side effect brought forth a generation of misfits whose lifestyles are halfway to the desert fathers. They are not in the pews, and who is there? Are these female churches abounding in virtues and discipline?
Mar 10, 2022 • 23 tweets • 4 min read
There is no “optimal strategy”. Offering an opposing coalition a choice between continuous material/symbolic defeats or escalation into massive retaliation is a superb strategy, if all the environmental parameters it depends on are in place
1. It assumes the “kicks” are painful enough that if the victim endures interminably, he is rekt. Either unsustainable material losses (diminution of capabilities) or semiotically unambiguous L’s (demoralization + disorganization of target’s coalition)
Oct 27, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
a few times a year i check in on what the LessWrongers are up to. It gets sadder and sadder
It was obvious 10 years ago to anyone who liked books that “rationalist” was an embarrassing misnomer since a cult that claimed to be governed by Bayes’ Rule falls on what everyone else calls the “empiricist” side of empiricist/rationalist dispute
Apr 26, 2021 • 28 tweets • 6 min read
btw, for ppl interested in translation, here is a more technical version of Wyatt’s argument: (1/?)
2/ Translation is an art if you’re translating Proust or La Fontaine or something. When the whole value of a work is the beauty of the individual sentences, the meter, the rhymes, wordplay and insinuations, then a great translation requires genius
Jan 8, 2021 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
I wonder what would happen if there were a country where the country's elite openly rejoiced in the fact that their policies benefit foreigners and freaks more than the natives
In private conversations among the upper class, for 8 years now or more, this has been the consensus line - "This is good for our kind, and it's good for {Guatemala Africa China Israel}, and if it's bad for most other Americans that's OK because why could we put Americans first?"
Jan 8, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The politics of enforcing a gun-grab would be very strange because blue states *already* don't enforce gun laws on their urban population (w/ exception of NY, during Giuliani/Bloomberg yrs)
The leftist dream has always been that by forcing extreme gun control on non-urban whites + red states, they can constrict flow of guns to urban blacks without actually arresting more urban blacks. Regardless of whether this would work (ofc not lol), would it happen?
Jan 8, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
people with this take are, i assume, foreign or childless. you can challenge the tactics or the timing, but some fighting back is always better than no fighting back
when i was a kid my dad's airforce buddy told me that he was bullied as a kid for a while and so every time the kid put his head down on his desk, he'd go and smack him on the head with a textbook
Nov 7, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
i ran simulations of counting two batches of ballots; the pattern Shylock observes does not arise naturally from one type of voter being more likely to mail in their vote
These scatterplots show the same thing as Holmes’ graph, for artificial elections w/ 100 random 2000-voters precincts, giving “D”s 2/3 chance of mail-in vote and “R”s 1/3
Nov 5, 2020 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
I will be taking down the histogram of total voters per ward to replace it w/ a corrected version (the peak is 12 or 13 at ~70 not 14 at 0), but it remains a curiosity — serious analysis of vote breakdowns is here:
reactionary skepticism of american revolution is good ofc, but bc no one studies the history carefully w/o being proud of their ancestors, currently most neo-loyalist memes are dumb. Some items:
1/ the basic problem with the “stab in the back” theory is that the British were cheapskates about *all* N American wars and had never beat French w/o heavy reliance on colonial volunteers
Jun 26, 2020 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
liberal theocracy is a deathcult b/c mass culture + meritocratic exemptions from anarchotyranny interact to hijack all impulses to family formation
mass culture: think of this as complement to intentional communities. you live in a mass culture when intentional communities are the only way to transmit your opinions and traditions to your kids
Mar 11, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
iiuc gayle langley, the person at CDC who was emailing ppl around country telling them it was illegal to use tests made in a facility that hadn’t been approved by medicare/medicaid, has been publishing with CDC since 2011 but has been employed by DHHS in some way since 2006
this is the CDC’s respiratory virus team. jfc wait until you get a load of who the chief of the team is
Jan 2, 2020 • 25 tweets • 6 min read
1/ I'm going to engage in meandering reflections throughout the day on basic rw political theories about the US, and modernity. They're numbered for your convenience, so you can ignore them if you want to (and also for organization)
2/ The immediate impetus is this thread from ZHP, a pithy and hard-hitting summary of things Moldbug ~ Land ~ SM ~ #NRx have been saying for 13 years
