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US US Politics General - Discussion of President Biden and other politicians
- Thread starter SeniorFuckFace
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- Oct 21, 2018
thats because your government was full of commies. East germany had the highest standard of living in the eastern block in the 80s and their economy was afloat because of production for west german companies and gifts from west german family members. i know that when i was very little i had to paint a picture that my mom put into the box of cheap coffee and razors we send to family in the east because they couldnt buy either in stores.
well politicians and journalists were never smart and it only got worse in the last 20 years.
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- Apr 1, 2017
You were 10 at the most.
NOBODY saw it coming, and anyone who says they saw it coming and it was obvious at the time is full of shit.
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- Feb 5, 2020
What are your thoughts regarding Curtis Yarvin's (Mencius Moldbug) political philosophy/perspective?
verissimus
kiwifarms.net
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- Nov 3, 2018
Last I checked, he's already done that.
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- Oct 21, 2018
yes.
our history books in school were full of articles and people who talked about the end of the east in the 80s, from east and west.
the articles from summer of 89 were all talking about the end of east germany with some fear about blood on the streets. there was no doubt that the wall would fall soon, because Poland had free elections in 1989 and hungary opened up the iron curtain that summer.
people who talk about the fall of the wall as a wonder are building a myth, it was just the last domino and not the start of it all.
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- Aug 17, 2018
Somehow, this is Russia's fault. Despite fuel prices being up at the time of his election. No, seriously, I really wanna know.
That text looked mean to me.NO. MEAN. TWEETS. THOUGH. AM. I. RITE. BOIS?!
Hold me, Joan Crawford...
wtfNeedSignUp
kiwifarms.net
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- Dec 17, 2019
I think Moore is just a faggot who sheds a single tear when people are sacrificed for the greater good (as long as it's the masses and not him or his gay buddies) and nothing else.
Rorschach was meant to be an unlikable "subversion" of anti heroes, with mommy issues and living like a hobo, but because normal people aren't self serving psychopaths he comes out as the only likable (and even admirable) character.
I like to view Watchmen as a catalogue of ways humanity approaches adversity (since every character is basically a version of a lolcow on this site) made by a person who is too afraid to give a moral judgement that an eighth grader will easily decide.
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- Dec 7, 2013
He’s overly sympathetic to the powers that be, and reads the nature of their decay as being more passive than it is, because he was born of them. There are gaping problems but also things that are spot on I think. Kind of like how with Ted, even if you’re not big on anarchoprimitivism his assesment of how America’s political groups think is devastatingly accurate even decades later.
Edit: Why is Moldbug getting more play recently?
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- Dec 18, 2019
Can she be arrested if she runs? If she gets any kind of blanket immunity there's your answer.
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- Nov 29, 2020
Got your gibs right here, Jarvis. Shouldn't have called me an Oreo for picking up a book while you were too busy reciting the latest Meek Mill song.
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- Jun 7, 2018
This was really the most thoughtful answer I could have expected, and I thank you a lot for it.
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- Dec 16, 2017
I'm getting so tired of this disingenuous platitude of "one death is too many." Flying formula in from Europe isn't the win you think it is, Joe. What about the carbon footprint of this endeavor? It's all over the news this morning, painted as a victorious rescue mission of some sort and not as a failure of the administration to address the issue domestically.
Reminder that even the closest entity that you depend on for your livelihood, your workplace, considers you a Human Resource. Never forget that not only do The Big They not care about you, they are actively trying to demoralize and outright kill you.
Reminder that even the closest entity that you depend on for your livelihood, your workplace, considers you a Human Resource. Never forget that not only do The Big They not care about you, they are actively trying to demoralize and outright kill you.
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- Jul 25, 2019
CO turns to CO2 over time in atmosphere, so it's not worth worrying about as a pollutant.
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- Aug 31, 2020
Like I said, people talk about China's population decline, but conveniently forget the US has the same problem and has less tolerance for it.
CAPTAIN HAPPY
kiwifarms.net
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- Jun 24, 2021
Has anyone ever considered that the baby formula shortage began soon after men started getting pregnant?
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- Jun 21, 2020
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- Aug 31, 2020
But men can't get pregnant in reality. LARPing manginas don't have uterii.
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- Feb 5, 2020
Interesting choice of words. I would have substituted 'overly sympathetic' with 'familiar'.
Please expand on this.
And this too, please.
Uncertain, it is the first I have heard of him. I like his perspective, especially "The cathedral"
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For those unfamiliar: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral?s=r
“The cathedral” is just a short way to say “journalism plus academia”—in other words, the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society.
A brief explanation of the cathedral
An oligarchy inherently converges on ideas that justify the use of power.
Jan 21, 2021https://kiwifarms.net/javascript:void(0)
I notice more people using this label, which I coined a long long time ago, and have always had ambivalent aesthetic feelings about. I used a capital C, but I see more of the miniscule and I think it’s better.
“The cathedral” is just a short way to say “journalism plus academia”—in other words, the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society.
But the label is making a point. The Catholic Church is one institution—the cathedral is many institutions. Yet the label is singular. This transformation from many to one—literally, e pluribus unum—is the heart of the mystery at the heart of the modern world.
The mystery of the cathedral
The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.Most notably, this pseudo-structure is synoptic: it has one clear doctrine or perspective. It always agrees with itself. Still more puzzlingly, its doctrine is not static; it evolves; this doctrine has a predictable direction of evolution, and the whole structure moves together.
For instance: in 2021, Harvard, Yale, the Times and the Post are on the same page. If there exists any doctrinal difference between any two of these prestigious American institutions, it is too ineffable for anyone but a Yale man to discern. (Though it may say something that Gray Mirror is not taught at Harvard.)
In 1951, Harvard, Yale, the Times and the Post were on the same page. But Yale in 1951 was on nowhere near the same page as Yale in 2021. If you could teleport either Yale into the other’s time zone, they would see each other as a den of intellectual criminals.
So it’s not just that everyone—at least, everyone cool—is on the same page. It’s more like: everyone is reading the same book—at the same speed. No wonder all the peasants are seeing conspiracies in their motherfucking soup. If you saw a group of bright red dots move across the evening sky this way, what would you think they were? Pigeons? Remote-controlled pigeons, illuminated by lasers? Sometimes even Occam is baffled.
Moreover, this mystery is critical to the nature, fate and epistemology of our society, because we regard the distributed nature of these prestigious and trusted institutions as an inviolable principle of of our intellectual security. We would never concede this level of axiomatic infallibility to a single organization, like the Catholic Church—that would be putting all our brains in one basket. No egghead would make that mistake.
While we are aware that individuals—even very smart individuals—can go extremely awry in their perception and analysis of reality, and while we have seen even groups do the same thing (hence “groupthink”), we are sure they cannot all go wrong together. To err is human—but eliminating error is just a function of sufficient statistical power.
But statistics only works if your samples are independent. If some mysterious force is coordinating them—you are not measuring reality, you are just measuring that force.
And indeed, our samples seem only nominally independent. While we can detect no obvious organizational connection between them, they are highly correlated. And they retain these correlations even as they move across long periods of time.
We can expect this form of coordinated progress in hard science and engineering. These fields are tightly constrained by two inexorable forces: physical reality and human ignorance. The latter relaxes its grip only by painfully-won millimeters.
But the physical and human situation of the arts and humanities—of philosophy, ethics, literature, religion and politics—has been largely unchanged for millennia. We see no evidence of any extrinsic and unidirectional force that should be coordinating these fields. Yet these are just the fields that seem to be moving the fastest.
Who are we? Where are we going? If we could understand the forces that are driving us, we could predict where we are going. Unfortunately, the answer may be: hell.
Darwin and the discourse
Harvard is not a black box. We know how these organizations work.The institutions of the cathedral are not relevant as hierarchical command structures. They are not an army of ideas, like the Church. The dean of chemistry does not tell the chemistry professors what God thinks they should think about methylfluorocarbons.
Rather, the cathedral operates as a discourse—not an army of ideas, a market of ideas. The institutions are just brands—marks of prestige. Ideas in this market evolve; they reproduce by being taught, they mutate by being thought, and they are selected by—
By what? If we want to know what a Darwinian system will evolve, we have to look at the selective pressures on its organisms. What is our cathedral selecting for?
First, let’s look at the soundest part of the building: math. In math, the marketplace of ideas is straightforward. Error is not tolerated. Priority is rigidly respected. Even the importance and quality of mathematical results is generally agreed on. In fact, even in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, pure mathematics did pretty well as a field.
In math, the only selective advantage an idea can have is that it is good math. Good math beats bad math. Math is perfectly suited to the cathedral—and the Soviet Union. In fact, it is hard to imagine any form of government so dysfunctional and dystopian that it could not, given the raw autistic IQ talent, make progress in math.
The hard sciences are supposed to work like math. In certain places, certain fields, and certain ways, they do. In few places are they completely broken, though this of course depends on your definition of “hard.”
But in science already we sense that here are other forces; that the selective advantage of an idea may not be solely driven by the quality of that idea; that while some shared sense of quality does remain intact, it is starting to feel like an eroding legacy.
And to the east of science—well, de gustibus non disputandum. Obviously, in the debate between 1951 Yale and 2021 Yale—your mileage may vary. I feel that in general, while both score some points, the former is nowhere near harsh enough. But that’s just me.
Suppose this is so, and Yale has declined. Yale is made of people and ideas. It is quite implausible that psychometric tests would show a great difference in the intelligence of its students and professors between 1951 and 2021—and they might well come out in favor of the latter.
Which suggests that any problem is with the ideas—that bad ideas in the humanities have in some way flourished at Yale (and everywhere else)—like toxic green algae in a once-blue mountain lake. Now why would that happen?
It must be related to the pattern of selective advantage in this marketplace of ecology. Maybe a nearby pig farm has unleashed a flood of sewage into the lake. Pig manure is a nutrient which alters the pattern of selective advantage in the lake, making it easier to exist as a stinking algal bloom and harder to flourish as a happy rainbow trout.
A parable
On the continent of Mu, there are two nations, Mundana and Mutopia. Like Burundi and Rwanda, they have very similar populations and very different governments.Mundana is a traditional absolute monarchy with an official state religion, like Tsarist Russia. Mutopia is a progressive liberal democracy, like here but more so. In Mundana you are beheaded for even acting gay; in Mutopia you are required to try it at least, like, once.
Mundana has erected its so-called Titanium Curtain between itself and this utter filth, preventing all social and intellectual contact. But in Mundana, too, there are liberal intellectuals—some people, it turns out, are born that way. These free-thinkers are of course hunted by the Tsar’s secret police and must use funky encrypted Internet stuff to live, breathe, think, shitpost and make gay bondage dates.
Whereas Mutopia, of course, is run by liberal intellectuals. To be precise: Mutopia is governed by a permanent administrative state which implements policies designed by liberal professors at prestigious institutions, and supervised by liberal journalists at prestigious institutions. These are hard gigs to get, and great gigs to have. And no one need supervise the professors and journalists—they are self-watching watchmen. Nice!
Now: which liberal intellectuals do you think will have better ideas, pound for pound? Remember that the Mundanan intellectuals can’t hear what the Mutopians are saying, or vice versa—these are two entirely separate marketplaces of ideas.
Your intuitive answer is that you’ll get better, more premium content from Mundanan dissidents than Mutopian professors. Let’s look at why you’re right.
Selective advantage of dominant ideas
The sewage that is polluting the lake is sovereignty. The dissidents have better ideas than the professors because the professors have sovereignty and the dissidents don’t.The professors and journalists have sovereignty because final decisions are entrusted to them and there is no power above them. Only professors can formulate policy—that is, set government strategy; only journalists can hold government accountable—that is, manage government tactics. Strategy plus tactics equals control.
The dissidents do not have sovereignty because neither the Tsar nor the Church cares what they think. These powers do care that they think, and their only wish is for this thinking to cease—furthermore, they know just where to make the incision. Dissidents have no good reason to think at all—so it doesn’t matter at all what they’re thinking.
So in the furtive, candle-lit garrets of dissident Mundana, the ideas that win are just the best ideas; the intellectuals that win are just the best thinkers. In Mundana, the only selective advantage an idea can have is its mere truth and/or beauty. The life of a Mundanan dissident is terrible, but diamond-hard and extremely pure.
Whereas in the lecture halls and newsrooms of Mutopia, there is a market for dominant ideas. A dominant idea is an idea that validates the use of power. Such an idea will enjoy a selective tailwind in the Mutopian market.
And there is no market for recessive ideas. A recessive idea is an idea that invalidates power or its use. Such an idea will fight a selective headwind in the Mutopian market. Neither of these distorting evolutionary effects appears among Mundanan dissidents.
Consider the problem of climate change. There are two responses to this problem: action or inaction. Action requires power—and a lot of it, because it has to redirect about, like, 10^14 dollars worth of economic activity. Ain’t no thing!
The idea of climate alarmism corresponds to action. The idea of climate denialism corresponds to inaction. Without knowing which side is right, we can observe that alarmism is a dominant idea, whereas denialism is a recessive idea.
It is not hard to see why, in the lecture halls and newsrooms, dominant ideas tend to outcompete recessive ideas. A dominant idea is an idea that tends to benefit you and your friends. A dominant idea will be especially popular with your friends and former students in the civil service, because it gives them more work and more power.
And a recessive idea, of course, is the opposite of all these things. A climate scientist who holds the recessive idea of climate denialism is saying to his colleagues and the whole world: climate science is not important. Is it surprising—in the Bayesian sense— that a consensus of climate scientists would conclude that climate science matters?
None of this analysis tells us whether the dominant idea or the recessive idea is good. What it tells is that the Mutopian cathedral cannot tell us—because its marketplace of ideas will always select for the dominant idea.
When we remove pseudo-information that has obviously evolved in this way, we are not left with the opposite of the pseudo-information, but an absence of information. Whatever the signal reality is sending us, we cannot hear it. All we know is that our institutions cannot hear, think, learn, know, understand or teach any recessive ideas—that is, ideas that would damage or delegitimate the powers that be.
This mass brain-damage to the public mind is curiously replicated over in Mundana, whose Tsar is no less intolerant of seditious, heretical and subversive misinformation. Why would the Tsar let some gay, atheist newspaper editor curse God, the Church, and the whole Royal Family? What? Has Mundana somehow run short of prison cells? Are all the knout-makers on some, like, knout strike? By God, he will beat the man himself!
The Tsar—whose public mind is a canon, not a discourse—gets almost exactly the same results as the cathedral, by the exact opposite methods. The Tsar punishes deviation from canonical thought. The cathedral rewards conformity with dominant thought.
Of course, stick and carrot are two great tastes that taste great together—but they are both power. It is easy to think that reward and punishment are different things; they are not; they are different ways of getting to the same place, that is, human dominion.
The cathedral cannot be repaired
The cathedral can’t be repaired for two reasons. The first is that it can’t be repaired—just look at it. The second is that it isn’t the problem.Go back to the lake and the sewage. How do you fix the lake? Not by skimming off the algae! Obviously, you need to stop the sewage leak and get rid of the pig farm. Then, you can either wait for the lake to purify itself naturally, or pump the polluted water out and let the clear blue mountain stream refill the basin. I recommend… the latter.
In this case the pig farm is a form of government that leaks power—that inherently wants to outsource responsibility to outside actors. Whenever the government relies on university research for a strategy or policy decision, or makes a decision which is influenced by media reporting, or selectively releases information to the media, this trust is leaking sovereignty into the cathedral. Which, being outside the government, is about as “democratic” as Genghis Khan.
Why does the government—or more precisely, the civil service—leak power? Because it is a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies leak power. It’s like asking why a two-stroke engine burns oil—or at least why a diesel engine puffs out soot.
In a bureaucracy, decisions at every level are not taken by individuals; they are taken by processes. All work is according to process. Managers in a bureaucracy are not bosses; they are exception handlers.
The fundamental rule of success as a bureaucrat is that while it is important to get credit for things that go right (everyone in the process will get credit), it is essential to avoid blame for things that go wrong. Fortunately, decision by process spreads and multiplies the thrill of success, while it diffuses and dilutes the sorrow of failure.
But if he can export accountability and responsibility outside the government itself, the bureaucrat feels like he is dumping this toxic waste in the deep ocean. Or in a blue mountain lake. What pig farmer wants a lagoon full of manure on his farm? Even the pigs hate that smell… and that’s why the Mutopian bureaucracy leaks power. As does every other bureaucracy, perhaps unless it’s brand-new.
And this is why you can’t fix it. An organization which focuses responsibility toward the top, without leaking, is an organization structured like an army or a corporation. In this form of organization (used by almost everything that isn’t a government), your manager actually is your boss. Final authority and responsibility lands on one person.
This form of government—the form that doesn’t leak power—has a name. It is called a monarchy. The form of government currently used by Mutopia also has a name. It is a bureaucracy, which is one kind of oligarchy. (“Deep State,” if you absolutely must.)
So the difference between our government, and a government which is “power-tight,” is as basal as it could be—not like the difference between a goat and a gazelle, like the difference between a gazelle and a chanterelle. There isn’t really, like, a kind of surgery that will turn either of these things into the other.
The future of Mu
So Mutopia’s magic 8-ball is broken—and it can’t be fixed. Its government is making decisions that are not just random, but actively perverse and self-destructive, because its brain is the cathedral, which is structurally biased toward these dominant ideas, many but not all of which are just plain bad ideas.No wonder Mutopia is such a hot mess. But then again, Mundana is a hot mess too. Its government, which is also totally unaccountable, is also making perverse, destructive decisions—because the Tsar is getting senile. His syphilis is starting to kick in, too…
Fortunately, just after the above parable was taken, things really turned around in Mu. In both countries, the peasants revolted. And as in (almost) no peasant rebellion ever, things miraculously turned out well.
What happened in Mundana
What happened in Mundana: the peasants revolted. With the collective rationality we often, or at least sometimes, see in peasants, they realized the following facts:First: their government sucked. The Tsar was creepy, incompetent and sadistic. His son, the Tsarevich, was a junkie, a rumored pedophile and a known hemophiliac.
Second: there was a responsible elite which could staff a new form of government. This new form is a “constitutional” monarchy in which the monarch is actually a joke—a stuffed shirt with a crown on top. The real power now belongs to the intellectual underground which survived the Tsar’s persecutions.
Therefore, these rational peasants used the power of democracy—which is irresistible but unstable—to depose their old monarchy and install a new oligarchy. This is the right way to use democracy—one political force which is never an end, but always a means.
Real power in the new regime is held by the new civil service—staffed, of course, by the dissidents against the old regime. Any evidence of having been persecuted by the Tsarist secret police is now a badge of honor which entitles you to various distinctions, privileges and job opportunities. Save those hit-piece clippings, dissidents—one day, they may well become your receipts.
This new system of government works extremely well, because the new ruling class is extremely well-selected. It consists of people who were ready to sacrifice everything to preserve both their sanity and their dignity. Such types make the best statesmen—and the ideas of the Mundanan dissident, we know, are evolved for nothing but cold truth.
So the new, free Mundana is run by its unbiased liberal intellectuals. Things are looking up in Mundana! And they’ll keep getting better—for a while…
What happened in Mutopia
What happened in Mutopia: the peasants revolted. With the collective rationality we often, or at least sometimes, see in peasants, they realized the following facts:First: their government sucked. Both the cathedral and the civil service were insanely obsessed with race—because race war is a dominant idea. Crime grew rampant— because tolerating crime is a dominant idea. And when the civil service actually had to solve a real, unanticipated, significant problem, it turned out to be almost useless. And there was an army, too—which could not win a war, not even an irrelevant war.
Moreover, as the cathedral’s worldview diverged from reality, Mutopia had more and more trouble in enforcing this worldview by carrots alone. Eventually it turned to the other kind of mind control—and started developing almost Mundanan techniques of stick-based intellectual punishment. There were censors, informers, the whole deal.
Second: there was a responsible elite which could staff a new form of government. In the so-called “private sector,” the art of monarchy had been perfected. Some of these monarchies had even assembled staffs as big as any government that Mutopia could need, with an average human quality (or at least IQ) perhaps never equalled, executing with relentless perfection to—
Executing with relentless perfection to bring you toys, conveniences, luxuries, games and entertainment, porn and drugs, and all the “service economy” money could buy. But—nothing that was actually important, of course. Lol.
Therefore, these rational peasants used the power of democracy—which is irresistible but unstable—to depose their old oligarchy and install a new monarchy. This is the right way to use democracy—one political force which is never an end, but always a means.
The new monarch—a man recognized by all as the outstanding visionary leader of the Mutopian “private sector,” a master of not one but two groundbreaking companies—staffed his new regime, a startup state, with veterans of Mutopia’s technology wars.
These hardcore West Coast thugs knew nothing at all of government—though they sometimes would hire some grizzled old front-line GS man, as a contractor, just for the transitional assistance—no Gordian knot ever stopped these hotshot punks.
As for the old oligarchy, the cathedral and civil service—they were simply liquidated—rounded up, shot, dumped in a ditch, soaked with gas and burned… No! What am I saying? That was a totally different timeline. Bad dream. Sorry. That would be a major bummer. Please definitely don’t do that.
The Mutopian bureaucrats were some of the best people in the country, of course. Some were even rehired in new, entry-level positions. The rest were paid a generous severance and helped to find new, fulfilling work that lived up to their real talents. If they were math or science professors—they might even wind up with the same jobs.
Obviously, by serving the old regime, none of them did anything even slightly wrong. Normal people would be Nazis in Nazi Germany and Stalinists in the USSR, too. It’s time to get over blaming citizens or even government officials for the crimes of their regimes. This is just one of those bad 20th-century ideas that needs to be forgotten.
Within months, or at least years, Mutopia was a clean, humming, gleaming paradise, where everyone had not only the toys and conveniences they deserved, but also the genuinely meaningful and fulfilling work they deserved. And no one—no one at all—was still obsessed with race.
The peasants’ gratitude toward their new monarch—also a highly progenitive man, with redundant budding heirs—is impossible to express. This new, functional Mutopia is run not by incompetent time-servers and eggheads with their heads in the clouds, but by its most capable and visionary doers—under the leadership not just of a new king, but of a new dynasty whose family mission is to make Mutopia great, not just on the scale of years, but on the scale of centuries—
So things are looking up in Mutopia! And they’ll keep getting better—for a while…
And if you learned something here, why not:
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- Jun 27, 2014
It falls into the same line that many oldschool Dems who were once part of the machine have been saying for a while: because the party's main rank and file operators got swapped out for useful idiots, they don't have anyone with the skillset needed to take charge.
The swamp got rid of the Dems who would rattle the cages too much, or caucus with the other side to circumvent the establishment hacks. There's not even any principled elder statesmen left to pick things up. The Dems got rid of all of those to embrace the Progs and Corporatists, which means any Dem with the spine to actually defy the main paradigm is fucking gone. The problem is that this is literally the most critical element of breaking out of their dive right now. They need to recognize that sometimes taking an L in one area is needed for a greater win elsewhere, but they lost the ability to process shit like that a while ago. What that left is the faux-populists like Bernie, and good luck trying to trot him out when the establishment very publicly cornholed him twice on the national stage.
It actually gets worse for them, if you can believe it. Bernie made a lot of the younger dems aware of complete horse-shit like the DNC's superdelegates system, which means only the candidate the Establishment wants gets in, primary voters be damned, and the Establishment has no fucking idea (or more accurately, does not care) what the populace wants. Enthusiasm is at an all-time low and people have abandoned the Dems en masse. Their ground game, which relies on this, is fucking dead.
Their other options are shrieking harridans that the Establishment absolutely does not want anywhere near actual power and would get absolutely vaporized in the generals (read: The Squad), complete charisma vaccuums like most of the old-guard Establishment hacks who have been there longer than anyone on this forum has been alive, Z-listers no one has ever fucking heard of and would be as irrelevant as Gary Johnson in the 2016 elections, and past-thelr-prime dipshits that wouldn't have draw if their lives depended on it.
Over 50 major Dems are retiring this year, and they can see why: They're hosed.
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- Mar 19, 2018
They’re also the same traitorous assholes that supported the Chinese over us until they somewhat recently realized that their demographics & poor policies would screw their investments over. Many of them refused to see the demographic writing on the walls and stuck it out as long as possible even as covid lockdowns were doubled down upon.
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