xunzilla

[xunzilla]

excuses, excuses

maybe it is a contributing factor to "everything has become political" that one of the two major parties in the US can't be trusted not to let their ranking of the hierarchy of races—

(with the majority on the bottom – in a democracy! how does that work? this scenario is the thing democracy was designed to prevent! is there funny business? well, historically they were the Corrupt Urban Political Machine And Associated Paramilitaries Party, their last guy won after results were affected by a water main break, and the guy before that was from chicago, cmon)

—influence policy in a way that rhymes with "how many corpses is our goal?"

the state of affairs where, while responsible parties do not form a unified front in favor of implementing the hierarchy of races as policy, they certainly aren't allergic to it, and they certainly aren't willing to break the taboo on mentioning in public that some people believe it – even when those people stand up in public and say out loud that that's what they believe – and every so often they'll throw them a bone, and let the Socialism with Concern for Underprivileged Communities Party, how do you say that in german?, add a field to google maps, the grocery store, etc. with a little tick that says ࿕ Deutsch-Owned. and by the way, it's a policy goal to reduce the Privileged Communities to minority status, after which maybe we will not have to be so nice to them, and maybe we'll win elections forever. and anyone who sees anything objectionable in this is—a nazi!

it's enough to make the average person go insane

To be less flippant about MR I thought this was a good piece to link; US vaccine & public health policy is absolutely captured by ideological culture warriors and being pinballed back and forth. It is valuable to point out that there was some truly ridiculous "woke nonsense" during Covid with the vaccine rollouts, and there is this current of "revenge against the libs" going on here with the RFK anti-vaccine agenda.

However, I do think in setting up a parallel here, they are implying a causation that isn't real. The vaccine rollout policies that pretty much said "we need to let some old people die for racial equity vibes" didn't actually happen at the federal level. The places they still did like California are not exactly the hotbeds of MAGA. In practice, the vast majority of the RFK-style complaints about Covid, vaccines, etc, are made up, or at best just spinning out mistakes borne of uncertainty and incompetence as opposed to intent.

If the public health establishment didn't do any of the "woke" stuff, the Megan McArdle's of the world would like it and respect it more. But Megan McArdle hates RFK! She never was gonna back that shit. The reality is that there is no response to Covid that could have "saved" this, because what has made public health political is that it became relevant, and in the modern era everything under the flaming eye of the public discourse is political. It is comforting to think that if health authorities were more reasonable, they would have more faith from the people. And they would at margins, don't get me wrong. Maybe margins enough to swing a close election, I guess that is possible? But beyond that very precise scenario, you were always gonna get a huge minority faction obsessed with public health conspiracy nonsense because a huge minority of the US public is steeped in endless conspiracy nonsense about everything. You can't use ~reasonableness~ to get out of that.

[xunzilla]

Yanko Tsvetkov isn't Jewish?

huh

[xunzilla]

china has dozens of centuries-old minority communities which are mostly small and rural (china's population is >90% han; the US's population is <60% white), and in some cases are remarkably culturally similar to the majority – the largest minority was constructed by scholars on linguistic grounds out of populations that generally considered themselves han:

In Li’s report, she observed that many of the Zhuang people were unwilling to be identified as Zhuang, but preferred to pass as Han people. Not only the Zhuang, but other lowland-dwelling minorities were also unwilling to be identified as non-Han since they had been extensively Sinicized and had become indistinguishable from the Han (Moseley 1973:41). Another problem was that many groups had referred to themselves as "locals"(土- tu) in the provincial census (tujia, tujiaren, and a number of other similar terms); the result was a proliferation of people scattered throughout the region with similar names, but who shared no cultural or linguistic characteristics in common (Mullaney 2011: 88). ... Even Fei Xiaotong, leading the project of ethnic classification, expressed the difficulty in classifying them, saying that: Guangxi has a type of people called “local people” who are widely spread across the province… They rather refer to themselves as “Han who speak the Zhuang language.”… Since the language they speak is generally called Zhuang, we recommend calling them Zhuang. The CCP instructed the team to merge together many different ethnic groups ... under the single rubric of the Zhuang nationality (at first, it was 僮族 Tong zu but later it changed to 壮族 Zhuang zu in 1965). This led the Zhuang to become the largest minority in China ... Kaup (2000) points out that the Zhuang autonomous units did not emanate from the grassroot level by the Zhuang themselves, since the Zhuang apparently had no ethnic consciousness of being “Zhuang”. ... The self-denigration of many people was viewed as a result of the racial prejudice that the majority Han Chinese had traditionally felt toward the Zhuang. The identification teams were assigned not only to investigate the claims of various groups and make their final decisions, but also to convince local cadres and the masses of the significance of establishing an autonomous area (Kaup 2000: 87).

the US has a lot of immigrant diversity that's more or less assimilated, often less – catholic infiltration of the US government, the use of the US government to enforce a catholic worldview, which is currently happening, figures in the end times prophecies of at least one american religion – in addition to deep cultural differences inherited from before its founding (read albion's seed), with more or less convergence over time. sometimes diaspora communities assimilate to their environment, but other times they become hyperconservative and try to increase their distance from it, which ime is often true within the deep south diaspora communities created by the great migration – what percentage of the white population of the average northeastern city, for example, believes in a literal biblical satan? the idea that the various US populations have homogenous marriage norms in particular is not in accord with the history of official literature decrying the lack of homogeneity in marriage norms between races or classes (coming apart, the moynihan report, etc.)

I've said this before, but "the US is diverse while China is homogenous" is a mainstream-ish talking point that you see sometimes, and if you have an academic background anywhere adjacent to mine (linguistics) it will probably strike you as pretty ridiculous. The US has a lot of largely-culturally-assimilated recent immigrant diversity, while China has dozens of centuries-old minority communities of various sizes which often retain not just their own language and culture, but indeed in some cases traditional subsistence methods, kinship systems, and so on, not commensurate with mainstream Chinese society. The diversity in China is considerably deeper. Whereas in the US you have white, black, asian people etc. all speaking the same language and practicing essentially the same culture (with local variations), subsisting in the same ways, practicing the same marriage norms, etc. etc. It's objectively much more homogenous. The outliers here are indigenous communities, which have a real and significant cultural diversity, but make up a very small proportion of the US population.

[xunzilla]

yeah if intelligence turns out to be heritable we're going to have to start killing and never stop. absolutely

[xunzilla]

practically speaking, because scarcity exists in the world, and resource allocation is an inevitably political question, the alternative to allocating resources based on economic utility is allocating resources based on like, other immutable traits. which is something a lot of people who talk about 'techno-fascist ideology' etc. miss!

"sure, they're jews, but they're good at science" - the inverse of this is "sure, they're good at science, but they're jews"

[xunzilla]

because, as we have seen, it creates a dependency between the feelings of the economically and numerically dominant about outgroups with whom familiarity cannot be guaranteed to fail to produce the proverbial outcome and the legitimacy of the state

The[re] [is a] problem with calling [...] for indefinite racial discrimination against "overperforming" groups (or one specific such group) with no actual terminating condition.

@mitigatedchaos

Why?

I'm not actually particularly in favor of the policies I think you're targeting here, but I'd like to play devil's advocate.

I am in favor of what might fairly be called "indefinite class discrimination against overperforming groups with no terminating condition", i.e. strong redistributive policies for wealth. I'm a socialist after all. I don't mind an indefinite policy of taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots qua such a policy. In fact I favor it! Moreover, I think the simple fact that one group has and another group has-not is reason enough to take from the first and give to the second, all else being equal, and issues of "overperformance" need not even come into it.

Of course, all else is not always equal, and I favor purely economic redistributive policies for all kinds of reasons, most prominently reasons of efficiency. But the objection you've stated is not to me a sufficient objection.

[xunzilla]

i don't have a crystal ball, but i don't see a way out of the mess for america. praying that policy tweaks can produce enough rising living standards to paper over the irreconcilable contradictions for another thirty years is probably the best they have.

the point of trump is that he was supposed to resolve the contradictions, but 2024 trump isn't equipped to do that. he's just a republican! we've had republicans before and they didn't work

[xunzilla]

2016 Trump was plausible as a new synthesis. 2024 Trump – the unholy alliance of too-online tech managers, White Sharia unassimilables, and the oil and gas industry – is not. But you don't need a synthesis to win; all you need is a scapegoat to unify the rest of the country against. We've had a number of candidates – "1350", "groomers", "deplorables", "Eurabia", – but right now it looks like the enduring one is "wokes", a broad-spectrum word which can be interpreted to mean anything from "the Democrats in their capacity as people whose electoral strategy was normalizing workplace discrimination against the majority" to "the people who invented trans in 2015 to sterilize your children". One of these is true.

The overall mood is that there are too many claims on the polity and some must be voided. Do the Democrats have a way to do this? They could try running against the ultra-rich, or leading the American people away from support for Israel, but do they have options that don't involve pissing on the third rail? I don't think they do.

Or, in short:

I'd been hoping that Harris would limp into office, and the Republicans would lick their wounds and then go to the effort of becoming a party that doesn't suck.

Didn't happen, obviously. The Republicans didn't have to do anything in order to win. So now, sigh, we're stuck hoping that the Dems lick their wounds and then go to the effort of becoming a party that doesn't suck.

Seems laughable, I know, but...I guess the version where the Republicans learned anything, in the current political climate, was even more laughable.

The upside is that the Dem-rooted version of the New Synthesis, should it actually manifest by some miracle, is likely to be a lot better than the Republican-rooted version. Trump of course thinks that he is the New Synthesis, that the political side of the culture war has been won, but - I'm pretty sure you can't create an enduring consensus just by kicking people in the face, which is apparently all that he knows how to do.

[xunzilla]

Ethnic minorities make up over 25% of the population of Israel, so even leaving aside the Oops! I Can't Believe It's Not Ethnic Differences between different groups of Jews, it's less of an ethnostate demographically than South Korea, Lithuania, Argentina, or Vermont.

I gotta say I still don't understand what you people mean by "Zionist" here on tumblr or in the broader world.

I guess my frustration is that the question of whether Israel was founded in a monstrous or unethical way does not seem to me to have any bearing on whether or not it can be dissolved as a country in 2025 or 2030 in a way that is safe for the citizens living there.

Honestly the current Netanyahu government seems to consist entirely of bloodthirsty monsters who should be removed from all power and left in a dark hole so that they can't hurt anybody anymore, so it seems like the anti-zionist position ought to be at its strongest but all I seem to find is a sort of glib conviction that the October 7th attacks proved that Israeli citizens should be happy to incorporate Hamas into a new Greater Palestinian government that accords Jewish citizens no particular status one way or another, and that anybody who is hesitant about this is just a racist of some sort.

Also there's a very bizarre conviction that the world's Jewish population can rely on the international refugee system if the shit goes down, and that's, uh, just ridiculous on the face of it.

[xunzilla]

(tumblr ad)

some small part of my descent into madness was caused by, when "food deserts" were the Current Thing, looking up where I lived on the #important cutting-edge researchers' Food Desert Map, and discovering that I lived in a Food Desert, at a time in my life when I regularly got food by walking to the grocery store

[xunzilla]

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: Doom is a user-extensible aesthetic vision of Hell, and one of the reasons it works so well at that is monster infighting - if one demon's attack hits another demon, the second demon will get mad at the first and retaliate. Hell is an endless cycle of violence where badass ripped monsters twelve feet tall with rocket launchers for arms kill each other until they die in Hell and are resurrected to fight again. As an irritable and short-tempered person who would very much like to be twelve feet tall with rocket launchers and tren, watching the hideous robotic spiders, musclegoats etc. slaughter each other in a 2.5D mosh abattoir totally succeeds at convincing me I should fear for the state of my immortal soul

[xunzilla]

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: it sucks that race science doesn't work

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: What do you mean by this.

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: think about it. if race science worked everything would be so much easier. evaluating competence would be a simple matter of breeding, and all men would be born into their rightful station

HAMPHECIUS HUMBUG: The sons of the tillers of earth would till, and the sons of the rulers of earth would rule... maximally efficient, with no more strife than between the lion and the ant...

ZEPHANIAH EZEKIEL THUD: Doesn't it devalue human intelligence to reduce it to that of the ant?

HAMPHECIUS HUMBUG: bro are you asking me if i want to #disrupt received wisdom to secure the bag. what do you think america is about

GIANLUCA D'BOVRIL: America is about the eugenic breeding of a transnational master race; look up what the founder of MIT said

[xunzilla]

Here's one for the 'post-doomer literature' files. Don't worry about which literature :-)

[xunzilla]

in 2024 the conservatives broke the civil rights era taboo on explicitly recognizing white identity in a major-party election. this passed without comment

[xunzilla]

that's at best a side effect of the process of figuring out how to make reproductively viable life paths that are meaningfully distinct from dying at 25-35 in a manner that aligns the various stakeholders, a set which includes forces that would really like for people to die to the world outside the office at 25-35, and does not in a relevant manner include the owners and operators of the individual lives in question

We're in a global memetic race to develop a secular breeding imperative

[xunzilla]

I'm not saying this doesn't go hard, I am listening to it on purpose, but that entire era of American culture where we got into music from Germany - where some of us learned German and went there - like, there's a cultural studies dissertation in that that I'll summarize (too flippantly) as "a response to Peak Rap for white people whose cultural inheritance included Enya"

Like how people looking for an alternative to rap got into German music when it was Kraftwerk and invented Detroit techno

[xunzilla]

conservatives often see government entitlements as a form of property, which we parody as like "get your government hands off my medicare" but are they wrong? if property rights are created by the government – which they are: patents, IP law, etc. – why should medicare be any different?

hence "welfare queens", a class of aristocrats that the working class both resents and disdains. resents because they're aristocrats and we don't hold with nobility, disdains because the proper values come from submission to authority. like you don't see middle managers having feuds