Why I am a redditor

Four short vignettes today:

Four short vignettes today:

1. Lindsey Graham

2. What if Biden won 2016?

3. Why Can I Still Buy Health Insurance?

4. Why I am a redditor

1. Lindsey Graham Was The Most Effective Political Operator Of The Past Decade

by Michael Tracey

Lindsey Graham’s death is the end of an era. He was the last of the old Bush-era neo-cons, who cemented the transition to Trumpism. I find it fascinating that the politician most closely aligned with Tracey’s views on Ukraine is JD Vance, and this gives him no pause.

Tracey uses the word “hegemonic” as if it is a slur. He seems to have been teleported straight from 1898, from a meeting of the American Anti-Imperialist League, to the present day.

I disagree with Tracey’s assessment that John McCain would have refused a war with Iran. I don’t know how McCain would have become president -- maybe if Bush died in 2003, and then McCain was nominated in 2004. But yes, a two-term McCain presidency probably would have started a war with Iran in 2007 and then tried to finish the job by 2012. Of course the global economic recession might have prevented him from continuing with that.

2. WHAT IF BIDEN WON IN 2016?

One of the counter-factuals I’ve been meaning to entertain has been a Biden presidency in 2016, which would then contain maximum chaos:

2017: January 6th Protests, and “Unite the Right” at Charlottesville, followed by massive internet censorship

2018: Successful Invasion of Ukraine by Russia, transgenders flashing on the White House lawn, economic downturn

2019: October 7th by Hamas, Epstein arrested and dead, #MeToo against Harvey Weinstein

2020: COVID and BLM, “the laptop from hell,” and mass economic chaos

The “Stop the Steal” effort would have begun in November 2016, with the loser Trump trying to cast doubt on Biden’s victory. A million patriots would mobilize at the capitol, leading to violence, mass arrests, and the occupation of the capitol by the national guard. Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, Milo Yiannopolous, and Gavin McKinnes would have been headline speakers that summer at Charlottesville, overshadowing people like Richard Spencer, Matt Heimbach, Matt Parrott, and Mike Enoch. Nick Fuentes, rather than being subjected to cancellation, probably would have risen much more quickly through the ranks of the conservative movement.

Trump then wins in 2020, defeating Biden. Operation WARP Speed begins in 2021, and doesn’t complete until 2022, so the lockdowns (and economic fallout) continue much longer. The success of Charlottesville as a mainstream conservative event means that Richard Spencer is never scapegoated for “hailgate” and continues his career in the alt-right. The optics war between TWP, TRS, and Dailystormer never occurs. The Syria Strike protest never occurs. Richard Spencer continues his campus tour throughout the Biden years. The alt-right / alt-lite split never occurs.

2021: The Trump administration launches investigations against Facebook, Twitter, and Google for internet censorship. Trump signs Ukraine over to Putin.

2022: Hamas is defeated, crime is down to historic lows, the COVID vaccine is rolled out. Elon Musk buys twitter.

2023: Charlie Kirk assassinated, Hunter Biden is arrested, the far right wins electoral victories in Germany and France

2024: Trump runs for his third nomination, and second term

2025: war with Iran, split between the alt-lite and alt-right, leading to fights between Proud Boys and Patriot Front

3. Why Can I Still Buy Health Insurance?

An exploration of the economics of insurance

by Nicholas Decker

Nicholas Decker takes a look at health insurance. This article not only made my head hurt, it also made my heart hurt. Thankfully, Nicholas acknowledges this, which made me feel better.

He looks at the data, and finds that consumers make bad decisions when they are allowed to choose between health insurance plans. “Why is this the case? It seems that people really hate paperwork, and they really hate thinking about health insurance. They really hate this.”

I am hoping that AI will be helpful in this regard. One should copy and paste a bunch of health insurance plans into ChatGPT, income and health risks, and have AI figure out which plan is best. The only risk is an exposure of medical privacy, but I do not believe in medical privacy.

I recently lost a testicle, which I think is the most embarrassing thing which can happen to a man without being obvious. If my face was mangled in some way that might be even worse, but there would be nothing “private” about that. Losing a testicle is the most “private” loss I can think of (forgive the pun). If you can think of something even more “private” let me know in the comments.

Yet despite being easily able to hide this loss, and being embarrassed by it, I choose to share the information with the world. Why? First of all, I am a strong believer that privately held secrets always have a cost. This is why I am so insistent that we treat perverts like Swalwell and Platner with less harshness, because it creates a veil of suspicion. Ideally, we send criminals to jail promptly -- or at least provide them the right to trial -- within a few months of their offense. Hanging crimes over someone’s head, years after the fact, does not make for an open and honest society. It encourages “victims” to keep things to themselves, hoping that, like a blackmailer, they can release incriminating information at a time when it will cause the most possible damage. It encourages men to view women with paranoia and resentment, suspecting every potential date as a potential future character-assassin. This breeding of hatred, resentment, and paranoia is good for no one -- it certainly does not prevent sex crimes, but rather hurts both genders by reducing the rate at which men approach and pair-bond with women.

Rather than having a secretive society in which we expect no one to make mistakes, I would rather we be honest and forgiving. Some men have a drinking problem -- this is not ideal, and I choose not to drink or do drugs, but it is not an unforgivable sin. Rather than hang this over someone’s head and define them forever by this bad trait, it would be good to move on, after a certain number of years have passed. If no charges were ever filed, I believe in a five-year amnesty. If you couldn’t be bothered to go to the police for five years, all is annulled, as far as I am concerned. Of course there are some crimes against the state (murder, theft, treason) which must be regarded differently. But crimes of a sexual or romantic nature are deeply personal, subjective, and therefore require a speedier trial than this “death by media time-bomb” that is now being openly advocated for by both parties.

I’ve gotten off topic, but I think it is tangentially related: although I am in favor of more forgiveness, I am also in favor of less privacy. There is no reason why a medical company should be expected not to share your healthcare data. Most consumers don’t care, and in fact, they would benefit from the advancement of science as data becomes more free and open. This is an area, like copyright law, where the interests of a few should not take precedent over the good of the whole. If anything, women who gossip about their ex-boyfriends deserve to be jailed, while healthcare companies which share cancer data should be praised. One destroys the public trust for the interest of the few, while the other ignores private interests for the good of the many.

While I cannot honestly say that I read Decker’s article with a fine comb, I have to complain that many of his paragraphs are unfinished. They end as follows, with no periods:

“one will pay”

“back up to an H plan”

“lower premiums for old customers. The”

I am a paying subscriber, so I have the right to complain. People say I do not edit, and to be fair, I do very little research or mathematics, so perhaps my task is easier. But it is demoralizing if, while trying to do the hard work of learning economics, I am met with unfinished sentences. This can be solved with an AI proofreader.

4. What Made The Sopranos Great

Are we all just LARPing?

by Richard Hanania

I’m reading this offline, so I’m left on a cliffhanger -- the email is too long to appear fully in my inbox, so I don’t get to know the ending. Still, I’d like to make a word on spoilers.

I’ve only watched one episode of the Sopranos. I enjoyed reading this article on the Sopranos, although I don’t plan to watch more. For me, I have a quasi-fanatical quasi-nihilistic attitude toward entertainment. If it’s not a “great work,” I’m not interested -- and yet, you’ll find me consuming AI slop, given the chance, as a guilty pleasure. Why?

Morally, I think that all my time should be occupied with greatness. Plato, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, forcing myself, through sheer discipline, to enjoy philosophy. Then, when I’ve had enough, I can relax with a bit of politics. Finally, for recreation, I can go to the gym.

This is my moralism -- the moralism of discipline. Yet if you accurately examined my life, you’d find hours upon hours wasted, not on the Sopranos, but on an individuated erotic cavern. I have cut myself off from this for the last two weeks, so I haven’t been thinking about it lately until now.

I had a reader once message me and tell me to never use AI, since he used it for his “particularly specific erotic fetishes.” I thought this was terrible reasoning. AI is a tool; like any tool, it can be used for good or evil. I especially resented his self description of being an “Addict,” the “victim” of a “disease.” This modern therapy-speak is just used to justify one’s self, although it really has deeper roots in Christianity, which sees sin as a “disease.”

In reality, we want to do what we do, even if we feel conflicted about it, otherwise, we wouldn’t do it. The first step to changing this state of affairs is to be honest. However depraved any individual might feel himself to be, his “evils” are rarely rare. Meaning: most “sins” are commonplace.

What differentiates me from the masses of humanity is that I am a Redditor. This is a joke, of course, and a self-aware one. Redditors are common, and yet, their distinguishing characteristic is that they think themselves to be unique. By the time I was 14, I was reading of Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Carl Sagan. This was all the way back in 2010, when Reddit was really just getting started. Fedora memes were just being invented. I was watching, with rapt attention, atheist vs Christian debates on youtube. The spirit of Voltaire was within me, a few hundred years too late.

What began as a very obscure and rare way of thinking, in the time of Spinoza, eventually became a mass and popular phenomenon, as the funeral of Voltaire was attended by many. Here we are now, in 2026, and there’s a NEET on food stamps in Alabama talking about “stupid Christians.” There’s always a smaller fish.

When we refer to Redditors, we’re referring to a group of people who are perhaps a standard deviation smarter than their surrounding family or peers, but who get stuck in a “midwit resentment” of those just barely below them, without really stretching their sights to higher goals. The Alabama Republican is loveable: he’s an auto mechanic, or a plumber, or even a retail worker. He does something useful, or he tries. He watches History Channel Documentaries on Sasquatch. He reads the Bible, sometimes. Instead of going to church, he watches the sermon “virtually.” He believes in Qanon, and many other conspiracy theories. He likes shooting guns. He drinks beer, and eats pizza. He is overweight, but since his doctor told him he is pre-diabetic, he’s trying to lay off the sweets. He is a human, but even if he was an animal, he’s an inoffensive and sympathetic animal.

The Redditor, however, is something perverse. His skills are purely white collar -- perhaps he’s a computer programmer, or an IT professional, barely proficient, and he will probably be replaced faster by AI than the blue collar worker. He’s a nerd. He plays dungeons and dragons. He likes Nietzsche, and describes himself as a socialist. He thinks of himself as a nihilist, and also either thinks: A. misgendering transpeople is evil; B. trans people are why the west has fallen.

Above all, the Redditor is defined by his lack of empathy and his shallow superiority complex, which stands alongside his inferiority complex. He is not sexually successful, athletically gifted, or musical, or theatrically talented, or handsome, or loved, or loving. He is simply slightly above average in intelligence, and this attribute alone takes upon the concentrated weight of his bloated ego.

It is this archetype that I fear I fall into when I refuse to watch the Sopranos, because, “I should be reading philosophy, or something,” and yet, for so much of my life, I’ve just been reading some obscure forum, or reading hentai, or playing a woodcutting simulator.

I think that I was raised to be this way. This isn’t an attitude exclusive to Jews, and I think it just as quickly can be taken up by gentiles of all stripes, but it seems to be common among all those who were bullied in high school. Although I was not bullied much, and actually ended up doing more bullying, I did have many friends who were nerds and who, under different circumstances, would have received wedgies and been called faggots. We were self-aware “Weird kids.” Some of us were closeted homosexuals, or half Jews, or Buddhists, or Redditors. Some of us were looking up gore videos on 4chan; some of us were reading incest hentai; some of us were getting into race realism; some of us were getting into communism. All of this came from a feeling of alienation from the “ugly American,” because, in the words of Green Day, “I don’t wanna be an American idiot.”

The defining characteristic of the Redditor is a desire to be superior to the mass man, and since the Sopranos is a popular show, it’s off limits. TV rots your brain, that TV is for the masses, that men of culture watch anime, or read hentai, or browse 4chan. That’s for the “normies.” This was reinforced through the alt-right, which taught me that TV is “Jewish degeneracy,” a psy-op to demoralize the Aryan race. If you’re a communist, TV is part of the culture of the authoritarian personality, providing distractions from the evils of capitalism, the opiate of the masses in a secular age.

I am bigoted and prejudiced in a specific and decidedly anti-social way. This is why I find Hitler appealing as a teenager -- he helped justify (morally) my anti-social tendencies. The problem isn’t that I’m alienated from others -- the problem is that the masses are evil, and I’m the only one who is “woke” to the truth.

I wonder if I’m the only person who has ever realized these things, but that is another Reddit-brained idea. Of course anti-social people sometimes see the folly of their ways and decide to change. Hanania is self-admittedly someone who went from being quite anti-social to being a celebrated and popular author.

Some of this might be hormonal and age related. Young men seem to have, as a survival strategy, a desire to be disagreeable. Being a pushover, or weak, is the worst possible thing. It’s better to be an anti-social asshole than an agreeable weakling. As we age, and socially integrate (degree, job, girlfriend, marriage) the fear of being perceived as weak decreases, so agreeableness isn’t as threatening. Hanania has spoken about this regarding Islamic radicalism -- if you give jihadis girlfriends, they stop being jihadis.

I can say that from 2018 to 2023 I did become less radical, and that was probably in part due to the fact that I had a long-term relationship and a career. If I remained totally alone and unemployed my thoughts may have crystallized on the side of nihilistic terrorism, as seems to be the attitude of those cheering on Hamas and Putin. At the same time, I think disagreeableness is valuable, since social conformism rarely aids the scientific process. I believe that the proper balance is to be honest about one’s disagreeableness through humility and psychoanalysis. So long as I am self-aware about being a Redditor, I think this restrains me from going too far. It’s when I “drink my own Kool-Aid” and have no inner critique that I genuinely lose the plot.

[There is a parallel to be found between political radicalization and pornographic fetishism, leading from moderate to more extreme fantasies, but I will have to address that question another time.]