This is the best article I have read in a long time, so in some sense I am reticent to nitpick, but I feel that what you have explained here is really 'why I will vote for the Left with a clear conscience'. But Richard Hananiah is 55-45 for Trump and if something changes he might swing the other way, and no-one would then conclude he was on the Left.
But I also think I have put my finger on the real problem. It's not just that 95%+ of the Left would hear your views and be repulsed (though perhaps you underestimate this somewhat) it's that they would have no idea at all what you are on about. To even follow your argument you have to have spent a few years reading dissident right material so de facto, you are a splinter group faction of the dissident right, whether you want it or not.
This sort of describes my own mindset. When I realized that my views would cause a normal person to immediately identify me as "right wing," I stopped coping and trying to pretend that I was anything else. But I also think the author's position of self-determination has a lot of merit to it. If you explicitly want the left to win and the right to lose, that seems like a pretty fair indicator that you're on the left, even if the average person wouldn't consider most of your policy views to be left-wing.
Also not sure if it's really true that the average leftard wouldn't recognize anything the author is talking about, or that they'd be repulsed by his views overall. In this article he talks a lot about abortion, Jan 6, and supporting Ukraine. Pretty sure your garden-variety libtard would identity with all of that quite readily.
Ukraine: he justifies this as the need to expand the American empire
Jan 6: He justifies this as White people being more dangerous that blacks because of their greater competence, and also because the lower orders should be subordinate to the elites.
Abortion: he justifies this as having eugenic effects, although there is also the pro choice aspect
I genuinely think that not only the average lib, but even thoughtful libs would just be completely confused by all this. You can say it accurately captures something deep in the liberal id, but a liberal would have to be exceptionally self aware and introspecting to recognize this. One way of looking at this is that DLA has accepted Moldbug's basic analysis of geopolitics and has decided to pick the winning team, but the whole point of the Cathedral is that libs don't understand they are the winning team.
A comparison might be made here with Richard Spencer. He too is pro Ukraine, pro choice, and anti Jan 6th. He explicitly wants the Left to win elections. No-one would say he is on the Left though. Maybe DLA can get away with this because he wasn't filmed saying Heil Trump, but for those of us who know, we know.
I think the reason Spencer is not a leftist because he worships the "God" Apollo, supports Apollonian eugenics, believes in Aryan supremacy, believes that Plato was controlled / influenced by proto-Jews, believed that Pythagoras was a proto-Jew, believes that quantum mechanics is fake Jewish science, etc etc. As you argued, antisemitism is only found on the right, therefore, Spencer is on the right. On the other hand, I am a Platonist, think (as an amateur non-physicist who has spoken to people good at math) quantum physics has explanatory power, and think Pythagoras was cool, whatever his genetic background.
You're much more up to date than me on Richard Spencer's views, which is perhaps my point. This is your world, you can try to escape, and maybe you'll succeed, but you're not there yet.
I think your best critique is that I am writing reactively or in response to the dissident right, rather than addressing some other intended audience. I think this is because of fundamental personality traits: disagreeableness, low intuitive empathy, individualism, low disgust, internet upbringing. I was confronted with internet neo-naziism at the age of 12, and created a blog arguing with conservatives on the internet.
I am not trying to "escape it," but stating my views honestly. If I wanted to escape the dissident right, I would avoid politics entirely. I seek to confront, not to escape.
I don't want the dissident right (Rogan, Tucker, Vance) to win. There are many atheists on Youtube who make hundreds of videos about how Christianity is bad and wrong. You could say "you're so up to date on fundamentalists. That is your world you are trying to escape." Maybe you'd have a point.
I am deeply upset and hurt when I see people calling me and others slurs, advocating for Russia and China, and promoting theocracy. Perhaps I should have thicker skin and let it go and "move on." Politics is my "astrological" project. Maybe I should just get a job as an accountant, then no one could accuse me of being dissident right anymore!
" think this is because of fundamental personality traits: disagreeableness, low intuitive empathy, individualism, low disgust, internet upbringing."
Which are the definitive traits of the smarter parts of the online Right.
In all seriousness, though, you have a great blog, both entertaining and informative and you really deserve the success you are having in building an audience. I remember before the podcast that I googled you and there were videos where you sounded really bummed out, so I'm glad that you are getting the recognition you deserve.
P.S. I think if you got a normie corporate job again and had to deal with DEI training on a regular basis, you might become a bit more sympathetic to rightoids than you are now, but I hope this doesn't happen.
I dunno. His reasons for supporting abortion, considering Republicans a threat, etc., seem like pretty standard leftoid reasons. Libtards might want to cancel him for daring to speak with right wingers at all, but I'm not sure if they'd want to based on his actual policy views.
I don't think that's true at all. The author is pretty clear in saying that he opposes forced eugenics but he doesn't mind it occurring naturally as the result of people's freely made reproductive choices. I feel confident that leftoids would heartily agree with that sentiment. They tend to be pretty friendly to anti-natalism so long as you don't make it about race.
I think 95% of people in general have no clue what I'm talking about, so this doesn't bother me too much! But I understand where you're coming from. I think it would be better if I could make my content a little more "accessible" to people, without needing to read 5+ years of content in advance. I think this supports the common criticism that my writing is "unstructured" -- it all makes sense in my head, and if you're good at mind reading, you can grok it, but otherwise there's a high barrier to entry. That's why I'm trying to do more dialogues with random people, so I can get better at explaining myself to the "man on the street."
OK, I will agree, if you achieve this, you will have earned the right to describe yourself as a normie lib, but, as it stands, you are still a disaffected dissident rightist.
I have never desired to describe myself as a normie lib. If you want to call me dissident right I can't stop you, but you are not using my preferred pronouns.
He is a neocon in all but name and should just proclaim himself as such. Most 8000 word essays on substack other than actual philosophical or historical studies are just intellectual masturbation really. He’s partially correct about that though didn’t describe it in those terms. Hanania is also a neocon along with Spencer (at least on foreign policy and disdain for the interests of average Americans aka ‘proles.’). Most people ( including Ken here) base many views on their feelings, their deep rooted convictions often shaped by their ethnicity, culture, class, and personal experiences and observations. Ken hates Russians like all neocons out of deep-rooted ethnic grudges possibly and supports Israel for similar reasons. There’s nothing wrong with this at all. It’s very human and natural to love that which is part of your identity and hate what you perceive a threat or heard your grandparents complaining about. Jews too have always hated and feared peasants (sometimes with justification as pogroms could be very nasty affairs).
Getting to ‘left’ and ‘right.’ These are illusory divisions within the existing system. While there are disputes between the two political wings of the establishment there is much more of a consensus on important issues (economics, foreign policy, immigration) at top levels. Democrats and Republicans are two subsidiaries within the same corporation. We are ruled by the dictatorship of the center ( the so-called spectrum from center-left to center-right). Parties or individuals outside this paradigm are usually condemned as ‘extremist’ or radical, as the establishment legacy media condemned Trump as such for the past decade.
This is so wrong. Jews who harbour ethnic grievances hate UKRAINIANS. I was once in a Jerusalem supermarket and an old guy with faltering vision asked me to check a packet of something to ensure it wasn't made in Ukraine. This is probably part of the reason why Israel was and still is one of the least overtly pro-Ukraine western countries despite obvious geopolitical pressures pushing them into taking a pro Ukraine stance.
Note here I am talking about Jewish neocons and their wacko Likudnik allies in Israel not ‘all Jews.’ Goy neocons are just as repulsive with their non-stop warmongering for ‘democracy’ their own offspring will never be fighting on the front lines for. That’s for ‘proles’ in flyover country.
Yes, you’re right. The real target is Russia though. Ukrainians are pawns who will be discarded when no longer useful. Jewish neocons in particular hate three groups in particular ( not necessarily in order); Slavs, Arabs, Germans. The Kristols, Podhoretzes, Abrams, Kagans, Nulands, etc don’t give a shit about Ukrainians one way or the other, nor Poles, Balts, etc. Let us be brutally frank here.
Wrong. Watch and listen to these people. Read their publications like Commentary magazine. It’s all out in the open. Nothing hidden or conspiratorial about it.
Your Article: "Here is a thorough explanation of why I am on one particular side, even though a bunch of people are trying to claim I belong on the other side based on my interests, temperament, and behavior. Being on a team is not about belonging."
This Comment Section: "You belong on the other side."
> But my most silly and secret dream is that I will someday be Aristotle to Alexander.
You've said the supposedly quiet part out loud. My guess is that this is what motivates a lot of earnest political writers. This is the number one temptation I fight when I write. My goal now (or at least for the current book I'm writing) is to help the reader operate better in the world by providing more useful maps of reality. It's a bit cringe that I'm ultimately writing a self-help book. But I feel this is more sensible than trying to change the world (I would not be writing if this were my goal). This has required me to try to be above it all, but I ended up with a different understanding of this than what you describe here. Girard's "an atheist in politics" has been the articulation that most resonated with me.
The Tim Pool joke reminded me a post I read time ago aimed to trolling multipolartards:
"Persia represents the imperial vision. Salvation can only come from the East. The West, represented by Athens, is nothing but decadence. Modern philosophical thought, the democratic ideal, pederasty and effeminacy are the diseased fruits of this Athenian West that must be eradicated. Only Persia can save us. We must pledge absolute allegiance to it and free ourselves from the chains of our ancestral identity.
The Spartans are not heroes, they are traitors. If they were true patriots, they would have taken up arms against Athens and allied themselves with Persia to save Greece. They must be hunted and exterminated like rats.”"
Something I began to suspect as I thought more about Moldbug's idea about the left believing in certain things because those things make them powerful is how that could apply to the right as well. I think as evidenced by your article here a lot of positions on the right are made simply to rile people up, make people feel better about themselves, and allow them to force other people to do things they feel good about.
Success as its own justification, aka realism and pragmatism, has been a core system feature of liberalism since Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hegel, Mill... Becoming a power-worshipper is an occupational hazard of leftism, as seen in the case of György Lukács, who eventually and willingly castrated his intellect for the benefit of terrorist goons. Since realism can be weaponized against the left -- see Hobbes's authoritarian response against the "democraticals" and "enthusiasts" that composed the progressives of his era -- usually a liberal will add something else to loosen up the doctrine to prevent it from becoming a Borg cube, such as a story about plurality or rights. I like Weber's modernist attempt to square realism with honesty, combining an acknowledgment that politics does not have a rational basis with an ethos of professionalism and responsibility. His idea is that one should act knowingly of the dilemmas and paradoxes of politics and take ownership of consequences as a condition that makes participatory politics, along with truth-telling, possible. Otherwise, we're taking orders from people like Posobeic, Tucker, Trump, and Putin, who aren't even liars -- they are bullshitters in Harry Frankfurt's sense, indifferent to the truth or falsity of what they say.
The conflict between conservatism and liberalism directly mirrors the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism over the past five hundred years. Conflicts like the War of Spanish Succession, the Thirty Years' War, the War of Austrian Succession, etc. don't make sense without this wider context, and philosophically, the arguments on the respective sides remain the same, just variations on a few themes. And just as conservatism has a habit of being yesterday's liberalism, Catholicism likes to present itself as eternally true as if it wasn't the Protestantism of its own time when it broke away from Orthodoxy.
I am a radical libertarian but I am enjoying your articles. I believe that for us all to get along and achieve the most (subjective) want satisfaction provided by markets (i.e., the best and most workable long-term policy), we need a modus vivendi based on liberty for all: a libertarian regime that minimizes constraints imposed by others as much as possible and respects person and property. In the absence of this we get “…growing discontent with the state…from its inherent incapacity to simultaneously satisfy non-identical individuals.”
I disagree here and there but “being Aristotle to Alexander” is too good not to like this.
Regarding this: “Even if the end goal was centrism, the most effective way to reach centrism is not through centrism, but by providing a counter-balance to the prevailing winds”, remember that you pathologically want to tell the truth.
A final comment: working in a civil service bureaucracy while you keep blogging could be practical and instructive. Perhaps you would have to avoid some provocations, but if you are able to sacrifice your centrism for influence in the left, why not some useful moderation on your expression? Plato was the creator of the theory of the Noble Lie, and probably Aristotle would agree…
I tell the truth, but pushing hard for my values sometimes means pushing farther than is reasonable. Moral "overvaluation" is not deception in my opinion.
Given the complexity and length of your posts, I recommend Hume level equanimity. Pushing is more for memetic footsoldiers. But of course, this is my preference, probably not yours :-)
I do not want any violent criminals running around! I will have to write an article eventually to address this -- i'm writing as fast as possible and publishing 1000s of words a day!
I considered the possibility you might prefer to shoot them, but dispatching with criminal justice suggests a certain lack of rigor in determining who’s shot. Curious to read your take.
I'm against the concept of "justice as revenge," as a leveling of scales, as a "righting of wrongs." I think we should protect people from recidivism, but punishing criminals is not justice in my book. I'm against the death penalty unless someone believes they deserve the death penalty. In that case, I don't think the state should deny their request.
The main upside of prison is incapacitation — i.e., not having a bunch of violent criminals running around. The main upside of criminal justice is right there in the name. Both are distinct from revenge and it’s hard to imagine a repudiation of public safety, or justice, that wouldn’t be morally depraved. But then, you do say you’re on the left.
(by “justice” i do mean something like fairness/reciprocity, but also procedural insurance against getting the wrong guy. and “getting” the robber or rapist is indeed something a desirable society attempts, though maybe not a leftist one)
>My ability to look at politics as a question of results rather than as a “source of love and companionship” seems incomprehensible to most people. I understand that most people see politics as a form of sports.
Everyone likes to whittle big complex issues down to an anecdotal friend-enemy distinction: are you pro-Rittenhouse, or do you think he should have been killed by antifa instead?<
I would say this is what you're doing when you focus on being of the left because the right is so bad/evil/stupid/etc. and draw up caricatures that many right-wingers would call out as strawmen, such as wanting to ban evolution or put women into forced marriages. Cheering for your team to hurt the bad people is the very essence of politics as a sport. Rising above that means staying focused on policy and principles and not indulging in terror fantasies about how the fundies are going to enact the Handmaid's Tale or how the libtards are going to enact 1984. If you're going to make this sort of thing fundamental to your politics, then you shouldn't claim to be above grug-brained friend-enemy style thinking. At best you're just putting yourself on the right side of that bell curve meme and saying that the low IQ thought process is actually correct.
>I have attempted, several times, to explain that while Civil Rights is a deeply flawed civil religion, at least it’s an ethos! Multi-racial white nationalism, or Judeo-Hindu-Christian values, or Duginist “multi-polarity” are all entirely incoherent and negative. They are anti-Atlanticist, anti-NATO, anti-western, anti-liberal, anti-academic, anti-intellectual, anti-woke, anti-left, anti-establishment, and anti-elite. They do not have a positive vision of the world.<
I disagree. Christianity is a positive vision of the world, and it has been proven as such through the trials of time and history. It has guided people's lives for millennia and continues to guide the lives of hundreds of millions today. I can seek guidance from it in every aspect of my life, from the highest most abstract questions about the meaning of my life down to the little details like how I should treat my co-workers at my job. It has real institutions full of real people that I can participate in and receive this guidance from.
Leftism doesn't have anything like this. "Civil Rights" was not sold as or meant to be a replacement for religion. When people try to use it that way anyways, when they try to view every single aspect of life through the lens of racial grievance, the result is wokeshit. This is not a positive vision of the world, or if it is, it's a really narrow and stupid one. It doesn't tell you to build your life *for* certain things, it only tells you to be *against* things like racism, sexism, etc.
And the same is certainly true of online rightoidism, which is chiefly concerned with being against wokeshit. Neither of these are a holistic ethos, but actual religion is, and leftism in its current form is incompatible with it. An intellectually honest accounting of leftism/liberalism would be to say to people, actually you don't need a guiding ethos, an over-arching guiding ethos is bad because it limits your thinking and places arbitrary constraints on your liberty, you're an individual so just figure it out for yourself as long as everyone consents.
I don't think my characterizations are caricatures. I also don't think that Handmaiden's tale is likely -- that seems like a caricature of my position. I can oppose fundies while still thinking they are likely failures. I agree that Christianity could be an ethos, but most of the right is not actually Christian, they are a mix of agnostic Nietzschean Darwinists. Civil Rights is extremely similar to Christianity in a number of ways -- other have argued this better than me, but to explain it myself would take some time. I disagree that "honest leftism" means "figure it out for yourself." That's not how academia operates.
You have a section called "worst case scenario" where you say this:
>Commenters object to my vision of these “nightmare” scenarios, stating that apocalypse is so unlikely that it is not worth thinking about. Most right-wingers are not white nationalists, they tell me. Be that as it may, politics isn’t driven by moderate majorities, but by motivated minorities.<
This is how libtards are operating when they freak out about Project 2025 and the fear that Trump will somehow pass a national abortion ban, or for rightoids when they say this is the last election because the Democrats are going to do this that and the other thing. If you don't think it's a caricature to say that right wingers want to ban evolution and put 16 year olds in forced marriages, then meh, we'll have to agree to disagree on that.
While there are certainly similarities between Civil Rights and Christianity if you look for them, this does not mean that they are of the same kind. There is no church of Civil Rights that I can go to every week and raise my family in. I understand that this may seem unimportant if you're young, single, and not thinking about raising a family anytime soon. But it's of paramount importance when we are talking about a guiding ethos, because people are imprinted with those values in their formative years when they are young.
Teaching my kids to worship Civil Rights as the center of their worldview doesn't give them any kind of coherent game plan for their life, and to the extent that it gives them a lens through which to view their interactions with the world, that lens is extremely narrow and retarded.
I'm not asking you to personally teach your kids that MLK is God -- I'm saying that opposing Civil Rights actively (reactively) is not a solution to anything.
I'm an abolish prisons guy, but that's from the perspective of executing the irredeemable and grueling community service (or for repeat offenders, a public flogging) for lesser crimes.
What punishment/discipline matrix are you replacing prison with?
I actually don't believe that punishment / discipline works well for "blue collar crime," but for white collar crime I just believe in fines, taxes, "alimony." For most crime, I think we should create "cities of refuge" where people can live. If they cause too much trouble for that to work, they will have 60 days to secure a "voluntary deportation" to another country, after which they will be forcibly deported and subject to the laws of their new country. Take the billions we spend on prisons and spending it on cities of refuge and deportation agreements with other countries.
I'm not in favor of murdering people outside of war. Making the positive case to explain why war is the exception might be complicated -- but leaving that aside, I just think killing people is generally a bad idea. However, if someone believes they deserve the death penalty, I don't think the state should deny their request.
"But if NATO dedicates 5% of federal budgets to Ukraine, the war would be over in a matter of 6 months."
Pardon me for ignoring the rest of the article, but this particular point is bs.
Military industry is a question of putting enough coins in the slot machine and fighter jets coming out.
It's a question of production capacity, of supply lines. If you want to double the production of tanks, maybe you can find the extra workers and once again work two shifts in your nations single tank factory like you did during the cold war.
If you want to 10x tanks, you need to set up new factories, train way more technical specialists than your currently have.
You can't just overnight convert factories producing Ford Mustanga into factories producing M1A3 Abrams like during WW2. Both products require different specialised machine tools and engineers.
All that is to say, industrial military buildup takes time. Had NATO started the level of military investment you suggested in February 2022, maybe we'd start seeing some serious result right now, but not within the same year.
Ok serious response: NATO has stockpiles of existing planes, bombs, guns, tanks etc. These can simply be "sold" to the Ukrainians ("loaned") while the reserves are slowly replenished. If the idea was only to give Ukrainians brand new stuff, then your argument would apply. I understand that replenishing reserves takes time.
Munitions expire pretty quickly, unlike the Russians we tend to scrap most munitions after 20 years. Most munitions being delivered now are new production or bought from the Koreans.
Planes there's not enough training capacity to transfer quickly, which you might have known if you've followed the news on F-16 transfers.
Our old Leopard 1 tanks have been transferred, only Turkey and Greece still have inventories far larger than what they need for their own operational readiness but they rather keep aiming that at each other.
Doing a deep dive with sources showing how much we have vs how much we have given of everything would be a whole article rather than a comment. I am confident that we have not given 100% of what we have. I am also confident that by making the 5% commitment, Russia would face insurmountable odds and be forced to make peace, as Germany was in 1918, even though it was not the subject of an invasion and theoretically could have fought on for 6 months.
Yes, if we devote enough resources we can supply Ukraine with enough material to defeat the russian army in a conventional war, though probably no earlier than 2026/27 assuming every NATO nation immediately starts spending like Poland.
Of course, Russia could still resort to nuclear escalation of sorts. Perhaps not to destroy Ukraine but force a settlement along lines of control.
Regarding deep dives into military stockpiles and production, I get a large part of my information from a defense economics YouTuber by the name of Perun.
You may know him already but if not I'll suspect you'll find him credible.
My argument isn't that we'd actually have to defeat Russia, but that Russia would back down in the face of overwhelming odds. Currently I believe Putin is banking on the idea that anti-war forces will restrict NATO's actions sufficiently for him to pull off a victory in a war of attrition. If that possibility was negated, I think he would simply give up.
I think Putin would prefer a negotiated loss (where he keeps his troops, equipment, and economy intact) over a forced loss (where he loses his troops, equipment, and economy, possibly also the government is toppled by radicals like Prigozhin).
Nuclear escalation is theoretically possible, but I give it a <1% chance so long as NATO troops never enter Russia.
Much of what exists in reserve is to deter or maintain an aggressive posture in both the pacific and middle eastern theaters. An example is ATACMs - these drew a lot of hype for being a destructive weapon when used by Ukraine, but those flashy attacks have significantly depleted the available stock without stopping the Russians.
It took one and a half years to get some two dozen pilots flying a squadron of f-16's.
Yes there's plenty more F-16's, Mirage-2000's, Tornado's, Gripen, F-15C's, but not enough pilot training capacity to train Ukrainians quickly enough to get them an air force on par with the Russians in say 2025.
It is true that training takes time, however some of the advanced missile systems and missile defense systems are much quicker to train and would be decisive. My point isn't that Ukraine would be marching on Moscow in 6 months, but that the odds would be so lopsided that the Russians would be forced to cut their losses. I am assuming that the Russians are rational, like Germans in 1918, rather than Nazis in 1945.
I think you could avoid most of these arguments by just picking a different pseudonym. Without even a name, it's inevitable that people click through to your blog expecting the usual stuff identified as leftism. When they're faced with some unique mashup philosophy it's inevitable they ask, "wait, is this really a left wing analysis?" because that's how it was advertised. Pick a different name and all that distraction will go away.
My intention is to clearly differentiate myself from the right and convert people to the left. Avoiding the left/right dichotomy, as you suggest, is tantamount to centrism, which as I argue in this article, is unproductive and useless.
An ideal world; multipolar, diverse cultures, nations, peoples, civilizational states in a post-liberal order. America defanged and one of many regional powers; decentralized, and non-interventionist. An independent Europe with a renewed identity and confidence, no longer dominated by the United States and led by a German-Russian-French partnership. Russia a strong regional power within its sphere of influence (FSU). China rising in East Asia but countered by Japan, SK, Taiwan, India in a balance of power. Israel cut down to size on the Middle East and living perhaps in uneasy coexistence with its neighbors after withdrawal of the United States from the region.
Semyon McNalensky, there is no partnership with the Russian Empire, only subjection. When the Mongols pushed West, the cities that resisted, like Chernigov and Kiev, were destroyed. Muscovy, in contrast, decided to pay tribute, squeezing its population for gold and slaves, and that has conditioned the nature of the Russian state ever since.
Russia is the ultimate Affirmative Action state. Like all empires, it is by definition multicultural and spreads like cancer, powering itself in a Jouvenelian manner by with a high mobilizing a low against the middle. On Russian TV, you'll see the Armenian lady Simonyan and the Jew Solovyov; in government, people like the Tuvan Shoigu and the Chechen Kadyrov. Nothing works, and everything sucks because people only get positions based on patronage, not merit. Today in Ukraine, Russia, a true friend of white people, is exterminating whites and flooding its new territories with Asiatic peoples. They want us to be meat so their elites can live magical fairy-tale lives. They are not Protestants. They don't use wealth to build wealth but for status -- wealth is like glitter to them. And again, the Russian state always likes making minorities do its dirty work -- they make good buffers and good scapegoats.
The Russian World is not a magical, happy place. They make it mandatory to quietly accept suffering, ignorance, misery, poverty, subjection, and death, as recommended by Orthodox teaching.
The world of prosperity, nationalism, and confidence is a product of the United States having eleven aircraft carrier strike groups securing the planet's oceans. Take that away, and global commerce will decline, and we'll see more regional empires behaving according to mercantilist principles based on permanent war, with periodic breathing intervals, which was the norm before Pax Americana. This is inevitable, but we can undertake change and set up the next round of history on our terms, or we can passively undergo change and let China and its proxies (Russia) drive instead.
Ukraine is Russia. Kiev is the cradle of Russia. Nothing going on in Donbas affects American national interests or is worth risking a war over. Our war is at home and against the ruling political and business elites of GAE. Partisans for Ukraine should frankly move their asses over there and place their own lives on the line for their beloved little NATO protectorate instead of encouraging young American and European men to die for the likes of Zelensky.
Look buddy, I'm from Chicago. There was an old superfans sketch on SNL where it was asked, "Who would win? Mike Ditka? Or God?" "That's a trick question, Bahb. Mike Ditka is God." Mike Ditka is a Ukrainian from a Pennsylvania steel town. There is a reason why he is worshipped here that goes beyond the Superbowl.
You can run Kremlin talking points on historically illiterate hillbillies with no connection to the old country, but it isn't going to work here. Every other person in the industrial Midwest is connected to Eastern Europe in some way. Senator Durbin is Lithuanian on his mother's side. Governor Pritzker's family? Ukrainian Jews from Kiev. Myself? Lithuanian on my Dad's mother's side. It isn't like Russia is a mystery to us. And supporting NATO isn't an act of charity since we are the same people. You wanted people to support things based on identity? Ask, and ye shall receive.
I really wouldn’t boast too much about being from Chicago. It’s not a garden spot. No one in the post-industrial Midwest aka rust belt want their siblings, friends, or kids dying for the EU and the scum running the United States. Military enlistments their lowest levels ever. NATO is a useless boondoggle that only exists to keep Germany in particular in permanent vassalage to the United States. As an overweight middle aged man beyond conscription age you should think of younger people in your family and region. Imagine dying to keep the Zelensky regime in power!
Nope, polling is consistently against direct military intervention or giving the Zelensky regime hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in their futile war.
As a matter of fact, I'm up at 530 AM on a Saturday morning to go to the gym. You are up at the same time to post about Dugin, AfD, spread low-information talking-points about Ukraine, and cluelessly repeat famous lines from bad tv shows, because that's what real Americans do. Thanks for the comedy.
Again Ivan, for reasons explained above, Russia sucks at everything, including war. They lost to the Japanese in 1905, the Poles in 1920, and the Finns in 1939. And today, they're struggling against poorly armed watermelon farmers. All we have to do is spend a small amount of money, and the Russians will quietly and obediently suicide themselves in meat assaults. Easy solution. We just need to make sure everyone on Team Europe is properly armed so Russia doesn't win by attrition.
There is no risk of them doing any damage to America in war. Their only skill set is dominating the information space, which is necessary to rule a multicultural empire, and they've had centuries of practice at it. The benefit is keeping them out of Europe and preventing them from mass murdering white people. I've seen the stuff they're saying about Poland and the Baltic states on Russian TV.
Your proposed solution already occurred. America already spent the bare minimum giving Ukraine old Cold War munitions. Now that stock has dried up and Russia is still advancing, and continuing to stop them will become expensive.
You’re old and fat, bro. Your life won’t be on the line in any war unless it went nuclear. Ukrainians are Russians so are slamming your own people at least by ancestry anyway.
America is already damaged and in terminal decline regardless whatever happens in Eastern Europe.
Russia must be doing something right as they’ve survived all those wars and conquests and are resisting the GAE.
There are multifaceted components to favelas. One part is unrestrained population growth which could occur under natalism (noting that no top down natalist policies have succeeded at raising birth rates outside of communist Romania). Another part is the social and legal promotion of criminals. Rightoids think lizard people rule the world. Leftoids worship George Floyd as a martyr. Black crime is an inescapable part of what makes Brazil Brazil. The idea that white flight to the suburbs can avoid this runs into the problem that mass immigration is now shipping whole new generations of thugs into these suburbs, at the behest of the Biden Harris administration (not antifa!).
Where will this based, intelligent Michael Bloomberg left rebuild America from when they’ve been chased into a corner by centuries of their own garbage beliefs?
America has never been more than 15% black, and is not projected to be more than 15% black at any point in the future. I don't support mass African immigration.
The current state of affairs would lead to very significant African admixture in the population. Both Brazil and MENA populations have such admixture that seems to contribute heavily to their dysfunction. And there is a great deal of immigration from countries like Brazil in addition to African countries.
The current state of affairs does not include mass black immigration. Mixed race children have lower fertility than the average black person. What percent of immigration is of African descent? Is it more than 15%?
Migrationpolicy (not sure if a credible source) lists 9% as being from Africa and at least 44% as being Hispanic. The latter includes some significantly Africanized populations, as well as populations that come from countries with a lot of favelas.
What is the source for lower fertility of mixed race children? From my eyes on the ground it does not seem that way
I agree that the argument of "natalism = favelas" needs some justification. It seems like that can be very much a case of mistaking correlation for causation. Israel has managed to maintain a relatively high TFR without having any favelas. Likewise, the Amish do not live in squalor despite their birthrates; white nations in general had much higher birthrates 100 years ago and yet they did not have favelas then either.
Israel has somewhat favelaish conditions. Google image search Teverya, Afula, Bet Shean, Bnei Brak, Bat Yam. We are coping with the rising population more or less, but life would be pleasanter if TFR was 2.2 or thereabouts.
Israel is an ethnostate -- if natalists advocate for ethnostates they would at least be consistent, but I think that ethnostates are silly or destructive (including israel)
I'm currently having this argument repeatedly throughout the comment thread, so it seems I did not make a convincing case. The case is this: Putin understands math, and he doesn't need to be militarily defeated in order to surrender. He is the Kaiser in 1918, not Hitler in 1945.
This is the best article I have read in a long time, so in some sense I am reticent to nitpick, but I feel that what you have explained here is really 'why I will vote for the Left with a clear conscience'. But Richard Hananiah is 55-45 for Trump and if something changes he might swing the other way, and no-one would then conclude he was on the Left.
But I also think I have put my finger on the real problem. It's not just that 95%+ of the Left would hear your views and be repulsed (though perhaps you underestimate this somewhat) it's that they would have no idea at all what you are on about. To even follow your argument you have to have spent a few years reading dissident right material so de facto, you are a splinter group faction of the dissident right, whether you want it or not.
This sort of describes my own mindset. When I realized that my views would cause a normal person to immediately identify me as "right wing," I stopped coping and trying to pretend that I was anything else. But I also think the author's position of self-determination has a lot of merit to it. If you explicitly want the left to win and the right to lose, that seems like a pretty fair indicator that you're on the left, even if the average person wouldn't consider most of your policy views to be left-wing.
Also not sure if it's really true that the average leftard wouldn't recognize anything the author is talking about, or that they'd be repulsed by his views overall. In this article he talks a lot about abortion, Jan 6, and supporting Ukraine. Pretty sure your garden-variety libtard would identity with all of that quite readily.
Ukraine: he justifies this as the need to expand the American empire
Jan 6: He justifies this as White people being more dangerous that blacks because of their greater competence, and also because the lower orders should be subordinate to the elites.
Abortion: he justifies this as having eugenic effects, although there is also the pro choice aspect
I genuinely think that not only the average lib, but even thoughtful libs would just be completely confused by all this. You can say it accurately captures something deep in the liberal id, but a liberal would have to be exceptionally self aware and introspecting to recognize this. One way of looking at this is that DLA has accepted Moldbug's basic analysis of geopolitics and has decided to pick the winning team, but the whole point of the Cathedral is that libs don't understand they are the winning team.
A comparison might be made here with Richard Spencer. He too is pro Ukraine, pro choice, and anti Jan 6th. He explicitly wants the Left to win elections. No-one would say he is on the Left though. Maybe DLA can get away with this because he wasn't filmed saying Heil Trump, but for those of us who know, we know.
I think the reason Spencer is not a leftist because he worships the "God" Apollo, supports Apollonian eugenics, believes in Aryan supremacy, believes that Plato was controlled / influenced by proto-Jews, believed that Pythagoras was a proto-Jew, believes that quantum mechanics is fake Jewish science, etc etc. As you argued, antisemitism is only found on the right, therefore, Spencer is on the right. On the other hand, I am a Platonist, think (as an amateur non-physicist who has spoken to people good at math) quantum physics has explanatory power, and think Pythagoras was cool, whatever his genetic background.
You're much more up to date than me on Richard Spencer's views, which is perhaps my point. This is your world, you can try to escape, and maybe you'll succeed, but you're not there yet.
I think your best critique is that I am writing reactively or in response to the dissident right, rather than addressing some other intended audience. I think this is because of fundamental personality traits: disagreeableness, low intuitive empathy, individualism, low disgust, internet upbringing. I was confronted with internet neo-naziism at the age of 12, and created a blog arguing with conservatives on the internet.
I am not trying to "escape it," but stating my views honestly. If I wanted to escape the dissident right, I would avoid politics entirely. I seek to confront, not to escape.
I don't want the dissident right (Rogan, Tucker, Vance) to win. There are many atheists on Youtube who make hundreds of videos about how Christianity is bad and wrong. You could say "you're so up to date on fundamentalists. That is your world you are trying to escape." Maybe you'd have a point.
I am deeply upset and hurt when I see people calling me and others slurs, advocating for Russia and China, and promoting theocracy. Perhaps I should have thicker skin and let it go and "move on." Politics is my "astrological" project. Maybe I should just get a job as an accountant, then no one could accuse me of being dissident right anymore!
" think this is because of fundamental personality traits: disagreeableness, low intuitive empathy, individualism, low disgust, internet upbringing."
Which are the definitive traits of the smarter parts of the online Right.
In all seriousness, though, you have a great blog, both entertaining and informative and you really deserve the success you are having in building an audience. I remember before the podcast that I googled you and there were videos where you sounded really bummed out, so I'm glad that you are getting the recognition you deserve.
P.S. I think if you got a normie corporate job again and had to deal with DEI training on a regular basis, you might become a bit more sympathetic to rightoids than you are now, but I hope this doesn't happen.
The libtard would call him right for the wrong reasons and then try and get him fired
I dunno. His reasons for supporting abortion, considering Republicans a threat, etc., seem like pretty standard leftoid reasons. Libtards might want to cancel him for daring to speak with right wingers at all, but I'm not sure if they'd want to based on his actual policy views.
Leftoids generally don’t like when one supports abortion for Margeret Sanger’s reasons
I don't think that's true at all. The author is pretty clear in saying that he opposes forced eugenics but he doesn't mind it occurring naturally as the result of people's freely made reproductive choices. I feel confident that leftoids would heartily agree with that sentiment. They tend to be pretty friendly to anti-natalism so long as you don't make it about race.
"Leftoids generally don’t like when one supports abortion for Margeret Sanger’s reasons"
That's still irrelevant for someone supporting abortion for Margeret Sanger's reasons.
I didn’t claim it was relevant.
I think 95% of people in general have no clue what I'm talking about, so this doesn't bother me too much! But I understand where you're coming from. I think it would be better if I could make my content a little more "accessible" to people, without needing to read 5+ years of content in advance. I think this supports the common criticism that my writing is "unstructured" -- it all makes sense in my head, and if you're good at mind reading, you can grok it, but otherwise there's a high barrier to entry. That's why I'm trying to do more dialogues with random people, so I can get better at explaining myself to the "man on the street."
OK, I will agree, if you achieve this, you will have earned the right to describe yourself as a normie lib, but, as it stands, you are still a disaffected dissident rightist.
I have never desired to describe myself as a normie lib. If you want to call me dissident right I can't stop you, but you are not using my preferred pronouns.
This is how I feel reading Sam Kriss. There’s a distinct “one of us!” chant that plays in my head as I read them. They vibe DR.
Such a vibe vanishes if you click on the ‘Notes’ page
He can also be a neocon, which is dissident left…
He is a neocon in all but name and should just proclaim himself as such. Most 8000 word essays on substack other than actual philosophical or historical studies are just intellectual masturbation really. He’s partially correct about that though didn’t describe it in those terms. Hanania is also a neocon along with Spencer (at least on foreign policy and disdain for the interests of average Americans aka ‘proles.’). Most people ( including Ken here) base many views on their feelings, their deep rooted convictions often shaped by their ethnicity, culture, class, and personal experiences and observations. Ken hates Russians like all neocons out of deep-rooted ethnic grudges possibly and supports Israel for similar reasons. There’s nothing wrong with this at all. It’s very human and natural to love that which is part of your identity and hate what you perceive a threat or heard your grandparents complaining about. Jews too have always hated and feared peasants (sometimes with justification as pogroms could be very nasty affairs).
Getting to ‘left’ and ‘right.’ These are illusory divisions within the existing system. While there are disputes between the two political wings of the establishment there is much more of a consensus on important issues (economics, foreign policy, immigration) at top levels. Democrats and Republicans are two subsidiaries within the same corporation. We are ruled by the dictatorship of the center ( the so-called spectrum from center-left to center-right). Parties or individuals outside this paradigm are usually condemned as ‘extremist’ or radical, as the establishment legacy media condemned Trump as such for the past decade.
This is so wrong. Jews who harbour ethnic grievances hate UKRAINIANS. I was once in a Jerusalem supermarket and an old guy with faltering vision asked me to check a packet of something to ensure it wasn't made in Ukraine. This is probably part of the reason why Israel was and still is one of the least overtly pro-Ukraine western countries despite obvious geopolitical pressures pushing them into taking a pro Ukraine stance.
Note here I am talking about Jewish neocons and their wacko Likudnik allies in Israel not ‘all Jews.’ Goy neocons are just as repulsive with their non-stop warmongering for ‘democracy’ their own offspring will never be fighting on the front lines for. That’s for ‘proles’ in flyover country.
Yes, you’re right. The real target is Russia though. Ukrainians are pawns who will be discarded when no longer useful. Jewish neocons in particular hate three groups in particular ( not necessarily in order); Slavs, Arabs, Germans. The Kristols, Podhoretzes, Abrams, Kagans, Nulands, etc don’t give a shit about Ukrainians one way or the other, nor Poles, Balts, etc. Let us be brutally frank here.
That's not a real thing, it's some retarded shit you made up in your head because your working model of reality is completely broken.
Wrong. Watch and listen to these people. Read their publications like Commentary magazine. It’s all out in the open. Nothing hidden or conspiratorial about it.
Your Article: "Here is a thorough explanation of why I am on one particular side, even though a bunch of people are trying to claim I belong on the other side based on my interests, temperament, and behavior. Being on a team is not about belonging."
This Comment Section: "You belong on the other side."
whyarepeoplelikethis.jpg
They cannot help themselves!
> But my most silly and secret dream is that I will someday be Aristotle to Alexander.
You've said the supposedly quiet part out loud. My guess is that this is what motivates a lot of earnest political writers. This is the number one temptation I fight when I write. My goal now (or at least for the current book I'm writing) is to help the reader operate better in the world by providing more useful maps of reality. It's a bit cringe that I'm ultimately writing a self-help book. But I feel this is more sensible than trying to change the world (I would not be writing if this were my goal). This has required me to try to be above it all, but I ended up with a different understanding of this than what you describe here. Girard's "an atheist in politics" has been the articulation that most resonated with me.
The Tim Pool joke reminded me a post I read time ago aimed to trolling multipolartards:
"Persia represents the imperial vision. Salvation can only come from the East. The West, represented by Athens, is nothing but decadence. Modern philosophical thought, the democratic ideal, pederasty and effeminacy are the diseased fruits of this Athenian West that must be eradicated. Only Persia can save us. We must pledge absolute allegiance to it and free ourselves from the chains of our ancestral identity.
The Spartans are not heroes, they are traitors. If they were true patriots, they would have taken up arms against Athens and allied themselves with Persia to save Greece. They must be hunted and exterminated like rats.”"
Ephialtes, August 19, 480 BC
Average Right Wing Third Worldists geopolitics lol
Ephialtes is their ancestor
This is pretty hilarious and very relevant.
Debatable on whether Athens or Macedonia ended up being worse for the ancient Greeks
Macedonia was awesome.
Something I began to suspect as I thought more about Moldbug's idea about the left believing in certain things because those things make them powerful is how that could apply to the right as well. I think as evidenced by your article here a lot of positions on the right are made simply to rile people up, make people feel better about themselves, and allow them to force other people to do things they feel good about.
More solid stuff. You're on a roll, man!
Success as its own justification, aka realism and pragmatism, has been a core system feature of liberalism since Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hegel, Mill... Becoming a power-worshipper is an occupational hazard of leftism, as seen in the case of György Lukács, who eventually and willingly castrated his intellect for the benefit of terrorist goons. Since realism can be weaponized against the left -- see Hobbes's authoritarian response against the "democraticals" and "enthusiasts" that composed the progressives of his era -- usually a liberal will add something else to loosen up the doctrine to prevent it from becoming a Borg cube, such as a story about plurality or rights. I like Weber's modernist attempt to square realism with honesty, combining an acknowledgment that politics does not have a rational basis with an ethos of professionalism and responsibility. His idea is that one should act knowingly of the dilemmas and paradoxes of politics and take ownership of consequences as a condition that makes participatory politics, along with truth-telling, possible. Otherwise, we're taking orders from people like Posobeic, Tucker, Trump, and Putin, who aren't even liars -- they are bullshitters in Harry Frankfurt's sense, indifferent to the truth or falsity of what they say.
The conflict between conservatism and liberalism directly mirrors the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism over the past five hundred years. Conflicts like the War of Spanish Succession, the Thirty Years' War, the War of Austrian Succession, etc. don't make sense without this wider context, and philosophically, the arguments on the respective sides remain the same, just variations on a few themes. And just as conservatism has a habit of being yesterday's liberalism, Catholicism likes to present itself as eternally true as if it wasn't the Protestantism of its own time when it broke away from Orthodoxy.
I am a radical libertarian but I am enjoying your articles. I believe that for us all to get along and achieve the most (subjective) want satisfaction provided by markets (i.e., the best and most workable long-term policy), we need a modus vivendi based on liberty for all: a libertarian regime that minimizes constraints imposed by others as much as possible and respects person and property. In the absence of this we get “…growing discontent with the state…from its inherent incapacity to simultaneously satisfy non-identical individuals.”
https://www.econlib.org/the-rise-of-the-plantationstatefbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1I0sTKyuYLXhLLpu4Dmy26Z_SQZD91Z2jU3cccv51NIDy0oJkxo70SOSA_aem_lllL4TlwFzpJj_e--XtQNA
Glad you're getting something out of it!
I disagree here and there but “being Aristotle to Alexander” is too good not to like this.
Regarding this: “Even if the end goal was centrism, the most effective way to reach centrism is not through centrism, but by providing a counter-balance to the prevailing winds”, remember that you pathologically want to tell the truth.
A final comment: working in a civil service bureaucracy while you keep blogging could be practical and instructive. Perhaps you would have to avoid some provocations, but if you are able to sacrifice your centrism for influence in the left, why not some useful moderation on your expression? Plato was the creator of the theory of the Noble Lie, and probably Aristotle would agree…
I tell the truth, but pushing hard for my values sometimes means pushing farther than is reasonable. Moral "overvaluation" is not deception in my opinion.
Given the complexity and length of your posts, I recommend Hume level equanimity. Pushing is more for memetic footsoldiers. But of course, this is my preference, probably not yours :-)
Presuming the answer is not “a sadistic zeal to inflict them on normies” (maybe it is), (why) do you want a bunch of violent criminals running around?
I do not want any violent criminals running around! I will have to write an article eventually to address this -- i'm writing as fast as possible and publishing 1000s of words a day!
I considered the possibility you might prefer to shoot them, but dispatching with criminal justice suggests a certain lack of rigor in determining who’s shot. Curious to read your take.
I'm against the concept of "justice as revenge," as a leveling of scales, as a "righting of wrongs." I think we should protect people from recidivism, but punishing criminals is not justice in my book. I'm against the death penalty unless someone believes they deserve the death penalty. In that case, I don't think the state should deny their request.
The main upside of prison is incapacitation — i.e., not having a bunch of violent criminals running around. The main upside of criminal justice is right there in the name. Both are distinct from revenge and it’s hard to imagine a repudiation of public safety, or justice, that wouldn’t be morally depraved. But then, you do say you’re on the left.
Have you heard of the Biblical concept of cities of refuge?
yes
(by “justice” i do mean something like fairness/reciprocity, but also procedural insurance against getting the wrong guy. and “getting” the robber or rapist is indeed something a desirable society attempts, though maybe not a leftist one)
>My ability to look at politics as a question of results rather than as a “source of love and companionship” seems incomprehensible to most people. I understand that most people see politics as a form of sports.
Everyone likes to whittle big complex issues down to an anecdotal friend-enemy distinction: are you pro-Rittenhouse, or do you think he should have been killed by antifa instead?<
I would say this is what you're doing when you focus on being of the left because the right is so bad/evil/stupid/etc. and draw up caricatures that many right-wingers would call out as strawmen, such as wanting to ban evolution or put women into forced marriages. Cheering for your team to hurt the bad people is the very essence of politics as a sport. Rising above that means staying focused on policy and principles and not indulging in terror fantasies about how the fundies are going to enact the Handmaid's Tale or how the libtards are going to enact 1984. If you're going to make this sort of thing fundamental to your politics, then you shouldn't claim to be above grug-brained friend-enemy style thinking. At best you're just putting yourself on the right side of that bell curve meme and saying that the low IQ thought process is actually correct.
>I have attempted, several times, to explain that while Civil Rights is a deeply flawed civil religion, at least it’s an ethos! Multi-racial white nationalism, or Judeo-Hindu-Christian values, or Duginist “multi-polarity” are all entirely incoherent and negative. They are anti-Atlanticist, anti-NATO, anti-western, anti-liberal, anti-academic, anti-intellectual, anti-woke, anti-left, anti-establishment, and anti-elite. They do not have a positive vision of the world.<
I disagree. Christianity is a positive vision of the world, and it has been proven as such through the trials of time and history. It has guided people's lives for millennia and continues to guide the lives of hundreds of millions today. I can seek guidance from it in every aspect of my life, from the highest most abstract questions about the meaning of my life down to the little details like how I should treat my co-workers at my job. It has real institutions full of real people that I can participate in and receive this guidance from.
Leftism doesn't have anything like this. "Civil Rights" was not sold as or meant to be a replacement for religion. When people try to use it that way anyways, when they try to view every single aspect of life through the lens of racial grievance, the result is wokeshit. This is not a positive vision of the world, or if it is, it's a really narrow and stupid one. It doesn't tell you to build your life *for* certain things, it only tells you to be *against* things like racism, sexism, etc.
And the same is certainly true of online rightoidism, which is chiefly concerned with being against wokeshit. Neither of these are a holistic ethos, but actual religion is, and leftism in its current form is incompatible with it. An intellectually honest accounting of leftism/liberalism would be to say to people, actually you don't need a guiding ethos, an over-arching guiding ethos is bad because it limits your thinking and places arbitrary constraints on your liberty, you're an individual so just figure it out for yourself as long as everyone consents.
I don't think my characterizations are caricatures. I also don't think that Handmaiden's tale is likely -- that seems like a caricature of my position. I can oppose fundies while still thinking they are likely failures. I agree that Christianity could be an ethos, but most of the right is not actually Christian, they are a mix of agnostic Nietzschean Darwinists. Civil Rights is extremely similar to Christianity in a number of ways -- other have argued this better than me, but to explain it myself would take some time. I disagree that "honest leftism" means "figure it out for yourself." That's not how academia operates.
You have a section called "worst case scenario" where you say this:
>Commenters object to my vision of these “nightmare” scenarios, stating that apocalypse is so unlikely that it is not worth thinking about. Most right-wingers are not white nationalists, they tell me. Be that as it may, politics isn’t driven by moderate majorities, but by motivated minorities.<
This is how libtards are operating when they freak out about Project 2025 and the fear that Trump will somehow pass a national abortion ban, or for rightoids when they say this is the last election because the Democrats are going to do this that and the other thing. If you don't think it's a caricature to say that right wingers want to ban evolution and put 16 year olds in forced marriages, then meh, we'll have to agree to disagree on that.
While there are certainly similarities between Civil Rights and Christianity if you look for them, this does not mean that they are of the same kind. There is no church of Civil Rights that I can go to every week and raise my family in. I understand that this may seem unimportant if you're young, single, and not thinking about raising a family anytime soon. But it's of paramount importance when we are talking about a guiding ethos, because people are imprinted with those values in their formative years when they are young.
Teaching my kids to worship Civil Rights as the center of their worldview doesn't give them any kind of coherent game plan for their life, and to the extent that it gives them a lens through which to view their interactions with the world, that lens is extremely narrow and retarded.
I'm not asking you to personally teach your kids that MLK is God -- I'm saying that opposing Civil Rights actively (reactively) is not a solution to anything.
There actually is such a church, the universal Unitarians. But like most New England churches it is dying out.
I'm an abolish prisons guy, but that's from the perspective of executing the irredeemable and grueling community service (or for repeat offenders, a public flogging) for lesser crimes.
What punishment/discipline matrix are you replacing prison with?
I actually don't believe that punishment / discipline works well for "blue collar crime," but for white collar crime I just believe in fines, taxes, "alimony." For most crime, I think we should create "cities of refuge" where people can live. If they cause too much trouble for that to work, they will have 60 days to secure a "voluntary deportation" to another country, after which they will be forcibly deported and subject to the laws of their new country. Take the billions we spend on prisons and spending it on cities of refuge and deportation agreements with other countries.
Ah, the city of refuge is a penal colony in this case?
Why avoid executions?
I'm not in favor of murdering people outside of war. Making the positive case to explain why war is the exception might be complicated -- but leaving that aside, I just think killing people is generally a bad idea. However, if someone believes they deserve the death penalty, I don't think the state should deny their request.
"But if NATO dedicates 5% of federal budgets to Ukraine, the war would be over in a matter of 6 months."
Pardon me for ignoring the rest of the article, but this particular point is bs.
Military industry is a question of putting enough coins in the slot machine and fighter jets coming out.
It's a question of production capacity, of supply lines. If you want to double the production of tanks, maybe you can find the extra workers and once again work two shifts in your nations single tank factory like you did during the cold war.
If you want to 10x tanks, you need to set up new factories, train way more technical specialists than your currently have.
You can't just overnight convert factories producing Ford Mustanga into factories producing M1A3 Abrams like during WW2. Both products require different specialised machine tools and engineers.
All that is to say, industrial military buildup takes time. Had NATO started the level of military investment you suggested in February 2022, maybe we'd start seeing some serious result right now, but not within the same year.
Ok serious response: NATO has stockpiles of existing planes, bombs, guns, tanks etc. These can simply be "sold" to the Ukrainians ("loaned") while the reserves are slowly replenished. If the idea was only to give Ukrainians brand new stuff, then your argument would apply. I understand that replenishing reserves takes time.
No, we don't really have such massive stockpiles.
Munitions expire pretty quickly, unlike the Russians we tend to scrap most munitions after 20 years. Most munitions being delivered now are new production or bought from the Koreans.
Planes there's not enough training capacity to transfer quickly, which you might have known if you've followed the news on F-16 transfers.
Our old Leopard 1 tanks have been transferred, only Turkey and Greece still have inventories far larger than what they need for their own operational readiness but they rather keep aiming that at each other.
Doing a deep dive with sources showing how much we have vs how much we have given of everything would be a whole article rather than a comment. I am confident that we have not given 100% of what we have. I am also confident that by making the 5% commitment, Russia would face insurmountable odds and be forced to make peace, as Germany was in 1918, even though it was not the subject of an invasion and theoretically could have fought on for 6 months.
Is sort of agree with you.
Yes, if we devote enough resources we can supply Ukraine with enough material to defeat the russian army in a conventional war, though probably no earlier than 2026/27 assuming every NATO nation immediately starts spending like Poland.
Of course, Russia could still resort to nuclear escalation of sorts. Perhaps not to destroy Ukraine but force a settlement along lines of control.
Regarding deep dives into military stockpiles and production, I get a large part of my information from a defense economics YouTuber by the name of Perun.
You may know him already but if not I'll suspect you'll find him credible.
My argument isn't that we'd actually have to defeat Russia, but that Russia would back down in the face of overwhelming odds. Currently I believe Putin is banking on the idea that anti-war forces will restrict NATO's actions sufficiently for him to pull off a victory in a war of attrition. If that possibility was negated, I think he would simply give up.
I think Putin would prefer a negotiated loss (where he keeps his troops, equipment, and economy intact) over a forced loss (where he loses his troops, equipment, and economy, possibly also the government is toppled by radicals like Prigozhin).
Nuclear escalation is theoretically possible, but I give it a <1% chance so long as NATO troops never enter Russia.
Much of what exists in reserve is to deter or maintain an aggressive posture in both the pacific and middle eastern theaters. An example is ATACMs - these drew a lot of hype for being a destructive weapon when used by Ukraine, but those flashy attacks have significantly depleted the available stock without stopping the Russians.
"Military industry is a question of putting enough coins in the slot machine and fighter jets coming out." I agree!
*isn't
My bad.
It took one and a half years to get some two dozen pilots flying a squadron of f-16's.
Yes there's plenty more F-16's, Mirage-2000's, Tornado's, Gripen, F-15C's, but not enough pilot training capacity to train Ukrainians quickly enough to get them an air force on par with the Russians in say 2025.
It is true that training takes time, however some of the advanced missile systems and missile defense systems are much quicker to train and would be decisive. My point isn't that Ukraine would be marching on Moscow in 6 months, but that the odds would be so lopsided that the Russians would be forced to cut their losses. I am assuming that the Russians are rational, like Germans in 1918, rather than Nazis in 1945.
I think you could avoid most of these arguments by just picking a different pseudonym. Without even a name, it's inevitable that people click through to your blog expecting the usual stuff identified as leftism. When they're faced with some unique mashup philosophy it's inevitable they ask, "wait, is this really a left wing analysis?" because that's how it was advertised. Pick a different name and all that distraction will go away.
My intention is to clearly differentiate myself from the right and convert people to the left. Avoiding the left/right dichotomy, as you suggest, is tantamount to centrism, which as I argue in this article, is unproductive and useless.
An ideal world; multipolar, diverse cultures, nations, peoples, civilizational states in a post-liberal order. America defanged and one of many regional powers; decentralized, and non-interventionist. An independent Europe with a renewed identity and confidence, no longer dominated by the United States and led by a German-Russian-French partnership. Russia a strong regional power within its sphere of influence (FSU). China rising in East Asia but countered by Japan, SK, Taiwan, India in a balance of power. Israel cut down to size on the Middle East and living perhaps in uneasy coexistence with its neighbors after withdrawal of the United States from the region.
Semyon McNalensky, there is no partnership with the Russian Empire, only subjection. When the Mongols pushed West, the cities that resisted, like Chernigov and Kiev, were destroyed. Muscovy, in contrast, decided to pay tribute, squeezing its population for gold and slaves, and that has conditioned the nature of the Russian state ever since.
Russia is the ultimate Affirmative Action state. Like all empires, it is by definition multicultural and spreads like cancer, powering itself in a Jouvenelian manner by with a high mobilizing a low against the middle. On Russian TV, you'll see the Armenian lady Simonyan and the Jew Solovyov; in government, people like the Tuvan Shoigu and the Chechen Kadyrov. Nothing works, and everything sucks because people only get positions based on patronage, not merit. Today in Ukraine, Russia, a true friend of white people, is exterminating whites and flooding its new territories with Asiatic peoples. They want us to be meat so their elites can live magical fairy-tale lives. They are not Protestants. They don't use wealth to build wealth but for status -- wealth is like glitter to them. And again, the Russian state always likes making minorities do its dirty work -- they make good buffers and good scapegoats.
The Russian World is not a magical, happy place. They make it mandatory to quietly accept suffering, ignorance, misery, poverty, subjection, and death, as recommended by Orthodox teaching.
The world of prosperity, nationalism, and confidence is a product of the United States having eleven aircraft carrier strike groups securing the planet's oceans. Take that away, and global commerce will decline, and we'll see more regional empires behaving according to mercantilist principles based on permanent war, with periodic breathing intervals, which was the norm before Pax Americana. This is inevitable, but we can undertake change and set up the next round of history on our terms, or we can passively undergo change and let China and its proxies (Russia) drive instead.
The American world is perpetual debt, little reward, and frantic diversions from shitty lives via online porn, gaming, fentanyl.
Ukraine is Russia. Kiev is the cradle of Russia. Nothing going on in Donbas affects American national interests or is worth risking a war over. Our war is at home and against the ruling political and business elites of GAE. Partisans for Ukraine should frankly move their asses over there and place their own lives on the line for their beloved little NATO protectorate instead of encouraging young American and European men to die for the likes of Zelensky.
Sure, Ivan.
Look buddy, I'm from Chicago. There was an old superfans sketch on SNL where it was asked, "Who would win? Mike Ditka? Or God?" "That's a trick question, Bahb. Mike Ditka is God." Mike Ditka is a Ukrainian from a Pennsylvania steel town. There is a reason why he is worshipped here that goes beyond the Superbowl.
You can run Kremlin talking points on historically illiterate hillbillies with no connection to the old country, but it isn't going to work here. Every other person in the industrial Midwest is connected to Eastern Europe in some way. Senator Durbin is Lithuanian on his mother's side. Governor Pritzker's family? Ukrainian Jews from Kiev. Myself? Lithuanian on my Dad's mother's side. It isn't like Russia is a mystery to us. And supporting NATO isn't an act of charity since we are the same people. You wanted people to support things based on identity? Ask, and ye shall receive.
I really wouldn’t boast too much about being from Chicago. It’s not a garden spot. No one in the post-industrial Midwest aka rust belt want their siblings, friends, or kids dying for the EU and the scum running the United States. Military enlistments their lowest levels ever. NATO is a useless boondoggle that only exists to keep Germany in particular in permanent vassalage to the United States. As an overweight middle aged man beyond conscription age you should think of younger people in your family and region. Imagine dying to keep the Zelensky regime in power!
Ivan, you're wrong about this, and polling data backs me up.
Nope, polling is consistently against direct military intervention or giving the Zelensky regime hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in their futile war.
Resistance is futile. Ukraine is losing and should settle before they lose another 200,000 casualties.
Hi Ivan,
Apparently there are still shortages of both humor and memes on your side of the Irony Curtain. I feel like I can help.
After you're done flapping your fingers against the keyboard, stand up, biceps flexed with fists in the air, and yell, I AM INVINCIBLE!
Theatricality and deception, powerful agents to the uninitiated. But we are initiated, aren't we, Boris?
I’m more ‘American’ than you are. Not a drop of Slav in me. You should get some more exercise and lay off the donuts.
As a matter of fact, I'm up at 530 AM on a Saturday morning to go to the gym. You are up at the same time to post about Dugin, AfD, spread low-information talking-points about Ukraine, and cluelessly repeat famous lines from bad tv shows, because that's what real Americans do. Thanks for the comedy.
Your ethnic obsessions and hatreds aren’t worth possible nuclear war. Sorry.
Again Ivan, for reasons explained above, Russia sucks at everything, including war. They lost to the Japanese in 1905, the Poles in 1920, and the Finns in 1939. And today, they're struggling against poorly armed watermelon farmers. All we have to do is spend a small amount of money, and the Russians will quietly and obediently suicide themselves in meat assaults. Easy solution. We just need to make sure everyone on Team Europe is properly armed so Russia doesn't win by attrition.
There is no risk of them doing any damage to America in war. Their only skill set is dominating the information space, which is necessary to rule a multicultural empire, and they've had centuries of practice at it. The benefit is keeping them out of Europe and preventing them from mass murdering white people. I've seen the stuff they're saying about Poland and the Baltic states on Russian TV.
Your proposed solution already occurred. America already spent the bare minimum giving Ukraine old Cold War munitions. Now that stock has dried up and Russia is still advancing, and continuing to stop them will become expensive.
Russians/Ukrainians are white people. The last thing NATO cares about are white people.
White people? I've seen the videos of Chechens chanting Allahu Akbar after they reduced Mariupol to rubble. No thank you.
You’re old and fat, bro. Your life won’t be on the line in any war unless it went nuclear. Ukrainians are Russians so are slamming your own people at least by ancestry anyway.
America is already damaged and in terminal decline regardless whatever happens in Eastern Europe.
Russia must be doing something right as they’ve survived all those wars and conquests and are resisting the GAE.
ew!
Israel can even exist in that world! Don’t fret now.
There are multifaceted components to favelas. One part is unrestrained population growth which could occur under natalism (noting that no top down natalist policies have succeeded at raising birth rates outside of communist Romania). Another part is the social and legal promotion of criminals. Rightoids think lizard people rule the world. Leftoids worship George Floyd as a martyr. Black crime is an inescapable part of what makes Brazil Brazil. The idea that white flight to the suburbs can avoid this runs into the problem that mass immigration is now shipping whole new generations of thugs into these suburbs, at the behest of the Biden Harris administration (not antifa!).
Where will this based, intelligent Michael Bloomberg left rebuild America from when they’ve been chased into a corner by centuries of their own garbage beliefs?
America has never been more than 15% black, and is not projected to be more than 15% black at any point in the future. I don't support mass African immigration.
The current state of affairs would lead to very significant African admixture in the population. Both Brazil and MENA populations have such admixture that seems to contribute heavily to their dysfunction. And there is a great deal of immigration from countries like Brazil in addition to African countries.
The current state of affairs does not include mass black immigration. Mixed race children have lower fertility than the average black person. What percent of immigration is of African descent? Is it more than 15%?
Migrationpolicy (not sure if a credible source) lists 9% as being from Africa and at least 44% as being Hispanic. The latter includes some significantly Africanized populations, as well as populations that come from countries with a lot of favelas.
What is the source for lower fertility of mixed race children? From my eyes on the ground it does not seem that way
I agree that the argument of "natalism = favelas" needs some justification. It seems like that can be very much a case of mistaking correlation for causation. Israel has managed to maintain a relatively high TFR without having any favelas. Likewise, the Amish do not live in squalor despite their birthrates; white nations in general had much higher birthrates 100 years ago and yet they did not have favelas then either.
Israel has somewhat favelaish conditions. Google image search Teverya, Afula, Bet Shean, Bnei Brak, Bat Yam. We are coping with the rising population more or less, but life would be pleasanter if TFR was 2.2 or thereabouts.
Walking around the Tel Aviv marketplace was traumatic for me… Too much noise, too many people, too much chaos…
It gets a hell of a lot worse, trust me.
Israel is an ethnostate -- if natalists advocate for ethnostates they would at least be consistent, but I think that ethnostates are silly or destructive (including israel)
Ethnostates are the only legitimate states.
>But if NATO dedicates 5% of federal budgets to Ukraine, the war would be over in a matter of 6 months.
How? The industrial capacity needs to be rebuilt, tanks made, and then figure out how to fill them with warm bodies. Well, mercs would be an option.
I'm currently having this argument repeatedly throughout the comment thread, so it seems I did not make a convincing case. The case is this: Putin understands math, and he doesn't need to be militarily defeated in order to surrender. He is the Kaiser in 1918, not Hitler in 1945.