With professional misogynist and accused human trafficker Andrew Tate out of the picture at the moment, it seems as though neo-Nazi troll Andrew Anglin is vying to become something of a Tate replacement in the affections of troubled young men, spouting reactionary Red Pill “wisdom” about women and giving advice to young men not altogether different from that proffered by the other Andrew.
Sometimes he sounds like a fundamentalist, railing against “satanic, rainbow America” and pimping the Bible.
Sometimes he sounds like an incel obsessed with Evo Psych.
And sometimes, he sounds like he’s channeling A Voice for Men.
Anglin has not exactly made his desire to recruit lonely men and incels a secret. Way back in 2016, he announced plans to launch local chapters of what he called Stormer Book Clubs that would not only provide firearms training “to prepare for the coming race war” but also help young men to “hunt and capture your own women as part of the [club’s regular] operations.” Minus the Nazi overtones, his advice at the time could have come from any pickup manual.
Anlin has some similarities with Tate that go beyond his reactionary takes on women. Both are bald. Both are named Andrew. But there are a few differences between Tate and Anglin as well, perhaps most notably their respective social media reach. While both were welcomed back to Twitter by Elon Musk after lengthy bans, Tate had millions of followers; Anglin, despite his notoriety, has less than 13 thousand.
Right now, the biggest advantage Anglin has over Tate is that he’s not currently in jail. But that could change if international authorities ever manage to track him down and arrest him for trying to evade nearly $15 million in judgments against him for harassment.
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First of all, Happy New Year everyone! Took a couple days off both work and the internet to recharge batteries. Kinda sad to find so many new entires about the usual shit here since that indicates nothing has changed (which was unlikely anyways, but an enby can dream, right), but then, I’m here for that anyways.
@Cyborgette @Love is all we need
Now that you mention it, I did get more and more AfD-speech videos in my YouTube recommendations lately. Too bad for right wing fucks that I only ever listen to stuff I already/got recommended/shown by friends there, usually… I can definitely see how unsuspecting, naive kids (and adults, naturally) can fall for that crap, though.
Hello.
> Mish of the Catlady Ascendancy & Kat, ambassador, feminist revolution (in exile)
Thank you for the precision.
Well, 5.7 feet (173cm here), which is also my size, is indeed shorter than the average. So long, my social dominance ! I never looked for you, so i wont miss you, though.
> Mish
Ah, indeed, it was sunday morning, i was still a bit sleepy, i made it short. My bad. 🙂
Have a nice day, everyone !
Well, we’ve known for quite some time that YouTube algorithms aren’t neutral, and there’s a huge amount of scholarly research to support that.
@occasional reader, I was only teasing you :). I’ve always loved how you sign off, but you’re absolutely allowed to have a sleepy Sunday.
@Kat, hi love! let’s hope he does look into that specific operation…
The men in those comments are truly terrifying.
but why is it pushing far right content?
@Love is All We Need
Because the key term is ‘engagement’, trying to keep people locked onto the site and clicking through to the next video so they see the next set of ads as well. People who are already into the far right content tend to be rather more obsessive about that.
Basically, the algorithm sees people with narrow but obsessive interests as being the ones mostly continuing to click through videos, and wants to train everybody else to be like them, so it keeps providing links to the videos that they watch. Since the alt-right is nothing but narrow and obsessive interests, videos from there tend to get higher priority.
It’s not so much that YouTube is trying to train everybody to be alt-right, but they are trying to train everybody to be obsessive consumers, and the alt-right happens to look just like that from their point of view.
@jenora
That is the most insightful analysis I’ve read on that topic. THANK YOU. I feel smarter already.
@Jenora, @Love is All We Need, @Crip Dyke
That’s the case but I believe there’s a more malicious level to it. Friends and acquaintances of mine who worked at Google have describe it as having a Nazi problem, with e.g. far-right employees coordinating among themselves and manipulating HR to get queer, POC, and leftist employees fired.
The algorithm may not be programmed as right wing, but leaving it that way is very much deliberate IMO. And I believe this also has the approval of upper management – the ultra-rich after all swing very far right. Many of them are banking on a civilizational collapse, believing they can rule over the ashes.
An article about this: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff
If nothing else, the ultra-rich stand to benefit from fascist politics by both corporatism and deregulation, just as business leaders did in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. So I’m not really buying the pure uncaring self interesting argument at this point.
The only animal that ever has sex with the intent to reproduce is the human animal, and mostly we don’t do it so. Even the Roman church, long hostile to sex even within marriage, has come to understand that sex strengthens the bond between partners, and so does not consider as sinful sex within marriage when one or both partners is sterile.
Mr Anglin has the ghost of the trace of a point: those species that have survived have maximised reproductive fitness; this has a natural consequence that on average fertility and desirability do track to some extent, but
0.) reproductive fitness means a lot of things at once, including the ability of parents to make good decisions, which for many at least improves markedly years after peak fertility,
1.) the fertility/desirability correlation is statistical, and has no strong cut-off,
2.) particularly for males whose costs are (absent strong social constraints) low, it pays for us not to be too picky—contrary to some lunatics’ opinions, we do not have a very limited amount of ‘seed’, and Nature favoured our potential ancestors who ‘erred’ on the side of being more interested in sex than on the side of less, and
3.) what is natural is not morally normative, anyway—ask any digger-wasp–infested caterpillar.
Shorter:
Nazis gets biology wrong on purpose.
@45: She sounds like a great friend. Well done, both of you.
@Cyborgette:
Fools, the lot of them. Some of the Roman elites tried this, retreating with heaps of gold to remote villas. Any attempt to spend the gold attracted thieves to raid them in the night, cut their throats, and take it. If they had hidden it, e.g. buried it in the woods somewhere, things got worse: the thieves would often torture them for the location of the hiding place and then kill them. It’s not like there was any law or police to stop them!
And to top all this off, the gold had become essentially worthless anyway. There had been a huge collapse in the productive capital and its output on which money is a claim. The effect of such a collapse is the same as the effect of fixed production but a massive orgy of money-printing: hyperinflation. Or put another way, if each ounce of gold represented x% of the overall output, and the output had collapsed a millionfold, so had the amount that could be claimed for an ounce of gold: x% of nothing is nothing. Gold that once got you 2 slaves, a house on 20 acres, and a nice set of silverware would now get you a cup of coffee, if you were lucky.
So, to the extent that they expect to continue to derive their power from money, they’re in for a rude shock. There’s also deriving power directly from force, by using a goon squad to keep some fiefdom in line, but … how do you keep the goon squad loyal? It won’t be by paying them the now-worthless gold …
The idea of retreating into a bunker with some giant stash of food, drink, and porn is a bit more sensible, if antisocial and solipsistic, but runs into a few significant logistical problems, starting with the likelihood of outliving these supplies so you’re only postponing the inevitable. There’s also the matter of the air vents. Unless your supplies include some serious NASA shit, you’re reliant on outside air for oxygen to breathe, and that means there are intake vents somewhere. A determined search by your enemies, rivals, or whoever-else will eventually find them, and then they can plug them, or quite literally smoke you out, or etc. … and if there’s rumor that someone’s hiding underground with a huge hoard of food, there’ll be a whole starving village full of motivated people searching for those air intakes, ready to (at best) threaten to clog them if not given some portion of the food stockpile. If you figure to defend the vents by having machine gun turrets or booby traps or such around them, booby traps tend to be expended on the first victims, and ammo, while holding out somewhat longer, is still finite. And sooner or later they catch you napping. And you can’t be at every gun turret simultaneously. And if you have gunners (or concubines or any other subordinates) with you, or an armed goon squad on the surface to defend the vent locations or the whole plot of land, see “fiefdom”, above. Letting them live in the bunker and share the stockpile with you might keep them loyal … again, until the stockpile runs low, and that will happen n times as fast now that there are more mouths to feed than just yours. And the smarter ones will realize that, and that it will last longer if some of those mouths stop breathing, and those ones are inside your defense perimeter and can probably get to you at night when you’re sleeping …
Well, until the Allied bombs started falling on their factories, their houses, their families, and their own damn heads, anyway. Short-term thinking seems to be a common disease with these types. Most have never had to scrimp and save and prepare for a rainy day, having inherited or otherwise lucked into their wealth and then solved every subsequent problem by just throwing money at it until it went away.
@Gerald Fnord:
So, the peak of decision-making ability would arrive right about the time the results of the peak of fertility became teenagers? I guess that makes sense. 🙂
@Surplus
Oh 100% agreed, and IIRC that article discusses it. The author talks about how these rich bastards think they can enforce loyalty with shock collars, food dispensers that only they have the keys to, etc. He talks about how he tries to explain to them that the best way to get loyalty from their guards is to treat them well, and they’re like… “Nah.”
Wealth and power poison people’s brains.
Tate update:
He’s appealing his detention. Can’t find any info on when there might be a decision on that.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/10/andrew-tate-romania-court-detention-appeal
There’s a quotation from someone about living under Nazi rule to the effect that the Nazis always talk about the “thousand year reich” but they can never plan ahead five months. I can never recall the exact phrasing to find who said it, but it’s true.
@ dali
“The Nazis spoke about a 1,000 year reich but they couldn’t think ahead 5 minutes.”
I’m trying to recall the guy’s name. I think there’s a ‘Paul’ in there. But he was an interpreter in the German diplomatic service. I seem to recall he was at the meetings with Chamberlain.
ETA: It was this guy
“Our foreign policy was an improvisation. Like Schacht’s financial policy, it lacked foresight. The Nazis kept talking about a thousand-year Reich, but they couldn’t think ahead for five minutes.”
~ To Leon Goldensohn (13 March 1946). Quoted in “The Nuremberg Interviews” – by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately – History – 2004
Jeez, there really isn’t any way it ends well for them short of outright sci-fi scenarios.
It’s the thermodynamics.
The only way to be truly self-sufficient and fully isolate yourself from the collapsed world outside would be a working version of Biosphere 2, more-or-less. So already sci-fi. A big glass dome full of plants on the surface is kind of hard to hide and sooner or later some starving survivor will chuck a rock through the window. So, you’d have to bury it. OK, now you need giant sunlamps and to power that sort of shit for decades you’ll also need a nuclear reactor and a buttloat of fuel. Right now you’d need a whole team of expert technicians and other hires (= more mouths to feed) to keep anything like that going with any level of safety, but suppose, just suppose, that in the future you can buy a compact, largely automated nuke plant for a few tens of millions (apparently they’re actually working on such things, probably for space and for military vessels).
Well, having a whole ecosystem in your bat-cave along with a nuke is going to generate a lot of heat, and unless you want that cave to become the oven in which you bake, you’ll need a cooling system. The usual for nukes is to run the secondary cooling loop into a convenient river, lake, or ocean. One could also put a heat radiator somewhere, or something like that. Thing is, we’re back to the air vent vulnerability. It won’t be hard for outsiders to spot an anomalous heat source and zero in on the source, and once they find your intake pipe or radiator they have you by the short and curlies. Again.
So now you’ll need to put your Biosphere 3 bunker in an asteroid or something to ensure that no-one can find and mess with the cooling system’s exhaust, and at that point we’re talking serious sci fi, as in “with this technology we could send a generation ship and colonize Proxima Centauri” level sci-fi.
If I were a rich douchebag, and knowing what I know about things like engineering and physics, you know what I’d do? Buy an island with a reasonably hospitable climate that’s in the arse end of nowhere along with a not-as-isolated cabin in the woods near civilization. Use the latter until collapse seemed close to get used to rustic living and get the hang of mostly living off the local land. And when the SHTF looks imminent, abscond to the aforementioned island and hope that I’m a thousand years dead by the time the future analogue of Polynesian explorers chances to find the place. Humans have been rafting and spreading for 300,000 years and only in the last couple of thousand or so did they find Hawaii, Iceland, Easter Island, or even New Zealand. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_human_settlements) Bermuda wasn’t found and inhabited until 1609. These larger islands will have surviving post-collapse populations, but there’ll be lots of small islands, in the double-digit acres range, that are quite isolated. If the interior is only reachable by helicopter, so much the better, as you can get there that way around the time the SHTF but nobody will be able to follow starting once the supply chain has collapsed and preexisting fuels have gone bad and until humanity reindustrializes, possibly centuries.
Keep it simple, stupid.
Of course, even the smart ones who abscond to a hard-to-find island with a hard-to-access interior will eventually get their comeuppance. The ravages of age will eventually keep them from foraging and there will be no-one to care for them, no servants to gather the food they no longer have the stamina to collect, no doctors to diagnose and treat their accumulating malfunctions of the gall bladder, joints, bowels, and urinary tracts, at most a pre-stocked pharmacopeia and a database. With only the meds with the longest shelf-lives still useful, or perhaps even safe. In the end they’ll die alone, and probably in some misery.
I’d suggest one thing to include in that pharmacopeia be a shelf-stable high-dose opiate for when the end comes, to dull the pain and speed it along.
Meanwhile, the non-douchey survivors are organizing into villages and small communities, dividing labor, socializing, and getting a start on building afresh, amid joy and fellowship much of the time.
Our best revenge will be living well … those of us who survive, that is, once the hard early years of widespread banditry and starvation are over. Let the smarter rich assholes on their remote islands stew in loneliness and, eventually, age and infirmity.
Islands are not going to be safe. We already know where all the islands are. If someone makes themselves evil enough to paint a giant target on their back, then they should be prepared for outriggers full of raiders. The Polynesians did not do a systemic search through the Pacific to constantly find new islands, at least not at first. Expeditions only set out when there was a reason to travel and colonize a new place. You are probably right that in a wide scale collapse, most people are going to have better things to do than tracking down every last Pacific island, but if there are rumors of valuables there, like medicine or books, someone might try to take them.
In general, though, someone should tell these people the Horizon Zero Dawn guy is not supposed to be a role model. Collapses are something you should work to avoid, not plan for living alone in a mineshaft with bags of gold you cannot use.
@Surplus
My guess is the old school rich fucks don’t understand thermodynamics (they pay other people to understand it for them), and the new school ones think it can eventually be defeated (because they’re tech bros high on Moore’s Law and such – trust me, I’ve talked to types like this). Either way these are people so unused to being told no that the universe’s ability to do so absolutely flabbergasts them.
NPR had an interview with a guy who designs high tech prepper bunkers and he says who says he’s now constantly hired by extremely healthy elites from politicians to celebrities to bankers to you name it to build them bunkers in remote locations. He said they are very short sighted. For example he builds most of them swimming pools in the bunkers on request but when he asks them what are your plans for keeping the pools clean and functional when the inevitable problems pop up, they say they haven’t thought about it.
He says they want the bunkers with all modern high tech amenities but they have no plan for the upkeep of any of it.
@love: because the capitalist class knows where their interests lie.
@Love is All We Need
Yeah that also surprises me not at all. They’re like men who think soap dispensers refill and sinks clean themselves, x1000000
They don’t know how to upkeep or repair their bunkers and at the same time are leaving behind to die all the people who do. That’s the irony of it.
Tate’s appeal against detention has been dismissed.
I don’t think Hamza’s on the Left (he doesn’t talk politics so might be apolitical) but he offers more positive content for young men and has a large following. He’s getting them to do things like journal, meditate, eat better (as opposed to Tate’s pizza boxes), etc. He probably has some issues too but it’s a step in the right direction. Plus he’s cute.
UM, Forget the above video. I posted it before listening because I had watched a few of his other vids that were positive. And I couldn’t delete it. He talks a lot of b.s. in that one but this one is good. About gratitude and journaling and family bonding.