In the third installment of his Nashville lecture series on the antichrist, Peter Thiel laid out a framework that fuses Catholic political theology with late-modern surveillance mechanics.

A few core takeaways that feel relevant:

Pope Benedict XVI's esoteric eschatology: Thiel breaks down how Joseph Ratzinger quietly believed we were living in the end times by communicating not through ex cathedra pronouncements, but sotto voce through obscure academic footnotes and private late-life letters. Ratzinger understood that explicitly shouting about the Antichrist ruins your analytical leverage.

The 33-year ceiling vs modern gerontocracy: Ancient and early-modern conquest required youthful velocity. Alexander the Great, Christ, and Caesar hit their world-shaping thresholds by age 33. In late modernity, our leadership has stagnated into an 80-year-old gerontocracy, causing individual human agency to collapse.

Turnkey totalitarianism: Because individual leaders are slow and sclerotic, power has migrated into non-linear, automated administrative trapdoors that turn at the flip of a switch under the banner of peace and safety.

It's a compelling look at how late modernity replaces individual human political agency with an automated inescapable administrative machine disguised as universal benevolence.

I put together posts about the three nights which have already taken place.

This is the link to night 3: https://danielforresternash.substack.com/p/the-physics-of-consolidation-velocity

Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare told NBC News on Tuesday, October 13 that it was “pretty obvious” an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer intentionally ran over 48-year-old construction worker Miguel Parra Hernandez in Texas last Saturday. Teare said federal authorities were refusing to cooperate with local investigators and may have allowed critical evidence to be erased.

“My viewing of it, and many other investigators that have viewed it as well, it’s pretty obvious that this was an intentional striking and running over of the person by the vehicle, and in that case, that is an aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in Texas,” Teare told NBC.

Teare said investigators had obtained additional video beyond the footage already circulating publicly. The vehicular assault left Parra Hernandez with multiple breaks and fractures, according to his attorneys. He remains hospitalized in ICE custody.

Teare said the federal government was not cooperating with his office and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. While the injured worker remains under guard, the agency responsible for running him over is obstructing the investigation.

According to Teare, investigators wanted to preserve and download potential crash data from the Jeep Cherokee that struck Parra Hernandez, including information about its speed, steering and braking. ICE refused to consent. While investigators were preparing a search warrant, an ICE agent drove the vehicle away, potentially erasing evidence.

Teare also revealed that two people detained in a separate operation were already in the back seat of the ICE vehicle when it struck Parra Hernandez. Both remain in ICE custody.

Cesar Espinosa, co-founder and executive director of the immigrant rights organization FIEL Houston, told the Associated Press that Parra Hernandez “had a surgery for the injury under his knee and now we’re waiting for swelling to go down in his ankle to be able to have a reconstructive surgery on his ankle.”

...

ICE claimed its target was Jose Mendoza-Cervantes, whom it identified as the driver of the vehicle, alleging that he had a final removal order and a criminal record. However, Parra Hernandez’s attorney Kim Bruno and Espinosa said neither Parra Hernandez nor the man accompanying him had any association with Mendoza-Cervantes.

Houston Public Media reported that a search of court records found no criminal cases involving Mendoza-Cervantes in either Dallas County or Harris County. ICE did not immediately explain the apparent absence of those records.

Five days after the vehicular assault, federal officials continued to defend the ICE thug, maintaining the lie that “Miguel Parra Hernandez ran in front of an ICE vehicle and was struck.”

“Allegations that ICE struck Miguel Parra Hernandez intentionally are RECKLESS and FALSE,” an unnamed ICE spokesperson declared in a statement Tuesday. The denial contradicts the surveillance footage, which has been viewed by millions, and the assessment of local investigators.

...

The Democrats, no less than the Republicans, bear responsibility for ongoing wanton ICE violence. They provided key votes for passage of the anti-immigrant Laken Riley Act as well as procedural votes to ensure ICE and Customs and Border Protection received billions in funding through the end of the Trump administration.

In a CNN Town Hall Wednesday, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico reiterated his support for the immigration Gestapo. Asked by CNN if he supported abolishing ICE, Talarico quickly replied, “No, and I never have.” The Democrat added, “We need immigration and customs enforcement in this country.”

Since Trump’s return to the White House, the immigration Gestapo has shot at least 25 people. More than 55 have died in ICE custody, and hundreds, if not thousands, have been brutalized by federal agents and for-profit prison guards.

The only social force capable of securing justice for victims of the immigration Gestapo is the working class, united on a socialist basis and politically independent of both capitalist parties. Their border regime divides workers by nationality and immigration status, pitting them against one another in a race to the bottom for the benefit of the capitalist class.

Can someone please try to explain to me why the right thinks there is a secret plot to impose sharia law in this country?

Some jerk off friend of a friend on Facebook was poppin his mouth off about it like a 2 or 3 months ago, and it really threw me back. I pushed him to tell me why he thought that and where he heard it from, and then he went silent.

Then today my friend told me that her Christian aunts and uncles up in central New York all think this too.

I'm honestly so lost. Where the hell did this come from?

And I havent heard anyone in MSM or on the YouTubes bring it up, so I thought maybe that FB guy was just an embarrassed quack, until I heard about my friends relatives. Is this something widely believed on the right? Maybe on the super secret downlow, and that's why msm and YouTube chirpers haven't looked into this bonkers belief?

Direct link to the episode here. This passage occurs from 14:00-21:00.

Pre-amble

So that brings me to the next point, the next question that was asked on this one, which is, well, what do you hope to do? What have you learned? And I think the most clear answer for this is that the show can serve as political education, but also intellectual discipline for the left.

I think there are a lot of people, sorry, I'm going on a little bit long for this one, but it's kind of a question about the thesis statement for the show, so maybe it warrants exploring in a little bit more depth.

The meat

So I think looking back two years ago, there was a lot of content around woke taboos that people could not talk about or were afraid to talk about. And I think that we, coincidentally, through timing but also through platforming certain guests, we gave the left-wing critique of those things where, you know, previously people couldn't really differentiate whether it was like center-right, classical liberal, or whatever, or maybe it was even like you're a Maoist and so DEI wasn't going far enough for you.

I think what is most clear to me is that we've been able to make the social democratic argument for why woke was bad. "Woke 1 was crazy. We're on to woke 2. We're doing a different thing now. We've learned from the past." I don't think we've learned anything. I think we've learned nothing from the past, and I think that we even got to that point demonstrates that we didn't know what the fuck we were doing to begin with.

You know, how could you have possibly arrived there if you had a kind of firm grounding for your political education? So I'm paraphrasing. I'm not going to recall all these numbers perfectly off the top of my head, but Adolph Reed, who is a scholar that I admire very, very much. I read his work for many, many years.

His line on this, and I believe his analysis is correct, is that DEI and anti-racist measures do not benefit people of color, do not benefit black people. They are part of a neoliberal policy platform. So there's a few statistics that come to mind.

I believe this is from the book that he wrote with Kenneth Warren. In 1968, if you were to take all of the black people in the country and take the median income, meaning you line up everybody and you pick the guy in the middle, you're picking the median because the asymmetry of wealth is enormous. The top 10% of black people own 50% of the wealth.

The top 20% own 75% of the wealth. So in order for us to get a kind of average that is meaningfully representative of that racialized population, we have to pick the median. If you pick the median black income in 1968 and compare that to the median white income, black workers are earning 55% of the median white income.

Now, that sounds profoundly unfair. People are basically, black people are earning a little more than half of their white counterparts. In similar jobs and similar industries, it's profoundly unfair.

Right after the civil rights movement, you still have the legacy of Jim Crow and all of these things that are holding people's upward mobility back. Fast forward some odd 40 years, the next index is at 2016. And you take all the black population and you pick the median income of a black worker in the United States.

In 2016, the median income for a black worker is earning 48% of their white counterpart. So just to underline exactly what is at stake here, that means all of the affirmative action stuff, all of the DEI, all of this kind of talk and, you know, allowing people to kind of get into roles that they would have been excluded from in the past, right? Like going to professional careers and building, quote, building the black middle class and whatever. People were earning, in 1968, black people were earning a little more than half of their white counterpart.

And now they're earning a little less than half. So how did they fall seven points within the 40 years of uninterrupted black upward mobility? That's because the underlying neoliberal policies are polarizing wealth to such an extreme degree that it hurts everyone in the society. So Adolph Reed's line on this is that the anti-racist policy actually damages black people and it is itself a class program.

So that critique has kind of been hinted at. I think Michael Brooks said this explicitly many times. But if you look at the ecosystem of left-wing content creators, they all kind of like tiptoed around the identity politics stuff.

And sometimes they would counter-signal it. They would be like, okay, well, like we went too extreme on this and now we'll walk it back because we're alienating the normies. But they basically haven't reformed any of their policy understanding or theoretical grounding for what they want to do.

And those things were wrong. They were never the Marxist position. They were never actually even the left-wing position.

I think what has basically been absorbed as the political common sense is that in 2016, universal policies like Medicare for all, full employment, free public education, this kind of stuff. And I think the way that these things have been kind of portrayed through the media and absorbed as political common sense on the left is that, well, we can't have those big universal programs, but we can compromise on a little bit of social justice, a little bit of redistribution and diversity, equity, inclusion, and whatever. So that this thing was understood, the kind of racialized redistribution as a compromise between universal social democratic programs and the neoliberal center.

And it was not a compromise. It was actually their program to begin with to rhetorically distract from the overwhelmingly beneficial universal policies that were being proposed in 2016. And they won.

And they won to such an incredible degree that people on the left internalized all of those ideas and built an ultimate untouchable taboo around these subjects where you had to have people or people had to like, you know, defend the admissions policy of fucking Harvard or whatever. It's like, you're not going there. It doesn't matter if the New York Times is a more diverse board or the, you know, the C-suite for some company is more diverse.

Like, that's what such a small fraction of the population, we don't benefit from that. Yeah. So, sorry, this is all to say that this program, I think one of the many functions that it serves now is intellectual discipline for the left where we can present better arguments because I have a deep faith, we have a deep faith in the ability of normal people to make up their own mind and to achieve change democratically through a mass politics.

And that means actually being more coherent on these issues rather than kind of zig-zagging and having like, I think you see everybody on the left when you bring up these topics, you know, they're very robust to talking about the need for redistribution and taxation or whatever. And then you bring up like, well, should we have subsidies for black owned business? And they're all of a sudden like, oh, oh boy. Oh, you know.

So, yeah, I think we didn't flinch on those topics. And that has been a big part of our contribution.

Summary: great monologue, well-articulated. It's in direct contradiction to some guests he has had on, and in direct alignment with other guests. I would say that over the past couple of years, Citarella has tip-toed around this issue and has been squeamish to get into the nitty-gritty details, so I somewhat disagree about the "we didn't flinch", because I think he did, but given the audience he started with, I understand the hesitation and the careful, gradual roll-out of class-first anti-idpol sentiment.

Eric Zemmour's Reconquête in France is a clear example. Per his interviews, he is against globalism and liberalism because they attack traditional values as it is a barrier to consumerism.

Why is the quest for traditional values against liberalism and globalism is at its peak vis-a-vis migrants and LGBTQ but it is all quiet against the market itself?

One of the most common defenses of Capitalism is that it’s fine for a few people or one person to control a business and reap most of the profits because they “take the risk” and so somehow deserve such disproportionate power and wealth. Another common argument is that wealth isn’t a fixed pie and someone getting richer (by millions or billions) doesn’t make others poorer.

My question for socialists is how do you respond to and refute these two arguments?

Is it that the arguments aren’t true? Or they still aren’t justified as means of organizing society and its economy if they were true?

Everybody's assuming that the youth, the coming-of-age youth, the people in the 18 to 25 age range, that these people are taking longer to launch into adulthood and the moral panic about how they're taking longer to just become self-sufficient, functioning citizens of society. But, in all seriousness, how about let's stop being pessimistic about that for a second and let's assume the other way around. What if our systems and institutions are just changing too fast for us to adapt to? And you're probably wondering, what do I mean by that? Because it's kind of hard to compress the general idea without being too wordy and lengthy. I want you to take a minute to process a very complex term you probably barely hear about in your daily life. Don't worry, I don't use it like that either, but I have a vague idea of what it means: bureaucratic red tape

In this particular context, because this may not be the universal way of applying it, but I'm using kind of like a more alternative context of bureaucratic red tape. In this context, it means that the very logistical processes that made it easier to grow into proper functioning adulthood generations ago used to be more digestible and straightforward. Let me think of a quick example. A great example would be going to college.

College used to be way much more straightforward and simple: Besides it being cheaper in the 20th century, the qualification of entry used to be more lenient and lax compared to today's more competitive qualification-grading system environment. The transcripts are also more piled up than ever.

Another example: Driving and owning a car.

It used to be a simpler process: 50 years ago all you needed to pass a driver's test was demonstrate capability and competence, especially with a manual, write a paper check to the dealer and you got all set, then on top on that cars were simply much easier and simpler to work on.

Example #3: Dating: Dating today is the equivalent of being in a marketplace

30-50 years ago dating was still focused more on dating to marry rather than the "dating for fun" module. Today dating may possess more social freedom and the constraints on what one can do may be more loose than what they were 50 years ago, but with that freedom comes also greater dread of decision making responsibility and paralysis for the individual, compared to the more family-centered courtship culture of previous centuries.

Another great example: Buying a house

Buying a house used to be also ridiculously easy: No background check, no credit bureau of statistics, no driver's license or state ID required, just hand the cash over to the real estate agent, settle in and call it a day.

So what's the TL:DR summary of this? Our systems and institutions are evolving and changing faster than we can get ahold of, is causing serious cognitive overload, hence the natural delay many people are giving themselves, but instead of society approaching this with proper understanding, we resort to a moral panic and assume bad intentions out of them

This is not to say past generations had it easier: War, racism, dangerous workplaces and shorter lifespans were serious concerns. But it was more digestible and readable is my point than today's bureaucratic overload

Edit-This is supposed to offer a secondary perspective the conversation, adding to the main "cost of living" narrative that's already everywhere

To Whom It May Concern,

I am writing to introduce a theoretical paper entitled “Theories about Cryogenic Weaponry, the Acceleration of an Isotope’s Half-Life, and the Diffusion of Nuclear Bombs.”

https://www.academia.edu/107074667/Theories_about_Cryogenic_weaponry_the_acceleration_of_an_isotopes_half_life_and_the_diffusion_of_nuclear_bombs

This paper explores several hypotheses concerning radioactive decay, isotope transformation, potential cryogenic effects associated with nuclear processes, and the neutron-absorbing properties of Xenon-135.

The paper asserts that the positrons of an oxygen isotope may force nuclei to undergo beta-minus decay faster, resulting in the rapid creation of new elements and a cooling chain reaction that could be weaponized for defense purposes.

If appropriate, I would appreciate the opportunity for the paper to be considered by individuals qualified to assess its scientific content.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Respectfully,

Anthony

I have wanted to ask this question here for a while but admittedly struggled with what I wanted to ask and how I wanted to ask it. I always enjoy reading the discussions here even if I don’t participate in many of them. So here goes:

Prefacing with backstory/context here: a close friend of mine regularly sends me Instagram reels from accounts like Dads_Against_Predators and Predatorgotcaught which are for all intents and purposes, vigilante pedophile “hunters”. If you’re unfamiliar, the content these types of creators produce mostly follows a similar format:

-The creators running these pages create accounts on various social media apps posing as prepubescent or young teenage children.

-The creators will engage potential predators in a discussion where they pose as a teenager or child who is somewhat precocious in regards to sex or a liaison with an adult. As an editorial aside here, this part seems a bit dubious to me as some of them will wait to be contacted first by potential predators while others skirt the line of what could be considered entrapment if they were actually law enforcement.

-The creators meet up with the potential predator at some sort of public location. Usually stores, gas stations or public parks and confront the individual.

-During the confrontation, and this is where some of the creators vary in their approach, the exchange can range anywhere from the creator simply announcing out loud to anyone within earshot that the individual is there to meet a child for a sexual encounter to the creator (or creators) punching, slapping and throwing the alleged predator around on camera.

After a lot of the interactions (at least from the stuff I’ve seen) it’s not very clear if there is any additional follow up on the part of the creators with law enforcement to report the individuals or provide evidence they gathered of their misconduct.

So, all this to say when my friend sends me these videos, I’m never really sure how to reply. Like yea I’m glad the guy got his ass kicked but is anything else going to happen outside of that? Some of the dudes that film these, it kinda seems like they want to just whoop someone’s ass that nobody will really feel bad for.

My personal take: while I understand a lot of these guys don’t receive sentences that are at all proportionate to the crime (or in this case potential crime) and many see street justice as doling out the punishment law enforcement cannot, I have to imagine a lot of them are serial offenders and if there is no parallel investigation taking place with the police, being humiliated on camera isn’t going to be enough of a deterrent to stop them from just going and trying to meet up with another child again a week later. Not to mention if the potential predator was also filming the interaction and the creators start punching/slapping him, I’d think he could just sue them if he really wanted to.

Don’t get me wrong, the crimes the potential predators are attempting to commit are disgusting and reprehensible however I’m not sure how much good the vigilante pedophile hunter approach is doing to prevent them. I also do not have a background in law (which is probably pretty evident at this point) so I’m not sure of the legal ramifications involved with what these guys are doing when they make videos like this. Anyway, I digress.

My question(s) for Stupidpol are these: what do you all make of these content creators? Are they a net positive for society? Or are they using this sort of vigilante justice to create a social media spectacle for their channel to gain views? Or something else? What say you?

LOTR-obsessed dorks have assumed a shocking amount of power