2rafa
4hr ago
Dissident right Twitter bodybuilders and even stuff like Charlottesville (despite subsequent messaging) has given some very online people a completely warped perception of Trump’s base. They’re thinking it’s tall white fit, salmon-colored shorts wearing frat bros, decently educated, probably 115 IQ college grads, deep red, hard right, well versed in issues, probably know how to handle a gun. Similarly, people’s very online perception of the Dem base is either the worst dregs of the criminal or homeless underclass, or like ‘aids skrillex’ type screeching weedy non-binary student protesters crying about Palestine and police brutality.
But that isn’t Biden’s base, and that certainly isn’t Trump’s base. As the Tomato says, Trump’s base is fat middle aged or old people in flyover states who watch Fox News. They may or may not have guns, but boy, they sure aren’t overthrowing the federal government with them, today or any day.
Trump's core demographic is >70% white; among young white men it is the overwhelming majority;
In 2020 Trump won young white men by just 6 points. Younger zoomers are already majority nonwhite or close to it. When adding the 45% of young white men who vote Dem to almost all young black and Hispanic men (many of whom are indeed armed etc) it seems unlikely that violent young men in total are as extremely Republican as you suggest. In addition we have things like obesity data and so on. Young Red men aren’t all, or even close to being, in any large number, fit, muscular 6’5 blonde Midwestern farm boys with a personal armory ready to March on Washington. Even if they tried, blue hair they/thems in Arlington or Silicon Valley can drone them as easily as the IDF drones square-jawed jacked Palestinian youths trying to throw grenades at Israeli soldiers. The idea that the reds would easily win a civil war is ridiculous. They might win, but it is unlikely to be easy.
2rafa
13hr ago
Trump hates humiliation or perceived weakness (‘being a loser’) above all else, and Taiwan being invaded would definitely play in the media (which is hostile to him anyway) as a big loss for America. I can’t see him shrugging. He was extremely pro-vaccine as President. He likes things that project American strength. His opposition to some Middle East wars was more about the US getting a bad deal than any moral opposition to them or even committed ideological isolationism. Likewise I think if he had been president in 2022 he would have been very supportive of maximum military aid to Ukraine.
The US basically accepted the eventual Hong Kongization of Taiwan until the early 2010s when the South China Sea stuff flared up, the trade war began and Xi started practicing more aggressive counterintelligence vs Western assets in China. Then the chip thing happened too and now Taiwan is an extremely valuable strategic asset.
Over time Taiwan’s centrality to chip making will reduce and the previous course will resume. There is no need for the CCP to invade now. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t.
The EFF has suffered in recent years because the most salient culture war issue in South Africa, especially to poor urban [black] proletarians (who would presumably be the core audience for this kind of socialist party), is immigration from elsewhere in Southern and Central Africa putting downward pressure on wages for working class urban black people. The EFF, as a socialist party with vaguely anti-imperialist and pan-Africanist views, endorsed and then partially walked back an open borders position that was extremely unpopular with those voters. Anti-white animus isn’t popular enough in SA for the EFF to exceed 12% of the vote; it’s possible they could go higher in the event of an economic collapse driving some kind of populist socialist sentiment, but I don’t think that’s really the same thing.
The ANC becoming the Xhosa party and the Zulus leaving is probably good. It means that the DA should be able to participate in most or all coalitions, and in any case increases the chance of the parties curtailing the most egregious corruption to try to compete for the vote, which the ANC has never previously had to do.
2rafa
22hr ago
They’re OK but so far they seem to lack the real killer feature of being able to make actually catchy hooks, at least from my prompting. They can make real sounding very mid music, like this or ‘lost records’ YouTube compilations generated by the AI.
I feel like LLMs are in a similar spot. They can write OK. They can’t write anything truly impressive. They can’t write fiction like Joyce or non-fiction like the best New Yorker journalism. The question is whether that’s just a minor revision away, whether it requires some tinkering with the training set, or whether it’s actually possible that there are limitations that prevent generation of 99.9th percentile art without architectural changes at the least.
2rafa
1d ago
It is true but historically the extremists pull back when the IDF does. Settlers left the Sinai. Settlers left Gaza. Raze their houses and let the enemy move in and they run scared pretty easily. Most extremist religious Zionists aren’t angry young men, they’re large families with huge numbers of women and children, they’re easy targets.
2rafa
1d ago
What would be the legally acceptable way to quietly pay off a mistress like this? If a Pro-Trump Super PAC had paid Daniels instead of Cohen/Trump personally, would that be unambiguously legal? If the National Enquirer had caught-and-killed the story with David Pecker’s personal funds instead of merely informing Cohen, would that be unambiguously legal? What if it was simply a friend of Trump who paid, with no business relationship to the president? A surface level reading would suggest not, because by these trial standards that would technically involve more than $2700 or whatever going to something that could possibly benefit the campaign.
2rafa
1d ago
Yes, but that could just be because the cops who vote Democrat aren’t the sort of people who donate to the Democratic Party.
2rafa
1d ago
1.25x is fine. Anything more and it begins to sound weird to me. If I’m watching YouTube rather than reading about an issue it’s probably because something about the video or audio presentation is interesting to me, and increasing the speed to 1.5x and beyond kind of defeats the purpose of enjoying that.
In the case of something purely informational like some kind of coding tutorial or software installation troubleshooting I’ll usually skip/scrub through it until I find the part I want, then watch closely and intently at normal speed.
2rafa
1d ago
It seems it was in a parliamentary panel on Palestine where this exact comparison was raised. In any case, he was a lifelong imperialist, which for much of the period was as much a liberal position as a conservative one. The liberals were more mercenary, and were divided over Empire, but there was a strong imperialist tendency in the liberal party early in the 20th century (referred to in contemporary politics as th gulf between the new idealists, moderates, liberal imperialists and - on the anti-empire side - little englanders). The early 20th century from around 1901 to 1935, despite the fact that Britain had already began its terminal decline and was already poorer than the US in absolute and per capita terms, was in fact the height of imperialist sentiment.
2rafa
2d ago
Even that isn’t intractable; there are countries where the middle class take the bus.
2rafa
2d ago
Our one was very inactive, a few people posting about challah baking, some orthodox people who work in back office trade functions in NYC/NJ posting Torah readings or rebbe quotes, and Israelis in the engineering team posting about Israeli EDM/techno/whatever. Political discussion is discouraged but unfortunately ours has just become “hope you guys are feeling safe, here are some mental health resources” concernposting since October 7th.
2rafa
2d ago
Churchill’s infamous quote about settler colonialism (“I do not admit that a great wrong”) was made in 1937.
2rafa
2d ago
(Sorry in advance for double posting)
But we’ve made an idol out of self-pity. Being a Jew means being a victim. All histories contain suffering—but haven’t the Jews suffered most of all? In every century? In every country we’ve ever inhabited? Aren’t we the weak, the poor, the persecuted, and the despised? Weren’t we bullied at school, for our high intellects and our limp lokshen arms? Don’t other people have an obligation to feel bad for us? Even Jews who, like me, have never once been a victim of antisemitism—we’re still victims by descent. As a Jew, I’m not more likely to be impoverished, uneducated, or imprisoned than my gentile peers; in fact, precisely the opposite. But the victimhood remains. The one legacy of oppression I can never hope to escape. Like black tar on my skin. On Christmas Day last year, while the bombs continued to fall, the smug fucking face of smug Stephen Fry took over British TV to demand that the public do more to cherish and pity the Jews. Anything unpleasant—the taunts of some ordinary bigot, or the resistance of a people violently dispossessed for seventy-five years—gets folded into the vast archive of Jewish suffering, from Tiglath-Pileser to the death camps.
I really do agree with Kriss here. As a Jew I find Jewish self-pity nauseating and embarrassing, but even more than that I find it kind of humiliating. But it’s important to note that many Israelis would agree with him too.
Israel was not borne of Jewish self-pity. Crying about how the goyim are oppressing us is, after all, probably the oldest diaspora Jewish pastime. You can find thousands of examples of it over the centuries, from medieval England to 17th century Iran, from the Old Testament to the shtetl. Diasporic Jewish writing for much of the last millennium, in both the Middle East and Europe, often accepted gentile torment as either just punishment by God, or just as an unfortunate reality of the test imposed by God on earth in anticipation of the world to come. Efforts to actually end that victimhood were limited to individual community success stories in some countries at some times, but little else.
Israel was a response to that, an effort to break free of it, to not be victims again and forevermore.
Sure, it is true that some of Israel’s supporters use the ‘historical oppression’ angle to justify Zionism. Personally I find that distasteful, though I understand that in the modern western progressive milieu an oppressed victimhood framework is pretty much the only acceptable one. But the actual core of the idea is quite different. It’s a commitment against self-pity, an acknowledgment of the hard ways of the world, an acceptance that while spiritual salvation and religious purity have their value, they are insufficient when it comes to survival in our earthly lives.
I don’t think there’s an issue imposing a Palestinian state upon the Israelis. Many in Israel would welcome it. The issue is with how that Palestinian state was structured, who ran it, how it was governed, and how the deep-seated Palestinian desire for revenge was tackled.
As it is, Independent Palestine would be declared, elect Hamas or equivalents, attempt a military campaign against Israel, be destroyed and be occupied. <— You Are Here etc etc. The only way to avoid this scenario is for the Palestinians to be ruled by someone who can actually control them. The Western powers, for all their moral frustration around Rafah, are unwilling to do this or to finance it; colonialism is in any case a tricky business. The Muslim countries don’t want to be seen dealing with Israel too openly, and besides Palestinians have caused many of them issues over the years.
Israel isn’t big enough, rich enough or politically powerful enough to attempt an Uighur-level pacification of Palestinians, even if it wanted to (which it doesn’t, really). The traditional, biblical outcomes of this kind of tribal conflict are off the table (at least for Israel) for reasons of modernity and geopolitics.
On the far left the solution is obviously to just make all Palestinians (including foreign descendants) citizens, rename the country Palestine and hope that everything surely works out. On the center left, it’s even more vague, essentially some version of withdraw, ‘accept’ a Palestinian state, pull back settlers and hope for peace. (See above.)
So there aren’t really any solutions. One can’t really fault the Arabs for refusing to accept the Palestinians, since they dislike them for many of the same reasons the Israelis do (violent, vengeful, doesn’t understand when it’s beat). On the Israeli side, “apartheid” was not the status quo for reasons of racial hostility, all the checkpoints and walls and restrictions on Palestinians entering Israel exist solely because of repeated Palestinian terror attacks against Israel citizens.
On the Palestinian side it is hard to find any logical undercurrent, but we might assume that - somewhere within - they truly and actually believe that the Jews might one day pack up and go home. That seems unlikely to me. The French in North Africa still had France, at least then. The white Rhodesians and South Africans made up less than 10% of the population, they were fewer than 4% in the former case and they were politically divided in the latter. The Israelis are half the total population and consider Israel their homeland. They will fight to the end.
On the Israeli side, there is a fair amount of exasperation. “We lived in exile for 2000 years, so can you” is a sentiment I have heard on a number of occasions. When that classic trope of the nature documentary, the old king, the patriarch, being supplanted by some younger challenger who beats him in combat, steals his territory and females, and sends the elder male into exile, occurs, we accept it as part of the cycle of life in nature. Nothing that has happened in Israel is uncommon in human history. Countless peoples are conquered by those more advanced and more capable. That is life.
Most Israelis don’t care what happens to the Palestinians, but they wish for them to stop being a nuisance. Economic growth has been tried and has failed. Ideological indoctrination would be unacceptable to the Palestinians or the wider Muslim world. What does that leave?
2rafa
3d ago
They were shunted onto largely shitty land and democracy is irrelevant since at 2% of the population they don’t have any real power. Palestinians were able to travel freely into Israel until they started killing large number of civilians in terror attacks.
2rafa
3d ago
I’m probably not going to do it but I’m curious as to what the diet would be to build muscle optimally.
Xi is openly a Marxist-Leninist. Deng acknowledged what many ML economists had already done (and even what Lenin had with the aborted NEP), which was that the ‘capitalist stage’ had to be fully completed in order to drive down the marginal cost of production before ‘full socialism’ could be implemented from each according to ability to each according to need. There was no fundamental reason why one revolutionary party could not guide and indeed manage the entire transition from feudalism or early stage, largely agricultural capitalism to communism, including through the majority of the capitalist state, provided it avoided corruption and remained steadfast in its belief that - once capitalism had done its job - communism would be faithfully implemented in service of the people.
This is the genuine majority view among senior cadres in the CCP.
The extent to which the Chinese believe in HBD is hard to gauge. Certainly ethnic stereotypes of all kinds are common. Nevertheless, the CCP is anti racist, party cadres are taught what is effectively blank-statism in school, research into related evo-psych topics is largely suppressed, even if it is not as immediately cancellable as it is in the US. For 30 years Very Smart Western midwits have pushed the idea that “nah, these guys aren’t really Marxists, they’re mercenaries, they believe in China but not some ideology that a German Jewish journalist came up with 170 years ago, they don’t really believe”. No, they really, really do.
That would make the best time to strike, presumably, the very point at which the contradictions of capitalism become most elevated. Perhaps AI related mass unemployment, who knows? At that point, the US and Western capitalist countries would struggle for an ideology, a path, would be wracked by ideological violence and division. The CCP would simply calmly and peacefully execute the transition they’ve been preparing for all along. Do they believe it will be soon, though? After all, the CCP might not be LW-type singularity believers. Xi did say ten generations, and he’s the fifth generation of party leadership, so that suggests quite a few more.
More options
Context Copy link