JTarrou
3d ago
This is what I'm talking about.
Lifestyle. That's not economics, that's class segregation.
JTarrou
3d ago
Why? I'd say it's perfectly achievable in most any state in the country for $50k/yr.
JTarrou
3d ago
Anywhere the starter single family home minimum is two million dollars is a fashion statement, not a reasonable place for normal people with normal jobs.
Your only contention is that I haven't adequately considered the effect on people who want to be less consumeristic, but have to live in Central Park West?
JTarrou
3d ago
A lot of this is just the price of participating in consumer culture, which most of us don't need to do nearly as much as we do.
You need two good jobs if you want a house, two cars, eight TVs and a steady stream of parcels delivered to your door and a lifestyle in which most of the domestic labor is done by servants or robots.
If you just need the house to raise a family in, and you can do without a lot of the instantaneous gratification, and one of the partners spends their time doing most of the actual domestic work plus finding ways to save money, one half-decent income is enough in most of the country. This is why poor south american immigrants have no problem providing for giant families. They live different to what middle class white people think of as the only proper way to live.
JTarrou
4d ago
This is one of those things where people are desperate for the label and all the old baggage of the label, but the label has faded.
No, the current US government isn't a fascist one. Yes, someone has called every single administration since Hitlers a "fascist regime". The most fascist government the US ever had, with minorities in internment camps, a militarized society, rationing and government control of industry, was the one that fought Hitler.
Similar to the time there was a poll and a majority of Republicans said they wouldn't vote for Trump if he were a convicted felon, so the Democrats went out and got an extreme technicality "felony conviction", and the Republicans..........didn't care. If you want me to care about fascism, it can't be this banal. We've heard all this before, remember Trump's first term? Trans genocide? Coup? Cancelling elections? FASCISM? None of it happened.
This boy's been crying wolf since the 1930s, every four years like clockwork. Time to let him squall. "Muh Fascism" gtfo.
JTarrou
6d ago
As it happened, relatively few of Germany's jews were genocided, because most of them were pressured to leave ("ethnically cleansed") before the war really kicked off. And no, no one did anything about that. In fact, Britain sent boatloads of jewish refugees back to Germany for trying to get into Palestine.
Immediately after 15 May 1948, the majority of the land belonged to the Palestinians.
According to who? Part of sovereignty is deciding who gets to keep what land. Britain held the "mandate" previously, from the Ottomans, and they gave it up. There was no deal in place due to the arabs declining, so sovereignty is a jump ball. Everyone had an even break to form a state, and the arabs were in a much stronger position. But they did not declare a state, and the jews did. Whatever palestinian national aspirations might have proved died when they lost to the Jews at the local level and were occupied by their "allies" in the neighboring arab countries. Part of that whole process was some of those arabs being forcibly moved off their land for any number of good and bad reasons. New borders had to be drawn, and policed, and defended on both sides. A new government had to make a lot of decisions about who gets what, and there's always losers in that process. They tend to come from the losing side, but the fact that arabs remain a significant portion of the Israeli population in a way that jewish residents of arab nations are not is a pretty big clue to how relatively ruthless those groups are.
JTarrou
6d ago
It is not. It is illegal to do that in the country next door, to the degree anyone feels like enforcing that law. No one at Nuremberg was convicted of mistreating Germans. Once again, this is one of those sovereignty things. It is not against international law, and is outside the purview of outside governments, for a government to use force to move or eliminate any portion of their population. These are internal matters.
It's not against the law for Iran to kill protesters, though we may use that for political advantage. It's not against the law for Hutus to genocide Tutsis, which is why no one did anything except the Tutsis. Where things get dicey is when people are being killed in an argument over who is the sovereign power. In those cases, it matters who wins militarily. Might does not make right, but it does make sovereignty, and sovereignty has certain rights.
On choosing your destructor.
An outgroup is any group in which status change is mirrored by another group.
The best endorsement any potential leader could have is the fear and enmity of the outgroup. This in turn means that every group has a significant (though not decisive) voice in the leadership and direction of their outgroup. The political lesson of the Trump era is that the hatred of one group is as good as an endorsement for their outgroup.
If you ask me, the reason both Trump and Mamdani won election is that they sought and exploited the condemnation of their side's outgroup. This leads to a lot of rhetorical brinksmanship which is completely divorced from actual policy, and acknowledged as Kayfabe publicly by both men.
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