2rafa
13hr ago
I loved the podcast but Anna got xanax’d out and the subreddit degenerated into a sad hybrid of ChapoTrapHouse and MDE that I didn’t enjoy.
2rafa
14hr ago
Why? Here’s why South Africa failed where Israel until now has succeeded, and it has nothing to do with the specific ethnicities involved:
White South Africans refused to become Israel. All the Boers (and the English) had to do is retreat to the Western Cape, which could have easily become an 80%+ white + cape colored + Asian ethnostate in perpetuity, just like most of Israel proper is by far supermajority Jewish. Why didn’t they? Because white South Africans were (and are) addicted to cheap black labor. They didn’t want to give up the farms or replace cheap workers with vastly more expensive white ones. They wanted a society where even a member of the white lower middle class had a gardener and a maid and a nanny to look after the kids. Israel, of course, supported and backed South Africa until the end.
They could have preserved it, they chose not to. It is what it is (claims of their immense suffering are largely overblown, not that I’m a huge fan of modern South Africa). Posts like this just symbolize a certain kind of bitterness that isn’t backed by historical fact. The wider question is even more ridiculous, because ethnic and tribal preference, which is what “apartheid ethnostates” do and are, are common around the world.
Malaysia explicitly privileges ethnic Malays over Chinese and Indians in every facet of public life, state contracting, welfare, housing, jobs, and politics. Brazil under socialist government privileges black over white for medical school places, for government jobs. America did too for a long time. Gulf Arab countries have Arab migrants (let alone Indian and Pakistani and Bangladeshi) who have lived there for generations without citizenship or political or other representation, officially stateless. These are all on a spectrum. Palestinians in the West Bank lead lives that are not particularly poor compared to others of their background in the rest of non oil rich Arab lands. They do not suffer the way that North Koreans or Eritreans do.
do you believe that all lawful residents within a country's borders are entitled to equal rights and equal treatment under the law?
Almost nobody believes this and almost no country practises it. Not America, not India, not Brazil, not China, not Russia.
2rafa
14hr ago
then surely you'll be perfectly fine if one day the shoe is on the other foot and the Palestinians achieve military supremacy?
If the Palestinians have the whip hand they will rape, torture, dispossess and genocide the Jews regardless of anything Israel has or hasn’t done at any point since its founding. They did this before Israel, they will do it after it.
2rafa
14hr ago
Only a tiny minority of Palestinians are Christians. Its why its so disingenuous when rightists show the far below 1% tiny minority of Gazan Christians as somehow central figures and victims in that conflict. The truth is that Arab Christians have been fleeing the Levant for the West since the 1800s, long, long, long before Israel’s founding, and largely fleeing persecution by people of the same faith as 99% of modern day Palestinians.
Describing Palestinian Christians as central victims of Israel is like saying the primary victims of Israel and America’s bombing of current day Iran are Iranian Jews.
2rafa
14hr ago
What separates a trader from an investor? You can discuss this professionally (traders execute to balance liquidity, market depth, optimize, PMs strategize, order etc), but its not relevant to amateur investing where the PM/trader distinction is definitionally irrelevant.
2rafa
14hr ago
Personality type clearly has an impact on the likelihood of these unpleasant things occurring, which feels like an extraordinary taboo but which should be obvious.
I have a semi-friend, let’s say acquaintance, who has a personal narrative of being raped or trafficked by a much older man in her early teens, kind of like an Epstein situation although this man while rich was just a moderately successful man in his early 40s.
At the time (and I was there and the same age) she saw herself as an empowered, tumblr-driven “sugar baby”. I see her as a casualty of the sexual revolution more than anything else. She bragged about this relationship to all the girls. She sought it out, lying repeatedly about her age on the dating platforms of the late 00s and very early 2010s, and to the multiple older adult men she had sex with (and would again brag about this). She had no trauma at home (yes, one never knows for sure) and came from a wealthy and loving family with several siblings whom I know well.
At the time, her own close friends advised her against what she did, called her weird and various other less nice things. But while she was pretty and popular, she was not the prettiest or the most popular and I think in a way the attention from older men helped make up for that in her own head. As I said, I think a better world would have found ways of preventing her from doing what she did, and of preventing the men who did what they did to her from doing it.
But it also doesn’t sit right with me to absolve her of any responsibility, and it frustrates me when she (on the one occasion I have seen her in the last few years) narrates this chapter of her life as if she had zero agency, when everyone who was there knows that she had plenty of it.
2rafa
15hr ago
Scalpers are smart enough to be able to provide the team with dozens of pictures of happy families at the ball game.
2rafa
15hr ago
In New York City, I think about a quarter of white people are Jewish. In LA it is much lower, though maybe 1/8th still makes sense.
2rafa
15hr ago
That isn’t quite true. “Amateur investors” includes everything from sensible people who manage their 401ks with a little panache and a slight preference in sector exposure to “day traders” of the WSB type who gamble on far out of the money options or who put their life savings into heavily leveraged short ETFs.
Among the latter, most data shows perhaps 1% make money consistently, far below professional active managers. In addition, their losses are far higher, while many active managers (loathe as I am to defend them) only marginally underperform the market.
2rafa
15hr ago
294, which I’m pretty happy with. I didn’t guess and as per the guidance didn’t mark anything unless I was sure. I got one PC cable wrong/missed the right answer and realized it as soon as I skipped to the next question (it was SATA). My intuition was right about the poets but I didn’t trust myself.
2rafa
1d ago
Ideally you want slightly more women than men, so that every reasonably eligible man pairs off, women don’t feel so overwhelmed with male attention that they resort to third wave feminism(and third wave feminism is, by and large, a reaction to the perception of male sexual threat.
This is why…New York is the happiest place in the country?
To answer your question, it would depend on the political objectives of the Shah. The threat of Pan-Arabism is actually what Israel has been trying to nip in the bud for all these years, preventing the political alliance of actually more secular leaders like Assad, Hussein, Nasser, and since the fall of Iraq Iran is the greatest threat of providing a basis for greater political unity and cooperation among Arabs.
Iran is hostile to pan-Arabism, its people aren’t Arabs, and a pan-Arabist state that incorporated Assad, Hussein and Nasser’s states would become (regardless of who was in charge of Iran) a huge threat to Iran militarily and civilizationally. Israel didn’t bring war to a region that was beset with countless sectarian and ethnic divides long before it was founded.
2rafa
1d ago
Rodriguez just made the erstwhile chief of the revolutionary secret police and notorious user of torture against regime enemies one of her top people and defense minister a few days ago.
2rafa
1d ago
Quite awhile back, you argued that none of Israel's enemies in the region could defeat it even without US help.
I will try to find my old comment, so you might be right, but I think what I said is that Israel’s destruction would not be inevitable in that event, or another statement that was maybe at least a little more cautious than what you imply. I’ve been pretty negative about Israel’s long-term prospects here for a while.
2rafa
1d ago
This is a response to a generic argument but not the specific one. Iran and Israel were not historic enemies. Historically, Jews were sometime treated poorly in Persia and sometimes well, but that was true in many places. Israel doesn’t have any territorial claims on Iran. Even the most fantastical, maximalist Zionist claims disavowed even by most religious zionists end in Western Iraq, nowhere near Iran, and would require conquering other nations to reach. Israel and Iran had a coldly neutral or allied relationship for most of the Cold War.
It is disingenuous to pretend that what changed was not the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which brought to power in Iran a theocratic government let by a clerical leadership that considered the destruction of Israel its central and absolute foreign policy goal (not the only goal, of course, it also sought to export the revolution to Iraq and Sunni states, but the central goal, yes). This government was not threatened by Israel, which has neither the population nor any economic or political reason, independently, to rule over an Iran that is not hostile toward it. Iranians have no ethnic and scant religious relations (other than those they imagine themselves) with the Palestinians, Sunni Arabs who have themselves fought wars against them for centuries (millennia, Iran being Muslim because the Gulf Arab conquerors destroyed the Persian Sassanids, of course) and today - Hamas fighters fighting against Assad in Syria for example.
The sole reason for Israeli hostility toward Iran for the last 45 years has been the revolutionary mission of the Islamic Republic, which seeks to destroy it. Or ask yourself a simple question - if the Islamic Revolution had never occurred, do you think Israel would care to fight a war against Iran?
2rafa
1d ago
…written almost 20 years after the Islamic Revolution, and 12 years after Hezbollah officially joined an alliance with Iran, receiving funding toward its mission of destroying Israel, which had been enshrined as a central goal of the Islamic Revolution from nearly the beginning. Israel didn’t start the hostility with revolutionary Iran.
2rafa
1d ago
“Apparently” they didn’t want Kushner and Witkoff because they were involved in the earlier “bad faith” negotiations and asked for Vance instead.
2rafa
1d ago
I agree, it’s disingenuous when people suggest Israel started the conflict with Iran. A core objective of the Islamic revolution is the destruction of the “Zionist entity”, not partially but wholly and absolutely, a raison d’etre of the modern Iranian state is Israel’s destruction, even at colossal political and economic cost (as we’ve seen). Since the neutering of Iraq in 2003 and Saddam’s replacement with a quasi democratic largely Shia government, no foreign power or group realistically wants to annex major parts of Iranian territory (other than perhaps the Kurds, but nobody else including Turkey would want that, and it won’t happen).
Israel’s hostility to Iran isn’t ethnic or national or irredentist or religious, like the hostility to the Palestinians. Iran is far away and Israel doesn’t claim any of it. It’s solely downstream from the Islamic revolution.
2rafa
1d ago
East Jerusalem has much more religious significance than most of Southern Lebanon. Arguably even Syria has more. All Israel has ever wanted in Southern Lebanon is some kind of Maronite ethnostate, but the reality is that Lebanese Christian elites are low tfr, far too comfortable and all have foreign passports and so don’t care to fight and die for their homeland really. This was the reality in the civil war and is the problem today. The Shias are poor and have nowhere to go.
This would be good for Americans in America, because we will not be top dog forever; in a century or two we may find ourselves in Iran’s place with a more powerful China attempting to oppress us and conquer us.
Whatever the Chinese decide is or isn’t in their interest in a century’s time, I have absolutely no doubt that it will not be determined by the comparative empathy level of American foreign policy in the early 21st century.
Yes, this war has not gone well for America, but that was hardly unexpected, there’s a reason no previous American president was dumb enough to do this, including HW and Jr. Disarming Hezbollah is equally flawed, Shias in Lebanon are loyal to it and will reform and rebuild it in whatever guise, whatever the case, and the country is too divided by sectarianism to stop them. I hesitate to say it’s over for Israel, it’s faced poor odds before, but the future certainly isn’t bright for it.
I am referring more generally to the long history of persecution in Muslim lands. You’re right that for most of the last 500 years the population of Palestine was very low. It’s also why I don’t really entertain claims the the Jews are “native” to the land, this is a cheap and halfhearted Zionist comeback - Israelis should be proud of being settler colonialists, like many great historical peoples.
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