2rafa
41m ago
For the Iranian government to fall, there would have to be mass protests today (or maybe tomorrow) coinciding with more strikes. I don’t know, that feels unlikely.
Iran - US - Israel War Flareup
“Israel says it has launched attack on Iran, as explosions reported in Tehran”
“The US has begun Major Combat Operations in Iran” - Donald Trump (headline flashed up just now on my phone, no link yet)
—-
More to follow but thought I’d post quickly for any commenting.
There was just as much reciprocal persecution of Jews in Arab and Persian lands, in fact 18th century Western European Jewish travelers to Jewish communities in Persia lamented the extreme persecution of the local Jewish community, which was worse than anything in Europe at the time. A specific animus against ‘European Christians’ seems unfounded.
The difference is that outright expulsion was rarer in the Middle East because those were already relatively confessionally diverse societies with various random leftover minority groups, both ethnic and religious, from Assyrian Christians to Samaritans to Zoroastrians to Alawites to Eastern Catholics etc etc. The ruling elite might viciously oppress minority groups but these societies didn’t (until the late 19th century) generally consider the possibility of outright ethnic cleansing. It is unclear to me that being expelled is actually worse than being extremely cruelly oppressed by the way.
By contrast, European Christian societies were more exclusive, regularly fighting wars of religion that were explicitly designed to cleanse territories of other flavors of Christianity until comparatively recently, and Jews were often caught up in that fervor. Ethnically and linguistically they were often still very much diverse, but religiously they were more exclusive, and they fought more internal wars, which again have a habit of leading to ethnic cleansing regardless. In addition, and this is again rarely noted even though it’s obvious, the “110 countries” are mostly European because a large swathe of Mitteleuropa consisted of hundreds of tiny micro states for centuries, whereas the Middle East was mostly divided (at the macro level at least) into much larger polities like the grand caliphates and later Ottoman Empire.
2rafa
2hr ago
Buying premade staple ingredients is usually both good value and efficient. For example, I regularly cook with what I guess is a standard vegetable / ‘soffritto’ base (very finely diced onions, celery, carrots) as a base for sauces, stews, whatever. Could I buy the ingredients myself and make this on the weekend, freeze it in bags, then use it when I’m cooking? Sure.
But I can also get it perfectly, finely and evenly diced, with no waste or disproportionate amounts of celery or whatever from the grocery store, where 1lb of the “frozen soffritto mix” costs me $2.50. There’s a French grocery store I found that sells pre-finely-diced frozen shallots, perfect for a fast pan sauce if you don’t want to buy and chop shallots, which I use too.
I also buy pre-peeled garlic, which keeps pretty well (the “hacks” for quickly peeling garlic have never worked for me). I buy jarred diced ginger, chili etc in vinegar, which saves both time and in the latter case that horrible feeling when you chop chili and imperfectly wash your hands and then touch your eye or something.
The store also sometimes has very good pre-marinated meats which, again, save a lot of unnecessary time and effort at miniscule cost (perhaps an additional 10% on top of the price of the meat itself). Store-bought curry sauces are also great; the gain from hand-grinding spices, mashing chillies, hand-making a massaman or red curry paste over a good store-bought base is real, but minimal. I think the same about homemade pie crust. A premium store-bought brownie mix is likewise superior to most homemade alternatives.
2rafa
2hr ago
If Ellison wanted a liberal who was also a Zionist there were thousands of people in the NYC media business (and indeed already at CBS News) he could have picked to run the news business, it would be a remarkable turnaround in your view on the ethnocentrism of the Jewish community if you disagreed with this.
So the fact he picked Weiss transparently has much more to do with her “anti-woke” views and perceived sympathy or at least neutrality toward Trump (whose administration ultimately has to approve his empire building) than policy vis a vis Israel (which a ‘traditional’ candidate from TV news could also have).
2rafa
2hr ago
In Singapore the power distribution is relatively ‘fairly’ distributed by proportion; the Chinese are in charge, obviously, but they are also the majority. In Lebanon the outcome of the Civil War was an arrangement that is tripartite and so not strictly proportionate but certainly moreso than it was before (and part of the instability is precisely that the Maronites have fewer children but cling onto the power they have, even still). There aren’t many historic examples of states where a large minority of the population (more than 25%, say) have been Jewish. The highest it got in prewar Eastern Europe was 6-10% really, the latter in Poland on the eve of the Second World War. There just aren’t that many Jews.
2rafa
2hr ago
The patriarchs themselves generally remain, but their large extended clans, daughters, grandchildren, many sons, cousins and so on often spend substantial time abroad and have European citizenship.
2rafa
12hr ago
As much as I like the idea of all our posting being immortalized by AI, it is very frustrating.
2rafa
12hr ago
Any man can have two partner in the same day (even women ones), a loser trucker can have two truck stop whores in a day. That’s not what it’s about.
2rafa
17hr ago
Many critics of Islam consider things like the Hajj (which most scholars believe predates Islam) and ritual circling of the meteorite stone embedded in the Kaaba to be pagan, sure. And of course many both Jewish and Muslim critics of Christianity consider aspects of the Trinity to be polytheistic / shirk / etc in character.
The reason Israeli tourists are disliked in non-Muslim parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America and places like Cyprus is simply that they’re largely boorish, annoying, plebeian men fresh with money from their military service and looking to get wasted, laid and cause trouble.
It’s like asking why British tourists have a much worse reputation in Spain and Croatia than in Japan and America; the former are of a very different class and standard of behavior. American working class soldiers have a very bad reputation in eg Okinawa and parts of the Philippines for harassing women etc.
2rafa
18hr ago
Lebanon is only good for the elite because they can flee with their ill gotten gains to Switzerland or Dubai after leaving office. If they had to stay in Lebanon the incentives would be very different.
2rafa
18hr ago
There is a history of homogenous societies turning on Jews but there was also plenty of antisemitism in corners of diverse empires like the Russian and Ottoman Empires (not so much in the capitals, at least most of the time, but certainly in many of the provinces). In 1980 America was far more diverse than Western Europe and yet had little antisemitism.
In general the “Jews want diversity because Jews do better in diverse countries” point is extremely contrived, it’s gained currency only because it’s promoted both by Jewish progressives who want to defend multiculturalism in a weekly Reform temple sermon and by far-right antisemites who want to ‘explain’ the motive for why Jews supposedly want to destroy formerly-homogenous white countries with mass immigration. There isn’t much evidence for it or against it. Some Jews supported mass immigration, but so did plenty of powerful indigenous Europeans both in Europe and in North America. Jews were more progressive than many other groups on immigration in the mid-20th century of course, but they were also more progressive on economic and other issues (eg being very overrepresented in economic leftist movements), which suggests it wasn’t an immigration-specific thing.
Seems like a failson wannabe Hollywood mogul centibillionaire heir wasting a huge amount of his father’s money (and some dumb money from outside investors of a similar caliber) on an industry that’s about to be completely upended by AI.
Smart move for Netflix to walk away, say what you will, these assets won’t be worth $100bn in 5 years.
As to your last point, the person doing more than anyone else to deport Somalis from Minnesota (including almost all gentile GOP politicians) is Jewish.
2rafa
19hr ago
Netflix has plenty of Jewish employees, obviously, but it’s controlled, run and was founded by Reed Hastings, who is of Boston Brahmin Mayflower arch-WASP pedigree.
2rafa
19hr ago
In part that’s because the Israel - Iran conflict is merely part of a larger web of interconnected Middle Eastern conflicts that exist above and beyond it, the most significant being about whether Saudi Arabia or Iran is perceived by the Ummah as the more Islamic government, the legitimacy of the guardianship of Mecca and Medina by the Al-Sauds, the millennium-old Sunni-Shia split, the war in Yemen (now tripartite between the Saudis, Iranians and UAE) etc.
People overfocus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but there would be plenty of drama in the region without it.
2rafa
5d ago
This is true but it doesn’t answer the specific question of purely homosexual gay tops attracted to femme men. That a bisexual top would be attracted to feminine men is comparatively unsurprising, both feminine men and most women present along the femme continuum. That a purely homosexual gay top attracted to relatively masculine or male-presenting men wouldn’t be attracted to women is likewise unsurprising, since this is a man who is physically attracted to maleness and masculinity. But a man who enjoys dominant penetrative sex with feminine-presenting men but is unattracted entirely to women is harder to explain.
2rafa
5d ago
In addition to the other answers, which make good points, I think there’s an aspect to male top psychology that enjoys the sexual dominance or humiliation of other men specifically. Many tops, after all, aren’t bisexual, something that can’t fully be explained by the ‘gay sex is easy’ meme when many entirely homosexual tops are traditionally handsome and masculine men, good conversationalists, friends with many women etc who could easily find female partners at least on occasion.
2rafa
6d ago
The weird bit is firstly that, while I can't speak for them, it's a fairly uncontroversial idea that heterosexual women can be as aroused by being an object of desire as they are by direct observation of what they desire. Apparently this is a very common theme in popular women's erotica.
Attraction to someone in particular being attracted to you and being attracted to a fantasy of yourself as a woman are two quite different things, in my opinion.
2rafa
6d ago
There is a typology of feminine gay men, but there is also a typology of hyper-masculine bisexual men. The modern agp phenomenon is just the latter run through modern technology, legal codes, academic cant and social hysteria.
The bisexual top phenomenon is real and distinct, but it’s not the same as AGP even if it overlaps with it. If you want to be a hyper masculine gay man who fucks men, this is after all a desirable gay niche today, at least as far as I understand it. Certainly there is no incentive to transition.
2rafa
6d ago
What occasioned this reflection?
I suppose that I think the TERF treatment of HSTS is unnecessarily harsh, but that such a judgment requires a clearer categorization.
2rafa
6d ago
The ‘Kathoey’ or Ladyboy designation is a more honest way of categorizing both very effeminate / camp gay men and most ‘straight’, feminine transwomen (HSTS in Blanchardian typology).
Transwomen of a kind are obviously very common. I understand there is still some social discrimination, but probably 70% of Sephora sales assistants in Thailand are ladyboys/transwomen/kathoey/your preferred term here. This is even more common than in Seattle, which I wrote about previously. In my local Sephoras (London Westfield - Shepherd’s Bush NOT Stratford, please - and Soho on Broadway I guess) there are some transwomen and a large number of very feminine, makeup wearing gay men, but something about the experience in Thailand just underscored to me how similar the two are.
It reminded me of a pioneering British local TV documentary I’d written about before, produced in the 1980s about gay life in London in the 1930s. One of the things the men make very clear is that the gay community, such as it was at the time, consisted entirely of camp, effeminate men who were to the man, in terms of sexual role, bottoms. Often they described each other, semi-ironically, with female pronouns or roles (queen etc) which are still used by many camp gay men today. The tops they had sex with were not considered part of this community. In a very real sense, they were not considered gay at all, even and perhaps most clearly by the men they were having sex with.
This wasn’t a legal distinction - a ‘top’ was still committing a crime at the time under British law in having sex with another man, and would flee the night club in the event of a police raid all the same - but it was a clear social one. The femme men themselves didn’t have sex with each other (this is, at least, implied in the documentary), only with the ‘straight’ or ‘topping’ men whom they solicited in clubs, parks, outside barracks and so on. More broadly, the sexual and communal landscape the men discuss seems to be by far the most common way in which human societies have historically understood effeminate or camp males who are primarily sexually attracted to other men. The ladyboys don’t have sex with each other for the same reason that the gay ‘queens’ of 1930 London didn’t. And then men who have sex with ladyboys - or who had sex with those men in the thirties - aren’t or weren’t gay in the same way that they were. That isn’t to say they’re straight, or not bisexual, or not anything else, but it’s clearly not the same thing. The modern Western gay identity, in which tops and bottoms (and indeed lesbians and gay men) are grouped together is essentially a consequence of the civil rights movement and AIDS crisis; it is ahistorical and unusual compared to all historical treatment of non-mainstream forms of gender and sexual identity.
Blanchard’s key contribution to the understanding of transsexualism was that he acknowledged - based on his own practice - that homosexual transsexuals or HSTS and autogynephilic transsexuals or AGP constituted two clearly defined, vastly different populations of males who identified with womanhood or female-ness. HSTS fundamentally existed along the spectrum of camp male femininity, expressed both sexually and generally. As I understand it, the gay man at Sephora who wears a skirt, a full face of makeup and speaks in a camp, exaggerated feminine voice is - even if he is not on hormones - considered a kathoey in Thailand. And this makes sense - camp femme gay men who are sexually submissive, may wear drag etc and HSTS transwomen are often divided solely by the extent to which they are committed to presenting as female (that commitment ultimately expressed in medical intervention), and nothing else in terms of dress, presentation, sexual preference, interests and so on.
The reason why Blanchard is controversial is not his categorisation of HSTS, of course, but its inverse. The non-HSTS, the top-who-transitions, the man (often in Blanchard’s own experience) who decides after 30+ years of normal heterosexual life, marriage, children, relationships with only women etc, that he is actually a woman, is not part of this long continuity of effeminate homosexual males. He is something different, something new, something comparatively unusual. He is a product, it seems to me at least, of modernity. In naming the autogynephilic transsexual man, Blanchard acknowledged a sexual identity largely divorced from sexuality (consider that many if not most AGP are attracted to women at least before heroic doses of female hormones, meaning their sexual identity is not a key part of their transition). The AGP male is closer to the archetypal modern fetishist (I won’t name examples because inevitably that will devolve into a pointless argument), except that the object of his attraction is inverted. His motivations for womanhood are completely different to those of the HSTS, but our understanding of trans identity doesn’t allow us to acknowledge this essential difference.
If an argument one occasionally hears about clearly differentiating HSTS and AGP is that it is impossible to tell the difference, I think the Thai example is a good counterargument. Perhaps someone else can correct me if I’m wrong, but I find it hard to believe that these transwomen are particularly interested in lesbian relationships with ciswomen. They are, of course, interested in relationships with men, with males, because they are gay males, but that is about it. They have their own bathrooms (at least in some Thai malls and bars I saw clear male, female and other (with the gender icons overlapping) bathrooms, which seemed - above all else - reasonable.
Indeed.
More options
Context Copy link