2rafa
2hr ago
Quite the opposite. Under Assad, the Islamists and broader Sunni population fled to Europe. If the West had helped the Islamists win, it would be the Christians and Alawites who would have fled to Europe.
2rafa
2hr ago
The EU could come to a deal to return them, but it would undoubtedly be blocked by the ECHR. The ECHR ruled that deportation to a country where any part is unsafe (construed extremely broadly, including for ‘human rights’ reasons) is illegal. They’re not going to allow deportation to Syria in any case, and wouldn’t whether under Assad or HTS or (likely) anyone else.
In addition, many Syrian migrants in Western Europe have already received asylum / permanent residency, many are already citizens.
2rafa
3hr ago
The Reuters article said one EU official ‘expressed concern’ with his views on that historical figure, then mentioned the AJC letter. Where is the causative relationship between that and the decision taken by the Romanian court?
2rafa
11hr ago
Where is the evidence that the election was cancelled because the AJC and Elie Wiesel institute wrote letters ‘expressing concerns’ about the candidate? You’ve often done this, arguing that anything that is supported by some Jews that subsequently happens must have been set in motion by those Jews, which is rather fallible logic.
2rafa
17hr ago
The Iranians had IRGC stationed throughout his country including in Damascus, he wasn’t in a position to tell them to leave.
2rafa
17hr ago
This current offensive doesn’t seem US-driven. Turkey has some involvement but even they appear surprised at the pace. It seems Assadist morale has been totally hollowed out and the SAA’s mostly Sunni fighters (Alawite men having suffered insanely high casualty rates over the last 14 years) didn’t care to fight.
2rafa
1d ago
The issue is that if you want real traditional classical architecture in the American tradition, you’re looking at least $3m for a modest house after land and every other cost. A handful of architects design it. A handful of skilled artisans still exist for the masonry and other details. Many materials will need to be imported, many fixtures designed abroad. Most importantly, the construction method will be radically different than the standard for a modern American home, may be made out of brick etc. I follow some New Classical Architecture instagram pages and there are excellent new proportionate classical homes being built in the US today, but they’re unaffordable for all but the wealthy.
The McMansion represents a desperate attempt to live in an aesthetically pleasing home that doesn’t quite land. Women are obsessed with bags in part because of status, of course, but also because the most popular classic bags (Kelly, Birkin, Chanel Flap) are some of the few beautiful objects unruined (at least in their usual form) by modernity. They are symmetrical, polished, beautiful, aligned, have OK (yes, even today) stitching. Men feel the same way about watches, some about expensive suits or dress shoes.
In the McMansion neighborhoods of Utah and Arizona, there is no legitimate classical architecture possible at even an affluent upper-middle class budget (new or old), so where does that leave the homebuyer? She can accept the discordant, soulless, anarchic emptiness of (post)modern architecture, which almost all normal people agree is usually ugly especially in a domestic context, or she can have the McMansion which at least features a big great room with a fireplace, a kitchen that feels something like an American kitchen, wood and decoration and a sloping roof and some the architectural elements that most people think should be part of a house.
Sure, if they could live in a McMansion that looked like a Gilded Age Newport villa, they would. But they can’t, and architecture is unable to offer them a remotely aesthetic substitute.
2rafa
2d ago
If a city has a fentanyl epidemic, is it best to do nothing and let it run through the junkies ?
This is the classic argument against Narcan, sure.
2rafa
2d ago
The US has peer countries in Europe, but when you look at median income (the best statistic) they’re limited to Norway, Switzerland and Luxembourg. Disposable income is still higher in the US but overfocusing on that doesn’t provide you with the whole story.
I mean, do they believe in God? Do they believe in the literal truth that Jesus Christ is the son of God and part of God and was sent for the salvation of mankind? Do they believe that our father art in heaven? Do they believe in the resurrection? These fundamental articles of faith are central to belief in Christianity. Unlike the beginning of Genesis and other Old Testament stories they can’t be handwaved as metaphor.
2rafa
2d ago
Energy drinks often have far higher caffeine than all coffee barring like 44oz of strong drip.
2rafa
2d ago
I don’t think it’s possible to be a Christian (or a Muslim, for that matter) and not truly believe. Judaism is a mixed bag since it’s more of an ethnotribal identity, but certainly there too belief is strongly preferable because it anchors most practice.
In previous phases of religious revival (including the rapid growth of evangelical Christianity in the US in the 1970s and 1980s, and the great revival movements of the 19th century) almost all lay revivalists already believed in God even if their practice was limited or nonexistent and even if their lives were not necessarily particularly Christian. Without that, I’m not sure if it’s possible.
2rafa
2d ago
the Right is slowly constructing a version of Christianity that is ready for violence, and isn't bound and shamed by Liberal memes like a good submissive Anglicanism.
It’s all le based ‘Christ is King’ memes, how many of these angry young men actually believe in Christianity? Most are no less atheist than Richard Dawkins fans in 2010, or the average /pol/ack. It’s not a genuine religious revival.
2rafa
2d ago
People are over focusing on a tiny X-based fringe of the online right that isn’t reflected in the vast majority of Trump’s cabinet picks, in Trump’s personal politics and in the opinion of 90%+ of people who voted for him. In time, it will be seen as as cringe and poorly imagined as the “hail Trump, hail victory” Spencer stuff was in 2016.
2rafa
2d ago
We have centuries of Chinese history in which imperialism was highly limited, contra centuries of Russian imperialism in which it very much was not.
2rafa
2d ago
I don’t care if South Korea and Japan have nukes and would probably consider it a good thing. I’m very confident that Xi Jinping does not personally want to rule over the Japanese the way Putin dreams of reconstituting the Russian Empire, so I don’t really care.
2rafa
2d ago
Because they don’t want. China for much of the last 2000 years had insane state capacity, a centralized government and some of the most modern technology of the age, and yet its territorial expansion was highly restrained.
2rafa
2d ago
Extending it down to surrendering our own borders and our own cities—isn’t that the source of most of your complaints?
If anything, I’m an American imperialist. I think America should directly rule the majority of the world, especially Central and South America, Western Europe and probably Japan and Korea. I just don’t care about China. The Chinese have no great imperialist instinct the way the Japanese, Russians, Anglos and French have or have had. They don’t seek to rule me or convert me to the Chinese system and never have. Theirs is not - in a deep sense, deeper than surface level marxism - an imperial civilization with global aims.
2rafa
3d ago
True, if you were to have knowledge of Putin vs Xi’s wildest territorial dreams if they could get away with anything, I think I’d be quite sure the latter’s would be Taiwan, nine-dash-line and the US out of Korea (and probably also the end of the Kim regime, which the CCP has long been ambivalent about). Putin’s wildest territorial dreams clearly go way beyond Eastern Ukraine.
2rafa
3d ago
Yeah, I agree that we should, but it would have been smart to negotiate that at the nadir of the Russian campaign in early 2023 when we could have gotten some major concessions.
2rafa
3d ago
I can think of half a dozen countries off the top of my head who could start wars to gain territory if they knew they had the implicit permission of NATO and the western powers.
None of those countries are as powerful as China, most don’t have nuclear weapons and - if they do - so does the other guy. That’s the difference.
2rafa
3d ago
Why don’t we just let China have Taiwan and the South China Sea? I really don’t care about China. China doesn’t care about most of the rest of the world. China doesn’t seek dominion over European civilization. China is uninterested in the export of world revolution in the way that, say, some historic communist states were. The Taiwanese will do just fine under Chinese rule; even the old KMT vets are unlikely to face any retribution in their very, very old age. Most people neither require nor care about democracy; they want streets that are safe, low crime, affordable and decent food on the table, a youth that is disciplined and hardworking, and a feeling that their country is headed in the right direction.
What matters is civilization. What matters is mass immigration. What matters is law and order. What matters is the cultural rot that has hollowed out the West, leaving a small class of feckless, neurotic elites and a vast population of normal people held hostage by the scum at the bottom of society who continuously go un- and under-punished. What matters is ugliness, in architecture, in obesity, in fonts, in advertising, in fashion. China is responsible for relatively little of this.
Challenging China is both pointless and cruel. The Chinese, for all the great flaws of their system, still have the kind of state capacity and self-belief that Western nations can only dream of. Waging a war against China would be an act of nightmarish self-harm. Fix the West, first, on a cultural level, then worry about whatever the fuck is going to happen with Taiwan (I don’t care).
2rafa
3d ago
Bill Clinton went 'oh the Chinese are trying to censor the internet, that's like nailing Jell-O to the wall!'. He was wrong. Censoring the internet is easy and desirable for any state, as we now understand.
You can easily access dissident material in China and most internet-literate Chinese could do so by VPN even with the crude blocking implemented as part of the great firewall. Chinese don’t do so not because they can’t, but because they don’t want to. The US should implement a similar policy of making socially deleterious messaging (like much of TikTok) hard to access for plebs, but easy for anyone with a modicum of intelligence.
China is a largely functioning, largely peaceful society. Democracy has nothing to offer them, countless genuine democracies in Asia, Africa and the Americas are complete shitholes with a much lower quality of life than China.
The Chinese don’t desire control of the world. They never have, it’s not in their genes. They want their little slice of East Asia, they don’t even really want Japan and are semi-ambivalent on Korea. They want to control the SCS, which is reasonable for the world’s second power given the US controls oceans and waterways many times further away from North America than the furthest extreme of the nine dash line is from mainland China.
As far as AI and related tech goes, they’ll have it anyway, it’s way too easy to steal cloud compute and divert GPU shipments and - even if it wasn’t - the Chinese could still just tune and run the models after they were created. The US needs peace with China, a 50 year plan to hand over Taiwan to the CCP in a negotiated fashion (OR a commitment by the Taiwanese that they’re prepared to fight this themselves, which they are not) and some kind of pathway to a settlement around the nine-dash that either extracts significant concessions from Southeast Asian allies or cedes the space to China in the interests of peace.
To be fair the vast majority did go to Turkey.
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