2rafa
13hr ago
Most of those things are discussed pretty regularly here. Others are just uninteresting. Another dissident right personage turns out to be Jewish? At this stage it would be surprising if someone prominent on the DR wasn’t Jewish (Sailer DNA test reveal when). Big price rises in the US, particularly in service (stuff like fast food etc) are just due to labor shortage related pay increases for the poorest workers since 2020, they’re not hugely interesting. Day traders being retarded again? As I recall the statistics showing, something like 95-99% of them lose money in the long term. Eurovision being gay and weird, really? (Also this was literally a discussion last week).
If you have a good idea, make a top-level comment.
2rafa
21hr ago
The more common Western opinion (if they have heard of the holodomor at all) is that it was caused by communism. That said, the only people who really discuss it are either American libertarians/conservatives or generic neoliberal NATOwave type Central Europeans who vote center-right and see Russia and communism as essentially the same thing.
2rafa
1d ago
Irish nationalism has been broadly leftist for a long time. Sinn Fein is an explicitly socialist party, and advocated quasi-revolutionary socialism until relatively recently. Ireland’s pro-Palestinian activism is based on perceived shared oppression by Anglo imperialists, it is inherently quite leftist (much like other European separatist movements, eg. in Catalonia). I would guess that if you polled the Irish, extreme pro-Palestinian sentiment would be highly correlated with political leftism.
2rafa
2d ago
I have long thought it was obvious that there are many more white man - black woman (and ‘woman of color’ generally) pairings than white woman - black man (and especially ‘other non-white man’) ones. Still, I thought I might be biased for whatever reason.
But in general white guy - black or minority woman covers all bases, you satisfy the right by having a tough white male lead, and the left claps because it checks woman and PoC boxes. The most cynical casting for a modern network procedural detective show would be like a white male lead and a gay woman of color co-star. White women are superfluous, especially as women are more progressive and less identitarian so presumably much less likely to be upset that there’s no white woman lead.
Black women definitely do complain about casting of black men with white women. I’m sure the threads are easily found on LipstickAlley etc.
2rafa
2d ago
It is working in the many African countries that have seen tfr crater in recent decades. It is more stubborn in a few particular places with high populations - Nigeria and Egypt come to mind - and in the absolute worst parts of the continent like Niger and Chad. Even there the trend is down though, it’s just looking more like Europe’s decline than some Asian countries’.
2rafa
2d ago
I think there are so many overlapping drivers of pro-Israel sentiment in the “ratsphere” (many Jews, the scene was largely founded by Jews, respect for Jewish inventions, Israelis as disproportionately active in tech/AI research, general dislike for religious Muslims, contempt for wokeness, dislike of student protestors) that it would seem unlikely for there to be any significant number.
The three core predictors of support for Palestine vs Israel are being Muslim, being leftist/‘woke’ and having a broadly low opinion of Jews. I’ve never met a strongly anti-Israel person who fell into none of those three categories.
I discuss it below, but it’s hard to quantify the extent to which Putin tolerates the extreme overrepresentation of various minority groups in organized crime in Russia proper. By contrast the modern FBI went after organized black gangs to the extent that the whole culture fractured and the drugs business is no longer even the main cause of internecine conflict in eg. the South Side.
2rafa
2d ago
How about the extreme amounts of organized crime by various non-ethnic-Russians that the Kremlin largely tolerates and which de facto amounts to huge wealth transfers to these minorities? Sure, there aren’t many state handouts (although there are some), but that isn’t the only thing that serves that effect.
2rafa
2d ago
I don’t think you really mean that. Would you accept a permanent end to affirmative action, bans on any DEI, guaranteed meritocracy in public and private employment and harsh crackdowns on any racial identitarianism (white or black) in exchange for limits on the number of kids white people could have?
It is simply indisputable that China is more leftist about this kind of thing than the US. The specific flavor of anti-racism in America is largely unique to the Anglosphere, progressivism isn’t.
2rafa
2d ago
Non-Han minorities get certain privileges but if they step out of line they'll be in a world of pain.
Non-Han minorities have received privileges that American leftists could never dream of. Imagine if the left restricted white parents to one child while allowing black and brown people to have unlimited children. The CHAZ and Star Wars are nothing compared to that.
Imagine if the top earning film at the US box office was 'Saving Private Ryan' turned up to 11 with an ending caption saying 'the eternal glory of the US Army shall be remembered forever and ever, the brave martyrs live forever in our hearts'. That's the Battle at Lake Changjin, that's real, intense nationalism. The top grossing film in America is Star Wars VII, a woke remaster of the original Star Wars.
Have you watched ‘Masters of the Air’ (2024)? It’s the successor show to Band of Brothers, it’s very patriotic and features a majority white male cast. I don’t think the occasional line about ‘But Black People Were Still Oppressed’ changes that. A rare negative review in Ars Technica said:
The only thing allowed here is wall-to-wall jingoistic patriotism—the kind where there's no room for anything except God, the United States of America, and bombing the crap out of the enemy.
Now, you can argue that no Chinese outlet would publish that about Battle at Lake Changjin, but it’s not clear that that’s really something negative about the US in comparison.
2rafa
2d ago
Imagine if black people and Muslims in America were allowed to have 4 kids each but white people were only allowed to have 1 child each. That was literally state policy in China until recently. I don’t know how you can say that’s better than the US.
2rafa
2d ago
Wokeness really isn’t very far from what Russia and China do for their minorities; both practice affirmative action openly or less openly. These countries’ governments are both officially anti-racist. Chinese rightists complain online about privileges granted to non-Han minorities; Russian ones complain online about advantages of Central Asians or Muslims replacing whites in Moscow and so on. Russia has emphasized national unity since the start of the Ukraine War, but it doesn’t seem to me more radical than the unity the US had in support of ‘the troops’ after 9/11. The US military’s internal rationale for affirmative action is domestic social unity, that’s why the Supreme Court gave them an explicit carve-out in the affirmative action ban last year.
2rafa
3d ago
No, the country music audience likes baseball
More than football? Hispanics I agree of course. But I do think there has been a big decline amongst Ellis Island Americans. Every suburban white male New Yorker (be he Jewish, Irish or Italian) over fifty seems to like baseball, almost no young ones do.
His profile says banned on request, people do it from time to time if they need to spend more time away from the community for whatever reason (like real life work).
I’m sure he’ll be back.
2rafa
3d ago
I’d guess the kind of people who liked baseball (coastal white ethnics) are now the dominant soccer audience in the US. Baseball seems to have completely died in terms of younger audience.
2rafa
4d ago
Could you not just manipulate vote totals so they go +20 when they fall too far below 0.
2rafa
4d ago
True, and that's what proponents of PR argue, that, say, the German system allows for the 'right' to consist of a center-right party (CDU/CSU), a libertarian party (FDP) and a nativist party (AfD) that reflect nuanced positions in the electorate. Another example is Israel where there are various minor flavors of secular vs. religious vs. very religious nationalist parties, centrist religious nationalist parties, ethnic parties and so on. But the downside is that many of the same voters feel betrayed when 'their' politicians compromise, which means that they quickly support and abandon certain parties, which makes dealmaking very difficult because everyone is afraid of being destroyed at the next election, which means nobody is willing to compromise to the extent necessary, which results in gridlock.
2rafa
4d ago
The cutoffs and bonuses are necessary in proportionally elected parliaments, otherwise the incentive would be for every niche interest to get a party unless there was no way it could achieve even 1 seat (which in a say 300 seat parliament would be 0.33% of the vote). You’d have dozens of parties and wrangling them together into coalition would be impossible. Israel is an arguable failure state; it has a low threshold of 3% and no majority bonus system which is really what it needs.
The more you look into non-FPTP traditional constituency systems the more problems come up. The UK/US two-party systems have major problems but force the public to make compromises instead of (just) politicians, which I think is theoretically preferable.
2rafa
4d ago
It’s been an occasionally dredged up topic in literature circles since about 2009, in part thanks to a general sense of impending doom that a lot of mainstream libs have had since then and because there are plenty of ways for them (as noted) to twist Zweig’s words into applying to the present culture war, even if this is relatively poor practice. There are also many literary comparisons (often unfavorable ones) to Joseph Roth. I don’t think there’s any reason why this year in particular would make it a thing, though, I bought my copy in Vienna while looking for books about Austria I could read in German.
2rafa
5d ago
15m people in <4 years
I’m not aware of any estimates that the total number of migrants in the last four years has been that high. Most estimates seem to be 6-7 million including illegals.
2rafa
5d ago
Again though, this is attacking the system rather than the rationale. I don’t agree with using this kind of thing to harass random gun owners, but do think this kind of analysis could help track down actual terrorists, or people undertaking illegal gain of function research or things like that. The problem is more that the entire federal government was co-opted by the enemy and the right went along with giving it the tools to do this.
Yeah, a top paragraph can be the length of one tweet - I don’t see how people can complain it’s too long. Becoming a news aggregator is a failure state for the board too.
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