2rafa
1d ago
A lot of becoming President/PM/etc is pure luck; being a competent political operator, sure, but being in the right place and right time. There could certainly have been a Jewish President of the US by now (and probably any time from the 70s onward), it didn’t happen for a variety of reasons but none are on the level that they precluded it from happening, they were just headwinds. Parliamentary systems elect more outsiders because leaders are chosen by MPs or by parties, rather than by the public, which is why you have more women and minority PMs than Presidents. Still, even that’s not prescriptive.
2rafa
1d ago
There’s no way the Pope would excommunicate arguably the world’s most powerful Catholic (other than or perhaps even including himself) even if he had done something to warrant it.
2rafa
1d ago
There are a number of dynamics in US politics that have made it hard for a Jewish Democrat to become President. Not impossible by any means, but difficult because of the nature of the Democratic base and the historic constituencies that made it up. The best shot would probably be as a business Republican with heartland appeal, and as Mark Levin quipped, there is something kind of intrinsically Jewish about Donald Trump. He’s a sleazy Queens slumlord who took on Manhattan and became president of the most powerful country on earth. He has chutzpah.
2rafa
1d ago
The Republican Professors Association represents as in many of these cases a Republican professor not hired at the university after a final round interview and mandatory diversity statement submission.
2rafa
1d ago
Suppose that a new regulatory bill affecting universities passes in congress in which political affiliation is explicitly described as a protected class (as it has been in some federal bipartisan AI efforts). What then?
2rafa
1d ago
Yes, but the point is that disparate impact is explicitly tolerated in insurance more broadly. Insurance providers are not required to ensure that the average premium paid by or payout made to a black person is equal to that paid by or made out to a white person. Real-world indicators for sociocultural groups are obviously in many cases baseline parts of actuarial calculations even when insurers strictly ensure nothing is too egregious or obvious.
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The Republican College Professors’ Association sues on disparate impact grounds after political party affiliation is added to more such laws. They say that the college’s DEI recruitment policy explicitly favors classes of people among whom Republicans are extremely underrepresented (female academics, minorities), which is especially egregious when only 10% of faculty are Republicans and 70% are registered Democrats, a trend the new policies will only exacerbate. They claim the college’s internal DEI materials advocating for a ‘less white, male’ faculty show explicit and direct animus or hostility toward the Republican affiliation because of the above.
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The college counters that white men are overrepresented on the faculty, that women and people of color are underrepresented, and that because both the vast majority of academics are Democrats and almost all Republican academics are white men, attempting to correct the balance in the party affiliation protected characteristic category would have an extreme negative disparate impact on minority and women applicants.
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The Republican Professors’ Association responds that black people and women are also highly underrepresented among professors, particularly in STEM, and yet this makes no difference to the university’s extensive efforts to recruit and advance those applicants and candidates, and suggests that a special effort for Republicans would be no different.
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The university is located in a blue enclave in a red state in a circuit that leans red. The court rules that disparate impact rules mean the college must make every effort to hire and promote Republicans in its diversity programs aimed at increasing the representation of underrepresented faculty. This is a legally questionable ruling, but it is made.
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The college appeals to SCOTUS, arguing that the same rules would destroy all diversity programs everywhere if they went nationwide, at least in those entities subject to laws that allow disparate impact claims based on the political affiliation/registration category. How does Roberts rule?
2rafa
1d ago
Disparate impact is severely curtailed for insurance in general, it’s a topic of some annoyance in critical justice theory circles and there are academic articles advocating for limits on “excessive” (defined broadly” disparate impact.
2rafa
1d ago
It doesn't matter if there's explicit statutory protections, or SCOTUS caselaw: lower courts and the broader progressive branch will happily look at that obvious contradiction and massive onslaught of cases and happily invite them.
It does matter for the same reason quota cases mattered in the run up to that decision, or the same reason it took decades for various pro-gun parties to get the wins they sought; every case increases pressure on SCOTUS to draw narrow, readable boundaries on disparate impact (eg making clear exactly what can be used to show it) or deal with it altogether.
2rafa
1d ago
the Damore case under California law
Damore sued becuase of that very law and settled with (it is rumored) a pretty substantial sum from Google because of it, did he not?
2rafa
1d ago
Disparate Impact is going to be struck down. The GOP pressing the inclusion political party registration, veteran status and religion (Christian etc) in disparate impact laws is one of the smartest things they’ve done recently (not, admittedly, a long list) since it will accelerate their demise.
But in the long term they’re just not viable. They are pushed because explicit quotes were ruled illegal by SCOTUS, but the more they contradict each other (eg disparate impact against hiring Republicans Va disparate impact against hiring minorities) the more the courts are going to be overloaded with an endless series of these cases and SCOTUS is going to have to act. Even though companies may have legally sound defenses to why their new hires are 70% registered diverse Dems but retirees are, say, largely Christian Republicans (age and politics, changing racial demographics, whatever) the sheer onslaught of cases will become unmanageable.
Nybbler will undoubtedly have some kind of blackpilled spiel about why even this is doomed, but it seems to me that, uh, heightening the contradictions of disparate impact is the surest route to tearing it down.
2rafa
2d ago
It’s ridiculous to assume the US military hasn’t fully prepared for the possibility of kesslerization given it’s been theorized as a warfare tactic for almost 50 years. In any case, I imagine both Russia and China would be extremely reluctant to use it given how much damage it would do to either side’s allies all over the world. The destruction of high orbit satellites is far from assured. The speed of it is also unclear and is actually pretty slow iirc in a lot of models.
2rafa
2d ago
The CCP has no issues with Chinese companies paying dividends, even substantial ones, to Western shareholders. They’re more suspicious and much more reluctant around actual acquisitions of Chinese companies.
Especially because there is moneyed interest at stake.
The NYT is a public company, but is completely controlled by the Sulzberger family who own a majority of super-voting shares as part of a trust so secure that even they are prohibited from selling them to non-family-members. That is to say that except for the very limited provisions against extreme failures in corporate governance overseen by the SEC and other federal regulators, other shareholders could do nothing if they ran the company into the ground. The current generation Sulzberger has a Jewish grandfather on his father’s side but is otherwise 75% WASP, largely Episcopalian and certainly does not identify as Jewish or practice as such; he is not Jewish even by the standards of most committed antisemites.
What moneyed interest is at stake?
2rafa
2d ago
Because in internet forum culture there is a long tradition of looking up one’s interlocutor’s posting history and throwing some personal insults in. Nobody is under the impression that hiding it deletes it from the internet, but it does make it harder for someone you’re discussing something with to dig up another post they disagree with from 8 months ago and criticize you based on that, or decide to dislike you because of it.
2rafa
2d ago
The Palestinians would quickly take over the Congo (a few thousand Lebanese dominate several sectors of Nigeria’s economy already, and of course Arabs are highly powerful in Central America) and then use tens of billions of dollars made from resource sales to fund jihadist efforts in the homeland. Doesn’t seem smart from the Israeli perspective.
The only real ‘solution’ along population transfer lines was for them to all move to Egypt/Syria etc in the late 40s and early 50s, with no special UN refugee rights, and that obviously didn’t happen.
2rafa
2d ago
Yeah, and as in Europe the position on immigration and borders is a big negative for them in SA.
Xi is openly a Marxist-Leninist. Deng acknowledged what many ML economists had already done (and even what Lenin had with the aborted NEP), which was that the ‘capitalist stage’ had to be fully completed in order to drive down the marginal cost of production before ‘full socialism’ could be implemented from each according to ability to each according to need. There was no fundamental reason why one revolutionary party could not guide and indeed manage the entire transition from feudalism or early stage, largely agricultural capitalism to communism, including through the majority of the capitalist state, provided it avoided corruption and remained steadfast in its belief that - once capitalism had done its job - communism would be faithfully implemented in service of the people.
This is the genuine majority view among senior cadres in the CCP.
According to Xi, "the consolidation and development of the socialist system will require its own long period of history... it will require the tireless struggle of generations, up to ten generations." On the relationship with capitalist nations, Xi said, "Marx and Engels' analysis of the basic contradictions in capitalist society is not outdated, nor is the historical materialist view that capitalism is bound to die out and socialism is bound to win." Xi also stated: "The fundamental reason why some of our comrades have weak ideals and faltering beliefs is that their views lack a firm grounding in historical materialism."
The extent to which the Chinese believe in HBD is hard to gauge. Certainly ethnic stereotypes of all kinds are common. Nevertheless, the CCP is anti racist, party cadres are taught what is effectively blank-statism in school, research into related evo-psych topics is largely suppressed, even if it is not as immediately cancellable as it is in the US. For 30 years Very Smart Western midwits have pushed the idea that “nah, these guys aren’t really Marxists, they’re mercenaries, they believe in China but not some ideology that a German Jewish journalist came up with 170 years ago, they don’t really believe”. No, they really, really do.
That would make the best time to strike, presumably, the very point at which the contradictions of capitalism become most elevated. Perhaps AI related mass unemployment, who knows? At that point, the US and Western capitalist countries would struggle for an ideology, a path, would be wracked by ideological violence and division. The CCP would simply calmly and peacefully execute the transition they’ve been preparing for all along. Do they believe it will be soon, though? After all, the CCP might not be LW-type singularity believers. Xi did say ten generations, and he’s the fifth generation of party leadership, so that suggests quite a few more.
2rafa
3d ago
Dissident right Twitter bodybuilders and even stuff like Charlottesville (despite subsequent messaging) has given some very online people a completely warped perception of Trump’s base. They’re thinking it’s tall white fit, salmon-colored shorts wearing frat bros, decently educated, probably 115 IQ college grads, deep red, hard right, well versed in issues, probably know how to handle a gun. Similarly, people’s very online perception of the Dem base is either the worst dregs of the criminal or homeless underclass, or like ‘aids skrillex’ type screeching weedy non-binary student protesters crying about Palestine and police brutality.
But that isn’t Biden’s base, and that certainly isn’t Trump’s base. As the Tomato says, Trump’s base is fat middle aged or old people in flyover states who watch Fox News. They may or may not have guns, but boy, they sure aren’t overthrowing the federal government with them, today or any day.
Trump's core demographic is >70% white; among young white men it is the overwhelming majority;
In 2020 Trump won young white men by just 6 points. Younger zoomers are already majority nonwhite or close to it. When adding the 45% of young white men who vote Dem to almost all young black and Hispanic men (many of whom are indeed armed etc) it seems unlikely that violent young men in total are as extremely Republican as you suggest. In addition we have things like obesity data and so on. Young Red men aren’t all, or even close to being, in any large number, fit, muscular 6’5 blonde Midwestern farm boys with a personal armory ready to March on Washington. Even if they tried, blue hair they/thems in Arlington or Silicon Valley can drone them as easily as the IDF drones square-jawed jacked Palestinian youths trying to throw grenades at Israeli soldiers. The idea that the reds would easily win a civil war is ridiculous. They might win, but it is unlikely to be easy.
2rafa
3d ago
Trump hates humiliation or perceived weakness (‘being a loser’) above all else, and Taiwan being invaded would definitely play in the media (which is hostile to him anyway) as a big loss for America. I can’t see him shrugging. He was extremely pro-vaccine as President. He likes things that project American strength. His opposition to some Middle East wars was more about the US getting a bad deal than any moral opposition to them or even committed ideological isolationism. Likewise I think if he had been president in 2022 he would have been very supportive of maximum military aid to Ukraine.
The US basically accepted the eventual Hong Kongization of Taiwan until the early 2010s when the South China Sea stuff flared up, the trade war began and Xi started practicing more aggressive counterintelligence vs Western assets in China. Then the chip thing happened too and now Taiwan is an extremely valuable strategic asset.
Over time Taiwan’s centrality to chip making will reduce and the previous course will resume. There is no need for the CCP to invade now. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t.
Fertility just isn’t going to be necessary in the near future with mass automation. Having 300 million useless mouths to feed vs 50 million is only going to be a drag on productivity and prosperity for those left. In addition, tfr in the rich world might well rise when most people are ‘retired’ and no longer have a career to provide a sense of purpose.
A few countries with extreme collapsing rates like South Korea and possibly China might struggle briefly while human labor is still widely necessary, but for the West, where native tfr still hovers above 1.5 in most countries, there’s more than enough time left. And as you note, the Amish, Hasidim and so on are - in a true ‘collapse’ scenario - sitting ducks for faction with modern weaponry.
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