2rafa
1d ago
Fascism in Italy emerged directly out of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism so can be seen more wholly (even as it later got capitalist/bourgeois support) as descended from the radical left.
Fascism in Germany emerged alongside the immediately-postwar right-wing anti-communist freikorps militias in the chaotic revolutionary atmosphere of Germany in 1918-1922, ideologically out of lower-middle class nationalist groups who weren't particularly leftist economically or socially and so can't really be described as socialist. The word 'socialist' was added to the German Workers' Party name to appeal to urban proletarians who might otherwise be drawn to the far left. After the mid-1920s the NSDAP was never particularly socialist, taxes rose during the war as they did everywhere, but were kept at moderate levels through the 30s, friendly corporations weren't seized, capital markets remained broadly operational, including the major stock exchanges. There were currency and import/export controls to some extent, but those had been implemented everywhere after 1919 and certainly after 1929.
Of course, you might argue that there were and are plenty of committed Chinese and Vietnamese Marxists who eventually embraced market capitalism and private wealth, but the circumstances are slightly different. In those cases and in the official Dengist state literature Marx and Engels' own argument about the teleology of capitalism and that it's a necessary stage of progress that societies have to go through is regularly cited and rephrased. Nazi Germany had no such explanation or argument really.
2rafa
1d ago
He seems to have been a political schizo, liar and clout chaser since the 80s and from Utah. It isn’t surprising he was there and it is even less surprising that when the assassination happened he made the split second decision to commit knowing that his face might be everywhere in the country and world in short order.
The only reason this is getting traction online is because some Twitter users (notably Candace Owens) alleging that Kirk was actually assassinated by Israel decided he was Jewish because of his name (as @DoctorMonarch says, this is far from clear, the name is German and there are plenty of non-Jewish Zinns on Wikipedia) and so must be involved.
2rafa
3d ago
“Reservation Dogs” is a Hulu comedy about modern native life that was largely written and performed by native americans. It’s largely an “early 2020s woke” show politically with some exceptions, but many on the native subreddit seem to have found a lot of the background details to be very accurate and it doesn’t shy away from depicting the squalor, alcoholism, reliance on welfare, single motherhood etc that a lot of people mention.
I’m sure people can still tell, but Former People by Douglas Smith makes the case that by the slow opening up of Soviet society in the 1970s the actual, titled aristocracy had been so totally destroyed as an identity by so many successive periods of purges, internal transfers, re-education, the gulag, the war and intermarriage that it didn’t really exist any more outside of maybe some early emigrant families who left in 1917-1921 that keep or kept a vague recollection of it as a cultural thing. Kulaks and gentry (and to some extent minor urban and provincial bourgeoisie) were obviously much greater in number and their descendants are still relatively powerful and disproportionately overrepresented in the Russian and Chinese elite. And Smith does end with an anecdote about the descendant of one princely family whom he meets in early 2010s Moscow making a fortune in the oil business or something like that.
Hereditarily upper middle, although not truly in the fifth or whatever generation continental European way (a little less common in the Anglosphere, where the haute bourgeoisie has a more fluid cultural and economic relationship with the more mobile upper middle class).
My father grew up small town upper-middle class and my mother something slightly above (or maybe just more urban than) that, although both families had a lot of rises and falls. On my father’s side a big industrial fortune was lost in the Great Depression; his own grandfather was a husk the rest of his life, a New Jersey accountant and business manager for other people when he had been groomed to be a Manhattan titan of industry, always struggling with money and in debt. There are no famous rabbis or scholars in my lineage, so on the Ashkenazi bloodline hierarchy we’re pretty mediocre, a mix of Latvian, Ukrainian and German-Swiss Jewry maybe.
My parents went from NYC upper middle class to wealthy when I was in high school, which was interesting, and I think I’ve written about that before. In England all professional Americans without specific signifiers (very strong Southern yee-haw accent, for example) are grouped into the same social class status, which is about as good as it gets as a foreigner other than the special privilege afforded to Kiwis and Aussies. Your accent, politics and culture will get made fun of, but you are considered competent, professional, relatively intelligent and are a viable dinner guest or party invite most of the time.
2rafa
4d ago
Opera house, high school sports facility or small events room at a local church?
Right, and @FiveHourMarathon says there’s no precedent. There are examples of billionaires handing over their fortune to be managed by others, although the small number of billionaires and fact that these kinds of private financial affairs would usually never be reported on unless there was either a famous legal case or high profile scandal / crime surrounding the arrangement affects visibility.
But if you look more generally, Epstein had been around super rich people to some extent for more than ten years when he met Wexner in the 80s. He had met a large number. All he needed was one. And he had a very good record of charming rich people. He charmed Ace Greenberg as a teacher. He charmed Bear Stearns’ rich clients. He was very good at charming even wealthy women, obviously.
Lauren Sanchez married one man who became a billionaire, then seduced (as a middle-aged woman!) one of the richest men in the world, convinced him to leave his wife in an extremely costly divorce, had herself made the figurehead of his yacht, and got a nine figure wedding out of it all. In total she cost Bezos dozens of times what Epstein made from Wexner.
99.9th percentile charisma people exist, you’ve probably met one or two. Most are harmless and most of the harmful ones are relatively powerless, but coupled with intelligence a few standard deviations above the norm and extreme personal ambition (as noted by Greenberg and others) and what Epstein is alleged to have done with Wexner really isn’t so impossible.
2rafa
5d ago
There is plenty of evidence regarding Wexner, but because he is still alive, un-charged and very, very rich, and because much of it is hearsay, it is rarely laid out explicitly. In any case, it is hardly unsurprising for even extremely sophisticated, highly intelligent investors to be duped, seduced (platonically) by charismatic con men and adventurers for fortune, and Epstein was both. Here’s a great story about one of the most sophisticated, intelligent fund managers of the last twenty years getting conned by an already-notorious conman just because he was charismatic. And the victim in the above story, unlike Wexner, was actually in finance. Madoff had plenty of intelligent victims. Wexner didn’t even ‘lose’ his or his clients’ money unlike the above, he just made less than he might otherwise have. There are countless private bankers, macro hedge fund managers and late stage VCs who likewise spent the last 15 years (and the 1990s before them) getting fat off the bull run with minimal effort other than client relationship management.
This is before you go into the other aspects of the case, like Wexner’s previously confirmed bachelorhood and various 80s and 90s NYC rumors that are hard for any legitimate journalist to discuss without getting sued. (Nick Denton, who is obviously gay and was in the NYC scene through the 90s, hinted toward it many years ago).
I personally think that Epstein's finances were above board and he simply wasn't as rich as he claimed to be (his lifestyle was consistent with the amount of money he could have made scummily but legally by charging Wexner 2-and-20 without providing alpha). But if I was the Feds I would have been going over his finances with a fine-tooth comb.
Indeed, and that also explains why the banks (in particular JPM) were so keen to maintain his business, because he did nothing with the money except hand it to them to ride the booming 90s equity market, so everybody got their cut. The private wealth division at JPM was making huge fees from Wexner (the kind of billionaire who would usually have a more shrewd family office) for pretty much nothing.
In Maxwell’s recent testimony they asked her about the house (legally transferred for almost nothing) and at last there was an answer there, too, namely that it was in lieu of “fees”. Epstein seduced Wexner, “invested” his money (unlike the Madoffs of the world for the kind of boring, safe returns best suited to that task) and then charged hedge fund fees. Why didn’t Wexner measure his returns against the market? Hard to say, maybe he was in too deep, didn’t care, assumed Jeffrey was a genius, liked the attention and friendship, was a little in love, or was just under the thumb of an overbearing and domineering mother (which is the historical record) and didn’t really think of it much.
But either way, a combination of a couple hundred million in fees from Wexner, reinvesting his own money, some shrewd early-90s real estate purchases in Manhattan (a few apartment buildings, as I recall) and the $170m from Leon Black (Epstein’s only other “client” even though he never managed his money and the one case where I suspect blackmail is possibly central) and his fortune is easily explained even with some blunders along the way.
@DaseindustriesLtd and @Bingbong are both partially right but a big reason is actually just that after the dotcom bust in 2001 the dollar had a decade of extremely, uniquely, ahistorically poor performance against pretty much every other currency (both EM and developed market) that distorted nominal dollar-denominated GDP figures.
For example, the pound went from being $1.45 in 2000 to $2.01 in 2007. The British economy wasn’t hugely stronger and this was a low point for Silicon Valley stocks, the cause was a bunch of investment and trade flow stuff, reallocation out of the US toward emerging markets and big commodity producers, the Australian and Canadian dollars did very well, US equity markets had a lost decade. The Euro also did well. That kind of thing. The GFC was the beginning of the end of this process but it didn’t really finish until after the oil boom finally ended in 2014.
After 2014, trillions of dollars in speculative capital flowed into American capital markets from the entire world because of the tech sector. That wasn’t unprecedented - the same thing happened in the 1880s and 1890s with European money headed for railroads and some other American industrials. But the reverse flows boosted the dollar artificially, exaggerating although not inventing comparatively more advanced American prosperity. Those capital inflows boosted every aspect of the American economy in comparative terms, making for a tighter labor market and therefore higher wage growth, more consumer spending etc in a virtuous cycle.
But European weakness doesn’t date back to 2014 or even 2009. If anything, there’s probably some kind of macro story around the unfathomable economic costs of German reunification and early Eurozone labor market distortion in the late 90s and early 2000s that was obscured by that asset reallocation discussed above but I don’t know enough to tell it.
2rafa
6d ago
I don’t think it would certainly result in US military action against China. If they were willing to let the US save face and said it was an overzealous action by a rogue general and made trade concessions they might even get away with it.
2rafa
6d ago
Zelensky has traveled to the United States multiple times, if the Russians blew up his limo would that be acceptable? What about the reverse, if Ukrainian nationalist psychos had shot down Putin's plane over Alaska?
Both parties are at war; killing the opposing leader is militarily acceptable, they are commander in chief after all. Doing so on someone else’s territory is impolite but whether you can get away with it depends on that country’s own position and power.
As others noted, Putin has regularly and publicly assassinated defectors in Western Europe for 20 years, this was tacitly accepted by everyone involved; serious sanction only happened after Crimea in 2014.
While it is evidence of a cultural shift, it’s also much more closely related to Trump’s personal viewership of late night TV and his early-boomerish fondness for network television in general.
A millennial conservative president, even one as powerful as Trump and to the right of him, probably wouldn’t care about this Kimmel comment. His audience all agree with him anyway, it isn’t like affecting the editorial position of CBS News in 1982 when 30 million or whatever it was Americans of all political views tuned in every evening.
For Disney, as this kind of late night general show fades in relevance anyway, this firing was more than worth it, they likely barely made money on Kimmel anyway if they did at all.
How do you know it was about the money? Because if the show was profitable, they would have forced him to apologise sincerely on air and at least tried to keep it going.
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