2rafa
4d 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.
2rafa
4d ago
This is just cons complaining about the lib version of 'noticing'. Pattern recognition applies to everyone. If they've detected specific transaction patterns highly predictive of possible mass shootings, why is it wrong to acknowledge that? Would you have the same sympathy with some Muslim garden supply business owner regularly profiled and investigated for his high-volume fertilizer purchases? I know for a fact that this kind of transaction analytics is responsible for preventing a lot of successful terrorist attacks, and I also know that conservatives don't care when it's used on their outgroup.
2rafa
5d ago
Surely the number of people buying 3D printers is far too high to perform meaningful background checks on all of them.
2rafa
7d ago
A good move would be to appoint a president with absolute power under the constitution (ie to make any law except that which SCOTUS rules unconstitutional) for a single 8-year term, with Congress’ sole function being to approve a new debt ceiling every 5 years and - but only with a supermajority in both houses - to dismiss the president if necessary. A secondary mechanism could involve a supermajority of state governments doing the same. That’s enough safeguards to avoid an insane dictator while allowing for high capacity governance.
2rafa
7d ago
will burn New York City and DC down simultaneously
Why is that certain? This is a community that has a high rate of general crime, but is otherwise highly atomized. They have been drafted before. Most are very much apolitical. Drafting would likely only happen in the event of war with China, and they sometimes have a contentious relationship with Asians anyway.
2rafa
7d ago
Lots of this is tongue-in-cheek, however, the hinted at truth is that, beyond a basic level of fitness, you hit diminishing returns quickly save for those women who really geek out over biceps or something
This is a better stated version of what I was trying to say.
2rafa
8d ago
Short of the kind of extreme plastic surgery that exists only in movies, he can't leave the life. I'm not defending him, and in any case he directly wishes me harm, hates me, and is an asshole. But I think he's realized his only option in life (other than subsisting off the most menial labor jobs anyone can get and hoping his coworkers never recognize him) is this from now on. It's clear he has some kind of relationship with intelligence since he can somehow still travel and use bank accounts, I presume he's feeding them stuff about other people in his movement, possibly about violent threats or people he thinks may be capable of political violence. That's usually a trade-off these people take.
2rafa
8d ago
Secular Jews may want some of the Haredim to become more secular, but by and large they are allied politically, culturally, and religiously with them, and do zero to combat their corruption. Meanwhile, Chabad houses are becoming the center of religious life for non-orthodox Jews in America.
Who do you think funds efforts like this (given an extensive write-up by a Jewish journalist for NPR), where non-Haredi Jewish journalists are hired to dig up stories on political and financial corruption, sexual abuse and so on in that community, founded by an ex-Haredi guy who hates them?
Moster says the stories on the Shtetl website aim to present what's often missing in the Haredi press: stories about contentious issues such as corruption, white-collar crime and sexual abuse. One recent Shtetl feature details how Haredi Jews took over a village in the Catskills by claiming it was the primary residence of Jews who spend most of their time living in Brooklyn. Another, written by Hakimi, describes a series of anonymous ads for a family court judicial candidate in one of the Haredi towns in the suburbs north of New York City.
I see how secular Jews (not just leftist or even progressive ones) talk about the ultra-orthodox. Many advocate Xinjiang-level re-education, completely unironically. They hate them, especially those that live near or alongside them. In New Jersey, the reality of state politics and the fact that the Democrats don't have a supermajority means that the ultra-orthodox can ally with the state GOP to stymie legislative measures against them.
Okay, so are you referring to the slumlords that have gotten away with corruption / discrimination so far? What helped them get away with it for so long?
NYC slumlords have always gotten away with it, the occasional lawsuit etc excepted, especially when it comes to simply having poor conditions rather than discriminating based on race. All these guys were sued dozens of times, pursued by the city. Again, that's true for all slumlords historically, including the many, many gentile ones. The aggressive pursuit now is arguably because the largely progressive Jewish donors who funded Bragg's DA campaign care about it a great deal.
That’s again not true. Their secular advocacy groups made it a national news story. There were statements made by every politician. Their politicians secured them more security grants.
The ADL lobbies harder about a swastika on an elite university campus than they do about dozens of attacks by black people on Jews in NYC. The biggest complaint is typically that they don't even, uh, 'name' the perpetrators, so to speak.
That’s largely for determining the circumstances of your birth, though. For conversion you just need to find an orthodox rabbi who is widely accepted by other orthodox rabbis (the vast majority of them; easily discerned by visiting even English-language orthodox messageboards) and then convert under him. Not that I particularly recommend becoming Jewish, but still.
2rafa
12d ago
Fine, yeah. But consider how many times the Soviet Union used extremely harsh measures to try to eradicate ethnic identity and still failed at doing so. Nothing is guaranteed. But the option is still better than either (a) fighting impotently and getting crushed or (b) doing nothing and guaranteeing failure.
Again, the only alternative is coup-complete and in that case the far right just doesn’t have the necessary amount of elite human capital versus the center and left as Tracing and others have (in my opinion) persuasively argued.
2rafa
12d ago
You don’t do it waiting for judgment day, you do it so that when the opportunity arises, and it may well do, you can eventually seize power. Not of the whole country, but of some kind of defensible territory. Look at the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The Jews waited 2000 years. But if you have a tight knit group, with money, that practices endogamy, that produces children, eventually you may well have the opportunity to exercise some kind of power. And on a more practical and immediate note, it also allows you to impose your own kind of order on a community, preserving a space for yourself and people like you even as the wider nation might shift radically.
Like I said, it wouldn’t come to it. Chinese trade isn’t enough to keep Texas alive. It all comes back to the fact that secession without a comprehensive, EEA-style free trade and movement treaty would be suicide. A single sanction prohibiting US-domiciled corporations from doing business in Texas (which would be a day-one emergency bill through congress) would be enough to kill the Texan economy. The US couldn’t survive the loss of 10+ states for long, but Texas? Yeah, it would be weakened, but it probably could.
The question is ‘how much is the average Texan prepared to suffer for independence?’ After all, unlike Russia, Texas is a democracy. The US would gladly welcome back smart refugees. The average Texan is not ethnically or culturally discriminated against by the rest of the United States. They share the majority of their culture, religions and values. How badly do they believe in independence, how much is the average car mechanic in Fort Worth or defense attorney in Dallas prepared to sacrifice to live in broadly the same kind of state they already live in?
2rafa
13d ago
My suspicion has always been that the CCP elite is less committed to increasing the birthrate than is often suggested.
2rafa
17d ago
No, for the far left (who do not, for obvious reasons, see their ideology and worldview as Jewish trickery)! I understand that was unclear, and edited my answer.
2rafa
17d ago
It wouldn’t necessarily limit Dem presidents much, but it would allow a GOP President much more discretion against mass illegal immigration. Given the Dems will do what they want anyway, that would have been a win.
2rafa
18d ago
Completely agree, this was the most progress on illegal immigration since the 1990s and the GOP squandered it to pander to Trump who might not even win in November and won’t be able to do something better even if he does.
2rafa
18d ago
It doesn’t matter. Unless Trump has a trifecta with an unrealistic senate majority (which isn’t going to happen) this was better than ANYTHING he can accomplish in office. It is truly an unbelievable blackpill that the bill didn’t pass, it represented a huge concession from the Dems in an election year and the GOP were unfathomably retarded to reject it.
2rafa
19d ago
I don’t disagree with the nuance you discuss, but it’s also true that people don’t necessarily fully think through the implications of the political and ideological positions they advocate. This is a big point of Moldbug’s: by our standards many of the key thinkers of the enlightenment were deeply conservative/reactionary, they didn’t seek to dismantle a lot of the things that subsequent liberal thinkers did, but they nevertheless established forms of ideological enquiry that through processes like the Hegelian dialectic created modern progressivism in a continuous process.
It can both be true that 1776 leads inexorably to 2024 and that none of the founding fathers would be remotely happy with the current ruling ideology of the United States. Similarly, it can be true that the early Christians established a religion that had a tendency towards universalism and universal equality even though the early Christians still believed in the vast majority of social institutions (slavery, patriarchy, tribalism) of their age.
Yeah I completely agree with everything you say here. But Malay discrimination against the Chinese (or indeed Bangladeshis) has no basis in Muslim scripture and isn’t justified religiously locally; the Chinese are infidels, sure, but so are the Christian bumiputera who benefit from affirmative action policies. In fact the Malaysia constitution guarantees that Christian bumiputera get the special privileges etc. What happens in Malaysia is just the standard thing that happens with market dominant minorities anywhere in the world, and compared to the historic treatment of Jews, the way the Ugandans treated the Indians, arguably even the way that the South Africans treat the whites now, the Chinese actually have it very good.
As for the Malay Arab worship/LARP, I’ve commented on it before (it’s far from unique, the Maldivians engage in it too, even more northern Desi Muslims do to some extent). The point is that racial discrimination against foreign or minority Muslims (not non-Muslims) in the Islamic world isn’t justified using scripture but by paeans to nativism or for economic purposes. The same is true in the Middle East. Everyone knows that Islam itself doesn’t encourage ethnic separatism and is a universalist religion.
2rafa
20d ago
It would be remiss not to say that the national mood around leftist riots has shifted considerably since 2020.
2rafa
21d ago
Probably Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens type stuff. Tucker and Musk obviously alluded to it. You don’t have to far on Twitter to find right-wing antisemitism.
2rafa
21d ago
Nigeria has ongoing sectarian conflict with Islamist terrorists in the North and Northeast and between Fulani pastoralists and settled people that involve hundreds of murders on a very regular basis (all of which are recorded by the military). The US murder rate also spiked in 2001 for obvious reasons.
Do you believe the true homicide rate in West Africa is on the order of 50-90 per 100k as in these high crime American cities? What do you think the ballpark figure is?
Red Scare is merely the current version of /r/drama on Reddit.
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