2rafa
12d ago
There are some people who simply cannot be trusted around most of the opposite sex. They’re usually at least moderately, although only very rarely exceptionally, attractive, but they have an intoxicating charisma and can seduce almost anyone. The archetypal siren, rake, Mata Hari, whatever. Only some variant of the Pence rule is going to protect you from them (if targeted).
2rafa
13d ago
The Israelis are delusional and wrong about regime change. It’s strange that critics of Israel seem to be so heavily invested in Mossad’s infallibility (even ‘October 7th was allowed to happen’ etc). The only way regime change happens in Iran is if the Tehran middle class get fed up enough to make it happen. That will be independent from Israel.
2rafa
17d ago
Ok, well let's just take a look at the undefeated Uno Reverso.
Indeed. Suppose Ignatiev were to reply to your comment (and general worldview) with:
“My dear SS, I agree completely. I think all practicing Jews should renounce their religious practice (including, as I have already argued, kosher dining and food preparation), and all ethnic Jews should abandon their cultural particularity. Jews should convert to mainstream Protestant Christianity, the predominant gentile religion in the United States, or practice no faith. They should marry gentiles (of course most already do, but let’s say all of them). All Jewish religious institutions (synagogues, museums of tolerance, etc) should be closed, all religious clothing banned. Those who refuse these terms ought to go to Israel, but those who accept them can remain in America with no further restrictions placed on their participation in society, culture, politics or the economy. Furthermore, any racial agitation by white nationalists towards those former Jews who fully, sincerely renounce and abandon their Jewishness will be strictly prohibited.”
Would you accept his offer?
Because that is the difference between Ignatiev’s position and those of the dissident rightists who borrow his words in this case. He (like all communists) allowed for conversion; even the last emperor of china was converted, after all. You do not.
“Remigration” certainly isn’t official AfD policy, its advocated by the far-right Höcke wing of the party, not the Weidel center.
2rafa
20d ago
Regime change isn’t possible without a ground invasion which isn’t possible. Posturing doesn’t change that.
2rafa
20d ago
undeclared
This word is doing a lot here. Declaration doesn’t really mean anything; it made sense for Pakistan for obvious geopolitical reasons, and every single nuclear state is aware of Israel’s nuclear capability. They could ‘declare’ it tomorrow and nothing would change, none of the major nuclear powers accept or are fully truthful around any international inspections or the full extent of their capability for standard secrecy reasons.
2rafa
20d ago
I find it very hard to believe that the consequence of a not-even-third-tier power nuking Paris would be Gaddafi being allowed to stay in power.
That’s the kind of hypothetical reserved for a Russia/China/USA level MAD situation where someone fires first and you hope against hope that cooler heads prevail and the attacked party ‘settles’ for a big payoff and apology (but still very unlikely).
A minor nuclear power firing a nuke like that would just result in absolute extermination for Gaddafi, because it’s not like the Chinese or Russians were going to nuke London or Washington in retaliation for an attack on Tripoli.
2rafa
24d ago
No, The Economist’s readership has a substantial number of students and juniors, plus interested normal people who like to imagine themselves as the kind of person who reads it, many of whom don’t have a lot of money. It’s largely the magazine for the back office. FT Weekend’s readership is likely wealthier, because it’s mainly older print readers of the paper who have some money (students and juniors on the app aren’t going to care to read it).
Tatler’s readership is bifurcated between that sub-group of rich Arabs and Asians (they have a big audience in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Gulf) who enjoy the Anglo aesthetic, are often involved with polo, ride, have country houses in England, that sort of thing, and the residual English upper and upper-middle classes, some of whom have money and some of whom don’t. That niche means Tatler’s ads are more targeted, although there is still plenty of Patek and Lori Piana. Bien pensant PMCs might read that awful Air Mail or even worse Monocle, which also have all the Rolex and Porsche ads.
2rafa
25d ago
Libya was already relatively internally divided, Gaddafi was just a great autocrat. Iran has far fewer internal divisions than Libya did in 2011.
2rafa
25d ago
Interesting how much “Imaginal Christianity” resembles an Islamic-Buddhist hybrid with some Christian characteristics.
2rafa
26d ago
Without dismissing what you’re feeling, I think your narrative of modernity maps to a lot of great criticisms of the wealthy society begat by the Industrial Revolution over the last 150 years. It’s not as new as you suggest.
I think measures of national or even personal happiness are hard to parse. Swedes versus Danes, Greeks versus Germans. Are some happier, or is what counts as ‘happy’ for a Finn just less ambitious, less happy, than what counts as the same for an American? How happy were our ancestors a century ago really?
As a young person online, I was never deep into ‘new atheism’, but like many people I adopted a deep disdain for any kind of spiritualism, hackneyed ‘the secret’ style self-help and so on (which of course only made adherents vulnerable to slightly modified versions of the same eternal ideas). As I got older, I realized that a version of “the law of attraction” or “the secret” or “practice gratitude journaling to make you happy” was in fact pretty much true. The happiest people are those who convince themselves most absolutely that they are happy, will remain happy, and that good things will happen to them, indeed that life itself is good and (broadly, if not in every case), just.
As I had more life experience and met more people, I realized that artists, (serious) writers and philosophers were often some of the most unhappy, most depressed people I knew, even if they had achieved great professional success or were otherwise wealthy, attractive and so on. This is no coincidence, it is because these careers often lead people to question the meaning of their lives, and doing that is a death blow to that simple kind of happiness that provides genuine satisfaction. Even those philosophies that attempt to grasp earnestly at a value and a happiness in that direction, like Buddhism, often embrace what appears at least to me to be a fundamental nihilism in their obsession with the mirror, with an interrogation of the self.
The key to happiness, and I say this as an amateur, is caring less, feeling more, and studiously avoiding the temptation to try to look behind the curtain. The smarter and more curious and more interested in the discussion of grand narratives you are (and if you’re here, that is probably ‘very’) the harder this is. But it is possible. As for young men, you can ‘enjoy the decline’ (which I suppose means checking out and enjoying the bountiful brothels of South-East Asia, or something), or see if there’s happiness to be found in the other people where you are. I suspect the latter might be more fruitful, but I won’t judge.
2rafa
4hr ago
Apparently Epstein was able to set up a meeting between some JP Morgan execs and Netenyahu? That sounds like deeper connections than you described:
Not at all, in fact it’s explained if you read my piece. Staley and Dimon were not particularly well connected in Israel. Epstein was close to Lauder and Wexner and could easily have asked either of them to raise the request with Netanyahu, for whom in any case it wouldn’t have been unusual to meet with senior figures at the most important Wall Street bank. That is most of what Epstein did in his later years, namely send emails to people in his Rolodex whom he had met in his decade of relentless socializing pestering them to do minor things that he could trade in for other things.
There's also the possibility that the operation was tied to a non-Mossad Israeli intelligence operation that pertained to internal divisions in Israeli politics.
It’s possible, and there is nowhere I disagree that Epstein may have played politics for Barak during the slow emergence of the modern Israeli security state in the early 2000s. But again, that was after he acquired fame and fortune and long after the sex stuff started, during which time he would have been a nobody to anyone in Israel.
2rafa
4hr ago
I think the primary beneficiary of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation was himself and maybe a small handful of actual friends, who he probably didn’t care to blackmail but may or may not have kept kompromat on. Separate to that was his love of the game and of impressing successful and powerful people, which he enjoyed doing his whole life, regardless of whether or not they shared his sexual proclivities. In the course of the latter he may have traded in secrets, although it was never close to being his main line of work.
Some of it, it’s fine but relies on a lot of the hearsay (quite a bit of it traced back to Epstein’s own bullshitting laundered through people he spoke to and then others who heard it second or third hand) I discuss in my comment. Especially discussions of when Epstein originally met Ghislaine Maxwell, speculation about what he was doing in the 1980s and so on is a weakpoint with little critical analysis. For example, every suggestion that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell (and this isn’t concrete evidence that he didn’t by the way, it’s just interesting) can be traced back to Epstein personally, who used to tell people in New York that Robert had personally asked him to look after his daughter, which was ludicrous and ridiculed as such by his sons, whom he had actually groomed to takeover his business and look after their sister and who, unlike Ghislaine, actually knew about his various business and personal affairs, including connections in Israel. That’s before we get to Khashoggi and the many, many people (almost everyone) he knew, none of whom heard of Epstein before the mid-late 1990s post-Wexner fortune grab.
Epstein was unemployed, living off savings and scrounged money in a 1 bed apartment in NYC (much cheaper back then than it is today, of course) before he met Wexner. The suggestion that he was a well connected shady international businessman with close and profitable Khashoggi ties doesn’t track.
I have a hard time believing there's any actually damning evidence against Trump or really anyone, or else someone would have leaked something by now. It's been a big issue for years, multiple administrations.
The common retort is that there’s stuff on Bill Clinton as well as Trump so they can’t. But this is a bad argument because
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They could just have published the Trump stuff and conveniently redacted the Bill Clinton stuff if they had wanted to.
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I really don’t think Bill’s grip on the party is so strong that they wouldn’t throw him under the bus to attack Trump if necessary.
2rafa
3d ago
It’s possible this was the final straw, but it doesn’t seem like a radically new kind of scandal for them.
Rich New Yorkers (WASP or Jewish) in the mid-1970s with daughters at Dalton were under no impression their daughters were certainly virgins whatsoever. That’s a ridiculous suggestion and would have been questionable even 20 years earlier (which would have been before it went co-ed lol).
Dalton was the most classically progressive of the old NYC prep schools (and still is), only outflanked to the left by the mid-late 20th century hippie outfits. It was explicitly built on the model of early 20th century progressive English schools that wanted to overturn the orthodoxy of the classical English public (private) school education.
2rafa
3d ago
Chinese online / younger nationalists are mostly over the hatred for much of the eight nation alliance. They have it, but it isn’t central to their mythos as their hatred for the Japanese and general dislike for the Koreans.
I don’t think they really have an ethnic hatred for Europeans, which is something you see more of in niche diaspora CCP-fan migrant communities in the West where complaints about, say, white men dating Chinese women are more central. The CCP teaches every Chinese child that Marx and Engels were some of the greatest people in history, has statues of them, murals of them and so on.
2rafa
4d ago
With enough lobbying they can pass laws that say things like “for each half hour spent in court, x lawyers based in local city who passed the state bar must have y billable hours attached to them”.
Lest that sound farfetched, Hollywood writers just got this kind of deal and the studios are far more equipped to play hardball than state congressmen.
2rafa
4d ago
I disagree, there were various leftist justice reform DAs that won big in NYC, Philly etc. De Blasio was on the progressive wing of the party; he wasn't Chesa tier but effectively welcomed that movement into office.
2rafa
9d ago
Ukraine is vastly larger than Gaza and civilians were easily and quickly (and still are) evacuated well behind the front lines where the intense conflict occurs. In Gaza, neighboring countries refused to accept evacuations, and Hamas - unlike either army in Ukraine - is an insurgent force that doesn’t wear uniforms, doesn’t observe any rules of war, and hides in the civilian population.
If the Ukrainian military had melted into the civilian population in the occupied cities where they emerged, daily, from schools, residential homes, hospitals and so on to attack Russians, the Ukrainian civilian casualty rate would be much higher. As it happened, the sides are fighting a conventional war (one Hamas cannot afford to fight, and doesn’t wish to).
Arguing against specific highly spurious claims is very different to arguing that intelligence is the only feature of the mind that is inherited. In any case, you might add that the more anti-Jewish side of the DR is actually split between “Jewish IQ is a psy-op, see Unz, myth of American meritocracy, IQ stats from Brooklyn high schools in the 1930s don’t map to Israel” etc and “it’s real but it doesn’t matter because they’re also hereditary cheats, sex pests, clannish narcissists”.
And that’s most of what’s necessary. Some kind of soft-kefala where the migrants don’t stay, don’t have or bring over children, and go home at the end of the season.
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