2rafa
6d ago
Marjorie Taylor Greene
The biography From Prostitute To President: An American Tale will be worth it.
2rafa
15d ago
Is the primary complaint of women in Korea really that the men don’t have enough money, then? That hasn’t been widely reported.
The problem for the antisemitic far right is that their allegation is that the entire ideology upon which the leftists base their support for Palestine (and BLM, and affirmative action, and DEI, and taking in refugees and so on) was invented and bestowed upon them by Jews. This creates an internal contradiction [edit: for any leftists they might ally with] that is very difficult to bridge. In addition, the white nationalist far right has no message for brown or black leftists (including Muslims) beyond “leave”, which again would make a coalition difficult.
I think you’re referencing a few different trends.
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The distaste for Christianity on parts of the dissident right is substantially Nietzschean, it precedes mass immigration. That perspective would say that the West is still post-Christian and still deeply embraces slave morality in policy areas like homelessness, justice, welfare, immigration, foreign policy and so on. Nietzsche is a very popular figure on the intellectual hard right. The argument in this case isn’t that Europeans aren’t capable of being tough under Christianity, clearly they are (and of course all of the greatest ages of Northern European civilization occurred in the Christian era) but that Christianity has an inexorable tendency toward worshipping victimhood and guilt that eventually led to cultural modernity, which these people broadly dislike.
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The internet led to a small resurgence of pagan LARPing among largely young whites in a way often tied to Nordic black metal. Not all of this is far-right really, but much of it is. Varg Vikernes is obviously a major figure in both worlds and a pagan missionary of sorts. Naturally these people blame Christianity for destroying ancestral European paganism, and they blame this for hurting Europeans in various ways for arguably religious reasons. There is also obviously a hostility towards the fact that in Christianity an aspect of God is embodied in an unambiguously Jewish man and that much Christian ritual and scripture is descended from Judaism. This did not bother earlier generations of Christian antisemites, but…
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Residual Christian antisemitism largely ended after WW2, certainly as a matter of policy. The Pope officially renounced it along with the entirety of mainstream Catholicism, and so did most large Protestant denominations. Over time, some, like American Evangelical Christianity, even embraced a quasi-philosemitic and certainly staunchly pro-Israel worldview. Even denominations that saw less ideological evolution like Orthodox Christianity significantly reduced their hostility to Jews. If you were an antisemite in 1900 it was quite easy to find a Church that agreed with you. In 2020, certainly in the United States, you would be hard pressed and would have to rely on a few small splinter groups that are very far from mainstream Christianity and not well-distributed around the country. This both led to a dislike among antisemitic dissident rightists for Christianity in general and a desire for some kind of certainly-not-Jewish alternative, which eg. Scandinavian paganism obviously is.
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As secularism increased and religious observance decreased in the West, the ingrained ideological hostility to paganism as savage or backwards (and certainly as ‘wrong’) declined with it. Young men aren’t afraid of going to hell if they become pagans, so the ‘ward’ against ‘deconversion’ is lessened. That said, pagan or quasi-pagan cults have had a long history in esoteric European intellectual circles, certainly back to the 19th century if not before. The popularity and then decline of New Age religions starting in the 1940s and 1950s may also be related to this.
We have a few dissident rightists here who are hostile to Christianity so hopefully one will come along and answer your question more accurately.
2rafa
23d ago
Which of BLM’s goals did it achieve? Stuff like the bail/justice reform movement long predates BLM and wasn’t the focus, so that doesn’t count.
If you attended an American high school, did you read the n-word aloud in English class? I’m curious. We did in like 2012 in NYC, I’m wondering if that was the cutoff point.
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
4d 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
5d 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
9d ago
By roided I don’t just mean bodybuilder physique, I also mean the distended stomach, like what Joe Rogan has which people say is a result of steroid use. Muscles help but they’re not a significant factor as long as he’s neither skinny fat nor actual fat. Henry Cavill is hot because he’s tall and has a great face, if he had the physique of a runner or something it would make minimal difference, that was my point.
2rafa
10d ago
A little-discussed phenomenon is that since 2011 or so, low-wage pay has skyrocketed in major urban areas. People who were making $8 an hour in 2008 make $30 an hour today. Meanwhile, white collar workers who made $50 an hour (converted to hourly pay) in 2008 may make $75 an hour today, a much smaller increase.
The cost of childcare, fast food, hotel rooms etc for white collar professionals (ie. the upper middle class) has therefore increased much faster than their own incomes.
2rafa
13d ago
Nicotine seems very tough to quit. A lot of people with not hugely addictive personalities who can control their gambling / drinking / weed use / etc seem to very much struggle with it.
2rafa
15d ago
I agree, but none of that means Germans and British and French are likely to recognize a hard-right independent Texas without the approval of the rUS. The Union was much less powerful internationally and up against a stronger foe in the civil war and even then no other country officially recognized the CSA.
Really the only optimistic case for Texas secession is a full breakup of the US with limited hard feelings and no large and powerful bicoastal blue bloc, which seems unlikely.
2rafa
18d ago
There is no solution to the housing issue barring radically reforming planning permission in favor of development, and that won’t happen unless COVID II hits and kills (at least) 50% of over-60s.
Long story, cut very short. I think I lost my most expensive watch, and she hasn't been so kind as to check.
I’m convinced my brother’s sketchy (I would use the word ratchet, but I feel like that has connotations of being black, and she was definitely white) college hookup stole a very nice vintage cartier watch my grandmother gifted to me. It wasn’t worth a lot of money (I assume she took it because of the brand) but it was very valuable to me. I had left it in my parents kitchen because I wanted my dad to take it to be repaired.
It’s part of the reason I could never have a one night stand. The idea of letting a complete stranger into your house surrounded by all your valuables, private documents (even stuff like bills lying around, wallets full of cash and credit cards, medical data) and then going to sleep such that they could literally get up and help themselves to whatever they want and you wouldn’t even know if they’d taken something you don’t use often or if they’d just photographed private information or something seems so irresponsible. I’m probably just neurotic but my trust in the kindness of strangers isn’t that high.
And as you say, once it’s gone, what can you do? “Oh, I happen to have recently lost a necklace, can you look for it?”. It’s not as if you have enough to go to the police, and it might take weeks or months to realize it’s gone.
2rafa
22d ago
American Jews would certainly prefer for Netanyahu to be deposed and a moderate Labor-led coalition that includes the Arab parties to come to power and recommit to immediately reopening negotiations about a two-state solution and the return of most West Bank settlers.
That is, however, a ridiculous pipe dream. The Israelis have radicalized and international pressure will radicalize them further still. The Israeli left is crushed utterly. Nobody believes peace is possible short of crushing the enemy now. That means American Jews will face a choice between disavowing Zionism utterly and embracing at least lukewarm support for a staunchly pro-Likud agenda that embraces Religious Zionism. Some will pick the former but Israel is important to most Jews and I suspect they will change politically rather than abandon Zionism.
2rafa
22d ago
Yes. Amusingly if the US hadn’t funded their opposition and the Soviet Union wasn’t already in the process of collapsing it’s quite possible that the Soviets would have eventually achieved this in Afghanistan. It’s not impossible to forcibly secularize Muslim populations, it’s just extremely hard and they put up much more resistance than anyone else.
2rafa
22d ago
Great post. It’s an extreme loss of state capacity for internal violence. Look at Mao’s China, successful eradication of a centuries-long opioid epidemic (in which as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of urban young men were heavy addicts) in fifteen years. And it wasn’t because he killed everyone; he killed the more obvious dealers, sure, but you actually don’t need to kill that many people to trigger prosocial change. If the US army rolls into the South Side of Chicago, or Baltimore, or St Louis, and starts blasting, you could quite possibly limit the death toll to three or low four figures in each city (ie barely above the actual homicide rate) and still seriously dissuade violent crime. And as you note, the Malayan Emergency, Mau Mau and really the entire history of British India show that you don’t actually need that many people or that much violence to accomplish this. 15,000 British ruled over 400,000,000 Indians. In 2003, 130,000 NATO forces ruled over 20,000,000 Afghans, a vastly more favorable ratio. And yet they lost, because they were too afraid to do the needful.
We were discussing South Africa earlier in the thread, and there are parallels to that situation (even though I disagree with apartheid and think the Boers are largely responsible for their presently poor condition). Even with the whole world against them, there is no way that 5 million Dutch and English in a country with a huge resource bounty and extensive arable land armed with literal nuclear weapons and modern technology, and bordered by countries that (unlike Israel’s foes) had no capable armed forces and definitely did not want a war with them, could not have held out indefinitely - even at a relatively high standard of living. But there was no will for it. The situation in American cities, as I noted in my post on Seattle a couple of months ago, is the same. It’s not a resource question, a few armed police could clear out the homeless permanently in a few hours. It’s a will question, like a hoarder who lives in filth because they just can’t throw anything away for psychological reasons even though there’s a dumpster right outside.
2rafa
27d ago
the lack of consequences for the grooming gangs
I mean hundreds, if not thousands, of people in those gangs have been arrested over the last 5 years. They just get sentenced to relatively short sentences because that’s what the sentencing guidelines say is owed for their offenses.
I have to say that I used to consider NPR’s bias much more egregious than I do now.
I had assumed that like most public broadcasting networks (which one would imagine that ‘National Public Radio’ was) it was entirely an organ of the government, like the BBC or CBC or (Australian) ABC and so on. But it turns out that NPR is essentially just a charity radio station that gets like 10% or maybe less of its funds from the government. The US’s actual state broadcasting network (VoA) doesn’t really have any media presence domestically, and while it is broadly globalist liberal, as one would expect from the State Department, it isn’t really close to NPR anyway.
2rafa
29d ago
The actual reason is that the air defense systems won’t really work well or efficiently for Ukraine. Air defense is uniquely viable in Israel because Israel is extremely small and quite rich, and so a density of systems is possible that wouldn’t even be viable somewhere like Germany or France, let alone a more sparsely populated Western country like the US, let alone a poor and sparsely populated country like Ukraine. Also, Russians aren’t firing homemade Hamas dumb rockets vaguely targeted toward Israel; defending against more modern missiles is harder and even in the recent attack a few Iranian missiles seem to have gotten through into Israel.
2rafa
6d ago
One, illegally allow in tens of millions of people into the United States; two, trick the (hopefully) absolute morons in the GOP to pass a "compromise bill" which allows a hostile administration to staff a army of bureaucrats which can more quickly adjudicate asylum claims under a "more strict" standard (it's really not) than one which could be adopted by executive fiat and then quickly stamp "approved" on large percentages of the illegally released people who now get automatic work permits. And it would have worked if it wasn't for that stupid Trump who is just so bad, doesn't care about immigration or the country, and opposes it because he just doesn't want Biden to get a win. And thank God for that
Literally none of this matters.
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Almost all illegals are eventually released or make it into the interior. That was true even with Trump’s remain-in-Mexico policy because there is no wall and Trump is no closer to getting Congress to build one than he was this time in 2016. That is to say even migrants turned back eventually make it into the interior, where they’re never deported unless they commit serious violent crime and ICE arrests and deports them which of course only happens to a tiny minority of illegals migrants, and even in those cases most return illegally.
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Because of 1 (a fundamental issue which, again, Trump has zero realistic plan to fix), the only difference between handing every migrant a green card (or, hell a passport) and not doing so is one generation. Every child of every single illegal migrant in the US born on US soil is a full citizen of the United States. That’s the trick with ‘amnesty’; it means nothing, because the demographic impact is guaranteed in any case. Birthright citizenship is the ultimate incentive for illegal immigration. Talk about “work permits” is hilarious; their sons and daughters have the same rights and privileges as you.
So, yeah. The only two things that would do “more” than this bill would be a meaningful end to most illegal inflows (impossible without transnational coast to coast impenetrable wall, and even then asylum seekers could just come legally and overstay visas if they could get them) and an end to birthright citizenship (almost certainly impossible without constitutional amendment). So this magic alternative to this bill (which again, would allow a GOP administration to take minor incremental steps to somewhat reduce inflows) does not exist. There is no plan, there never was, and Trump killed it because he didn’t want to give Biden what he felt was some kind of ‘win’, whatever the cost.
why you and other ostensible progressive organizations do not seem to care about their enclave or crime
In NY state and in NJ it’s often secular Jews at the forefront of anti-Haredi policies. Every charity and organization designed to ‘deconvert’ (essentially deradicalize) Chareidim is funded by secular Jews, in many cases literally by George Soros. Consider that this is in marked contrast to, say, Islamist deradicalization efforts, which in the West are pretty much entirely funded by non-Muslims. It’s secular Jews who are most aggressive about lobbying the Israeli government to take away more privileges from the ultra orthodox too. In Haredi circles there are extremely common ‘conspiracy’ theories that secular Jews (who among other things they low key blame for the Holocaust) are trying to destroy their communities, both in the US and in Israel.
One of the reasons the ultra-orthodox have shifted so aggressively to the GOP in recent decades is precisely because the NY and NJ Democratic coalitions, which have a lot of senior Jewish politicians and leaders, have a fundamental contempt for them and their way of life, view them the way elite white northeastern Episcopalian progressives view Southern redneck trailer trash. They in turn spread this attitude to their Italian, Hispanic and black associates, which is why the most common complaint in Brooklyn 770 circles is that wealthy secular Jews said and did very little when eg. black people were attacking the black hats. Recently they’ve accused secular Jews of coming after the ultra-Orthodox by targeting the landlords/slumlords who finance a lot of the community.
I agree. Any Indian could legally move to England through the entire period of the British occupation of India. There were even Indian MPs, Indian students at elite public schools and British universities and so on. But there was little demand to immigrate. A big reason for mass immigration is ease of travel and mass media. The UK only imposed restrictions on Commonwealth/Empire immigration years after WW2.
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