2rafa
4d ago
It seems to me to be a massive screw up if you do not become a citizen through marriage if you are not already a citizen.
If you’re an illegal immigrant can you easily naturalize by marriage? Presumably you’d have to leave the US (and they would have recorded no exit stamp from his student visa 20 years ago, which means he’d have to pretend he left the country without passing through any controlled emigration point), pretend you’d lived abroad for 20 years, and then apply from abroad for a marriage visa (concocting another fake narrative about how you met).
2rafa
5d ago
It’s flawed for sure, but there is substantial anecdotal evidence that the percentage of men willing to engage in homosexual activity, especially in substantially or entirely male communities (men at war, men in prison, all-male boarding schools, male-only religious institutions) is probably higher than the 3-5% estimates of gay men.
2rafa
5d ago
Many male porn addicts seem to be in sexually active relationships though. Besides, I don’t think it’s clear that men with trans ‘girlfriends’ couldn’t find female partners, that seems spurious.
2rafa
5d ago
My understanding of the data we have on sex and partner count is that you had the sexual revolution in the 60s, which took until the ~late 1970s/early 1980s to filter down into mainstream society. From that point (ie the youth of Gen X) everyone has been having pretty similar amounts of sex. Millennials weren’t much more promiscuous than GenXers, and Zoomers are as or less promiscuous than millennials.
The emergence of apps, online dating, social media, none of these seem to have substantially affected population-level promiscuity, only shifted it. The (heterosexual) people hooking up with dozens of people on the apps are the kind of people who would hang around dive bars and clubs until closing time to pick up the best option left had they been born twenty years earlier.
I think it may be different for gay men, although large parts of that are surely increased social acceptability and the fact that HIV is no longer a death sentence, but even then, my guess is many people racking up 4-digit grindr body counts would have been anonymous bathhouse regulars back in 1977 too.
2rafa
8d ago
I think she has cringe but harmless wine aunt energy, a soft-ish voice, she’s not shrill, she seems somewhat befuddled, she doesn’t seem smart enough to screw you over. I felt sorry for her in some of the bad interviews, whereas I never felt sorry for Hillary.
2rafa
8d ago
I think a gay candidate could win a presidential election and I think a woman, including a black woman, could too.
I feel strongly, though, that it’s a question of type. A woman president could be maiden, mother or crone (there are examples of all three winning elections in recent history), but she must across as kind, at least to her allies, and wise. Kamala seemed kind enough, but not wise, and Hillary did not seem kind.
Oprah would win a presidential election for the Democrats. A gay man in the Scott Bessent / Tim Cook mould (soft-spoken but assertive, not necessarily ultra-masculine but not really camp) could win, probably for both the Democrats and the Republicans at this time. I think a gay black man would struggle, although it isn’t impossible. I don’t think a lesbian could win.
2rafa
10d ago
Thank you, interesting. The decline hasn’t been as significant as I’d imagined.
2rafa
10d ago
India is illustrative: they wanted to latch onto Pax Americana and get something out of it; what have they got so far for India proper?
45% of Indians are agricultural workers. In England, that threshold was last fallen beneath around 1675. In America, it happened around 1880. In India, it obviously has yet to happen.
Everything is downstream of this. In the aftermath of independence, the Congress regime (and that is what it was) decided that adopting state-driven industrial policy in the socialist mould was necessary to overcome this. The result was chaos and food insecurity, because the huge mass of rural Indians still had extremely high birth rates. The response, because in a democracy every peasant farmer had a vote, was to invest a huge proportion of the state's resources into incentivizing those peasant farmers with agricultural price floors while also implementing a highly protectionist policy regime that prevented farm consolidation and agricultural efficiency, which in turn prevented urbanization at the degree necessary for the industrial transition.
The % of agricultural workers is the most important metric for understanding India. You can understand nothing without it and understand everything with it. India has a space program and tech outsourcers, but these are the equivalent of the royal astronomer or the imperial library circa 1237; they have not undergone the industrial revolution, let alone anything after that. Imagine a Western country in which peasants obtained universal suffrage around 1400, but which was too large and well-armed to be invaded. This is India. The masses vote themselves the most generous affirmative action policy in the world, with 60% of all government jobs and college places reserved for lower castes and tribes. They vote a huge percentage of the state budget to be devoted to minimum agricultural prices, which make staple crops more expensive in India than they are in the West, and halt mechanization, which further disincentivizes urbanization (because urban workers rely on cheap food). Interstate commerce is guarded by labyrinthine protectionism, all of which leads to the inevitable corruption.
Modi attempted some tiny, granular reforms. Tens of thousand of haggard peasant smallholders marched on Delhi. The Supreme Court, the only true authority in India, stayed and then forced the repeal of the laws (which the government happily accepted) for reasons of social order and societal stability. But India's problems aren't a result of any allegiance with America, which is limited enough as it is (it is if anything closer to Russia).
No. I don't understand. Why? What happens to the US that did not "win"? Unlike the USSR, China doesn't even have a messianic revolutionary project.
We are, of course, in agreement here.
2rafa
10d ago
I doubt it was more than about 200,000. 3 million was obviously laughable. Aerial footage suggests fewer than at some of the largest Gaza protests, which police estimated had ~300k protesters. The largest ever protest in the UK was against the Iraq War, police estimated 750,000 people attended, there was little aerial footage but from some pictures of the route it does appear substantially larger.
2rafa
11d ago
The congressmen who take actual bribes tend to be the dumbest, so it’s still useful to weed them out.
For the smarter ones it’s better to build connections ‘for free’ with lobbyists and then be guided into board and advisory roles when you retire from politics that pay far more than any naked bribe.
2rafa
11d ago
This was previously vetoed by Trump as a favor to tech people (Musk, Bezos, Pichai, Altman, Ellison and Nadella), who he now likes because they flatter him and support him publicly. It was advocated by Miller and Lutnick and obviously commentators outside the admin like Bannon.
Now Trump is annoyed with Modi for buying Russian oil, which he sees as the reason for Putin being nonchalant about a deal on Ukraine, so he asks what will annoy India, and they pitch this again and he says “OK, fine” but without much more detail.
2rafa
11d ago
This is a good idea but will take decades to yield results at the top of government. It’s also true that even in Singapore most of the top politicians and government officials being paid this much are essentially the children of leading PAP members, they just happen to be a highly competent group and so have smart, capable kids.
2rafa
11d ago
Constantly angering the Arab and Islamic world is not a smart idea. Israelis may be better at fighting but they're vastly outnumbered. This is not America vs native Americans. It is provocative and obnoxious behaviour to derive national legitimacy from harsh treatment in the ghettoes and expulsions in Eastern Europe and then ghettoize the locals of a graciously granted strip of land, while continuously striving to expand it for lebensraum. This kind of behaviour has and will reduce favourability in the West.
Yes, Israel was founded in the wrong place.
Most accept this and would take it a step further, viewing defensive violence as legitimate and offensive violence as wrong.
I reject the characterization of colonialism as wrong. The end of empire led to a sustained and considerable decline in quality of life in many parts of the world.
What is their plan for EU sanctions or the US walking away? Or even just a prolonged insurgency and skirmishing with Iran that wrecks their economy? Vae victis works both ways.
While I agree that Israel’s future is very uncertain Israeli unreasonableness has yet to be tested. In the event of European sanctions and American disengagement, an end to all aid, a prolonged military crisis and food supply issues, I think there’s every chance that in the resulting domestic political upheaval they negotiate with the Europeans and Gulf Arabs and agree to some kind of two-state solution; they know if they’re overrun its lights out forever, or at least another 2000 years.
A lot of it is cultural. I really don’t mind third world elites, probably 85% of my apartment building consists of them and they are generally polite, comparatively well dressed, keep to themselves and keep communal spaces clean. Having grown up around rich Americans I can’t really say they are any less pleasant to be around.
But the last 30 years have seen large numbers of peasants come in, in addition to existing third world peasant populations like the Mirpuris in England, rural Anatolians in Germany and so on.
A few very rich westernized Bangladeshis in Mayfair and Chelsea doesn’t bother (almost) anyone. Tower Hamlets becoming a Sylheti Islamist ethnostate does. This is pretty simple stuff.
2rafa
12d ago
Argentina had as many problems as a dictatorship, I think the cause is the urban-rural setup, the first period of deglobalization after 1914, the constitutional structure in terms of regional/state authority and some cultural issues, plus some other things.
2rafa
12d ago
The democratic victory of the national party in South Africa after the depression arguably led inexorably to its state failure decades later.
2rafa
12d ago
Yeah, most of the huge additional admin spend went on sports, facilities, mental health, nicer dorms etc to compete with other colleges.
2rafa
12d ago
The reality is that India is fundamentally broken, in thrall to a legitimate but dysfunctional democracy that serves the interests of the agricultural peasant class, lower and backward castes, tribal people and resentful minorities over the middle and upper classes, who are a small minority.
I don’t believe truly universal suffrage is viable in a country where almost 50% of the population still work in agriculture. Until 1900 fewer than 20% of the total American population voted in presidential elections, in part because even many who could vote didn’t. In India it’s around 45-50% iirc, similar to Western countries. (Around 650-700 million votes cast in the last election).
The problem with India is that emigration acts as a pressure valve on the domestic middle and upper classes. They leave instead of overthrowing the system. To save India, they must overthrow democracy, re-assert the whip hand over the peasants, abolish the perverse system of reservation, abolish price floors in agriculture, consolidate small holding farms (brutalizing any peasant farmer resistance, which they have caved to every time so far) and embark on the kind of infrastructure development projects China did two generations ago.
But that seems like a lot of work when you can just go to America and be a doctor or engineer and have a nice comfortable life. India is probably the biggest example of the failure of democracy in human history.
2rafa
12d ago
In the end this had to happen. While illegal immigration and family / chain migration from places like Central America, Somalia and Haiti were and are far more critical (and still aren’t being stopped to the necessary degree) than a hundred thousand Indian programmers a year moving to America, the latter was still an issue.
The H-1B system was designed in 1990 when remote collaboration was nonexistent or in its infancy. Today there is no need to bring highly skilled foreigners to America permanently to collaborate. You can work together on Zoom, over email and instant message, can meet in person for social reasons a couple of times a year. Relocating a family from to America permanently, making all their descendants in perpetuity American citizens, that should be done for reasons more substantial than to add another database guy to the Tata team in Orlando.
I’ve long thought Trump should just make a better ‘America is closed’ speech. We had the era of mass immigration, we settled the country, now it’s ended, it’s not coming back.
It depends. Annual immigration as a proportion of the total population is low relative to other Anglo countries and most of Western Europe.
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