2rafa
6mo ago
I don’t have any issue with Canada’s euthanasia system, and the only flaw people seem to note is that they get upset when someone they don’t think should choose to kill themselves does so. But again, depressives, people dealing with extreme loneliness etc have always killed themselves at disproportionate rates, I don’t consider it morally abhorrent to ease their pain more painlessly.
Not all people, not all civilizations, not all tribes, are equal. This is a core conservative conceit, it’s also inherent to ideas like HBD that you yourself agree with. Human progress has always involved the conquest of some peoples by others.
“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, 'The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.' They had not the right, nor had they the power.”
- Winston Churchill on Palestine (1937)
‘Punching down’, in other words, may be more moral than ‘punching up’. The many settlers of the Americas did what they did and so, perhaps, will the Israelis.
2rafa
7mo ago
What chance does the average white collar criminal have of getting murdered on Rikers lol
Hollywood accounting is largely a legend from the old days, and despite some real examples it was never as common as is sometimes implied (accounting tricks were commonly used for production finance and tax reasons, most creators who sold rights were paid cash). In the modern day, agents will make sure you get points up front or a substantial cash payment for IP rights.
For the most part in movies the people who make money are those who fund movies and some star talent (directors, star actors, occasionally others) that can bid up their price. Everyone else gets paid standard or union rates. This is similar to any other business.
The problem is that in entertainment an additional entitlement exists, namely the ‘right’ some people demand to revenue points even when they bear none of the risk for a production. In other industries this doesn’t fly, equity is offered either as part of compensation packages to attract talent or to keep it, there is no ‘right’ to it. And when an accountant or lawyer makes partner, they have to ‘buy in’ for several years before they start making a personal profit.
This (not AI or writers rooms) is actually the biggest sticking point in the current strikes.
When you say 'I'm anti-woke' when you talk about wokeness, you're saying 'I'm anti-Black.’”
How is this different from conservative commentators saying “diversity is code for anti-white”? It’s the same rhetorical game.
More generally, I think reactionaries are too obsessed with black people. Black people are unlikely to make up more than 15% of the American population any time soon. AA birth rates have converged with the white rate. In South Africa, black people are the great majority of the population. In America, they likely never will be. Black people have been in the US longer than many Europeans, and have nothing much to do with the large scale demographic change that has occurred since the 1970s. Ultimately, any pro-black affirmative action, state support etc will always have to be passed with the assistance of the majority of the rest of the population, whether that is white or latino or a mix of both. Issues with race relations that exist between black and white Americans are largely separate to mass immigration, and would exist in the same way even if America had remained 85% white.
2rafa
11d ago
Marjorie Taylor Greene
The biography From Prostitute To President: An American Tale will be worth it.
2rafa
1mo ago
I think ‘from the river to the sea’ shouldn’t be banned at colleges or universities, and I agree that most people who use it don’t intend for it to mean the ethnic cleansing or murder of Israelis. (I also think most people, even at Malema rallies, who shout ‘kill the Boer’ don’t actually want to exterminate Afrikaner farmers, but they do typically quite transparently wish to dispossess them).
Nevertheless, as in that case, ‘from the river to the sea’ effectively means the large-scale murder of Jews, since no Palestinian one-state solution would tolerate a longstanding Jewish presence and because the democratically elected leadership of a free Palestine would almost certainly be an Islamist group that, like Hamas and the Houthis and bolstered by countless extremely anti-Jewish hadiths that have become more prominent in Islamist scholarship over the last forty years (gharqad tree etc), would in practice seek to kill any remaining Jews in Palestine.
You can draw the South Africa comparison, but the simple fact is that South African black people mostly have no personal animus toward whites. There is a politician grift complex and there is plenty of resentment that 30 years after apartheid ended many are still poor etc etc, but the primary racial hostilities in South Africa are between blacks and Indians, between indigenous black peoples (ie. Khoi-San) and Bantus, and between South African citizens and migrants from the Congo and elsewhere in Central Africa who are perceived as pushing down wages for the urban poor. This was substantially true even before 1994, and from the rich to the poor few people in SA actually think that kicking out whites will solve the country’s problem. Even today, polling in SA shows that:
South Africans say creating jobs and fighting corruption are much more important as government priorities than “racism”, or “land reform”.
By contrast, it is clear that the primary policy preference of most Palestinians in the Levant is hostility towards Jewish rule of Israel even at extraordinary cost to themselves, no matter how many bodies pile up. There would be no ‘debate’ on land reform in a one-state Palestine (unlike in SA, where whites still own 55% of prime agricultural land, the majority of valuable private enterprise and so on), everything would be taken. And given that this hostility is also a longstanding part of Islamic religious and cultural values, we can assume without any leaps of logic that the end of Israel as a Jewish state would also guarantee, in short order, the end of any Jewish presence in Palestine. Meanwhile, there are many African countries like Namibia, Botswana and Kenya that retain sizable white communities 50+ years after independence.
2rafa
1mo ago
Yes, and the right wing critique that appears to be most shared is just the left wing critique copied by thirdworldist rightists like Fuentes and Woods, and to some extent by Owens, it’s not a distinctly reactionary critique. Rightists forget that the left zoomer response to “‘open borders for thee but not for me’ is unfair!” isn’t going to be to advocate for closed borders in the West, its just going to be to advocate for more leftist policies on the border, immigration and identity in Israel, which of course Soros and others already do. I suppose if one’s primary motivation is just owning the juice that might be enough, unless their view of Western leftists (who they typically argue are dominated by Jewish influence anyway) is so delusional that they think they’re going to abandon all their other principles to go full fash because they don’t like zionism.
2rafa
2mo ago
Yes, and in general the depiction of small town midwestern USA as some kind of paradise is ridiculous. Stripmallville with a dying main street, Applebees as the best restaurant, no organic spontaneous community because you have to drive everywhere (even to somewhere a half mile away because there’s either no sidewalk or you’re separated by an interstate that goes right through the middle of town), no beautiful architecture, and the same slowly declining social trends (birthrates, single motherhood, drug addiction) as the rest of the country, just 20 years behind is not some bucolic garden of eden.
Indeed, if one lived in the Midwest and actually wanted the kind of comfortable, pastoral, low risk existence @Walterodim described they’d be best off getting their proof of German ancestry in order, applying for a visa and moving to some little village in Bavaria or Baden Württemberg with zero immigrants; at least there the scenery is much better, the architecture is better, the schools are probably better, the buses are both more frequent and more timely and you’re actually in (or nearer to, certainly) the homeland of your ancestors.
2rafa
2mo ago
I don’t think the vast majority of Jews act with or have any substantial ‘anti-white’ animus; otherwise intermarriage rates with gentile whites wouldn’t be well over 50%.
I think Jews embraced liberal ideas with great zealotry on account of perceived and real prejudice toward them in many traditional European societies. This affinity for liberalism continues today.
But liberalism was invented by white gentiles, and through much of the last 200 years the majority of its destructive impact on aspects of Western societies has been imagined, implemented and supported by gentile whites, and that includes things like mass immigration to the US, championed by gentiles like Phil Hart, Ted Kennedy and so on as well as by some Jewish activists, and the sexual revolution, whose clear champion was one Hugh Hefner.
But disproportionately buying into the ideals of their host society is not a crime, and the most Jews can be accused of (as a group, I mean) is for believing too hard in the principles of the gentiles who themselves adopted the ideas of equality, universality and democracy that their own people created.
The modernity you decry is a predominantly gentile project in which Jews played a substantial-but-supporting role, in part because the goys really seemed to know what they were doing. Nobody deserves to hang for that, although it is true some people have a curious inability to look inward for the cause of their people’s misfortune instead of blaming everyone else; we’ve all been there.
If Lindell didn’t trust government authorities to properly investigate election interference claims, he should have also known not to trust the courts to fairly (from his perspective) enforce an arbitration issue about it.
I realize that I’m skirting close to the ‘if pro-lifers really believed abortion was murder, surely they’d…’ argument, but there is a case to be made that this kind of applies to Trump himself. Like, if the deep state stole the election from him once, why would he have any faith they wouldn’t do it again, especially now “they” have the presidency and thus surely even more power and less oversight?
I don’t think Trump is the kind of guy who does something unless he believes he has at least a chance of winning, and I think he does believe he has a chance of winning this year.
That leaves two possibilities. Firstly, that the deep state is too weak or his margin of victory will be too great to cheat him of the presidency again or, secondly, that he never really believed he won the first (well, second) time, but was just using the claim of interference as a political tool (both to rally his supporters and maybe as some kind of gambit to stay in office).
2rafa
3mo ago
various New York headlines about the sex lives of a middle aged Floridian couple are gauche at best
The headlines are fine unless you believe in extreme UK-style libel laws (and even there tabloids report on these things), it’s any actual legal action that is presumably debatable.
In any case, social conservatism doesn’t really exist in America anymore. Of course Republicans are swingers and sexual degenerates; their king is, but even Ronald and Nancy had their pasts, come on.
The fact that the conservatives seem to be publicly having more fun than liberals seems meaningful doesn't it? I'm not sure how, but it does.
This misunderstands the objection to sexual libertinism. It’s not ‘hard’ to have this kind of fun. Sex is easy, it’s just a question of correctly evaluating one’s own attractiveness and finding partners on that basis. Provided they have sufficient humility, even ugly people can get laid all the time, or they can pay for it.
In this case, the Republican in question, while schlubby, has a pretty wife, which I’m given to understand is the most important thing in swinging circles (especially for ‘unicorns’ who could, after all, find a more attractive single man if they wanted that).
2rafa
3mo ago
I agree, though I don’t think it’s mostly about virtue signaling to the left. It also seems (admittedly I have no firsthand experience) that a lot of those southern megachurches have a big fixation on fundraising for Africa, African famines and so on, and about Haiti. They have church groups that travel to these places, they spend a lot of money on political activity in these places. The left is often complaining about alleged American Christian involvement in eg. Uganda’s laws on homosexuality. Traditional Catholics also seem to hold Haiti as especially important (I suppose unsurprising given it’s a Catholic country), ACB’s adoption decision clearly wasn’t random.
I assume you don't think this is evidence of a genocidal intent.
“Genocidal intent” is a largely bullshit term (even if it’s sometimes necessary) outside of the most banal “I will commit genocide” declaration (and even then), just look at how many thing politicians say they’ll do and then don’t.
That said I think, exactly like some of the speeches and diary entries you mention, that some on the extreme right fringe of Israeli politics (not Bibi) have expressed what could become an openness to genocide. And I certainly think there are a substantial number of religious Zionists who don’t particularly care what happens to the Palestinians, or whether they live or died.
But litigating genocidal intent is different than litigating genocide. And yes, I absolutely think that if there’s some geopolitical chaos and 90% of Palestinians on territory controlled by Israel vanish in 4 years Israel should be the prime and obvious suspect in their disappearance. So I’m not, in that sense, disagreeing with you at all.
Edit: And regarding your first point re. the Iranian control example, I agree and am glad you acknowledge that the central question about the whole revisionism debate does revolve around estimates of the prewar and postwar Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe, as I have long argued here.
2rafa
4mo ago
In America, even without mass immigration, you have the high fertility of the ultra Orthodox Jews. So unless you want a future without music or art or equality or indigenous Europeans it’s a good idea to incentivize births. Eg 200k in New York, doubling every 20 years means hundreds of millions within 200 years. And they already wield an absurd amount of political power in New York
The number of Ultra Orthodox and the number of Amish in the US is actually pretty similar (~400k). Good tfr estimates for both are fraught (both populations are actually experiencing falling birthrates) but many estimates are similar. Of course, neither the Amish or the Ultra-Orthodox in their current forms will ever be the majority in the US because their cultures will undergo huge changes as they become large shares of the population (as they already are in Israel).
A much larger Amish population will necessarily experience urbanization and the cultural and economic change that will follow, and a much larger ultra orthodox population will become more splintered and atomized, and as more men labor (or spend any time) beyond the kollel the whole institutional structure of that society will begin to crumble in places. In both cases, birthrates will fall (as they already are).
2rafa
4mo ago
The red tribe is best served by red states ‘pissing on’ rulings by SCOTUS and executive decisions by the president or cabinet and daring congress to respond militarily or in some other extreme way. The left hasn’t been tested in this way in sixty years, conservative states should just start refusing to enforce policy they don’t like.
2rafa
4mo ago
Do Southern whites enlist more than Northern whites because they’re culturally warriors, or because they’re poorer and come from places with less opportunity? One sees similar patterns in most wealthy Western nations.
2rafa
5mo ago
I think it’s likely that some low level corruption / rigging occurred on both sides as is the norm in American politics, but it’s unlikely it’s impact can be fully quantified and there’s limited evidence it secured Biden’s victory. And I think there was a major effort by the majority of the American ruling class to (as various things about ‘securing (or fortifying) the election’ suggest) strongly discourage Trump support, encourage Biden support, and establish favourable conditions on the ground for Biden in terms of covid rules, voting by mail etc. I also think Trump was almost uniquely unpopular as President and would most likely have lost even without any illegal actions, as far they occurred.
2rafa
5mo ago
Without this guy, even though (as many, not just you, have noted) he’s a troll, we’d be back to the usual conversations about trans bathrooms, abortion, guns and childhood transition making up 70% of regular threads, and those were in many ways played out discussion topics by the end of the last Bush administration.
2rafa
7mo ago
Most Palestinians aren’t the descendants of Ottoman smallholders, it’s unlikely the above is true given the way land ownership worked in the late empire.
2rafa
7mo ago
Preventing 'dual-use' equipment like X-ray machines to be brought into the West Bank. Sabotaging the economy of the West bank by bombing power plants, constraining trade into and out of the region, restricting quantities of industrial fuel brought in...
How much of that would have happened if they had accepted their situation and had not pursued armed resistance against Israel since the mid-90s? Probably none of it. They would prefer to fight than to accept a comfortable enough middle-income existence in a crowded city state that would likely be little worse than that had by their cousins in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt or (pre/postwar) Syria. I respect that they want to fight, but then it’s harder to sympathize with what is done to prevent them killing more Israelis.
2rafa
8mo ago
Again, why do you think 16 year old girls in 1965 had more power than rock musicians, Hugh Hefner, Hollywood and the ad industry? Blaming women for the sexual revolution just doesn’t stack up.
2rafa
8mo ago
Your boyfriend being sexually aggressive in bed is obviously absurdly different to being raped by a stranger you’ve never met. The latter involves a core component of fear that the former doesn’t. There are a handful of Bay Area weirdos who arrange polyamorous orgies for programmers, yes.
The average woman would find it pretty easy to have aggressive, anonymous (and therefore zero blowback) sex with a large number of male strangers on an extremely regular basis and yet the vast, vast majority don’t.
If you say “they want it without the risk and fear and horror” [which are inherent to violent rape] then you have literally ceased to describe violent rape. So the point is void either way.
I can absolutely infer that there's a significant portion of the male population that enjoy war, violence, combat and competition, even to the point of lethality.
The military is always looking for recruits, and for those with a more lethal view of blood sport there’s always Ukraine. Again, the obvious difference between Call of Duty and real life is that in the former, there is no real fear. That makes it a useful analogy. By contrast, the male porn analogy is not useful because we know that most men would fuck anything. The same isn’t true for women.
The GOP has a deep bench precisely because the quality of candidates is so poor that random businessmen, grifters and various elected congressmen, governors and so on always think it’s their year.
The Dems have a mostly shitty slate (Buttigieg isn’t winning a presidential) but they can almost always dig up someone capable of winning. Once it was Obama, in a few years it’ll be Gavin Newsom. And Newsom isn’t smart, but he’s very handsome and looks like the President from a Hollywood movie, so he’ll win. Do the GOP have one hot man capable of winning a presidential election?
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