2rafa
25d 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
25d 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
25d 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
25d 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
26d 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
26d ago
The democratic victory of the national party in South Africa after the depression arguably led inexorably to its state failure decades later.
2rafa
26d ago
Yeah, most of the huge additional admin spend went on sports, facilities, mental health, nicer dorms etc to compete with other colleges.
2rafa
26d 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
26d 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.
Nevertheless, it is possible for one people to actually oppress another. Palestinians don't get to jury-vote their coethnics out of crimes in Israeli courts, there is/was no Palestinian president of Israel... they're actually being oppressed.
Sure, but why? Because they’ve engaged in a (so far) futile decades-long campaign to reverse the Jewish settlement of the levant that eventually angered the settlers enough that they imposed a series of escalating forms of oppression on them. Losing East Jerusalem, much of the West Bank, various other territories was the direct consequence of losing wars (just as it was for the Native Americans) many times in a row. The walls and checkpoints that prevent many Palestinians from living and working in Israel were likewise erected solely in response to terror attacks on Israeli civilians committed by these people and in their name. At every juncture, the noose tightened slowly because the Palestinians did not admit defeat and surrender, culturally and militarily, which is the route to survival for any conquered people.
Native Americans have reservations and affirmative action, sure, but many live on territory far removed from their ancestral homeland due to the westward forced migrations of the 19th century, and in total they have only a tiny percentage of their historical holdings (obviously), far less proportionally than the Palestinians have. Much of the Indian welfare and casino apparatus also only came into being a century or more after the great majority of the country was ethnically cleansed of most or all of its native population, so Israel has time yet.
Many on this forum are too accustomed to dismissing racism and oppression. Most of the time, the concept is used inappropriately. Blacks in America receive all kinds of special privileges, the US media and govt tries to sweep black anti-white terror attacks under the rug.
There has been no effective organized black nationalist movement in American history, and the last ineffective one fizzled out in the 1970s. Crime stats are one thing (almost no black-on-white crime is ‘terrorism’, that ascribes a political and ideological aspiration to the perpetrators that, as mentioned, they just don’t have), 300 armed and trained black men aren’t invading the country club to slaughter the men and rape the women as part of a race war against whites designed to drive them back to Europe, that isn’t something that happens in America.
There is a world in which the Palestinians accepted the reasonable 1967 borders (after already losing to Israel twice), kept a substantial proportion of their land, fortified their borders with the help of their Arab neighbors (such that no settlers would be coming in) and set up a relatively peaceful coexistence with Israel. As they did before and after, they chose otherwise. Gaza would not have been destroyed if Hamas hadn’t gambled on Hezbollah and West Bank Palestinians successfully joining a huge uprising on October 7th.
The Arabs are actually oppressed, certainly. But they are oppressed because they have continued to make very bad decisions in service of their pride over their comfort, liberty and life for so many years and show no sign of stopping. They had options and still do, if worse ones.
2rafa
27d ago
Let's not forget these guys outwitted Mossad and the whole Israeli-American intelligence complex with their surprise attack on October 7th.
Secular Israeli society is also undergoing severe genetic decline as a consequence of Ashkenazi - Mizrachi intermarriage, and the more endogamous Charedim don’t serve in the IDF or Mossad, so you will find no disagreement from me there.
Few would justify Palestinian suicide bombings like this - 'it was for the Israeli's own good that the Palestinians blew up that bus full of civilians, they crossed an invisible Palestinian security line or something.' Suicide bombings are acts of hatred.
It was extremely common in the mid 90s in mainstream Western leftist (not even radically, mainstream-ish publications like the NYRB, the Guardian’s opinion section, the Center-left French and Italian press) to justify the first intifada’s terror attacks against civilians including teenagers and children on similar grounds, that these were dispossessed people just trying to defend their land and doing what they could in protest. It’s nothing new, it’s common even.
it's a case where some well-organized, well-connected home-invaders beat the crap out of the home-owner, lock him up in the basement and while lambasting his poverty and squalid conditions, use them as proof of why they should be in charge.
If some Native American terror movement rises out of the alcoholic emptiness of the reservations to start committing terror attacks against white American civilians, including children then I fully expect that the reaction on this sub will be the same as the Israeli one.
2rafa
27d ago
The reason boys collect the aid might be because the IDF frequently shoots civilians.
An unarmed man is no more bullet resistant than an unarmed woman, so this is a strange argument. If the Gazans had surrendered, the only IDF casualties would be due to unexploded ordnance and friendly fire. Clearly given ongoing military casualties and regular firefights this is not the case, therefore the Gazans have not yet surrendered. If you look at footage of food distribution lines in violent conflict zones anywhere else in the world (esp in places like East Africa) there are almost always substantial numbers of women. The highly disproportionate number of fighting age male casualties in the ‘peaceful’ aid lines is very telling in this regard.
I don’t trust the UN when they say being against mass immigration to Europe is Dacian, so why should I trust them when they say that everyone shot outside these aid centers is an innocent lamb, especially when there have been countless firefights outside them since the invasion of Gaza began in 2023.
2rafa
27d ago
Those are the tools used against an unruly population that has not yet reached the final straw of the other side. This war has been going on for 75 years. Rubber bullets, razor wire, tear gas, these have all featured extensively, they still are used in the West Bank. But at some point, empathy declines and then fades. The views of Israelis have hardened, the views of Palestinians are unchanged. The move from rubber bullets to real ones is an inevitable consequence of that dynamic over decades.
I don’t think it’s irreversible, by the way. Foreign powers could force change, Israel could collapse (in which case the dynamic would only be inverted, with far more brutality and bloodshed for that matter), or the Palestinians could surrender, truly this time. I am a poor gambler, so I will leave the odds of each of those to others.
2rafa
27d ago
I really don’t think Pete would do much better with black Dems if he was straight. Black Dems tend to like (like most people) charming, handsome men and Pete is neither. Obama and Clinton had more in common than either does with Pete.
They’re boys who try to storm the food distribution sites. Killing those who try to steal food distributed in times of war and famine has happened for thousands of years, it’s critical to preventing both fatal crowd crushes (which have killed dozens or hundreds regularly at aid distribution sites across Africa and the Middle East for many decades) and, even more importantly, to preventing young men and teenage boys from taking all the food, which they’re very liable to do and which leaves nothing for the elderly, women and young children.
As the Dutch example says,
Most are boys—teenagers and young adults.
No random sample of the population, especially when in global times of famine and in refugee camp situations women tend to be disproportionately responsible for food collection.
You have a hostile, deeply dysgenic population that has repeatedly decided to commit suicide-by-IDF for 70 years, where young boys are raised from toddlerhood to believe that being martyred by an Israeli bullet is the highest calling and achievement in life. They have no fear, it’s almost impressive. This is an ethnoreligious (ethno because it doesn’t really encompass all practicing Muslims) ideology devoted to the afterlife absolutely, far moreso than any other widely practiced Abrahamic denomination. Even millenarian Christian movements often have a love for life.
If it sounds very early 2000s hitchens atheist boomerish to describe the worldview of a lot of deeply committed Palestinian Sunni ethnonationalists as a “death cult” then so be it, but there is truth to it. Most children early on develop the ability to respond to positive or negative stimulus. Animals like horses and dogs are trained with gentle(ish) physical feedback, with punishment and reward. If you’re beaten and beaten for 75 years you might just surrender - not even to a terrible, North Korean or Cuban or Yemeni QOL but to a quality of life that is still much better than the regional average for your tribal cousins (which was the life most Palestinians had before the borders were closed or tightened after the last intifada; Israel had plenty of need for decently paid blue collar labor). Gazans don’t. They just keep fighting.
In a way, the war on Gaza is kind of like the battle against psycho drug addict violent homeless people like Decarlos Brown. Is rehabilitation possible? Is “justice reform” possible? When someone has 15+ convictions and just keeps on crusading against advanced civilization, well, at some point you have to accept that they have no intention of living peacefully. Unlike countless peoples, including the Jews for millennia for that matter, the Gazans are not content to live as vassals or dhimmis. Perhaps there is honor in that, but there are consequences to it too. So be it.
2rafa
28d ago
While it is evidence of a cultural shift, it’s also much more closely related to Trump’s personal viewership of late night TV and his early-boomerish fondness for network television in general.
A millennial conservative president, even one as powerful as Trump and to the right of him, probably wouldn’t care about this Kimmel comment. His audience all agree with him anyway, it isn’t like affecting the editorial position of CBS News in 1982 when 30 million or whatever it was Americans of all political views tuned in every evening.
For Disney, as this kind of late night general show fades in relevance anyway, this firing was more than worth it, they likely barely made money on Kimmel anyway if they did at all.
How do you know it was about the money? Because if the show was profitable, they would have forced him to apologise sincerely on air and at least tried to keep it going.
2rafa
29d ago
Fascism in Italy emerged directly out of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism so can be seen more wholly (even as it later got capitalist/bourgeois support) as descended from the radical left.
Fascism in Germany emerged alongside the immediately-postwar right-wing anti-communist freikorps militias in the chaotic revolutionary atmosphere of Germany in 1918-1922, ideologically out of lower-middle class nationalist groups who weren't particularly leftist economically or socially and so can't really be described as socialist. The word 'socialist' was added to the German Workers' Party name to appeal to urban proletarians who might otherwise be drawn to the far left. After the mid-1920s the NSDAP was never particularly socialist, taxes rose during the war as they did everywhere, but were kept at moderate levels through the 30s, friendly corporations weren't seized, capital markets remained broadly operational, including the major stock exchanges. There were currency and import/export controls to some extent, but those had been implemented everywhere after 1919 and certainly after 1929.
Of course, you might argue that there were and are plenty of committed Chinese and Vietnamese Marxists who eventually embraced market capitalism and private wealth, but the circumstances are slightly different. In those cases and in the official Dengist state literature Marx and Engels' own argument about the teleology of capitalism and that it's a necessary stage of progress that societies have to go through is regularly cited and rephrased. Nazi Germany had no such explanation or argument really.
2rafa
29d ago
He seems to have been a political schizo, liar and clout chaser since the 80s and from Utah. It isn’t surprising he was there and it is even less surprising that when the assassination happened he made the split second decision to commit knowing that his face might be everywhere in the country and world in short order.
The only reason this is getting traction online is because some Twitter users (notably Candace Owens) alleging that Kirk was actually assassinated by Israel decided he was Jewish because of his name (as @DoctorMonarch says, this is far from clear, the name is German and there are plenty of non-Jewish Zinns on Wikipedia) and so must be involved.
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.
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