2rafa
2d ago
Princeton and Brown both have gentile presidents (their names are Christian and Christina, respectively).
2rafa
17hr ago
It doesn’t matter. Unless Trump has a trifecta with an unrealistic senate majority (which isn’t going to happen) this was better than ANYTHING he can accomplish in office. It is truly an unbelievable blackpill that the bill didn’t pass, it represented a huge concession from the Dems in an election year and the GOP were unfathomably retarded to reject it.
2rafa
2hr ago
It wouldn’t necessarily limit Dem presidents much, but it would allow a GOP President much more discretion against mass illegal immigration. Given the Dems will do what they want anyway, that would have been a win.
2rafa
3hr ago
Sure, but the issue is that if you truly believe African and Filipino Catholics (for example) are your brothers in Christ and that it is your duty to help them as coreligionists it’s easy to see that developing into an ideology supportive of mass immigration even if Christianity does not require it to per se.
2rafa
17hr ago
Completely agree, this was the most progress on illegal immigration since the 1990s and the GOP squandered it to pander to Trump who might not even win in November and won’t be able to do something better even if he does.
2rafa
2d ago
I don’t disagree with the nuance you discuss, but it’s also true that people don’t necessarily fully think through the implications of the political and ideological positions they advocate. This is a big point of Moldbug’s: by our standards many of the key thinkers of the enlightenment were deeply conservative/reactionary, they didn’t seek to dismantle a lot of the things that subsequent liberal thinkers did, but they nevertheless established forms of ideological enquiry that through processes like the Hegelian dialectic created modern progressivism in a continuous process.
It can both be true that 1776 leads inexorably to 2024 and that none of the founding fathers would be remotely happy with the current ruling ideology of the United States. Similarly, it can be true that the early Christians established a religion that had a tendency towards universalism and universal equality even though the early Christians still believed in the vast majority of social institutions (slavery, patriarchy, tribalism) of their age.
Yeah I completely agree with everything you say here. But Malay discrimination against the Chinese (or indeed Bangladeshis) has no basis in Muslim scripture and isn’t justified religiously locally; the Chinese are infidels, sure, but so are the Christian bumiputera who benefit from affirmative action policies. In fact the Malaysia constitution guarantees that Christian bumiputera get the special privileges etc. What happens in Malaysia is just the standard thing that happens with market dominant minorities anywhere in the world, and compared to the historic treatment of Jews, the way the Ugandans treated the Indians, arguably even the way that the South Africans treat the whites now, the Chinese actually have it very good.
As for the Malay Arab worship/LARP, I’ve commented on it before (it’s far from unique, the Maldivians engage in it too, even more northern Desi Muslims do to some extent). The point is that racial discrimination against foreign or minority Muslims (not non-Muslims) in the Islamic world isn’t justified using scripture but by paeans to nativism or for economic purposes. The same is true in the Middle East. Everyone knows that Islam itself doesn’t encourage ethnic separatism and is a universalist religion.
2rafa
2d ago
How strange that two Jews named after Christ should run Ivy League universities. I stand corrected, though I think both are pretty noncentral examples of Jewish Americans, especially when Eisgruber had no knowledge of his Jewish identity until well into middle age and Paxton has no Jewish ethnic identity at all. On another note, do you really think Abbott is getting rid of pro-Palestine protesters as a favor to Jewish donors? That seems unlikely. Almost all of the protesters (and I’d wager that, certainly in Texas, they’re disproportionately Jewish compared to the population average) are enemies of the GOP and American conservatism regardless of their views on Israel, so this seems more like something that provides a useful pretext than something driven by Jewish policy preferences.
In New York City, especially at Columbia University, things are different; the UWS (and NYC really) is the capital of the Jewish world and Columbia has long been and perhaps remains the most Jewish Ivy, it’s fair to say that neither Hochul nor Adams want to annoy the state’s Jews in an important year for the party.
2rafa
2d ago
It would be remiss not to say that the national mood around leftist riots has shifted considerably since 2020.
2rafa
3d ago
Probably Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens type stuff. Tucker and Musk obviously alluded to it. You don’t have to far on Twitter to find right-wing antisemitism.
2rafa
3d ago
Nigeria has ongoing sectarian conflict with Islamist terrorists in the North and Northeast and between Fulani pastoralists and settled people that involve hundreds of murders on a very regular basis (all of which are recorded by the military). The US murder rate also spiked in 2001 for obvious reasons.
Do you believe the true homicide rate in West Africa is on the order of 50-90 per 100k as in these high crime American cities? What do you think the ballpark figure is?
2rafa
4d ago
If what you say is true, why hasn’t the judiciary destroyed Google for the fact that fewer than 15% of software engineers there are black?
2rafa
6d ago
Would even a conventional war between NATO and Russia really be decided by artillery shell production rates?
2rafa
16hr ago
I think your rational concession is likely correct. When very stressed or busy it is easy to make it to the evening without eating anything; over a prolonged period in many people this will mean a calorie deficit and therefore weight loss.
2rafa
1d ago
Well, we can just make it Portland. Or Skid Row. The problem comes when every downtown starts to look like Skid Row.
2rafa
1d ago
I’m sympathetic to monarchism (I mean I live in a monarchy, and I don’t think it would be a worse place if the king had much more power). I do think it’s a failure state to be aware of, though.
2rafa
2d ago
There are certainly antisemites here but I’d say they get more downvotes than upvotes much of the time.
Homicide rates are relatively hard to obfuscate and I suspect that rates in cities like Accra and Windhoek are broadly accurate. Again, these rates are still much higher than in Western Europe, but well below rates in St Louis, New Orleans and Baltimore. Lagos reported 350 murders in 2022 in a city of 15 million (of whom practically all are African), that year St Louis reported 200 murders in a city of 300,000 (of whom only 150k are black). While it's likely more homicides slipped under the radar in Lagos than in St Louis, West African cities would have to miss the vast majority of homicides to come close to the US' most violent cities. Having spent a lot of time in Africa, even poorer people in big cities would report these kinds of deaths, even if they have little belief in the competence of the police to solve them.
I agree that the gap closing appears unlikely, but reducing homicide rates in these cities to West African levels would still be a big improvement.
2rafa
4d ago
YouTubers can only be MeToo’d if they actually go to jail, it’s not like YouTube has a ban on accounts owned by people who may have engaged in unethical behavior.
To some extent Pygonyangification is a risk, but the current elite already has the power to ruin your life, strip you of your livelihood and take your money (something that effectively means you're going to have to move out of Manhattan anyway), so what's the difference?
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