2rafa
20d ago
undeclared
This word is doing a lot here. Declaration doesn’t really mean anything; it made sense for Pakistan for obvious geopolitical reasons, and every single nuclear state is aware of Israel’s nuclear capability. They could ‘declare’ it tomorrow and nothing would change, none of the major nuclear powers accept or are fully truthful around any international inspections or the full extent of their capability for standard secrecy reasons.
2rafa
13d ago
The Israelis are delusional and wrong about regime change. It’s strange that critics of Israel seem to be so heavily invested in Mossad’s infallibility (even ‘October 7th was allowed to happen’ etc). The only way regime change happens in Iran is if the Tehran middle class get fed up enough to make it happen. That will be independent from Israel.
2rafa
5d ago
Chasidic views on interracial marriage (and therefore conversion into Judaism, really) are less exclusive than you might expect. All ultra orthodox accept sincere religious conversion as an inherent part of Judaism and there are occasional ethnic minorities.
As with the Amish, though, an extremely high native birth rate means the majority of the population will probably always be of the original stock.
2rafa
8d ago
Mandatory e-verify doesn’t work because most settled illegals appear to have stolen social security numbers, as discussed above. It’s a fake solution.
2rafa
20d ago
The Israelis are still a big part of the western internet it would be impossible to hide if many thousands of Israeli civilians had died in Iranian strikes.
2rafa
17d ago
Ok, well let's just take a look at the undefeated Uno Reverso.
Indeed. Suppose Ignatiev were to reply to your comment (and general worldview) with:
“My dear SS, I agree completely. I think all practicing Jews should renounce their religious practice (including, as I have already argued, kosher dining and food preparation), and all ethnic Jews should abandon their cultural particularity. Jews should convert to mainstream Protestant Christianity, the predominant gentile religion in the United States, or practice no faith. They should marry gentiles (of course most already do, but let’s say all of them). All Jewish religious institutions (synagogues, museums of tolerance, etc) should be closed, all religious clothing banned. Those who refuse these terms ought to go to Israel, but those who accept them can remain in America with no further restrictions placed on their participation in society, culture, politics or the economy. Furthermore, any racial agitation by white nationalists towards those former Jews who fully, sincerely renounce and abandon their Jewishness will be strictly prohibited.”
Would you accept his offer?
Because that is the difference between Ignatiev’s position and those of the dissident rightists who borrow his words in this case. He (like all communists) allowed for conversion; even the last emperor of china was converted, after all. You do not.
2rafa
17d ago
Can you explain to me how that's relevant at all to what I said?
(Since you tagged me) It literally serves as an example of him opposing Jewish particularism, which is ultimately what you accuse him of.
2rafa
19d ago
Regime change isn’t possible without a ground invasion which isn’t possible. Posturing doesn’t change that.
2rafa
11m ago
I think the primary beneficiary of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation was himself and maybe a small handful of actual friends, who he probably didn’t care to blackmail but may or may not have kept kompromat on. Separate to that was his love of the game and of impressing successful and powerful people, which he enjoyed doing his whole life, regardless of whether or not they shared his sexual proclivities. In the course of the latter he may have traded in secrets, although it was never close to being his main line of work.
2rafa
14m ago
He got off the hook in 2008 and pled not guilty here.
He was still convicted in the early 2000s, though, he just got a sweetheart deal. This time there were more witnesses and more credible witnesses, more victims and more medium to high quality testimony from his own former employees. In addition, he was already a convicted criminal, which would affect sentencing and make a second sweetheart deal less likely in any case (regardless of offense or offender). The Florida cases were localized, the New York case had a much greater emphasis on interstate and international movement which meant a much longer sentence in a real prison was inevitable if convicted. As the Ghislaine sentence (and there was much less direct evidence of a lot of her involvement shows), Epstein wasn’t making it out in his lifetime and there is every chance he knew it. It wasn’t embarrassment, it was someone realizing he wasn’t going to get to do any of the things (or people) he wanted ever again.
The Israelis are already among the top 3, if not higher, countries in the world that target the United States most aggressively for spying operations. So the "why would they collected blackmail on allies" would be "for the same reason they do all their other spying operations on their allies."
Spying on the Mormons at the CIA and the hippies at State is very different to blackmailing Alan Dershowitz into becoming a more fervent Zionist. Israeli intelligence in the US is largely about acquiring intelligence Mossad can’t get directly about Israel’s enemies because the US has sources and deals with Qatar, Lebanon, Bahrain, with Iran via Russia and sometimes directly, intercepts intelligence from other countries that might deal with anti-Israel groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah, has some channels with the IRGC. For example, there was a big Israeli effort to get more information about conversations between the Assadist Syrian and Russian governments, and it’s possible that the US might be able to intercept more than Israel, and it has access to shared Five Eyes intelligence that Israel doesn’t. That makes strategic sense and is much cheaper than running a blackmail op on rich Zionist Wall Street tycoons who already attend the friends of the IDF annual fundraiser for free (or indeed, for a significant donation).
“he really charmed his way into getting a job at Bear Sterns”
As I explained, in the Wall Street of the 1970s it really wouldnt have been unusual for a really smart Brooklyn kid to drop out of a math degree at NYU and still end up in finance on the trading floor. At that time, many new traders were working class and didn’t necessarily have college degrees. Everyone who met Epstein said he was insanely charismatic.
Some of it, it’s fine but relies on a lot of the hearsay (quite a bit of it traced back to Epstein’s own bullshitting laundered through people he spoke to and then others who heard it second or third hand) I discuss in my comment. Especially discussions of when Epstein originally met Ghislaine Maxwell, speculation about what he was doing in the 1980s and so on is a weakpoint with little critical analysis. For example, every suggestion that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell (and this isn’t concrete evidence that he didn’t by the way, it’s just interesting) can be traced back to Epstein personally, who used to tell people in New York that Robert had personally asked him to look after his daughter, which was ludicrous and ridiculed as such by his sons, whom he had actually groomed to takeover his business and look after their sister and who, unlike Ghislaine, actually knew about his various business and personal affairs, including connections in Israel. That’s before we get to Khashoggi and the many, many people (almost everyone) he knew, none of whom heard of Epstein before the mid-late 1990s post-Wexner fortune grab.
Epstein was unemployed, living off savings and scrounged money in a 1 bed apartment in NYC (much cheaper back then than it is today, of course) before he met Wexner. The suggestion that he was a well connected shady international businessman with close and profitable Khashoggi ties doesn’t track.
2rafa
29d ago
Anyone who doesn’t think this was clearly telegraphed is kidding themselves. The US pulling troops’ and diplomats’ families out of the region in recent days is about as clear a signal as you can give. The only developments in the conflict in recent years that appear to have been surprising were October 7th (which the IRGC seemingly didn’t even know about, at least not comprehensively), the Israeli surprise attack on Hezbollah (which was semi-expected, albeit not the exact format) and the Soleimani assassination. To some extent you can include Assad’s collapse, although all factions were surprised by that except for Turkey, which organized it.
2rafa
20d ago
TFR is going down, indicative of women no longer internalizing the values of Islam
TFR is going down in almost every country. In Iran, which had a brief 1970s baby boom under the Shah, TFR has declined almost every year since the Islamic Revolution, even when it was rapidly becoming more conservative.
2rafa
25d ago
The Christian population of the Middle East has been leaving since the late years of the Ottoman Empire, a process that has only accelerated since the rise of Islamism post-Qutb after the middle of the 20th century and especially since 1979.
The War on Terror was the death knell for ‘humanitarian’ US regime change opps because it was the moment it became clear that the State Dept, CIA and DoD no longer had the appetite for actual population transformation. There were people who pushed for it. Ann Coulter after 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”. But when it came to it, nobody had the guts to do it and it seemed like a lot of work when you could get some peace corps Yale grads at State to fund a few schools to teach women how to sew, fund girls sports teams, give the top ten high school students in the country scholarships to Georgetown and call it a day.
2rafa
2hr ago
Because there certainly was enough evidence to convict him of interstate trafficking of a minor for sex (with himself), which is the killer charge in all of these cases and which Epstein’s lawyers would have told him guaranteed he was going to die in jail given the salacious public attention to the case, the fact that federal sentences don’t have more than a small reduction for good behavior / parole, and grandstanding by the prosecutors on the case.
He had lived like a billionaire for 30 years, private jets, satisfying his sex addiction with teenage models, doing whatever he wanted, and now faced not merely the prospect but the certainty of spending the rest of his life in jail - and not only in jail but in jail as a chomo, the worst of the worst, where (like Derek Chauvin) it was inevitable at some point that the guards would turn a blind eye and he’d get beaten, stabbed and so on (maybe even sexually violated) by other inmates.
Many people would kill themselves in that circumstance. It’s one of the least suspicious cases of suicidal tendency imaginable. If someone in that circumstance told me they were thinking of killing themselves I would literally think “yeah, that’s unsurprising”. It’s common for people facing charges like this who are out on bail to kill themselves. As for how he did it, he may have had his attorneys bribe the security team at the jail so they didn’t stop him.
2rafa
8d ago
Psychological factors are understated. All that needs to happen is that a degree of terror is implemented that scares most of the illegal population.
Mexico - even Guatemala - is not Afghanistan. Enough random, arbitrary and terrifying enforcement and enough will leave. Legal immigration can’t be reformed overnight and Trump doesn’t have the votes in congress.
2rafa
27d ago
I agree that the last 20 years saw a move of the last of these Catholics to the GOP. Pro choice Democratic politicians were censured by the church itself which is a big step. In liberal European countries like Germany there are Catholic groups who have semi-openly broken with the Vatican on abortion but in the US the clergy tend to be more socially conservative.
But an example of the above would be like ACB who is a liberal except for abortion.
2rafa
9d ago
Ukraine is vastly larger than Gaza and civilians were easily and quickly (and still are) evacuated well behind the front lines where the intense conflict occurs. In Gaza, neighboring countries refused to accept evacuations, and Hamas - unlike either army in Ukraine - is an insurgent force that doesn’t wear uniforms, doesn’t observe any rules of war, and hides in the civilian population.
If the Ukrainian military had melted into the civilian population in the occupied cities where they emerged, daily, from schools, residential homes, hospitals and so on to attack Russians, the Ukrainian civilian casualty rate would be much higher. As it happened, the sides are fighting a conventional war (one Hamas cannot afford to fight, and doesn’t wish to).
2rafa
4d ago
With enough lobbying they can pass laws that say things like “for each half hour spent in court, x lawyers based in local city who passed the state bar must have y billable hours attached to them”.
Lest that sound farfetched, Hollywood writers just got this kind of deal and the studios are far more equipped to play hardball than state congressmen.
2rafa
20d ago
I find it very hard to believe that the consequence of a not-even-third-tier power nuking Paris would be Gaddafi being allowed to stay in power.
That’s the kind of hypothetical reserved for a Russia/China/USA level MAD situation where someone fires first and you hope against hope that cooler heads prevail and the attacked party ‘settles’ for a big payoff and apology (but still very unlikely).
A minor nuclear power firing a nuke like that would just result in absolute extermination for Gaddafi, because it’s not like the Chinese or Russians were going to nuke London or Washington in retaliation for an attack on Tripoli.
It’s an interesting question. Consider the following points:
Half the world’s Jewish population lives outside Israel. Most are Zionists. Large reservoirs of highly fecund 6+ tfr Orthodox Jews live in the United States and indeed in Western Europe. It is unlikely that Iran nuking Israel would kill more Jews than the Holocaust, which the Jewish population will recover from in less than 100 years. The question is therefore some variant of “would a nuclear war between Israel and Iran spell the permanent end of (at least this iteration of) Jewish settlement in the Levant?”.
Rich American and European Jews have the money to fund the reconstruction of Israel, which is possible unless it is overrun. If it is overrun then all reconstruction is impossible, since there are probably no mercenary armies capable of retaking it and even the US likely wouldn’t. However, Iran alone can’t mount a ground invasion of Israel and Iranian proxies have been badly damaged by the recent conflict. The overrunning scenario therefore involves a kind of organic jihad - post nuclear strike - in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, marching across into a ruined Israel and taking it. This is entirely possible and that should be acknowledged. However, such a march could be stymied by Western air support in service of a surviving Israeli civilian, military and mercenary force in theory, depending on the global geopolitical situation.
I think the answer is unclear. I don’t believe Israel would invite nuclear war. But that they would lose is not fully certain, even if it is likely for reasons of Israel’s Arab neighbors and Iran’s strategic depth and lower population density.
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