2rafa
21d ago
Yeah yeah you can’t believe anything the government says etc etc. This is a trite, banal, useless, pointless, infantile, irrelevant and altogether worthless criticism. It says nothing and means nothing. Yes, I think the broad outline of events as described in the article is true. There is little reason to believe otherwise. Likewise, there are truths discussed in the Russian and Chinese state press. In this case, this has to do with a longstanding and very real series of events that have been unfolding for many years, mostly in public view. The real sheeple, as ever, question everything without believing anything, which means - of course - that they know nothing at all.
2rafa
5d ago
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?
2rafa
6d ago
I mean it’s cope all the way down. If I hate Disney and make fun of it, then go with my brother and have the best time and love it and think it’s the happiest place on earth, clearly I do, in fact, objectively, enjoy Disney as an adult. But I can tell myself that I only went to spend time with my nieces and this satisfies the internal cognitive dissonance.
Similarly, we can imagine that a man who maybe isn’t hugely sexually successful (which of course describes most people) might watch free porn because it’s easy and there and free and there’s nothing wrong with a little onanism now and again, but actually handing over his card details to pay for it (or buying Bitcoin or whatever to do it, I confess I’m not sure how it works) puts into more stark relief the fact that he’s choosing to sit at home at masturbate in a dark room instead of engaging in any kind of self-improvement or socialization or trying to get laid or a relationship in real life. Paying is what turns you from a mere man into a hobbyist, a gooner, a connoisseur, a creepy guy with a funny mustache masturbating under a newspaper in a public park.
Again, I’m not defending this logically. It is, like so much of life, pure cope, but spending money on something often has loser connotations. Consider the difference between using a free dating app and paying a matchmaker, for example, the latter makes someone seem more desperate by default.
I didn’t tell you to ally with them or that they would serve the ‘interests’ of white people. I said that a large shift in their politics away from the increasingly anti-Israel left in America would be a win for the right regardless because they would separate an important part of the progressive coalition from it. Most Islamic immigration to Western Europe has been from Pakistan, Algeria and Turkey, and to some extent from the Caucasus, not from Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria. They left not because of American policy but because Europe offered a much higher quality of life and welfare. It’s delusional and ridiculous to suggest that the large increase in the Muslim population of Western Europe since the 1960s is the fault of US intervention in the Middle East.
2rafa
2d 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.
Seems part of the theatrical tit for tat that’s been ongoing for a few days now. Everyone recognizes that taking out the IRGC general directly involved in funding and planning October 7 was a legitimate military act. Iran needed to save face, now Israel does.
Israel can’t destroy Iran’s nuclear program from the air. Iran’s nuclear facilities are specifically designed to be resistant to US or allied air strikes. They’re deep underground, fortified and highly dispersed.
Right now it’s still a nothingburger, neither side is capable of destroying the enemy’s government. Neither side is capable of fielding a viable ground invasion for now. All they can do is kill a few of the enemy’s civilians by air, and possibly some performative strikes on military targets.
2rafa
14d ago
The Iranian government uses political assassination on foreign soil extensively, though.
2rafa
15d ago
The main result has been to reaffirm how utterly hostile the Arab states are to Iran even in the middle of the partial Saudi-Iranian detente. Iran has no force projection, and a combination of the Quds expeditionary force, Hezbollah and a few Shia militias would never be enough to overrun Israel. This has made me a lot more optimistic about Israel’s position in the region; the Arabs and Turks both know that even if the masses hate Israel, Iran is a much more substantial threat. The Arabs just want the Gaza thing to be over (they don’t really care how it ends) and for things to go back to ‘normal’.
2rafa
17d ago
You also ought to give Trump credit for being an obstacle to a much more neocon, interventionist, deep state aligned republican administration.
Neocon and interventionist like assassinating Iran's most important and revered military leader in a foreign capital by drone strike?
2rafa
1d ago
That wasn’t really my point, which was that I don’t think these protests increase the popularity of the dissident right policy platform at all, which is fundamentally hostile to the interests and politics of almost all these protestors.
Do you see the leftist DEI advocates and BLM fans protesting as ‘true’ rather than fake opposition now that they oppose Israel?
2rafa
4d ago
Princeton and Brown both have gentile presidents (their names are Christian and Christina, respectively).
2rafa
12d ago
Biden and Obama did well with Hispanics but Bush did pretty good too, particularly in 2004 (44%). The Romney GOP postmortem assumed that this was because Bush signaled openness to immigration reform in his second term, but I think that was ill-founded.
2rafa
18d ago
The US absolutely won the 'partisan' war in Iraq, it successfully put the Shiites in power and granted the Kurds a largely self-determined homeland and both factions remain in power in their respective parts of the country to this day. Whether that's in the strategic interests of the United States is an interesting debate, but the Sunnis no longer rule Iraq.
2rafa
22d ago
All great civilisations have a death drive. Consider the fin de siècle or Edwardian obsession with the occult, or the proliferation of millenarian new age movements at the height of postwar American dominance.
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
4d ago
It would be remiss not to say that the national mood around leftist riots has shifted considerably since 2020.
2rafa
5d ago
The Angolans weren’t capable of mounting an invasion of South Africa proper and had no intention of doing so, plus by the mid-80s when the Mig-29 was entering service as an export product the Cold War was winding down. More generally, I don’t think it’s possible to believe in HBD and think any of the Southern African countries could present a serious military threat to South Africa, especially when most of SA’s neighbors relied utterly on South Africa for economic reasons and had no interest in participating. Angola’s annoyance with South Africa extended to South Africa’s involvement in Namibia and the Angolan Civil War (where it was in practice on the American side). The US only passed anti-apartheid legislation in 1986 and frankly I suspect that had the Soviet Union not collapsed the CIA would have found other ways to ensure the Angolan communists continued to be contained. In addition, both the Soviet Union and China traded extensively with South Africa behind the scenes, including in arms, as has only more recently become fully clear. The decline of American power since 2001 and the growth of China, not to mention new opportunities for trading relationships with the Arabs and others who wouldn’t care about apartheid would have further made the system more tenable for longer. The economy had stabilized even under American sanctions by 1989 as, like Russia today, the South Africans figured out how to obtain what they wanted anyway.
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
6d 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
15d ago
I think the fact that the USAF has bases around and can operate pretty much anywhere in Iraq/Syria/Jordan was probably more relevant.
2rafa
18d ago
I mean yeah, the Yiddish Policemen’s Union is kind of about this scenario. There were already many settlers in Palestine in 1939 and the relationship between Zionism, the Arabs, Arab nationalism and decolonization would have been so different it’s hard to say. I think they would still have tried for a two-state solution but they might have been overrun.
2rafa
21d ago
Well, I suppose there are degrees of control. Obviously Bellingcat is very tightly integrated with Western intelligence and almost all its sources are from there, but that’s the nature of intelligence reporting; your source is either your intelligence agents or theirs, nobody is ‘neutral’ in that world. The agencies use it kind of like the associated press, it’s a source for the stories printed by various other mainstream outlets. But again, I don’t think anyone in that space would dispute that it’s essentially an outlet for what the CIA / MI6 etc are willing to disclose.
Dase, what happened? You seem much more bitter lately.
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