I agree that the dissident right is overdosing on hopium regarding antisemitism.
With the exception of some of the Muslims (and not even all of them, since many at elite universities are largely secularized DEI libs who do not or barely follow any tenets of Islam) these protestors are not racially or religiously hostile to Jews in and of themselves. At most they consider Jews to be ‘white people’, whom they may dislike, but that is hardly the basis for a coalition with white rightists.If this is how young progressives protest against what they perceive as ‘white ethnonationalism’ on the far side of the world, it does not take a great intellect to imagine how they feel about white ethnonationalism in the United States, which is the central policy position on the dissident right.
It is cathartic for far rightists to see Jewish people finally getting their supposed ‘comeuppance’ for supporting progressive policies in the diaspora while defending an ethnic homeland in Israel (allegations of hypocrisy were not unfounded, although many did ‘pick a side’ and advocate liberalism in both, like Soros, or in neither, like many Jewish conservatives).
In practice, though, the most strategic thing for the dissident right to do would be to shut up. Each major Jewish donor or lobbyist who leaves the left because of its anti-Israel activism, even if they merely become politically neutral rather than center-right (let alone hard right, let alone far right) is a win for conservatives. Richard Hanania made this point more eloquently.
The coming together of leftist and rightist antisemitism is not particularly likely. Blue haired DEI activists who think Israel is a white nationalist fascist police state oppressing innocent people of color (much like Amerikkka amirite) are unlikely to agree that the progressive ideology, media, art and culture they love, which in fact is the impetus behind their antizionism itself (!) is in fact degenerate art and subversion created by the very Jews they are protesting against. The protestors like everything the rightists dislike about Jews except their zionism, while the antisemitic far right sympathize on some level with ethnonationalism but dislike everything else.
However, I disagree that antisemitism will not rise. It is clearly rising, as is visible in everything from comments on mainstream YouTube and TikTok content, in Zoomers memes and in real life among younger people, both white and non-white in the West. That does not mean that things will necessarily get very bad for Jews, at least in the Anglosphere (it was still much worse a century ago), but it is undeniable.
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
5hr ago
The difference is that in Europe existing parties tried desperately to keep out ‘new right’ populists almost everywhere so young people still believe things can actually change.
When the AfD joins a governing coalition and turns out - just like Meloni in Italy - to be another center-right party that in practice will do nothing about mass immigration, their supporters will probably abandon them pretty quickly. Le Pen in France is another example, she’s much less reactionary on immigration than people think (only Zemmour was the truly anti-immigration candidate). The Sweden Democrats have strongly moderated too, they’re barely to the left of the Danish Social Democrats if at all.
2rafa
3hr ago
Yes, because there is no alternative. In practice Meloni has only seen increases in mass immigration to Italy, she has betrayed those who voted for her on that platform. But that is nothing new; the Tories did very well in 2019 after a decade of overseeing rising immigration but promising lower immigration too, this is common in Western countries.
Poll numbers don’t mean that she implemented her manifesto or fulfilled her promises.
2rafa
4hr ago
Germany, Sweden and continental countries are also much whiter and more homogenous than Australia, the UK
Is this actually true? In Germany in 2019, 40% of children born had at least one parent born abroad, the situation has accelerated further since then.
In the UK in 2021 77% of the population were White British or Irish. In Germany only 71% of the population have no “Migrationshintergrund”, however that 29% category does include remaining returning Ostsiedler. Nevertheless, I would assume the native percentage in Germany is around 75% or so too. 25% of Swedes had both parents born abroad or themselves immigrated, while an additional 10% had one parent born abroad and one in Sweden (which includes many people of immigrant descent). So again, Sweden is likely less than 75% native, although many migrants are Finns. Perhaps 75% of Australians are ethnically European according to most estimates.
So again, neither Germany nor Sweden retain a higher percentage of their indigenous populations than the UK. They are likely whiter due to differences in migrant country of origin, but not considerably so.
2rafa
2hr 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
1d ago
It’s interesting. The thing that seems to be driving popular outrage against mass immigration in Ireland and Canada is that the government does it with a smile on its face, calls those who oppose it bigots, winks at them, then dares them to blink. Kind of like being patronized by an annoying teacher.
By contrast, politicians in Britain, America and Australia, which have the same migration situation but less monolithically progressive politics and media, will publicly say more should be done to control illegal immigration, stop the boats, it’s not right, it’s a crisis, propose some measures blah blah (I mean even Biden does this to some extent) but then actually do nothing. And in a way, that seems to stifle some of the dissent.
There has been some of this thing (rioting against migrant camps) in Britain, but proportionally it has been much, much rarer than in Ireland. And in Canada one senses even normal centrists are getting increasingly angry about their own situation. I wonder if the Irish politicians will clock on and embrace the Tory policy of talking the talk on migration and then just not doing anything about it (or indeed increasing it further).
2rafa
2d ago
I also think there needs to be a more nuanced understanding of what people mean when they talk about historic Christian racism. For example, not only were almost all abolitionists devout Christians (and indeed believed that Christianity required an end to slavery) but even many slavers, for example, acknowledged that the practice seemed un-Christian and struggled with it; Washington owned slaves his whole life, but considered it “wicked, cruel and unnatural”.
Of course many founding fathers believed that slavery was wrong but that there was still a clear intellectual hierarchy of races, including Washington, but even in the 18th century it was not unheard of to believe in the actual equality of man along modern blank slate lines; particularly in England as slave narratives became popular literature, many abolitionists did believe in the 1820s and 1830s that black and white were equally capable, some hoped to settle free black people from Africa (as citizens!) in the Caribbean colonies where they would own land and farm etc. There was a strong and widespread belief that Africans could be taught to fully adopt English civilization that persisted through the 19th century, although it increasingly conflicted with Darwinian racialism that emerged later in the Victorian era.
So there were in fact devout Christians who considered that the implication of Christianity was the equality of races even centuries ago, it was just that temporal political interests were stronger.
If you mean in Syria, not many US soldiers have died in the occupation of Syria.
I think they’re referring to the 240 US military personnel who were killed by Hezbollah (or rather its immediate precursor) in Beirut in 1983, which is the single highest one-day death toll for the US marines since Iwo Jima and for the entire US military since Vietnam.
Hezbollah has had a neighbouring country flooded with jihadists who are down right genocidal toward Hezbollah and Syrians of the same religious and ethnic background as Hezbollah. Why wouldn't they fight?
Israel has a neighboring territory flooded with jihadists who are downright and openly genocidal towards Israelis of Jewish ethnic and religious background, so I’m glad you’ve come around on the war in Gaza. In any case, Syrian jihadists were never particularly set on conquering Lebanon, it wasn’t a primary target for them and it would be just about the only thing that could unite the Maronites and the Shiites.
2rafa
1d ago
I think the main reason is that Portugal’s population was much smaller than the big Western European powers (especially England) and so they were quickly supplanted in Asia. The second golden age happened well after the 16th century and was finished off by the great earthquake and subsequent war.
Portuguese do have more sub-Saharan African ancestry than other European peoples (iirc around 2.5%) because of African slavery in places like Madeira and domestically in Lisbon before they started large scale plantations in Brazil, but their PISA scores are comparable to other European countries with much lower percentage SSA DNA, so I don’t think the reason for their decline can be expressed primarily in HBD terms.
2rafa
14hr ago
The argument re. London / England is indeed largely bullshit but the evidence that perhaps 5-10% of Lisbon was black in the 16th century is not inconsiderable, the Portuguese were in part the progenitors of the a European slave trade to the Americas, but the effort started with slave plantations in Madeira which was settled from the early 15th century. After the ravages of the Black Death Portugal was a weird place and, again, modern Portuguese do have significantly more sub-Saharan ancestry than other Europeans (including Spaniards, so this is not simply a matter of mixing during the Moorish era), including those in very rural parts of inland Portugal that have seen no major immigration for centuries, which is further evidence for the hypothesis.
2rafa
16hr 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
16hr 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
1d ago
Respect for the wisdom and status of the elderly is a feature of many societies including those that Nietzscheans would not consider to practice slave morality.
Long story, cut very short. I think I lost my most expensive watch, and she hasn't been so kind as to check.
I’m convinced my brother’s sketchy (I would use the word ratchet, but I feel like that has connotations of being black, and she was definitely white) college hookup stole a very nice vintage cartier watch my grandmother gifted to me. It wasn’t worth a lot of money (I assume she took it because of the brand) but it was very valuable to me. I had left it in my parents kitchen because I wanted my dad to take it to be repaired.
It’s part of the reason I could never have a one night stand. The idea of letting a complete stranger into your house surrounded by all your valuables, private documents (even stuff like bills lying around, wallets full of cash and credit cards, medical data) and then going to sleep such that they could literally get up and help themselves to whatever they want and you wouldn’t even know if they’d taken something you don’t use often or if they’d just photographed private information or something seems so irresponsible. I’m probably just neurotic but my trust in the kindness of strangers isn’t that high.
And as you say, once it’s gone, what can you do? “Oh, I happen to have recently lost a necklace, can you look for it?”. It’s not as if you have enough to go to the police, and it might take weeks or months to realize it’s gone.
2rafa
2d ago
For sure, but it’s also ahistorical to say “none of them believed blacks and whites were actually equal”. Some, many even, did. There was a wide spectrum of positions on the subject.
2rafa
20hr ago
They have (like the Native Americans) a right to resist, but they also must accept being utterly vanquished in response.
2rafa
1d ago
I agree. Any Indian could legally move to England through the entire period of the British occupation of India. There were even Indian MPs, Indian students at elite public schools and British universities and so on. But there was little demand to immigrate. A big reason for mass immigration is ease of travel and mass media. The UK only imposed restrictions on Commonwealth/Empire immigration years after WW2.
2rafa
4d ago
Great post. It’s an extreme loss of state capacity for internal violence. Look at Mao’s China, successful eradication of a centuries-long opioid epidemic (in which as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of urban young men were heavy addicts) in fifteen years. And it wasn’t because he killed everyone; he killed the more obvious dealers, sure, but you actually don’t need to kill that many people to trigger prosocial change. If the US army rolls into the South Side of Chicago, or Baltimore, or St Louis, and starts blasting, you could quite possibly limit the death toll to three or low four figures in each city (ie barely above the actual homicide rate) and still seriously dissuade violent crime. And as you note, the Malayan Emergency, Mau Mau and really the entire history of British India show that you don’t actually need that many people or that much violence to accomplish this. 15,000 British ruled over 400,000,000 Indians. In 2003, 130,000 NATO forces ruled over 20,000,000 Afghans, a vastly more favorable ratio. And yet they lost, because they were too afraid to do the needful.
We were discussing South Africa earlier in the thread, and there are parallels to that situation (even though I disagree with apartheid and think the Boers are largely responsible for their presently poor condition). Even with the whole world against them, there is no way that 5 million Dutch and English in a country with a huge resource bounty and extensive arable land armed with literal nuclear weapons and modern technology, and bordered by countries that (unlike Israel’s foes) had no capable armed forces and definitely did not want a war with them, could not have held out indefinitely - even at a relatively high standard of living. But there was no will for it. The situation in American cities, as I noted in my post on Seattle a couple of months ago, is the same. It’s not a resource question, a few armed police could clear out the homeless permanently in a few hours. It’s a will question, like a hoarder who lives in filth because they just can’t throw anything away for psychological reasons even though there’s a dumpster right outside.
2rafa
4d ago
Porn is inherently low status. Even in the 80s, being caught going into a porn store to rent a VHS was the height of embarrassment, made fun of on sitcoms etc.
It’s not just that horniness is embarrassing. The level of cringe was much greater that, say, merely catching your friend picking someone up at the bar for a one-night stand. The idea that you watch porn instead of actually getting laid makes you - in the eyes of much of society - a loser.
This is what really makes selling porn online so difficult to make profitable. Terms like “post nut clarity” (which, yes, has a real-world meaning but is most commonly used in relation to porn) speak to the shame of the whole enterprise. Men don’t want to feel like the kind of men who pay for porn.
There’s more deniability when it’s free. If I relentlessly make fun of Disney adults for 10 years and then go with my brother and his kids when they invite me along, my cognitive dissonance is limited. If I spend $300 for a ticket and rock up with Minnie Mouse ears and a rockabilly dress and a Snow White tattoo, I’m going to feel like a fucking loser.
Men don’t want to pay for porn because it makes them feel like losers. I don’t see why that’s not the obvious answer. When men had to pay to access it, more swallowed their pride. Now that it’s free and plentiful online, only the most committed coomers do.
It’s largely the fault of the Clinton admin, which began the push to essentially put the SEC and IRS in charge of the entire global financial sector after a panic about rich people not paying taxes. Step by step they destroyed Swiss banking privacy, went after tax havens (not to destroy them, just to make sure they handed every shred of data over to the American government) and eventually established the current regime in which every bank in the entire world that might remotely engage with anyone doing business in or around or via the United States is subject to the whims and reporting requirements of the American government.
The US extradites foreigners for financial crimes even if they had no American victims, did not occur on American soil and had nothing to do with the US, simply because in some vague or distant way they relate to the US financial system. It is bullshit, but who can stand against America? Its European and Asian vassals certainly can’t.
2rafa
15hr 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
2d ago
My grandmother had Alzheimer’s and my grandfather spent the final six years of his life taking care of her. We hired help, but he wanted to be there for her. It ruined him. He practically starved himself to death, lost the will to live even though he had previously been a remarkably healthy man in his early 90s. He watched his wife grow to hate him, shout, yell, turn into a horrible person (through no fault of her own, she had been a very loving and caring wife, mother and grandmother before her condition set in) and it destroyed him. He had been set on living to 100, had planned a long retirement of reading and walking, traveling, playing poker which was his great joy and so on. He was independent until a few months before he died. Everyone in my family (including the doctors) believes wholeheartedly that if my grandmother had been hit by a bus a few months after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s he would have made it to three figures, might even still be around today. His mother lived to 103 and his father to 94, so he had the genes for it.
I think in your case it will depend on what your father in law wants to do. If he is truly committed and sees it as part of his marriage vows, it will be hard to shake him out of it, and you will bear witness to a tragedy (albeit hopefully much less bad in your case). If he would in any way accept someone else (perhaps a sister or brother in law, maybe your children or nieces/nephews if you have any) looking after her for a while, then I would take him as soon as possible. I know my dad wishes he had spent more time traveling with his father.
Israel is under no extremely urgent (ie advancing enemy army) pressure to retreat, so mass graves of executed dead Gazans with their hands tied behind their backs left where the UN can find them seems very unlikely. That said, and as you suggest, it’s unclear whether executing enemy combatants would even be a war crime in this case, since Hamas does not follow the rules of war, does not wear uniforms and so on, so their fighters can’t be considered legitimate PoWs but instead partisans, who are allowed to be executed.
Why not occupy it long term, turning Gaza into an open air prison in earnest, with checkpoints and curfews, eventually establishing an alternative structure of government?
Even though Israel is a rich country, it’s small by first-world standards with only 9.5 million inhabitants. The US or China could intern a few million people, Israel can’t. The population of Gaza is a quarter of Israel’s, it would be like the US permanently occupying a country of 80 million people extremely hostile to America in every way (far more than the Germans or Japanese were to Americans, or arguably even the Afghans and Iraqis were) for deeply ingrained ethnic and religious reasons.
I would hesitate to say that Arabs will never accept being ruled by Jews, since 20% of Israel’s population is Arab, but occupying Gaza permanently would put a severe and probably unsustainable strain on Israel’s finances.
The only options are to do nothing, to ethnically cleanse Gaza (politically impossible), to pummel them into submission to the extent they don’t rebel again (almost impossible in the Middle East where birthrates are high and these kinds of blood feuds last millennia) or to do as much damage to military infrastructure and kill as many fighters as you can and then leave, which is what Israel is doing now.
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.
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