2rafa
3hr ago
There are some people who simply cannot be trusted around most of the opposite sex. They’re usually at least moderately, although only very rarely exceptionally, attractive, but they have an intoxicating charisma and can seduce almost anyone. The archetypal siren, rake, Mata Hari, whatever. Only some variant of the Pence rule is going to protect you from them (if targeted).
2rafa
5d ago
This is just a re-run of the “stunning” surprise justice-reform prosecutor / mayoral wins in some big cities during Trump I. The core of progressive ideology is only temporarily vulnerable to reality-based criticism (for example ‘crime just doubled, the streets are now full of psychotic homeless vagrants, the subway is unsafe, these guys want to defund the police’).
As soon as the issue is even partially resolved, the progressive voter returns to his comforter position (electing candidates like Mamdani) because he never actually questioned whether his own ideas were wrong; his shift to the center was ‘pragmatic’ (fear based), as crime stabilizes he again has the luxury of voting ideologically.
More generally, the Democratic establishment is at least partially responsible for screwing over Adams. Corrupt? Maybe, but there are 50 Dem mayors of major cities over the last 100 years who were more corrupt than him.
2rafa
1d ago
Nope, Trump did what neocons failed to accomplish during any previous GOP administration over the last 40 years, namely direct, massive US air strikes on the Iranian nuclear program, and he did it over the wishes of isolationists like Carlson and to the approval of the great majority of his base. Framing this as a win for principled anti-intervention rightists is ridiculous.
And Trump didn't keep his intervention limited because everybody was so supportive of it.
Ground invasion of Iran is impossible and externally-forced regime change is impossible without ground invasion. Trump picked the most maximalist neocon option realistically possible, just like when he had Soleimani assassinated over the suggestions of the DoD and most of his own senior advisors.
I had a feeling this was going to end up here when I first saw it. Really, this is just ‘gender black pill’ stuff from a vaguely femcel-adjacent perspective, but not structurally different to the male equivalents (Tony Tulathimutte etc). I think it would be a mistake to read into it too deeply. You can always find good reasons not to trust people. It’s no real surprise that someone who resents men in this way would embrace the transactional nature of ‘sex work’; this may be an advertising strategy, but it is probably not insincere.
2rafa
1d 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
8d ago
People have been saying this since the late 1980s. The IRGC and mullahs’ grip on power is too strong. There is a fed up secular elite but their casualty tolerance is extremely low and as long as they can take their money in and out and vacation in the many countries where they can drink/fuck/etc (and they largely can) they won’t be a threat. The regime essentially banned dog ownership a few weeks ago just because it started trending on their social media and some scholars consider it un-Islamic; not the behavior of a regime desperately accepting some liberalization. The same happened after the hijab protests, they didn’t give an inch even if enforcement remains somewhat lax in Tehran (which it was before too). In the 1990s (the last major liberal turn) they assassinated a bunch of people effectively openly and then even semi-admitted it (politicians, businessmen, authors, journalists, public intellectuals) until the PM backed out of all his promises.
In the end, Iran will have nukes. They’re too large, too developed and have a relatively good academic pipeline in the hard sciences such that it’s inevitable. It might be a year, three years, five years, but they will have them.
A ground invasion of Iran by the US is impossible. The only hope for regime change is either that there’s some mass minority uprising against the Persians (very unlikely, they’re not staunch ethnic nationalists and have mollified most of the minorities quite well) or that there’s a middle-class ‘color revolution’ in Tehran and the mullahs and IRGC just kind of give up in that late stage GDR type way and melt away into the crowds (which is also extremely unlikely because they know what they have to lose).
At the same time, Iran’s near term options for retaliation are limited. They can’t shut down the strait because the Chinese will hit the roof and selectively bombing ships is a bad idea (the true shutdown scenario, as I understand it, would be mining the strait, and that’s not going to distinguish between Chinese ships and Western ones). If they bomb Saudi oilfields it will only hasten the return of Abraham Accord type stuff just when they’d achieved some diplomatic successes with the Gulf Arabs.
2rafa
8d 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
14d ago
Without dismissing what you’re feeling, I think your narrative of modernity maps to a lot of great criticisms of the wealthy society begat by the Industrial Revolution over the last 150 years. It’s not as new as you suggest.
I think measures of national or even personal happiness are hard to parse. Swedes versus Danes, Greeks versus Germans. Are some happier, or is what counts as ‘happy’ for a Finn just less ambitious, less happy, than what counts as the same for an American? How happy were our ancestors a century ago really?
As a young person online, I was never deep into ‘new atheism’, but like many people I adopted a deep disdain for any kind of spiritualism, hackneyed ‘the secret’ style self-help and so on (which of course only made adherents vulnerable to slightly modified versions of the same eternal ideas). As I got older, I realized that a version of “the law of attraction” or “the secret” or “practice gratitude journaling to make you happy” was in fact pretty much true. The happiest people are those who convince themselves most absolutely that they are happy, will remain happy, and that good things will happen to them, indeed that life itself is good and (broadly, if not in every case), just.
As I had more life experience and met more people, I realized that artists, (serious) writers and philosophers were often some of the most unhappy, most depressed people I knew, even if they had achieved great professional success or were otherwise wealthy, attractive and so on. This is no coincidence, it is because these careers often lead people to question the meaning of their lives, and doing that is a death blow to that simple kind of happiness that provides genuine satisfaction. Even those philosophies that attempt to grasp earnestly at a value and a happiness in that direction, like Buddhism, often embrace what appears at least to me to be a fundamental nihilism in their obsession with the mirror, with an interrogation of the self.
The key to happiness, and I say this as an amateur, is caring less, feeling more, and studiously avoiding the temptation to try to look behind the curtain. The smarter and more curious and more interested in the discussion of grand narratives you are (and if you’re here, that is probably ‘very’) the harder this is. But it is possible. As for young men, you can ‘enjoy the decline’ (which I suppose means checking out and enjoying the bountiful brothels of South-East Asia, or something), or see if there’s happiness to be found in the other people where you are. I suspect the latter might be more fruitful, but I won’t judge.
The Mamdani craze is because progressives, especially in Manhattan, cannot help themselves when it comes to electing DSA types who want to defund the police.
Amusingly, black people saved NYC by electing Adams who arrested the Floyd crime wave by allowing the NYPD to do their jobs. Now, because memories are short, the libs again forget what it’s like to live in a society without the rule of law. Crime rises, progressives get pragmatic, crime falls, progressives become idealistic, crime rises, etc.
The win state for big American cities is to elect a slightly grizzled, probably somewhat corrupt older black male cop who is technically a democrat but too compromised by big business to pursue dumb ‘justice reform’ policies.
2rafa
17d ago
As @Iconochasm says, if you’re a 19 year old white English-speaking American college student without a summer job, making $30 an hour picking fruits with other white, English-speaking American college students on summer break (who you can chat, joke, flirt with) is a completely different proposition to making $12 (or indeed $30) an hour as the odd one out in a group of only-Spanish-speaking 40 year old Oaxacans with whom you cannot really communicate or talk.
2rafa
17d ago
Guest workers as used in eg. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are non-viable because - 60 years later - everybody knows that they don’t go home. The Turks in Germany were “temporary”, they were promised to never receive citizenship, the German public were told clearly that they would work for 3 years and then go home, every single one. Even renewals were initially banned.
Of course what happened is that businesses that employed “guest workers” didn’t want them to leave at the end of the 3 year period because recruiting new guest workers was expensive and required training them. So the periods were slowly extended, then in-country renewals were allowed, so the Gastarbeiter didn’t have to go home in between stints which was disruptive (and most stopped following the rules after a while anyway).
Then, they were slowly allowed to benefit from the growing postwar welfare system, and to bring over more and more relatives. Lastly, to avoid “social unrest” as a consequence of having a huge non-citizen population that was clearly not going to leave they were granted citizenship.
In 1982 Kohl told Thatcher that he would deport at least half the Turks in Germany. But then it seemed like a lot of effort, his ‘self deportation scheme’ (paying them to leave) led only 100,000 to return, and the military coups of the 1980s doubled the Turkish German population as they brought over wives and children and brothers and cousins (who promptly declared asylum) even though Turkish guest worker recruitment ended in 1973.
In 2000, Kohl’s own son married an (upper middle class, but still) Turkish woman and the Germans slowly started amending nationality law to essentially hand out citizenship to Turkish migrants and their children in an effort to assimilate them.
The point is simple: Western countries are incapable of approaching a guest worker workforce with the necessary maturity. The only way they come and leave is if their home country is at least 60-80% as prosperous as the country they move to (which usually means they are unviable as guest workers unless you’re like Switzerland hiring German doctors).
Since 2000, the Republican majority in congress and very careful lobbying by those on the right of the congressional party has successfully killed another amnesty bill that would hand out citizenship. Eventually the dam will break and a Democratic president will pass another amnesty, though it has been a valiant effort. But it doesn’t actually matter, because as Trump’s capitulation shows, the vast majority of migrant workers will never actually be deported.
If Americans don’t want to do ag work, then the fields can rot. It’s OK. Robotics and multimodal AI are progressing at breakneck speed. In less than a decade robots will pick our strawberries (and all the people we might import still won’t leave). In the meantime we can import them from overseas (and in the event of some kind of truly catastrophic global crisis, ex-PMC Americans will pick them diligently rather than starve, I assure you).
I don't think they'll directly attack US assets in the area, but I do think they'll close the straight of Hormuz for any European or American traffic.
This is less devastating than people think because Iranian oil flows to China, Japan, India and elsewhere would continue and even Europe is less reliant on Gulf oil than it previous was (and the shortfall could be made up).
The real impact would only happen by closing off the strait (by mining it, probably), which would send the price skyrocketing and which would infuriate China.
number of people killed by analog cyclists nationwide has been, for many years, single digits.
Cyclists need to understand that they can make pedestrian life much worse without actually killing pedestrians, which I agree is rare. I spend time in Amsterdam semi-regularly for work, and the Dutch are presumably the biggest cyclists in Europe. You cannot walk around without constantly being alert. Not because of crime, which at least in the wealthy city center (including the red light district, museum quarter, Jordaan, business district etc) seems rare, with the streets safe even at night, but because of the cyclists.
The Dutch seem to have a lot of marked and unmarked cycle lanes, but the problem with any dense city is that (of course) you constantly have to cross them most times you turn to a new street, change direction, cross the street, whatever. They cycle extremely fast and with minimal concern for their own safety. Even if you just miss them they ring their bells at you and sometimes shout at you. The whole experience of walking in Amsterdam - a city so pedestrianized that many of the non-arterial central streets mostly or fully ban cars, or so deter them that only the occasional taxi or delivery truck goes down them at 3 mph - is unpleasant as a result.
When road traffic does run alongside cycle paths, crossing the street is even more annoying, since even a small road becomes a multi lane stroad crossing when you first have to navigate the cycle lane, then the car lanes, then the cycle lane on the opposite side. The speed of the motor and bike traffic is also completely different so it’s much harder to judge whether you can jaywalk (which is necessary to get anywhere in a timely manner in most dense cities). It just sucks. Walkable cities only work if the experience of walking is low stress and chill - in other words if you can put your AirPods in and relax, or call your mom, or dictate an email, without worrying about getting mugged/assaulted by an addict/hit by a cyclist. This is a low bar and many cities have achieved it.
I love cycling. It’s fun, in the countryside, on nice bike lanes, with few pedestrians or cars nearby, seeing nature, stopping at a lake for a picnic and a swim, mountain biking in the summer, all good. In cities? No, it sucks. The combination of public transport and walking is good for navigation, with taxis for the lazy, elderly, disabled or rich. Cyclists make walkable cities less walkable.
2rafa
17d ago
Ex-cons are notoriously lazy, many of the laziest, most ADHD, most high time preference people in the underclass become criminals precisely because they can’t / won’t keep down a normal job (which they are usually capable of getting). They don’t do anything “for free” and are usually too lazy even for paid employment unless it’s very fast money like selling drugs.
Meanwhile college students do hours of boring, grinding work and studying in the hope that in 4 years they can get a solid entry level job. They are mostly low time preference.
2rafa
17d 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
17d ago
Human beings have worked in agriculture picking crops for thousands of years. Modern technology (including novel reflective materials) makes fruit picking more comfortable than ever. Change the incentives and people will do it. Put simply, if I had the choice between starving and picking fruit, I’d pick fruit. Everything else is just moving incentives along a scale.
The high school kid who picks the most fruit gets guaranteed entry to Harvard, suddenly every child of every tiger mom and pushy Indian dad in America is out there training their kids to pick strawberries from the age of 8. You can literally do anything, it’s not hard.
To be honest, though, everything is midwit if you’re an internet snob like you and me, Dean. Bellingcat? The ultimate midwit NAFO publication. The London/NY/Paris Review of Books? Catastrophically midwit zine read by aging socialists of the kind who use The Guardian’s dating platform and chuckle at another lame Trump nickname at dinner parties. The New Yorker? Vanity Fair? Magazines for parents of Juilliard students, nought more need be said. The popular substacks or newsletters (unaffiliated or affiliated) of erstwhile online political commentators (Iglesias, Sullivan, Klein)? Soothing balm for dull, aging millennial and GenX centrists upset at a world they no longer understand. More obscure commentator figures (Yarvin, Kriss)? Slightly more verbose Twitter bait dressed up for the audience of clapping chimps paying $5 a month to chuckle gently while pretending to do their email job and thinking themselves above the worker ant masses consuming their cyber slop.
In the end, the choice is between the last few good blogs (never read the comments), the intelligent but supremely annoying autists at HN and LW (but only on topics they know something about), prediction markets, a few good bank and third party research analysts if you can get access through your company, some columnists that agree with your personal biases at major publications and this place.
2rafa
8d 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
Libya was already relatively internally divided, Gaddafi was just a great autocrat. Iran has far fewer internal divisions than Libya did in 2011.
2rafa
17d ago
You aren't chatting with your friends because no talking is allowed. Sunup to sundown every day, and you can forget about taking a vacation.
This is all stuff that can be changed.
Fail to listen to the people and you will eventually invite into power someone ambitious, cynical and charismatic enough to ride their rage into power. It turns out that in addition to their political talent, those leaders are also usually extremely greedy and corrupt. Who would have guessed?
Fortunately, any potentially affected country’s political elite can avoid this disappointing outcome with one simple trick. Just end / partially reverse mass immigration and, if you can stretch to two policies, facilitate the construction of huge amounts of cheap, quality housing.
2rafa
17d ago
You only hear about the VIPs who got killed, too. There were warnings about Soleimani going to Baghdad but he still did it, a lot of senior clerics and IRGC are true believers in a kind of divine providence, a consequence of the elaborate ideological structure and testing Khomeini devised for the clergy and IRGC and wider IRP (which, though it was later dissolved, was the progenitor of countless subsequent organizations and currents) to prevent a successful counterrevolution by the large, secularized Iranian middle class and left. It’s quite possible they actually believe that what happens is God’s will and they’ll be protected if He wills it or something. In addition, it’s quite unconfident of a state to send everyone to the bunker every time Israel seems likely to attack, plus it affects government efficiency a great deal if the leaders are shuttling to and from bunkers.
Israel also doesn’t typically target Iran’s actual leaders in the clergy.
2rafa
17d ago
The dynamics are also different. India and Pakistan border each other and can fight a conventional war that escalates, they also have an ongoing border dispute.
Israel Iran would be more analogous to the actual US v Russia Cold War (although even they did/do actually border each other). They can exchange nukes but they can’t mount a ground invasion of each other.
The elites of all four countries in both the India/Pakistan and Israel/Iran conflicts are relatively corrupt and don’t want to die, which distinguishes them from e.g. Sunni Islamist terrorists. And the fact that Israel / Iran don’t have an active border dispute that could escalate is probably also bullish on the no nuclear war side.
My guess is that he just fell in love with her. If he wanted to fuck 18 year olds he could have divorced his wife 20 years ago (or come to an arrangement, like Eric Schmidt, or done that classic rockstar / Larry Ellison / Henry VIII thing and just had a succession of younger wives). It seems more likely that he was relatively happy or at least comfortable in his marriage and was then seduced by Sanchez, who is no doubt a skilled and immensely ambitious operator, and then divorced his wife (likely at Sanchez’ request, and certainly as a consequence of her will given she gave her own texts to her brother who then sold them on to a tabloid) so he could marry her. There was no buffet of 20 year olds to pick from, it wasn’t like that, and the billionaires who do live that lifestyle are essentially plugged into the party circuit, big time nightclub promoters, model / escort agents and so on on the Cannes/Miami/LA/Mykonos circuit with which Bezos was not really familiar pre-Sanchez given he was a nerd who mainly attended sober economics conferences.
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