Affluent and educated Indians simply have no retort to the core criticism of many people on the DR about India, which is that it is the only place in the world in which the rich are so permanently content with public squalor.
You cannot simply appeal to ‘socioeconomic development levels’. No. African countries with small fractions of India’s median income have much cleaner capitals. I was in Central Africa again last week. Kinshasa is much cleaner than Mumbai or New Delhi. I work, on occasion, with senior African officials across many sub-Saharan countries. One of the first things they’ll do, even the most corrupt ones, as they increase state capacity and collect more tax money, is beautify public spaces, hire people to clean the park opposite the national parliament, that kind of thing. I have walked through shanty-town level African neighborhoods where the working class is and you will see boys picking up litter, sweeping streets and so on. Of course, sheer poverty means these places are still squalid by first-world standards.
But they are much cleaner than even middle class neighborhoods of Indian cities. Even wealthy ones. If you are a wealthy Indian you have probably been to Soho House in Mumbai (a few years ago at least it was one of the places the wealthy younger people hung out, probably less fashionable now). Even there, the street outside was dirty, garbage everywhere, unswept, sandy. Street cleaning has been solved, we have machines for it now, India can afford them (many other cities with much lower median income than Mumbai manage it). This squalor is a choice.
India fills me with a certain horror that the rest of the developing world does not. You see, I can go to Singapore and see what a Chinese civilization that is rich looks like. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but it is pleasant enough, competently managed and a high-quality place to live. Even the Arabs, when they have money, create a passable or moderately livable society. There are good parts of South and even Central America. Africa is very poor, but as I said, I am encouraged. Only in India are the rich content with public squalor. I cannot understand why. I don’t think even you know, exactly, I’ve engaged on this issue with the many intelligent Indians here and I get the sense that it’s not something they really think about, even though to me it is obviously, by very very far the biggest issue with their country.
I don’t condone the ridiculous racism of the 4chan troll, Indians are by and large decent immigrants to the West. But the question of India’s squalor looms over every stamped visa.
2rafa
18d ago
For some reason I was thinking about the OJ Simpson trial today, and it reminded me of your comment.
The most damning evidence in the OJ trial (barring DNA which was little understood by juries at the time) wasn’t the glove, or the record of Simpson’s movements, or the police interview. It was the fact that his defense could not provide any alternate account of what happened to Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman whatsoever. Two young white (well…) people killed in brutal fashion in a rich part of LA, somewhere that would have had witnesses to on-street commotion, and zero evidence (for any alternate explanation). They hinted or gestured at some kind of gang, or a drug deal, or something related to the restaurant where Goldman worked, but they had nothing, not one shred of evidence for even the most faintly plausible alternate theory of why these two people were murdered by someone other than OJ. This from an extraordinarily skilled legal team with unlimited budget to hire private investigators, research leads and come up with theories.
Holocaust revisionism functions in much the same way. Details about the process of execution, the precise methods, quibbles with testimony, calling the veracity of various accounts in question, all mirror OJ’s defense strategy. The glove don’t fit, the police officer who found the evidence was a virulent racist who had motivation to lie to convict a successful black man with a pretty blonde wife, and the whole trial was surely just another libel against a rich black guy and, especially after Rodney King, who would doubt the hostility of the cops toward black men etc…
But there was and is no alternate theory. The best revisionists can do is, as SecureSignals does, to gesture at possibilities. “Oh, maybe they all went to Russia, changed their names and lived happily ever after”, or “maybe the Austro-Hungarians randomly overcounted the Jewish population by 400% and there were actually far fewer Jews than anyone thought in Eastern Europe”. None of these are evidenced, they’re not supposed to be. They’re mere gestures, hints, seeds of doubt, held together by a narrative in which devious Jews are permanently hostile to white/aryan interests and therefore are probably lying anyway. There is, as @To_Mandalay has said, no real alternate hypothesis; some revisionists apparently argue that Himmler was supposed to kill all the Jews but then didn’t because he was actually a traitor to the cause, which conflicts with other revisionist theories, which conflict with others.
Revisionists avoid believing in strict alternate hypotheses (for example presenting multiple options in the same book or article and feigning ambivalence about which could be true) since doing so would pin them down and make very obvious the extreme dearth of evidence they’re built upon. But it is reasonable for historians to request that they provide and defend comprehensive and evidenced alternate theories for the disappearance of European Jewry.
2rafa
6d 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.
The most important thing to understand about investment banking analysts (and associates) is that they do - in the purest, Graeberian sense of the word - a bullshit job. Moreso even than consultants.
Investment banking is a critical part of a market economy. But the role of the analyst and associate is a curious historical oddity. Before modern investment banking emerged in the 1980s the role didn’t really exist; junior bankers were clerks and then the good ones quickly became dealmakers. It emerged because every major investment bank can handle the same IPOs, M&A, secondary offerings and so on in exactly the same way. There is no functional difference whatsoever between hiring Goldman Sachs and hiring Morgan Stanley, or Barclays or Citigroup for that matter, to IPO your big tech business or to issue debt for your public athleisure company. They know the same people at the same funds, can structure the same things in the same way etc.
At the boutique and mid-market level, and in niche markets where capital is harder to find and more picky (like the one I work in), actual skill on the part of bankers is required because it’s not guaranteed that you’ll actually be able to raise money (for example). But at the major bank (‘bulge bracket’) level, even the most retarded banker of all time is not going to have any issue IPO’ing Arm or issuing equity on behalf of Nvidia or Shell.
This led to a strange arms race starting in the late 1980s among bankers about who could add the most ‘value’ to their client offering. The banks operate as a soft cartel in fee terms, so Barclays isn’t going to undercut Goldman by offering half the fees in basis point terms on a deal. But they can compete on flair, and on pitch decks. This, in turn, led to the pitch deck arms race that exists today, where junior bankers work 100 hour weeks making up bullshit numbers for PowerPoint slides that nobody reads in the hope that this will surely lead to us getting the deal and not the shitstains at MS or Bank of America and so on.
In the 1980s, a pitch deck might be a few hastily Xerox’d pages stapled into a booklet. Today it’s a 200 page brochure. No bulge bracket bank can opt-out because then you look like amateurs next to Goldman’s production design (all BB banks have large graphics departments that work on this stuff, not even outsourced to India but often actually in NYC/London). Clients don’t care because they pay the same fee regardless (as mentioned), so they might as well take the brochure.
The analyst economy works for banks. Most analysts leave after a couple of years, either because they’re forced out or go to private equity, those who are good enough and don’t want to leave can stay and eventually rise to become actual dealmakers (above VP you’re essentially working a normal corporate sales job most of the time).
Beyond the fact that the need for the role is nonexistent (analysts perform no intellectual labor, just downloading and copy-pasting from Bloomberg/Factset), I think one of the best things AI could do would be to get everyone to realize how pointless pitchbook inflation has been. But it’s more likely this is just an excuse for layoffs because deal volume is down since 2021.
It is very unlikely that all of the issues disproportionately affecting African American communities are the product of HBD. West African and Caribbean countries whose populations are genetically very similar to African Americans have huge variation in violent crime rates, for example, strongly suggesting these are malleable.
More generally, why would the squalor and violence seen in some African countries and diaspora populations be less fixable than the squalor and violence seen in the Europe of centuries past was? According to the New Yorker this week, the homicide rate in medieval Oxford was as high as it is in New Orleans today, some sixty times higher than it is now.
This is probably a troll, but if it isn’t I work regularly with intelligent and capable Africans in finance, here and in Africa itself, who are very bullish on the trajectory of black civilization in the coming years and decades, and who have every reason to be. Despair is certainly unwarranted.
2rafa
6d ago
They don’t typically think they’re taking the side of Hamas (some do but they’re in the extreme minority), they think they’re taking the side of a rainbow future one state solution where Jews and Muslims live together in peace, harmony and democracy. That is indeed hopeless naïveté, but no moreso than ‘defunding the police will reduce crime’, which they almost certainly also believe.
A comparison is indeed apt, because just like we have many well-researched contemporary estimates of the Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe before 1939 and after 1945, we have many well-researched contemporary estimates of the Arab population of Gaza in 2023 and will almost certainly have good estimates after the end of the current war given how international the Palestinian diaspora (much like the Jewish diaspora) now is, how many relatives people have abroad, how many people are aware of extended family members and so on.
We will therefore be able to find, to a likely high degree of accuracy, what percentage of the civilian population of the Gaza strip (2.3 million pre-war) under Israeli military authority has died in the war that is currently unfolding.
If the percentage is close to the figures for the proportion of Central and Eastern European Jewish civilians who vanished between 1941 and 1945 (over 80%) or even the proportion for European Jewry as a whole, including in countries never occupied by Axis forces like the UK and most of Russia (~65%), I will accept that the events are comparable in precisely the way you insist they are.
I think, however, that it is very unlikely that even 10% of the civilian population of the Gaza strip will die in this conflict. It is unlikely even 5% will (the current figure, doubling the official number and taking all casualties as civilian, is perhaps 2%). This is well within the bounds of modern conflict (for example, 15% of the Korean civilian population died in the Korean War; as a comment below reminds us, 10% of Afghans died in the Soviet war there). 80% is not, which is why revisionists must argue that most Holocaust victims never even existed, not that they just didn't die.
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.
Foreign protests and eventually sanctions didn’t really kill apartheid. The South Africans could have held on and non-aligned countries (Israel, amusingly, being a central example) would have continued doing business with them. The main reason apartheid failed was that it never had buy-in from the non-Afrikaner (largely Anglo, in some cases Jewish) white elite in South Africa who actually ran the economy and who had repeatedly chafed with the Afrikaners who controlled the entire politics of the country for fifty years via the national party (which was for much of its history not merely white nationalist but Afrikaner Calvinist ethnonationalist). Young whites, particularly urban, particularly in the middle and upper middle classes, increasingly and ever more earnestly opposed apartheid. The system lost the will to function, the older Afrikaners (who had steadfastly opposed non-Dutch European immigration well into the 1950s) no longer had the a popular support to maintain the system as it was. That process began in the 1970s, long before the US and UK implemented major sanctions (which were themselves not comprehensive in practice and which were - as you note - strongly opposed by Reagan and Thatcher at the time).
Rhodesia is a better example of a country that was more crippled by sanctions, but Rhodesia peaked at 300,000 whites while South Africa had 5.2 million, a number much more capable of maintaining autarky with high living standards and extensive domestic industry. In Israel, the domestic economic and social elite is much more aligned with ethnonationalism than was ever the case in South Africa, where Anglos never really cared for apartheid (which, pointedly, was never strictly implemented in Anglo-majority African colonies even if they had some segregation; even Rhodesia did not actually have codified apartheid like South Africa did).
The fall of apartheid was as much about domestic politics in SA after centuries of conflict between the Anglos and the Boers as it was about international pressure. If all white South Africans had been firmly aligned behind Afrikaner ethnonationalism it’s quite possible they would still be in charge today, but of course they were not.
2rafa
6d 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.
2rafa
13d ago
Critical race theory, as an application of Marxist theory, is essentially a product of white (and Jewish, if you want to separate that out) academics engaging in a project to rehabilitate the post-Stalinist left after the Soviet Union (and Maoist Chinese) economic project failed and orthodox Marxian economics was widely discredited.
It has nothing to do with an inward-facing attempt to understand black people, black identity or black culture. To the extremely limited extent that some black people were involved in early progenitors of what would become critical race theory (and personally I really would push back at the idea that this is what, say, Frantz Fanon is doing, but hey) it was largely about colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean rather than the unique situation that what exists in the modern US.
I don’t think black people are necessarily being ‘unreasonable’ and I think that Hanania would certainly acknowledge that a large contributing factor to the development of a separate, extremely prominent African American identitarianism is the history of slavery and segregation. But the solution doesn’t run through CRT, it revolves around whether this separatism is something the black community wants to change, and even if it is, whether it can.
2rafa
20d ago
Surgery isn’t a new treatment for BIID; I covered this some months ago in my post on an interesting nullification fetish criminal case, but there have been scattered cases over the last thirty years of surgeons agreeing to amputate in cases of this condition.
The interesting dynamic, which I noted at the time, is that the surgeons typically shrugged and were willing to do it, while the psychiatrists were more opposed.
I will solve the childlessness problem hypothetically (amounts and currencies can of course be adapted to a country):
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65% (deductible) federal income tax for all income over $50,000 for anyone over 30 with fewer than one child. The tax drops by 15% per child for the first three children, with historic deductions so that people who still have 3 kids but do so late can claw back some of what they paid. Child deductions only available to couples married at (or within six months of) birth.
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Capital gains tax is doubled for those over 35 with fewer than two children, normal above. Normal rate only available to married or widowed people.
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Death/estate tax for childless people is 60% marginal on estates over $1m in net worth, falling by 20% and rising in threshold by $2m for each child until the fourth.
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75% of roles on boards of directors must go to married parents of at least two children. 50% must go to married parents of at least three children. The same applies to Congressmen and women and to senior positions / positions of responsibility in all regulated industries, and to all cabinet positions in the executive. 90% of senior positions in the military, state department and justice department must be occupied by parents of at least two children.
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Divorce comes with a 10-year additional tax penalty except in cases of (convicted) domestic violence or other abuse (in which case all marital benefits can continue for the victim).
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To qualify for any tax credits, a movie or television production must show or imply that at least 65% of characters with more than 10 minutes of screen-time described or implied as over the age of 27 have children. The same, in real life, applies to cast members with the same screen time threshold.
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Entry to any selective schools (specialized high schools, gifted programs etc) requires a child to have at least one sibling. Priority is given to those with two or more siblings.
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For every child after and including the third under the age of 18, graduates of four-year college degrees can receive $8,000 per year in student debt forgiven. This stacks for married couples where both partners have student debt, and for graduates of medical schools or STEM programs at top-50 (US News) universities, it rises by an additional 50%, meaning that some PMC professional couples could have hundreds of thousands of dollars of college debt completely wiped out, never paying anything, if they have three or more children. (Two doctors with 4 kids under 18 would see $48,000 per year of college debt wiped off).
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A 10% state levy on home sales by childless adults over 30 funds mortgage subsidies for married parents of three or more children on a variable basis depending on the money raised the previous year. Married parents of 2 or more children who have had a child within the last 48 months pay no capital tax on primary home sales.
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White House, senate and congressional internships, state-funded scholarships, Supreme Court clerkships and other prestigious positions for young people are limited to those with at least one sibling. A core part of pushing up birthrates is convincing parents of only children to have another, so it has to be stigmatized.
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For constitutional reasons, exemption from some policies is available for those “constitutionally incapable” of having children. These exemptions must be filed for with a $10,000 processing fee, do not apply to inability to bear children related to any decisions taken by the individual (eg. gender transition, voluntary castration) above the age of federal criminal responsibility (12), or to psychological or material conditions like ‘asexuality’ or just being ugly. All decisions have to be approved unanimously by a panel appointed 50% by congressional republicans and 50% by congressional democrats. The presumption is that in cases of genuine medical infertility that is likely from childhood (ie not discovered later in life) the state will know about it years before any exemption may be needed.
2rafa
18d ago
This is just Motte and Bailey reasoning.
Revisionists don’t merely quibble with minor to moderate details of the official account, they claim (typically) that less than a million, certainly fewer than two million, Jews died altogether and that Nazi Germany had no deliberate plan to kill any large number of Jews in an organized way, and those who did die died solely of disease and (unintentional) famine.
Disputing individual accounts is easy. There were at least tens of thousands of people who survived, of course some lied. There are 9/11 survivors who lied about being on a higher floor so that their escape seemed ‘even luckier’ than it actually was. Exaggeration is hardly unusual. But no quibbling with details or individual stories can change the three core facts of the Holocaust:
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At least 4 million (largely) CEE Jews vanished during WW2 never to appear again. They didn’t show up in Russia, in Israel, in the West or anywhere else, never contacted friends or family again and so on. The size of Jewish communities in the former Pale was well-documented by both Jewish and secular/Christian sources, eg. the governments of Austria-Hungary, Imperial Russia and so on, censuses, statisticians’ estimates and extrapolations from numbers of synagogues and Jewish schools etc.
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The death rate for civilian Jews was universally much higher, by an order of magnitude in many countries, than the death rate for gentile civilians, both urban and rural. This means their treatment can’t be explained away by the generic depredations of war upon the peasantry. The fact that almost all the Jews in many affected regions died while the vast majority of gentiles likewise occupied by a hostile foreign power survived suggests ‘special’ treatment that resulted causally in their death.
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The leadership of the Nazi government had spent twenty years blaming the Jews for the many severe problems they had with Germany, from hyperinflation and capitalist exploitation to the Bolshevik threat, social and cultural degeneracy and, worst of all, the Treaty of Versailles. They had openly promoted the removal of Jews from all territory under their control since before they achieved absolute power, which they had had for a decade by the point of Wannsee. The war and Allied blockades prevented any voluntary or forced mass deportation beyond Nazi-occupied Europe, which was (as ‘mainstream’ Holocaust historians plainly admit) the longstanding Nazi preference. The war was increasingly going poorly for Germany as of 1943.
None of these are conclusive proof of what exactly happened, but they suggest that 4+ million people under the occupation of an invading power for whom a central shibboleth was hostility towards their ethnic group (and a desire to cleanse their territory of them) died during that very occupation in great disproportion to any other civilian population under the same occupation. The guiding presumption, even without any additional evidence, is logically that the German occupiers killed them or facilitated their deaths in some way.
The board is more right wing but a lot of the most low-quality racist users have also left and/or been banned. There are far fewer slurs and there is far less generic trashy racism than there was on Reddit. I’m surprised people don’t remember what it was like to have constant drive-by posting from people unfamiliar with the subreddit and rules who came over from MDE, Opie and Anthony and other DR shitposting subs.
I pretty much never report anything these days. I’ve literally reported maybe three or four comments in the last couple of years here, whereas on Reddit I’d report regularly. You may remember I was highly opposed to the move from Reddit and predicted it would be the death of the community; I have been pleasantly proven wrong.
Arguing that the CRA was unconstitutional doesn’t mean it was immoral or even a bad idea; I think a lot of federal authority is unconstitutional but agree that it’s in effect necessary for the functioning of America as a modern state. But the CRA should have passed as a constitutional amendment given its sweeping constitutional scope.
There needs to be a stage in between prison and freedom
I’m unsure why this isn’t discussed more. Historically, there were many alternatives to jail that were used to control unruly people and populations. The death penalty was one, of course (we still have it in the US but it’s used so rarely that it doesn’t really impact anything, and most other developed countries have abolished it). But the others - exile, internal exile, population transfers more broadly, asylums (abolished since the 1980s) and so on have ceased.
Jail sucks, especially American jail, and I don’t think that people who - through no fault of their own - have high time preference and impulsivity deserve to spend their whole lives there in a small cell, no nature, no greenery, no alcohol or drugs (other than what can be smuggled in or made locally), no real employment at normal wages, no privacy, no exposure to sex or romance for straight people and so on. That does sound terrible, and it’s a shame we condemn so many to it.
At the same time, that doesn’t mean I want to be exposed to the problems of the criminal, drug addicted or homeless underclass. They should be allowed some joy but separated, in every crucial sense, from the edifice of civilized society and from people who Follow The Rules. A kind of sealed reservation for people who aren’t the worst of the worst violent criminals (who should remain in jail or in the noose) but who are manifestly incapable of living among law-abiding people with some propriety. An American Siberia.
2rafa
25d ago
He is self-worshipping; he cooked himself an identity in Kitchen Confidential and was too blinded by pride to ever revise it. Bourdain wanted to be the cool Western individualist loner, enjoyer of all but adherent to none. He attended every place’s ritual meal — each one a eucharist, essential, consuming God — but only as the aloof tourist, the narrator. It was this pride and absence of self-reflection (one’s real needs and obligations) which is the deepest reason. He let his heart be captured by an exotic woman to fulfill his own self-image, the idol he worshipped, which led to his demise.
I really think there’s something to this. I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘he found out his girlfriend was cheating on him’, but I do think that’s the key to it, in a way. People who have this particular sense that they’re unique, that they stand above this mass of parochial humanity, beyond it, viewing it almost objectively are very vulnerable to obsessing over a romantic partner who they feel is like them, also ‘separate’ in some way. It both soothes their vanity and feeds into the ‘favorite person’ complex that is pretty common in people with some personality disorders like BPD.
Bourdain clearly thought Argento was something of a kindred spirit according the documentary, a fellow traveller, someone who had suffered as he had and become strong and funny to cope.
Losing someone like that, or worse realizing that they’ve left you, bored of you, tired of you, is much worse than breakups are for psychologically stable people who lack this perception of their own intellectual apart-ness from community, identity and so on. That’s why even though Bourdain was on vacation with his close friend in a picturesque little town this wasn’t enough to save him, because nothing can replace this person. The sense of loneliness is absolute and profound, exacerbated by the inability (as you say) to self-reflect and conclude that maybe they were projecting large aspects of the image they’d created of themselves onto someone else.
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
12d ago
The ‘facts’ here seem obvious, and don’t necessarily favor either side’s story:
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The ‘West’ is bleeding Russia for cheap and with no military or civilian casualties, but military experience is useful for an army and the Russian conscripts are largely Central Asian peasants, not higher IQ Muscovites and Peterburgians whose loss would actually damage Russia’s long term prospects. On the other hand, many high IQ Russians in tech and other industries have fled, there has been a brain drain (which was already happening before the war and has now accelerated). Russia has no good long term prospects. The birth rate is shit, demographically the Muslims from Central Asia are ascendant, the culture certainly isn’t ’based and trad’, and were still talking about a relatively poor country (certainly by Western standards) on every indicator.
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Russia’s industrial capacity has improved, and as someone here said last week re. Wirecard, if desperation even slightly reduces Russian corruption, that’s a very bad thing for the West in the long term since elite Russians are very competent when not hamstrung by their own corrupt tendencies. On the other hand, Russia’s defense export business has declined while that of core Western provinces like France and South Korea has increased, which is good for the West both economically and in terms of building up production capacity for future conflict.
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While the lack of munitions production capacity in the US, UK and much of Western Europe has been noted, it is slowly starting to be rectified. Consider the counterfactual where we don’t ‘realize’ this until we’re about to fight China. 10 or 15 years from now the Ukraine war will have led to a major increase in Western defense production capacity, which is more useful against the primary threat. Better to find out the stores are empty in a largely irrelevant little post-Soviet proxy conflict with Putin than in the big war everyone knows could be coming.
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While fighting this war is genuinely disastrous for the Ukrainian people for the many reasons raised in this thread, they seem to want to do it. This can’t merely be dismissed or ignored, there seems to be a genuinely popular will to resist the Russians. The West predicted Kiev would fall in 3 days, literally pulling out embassy staff temporarily so they didn’t accidentally die and cause a diplomatic incident with Russia as new landlord. The Ukrainian army didn’t collapse. Therefore game theoretic reasons why they’re retarded are manifestly subjugated to romantic or other desires for nationalism (a useful lesson in any case).
My opinion? Thy shall know them by their fruits. Russia is a shithole that most intelligent and wealthy people are fleeing, at least in part. It simply isn’t a good place to live, it has no glorious civilizational trajectory, and it’s an afterthought in the broader geopolitical conflict with China. Ukraine is a failed country with a sublevel tier GDP (one of the worst IQ to GDP/capita ratios in the entire world) that has no future. But, they want to fight and to die, so I don’t think giving them some old munitions is really disastrous for the West.
2rafa
4d 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.
Because he will be judged according to his tribe. If you’re a white foreigner in a distant land with only a few white people, and one of your fellow whites becomes embroiled in a huge scandal for committing horrific crimes, you will pay a price for that even if you did nothing. If HBD becomes widely accepted in the West, it will affect in perception all black people, even those who are very smart. If a woman crosses the street before you walk past because of her experience with the ‘urban underclass’, you can’t simply exempt yourself from this insult because you’re not part of it, you are being judged on the basis of race.
2rafa
26d ago
Jonathan Majors was cancelled for relatively modest (by MeToo standards) allegations. It seems to me more like historic things are grandfathered in for most older actors unless (as with Allen) the accusers are both prominent and unrelenting in their desire to take the accused down.
Everyone knows that pretty much every surviving rockstar from the 1960s to 1980s fucked 13-15 year old groupies, for example. It’s essentially common knowledge. But they still do huge global tours that sell out stadiums and make hundreds of millions of dollars. They’re not cancelled for this (despite the topic being discussed in the press semi-regularly) because there’s kind of a broad social amnesty for that behaviour by those specific people.
She could file a complaint with the ECHR, and under Scottish law the government would have to consider their decision, sure. But it would be as meaningless as appealing to the King for a royal pardon (and about as likely).
Hate speech (which the ECHR admits is vaguely or broadly defined) or any speech that runs contrary to the “fundamental principles” of the ECHR is explicitly considered exempt from Article 10 (free speech) protection.
Not only that, but the ECHR has a history of rejecting challenges to hate speech convictions, especially those relating to LGBT issues. For example, here’s the ECHR affirming the conviction of an Icelandic national for calling LGBTQ people “sexual deviants”.
Rowling would not win her case there, an appeal to the ECHR would be appealing to a body around which the Scottish government essentially bases much of its social policy.
2rafa
3d 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).
It is by now common knowledge that Russian intelligence very nearly took over Deutsche Bank without anyone in the German government even knowing (or caring), and while pressuring the German financial regulator into pursuing a criminal investigation into the Financial Times' journalists trying to figure out why it didn't make sense.
What is less commonly understood (and in part only now being revealed) is what a combination of hilarious disaster and glorious victory the Russian intelligence operation in question was. Having stumbled onto Jan Marsalek, the co-founder of Wirecard (a longstanding fraudulent German fake payments startup), an autistic Austrian-Czech who was obsessed with secret agents and James Bond, while he was abortively attempting to extend his scam to Russia, Russian intelligence compromised him with the help of an ex-pornographic Russian actress and several "retired" FSB officials.
Over the years, Wirecard helped move (with Marsalek's full approval) the funds of sanctioned Chechens, questionable Libyans, and shady Russian-Israelis between East and West, with the help of ex-KGB fixer Stanislav Petlinsky and his Israeli financier son. They had under their control the darling of the entire German tech industry, a man praised by Merkel, and a company so overvalued it was genuinely attempting to buy Deutsche Bank. They had thoroughly taken control of Austria's intelligence apparatus, which meant they had unlimited access to classified intelligence from Western allies, the entire European border entry database and so on. And then it failed, because it could not locate 1.9bn Euros.
It turned out that a great deal of the FSB program, as it happened, had only tangentially to do with what one might consider the interests of 'Russia' the nation. Much of it - including large elements of the assassination program - had to do with the grift, the transferring of money, the profiting of various senior officials, and the fear that MI6 or the CIA would buy the information on who was making money in Russia (and how) from defectors like Skripal and Litvinenko. A competent FSB would have furnished Wirecard with the money needed for KPMG to sign off its audit (something well-paid accountants are always desperate to do) by showing proof of the 'missing' 1.9bn euros. But when it came to it, the FSB could not do this. The Russians, for all their immense capability and cunning, were so addicted to the grift that they were unable to salvage their own intelligence operation because they were too busy enriching themselves.
A tragic tale. Marsalek is now an Orthodox priest in hiding deep in Russia. Its inhabitants, that great people of so many contradictions, live to fight another day. I'm excited to see what they come up with next.
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