2rafa
4d 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.
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
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.
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
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.
2rafa
4d ago
Your argument doesn’t really make sense. Young men in poor urban black communities in the US have higher rates of violent criminal behavior than any black population on earth other than maybe Haitians. West African nations, even many black Caribbean countries, have much lower violent crime rates than these communities in St Louis, New Orleans and Baltimore, despite the fact that they have higher birthrates than African Americans, meaning they have more young men as a proportion of the population. Saying “well it’s HBD, nothing we can do about it [except become wignat separatists, presumably]” just isn’t true.
It isn’t a denial of HBD to suggest that these communities have specific dysfunctions, likely enabled by legal and social changes that were predominantly enacted by non-black politicians, entertainers and businessmen, that are not the natural destiny of their inhabitants per se.
2rafa
6d ago
According to the internet the Wonderlic test, which is an IQ test, is used by a large number of major American corporations, from Bank of America to American Airlines to Abbott medical. Dozens of other major corporations have their own in-house cognitive assessments. The infamous ‘Google interview question’ is an IQ test. The US military and many parts of federal and state civil services use IQ tests. Somehow these places did not stop using them under legal pressure despite the disparate outcome standard being in place for fifty years or more.
The sole requirement for employers is that they must be able to prove that test performance equals job performance. This is absurdly simple to do in any profession in which performance can be objectively measured (which is most of them).
The major lost cases (iirc a big one semi-recently was some firefighter or cop promotions in New England) are where this standard couldn’t be shown to investigators. If you can prove it the justice department will typically just move on and not even look further into a case.
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
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.
2rafa
4d ago
Legal drugs is just because of federal policy though, right? If Congress repeals the federal weed ban tomorrow, it’ll be sold at Walmart and CVS in months. The reason weed is still a shady business is because banks can’t do business with them because the feds say it’s still illegal, they just don’t enforce the law against states that have legalized.
2rafa
5d ago
By ‘Google interview question’ I mean the historic kind that made Google a famous interviewer in the early 2000s where they’d ask how many pizza boxes could fit under the Golden Gate Bridge or whatever and see how you reasoned your way through the question.
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
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.
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
3d ago
I fully sympathize with Ukrainian exiles, there’s no way I’d have stuck around if I was Ukrainian.
That said, I also sympathize with Zelensky, who is largely doing what his people seem to want him to. If the US or Western European countries were also defending in total war against a larger invasion force I’d imagine similar measures would be implemented here. We should be grateful that is unlikely for now.
I also think that Putin knows he’s winning and is thus unlikely to agree to a peace that is anything less than catastrophically punitive and for which Zelensky would be killed or exiled and blamed for generations by future Ukrainian nationalists.
2rafa
4d ago
If you were exiled to Siberia in 1880 you couldn’t just be a homeless bum in Moscow or St Petersburg, presumably.
2rafa
6d ago
Sure, but he was always politically a libertarian. He lobbied against banning Holocaust denial on Facebook until it became politically untenable for example because he believes in freedom of speech. I don’t think he’s very political, that means both that he’s not a lib and that he’s not going to sacrifice huge money for conservative causes like Elon. Plus he’s a Jewish guy with half-Asian kids so that likely sets an upper bound on how rightist he might go.
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
2d 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
5d ago
I always thought the Roman haircut was just a meme, but apparently his kids’ names are Maxima, August and Aurelia lmao.
2rafa
5d ago
“The cavalry isn’t coming. Everything that you want out of your life, you need to make happen yourself, you’re not going to be rescued randomly”
I eventually had this realization around 20, but I’d have been spared a lot of nauseating self-pity if I’d had it earlier.
2rafa
2d ago
I wouldn’t say that Christianity guarantees slave morality, Christians had after all conquered and subjugated the majority of the world a century ago. I just think it lacks any safeguards against slave morality the way that Judaism (with its inherent ethnonationalism and more vigorously harsh Old Testament) and Islam (with Muhammad the conqueror cemented as ultimate example for mankind) have. If your civilization has a brief slave morality cult or phase, there’s nothing in Christianity or Christian-descended secular society to say ‘stop’.
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.
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