2rafa
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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.
2rafa
1d 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.
2rafa
1d ago
Malaysia has a big undercurrent of anger about migrant workers not going home, it’s just rarely reported on in the West. Malaysia has 35 million people and as many as 2.5 million illegal immigrants according to some estimates, higher proportionally than the US.
2rafa
1d 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.
2rafa
1d 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
1d ago
The military consensus appears to be, but correct me if I’m wrong, that many Iranian nuclear facilities are buried so deep that even direct hits wouldn’t necessary be slam dunk destructive to the facility. There are semi-reliable sources that claim the bulk of the most valuable development conducted at Natanz is 800m below ground protected additionally by dozens of meters of shielding. Even moreso than almost all of the US’ nuclear bunkers the entire facility has been engineered to withstand a direct Israeli nuclear hit from the get go, and the Iranians are widely considered competent engineers.
E-verify was a compromise at a time when Republicans’ biggest fear was permanent Democratic victory due to demographic change resulting from mass immigration. Republicans didn’t want to deport illegals (for the same reason Trump is demurring now), but they wanted to redirect as many as possible to blue states that would impose so many restrictions on e-verify that it would be effectively unusable (as California does) except by ideologically committed Republican business owners. Red states, meanwhile, could pass laws that slowly increased pressure on employers to use e-verify while exempting (explicitly or implicitly) sectors run by wealthy conservatives that relied on illegal labor.
2rafa
1d ago
High time preference populations aren’t going to be worried about what happened to the last group of migrants 10 years ago.
2rafa
1d 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
1d ago
He is friends with large numbers of other hotel and casino owners / real estate investors who have obviously called him and said they don’t want this, and it is also very possible people in his own business that he trusts have said it too.
2rafa
1d 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).
2rafa
1d ago
It means that Iran will launch actual strikes on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem targeting civilian infrastructure or more important military sites depending on what the Israelis just hit (this is far from a surprise attack so one presumes there was a degree of telegraphing in advance, the US moved troops, the Iranians had several days to move things around).
The overall situation remains the same: neither Israel nor Iran are capable of invading each other and therefore of fighting an actual war.
2rafa
1d ago
Symbolic at best. Most Iranian nuclear facilities are buried deep underground, conventional weapons and likely even Israel’s existing nuclear arsenal are incapable of destroying them.
2rafa
4d ago
But I do see people driving gray-import Rams around.
Anti-Americanism is highly concentrated in the environmentalist left and liberal professional class.
Below them, a lot of things associated with America are loved, from Disney to conspicuous consumption to Las Vegas and Hollywood to the Wild West and Cowboys and Indians and ‘take me home, country roads’ and In-n-Out burger and fanboats in the Everglades and Twin Peaks and Twilight and police procedurals with those old Ford crown victorias and oversized portions and endless suburbs where even a cop can buy a 6 bedroom McMansion with three cars in the drive and cheerleaders and jocks and frats and (American) football (yes, all these things blend into some kind of generic Americana).
That’s why it’s not uncommon to see relatively affluent right-ish leaning German or British or Scandinavian working class or small business types spend huge amounts of money importing and fueling pick up trucks, Mustangs, Chargers etc. Often they will go on vacation to ‘Americana’ places they associate with American movies, music and culture like Vegas, Miami, LA or even Nashville despite very high American salaries and hotel prices making vacations in the US more expensive than almost anywhere else in the world for Europeans.
2rafa
4d ago
I think you are correct about the cat girl persona, but the paganism seems to me to be more ‘genuine’ (in the sense that he doesn’t like Christianity and isn’t just doing it to appeal to atheists, not in the sense that he is some kind of actual pagan). He never seemed to be Christian except in a vaguely aesthetic way when he lamented the decline of Anglo-Saxon (and thus to some extent Anglican) Canada.
2rafa
4d ago
He was unfortunately doxxed. It actually happened a while ago but he was until recently not famous enough for anyone to pay attention. As per longstanding convention on this board I won’t link to it; suffice it to say he was an interesting poster then and still is now, although nobody is immune to the negative effects of Twitter power-use and hot take bait.
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
4d ago
It’s OK but as @4bpp says a little bombastic. Worst of all, it ignores the point. The average taker of the paper (then or now) wasn’t expected to have this level of depth of knowledge about portrayals of the relevant figure through history. The basics, sure, otherwise you can’t do anything (although my guess is a handful of the kind of people who take the exam and think ‘I have no idea what that word means’ could still produce something interesting).
The real intention is for the prompt to spur a deeper discussion of something interesting. The output attempts this, briefly and in places, but it’s muddled, poorly structured, keeps returning to the prompt, and doesn’t perform more than surface level analysis. I suspect a ‘winning’ answer would do something like use Achitophel as a launching point for an earnest (re)appraisal of one particular modern historical figure’s character and legacy, or use it to examine some debate in academic biblical studies. The word / name in this case might be mentioned only a handful of times in the essay. The Dons do not want to read 150 essays that reference Machiavelli and Kissinger.
2rafa
8d ago
I don’t think this feud is about immigration.
Musk was pro-H1B, and Miller is opposed, but this bill has no impact on H1B immigration and both Miller and Musk are opposed to illegal and low skill immigration. There are, of course, Republicans who support those things (those with big ag constituencies, construction and meat processing donors etc), but it’s not at the heart of this conflict.
The core of it is Musk has libertarian or classical liberal beliefs about the deficit, while Donald Trump doesn’t care about it at all. Trump has always borrowed as much as he could and thought about how to pay it back later. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t, but he somehow always made it. Donald Trump’s entire career is a lesson in not worrying about going deep into debt. He is not about to start caring deeply now. DOGE was fun for a while, but as Musk quickly realized that almost all major spending was Medicare, Medicaid and defense (which Trump’s political instincts tell him, correctly, that he can’t cut) they were always going to be at loggerheads.
Miller is solely focused on immigration and therefore needs the bill to pass to give him more money and therefore more options re the border, but the reality for him is that congress needs to act to really change the immigration situation long term barring a curveball like SCOTUS allowing the president to end birthright citizenship or some kind of actual mass deportation apparatus capable of locating, detaining and deporting 3.5m+ illegal migrants per year spinning up magically in the next few months - neither of which will happen.
In the end, possible AGI weirdness aside, this will probably end with a fiscal and therefore political crisis of great magnitude followed by ‘emergency, temporary’ tax rises and medicare/medicaid cuts some time in the near to medium term future.
Indians always blame other Indians. When you ask Indians why India has to be so dirty, squalid, poor, emaciated cows in the street, no hygiene in cooking, even $1000 hotel rooms or $5000 Air India first class seats grimy and disgusting, they always blame other Indians. The upper castes blame the lower castes, the lower castes blame the upper castes and often each other. You can’t fix it because then “village people will just destroy it again”. There is no will, there is no program for change. I respect that (unlike certain other peoples) they at least accept responsibility on a national level, but that is still no solution.
If India needs to be saved, someone needs to seize power and exert force on their own countrymen. India is historically an easy place to conquer, the British ruled it with only 12-15,000 men. The military was humiliated in the recent bout with Pakistan and they’re not going to nuke their own people (and you say the army is mostly upper castes too, so would hardly be opposed), I don’t see why an Indian couldn’t do it. The real conundrum is why the BJP don’t just end democracy. No major constituency stands against them. It’s clear the lower castes are not advanced enough to vote. If Congress socialist elites kick up a fuss, they can be exiled to America and Britain.
But someone needs to end the squalor. Every building needs to be repainted and plastered in vernacular colors every 2-3 years. Littering needs to be punished with some form of public humiliation. Wild animals should not be allowed to roam in public. Hygiene standards should be rigorously enforced. Random piles of dirt, construction materials and so on need to result in extreme fines for landowners, up to confiscation. Driving laws strictly enforced. Violation of basic civilized standards of behavior should again be public humiliation. Failure to leave a public facility clean should likewise result in extreme punishments. Those disgusting peasant farmers protesting in favor of their price fixing handouts and unmechanised family farms need to be forcibly expropriated and replaced by large scale industrial farming for goods sold at market prices, with any resistance crushed with extreme force. Do this and in 20 years India is mostly fixed.
2rafa
8d ago
Ok, were I a Musk aid I would be strongly advising him to shut his mouth.
This is a man who fired his entire PR team, the media equivalent of choosing to represent yourself in court. There are ways of making even extremely impulsive and annoying celebrities look better in the press by seeding certain narratives, but Musk is reliant on his friends, business partners, ideological allies and (ex) girlfriends doing this ad-hoc, and they all have their own competing interests with no real coordination.
2rafa
8d ago
That’s more the CIA’s territory, it’s likely they sometimes get slushy with the aid budget but it isn’t its purpose. It’s mostly stuff like health/‘community cohesion’/education programs that get skimmed off by local elites who then bribe their own cascading hierarchies of clan members. Whether it’s value for money is debatable, but its purpose is clear and political especially because most of these countries have competing US and Chinese influence operations, and the current Trump admin policy is about maximally antagonizing the Chinese.
Revolutionary Iran by Axworthy only covers to 2012 but is probably the best introduction (meant only loosely, it’s relatively comprehensive unless you’re fascinated by a particular area of the Iranian state) to modern post-revolutionary Iranian history and the ideology of the revolutionaries before and in government. It shows quite meticulously how Khomeini strategically and patiently exploited just about every single cultural, class, political and ethnic division in Iranian politics to grant himself a level of absolute power rare even in the most autocratic traditional Islamic societies and then set about building an elaborate political operation and pipeline that sidelined even many of his own allied clerics (including many hardline Islamists) to ensure that the state he created would be extremely difficult to dismantle from within, even though he knew it would always be unpopular with Iran’s large, secular, urban PMC and wider middle class.
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