2rafa
1d ago
No, The Economist’s readership has a substantial number of students and juniors, plus interested normal people who like to imagine themselves as the kind of person who reads it, many of whom don’t have a lot of money. It’s largely the magazine for the back office. FT Weekend’s readership is likely wealthier, because it’s mainly older print readers of the paper who have some money (students and juniors on the app aren’t going to care to read it).
Tatler’s readership is bifurcated between that sub-group of rich Arabs and Asians (they have a big audience in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Gulf) who enjoy the Anglo aesthetic, are often involved with polo, ride, have country houses in England, that sort of thing, and the residual English upper and upper-middle classes, some of whom have money and some of whom don’t. That niche means Tatler’s ads are more targeted, although there is still plenty of Patek and Lori Piana. Bien pensant PMCs might read that awful Air Mail or even worse Monocle, which also have all the Rolex and Porsche ads.
2rafa
1d ago
Problem was that they started actually believing all of the universal spread of liberal democracy stuff because the Cold War involved an ideological component that 19th century European colonialism didn’t (“spreading Christian civilization” was a post-hoc thing). That meant that which side was supported was often determined more ideologically than it had been under the British or French, who were regularly willing to screw over fellow Christians, liberal reformers, or other more ideologically aligned factions if their opponents had better will to power.
The Mamdani craze is because progressives, especially in Manhattan, cannot help themselves when it comes to electing DSA types who want to defund the police.
Amusingly, black people saved NYC by electing Adams who arrested the Floyd crime wave by allowing the NYPD to do their jobs. Now, because memories are short, the libs again forget what it’s like to live in a society without the rule of law. Crime rises, progressives get pragmatic, crime falls, progressives become idealistic, crime rises, etc.
The win state for big American cities is to elect a slightly grizzled, probably somewhat corrupt older black male cop who is technically a democrat but too compromised by big business to pursue dumb ‘justice reform’ policies.
2rafa
1d ago
The Christian population of the Middle East has been leaving since the late years of the Ottoman Empire, a process that has only accelerated since the rise of Islamism post-Qutb after the middle of the 20th century and especially since 1979.
The War on Terror was the death knell for ‘humanitarian’ US regime change opps because it was the moment it became clear that the State Dept, CIA and DoD no longer had the appetite for actual population transformation. There were people who pushed for it. Ann Coulter after 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”. But when it came to it, nobody had the guts to do it and it seemed like a lot of work when you could get some peace corps Yale grads at State to fund a few schools to teach women how to sew, fund girls sports teams, give the top ten high school students in the country scholarships to Georgetown and call it a day.
2rafa
1d ago
Libya was already relatively internally divided, Gaddafi was just a great autocrat. Iran has far fewer internal divisions than Libya did in 2011.
2rafa
1d ago
Interesting how much “Imaginal Christianity” resembles an Islamic-Buddhist hybrid with some Christian characteristics.
2rafa
2d ago
Without dismissing what you’re feeling, I think your narrative of modernity maps to a lot of great criticisms of the wealthy society begat by the Industrial Revolution over the last 150 years. It’s not as new as you suggest.
I think measures of national or even personal happiness are hard to parse. Swedes versus Danes, Greeks versus Germans. Are some happier, or is what counts as ‘happy’ for a Finn just less ambitious, less happy, than what counts as the same for an American? How happy were our ancestors a century ago really?
As a young person online, I was never deep into ‘new atheism’, but like many people I adopted a deep disdain for any kind of spiritualism, hackneyed ‘the secret’ style self-help and so on (which of course only made adherents vulnerable to slightly modified versions of the same eternal ideas). As I got older, I realized that a version of “the law of attraction” or “the secret” or “practice gratitude journaling to make you happy” was in fact pretty much true. The happiest people are those who convince themselves most absolutely that they are happy, will remain happy, and that good things will happen to them, indeed that life itself is good and (broadly, if not in every case), just.
As I had more life experience and met more people, I realized that artists, (serious) writers and philosophers were often some of the most unhappy, most depressed people I knew, even if they had achieved great professional success or were otherwise wealthy, attractive and so on. This is no coincidence, it is because these careers often lead people to question the meaning of their lives, and doing that is a death blow to that simple kind of happiness that provides genuine satisfaction. Even those philosophies that attempt to grasp earnestly at a value and a happiness in that direction, like Buddhism, often embrace what appears at least to me to be a fundamental nihilism in their obsession with the mirror, with an interrogation of the self.
The key to happiness, and I say this as an amateur, is caring less, feeling more, and studiously avoiding the temptation to try to look behind the curtain. The smarter and more curious and more interested in the discussion of grand narratives you are (and if you’re here, that is probably ‘very’) the harder this is. But it is possible. As for young men, you can ‘enjoy the decline’ (which I suppose means checking out and enjoying the bountiful brothels of South-East Asia, or something), or see if there’s happiness to be found in the other people where you are. I suspect the latter might be more fruitful, but I won’t judge.
2rafa
4d ago
I agree that the last 20 years saw a move of the last of these Catholics to the GOP. Pro choice Democratic politicians were censured by the church itself which is a big step. In liberal European countries like Germany there are Catholic groups who have semi-openly broken with the Vatican on abortion but in the US the clergy tend to be more socially conservative.
But an example of the above would be like ACB who is a liberal except for abortion.
2rafa
5d ago
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.
2rafa
5d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d ago
High time preference populations aren’t going to be worried about what happened to the last group of migrants 10 years ago.
2rafa
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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.
To be honest, though, everything is midwit if you’re an internet snob like you and me, Dean. Bellingcat? The ultimate midwit NAFO publication. The London/NY/Paris Review of Books? Catastrophically midwit zine read by aging socialists of the kind who use The Guardian’s dating platform and chuckle at another lame Trump nickname at dinner parties. The New Yorker? Vanity Fair? Magazines for parents of Juilliard students, nought more need be said. The popular substacks or newsletters (unaffiliated or affiliated) of erstwhile online political commentators (Iglesias, Sullivan, Klein)? Soothing balm for dull, aging millennial and GenX centrists upset at a world they no longer understand. More obscure commentator figures (Yarvin, Kriss)? Slightly more verbose Twitter bait dressed up for the audience of clapping chimps paying $5 a month to chuckle gently while pretending to do their email job and thinking themselves above the worker ant masses consuming their cyber slop.
In the end, the choice is between the last few good blogs (never read the comments), the intelligent but supremely annoying autists at HN and LW (but only on topics they know something about), prediction markets, a few good bank and third party research analysts if you can get access through your company, some columnists that agree with your personal biases at major publications and this place.
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