2rafa
1d ago
Ukraine is vastly larger than Gaza and civilians were easily and quickly (and still are) evacuated well behind the front lines where the intense conflict occurs. In Gaza, neighboring countries refused to accept evacuations, and Hamas - unlike either army in Ukraine - is an insurgent force that doesn’t wear uniforms, doesn’t observe any rules of war, and hides in the civilian population.
If the Ukrainian military had melted into the civilian population in the occupied cities where they emerged, daily, from schools, residential homes, hospitals and so on to attack Russians, the Ukrainian civilian casualty rate would be much higher. As it happened, the sides are fighting a conventional war (one Hamas cannot afford to fight, and doesn’t wish to).
While Israel and the US can't take an area the size of a municipality in Gaza against enemies with no resources Russia took the area the size of Denmark in a week against an enemy with 3x larger force.
“The world” is shrieking about modest civilian casualties in Gaza’s dense urban landscape, if the gloves were off the Star of David could be flying off (the remains) of every building in Gaza in a month. The key to that would be a more ‘biblical’ kind of warfare where you go in and kill every single male above the age of 12, which Israel and the US are clearly militarily capable of doing. That they aren’t doing it isn’t a question of capability. (Note, of course, that I am certainly not advocating this.)
Ukrainians in the occupied territories are, as pro-Russians often remind us, just unwilling to resist Russia to the degree that Gazans are Israel.
Arguing against specific highly spurious claims is very different to arguing that intelligence is the only feature of the mind that is inherited. In any case, you might add that the more anti-Jewish side of the DR is actually split between “Jewish IQ is a psy-op, see Unz, myth of American meritocracy, IQ stats from Brooklyn high schools in the 1930s don’t map to Israel” etc and “it’s real but it doesn’t matter because they’re also hereditary cheats, sex pests, clannish narcissists”.
2rafa
3d ago
There are some people who simply cannot be trusted around most of the opposite sex. They’re usually at least moderately, although only very rarely exceptionally, attractive, but they have an intoxicating charisma and can seduce almost anyone. The archetypal siren, rake, Mata Hari, whatever. Only some variant of the Pence rule is going to protect you from them (if targeted).
2rafa
3d ago
My guess is that he just fell in love with her. If he wanted to fuck 18 year olds he could have divorced his wife 20 years ago (or come to an arrangement, like Eric Schmidt, or done that classic rockstar / Larry Ellison / Henry VIII thing and just had a succession of younger wives). It seems more likely that he was relatively happy or at least comfortable in his marriage and was then seduced by Sanchez, who is no doubt a skilled and immensely ambitious operator, and then divorced his wife (likely at Sanchez’ request, and certainly as a consequence of her will given she gave her own texts to her brother who then sold them on to a tabloid) so he could marry her. There was no buffet of 20 year olds to pick from, it wasn’t like that, and the billionaires who do live that lifestyle are essentially plugged into the party circuit, big time nightclub promoters, model / escort agents and so on on the Cannes/Miami/LA/Mykonos circuit with which Bezos was not really familiar pre-Sanchez given he was a nerd who mainly attended sober economics conferences.
2rafa
4d ago
The Israelis are delusional and wrong about regime change. It’s strange that critics of Israel seem to be so heavily invested in Mossad’s infallibility (even ‘October 7th was allowed to happen’ etc). The only way regime change happens in Iran is if the Tehran middle class get fed up enough to make it happen. That will be independent from Israel.
2rafa
4d ago
Nope, Trump did what neocons failed to accomplish during any previous GOP administration over the last 40 years, namely direct, massive US air strikes on the Iranian nuclear program, and he did it over the wishes of isolationists like Carlson and to the approval of the great majority of his base. Framing this as a win for principled anti-intervention rightists is ridiculous.
And Trump didn't keep his intervention limited because everybody was so supportive of it.
Ground invasion of Iran is impossible and externally-forced regime change is impossible without ground invasion. Trump picked the most maximalist neocon option realistically possible, just like when he had Soleimani assassinated over the suggestions of the DoD and most of his own senior advisors.
I had a feeling this was going to end up here when I first saw it. Really, this is just ‘gender black pill’ stuff from a vaguely femcel-adjacent perspective, but not structurally different to the male equivalents (Tony Tulathimutte etc). I think it would be a mistake to read into it too deeply. You can always find good reasons not to trust people. It’s no real surprise that someone who resents men in this way would embrace the transactional nature of ‘sex work’; this may be an advertising strategy, but it is probably not insincere.
2rafa
8d ago
Ok, well let's just take a look at the undefeated Uno Reverso.
Indeed. Suppose Ignatiev were to reply to your comment (and general worldview) with:
“My dear SS, I agree completely. I think all practicing Jews should renounce their religious practice (including, as I have already argued, kosher dining and food preparation), and all ethnic Jews should abandon their cultural particularity. Jews should convert to mainstream Protestant Christianity, the predominant gentile religion in the United States, or practice no faith. They should marry gentiles (of course most already do, but let’s say all of them). All Jewish religious institutions (synagogues, museums of tolerance, etc) should be closed, all religious clothing banned. Those who refuse these terms ought to go to Israel, but those who accept them can remain in America with no further restrictions placed on their participation in society, culture, politics or the economy. Furthermore, any racial agitation by white nationalists towards those former Jews who fully, sincerely renounce and abandon their Jewishness will be strictly prohibited.”
Would you accept his offer?
Because that is the difference between Ignatiev’s position and those of the dissident rightists who borrow his words in this case. He (like all communists) allowed for conversion; even the last emperor of china was converted, after all. You do not.
2rafa
8d ago
Can you explain to me how that's relevant at all to what I said?
(Since you tagged me) It literally serves as an example of him opposing Jewish particularism, which is ultimately what you accuse him of.
2rafa
9d ago
This is just a re-run of the “stunning” surprise justice-reform prosecutor / mayoral wins in some big cities during Trump I. The core of progressive ideology is only temporarily vulnerable to reality-based criticism (for example ‘crime just doubled, the streets are now full of psychotic homeless vagrants, the subway is unsafe, these guys want to defund the police’).
As soon as the issue is even partially resolved, the progressive voter returns to his comforter position (electing candidates like Mamdani) because he never actually questioned whether his own ideas were wrong; his shift to the center was ‘pragmatic’ (fear based), as crime stabilizes he again has the luxury of voting ideologically.
More generally, the Democratic establishment is at least partially responsible for screwing over Adams. Corrupt? Maybe, but there are 50 Dem mayors of major cities over the last 100 years who were more corrupt than him.
“Remigration” certainly isn’t official AfD policy, its advocated by the far-right Höcke wing of the party, not the Weidel center.
2rafa
11d ago
Regime change isn’t possible without a ground invasion which isn’t possible. Posturing doesn’t change that.
2rafa
11d ago
TFR is going down, indicative of women no longer internalizing the values of Islam
TFR is going down in almost every country. In Iran, which had a brief 1970s baby boom under the Shah, TFR has declined almost every year since the Islamic Revolution, even when it was rapidly becoming more conservative.
2rafa
11d ago
undeclared
This word is doing a lot here. Declaration doesn’t really mean anything; it made sense for Pakistan for obvious geopolitical reasons, and every single nuclear state is aware of Israel’s nuclear capability. They could ‘declare’ it tomorrow and nothing would change, none of the major nuclear powers accept or are fully truthful around any international inspections or the full extent of their capability for standard secrecy reasons.
2rafa
11d ago
People have been saying this since the late 1980s. The IRGC and mullahs’ grip on power is too strong. There is a fed up secular elite but their casualty tolerance is extremely low and as long as they can take their money in and out and vacation in the many countries where they can drink/fuck/etc (and they largely can) they won’t be a threat. The regime essentially banned dog ownership a few weeks ago just because it started trending on their social media and some scholars consider it un-Islamic; not the behavior of a regime desperately accepting some liberalization. The same happened after the hijab protests, they didn’t give an inch even if enforcement remains somewhat lax in Tehran (which it was before too). In the 1990s (the last major liberal turn) they assassinated a bunch of people effectively openly and then even semi-admitted it (politicians, businessmen, authors, journalists, public intellectuals) until the PM backed out of all his promises.
2rafa
11d ago
I find it very hard to believe that the consequence of a not-even-third-tier power nuking Paris would be Gaddafi being allowed to stay in power.
That’s the kind of hypothetical reserved for a Russia/China/USA level MAD situation where someone fires first and you hope against hope that cooler heads prevail and the attacked party ‘settles’ for a big payoff and apology (but still very unlikely).
A minor nuclear power firing a nuke like that would just result in absolute extermination for Gaddafi, because it’s not like the Chinese or Russians were going to nuke London or Washington in retaliation for an attack on Tripoli.
I don't think they'll directly attack US assets in the area, but I do think they'll close the straight of Hormuz for any European or American traffic.
This is less devastating than people think because Iranian oil flows to China, Japan, India and elsewhere would continue and even Europe is less reliant on Gulf oil than it previous was (and the shortfall could be made up).
The real impact would only happen by closing off the strait (by mining it, probably), which would send the price skyrocketing and which would infuriate China.
In the end, Iran will have nukes. They’re too large, too developed and have a relatively good academic pipeline in the hard sciences such that it’s inevitable. It might be a year, three years, five years, but they will have them.
A ground invasion of Iran by the US is impossible. The only hope for regime change is either that there’s some mass minority uprising against the Persians (very unlikely, they’re not staunch ethnic nationalists and have mollified most of the minorities quite well) or that there’s a middle-class ‘color revolution’ in Tehran and the mullahs and IRGC just kind of give up in that late stage GDR type way and melt away into the crowds (which is also extremely unlikely because they know what they have to lose).
At the same time, Iran’s near term options for retaliation are limited. They can’t shut down the strait because the Chinese will hit the roof and selectively bombing ships is a bad idea (the true shutdown scenario, as I understand it, would be mining the strait, and that’s not going to distinguish between Chinese ships and Western ones). If they bomb Saudi oilfields it will only hasten the return of Abraham Accord type stuff just when they’d achieved some diplomatic successes with the Gulf Arabs.
2rafa
12d ago
The Israelis are still a big part of the western internet it would be impossible to hide if many thousands of Israeli civilians had died in Iranian strikes.
2rafa
12d ago
As a whole not really, it can still get hot, SF itself still gets a lot of fog even if it’s less than it was.
But slightly inland in Silicon Valley proper yeah, the ultra expensive places like Atherton, Woodside around Redwood probably have a close to ideal climate-weather combination.
It’s not perfect, though. That honor goes to San Diego.
Fiscal discipline can only be enforced by the bond market, that is the reality. Since both Democrats and Republicans have borrowed and would borrow, the questions around deficit spending are only these:
How can we maximize spending to fiscally constrain a future opposition administration/congress?
How can we allocate the greatest possible funding to issues we care about?
This bill, while far from perfect, mostly accomplishes both. You can’t mass deport without large scale holding camp infrastructure. $50bn or whatever isn’t enough, but it’s a good start. Immigration is the only thing that matters until immigration is solved (AI matters too, but the state is powerless to stop that march of technological progress).
More options
Context Copy link