2rafa
12hr ago
The CCP has no issues with Chinese companies paying dividends, even substantial ones, to Western shareholders. They’re more suspicious and much more reluctant around actual acquisitions of Chinese companies.
Especially because there is moneyed interest at stake.
The NYT is a public company, but is completely controlled by the Sulzberger family who own a majority of super-voting shares as part of a trust so secure that even they are prohibited from selling them to non-family-members. That is to say that except for the very limited provisions against extreme failures in corporate governance overseen by the SEC and other federal regulators, other shareholders could do nothing if they ran the company into the ground. The current generation Sulzberger has a Jewish grandfather on his father’s side but is otherwise 75% WASP, largely Episcopalian and certainly does not identify as Jewish or practice as such; he is not Jewish even by the standards of most committed antisemites.
What moneyed interest is at stake?
2rafa
13hr ago
Because in internet forum culture there is a long tradition of looking up one’s interlocutor’s posting history and throwing some personal insults in. Nobody is under the impression that hiding it deletes it from the internet, but it does make it harder for someone you’re discussing something with to dig up another post they disagree with from 8 months ago and criticize you based on that, or decide to dislike you because of it.
2rafa
14hr ago
The Palestinians would quickly take over the Congo (a few thousand Lebanese dominate several sectors of Nigeria’s economy already, and of course Arabs are highly powerful in Central America) and then use tens of billions of dollars made from resource sales to fund jihadist efforts in the homeland. Doesn’t seem smart from the Israeli perspective.
The only real ‘solution’ along population transfer lines was for them to all move to Egypt/Syria etc in the late 40s and early 50s, with no special UN refugee rights, and that obviously didn’t happen.
2rafa
14hr ago
Yeah, and as in Europe the position on immigration and borders is a big negative for them in SA.
Xi is openly a Marxist-Leninist. Deng acknowledged what many ML economists had already done (and even what Lenin had with the aborted NEP), which was that the ‘capitalist stage’ had to be fully completed in order to drive down the marginal cost of production before ‘full socialism’ could be implemented from each according to ability to each according to need. There was no fundamental reason why one revolutionary party could not guide and indeed manage the entire transition from feudalism or early stage, largely agricultural capitalism to communism, including through the majority of the capitalist state, provided it avoided corruption and remained steadfast in its belief that - once capitalism had done its job - communism would be faithfully implemented in service of the people.
This is the genuine majority view among senior cadres in the CCP.
According to Xi, "the consolidation and development of the socialist system will require its own long period of history... it will require the tireless struggle of generations, up to ten generations." On the relationship with capitalist nations, Xi said, "Marx and Engels' analysis of the basic contradictions in capitalist society is not outdated, nor is the historical materialist view that capitalism is bound to die out and socialism is bound to win." Xi also stated: "The fundamental reason why some of our comrades have weak ideals and faltering beliefs is that their views lack a firm grounding in historical materialism."
The extent to which the Chinese believe in HBD is hard to gauge. Certainly ethnic stereotypes of all kinds are common. Nevertheless, the CCP is anti racist, party cadres are taught what is effectively blank-statism in school, research into related evo-psych topics is largely suppressed, even if it is not as immediately cancellable as it is in the US. For 30 years Very Smart Western midwits have pushed the idea that “nah, these guys aren’t really Marxists, they’re mercenaries, they believe in China but not some ideology that a German Jewish journalist came up with 170 years ago, they don’t really believe”. No, they really, really do.
That would make the best time to strike, presumably, the very point at which the contradictions of capitalism become most elevated. Perhaps AI related mass unemployment, who knows? At that point, the US and Western capitalist countries would struggle for an ideology, a path, would be wracked by ideological violence and division. The CCP would simply calmly and peacefully execute the transition they’ve been preparing for all along. Do they believe it will be soon, though? After all, the CCP might not be LW-type singularity believers. Xi did say ten generations, and he’s the fifth generation of party leadership, so that suggests quite a few more.
2rafa
23hr ago
Dissident right Twitter bodybuilders and even stuff like Charlottesville (despite subsequent messaging) has given some very online people a completely warped perception of Trump’s base. They’re thinking it’s tall white fit, salmon-colored shorts wearing frat bros, decently educated, probably 115 IQ college grads, deep red, hard right, well versed in issues, probably know how to handle a gun. Similarly, people’s very online perception of the Dem base is either the worst dregs of the criminal or homeless underclass, or like ‘aids skrillex’ type screeching weedy non-binary student protesters crying about Palestine and police brutality.
But that isn’t Biden’s base, and that certainly isn’t Trump’s base. As the Tomato says, Trump’s base is fat middle aged or old people in flyover states who watch Fox News. They may or may not have guns, but boy, they sure aren’t overthrowing the federal government with them, today or any day.
Trump's core demographic is >70% white; among young white men it is the overwhelming majority;
In 2020 Trump won young white men by just 6 points. Younger zoomers are already majority nonwhite or close to it. When adding the 45% of young white men who vote Dem to almost all young black and Hispanic men (many of whom are indeed armed etc) it seems unlikely that violent young men in total are as extremely Republican as you suggest. In addition we have things like obesity data and so on. Young Red men aren’t all, or even close to being, in any large number, fit, muscular 6’5 blonde Midwestern farm boys with a personal armory ready to March on Washington. Even if they tried, blue hair they/thems in Arlington or Silicon Valley can drone them as easily as the IDF drones square-jawed jacked Palestinian youths trying to throw grenades at Israeli soldiers. The idea that the reds would easily win a civil war is ridiculous. They might win, but it is unlikely to be easy.
2rafa
1d ago
Trump hates humiliation or perceived weakness (‘being a loser’) above all else, and Taiwan being invaded would definitely play in the media (which is hostile to him anyway) as a big loss for America. I can’t see him shrugging. He was extremely pro-vaccine as President. He likes things that project American strength. His opposition to some Middle East wars was more about the US getting a bad deal than any moral opposition to them or even committed ideological isolationism. Likewise I think if he had been president in 2022 he would have been very supportive of maximum military aid to Ukraine.
The US basically accepted the eventual Hong Kongization of Taiwan until the early 2010s when the South China Sea stuff flared up, the trade war began and Xi started practicing more aggressive counterintelligence vs Western assets in China. Then the chip thing happened too and now Taiwan is an extremely valuable strategic asset.
Over time Taiwan’s centrality to chip making will reduce and the previous course will resume. There is no need for the CCP to invade now. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t.
The EFF has suffered in recent years because the most salient culture war issue in South Africa, especially to poor urban [black] proletarians (who would presumably be the core audience for this kind of socialist party), is immigration from elsewhere in Southern and Central Africa putting downward pressure on wages for working class urban black people. The EFF, as a socialist party with vaguely anti-imperialist and pan-Africanist views, endorsed and then partially walked back an open borders position that was extremely unpopular with those voters. Anti-white animus isn’t popular enough in SA for the EFF to exceed 12% of the vote; it’s possible they could go higher in the event of an economic collapse driving some kind of populist socialist sentiment, but I don’t think that’s really the same thing.
The ANC becoming the Xhosa party and the Zulus leaving is probably good. It means that the DA should be able to participate in most or all coalitions, and in any case increases the chance of the parties curtailing the most egregious corruption to try to compete for the vote, which the ANC has never previously had to do.
2rafa
1d ago
They’re OK but so far they seem to lack the real killer feature of being able to make actually catchy hooks, at least from my prompting. They can make real sounding very mid music, like this or ‘lost records’ YouTube compilations generated by the AI.
I feel like LLMs are in a similar spot. They can write OK. They can’t write anything truly impressive. They can’t write fiction like Joyce or non-fiction like the best New Yorker journalism. The question is whether that’s just a minor revision away, whether it requires some tinkering with the training set, or whether it’s actually possible that there are limitations that prevent generation of 99.9th percentile art without architectural changes at the least.
2rafa
1d ago
It is true but historically the extremists pull back when the IDF does. Settlers left the Sinai. Settlers left Gaza. Raze their houses and let the enemy move in and they run scared pretty easily. Most extremist religious Zionists aren’t angry young men, they’re large families with huge numbers of women and children, they’re easy targets.
2rafa
2d ago
What would be the legally acceptable way to quietly pay off a mistress like this? If a Pro-Trump Super PAC had paid Daniels instead of Cohen/Trump personally, would that be unambiguously legal? If the National Enquirer had caught-and-killed the story with David Pecker’s personal funds instead of merely informing Cohen, would that be unambiguously legal? What if it was simply a friend of Trump who paid, with no business relationship to the president? A surface level reading would suggest not, because by these trial standards that would technically involve more than $2700 or whatever going to something that could possibly benefit the campaign.
2rafa
2d ago
Yes, but that could just be because the cops who vote Democrat aren’t the sort of people who donate to the Democratic Party.
2rafa
2d ago
1.25x is fine. Anything more and it begins to sound weird to me. If I’m watching YouTube rather than reading about an issue it’s probably because something about the video or audio presentation is interesting to me, and increasing the speed to 1.5x and beyond kind of defeats the purpose of enjoying that.
In the case of something purely informational like some kind of coding tutorial or software installation troubleshooting I’ll usually skip/scrub through it until I find the part I want, then watch closely and intently at normal speed.
2rafa
2d ago
It seems it was in a parliamentary panel on Palestine where this exact comparison was raised. In any case, he was a lifelong imperialist, which for much of the period was as much a liberal position as a conservative one. The liberals were more mercenary, and were divided over Empire, but there was a strong imperialist tendency in the liberal party early in the 20th century (referred to in contemporary politics as th gulf between the new idealists, moderates, liberal imperialists and - on the anti-empire side - little englanders). The early 20th century from around 1901 to 1935, despite the fact that Britain had already began its terminal decline and was already poorer than the US in absolute and per capita terms, was in fact the height of imperialist sentiment.
2rafa
3d ago
Even that isn’t intractable; there are countries where the middle class take the bus.
2rafa
3d ago
Our one was very inactive, a few people posting about challah baking, some orthodox people who work in back office trade functions in NYC/NJ posting Torah readings or rebbe quotes, and Israelis in the engineering team posting about Israeli EDM/techno/whatever. Political discussion is discouraged but unfortunately ours has just become “hope you guys are feeling safe, here are some mental health resources” concernposting since October 7th.
2rafa
3d ago
Churchill’s infamous quote about settler colonialism (“I do not admit that a great wrong”) was made in 1937.
It’s ridiculous to assume the US military hasn’t fully prepared for the possibility of kesslerization given it’s been theorized as a warfare tactic for almost 50 years. In any case, I imagine both Russia and China would be extremely reluctant to use it given how much damage it would do to either side’s allies all over the world. The destruction of high orbit satellites is far from assured. The speed of it is also unclear and is actually pretty slow iirc in a lot of models.
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