DimitriRascalov
No bio...
User ID: 450
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
The 11th and 12th of September are auspicious dates in political Islam as they represent the Caliphate's "high water mark" and end of the Islamic golden age. While it has largely passed from conscious memory in the West, the day that King Sobieski of Poland broke the Siege of Vienna (September 12th 1683) is remembered by many in the Islamic world as a bloody and shameful anniversary, the day that Islam lost it's way.
Do you have a source for that? Because that sounds very unlikely, given that the battles at the end of the Siege of Vienna happened on the 19th and 20th of Ramadan 1094 (9/19) and 9/11 happened on the 23rd of Jumada al-Thani 1422 (6/23) in the Islamic calendar. The correct date would have been the 5th of December 2001 (19th of Ramadan 1422) if the terrorists were after a symbolic message.
Apparently, the Battle of Vienna happened on the 1st of September 1682/83 in the Julian calendar (both years are possible depending on where the locality in question puts the date border between years). Mistakenly treating this as a Gregorian date and converting it to the Islamic calendar yields either Shaban 29, 1093 (8/29) or Ramadan 10, 1094 (9/10). However, as stated above 9/11 2001 is 6/23 in the calendar that matters for the terrorists and the Islamic world that is supposedly aggrieved about this date, so neither one fits.
The other way around also doesn't work: mistaking September 11, 1683 for a Julian date converts to Shawwal 3, 1094 (10/3) or Shawwal 15, 1095 (10/15) Islamic.
Maybe I'm getting something wrong or there's another way to spin this, but I don't see it.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
You mean aside from assorted Muslims that I've spoken to? No not really, but I could just as readily, ask you the same question.
Searching the web I can find literally no Muslim accounts while the only two sources supporting your interpretation are Lawrence Wright and Christopher Hitchens, who both present no direct evidence (e.g. statements by bin-Laden, Muslim scholars discussing the significance of the date etc.). In fact, your paragraph in the OP comes suspiciously close to simply remixing their claims with a bit of rhetorical flair.
The downhill cavalry charge into the Ottoman flank that inspired both Tolkien and Sabaton is generally agreed by both sides to have happened on the morning of September 12th per the Georgian Calendar. Sure there are other calendars, but if the intent is to send a message you're going to use the one that is mutually intelligible.
That's only part of your original claim. I can buy that a westernized radical Muslim like Atta chose the 9/11 date for its historical significance in the struggle between Christendom and Islam, even if no direct evidence exists. What I take issue with and would like to see concrete proof for is the idea that 9/11 ..
is remembered by many in the Islamic world as a bloody and shameful anniversary
How did 9/11 become a cultural touchstone for historical/geopolitical thinking east of the Bosporus when nobody outside of a tiny number of scholars concerned with calendars would even have a clue what the Gregorian date for it is, pre-1917? Further, we'd expect people who are especially concerned with the fate of Islam to be less likely to use a Western calendar than their traditional one. The main calendar for Saudi-Arabia, where the supermajority of the hijackers came from, is still the Islamic one, they switched to the Gregorian one for matters of paying civil servants only in 2016.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
For instance, where the fuck is this idiotic nonsense about "nobody outside of a tiny number of scholars concerned with calendars" knowing the date coming from?
...
but that doesn't mean they were unaware of the Gregorian Calendar or what date a given event happened on.
Let me be precise about what my position is: of course there were lots of people in the Muslim world pre-modernity that understood the Gregorian calendar. However, the great majority of intellectuals and the general population would at most be aware of its existence, but not of how to use it or convert their own dates in the Hijri calendar that everyone of them would be using, just as I or about 99,9% of all westerners can't tell the Julian date of a particular day without consulting an expert or a web app. Because of this, the idea that the numbers or the date 9/11 hold special significance for Muslims is suspect to me. The date would have been announced as Ramadan 19 as heralds spread the news throughout the Middle East. Where would a tradition of assigning 9/11 with special importance have organically come from instead of 10/19, the actual date almost everyone would have been thinking about before the 20th century?
Likewise, you say you didn't find anything on the web. Well no shit. Wahhabis don't exactly maintain much of an online presence, something about the internet being a Satanic construct. What presence they do maintain is typically in Arabic rather than English.
Sure, but people translating and writing about them might. I can't read classic Greek, yet I still have access to a great deal of Greek thinking and commentary on it. For example, the original writings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab survive and are available in English.
You can demand "proof" from me, but your attitude is giving me the distinct impression that there is nothing I can provide that you would accept. So with that in mind, what is your alternative theory?
What exactly gave you that impression? I did directly mention things that would convince me: a statement by bin-Laden or someone else from the group responsible referencing Vienna and the context of the 9/11 date, writing by Muslim historians or scholars about the importance of the Battle of Vienna and particularly the (Gregorian) date it was on, basically anything that provides some evidence for the notion that the Gregorian date itself is really something that people paid attention to in the Islamic world other than hearsay or statements by outsiders like Hitchens or Lawrence.
I don't really have an alternative theory. My best guess would be that it was just random chance. For example, here on the Wiki it says that in a meeting in Spain in July 2001, a middleman expressed that bin-Laden wished for the operation to go ahead ASAP. This old CNN article about an Al-Jazeera documentary that talked with the same middleman before he was captured by US forces recounts the anecdote of how Atta revealed the final date of the attack to him, which has no mention at all of the significance of the date (while it does confirm that the date was in given in the Gregorian calendar). Both of these taken together imply to me that there was no or little group-wide discussion and that the date was chosen for practical reasons.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
First off, if my posts come across as confrontational or angry I apologize and will try to tone it down. My thought process wasn't "ha, I'm gonna nail him down on a potential minor mistake in a huge effortpost" but more like "huh, this sounds interesting but conflicts with my background knowledge (i.e. Muslim calendar vs Western ones), let's do a quick search to see if it checks out". FWIW, I upvoted and appreciated the original post.
Second, I think you need to go back and reread the OP. I never claimed the the numbers 9/11 held special significance to Muslims. I claimed that the date, that is the anniversary of the siege, was significant.
But the Muslim anniversary would have been on December 5, 2001, because that's Ramadan 19, 1422 and the battle at the end of the Siege of Vienna was on September 11/12, 1683 Gregorian or Ramadan 19/20, 1094 Hijri, unless my date conversion is mistaken (see below). That's where I got skeptical: I understand that it's not about the numbers but about the anniversary, but using the calendar religious Muslims follow there is no anniversary to speak of on 9/11, 2001. If Muslims care about the anniversary (and I can buy that there are Muslims who do), I'd expect them to do so on wherever Ramadan 19 happens to fall on in a given Gregorian year.
You did already mention that it might be about sending a mutually understandable message and that does make sense. However, I'd still like to see more direct proof that this is a thing in these circles. The conversations you had with people on the ground are no doubt illustrative, but not accessible by me. I had simply hoped that there would be more material evidence out there to support that statement, something like a famous cleric writing a fatwa specifically referencing the Gregorian anniversary or something like that.
The date would not have been announced as Ramadan 19, it would have been the 22nd or 23rd of Jumada depending on your time zone.
I'm using this website for conversion and it spits out the dates I mentioned above. I double-checked by typing "september 11 1683 in hijri" into Google and it concurs. 22nd and 23rd of Jumada[al-Thani/al-Akhirah probably] seem to be 9/11 2001. It's probably because the way I worded it was bad writing, but in that paragraph I was always talking about the date of the siege, not the terrorist attacks. Accordingly, the news I mentioned would be that of the defeat at Vienna, not of the Twin Towers.
You ask me why I think a Wahhabi or some other flavor of Sunni Revivalist would care about the Seige of Vienna and that's how I can tell that you've never actually talked to one and that your alleged "web search" must have been half-assed or non-existant because when given the opportunity to talk about this stuff it seems like half of them wont shut up.
That's a bit of a misread of what I meant, most likely due to clumsy writing on my part. It's not the idea that such people would care about the siege that I'm skeptical about, in fact I find such obsessions rather likely given other things we know about e.g. al-Qaeda in particular, it's the notion that they would do so under the label 9/11 instead of thinking about the date in their own native tradition, which given the above should be Ramadan 19 or 9/19 (unless I'm mistaken).
I did search for about 20 minutes and found several forum/stackoverflow-clone-for-history threads talking about the same idea, which is how I found the contributions by Lawrence and Hitchens as well as the CNN article. I don't speak Arabic and accordingly don't have unfiltered access to the ideas from that part of the world. If you have a link to some kind of source, Western or Middle Eastern, to share I'd genuinely appreciate it, I'm a sucker for these kind of minor historical anecdotes and connections.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Maybe whites overall have been told more over childhood an later life that being a good person requires not having racial biases and when filling out surveys people may (perhaps subconsciously) not describe themselves but instead their good-person-ideal, or what they know they should be.
But this still constitutes a real signal, doesn't it? The guidelines imparted by society generally do not have explicit racial clauses in them. While open racial camaraderie or preferences are often tolerated if done by non-whites the general societal script still prescribes universal tolerance, politeness and equality of opportunity, and this is taught to children of all backgrounds. That whites are the only ones to publicly commit to that (even if they don't live up to the ideal) is still something.
I'd be more convinced by studies that somehow measure people's behavior in the real world (I don't know, hiring stats or something, as an example) instead of just asking questions on paper.
In the context of outgroup-ingroup bias that raises the question of how to account for society-wide behavior. While it might be the case that white business owners hire people with the surname "Zapata" (or "Abadi" if we're talking about Europe) less often than people named "Anderson", how would such a study account for the fact that it's rather uniquely societies like the ones that brought forth these white business owners that allow a situation such that there are millions of Zapatas, many of them equipped with citizenship, available to be hired in the first place.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Maybe you think that the EU is less united than it appears, and winter will be harder than Europeans are prepared for.
This is definitely a side note to all the other things going in this thread, but I can't help but wonder how this will play out. I just received a notice from my German gas provider and the price per cubic meter has gone up x5, that's on top of a 60% increase in electricity price. Fortunately my wife works at a place where they're legally obligated to keep the heating on, I do WFH and am unusually cold-resistant and whatever else we'll actually consume fits comfortably in our budget, but not everyone has that privilege.
Across Europe, there will be a large number of people that will be unable to pay for some of the basics of life this winter. Assuming that they'll not just be content to lay down and die, this might have serious consequences starting from cascading economic consequences of non-payment of absurd utility bills to populist parties surging in support. Another thing to consider is that this winter we're still able to largely run off of Russian gas which filled our storage tanks over the summer. That won't be the case next winter.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Let's go best case scenario. Even if these immigrants do end up integrating into Western society and adopting their values - I'd say that's definitely still something one should be worried about. Western culture itself seems absolutely intent on stirring up racial animosity between the groups, as well as creating and maintaining a threat narrative that paints whites as being deserving of contempt regardless of whether they actually did anything or not.
Another point here is that even if the ideal version of integrating into Western society works out instead of the one where the different ethnic groups are living in strife, that still leaves such a society on the very same long term path OP is complaining about, unless a lot of other things radically change as well. Migrants who are productive, who attain academic degrees, who don't make constant tribalistic or ethnocentric comments have birthrates very similar to the ones of Western white majorities. The problem of demographic replacement applies to "good" minorities just as well as to whites!
I brought it up on the old place a while ago and it's an illustrative example: probably the most famous and accomplished migrants (of Turkish heritage at least) here in Germany, BioNTech (known through the Pfizer vaccine) founders and married couple Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, have just one child, despite their fabulous wealth. Meanwhile, the Arab crime families of major German cities like the Abou-Chacker- or Remmo-clan are expanding demographically at a fast pace.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Why are gypsies so very hard to integrate in to societies yet their ethnic brethren from North India much easier?
The ethnic brethren from North India that make it to the West are the ones with a job offer and university education. You'd expect such people to have an easier time fitting in regardless of ethnic origin. Also, the Wiki article about Roma people states in its section about genetic inquiries into their origins that the original population that migrated westwards was quite small, as evidenced by founder effects like several heritable diseases being quite frequent in modern European Roma. Given this, it's very plausible that there are also other genetic oddities in Roma compared to the broader population of their ancestral homeland.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
That depends on how much of a difference AI will make, doesn't it? If advanced AI enables big American corps to churn out absurdly efficient code or highly advanced machine designs in minimal time, what will sclerotic German companies do?
I used to work at Siemens and half the people employed as programmers there thought that automating things in Excel was black magic, let alone doing basic things in Python with libraries like pandas. The difference in productivity compared to its rivals is small enough that coasting on momentum of past strengths might be sufficient to stay relevant in the present, but strong AI could plausibly make a lot of crusty German institutions obsolete in a way that our lawmakers won't be able to compensate for.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
But what if it goes mainstream, and from subconscious to conscious?
In some ways, it kind of has. The overwhelming consensus in mainstream discourse is the environmental model of intelligence/capability/doing-well-in-modern-society: if you have loving parents, went to a good school/college, had good nutrition etc. you're going to be more likely to be successful in a wide range of metrics and the mentioned things are causally affecting this. At the same time, a common narrative is how certain groups, e.g. ethnic minorities, the poor or people from the Global South have less access to things like Spanish immersion daycare or well-funded schools, i.e. exactly the things that are supposed to boost intellectual capability.
The obvious conclusion when considering these ideas together is that at this very moment, even if it's subject to change and also the result of unethical acts like Colonialism or racial segregation, generally speaking a rich person will be smarter than a poor person, a white one smarter than a black one, a westerner smarter than a third-worlder. This also goes for a lot of other things education/the environment in general is sometimes said to cause in people, e.g. open-mindedness, kindness or critical thinking. Taking the environmental model seriously, all the disadvantaged groups should be seriously lacking in these things, at least in comparison to people with stable finances or those going to Harvard.
Now, obviously no one is shouting exactly that from the roofs in mainstream media. Instead, a popular approach, often documented in this space, has been to say that certain groups are lacking by Western/white standards, but only because those standards were implicitly or explicitly constructed to systematically supress other, equally valid ways of knowing and societal conduct. A well-known incarnation of that idea is the now-removed chart that the NMAAHC had on its website for a short while (1, 2, 3). This isn't quite the same as a full on 4chan IQ-redpill link dump and it's also not attributing anything to genes, but it's still acknowledging significant and pervasive (and therefore hard to change) group differences all the same.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Why so? You think the two week gap has that much statistical power? That would only be over a short timespan.
How much fake efficacy can be created this way depends on both how many people are infected in the beginning and the current rate at which the disease is spreading. Running a toy SIR model of a 0% mortality disease with R0 1.14 (that's apparently the median estimate for wild-type Covid under Western lockdown) and 100 people, 10 of which are infected at the start, you end up with a total of 46 infected people after 10 weeks.
If you apply the accounting trick and only count infections starting after week 2, you instead get 29 total infections, so even a saline injected population would imply a vaccine efficacy of ~40% simply by counting this way. If R0 were 0.85 instead, you'd get 50% VE, if only 2 of 100 start out as infected it'd be 20%, if 10 people were already recovered at the start of the study you'd get 60% etc. pp. Point is: how much of an effect this can have depends a lot on the initial conditions of the population you're studying.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
It wasn't until after Biden's assuming of office that ultra-rapid vaccination rollouts, universally, became the cause celebre of the progressive press
Speaking of Biden, here's a pretty famous quote from July 2021:
You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.
I have no doubt that specific scientific writing was clear that a reduction in infections was a probabilistic thing and might wane as time goes on, but here you have the most powerful man in the world, whose administration was trying to mandate the vaccines in various ways and is still requiring them for entering the country as a foreigner, confidently stating that they confer sterile immunity. I'd say that outweighs whatever science reporting or personal anecdotes from upper-class London you can bring to the table.
Throwing in my own anecdotes, the German press was absolutely completely on the same wavelength as Biden here, solid looking and repeated promises about immunity against infection were like 95% of the reason I myself got vaccinated. A common talking point in German (social) media in early 2021 was how Israel had "vaccinated away" its Delta wave. For months on end, even as the divergence steadily shrank and several scandals in data collection undermined its trustworthiness, public health authorities and their lackies in the media obsessed over the differences in unvaccinated and vaccinated case rates, a talking point that is now completely forgotten.
Mainstream COVID discourse was 100% thoroughly permeated with the idea that the vaccines are going to stop transmission up until late summer 2021. This only started to go away in the fall and died completely with the emergence of Omicron.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
This only applies to situations where there are multiple valid ways or timings to proceed and augury can help you to randomly pick one. In other cases, augury might commit you to pointless or even disastrous decisions. Consider this example from the Anabasis (this is quite late in the book where the Greek army had already reached the Hellenized parts of modern northwestern Turkey):
Thereupon the generals sacrificed, in the presence of the Arcadian seer, Arexion; for Silanus the Ambraciot had chartered a vessel at Heraclea and made his escape ere this. Sacrificing with a view to departure, the victims proved unfavourable to them. Accordingly they waited that day. Certain people were bold enough to say that Xenophon, out of his desire to colonise the place, had persuaded the seer to say that the victims were unfavourable to departure. Consequently he proclaimed by herald next morning that any one who liked should be present at the sacrifice; or if he were a seer he was bidden to be present and help to inspect the victims. Then he sacrificed, and there were numbers present; but though the sacrifice on the question of departure was repeated as many as three times, the victims were persistently unfavourable. Thereat the soldiers were in high dudgeon, for the provisions they had brought with them had reached the lowest ebb, and there was no market to be had.
This scene also happened while at the exact midway point between two Greek cities in the territory of a hostile Anatolian tribe. A little while later a scouting party is attacked and almost wiped out by hostile cavalry that had time to arrive in the time the army sat around idle. It's only after the supply of sacrificial animals runs out and oxen pulling the wagons have to be used instead that finally the signs are favourable.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Barely. As the other post mentioned, it's only until April, but, more importantly, it's only three locations for which no new fuel will be purchased. That means that in January at the latest all three plants will have to greatly reduce their power output in order to be able to run all the way into April, at least according to the company maintaining operations.
It should also be mentioned that this decision was only reached after months of discussion. As late as two days ago it seemed plausible that the original end date (the new year) would stay simply because the parties in the governing coalition couldn't agree on this. It has only happened now because the chancellor used a special and very rarely used provision in German law that allows him to shutdown any debate within the (executive branch of the) government on its course of action.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
My first reaction when I heard of Musk's plans here was that this does indeed sound a bit harsh, however, that was before I found out that Twitter apparently employs 7500 people. I get that Musk is controversial and has enough of a reputation by now that many people will view his suggestions with instinctive disapproval, but even as someone who doesn't like his personality, I can't help but agree with him here: what are they even doing with 7k people? When was the last time Twitter rolled out a significant feature?
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
... reads exactly like "race is a social construct" except you're constructing it in a way convenient to your particular (somewhat idiosyncratic) white nationalist sentiments.
That just gets back to the common Motte-and-Bailey of "race is a social construct", doesn't it? On a narrow reading, it clearly is, as OP's personal account of racial categorization provides evidence for. On the reading with the further implication of "... and therefore whatever racial groupings are often used are entirely arbitrary [and have no grounding in biology whatsoever]", which is the one that's often meant when the phrase is used in arguments, I'd say it's clearly not, and OP provides a few reasons to think that, e.g. phenotype or various degrees of admixture.
In other words, I don't see the own-goal here, OP seems clearly aware that racial categorization draws both from cultural attitudes and genetic facts. You could basically read his posts as: "this is my social construction of whiteness, here's why I think it captures something about objective reality and why it's socially useful".
Three days ago, my hometown Berlin witnessed an event (German news article) that combines several culture war flashpoints into an almost absurdist melange: a cyclist was driven over by a concrete mixer truck (who was at fault is unclear at the moment, initial statements by the police indicate that the cyclist fell over by her own and that the driver could not react in time, though he might still be at fault for driving too close to her), the driver, as he was leaving his vehicle to call for help, was attacked and wounded with a knife by an unknown and currently fugitive homeless* person, resulting in him needing hospital care, and finally, to top it all off, the special emergency service vehicle purpose built for rescuing people stuck under heavy vehicles was hindered in its approach to the scene of the accident by a traffic jam caused by climate activists who had glued themselves to one of the main highways of the city, losing valuable time and forcing personnel that had made it to the scene to "improvise", in their own words. The woman has died of her injuries today, the driver will survive, as far as is known.
It goes without saying that this story has something for everyone: car drivers vs bikers & new urbanists; crime, homelessness and decay of public spaces; climate activists vs people wanting to go about their day without disruption; and of course the extra comedic cherry on top that this happened in Berlin, notorious for incompetence and embarrassing gaffes.
In the days that followed, several notable people weighed in on social media. One particular take by one of the luminaries of German climate activism quickly made waves on social and legacy media for its display of a pretty cold-bloded pragmatism:
#cyclist mortally injured: "special vehicle for lifting the truck came late due to blockades and the traffic jam they caused"
shit, but don't be intimidated: it's climate fight, not climate cuddling & shit happens.
(image of the now deleted original)
Now, this guy in particular was always pretty radical, but until now this exact scenario was always waved away as something improbable that no activist of good conscience would allow to happen. As already mentioned, after the backlash he quickly deleted it and apologized, but his output since then has been to basically affirm the content of the tweet in a more polite tone, and the scene around him seems to agree AFAICT.
The last few months have seen an increase in highly visible stunts by climate activists, most notably a constant flow of people gluing themselves to the glass casings around famous paintings throughout Europe's museums. Highway blockades such as the one from this event are becoming a regular occurrence here in Berlin and other large German cities. It seems as though climate activism is becoming more and more serious. Up until now, reactions have been more annoyed than angry, with most people I talked to or saw posting on social media dismissing these activities as childish stunts. This and the rather unapologetic stance of the people involved might change things a bit. It remains to be seen if the reaction will be a decrease in happenings as activists are slapped down by prohibitive fines or a further radicalization. Demographically, the protestor seem to be a mixture of almost entirely urban and college-educated young people and a few younger Boomers and older Gen-Xers. I don't know if that's the stuff which refinery bombers or electricity-cable cutters are made of, but perhaps an event approaching significant eco-terrorism might be on the horizon.
* I remember reading something to this effect initially, but that seems to have been retracted or deleted. For now, nothing but the assailant's gender is confirmed.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
I could swear I read in one of the news articles that witnesses described the assailant as a man with unkempt hair and tattered clothing, but as of now all articles I could find only confirm his gender, but nothing else. I'll edit it.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Not sure how much help it'll be to you, but here's a page containing all the articles the author of the tweet I quoted published for the Rosa Luxemburg institute, which is institutionally and ideologically very close to the "Die Linke" ("The Left") party. Most of this material is German only, but if you switch to English a few have been translated, like this latest one from May 2020.
From what I can tell from reading a few articles, what he's saying here largely conforms with what I've seen elsewhere: dismissal of market based solutions (interestingly, in an article from 2015 carbon taxes are mentioned as a valid tool in tandem with more direct interventions like mandating the phase-out of coal, in the 2020 article however he advocates full on socialization of the means of production as a precondition for success), the need for faster and way more radical action right now (society waking up to the reality of climate change 10 years too alte is a common theme of the newer stuff) and a focus on climate justice aspects, especially with regards to Global North vs. Global South.
So in other words, he's not hoping for an initiative of current governments or private enterprise as anything more than a temporary thing, he wants a total transformation of society along broadly Marxist lines which would then be able to tackle climate change effectively and ethically (I guess, the things he mentions and the party association obviously imply that, but he doesn't mention Marx or communism by name). I'm sure this doesn't reflect on the entire movement, I'd say the median member is much more concerned about climate change than about climate justice, but among the leadership this line of thinking seems very common to me.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
An interesting related aspect: I was watching this interview with the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman on his Vision 2030 project, basically aimed at propelling Saudi Arabia forward and lessening its dependence on oil (you might have heard of parts of it like NEOM or, most recently, the Line). Right in the opening few minutes, he goes into detail how such a transformation is necessary because (paraphrasing) the Saudi population has grown at such a rapid pace that the living standard secured by fossil fuel wealth is in danger.
He doesn't directly draw a connection to his social reforms, but I was wondering if there might be at least a partial intent there: increase women's liberation, reduce the birth rate, stop his barren desert country from becoming overpopulated.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
The question is whether the Salvadoran or Hmong Republicans will be similar in their beliefs, both explicit (e.g. policy proposals) and implicit (values or behavioral traits), to today's Republicans or whether the term Republican will come to mean something different. Someone recently posted this analysis by a user from the old forum (don't know if he's on here), and if this is accurate it suggest that even the additional European immigration from outside a vague Northern European cultural sphere already greatly shifted political leanings in the general population, and the Hmong and Salvadorans did and will shift it even further.
In light of this, I don't think the assumption of your argument, i.e. that we shouldn't care about demographic change because incoming populations will politically assimilate, is broadly false: the trappings and names of the past might be kept, there will be probably continue to be Republicans and Democrats well into the future, but the actual content underneath these labels has shifted in patterns largely dependent on the underlying demographics.
DimitriRascalov
1yr ago
Don't know about Korea, but at least for Germany there were some notable differences even before the split after WWII. To name a few:
-
the east was much more agrarian than the west, although there were of course many industrial centers like Halle, Berlin or Breslau/Wrocław but these were much more spread-out than in the west
-
politically, the east was dominated by the protestant Junker class, the descendants of the feudal nobility that conquered/colonized the east, while in the west industrialist families like the Krupps had the most influence, with a much more mixed religious background overall, as most German Catholics lived in the areas that were to become part of West Germany
-
in terms of cultural history, the west was largely congruent with the core German territory since the first time there was something like Germany, while the east was a colonial conquest taken from the territory of the relatively unorganized Western Slavic tribes like the Sorbs or the Pomeranians that were stuck between Medieval Germany and Poland. Go back in history far enough and I guarantee that anyone whose ancestors have lived in Eastern Germany for a while will have a lot of Slavic ancestry, this is completely unusual for Western Germany outside of regions that have received heavy Polish immigration in the Industrial Age
(also @Syo)
Maybe these maps help: SPD, USPD, KPD; for comparison NSDAP, DNVP (monarchists, revanchists and hard conservatives), Zentrum (Catholic centrists and conservatives).
Looking at these, I agree that there is a trend, but it's not that strong and centered less on East Germany as a whole and more on Saxony* in particular, especially for the KPD votes. Both Nazis and DNVP were pretty strong in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg and Pomerania, all three of which would become part of the DDR.
*Funnily enough, my parents always called the Saxons the 5th occupying power (besides Russia, the US, France and the UK), because chances were high when talking to a representative of state power like a policeman in East Berlin you'd be spoken to in Saxon dialect. EDIT: I just found this article from the early 60s that investigates this cliché via a statistical deep dive quite like the debates about Jewish overrepresentation elsewhere in this thread. The result: while strongly overrepresented among the chief leaders of the DDR, Saxons are actually underrepresented in various important committees and positions.
Within those less conservative nations, it's the more conservative subset having more children however. In Germany, refugees, recent migrants and obscure evangelical sects have tons of children, everyone else has mostly one, with sizeable minorities having none or two. How would your model explain this? More conservatism on the national level causes lower birthrates, but at the level of broad social subgroups it causes higher ones? Doesn't make sense IMO.
More options
Context Copy link