MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
12d ago
heredi Jews, the Amish, Mennonites, and other similar groups.
Two very different models. The Haredim have a social model based on parasitism (both in Israel and the US) and the main source of income in Haredi communities is fiscal transfers. The Mennonites and Amish (which are descended from the same Swiss Anabaptist sect) are probably slightly fiscally negative at the margin but social model values economic self-sufficiency at the community level.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15d ago
Very little of Europe - probably just Berlin, which is the crunchiest city in Continental Europe, driven by some combination of the west Germans who moved there during the Cold War to dodge the draft and the hippies who moved there to take advantage of cheap rents immediately after the Wall came down.
In formerly-Catholic Europe (I have personal experience with France, Spain, Italy and Poland) vegetarianism is seen as a weird Anglosphere perversion (veganism even more so) and the only decent vegetarian food is traditional cuisine-of-the-poor which typically uses cheese as the main protein. A fond memory of my trip to Naples was seeing a solo American female who appeared to be EPLing being shown the door after bothering the only English-speaking waiter about her "intolerances" and being told that there were only three vegetarian items on the menu (two of which were the margherita pizza and the arrabbiata pasta) and she could take or leave them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
I’m willing to believe that they’re so much more dense, but I want to understand the mechanism. Is it heavily mid-rise? Is it the reduced car infrastructure? Has their density trended up or down in the postwar era?
Mostly 6-story residential vs 2 as the default. You don't see many single-family homes with garages in Paris proper.
For comparison, SF proper is 800k people at 19k/square mile, Inner London is 3.4 million at 28k/square mile, Paris proper is 2.1 million at 52k/square mile, and Manhattan is 1.6 million at 75k/square mile. SF is mostly 2-story single-family houses. Inner London is mostly 2-3-story rowhouses. Paris is mostly midrise apartment buildings, Manhattan is a mixture of midrise and highrise. You can see an almost perfect linear relationship between building height and population density.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
Apart from anti-Civil Rights political violence in the south, of which there was a lot (the rioters were right-wing, but would have been registered Democrats), the Hardhat riots are the most obvious example of right-wing political violence in the time period you are looking at. Over 100 people, including 7 cops, were hospitalised. Given the partisan politics of NYC construction unions, you can call it a Democratic riot on a technicality (the ringleaders were construction union officers who were registered Democrats, and they were protesting the decision of liberal Republican mayor James Lindsay to fly a flag at half-mast after the Kent State shootings), the rioters were condemned by national Democratic leaders and praised by the Nixon administration.
Opposition to forced bussing was mostly peaceful, but anti-bussing riots in Louisville in 1975 involved police cars being torched and widespread use of tear gas, so I assume there were multiple injuries. Again, given the partisan politics of the white South, the rioters were probably registered Democrats.
But my google-fu is telling me that
- The vast majority of political violence in the US during this period was race-related.
- After 1963 or so, the vast majority of the race-related violence is black urban riots.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
We have something called "free sifting of evidence". This means courts can use evidence no matter how it was gathered; even if the police themselves commit crimes or had no reasonable suspicion whatsoever this is a separate matter and won't get the evidence "thrown out" or the like.
It is the US that is the outlier with its strong exclusionary rule (so the rights of guilty criminals are well-protected) and strong qualified immunity (so the rights of innocent people are not). Most civil law countries have no exclusionary rule and no qualified immunity at all. Most Commonwealth countries have weaker exclusionary rules - for example Canada only excludes illegally-obtained evidence if admitting it would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
In my experience it could be best stated as there's a subculture of anarchists/communists who basically participate in every left-aligned protest, but many of the protests (particularly bigger ones on popular subjects like anti-austerity or LGBTQ+ rights) will also attract a changing crowd of other, more normie types, which means the anarchist/communist contigent is less notable.
From a UK perspective, the problem is that the SWP crowd have the necessary skills to organise large protests which skirt the boundaries of legality, and the normies don't. So unless the protest is organised by some other group with access to those skills (like a union), it inevitably becomes a SWP-led protest. I became something of a meme in left-wing student circles after I was identified as "the Lib Dem who turned up at a demo in a black cab" - I had 50 protest signs with Lib Dem sympathetic messages to dish out to Lib Dem supporters and a taxi was the only way to get them from the sign printer to the protest in the time available. The SWP had pre-distributed 2 or 3 protest signs each with SWP-sympathetic messages to the 100+ activists they had milling around the start, and lots of non-SWP-supporters ended up carrying because they thought they were just picking up a spare sign from another protestor.
Also the folks who bring Palestine flags to every protest tend to be Middle-Easterners, often actual Palestinians, themselves.
In the 1990s most of the Middle Easterners in the UK were either rich Arabs (who didn't go on protests) or Turkish Cypriots (who don't care about Palestine). The "every demo is about Palestine" dynamic back then was definitely driven by white British lefties. Looking at media coverage, I think that 2024-vintage pro-Palestine protests in the UK are dominated by people from predominantly-Muslim ethnic groups, although I see more South Asians than Middle Easterners.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
14d ago
Bears might not attack you. Bears are more afraid of you than you are of them!
Bears seem to be one of the very few kinds of animal where this is not true. When I was hiking in Sequoia/King's Canyon National Park, the bears did not seem to be avoiding me, but I was definitely avoiding them. Both a sensible bear and a sensible human will run away if the other makes a credible threat display, but bears will ignore people who are not particularly threatening.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
In a general sense, I think university leftists have done a great job convincing college students that being anti-Israel, pro-Palestine is the default "leftist" "intellectual" position.
I think this is the wrong level of generality to look at it. Someone has convinced the students that the default leftist intellectual alignment is anti-establishment, despite Columbia being an establishment institution that largely exists to train the pro-establishment left. The pro-establishment left has been mostly pro-Israel since the Holocaust and solidly pro-Israel since before I was born. The anti-establishment left has been mostly pro-Palestine since the Nabka and solidly pro-Palestine since kibbutzim stopped being a useful example of really existing socialism. The changing views of leftwing students on Israel-Palestine is downstream of their changing views on the centre-left establishment.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
The critical point here is the meaning of "lower intelligence". Having IQ 90-100 servants with a good attitude is life-enriching because they do the crapwork so you don't have to. Having IQ 80-90 people in your space is just a problem because they can't even operate a washing machine correctly.
The other problem is that your servants won't retain a good attitude if they are going home to a place dominated by a violent oppositional culture where displaying any sign of servility is putting a target on you.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
This is so silly. The thing that makes a cuck cucked is that the children he is supporting are not biologically his. But (absent certain modern reproductive technology that is in practice only used by the infertile) your daughter's children will always be your biological grandchildren.
If you think about the social scripts about how RealMenTM deal with their future sons-in-law, you talk to your daughters' dates while cleaning your guns in order to convince them that she isn't available for casual sex, but once it is clear that the young man is suitable and his intentions are honourable, you are on the same side.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
It’s not the same people protesting every time.
I'm not directly familiar with US protest culture, but in the UK it so is. Sometimes they forget to change the protest signs and people march against student funding cuts behind a "Free Palestine" banner. We have a single-digit number of activist groups experienced in organising this kind of noisy, disruptive protest, and until the SWP collapsed due to sex scandals most of them were SWP front organisations.
Even if you look at people rather than orgs, we are talking about a subculture (strictly two subcultures because the socialist-anarchist split hasn't gone anywhere) involving a few thousand people split between a small number of big cities (mostly London and Bristol in the UK) which is cohesive to have its own values. The tribal values of the subculture that is socialist protest includes a hierarchy of issues, and Palestine is number 2 on the list after opposing US foreign policy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18d ago
Agreed - the story here is that Christian right has, consistently with the broader "pro-life" memeplex, always been sincere in their opposition to eugenics, and the links between Darwin and Margaret Sanger (and the early C20 Progressive memeplex more broadly) and support for eugenics are absolutely real - in the modern world where "eugenics bad" is near-universally accepted, this creates an open goal for the religious right which they are happy to kick the ball through at every opportunity.
There are not many cases where the religious right was on the right side of history by the woke left's own standards in living memory, but this is legitimately one of them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
The core financing system is savings-based - everyone in Singapore contributes 37% of their income (some of this is formally an employer contribution, but the incidence is on the employee) into a forced-savings fund. There is a complex formula which determines how much of that is allocated to the HSA "pot" (Medisave) but the effect is that most people end up with $1 less in their retirement pot for each $1 they spend on healthcare. This is backstopped by a government-subsidized catastrophic insurance fund (Medishield) and an indigent fund which is made deliberately unpleasant to claim from (Medifund).
But it looks like the secret sauce of how the system works is on the provider side - most Singapore hospitals are State-owned but commercially managed, and the Singapore government generally runs State-owned enterprises well. There is also a very deliberate class system - if a Singapore citizen stays in a class C ward (nightingale wards with no facilities and deliberately inferior food) the government picks up 65-80% of the bill and if they use a class B2 ward (similar but with 6-bed bays) the government picks up 50-65%. Class B1 patients get 4-bed bays, decent food, and phones and TV at the bedside and get 20% subsidy. Class A patients get a private room and pay full freight (including an extra $200 a night or so on top of class B1 to cover the room itself). Medisave and Medishield only cover the class B2 fees so you have to pay cash for B1 or A.
Don't even think about doing a PhD.
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