MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3hr ago
At least two - Germany and Switzerland. (You may have meant only one country in the EU). Belgium and Spain are marginal cases - they don't use the word but they are probably federal in substance - definitely the top-tier subunits have executive, legislative and at least some judicial power entrenched in the constitution.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3hr ago
The UK and USA are both explicitly not nation-states from their foundings - that is why they have "United" in their names. (FWIW, Belgium doesn't work as a nation-state either and the Flemish-speaking Belgians who talk like it is one are somewhat ambivalent about including French-speaking Belgians in their project)
You can have a concept of Britishness as a civic identity shared by a closed class of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish (or Northern Irish) people, although there isn't an attempt to actually do that until modern right-populist movements, and it goes down like a lead balloon with the Scottish and Welsh. But the idea that an Englishman and a Scot are part of the same blood-and-soil folk community is offensive to both of us.
The US just is a nation of immigrants as a matter of historical fact. The de facto leader of the anti-immigration movement in American is the grandson and husband of immigrants.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3hr ago
I use a similar definition - fascism is totalitarian socialism with right-wing aesthetics. (As opposed to communism, which is totalitarian socialism with left-wing aesthetics).
Incidentally, although Singapore is a long way off being totalitarian socialism with neoliberal aesthetics, it is proof of concept that it would be possible.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4hr ago
This is in the context where the US government has accepted a (probably below-market) premium for quasi-commercial insurance. Sending Xi an invoice would be the US ratting out on an obligation it voluntarily accepted as a gutsy move just a few weeks prior.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
18hr ago
There are a lot fewer stories of the Gilded Age billionaires being personally depraved than there would be for an equivalently-sized group of medieval aristocrats whose escapades were equivalently well-documented. "Robber baron" refers to business practices that were and are considered evil by leftists, but in many cases are still SOP today.
They really were better people than most elites through history. I suspect they were better people than most modern-day billionaires, although it is hard to tell because modern-day celebrities are so well-documented that you hear about every minor extramarital affair, which would not have been the case back in the Gilded Age.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
18hr ago
Particularly if they were headed for China. "US taxpayer spends billions bailing out the Chinese because of Trump's unnecessary war" is a very easy message to demagogue.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
21hr ago
Yep - this only makes sense if the US can protect shipping, which is unlikely given what we know about the relevant technology (note that based on experiences in Ukraine, the main threat is now land-based drones). It may even only make sense if the US can selectively protect US-insured shipping.
Of course, it not making sense doesn't guarantee Trump won't do it.
The market is apparently clearing again, after a morning where you couldn't buy insurance for shipping through the Straits of Hormuz at any price. The cost is about 3% of the sum insured for a 1-way passage*, an order of magnitude higher than the pre-war price. I suspect that is low enough that ships will start moving again, and we won't see Trumpsurance materialise. Nobody is going to be sailing into a war zone based on a Truth Social post, so until Trumpsurance is at least an executive order it isn't going to affect the facts on the ground.
If I was Trump, I would structure the offer as cheap reinsurance to Berkshire Hathaway (who are the only US insurer sophisticated enough to compete with Lloyds of London) allowing them to undercut the London marine insurance market for primary insurance - a low probability of success but cheap and high-reward attempt to move commercial insurance business from London to the US. Using Berkshire as an intermediary also avoids the "would you buy insurance from a man like Donald Trump?" problem - Buffett's integrity is unquestionable, as is Ajit Jain's (and presumably Greg Abel's, though I don't know enough about him).
* Cargo is usually worth more than the ship, so insuring a VLCC for a round trip is going to be ~5% of the value of the oil
I was thinking actual rich people, not just the upper-middle-class. Not necessarily billionaires, but biglaw partners, VP-level corporate executives, bank MDs. Also prominent politicians, who have a similar level of status as the above even if they only have upper-middle-class incomes.
I don't have any visibility into what kind of second wife a multi-millionaire small business owner in the sticks would go for.
FWIW, the divorced and remarried doctors in my social circle all remarried nurses.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Very much agreed - lore when I was a teenager considering careers was that doctors had some of the highest divorce rates as a result. (No idea if this was or is correct or not)
But the same is true of any other high-earning upper-middle-class career, apart from the life-or-death aspect. The thing that is different about doctors that makes marrying a doctor a meme is their visibility. I suspect marrying a doctor really is the easiest route for a lower-middle-class woman to enter the upper-middle-class.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Not the second time, either.
The typical trophy second wife is either a PR girl or some kind of art ho (like Lauren Sanchez Bezos)
On the flip side, medicine is unusually legible to marriage-minded women who are into that kind of thing as a high-potential career track. There is a reason why <culture X> mother jokes involve the daughter marrying a doctor.
You could probably use "What fraction of lower-middle class women want to be a doctor's wife?" as a measure of family-orientation across ethnic groups.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The Blue tribe is the Jews. To be more precise, the Blue Tribe is the Anglo-Jewish culture that appears when not-Orthodox PMC Jews and PMC WASPS start working at the same banks/law firms etc. and joining the same golf clubs.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I think the canonical Judeo-Hapa text is Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The precise date of that invention is controversial. My understanding is that "at the dawn of civilisation" is the late estimate.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
"If you're not getting laid, you're not praying hard enough" is a message that gets applied by cucked pastors to married sex as well as premarital sex.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Yes - the Arabs rejected a UN-backed partition plan, invaded Palestine, and lost. During the war the Arab population of the contested territory left/was driven out, with more than enough blame to go round. Some of what the Israelis did probably counts as ethnic cleansing. But that was the norm pre-1945 - if you start a war and lose, you are SOL. If you win a just war, you are allowed to keep the spoils. Nobody complains about the ethnic cleansing of Germans at the end of WW2.
After WW2, there are a bunch of humanitarian treaties which establish the principle that it is no longer acceptable to move ethnic groups around by force. But these were agreed with the understanding that they were not retroactive - the German cleansings or the various ethnic cleansings associated with Indian Partition were recognised as irreversible. By 1950 it is expected that decolorisations will happen without ethnic cleansing. By the time of the Six Day War in 1967 it is absolutely clear that Israel isn't allowed to ethnically cleanse its new territory, so they don't.
The inane arguments about the morality of the Nabka seem to me to boil down to whether it should be judged under WW2-era or post-WW2 standards. Or to put into lawyerspeak, the Israelis are right on the edge of the statute of limitations for ethnic cleansings.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The problem is that the opposite is true from a domestic perspective. "Iran" is the endonym of the various Persian empires, whereas "Persia" is the region (and "Persian" the tribe) from which the Achaemenid and Sassanid dynasties originated.
If a historical quirk meant that the rest of the world called England "Plantagenetia" after the historical dynasty, asking them to use an endonym would be sufficiently popular domestically that we would do it even if it hurt our soft power.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The USA, with the Nicaraguan Contras as a group analogous to Hezbollah. The USSR, with the IRA, ETA, PLO, etc. etc. ad nauseam as groups analogous to Hezbollah.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Doubt was enough, because it is difficult to prove a negative.
On the Iraqi nuclear programme (as opposed to chemical weapons, which were deliberately conflated with nukes under the WMD label) there was never any real doubt that the programme had made very little progress and had been dismantled after the first Gulf War - the Bush administration just lied.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Israel isn't the country it was even in 2014 - religious Jews outbreeding secular Jews has changed the balance of power.
There was a soft right wing of Likud, including people like Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, who thought that Israel's best hope of security was to annex as much land with as few Palestinians as possible, build a fence to keep the vast majority of the Palestinians out, and rely on American support (based on shared interests and values) for defence against Iran and friends. That soft right is now de facto the centre left (parties like Kadima and Blue & White), and even so can't win elections against the Netanyahu coalition. (The only government without Likud since 2009 was a short-lived monstrosity formed when far-right Naftali Bennett went into coalition with the centre-left because he was disgusted by Netanyahu's personal corruption. It lasted 18 months, after which Bennett's party was wiped out).
Netanyahu's coalition don't want to build a fence (at least in the West Bank - Gaza is a shithole nobody wants) - they want to fill Eretz Israel with Jews (sometimes explicitly for religious reasons - religious Zionists are a core part of the coalition) and somehow-or-other have the Palestinians who currently exist there go away. And given a choice between relying on God or the United States for Israel's security, they are going to choose God. Israeli religious Zionists don't have shared interests and values with the US, but there is a popular evangelical heresy which wrongly teaches that they do. Given Netanyahu's ability (or at least perceived ability) to sic AIPAC (in a Democratic primary) or Christian Zionist evangelicals (in a Republican primary) on individual American politicians who cross him, his approach to the US is closer to oderint dum metuant.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Mainstream discourse might act like female attraction is meritocratic, but in my experience if one talks to actual women they tend to be quite open about the non-meritocratic nature of their attraction to men.
The Blue Tribe has decreed that only feminists are allowed to have an opinion on gender relations, and feminists will insist that female sexuality is meritocratic on average (while defending any individual woman's choices to date badboys, especially their own) because to do otherwise makes women look bad.
This is made worse because the Red Tribe thinks that the people who should be listened to on gender relations are pastors who are , in the current year, more likely than not to say that female sexuality is meritocratic even if they are otherwise-conservative evangelicals. The idea that if you aren't getting laid you must not be praying hard enough is sufficiently pervasive in modern American Christian culture that even the otherwise admirable TitaniumButterfly AAQC hints at it.
It also didn't help that Roissy deliberately chose a term ("alpha") that implies female sexuality is meritocratic (but with a less pussified definition of "merit" than the standard one) while correctly insisting that it is not, and a lot of less talented manosphere writers following him didn't understand that he was using "alpha" in a sense where the positive connotations were ironic.
And access to the ground truth is not available to the men who need it because women do not discuss their own sexuality frankly around men they do not trust. Women being open about their non-meritocratic sexuality happens in all-female settings or in the kind of art fag-ridden mixed groups where straight men who can't get laid are already selected out. Hence the advice to read bestselling Amazon romance slop to understand what women want rather than asking them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Bullying followed the Hollywood pattern (athletes and the children of the super-rich were the ringleaders, low-status kids were the losers, all tempered by the basic fact that older boys are socially dominant over younger boys) at the expensive British private school I attended in the 1990's. The only difference was that nerds were not low-status because the school culture valued academics and classical music as much as athletics and partying. Though when your rival for the hottest girl in the class is all of 6'2", vice-captain of rugby, solo bass-baritone in the choir, and one of the top 2 in his year in maths and physics, the precise criterion you fall behind on doesn't matter. (He personally wasn't a bully, as far as I was aware of)
Bezos was already rich by normal-person standards after four years at DE Shaw, during which he was promoted unusually rapidly so was presumably a high performer. (Incidentally, I think this answers the question about where Bezos Sr got the $600k from - a lot of it was Jeff's own money but in the 1990's startup culture daddy was a better story).
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