MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
No bio...
User ID: 1678
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1d ago
Looser sentences was absolutely a key focus of BLM. The fact that those demands predated BLM does not negate the fact. As for achievements? That's another story. But I think the goal for BDS is more tangible since most people don't really care much about Israel one way or another. That's why the Zionist lobby has been successful. It's enough for a small but passionate minority and you can have outsized impact on foreign policy. Domestic policy is trickier.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1mo ago
A few days ago, a Jewish event at UC Berkeley was violently shut down and now an upcoming event with Tzipi Livni at UCLA is being moved online for fear of violent disruptions. Worth noting that Ms. Livni is a liberal secularist with a history of arguing for the necessity of negotiations and a path to peace.
How representative are these of a broader shift against Israel within the left? The polls are mixed. On the one hand, the US public appears to be overwhelmingly favoring Israel over Hamas (>80%), but I am not sure if this means as much as Israel's supporters claim. I've seen many pro-Palestinians and anti-Zionists denounce Hamas for other reasons and I got the sense that not all of them were for sake of optics. And even many who refuse to condemn Hamas do so out of a "an oppressed people has a right to resist" framework rather than a genuine sympathy for the group.
It's worth recalling that even before Oct 7th, the sympathies for Israel among democrats in America were collapsing. My sense is that this trend was halted - and perhaps even reversed somewhat - in the immediate aftermath of the attack but soon began to resume its plunge. It now appears to be very difficult for even liberal Zionists to get a fair hearing among only Jewish audiences on progressive campuses, let alone to a wider public.
While it is true that the core groups making these interruptions are small and heavily concentrated among muslim and "POC" demographics, along with a few white leftists, what's remarkable to me is the wider silence among the broader progressive coalition. Many Jews have remarked upon this, that sympathy seems to be muted or even absent. There is an unwillingness to police these radicals among the wider liberal public, which seems to suggest a hidden reserve of silent sympathy which is not being publicly expressed.
The former AIPAC president Steve Rosen once said that the Israel lobby is like a nightflower: it best operates in the shade. That is now becoming impossible as progressives with a national profile such as AOC are publicly likening them to NRA. Another very important principle has been bipartisan support. Israel needs Western backing and among all Western countries, the US stands heat and shoulder above the rest. America was unique among Western countries that Israel had broad support among both the left and right for so long, whereas in Europe the left gave up on Israel early. The UK Labour party's Keir Starmer may try to resurrect matters after the Corbyn years, but one gets the sense he is fighting against his own base which is usually not ending well for leaders in the long run.
But this exceptionalism now appears to coming to a close as well. Support for Israel among the right-wing is as strong as ever, but being a Zionist is now increasingly a right-coded statement. It was remarkable to see Biden in his latest interview with Seth Myers to state publicly that he is a Zionist. It's an uncontroversial statement for a man of Biden's age, but I suspect it will be a toxic statement for liberals under the age of 40, at least among non-Jewish liberals. I think Israel becoming a bipartisan football is ultimately bad for the country, but I don't see how it ends any other way. And given how liberals dominate elite institutions in America, I'd argue that this does not augur well in the long run. If Biden loses in 2024 because of Michigan, then a narrative will be set that you cannot be too pro-Israel as a democrat anymore.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
2mo ago
One thing that I don't understand is how countries like France, with a larger and often more radicalised muslim population, doesn't seem to have the same problems. Sweden also has a larger muslim population (in proportionate terms) and while Jews in Sweden are under concurrent attack, at least elite institutions seem to weather the pressure fairly well. Their PM is openly saying things like immigrants from MENA have problems with antisemitism and even questioning their loyalty.
Perhaps it's a combination of two things. First, many Islamist radicals are not poor and downtrodden but often well-educated and from relatively more affluent families. Britain's status as a magnet for relatively more prosperous migrants from non-EU sources could perhaps account for this. Second, perhaps the British state itself has been a bit more hands-off rather than the forceful French assimilationist approach. I can't say that it seems like the French have succeeded with their attempts to assimilate these groups, but perhaps an inadvertent side benefit is that they have greater control over various radicals.
As a final note, in a sane society these remote Middle-Eastern squabbles should not have been a major issue in the domestic politics of various Western countries. But we are now well past that point in Europe.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
6mo ago
Glenn Greenwald has written up a good Twitter thread on the EU's proposed new draconian censorship laws. The pretext is that Slovakia's recent election resulted in a guy who has promised to end all Ukraine aid to end up winning it. This is all apparently due to "misinformation". Clearly when the voters have the wrong viewpoints, they must be treated with extra doses of correct thinking and anyone who deviates from it should summarily be punished. The law itself moves the onus onto the social media companies.
So if you think the era of censorship is over, think again. It's not just the EU. The Canadian parliament is also preparing something similar.
The most banal observation is that a system that is confident in its own survival does not need repression. The obvious implication is that the people running the system are not confident in their grip on power and in Europe in particular the big structural trend will be ever-increasing illegal migration once the Ukraine war passes. I suspect this censorship law will be used vigorously to deplatform anyone critical of the loose border policies the EU is promoting.
It's funny because we've long read about people in repressive societies like Iran, Turkey or China using VPN services to get around censorship by the regime. Might we get something similar in Europe in the not-too-distant future? I should add that I am not too pessimistic. People have tasted (relative) freedom and will not go back to the old regime. The rise of alternatives like Rumble is directly linked to increasing political repression on YouTube. Even outright totalitarian systems like the Soviet Union did not succeed in brainwashing their population. I've always felt that Aldous Huxley's dystopian vision of cheap entertainment to distract the masses was a better analogy to the Western elite's preferred methods of control over the more stereotypical 1984 vision that Orwell laid out. But clearly there are limits to how much you can distract people and now the gloves are coming off.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
10mo ago
Remember "creeping Sharia Law" that far-right hysterics were warning about 10-15 years ago? Of course it was always ridiculous, but now something pretty amusing has happened.
‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags
What stood out to me was the support of right-wing activists from nearby towns. So this isn't just a moslem issue, even white Republicans are joined up. Here in Europe, populists like Geert Wilders were often warning about how too many moslem immigrants would threaten liberal values but they've been supplanted by a newer generation of populists that appear to increasingly take a page out of America's right-wing playbook by uniting with moslems against the LGBT crowd.
For liberals it also creates a bizarre spectacle. They've been obsessed with white Christian "fascists" and often turned a blind eye towards immigrants. Many of these immigrants rarely had much in common with them on social issues. They just voted left because of economic interests and the fact that the white left is more likely to let their entire family back home settle in the West.
Another ironic twist is that the supposed "Great Replacement myth" is largely what facilitated this change. Moslems are now a clear supermajority in the city and the change happened relatively quickly. Liberals were demographically replaced by the people they brought in and now feel like they've been hosed. Can't feel much sympathy for those who use immigration as a political weapon against their domestic political enemies.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1mo ago
Michael Tracey, who has a good track record of predicting presidential winners, is saying Michigan augurs badly for Biden but not for the conventional reason most people are citing, i.e. the uncommitted vote is a bit overrated but looking at a larger set of indicators the picture changes.
Will Gaza even be a live issue by the time the real election finally rolls round?
Given that Israeli generals have said that the war will continue at least for this year (albeit in lower intensity), I suppose so. In addition, there are negotiations underway for an extended ceasefire to do a prisoner exchange. And all of this ignores a potential blowup in the North with Lebanon.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
6mo ago
Is the left-right distinction really the relevant political metric we should look at the in US?
The president of NYU's student bar association lost their job offer after expressing support for Hamas. I say they, because it's a trans person who also happens to be black. Can you hit higher on the diversity bingo? Well, take the wrong side where Israel is involved and apparently that does not help you. And it's not like NYU is a conservative campus.
I'm sure this person has a history of anti-White statements (that is usually the case with black progressives). But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism. So, this isn't a case of being a leftist or a rightist. It's a case of being against perceived Jewish interests. Sometimes people talk about the progressive stack and we have once again found out that being black and trans is no defence if you go against Jews. No such punishment against being anti-White. This seems to imply two things:
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The highest position on the progressive totem pole is being Jewish, not black or trans.
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People who claim Jews are White must explain why making anti-White statements rarely carry punishments but going against Jewish interests does. In other words, Jews have relative privilege in America in a way that is not available to Whites.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
6mo ago
Israel bent the knee, unsurprisingly. The siege is all but broken. There are also reports floating around that the US is pressuring Israel to delay the invasion. The Israelis basically tried a genteel version of ethnic cleansing by enticing Egypt to take them in, apparently with the blessing of EU+US. But it flopped and the Egyptians told the Europeans that the refugees would be allowed to stream into Europe the first possible moment. Given the explosive politics re: mass migration in Europe, I suspect the Europeans got cold feet and backed off.
So we're seeing two different versions of reality playing out. Israeli statements continue to be incredibly hawkish and all-but-confirming an invasion. Meanwhile the US is undercutting and undermining those efforts by either reversing or delaying Israeli decisions. If Israel will not be able to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip - which it transparently wants to do - then I don't see how they are not walking straight into a trap here.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
6mo ago
I'm surprised that people are surprised. The West will back anyone from a radical jihadist or in this case praising a former (?) Nazi if it suits its geopolitical interest. Ultimately, the rhetoric of "human rights" is reserved for the large domestic audience of midwits even as the de facto foreign policy is far more ruthless.
Remember the big energy crisis that Europe was supposed to be doomed with for years to come? Yeah, it's pretty much gone. Worth pointing out two things.
First, natural gas demand has been much weaker than anticipated since China is weaker. Indeed, there is now a surplus of gas in the world market.Some people claim that "last winter we got lucky", but this doesn't explain how gas storage is at historically high levels. Germany, Europe's biggest gas consumer, has an excellent position going into the autumn.
Second, renewable energy is beating new records by the day. In Northern Europe, electricity prices are bouncing around zero and occasionally dipping below the line into negative territory.There's also a structural trend of rapidly growing renewable energy, which means that even as gas prices return to historical norms, it is unlikely that consumption will stay the same. The shift now underway to renewable and clean energy (e.g. nuclear) is permanent. Russia had its chance at energy blackmail and it turned out it was a dud.
I think there are a couple of conclusions to draw from this. The most important one is that scaremongering and hysteria rarely pays to listen to. We can broaden this to a discussion about climate change or even immigration. Sure, there will be issues, but the doomsters on both issues were proven wrong historically. So were the doomsters on Europe's supposedly "permanent energy crisis" thesis.Then why do people persist by wallowing in fear? I don't have a clear answer but perhaps there are evolutionary adaptions that were beneficial to those who were erring on the side of caution?
Another important takeaway for me is once a crisis gets going you should never underestimate humanity's capacity for adaption and change. The system we inhabit may look brittle, but it's probably a lot more sturdy than we give it credit for. Some of us still remember the panicked predictions about the food supply chains breaking down when Covid hit, and plenty people stocked up on tons of canned food, often for no good reason. Some even talked of famine.
Perhaps being the optimist just isn't socially profitable. You're taken more seriously by being a "deeply concerned" pessimist. If this is true, then social incentives will be skewed to having the bad take. People who will be aware of this will probably draw the right conclusions in times when most other folks are losing their minds in fear.
I'll make a few brief observations.
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These videos are mostly an American phenomenon. Attempts at blowing up a banal social interaction to a national scandal doesn't happen in Europe. I'm not talking about something going viral on social media because it's funny or whatever. I'm talking about a genuine witch-hunt, invariably on racial grounds. Sure, there's public shaming in Europe but it isn't extrapolated to the person's race like it is in America.
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The victims of these witch-hunts are almost always white. I don't think this is a coincidence. For the same reason, when mass shooters are non-white, media interest drops off. For this reason, I think it tells of a societal sickness in the US which is missing in Europe. It isn't just "obsession with race" but rather "obsession with white people", always in a negative way.
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Many white women went along with the anti-white bandwagon in the (naive) belief that the mob would spare them. Well, they sure did miscalculate on that one. In fact, I get the sense that white women are often treated worse than white men in the media when there's a pile-on like now. There's a particular resentful nastiness to the "Karen" insult - which again is only applied to white women and not women of other races - which has no real equivalent among white men.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
9mo ago
Stuff like this is why I'm longterm bullish on platforms like Substack. People ultimately don't care about 538 as an institution. They mostly just cared about Nate Silver's takes. I suspect this is true across many other media orgs. There's typically a few voices who actually matter and the rest are background noise. Paying people directly for their insights is ultimately a better model than subsidising a whole team indirectly, whom you are mostly not interested in.
It's a bit like why cable started to get a lot less interesting to people.
What can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?
Nothing, especially as Hamas was smart enough to take dozens of hostages. Bibi was dumb enough to say "we're at war" when in reality it was a limited cross-border raid that affected the immediate vicinity border communities. A war would entail something like the 1967 or 1973 wars which were existential. This clearly is nothing even remotely similar. This miscategorisation has now boxed him in rhetorically and he can't be seen as backing down. It would have been better if he called it what it is: a major terrorist attack/raid.
In terms of propaganda, it seems clear that international opinion is (and should be) with Israel. But what I'm seeing from Israeli military experts is that this is being described as Israel's 9/11. It was a massive intelligence and military failure on their part and once the initial shock dies down, people will be starting to ask hard questions of the govt. So there will be a political angle to ramp up a massive response which may not be effective in the long run but needed to save the govt from its downfall.
Israel is now a very wealthy society and appetite for large-scale casualties which a major ground operation would necessarily require is very low. While you could do a lot of bombings which would level entire neighborhoods, you'd also risk killing your own hostages. It's really a gigantic failure on the part of Israel. I don't really see any good option for them. Gaza is this problem that they can't seem to solve and govt advisors have talked about "mowing the lawn" in the past, as you'd need to continually launch mini operations to degrade the militants' capabilities without actually solving anything at a root level.
I think this ties into Israel's larger failure of solving the issue with the West Bank situation. The left's "land for peace" formula is dead but the right-wing's continued settlement expansion invariably leads to ethnic tension. Bibi used to be good at "managing the crisis" which allowed the mainstream of Israeli society to sort of forget that there ever was an unresolved issue. This year has seen as a huge uptick in terrorist attacks and now this latest Gaza crisis just compounds the issue.
In a very weird way, Israel is safer externally than it has ever been from invasions from other Arab countries with Saudi normalisation on the tangible horizon adding to the Abraham Accords. On the other hand, the internal situation keeps deteriorating and not just between Moslems and Jews but even between religious and secular Jews. Seems like the place is just a perpetual cauldron of unrest.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
9mo ago
The ongoing French riots bring into sharp relief the fantasy that if we just don't talk about race or religion, the issue will disappear. To be clear, I still prefer the French approach because if you don't measure something you can't really do much about it. The main beneficiary of France suddenly going the US/UK route of meticulously collecting racial and religious statistics wouldn't be the far-right but rather the far-left. Racial and possibly religious quotas would soon follow with official state-sanctioned discrimination as the end result.
Yet the rioters clearly view themselves as apart from French society. Even genteel liberal journalists concede as much.
What are the long-term effects going to be? Perhaps I am cynical but I suspect nothing much. France had these kinds of riots in 2005 and they changed nothing.
I remembering reading a lot about Islam and immigration in the 2010-2012 time period, during which many UK conservative personalities were praising the French approach of "aggressive assimiliationism" as opposed to the supposedly feeble multiculturalist approach preferred by the UK. It seems to me that there's no functional difference. The UK had its own riots in 2011. One could plausibly make the case that the BLM riots in the US during 2014 and then 2020 fall under the same rubric.
Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak. The system isn't strong enough to overcome racial and religious differences completely but it's also much stronger than many right-wing doomers seem to think. After the kerfuffle everyone moves on. There's no reason to think it will be different this time.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
9mo ago
Musks buyout of twitter has helped the right a lot with activision. Protests work now. Lack of censorship helps them get there more intellectual debates out there which they couldn’t before.
I agree and was a bit amused when certain people on the right, who seem to think everything can be quantified, were gasping that he paid tens of billions for a business that was either barely making money or none at all. But this ignores the central role Twitter has in our politics. It is, as Musk noted, the closest thing we have to a "town square". Facebook, Whatsapp or Instagram are not political in the same way. Sure, Whatsapp forwards can have political content but there's no "public arena" aspect to it as on Twitter.
This is something the left has understood intuitively for a long time. All those conservatives making fun of those humanities NGO losers didn't understand the latter were playing the long game, and a different game at that. A slow filtering into the institutions where the main currency is social clout and influence. That's basically what Twitter generates. Whoever controls it, has a very strong influence on public discourse.
For the same reason, when boomer conservatives gave up on cities and told everyone to ignore university and just focus on money, look at where that led us. The steady march of insanity from the 1990s up until 2020 couldn't have happened without unilateral surrender. Elon isn't even that right-wing, but at least he's fighting back. IMO, his Twitter purchase shouldn't been seen as a business investment so much as political activism.
P.S. it also seems Threads is tanking badly after a brief surge, so there's that. D.S.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
11mo ago
All societies have hierarchies. Mehdi Hasan, when he was attacking Tulsi Gabbard during the 2020 campaign went through her entire donor list and counted all the Hindus.
Needless to say, if someone would have gone through the donor list of Trump or Biden and counted all the Jews as a public media figure, it's quite likely they would have been out of a job very shortly thereafter. Everyone understands this, which is why nobody is doing it.
That's why the Kanye dust-up was interesting to me. You had two groups with the highest "anti-racism" cred suddenly pitted at each other and in the end, we got to learn that Jews had more social power in that struggle. This is another instance re-affirming that, as Diane is grovelling in a way she would never have done if she hadn't included Jews in her diatribe.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
9mo ago
There's a lot of hype surrounding India. The US clearly wants to boost the country to provide a Western-oriented alternative to China. No other country has the scale comparable to China and India's demographics are much better (26 million births compared to China's 10). The Indian diaspora is very successful in the US and largely pro-American and anti-China. So what's not to like here?
To India boosters like Noah Smith, there's pretty much nothing to be skeptical of. He sees the emergence of an Indo-US alliance in all but name as a necessity.
For this alignment to make sense, India must actually become a real alternative to China. Is this plausible?
First, India's economic structure is dominated by services and elite services at that (IT exports). Its manufacturing sector has been very weak. Modi tried to change this with his 2014 "Make in India" campaign. We've now gone almost a full decade since then and there's basically been zero movement on this issue. India boosters will claim that this is simply because decoupling never really got serious until now. But the problem with this line of argument is that the rhetoric is changing. Even Raytheon's CEO is claiming decoupling is impossible; the new watchword is "de-risking" which is a tacit admission that China's integration into the world's supply chains is far greater than the Former Soviet Union ever was, which is why the analogies to the Cold War are often misleading at best.
Second, a key part of China'a ascent was built on skilled, but cheap labour. Economists often overstate the importance of labour costs. What matters is productivity. Labour costs can increase as long as productivity increases faster: this is what drives long-term growth.
Nobody is denying that India has cheap labour, but is it skilled? Moving past the rarefied IT, pharma and finance sectors that dominate India's services, we find a much bleaker landscape.
50% of Indian kids are functionally illiterate. Female literacy has actually worsened over time. Though this is partly a function of the school system taking in far more kids than before. Yet Vietnam and Indonesia did the same yet did not notice such a fall. Finally, there's no improvement over the past decade.
We can argue over whether education matters much for simple manufacturing. Economists like the heterodox Ha-Joon Chang of South Korean descent has argued that it really doesn't. Perhaps this was true when SK, JP, TW and other East Asian "tigers" took off in the 1960s. Today, everything is far more digital, even relatively simple manufacturing. Workers need to read basic instructions and should at least be able to operate basic machinery, which in turn requires them to read and operate screens. Being unable to read a simple sentence immediately disqualified half the Indian workforce.
If India were to really become a fully fledged alternative to China, then it means that it would need to scale the value-added ladder the way China has. It can't just produce toys or textiles. It would have to create a fully industrial ecosystem covering the greatest sophistication. Simply put, does India has the human capital base to pull that off? The data seems to draw us to a stark conclusion: not really.
Poverty cannot be an explanation either. Vietnam had a similar per capita GDP to what India has now in the mid-2010s. Yet it did very well in international tests and it has continued to draw in a great number of manufacturing projects in a way that India has been unable to. Some of this may be related to government: Vietnam is a one-party dictatorship like China and can bulldoze through various projects of importance. But a more important explanation is simply that Vietnam has the same combination that China had a generation ago: skilled labour but at cheap rates.
In short, if American elites are now betting big on India supplanting China - or at least becoming a real viable alternative - for manufacturing then it is very likely that they will become disappointed. By the same logic, any talk of decoupling (or "de-risking") is likely to run into the hard wall that the alternatives are either too small (Vietnam) or not up to par (India).
On a sociological note, we should acknowledge that discussions on India are colored by their diaspora in the West, primarily in Anglo countries. This group are an incredibly elite selection, particularly in the US. They come from highly privileged homes with house maids and a cultural aversion to manual labour, and by extension manufacturing. It can hardly be surprising that India was ground zero for fantasies that developing countries can "leap frog" manufacturing into prosperity, despite there being virtually no examples of this in world history (barring petrostates, financial êntrepots like Singapore etc).
I've hoped to convince you of becoming more realistic about India's prospects, even if I support a move to diversify away from China for obvious geopolitical reasons. India's own potential can be hotly debated. Certainly their smart fraction is highly capable and we know that smart fractions are important for driving prosperity. The question before us is if India's much less capable "middle" will prevent it from rapid convergence once the easy gains from growth are gone. East Asia managed to educate the broad masses to fairly decent levels whereas India clearly has not. Should we really expect them to emulate East Asia given these sharp differences? As things stand, the West's current policy completely ignores this question.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Samantha Power, a key member of what John Mearsheimer terms the "liberal interventionist wing" of the US foreign policy establishment, was appointed as head of USAID a few years ago. I was under the impression that USAID was supposed to be helping poor people in disaster zones grappling with famines etc, but perhaps I've been underappreciate of the radically new direction the agency is taking.
She is now in Budapest handing over tens of millions of dollars to "locally-driven" initiatives and "independent media". Perhaps I am far too cynical but this smells like a barely-concealed operation designed to groom a future leadership class to oppose Orban and what he stands for.
While Orban probably knows what's going on, he also can't do much as he's locked into NATO and the EU ecosystem. He did successfully eject Soros a few years ago but USAID is a different beast. It's a governmental organisation of the most important player in NATO. The current US ambassador is also a highly vocal LGBT activist. It's pretty clear what their goal here is and Orban is powerless to stop it.
In a sense, one cannot but admire the sheer audacity of the US foreign policy apparatus. Playing to win.
The last gasp of the europoor
For years, I've been treated to a steady diet of smug elitism coming from effete liberal Europeans laughing at obese, gun-toting and bible-thumpin' Americans. This reached its crescendo during the George W. Bush administration, took a lull during the Obama years and was resurrected after Trump took office.
The American was an ignoramus, a loud-mouth, a religious fundamentalist and irreversibly stupid. Hopelessly inferior to us sophisticated and cosmopolitan Europeans. Did you know half of Americans don't even own a passport? Most don't even know a second language!? Ha! And don't get me started on their healthcare, their gun crime and all other sorts of social pathologies. America, you see, is a third world nation masquerading as a first world one.
But as the years went by, these smirks felt increasingly hollow. The economic distance - and with it, standard of living - between the two major partners is growing wider by the day. A young French econ professor at Wharton lays out the bad news over just how deluded his fellow Europeans are on this question. Prominent FT columnists have noted the same.
Yet, perhaps there is still time to save the last shreds of honor for us poor Europeans. For one, the gap in PPP terms doesn't seem to be changing much. Europe has been behind for a long time. In terms of total GDP, the situation is much the same. Another aspect is that Europeans tend to work fewer hours.
While some of these arguments may have some validity, they all feel like desperate excuses. I for one am very much happy to see the insufferable elitism of Europeans slowly being wiped off our collective smug faces. The uncouth and primitive barbarian across the ocean turned out to be smarter and harder-working all along.
Perhaps this can also lead to a more pro-capitalist liberalism in the US. For much of my upbringing, liberal Americans were typified by folks such as Michael Moore and his obsessive admiration of the European welfare state. Colbert's snark about the embarrassing Red State American always felt like an underhanded way to gain favor with declassé elites across the ocean. Ann Coulter's observation that liberal elites in the US loved soccer because it is European surely hit closer to home than many in the media were willing to admit.
Of course, there is still some amount of liberal American simping left in the bag. This is perhaps most obvious whenever there are discussions on urban policy and the words "walkable city" invariably comes up. (To be clear, I actually think Europe gets this part better than the US).
Outside of an increasingly narrowing set of areas where Europe still outperforms, we are slowly witnessing a reshuffling of the deck. The old illusions are slowly coming undone and reddit-tier arguments about the US being a third world hellhole are convincing fewer by the day. At long last, after years of insufferable and unjustified smug elitism, the europoor is finally unmasked as the sham living on a lie that he always was. And I couldn't be happier.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
6mo ago
I've been unable to understand how there can be a stable equilibrium without something pretty close to ethnic cleansing
You're correct and many Israelis of the hard-right and even some on the center-left have publicly lamented that Ben-Gurion didn't "finish the job of 1948" where Israel ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands in what the Palestinians refer to as "The Nakba". There was another round of ethnic cleansing during the aftermath of 1967.
Since then, the political pressure on Israel has ratched up significantly and even if international opinion is with them now, I highly doubt the West would allow forcible removal of millions of Palestinians today. More importantly, I also suspect the Palestinians would put up a lot more resistance today than their grandparents as they're far better armed and co-ordinated at a local level than they were in the 1940s or 1960s.
In addition, such a large-scale ethnic cleansing would invariably drag in Arab neighbours and kill any attempt at normalisation with Saudi Arabia and dial back the Abraham Accords. Hezbollah is also armed to the teeth and could well join the fray. So I highly doubt something like this would happen. Israel is just boxed in with no good options.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
7mo ago
Seems to gel with my impression that a lot of higher-ups in "aid organisations" are complete sociopaths. I recall a top boss in the Red Cross who systematically groomed and later raped refugees. Doing so was easy because they didn't know the language, didn't know people in their new country and many of them were single and teenagers.
The same pattern was found in Haiti. This isn't to say that aid work is inherently suspect. Just that it often provides a perfect cover for sociopaths to exploit victims who rarely can defend themselves. This Ballard character is just the latest example.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
9mo ago
A common theory is that DEI programs are a luxury program, the first to go when businesses look to trim fat.
I think this undersells a deeper structural shift seen in many domains of the US elite (media, tech, even academia). We're seeing a broad pullback from the excesses of the past.
Ultimately, the fact that US elites are overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning is a structural weakness for the US system because the population is much more evenly split. That's why conservatives broke with previous Reaganite dogma about never using the state for their own ideological means. Hence why nobody is now protesting Abbott or DeSantis for using raw state power to enforce ideological norms. Too many members of the "old" conservative establishment, such as David French, essentially became advocates for what can only be termed as "losing beautifully". It's okay if liberals keep winning because at least we're not being statists!
But it's not only the right that changed. I think liberal elites also understood what was happening and that they had to rein in their crazies. That's why the people who manage Biden told him not to stack the court, which enraged the progressive base. But if you're concerned about overall system stability, it was a smart move. If one side just keeps running over the other side, which is largely what happened during the 2010s (even under Trump) then at some point the losing side will simply disengage or even become actively hostile.
That's also why the media has been somewhat restrained in their treatment of the SCOTUS decision, lamenting weakly in what I see as crocodile tears. The right has gotten tougher and the liberals have gotten smarter and it has led us to this moment. If Darwin's maxim about the most adaptable species are those who are fittest to survive is also true of systems, then we must rate the US system highly.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
9mo ago
Putting aside the practicalities of such a plan, how many whites even want one? I suspect the vast majority of whites are in the same category as me: we don't like racism against whites being normalised in the media and in the general culture but we still prefer to live in societies that are classically liberal, with strong rights given to individuals above "collective identities" as the foundation.
It seems to me that most white nationalists simply live in a false, idealised world where all problems would dissipate if there was racial homogeneity. Europe's history prior to WWII was full of internecine warfare and petty tribalism. There is no reason such a "white state" wouldn't eventually fall prey to the same kinds of internal forces even if it became a big success on its own terms (high fertility, strong economy, xenophobic immigration policies).
Ethnogenesis is a constant historical process. "White" identity itself is mostly an answer to racial diversity. In the absence of it, other forms of separatism could well form. What was Southern identity during the 1800s in America? You don't even need a separate language or ethnicity for secessionism! Why do these white nationalists believe that their fantasy state would be any different?
And this all ignores that "white identity" is mostly an overseas Anglosphere thing. In France, Germany or Finland the natives don't perceive themselves as white but rather simply according to ethnicity. So even talking of a broader Western whiteness is a stretch to me.
I think what's really going on here is that the founding Anglos and the later European ethnicities who went to the US, Canada and Australia became victims of their own success in a way. They succeeded far more than anyone could have possibly imagined. They've built the greatest societies on Earth and with English being the lingua franca of ambitious third world elites, it was simply never possible to remain closed. Given that the US can pick the best and the brightest out of 8 billion people, its domestic elites would never choose any other system. They'd be idiots to do so, as being the world's primary human capital magnet accrues compounding advantages over time that are simply irresistible and possibly even insurmountable, as we see now with China's stagnation.
I find these separatist fantasies to be utterly devoid of any contact with reality.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
10mo ago
Nobody seems to talk about the RU-UA war here anymore. I guess it's because we're saturated with it everywhere else.
Yet given that Ukraine has launched what is unquestionably the largest offensive since the Kharkov surge in late September when it took back wide swathes of territory, I believe a status update is warranted.
First, it is immediately clear that the Russians are much more prepared this time. The area that Ukraine took back in autumn was barely defended by a rag-tag group of volunteer militias. That was a big lapse by the Russian general command, which also led to the big mobilisation drive. This time is different.
Even pro-UA accounts like Julian Röpcke are conceding that Ukraine is losing lots of armored vehicles with very marginal gains. Western officials like the CIA chief or the US foreign secretary have all pointed out that the aftermath of the offensive will shape upcoming negotiations. Given that Ukraine has little to show for their offensive thus far, this inevitably casts a dark shadow on any prospects for large territorial compromises. Why would the Russians give the Ukrainians something at the negotiating table which they cannot gain on the battlefield?
To my mind, the best that Ukraine can hope for now is a stalemate. This war has shown that in the era of ubiquitous ISR capabilities, trying to surprise your enemy is much harder if he's on his toes (which the Russians weren't in the autumn, but they are now). Consequently, offensives are simply far costlier and harder. The Russians had the same problems, which is why capturing Bakhmut took such an absurdly long time.
For those of us who would want to see a negotiated settlement, the reality is that neither side is running out of money or arms. Russia is spending a moderate amount of money and the West can keep supplying Ukraine enough to keep going for years if the decision is made that defensive action is the way to go. The only way this war ends is if the West tells Ukraine to give in and accept large territorial losses in return for a settlement and possibly security guarantees. Such an outcome would be nearly impossible to sell to Ukraine's domestic public and would almost certainly end the career of whoever was leading the country, including Zelensky. Whatever comes out of this war, I'm not optimistic about Ukraine's long-term prospects.
It's not just students. Faculty are now showing up in force to support the protests. And protests at Yale are if anything even bigger. New encampments are spreading to NYU, Michigan and others.
I've pointed out in the past that when liberal America slowly coalesces into a new consensus on a topic, then any opponent of that new consensus better have a great political machine. The only two examples I can think of are gun rights and pro-life activists. Both have scored important victories against liberals.
So how does things look for Israel? Well, AIPAC is certainly very formidable. But the support for Israel is cracking among the younger conservative crowd (e.g. Candace Owens), let alone the hard right (e.g. Nick Fuentes). It's not like Israel will start losing votes in Congress. If you look at the history of Apartheid South Africa, they still had a lot of support from the WH right up until the end. The political scene will be the most reactionary. In the case of Apartheid South Africa, the huge protests on universities began already in the 1970s. It would take 15 years for serious political change. And they never had a lobby as strong as the Israelis.
So I suspect political change will be slower, but I also think we're crossing a rubicon as I write this. I don't see things ever going back to normal for Zionists henceforth in the West, certainly not among leftists or increasingly many liberals. The Israel lobby always wanted and sought bipartisan support. They were remarkably successful in that for many decades. But that era has now decisively ended.
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