MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
No bio...
User ID: 1678
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
If Twitter dies then it is because TPTB want it to die. There's an ADL-sponsored advertiser boycott going on right now, for one.
The fact of the matter is that Twitter doesn't need as many people as it had. Many of those employees had "narrative control" functions. Some of the Japanese users noted that when the mass firings began, suddenly all the trending topics were things like manga or video games rather than politics which is what it was before. Thereby suggesting that Twitter employees had a "steering function".
That's the crux of this entire affair. Twitter wasn't a free platform, it was used as a propaganda vehicle by powerful establishment interests. A mass firing of these "narrative control" workers is potentially dangerous to the regimes, because free speech is now seen as a threat to their power. It is the same reason why Julian Assange had to be taken down.
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.
I'll make a few brief observations.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
1yr ago
SBF had a long interview with NYT where they were remarkably soft on him. The whole thing can be read read here.
For my part, it seems like he has little remorse and is spinning things as "things expanded too fast and I made a mistake". The fact that his hedge fund (Alameda Research) was propped up by client deposits without their knowledge is not something he wishes to mention.
Over at Twitter, he has been consistently deleting tweets such as his Nov 7th tweet assuring everyone that FTX has a "long history of safeguarding client assets". Some are speculating that his recent gibberish tweets are in fact a way to keep his tweet count constant, so to not alert bots when a large amount of tweets are suddenly deleted (as some bots may begin to do auto-archiving). In his interview with NYT, he instead spun his new tweets as some kind of cryptic message he wants to send.
All these things re-affirm my view that he's basically a manipulative psychopath. What's disappointing but not surprising is the soft gloves treatment he gets in the NYT. One cannot help but ask whether his status as democrat megadonor plays a part in that.
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
1yr ago
So Israel had its fifth(!) election in four years a few days ago. I wanted to wait until we got 100% of the votes counted before commenting. The big story is that Netanyahu (henceforth called 'Bibi', which is his nickname) is almost certainly going to be back as prime minister. He has already beaten Ben-Gurion - arguably the most important founding father of Israel - in being longest-serving PM and looks set to extend that lead.
Israel had all these elections because the country is very divided without any faction seemingly being able to take the lead. The previous PM ruled in an uneasy Arab-Leftist-Centrist coalition with even right-wingers like Lieberman supporting them. Lieberman used to be Bibi's defence minister and has very hawkish views, yet he is also a secularist and couldn't stand both Bibi personally nor his religious support parties.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a coalition which has nothing in common except "everyone hates Bibi" didn't last long.
Bibi is often accused of being corrupt and perhaps he is, but more coverage has been dedicated to the surge of the far-right in the wake of this election. The far-left Meretz party (mostly supported by secular Ashkenazi urban liberals) didn't make the cut to be voted into the Knesset. An Arab hardline party also just missed the threshold. As a consequence, Bibi's coalition will notch up 64 seats in the 120-seat Knesset.
The mainstream narrative is that this represents a "dark turn" in Israel's chapter. The reality, more likely, is that the far-right notched up wins after a surge of riots and terrorist attacks. A very long twitter thread from an Israeli politics watcher makes a convincing case. In other words, it isn't a sign of a sudden religious fanaticism so much as a response to crime and terrorist attacks.
Besides, if the far-left Meretz party would have combined with other left-wing parties like Labour then they would have both made it to the Knesset (parties can combine on so-called "electoral lists"), denting Bibi's margin of victory. If the Arab parties had united, Bibi's coalition would have gotten even fewer seats, likely sub-60. Thereby, Israel's deadlock would have continued. Napoleon used to say that luck was a quality in of its own and some of his generals had it and some didn't. Bibi has proven himself lucky, but counting on this kind of luck going forward is probably unwise. If the opposition learn from its mistakes next election and unites into more electoral lists, it will be very hard for him to repeat such a victory.
I do think Israel has a long-term RW trend but this election probably is a bad case to make for it. A more salient conflict is the religious/secular divide. It cuts across the left-right spectrum, as the example of Lieberman shows. But even secular voters can support far-right religious parties in times of increased tension, and this election proves it.
Going forward, the price for Bibi will be to give the religious parties what they ask for, namely continued lavish funding of their educational institutions without much secular knowledge imparted. This equation sits at ill ease given Israel's high-tech economy, which is supported largely by secular or "modern Orthodox" workers. Such a giveaway with no strings attached is deeply impopular in the secular strongholds like Tel-Aviv. I suspect balancing the electoral compulsions with the preferences of the those who actually run Israel's economy will be more difficult for him than dealing with any outside pressure "expressing concern" over perceived democratic deficits. The ADL is already warning Bibi it won't keep quiet.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Yes, that's an actual headline at Yahoo News, published just a week ago. It's basically a long anti-white rant by a bigoted ethnic activist. I am fascinated that white Americans are so sissified in the face of this open bigotry. In many ways, their patience is Christ-like. I for one don't hope for a tit-for-tat development, because this world needs less tribalism and conflict. But as long as anti-white racism isn't called out, I can't take people who claim to be anti-racists seriously. And the editors at Yahoo news allowing this vile rant to be published shows that its ingrained in US culture.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr 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
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.
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
1yr ago
Surprised so few people talk about Brasil here. Their election (2nd round) is today. It looks like Lula is the slight favourite but even his supporters concede that Bolsonaro has a good shot. For those not in the know, Lula is the social democrat with Bolsonaro best described as "Trump of the Tropics".
Yet a complicating factor is that the new congress has already been elected and it was much more right-wing than expected. So Lula's room for maneuver will be significantly constrained if he happens to win.
There does seem to be a structural undercurrent at play here. A very fast-growing demographic in Brasil are the evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly favour Bolsonaro. Traditionally, Catholicism has been the bedrock of the nation's social fabric, inherited from the Iberians. So a very fervent form of Protestantism is unquestionably a break from the past where Catholicism was viewed as intertwined with national identity. Whoever wins this presidential election will have to grapple with this changed reality in Brasil.
Incidentally, this also suggests the lazy assumption that "as America gets more diverse it will invariably get more liberal" could potentially not come to pass.
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.
Can geopolitics also be culture war? I'd argue yes.
PM Modi: Global South must create new world order
“We, the Global South, have the largest stakes in the future. Three-fourth of humanity lives in our countries. We should also have equivalent voice. Hence, as the eight-decade old model of global governance slowly changes, we should try to shape the emerging order,’’ he said, while underscoring the need to escape the cycle of dependency on systems and circumstances which are not of developing world’s making.
My question is, what makes people living in Third World countries think that just because they are numerous, that means they count? Nigeria has a much bigger population than France. Which country matters more in international affairs? Why is Taiwan so important? The country has a huge footprint in semiconductors despite having only 24 million people. Had it been a primitive basket-case, its potential capture by China would still be opposed but there wouldn't be fears of far-reaching economic ramifications.
I worry that a narrative of "our time is due" has set in, giving birth to unreasonable expectations of international influence that may in fact never materialise for most Third World countries. Once this finally dawns on them, rage and jealousy may set in, a feeling of being betrayed of "our rightful influence". Influence is earned, not given. I'm reasonably optimistic about India but not so optimistic on most other poor large countries (Egypt, Pakistan, Ethiopia etc). Given disparate birth rates over the world, a growing imbalance between countries who hold the actual power versus where most of humanity will increasingly be located could lead to increased international tension.
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
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
Well, I guess it was only a question of time before the ADL condemned Dave Chappelle and SNL more generally for "popularising" anti-Semitism.
Chappelle had a SNL monologue a few days ago where he walked a tightrope between supposedly condemning Kanye and Kyrie before slyly signal-boosting some of their talking points. Kanye comes across as crazy and Kyrie as plain dumb but Chappelle is neither, so this is arguably bigger news. Of course, Chappelle has been courting controversy before, such as his perceived anti-trans comments or complaining about college kids being too sensitive these days.
So I am not sure if this is some kind of cultural shift where black entertainment elites are more willing to criticise Jews or if it is simply Chappelle running towards controversy in order to stay relevant. Maybe it is both. Nevertheless, I think the ADL has by and large been enormously inefficient and self-defeating during these past 6 weeks. It seems even some Jewish publications agree.
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
Roberts' poison pill of allowing race to be discussed in personal essays and then allowing universities to take that into account mostly nullified this decision. As others have noted, this tactic has been used by universities in several states like California in previous years.
I would say this is a small and positive step, mostly for normative reasons, but in practical terms it's a whimper rather than a bang.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
9mo ago
The intellectual arguments come first. Everything else follows.
I used to think it was just a matter of reaching enough people, but I've now come to realise that evidence doesn't really matter for a great number people if it interferes with their ideology and/or personal interest.
The amount of people in the West who would be negatively affected if HBD became the dominant intellectual frame of reference is now massive. They have a clear personal stake at never allowing that to happen. Dispassionate scientific inquiry is in fact something very few are interested in. You can show them a thousand papers. It won't matter. They will only use it to indict you for heresy.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Reminds me of the protests in Ireland. I suspect both will fail for a similar reason: street reactions to Twitter videos have clear limits of how far they can change matters. Policy is changed in the halls of power, ultimately. Though, the issue of "street power" is interesting to ponder. I've been following the Israeli debate on trying to enlist Haredi men into the army and every single government has failed because they managed to bring about huge numbers of people to the streets every single time. So perhaps if this was sustained, there could be a way to change policy indirectly. I don't know.
Either way, the government does try to be tough. The Economist has a piece about it. Predictably, The Economist's solution to the boat asylum issue is to speed up offshore processing. That would actually increase the amount of asylum seekers in the UK, the paper acknowledges, but it would also mean fewer boats. (The paper thinks the main issue is one of optics rather than volumes, but that probably speaks to their own delusion).
So what has the government done? It tried to enlist the help of Rwanda to send failed asylum seekers. The problem is that the Rwandan government only wants a few hundreds. There's talk of quitting the EHCR, which is a Europe-wide human rights court that often makes it hard to deport failed asylum seekers without several re-trails, at which many simply go underground and authorities lose touch with them. 800K people in the UK are thought to be living illegally and the number is growing.
Last year, Britain received 45,000 asylum seekers and the current projections is that this figure will rise to 65,000 this year. It's worth pointing out that Sweden received over 100K in 2015, so on a per capita basis, the UK is definitely not in a "crisis" even at this numbers. But the UK has historically had low levels of asylum seekers compared to the Scandinavians and some mainland European countries, so this situation is new.
I'm frankly not sure if there's any real solution (that is democratic and passes the basic threshold for decency). The problem is that the Third World is not doing well. Pakistan is on the verge of bankruptcy yet has 230 million people. It has a TFR well above 3. Egypt is barely doing better. Nigeria is holding on for the moment but the future looks uncertain. In the 1950s, these countries had much smaller populations and air travel was expensive. Today you have large and growing diaspora populations and smartphones are common even in poor countries, so people know how it is possible to live in the West. In short, there are structural reasons for these waves to continue. Not just to Europe but also to the US. Europe's geographic connectivity with MENA, SSA and to some extent South Asia means that pressures will be greater on Europe. I suspect this will lead to increasing political divergence with the US over the long-term as the far-right will gain ground (just look at the latest polls out of Germany or Austria).
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
11mo ago
Honestly he just comes across as a weird schizo, but it sure is amusing to see the uptick in Latinx and Indian nazis.
If memory serves, the leader of the far-right "Proud Boys" group was mestizo.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
1yr ago
Difference is that the islands of relative stability were larger and more numerous 30 years ago. Now there is a broader degeneration. You didn't have these massive rolling blackouts, a greater fraction of the railway system was intact etc.
But this is all water under the bridge. South Africa failed because it wasn't racist enough, ironically. Even Apartheid was in many ways a bandaid. The story is similar with Israel. You can only extend and pretend for so long until the past catches up with you.
After a surprisingly fractious negotiating period, Israel finally has a new government in place. The most religious, hard-right government it has ever had! A brief list of its priorities are listed here.
For my part, I remain puzzled over how some of their initiatives are termed anti-democratic. For instance, they want to allow businesses to reject certain customers/requests based on their faith. This reminds me of the "LGBT cake" ordered by a gay couple from a Christian baker in the US a few years ago. One gets the sense that they did it as a provocation, and to rub it in his eyes. He refused, was sued, and the case later went all the way up the courts.
If you're libertarian, shouldn't individuals and businesses be free to associate and do business with whoever they may want? I can see why this would be offensive if you're a leftist, but the charge is that this is "anti-democratic" which isn't synonymous with leftism. Or it shouldn't be, at least.
The coalition agreement is non-binding but rather a statement of principles. How much gets implemented remains to be seen, and there is rife speculation - one may be forgiven for thinking it is wishful thinking - in the media about the current government being short-lived. Either way, Israel's new government will be worth watching for how far a genuine right-wing government can be allowed to travel before it gets blocked by the establishment.
It's also worth mentioning that Prime Minister Netanyahu's own Likud party is substantially more secular than its right-wing/religious partners. So there is also an internal split that Netanyahu has to manage. He is liked by his base, but is loathed by much of the larger Israeli establishment. Particularly in the judiciary and the academic/media class.
So Tucker is under fire from the ADL after Tucker claimed attacks on white women was because they were "key to reproducing the white race" or something to that effect. Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, has now openly called him a Nazi. Greenblatt in particular seems to have a personal obsession with Tucker, with him publicly demanding Fox News fire the talkshow host on previous occasions. Tucker has also been the subject of a massive frontpage NYT article claiming he was a white nationalist.
An Orthodox Jewish group has decided to never let a good opportunity stirring the pot go to waste, joining the fray by issuing a statement demanding him to resign. Who? Greenblatt, of course! They represent about 2000 rabbis, so it isn't a small group, though admittedly the Orthodox community within the American diaspora is much weaker than they are within the British community.
There are two things of interest to me. First, the intra-Jewish CW on how to deal with rising de facto white nationalism. Even the most generous reader of Tucker's words will have to concede that he is making explicit racial arguments on behalf of a race, namely his own. Whether you agree with him or not is beside the point. He is no longer mumbling or hinting.
But secular Jews, who have historically been most alarmed about white nationalism, are now training their guns on the Orthodox community. The NYT - arguably their house paper - unloaded on Jewish day schools (called "yeshivas") in a front page article some weeks ago. The Orthodox community is growing very fast and unlike previous eras, retention appears to be stronger. So we can expect the American Jewish community to look more like the British one (which tends to lean conservative). Right-wing Jews do of course worry about white nationalism but they tend to not overlook left-wing anti-Semitism as much as secular Jews do.
Just a few days ago, Jerusalem Post carried an Op-Ed predicting the end of the "golden age" for Jews in America. Were Nazis the culprits? No, the author contended. The threat is "Islamo-Leftists". As the Jewish community trends right, a more diverse range of opinions will flourish away from the monolithic focus on white radical right extremism. But at the same time, it is hard for non-Americans such as myself not to notice how open racial appeals are made by folks like Tucker or Ann Coulter. Admittedly, Coulter has dipped her toes in these waters in previous years but even a cursory look at her substack shows the word white come up just as often as conservative. A decade ago, that wouldn't have happened.
As a curiosity, her podcast partner is Mickey Kaus, who is Jewish. So we seem to be viewing two different trends. First, an ever-increasing explicit focus on race from white right-wingers away from generic terms like "conservative" or "Christian". Second, an internal Jewish struggle where the long-term trend seems to favour the right-leaning Orthodox community. Stuck in all of this, you have legacy organisations like the ADL which still has institutional clout. Yet Tucker seemingly cannot be fired despite being openly called a Nazi by the head of the ADL, something that I would not have expected under the era when Abe Foxman ran the organisation. Is this a sign of a weakening hold of the ADL within the Jewish community or a radicalisation (racialisation?) on the part of white America? The answer, it appears to me, seems to be both.
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.
More options
Context Copy link