MiltonMurrayRobertLucas
Conan still talks to us too
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User ID: 2887
MiltonMurrayRobertLucas
Conan still talks to us too
5d ago
Becoming Jewish if not born one is a headache of all sorts, starting with what type of Judaism are we talking about:
Look at that flowchart. I mean reaaaaly look at it. If Jews are interested in not being thought of as a secret society that rules the world, would it hurt them to begin by making the process of becoming one of then a little simpler? Not even Masonry is that complicated; I was offered to become part of them without asking them just by knowing the right people!
-Make a two state deal with with the West Bank that implies a massive land-swap ; in exchange for giving up on any claims of rights to the Gaza Strip and allowing its full annexation by Israel, full condemnation of 10/7 and declaring Hamas to be a rouge organization, Israel will abandon all settlements that aren't Ariel, move back the Wall correspondingly, and the map will be radically redrawn in order to give the West Bank a nice chunk of the Golan Heights (if Syria wants to give the piece it claims to own too, better yet), which is decently fertile and apparently has a boatload of oil (although it's not clear if it's any good to be refined and used). Israel will abandon all military occupation of the zone, recognize the Nation of Palestine as fully sovereign and will let them be whatever they want to be. Abbas gets to make Palestine a better place for its citizens, or to turn it into another corrupt petrodollar tyranny (or both!)
-All people and descendants of who left the place due to Nakba will get right of return to the Palestinian country, as all Gazans. All Israelis currently living in the Golan Heights region and the settlements will be moved to Gaza. Cities will be created on the Golan Heights from scratch in order to accommodate the massive flow of immigrants, while the already existing towns will be expanded if it's needed to. Gazan cities will be massively redesigned from scratch to allow Israeli high quality infrastructure. Both refugee groups will get free housing for the troubles caused. All this will require money, and looots of it; so the peace deal will be executed with the financial support from the international community (The G7 and the Gulf Tigers will pull 90% of the weight, BRIC the rest)
-Having gotten the two-state solution done and over with, in exchange for recognition of Palestine as a sovereign country, Saudi Arabia and the UAE agree to push all the buttons on Qatar and do a full blockade of the country in joint with the US until all Hamas leaders are turned over to the Israeli government to do with them as they please (and this is very important; the Israelis want more than justice; they want revenge; if they want to stone Ismail Haniyeh in the streets of Tel Aviv and broadcast it on TV, let them)
-The international community agrees to consider the Gaza Strip as belonging to Israel, the IDF invades Gaza by land mostly with troops on the ground and a very few targeted non-carpet bombing campaigns, in a no-prisoners-taken approach; anyone living in Gaza who collaborates in the IDF will be rewarded (and its identity shielded in order to avoid being punished for treason), anyone who fights for Hamas will be shot on sight short of dropping their weapons inmediately, laying on the ground/rasing the white flag.
-Turn the script I just wrote.
I mean, let's be fair, from a rationality point of view, I don't see any egregious with my plan (except for Jerusalem, which I don't know what to do about it); even with the logistical costs of the relocation of millions of people and building of cities amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars, they get easily compensated by avoiding WWIII and getting long-lasting peace in the Middle East. The problem is that it implies massive sacrifices to both sides; neither is getting what they want at all; they're just giving up things in order to avoid losing even more. Israelis want the whole land. Palestinians want the whole land. Neither is going to give an inch of it. But the two state solution thought about by the mainstream is impossible to work; two pieces of non-continuous land becoming a country? Get out of here.
MiltonMurrayRobertLucas
Conan still talks to us too
1mo ago
This seems like it touches upon the same topics as all the secession/independence debates do - who is obliged to get out of the way? Do the people who want nothing to do with the secessionist project have the right to a state of their own, and who has the obligation to get out of the way for that? The idea that any group of people can consensually obtain their own clay on which they only answer to themselves is appealing enough to me in theory, but the practice of it runs into insurmountable problems. Any such group seldom already controls a contiguous piece of land, and fair division algorithms (forgetting for a moment about their asymptotic complexity) only work if the subdivision valuations are independent (so you don't have preferences like "I want parcel A iff I can have parcel B"), which is basically never the case for land.
I don't want to comment on the viability of an European ethnostate or how its supporters are hypocrites by not actually allowing those who don't wish to form part of it to have to move.
However, as someone who is pro-separatism, I would like to to say that the quote above reeks of being a too correct argument. If there's a problem with the people inside a territory not being able to leave, then there's still a problem with that territory itself being part of another larger territory; that means you're left with two choices to solve to conundrum, either the individual is the maximal sovereign unit and there isn't a state at all (anarchism) or you have a one-world government that everyone is stuck with and that's it.
In order to defend the nation state just as it is by saying it's not fair for some to leave the unit and others can't, but without advocating either of the two options above, it seems like you would like you would have to make the case that nation states just like they're now are the result of natural political/territorial/demographical processes, and people have to suck it up or move to another country if they don't like it. I don't deny that plays a role; however, from my (admittedly not deeply researched point of view) history seems to show there's quite some degree of violence behind their creation instead, to say the least.
At the end of the day, you're always going to have people unhappy with the social experiment they were handed, so that practical problem doesn't go away with decentralization but I think it's better at solving it; more sovereign units with less territories makes it easier for both un-popular social experiments but desired by a passionate minority to prop up, and to remove oneself from them .
American involvement also helped produce the two most stable, productive South American countries in Chile and Uruguay.
Defining "stable" and "productive" is a headache all by itself, but even if I assume you mean "political stability" and "economic prosperity", I think that thanking the USA for those in the two countries you mentioned makes little sense.
What happened in Chile was a series of quasi-fortunate events. Unlike leftists would like you to believe, Pinochet began his regime being just as much socialist as Allende; the CIA trusted him merely because he hated commies, but that's about it; he had no economic ideas for the country at all, so basically continued doing the same as his predecesor but with an CIA stamp of approval (he even met with Fidel Castro! Seriously!). The only reason why things took a free market turn was due to Milton Friedman (who at that time was advising Xiaoping's China to end communism there) meeting with Pinochet once and writing him a letter explaining what he should to turn things around. That's it. Never did the CIA or the Pentagon had anything to do with the so-called "Chilean Miracle". If it wasn't for that visit and the involvement of the Chicago Boys (José Piñera, Hernán Büchi, etc.) in Pinochet's rule, the CIA would've merrily go along with whatever crap Pinochet would've thought that made things better as long as he continued throwning tankies off helicopters.
While I myself consider the Chilean model to be a very good example of how to achieve economic well-being, there's no doubt it that caused signifcant social unrest that climaxed in the 2019 protests, and even if you consider to be the protests to be unworthy of merit (just because people dislike economic policies doesn't necesarily mean they're bad, even if legitimitate concerns like the massive unemployement in the just-out-of-college-with-student-debt demographic and the privileges the goverment continued to hand over to the military elite where there), it shows there are consequences that go beyond economics to take into consideration when a country formulates policies.
I can't comment much on the country's political stability, and it's true that there wasn't any dictatorship after Pinochet, but social unrest, justified or not, is never a sign of it, and even if we assume stopping communism justifies a strongman with an iron fist, I don't think the 3000 people killed during his regime were all a threat to the country.
Regarding Uruguay, as someone who was born and lives there...please. First of all, lumping those two countries together makes it sound that the CIA was also involved in the country's military junta rule, and it wasn't at all. It's true that they collaborated with the democratically elected National Party goverment of the sixties and the following presidency of Jorge Pacheco Areco's as part of the Condor Plan by training our military and police forces in counter-subversion techniques including torture (one of the most famous murders carried out by left-wing guerillas in that turmoil of an period was of a CIA operative named Dan Mitrone, who had also worked in Brazil with the military junta that was there at the time), but by the time the tanks rolled in 1973 and the dictatorship started, the buck had already ended for the US; the left wing guerrillas were completely defeated, and the military junta began its rule with no foreign involvement of any kind (why it happened deserves a post of it's own).
So why is Uruguay so politically stable? We...just sort of are that way, I guess? Democracy and the rule of law is in our DNA: the military junta was an anomaly, and in 200 years there were only two other dictatorships in the country, which were resolved as peacefully as the last one and which shed little blood. Our parties institutional resilience is both a cause and proof of this: of the four major political parties in the country, just one (CA) started recently; Broad Front, the main left-wing coalition, started over 50 years ago, while both the aforementioned National Party and Colorado Party have been around ever since the country's beginnings. There are cracks which are starting to show however; ever since the end of the pandemic, the tripartite coaltion led by the NP, which won in no small part due to several corruption scandals by the Broad Front, has been mired on scandals of its own which are arguably worse, one of which involves a very important Senator who has been prosectued for a long history of sexual assault of minors, while the Colorado Party, which once was pretty much the country's dominant party, has become a shell of its former self and lives off its memories, has plenty of candidates for their next primary but no leadership (their leader shockingly resigned and left politics during the pandemic due to disagremeents with the goverment, which considering the guy's reputation I suppose had much to do with its lack of care for accountability and transparency). Add the fact that we have become more polarized, and yeah, we got problems.
As for "productive", we're like the third world that everyone would like to live in if they had to live anywhere in the third word, but that's it; our economy isn't doing horribly but it isn't doing that great either. The fact that we're considered both one of the most "stable" and "productive" countries in Latin America speaks little of us and volumes of how fucked up the region is.
I think the word is even worse than you think; it's not just that it's being overused, it's that it's so wrong.
What does 'Semitic' mean? It's a linguistic term for referring to people who spoke Semitic tongues. If Hamas is anti-Semitic then they might as well be called a "self-hating" group, since Arabic comes from the same Semitic family of culture as Hebrew.
What does "Anti" mean? It means to oppose something; but to oppose doesn't mean "a wish to destroy each and every single one of it's advocates". It's why it's so obtuse and disingenuous to use the term "anti-trans" to refer to someone who opposes any of the trans lobby's social and institutional takeovers; since the term "anti-semite" is the biggest culprit of "antis", you're basically implicitly putting someone who thinks male serial rapists who all the sudden identify themselves as female shouldn't be in women's prison in the same camp as someone saying "We should lock all transgender people into death camps and exterminate them until none are left alive, and hunt down all those who got away to the end of the world".
Gustavo Perednik, famous historian of Judaism and philosopher (who I met once!), uses the term "judeophobia" to describe this feeling, which is better because at least the targeted group is being accurately represented, but I still think it comes short; fear isn't the root of what we're talking about here. Guys who rub their hands on their shoulders after shaking them with someone gay can be called homophobic since he can be understood as being afraid of them; someone who wishes to place restrictions of homosexual behaviour on public places, put gay people into ghettos and make conversion therapy compulsory (or worse) isn't being homophobic since he isn't operating out of fear, but disgust and hatred.
The only "marginalized" group who's had the dubious luck to have the correct term for people who despise them are women: misogyny (ironically, they are also a group who despite all their oppression have never been a victim of genocide! "Women, can't live with them..."). Some times it can be over used (oppressing women of the "keep them in the kitchen" variety isn't misogynistic; raping, murdering them and treating them live slaves of the opposite sex is), but if you want to imply hatred or disgust of something, that's the correct prefix: "miso". Hence, the prefix "miso" should be used to describe someone/something that holds a group of people in contempt.
The result being: a force like Hamas, who wishes the genocide of Jews, should be described as miso-Judaic or having miso-Jewry at it's core. I think anti-judaic is a ludicrous label to place on someone chanting "They've got tanks, we've got hang gliders, glory to all the resistance fighters": it's a valid way of describing someone who mows the lawn on Sabbat while rubbing it in its Rabbi neighbour face, or someone who doesn't stop making dumb jokes about its co-worker's yarmulke because he can't stand it, but I think it comes short of describing in accurate dimensions the feeling harboured by Nazism/Islamic supremacism.
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