Soriek
2yr ago
That's makes sense, people marrying in from different ethnicities and religions and converting is still pretty different from a blood and soil religion. Aside from a period of study (that Catholicism requires as well), the things that make converting to judaism challenging afaik are no harder than what people born as Jews go through, ie Bar Mitzvahs, I could be wrong though.
Soriek
2yr ago
At least from their wiki Gaza is 99% Sunni. There used to be more Palestinian Christians but a lot of them left during 48 and from the years after.
Soriek
2yr ago
((Separately, the emphasis on the failed judicial reform bill in a lot of these theories is kinda goofy. Netanyahu didn't win, but neither did Biden get a SCOTUS expansion. They gambled some political capital and lost; it's not the end of the world.))
I'm not sure what you mean by either of these, Netanyahu was successful in his judicial reform bill, pending SC review; Biden was against the SCOTUS expansion and never tried.
I think it's more the optics of six months of large scale protests disapearing overnight, but I agree that wouldn't have driven Bibi to do something so crazy. I think it might've been unclear, but part of why I made that post was to illustrate how unlikely it was that he let the attack go through given that polls show what many people would have suspected, that it was bad for his own own political future.
Agreed with all the rest of your post.
the rockets mostly hit open fields, so they are not doing as much damage as they cost to produce and deploy,
My impression was the rockets are super cheap, since they're either gifts or McGuyvered from random materials, but the cost of the Iron Dome to intercept them is pretty high.
Soriek
2yr ago
The idea that religious/ethnic identity is a matter of blood rather than one of cultural practice/affiliation is a distinctively Jewish one. Even the Jihadis for all their barbarism are welcoming of converts and on occasion respectful towards those they view as useful allies/worthy opponents.
Is this really the dominant idea among Jews nowadays? I'm sure someone can find a rabbi somewhere who endorses this or something, but I've never had the impression people actually reject converts. 17% of Jews in America were raised in another religion, Israel is already diverse and anyone from the rest of the world can get citizenship by converting, regardless of ethnic origin.
Soriek
2yr ago
If he knew it was coming the way to consolidate power would have been a thousand Palestinians dead in the attack, a handful of civilians, and a 100 IDF. Looking extremely competent as you crush a massive attack as it happens boost support.
I think most likely you're right.
Soriek
2yr ago
A true Mottezan at heart! He was definitely pretty contrarian and ruffled folks regularly, but also made the rare articulate defense of positions we don't see too often here, which I thought made for some interesting discourse.
Soriek
2yr ago
I always have the same question: can you name a community that does more than us in this regard.
No, for our faults we're probably still the best forum you're gonna get on the internet. That may say more about the rest of the internet than us, but we still deserve a little credit.
Soriek
2yr ago
With the reports of Egypt notifying Israel in advance of an impending attack, people here and elsewhere have wondered if Bibi maybe let the attack slip through on purpose to consolidate power. Overnight he went from dealing with protests against his judicial reforms and the draft to having those problems disappear and securing the full backing of a broad unity government with his former opposition.
But Jerusalem Post just released a pretty damning poll:
An overwhelming majority of 86% of respondents, including 79% of coalition supporters, said the surprise attack from Gaza is a failure of the country's leadership...
Furthermore, almost all of the respondents (94%) believe the government has responsibility for the lack of security preparedness that led to the assault on the South, with over 75% saying the government holds most of the responsibility...
A slim majority of 56% said Netanyahu must resign at the end of the war, with 28% of coalition voters agreeing with this view.
In addition, 52% of respondents also expect Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to resign.
In addition, most respondents also noted that they do not trust the government to lead the war on Gaza, though the poll was held prior to former defense minister Benny Gantz joining an emergency unity government on Wednesday evening.
Is there any way for Bibi to hold onto power? If not, what might the future look like?
How do we assess how much of the Gazan population supports Hamas, or at least this conflict?
They won their only election with 44% of the vote and haven’t held any since. I keep hearing people say they hold supermajority support but the most recent polls I see, conducted on 500 people, show a more mixed bag:
According to the latest Washington Institute polling, conducted in July 2023, Hamas’s decision to break the ceasefire was not a popular move. While the majority of Gazans (65%) did think it likely that there would be “a large military conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza” this year, a similar percentage (62%) supported Hamas maintaining a ceasefire with Israel. Moreover, half (50%) agreed with the following proposal: “Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction, and instead accept a permanent two-state solution based on the 1967 borders.” Moreover, across the region, Hamas has lost popularity over time among many Arab publics. This decline in popularity may have been one of the motivating factors behind the group’s decision to attack.
In fact, Gazan frustration with Hamas governance is clear; most Gazans expressed a preference for PA administration and security officials over Hamas—the majority of Gazans (70%) supported a proposal of the PA sending “officials and security officers to Gaza to take over the administration there, with Hamas giving up separate armed units,” including 47% who strongly agreed. Nor is this a new view—this proposal has had majority support in Gaza since first polled by The Washington Institute in 2014.
Nevertheless, there is widespread popular appeal for competing armed Palestinian factions, including those involved in the attack. Overall, 57% of Gazans express at least a somewhat positive opinion of Hamas—along with similar percentages of Palestinians in the West Bank (52%) and East Jerusalem (64%)—though this is fewer than those who support Fatah (64%).
Even the 57% positive opinion may be an overestimate, given that other polls show 75% of Gazans are afraid to criticize Hamas.
I have no idea how credible these polls are, or where other people’s numbers about supermajority support come from, this is mostly an open question.
Soriek
2yr ago
I think they maitained peace pretty well for the past decade or so, and my understanding is the flare up is over something the French government didn't have much to do with, which leaves me hope there's still room for resolution (though maybe if they're fighting for irrational reasons that should give me less hope)
(the homes bombed were second homes, so it’s an attack on the tourist industry).
It's good to know at least it doesn't seem targeted at random civilians.
Soriek
2yr ago
It’s not, but the point is that Texas was only part of Mexico for 15 years, and California for 25, because Mexico qua Mexico had only existed for that amount of time when those states broke off, not because of shifting borders and lack of historical justification.
Sure but we normally don't assume that post-colonial nations have clear rights to all of their former sovereign's land; nobody thinks Colombia maintains a strong claim on Ecuador and Venezuela just because Gran Colombia was a successor state to the Viceroyalty of New Grenada.
the tdlr is that the republic of Texas claimed territories north of the Rio grande, while Mexico claimed territories north to the nueces river. The region was rural but not by the standards of rural northern Mexico in the 1830’s particularly sparsely populated and there was significant back and forth in terms of actual territorial control.
Do you have any estimates on population size? I feel like everything I'm looking at says the Nueces strip was fairly sparsley populated because of the consistent problem of Indian raids. Or is the point just that they weren't as unsettled as California or the rest of rural Mexico?
Soriek
2yr ago
Alta California, Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico, and Texas were also their own administrative divisions with their own Governors under New Spain, and Texas at least was genuinely federated under Mexico (Cali had a legislature that the Mexican gov never recognized). The central Mexican government's tearing up of the constitution and revoking of their federated privledges is part of how the Texan revolution started.
It didn't break down super neatly in the USSR either. Plenty of the Republics of course had only nominal independence, likely less than Texas, and had their borders adjusted at will from above; the Karelia-Finnish Republic was turned into part of Russia, and of course none of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics got independence.
Soriek
2yr ago
Are these like an unusually generous set of reforms pressured by the protests / political polls, or was this sort of an expected, normal bill?
Soriek
2yr ago
But the viceroyalty of new Spain, to which Mexico is the successor state, had them for hundreds.
This would also grant them claim to much of the rest of the US, the Carribean, and Central America. Most people in the West at least don't grant that modern Russia has a valid claims the territories that its predecessor the USSR once held. Most people back in 56 also found in galling when the USSR revoked Hungary's privledges of self-governance and reinstated dictatorship, which seems somewhat anologous to Santa Anna's suspension of the constitution and installation of himself as a dictator prior to the war. But maybe Mexico's claim was more valid than it seems, I'm sure you know more about Texas history than I do.
And BTW it’s a myth that Mexico settled Texas at lightly as California; the currently populated parts of Texas(except San Antonio) were pre-Anglo settlement very lightly peopled, but border disputes between the republic of Texas and the Mexican empire led to the incorporation of lots of Mexican settlement into the territory which would later become the state of Texas.
Oh really? That's interesting. You have anything you recommend to read on how much population / settled areas got incorporated?
Soriek
2yr ago
I'm not going to give Zionism a pass because experience has proven beyond doubt that White people supporting Zionism earns -zero- reciprocity
Israel was pretty famously one of the last countries in the world backing and arming the white minority governments of South Africa and Rhodesia, and the current government has always preferred and advocated for conservative, anti-immigration parties in the US.
Soriek
2yr ago
If you or others are interested, the blogger Nintil did a cool deep dive into the claims for vs against economic growth under Stalin. The tl;dr is that Stalin probably achieved more industrialization than Czarist Russia would have if it continued on its present path (which it's worth remembering was basically Import Substitute Industrialization and probably would have pewtered out). Stalinism still achieved less than a counterfactual Czarist Russia likely could have achieved if they had genuinely liberalized, but who knows if they would have done that.
This is leaving aside of course the cost of human suffering, which would have made the system not worth it either way.
Soriek
2yr ago
There's a specific ruling for the 9th circuit where you can relocate the homeless, but only if you have a place to relocate them to, which SF didn't. (And regardless of whether that's a good ruling, if you don't have a place to put homeless people you're probably not really getting rid of tent cities, just moving them around.) AFAIK there's no similar law/ruling that would apply to the above situation, though IANAL.
Soriek
2yr ago
Slovakia
Former populist PM Robert Fico seems poised to make a comeback to the position, having seemingly cemented a coalition. The alliance would bring together SMER, or the Social Democrats, with the left wing Hlas Party and the right wing Slovak National Party, for I guess a general populist platform. This election has gotten a lot of international attention partially because Fico is viewed in a similar illberal light as Hungary’s Fidesz and Poland’s PiS (who are up in their own election this saturday), but also because of Fico’s pro-Russian stance and promise to cut aid to Ukraine (though one of his coalition partners, Hlas, is opposed to this). As far as I can tell this doesn't have any implications for broader European funding but would represent the first NATO country to take such a stance, and may move forward the general fatigue we see countries (ie the US) display towards funding the war. @georgioz may have more light to shed.
Soriek
2yr ago
France
Socialist leader Melenchon has gotten some flak for his less than sympathetic coverage of the Gaza crisis. In May his party, La France insoumise, together with the Communist Party, pushed for a resolution to boycott Israel and condemn them as an apartheid state, so this has not exactly come out of nowhere, but the movement seems divided in the wake of the attacks, with other socialist MPs condemning their leadership.
France has been in an awkward spot with its former colonies as they successively coup and expel their French military guests. This week they have finally begun withdrawing troops from Niger en masse, though Italian and German troops remain and the government has requested American troops as well (unlikely to happen, as the US has now formally declared the coup to be, in fact, a coup, which means we’re barred from sending no military assistance). On the other hand, recently France has begun to run flights again to Mali. The Guardian runs a retrospective on the great de-Frenching:
In Mali, violence has surged since military regimes took over in 2020. The deal cut by the new rulers with Wagner forced Paris to end the deployment of thousands of French troops that had fought Islamist extremists and other insurgents for a decade. In the last two years, with 1,000 Wagner mercenaries now in Mali, atrocities have multiplied, accelerating a negative feedback loop of abuses, recruitment to jihadist groups, more attacks and more abuses.
In Burkina Faso, where French forces were told to leave after a military takeover last year, the number of people killed by militant Islamist violence has nearly tripled compared with the 18 months before. “This violence … puts Burkina Faso more than ever at the brink of collapse,” said the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in a recent report…
During the month after Niger’s military seized power, extremist-linked violence increased by more than 40%, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. At least 29 Nigerien soldiers were killed by jihadists on the border with Mali last weekend by more than 100 extremists using homemade explosives. It was the second such attack in a week.
Speaking of managing colonial relations, France and Corsica have been in negotiations about their own relationship for months now. This culminated in Macron recently visiting Corsica and promising them “autonomy within the Republic”. The independence group FLNC set off bombs at 20 locations yesterday, which I guess shows how they feel about that.
China
American Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer recently met with President Xi Jinping to prepare and agenda set for of an anticipated dialogue between the Chinese leader and Joe Biden. Apparently the meeting also resulted in a stronger statement of condemnation against the Hamas attacks from China, although their public wording was still careful. China also welcomed the European Union’s top diplomat yesterday and has said they hope to work to increase relations, a day after the EU announced that it would pursue a probe into Chinese steel subsidies, in hopes of not renewing American’s own steel and aluminum tariffs.
The government has finally released figures for the toll from the biblical plague-like series of natural disasters the country has been going through:
China suffered direct economic losses of 308.29 billion yuan ($42 billion) over the first nine months of 2023, the government said, from natural disasters such as torrential rains, deadly landslides, freakish hailstorms and a string of typhoons.
The emergency management ministry unveiled on Sunday the unprecedented toll wrought on the nation of 1.4 billion by calamities that ranged from sandstorms to rains that brought massive flooding and historic rainfall in Beijing, the capital.
Officials said 499 people were reported dead and missing in natural disasters during the nine-month period, with more than 89 million affected, while over 2.75 million had to be evacuated and resettled.
What's the point here? Why make an argument about someone based on a completely different user you for some reason suspect of being him, instead of just looking up him?
I don't like trawling through people's personal profiles but if you really want I guess I can look him up and find arguments I thought were interesting.
More options
Context Copy link