Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
I'm not saying that the differences between AMAAC and AWAAC are not significant. I'm saying that if you're asking me about my life-chances from behind a veil of ignorance, the differences imposed on me by being AMAAC or AWAAC would be swamped by (and in many ways significantly dependent on) other traits about me - inherited wealth, inherent intelligence, inherent beauty, sketchy family, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I agree that FBI opposition can harm an administration they don't like. However, I don't think that a more competent and audacious administration would have been nearly as harmed as Trump was by Russiagate. The FBI is nominally under executive branch control, and the President has the pardon power - an administration that doesn't concede to opposition pressure has ways of pushing back against rogue enforcement.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
In real life, among people with decent social skills, moderate effort put into their appearance, some charisma and an openness to others
Hell, even the "moderate effort into appearance" thing isn't all that important. I'm a disgusting landwhale and I do OK because, frankly, I know what I look like and don't expect to be pulling Insta-thots.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Why would western intelligence services decide, in 2022, to ignite the exact sort of protests they spent much of 2020, 2021 and 2022 trying to stop?
Because they have more than one priority at once? Western rivalry with, and distrust of, the Chinese Party-State is longstanding public knowledge. And when you have a big objective like that, any tool to hand looks attractive.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I personally would hate to live with the idea that all altruism and kindness in the world is fake and done for selfish reasons.
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
And by importing, you mean advocating fewer restrictions
I can't speak for OP, but this is only kinda true. Yes, the nice white Unitarian types and Matt Yglesias do advocate for fewer restrictions, and feel bad when they see ICE hustling some poor dude in a hoodie onto a deportation flight because they figure the guy just wanted to make more money than he could in [$othercountry].
However, there are also well-organized NGOs, as well as less-formal ideological networks that exist explicitly to facilitate migration up and down Latin America, with the terminus being in the United States.
probably for another time, but I'd just ask on what specific issues wholly within the President's power Trump was stymied on.
Most frustratingly, withdrawing from Afghanistan and otherwise fighting the foreign policy blob.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
What makes you think Florida isn't? It took me all of a couple seconds of googling to find recent press releases trumpeting partnerships between florida state law enforcement agencies and ICE. Do you think that ICE isn't doing workplace raids in Florida? Do you think that Florida cops aren't referring individuals without immigration status to ICE? On what basis?
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
There's nothing inherently "activist" about critical theory, but the activism its theories enable are particularly destructive and quasi-nihilistic, so it gets a particularly bum rap.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
He was widely seen as being responsible for the rise of Ron DeSantis in Florida, which counts for something. Moreover, Trump was a brick through the Overton window.
Supah_Schmendrick
22d ago
Many thanks!
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
The culture war is as much a commentary on whose righteousness can be expressed as much as it is a contest over the definition of righteousness.
Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't see a large distinction between "a definition of righteousness which can be expressed without significant social pushback" and "a definition of righteousness which has triumphed and been accepted by society." Can you elaborate?
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
It may shock you to know this, but most Jews aren't affiliated with, donors to, or otherwise associated with AIPAC or the ADL. Most Jews don't even think about those groups much (if at all). I'm not talking about "poor" Jews - but a large percentage of ethnic "Jews" who are only loosely (if at all) affiliated, either religiously or socially, with "Jewish" organizations. They're about as Jewish as a random American with the surname "Mulvaney" and who wears green on St. Patrick's day is Irish. There are a lot of "Jewish" advocacy organizations and charities in the same way that there are thousands of Catholic organizations.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The number I recall is 6%, but either way its a tiny minority.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
At least in the case of colleges, because the foreigners pay a crapton of money to attend the school.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
What's a non-sectarian cause?
Presumably one not identified with a particular (religious) sect.
There's probably a lot of Jews working for and supporting NGOs helping refugees move to the USA
Well, the House GOP just told three NGOs to preserve documents in connection with the southern border, and the three are each overtly religious. One Catholic, one Lutheran, and one Jewish. Just because of the religious affiliation of the migrants in question, I would naively expect the Catholic group to have an easier time networking, but who knows?
how many of them support helping refugees move to Israel
Jews in the U.S. care more about US politics than Israeli politics, for the sensible reason they live here, not there.
or to their own neighborhood
Jews tend to live in the biggest American cities, like LA and NYC. Aside from border areas which directly process new arrivals, those cities have the highest foreign-born population in the country.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
This is the section I was referring to:
For the past year and a half, I have been studying the giving patterns of North American Jewish grant-making institutions.
These include nearly 150 Jewish federations. There are also thousands of Jewish community foundations, family and corporate foundations and donor-advised funds, such as the Jewish Communal Fund, which pools giving by about 6,000 affluent people.
I found that many of these U.S. and Canadian institutions actually give more to non-Jewish causes than to Jewish ones. In fact, my preliminary findings suggest that despite differences between distinct categories of grant-makers, at most an average of 25 percent of this money backs Jewish causes.
There is also a link in the article to this 2013 piece from the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
here is what Wikipedia says about Cuban refugees
That's why I was specifying the boat people (definitely not middle class) who kept drifting on over on slapped-together rafts, or getting smuggled through latin america and up through the southern US border, like Yasiel Puig.
how many of the groups came here and became sharecroppers, as African Americans did after slavery?
If they were sharecroppers, they weren't all that different from most Southerners - two-thirds of sharecroppers in the South were White. Moreover, they didn't stay sharecroppers - millions moved north for industrial jobs in the Great Migration of the early 20th century (i.e., the big urban transition in U.S. history). While they were frequently met with opposition, quietly-prosperous black middle classes developed.
This actually mirrors the refugee and immigrant experience to the U.S. - show up in the cities, take a bunch of low-skill industrial and menial jobs (railway porters for blacks, taxi and uber drivers today), and slowly save and skill-up until you're basically level with most everyone else. Only, every time the black middle class started really developing, their neighborhoods got progressively wrecked worse-and-worse by radical "activism."
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I was thinking of Cuban boat people, Latin American refugees from any number of crappy revolutions, and SE Asian post-Vietnam migrants for the first, actually. For the second, I was thinking, yes, of the Holocaust, but also of first-wave Armenian immigrants in the 1890s-1920s, Ibo migration to the US after the Biafra conflict, Rwandans fleeing the 1990s conflicts, etc. The communities are smaller, but they're there!
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Except on the point of stopping the left, where it is extremely unified.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
First off in a post-scarcity society the amount of problem would be greatly reduced. Hundredfold the economic base of humanity and most problems will be cheap to deal with. With boundless resources, a huge number of jobs performed by AI and a massive economy most problems can be solved by spending small sums of money.
This assumes that the relevant problems are, in fact, material. What if they are instead zero-sum games of pure status? That's what the last 20 years increasingly looks dominated by.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Who are your coworkers, and where do you work? None of my co-workers have heard of Andrew Tate, but a few have heard of Tucker Max.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Sometimes - depends on the person.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I don't see the gambling. Card X now costs $4, and Card Y now costs $5, and Card Z now costs $10. No need to gamble for them at all; you pick the ones you want and buy them in the quantity you want for set prices.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
You seem to fundamentally not understand EA.
There are a lot of things which would call themselves EA, or otherwise claim to be affiliated with or influenced by the movement, but which act very differently.
In principle, it is not about hating your local community
I recognize this...and yet...
it is just that mentoring through Big Brother is hard to justify if you count the life of an African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you.
...then this kind of thing rears its head. The act of "valuing the life of an [unknown] African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you," if widespread, actually harmful to your locality and (insofar as you have one remaining there) community, which depends on "inefficient" time-sink efforts to generate public goods. Either that's a basic oversight made at the ideology's creation, or it is, as I put it, an "affective bias" against locality.
Okay, so now you've just displaced the object level arguments one meta-level higher; now it's a battle over whatever historical evidence you can turn up or torture to support your position. Originalist arguments can be made on both sides of most constitutional questions if you work hard enough at it, and there are may very smart, well-paid, and/or motivated people who work full-time at doing just that.
But this whole debate is pointless; you can't make people conform to an interpretational theory. There's just no processing or proceduring your way over serious substantive conflicts in society, or stopping the inevitable drift in culture, language, economic relations, technological circumstances, morality, and language that occurs across the generations.
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