Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
downtown Baltimore, for example, is going to be a shithole
Except it wasn't for over a hundred years. Perhaps the understanding of "civil liberties" which obtained during those times was better? E.g. Miranda is a comparatively-recent innovation which correlates with a significant reduction in police efficacy, particularly among those with prior felony records (Leo, 1996). Since multiple-recidivists are responsible for a vastly disproportionate share of the crime in society, including large numbers of un-reported crimes (Farrington et. al. 2021), Miranda's effect on public order - particularly in high-crime and low public order communities where cooperation with law enforcement is significantly depressed - is probably undersold by the subsequent literature.
It takes effort and incentives to create a high-trust, orderly society that can have nice things like beautiful and civilized city centers.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
That's not actually true. A lot of the "ultra-Orthodox" in the U.S. have historically had the position that the modern state of Israel is a biblical abomination, as Jews should only return to the Promised Land when the coming of the Messiah shows that God has redeemed the Jews from the sins that resulted in their expulsion. They'll come and protest speeches by prominent Israelis just like pro-Palestinian groups will.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
the goods
These don't have to be some new case; it just has to be enough drip-drip-drip of legal proceedings, bureaucratic reports, and other assorted smears to convince "independents" to vote Biden instead of MAGA. (Oh by the way, Alvin Bragg has set Trump's goofy-ass Stormy Daniels trial for early 2024. Oh by the way, Jack Smith, the Mar-a-Lago documents special counsel also will be releasing a report justifying his charging decisions, and I'll bet any amount of money you care to name it'll be at a politically-advantageous time).
The Democrats' goal here is not really to have Trump executed or whatever; it's to get and keep power so they can push their policies and reward their friends. The point of persecuting Trump is that the Dems can use his unpopularity among their base as a pinata for heightened turnout numbers and negative press about the GOP they can wave in the faces of status-conscious moderates and independents. They also happen to get the perverse side benefit that the more they target Trump, the more popular he gets with the core GOP base, locking them into a candidate who the Dems are confident they can beat.
I understand why this is viscerally frustrating - the Dems are pulling a lot of really nasty lawfare stunts on Trump (though he is also bad at avoiding unforced errors and bad at defending himself), and it feels extremely wrong to abandon him and let them get away with it. But tactically it is playing into the Dem's hands more than a bit.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
No, part of being "more effective" includes, for example, drafting EOs with language that is less-susceptible to challenge than Trump's were, and avoiding explicit public statements which provide grist for the lawfare mill. Or being more familiar with the administrative process, and handling the promulgation of new regulations with the proper procedures. Or being more familiar with the wide variety of administrative and procedural tools that can be brought to bear against, e.g., rogue prosecutors, as DeSantis has been doing with Florida state's attorneys. Or being more dedicated to governing in an anti-progressive manner than in getting good press coverage (See, e.g., Trump firing Sessions, hiring Wray, appointing a special counsel re: Russia hoax, etc.)
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
Population growth? What population growth? California is shrinking and the U.S. has flat-lined. And yet still housing prices go up.
We are allergic to actually counting the number of immigrants in this country. We're probably undercounting the population by around 20 million, which would definitely be enough to put upward pressure on housing costs.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
But this is fairly easily defeated by pointing out that in 1933 no-one had recently tried to genocide the Jews
Not fully, but Jews had been conditioned over the past 100 years to the idea that their neighbors could turn on them at any moment in smaller-scale violence (i.e., "only" 5-10 dead, and maybe a dozen women raped plus various property destruction, sub-lethal beatings, etc.) which occasionally escalated in turn into something much worse. Like, imagine if the 1992 LA anti-Korean riots kept occurring in LA every 5 years or so, with fatalities each time. Or if BLM went out and rampaged through white suburbs every couple years. Under those conditions, it seems pretty obvious why they would have been a mite twitchy.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I would be interested in what mistakes those are - I read and enjoyed "Stalin's War" but have very little outside knowledge of Finnish history.
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
I haven't seen any type of coordination or planning to it, which is something common to most other historical examples I would call "ethnic cleansing." To my knowledge, the 60's and 70's radicalism was not focused on forcing whites out of cities, but rather blaming whites for self-segregating in areas away from blacks.
Like 2rafa, however, I would certainly agree that it was "ethnic replacement," with a fair amount of inter-ethnic conflict as well. I would also call the displacement of blacks out of many areas of Southern California by latinos "replacement" as opposed to "cleansing," because it was an emergent phenomenon and not premeditated.
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
I stand corrected, but would suggest that Poland, Denmark, and Hungary, are very much the exceptions that prove the rule (e.g. Germany, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Greece, UK, etc.)
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
except the ones that admit anyone with a pulse
This is actually most schools. Most colleges in the U.S. have an acceptance rate of over 2/3rds.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
"Critique of STEM supremacism" is useless because the alternatives tend to be woo
It's not a question of "alternatives," its a recognition that STEM disciplines are still full of people, with the same conflicts of interest, corruptions, status-games, cliquishness, and all the rest. STEM doesn't get you an "objective" view of society because the map is still not the territory, and to the degree that it gets you an objective view of the physical universe you still have to convince all the other non-STEM people that you're right or else they'll just coordinate meanness against you using the same old dark arts as always while you're demonstrating the perfection of your equations alone at a blackboard.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
But what you're talking about here is collective punishment, and the duty for an ethnic group to police it's own members or face consequences.
Correct. If Germans don't think about the consequences of electing a radical party to control the Reichstag, and the Nazis get control of the country and start annexing and invading the neighbors, the result is that other countries declare war on the entire country of Germany and not just on the individuals controlling policy. This is because the basic assumption of the modern nation-state system is that the nation is the sovereign unit, and has the right, ability, and duty to ensure it is governed in the manner it prefers.
If the Palestinians can't even ensure their representatives to the rest of the world match their preferences, then it's hard to call them a "nation" in any meaningful sense.
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
Maybe I'm weird, but the knowledge that someone holds me in contempt takes a big chunk out of my aesthetic appreciation of them. Plus, maybe this is my bias talking, but she never looks happy or joyful in any of the photos I've seen of her. People in general are more attractive when they're happy than when they're scowling.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
If you rob a Walmart, or assault someone, even if you are a repeat offender, you will go to jail but then eventually be released. A permanent ban from the public square is tantamount to a worse punishment than faced by many criminal offenders.
Only if you're a white-collar PMC. The underclass is not governed in the same way as the overclass. Do you think that being banned from Twitter would do anything to the people stealing random shit from Sephora? Most people are not on Twitter, or, if they are, use it to communicate shit-takes with their friends or as a mechanism to view various types of entertainments. Those latter functions are not part of "being in the public square" and can be done in any number of other ways, including passively consuming TikToks, Instagram Reels, YouTube shorts, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
De facto, it was.
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
But Jim Crow wasn't exterminationist. The sum total of all lynchings of blacks in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968 was 3,446, according to the Tuskeegee Institute (who I don't think are incentivized to be conservative with the number).
Supah_Schmendrick
14hr ago
aside from some with exotic racial preferences, people usually want to see people that look like them in the media they consoom.
This isn't actually true. White people used to care about seeing people of their own race in their media, but during the Civil Rights era have pretty much stopped doing that. Black people, on the other hand, really want to see themselves, and haven't stopped. (source: Lenk, Hartmann & Sattler; "White Americans’ preference for Black people in advertising has increased in the past 66 years: A meta-analysis" PNAS, Vol. 121, No. 9)
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
I don't know why paid parasocial entertainment isn't really a thing in the western world,
As to bar girls, it's very illegal under most states' alcohol laws (the employment of companion-girls, the act of drink solicitation, accepting a drink from a patron, or some combination of all three).
Supah_Schmendrick
19d ago
It seems like a person would have to be awfully stupid not to notice this about their own life?
People often are, particularly about personal preferences.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I apologize, I think I was not clear. What I meant was that the OIF comment @Ben___Garrison cited itself does not provide convincing examples of the proposition that a partisan war can be handled without reprisal against civilians, because the methods described both explicitly involved significant intracommunal violence up to and including actual ethnic cleansing.
Personally, I think physical relocation and/or separation can be, but isn't always, a solution to intracommunal violence. More important, to my mind, is that a situation be reached whereby all parties agree that one side has conclusively triumphed, the other has conclusively lost, and that further conflict is futile to change this result. That's the only way that both parties will settle down and start funneling resources into building their own prosperity rather than attempting to destroy/displace the other.
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
Dying for something is easy, it's living with it that's hard.
Lin Manuel Miranda?!? You've been behind Hlynka the entire time?!?
(I say, tongue planted firmly in cheek).
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
Like all those African migrants coming into Europe? Or Central and South American migrants moving in the millions into the U.S.?
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
The question of what is "effective" will have different results depending on what the political goal which the warfare is seeking to achieve is. Attempting to clear an area is a different task with different methods than attempting to identify and eliminate particular individuals in a large civilian mass.
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
The definition of a "lynching" from the Tuskegee institute is "a confirmed extra-legal death in which three or more people participated as perpetrators."
"Terror" is very different from "extermination," and distinguishing the two doesn't support your case. Terror can, and often is, employed in order to punish people who are seen as stepping outside of the proper, socially-prescribed role. Thus, a black man who tried to vote in the Jim Crow South, or who insisted on dating a white woman, might well be terrorized with a nighttime visit from the Klan and a flaming cross on his lawn. But if the black man stopped trying to vote, or broke up with the white woman, he would then be left alone - the terror had performed its purpose. That is malevolent, but not an attempt at extermination.
Except your example also demonstrates that "let them do it on their own" is BS. The Azeris had Iranian, Turkish, and Israeli backing...the Armenians "fought on their own" and got stomped. Little countries will always cozy up to big countries, and whoever doesn't have a patron had best find one quick or risk domination by their mobbed-up neighbors.
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