Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
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
6mo ago
Unless the idea is to have them as Jewish citizens of the new Palestinian state,
And why should this be so farfetched? Perhaps because implicit in the idea of both Israel and the Palestinian national project has been ethnic homogeneity, or at least hegemony, for the dominant ethny. Two states has always meant division of the Cis-Jordanian territory into two ethno-states, which simply isn't practical for any number of reasons (water distribution, population distribution, transport networks and ocean access, etc.) even before we get to the basic fundamental fact that significant factions in both sides see themselves as entitled to all of the land, and anything less as a bitter half-loaf to be mourned until revenge can be taken.
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
To be fair, Israel has a history of trouncing the Arab powers in conventional conflicts - it would be counterintuitive to conclude from that that they are incapable of defending their position against Arab states.
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
Why would the Palestinians agree to less than half of their land?
Because they have lost repeated wars over ownership of the land, and the consequence of losing is not getting what you want. I.e., the same reason why Silesia, Pomerania, and Prussia are no longer parts of Germany, why the western coast of Anatolia and Constantinople are not Greek, and why California is no longer part of Mexico.
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
Eugene Debs' 1920 run on the Socialist ticket was from prison because he was still serving a 10-year sentence he received for sedition based on 1918 speeches advocating resistance of the WWI draft. Notably, in addition to the prison term he was also sentence to a lifetime disenfranchisement, so in addition to running from jail he couldn't even vote for himself. However, he only got 3% of the vote and didn't win any states, so there was never any cause to examine the matter further.
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
or it seems like they are pricing in wide spread fraud.
It doesn't need to be fraud for there to be a significant disjunct between the population being polled and the population whose votes actually get tabulated. Particularly with the relaxation of rules around drop-off ballots, early voting, and ballot harvesting in many states, activists have much more leeway to shape the electorate by activating particular groups of low-propensity voters than they did prior to the 2020 cycle.
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
I hate the discourse around inflation - when people say "inflation is down" they are talking about a decrease in the rate of change, not a decrease of an absolute number. This is unlike many other things we talk about in economic life; when the unemployment rate goes down, more people have jobs; when there is a decrease in the mortgage rate, houses cost less, etc. This condition people to think that an economic indicator "going down" means that things are getting better.
This is not the case with inflation. When inflation "goes down," it does not mean that prices are actually decreasing back to the levels that existed prior to the inflation. Deflation is a separate phenomenon that almost never actually happens (and maybe shouldn't be allowed to happen - I'm not smart enough to parse the monetary theory of it all). When inflation "goes down," it means "you're still paying way more for stuff than you were a year ago, but at least the prices aren't skyrocketing up quite as fast anymore; you have some time to rebudget and get used to these new, permanently higher prices."
That statement isn't actually a "good sign" for the economy; at best it means "things aren't actively getting worse." Unless there is some significant increase in productivity to drive prices back down, people are still having to pay more for goods and services than they did previously; their money is worth less and they are poorer now than they were previously. The damage has already been done.
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
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.
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
6mo ago
Be careful with historical documents - those were political documents written for public consumption. You're not entirely wrong - the seceding states clearly thought slavery was a central pillar of their unique civilization (though they were not unconflicted about it). However, they also had every incentive to try and bring the northern abolitionists, who were a small minority widely-viewed as radical, humorless, and radical (not in the good sense), front and center. When you're reading those, take the same attitude you'd take towards Lindsey Graham talking about the invasion of Iraq in 2003, or AOC talking about the Floyd riots - it's basically the same thing.
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
6mo ago
Cannot Europeans simply deny the refugees passage on grounds that Egypt is already a safe country for them?
The Europeans could do a wide range of things, both inside and outside the ambit of international law. Pakistan is expelling nearly 2 million Afghan immigrants. However, there is no will to use force to keep large waves of immigrants outside of Europe - that has been rendered so morally-unconscionable in their view that just about any justification to ignore the problem or refrain from action will be accepted.
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
Letting radicalized refugee populations into your country is destabilizing and dangerous generally. In particular, the Arab states near Israel are not particularly stable, vulnerable to Islamist appeals, and have a history of sneakily collaborating with Israel under the table while denouncing them in public that would not endear them to their new Palestinian residents. Most of all, they remember the fairly disastrous war that previous generations of Palestinian refugees waged on the Jordanian state.
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
How effective is this, trying to control discourse via religion? Has MBS, or Saudi in general, tried this in the recent past?
My understanding was that the fundamental basis for the Saudi state was a unification of interests between the royal house of Saud's exercise of secular power to keep order for and on behalf of the Wahhabist religious sect. In particular, the Saudi's maintenance of holy sites (primarily, but not exclusively, Mecca) and the annual hajj pilgramage, is a major source of prestige and legitimacy.
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
7mo ago
W/R/T Germany it did mean the expulsion and resettlement (with significant casualties from hunger, exposure, disease, and criminal predation) of over 10 million ethnic Germans living throughout eastern and central Europe. See, e.g. R. M. Douglas' Orderly and Humane (2013) - just a couple years before a similar, though smaller-scale and less thorough version of the same policy was enacted upon arab residents of the nascent state of Israel in what Palestinians call the nakba, or "catastrophe."
I think OP's argument is that the Israeli fault lies in being less thorough in expelling arabs from a defensible perimeter than the allies and communists were with Germans in eastern europe. I am sympathetic to this argument, though it makes me uncomfortable to admit that, and understand that there are significant differences in the two situations - the arab/palestinian refugees would not have had major military occupations or "Marshall Plan"-style aid as the Germans did, and the strategic situation of Germany (divided in half between the west and the commies, stuck in a geographically-vulnerable middle position) does not describe the strategic geography of the Middle East at all.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
To be fair, B-H has a long history of being shoved together under the same imperial suzerain (Ottomans, Habsburgs, Yugoslav communists, etc.) And I'm not sure what, other than pride, would be incentivizing renewed fighting today.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
I don't think that a major state-on-state action is necessary to seriously destabilize Israel - intervention by Hezbollah and significant communitarian violence/obstruction by Israeli arabs could do that. I'm not even sure that any of the local states' military forces have the capacity to do much to Israel in a standard straight-up battle. The asymmetric stuff targeting civilians seems like much more of a problem.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
Also, I’m pretty sure this is how “dry counties” and similar alcohol laws work.
Alcohol is generally treated as special because of the powers given by section 2 of the 21st amendment - if a state constitution grants counties the authority to declare themselves dry, that would be a pretty clear application of section 2. But given that SCOTUS has ruled that the dormant commerce clause still applies to alcohol notwithstanding the 21st amendment (e.g. Granholm v. Heald (2005) 544 U.S. 460 and Tennessee Wine and Spirits Retailers Association v. Thomas (2019) 588 U.S. ----) there's probably some wrinkles here that I'm missing.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
The most recent meta-analysis I've seen on lead-crime was this, which as I read it suggests that lead likely was responsible for somewhere between zero and one third - closer to zero in the most rigorous studies - of the crime surge.
Anthony Higney, Nick Hanley, and Mirko Moro, “The Lead-Crime Hypothesis: A MetaAnalysis,” University of Glasgow Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health & Comparative Medicine, Discussion Papers in Environmental and One Health Economics series, no. 2021–02, Feb. 21, 2021.
And as for the abortion explanation, my understanding was that the Freaknomics guy's study was pretty convincingly critiqued here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=270126
YMMV, of course.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
Any attempts to use more police enforcement and harsher punishments and whatever will just make the problems worse, for you as well as for the people you're talking about. We've seen that through decades of 'tough on crime' policies.
Do we know this? I thought the general consensus was that "tough on crime" policies like NYC's vaunted "broken windows" efforts, while expensive and not as world-shaking as initially billed, did drastically cut down on street crime and enable the revitalization of the city. I thought that the general consensus was that the harsh policies adopted in the 80's and 90's were a major factor in the plunging murder rate in the U.S., which only started upticking again after the recent racial brouhahas (Ferguson, Minneapolis, etc.) put the kibosh on aggressive policing of the poor and disproportionately black communities where most serious crime crawls up out of.
This is not a new phenomenon. The Black September massacre of the 1972 Israeli Olympic delegation in Munich was supported and facilitated by German anti-fascist radical leftist groups, and the airplane hijacking that resulted in the Entebbe raid a decade later was also a joint effort between the PFLP and German leftists.
Literally the kids of Nazis, who were so obsessed with being anti-Nazi and repudiating the sins of their parents that...they wound up separating Jews from non-Jews to figure out who to shoot. The contemporary far left has a pattern of these kinds of contradictions.
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