ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
Maybe it was the weather, but that night I found her very alluring.
User ID: 812
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
5hr ago
But we're discussing rape as a "public security" issue in peacetime. The "random strangers in an alley rip off a teenager's clothes and force themselves on her at 3am" kind, where the perps do not belong to the educated and advanced profile. That has been a crime for centuries, and remains an ambient problem in third world societies. Not really comparable to wartime atrocities IMO. And many of these societies do criminalise that kind of rape, but are hindered by structural challenges in actually enforcing the law. Now China is an advanced country, but marital rape is "legal" there. Yet Chinese men in the west rank bottom in all crime statistics.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
15hr ago
What country are you referring to here? As far as I'm aware, rape has been illegal for centuries even in the now third world societies. Do you mean age of consent and/or marital rape?
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
1d ago
The UK Home Office just published a guide for asylum seekers on... how not to rape women.
Some extracts from this 9-page document:
Women can work and earn their own money, study and go to school or university, travel freely, choose who they marry, or choose not to marry, make their own decisions about their lives
Women do not need permission from a husband, father, brother or any other man to do any of these things.
If you have sex with someone without their consent, this is called rape.
Rape is a serious crime in the UK. You could go to prison, lose your support and accommodation, and it will affect your asylum claim.
You are expected to never try to have sex with someone who is asleep, drunk, or unable to consent clearly
The legal age of consent in the UK is 16. This means that anyone under the age of 16 is considered a child and cannot legally agree to have sex.
What could happen if you do not follow those rules?
Treating someone unfairly because of their gender can have serious consequences. If your behaviour is controlling or threatening, it may also be treated as domestic abuse, which is a crime. You could get into trouble with the police, lose your accommodation and support, and it could affect your asylum claim. There is more information about domestic abuse in the next section.
Domestic abuse is a serious crime in the UK. If you do any of the behaviours in the list, you could be arrested and go to prison, lose your accommodation and support, and it could affect your asylum claim.
It follows several high profile cases in which migrants convicted of sexual offences in the UK claimed in court to not understand the law.
A migrant who sexually assaulted a 14-year-old schoolgirl whilst living at an asylum hotel in Epping was said to have told her that it is normal to marry children “in his country”.
Ethiopian Hadush Kebatu, was sentenced for sexual assault before being deported to Ethiopia.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We expect everyone who comes to the UK to abide by our laws. If they do not, they will face consequences, including the refusal of their asylum claim and removal from the UK.”
Prime Minister Andy Burnham defended the booklet saying the government wanted to make UK law "explicitly clear".
Finland has also been offering classes on "how to behave towards women" since... 2016. The fact that a government department, under UK Labour, produced a 9-page guide on these points, in this register, suggests that those migrant crime statistics are not so trivial after all. Incredible.
In a time where even legal immigration has become THE hot button topic for the right and even parts of the left, shouldn't it logically follow that people who treat the law and age of consent as optional are not blending in with the doctors and engineers if you DON'T want to harden public opinion against immigration? It's like they're not even trying.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
1d ago
The analogy is neat and mostly besides the point. You are not selecting athletes for a race next month. HBD is about what follows when large, persistent group differences in traits that society actually rewards (IQ, crime, educational attainment) exist inside a single country, and when those differences are visible enough that ordinary people can pattern match on them. And in this case, he literally cannot switch teams. We know the Chinese and Japanese can build and maintain complex, high trust, developed societies of their own. Just look at their countries, then look at sub-Saharan Africa. This will shape perceptions and social status even if you're not allowed to say it out loud. An individual black man who is personally intelligent and did not choose to be his group's average will still be judged by his tribe's behaviour. And that shadow feels unfair to him, because if the patterns are real, then the old racists weren't entirely wrong about his people. What's grimmer still is that, perhaps, the average black person may be doomed to live in squalor many generations down the line, in America and in Africa. It's perfectly reasonable to want better outcomes for your tribe, and feel frustrated by the bleak likelihood that they may never be achieved.
The moral worth of an individual doesn't dissolve the practical problem @Chi_Wara is lamenting over.
Even if every person has equal moral worth, human psychology will pattern-match group averages when those averages are large, persistent, and predictive. Crime rates, IQ, and other measurable outcomes are not evenly distributed across populations. When those patterns are visible to everyday joe's, even accomplished individuals will be judged according to their group's profile. And if these patterns are real and not simply explainable by environmental factors, then the social and status costs of sharing physiognomy with the lower performing groups become "justified" in some sense. Anti-racist HR policing can suppress HBD discussions, but it cannot rewrite human psychology and subconscious behaviours.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
2d ago
I don't know what the solution is
Banning all social media, obviously!
There is no solution that would work. That is a big reason why the culture war is never ending.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
2d ago
An intentional predator ring run by a well connected elite and covered up by multiple powerful politicians gets less focus (and often in the case of The Spectator, active defense like in the case of Prince Andrew) in them than a professor getting caught in a plagarism scandal. Is this not crazy?
Man, we had this convo just yesterday. See here and here. The "intentional predator ring" doesn't appear in any legal document. Pointing to the absence of wall-to-wall coverage of the most elaborate version of the story as evidence of suppression assumes the elaborate version is true in the first place. Amazing job covering up something that the man wasn't even investigated yet became globally infamous for. And I assume this is the "active defense" you're referring to, the author directly addresses your concerns in the final paragraph:
I can hear the cries from the cellars of the Epsteinheads: ‘How can you defend Andrew?!’ Actually I’m trying to defend the presumption of innocence. And truth. And reason over hysteria.
Other than the Spectator, how many articles do we have doing something so radioactive (on both sides!) as "defending Prince Andrew, the Epstein associate"? The scarcity of such pieces is what you would expect when the social cost of defending process values in this particular case has become extreme.
Self defense is morally okay and it's a weird thing to constantly wish to happen so a good bit of them are just sadists who are fantasizing about the legally acceptable way they can finally kill someone and part of why every once in a while you get "guy shoots at girl scout who knocked on door" stories because they saw a potential opportunity to finally shoot and their idiot brain took it without thinking.
Exhibit A: the absurd oxygen the UK left poured into "Adolescence", a completely fictional story that flattered a particular set of priors about young males and online radicalisation. Exhibit B: every single pred catcher channel's frisson of righteous confrontation packaged as public service.
Anyway, coming to Arday, you're not wrong that a large portion of right wingers were feverishly licking their lips for a story just like this. A disgraced black academic elevated through DEI culture being outed as a fraud lines up neatly with certain HBD-adjacent priors. And yes, the discourse has unfortunately devolved into a decibel contest of validating narratives. Every inconvenient case is just a flag that must be defended. Even when the details are messy or the individual is indefensible, aura is necessarily spent defending it. The result is, both sides end up being tethered to weak or embarrassing exemplars because abandoning them feels like conceding the broader frame.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
2d ago
That's a HUGE amount to reach if you start from the bottom.
And you still don't need a conspiratorial explanation for this. In private wealth management, especially when one ultra high net worth client dominates the book, the gap between “assets under management,” “assets under control,” and “personal net worth” is routinely large and not so transparent. Confusing the three is how the mythology gets built.
And yet, if he was really insider trading for decades you'd expect him to probably get even richer than he apparently was.
Why? It's not a video game score. Returns are consumed, diversified, parked in illiquid assets, spent on lifestyle, used to maintain the social machinery that generated the access, or simply not compounded at the theoretical maximum. A person can extract large sums over time and still end up with a mid-to-high 9-figure estate rather than a clean, ever growing billion dollar balance.
So the part where I go out on a limb for real is the assumption that much of his wealth did not actually belong to him and was occasionally siphoned off for other purposes.
Again, assets under management, assets under control, and personal beneficial ownership are different things. An asset manager with broad discretion over a principal’s non-core assets can live extremely well, direct capital, and accumulate personal wealth through fees and extraction without those assets ever being “his” in a balance sheet sense. You do not need a siphoning conspiracy to explain the gap between apparent power over money and audited personal net worth.
Its not proof that "EVERYONE WAS IN ON IT!" but it suggests some unifying factor keeping people from commenting.
People stay quiet for ordinary reasons. Reputational risk, civil liability, not knowing the full scope, and simple conflict avoidance. This is not unique to "Epstein friends".
The problem being that the financial trails are the ones that we've gotten very little insight to, and have been kept particularly secret... which is where I think the meat of the actual conspiracy would be found.
Take it from a CA, the absence of a clean, public track record of investment returns is not the smoking gun you might think it is. Many private managers never publish audited, strategy-level performance. When the client is one dominant principal who has granted broad authority, the usual external checks are weaker still. That creates room for both scummy but legal fee capture and for misappropriation.
My theory is that he ended up as the nexus/fall guy of some kind of slush fund for, at a guess, one or multiple state intelligence agencies. Maybe Mossad, CIA, or whatever.
This is retrofitting a few nothingburgers. If you take every awkward fact, supply the most elaborate remaining narrative that can absorb them, and treat the absence of contradiction as support, BOOM. A very coherent conspiracy. Aggressive, secretive insider trading run for the benefit of one or more state agencies is possible in principle. It is also an extremely complex, high risk activity. Professional intelligence services already have established channels for moving and growing covert funds. Inserting a flamboyant, sexually reckless, attention seeking private operator as the central node adds operational risk without obvious compensating advantage.
The thing is IT DID generate such records, there were various leaks and both victims and staffers occasionally coming forward to add details, although it was mostly about the sex trafficking stuff.
Two of the four witnesses in the Maxwell trial, Annie Farmer and Anouska De Georgiou, were found NOT to have suffered illegal sexual activity. Check out this whole thread and the links within the comment.
It remains unclear why else he'd have gotten such a sweetheart deal when he was pretty well dead to rights on various serious charges
They did not have him dead to rights. Many of the encounters involved teenagers who were themselves part of the recruiting network. Many of them admitted to lying about being 18 and also instructed the new recruits to lie as well. That creates credibility and motivation issues at trial. Witnesses who were paid, who brought others, who gave changing accounts, or who had their own exposure. The lead detective’s later deposition makes the difficulty explicit:
WEINBERG: So Ms. [redacted] did not engage in prostitution, but others did, during the course of the investigation?
RECAREY: I wouldn’t say others did. It’s a negotiation. If you’re paying for a sex act, it’s a negotiation. You get X for Y.
WEINBERG: So that if the negotiation was purely for a topless massage, then there was no prostitution?
RECAREY: Not in my eyes, no.
WEINBERG: So in your eyes, were any of the so-called victim/witnesses, did any of them engage in prostitution?
RECAREY: Do you mean since that time, or—
WEINBERG: Well, let’s start with that time, when Mr. Epstein was the customer. Were any of the women going to his house engaging in prostitution, in your opinion?
RECAREY: In my opinion?
WEINBERG: Yes.
RECAREY: No.
WEINBERG: And that included those who were going to his house who were above 18 as well as below 18, correct?
RECAREY: Like I was told, people that I interviewed that were above 18, what happened between them were between two consenting adults.
WEINBERG: And in fact, had some of these girls that went there who were under 18, had they been over 18, then this entire case would have been a consenting massage case, correct?
RECAREY: If they were over 18?
WEINBERG: Yes.
RECAREY: That it would have just been what, a massage case, you said?
WEINBERG: It would have been a case between two consenting adults, other than prostitution.
RECAREY: Unless we got a complaint.
Then there was the difficulty of reconstructing specific acts years later, and the risk that a jury would see a messy, transactional, partially consensual-appearing activity rather than the forced commercial enterprise the more serious statutes contemplate. The case wasn't unwinnable, but not without risks. Prosecutors genuinely feared Epstein might get an acquittal in 2007. So what happened 12 years later? The Trafficking Victims Protection Act became more elastic and more aggressively used in the intervening years. Witness availability, civil litigation, and political attention had also changed.
Finally, the NPA was hardly a "sweetheart" deal. Sex offender registry is not a gentle slap on the wrist, not in Florida of all places. It restricts housing, employment, travel, and ordinary social life in general. Sure, he was not yet the global symbol he became after 2019, but the relevant circles already knew him as a rich man who had taken a sex offense plea involving minors and was required to register. That status limited certain forms of respectability even if it did not expel him from every elite room.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
3d ago
I'm not sure why I don't believe this one - it actually makes a lot of sense
For one, this theory is notably light on specifics. What was the work performed? What information was obtained, and what outcomes were achieved? And why was this particular channel chosen over more conventional ones? Absent those details, it functions more as a way of making the residual awkwardness of the relationship feel intentional rather than foolish.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
3d ago
In my country, a guy raped 4 girls and sexually violated 1, and his sentence was a 9 month home detention. The guy went on to commit MORE sexual assaults against underage girls just hours after his bail. And this is not a billionaire heir or some politician's son. It's not unusual for serious offences to be sentenced lightly due to messy legal technicalities.
Regarding Epstein, Michael Tracey has multiple write ups on what the investigation was really about, and why prosecutors reached the NPA. Basically, the case carried real evidentiary and legal risks, including problems with victim credibility, the difficulty of proving the newer “trafficking” elements, and the lead detective’s own later testimony that much of the conduct did not meet his definition of prostitution or coercion. In that context, securing a state guilty plea, registration as a sex offender, and a jail term (however work-release-heavy) was not an inexplicable gift. It was a negotiated outcome in a messy, winnable-but-risky case involving a wealthy defendant with top counsel.
Look, I read a lot of mystery books in my youth, lot of Sherlock Holmes, Hardy Boys... Scooby Doo
Well, there you go. Most real life villains are a lot less smart, calculating and I suppose, more boring than Professor Moriarty. Perhaps it's narrative attractive to treat gaps, coincidences, and preferential treatment as deliberate clues pointing to a hidden master plan. Real life problems are more mundane and ironically more frustrating. Uneven institutional responses, weak or compromised witnesses, and later narrative inflation that rearranges the same facts into something tighter and more cinematic than they ever were.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
3d ago
Epstein was a millionaire, not a billionaire.
Secondly, There is a very large, very ordinary gray zone of questionable to even illegal wealth portfolio that does not require a "global child sex trafficking" conspiracy to explain.
His connections begin to make sense when you treat "the elites" in his orbit as ordinary human beings capable of stupidity, vanity, and bad judgment than as a cold, coordinated hivemind operating from the top floor of Evil Inc.
Both "victims" and "connections" tell us he was an ambitious smooth talker who was super duper good at attaching himself to powerful people and making them feel like they were getting something valuable. His knowledge about the architecture of modern finance was impressive, we're told. Combine his knack for sociability with above average intelligence and it's easy to see why men like Chomsky would be charmed by him.
Charisma is the ability to get someone to do what they would not otherwise do. That is a higher-base-rate explanation for things like the Wexner relationship than a sophisticated, government tolerated and Mossad-led blackmail enterprise that somehow left almost no operational footprint. At least nothing to actually.... convict any of his friends.
And this is an age where such large scale, systematic trafficking and blackmail of the kind imagined would generate multipple records, witnesses, communications, financial trails, opportunistic leaks and competing incentives among so-called participants. To me, that's a much harder sell than a disordered, opportunistic socialite who climbed socially, engaged in some illegal sexual activity with underage girls (personally), and left behind a mess that looks more chaotic than engineered.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
6d ago
It speaks to the inordinate amount of social and political capital that black people have today. There wouldn't be a shred of sympathy from either aisle if Arday was Israeli or Indian. I don't have a strong opinion on whether the dogpiling was deserved or not (okay, maybe I'm leaning towards not).
Academic misconduct is a serious issue, and this was a grown man who knew what he was doing, mental illness or not. His fate was sealed by his own choices, his widow and children will bear the brunt of his actions now.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
8d ago
I suppose that’s a fair example of personality de-glamming the package.
Look at her mannerisms and overall presentation: tightly pulled-back hair and wears a coat, the overall style broadcasts “girlboss.” A lot of men, especially conservative men, find that combination either deeply unappealing or actively off-putting. And she's basically the mascot of woke polticis, which actively celebrates those traits, treats male preference as something to be overridden or mocked, and works hard to render any criticism of them low-status and socially costly. It’s a mismatch between desirable and celebrated preferences, backed by a status hierarchy that insists the mismatch is your problem.
She's still attractive in a girl next door kind of way, but that is the only vibe that would make her appealing. She's not hot enough that her girlbossing becomes tolerable.
And it cuts both ways, just look at the many dating threads here. You see the same recurring theme vis-a-vis female attraction, the asymmetric tolerance levels for misogyny displayed by incels vs hot Chadonis.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
8d ago
Exactly, woke 1, woke 2, woke 100, doesn't matter. I don't want ANY shit sprinkle in my ribeye, zero. And I consider woke as objectively shit.
Yes, some pushback against woke has become socially permissible now than before, but zero material gains are made until you significantly dismantle female and minority associated privileges in political, social and cultural contexts. An all white, all straight gender conforming cast in Odyssey for example. Zero girlbosses in male oriented media. Media napologetically catering to the straight male gaze. Regardless of who it offends. No more diversity hiring and affirmative action (at least, not based on anything beyond income levels). No more woke pandering in academia. These are real gains, "well, more people hate it now" is just a consolation prize.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
15d ago
Well I think that once a black person has been cast, there is a lot of pressure on the show runners, directors, producers, etc. to follow certain rules about how that black person must be portrayed.
But this is downstream of the first mandate though, the non-negotiable racial inclusion. LOTR is objectively not made any better by including blacks, no matter how stellar their performances purportedly are.
As I mentioned above, while I think that there is a taboo against this kind of fan service, it's nowhere near as strong as, for example, the taboo against portraying a black character as being unintelligent.
Okay, so the grievance hierarchy places black representation above male gaze and penalises it harder. So what? Exceptions like Landman may exist (I haven't seen it, so I'll take your word for it) but the direction of the pressure is still the same. Do you think Stripes would be made today?
Sure, access to online porn may reduce the pure commercial incentive to include softcore fanservice, but it does not explain the active moralisation of female sex appeal. If this were merely demand adjusting to free alternatives, we would expect quiet reduction. What we actually get is reduction plus public scolding. Attractive female characters are not simply less common, they are frequently treated as ideologically suspect. And there's a corresponding rise in male nudity even in male media, like Thor. What is the commercial incentive here?
But this shift is especially obvious in video games. Female character designs are frequently unrealistically ugly and androgynous, look at Abby in TLOU2 vs the live action TV show. Ironic, the graphics get prettier while female models get uglier. And the stated reasons are explicitly "diversity" and "subverting the male gaze". That is not the market spontaneously deciding that gamers (majority straight male) no longer like looking at pretty women. It is a cultural and professional status hierarchy asserting itself inside studios, marketing departments, and critical institutions, independent of any commercial incentives.
That is why I brought up Black Myth Wukong. There's literally zero wank material there, but the complaints still arrived because the female designs were conventionally feminine and attractive, despite being non-sexual. Not as loud as Stellar Blade, but they were still there.
But it hardly really ends there. Forget oysters, take homosexuality.
I think it's disgusting and don't like people who engage in the practice, but I don't find it immoral and it's fine for people in my society to engage in this practice.
That statement will not be taken kindly in polite society. But it's socially permissible to shame and police straight men for liking straight male gaze oriented content, and as a result, police the content itself.
You dislike immodesty and porn in general, that's fine, but practically there really is no difference when you say "it's fine" and in the breath attempt to shame someone out of watching porn. Your words and vibes don't match, is the point.
Edit: Sorry, groggy typing. Edited many times.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
16d ago
Adding to what @haroldbkny already said, the principle is still worth defending.
I rarely watch mainstream media that features black people anymore, even when their presence is technically plausible within the setting. Not because I harbour some pathological hatred of blacks (I don't), but because experience has taught me that “plausibility” is almost entirely incidental.
Beyond a certain budget, an all white, all straight, gender conforming cast with traditional sex roles is effectively forbidden. The industry treats demographic representation and progressive tropes as non-negotiables first and a storytelling choice second. I oppose that cultural settlement on principle.
Now regarding male gaze, I'm all for flat justice, and cannon-boobs aren't exactly my first preference. Nor do I need to see hot naked women to enjoy something. But I know why that is stigmatised. This is not some aesthetic evolution that emerged "neutrally". It is the product of constant feminist cultural policing of traditionally male spaces. And the same environment that treats the male gaze as something to be ashamed of and confined to privately consumed vices like porn, simultaneously celebrates male nudity and the female gaze in those same mainstream venues, see Thor Love and Thunder.
The messaging is that male desire is low-status and must be disavowed in public, female desire (and its equivalents) is high-status and may be displayed openly.
And you as a man should internalise this hierarchy and join the choir in calling out the "weirdos" who refuse to comply. You see this specimen of man everywhere, it's obvious as hell that he doesn't actually believe this, but performs it anyway purely for social approval. I've even seen it in games like Black Myth Wukong. The female characters are not at all sexualised in costume or behaviour. But the complaint still persists merely because females in the game were facially feminine and pretty. It's transparent from the language, "have you SEEN an ACTUAL woman?" Pure status signaling through and through.
I think South Korea is still a bit equitable, they don't get as upset over male targeted goonerbait as western women do as far as I'm aware. I don't recall a domestic backlash against Stellar Blade for instance. Meanwhile in mainstream western media there's been far less female nudity in recent years, and way more male nudity, even in presumably male targeted IPs.
Edit: Relatedly. My theory is that mainstream TV, gaming, cinema, etc are a shared cultural space, a public park of sorts. If EVE is allowed in this space, where millions of normies could see her casually and frequently, it's culturally "okay" to publicly cater to the male gaze. Hence the push to stigmatise it, so you realise that designs and body standards that appeal to you are culturally taboo, you should be ashamed of liking them and only find them in porn.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
17d ago
But slow-mo replay of shower scenes in kdramas are a-okay! A man being offended by his girlfriend ogling at another dude's abs is also low-status, apparently. I'll reiterate @Botond173 that goonerbait targeting the female gaze is freely celebrated, and the expectation that men should "suffer" through it to make their girlfriends happy seems to be norm in many, many relationships. At least, in the west.
Yes, the institutional inertia is a factor
You say this like the institutional apparatus that no single President can overturn is somehow ancillary to "some politicians". It all comes down to Zionist Inc, who are "beyond" supposedly anything?
Pointing to high spending and a few costly policy choices (missile stocks, etc.) does not by itself demonstrate that the relationship is held together by a uniquely captured political class rather than by a thick combination of strategic continuity, bureaucratic path dependence, legal commitments, and mutual military utility. Those layers can absorb a good deal of friction before they actually reverse. The fact that the relationship remains costly for the US does not prove it is irrational from the standpoint of the institutions that maintain it, it only proves that the costs of reversing it are real and that the institutions have so far judged them worth bearing.
And the engine behind this is the strength of the American state apparatus itself.
I repeat, we're talking 8 decades of joint planning, co-developed systems, intelligence sharing protocols, formal MOUs, and career tracks across the Pentagon, State Department, and intelligence community have embedded the relationship into the operating assumptions of the national security bureaucracy. Key committees treat this continuity as the default. Legal and procedural commitments accumulate over time. Once a foreign policy relationship reaches that level of sustained institutionalisation, reversing it would require the entire state apparatus crafting a uniquely exigent response against its own characteristic habit to resist abrupt shifts. That is a much higher bar than generating noise or imposing marginal costs.
So we are supposed to believe that hundreds of millions are being spent by what is arguably the most successful lobbying operation to ever exist, and it is all for no reason at all? Because nothing can change! Yeah, I am going to trust Aipacs judgement on this, over yours.
You are free to trust AIPAC’s revealed sense of urgency more than the institutional analysis. But urgency is not the same as fragility. A lobby can be highly competent at defending a structure that is still deeply embedded, and still feel the need to spend aggressively when the political weather turns against it.
Zionists, Mossad, the CCP, competent as they are, are still run by humans. They're not the calculating hiveminds you see in Hollywood. IRL conspiracies are messy, imperfect, and boring. Internal churns happen, personalities and egos clash, some of them are rank incompetents who simply knew the right people, and some of them are greedy bastards who just want to add more zeroes to their bank account.
All of these facts sit comfortably together.
You said
Yes, it will quite obviously entirely change the US policies towards the whole of the Middle East, including Israels enemies. If you are in denial about this, I suspect you are in a minority, even among zionists.
That's some strong vocabulary, and does insinuate that by 2032-36, we would have seen the type of policy reversals that I described. That institutional inertia, i.e. the airtight legal architecture and bureaucratic path dependence, is the decisive factor in the US-Israel relationship. And anything short of overturning those thick set of constraints, even by a trifle, is frankly a consolation prize. Realistically, yes, aid packages can be delayed, conditions can be dictated, criticisms can mount, and specific arms transfers can be slowed or scrutinised. Variants of that have already happened in limited ways under Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr.
Re AIPAC, consider that it is a human organisation run by humans with very human judgements that are neither perfect nor 100% rational. Yes, public opinion has turned against Israel and even American Jews by extension.
Yes, they're a fundamentally pro-Israel lobby, and obviously wish to preserve a pro-Israel public consensus for that reason alone. That by itself isn't evidence of anything.
AIPAC is headed by American Jews. They are naturally concerned by the rise of rancid antisemitism both online and IRL that doesn't care to distinguish Netanyahu from IDF/Mossad from Israel from regular Jews. And that could directly impact their immediate livelihoods. In their minds, protecting American Jews is analogous to defending Israel.
To you, this wave of antisemitism may be justified or at least excusable, because this time the Jews have truly earned it by bombing Palestinian babies. But to the group whose ethnic and cultural history is marked by the Holocaust, multiple ethnic cleansings and pogroms, and all around scapegoating, that just brings up very unpleasant memories irrespective of context. So yes, they want "their" candidates to win. But even if they don't, the US-Israel relationship would still be protected by institutional inertia.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
24d ago
Yes, it will quite obviously entirely change the US policies towards the whole of the Middle East, including Israels enemies. If you are in denial about this, I suspect you are in a minority, even among zionists.
If you believe the US-Israel relationship is built on some billion shekels, then sure that's a possibility.
But what about the extensive interoperability created from decades of joint ops? What about the co-developed missile defence systems? Multiple mid-level officials across the Pentagon, State Department, and intelligence community, as well as key committees (Armed Services and Foreign Affairs) have entire careers, doctrines, and planning assumptions built around the US-Israel relationship, and favour continuity. Multiple laws, MOUs, and bipartisan resolutions across 8 decades have created locked-in commitments. Changing this needs a historically rare sustained coordination across both parties to amend many, many layers of complex legal procedures over a foreign policy issue.
Are you willing to bet AOC can girlboss her way through such overwhelming institutional inertia and rewrite war plans and agreements to overturn 8 decades of sustained policymaking?
Well like any movement, they build their case gradually. See the pro-life movement.
@FtttG 's point is that these movements rarely impact foreign policy, abortion is a domestic matter. But the fact that both BLM and Palestine protests erupted across Europe, Australia and New Zealand clearly shows they were US culture war exports.
Well, never mind then. I don't think it's a claim even they seriously believe in, just like the one-state proponents, because their real audience is domestic (not the Gazans). "Queers for Palestine" is a loyalty test, it is inconsistent but the real currency is status and tribal payoff.
That is why I don't see any "gotchas" working against the Palestine movement for now. The sexual violence and homophobia should've sufficed. But a "gotcha" only works when a non-trivial number of politically neutral or moderately-aligned people are already experiencing private friction with the movement, and the side shooting the "gotcha" carries enough status and optical legitimacy to attract more supporters. Yes, it can still damage the target. Yes, it can expose the contradictions in the coalition. But it won't make the Zionist opposition more attractive. "What is a woman" works because opponents of trans ideology aren't immediately dismissible as unhinged cranks, and it turns beliefs and internal logic directly held by its proponents against them. Zionism is politically homeless in American CW.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
24d ago
My read is @FtttG was using Instagram as a byword for "reductive, zero nuance, zero context, sheltered takes from privileged people supporting the current thing out of peer pressure". Just like George Floyd 2020 and ACAB. The human mind is drawn to one-note takes with cut and right moral clarity, so naturally they get the most decibels both online and IRL.
"Every problem has an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
In 2026, some flavours of antisemitism are acceptable in common parlance when sufficiently couched in progressive speak about Palestinian suffering ("poor brown babies colonised by white (adjacent) people"). Muslim antisemitism is excusable (if not justified) for the same reasons why anti-whiteness is excusable. White antisemitism, less so, because holocaust and uncle-Adolf. However, it is inconvenient to give too much oxygen calling out these folks (real as they are) when they're attacking Jews, at risk of giving ammo to the pro-Israel narrative.
Though I am surprised that @FtttG hasn't heard of "Rainbow Hamas", since they tend to overlap with this demographic:
you're almost equally likely to encounter a well-meaning young person who's simply upset by gory war footage in her Instagram feed
They also overlap with the noble savage myths in woke academia, which insist that any retrograde practices like slavery and superstitious anti-female, anti-gay violence in indigenous cultures were amplified (if not outright imported) by white colonialists. Modern portrayals of Native Americans (see RDR2 and Yellowstone/its spinoffs) are basically Bay Area woke self-inserts wearing Native aesthetics. Even if they know this isn't true, it's simply not optically feasible to acknowledge, let alone reconcile with progressive priors ("Should I support the browns or the brown gays?"). You don't wanna steelman colonial apologists, because again, it's a decibel contest!
Regardless of if they truly believe it or not, hardcore progressive pro-Palestinians have to pretend the browns they so zealously defend won't go back to oppressing women and uncle-Adolfing all Jews and gays.
I'm not disputing that certain forms of rape were legal in western countries until very recently. Rape is punishable by death in Pakistan, but they have a hard time in actually enforcing the law. I did not get your point before, yes there is a thing as "revenge rape" but I'm unsure about the tribal element. Some 82% of rapists in Pakistan are fathers or brothers of the victim, which don't get reported. It's likely true they don't view Britons as their tribe, but I think they target white girls simply because white people are the UK's majority.
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