What amazes me is the number of people who understand that the Iraq war, Vietnam war and Afghanistan war were spectacular fiascos and the whole establishment lied. But the next time the media sells a war they get all hyped up for it! This time there is a new supervillan who for absolutely no reason and with absolutely no historical context just behaves like a cartoon villian and we have to take him out now!
During Iraq there was at least some critical media and Baghdad bob was at least allowed on CNN. In Ukraine there are now dissenting opinions allowed. The people who spent 120 000 000 000 dollars building a 300 000 man army in Afghanistan and then told us the troops didn't exist yet the spending did, are supposed to be trusted blindly.
One of the main reasons why politicians are so freaked out about Ukraine is that they lied as much about Ukraine as they lied about every other war and they are afraid of the piles of lies being exposed. One day would could have a Ukrainian Ed Snowden or Bradley Manning.
in that they deeply resent western values.
The ones who resent western values are Israel. AIPAC and ADL are some of the biggest threats to western values. Israel is a state fundamentally opposed to western values that causes constant headache for the west.
They want to see Isreal as a western ally weakened
Israel isn't a western ally, it is nothing but a giant burden on the west causing constant problems in the middle east, engaging in massive foreign interference and receiving a tonne of aid.
as they want to see Iran
Iran is an indoeuropean nation that is stable and exports oil. They are socially conservative while still having a modern and industrial economy. They have done an excellent job at resisting the catastrophic neo-con policies that have swamped Europe with refugees and let jihadists run amok in the middle east. We should be thankful that Iran helped liberate large parts of Iraq and are fighting jihadists in Syria.
to a Isreali woman's right to choose not to be raped
What about European women's right not to be raped by the migrants IsraAID is bringing into Europe? What about the christians in the middle east that are being destroyed by the hostile nation of Israel?
While Trump is making a correct move by being among his voters and not hiding in an ivory tower McDonalds isn't exactly a great brand to be associated with. Why associate yourself with unhealthy, bland consumerist food? Mcdonalds should represent the opposite of what the right stands for. It is the antithesis of tradition, beauty, culture, small business and family.
is practically designed to mislead. What the poll results say is that 35% say Australia should recognise an independent Palestine, 21% say it shouldn't, and 44% don't know.
So most voters don't care and don't have an interest in the issue. Those who do lean pro Palestine and there are few of their voters that are actually pro Israel. No reason to cause conflict over such an issue.
well, it's what I said just above about details - the question is the way in which that recognition can or should happen. In the SBS piece I linked about the Greens bill in May, the Assistant Foreign Minister says
Israel is a great threat to Palestine and the lack of a Palestinian state is a direct threat to the Palestinians. There is no reason except the donors to value Israel higher than Palestine.
- In the last year I've actually been particularly concerned by what seems like the importing of American-style activism over Israel/Palestine, with disturbing effects.
Israel is diversifying its support from the US and investing a lot more in lobbying in Europe and other places. They don't want to be dependent on one state. Unfortunately that is having an impact in other parts of the world when more politicians are going on paid trips to Israel and more Israeli lobbying money enters politics.
The US until recently occupied Afghanistan flooding Russia with heroin and putting American air bases close to Russia's nukes. The US has been invaded Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. It is clear that the US would attack Russia if it could. American politicians would attack or topple Russia if they could. The US is hyper expansionist and extremely aggressive. There is a clear reason why the Russians wouldn't want them on their border. If caring about countries outside your border is paranoia, why does the US care so much about latin American countries?
The Palestinians have every right to fight back when their land is being stolen. Do you not think Ukraine has killed people in its counter offensive?
How much muscle is ideal for a man? At what point does lifting weights become detrimental? What is the ideal proportion of body weight to be able to bench/squat/deadlift/overhead press for a man with healthy bodyfat?
Shale was a major mistake by the US. Shale oil is short lived compared to conventional oil with high decline rates and is expensive to extract. The shale boom will not be a long term solution. Shale caused a 10-20 year boom which will be followed by a decline. Meanwhile, the US is missing valuable years transitioning away from fossil fuels. The world is building public transit and high speed rail at record rates, the US is investing in short term shale oil as its long term energy solution. Cheap natural gas has allowed for construction of energy inefficient buildings and a lack of investment in efficient heating/cooling systems. The US is seriously lagging behind in walkable and bikeable cities due to cheap gas. Even when it comes to electric vehicles the US is somewhat behind
As for the energy grid, the US is lagging behind in nuclear with an older fleet of reactors than Europe and only 1 of 60 reactors planned for construction in the world are in the US. The US is lagging behind in renewables, and overall investments in the energy transition
The shale boom absolutely benefited the US. However, other parts of the world have ripped of a sizeable chunk of the bandaid regarding getting off fossil fuels.
Deportations can be done easily and cheaply without any government involvement.
Require some proof of being legally in the US for opening a bank account. I highly doubt the banks don't know exactly who people are already. Make sure digital forms of payment as well as credit is impossible without legal paperwork.
Limit the time window that a Latin American driver's license is valid in the US and make Latin Americans registers when they start using that driver's license. Driving without a proper license should be punished.
In order to buy alcohol and cigarettes with a latin American passport there should be an American passport stamp in the passport.
Companies should be investigated for tax fraud if they hire illegals.
Make at least larger landlords verify the identity of their tenants.
Make it impossible to register illegals at schools, universities or other institutions.
When I was in the US I had to fill out information to register who I was when I stayed at a hotel. Make that process only go through for people legally in the US.
Create a miserable user mode for illegals in the US and they will leave. The US has millions of illegals because the US facilitates illegals in their country. Stop facilitating them and it will stop being fun to be an illegal in the US. Mexico is not Sudan, life there is not that bad.
It isn't an economic issue. It is the UK no longer being British. It is the loss of a people, an identity, a culture och sovereignty. The UK belongs to the people who built it for the past thousand years and those who will inherit it for the next thousand. It isn't up to the current people to give it away to strangers.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/germany-afd-most-popular-party-among-under-30s/
Germany: AfD Most Popular Party Among Under 30s Increasingly dissatisfied with the conditions under which they live—the growing prospect of war in Europe, a precipitously declining standard of living, mass migration, and a bleak future in general—a large number of Germany’s youth now view the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as the party which best articulates their concerns.
Findings from the 2024 Jugend in Deutschland study, published days ago, have revealed that 22% of Germans aged between 14 and 29 years old would vote for the AfD if federal elections were held today, making the rightist, anti-globalist party the most favored among young people.
AfD’s favorability among young Germans has spiked sharply compared to past years, rising from 9% and 12% in 2022 and 2023, respectively, and has come at the expense of the parties in the ruling left-liberal traffic light coalition.
Support for the Greens, which in 2022 stood at 27%, has tumbled to 18%. The liberal pro-business FDP, having largely kneeled to all of the dictates from the Greens and the SPD since forming the coalition, has seen its standing among youths nose-dive even more drastically, plummeting from 19% in 2022 to a mere 8%.
Commenting on the results of the study he helped author, Klaus Hurrelmann, a Professor of Public Health and Education at the Hertie School in Berlin, said:
The assumption that young people are left-wing is wrong. We can speak of a clear shift to the right among the young population. … The AfD has clearly succeeded in presenting itself as a protest party for the traffic lights and as a problem-solver for current concerns.
Among the chief concerns for young people is not climate change, LGBTQ rights, or gender ideology, as the mainstream globalist press might have it, but rising costs and a lower standard of living due to inflation (65%), the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East (60%), and overpriced and scarce housing (54%).
Deteriorating social cohesion, the managerial state’s disproportionate concern for migrants and asylum seekers, the growing risk of an economic crisis, and the prospect of poverty in old age are also worrying vast numbers of young Germans.
Youth sentiments reflect issues raised almost exclusively by the AfD.
This trend isn't unique to Germany. In Sweden SD was more popular among the youngest voters than average. Since more young people are immigrants and less likely to vote SD that means young ethnic Swedes are fairly overrepresented voting SD.
In Poland support for Konfederacja was by far the strongest among young people
Le Pen has done well among young people.
Meanwhile, in the US Young people lean massively democrat and in the UK the tories have essentially lost support among young people. Only 15% of young Brits support the Tories while 60% support labour, with greens and libs being the third and fourth choice.
Why has right wing politics become so heavily correlated with age in the Anglosphere, while it is not in other countries? What can the Anglosphere right do to attract younger people?
Rather, city streets shouldn't be built for cars. There is no real reason why people should be drivng in cities except for delivery vehicles and workers transporting tools. Streets should be built in a way that is adjusted to people and how people use the streets, not cars.
Did the FED create wokeness?
I graduated with a CS degree ten years ago, and I still regularly meet my old class-mates. Some are right-wing, often libertarian types, while some have gone full woke including some unexpected ones. The main factor separating the two seems to be what industries they are in. Those who write software for the electrical grid, defence contractors, or industrial machines seem to have moved rightwards over the past decade. Those who work in industries propped up by low interest rates have all gone radically left. Spotify's headquarters are close to my office, and I am good friends with several of their employees. Their business-model is essentially dependent on an extreme individualist philosophy. If music is an integral part of culture, something that is typically experienced live and locally, the business of making cents per thousand listens is infeasible. Spotify is built on billions of people listening to the same pool of music. No nations, no borders, just atomized consumers is a suitable ideology for such a company. Grubhub, uber, twitter and Netflix make small sums of money off vast quantities of people. In a more nationalistic world, they wouldn't be nearly as valuable. My woke friends nearly all went for a company that has millions of clients all over the world, generating tiny profits off each client. The art stemming from these companies tends to be bland and placeless. Strong collective identities such as nationalities, ethnic groups, traditions and gender roles doesn't flow well with a world consisting of users.
These companies had another pillar holding them up besides global homogenization, low interest rates. Spotify, Netflix, Uber, and Twitter have lived for over a decade without any real profits. They have consumed monstrous amounts of cash without generating much revenue. This has only been possible because of low interest rates. If bonds were yielding 8% a year, borrowing money for fifteen years and dumping it into spotify wouldn't have been an attractive investment. These companies have lived on cheap credit and a globalized world pooling wealth into a few major cities. A global financial hub is going to be multicultural, it won't be able to have a strong culture or strong norms, and it will be inherently individualistic. NYC needs rich arabs buying expensive apartments. Those working in finance insurance and real estate benefit from Saudis buying lavish apartments which are empty 95% of the time. A janitor trying to buy a house is less amused by Saudi oil flooding the NYC housing market.
Those coding for the electrical company are more interested in people who are committed long term to their society. They don't need a global market, as their market doesn't extend further than the grid. Their interest is people with high skin in the game in terms of the society they live in and who are willing to make long term investments in the grid.
Those on the left seem to still view the elite as those managing local businesses. They see the elite as conservative, and having the values of my friends working at industrial companies. They seem to have missed the growth of a new elite that is international by nature. This elite builds its wealth on taking a 0.1% fee for managing the investments of millions of people, or charges a few cents per payment on their fintech app. My suspicion is that they don't want to see the nature of the new elite, since so many of them make their living serving it. Universities need foreign students, journalists need international readers. The blue tribe is urban because they make their living teaching, entertaining and managing with funding coming from tech/finance. The bookmakers at the coliseum in Rome were more dependent on Rome as a vast empire than the farmers were. Thousands of people betting on gladiator fights required an empire to sustain it. Farmers on the other hand didn't like competing with slaves.
Interest-rates are rising and tech lay-offs are in the news. Spotify, twitter and Facebook are slashing employees. Meanwhile, new nuclear power is in the news and thousands of coders will be required. Defence contractors are trying to hire all the people they can find. Reindustrializing has lead to a surge in jobs in manufacturing, and the machines require code. Government, health care and other sectors are in dire need of developers and there is no shortage of jobs. We are seeing a shift away from 10 cent per thousand adds to agricultural machines.
With higher interest rates San Fransisco, LA, NYC, and London will decline as portions of GDP and manufacturing hubs will increase their portions of GDP. We are seeing a shift away from a global woke class to manufacturing, both in rust belts in the west, but also in China and various developing countries. The end of occupy Wall street is often viewed as the start of the great awokening, the end of the global financial crisis was the FED printing money. The great awokening occurred roughly at the same time as zero interest rates started to have a tangible effect on the economy.
Israel bombed an embassy a few months ago and has a long history of fighting dirty. They shouldn't be surprised that they get the same treatment back. The expectation can't be that they can finance terrorism, assassinate people, and bomb embassies and then not get the same back.
Why should Gaza accept being locked in a small open air prison in which they are under a blockade? Why should they accept continuously expanding Israeli settlements that slowly ethnically cleanse Palestinians? Why should they accept being second class citizens on their ancestor's land compared to recent arrivals from Eastern Europe? The option of cooperating with being ethnically cleansed because it will be nicer doesn't really make sense.
The best comparison to Palestine is the French in Algeria. France entered Algeria in 1830 and stayed for 132 years. That is 57 years longer than Israel has existed. There were 1.6 million ethnic French in Algeria. Many had lived there for generations when they moved home.
There are 2.3 million people in Gaza, making it a large city, 3.2 million on the west bank and 2.1 million arab citizens of Israel. Furthermore, there is also Hezbollah in Lebanon. They have a young population and a growing population. Their best bet is to do what the Algerians did in the 50s and 60s, simply make occupying them unsustainable. The French shot lots of Algerians, jailed lots of Algerians and won almost every battle. The Palestinians are not going to run out of people. Even with 20 000 dead in Gaza over the past 2.5 months, 15 000 have been born during the same time. The Palestinians are fighting an existential threat and have to push back continuously.
The Iraq war was a massive drain on the US. Israel has about 5.7 million jews not counting Haredis who don't pull their weight. They are not going to be able to fight an equivalent to the Iraq war. The Palestinians have a genuine chance of making Israel unsustainable. They can force Israel to have a huge prison population, to have a continuously mobilized army and to be in a constant state of turmoil.
The current arrangement is fundamentally broken. The US has the dollar as the reserve currency, making the dollar too expensive. This is great for the American finance, real estate and insurance industry that require little labour and are capital intensive. The US as a reserve currency means that the world is subsidizing the financial markets in the US.
This means that the US becomes an incredibly expensive country to do business in. The working poor in the US are well paid. They are just living in a financialized economy with high costs. With an overvalued dollar, real estate in the US is way too expensive which means that American workers have to be well paid. All that money sloshing around the American financial system keeps medical insurance expensive.
This worked in 1960 when the US was so technologically superior that much of the world ended up selling bananas and clothes to the US for dollars that then were used to buy overpriced industrial products from the US. As the world has caught up, much of the US has gotten shafted. They have high costs of living while struggling to compete with cheap foreign products in a globalized economy under pax Americana.
Trump wants to keep the US dollar dominance while having a more normal internal market by having tariffs. Prices will be high within the US while Americans will continue to be relatively rich while going abroad.
For the rest of the world the deal is awful, we will have to sell products to the US in order to get dollars and then pay a 25% tariff in the products we buy. So if we want to buy oil we have to sell 100 dollars worth of goods to get 80 dollars of money post tariffs that the Americans just print so we can get our oil.
And this is why there's always a distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Palestinians might have very good reasons to go to war, but they also break the rules of war seemingly as a hobby.
Not really, they are engaged in classic guerilla warfare. They are far, far more well behaved than the "moderate jihadists" that the US and Israel supported in Syria. They are fighting a cleaner war than Israel.
The right's support of Israel never made sense. Israel has created a perpetual refugee crisis on Europe's border, it costs a fortune in foreign aid, and it is a PR nightmare. Meanwhile, ADL, AIPAC and every mainstream jewish groups work against the interests of social conservatism in western countries. Simping for the Israel lobby while the ADL wants to ban conservatives off Twitter is a one way relationship. Israel is oppressing Christians and has sponsored terrorist groups in Syria. Israel works to destabilize the region when the rest of us benefit from it being stable.
There is absolutely no reason to burn political capital defending some of the bloodiest and most brutal wars in recent history in the middle east. Israel can't really provide any tangible benefit to social conservatives in the west. Especially not when Ben Gvir who is Minister of National Security of Israel wants to relocate large numbers of Palestinians in the west.
Had Israel supported similar politics in the west as they promote in their own country, it could have worked. But "nationalism for me, open borders for thee", will upset the left in the west that doesn't like nationalism as well as the right in the west that doesn't like the "open borders for thee"-part.
A regime change operation in Ukraine with the goal of pushing the US sphere of influence right into Russia's back yard even though they repeatedly warned against it. The US was doing everything it could to get a war and the war has gone a lot worse than reported.
The cost will be in the multiple trillions as interest rates have gone up sharply since the start of the war and the equipment that is replacing the stuff sent to Ukraine costs multiples of the equipment sent to Ukraine. Not to mention that NATO is inheriting a basket case nation that makes nation building in Afghanistan look like a cake walk. NATO now has to finance a military a quarter the size of the US military that is supposed to be capable of fighting a high intensity war in a country that has no arms production and now tax base to support it. Ukraine is going to be an endless foreign aid black hole
Iraq was definitely different. It was a completely unprovoked land grab on the other side of the planet. It wasn't really any different then the Belgians grabbing the Congo. The goal was to occupy and control Iraq while giving them zero legal status within the empire.
China is the largest trading partner to most countries in the middle east. They managed to do this and have large numbers of Chinese people working in the middle east by not wasting trillions enraging the middle east by bombing them. Israel supported jihadists in Syria, Europe got culturally enriched and the same terror groups attacked Europe.
The best thing the US could do to strengthen its position in the middle east would be to pull out all troops.
Are gay men actually gay?
What portion of gay men are completely uninterested in women? If there was a highly attractive women who wanted to have sex, what portion of gay men would say no?
Maybe it is my autistic inability to see things from other's perspective but I have a sneaking suspicion that many gay men are gay because grindr is tinder on tutorial mode. I can understand if some of them feel attraction to men but honestly if they had the ability to easily attract high quality women would they really say no?
Transgenderism is religious dogma taken to its logical extreme. The fundamental thesis of the religion is complete mind body dualism. They see humans as a blank slate sould that randomly attached to a body and thereby has had many constraints and suffering imposed on it. Their goal is to liberate the free soul from the constraints of the physical world. The view can't be understood outside their theology. HBD, genetic explanations for class our sex differences, are the ultimate heresy against their religion. They invalidate the core principle and understanding of their theology. The woke ideology is built on a worldview that free souls were created, they were bound to physical constraints through evil and the march of history is toward liberating the soul.
The more tech Silicon Valley take is that this will be done through genetic engineering/AI/fusion powered utopia. The more social science approach is through "justice".
Academia has fallen into a pit because academia consists of writing commentary to other peoples work. In the social sciences the commentary is to a large extent based on philosophers and thinkers that had ideas that are invalid. Rousseau doesn't live up to scientific scrutiny. Yet the ideas that stem from his thinking aren't tossed out. There needs to be a search algorithm that can search citations iteratively and redact those papers whose fundamental principles are false. Papers built on ideas such as "Existence precedes essence" are wrong since your DNA is at least as old as your existence, since you became you at the point of conception or later.
Wokeism in Academia is theologists arguing about the number of angels on a needle. They are taking religious ideas with weak scientific basis and arguing them to their logical conclusion. Transgender issues are so explosive even though they are marginal issues since they fundamentally are a clash of theology. Theologians could spend centuries arguing about the word "Filoque", we are seeing similar debates today centering around the new religion.
I have no idea how you can analyze this conflict and not see immense Israeli competenc
They fought a small town that doesn't have any weapons and still haven't really been able to win in a year. The only thing they manage to do is get weapons as welfare checks and blast large numbers of civilians.
This is just... bizarre. This isn't a math test, this is war.
And they have a population that is physically and academically weak.
I think there should be a major news story every time civilians are killed in Palestine. Israel is blasting away with airstrikes and plays victim when a few fireworks get shot back.
Israel doesn't want to get involved in Lebanon. Their military is tired after trying to control Gaza for 9 months. They are getting pulled into their nightmare situation, in which they have 7 million Palestinians and 5.5 million Lebanese to subjugate. That is more than half of the population of Iraq in 2003. The non ultra-orthodox jewish population of Israel is less than the population of Denmark or Wisconsin. The current war isn't going to end because they fundamentally can't subjugate that many people. They are stuck in the same situation Rhodesians were stuck in during the 70s and the French were stuck in during the 50s in Algeria.
They can kill people, they can arrest people, but there are simply will be more people.
The idea of having lots of kids while living with low status breaks down when you realize that the women who agrees to this will most likely be fat and below average Iq. The dating market is a status game and with birth control people can afford to trade time for more status. Men can spend years going to grad schools, traveling, saving for an impressive condo etc while building their career to move up the stack of profiles on tinder.
Dropping out of the status game at 21 years old to marry a woman who is happy to have 5 kids in a three bedroom house, never travel and live a low status life means your kids would be dead if we had natural selection. The exception is men who have such high status that they have won the statusgame at age 21.
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