functor
6mo ago
They get more foreign aid than any other country. All politicians more or less have to bow to Israel. Lots of American politicians openly say they are Israel firsters. There is an absurd overrepresntation of jews in the american elite and people have gotten fired for not supporting Israel. American aggression toward Syria, destabilizing Iraq and decades of involvement in the middle east has been a tremendous gift to Israel. Even when Israel is mass bombing cvilian areas the US is flying in weapons and stationing air craft carriers off their coast.
The relationship is unidirectional. The US politicians go the wailing wall and bow to their rulers. Blinken is openly running policy for his ethnic interest.
functor
10mo ago
The idea that we can just replace the population with other people is ludicrous. A nation is like a family, just because someone does the dishes and is pleasant doesn't make them a part of my family or mean that they can live there. France is a nation and a people, not an economic zone. There are countries that are nothing but administration of an area of land and these countries tend to be unsuccessful. Countries created after colonialism as nothing more than lines drawn on a map by foreigners concerned by 19th century geopolitics are terrible. Not to mention that we are giving up our history, culture and our way of being to save a government program.
Furthermore, every country is now in serious resource overshoot. Our consumption is wildly unsustainable. The population of humans is several times higher than what it was when we lived sustainably and each human consumes far more. Population reduction has benefits, cheap housing and nature. If you ride through rural Europe on a train you will barely see any real nature. You will mainly see urban sprawl and agriculture upheld by mountains of petrochemicals. Exponential growth in the number of humans isn't sustainable at all. We have witnessed a collapse in insect and bird populations over the past decades. Forests in Europe are largely gone and high intensity agriculture wrecks the land it uses.
functor
10mo ago
In a society with no collective identity this is inevitable. There isn't a sense of the country being one big family with people fighting for the common good, instead countries are viewed as a legal platform and a market administrated by a government. In many ways it isn't too different from Iraq, a plot of land which arbitrarily became a country. Within this arbitrary zone the obvious winning strategy is to form a group and promote your group's special interest. That may be feminism, it may be more money to the military industrial complex, lower taxes for wall street, more money for Israel, extra spending on infrastructure in the place you live etc depending on what group you belong to. The society is a nothing more than a shopping mall and people want to benefit themselves.
The US is largely government by a legal system and the legal system is has as one of its primary duties to defend victims. For lawyers and judges, having grievances is hold the aces. In previous societies claiming noble birth and belonging to the main ethnic/religious group would have provided one with benefits. In a society that has equality before the law combined with a society largely run by lawyers whose job it is to compensate victims people are going to perpetually try to gain maximal victim status.
functor
10mo ago
The issue is that there isn't enough content to fill facebook with quality content. People are spending several hours a day scrolling on their phone. There aren't enough childhood friends getting married and second cousins graduating to fill such a massive feed. People are opening their phone 50 times a day. The world isn't eventful enough to provide content.
functor
10mo ago
The US is stuck in a cold war mindset and can't stop thinking in a two-polar world. The world isn't split in pro America/anti Soviet and pro Soviet/anti America. The world now consists of multiple poles with their own interests and that can cooperate and have their own conflicts. India is the largest country in terms of population, has nuclear weapons, is a major economy and their borders mainly consists of ocean and impenetrable mountains. They aren't Norway in 1955 trying to avoid being conquered by the Soviets in some ideological struggle. The US elites seem to swing between India doing business with the US and thinking they have almost joined NATO and India buying Russian military hardware and thinking they have almost joined a neo-Warsaw pact. India isn't going to be a junior member of someone else's pole, they are going to be their own pole. India is going to do tech deals with the west, buy manufactured products from China, buy natural resources with Russia and buy oil from Arabs.
Until the US realizes that the rest of the world in many ways has caught up, they are going to be frustrating much of the world by treating them like children.
functor
1mo ago
It is a win in a multitude of ways:
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Israel spent far more on this attack than Iran.
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It caused widespread disruption in Israel. Few people slept well last night, flights were cancelled, large numbers of people hid in bunkers and thousands of soldiers participated in the air defence operation.
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Air defence is limited by industrial capacity, not money. The interceptors are complex machines and production is limited. SAM were low priority during the 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan so few SAMs were bought and production capacity was reduced. Now Ukraine is consuming SAMs at a rate several times higher than production and their interception rate is dropping due to shortages of SAMs. Ukraine will also need thousands of SAMs after the war ends to rebuild. Israel is firing SAMs wildly as they are exceptionally casualty averse. Meanwhile China builds missiles are drones at a higher rate than any other country and they are stockpiling their weapons. Depleting SAM inventories is a success in itself.
functor
1mo ago
Catholicism can lower birth rates.
Getting married is a big barrier to having children. Men aren't marriageable until they have finished their education, have a job and a place to live. In a country where 29 year old men can't afford their own place and are working as interns few men are going to be married at a fertile age. Unless young women start marrying substantially older men having a high fertility rate becomes unfeasible if marriage is a requirement.
There are really only three solutions:
Lower the social requirements to having kids. Aka single motherhood.
Make becoming a husband more achievable. Aka make it possible for young men to get a stable job and buy a four bedroom home.
Adapt to a middle income country lifestyle. This is common among high fertility immigrants. They can live with six kids in a small apartment, never eat in a restaurant, live off rice and beans and pull teeth out by themselves instead of going to a dentist. Their lifestyle is still materially superior to the vast majority of humans who ever lived. With free school lunches, the children can stuff themselves and get enough calories to cover most of their needs. Humans can survive on a tiny fraction of what middle class people assume to be the limit of survival.
The combination of high requirements and a Catholic view of family means that a sizeable portion of men will never be fathers and those who do will only meet the requirements after age 35.
Is Israel responsible young vs old
Is Israel going to far Young vs old
The big rift is young vs old, with boomer republicans being much more pro Israel than young conservatives. The conservative zionist partnership is strained by AIPAC/ADL being highly anti right on social media. Israel has in no way delivered for the right. Israel with the lobby has pushed migrants into Europe, promoted censorship and cost hundreds of billions. With Israel ethnically cleansing christian Palestinians and mistreating Christians in Jerusalem, it is hard to see what the right gets out of the support. Putting MAGA and ADL in the same tent is as hard as getting the leftist coalition together. Right-wingers are supposed to like Israel, while Israel's lobby wants right-wingers banned off twitter.
The big split is most likely between those who get their information from oligarch owned media and those who get their information from more distributed sources.
A big problem for Israel is the diaspora demographics. Europe's jewish population is in a state of collapse, with especially Eastern European jews moving to Israel. Russia only has 10% as many jews as they had 50 years ago.
American jews are older than the average American and non orthodox american jews have low birth rates.
In the 2020 survey, Jewish adults ages 40 to 59 report having had an average of 1.9 children, the same as in the 2013 survey and slightly below the comparable figure for the general U.S. public, which is 2.3 children per adult in the same age cohort
Source The jewish number is propped up by orthodox jews. Non Israeli jews are trending toward either Haredi jews or secularized liberals with few children and lower levels of ethnocentrism.
In other words the US has a population that is rapidly rising while the number of jews is in decline. There are enough jews to staff high positions but this means that there simply aren't enough jews to keep a presence in broad sectors of society.
functor
2mo ago
Lots of people aren't on the stack. People with fetal alcohol symptom, the ugly, the short, people in wheel chairs etc..
I highly recommend the essay Biological Leninism. Basically, the left is a coalition of people who naturally resent society and are in the bottom of it. The left finds people who will never be able to seize power and promote them to middle managers. The left's coalition is obese black women in a boardroom with Iqs of 100 when everyone else in the room has an Iq above 120. They would never be there in any other society and will therefore be loyal to the current system since they are entirely dependent on it. At the same time they won't actually take over the power structure.
Autists are either too autistic and therefore too incompetent or they are highly skilled autists and will not conform to social pressures and may even take over the power structure.
functor
3mo ago
The military was in many ways the organization that least represented conservatives. It has always been the power tool of the globalists and internationalists. In a global empire, the capital city will be multicultural. The US elite won't be loyal to the population of the fly over states when their empire consists of a billion other people and their interests. The US elite won't consist of WASPs when the empire is less than 10% wasp.
The US military doesn't protect America, Americans or the American way of life. It protects international trade, aka shutting down production in the rust belt and outsourcing production to cheap countries.
Socially conservative and nationalistic minded people won absolutely nothing in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen or Afghanistan. On the contrary, these wars were against the interests of conservatism. If anything, the average conservative voter has a greater strategic interest in supporting the groups fighting against the US military.
functor
7mo ago
Israel is running into the problem France had in Algeria and the whites had in South Africa. Once the minority becomes too numerous they can't be controlled. Had there been a million Iraqis the US would have won. With a booming population they simply couldn't. France controlled Algeria relatively well when their population was small. With the economic benefits of being a part of France their population boomed and it just became impossible for France to police that many Algerians. Apartheid South Africa would have been hard to maintain with a 4% white population. The Palestinian population is increasing rapidly and is getting to the size where counter insurgency is hard.
Academics in Saudi Arabia are Sunni muslims, Academics in Berlin were national socialists in 1940 and communists in 1960. People probably greatly overestimate the influence of academia and underestimate the extent that academia promotes what is popular. Universities are finishing schools that train the future employees of government and business. They train their students in what their future employers want. There are academics of all opinioins but only some get attention. Michelle Foucault got CIA funding, other academics had the security state working against them.
The US isn't as much a country as it is the center of a global empire. Having an empire requires not having a strong central culture or people. An empire is almost by definition multicultural. Maintaining an empire with one ethnic group at the core and one culture at the core is hard unless the colonials are far behind the people in the imperial core.
Early Rome could be racist and intolerant. A Rome in which latins were a tiny minority had to be inclusive, diverse and tolerant of norms outside of the norms of the latin tribes. The big cities in the US aren't just big american cities, they are imperial centers. They will therefore have to have lots of people from other countries. Having strongly enforced WASP culture and WASP ethnonationalism is hard when the empire largely consists of and is largely staffed by non WASPs.
Also the US dollar is far too expensive compared to how many dollars are printed. This means that prices in the US will be too expensive. Having a global reserve currency and having prices that aren't completely through the moon requires having a large imported underclass that works in agriculture, food services and construction. There can't be a conservative WASP ethnostate with tens of millions of latin American and Filipino migrant workers.
The inverse, how many women can you hookup with without raping one?
By rape I don't me beat up, drag into an alley and wrestle to the ground while she screams and fights, I mean women who really wasn't into it or ended up getting something different than she expected. These loose sexual encounters are difficult to read and people aren't communicating clearly. If a women can change her mind half way through, have blood alcohol content above a certain rate or be ok with x but not y without giving a manual before hand it isn't strange that women have had miserable experiences.
False rape is a common trope on line. The reality is more like a middle ground. A lot of these cases aren't a man consciously trying to rape a women, they aren't a women enthusiastically participating in sex and then changing her mind the day after. They two drunk people steared by horniness having an akward encounter that went wrong. The women in these college rape cases have a point. A lot of women are having deeply uncomfortable experiences that they really didn't want. The men also have a point, they didn't put on a mask and bring a gun in order to execute a planned crime.
The fundamental issue is that all forms of training for how people should behave, what is expected and norms for sex has been replaced with do what you feel like. This is going to lead to a greater than 0.1% instance of someone clearly not getting what they bargained for. By replacing norms with do what you feel like we have entered a behavioural sink. The feminists wanting consent laws probably aren't evil man haters, they are probably women who have been legitimately hurt and are deeply unhappy about the state of things. However, their solution of throwing men in jail for years based on hearsay worsens the situation and furthers the rift between men and women instead of healing it. Having removed romance, deep bonds and love from sex as well as the stability of marriage we have created the grounds for bitter encounters.
TLDR; Don't expect to be happy the day after you sleep with a drunk/high guy who doesn't know or care about you.
functor
10mo ago
Mostly because they are built at such a low rate. If Canada were to send four rockets into space and use custom built Canadian ones, they would cost a fortune and be delayed for years. Spacex is cheap because spacex launches several times a month. The nuclear industry in the west is stuck between silly levels of regulation, such as the decades of fighting over how to store waste and a lack of an industrial base.
If we are actually going to get somewhere with nuclear, we need to build 10+ reactors a year in the west.
functor
11mo ago
Culture shouldn't be corporate. A corporation shouldn't run something that ultimately isn't about money and that can shape the values and culture of the participants. Woodworking is safe since nobody owns woodworking. There may very well be communist, jihadist, trans, national socialists etc who do wood working, but ultimately they can't set policy in the wood working world. Copy right law ensures that a few people who often don't even belong to a fandom can control it without the fandoms or society at large's best interest at heart.
Getting deep into a corporate product is slightly cringe, opt for forms of entertainment that aren't copyrighted or have some natural monopoly.
functor
1mo ago
A good metric is the wars in the balkans in the 90s. 2/3s of those who fled stayed and 1/3 returned home. It is likely the numbers will be similar for Ukrainians who fled west. For the several million ethnic Russians who have moved to Russia it is unlikely they will return.
functor
2mo ago
I am seeing a positive trend, open source software is thriving. Java was a programming language owned by a company. Today it is unthinkable that a Java or Matlab like language with terrible license agreements would gain mainstream adoption. With the rise of geopolitical tensions more governments and large corporations are motivated to move toward open source. Unless your country is on superb terms with the US and you don't mind the NSA getting all your data American software is a risk. Developing a completely independent tech stack is hard. More governments and companies will move to linux as it is easier than developing a windows alternative.
The services which can be locked down sit ontop on lower layers of abstraction that are free. Censoring the internet or banning people from running code won't work because Facebook and windows may be blocked but TCP and linux are alternatives.
functor
2mo ago
The race isn't democrat vs republican, it is voting vs not voting. 66% voted in 2020 meaning that 33% of the population is enough to get 50%. Not voting was as popular as Trump or Biden. Rallies and campaigning isn't so much about getting republicans to vote for Biden or democrats to vote for Trump, it is about getting people to show up. The goal is to create energy and momentum that will make people show up, volunteer to drive granny to the polling both or pester their friend to tag along and vote. Often people don't really care about what is hyped, they care about the hype. People will watch the Olympics because it is the Olympics because it is the big thing everyone is talking about. People want to be there and be a part of something historic and see something greater than them.
The risk for Biden isn't that his voters will vote Trump or even that large numbers refuse to vote because of Palestine. The risk is that the enthusiasm dies. People who would have hyped him when talking to their friends will just talk about how politicians suck. People will be less motivated to put up signs, knock on doors, post stuff on social media etc.
Biden's campaign already lacks energy and enthusiams as "Trump sucks" isn't a great slogan. If his voters can't be bothered to watch and like pro Biden tiktoks the tiktoks will gain less traction and energy is reduced. Less hype leads to fewer people creating hype which in turn leads to less hype.
Ukraine's military is the size of the French and military put together. Their military is 30% of the US military in size and currently fighting a high intensity war. The amount of resources required to sustain the Ukrainian military is astounding and completely unsustainable. They are consuming many systems at a much higher rate than they are produced. They will have to replace many soviet systems with western systems. Ukraine will need to retrain large portions of their military and continue to take in tens of thousands of recruits per year. Just the minimal training the European militaries have provided a small portion of the Ukrainian military has already had a real impact on the militaries of Europe.
Ukraine's military is heavily dependent on using its professional core. The officers and experienced soldiers are carrying their efforts. These soldiers have soon been at war for two years and are a draining resource.
The western militaries are coming out of 30 years of cutbacks and fighting in the middle east. The western militaries are in dire need of rebuilding themselves. Just sustaining the western militaries would have been hard enough before the war. Now dozens of brigades have to be rebuilt and equipped, several hundred mid and long range SAM systems are needed for Ukraine, millions of shells will be needed after the war to restock the Ukrainian military. Entire supply chains, bases and training facilities will have to be built up from scratch.
The price of Ukraine won't end when the war ends. The Ukrainian military will be getting aid for decades and decades to come after the war ends. It is going to be a constant black hole for resources. Rebuilding their losses and sustaining their new military will make building the Afghan military look like a cakewalk. This is nation building on steroids.
The main problem for the US is that the US military is old, has a decaying industrial base and has pushed long term costs forward for 30 years. At the same time the US is trying to handle multiple areas of conflict at once. The US military has the Ukraine problem, the middle east and China. While each individual conflict is manageable the US is failing to manage all of them at once.
functor
5mo ago
He is one of the people who pushed globohomo on the world. He was a key architect in creating a global order that is a giant airport terminal, bland, placeless, multicultural and generic with mass surveillance and shopping. The world order he pushed makes national sovereignty impossible as we are all subject to an imposed world order by the US. The US milks us by rigging trade and acting as a financial hub while barking orders at us and occasionally killing hundreds of thousands of people in a war of aggression and leaving us with the migrants.
Imagine if any other foreign group were so outright in tying financing to their state interests. Israeli/jewish control over the US isn't even hidden at this point.
As for support there really only are two support bases for Israel in the world, zionist jews and American evangelical boomers. Israel has never been popular in Europe, latin America or Asia. The support base for neoconservatism is largely a generational thing. Young Americans are equally split between favoring Hamas and Israel and that is in a country that is more hardcore zionist than Israel.
The almost fanatical support for a foreign nation that is culturally alien was never organic. It hinged on carefully controlled media narratives. Once people in Palestine got phones and their images could be spread around the world Israel was inevitably going to lose public support.
The problem is that Israel is a major source of migrants. The Israeli state has expanded forcing millions of Arabs out of their homes. When they bombed Lebanon in 2006 I got some new classmates in Sweden. Israel has been a major force acting to destabilize the middle east and create chaos. This means migrants to Europe. Meanwhile Israel has been busy promoting multiculturalism in Europe. Israel has been fighting Syria for decades and there are now vast numbers of Syrian refugees in the world.
The best option for Europe is stable secure arab states. Israel wants to expand and wants dysfunctional failed arab states. The blowback from that means Europe gets another wave of migrants that Israaid can help bring into Europe through their activities on Greece's beaches.
The last thing I want to see is the world get more destroyed and more migrants flood into Europe because of zionists. If there is a step one to saving Europe, it is ending the pro Israel neocon agenda that has been a root cause of migrants. I don't want to meet more people with heroin addictions and missing family members after neocon Americans decided that they wanted to go on another mass murder spree in the middle east.
What we need now is to speak the language they understand- pushback. Palestinians have shown great courage and resolve today when they fought back. The same neocons who made billions bombing Afghanistan while working class whites died of heroin lost dozens of vehicles. The same neocon/zionist establishment who flooded Syria with weapons and my neighbourhood with people who fled from them got humiliated today. Aggression is in their nature, they will only stop once they get properly bitten back.
functor
8mo ago
Is learning new languages actually worth it for adults?
I have met people who have lived in a country for years, are intelligent and have studied hard. Yet they are far from a native speaker. Those who haven't spoken their new language for years seem to lose it. Is picking up French/German/Spanish worth it? It seems like an enormous investment to develop worse language skills than the average native 12-year-old. Even when it comes to enjoying the culture in the native language, I am not even sure it would be the case. A person who learned latin and read Caesar's memoirs in the original latin would probably get less out of it due to their lacking latin than reading a translated copy.
I studied a language for 6 years in school. Along with everyone I know who hasn't studied their extra language extensively post school I can barely write a paragraph in it. Was it a giant waste of time to have Spanish or French an hour a week for 6 years when the results are lacking?
If learning a language meant learning it to the point of fluency or near native ability, I could see the point. However, most learners seem to spend countless hours learning without being able to have a conversation that doesn't require effort from both parties.
functor
9mo ago
Is there really a point to cinemas when massive televisions with stunning visuals are affordable? Cinemas are expensive and the need to see the film on a large screen isn't as important with modern televisions.
Should we expect the wave of Hollywood movies to be movies that base themselves around known quantities but make them into movies?
Most likely. It will upset hardcore fans as these movies will shoehorn the IP into a plot. Write a movie and call it "Catan" in order to get people who have played the game to watch it.
Egypt has no reason whatsoever in aiding Israels ethnic cleansing of Palestine by helping Israel move millions of Palestinians into Egypt.
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