johnfabian
5mo ago
This is the only possible outcome. Getting rid of DEI is an impossibility. Nobody with their hands on the levers of power actually wants to do it. All that will actually happen is Jews will get re-ranked inside DEI orthodoxy, or a parallel Jewish patron bureaucracy will be set up. And they will continue to collaborate throwing white people under the bus for literally everything.
Somebody writing for the Wall Street Journal did a bit of polling, and the results were amusingly predictable.
Only 47% of respondents could identify which river and which sea "from the river to the sea" meant. When shown the region on a map and realizing what the slogan would mean, 75% of respondents who had previously supported the slogan moderated their opinion.
johnfabian
5mo ago
This is not really a cynical take, it is what our officials out-and-out say: the purpose for immigration is cheap labour and keeping up housing prices.
Building new cities does not work towards those goals. Shoving 500k new people every year into the GTA does.
johnfabian
6mo ago
I think you know that's a rather markedly atypical use of the word "liquidate". I'm inclined to think you are trying to be deliberately inflammatory, and (poorly) pretending otherwise.
"Ah you see officer, when I said on twitter that Hamas should liquidate all the Jews I simply meant that they should be provided with refreshing beverages!"
johnfabian
6mo ago
I read The Left Hand of Darkness earlier this year and was sort of surprised to see the amount of reading into it of exploration of trans topics. To me the novel did not really address what I could recognize as transgender/sexual themes. Rather Le Guin seemed much more interested in exploring masculinity/femininity as social constructs, and how a culture might be affected without "true" masculinity/femininity. Besides the toying with the reader of seeing the characters as male by default, the introspection seemed mostly to focus on what the cultures lacked in their essence by not being sexually dimorphic. E.g., Karhide is a society that simultaneously lacks female affection and childrearing, but also male obsession and capacity for war.
Maybe I have a sort of inherent bias against reading things as trans metaphors, but some of the reflections I read afterwards trying to tie the novel to contemporary trans politics seemed like rather clear misreads of the novel to me. Just my impression
It's pretty wild to imagine how different history may have been if that vote had swung another half percent in the other direction.
The result would not have been Québec leaving Canada, but there probably would have been a marked increase in French/English antagonization, as well as presumably French/indigenous strife. The 1995 referendum question was much too vague; while the PQ fully intended that a 50+1 Yes vote would allow them to proceed with a negotiated or unilateral secession, how it would have played out in reality is doubtful. Subsequently the Supreme Court adjudged that provinces do have the right to secede, but it requires "a clear question and a clear answer" (neither of which the 1995 vote had), and that would oblige the federal government to negotiate an exit for whichever party was seceding.
But one could certainly imagine a lot more social strife and culture war if the vote totals had been reversed. For reference here is the referendum question:
Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign, after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership, within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?
I imagine that for many it was very much less than clear what this entailed. This was of course, by design.
johnfabian
7mo ago
Would that really be necessary? There's millions of Ukrainians who already lived within Russia's pre-2014 borders, and unless I'm very much mistaken I've not heard of much repression or resistance from them.
johnfabian
7mo ago
I think this will be bad for Bibi. It's one thing to have occasional rockets slip through the Iron Dome and kill a civilian or two per year. It's another thing to have this happen on his watch. The legitimacy of Likud is that their hardline approach delivers results with respect to the security of Israel. When the dust settles opinion might turn on him; I think this might happen regardless of whether there will be a general political shift.
I think the decision to slowroll settler expansion in the West Bank in exchange for petty violence from Palestinians was a very deliberate one, but this level of violence will probably force some kind of shift in Israeli strategy, one way or the other.
johnfabian
11mo ago
Several of the ones I wanted to read appear to have been immediately deleted by their authors.
johnfabian
1d ago
Rummel was writing before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives to western historians. There was a good 15ish year window after 1991 where western historians got a good insight into the history of the Soviet Union and that deflated a lot of the more extravagant numerical claims with respect to the death toll of the Soviet regime.
johnfabian
3mo ago
At the start of the 20th century, if you were forced to pick a country that you think would carry out a Holocaust-level atrocity in the next fifty years, everyone would have picked Russia. (Not necessarily with Jews as the target, they were just the most obvious target). No other state in Christian Europe was nearly so repressive.
johnfabian
3mo ago
If the Western Allies had refused to ally with the Soviet Union, there would have been no war between Germany and Western Europe.
I cannot fathom what you mean by this. Like I cannot tell if you are being deliberately dishonest or if you have a perplexing, gigantic gap of knowledge. Who was the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact signed by? Who made a deal split Poland, and all Eastern Europe? Who was allied right up until the point tanks began crossing the border on June 22 1941? Because it sure as shit wasn't the western allies and the Soviets.
johnfabian
5mo ago
This is a non-spoiler detail: later in the show one of the drug dealers has a chief enforcer who was ex-Army/Marines, and it's implied he served in Iraq. All these complaints and suggestions are more or less embodied by this character.
johnfabian
7mo ago
Israel has gotten a lot of egg on its face, but I do not think it has in any way been meaningfully "weakened" by the Hamas attack. If anything it is more likely it has been strengthened through greater public unity
What makes the Czechoslovakia situation even worse in hindsight is that there was a good chance the Heer was going to launch a coup against Hitler if the western allies hadn't backed down. Not that anyone knew this at the time.
johnfabian
11mo ago
The "Holocaust" does not exclusively refer to Jews killed in concentration/extermination camps though. Roughly a similar number of Jews (~2.5 million) died in mass executions as were gassed to death. While it is true a relatively small number of non-Jews died within the camp system, if you wiped out the Holocaust from existence history's largest genocide would then be the German murder of Soviet POWs (roughly 3.3-3.5 million victims), and if you wiped out that it would be the German genocide of ethnic Poles (2-2.5 million victims)... either that or the genocide against non-Jewish Russians (which is difficult to get an exact bearing on in terms of numbers).
I've mentioned this before but Timothy Snyder provides a simple breakdown: when it comes to the mass murder of civilians in 20th century Europe, there are three prominent cases of roughly equal size: the Nazi murder of Jews, the Nazi murder of Slavs, and the Soviet murder of their own citizens. Whether or not you think the term "The Holocaust" should include both of the first two categories is a matter of debate. For the most part I think they are separate phenomenon and it is more useful for the term "Holocaust" to refer to exclusively Jewish victims.
johnfabian
11mo ago
Low stakes conspiracy theory: referees in the NHL (hockey) are instructed to deliberately make games more "competitive." They're not on the take or rigging it things for a certain team, but they are encouraged to keep things within distance, mainly by calling marginal penalties or not calling obvious penalties. You see it most obviously in the playoffs (it becomes near impossible to get a call for all but the most egregious infractions when approaching overtime), but it's present through the entire regular season as well. The strongest predictor of which team will get the next power play is who got the last power play.. Once your team is up a few goals, the power plays predictably disappear as well. The NHL uses various ways to enhance the "competitiveness" of the league which is one of its major selling points compared to other sports leagues, including a deliberately distortionary points system that ranks teams much closer together than it should. The only time an NHL ref has been suspended in recent history is when he accidentally said the quiet part out loud.
johnfabian
5d ago
In an effort to improve my German, I'm reading Zweig's 'Die Welt von Gestern', The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European.
Has there been some recent fascination with the book? I looked it up in the Toronto library system and all 8 copies are signed out, with multiple holds past that. Unusual popularity for a book from the 1940s.
johnfabian
8d ago
Somewhat related, Scottie Scheffler has been on the biggest tear golf has seen since prime Tiger; in late March/April he won four out of five tournaments in a row and narrowly missed winning the fifth - some $20ish million in winnings. All this while his wife was 8+ months pregnant; I can't find speculation as to what the precise due date was but comments from him seemed to suggest late April so now she's overdue. He is skipping the big money event this week but more to the point he was very vocal that if his wife went into labour he would step off the course mid-round. He said this also applied if he was leading in the last round of the Masters (which he won comfortably). Now it's not a team sport (besides I suppose the caddy) but the question is essentially would he potentially compromise his individual legacy as a golfer to be with his wife during labour.
johnfabian
18d ago
Lots of places sell or "misplace" their mailing lists to other parties.
johnfabian
3mo ago
I'm a progressive! (circa 2014)
johnfabian
3mo ago
It's hard to say exactly how much has filtered through to him on social media - I always hope that people in the public eye don't look at this kind of stuff, but you have to expect they do. The team itself always treated him very differently from Formenton - they gave him the A, he played a big part of media/promotion, etc. They clearly tried to establish without saying directly that he wasn't at fault. I think that makes the "guilty before even accused" behaviour worse, really. But it was also from a pretty small wedge of the fanbase, I wouldn't say all or even most of the "prog side" jumped in on this
johnfabian
4mo ago
At present Israel could take the rest of the Arab world by itself with little difficulty. It's no longer 1970; they've far outstripped their immediate contemporaries in ways they did not expect. If they had anticipated the economic state of their rivals they would not have ceded all the land they did for peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, etc.
johnfabian
4mo ago
Finished Prit Buttar's Battleground Prussia: The Assault on Germany's Eastern Front, 1944-45. The endgame of the Eastern Front tends to get short shrift in popular history with the exception of the capture of Berlin, and this is a very interesting book about a very messy series of campaigns. A must-read for lovers of war crimes.
Currently reading a collection of dissident (leftist) Soviet author Varlam Sharlamov, called Sketches of the Criminal World. More grim stuff, but quite darkly humourous at times.
johnfabian
4mo ago
That may be tolerable for someone who wasn't Netanyahu. Netanyahu built his image on being the Great Defender, while simultaneously burning his political capital with his corruption and mismanagement. Maybe another leader could've weathered the storm in trying to show restraint, but Netanyahu had to strike back disproportionately. Every Palestinian killed works towards rebuilding his position.
I think it was likely that political pressures in Israel meant that a primarily non-violent response would not have been acceptable. Yes, Israel could have used the rush of international sympathy as diplomatic capital, but Israelis want a lot of Palestinians to die for this, and would vote for whoever promised that.
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