laxam
16d ago
Zionists have always been close to conservatives in many respects
While Zionism has always had a spectrum, up until the 1990's Israel was a pretty left wing country. Early Zionists especially were almost all socialists of one variety or another. The Kibbutzim are communes!
laxam
23d ago
There has been no evidence up to even the level of the coup against the Mosaddegh government (ie. not a particularly high bar) that the CIA planned or executed any of it.
laxam
6mo ago
Very few of these sneers are coming from the BEA or BLS directly, who mostly are just grinding out the incredible work they have always done (along with all the other statistical agencies in the Federal government), and whose feet I worship at.
But the sneers themselves remain dumb. They come from the ideologically incurious. The puffed up underinformed. The boys at the BLS know that the sub-aggregates matter, too, that's why they do stuff like break things down by industry, region, or state. But the commentariat just knows the national macro aggregates look good, so why won't the deplorable love Biden? He's an on old white guy, isn't he? They love that shit.
laxam
11mo ago
America has never been an ethnostate. If anything it is the literal anti-ethnostate. As far back as 1776, Thomas Paine pointed out that less than a third of Pennsylvanians were of English descent and so any claims of being an English nation were already moot.
While it is true that Pennsylvania and the Southern upcountry weren't ethnically homogeneous by any means, the colonial and early US absolutely had an ethnic nation: Yankee New England. It was a ridiculously homogeneous area -- culturally and ethnically -- for North American subsequent experience. Their culture was also very influential on American culture generally for a long time, too. So, America has historically had at least sub-national ethno-states in the past.
Now, however, they have greatly subsumed into 'general American' culture, fully assimilating into the broader gestalt of the republic. When was the last time you ever saw someone called a 'WASP'? Even New England itself is plurality Catholic these days so, while Yankee heritage is still probably very widespread there, there is a new ethnicity living in New England that is descended from the Yankees and a whole lot of newcomers.
laxam
1mo ago
The bill said "owned or controlled, directly or indirectly". That seems incredibly broad to be honest.
Here's the whole of the relevant section of the law, so people can judge for themselves how broad it is:
(g) Definitions
In this section:
(1) Controlled by a foreign adversary
The term controlled by a foreign adversary means, with respect to a covered company or other entity, that such company or other entity is—
(A) a foreign person that is domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of a foreign adversary country;
(B) an entity with respect to which a foreign person or combination of foreign persons described in subparagraph (A) directly or indirectly own at least a 20 percent stake; or
(C) a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity described in subparagraph (A) or (B).
(2) Covered company
(A) In general
The term covered company means an entity that operates, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that—
(i) permits a user to create an account or profile to generate, share, and view text, images, videos, real-time communications, or similar content;
(ii) has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users with respect to at least 2 of the 3 months preceding the date on which a relevant determination of the President is made pursuant to paragraph (3)(B);
(iii) enables 1 or more users to generate or distribute content that can be viewed by other users of the website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application; and
(iv) enables 1 or more users to view content generated by other users of the website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application.
(B) Exclusion
The term covered company does not include an entity that operates a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application whose primary purpose is to allow users to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel information and reviews.
(3) Foreign adversary controlled application
The term foreign adversary controlled application means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by—
(A) any of—
(i) ByteDance, Ltd.;
(ii) TikTok;
(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or
(iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or
(B) a covered company that—
(i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and
(ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—
(I) a public notice proposing such determination; and
(II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.
(4) Foreign adversary country
The term foreign adversary country means a country specified in section 4872(d)(2) of title 10, United States Code.
And here's the relevant, referenced section from subsection 4 above:
section 4872(d)(2):
(2) Covered nation.—The term “covered nation” means—
(A) the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea;
(B) the People’s Republic of China;
(C) the Russian Federation; and
(D) the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It's all honestly really quite narrow. It could not be applied to Twitter because Elon isn't 'domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of' 'the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea...the People's Republic of China...the Russian Federation...[or] the Islamic Republic of Iran', nor is Twitter 'directly or indirectly own[ed]' by someone with 'at least a 20 percent stake' who is domiciled, headquartered, doing business in, or organized under the laws of the preceding four countries.
If, someday, we added Saudi Arabia to that list (not something I would put past the left of the Democratic party, a portion of which will never get over Khashoggi), Twitter might be in trouble. Until then, this law would not apply.
The law is quite short. It's also pretty free of the kind of cross-references and surgical edits that make reading many other bills so confusing. Just make sure to understand that most things in the law are defined somewhere.
laxam
2mo ago
The reasons for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, have been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy. The original context for the enactment of the CRA and all the legislation meant to make racial equality not just a theory but an actuality was America's ideological content with the Soviet Union, a country that could lay a credible claim to an antiracist practice that made it very attractive to Third World masses and First World intellectuals; since it was also known that the equitable treatment of African-Americans was one of the main areas where United States had, to put it mildly, failed, it was also imperative for the US to show that it was working to fix it.
While this is true -- as in, you can find people talking about doing things during the Civil Rights Movement for this reason, up to and including Eisenhower administration officials and Earl Warren --, it's also true that the Civil Rights Movement itself was both older (ie. the NAACP dates to the 1900's decade and the organized lawfare against Jim Crow is as old as Jim Crow, with Booker T Washington being the silent hero here. Plessy was a test case brought by early civil rights activists in cooperation with the railroad companies) and that it had been scoring wins prior to the Cold War and the decline and fall of the European empires. Successful school desegregation cases date back to the 1920's and there were increasingly serious efforts to pass a national anti-lynching bill in that decade, only cut off by the coming of the Great Depression.
By about the late 1940's, national public opinion had swung decisively against segregation and it was just a matter of time before politics aligned around doing something about it, Cold War or not.
laxam
5mo ago
Kinsey's style used to be something you could find along Democrats, too. Especially the budget-hawking-but-only-against-the-military bit is something that could go either way in my eyes.
O'Neill's outlook is definitely post-Vietnam military burnout, but absolutely everything else about him codes hard on the right for the time. There really was no archetype of the Dem leaning special forces guy in the 90s. If anything, he has always struck me as the kind of mostly disinterested (if not actively disgusting) in politics personally conservative but not religious middle aged white guy who would be activated by Trump in 2016.
laxam
5mo ago
Nope. There's too many middle-class black people where I live, way too far from the actual ghetto, for this to be a realistic concern. This isn't the 60s. Nice neighborhoods don't turn to shit overnight when blacks flood in from the ghetto. We've built an elaborate social system that pretty well precludes that particular mistake from being repeated, barring overwhelming and abrupt government action. The blacks moving in can afford the housing prices, which means they've more or less got their shit together.
FC, you're Southern, aren't you?
I've found that a lot of people have trouble conceiving of the Suburban South as anything but Bull Connor's Alabama. The idea that the modern South has a lot more black people than other parts of the country and therefore -- blacks less likely or not -- has a lot more middle class black people is just outside of most people's experience.
laxam
10mo ago
Man on Fire is really such a ridiculously good movie, too. Denzel runs circles around Smith as an actor.
laxam
2mo ago
It's just word associations.
That seems to be a substantial portion of all political communications these days. A huge portion of politics (including political 'news', which is usually essentially just propaganda for one side or the other) is finding some way to put two things on a shelf next to each other, one thing universally agreed to be bad and another an unrelated politician, political party, or political idea, and just go, "Eh? Eh? How about it? They're like, right next to each other!"
It's pretty obvious that Hawley either doesn't understand or thinks his audience doesn't understand (and thus doesn't care about making shit up) what Section 230 is about.
laxam
6mo ago
The small group of GOP representatives were able to get concessions which should end the Dictator Speaker Era as well as the Omnibus/Continuing Resolution Era from McCarthy in exchange for McCarthy getting the gavel. Appropriations must be passed through the normal process which means 12 appropriations bills produced by the 12 committees through the normal process and are brought to the floor before the statutory deadline which means no more omnibus bills and no more continuing resolutions. And there were many other smaller concessions. McCarthy broke his promises and used Democrats to do it. The small group revolted and that was the end of McCarthy's speakership.
It's important to note that this small group was intentionally making it impossible for McCarthy to keep his promise. He was going forward with regular order, the Appropriations committee and relevant subcommittees had reported their bills already by mid-July, but Freedom Caucus holdouts spiked rules votes to begin floor debate on those bills time and time again.
The whole situation was engineered by a group that got to get their names in the headlines off of it. They wanted him to break his promises because then they got to fundraise off of being the scrappy freedom fighters against the duplicitous Establishment. But, by forcing a delay, they put McCarthy in a situation where he had to choose between a shutdown and a CR.
Just like the Left, the Recalcitrants in Congress depend on people being underinformed about how a complex process works so they gin up a self serving narrative.
All twelve bills could have been passed by early August and a unified Republican Conference could have fought a very public and very righteous fiscally conservative battle against Democrats in the Senate and White House through the end of September, boosting their credibility as a serious party of responsible government without risking a shutdown. Instead, they're embarrassing the party and all but guaranteeing the Democrats regain the House next year, all so Matt Gaetz can send out fundraising emails while he votes to kick his own party out of power.
laxam
9mo ago
I don’t agree with Trump, but one thing I loved about him apart from all that was that he wasn’t changing everything about him to pander to whoever he was talking to or wanted to appeal to. He was upfront about what he was about. He’s on tape saying “grab them by the pussy” and he didn’t walk it back or pretend it didn’t happen or recontextualize it as not meaning what it sounded like. He said a lot of guys talk like that in locker rooms. Trump never really pretends to be anything other than Trump, a rich guy who is just going to do whatever he wants. He’s been the same trashy New York rich guy he was back when he was selling Trump steaks mail order in the 1980s. He might be overstating his business acumen, but there’s at least a core part of who he is that like it or not, you can know that he’s not going to disown his past or his stated opinions.
Trump lies constantly. The fresh, relieving thing about him is that he never tries to make his lies believable: If you like him, you'll believe him (or at least ignore the lie), if you don't like him, you won't. He lets you decide if you're going to be taken in by him, while a lot of other politicians seem to actually care if you're being fooled.
laxam
13d ago
You'd have to be pretty simple to think that most of the political stuff you read on Reddit or Hacker News isn't deeply manipulated.
You ever notice how political arguments usually have the same arguments, even the same sources? Plenty spreads through the networks of social media, I'm sure, but the idea that they're working from the same songbook because it's been provided to them by an organization is pretty credible. There's a LOT of money floating around, ready to chase after social influence.
laxam
17d ago
That one guy that used to be a mod is right about the fact that they are much more similar to white progressives than they are to Red Tribe whites in America or working class whites in Europe. The whites they imagine only exist in their head.
Wasn't that the original idea behind Scott's tribal classification? All of these DR people are Blue Tribe, of course they don't like or get along with actual Red Tribers.
laxam
23d ago
In the past I've heard a lot of jokes about "The People's Republic of Pennsylvania".
I have never heard of that in my life. Pennsylvania is the quintessential purple state, with no one party dominating the state government for more than a term in decades (and that was a Republican trifecta) and it being close to a century since there was permanent partisan control of the sort you see in California or Massachusetts.
Overzealous bureaucracy knows no partisan bounds.
laxam
23d ago
The CIA really does organize coups, but the guy that lit himself on fire is a garden-variety nutter.
Has the CIA actually coup'd a government since the Church Commission?
laxam
5mo ago
Napoleon was on the political left of his day in an important sense, and Caesar was a populares.
laxam
5mo ago
The really screwy thing about black representation in ads is that the 70% despite being only 13% elides that a huge number of these black people in ads are generic middle class black people (often, but blessedly less than in the past, light skinned). For a people who are disproportionately poor, it really seems like the TV ad execs want to ignore that most black people exist.
The Trump era has been a historic disaster for the Republican Party downballot. After fighting and clawing it's way into centuriate power during the Tea Party era, reaching a peak of state and local power in 2016 unmatched since the 1920s, the anti-Trump backlash drove them out of power everywhere in 2018 and 2019.
They have the luck that the Democrats really suck at not just assuming they will hold power forever, so driving yet more backlash, but people in many places would rather have Democratic leftists over Trumpist conspiracy theorists (even if that is a near run thing).
The fact that the crazies have gained local party power in a lot of places is going to be a hobble on the party's performance for a long time. Arizona -- what is probably still a light red state in natural circumstances -- is probably going to be become blue just because the AZGOP is nuts.
My local party has stayed mostly sane, thankfully, so hopefully we can finish pushing the Democrats who won county control for the first time in half a century back into minority status. We'll see.
laxam
9mo ago
1 By the way, the Americans founders were mostly Deists, a highly enlightenment-derived version of Christianity that Wikipedia describes as a:
While some of the best known ones were Deists, most of the people who signed the Declaration or attended the Philadelphia Convention were just Christians, albeit frequently very lukewarm ones. More Washington than Jefferson. The effects of the First Great Awakening were starting to peter out and religion was becoming more laid back again, as it would become in cycles throughout American history. John Adams, for example, was a Congregationalist by birth, some of the most committed Christians in the country, but died a Unitarian, some of the vaguest and least fundamentalist.
laxam
27d ago
Either way I think the most important development in all of this is that post-internet, nationalism cannot really be a thing.
Someone has never run into a bunch of people from different Balkan countries online.
laxam
5mo ago
Blacks aren't even the source of the Propaganda; Blues are.
Some of whom, mind, are black.
This is a big bugaboo of mine: Everybody is so obsessed with ragging on the young white radicals ruining everything they seem to just not notice the young black radicals who are right next to them. My personal theory is that people, even the ostensibly 'anti-woke', really have internalized that it's somehow OK to be mean to white people in a way that it's pretty much never OK to be mean to black people, even if the black people are behaving in exactly the same way as the whites.
It's also something you see coming from some on the right, where they're convinced blacks are just a bunch of conservatives kept on the Democratic reservation by something like brainwashing. In reality, a lot of black people I've met really do have quite different political opinions from me on a bunch of issues with low direct salience to race. For example, a lot of black people in Northern cities really are much more pro-gun control, even if they happen to also share some conservative opinions on homosexuality or gender roles.
Isn't that the story of the online trans community in the late 2000's/early 2010's?
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