stuckinbathroom
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User ID: 903
stuckinbathroom
22hr ago
And less famously, not all Iranians are Persians. A good ~30% of Iranians are of Kurdish or Turkic stock, for instance.
stuckinbathroom
1d ago
The UK and France. Although it’s almost certain that Russia and China have nuclear-armed submarines on patrol in the western hemisphere, too.
Frankly both pro-Israel and anti-Israel right-wingers are guilty of this, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Even aside from Israel/Palestine stuff, I’ve heard NRA types go on about how the Nazis confiscated firearms and Ron Paul libertarians draw comparisons between the PATRIOT Act and the Nuremberg laws. If we relax the reference class to include communists as well as Nazis, then basically every strand of the conservative movement from the 1980s onward has had adherents who make such comparisons to their ideological enemies.
On the topic of anti-Israel right-wingers: they come in at least three different varieties, none of which is per se what I would consider “woke right”, exactly:
- Paleoconservatives of Pat Buchanan’s ilk, who are skeptical of foreign entanglements in general and often support for Israel in particular. These types may harbor some negative opinions about Jewish influence in American politics, but don’t make it the center of their political worldview, nor do they generally harbor any animus towards individual Jews or to their religion.
This group may have some overlap with the “woke right” in the sense that they view preserving the historic American “national character”, and perhaps even the specific “founding stock” ethnicity, as an important political goal; as such, they are, for example, opposed to mass immigration. But the overall vibe of paleocons is very different: more patrician, more old-school Ivy League WASP (at least in bearing, if not actual ancestry) rather than Ellis Islander/white ethnic.
- Right(-ish)-of-center contrarians in the vein of Theo Von and Joe Rogan. While open to “questioning the narrative” and “doing their own research” and, indeed, being somewhat prone to conspiracy theorizing in general (e.g. Covid-19 origins, QAnon, 9/11 truth, etc.), these folks mostly seem to have soured on Israel due to (what they perceive as) atrocities committed in the current Gaza conflict. They do not deny the historicity of the Holocaust, though they are increasingly immune to its use as a mystical talisman that renders any criticism of Israel null and void. They likewise do not deny Israel’s right to exist, and, like the paleocons, do not personally hate Jews or Judaism.
These types are furthest from the “woke right” in my view: they genuinely want to go back to 90s-style colorblind meritocracy, with no handouts or special treatment for anyone, white or not.
- Out-and-out Holocaust deniers, who invariably do hate Jews and Judaism. Even when they hide behind “just asking questions” or “look at how much influence AIPAC has” or “anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism”—all of which are in theory positions within the ordinary bounds of political discourse or academic inquiry, _when posed in good faith_—I have literally never once known a Holocaust denier not to loathe Jews on a personal level. IME, Holocaust denial in actual practice is, without exception, an argument-as-soldier, and behind the claims of “the Holocaust never happened”, the undercurrent of “but wouldn’t it be great if it had?” is always palpable.
This view is strictly orthogonal to “woke right”-ism, though I would hazard a guess that it’s more common on the “woke right” than on the “tech right”, if only because the latter (correctly, in my opinion) usually attribute Ashkenazi over-representation mostly to IQ, which rather tends to immunize them against crude conspiracies about Jewish subversion and the attendant animosity towards Jews.
EDIT: perhaps you were gesturing at something like the following syllogism: “woke tactics + right-wing views = ‘woke right’; ~every right-winger compares his opponents to Nazis, which is a woke tactic; ergo the entire right is ‘woke right’”
My claim, on the other hand, is that Nazi comparisons are so ubiquitous (cf. Godwin’s law) that it doesn’t make sense to call it a “woke tactic”; indeed, it precedes wokeism by decades.
stuckinbathroom
13d ago
As I understand it, “woke right” doesn’t just mean “hardcore right-winger”; it means, roughly, co-opting the tactics and analytical methods of wokeism to advance a right-wing political agenda.
For example, hiring quotas for conservatives in academia to boost “viewpoint diversity”, or affirmative action for flyover-country whites, would be “woke right” policies, while Ramaswamy/Musk-style “green cards stapled to STEM degrees” would be “tech right”.
stuckinbathroom
13d ago
If bargaining were truly Coasian (hah!) then you could easily make a deal to increase salaries even further in exchange for bringing staffing to international standard.
Not that this is politically feasible in the least, but to keep labor costs down, we could (like Singapore) bring in guest workers from places like Bangladesh to do construction work on the cheap—co-Asian bargaining, if you will
stuckinbathroom
22d ago
And as an opening policy, Shipman, and the most direct Bollinger-era Board proxy yet, votes to dissolve the Senate.
with_thunderous_applause.gif
stuckinbathroom
24d ago
Came here expecting a lecture on measure theory and Lebesgue integrals. Enjoyed this post regardless.
I am no expert on Singapore in particular, but the vibe I get is that most of Singapore’s success comes from its position as Southeast Asia’s financial hub, which itself is partly a gift of geography (much like the UAE’s oil, really) and partly due to the aforementioned property rights, rule of law, and Sinosphere-descended culture of hard work and education.
I am not aware that Singapore is at all a hotspot of advanced indigenous industry/manufacturing. A decent number of multinationals have a Singapore office, typically for Asia-Pacific sales or finance—as I said, Singapore is the financial hub of Southeast Asia—but I’m only aware of a couple with any engineering or product development presence in Singapore. Both are FAANGs/software shops (software being a perfect fit for symbol-manipulator types, naturally) which are (in)famous for using the Singapore office as a staging area for Indian and Chinese engineers while finessing the American immigration system for H-1B visas.
Nor do I know of any homegrown Singaporean companies that have become globe-striding household names, a la Samsung, Sony, or TSMC (the latter, I suppose, being a household name only in the nerdiest of houses)
(not OP but)
In a nutshell, yes, this is my understanding.
An initially-poor but erudite population—or more precisely, one with bourgeois values and at least enough erudition to succeed in the world of commerce—without any particular ties to the land can pick up stakes and succeed as a “market-dominant minority” somewhere less shithole-y so long as that place has a semblance of property rights and rule of law (cf. assimilated Ashkenazim in Europe before the Holocaust and in the northeastern US for most of the 20th century; Lebanese in Mexico; Indians in East Africa; Chinese in Southeast Asia)
But these peoples are middlemen, arbitrageurs, rootless symbol-manipulators par excellence. I say this as someone whose own parents immigrated to the West from South Asia in pursuit of precisely this sort of opportunity. That’s not to say these peoples provide no economic value—they obviously do, else they wouldn’t get rich under mercantile capitalism—but you don’t see advanced manufacturing or even agriculture above subsistence level coming from a people who lack a deep, abiding attachment to the very soil where their fathers died, or the soil for which they shed blood in the hopes of securing its bounty to their kinfolk and their descendants, forever and ever.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Unfortunately, their Erdo’s number wasn’t sufficient
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
in order to defend themselves both against direct attempts on their life, and in case their own government becomes tyrannical.
To steelman as much as I can, yes to the first point (defending one’s own life and limb) but not the second.
DADA was never portrayed as being about defending against the government; it was always about fighting off malicious magical creatures (earlier books) or dark magic performed by evil witches and wizards (later books). That the Ministry of Magic was at first subverted by a recalcitrant Fudge who wanted to cover up Voldemort’s return, and then co-opted by Voldemort himself, was never mentioned as a reason for studying DADA.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Hypothetically, if India were to blow its hot nuclear load on Pakistan—in which case, as you mentioned, it would likely suffer the worst disaster in history—would India then have the (nuclear or conventional) wherewithal to prevent, say, a Chinese invasion of the contested northeastern borderlands? Or other violations of its territorial integrity?
If not, this may be reason enough for India not to pursue escalation to nuclear war, even if a nuclear exchange with Pakistan would technically be survivable.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
I dunno, I could imagine one of his legion of donors offering him a chance to defect, under cover of night, to a sympathetic foreign country (Russia? Venezuela? South Africa?) where he will spend the rest of his days eating from that government’s trough and parroting the lines they spoon-feed him about “white man bad” to throngs of starstruck admirers on TikTok
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Make Electrical Engineering Solely for Americans?
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
He had me at “Radicalizing the Romanceless”
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Well, there is 8chan/8kun, which was founded over a decade ago by a guy who thought 4chan was over-jannied
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
What’s the Chinese for “Is that a heat-seeking missile in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?”
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
Maybe they thought it was a lieutenant junior grade lmao
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
Yeah, more like “wither Canadian identity”, am I right?
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
Not that this is politically feasible in the slightest, but here are 2 possibilities:
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SCOTUS interprets the relevant clause of Amendment XIV Section 1 (“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”) such that the children of work visa holders are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and therefore are not citizens.
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The work visa program mandates regular pregnancy testing of all female visa holders with immediate deportation of any found to be pregnant.
stuckinbathroom
3mo ago
But seriously: apartheid-era South Africa attempted to do pretty much exactly this. The plan was to establish separate, independent, sovereign states for blacks to live in, with blacks being allowed to enter white South Africa only temporarily as "guest workers". A fun bit of historical trivia: by the end of apartheid, the South African government had declared 4 such "black homelands" to be independent*, and had deemed some others "self-governing", with an eye towards eventual independence. As far as I know, this is one of only 2 cases of a post-WWII nation-state willingly separating from, and granting sovereignty to, a part of its territory (the other being Singapore's expulsion from Malaysia in 1965, though I suppose the Velvet Divorce could arguably count as well).
Related to the foregoing, apartheid South Africa also had a kind of internal passport system which allowed blacks to be present in urban areas only with government permission, which was generally granted only for purposes of employment by a white employer.
*a claim recognized by no other national government, nor by the UN
stuckinbathroom
3mo ago
“We wanted workers, but we got people instead” —Max Frisch
“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program” —Milton Friedman
stuckinbathroom
3mo ago
To add color
Heh.
This is precisely the rationale behind the so-called Hannibal Directive
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