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Can someone give me an analysis on who Abdul El-Sayed actually is as a person? He gave a weird interview where he said trans is a made up issue because your daughter has an I-Phone in her pocket so she will see dicks all the time anyway.
The first impression is he’s some sort of Muslim Brotherhood type. My second impression is pegging him as similar to brown friends I know whose parents do something science (medicine/engineering), are fairly wealthy, follow zero Muslim codes, hate white girls but probably slept with a few dozen in their twenties. All of these types are/can be fully assimilated into America. Half seem like they really do assimilate. The other half to me seem like they have a chip remaining on their shoulder that their people couldn’t build America.
My guess is he’s that type that still has a big chip on his shoulder to fully white people. So thinking things like sexualizing normies is perfectly fine for him in the same way a westerner might go to Thailand for a holiday and not view Thai’s as his people.
I'm sympathetic to Jonah Goldberg's argument in this podcast, that is, that El-Sayed wants the Democrats to be a straightforward anti-Israel party.
I don't think El-Sayed supports the full Muslim Brotherhood agenda. The social democrat positions that he holds are honest. He is not, I think, secretly an MB supporter in the sense of everything they stand for. But he is, I think, basically a middle-class western Muslim who attributes a disproportionate level of importance of Israel, and it has become organising for his thoughts in a way that it is not for other people.
To be fair, at the moment the Democrats, like the Republicans, are a straightforward pro-Israel party. Most state governors would probably be thrilled to get half the per-capita resources from the USG the US spends on propping up Israel even without the ability to also drag the US into wars for their benefits. Most US states might even spend a smaller fraction of comparable federal resources on killing people.
We know how it looks if the US is 'anti-$COUNTRY'. They find themselves internationally isolated, their nuclear facilities get bombed, their leaders get assassinated or kidnapped, their military (and sometimes educational) facilities get annihilated, their civilian infrastructure destroyed, Trump calls them bad names on Twitter.
For Israel, that is currently far outside of the Overton window, which is a good thing, because most of these tactics are net-negative for global utility no matter who is on the receiving end.
What is reasonable is unfriendly neutrality. "We think your government is doing bad things, thus we might do some trading with you but will not sell you weapons or go out of our way to protect your interests." If Israel can persuade Gulf monarchies to shoot down incoming missiles for them, good for them, otherwise, bombing the shit out of each other seems to be a quaint ME custom which us Westerners can simply not get, it would be disrespectful to their religions interfere on one side or another.
The problem is that Israel and AIPAC clearly have an outsized effect on US politics. If someone told me that the Uzbek or Peruvians were largely responsible for US foreign policy, they would have a hard time providing evidence for that. With Israel, the claim that they do not have a higher influence than Uzbekistan on US policy is plainly absurd.
The real failure mode is that people over-update on the evidence, and it becomes a lens through which all of the world is perceived. If you have just learned about the Van-der-Waals force and are excited about it, you might start to attribute all sorts of effects to it which are vaguely explainable by it but are in actuality unrelated to it. Similar things happen with all sorts of lenses: you can probably discover something worthwhile about international politics by looking at it from the perspective of gender relations, but if you are unable to take off the gender lenses, you will be blind to a zillion explanations which have nothing to do with gender.
Officially Israel is earmarked $3.8 Billion a year, which with 9.55 Million people comes out to a few hundred dollars per capita. Quick estimate is that even the most-neglected states get $3,500 in federal spending per capita, an order of magnitude larger.
You can argue that Israel gets a lot of other value out of the American government, but then, so does the taxpayer. Social security paid $1.58 Trillion last year.
Another figure going around is $147 Billion to Israel, over about 80 years, since Israel's founding in 1948. I don't know what the equivalent figure is for American spending but I'm quite confident if we total up all the federal money spent on each American state since 1948 it remains orders of magnitude larger.
Israel definitely plays an outsized role in American politics and has benefited from a lot of generosity and largesse. But it doesn't even come close to what Americans spend on themselves.
After looking up the data, Israel gets $350 per citizen almost exclusively for war. Meanwhile Africa gets $7 and Central America gets $10 on a blended basis.
That's pretty horrifying.
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
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