RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
One is enough, but two is better to show the first one wasn't a fluke. And some of the later Dune books aren't anything special.
Discrimination against whites is a hard sell when the executives & the board are white[*]. Moreover, 'Trump voting white' isn't a protected category.
The China analogy doesn't work because China is naturally positioned as a competing power while Israel is strategically, culturally and spiritually positioned to be collaborative power.
Broadly, Jews are found in 2 places: US and Israel. When America flourishes, Jews flourish. That's to Israel's benefit. Strategically, Israel's enemies are Islamist. So, they want to ally with an anti-Islamist power : USA. Israel is a liberal & open democracy. It wants to ally with a liberal and open democracy : USA.
Israel wrecks the relationship with middle eastern countries
America wrecked its relationship with the middle east all by itself. Israel fought the Suez Crisis on US & UK's behalf. Saddam Hussein's overthrow was classic American overreach. Intervention in Afghanistan was first a cold war exercise, and later a response to 9/11. Syrian efforts were a proxy war against Russia. Iran-US relationships soured because the Shah was overthrown and Americans were taken hostage. Jordan and Israel actually have pretty decent relations. The Saudi, UAE and Israel relations have been on a consistent up and up. Qatar always plays all sides, Israel or no Israel.
So, can you name a country who's US-country relationships got wrecked by Israel ?
they were all about owning the libs by taking out DEI efforts specifically hurting Chinese people.
The analogy doesn't work because American Jews are 'the libs'. The majority of American Jews live in NY and California. American Jews (pre Oct 23) overwhelmingly voted for deep-blue candidates in deep-blue cities. They subscribed to generally 'blue' opinions such as : 'Netanyahu bad', '2 state solution good' and 'Trump bad'.
There is healthy skepticism towards Israel from within the Jewish community itself. America's temporary sycophancy towards Israel has more to do with recently empowered fundamentalist Christians signalling to their voter-base during Trump2, than a deeply rooted allegiance to Israel.
[*] The discussion of how specific whites are being discriminated against is longer conversation about the sub-racial dynamics among whites people. I think white groups (rich and poor) both benefit from not opening this pandoras box.
That's one way of putting it, but another way of putting it is that such a distribution is effectively punishing white people for being too healthy.
Essentially, "you're not dying enough, so you can't have a vaccine". The underlying problem that the machete version of the cartoon is trying to point out is that attempting to compensate for different base health by race is in practice going to mean depriving people from healthier groups of care that they would receive in a colour-blind society, until and unless they start dying at an equitable rate.
this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace
But the opposite, right? She is aware of her sexual value. So she doesn't squander it on a 19 year old. He has no money.
Our hypothetical woman is with a financially secure older man with disposable income. Not a penniless 40 year old and not a penniless 19 year old. Call her a gold digger if she seeks marriage. Or chuckle at those charts of Leonardo DiCaprio's age vs his girlfriends' age. But this hypothetical woman has determined her sexual value and found a buyer.
If we are going analogize finding romantic partners to buying and selling, then these women are like me when I sold my last house. I didn't sell it to a penniless college student. I sold it to an older man after he showed me his bank account. He had a million dollars in a checking account. I didn't fail to realize my house's value. I found a buyer and we agreed on a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Not that I endorse comparing dating and marriage to selling yourself, but if we're making the analogy then let's follow it through.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
It’s adapting a quote from Goebbels. Using a nominally-accurate term as an insult is the point.
In Turok’s model, mottizens neoreactionaries are strivers in denial. They want to be comfortable, educated, well-connected arbiters of taste, but admitting such would give the outgroup too much credit. So they try to construct a rival hierarchy which puts their class markers at the top.
If this is true, then the most vicious thing Turok can do is point it out, revealing the neoreactionary’s class interest. That’s why Turok assumes that he’ll get banned. “They hated Him because He told the truth.”
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
If our relationship with Israel is characterized by Israel doing America’s dirty work, then: (1) why are our politicians handing synagogues hundreds of millions in free funds, yearly, as SS notes? What does this have to do with our geopolitical interest? This is more readily explained by a group of people having sophisticated lobbying capabilities. (2) Why did Trump specifically go after students who criticized Israel on social media, rather than students who criticize America or the West broadly? (3) Why do we, in effect, subsidize the entirety of Israeli society, from their subsidized colleges and subsidized healthcare to their subsidized religious institutions? We are Israel’s security in the region for free; they gave nothing, not money or troops, for our wars in the region, and they will not be repaying the $1,000,000,000 we spent on their defense vs Iran. If Israel were the client state of our Empire, you would expect them to pay Caesar’s tax, right? Instead, we hand them our resources for no obvious gain. It should be the other way around. As Mearsheimer spoke to Tucker Carlson the other day,
And the lobby is so effective, it is so powerful, that we basically end up supporting Israel unconditionally. What that means, Tucker, is in those cases where Israel’s interests are not the same as America’s interests, we support Israel. We support Israel’s interests, not America’s interests.
[…] anytime the Egyptians or the Jordanians get uppity about Israel, the United States reminds them, “You better behave yourself because we have huge economic leverage over you. You have to be friendly to Israel.” So Jordan and Egypt never cause the Israelis any problem […] as I said to you before, we have a special relationship with Israel that has no parallel in recorded history. Just very important to understand it. There is no single case in recorded history that comes even close to looking like the relationship that we have with Israel. Because again, as I said, states sometimes have similar interests, and this includes the United States and Israel, but they also have conflicting interests. And when a great power like the United States has conflicting interests with another country, it almost always, except in the case of Israel, acts in terms of its own interests, America first. But when it comes to Israel, it’s Israel first. And if you go to the Middle East and look at our policy there, there’s just abundant evidence to support that.
I believe there’s one simple answer [as to why this is the case]. The Israel lobby. I think the lobby is an incredibly powerful interest group, and I’m choosing my words carefully. It has awesome power, and it basically is in a position where it can profoundly influence US foreign policy in the Middle East. And indeed, it affects foreign policy outside of the Middle East. But when it comes to the Middle East, and again, the Palestinian issue in particular, it has awesome power. And there’s no president who is willing to buck the lobby.
If Israel were our forward operating base, then it would be easy to support them: Israelis would be working day and night to secure a better future for Americans. Their tax dollars would go to our institutions and their blood would be spilled in Syria / Iraq / Afghanistan for us. Alas, this does not appear to be the case.
A couple asides on Pegasus: its ancestor PROMIS was indeed developed by the CIA and sold to Israel, and then from Israel it was disseminated to other countries. The person doing this dissemination was no other than Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell. But Israel, rather than acting purely as a FOB to America, has its own interests in mind:
"L'Oeil De Washington" contends that a bugged version of PROMIS was sold in the mid-1980s for Soviet government use, with the media mogul Robert Maxwell as a conduit. According to the book, Israel's knowledge of this operation became a bargaining chip in trying to curb U.S. arms shipments to Iraq before the Gulf War; the Israelis threatened to tell the Russians their computers were open to American surveillance. Apparently, the U.S. called Israel's bluff and lost. One of the book's major sources, the Israeli arms merchant Ari Ben-Menashe, told the authors that in 1989 the Soviet spy agency, the GRU, shut down all of its computers for a week after learning that they were bugged by PROMIS.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Not a mod but I consider his posts to be pretty forthrightly criticisms of people/caricatures of movements rather than descriptions of movements and subsequent criticism. That is, he completely ignores the “discuss the CW don’t wage it” rule which admittedly is a tough one to police and maybe even flawed as a concept but Turok (to me) didn’t seem to even bother to attempt to follow it.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Saying this is about Israel is as misleading as saying it is about DEI, or immigration in isolation. It about no one of these things- it's about the collection of progressive/democratic coalition shibboleths, any of which is sufficient for the goal.
The text literally said
Discriminatory prohibited boycott means refusing to deal, cutting commercial relations, or otherwise limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies or with companies doing business in or with Israel or authorized by, licensed by, or organized under the laws of Israel to do business.
They defined "discriminatory prohibited boycott" solely with Israel and nothing else. They've since removed it, however their tweet still specifically says they're gonna deny federal funds to BDS (i.e boycotting Israel) so it's not even different.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Well they're denying it's specifically Israel now. https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1952482455954341930
Nevermind that people could see the original document where it literally said Israel, and that this tweet even reinforces that they plan to deny federal emergency aid over boycotting them ("including as it relates to the BDS movement"
I wonder how they feel about putting tariffs on Israeli goods then? It's the government making the Israeli products more expensive through taxes for the express purpose of reducing sales, seems like that isn't far from antisemitism if boycotting is.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
I mean if we’re talking gene editing in America, there is theoretically a delivery mechanism that could deliver uplift to about 80% or more of the public. You’d just have to pass an Obamacare style law to require health care insurers to cover some degree of the process.
Now at the same time there’s probably a good argument to be made that America (assuming it were invented here! It might be China) might functionally withhold the tech from other countries under IP law stuff. But if China invented it and perfected it then the US might find itself in the weird position of pulling a China and blatantly ignoring IP, stealing it themselves and refusing to impose punishment. And I’d assume other countries stealing it too would also occur.
I view the problem of trust about gene editing to be noticeably distinct from other public health trust issues, if for no other reason than you’d potentially have to wait 100 years to get a good sense for the true consequences of the tech (in the more extreme versions of the tech) since you can’t accelerate human development very much. Literally none of our systems or science are set up to track and process that kind of data. Ironically for you perhaps global climate change is the only similar example.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
1d ago
No, he wasn't. The only intelligence that I'd give him credit for was skirting the lines of a permaban for so long, and even that was finally quelled. Like many lolcows, he just couldn't resist having the last word and doubling down on absolute nonsense.
At this point, I'd respect more a 4chan shitposter giving me a scrolling page of n-words: at least, in this example, he isn't wasting my time.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
Trumps own former BLS chief himself doesn’t like it. And it includes this very damning quote:
“There’s no way for that to happen,” Beach told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on “State of the Union.” “The commissioner doesn’t do anything to collect the numbers. The commissioner doesn’t see the numbers for until Wednesday before they’re published. By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared.”
Other articles note that usually, initial estimates are based on larger employers, and smaller ones take longer to report. Savvy consumers of the stats know this. Also, what size company has been hit hardest by recent market uncertainties including tariffs? Small employers. The variance is higher.
If a number feels off is your evidence, and it’s plausible or even likely that the explanation could be explained by either malice OR the underlying stats actually being off, it’s still “no evidence” in a statistical sense. We need DETAILS to be able to assess the claim, and Trump provided none, and furthermore if his own former guy says that the chief doesn’t even see the numbers until they are nearly fully assembled, we have strong reason to be skeptical and zero actual reason to trust him (beyond a baseline level of trust in Trump himself).
Obviously it wasn't intended as a 1:1 comparison, but Haiti has an average IQ of 82. A significant percentage of that difference is likely genetic, based on our current understanding of the heredity of intelligence. The mother's health and nutrition also plays a significant role, and that's outside the control of the adopting family. A young child adopted from Haiti is statistically going to be at a significant intellectual disadvantage compared to the biological children of that "wealthy white couple".
International adoptions in general come with a much higher risk of a child with physical or mental disabilities. Growing up I knew two families that did international adoptions, one from Russia and one from Asia. The Russian child had fairly significant behavioral issues and developmental delays, and the Asian child had a physical disability likely caused by prenatal or infant malnutrition.
The charitable interpretation is that these families do international adoptions out of a genuine desire to do good and provide a better home for a child, but from a utilitarian perspective it seems to provide pretty low impact compared to other forms of charity in terms of cost effectiveness. What is does provide is a very visible signal of social status and virtue, and the frequency seems to ebb and flow depending on whether it's trendy in a given community. For example, it was a trend in Hollywood in the early 2000s, with celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Madonna. At some point it fell out of fashion, and now international adoptions are practically verboten in left-wing circles, particularly if the parents are white and the child is not. The same dynamics seem to play out on a smaller scale in some Christian communities.
I could see a similar dynamic playing out with Down's Syndrome in the future, particularly for for parents wealthy enough to offload much of the care onto hired help. Let's be real, Angelina Jolie likely didn't change the diapers for all six of her kids while shooting movies every year or two.
popocatepetl
1d ago
Yes. I went through a period in my early twenties when I worried about this. But eventually I realized it's all preference falsification: "Women like responsible nice guys who respect women" but for men.
If you've ever thought a 16yo looked pretty as a grown man welcome to the "normal heterosexual male club". Almost everyone else is lying.
Jiro
1d ago
There are no such additional distinctions for terms in 1A.
I'm not sure what you call a "distinction" but they certainly used terms that are not all-inclusive. If you're going to say there's freedom of the press, the term "press" doesn't include everything.
Where would be the part of your hypothetical Constitution where they distinguished between two separate things?
Saying something about the military implicitly distingushes between military things and non-military things. If the Air Force only became part of the military later and you are using your "after the fact" standard, then the Air Force would not be part of the military at the time the Constitution was written.
So, uh... which category does the Air Force fall into, given the distinction above? I keep asking this question, and you keep not answering it. Is it an Army or a Navy?
I don't know. You could make arguments for either one. I'd readily agree that we can't prove for certain which one. Some interpretation is inevitable here. But not an unlimited amount of interpretation.
MollieTheMare
1d ago
I would posit that seeing window mount or other external AC units in a city is actually evidence of poor AC infrastructure. A residential structure with a bunch of window units sticking out means that there is no central AC available to the building. That means every window without a unit is a room without AC. For example, my high school was built before central air handling was common. It was absolutely covered with window AC units. Even still 0% of teacher offices had AC, maybe 20% of common areas, and only about 50% of class rooms had AC. Of those that had AC about 80% were inadiqute to cool the rooms to normal office temperatures. The office building next door, however, was built to modern North American mid-rise building standards. It had no external AC units, central air handling, and district supplied chilled water. Handling a bunch of IT and computer equipment the whole thing was kept at a chilly 72°F (22°C) all year round.
Besides that though @FtSoA is clearly right. It's trivially easy to find statistics showing less AC availability in Europe. From the International Energy Agency The Future of Cooling (emphasis mine):
Household ownership of ACs varies enormously across countries, from around 4% in India and less than 10% in Europe, to over 90% in the United States and Japan, and close to 100% in a few Middle Eastern countries.
Things are changing, as new homes in Europe are often heated with heat pumps that can be reversed for cooling in the summer. The pace of retrofits and new construction is slow though. In the mean time "Heat claims more than 175,000 lives annually in Europe."
If you insist on trading anecdotes though: "How is it that the most advanced research facility on Earth forgot to install air conditioning? " This is in a place that has reached 40°C (104°F). The "birthplace of the World Wide Web," but all the network switches overheat at 2PM every July.
SSCReader
1d ago
we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
So obviously you feel strongly about it and I don't want to rile you up. But I don't see too much objectionable here. Levelling the playing field is about taking into account the differences here. He even says it, the white populations are healthier so they live longer, so if you just take into account age, you will miss out on morbidity increasing factors which in the United States are drawn heavily along racial lines because your underclass is heavily skewed black. Likewise with teachers, middle class white people with degrees are likely to suffer from fewer health issues than non-middle class, non white, non degree holders. All of this appears to be factual information.
I think that equity phrase/cartoon is hijacking your perception a little here. The equity cartoon isn't a one to one description of how equity would work in the real world when carried out by real people, nor do people always mean the same thing when they say equity. The actual positions they were advocating are nowhere similar to taking a machete to a tall person. They are actually advocating for something closer to the original equality cartoon, with vaccines instead of boxes. The tall people are still going to be tall. The healthier groups are still going to be healthier, they would have to be making the healthier group intrinsically less healthy in the name of equity for the machete to apply. Like putting immuno-suppressants in the water, so that the death rates were equalized with the worse off populations or something by making them worse (a al Harrison Bergeron).
Rather than giving something to the worse off populations to reduce their death rates to similar to the taller population. That's the definition of the ladder analogy really. They advocate to make the short person taller (healthier) rather than make the tall person shorter (unhealthier). The latter would be equity as described by the (I agree) objectionable cartoon. If they were recommending making white people more vulnerable to the disease, so that they died in rough equity with black people, I completely agree that would be very objectionable! That would be taking a machete to the legs of the tall. But that's not the recommendation they are making. The vaccine is the boxes or ladders. If you didn't give them to anybody, the tall person would still be tall and the short person would still be short.
Which isn't to say they don't have objectionable views in general, or that they are definitely correct. I'd want to take a much deeper dive into specific proposals and trade offs, and confirm numbers and the like, but I don't think they show much sign of being outright evil monsters. At worst they believe the boxes version of equity, while you believe the machete version of equity.
Note: The Equality vs Equity cartoon a woke person is likely to point to doesn't involve any machetes at all. It just shows shifting one box from the tall man (equality) to the short man (equity) so the short man has two and the tall man has zero. But I've gone with the (more critical of equity) version you describe to keep the analogy rolling along.
https://pressbooks.openedmb.ca/app/uploads/sites/52/2023/01/image1.jpeg
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1d ago
Have you seen "Foundations", from Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes, and Sam Bowman? Also available in podcast form with Sam Bowman at Quillette.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
messed up big time confusing Africans with Indonesians
Yep, that's what got me as well. I remain amused how well I did with Asians and actual Africans. Real "wait, why do I know this?" feelings.
hanikrummihundursvin
1d ago
So much for meme history.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
Strictly speaking, I'd be happy with either. If I have to choose, the one who's actually my age. More longterm potential there.
faceh
1d ago
Yes, I've zeroed in on college as a particular problem since it has compounding (negative) impact on a woman's marriageability and fertility. Four fertile years burned, racking up both debt and body count, for a degree that they may not use, and then they often opt to go for MORE schooling rather than enter a marriage or the 'real world.'
And of course it also creates the target-rich environment for the virgin poppers. Women from small towns, leaving their high school boyfriends behind, no parental supervision, tons of drugs and alcohol available, and both blatant and subtle nudges towards promiscuity all around.
Without some strong social pressure its almost impossible to expect women to resist for the full four years. And by the sheer numbers, most women don't resist. body counts at time of first marriage have steadily climbed.
So yeah, more supervision on the women is part of the the solution.
AND YET, removing some of these guys and deterring the rest would likely have an overall positive effect as well.
I mean, lets just use a fox and henhouse analogy. Yes, you guard the hens/eggs because they are dear, but if you catch a fox in the act, you still kill it. You don't want a whole population of foxes that are optimized for henhouse raiding to arise.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
Or even worse, low class!
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
Trump is proposing the drug companies sell in the US for no more than they sell in other developed nations. As far as I can tell, the drug companies could refuse to sell to other price-controlled nations and retain their US pricing that way.
Not that prescient, as the net in AFUTD was heavily inspired by the early 1990s Usenet computer network, and the phenomenon you describe existed just as much on Usenet back then as on Internet fora today.
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