domain:mattlakeman.org
Zohran Mamdani, who claimed to be black to get into Columbia and is probably going to face zero consequences for it.
Ironically, this could be called a lie. Per the NYT article
But as a high school senior in 2009, Mr. Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, claimed another label when he applied to Columbia University. Asked to identify his race, he checked a box that he was “Asian” but also “Black or African American,” according to internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with The New York Times.
This is a man born in Uganda, and lived in South Africa through his early life.
Whether or not he's African American, and likewise with similar non-black Africa > America immigrants is a difficult question given that he literally is an African who became an American, and it's really hard to even think of an alternate term to call them along the lines of what we would call other groups! Like do we say "African-place Americans" instead to make the distinction clear? I'm not sure what the alternative even is here, we clearly don't have an established alternative.
This is realistically more the fault of terrible and misleading categories that are culturally outdated. It is weird, unintuitive and often nonsensical nowadays that Black people who have been living in South America or Europe for generations are considered "African" but someone literally from Africa isn't. And it makes for an interesting question, why do we call them African until they move then?
And if we want to say "well that's because they were originally African" or something, then it's a rather arbitrary cutoff that originally only applies to the great grandparent or great great grandparent or great great great grandparent (depending on the person's particular heritage) but is also a moving definition that applies to the great(x4).grandparent next and so on and so forth to where you could be great(x20) grandparent heritage now and be African but someone with great(X2) heritage now isn't, and also doesn't include we're all from Africa originally so why is there a cutoff to begin with then? Does that mean a black person in the year 300000 will no longer be considered African anymore because we've hit the time limit on African heritage? It doesn't make things much less confusing or weird.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10hr ago
I'm not sure what the alternative even is here, we clearly don't have an established alternative.
The alternative is exceedingly simple. "African-American" is commonly understood to mean American Descendants of Slavery, not Elon Musk. If the majority of your ancestors weren't enslaved Americans, you're not "African-American" and thus not entitled to any of the affirmative action schemes intended to benefit that group. You're just "African", and that's how it will be until race/ethnicity-based affirmative action schemes are totally abolished.
ResoluteRaven
19hr ago
The cuts to science funding seem likely to do major damage to American R&D, cause a mass exodus of skilled workers to Europe, and give China the opportunity to get even farther ahead of us in key fields such as battery development. As an attack on the woke elements of the Academy they seem both disproportionate and poorly targeted, and as an attempt to burn it all to the ground they are clearly insufficient. I'd like to see someone at least propose a new Bell Labs-type enterprise as a replacement for the scientific infrastructure that they're trying to dismantle, if that's the way we're going.
In other news, Elon promised to start a new political party and to primary a bunch of Republican congresscritters if the bill passed. That should be entertaining to watch if he doesn't chicken out.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
9hr ago
The cuts to science funding seem likely to do major damage to American R&D, cause a mass exodus of skilled workers to Europe, and give China the opportunity to get even farther ahead of us in key fields such as battery development.
The damage was done. The science funding was being used for woke first, climate alarmism second, and any useful science well after that. Politico did an article on the "scientific refugees" moving to France; those identified included only a climate historian, a climate scientist and his wife "who studies the intersection of judicial systems and democracies".
WandererintheWilderness
7hr ago
Why don't you think that climate science is useful science?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
15hr ago
You know, the UK gets plenty of flak for its groveling attitude towards anyone with a slightly different shade of skin and the most threadbare justification behind seeking reparations for past injustice, but have you seen the other Commonwealth states? Australia and NZ are so cucked it beggars belief.
They all seem to cling on to a form of DEI that's about a decade out of date, at least compared to the US, and even there, it was never as strong and all-encompassing.
What even drives people to such abject and performative self-flagellation?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
17hr ago
If they can stop the damn thing from hallucinating caselaw and statutes, it might already be there.
Sure, but hasn't that always been the challenge? This feels like it boils down to "if they can fix the problems, it'll be great", which is true but applies to everything.
they just need enough to make the cost of a nuclear exchange so high Israel would never risk it
But this has further implications that you omit.
If Iran has the bomb, they can provide it to a smaller, far more suicidal group of allies (the Palestinians) to lock the Israelis into their current borders unless they negotiate with Iran. Technology transfers, taxes, religious rites/rights, not purchasing American weapons, etc. is what that looks like.
In this way, the Hamasi would serve as the permanent Iranian veto over the [Ashke]nazi. Because they simply don't care if the Israelis nuke them in response- the fact is, the Israelis get hurt far more than the Palestinians, the Palestinians are suicidal, and that is sufficient to accomplish this goal.
Conversely, if Israel believes that Iran will, or already has, or will inevitably soon obtain, a bomb like this... then their only response is to start removing the local kebab as fast as humanly possible. They didn't like the paragliders the first time; imagine how much they're not going to like them when the settlers further encroaching on their territory prompts an air-borne SADMization of the Israeli countryside.
The Iron Dome can stop a lot but the bomber is going to get through. And sure, Hamas could always attack from another country (perhaps one in which they seek refuge after the dust settles), but in that case that other country [and its people] are collateral the Israelis can threaten such that Hamas is kept down- since if Hamas manages to get an attack off then it's the entire host nation's problem, and Israel becomes the one with the nuclear veto.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Because it’s ’the End is nigh! Pay attention to me!’ Doomsday ascetic attention whoring.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
9hr ago
The category "African-American" is neither limited to American Descendants of Slavery nor does it include Elon Musk. The Census definition is "A person having origins in any of the Black [sic] racial groups of Africa."
So it's pretty clear that neither Mamdani nor Musk is "African-American", but Obama (regardless of whether there's really a slave in the family on the white side) is.
No_one
13hr ago
That's what I am saying.
But the only way to do it is thermonuclear weapons.
20*20 kilotons on Israel would be catastrophic but it'd be survivable for Israel.
It'd not be survivable for Iranian government.
100*400 kilotons would destroy Israel, possibly even partially prevent retaliation.
That's the moment when Iran would have true deterrence and MAD with Israel.
Being able to wound the enemy and then assuredly die is not deterrence.
Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space.
I have an informed source in this general area. According to my friend, the indigenous lobby generally is full of maximalists, they've always been into maximalism and word-games to achieve maximal gains rather than good-faith bargaining. That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about. Universities don't actually mean that the Australian government is not sovereign and Eora tribe is in control when they say it. They just mean 'I'm progressive and left wing and a Good Person'. But it's a way of seeding the idea that the government isn't actually in control for further usage later on. If you say it and repeat it enough, it becomes true.
There are similar games being played with 'First Nations'. Nation means race or ethnic group in English but it can also mean state. They wanted to insert into the constitution, IIRC, recognition of First Nations and they said 'oh this is just for aesthetic purposes, recognition, just being a Good Person'. This got watered down in the public referendum question since the more sensible white lawyers saw through this immediately, but that's what the activists wanted. Later on, when there's a friendly High Court, the idea was to reimagine it to meaning First Nations as a political entity still around today, so then they can get a Treaty and even more gains. There's no such thing as a compromise with these people (exceptions exist obviously), only an endless struggle.
WandererintheWilderness
6hr ago
Many kinds of scientists are irrationally prone to thinking their particular specialty is the most important thing evah, but AI risk is still a real thing, space exploration is still a real thing, deadly viruses are still a real thing, etc. I think the same is obviously true of the climate. Global warming isn't going to literally set us all on fire by 2035 but climate change is still an ongoing phenomenon with massive global implications and it needs to be studied. So long as you don't follow them on X, I think most scientists still produce more light than heat, if you'll forgive the expression.
magicalkittycat
9hr ago
The alternative is exceedingly simple. "African-American" is commonly understood to mean American Descendants of Slavery, not Elon Musk.
We can not expect every single person to have been exposed to everything and culturally absorbed this in their life, especially when it is so unintuitive. Like that XKCD comic that's pretty famous, there are a lot of people out there who don't have or never experienced "everyone knows" situations.
So if your category is unclear and inconsistent, and other more intuitive interpretations clash with the culturally accepted one, then you are inevitably going to land on a bunch of people who use it "wrong".
You're just "African", and that's how it will be until race/ethnicity-based affirmative action schemes are totally abolished.
So he's an African, and he's an American, but he's not an African American? Certainly you can understand how that at face value looks incredibly stupid right?
Lizzardspawn
9hr ago
Never half ass a genocide. One of the most important lessons of history.
2D3D
10hr ago
Why wait for Iran? Pakistan has nuclear devices available for sale to destroy the Zionists.The same problem for the Iranians would exist for the Pakistanis: how do you trust that Jihadi Jamal really is able to execute his plan to bomb Tel Aviv and is not compromised or incompetent. Russia could have sold any of its nuclear devices as well, but that runs into the additional problem of getting the cash into a usable form.
No nation outsources strategic capability to external actors, and Irans employment of such a strategy for the Axis of Resistance showed how hollow such a strategy ends up being. Lack of direct oversight saw Hamas pulling the trigger on bad assumptions and Hezbollah getting thoroughly compromised. Whether Iranian direct control would have been better is unknown, but if the benefit of strategic ambiguity is wasting money on incompetent stooges then the decision maker needs to be put on performance review ASAP.
OliveTapenade
10hr ago
Eh, I think it's contextual? The terrain is different depending on each nation. You don't find exactly this sort of thing in the UK because the UK isn't a colony.
However, the proper comparisons here are between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. On those terms I feel like Australia is arguably the least grovelling. All three other Anglo colonies already have treaties with indigenous peoples that make those peoples semi-autonomous. Australia is the only one that doesn't, and the Voice was roundly rejected by the Australian people, which tells me that actual grassroots support for this is pretty low.
Yoorrook is part of the activist industry, and it's supported by the government because the government and the public service are deeply in bed with Group-like NGOs. That's a bad thing, but I'm not sure it tells us that much about l'Australie profonde, so to speak - and if the existence of that whole complex is the problem, well, half of that is imported from the United States anyway. We're downstream of American culture wars and tend to absorb their worst elements, albeit a few years too late.
So I certainly wouldn't advise the Americans to be too smug.
As for the British... honestly, I think they have their own issues to deal with. They aren't colonial in nature, but national pride and identity in the UK are complicated enough as to need their own post.
ControlsFreak
13hr ago
Government rules are enforced through violence and kidnapping.
This is missing some steps. There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.
If such a proposition holds, it should hold in other domains as well. Let's consider household/family rules. At different stages for children, some household/family rules are directly enforced via spanking or timeouts or whatever (violence/kidnapping). For others, you can often find a similar escalatory process if you posit a sufficiently oppositional child. Another end state may be 'exile', kicking someone out of your house. Of course, if we assume a maximally-oppositional child, what might it take to actually enforce kicking them out of your house? If they just refuse to go? Violence? Kidnapping? Calling the state... to use violence/kidnapping?
I think this reasoning about maximal-opposition holds for essentially every rule ever, government or not. That is, under the hypothesis of maximal-opposition, essentially every rule ever is either ultimately enforced via violence/kidnapping or... well, at some point, it just goes unenforced, as efforts are dropped in the face of maximal-opposition. Of course, one might think that choosing to present maximal-opposition is, itself, a rule that is chosen by someone.
That is, there doesn't seem to be anything unique to government rules here. Yet, I don't think that most people are willing to apply this same standard to the entire set of rules in the universe.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
19hr ago
I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo
A great way to predict most western government actions these days
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
These scientists continually produce predictions which turn out to be cartoonishly wrong. When they don't come true they just change the date for extinction of the human race and demand more power. Climate science exists for the purpose of pushing a single environmentalist narrative with a single goal(states of nature as close to pre-European colonization as possible) for which they are willing to sacrifice human achievement. I think this goal is stupid, and I'm sure not willing to entertain people wanting to sacrifice human achievement for it. Australian megacats are really cool and a valuable source of scientific knowledge, not a crisis. And if the earth gets warmer this isn't a crisis, either- maybe it'll suck for penguins and polar bears but it'll open more land for settlement and that's good, and there's plenty of animals that aren't penguins.
The category "African-American" is neither limited to American Descendants of Slavery nor does it include Elon Musk. The Census definition is "A person having origins in any of the Black [sic] racial groups of Africa."
Not only is this silly in that it declares government to be the final arbiter and definer of race, it doesn't even work out well when governments themselves disagree on these types of definitions.
Check out the status of groups like the Brazilian or Portuguese Americans for instance.
For the Portuguese, whether or not they are officially Hispanic depends in part on the state they live in.
Some states, such as Florida, categorize Portuguese Americans as Hispanic, while others, such as California, do not. In a few places, including Massachusetts, laws and regulations treat them as a disadvantaged group for at least some purposes.
Is ethnicity really a concept that is state defined? Does a person's ethnicity really change if they move from California to Florida?
Brazilians are even more confusing, they aren't officially considered Hispanic or Latino either, and yet it seems more than two-thirds of them define their identity that way
This is more people than some traditional Hispanic groups!
In fact, enough Brazilians identified as Latino in 2020 that they would fall in the middle of rankings of U.S. Hispanic or Latino origin groups by size, if they were officially counted as one. In 2020, Brazil would have been the 14th-largest Latino origin group with 416,000 who identified as Latino, ahead of Nicaragua (395,000) and below Venezuela (619,000).
It even changes constantly in this list of racial prerequisite cases on who is determined white
Syrians, Asian Indians and Arabians are both white and not-white. Mexicans btw in the single case for them are white.
Chinese aren't white, but they do get a pass in Jim Crow Era Mississippi to attend the white only schools and join the White Citizens Council so it seems even that isn't fully clear!
I mean, yes, but the hallucination problem of putting in wrong cases and statutes is utterly disqualifying in advanced legal writing. Citing to a nonexistent case or statute compromises the entire brief or argument. A decent first year associate might misinterpret a statute or case, or miss that the case was overturned, but they wouldn't make up cases from whole cloth and build their arguments off those.
For a lot of tasks, you just need to go through and proofread or fix up the places where it filled in basic info that it obviously didn't have.
But citing a case that doesn't exist to build an argument is like asking it to design a bridge and it get the tensile strength of steel completely wrong, or perhaps it makes up a type of material that doesn't exist and hallucinates its properties as part of the specifications.
And maybe it does that, I don't know. But there's literally no reason for it to be doing that, either, when there is definitive information, easily available for reference. Its information it should never get wrong, in practice.
And it really shouldn't be hard to fix, the caselaw and statutes are already simple to look up. Just teach the thing to use WestLaw.
So I do expect them to solve that particular class of hallucinations pretty handily, even if it will still completely fudge its outputs when it doesn't have an easy way to check.
OliveTapenade
10hr ago
That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about.
My lasting frustration with 'sovereignty' dialogue in Australia has been the steadfast refusal of the indigenous lobby to ever define exactly what it is, or what they think it means. These examples are pretty representative - there's a lot of waffle about a spiritual connection to land but it is not remotely clear what that means in practical terms, or what it is that they think they need but do not have. If sovereignty is a spiritual sense of oneness with the land, in what sense do they currently lack it? What do they think other people need to do in order for them to practice it? Or is the idea, sometimes hinted at but rarely expressed, that Aboriginal people are a different nation to Australia? If so, would some sort of secession movement be the result? The establishment of a new and independent nation on the Australian continent, alongside the Commonwealth of Australia? It doesn't seem like anybody wants that, if only because any such nation would be desperately poor and would survive only insofar as the Commonwealth props it up with foreign aid.
It just doesn't seem to mean anything. It's a slogan - 'sovereignty' is a word that people say, but there's no shared understanding, and it feels to me like a set of goalposts designed to be moved.
I don't go so far as assuming there's an intentionally nefarious conspiracy here or anything, but the indigenous lobby definitely has a lot of ambiguity in what it preaches.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
In what way was Hamas' action incompetent or harmful for Iran?
The continuing saga of Aboriginal issues in Australia!
You may recall that in 2023 Australia had a referendum on changing the constitution to attach a permanent Aboriginal advisory body to parliament. That referendum was rejected around 60-40. We discussed it here at the time, and since then I've been keeping an eye on the issue. Since then, many state governments have stated their intention to go ahead with state-level bodies, or even with 'treaty'.
'Treaty', in the context of Aboriginal activism in Australia, is a catch-all term for bilateral agreements between state and federal governments and indigenous communities. Whether or not this is a good idea tends to be heavily disputed, with the left generally lining up behind 'yes', and the right behind 'no'.
Anyway, I bring this up because just last week, in Australia's most progressive state, Victoria, the Yoorrook Report was just published.
This is the report of a body called the Yoorrook Justice Commission, a body set up in this state with public funds whose purpose is to give a report on indigenous issues in the state. They call this 'truth-telling' (and indeed 'Voice, Treaty, Truth' was the slogan of the larger movement for a while), though whether or not the publications they put out are true is, well, part of the whole issue.
Here is the summary of their report.
You can skip most of the first half - the important part is their hundred recommendations, starting from page 28 of the PDF, all beginning with the very demanding phrase 'the Victorian Government must...'
This puts the Victorian government in a somewhat difficult position. They love the symbolism of being progressive on Aboriginal issues, and indeed are currently legislating for a more permanent indigenous advisory body to parliament. However, the actual recommendations of the Yoorrook Report are very expensive, very complex, and in many cases blatantly unreasonable, at least to my eyes. Some examples would include recommendations 4 (a portion of all land, water, and natural-resource-related revenues should be allocated to indigenous peoples), 21 (land transfers), 24 (reverse burden of proof for native land title), 41 (recognise waterways as legal persons and appoint indigenous peoples as their representatives, like that river in New Zealand), 54 (decolonise school libraries by removing offensive books), 66-7 (universities must permanently fund additional Aboriginal support services and 'recompense First Peoples staff for the 'colonial load' they carry'), and 96 (establish a permanent Aboriginal representative body 'with powers at all levels of political and policy decision making'). Needless to say the recommendations taken as a whole are both expensive and politically impossible, especially since even Victoria rejected the Voice 55-45.
Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space. From the state government's perspective it's tricky, because they will want to appear responsive and sympathetic, but not want to actually do all this. I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo where we engage in symbolic acts of recognition and guilt but nothing more, and the Aboriginal rights industry, so to speak, continues to perpetuate itself.
If the Victorian Liberals (the state branch of our centre-right party) were more on the ball, I might have expected them to politically profit from this and make a good bid at the next election, but unfortunately the Victorian Liberals are in shambles and have been for some time, and the recent smashing of the federal Liberal party at the last election doesn't make it look good for them either.
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