domain:alexberenson.substack.com
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1m ago
That escalated quickly. What's the logic here? I don't take it particularly personally, but it seems a bit out of left field.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4m ago
If this is how things are supposed to go, on what grounds are you demanding that anyone fights and dies for your vote to say "fuck that guy, he's already dead"? Go and fight yourself, if you think it's such a great idea.
No_one
4m ago
It's true for some people, at least, or possibly much easier for some people than others, same as alcoholism.
However, there's only something like 12 scholars publishing on it worldwide, and most of the research is very bad of the type "we handed out a bunch of surveys to a 60% undergrad female body" or evaluation of an "online survey".
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
5m ago
It would be remiss to say that, the behind the scenes political machinations shows this is not at all whatsoever about the national mood of leftist protests in general, it is specifically about the fact that the establishment does not support these protests whereas they unanimously supported anti-White demonstrations.
Look at the lengths Nemat Shafik went to in order to try to appease them:
Dr. Shafik, an international finance expert with few prior connections to Columbia, has conceded the university was unprepared for the outpouring that followed Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. She had been ceremonially inaugurated just days before. But as the protests escalated, and the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania lost their jobs after botching their own appearances before Congress in December, she slowly began clamping down.
In the fall, the university suspended two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, whose rolling protests repeatedly violated its policies. This month, it suspended students who it said had been involved in an event called “Resistance 101,” where speakers openly praised Hamas.
By the time she was called to testify before the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Work Force this month, it looked as though Dr. Shafik might avoid the fate of the other Ivy League presidents targeted by Congress.
Columbia spent months preparing for the hearing. Shailagh Murray, a former adviser to President Barack Obama who oversees the university’s public affairs office, recruited a large team of lawyers, old political hands and antisemitism experts to prep Dr. Shafik. It included Dana Remus, President Biden’s former White House counsel; Risa Heller, a crisis communications guru; former Republican congressional aides; and Philippe Reines, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton.
Many team members gathered in the Washington offices of the law firm, Covington & Burling, beginning the Saturday before the hearing for mock testimony.
Dr. Shafik was determined not to make the same mistakes as her Ivy League counterparts, according to the people familiar with her preparation. Where their testimony came off as haughty and convoluted, she wanted to project humility and competence.
The university handed the committee thousands of pages of documents, including sensitive records that almost never become public. They showed that Columbia had suspended more than 15 students and removed five professors from the classroom, including at least three facing accusations that they had made Jewish students feel unsafe.
Though her testimony on the disciplinary cases made supporters of academic freedom furious, the approach appeared to work inside the hearing room. Dr. Shafik defended free speech rights, but said universities “cannot and should not tolerate abuse of this privilege.”
Grudging Republicans largely accepted the answers.
This has nothing to do at all with national mood over leftist protests in general.
It's funny, Shafik is still probably not going to survive this despite the fact she's obviously trying to play ball, meaning that all 3 of the only non-Jewish Ivy presidents are going to be kicked to the curb in only the past six months.
Tanista
7m ago
Intellectually, I recognize that executing your opponents at will because they are not uniformed soldiers of a recognized nation state might not be a good policy because one man's terrorist is another one's freedom fighter, and having certain humanitarian standards makes conflicts with non-state actors less gruesome.
Less gruesome for whom?
These people are already happy to kill and rape civilians and turn their own people into unwilling martyrs.
Many of these groups directly benefit disproportionately not just from flouting rules about military dress but other alleged basic rules of warfare.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9m ago
Man, I really enjoyed the summary, especially Gorsuch reducing a professional to a stammering mess. Warms the soul.
Then you had to go and ruin it by tilting at this weird caricature of “New Lefty Science” and “the Lefties That Be.” Have you considered that maybe people you don’t like can be right?
- Sotomayor asks: if this ordinance is not applied to people who are incidentally sleeping outside, but only if the police think they have no home address, is it really legalizing conduct?
- Kagan adds that enforcement rests on having a home, which is a status, not a conduct.
- Evangelis counters that Robinson featured no actus reus, but this situation does: camping. Or really sleeping outside, due to the specifics of the injunction.
- Jackson reasons that if you’re relying on the act of sleeping, then you are touching on a “basic function”. And that’s what gets proportionality protections from the 8th.
- Evangelis avoids a follow-up about eating in public by arguing that a “necessity defense” would come up before the 8th.
- After some going around in circles, Roberts shelves the subject.
Which part of this do you have a problem with? Because it looks, to me, like a legitimate debate over the limits of the 8th. The hypotheticals are relevant. The questions are clear. No digressions about historical richness or other sources of vibes. Just “why is this different from Robinson?”
I will try to review more of the summary later. So far, I don’t see what you’re so sarcastic about.
TIRM
10m ago
A lot of the populace already thinks Israel's guilty of ethnic cleansing
"Ethnic cleansing" is so broad that I think Israel is doing it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13m ago
I never suspected you to be one of the Western (or Ukrainian, for that matter) elites, so this doesn't come as a surprise.
No_one
16m ago
The extreme difficulty of getting adult content published on major distribution channels like Steam or the Apple/Google app stores
Difficulty publishing porn on steam? I find that doubtful.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
20m ago
Small-scale shower thought, since I don't want to wait until Sunday
You do realize that you're allowed to post in the existing thread, right? It still exists, it doesn't expire on Monday, it expires next Sunday when the next thread comes out.
Harlequin5942
28m ago
Then it wasn't something that men had as men, whereas women had their immunity from conscription as women. Different from today, but not that different, and no solace for an unmarried man who was conscripted (as many young, unmarried men were, sometimes violently e.g. press gangs).
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
37m ago
The drug addicts are on drugs and "have no choice". The rich guy cheating with 8 different mistresses only "feels shame" insofar as he is found out and it affects his status when they play it on the news.
I think both the addict and the rich philanderer have, through their intentional choices, crippled their capacity to feel shame. I don't think this happens automatically; people who haven't intentionally crippled their own capacity for shame continue to feel it. Those who do cripple their capacity for shame in this way have damaged an important part of their own mind, making them less sane in a meaningful sense.
That said, I agree with you personally, and I would never cheat on my wife, but I come on here to exercise the rational part of my brain, not the boyscout part.
I would argue that the boyscout part is a subset of the rational part. Shame is deeply rational. Those who have crippled their capacity for shame are less rational, not more.
Most is not warranted in this day and age, vestigial nonsense, like people who say they won't sit with their back to the door.
Some fears can be vestigial nonsense, depending on the specific environment. Fear itself remains rational, and always will so long as humans survive.
Shrike
50m ago
I don't think, in a conflict like this, there's likely to be a binary, clear cut win/lose situation. Western nations providing aid to Ukraine does two things:
- Increases Ukraine's ability to exercise military power, increasing the odds of a settlement in its favor, on the sliding scale, and
- Increases cost on a hostile foreign power (Russia.) You see some rhetoric along these lines ("killing Russians at no American lives lost is a great deal") in the United States from time to time.
So even if Ukraine "loses" it's possible that military aid to it causes a better outcome than the outcome with no military aid. Notably, the second point holds regardless of the ultimate outcome of the war.
In fairness, it seems possible that things could backfire on one or both of these points (e.g. over the long run Western aid hardens Russian support for the war, driving them to successfully pursue more expansive war aims) – one historical example of this might be England during the US Civil War – but generally speaking "more military power" is traditionally thought to improve ability to negotiate a favorable conclusion to a conflict, even if said conclusion is not entirely satisfactory.
quiet_NaN
57m ago
it’s unclear whether executing enemy combatants would even be a war crime in this case, since Hamas does not follow the rules of war, does not wear uniforms and so on, so their fighters can’t be considered legitimate PoWs but instead partisans, who are allowed to be executed.
The US position from the the GWB era is of course that these would be unlawful enemy combatants who could be subject to torture without any violations of international law. I do not share this position (because I detest torture), but emotionally I would have no problem with any Gazans found carrying a firearm or explosive device being presumed partisans and getting a short court-martial followed by a long drop.
Intellectually, I recognize that executing your opponents at will because they are not uniformed soldiers of a recognized nation state might not be a good policy because one man's terrorist is another one's freedom fighter, and having certain humanitarian standards makes conflicts with non-state actors less gruesome. Then again, being a partisan has always had its perils, not matter if you were fighting Nazi occupation in France or for a communist revolution in Latin America.
Still, as far as armed opponents are concerned, my preferred frame of reference is to see the Gaza war as a police action against especially murderous bandits in a border region which is not a matter for international law. If any country wants to make it a matter of international law, I would encourage them to ship grant their passports and uniforms to Hamas.
The only options are to do nothing, to ethnically cleanse Gaza (politically impossible), to pummel them into submission to the extent they don’t rebel again (almost impossible in the Middle East where birthrates are high and these kinds of blood feuds last millennia) or to do as much damage to military infrastructure and kill as many fighters as you can and then leave, which is what Israel is doing now.
My frustration is that that I do not see any winnable end game in that strategy. A majority of Gazans seem to be happy with Hamas. Kill 90% of their fighters and they will just come back in a decade.
One thing would be to invite an international peace keeping force. But even if you find any countries outside Iran who would be willing to participate, this would mostly bring in a lot of weapons while at the same time limiting the tactical options of IDF to respond to future attacks on Israel.
Or they could try a carrot and stick approach. Split Gaza into ten zones separated by borders. Able-bodied men are restricted from passing between zones, while everyone else can move freely around unless they are carrying goods. Each zone gets assigned a cooperation level. At cooperation level zero you only let the goods in which humanitarian law absolutely requires. Water pipes can be turned into rockets, Rebar makes for makeshift weapons, so you get to live in tents and carry your water. That is the stick. Any zones which manage not to shoot rockets at Israel, rats out Hamas fighters to the IDF and elect a leadership which does not want to drown the Jews in the sea moves up on the cooperation level. They get more privileges. Houses out of concrete, zone transition privileges for able-bodied men, shorter waiting times at checkpoints, vehicles, work permits for Israel, ultimately perhaps an Israeli passport (with limited franchise if you want to preserve the Jewish ethno-state, whatever), or broader rights of self-determination. That is the carrot.
Perhaps seed one zone by requiring any able-bodied man wanting to enter to publicly renounce Hamas in a way which will get him on their kill-list. Or with known IDF collaborators.
My theory is that given the choice of maintaining eternal animosity towards Israel and living in a country which is not a total third world shithole, most people might eventually relent on their Antisemitism. As you pointed out, the 20% Arab Israeli mostly manage to suppress any urges they might have to slaughter their Jewish neighbors and instead enjoy a life as second-class citizens in a country which offers an amazing quality of life compared to its neighbors.
Astranagant
58m ago
If the US or Western European countries were also defending in total war against a larger invasion force I’d imagine similar measures would be implemented here.
And I would miraculously become transgender and leave. Who among us would stay and fight, really?
Shrike
59m ago
As far as I can tell, this absolutely depends on where in the West, and in what aspect you choose to exercise your individual self-determination. If what you want to do is to criticize Vladimir Putin (something that is important, and something I think everyone should be able to do without fear), the West will almost certainly be freer than Russia every time.
If you want to speak your mind on one side of certain other sensitive culture war issues, Russia is freer than England. If you want to go through life wearing religious apparel, Russia is most likely freer than France. If you want to create and run a hyper-nationalist right-wing party concerned with ethnic unity, Russia may be freer than Germany. If you want to display Soviet iconography, Russia is freer than Latvia. If you want to vote for the Communist Party, Russia is freer than Ukraine (not merely because Ukraine has suspended elections, but also because the Communist Party is banned by law in that country.)
Of note in this discussion, Russia has a conscription system, but so to do several Western states, including several in Europe.
My point here isn't "Russia Good Actually" but that Western states very often are extraordinarily repressive, at least by the standards of the United States (but not so much by the standards of the world as a whole). There's an idea that because Western nations generally have some form of democratic government they don't repress minority groups, and I don't think that's true at all.
It isn't as if the current social arrangement is only held up by men in general wanting to have their cake and eat it. You really are fixated on men at primary to blame movers and shakers and as if such things are just an adversarial negotiation between men and women. Actually some of male influence has also to do with male feminists, so it isn't' as if men prioritize in a self serving manner just male interest and there is the influence of women too and what they want. But I agree that things changing where we have a prioritization of marriage over constant dating life, is going to involve both men and women doing that.
TIRM
1hr ago
Every single liberal leftist normie-oriented talking head I ever encountered kept repeating for months
Any chance these drooling morons exist almost entirely in your imagination and almost not at all in real life?
do_something
1hr ago
when you're working day and night to abolish the "self" of Ukraine
I am not, next question please.
freemcflurry
1hr ago
I'm not saying you should necessarily, but if the plan is "accept X Slavic refugees to help beat Russia" then it's more effective if they're Russians instead of Ukrainians.
mildly_benis
1hr ago
We already have a substantial minority of Russian speaking people.
My hunch is that a policy of open arms for all (ethnic) Russian immigrants would help with the Polish reputation of being rabidly russophobic, and make it a tiny bit harder for German politicians to explain away a local conflict as something Poland pushed for and maybe even deserved, actually. And anyway, not many Russians would come, I imagine.
I suppose the potential for sabotage is a concern.
do_something
1hr ago
Perhaps not this stimulus or that stimulus, but the implication is that $X will win the war (for some value of $X).
That is true, on assumption that converting this to weapons will be possible. This war is more equipment-constrained than manpower-constrained.
do_something
1hr ago
So now Reuters is stating that Russia is a "larger, better-equipped enemy"? Really? This is where we're at, after more than 2 years? They actually have the cheek to say this? Every single liberal leftist normie-oriented talking head I ever encountered kept repeating for months that the orc invasion force is completely undersized for the task, their rapist orc cannon fodder is deserting en masse and running from their positions like rabbits, they ran out of artillery shells and missiles, have no food, no gear, no body armor, no tanks, what equipment they have is all a piece of crap etc.
Really? I have seen many many "Russia outguns Ukraine" articles over time. Also who the heck claims that Russia has no tanks and run out of artillery shells? Where are you getting your "normies"? Even dumber parts of reddit are not so dumb.
orc invasion force is completely undersized for the task
This one I heard mostly from pro-Russia trolls before full-scale war started in their "Russia has no plans to invade Ukraine full scale and no Russian soldiers attacked Ukraine" mode.
do_something
1hr ago
What about "Russia is so strong that if we don't stop them here, they may be able to take Moldovia/Estonia! But if delay them and rebuild European armies then risk becomes nonexisting. Also, maybe they will be even kicked out of Ukraine that has not collapsed yet?" for pessimistic version? Without cognitive dissonance?
Well, that's what I'm driving at. The issue isn't as narrow as women not being drafted, as some people say, it's that people are being asked to take one for the team, when the same people who are asking, are deconstructing the team.
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