2rafa
4hr ago
Niall Ferguson is a very widely read and famous popular historian who has made a living defending the British Empire. Sure, many leftists don’t like him for it, but they typically don’t like Israel either, and Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg and Newsweek so can hardly be considered cancelled by the mainstream. In general neoconservatives broadly defend the legacy of European (especially British) imperialism while acknowledging some limited atrocities.
2rafa
6hr ago
Rather Sunak than Jeremy Corbyn, surely? I see (and would largely agree with) your position, but for Indians especially their political distribution does not appear substantially different than that of natives, and it’s telling that in recent years (as usual) it was the ethnics in the Tory party who wanted to clamp down on immigration while the native wets were largely reticent.
2rafa
6hr ago
The church is certainly still against both gay marriage and abortion, nevertheless the official position is still more conciliatory on many of these social issues than US tradcaths are happy with.
2rafa
6hr ago
If you bang one guy for 10 years during your twenties, while a loser male has one or two hookups but otherwise remains single and technically sexless for 8/10 of those years he still has an equal or higher body count to the woman. In this way measuring promiscuity by sexual partner count in the last year doesn’t make sense.
2rafa
10hr ago
Certainly the Maronites are substantially responsible for the banking crisis, but that’s just what happens in highly fractured low trust countries with major sectarian disputes, every group is out for itself. I don’t think an independent 75% Christian Lebanon would be Switzerland or Denmark (or indeed secular Israel) but it would probably be a moderately corrupt Med country on the level of, say, Greece or Malta. They got away with it in part because every tribe there is corrupt and self-serving in its own way.
2rafa
12hr ago
Women being more likely to have a partner doesn’t make them more promiscuous. I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like you’re reading the statistics correctly.
2rafa
12hr ago
The Maronites were patrician intellectuals whose French-educated elite thought they could continue the colonial system indefinitely after colonialism. If they had agreed to let Israel help them build a Christian state in the late 1950s it would have been fine and they’d literally be living in a rich modern country by now. Their hubris destroyed them, a similar situation played out in South Africa with the Boers.
2rafa
12hr ago
Israel can’t allow Palestinians to rule themselves before being pacified because Israel has no strategic depth. The Iron Dome vs Gaza is one thing, the risk of an October 7 repeat shoots up hugely if they get full control of Area C.
2rafa
13hr ago
Tattoos are degenerate and an affront to God. I always dislike people who have them at least a little. One of the best signs (along with being fat) of poor impulse control and general stupidity in an adult.
2rafa
1d ago
I think natives have known for centuries now that the idea of settlers leaving is ridiculous and would never happen, so they see the world in that way. And like you say, most modern natives are mixed-race. If you went to parts of Alaska, Hawaii or northern Canada I imagine you could find plenty of people who would happily say they’d like all Europeans to leave.
2rafa
1d ago
You and I are usually on the same page with regards to this particular black pill, but this legislation seems so obviously stupid (because the mitigating algorithms will have to be stated clearly) that it transcends my usual pessimism in its idiocy.
2rafa
1d ago
Then everything counts as diversifying. You get sued for hiring too many white males? You’re diversifying politically. You get sued for hiring too many liberals? You’re diversifying racially. It effectively abolishes disparate impact anyway. Even progressive corporations will just use whatever excuse their lawyers tell them to.
2rafa
1d ago
Since diversifying in one direction (racially, LGBTQ) will almost certainly run contrary to diversifying in another (political party registration) the law would appear likely to be inherently contradictory. All smart whites/asians/indians will quickly register as Republicans (whether they vote as such or at all is of course irrelevant).
What does a college do when faced with the direct trade off between hiring Democrat (overrepresented) black (underrepresented) faculty and hiring Republican (underrepresented) white male (overrepresented) faculty, if both types of rejected applicant threaten to sue?
This bill should pass because it will lead to SCOTUS having to bring down disparate impact or literally paralyze the entire American civil legal system.
2rafa
1d ago
Yeah, but the whole reason this approach is even viable is because when Red Lobster was both real estate company and restaurant operator, investors valued it at less than the sum of its parts. Since the late 1980s conglomerates have fallen out of fashion because asset managers of all kinds prefer to deal with pure play companies (especially outside big tech) and to handle allocation themselves. The big Japanese conglomerates often trade at very poor multiples compared to Western businesses not only because of the state of the Japanese economy but because when you buy into one you’re buying into like 15 arbitrary and often barely related business areas. By contrast in the American equity market an investor can more easily measure and tailor their exposure to real estate, oil, railroads, video games, b2b SaaS and so on. Those looking for a preset diversified portfolio can buy an index or buy big holding companies like Berkshire or the public PE firms that have exposure to many different kinds of business.
2rafa
1d ago
Evangelicals are very rare in both rationalist and reactionary spaces. One sometimes finds other Protestants, there are the Episcopalian/Anglican equivalent of tradcaths (many of which are now formally or semi-schismatic from the Church of England), the occasional Germanic Lutheran, some of the weird other Protestant denominations. But Evangelicals are rare. Aspects of Evangelical Zionism have now filtered down to some other US Christian denominations, though, I’ve met Catholics who are very pro-Israel and consider Israel to have some kind of special eschatological role, even if Rome says otherwise.
2rafa
1d ago
Few natives are left but in many cases I do think they’d vote emotively for settlers and descendants to leave. See the New Caledonia situation right now; the natives benefit tremendously from French rule but still want France and French people to leave.
2rafa
1d ago
The Saudi Option, whether @4bpp knows it or not, is actually not off the table at all, although not to the level of generosity that he proposes. Kushner strongly implied it was the central option discussed with MBS. It would likely take the form of a colonial Palestinian regime under Saudi control, perhaps as some kind of quasi-independent (in theory) ‘emirate’ ruling much of the West Bank, perhaps almost all of it (but in practice granting Jewish settlements full internal autonomy). In exchange Saudi Arabia could administer large parts of East Jerusalem, would gain official control over Al Aqsa (meaning all three core Islamic holy sites would be under Saudi Arabia) and there would some kind of joint funding deal for peacekeeping. The Muslim world would turn a blind eye to harsh secret police tactics used against the Palestinians by the Saudis, and Israel would officially recognize the “State” of Palestine under Saudi guardianship. This is also the most likely near term solution, though I wouldn’t say it’s likely in an absolute sense.
2rafa
1d ago
Yes, but in practice that would be it, since once reclaimed by the Arabs Jews would likely never again be able to win it militarily.
2rafa
1d ago
In simple utilitarian terms Palestinians obviously suffer more. The end.
That’s entirely irrelevant even when making a utilitarian argument in this war, since the hypothetical is about who would suffer more if the other side achieved its military aims.
2rafa
1d ago
Almost all Palestinian Christians left (many long before Israel’s founding) so there aren’t really many left.
2rafa
1d ago
Many tradcaths seem to consider other tradcaths apostates especially because there’s a big gradation in terms of their relationship with the actual church as an institution (see FSSP vs SSPX), views on the pope and so on.
2rafa
1d ago
It also involves listening to the Argentinian socialist in Rome, which American Catholics often seem to chafe at.
2rafa
1d ago
McDonald’s is in part a ‘real estate’ business because of its franchising system, wherein it acts as landlord to franchisees. McDonald’s therefore both makes money the usual way franchised restaurants do and on rent for those same franchise owners.
Red Lobster was not franchised. When it was sold in 2014, every single Red Lobster restaurant was owned and operated by the company itself. From an article from the time:
…Golden Gate, which bought the chain for $2.1 billion in 2014. At that time, virtually all of the real estate under Red Lobster restaurants was owned by the chain, which has no franchisees.
McDonald’s’ model isn’t typically attempted by most modern restaurant chains, even those that do franchise, because shareholders tend to prefer that excess profits are reinvested in growth or returned to them rather than used to buy commercial real estate which the investors could buy exposure to themselves to the extent that they want to.
2rafa
1d ago
I think the raw classical economics argument for prohibiting most forms of takeover defense isn’t completely wrong, but it also isn’t entirely correct. Im based in the UK which bans many of the major tactics used in the US, and I don’t think UK pubcos are run better than American ones on the whole, but I think to me the biggest issue I have with US public companies is super voting shares. These were illegal in London until about 5 years ago; every share had to have the same voting power to be (in practice) eligible for a primary listing in London and for inclusion in indices. They changed it under pressure from the government because British tech companies were IPOing in the US to preserve founder control. I think it’s a hugely negative development in ECM for shareholders, banks and the wider public.
Assassin’s Creed is more in the ‘Bridgerton’ school of historical fiction than the more realistic style. I don’t think the demographics of Bridgerton are propaganda to trick people into thinking the British aristocracy in 1820 or whatever was half black because so many other aspects of the show, from the music to the hair to the gender relations and sex are completely anachronistic. The casting is because it’s a show created by a black woman legendarily famous for self-insert characters. It’s “historical fiction” in the way that Disney’s Cinderella is.
In any case, the rage well has surely been mined with Assassin’s Creed to the point of utter depletion. A woman in 1868 London facing no instances of sexism was standard for the series back in 2015, so I find it hard to work up any performative outrage about a black samurai in 2024.
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