2rafa
2d ago
And it is important to say that even 1 million to-the-death committed settlers in Algeria in 1960 could likely still have fully pacified the native population given both HBD and other factors.
The end of French Algeria is one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century. It happened under American pressure but it really happened, ultimately, because the settlers did not fight to the death to save it. They had France to return to. The Israelis (most of them, anyway) lack the same luxury, even if they have dual citizenship it is to a land of which they know nothing and to whom they will never belong. Their only identity is Israeli, or Jewish.
Countless native civilizations have been destroyed before. As Churchill said, nobody now mourns the native Americans beyond the vapid and entirely European absurdity of “land acknowledgements”. The only time settler regimes ended despite real and proper resistance (see Rhodesia) had a 20:1 native to settler population ratio. Israel will soon be at 1:1 with the total Palestinian diaspora still in Arab lands.
There is a good chance that Israel is still destroyed in the lifetimes of most of the people reading this. But even in that scenario I anticipate it will still be a fight to the death for millions.
2rafa
2d ago
To be fair, it was, until it wasn’t. If they’d accepted 1948 and stationed a Jordanian-Egyptian army garrison just outside East Jerusalem (which I guess would have been a Danzig-style international city) there would be no settlers on the West Bank.
2rafa
2d ago
The AIPAC strategy relies (or relied) on one central fact:
Most American voters and politicians were either ambivalent (which includes mild antipathy) or positive about Israel.
This meant that the average Democrat or Republican, outside a tiny handful of very progressive or substantially Muslim constituencies, lost nothing from taking AIPAC’s money. There was no tradeoff. Increasingly now there is, so AIPAC’s influence will likely decline.
You also can’t do the same thing as the libertarian. The Republican will get primaried if he isn’t sufficiently anti-immigration. The Democrat will get primaried if she supports lower taxes on the rich. These are issues where almost every voter, and every voter in the primaries, has a relatively strong opinion. “[Democrat] took five million dollars from the mining lobby to destroy our environment and the habitat of our birds and fishes” might easily be the different between winning and losing a tight primary.
2rafa
3d ago
Despite being purported as the main beneficiaries of Citizens United, big corporations weren't really trying to spend large sums of money on politics. Exxon Mobil didn't park an oil tanker full of cash in the Chesapeake waiting for the signal to shower Washington in oil money as part of their dastardly plan. That just wasn't how buisinesses operated. It took time to develop both a theoretical framework for how to turn an abritrarily large amount of money into political power (it's a lot more complicated than simply buying ads), and to develop a philosophical framework for why this isn't cartoonishly evil.
“Money in politics” is far too broad a term.
Say you’re a Koch brothers libertarian-ish conservative. You want big immigration (including illegal, although you’re not too invested in amnesty), very low taxes particularly on the rich and on corporate earnings, and maybe you’re culturally moderately anti-woke and especially dislike that you got hit with some very expensive civil rights based employment rulings a few years ago but you still have a gay grandson or something.
Which cause are you going to donate a billion dollars to in the next cycle? The party of Stephen Miller, or the party of AOC?
Musk buying Twitter only “worked” (and again, whether it worked has yet to be decided, both on a long term cultural and on an economic basis) because there was already a large constituency of social conservatives who could use the platform to align and organize, especially on topics like immigration. That movement long predated the acquisition, Miller and Bannon had been central to Trump’s initial anti-illegal-immigration messaging in 2016, back when Musk was still a lib centrist and openly criticized Trump as ‘not the right guy’.
Now, back your big corporation. If I want deregulation and tax cuts, I might give a billion dollars to some centrist Dems and some libertarian Republicans. But then it turns out that a future Dem administration has a heavy presence of environmentalist progressives who dislike my polluting factories. And it turns out a future GOP administration contains politicians who owe fealty to and get support from a bunch of farmers or mining interests who don’t like me sourcing cheap inputs for my big business and like protectionist tariffs. So the billion dollars will be worth less than you might imagine.
2rafa
6d ago
Do you make the confession in plain language as a more banal description of exactly what you have done (or not done) or thought, or in vaguer terms (“I failed to do this”, “I allowed greed to get the better of me”)?
2rafa
6d ago
In the UK? It's more obvious. I am loathe to make strong statements, since I don't know how much of the cultural differences in the workplace at our hospitals is due to the women, and how much of it is general zeitgeist bleeding through.
It’s a complicated issue. In Britain, white doctors and nurses are subject to the extremely common and overrepresented predations of overseas and BAME (the UK term for ethnic minorities, for any readers) doctors and nurses who are extremely overrepresented in sexual harassment and assault claims. Certainly when I read through a bunch of the decisions a few years ago I found that the vast majority of serious sexual misconduct by doctors appeared to involve non-native medical professionals (whether first or subsequent generation).
It’s true for other crimes too. As the GMC itself noted 7 of the 9 doctors convicted of gross negligence manslaughter since 2004 were BAME. BAME doctors are referred for misconduct at more than double the rate of white doctors. International medical graduates are referred at more than 2.5 times the rate. (The GMC’s solution, in true current year fashion, was to try to fix the disproportionality, which could only be due to racism, not to investigate the cause).
Anecdotally doctor friends report leering, pestering and other sexual harassment by foreign doctors, many of whom speak poor English and have questionable medical skills, and some (eg Pakistani Muslim) domestically trained ones too. Obviously there are many civilized overseas doctors, yourself surely included, but the context is important when looking at why there might be a heightened women’s sensitivity here.
2rafa
7d ago
It’s definitely someone we’ve seen before, but I don’t know that it’s him either.
The overarching theory is very poor here. Andrews is writing as one of the few women in a field that has always been and continues to be extremely male (American right wing political opinion), and has no real experience of working in a female dominated environment.
empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.
Women are viciously competitive (as most women who went to high school will tell you) and don’t particularly empathize with their enemies. The safety point is correct in the abstract (men are much more willing to take risks) but arbitrary and poorly considered, for example one can easily construe mass immigration, soft-on-crime and other progressive policies as inherently riskier and ‘less safe’ than just not doing them. You can say that empathy overrides safetyism, but then it appears to sometimes and not at others, and that arguably challenges other conclusions she makes too. Andrews hints at this but then dismisses it in a very unsatisfactory way (she mentions ‘underhanded’ female competition but then says again later than women aren’t competitive). The implication is that a few women (like her) are fine but majority women (she has never worked in such an organization) are not. In fact, historically there have been many times in which women were more conservative than men. Women were and remain in many parts of the world the enforcers of traditional sexual morality (ie ‘slut shaming’) in the traditional institutions that they manage.
Nevertheless, their urging and clamouring is real and does have an effect, the UN Human Rights Commission helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa.
What helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa was the largely male Western governments being afraid of the almost entirely male governments of the Soviet bloc and almost entirely male government of red China and the almost entirely male governments of various third world countries fomenting a more intense global anti-western movement if they didn’t support the end of apartheid. Indeed this drove the entirety of ruinous American ‘decolonial’ and ‘anti colonial’ policy back to the late 1940s, through Suez and Algeria and onward.
What really drove academia to be woke from the early 2010s is the interaction between both wider cultural developments like mass immigration and specific sector dynamics, like large numbers of foreign faculty at American universities (the global holy grail for academics because pay is 2-3x what it is anywhere else), extreme competition for tenure due to ridiculous levels of PhD overproduction, the need to narrow that competition, the fact that academia had been broadly very left for many decades (depending on faculty for centuries) and extremely so since the 1960s, making structures very weak to faculty racial activism. Once you decide you must hire many more black faculty, you soon find, for example, that 67% of black people awarded PhDs in America are women, so naturally you will hire mostly women.
This is all obvious stuff that Andrews was too lazy or otherwise unwilling to google, clearly.
2rafa
7d ago
Is Myron Gaines really on the “right”? The black Muslim host of the “Fresh and Fit” podcast fits more into the long tradition of black American antisemitism into which the Sudanese Gaines (real name Amrou Fudl) assimilated. He advocates an alliance between white, black and brown against Jews, as some others did before him.
In the end, this is a politically untenable alliance. The interests of many black and many white voters are opposed, and in debates about crime, courts, welfare, political representation and tax, in much of the country, this and other political divisions limit any political program. The reality is that in an extremely racially and ideologically divided nation, the comparatively tiny Jewish population, heavily concentrated in major coastal cities and their suburbs, is not sufficient to ‘soak up’ the grand sum of political and cultural resentment that now exists.
That is not to say that antisemitism isn’t rising rapidly, it is. But antisemitism can’t heal the political rifts that exist and are developing in this country. Nor does that mean some grand reckoning against Jews is inevitable. Antisemitism was very high in the 1920s in America, probably moreso than in Germany at the time, but it didn’t lead to actual oppression. The reality of antisemitic violence, indeed all racial violence, is that while it requires some pre-existing racial animosity its actual occurrence is often arbitrary and historically contingent.
Dotcom bubble was a bubble because there were no users. The reasoning was along the lines of 20% of all shoe sales in 2010 will be online.
That really isn’t true. Plenty of dotcom companies like Yahoo had huge numbers of users; Yahoo had 400 million registered users at the peak in 2000 with 60 million monthly users (double the previous year’s figure). Many other dotcom companies had large user numbers too.
And if you look at the non-dotcom companies that still saw huge stock price crashes after the bust, many were businesses with big revenue, like Microsoft ($23bn in revenue in 2000, down 70%+ during the crash, didn’t recover until 2016) and Intel ($34bn in revenue in 2000, down 80%+ during the crash, didn’t recover until 2020). Both Intel and Microsoft were also extremely profitable during this period, contrary to boosters who say all tech stocks at this time lost money or whatever.
The bizarre myth that dotcom was all money into worthless internet businesses with 10 users and inflated traffic figures on zero revenue is peddled by exactly the same people trying to claim that “this time is different”.
2rafa
9d ago
Every bubble has its boosters, and at a late stage they often resort to the ultimate and final bull cope:
“They won’t (and indeed can’t) allow it to crash”.
In each generation this has a different name, but in this cycle the most common is probably some variant of ‘the fed put’. Of course, if elected governments and their appointees were powerful enough to stave of a market crash, these things would never happen, given their typical electoral consequences.
2rafa
9d ago
it could well be similar to how the dot-com investments worked out. lots of duds and even scams but on average i think the return on investing during that era was good
The overall market (the S&P 500) didn’t reach its dotcom peak again until 2007 and then promptly crashed again, not reaching it again until the 2010s. The Nasdaq didn’t hit its 2000 peak until 2015. Looking at total returns paints a slightly rosier picture but it was still a long time.
2rafa
9d ago
The Nazis were relatively gay and not particularly trad. Limited moves to deal with the red light districts in a few major German cities were halfhearted at best. Single women were in some cases even encouraged to become single mothers, women weren’t removed from the workplace, there were forms of proto-feminism that certainly clashed with traditional Christian views of a woman’s place, even as fertility was lauded (but in a technocratic kind of way, not necessarily a trad one). Economically although heavily supported by small petit bourgeois business owners, the nsdap increased the presence of the major German corporations in the economy and was broadly supportive of the major capital markets through 1939. Exhibits on entartete kunst existed in an uneasy relationship with plenty of relatively modernist sculpture, art and especially architecture that, a few short decades earlier, would definitely have been considered degenerate and abstract by critics.
2rafa
10d ago
That’s an AI ad / promo more than a summary. Kind of like the difference between a blurb and a summary.
2rafa
10d ago
Russia is much more comfortable directing sabotage operations on European soil than American soil. Since Putin came to power he has overtly, publicly assassinated dozens in Europe, including many in Western European countries like the UK, Spain and Germany. Russia also planned assassinations of major military and defense figures like the Rheinmetall CEO. He hasn’t assassinated anyone overtly in the USA, and hasn’t even come close to assassinating US defense figures.
If they were going to escalate by blowing up a munitions factory, they would 100% do so in Europe.
2rafa
11d ago
The bulk of the peasantry and proletariat in the region would gladly throw everything at Israel. The leadership refuse because of a number of reasons; the connection between Hamas and other Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood that wants to overthrow the Egyptian military regime, those who would destabilize the Jordanian monarchy etc; the fact that the US supports Israel; the fact that the IDF could destroy their militaries leaving them vulnerable to domestic upheaval (see the first reason) and so on.
However, if Israel appears weak, these same governments may be unable to resist popular pressure to give in to the people and mount an invasion. This would be especially true if there was a Palestinian uprising. In addition, Egypt may well eventually fall to an Islamist government.
2rafa
11d ago
It’s more about the situation in which 3 would occur, namely near-total loss of US support, an increasingly Muslim Europe, China and Russia signing onto sanctions to appease Muslim allies like Pakistan and Iran, and then relatively quickly almost the whole world is against them, the US for residual world peace reasons forces them into this quasi peace, and then maybe Turkey or another coalition of Arab nations decide that it’s just time for the killing blow, there’s a mass Palestinian uprising of the kind that didn’t occur on October 7th etc…
2rafa
11d ago
I think Israel will change behavior if that happens and act / beg for scenario 3, but as I said, there are many routes by which that leads to scenario 2 anyway.
2rafa
12d ago
It’s clear that the Nobel committee for reasons of generic Nordic internationalist liberalism could not stomach giving it to Trump directly (think of the humiliation at parties!) but decided to give it to a Trump-aligned Venezuelan conservative and anti-communist as a kind of consolation and gesture, in that Trump could hardly say she absolutely didn’t deserve it.
2rafa
12d ago
This conflict has continued for 70 years and will continue indefinitely until a “final resolution” occurs. Settlers continue to exercise growing power in Israeli politics; while not as fecund as the chareidim they stil have substantially higher tfr than secular Jews. Hamas is re-asserting control of Gaza and still likely has at least 10-20,000 fighters, and very high Gazan fertility rates and a large pool of existing 10-14 year old males means it will have many more in short order.
There are only 4 final resolution states:
-
Total victory of the Israelis, involving the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, followed by a subsequent peace deal with the surrounding nations that involves some kind of naturalization for Palestinian emigres as full citizens of other nations or another nation. Very unlikely.
-
Total victory of the Palestinians, involving the ethnic cleansing of Jews (either in a genocidal context or Algeria-style ‘suitcase or coffin’ emigration) from all current Israeli territory and a single Palestinian Arab state. Unlikely for now although less unlikely than scenario 1, and radically more likely if the world enters a period of sustained international upheaval.
-
A two-state solution imposed by the United States and other powers to Palestine’s benefit. America and other nations sanction Israel or threaten to until it experiences a domestic political crisis and forcibly withdraws settlers from the Palestinian Territories and agrees to a Palestinian state along either 1967 or (less likely) 1948 borders. There is a substantial chance of this turning into scenario 2, although it is theoretically possible with a ‘neutral’ international force overseeing the process. If public sentiment shifts further against Israel in America I think this is plausible in the medium term.
-
A two-state solution imposed by the United States to Israel’s benefit, which would involve one or more Muslim powers administering a semi-autonomous collection of Palestinian city states in an arrangement with Israel and possibly other global powers, principally America. This was the goal of the Israeli right but seems less likely as time goes on.
The most likely outcome of the current process is that Hamas returns to power in Gaza, the world mostly forgets about the conflict for 5-10-15 years, and then things eventually flare up once Hamas is ready for another big attack.
2rafa
12d ago
For example, why do antipsychotics increase the risk of pneumonia? Nobody knows. Why do clozapine and olanzapine cause the most weight gain (within antipsychotics)? Fuck knows. There is no logical chain that leads from the pharmacology of clozapine to it causing more weight gain than ziprasidone. We only know these things through observation. The exam questions reflect this reality. They do not ask you to model the interaction of dopamine antagonists with hypothalamic appetite centers. They ask: "Which of the following drugs is most associated with weight gain?" This is not a test of your reasoning. It is a test of your internal lookup table. You either pass the herblore skill check or you don't.
Sure, but I would classify this closer to the ‘classical’ examination than the rote legal memory check where, you FOOL, you forgot that it was actually a class 5(a)i notice and not a class 5(b)i one even though you actually! In the sense that I would imagine that smart and well-read psychiatry students would probably know that antipsychotics increase the risk of pneumonia and so on. Even moreso for Freud’s ‘nonsense’.
2rafa
12d ago
First of all, sorry to hear that and all the best with the tests.
Secondly, about:
Especially exams that require months on end of grinding and memorization, when is rather be doing anything else.
I’m curious about these medical exams and studying. Are there some candidates you’ve met that can just ace them without studying, based solely on general medical knowledge and above average recollection from both medical school and hands-on training in the years before their specialist qualification? Or is it like some legal qualifications, where even a towering intellect needs to rote memorize that the answer is a section 37 part 3 form and not a part 4 and that a certain period is 13 working days and not 12?
Yeah, but the South Africans were not interested in putting up a fight to the level that the Rhodesians had.
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