2rafa
1hr ago
While I enjoy fiction like the Yiddish Policeman’s Union, I don’t think an Israel anywhere else would have survived either. There were two very large waves of migration that have given the state the necessary human mass to survive (especially given the workshy chareidi population, which for lack of good alternatives probably would have migrated in large numbers to any Jewish state with religious freedom) - the Mizrachi migration and the Soviet migration.
The former wouldn’t have happened without Israel being located where it is (I don’t think the Jewish population of the Middle East would remain particularly large, but like the Christian one it would slowly have trickled out over time due to persecution, mostly to the West, maybe some to Latin America and Asia). The latter would never have happened, because an Israel located in eg (West) Germany would have been in the more discrete enemy category for the USSR than Israel and so emigration would be much less likely to be allowed (yes, some Soviet Jews went to the US, but they usually pretended they’d go to Israel first).
I also don’t think, even in their anger, any of the allies or even many Jewish leaders would have agreed it was structurally stable to carve out a corner of densely populated West (and it would have been West) Germany, ethnically cleanse the natives and establish some kind of Jewish ethnostate. Yes, the Ostsiedler were ethnically cleansed, but that was behind the Iron Curtain, in the chaos of the postwar period, and by countries with tens of millions of people in an empire with hundreds of millions of people.
2rafa
1hr ago
The Israeli Arab rapprochement isn’t the risk here. Ultimately the Arab world might destroy Israel, sure, but it’s not the primary threat. MBS still doesn’t care, the domestic population was pacified, there were actually surprisingly few violent pro-Palestinian protests in places like Egypt and Tunisia, the UAE obviously remains onside for Israel. The risk is that the Shiites (primarily in Lebanon but to some extent also Yemen and Iraq) and Hamas alone can make Israel unliveable by first world standards.
By the way, I don’t think the evidence has borne out your speculation on Hamas’ plan. Everything I’ve seen suggests they really did believe they’d storm through to the West Bank and ignite a popular uprising among Palestinians and possibly even Israeli Arabs, and at that point Hezbollah would probably have finally joined in with Iranian permission (which they probably didn’t initially have), and that would have been immediately existential for Israel, fighting on three fronts including internally, everyone throwing everything at them. It wasn’t a PR move.
This is like one of those weird fantasy-movie retcons where the new villain introduced in the sequel is suddenly found to have been the biggest villain all along behind all the bad things that happened. Israel was the primarily villain in the Muslim world for three decades before Khomenei appeared on the scene, Israel had already fought several wars against a varied lineup of Arab muslim enemies.
There was no suggestion that Khomenei invented Muslim anti-zionism. But the transition from secular Arab Nationalism of the PLO and Nasser to anti-zionism with a more explicitly Islamist character - both inside and beyond Palestine - coincides almost perfectly with an expansionary (Sunni) Islamist identity, spread in grand irony from the gulf, that radically reshapes the Muslim world, as Naipaul so adeptly chronicles. That ideology completely changed Islamic identity in Muslim states more populous and in some cases more important than much of the actual Arab heartland. Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Muslims in India, in the Philippines, in West and East Africa. Regions of increasing strategic importance to the United States. Regions where Muslims care much more about Palestine today than they did in 1955.
It was in that context that the Islamic Revolution tried to take that mantle from the Sunnis.
2rafa
10hr ago
Nuking Tehran wouldn’t destroy the regime. Tehran is actually a comparative hotbed of opposition compared to other cities. Power and the IRGC are highly distributed, as are weapons stockpiles, missiles, the conventional military, and the nuclear program. Iran is too big to defeat militarily with anything other than a ground invasion, a spontaneous revolution, or both. Even the Japanese only surrendered because they knew the alternative was full invasion. Israel can never invade Iran.
2rafa
11hr ago
Russia and Iran are allies of convenience. Russia also likes a close relationship with the Gulf. Russia also sold out close Iranian allies Armenia. Putin pursued and expropriated some Jewish oligarchs, but also plenty of gentile ones, and there are still plenty of Jews he allows to remain rich, or indeed in other important roles in the state (politicians, propagandists, etc).
2rafa
11hr ago
That doesn’t really answer the question. Israel has no good strategic options and didn’t even before October 7th. Hope that eventually something happens in Iran and that Hezbollah doesn’t want to fight and that they can hold off every attack and Hamas never develops rockets that can breach the Iron Dome and that the Houthis don’t get more aggressive with missiles and that they continue to maintain a huge technological / military advantage.
A lot of hope, in other words. October 7th showed how weak Israel was and is to ground invasion, it’s a largely flat country with no strategic depth, surrounded by civilians who - regardless of what their leadership may or may not believe or say - want to kill and pillage its inhabitants and take their land. The only winning move was not to play, but that was decided a long time ago.
In the long term, I increasingly feel that the only hope for Israel is that whoever first invents and controls ASI (Amodei, Altman, maybe Brin and Page) takes pity on their co-ethnics and/or purported homeland.
Otherwise the geopolitical situation is bad, the demographics are bad, the reputation is bad. Israel was a fool’s errand. You can’t stand against two billion Muslims forever, especially as they stream into Western lands in ever higher numbers and grow to be politically prominent there, too. As Scott has said so many times, only a small number of people have to really care about an issue to get their way if most people don’t care about it, and Muslims care about Palestine as much as Jews care about Israel and are far more numerous. The Iranian state succeeded in its central ideological mission of making Palestine the central, primary ideological cause (by far) of two billion people, 25% of the world’s population. No cunning, no chutzpah, no number of places on the Forbes billionaires list can stand up to that.
The only possibility was gambling that the easy prosperity and trade ties that had persuaded the Gulf Arabs into reducing their hostility could be replicated in an Iran in which the revolutionary regime was defeated, and that possibly as a consequence over many decades hostility toward Israel could be reduced. The Mossad judged that, after the recent widespread protests, a killing blow to the ayatollah and IRGC and cabinet elite, plus using Claude and image recognition to dynamically identify and track police stations, local pro-regime militiamen and troop movements and strike them with air superiority, would bring the people back to the streets in a way the government could not crush. That gamble clearly failed. The highest risk tolerance protestors were already arrested or killed. The rest stayed home. The Iranian middle class are simply too comfortable to rebel in a way that threatens, for most of them, their lives. Most of us would do what they did, which is nothing.
What more is there to say? The decline may be fast or slow, maybe both. You can’t hold out against the world forever, surrounded by enemies.
2rafa
11hr ago
There is no plan. To understand the Iran War from Israel’s perspective you have to understand that it was a Hail Mary move.
Since the JCPOA it was clear to Mossad that Iranian nuclear weapons development continued largely unabated. Inspections were limited and easily misdirected. Iran had no need for a large domestic nuclear power program. The founding mission of the Islamic Revolution was the destruction of Israel. Iran was funding proxies. The IRGC controls much of the export economy and therefore foreign currency.
The risk for Israel is not necessarily being overrun. This remains the ultimate risk, but there are others. The risk is that regular attacks from Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis perhaps, make life in Israel unliveable for those who want first world conditions, and they leave. The economy collapses, leaving a mass of zero skill ultra orthodox who don’t work, some Arabs and various Mizrachim who have no foreign passports or the skills to get a visa. At that point, the country ceases to exist in a defensible state. That is why they felt Iran had to be defeated.
They gambled and they lost. They’re not that smart.
2rafa
11hr ago
The excerpt is questionable. A pacifist approach in the decades that followed would have been far more disastrous for Zionism than the misadventure described. Arabs, particularly Levantines, are more feminine, more emotional, and more neurotic than the one dimensional ‘Arab mind’ narrative suggests, sure. That is only part of the story.
2rafa
11hr ago
Yeah, and the consequence of the US and Ukraine blowing up Nordstream 2 was that Germany did…absolutely nothing, cozied up to Trump, increased their contributions toward the NATO target and sent more money to Ukraine.
Men relish competition, hierarchy, inequality and status. For all the discussion of the welfare state, the late 20th century did provide many men with that. At the same time, men like being winners, not losers. Men seek to dominate other men. Men invented communism and socialism, but most modern-day leftists are women.
These statements lay bare a fundamental challenge to any group-based understanding of male identity, which is that for underlying evo-psych reasons, males cannot ever have true gender-based in-group solidarity. For one man to have five exclusive sexual partners, be they wives, side chicks, baby mommas, ‘plates’, other men must go without. Male reproductive success is uncapped. A woman derives no real benefit in most cases from locking down every man, a man does for the inverse. This is why only a small minority of men reproduced historically according to some (disputed) figures. This is why the most male-dominated, masculine, primitive societies that postdated the Neolithic Revolution involved in many cases forms of polygamy. Whether in Utah or the Arabian peninsula or in Elon Musk’s bizarre IVF harem, when the ‘longhouse’ of settled, city-led civilization fractures, men screw each other over to monopolize access to sex and to women.
Young men yearn for high variance life outcome scenarios. They do not want to be average. They want a world split into a small number of winners and a great number of losers and they want to gamble on being in the former category. They may rage against it. They may hate themselves for it. But they want it all the same. They don’t want a world without chads. They want to be chad, fucking some other guy’s girlfriend while he waits for her to come home from the club. This, too, is the fantasy that Clavicular and others offer their viewers.
The sexual revolution can have screwed over most men and yet also still have been a (young to middle aged) male invention. A man can be a loser at life and still want to preserve the hope that an unequal system offers him. The students at the Sorbonne rioting to get access to the girls’ dormitories (one of the seminal events of the sexual revolution and thus of modern sexual history) were not old men. Even Hugh Hefner was not an old man when he got started.
Monogamy was imposed on young men, like every form of welfare, largely by the old of both sexes. It was imposed because of the instability of the alternative, but young men don’t care about that. Young men do better in unstable times than anyone (certainly better than children, than women, than the elderly), even if most still suffer in them. When they cast off its shackles, they set themselves up for their present situation. Why? For the same reason almost all gamblers are men. Because most young men would rather gamble on a 20% chance of dominance (financially, sexually, politically, whatever) than accept a lifetime of being average in a ‘fair’ system.
Lowe did an interview where he called Farage a cult leader, said he didn’t have what it took to be PM. Farage discovered or invented depending on your view some bullying rumors and used them as pretext to remove him. It was during that growing spat that the police were called.
But that only starts at the middle of the story. They’re both big egos and Farage has always been a solo leader.
Most of the stories were previously reported, the new reports are actually quite limited although I appreciated their collation. The report is horrific, although barely more so than many of those published over the last 12 (!) years since the scandal broke. Over that period, of course, net immigration from beyond Europe effectively quintupled, only recently (in the last year) beginning a slow fall, but still far higher than it was in 2014. There is outrage and there is action. Nothing will happen.
Rupert Lowe quit Nigel Farage’s political bloc out of personal disagreement and has now positioned himself to his right. His main effect is that if he can continue to draw 5-7% polling support, then in combination with Farage’s group (~24%), and the Tories who continue to hover around 20-22%, they will split the conservative vote (probably an absolute majority of the voting public) and hand Labour another 5 years in absolute power in 2029.
So we have that to look forward to, which is nice.
2rafa
2d ago
The only viable option for long term peace with Iran is the slow development of trade and business ties. Even though this was has been a strategic disaster for America and especially Israel, in the long term, interesting things might happen.
Like @hydroacetylene says it was a big expansion in male earnings and rapid improvements in quality of life, but that’s not the whole story. Quality of life and male earnings increased rapidly in countries like Saudi Arabia and Vietnam while birth rates collapsed, for example. Eastern European countries saw small bumps in some cases as the post-1990s recovery went on, but rarely anything spectacular.
I suspect it was in large part suburbanization and pent-up demand. The former had both push and pull factors (like white flight in the former case) but also meant large numbers of white people - especially’ the US where the boom was most pronounced - left fertility shredder cities and moved back out to lower density housing. If going from rural low density environments to squalid tenements kills tfr, then it stands to reason a partial reversal might temporarily boost it. In addition, labor saving devices made domestic work far easier than it had been.
As for pent-up demand, it is an interesting fact that when people from many very poor countries move as refugees / migrants to the West, their fertility rate briefly spikes. For a time (I haven’t checked recently) first generation Libyans, Bangladeshis and other groups actually had higher birth rates in Britain (even adjusted for age of migrants) than in their home countries. These usually come back down in the second generation but there is a built up demand unfulfilled out of extreme poverty that expands into the available prosperity of the new host country, welfare etc.
The move to the suburbs and higher incomes provided this during the baby boom. People who had only two kids in the urban tenements suddenly had three or four because they had the space or money. When their children went back to having two kids, it was cultural, not financial. Either the unfulfilled demand wasn’t the same, or standards had increased. Imagine if everyone in the middle class suddenly attained the material living standard that, say, a successful surgeon has today, and got a big new cheap house. That might cause a tfr rise.
Thats why there aren’t any easy lessons from the baby boom, other than maybe that if every American could afford a 6,000 square foot McMansion, a robot nanny and butler, and could make the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $500k a year forever, they would have more kids. And indeed the higher birth rates we’ve seen among those making more than $800k a year in recent years largely prove this true. When you reduce the lifestyle impact of children to basically frictionless status, people are willing to have unlimited kids. Elon Musk kind of shows this too.
2rafa
2d ago
But that suggests that sharing any communication, even one made completely non-pseudonymously, is doxxing. It obviously isn’t. Receiving a (non-anonymous, signed by them with their full name) letter from someone and publishing it may be rude, depending on its contents or local law it may even be a crime, but it’s not doxxing. Doxxing specifically refers to revealing the identity of a pseudonymous figure.
2rafa
2d ago
It’s my view that while ponytail, ill fitting suit and fedora types probably did think they were cool, this was more to do with a fondness for the jazz age, bogart, Sinatra, Fred and Ginger movies, the late 2000s / early 2010s electroswing caravan palace age (now thankfully forgotten but for a time the favorite music genre of this kind of neckbeard) than a desire to look like a ‘normal’ business man type in a suit.
2rafa
2d ago
Can you give an example of this actually happening?
Give an example of reactionary Twitter trying to cancel someone for anti-white comments?
Portraying "let me know if he ever gets hired, and I will RT" as "publicly critizing" is also not very productive to thr cause of fighting antisemitism.
Why is there an expectation that when engaging in clear attention seeking behavior like telling someone you won’t take their job offer because you refuse to work for a Jew that you won’t get attention for your comment?
Think about it, there’s zero reason for Franco to have ever sent this message (rather than ‘no, sorry’, ‘not interested’, or just ignoring and blocking him) other than to grandstand. I would guess he immediately posted a screenshot of the ‘sent’ message to a friendly Discord, forum, whatever to show how based he was. Now the travesty is that his grandstanding got him the attention he was clearly seeking?
By the way, I agree with you that Jews should try not to draw attention to antisemitism. It is and always has been a losing game. But the actions the DR is criticizing weren’t unreasonable, they would applaud the same done by their perceived in-group, and this drama is just a lot of hypocritical faux outrage on their part.
2rafa
2d ago
I don’t know that Yud really comes across as 3. Some people who wear weird clothes really want attention - but those are precisely the most normal, personable people who dress and act flamboyantly. If your outgoing, socially successful, charismatic friend is wearing something loud, they’re peacocking / attention seeking. If your extremely weird autistic friend does it it’s more likely they’re wearing cat ears to the office because they’re an autist with little understanding of social norms than because they’re looking for attention.
2rafa
2d ago
It’s manifestly hypocritical when
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Some woke biracial girl studying labor relations or whatever refusing an internship by saying “not interested in working for a white person. Thanks” and being doxxed by the would-be employer would be celebrated on the dissident right and MAGA more broadly, and certainly the employer would be applauded for sharing it.
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It would be completely unsurprising, even expected, for “senior members of the administration” - including most likely the second most senior of all, JD Vance - to comment on it publicly and criticize the person in question.
What is the actual objection from the DR here? There isn’t one, really, except to the fact that some guy might suffer career consequences for his comment. All the company did was share a rude and unnecessary message sent under his real name.
2rafa
2d ago
Writing is too subjective and has in any case been better than the average native English speaker since GPT-3, probably 2. It is not going to write Ulysses (yet), but there isn’t much at that quality in the training set and almost nobody would appreciate it if it could. 99.9% of writing in the English language is covered by models that have been available for years. It may be generic, but compared to the writing ability of the average member of the public it’s good enough to write a restaurant menu, an email to a colleague, a press release, a Facebook marketplace ad, a high school essay. We may lament the sad end of the amusing broken English of earlier years, but few will miss it.
2rafa
2d ago
But 7am to 2pm is actually 7 hours of sleep. It’s not a great sleep schedule but it it’s a healthy amount of sleep and you could perform pretty well indefinitely on it.
Is it “doxxing” if you message a Jew on a social media platform under your real name saying you don’t want to work for him because he’s Jewish and he decides to share that with the Jewish community? Thats a very wide definition of doxxing.
Doxxing, classically, would be tracking down the owner of an anonymous account the way that the SPLC and other do and outing the real owner. If John Smith sends an email to a company from johnsmith@gmail.com signed John Smith and the company makes it public that’s not a dox. It might be a violation of privacy, if the email is understood to be in confidence, but that’s a legal question.
They have no route to Iran without American landing vessels, and for a largely conscript army the casualties that would be incurred even if victory was possible would be so high as to existentially threaten the state. If 100,000 young men die in a country of 6 million (when you subtract the Arab and Charedi population who don’t fight) ie 3 million men total, 1.5 million young men, everybody loses people. Plus, there’s no game plan for that quagmire either. A tiny country can’t occupy a hostile major one for long. They can occupy an indifferent one (colonial India) or one where they have a centuries-ahead technological advantage, but no more.
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