The reason Israeli tourists are disliked in non-Muslim parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America and places like Cyprus is simply that they’re largely boorish, annoying, plebeian men fresh with money from their military service and looking to get wasted, laid and cause trouble.
It’s like asking why British tourists have a much worse reputation in Spain and Croatia than in Japan and America; the former are of a very different class and standard of behavior. American working class soldiers have a very bad reputation in eg Okinawa and parts of the Philippines for harassing women etc.
2rafa
1hr ago
Lebanon is only good for the elite because they can flee with their ill gotten gains to Switzerland or Dubai after leaving office. If they had to stay in Lebanon the incentives would be very different.
2rafa
1hr ago
There is a history of homogenous societies turning on Jews but there was also plenty of antisemitism in corners of diverse empires like the Russian and Ottoman Empires (not so much in the capitals, at least most of the time, but certainly in many of the provinces). In 1980 America was far more diverse than Western Europe and yet had little antisemitism.
In general the “Jews want diversity because Jews do better in diverse countries” point is extremely contrived, it’s gained currency only because it’s promoted both by Jewish progressives who want to defend multiculturalism in a weekly Reform temple sermon and by far-right antisemites who want to ‘explain’ the motive for why Jews supposedly want to destroy formerly-homogenous white countries with mass immigration. There isn’t much evidence for it or against it. Some Jews supported mass immigration, but so did plenty of powerful indigenous Europeans both in Europe and in North America. Jews were more progressive than many other groups on immigration in the mid-20th century of course, but they were also more progressive on economic and other issues (eg being very overrepresented in economic leftist movements), which suggests it wasn’t an immigration-specific thing.
Seems like a failson wannabe Hollywood mogul centibillionaire heir wasting a huge amount of his father’s money (and some dumb money from outside investors of a similar caliber) on an industry that’s about to be completely upended by AI.
Smart move for Netflix to walk away, say what you will, these assets won’t be worth $100bn in 5 years.
As to your last point, the person doing more than anyone else to deport Somalis from Minnesota (including almost all gentile GOP politicians) is Jewish.
2rafa
1hr ago
Netflix has plenty of Jewish employees, obviously, but it’s controlled, run and was founded by Reed Hastings, who is of Boston Brahmin Mayflower arch-WASP pedigree.
2rafa
2hr ago
In part that’s because the Israel - Iran conflict is merely part of a larger web of interconnected Middle Eastern conflicts that exist above and beyond it, the most significant being about whether Saudi Arabia or Iran is perceived by the Ummah as the more Islamic government, the legitimacy of the guardianship of Mecca and Medina by the Al-Sauds, the millennium-old Sunni-Shia split, the war in Yemen (now tripartite between the Saudis, Iranians and UAE) etc.
People overfocus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but there would be plenty of drama in the region without it.
2rafa
4d ago
This is true but it doesn’t answer the specific question of purely homosexual gay tops attracted to femme men. That a bisexual top would be attracted to feminine men is comparatively unsurprising, both feminine men and most women present along the femme continuum. That a purely homosexual gay top attracted to relatively masculine or male-presenting men wouldn’t be attracted to women is likewise unsurprising, since this is a man who is physically attracted to maleness and masculinity. But a man who enjoys dominant penetrative sex with feminine-presenting men but is unattracted entirely to women is harder to explain.
2rafa
5d ago
In addition to the other answers, which make good points, I think there’s an aspect to male top psychology that enjoys the sexual dominance or humiliation of other men specifically. Many tops, after all, aren’t bisexual, something that can’t fully be explained by the ‘gay sex is easy’ meme when many entirely homosexual tops are traditionally handsome and masculine men, good conversationalists, friends with many women etc who could easily find female partners at least on occasion.
2rafa
5d ago
The weird bit is firstly that, while I can't speak for them, it's a fairly uncontroversial idea that heterosexual women can be as aroused by being an object of desire as they are by direct observation of what they desire. Apparently this is a very common theme in popular women's erotica.
Attraction to someone in particular being attracted to you and being attracted to a fantasy of yourself as a woman are two quite different things, in my opinion.
2rafa
6d ago
There is a typology of feminine gay men, but there is also a typology of hyper-masculine bisexual men. The modern agp phenomenon is just the latter run through modern technology, legal codes, academic cant and social hysteria.
The bisexual top phenomenon is real and distinct, but it’s not the same as AGP even if it overlaps with it. If you want to be a hyper masculine gay man who fucks men, this is after all a desirable gay niche today, at least as far as I understand it. Certainly there is no incentive to transition.
2rafa
6d ago
What occasioned this reflection?
I suppose that I think the TERF treatment of HSTS is unnecessarily harsh, but that such a judgment requires a clearer categorization.
2rafa
6d ago
The ‘Kathoey’ or Ladyboy designation is a more honest way of categorizing both very effeminate / camp gay men and most ‘straight’, feminine transwomen (HSTS in Blanchardian typology).
Transwomen of a kind are obviously very common. I understand there is still some social discrimination, but probably 70% of Sephora sales assistants in Thailand are ladyboys/transwomen/kathoey/your preferred term here. This is even more common than in Seattle, which I wrote about previously. In my local Sephoras (London Westfield - Shepherd’s Bush NOT Stratford, please - and Soho on Broadway I guess) there are some transwomen and a large number of very feminine, makeup wearing gay men, but something about the experience in Thailand just underscored to me how similar the two are.
It reminded me of a pioneering British local TV documentary I’d written about before, produced in the 1980s about gay life in London in the 1930s. One of the things the men make very clear is that the gay community, such as it was at the time, consisted entirely of camp, effeminate men who were to the man, in terms of sexual role, bottoms. Often they described each other, semi-ironically, with female pronouns or roles (queen etc) which are still used by many camp gay men today. The tops they had sex with were not considered part of this community. In a very real sense, they were not considered gay at all, even and perhaps most clearly by the men they were having sex with.
This wasn’t a legal distinction - a ‘top’ was still committing a crime at the time under British law in having sex with another man, and would flee the night club in the event of a police raid all the same - but it was a clear social one. The femme men themselves didn’t have sex with each other (this is, at least, implied in the documentary), only with the ‘straight’ or ‘topping’ men whom they solicited in clubs, parks, outside barracks and so on. More broadly, the sexual and communal landscape the men discuss seems to be by far the most common way in which human societies have historically understood effeminate or camp males who are primarily sexually attracted to other men. The ladyboys don’t have sex with each other for the same reason that the gay ‘queens’ of 1930 London didn’t. And then men who have sex with ladyboys - or who had sex with those men in the thirties - aren’t or weren’t gay in the same way that they were. That isn’t to say they’re straight, or not bisexual, or not anything else, but it’s clearly not the same thing. The modern Western gay identity, in which tops and bottoms (and indeed lesbians and gay men) are grouped together is essentially a consequence of the civil rights movement and AIDS crisis; it is ahistorical and unusual compared to all historical treatment of non-mainstream forms of gender and sexual identity.
Blanchard’s key contribution to the understanding of transsexualism was that he acknowledged - based on his own practice - that homosexual transsexuals or HSTS and autogynephilic transsexuals or AGP constituted two clearly defined, vastly different populations of males who identified with womanhood or female-ness. HSTS fundamentally existed along the spectrum of camp male femininity, expressed both sexually and generally. As I understand it, the gay man at Sephora who wears a skirt, a full face of makeup and speaks in a camp, exaggerated feminine voice is - even if he is not on hormones - considered a kathoey in Thailand. And this makes sense - camp femme gay men who are sexually submissive, may wear drag etc and HSTS transwomen are often divided solely by the extent to which they are committed to presenting as female (that commitment ultimately expressed in medical intervention), and nothing else in terms of dress, presentation, sexual preference, interests and so on.
The reason why Blanchard is controversial is not his categorisation of HSTS, of course, but its inverse. The non-HSTS, the top-who-transitions, the man (often in Blanchard’s own experience) who decides after 30+ years of normal heterosexual life, marriage, children, relationships with only women etc, that he is actually a woman, is not part of this long continuity of effeminate homosexual males. He is something different, something new, something comparatively unusual. He is a product, it seems to me at least, of modernity. In naming the autogynephilic transsexual man, Blanchard acknowledged a sexual identity largely divorced from sexuality (consider that many if not most AGP are attracted to women at least before heroic doses of female hormones, meaning their sexual identity is not a key part of their transition). The AGP male is closer to the archetypal modern fetishist (I won’t name examples because inevitably that will devolve into a pointless argument), except that the object of his attraction is inverted. His motivations for womanhood are completely different to those of the HSTS, but our understanding of trans identity doesn’t allow us to acknowledge this essential difference.
If an argument one occasionally hears about clearly differentiating HSTS and AGP is that it is impossible to tell the difference, I think the Thai example is a good counterargument. Perhaps someone else can correct me if I’m wrong, but I find it hard to believe that these transwomen are particularly interested in lesbian relationships with ciswomen. They are, of course, interested in relationships with men, with males, because they are gay males, but that is about it. They have their own bathrooms (at least in some Thai malls and bars I saw clear male, female and other (with the gender icons overlapping) bathrooms, which seemed - above all else - reasonable.
2rafa
6d ago
Some are very good, but you have to sort the good from the bad. In a way it’s like the internet. Because the contemporary art world has no real relationship to meritocracy (since almost everyone involved, at every level from artist to gallerist to dealer to buyer to journalist to viewer, is rich because almost nobody is making any money) bad pieces or showings are marketed the same as good ones. Price has no relationship with quality. So, like YouTube, your own research is necessary, and over time you find what you like, which gallerists have similar tastes, etc. One good thing if you ever move to London is that so few people really care that the motivated individual can essentially gallery-hop for free champagne every Thursday if he or she so chooses. Occasionally you even see something very good.
2rafa
6d ago
Sam Kriss is a good writer (a great one, even), but a bad thinker. Once you’ve read enough of what he writes, you can not only predict the broad outline of a Kriss Essay, you can also write your own in your head by stringing together obscure references, the occasional semi-ironic blasé fabrication, and a contemptuous leftist sneer for both the masses in general and anyone who works a regular job specifically.
2rafa
6d ago
Somewhat funny watching very online people / nerds discover the state of a lot of contemporary multimedia (we could use the word multimodal) art over the last 20 years. Of course the references in a default show at a Gagosian or whatever will be more ‘normie’, but the spirit - a jumbled, largely incoherent reflection on the itself incoherent shared reference library of modernity - is the same.
2rafa
6d ago
My REAL suspicion is that AI will get good enough at predicting case outcomes that it will discourage active litigation/encourage quick settlements, as you can go to Claude, Grok, and Gemini and feed it all the facts and evidence and it can spit out "75% chance of favorable verdict, likely awards range from $150,000 to $300,000, and it will probably take 19-24 months to reach trial."
As I understand it a lot of commercial / divorce / etc outcomes are already predictable and it doesn’t make people less litigious.
2rafa
6d ago
A functioning Congress is only possible if the senate filibuster is overturned. 51 votes must be able to pass any constitutional law.
Indian women don’t really out marry at particularly high rates, the culture is more sexually conservative in any case. The main place one even sees particularly visibly promiscuous Indian women is probably the West where there is some second/third onward generation assimilation. India also has an extremely high gender imbalance, especially in the north, and a very strong continued tradition of true arranged marriage that has survived longer and stronger than almost anywhere else in the world.
Working class Thai, Filipino, Viet, even some Chinese and Japanese women married to blue collar or lower white collar white men are not uncommon in Western/Northern Europe and North America. But if I think about the not insignificant number of couples I know with an Indian woman and a white man, every single one is some kind of second gen PMC Indian woman and PMC white guy of the JD and Usha or “we met in medical residency” type. I think it’s hard to say that Indian women are undesirable when - outside of this small slice of the diaspora - they don’t appear to seek intermarriage the way many other Asian women do.
Ethnic SEAsians are pretty distinct from Chinese/northeast Asians ime; yes, there are plenty of swarthy Chinese but broadly speaking ethnic Indonesians or Malays and ethnic Han or most other Chinese, assuming the same dress and no other identifying markers, seem pretty easily distinguished, at least that’s my impression.
2rafa
7d ago
In the end tourism is a choice. Bhutan still has a $100-200 per person per night tourist tax to discourage budget tourism and it works for them.
When people in places like Barcelona, Venice, Tokyo etc complain about tourism without stuff like this they are making an active choice to keep the money flowing at the expense of crowdedness etc.
2rafa
7d ago
Religion is very relevant, especially in Malaysia, but the Chinese are still endogamous in Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines despite substantial non-Muslim, non-Chinese populations in each of them.
2rafa
7d ago
As I understand it Thailand forcibly assimilated the Chinese so now everyone pretends not to notice that all the rich are Chinese (although some assimilation did occur, a lot of intermarriage etc, certainly much moreso than with affluent overseas Chinese anywhere else in SEA).
They are only just starting to promote tourism again with the recent visa free travel deals. Luxury hotels that cater to tourists rather than business travellers (like the Amans) are still pretty empty in the mainland in my very recent experience. The English proficiency of hotel staff even at top international chains also varies much more than elsewhere in East Asia, yes including Japan (this may be true even if the average Chinese person speaks more English than the average Japanese, I couldn’t comment); there is always someone relatively fluent, but many staff aren’t. I don’t expect this but it obviously makes it harder for international tourists, whereas you can navigate as an American with no real experience in Asia in Tokyo with almost no problems. In Beijing and Shanghai having local coworkers around felt if not necessary then very useful.
China is also in that place where tourists looking for cheap beach vacations will naturally go to Thailand / Vietnam / etc over China. As a big, increasingly expensive and seasonal (in the sense that a lot of key cultural sites are in places that get [very] cold in the winter and [very] hot in the summer) destination, places like Beijing seem more like Moscow or St Petersburg before the war in terms of rich world tourism, in that they are going to attract primarily (upper) middle class, relatively well travelled people who want a glimpse into another culture rather than to go for a bucket list item, for food, because it’s cheap or for status (all the above have driven the recent Japanese tourism boom for example), which is a small proportion of the total.
Many critics of Islam consider things like the Hajj (which most scholars believe predates Islam) and ritual circling of the meteorite stone embedded in the Kaaba to be pagan, sure. And of course many both Jewish and Muslim critics of Christianity consider aspects of the Trinity to be polytheistic / shirk / etc in character.
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