2rafa
1hr ago
In the end this had to happen. While illegal immigration and family / chain migration from places like Central America, Somalia and Haiti were and are far more critical (and still aren’t being stopped to the necessary degree) than a hundred thousand Indian programmers a year moving to America, the latter was still an issue.
The H-1B system was designed in 1990 when remote collaboration was nonexistent or in its infancy. Today there is no need to bring highly skilled foreigners to America permanently to collaborate. You can work together on Zoom, over email and instant message, can meet in person for social reasons a couple of times a year. Relocating a family from to America permanently, making all their descendants in perpetuity American citizens, that should be done for reasons more substantial than to add another database guy to the Tata team in Orlando.
I’ve long thought Trump should just make a better ‘America is closed’ speech. We had the era of mass immigration, we settled the country, now it’s ended, it’s not coming back.
Nevertheless, it is possible for one people to actually oppress another. Palestinians don't get to jury-vote their coethnics out of crimes in Israeli courts, there is/was no Palestinian president of Israel... they're actually being oppressed.
Sure, but why? Because they’ve engaged in a (so far) futile decades-long campaign to reverse the Jewish settlement of the levant that eventually angered the settlers enough that they imposed a series of escalating forms of oppression on them. Losing East Jerusalem, much of the West Bank, various other territories was the direct consequence of losing wars (just as it was for the Native Americans) many times in a row. The walls and checkpoints that prevent many Palestinians from living and working in Israel were likewise erected solely in response to terror attacks on Israeli civilians committed by these people and in their name. At every juncture, the noose tightened slowly because the Palestinians did not admit defeat and surrender, culturally and militarily, which is the route to survival for any conquered people.
Native Americans have reservations and affirmative action, sure, but many live on territory far removed from their ancestral homeland due to the westward forced migrations of the 19th century, and in total they have only a tiny percentage of their historical holdings (obviously), far less proportionally than the Palestinians have. Much of the Indian welfare and casino apparatus also only came into being a century or more after the great majority of the country was ethnically cleansed of most or all of its native population, so Israel has time yet.
Many on this forum are too accustomed to dismissing racism and oppression. Most of the time, the concept is used inappropriately. Blacks in America receive all kinds of special privileges, the US media and govt tries to sweep black anti-white terror attacks under the rug.
There has been no effective organized black nationalist movement in American history, and the last ineffective one fizzled out in the 1970s. Crime stats are one thing (almost no black-on-white crime is ‘terrorism’, that ascribes a political and ideological aspiration to the perpetrators that, as mentioned, they just don’t have), 300 armed and trained black men aren’t invading the country club to slaughter the men and rape the women as part of a race war against whites designed to drive them back to Europe, that isn’t something that happens in America.
There is a world in which the Palestinians accepted the reasonable 1967 borders (after already losing to Israel twice), kept a substantial proportion of their land, fortified their borders with the help of their Arab neighbors (such that no settlers would be coming in) and set up a relatively peaceful coexistence with Israel. As they did before and after, they chose otherwise. Gaza would not have been destroyed if Hamas hadn’t gambled on Hezbollah and West Bank Palestinians successfully joining a huge uprising on October 7th.
The Arabs are actually oppressed, certainly. But they are oppressed because they have continued to make very bad decisions in service of their pride over their comfort, liberty and life for so many years and show no sign of stopping. They had options and still do, if worse ones.
2rafa
16hr ago
Let's not forget these guys outwitted Mossad and the whole Israeli-American intelligence complex with their surprise attack on October 7th.
Secular Israeli society is also undergoing severe genetic decline as a consequence of Ashkenazi - Mizrachi intermarriage, and the more endogamous Charedim don’t serve in the IDF or Mossad, so you will find no disagreement from me there.
Few would justify Palestinian suicide bombings like this - 'it was for the Israeli's own good that the Palestinians blew up that bus full of civilians, they crossed an invisible Palestinian security line or something.' Suicide bombings are acts of hatred.
It was extremely common in the mid 90s in mainstream Western leftist (not even radically, mainstream-ish publications like the NYRB, the Guardian’s opinion section, the Center-left French and Italian press) to justify the first intifada’s terror attacks against civilians including teenagers and children on similar grounds, that these were dispossessed people just trying to defend their land and doing what they could in protest. It’s nothing new, it’s common even.
it's a case where some well-organized, well-connected home-invaders beat the crap out of the home-owner, lock him up in the basement and while lambasting his poverty and squalid conditions, use them as proof of why they should be in charge.
If some Native American terror movement rises out of the alcoholic emptiness of the reservations to start committing terror attacks against white American civilians, including children then I fully expect that the reaction on this sub will be the same as the Israeli one.
2rafa
22hr ago
The reason boys collect the aid might be because the IDF frequently shoots civilians.
An unarmed man is no more bullet resistant than an unarmed woman, so this is a strange argument. If the Gazans had surrendered, the only IDF casualties would be due to unexploded ordnance and friendly fire. Clearly given ongoing military casualties and regular firefights this is not the case, therefore the Gazans have not yet surrendered. If you look at footage of food distribution lines in violent conflict zones anywhere else in the world (esp in places like East Africa) there are almost always substantial numbers of women. The highly disproportionate number of fighting age male casualties in the ‘peaceful’ aid lines is very telling in this regard.
I don’t trust the UN when they say being against mass immigration to Europe is Dacian, so why should I trust them when they say that everyone shot outside these aid centers is an innocent lamb, especially when there have been countless firefights outside them since the invasion of Gaza began in 2023.
2rafa
23hr ago
Those are the tools used against an unruly population that has not yet reached the final straw of the other side. This war has been going on for 75 years. Rubber bullets, razor wire, tear gas, these have all featured extensively, they still are used in the West Bank. But at some point, empathy declines and then fades. The views of Israelis have hardened, the views of Palestinians are unchanged. The move from rubber bullets to real ones is an inevitable consequence of that dynamic over decades.
I don’t think it’s irreversible, by the way. Foreign powers could force change, Israel could collapse (in which case the dynamic would only be inverted, with far more brutality and bloodshed for that matter), or the Palestinians could surrender, truly this time. I am a poor gambler, so I will leave the odds of each of those to others.
2rafa
1d ago
I really don’t think Pete would do much better with black Dems if he was straight. Black Dems tend to like (like most people) charming, handsome men and Pete is neither. Obama and Clinton had more in common than either does with Pete.
They’re boys who try to storm the food distribution sites. Killing those who try to steal food distributed in times of war and famine has happened for thousands of years, it’s critical to preventing both fatal crowd crushes (which have killed dozens or hundreds regularly at aid distribution sites across Africa and the Middle East for many decades) and, even more importantly, to preventing young men and teenage boys from taking all the food, which they’re very liable to do and which leaves nothing for the elderly, women and young children.
As the Dutch example says,
Most are boys—teenagers and young adults.
No random sample of the population, especially when in global times of famine and in refugee camp situations women tend to be disproportionately responsible for food collection.
You have a hostile, deeply dysgenic population that has repeatedly decided to commit suicide-by-IDF for 70 years, where young boys are raised from toddlerhood to believe that being martyred by an Israeli bullet is the highest calling and achievement in life. They have no fear, it’s almost impressive. This is an ethnoreligious (ethno because it doesn’t really encompass all practicing Muslims) ideology devoted to the afterlife absolutely, far moreso than any other widely practiced Abrahamic denomination. Even millenarian Christian movements often have a love for life.
If it sounds very early 2000s hitchens atheist boomerish to describe the worldview of a lot of deeply committed Palestinian Sunni ethnonationalists as a “death cult” then so be it, but there is truth to it. Most children early on develop the ability to respond to positive or negative stimulus. Animals like horses and dogs are trained with gentle(ish) physical feedback, with punishment and reward. If you’re beaten and beaten for 75 years you might just surrender - not even to a terrible, North Korean or Cuban or Yemeni QOL but to a quality of life that is still much better than the regional average for your tribal cousins (which was the life most Palestinians had before the borders were closed or tightened after the last intifada; Israel had plenty of need for decently paid blue collar labor). Gazans don’t. They just keep fighting.
In a way, the war on Gaza is kind of like the battle against psycho drug addict violent homeless people like Decarlos Brown. Is rehabilitation possible? Is “justice reform” possible? When someone has 15+ convictions and just keeps on crusading against advanced civilization, well, at some point you have to accept that they have no intention of living peacefully. Unlike countless peoples, including the Jews for millennia for that matter, the Gazans are not content to live as vassals or dhimmis. Perhaps there is honor in that, but there are consequences to it too. So be it.
2rafa
1d ago
While it is evidence of a cultural shift, it’s also much more closely related to Trump’s personal viewership of late night TV and his early-boomerish fondness for network television in general.
A millennial conservative president, even one as powerful as Trump and to the right of him, probably wouldn’t care about this Kimmel comment. His audience all agree with him anyway, it isn’t like affecting the editorial position of CBS News in 1982 when 30 million or whatever it was Americans of all political views tuned in every evening.
For Disney, as this kind of late night general show fades in relevance anyway, this firing was more than worth it, they likely barely made money on Kimmel anyway if they did at all.
How do you know it was about the money? Because if the show was profitable, they would have forced him to apologise sincerely on air and at least tried to keep it going.
2rafa
2d ago
Fascism in Italy emerged directly out of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism so can be seen more wholly (even as it later got capitalist/bourgeois support) as descended from the radical left.
Fascism in Germany emerged alongside the immediately-postwar right-wing anti-communist freikorps militias in the chaotic revolutionary atmosphere of Germany in 1918-1922, ideologically out of lower-middle class nationalist groups who weren't particularly leftist economically or socially and so can't really be described as socialist. The word 'socialist' was added to the German Workers' Party name to appeal to urban proletarians who might otherwise be drawn to the far left. After the mid-1920s the NSDAP was never particularly socialist, taxes rose during the war as they did everywhere, but were kept at moderate levels through the 30s, friendly corporations weren't seized, capital markets remained broadly operational, including the major stock exchanges. There were currency and import/export controls to some extent, but those had been implemented everywhere after 1919 and certainly after 1929.
Of course, you might argue that there were and are plenty of committed Chinese and Vietnamese Marxists who eventually embraced market capitalism and private wealth, but the circumstances are slightly different. In those cases and in the official Dengist state literature Marx and Engels' own argument about the teleology of capitalism and that it's a necessary stage of progress that societies have to go through is regularly cited and rephrased. Nazi Germany had no such explanation or argument really.
2rafa
3d ago
He seems to have been a political schizo, liar and clout chaser since the 80s and from Utah. It isn’t surprising he was there and it is even less surprising that when the assassination happened he made the split second decision to commit knowing that his face might be everywhere in the country and world in short order.
The only reason this is getting traction online is because some Twitter users (notably Candace Owens) alleging that Kirk was actually assassinated by Israel decided he was Jewish because of his name (as @DoctorMonarch says, this is far from clear, the name is German and there are plenty of non-Jewish Zinns on Wikipedia) and so must be involved.
2rafa
4d ago
“Reservation Dogs” is a Hulu comedy about modern native life that was largely written and performed by native americans. It’s largely an “early 2020s woke” show politically with some exceptions, but many on the native subreddit seem to have found a lot of the background details to be very accurate and it doesn’t shy away from depicting the squalor, alcoholism, reliance on welfare, single motherhood etc that a lot of people mention.
I’m sure people can still tell, but Former People by Douglas Smith makes the case that by the slow opening up of Soviet society in the 1970s the actual, titled aristocracy had been so totally destroyed as an identity by so many successive periods of purges, internal transfers, re-education, the gulag, the war and intermarriage that it didn’t really exist any more outside of maybe some early emigrant families who left in 1917-1921 that keep or kept a vague recollection of it as a cultural thing. Kulaks and gentry (and to some extent minor urban and provincial bourgeoisie) were obviously much greater in number and their descendants are still relatively powerful and disproportionately overrepresented in the Russian and Chinese elite. And Smith does end with an anecdote about the descendant of one princely family whom he meets in early 2010s Moscow making a fortune in the oil business or something like that.
Hereditarily upper middle, although not truly in the fifth or whatever generation continental European way (a little less common in the Anglosphere, where the haute bourgeoisie has a more fluid cultural and economic relationship with the more mobile upper middle class).
My father grew up small town upper-middle class and my mother something slightly above (or maybe just more urban than) that, although both families had a lot of rises and falls. On my father’s side a big industrial fortune was lost in the Great Depression; his own grandfather was a husk the rest of his life, a New Jersey accountant and business manager for other people when he had been groomed to be a Manhattan titan of industry, always struggling with money and in debt. There are no famous rabbis or scholars in my lineage, so on the Ashkenazi bloodline hierarchy we’re pretty mediocre, a mix of Latvian, Ukrainian and German-Swiss Jewry maybe.
My parents went from NYC upper middle class to wealthy when I was in high school, which was interesting, and I think I’ve written about that before. In England all professional Americans without specific signifiers (very strong Southern yee-haw accent, for example) are grouped into the same social class status, which is about as good as it gets as a foreigner other than the special privilege afforded to Kiwis and Aussies. Your accent, politics and culture will get made fun of, but you are considered competent, professional, relatively intelligent and are a viable dinner guest or party invite most of the time.
2rafa
6d ago
Opera house, high school sports facility or small events room at a local church?
Right, and @FiveHourMarathon says there’s no precedent. There are examples of billionaires handing over their fortune to be managed by others, although the small number of billionaires and fact that these kinds of private financial affairs would usually never be reported on unless there was either a famous legal case or high profile scandal / crime surrounding the arrangement affects visibility.
But if you look more generally, Epstein had been around super rich people to some extent for more than ten years when he met Wexner in the 80s. He had met a large number. All he needed was one. And he had a very good record of charming rich people. He charmed Ace Greenberg as a teacher. He charmed Bear Stearns’ rich clients. He was very good at charming even wealthy women, obviously.
Lauren Sanchez married one man who became a billionaire, then seduced (as a middle-aged woman!) one of the richest men in the world, convinced him to leave his wife in an extremely costly divorce, had herself made the figurehead of his yacht, and got a nine figure wedding out of it all. In total she cost Bezos dozens of times what Epstein made from Wexner.
99.9th percentile charisma people exist, you’ve probably met one or two. Most are harmless and most of the harmful ones are relatively powerless, but coupled with intelligence a few standard deviations above the norm and extreme personal ambition (as noted by Greenberg and others) and what Epstein is alleged to have done with Wexner really isn’t so impossible.
2rafa
6d ago
There is plenty of evidence regarding Wexner, but because he is still alive, un-charged and very, very rich, and because much of it is hearsay, it is rarely laid out explicitly. In any case, it is hardly unsurprising for even extremely sophisticated, highly intelligent investors to be duped, seduced (platonically) by charismatic con men and adventurers for fortune, and Epstein was both. Here’s a great story about one of the most sophisticated, intelligent fund managers of the last twenty years getting conned by an already-notorious conman just because he was charismatic. And the victim in the above story, unlike Wexner, was actually in finance. Madoff had plenty of intelligent victims. Wexner didn’t even ‘lose’ his or his clients’ money unlike the above, he just made less than he might otherwise have. There are countless private bankers, macro hedge fund managers and late stage VCs who likewise spent the last 15 years (and the 1990s before them) getting fat off the bull run with minimal effort other than client relationship management.
This is before you go into the other aspects of the case, like Wexner’s previously confirmed bachelorhood and various 80s and 90s NYC rumors that are hard for any legitimate journalist to discuss without getting sued. (Nick Denton, who is obviously gay and was in the NYC scene through the 90s, hinted toward it many years ago).
I personally think that Epstein's finances were above board and he simply wasn't as rich as he claimed to be (his lifestyle was consistent with the amount of money he could have made scummily but legally by charging Wexner 2-and-20 without providing alpha). But if I was the Feds I would have been going over his finances with a fine-tooth comb.
Indeed, and that also explains why the banks (in particular JPM) were so keen to maintain his business, because he did nothing with the money except hand it to them to ride the booming 90s equity market, so everybody got their cut. The private wealth division at JPM was making huge fees from Wexner (the kind of billionaire who would usually have a more shrewd family office) for pretty much nothing.
In Maxwell’s recent testimony they asked her about the house (legally transferred for almost nothing) and at last there was an answer there, too, namely that it was in lieu of “fees”. Epstein seduced Wexner, “invested” his money (unlike the Madoffs of the world for the kind of boring, safe returns best suited to that task) and then charged hedge fund fees. Why didn’t Wexner measure his returns against the market? Hard to say, maybe he was in too deep, didn’t care, assumed Jeffrey was a genius, liked the attention and friendship, was a little in love, or was just under the thumb of an overbearing and domineering mother (which is the historical record) and didn’t really think of it much.
But either way, a combination of a couple hundred million in fees from Wexner, reinvesting his own money, some shrewd early-90s real estate purchases in Manhattan (a few apartment buildings, as I recall) and the $170m from Leon Black (Epstein’s only other “client” even though he never managed his money and the one case where I suspect blackmail is possibly central) and his fortune is easily explained even with some blunders along the way.
@DaseindustriesLtd and @Bingbong are both partially right but a big reason is actually just that after the dotcom bust in 2001 the dollar had a decade of extremely, uniquely, ahistorically poor performance against pretty much every other currency (both EM and developed market) that distorted nominal dollar-denominated GDP figures.
For example, the pound went from being $1.45 in 2000 to $2.01 in 2007. The British economy wasn’t hugely stronger and this was a low point for Silicon Valley stocks, the cause was a bunch of investment and trade flow stuff, reallocation out of the US toward emerging markets and big commodity producers, the Australian and Canadian dollars did very well, US equity markets had a lost decade. The Euro also did well. That kind of thing. The GFC was the beginning of the end of this process but it didn’t really finish until after the oil boom finally ended in 2014.
After 2014, trillions of dollars in speculative capital flowed into American capital markets from the entire world because of the tech sector. That wasn’t unprecedented - the same thing happened in the 1880s and 1890s with European money headed for railroads and some other American industrials. But the reverse flows boosted the dollar artificially, exaggerating although not inventing comparatively more advanced American prosperity. Those capital inflows boosted every aspect of the American economy in comparative terms, making for a tighter labor market and therefore higher wage growth, more consumer spending etc in a virtuous cycle.
But European weakness doesn’t date back to 2014 or even 2009. If anything, there’s probably some kind of macro story around the unfathomable economic costs of German reunification and early Eurozone labor market distortion in the late 90s and early 2000s that was obscured by that asset reallocation discussed above but I don’t know enough to tell it.
2rafa
8d ago
I don’t think it would certainly result in US military action against China. If they were willing to let the US save face and said it was an overzealous action by a rogue general and made trade concessions they might even get away with it.
2rafa
8d ago
Zelensky has traveled to the United States multiple times, if the Russians blew up his limo would that be acceptable? What about the reverse, if Ukrainian nationalist psychos had shot down Putin's plane over Alaska?
Both parties are at war; killing the opposing leader is militarily acceptable, they are commander in chief after all. Doing so on someone else’s territory is impolite but whether you can get away with it depends on that country’s own position and power.
As others noted, Putin has regularly and publicly assassinated defectors in Western Europe for 20 years, this was tacitly accepted by everyone involved; serious sanction only happened after Crimea in 2014.
2rafa
10d ago
In postwar South Africa and Rhodesia, it was often noted by visitors that the (white) working class lived better lives than even the upper-middle class in Europe and North America. Even a mailman had a pool, a gardener/pool boy, a nanny, a maid. You would walk down a jacaranda-lined street in Salisbury, immaculately swept, the kind of place that would house doctors and bankers anywhere else, and the average resident would be like a high school teacher or the guy calling out departures at the railroad station.
Of course the foundation of that material affluence was cheap black labor. And it was that very labor that prevented - when the time came - white South Africans from migrating to the Western Cape (where they might have been a permanent supermajority). After all, in that scenario, they’d live just like other Europeans in European-majority countries, and to have a maid and a pool boy and a nanny in Denmark you need to be (well into, the threshold won’t cut it) the 99th percentile of income.
The Thais, of course, don’t have that specific racial hierarchy (although the Chinese, like everywhere in SEA, are still a market dominant minority), and so labor costs are mediated by actual supply and demand without artificial restriction. The best way to think of the Thai economy is as a highly unequal middle income country in which the top 5% are relatively affluent and everyone else is relatively poor. In a way, that makes it like Brazil but with a lower crime rate (for the usual reasons). Things are cheap in Thailand because labor costs are low. The rest of the story has been discussed elsewhere below.
2rafa
22d ago
The union has a veto over the style guide that no doubt mandates specific pronouns (or at least a big say in it), and I highly doubt the style guide has carve-outs for sufficiently evil criminals.
2rafa
23d ago
All demographic groups (including whites, including Anglo-Saxon whites) have much lower homicide rates in England than they do in America, which is usually the point the gun control advocates were making, no?
The reality is that India is fundamentally broken, in thrall to a legitimate but dysfunctional democracy that serves the interests of the agricultural peasant class, lower and backward castes, tribal people and resentful minorities over the middle and upper classes, who are a small minority.
I don’t believe truly universal suffrage is viable in a country where almost 50% of the population still work in agriculture. Until 1900 fewer than 20% of the total American population voted in presidential elections, in part because even many who could vote didn’t. In India it’s around 45-50% iirc, similar to Western countries. (Around 650-700 million votes cast in the last election).
The problem with India is that emigration acts as a pressure valve on the domestic middle and upper classes. They leave instead of overthrowing the system. To save India, they must overthrow democracy, re-assert the whip hand over the peasants, abolish the perverse system of reservation, abolish price floors in agriculture, consolidate small holding farms (brutalizing any peasant farmer resistance, which they have caved to every time so far) and embark on the kind of infrastructure development projects China did two generations ago.
But that seems like a lot of work when you can just go to America and be a doctor or engineer and have a nice comfortable life. India is probably the biggest example of the failure of democracy in human history.
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