2rafa
5d ago
The person I’m replying to thinks that mythos is perhaps the greatest fraud and/or mistake of the 20th century.
Surely it’s just because the mega jails are for male inmates only, they likely don’t have excess capacity in the women’s prisons.
2rafa
5d ago
The Anglo-American presence in and involvement with the house of Saud predates Israel.
Why should Americans care about the cycle of violence in the Middle East? Their lives are of no relevance to those who reject banal Christian platitudes about the brotherhood of man or the universal value of human life, which I know you don’t share. Dispense with the fake tears for the Arabs; if they were being killed by someone other than the Jews you wouldn’t care at all for their suffering, even performatively.
2rafa
8d ago
Also the employment market for tech people is probably worse today than at any time since immediately after the financial crisis, so companies have more leeway to take actions employees disapprove of.
2rafa
8d ago
I would guess upwards of 95% of people who play cricket in America on a regular or semi-regular basis are of South Asian descent. In very big cities there will be a few expats from the UK / Australia / NZ / South Africa, and maybe some expats and immigrants from the former colonies in the Caribbean, but that’s it.
2rafa
8d ago
I was thinking that if Trump was really smart, he would have forced them to actually commit to hiring, say, 30% of their junior lawyer intake from a college Federalist Society approved list.
2rafa
8d ago
Is Israel (ie the Jewish seizure of Judea) settler colonialism? I would argue it is (And That’s A Good Thing), you seem to be suggesting otherwise.
2rafa
8d ago
Beer isn’t the best tasting drink in the world but I don’t remember it tasting bad as a teenager.
2rafa
8d ago
Crazy that a firm with 4000 employees allowed a junior to send out a firm-wide email, everywhere I’ve worked heavily restricts that kind of thing to very senior management and the internal comms team.
2rafa
8d ago
I feel like this is plainly inconsistent with the canon. We don't see the conjuration of everyday household items or food, and magical items such as wands and infinite-capcity containers are obviously scarce and valuable. And of course something like transmuting lead into gold is explicitly mentioned to be difficult if not impossible.
You don’t need to conjure food or water when you can just Apparate to a fresh mountain stream or tree laden with fruit whenever you want (transatlantic teleporting is made out to be difficult, but the length of the UK between, say, Scotland and London is easy and common enough). At the world quidditch championship, the Weasleys also conjure up an entire camp the size of a small home from almost nothing, suggesting that shelter is also post-scarcity in every real sense.
Items imbued with certain magical essences that can seemingly only be created by human craftsmen are not abundant, sure. But other than wands, these are essentially luxury goods (an adult wizard has no need for a broom, and the other things that money is needed to buy are things like rare artifacts, magical candy and toys - presumably handmade - and so on). The financial system exists for the sake of itself. The magical night bus doesn’t need a driver, since magical objects can act and think for themselves many times in the series. It has one because it should have one, or something.
The same is true for white collar employment. Magical automation clearly exists (see the hate mail envelopes, the automation of memos in the ministry, automated magical maps, automated dictation tools / pens, interactive magical videos in picture frames and - most significantly - magical portraits, which are clearly generative AI trained on an artist’s impression of the subject, and which would appear to be capable of complex thought and therefore white collar labor), its use is governed by something other than possibility or efficiency.
Consider the aurors who trace misuse of magic. Are they actually necessary? The ministry has the ability to track, seemingly, every use of magic in all of England. If it doesn’t do so it is purely by choice. This is what I mean by propriety, the magical society is governed by its own code that involves this manual labor and a simulated quasi-market or capitalist economy in some aspects, with strict rules (like that you can’t conjure money) enforced arbitrarily.
2rafa
8d ago
My Iranian coworker (who travels back once or twice a year) says he does get the impression that over the last two years, the ideological basis for the current regime seems to be running on fumes, even beyond the kind of affluent North Tehran circles that were always ambivalent about the Islamic revolution. One of those things where it feels like it could all crumble tomorrow and most people would just shrug. Best to let it happen on its own, I think.
2rafa
8d ago
Yes, Iran is closer to the Armenians, Azerbaijan’s primary foes. This is responsible for some strange bedfellows. Like the Azeri-Israeli alliance.
That’s a fun fan theory! Another one I like for science fiction settings that don’t have advanced AI / automation is that there’s some kind of in-universe lower bound on transistor size such that you have hyper-optimization of like late-1980s chips over centuries. Would be interesting to see a sci fi setting pursue that earnestly.
Another redemption of hollow world building I like is the theory that Harry Potter is obviously post-scarcity (they can conjure and replicate objects, magic the dishes into doing themselves, teleport from anywhere to anywhere etc) but governed by such a deeply ingrained network of rules of propriety and good behavior that the class hierarchy, private property, deference, human labor, a form of simulated capitalism (likely borrowed from muggles in a bizarre and twisted form of cultural exchange, along with the school express, the magic bus) etc are followed unquestioningly. This also explains why so many people would find muggle-born wizards deeply vulgar and an affront to their society, and therefore enhances the general story. (To wizard society, the idea that a “poor” family like the Weasleys could just conjure themselves a giant mansion with 500 rooms with magic would be like suggesting someone should just shit on the street whenever they need to go).
2rafa
8d ago
A few big Indian tech tycoons / execs are trying to promote cricket in the US.
2rafa
9d ago
The Commonwealth includes India and Pakistan, so no. The British monarch is head of state of approximately 150 million of the 2.4 billion citizens of the commonwealth.
2rafa
9d ago
Sure, but they’ve been offering that kind of thing for decades and it hasn’t happened and voters have internalized that.,
2rafa
9d ago
Gen Z is in a much better position economically than millennials were at the height of Occupy and then the run up to Sanders’ campaign in 2015. Unemployment is extremely low and outside of tech (which only a small minority will pursue careers in) jobs are relatively plentiful for now. It makes sense that economic populism is an unattractive message. “Make the rich pay” always comes back into style when the going gets tough, as does expanding the state to provide more money, more welfare, more services.
A pivot for the GOP into full social conservatism and progressive economic policy is theoretically possible, but not under Trump or his likely successors, who on economic policy still preach a small state, lower taxes, fewer regulations, more liberal financial markets and deregulation etc.
2rafa
9d ago
The most significant thing that would change is that the ~200,000 Americans in the UK could vote in UK elections.
2rafa
9d ago
Probably option 2 in the next financial crisis. Some major donors will leave, others won’t. Many ultra-rich Dem donors are fine with higher taxes on the rich. The Disney heirs, Laurene Jobs, plenty of others besides.
2rafa
9d ago
The Democrats had nothing to offer any voter who was unhappy with the system as it was. The entire campaign was based around continuity, as it has been since 2012 (at least). Trump promised change, to flip the system. Young people will always vote to shuffle the deck because they have less to lose and more to gain.
The risk is that the left is more than capable of eventually offering rather compelling deck shuffling of its own.
2rafa
9d ago
That doesn’t matter if young white men are a small minority of the population. Black women are the strongest Dem demographic, they’re clearly not enough to win an election. As the first post suggests, young non hispanic white men are no longer even a majority of young men if you look at gen alpha.
No, all of this is rhetorical tap-dancing around the fact that he cries fake tears for Arabs while dreaming of a white Israel that guards against his enemies more zealously than Israel does. Almost all dissident right criticism of Israeli conduct in Gaza is envy, it's that it's "unfair". It's not principled criticism of settler colonialism (see their views on Rhodesia and South Africa).
This is a monumentally dumb argument. It's the literal inverse to "white nationalists can't complain about immigration because they immigrated to non-white territories en masse and took many of them over". If someone says mass immigration of Europeans to Rhodesia was good, but mass immigration of Somalis to Sweden is bad, should they be similarly "held to account"? 'Nooo, you can't possibly justify settlers fighting a war against barbarians who want to rape and kill them unless you ALSO justify them being expropriated and slaughtered in the land where they previously lived for a thousand years, which also led many of the survivors to flee to that very place'. Don't think so.
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