2rafa
1hr ago
My guess is that he just fell in love with her. If he wanted to fuck 18 year olds he could have divorced his wife 20 years ago (or come to an arrangement, like Eric Schmidt, or done that classic rockstar / Larry Ellison / Henry VIII thing and just had a succession of younger wives). It seems more likely that he was relatively happy or at least comfortable in his marriage and was then seduced by Sanchez, who is no doubt a skilled and immensely ambitious operator, and then divorced his wife (likely at Sanchez’ request, and certainly as a consequence of her will given she gave her own texts to her brother who then sold them on to a tabloid) so he could marry her. There was no buffet of 20 year olds to pick from, it wasn’t like that, and the billionaires who do live that lifestyle are essentially plugged into the party circuit, big time nightclub promoters, model / escort agents and so on on the Cannes/Miami/LA/Mykonos circuit with which Bezos was not really familiar pre-Sanchez given he was a nerd who mainly attended sober economics conferences.
2rafa
1d ago
The Israelis are delusional and wrong about regime change. It’s strange that critics of Israel seem to be so heavily invested in Mossad’s infallibility (even ‘October 7th was allowed to happen’ etc). The only way regime change happens in Iran is if the Tehran middle class get fed up enough to make it happen. That will be independent from Israel.
2rafa
1d ago
Nope, Trump did what neocons failed to accomplish during any previous GOP administration over the last 40 years, namely direct, massive US air strikes on the Iranian nuclear program, and he did it over the wishes of isolationists like Carlson and to the approval of the great majority of his base. Framing this as a win for principled anti-intervention rightists is ridiculous.
And Trump didn't keep his intervention limited because everybody was so supportive of it.
Ground invasion of Iran is impossible and externally-forced regime change is impossible without ground invasion. Trump picked the most maximalist neocon option realistically possible, just like when he had Soleimani assassinated over the suggestions of the DoD and most of his own senior advisors.
I had a feeling this was going to end up here when I first saw it. Really, this is just ‘gender black pill’ stuff from a vaguely femcel-adjacent perspective, but not structurally different to the male equivalents (Tony Tulathimutte etc). I think it would be a mistake to read into it too deeply. You can always find good reasons not to trust people. It’s no real surprise that someone who resents men in this way would embrace the transactional nature of ‘sex work’; this may be an advertising strategy, but it is probably not insincere.
2rafa
5d ago
Ok, well let's just take a look at the undefeated Uno Reverso.
Indeed. Suppose Ignatiev were to reply to your comment (and general worldview) with:
“My dear SS, I agree completely. I think all practicing Jews should renounce their religious practice (including, as I have already argued, kosher dining and food preparation), and all ethnic Jews should abandon their cultural particularity. Jews should convert to mainstream Protestant Christianity, the predominant gentile religion in the United States, or practice no faith. They should marry gentiles (of course most already do, but let’s say all of them). All Jewish religious institutions (synagogues, museums of tolerance, etc) should be closed, all religious clothing banned. Those who refuse these terms ought to go to Israel, but those who accept them can remain in America with no further restrictions placed on their participation in society, culture, politics or the economy. Furthermore, any racial agitation by white nationalists towards those former Jews who fully, sincerely renounce and abandon their Jewishness will be strictly prohibited.”
Would you accept his offer?
Because that is the difference between Ignatiev’s position and those of the dissident rightists who borrow his words in this case. He (like all communists) allowed for conversion; even the last emperor of china was converted, after all. You do not.
2rafa
5d ago
Can you explain to me how that's relevant at all to what I said?
(Since you tagged me) It literally serves as an example of him opposing Jewish particularism, which is ultimately what you accuse him of.
2rafa
5d ago
This is just a re-run of the “stunning” surprise justice-reform prosecutor / mayoral wins in some big cities during Trump I. The core of progressive ideology is only temporarily vulnerable to reality-based criticism (for example ‘crime just doubled, the streets are now full of psychotic homeless vagrants, the subway is unsafe, these guys want to defund the police’).
As soon as the issue is even partially resolved, the progressive voter returns to his comforter position (electing candidates like Mamdani) because he never actually questioned whether his own ideas were wrong; his shift to the center was ‘pragmatic’ (fear based), as crime stabilizes he again has the luxury of voting ideologically.
More generally, the Democratic establishment is at least partially responsible for screwing over Adams. Corrupt? Maybe, but there are 50 Dem mayors of major cities over the last 100 years who were more corrupt than him.
“Remigration” certainly isn’t official AfD policy, its advocated by the far-right Höcke wing of the party, not the Weidel center.
2rafa
7d ago
Regime change isn’t possible without a ground invasion which isn’t possible. Posturing doesn’t change that.
2rafa
8d ago
TFR is going down, indicative of women no longer internalizing the values of Islam
TFR is going down in almost every country. In Iran, which had a brief 1970s baby boom under the Shah, TFR has declined almost every year since the Islamic Revolution, even when it was rapidly becoming more conservative.
2rafa
8d ago
undeclared
This word is doing a lot here. Declaration doesn’t really mean anything; it made sense for Pakistan for obvious geopolitical reasons, and every single nuclear state is aware of Israel’s nuclear capability. They could ‘declare’ it tomorrow and nothing would change, none of the major nuclear powers accept or are fully truthful around any international inspections or the full extent of their capability for standard secrecy reasons.
2rafa
8d ago
People have been saying this since the late 1980s. The IRGC and mullahs’ grip on power is too strong. There is a fed up secular elite but their casualty tolerance is extremely low and as long as they can take their money in and out and vacation in the many countries where they can drink/fuck/etc (and they largely can) they won’t be a threat. The regime essentially banned dog ownership a few weeks ago just because it started trending on their social media and some scholars consider it un-Islamic; not the behavior of a regime desperately accepting some liberalization. The same happened after the hijab protests, they didn’t give an inch even if enforcement remains somewhat lax in Tehran (which it was before too). In the 1990s (the last major liberal turn) they assassinated a bunch of people effectively openly and then even semi-admitted it (politicians, businessmen, authors, journalists, public intellectuals) until the PM backed out of all his promises.
2rafa
8d ago
I find it very hard to believe that the consequence of a not-even-third-tier power nuking Paris would be Gaddafi being allowed to stay in power.
That’s the kind of hypothetical reserved for a Russia/China/USA level MAD situation where someone fires first and you hope against hope that cooler heads prevail and the attacked party ‘settles’ for a big payoff and apology (but still very unlikely).
A minor nuclear power firing a nuke like that would just result in absolute extermination for Gaddafi, because it’s not like the Chinese or Russians were going to nuke London or Washington in retaliation for an attack on Tripoli.
I don't think they'll directly attack US assets in the area, but I do think they'll close the straight of Hormuz for any European or American traffic.
This is less devastating than people think because Iranian oil flows to China, Japan, India and elsewhere would continue and even Europe is less reliant on Gulf oil than it previous was (and the shortfall could be made up).
The real impact would only happen by closing off the strait (by mining it, probably), which would send the price skyrocketing and which would infuriate China.
In the end, Iran will have nukes. They’re too large, too developed and have a relatively good academic pipeline in the hard sciences such that it’s inevitable. It might be a year, three years, five years, but they will have them.
A ground invasion of Iran by the US is impossible. The only hope for regime change is either that there’s some mass minority uprising against the Persians (very unlikely, they’re not staunch ethnic nationalists and have mollified most of the minorities quite well) or that there’s a middle-class ‘color revolution’ in Tehran and the mullahs and IRGC just kind of give up in that late stage GDR type way and melt away into the crowds (which is also extremely unlikely because they know what they have to lose).
At the same time, Iran’s near term options for retaliation are limited. They can’t shut down the strait because the Chinese will hit the roof and selectively bombing ships is a bad idea (the true shutdown scenario, as I understand it, would be mining the strait, and that’s not going to distinguish between Chinese ships and Western ones). If they bomb Saudi oilfields it will only hasten the return of Abraham Accord type stuff just when they’d achieved some diplomatic successes with the Gulf Arabs.
2rafa
8d ago
The Israelis are still a big part of the western internet it would be impossible to hide if many thousands of Israeli civilians had died in Iranian strikes.
2rafa
8d ago
As a whole not really, it can still get hot, SF itself still gets a lot of fog even if it’s less than it was.
But slightly inland in Silicon Valley proper yeah, the ultra expensive places like Atherton, Woodside around Redwood probably have a close to ideal climate-weather combination.
It’s not perfect, though. That honor goes to San Diego.
2rafa
9d ago
Climate of London (5-25 C for most of the year), weather of somewhere sunnier, like NYC.
To be honest, though, everything is midwit if you’re an internet snob like you and me, Dean. Bellingcat? The ultimate midwit NAFO publication. The London/NY/Paris Review of Books? Catastrophically midwit zine read by aging socialists of the kind who use The Guardian’s dating platform and chuckle at another lame Trump nickname at dinner parties. The New Yorker? Vanity Fair? Magazines for parents of Juilliard students, nought more need be said. The popular substacks or newsletters (unaffiliated or affiliated) of erstwhile online political commentators (Iglesias, Sullivan, Klein)? Soothing balm for dull, aging millennial and GenX centrists upset at a world they no longer understand. More obscure commentator figures (Yarvin, Kriss)? Slightly more verbose Twitter bait dressed up for the audience of clapping chimps paying $5 a month to chuckle gently while pretending to do their email job and thinking themselves above the worker ant masses consuming their cyber slop.
In the end, the choice is between the last few good blogs (never read the comments), the intelligent but supremely annoying autists at HN and LW (but only on topics they know something about), prediction markets, a few good bank and third party research analysts if you can get access through your company, some columnists that agree with your personal biases at major publications and this place.
2rafa
12d ago
No, The Economist’s readership has a substantial number of students and juniors, plus interested normal people who like to imagine themselves as the kind of person who reads it, many of whom don’t have a lot of money. It’s largely the magazine for the back office. FT Weekend’s readership is likely wealthier, because it’s mainly older print readers of the paper who have some money (students and juniors on the app aren’t going to care to read it).
Tatler’s readership is bifurcated between that sub-group of rich Arabs and Asians (they have a big audience in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Gulf) who enjoy the Anglo aesthetic, are often involved with polo, ride, have country houses in England, that sort of thing, and the residual English upper and upper-middle classes, some of whom have money and some of whom don’t. That niche means Tatler’s ads are more targeted, although there is still plenty of Patek and Lori Piana. Bien pensant PMCs might read that awful Air Mail or even worse Monocle, which also have all the Rolex and Porsche ads.
2rafa
12d ago
Problem was that they started actually believing all of the universal spread of liberal democracy stuff because the Cold War involved an ideological component that 19th century European colonialism didn’t (“spreading Christian civilization” was a post-hoc thing). That meant that which side was supported was often determined more ideologically than it had been under the British or French, who were regularly willing to screw over fellow Christians, liberal reformers, or other more ideologically aligned factions if their opponents had better will to power.
The Mamdani craze is because progressives, especially in Manhattan, cannot help themselves when it comes to electing DSA types who want to defund the police.
Amusingly, black people saved NYC by electing Adams who arrested the Floyd crime wave by allowing the NYPD to do their jobs. Now, because memories are short, the libs again forget what it’s like to live in a society without the rule of law. Crime rises, progressives get pragmatic, crime falls, progressives become idealistic, crime rises, etc.
The win state for big American cities is to elect a slightly grizzled, probably somewhat corrupt older black male cop who is technically a democrat but too compromised by big business to pursue dumb ‘justice reform’ policies.
There are some people who simply cannot be trusted around most of the opposite sex. They’re usually at least moderately, although only very rarely exceptionally, attractive, but they have an intoxicating charisma and can seduce almost anyone. The archetypal siren, rake, Mata Hari, whatever. Only some variant of the Pence rule is going to protect you from them (if targeted).
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