2rafa
2d ago
Because the loyal natives who benefited most from socialism will riot and the army is relatively loyal (and they don’t need to be fully loyal, just loyal enough for some to rebel and hand over the weapons and ammunition stores), the chance of a prolonged leftist insurgency in the country’s difficult terrain is significant. A FARC type campaign (and various other Latin American leftist groups, cartels and likely low key foreign governments hostile to the US would gladly fund it) would be very costly in terms of lives even if an initial invasion was fast, there would be bombings and terror campaigns targeting occupying soldiers, the whole thing would turn into a quagmire.
2rafa
2d ago
There is violence in prisons, but almost none of it is at the hands of the guards.
2rafa
2d ago
I don’t think this alone will do it but the only way to topple the bolivarian regime is to deject and destroy the morale of the millions of indigenous peasants who prevented previous coup attempts and who form the loyal core of Maduro’s support. With the military co-opted fully after 25 years of socialism, the right lack the manpower to mount an effective revolutionary attempt; those with money have fled and the remaining and even former middle classes have the most to lose from another failed attempt to topple him. The US will never invade Venezuela, it’s hardly Granada and would likely hit the casualty level (~2000 US troops) where public sentiment can quickly turn, but if it can humiliate the military, and humiliate the regime, it probably makes the end marginally more likely.
2rafa
2d ago
The US has broad dominion over Latin America and Central America in particular (and Venezuela after the totality of its decay is now a standard Central American country, geography aside). I don’t think this is anything new, nobody in the rest of the world even cares much. There are probably some cringe X edits set to synthwave music that a previous admin wouldn’t have (re)tweeted, but I don’t consider that a change of policy.
2rafa
2d ago
Either:
- The police are able to dispense low level summary justice, as they were for hundreds of years. They can smash up stores of counterfeit products, they can beat the shit out of petty criminals, they can punish groups of disaffected or antisocial youths at risk of turning to more serious crime, they can clear up homeless encampments and disperse loiterers, and they can adjudicate local neighborhood disputes based on their obvious local knowledge of who the party most likely to have the litigious or ridiculous grievance is.
or
- The public will eventually start taking the law into their own hands, with endless he said she said disputes, instances of clearly immoral but legal killing, and ultimately this a peculiar but hardly previously unheard of form of anarchy.
Personally, I would prefer (1), but the neutered police forces of the modern west, constantly monitored, unable to dispense even basic local low-level enforcement (which for reasons of criminal high time preference and the time the evidence gathering, prosecution and court process usually takes can never be replaced by another aspect of the justice system), also known as “police brutality”, are for now incapable of it.
2rafa
7d ago
Yeah, but the South Africans were not interested in putting up a fight to the level that the Rhodesians had.
2rafa
8d ago
And it is important to say that even 1 million to-the-death committed settlers in Algeria in 1960 could likely still have fully pacified the native population given both HBD and other factors.
The end of French Algeria is one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century. It happened under American pressure but it really happened, ultimately, because the settlers did not fight to the death to save it. They had France to return to. The Israelis (most of them, anyway) lack the same luxury, even if they have dual citizenship it is to a land of which they know nothing and to whom they will never belong. Their only identity is Israeli, or Jewish.
Countless native civilizations have been destroyed before. As Churchill said, nobody now mourns the native Americans beyond the vapid and entirely European absurdity of “land acknowledgements”. The only time settler regimes ended despite real and proper resistance (see Rhodesia) had a 20:1 native to settler population ratio. Israel will soon be at 1:1 with the total Palestinian diaspora still in Arab lands.
There is a good chance that Israel is still destroyed in the lifetimes of most of the people reading this. But even in that scenario I anticipate it will still be a fight to the death for millions.
2rafa
8d ago
To be fair, it was, until it wasn’t. If they’d accepted 1948 and stationed a Jordanian-Egyptian army garrison just outside East Jerusalem (which I guess would have been a Danzig-style international city) there would be no settlers on the West Bank.
2rafa
8d ago
The AIPAC strategy relies (or relied) on one central fact:
Most American voters and politicians were either ambivalent (which includes mild antipathy) or positive about Israel.
This meant that the average Democrat or Republican, outside a tiny handful of very progressive or substantially Muslim constituencies, lost nothing from taking AIPAC’s money. There was no tradeoff. Increasingly now there is, so AIPAC’s influence will likely decline.
You also can’t do the same thing as the libertarian. The Republican will get primaried if he isn’t sufficiently anti-immigration. The Democrat will get primaried if she supports lower taxes on the rich. These are issues where almost every voter, and every voter in the primaries, has a relatively strong opinion. “[Democrat] took five million dollars from the mining lobby to destroy our environment and the habitat of our birds and fishes” might easily be the different between winning and losing a tight primary.
2rafa
9d ago
Despite being purported as the main beneficiaries of Citizens United, big corporations weren't really trying to spend large sums of money on politics. Exxon Mobil didn't park an oil tanker full of cash in the Chesapeake waiting for the signal to shower Washington in oil money as part of their dastardly plan. That just wasn't how buisinesses operated. It took time to develop both a theoretical framework for how to turn an abritrarily large amount of money into political power (it's a lot more complicated than simply buying ads), and to develop a philosophical framework for why this isn't cartoonishly evil.
“Money in politics” is far too broad a term.
Say you’re a Koch brothers libertarian-ish conservative. You want big immigration (including illegal, although you’re not too invested in amnesty), very low taxes particularly on the rich and on corporate earnings, and maybe you’re culturally moderately anti-woke and especially dislike that you got hit with some very expensive civil rights based employment rulings a few years ago but you still have a gay grandson or something.
Which cause are you going to donate a billion dollars to in the next cycle? The party of Stephen Miller, or the party of AOC?
Musk buying Twitter only “worked” (and again, whether it worked has yet to be decided, both on a long term cultural and on an economic basis) because there was already a large constituency of social conservatives who could use the platform to align and organize, especially on topics like immigration. That movement long predated the acquisition, Miller and Bannon had been central to Trump’s initial anti-illegal-immigration messaging in 2016, back when Musk was still a lib centrist and openly criticized Trump as ‘not the right guy’.
Now, back your big corporation. If I want deregulation and tax cuts, I might give a billion dollars to some centrist Dems and some libertarian Republicans. But then it turns out that a future Dem administration has a heavy presence of environmentalist progressives who dislike my polluting factories. And it turns out a future GOP administration contains politicians who owe fealty to and get support from a bunch of farmers or mining interests who don’t like me sourcing cheap inputs for my big business and like protectionist tariffs. So the billion dollars will be worth less than you might imagine.
2rafa
12d ago
Do you make the confession in plain language as a more banal description of exactly what you have done (or not done) or thought, or in vaguer terms (“I failed to do this”, “I allowed greed to get the better of me”)?
2rafa
12d ago
In the UK? It's more obvious. I am loathe to make strong statements, since I don't know how much of the cultural differences in the workplace at our hospitals is due to the women, and how much of it is general zeitgeist bleeding through.
It’s a complicated issue. In Britain, white doctors and nurses are subject to the extremely common and overrepresented predations of overseas and BAME (the UK term for ethnic minorities, for any readers) doctors and nurses who are extremely overrepresented in sexual harassment and assault claims. Certainly when I read through a bunch of the decisions a few years ago I found that the vast majority of serious sexual misconduct by doctors appeared to involve non-native medical professionals (whether first or subsequent generation).
It’s true for other crimes too. As the GMC itself noted 7 of the 9 doctors convicted of gross negligence manslaughter since 2004 were BAME. BAME doctors are referred for misconduct at more than double the rate of white doctors. International medical graduates are referred at more than 2.5 times the rate. (The GMC’s solution, in true current year fashion, was to try to fix the disproportionality, which could only be due to racism, not to investigate the cause).
Anecdotally doctor friends report leering, pestering and other sexual harassment by foreign doctors, many of whom speak poor English and have questionable medical skills, and some (eg Pakistani Muslim) domestically trained ones too. Obviously there are many civilized overseas doctors, yourself surely included, but the context is important when looking at why there might be a heightened women’s sensitivity here.
2rafa
13d ago
It’s definitely someone we’ve seen before, but I don’t know that it’s him either.
The overarching theory is very poor here. Andrews is writing as one of the few women in a field that has always been and continues to be extremely male (American right wing political opinion), and has no real experience of working in a female dominated environment.
empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.
Women are viciously competitive (as most women who went to high school will tell you) and don’t particularly empathize with their enemies. The safety point is correct in the abstract (men are much more willing to take risks) but arbitrary and poorly considered, for example one can easily construe mass immigration, soft-on-crime and other progressive policies as inherently riskier and ‘less safe’ than just not doing them. You can say that empathy overrides safetyism, but then it appears to sometimes and not at others, and that arguably challenges other conclusions she makes too. Andrews hints at this but then dismisses it in a very unsatisfactory way (she mentions ‘underhanded’ female competition but then says again later than women aren’t competitive). The implication is that a few women (like her) are fine but majority women (she has never worked in such an organization) are not. In fact, historically there have been many times in which women were more conservative than men. Women were and remain in many parts of the world the enforcers of traditional sexual morality (ie ‘slut shaming’) in the traditional institutions that they manage.
Nevertheless, their urging and clamouring is real and does have an effect, the UN Human Rights Commission helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa.
What helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa was the largely male Western governments being afraid of the almost entirely male governments of the Soviet bloc and almost entirely male government of red China and the almost entirely male governments of various third world countries fomenting a more intense global anti-western movement if they didn’t support the end of apartheid. Indeed this drove the entirety of ruinous American ‘decolonial’ and ‘anti colonial’ policy back to the late 1940s, through Suez and Algeria and onward.
What really drove academia to be woke from the early 2010s is the interaction between both wider cultural developments like mass immigration and specific sector dynamics, like large numbers of foreign faculty at American universities (the global holy grail for academics because pay is 2-3x what it is anywhere else), extreme competition for tenure due to ridiculous levels of PhD overproduction, the need to narrow that competition, the fact that academia had been broadly very left for many decades (depending on faculty for centuries) and extremely so since the 1960s, making structures very weak to faculty racial activism. Once you decide you must hire many more black faculty, you soon find, for example, that 67% of black people awarded PhDs in America are women, so naturally you will hire mostly women.
This is all obvious stuff that Andrews was too lazy or otherwise unwilling to google, clearly.
2rafa
14d ago
Is Myron Gaines really on the “right”? The black Muslim host of the “Fresh and Fit” podcast fits more into the long tradition of black American antisemitism into which the Sudanese Gaines (real name Amrou Fudl) assimilated. He advocates an alliance between white, black and brown against Jews, as some others did before him.
In the end, this is a politically untenable alliance. The interests of many black and many white voters are opposed, and in debates about crime, courts, welfare, political representation and tax, in much of the country, this and other political divisions limit any political program. The reality is that in an extremely racially and ideologically divided nation, the comparatively tiny Jewish population, heavily concentrated in major coastal cities and their suburbs, is not sufficient to ‘soak up’ the grand sum of political and cultural resentment that now exists.
That is not to say that antisemitism isn’t rising rapidly, it is. But antisemitism can’t heal the political rifts that exist and are developing in this country. Nor does that mean some grand reckoning against Jews is inevitable. Antisemitism was very high in the 1920s in America, probably moreso than in Germany at the time, but it didn’t lead to actual oppression. The reality of antisemitic violence, indeed all racial violence, is that while it requires some pre-existing racial animosity its actual occurrence is often arbitrary and historically contingent.
Dotcom bubble was a bubble because there were no users. The reasoning was along the lines of 20% of all shoe sales in 2010 will be online.
That really isn’t true. Plenty of dotcom companies like Yahoo had huge numbers of users; Yahoo had 400 million registered users at the peak in 2000 with 60 million monthly users (double the previous year’s figure). Many other dotcom companies had large user numbers too.
And if you look at the non-dotcom companies that still saw huge stock price crashes after the bust, many were businesses with big revenue, like Microsoft ($23bn in revenue in 2000, down 70%+ during the crash, didn’t recover until 2016) and Intel ($34bn in revenue in 2000, down 80%+ during the crash, didn’t recover until 2020). Both Intel and Microsoft were also extremely profitable during this period, contrary to boosters who say all tech stocks at this time lost money or whatever.
The bizarre myth that dotcom was all money into worthless internet businesses with 10 users and inflated traffic figures on zero revenue is peddled by exactly the same people trying to claim that “this time is different”.
2rafa
15d ago
Every bubble has its boosters, and at a late stage they often resort to the ultimate and final bull cope:
“They won’t (and indeed can’t) allow it to crash”.
In each generation this has a different name, but in this cycle the most common is probably some variant of ‘the fed put’. Of course, if elected governments and their appointees were powerful enough to stave of a market crash, these things would never happen, given their typical electoral consequences.
2rafa
15d ago
it could well be similar to how the dot-com investments worked out. lots of duds and even scams but on average i think the return on investing during that era was good
The overall market (the S&P 500) didn’t reach its dotcom peak again until 2007 and then promptly crashed again, not reaching it again until the 2010s. The Nasdaq didn’t hit its 2000 peak until 2015. Looking at total returns paints a slightly rosier picture but it was still a long time.
2rafa
15d ago
The Nazis were relatively gay and not particularly trad. Limited moves to deal with the red light districts in a few major German cities were halfhearted at best. Single women were in some cases even encouraged to become single mothers, women weren’t removed from the workplace, there were forms of proto-feminism that certainly clashed with traditional Christian views of a woman’s place, even as fertility was lauded (but in a technocratic kind of way, not necessarily a trad one). Economically although heavily supported by small petit bourgeois business owners, the nsdap increased the presence of the major German corporations in the economy and was broadly supportive of the major capital markets through 1939. Exhibits on entartete kunst existed in an uneasy relationship with plenty of relatively modernist sculpture, art and especially architecture that, a few short decades earlier, would definitely have been considered degenerate and abstract by critics.
2rafa
16d ago
That’s an AI ad / promo more than a summary. Kind of like the difference between a blurb and a summary.
2rafa
17d ago
Russia is much more comfortable directing sabotage operations on European soil than American soil. Since Putin came to power he has overtly, publicly assassinated dozens in Europe, including many in Western European countries like the UK, Spain and Germany. Russia also planned assassinations of major military and defense figures like the Rheinmetall CEO. He hasn’t assassinated anyone overtly in the USA, and hasn’t even come close to assassinating US defense figures.
If they were going to escalate by blowing up a munitions factory, they would 100% do so in Europe.
2rafa
17d ago
The bulk of the peasantry and proletariat in the region would gladly throw everything at Israel. The leadership refuse because of a number of reasons; the connection between Hamas and other Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood that wants to overthrow the Egyptian military regime, those who would destabilize the Jordanian monarchy etc; the fact that the US supports Israel; the fact that the IDF could destroy their militaries leaving them vulnerable to domestic upheaval (see the first reason) and so on.
However, if Israel appears weak, these same governments may be unable to resist popular pressure to give in to the people and mount an invasion. This would be especially true if there was a Palestinian uprising. In addition, Egypt may well eventually fall to an Islamist government.
What do you make of Fuentes’ embrace of civic nationalism today, the videos of him saying that anyone born in America is an American, that that’s what America First means and so on? It seems like a stunning moderation, but it’s not truly sudden either, he’s been setting it up for several months (even before the Kirk assassination), pushing back against his followers’ violent antisemitic rhetoric in a way he didn’t before, tongue-in-cheek comments about Jews actually being behind a lot of great movies and comedy, gently dressing down his more…violent commenters in the chat. Certainly it’s drawn a hugely negative reaction from many groypers and extreme antisemites who formerly liked him in the last 24 hours on Twitter. I don’t think it’s as simple as just moderating to appeal to Carlson’s audience, because it’s aligned with his own streaming on his own channel recently. Six months ago he was hostile towards Dave Smith, the libertarian anti-zionist and Jewish convert to Christianity, primarily for being ethnically Jewish. Beyond antisemitism, he advocated for the imprisonment and/or expulsion of certainly a substantial proportion, if not the great majority, of black people in America. Today, Fuentes makes the case for what I would consider Bannonite civic nationalism, indeed he’s almost totally aligned with Bannon’s vision of a loosely culturally Christian multiracial conservative coalition.
Tucker too essentially asks Fuentes in the interview, and it’s relatively explicit, “OK, so what do you want to do about it?” and Fuentes says (and I paraphrase loosely) force AIPAC to register as a foreign lobbying organization, ban dual citizens from serving in congress (Randy Fine, announcing legislation that would do just that, said last week that to his knowledge no Jews in Congress are Israeli citizens, so this would be no change), stay out of foreign entanglements and put America first, and that anyone who puts America first (relatively nebulous) is an ally of his. This is a pure Buchananite position, when previously Fuentes was well to the right of Buchanan, who was certainly moderately antisemitic but not in an ‘expel the Jews’ way, which was much more central to groyper messaging.
There was also some minor drama today on Twitter (which I’m sure you saw) about some guy who was full-on “kill them all” rhetoric about Jewish people getting a cop visit, which I think highlights what is increasingly a rather colossal gap between the groyper hardcore and the current Fuentes position.
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