CriticalDuty
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User ID: 368
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I don't think they'd ever dare to do this, even if they had the ability, because a sniper gunning down targets in a major city automatically sends off alarm bells at the federal level. You're basically asking for the FBI to crack down on you. Certain tactics just aren't worth the heat they bring. There's a scene along those themes where the state senator rips off Stringer, and Stringer tries to get Wee-Bey to kill the senator in retaliation - Avon immediately shuts it down because a political assassination means the feds take over from the local cops and life gets much harder for the Barksdale crew. The powers-that-be will tolerate petty handgun killings, or at least leave it to the cops, but anything resembling military tactics or political vendettas from organized crime will naturally be assigned a much higher level of importance.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Yes, the usual tactic is to present the problem as a fait accompli that must be grudgingly tolerated because nothing can be done to change it.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Shining Path in Peru was largely defeated militarily. The Peruvian government even armed, trained and deputized civilians with the authority to kill Shining Path members.
Generally speaking, I think people who say things like "you can't destroy a movement" or "there are no military solutions to this problem" are just people who do not want to see that particular movement or problem destroyed, and have to cloak it in the language of strategic wisdom rather than admit to their desires. I have a particular disdain for Arab liberal types like Shadi Hamid who claim destroying Hamas is complicated because Hamas isn't just a group of militants, but a government with a bureaucracy and employees and yada yada yada, we will need to find some way to live with them - the LTTE was all of these things and also considerably more advanced and sophisticated than Hamas, as pseudo-states go. ISIS had a government, a bureaucracy, courts, all of the mundane accoutrements of statehood, and somehow we managed to bomb it into oblivion. There are very few problems that violence can't actually solve, so long as you're committed to the necessary scale and force of violence required.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Plenty of Chinese illegal immigrants already arrive through legal avenues, mainly in the form of criminal organizations getting people tourist visas that they overstay on. That's how most of the girls in "massage parlors" in NYC and LA are trafficked into the country. They don't need to cross the border in the dead of night, they just book a flight and land at JFK or LAX. Why would a state need to resort to this sort of needlessly arduous infiltration when common gangsters have already figured out easier ways?
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Sweden's current "ruling party", to the extent it has one, is the Moderate party. The Sweden Democrats agreed to provide support to the Moderates and their allies to form the government in exchange for tougher immigration policies, but there is still a cordon sanitaire against the SDs - they have no portfolios in the Swedish Cabinet despite being the second-largest party in parliament and having more seats than the Moderates. Similar dynamics play out in most European parliamentary systems; it's very much an open question as to whether Dutch center-right types will simply let the Netherlands be rudderless rather than support Wilders becoming PM.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Operation Wetback led to the departure of over a million Mexicans from the United States, using less than a thousand federal agents. Most of them weren't even arrested; hundreds of thousands simply fled the US to avoid arrest and formal deportation proceedings. And that was in an era with a much weaker state apparatus and no significant tracking capabilities, at least none comparable to what we have now, let alone the means and ability to punish domestic sponsors of illegal migrants. Modern Western states are vastly powerful in ways most people cannot even imagine; what cripples them is democratic restrictions on exercising their powers. I don't think the illegals hanging around outside Lowe's are going to take up arms against the government if they hear that the US is deporting all Mexicans or Central Americans - like their forebears, the odds are that they'll simply pack up and leave, or they'll hang around hoping they're lucky enough to avoid getting swept up. "Civil conflict" is an absolutely minor and irrelevant possibility. It's not a question of logistical ability - it's a question of political will.
you will have to morally justify that to a large portion of the United States population that will not be in favour of such drastic policies and will risk losing a large portion of your support to the immigrants you are attempting to displace.
Yes, ultimately this is the only real obstacle to effective border security and demographic policies, which is why I have little sympathy for liberals who wring their hands over the election of right-wing anti-immigration politicians in Europe - if your position is that democracy is necessarily a racial suicide pact, you should not be surprised if people emerge who are not as beholden to democracy as you.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Nobody cares about Jewish approval in progressive circles. You demonstrate your credentials there by having the darkest person you can find certify that you are One Of The Good Ones. The far-right believes Jews manipulate immigration policy to marginalize white people and force multiculturalism so that the resulting societies will be too disunited and incoherent to form a new Reich, and while this is true in extremely broad strokes (the truth is probably closer to what Jamie Kirchick said about supporting mass immigration because of the belief that diverse societies will be more tolerant to religious minorities like Jews), progressive societies nearly everywhere in the world revolve around this kind of racial fetishism and hierarchy, with or without Jewish input. Its purest expression is the ubiquitous negrolatry of America and the UK, but in a pinch any dark-skinned group will suffice.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I don't believe Jews have been the sine qua non for these sorts of policies and beliefs to spread in former WASP bastions, but there's no denying that they've played a significant role and have been stalwart supporters. A lot of Jews were all-in for these reflexively anti-white norms until it became clear that a special exception wasn't going to be carved out for them. So my sympathy is limited, even though I wouldn't bat an eye if everyone in Gaza died under IDF fire. The main reason you'll never see a "white and Jewish alliance" as the OP described it is that Jews will gladly burn that bridge for the dream of a pat on the head from a dark-skinned hand.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
The left and the right have issues with Israel for reasons that are diametrically opposed and difficult to reconcile. The right views Jews as an insidious influence on European society (including Euro-derived societies like America, Canada, Australia etc.) because of their community's left-wing advocacy at the heights of politics and culture. The left views Jews and Israel as an extension of European civilization, which is automatically presumed to be wrong in any conflict with non-European cultures. You're always going to find a few weirdos like Nick Fuentes and his supporters who will make opportunistic cause with "based Muslims", but by and large these two sides are not going to see eye to eye.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I think polls are fairly useless for issues like this. Israeli Arabs live in a society where they are a minority closely scrutinized by a distrustful majority. If you changed that society in a way that greatly increases the proportion that is Arab, new possibilities emerge for the people you previously polled - where before they had to reconcile themselves to a Jewish state, now they might not be so restricted. It's hard to blame Israeli Jews for refusing the right of return when the only reward is likely going to be the meager satisfaction of getting to say "I told you so" later.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
There isn't a new Israel/Gaza thread so I'm just going to ask here - does anyone know why exactly Israel agreed to exchange over a thousand Palestinian prisoners for Gilad Shalit? He doesn't appear to have been a particularly important or connected IDF soldier, and I've seen some commentary suggesting this deal may have greatly boosted the value of taking Israeli hostages for Hamas.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Ok, so what is the third choice here? There's nothing explicit about gesturing to "a better way" without spelling out exactly what that way is. That's just smugness masquerading as nuance. Is Israel supposed to follow the Munich strategy in a dense urban area filled with hostile civilians?
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
That seems incredibly naïve to me. If you're surrounded by people who would gladly see you dead, it would be a fatal mistake to broadcast to them that they can kill you without fear of retribution.
Israel's response to the Munich Olympics attack involved very different circumstances, since they were assassinating PLO members living in Lebanon and various parts of Europe. They obviously couldn't kill large numbers of civilians in sovereign states they weren't at war with. There are some Hamas leaders living in Turkey and Qatar, but the rank-and-file of Hamas live in Gaza, among the civilian population.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
The Grauniad's readers are considerably more psychotic than their staff:
But what if Israel had not met horror with horror? What if, with restraint and dignity, it had mourned its dead, leaving the depravity and hatred of the Hamas project for the world to behold? What if the international community had learned the lesson of Iraq, and insisted that Israelis and Palestinians find ways to live side by side, or even, as they surely eventually must, together?
It's really not possible to talk to someone who thinks you could shame the Arab street into compliance by turning the other cheek and ignoring a major terrorist attack.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
There are US troops all over the region (including two carrier groups off the coast of Israel) and an extensive CIA presence. He's not just going in there defenseless. I doubt Hamas or al-Qaeda have the capability to shoot at Air Force One, and on the ground there's going to be US and IDF troops swarming all over the place.
It would be suicidal for Iran to try killing the US President, because it would make them global pariahs, and what few allies they still have would disavow them. They'd basically be greenlighting Lindsey Graham's fever dreams of flattening Tehran.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
If you mean the existence of Israel stopped Nasser from being able to march troops into Syria to crush dissent, then sure, but the actual reason the UAR collapsed was because Syrians felt the Egyptians had turned their country into a colony under Egypt's control and not into an equal partner. The existence of Israel is a logistical hurdle to the formation of a united Arab/Muslim state, but the real obstacle to such a state is that nobody wants it, and those who experienced it for the briefest moment discovered that they hated it.
Gaddafi tried to create a unified state with Tunisia as well, on the same theory of Islamic unity. It fell through because Algeria's secular, Arab nationalist government threatened to invade Tunisia if the union materialized. Israel had even less to do with that failure.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
When has Arab unification ever been a serious threat, rather than just something fringe theorists and diasporoids jerk off about? Nasser's great union of Egypt and Syria lasted a whopping three years before the Syrians wanted the Egyptians to leave. That great Ba'athist, Saddam, was kept afloat during his war with Iran by Kuwait, and then decided to repay the favor by invading and plundering Kuwait. Arguably Arab nationalists and pan-Arabists have done more damage to the cause of Arab unification than anyone else.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Harvard Indians are most certainly the elite. The Harvard-attending subset of any group is the elite of that group.
Modi-supporting Hindus in India back Israel because they resent liberal favoritism towards Muslims and the perceived kid-gloves manner in which liberal institutions treat Islamic extremism. To them, Israel is a country that "fights back". If you read their rhetoric, they're full of contempt for American/British-educated liberal Hindus and the foreign universities that produce such people, as well as the domestic universities that seem to copy that foreign model. But the sort of Indians who attend Harvard are not really drawn from the same demographic. They belong to that mobile, transnational, globalized subsection of every Third World country that has more in common with their counterparts in the West than with their average co-ethnic in the old country. Their concerns are the usual liberal stuff about "Eurocentrism" and "white supremacy", not Muslims or terrorism.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I didn't use brown as a proxy term for Muslims. I have used it as a proxy term for brown people. There were plenty of non-Muslim South Asians adding their names to that letter, including Hindu Indians and Nepalis. Your average Modi-supporting Hindu might be pro-Israel, but very few of them make it to Harvard.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
It can mostly be attributed to Gen Z being browner and more foreign in origin than any preceding generation.
One of my biggest criticisms of Jewish politics in the Anglo world has always been liberal Jewry's sympathies for Third-Worldist causes, and the associated scorn meted out to the sort of philosemitic whites who form one of the main pillars of Jewish security in the Anglo world. In that recent Harvard student letter that was retracted after threats of blacklisting from Jewish employers, you could see that most of the groups who signed it had absolutely nothing in common besides their foreign origins or general non-whiteness - one an "African-American resistance organization", another a Bollywood dance troupe, then a Nepali undergraduate group, predictably the Middle East and North Africa caucus, the Pakistani students group, the Islamic Society, and so on. So it's difficult to feel sympathetic for liberal Jews who are now expressing their sense of "betrayal" and "abandonment". Your average Indian, Pakistani or Nepali will live and die without ever meeting a Jew - but give him an F1 visa and send him to Cambridge, and suddenly he feels the need to take a stand against the yahudi, which most Jews feel is preferable to assoaciating with the chuds and gammon.
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threatening to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
It's actually a pretty good comparison, because while Satan's defiant declaration that he would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven is the most famous of his lines from Paradise Lost, he spends much of the rest of the story reflecting on how he is the architect of his own suffering, and how his pride and arrogance will never allow him to repent, but will only ever condemn him to even greater suffering.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I don't know if it was actually going to be called "the Voice" or if that was just a placeholder name, but it's so comically ominous. "There will be a Voice!" "We must consult the Voice!" "What will the Voice say?". Like something out of a Lovecraft story with a cult and an Old One.
I assumed the Yes campaign's insistence that the Voice would have no legal force was just a bad-faith position, as it's fairly easy to conceive of a dynamic where the Voice doesn't need legal force because it has the liberal media waiting to brand any government's disregard of the Voice as ipso facto evidence of racism, which will be used to declare that government's positions as morally illegitimate. When your enemy is campaigning to build a new weapon, don't vote to give it to him.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
Palestinian refugees attempted to overthrow the government of Jordan and take control of the Jordanian military, it was a pretty notable event in modern Arab history. Since then I think there's been some understandable reluctance from many Arab states to shelter the Palestinians. Egypt's military government overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood to take power, so I doubt they're eager to take in Hamas-friendly refugees who might bolster the ranks of the Ikhwan.
CriticalDuty
1yr ago
I don't mind it, honestly. But if some level of ethnic cleansing that falls short of total genocide would be an effective solution, then sure, go for that instead. It's worked out plenty of times in the past. What I object to is this idea that everything on that spectrum of atrocities, from population transfers to mass graves, should be declared off-limits.
The term for invoking papal infallibility to establish doctrine is called speaking ex cathedra. Francis has never spoken ex cathedra, and in fact it's very rare for Popes to do so.
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