MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
I think in the context of American race politics, both "Black" and "White" are normally used to refer to specific ethnic groups, and are therefore correctly capitalised. American Blacks are definitely an ethnic group - they have a distinct identity and their ancestors have been in America and mostly endogamous since 1808. American Whites' status as an ethnic group is less clear - their distinct identity (as White, rather than the various European nationalities their ancestors came from) comes from an artificial project designed to hold the Democrat's corrupt bargain between northern "white ethnics" and southern racists together, and they weren't meaningfully endogamous until the taboo on Catholic-Protestant intermarriage weakened after WW2. But the Democrats' racist project was successful, and in the current year "White American" is an ethnic group and American White nationalists (and Black nationalists) are bad people, but intellectually coherent.
Applying the American ideas of Black and White to the rest of the world makes you stupid - outside American there are black people and white people (based on broad racial characteristics, and not capitalised because the words are purely descriptive like "short" and "big-nosed") but neither is an ethnic group. For a European to be a White nationalist is not even wrong - there is no White nation over here.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Good point. The Catholics protesting housing discrimination in Derry in the late 60's (and both sides agree that this is the flashpoint that escalated into the Troubles) explicitly modelled their movement on the US Civil Rights Movement. And Ian Paisley (who became the leader of the Protestant diehards) saw his role on the other side as part of the same spiritual project as the Southern conservative evangelical/fundamentalist/segregationist rearguard - he ended up on the board of Bob Jones University.
I think you could probably argue that the Days of Rage was the American troubles, just dramatically less troublesome.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
The Straits were open before the war, and Iran's ability to project force across the Middle East involved individual men crossing borders clandestinely with guns and bombs, which is not a capability they have lost.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Trump is Texas Sharpshootering here. Before the war, he said that his political goal was regime change. During the war he is saying that he didn't necessarily mean that, and is keeping his real political goals secret in order to confuse the enemy. After the war, he is going to declare that whatever he got, particularly if it is status quo ante is a YUUGE victory and the thing he was looking for all along. But if Trump's real political goal was (as he will no doubt claim) opening the Straits of Hormuz, he could have achieved it much more cheaply by not starting the war in the first place.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
This is a good post. I would go ahead to the obvious conclusion. The war is drawn. This is what a draw looks like. Neither side has a feasible path to a better outcome that status quo ante.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
After all, Europeans are the only people that managed to stop the trade of African slaves within the territories they controlled. As soon as they relinquished control of African territories, the slavery returned.
What do you mean by "Europeans"?
The British managed to stop the slave trade within the territories we controlled (which, by the second half of the 19th century, included the entire Atlantic) and so, belatedly, did the Yankees in the territory they controlled. The other Europeans didn't really bother until the Royal Navy made the trade dangerous and unprofitable.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Very much so. Shortly before Trump came down the escalator, America was at less risk of a race war than at any time since the Monroe administration, and possibly since the founding.
Why do I say this? There was a constant, very real, threat of political violence over slavery from the 1820 Missouri crisis forward, that would eventually break out into large-scale political violence in 1854 (Bleeding Kansas) and all-out civil war in 1861. After the war, there was a failed white insurgency in the South (the 1st Klan) followed by a successful one (Redemption), such that the South was not consistently peaceful until Jim Crow was secured around 1890.
There is then a period of relative racial peace (in the "absence of violence" sense, not the "presence of justice" sense) as Jim Crow is uncontested, but this requires occasional pogroms to maintain white dominance, and is a period in which a violent criminal racist organisation (the 2nd Klan) ran Indiana and was a big political player in several other states.
I don't think "the Civil rights era was full of threatened political violence and America getting through with as little bloodshed as they did was a great achievement" should be controversial.
And post-1970, the main forms of race-linked violence in America have been black-on-white crime, attempts by white vigilantes to stop it extra-legally, and attempts by Blue state and local governments to suppress white vigilantism. And crime in general, including black-on-white violent crime is dramatically lower than it was at the peak of the 1970s/80s crime wave.
So until MAGA and Woke started threatening political violence against each other, 2010s America had less race-linked criminal violence than at any time since the civil rights movement, and the post civil rights racial order featured no organised race-linked political violence and a lower threat level of potential political violence than previous racial orders.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
I agree with both @lollol and @MathWizard - the median voter in the Anglosphere wants a secure border and minimal in-country enforcement (apart from the expeditious deportation of foreign criminals), and this doesn't work very well in practice. As well as the incentives point, illegal immigrants can arrive by overstaying tourist visas, not just by jumping the border - and before the current wave of "refugee" arrivals most did.
But I don't think this means you should be "pro-stock and pro-flow" or "anti-stock and anti-flow". Once we understand that you can't make sane immigration policy by pandering to the median voter, I think you should try to make policy in the national interest, and that means distinguishing between wanted and unwanted immigrants. The Canadian and Australian experience is that if you are visibly trying to do this (by which I mean actually trying, not pretending to try) the public will tolerate a reasonable number of mistakes. Trump, of course, is not doing this - almost nobody thinks that deporting military spouses over paperwork issues is a good idea, but the administration (and its noisiest very online supporters) want to do it as a show of commitment to "deport them all". What is going on here - if we assume the administration is at least marginally competent, the answer is obvious - Trump's mass deportation policy is about putting on a show for his base, not about appealing to the median voter.
As a separate issue, effective in-country immigration enforcement requires a citizen register including biometric data. (And once you have that, you effectively have ID cards even if you don't require people to routinely carry the card). The US basically has this, but it is split between various databases (particularly the SSA and State DMVs) in a way which makes using it for immigration enforcement ineffective. The UK doesn't, which is why we had the Windrush scandal when we tried to do serious in-country enforcement. I think the MAGA base would now support ID cards, but a noisy minority of Republicans profoundly wouldn't. But in any case, ID cards are less unpopular than either open borders or mass deportations of well-behaved settled illegals.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
I much prefer the Warhammer version of this statistic - the UK exports more Space Marines than fish. (And the rump UK would become even more dependent on Warhammer for hard currency if London somehow did secede).
The UK fishing industry is tiny because there are so few fish left in the UK EEZ, and most of the rights to catch them well sold to Spanish commercial trawlers (who could pay more for the quota because they were more efficient catching the fish). It is traditional to blame the EU for this, but the cuts in quota due to overfishing would have happened whoever was in charge, and allowing retiring British fishermen to sell their quota to Spanish commercial operators rather than tying the quota to a specific port as most EU countries did was a Thatcher government decision.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Though London would have a reasonably strong negotiating position because as a matter of property law we own most of the infrastructure that makes the estuary navigable.
Aviation would be a worse problem - planes taking off from Heathrow would enter rump-UK airspace almost immediately and London's other airports are outside London. And obviously the rail link the the Channel Tunnel would become dubiously usable.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
3,000 people is nothing
180,000 people signed a change.org petition calling for London to secede from the UK over Brexit.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
Most Barclays employees are going to be at 3 (Peon -> MD -> Jes Staley -> Epstein)
Anyone with a Clinton number of 2 has an Epstein number of 3, and that is a lot of people.
The guy was one of the best-connected people on the planet - he makes Paul Erdos and Kevin Bacon look like nobodies.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
At least as regards speech restrictions, the historical evidence is that even rules that are intended to be used exclusively by ingroup against outgroup end up mostly being used to settle personal beefs within the ingroup.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
The Mossad did not have hundreds of millions of dollars to spare to channel through Wexner or anybody, if they had the money by whatever means, they had other things to spend it on instead of a vague 40 year influence operation with as yet completely unclear outcomes led by a compulsive liar with no real loyalty to Israel beyond his ethnicity
I think I agree with you there - if Wexner was paying Epstein to run a Mossad-linked blackmail ring, he was using his own money and not Mossad's.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
Most of Wexner's net worth was his L Brands stock, which Epstein won't have been taking a management fee on. If Wexner was like other founder-CEOs his non-L brands net worth would have been less than a billion for most of the period.
If Wexner was paying Epstein a management fee on his own stock in his own company of which he was the full-time founder-CEO, we are back in the territory of "Wexner was using fund management fees to pay Epstein under the table for something else"
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
Nouning verbs is dangerous. It uses a word that pointedly fails to describe itself, and if you as much as think the word "non-self-descriptive" then you will no longer be capable of coherent thought.
Verbing nouns is safe as long as you verb the noun "verb" first. Whether "verb" is a self-descriptive word or not is unclear, but not dangerous.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
Does anyone know what, if anything, the connection is between the work that led to transformers and the rapid developments in corporate big data/machine learning (particularly recommendation algorithms and similar marketing strategies) going on at around the same time? The model of AI history in my head has the post-Woo era of AI beginning with the Netflix recommendation algorithm in 2006, but I don't know how accurate it is.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
Epstein was a millionaire, not a billionaire.
The best published estimates of Epstein's peak net worth are around $350 million.
Epstein's main source of wealth is his relationship with Les Wexner, who founded L Brands, a retail empire which ended up owning (among other brands) Victoria's Secret, Abercromie & Fitch, and Bath & Body Works. Googling suggests Wexner had a peak net worth of $9.6 billion, so Epstein got about 4% of it. Epstein was, over a 20-year period, managing basically all Wexner's assets apart from his L Brands stock, as well as large parts of his personal life.
It is just about plausible that Epstein was exploiting Wexner's trust to charge ridiculously high fees (charging 2-and-20 to buy leveraged S&P futures is a good living if you can get it) to manage Wexner's non-L Brands assets and made the $350 million in a legal-but-scuzzy way. It is also possible, and in my view more likely given Epstein's history of criminality, that he was embezzling. But you don't need a non-Wexner sources of dirty money to explain Epstein's wealth.
Incidentally, Wexner met Epstein before Maxwell did (1987 vs "early 1990's") and was deeply involved in pro-Israel activism, so if Epstein was a Mossad asset it makes a lot more sense that Wexner rather than Maxwell made the initial contacts. Top conspiracy theory is that of course Wexner did not in fact display uncharacteristic naivety in his relationship with his majordomo, and was in fact deliberately overpaying Epstein as a way of paying him under the table for his work for Israel. (I'm not sure why I don't believe this one - it actually makes a lot of sense).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
Robert Maxwell was deeply involved with the Israeli deep state, but the dates don't line up for him to have recruited Epstein. Mossad membership is not hereditary, and nothing apart from her parentage points to Ghislaine being Mossad. If she was, she wouldn't have been senior enough to be Epstein's handler (in any case, as a diaspora Jew who never lived in Israel she would not have been eligible for the required Israeli security clearance). Plus there are plenty of other Israeli figures in the Epstein files, up to and including former Prime Minister Ehud Barack, who could have recruited and/or handled Epstein, if he was in fact Mossad.
I find Epstein being Mossad plausible, but on balance less likely than not because I think Mossad would have tried to cover up the sex crimes if he was their top asset. I don't find either Maxwell being responsible plausible.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
Known philanthropists can get academics and other people whose work is funded by similar patronage-begging to email them back for the obvious reasons. In addition, Minsky and Bach were affiliated with the MIT Media Lab, whose director Joi Ito was deeply committed to keeping the Epsteinbucks flowing to the point where (assuming the information about Neri Oxman which became public during the epic Ackman-Big Academia social media feud is roughly correct) being willing to put on dog-and-pony shows for Epstein was a condition of continued employment.
Chomsky is a piece of shit who didn't do anything for Epstein that he wouldn't have done for Pol Pot, of course.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
I think we can, and in this case should, hold off on the invective until after the funeral.
There are plenty of blameworthy people in this affair who are still alive and still hold office in the University of Cambridge. Let's take the time to go after them. Hilary Cremin for instance, apparently has advanced skills in "Peace Education" which I am sure could usefully be deployed in Somalia for a few years, which would also provide her with some source material for her autoethnographical research.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
Although she doesn't explicitly benefit from formal affirmative action, parts of the conservative movement have a strong felt need for black and female talking heads in the same way that establishment institutions do.
Per her Wikipedia article, her first big break was being hired by TPUSA as "director of urban engagement" which sounds like a job title you would use if you specifically wanted to bring a black person on board, or at least do targetted outreach to black people (for which a black talking head is practically a necessity - black Americans don't listen to white movement conservatives for good reasons). Wikipedia being Wikipedia, they darkly hint that she was hired as a token black in order to deflect allegations of racism against TPUSA.
Despite the lack of formal affirmative action on the right, I think a pure grifter could do better as a black conservative than a black leftist because there is so little competition. "Reasonably attractive" is also more valuable in right-wing spaces than left-wing ones.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
My wife is a freelance writer and she only signs over full copyright when she writes for in-house publications in large organisations, or early in her career when she was working on the type of day-rate contract that would now be considered disguised employment and trigger tax liability under IR35.
If before the war you had told the average person that at the end of the war the Iranian regime would still be in power, that the Straits would be marginally less open to shipping than before the war, that there would be no change in the status of the Iranian HEU stockpile that had been buried under rubble a year earlier, and that the US had achieved this result based on a huge drawdown of hard-to-replace munitions stockpiles, this would be seen as a draw, and a net negative for the American national interest.
Bombing Iran, destroying its navy, killing its top leaders, dismantling its militias, and blockading its ports doesn't benefit America unless it also delivers a political goal.
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