Tanista
20hr ago
There is a bright side: if you were overcome by Saladins there'd be nothing to learn! Everyone understands losing to a Hannibal.
If Western civilization does die (dubious) it'll be a reinforcement of the importance of the concept of decadence which it, reasonably, thought it had demoted to the same status as polio.
Tanista
20hr ago
For those who want to see how it'll play out: the Green Party is going to be a bloodless example soon. They're already being outflanked by the Gaza voters they let in when Israel became one of the more important nodes of the Omnicause, they're already folding to more and more extreme statements that will squeeze out leftists who can't live with their stance on zionism and eventually they'll just try to knock over Polanski and replace him with one of their own.
Does capitalism work better in the long term than socialism? Does it lift all boats higher than socialism does? In the conditions of 20th century economics, yes, undoubtedly. In the conditions that we are now entering, however, I am not so sure
The condition being massive welfare states - used by capitalists to fend off socialists at first - eating up more and more of the nation's money and vitality? I'm not really sure what that has to do with the old capitalist-socialist ideological debate.
You can't build because boomers want to keep their house prices up (and keep certain people out), you're taxed to shit to pay for welfare systems meant to solve elder poverty that never expected this fertility rate matched to this level of support for even well-off boomers, you get migrants because nobody wants this gravy train to stop. Trying to blame the rich, or capitalism, as this new class of Gary Stevenson populists do is just cope from people who can't admit that the system they're so proud of is fundamentally flawed and in danger.
If we don't want to blame the problem on socialism, I don't see how we can blame it on capitalism.
Tanista
4d ago
Trump will remain the most powerful politician in America likely until the day he dies.
This is good for Trump. It is questionable how good it is for Republicans.
Even if we grant that the GOP would not have won the elections that Trump did, a lot of the political capital and momentum of the movement post-2024 win has been bled off on Trump-specific nonsense like his potential connections to Epstein and now this massively unpopular war.
Why else would Dems still be talking about prosecuting Trump if his political power disappears when he’s not in the WH?
Because they believe he tried to subvert democracy, and voters cannot be trusted to punish that.
I find the ultimate thematic thrust somewhere between muddled and banal. It seems like the ultimate point of the movie is to say that making satirical art about evil elites doesn't stop elites from being evil. Which... yes, that's true, but who doesn't know that?
This is one of those takes anyone you talk to will agree with, then people hound Ed Sheeran for not freeing Palestine and cream over Don't Look Up.
I also think the movie's claim is much stronger. It's not just that it won't stop billionaires from being evil, it's actively soporific, a false catharsis. Jesse Plemons' character is a pretty creepy figure when you think about it, and he uses the play the same way Digger tries to use Riz Ahmed.
I don't disagree that Rowling gave him something but it never sat right with me how he and the Slytherins were written throughout the series in general. For a series that makes so much importance of love and understanding, having 1/4 of the student body be cartoonishly evil cartoon bullies feels incongruous. Hell, most Slytherins aren't even allowed to be good-looking — the majority are described as ugly chuds with the appearance of gorillas, even the girls. The artistocrats among them are invariably shown to be sniveling bullies who hide behind their wealth and have no shred of character
It makes some sense that Slytherin is structurally chuddish (though most of them just don't seem to give much of a shit beyond general teenage tribalism up until they're put to a choice by Voldemort's takeover of Hogwarts).
If you want character, there are already two houses dedicated to that, and one catch-all house in Hufflepuff for people who are mostly just chill about things.
There's a constant influx of Muggleborns yearly (and we have no evidence they perform worse than wizards), and it's quite clear that there are a lot of talented aristos and purebloods who simply don't care to hate on them and are just fine climbing the shared status hierarchy. We see two generations of purebloods - James and Sirius have the bluest of blood - weeding themselves out of the Slytherin gene pool because they simply don't have a problem benefiting from Muggleborns.
Slytherins are the equivalent of Roman patricians who never made their peace with plebians becoming Senators, and so lost out on a bunch of talent and marginalized themselves.
Somewhat fucked up given JKR's other points on stereotyping, but makes some sense.
The only thing we actually see harm pureblood families is association with Voldemort. The ones that go extinct are because of him, he preserves nothing.
It's almost too on the nose that, as his enemies start to finally get a bead on how to kill him, Voldemort becomes occupied taking pleasure in bullying the aristocratic Malfoys and putting their only living heir in mortal danger.
Tanista
12d ago
In Caplan's eyes immigration is undoubtedly good for the migrants themselves, to a massive degree, while also benefiting the receiving country.
Imagine that Caplan believes that the benefits to the natives of avoiding immigration are not so great as to outweigh the damage done to various peoples who could be living better lives or the foregone economic growth , and is anything in his behavior incongruent?
Tanista
12d ago
He is a blank slatist who believes in magic soil.
I don't know how this can possibly apply to Caplan, given his stated views on IQ.
I’m an IQ realist, all the way. IQ tests aren’t perfect, but they’re an excellent proxy for what ordinary language calls “intelligence.” A massive body of research confirms that IQ predicts not just educational success, but career success. Contrary to critics, IQ tests are not culturally biased; they fairly measure genuine group differences in intelligence.
Tanista
15d ago
If the club is a money pit, that is the club's problem.
The clubs don't work like the US where they can be uprooted at will. They're privately owned but considered semi-public goods or at least important cultural artifacts. Maybe it's irrational, but it's not considered acceptable that anyone can buy one, vastly overpay (which makes life harder for their competitors) and potentially run it into the ground by leaving it with the debt from the higher expenditures when they lose interest.
One way to preserve this would be to insist on a fan-owned status for all of them. But this would obviously piss off a lot of owners. You could also lock out foreign owners, but then you miss out on their capital (and piss off owners, again). Salary cap would piss off players.
So you get this. This is actually the compromise that comes of the system being more capitalist than the US.
High class rape stories go viral.
The intersectionalists made a lot about how "MeToo" was first put forward by a black activist in the 2000s, but didn't take off until celebrity women used it.
In that case a lot of the lurid stories were true.
Tanista
18d ago
"Some people did something, as a certain Congresswoman said, but we're not going to cede the whole moral core of the faith by saying it's Muslims as such."
Funny, I was just thinking of this comment chain, and some claims I made because of this new CATO article
Data from the State Department through February 2026 show that the Trump administration has cut legal immigration by nationals of 45 majority-Muslim countries by 96 percent since December 2024. Monthly immigrant visa issuances and permanent lawful refugee admissions fell from 21,096 in December 2024 to 808 in February 2026.
The graph below shows that this outcome was not the result of seasonal trends since the drop from February 2024 was nearly as significant. Immigrant visas—primarily for family members of US citizens—were down 95 percent. Meanwhile, refugee resettlement—immigrants admitted lawfully based on threats of persecution abroad—was completely ended for majority-Muslim countries, dropping from 5,157 admissions in December 2024 to 0 admissions in February 2026.
I guess this is a win for @Iconochasm, because my take was that Trump had downsized the Muslim ban because of the problems with getting it passed. I had heard from family that he'd made processing for West African countries much harder (by requiring a large bond) but didn't think other nations were that impacted.
I don't quite know why this is the case
It doesn't seem that complicated. Any sort of reasonable standard for war crimes or violation of international law damns Hamas (and Hezbollah) as much as Israel and functions as a casus belli for Israeli actions against Hamas that would cost a ton of lives. You go this way and then you're just Biden and everyone else complicit in the "genocide".
Any rejection of moral standards turns this into an amoral contest of strength, which Palestinians cannot win. If they both suck, why not go with the richer, more competent, more militarily capable force and close your eyes and let nature take its course?
So the only response when faced with things done by the other side is to deflect, deny, minimize and hope that enough people have internalized the progressive stack enough to find those denials convincing.
It makes sense for the Palestinians to do this - though kind of sad that they've had to Christianize their jihadism - but why Westerners care is the strange thing.
tl;dr: They're pussies. Pussies cannot win fights, so pussies construct a moral system in which responding to their indirect or feeble aggression with the direct version is unacceptable (this has already been trialed in local contexts with the whole prescription against "punching down")
Tanista
18d ago
Is this not just the general pattern of how everyone handles instances of violence (or, more generally, violations of something they claim to be a principle they hold when they actually don't) against an enemy?
Without getting into whether all these deflections are equally credible, I suppose one odd thing is that liberal, secular Westerners are deploying tribal rationalizations for various Middle Eastern groups whose values are very different from theirs (or they outright swear hostility).
The Israelis and Ukrainians and Russians and everyone else who shrugs at reports of crimes from their own are at least behaving in a normal, if not morally upstanding, way.
Weinstein did take punitive action against those who refused him (on top of the reports of his generally violent and unpleasant behavior). So there was at least an element of coercion.
Tanista
20d ago
I actually went back to remind myself by skimming his Why I don't criticize Israel post.
It's more ambiguous on Zionism than I remembered. Basically: Zionism is wrong but understandable for Jews given the situation they're dealing with. Which is Zionist, we count those!
This is why slut-shaming is such a bad idea. Give women incentives to make false accusations of sexual assault, or even appear to do so, and women who have actually been assaulted will find the matter treated with much less gravity than it deserves; the perpetrators will then have the opportunity to victimise more women, who otherwise would have been spared such horror.
Yes, this is the feminist argument for not slut shaming. The problem is that other feminist reforms to the status quo make false accusations more likely. It's a difficult crime to prove. The feminist line that we should just believe women (or even shower some lucky ones with fame and attention for lurid stories no one can criticize) creates an incentive in and of itself. If women are people, not saints, this cannot be avoided.
The actual purpose of (male) slut-shaming wasn't just to deter inchastity. It was to create an incentive towards behaviors that would not create ambiguity about what happened to a woman in the first place, which was rational given that men were expected to take on the burden and risk of avenging the honor of their women if they had been raped. So the women is expected to take on the burden of not behaving in a way that both puts her at risk directly and implies that maybe she just was a slut who changed her mind and the blood feud/investigation wasn't worth it.
This obviously cannot work in a world where nobody follows those rules. If a woman can choose to get drunk and get a train ran on her and later claims rape, the ambiguity is much harder to resolve.
The only solution feminists have settled on that lets them have their cake and eat it is simply assuming the man is prima facie guilty. Someone is going to have to be responsible for some of these unfortunate cases.
Tanista
20d ago
The treatment of the two blend together because there's often no way to tell.
But rape was still seen as outrageous. The story of the expulsion of the last king of Rome could be legendary, but it's interesting then that they chose to have the whole thing kicked off by the rape of a noblewoman if seduction alone would suffice.
Don't think this is possible under Title IX (which is what I believed Obama used to get them to get more involved in these cases). Universities need administrators to manage compliance like any other business and the government will react to lobbying for more interference in captive institutions.
Tanista
20d ago
Viral story, sûre, but not actually much to see here.
It does tell us that there's only so long the media can resist before sticking its hand in the "lurid story about college men that may or may not be true" jar.
The UVA rape case was...twelve years ago? Mattress Girl was 11. So about a decade at max stretch.
Tanista
21d ago
Seems deeply unwise compared to letting them into a coalition and having them disappoint people through governing, like the Tories did the Lib Dems, and Trump is doing now.
But, hey, I'm a naive observer of German politics. Maybe in a decade this'll prove some genius move. Maybe Germans really cannot handle their liquor and even a sip of the far-right will be a jump off the slippery slope.
Tanista
21d ago
The whole Van Jones "character matters" critique of uncouthness is validated by Trump's later actions.
It's not like the man lied. He was quite adamant about refusing to even contemplate losing, or being transparent about certain things. Some people saw that as a game, while others argued that such a basic failure of character would show itself.
They actually have parties that challenge the orthodoxy, but that may make it worse. Germany's attempts to quarantine the AfD forces coalitions that cannot really be that ideologically coherent given the inherent compromise needed to neutralize the votes of a growing share of the electorate.
Is it though? That seems to make perfect sense: they're democracies.
What is strange is that rioting is typically not the activity of the old. So young people apparently riot when benefits to old people they were never gonna see themselves are cut. That's a psychological puzzle
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