I believe Obamacare was not designed to succeed. Literally succeed, that is. It is designed to fail in a direction that leads to further nationalization. In that sense, failure is still a success. Regardless of political affiliation, improving Obamacare is getting rid of it. What you get rid of it for is the question. Just my gut feelings on the matter, I wouldn't make any solid arguments for this notion.

I agree with that although I remember the Scooter Libby prosecution being pretty sketchy.

The Democrats aren't ambitious enough to be accelerationists.

*yawn*

Cool podcast on accelerationism, for anyone interested. In general this podcast is my favorite out there right now, although they unfortunately don't put out episodes very often.

https://manifesto.fireside.fm/12

https://www.apple.com/apple-card/

ahaha and here i was joking that apple is wall street's darling for creating securitizable products but turns out they're just making securities

It's a credit card by Apple, not a bank, making it much worse! Now your creditor knows where you go after work, how late you are usually, who you speak to, who your drug dealer is, and what your porn preferences are. At least it reminds you when the first of the month is lolll

Damn, us Americans are sitting here with our ****-tier conspiracy theories like flat earth & vaccines while Muslims are going full ****ing galaxy brain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az4BEmu0Q_w

Don't ask me why YouTube autoplayed this for me but it did.

****ing technology djinns rofl, oh and THE JEWS.

I'm in tears laughing in my office like a maniac this is so funny. 5:53 WHERE DID THE JEWS LEARN THIS MAGIC??

Alright, in summary, that was only on par with the dumbest things American fundamentalists have ever said, but when you add in the extreme antisemitism it gains both the badge of being supremely dumb and supremely racist. So yeah, that **** is scary af.

It’s extraordinary that in the past few years mainstream America has so totally reprogrammed its attitudes towards Muslims that instead of antisemitism seeming like the norm amongst Muslims it’s now seen as a comical outlier or oddity. Like, go read something written around the time of the Charlie Hebdo attacks and what people were saying about Muslims, even liberal commentators. It might as well have been written decades ago, it’s so coarse in what it assumes about Muslims -- assuming that they are intrinsically other, and that there is such a thing as "Muslim values" that are incompatible with liberal values, or that publishing offensive comics of Muhammad is actually a necessary response to the Hebdo attacks.

Of course there’s also some reason to think that some aspects of the prevalent attitudes don’t entirely conform to the reality, especially regarding antisemitism. It's not really that funny. http://global100.adl.org/#map/meast

In the few friendships I've had with Muslims, I've never seen it personally. Which either means American Muslims are less radicalized, or they just don't let their hair down that easily.

I'm definitely surprised a bit by that map, really unfortunate.

In regards to humor, it's not really funny, but I have a weird funny bone. Often things which seem so absurd they border on satire make me laugh. Like, calling technology Jewish magic is what I'd expect from a Sacha Baron Cohen skit. That anyone could speak like that unironically was unfathomable to me.

If I had to hazard a guess: Muslims are now part of the #resistance, so they are beyond reproach in American politics perhaps (although perhaps the criticism that Ilhan Omar has sustained from some voices on the left is a counter example to this!). Not that I am endorsing any sweeping generalizations that may have existed before, but the narrative of the left since Trump has been to paint them as the victims of Trumpism, and in a lot of ways I think this is a really good thing.

That all said, as somebody who knows nothing about this topic and doesn't really know any Muslims closely, I'd hazard a guess that when it comes to the topic of anti-Semitism among Muslims, wouldn't the bigger factor be geography? American Muslims don't grow up in schools that brainwash them into demonizing Israelis (for example).

Edit: also, a lot of the really awful opinions that are apparently popular in Muslim countries are total non-starters in the US, so even if Americans chose to harbor controversial opinions more consistent with their foreign peers than their fellow Americans, it would only serve to draw attention to said abhorrent views. I also like to think that the West has a moderating influence on some of these things culturally anyway, and that anybody, regardless of religious background, is capable of modernizing their worldview when put in the right environment.

Yeah, I would never assume that someone harbored any kind of antisemitic prejudices just because they happened to be Muslim.

However, the pervasiveness of anti-semitism in the Middle East may be relevant in the whole Ilhan Omar controversy. But that whole thing is super complicated, and I wouldn't assert with any degree of confidence that anything about how her background informs public comments that she's made.



Yeah, well, regimes in the Middle East often use anti-semitism and anti-Zionism as a scapegoat to distract from their own abusive policies towards their own people, so it's effectively a state-endorsed policy. Like, even Egypt, whose government has made peace with Israel, and which has even cooperated with the Israeli Air Force to combat ISIS in the Sinai, still widely disseminates antisemitic material through its media, because pointing to the "foreign threat" helps to maintain internal solidarity. In quite a few Arab states, there's a real gap between public opinion on the one hand, where hatred of Jews and Israel is widespread largely because the public has been fed on government sponsored anti-semitic propaganda for decades, and, on the other hand, the views of their governments, which see Israel as a potential ally in the region in the broader regional conflict with Iran.

It's really bad, in part because it means that any strides that Israel has made with Arab allies in the region is fundamentally premised on the disenfranchisement of the people who actually live in those countries, and therefore, on ensuring that they remain autocratic. If they were democratic societies, they'd behave in a profoundly different way.

(On the other hand, if you're looking for safe harbor to promulgate absolutely despicable ideas on domestic soil, look no further than the fundamentalist Christian right...)

It's more socially acceptable in the US to be an antisemite than it is to criticize Israel.

Where's Israel in that list of countries

Isn't this just the way it goes everywhere, though?

The UK government got into a habit of blaming the EU for its regulatory problems, so when the people were given the vote they chose to listen. And in the US, would Trump have been elected had US oligarchs not spent so much time blaming cheap Chinese labor for their own failure to allocate American labor? I would guess not.

Obviously this isn't as bad as government-sponsored radical anti-semitism but there are still consequences to this sort of rhetoric.

As evidence of this, you can look at Turkey, which through much of the 20th century was actually a fairly close ally to Israel (it was, I believe, the first Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel after it was founded) and played a central role in the US' Middle East strategy during the Cold War. But the close relationship with Israel was largely built on the dominance of the deep state in that country, which meant effectively rule by the military, who saw it as being in Turkey's interest to maintain close ties with Israel, because that meant also close ties with NATO and the US. Erdogan's rise has largely been a story of trying to combat the military establishment and develop policies that appeal more directly to the people (although he's done it in a totally populist fashion), and his anti-Israel/anti-Jewish rhetoric is a part of that populism.

Yeah I don't think there's really anything unique about it. It's part of a larger story that's happening virtually everywhere, of accountable elites making unpopular decisions on behalf of both their governments and other interests that don't necessarily align with the interests or with the wishes of those governments' citizenries. The only big difference is that most governments in the Middle East are vastly more repressive than, say, the governments of Western countries, and even less accountable, so there's a much larger gap between public opinion and what the governments does.

That's true, but I'd still be careful underestimating the pressures built up behind frustrated promises of change. Western politics has been dominated by a sort of bipartisan liberal consensus that has effectively discounted what the public wants despite clear voter intention. Is that better or worse than an oppressive dictatorship that the public can't even fantasize about changing?

And given the revolving door between government and industry, can we really say western political elites are actually accountable? The ousted western politicians who engineered the response to the 2007 financial crisis (bailouts, worldwide failure to prosecute, worldwide failure to institute meaningful regulation/oversight) are mostly all working in finance. The public held them accountable alright, by firing them into vastly better paid jobs outside of public scrutiny.

F.A. Hayek said you could have both at the same time! :downs:

From the sound of things, there's no route to cleanly fix it since the continued rhetoric will only ingrain itself further. They can't repress beliefs forever, but they also can't let up without losing support.

It does seem to be pretty much a global trend, just expressed differently. Once a government becomes illiberal and wants to act in way that oppose the public will, it must predicate its existence on some kind of narrative, some amount of lying. That's how in the U.S. you get people blaming Mexicans for so many ills that are unrelated, and I suppose that's how you get antisemitic views in Muslim nations. I'm getting a sense that illiberal governments predicated on conspiracy theories are really bad.



I don't know a huge amount about Ataturk's weird arrangement, but wasn't there an effective balance of power between the military and government? The military's role being to dethrone potential dictators from Turkey.

In either case, is he tapping into old antisemitic views or is did he create new ones to radicalize people against the military during the last attempt to remove him from office? I'm guessing both.

Now it's better, but I don't think there's any guarantee that it will remain that way. I also don't know though that discontent is really so severe at the moment. Things could get better. But still, to go back to this post Reid made:



I'm not nearly so sanguine that a massive economic catastrophe, or a massive war, or some kind of ecological crisis, would have the effect of producing a more equitable society, as it did during the 1930s and 40s in the US. I suppose it's possible, but I see no real reason why it would be a more natural way for things to develop than other alternatives. It seems to my mind like a more natural response is that western states would adopt a model that more closely resembles China's, where technology would come to play a much more invasive role in citizens lives, and it would be used to subdue the public and prevent civic unrest.

But I think things would have to be pretty bad for that to happen.

Also, that bit about the public can't even fantasize about changing, another plug: it reminds of me that episode of the podcast about accelerationism I posted recently. The accelerationist critique of the current system is precisely that it destroys the economic and cultural conditions that even make it possible to imagine that things could be different than how they already are. One of the things that they argue on that podcast is that accelerationism is an ideology that only a few years ago was on the fringes but now is basically boilerplate and just part of how ordinary people interpret and understand the world, even if they aren't aware of the origins of their ideas.

I wish I knew more about that. Bernard Lewis' magnum opus is a book about the development of the state in Turkey that's been on my list for ages but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

I think Yascha Mounk has said some really smart things about this. For him, the problem with elite takeover isn't that countries become illiberal, but that they become too liberal at the expense of countries' democratic character. One way to think of liberalism and democracy as distinct traditions is that liberalism and constitutionalism go hand in hand: liberalism is largely about guaranteeing protections of individuals that even the legislature, which is generally supposed to the most democratic of institutions, doesn't have the right to take away. That's why you see in Israel, Hungary and Poland that the elected officials are going after their judiciaries: the largely unelected and unaccountable courts are blocking the legislative agendas of elected political figures that represent majoritarian groups who want to use the legislature to secure special privileges for the majorities, but are being constrained by their constitutions (which, of course, is one of the important functions of courts, a way of providing checks and balances). So their limiting the ability of courts to constrain them. It's majoritarian rule without the constitutional constraints that are supposed to protect civic liberties (or at least it's going in that direction).

I think it's kind of different from what's happening in the US, where the courts are being used as a way of creating change by circumventing the legislature, because there's so much disfunction in congress.

But yeah, going back to Yascha Mounk's point: when the elite liberal side completely suppresses the democratic side, you're left with a situation where all significant issues of governance are decided entirely by technocrats -- which potentially explains why our politics has fundamentally turned to culture wars in recent years. When effecting change through democratic political institutions is impossible, it's only worthwhile to talk about social and cultural issues.

Because just like the 1930s, present-day inequities are only possible because of globalism. Or, as Adam Smith puts it,



...when your shivering masses are a world away, you don't have to stay awake at night worrying about them burning your house down.


Another major crisis that causes capital destruction or expropriation, or, equivalently, a civilization or global supply chain collapse that causes de facto expropriation because the foreign owner is no longer physically capable of enforcing or benefiting from that ownership, doesn't technically, necessarily mean society becomes more equal. In practice, though, the more nice stuff you have, the more money you need to spend to protect it (and yourself). You need to pay guards a certain amount to keep them honest. Then, your industrial wages have to go up because law enforcement is crowding you out. I'm not sure what the equilibrium should be, but I would guess it's much less favorable than imperialism - which is ultimately why they did it, right?

My hobby: confusing advertisers.

I subscribed myself to /r/catholicism on reddit, I don't remember why. Now I read the posts from time to time and it's interesting to see what they think (apparently, abortion is a genocide that makes Hitler look soft in comparison).

Now Reddit is determined to sell me Catholic stuff, particularly Catholic Bibles. I guess it's a reasonable assumption that he who reads Catholic posts is very likely to be Catholic, but I'm still amused by the dumb logic of it all.

I'm surprised that Google doesn't try to sell me catholic **** given how religiously I read Ross Douthat articles.

I like reading a lot of stuff on the DPRK and the google/facebook ads I get always seem to be related to K-Pop or stuff like that. Guess the algorithm can't tell the Koreas apart.

Facebook has popped up something asking me if I purchased something and to review their advertisement because they, of course, already know I bought it, and, of course, know they advertised it to me. The funny thing is I don't think I've ever purchased anything because I saw a facebook advertisement. They just throw up ads for stuff that they see I've already browsed for somewhere else. It's kind of creepy and I'll let them know if I answer the questions they've been asking me.

I took a gander and I'm not sure if that subreddit is one of the daft roleplay ones or not.

Me either.

I heard an interesting take lately on the all-American trend to try and rebrand Nazism as a left-wing movement. Their idea was that it's not always a slander of the left, a cheap way to go "hur hur the left are the real nazis". There's also the desire to portray history as though there's no bad consequence for moving further to the right. It's an attack on centrism. Previously the argument for centrist views was, too far left you're a Soviet, too far right you're a Nazi. If all of the worst crimes are by the political left, it seems as though going further right has no bad consequences.

I think it's often to remind you of when you last looked. Sometimes I'll look up something on Amazon, decide not to buy it, then later it appears in ads. It's not meant to be a neutral ad, it's meant to remind me of when I searched and makes me think if I still want to purchase it.

To be fair, the "center" in politics today is probably a lot more to the right than it was some years ago. Not only that, the american """""left""""" (dems & co) would probably be considered center-right in some other countries.


This whole "nazis are left-wing" phenomenon is a direct result of that libertarian "left=more state=opression"/"right=less state=FREEDOM" bull**** that a lot of poorly informed people buy. Plus it just fits so well in the general american worldview that it's not surprising it's a thing. It's a bizarre and even less rational form of a red scare revival, where everything bad is left wing and therefore everything left wing is bad.

As a non-american I wonder, has the failed Hanoi summit had any impact in the general liberal american populace's (or anyone's who's not explicitely pro-DPRK) view of north Korea?

I mean, originally everyone was certain Trump was going to get played and make too many concessions and that the DPRK wasn't going to denuclearize etc, then when the Vietnam summit fell apart, Trump presented his version as to why the summit had failed, then north Korea presented theirs, which even the ****ing US state department confirmed was more accurate than Trump's, then finally news of Trump's ridiculous note to Kim came around and... I mean, come on.