Malcolm X told you 60 years ago: The white liberal’s concern for black people is abstract, performative. The black people to the white liberal is as a moral bludgeon to wield against white conservatives, and they attack any black person who refuses to play along.
If the lives of black people actually improved, they would vote on issues like tax policy, national security, immigration - and inevitable veer in the direction of partisan parity - therefore the lives of black people must not improve.
If Latinos assimilate, they will vote on education, taxes, and social issues - rather than ethnic identity - and inevitable veer toward partisan parity, therefore Latinos must not assimilate (we’re told assimilation is “cultural genocide”, “selling out”, etc.)
A terrible set of incentives emerges for a political coalition of the fringes: any fringe-dweller who improves their lot and moves toward the socioeconomic middle is a sellout, an Uncle Tom, a traitor.
The Soviets used two strategies to discourage potential defectors: 1) threats (incl threatening families), 2) convince them that the West was vicious, implacable devil that wished them dead. Who can deny that this is the strategy of progressives and the Democratic Party in 2022?
The worst thing that could happen to the Democrats is that the lives of their minority constituencies actually improve, and that their political decisions begin to reflect elements other than terror, rage, desperation, and misery.
Because they insist on the primacy of words, and reject as irrational the idea that both are happier when the man sees his job is not to achieve a meeting of minds, but to manage her emotional state, keep her calm, content, optimistic… less like your bro, more like your horse.
She won’t like hearing that, so don’t say it to her. But make that shift and thank me later.
Yes, but she has to learn to treat you like a child in some ways, too, like “aw, he thinks the sounds coming out of his mouth mean things and are important…”
This is a list of science/engineering achievements, but also a description of capital flows. The way to make big $ in the 2000s was through finance and tech, and too many of our best brains were wasted creating CDOs and dick pic apps.
Add in that labor & regulatory arbitrage provided industry w/an easy way to drive up the bottom line without the risky business of innovation, and you get what we have now, secular stagnation or whatever.
In the most recent MartyrMade Substack essay on slavery and the leadup to the Civil War, I describe some of the bizarre practices of societies encountered by Europeans during the Age of Exploration, to try to put the European response in perspective.
Thread.
J.G Frazer, in his book, The Golden Bough, summarizes an Aztec ritual dedicated to the Maize Goddess, Chicomecohuatl. A young girl was chosen to play the role of the goddess, and was paraded around town to be worshipped by the people. Then came the festival's climax:
The conquistadores were hard men, accustomed to violence, but what they found in Mexico shook them to their core.
After the ‘93 Oslo Accords made it increasingly difficult to legally establish settlements in the West Bank, settlers began to employ increasingly sophisticated means to work around Israeli law.
This is Antenna Hill in the West Bank:
Settlements continued to expand, with right wing Israeli politicians helping to to skirt Israel’s own laws. Despite being there illegally, the govt decided it was necessary to construct a cell phone tower on a nearby hilltop to fill a blind spot at a bend on the highway.
It was determined to be a security need, since it was unacceptable that Israelis might be caught in a bad situation w/o cell service. The hilltop, owned by Palestinian farmers, was seized and connected to the grid and water supply to facilitate construction.
GOP primary rant. RDS & other supporters of Not Trump, this is for you.
In 2004-12, Bush, McCain, and Romney each got ~60 million votes. That’s what the GOP was stuck at until Trump came along. In 2020, Trump got 14 MILLION more votes than any other GOP candidate in history. I’ve yet to hear the “Trump can’t win” crowd explain how their guy is going to beat every GOP candidate in history by more than 14 million votes.
I get the impression that they know their guy can’t match that number, and their argument is that they don’t need to beat it because RDS or whoever won’t drive Democrat turnout the way Trump does. It essentially boils down to their guy being more palatable to the enemy, which is not going to be an effective argument in a polarized environment. What drove turnout for Biden was Democrats using COVID to scam the mail-in ballot system. That’s a much more plausible explanation for Biden getting 16 million more votes than Hillary, despite not campaigning, than that Trump drove Biden’s turnout. Imo this is obviously true, and people claiming otherwise are either disingenuous or seeing what they want to see.
Personally, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell Biden would’ve even reached Hillary’s total in a regular election where people had to get off their asses on Election Day. After the pussy tape and all the rest of Trump’s antics before the 2016 election, everyone who was going to hate him already hated him. He didn’t have a swarm of new haters in 2020 - he added 11 million votes to his 2016 total. The idea that Trump gained 11 million votes, but then on top of that another 16 million people who didn’t hate him in 2016 had just seen enough in the intervening years to come out of the woodwork… seems patently absurd. I think the regime knows, or at least us afraid, that they can’t get Biden more than Trump’s 74 million 2020 votes without cheating, and that’s why they’re prosecuting him.
For RDS & co supporters, a real question: Why do you think your guy can do more than 14 million votes better than every non-Trump Republican in history? Especially when so many of you don’t seem to care about alienating Trump’s base? Saying that MAGA people are idiotic cultist low-class trash, but by the way please vote for my guy after we axe Trump is, I regret to inform you, not a winning strategy.
Then what does it matter? If Biden gets 81 million votes again then it doesn’t matter who the GOP candidate is.
The argument that Trump’s behavior since 2020 has alienated moderates is cancelled out by the fact that Biden’s administration has been a very-public disaster, and he’s literally falling asleep in TV interviews.
This, like Jen’s please clap moment, is something you couldn’t really imagine Trump doing. Trump is never self-evaluating when he speaks (sometimes to his detriment), never second-guesses himself. If he feels like smiling, he smiles, scowling, he scowls. It can be obnoxious, but…
Jeb’s name is so retarded that autocorrect keeps changing it to Jen no matter how many times I try.
Look at him. Just like his rambling stream of consciousness interviews, his emotions manifest on his face as soon as they form.