Treason, sedition, nah.

I think that if he would be indicted for money laundering would be enough. Because what else were those Russian clients buying his real estate. You think the Trump people would use "due diligence" on looking at where the money came? Especially when normal financial institutions wouldn't lent him. After all, Trump declared that his financial dealings were "off limits".

Israel has accepted that it will be in perpetual war and that this isn't a too big burden for it. With the US fully embracing Israel, other Western countries basically accept this as de facto. Joe Biden won't move back the US Embassy to Tel Aviv.

And there's really nobody in power seriously wanting peace. Extremists are in power or at least have enough influence to dominate the political environment. In the Middle East, those politicians that sign peace agreements are assassinated by their own people and the assassins are viewed as heroes.

So when a Palestinian cheers an Israeli death, it's not the same thing. If an Israeli is killed in this conflict, it's not the same thing. To interpret the violence between these two groups as morally equivalent is wilfully ignoring context. — Benkei

Just to take out of context what you wrote will just entrench further some that they are right and you are wrong. I did read your points, but still, what is the difference between one or another human being killed?

Anyway, this is quite a unfruitful way to look at a conflict. Every civilian casualty is a tragedy. Every combatant casualty is also a tragedy as we are talking about human beings. Conflicts are either solved by military means or by diplomacy, not by moral righteousness. I think the better way would be to look at what to do here.

I think that problem in general are religious fanatics who cherish this conflict. They keep sanity away from decision making.

Typical? I don't know, maybe for alarmist outlets claiming — Count Timothy von Icarus

For example the media, let's say. Usually you don't have great scoop that the things are getting back to normal. (Here the pandemic has been an exception.) No news is good news, as the saying goes.

Models projecting a century out are subject to all sorts of problems, but for the last two decades they have stayed fairly on track. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Demographic models are very accurate for a couple of decades: everybody that can increase the population is already alive and migration can be forecasted. Yet 50 to 100 years and then the modelling gets surprisingly difficult.

Because that isn't projected, Europe is much larger than the three largest Western European nations' populations combined. The French government doesn't collect data on race, so extrapolations are all by third parties. — Count Timothy von Icarus

A typical way to get statistic models that show Europeans becoming a minority is simply use the peak migration levels or extrapolate past increase trend in migration to the future. Then you can get these statistics showing that Europe's population will change. Of course, these models didn't take into account that EU would decrease immigration as it did. Or later that a pandemic happened.

Will someone worried about immigration use a chart like this:


Or these kinds:



The story can go on differently when the public attention is somewhere else.

Thinking like that, would it be possible to make any perfect geometric drawing?

Let's assume that you have draw a square that has exactly 10 cm sides. So not only 10,00 cm or 10,000000 cm, but with total accuracy to be exactly 10 cm. Again, you simply cannot do it.

Mathematical objects aren't limited by our physical limitations on what we can physically do in reality.

However, the same body of research shows that explicit ethnic power sharing agreements preform very poorly at reducing the risk of further disintegration.

Anyhow, I think it's overly pessimistic to think that multi-ethnic states are doomed to faliure by their borders. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Here the problem is that the success stories simply aren't taken into account. Prosperous multiethnic countries simply don't have any kind of power sharing by ethnic lines. They are not viewed as first and foremost multiethnic countries. The political fault lines are drawn by the ordinary left-right axis and not by ethnicity. We simply don't even consider them so multiethnic as they are. Think about Belgium, Canada or my country. Then again Italy, German and France could also be seen this way too, as they are composed of multiple earlier countries.

However, the biggest factors would be those internal to Israel:

1. Demographic shifts with higher birth rates in ultra Orthodox and Middle Eastern Jews, who tended to favor conservative parties led to a long series conservative governments less in favor of peace.

2. The new Israeli border security measures were very effective. The dramatic reduction in successful terror attacks took pressure off the government to make peace. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In Demographic shifts one should mention the huge influx of East European Jews once the Soviet Union collapsed. This immigration to Israel was far larger than at any time earlier. Hence this huge influx of European immigration in the 1990's changed the political landscape, as those coming from the Soviet system likely didn't vote for the Labor party. And also created natural growth of the economy. Before that people could forecast that the Palestinian population would overcome the Jewish population because of higher fertility rates, but after such dramatic increases in population fertility rates were unimportant.



And the basic problem is that if Israel makes peace, then that peace should be upheld by all sides. Basically only Egypt and Jordan have had the ability to enforce the peace treaty with Israel where the government of Lebanon hasn't been able to control it's territory. Hence the withdrawal from Southern Lebanon was done by Ehud Barak's labor government, the Hezbollah swiftly occupied the region (which then lead to war only in six years). Especially in Egypt the peace with Israel has been a political hot potato issue in Egypt. Yet this isn't a problem as the neighbors of Israel aren't a military threat anymore to it.

In the end, Israeli leadership has decided that this is just the "new normal", a permanent state of low intensity conflict which the nation is able to endure.

I guess we know the history and no need to go there.

However why the US has quite a different approach to the conflict as in other cases was what I had in mind. This is very important in this case. We see that the whole peace process itself was started by Israel anticipating that once the Cold War was over, the US policy might change (as happened with South Africa). But that didn't happen, which is crucial here.

And of course the main issue is that this low key off and on -war has become totally sustainable for Israel: Israel can once in a while have these exchanges and a limited war with it's neighbors every once in a while without it making a huge burden for the society and economy. So the occupation can continue.

Which is tragic. But even worse are the number of elder Palestinians and children being killed. So again, I don't see the point of talking about Jews here. — Manuel

Why? They are one side in this conflict.

And to understand just why the stance of the US is what it is, it's crucial to understand how domestically different this issue is compared to let's say the Turks bombing the Kurds, the Burmese going after the Rohingya or the conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan or Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

And I gave as an example an article from 30 years ago! And failed in grammar!

And oh, the best refutation, which it should be mentioned didn't come from you: the country that I'm from doesn't have a large black minority.

Great refutations of criticism towards CRT in a discussion about "Critical Race Theory, Whiteness, and Liberalism".

So far the only person who has actually cited a single line of anything remotely resembling CRT has been ssu — StreetlightX

Rest my case.

Strawman or ad hominem, never to debate the actual issue.

Woke way to go.

How much North Sea oil can Scotland lay claim to? — Bitter Crank

North Sea Oil cannot be called a "growth industry" even if it has been sustained, to say at least. And only part of the UK production would be Scottish (knowing the English):



The hey-days of increased oil revenue are over I'd say.

Lol. Well your idea of a philosophical debate is peculiar.

An idiot can simply make up a line of influence for anything (that is positive), yet they're still an idiot whom no one has to 'defend' anything from other than to point out they they made shit up. — StreetlightX

And even easier is just to call others idiots and leave it that...

And of course, nobody actually has defended CRT by correcting the views presented (or then I've missed that, which can happen). Only few smirk about that "people have it wrong" and leave it there. (Which is typical.)

David Theo Goldberg, in the article I cited, put it best:

"It is true that anti-racism today has been turned into something of an industry. But “diversity training,” “racial equity,” “systemic” and “institutional” racism, and indeed “anti-racism” itself are not the inventions of CRT — StreetlightX

This likely is so, but it's that "industry" and it's effects that people are talking about. A theorist can simply deny his or her influence in anything (that is negative), yet it's the influence that typically is important. When ideas and theories are implemented to the real world, the outcomes can be far from what the thinker had in mind. In a similar fashion one could for example deny that the neoclassical "Chicago School of economics" has nothing to do with the current economic system and it's failures (or successes). Surely the economy and the financial system existed well before the economics department got it's first successful and notable neoclassical economist.

Robin DiAngelo has been mentioned too, but she's a corporate grifter exploiting the self-serving guilt of white liberals who milk catharsis from having their 'guilty feelings' recognized and acknowledged so they can feel like they have a part to play in combating racism — StreetlightX

Yet that is the phenomenon. And it's the corporate grifters that do take the important role. Or perhaps it's the powerful PR-people (and timid CEO's) in the corporate structure trying to keep the corporate brand totally spotless by hiring Robin DiAngelo and "going woke".

The think tank Policy Exchange was founded in 1999 by UK Prime Minister and Fabian Society member Tony Blair, another leading Fabian Peter Mandelson, Germany's Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and US Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Among many other organizations promoting globalism Tony Blair also founded The Tony Blair Institute For Global Change. — Apollodorus

Interesting, but I assume Jeremy Corbyn surely wasn't a Fabian (or am I wrong?). The way how Blair was against Corbyn and predicted a disaster (which the elections were, so Tony was right), I assume that there is an opposition to the old-school Fabians in the Labour party.

Now the leader Keir Starmer is for a foreigner like me a total unknown.

All in the former British Empire, as I said.

And of course there might be influences and exchanges of ideas with international relations. But then, I guess,for example the work within EU by various political party factions might be on a different level now to earlier exchanges between various social democratic parties.

I tend to think the Fabian influence was more on England and America - and maybe other former parts of the British Empire like Australia which also had a Fabian Society. — Apollodorus

This I accept. The strong bonds are quite apparent here. Outside of that realm there come many differences and obstacles more than the language barrier.

However, the Fabians did reestablish the Socialist International after WWII which they controlled together with the Labour Party that was in charge of government in the British Empire. The SI was reestablished in London and was funded by the Labour Party (itself founded by the Fabians) so it was able to exert influence on all member parties. — Apollodorus

I think this is quite small compared to what lengths the Soviet Union went to finance and control Communist parties all over the World. UK Labour Party is quite puny in it's influence compared to that.

And of course when you think about the various Social Democrat leaders in Europe, Miterrand, Blair, etc. they differed in many ways both with their domestic and foreign policies.

Also, is it still a "conspiracy" if it involves the whole world? — Apollodorus

Then you start to be more of a tin-foil hat conspiracist.

You see, "the whole world" has in itself other actors than the US and the West as Putin's Russia, China controlled by the CCP, India, Saudi-Arabia, Pakistan, North Korea, Latin American countries etc. That these hold a same agenda sounds extremely dubious. The conspiracists simply forgets them or disregards them as independent actors with minimal knowledge of them. So one has to be careful.

The main difference is that the Fabians pursued their agenda by "non-revolutionary" means even though the agenda was revolutionary in its objective. — Apollodorus

I would say that this is something close to every social democratic movement that has been in power in Western Europe. All of them don't directly link to the Fabian society.

19th and early 20th century industrialists made no secret of their attempts to intentionally hire a diverse workforce because it reduced the risks of worker cooperation and unionization efforts. Moving to today, Amazon had a leak showing that it also pursues diversity as a means of reducing the risk of unionization efforts, using it as a key metric of risk in statistical models. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is very interesting. This reinforces my view that CRT and also the "Culture Wars" play well to those in power as a divide and rule -strategy to separate the middle and lower classes and being in separate groups.

White, as an overarching identity shows up first as a meaningful social force in the US, and has gained relevance in Europe following the Post-War integration of Europe and the introduction of large non-European populations into Europe. Certainly a form of white identity existed in Europe prior to the 20th century, but it was not the inclusive identity it became in America. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sharing the same skin color didn't stop racism as 20th Century Europe clearly show. To the European racists the idea of Germans, Poles and Russians all belonging to the same racial group is very new. Yet this is happening, as you said.

Now the dominance of US culture is so evident that Europe basically shares the same narrative as in the US. The stupidity is that the narrative isn't changed nearly at all, but basically has to fit the US narrative.

The term “conspiracy” seems to denote an agreement to commit an act that is either morally reprehensible or criminal. However, if we look at how it has been used historically, this doesn’t seem to have always been the case. — Apollodorus

Good observation. We tend to say something is a conspiracy if the agenda or the objectives aren't publicly declared about some action or policy.

According to Wells, this necessitates a “conspiracy against established things” that would have to enroll supporters from all quarters, socialists and fascists alike, and it would have to go on in the daylight.

In fact, he seems to suggest that the whole world is already engaged in a sort of “open conspiracy” to reshape the world through world government, abolition of the nation-state, population control and redistribution, and similar far-reaching policies. — Apollodorus

Hmm. So is globalization an agenda of the Fabian society? I think not (yet I don't know, so that's why the question).

Historians often all too readily dismiss both Anarchism and the various theories to precede and follow Socialisme ou Barbarie as small ideological sects with an insignificant influence upon the greater course of human history. What, then, of the Spanish Civil War or the student protests in France in May of 1968? — thewonder

Historians do mention the anarchist factions in the Spanish Civil War, yet the reason is that anarchism hasn't simply been so successful as Marxism-Leninism, for example. If the Free State (Makhnovia) in Ukraine would have endured for longer, it likely would gather more interest than now from historians. But it was squashed by the Bolsheviks and thus are a side note in history.

Failed attempts are failed attempts and attempts in general are for the sideline notes in history.

What I referred is to the narrative that once the leftist intelligentsia understood that communism was bankrupt, they changed to the Frankfurt School / postmodernism / Critical race theory etc.

I'm not so sure I believe this.

First of all, likely after the total surprise of the sudden collapse of the Soviet system, the leftist intelligentsia simply denied that they had anything to do with it, hence their ideology wasn't bankrupt. People just move on and forget the issues they weren't correct about earlier. And if right wing thinkers were worried about the Soviet system overcoming us, the belief was far more firm in the leftist camp. And of course, there still were all the defects of our capitalist system to point out.

Let's leave that subject, yes.

I think that you expect too much from a series of Libération articles. — thewonder

Likely so. But also something that came from literary theory doesn't seem to be the next phase of communism, as some say it is.

He was making the fair point that above and beyond anything it was a huge media event, with the sanitised gloss of a video game. — Tom Storm

Actual war isn't the same as the media coverage of the war.

Where Baudrillard puts far too much emphasis on the coverage, the propaganda part of the war or the war being "a message" to other countries. Iraq with the Kuwaiti oil reserves would have become the country with the largest oil reserves and simply the invasion put Saudi Arabia in a threatened position. Saddam prepared a conventional defence with 70's era equipment against a war machine built to fight the Soviet army and then fought on a flat desert. The outcome is quite obvious. Such simple reasoning is perhaps uninteresting for Baudrillard.

Oh I didn't mean to refer to you, but in general.

I think the practical problem with CRT and other such theories purporting to define or describe immensely complicated societies and their history (the theoretical problem with them is their absolutism) are the zealots who preach them and interpret them, and the zealots who oppose them. Those who think racism an aberration are foolish; those who think (for example) that racism has been a peculiarly American trait or phenomenon because a privateer intercepted a Portuguese ship and brought about 20 enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619 are guilty of poor thinking, if nothing else. — Ciceronianus the White

The preaching zealots make a more lively debate than the dreary timid professional, who confuses the audience with multiple viewpoints of the issue at hand.

And in our times, the preaching zealots get more hits, be they likes or thumbs down doesn't matter.

A question for those who live in the UK and are citizens there:

Does being British matter to you?

Are people OK if you weren't British anymore, but only Scottish, Welsh, English?

You'd do a lot better looking at how schools are funded than trying to get rid of standardized tests, but I suppose they are low hanging fruit. Indeed, it's ironic since standardized tests are a great way to identify talented individuals who might be preforming well because they are in poor school enviornments, it's exactly the sort of thing you don't want to get rid of. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's a good example of how complex policy issues in education are. Yet simple answers with a simple focus on any issue are easy to grasp, the reality behind it is more difficult.

I always find it funny when ssu inserts his opinion on subjects related to Black Americans when he lives in Finland, which has a population of 54,450 with a "close African background" or about 1% of the population. — Maw

Oh yes, the state of Maine is far more multicultural than Finland. And indeed, few countries are so homogenous as my country. Yet I do see the same problems even here and that's what I find so interesting. I have lived a small but crucial time in the US, so where the country is going does interest me. Yet even here, in a Nordic welfare state, coming from a more affluent family or even more affluent region does have an effect. It just seems that once race is involved, there's not much else to be seen.

And of course: there are the proponents of critical race theory here, of course.

While class is important, as Timothy points out, poor whites do tend to fair better than poor people of color. — ToothyMaw

Children for more affluent families tend to fair better than children from poor one's.

For instance, this article points out a disparity between treatment of people of color and whites with regards to hunger relief — ToothyMaw

27 million went to an area that is has more whites than US average? Hmm.

I'd think far better examples would be to compare Indian reservations to other communities, as there historical reasons for the disparities are even more obvious. What is true in the US is that povetry & minorities go hand in hand in the US. Yet it's a complex issue that straight forward conclusion can hide real factors.

B. CRT's unpopularity. You can take a radical stand on the side of goodness knowing full well you aren't at risk of having to follow through on the radical promises. And indeed, we we wealthy Whites jumping ship and moving in cases where they actually win victories on these fronts. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's telling that a lot of leftists who indeed are leftists do oppose the theory, unlike who seems to think that it's just a red scare issue while the theory itself is just fine. Yet It's basically a flawed theory which basically starts explains everything with slavery. The major idea I guess is that racism is a systemic feature of social structure, hence you have a lot of explaining how racist the society is. Sure, the US does have it's past and the present is an continuation from the past, but this viewpoint doesn't seem to notice that a) things and views change and b) there can be other explanatory factors too.

And what a better way for things to stay the same than by putting on a pedestal a flawed theory. But let's take an example of what this theory is like by reviewing one critical race theorist, Cheryl I. Harris just as an example.

Perhaps it's telling that Cheryl I. Harris in her article "Whiteness as Property" written in 1993 starts with the experiences of her grandmother in Chicago in the 30's. Not with the experiences of herself, not of her mother, but grandmother (and written quarter of a Century ago). She writes:

”Slavery as a system of property facilitated the merger of white identity and property. Because the system of slavery was contingent on and conflated with racial identity, it became crucial to be ”white”, to be identified as white, to have the property of being white. Whiteness was the charasteristic, the attribute, the property of free human being…”

And thus, she makes the deduction:

”Whiteness fits the broad historical concept of property by classical theorists”.

So property rights are whiteness. And then she concludes:

”Whiteness as property has carried and produced a heavy legacy. It is a ghost that has haunted the political and legal domains for in which claims for justice have been inadequately addressed for far too long. Only rarely declaring it’s presence, it has warped efforts to remediate racial exploitation. It has blinded society to the systems of domination that work against so many by retaining an unvarying focus on the vestiges of systemic racialized privilege which subordinates those perceived as a particularized few – the Others.”

Perhaps it's similar to a feminist giving as proof of the dominance of the patriarchy that people referred to things like "The rights of man". Yet for an outsider the obvious question would be if the rights of a man or a woman are really different. They have been earlier, but not so much now. And a major question is if these findings are taken out of the US context and other countries which are racially homogenous, does one find similar issues between poor people and rich people? Are there example of the system being biased for the more affluent and the owning class? Surely there is, even if slavery doesn't exist.

But if whipping a horse has worked before and brought success, why stop whipping it if suddenly has become "quite passive and inert", yet you still win?

What is true for poor culturally disadvantaged blacks is largely true for poor culturally disadvantaged whites, too. — Bitter Crank

And here's the important issue. This a problem of class and income inequality, which goes beyond race. Yet better to put the emphasis on the racial side of this and let the poor white people, who often are called white trash in the US, know that they enjoy white privilege. Divide et impera, I say.

I think that the rest of the UK should get to vote on the matter as well. I'm British so should have a say in whether or not my country breaks up into two. — Michael

So thought many who considered themselves being Yugoslavians...

Was it in fact a 'war'? — Tom Storm

I think in the clearest case it was.

One side just got beaten so that general Powell, later the secretary of state, thought it was "unchivalrous" (or something similar) to pounce the fleeing remnants of Saddam's army. But wars seldom are as conventional as that one.

This is all historical speculation, but I think that council communism could've turned out a lot better than the Soviet experiment. I come from a particular set of factions within the libertarian Left, none of whom have ever been in a position of power. It's easy for a libertarian communist, Autonomist, Communization theorist, Anarchist, or libertarian socialist to say that, comparatively, they have an immaculate human rights record because of that they have never been given the opportunity to vitiate it. Of council communism, most people tend to either given them the benefit of the doubt or to be fairly cynical. You can either see it as having been a considerably less authoritarian alternative to Bolshevism or kind of a sectarian distancing from it that paradoxically somewhat fanatically puts forth effectively the same praxis, as, if you ask any Trotskyite about council communism, they will tell you that it is just a rehash of workers' soviets.

I think that Rosa Luxemburg was relatively free of any implicit authoritarianism or intransigence, though, and, so, am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. She's often cited with the quote, "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.", which is from a critique that she wrote of Lenin's authoritarian nature leading up to and during the October Revolution. — thewonder

The basic problem is that communist revolutions don't have safety valves: they don't limit the powers of the revolution and I'd say the attitude towards democracy is at least biased. They have the enemy what they are revolting against, which is a class of people. Figure out how democracy and freedoms of the individual fit with that. And the response to violent uprisings is usually violence. It the social democrats who want to "work within the system", not revolutionary communists! And especially in 1919 this would have been totally evident. This means that the Lenin/Trotsky/Stalin types are quite predictable to rise to power just as Maximilien Robespierre was in the French Revolution to "salvage" the revolution. Tough times bring up the no-nonsense tough guys willing to use violence.

In 1919 I don't think that those being opposed to Communism would have noticed any difference in council communism to Leninist bolshevism. If it wouldn't have been the German government, likely then the council communists would have faced the Allies, just as, in a small way, did Soviet Russia, which had earlier been an allied country. Germany naturally would have been geopolitically far more important for the Western allies than far away Russia.

And let's remember that in Germany there was another Communist Revolution, that went a bit (few more days) further than the Spartakists: the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which lasted from 12th of April until 3rd of May 1919. Here again we see the transformation of hardliners taking the helm with which is so typical to communist revolutions with the playwright Ernst Toller (who talked about the "Bavarian Revolution of Love") being replaced with Eugen Leviné, a Russian emigrant, who had gotten his blessings from Lenin. Again something that would be typical later: the interest of the Soviet Union in other communist revolutions. (This brief encounter with communism, which the Bavarians then referred to Schreckensherrschaft, the "rule of horror", made Bavaria quite anti-communist.)

Any Communist revolt in 1918 - 1919 was to see immediate response and would right from the start mean wartime for the communist revolution. How much different council communism would have been after that kind of encounter seems questionable, fighting the allies with with Soviet-leaning bolsheviks stabbing in the back by trying to take over the council communists.

Yes, indeed pure speculation, but one can look at how these revolutions have gone down in history and draw conclusions.

(These guys won in Bavaria)

Sometimes that something doesn't matter to you is equivalent to denial.

I remember Jean Baudrillard writing an article "The Gulf War did not take place". Of course, the war actually was the most conventional war that the US armed forces built up during the Cold War and especially during the Reagan era then ended up fighting before the "Peace dividend" cut backs started to have an effect in the later 90's.

In economics, efficiency is EVERYTHING. It's what drives the entire system. The more efficient, the more productive. The more productive, the more profit (which can be used to pay higher wages, invest in technology, or saved for other purposes). — synthesis

And countries with more efficient economies end up being prosperous and those that aren't end up constructing trade barriers that make them even worse off. And even if it's separate companies that nowdays are multinational, people still see it like a competition between countries.