You and I don't disagree much Saul. DEI is assuredly, along with a terrifyingly large number of NGO's and nonprofits, the left wing equivalent of the rights' megapastor Christian circuit. And, much like the megapastor Christians before it, the whole thing has made the left look bad and steered the left in unproductive cul de sacs.
I would never, ever, say that Trump is worth getting rid of DEI. We seemed to be steadily rolling it back on our own. But I have no qualms about saying that Trump tossing it out is probably more good than bad. Those highly educated folks will simply have to find other jobs instead.
Well, to be clear, the centrists said "this seems not very helpful as a practical matter and pure poison as a political matter", the idealists answered "even trying to assign a name to this, let alone critiquing it, is racist" and then the voters said "yup, woke is worse". And here we are. Though, let us be clear, the question of wokeism is only one of many elements many of which make the centrists look bad too.
Yes really. The reason we keep talking about Sista Soulja is because it was an unusual thing for Clinton to do and because Clinton managed to pull it off. I already agreed that Harris was too associated with further left wing views to be able to silently ignore them the way your standard Dem politician does but Kamala was a unique candidate in a variety of negative ways that aren't typical for her party. That doesn't change my wider point which is that even though none of these left wing fringe positions are formally embraced by the Dems as a matter of course they are expected to be renouncing and policing them whereas the GOP are not.
And you're recapping my main point- why does the GOP not need to? It's not like the right wing fringe ideologies are popular- they're toxic and despised. My own theory is that it may be an artifact of Trump; a kind of reverse Obama field where every possible supporter says of Republicans more toxic positions and associations "well those are who Trump is going to con."
And yes, I know there're more than two groups of voters, and I'm asking you, since you give the vibe of being one of the view from nowhere unaligned voters, why the Dems have this obligation while the GOP doesn't. This isn't just Harris- Biden faced it when he won narrowly in 2020 for instance.
Left wing fringers are generally not Dems. They consider Dems picayune sellouts, despise them and go with the Greens; Dem Socialists or other similar left wing failure parties. This doesn't strike me as controversial to observe.
Why do these fringers reflect on the Dems when right wing fringers, it seems, don't reflect on the GOP? Why do we generally not hear our various unaligned centrists calling on the GOP to denounce their fringers?
Harris didn't denounce left wing fringers. I agree. She generally just ignored them or distanced herself from them. And it can't be denied that her 2020 positions, which were not wildly left wing fringe but were assuredly in viewing distance of wild left wing views, didn't help.
Still, Harris aside, the general political rule is there's very little hay to be made making war on your own fringe- it annoys and turns off your base, signal boosts said fringe and your opponents will always claim you're disingenuous or insufficiently vehement. I'm just curious about this double standard (I certainly don't deny it exists I just am puzzled as to why). Why must Dems make war on or answer for their fringers while the GOP has no similar obligation vis a vis their own? Heck, if the Dems embraced and nominated their nuts the way the GOP does their own the media's collective heads would >pop< explode.
Ah, then your position is that the Democrats must police their left wing fringes even though these are people who aren't Democrats because those fringes deranged fringing reflects poorly on the Dems because... reasons. But the GOP has no need to do the same for their right wing fringe nuts possibly because they elect them as Republican Senators, Congressfolk and President and manage to eke out wins about half the time? And who sets these rules?
I mean, yes, he's won twice (and lost once) but both the first time was incredibly close and the second time was not as historically narrow but not particularly a big win. Then again, considering what he has to work with in terms of the right and the GOP, those wins remain remarkable so maybe you are in grandfather sucking eggs territory.
Frankly I'd find you opining about the first one to be interesting in telling me a bit about your morals. I'd find you opining about the second interesting as to how you think the electorate works. And I'd find both interesting to have an idea as to what you'd be saying if, say, you hadn't been banned from Redstate. So I'd welcome you opining on both.
I think there's a pretty persuasive case to be made that Bibi isn't afraid exactly of Trump but uneasy because he knows a lot of people who don't like him have Trumps' ear. The Saudi/'s, for example. I think it's not so much fear of Trump trying to fish Bibi over so much as fear that Trump will be too unpredictable for Bibi to continue to do the fan dance he's been doing.
It's really really tough. The core root of NIMBY is naked self interest and property is a huge portion of most home owners fiscal worth. I'm very pro-development but when a ten bedroom apartment went up next to my home replacing a little bungalow (core urban neighborhood) I couldn't even pretend to be happy. I am proud that I did nothing to discourage it or encumber it in any of the hearing or planning stages but having the south side of the house cast in perpetual shadow stung like a mother-fisher and that's without even thinking about if it actual impacted the property value.
There's a very real parochial interest in NIMBYism but it's wildly, desperately, important that city management doesn't succumb to it because the downstream impacts of succumbing to is have proven to be utterly catastrophic- particularly to liberalism.
That appears to be economically illiterate. Holding premiums the same in fire prone, or flood prone, areas doesn't produce steady profits- it produces catastrophic losses. Increasing premiums in higher risk areas doesn't produce larger profits- it simply prevents catastrophic losses. We see this on the right, Florida's flood insurance debacle, and on the left, California fire insurance mess.
Yes, precisely, it's a grade curve. If that is the objective grade outcome then, in political and human terms, we'd be the A+ nation and people will still be clamoring to come to the US.
I don't think it was a particular failure prior to 10-7. Had the IDF been in position when the "armed up" enemy attacked on 10-7 there'd have been a small mountain of dead Hamas militants and a spare handful of Israeli casualties (and few to no hostages).
We can look at Lebanon for another example. Hezbollah armed up and, indeed, got up to other shenanigans in Syria while Israel looked on quietly. But the Israeli's didn't waste this time either and were able to extensively identify and compromise their opponents assets, communications and leadership. When they elected to strike, all of Hezbollahs time arming up availed Hezbollah only a slow sprinkling of blown up people and missile stocks and even greater exasperation and dislike from the people of Lebanon.
As for if Israel is expected to live with hostility and potential genocidal armies sitting outside its border? I suppose so, but now probably also less so than any time her short history except perhaps the brief period before Bibi took charge in the early teens.
That's understandable- they're the people you have to rub elbows with as they're extremely loud and prominent on the internet. They're the libertarians of the left. Noisy, influential but in command of very little love or votes in meatspace.
Maybe the UN would, maybe it wouldn't that and two bucks would buy ya a cup of coffee. If Israel was no longer controlling the territories and had granted citizenship to all the people who lived in the land it formally annexed then most of the world would stop paying attention.
As for Gaza and Lebanon the lesson is probably more along the lines of, you shouldn't redivert your defense forces to keep their boots on West Bank Palestinians while you get up to shenanigans in the West Bank when there're avowed genocidaires behind you. Bibi probably hopes the Israeli public will forget who midwifed those groups and who funneled money to them- it might even work.
Umm if Israel unilaterally withdraws from the West Bank then they'll first annex all the land along the boundary that they've already settled to the nines before dragging their wingnuts kicking and screaming from the more disconnected or far flung settlements. They obviously will take all of Jerusalem and its surrounding environs (as they generally already have) and every other choice bit they can manage to keep without annexing in very many Palestinians. Unilateral withdrawal means that the Israeli's will be drawing the lines mostly by themselves and exactly zero Israeli land will be given to the Palestinians in return. You can bet your bottom dollar the Palestinians, were Israel to do this, would be very unhappy about the ultimate map and outcome.
As for if the Palestinians keep advocating for the right of return? I have no doubt they will. So will the various far left identarians wing do the same. But neither of them will have any means of making what they want to happen- happen. The world will mostly tune out until/unless the West Bank Palestinians are actually dumb enough to attack Israel at which point Israel will move the attackers and likely every other Palestinian down in a couple block or maybe even mile radius, the left will scream genocide but the other 95% of the world will say "dumb fishers what did you think would happen" and tune out again.
And at some point, likely pretty quickly going by Lebanon, when a Palestinian gets word that someone in a one block or one mile radius of them is gearing up to attack Israel their response will not be "Allahu Akbar" but "Stop you dumb fisher, I live here, I'm calling the cops!"
And even if they don't? Israel can -easily- sustain an occasional attack from the Palestinians and deliver back a disproportionate retaliation. Because everyone everywhere who matters will be saying "Ya dumb fishers, what did you expect?"
And we don't disagree as much as one might think. It can't be denied that a negotiated withdrawal, an agreement or even merely a representative government worth its name that could actually speak to and for the Palestinians would be enormously superior to a unilateral withdrawal. You're unambiguously correct on that point. I simply do not have the idealism (or duplicity) to think that such an outcome is in offering in the foreseeable future. I think, if my cynicism is correct, that unilateral withdrawal is better, for all concerned (except the Israeli right-settler movement and their Palestinian terrorist Israeli-eliminationist counterparts but fish them), than a continuation of the status quos.
The Jordanians, the Syrians and the Egyptian men on the street populations all have the same attitude and their governments say the same thing and, yet, the Israelis seem to manage to get by without having any form of West Bank entanglement with them. Which brings us back to the base fact that the right of return question is simply an excuse Israel (primarily the Israeli right) uses to not make the hard decisions on the West Bank that they need to make. They could set their borders unilaterally at any time, they just claim to want to be given some promises in return for doing so.
As for Israel's activity in the West Bank... the uh... facts don't quite comport with your notions.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624qr3mqrzo
Let's not dance around that issue which is that we both know that Israel got caught with their pants down on 10/7 and the 10/7 attacks were, accordingly, so destructive because the Israeli right had re-oriented the IDF away from Gaza to cover their activities in the West Bank. To put it even more starkly their idiotic and atrocious activities in the West Bank enabled Hamas's body and kidnapping count. Hamas remains, ultimately, responsible of course but the Israeli right, both in being a midwife of and enabler of Hamas and in redirecting the IDF and ignoring intelligence warnings unambiguously puts the Israeli rights as the chief contributing element to the 10/7 attacks.
The subsequent outcome, moreover, validates the unilateral separation policy since Israel was able to devastate both foes since they had little entanglement and no settlements or other insanely unethical attachments clouding the issue in the Gaza or Lebanon theaters. By virtue of the IDF's guile and determination as well as American ammunition Hamas and Hezbollah were decimated. The IDF is unlikely to run out of the two former elements but, again, the occupation of the West Bank is steadily eroding the Israeli's future assurance of access to the latter.
The dictionary definition (Though the definition itself is in some dispute) of ethnic cleansing is:
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing
If you want to try to claim that now two decades of violent steady but gradual land expropriate and dispossession doesn't count as ethnic cleansing because, what, it's too gradual? I suppose you can but it doesn't strike me as a strong claim.
As for the right of return? It's a canard and we both know it. Israel will -never- permit the mass immigration of Palestinians into Israel proper and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. That the PA or other Palestinian representatives won't say the magic words that acknowledge that reality changes nothing except that the Israeli right uses it as a fig leaf excuse to enable them to continue their "it's only a little bit of" ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
On “Trump Term Two, Day One, Executive Orders”
You and I don't disagree much Saul. DEI is assuredly, along with a terrifyingly large number of NGO's and nonprofits, the left wing equivalent of the rights' megapastor Christian circuit. And, much like the megapastor Christians before it, the whole thing has made the left look bad and steered the left in unproductive cul de sacs.
I would never, ever, say that Trump is worth getting rid of DEI. We seemed to be steadily rolling it back on our own. But I have no qualms about saying that Trump tossing it out is probably more good than bad. Those highly educated folks will simply have to find other jobs instead.
"
Well, to be clear, the centrists said "this seems not very helpful as a practical matter and pure poison as a political matter", the idealists answered "even trying to assign a name to this, let alone critiquing it, is racist" and then the voters said "yup, woke is worse". And here we are. Though, let us be clear, the question of wokeism is only one of many elements many of which make the centrists look bad too.
"
Yup.
On “Trump’s Ace in the Hole”
Yes really. The reason we keep talking about Sista Soulja is because it was an unusual thing for Clinton to do and because Clinton managed to pull it off. I already agreed that Harris was too associated with further left wing views to be able to silently ignore them the way your standard Dem politician does but Kamala was a unique candidate in a variety of negative ways that aren't typical for her party. That doesn't change my wider point which is that even though none of these left wing fringe positions are formally embraced by the Dems as a matter of course they are expected to be renouncing and policing them whereas the GOP are not.
And you're recapping my main point- why does the GOP not need to? It's not like the right wing fringe ideologies are popular- they're toxic and despised. My own theory is that it may be an artifact of Trump; a kind of reverse Obama field where every possible supporter says of Republicans more toxic positions and associations "well those are who Trump is going to con."
And yes, I know there're more than two groups of voters, and I'm asking you, since you give the vibe of being one of the view from nowhere unaligned voters, why the Dems have this obligation while the GOP doesn't. This isn't just Harris- Biden faced it when he won narrowly in 2020 for instance.
"
Left wing fringers are generally not Dems. They consider Dems picayune sellouts, despise them and go with the Greens; Dem Socialists or other similar left wing failure parties. This doesn't strike me as controversial to observe.
Why do these fringers reflect on the Dems when right wing fringers, it seems, don't reflect on the GOP? Why do we generally not hear our various unaligned centrists calling on the GOP to denounce their fringers?
Harris didn't denounce left wing fringers. I agree. She generally just ignored them or distanced herself from them. And it can't be denied that her 2020 positions, which were not wildly left wing fringe but were assuredly in viewing distance of wild left wing views, didn't help.
Still, Harris aside, the general political rule is there's very little hay to be made making war on your own fringe- it annoys and turns off your base, signal boosts said fringe and your opponents will always claim you're disingenuous or insufficiently vehement. I'm just curious about this double standard (I certainly don't deny it exists I just am puzzled as to why). Why must Dems make war on or answer for their fringers while the GOP has no similar obligation vis a vis their own? Heck, if the Dems embraced and nominated their nuts the way the GOP does their own the media's collective heads would >pop< explode.
"
Ah, then your position is that the Democrats must police their left wing fringes even though these are people who aren't Democrats because those fringes deranged fringing reflects poorly on the Dems because... reasons. But the GOP has no need to do the same for their right wing fringe nuts possibly because they elect them as Republican Senators, Congressfolk and President and manage to eke out wins about half the time? And who sets these rules?
"
I mean, yes, he's won twice (and lost once) but both the first time was incredibly close and the second time was not as historically narrow but not particularly a big win. Then again, considering what he has to work with in terms of the right and the GOP, those wins remain remarkable so maybe you are in grandfather sucking eggs territory.
"
Err.. you're using a left wing academic example for the right? Could you unpack that more?
"
Frankly I'd find you opining about the first one to be interesting in telling me a bit about your morals. I'd find you opining about the second interesting as to how you think the electorate works. And I'd find both interesting to have an idea as to what you'd be saying if, say, you hadn't been banned from Redstate. So I'd welcome you opining on both.
On “Reports: Isreal and Hamas Agree To Cease-fire Deal”
I think there's a pretty persuasive case to be made that Bibi isn't afraid exactly of Trump but uneasy because he knows a lot of people who don't like him have Trumps' ear. The Saudi/'s, for example. I think it's not so much fear of Trump trying to fish Bibi over so much as fear that Trump will be too unpredictable for Bibi to continue to do the fan dance he's been doing.
On “Trump’s Ace in the Hole”
I'm curious. Are there any subjects where the Republicans should, or should be expected to, be policing the right?
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/13/2025”
Really makes some of his stories, Calliope in Sandman especially, land very differently.
"
It's really really tough. The core root of NIMBY is naked self interest and property is a huge portion of most home owners fiscal worth. I'm very pro-development but when a ten bedroom apartment went up next to my home replacing a little bungalow (core urban neighborhood) I couldn't even pretend to be happy. I am proud that I did nothing to discourage it or encumber it in any of the hearing or planning stages but having the south side of the house cast in perpetual shadow stung like a mother-fisher and that's without even thinking about if it actual impacted the property value.
There's a very real parochial interest in NIMBYism but it's wildly, desperately, important that city management doesn't succumb to it because the downstream impacts of succumbing to is have proven to be utterly catastrophic- particularly to liberalism.
On “Multiple Wildfires Rip Through Los Angeles Amid Historic Winds”
That appears to be economically illiterate. Holding premiums the same in fire prone, or flood prone, areas doesn't produce steady profits- it produces catastrophic losses. Increasing premiums in higher risk areas doesn't produce larger profits- it simply prevents catastrophic losses. We see this on the right, Florida's flood insurance debacle, and on the left, California fire insurance mess.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/6/2025”
Well done.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/30/2024”
Yeah I like his work.
On “The Immigration Thing”
Yes, precisely, it's a grade curve. If that is the objective grade outcome then, in political and human terms, we'd be the A+ nation and people will still be clamoring to come to the US.
"
The only consolation is that we don't need to do well on the question in an objective sense- merely better than our peers and competitors.
On “Joe Biden Agrees that Some People *DO* Deserve the Death Penalty”
I don't think it was a particular failure prior to 10-7. Had the IDF been in position when the "armed up" enemy attacked on 10-7 there'd have been a small mountain of dead Hamas militants and a spare handful of Israeli casualties (and few to no hostages).
We can look at Lebanon for another example. Hezbollah armed up and, indeed, got up to other shenanigans in Syria while Israel looked on quietly. But the Israeli's didn't waste this time either and were able to extensively identify and compromise their opponents assets, communications and leadership. When they elected to strike, all of Hezbollahs time arming up availed Hezbollah only a slow sprinkling of blown up people and missile stocks and even greater exasperation and dislike from the people of Lebanon.
As for if Israel is expected to live with hostility and potential genocidal armies sitting outside its border? I suppose so, but now probably also less so than any time her short history except perhaps the brief period before Bibi took charge in the early teens.
"
That's understandable- they're the people you have to rub elbows with as they're extremely loud and prominent on the internet. They're the libertarians of the left. Noisy, influential but in command of very little love or votes in meatspace.
"
Maybe the UN would, maybe it wouldn't that and two bucks would buy ya a cup of coffee. If Israel was no longer controlling the territories and had granted citizenship to all the people who lived in the land it formally annexed then most of the world would stop paying attention.
As for Gaza and Lebanon the lesson is probably more along the lines of, you shouldn't redivert your defense forces to keep their boots on West Bank Palestinians while you get up to shenanigans in the West Bank when there're avowed genocidaires behind you. Bibi probably hopes the Israeli public will forget who midwifed those groups and who funneled money to them- it might even work.
"
Umm if Israel unilaterally withdraws from the West Bank then they'll first annex all the land along the boundary that they've already settled to the nines before dragging their wingnuts kicking and screaming from the more disconnected or far flung settlements. They obviously will take all of Jerusalem and its surrounding environs (as they generally already have) and every other choice bit they can manage to keep without annexing in very many Palestinians. Unilateral withdrawal means that the Israeli's will be drawing the lines mostly by themselves and exactly zero Israeli land will be given to the Palestinians in return. You can bet your bottom dollar the Palestinians, were Israel to do this, would be very unhappy about the ultimate map and outcome.
As for if the Palestinians keep advocating for the right of return? I have no doubt they will. So will the various far left identarians wing do the same. But neither of them will have any means of making what they want to happen- happen. The world will mostly tune out until/unless the West Bank Palestinians are actually dumb enough to attack Israel at which point Israel will move the attackers and likely every other Palestinian down in a couple block or maybe even mile radius, the left will scream genocide but the other 95% of the world will say "dumb fishers what did you think would happen" and tune out again.
And at some point, likely pretty quickly going by Lebanon, when a Palestinian gets word that someone in a one block or one mile radius of them is gearing up to attack Israel their response will not be "Allahu Akbar" but "Stop you dumb fisher, I live here, I'm calling the cops!"
And even if they don't? Israel can -easily- sustain an occasional attack from the Palestinians and deliver back a disproportionate retaliation. Because everyone everywhere who matters will be saying "Ya dumb fishers, what did you expect?"
"
Fair enough, good conversation.
And we don't disagree as much as one might think. It can't be denied that a negotiated withdrawal, an agreement or even merely a representative government worth its name that could actually speak to and for the Palestinians would be enormously superior to a unilateral withdrawal. You're unambiguously correct on that point. I simply do not have the idealism (or duplicity) to think that such an outcome is in offering in the foreseeable future. I think, if my cynicism is correct, that unilateral withdrawal is better, for all concerned (except the Israeli right-settler movement and their Palestinian terrorist Israeli-eliminationist counterparts but fish them), than a continuation of the status quos.
"
The Jordanians, the Syrians and the Egyptian men on the street populations all have the same attitude and their governments say the same thing and, yet, the Israelis seem to manage to get by without having any form of West Bank entanglement with them. Which brings us back to the base fact that the right of return question is simply an excuse Israel (primarily the Israeli right) uses to not make the hard decisions on the West Bank that they need to make. They could set their borders unilaterally at any time, they just claim to want to be given some promises in return for doing so.
As for Israel's activity in the West Bank... the uh... facts don't quite comport with your notions.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624qr3mqrzo
"
Let's not dance around that issue which is that we both know that Israel got caught with their pants down on 10/7 and the 10/7 attacks were, accordingly, so destructive because the Israeli right had re-oriented the IDF away from Gaza to cover their activities in the West Bank. To put it even more starkly their idiotic and atrocious activities in the West Bank enabled Hamas's body and kidnapping count. Hamas remains, ultimately, responsible of course but the Israeli right, both in being a midwife of and enabler of Hamas and in redirecting the IDF and ignoring intelligence warnings unambiguously puts the Israeli rights as the chief contributing element to the 10/7 attacks.
The subsequent outcome, moreover, validates the unilateral separation policy since Israel was able to devastate both foes since they had little entanglement and no settlements or other insanely unethical attachments clouding the issue in the Gaza or Lebanon theaters. By virtue of the IDF's guile and determination as well as American ammunition Hamas and Hezbollah were decimated. The IDF is unlikely to run out of the two former elements but, again, the occupation of the West Bank is steadily eroding the Israeli's future assurance of access to the latter.
The dictionary definition (Though the definition itself is in some dispute) of ethnic cleansing is:
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing
If you want to try to claim that now two decades of violent steady but gradual land expropriate and dispossession doesn't count as ethnic cleansing because, what, it's too gradual? I suppose you can but it doesn't strike me as a strong claim.
As for the right of return? It's a canard and we both know it. Israel will -never- permit the mass immigration of Palestinians into Israel proper and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. That the PA or other Palestinian representatives won't say the magic words that acknowledge that reality changes nothing except that the Israeli right uses it as a fig leaf excuse to enable them to continue their "it's only a little bit of" ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.