13

So about the CW: this author is an Israeli neoreactionary, a "race realist", and a seeming Ashkenazi supremacist. I am not looking to downplay that, and I am posting this with some caution. (In particular, there is a racist barb in this article against Candace Owens and Kanye West.)

Having said that, they are also fairly knowledgeable about Jewish history, including Zionism, antisemitism, the Holocaust, etc. and as far as I can tell they are relatively intellectually honest about these things - certainly more intellectually honest than the Israeli goverment's propaganda vessels, or pro-Israel American politicians, etc. I'd be lying if I said I haven't learned anything from reading this guy's stuff.

In addition to the article linked above, they also wrote two follow-up posts:

Antisemitism as the Resting State of the Far Right

Wrapping things up on antisemitism

The last article, if you can look past the predictable communist-bashing stuff, includes a point that I think is fairly useful and important:

There is a stupid belief common to both antisemites and the antisemitism industry, which is that America, and white countries in general, are always one step away from breaking out into antisemitism... In the 1930 Federal German election, the NSDAP won 107 out of 557 seats, so any German Jew under the impression that everything was hunky dory on the antisemitism front must have been on some pretty strong opium. More than that, though, there had been explicitly antisemitic parties, including ones that had antisemitism in their name, in the German parliament for 50 years. Hell, the German Conservative party officially included antisemitism in its electoral programme in 1892. The idea that one day ‘for no reason at all’ Germans became antisemitic and elected the Nazis has literally no basis in fact at all; it was the product of nearly a century of dedicated propaganda.

This is the kind of stupidity that comes from seeing antisemitism as a ‘virus’ rather than an ideology. You could get a virus at any moment; you might get Covid tomorrow and be bedridden for literally minutes. Ideologies aren’t like that though. How likely is it that Libertarians will take over America three years from now? Not very, but they have had a party getting 2 or 3% in elections for decades and a whole nonprofit ecosystem promoting their beliefs. Do antisemites have that? So what are you even talking about?

26

It's pretty interesting, and definitely useful for dispelling the common notion of him in the West as merely a crazy, violent, Jew-hating religious nutcase.

A lot of good stuff, but I'd say this is the money quote:

What was [the occupation's] purpose? Raising killers? Have you watched the video where a soldier shoots at us as if we were bowling pins? And he laughs, laughs. They (the Jewish people) were people like Freud, Einstein, Kafka. Experts of maths and philosophy. Now they are experts of drones, of extrajudicial executions.

14
Has anybody read this book? (wp.production.patheos.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by join_the_iww@hexbear.net to c/books@lemmy.ml

If so, what did you think of it?

I'm curious about it, but I have too much other stuff I want to read first.

[-] join_the_iww@hexbear.net 56 points 4 weeks ago

so this is it, right? We're, like, definitely in WW3 now?

been thinking about this a lot this morning.

12
43
141
Yeah I read theory (m.media-amazon.com)
27
[-] join_the_iww@hexbear.net 6 points 5 months ago

lmfao I didn’t even know that half of it

56

"we'll never be able to accomplish fascism in the US because our base of suburban Fox News watchers are stupid and incurious about political theory" is a pretty amusing premise

72
[-] join_the_iww@hexbear.net 35 points 6 months ago

Free Palestine

(Bum-Bum-Bum)

From the river to the sea

THE SEA

THE SEA

ba-da-ba-da-ba

[-] join_the_iww@hexbear.net 10 points 6 months ago

to be fair, how do we know that that isn’t also because of subsidies?

[-] join_the_iww@hexbear.net 8 points 6 months ago

An abortion is when the doctor yanks the 36-week fetus out by its umbilical cord and then whips it against the table a bunch of times to kill it

[-] join_the_iww@hexbear.net 27 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Civil Rights Corps is way better

67
submitted 8 months ago by join_the_iww@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net
33
submitted 9 months ago by join_the_iww@hexbear.net to c/art@hexbear.net
27

When it comes to housing policy, we conservatives run the risk of becoming a caricature of ourselves, long on reactionary impulse but short on principle. In a recent National Review headline, “Biden and Dems are Set To Abolish the Suburbs,” Stanley Kurtz leads a parade of incoherence on the topic.
What has Kurtz and others so exercised is the Obama-era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation and the potential that a President Biden will use it to destroy the suburbs and all that is sacred in this country. In a bit of melodrama, Kurtz contends:

Since the Pilgrims first landed, our story has been of a people who chose how and where to live, and who governed themselves when they got there. Self-government in a layered federalist system allowing for local control right down to the township is what made America great. If Biden and the Democrats win, that key to our greatness could easily go by the boards.

What is allegedly at stake is the ability of cities to artificially restrict the development of property through zoning. If you’re conservative in your disposition but don’t know Kurtz or this line of reasoning, you might assume that he is against zoning regulations. After all, there is no greater distortion of the market than local zoning codes, and there are few bureaucracies doing more harm to property rights and freedom than local zoning offices.
That assumption would be wrong. What is at stake here for Kurtz is the sanctity of single-family zoning, the ability of suburban governments to deploy this repressive land regulation on America’s suburban development pattern.
The first of many ironies, of course, is that single-family zoning became the standard for American suburbs during the New Deal when the Roosevelt administration, through various programs such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, required it for home refinancing assistance.
These onerous regulations were further mandated for new construction by the Federal Housing Administration as well as the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
So if you want federal support for your housing, build a single-family home. If you want to live in that downtown shop with the house on the second floor, convert your house to a two- or three-unit building and rent it out—or do any number of normal and reasonable things that humans had been doing with their property for centuries to build their own wealth and prosperity—don’t expect assistance from the government.
Yet now that we’ve lived with this artificial distortion for a couple of generations, and piled on others like the mortgage-interest tax deduction, some strange conservative instinct kicks in to defend this bankrupt institution. In reality, the Pilgrims built a traditional town surrounded by farmland. Our government paid us to move to the suburbs. Invoking the memory of the former to defend the latter is an historical absurdity.
It’s important to understand here that Kurtz is not suggesting that “Biden and the Dems” are coming for your precious zoning regulations unilaterally. No, whatever initiative they are proposing to do is going to go down the same old way they tricked us into the set of regulations we’re now defending—by dangling subsidies. From Kurtz:

AFFH works by holding HUD’s Community Development Block Grants hostage to federal-planning demands. Suburbs won’t be able to get the millions of dollars they’re used to in HUD grants unless they eliminate single-family zoning and densify their business districts.

So, suburban governments, you won’t get the subsidy this time unless you repeal the regulation we required you to enact decades ago to get the subsidy we were offering back then. And we oppose this today because we are conservatives?
For those of you who aren’t motivated to defend repressive zoning regulations and the chance to receive federal housing subsidies, Kurtz alludes to the sacred subsidy of suburban living: federal transportation spending:

[Senator Cory] Booker wants to hold suburban zoning hostage not only to HUD grants, but to the federal transportation grants used by states to build and repair highways. It may be next to impossible for suburbs to opt out of those state-run highway repairs. Otherwise, suburban roads will deteriorate and suburban access to major arteries will be blocked.

Yes, it might be impossible for suburbs to opt-out of this because they are wholly dependent on federal transportation subsidies. The Highway Trust Fund has run billion-dollar deficits for years. There is a net transfer of transportation dollars from blue states to red states, from big cities to suburbs. Suburbs use federal transportation dollars for growth in a Ponzi-scheme financial arrangement. Suburban development patterns are ridiculously expensive to sustain, with more infrastructure per living unit at much lower financial return.
The suburbs run on federal subsidies. Without them, America’s suburbs would have to become more financially productive. They would need to get greater returns per foot on public infrastructure investment. That would mean repealing repressive zoning regulations, allowing the market to respond to supply and demand signals for housing. It would also mean allowing the “little downtowns” Kurtz fears to form where demand for them exists. Isn’t that what is supposed to happen with self-government and local control?
All this would have to happen or the suburbs would go away because they can’t exist without excessive and ongoing federal subsidy.
The progressive left has discovered that single-family zoning has racist underpinnings. That’s great, because we should now have no problem finding common cause for repealing this most distorting of regulations, one that the federal government never should have forced cities to adopt to begin with.
In fact, the conservative thing for suburban leaders to do here is to not wait for the federal government to tempt us with more handouts, but to go ahead and show those progressives running the big cities that we live by our principles, that we embrace vibrant markets and free people, by preemptively repealing single-family zoning.

[-] join_the_iww@hexbear.net 10 points 10 months ago

Ehh. I don't think private equity is the main issue. I think that private equity firms would prefer to fund the construction of new housing if they could, but they can't, because of zoning laws. So they opt for the next best thing which is buying up existing housing stock and renting it.

The crux of the problem is zoning laws, single-family zoning in particular. We either need to allow a bunch of undeveloped land to be developed, or we need to allow already-developed land to be converted into more dense forms of housing. I think the latter option is preferable.

[-] join_the_iww@hexbear.net 15 points 10 months ago

Same. I have to give up and use Chrome to open it.

[-] join_the_iww@hexbear.net 8 points 1 year ago

Man we really need to just get rid of districts and do proportional representation. This is such bullshit and it keeps happening.

[-] join_the_iww@hexbear.net 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The author provided a summary version in footnote 1.

If you'd like an even shorter version, I am working on a bullet list and will update this comment soon.

EDIT: here you go. I think I've summarized pretty well the main points and arguments of the article:

  • The open letter released on August 18th 2021, cosigned by Lyta Gold, Allegra Silcox, and three others, was misleading or dishonest about numerous things. Particularly, it stated that Nathan J Robinson (hereon referred to as NJR) had "fired" them when he had actually asked them to resign. This is an important difference. He did not have the authority to fire them, and he had not attempted to.
  • Lyta Gold and the others affected led the public to believe that their financial situations were a lot less secure than they actually were. Yasmin Nair makes a compelling case that by August 18th when they published the open letter, they almost certainly knew they would be getting significant severance. Despite this, they created a donation drive on Cash App (and later Venmo as well) under a false pretext.
    • Per the article:
      • In a response dated August 13, Robinson, by now massively regretful and apologetic for how he had responded, heartily agreed with the idea of a year’s severance and also went beyond their proposal with a larger sum amounting to $234,352. There is no indication, in either the correspondence or even the statements by the department staff or the board, that he resisted any of the proposals. Since it was unlikely the magazine could pay out such an enormous sum, he said he would pay for the difference out of his own pocket, by any means possible—even if it meant paying in instalments.

      • Robinson never resisted any of the staff’s demands, and in fact offered them more than they asked for (though it was not in his power to do that, and the board had control and did not accept his offer of a large sum to be paid out over a one-year instalment)

      • In the end, including August and September payrolls, the magazine paid out $76,014, divided among seven people . This amounted to five months’ salary for most (and as we’ve seen, money was given out to people who were not even part of the staff).

  • One point of tension leading up to the events of August 2021 was disagreement over which candidate to hire for the role of Online Editor. The final two candidates were Lily Sanchez and Sam DeLucia. NJR preferred Lily Sanchez, while some other people at Current Affairs (particularly Allegra Silcox) preferred DeLucia. At one point in the hiring process (slighly earlier actually, when there were were still four remaining candidates), Lily Sanchez asked the hiring team a clarifying question about an editing test assignment that was a step in the hiring process (clarifying questions were allowed). NJR answered her question, in an email that was also visible to the rest of the hiring team. After August 18th, Adrian Rennix recounted this event in a dishonest way that would lead the public to believe that NJR gave Lily Sanchez special and unsolicited advice because she was his preferred candidate and he wanted to get her in by any means possible, even unfair ones.
    • Eventually Lily Sanchez did end up being selected for the role, by a majority vote. After Sanchez was hired, some of the people who had preferred Sam DeLucia were unhappy and unprofessional about it, and looked for a way to bring on DeLucia anyway. In a virtual meeting that included the newly hired Lily Sanchez as an attendee, Allegra Silcox stated that “We need to bring Sam on basically as soon as we can because as far as we know, we love her and we want to give her work, bring her in full-time.” Yasmin Nair correctly states that being this overeager to hire a runner-up alongside the person who actually got the job "sets the stage for terrible office dynamics."
  • The people who had been asked to resign led the public to believe that NJR had done so because they had been trying to restructure the magazine as a worker co-op. This is questionable at best. A better way to describe the situation is that restructuring as a worker co-op was one of numerous ideas that were suggested to deal with two problems: that (a) Current Affairs was dysfunctional in numerous ways, and needed more structure and better-defined roles just for practical business reasons, and (B) it would be desirable for Current Affairs to be structured in a more egalitarian way as well. There was wide agreement that both of these issues existed and needed to be resolved, but converting CA to a co-op was only one suggested solution, and it was still only being discussed loosely and hypothetically. Certainly no formal demands had been made in regards to forming a worker co-op.
    • NJR was opposed to the worker co-op idea. His stated explanation for this is that he preferred the idea of converting CA to a registered nonprofit, without any owners. However, this idea ran into problems because nonprofits are prohibited from making political endorsements, and are legally constrained in their political commentary in other ways as well. Current Affairs' website presently acknowledges this in its explanation for being a C-Corp.
    • One of the main proponents of the worker co-op idea was Allegra Silcox, and she also was a proponent of converting CA into a for-profit organization as well. It is possible that NJR's opposition to the worker co-op suggestion was partly because it seemed to be joined with converting it to a for-profit as well.
    • Some media accounts described all of this in an even more inaccurate way, that they had been asked to resign because they tried to unionize the workplace. This was never true, there was never a unionization effort, and unions are not the same thing as worker co-ops.
    • Just as a note, at the time this happened, Current Affairs was collectively owned at the time by its board of directors, which consisted of NJR, Lyta Gold, Adrian Rennix, and three other people who had contributed significantly to the magazine.
      • One of the problems with the magazine's management was arguably that the board of directors overlapped too much with the editors and contributors of the magazine.
      • Also, Yasmin Nair describes that the board of directors was rather inactive and did not operate with the same rigor as a typical company board of directors. Quote: "minutes were never taken, and meetings were sporadic"
  • One of the people whose resignations NJR requested, Kate Gauthreaux, really was just bad at her job and even complained that it was boring. Allegra Silcox tried to create a new role for Gauthreaux that would be more enjoyable for her, but this raised the question of who else would do the administrative work for which Gauthreaux was initially hired.
view more: next ›

join_the_iww

joined 4 years ago