* What have puzzled me is that the Bernie people still don’t get that what the dissident right (libertarians, nationalists, traditionalists, paleo-conservatives and national-conservatives) go against are the same enemy they go after. The Bernie people just don’t seem to grasp it. Instead they have created some weird unrealistic alt-globalization communist ideology which basically is about “everything to everybody”. I think it is a matter of time until more of these Bernie people (just like the Paul people) will turn more nationalist. There is some evidence that it is possible. You see it in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Scotland.
* You know, in my youth as an orthodox liberal I always wondered why the paleocons and nationalists (no alt-right back then) didn’t realize the rich people they loved so much were playing them for fools. If only the black and white working and middle classes would unite instead of fighting over social issues they could get rid of the rich and shut down globalization and bring back the unions and a less-racist version of 1950s America.
My answer to you is my answer to my old self: the divide-and-conquer scheme is too effective. Identity politics is natural to humans because we’re made to get into tribal wars with people who look, speak, or act different. So once you have a multiracial working and middle class, they’ll spend all their time going after each other instead of the man on top. There’s always some black guy who got shot by a cop or some white guy who got mugged by black kids (yes, these are real problems, I don’t deny that and that’s why this is so effective), and bang, off we go again.
We’ll see what Trump does in 2016. At this point I’m past hoping for a better world and just that immigration runs slow enough for assimilation to occur.
* I was surprised to see that Zuckerberg actually sat down with a bunch of conservatives to hear their issues with Facebook.
Today’s google doodle is about an obscure Asian-American radical who’s main claim to fame seems to be that she cradled Malcolm X as he lay dying, which is pretty typical for a google doodle. But you’ll never see Sergey Brin apologize for Google’s effort to drive the culture leftward.
* Transfer of population has been going on since Roman times (and before). The Visigoths started out on the Black Sea and ended up in Spain. Millions of Greeks had lived in Turkey for thousands of years and then after 1923 they didn’t. Millions of Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe at the end of WWII. These things usually seem unthinkable until they happen and then they are not. Usually these movement happen by force (although a relatively small # of killings can panic the rest to flee) , but maybe they could be accomplished by peaceful means.
Most of the Arabs living in the West Bank don’t have deep roots in the area – even many of those that fled Israel in ’48 had migrated from other parts of the Arab world quite recently, attracted by the Jewish economic development of Palestine. If you read Twain’s Innocents Abroad, he describes Palestine as being mostly empty – think of Arizona, which had 122,000 people in 1900 and 6 million today. There was never any such thing as a “Palestinian” nationality – the identity of the people in the area was just “Arab subject of the Ottoman Empire” and there were no barriers that prevented people from moving around. Arafat himself was born in Cairo. They already share a religion and culture with the rest of the Arab world, so the obstacles to relocating them are mostly political. That being said, there are a lot of vested interests in keeping things the way they are, and a whole mythical “Palestinian” identity has been constructed (keeping in mind that to some extent all national identities are myth based) so the idea of transfer of population will meet fierce resistance, be labeled genocide, etc.
* I think I’m going to have to start using Yahoo search. A Google doodle honoring Yuri Kochiyama. Yes, truly an honorable American. What does a search into this Great American worthy of note on the home searchpage by the biggest US search engine turn up? A loudmouthed rabble-rousing activist with all the boilerplate stereotypical ideals you’d expect from a 60s far-left liberal. But while most of the rest of the people from that era grew up, she continued on with it through to the present day. She praised Osama bin Laden for the attacks on 9/11, and even went on record thanking Islam for Osama. She supported a number of other violent attacks on the US and Europe. In a sane world, Google would put out a doodle honoring the day she pushed up the daisies, instead of her birthday.
* I think it’s clear that some Jewish nationalists and some defenders of Jewish nationalism want the land between the Jordan and the Med but not the people living on it. That’s cold, even if that’s what we did in the US when we settled here, but let’s not forget that same justification was used by Goering at the Nuremberg Trials (using the American example.)
You just aren’t going to get much traction for population transfers of this kind in today’s world. The underlying idea is that you cannot have a pure ethno-state for one group of people unless you get rid of everyone who isn’t a member of the group. It is extremely ironic that any Jew would argue like that, which is why Ben Gurion did not endorse expelling all Arabs in 1948. And the idea that one cannot remain a democracy unless you expel approximately 50% of the people living on the land you control is extremely funny, if you stop to think about it. It’s far easier and much less morally problematic to just stop being a democracy, without declaring it so.
As for the demographics, that’s the way it goes. Anyone who is a student of history knows that borders, and nations, rise and fall and change their composition over time. Israel is not likely to be any different. The entire 20th Century is just a snapshot in recorded human history, and the history of the USA, which comprises about 2-3 snapshots, has changed radically from what it was in the 240 years of its existence, particularly in terms of ethnicity, culture, and demographics. Concerning our future, sure, I’d like to see a European resemblance in America for the future. But based on current global demographic and migration trends, I doubt it. We just have to hope that the best parts of our culture survive.
