Frame Game Radio joins and then Fahad Game Radio provides the Iraqi Shia perspective.
From an interview with Israeli military expert Martin Van Creveld:
There seems to be a fear about a large scale conflict; militarily, what do you think that Israel could put in place?
With its vital infrastructure—power plants, fuel depots, factories, and the like—exposed to precision-guided missiles launched by Hezbolla Syria and possibly Iran, Israel will find itself in a difficult situation. As well as doing its best to protect these assets by means of its highly-developed surface-to air missile system, it will mount air- and missile attacks on enemy air defenses, missile launching sites, and infrastructure targets (one Israeli officer has recently warned that, should Hezbollah get involve in a war with Israel, the latter would bomb Lebanon back into the Stone Age). One can also expect Israeli commando raids against military targets which, for one reason or another, cannot be tackled by airpower on its own.
Steve Sailer writes: I don’t have the patience to listen to talk when I could be reading.
Comments:
* No offense, but since you are a Baby Boomer, I feel compelled to ask: were you aware that you can download podcasts on your smartphone, allowing you to listen to them while you’re doing some otherwise dreary and time consuming task like commuting, walking, doing dishes, et cetera?
Because I share your preference for reading over audio when possible, but I think the reason that podcasts are so popular among what Tyler Cowen calls “infovores” is that they’re a way to get extra information when you’re doing something that’s boring but you can’t read a book while you do it.
* I have a job where I can listen to podcasts all day long. Then I walk to the gym (takes 50 minutes), lift weights, walk back home, all while listening to podcasts. I also listen while walking the dog, doing housework, working in the yard, etc. And then there’s bluetooth in the car for more listening. That’s a lot of hours of podcasts in a typical day. Much more efficient for me than reading.
* I check in regularly at Vox Day’s site as he often has interesting things to say, but his current all-out assault on Jordan Peterson displays some of the flaws in his own personality: his compulsion to indulge in petty squabbles and need to constantly assert his own preeminence.
* I have to imagine that Professor Peterson’s public reach is an order or two of magnitude above Vox’s, which I suspect is a source of jealously and frustration for Mr. Beale.
* Unfortunately, in one his genuinely more illuminating recent posts, he explained how the only person who never really failed him was Tolkien, but Tolkien is dead, so he’s not going to give personal advice. Vox obviously reads Sailer, so if he reads this I urge him to seriously consider whether he has gone off track. Ditch all of the petty squabbles and self-assertion. You’re doing good. You don’t need that stuff.
* I enjoy reading him, but he seems unhinged. Like Roissy (apologies, as you are probably on this thread, and you have made some intelligent posts that I have commented on), he is obsessed with proving that everyone who opposes him is a gamma male and everyone who agrees with him is an alpha.
I also find his habit of calling Trump “the God Emperor” a bit weird.
* On the PUA scene, the alpha is the guy who gets to bang a reasonably attractive drunk woman after the bar closes, but he may in all other aspects of his life be a loser. When I worked at a large ad agency there were two good-looking young guys who did very well with the ladies. However, they were at the bottom of the totem pole in the corporate hierarchy. No one took their opinions seriously. So they were alpha in one domain and nothing much in the other.
* I think that there is a rational but unspoken reason for women to object to pick up artists. For most of human history if a woman wanted to identify a man who could take care of her children, self confident behaviour around other men was probably the best tell. There were well built men who were slaves, men with genetically good looks who were young and powerless, men who had all the outer appearences of success but whose position was insecure and so could not afford to act confidently as they might annoy other men who they were dependant on.
Self confidence was the best single measure of how well a man could take care of you, if a man acted this way around other men and did not have the power to back it up he would quickly be put in his place.
In a modern, urban, law abiding state where people meet and may not see each other again there is now little danger for the even the least powerful to behave convincingly confidently in public and this can be consciously learnt by PUAs. Many women still have an irrational attraction for this behaviour, the way a cat cannot control itself in chasing a laser pointer.
The elder Kahn, a Republican from San Francisco who served 12 terms in Congress between 1899 and his death in 1924, championed an extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1902 prohibiting immigration by Chinese laborers.
While doing so, he approvingly read to Congress excerpts from a travel writer’s 1853 journey to the Far East, describing the Chinese as “morally, the most debased people on the face of the [E]arth.” Kahn personally endorsed these views, stating they are “undoubtedly equally applicable to any Chinese community in our country.”
A tremendously influential legislator, Kahn was successful in getting the votes for the act’s extension, which made Chinese immigration permanently illegal and legally enshrined anti-Chinese sentiment until its repeal in 1943…
What is certainly true is that the anti-Chinese immigration stand was the party line of the day. And, say Bay Area Jewish historians, virulently anti-Chinese sentiment was also par for the course among Kahn’s fellow German Jewish gentry of San Francisco…
“They were a civilizing influence on a kind of boomtown of young men running wild,” said Fred Rosenbaum, the founder of Berkeley-based Lehrhaus Judaica and the author of many books about San Francisco Jewry. “But they did have a giant blind spot. And that had to do with anti-Asian racism. They really were leading participants in the persecution of the Chinese in California.”
Added historian and author Ava Kahn (no relation to Julius): “Julius Kahn was one of the few Congresspeople who was against a literacy test for immigrants. So he was not anti-immigrant. He was anti-Asian immigrant.”
So was Jacob Voorsanger, the famed rabbi of the city’s Congregation Emanu-El (and founder of the local Jewish newspaper that became J.), who described the Chinese as a “non-assimilative race” who were “unable to mix with caucasians” in the pages of J.’s predecessor, the Emanu-El.
Levi Strauss summarily dismissed 180 Chinese workers from his famous blue jeans factory after thugs targeted the Chinese in 1877 riots. Adolph Sutro, a social liberal, one of the city’s greatest industrialists and philanthropists, and, in 1894, the first Jew to be elected mayor of a major U.S. city, boasted about having never hired “a chinaman.” He wrote that “the very worst emigrants from Europe are a hundred times more desirable than these Asiatics.”
Rosenbaum’s research has revealed that Jewish communities on the East Coast and in the Midwest, where there were few Chinese, were confused and horrified at San Francisco Jews’ peculiar animus — which, to be fair, they shared with much of the city’s white establishment. Many worried that the fanatical drive to limit Asian immigration would eventually boomerang on Jews — and, with the Immigration Act of 1924, it did: Jews from much of Europe were barred from entry, intensifying the magnitude of the Holocaust.
