malandrew

or just stay with her current employer and somehow work on her startup.

The first two options make sense but this latter option sounds like a risk. As I understand it, she can't earn any active income from this startup unless see has an I-129 for it. A share grant counts as income.

I mean, yeah you can work on a side project in your spare time that could become a business, but the moment employment and active income enters the picture that becomes something else.

Why don't they just start a company in the country where they are from or why don't you start a company with someone who is a citizen or has a green card?

The entire premise of your question is misaligned with the intention of the H1-B visa. Yes, everyone abuses its intent, but that isn't justification for more people to find more ways to abuse it. The abuse of that visa (and other visas) is why folks just want it abolished outright. I guess the purpose of a system is what it does, but it was sold to the American electorate as a way for companies to get access to talent that they simply cannot find domestically.

Trying to use the H1-B to hire a very specific person instead of any person with the skillset needed for the role would be in contradiction with the labor market test (LMT) needed for PERM status.

An H1-B can only work for the employer on the I-129 petition. There are some forms of passive income allowed but to placing shares in a trust and having an unpaid board seat just seems like an attempt to cheat the process because ultimately the goal is for her to work for this startup. Doing what your proposing puts a target on her head where anyone that is anti-H-1B can report her to USCIS and get her deported.

Moving home, working remotely and then applying for an L-1 seems like the correct approach here for what you're trying to do.

Where?

Can't think of any particular sources off the top of my head. It shows up from time to time in different places.

I think blood-and-boden arguments for territory are bad, full stop.

I generally agree. I generally argue for reciprocity and even handedness. If someone else claims a certain argument as legitimate, then it's fair to use that same argument for counterclaims. In this case, the person I was replying to was making the "blood-and-boden argument", which means it is fair to apply that same argument to the counterclaim for those against whom they feel entitled to the same territory.

Me? I have no dog in this fight as my ancestry is so far removed that I can't claim it. My take is that if you go back in your ancestry and you can't point to a single named ancestor in your family tree (unbroken. you have to know everyone between you and that person), then you really can't claim connection to a place as you can't physically place a specific ancestor in a specific community (town, city, village), much less a controlling interest or other form of ownership. I've researched my family tree back to about the 1500s. That's about as far back as 99% of people can claim because written records largely dry up in the 1500s, with the exception of some folks with ties to nobility.

In your opinion, what is a good argument for territory?

To the best of my knowledge, the overwhelming scientific consensus considers Ashkenazi Jews descendants of Levantine ethnic groups.

A question I have there is how far back to do you have to go to reach that ancestry. Pretty much all Europeans have paternal and maternal haploproups whose origin is in the Middle East. In fact, I would reckon that the only individuals in Europe today that don't claim ancestry to the Middle East would be folks whose ancestors migrated directly from Africa to Europe. Almost everyone else from Europe is going to be able to claim the Middle East. https://vimeo.com/50531435

But the solution is to observe that irredentism is wrong full stop, not to attempt the erasure of Ashkenazi ethnic identity.

Makes sense. I'm going to incorporate that into my understanding here. Thanks for the corrections.

As a followup, I just did some googling and it looks like Ashkenazi Canaanite ancestry likely originated around 1000 BC.

According to Wikipedia, it looks like the Northern Kingdom of Israel was established around 900 BC and the Kingdom of Judah existed around 850 BC.

Correct me if I'm making a logical error here, but this would suggest that Ashkenazis likely originate from a voluntary diaspora and not a involuntary diaspora (like in 70 AD), if they share genetic ancestry to the region from around or just before the Kingdom of Israel and Judah were established (unless they were expelled by their own. i.e. the equivalent of different denominations and ideological schisms).

That all said, I'm still with you that blood-and-boden arguments are bad, but if folks are going to make that claim it's still worth asking questions about whether that claim is any stronger than the blood-and-boden arguments presented by others.

I think you're confusing me with other folks on HN. I value cohesive high trust societies so I'm personally in favor of assimilation and much more gradual changes to any culture.

I think a change from 96% to 67% in 76 years is a catastrophe for culture indigenous to a region, and it's not a surprise that the Nakba followed such a rapid change without assimilation. The rate should be one where outsiders coming into a society become part of that society instead of splintering the society.

In chemistry terms, it's the difference between a solution, emulsions, suspensions and mixtures. In my mind, the goal should be cultural "solutions". If the rate of change is such that you end up with enclaves that resist mixing, then that leads to decline of trust and civic engagement. You end up with a society that is highly political and fragmented and liable to balkanize and potentially engage in armed civil conflict.

Fair enough. With that in mind, at what point does it no longer make sense to track it?

There must be some principled position where you can argue when it does and or does not make sense. In the case of this conflict, we're talking about a conflict where a few folks that directly experienced it are still alive and that many folks whose parents experienced it are still alive.

The Nakba is more recent than the Holocaust by a few years. Should it get the same treatment? Countries like Germany are still paying reparations.

In the US, we constantly have discussions about the institution of slavery in the US that ended in 1865. Jim Crow laws are more recent injustice however and only ended in 1865.

The Ukraine likewise had the Holodomor. There's actually a fascinating video of Abe Foxman of the ADL speaking with former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, telling him that it would be unproductive to talk about "your genocide, our genocide", but at the end of the day that's what we have here and it only seems fair to give comparable treatment for comparable catastrophes.

Speaking of catastrophe, I've always found it somewhat ironic that the word Nakba and the word Shoah (the original vernacular used to describe the Holocaust before it was replaced in the late 60s) both have the same meaning. Nakba is Arabic for catastrophe and Shoah is the Yiddish word for catastrophe.

I'm not saying where that line should or should not be, but it only seems fair that if we're going to draw a line that victims of different but comparable injustices should be given comparable treatment.

Fair enough. I didn't realize that the Khazar hypothesis was fringe. I've seen it pretty widely cited and assumed it was more commonly accepted.

What is still fair to say is that many Jews in Israel do not actually have a continued occupation of that land going back thousands of years as was claimed by the person I was originally responding to.

4% in 1872 is a very low number. Absent the mass immigration that diluted the local population and a Nakba that expulsed many, that 4% population there in 1872 would still be about 4% of the population today give or take a few percentage points assuming the fertility rate of that 4% and the 96% percent that were not Jewish were comparable.

Many of the Jews that are in Israel today are of European descent (i.e. no thousands of years of continued occupation of Palestine) and many of the Jews that are in Israel today that are of Arabic descent are there due to Zionist terrorism from the Irgun, Lehi, and Haganah prior to 1948 and the mass migration from around the Arab-Israeli war. For example, Avi Shlaim from Oxford University has given numerous interviews on the terrorism committed by Zionists in Iraq to coerce the Middle Eastern Jewish populations to concentrate in Palestine as part of the Zionist project.

What is indisputable is that the claim of a continued presence of Israel/Palestine by Jews going back thousands of years really only applies to a very small percent of Jews in Israel. The reality is that that number is most certainly dwarfed by the quantity of Palestinians in Israel/Palestine that can claim to have "lived there for thousands and thousands of years" per the person I was replying to.

I'm not denying individual soldiers committed atrocities. However if we go back to the actual news following October 7th, the claims were that the types of atrocities being claimed were claimed as widespread/systemic amongst the Hamas combatants. For example, there was absolutely no lack of claims of sexual assault, rape and other crimes against women, and in the coming months as more evidence surfaced, these claims have all been debunked thoroughly. Not only were they debunked, but many of the "journalists" working for Western media (NY Times for example) have been exposed as former IDF or other strong ties to the Israeli government. These are the types of "conflicts of interest" that would have caused any legitimate journalist to recuse themselves from reporting on.

And if what you are trying to claim is true then where is the footage from Hamas that shows that?

Who do you think released the footage from the Hamas combatants? They were using GoPros and other cameras with local recording and when the militants were killed, the IDF took possession of the recording devices. How many devices were being used? How many minutes of footage were there from these devices? What aren't the contents of these devices released unedited in their entirety. To date all we have is basically a selectively edited 46 minute video released by the Israeli government that compiles everything they want us to see from October 7th and nothing they don't want us to see.

Between the myriad lies that have been debunked (40 beheaded babies, baby in an oven, rapes, etc.), every one should be demanding more primary unedited evidence of what happened so we can actually pass judgement based on evidence. A link to a video of testimonies from people that almost certainly served in the IDF at some point and possibly could still be reservists, is something that should be taken with a grain of salt. These interviews also came out in the days following the festival after such folks had been questioned about what happened and possibly prepped about what they should and should not say to the media.

In that 7 to 8 minute video, there's like 1 maybe 2 minutes of video showing actual actions of Hamas operatives. You have video of them shooting at something in the distance (at who is unknown). You have video of them shooting at cars driving towards them where you don't know who was inside and who was shot. You have video of them throwing grenades in a car and them being tossed out by the occupant of the car. You have video of someone being taken prisoner with zip ties. All of these are very short clips taken from longer footage and selective edited/disclosed. Where's the rest of the footage? What does the rest of the footage show?

Furthermore, the conceal carry license rate in Israel is estimated at 10%. This even exceeds the rate of 8.4% for the US. Approximately 6 to 7% of Americans served in the armed forces. 69% of Israeli men served in the IDF and 56% of women (2019 figures).

In the US, in the event a violent event involving firefights, there's a pretty good chance that a non-trivial portion of Americans of fighting age represent an armed threat or a potential threat with military training (e.g. initially unarmed but could pick up a rifle from a slain combatant and then present a threat). That likelihood is far greater in Israel than in the US.

Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto lamented that “there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass” when explaining why Japan would not consider trying to invade the US in WWII. That same sentiment applies to Israel and makes identifying friend or foe or non-combatant very difficult.

Compulsory military service is a double-edged sword. There are the obvious benefits for national defense, but it also creates a liability for all individuals of fighting age in the event of an armed conflict. Trying to judge an armed conflict in a country or region from a lens of a country of region where most folks are unarmed and have no small arms training is a fools errand. For example, if you're in California, you're from a region where 0.31% of the population has a conceal carry license. I would suspect that those with military experience and/or small arms training is similarly low.

It's pretty much impossible to judge how an armed conflict unfolded in a place with a wildly different reality in these respects. Just using the United States as an example, if an armed conflict were to occur some place like the Idaho panhandle, it would be very different than an armed conflict in San Francisco. Or pick any two places in the US with wildly different rates of conceal carry permits, firearm ownership, military service and small arms training.

With all this in mind, the firefight videos I've seen are not really out of line with what I'd expect in any region with very high rates of conceal carry permits, firearm ownership, military service and small arms training.

Hamas has all the incentives to show that it didn't commit war crimes, and yet we've seen nothing from them, which should raise an even larger suspicion.

Assume for a moment that they didn't commit war crimes (I don't actually believe this, but the hypothetical matters here). How do you demonstrate something that didn't happen? Selective video footage disclosure can only show things that did happen, not things that didn't happen. Only with holistic mass disclosure of all available video evidence existence can you actually start to infer what likely didn't happen.

What you could ask that is totally reasonable is why they haven't released footage showing what the IDF did that day? Did any of the Hamas combatants recording GoPro footage make it back with footage that shows the actions of the IDF. I think this is reasonable question to ask.

The biggest issue I see here is survivorship bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias). Those Hamas combatants most likely to have been engaged in gunfire with IDF soldiers, tanks and helicopters would have been the most likely to have been KIA, and their footage captured. The footage most likely to capture the actions of the IDF that day are the most likely to be in the possession of the IDF following the end of the armed conflicts that day. Those Hamas combatants that fled back to Gaza once they had a hostage before engaging with enemy combatants would have footage from that day showing their actions but not the actions of the IDF if they didn't exchange gunfire. What I want to know is what the IDF did that day. We can be certain the footage exists and we aren't being shown it. I understand why its being omitted, but everyone should be naturally skeptical of claims without that evidence.

Anyways, my main point is that we should be demanding all the raw unedited footage from October 7th from both sides. Without that, all we have is propaganda from both sides because we can't judge what happened holistically. We can only judge based on what we've been very selectively shown, which certainly isn't anything approximating the truth of what happened that day.

That festival is one of the places I'm most curious to see the footage from the helicopters and tanks.

Where's the footage from the AH-64 Apache helicopters that engaged? Did the helicopters distinguish between Hamas combatants and festival goers? How can they distinguish between the two since Hamas combatants don't really possess uniforms beyond the green headbands that make positive identification of enemy combatants very difficult during a firefight?

RPGs are a precious commodity for any fighting force, but especially one as supply constrained as Hamas. I find it incredibly hard to believe that any combatant force would use so many of them to inflict this level of anti-material damage to this many non-military vehicles at a music festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1T51_iroHo

Again, you lost the plot.

I'm not interested in a plot. I'm interested in hard evidence that provides and objective view of what actually happened. The little evidence we have from the festival does not support damage commensurate with what an insurgent force with small arms and a limited number of RPGs has the capacity to inflict.

Fair enough. It was a poor choice of words. I wasn't trying to justify the taking of hostages. I was trying to raise a discussion that we should be demanding more evidence about what actually happened on October 7th and that such evidence most certainly exists (assuming it hasn't been intentionally destroyed).

In another comment I just made I raise a question about the makeup of the 251 hostages. I'm genuinely interested in knowing how many of them were civilian hostages and how many are IDF soldiers and therefore prisoners of war.

This same question applies to the hostages that Israel has taken as well. They are portrayed as prisoners/detainees, but other than the legitimate combatants, all others are effectively hostages as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_detentions_in_the_Israel%...

relevant illustration: https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/16w6g5l/...

Yes it matters.

1195 people were killed on October 7th. My understanding is that 815 of these were civilians. This means that 380 were IDF. This is a ratio of 2.15 civilians killed for each combatant.

The IDF considers a 2:1 ratio "tremendously positive" [1].

Now this ratio largely depends on the belief that the Israeli civilians and IDF combatants were all killed by Hamas combatants.

If, however, the evidence (all the video footage) were to demonstrate that Hamas was far more measured and actually killed far fewer civilians, then it starts to look a lot less like terrorism and more like military action between two combative forces with unfortunate civilians caught in the crossfire in a combat zone.

For comparison, let's take Pearl Harbor. 2341 soldiers and 68 civilians were killed. Was it an act of war? Absolutely. Was it an act of terror? No. Pearl Harbor had a ratio of 0.03 civilians killed per combatant. None of what I'm saying is defense of Pearl Harbor. I'm just objectively describing what occurred for the sake of comparison to the conflict at hand.

I can't seem to find a breakdown of the 251 hostages that were taken on October 7th in terms of how many were civilians and how many were active duty or reserve IDF. Is it terrorism to take civilians hostage? Yes. Is it terrorism to take enemy combatants as prisoners of war? No. (That said, all POWs should be treated with dignity while in captivity. It's pretty clear that one side has treated their POWs with far more dignity than the other side in this conflict.)

October 7th didn't happen in a vacuum. This is an ongoing conflict spanning almost 80 years. How the Hamas combatants collectively conducted themselves on October 7th absolutely changes the framing on how to interpret what happened that day. If the majority of the civilian death were in fact caused by the Hannibal Directive, then it looks a lot more like a act of war than an act of terror. Not saying it can't be both. There's a spectrum here. But up until now, we've largely been led to believe one interpretation while a LOT of evidence that would provide a much clearer objective picture of what happened has been withheld.

Furthermore, Israel is a country with compulsory military service. This largely blurs the distinction between combatant and civilian. Citizens serve in the IDF at age 18 and you can be a reservist until 41 for soldiers and 46 for officers. Both men and women serve. The compulsory service pretty much creates a condition where every man and woman between 18 to 46 may be either active duty or a reservist. My guess is that approximately 34% of Israeli society is a potential combatant and that this ratio would be higher the closer you are to military bases, as was the case with the kibbutzim near the Gaza border.

The point is you are going lengths to try and prove what exactly?

Anyways, I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm demanding that what folks claim happened on October 7th actually be proven using all the available evidence. The entire justification for relation and the initial acceptance of that retaliation by Israeli was largely based on what we have been led to believe happened on October 7th. What actually happened matters. US involvement in the conflict was predicated on the current belief of what happened. We've sacrificed our nation's national security and reputation on the international stage based on beliefs about what happened. Thank God we at least haven't sacrificed our warfighters in service of this conflict.

I've honestly been shocked that no one really demands all the evidence be presented before believing any of the claims made. Nothing about October 7th is black and white and the discussion would be a lot clearer if we actually had all the evidence of what actually happened that day and we weren't basing our opinions on what we've been lead to believe by propaganda and the intentional omission of evidence that most certainly exists. "Truth is the first casualty of war"

And will you also do the same to investigate and see how many Gazans did Hamas kill with failed rockets and explosives?

Yes, totally support that. It's documented here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_...

Here's data on casualties on both sides: https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/05/middleeast/israel-hamas-m...

Are you know claiming that an Ak-47 is incapable of killing people?

Yet another strawman.

I'm guessing you have no practical experience with firearms otherwise you'd argue the points I'm making.

If you find yourself in a position trying to defend a terrorist attack on civilians (on either sides) it means you lost the plot somewhere along the way

I don't know how you arrived at the view that I'm defending a terrorist attack. I'm asking for an accurate account of what happened by the terrorists on both sides on October 7th.

Yes, if you have policies like the Hannibal Directive and the Dahiya Doctrine and your politicians actively advocate in defense of the rape of prisoners of war, you're as much as terrorist as Hamas. Let's not forget that the country was founded from the violence of the Irgun, Lehi, and Haganah.

I'm happy to condemn terrorism by Hamas. Will you likewise condemn the terrorism committed by the IDF? I ask because "if you find yourself in a position trying to defend a terrorist attack on civilians (on either sides) it means you lost the plot somewhere along the way."

Thanks for the correction.

Strawman much?

Taking hostages has practical benefits. Indiscriminate killing of folks that don't present a threat isn't practical.

Every single one of those combatants that left the fence that day had a limited amount of ammunition on them. Practically speaking, most US soldiers will patrol with about 7 magazines with 30 rounds in each magazine, plus two pistol magazines. Add another magazine in each firearm. A typical double stack magazine will be about 17 rounds, so we're talking about less than 300 rounds for a full load-out.

In the case of Hamas, they are using imprecise arms like AK-47s. They likely have no optics like red dots or scopes and are just using iron sights. Match grade AK-47s probably have 2 to 4 MOA of accuracy under ideal conditions with modern optics and meticulously handloaded ammunition using modern bullets.

Between poor accuracy and the need to occasionally lay down suppressive fire, 300 rounds isn't going to get you very far.

Unlike US warfighters, the Hamas warfighters also have no ability to call in close air support or be re-supplied. If you have a limited number of rounds and the only potential for "re-supply" comes from enemy combatants, the one thing you don't do is waste ammo on folks that aren't a threat like women, children, elderly. You prioritize fighting age men and in the case of the IDF, fighting age women as well.

RPGs are especially valuable and limited in supply and would likely be reserved for tanks, attack helicopters and vehicles that present threat. It's highly unlikely a reasonably trained fighting force with limited ammunition and explosives would waste them on non-threats. Not saying it didn't happen with any of those warfighters, but the majority would be more disciplined than that, especially coming from an environment plagued by scarcity. US soldiers pretty much have unlimited access to ammo and support and they aren't wasteful with ammo when there isn't a prospect of prompt resupply.

Honestly, I don't know how someone can see this take as unhinged unless they've been largely brainwashed into accept the narratives spun after October 7th.

When someone or some entity intentionally deceives you (which happened a lot with respect to October 7th. e.g. 40 beheaded babies), the only practical response is to assume maximum deceit so they are forced to present evidence to actually support their testimony about what they say happened.

No critical thinking person should accept the official Israeli government's accounting of what happened on October 7th at this point. “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”

Anyways, the truth about what actually happened that day is far more knowable than we currently know. All that is needed is transparency. Release everything.

Ukraine won't end until terms can be achieved that allow bankers and Western investors to buy up all the "distressed assets" in the Ukraine for pennies on the dollar just like the oligarchs bought up all of the major industries following the collapse of the USSR.

If you've never seen it, these videos from a banking conference in 2023 are "enlightening":

https://x.com/mtracey/status/1647811834039136258

Mitch McConnell's comments about Ukraine and it's natural resources also support this plan. If assets become to expensive to buy, just cause them to be distressed so you can buy them cheaply.

Pretty much all wars are banker's wars.

My understanding is that there's been renewed interest in building the Ben Gurion Canal proposed by Howard D. MacCabee in 1963.

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/servlets/purl/453701.pdf

Google's Ngram viewer isn't working for the term "Ben Gurion Canal" for some reason, but it would show approximately when renewed interest started getting traction since the proposal was declassified in 1996.

I wouldn't be surprised if the 2021 Evergreen fiasco was contributory to this renewed interest but this is pure speculation on my part.

To be fair, the JIDF has been astroturfing Wikipedia for far longer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t52LB2fYhoY

Who knows where the balance actually lies, but it's not just pro-Palestinians doing the propaganda here. Israel has engaged in far more propaganda than pretty much everyone (except maybe the United States) since the hasbara policy was first established following the public image fallout from the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_and_Shatila_massacre

To this day we still have no idea how many of those 1200 people were killed by Hamas and how many were killed by the IDF under the Hannibal Directive.

There likely are thousands upon thousands of hours of footage from October 7th from private/personal security cameras and also from the camera equipment on the attack helicopters and tanks.

Yet, despite all the footage that likely exists, a total of 46 minutes has been screened for the purpose of hasbara.

We could easily have an actual accounting of which of the 1200 were killed by Hamas and which were killed by the IDF if there was actual transparency and all the footage was released instead of selectively released to insinuate that 100% of the deaths were committed by Hamas.

Absent transparency, I'm inclined to place most of the 1200 deaths on IDF. There's more than enough footage of testimonials from IDF soldiers afterwards talking about how they engaged on October 7th to know for certain that they killed many of their own either due to the fog of war or due to the Hannibal Directive.

Personally, I would not be surprised if more than half of the 1200 were killed by the IDF given the ratio between how much footage has been shown relative to how much footage exists.

Absent transparency, the only fair thing to due is assume an intent to maximally deceive the public about what actually happened on October 7th.

In many ways, this is comparable to how the United States was misled about January 6th, 2021. A lot of the footage released in March 2023 contradicted much of the narrative that was spun in the weeks following Jan 6th, 2021. Even now, a lot of the footage still has yet to be released and we still have no idea how many undercover agents and other agent provocateurs were in the crowd that day.

In 1872, less than 4% of Palestine was Jewish. It was 17% in 1931. 33% in 1948 when Israel was formed.

The vast vast majority of Jews in Israel now are Ashkenazi. Ashkenazis are from Khazaria and converted to Judaism between 740 and 920 AD. Even from this population, there is a bottleneck around 600 to 800 years ago where the population was down to 350 individuals [1].

By and large very very few Jews in Palestine/Israel are able to claim Levantine/Semitic genetic ancestry.

Many Palestinians and other Levantine people in Palestine who now practice Islam are far more likely have to have ancestors that were once Jewish that actually lived in historical kingdom of Israel prior to 70 AD when Titus and Vespasian crushed a revolt there.

The ancestors of these folks that today practice Islam in Palestine likely converted to Islam sometime after 637 AD when Arabs started to settle in Palestine.

It's pretty commonly accepted all over the world since basically forever that ownership is bequeathed from parents to children. This means that those who are Islamic today but whose genetic ancestors practiced Judaism in the past and lived in the historical kingdom of Israel have far greater claim to the land than folks who have no genetic ancestry to the Kingdom of Israel and instead have ancestry with no genetic relationship that converted to Judaism about 1105 to 1285 years ago.

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/ashkenazi-jews-descend-from-35...

Thanks for the correction.

I'm not sure there is a modern form of government that can solve the problem we have. If a non-trivial quantity of your leaders (elected or appointed) are being coerced and blackmailed, there's not really a solution. Maybe in the past, a monarch could have their blackmailer and associates put to death, but there's not really a solution for a nation under blackmail. You certainly won't be able to have a form of government with a functional justice system with concepts like innocent until proven guilty and due process. I can't think of a way for a leader to remain beholden to the will of the people, if there is no mechanism to swiftly deal with blackmail, when the price is to go against the will of the people. Such a mechanism would be incompatible with the modern tenets of justice.

"Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion, Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." — John Adams, October 11, 1798.

I don't remember the interview, but there was an interview in the second have of 2024 with Peter Thiel where he basically alludes to the fact that we're largely operating with institutions today that are basically a club where admittance is granted on the basis of being compromised. Basically, this reeks of the adage attributed to Lenin "Trust is good. Control is better".

As greed and avarice and numerous vices become more common, the pool of blackmailable people to sponsor to a position of power only grows. There was a reason, institutions like the FBI and CIA used to strongly prefer hiring Mormons, who did not drink and were very unlikely to partake in adultery or other frowned up sexual proclivities.

For the most part, I would not be surprised if getting the financial support to run for office in many parts of the country are largely predicated on the whether or not the financial backers underwriting your campaign feel confident they can control you. It's probably not enough to trust a politician for many financiers of politicians. They need to know they can control before they write a check.

This is why we have so few politicians of any integrity like Thomas Massie. Even he has a massive target on his back, with lots of money pouring in to support his opponents. I can imagine that someone like Thomas Massie could only ever win in a state that is still largely constituted of the types of people of which John Adams wrote. A politician with any integrity would be very unlikely to ever win in states like California, New York or Illinois.

The fact that the only people arrested in the Epstein scandal have been Epstein and Maxwell, pretty much speaks volumes about how out how our government is being run. There is little to no accountability (for government officials or executives in corporations) apart from a token person going to jail now and again. We have a system of government and institutions actively protecting criminals.

The way I see it, the overly powerful government and corporate institutions are two sides of the same coin. There's been so much revolving door activity and corporate capture of government, that depowering either in either order yields a weakening of the other.

One person that I can't recommend enough is Mike Benz, if you've never checked out his videos. He's an absolute fountain of knowledge, it's just that there is such a vast spiderweb of "<foo> industrial complexes" out there (finance, military, media, tech, censorship, etc.) that it's impossible to convey in short media clips.

Best place to start is his pinned video: https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1838448979799085456

Shellenberger is another one to check out.

Once, you've seen enough of the links between government and corporations pointed out by him and others that are watchdogging, you start seeing it everywhere. You literally can't turn on a single MSM news show today and not see "expert" after "expert" that if you dig in are just cutouts for the vast web of "<foo> industrial complexes" out there and how there are so many innocuously named institutions, think tanks and NGOs that are quietly guiding so much of what is happening from behind the scenes and manufacturing narratives.

What I see in the new administration has less to do with policies and more to do with folks that are increasingly hard to manipulate and blackmail. Thiscertainly doesn't apply to Trump's first administration, which was a disaster, but it was a disaster because he really didn't expect to win, and completely underestimated the swamp. As a result, he hastily put together a first administration of folks that had ulterior motives or was compromised.

At this point, Trump is probably the most vetted president in modern times. They have literally done everything possible to try and take him down. Yes, he's had his fair share of indiscretions and he absolutely is a flawed human, but none of his legitimate indiscretions were enough to take him out that there have now been many unhinged efforts to manufacture scandal to take him out because he represents such a threat to the deep state.

One reason Trump has largely been able to avoid this stuff is because he learned first hand how the coercion and blackmail machine functioned very early in his career with his exposure to Roy Cohn and the Blue Suite scandal at the Plaza Hotel. His behavior certainly hasn't been beyond reproach (far from it), but at this point, it's safe to say that he's not nearly as compromised as the Clinton's, the Bush's and the Biden's have proven to be.

While I'm not keen on many of his cabinet picks, there are quite a few folks in there that have already had their dirty laundry aired, and while it wasn't always pretty, it also wasn't career ending. What you're left with are folks that have seen how the coercion and blackmail and scandal operating machine works and are on a mission to destroy it. This time around, more of the cabinet picks appear to be far less compromised than previous administrations including Trump's first administration.

Basically, my take is that this is the first administration in my lifetime that has some leeway to break from from the orbit of blackmail and coercion that has shaped policy since Kennedy was assassinated.

TBF, I'm not against wealth transfers and infrastructure investments. I just think they should be handled as close to the local level as possible.

Wealth transfers for example worked better when Churches and other local community institutions were involved. They'd collect directly from their parishioners and provide support directly to those that need help. This is a system that is highly accountable to the people providing help and keeps those receiving help accountable for "helping themselves" and not just mooching.

Same with infrastructures. With infrastructure, there are times, that some big may have value, but very rarely does it require the scale of the state or the federal government. The biggest of infrastructure projects are rarely larger than an economic region (e.g. SF Bay Area. Seattle Metro area. etc.).

The interstate highway system is like the only infrastructure project that benefits from Federal involvement.

Right now, doing through the Federal government provides far too little accountability for results and spending money wisely.

Thanks for the kind words.

I'd add the nuance that in the past trust was not (largely) extended across racial lines, but there was progress made, up until it began falling apart altogether.

Yeah, I'm not going to deny this at all, but I must say that in the 1990s and 2000s at least among the older Millennials and younger GenX, there was a very real sense of judging people mostly by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. What has happened in the last 15 years in race and gender relationships is a massive step backwards. Even I can't help having prejudiced thoughts today as a response to these changes that me 20 years ago would have been repulsed by. I say this as a third culture kid, who is mixed race whose "plurality" leans European, but who who identifies with Europe, Latin American and a tiny smidge of Indigenous South America.

It's actually been sad to see some of the comments here where folks have expressed that "America doesn't have a culture". I know it's largely attenuated from when I was younger, but it's still palpable to me. It's sad to see that it's now so weak that many express that they don't even think it exists.

Coming from a left-liberal point of view, I think the root cause has been economic, rather than cultural, because (developing along the same timeline as your tenure in the United States) we've arrived at an extractive rather generative form of capitalism.

Couldn't agree more. I was left leaning most of my life. I remember back when Zappa testified in Congress about overzealous right leaning conservative school marms. Today, it largely feels the same but the longhouse school marms are left leaning. I'm always conflicted about self describing myself as conservative these days because while policy-wise that's where I'm out, it's mostly out of the complete failures of the left-leaning policies of those in control of every major American institution. In 20-30 years, I would not surprise if I end up back expressing support for the equivalent of left leaning policies in 2050 or so in the event the right successfully takes back these institutions. Ultimately, I just want to be left alone and want to see everyone else left alone as well.

I'm also in complete agreement that its the blind pursuit of economic policy that serves those in power that's been most contributory to the destruction of American culture. If I read correctly a full 1 in 5 working adults in America are immigrants. That's wildly high and it's insane to me than anyone can argue that hasn't depressed wages, increased pressure on housing costs (which increases the cost of living across the board).

That said, this all falls under the research of George Borjas, who has done an amazing job documenting the impact of immigration workers on the American workers. But it isn't the whole story. He has a colleague at Harvard, whose work is equally important in this discussion and that is the work of Robert Putnam, who has done the largest and most comprehensive studies documenting the decline of civic engagement in America. His work is summarized in his book "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community", but his larger body of work merits attention.

The disintegration of homogenous communities and replacement with heterogenous communities has creation circumstances where groups are fighting with one another.

One of the seminal lessons I've learn in my life personally is that politics rises when things balkanize. Instead of a single culture rowing together in the same direction to grow the size of the pie, they instead fight against one another to grow the size of their piece of the pie. I've seen this happen in America broadly in the time I've lived here, but I've also seen it up close and personally while working at one of Silicon Valley's best known unicorns.

I feel like I joined the company relatively late at around employee ~2000 and engineer ~200, but by the time I left about 10 years later, I was among the 25 most tenured employees at the company and had seen probably 10000 engineers pass through the company and who knows how many total employees. My guess is 50k or more.

The last 4 years or so were painful. The company went from one where everyone had shared economic incentives (stock options) and a shared mission, to one with fiefdoms everywhere and everyone just trying to further their career and the career of their manager or skip level. By the time I left, my guess is that I could count those folks that I worked with that still truly believed in the mission of the company on two hands. Which is nothing in a company of 25k+ active employees.

I sincerely believe we can get back to a unified culture, but it's going to require something drastic like the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 to stop the bleeding and then one to two generations to pass to allow for those here to figure out how to form one new common American identity. That's not to say we shouldn't allow anyone in, but it should only be allowing those in that truly benefit all Americans and not just the American oligarchy.

That is, of course, the opposite of what I expect to happen with (as I see them) the extractive capitalists fully in charge, but I am prepared to be proved wrong.

I too am skeptical, but I'd put the emphasis more specifically on globalists and the deep state. Between all that's happened with Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Thomas Massive, Jeffrey Epstein, P Diddy, Twitter Files, revelations from Mike Benz, Hunter Biden laptop, etc. etc. etc., I have very little confidence that corruption from those in economic and political control will actually be held to account.

I will ask you, as I've recently been asking all of my right-wing friends, to judge what happens in the near future against the expectations that you have now. If things go badly, and those solutions fail, will you be willing to try "my side's" ideas - think TR +FDR reduce corporate power, : wealth transfers and massive infrastructure investments - next?

Yes and no. I'm absolutely willing to condemn what you're describing as "my side's ideas", but I have no confidence in the ideas you're talking about as well. I've seen them fail both in this country and the country I'm from.

The ideas I want to see tried out are neither Republican or Democrat ideas. I want to take a wrecking ball to power structures in America. Everything deep state related needs to go.

The analogy I use as a sailor (which should also be familiar to anyone who has kitesurfed), is the idea of "depowering" the sails. Right now, we have instutitions with way too much power and all that power is a massive magnet for the most corruptible people. Orwell said "Absolute power corrupts absolutely", but their is more to it than that. Absolute power also absolutely attracts the absolutely corrupted. I'd love to see far more decentralization and power back at the state and local level. I'd love to see every major institution under the Executive branch either dismantled or spread across medium-sized cities all across the country.

Back before we had the Department of Education, we relied on 50 department of educations in each of 50 states trying things out. Some had good ideas, but some had bad ideas, but those with bad ideas had the option of copyingt those experiencing success with their policies.

I've seen this exact same situation at the big company I left. For the first 5-6 years anyone with an idea had to first implement that idea, prove it out and then scale it up. Eventually, everything became command and controls and now every idea could no longer be experimented with and scaled up. Instead they had to be implemented by or get the blessing of the annointed ones with power and if considered acceptable could only be implemented company-wide or not at all. With that approach, I saw so many "ideas" that were ram-rodded through as multi-year efforts, many of which failed, but failed only after their original "sponsor" was promoted and had moved on, leaving a wake of destruction for others to clean up.

The closest equivalent to this is what's happened with Milei in Argentina. I'm still skeptical of him as an individual, but what he's achieved has been nothing short of remarkable.

If I could have one wish for America, it would be that the bulk of my taxes went to my local jurisdiction first, then state and only pennies were left over for federal only for those things that can only be handled at the federal level like national defense (but only acted upon with the blessing of 50 states).

One of the biggest failures I think with our Constitution are that representation wasn't designed to scale. When the first Congress was established the US had 3.9 million people. Today, it's 346 million. In 1789, with the first Congress, we had 26 senators and approximately 65 representatives by the end. The ratio in 1789 was 43k people to each member of Congress. Today it is 643k.

This is a failure to scale because each citizen has a far smaller voice and it's much cheaper for those in power to corrupt 538 members of Congress today. Had we scaled proportionately (43k to 1), Congress would have just over 8000 members. IMHO, that would be far healthier because it would be far more expensive for special interests to buy their way into getting a majority of votes of 8000+ members of Congress.

Anyways, that's enough for now. I could go on forever on this. Again, I appreciate your comment.

Glad to know other people feel this way. My experience has been that there are a lot more of us out there than it feels, but you only find that our when you start speaking up about it.

One of my biggest observations in life is that many discussions that seem dichotomous are not. Most everything exists on a spectrum.

One of the biggest one is pro-choice vs pro-life. My experience has been that there is a very very very tiny minority that is absolutely pro-life and an even tinier minority that is pro-choice. The vast majority are in the it depends on time and gestation. If you ask the right questions of someone, you find out that they are pro-choice but feel that abortion in the 8th month is wrong. Likewise, when you ask the right questions, may pro-life people are okay with abortion like the morning after pill to like up to a month or two. What I've learned is that we've been conditioned to think we all fall into one camp or another, but the truth is most are in the same camp but just disagree on when is okay within that very wide 9-month span.

Likewise, the same goes for the debate about immigration. There's this push to force everyone to fall into the camp of 100% for immigration no matter what or no immigration whatsoever.

The truth is that most folks are actually simultaneously pro-immigration and anti-immigration. Almost everyone feels like there is some common culture. You need to have it if you want any semblance of cooperation, but even the most ardent anti-immigration person agrees that there are folks work bringing into the tribe.

There is no magic dirt. Demographics are destiny and you really can't reverse the damage from an immigration policy that makes no attempt to discern between folks you should and should not allow in. It's possible to take a cautious approach and increase it later if proven to be too conservative. The reverse however is very very messy.

If you haven't seen it yet, you should check out Sam Hyde's ~45 minute video message to Elon Musk. Absolutely amazing summary of the state of things.

First of all, I want to say, I'm sorry for what our government did to your countries. Absolutely shameful. (This goes for pretty all the wars the US has been involved with in the 20th century, but especially those since Kennedy was assassinated).

I've always been curious about Washington DC. I've visited twice. Seems like it attracts a lot of the best people from all over the globe but the worst people from within the United States.

One of my biggest wishes for the US is to decentralize pretty much all the functions that Washington DC does today. In its current form, it doesn't exist to further the best interests of the United States. It only functions to further the best interest of itself. Classic case of the Shirky Principle applied to a city.

Curious to hear more about the soul you're talking about? My guess is it has more to do with the foreign presence in that city than the domestic presence.

For the most part, my observations is that we now just put up with rampant property crime and very little of it gets reported. This isn't surprising because getting cops to respond to property crime reports when you call 911 now takes so long that it isn't even worth it.

I've personally experienced more property crime and other issues in the past 5 to 10 years than my entire family experienced in the 29 to 34 years prior.

About a month and a half a go, I had some kids damage my car in the supermarket parking lot. Called 911. Waiting on hold for like 20 minutes because it wasn't an emergency. Cops didn't show for an hour. Called back, changed the address of the incident to my home. Cops ended up showing up 13 hours after the incident between 1 and 2 am. Growing up, I don't recall ever waiting more than 30 minutes for anything when 911 was called. I wouldn't have even called 911 for this issue if I had a choice. Supermarket wouldn't provide surveillance footage without a police report filed.

The statistics simply aren't telling the whole story. People have largely given up on reporting things because they've become so commonplace and folks don't expect anything to be done. Crime clearance rates for all crimes are down all over the country as we lose faith that anything will be done.

I wish I had the study I read one time handy, but it was comparing crime stats between the US and Japan over time and it basically showed that you can get to a point where crime has gotten so bad that it's no longer reported because folks no longer expect any resolution from reporting crime. This closely matches my personal experience with property crime that has impacted me and others I know.

Even the arsonist who tried to set my home on fire two years ago while on a meth bender is getting out in 5 years from now. The charges were two separate cases. One was 5 counts of arson 1 and the other was 1 count of arson 1 and violating a restraining order IIRC. Pled everything down to 6 counts of arson 2. 7 years total, with two years already served. In the end, one entire house burned down. One was severely damage and the other had minor damage because the fires were put out promptly.

We wouldn't bother to lock our doors growing up. Today, I probably record someone checking to see if my car is unlocked (crime of opportunity) about once every one to two months.

you cited 0 things I would personally be interested in

what things are you interested in that are cultural?

as hard times coming

This wouldn't surprise me, but unless it happens in 2nd to 4th year of his presidency, it's almost certainly going to be the bipartisan drunken sailor spending of Congress since the pandemic our country likely had a hand in causing.

Between accelerating national debt and our disastrous Ukraine war banking policies and international asset seizures that have undermined dollar supremacy, I'm expecting hard times unless we get a Milei-style intervention to course correct.

Disclaimer; lived and worked in the US; left the first time trump got the presidency.

Hope that's working out for you. It's working out here for me.

Got it. Wish you the best. Wish you had had a better experience here like I have. Only thing I can surmise is that you ended up in some cities in your list that left a lot to be desired. Denver is the only place on that list I'd ever consider living in. I'm unfamiliar with Fayetteville, AR, so no thoughts there, but I'd never want to live in DC, Chicago or St Louis.

What was your favorite city out of all those and what was your least favorite?

Are you and your wife from the same country? Did you meet in the US or came here together?

Strawman much?

I don't understand how you can get "America sucks" from from my comments. I love this place. All the stuff you said sucks are things that suck in lots of other countries too. Why am I going to get upset about phenomena that's happening everywhere? The things I like about America are those things that are unique to America.

being lonely is a function of your political affiliation (this was absolutely amazing to see - wow)

I was pointing out correlation. I didn't imply causation. You're reading causation into what I wrote. Loneliness or just general unhappiness is far less prevalent amongst those that lean conservative and very conservative. It's probably something worth investigating to figure out why this correlation exists.

Tokio Japan - has kids riding metro by themselves, you should look it up.

Glad you brought this up. It was something I was thinking about when I wrote my comment. Japan has exactly that which the US has lost a LOT of in the past 30+ years. It's a highly cohesive, high trust culture.

You should go and look up the research of Robert Putnam, who has done the largest, most comprehensive longitudinal studies of the decline of civic engagement.

If you're so unhappy in the US, why are you here? Why not move back to wherever you're happier that has culture when you think the US has no culture? Reading between the lines, it sounds like you haven't made an effort to assimilate into the culture and that has colored your experience and negative view of America.

I'm not going to disagree that America is sick, but it has the potential to get healthy again and that starts with changes that prioritize increasing the quality of life for those already here, whether they were born here or became naturalized citizens. And the prioritization of finding commonality between those that are Americans by birth or chose to become America because they believe in its potential as a nation.

I'm not surprised by your interpretation of a lot of my comment. Coastal/Urban America hasn't had anything resembling a common culture for a lot longer than 8 years now. I'd say that it's been a wholly different place pre- and post- 9/11.

Your view of America is limited by your experience of it in the past 8 years. I assure you, it was very very different even just 20 years ago. America pre-social media was a very very different place. We now have at least one (Gen Z), if not two full generations (younger Millenials) of Americans that have grown up with all of their experiences mediated in some form or another in a relatively international post social media landscape.

And a lot of american are not.

Believe it or not, this is a pretty recent phenomena. It's only been since the late 90s as best. Hyphenated Americans is about 36 years old. It started with African-American" in about 1989 and didn't spread to others until at least another decade. Go check Google's ngram viewer for "African-American" and see for yourself.

Even much of the divisive language we have now is like 15 years old: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08944393211031452

A lot of this language coincided with Occupy Wall Street because the powers that be had a vested interest in diverting attention away from a discussion of class in America.

I'm a nationalist because I remember back when America largely had a singular identity and it was highly socially unusual to split up into all these sub identities. It still isn't the case for much of small town America and what coastal elites consider flyover country.

But all in all it turned out well.

Only because of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act that allowed a single cohesive identity to form over like 40 years. The history of America is actually pretty messy.

America was never a "high trust culture".

Absolutely not true. It was much much higher trust when I first moved here in 1986 (which is 39 years ago, not 29 years ago. I did my math wrong in my comment and just now realized it).

It's interesting that you seem to read the exact opposite of what "e pluribus unum". It's a celebration of differences...

This is not at all what it was three decades ago and further back until the origin of the country's founding. It was a celebration of finding commonality despite differences. What you're describing is a complete retcon of what it historically has meant since it was first used on the great seal in 1776.

Go watch American classic movies and TV shows from the founding of Hollywood until about 1990. Much of it was highly representative of American culture I experienced in the earlier years when I first moved here. Much much much higher trust than today.