One of the big differences I’ve observed between the USA and Europe is the way cities are zoned: I didn’t realise until I actually went to America that SimCity 2000 is somewhat realistic with regard to Californian city design.
By comparison, my residential building here in Berlin has a restaurant and a café on the ground floor, a business office on the first floor, and the rest is residential, and even the parts of the city with houses rather than apartment blocks do similar things horizontally rather than vertically: house, house, kebabs, five houses, small supermarket, three houses, office.
Similarly in the UK, you’ll have domestic resistances above or next to shops and pubs and offices. Or next to (I’ve never seen them above) industrial buildings: workshops, factories, etc.
In that were the real concern, the DDR would have restricted travel from the West to the East by residents of the West, but not travel by its own residents to the West and return journeys—yet it prohibited the latter.
Moreover the DDR cannot seriously have had such concerns, since it too e.g. employed former Nazi officers in its army.
Bin Laden certainly has been to Oxford, but I’ve not heard of any connexion with the university.¹ I wouldn’t say that those attending language schools and similar tend to interact much with students of the university. With the exception of a few cramming programmes for admissions, the ‘best and brightest’ (I assume by this you mean those sufficiently academically able to get into Oxbridge as matriculated students—I daresay the average Imperial mathmo is brighter than the average Cambridge land economist) tend not to take courses in Oxford outside the university, since they mostly use the name ‘Oxford’ to entice gullible tourists who don’t realise that these places have nothing to do with the university.
Malaysia is not necessarily more threatening than Indonesia so it’s rather unclear why you mention it in particular. Indeed, Indonesia bombed various things in Singapore during the Konfrontasi period, whereas Malaysia has never done anything like that. (Well, I’ve heard rumours of actual hostilities about some islands supposedly from a relative in the army, but either way both sides have kept it very quiet if that did happen.)
I don’t really see the point of an iron dome system for SG: Singapore can hit KL or Jakarta in a matter of hours (if that), their relatives shop and children go to school at international schools in Singapore, there’s a big American base, if Singapore gets hit they’ll immediately end up in a terrible recession, etc.
There's not a big US base. I used to be stationed there. There is a logistics command, CTF-73, and more recently (past decade) some LCS rotational crews call Sembawang/Chagi Naval Base home. Singapore owns the wharf where the logistics command resides, as well as the old black and whites used by the US military.
To your point of it being intended for Indonesia over Malaysia, that could be the case. I was going off of heresay about Malaysia being the threat . It seemed plausible since some sensitive positions are still off-limits to Singaporean-Malays during their NS.
It’s not that Malaysia isn’t a threat (there has been sabre-rattling too, e.g. in 1991 when the army was mobilised in response to a Malaysian exercise)—just that it’s not only or most important one. Merely geographically Indonesia is probably in a broadly comparable position to try to blockade Singapore to that of Malaysia. There are fewer e.g. Javanese citizens of Singapore, and many Indonesians assimilated to a Malay community principally associated with Malaysia and not Indonesia if anything, so fears of dual loyalty do not tend to focus on Indonesia; for example many Malays will have Javanese ancestry.
Changi is not, as you point out, really a big US base, but I imagine that putting strategically important thingums for the US Navy at risk would not be regarded well in DC which, (inter alia!), would deter Malaysia and Indonesia. It would also hurt US economic interests regardless because of the port and various investments, so I suppose the US Navy might not even be terribly important.
> These sorts of people are notorious for being unable to recognize that Nazi-ism was an ideology of the hard left, an ideology that the academic classes are extremely susceptible to.
There is pretty substantial disagreement amongst historians and political scientists (see Kershaw, The Nazi dictatorship: problems and perspectives of interpretation, which unfortunately I don’t have to hand.) This dispute predates 1968. Many bog standard liberals or centre-right types, insofar as such classifications apply to historians, subscribed to the Nazism as totalitarianism thesis (whilst, crudely, a Marxist view was that it was an outgrowth of the contradictions of bourgeois liberal capitalism). The view that it was hard-left was pretty fringe in the 50s and is still fringe now. There are several good reasons for this—amongst which is the fact that Nazism was an essentially illiterate tradition, in the sense that it had no meaningful intellectuals, whereas Marxism is an extremely literate family of ideologies—in fact, arguably at the expense of a proper connexion to actual reality. So the notion that there is even a substantial body of Nazi intellectual output with the same importance as, say, Lenin had to Soviet life, seems rather misconceived. (This of course is subject to the caveat that Marxists are very argumentative people and one can probably on nearly any given question find Marxist authors who disagree; Nazism, by contrast, barely developed a canon of authors, and had little theoretical unity or basis, so whilst there were substantial contradictions in utterances there were relatively few in practice, which is all we really have—and indeed on that metric there was quite substantial diversity amongst the various Marxist states—even Maoism and Stalinism differed in their choice of revolutionary class, for example, and then if we take Pol Pot, Tito, Juche before the constitutional revisions about a decade ago, and so on, there is even more diversity.)
To consider your argument—
> in their own analyses of their enemies they were inseparable from the Soviets they were fighting
This seems to elide the obvious places where they would be different, viz., the sort of society they wanted to build. Now, you might subscribe to the, shall we say, totalitarianism thesis of liberal and liberal-conservative historiography—and that’s perfectly respectable as a view!—but one ought to at least discuss this to a certain extent.
> even after the defeat of the Nazis and the fall of the USSR, in the western world this type of racist leftism was not wiped out as commonly assumed but merely retreated to its stronghold in academia
It’s really not obvious whether you’re referring to bog standard social democrats who primarily focus on class or randos on Twitter who advocate the extermination of whites. Whatever it is, the latter clearly have far less institutional power within the left than advocates of the total extermination of their racial enemies did under the Nazis.
> The exact sort of people who are obsessed with equating Nazis and conservative white men are also the sort of people who write glowing reviews of Nazi propaganda magazines
Perhaps the author is indeed this sort of person, but in that case you could probably try finding something to cite. I have no doubt that such people exist, but it is rather lazy to sneer at, let’s say, at least a third of the political spectrum (on a crude left-centre-right trichotomy) on the basis of one article.
This seems to be a pretty thin rebuttal. There’s a perfectly sound case against calling Trump a Nazi—which is not what the article does. It’s not really very obvious what your objection to the actual content of the paragraph is. Then you seem to jump on sociology simply because it’s in the submission headline—but it’s far from clear that the article is a representative example of the practice of sociology, so it’s rather mysterious how you get from whatever was in the article to the claim that sociology should be named ‘far-left propaganda’. I’m afraid I don’t really see any substantive content here, and posting that is, I thought, the point of this website.
> Voting isn't even that important. The wrong guy gets picked, what happens? Same bullshit as if the right guy got picked.
If voting is unimportant, why do you care about racist requirements for physical ID cards? Perhaps there might be some sort of connexion between the two!
It's more important that you are able to participate than what the result is. Better to have an insecure system where 10 million people get to vote, than a secure system where only 10 people get to vote.
Billions of people seem to have worked out how to do this on bicycles and public transport.