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.
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.
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.
> 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!
> When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about things like whether it's permissible for the state to take someone's life, whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent, and whether more death sentences are given to some groups than others. But in practice the debate about the death penalty is not about whether it's ok to kill murderers. It's about whether it's ok to kill innocent people, because at least 4% of people on death row are innocent.
It’s not obvious whether Graham has read a reasonable cross-section of the literature on the death penalty and come to this conclusion (in which case some references might be in order) or whether he's just pulling this out of his arse. I’m not familiar with the literature, but a Google Scholar search brings up the following:
> Although death penalty discourse has always been, and remains, multifaceted - encompassing morality, religion, cost, deterrence, theories of punishment, fairness, race, class, and human rights - we suggest that over the past decade innocence has emerged as perhaps the dominant issue in death penalty discourse with "an unprecedented effect on the debate about capital punishment" (Bandes 2008, 5; Baumgartner, De Boef, and Boydstun 2008, 157). This phenomenon has been referred to by such labels as the "age of innocence" (Rosen 2006, 237) or even an "innocence revolution" (Marshall 2004, 573; Steiker and Steiker 2005, 613). The abolitionist movement has embraced innocence as a new rhetorical asset in the death penalty debate, one with the potential to decisively shift the weight of public opinion in abolition's favor (Radelet and Borg 2000; Bedau 2004a; Acker 2009). "Unlike other challenges to the fairness of capital proceedings, which have failed to stimulate widespread public outrage," Marshall (2004) argues, "evidence of the system's propensity to factual error has the power to open closed minds and trigger reexamination of the costs and benefits of capital punishment" (579). Banner (2002) notes, "the prospect of killing an innocent person seemed to be the one thing that could cause people to rethink their support for capital punishment" (304). He goes on to suggest that "if any development had the potential to change" the popularity of the death penalty, "this was the one" (305). Thus, one scholar claims, "it is no exaggeration to say that wrongful convictions spurred . . . the most successful death penalty reform movement in our lifetime" (Bandes 2008, 4). Already, scholars claim that innocence "has produced a massive shift in the terms of the national death-penalty debate" (Hoffman 2005, 562), a shift "away from moral and procedural considerations, and toward the more substantive question of guilt and innocence" (Hall 2005, 373).
(J.D. Aronson and S.A. Cole, "Science and the Death Penalty: DNA, Innocence, and the Debate over Capital Punishment in the United States", Law & Social Inquiry 34.3 (2009), pp. 603-33, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40539373.)
Perhaps it’s somehow satisfying to Graham to make a wide sweep at ‘intellectuals’ whilst presenting a purportedly distinct argument without trying to determine whether it’s been anticipated, but it strikes me as rather dishonest.
That said, you don’t seem to have looked up what test to release actually is. It’s a scheme for travellers to get out of quarantine early. So no, we aren’t ‘all’ captive to ‘test to release’—we (inhabitants of the UK) are captive to many other regulations though!
Narratives can be correct or incorrect (and this one is mostly correct insofar as it makes specific claims about the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.) Calling a set of claims a narrative for the purpose of pointing out some people don’t agree doesn’t entail that those claims are wrong.
The UK is not blocking exports. The EU were free to conclude contracts with the (not very productive) UK manufacturers at the same time HM government was doing so.
I broadly agree but I usually trust one of the big ones (e.g. ‘recovery’ in the UK) since they have pretty big sample sizes and seem to be on top of stats.
Well I suppose one could say we call the analogue of reparations the welfare state at which point that prospect doesn’t sound quite so ludicrous after all.
Billions of people seem to have worked out how to do this on bicycles and public transport.