Providing common sense where its needed. 🇿🇦🇮🇱
Joined December 2021
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Alex Sack retweeted
Irrespective of who you're going to blame for South Africa's removal of AGOA, South Africa does what it does best:
Spends 99% of its time BLAMING instead of DOING and putting ideology before everything else.
The plane nose-dives, while the pilots argue and no one cares about pulling up on the stick. Truly surrounded by morons.
Alex Sack retweeted
South Africans suffer from delusions of grandeur. We'll watch other African countries surpass us, reveling in our own ideological greatness, so intoxicated by the fantasy of our moral superiority that we've become completely detached from reality. It's mental.
We'll clap as our industries collapse, our economy crumbles. Yet we'll stand proudly among the ruins, congratulating ourselves on how enlightened we've become, utterly convinced that everyone else is the problem.
Watching the online community cope with the loss of access to AGOA is real. The ideologues always have an excuse for everything.
It's just 1%. We export to larger numbers to Europe.
These are half-truth explanations you'd expect from them, none of which are economically sound. No surprise there.
The greatest threat is not the loss of AGOA.
It's economies of scale. That does not only affect us in relation to the US market. It affects us in all markets.
Manufacturing costs rise when export volumes fall, and the knock-on effect is that it makes us less competitive globally.
That's the immediate danger, which is not quantifiable right now. It will take some time before we see the real damage.
The long-term threat is investment.
If a factory's export opportunities diminish, it becomes harder to justify new investment.
Attempting to isolate the damage to percentages of market share based on US-dependent product lines is not a true reflection of the damage. The knock-on effect spills into other markets, and until the numbers come in, we have no idea if we've shut the doors on many of those too.
Job loss is inevitable.
Alex Sack retweeted
It’s funded by the Afrikaner middle class.
The black middle class totally eclipses the white middle class let alone the Afrikaner middle class.
The black middle class could build 3 or 4 of these if they came together as a collective and paid memberships to institutions that represent their interests, but it won’t happen, instead they’ll bitch about exclusion and expect government to do something about the racist Afrikaans university instead.
Alex Sack retweeted
WATCH | The scenes in Joburg as uncollected rubbish piles up in the heat. Residents say the smell is unbearable, and Pikitup can’t say when services will return to normal.
Alex Sack retweeted
Apology not accepted. You repeatedly campaigned to erase the very meaning of hatred against Jews and engaged in Holocaust inversion. You have apologized before for antisemitic remarks, only to then renege. You are not acting in good faith. You must resign. In the name of God, go.
Alex Sack retweeted
As @POTUS has made clear, the South African people are being failed by a government that is destroying its economy through an obsessive pursuit of racial grievance against the Afrikaner minority. The South African government has consistently failed to adequately address rural crime, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric, and race-based discriminatory policies against Afrikaners and other minority populations.
Today, I’m announcing a new visa restriction policy targeting foreign nationals who enact or enable policies that promote race-based discrimination, incite violence, or enable land confiscation without compensation in South Africa. Those responsible for these injustices have no place in the United States. state.gov/releases/office-of…
Alex Sack retweeted
Fighters, there is no need for this meltdown and chest pains. You can just open your accounts at VBS bank.
Alex Sack retweeted
Qatar: The most unprincipled and amoral country in the world, and how it gaslights the West.
Qatar is a tiny Middle Eastern country and one of the wealthiest nations per capita in the world. It has a population of about 350,000 Qatari citizens out of a total population of roughly 3.18 million people. The latter are not only excluded from citizenship, but in many cases are treated, by Western standards, as though they are not even human beings.
Qatar’s noncitizen majority are not merely foreign workers earning less than the country’s wealthiest residents, as this “class war” situation is often portrayed in the West. The citizen class in Qatar lives in more opulence than the American top 10% does, while their 90% live in conditions we have made illegal they are so inhumane and abusive.
The migrant class of Qatar is an entire population living in what amounts to an undeveloped 3rd world country contained within the legal borders of one of the richest nations on Earth.
Many of these workers are confined to chicken coop like quarters that function as labor camps, while spending their days constructing and servicing the unbelievably luxurious homes, businesses, hotels, stadiums, and infrastructure enjoyed only by Qatar’s legal citizen minority.
For years, Qatar’s kafala system tied migrant workers to their employers. Workers reported confiscated passports, withheld wages, illegal recruitment fees, dangerous working conditions, and being unable to freely change jobs or leave the country.
Qatar has since announced reforms, including a minimum wage and greater freedom to change employers. But announcing a reform and actually enforcing it are two different things. Human Rights Watch continued to document wage theft, recruitment debt, unexplained deaths, and weak enforcement after the World Cup ended.
Then there is the World Cup. You might call for people saying America should not be allowed to hold the world cup this year due to the administration. That is rich when you consider the same people had nothing to say about Qatar hosting 4 years ago.
More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka died in Qatar during the decade after it was awarded the tournament.
To be accurate, this does not mean that 6,500 workers died while physically building World Cup stadiums. The official number connected directly to the stadium projects was much lower.
But that defense leaves out the real scandal. Qatar routinely classified migrant deaths as “natural causes” or “cardiac arrest” without properly investigating what caused them. Amnesty International found that a massive share of migrant worker deaths remained unexplained, sometimes involving young and previously healthy men who had passed medical examinations before arriving in the country.
Without an investigation, there could be no finding that extreme heat or dangerous labor contributed to a death. Without that finding, families could also be denied compensation.
Qatar built the World Cup with a labor force it often could not even be bothered to properly account for when its members died.
If any Western country displayed a modicum of this brazen inequality, the NGOs and human rights organizations of the Western world would have their sights laser focused on it.
Qatar understood this and used copious amounts of capital to influence the very institutions that should have been scrutinizing it.
Qatar is now the largest reported foreign source of gifts and contracts to American higher education. The disclosed total is roughly $6.6 billion, with much of it connected to American universities operating campuses in Qatar’s Education City.
In 2025 alone, American universities reported more than $1.1 billion from Qatari sources.
This does not mean every professor or university taking Qatari money is directly controlled by Qatar. It does mean that the financial relationship is enormous, and pretending it has no effect on incentives, access, research priorities, or institutional behavior is absurd.
Qatar is also not a party to the United Nations Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol.
It did pass a political asylum law in 2018 and has recently taken steps with the United Nations to put that system into operation. But it still does not maintain anything resembling the asylum systems demanded of Western countries.
Although nearly 90 percent of Qatar’s population consists of noncitizens, many live in the conditions shown on the right while serving those living on the left.
One of Qatar’s most powerful tools, other than its immense wealth, is its media.
Al Jazeera is known for championing liberation, criticizing capitalism, and highlighting human rights abuses. It describes itself as independent while acknowledging that it receives funding from the Qatari government.
If that coverage were applied consistently at home, Qatar itself might be Al Jazeera’s biggest ongoing story. The fact that it is not appears entirely intentional.
While Qatar has migrant workers living in squalor and being transported daily to serve a citizen minority living in levels of opulence considered gaudy even by American standards, its money and media support voices that lecture Israel, America, and Europe about inequality, colonialism, immigration, capitalism, and human rights.
Qatar has also managed to play nearly every side of international politics.
It hosts Al Udeid, the regional headquarters of United States Central Command, and is classified as a major non NATO ally. At the same time, it has hosted Hamas’s political office, maintained relations with the Taliban, and positioned itself as an intermediary between the West and some of its enemies.
The answer for why Qatar is so interested in all of this is not simply Islam, it's Qatar’s use of political Islam, money, media, education, sports, and Western institutional weakness to increase its influence while protecting its ruling elite from scrutiny.
Qatar promotes one moral standard for the West and none for itself. It spreads protest of "liberation" abroad while maintaining a modern day slave like monarchy at home. It condemns inequality in other countries while preserving one of the most extreme legal divisions between citizens and workers anywhere in the world.
Qatar is not conquering the West through military strength. It is buying influence from Western institutions that have decided their values are available for the right price.
And many many American and European celebrities, politicians and journalist have gladly accepted their money and continue to, while lecturing others on morality. The most recent example is the election of Abdul El Sayed in Michigan. A candidate that repeatedly brings up he has no corporate pack money, while he does have a far more unethical source being Qatari funds and media support, laundered into his campaign bank account and influence operation.
Qatar must be recognized as modern day slave state, engaged in an information war against western civilization, human prosperity and rights.
If they are not, they could win.
Alex Sack retweeted
The Yevsektsiya were Jews. They blamed Zionists and traditional Jews for alienating Soviet society. They believed that if Jews abandoned religion, nationalism, and every trait the regime found objectionable, Communism would reward them with acceptance.
They helped shut down synagogues, persecuted Hebrew teachers, and denounced fellow Jews as enemies of progress. When they were no longer useful, the Soviet state disbanded the Yevsektsiya. Many of its members were executed during Stalin's purges. Others disappeared into labor camps. Their loyalty bought them nothing.
The Antizionist League of Iraq was made up of Jews as well. Its members insisted that Zionism was the source of hostility toward Iraqi Jews. They argued that if Jews publicly rejected the idea of a Jewish state, suspicion and hatred would disappear. They were wrong. The League itself was dissolved and its leaders imprisoned. The Farhud left hundreds of Jews dead, Jewish homes and businesses were looted and destroyed, and over the following years an ancient community was driven into exile. Nobody stopped to ask whether their victims were Zionists before burning their homes or stabbing them in the streets.
A century ago, Baghdad had one of the largest Jewish communities in the world. Jews made up roughly a quarter of the city's population. Today there are fewer than ten Jews left in all of Iraq. Trying to prove that you are one of the "good Jews" has never altered the outcome.
German Jews were among the most assimilated Jews in the world. They were educated, patriotic, and deeply proud of being German. Many of them fought proudly in WWI. They often looked down on poorer Jews arriving from Eastern Europe. Some convinced themselves that antisemitism was directed only at those less refined than themselves. Even the Association of German National Jews sought accommodation with the Nazi movement and declared its opposition to Zionism. The Nazis outlawed the organization anyway. Its members were deported and murdered alongside the rest of European Jewry.
Today there are fewer Jews in all of Europe than there are Arab citizens of Israel. So much for Europe lecturing Israel about tolerance.
Once a society begins stigmatizing Jews, or even just one category of Jews, the writing is already on the wall. Assimilation has never provided lasting protection. Appeasement has never provided lasting protection. Explaining ourselves politely and hoping to be accepted as the "good ones" has never provided lasting protection.
We are living through a dangerous moment. The United States, and perhaps Argentina, remain among the few places where Jews are not broadly stigmatized. But even that cannot be taken for granted. A 2023 Harvard-Harris poll found that two thirds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 agreed that "Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors." Those young people will shape the future of public opinion.
We have no choice but to speak plainly about antizionism.
Because if antizionism were merely opposition to Netanyahu, it would not predate Netanyahu. If it were merely opposition to Israeli policy, it would not predate Israel. Long before 1948, Jews were being massacred for refusing to accept their place as a tolerated minority.
The uncomfortable truth is that antizionism did not emerge in response to Jewish power. It emerged in response to the idea that Jews should possess power at all.
Kind explanations did not save the Jews of Baghdad. Compliance did not save the Jews of Germany. Revolutionary zeal did not save the Jews of the Soviet Union.
Clarity matters. Memory matters. And the refusal to lie about what we are facing matters most of all.
Alex Sack retweeted
The IDF released an estimate that Iran had reconstituted its medium range arsenal to approx. 2,500 missiles since the 12 Day war last June. They’ve fired about 250–300 so far and the Air Force has struck around 500 missile related targets.
The ones capable of reaching Israel are liquid fueled like the Shahab-3 family (Shahab-3, Ghadr, Emad) and the Khorramshahr series, plus solid-fueled ones like Sejjil, Kheibar Shekan, Haj Qasem, and related Fateh-family extensions.
Liquid-fueled Shahab-3, Ghadr, and Emad are larger and heavier measuring 15–18 m long with a 1.25 diameter, weighing anywhere between 17 and 24 tons, while newer solid-fueled ones, especially the Kheibar Shekan and similar types, are more compact -- around 11–13 m long and 1 m diameter -- and weight roughly half at 5-10 tons.
Iran uses road-mobile transporter erector launchers (TELs) for nearly all of these missiles. They are typically modified commercial heavy trucks with 6x6, 8x8, or 10x10 chassis like Mercedes, MAN, or domestic copies, or extended trailers with hydraulic erectors. Single missile per TEL is standard for most MRBMs given their dimensions, especially the larger liquid-fueled ones. Similarly logistical transport vehicles like the one below typically carry one at a time.
It’s unsure what portion of the 500 strikes aimed at Iranian missile capabilities targeted MRBM TELs and transport vehicles, or other missile targets such as short range, production, or logistical assets, but the MRBM arsenal is largely stored in hardened, deeply buried ‘missile cities’ so it’s mostly an above surface missile hunting job as documented in in the IDF update below (qt).
Assuming that only half of the those strikes destroyed a single MRBM to establish a reasonable low end estimate, Iranian forces have already expended or lost 500 (say, 250 launched and 250 destroyed) or more from their estimated 2,500 magazine depth. At the current intensity of the conflict, the remaining 2,000 missile arsenal, capable of reaching Israel, would be spent in 5 days or so.
On face value, this would explain the government’s plan to open airspace for commercial flights by Friday next week. However, since the stated objective of IRGC commanders and Iranian officials is to outlast the Israeli-US campaign, it is likely to pace itself rather than attempt to sustain its current intensity, or launch a mass salvo. If the goal is survival and denial of the enemies coercive aims, then preserving arsenal to continue the fight longer is a strategic imperative.
Further constraining the regime, is a heavily degraded TEL inventory creating a salvo generation bottleneck. Moreover, any launch from inside a subterranean launch site through portals or silos leaves a thermal and electromagnetic signature that overhead ISR can quickly detect and that can subsequently be attacked.
Taken together, it is likely that the war will settle into a slower drip of a dozen or two missiles launched at Israel, unless a regime survival tripwire is hit and a decision is taken to use what’s left or risk losing the opportunity to attack.
Alex Sack retweeted
WHAT IS ‘ETHNIC LITTERING’?
An occasional feature of history - mass population transfers of groups from their home territories to other, different and often alien territories for labour or other ideological purposes. This type of motivated transfer of non-sequitur groups is ‘Ethnic Littering’; the process of moving groups into territories where they make no (historical or cultural) sense, ‘Littering’ in the sense that the transfer is frequently careless, short-termist and unconsidered and creates and entrenches cultural, political and demographic problems in the territories these new populations are imported into
These top down transfers (as distinct from colonisation) are rarely reversed and the transferred populations often establish themselves in the new territory over time, sometimes creating novel creole fusion cultures. Where these creole fusions are unsuccessful or only partially successful entire territories are frequently condemned to intractable kinds of low level conflict because of the irreconcilable nature of the groups that have been forced to live up against other post-‘Ethnic Littering’
‘Ethnic Littering’ is characteristic of the motivated mass immigration seen into the west in the 21st century, in Britain for instance it has resulted in the beginning of the process of ‘Yookayification’. There are many other earlier historical examples of ‘Ethnic Littering’ to different degrees though too, eg in Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, Imperial China, later the Incan Empire (where under the ‘Mitma’ system groups were forcibly resettled to territories they were not native to transfer their loyalties to the state as well as to spread Inca culture) and also under the Ottoman ‘Sürgün’ system, in Imperial and Soviet Russia etc
One of the most egregious examples of ‘Ethnic Littering’ post-Atlantic slavery was the indentured labour C19th population transfers of particularly South Asians to territories of the European Colonial powers, primarily under the British Empire. In many ways the rationale for importing South Asians to Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, South and East Africa etc in the 19th century is the same rationale for eg importing South Asians to former industrial towns in Northern England in the post war years. A slight difference perhaps in that more recently mass population transfers have also taken on the dimension of a moral dogma, though both historical population transfers represent a kind of ‘Ethnic Littering’. Few of those countries receiving indentured labour transfers then are today properly ‘First World’ and many of those countries are still plagued by eg low level ethnic conflict. Many of those countries are artificial too, like the British and French Guyanas, formerly Dutch Suriname etc in the sense that they are countries with populations almost entirely composed of the now ‘locked-in’ descendants of ‘Ethnic Littering’ historical labour
This is the flipside of ‘You Can Just Do Things’ - you can transport entire non-sequitur groups halfway across the planet for whatever trivial reason and then in two hundred years you will have created a strange new synthetic fusion culture from the resulting mixing. You Can Just Do Things. Why not? Import a load of Kazakhs to Honduras if you want, create an ‘exciting’ new synthetic Kazakh-Honduran creole culture with no attention paid to the types of problems this kind of transfer later creates. It is true to a certain extent that this is how mass population movements have always worked throughout history, ‘human history is a story of migration’ is a truism for a reason - the distinction here seems to be though the motivated arbitrariness of the population transfer, how inorganic and careless it was, the often quite asinine ends it is undertaken for and then the jarring bizarro ‘nations’ with intractable structural problems the process produces centuries later
Mauritius’ population is a major example of ‘Ethnic Littering’ - one of those ex-British territories like Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Fiji, East and South Africa or French territories like Reunión, the French Caribbean, New Caledonia as well as the formerly French Central Africa etc where historical imported labour (after the abolition of slavery) makes ownership claims harder to untangle in a contemporary human rights framework since those imported labour groups aren’t really themselves indigenous, they are colonial interpolations who in most cases came later than the Europeans
Alex Sack retweeted
Notice how every single anti-merit argument relies on complete fantasy rather than evidence: “systematic exclusion by design.”
What “systematic exclusion”?
Can you name a single law that explicitly bars black people from a position on the basis of identity?
Can you point to any property-rights restrictions that prevent participation by a black people?
Is there genuine censorship of black people in public or media life?
Do any institutions in this country actively promote the exclusion of black people?
Is there unequal access to public services, healthcare, or education against black people that is formally built into law?
The answer to each of these questions is plainly no. At the same time, numerous measurable examples of structural bias against white people can be shown and verified.
When people cite disparities in outcomes as evidence of “systematic exclusion,” yet no systemic mechanisms exist that reduce the opportunities of black people, it becomes painfully clear that differing outcomes cannot be explained by any systematic measure.
Differences in outcome can therefore only logically arise from other causes, like cultural, or individual competence, but not from any formal system of exclusion as none exist.
Alex Sack retweeted
Elon, accounts like mine that are showing what's going on in South Africa are being mass reported and targeted. I have just received a DMCA takedown request, yet X won't tell me what for? And premium support doesn't answer DM's. This is on top of prior mass reporting. Help.
