I'm responding to John's more general ethical stance here of "working with moral monsters", not anything specific about Cremieux
For what it's worth I interpreted it as being about Cremieux in particular based on the comment it was directly responding to; probably others also interpreted it that way
Yeah I was reading the other day about the Treaty of Versailles and surround periods and saw a quote from a German minister about how an overseas empire would be good merely as an outlet for young men to find something productive to do. A totally different social and political environment when you have a young and growing population than an aging and shrinking population. And Russia is still relatively young: Italy, Germany, Greece, Portugal, and Austria all have median ages of 45 or higher.
Regarding the Russians and East Slavs more broadly, Anatoly Karlin has some napkin math that at the very least shows the huge toll that the world wars had on their populations, which barely grow or s:
(8a) Russia just within its current borders, assuming otherwise analogous fertility and migration trends, would have had 261.8 million people by 2017 without the triple demographic disasters of Bolshevism, WW2, and the 1990s – that’s double its actual population of 146 million.
(8b) According to my very rough calculations, based on various sources, the population change for each of the following in their current borders between 1913/14 and 1945/46 was about as follows:
Russia – 91M/97M
Ukraine – 35M/34M
Belarus – 7.5M/7.7M
Assuming a threefold expansion in all of these populations, we could have been looking to a Russian Empire or Republic with a further ~120M fully Russified Belorussians and largely Russified Ukrainians, for a total Slavic population of almost 400M.
That’s twice bigger than the number of White Americans today, the most populous single European ethnicity, and almost as much as all of today’s Western Europe.
(8c) Total population of a hypothetical Russian Empire that also retained Central Asia and the Caucasus, and that hadn’t been bled white by commies, Nazis, and Westernizers during the course of the 20th century, would likely have been not that far off from Dmitry Mendeleev’s 1906 projection of 594 million for 2000.
These indices are probably not meaningful. It's easy to find news stories of ordinary people in England and Germany being arrested for their opinions or even for mocking elected officials.
In England, content that's merely "grossly offensive" or "menacing" is illegal under their Communications Act 2003, and similar laws date back earlier.
In contrast, in America since Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), speech is criminal only when it is (a) intended, and (b) likely to produce imminent lawless action, or when it is a true threat, obscenity, or narrow category such as child‑pornography.
> So after removing the international students from the calculations...
Having a sizable portion of International students necessarily subsidizes the cost of higher education for domestic students
Maybe I should rephrase the sentence in OP. What I mean is that "After assuming that half of international students scored at or above 1550 and half scored below, the remaining spots are divided among domestic students in such-and-such way."
At the start of the post I describe an argument I often hear:
But many people are under the misconception that the resulting “rat race”—the highly competitive and strenuous admissions ordeal—is the inevitable result of the limited class sizes among top schools and the strong talent in the applicant pools, and that it isn’t merely because of the reasons listed in (2). Some even go so far as to suggest that a better system would be to run a lottery for any applicant who meets a minimum “qualification” standard—under the assumption that there would be many such qualified students.
This is the argument that I'm responding to and refuting.
You're phrasing this as though it's rebutting some remark I made; if so, I'm not sure what remark that is. I know that admissions offices are admitting students according to an intentional system.
Didn't watch the video but is there the short version of this argument? France is at the 90th percentile of population sizes and also has the 4th-most nukes.
For what it's worth I interpreted it as being about Cremieux in particular based on the comment it was directly responding to; probably others also interpreted it that way