2D3D
1d ago
Quisling because they made the devils bargain with the clerics following the grand mosque seizure. The Hashemites should have won over the house of saud, but they overrepresented their position to the colonial powers and could not capitalize on the fall of the ottomans. There is ONE polity that functions exceptionally well in the region on its own merits, and literally everyone ignores them for reasons that baffle me.
All Arab leaders wish to vacation in the West and fund such travels with their receipts from home. Their domestic political situations make reconciliation with the hardliners impossible because islamists rush to fill any political void and their ability to destroy what little influence the Arab nations have is quite astonishing. Left to their own devices, eternal repression and poverty is the only way the leader can keep his neck off a noose, and so they must beg and abase themselves to anyone willing to lend them some technical experts to keep their rigs flowing and the secret police happy.
2D3D
1d ago
In my ideal world, every state brazenly implementing such a value function in favour of its own citizens ought to be ganged up on by everyone else, until only countries that assign reasonable value even to foreigners remain
Is whats good for the goose good for the gander? The Arab states CONSISTENTLY display and act on their desire to destroy their proximate enemies, be it the neighbor or village or country or cousin. Israel isn't even the most devastating conflict each of their antagonists engaged in, with Egypt intervening in Yemen to lose more troops than the Yom Kippur War and Syria losing.... well, literally everything. Even their domestic conduct and respect for foreigners leaves much to be desired, as anyone who has ever set foot in any of those countries can attest. Try going for Haj if you're not of superior Arab or acceptable White blood, see how they treat you. If you put your value function as 'fuck these constantly defecting assholes', we have EXISTING proof of such actions being conducted ad nauseum. I maintain that the best path for the Israelis is to just buy out Carnival Cruises and go on a nationwide 4 year booze cruise, and let the region implode upon itself.
2D3D
1d ago
Much of this comment smacks of US centrism rather than contempt of Israel, though Israel certainly is consistently sneered at by everyone. Theres this weird fiction that the USA is God, that the USA simply flexes and all submit before its might, and that flexing is the only reason Israel is able to exist. It ignores the USA flexing on behalf of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and UAE and literally any asshole anywhere in the world that has positional relevance against US strategic threats.
Israel is, unfortunately, not merely a puppeteer that will be helpless once the glorious USA has cut off its strings and unshackled itself to this meddlesome burden of irrelevance. Sanctions don't work if someone has useful shit in the first place, as we see with Iran and USA still able to import all manner of European technologies never mind random Asian crap. Israel has a domestic tech base and production capacity that can be spun up irritatingly quickly, and the entirely of Gaza is within dumb artillery range, a capability that Israel can restart with little effort given that they actually manufacture their small arms themselves and are a net exporter of smart arms.
There is this worldview that the great act and the weak suffer as they must, and the defiance of the weak is merely due to the restraint of the great. Russia conducts itself in this way, as if their dominance is assured and their stumbling in Ukraine is an act of deliberately considered mercy on their part. And as Russia acts, so too does this current iteration of USA in its trade wars, where the first order logic is 'US trade is critical for all other economies, so they will all rush to surrender to our threats'. Its a nice comforting logic that means the weak inferiors are about to collapse immediately and all that must be done is to wake up and simply flick the switch to manifest reality. Flicking the switch to turn off Israel will see that country drowned in its own iniquities, but the bright light from Israel is less likely to be its burning and more the activation of its own backups.
2D3D
1d ago
If everything is Genocide, nothing is Genocide. The cooler heads currently in power in Egypt and Jordan are the ones imploring Israel to not go forth with the mass exodus, because Egypt and Jordan are even less ready to deal with an eternally hostile population than the Israelis are. Egypt just kicked out several hundred 'peace activists' that wanted to go show their support for Gaza by marching into Rafah, and the entire world was just reminded that Egypts border wall with Gaza is even more intense than Israels. The neat new trick is that these border walls are there for Palestines benefit because 'if they were allowed to leave then the Palestinian cause would be extinguished', and I for one REALLY hope this logic takes full root everywhere because then every single asylum seeker will be denied on compassionate grounds. No, little Aylan, you must stay in shitholestan to keep the dream of the PKK alive.
2D3D
1d ago
Maybe we should just abandon Israel and let them sink or swim on their own. I'd actually be okay with that, as long as there are no crocodile tears when Israel says "Fine, we'll show you what a genocide actually looks like."
Foreign intervention on behalf of local proxies seems weighted towards Israel only because Israel seems to have the best ROI for stability generation. Supporting Iran lead to its revolution, supporting Iraq lead to the Gulf War, etc etc etc. Despite that, CENTCOM still has to swing its dick to shower 'regional support' jizz to thirsty Saudis and the Gulf States because without that the whole region goes even further to hell. Its a shit pot with shitty players that will blow up the casino if they aren't bankrolled by a big daddy somewhere, and US/West either plays big daddy or China gets more notches in its Belt (and road). Israel just happens to be the least shit player in a table full of self destructive retards (including Israel). Besides, foreign intervention restrains more than enables. Were it not for foreign intervention Israel would have had parades through Cairo and Damascus in 73, if not 67, and effective control of the Suez in 50whatever. Israel actually produces shit that makes sanctioning it ineffective, just like how Russia and even Iran sanctions don't even matter. If Israel truly had a free hand, they'd force all the Gazans to be Egyptian citizens and West Bank to be Jordanians, like the Palestinians Territories were before the Egyptians and Jordanians got sick of their shit. Forced displacement is nothing foreign to the middle east, and the last great Palestinian exodus was the Kuwaitis kicking out 400k Palestinians. Its well known that no one gives a single shit about 130k Jews expelled from Iraq back in the 1950s, and we can see no one gives a shit about Arabs kicking out other Arabs. Any foreign intervention on behalf of Jews is conducted out of necessity to keep a tenuous balance beyond the Middle East in place, not out of love for the Jews.
2D3D
1d ago
I'm just waiting for random attacks on buildings to be justified as 'Theres a SCIF there!' and have a whole web of 3 letter national agencies try to figure out which dumbfuck might have put a SCIF in Office Tower 55.
Before I get accused of 'justifying attacks on civilians' (not that I particularly care about the moral valence of such a statement as much as I care about the trotting out of this thought-terminating cliche as some gotcha meant to end all subsequent conversation), the primary objection to mass ballistic strikes against theoretical civilian or decision making centers is that there often will be more immediate threats that actually further ones cause of shifting the balance of power. Hegseth can shitpost from the Pentagon Pizza Hut all he wants, but if the 5th Fleet is blocked off the Strait of Hormuz he's just being a little bitch. The Houthis arguably achieved more strategic impact by lobbing shitbottles at random vessels in the Red Sea than the Hamas rocket attacks ever did.
2D3D
6d ago
My gut feel is that the one reason (akong many) the democrats lost in 2024 was that the main beneficiaries of their better policies were or would have ended up being white men, so it was forbidden to highlight those successes without finding a way to portray them as actually having benefitted BIPOC. Apply the same rule to the converse and you get the absolute paralysis of law enforcement and civic responsibility.
2D3D
12d ago
The hypocrisy of the "theres no such thing as social contagion" brigade is, once again, amazing. Adolescence showed that problematic white boys are poisoned by Andrew Tate into killing girls with their misogynistic incel culture, which justifies broad castigation of the adolescent white male as the obvious target requiring remedial action. Meanwhile there is no such thing as transtok telling girls that being queer is simply self expression oh and binding makes the icky male gaze go away and if you think girls are prettier then maybe youre actually not a straight girl blablabla.
Social contagion is real, but its only a bad thing if boys can be blamed. There are no such thing as bad philosophies, only bad targets.
2D3D
12d ago
Perhaps the attention paid to the male loneliness crisis is due to the fact that it manifests as societal wide problems, whereas female loneliness just results in shut-ins posting on private tumblrs to a circle of cheerleaders waiting their turn at the podium.
To share my own experience, my own compatriots who fell into this insanity actually fell into such due to the harry potter fandom spaces, where they would go insane about how gay pederasty was morally pure compared to disgusting heterosexuality. Their real life end state manifestations is raging at the CCP for censoring their beloved boy love dramas and spamming chatgpt for increasingly explicit kpop slashfic, but the through line still exists. They have eschewed all heterosexual relationships, consigned themselves to a chaste nunnery dedicated to homosexual pedophilia, and find plenty of validation from adjacent groups cheerleading self-indulgence as liberation from the patriarchy.
The great awokening obviously broke many brains, and till my death I will point to elevatorgate as the crystallization of feminism+racism+mental issues in the social justice caucus, but it particularly affected unmoored young women who lacked real life reinforcement. Whether negative or positive reinforcement, the lack of real life consequences for life choices makes online communities easy to fall into and hard to escape once that becomes a 'community'. Men who crawl out of the porn and vidya pits could be threats, women just become the crazy cousin no one talks to anymore.
2D3D
17d ago
The big fear I personally have is that management buys into the promises of consultants and vendors who claim that AI will be their solution and advise cost cutting before benefits materialize, or worse when the low hanging fruit is all that is plucked.
If you want a preview of this nonsense, just attend literally any conference now. Every single vendor is now forced to add 'AI' into their suite of offerings, but more concerningly they are saying that they will deliver AI capabilities to clients who hire these guys. The incentive structure for companies is to have an internal manager assigned to spearhead this endeavor, and that persons incentive in turn is to outsource all responsibility possible to the vendor. A vendor that is thus inclined to lie because they have little to lose is the most likely outcome, and I've seen it happen so many times. Builder.ai is the clearest high profile example of late, but I've seen this happen like a dozen fucking times already.
2D3D
17d ago
I've also had better luck using AI as a disposable coder I can rush to test and let it run into walls rather than hoping my dev team would be able to figure things out organically. The tension of streamlining vs overloading a dev team is always an issue, and I've certainly found human intervention necessary for a great many edge cases that will show up.
Certainly the administrative loads and documentation tracking for what projects are extant and what is viable is helped. In the weirdest sense AI is useful as a stupid conversation partner to sanity check, and it doesn't mind being bullied or rejecting effusive praise.
2D3D
19d ago
I'm a pretty firm advocate of the techno robocracy. Low TFR among high performers may be extant, but Korea would rather give robot kpop stars citizenship and permanent bodies than let foreigners take root in their soil, and frankly who can blame them. Europes mistake was not leaning into robo-utopianism instead of their chosen path of human unversalism. The 20-40 year timespan for East Asian robotopia vs the Southmuskbotland is more likely than East Asia or USA opening the floodgates to satisfy the VOO IRR.
2D3D
19d ago
Its businesstoday.in. Their slop was worse before AI, at least now theres a semblance of grammatical coherence. I have placed hardstops on google to filter out all Indian news sources (except for theprint and thehindu) from any search results, and my news quality sources have improved dramatically. Thanks to slop like Eurasiantimes and businesstoday and all manner hindustantimes and ndtv and even 'respectable' not-obviously-indian sources like economictimes all being published in english and churning out AI slop nonstop we are going to see source pollution by AI generated articles very soon. Bad enough when AI overweights archived blogposts from the livejournal graveyards, worse when its the entire subcontinent clickjerking over every piece of mediocre slop churned out by hypernationalist basement dwellers.
2D3D
21d ago
Trumps personal corruption is stupid and I honestly think he's just creating a void where bad actors and those confident in his insanity can profit. Timing stock purchases around tariff announcements is risky if you think Trump will back down at the last minute, as he has done before, so it just reflects a bet that Trump is actually pulling the trigger on something every suited economist is screaming will be stupid. The memecoin stuff is honestly just funny at this point and calling it access capitalism is dubious since access to Trump seems to be counterproductive - Musk is on the outs, and Susie Wiles is still by all accounts the main powerbroker.
Right now the bigger problem is that the irritating screeching makes it hard to filter genuine problems of Trump accruing personal gains through the power of the executive versus the normal machinery of government being somewhat incompetent. Everything Trump does is corruption destroying the republic, but yet it still stands, so at a certain point it is legit to ask what the hell this corruption actually is.
The mechanisms to hold Trump accountable are unfortunately degraded, and the question must be posed on whether such mechanisms ever would have worked as intended anyways. In such a degraded and polarized environment, we're going to end up in a vibeoff anyways. Wait, I just time travelled back from 2011, and its been a vibeoff since a decade ago. Elevatorgate raises its head again!
2D3D
21d ago
Virtue is predictability. Those with honor can be trusted to at least follow the terms of a deal and not try to screw you at the last minute. A man who promises wine at one drachma per amphora but who will fill it with cholera water is less worthy a partner than a man who sells at five drachmas per amphora but who fills it honestly.
That is the big problem with corruption: it is an open ended incentive to race to the bottom, and it ruins any faith that any activity with a time lag will be honored. Did the property owners intimidated by Crassus have any faith that Crassus would not come back later and spike up the rates? The main advantage is that Crassus would have stopped other arsonists from burning down their property if only to reserve that right for himself, which from our modern lenses is insane.
What we see in modern USA is a different form of corruption: the corruption of credit. The wheel of loans and equity and finance have made money in hand disconnected from money that is spent, and so it is those who game the system that benefit. Republican corruption may involve private benefit, but Democrat corruption involves robbing the public purse to pay off their friends and pets. I again point to the homeless advocacy industrial complex that exists only to drain coffer for the privilege of inconveniencing everyone including the homeless even further. Its not like the grifter even profits that much; Dominique Davis of Community Passageways per propublika bilked 10m from 'community contribution' which are largely state funds put into 'dollar matched' foundations and the wages only hoovered up 50% of the funds, with the remaining 50% just disappearing.
For all the crimes of Caeser and Crassus and Trump and the republicans, I can at least squint and see they did SOMETHING with their corruption and their grift. For the corruption which includes democrat and socialist and every possible shithole tinpot dictator you'd be lucky to even see the mansions that are built off stolen lucre. Spending money to waste money even more quickly seems to be the order of the day for others, and if you're a US citizen asking what the hell the democrat states do with their current tax bases should make promises of taxing the rich being the panacea suspect.
2D3D
25d ago
Thats a really good point, but if anything the Syrian civil war shows how quickly realizing the fragility of the state is the observation that collapses the schroedingers unreality of state capacity. The SAA collapsed and retreated, and more importantly the citizens in the overtaken cities saw fit to allow, if not actively aid, the various advancing rebels. Counterexamples are how Russians reached the end of their logistical trains and could not advance further in Ukraine (or hell even Chechnya), the USA found willing collaborators in every town in Iraq, the Tigrayans go only as far as their kin exist etc etc etc.
Does the left want chaos? Their behavior is consistent with wanting to seize the levers of power for themselves so that they can create a better world in their preference, with their only active step being stepping out of their high towers to lead the huddled masses that will mill around aimlessly wondering what to do next after the hated patriarchy is cast down. Cheerleaders for violence are never on the field, and the rare times they're there its just to get gangbanged by whatever players still playing for keeps.
2D3D
25d ago
Agree, but this also means that the lesser threats of breaking civil society due to the rampancy of low level crime is ignored, leading to a tautological ouroboros whereby the lack of reporting about crime is itself taken as proof of the lack of crime, rather than the ubiquity of said crime.
If its easy to close ones eyes to the death spiral of tolerating petty crime when it happens far away, it becomes easier to close ones eyes towards the violence committed by your ideological allies even when close by. The gays for palestine will not sway from their support for violent islamists, the hijab appreciation day brigade will not notice the cries of the Iranians being tortured, the Robin diAngelo book parties will not notice the monochromity of supermarket theft in their midst.
By social pressure, westerners see it more important to forgive foreign rapists and murderers of their kin than to enforce laws blindly. Reality might reassert itself in time, but recency bias overweights the cultural milieu of the 2010s even till now.
2D3D
25d ago
There is no actual population mass willing to engage in active actions that exists to delegitimize external authority beyond their local sphere. There are cheerleaders for violence like Black Lives Matter, pro-palestinians, Jan 6 (though the motive was seizing power rather than juvenile chaos) that will celebrate violence that reaches escape velocity but are largely unwilling to travel outside the start point of violence to continue it. There are local resistances like CHAZ, Black Hammer, Koresh, technically the various Mormons, that carve out a local territory for themselves and attempt resistance against state authority, but they seem content to self implode rather than actually wage violence against society. And of course you have all criminal gang wars that exist in the space between state capacity and extractable resources, where violence is waged against each other in lowsec but never attempting to attack the state.
In none of these circumstances do we see, at least in the USA, any appetite for mass movement of violence that would see either armed revolution or enforcer defections. The Days Of Rage of the SDS in the 70s was perhaps the last time the intelligensia thought they had the mass of society on their side that simply was waiting for the chosen ones to lead the way, and they got smacked down by reality when not a single normie joined their revolutionary uprising. Even the Black Panther Party failed to significantly mobilize the Black Middle Class who were still extant (this Black Middle Class now has turned into normie whites, living entirely seperately from their co-ethnics).
The above impression of equivalence between leftist and rightist violence is due to categorization of intent, not scale or capability. Should rightist violence truly emerge, it will utterly dominate and show the hollowness of leftist rhetoric. Leftist agitators are keyboard warriors happy to cheerlead the violence spilled against their enemies, taking credit for the violence being proof of their ideologies salience when convenient and staying silent when not. The vanguard of revolution is happy to proclaim their inevitability and act as such, despite their subreddit members not being able to leave the house to get a sandwich let alone lead a charge.
2D3D
26d ago
no university has a department of data fabrication
Except they do? Soft sciences all suffer massively from replication crisis, but faked data is a huge problem that goes unchallenged and covered up till it could not be hidden anymore. Francesca Ginos work on behavioral science was totally fabricated and earlier attempts to highlight it were quashed till 9 years later. Roland Fryers work on black outcomes was quashed because he went against the orthodoxy of white supremacy being responsible. Hard sciences also suffer from dubious research overenthusiastically seeing shadows in slides.
I think its fair to see the prestige of academic research as a dead end if they don't stand the test of the real world. The endowments and sinecures lavished are rewards for satisfying the emotional wants future billionaires whose nostalgia overweights the contributive effect of their university years to their success. The actual practical knowledge of university is either relevant only to the arcana of the universities internal minutae or only temporarily substantive as the world is so dynamic. Spending eight years locked in your lab to dissect nanoparticle impregnation becomes irrelevant when corning glass comes up with 5 different product iterations in the meantime.
2D3D
29d ago
The secret to deportation is to register every single migrant entrant and have strong relationships with the origin countries of these migrants. Remittances incentivize India to cooperate with UAE in cataloging and receiving deportees so that surplus labor can continue to be exported from India. The imbalanced power dynamic is a feature, not a bug, that the domestic population actively supports.
The only breaking point is if there are illegal migrants, but the secret the UAE has is strong border agreements with neighbors who are equally if not more hostile to migrants than they are. No Ethiopian is crossing into the UAE when the Saudis shoot them on the border first. What few ever make it there have no reason to stay because imported labor keeps demand for illegal low wage labor low.
The imports will immediately overthrow the UAE rulers if they could. The calculus for the UAE is that the imports are disincentivized from doing so because the only value the UAE provides, stability (tax safety income or other), is precisely what the imports lack in the lives they came from.
Oh, the final secret: citizenship is restricted. The great mistake the Europeans and Americans made was giving citizenship and family reunification to what should have been temporary imports. The khaleeji get to be stupid and decadent, and all they have to do is endure the disrespect of seething activists.
2D3D
30d ago
I'm too lazy to dig deep so I'm gonna rely on the bigbrains here to ask: is it legal for such an open lottery system to have race clauses baked into it? Like, most babies born of 2 parents whose combined skin tone is or is below a certain reflectivity or some weird shit like that?
I ask because there have been similar legal challenges here in my neck of the woods to extremely patriarchal wills. A common issue used to be where an alleged deathbed conversion of the patriarch to islam (or a marriage cert found in Indonesia where underage prostitution is conducted under the guise of temporary marriages - 'convert' marry pump dump divorce in about 1 hour) invalidates previous wills which specifically state that no property can be disbursed to muslims. A new tactic gaining (weak) traction is that such wills are invalid because of their discriminatory nature against mixed marriages, but southeast asia doesn't really play that game. Does such stuff happen in the west?
2D3D
1mo ago
Cooperation is useful.
Thet is a function of hyperconnected modern societies with resource extraction capability no longer being the determinant of biological survival. The extent of cooperation historically was limited to how far the reach of your competitors were, and how much work was needed to get something useful out of the ground. We see that in societies with much more reliance on local resource extraction that the incentive for cooperation is much lower, since the pie is shared with more mouths.
I actually agree that open communication and cooperation is the most effective way to function as a society, with defectors being punished heavily to prevent tragedy of the commons. Unfortunately with disparate impact it is. now unbecoming to punish troublemakers, so we live in societies where the effort to create discord is so minimal and the rewards for the disruptor so great. Johnny Somali actively seeks to cause disruption for personal benefit, and he was never punished for his antics until he went to Korea and discovered Asian Racism.
2D3D
1mo ago
Maritime bridge systems technician. Always demand for that and the increasing digitization of equipment means you can't just climb the mast and bang on the radar till things align, since the network connections and system settings need to work in concert. Many bridge systems engineers bitch about how turning on one system gimps another system in another part of the bridge, and specialists refuse to learn the capabilities of other departments.
Navigation and comms are the two broad categories that bridge systems fall under, so depending on your future interest for when climbing up and down masts isnt exciting anymore you can transition to some office role.
Another big issue is navigating the unions for work. Federal level unions are basically extortion rackets, and state level affiliates seem to be politicizes shitpiles. Only one I've heard positive news about is Maine, which is generally top tier for anything marine in the USA.
2D3D
2mo ago
It wasn't even that good as TV went. It was just Omarosa being an absolute meme queen with the racialized undertones glaringly present, and Trump dunking on clowns. It was novel as TV concepts went, so gotta give that to ABC.
Anyways, I would posit that the Trump tariffs can be summed up in 3 different memes:
stickinbike.png michael scott handshake.png chadxi.png
There are many different image macros that can be applied. Be creative in my stead, dear bored board members.
Libya was run by a clown moron that looked like a parody of what a dictator should be. He was also sponsoring terrorist attacks that managed to actually kill a sizable number of people, in addition to just enriching many terrorists groups that were not competent enough to achieve their goals. The reality is that terrorism has a fairly low capability bar to clear, and maintaining the discipline of agents until a target of opportunity arises is the largest problem. Even after Gadafi died Libya still hosted terrorist training camps that resulted in the manchester bombing, killing dozens of actual children - prepubescent little girls not 17 year old bearded boys - to no response from the UK authorities. Perhaps the irritating Syrian minnow should not be brushed off as irrelevant just because you wish to focus energies on preferred aggressors. Thats not very aladeen of you if you only aladeen the aladeen aladeen.
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