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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
"Silence is violence" is absolutely deployed in defense of "free speech" too - it's a mainstay in protests where students disrupt unrelated university functions to inject progressive talking points of the day, and in those cases is taken to mean that being forced to stay silent (on the talking points, at university) is tantamount to being forced to be complicit in violence. Essentially, you and they are conflating the "I have the right to be heard" notion of free speech and the "I have the right to speak wherever and whenever I want" notion; while neither can be implemented perfectly, we can get a lot closer to something like a stable equilibrium with the former.
Also, from where do you get the idea that there is a consensus here, and anyone is trying to force some other consensus? I am under the impression that, weighted by posting frequency or upvotes, this place leans mildly towards the at least boogaloo-sympathetic. I do not think that a right-wing uprising in the US would win, and I am generally pro-chaos so I would want to see it happen! Yet, I do not want it to be discussed here, just like I don't want my approximation algorithms lecture to be disrupted by people yelling about Palestine (even though I am inclined to agree with them).
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1d ago
Why does there need to be "prevailing wisdom" here on this topic at all? You treat it as a given that we can't just ignore the topic, as something that can't be discussed while maintaining the spirit and purpose of the forum, and perhaps even mean to suggest that enforcing non-discussion is tantamount to complicity with your enemies. The exact same approach has been tried on the other side, with popular glosses like "the personal is political", "silence is violence" and what-not; and look where the discussion norms built around those memes got them.
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1d ago
Irrespective of whether it's "rational", is it really a conversation we need or want here? I'm with @FiveHourMarathon below regarding how these discussions always wind up going. I don't even think that there aren't interesting discussions to be had about how a popular uprising in the US would proceed, but the burden at this point should really be with those who want to talk about it to lead with something novel rather than another instance of "my chad tribesmen will beat the shit out of your effeminate wimps, if only the sheeple finally wake up and develop classtribal counsciousness".
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1d ago
One of the consequences of propaganda culture that I think is not discussed enough is how having too effective control of public opinion in your camp can actually work against you in contexts where treaties have to be made. Similarly to the concept of "right to be sued" I have seen in the context of trade agreements, being able to assert that some party will judge and appropriately punish you should you violate the terms actually gives you more freedom to offer terms. In the case of international agreements, when the world police (US) has a stake in the game or is aggressively indifferent or both, the only one that could stand in judgement whether a treaty is being adhered to is public opinion (which could enforce its judgement by boycotts, protests or simply non-cooperation when a treaty party needs the general public to cooperate e.g. by enlisting to fight in the military or maintaining social exclusion). However, this does not work if a treaty party has the part of the public it is sensitive to (usually its own populace) around its finger to the point that it will always be able to convince it that it is in the right. In this way, Russia has crippled itself long ago, and the collective West has by now followed suit.
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1d ago
I don't know, is the NATO:Russia air advantage much bigger than the Russia:Ukraine air advantage? Being able to lob KABs is one thing, but Russia at no point dared overflying Ukraine freely, because the economics and optics of losing even one manned plane every now and then because an AD launcher was successfully hidden in a nondescript warehouse somewhere are too painful. The dynamics of a hot war with the involvement of the entirety of NATO would of course be different, but despite everything it seems implausible to me that they would look like the comfy desert turkey shoot war that NATOcore acolytes live for.
(I would also expect that the opening move after a NATO entry into the war is that at least all the NPPs in Ukraine - and quite possibly also everything in Europe east of the centerline of Germany - get blown up, since the only thing that kept them safe so far is Western sensibilities. As for what effect this would have on warfighting capabilities, I honestly can't tell - do we have contingencies to maintain our economy if there is actually no energy grid? Would the sudden need to cook on an open fire in your block's courtyard shatter Europe's heiwa-boke and result in rapid return to WWII-era buff doge form, or a quick noping out and licking of wounds?)
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1d ago
One of the most fun culture war games to play is always that most men:women statistics about bad things have similar counterparts with black people:white people, and with those each tribe's inclinations to downplay or exaggerate are flipped.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
I don't know, I think at least on an intuitive level she was more than cynical enough. There were many adjacent justifications that she could have told herself and her party allies to rationalise it - a real sense of compassion, and the need to get workers to fill low-level jobs in the face of dipping birth rates (which when you think about it really is almost a flip side of "stop leftists from being able to drive a hard bargain for cushy jobs").
Moreover, I think there was another semi-cynical reason in play for Merkel in particular, which was their ongoing conflict with the European South about austerity (a Merkelian pet project if there ever was one). By inviting all the refuges (who came via many of the same Southern countries) to Germany, she simultaneously piled up Germany's karma supplies (in the eyes especially of those who were starting to feel uneasy about the resentment their policy was inspiring in their southern neighbours), created a concrete debt (since per normal asylum rules many of those refugees would have been the responsibility of Spain/Italy/Greece where they first entered the European mainland) and an implicit threat if they keep resisting German demands (Germany doesn't have to take all those refugees off their hands).
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4d ago
My pet conspiracy theory regarding Europe was always that our own continental elite - the ilk of Merkels and Merzes and von der Leyens, and their true power base of dynasties owning supermarket chains, publishing houses and car manufacturers - was shocked into action by the left-based attacks on their core interests in the '90s and early '00s. This was when waves of popular protests empowered by the ascendant internet demanded increasingly cushy labour conditions, tanked transatlantic trade treaties that were meant to secure information-economy revenue streams against the internet gift economy, and often even produced geopolitical embarrassment such as when Germany was forced to keep its involvement in the Iraq war a minimum.
Their political intuitions correctly told them that introducing a large culturally incompatible immigrant underclass would amplify existing contradictions in the "uppity left" to the point that it would tear itself apart and stop functioning as a coherent political force (as indeed it did, with all the anti-elite energy having been successfully redirected into a war between those who are horrified at immigrants and those who are horrified at the preceding group), and they probably bargained that no comparable threat to them could emerge from the right (which anyhow they had good experience and infrastructure to manage).
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4d ago
I'd take the case against international law more seriously here if there were any politically significant actors who abstained on principle from invoking it to condemn their geopolitical enemies as well. I find the rank hypocrisy morally more revolting than any object-level "violation of international law".
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4d ago
· Edited 4d ago
Why should being democratically elected shield you from ICC prosecution? The whole point of the ICC is that it is, well, international; you may believe that the people of Israel forfeited their right to judge Netanyahu when they elected him, but the ICC does not judge in the name of the people of Israel but in the name of the people of a pretty large chunk of the Western world. If anything, maybe the majority of Israeli voters should also stand trial in some sort of reverse class action suit - I think it's high time to patch out the stage magic trick by which democracies make accountability disappear.
For a very different polarity example, by all accounts Milošević was elected democratically and "genocide the Albanians" seems to have represented the Serbian people's will pretty accurately in the '90s. Was it "dangerous and destabilising" that he was dragged to the Hague for enacting it? Are you instead using the old descriptivist definition of "democratic" as "friends with the US" here? (Playing brazen word games like that is how you wind up bleeding soft power.)
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5d ago
I really don't think that an assertion to the effect of "we believe Trump's orders are illegal, and want to remind you that you have an obligation to not obey illegal orders" is in any sense similar to a coup - even if some soldiers actually followed up on it, insubordination is still not a coup but just a disciplinary matter. To begin with, I'd be surprised if under the present US military code, the actual action they are calling for even obliquely (refusing an order to participate in some attack) would carry the death penalty, so in what world does it make sense to suggest that the instigators deserve it? (In toxoplasma terms, it would seem eminently less escalatory to me to call for giving Trump the Saddam treatment in response to this, given that he is apparently calling for killing his political opponents.)
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5d ago
Where in the video does it say that? To begin with, I assume the context is what Wikipedia glosses here as "Experts, human rights groups and international bodies said the killings were illegal under US and international law", so even if they are wrong or confused, the form of the belief clearly is that the military may be given orders that are illegal in the standard sense of the word rather than some sort of tribal brainrot Calvinball of the type you are evoking.
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5d ago
The civil war would surely not manifest itself as a coup attempt, but as something like CHAZ on a much larger scale. Do you think the Marines would actually gladly clear out Seattle or Chicago if they decided to set up armed checkpoints to prevent federal government representatives from entering? Do you not think some units would mutiny if the order were given, given that the rank and file is hardly uniformly Red?
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6d ago
· Edited 5d ago
While the Democrats were hinting extremely obviously that the military / intelligence community should basically pull off a coup
Whatever sort of dogwhistle this is supposed to be, I don't hear it. Are you saying that their assertion (that under US law, as a soldier or whatever you are allowed to or even obliged to ignore illegal orders) is false? Because if it isn't, then this is as much of a coup as it would be for a random civilian to fail to bend his schlong straight into the rectum if the Donald were to say "go fuck yourself" to his face. Presumably written and customary law already circumscribes what commands from the president anyone actually has to obey; the video merely asserts that this is not "all of them" for soldiers or the intelligence community either. Any expectations that those who made it may have about the specific kinds of unlawful commands that they expect to be given in the near future are irrelevant, and surely this is for the individual soldier/intelligence community member to determine (under risk of standing court martial or whatever if they determine badly).
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6d ago
Yet, Nepal started out higher (121) and wound up much lower (1535), and all they had was a civil war 1996-2006 that was not particularly bloody (and Vietnam had already overtaken them by 1996). Even Thailand, which is generally remarkably stable and is pretty hard to separate from Vietnam even with the most tortured HBD just-so stories, started out much higher (366) and only went up to 7942. Laos (no big wars): 68 to 2174. Indonesia (no wars): 271 to 5074. Vietnam outperformed a variety of countries in the same corner and general socioeconomic starting conditions on this metric. It also outperformed them subjectively, in terms of "how reasonable would it seem to cast my lot with that country in the long run".
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7d ago
The only reason, I think, our society doesn't see this is that we haven't had a war with existential stakes since women joined the military in any appreciable numbers. Even during the most rigorous war in recent memory, Vietnam, the US army was <1% female, and most of them nurses.
On the other hand, women's participation in the North Vietnamese army is generally taken to be very high (I've seen figures like 30% bandied around, and certainly anecdotes check out), and since the war ended, Vietnam has done rather well. Its GDP per capita (Wikipedia figures) went about 60x from 80 USD to 4745 USD since 1975, while the US one went from ~12x from 7713 to 92883.
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7d ago
Helmetless biking is fine if you're riding on bike paths or flat roads with little traffic. If you're riding in traffic or on more topographically interesting terrain they're a good idea, and if you're mountain biking they're a necessity. Every once in a blue moon I'll see someone in the woods without a helmet and it's almost always a guy with a cheap bike not suited to the trail and nothing else to indicate he has a clue what he's doing.
I don't buy into the traffic part (though it might be more applicable in the US, where drivers are not trained or compelled to give cyclists proper room?), but mountain biking, sure. At that point you are doing a hazardous sport rather than utilitarian transportation; I'd accept the necessity for parachutes when high-altitude tightroping too, without being for making them mandatory while walking on firm ground.
And you can put bluetooth speakers in the ear pockets and have headphones that you can easily control with a gloved hand.
I really don't want people who are wearing headphones on my piste (or, on that matter, on the road)...
I was actually convinced to try wearing a ski helmet once. It was not only uncomfortable, but also messed with my situational awareness (since it restricts wind flow around my face and heavily buffets my ears), though perhaps if you are the sort of person to want to wear bluetooth earbuds while skiing you don't particularly use that sense anyway.
Relevantly, perhaps, I don't see what gear there really is to hold down. I'd use a single heavy knit cap with lining, which holds itself in place just fine, and maybe add polarized sunshades if it's a sunny day. If I am going to engage in skiing where I expect head-down crashes of the type that would get snow on my neck, then sure, there is an argument for helmets, as there was for mountain biking - but again, we would be engaging in a strange conflation where we force the safety standards of an adjacent high-risk activity on a lower-risk one that doesn't need them, unnecessarily encumbering the lower-risk one in the process. Most biking does not involve uneven dirt paths that weave between trees, and most skiing does not involve doing 360-degree flips or unmaintained mountainsides.
(cf. Rust: Most programming does not involve people dying if a use-after-free happens!)
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8d ago
· Edited 8d ago
Helmetless biking (and skiing, omg, the 0-to-100 in the uptake rate of ski helmets in Europe in the past decade is making me fume) achieves a lot. It makes the difference between a bike being something you can just hop onto, go from A to B with and leave wherever, and it being an activity that requires locating a particular piece of gear and hauling it with you everywhere at the destination, leaving you with either -1 hand or -1 head's worth of volume in whatever bags you bring until you return home, unless you engage in extra planning to be able to leave it somewhere.
Seatbelts are ok because the delta-inconveniencs to driving is small. Bike helmet advocates, though, belong together with Rust programmers and playground securers on the scrap heap of history for being scolds that would sap all efficiency and convenience out of life by a thousand cuts for the sake of their padded-cell utopia.
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9d ago
Just to follow up, now that about 2 months have passed, do you think Charlie Kirk is still on people's minds? My sense is that in the conversation it's been completely displaced by the government shutdown and Epstein electric boogaloo, but maybe there are subcultures in which people still talk about it.
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10d ago
· Edited 8d ago
Notably, Russia promised it would have Pokrovsk (and much more) by the end of the summer.
What is the source for that promise? I'm seeing this "our top secret leaks from the enemy suggest they aimed to achieve X by time Y, since they didn't that means they are losers" pattern since the start of the war, and it's a bit facile.
Generally, I think there's a strange sort of alignment of interests between the two sides in continuing the current near-static attrition warfare until one of the sides folds. For the Ukrainian side, it's not like anything that's behind the current frontline is more defensible than the commieblock smelter fortress hellscape of the Donbass; and for the Russians, between having to fight a given Ukrainian soldier while pulverising anything he could use for cover in Pokrovsk and having to do the same thing while pulverising cover in Zaporizhia/Kharkiv, the former is preferable, since if they do the former and prevail, they eventually can capture Zaporizhia/Kharkiv (which are actually worth something) intact. Allowing the frontline to move while there is still meat to keep it where it is is more or less strictly negative-sum.
not be allowed to return, but will be given land in conquered Ukraine
I don't think they really have the social machinery, or stomach, to actually implement some sort of way to prevent them from returning - after all, many of the contract soldiers likely signed to get money for their families, which means that they have ties in the old country forcefully cutting which would cause widespread discontent. Just turning them into some modern version of Székely-style marchers by giving them allotments of conquered land, in the hope that the most unhinged elements stay put and perhaps even make the land more defensible should Ukraine go in for a rematch, seems fairly plausible though.
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10d ago
At it it's most basic level what is a moral conviction if not a pre-commitment to be unreasonable.
A positive term in your value function. Rationalism is about achieving your terminal goals, not about choosing them. There is nothing "irrational" about acting optimally to, say, purge all idolatry.
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11d ago
5: Which ones specifically?
4: Russia hasn't even managed to wipe out Ukraine's aviation or train network yet, and most of Europe would be rather further away.
2: It's about half the size (of presumably full-sized Ukraine), plus Poland and the Baltics have Russia by the balls due to Kaliningrad (whatever happens later on, it probably gets turned into a parking lot or occupied/taken hostage in the opening weeks of a conflict)
1: I mean, if Ukraine falls, what further ways does NATO have to validate Russia's fears? There will be no immediate Russian objectives like controlling Ukraine that NATO can actively prevent, so the ball will be in their court. If they then actually start something (like the aforementioned moves on Kaliningrad), then sure, all bets are off, but so far I thought the lizardmen were trying to be a bit more subtle about the whole "look how dangerous and unhinged they are, if we punch them they punch back" schtick.
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11d ago
On the other hand, I'd wonder if Ukraine's leadership wouldn't have jumped ship and left the country headless by now if they saw that there is no opportunity for profiteering. Kickbacks are the superstar CEO salaries of politics.
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11d ago
· Edited 11d ago
Well, we shouldn't forget that Poland, too, has actually greatly increased the size and funding of its army since 2022. Besides, how likely is it really that there would be no NATO response in case of a Russian invasion of the Baltics/Poland? (even if it's not immediate, the rest of the EU certainly would get involved, and if it possibly goes badly for them, I don't see a world in which the US stands by idly)
It seems to me that you just need to believe a lot of fairly peculiar (and likely unacceptable to any in the pro-UA camp apart from people like Julian Roepcke who went off the deep end in contrarianism) things to imagine a Russian invasion of Poland or the Baltics being successful: either you really think that NATO is already lending Ukraine most of its power (and so Russia is really currently barely prevailing in a stalemate against the collective West) and so Poland and friends will be weaker when Russia comes for them because they were already stripped bare, or that NATO is not giving Ukraine that big a fraction of its power and so the current stalemate means that Russia and Ukraine alone are about evenly matched and each stronger than NATO.
(Mind you, technically I think the picture is more complicated than that because the non-entry of the West has currently kept Russia several steps below the top of the escalation ladder, e.g. by leaving NPPs and civilians alone. However, to use this in your argument, you would have to concede that Russia is not currently evilmaxxing, which is also taboo for pro-UA.)
Adding to @Jiro's comment below, there are some arguable cases predating the level of statecraft needed for full colonisation: the Magyars turned up on Europe's borders as a tribal confederation and took plenty of scalps until getting their asses handed to them by the Germanics, whereupon they seemingly settled down and advanced to whatever they technical frontier of 12th century Europe was. The various states of the Korean peninsula were still in tribal stage when first encountered by the Chinese blob but had seemingly more or less caught up before the Mongols/Yuan riding the soft power tiger that was the Middle Kingdom finally rolled over them.
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