ABigGuy4U
5mo ago
I am reminded of the George Carlin bit where he talks about how the rather ugly term “shell shock” got softened into “battle fatigue” and later the sterile acronym “PTSD”.
ABigGuy4U
5mo ago
While you have more stuff, maybe some servants, being rich in a low trust society is not as fulfilling as being average in a high trust society.
It’s not just emotionally unfulfilling, it’s dangerous. Being rich can protect you from a lot of the day-to-day violence. But if the whole country tumbles into the abyss because of civil war, foreign invasion, state collapse or ethnic conflict, the gated community isn’t going to do much other than make you a target.
ABigGuy4U
5mo ago
Oh that’s easy. America should be a proposition nation, right up until all the members of my ethnic group have finished immigrating, whereupon it should become a nation of founding stock, “founding stock” here meaning my ethnic group and all the ones that came before it, except for the ones that I don’t like. This is the objectively correct opinion and no one can prove me wrong.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
Also there’s already a lot of pretty suspicious circumstantial stuff that’s public knowledge that has still been summarily ignored by the media and the general public. Like the fact that Oswald had a CIA handler (George de Mohrenschildt). Or that Alan Dulles spent November 22 hunkered down at the Farm (the CIA’s training complex) even though by then he no longer worked for the CIA. Or the fact that Alan Dulles spent the months leading up to the assassination taking documented meetings with various sketch Cuban exiles. Or the fact that there was a massive spree of CIA backed assassinations of various foreign leaders in the months leading up the assassination (Ngo Dien Diem’s assassination was less than three weeks before Kennedy’s). Or that Robert Kennedy suffered a similarly convenient assassination when it looked like he might unexpectedly be in a position to investigate his brother’s death. Or that Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon all seem to have believed there was a conspiracy. I don’t think throwing a few more facts onto the pile of things that make ABigGuy4U go “hmmmm...” is going to break the dam.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
My suspicion is that he’s not just going to immediately fire anyone who doesn’t answer. The people whose accounts don’t answer will probably be placed on a list for further investigation and cross-checking. I think he’s looking for literal Mafia-style Union no-show jobs, not just slackers.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
I agree. Oswald’s protestation “I’m just a patsy!” doesn’t necessarily imply that he’s saying he’s innocent, just that he’s the designated fall guy for a larger operation. If you look at declassified CIA assassination manuals from that era, half the word count boils down to “find a mentally unstable political radical to do it for you”. I would argue that even if Oswald was the only shooter, it doesn’t necessarily rule out a conspiracy.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
@Lazuli is right. But generally speaking criminal trials are open to the public outside of specific cause like a minor victim, a proceeding that involves classified state secrets as part of the testimony, or a situation where there is an exceedingly high chance of attempted witness or jury tampering (like a cartel trial). Televised is less common, and many judges are wary of it after the OJ trial circus.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
I would argue the cultural 20th Century ran from the summer of 1914 to Christmas of 1991. The 21st century began on September 11, 2001. The 90s is a historical liminal space that serves as both an epilogue to the 20th century and the prologue to the 21st.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
Another one of Diocletian’s innovations to circumvent the Praetorian Guard was to never set foot in the city of Rome and just rule the empire from Florida uhh I mean Mediolanum. This also allowed him to always stay with the army on the frontiers. One thing that got emperors into trouble during the third century is that they could either stay with the army at the German frontier to keep it from rebelling and keep the barbarians out, or stay in Rome to keep the Praetorian Guard under control. Moving the admin center closer to the border solved that issue.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
Yes it’s an often unremarked upon hilarious factoid of history that Mexico briefly had a Hapsburg Emperor
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
In Haiti the life expectancy is currently 64 years on average. That’s about 60 years higher than the four year life expectancy of the slaves that were shipped to Haiti to work there. So yes, I would say Haiti is much better off as independent country than as a hellish French sugar gulag.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
The Turing test is like the Bechdel test. It’s not a perfect heuristic, and it’s misused in a lot of ways, but the point is that it’s a fairly low bar that most things at the time still weren’t able to clear.
But were performers ever a large part of the economy?
They weren’t ever a huge load-bearing part of the economy, but it was a lot larger than it is now. Back before video and audio recording technology, if you wanted to listen to music or watch a play, someone had to do it live for you. That meant there were a lot more paid performers, and a lot more people skilled in music and the performing arts as a serious hobby. While the economic loss was relatively small compared to say, the loss of manual labor, it does mean there are more people who feel unfulfilled because they will never be able to support themselves doing what they love. It’s a psychological loss similar to the complaints you hear by artists about AI drawings.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
Even the drugged-out lumpenproles taking to the streets in 2020 were mostly acting because they knew they had official cover. Police that wouldn’t open fire on them, shady mystery funds that would immediately post their bail, political DAs that would recommend sub-minimum sentences, and a news media that would paint them as heroes. And I suspect many of them were receiving a salary for it.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
However, realists would argue that states cannot know the intentions of other states, and so often over-react.
True. Unfortunately the United States pillaging the Russian economy, rigging their elections, funding separatist movements, loudly and publicly stating through various think tanks that they intended to cause the collapse of the country, and harboring child-murdering Chechen terrorists all combined to give the misplaced appearance of ill-will.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
Russia has no more right to demand subservience from Ukraine than the US does from Canada or Mexico.
And yet the United States has a long, long history of demanding subservience from both:
•Invading Canada twice in 1777 and 1813 for not sufficiently supporting the American revolutionary project
•Sponsoring and funding a breakaway republic from Mexico in 1836, then officially recognizing that breakaway republic
•Launching a Special Military Operation against Mexico in 1848 and extracting massive territorial concessions because Mexico tried to destroy that breakaway republic
•Threatening to invade Canada in 1862 because their mother-state was providing aid to America’s own attempted breakaway republic
•Allowing foreign insurgents to stage in Minnesota and perpetrate multiple massive cross-border terrorist attacks into Canada between 1866 and 1871 resulting in hundreds of deaths
•Invading Mexico in 1913 to try to rendition a high value target that perpetrated a cross-border terrorist attack against the US
•Seizing the port of Veracruz in Mexico in 1912 to ensure access by military shipping
•Stationing numerous troops and military facilities in Canada
•Extracting trade concessions from both Canada and Mexico
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
But it's also hard to square that with the Zelensky of today asking for every weapon under the sun, wanting to make zero territorial concessions, and even "retake" Crimea which was only ever Ukraine's on paper.
It’s pretty easy to square when you notice that the hardliners in the SBU started killing anyone trying to make peace. Zelensky had two choices: relentlessly prosecute the war himself, or get shot in the head by a “Russian assassin” and have someone else relentlessly prosecute the war in the name of his heroic martyrdom.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
The bigger problem is that foreign policy stays exactly the same regardless of who is President. Clinton, Bush II, Obama and Trump all wanted détente with Russia. And yet, the State Department undermined all of them and continued pursuing its own aims of unlimited hostility and NATO expansion.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
Overall I think you’re right, but I suspect he took the CIA’s warnings a lot more seriously than he let on, and was just messaging that way in public to prevent panic.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
It really doesn’t feel like they anticipated or were preparing for a war though. It took them four months of panicking and hand-wringing before the first substantial aid packages started to arrive.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
Because they are in demographic decline and they’re thinking about how they are going to defend their border 40 years from now.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
Until they decide they would rather not get frog-marched off to die in a trench in Ukraine and decide that Tiocfaidh ár lá might in fact refer to today.
ABigGuy4U
6mo ago
If you’re unfamiliar with the idiom, “nice work if you can get it” carries with it the sly implication that said work would be nigh-impossible or at least very difficult to get.
I’m on record here several times saying that I think it was a stupid plan because of its high likelihood of backfiring. I think if they were going to try to pull it off, it would have best to do it sometime back when Alanis Morrisette and overly baggy jeans were still popular.
A few things:
-Regarding your point about the Vietnam War, escalation with China was a serious concern and explains a lot of the half-hearted prosecution of the war that you see from the United States. The Korean War was only about 15 years before Vietnam and there was a lot of fear that if North Vietnam was invaded you might see two million Chinese “volunteers” flood across the border like the last time. It was also one of the main things that prevented the United States from “pulling a Watchmen” and using nuclear weapons to end the conflict. It was assumed that if the United States used nuclear weapons the Chinese would retaliate by giving North Vietnam or the NLF nuclear weapons and short range delivery platforms to attack US bases in the region.
-Regarding “Option C” this is only a bitter pill to swallow if you assume that Ukraine would win an attritional conflict, or at least keep their heads above water. They won’t. Ukraine is taking enough casualties that it’s affecting their force structure. They can’t furlough anyone who isn’t seriously injured, and it’s increasingly getting to the point that they can’t even rotate out brigades on the front line. They have to keep them their until they are completely destroyed. We are rapidly progressing towards a Germany 1918 complete operational collapse of the Ukrainian army.
-Also regarding “Option C”, the front line is increasingly not static. 80 percent of Russian territorial gains made in the last two years have been made in the last three months. In another six months the Russians will likely have closed the Kursk salient, and taken both Pokrovsk and Chasiv Yar. After that they are past urban fortresses and bunker complexes and its cattle-country all the way to Kyiv.
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