Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
It is not really taxing wealth, because an equally rich person who spends his money right away avoids it.
Someone who spends their money by buying stuff gets hit by sales taxes, while someone who "spends" their money to make more money gets hit with capgains taxes. The two are symmetrical in that way.
There's nothing inherently "unfair" with taxing investments, as opposed to taxing something like labor income. I read all 3 of your links since they were short, and basically the only argument he presents for not taxing investments is that saving is intrinsically good, but he gives no real reasoning for this. Yes, some saving is good, but he wants to replace capgains taxes with massive taxes on labor income. So doctors and engineers would be hit massively harshly (or "unfairly"), while trust-fund kids would get a windfall. He's trying to smuggle a plan for the rich with vague notions of "fairness" and "saving good" without examining externalities related to high inequality or dynastic wealth. High inequality is just as acidic for the civil polity as massive unassimilated immigration is, so we should generally avoid it where possible.
If you invest in government bonds, your real tax after-tax return will be negative.
Well that's just flatly not correct, as "government bonds" encompasses a range of investment vehicles including higher rate munis. Assuming you were talking about T-bills... it's still not really correct. Returns would depend on the prevailing rate set by the open market, the level of inflation, and timeframe. E.g. today the 30 year T bill is 4.77%, which is quite a bit higher than inflation.
I'm not generally opposed to adjusting capgains for inflation, as long as the total rate of capgains across the board doesn't change (it'd need to rise in other places to compensate). But the prevailing rates offered would likely decrease to the point where it was mostly a wash, and you were the same as before except with more complicated taxes where you'd need to calculate inflation rates.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
is too stupid to be allowed to vote.
Calling people who support Ukraine aid "too stupid to vote" is just "boo outgroup", and if the valence was flipped it would probably be considered banworthy.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
Trump passed two major pieces of legislation which helped unleash an economy that had been sputtering under Obama.
This is not an accurate retelling of economic conditions, but rather is a skewed worldview based on partisan priors. The economy recovered slowly but consistently over Obama's terms, and was quite good towards the end. Trump just caught the tail end of the bull market before it fell off a cliff due to covid. Trump's tax cuts for the rich did little to improve the economy.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
sending most of their men off to die in trenches
This is not congruent with reality. Russia itself claims UA has lost 444k soldiers killed and wounded up to 2/27/24. Assuming a roughly 50/50 split of males:females, this means they have lost (KIA or WIA) around 2% of their prewar male population. And of course that number is coming from Russia, so that's massively inflated for obvious reasons, as well as for reasons unique to Russian reporting statistics. That's obviously a huge tragedy in human terms, and there's also the ~5M mostly women and children that have fled as refugees, but it's nowhere near "most of their men dying in trenches".
On the other hand, Russia's aims have always been transparently genocidal. The "misguided mini Russians" need to be put in their place according to the Russian government, and that's how stuff like Bucha happens, or that video of Russians decapitating a screaming Ukrainian POW, or the various castrations of POWs. Real ethnic solidarity there.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
30d ago
I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations, because, respectively, social status is zero-sum and material resources are finite.
This is a silly position to hold. The world is positive-sum given that scientific advances in productivity combined with returns-to-scale have allowed us to make humanity richer than ever before. I presume you are right-wing but this horseshoes pretty well with the leftist idea that European civilizations only got rich by plundering brown countries, and that whites will forever be tainted by this until reparations enforces equity upon all nations (and perhaps not even then). It's utter tripe.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
28d ago
With Dems increasingly opposed to Israel, this makes me wonder if we'll see a broader realignment of American Jews towards the Republican party. Most are currently overwhelmingly leftist, although Orthodox Jews (a small minority) are conservative.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
Israel is fighting a partisan war, which cannot be won without high civilian causalities, in the first place because the militants live among the community but, more importantly, because reprisals against the civilian population are a requirement for winning a partisan war (Israel knows this, the US could never accept that).
Haven't read the rest of this post yet, but this part in particular is dead wrong. Reprisals might be effective in some circumstances, but are by no means required. A good example is the US pacification of Iraq. The following post is made from someone with first-hand experience in the matter:
I'm a OIF veteran myself, who spent two years in Iraq, one during the bloody Surge in 07-08, the other including being in the "last" US combat brigade to leave Iraq in 2010 (after that, they were only advise-assist brigades not meant to perform any combat duties). Besides my own military service (as an infantry NCO), I spent years afterwards reading every book, article, report, etc that I could find to better understand what actually happened during "my war."
You are dead wrong in your assessment.
When we handed Iraq over to the Iraqi govt, as part of the SOFA agreement, it was pacified and the typical Iraqi city was less violent than the typical American city. That was due to successful execution of COIN doctrine.
We broke the back of the Sunni Arab insurgency with the Al Sawah/Awakening Movement, which capitalized on growing hatred between the rank and file moderate insurgents and especially their tribal leadership and the hardcore Salafi insurgents, most notably Al Qaeda in Iraq/Islamic State of Iraq, who were already pissing off the locals with their extremist tactics.
Starting in 2006 in Anbar Province, the US partnered with Iraqi tribes against AQI, standing up militias to take control of the local areas, driving AQI out as the local former insurgents turned militia knew exactly who they were, where they lived, where their caches were located, where their safe houses were, who supported them, etc. The Awakening spread to the rest of the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq through 2007, by the second half of that year the daily number of Significant Actions (SIGACT), violent attacks against Coalition forces, Iraqi Security Forces, or civilians, had plummeted.
Halfway through my first deployment, all spent in the "Sunni Triangle," it went from me thinking it would be pure chance to spend 15 months without getting at least seriously wounded, to being shocked at how boring and quiet it had become. My second deployment, also in the Sunni Triangle, was absolutely boring. Zero action, no IEDs, no ambushes, no firefights, there was almost no fighting happening period.
The Shi'a insurgency, dominated by the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade (and other Iran proxy groups) was also broken in 2007-8. Partly by the US, especially punishing the Mahdi Army in their uprisings. But mainly it was Maliki and the Iraqi Army who did it, crushing the Basra uprising in 2008, which was only possible because the US trained them, assisted with the clearing operation, etc. That forced al-Sadr to come to terms and agree to both a cease fire and to disband.
The US didn't squash the Badr Bde, they were tied to the Iraqi govt, with so many of them moonlighting in Iraqi Security Forces, but when they knew the SOFA was going to kick after Bush signed that agreement, they recognized there was no point attacking US forces anymore so they stopped, also around 2008. With Baghdad largely ethnically cleansed of Sunnis by that point, they also laid off the death squads, especially after the US/British SOF dismantled the AQI terror cells that were deliberately targeting Shi'a civilians with mass casualty events to purposely start a secular civil war, JSOC's army of face-shooting Tier 1 assaulters and brainiac secret squirrels ended that threat through a campaign of intelligence directed raids that is still absolutely awesome to contemplate.
Iraq went to shit after we pulled out because the US wasn't there anymore. Maliki was left to do as they pleased, and he really wanted to terrorize the Sunni Arabs into compliance, which was a huge mistake. When GWB was POTUS, he spoke almost daily to Maliki on the phone offering guidance, coordinating, etc, and that kept him in check. After Obama became POTUS, he spoke to him once, and then washed his hands of Iraq after the pullout. When the US left and quit involvement in Iraq in 2011, done and no longer "answering the phone" that created an enormous power vacuum which Iran filled, who were also pressuring Maliki to crack down on the Sunni Arabs.
THAT is what caused the DAESH Uprising. The Sunni Arabs were even trying to address political issues non-violently, but Maliki cracked down on them with state-directed violence and mass arrests in 2012-2013, and that was what broke the camel's back and restarted the sectarian civil war. At that point, the largest, bloodiest, most well-funded insurgent group was Al Qaeda in Iraq/Islamic State of Iraq, who had recently been fighting in Syria for the past two years developing even more effectively violent means of terrorism and warfare, had renamed themselves Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (Syria), and the rest is history.
But that was not a failure of US COIN doctrine, which was to seek local solutions to problems, to use whatever means we had (including bribery) to win locals over to our side, to emphasize non-violent means of problem-solving over violent (such as setting up new businesses to grow their economy, a role every US military combat arms unit commander was performing), to live among the people, to share their dangers, to learn to know them, etc.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
I think it's wrong to attribute the popularization of "incel" primarily to women. Women definitely prefer to be with men who are successful with women, but the vast majority are not consciously aware of their hypergamy. Women don't look for men who brag about their bodycount. They have other insults for low-status men, like the ever-useful "creepy" term that will never go out of style. While some women might have used the term "incel" on Tumblr or in random blogposts, it was more used as a replacement for the "entitlement" phenomenon, i.e. that men are not "entitled" to have sex with women because they're friends or neighbors or "boys will be boys" or whatever.
In contrast, some men absolutely consider bodycount to be crucial to any man's overall value. Thus, terms like "incel" really started gaining popularity on male-dominated forums like 4chan long before they broke into the mainstream.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
I do think people overstate the extent to which communism doesn't work
Definitely not. Communism is just totally bankrupt as an economic ideology. The only reason why the USSR lasted as long as it did was because they let limited capitalistic ideas seep through pretty quickly. If you want to see the closest thing to Communism as written, read up about War Communism. Everyone hated it.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
America be flooded by Africans
My dude, what the heck are you talking about? The top countries of origin for immigrants were Mexico (24 percent of immigrants), India (6 percent), China (5 percent), the Philippines (4.5 percent), and El Salvador (3 percent). So El Salvador sent more immigrants to the US than any nation in Africa. Concern about the US being flooded by Hispanics would at least be grounded in reality, although most indicators show them following a similar path that the Irish went through.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
Russia itself was mocked as being a third world country with a gas station. That hasn't exactly aged well.
It was mocked as a gas station with nukes. Nobody ever said Russia couldn't be dangerous if it wanted to.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
28d ago
The problem with crypto is that it's used for a lot of fully illegal things, and so the government has cracked down on it quite a bit. It's also somewhat difficult for the average person to use, at least marginally more complicated than something like Paypal. Then there's the issue of risk, where plenty of people use crypto as a form of speculation so you can never be sure if the crypto held will have the same value as before unless you're using a stablecoin. Then there's the risk of exchanges just running off with your money like FTX did.
Most people beyond the small niche of ideological libertarians only use crypto when they're doing something sketchy or illegal, otherwise conventional banking is the easier option with far more guarantees for standard transactions.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
12d ago
PR doesn't end with just public facing statements. For example, if an organization is established to help the poor but all the workers openly hate poor people, that's a PR issue since news organizations or even just the poor people themselves would eventually realize how much the organization loathed them.
And again, Trump's loathing of illegal immigrants has never been a secret by any means.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
You seem like a Perun-watcher. I watch him too. He's great.
I should have specified a bit more clearly: Russia will be able to reconstitute the majority of its combat capacity in 5-10 years. There will be some lingering areas that take longer of course, but people are acting like Russia is going to be incapable of launching another invasion for 20+ years. The US army was severely battered after Vietnam, yet it reconstituted itself very effectively in 18 years to curbstomp Saddam in '91. It probably could have done so a lot earlier too.
An officer corps of 20-years experience takes 20 years to build
This seems like it would be referencing NCOs, but Russia never had a robust and empowered NCO contingent. It's always been a very top-heavy organization relative to other militaries. This conflict practically erased the reforms trying to implement the Battalion Tactical Group as a coherent fighting unit, but in many ways this conflict has been a return to the basics for Russia. It's a big stupid artillery-centric army that tries to solve problems by blasting them with a truckload of artillery and frontal assaults using infiltration tactics in good scenarios and cannonfodder kamikazes in bad ones. In other words, there's not really a lot to relearn here.
The Russian production rates of aircraft
The naval losses
Both the Russian aerospace forces and its navy would be irrelevant in any larger conflict with the West. It might be relevant if Trump causes NATO to collapse and Russia manages it's diplomacy to 1v1 a country like Finland, but otherwise it was never much of threat.
The bigger issue for the Russian military-industrial complex is the Russian arms export industry.
Yes, this is definitely happening. As of now this market share is mostly going to countries like France and South Korea, but in the long run it will likely go to China which will probably be a lot worse simply since they're more of a long term threat.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
20d ago
I'm coming here from the QC thread, and I must agree that this is an absolutely fantastic post. I was wondering why the gender divide was so huge in Korea, and this answered it quite nicely.
How did you get this info? Are you Korean yourself? Do you have friends that live there? Or is this all from reading articles/online discussion boards?
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
20d ago
I'm pretty big into the political scene, and I haven't heard of any major campaigns using Reddit bots to any degree. There's two problems. The first is the tradeoff between price and effectiveness, where cheap stuff isn't particularly effective and effective stuff isn't cheap (at least relative to traditional advertisements). The second problem is that it's against ToS so most strategists and consultants shy away from it. It would be pretty obvious if they used typical campaign advertisements and just had bots upvoting them, so to get around that they'd need a second ecosystem of secret internet-only advertisements which would make costs balloon further. What you're saying isn't wrong, but I just haven't seen it happen to any real degree.
Microtargeting has been tried a lot but is just not effective.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
Why are you asking that as a top-level post instead of responding to @Hoffmeister25 directly?
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace
This was the UK, not the US. And by UK, it was really just Boris Johnson, and it's not like he was strong arming them to prevent them from making peace, but rather encouraging them to stay in the fight. It still looks bad in hindsight, but there's a large gulf between one head of state saying essentially "hey you guys can do this and we'll help you" vs the implied notion of forcing them into a voluntary conflict.
The US has been lightly pushing for peace behind closed doors since at least November 2022.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
20d ago
nobody is going to buy or create a fake account because they want to do something good for the original community.
I don't think this is necessarily true. Reddit has a lot of silly or dumb rules... that's part of why this site decided to separate in the first place! I'm fine with Onlyfans sloots slinging their wares on the proper subreddits if that's what they want to do, and I really haven't seen much of an issue with pornspam on unrelated subs. All purchased accounts that I saw advertised on NSFW subs.
I'll believe political manipulation via bought accounts is a problem when I see actual evidence, but so far it's mostly been lacking. At least, I don't think it's much of an issue in comparison to the stuff the Reddit admins themselves are already doing via biased moderation policies.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
20d ago
Right, these politically motivated reposts are interesting to me simply due to novelty so I wanted to investigate more, but alas it seems that the duplicated post with comments has been scrubbed.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
I personally like having things like roads and the military for protection.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
28d ago
Are you suggesting everyone just not use exchanges, or only use exchanges that let you still "hold your keys"? That's fine for committed crypto enthusiasts, but most people just want the financial system to work hassle-free. It's like the difference between an iPhone and some hacky Linux system.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
bleeding Russia is on sale right at an amazing discount right now, so we're buying a bit.
I'm as pro-Ukraine as they get, but this point never seemed correct to me. Russia will be able to reconstitute itself 5-10 years max after the war is over. Rebuilding doesn't take that long. And we're mostly just burning through Russia's legacy Soviet stockpile, which would have become more and more obsolete anyways as time passed by. Even the long-term damage Russia will experience from sanctions and the like won't matter much, since Russia isn't really a long-term threat like China is.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Market forces will kill any initiative like this. There is no demand for role models that don't teach young men what they want to learn (at least from the young men themselves).
The same thing happened with injecting progressive politics hamfistedly into tv, movies and video games. The market will just flow around and find what it demands elsewhere.
Market forces are not all-powerful. For example, video games are an utterly male-dominated hobby, and most men would prefer to look at beautiful women ceteris paribus, yet large western studios have done everything in their power to eradicate attractive women in AAA releases to appease their loud contingents of leftist female employees. It's not a total ban, indies and Japanese games still have attractive women albeit with large pushback from woke forums like Resetera, but the difference overall is still quite notable.
A better article is here. It's the only one you'll really ever need. Attacking the impacts (i.e. the people hyperbolically claiming we'll all boil alive or drown or die in some other way is a lot easier (and probably truer) than saying the greenhouse effect doesn't exist.
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