Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a hilarious insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man idiosyncratic party-line Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Looks more the "civvies" they wear under the plate-carriers are tacticool,
Good sir, a they are too much of a grab-bag or awkward shapes to appeal to the rule of cool. They are tactitacky if anything.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Sure. It can also work if the new officers have positive modifiers. And thus we get into the implications of highly personalist autocratic systems that result in information flows for evaluation getting systemically distorted.
To continue the analogy, most strategy games work on an assumption that the numbers presented to the player are actually correct. When the game tells you the character has positive or negative modifiers, you can believe it because the game systems don't lie to you.
It would be a completely different dynamic if the character with negative modifiers was presenting as a character with positive modifiers, and that the only way for you to know it was different was to use that officer in combat first. And it would be an even greater deviation from that if using in combat didn't actually reveal objective stats. Say their negative modifier only comes into view if they lose- so if you actually win with them in an easy conflict, you think you have a good officer and that the costs were other issues.
But of course, between the paradigm of 'the game system doesn't lie to you' and 'the game system does lie to you,' reality is a bit closer to the later. The systems often lie, because the systems are made out of people with their own interests to distort the truth. China is no stranger to that, hence the economic statistic reliability for decades.
But that in turns is what helps drive the top-down paradigm that can over-emphasize a leadership solution. If you can't trust/rely on the reporting system, you trust/rely on what you can trust/rely on instead. Yourself first of all, but then intermediaries you trust, and then subordinates they trust. Less trust per degrees of separation, but a personalist system tends to run on personalities for a reason. And if a personality disagrees and isn't performing...
To step away from the analogy and make a clarification, I'm not saying that this is what is happening. But it is a failure mode that can happen, and would explain a bad decision- such as going forward into a war after an officer purge. No one rationally chooses a failure mode, but then no one would have rationally chosen China's Zero Covid policies either, and it still happened under- and because of- Xi.
Sounds like you're not actually disputing any of his observations, as much as trying to dismiss their relevance to the conclusion because they individually make sense as tools.
Which is how most professional military, and paramilitary, things turn out to work when broke down into individual components. There are no magical secret ninja techniques to running a military, or an insurgency. At its heart, it's all a combination of individually simple, logical concepts that make sense with just a bid of explanation. It does not require a college degree, not least because they are often constructed to be executed by people without such credentials.
And yet, there remains a wide gulf between professional/competent organizations and those that fumble about. A large part of that comes from not only having the drive to actually make sure everything that needs to be done gets done, but also knowing the scope of things that needs to get done for a specific ends, and how to organize the allocation of tasks of develop those particular means, as opposed to getting drawn into irrelevant rabbit holes. That is where the indication of exceptional understanding, and deliberate intent, comes in.
So when you say things like this-
I mean yeah, this is just specialization of labor, well-understood by humans for many thousands of years. Pretty much anyone who has been on a sports team or has had a job understands the idea of having different members of the organization focus on what they're good at.
In response to this-
Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases
That the [specialization of labor] is developing a shared database, which entails a host of specialized efforts, and developing specialized reconnaissance efforts for the deliberate purpose of the database, which entails a host of allocation decisions, is far more important than the presence of [specialization of labor]. [Specialization of labor] is a means, not a reason, to develop such a database.
'Just specialization of labor' could be found anywhere, in any protest movement. Not any given protest movement has a reason to develop the means to build vehicle databases of law enforcement agencies. Even fewer have a need to develop such a database for the purpose of establishing real-time tracking networks of law enforcement agencies in the process of their work. Even fewer yet have a legal basis to use said real-time tracking networks for the purpose of targeting law enforcement agencies in the middle of their activities with the intent of disrupting those activities.
And because these reasons, needs, and basis are so rare, all the steps and sub-steps required to do them are not obvious common knowledge. They are not obvious common knowledge for people even when they intend to disrupt ongoing law enforcement agencies. The insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan underwent darwinian evolution to such collections of both deliberate targetting and operational security precisely because all the required elements were not inherently obvious to the people who got taken out.
In turn, we know that Americans don't know all these techniques either. You yourself admit to not recognizing the implications of signal chat caps or the call rotations. We have various Americans openly publishing their participation and crowdfunding off of it, which both the funders and fundees would recognize as a terrible idea if they actually cared about the OPSEC. Protestors are consistently inconsistent about whether they need face masks to protect their identity or not. They are not subject to darwinian organizational evolution.
These are not the people who know the various insurgency mechanics to start building into the organizing infrastructure. They do not know the 'sensible' things, or the importance of enforcing it with regularity, or the longer why's behind various guidance. They merely fall into the architecture that was set up for the purpose.
That architecture, in turn, required both specialized knowledge, and intent. No one 'accidentally' develops a government license plate tracking network. That the people who have are coincidentally cribbing from insurgency network practices is, as the tweet says, concerning.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
That meme is classic military culture. Fits right in with the classic 'What I actually do' meme format.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
To add to this, you can't really damage the combat readiness of an army by leadership purges if it's not combat-ready to begin with.
You can, however, convince yourself that the purges will get rid of the reason it's not combat ready, and trust the post-purge officer corps when they say 'Yes Supreme Leader.'
One of the classic failure modes of officer purges is when the people doing the purging believe that issue with readiness is the officer corps, as opposed to the army as a whole. It typically comes with the underlying premise that the current issue is that the purged officers were being given everything they needed to make the force combat capable, and that by replacing the bad officers with good ones the previous malign factors will go away in relatively short order. Think of a strategy game where unit commanders provide modifiers to the units they are in- if you change the commander, the modifiers change as well, because the modifiers are tied to the commander, not the army.
If this seems silly due to the example, there is more historical precedent than one might remember. Leader personality do matter. Strong personalities can distort entire organizations around themselves, toxic leaders can poison a climate, and a transition from incompetent leaders to good leaders can see the same forces change in readiness without expensive campaigns abroad.
But it is also reflective of a sort of top-down control paradigm, the sort of mentality that leans into technnocratic or personal-control impulses on the underlying belief that everything would be better if people just listened to you/people like you/the people you 'know' are better. This sort of mental paradigm, in turn, is prone to its own forms of confirmation bias, particularly if your totally not yes-men more professional and competent officer corps begins reporting improvements that coincided with their assumption of the job.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
Good points, and I'll raise another aspect for audience consideration.
The ground aspect of a Taiwan invasion is definitely a massive challenge. The other side of the issue is if it will be necessary if Taiwan can be blockaded and starved into submission. China could absolutely bungle an invasion, a D-Day failed, and still end up with the win if it just successfully blocks ships from coming in and landing to unload long enough. Taiwan has something like a third of food self-sufficiency in peace time.
This is where the question of the naval war, and war length, comes. While it's typically framed in terms of whether China can keep the US Navy out, and that does matter for letting China try that very difficult landing scenario, the actual needs in the war regarding Taiwan ports change depending on if the war is a short conflict or a long conflict.
In a 'short' war, China just needs to keep the US out long enough to make the naval invasion, which- even if it can't sweep the island- might have the political shock effect of a political capitulation by the Taiwanese. I generally take a dim view of 'and then the enemy loses the will to fight' scenarios, but they aren't impossible. From the Taiwan coalition situation, the key interest is maintaining enough naval / air power in the area to deter / undercut / critically weakening the landing threat so that it trips and drowns, until the PRC accepts a status quo ante end to hostilities. However, the shortness of this war makes Taiwanese ports relatively unimportant beyond a defense objective. They don't have to work, just not be captured to facilitate PRC logistics.
In a 'long' war, China and the US are now involved in a global-scale power struggle with global economy cracking implications even as dynamics prevent a status quo ante resolution. One of the reasons this might endure is because the PRC get enough of a bridge head that they have a toe hold on the island that can neither advance nor be driven into the sea, but it's not the only one. In this format, the Taiwan ports- especially those on east of the northeast of the island become a critical facilitator for supplies, both military and, well, food. Except ports can be shut down via missiles or cyberattacks or other things. So now it's the Taiwanese coalition that has to overcome the 'how do I get men and material onto the island,' where instead of hostile terrain and a defender they are facing hostile terrain and a major regional airbase trying to enforce a naval blockade.
I'll start by noting I was probably editing in additional paragraphs of how validity interacts with trust in the time you replied. I will let that stand as a general point.
But why suppose an atheist who says "I don’t believe your religion is true, but according to your religion you should act this way" is more likely to be someone who uses 'arguments as soldiers' (any more than e.g. a co-religionist)?
You are arguing against a(nother) claim that was not made. There is no argument or claim that the atheist is 'more likely' to be someone who engages in arguments as soldiers than a co-religionist. There is not even a claim that it is worse when they do.
The athiest, however, is engaging in arguments as soldiers when they make an argument from a basis they do not believe valid, and attempting to have the other people act to their preference as if it were.
Arguments as soldiers, in turn, is a strategy with a spectrum of applications. There are egregious abuses of it, and there are unremarkable utilizations of it.
Where a particular instance of arguments as soldiers resides matters in some ways, but in other ways does not for the point of whether it decreases validity. The introduction of the variable itself changes the warranted level of faith in good faith to be taken as default, and compounding context- such as reason to believe the person is engaging in the argument in bad faith- magnifies the impact.
They could be prioritising logical validity, you don't know until you listen to them.
If they were prioritizing logical validity, they wouldn't be making the argument from (religious) faith that the meme pre-supposes they find illogical.
This, in turn, doesn't require to know what the specific argument is, merely the nature of the argument and the arguer. If parts of this are known in advance- such as knowing the atheist is an atheist- all the better.
I will also turn back to the earlier post I provided, which itself ties the Boy Who Cried Wolf part of the previous post about why personal credibility / intent matters for validity.
And that point can be by balanced by other points that they would not raise because they do not share your basic goals. Such as how they do not share your basic goals, and are merely using arguments as soldiers to get their goals instead of yours... and that their goal is to obstruct yours.
In a context-less vacuum, the meme Atheist and the Christian do not necessarily have oppositional goals. This is why the meme works as a meme- it's unspecific and vague enough to allow the viewer to assume their own interpretation that is more innocuous to their preferences.
For example, their desires could be orthogonal or even overlapping, like Christian wants to spend charity in way A, like supporting widows, and Atheist wants way B, say orphans. Atheist using an appeal to religion in shaping the shared priority might still be a case of arguments as soldiers, but it doesn't challenge the basis of faith in good faith in the way a more hostile demand might. As a result, the Christian comes off as more unreasonable for such a tepid contradiction.
But there are Atheists who might not be interested in orthogonal co-existence, but active obstruction or even harm. If this were the case, and this was known, then the recognition of arguments as soldiers does considerable harm to the validity of that Atheist's arguments. They would- appropriately, rationally- not be warranted the sort of external faith that they are engaging in good faith, since good faith is at odds with a pre-commitment/desire to negate other good-faith actors.
And this leads back to the meme being raised in the context of anti-ICE actors. There are anti-ICE actors who are orthogonal actors who just want more effective immigration enforcement. There are also anti-ICE actors who are directly oppositional to immigration enforcement categorically, even if they try to deny such because it would discredit their public validity. An orthogonal actor may propose a change on the belief that it will actually make for more effective, and be willing to not only implement said compromise but also change it if that change does not actually meet their claimed priority of improving effectiveness. A directly oppositional actor may advance the same change with the expectation/intention of deliberately foiling the implementation and resulting in a decrease in immigration enforcement.
One is a possibly valid way to improve immigration enforcement, and one is an invalid way. How does one evaluate the validity of whether the anti-ICE proposer is proposing a valid improvement to enforcing immigration?
Well, it helps if the previously identify themselves as categorically opposed to the validity of immigration enforcement, and thus warrants low social faith-based validity, much as it helps the meme Christian to know that the aetheist categorically does not believe in the religion, and does not merit social faith-based validity. In the meme, the atheist is clear. In the United States, the disband ICE types are unclear... not least because only a few years ago the same general coalition had the defund the police movement, with similar dynamics.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
I am just noting I agree with this argument in general / don't feel we were disagreeing over anything in particular as much as emphasis or some order of operations, and have nothing else to add.
A rationalist might also be expected to recognize that 'reduce the validity' is not the same as 'ignore arguments from people in different camps to you,' and would not strawman accordingly. Fortunately, as you say, this is only nominally a rationalist forum.
Validity incorporates many factors, such as logical soundness, factual soundness, or so on. These are aspects that must be judged externally, either taken on faith or evaluated at more extensive effort. One of the aspects of people who use arguments as soldiers is that they are not prioritizing logical soundness, or factual soundness, but merely effect. Effect-prioritizing approaches will happily skip steps of logic, or ignore inconvenient facts, in order to achieve their desired effects.
Arguers who adopt styles of debate that routinely smuggle in unsound logic, or ignoring inconvenient facts, do not merit as much faith that their arguments are being cultivated for sound logic or sound facts. Thus, their validity is reduced, even if the more onerous evaluation supports them in a particular circumstance, because the specific instance is independent from the meta-context of who they are and why they are adopting a particular style of argument.
Or, in other words- validity results from a combination of both formal support or faith in their good faith. Few people provide or can evaluate because of how hard it is to work from first principles each time. Good faith is reduced when someone is knowingly presenting arguments from a position of bad faith.
This, in turn, is part of why rationalists have put a great deal of attention to the matter of credibility in conflict-bargaining and conflict analyst. The same message- be it promise or threat or something else- has different credibility/validity when offered by different actors, even if those actors use the exact same words.
To pull from a classic word-manipulator fable, since that is what arguments as soldiers is a style of: the boy who cries wolf and the boy who doesn't cry wolf may both say the same thing when there is a wolf, but the validity for disregarding the warning of the boy who cries wolf is much stronger. After all, he has used his false warnings as arguments as soldiers repeatedly to gain his desired effect of riling the villagers to his amusement. Logical and factual soundness were never his priority, and would have been known sooner had he been known as the boy who cried wolf from the start. Once these became known, he no longer maintained the faith needed to be a valid messenger of warning.
None of which means / implies that his warnings should be ignored entirely- the wolf still exists and does harm the town- but the moral of the fable is not 'he should have been seen as valid no matter what he said or why.' Why you say what you say absolutely matters for the faith people take your word at, which is a foundation of the validity of your arguments.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Identify / appoint judges willing to support the federal action, and process the actions through them specifically. If chokepoints exists, create redundancies that are more favorable to actions.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
The structural insurgent groups he believes are forming are a problem. But they're a second order effect of the broader media campaign that is rallying these groups under a banner.
My only... quibble? addition?- is that there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg of whether the structural groups are caused by the media, or cause the media. Journolist and Ezra Klein of NYT fame was deliberately trying to shape the media framing of things as far back as the later 2000s. This doesn't even go into The Resistance phase of Trump 1, in which various media actors were willing partners in coordinated instigation, or some of the Biden-era totally-organic media campaigns.
I can agree that the structural insurgent groups in this discussion are downstream of the broader media campaign, but the structure with intent to resist had media allies/participants/collaborators from the start. The broader media campaign in this context is itself a product of structural insurgent groups. Even if the nature of the media insurgent groups is different from the whistle-blowing groups, that itself is consistent with the nature of those GWOT networks-of-networks.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Do you think I'm wrong that this was an LLM's output? Why do you disagree?
It's more that I don't find those three particular points as particularly strong evidence. I've been known to use all three myself, particularly if I'm trying abide by a relatively limited format like twitter, and as you seem confident enough that I'm human. Then again, other people online (typically in other spaces where I don't have a reputation) occasionally accuse me of being a bot, so...
I am ambivalent about whether the overall post is LLM. I wouldn't be surprised one way or the other, but LLMs typically write about what's been well written in the training data. That sort of description of mid-2000s insurgency cell structure isn't impossible to find, but it's not exactly particularly common either. Parts of the text- what you refer to as the 'it's not X, but Y' tell- was a not-uncommon style of upfront caveats I loosely recall being more common from the era. Part of the challenges of counterinsurgency was trying to get (often senior) leaders to break their analogies or default framing devices. 'It's not familial complicity, it's a tribal dynamic' sort of distinctions. These tended to be more rhetorical than written, since you often needed to find the metaphor/analogy that would work for your audience.
So could I see an LLM picking up old reports for some prompt trying to analogize anti-ICE protests and the Iraq insurgency? Sure. But I could also see it being a rhetorical hangover of someone who actually imbibed in that language-culture back in the day, which would match their basis for claiming to recognize the patterns being discussed. And since I haven't seen a particular flood of media sketching out the structural similarities between anti-ICE protest groups and insurgency groups, it weakens my priors that a colon: list is 'just' AI output. Not enough to discount the possibility, but not enough to presume it either.
I do find it kind of tangential to addressing the point of the post, and the sort of thing that I occasionally see as a way to dismiss grappling with the argument entirely in a 'it's just AI, no reason to consider the argument.' I don't think that was your intent / purpose, but rather that you were focusing on a particular aspect of the post's composition, which I consider valid enough. I just raise an eyebrow only at a particular part of your part that I've been accused of being a bot over.
If you agree with me, what is the purpose of your comment? To point out to me that em-dashes existed before 2022? I'm aware. Thank you, Dean!
Any time. For my next trick, I'll point out that em-dashes and such are still used by non-LLMs after 2022 as well.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
^^this one's a doozy. Em-dashes, "not x, it's y," and a list in a series all in a row.
LLM's didn't invent that rhetorical style, you know.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Does that meme actually reduce the validity of what the atheist says though?
Yes.
Someone from outside your group may not share your basic goals but might still have a point.
And that point can be by balanced by other points that they would not raise because they do not share your basic goals. Such as how they do not share your basic goals, and are merely using arguments as soldiers to get their goals instead of yours... and that their goal is to obstruct yours.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
Besides the summary part, which is a matter of time not indicated here, and execution brings implications not yet established.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
Kyle Rittenhouse was the guy who decided it would be a good idea to open carry at a protest, as if that would help anything. The results were predictable.
The results, and the protest, and the chase that led to his self defense, were also not situations he created, let alone went out of his ways to create.
I'd agree to be less contemptuous if I saw anyone take their own side to task in this area.
Then you haven't looked well enough, possibly because you are contemptuously looking down on people you are actually at the same level as.
Note that you will not hear the right say this about Kyle Rittenhouse
You really want to start your list with the kid who was running away from the people who chased, and who didn't shoot first, and who didn't create the situation of the fiery but mostly peaceful protests in general that led to escalation?
Not a particularly good list in general, but that one in particular is a weak foot to start off on if you intend to leave off with contempt. However low you think the MAGA-right is, you are at eye level.
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
Minneapolis has clearly become a clusterfuck with no real win condition for the ICE side.
Law enforcement in general has no real win condition. As long as there are profit, personal, or partisan reasons to commit crimes, there is no point where it is 'done.'
However, there is a fail condition for law enforcement, and that is to stop enforcing laws at heckler, and violent, veto.
You 'answered' by trying to ignore the premise of the question- evidence that doesn't actually support or deny a conclusion- and then tried to insist you need to know ahead of time, at which point you transitioned to questioning future prediction. This is a deliberate inversion of the framing of something known into something not known, in order to insert your deflection of a question of future prediction.
Future prediction is not needed when you already have reviewed evidence to determine what it does or does not support. Removing evidence that neither supports or refutes an outcome is not bias towards one outcome, because it supports neither outcome.
Yours was a transparent dodge, for a transparent purpose of giving a non-answer after earlier concessions that you didn't want to answer the question. First the evasion you denied you were avoiding, before you conceded you weren't answering but insisted it was because it was a leading question, and now this attempt to change the question.
Thank you for the public demonstration. At this point I suspect anyone knows what your answer in that dark alley would be, however incriminating it might be for you. Feel free to take your last word and zinger if you'd like.
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
Yes, they have an agenda. But I couldn't find the detentions and arrests bar chart anywhere else.
The availability bias is truly a wonder, and an easy tool to exploit.
Cause aside, 7 deaths in 15 days is anomalously high and warrants explanation.
Sure. But also questions. Among which- what would have been the death rate in 2023 had the Biden Administration surged ICE differently? After all, a core premise of your critique is the (in)competence. Incompetence requires a baseline of competence, which in turn requires a baseline of 'acceptable' failures across an institution.
And also- what would the death rate in January 2026 have been had the Obama and Biden administrations not taken their benign neglect for over a decade? Had they changed policy, would the downstream factors of January 2026 been possible?
But also- 115 compared to what base number? Not only what is the base numbers in January 2026 versus 2023, so that you can have some % comparison, but also what is the 'acceptable' number of deaths in general?
And this is if we concede 'cause aside.' Someone might- quite reasonably- believe that cause must not be put aside. It matters quite a bit for discussions of competence if deaths in ICE detention are because ICE beats the detainees to death, or if the prisoners kill eachother, or if they die because of heart attacks but previous administrations didn't have such figures because they were ideologically opposed to deporting people at risk for heart attacks when stressed.
That's usually how it goes. The dirt is usually unearthed by those who want to bring you down. Back during the excesses of the work movement, opposing statistics required swimming through doomer incel sewers. Just because they wanted to radicalize me into giving up didn't mean their numbers were wrong.
Ah, but numbers are wrong. Quite commonly. Especially numbers provided for the primary purpose of propaganda- and especially numbers presented to prime emotions. As they say, lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Where are you getting the idea that I am claiming that is what is happening?
Particularly when, just further down in the exchange, I helpfully clarify for any confused Russians in the audience who might have confused a general argument for a specific claim-
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