Dean
1d ago
He wouldn't be gunning for a Trump victory, he'd be absolving himself of the blame for a Democratic defeat.
Regardless of what Obama may or may not have intended a convention to go, two of the facts that were critical to Kamala's consolidation of being nominee was (1) her head start on all other candidates with her campaign media (some starting the Sunday after the Saturday-ish media covering Biden's step down, meaning all the other main political rivals and their support staff were home for the weekend), and (2) her legal inheritance of the Biden campaign war chest. The later of these was already known and being speculated about even before Biden's resignation, and the former was clearly pre-planned at the time given the dynamics of the surge flooding the media space. Again, no matter what Obama or others might have wanted, these dynamics were already in play and smothered potential for a viable convention.
What a Biden endorsement of Kamala does is flip the script of the pre-stepdown narrative of Biden as the responsible actor with agency (if Biden loses this, he put himself before the Party) to Biden as the non-primary agent (Biden ultimately put the Party before himself). This puts the agency in the actors/leaders of the Party who led the confrontation- namely, Obama and Pelosi among others. Except Pelosi has already largely retired from active politics (and is very old), whereas Obama specifically lives in the DC area to remain engaged in party politics.
Whereas a contested political convention might have produced an absolving 'well, no one's at fault especially not me' dynamic (or, more plausibly, everyone blaming eachother, but not one specific person in general), and Kamala coronation puts the agency/responsibility for the results of that one the part of those who arranged it- which goes back to the Obama wing of the party. Note further that Obama never actually publicly opposed Kamala, so any post-defeat gripings would be significantly undercut by his agency in putting her in the position in the first place.
Bringing this back to Biden, there's basically a political binary after supporting Harris. Either Kamala wins- in which he has backed the winning horse / has a higher relative influence than he would have had he held out / Kamala's favors to him likely include the protection of his political dynastic interests- or Kamala loses. If Kamala loses, however, the fault is not his- it's either whoever failed to support her (if a key wing of the party rebels), or it's the fault of whoever put her in the first place (the Party leaders who ejected him). The Obama wing of the party suffers whatever intangible consequences there are of having backed three losing candidates (Hillary, Harris, and Biden who they themselves ousted) and bringing Trump into office twice.
It might be to the Party and/or Obama's interest that Biden have not supported Harris in a purely 'Trump minimization' perspective... but this route is also a route in which Biden could also be blamed for a failed convention (which itself could be a defeat condition), which would serve Obama's political interests but hardly Biden's. And also if the party actually wanted a Trump-minimization strategy in the first place, there were many other things they could have done over the last few years other than pave the road for MAGA's return.
Dean
4d ago
It also has substantial value in crisis contexts, in the 'natural disaster just cracked the ground-based infrastructure, can anyone tell me what's going on' sort of system.
Dean
5d ago
Sure. No disagreement, even. Consider this an assent.
...I'm not sure how else to add 'that is a sound and valid addition' without coming off as sillier than I mean to.
Thank you for demonstrating your continued retreat from your opening positions. I look forward to seeing how much of a motte you retreat to over time.
And no, for others, 17 year olds is not the limits of what one can find regarding Hamas child soldier reports.
This is barely intelligible. If you make a surprising and significant claim, you should provide a source.
And if you wish to claim that Israelis shoot children, and then launch screeds on the jews being uniquely evil, you should provide a source that accuses the Israelis of shooting children, instead of claims that children were shot without an attribution as to by whom.
Which serves as another basis of the non-linking, since the lack of relevant sourcing to support a surprising and significant claim (like 'the Jews are deliberately one-shotting children') has been a reoccuring theme of this thread.
And yes, that was left for you specifically to walk into.
Because the argument wouldn't be as effective if I were the one to provide a link.
If someone is actually interested in whether Hamas uses child soldiers, they can very trivially google "Hamas Child Soldiers" and find multiple reports on the history by organizations including Amnesty International, Child Soldiers International, and the United Nations, among others. This doesn't even include self-publicized material such as from the Hamas Youth Wing. These aren't even 'new' reporting- there are easily observable reports from the early 2000s during the tail end of the Intifada years to late last decade, well before the current conflict. Any observer of the conflict with any significant experience has read any one of these over the last few decades- they are old news, not particularly controversial, and numerous.
The reminder of the existence of such reporting isn't just the function any link would provide- it is remind the reader of past reports they've heard of and can easily find again (thus appealing to their own understanding of the conflict), and thus the contrast to the OP's dogmatic dismissal of contrary evidence published over the last decades. Their own trust in their own memories and experience is the legitimizer of the position.
While nominally the target doesn't work as well on people not as experienced in the topic, the prompt that they could easily search for it serves a second level of argument, in which if they do look they will find, and their ability to find evidence of child soldiers if they choose to look for it will be contrasted with the OP's dismissal. This, too, utilizes their agency in the search to bolster the argument.
People who refused to do the search, as a third category, in turn expose themselves to audiences one and two, and thus discredit the OP's objection even fuller when people who are aware recognize they are denying international records that aren't obscure.
None of these three layers of effect would be as effective if a link is simply provided, which can be dismissed on the basis of coming from a partisan regardless of what reference was linked to. The searcher's own agency is what legitimizes the discovery.
Additionally, there is a fourth level, which is a rhetorical trap for the less aware if someone tries to do a surface-level search. One of the easy top-searches is a past UN report that also criticizes Israel for 'child soldier' use (primarily in the context of proximity when searching tunnels / etc.). If this were to be raised in a way to try and establish moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel, not only would a choice to focus on that report validate the relevance of child soldiers as a mitigating circumstance (by acknowledging that the children are not necessarily automatically moral innocents in a combatant sense), but it would also be a demonstratation of a motive for why someone besides Israel might have shot the children (as in, rather than be shot by the Israelis, they are shot because they are associated with the Israelis).
This snare was non-central to the point on the ease of finding evidence that the OP looked to, but was on hand to use if pulled, which again would not work as well if proactively linked to and explained by myself.
Did you predict the 2022 special military exercise?
I assume you mean the Russian one? Sure. I was noting they still weren't committed until they were, but I was one of the realtively people on the forums arguing that the invasion threat was credible and shouldn't be dismissed because of visible factors. It was a relatively minority position back then due to European inclinations to reference the Iraq War intelligence failures / this was American fearmongering / a very memorable denunciation that I knew nothing of slavic brotherhood.
I wasn't sure if the intervention would be tailored to the Donbass and if the other forces were diversionary (they did appear to be too small for a full invasion, but enough for a significant impact), and I believed (and still do) that Putin might have pulled back at the time if he got some of the geopolitical concessions he was angling for at the time (like the Nord Stream pipeline completion). I even thought Ukraine would crumple.
But I was very much against 'this is just another drill.'
What were the visible actions that were not part of the historical pattern of exercises-that-were-not-starts-of-war?
Among other things fact that the Russians had left equipment near Ukraine in 2021, and then not taken it back home with them, allowing it to be proximal and staged so that when they did the 2021 exercise it was building up new force capabilities that were far beyond normal levels. This was significant because when Russia or equivalent countries do a military exercise, they generally don't actually bring enough to do a full invasion and it's visible from orbit. The fact that Russia didn't take it's equipment back home, but then brought in another small army's worth of stuff, and then kept bring more stuff in, was the visibly apparent 'they have an invasion-scale force assembled' which they didn't need if they were 'just' doing exercises.
Additionally, 2021 had multiple developments that correlated with pre-conflict shaping, including a massive pre-invasion propaganda campaigns both against Ukraine (fake nation, nazi narratives) and international legitimization by framing it against NATO (the NATO infrigement/withdrawal demands), the European energy non-refil in which they didn't go through their normal practice of filling European gas stocks during the summer per normal practices, and there was the Russian dynamic behind the Belarusian migrant crisis which was a challenge / shaping perceptions of the new German government.
There wasn't some big propaganda push afaik,
You misremember. The propaganda campaigns were in 2021 mostly, but they were very consistent with pre-war justificaiton narratives, on three grounds- trying to prep the target population (we are you liberators / brothers freeing you from despotic rule), the home population (Russia is standing up for itself for historical Russian brotherhood and territory), and internationally (are war is historically justified and also it's NATO's fault).
and neither was there a withdrawal of the hundreds of billions in economic funds that subsequently got trapped in western banks.
The Russian funds were frozen, but the anamolous economic behavior pre-invasion was the effort to increase European dependence on Russian imports through supply chain artificial shortages of gas.
Notably, in turn, the Russian funds not being immediately moved was a reflection of how the Russians thought the conflict would go (a quick fait accompli the Europeans would ascede to), which has generally been understood to be a mistake for a long-war (which a Taiwan blockade would likely be).
Dean
6d ago
While I fully agree with your general point and thrust of argument, particularly in overall polling differences compared to previous elections, the current leads in key states are still well within normal margins of error. We are in various cases talking about leads of 0.X% when a margin of error can be wide.
While I fully agree that based on historical patterns this would be a shoe in, there is a point that this assumes no changes in how polls were conducted between election cycles to try and improve their accuracy. There are many interests- commercial, strategic, and political-competitor- that have incentives to try and improve polling accuracy, and so it's not good to assume the same errors will continue to be repeated in the same way.
New equivalent errors may be introduced, and there are even conspiratorial takes on why polls may be wrong (such as presenting polls claiming a much closer race to support the effectiveness of future cheating by reducing the amount of cheating needed to plausibly 'narrowly' win), but these would have to be made and I don't think you or most other people are making them.
Dean
6d ago
Here are the problems with that: I don’t see evidence of that happening in the past;
Then you ignored past evidence. As such, no reason to link it again when you can easily see for yourself if you search.
Hamas would like to maintain access to top medical care, which would be jeopardized if they began to threaten medical providers;
Hamas is not prioritizing civilian access to top medical care over things that jeopardize access to top medical care.
This is demonstrated when it regularly does things such as turn medical centers into military bases and steals aid from the public and co-opts local palestinian medical organizations into logistics and propaganda associates, all of which decreases the quality and availability of medical care. Hamas does them anyway.
Hence, there is no reason to believe maintaining access to top medical care prioritizes goals (such as control of the Gazan territory) that could be advanced by threatening medical providers (who could complicate narratives if allowed to be outspoken, but whose shortage serves as a useful propaganda tool for soliciting international sympathy).
Note that this is paralleled with Hamas's use of interior ministry regulations and enforcement of journalism coverage from within the strip, which itself has had observable not-back effects as while these rules nominally don't apply to organizations like the Assoicated Press, the reliance of these organizations on people within the strip, and thus subject to Hamas retaliation, shapes which relationships with the outside world can form in the first place.
Most of the volunteer doctors are not making a career in the Gaza Strip, so there is no reason for them to cowtow to the ideology of Hamas;
Sure there is- access to Gaza in the first place.
In order for external actors to operate within Gaza, they must be permitted by whichever authority controls access to the ground the organization wishes to work on and from. Organizations which do not cowtow, do not gain or retain access. This is basic access-control policy.
the very same survey we are talking about has 20% of the doctors say they didn’t see shot children — so why did this 20% say that? Where’s the evidence that 20% were harassed or asked to leave?
You are reversing the cause and effect of a filtering process, and in turn running into the issue of the nature of small-scale surveys which you are conflating with the filtering effect.
The filtering effect is a pre-survey effect. The effect of filtering is not claiming that 20% of the survey respondents would be asked to leave after saying 20% say that they didn't see shot children. The filtering effect can be something like that 80% of doctors surveyed are willing to say they saw shot children because they are recruited from the sort of (permitted) organizations that include a higher number of doctors who would be willing to say they saw shot children on a survey if it benefited the palestinian cause, but also would not opine on who shot the victims, especially if doing so might work against the cause.
Which goes into the data on who was doing the shooting, rather than who was shot, which not even the NYT respondents cited claim were Israeli shooters.
Except even in this case there is a far more mundane explanation for radical scores, which is survey structure of small samples.
The author is writing on the basis of surveys that includes themselves and people/organizations they know. Groups of people who know eachother are also groups of people who have a stronger tendency to have heard about the same things, often from eachother. This is how you get cultural / information silos where people can get influenced by group thought dynamics that do not have to reflect reality, and why establishing the representativeness of a sample population is critical.
What you presented is a story but the story has nothing evidencing it. The rest of your comment is just trying to obfuscate the fact that innocent Palestinian children ought to obtain medical care.
Medical care for being victimized by whom?
Again, I return to the data points that not only do the shooting-cases not claim that the shooters were Israelis, but that the majority of the article is focused on medical consequences of things like malnutrition and psychological damage that are the responsibility of Hamas, who have been stealing aid, compromising medical organizations, and perpetrating the conflict.
Which, while you certainly had a... take on the evilness of da joos, seemed rather light on equivalent religious analysis on the rulers of gaza.
Dean
6d ago
That Hamas is utilizing 8 year old child soldiers to lob grenades is a level of propaganda that the IDF hasn’t even reached yet.
You seem to have misunderstood the point of the opening, which was to contest your characterization of the limit of child soldiers, which itself wasn't limited to Hamas. A child soldier is not a 16 year old. A child soldier is a child who is used in the function of war, regardless of their age, and as such age alone does not disprove someone someone from being a combatant unless the age is so low that they physically cannot.
There has been no information coming out of Israel that Hamas is using preteen child soldiers in their operations, neither is there drone or other footage which would immediately shift public opinion in favor of Israel. This isn’t happening.
Sure it is. It's denied and disparaged as Israeli propaganda or otherwise that it shouldn't matter because children, but it is in no way hard to find information of Hamas using pre-teen children as human shields to military operations, of using preteens as messengers or conveyers of military goods, of Hamas opening fire into crowds of civilians which would involve pre-teens, of stealing and depriving the Gazan population of resources which lead to murder over or due to a lack of resources, of Hamas deliberately murdering families of dissidents for the purpose of intimidating the populace, and otherwise setting conditions in a warzone in which people are regularly shot for less-than-maximally-nefarious-reasons by maximally-nefarious jews.
This is not true. Emergency nurses will deal with children shot in all places.
There are two problems with this contestation, both demonstrating separate logical errors leading to data issues.
First is a dynamic which can be summarized as 'tell me you didn't think about triage without telling me you didn't think about triage.' Triage itself is screening function when medical issues over overwhelming and resources- included the doctors themselves- are limited. Not all injuries are emergencies to a triage, and in turn not all injuries will go to emergency treatment in the first place. If you then cite numbers of medical emergency cases, you are starting to count after triage has already filtered relevant contextual numbers.
Second, the NYT isn't citing a representative sample of emergency nurses- or even exclusively emergency nurses- in the first place. It was specifically citing people who were willing to claim observation of children being shot, which is itself a selection bias. '100% of the people I cited claimed cases of X' means nothing on a statistical when you are not citing people who do not support X, and that's if you had a representative survey basis in the first place, which the NYT opinion presenter does not.
As would surgeons, parademics, and critical care doctors. Any child shot is going to see these professionals. There’s not some “child shot in the head super-specialist” at these clinics. I mean, maybe neurosurgeon, but that’s not even a listed specialty in the article.
Thank you for admitting another issue in the article's data base, I was hoping to lead you to that point.
Yes, the lack of professional characterization is a separate issue for the brilliance of the research, as it conflates the medical supporters who might have a more representative understanding of general child injuries as part of the triage process (who, in the article, aren't even claiming Israeli snipers or the such in the first place) from more specialized medical experts whose expertise in specific things- like, say, chest surgeries- who would only be under a significant selective survivorship bias of what they are exposed to (both the nature of the injury, but also operating on people who survive long enough to get to them).
This conflation of category of medical experts, in turn, can be and is used to conflate the different viewpoints to distorting effect. As the viewpoints of people with wider-but-less-serious issues are presented in equal ground with more narrow perspective that are narrower-but-more-severe (because the person in question is primarily dealing with the most severe cases). This is a technique to shape audience perception by insinuating that the equivalence of the reports suggests that the conflated categories are a single category that is both more common and more severe on average than the spread actually is.
But since relevant medical and surgical specialties do exist, and the volunteers of any previous or accumulated experience will be allocated those cases as a matter of course, we can infer from organizational practicalities (and some parts of the article itself) that there is a relevant degree of case selection filtering going on.
Who do you believe is the lower specialty on whom they drop off the children only merely shot in the abdomen or thigh?
Or the hand or the foot or the arm?
The person with clearly vestigial wounds is clearly the lower priority and will receive more limited care by less trained or specialized people. A surgeon who specializes in opening up chest cavities to remove things that can kill people is not going to spend their time resetting dislocated joints or applying splints, when that level of care can be provided by a more-numerous non-surgeon whose use in that role can free up the surgeon to do surgeries.
Now, if you wish to make the argument that the Gazan medical situation is not so dire such that there is no need to triage and thus more specialized medical professionals see a representative selection of wounded children...
Dean
6d ago
Sure it is, if you define value innocence. If you value innocence, then coercing non-innocent actions devalues it by decreasing the degree of innocence.
This includes, for example, compromising information integrity as a condition for access. If you want to assist people in gaza under the administrative control of Hamas, your access to Gaza depends on your public statements aligning with their interests. If they do not like your position, then depending on who you are you may lose access, or people may lose their lives. Therefore, there is a systemic bias at play, and all participants who play to it (speaking only within the bounds Hamas presents) are complicit, and thus less innocent, and thus less valued.
This is why arguments to the value of humanity rarely want to focus on innocence per see. Innocence is too easily compromised.
Dean
6d ago
That was a Palestinian doctor, not a foreign volunteer doctor like most interviewed here.
I think this is a brilliant bit of journalism. First, they specify preteen children who are killed, a hugely important qualifier for a conflict which may see 16-year-old boys plant IEDS.
...because the spiritual purity of 15-and-younger boys disarms explosives?
You may feel this is brilliant journalism, but nothing in it really addresses child soldiers, which have a sordid history in islamic extremism even without touching on Hamas' deathcult tendencies. Child soldiers aren't merely 'are they big enough to carry a gun', which can be well below 10, but 'are they old enough to throw stone-heavy grenades,' which is even less. A preteen can easily be a child soldier, and even a cutoff of 6 is being arbitrary in terms of 'can they provide militarily-useful tasks.'
Nor does anything in the article address the nature of Hamas's influence in the information space, which is not only in the form of influence on intermediaries (by controlling access to Gaza) but also on the locals reporting to those intermediaries (by threats of retaliation).
Nor does the article- or you- make any effort to clear for selection bias on head/body shot children. For the article, there's only 8 cited speakers and the doctors who have the internal medicine specialty to be spending time on children shot in the head are, by the nature of their specialty, not going to be the medical experts handling walking-wounded children who got shot in the arm or non-critical parts of the leg but who don't rise to their need.
You say this...
Third, the data uniquely sheds light on possible Israeli misconduct.
...but the data doesn't uniquely shed light on possible Israeli misconduct. The data doesn't uniquely shed light on any misconduct. The data doesn't even demonstrate a pattern, because the data is depicted without time, context, or even attribution.
Heck, the data doesn't even provide an actual number of children shot.
Most of the article- the vast majority of the article- isn't even about gunshots. It's about malnutrition, psychological harm, baby mortality, and other things.
There are only 8 speakers cited with stories of children being shot. Given the relative range differentials between the Israeli small arms users and Palestinians, it would seem reasonable that a 'the Israelis are deliberately targeting children' to rely on snipers (shooting individual targets from range with precision), rather than closer-range options (pistol-executions) or mid-range-but-less-accurate fires.
On a very basic breakdown of -Attribution of who done it -Attribution of child-soldier era child -Characterized as single shot -Characterized as a sniper (single shot, single targets)
We have
Claim 1: 6 children, ages 6-12, single shots to skull
Attribution: None Child-soldier age: Yes Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (no claim of a sniper context, or how a sniper would be responsible for a singular group)
Claim 2: Pediatric gunshot-wound patients
Attribution: None Child-solder Age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: No (gunshot-wound patients is plural patients, not claiming all patients had a single gunshot wound) Sniper characterized: No
Claim 3: Several children with high-velocity bullet wounds in head and chest
Attribution: None Child-soldier age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: No Sniper characterized: No ('high-velocity bullet' does not imply sniper, and no basis of what this means is provided)
Claim 4: 4-5 year old children, all shot in head with single shot, all delivered at once
Attribution: None Child-soldier age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (Additionally, group delivery implies no risk in taking the time to load all individuals, supporting a close-killing, not snipers)
Claim 5: Child shot in the jaw
Attribution: None Child-solder age: Unclear Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No (Not in nature of delivery or precision)
Claim 6 Father + Brother claiming children (3 and 5) were shot by snipers in house after rumored Israeli pullout
Attribution: None (Israeli attribution is of the rumor of an Israeli pullout from a neighborhood; the sniper is not attributed) Child-soldier Age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: Yes
Claim 7 18-month little girl with gunshot wound to the head
Attribution: none Child-soldier age: No Characterized as single shot: Yes Sniper characterized: No
Claim 8 (Dr. 'Many' children, on almost daily occurrence, with nonfatal gunshot wounds to head
Attribution: none Child-solder age: Unclear Characterization as single-shot: No Snipe characterized: No (Not in nature of delivery or precision)
So of our 8 claims- claims that are clearly selected for shock impact to print and thus are probably at the bounds of what even the NYT would consider worth reporting- we have...
8 Claims
Attributions to Israeli Shooters: 0
Characterization of Non-Child Soldier Age Victims: 3
Characterization of single shots: 5
Sniper characterized: 1
So when you say this...
So, why are Israeli soldiers one-shotting children in Gaza?
This is assuming a conclusion not supported by the data.
No evidence, or even claim, is made that it was Israelis in particular shooting the children. That may be the insinuation, but nothing in the article elevates the Israelis over other factors or actors, including...
-Revenge killings / crimes of passion targeting a family
-Armed criminals attempting to silence witnesses of a crime
-Suicide by traumatized children (see lower article on psychological trauma)
-Resource-shortage/'mercy' murders by caretakers unable to afford the children (see lower article on inability to care for children)
-Cross fire from other combatants
-Deliberate fire by other combatants*
*This is the due reminder that Hamas deliberately works to get Palestinians killed, uses human shields for military positions, and done the shooting themselves on occasion... and that the current conflict wouldn't be occuring if they weren't willingness to plan and execute theatrical murder of children for propaganda effects
And this is if the claims made are to be taken at face value, and not reflective of other data compromise issues such as selection bias (if Dr. Farah is the sort of doctor who can help children shot in the head, he's not going to be given the children who were shot less severely who other, less specialized, people can care for) or other issues of unintentional or intentional bias, or examples of outright deception.
(This is the due reminder that any Gazan medical center data that relies on the Gazan ministries is using Hamas-approved and provided data. This includes conflating gazan civilian and gazan combatant casualties, and exagerating claimed losses.)
And this doesn't even approach whether incidents which would be Israel were results of laws-of-war-acceptable action, which the article doesn't even try to address from any perspective. Naturally the Hamas-institutional data would not exactly be publicizing how many children who have been shot were shot in the context of being belligerents in the current conflict.
And this doesn't go into data collection issues, such as how the relevant medical authorities were picked, the lack of cross-reference to any sort of objective data sets (or even unobjective data sets), and the rather blunt use of emotive language and framings for what ends with a rather direct policy advocacy stance which itself would imply the selection of data was driven to justify the policy rather than the other way around.
So, as far as brilliant research goes, nah. Not really.
Sure. Let's start with 'pattern recognition.'
This is not the first time China has conducted a military exercise simulating a blockade of Taiwan. In all exercises simulating a blockade to date, Taiwan has not, in fact, been blockaded. Therefore, there is no causal relationship justifying a claim that a Chinese military exercise simulating a blockade of Taiwan is evidence of imminent blockade of Taiwan, as there must be other distinguishing features for the former to lead to the later. This takes even more meaning when there is a separate pattern of China conducting threatening exercises, but no attack or blockade, in protest to some Taiwan official statement or another. Again, distinguishing factors needs to be observed to justify claims of deviating from historical patterns of behavior.
We could go further with the advanced concept of backwards reasoning. If China were making a deliberate decision to initiated a military blockade of Taiwan, then what would we expect to see China do in the context of a deliberate leadup to war that would not be seen in the historical pattern of exercises-that-were-not-starts-of-war. This might include, for example, a pre-event propaganda campaign providing initial narrative buildup or international legitimization for the immeninent actions, particularly propaganda emphasizing the historical nature of rectifying the century of humiliation. It might include the mobilization of the Chinese navy, which is to say the social media reflections of the recall of shore leaves, the noticeable trends of all the Chinese naval groups readjusting their movements to start adopting both reinforcement of a blockade and preparing to intercept any efforts by regional naval actors to block it. It might include things like minimizing sanction exposure risk by a sharp withdrawal of PRC state-controlled economic funds from western financial institutions, demands made of the Taiwanese, and threats against external intrusion.
We would expect, in other words, to see actual effort correspond to the sort of actions that would be taken to launch a blockade, and not just the adjacent fleet sailing around for a day not actually stopping anyone going to Taiwan.
We can go further if you'd like, but it'd be punching more than a little down. As an alternative, I propose we let you memory hole this oops of a catastrophizing and then slightly more embarrassing attempt to reserve the right that you told me so.
Dean
7d ago
Musk claims he wants to just set a booster back on the launch mount after a catch (as they just practiced late yesterday) and stack the next ship on to launch again an hour later (as they probably won't practice for years). Sounds crazy to me, but I though catching the giant rocket in more-giant robot arms was crazier, so what the hell do I know?
I suspect that's one fight he'll lose on regulatory grounds. Space travel isn't quite regulated like the FAA, but aircraft maintenance requirements are no joke and no small part of why airline scandals become such a big thing, even as those same maintenance standards are why airline safety is so exception. The federal government is willing to accept some form of risk by SpaceX in the name of R&D, but if/when flights fail because of the complications of one flight compromise the next, maintenance delays can be enforced.
This is especially true if the inevitable accidents knock out a tower. One of the logistical issues of the catch-strategy is that it makes the towers a far more 'brittle' chokepoint. Previously, towers needed to just be able to set up the rocket in the first place, but the rocket could land more or less wherever that was a suitable pad. Now the rockets can only land in one place, and if a tower is damaged then no flights what-so-ever can land or launch from there until it is re-established. Which is to say, a single landing accident could take out a launch site for days / weeks / even months.
What that means for Musk is that the boosters will likely need to be re-inspected / re-certified. That would likely entail lowering them to the ground, driving them over to a maintenance facility, and otherwise doing more than an hour of work. The exception would be if a government was willing to provide a waiver for this requirement, say in time of conflict... but in such a conflict, an adversary who could justify a need to launch more payloads into orbit would also have the capacity to target the towers by various means, meaning, again, safety and reliability issues. And this, in turn, would bring the comparison of how governments regulate military aviation, which in some respects is more intense than civil regulations (because the government actually owns the expensive thing).
Now, don't get me wrong- it's all still very impressive- but this is one of those areas where the salesmanship and technical capacity starts to run against other actor interests.
Dean
7d ago
And yet, Taiwan remains unblockaded, the nukes are not flying, and the satellites are not falling. Instead, in the last 48 hours, the Chinese ships returned, nuclear sabers were not rattled, and one of the most impressive technical feats of a decade has foreshadowed an even greater resilience of the space economy.
Yesterday was not the start of a war. There was no particular reason to believe that yesterday was the start of a war. That the many various reasons why not were beyond to are what demonstrated a lack of basis for your judgement and justification for fears, much as your lack of perception in 2017 led you to be 'nervous' and believe yourself 'at risk' during a propaganda cycle. The world does not function as you think it does, and the way you think it does is a result of fear mongering you decided to try and spread to others.
You are not charged with insanity. You are charged with a lack of sound judgement.
Dean
7d ago
Looks like you still haven't found a declassification process the President needs to go through that Trump failed to go through. Feel free to come back when you do.
Dean
7d ago
Looks like you still haven't found a declassification process the President needs to go through that Trump failed to go through. Feel free to come back when you do.
Dean
8d ago
What's your take on the likelihood of a "soft blockade"/quarantine/enhanced customs inspections?
In the current week / imminent days, as the OP fantasized? Below negligible, particularly without a corresponding buildup of forces or chinese domestic narrative campaign.
If the OP wanted to say this was a drill normalizing conditions for an attempt to establish a blockade, sure. And whatever- that's not actually a blockade. But that wasn't the position.
How would Taiwan and allies respond?
In current week / month / year, October 2024?
The Biden Administration publicly identifies the effort, denounces, and announces an intent to break the blockade while moving multiple carrier groups towards the region. Harris issues as-fiery-as-she-can speaches on the need for American strength and unity against the Chinese threat, while being conspicuously present in official photos of Biden and the National Security aparratus taking response, even as a new rush of adds characterize the Democrats as the party of defense and appeal to the neocons once more while social media sites like Reddit begin to mock Trump for bonespurs and Vietnam avoidance. The Republicans, in turn, offer full throttled support (for the Troops, not Biden), seek to out-hawk Biden even as Republican propaganda elevates Biden's China-corruption links and attacks Waltz on his links and otherwise claims this as the vindication of every objection to Ukrainian aid (regardless of how little of it would be relevant or useful in the current week/month/year).
Taiwan and allies quietly watch in horror and try to silently wave down the Americans for overreacting to yet another Chinese drill where the US overreaction might increase Chinese counter-reaction in ways that the Chinese will continue doing even after American attention drifts away a few news cycles later.
Dean
8d ago
Not only am I ignoring your warning, I am recommending for your own health- mental as well as possibly physical- to get some rest.
You are doom posting. Go sleep it off.
You continue to not identify a process Trump failed to follow to prove he actually did it, which by definition would be a required process in this context, as well as continue to not identify where this validation requirement comes from.
"He doesn't have to follow a process to do something, he just has do actually do [a process that demonstrates he did the thing]" is not the informed defense you think it is, particularly when this is the basis of the accusation against the prosecution flipping the burden of proof as a prerequisit of assuming guilt and requiring Trump to prove otherwise.
Which you have not identified a binding requirement requiring the President to do.
Feel free to come back when you identify a required process.
Dean
8d ago
To be clear, I'm more worried now than I've been since at least 2017 (the Trump-Kim yelling match) - and I was in Melbourne then, and thus personally at risk. I was mildly nervous back in April of this year, but you'll note that I didn't make a post like this then.
Way to undercut your credibility, lol.
2017 was practically an archetypical example of American ethnocentricism of thinking their internal political squabbles reflect how other key actors view the world. No one who remotely paid attention to Korea for any amount of time was particularly surprised by rhetoric that wasn't matched by mobilization by North or South, and no one whose seen a 'don't hold me back, bro' moment of bar-posturing would have missed the caveats on both sides were using throughout. Variants of 'If you attack me, then you will regret it' were blatantly (and politically) being misrepresented and misreported by actors whose motive was to inspire panic and fear in the audience.
Meanwhile, in Korea, coverage of the 'crisis' had far more of a 'wow, the American media are talking' tone than one of concern... if they covered it at all. Certainly the South Koreans weren't mobilizing their society for a conflict.
How and why the Americans would wage a war against North Korea without South Korean support or ascent was, of course, rarely if ever raised and never addressed beyond possible dismissals of 'the South Koreans don't have a choice.'
Remember that your life is worth a lot more than a few hundred bucks; it is rational to take action even if you rate the chance of nuclear war as "small but significant". Remember also that it is good to survive; while QoL might suck in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war, we'll recover, and if you have any ideological goals you will in almost all cases help them more if you're still around to advocate and act for them. That said, good luck to us all and I hope I'm worried over nothing.
Well, you're certainly demonstrating the classic failure mode of utilitarians, who struggle to conceptualize or deal with conceptual infinities and start doing irrational things on the basis of existential dread spirals.
No, the Chinese are not about to try and cold-rush Taiwan, or try to start a war via blockade that would be publicly jumped on by both US political parties for electioneering purposes. No, there isn't any particular grounds for panic-buying resiliency goods beyond the universal basis to have a stockpile for emergencies. No, the nukes (and the satellites) are not about to fall.
You are doomposting. Go back to bed and sleep it off.
You are seeing what the early part of an era of exploration or expansion looks like.
Commercially-driven exploration starts by trying to focus on the most profitable quickest returns, which are often closer, to further expand the new technology. When the Europeans began to build ships capable of traversing the world, they did not, in fact, immediately use most of those ships to traverse the world- they used them primarily for more profitable ventures closer to home. However, it was the capacity to go further which enabled the outlier minority to do the things that got famous.
Technological era innovations have similar examples. Yes, the telegraph enabled long-distance communications... but most investments were within or between cities already relatively close together. Yes, electrification has massive implications for making rural regions more efficient and profitable, but most electrical wiring started and focused in the cities. Yes, the American automobile revolutionized how people viewed distance and the ability to move across state and even continental scale, but things like the Interstate System trailed far behind. It didn't make the technologies less revolutionary.
What is currently going on with SpaceX and the reusable rocket technologies is that it is still scaling to meet the latent demand for low-earth investments that were previously priced out of application. There is still considerable profit, and market share, to be made, and currently SpaceX is about the only one making it. SpaceX is in turn using those profits to both expand capacity and develop new capabilities. The Falcon series is what prototyped the technologies for the Falcon Heavy, and the Falcon Heavy for the Starship.
Starship, in turn, is the new emerging and still experimental technology combination that- if it can be made to work, which yesterday was a significant step towards- will unlock a significant amount of lift capacity potential for beyond LEO activities.
The lift capacity gate is what limits what you probably think of as exploration, because the ability to lift fuel and resources is what increases range into deeper space. If you want deep-space transit, you want to lift material into space, where it is cheaper / easier / more technologically feasible to package it up and start pushing from a space gathering point than to lift all pieces at once from earth. That means cost-efficiency of lifting stuff, not just the capacity of stuff you can lift.
For example, the Saturn 5 rocket of the Apollo program to the moon had a LEO lift capacity of 118 tons, and about $5.5k per kg. The Starship is expected to have a LEO lift capacity of 100-150 tons, with a forecasted cost of around $1.6k per kg... possibly falling to $0.15kg ($150/kg) over time due to to reusability reduce the cost per flight as you don't have to keep re-making the whole thing.
Not only is Starship offering capacity on par or better than some of the heaviest lift rockets in history, but with a cost profile that is -70%of the Saturn 5 on the near-term side to -98% less expensive per launch over time, while offering more launches because the components can be reused rather than having to be built per launch. If you built 5 saturn-5 rockets a year, you could only have 5 saturn-5 missions a year to move stuff into space. If you build 5 Spaceships a year, you can have 5 + [Sum of all still-mission capable rockets from all previous years] missions a year, which is to say a heck of a lot more missions over time.
More missions means more opportunities to get stuff into space, including eventually deeper range mission preparation material.
To bring this all back to the age of exploration comparison- imagine if Caravels had the characteristic of having to be sunk the first time they landed on any foreign shore. Now imagine what exploration looks like if Caravels can land, restock, and go out again. This is the technological implication difference of SpaceX's reusable rocket technology.
In turn, the first caravels were in the 13th century. Magellan wouldn't circumnavigate the world until the 1500s. The carracks that Columbus used to reach the Americas were developed more than a century prior.
So when you ask-
Do you think we'll get there any time soon?
Then given that we are literally on the 5th test flight ever of a new degree of capability, historically speaking 50 years from now would be very soon, let alone 15 or 5.
Trump has always had a bit of a plebian sense of wealth. The expression a decade ago was that Trump lived like how poor people thought the rich lived, as opposed to how the rich actually lived. In that sense, he's the 'what the Everyman would see himself doing if he had Trump's wealth.'
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