Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being an 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 Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
They previously had to explain it to DEI bureaucrats who thought "we will abide by such-and-such buzzwords" was a good justification.
To which the question you dodged repeats:
If they never actually explained in the first place to a non-DEI bureaucrat, why should they continue to get more money before having to justify it to a non-DEI bureaucrat?
The standards have changed. There is no reason to think the grifters are able to fool people who do not think "but [woke value]!!!" is a conversation-stopper; they've never had to.
And they won't have to if the formerly-DEI bureaucrats are the arbitrators of such-and-such buzzwords being sufficient evidence of goodness or not, which is what you have if you insist that they review all the programs and decide which one to cut rather than let their senior executive branch leadership circumvent them and do things like cut.
Note, after all, the reason that they have to be circumvented is because they can't be replaced- the existing employment laws do not allow for just direct firing and replacement hiring of DEI-managers with non-DEI managers. Nor does the budgeting authorities allow for simply hiring a new cadre of reviewers on top of the existing ones- the budgeting authorities are only for so much money and often for so many billets, and the lawful hiring processes are controlled by the category of bureaucrats being circumvented as part of the problem.
Which is among the reasons to think grifters will still be able to 'fool' people- the bureaucracy does not reflect the viewpoint of the executive, and does not change as the executive does, and much of the bureaucracy was never fooled as much as on-board with the measure and sympathetic to keeping it for the same reason they were sympathetic to approving and keeping it before. DEI didn't force approvals of things like operas abroad- it was compatible with the ideological interests of the people who did the approving, and the people who would do the reviewing.
The DEI-shaped bureaucrats who thought 'we will abide by such and such buzzwords' are still DEI-shaped people who think DEI is Good Things that Good People do. The resistance of such bureaucrats to executive branch pressure to change was demonstrated both in the past with The Resistance 1.0, and has been explicitly called for with attempts to build a Resistance 2.0 coalition which opposes the goals, not just the means, of the DOGE.
The (many) examples of internal resistance to first Trump administration are what give plenty of reason to doubt that the current middle-management which previously regularly frustrated efforts will be sincerely compliant this time.
You're justifying in terms of capital-centric paradigm that doesn't work at a continental scale.
One of the historical failing points of empires / large states is that the capital politics is going to prioritize the benefits of the capital region to the disadvantage of the peripheries. The periphery regions, in turn, begin to build up grievances and divisions against the capital regions, which- over time and exasperation- can lead to resistance / revolts / insurgencies that threaten the capital's ability to control the peripheries, particularly when the costs of trying to maintain control threaten the ability of the capital elites to maintain control. This elite capacity is further complicated by the willingness of elites to trade off elements of the periphery for personal advantage in control over the rest, or the ability of external states to support the periphery against the core.
Historically, there are three main outcomes of this: (a) the peripheries are lost until the capital reaches an equilibrium of being able to maintain control as a small-to-medium state, (b) an extensively resourced suppression state apparatus is built and maintained to suppress separation for as long as the means to do so are available, or (c), the core region's institutional powers are deliberately limited so as force greater consideration of the periphery territory's interests.
The US, as a federalist system, commits to (c), which in turn allows the periphery power centers to become miniature capital centers and dominate their peripheries... but only to the point within the system. The California elite can dominate California, but it can't dominate the power center of Nevada. The California elite can't in turn build their own suppression state, and so have to balance how they deal with people with the ability of people to migrate out. If California were to leave the protections of the federalist system, the capital-periphery dynamic of the state would change- not least because they could be supported by the now-external federalist state to break apart the California core zones against the periphery zones (see the prospect of California spin-off states).
The inverse of that federalist system, however, is the systemic protection of the voting power of the periphery states against capital-group interests. This means states who power is in a sense decided by land area (namely- they control an area of land sufficient to be a state, which has equal senate representation).
Rather than being a ridiculous way to allocate power in a system, this is the way to have a federal system in the first place once you hit a point where core centers of power can no longer maintain control of the peripheries. The alternatives are for a still-born system where periphery states wouldn't join in the first place, or a suppression-state system which the periphery states wouldn't willingly join in the first place and would have much higher tendencies to fight back against.
Systems where a populated core dominates the periphery aren't formed of willing members, they are conquered or converted from more restricted beginnings. There are reasons that even the EU has gotten less stable as it has tried to concentrate powers that functionally consolidate the influence of the core regions (Germany and France) at the expense of periphery regions.
Because the programs will have to actually explain how they're supposed to be worth the money spent,
This implies that the programs did not have to actually explain before they were given money to spend.
If they never actually explained in the first place, why should they continue to get more money before having to justify it?
In the alternative...
and useless ones trying to obfuscate their uselessness can simply have their request for an extension denied.
If they were useless from the start but also able to obfuscate to both get initially funded and re-funded since, why should a proposal to rely on detecting known liars after their repeated success?
Especially if the system's managers are- by the fact that they were persuaded by the corrupt lies in the first place- either unable or unwilling to screen fraud programs from legitimate programs from the start?
There are certainly reasons not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but your proposals are structured to keep the grifters in, not least because the grifters were clearly not being successfully caught by the people who were supposed to be checking for grifters.
Or maybe it's a bit simpler. If someone can present a DoD planning document stating "if you issue these orders, here are the negative consequences", and Biden signed it saying "do it anyway", that would be a pretty open-and-shut case of this being Biden's fault. Only, I'm pretty sure that document doesn't exist.
If others are less familiar with bureaucratic speak, 'we are in a stalemate with current support' is non-code for 'and things will get worse if we no longer support.'
I am not inclined to hold Biden accountable for the outcome because he is neither a tactician nor a strategist nor a bureaucracy expert.
As politely as I can, two of those three qualities are rather fundamental job elements for the job the man in question took quite a lot of effort to secure.
As the President of the United States, Biden was literally the signature authority of American strategy. In fact, the Biden administration made a very deliberate point of releasing their own interim strategy within two months of entering office, just so Biden would have his own strategy in place before the normal strategy process took its usual timeline to produce.
As the Chief Executive, Biden was, in fact, the master of the bureaucracy. Moreover, before entering office Biden had been a career senator with decades of experience in the development of laws and oversight of the executive branch, including the quite significant Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. He was arguably the most President with the most experience of the Federal government politics of the last 25 years, not least because he had literally spent the better part of a decade helping a previous president manage a bureaucracy.
It's fine if you don't blame Joe Biden for being a tactician, unless you mean that in both the military and political tactics sense. A military tactician is not part of being the President, and it wasn't the sort of mistake that made the pullout a mess. Those were very much strategy and inter-governmental bureaucratic issues, which were precisely the job of the Commander in Chief and Chief of Executive- Joe Biden- to perform. (And Trump, of course- but, again, Trump's setup would have been a significantly different mess for Biden than what ended up happening.)
I can readily believe he imposed restraints: get out of Afghanistan by one year from now, in time for the 9/11 anniversary. A year is a pretty damn long runway for an event that should have been pre-planned in detail twenty years ago. If there was not a plan on a shelf for this eventuality, that seems like a failure on the part of the planners.
Okay, but who do you think plans for the evacuation of the embassy? Or the other countries? Or for the immigration processing for thousands of foreign nationals?
You repeat in your post that you don't trust the American Department of Defense. Sure- I'm not trying to argue that you should. But when you raise issues like these, it makes it sound like you believe that the American military is the part of the US government responsible for planning and handling a lot of things that the military isn't actually responsible for in any non-military-dictatorship that I can think of.
That is why- for rhetorical effect, not as a challenge against you or for you to actually answer- I am going to repeatedly ask what you think the DoD should have done about various issues you and I agree on that were bad.
Likewise with the paperwork. Why is all this paperwork being kept in an office in Afghanistan?
Because the State Department chose so.
What do you think the military should have done to overrule the State Department?
We have telecommunications.
Not when your executive and legislative branches for decades decline to modernize the IT infrastructure of various parts of the US government.
What do you think the military should have done to overrule previous president's and congress's spending priorities?
There were no backups in Washington?
Not in a way that the State Department could retrieve and access in a hurry.
What do you think the military should have done with State Department data systems?
Those backups weren't integrated into the bugout plan?
The State Department's bugout plan was to fly out of a military base that the State Department facilitated the handover of after a delay at Biden's behest.
What do you think the military should have done to overrule the turnover of a military base after they departed as directed to?
There was no way to keep this important data other than in paper files in a cabinet in Kabul?
Certainly there were.
But do you think the military should be checking and auditing how the State Department handles State Department data?
I'll be perfectly open in my feelings on this: I do not believe the military wing of a government should run the diplomacy wing of government. There are a lot of no-good, very-bad, downright-awful tendencies to come from that, and I suspect you'd agree with me on at least some of them.
But a consequence of that is that it means not all planning failures are a failure of military planning. It is not actually the military's job to run the other branches of the government well, even if it becomes the military's job to clean up and mitigate messes that result.
What if an actual hot war kicked off, and we needed to pull our forces out of Afghanistan not in a year, but by the end of this week? There was no plan for that?
Of course not- it wouldn't have been physically possible.
Hence why the withdrawal was the process of several months, and entailed leaving behind much of the equipment, and why the US military strategies of the era emphasized the ability to fight two wars at once.
Hence also why many people felt it was better to bite the bullet and withdraw from Afghanistan sooner than later, so that the military personnel- if not the turned over equipment which would cost more to recover than simply replace- could be reallocated / repurposed / reserved for other conflicts.
Hence the initial timeline timed for an earlier pause in the fighting seasons for the withdrawal.
Which Biden entered office trying to delay.
Dean
Flairless
7mo ago
My compliments for your elaboration, and a sincerely deserved AAQC.
Why would delaying the withdrawal or specifying the anniversary of 9/11 for the pullout date cause the specific failures we saw?
Because in August you can still more or less drive freely in Afghanistan, and in February you can't because the mountain passes are still snowed in.
Due to the elevation, topography, and regional climate, the term 'fighting season' in Afghanistan was literal, not just figurative. Fighters would literally drive / ride / walk out of Afghanistan before the winter snows, because if they didn't before they were liable to be unable to (or risk death if they tried, because no help is coming on those roads or in those passes). Civilization basically shuts down, and while there is no hard dates, the fighting season is typically over in October and doesn't start again until March-April, once the passes free of snow and you can get people in
In turn, this made the summer season an escalating tempo, as more reinforcements / seasonal fighters would enter the country, prepare for major attacks in the country, and so on. Typically the there would be a peak during whatever the last major islamic holiday was of the fighting season- basically islamist theology that virtuous actions are holier then- and then the tempo would fall off as militants began to move out for the winter.
In 2021, when Afghanistan fell in August, the offensives that started building the pressure were basically timing to such religious holiday offensives. Specifically, while Kabul fell on 15 August, in 2021 that was 3 days before the Day of Ashura, a week after the Hijra, Islamic new year, and Eid-al-Adba, was 20 July, less than 4 weeks before.
Put another way- the Taliban took over in the middle of a series of obvious, typically, and routinely foreseen religious holiday offenses at the height of the fighting season. These offensives were going to occur because they'd occurred yearly for the previous decade, almost two. The offensive was as fast as it was because you could literally drive from a village that had just flipped to the next village, with the village leader who flipped, and make the point that if he flipped, maybe you should to, and anyone who was familiar with Afghan tribal / clan based politics could have told you the implications that had- which were forewarned more than once.
In the original Trump-era plan, the plan was for the US forces by 1 May 2021. Since the American troops don't literally board the plane the last day, but typically do so over weeks and months, the actual pullout would have been in the preceeding months. That means March and April on the final combat units, before the fighting season is in full swing, and January February for everyone else, still in the winter lull.
Which is to say, the Americans would have stayed in force for the climax of the last fighting season, had an uncontested winter non-fighting season to withdraw in good order, and have the opening months of the first fighting season (March/April) to make a decision of re-surging if necessary before a major Taliban offensive could get the people and material in-country for a country-wide offensive.
That, in turn, would have given the western leaders who wanted to more time to decide to send in a relief force to secure Kabul, rather than be overtaken by events on the ground, and given the Afghan government a gradual escalation of enemy activity rather than a sudden shock of attacks everywhere. Because the situation would have taken longer to unfold, the nature of the system shock that enabled / incentivized the domino cascade would have differed, in part because, again, you couldn't just drive from Pakistan to Kabul.
Kabul might still have fallen, but it would have taken considerably longer without the political cascade effect, and most notably well after the Americans had mostly withdrawn, without the Taliban able to claim the momentum of an uncontested crescendo.
In the Biden plan, which became a thing because Biden tried to abandon the Trump plan but then wasn't able to secure another full year for withdrawal, the Americans withdrew in the middle of the fighting season. Which, of course, the Taliban knew, and the Afghan government knew, and all the tribals elders knew. This, in turn, set the conditions for the sudden offensive shock that saw the rapidity of the cascade we saw in history, as American forces ceased combat support operations in preparation for the multi-month pullout process.
What this also did was mess with the coalition evacuation plans. Up to the year before, the plans to leave Afghanistan if necessary relied on using Bagram Airfield, the major American military airbase in the capital. As long as the US was in Afghanistan, it was the safest / most defensible / easiest to access route for any entry or exit movement. When it was abandoned- because of the summer pullout schedule- various states and organizations hadn't actually updated their plans on how to leave Kabul. Which left Kabul airport, with the results you saw of the American airborne basically flying in to occupy from the inside while the Taliban controlled the gates, rather than having American and their Afghan partners at the guard points.
Further, the nature of the speed- and thus shock- is what led to the American embassy implicitly burning all its Afghan personnel records in the 'burn it all / don't let anything get captured' continency that most warzone embassies have. Except... in part because the embassy hadn't actually had to follow through on the evacuation according to the earlier timetable, the US Embassy in Kabul was the only location with the various documents such as the pre-approved visas for Afghan partners who were intended to be pulled out last moment. Which were supposed to be what cleared Afghan friends and partners to get on the planes to get out.
So when those went into the burn pit, you had literally nothing distinguish -person who helped US soldiers for decade at great risk to themselves- from -person who sees opportunity to get into US / flee the Taliban-. Which is how you got the stories of afghans calling American soldiers they worked with years ago, who called actively serving soldiers at the airport, to guide people to sneak in side doors, using nothing but 'I know a guy who knows a guy' levels of trust and coordination.
Because the partner document packets were burned in a panic that wasn't necessary.
Because the Embassy thought it was going to be overrun in an offensive that wouldn't have been possible 6 months earlier or later.
Because the Embassy thought it had several more months to get around to dispersing the documents because Biden pushed the pullout date back to the end of the fighting season.
Because anything but Trump was the order of 2021, and after his election in 2020 Biden was signaling he was going to redo the pullout (but was 'convinced' not to by his opposite negotiators).
Because Biden wanted a big ceremonial 9-11 anniversary rather than an unceremonious pullout that would have been a minor political critique in his first year.
I'm not a Biden fan, but I do praise him for actually getting us out of Afghanistan.
I, too, approve of actually getting out of Afghanistan. I don't think that was a mistake. I even think biting the bullet and accepting the humiliation was the correct move. History would be significantly different had Biden doubled-down, and had a major military force in Afghanistan when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Likewise, my prior is that the US military should be able to pull out of Afghanistan in good order on a specified date more or less regardless of what the Taliban or the locals do. To date, I've seen no reason not to assume malicious compliance on the part of the military brass, something they very clearly are willing to do given the bragging about straightforward insubordination and deceit under Trump.
What reason would you need to see to convince you that the military was simply compliant as opposed to maliciously compliant, particularly for an order to withdraw at a date that practically guaranteed bad order in pursuit of domestic political advantage?
The American military was not responsible for the decisions to re-adjust the military pullout to the middle of the fighting season. They were not responsible for the decision to handover Bagram, the main military airbase to be used for emergency evacuation plans, or the timeline to do so. They were not responsible for the decision by the Embassy to destroy partner national documentation, or to only have the copies literally in Kabul. They weren't even responsible for sending the airborne to into Kabul airport at the end, where the world then got to see Afghans falling to their deaths off of military aircraft.
And I do not even believe those were all bad decisions to make. Once the offensive was clearly racing forward, embassy purge was not an unreasonable choice to make. Having already given up a military airbase, a civilian airport is not the worse substitute. The Afghan pullout, as much as it is remembered as a shameful defeat, was an unprecedented logistical effort that, coincidentally, got a lot of people- including non-Afghan partners- safely out of Afghanistan when the Taliban took over. Many of the ISAF partners were in more or less the same boat of having no backup plan to Bagram, because they, too, thought ISAF would have time to muster a relief force.
But the Biden administration, including Biden himself, made a significant number of political decisions with easily predictable- and predicted- consequences that led to those reasonable-in-context decisions. Consequences that- had the administration struck to the start-of-the-fighting season pullout- would have substantially reduced the various costs, reputational and otherwise, to the americans in general and to the Biden administration in particular (which certainly did itself no favors by claiming no one warned them and claiming that a 9-11 anniversary just happened to be necessary for a well-ordered pullout).
Dean
Flairless
7mo ago
If the United States tells the people of the Global South "We have the ability to save you from a painful death, but we are choosing not to For The Greater Good", the survivors will be fertile soil for Usama bin-Ladin 2.0 or some other radical cultists.
You are making the classic mistake of presenting the status quo as the undesirable alternative to the status quo.
Notably, bin Ladin did come from the Global South, which was/is already fertile soil for various radical cultists, however you decide to define the term. Moreover, this occurs despite the status quo already being the funding line, as opposed to the supposed consequence of not funding.
The mistake in the framing is presenting the lack of preferred policy as a difference in nature, as opposed to a difference of degrees. This creates a discrediting effect- 'why should we keep paying for the thing we'll get regardless of if we pay'- rather than a cautionary effect 'things will be worse if we don't pay.'
The issue/weakness of the later, of course, is that an argument of efficacy has to prove it's efficacy, and that has the burden of being coupled with what's being paid for in practice and not just in objective. Like, 'USAID is spending money on life-saving things... but does so by also paying for gay operas.'
You can like opera. You can approve of gay operas even. But a medical cause that is spending on gay operas is not a compelling medical cause, even if people would be- in theory- willing to support medical causes.
(This is a classic weakness of government agencies that lose their sense of purpose / mission and get scope-creeped into fields outside their focus. The consequence of losing public legitimacy and political support isn't losing the scope-creept stuff, but also the efforts that were the nominal original focus.)
Dean
Flairless
7mo ago
No, Biden absolutely owned that one, on multiple levels. From the decision to delay the American withdrawal in an attempt to renegotiate with the Taliban to the choice to putting the formal American withdrawal to the anniversary of 9-11, which was the peak of the Afghan fighting season, was an American political decision to try and wrap a bow on it for the american electorate.
Dean
Flairless
7mo ago
Wow, I don't think you've done that to anyone since at least the forum migration.
Dean
Flairless
7mo ago
Care to expound on the implications for the less financially literate?
(I'm fairly sure I know what you mean, but it's also not something that was covered much in the coverage of the Twitter takeover deal, since much of the media coverage at the time was jeering Musk.)
Dean
Flairless
7mo ago
It's profitable and, with the advertiser boycott broken,
Was it?
This is a sincere question- I wasn't tracking any particular industry movement, and last I'd heard was of a lawsuit against boycotters, rather than a breakdown and return of advertisers.
Dean
Flairless
7mo ago
How many nations born from ideological wars to force ideology onto them have actually stood the test of time?
During the monarchist period, claimant or imposition wars were far more about having a conciliatory neighbor / concessions / etc. than for the ideological sake of the neighbor. Religious wars might have spread the faith, but when they did they were more often wars of conquest rather than ideological imposition. Even post WW2 most conflicts with ideological points were civil wars or post-colonial insurgencies rather than 'ideology from the outside.'
Dean
Flairless
7mo ago
Truly the rule of 'if you can't guess how they are lying, you aren't trying hard enough' reigns again.
Dean
Flairless
7mo ago
It is/was typical for the Obama-era style of executive governance to set up things in ways that lacked the congressional buy-in to protect them from changes down the line. Very much a mix of 'we will continue to win, so it won't matter,' mixed with 'I dare anyone to pay the political costs of trying to change it afterwards.'
In theory, it was supposed to be a ratchet. In practice, they did not continue to win, and a consequence of using a party-state to undermine a political opponent from within the executive bureaucracy is that they have much higher baked-in political costs regardless.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Sure. He could have done better. He could also have admitted error, in the 'I acknowledge what I did was wrong' rather than the 'I wouldn't do it again because of the reaction I received' manner that he did. It certainly didn't help that he approached his hoax in a tenor of triumphalist jeering at his target for being gullible, rather than Sokal's matter-of-fact 'this is what I did, this is how I did it, and these are the stages where a reasonable reviewer should and could have asked questions.'
That TWG is a partisan is the least of the issues that led to the response. There are plenty of partisans in the Motte community, for various factions and interests. The issue was that he expected to be applauded for it, and then blamed anyone but himself for the response with poorly disguised contempt. There was a reason his depture-flounce was with a 'I've hated this entire community for so long now' spiel despite having re-entered to post a dunk-piece while claiming solidarity with the community, and that reason was that his claimed solidarity was insincere and had been for some time.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
The crux of Sokal's hoax was that it was inherently obvious to anyone who had a passing knowledge of the subject matter, and that Sokal made no attempt to hide it but that no one bothered to ask about it. Tracing made claims that were very much withing the spectrum of sillyness that has occurred, and that when the target bothered to asked about it, Tracing took actions to further hide it.
In short- the Sokal hoax rests on the point that no one bothered to try and check claims that were inconsistent with the subject matter because they were politically flattering. Tracing's hoax rested on the point that he fabricated evidence that was compatible with examples of the subject matter, and then blamed the person who tried to check.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
And for AAA games, I'd generally agree. Unless the pre-order comes with something nice that I'd enjoy (and I'd consider 'free' cosmetic as valid as anything else), I'd usually not. If the pre-order bonus comes with, say, a bundled season pass for the first X DLC, then I'd consider it, based on my expectation of the developer in question. Some studios, sure- I expect to play that DLC. In others, not.
I'll give an example of the one of the last times I did it, which was... two years ago now?
Anyway- Book of Hours, which is a same-setting spinoff/sequel of Cultist Simulator. Cultist Simulator is a very esoteric game- it's very hard to even describe the game without spoiling some of the (occult) magic of the experience. But it was weird, I liked it as a great experience in world building from a very 'I don't know what's going on and have to piece it together' sense, and I was willing to engage the sequel.
I pre-bought the sequel at full price (~$25) solely because doing so might get any future DLC for free. It wasn't a guarantee there would be DLC, just that if you pre-bought the game, you'd get the free upgrade and get any future DLC for free.
Turns out, that did happen. There's a $15 dollar expansion. I also haven't played it (yet- maybe later this year). I also don't regret it, because I greatly enjoyed the quirky little game of being a librarian who opens rooms in a ruined occult library and [insert gibberish of explaining how the sun died and may yet be reborn because the new king of england is-].
On the flip side- once upon a time, I was big Bioware fan. I bought the third games of the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series because they were big culminating events. I didn't even mind that they were controversial- I just wanted to know how they ended, and learn it from myself, without the vibes from other people. No regrets. But of the recent Dragon Age 4 Veilguard, I had no hopes and was not disappointed that my non-preorder saved me several dozen gameplay hours. By the sounds of it, Bioware is an all-but-dead studio, and I'll just give it a little toast and move on while waiting for another Indie strategy game later.
(Menace, by the creators of Battle Brothers. An almost-indie studio that has put some solid strategy games that are rough and unreasonably fair. I probably will pre-buy, because a sci-fi positioning strategy game is my jam and I want to encourage.)
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Indie-dev promotion in general, or a Paradox yearly update pass for a committed series.
I buy relatively few games anymore, and when I do more of them are Indie than not. Given the value of assured dollars today to such small companies, I shrug and view it as both a bit of charity and a bit of gambling. If I find I don't enjoy a game, it's a shame but I probably got more out of it than I would out of dinner and a movie out. But even if it fall through, I usually pre-bought because I enjoyed the premise, and even if that specific game didn't keep me hooked, I want the indie sphere in general to exist and keep considering such things. It's a bit like trying food at a small non-chain resteraunt: it may not end up good, but I want there to be a society that promotes such things, and I live in a society and all that.
Otherwise, my main gaming expense is the annual pass for whatever Paradox game I enjoy, with the pre-purchase being for all the DLC of the coming year. Paradox games are often both distinctive enough and long-term enough that I fully expect to play 100+ more hours regardless over the next year (even if 'just' 10 hours a month), and so the actual quality of specific DLC is less important than the general increase in refreshed novelty. In these cases, though, while I could buy each DLC separately upon review... the annual pass is a functional discount compared to buying each individually. Eventually a bigger sale discount would occur, but I'd generally need to wait a year for one year's DLC to go on sale the next year after the pass. At which point, I'd really rather not wait a year to play the mechanics that are being talked about in the hobby space.
The location of a center does not care if you think it's unreasonable or ridiculous. A center is a relative state, and it is relative to elements adjacent to it as a whole, not what someone wishes those elements would be. Trying to claim an 'authentic' center is just a No True Centrist fallacy in the making.
TracingWoodgrains is not a centrist because they disagree with both elements the Left and the Right. They are a fake centrist because they are not in the center. That they quibble with the left on matters of tactics is irrelevant.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Personally I'll always remember the Chris Matthews. He was the 'I felt this thrill going up my leg as he spoke.", who also cried over an Obama speech and compared him to Jesus.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Even for an amoral Nietzschean overman such as myself,
...has anyone ever accused you of such? If so, I can assure you they are wrong.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
And where is this wall?
You've listed a DOGE member who was too politically toxic to keep in DOGE. Okay. Is he the only member of DOGE? Critical to DOGE? Impossible to replace? Did the great DOGE experiment hinge on this one person?
You have also raised a court case. Was... that not part of the expectation? Was DOGE only supposed to be able to work if literally no one tried to bring a lawsuit against it?
Particularly when military-industrial investments and the quality of the opposition's decision making is factored in.
If you show a map of a large part of the world and small part of the world, but the small part of the world invests more in the most relevant military technologies that can be brought to bear than the large part, you should expect to see to see the smaller part of the world out-perform and out-compete the larger parts, and to continue to do so until industrial outmatch leads to disparities that can overcome advantageous positions (like, say, being able to launch history's largest naval invasion to overcome the moat that is the English Channel).
It turns out, military-industrial economics don't work like in video games, where you pay money to buy a formation whole-cloth. You actually need to, you know, build the relevant assembly lines beforehand... emphasis on before. And a significant part of the WW2 opening military dynamic was that the western europeans were much later to invest in military expansion.
That, in turn, was driven by the rest of the world's assessments of what a good german leader would do. German headstart mobilization was tolerated / not matched up to a point in no small part because the western europeans and soviets alike thought Germany would have to be very stupid to begin a warmongering campaign against the western empires who economically outsized them on the west, and particularly with the the soviets who outsized them on the east. It would be a particularly bad leader who, even with the early military investments, would try to take one or the other, let alone both.
Which was correct! It was very stupid of the Germans to begin a warmongering campaign. That was an accurate understanding of the situation, because even with its unexpectedly high initial performance advantages the Germans did ultimately fail and fall. The unexpected success in topping- which was unexpected on both ends and hardly a reasonable expectation- did not, in fact, enable Germany to beat the Soviets in turn, even when the Soviets took several non-necessary policy errors like 'purge the Red Army right before a war' and 'ignore strategic warning intelligence.' Even with major unexpected failures on the part of the allies, and gambles that even the Nazis acknowledged were gambles, the Nazis still lost. The pre-war expectations- that the Germans would have to be stupid to try such things- was validated.
It just didn't mean that the hyper-authoritarian Germans wouldn't do stupid stuff that got their own country conquered in the process. Hitler was a romantic-nihilist, and that is not exactly commonly understood even now, let alone back then.
Which, in turn, throws another wrench in the 'liberalism is incompetent, authoritarianism is based' premise. The authoritarian lost, and lost badly, and lost for reasons broadly known beforehand. The western liberal incompetence along the way, in turn, were generally either 'this emerging aspect of technology was not recognized across the world'- in other words, not a general competence failure- or failures to believe the authoritarian would be that stupid by gambling on high risks... which, of course, is treated as a validation of the authoritarian.
The former is hindsight bias of believing what is known afterwards should have been obvious at the time, and the later is just the military variant of 'jokes on you, I was just pretending to be retarded.'
No, not particularly?
You come off as a pretty standard Blue-Tribe American democrat with left-leaning sensibilities. You reliable tend towards the left framing paradigms, complete with regularly adopting left-fronted framings of what goes on, and this has been true of Trump in particular for who knows how long. Your dislike of the progressive-left comes more from irritation at friendly fire in your direction than a distrust of statist / establishment-dominated politics in general- it's just a who, whom, rather than anti-left.
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