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
As for cross country comparisons, I didn't say anything about those at all. Obviously you should compare means with means and medians with medians. My point is that 18 miles is not very far, and that stands regardless of what happens in other countries.
The transience of Americans being transients isn't based on how much Americans move in and of themselves- it is how much Americans move compared to non-Americans.
What happens in other countries is what matters when characterizing a relative characteristic of a country-level population (Americans), just as minority difference in the face of overwhelming similarity are key distinguishing factors in other forms of overall-population comparison.
This can go from comparisons of GDP per capita (we don't go with a median income), to comparisons of intelligence (the interesting difference in a 100 vs 120 IQ is not the 100 they have in common), to even species (the DNA overlap between humans and monkeys sharing 99.8% DNA would not imply a difference if you took a more median-concept basis of comparison).
That both Americans and non-Americans have 50% of their populations that live in the same pattern isn't what would indicate whether Americans and non-Americans significantly diverge in ways that drive a population-level characterization.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
It's precisely because the distribution has a long right tail that you want a mean rather than a median if you want to discuss relative differences. The relative differences are themselves located in the nature of the right-end tail.
Mean, median, and mode are all forms of averaging, but imply different things and thus serve different demonstrative / comparative purposes.
Median average is just '50% of the population is below this number, and 50% is above.' It's decent for centering on clusters, but when spectrums are non-symmetrical it's also non-representative. This can be a good thing- it's a way to ignore outliers- but it can also be a bad thing- because it ignores outliers. In the structure the claim- 'American transience is overstated'- the very premise is about the nature of the outliers (if Americans are more transient than others), but the model of averaging chosen specifically omits the role of outliers.
A mode-average is just the most common category in a set. If you broke the average distances of [distance from mother] in 20km blocks (0-20 km,20-40, etc.), a mode-average could tell you which category was the most common, but not actually what a mean or even median average was. After all, there is only 1 20-unit blocks between 0 (co-located with mother) and 20, but there are potentially infinite blocks beyond 20, but as long as more people in the single 0-20 block than in any single 20-unit block beyond it, it wouldn't matter if a hypermajority of people lived beyond 20 units from their mothers, the 'average' would still be 0-20.
Median averaging is where you'd expect to the differences in cultural differences show up in data, because the nature of the right tail is itself going to be that difference. Being a long right tail is itself a demonstration of transience compared to a population which has a short right tail. However, only a median-average would be expected to capture that if/when mode-groups or medians are skewed towards a hyper-concentrated left.
This is especially true when you consider reasons why mother and adult-child might live close other than a lack of transience. The article / you worked with an assumption that it's because people never move away in the first place (non-transient), but a transient-lifestyle could alternatively simply move back after some point (to take care of an elderly parent)... or see the parent move after the child (moving closer to the grand kids). Transience could be very high, but the median being used (heh) wouldn't reflect it. This is something that only a highly transient, but also exceptionally rich, society could do. It would have very different implications from a society where the generations never left the home village at all, even if both fit the same median average.
It's not that median-average doesn't serve very important roles, but for comparing different populations- and thus the validity of macro-trends such as relative transience- you need means.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
I don’t want to treat women as having agency. They have far less than men.
And?
Having less of a thing does not mean you are lacking in the thing, let alone that you are so deficient in the thing that your possession of the thing should be disregarded.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
The use of median rather than mean suggests a selective approach to characterizing transience relative to other parts of the world.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
I remember that at least two, possibly three, of those were specifically articles of the same Guardian writer.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
(see literally all advice column and lit fic for women from the '10s).
I am genuinely curious, since advice columns aren't my thing and I'm fairly sure I wouldn't even be looking for the right ones. Could you please provide what you would consider three archetypical examples from the era?
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Thank you for further demonstrating your habit of misrepresenting the position of others by insisting they make claims they have not made.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Thank you for further demonstrating the points of my previous posts for the audience.
You are arguing that USA is innocent by default of its warmongering because it chooses to not accept the sovereignty of international courts.
Alas, international courts do not have sovereignty.
I will submit that this attempt to reach for a trumping buzzword is demonstrative of why you do not understand the argument being presented, or even the nature of international law.
The reality is that obviously you want to support USA and Israel to commit any and all criminal actions and to oppose any valid criticism of such. While you also desire to promote one sided narrative as you have done towards other countries.
This would be incorrect. My want is to highlight that your position is not based on international law, but the sort of selective and increasingly emotional appeals to international law that see it so often misused as a geopolitical cudgel.
In a few posts you have-
-Mis-identified the legal international bodies taking actions
-Mis-identified the legal actions taken by international bodies
-Mis-identified the conclusions of international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal basis for international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal limits of international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal responses to the actions of international bodies
-Mis-identified the legal implications of certain states not abiding by certain international bodies
-Mis-identified the provided legal basis of non-compliance with international bodies.
Upon correction, rather than even contest disputes by counter-citations, you have transitioned to ad hominem attacks that ignore the arguments provided.
This is not atypical of people with less interest in international law than in making strong claims about international law.
You seem to try to impose your own corrupt understanding on others. It isn't mine or anyone's idea but there is an objective criteria into which warcrimes, genocide, causing civil wars, can be defined and understood.
Except, of course, there are not objective criteria- hence why ICC claims jurisdiction over territory not a part of any ICC member despite the objective limitations of the ICC's jurisdictions under its own laws to its own members and their territory, and why the advocates of the case against Israel in the ICJ submitted alternative and broader definitions of genocide, rather than the older and more established forms.
Which is why textualism is so important for advocates of law. Acknowledging the limits of the law- what you deride as the loophole or innocence- is what protects against corrupt re-interpretations of law by taking items beyond their scope, or ignoring what is there.
By contrast, ignoring the text of what is or is not provided for in international law as convenient (or inconvenient) to advance your desires is the paradigm that leads to systemic abuse of the international law by powers that have more power to shape when and what sort of selective interpretations are advanced more often.
So, I would encourage those who care about the truth of the matter to not treat as even a tiny bit impartial what are essentially extreme 100% partisans for Globalist American Empire and Israel. Because they will always support their actions, no matter the consequences and what moral rule or laws they violate. When you break it down, they are completely against international rule of law but completely in favor of abusing the concept against their targets and for their supported regimes and their actions. And that is all there is to it.
My encouragement for the audience is to consider whether Belisarius is making a legal argument on the nature and nuances of laws, or an emotional appeal more motivated by their geopolitical hostilities.
What you are looking is for excuses. At the end of the day one can win, claim might is right, and argue they have no obligations.
'Just trust me, bro. The contract totally says you have to do what I say it says you have to do. Don't read what it actually says. Also don't refer to any other laws that may cover you and what you're doing. Also, you're guilty because someone accused you. Why do you hate justice, bro? You're so illegal.'
International rule of law is not about finding loopholes to justify your criminal conduct while promoting maximal propaganda about others criminal conduct. Which will be used not only to oppose actual criminal conduct but also to justify aggressive action.
You can either claim the law that is applies, or you can claim that law that does not exist should apply. You do not get to claim both, particularly when doing so is its own avenue of criminal conduct and justifying aggressive action.
This is particularly true when laws have conflicting elements, so that compliance with one part of the law does, in fact, create gaps in applicability in other parts. To do so otherwise is to demand the selective suspension of both letter and principles of law.
A vibes-based approach to international law rather than a legalistic-approach is how you get (and justify) neocon foreign policies of powerful states applying the 'spirit' of international law against others in the name of international law.
The powerful can at times make it so the law and principles don't apply to them. And even try to make it officially. International rule of law requires to accept the authority and restrain ones behavior in line with international courts of justice.
Laws do not apply to those they do not apply to. That is not tautological- that is categorical due to the nature of the thing. This is why principles of jurisdiction, basis of authority, and other such limiting factors. A lack of sufficient coverage/definitions may be an argument for different laws of different scope, but it is not an argument that, actually, the person/place/think is against the laws.
The nature of international law in turn is that it derives from the consent of the sovereign nation. That consent may be pressured/purchased/lobbied/transactional, but absent of that consent a treaty does not apply.
The International Criminal Court is not 'an international court of justice.' It is a treaty-court of members of the treaty, applying to members of the treaty, bound by the scope of its treaty... which itself explicitly limits itself to its members and its members sovereign territory. You, in turn, are the one saying others are violating international law by not complying with it.
This is not an appeal to international law. This is against the very law (treaty) that establishes the ICC. This is antithetical to the principle that the very same international law is based on, which is the sovereignty of the state to freely enter into treaties or not.
Of course, you can't claim to not recognize a court and therefore warcrimes and invasions are compatible with international rule of law. If you choose to be exempt the fact is that this illustrates your hostility to international rule of justice.
You are assuming the conclusion to conflate unlike issues, and poorly. It is not hostility to international law to not submit to a court that by international law does not have jurisdiction over you. Nor has an international court made a verdict on warcrimes if it has not made a verdict. The accusations in the ICJ are an accusation, not a finding, and it is not hostility to principles of law to deny the accuracy or validity of accusations, particularly when there are many grounds to.
The point is to adhere to principles consistently. The USA and Israel definitely do not do that. Nor do its elite, opinion makers and those pushing such talking points adhere principles consistently.
Alternatively, they are being consistent with their principles, you just disagree with those principles, and want different principles to apply, inconsistently, by virtue of disagreeing with the limiting principles that are the bedrock of international law.
Do the numbers suggest a racial reckoning for Democrats? Hardly—they just failed to turn out the non-white vote.
This is a racial reckoning for Democrats. A racial reckoning isn't when the racial block converts in-majority to the other side, but when it can no longer be counted upon as a racial block.
Due to the structure of the Democratic coalition and its distribution across various electoral units, Democratic victory across the national electoral landscape requires not just a preponderance of 'minority' voters, but a consistently high preponderance. Those voters are what make 'favorable' gerrymanders favorable in the first place by having narrow coalition majorities in as many districts as possible. Due to how a First Past the Post system works, if a coalition goes from a hypothetical 52% to 49% output- a swing of just 1% protest voting and 1% switching sides- a coalition goes from winning the electoral contest 100% of the time to 0% of the time.
This is why Harris 'only' getting around 80% of the black vote, and Trump doubling from 8 to 16% of the black vote was such a disaster for the Democrats' nation-wide results. The Democratic coalition in the modern urban-based PMC-centered format is/was dependent on 90%-ish alignment to maintain the degree of reach they did have outside urban centers. Worse than a nearly 10% drop from African American support levels earlier in the century, the crossover of voters is double the impact in a binary first-past-the-pos setup. Every drop below that is a 1% equivalent needed from elsewhere, and every crossover is 2% equivalent needed from elsewhere to make up for not only the lost vote, but the additional vote to the other party.
Moreover, voter consistency of a block hinges on the block never voting otherwise. The biggest predictors of how someone will vote is how their parents and family vote, and the biggest predictor of how that someone votes is how many times they've crossed party lines before. The first cross-over is both the hardest and the most significant, as the voter who has crossed over even one time before is far more likely to do so again, and the voters who are known to cross over are among the biggest influencers to get their families to cross over as well, until you have a critical mass of people who are no longer 'reliable' voters for the party. This is how voting blocks / electoral walls crumble.
The issue for the Democrats, going back to the coalition structure, is that the urban-based PMC-core model was the development of the Obama-era party, and the party coalition expectations were based off of his coalition. Except Obama's black and minority support was the exception, being exceptionally high, not the norm, or the level of expected support to baseline from. And as the normalization of Black voters defecting continues, the future reliability of the ethnic blocks is going to decrease, not increase.
As long as the Democratic party coalition continues to baseline off the expectation of Obama-era levels of support- and dismiss failure to meet it as a failure of turn-out as opposed to a transition in the degree of party loyalty of the ethnic voting blocks- they are going to continue to face the racial reckoning as the racial groups they reckon will overwhelmingly support them, won't.
Nah. Tyranids may be the less unique horror villain, but they are the better one. (IMO, of course.)
Mindless things that kill you just to kill you are boring horror. There's nothing particularly lovecraftian about dumb robots / terminators that don't have a higher reason to kill you- it's just robots carrying out their programming. You may not be able to stop it, but it's not a force of nature premise either- it's just artifical constructs gone wrong, rather than, well, the nature. The C'tan shards were already really just stronger units that could be defeated with artillery or the hero of the hour, and downgrading them to the equivalent of newcron personalities would further downgrade the urgency. That's not cosmic horror, that's just a resourcing issue- there are a finite number of C'tan shards, and when they're gone they're gone.
Mindless things that kill you to eat you are a greater form of existential horror because it taps into primeval prey-dread instincts. They are a force of nature precisely because of how low-level and base the motive is- they don't kill/value you for mind, or your culture, or because god says so- they're just hungry and you're just meat. It's nature at its most brutal, and disempowering in a way that being overpowered by terminators isn't. Additionally, having the elite units be explicitly expendable and replaceable undercuts the triumph of resistance needed for the dread- it doesn't matter if you kill the swarm lord, the fleets in the dark just produce another, and there are always more fleets in the dark to do so.
Then there's the matter of scale.
The Necron are planetary-engineering scale, and outside of some ill-thought 'GW will never use them' lore-only throw-away items, that's as big as they are. The Imperium cracks planets on the regular, so while a Necron Deathstar-equivalent has narrative weight, it is- again- a resourcing issue.
By contrast, the extra-galactic nature of the Tyrannid approach lets them be depicted at galactic-scale. The Tyranid Hive Mind literally encompasses substantial fractions of the galaxy. The Tyranids aren't a resourcing issue because they can be depicted as bringing in more resources than the setting has to resist with. They're not beyond planetary-scale engineering either- that is how they strip planets of biomass and there's the lore-only flesh-planet-thing that was itnroduced later- but for the presentation of horror-via-scale, the Tyranids trump the Necrons simply by starting from a larger scale.
Then there are the appeals to lovecraftian horror.
Oldcrons weren't particularly lovecraft. Or rather, the only particularly lovecraftian thing were the pariahs and flayers- otherwise it was pretty clean and comprehensible. The necrons were murder-bots, made to murder, subject to greedy gods who plotted against them. Which is contrary to lovecraft's major themes of corruptive breeding between pure and alien, incomprehensible motives for which death/madness were a consequence rather than a point, and gods so far beyond us that the terrifying thing is that they don't pay attention to us and our existence will end as a consequence of their own movements for their own purposes. The insignificance of humanity such that C'thulu doesn't even try to murder us is why C'thulu works as a cosmic horror figure.
Tyranids are far more lovecraftian to many of lovecraft's major themes. This includes the interbreeding and corruption of cults, the organic/fleshy/aquatic imagery, and cosmic-scale indifference. The Tyranid Hive Mind does take a distinct difference in that it has a comprehensible motive- hunger- but that motive is itself aligned to the themes of disempowering 'you are not special' of Lovecraft's gods. The Hive Mind is an incomprehensible mind, and we are just in the way of it doing it's own thing for its own reasons.
The tyranids may not be unique threats, but they are both (a) a better force-of-nature antagonist than the Necrons, and (b) were better lovecraftian-horror antagonists than the Oldcrons.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
Ah, but I am not talking the quality of the output created- I am talking about the characteristic of the type of person who tries to improve themself at something they are bad at.
If quality of output / task mattered, then no, I wouldn't select this person to be the person to do that task. And if I needed specifically someone who could improve in a certain way, I would indeed select for that person. But I am not- I have no task for SubstantialFrivolity, and am making no sort of employment decision on the basis of this skill.
I would, however, have a much better opinion of employing someone like SubstantialFrivolity for a task they are already good at, even over an equivalently skilled person who I lack any other insight into.
The capacity for self-improvement at the cost of personal shame, of things one doesn't already find fun or is already proficient at, is in and of itself a quality for a person, and part of that is their willingness to accept the possible humiliation of struggling to do things that other people find easy. Embarrassment at one's limitations are an easy out / excuse / reason for people to avoid self-improvement, whether it's the person who insists they are too fat to start running, too weak to start building mental strength, too dumb to start studying, to friendless to work on their social skills, and so on. This gets particularly obstructive if you justify it on relative grounds- there is always someone better, and always will be someone better, so why try when you will be inevitably embarrassed or humiliated or shamed?
SubstantialFrivolity is the type of who has the requisite mix of humility to face their limitation rather than ignore it, bravery to admit to it even on a forum filled with often high-IQ egotists who would cringe at being characterized as less capable than a child, and persistence to push through with it anyway. He also, if it can be believed, is lucky, and has found a partner with the grace to support him in his efforts rather than one who would belittle or shame or do nothing, which itself implies various other things- being the sort of person someone would want to spend time with, the sort of person their friends would go out of their way to help, possible multi-cultural comfort, and so on.
If I wanted to make a hiring decision, these are a lot of good traits that would immediately make someone more appealing over someone who may have the same or even higher posted skills but not the same commitment to self-improvement. Would that other person be as capable of relearning old skills for new systems when their previous metrics can't apply? Could that person learn a new skill set as the needed flexibility in a team? Would that person have the bravery to admit mistakes / failures / things that made them look bad, or would they let them stew for weeks and months until it becomes a worse problem?
SubstantialFrivolity isn't worthy of respect because he would be a preferred spanish reader for a job. SubstantialFrivolity isn't even worthy of respect because he could be preferrable for a non-spanish reading job. SubstantialFrivolity is worthy of respect for being the sort of person to internalize the value of self-improvement even when it exposes him to risk of shame, which itself implies other virtues worthy of respect.
@SubstantialFrivolity, keep on keeping on.
That's nice, but why did you ignore the point you chose to reply to? Mitch McConnell is an individual, not a totem for the entirety of the American right- his stance neither proves or disproves whether there were always significant voices on the American right that disagreed with blue-tribe framings.
Moreover, Mitch McConnell's own change of views being simply labeled a retcon is itself assuming a conclusion. An alternative hypothesis would be that McConnell never bought into the Blue Tribe's framing, but was willing to pretend for political advantage at a time when it would have seemed politically advantageous. Or that McConnell believed it at the time based on information that he had, but later information changed his views. Or various other, non-assumed conclusions.
You are, of course, under no obligation to value those alternatives, but you are also under no obligation to assume Yglesias' conclusions either... which is to say you are just as free to assume the conclusion to justify booing the outgroup for not booing the outgroup.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
The USA does not obey the international court of justice on its declaration of Israel's genocide and Netanyahou arrest warrant. It threatened it in regards to the Iraq war.
You confused your international law bodies and what they did.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), which is part of the UN, did not issue an arrest warrant on Netanyahu.
The ICJ did issue provisional measures to 'prevent genocide'- but did not make a finding that genocide had occurred. (That is the point on ongoing litigation that is the geopolitical football being used for domestic politics by various countries- whether efforts by the Israelis (and/or US) are sufficient enough to meet the bar.) While there are certain elements of the ongoing litigation that might raise some eyebrows- such as accuser efforts to substitute expanded definitions of genocide in lieu of more restrictive standards, the reliance on Hamas-provided casualty figures that regularly fail analytic scrutiny to justify civilian death toll claims, or the lack by any accuser to provide a baseline estimate of militant-to-civilian casualties that might be used to judge Israel's impact against civilians in an ongoing urban conflict zone compared to contemporary urban warfare examples that were not genocidal- they are ultimately not relevant until the ICJ makes a further determination.
Until such time as the ICJ makes a further determination, there is no further element for the US or Israel to 'obey' beyond what they are already claim they are doing- not commit genocide.
The International Criminal Court (ICC), which is not part of the UN, was the body that issued the arrest warrant for Netanyahu.
While the ICJ did kindly issue an arrest warrant for already-dead Hamas leader Sinwar in a show of balance, the ICC warrant- by the nature of the ICC-being a Treaty-based institution rather than a UN body- faces significant jurisdictional challenges. While the ICC did graciously grant itself jurisdiction over the Gaza Strip despite no ICC member having ever held territorial control or jurisdiction of the Gaza strip while a party to the ICC, that does not change that the ICC's treaty limits its applicability to ICC-treaty members and their territory... of which about half the world, including the Israelis and Americans, are not. It is the internal law legal duty of court members- notably every European Union country due to the EU's policy of making ICC membership a requirement- to honor such warrants, but not non-members. While there are certainly grounds to protest the objections of the French, the Poles, the Germans, and so on for resisting that, those are other people.
Until such time that the US and the Israelis are members of the ICC, there are no internal law obligations on them to obey the ICC.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
At what point are Trump's allies tacitly seconding accusations that Trump is an authoritarian and his "movement" a cult of personality, by treating him as though the accusations are true?
Whenever you want to assume that conclusion.
I mean, sure, you could come to other conclusions based on available evidence- such that rather than a Jan 6 retcon there were always significant voices on the American right that disagreed with blue-tribe framings, that there are enough examples of boy who cried wolf that the media-commentator sphere's credibility is abysmally low, that Matt Yglesias isn't exactly anyone's idea of an objective and even-handed commentator- but you can always just dismiss such things to boo the outgroup for not booing the outgroup.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
But you try, and that is worthy of respect, just as it sounds like she is if she gave it with the spirit and intentions you received it with.
Bi- or multi-lingualism is something many people do, but it's always worthy of respect all the same. Especially if you could get away in your life without it, or move too often to justify it, and even more so if you try later in life than earlier. Deliberate learning after your formative years is even harder, but putting in hard work to improve yourself is always meritorious.
To paraphrase a parable- a polygot who picked up every language with ease is less impressive than a bi-lingual who did it with much difficulty, because what impresses are things that are hard, not easy.
Kudos to you, and feel no shame.
(Plus, sometimes you get some funny dynamics if you try to learn via media you already somewhat know. Think 'spanish Harry Potter,' or 'Mexicans love Dragon Ball Z.')
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
If he doesn't, I doubt anyone will.
I will say that, personally, I've found the transition to be beneficial for the 40k setting. 40k already has a universal 'force of nature' antagonist, and that's the Tyranids. Oldcrons were just competing for a niche, and the transition has opened space for a number of interesting dynamics that offer an alternative narrative space. There's still narrative space for omnicidal machines, but giving the newcrons personality has allowed them to have, well, personality.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
Drop your thoughts in a Friday Fun thread when you finish, and drop an @ when you're finished. I'd be interested.
Honestly, one of the fun things of being anywhere adjacent to the franchise as a hobby is watching new people get involved.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
As opposed to Fire Warrior, the video game, which should not be anyone's first introduction to the franchise.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
Ciaphas Cain is a good introductory series as well, as long as you recognize it's not the norm. It's very much on the lighter grey side of the grim dark black on black setting, though with enough elements to understand parts of its disfunction. It avoids some of the worst habits of the franchise's tendency towards purple prose or overly in-depth combat sequences, but has its own familiar tropes it can fall into.
If you need a frame of reference, Cain is a more comedic take on the Harry Flashman premise- someone who is a self-described coward and scoundrel who ends up looking the hero. The series is presented as Cain's unpublished memoirs, collected and edited by a close acquaintance, so there's a general contrast between how Cain presents himself, how others in the moment perceive him, and how the audience of the memoirs sees him.
The series isn't a linear narrative, but rather a series of self-contained adventurers, so there's no real issue in picking and choosing. You'll get basically teasers alluding to other adventures, nothing that spoils things.
If you'd like recommendations of where to start-
For the Emperor - First novel, key characters and premise introduced, makes everything else make more sense. Probably the best all-in-one for whether you'd like the series as a whole, especially since this is the starting point for Cain's adventurers with his most-reoccurring supporting cast. If you don't like this book, you probably won't like the series.
Death or Glory - Chronologically this takes place before For the Emperor, but it was written after, so many of the characters introduced there aren't present here, even as this campaign is the basis of various allusions and future plot threads. Because of its more limited scope as 'the thing that really got Cain famous,' it also makes a good starting point. Generally commits the hardest to the question of 'how does a self-described coward become a famous hero?'
The Infinite and the Divine by Robert Rath is often recommended, and deservedly so. I've known people who aren't even into Warhammer 40k who enjoyed it after the insistence of their more 40k-imbibed friends. The narration by Richard Reed is well done as well.
In short, it follows the feud between a kleptomaniac historian and an acerbic court wizard, except are both immortal space robots of technology beyond comprehension, with massive egos that entirely are entirely comprehensible, which allows incredibly petty efforts to bicker and nettle each other.
There was a moment of contemplative silence.
‘Do you have a statue of yourself, Orikan?’
Principles are only really worth anything if they meaningfully constrain behaviour,
Criteria met.
and if their application is sufficiently predictable that others can anticipate in what way behaviour will be constrained by them.
Criteria also met.
As a hypothetical country opposing the US, are there behaviours I could actually confidently predict the US would or would not take, which would not be sufficiently predicted by a model in which the US always acts to maximise its own wealth and power?
Yup. There are many ways to describe the US policies of the last century or so, but 'always act to maximize its own wealth and power' isn't a competent characterization of it.
Given how simple this opening premise was, and how you didn't even try to argue about Kosovo, I think we can move on from the US to what you actually care about.
As a concrete example, if I as a German voter were to vote in the AfD or BSW and they seek business with Russia, should I expect more US attacks on our infrastructure?
Nope. Not unless you want to insinuate AfD or BSW voters are morally obliged to subscribe to certain conspiracy theories.
They get voted in by a narrow margin, a great MR-two-point-oh rapprochement occurs, and then the pipelines and train lines start mysteriously blowing up. I have a pretty good hunch who did it, but all the Baltics stonewall us so I can't even coordinate a protest, and our economy is once again in shambles.
Do you? I'm pretty open that I think it was plausibly Ukraine, and I've written to that multiple times over the years, but then there are holdouts and you did insinuate 'more' US attacks, so your position is not particularly clear.
I am also not convinced you cannot coordinate a protest so much as your protest is sufficiently unsympathetic enough to garner support you feel you are owed in the way you want it. In so much that our economy is in shambles, some of that seems unavoidable to any reasonable agency and some of that is a well-earned consequence of sovereign prerogative to make bad macroeconomic decisions and take macroeconomic risks that turn bad, even against the advice of partners and allies.
Will the inevitable fifty-page treatise of international law theory that explains how this is actually fully in line with all professed principles be of any solace to me, after I made a decision based on a flawed world model and reaped a catastrophic outcome?
Does your solace or lack thereof serve any relevant form of proof or disproof to whether the professed principles were actually held and adhered to or not?
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
I also agree that the Russians made very severe mistakes going in (contra some people, I tend to believe that after several years of war the Russian and Ukrainian armies are now arguably the most capable ground forces in the world man for man, simply because exposure to peer conflict tends to result in the swift development of military skill – even if it is not true, I think it is good to behave as if it were rather than making the opposite mistake I detail above. I do not believe this applies to their air or especially their naval arms, although I think the Russians in particular have learned a lot from the air war, a lot of it was lessons the US has known for twenty-forty years.)
That would be an argument that assumes effective Darwinian processes. It really doesn't work that way in a force-generation contest like Ukraine.
While the Russian staff officer level is able to adjust and improve at a planning level, the quality of ground forces has degraded on both equipment and personnel quality levels. It started with the short-signed seed-corn strategy in 2022 when the Russians canibalized its training corps for front line forces for conscription, and the consumption of 'quality' with low-quality replacements has only increased. Russia continued to commit and recommit forces until their functional dissolution and necessary reconstitution.
Rather than build up combat-tested elite veterans, Russia has mostly expended its elites and replaced them with less and less capable replacements who are less trained, less equiped, and more prone to drugs and ill-discipline. The most capable elements of the ground forces are those that aren't exposed to fires, namely the EW, drone, and missile corps.
And what is the equivalent point for non-helpless people, and non-terrorist combatants?
Even people under terrible regimes have agency, which is why 'just following orders' or 'just running train schedules' were dismissed as defenses in notable past examples. Helplessness in turn also implies an inability to defend one's self- but this cannot co-exist with the ability to attack, since the means are the same, and which has certainly been displayed.
Similarly, terrorists are- by almost universal international definitions- actors who conduct unlawful violence. This is not only categorical, but generally morally, distinct from the systemic use of lawful force by a governing entity- particularly when the stated and demonstrated intent is to continue violence as a matter of policy. The categorization is certainly complicated by legalistic disputes, but as far as the moral premise goes the acts which started the war were conducted by the same entity that would be responsible for punishing said acts if they were unlawful.
The Palestinians have many issues, not all of which are their own fault, but treating them as helpless and without agency is neither accurate or humanizing them. There certainly isn't a lack of willingness and ability to fight and die against a hated administrating entity- only a dispute as to who it is. A consequence of that, however, is that arguments of helplessness against the other don't carry the same weight.
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