Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a 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
My knowledge of Ukr politics begins and ends at ‘I support whatever the UGCC wants’, so this is an honest question- does Zaluzhny
I'd preface my response by noting that after Hershs' earlier farce regarding the Nord Stream Bombing, in which he favored a Russian-backed conspiracy theory of perpetrator, with his own falsifiable and falsified narrative, over the implicit and explicit attribution of the European governments including Germany itself (i.e. Ukraine did it), I'd be very, very skeptical of any claim by him for insider insight. Hersh may have his sources, but I would not trust they are sources actually inside the American administration... and if they were, they'd be exceptionally desperate- and motivated- to publicize them via Hersh rather than someone else.
Hersh is a crank when it comes to the Ukraine War. More to the point, Hersh is the sort of person that majority of Trump's Republican administration considers a crank on the Ukraine War. You don't go to the other tribe's conspiracy cranks to launder your own efforts on the subject, unless you want to discredit the premise.
have sufficient internal support to force through a peace agreement over the nationalist’s objections,
Almost certainly not.
The biggest obstacle to a Russia-Ukraine peace agreement isn't the objection of 'the nationalists' to peace, but rather the 'everyone who suspects Putin would attack again' caucus to 'a peace agreement that sets conditions for Putin to attack again.' This is the reminder that the Ukraine invasion was the third, arguably fourth, continuation war by Russia against Ukraine since the invasion of Crimea. The first was the Nova Russia astroturf revolt, the second was the conventional military intervention to keep the separatist republics from falling, and the arguable third was efforts in between those, distinct from the attempts to coerce Ukraine into a state of constitutional paralysis by the inter-war negotiations.
There is no politically viable coalition of people who want to make a deal for the sake of a deal, particularly when Russia keeps claiming that a required condition of the deal is the demilitarization of Ukraine's capabilities to fight back. Just at a game theory level, such a demand requires a certain level of trust in the other player, and in this context- and for the foreseeable future- that other player is Putin.
or to expand the draft until Ukraine is fully staffed again?
Also almost certainly not.
For one thing, there's no particular standard of 'fully staffed.' The only time Ukraine has a meaningful manpower advantage- i.e. 'fully staffed- was pre-mobilization in the first year. This was a result of policy decisions by the Kremlin, not Ukrainian draft politics.
Ukraine has manpower challenges- though you probably look more towards Michael Koffman than anyone posting on the Motte this year for insight on that- but one dynamics of the situation is that the current issues aren't even something that forcibly conscripting more bodies would 'fix.' One of the reasons here is that the technology adaption/evolution of drones has limited the ability of both sides to actually maintain 'full' front line units. The drone dynamics are complicated, but the short end is that the Ukrainians are in some respects doing better defending longer terrain with fewer forces than would normally be considered 'full.'
But the flipside is that this is also applying to the Russians for much the same reason- drones are increasingly too common to allow maintaining massed forces on the battle line, and the more drones there are, the smaller that mass that can stand by gets. This is why the Russians have been getting increasingly effective use out of YOLO motorcycle/golf car assaults as with motorized/mechanized assalts. It's not that either is good, but both are bad, and the speed of the motorized assaults is enough to mitigate the exposure before the Ukrainian infantry can counter attack. Would more Ukrainian infantry in the trenches to resist attacks against the trenches be better? Sure. But it would also mean more exposure to the drones in those contexts.
I'm not claiming that the Ukrainian shortage is secretly an advantage, but it's a disadvantage that mitigates the cost of another significant risk factor. Which is not exactly unknown in conflicts.
Could that be the reason?
Also a third almost certainly not, though I'll pivot here to choosing to interpret 'the reason' as 'motive for the story.'
Hersh aside, the motive for an anti-Zelensky story 'now'- as in, 'why now?'- would probably be the consequence of internal Trump administration politics, as the losers of the cut-all-aid-from-Ukraine caucus shake some trees in hopes something falls. The biggest change in the Ukraine situation recently isn't that the military situation has gotten worse, but rather that the Trump administration relationship got better, and so negative press is part of that 'don't just do nothing, do something' response of people trying to shape an emerging policy.
I do owe a follow-up on late last year / early this year predictions, but one of the bigger predictions I made earlier this year was that the Trump-European relationship was primed to go transactional.
From February-
Low and behold, that's begun to happen, as the recent NATO summit that expanded the NATO spending target to 5% in a yuge win for Trump, also explicitly counts aid to Ukraine as counting for that limit. In turn, and around the time Trump made his more recent 50-day demand towards Putin,* Germany announced it was going to finance Patriots from the US for Ukraine. Europeans can win points from Trump, reduce Trumpian critcism of their defense investments, support Ukraine, and secure the American material that they themselves do not have, all while getting to claim they are meeting their NATO requirements by... buying American stuff for Ukraine.
In other words, the US-European relationship towards Ukraine is shifting from where where Biden donated aid to Ukraine, to where Trump sells aid to Europe who buys for Ukraine. Remember that the Russian theory of victory since choosing to prolong the war was that Ukraine would be cut off from American-European military-economic support and thus fall victim to the greater Russian military-economic mass. Having a transition where the rich Europeans using their economic resources to continue the supply of American munitions is 'better' for Russia than the US outright donating them outright, but it's a Bad Thing for Russian sustainability in the long term (as in- more than 3 years out).
But this is also a Bad Thing, specifically, for a small subset of the anti-Ukraine trump administration caucus who didn't want any military production to go towards Ukraine, at all, in favor of supporting the China buildup (or, more pressingly, Israel and the Middle East). This line of argument is against any diversion of material capabilities, including that which is sold rather than donated, on the urgency-of-China argument.
Well, that caucus has lost the bureucratic fight, and defying Trump openly is political suicide. Therefore, how do you try to undercut a commercial diversion? Lead corruption allegation #XYZ and hope it sticks, reducing / shrinking sales on corruption grounds.
Notably, however- and more relevant for some of the potential media planting efforts- it's not just inner-Trump admin dissidents who don't like the policy change. France and Italy have signaled dislike of the US policy change, less because they don't want to support Ukraine and more that they (especially France) don't want European money going to buy American weapons for Ukraine, as opposed to European (especially French) weapons. If Zelensky is particularly happy with the Trump development- and to be fair it's probably impossible to tell a sincerely happy Zelensky to one desperate to avoid a repetition of the White House blowup conference- then perhaps an alternative to Zelensky would also be more willing to entertain alternative (and long lead time) deliveries of military aid in a context.
I doubt it- I think this is not much ado about even less- but pettier axes have been ground.
*The 50 day puts us towards the end of the fighting season... which is about the point we'd see a summer/fall offensive peter out for the year regardless before the mud and winter season reset. I'll expect pro-forma negotiations there regardless, and that'll probably be when I do a Ukraine review of predictions.
As for Zelenskyy, making high risk maneuvers is far from unknown when leaders sense a direct threat to their power.
I'm not clear what high-risk maneuvers you think Zelensky is making in this context, but if this is referring to any given part of the OP, I wouldn't worry.
I would generally dismiss the objectivity the OP's framing of just about everything to do with Ukraine's negotiations, ranging from the 'surprising move' (something that has been repeatedly going on since the first Trump-Zelensky summit is not a surprise), to attribution of effort (the summer negotiations were not a result of Ukrainian 'trying,' but rather blatant coercion from the US), to even attribution of origin (the 30 day ceasefire demand did not originate from Ukraine, but was Zelensky echoing/supporting a Trump administration position on immediate cease fire).
Then again, I admittedly do have a flinch when I see someone unironically use 'regime journalist' as a way to discredit an objection to a known conspiracy theorist. Nor do I put much stock in the latest iteration of 'Ukraine is about to militarily collapse any month now' narrative that is over three years old at this point.
As far as Zelensky's political risk goes, I'd say his position has gotten stronger, not riskier, since this spring summer. Zelensky went from being 'the President who personally lost almost all American military support' to 'the President who made the American military support less generous but more stable, while offsetting the direct cost to us.' I can see a case for a palace coup against the former, but far fewer people within Ukraine will take the risks to reverse the later. Particularly if the nominal basis for removal- 'we must remove the appearance of corruption'- is to be done by...
Well, does anyone actually believe that the sort of people who think Ukraine shouldn't be given aid on account of corruption are going to be more forthcoming after an easy-to-characterize-as-corrupt palace coup?
(Curse you for directly asking for my opinion! I've been trying to Ukraine War post less this year.)
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
On one hand, thank you for further validating my already poor opinion of him. On the other hand... I'm sorry you have felt it useful to have that link on hand.
Am I missing something here?
Imagine someone who not only unironically uses the term human capital, and unambiguously considers themselves as higher human capital, but who also conspicuously talks about how the Republican Party has really gone downhill since it started catering to the tastes of those lower human capital against the advice of better human capital.
iprayiam3's characterization of Turok can apply to Hanania in general- someone who is generally upset that their intelligence and self-evident superiority aren't met with the deference and leadership they feel is their due. You can talk about Hanania, the social critic, but what that misses is Hanania, the would-be luminary / public intellectual / movement leader. Critics are common, but it takes a special sort of Influencer who is Intelligent enough to deserve to be listened to.
In mechanical terms, Hanania is/was a journalist who gained noticed in the 2000s by writing for far-right publications (that he has since disavowed). But from those publications he made connections with the sort of people who read them and more mainstream right-leaning media to sometimes write for those, and in turn use those as a further spring board. Hanania is a sharp enough wit that he can stand out by poking midwits, and enjoys it for both its own sake and the adulation it brings from those happy to see the victims pricked.
IIRC, part of what made Hanania stand out / get excommunicated from the respectable media (besides his not-quite-secret further right entry point) was that his schitk of being an angry libertarian also made him one of the earlier public critics/opponents to what we now call DEI. Hanania was always something of a shock-jock writer, picking arguments to provoke, and mocking woke / social justice / DEI efforts was something where he was ahead of the crowd. That boosted his credentials in some circles, especially those more interested in racial-IQ science, in the 'only Diogenes is wise enough to tell it like it is' sense. However, intellectual humility is not exactly something Hanania gets accused of having too much of, and he (or at least his support group) would probably tend to fixate more on Diogenes' acerbic wit and less on the joke.
This comes to the political pretensions... not really ever, but the closest in the the early-mid-2010s, pre-Trump. Trump rose because there was a power vacuum of voter base trust in the Republican establishment. That vacuume was because the Republican base disagreed with the Democrats on a lot and wanted someone who would fight. Hanania was also someone who disagreed with the Democrats on the lot and wanted to fight. This is a now decade-old vibe, but there was a vibe that Republicans were looking for something different than the stale old Bush-era republicans. (Memorably, the Republican Party elite had been taking the lesson via post-Romney autopsy that the change they needed was to become more like the Democrats. This, uh, didn't work out for that wing of the party.)
The fact that the Republican base went with someone like Trump, rather than someone like more Hanania-adjacent, is somewhere between 'something that will never be forgiven' and 'It's not like I wanted to be popular with you' and 'I knew you were all idiots anyway.'
I don't know / recall if Hanania ever made an overt play for Republican Party influence, but he's been bitter about it in ways that are more akin to a spurned would-be-lover than an outsider. Hananaia has written about how conservative republicans are worse (in some ways) than democrats, about how Trump has a stranglehold on the party, about how the party has become the low human capital party (since Trump), etc. etc. The sort of thing that gives the impression that Hanania sure would think it was a good thing if the Republican party was replaced with people who met Hanania's standards, which of course includes agreeing with Hanania, and would naturally elevating Hanania-like people like Hanania into policy power. (But, of course, he'd never be so low-brow as to directly appeal to his own greatness.)
Despite that, Hananaians occasionally make scratches, or at least associations, with political relevance. Hanania was allegedly / accused of contributing to the Project 2025 republican wishlist / template that the Trump administration cribbed from for early policy priorities. At the same time (loosely / more recently), Hanania did a media tour publicly professing regret for ever voting for Trump (which, of course, was due to Hanania being insufficiently Hanania and taking his reasoning further). Hanania thus tries to shape Trumpian politics, while also keeping as far distance as he can. If Trump zigs, he will zag, and comment at length at how bad zigging is.
Hananaia acts, in other words, loosely like a would-be government-in-exile hoping that, should the hated regime fall, people will naturally look to them for guidance. However, this is undercut a bit by how the would-be government is led by a hated aristocrat who openly loathes the peasants, and hardly loved in return. Still, he's useful enough to enough people that he continues to exist.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
'There is now way Trump will get away with [latest thing] this time!'
Not going to lie, mate, you are kind of all over the place on this. You say that this suit 'just put things into overdrive,' but your conclusion is really just jamming a lot of different concept that could be these [things].
In paragraph one, it was the survival (preferably end) of Trump's political career. In paragraph two it... could just as well apply to a thing you characterize as would have been a non-scandal if only Trump waited a weekend? Or maybe the Murdoch trap. You kind of veer from one into the other. By paragraph three, it's the terrible prospects of a disposition of a guy who (repeatedly) had (multiple) hostile prosecutions and investigations leak unflattering things for decades. Come paragraph four, it's how bad the optics will be for a guy who won his first presidential election after an audiotape of 'grab them by the pussy,' followed by a technically-not-treason conspiracy, and, well, way too many bad optics to list.
So when you throw in things like this-
But Trump is impulsive, and wasn't going to wait until Monday to file, wasn't going to give himself a chance to cool down. Get it out Friday. Now he has opened himself up to a world of hurt that he couldn't imagine beforehand.
Dude. Dude.
This is a guy who has been variously accused of rape, infidelity, insurrection, and racism in various courts for the better part of a decade. He was the target of a historically unprecedented fraud prosecution in which the largest fraud fine in New York history was leveled against him despite the victim testifying on his behalf. So many novel legal theories have been used against him that entire aspects of constitutional law have been developed to manage it. There have been multiple government conspiracies that we know about that aimed to hurt him in court.
I am going to go on a slight limb here and suggest that maybe, just maybe, Donald Trump has a better idea of the world of hurt that comes with court cases than you do.
This is fundamentally a categorization boundary difference. This is the sort of thing where we may simply have different categorization hierarchies/boundaries.
What you quoted is / was intended to be a reminder against the fallacy of composition without calling it such, since overtly calling on a fallacy can come off as an attack / belittlement. Which was not the intent, but lost some clarity, particularly on the categorization hierarchy.
The fallacy of composition is the error in which what true for a part of a whole is assumed to be true for the whole. It is a common categorization error when sub-sets are conflated with broader overarching categories. What is true for a subset (all dogs are mammals, A = B) does not necessarily apply to the over set (all mammals are not dogs, B =/= A). (Part of the error is that it's not actual the same category in both sets, as 'mammals' and 'all mammals' are not the exact same group- that is, they are not both 'B'.)
Reciprocal relationships are a category of relationships, distinct from other, non-reciprocal relationships. It itself is a subcategory of [relationships]. Reciprocal relationships as a (sub-)category can in turn be broken down into further sub-categories.
Obligation-based and transactional relationships are subcategories of reciprocal relationships. There are additional subcategories as well, types of reciprocity that are also not obligatory or transactional. Mutual love and mutual hatred are both reciprocated relationships that have no intrinsic obligatory or transactional element. More can be found.
The fallacy of composition limits the application of any of them to characterizing the others- what is true for a part (a specific subcategory) is not true for the whole (other subcategories / the broader category). What is true for one subcategory (god's relationship with man is not a specific type of reciprocal relationship, i.e. not a transactional relationship) does not disprove another subcategory, or the overarching category.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
I agree that often duty based ethics is framed in terms of mutual duty. But @Clementine is still correct with the assertion that duty without reciprocity is virtue, not exploitation. You may not be required to discharge your duty towards someone who doesn't discharge theirs to you, but it's still praiseworthy to do so. For example, Judaism and Christianity both depict how God continuously acts benevolent towards humanity despite them not deserving it. This isn't framed as "God is a sucker", but rather as God being the exemplar of virtue whom we should strive to imitate. Not all religions frame things that way, of course, but when you have some 3000 years of one religious tradition which does, it seems fair to call that just as established as the reciprocal duty that you outlined.
This misses the argument previously made.
Religiously-derived deontological ethics aren't a duty towards the person you are doing the virtue towards, but the duty to the god who sets the paradigm of right and wrong action. Other people don't need to reciprocate your execution of virtue because the duty relationship isn't to them, but to god. The execution isn't praiseworthy because the recipients or human observers praise it, but because the worthiness is set by god regardless of the beneficiary.
In turn, the sucker being raised is the deontologist if god does not exist, not god if the deontologist fails. Being the root of deontological legitimacy challenges any premise of obligation to god by those without deontology-setting power, but people who do something on the grounds that derive from god are being suckers if that belief was always wrong, regardless of how socially commendable their niceness may be.
edit: forgot to mention that your explanation of Christianity is very much not how it works, and is in fact a heresy! Salvation is explicitly not something that God owes us because we upheld his law, but rather is a freely given gift. Thus our only choice is to say "yes, I accept" (out of which comes trying to uphold God's laws, again not out of obligation but out of love for him), or to reject his gift (because we would rather do our own thing). Salvation as a gift rather than earned by our conduct is a core tenet of Christianity.
Reciprocal relationships are not the same as obligation relationships, much as they are not synonymous with transactional relationships. The duty (deontological obligations) to god for freely given grace is still a reciprocal relationship, even though it is not a transactional relationship nor does is obligate god in return.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
And rightly so. Please keep that link and reminder on hand. It is certainly a good example of AlexanderTurok's bad faith characterizations of past arguments.
Lots of duty based systems eg confucianism lasted long term. I'm not sure how well adapted they are to modern day life, where a lot of the scaffolding¹ that helps maintain the systems is crumbling. But these systems usually specifically have moral parables about people behaving virtuously — dutifully — even when they're reciprocated not just with nothing but with active ingratitude and disrespect.
Confucianism is an explicitly reciprocal duty-based system. It was often explicitly modeled both in terms of father-son relationships, where the son's obedience to the father is contingent on the father being a virtuous enough patriarch to be worth respecting, and between subject and sovereign, where a sovereign's failure to maintain virtue is the basis for losing the mandate of heaven and being replaced by someone else who will appriopriately fill the duties required.
Confucianism and deontological religions have a commonality in that the duty-based system is based on relationships that are reciprocal. Religious deontology works from the premise of virtue's relationship, and thus duty to, one's own god. Doing so brings you closer to your god / earns good karma / etc. from your metaphysical duty-obligator. More secular Confucianism works from the premise of the duty to natural relationship of [child] and [parent]. Doing so brings you more harmonious relationships with the other part of the relationships.
No major deontology system has ever worked from a premise of a duty towards an action outside of the context of the relationship. Even when the Christians preach charity to one's enemies, it is based from the premise of the relationship of the charitable practioner to their god. When the virtue-ethicists like Aristotle talk about balancing bravery between cowardliness and foolhardiness, it is in the context of its effects on, and the relationship of the practitioner to, others.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
If you ignore a few millennia of cultural understanding of duty-as-virtue ethics, perhaps.
Duty-based ethics, aka deontological ethics, are highly reciprocal. This is especially true in the western tradition, due to the derivation of why there is a duty and to who. Namely- because God. Hence why deontological ethics and religious ethics are so intertwined across history, since the fundamental question of any duty-based ethical system leads to 'according to who?' whenever a secular authority demands dutiful obedience.
A god isn't required to be that 'who,' but it is the moral authority higher than any king to make those demands for obedience something more than arbitrary human with thugs and clubs. In turn, religious deontologies are incredibly reciprocal- you do your duty unto God, which can entail more worldly obediences as well, and you go to heaven. Defy your duties, and you are separated from God / go to Hell / bad karma happens. God's love may be unconditional, but the state of grace of being close to god is not. Your reciprocal gain for doing the right thing is that your soul will go the right place, no matter the worldly harm you may suffer. This isn't exactly unique to Christianity either, as a brief review of any karmic system metastructure can show.
But the element of God isn't required for reciprocity either. One of the most successful non-theistic deontological ethic systems about duty, Confucianism, is explicitly reciprocal. It appeals to a 'natural' relationship rather than a deific basis, namely the relationship of fathers to sons, but this duty system is obligations on both parties, the failure of which on either part can justify action by the other. A son who lacks filial piety may be disciplined. A king who lacks virtue loses the mandate of heaven and may be replaced.
The non-abrahamic reciprocal duty also goes back from east to west to the foundational civilizing force of western antiquity, Rome. In Rome, the patron-client relationship wasn't a brief transactional relationship of bribes or business, but a fundamental social institution. Patrons provided support and benefits to their clients, from nepotistic favors to representing them in court or assisting in arranging marriages, and in turn the clients owed loyalty, respect, and support... so long as the Patron provided. But if the Patron didn't, then another, more worthy, Patron could be shifted too. This was a bedrock arrangement of not only rome itself, but everywhere Rome dominated, as this was the relationship deliberately pursued between Rome and its clients/allies/conquests/etc. And it was part of a broader mindset that didn't limit this to the secular, but the religious practices as well, where Roman polytheism was part of a reciprocal 'if we don't show piety we will be punished' leading to 'show piety for divine favor' paradigm.
All of these duty traditions far, far, far predate any contemporary notion of 'rights-based mindset.' The Jews were in covenant long before millennia before any enlightenment philosophers were quibling over human rights. The enlightenment built from the corpse of the Roman reciprocity. The Confusicians and the Hindus and more didn't need their example to figure out their own thing.
Duty-based ethic systems are highly reciprocal.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
She's a member of the United States Cabinet!
Which is a collection of individuals with distinct and often contrasting opinions, not a hive mind, or an avatar summoned from the collective unconscious of parts of the electorate.
You may not think it's true, but you certainly act as if it's true.
We can all look at your posting history and note that you are not spending your time denouncing or distancing yourself from any given stupid comment by any given political figure. Despite your constant failure to distance yourself from the infinite stupidity of the universe, it would, in fact, be unreasonable to claim that said stupidity represents you to any relevant degree.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
It is still weakmanning to insist that [someone] else speaks for [group X] because arbitrary-subjective sections of [group X] weren't sufficiently vocal in denouncing [someone].
You think you could find 10 right-wingers or just mercenary guys willing to do 10 year in federal prison, on a lie?
Laddie, you posted the incident where the American leftwing actors were willing to risk 10 years or more in federal prison for an attack on ICE agents. You have been provided a decade-long historical example of magnitudes more than 10 people were willing to suffer far worse than 10 years in jail. Are you really going to try and insist that not even 10 of their rightwing equivalents would cross the line at a lie?
Go to a serving infantry soldier and tell him LMGs are 'tacticool'
An AR-15 modified for an automatic rate of fire is not a LMG. People pretending they are the same would very much fall under the tacticool coolaid.
and 'not actually very useful'.
Spraying and praying beyond effective range not being very useful is why doing so is often teased / mocked as playing Rambo.
AR rifles are fairly controllable in full auto, and with a bipod they're probably extremely controllable.
If all you mean by 'fairly controllable' is 'in the general direction,' this would be missing the point, much like firing at full auto at the ranges of this incident.
Whoever they'd have been shooting at would have been dead. Swapping out mags isn't that hard either.
Unless they missed because they were playing with full auto beyond the effective range of auto. Like what happened in Texas.
Building on this- the problem is what the nature of that debt, and the collapse of housing investments for future returns, implies for future economic development.
For example, the implication of the private household debt is how it shapes China's ambitions of escaping the archetypical middle income trap. The classical understanding of the cause is that a country makes good money as an export nation working the lower value chain, tries to work its way up the value chain, but the main basis of national growth (a productive low-cost but also low-income manufacturing worker class that produces exports) goes away before the worker class is able to transitions to a higher-income level of productivity that corresponds with the higher value chain. Some of the country does, but not enough (proportionally), resulting in more stagnant growth, both in terms of national economy and average wages. It's not 'bad,' but it's, well, middling. No longer economically viable for the thing that made it good.
The classical theory of how the higher income countries escaped this is that they transitioned from a manufacturing-export economic model to an internal-consumption model. The internal economics for wages and such are driven more by how the country spends and consumes within its own market, rather than how it exports to foreign spenders and consumers. Ideally, it's to some respects self-reinforcing, for the typical economic multiplication effects that let commerce grow the economy.
This was the basis of the economic question of if China would get old before it got rich. It was referring not to the country GDP as a whole, but to the wealth of the population and its ability to power a consumption-economy model. Could the Chinese public get rich enough in their economically productive years to power a transition to a consumption-based economy, before they grew so old that their savings were instead consumed in end-of-life support?
Well, that's a great deal harder for a family to contribute to if a family's lifetime of savings and investments no longer exists. Like, say, because it was invested in buying an apartment that never was built, or was built and torn down before it could be sold, or which lost its value due to the property crash.
China may yet escape that. It's unclear if the middle income trap is an issue of proportion or absolute number, in which case a proportionally small core of rich-enough Chinese could maybe drive a system. But the middle-income trap would be a lot less likely if a lot more Chinese had a lot more of their lifetime investments have a lot more value.
And, of course, if losing investments didn't contribute to the vicious cycle of ongoing deflation. Which is generally agreed to be bad, but makes individual actor sense if you recently lost much of your money but now find yourself in a position where things look like they will get cheaper the longer you refrain from buying them.
The Chinese local government debts, by contrast, are a bit 'simpler.' These are debts by lower governments, or government enterprises, that the Chinese national government is ultimately likely on the hook for. That's not a macro-economic-structure crisis, 'just' the official debt numbers being radically off and at risk of a liquidity crisis if ill-structured debts create bank runs. Which, technically, might be solved by simply printing more money and forcing the mostly Chinese holders of the debt to accept it, but...
Did I strawman the Right?
Yup.
Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:
Unless Lore Chavez-DeRemer has put on an unprecedented amount of weight in the last 48 hours, no one should confuse her for the mass of tens of millions of people that could be considered 'the Right.' The volume of space alone would be magnitudes off.
As such, attempting to use her as a proxy of tens of millions of people is a strawman, absent compelling evidence the views of those tens of millions are accurately represented by her.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
I would like to first say I appreciate your contestation / elaboration. It was certainly a quip to move that can be contested on 'well, actually...' grounds. Kudos!
That's why I am only going to clarify my intent / dispute against two sub-elements.
They're cheap, good, and half the world's nations actively use them to wage war in some capacity. If that is not a good rifle I'm not sure what is.
The rifle the AR-15 is based on is better in part for the functions that differ it from the commercial AR-15. Which is to say- deliberate design access to to limited automatic as appropriate, as opposed to reliability-decreasing ad-hoc modification access to quasi-auto. Plus the additional attachments not used here, but that's getting into broader kitting options rather than potential.
The AR-15s the anti-ICE attackers used were modified AR-15s, nominally for that additional ability, but which may have compromised their reliability. Reliability (at least when maintained) being a key point of why half the world's nations actively use the M-16 and derivatives.
But that's not what I said in what you're responding to, so fair rejoinder.
But when we're actually fighting- we're shooting at targets that are actively trying to avoid being shot at, and trying not to be shot ourselves- and not just trying to score bullseyes on a static range, we want it to be as easy as possible for us to make hits.
My view is that this context, the Praireland Texas attack, is closer to the shooting range context than the 'actually fighting' context. And this probably the context anti-ICE facility attacks will have for any sort of anti-ICE insurgency.
Consider the attack at The ICE attack was done at range of 100-300 meters (or more), from cover / concealment, over a relatively brief amount of time. We know this by the criminal complaint report tying the shooters to nearby woods/treelines (100m and 300m away), and only 30-ish rounds being reported despite more-than-semiautomatic weapon fire rates. The only injury was implicitly in the initial salvo, before the defenders fell behind cover, and this salvo was the surprise/opening attack in terms of introducing gunfire. At which point, the officers at the scene were suppressed until the attackers withdrew, supported by the shooters in the forest, one of whom had enough concealment to remain hidden beyond the initial search response.
This is something that should be expected as a norm for anti-ICE attacks, in part due to the sort of government building design the Americans adopted after 9-11. The American federal government has been incorporating stand-off distance in new / security / detention facilities basically ubiquitous since 9-11, and in many contexts even before. Part of this is terrorism fears of truck bombs, part of this is security fears to prevent infiltration / unauthorized access, and part of it is wildfire management.
When- as is the government's preference- it has more freedom for standoff space, this creates longer sight lines, and thus requires longer weapons range which makes the post-opening cover movements more effective, and hasty counter-fire less effective. And when- as a matter of legacy- thick vegetation is far closer, so is the concealment advantage to the shooters from within the woods, who have to set up their own sight lines through the vegetation.
I recognize you and I may have different opinions, but I'd consider either of these dynamics more akin to (semi-)static rifle ranges than the close-in maneuver / counter-maneuver that I suspect you mean by 'actual combat.'
But this, too, is not exactly what I said in what you're responding to, so still a fair rejoinder.
The problem with false flag theory of this size is that the ten people arrested would have to be genuine. You can't find ten people willing to do a decade in prison over a false-flag attack.
As opposed to the 10 people who demonstratable were willing to do a decade in prison over a non-false-flag attack?
Present culprits aside, you should probably update your sense of scale of people willing to accept severe consequences to act against their enemies. There were more than 1000 suicide bombings, which is to say more than 1000 suicide bombers, in Iraq alone between 2003 and 2011. Iraq during that period was about 1/10th of the population of the US, and hardly had a monopoly on whatever virtue/vice you think it takes to accept guaranteed death for a chance to kill the target of your animosity. Whatever your view of the relative hardiness of the average radicalized American versus the average radicalized Iraqi, finding 10 people to take much lower risks for much lower costs is not the bottle neck.
In fact, we can find far more than ten Americans willing to risk a decade in prison merely by going to the prisons where people are serving sentences of ten or more years. These prisoners are a group who are, by necessity, a smaller subset of the group of people who take risks that could result in a decade or more of prison, since the people who did the same but were not caught/convicted will obviously not be there. And the people who are actually did take the risk is a smaller subset of the people willing to take the risk, and so on.
If your formulation was meant to specify people intending to go to jail as part of the plan would be impossible to find, that would indeed be a lot harder... but it would also be unnecessary. Getting caught isn't required for a false flag any more than it would be for a non-false flag.
Well, they didn't seem to have practiced or thought this out. A competent cell could have modified rifles for fully automatic, controllable fire. I'm sure if you do a bit of research you can find accurate blueprints on how to modify the receiver to allow full auto..
They could, but this would be the sort of tacti-cool that serves as an even greater indicator of cell incompetence that works against a false flag from a competent group hypothesis. It's not that modifying for full auto is something a competent could do and this group failed to do it right, but rather that modifying for full auto for the purpose of this attack is something the competent would not do, and this group thought it would be good to pursue.
Part of this is because 'fully automatic, controllable fire' is more of a video game hollywoodism than a practical advantage for this sort of attack. The physics of recoil are why the sort of squad automatic rifles that use the AR-15's 5.56mm ammo, and larger caliber automatic weapons, are braced against the ground with bipods for full auto. It's also why shoulder-braced SMGs use correspondingly smaller ammo with less kickback, so the body can more easily absorb recoil. Recoil is why militaries train both in terms of small bursts rather than, well, 'full auto.' Unlike video games, where automatic rifles put out more shots on target for more damage, in reality the role of automatic fire is far more for suppressing the enemy for movement and maneuver. You don't control fully automatic fire onto a meatbag target unless that target is particularly numerous, like a WW1 wave attack, particularly close, or both.
And part of this is that this is the google maps image of Prairieland Detention Center. This sort of image is the bare minimum you should expect the weapon-modifiers to have for their planning purposes.
Note that the closest treeline is 100m away from the parking lot. Note that the other woods- the ones large enough to be where Song hid- are closer to 300m. These are not 'close' targets for automatic weapons to effectively hit the target.
And then there's combining the role of an automatic weapon, suppressing for maneuver, to the terrain and how the attack initiated.
From the initial criminal complaint describing the attack in the original Ngo post-
…around 10:59 p.m., an Alvarado Police Department ("APD") officer arrived in the parking lot at the Prairieland Detention Center in response to the 911 call by the Correctional Officers in order to assist the Correctional Officers in their official duties. Immediately after the APD officer got out of his vehicle, an assailant in the woods opened fire, shooting the APD officer in the neck area. The assailant in the green mask, standing near the woods on Sunflower Lane, then also opened fire at the unarmed DI-IS correctional officers. In total, the assailants shot approximately 20 to 30 rounds at the Correctional Officers. Police later recovered spent 5.56 caliber casings at the locations of both of the shooters.
An unmodified AR-15 in its purely semi-automatic function of a shot a squeeze could go through 30 rounds in about 30 seconds.
A M16 on full-auto, the military basis of the AR-15, would go through 30 rounds in about 3 seconds.
Even if you double or triple the shots fired if the weapons didn't jam- a jamming made more likely by the modification to fire faster- you still aren't having a maneuver element do a 100-meter flank assault in 7-to-12 seconds from the closer tree line. Even Usain Bolt took over 9 seconds for his world-record 100m dash, and he wasn't carrying a roughly 6 lb / 3 kg two-handed rifle while doing it.
Again- modifying for rate of fire here is tacti-cool, not tactical. It is anti-competence to expect or pursue, and this group's effort to do so is an indicator against the false flag hypothesis.
(Which is part of why I wish Ngo's article had mentioned it from the start. It would been a helpful balance against his weird flags. Ah well.)
If I were to try and make a fancy title for my opinion on the Texas anti-ICE attack, I'd call it 'How I Had To Figure My Way Out Of A False Flag Suspicion.'
I was hoping to do a writeup on this incident, since the Antifa attack has some ties to a post last month on how the Democratic civil war will give the Trump administration a lawful basis to go after parts of the background Democratic coalition. Antifa is a fringe part of that coalition, but still a part, and this certainly counts as a basis to go after a network. I was holding off because Ngo's article- while informative- had several 'weird flag' indicators that had me raising an eyebrow and waiting for information to dispel a possible false flag / misattribution.
One of the weird things was the mix of preparation and self-affiliation. Preparation is usually a sign of competence, but self-incrimination is usually incompetent, unless it's intended for a false-attribution, in which case incompetence can be explained by even greater competence.
On the preparation side, there was clear material preparation for first, second, and even third order consequences. From the Ngo article, the plan was to use fireworks and graffitti as a flashy / damaging, but low danger, way to bring out the ICE agents. Then the responders would be ambushed by the gunmen with, well, lethal guns, even as the team had personal radios for their own communication. At least a limited firefight was prepared for with body armor. An electromagnetic blocking device, i.e. a jammer, could then be used to frustrate the secondary response units, any ICE-Police coordinations, and otherwise help with the escape. The assailants appear to have fallen back and retreated through the immediately adjacent woods. They had a getaway car plan as well.
This is a multi-step plan that supports a level of sophistication and prior thought. This is competent, dangerous, and effective small-unit tactics that comes from training and deliberate preparation.
But then you have some of the incompetent aspects that suggest the planners were going for tacti-cool rather than tactical advantage. At least seven of the militants dressed in all black, as opposed to useful camouflage or even clothes to help blending in with normal people on the escape. Pure-black 'looks good,' but it's more a uniform for official police teams to distinguish or play to light contrasts in overt contexts- it makes as much sense in a guerilla force as thinking that historical ninjas actually dressed in all black, as opposed to the black uniform being the stage-show theater dress to make it obvious. They used AR-15s, which are not, despite years of anti-gun campaigning, particularly good rifles for waging war (or insurgency). They discarded their AR-15s, leaving evidence behind in literal walking distance of the target. Some of the discarded AR-15s were found jammed, suggesting poor weapon handling... or, reported later, weapon modification attempts to increase rate of fire. This theory of 'more bullets = better' is not actually better in general, since a good part of the value of a semi-automatic rifle for small teams is that the slower rate forces better shooting fundamentals for reliability per shot, rather than wasting ammo faster for less gain.
And then there's the backpack with antifa literature. Just... why?
This, more than anything, got my 'is this a trick?' allergy going, because this is the sort of thing someone could do to try an inflame political tensions for its own sake as a false-flag action.
Leave behind left-coded Antifa literature to feed the initial view of a blue tribe attack. The right-coded AR-15s as a symbol of red tribe means. The mix of high-competence (a group who knew what they were doing) and low-competence (a group who were making incredibly basic mistakes) that could in and of itself be used to dismiss / deflect initial attributions. 'Of course it's Antifa- the literature matches the motive matches the target in attacking ICE!' could be deflected with 'Of course it's not Antifa- Antifa would be more competent, it's obviously a fake by a red tribe domestic extremist. Right wing extremists are obviously military competent, and look- they used the scary AR-15!'
This is the sort of narrative motivation that could support a broader variety of 'true' actors. Anyone with a 'maximize for heat, not light' could want that sort of recrimination spiral. It could be right-wing accelerationists. It could be the Antifa actors seeking to maximize (in)famy while invoking a circle-the-wagons effect of their left-tribe brethren. It could even be foreign agitators. If you want to accelerate a conflict in another country, the ideal false flag is to do something that elements in the target country would plausible want to or even try to do. It's not like this would be the first Antifa attack on a ICE facility.
To be clear, a false flag is not the assessment I would make from the initial information. But it's not a scenario I would rule out either. One of the most effective ways to do a false flag attack is to do something that non-trivial parts of an existing political coalition's fringes wishes (someone else) would do. And with the recent Democratic politician accounts in the (increasingly visible) Axios "Democrats told to "get shot" for the anti-Trump resistance" article, there are certainly people who think fighting ICE and Trump is the good fight.
Which is why another of the really weird things about Ngo's initial big post was how it didn't support that this was an actual Antifa cell in the first place, particularly when the initial government accounts didn't make that claim.
Ngo didn't actually provide evidence that these people were Antifa in the original article. Ngo makes the claim, but his supporting evidence in his post is that there was Antifa literature in a backpack of one of the caught shooters- aka, the sort of very easy thing to do if one wanted to insinuate Antifa. Ngo also cites fundraising by Antifa-linked people in support of the shooters... but the political tribal sympathy nature of tribal fundraising is also well established, and doesn't rely on prior association. Ngo does not actually cite any Antifa organization / social media / group that claimed the shooters as their own, or cite any of the shooters self-identifying as Antifa.
One reason I'd been holding off posting on this was hoping that follow-on media reporting would clarify the affiliation. It largely did not. The Washington Examiner released an article repeating the claim, but they did not really justify it either. The WE article did include a reachout to the FBI, but didn't attribute any Antifa attribution to the FBI. Then again, the FBI is often mum with ongoing investigations. The New York Times article does not make the antifa attribution... but this could be explained on partisan grounds of omitting politically unfavorable context. (Another weird(?) thing of the NYT article- no comment section. Not all NYT online articles get to have comment sections, but enough do that sometimes it can be seen as a choice not to.)
So I was waiting for yesterday's Department of Justice charging statement. I would imagine that at least some in the Trump DOJ would like to emphasize an antifa connection if they could. But there is no mention of Antifa in the DOJ statement.
So, not Antifa?
Well, not quite. Not only has there not been the sort of firm denunciation/separation that would be expected if a group was not affiliated with the broader political spectrum (as with other politically-sympathetic but unaffiliated political violence attempts over the years), but there's also Benjamin Song.
If you don't recognize his name from the OP article, that's because he was not one of the ten identified in Ngo's initial article, or the NYT article of the incident, or in the initial DOJ statement of charges.
The Dallas Express has published a much more extensive look at a specific (but still at large) suspect, which gives more compelling evidence of a specific connection via one (still wanted) suspect: Benjamin Song.
The Dallas Express writer is not entirely neutral- the left-skeptical political bias of which was probably why they got the presumably FBI-supported information for the article- but it provides a bit more specific claims that are contestable by others. So far none seriously have been, but these are at least falsifiable. To quote-
Song was a member of the militant Antifa group Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, and he had a history of left-wing radicalism.
This, at least, is falsifiable. And elaborated upon, with a history that suggests a clear pattern of 'helping others with violence.'
He was a member of the violent Antifa group Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, known for intimidating people outside drag shows. Song faced a lawsuit for “battery, assault, stalking, and conspiracy” after a confrontation at a 2023 drag show, as The Dallas Express reported. During the event, Fort Worth Police busted violent members of Song’s group.
Song was also reportedly a member of the Socialist Rifle Association. A transgender suspect, accused of shooting and bombing a Tesla dealership, was part of the same organization.
He trained Antifa in firearms and combat in 2022, according to a video uncovered by journalist Andy Ngo.
The account that posted the video – “Anarcho-Airsoftist” – is an apparent Antifa training ground in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Notably, according to his alleged LinkedIn account, Song was formerly a martial arts instructor. The account* showed participants learning to fight.
Before he trained Antifa militants, Song was arrested for “aggravated assault” at a riot in Austin during 2020, according to KVUE.
And, of course, where he got his skill set-
Song was a member of the Marine Corps reserves from 2011 to 2016, when he was dismissed on an “other than honorable discharge,” as The Dallas Express reported. According to LinkedIn, he “managed up to 60 Marines” and “managed, organized, and accounted for inventory worth over $1 million” during his time with the service. His profile stops after this.
For those unfamiliar, 'other than honorable discharge' is the 'you are being kicked out for causes that don't necessarily raise to the level of a felony' that typically accompanies the dishonorable discharge. 'Up to 60 marines' in turn scales to between a larger-than-normal platoon or a smaller-than-normal company. 'Managed' insinuates, but does not imply, a platoon leadership position- rather, when mixed with the inventory metric, suggests an administrative role. This does not imply he was not also tactically proficient, but would explain additional skill sets in organization.
And with this, some of the earlier discrepancy falls into place. We are not talking about a group of an average consistent quality that must be competent or incompetent. We can be looking at a cell with a more-competent organizer, a former Marine who taught tactical skills, and less-competent line members.
Which also helps explain another weird flag in the initial report, of how 10 suspects were arrested... but 12 sets of body armor were recovered.
And why Song is still at large.
From the Dallas Express-
[Song] allegedly bought four guns used in the ICE facility ambush on July 4, which wounded an Alvarado police officer, as The Dallas Express reported. He reportedly hid in the woods near the scene for a day after the shooting, then fled.
This, if true, could be a result of a particularly competent technique. Two, possibly. One way to hide something valuable is to hide it in relation to something extremely visible and attention-grabbing, so that to observer's attention is drawn away. Another is to use a sacrifice play, so that the person who searches finds a first, and expendable, asset, but doesn't know to keep looking for the more valuable, and better hidden, asset.
If immediate police response finds 10 suspects fleeing a scene... what are the odds there is another still hiding for the attention to drift further away, to depart under better conditions once the initial surge of attention starts drifting and looking further away?
Of course, there are limits to this level of competence- limits that are explainable by the limits of Song and of chance. If he was a small-unit-tactics focused Marine for only 6 years, that would suggest limited exposure to the sort of investigation/exploitation awareness that might have led him to plan better on the evidence disposal. He didn't know what he didn't know, and thus didn't prepare for them, which is how investigators could unravel things relatively quickly afterwards. He might have typically-minded his Antifa cell members and not overseen them.
And, of course, the rapid capture of specific members- especially the get-away driver- allowed a rapid exploitation of evidence / safe house / etc. while he was still in his hide-and-escape phase. This was not part of the plan, and was an issue of chance, probably. If that getaway driver hadn't been caught, then the members might not have been captured, the staging base might not have been identified, and so on until Song could get back, clear out, and cover his tracks before the police found it.
Or maybe those preparations wouldn't have been enough either. Point is- the police response that found the getaway driver, something that might have been pre-empted by the jammer or if the police car had taken a different route or any number of things, created a vulnerability in the getaway plan. That's not necessarily incompetence on his part.
Song specifically has since appeared in more reputable, mainstream, and Democratic-Party-respected media like ABC, Newsweek, and CBS. This is consistent with standard media industry practice to support government requests to publicize criminals to increase their profile and make it easier to solicit tips to lead to their capture.
None of the above media sources mention Song's antifa affiliation.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
I wonder where all the furries were in 1980s-1990s.
Being born in time for the Disney renaissance to influence their formative years.
Or gattsuru's account of the people who were already adults even then.
Again, you (and your cited paper) are running away from the issue of scale, and comparing proposal requirements versus production prospects. This is the shell game, and always will be the shell game, much as how calling renewable energy production 'cheap' is inevitably made apart from the subsidy costs and the opportunity cost impacts to other issues.
A very simple test to separate the renewable energy proposals that are solicitations for subsidies from serious engineering proposals is to check if they address issues of 'where.' Your Masterplan 3 (producer: Tesla), for example, has a section titled 'Land Area Required.' Tell me if you can spot the issue in one of its only paragraphs.
Solar land area requirement is estimated based on a US Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) empirical assessment of actual US projects, which found that the median power density for fixed-tilt systems installed from 2011-2019 was 2.8 acres/MWdc57. Converting MWdc to MWac using a 1.4 conversion ratio yields roughly 3.9 acres/MWac. Therefore, the global solar panel fleet of 18.3TW will require roughly 71.4 million acres, or 0.19% of the total 36.8 billion acres global land area.
If someone cannot, this product was aimed at them. But for electrical engineering considerations, this is making a global production requirement estimate based on where already-existing projects are- not where future projects would need to be be.
Existing solar generation projects in the US are, by the nature, where it is most economical in the US to build the systems for the people they would support. A lot of that is in or near US deserts. Most of the global population does not live near within US deserts, or even within the US. Nor does most of the US population. Nor it is economical for even the US to transmit electricity 'merely' from the productive deserts to cities far away. It is considerably less economical to charge batteries on site and then physically ship them by truck or train to distant destinations, only to bring them back once drained for a recharge. Moreover, these are already occupied good sites. Additional solar panels farms will be, on average, less cost-efficient as the most cost-efficient locations are farmed first, and subsequent farms are added elsewhere.
Metaphorically, this is analogous to taking an average of output of some group of exceptionally bright students at a highly selective university producing Y amount of quality players, and then claiming that if only you only expanded the class by X, then you would have XxY output of quality papers from the university. It ignores the screening that went into the initial group selection.
What does this mean? Well, it means Masterplan 3 is deliberately underselling the solar panel production requirements- and possibly by quite a bit. Not some mere 5-10% margin, but potentially magnitudes more, depending on where the solar panels will be installed and under what policies. Germany's energiewende policy is an example of, well, extremely bad solar panel policy, not least because it chose bad places for solar generation potential. (Namely- Germany. Energiewende was a policy that started with the conclusion- build solar energy in Germany, then figure out where in Germany- rather than whether the policy should be.)
Similarly, look at where Masterplan 3 expects the increased mineral extraction to come from. These are, after all, the critical inputs for those refining investments.
If you are still looking, or haven't started looking yet, save yourself time and stop. It doesn't.
You can CTFL-F all the most relevant global producers of minerals, and none of them will show in the report, let alone an assessment of how much they can feasibly increase production. In fact, you won't even find the word 'country' in the entire report. National polities do not exist in this report, any more than funding sources, backers, or second-order effects of driving production to this proposal to the measurable detriment of others.
Heck, it doesn't even raise the issue of transmission loss between countries. It vaguely handwaves the issue on the US (the only country it addresses to any depth), and when it actually does...
For purposes of estimating material requirements, 90% of the 60 million circuit miles will be reconductoring of existing low-voltage distribution systems and 10% will be new circuit-miles from high-voltage transmission, which is the current ratio of US circuit miles between high-voltage transmission and low-voltage distribution.
Translated into plainer english- while assuming all the new power generation will be produced in places comparable to the highest cost-benefit solar generation potential, where it already does not make economic sense to transmit the generated solar power long distances, fractionally few new power lines will be created to transmit (via high voltage) the new generation to the (often distant from the high-potential areas) population centers to use it.
Translated into even plainer english- this proposal is not so much about building a new and far more capable power transmission network than already exists, but ripping out the existing one and replacing it with Something Better.
This is not a serious proposal. It does not address actual engineering problems it raises. It doesn't even have the virtue of existing to justify handing people money to try. It's primary purpose is to convince people that renewable energy in mass is cheap and affordable, and as proxy there will be increased demand for Tesla.
This is advertising to justify subsidies, not a master plan.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
I'm pretty optimistic that much of that is going to resolve itself in the short/mid-term. They're just a little behind on the battery front, but those are getting so absurdly cheap, they just have to pull their heads out of their asses and connect them.
Well, they also have to pull the mountains of lithium and other rare earths out of their asses as well, if not the ground. Which is already hard enough without casually asking China for a few more mountains as well.
There's a reason the article you listed tried to frame impressive growth in terms of ratios of batteries produced (battery storage increased by a factor of 100 in a decade, 16 nuclear power plants) and not in terms of absolute volume of storage needed (storage capacity produced versus storage capacity needed) or grid scale (16 nuclear power plants versus the 54 US nuclear power plants in service, when nuclear power is only about 1/5th of US energy production anyway). The former works from starting from a very small number, and the later would put the battery capacity projections in contrast to much, much bigger numbers.
Which is the usual statistical smuggling, as is the ignored opportunity costs obligated by solving the green energy solution that requires the battery storage at scale.
One form is that all the batteries being used for power system load storage are, by mutual exclusion, not being used for any other battery purpose. Given that the fundamental advantage of the technology of a battery in the first place is that it is for things that cannot / should not / you don't want to be connected to a power grid in the first place, massive battery investments to sit connected to the grid and useless for things that only batteries can do is a major cut against the cost-efficiency off all alternative battery uses of the batteries that could have been made for off-grid use. This is just a matter of supply and demand meeting with the absolute rather than relative scale referenced above. When your article is arguing that batteries have lower marginal costs then fuel power plants, they certainly are not factoring in the higher marginal costs for all other batteries, and battery applications, the load-storage batteries are increasing the costs of by demanding the battery materials.
The second form of opportunity cost is that a battery-premised grid balance plan has to plan for significant overproduction of energy generation to work 'well.' By necessity, the batteries are only storing / being charged with the energy generated that is excess to current demand in the windows where the renewables are sufficient. A renewable-battery strategy requires enough excess renewable generation in the good periods to cover the renewable deficits in the bad times... but this is literally planning to increase your fallow generation potential (100 vs 50 units of idle panels / turbines) in order to to charge the batteries for the time that 50 units of generation are offline. When your article is arguing that batteries have lower marginal costs than fuel power plants, they are also not factoring in that they have to build considerably more generation capacity to feed the batteries. (And compensate for the energy storage loss to, during, or from the storage process.)
Add to this that both the green generation systems and the battery storage are competing with each other for the same chokepoint- processed rare earth minerals. They don't use the exact same amount for the exact same thing, but they are competing for many of the same inputs. If you order X units of rare earths for storage capacity, that makes the X units of rare earths for generation capacity that much more expensive because you are increasing complimentary demand for the same non-substitutable good. A renewable-battery solution at scale is increasing the cost-pressure of a limited resource, not just for other uses of the rare earths but with eachother.
And all of that runs into the geopolitical reality that the country that has cornered the rare earths extraction/processing market as the input to these renewable-battery strategies is... China. Which absolutely has used cut-offs as a geopolitical dispute tool with countries with policies it finds disagreeable. While I am sure they would happily sell a few more mountains of processed rare earths for mountains more of money, it would be a, ahem, risk-exposed investment.
Risks, costs, and limitations that could largely be avoided if you did not invent a problem by over-investing in renewables in the first place. Batteries are a solution for the costs of renewables, but renewable generation weren't the solution to an energy challenge either. They were a political patronage preference to the already-engineered solution of nuclear power, which would free up massive amounts of rare earths for more useful (and less ecologically harmful applications) than renewable energy schemes.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
'The entire rotten edifice will go down with one good kick' ranks up there with 'and then the enemy will lose the will to fight' in my personal list of 'big indicators of really bad strategy.' There are historical examples of it happening, and you can even identify trends that make it more likely to happen, but strategies that bet on it happening, as opposed to factor in the possiblity, tend to be poor strategies.
The one thing that really baffles me is whether Hezbollah also failed to reign in its own militants itching for action given their lack of full greenlight from Tehran or likely Nasrallah himself. For all its failures and cosplaying at being a fighting force (uniforms for nasheed tiktoks, journalist vest for publishing in reuters, the senior Hezbollah leadership must have known that keeping its cards in reserve for any Israeli incursion was the right play no matter what Hamas did.
This presupposes that they didn't have as much of a greenlight as could be expected, with the patron parties distancing themselves from Hamas's decision after it became clear it wasn't going to spark the regional bonfire. Which, from my memory of those first few weeks, was pretty apparent in the first day(s). Hezbollah in particular had a pretty big anticlimatic drawdown in which they spun up the media organs like they were going to directly enter the conflict, demurred, and then 'quietly' began the artillery campaign after a bit later.
Though to be fair to past considerations, I am on record as believing that Iran has kind of lost the plot on managing its proxy warfare strategy. The curse of the deep state / cult of the offense strikes again, conflating strategic means with strategic ends and over-leveraging a strategic asset (the proxy network) beyond diminishing returns and into outright counter-productive tendencies.
Remember, the US is the hyperagent. Other countries don't make and execute their own decisions- other countries either act in accordance with American permission, or are forced to respond to American impositions.
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