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. No one yet has guessed multiple people, or a scholar. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
I don't need to cite a million papers to show that many Chinese people spy for China or take steps to advance China's interests.
You do, however, need good papers to show that ethnic Chinese are Chinese people solely because they are ethnic Chinese, or that 'many' is 'most' as opposed to 'a small ratio,' let alone whether the costs of the 'many' outweighs the benefits of the other 'many' who do not.
This is the typical smuggling of the conclusion that goes on with ethnonationalist constructs, both in the self-identification (what is an 'ethnic chinese') and in the external identification (the observable versus unobservable nature of loyalty) and in the cost-benefit (whether the costs of PRC-loyal ethnic chinese outweighs the benefits of non-PRC-loyal ethnic chinese).
I don't need the most reliable sources to prove that their sympathies generally lean towards the country they have ethnic ties to.
You do, however, need reliable and accurate sources. Particularly, you need reliable sources that can accurately distinguish between 'ethnic ties' and 'familial ties,' as the former has significant organizational and societal implications than the later.
If, for example, you take an ethnicity-based caution, then there are categorical exclusions on the basis of race to positions of trust / the armed forces, which in turn comes with the social and political complications of embracing formal racial discirmination on people for potential actions regardless of guilt, even if they are avowed enemies of the regime. If you take a family-based caution, on the other hand, then perhaps you don't give security clearances to ethnic han with family members in China who can be used as leverage against them, but you can employ people who lack said families in China (or whose families were purged by the CCP).
This is particularly so when much of an ethnic diaspora is a diaspora because of the misconduct of the ethno-state, including a non-trivial number being exiles of the current ruling party for issues in the current living memory.
I can't be bothered to do a 20 second search and bring up examples for pedants, I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
It would be amusing to see you fail to a practically textbook Chinese robbers fallacy, which was memorably coined for its statistical implications of the availability of non-representative examples.
Furthermore, 'Australian' is not an ethnic group.
It is, however, a distinct cultural group, and a national group, and a political-identity group, and various other forms of groupings that make it distinct, foreign, and unreliable to other [groups] due to the divergence of identity, interests, and expected activities, despite nominal genetic commonalities.
No one is particularly confusing the Australians for the Germans, or the Brits and the French, despite their ethnic commonalities. (Not least because the vague concept of 'ethnic' stretches as far or as narrow as needed for the argument of the moment.)
There is a reason that the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Britain are very, very closely aligned and similar in many respects. We both know what that is but one of us is choosing to ignore it to score cheap points.
A foreigner inventing caveats to claim they are not a foreigner and so benefit from in-group bias sounds like something a treacherous and manipulative foreigner would say to gain an unwarranted position of trust and persuasiveness over other people's opinions despite a lack of shared loyalties and interests (because they are a foreigner).
Real self-negating advocacy is taking a straightforward opinion 'states should focus more on national interests than profits or ideology' and trying to twist it into 'beware the Eternal Australian trying to manipulate you into... using your own state to advance national interests', as though this is a wise and useful revelation.
The irony, again, exerts itself, though I doubt you'll recognize the applicability (or nested irony) of citing your earlier post.
People are happy fighting wars to defend their nation, they are not so keen fighting for abstract causes.
Dean
Flairless
4mo ago
Why would you think you aren't? Just because you are in conflict with a spectrum notorious for internecine conflicts?
The credibility you granted to a currently unfounded conspiracy theory of Jews secretly arranging the murder of children for their nefarious ends.
I am all for recognizing the potential of false-flag operations, but setting up one in the format of a cliche is, well, a cliche. Hence setting it aside after recognizing it.
Dean
Flairless
4mo ago
When your own proof of not being a leftist is practically a cliche of leftist self-contrasting with other leftists, I'm inclined to just generally gesture in your direction.
You may really, really want to not be characterized as a leftists, but this is itself a common leftist trope- it's why many of the American leftists characterized them as liberals during the Democrats neoliberal era, while communists bitterly maintained they weren't real leftists.
Did the US even try over there?
Yes.
Was the whole thing just an excuse to put taxpayer money into rich people's pockets?
No.
People just nod and smile about the whole thing, like "of course we spent $2.3 trillion and got nothing for it other than neutralizing Al Qaeda, that's just how the government works".
The only people I've personally met who would nod and smile at that characterization were not supporters of the ISAF coalition.
It's kind of weird to me that there isn't more outrage about the whole thing.
Why? The level of weirdness would be consistent with the weirdness of your preceeding three questions.
Ultimately, outrage is not an inherent response to policy failure. Outrage is not the same as anger, but even anger is not only response- disappointment, shame, disgust, contempt, mockery, and more are additional options, and there was (and still is) plenty of that to be found.
Not directly, but indirectly. If you see some powerful people do some terrible things, and these people just happen by sheer coincidence, to be jewish about half the time (despite only 2% of the population being jewish), who could blame you for associating the two?
Anyone with the statistical literacy, which is why I asked the question you have tried to avoid.
Again-
How can non-existent people self-reflect about why they are hated in places they don't go to?
You're correct that I have never met any of the powerful people who are actively making life worse for me. They're just jewish at surprisingly high ratios.
If you have never met any of the people who are actively making worse for you, why do you believe you know who they are well enough to determine their relative ethnic distribution?
Moreover, if you have never met any powerful jews who actively made life worse for you, then how could the number of jews you have met who were not powerful jews actively making life worse for you provide a personal experience to believe that the jews as a collective are actively making life worse for you?
By your own statistics, you'd have a 0 encounter rate of powerful jews who actively make life worse for you, versus a X number of Jews who are not powerful and making life worse for you, where X is the number of Jews you have met in your lifetime. Unless you have personally known 0 jews, 100% of all jews you would personally know would be lived experience evidence against powerful jews being responsible for your misfortunes.
And it makes sense to distrust the elite, and even to hate them, for they know the consequences of their actions. Countless books (some dating back over 100 years) warn against what's currently happening in society.
Prejudice and scapegoating on the basis of historical ignorance are among the things the venerable classics warn against. On the other hand, there are countless old books filled with nonsense, including conspiracy theories and prejudicial scapegoating that other books warn against.
Dean
Flairless
2mo ago
Probably not the examples you want to use for that argument.
Employers do regularly lose money and value in employing bad employees and producing bad value. We know this because employers regularly go out of business. Those bad employees will be ideally fired before that, but their are reasons from corruption to labor protection laws to conflicts of interests why value-losing employees. Trades are made on an expectation of some sort of value gain, trade is not a proof that the value has bee gained. Especially when there are reasons beyond the initial value-premise that trades keep happening (not least because [value] isn't static).
Shoppers do regularly lose- in the sense of waste- money on goods and services. There are entire industries based around the legal and psychological tricks to make people spend more than they 'rationally' should, particularly for luxury non-essentials. 'Value' is not a fully substitutable nature- hence historic prohibitions against gambling and addictive, no matter how much 'value' that fun has, or against recognition that parasitic corruption is bad no matter how much easier it makes the 'buyer's' life to engage in that bit of society-wide prisoner's delimma.
Not all trades are good, any more than all investments are good. There are plenty of bad, corrupt, wasteful, and outright harmful investments. It is not hard to find histories of similar trade dynamics fully open to critiques of being driven by bad decisions and bad value judgements. Treating either 'trade' or 'investment' as axiomatic virtues because the point of the word is the good thing is not going to be convincing to skeptics of judgement.
In Greenville, SC, FEMA has taken over a runway with 10 helicopters that loitered all Sunday. For the past week, that runway was being utilized by private charities who were sending materials into the disaster area. Yesterday, it was out of commission for no visible or communicated reason.
The visible reason would appear to be 10 helicopters that were relocated to one of the multiple runways at Greenville airport?
In fact, the video shows another still being used by private charities. There doesn't seem to have been a 'stop' of aid flow through the Greenville airport. There isn't even a claim that this runway is needed to reach Tennessee.
There is an accusation that the FEMA helicopters are doing nothing based on... a glance towards a hanger that you can't see inside. Planning? Briefing? Crew rest? No way to know.
Meanwhile, a Blackhawk helicopter just wrecked a distribution center in Pine Spruce (Spruce Pine?), North Carolina. Was it intentional? I hope not. But it displays a level of incompetence that boggles the mind.
Yeah, whoever setup a light-weight tent on asphalt without weighting or tying it to the ground was an idiot.
That sort of thing could cause a helicopter to crash if a tent flew up like that, let alone who on the ground could get hurt if a vehicle or just a too-busy person knocked into the tent to hard. This is why airports regularly check for foreign objects and debris anywhere helicopters or aircraft engines would be near.
It's a good thing that helicopter was looking around. Can you imagine if that distribution center was supposed to receive a delivery of air-lifted aid?
Like, say, from a bunch of helicopters staged at a NC airport, possibly waiting for the results of an aerial recon to see where there was a good distribution center that could receive a helicopter lift?
Or- wait.
Was your accusation of incompetence aimed at the helicopter for the rotor wash that sent unsecured tents flying?
It's unclear. One of your links was a condemnation of what would appear to be the movement of and staging helicopters for distribution operations, and the other link was a condemnation of what appeared to be a helicopter doing an aerial recon of a distribution center.
I can't speak to the state of actual relief efforts, but there does seem to be a bit of an effort to manufacture this as a mirror image to Bush's Katrina response, which dragged on Republicans for a long time: see Kanye's infamous "George Bush doesn't care about Black people" line.
Now adays, any time there is a disaster in the United States, you should assume that there is a Russian social media effort to try and inflame and twist it. Sometimes a disaster doesn't even have to actually occur, and they'll just fake-news one. This is just one of the things they do, independent of any truth to any criticsm.
Which is funny to me because in hindsight it's less clear that it was purely the Bush administration's doing. Much can be said about the (blue!) city and state leadership not taking the imminent storm seriously even as the National Weather Service issued extremely dire warnings, but Mike Brown's leadership of FEMA wasn't exactly a "heckuva job" either.
This is underselling the culpability of the democratic city and state leadership. There wasn't merely a 'not taking the imminent storm threat seriously', but actively delaying and hindering federal support responses including by not actually asking for various types of assistance from the federal and other states until days later, instigating a posse comitatus policy freeze disrupting federal military assistance, and of course the police not merely abandoning duty roles but partaking in the looting.
When the local police are joined in on the looting and a state senator is diverting national guard assets to get material from his personal home, there's not terribly much an organization like FEMA can do.
At least that's how I see it under the "politics is unprincipled conflict" lens. I suspect there are real challenges to providing useful aid with so many roads inaccessible (as there were in 2005), and I doubt anyone is actually slow-walking aid, even if they are trying to play political football ("FEMA is running out of funds" "that's because you spent it all on migrants"). Personally, I don't know much more to do than pray, although I'm open to suggestions.
The steelman is that airspace is dangerous if uncontrolled, and so in a disaster a government doesn't want to be competing with airspace. This is especially true when rescue agencies would be further diverted if they had to rerout resources to help someone who got themselves into a mess- like, say, by crashing aircraft into a town.
On the other hand, this administration is the heir to the one that repeatedly targeted religious medical charities if they didn't support abortion-enabling policies. There is an established vein of 'our way or not at all' in some parts of the US government.
I have no insight into this specific circumstance, but 'stop getting in our way as you try to help' is a real, and sometimes even valid, thing.
As opposed to covering up the context of an ongoing indirect fire conflict that had already seen hundreds of thousands displaced?
Blood libel credibility aside, northern Israel has been subject to a bombardment campaign for nearly 8 months now as part of Hezbollah and Iran's attempts to open a second front, and the Israeli-Jews and others evacuated a long time ago. Something like 80k Israelis were evacuated by March, not including those on the Lebanese side, and while reliable numbers on rockets fired are hard, we are talking in the relative ballpark of ten thousand, and part of the reason Israel withdrew its people is to reduce the cost of trying to intercept all those rockets by, well, not needing to. And thus letting them land.
When you are willing to launch thousands and thousands of rockets, even low probability events will keep happening. The low odds of a Hamas rocketing it's own hospital in Gaza didn't make it an Israeli strike, and it's not like Israel is timing its diplomatic engagements to the US with Hezbollah attack planning, or Hezbollah/Iran changing their attack plans during Israeli state visits to the US.
I am pleased to see you have abandoned without defense the claim that Ukraine is a completely irrelevant country to the resolution of the Ukraine War in Ukraine.
I look forward to your future rejoinder that similarly attempts to avoid defending that claim.
Wait though... you're still not giving any actual specific reasons based on my writings to show that I am a leftist.
My reasons were that you adopt framings of leftists. I add to it that you adopt the tropes. These are both specific reasons.
I mean, if I was a leftist it's not like I would be embarrassed by being a leftist.
Why not? In the American parlance, post-Cold War use of 'liberal' itself was a label of leftists embarrassed by the socialists on their flanks, and used to try and distance themselves from embarrassing ideological relatives.
Leftists being ashamed of the various leftist labels is why we have euphism treadmills where terms like woke replaced terms like SJW when SJW went from being a mark of pride to cringe, or how 'cultural marxism' went from an academic term to a rightwing slur that never existed.
I would proudly wave a leftist flag high, since I am pretty straightforward as a person (sometimes too straightforward) and I would have no good reason to lie on this site.
Alternatively- you are a contrarian. And you are on this site, in this community, because the group you are a contrarian in contrast to are not the people on this site, but the people of your own information silo / social bubble, particularly those in positions of authority to impose things upon you that you dislike.
Which are not- and you can correct me if I am wrong here- Red Tribe rightists.
You defining yourself off the contrast to your political bubble context would both be honest, and would also not disprove anything.
I'm Australian;
[Insert ad hominem fallacy on an account of foreigner category]/Joking.png
Am I correct in thinking that that guy, assuming he really is a US Army recruiter, will probably get in trouble for that? One would assume that this would be in flagrant violation of recruiter codes of conduct, and possibly implicate him in violations of base security protocols.
You could be correct, but you could be incorrect. It depends on more information than we have.
One of the weird things about the initial claim is that the Pentagon banned tiktok from government computers in 2023 barely a year and a half ago. In fact, there was an Army recruiting scandal in 2021 about use of TikTok when not supposed to. If an American recruiter is doing recruitment on TikTok, he is either doing something very wrong regardless of message/loyalty concern (violating policy), or may actually be operating within approved scopes (is operating within special exceptions).
If it's the later, there may be no violation at all. It may, in fact, even be the point.
More on that later, but it's not like the militaries lacks people who garner contempt for wanting to sit out specific conflicts. Kamalla Harris's vice president pick during the recent US election had the baggage that he tried to present himself as a service veteran despite possibly having arranged to get out of his reserve unit's overseas deployment. It's not exactly hard to find dissent within an institution over 2.8 million strong (standing military, reserves, support civilians), with some people shaping (or ending) their careers to not be associated with some conflict / etc. In past unpopular wars, it wasn't unknown for people to join entire other services (such as joining the Navy to avoid being drafted into the Army in Vietnam), or to unceremoniously retire to avoid deployments (in the Iraq War era there was a surge of American reserve / national guard retirements by people who were content to be in the reserves during the 90s when it was considered low/no risk).
Ultimately Ranger's argument relies on assumptions of a separate topic (presentation of loyalties, as opposed to policy adherence) where there's a perception of what sort of loyalty people think is required (members must be willing to fight all enemies and say so!) that is less absolute in practice.
It's less absolute because manpower is not only limited (there has never been an endless supply of ideal candidates), but manpower is often both fungible (one person here can free up another person to go there) and mutually exclusive (person trained for expertise A can't be used in occupation B anyway). Full-throated concurrence with all wars wasn't a requirement in the conscription era (where conscientious objectors / pacifists could sometimes be shunted to support roles, or just put in risk and expected to save themselves), nor is it typically demanded in a volunteer-service model (where service members have some significant influence over their careers as they reach higher ranks, and thus can choose areas where they're not likely to do what they really don't want to do).
There are certainly cases / issues when an expeditionary military says 'go' and the person says 'I don't want to,' but these are both very rare at the level of the recruiter in question, and, uh, wouldn't be present for someone who is a recruiter.
///
Now to return to the point passed earlier, where it could be a context of approved message. (Emphasis on could.)
Ranger's argument works from a perspective of how this is terrible because lack of loyalty and inherent untrustworthiness and mercenaries bad and yada. Ranger is also very clearly not thinking like a manpower-capability developer (i.e. recruitment at scale), but operating from a basis of purity politic demands. Purity politics is bad force generation policy. Even governments obsessed with ideological compliance, such as the Soviets, used a purity-cadre model (political officers) as opposed to a purity rank-and-file model.
Starting from the most obvious, monetary incentives are absolutely a basis of building and retaining talent. This isn't an issue of 'mercenary' pejoratives, it's a point that that in a volunteer service model the military is an employer, and as an employer they are competing with all other employers to recruit and retain. Fundamental disconnect there, and also woefully ignorant of why so many of the common US incentives include post-service benefits, like paying for college (i.e. investing in domestic talent development after getting your military use out of them). This is why in modern history the American military has been often seen approvingly as a 'way up' for underclass Americans- it provides substantial training / more structured environments / post-service education that people may not otherwise be able to afford. It's not a guarantee, but it's a powerful incentive. Someone who serves 4 years and than leaves to enjoy college is not a failure, it's a success story of how you got someone to successfully serve 4 years at the lowest runs of the military and then improved their national value potential.
Part of any recruitment pitch, in turn, comes with conveying the perception of costs for taking the job. If a recruiter says 'you may never go see your family abroad,' then that is a lot of people who might be willing to serve but not if it means they can't serve abroad. Similarly, if a recruiter says 'you must be willing to fight the Chinese state, no matter if the PRC attempts to use your family as hostages,' then again, you are winnowing the field. The US military is designed to fight on 2 different continents at any time, with at least Europe and Korea providing non-Chinese fronts.
Further, a recruiting pitch that can appeal to both hard-core joiners (the people who would be more gung-ho than the recruiter) and the wavering (ethnic Chinese who would share the sentiment of not wanting to join a war against China, but would also not want to fight the US) isn't inviting a trojan horse with the later category, it's getting an asset.
The chinese language is, in a word, hard, and there is generally a shortage in any non-Chinese government of people who can speak and/or read it. As a result, there is a demand that far exceeds the supply in people who can (a) read / speak Chinese, and (b) are willing to do it for the government. Someone who is (c) willing to do it at an enlisted soldier's pay (low) at (d) enlisted soldiers hours (no overtime pay) and in (e) enlisted soldier's living standards (non-affluent) and at a (f) enlisted soldier's 'can be moved across the world to where most conveneient (incredibly high) is incredibly good value-for-money.
There is, in other words, a great many useful / desirable roles that a government wants a Chinese-speaker for, many of them that do not require taking up arms against the PRC even in the course of a war against the PRC. Many of them require no access to sensitive material / networks / resources either.
The role of any human resources / recruiting institution is to try to match potential incoming talent to desired needs, not to refuse to accept valuable talents because it is unsuited for any particular need. 'Speaks Chinese, but is not willing to fight the Chinese state' is not a the most desirable recruit package, but it's a very useful one. The questions / investigations of loyalty / questions of what they are willing to do are real considerations, but they are more questions on how to direct talent to the best cost/benefit position after they joined, not whether to encourage them to join.
They are also, critically, questions that go on well beyond the initial recruiter pitch. As such, a recruiter who is authorized to make such a pitch agreeable to such people, may be doing nothing wrong.
Do you have evidence to your claim, or do you not?
If not, why should your accusation not be analyzed in the context of unfounded anti-semitic conspiracy theories it shares notable parallels with?
You are not exactly countering that unfounded blood libel accusations exist or are invoked. Your own list of events to rebut the structural parallel... doesn't, on a trifacta of ignoring the structure (Isaeli claims on Iraqi actions is not structurally analogous to accusing jews of killing children), of invoking a demonstration as a counter-point (yes, the NYT and other global media parroting Hamas propaganda falsely accusing the Israelis of bombing a hospital and killing children is an example of spreading Jews-kill-children conspiracy theories), and a general composition fallacy (even were all your examples valid, it wouldn't mean anything on how others invoke anti-semetic conspiracy theory tropes and usages).
Nor are you countering that the context of this event is an ongoing conflict of such danger that over a hundred thousand displacements already occurred nearly half a year ago, or that such attacks are routinely ongoing without respect to Israeli foreign policy travel, or that the act of launching tens to hundreds of thousands of rockets into northern Israel will, over iterations, reasonably result in killing people on the ground in northern Israel.
Israel is routinely a target of conspiracy theories, so many that it ranges from the victim-blaming (accusations that the current government deliberately let the Hamas atrocity occur) to the comedic (the entire genre of local arab authorities arresting animals as jewish spies if tagged by Israeli universities). As such, charges that share the structure of conspiracy theories can be expected to provide supporting evidence, rather than just vaguely claim interests... not least because the demonstrated interests of large numbers of commentators in the topic also aligns with spreading and insinuated unfounded conspiracy theories.
Dean
Flairless
11mo ago
Of course, there's no changing the past, so I'd say the only thing to do is Be Good going forward. You have my faith that you can and will, as with this article.
Strictly speaking, there is a way to escape this trap, which is to fully admit to the past errors and stop using the tainted persona, adopt a new Internet pseudonym, and with it a new identity set unassociated with past errors. If found and pressed, (re)acknowledge the past errors, and make the point that the new persona is on the diferent path. It's hard, it doesn't assauge the worst opponents, but it is a clear and credible break with the past practices.
It also means, however, dropping the reputation of being one of the luminaries of the whole SSC-sphere, and for people who have devoted large parts of their identity and emotional sense of self into that sort of persona, that's unacceptable.
He dares to makes demands, to criticize us ...
Your cultural chauvenism / fragility is showing.
If whichever collective 'us' you are trying to appeal to has such a fragile ego as to take offense at a lack of groveling obeisence, it frankly deserves critique and contempt for being offended at a lack of groveling obeisance. Not only is it a sign of a fragile ego that will be perpetually offended, and thus safe to dismiss as 'Pope insists Catholicism is one true faith,' it's also indicative of an inept understanding of international relations (where performing ritual humiliation of yourself for benefactors is poor strategy) and strategic self-interest (where requiring ritual humiliation of your benefactees is poor practice).
Given that groveling is both a bad strategy for the state doing it, and a bad strategy to demand it for the state that might receive it, any 'us' who wishes to insist upon it deserve a good deal of criticism and demands to stop such ineffectual, shallow posturing that primarily benefits ego.
Do you retaliate with the full strength of your nuclear arsenal, do you launch a conventional attack, what do you do?
You eject the advisor who raised the dilemma for the same reason you would if they raised the fear of waking Godzilla: if you are in a decision to launch nuclear missiles, you want serious people asking serious questions.
If you are right to fire him you've just avoided a catastrophic nuclear policy failure that would lose your nation it's global position as a credible power for generations. Assuming a mass nuclear strike at odds with all intelligence, precedent, and political contexts of the supposed aggressor and backer states is the mark of an incompetent who should not be in the halls of power. You will have done your nation a service.
If he was right and the incoming missiles are nuclear missiles planning a preemptive nuclear holocaust, then your country is already doomed to lose its global position as a credible power regardless because there is currently a mass nuclear holocaust in progress and nothing you can do would stop it. You won't feel bad, or anything, for long, and he'll be dead too soon to be vindicated. The fact that the fate of the nation is the same whatever option he offered the atomic underscore to the point that it wasn't a good policy question.
Regardless of which, the second-strike nuclear capability is already underway and ready to ruin the lives of those who were so irrational that nuclear deterrence doctrine wouldn't work against them anyway, so even if you are about to be nuclear ash you can rest easy (or at least with a bit of spite).
Dean
Flairless
7mo ago
I agree with your conclusions, but disagree with your approach on 'what did they actually say' as a defense against Russian red liens threats. That's providing an overly strict definition of 'red lines' which assumes Russia actually provides clear coherent red lines and does so specifically via Putin, which isn't really how Russia operates.
Russia routinely provides a variety of framings / warnings / threats by different actors within the government. None of these have any actual binding power- Putin's own flip-flops/lies/whatevers have a long story, but the same applies across the foreign ministry, the military, and any other communication channel you like. None of these are absolutely authoritative, and any of these warnings may be ignored, or dismissed, or forgotten as useful.
What Russia does is more of retroactively justify an action based on some previous claim of a red line. There's always a 'our previous warning was ignored' warning to find, even as when Russia is making these warnings it uses them in a more aggressive-bounding function (in the sense of claiming more expansive red lines than one actually has, so that you can get more concessions without making a direct threat).
So when you say something like this-
So (at least here) he actually did not threaten nuclear war in the event of ATACMS strikes. He reminded everyone of Russia's nuclear doctrine. Which – newsflash! – is the same as or arguably more restrictive than US nuclear doctrine in this regard (the United States, unlike some nations, does not have preconditions on nuclear use.)
-this is wrong, because reminding everyone of Russia's nuclear doctrine is how Russia regularly makes threats, because Russia's nuclear doctrine is deliberately vague enough to create space to justify a response. That Russia routinely does not carry through with those justifications is irrelevant to the claim that it's not a threat, because if Russia were to carry through, then Russia would point to something like-
"Russia will also consider the possibility of using nuclear weapons when receiving reliable information about a massive launch of means of aerospace attack and their crossing of our state border."
He added: "This includes strategic and tactical aircraft, as well as cruise missiles and drones, hypersonic and other delivery vehicles. Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in case of aggression, including if the enemy using conventional weapons poses a critical threat."
-as the proof that it warned (i.e. threatened) beforehand.
In other words, it's a motte-and-bailey. It's a threat until it's challenged and retreats to the position of not being a threat, unless there's a counter-attack afterwards in which case it totally was a threat.
One of the two runways at Greenville airport.
Unless you think the loading and unloading happens at the runway itself, the point stands.
A 50% reduction of available runways is not the same as 50% airport throughput reduction, because the throughput of an airport is almost never limited by runway availability. This is why targeting runways is and of itself so rarely effective in a war, and why it's more important to target hangers and loading areas near the runways. Unless the runways are actually being constantly used at maximum capacity- which there is no reason to believe given the video's own lack of use of the still-active runaway and instead focus on a loading area- reducing runways is not what limits functional throughput.
This is especially true when a specific airport itself is not required to reach the end destination, which in this case is not Greenville but the places in Tennessee the video was claiming the flights were going to. There is no requirement for aid being flown to Tennessee to fly via the Greenville airport, because the aircraft flying to Tennessee via Greenville could fly via other airports. Fixed wing flights through Greenville could drop 100% and it wouldn't necessarily entail fewer goods reaching or passing through Tennessee airports.
Now you're getting ridiculous.
No, that was a shock-line opening of a genuine criticism. If the location is planned to be an aid distribution center, part of the plan's merit is how it plans to received aid to distribute.
Rotor wash is not an issue of aviator incompetence, it is the mechanical consequence of how helicopters fly in the first place. If you have any desire to receive aid via airlift, you need to plan your reception sites around those limitations. This means you need to not actively create aircraft safety hazards like FOD. There needs to be a place for helicopters to approach to either land or- at the very least- hover to hoist down pallets.
The issue is that the distribution point set up in the middle of a parking lot with an apparent lack of planning for receiving stuff by air. A parking lot is normally an excellent location for an impromptu helicopter zone. It's naturally flat, open, few obstructions to create rotor backwash, and naturally connected by and to roads for disseminating any goods downloaded from an aircraft quickly and efficiently to staging areas.
Instead, the on-site actors have made a functionally ground-only delivery reception point... in a disaster where ground-logistics were significantly degraded.
In order for that distribution point to receive any benefits from airlifted supplies, the airlifts will need to find somewhere else in the general area that meets helicopter requirements in order to unload. To reach the distribution site, those pallets will then need to be loaded on new vehicles, to be driven to the distribution point, which will then need to unload from the vehicles before it can be distributed.
This is not only doubles the number of logistical sites and loading logistics (forklifts, teams, etc) needed to support receiving aid, this also negates one of the advantages of air-lifted supplies in the first place, which is that they can be packaged in ways to facilitate fast dispersal that doesn't need forklifts that may be limited in a disaster area.
A pallet of rations air-lifted to a site doesn't necessarily need a forklift at all. If you have a surplus of bodies compared to forklifts- as is visible in the video- boxes of high-value/low-weight aid can just be directly carried off until the wooden pallet is all that is left, which can be picked up and moved elsewhere. This is far, far better in a disaster context than imposing a requirement to lift the pallet 5+ feet into the air (to put it into a truck for transport).
But this can't be done, because of how the organizers of the site have taken and chosen to use a parking lot. Which includes their choice of tent placement and not security it (or trash).
Now, maybe there are extenuating circumstances. Maybe that lot is the only one in the area. Maybe there are no resources to secure tents. Maybe there was literally nowhere to drag the loose trash that was just left in the middle of a distribution site, no man-hours or volunteer teams to move refuse to dumpsters to clear up more space, no time to plan or prepare for how to receive aid, no space to do things otherwise.
Or maybe they were using unsecured tents as sunroofs in the middle of the parking lot because it was convenient, and left trash in place because moving it was inconvenient, and didn't think through what that would mean if/when they become potential recipients of helicopter delivery and someone was sent by to do a check.
I get that 'FEMA bad, local volunteers good' is the narrative of the cycle, but this is what bad implementation looks like. Good implementation may be hard, good implementation may be beyond what can be expected, but good implementation is not what you are seeing if you are looking at the ground in that video.
Dean
Flairless
8mo ago
Out of the Disaster Relief Fund? Nothing, unless you consider Appalachia third world.
Indeed. Which is why their former employment does not suffice for why someone should care about their explanation / interpretation on a culture war issue.
'They worked for a smart person' is not a credit that bolsters one's own credibility, particularly when said smart man was known for routinely hiring people he thought were substantially wrong on major issues.
Why not just attack from NATO territory in Poland, Finland (only decided to forego neutrality because of the Ukraine invasion), or the Baltics? They are closer to the presumable targets anyway.
Because nukes.
Any geopolitical discussion on what Russia needs to survive as a state that does not acknowledge or address the role of second-strike nuclear deterrence is not a serious discussion.
All the more reason he should be brought back to defend himself!
And yet, he isn't, which you knew when you began to lambast it. I maintain it was in poor taste, as well as inaccurate.
But it did seem to be one of his most critical recurring positions, it's the position that I've encountered most frequently in other conversations with posters here who claim to be carrying his mantle, and, crucially, it's the position that was outlined in the post I quoted from hydroacetylene. So that's what I wanted to respond to in my post. My post was only intended to respond to that position and not any of Hlynka's other positions.
This would be part of the fundamental flaw in your critique, and further bolstering the validity of Hlynka's critique. Hlynka's positions were relatively closely interconnected, much as the various influences of the Enlightenment were interconnected, and attempting to take and argue over one element in isolation of the underlying substructure leaves a substantial hole in the discourse.
The more you talk around the premise of the hole or substructure argument, the more relevant that premises becomes. An argument of substructure doesn't get disproven by surface-level variances when the substructure argument already predicts and allows for surface-level variations.
But this isn't actually a good way of dividing up different ideologies. It's essentially a non sequitur. It's just something Hlynka latched onto because it seemed like a good way of putting all his enemies onto one side, while he got to stay on the other side.
You are continuing to demonstrate the point of Hobbes-shaped hole in political discourse. The hole exists because the avoiders of the hole reject the underlying premise even when they are aware of it, if they are aware of it in the first place. It is simply another expression of rejecting alternative but existing and relevant frameworks of analysis as an invalid basis of discussing/analyzing politics.
It really doesn't matter if you feel that underlying framework analysis is a bad way of dividing up different ideologies, any more than the narcissism of small differences discredits outside analysis noting relative commonalities. A characterization of you does not need your consent to be accurate or insightful. The same also applies to groups at scale. The premise that it does- that self-identification of most relevant attributes is what matters most- is simply another element of the common-cluster.
It is also a part of the cluster that creates the hole in social understanding when it fails to acknowledge / recognize the relevance of the hole-clusters, or their basis of analysis.
Put another way- you are demonstrating an analytic failure mode equivalent to those who criticized islamic extremists like ISIS of not knowing their own religion and being irrational. This was quite often false. ISIS did have an Islamic cluster-structure which informed their world view. It may have been different from what observerses believed an Islamic cluster-structure should be, but it was quite real, and quite relevant. It was real and relevant regardless of how little someone from another perspective disagreed or dismissed it, because enough people did share in the cluster that ISIS was able to be a major threat rather than an irrelevant marginal movement.
Hlynka's point on the hole in Enlightenment discourse is that various modern political elements that can be traced back to / self-identify with Enlightenment discourse have a similar cluster dismissal / divide. They do not recognize / acknowledge that their cluster-commonalities are not actually the scope of Enlightenment clusters. In turn, they make assumptions that divisions within their subcluster are major divisions in Enlightenment premise, rather than subdivisions of a sub-section.
It also just misrepresents the basic facts about what different groups believe, particularly in the DR. As HBD advocates, they believe in a relatively static human nature that cannot be reshaped by social institutions. Nor can their position be reduced to "white people inherently good, everyone else inherently bad"; they acknowledge that whites have a higher genetic disposition to violent crime than East Asians, for example, and that this would persist regardless of social arrangements.
You are continuing to conflate what Hlynka's regular arguments on the commonality between groups was. It was not an argument of shared surface-level beliefs and conclusions. It was an argument of shared underlying paradigm-assumptions, the common clusters, that undergird and shape the political discourse that reach diverging surface-level beliefs and conclusions but share underlying logic.
Dean
Flairless
4mo ago
NeZha2 is China's first big blockbuster. It's being heralded as a 'Deepseek moment' for Chinese cinema
By who? What is this supposed to mean?
With a few weeks of space between the initial marketing hype and observation, and Deepseek seems to be most notable for (a) claiming to have taken less money to develop (which is unclear given the nature of China subsidies), (b) being built off of other tech (which helps explain (a), and (c) being relatively cheap (which is partially explained by (a).
If someone feels it's inspired, okay- the vibe war for propaganda is what it is and anyone in a different set of contraints is liable to feel it's novel rather than just different- and it's not like it's impossible for good cinema to come out of a state censorship apparatus. But is 'Deepseek for cinema' supposed to imply 'Chinese government constraints, but cheaper'?
The general irony of the post, but this line in particular, is the Christmas present I didn't know I needed. Truly it could only have come from a self-identified Australian who regularly cites Chinese tiktok as a representative and reliable source of information, who has been an impassioned advocate of deferring to American geopolitical offensive-realists, and whom routinely uses collective self-identification terms with American and European audiences from nearly the literal opposite side of the globe.
(Another irony for non-Australians in the audience being that if you are to rely on the Ranger's opinions to shape your own, you would be opening yourself to treachery and manipulation from a foreigner, the best way to guard against being to disregard any foreigner's opinions. Self-negating advocacy at its most unintentional.)
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