EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
24m ago
Realistically it's somewhere in between. You have to understand that the US is literally Hitler to theocratic Iran. Not just morally, but in its "founding legend" and historical sense of self. So America is not just some foreign country, it's emblematic of their very independence. As such, chants of "Death to America" are somewhat patriotically entwined. Of course, now that we have literally been at war, the tone will probably be a bit different for the next decade.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
35m ago
Europe definitely agrees, but Trump is such a pain to work with that it's making it hard for them to actually do anything about it, because they know Trump will spin anything they do very loudly. He is simply incapable of graciously accepting quiet assistance, otherwise they would. In other words, Trump turns any action into a potential domestic political disaster, so coupled with the collective action problem Europe always has, of course no one is willing to stick their neck out even if they know that they probably should.
Plus, most of them are still pissed that Trump didn't involve them to begin with (they didn't get any sort of meaningful heads up) and in fact Trump initially bragged about not needing help, and then had the gall to turn around only a week or two later and trash them in public for not helping anyways.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
44m ago
> Poster specifically mentions factor analysis
> Blithely replies with yet another topline aggregate statistic
That's a statistical non-sequitur.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
54m ago
I don't think it has a strong moral valence either way.
Part of the modern discourse disconnect I didn't really mention is also how we mentally model feelings. I think some progressives believe (and this isn't actually all that unreasonable) that your feelings are so strongly interconnected with each other across scenarios. In that model, it would be bad, because this emotion of "danger" would inevitably bleed over to other innocuous situations (for example, maybe you then innately also feel even a Black coworker in a white collar workplace to be somehow more 'dangerous' than other colleagues, all else equal).
I disagree on two fronts with this progressive logic. First I think context is pretty strong in these situations. Second I think progressives often are very guilty of assuming all emotions are equally valid and real (and thus by implication must be sourced in some internalized attitude). Flatly speaking this is just wrong. Humans do not actually have amazing control over their emotions, and it's not uncommon for emotions to show up that aren't even all that deeply connected to the fabric of our existence and attitudes. They just show up. Rather than judge the emotion, we should judge the reaction to them, and feel free to discard them at times. Obviously we aren't like, ignorant or unaware of emotions - sometimes we do need to process them - but they shouldn't dominate our lives in every single regard, and we can generate emotions too to some extent (not just be dominated by them).
Progressives are correct that emotions can be data worthy of self-reflection (if I see a Black guy and feel uncomfortable, why might that be?), but they've messed up the scale of the matter pretty badly (it's absolutely not something automatically worthy of a moral panic).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1hr ago
Victimhood mentality requires far more than the mere allegation of inequality or oppression or whatever word you want to use (or is in vogue). "True" victimhood (the most problematic kind) is when you've over-corrected into a type of learned helplessness, and when victimhood begins to take shape as a defining and incredibly prominent trait, rather than just something you happen to experience once in a while. Merely claiming that oppression exists is not victimhood. Even claiming that oppression is near-universal is not victimhood. Victimhood is when it infects identity and behavior to an unhealthy degree.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1hr ago
I think we also paint things with a pretty broad brush. It's true there's really significant clustering geographically, but the Black community in Texas vs Alabama vs Virginia vs New Jersey seem to have some variations in how the culture presents, at least as far as I can tell. It's also in my actual experience a bit hard to disambiguate racial angles from economic angles - truth be told a lot of white women and white men who are poor also don't really seem to get along all that well. When life is hard, you have more complaints.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1hr ago
I'd say that someone's appearance and attraction is, mostly, uncontrollably subjective (and likely unchanging), so yeah it's a good instinct to be cautious of gatekeeping there. But part of the context of the conversation here is about personality and other stereotypes, so refusing to consider dating someone because you think their personality is probably a certain way is almost certainly discrimination.
Dating is a bit of a side quest though compared to most everyday interactions, since it's also not like people are entitled to a certain level of dating interest, and so I think it's reasonable to think that different aspects and phases of romance might need to be treated separately. Plus we all know opinions about 'checklists' for finding a partner are all over the place. Even with all these caveats, exempting dating entirely (as you seem to suggest?) from conversations about discrimination, prejudice, and stereotyping feels fundamentally wrong.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
Is this the most ToaKraka comment ever?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
Almost certainly you are seeing this too late, but on the weird chance you do see it on time: many women do in fact believe that there is no such thing as too many wedding day pictures. Bribe your friends, even literally, to take some candid shots that they can share!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
Having kids might change that, but I don't think it will.
Famous last words :)
I jest (mostly). Congratulations!
Another race discussion, another of a slight variant on the same, very contrived "dark road at night" scenario. At some point you start to wonder if it's just a lack of originality, or there really aren't any other similar 'gotcha' scenarios out there. I welcome more substantive comments, if you have them. And I know for a fact there was more you could have responded to there.
Obviously a new spot, fine. No one is pretending that tradeoffs don't exist. Even Jesus, the super (mostly) pacifist, didn't advocate for being an idiot:
I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves (Matt 10:16)
Safety tradeoffs are especially significant. Groups of men alone on the street at night is not a normal innocent thing either, that's somewhat race-independent. And it's also a group-level dynamic, at least mostly. The question is really only tangentially related to morality, and is a straw man. As the scripture says, it's possible to be wise, and also maintain an ethical purity that reveals itself in other situations. Also, we often have more than binary choices available to us, and I think people often underestimate the presence of these third-way options that leave everyone happier.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
I breezed through a rough transcript, but found it pretty interesting. Insofar as an internet dude can pass judgement, I think I'm actually going to declare her very much "not guilty" of the charge of discrimination. That's the opposite of her message. I ended up quoting a bit from it because I think there are some interesting nuggets of discussion inside. (I should also note that this video you linked is not the OP's video about NYC guys)
I'll say first of all, she talks about how Black women used to think about Black-Black relationships as "loyalty" but that's by the wayside - good! There's enough problems trying to find a lifelong marriage partner to have to restrict yourself to an eighth of the population (or less) out of some vague, ill-defined sense of loyalty. I think Black Power and the associated feelings were super important to the Black community for a few decades, but no longer serve their best interests so to speak.
If we want to find love, if we want to find a partner who accepts us and loves us, we can't minimize our dating pool to such a small small percentage of the population. Many black women feel they should marry down before they marry out. I explained in the book why black women should not be pressured to sacrifice their own chances for happiness out of some misplaced loyalty to black men, nor should black women feel beholden to black men under the guise of advancing the race. If the price of racial solidarity is a bad intimate relationship, then the cost is too high. Black women should not be held hostage to the struggles of black men, so like I said only dating black men really minimizes your dating pool by a lot. Let's get into some statistics...
And yes, she gets very frank with the statistics. But that's exactly where statistics should be used, yes? At least when assessing what we might call "dating strategy".
She also talks about how Black men have internalized some of the double standards that hit Black women especially hard, and you know what? That's true. I absolutely, positively cannot stand Jasmine Crockett. But I will say that the notion that, as she says, "we are never enough: we're too dark, or we're too loud, we're too demanding, we're ghetto, we're ratchet, we are all of these things" is probably tough - (especially Black) women DO need to walk a bit of a tightrope without any traits that are too "extreme". (Men actually DO have a parallel to this as well, especially when it comes to sexuality, but that's another conversation for another time). And media representation of Black women is an exercise in true whiplash (and yes, Black creators are partially to blame). The problems of race, both "self" inflicted and otherwise, are real, even if they aren't defining. Then we get I think the heart of the rant (apologies for poor formatting but I don't want to spend forever correcting the auto-generated transcript):
You know these guys have been coming with these very clever lines whining since the end of slavery pretty much 'oh my God, I can't possibly do all the things that all the other men do, it's unreasonable to expect it because slavery and discrimination and shit,' yet they think it's perfectly reasonable to expect black women to fulfill all these feminine requirements. You want submission, you want the house clean, you want all the child rearing and labor done, and you also expect us to go out and work? And now it's gotten even worse - I think this was their plan all along, now they want us to pay to have them in our lives. You were expected to subsidize these men like we do not also face discrimination and whatnot in trying to find and maintain work and getting an education and making money. I think it's interesting, you know, being a "baby mama" is very prevalent within the black community, that's where the phrase come comes from in the first place, and it's a very interesting place to be.
So basically she's saying that Black women in particular are tired of having a victim mindset. Great! I agree that's a very exhausting place to be, at the very least on a permanent basis. Does that come with some judgement for the men? Yes. But to me this is still speaking to group-level dynamics, with a dash of normal sexist-like expectations.
...and it feels like far too many black men who date out make it their entire personality and cannot go five minutes without telling the world how much better white women or Latino women are compared to black women, and this is probably the most prominent point of conflict of interracial relationships for black people
This makes me wonder how much of her rant is itself stereotypes, or media consumption, vs how much might be personal experience. I think that would change a bit about how I feel about what she's saying! But alas, we don't really get any extra information here. Her next complaint is, I'm going to be honest, this is just a man thing. It's not a Black man thing:
Where men think they want something, when really they want something else, they just want the illusion of it you know they want the illusion of natural beauty even if it's not natural, even if you are wearing makeup or you have lash extensions or you have extensions or a wig. They don't really care that much as long as they can't tell, but God forbid that you let that man touch your scalp and it's all over
So yeah. Standard complaints with a racial undertone. She's got this aside that's a theory about the specific pairing of white women and Black men:
I actually think that's why black men and white women go together, because they both have a privilege blind spot, where white women they have the privilege of being white, but the experience, the oppression, of being a woman; black men have the privilege of being men, but they experience, the oppression, of being black... so you know those are just some theories.
Honestly? Interesting theory. Maybe even true? I'm a bit skeptical still. But I think when it comes down to her main message it's pretty clear:
I'm not saying oh I don't believe in Black love; I believe in love in general. That's the thing, that's the point really.
I'm going to say this, white men are not the answer. Okay, I am all for interracial dating, you should date whoever makes you happy, that is the point: date someone who loves and respects you, and treats you the way that you deserve to be treated, someone who cherishes and loves you, and sees you for all of your beauty. I'm a little concerned with the pasta Lobster Trend and how it's gone a little too far - like many Tik Tok Trends tend to go - it's like you know oh fun p and lobster it's cute, and then a lot and then women start to glorify white men and they think "oh, white men are the answer, let me find me a white man, um so I can be happy, how do I find a white guy?" It's really embarrassing as black women to be glorifying white men and to be putting them on a pedestal, that is not the point, please let's not set back the black community centuries by glorifying white men, you don't have to get you a p and lobster... you can get you a kimchi and kebab, you can get you a taco, and burrito whatever it don't matter. As long as he makes you happy and he treats your right girl that's all I care about, okay, cuz at the end of the day a man is a man whether he's black, white, asian, Hispanic, godamn it it don't mean shit to me fuck ethnicity, like a man is a man.
Love it. Treat people like people. Endorsed. With maybe a little note of you know, it takes two to tango and put investment in the relationship, but time and place and all that.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
See? Again with the "them". (Genuinely not trying to be nitpicky and you didn't mean it that way - a family is a plural noun - but hopefully you'll allow the point.) I'm not talking about "them". I'm talking about specific people. I'm saying that if you see the new black family and then expect them to act per negative stereotypes and then that comes across even when you first meet them and say hi, that's bad. It's true that humans and especially modern Americans aren't super great at "firewalling" the two things, which the whole 'microaggressions' thing was a somewhat deluded and misplaced crusade at affecting, but it does take effort to extend some charity especially at first.
And of course you did list purely and universally negative stereotypes. The family could equally as well bring humor, food, a neighborly sense of watching out for the kids, hospitality, a deep faith, etc. Of course, there are some "culture-clash" values or practices that are a bit more value-neutral than selling drugs/blaring music at 2am/street racing that cause friction, sure. I'm not going to claim that all cultures and practices are of equal value either. But you have to admit starting out with "white = universally good" is not a great building block. I'll still stand by what I said though. It's really not all that bad if that's the true belief you have, but you have to be honest with yourself about whether it might bleed through or not. Only God will judge us by the contents of our heart, for everyone else in society, we have to make do with actual behaviors.
If you get right down to it most of us agree about this, but I think it's really easy to let the politically charged parts distract from it. And it tends to be a more prosperous and mentally healthy mindset to boot, when you default to trust rather than default to suspicion. That's the secret sauce of humanity's success and I don't think tech has changed it too much.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
No, see, this is exactly what they were talking about, and my comment above as well. You jumped straight to a factual debate about the stereotypes but that’s not the point. The point is, you have these beliefs about Muslims, fine. You think your views are more accurate, fine. Are you following it up by treating individual Muslims as dangerous and potentially violent as a baseline belief?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
Internationally speaking there isn’t a such thing as a neutral observer. Well, there are a few, but they don’t have the media and information collection apparatuses to be useful.
Next best thing is media diet. Financial Times is a classic because its clientele usually like realistic, no-bullshit news because they actually use it to make decisions. Personally I find a mix of The Hill and Politico also helpful, because they are matter of fact about the political behind the scenes action. Sure that’s a degree removed, but you can infer quite a lot about the facts on the ground by observing what the political actors are doing and how they are doing it/phrasing it. Frankly most other outlets don’t consistently cover politics this way, but again, why? Think of the consumer. Politico and the Hill are staples of congressional staffers who also have a vested interest in seeing how the winds are blowing without too much bullshit. At least that’s my 10 cents.
The problem of our modern age is that even very smart people are not very good at divorcing the “group dynamics” from the “individual dynamics”. Motte and Baileys specifically also don’t help here.
There are stereotypes, and many of them are rooted in truth. You may justifiably take some actions that reflect these stereotypes and that’s fine. What’s not fine is the small subset of people who seem to have no sense of tradeoffs - they turbocharge stereotypes with seemingly no upper bound to how powerful these stereotypes are.
Then there are your actions on a personal, individualized level. Meaning usually the recipient of these actions and attitudes. This is the crux of the disconnect. It might be fine for me as a salesperson to avoid marketing to, say, Hispanics. But if a specific Hispanic customer comes in, I shouldn’t treat them differently. Why? Well the most powerful piece is that I consider their identity as a human being to trump their identity as a Hispanic by at least an order of magnitude if not more. The second piece is that we want to live in a society that treats people fairly and sometimes it requires locally suboptimal choices to achieve a globally optimal result. This requires a degree of personal ethics.
If my neighbor goes on a rant about how Black people are bringing in all kinds of crime to the area, I might think it’s uncharitable, or maybe factually incorrect, and I might even think a little less of them… these are societal tensions that are understandable though, in the general sense. I’m not going to treat my neighbor way different based only on that. But it’s a degree of magnitude worse (or maybe two) if my neighbor then deliberately gives the cold shoulder to a Black family that moves in on our block.
Do you see what happened? He crossed the boundary line from stereotyping to personal racism. Which has a word: discrimination. This is a serious moral failing. Whereas the act of stereotyping is relatively speaking vastly more neutral. Discrimination is an action. Sure it might be sourced from an attitude, but there’s a big step there.
The waters get muddied because bad actors (and also overly defensive otherwise good people!) often retreat to the Bailey here. Some might assume that a stereotyper will also discriminate based purely on the presence of a stereotypical belief they hold. This is, well, understandable but bad, a lesser form of the same pattern of discrimination. It also provokes hard feelings because words like “racist” or “sexist” are pretty charged. On the other side of the coin sometimes a discriminator will defend their behavior by pointing to the stereotype as truth. I wish to call this out as bullshit. They are different things with different moral stakes.
And then you have a small handful of people who react to approbation with extremism. Not only are all these stereotypes true, they think, they are strong, they are universally applicable, and individualized discrimination is sometimes not even just a necessary evil but somehow good or wise. There are a few of them on this forum. Only IRL experience can pull them back from the brink, so words can’t really reach them. Usually this is a race thing, but you see the same pattern with the most notorious of incels. Think Elliot Rodger. They take some (maybe rooted in truth!) belief about women but then apply it with such a broad brush to individuals in their lives that it creates a cycle of unhappiness (on top of being unethical).
Anyways, your particular case is a classic. I would argue the woman on the street is fundamentally in a group-dynamic, stereotype paradigm. She is not levying an individualized discrimination. She’s being realistic about a mostly-true stereotype. If she were to follow up her statement with “and so as a rule I don’t date Black guys” then we have a problem. That’s discrimination because it ignores the humanity of individuals (and also creates hard feelings that are often counterproductive on a societal level). I realize this is not always cut and dry (what if she says “and so I’m reluctant to date Black guys?”) but I strongly believe we should save the vast majority of the moral approbation for this kind of specific individualized behavior. Kindness is a bit of a skill.
We (as a society, but particularly this is directed at liberals and moderates) need to (relative to current effort) speak up stronger against discrimination and not so strongly against garden variety stereotypes. It may be true that one leads to the other by tendency and in chronological order, but the focus should be on weakening the link. Conservatives by the same token (relative to current effort) need to call out those individuals that cross the line away from “mere” stereotypes and into outright discrimination better and not hide them behind a shield of persecution, victimhood, circling the wagons, or playing the Bailey card.
Why is gender “better” at avoiding discrimination? Because the link between stereotypes and individual behavior is weaker, as it should be. Women who spout off frustration at “men” as a category are one thing (common), women who treat specific men in their life like dirt because of those frustrations are another thing (thankfully less common and less accepted as morally fine). Simple as that. We should learn from this model and apply it to other areas where discrimination is problematic.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5d ago
Far and away the most frustrating ones are when I misspell a variable exactly once in an awkward spot.
Although, R has this thing where the logicals (booleans) TRUE and FALSE can also be replaced with T and F for conciseness (you can pass something like ‘param=T’ without typing the whole thing, which is awesome) … but T and F unlike TRUE and FALSE are not reserved key words! Once I accidentally assigned (capital) T or F as a variable and that was a nightmare to figure out why random things were breaking all over.
The other infrequent but annoying thing is “factors”. In data analysis often you have categorical variables with preset and limited values. You can make these into “factors” but really it’s stored as a named integer vector. Say we are storing HTML codes, 200, 404, whatever. You might in some common analyses cases treat them as strings, and categorical, although obviously they are maybe still ‘numbers’ in your head. If you aren’t careful, you might accidentally write ‘as.numeric(HTML_codes)’ but that will return the integers that are used as internal representations, (like 1,1,2,4,1) rather than the numbers (really strings) themselves. Because they aren’t strings anymore, they are factors as a data type, and R decided rather than have a special unique data type they would just implement it as an integer with metadata (the actual “value” eg “200” is stored as a “name” attribute). Honestly there are good reasons for that, but still a major gotcha. (A very common package import makes this a lot less mistake prone but sometimes coding in a hurry you might forget)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5d ago
I’ll yield to experience, but I do want to follow up. Just to be clear: are you sure this would still apply in real fight conditions? As I mentioned, most all grappling comes with some rules for what you are and aren’t allowed to do, and objectives differ. Because in a real fight, it’s probably more “do enough damage to make them give up” not just “make them temporarily helpless” - or even “knock them out” or “attempt to kill them” in other cases. It’s clear that many wresting and grappling and even combat sports evolve differently because they fundamentally have “repeat customers” and need to reach a certain safety and risk (and skill expression) tolerance to make that happen. It’s “sport selection bias” at play. When you were 140 vs 215, what exactly did victory look like?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5d ago
I mean just to pick something that has had a very personal impact to people I know, the NSF and related science cuts have basically been Covid-level fallout for higher education and related research. The fact this was done on purpose and even lauded is nauseating. For every person like my friend’s wife whose half-bullshit psych masters degree got derailed by a year or two, there’s two people like my aunt who got laid off from her incredibly important job at a primate research lab that does a ton of stuff on both infectious disease and cancer research, where the whole lab is probably going to close. For all the whining Republicans did about Covid pummeling K12 education with knock on effects for another decade or more, it’s extra astonishing none of them seem too concerned at all that the same thing is happening in slow motion at higher levels.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5d ago
Yeah. This has long been my position about the Trump rhetoric and phraseology. It’s brilliant politics, and honestly fair game, but transitions very poorly to governing where people actually do expect government officials to utter things with a stronger relationship to truth. Take Trump’s recent threat about ending civilization in Iran. Facially, that’s a nuclear bomb threat. The fact we cannot tell if that’s what he means or if it’s pure vibes is dangerous. Even if we assume it’s pure politics, it degrades the future ability to rationally assess the official positions of the government and facts on the ground. What particularly grinds my gears is some of the most ardent defenders of Trump around here have taken the simultaneous and cognitively dissonant position that Western civilization is in trouble because it is losing high trust social dynamics. But no, it’s the darn immigrants and their trust-caustic culture that is at fault, or maybe the darn liberals and their moral purity crusades, it can’t possibly be something as simple as the loss of trust from a direct attack on institutions or a President who lies and exaggerated as easily as he breathes.
So, I remember reading this a year or two ago, and I thought it was so apt I'm just going to roughly word-replace it because history rhymes. I mean, it's eerie. In some spots I've simply struck through the original words rather than [replaced] them, because the original bears keeping in mind too.
Bipolar Iraq Iran, By Michael Wolff EverythingIsFine (original here)
Here are the two opposite story lines:
(1) It’s working.
(2) It’s a quagmire.
Let’s fill them out a little more:
(1) [Iranians are hiding and scared; their military is in shambles, their leaders are either killed or too scared to even appear for video messages, their missile production crippled]. By virtually every [military] measure, the state of [Iran is vastly weaker] now than it was during the reign of [Joe Biden]–and it will be even [worse] in the near future. As [military] experiments go–[reducing missile capacity, gaining diplomatic leverage, reducing proxy activity]–there is every reason to be optimistic (and even proud) about this one.
(2) We’ve gotten ourselves into an ever-expanding war with a fanatical and well-armed resistance. What’s more, growing numbers of [attacks on energy facilities and tit-for-tat drone strikes are swamping] this battlefield, which threatens to turn [Lebanon, Israel, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq, Saudia Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, and the entire Persian Gulf region, and especially the Straight of Hormuz] into a permanent [Iran-sympathetic oil tanker nations] versus non-[Iran] front and international tripwire. We’re stuck in a situation with consequences and financial burdens that we cannot estimate. This is the definition of quagmire. And by the logic of quagmire, the situation only ever becomes more intractable and the consequences more fearful and destabilizing.
As you read those quick précis, your inclination is, invariably, to pick one. They can’t, after all, really exist together. Or, if perchance they do exist together now, one will inevitably come to overshadow the other. Obviously, if you’re a [Trump] person, you choose the former, and if you’re an anti-[Trump] person, you choose the latter. In some sense, in fact, these are not even alternative views of the reality in Iraq as much as opposite worldviews applicable to almost any situation.
(1) There is, quite simply, the patent superiority of the American way. When people are exposed to it, it spreads like a virus. We have not only righteousness on our side but modernity and economic [and military] reality. [Two hundred] billion dollars changes any equation. Everything seems messy, inchoate, ugly, fraught, without organization; but at some point in the organizational process, rationality and benefit will begin to become clear. Upside will outweigh downside. Ambivalence and self-doubt are the real killers here. Long-term investment and staying the course are the solutions and the way to get a big return.
(2) An incredible arrogance chronically pervades the American mind-set. Our lack of self-doubt makes us stupid. We’re blinded to the intractable problems set against us: not just to a deep cultural antipathy but to a million details on the ground that the guys at the Pentagon or at Centcom HQ in Florida don’t have the patience or the language skills or the in-country intelligence to think through. What’s more, because we pride ourselves on “can-do” and turn up our noses at intellectual and abstract analysis, we never really or accurately appreciate cause and effect. We’re always the victims of the law of unintended consequences. Because we’re too big and too quick, we necessarily upset the ecology in ways that will certainly come back to haunt and terrorize us.
(1) Essentially good news.
(2) Inevitably bad news.
Which brings us to the [rescued pilots in Iranian territory]—and before that the attack on the [Saudi Arabian Embassy], and before that the [Kuwaiti base] attack.
The fervent bad-news-ites seem to believe that the BushiesTrumpists understand the kind of mess they’re (we’re) in and are doing everything they can to disguise (spin) it and to blame someone else for it. But the more interesting and complex and difficult possibility is that they don’t see it as a mess at all.
For them, these bad-news incidents represent an illusion created by the small resistance, the leftover [Islamic Republic of Iran and IRGC holdouts]. These thugs and irregulars. What we have here are isolated acts meant to sow widespread fear—it’s just, well, terrorism. The odd thing, of course, is that such terrorism is exactly why we went to war—so it’s rather disorienting to have it dismissed now as somehow inconsequential in relation to the bigger picture.
It’s not bad news, the [Trumpists] seem to be saying, as much as bad PR—or the other side’s good PR. The bad guys have effectively influenced the media coverage without, the [Trumpists] seem genuinely convinced, affecting the reality. [Our military and diplomatic position] gets better and better—except for the fact that these scumballs know how to generate bad press for the Americans who are making [the long term balance of power in the region against Iran] better and better.
Hence the [Trumpists] have countered with a campaign to generate good news. There is even the sense—again, a reality inversion—that the best way to deal with terrorism is in the court of public opinion rather than on the battlefield.
So the good-news offensive. The mainstream media—because it is overly liberal and crassly superficial—is emphasizing the (minimal) bloodshed [and economic fallout] and ignoring the story of a [dominant, overwhelmingly competent military campaign]. And there has been the careful parsing of the story: carving the [Iranian elite] from the rest of a (largely) pacified [rebellious and also humbled] country; rushing in American [marines] (and then [using them as threats]); separating good [Iranians] from bad [Iranians waiting in the wings to revolt].
And, indeed, there has been a sudden rush of not unconvincing good-news accounts. Life was terrible. Life is better. Nothing worked. Now many things are working. Average [Iranians] may not be embracing the American [offensive], but they are sure grateful not to have [Khomenei] around. Life, as seen by [the stock market], [will soon be] returning to normal.
But there are the bodies.
The [Trump] people, as they argue their story line, have to distract people’s attention from the dead. The president doesn’t mention the bodies; doesn’t attend funerals. Body-bag shots [and indeed any video or photos about damage to US bases] are on the media proscribed list. You can sense their frustration in this regard—that the bodies are always, annoyingly, the story. This is partly a military-civilian disconnect. Our job, you can hear [Hegseth] saying, is to minimize maximize [foreign] casualties, not to eliminate them [and certainly not civilian casualties]. In sheer military terms—troops deployed versus casualties sustained—it’s not even that bad. Arguably (although it’s an argument you lose by making it), the kill ratio indicates a big success. I mean, you can’t really fight a war if everybody is precious—if nobody is expendable.
And yet, the great nonmilitary sensibility of the country, and of the media, sees each body as a story, and multiple bodies as a bigger story, and the aggregate of bodies as a really damning piece of evidence.
There is a socio-military calculation on the part of reporters and politicians (both Democrats and Republicans) and, one would assume, military people as well, as to how much is too much. What’s sustainable and what’s a big problem?
When the number of soldiers killed in the aftermath exceeded the number of people killed in the actual war[time it took to reasonably accomplish our initial goals in their entirety], that was seen as a problematic milestone.
When the total number of people killed in Iraq II[this confrontation] surpassed the total number killed in Iraq I[when the US killed Soleimani, in just the first day], that got serious.
Oh yes, and significant multi-casualty incidents are major bad news. Mogadishu levels would be very dicey. Beirut levels in the Reagan era might well put the whole proposition over the top.
Now, what the [Trump] administration is arguing is, in effect, that our enemies know these numbers. That they cannot damage us enough to truly harm us or even to actually hamper our mission, but they can inflict enough damage to frighten us (or frighten you—or frighten the media)—precisely because our tolerance for damage has been set artificially low.
Not least of all by Democrats and by the biased media!
And so we move from a military war to a political one.
This is the exact opposite of the wars of the last generation—of the Clinton[Obama-Biden] approach or even of the first [Trump] administration—that constant and obsessive cost-reward analysis.
Of not being caught out there without a way back. Retreating from Mogadishu[Kabul and all of Afghanistan]. Not following Saddam into Baghdad[Iran's Soleimani retaliatory strikes up with a larger strike, calling it off with 10 minutes to spare]. Of always making the calculation about when the consensus might divide. Of not making people choose sides. Of not letting there be two stories told at once.
The [Trump] people don’t believe there are two sides. Not two right sides, anyway. This mission is sacrosanct. The WMD canard and the sexing of intelligence reports happened, not least of all, to protect the mission [[no changes!]]. Nobody is going to go for broke in an elective war—it had to be a necessary war.
There’s no debate. There’s polling (of course) but no interest in consensus. Stubbornness (Rumsfeldness) is both virtue and strategy. If you refuse to engage in any back-and-forth but just say what you believe relentlessly, repetition eventually changes perceptions.
Righteousness went out of favor in the post–Cold War world (incrementalism, globalism, complex systems analysis came in). But righteousness is surely back. The righteous don’t compromise, don’t negotiate, don’t wimp out. The righteous (even if they had planned not to have to) take casualties (unlike that thoroughly nonrighteous [Biden], who hated to take casualties).
There’s no longer even a pretense that this is about conventional success measures (indeed, failure suddenly seems part—even a necessary part—of the great ultimate success). The we’re-not-quitters stance of the Trumpists (and that the Democrats are, ipso facto, quitters) is explicitly disconnected from any talk about how we’re actually going to win.
The arguable merit of the [Trump] position—life is certainly [going to be] better in [Iran]—is subsumed by its larger, relentless, messianic, and fatalistic ambitions.
We’re at the bear-any-burden stage. That is, in most political terms, a wildly unpopular place to be. We are, after all, selfish, self-obsessed Americans.
So the only way they’re going to sell this is to turn it from a problem-solving issue into an ideological one. “We are fighting that enemy in [Iran] today so that we do not meet [his nukes] on our own streets, in our own cities,” said the president.
It’s a setup. We’re going to have to choose position (1) or position (2).
The Democrats and [Rashida Tlaib] play into that hand ([Trump]-bashing [by TDS-afflicted people] is probably good for the [Trumpists].)
It’s them or us.
Winners or losers.
Lefties or real Americans.
We’ve been here before, and we know how badly it turns out.
Okay, sure, not everything maps cleanly. However, the points about casualty tolerance, the media propaganda games including by Iran themselves, the insistence that somehow things will be better if we can just finish winning, the rapidly spiraling military and (this time also) economic damage with no clear end in sight, heck even talk about boots on the ground as a temporary measure that will surely be the final thing to bring the enemy to the negotiating table, or the delusional talk about how the regular people of Iran will somehow be so empowered by American actions that they will fix everything, the political tribalism, the shifting goalposts for victory, all of these things have pretty clear parallels for us. I'm sure I missed a good parallel or two at least once in there. And also, Michael Wolff was once an incredible writer (what happened?)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5d ago
A lot of responses that are non-central to your question. Grip strength, powerlifting, etc. You (originally) asked about fights. It’s my understanding that many if not most fights end up as glorified grappling contests, especially when at least one of the participants is untrained. As such, it’s far more fair to consider fights as grappling contests. Especially when we are talking Black Widow comparisons. Think "half-drunken skirmish outside the bar by people who hate each other". Time and time again most fights pretty soon devolve first into close contact, one or both grabbing the other and attempting punches or other action with a free hand, and then pretty soon it goes to ground. If both people are really out to do damage, at this stage the fight usually doesn't last an incredibly length either.
In this context, a few hard truths. Weight matters a LOT. Like a lot, a lot. Wrestling is very very narrowly sliced up into 10 or 15 pound windows for a reason - and other combat sports too! ~50-60 pound weight advantage is massive that even a very skilled grappler will have trouble with. This is not linear: say a 20% body weight advantage is big, a 50% advantage might be insurmountable. Critically, in uncontrolled grappling, the skill advantage is even weaker, because there aren't really "rules" limiting what you can do. Remember that body weight scales better than muscles do, essentially, in humans. Why weight? Mostly, inertia, though bulk can help. Sheer mass makes it more difficult to be swept, moved, submitted, etc and it doesn't usually take much skill to leverage weight offensively either. Moving a huge weight is really exhausting. Factor #1 is almost always weight.
Now, I know you said "I'm making sure to equate the sizes of the woman and the man" so forgive me if I've gone off on a tangent, but "all else equal" isn't very realistic. Pure weight matters more than almost anything else, and weight differences are pretty common. The other things are more fun to talk about, and sometimes have culture war implications, but weight is the boring but accurate answer.
Gender is probably #2. Upper body strength is actually pretty important in grappling, and men have more even just proportionally, plus men with their broader shoulders and generally longer limbs and height (even denser bone!) can have some real substantial advantages in leverage, which is a force multiplier. Men have better muscle fiber density and explosive power. All else equal, it's probably true that a gym-trained woman can beat an untrained man pound for pound, but even a bit of training erodes that.
Skill falls probably down to #3. As mentioned, chaos is less kind to skill than sport is. Okay, one caveat: I think pound for pound skill probably comes above gender (!!). But skill scales much, much worse. Most fights, again, are not pound for pound. Your question is fundamentally asymmetrical: how much does the skill of a very fit woman impact her fight chances?
Gym training is probably #4. It's real but usually overstated. Functional strength encompasses wider ranges of movement, better positional awareness, flexibility, etc. It's fun but unrealistic to isolate this completely from #2 as well, as we do use our muscles regularly in daily life, not just in the gym. Many men use muscles in their work or leisure. So gym training has some limited upside, and we all know that you get up against diminishing returns pretty easily.
So, a few illustrative matchups:
-
170 pound fit regular guy vs trained 170 pound trained grappler. Grappler wins north of 90% of the time. Skill is super potent when things are roughly balanced.
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170 pound pretty good grappler vs 240 pound untrained but not pure fat regular guy. That's a big ask, probably near the tipping point I think. On the feet the bigger guy can just fall on the grappler. Bigger neck, wrists, legs all make pins harder and escapes can be exhausting.
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140 pound fit very trained woman vs 150 pound untrained but healthy guy. The woman wins a pretty large chunk of the time. Competitive but not dominant - grips on arms are hard to get out of, in the chaos of an uncontrolled fight raw explosions of strength can be a problem, but if she's willing to fight dirty and is smart on her feet she should be able to do fine.
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200 pound top tier male powerlifter vs 185 pound guy who did a good amount of wrestling in college 5-10 years ago. The lifter is crazy strong and has amazing grip, posture, resistance, etc. But the wrestler has spent years shooting levels, sprawling, controlling wrists, and understanding base. The lifter doesn't know what a double leg feels like coming at him, has no hip defense, and will be exhausted in 45 seconds of real scrambling. The wrestler wins this handily.
On top of all this there's an irreducible source of variability of the chaos of a serious fight. Humans can get injured easily on some uncontrollables. Someone slips, hits their head in a weird way, uses a makeshift weapon, makes a passionate error, all this means there's usually an upper limit to how dominant any single person can be. I think this is actually the silent killer, the black mark against a Black Widow: sure, maybe she can take down 4 guys in a row especially with surprise at her back, but it only takes one time to mess up when the margins are thin and so maybe a fifth will go wrong.
(I didn't talk about tech or weapons, of course, that's a whole other ball game. Black Widow has like, stun guns and stuff, but also guns exist for everyone.)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
16d ago
Why is this narrative making the rounds? Yes, okay, Netanyahu and a few of his allies wrote articles supporting an Iraqi invasion, and Israel shared some intel with us, but there's also a pretty large body of evidence suggesting that a lot of Israelis (especially government officials as opposed to pure politicians) felt like it was a distraction from the 'true threat' of Iran, the Axis of Evil member they cared a lot more about. No one seriously believed that toppling Iraq would weaken Iran, after all. And as history proved this notion was indeed idiotic; Iran profited greatly from Saddam's downfall and Israel pretty directly suffered as well as Iran-sympathetic militias and religious groups gained greater control. On the whole there's really no good argument that Israel puppeteered us into Iraq.
Afghanistan? Sure, Israel supported it (happily). So did almost everyone though (at least in general). Other countries and their populations disagreed about how militaristic the response should be (and how quickly the US should have reached for that option), and certainly weren't as gleeful, but the notion that Israel effectually egged us on is extremely skimpy on evidence. In Afghanistan we had invoked Article 5 with NATO, had UN backing, had an obvious grievance, etc. and it's absurd to suggest Israel possibly could have meaningfully moved the needle there.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
16d ago
I think it's more a result of the gaping hole here of anything resembling a mainstream liberal. There's plenty of non-anti-semitic anti-Israel people that exist, but this place is kinda warped.
Totally orthogonal, but FYI it's "in the vein of" - it was originally a mining analogy, since ores show up in "veins", if you're in the same vein it's implied to be a thing of similar type.
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