Goodguy
20hr ago
I think she did. Sometimes people need somebody to tell them that their emotions and habits are making them do really stupid things, like drink a lot of alcohol every day or regularly interact with a man who has a non-trivial chance of murdering them. That's one of the good things about friendship actually, the ability to have somebody tell you things like that and to help somebody else by telling them that.
Goodguy
1d ago
I don't know if I'm right, but my hunch is that even if that is true, men nonetheless have a higher rate of causing serious damage because they are much stronger than women.
Goodguy
1d ago
I can make a conscious choice to love my wife
I find this to be an interesting statement. Could you please elaborate?
Goodguy
2d ago
Look at the US - where housing prices collapsed in the Sun Belt in 2008/2009 by 50% in many places like Arizona even as the population broadly rose
Didn't that happen partly because a bunch of new houses were built?
Some arguments in favor of the US either ending the war or losing the war are the following:
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The war encourages the "imperial Presidency", a dangerous concentration of power in the top of the executive branch. This may have negative effects on checks and balances in the US. Which is not to say that the imperial Presidency is anything new in US history, of course. Trump's version is just the latest in a long line of them. Nonetheless, Trump's extremely broad ability to make sweeping foreign policy decisions feeds into a "populist strongman" image that is appealing to many people but may be bad for the country in the long run. For example, victory in the war could encourage Presidents in general to seek the optics of easy foreign policy wins in order to make up for domestic policies that do not actually do much for the average American.
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The war encourages the growth of an unhealthy fusion between American, Israeli, and Gulf Arab elites, a fusion that I think likely involves shady corruption and motives of personal enrichment and might even include intelligence agencies working together to bypass their theoretical legal restraints. Israel at least is a democracy. The close cooperation with the Gulf Arab elites is of course not new, but Trump's policy is likely to bring them even closer to the US-Israel fold than they were already, and since Trump probably doesn't really care much about democracy, he is unlikely to pressure them to reform their political systems. It is geopolitically understandable why during the Cold War the US supported any brutal dictator it could find who was willing to fight communists, although this policy partly led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths - however, such close ties between the US and authoritarian governments are, to say the least, unlikely to help the political health of the US.
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The US seems to lack the political will to do whatever it takes to overthrow Iran's government, something that might in fact require a ground invasion. As a result, continuation of the war causes the Iranian people to suffer without actually giving them a better government. This also affects future US foreign policy: in the future, people who are being encouraged by the US to rise up against their governments may have second thoughts based on what is currently happening in Iran.
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It is possible that the overwhelming military success in the war could cause US foreign policy decision makers to become overconfident in confrontations with China, which could potentially increase the chance of a mutually devastating war between the two countries.
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The unilateral and gangster-esque way in which the US and Israel have been conducting their various military operations (kidnapping, surprise assassinations, threats to send another country into the Stone Age, etc.) allows the two countries to achieve short-term wins but at a high reputational cost. Given how Iran acts, I'm certainly not going to argue that such conduct is one-sided. I'm pretty sure that the Iranians would like to assassinate Netanyahu and Trump and bomb US and Israeli civilian infrastructure on a large scale the second they could do so, it's just that they don't have the capability to do it. And Israel's massive military response to 10/7 is understandable. However, people expect ruthless conduct from Iran, whereas the US has spent decades attempting, often successfully, to depict itself as the champion and linchpin of a "rules-based international order". So such conduct from the US deflates American soft power to some extent and complicates relationships with normally friendly countries, for example in Europe. It also reduces the US' ability to make moral arguments against, for example, Russian foreign policy. If history is any guide, it is also likely that long-enough continuation of such unrestrained power flexing will encourage the growth of counterbalancing anti-US blocks.
America already basically controlled Panama, Malacca, and Taiwan for all serious intents and purposes before Trump, in the sense that in any serious geopolitical situation before Trump, the US could have decided to drop pretenses of diplomacy and instead directly dominate those regions just as effectively as it could do so now. An alliance with Indonesia is largely irrelevant, I think. The power of the US navy is the key thing whether there is an alliance or not, and that power has existed for a long time.
That said, I do agree that America probably controls the Strait of Hormuz more now than it did before the war, even if it does not necessarily look that way right now, because it has destroyed significant portions of Iran's ability to close it, even though significant portions also still remain. The fact that the Strait was not closed before the war is irrelevant in that sense. The important thing for the US foreign policy establishment's long-term goals is not whether Iran is actually deciding to keep it closed or not at any given moment, but rather the degree to which Iran is capable of closing it at any given moment.
Goodguy
3d ago
In the case of short-term war plans like the date of a surprise attack, the US as a whole is better off if the government can keep secrets
Not necessarily. That depends on what the intention of the surprise attack is and who it is meant to attack.
Goodguy
3d ago
I believe that the demand for active, violent white racism probably outstrips the supply here in the US. However, I don't see how that applies to the SPLC case. Paying informants money with the hope of getting information is not the same thing as paying them money with the hope that their racism justifies your existence.
Goodguy
3d ago
The only ways I can think of in which groypers help any elite groups is that they stir infighting among right-wingers and make it easier for some groups to raise money under the guise of fighting extremism.
However, both of those things could also be explained by the simpler theory that the groypers are genuine in their political beliefs, so I don't know why the theory that they are controlled opposition would be more credible.
Goodguy
3d ago
If you've heard of a "white supremacist", odds are good he's being promoted by teh glowies.
Whether that's true or not, I don't think it applies in this case, since the SPLC's definition of "white supremacist" is probably so broad that it certainly includes large numbers of people who are not glowies.
Goodguy
3d ago
I'm no fan of the SPLC, but... I don't see any contradiction between claiming to fight right-wing extremism and funding extremist informants.
If they broke laws while doing it, that's a different matter, but I'm not understanding the framing that they were hypocrites or something.
Goodguy
5d ago
What kinds of persecution do you have in mind. Like, affirmative action or something? The way taxes work?
Goodguy
5d ago
I see your point, but how are those people a persecuted minority in the United States? They usually make loads of money.
Some notes on the manifesto:
Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.
No affirmative obligation is necessary. There are enough engineering elites who are either US nationalists or who will work on weapons simply for money without thinking too hard about moral questions to suffice for the needs of national defense. As for the needs of national offense, that is a different matter.
American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.
Strange take. It was mainly nuclear weapons, not American power, although American power certainly played a role. Let me give an example: in the early stages of WW2, US, UK, and Soviet power did not deter the Germans or the Japanese. Being weaker than the enemy does not deter leaders from starting wars often enough to bring about an era of peace. Facing nuclear war, on the other hand, so far has kept peace between the great powers. I wonder if Karp actually believes his thesis or if he is just sucking up to the establishment, which indeed seems to love to believe this kind of theory about America's role in the history of the last few decades.
The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.
Europe is not being forced to pay any heavy price for Germany's weakness. Europe's support of Ukraine is a matter of choice, not something forced on it. There is no existential risk to Europe from Russia (outside of the risk of mutually assured destruction in a nuclear war, which Russia wants to avoid every bit as much as the EU does) for the simple reason that the EU has 3 times Russia's population, 7 times its GDP, a nuclear-armed member in France, and can easily produce more nuclear weapons at any time it wishes. And that's even leaving NATO out of the equation. Even if Russia somehow managed to conquer all of Ukraine, which seems extremely unlikely, it would pose no genuine threat to Europe. It's simply not strong enough.
More to the point, Europe is so far effectively deterring Russia even in Ukraine, even despite Germany's military weakness. The war has become stalemated and the EU is through proxy regularly blowing up Russian infrastructure without even having to send a large military contingent to fight directly in the war.
We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.
This, and point 18, seem blatantly self-serving to me. Of course Karp would think this. I mean, it's possible that he actually is saying this abstractly rather than from his own bias, but it seems more likely that he is saying it from bias.
The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.
This one surprises me, since I have no idea what is motivating it. It also does not necessarily make sense. Being an open intellectual movement does not necessarily mean being tolerant of people who claim that the Earth is flat or that they are being mind-controlled by lizard people. It does mean that you should give such people a say instead of censoring them, but it does not mean that you should pretend to take them seriously or give them much attention. And as for the kinds of religion that are compatible with rationality (they do exist, for example pure spirituality without belief in gods or woo), I don't really see the elites being intolerant to them. Indeed, since such kinds of religion are relatively obscure, I'm not even sure that the elites are aware of their existence.
National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.
Of course Karp himself would not serve, nor would any children that he has be likely to serve in any dangerous capacity either. Maybe as a society we should be hesitant about launching wars and only fight the next war even if not everyone shares in the risk and cost?
To be fair, I think it's usually more like a rubber mallet and it's relatively gentle tapping, not really what one imagines if one imagines hitting something with a hammer.
It might still be a bit dangerous, but not as crazy as it sounds.
Goodguy
8d ago
I think that the womanosphere has very little effect against the female sex drive, which after all evolved in times when men actually were probably much more likely to rape any woman who was not being protected by other men than they are today. The female sex drive is so powerful that it often drives women to go to isolated locations with much larger and stronger animals, men, whom they just met.
The vast majority of women are still trying to hook up with men, even if the womanosphere might drive some of them to the left. Not only that, but they are as fascinated by men as men are by women, maybe even more so. Which means that the vast majority of women will be regularly exposed to actual real life men rather than propaganda men, which might temper any possible misandry. Or maybe not, given how many men treat women poorly, but that's a different matter.
Goodguy
9d ago
She discussed the allure of both left-wing and right-wing extremism, not just right-wing.
Goodguy
9d ago
I think that the kind of dissident right-wingers who are very vocal on Twitter have a hard time with people like Trudeau and Gavin Newsom because they hate those politicians' politics, yet those politicians are also examples of the handsome successful possibly somewhat Machiavellian white men that these kinds of right-wingers tend to idolize. Newsom even kind of looks like Christian Bale in American Psycho, a character who has become a meme touchstone for the highly online right. There might be some psychological "this guy is despicable, but... uh... he's kind of badass too" thing going on, tempered only by the fact that Trudeau and Newsom's success did not come through the kind of "rising from nothing" scenario that those kinds of right-wingers tend to prefer (since while those kinds of right-wingers might praise aristocracy in theory, in practice their emotions prefer a rags-to-riches story like that of a Hitler to a born aristocrat story like the Kaiser or something).
Goodguy
12d ago
I think that would be a bad strategy for Altman, since I think that the majority of the population's reaction to hearing about the assassination attempts against Altman is either "who's that?" or "I wish they had managed to kill him". Even among the economic movers and shakers, I doubt that many people would actually be sad if Altman was killed.
Goodguy
13d ago
If one saw the kinds of things that Indians and Pakistanis regularly say about each other, one could expect there to have been a nuclear war between the two countries by now. Yet there has not been one, even though both have been nuclear-armed since 1998 and they actually fought a conventional war recently.
Goodguy
13d ago
I'm sure that Putin and Xi also say the Russian and Chinese equivalents of "death to America", but I don't worry about the possibility of a Russian or Chinese nuclear first strike on the US.
India and Pakistan have attacked each other through proxies before, yet neither has launched a nuclear first strike on the other despite extreme levels of mutual hatred and the fact that both have nuclear weapons.
Police tools and surveillance have gotten to a very advanced state in the US. Many murders go unsolved, but I'm not sure it's so much that police can't solve the murders. I note after that Mangione's assassination of Thompson, police went all-out. They take assassinations and terrorism seriously. And there are cameras everywhere. In people's pockets, on the walls of buildings.
Basically, it's hard to get away with any kind of political violence. That reduces the number of people who are willing to do it.
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