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
2mo 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
2mo ago
She discussed the allure of both left-wing and right-wing extremism, not just right-wing.
Goodguy
2mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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.
Goodguy
3mo ago
They do want nukes. No matter what one's opinion about the war is, and mine is against it, the fact is that they clearly want nukes. They would be insane not to want nukes. Having nukes is just better in almost every way than not having nukes, if you can afford the high price tag of building and maintaining them. For Iran's government nukes are the only possible way of guaranteeing their system's survival, other than a Russian or Chinese commitment to defend them in case of war, which does not seem to be forthcoming.
Goodguy
3mo ago
I disagree. They cannot actually resist invasion without them. They are perpetually one hawkish US administration that has enough political capital away from being invaded and replaced.
If the US committed to a ground invasion of Iran, the US would easily and quickly topple Iran's government. It would be like a world heavyweight boxing champion fighting a scrawny 15 year old. US soldiers would be in Tehran within a few weeks of the start of the conflict. What would follow would, from the point of view of the current Iranian government, be horrible. They have seen what happened to Saddam and to Gaddafi. They would be turned over to their political opponents, put on trial, their lives as they knew it over, some possibly executed. They're in danger of assassination every day now, but at least they still have power and the emotional satisfaction of not having been defeated. A US invasion would be the end of everything for them.
Would they like to use nuclear weapons in support of their global Islamic revolution? Sure. Would they actually use nuclear weapons in a first strike? I doubt it. When I look at their actual foreign policy in the recent decades, they haven't been acting like ISIS-type fanatics. The most reckless thing they did was to support Hamas too much, and then Hamas massacred a bunch of Israeli civilians, which made Israel unite even more than before around the goal of destroying them by any means necessary. But that does not necessarily mean that they follow a fanatical foreign policy any more than the fact that the US supported an Indonesian government that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the 1960s means that the 1960s US was following a fanatical foreign policy.
Goodguy
3mo ago
That doesn't worry me any more than I worry about the slight chance of getting hit by lightning when I walk outside while it's raining.
I don't think Iran having nukes, in and of itself, would be costly for me. I estimate the chance of a nuclear-armed Iran using nuclear weapons against the US to be extremely low unless the US for some reason launches an existential war against the nuclear-armed Iran, which I also think would be very unlikely to happen.
As for a nuclear-armed Iran's ability to disrupt global shipping, I also do not care about that. A nuclear-armed Iran would likely prefer to be integrated with the global economy, just as it prefers that now over being sanctioned, and would not benefit from being heavily sanctioned if it tried to strong-arm itself into control of the Strait of Hormuz.
If Iran had nuclear weapons, it would be able to more successfully deter US and Israeli geopolitical ambitions in the Middle East, but I don't care about those ambitions.
The only thing that actually bothers me about the idea of a nuclear-armed Iran is that having nuclear weapons could help to stabilize the Iranian government and its authoritarian chuddism, with negative consequences for its population. But then, the current war has so far also been bad for the Iranian population. So far they are getting a really bad deal: getting bombed, their economy damaged, but without the government being replaced by a better one. And that seems unlikely to change barring a US ground invasion or a sudden collapse in the government's structural integrity. So it's not like the US is actually pursuing a policy that is focused on helping the Iranians to get a better government.
Goodguy
3mo ago
I am skeptical of that theory, for two reasons:
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The civilizations most historically associated with circumcision did not, for the most part, live in deserts. The parts of ancient Egypt and the Levant where the vast majority of the population lived were not desert. Arabia was more desert-like but even there, most of the population in ancient times were not desert-dwellers.
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I don't know from direct experience, but I think that one could clean sand out of one's foreskin with a very small amount of water.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Probably, but most people of every political persuasion are extremely un-knowledgeable about military affairs. I think that smart people who follow military affairs knew how this war would go militarily because they paid attention the last few recent wars between the US/Israel and Iran. It's gone largely as I expected it to go, from a military point of view. Actually, Iran has done better than I expected. I did not expect them to still be capable of regularly launching effective strikes against their enemies after a month of US and Israeli air strikes.
Goodguy
3mo ago
My understanding based on my very vague knowledge of the relevant history is that in the US, conservatism became entwined with free-market capitalism ideology only around the 1940s, in large part as a reaction to the New Deal and communism. So it is not too surprising that eventually conservatism is becoming partly un-entwined from it.
But I am sure that the real history is much more complex than that.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Whatever their conventional military abilities are, the US cannot do whatever it wants in the territories of Russia and China without a high chance of getting nuked. Thus the US does not have the military power to do whatever it wants in the world.
Goodguy
3mo ago
That's interesting. I'm not an expert in the topic, but my reading it seems to me that there is a rich history of political leaders ignoring the Catholic hierarchy's orders. Maybe political leaders, historically, even ignored its orders more often than they followed them, though I really don't know.
“America,” Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”
If this story is true, did Colby think that the cardinal is not aware of the military abilities of Russia and China?
Goodguy
3mo ago
Good point. There weren't any US casualties in the aftermath from what I recall at least, but there was definitely use of military force.
I despise Pete Hegseth, but I don't see much reason to blame him for the conduct of the war. The military performed very well from what I can tell, it's just probably not possible for the current US military to open the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping without either a ground invasion or a several months' long air campaign, no matter how brilliant the leadership is. Based on how Hegseth acts, I suspect that he would have been all for a ground invasion.
I should probably also say that I don't give Hegseth any credit for the conduct of the war, either. You could have put a 10 year old in his position at the start of the war, and the war would probably have proceeded pretty much the same as it did.
In certain cases, you can just bomb and assassinate the enemy into submission pretty quickly and win that way. Iran happens to not be one of those cases because its political structure turns out to be more resilient and stable than many people thought and it has the Strait of Hormuz card. Of course, the latter should have been obvious to every US leader at the start of the war.
I feel like not enough people are talking about how Trump screwed over anti-regime Iranians who live in Iran. They got bombed, there has been no regime change, and now the regime is probably going to be even more wary of dissent than it was before the war.
Goodguy
3mo ago
Most recent American wars didn't turn into forever wars, though. The first Bush's Gulf War, Clinton's Kosovo War, Obama's Libya war. I'm not a fan of any of those wars, but to be fair to those Presidents, they managed to get in and get out pretty quickly.
I think this civilian control of the military is normally a good thing, but there are edge cases: for example, I suppose it's possible that the President might order the military to commit some atrocity that is not clearly illegal under relevant law, but is clearly immoral. The military refusing an order is, I think, in most cases not as bad as what civilian control of the military is mainly intended to prevent, which is the military taking control of the country and supplanting the civilian authorities.
Goodguy
3mo ago
The thing is, there's no way to shift blame away from Trump onto Israel without making Trump look weak in the process, and MAGA does not want to make Trump look weak. I think that most of MAGA, the rank and file rather than the strategists, also genuinely don't think Trump did anything bad or wrong in this war.
Some notes on the manifesto:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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