Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
1d ago
Salami tactics. That was apparently what Putin was trying prior to 2022, but changed his mind for some reason, possibly because of Ukraine's arms buildup.
Harlequin5942
1d ago
when China is currently supplying Russia.
Are we talking about steel? Because the US also imports from China. And, if there wasn't the current glut in steel production, the US could outbid Russia easily.
People saying "if we don't stop him now, he'll take Poland" are fabulists. This is not a realistic scenario.
What about, "If we don't stop him now, he'll attack Ukraine again"?
Just because Russia can't beat Ukraine militarily now, doesn't mean that Putin can't try for a second bite in the future, with the same rationales.
Harlequin5942
2d ago
The only reason the West got sucked into the conflict in its current capacity is because Ukraine put up an impressive resistance
Was it that, or more that Russia is much more pathetic (and apathetic - just look at their public's reaction or the level of mobilisation/defence spending that Putin can muster) than anyone expected?
From what I have seen, it's not so much that Ukrainians have been fighting well, and more that Russia's ability to project power beyond its borders is almost completely gone. Once they could dominate Eastern Europe, now they take months of grinding to gain worthless plains within a country that they once lorded over directly.
When it comes to mass manufacturing pieces of steel financial hubs won't do well. The US sees itself as economically superior because smart americans work with insurance, investment banking and Netflix while Russians work in a tractor factory. The tractor factory will produce far more mortars than Netflix.
The US produces more steel than Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production
And "smart americans" can buy steel from the Chinese, who massively outproduce Russia (or the US).
The US is also a major tractor manufacturer and exporter, Russia is not: https://blog.howdeninsurance.co.uk/tractors-where-are-they-manufactured/ -------- though Russia does import a lot of tractors from countries with better tractor manufacturing industries: https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/russia-agribusiness
Just because the US outperforms Russia in service industries, it doesn't mean that the US doesn't ALSO outperform Russia in manufacturing.
Harlequin5942
2d ago
I believe that there are writers primarily motivated by money, but that's not the same as being emotionally uninvested in a story. (This is distinct from being passionate, in a strong sense, about the story.) However, yes, I think it's hard for someone to prove that they aren't emotionally invested at all. How does one prove such a thing? And is it really possible for an intelligent human to both understand a book like Crime and Punishment and read it and be emotionally indifferent to it?
Harlequin5942
2d ago
The former is definitely conceptually possible, but I am not sure it has ever happened. I think Dostoevsky claimed he was more or less a mercenary writer to pay off his debts, but I don't believe him.
Harlequin5942
2d ago
This is not to say that passion is a necessary component of great writing
Do you mean sufficient effect?
For Sonic fan fiction, I bring you the lowest depths to which the human mind and soul can sink: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LCWoZEXyGU0
Harlequin5942
3d ago
Suppose an American consulate were bombed by anybody, what would you expect the US response to be?
Let's imagine that Iran didn't just bomb a US embassy, but stormed it and took diplomats/civilians hostage. What would happen?
There's precedent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis
The US response would probably be to tighten economic sanctions on Iran, but to avoid military escalation. As the Ukraine war shows, the US is very wary of escalating conflicts, even with second-tier powers like Russia or Iran.
For purchasing internationally (and thus for the arms industry) nominal GDP is more important. PPP is a better indicator of domestic prosperity. International suppliers care about what you can offer them at market exchange rates, they don't care about your domestic prices. If Israel can offer me $500 for some small electronics part and Iran can offer me $400, I don't care if it's cheaper to live in Iran.
Harlequin5942
8d ago
I'd be surprised if they thought of any nation that is not of immediate concern to them.
And very often not even then: https://youtube.com/@JustinAwad/videos
Harlequin5942
8d ago
Esteem/affirmation culture, in my view, lends itself far more to mere masturbation-by-proxy than a guilt or shame culture does.
Plausible and interesting. I shall look more into this issue.
Though I am not a Christian or against homosexual behaviour as such, I shall say this: their separation of (a) homosexual preferences from (b) homosexual behaviour ("It's ok to be born gay, as long as you don't do gay things" etc.) is already more sophisticated than many of the takes I hear from my students when debating this issues. Again, what people are vs. what they do.
Harlequin5942
8d ago
Agreed. The similarities between affirmation/esteem culture and guilt culture have probably been underinvestigated. I have a meta theory that many problems of human activity involve too much focus on what people ARE rather than what they DO. "Hate the sin, not the sinner" is once instance of moving in the right direction, but I think there are others, e.g. "Provide children - and people in general - approval for good things they accomplish, not for what they are."
(That's not to say that affirmation/esteem/guilt have no place in parenting, education etc.)
Harlequin5942
9d ago
I grew up in a relatively conservative community. There was one boy who, at age 4-ish, liked to dress in girl's outfits when we played dress-up games. He also liked some "girl's" toys, e.g. Polly Pocket. He was also fearful of competitive sports and tended to make friends better with girls rather than boys (I was an exception).
As often happens, he's just gay. He often finds it easier to identify with women and empathise with them, perhaps because he has more of a lady-brain (who knows?). People in this relatively conservative community generally ignored it, reasoning "He'll grow out of it," and they were right, since he is (99%) a typical adult guy these days.
The same thing happened with a girl in my neighbourhood, who just turned out to have a very active imagination as a child. She's now married to a man, with kids etc. She had a very religious family, who treated it as a game (like a child who decides that they are a dinosaur) and within a year she had forgotten even that she used to insist that she was a boy.
Kids are weird. Sometimes, it's because there is something deeply different about them. It's hard to know why, so it's best to enjoy the ride (within sensible boundaries e.g. keeping them from sexual experimentation) and offer them love throughout the process.
Harlequin5942
10d ago
don't have enough for retirement.
I'm sure that there are some deserving poor Boomers, but it's notable that the savings rate fell as they earned more of national income:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT
Cutting saving rates by > 50% on average doesn't seem like a good retirement strategy, except insofar as you know that welfare (Social Security, Medicare etc.) will come to the rescue.
I don't know if Boomers in particular were saving less, though.
Harlequin5942
11d ago
The Twitter account is run by the character's creator, Andrew Doyle, and has some funny moments. As often happens, the best stuff is the material that is JUST plausible enough to get sincere reactions. Or when reality catches up with parody:
https://andrewdoyle.substack.com/p/the-prophecies-of-titania-mcgrath
Harlequin5942
11d ago
I remember talking to someone from Pakistan about life in a part of that country where the Taliban were active. He was threatened by armed men on the train because of a little Western apparel. He also once saw a dead man in the street, but just ran away, in order to not instigate a feud between the dead man's family and his own. Presumably the dead man stayed on the street and fed the flies, until someone from his family found his rotting corpse.
Harlequin5942
11d ago
also empirically the Arab population grows
More and more slowly, as they become more prosperous, like other ethnic groups:
https://www.prb.org/resources/fertility-declining-in-the-middle-east-and-north-africa/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/806110/fertility-rate-in-the-arab-world/
Primarily, Arab birth rates are high because most Arabs are still poor. They are about half that of the DRC, where most people are even poorer than most Arabs.
finding an ideology not of mutual servitude but of domination and strength has a lot of appeal to disaffected western men.
Which is ironic, given the actual level of social power and approved autonomy of young men in most Islamic societies. One of the most successful efforts of feminists has been to persuade people that, in traditional societies, the overwhelmingly significant power differential is male vs. female. The lives of young male Muslims does not seem to be defined by domination and strength.
One introduction to what life is like for most young male Muslims, at least in the Arab world, is to see what it's like to be a soldier:
https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/meria/meria00_den01.html
Head-to-head competition among individuals is generally avoided, at least openly, for it means that someone wins and someone else loses, with the loser humiliated. This taboo has particular import when a class contains mixed ranks. Education is in good part sought as a matter of personal prestige, so Arabs in U.S. military schools take pains to ensure that the ranking member, according to military position or social class, scores the highest marks in the class. Often this leads to 'sharing answers' in class--often in a rather overt manner or junior officers concealing scores higher than their superior's.
American military instructors dealing with Middle Eastern students learn to ensure that, before directing any question to a student in a classroom situation, particularly if he is an officer, the student does possess the correct answer. If this is not assured, the officer will feel he has been set up for public humiliation. Furthermore, in the often-paranoid environment of Arab political culture, he will believe this setup to have been purposeful. This student will then become an enemy of the instructor and his classmates will become apprehensive about their also being singled out for humiliation--and learning becomes impossible.
It's tempting to think that American-style individualism and meritocracy is universal, but the opposite is true. Power over your wife (provided her family isn't more high status than yours, within the constraints of various reprisals by her family against you etc.) is a small degree of compensation for the more general submission that Muslim men (and men in most societies) must do to their parents, in-laws, and so on. And until you are an old man, that power is mostly exercised by your parents, by-proxy, since you are expected to obey them. So your "authority" over your wife is mostly power for your parents, including your mother-in-law (dominating you and your wife is HER compensation for submitting to HER parents/in-laws in the past and her current husband).
Of course, unless your parents also convert, you are instantly suspect and low status, precisely because your parents are infidels, so a greater degree of deference and forfeiture of power is likely to be required, unless you're rich, famous etc. (in which case Western dating is probably working fine for you). I suppose you might have some success in social acceptance if your in-laws essentially take all the power over you associated with both your parents and in-laws, but I wouldn't recommend that.
Frankly, the idea of men adopting a religion named "Submission" to gain domination and strength is one of those classic "buyer beware" cases. More generally, historically what has been called "patriarchy" was primarily power for patriarchs in relation to their social status. In your case, almost certainly, you aren't close to a patriarch, and even if you were, any power you would have relative to the West would be more than compensated for by your superiors (even once you are old, there are more high status patriarchs who have deep social authority over you) to whom you would be expected to submit.
I do understand why e.g. some submissive (sexually or otherwise) men convert to Islam, since it integrates them into a system where they get thoroughly dominated by men, women, and God. This can also appeal to wayward men who feel like they can't control themselves, since Islam offers a social and religious structure in which they are thoroughly controlled by older/more powerful men and women, and God himself.
Harlequin5942
11d ago
More power to them I say, since the white pro-Muslim feminists are some of the most obnoxious blue tribers in existence
See Pro-Muslim Slut Walk: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BTbXjksvsbI
Harlequin5942
13d ago
Argentina does have some incredibly bad policies, though, e.g. about 1/6 of government tax revenues come from taxing exports. It's as if they looked at export-led industrialisation success stories and said "How can we stop that happening here?"
'Hermaphrodite' is not a social category
If "social category" is a classification of people that makes a significant difference to how they are treated and grouped by social instiutions or practices, then "hermaphrodite" is a social category that predates trans women/trans men (in the predominant modern senses) as social categories. In many cultures, by THOUSANDS of years. The Ancient Greeks were making myths about hermaphrodites long before the sex/gender distinction was even invented. The Laws of Manu distinguish three genders: male, female, and hermaphrodite. Ancient Rabbinic law distinguishes hermaphrodites as a separate category. Ask anyone in the ancient world to tell you what a hermaphrodite is and they would be able to tell you; ask them about our modern categories of transness and your chances of initial comprehension of the relevant categories would be more dubious.
The main difference is that hermaphrodite is also a longstanding biological category that presumably predates humanity, but obviously something can be both a social category and a biological category.
Or are you using "social category" to mean something else in a way that excludes hermaphrodites?
Also, you probably don't think that being a social category identified on the basis of appearance or genitalia is a sufficient condition for self-identification rules, because you probably don't think that race should be determined by self-identification rules. So this is a potential red herring: even if it could be proved that hermaphrodites are a social category, that wouldn't be enough to change your mind.
Harlequin5942
16d ago
Taking back the North Sea Oil from the thieving English will allow an independent Scotland to have Scandinavian public services with British taxes
While also not growing the industry:
Late last year in response to the UK Government’s announcement to grant new licences, The First Minister, Humza Yousaf; attacked the decision saying: “This is the wrong decision. I have expressed concerns about this going ahead for some time. We don’t think the taps should be turned off tomorrow, but neither can the north-east have unlimited oil and gas extraction. ”
It's one thing to believe in a magic money tree, but it's quite another to think that the magic money tree will survive without water.
Harlequin5942
16d ago
Whereas people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people, and they're annoyed that people like Peterson have scared some of their supporters into thinking they might ever face consequences for spewing vile slander 24/7, thereby mildly restricting the spigot.
You are usually more charitable than this.
So that's your update after finding out that your image of "Netflix producing Americans vs. steel producing Russians" was wrong?
"Well, actually US steel production is not enough, because of this qualitative analysis I just developed. The US is entangled in the Middle East (unlike Russia?!)"?
The US spends 3.5% of GDP on defence, around the lowest in its history. For illustration, Russia had been spending 4.1%, but it is now increasing defence spending to 6%. The US is very far from exhausting its capacity to deal with military problems.
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