Immediate_Bit
10d ago
It has to be on the scale of de-nazification but I think it's doable. Complete disarmament of the populace. Choosing new winners. If people want to go and hide in the mountains/foreign countries you can keep them there with drones/border control. Levels of security need to match levels of resistance, but once everyone is more prosperous than before and the most resistant have been dealt with it should be pretty stable.
People respect power and competence including everyday Arabs. Yes, done poorly it will be a shit show (and shouldn't be done at all), but for a competent regime with modern tech it shouldn't be hard.
But you do have to classify them as an enemy nation which, if they got a nuclear weapon, would use it against you or allies, in order to justify the de-nazification treatment. And I do think you would need direct foreign rule for decades to ward off insurrection because they are a more foreign culture than Germans.
Immediate_Bit
11d ago
This reinforces my belief if you do these things you have to do them properly. If you go in and say "This "death to America" thing has gone on too long. We will rule you for 100 years." you have a good chance of success. Overwhelming force; casualty rate will be higher, but achieving ultimate victory will be popular. "We now have monarchic control of a 90M person country who we've spent the last 40 years preventing from getting a nuke because they have every intention of using it" sells pretty well.
Putin made a similar mistake in Ukraine. Limited military operations don't work if your counterpart is not willing to go along.
Of course America is not a politically serious country and this kind of thought is not acceptable. Sort of a nightmare scenario for this kind of failure because these are religious zealots who have sufficient resources for serious retaliations both now and in the future.
Immediate_Bit
11d ago
You have to have a total victory where the regime has a different perspective on immigration. Everything else is just delay tactics.
Immediate_Bit
18d ago
This is completely egregious with regards to Elon. I don't think you appreciate the magnitude of achievement of starting a new (electric) car company in a country when a new successful car company hadn't been started for decades. Similar for rockets, where the private industry was incredibly inefficient and the public side almost completely ineffective. If he'd done this with purely inherited money it would still be incredible. I think he has personality flaws but his work input and entrepreneurial ability are not matched.
Cuban is correct. He was a pretty good NBA owner. Above median. Witless when he sold the team - and seems to be developing more liberal witlessness the older he gets. Licking a dirty boot can do strange things.
Ballmer seems right also. His era was when Microsoft was heavily hamstrung by anti-trust. He doesn't seem like a good NBA owner - given that's all we have to go off.
I think Bezos worked extremely hard and knew how to make consistently good business decisions, which if you've ever worked with other people isn't trivial. Much like Elon I think he has personality flaws.
The funny thing about these 4 is the 2 with the highest levels of social intelligence (Cuban and Ballmer) have the least case for true business brilliance, while the other two are less savvy but have better resumes.
You don't necessarily have opportunities to evaluate these guys if they don't take repeated swings. Some people are just carried on good business waves. Pretty hard to argue against Elon and Bezos though, given the breadth and success of their product/service suites.
Mistake theory has to be rejected for high stakes because it's gameable both on a conscious and unconscious level.
I agree there is some predictive and curiosity satiating value to this kind of work but not worth the risk.
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