JTarrou
9mo ago
Well, that's your opinion, you can hardly expect people who do not belong to your socio-political tribe to agree just because you assert it.
Let me ask a question about election fraud, do you support the conviction of Trump on charges he tampered with the election by paying off a porn star?
JTarrou
28d ago
If war becomes increasingly technological, as seems the trend, we can expect a re-feudalization of our politics produced by this basic military necessity. Not in our lifetime, of course, but soon. Mass politics is necessary to get masses of men into the field in an age when how many men you can put in the field determines who wins. This five hundred year cycle of "democracy" has really been the political concessions necessary to get large numbers of men into the army.
When the question is "who has the ability to call a drone strike?" The answer does include a few dozen corporations, major police forces, criminal organizations, terrorists and a cracked-out teenager from Burbank, but does not include a majority of nations. A new sort of feudal system must necessarily form as military capacity is disengaged from political organization.
JTarrou
11mo ago
after total victory.
That's the part you're eliding. After, it is possible. Before, it is not.
Yes, I get that.
But he isn't paying people what the market will bear for those skills. The only way he can keep workers is if they're legally tied to his company after they are trained.
So he isn't paying market rate for those jobs. That's how people can leave for more money. If he were paying the going rate, his newly trained ungrateful american workers would have nowhere to go.
Those other companies apparently value those workers much higher than OP does.
JTarrou
8mo ago
As an analogy, I think of IQ a bit like horsepower in a car. You can measure power a few different ways, they're all correlated but slightly different, and bigger numbers don't always translate to more actual speed on the road. A lamborghini has a lot of horsepower, but so does a digger.
Strictly speaking, IQ predicts educational capacity. It's correlated imperfectly with a bunch of other positive mental attributes, but bigger numbers don't always translate to more intelligence in the real world, and at the extremes the statistical selection effects are strong.
At the high and low ends, IQ is dysfunctional. Above a certain high threshold, more IQ has negative real-world effects, many of the "smartest" people in the world can't manage their own lives, stay employed or be understood by normies. Even our distant patron Scott looks and sounds either insane or stupid in person. Very bright guy, but a total weirdo IRL, and I'm pretty weird myself.
A society with an average IQ of 120 or 130 would have incredible human capital, a society with an average of 170 would collapse in about six minutes. To bring it back around to my analogy, most of us don't actually want a thousand-horsepower supercar to drive. Roads full of Bugattis would be a nightmare. A bit more speed than average is fine, but as you get faster, there's fewer and fewer places you can drive, and fewer and fewer uses until you get to something like a drag racer, which is fast as hell, and totally useless.
JTarrou
11mo ago
Per Machiavelli, you should do your evil all at once, then blame the subordinate you had do it, execute him and after that be conciliatory.
JTarrou
11mo ago
"If you do to us what we did to you, that would hurt Democracy, so be responsible and let us continue discriminating against you, because we're morally superior"
Yeah, that's a tough sell, bro.
JTarrou
3mo ago
Was that the tacit agreement?
If so, it makes a certain limited and temporary sense for Germany and Japan.
It makes no sense at all for the rest of Europe. The US is just going to project power across the continent permanently so none of these countries need a functional military?
And we're going to do that based on a "tacit agreement"?
JTarrou
6mo ago
Nothing is fair except double-blind lottery by SAT cutoff. It would be interesting to see the student mix that creates, but it won't happen.
JTarrou
8mo ago
Closest I've seen is Generation Kill, a miniseries, which was written by an embedded journalist, had a dozen of the guys from the unit on as instructors and producers, and one or two even played themselves (Rudy Reyes).
JTarrou
4mo ago
When the elites will not lead the people in the direction they want to go, they will find other leaders, who will be mostly grifters, because that's who is left.
JTarrou
5mo ago
I love you guy, and I get the appeal. Did a bit of trapper-convention cap and ball a few times. But fundamentally, it's a long time to load the thing, not much to empty it and an hour to clean it.
There is something to it, but it's not how I approach and think about firearms. You know, different people are into different cars for different reasons. Classic collectors and rat rodders want different things out of their machines. Guns to me are just the gear of a martial art. I do appreciate guns aesthetically as functional machines, and a lot of those old guns are pretty. In fact, those old .44 Armys of mine might be my prettiest guns. Everything else is basic bitch ARs and Glocks, plus a couple hunting guns.
If you like taking your time and shoot for sentimental reasons, you might take OP up on it. Some other positives, it's relatively cheap, recoil is generally mild (unless you're getting into buffalo guns), and those old guns are surprisingly accurate and some have quite good triggers. Cons, they're heavy, awkward, messy to load, ergonomics suck, sights are appalling, wildly unreliable by modern standards. It feels just a touch like alchemy getting the whole contraption to go off. 2/10, haven't shot my .44s in years. And just wait until you get to adjust the rear sight!
But, if we're using the car metaphor, I'm an amateur competitive driver, not a classic collector or a hot rodder.
JTarrou
8mo ago
For most of teh Roman Republic stage of the empire, they maintained the fiction that most of the territory controlled by Rome was technically sovereign and merely an "ally".
The US is a good bit less interventionist than we could be, and that's probably for the best, but we should not pretend that just because we haven't annexed Canada that they aren't US territory.
JTarrou
6mo ago
He's a censorious worm in league with the intelligence agencies.
Now that the vibe shift is making that seem like less of a good thing, he's backpedaling.
Your charity runs dangerously close to gullibility.
JTarrou
3mo ago
Forcing someone who underwent HRT and surgery and passes as female even naked to shower with the guys also seems bad.
Where does that happen? At what point in any trans person's life will they be through the transition process so well that they "pass", and also still sharing showers with sex-segregated people? I can only think of a couple, and they're either voluntary organizations that can make their own rules (like gyms) or places like prison where they don't have full civil rights anyway. What's the scenario here?
JTarrou
4mo ago
The entire analysis, from both you and Scott, is simply one level too tactical. Scott runs through all the psychological reasons why people will always push themselves into conflict with other people, regardless of the issues or the facts. And then says that mistake theory wins because many of the tactical positions taken by the two sides of an eternal conflict are essentially random.
Individual and group status competition is the constant. That is conflict theory, and it is objectively correct as the only reality humanity has ever known. Mistake theory requires something not yet observed.
The individual issues of politics are ridiculous, and the sides often change over time. Basing your view of human interaction on the irrationality of the issues obscures the reality that political conflict is inevitable anywhere there are three or more people.
We may be mistaken about the reasons, we may increase or decrease our level of conflict (social, political, violent etc.). We may change teams or stress different identities. But the conflict will always remain, because roughly half the power of any given society is balanced against the other half, and politics is the result.
All this business of trying to analyze individual political issues as "conflict" or "mistake" is very much missing the forest for the trees. The forest is at war, and always will be. The issues don't matter, they are only temporary battlegrounds for the political will of the population. There are plenty of mistakes in conflict.
Think of any long term relationship. There is always conflict, and it is rarely about whatever incident inspires a fight. There is conflict because it is two different people who have to live together. So it is in the home, so it is in the nation, so it is in the world. Our human nature forces us into conflict with each other, and we channel that into our lives and our politics. Because of our cognitive biases, we make a lot of mistakes, no matter how smart we are, or think we are.
If you want to solve a problem, you have to find ways of extricating your issue from the conflict. This can be done, in the manner Scott describes. But the conflict will go on, using different issues. Many issues that were important long ago are gone from our political conflict, but that has never stopped the politics. Once an issue is "solved" it is no longer useful. Humans are never short of things to disagree about.
JTarrou
7mo ago
Clinton was so charming that he probably could have run on a bizarro world mirror image of the package he actually ran under (protectionist, openly pro-gay marriage, doveish on the international stage etc., unlike the real Clinton) and would still have won a first or even second term.
I think this is off base. Clinton was charming, but he won his first term with a plurality because Ross Perot won 19% of the vote. And immediately he had to govern far to teh right of how he campaigned. All that "Triangulation" stuff was Clinton being a shrewd political operator and figuring out that the country didn't want his ideas, they just wanted his face and interpretations on a Republican policy platform.
The Democrats got smashed in the '94 elections (where Joe Scarborough got his start as a firebreathing Republican). Clinton made political hay out of the defeat, and it won him re-election. Welfare reform, the '94 crime bill (notice that year?) etc.
But no, there is no way in hell the people who were in power and voting back in the '90s were in any mood for very liberal policies except perhaps a narrow range of gay rights and general fun-having. If you think liberal criminal justice policies were popular the year murder peaked in the US, you didn't observe it up close.
We'd just won the Cold War, had the Gulf War and no one wanted the stern Republican daddies in charge anymore, but they certainly didn't want the policies of the seventies back. And marginal Republicans weren't as worried about the existential nuclear threat and ideological superstruggle anymore, and were willing to vote on other issues. Hence, Perot picked up a lot of people from both sides who were looking for an option to the old ideologies. Clinton was the one who wound up seizing the moment to change the policies and interest groups of the left-wing coalition, which is what is being reacted to with the current re-alignment.
Only this time it is Trump who is doing the moving around, liberalizing the old Republican doctrines that no longer serve their new political base.
JTarrou
1mo ago
How do you teach them to actually understand the difference?
Easy. Inter-sex physical combat.
And forget "teaching them to understand", this is one of those truths you have to feel in your bones. Every school could do it for gym. Perhaps Freshman year?
Feminists to the front.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Anyone remember Red Wolves?
Pepperidge Farm remembers! Critically endangered, then died out, then reappeared because it's just what happens when a wolf fucks a coyote.
I was terrified as a kid when Ranger Rick magazine lead me to believe that their impending extinction would extend to all life on earth via the acid rain!
JTarrou
9mo ago
This whole thing, the NYT and your tongue bath of it, bespeaks nothing so much as two people who have never seen terminal ballistics talking ridiculous.
We should expect that, if these children are shot because they have caught stray bullets aimed elsewhere, that most of the children would be shot in places other than their head and chest.
Now why would that be? What percentage of surface area of the body is the head and torso, and how does the movement of the limbs affect their statistical chance of catching stray rounds? What's the effect of people poking their heads out to see what's happening? Is this calculation well established in the military literature? Because I've never heard of it.
And how exactly does one calculate that someone had been shot only once in the head? A rifle round through the skull will tend to pop the whole thing open like a smashed pumpkin. Could have been shot once, could have been shot fifty times. Could have not been a bullet at all, but a rock or chunk of shrapnel from an explosion. Good luck telling the difference.
This is the sort of thing that NYT journalists find impressive, the fact that you do as well speaks more to you than to anything going on in any war anywhere.
JTarrou
9mo ago
Parsimonious explanation, the first Joker was supposed to be a middle finger, but it was too balanced and hit at the right time and people liked it. So they went back to the drawing board and made a musical.
JTarrou
5mo ago
Some amount of the variance must necessarily be the heightened definitions of bad behavior when your dating pool is feminists and other man-haters.
"Sexual assault" is one of those fun terms that depending on strict definitions may be literally any behavior.
Probably easier to get caught "sinning" when you're banging nuns.
The dumb progressive fads aren't coming from the federal agencies, they're coming from the education schools.
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