JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
JTarrou
6mo ago
Morals don't tend to have much support or actuality in interstate conflict. We can argue about what is "moral", but the only way that has any effect is if we manage to convince some more powerful nation (the US for instance) to put enough military force into the area to create the conditions we think preferable. This sort of thing doesn't tend to solve much.
JTarrou
1yr ago
You are very clearly implying
You're either illiterate, illogical or lying. Readers can choose. This may adjust their priors on whether anything else you say can be relied upon.
I did not say, imply, or even discuss who is going to run out of what first. Both sides have burned through a lot of gear, so claiming that one side's consumption of military ordnance is a sign of defeat is fallacious. The same argument could be made about Russia, and would be just as stupid. I didn't say anything at all about tanks specifically, so your assertion that I "implied" that Ukraine would run out of tanks first is bullshit top to bottom. You are making this up, which brings up the more interesting question: why?
When someone is this desperate to argue against a strawman, it makes me wonder about motivation. My post wasn't a reply to you. You clearly didn't read it. Your metrics for talking about military conflicts are (charitably) total amateur hour. You obviously know next to nothing about warfare, as evidenced by your discussion of military vehicles and technology.
You accuse me of making specific claims that never appear in my writing. Let's drill down on something you claim:
peak maximally useful military machines are generally from the 70s + a few cheap modernisations on top such as a 1 dollar gps/glonas chip.
Go ahead, tell me where exactly you put your "one dollar GPS chip" in a BMP-1 to make it work. Do you just glue it to the engine manifold, or does it have to be connected to anything? Does that thing cost any money? Does it need electrical power? Does it need an antenna? Does it need encryption? Whose GPS satellites are they going to ping? Do you think that those satellites might have the ability to collect that data? Could the US department of Defense knowing where all your BMPs are have any repercussions if they were to tell the Ukrainians?
On what do you base the judgement that "maximally useful" military vehicles were built in the 1970s? The fact that the Russians mothballed most of them would seem to suggest that they do not agree. Your assertion is not that the vehicles are useful, but that they are "peak maximally useful". That would seem to be both laughable, and contrary to the belief of every military in the world. People use old 1970s tech not because it is "maximally useful", but because they can't afford the stuff that is maximally useful, and the old stuff works well enough in most situations*.
Since you seem to be a tank-wanker, let's put this in direct terms. If you were Russia, and you had the option of a T-72 or a T-14, you're saying the T-72 is the clearly superior choice? Let's put this on record so we can tease out how much we should trust your opinions on the matter.
*Exceptions for people fighting armies that do have the "maximally useful" stuff.
JTarrou
1yr ago
The western elites are currently mad at the gulf for
4: Slowing down the financing of terrorism. When Islam was the outgroup for the country, the elites couldn't get enough. Now that they've ceded Big Baddy territory to Russia, they're just uncivilized barbarians again. It's hard to muster support for a grubby dictatorship when they won't even murder your citizens for you.
JTarrou
11mo ago
Far from it. But "never" is a long way from "always".
We've all had a reason to fight. But not everyone is willing to put everything on the line and seek a decision. Too risky. They might lose an internship, or an eye.
It's a matter ultimately of values. If you value money, career, house, a clean criminal record and the good opinion of other people who value those things, physical risk is crazy.
I find all that utterly worthless. The good opinion of people incapable of risking anything real is meaningless. Money is paper. Careers are bullshit.
I think sacrifice produces value. Things are worth what we gave up to get them. By those lights, I made out like a bandit.
I gave several examples of literal apocalypses though
I did too. They all were considered possible, likely or certain by millions of geniuses in their day (except the silly ones, of course). They all had a reason why this time it was for real. They all happened, for some definition of "happen", and they all did not result in the end of the world, humanity, life or anything else so dire. I'm sure AI is dangerous. I'm sure we'll have some colossal fuckups with it that will probably damage something important. When this happens, the frenzy will begin in earnest. Timelines will be settled on, politics will change, a solution will be found, and we will learn to live with it, as we have with nuclear weapons.
Whichever generation of asshole eschatologists alive at the time will write a million books saying they averted the apocalypse. Ten seconds later, it will be something else, and everyone will forget about it. The End of the World is dead, long live the End of the World.
Maybe I'm wrong. Tell you what, if the world ends due to AI, I'll give you a million dollars.
JTarrou
1mo ago
I'd settle for a humanity with the ability to tie shoes and sit on a toilet properly. But like God before me, I am doomed to disappointment.
JTarrou
6mo ago
There are many things people thought okay that we have decided is not, and their arguments weren't that great anyways.
Everyone who lived before 2015 was not a moral monster. A lot of people put a lot of thought into the moral structure of our past societies, their conflicts and wars. So perhaps it is not all of human history that is wrong here. Perhaps, in our excessively peaceful modern society, we have lost touch with the basic facts of the world and allowed our moral theories to outrun physical and psychological reality.
JTarrou
11mo ago
Money is a symbol for work, work is operationalized as time, you are buying things with the only thing you can't get more of.
And yes, we all need to work to make the symbols that let us pay for the necessities of life.
But how much is needed and what is actually necessary can vary widely. With less work, you get more time.
you probably figure any real man would take a swing at the cop.
Because everyone not a coward is stupid. A real man would have options, and he'd probably want to exercise them intelligently.
I wonder, as you lovingly recount a just-so movie scene of abject humiliation, what you really feel when you see yourself in that moment. Injustice? Vengeance?
Gratitude that it's a cop, otherwise you'd be expected to do something?
Something more prurient?
Two can read minds, mon frere.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek - Annie Dillard's masterful contemplation of nature and man's place in it.
The Fall - Camus turns on Sarte, heralding the turn of europe against communism. A veritable nesting doll of allegory.
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber - Hemmingway does battle of the sexes in short-story form!
JTarrou
1yr ago
Chapter 47 in the Warren Files
https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/mary-ellen-turpel-lafond-indigenous-cree-claims
CBC discovered that some of Turpel-Lafond’s claims about her Cree ancestry, her treaty Indian status, the community where she grew up and her academic accomplishments are inconsistent with publicly available documents.
The hilarious combination of white hate and white guilt combines to push affirmative action programs to benefit the "marginalized" but resists categorizing who exactly that is. The result is this sort of thing, a pile of rich, privileged white twits cosplaying Injun to the seal-clapping of the morally righteous class. While we beat our breasts about blackface at a Halloween party, these jackasses are appropriating the affirmative action slots of the people they claim to be supporting with their "activism". These are the people who style themselves the moral superiors of "deplorables".
JTarrou
10mo ago
Yes. That's exactly what happened.
We saw it again with Monkeypox, where no one was willing to say "hey, this is mostly in a subset of the gay population, they should probably take precautions and it won't spread". This wound up costing some number of gay lives, but it was worth it to the powers that be to avoid a rando right-winger on the internet fulminating about gay diseases.
Public health is just political arguments as soldiers.
JTarrou
11mo ago
I mean, he probably convened a meeting of ethics professors, focus grouped the results a bit, got a supreme court ruling and a blessing from the pope before confronting the maniac.
You've got fifteen years of martial arts training? What's the better control position to back control? What's the least damaging incapacitation you can do to a person?
Should he have gone for the Kimura and torn Neely's shoulder off? Snapped his elbows off backward? Or just punched him in the head repeatedly?
JTarrou
4mo ago
are we all ok with calling BAP a racist, after posts like this?
I'm ok with calling both you and BAP racists. After all, isn't everyone?
JTarrou
1yr ago
Fear is an excuse to hate.
You're fucking up their hate party, man. Quit killing the buzz.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Achievement is always zero-sum. We only respect and feel the power of things that other people cannot or will not do. The magnitude of an achievement is directly proportional to the number of people who have failed.
What the people whining for easy mode are trying to do is co-opt the social cachet of the skill required to beat a hard game at a lower investment in time/ability.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Think a bit more deeply, and it will seem far less important. The only reason we fetishize IQ is because it predicts academic performance and we use academia as the filtering mechanism for our elites.
Yes, if we keep using academia as the way we pick our upper classes, IQ is going to be important, and the current black population will be at a disadvantage for a long time. But that's a big "if". If we chose our elites using the olympics, asians would be at a pretty strong disadvantage.
The problem is not relatively minor (but important at the margins) IQ differentials, it's a social system that outsources elite production to an IQ-loaded institution.
JTarrou
9mo ago
Rhetorical question, Amnesty has been on the side of the devils since inception.
JTarrou
6mo ago
Wait, you think that Israel should be putting troops in Afghanistan/Iraq? Even Bush wasn't that dumb.
JTarrou
1yr ago
"Depth" is just what people call it when they don't understand bad writing. "Character" and arguing over why your wine tastes like cat piss is likewise an exercise for the middlebrow strivers trying to look sophisticated. Most (not all) of both literature and wine (and whiskey, and film, and painting etc.) is bullshit marketing and nobody really enjoys most of the work. They claim enjoyment to gain supposed status, and entrance to those "elitist" groups of middlebrow, midwit, middle class schlubs aping a cartoon of old-timey rich people.
got 'em coach!
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