JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
JTarrou
1yr ago
If the question is whether slavery and associated industry was a large portion of the national GDP, it was.
If the question is whether anyone else built anything, yes, they built most things. Slavery didn't build anything except some very nice houses and a lot of graveyards. The whole reason the South gets trounced in the war despite better tactical leadership is that they don't have anything close to the numbers of people, factories and equipment that the North does, and virtually none of that can be attributed to slavery. In fact, it can and has been argued at length that slavery kept the South from industrializing and that this crippled their economy up into the 1980s.
The claim that slavery was in some way underwriting the free states is ahistorical stupidity, and a slanderous historical insult to the people who died to end slavery. There isn't a person alive today who has done as much for black americans as the lowliest, whitest, most racist private in the Union Army.
Ok, definitely not a SEAL here, but as one of the few in the forum with any pointy-end experience, here's my take:
1: I'm weakly against the ban on PEDs in the military. During my time in, steroids were by far the most popular illegal drug, people pissed hot for that shit constantly. Every unit is different, but we were hard up for bodies and infantry NCOs tend to be a practical bunch. I never wrote a soldier up for steroids unless he was also a shitbird. My opinion at the time and today is that if you're taking stuff to get better at your job, I'm not going to stand in the way.
2: When we talk about very specialized schools, we're talking about a very perverse set of conditions. Any special forces unit gets a lot more applicants than they have slots for, so they set up "weedout" programs. For Green Berets, it's Selection, for SEALS it's BUD/S. This is key, these are not training. These are shitshows intended to get gung-ho soldiers to quit. Exhaustion, sleep dep, pain, cold, heat, etc. The cadre will choose targets daily and focus their collective efforts on fucking with one soldier to see if they can get him to quit. The pressure is intense. What they're selecting for is the mental and physical ability to continue suffering indefinitely.
3: For those who are worried about rules not being followed, allow me to set your mind at ease. Rules are never followed, war is a free-for-all. You can do anything your balls and guns are big enough to handle. The idea that soldiers in combat give the tiniest of fucks about back-home moralizing about drugs is ridiculous on its face, and clearly denotes someone who has never met a real soldier.
4: Going out for special forces is a bit like going out for a pro sports team. There's a brutal and brutally efficient weeding-out portion, the vast majority of people do not make it. The collective pass rate for all the schools, training and selections required to become an actual special forces operator is a very small fraction of one percent. Maybe three to five out of every thousand who start will make it to the teams, and even fewer will be able to serve out a career there. We cannot think of these jobs as something that most people could or should be able to do.
JTarrou
9mo ago
I think it's an interaction of a few things, a big one being an old trope about an old bear male figure coming out of retirement for one last score/mission/whatever. Most of the Bond films, most of Eastwood's ouvre, Taken, Black Samurai, True Grit, Nobody, etc. This is, at core, a male fantasy of an aging yet skilled/dangerous man become cynical about the structure his violence has served. He finds a new mission, a new cause and allows himself to be consumed by it, because it wasn't the cause itself he cared about, just the fight. Possible death is treated as penance for any misdeeds or guilt held over from the first, less moral cause, an opportunity for redemption. It's a moralistic view of male violence, a feeling that those who live by the sword should die by it.
Now let's add to this Hollywood's complete inventive drought. They have no ideas and so are resurrecting old franchises left and right to try to get some content. This means a lot of old white male protagonists who have to be dealt with somehow, and half the story is already written. So, Han/Luke have to hand things off to new actors. Cheaper actors. Newer actors who fit the social and political prejudices of the elites, which is mostly anti-white racism and class snobbery.
It is sometimes done well (Gran Torino is a top-5 all timer IMO). But these days, few directors have the chops of Eastwood, the writing has gone to hell in a handbasket, and so we get this cheap propaganda about how all the old heroes are shit and need to be replaced by strangely competent kids who somehow never have a thing to learn or struggle at. This is then sometimes mapped onto racial lines because, well, racist elites. But they do it with gender as well, see the aforementioned Star Wars, the current Indiana Jones etc.
This pattern repeats. An old property, a white male protagonist and some sort of minority successor. We started with Harrison Ford, but we're getting Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and just the name tells you everything you need to know. The woke-washing is at least partially a defense mechanism because they know the products are terrible and rehashed, likely to generate criticism. Moralizing about their artistic vapidity is the best defense they have.
JTarrou
5mo ago
People don't change. Despite every generation thinking they're the first ones to ever apply intelligence and morality to the problems of the world, they are not. The people who live today are the exact moral equivalents of Salem, or Mao's China, or interwar Germany. They're just pushing their bigotries, hatreds and moral panics along different channels. It has always been this way and always will be. We cannot predict which issues will rise to salience, but we can predict with absolute certainty the psychology and behavior of the people in aggregate.
I believe the current mishmash is a religious void being filled by various cults, one of which will eventually rise to prominence and challenge "traditional" (whatever that means) christianity for the default belief system of western civilization. The "In this house, we believe...." posters are the early adherents.
Re-read your Hoffer if you want to know how it's going to play out.
JTarrou
9mo ago
Amnesty International
Why are they painting benches in randome eastern european towns?
JTarrou
1yr ago
My read is a pretty simple one:
Young men are a dangerous and often degenerate demographic and they really have only two motivations: Sex and violence. Sex is what they want and violence is what they can do. One of the prime problems of society is how to get young men into adult society without doing anything too damaging. In the past, this was accomplished with marriage. Boys got married young, and the combination of sexual access, family responsibility and parental attachment was generally a strong enough combo to blunt the worst impulses.
That system is gone now, for most of the developed world.
The intersection with feminism is one of several reasons for this. Feminism wants equality with men, but specifically in the male dominated spaces, not the female spaces they had already dominated for millennia. The problem is that while all people are status-seeking, women are mate-status-seeking. Men don't much care, so long as a woman is attractive and pleasant. Achievement is sexy on a man, it's completely orthogonal for a woman. By gaining status in formerly male fields, women reduced the number of mates they are willing to consider substantially. The success of women in academics and the workplace creates a large and growing sector of the male population competing over a small and shrinking number of women who are poorer and lower status than they are. It also creates the phenomenon of wildly successful women complaining bitterly there are no decent (i.e. higher status/richer) men anymore. And there aren't, because the ladies succeeded in pricing themselves right out of a mate. Men can and will date down the heirarchy. Women (as a generality, exceptions, NAW, all that) don't.
This state of society is unstable in the long run. Young men who are not brought into society will eventually turn on society. And once they turn, it's only a matter of time before they organize, find a cause and start using the only power they really have: a violent death wish. I believe we already see the first stage of this with school shooters, ISIS recruits, etc.
The question is which way women want to go? They can keep the money and status, but they'd have to fight their own psychology and mate down. Or they can give up the money and status and have more mate options that coincide with their preferences. Or they can rely on repression to keep the men in line, but that requires men to do it, the women will still be alone, and people who are willing, even eager to die are really hard to stop.
JTarrou
5mo ago
I doubt you can extrapolate much from a year or so of missed recruiting goals in a strong job market.
But there might be a kernel of truth that the sort of people who generally staff the pointy bits of the military are increasingly skeptical of their role as the enforcers of a world order that is explicitly hostile to them, their families, states, politics and demographics.
The most basic issue is that the right is correct to mistrust the government, academia, the MIC and the corporate-activist superstructure. Those institutions had maintained the facade of neutrality for a long time, but decided to burn it all to damage Trump. Now the elites need a new pack of grifters to control this diffuse mob that doesn't trust all their carefully controlled outlets.
Tucker and DeSantis are some of the early attempts to get controlled opposition out in front of this distrust, but they won't be the last. Eventually the "new right" will be either discredited, destroyed or co-opted (probably all three). Just like the "new left" forty years ago, only these poor bastards aren't going to wind up in tenured academic positions once their "revolution" fails.
We know very little directly, but what we do have from the bronze age in terms of written inscriptions is mostly kings boasting about how many thousands of people they killed in various inventive and horrifying ways, how many they carried off into slavery and how many they sacrificed to various deities. This was the propaganda being put out to impress the populace, which says something about the public morals of the day. And the fact that there were several empires maintaining major standing armies, all our evidence points to a time of significant, regular state violence on a mass scale. Many of our remaining bronze age-era human remains were killed, and many of the ones that weren't have healed wounds from repeated violence. Even Pharaohs were sometimes bashed in the head with a mace.
It may be the case that in the smaller societies which left much less historical footprint, violence was less than in settled cities. No way to really tell for sure. What we have says that these people were far more violent than most modern states before the collapse. Then things got worse.
A sample inscription from an Assyrian king:
In strife and conflict I besieged and conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms and hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of the heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city.
JTarrou
3mo ago
Technology as politics.
Feminism is more a product of the washing machine, the pill and air conditioning than it is political organizing. It is less an ideology than it is a set of opinions enabled by a certain level of technological advancement.
Anti-racism is more a product of the steam engine than it is of any moral progress. All of human history no one thought to free the slaves, until one day from out of nowhere.....the richest and most technologically advanced society on earth invented a way to turn fossil fuels into energy and all the sudden slavery and the racism that supported it isn't strictly necessary. Hence "moral progress".
Today, we all benefit from less-than-free labor in third world nations making us cheaper consumer products. In the most technologically backward parts of the world slavery still exists. That is not because those are worse people than those of us who can afford to pay for the labor that supports our first world lifestyles.
The "moral" arc of history bends toward whatever options technology provides.
What this means for the age of AI is anyone's guess.
JTarrou
1yr ago
what’s your excuse?
I don't need an excuse for the diet of my species.
Your veganism wouldn't outlast Whole Foods, while my diet is far more "sustainable".
Worse comes to worse, we can always eat the vegans.
JTarrou
1yr ago
The TL;DR is that Ukraine has burned through multiple iterations of armaments and is now reduced to begging for active NATO matériel, hence Germany's reticence to send Leopards.
If this is the level of analysis on offer, it's beyond worthless. Russia too has "burned through" much of their advanced equipment and is now mostly limited to their own domestic new production or mothballed shit from the '50s and '60s. Of course Ukraine wants good weapons, rather than the outdated military surplus most countries have been dumping on them. This is not an indication that anyone is "winning" or "losing". This is what happens in attritional combat.
Germany isn't reticent to send Leopards because the Ukrainians are losing, they're reluctant to send them because they don't have very many and their politics is incredibly fucked up around military matters, for understandable historical reasons. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/21/what-is-stopping-the-supply-of-german-made-leopard-2-tanks
Here's a technical video about IFVs specifically, what sorts are involved, how many, tactics etc. https://youtube.com/watch?v=UGZi-F3tz-o
JTarrou
6mo ago
This is a real key issue that I haven't been able to get anyone to bite on when I raised it before. Exactly what are the features of a group with the right to claim territory and "self-determination"? Is it races? Ethnic groups? Language groups? Any group with the military muscle to make it stick? How long does how much of a group have to live in an area before they have a "right" to the land? How long does that "right" last after they leave?
Everyone acts like there is a set of good definitions and well-established international law here, but there just isn't.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I have bad news. It was always this bad and you just found out.
The only thing that happened was a cohort of Millenials thought that Science was a good replacement for Religion, and so convinced themselves that it wasn't populated with the same stupid, scheming, biased humans as every other profession. Now you know what your father knew, and his father before him. There is no one to trust, so get on with it.
JTarrou
1yr ago
1: Labor isn't woke
2: Railroad crewmen aren't particularly woke
3: Biden's been shitting up the shipping infrastructure for two years and can't afford another fuckup. The midterms are over, but he's up on the block again in two.
JTarrou
2mo ago
A world in which we go from a significant Hispanic and African American Ivy League admissions rate to one that is virtually zero would not be tolerated by the existing social order.
We already have that. Virtually no poor black americans wind up in the Ivy Leagues. The children of wealthy black immigrants do. The children of foreign elites who are also black, or "hispanic" or asian do. Not the actual struggling communities here.
Your whole structure is built on the social identification of poor black americans with much richer, more educated and very culturally distinct groups based on nothing more than skin color.
Yes, so long as black americans think the reason they aren't getting into Yale is that Yale hates black people, not poor people, this will not be tolerated. But that's an assumption that could change quick.
JTarrou
1yr ago
regular conservative posters
I appreciate the shout out, but I'm not, nor have ever been, a conservative. I know and respect a lot of conservatives and I'm conversant in their ideas and politics, but that's a long way from agreeing with them. I sometimes present conservative arguments, but I do try to denote that these are not my own opinions (not that anyone notices).
I am a (small "n") nationalist
a (small "l") libertarian
A classical liberal, if you will.
I have never voted for a Democrat or a Republican for national office (I've voted for both at the state and local level)
The only political party I have ever belonged to is the Libertarian Party (long since lapsed)
I support full drug legalization, legalized sex work, relatively easy access to firearms, enforced borders with generous legal immigration limits, full legal equality for all races, sexes, and sexual orientations. In today's society, I recognize that this codes "Nazi", but I think it's important to maintain the correct terminology, just in case anyone wants specifics.
JTarrou
1yr ago
The fact is that gender is indeed totally distinct from sex.
You assert that which must be proven.
This is not a fact, this is an assertion.
And it's a pretty silly one at that. Gender is totally distinct? What does that even mean? Does it have any relation to sex? What is that relation? You can't define "gender" without reference to sex, and if you could it would stop meaning what the trans lobby wants it to mean.
If gender is a "feeling", as you claim, then that is the same thing as saying it does not exist.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Or alternately, the media has never strung two true words together in the history of the media, depending on your "angels on a pinhead" definition of "lying".
I disagree with Scott that laundering their made-up narratives through political partisans who can be counted on to give the appropriate quotes to support this pre-existing lie is in any way better than just writing the fiction directly. It's just lying with one extra step.
Scenario 1:
Journalist: Hur dur, I'm gonna write that the Hunter Biden laptop isn't a story its.......[shuffles deck] White supremacy! Wait, that might look weird since he's white. Russian disinformation? Let's roll with that!
Scenario 2:
Journalist: Hey Bill, I'm trying to spike this Hunter Biden story, can I quote you as an "anonymous national security official" saying it's your professional opinion that it's Russian Disinformation? Great! Thanks buddy! Hail Obama~!
Scott looks at those and says "see! They didn't technically lie in the second instance! They got someone to say the thing they wanted to say, so by the rules that I've just made up, it's not an untruth!"
And I say they're the same picture.
JTarrou
1mo ago
Ok depressives, hop in.
For once on this forum, I'm really going through it in my personal life. Been a tough winter. Grandparents are dying in slow motion. Marriage is imploding. PTSD is acting up. Even broke down and went to the VA to see a therapist. That was back in January, they've scheduled me to see someone to evaluate whether I should talk to a therapist sometime in May. You know, normal bureaucracy.
I'm in my mid forties and my life is coming apart at the seams.
But lads, this is my year. One way or another, it's going to end better than it began. As bad as things are right now, I am entirely confident in my ability to turn it around.
To psych myself up a bit, I want to talk about my luckiest day. The real hinge point in my life. The reason I'm talking to all of you, or to anyone at all. A dummy-rigged IED just outside Iskandaria nearly twenty years ago.
Just wasn't injured badly enough. Hadn't planned on living. I was clawing my way up the ranks of the pointy bit of the US imperial project. The whole point was to get as high as possible before my luck ended and I bled out in some dingy alleyway or Afghan hillside. My luck though, was even better.
By a combination of the vast sums of money America spends on protecting its troops, and the inferior grade explosives used by the Iraqis, the rocket that should have killed me by any rights instead fizzled. I was left “disabled”, but not enough to feel sorry for myself about. Given the options, of course.
A lot changed that day. My career was over, and with it identity and status. I wasn't going to get to die. I was going to have to live, broken. And be a civilian. Took me a few years to get my head around it. The plan was always live fast, die young.
I had to change. Adapt. Re-orient. Re-motivate. Learn new skills. I spent twenty-five years becoming someone, and then I had to become someone else.
I gotta say, it's been excellent. Even with current troubles, I've had another twenty years with my grandparents, reconciled with my parents, seen my siblings grow up and grow families of their own. Met a great woman, and we had ten good years. I've been happier (and sadder) than I ever thought possible at twenty-five.
This is all bonus round for me. I should have died a long time ago. I've been hurt worse, I've rebuilt from less.
Yes, it sucks right now. Currently at “forcing myself to leave the house” stage, and started crying in public at my boot guy's place yesterday. It's gonna be a long year, but I'll get there.
Life is pain, anyone tells you different is selling something.
JTarrou
1yr ago
This is well known as an economic phenomenon. Capitalists are not capitalistic. They can make more money as a more-regulated semi-monopoly than they can as a less regulated large company with many more competitors because of the lower barrier to entry.
In the industry I work in, holster manufacturing is crazy, there's thousands of companies, many of them one-man shops, because the regulations are very low. It's not a gun, there's no paperwork, no explosives, no hazardous shipping, etc. You get a very vigorous and responsive industry, but cutthroat. The firearms side is the opposite, there's a few conglomerates that own most of the smaller brands, new companies have a hell of a time getting off the ground and if they do, they get bought by the big companies and shelved or run into the ground. This is because the regulatory burden keeps most of the competition out.
JTarrou
1yr ago
A long time ago, in the mid-'90s I worked in a shop fabricating windows. My co-workers were ex-amish, hardcore christians, lifelong contractors and builders. Rush Limbaugh was the preferred shop radio channel. While I don't agree with much of Limbaugh's policies, I did find his show charming and interesting, as political demagoguery goes.
It was an article of faith among these men that the "liberal media" systematically discriminated against people like them, their politics and misrepresented their views. And mostly, they were right, at least in a vague way. This mistrust goes back a long way, but it definitely got ramped up massively under Trump.
And before anyone points out the obvious, yes, of course Fox and Limbaugh or Hannity or Tucker are all doing the same thing from the other side. But anyone can see the power differential between Fox and........everything else at the major media level. More interestingly, there's a whole parallel media infrastructure being built out on the right over the last ten years to match what the left had been doing all along. Creating an entire media ecosystem that can do what mainstream media does, circle-jerk reference their way to "legitimacy". A lot of money got dumped into this, setting up foundations and jobs and funding for twitter/instagram warriors, various news websites of smoothly increasing sketchiness. The right is building a war machine for the culture war, because the regular culture got turned into one against them. They're fifty years behind and they know it. They don't have access to the most educated and talented thinkers, they know that. They do have the sillier shit that the left is dreaming up with their near-monopoly on the mainstream of culture. It magnifies some of the more marginal areas of left-wing politics beyond their actual importance. This can be both because the left is obsessed with their intra-mural fights, and because the right is obsessed with pointing at the resulting wackiness as indicative of the general nature of the left as a whole.
Now, as manifested in this very forum very much downstream of some minor twitter drama with the NYT about an obscure blogger who was subsequently bullied a bit and then sequestered on substack with a nice little gig writing technical stuff just so long as he avoids his spicier takes on politics and culture. A transitory thing in the great scheme of things, but thousands of us had to move our digital home several times because of it.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Yes, and this is how the ATF has done business for fifty years at least. "But don't you hate it when we do this to you?" isn't a strong argument. The right knows they're on the chopping block for stuff that was legal six seconds ago, or will be again shortly when their opponents do it. This is how the rule of law is slowly degraded until it holds no force but force itself.
No laws count other than the "will of the people"? Ok, people on the right have will also. "Your guns won't help you, you need to control the government to crush your opponents"? Ok, the people on the right have votes too. In the same way that the law does not exist to protect the victims of crime, but the perpetrators, the Constitution does not exist to protect the majority from the minority. If the left imagines they can govern by force and without the consent of the opposition, why should the right not adopt a similar stance? If you excuse the bad actions of one side, you lose moral authority to criticize the other.
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".
Let me illustrate by talking about a game that I was very interested in, bought, and turned out to be shit. This has nothing to do with SBI directly.
For those who don't know, the Payday series is co-op crime shooters, think first-person GTA without cars and with friends. You get heists, objectives to complete, you can do stealth or go loud etc.
Payday 2 was excellent, it still has a strong playerbase despite being released over a decade ago. I played quite a bit of it.
So they announced Payday 3 and I was ready. The initial guff I got from beta testers was that teh game was a bit janky (somewhat to be expected) and the female models had gotten ugly. There were a couple people whining about "diversity" and shit, but nobody really cared if the game was good.
Narrator voice: The game was not good. They made it permanently online, meaning you had to be connected to their servers, even to play alone. You needed a new launcher and a special Starbreeze account. And their servers didn't work. And the whole structure of the game was just......bad. It wasn't fun or engaging. Just a joyless grind-fest with no rewards. If you could even get in to play it, which you couldn't for the first three weeks of release. The relative fatness of the female characters was the least of anyone's worries. Frankly, the models weren't that bad.
The playerbase cratered after an initially decent start. Within a few weeks, the number of people playing had dropped 99%.
The CEO of Starbreeze just lost his job for his role in this abortion.
And yet, lots of people who didn't play the game defend it against people who did by claiming that they just hate diversity.
It's not about the uglier female models. That's just a symptom of a deeper problem. When you see that in a game, it indicates that the game wasn't meant to be good, it was meant to tick the DEI boxes. IDGAF about the female models in isolation, but I have a very strong association between obvious political choices in games and shit games. I gave the game a shot, ignoring the trolls whining about unimportant things like how fat the females are now.
Now I'm out forty bucks and I have a game that is worse in every single playable way than its predecessor. Because the studio decided that chubbing up the female models was more important than making sure the servers were functional for a permanently online game.
DEI, not even once.
https://www.ign.com/articles/starbreeze-ceo-out-after-payday-3-disaster
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