JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Of course if somebody in the government does something we don't understand, it always because they have their ineffable ways, which can not be understood by mere mortals. Never attribute to inefficiency and rigidity of humongous bureaucracy what you could attribute to ineffability and unknowable reasons.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
someone needs to do janitor duty in the closed area
True, but the secret documents don't have to be laying around, ready to be photographed, when they do it. There are such things as safes.
literal janitors are going to be granted top secret clearances
Don't see how it follows. Getting physical access to where the safe stands and getting inside the safe is two different things. That's kinda the whole point of the concept of the safe.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
All fraud relies on people trusting without good reason, or more specifically: not distrusting enough. This is no exception.
That's a useless statement, it's like saying all deaths are caused by not living long enough and presenting it as some ultimate discovery in medicine. Of course fraud relies on trust, that's by definition, and of course in the hindsight, that trust was misplaced. But one absolutely can not function in a society without trusting somebody with something. Even low-trust societies have some trust. You go to a store and you trust the owner not to murder you, feed your body to the pigs and take your money. You put your money in the bank and you trust the bank not to refuse to give it back, or the society to be on your side if they do. You get employed and you trust your employer to pay you and not to sell your data to the identity thieves and ghost you, etc. (Sidenote: before you say "I actually never trust anybody, I grow my own food on the top of remote mountain and never speak to another human being unless I see them through the sights of my rifle, and only to procure ammunition for the said rifle, and I demand it upfront" - good for you, it's not how human society works, please understand "you" as collective pronoun here). We trust somebody many times a day if we live in a society, and in the most of these cases the trust is reciprocated with cooperation. Sometimes, though, there are defectors. We recognize the pattern of defection and avoid trusting them - if somebody comes to you on the street and offers to sell you genuine Rolex watch for $5, you rightfully mistrust them - because you have prior experience that says in this context, trust is not warranted. However, absent such context, the cases of misplaced trust would always exist, because it is not possible to perfectly calibrate one's trust without decent knowledge of the matter at hand.
Indeed, but it doesn't have to be proven because the hallmark of having a solid epistemology is not believing things without evidence,
Again, this is a banality which on closer consideration comes apart as useless. You can not evaluate the quality of evidence without experience in evaluating the particular kind of evidence, and not many have experience with evaluating evidence in this particular area.
in order to fall for the fraud you have to believe things without evidence
No you don't. You just would believe the evidence that in the hindsight proves wrong or low quality. In most topics, you can not evaluate evidence by yourself - nobody can. Most people rely on authority of some sort for that - we're back to trust. The modern newspaper fashion of sanctifying "evidence" is a meaningless ritual - anything can be "evidence" or "not evidence", depending on how you evaluate it and relate it to the question at hand. How you know if some investment is good or a fraud? You check its description, its references, the opinion of other people, the data about similar investments, your knowledge about how financial system works, you knowledge about who particular person is - all this relies on myriads of sources which you can not check empirically - it's trust all the way down. There's no procedure that can guarantee you absence of possibility of being deceived here - only methods to reduce this possibility to the level you would find tolerable, but even these calculations again rely on some data which you'd have to take on trust. Sometimes the whole house of cards fails, and you find yourself defrauded. It may be because you personally misjudged the evidence, it may be because somebody who you trusted made a mistake, it may be because somebody somewhere in the web of trust defected. There's no "solid epistemology" that would provide you a guarantee against that. If you think there is - you are the one that is believing things without evidence.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
If you had different names on the doors of Russian offices, it would probably be on par the US,
That's the whole point, it wouldn't. Not in the Russia as it is today. It's not 140 millions of people under the magic spell of a single Volde-Putin. It's a country whose moral fiber is by now profoundly rotten and corrupt. That's what allows Putin and his henchmen to thrive. Changing the names wouldn't help anymore (maybe if it happened 20 years ago, it could, but not today).
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Are Americans as a group to blame for war in Iraq and should be hated for it because majority of them once supported it?
Hated by whom? By Saddam Hussein? Probably. But why would I care what Saddam Hussein would think, if he wasn't hanged and dead?
And I don't think that majority of Russians will support SMO in the next 10 years.
So all we need is to wait 10 more years or terror, murders, war crimes and atrocities, and then it all be ok. Or at least some guy on the internet says so. That really makes one confident, thanks.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Apparently I'm not the most men, as I find her very attractive. That said, the point about makeup in other comment applies. I think it's something that is supposed to be "oriental" and "exotic" and I don't like that part too much.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
aimed at benefiting the working class
aimed at benefitting union members, which constitute part of the working class, at the expense of the rest (including non-union working class)
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
I'm 98.45730468302835030019% certain.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
increased costs such as healthcare of dealing with people who take too many drugs
That'd be a valid argument if those people didn't do exactly the same right now. It's not like it's completely impossible to get drugs - any major city, like San Francisco, has open and well-known drug markets operating, and the authorities pretty much has long ago given up on doing something about it. They still can arbitrarily arrest people for it, but nobody is under an illusion that anything will make any dent into the availability of any drugs.
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
Can they articulate why selling marijuana is worse than selling vodka?
JarJarJedi
1yr ago
The mention of the Jewish origins is not a problem by itself, the "don't expect much" part is the problem. It's certainly not kind, it doesn't make any important point (unless "Jews are by default people that you can't expect much from" is the point, hope it weren't) and it was much more antagonistic than necessary. That's breaking 3 of the first rules right there. If it were expressed as "he is a Jew so it is understandable he is inclined to follow Jewish tradition" then I think it'd be much less objectionable.
JarJarJedi
2mo ago
Not really, it just needs to have the same set of vulnerabilities as legitimate governments, or at least a sizeable subset of them.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
I'm probably too far away to see minor differences, but I don't think I have seen/heard/read a lot of "progressive democrats" criticizing leftist dictators and their approach to elections. I mean, when did I have the last opportunity to see a leftist protest demanding to hold free elections in Cuba? Venezuela? North Korea? China? Anywhere where a leftist or islamist dictator holds power? I mean, a lot of Americans have opinions, as we recently found out, about how Israel's democracy must be managed, but none have any opinions on any of those? Doesn't it look a little bit weird?
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
I'm not sure how the second part follows from the first. It's like saying "we desperately need the cure for common cold, so I am using charmed bracelets and pyramid power". The proposition that something is sorely lacking does not imply logically acceptance of something that is clearly inadequate for that purpose.
I mean, one can hope "he's clearly a grifter but may be he will fool some of the most stupid of Dems" but one can't rely on this as a plan for anything?
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
The implication being that the pro-Ukraine side, by contrast, has a plan?
Whatever plan they may or may not have, it's certainly less stupid than Carlson's "we feed Ukraine to Putin and he'll battle China for US" or Vivek's "We feed Ukraine to Putin and there would be peace in our time". But I suspect, different "pro-Ukraine" sides - many of which aren't as pro-Ukraine as they present - have different plans. US Democrats probably try to maximize the profit (both pecuniary and political) from the war while committing to as little as possible and not letting Russia become unpredictable (because that looks like work and who needs that), most of the EU tries to show off as much as possible while doing as little as possible, Ukrainians try to survive...
Like, what's your actual conception of how this is all going to roll out?
Given current players, likely pretty badly for all involved. Probably there will be some temporary ceasefire and then a new war in 5-10 years, and so on. Until Russia finally collapses, but that can take a long while - last time it took 70 years.
But what's the endgame, here?
We all dead, sooner or later? I mean, what exactly you expect the "endgame" to be? It's not some kind of Magic The Gathering match, where you sit down, play a round, then come up and go back home. Who told you there's such a thing as "endgame" at all? The war surely will end, one way or another, at least all the previous wars did. How it will end depends on a lot of things, and anybody who says they can predict it, are lying.
What are you willing to call failure, such that you agree that it's time to cut our losses?
If you approach any task with "when are we calling it a failure finally", then yes, the question would only be when you call it a failure. But then, why you are surprised there are so many failures? You're literally rooting for it, so you're getting what you asked for.
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
companies can go for long periods without CEOs. losing coders would be a disaster for a company like Meta or Google
Losing all coders - sure. Losing one coder - nope. Of course if you compare one Elon Musk to the collective intellectual capacity of all programmers in Meta or Google combined, he's likely lose, as would any single human. But that's hardly a fair comparison.
but management can be done by many people and is a more inclusive skill
Management can be done poorly by many people. Doing it well is a skill not unlike any other skill, and probably less frequent than the ability to write Python scripts.
They are both smart, but a top coder wins out in the IQ game compared to a top manager.
What's "the IQ game" and by which rules is it played?
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
Nothing "modern" about artillery shell production.
So, you are saying the West does not have any manufacturing capacity to produce something what doesn't even require any modern technology? This is a very sharp contradiction with everything I can observe, where the West is producing a lot of things right now. Of course, there's an obvious solution to this contradiction - the capacity of the Western economy and manufacturing power vastly exceeds the necessary one to produce any number of shells. But nobody wants to direct all that capacity to producing shells for Ukraine, because that would mean withdrawing the capacity from other products, and consequent troubles in the areas of economy that currently use that capacity. US does not want to be on WW2 war economy footing just because Ukraine needs shells. I think it is much more plausible explanation than your suggestion that there's no way to produce more than 100k shells by 2025 in the US. There is, but the US does not want to do it, because any politician that would propose it would be thrown out in the next election, or maybe recalled even before that.
Modern world industrial production and logistical capacity is at least by magnitude higher than during WW2 time, all these things can be ordered online
Wait, so you are claiming the West can't produce any sizeable amount of shells, but all the necessary components for producing any sizeable amount of shells can be easily "ordered online" and deployed in 20 days? Are you not noticing how you are contradicting yourself? I don't even need to argue with you - you are doing it for me!
This is not even slight exaggeration of things that were routinely done in the past.
This wasn't a) routine b) building from empty field c) done in 20 days. The very article you are quoting states that the preparations begun in 1940 and the production started to increase in 1942. And that was building on existing industrial base - nobody evacuated the factories into empty fields, they were evacuated to existing industrial and population centers.
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
I am not a Dutchman (not that there's anything wrong with that ;), neither I am a native English speaker, so I make such mistakes regularly, especially when I tweak the phrase several times before posting and forget to re-read the whole thing and see if it still sounds like a coherent and correct phrase. I do know about that rule, in fact, by a weird coincidence, I was reading an article about it just yesterday (even though I knew it before that), but of course that means nothing. I sometimes make such mistakes even in my native language. I appreciate you pointing it out, which reminds me of the necessity of paying more attention.
JarJarJedi
7mo ago
However, the more sensible view is that there are cases where a lack of US intervention will still result in a shitshow, but nonetheless likely to be a less bad shitshow on the whole, e.g. the Vietnam War or the Iraq War.
It's not at all clear that the shitshow sans the US would be actually less. I mean, sure, not opposing the USSR (and China) communist takeover over the globe would be cheaper near-term. But do you think USSR taking over the whole Asia, South America and Africa would be less of the shit show than now? Of course, all these commit regimes would come crashing down as they did in Eastern Europe, but with the West looking the other way and pretending the commies don't exist or don't matter - could it have happened 50 years later? Could it cause much more blood (remember Budapest 1956 and Prague 1968?) and death? I think pre-supposing the answer to that is the same fallacy as saying "US meddling is the root of all evil", only in different words.
With Iraq, again looking into it in context, no US meddling means Iraq taking over Kuwait, and then expanding its operations further, and likely getting into a hot war with Israel using whatever WMDs they had. I'm not sure that'd be less of a shitshow, especially given that Israel does have nukes, and doesn't have any strategic depth, which means if seriously threatened... use your imagination. Not saying Iraq would be strong enough to get as far as to threaten Israel's existence as such - but if they get lucky and get this far, who'd stop things going there? Remember, US is not meddling anymore, which means they would neither prevent any shit from happening by force nor by promise of their protection (or its withdrawal). The world of "not meddling" would be much more dangerous and shaky, I am afraid. When there's no police, there would be shootouts. I suspect that'd be much bigger shitshow.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
considering the endurance the US has shown in unpopular and not particularly televised campaigns since 1945
That was a different US. Right now, the question of support for Ukraine has become intensely tribal, and the red tribe wants nothing to do with it. The blues want to support it, but how long it will last? The example of Afghanistan shows us the 180 degree turn is possible at any second, and when it happens, nobody would try to do a smooth transition - the mode of operation would be "dump and run".
Ukraine's main problem right now seems to be that it's "kept on its toes" and can't actually catch a break to accumulate supplies and temporarily swing the balance
They don't have any supplies to accumulate, their own production facility is tiny and can't be upgraded to the necessary level for a long time, at least not without a massive Western investment. Ukrainians spent a lot of time in the last decades selling off their stockpile and production capacities - including to Russia, btw - because they didn't believe Russia would dare to launch the full invasion. Getting their own capacities to the level they could do more that temporarily hold off the Russians would take many years. The years which Russia wouldn't be sitting and waiting.
On the other, Russia's economic sprezzatura has to crack eventually
Why? No it hasn't. Russians have certain problems with both selling the hydrocarbons and obtaining the technologies, which limit their capacities somewhat, but not ruinously so. They still largely have enough weapons to essentially grind the situation to an expensive stalemate, and they can keep on keeping on like that for a very long while. Yes, the life of an ordinary citizen of Russia under such regime would be somewhat shitty, but the life of an ordinary citizen of Russia has been somewhat shitty for centuries, it's absolutely nothing new. Economically, Russia is not close to breaking and the current level of sanctions won't break it, at least not for a very long time. They can muddle through just enough to get to the point where the West gets tired and removes the sanctions, or at least weakens the support of Ukraine, at which time they'll resupply everything they need to grab a bit more territory and repeat. They are banking on Western attention span being short and resolve being weaker with time and expense, and I can't honestly say that it's a completely baseless assumption.
I would therefore actually expect that in 5 years, a rested, rearmed, hardened and sure-footed Ukraine could roll over a Russia
If you expect that you are horrendously deluded. Nobody is "rolling over" anybody there, not with Ukrainian capacities. They are smart and brave people, but in this war God is on the side of big battalions. They just don't have the capacity to roll anything, without substantial air force, naval capabilities, far strike capabilities and with numerical and resource disadvantage. They are much better warriors than Russians, but it's just not enough. The absolute best Ukraine can hope for is slowly (and very, very expensively) pushing Russians back to pre-2014 borders, and that would cost a lot and require a lot more Western help that is being given now. If Russia is given time to resupply and rearm and upgrade their technological level and turn all the occupied territories into a massive fortification, the best Ukrainians can hope is when the Russians attack the next time (and it will be them attacking, Ukrainians would never dare to break the peace and risk jeopardizing the Western support) it won't cost them more than a couple of minor cities until the Russians are ground to a stop again. Then there would be the next time, and the next time after that, until the West would reasonably decide that since 40% of Ukraine territory is occupied by Russia anyway, and in the current form it's not economically viable, it's better to broker a permanent solution where Ukraine becomes Russia's bitch protectorate and the war finally stops. And all the armchair strategists would lament that we should have done it decades before and saved all the effort and trillions spent.
For the latter, I think that after Ukraine's resilience surprised most Western commentators in the opening days
That is true, Ukrainians proved to be much more capable warriors than the West expected. That's the reason why Ukraine still exists as a nation. But it's not enough. Long war is a question of resources, and Ukrainian's own resources are small compared to Russia. If the West is not willing to commit enough resources to overcome that disadvantage, the Ukrainians will lose. And if Russia is able to resupply and refit their resources, then the disadvantage will only become more pronounced. Heroism can only take you so far.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
My point is pro-establishment Jews vote Democrat, so Vivek, being a Republican candidate, can have no currency with them. To gain any possibility of their approval, he'd have to run as a Democrat for starters. Since he doesn't, he has to address some audience where he has a chance.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
but - "abandoned"?
Well, that was a messy time so no answer would cover everybody. But if we would simplify and condense the story a lot, once Israel declared independence, the surrounding Arab countries immediately declared a war to it. To be sure, by then the war between Jews and Arabs was already ongoing for a while, but there wasn't any official entity to declare war to, and invasion into territory which is officially part of the British Empire is not something one does lightly (or at least did back then). Once it was no longer British, just Israel, it was go time.
However, the territory was inhabited by a lot of Arab people too, and living in the middle of an active military campaign is no fun. So the advice that was given to the Arab population of Israel was thus: move out for a bit, we massacre all the Jews quickly, they stand no chance obviously, and you can come back and live happily ever after. And so some did. To be frank, the Jews weren't exactly stopping them and begging them to stay. Then, as the war progressed, it turned out that Arab armies are not exactly winning. More like losing miserably. And some Arabs who stayed so far started wondering - if we planned to massacre all Jews when we win, what would the Jews do now that they are winning? Obviously, not treat us to kumbaya feasts. We weren't even hiding our plans. They must be very angry by now. So, more people moved out, in fear of Jewish retaliation. Again, the Jews weren't exactly begging them to stay. Then, of course, there were also cases where Arab villages, especially ones who took active part in fighting against Jews, were expelled from their villages when their side lost, that happened too. And the rumors about war atrocities - which were happening, as they happened in any war, and were exaggerated in retelling as they commonly are - contributed to this too, thus if in some village the men were fighting against the Jews, they sometimes chose to take their family and flee even before Jews come in, because they heard some tales what may happen otherwise (true or false). Again, some among Jewish leadership saw it as a positive factor so they were encouraging such rumors and reactions to them as much as they could. Some of them thought they may have to do some kind of population transfer or exchange anyway, once they win the war, so if it's happening right now it's even better, less work later.
Of course, alongside with all that, there were also, as I mentioned, cases of forcible expulsion too. So this does not describe every single case.
This makes them sound like they just sort of flaked out for no good reason.
Well, as I described above, they had plenty of reasons. Having to stay in the "refugee" status for three generations is much less reasonable though.
Weren't these people fleeing some pretty scary massacres
Deir Yassin is one of those atrocities that I mentioned above, and even though it wasn't a typical occurrence for that war, it certainly contributed to the atmosphere. But it wouldn't be accurate to say most people would be fleeing same events that occurred at Deir Yassin - some of them may have been concerned it might happen again, but for most of them it's not what has or was about to happen.
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
99.9999% of what you do in your daily life (I am not sure about the number of nines, but a bunch of them for sure) is resting on thinking done by the old dead men (and a few old dead women too, thankyouverymuch) who had no conception of what a smartphone is. Even if you are a genius far surpassing such people as Newton (who wasn't too proud to admit his debt to his predecessors, old dead men who didn't have a concept of calculus or gravity), you still could not manage to create much of what you enjoy from the first principles without relying on those dead old men's work and thought. Even if you skipped the exercise time. You could be thankful and appreciative for it, or you could throw a juvenile temper tantrum and scream "you are not the boss of me!" and slam the door to your room, it doesn't matter - your debt to those old dead men is still real, enormous and never to be overcome. Unless you renounce everything and go to the caves (to think of that, I think Rousseau already explored that too?). Given that you post here, it's probably not your cup of tea. Which is smart. Enjoying what the old dead men could give you instead of petulantly denying them would be even smarter.
I also asked if it's a longer dick, so let's get into the gay angle too, right? I just enumerated the known definitions of "superior", without having or implying any idea which one is yours. I thought mentioning the dick would be enough to make sure this list is made in mockery of the whole concept, not as a suggestion for it, but of course, it wasn't.
That said, if you are fine with eugenics, I am not sure why the racist angle offends you so much. Even if racist eugenics is wrong (which I am not sure if you believe or not, but it's immaterial) - it's a small wrong. It's like an argument between two theoretical physicists about quantum theory - one may come out right and another may come out wrong, but they both are and remain respected scientists, and their ideas, even is occasionally wrong, would still gain them respect. If eugenics is fine, the only sin of racist eugenics is they get some small details wrong, not that the whole thing is morally abominable.
Again, thanks, but fuck that. As a Jew, I don't want my shield against the fires of Auschwitz to be "high-quality genes", by any definition. Neither I want anybody else's. Either we agree that we don't do "genetic engineering by murdering people" thing (and forced sterilization and other things - which can not be "non-violent" by definition - are only a small step removed from it), regardless of how sure we are we got it right this time (we didn't, we never will) - or we are in the deepest pits of Hell, and no rationalization ever changes that.
Yeah, I remember, the forced sterilization programs and the Nobel prize for lobotomy. Thanks but no thanks.
Also, weren't those the same guys that were super-worried too many Jews are getting into Harvard and Yale? They finally solved that problem, I hear, took them a century but it's done.
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