JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Please explain which word in the description "Hamas operatives" that I used is giving you the trouble?
JarJarJedi
22d ago
Thank you for this thoughtful and well argued observation.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
using them apparently interchangeably with "anti/pro American strategic interests"
That's nonsense. Having war in the middle of Europe is not German or Polish or British or Spanish or Greek or any other European interest. Russian imperial plans is not "American" problem, it's the problem for everybody who is part of what we call "Western civilization".
That's not the same thing really as being 'pro Western civilisation'.
True. They are allies. That was my point.
Putin actually leans into a lot of Christian elements
Of course, Russia's ideology has always been that they are the "true" Christians and all the non-eastern-orthodox Christians are heretics, and thus taking over Byzantine inheritance and serving as sole protector of the Christian faith is the Russian destiny, thus it's called the "third Rome". Putin invented nothing here, he just reheated the policies of Russian Empire. Of course, this implies inherent conflict with the West, who also considers itself the continuation of Greko-Roman civilization - they are the fakes, and Russia is the true heir, so until they recognize this fact, there can be no peace (though there could be some temporary tactic armistices and alliances, of course).
"Russia is the enemy of American-led global supremacy"
Again, nonsense. Russia is the enemy of the EU as much - likely more - as America. Of course, if you want to go back to the Holy Roman Empire, maybe Russia isn't the enemy of that, but it's the enemy of everything the Western civilization is now, and not just tactically, but strategically - at least until it abandons the "third Rome" ideology, which definitely won't happen while Putin is alive.
I personally believe they assisted or overlooked Ukraine in destroying the Nord stream pipelines and therefore participated directly in crippling "western civilisation" for the foreseeable future.
You can believe whatever you like, but some German politicos being bought by Putin is not really a sign that Europe wants to submit to the glorious Russian empire. Some politicians, sure, would like a share of Gazprom billions, no doubt about it. But those politicians don't represent much beyond their own greed.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
Blacks will never accept being an underclass any more than whites would,
True, and that's why the only solution is to abandon the framework where the measure of equality is the equality of statistical outcomes between races (or any other large population-wide categories, for that matter). This framework is not something that is inevitable and it's not something that is necessary. I don't care how many people who have the same eye color as me and the same nose length as me are rich and how many are poor. I care if I'm rich or poor, I care about whether my family and my friends are rich or poor. I care about whether I could be prevented from being richer or made poorer by unjust means. But wide-area statistical frameworks are meaningless to me - unless they are made meaningful by adopting them as political and cultural framework that is dominant in the society. There's no inherent reason why US should have adopted the racial framework. To be an "underclass" you should first be a "class", and "classes" are entirely arbitrary. Stop obsessing about them and the problem will be gone.
give blacks an area that they control completely
Who are "they"? Any man that can prove a drop of African blood? That's much more people than you think. What happens to other people living there, if they don't want to live in the racist paradise? What does it mean "control completely" - does it secede from the US? What happens to people that want to keep living in the US and keep being US citizens and keep having US laws? I don't see why for example a black professor at local university would suddenly want to subject himself to a regime that may not be able to sustain any universities at all. Doesn't he have any rights?
Grant this area leave to write its own laws as it sees fit
Areas can't write laws. People write laws. Who will be choosing these people? Will it be mass combat or lottery or how are you planning to choose those people? What if there would be 10 groups of people writing ten competing sets of laws - which group is the real one that gets the full control? How this control would be enforced - will US army and police participate if armed conflict happens? Will it blockade the area if there would be threat of violence spreading out? What about if they decide to build a giant meth factory and ship it to the US? Or even much worse, a giant generic drugs factory, without respecting any US drug patents? Will there be a complete trade embargo?
Then declare that outside this zone, racism has been solved. Blacks get the exact same legal status as everyone else
They already have this status, why we need the racist paradise to achieve what we already have?
No AA, no hate crime laws, no special privileges, we implement pure colorblind enforcement of the letter of the law.
Again, we can do it right now - why we need the racist paradise? What if the blacks don't want to live in the racist paradise, but want to keep living in New York and California, only better than they live now? I'm not sure what exactly having the racist paradise zone achieves. If you have a mechanism that can stop the racial grievances, I don't see why you can't use it without that, and if you don't have that mechanism, what did you achieve then?
I think he's right that the colorblind 90s aren't coming back
The past is never coming back, but we're coming into the future, and it can be made better than the present, if there's a will.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
I'd assume the ones in Britain are predominantly relatively recent arrivals, so they still communicate in their native tongues.
JarJarJedi
22d ago
This is just a payment-processing system, not a whole new currency.
Yes, but if the processing system uses dollars and US banks (or banks that eventually connect to US banks) then US can control it. Dealing with a ton of different currency without having an intermediary one where you can align everything to the single common measure could be challenging...
PAPSS's governing council appears to be populated by the top officials of the central banks of its member countries.
Yes, of course, but what happens if there is a conflict between them? Say, one government has a lucrative trade in goods that are frowned upon by other governments, and wants to use this system to facilitate it? What if two members have a fight and try to block (or steal) each other's payments?
JarJarJedi
22d ago
It is understandable that they may have different interests than the US, and thus want a monetary system that can not be controlled by the US. The question is, who will be controlling it then? Somehow I doubt it being controlled by Zambia or South Africa or any other African state would be better for the long-term perspectives of it, and in general African states - especially ones that are located close and thus most in need of common currency system - aren't best known for always valuing cooperation over conflict. Of course, they could elect China or Russia or Iran to be their master - but why exactly would that play better for them than the US?
They could try to implement a truly decentralized zero-trust system, but given as nobody really done it on the national scale, I'm not sure they have the expertise or the guts to try it. Would be an interesting experiment though, but there are so many failure modes there that it could only be of any value if successful.
a $200 million trade between two parties in different African countries is estimated to cost 10% to 30% of the value of the deal.
That sounds horrendously expensive. I wonder is that because of the risks? Then of course homegrown systems would be cheaper - by just ignoring the risks, until the next rugpull.
JarJarJedi
23d ago
I'm sorry but I vastly prefer "degeneracy and blight brought about by modernity and late-stage capitalism" - aka civilized living in good conditions, decent income, nice job and all trappings of modern civilization - to "mostly functioning nations" (side note - did you notice how "mostly" became the most deceitful of words in English recently? Take "mostly peaceful"...). Given how many people move from "mostly functioning" to "degenerate late capitalist" nations and how many move the opposite direction, I somehow suspect I am not a rare exception.
JarJarJedi
1mo ago
It tastes like alien cat piss, it has a bunch of spooky chemicals and there's absolutely no reason to drink it when there are many better alternatives.
JarJarJedi
1mo ago
Enmity between the Capitalist USA and the USSR started with the latter's birth, or preceded it.
This is true, but that initial enmity has officially ended in 1930s by FDR, and turned into an alliance in the 1940s and had highs and lows since then. You seem to be making some kind of a point that there was one constant policy over seven decades of USSR existence, but it was a multitude of different policies. Sometimes US chose to fight, sometimes they chose to sit aside, sometimes they chose to ally with USSR against common enemy.
I'm not sure what you mean by "credibility" here. My point is very simple - if US chose to never fight, it would not lose any specific wars to USSR, but it would lose everything, and in that hypothetical world, we'd still have USSR right now, probably owning most of Europe, Africa, Latin America and China owning Asia. Fortunately, we live in a better world - the one when US sometimes chose to fight, and ultimately won, even despite losing some wars. I don't see any possibility of avoiding any lost wars in advance, except giving up from start and not fighting at all.
JarJarJedi
1mo ago
The US DID give up Poland without trying! That's a thing that really happened!
Nope. Solidarnosc had a lot of support from the US, though it was not all in the open. Reagan lead a lot of it.
With Hungary and Czechia it was different - those were already considered owned by USSR, so it was USSR atrocities in their own space rather than the US losing to them.
From this we can deduce that US global prestige suffered less from scenarios in which they didn't try than scenarios in which they tried and lost.
If it didn't try, what "prestige" you are talking about? Prestige of doing what? Sitting in their corner of the world and silently watching as USSR eats the rest of it?
I was referring to Kiev, the first capital of the original Rus state from which modern Russia claims cultural, linguistic, and religious continuity.
That is an extremely tortured argument. Like claiming US must invade and annex Italy because our culture has so much connections to Romans. Kiev, as you know, is the capital of Ukraine, and not Russia, and while it is true that Kiev, at certain times, was the center of the civilizational entity which gave birth to many other that eventually become modern entities including Russia, treating this as a claim that "Ukraine was an ancient part of Russia" makes as much sense as claiming "Rome is an ancient part of the US". It's just ahistorical nonsense based on shallow TV-news-level knowledge - which is exactly why Putin is using it btw, his target audience knows "there was something with the name vaguely resembling "Russia" in Kiev at one time, so that means Kiev always belonged to Russia".
despite having been easier for them to conquer in the current war on account of their terrain and their population not having gone through the cultural separation from Moscow and St. Petersburg that the rest of Ukraine has.
This has nothing to do with the population or what they would want or not want. Pre-2022, the territories were mostly conquered by using Ukrainian internal turmoil and weakness to capture control. The population wishes had precisely little to do with it - it's not like Russia is a democracy or cares what the population thinks - people that think wrong just get jailed (or die of mysterious illnesses, or fall out of windows, you get the idea). Once they expanded their interest to the territories which couldn't be easily grabbed, the default mode became just bomb the shit out of it until nothing but barren scorched earth is left. Again, nothing to do with "cultural separation". It's not like Civilization games when there's a "cultural vote" among the population and if the culture of other country wins, this city joins it. What actually happens Russian just bomb this city into dust, and it matters preciously little what the former occupants of the former city thought about St. Peterburg's culture.
JarJarJedi
4mo ago
"yes" is not an answer to the question "Where does that definition come from?" If you believe there are some objective "country goals", you should explain who is entitled to set them and how. I mean, "country" can't speak to us and tell us what the goals are. So what is the mechanism by which we know what are the objective "country goals"? How would one make sure, for example, that investigating corruption by somebody named "Donald Trump" aligns with "country goals", but investigating corruption by somebody named "Hunter Biden" contradicts them? Please describe the decision chain here that allows to make an objective decision not reducible to political power balance between competing partisan fractions.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
Capital punishment is not a medical procedure and you shouldn't make it look like one.
Why not? When guillotine was invented, execution of the enemies of the state was a public spectacle that was explicitly designed to terrify and intimidate the population (and, to some measure, entertain it, with the idea that however bad you've got it, at least it's better than that guy). I think the government has since improved to a point where it has much more widespread and efficient methods to terrify and intimidate the population, and does not limit itself to the worst of the worst of the criminals anymore. So there's no point in spectacle, why not get rid of it and get to the end point of it with minimal amount of hassle?
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
I am not sure what exactly Russia is constructing (a fascist empire would be a good general description but it lacks specific details) but it has very little to do with what we understand as Western civilization, and it is ideologically opposed to it. You can call it "civilization-state" in the meaning of its own, peculiar to that state, civilization which is built on the principles alien to the Western one, and that's exactly my point.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
And the reason they don't because it's only needed when you can't use iCloud, and you can't use iCloud when your country is debanked for starting a war. I don't know how Apple's internal project management works, but I suspect a task "make data migration work if my country is under sanctions" is not very high on the list.
JarJarJedi
6mo ago
So what? What would it accomplish?
Hopefully, reframing the conversation from "greedy capitalists kill grandmas" to "healthcare policy matters and we must pay a lot of attention to it and demand much better from The Experts (TM) and relentlessly shame those who dared to lie to us and lead us to the mess we have, and demand from the future ones to be candid with us and provide solutions that look better".
that would still be true
I hope that if by some miracle we found in ourselves, as a society, a way to move conversation from murdering CEOs to discussing policies, then we could also find a way to improve those policies or at least have people en masse understand what those policies are and what are their consequences, so it won't be as easy for the next Gruber to deceive people. I don't exactly expect it, but I hope.
And Congress, like most institutions these days, cannot be fixed, only replaced.
Replaced with what? How? The founders of the current government have done a lot of work to lay the philosophical and practical foundations of the system now in place. It is true that it has diverged from the original intent significantly, but at least if we proclaim as a goal to return to that, we may rely on that work to understand what has to be done and why. What is your foundations and where you want to move, beyond destroying the US government?
JarJarJedi
8mo ago
Where I live, I have no idea what ideologically most of people are, though since it is quite red area, I have my suspicions, but I don't know about each person specifically.
Ideally, I do not mind living around people who disagree with me on ideology, provided the disagreement is not too far. If somebody thinks we need to raise taxes and spend the money on public works projects like building a park, maybe I disagree but I'm fine living with them around me. If somebody thinks enforcing laws is racist and we should cut the police budget and use the money to distribute free drugs to drug addicts and perform gender transitions to kindergarten children - I'd rather live in a place far, far away from that person. It probably will be hard for me to draw the line per policy, but usually such things come in a package, and having lived with the results of applying that package to day-to-day life, I'd rather not go through that again.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
I care when people say that whites should be discriminated against or disadvantaged, because I'm white.
And so should you. That's why "no discrimination against any group for any quality" is the right answer. The law should be blind to arbitrary class categories.
The actual, current black community, or whoever they choose or designate from among that community.
Why do you think such a "community" exists? So far there's no any indication of it. Black separatists do exist, but they are tiny and vast majority of black people has no idea who they are and if they do, they do not support them. If there would be a unified black community that would show interest in separatism, there could be some discussion about it, but what's the point of discussing making deals with entities that are entirely imaginary?
No one of any race has to go there, at all, ever.
So why anybody would? Why they don't just stay right where they are and keep demanding reparations from the US? What is going to stop them?
That would be for them to sort out.
What do you mean by "them"? The US just declares on 1.1.XXXX the US laws stop working in Atlanta? That's not what any lawful framework in the US could ever allow. And I don't see how it wouldn't just invite Sinaloa cartel (or anybody else quick on their feet) to capture the territory by force and not give a whistle about your racist paradise plans at all?
We check goods at the border and confiscate contraband.
You know how well it works on Mexican border, where the counterparty is the actual functioning government that kinda wants to help us with that? Now imagine how well it would work when the government on the other side actually actively wants it not to happen. You will confiscate exactly nothing and you will have zero control over it.
The rest of your questions seem to be predicated on people being forced to live in such a zone
If any of the populated area is turned into the racist paradise, the people living there would be forced to either live there or lose their homes, jobs, social environments etc. Why would they agree to that? Say, why Oprah would want to live in this racist paradise enclave, if she's already a billionaire in America? I think she'd certainly prefer keep living in America - as she does. If there would be any desire on the part of the black Americans to live in something like that, black separatism wouldn't be a political nonstarter. Yet, it is.
Moreover, why limit ourselves to American blacks? There are millions of people who already enjoy this deal - living in a places where US does not control it, and doing whatever they want there, mostly. Yet, we are witnessing millions of them, day after day, at great personal expense and risk, to try to get into America and stay there. Why do you think black Americans - who already enjoy full citizenship right, full access to welfare services, significant representation in all power structures and undying admiration of at least one powerful political movement - would want a worse deal than Haitian blacks want? I see no evidence and no logical reason why they would, and this makes this whole scheme doomed and useless.
so you need to give them a demonstration of good faith,
How do you know they'd take it as a demonstration of good faith? I don't see any indication from them that they would. Again, black separatism is not exactly popular, and if people understood what it actually means - e.g. losing all access to all the welfare state goodies, US citizen benefits, etc. - it's be even less popular. If they think US is built mostly by their ancestors (let's no argue how true it is but assume that's what they think) but they aren't getting their fair share of it, how giving them a soon-to-be-shithole area and absolving ourselves of any responsibility of what happens there would sound like a good deal? They want a fair share of everything, not some scraps that somebody decided to throw to them and lock them out of the rest.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
American blacks go their own way,
Go their own way where? Liberia? I don't see them doing that voluntarily, why would they go to some shithole, they are as American as everybody else (and more than myself, a relatively fresh immigrant, for example). Or just ethnically purge Atlanta and ban whites from every coming in there? Why Atlanta then and not New York or Santa Monica? How that's supposed to work without destroying every principle of American society? I mean sure, if you imagined you are building a simulation from scratch, you could add a rule "black and whites live separately" and see if it works. But this simulation has already been running for a while, and I can't even begin to think that "their own way" would mean in this context. What if they think their own way is keep living in America, just as they did - does it mean whites have to get out?
Black-white conflict will never cease in this country so long as blacks continue to lag so far behind other races
I don't think it's true. A lot of countries have ethnically heterogeneous population, and a lot of countries have a lot of issues and concerns connected to that. But nowhere (at least not among developed countries) it's as central to literally everything as in America. And it is getting worse. Which also, paradoxically, means it is possible for it to be better - because it has been. And it has been deliberately made worse, for very practical partisan political reasons. If Americans, as a culture, find in themselves to sacrifice their partisan interests to their common culture interests, if they still want to make it better and not just to win over the other team, no matter the cost - it is possible for it to be better. Will it be all ok and nice? No. Shit's probably will be going on for decades, and there would be low-key racism and low-key hatred for a long time. But it can be much better than it is now, and the only thing that is really necessary if for people to want to make it better.
unilateral disarmament by blacks, despite no structural changes that could plausibly lead to a future favorable outcome for them
The only way there could be "future favorable outcome for them" is a racist regime actively (and by our current standards, absolutely outrageously) discriminating against people who are not them. Nothing less would make a dent. Even if that were possible, it may persist for one generation, while people who saw the reverse regime are still alive and still feel guilty for it. The next generation would not feel this guilt. They will inevitably demand justice. And then what? How do you give them justice? The only way you know?
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
The San Francisco guy preached to birds and animals, but didn't hit anybody with flaming logs. That's much better IMHO.
JarJarJedi
9mo ago
Sounds like an extreme maniac (of course, it's probably false anyway). I mean, if the prostitute has already been paid, all he had to do is to tell her "go away, I don't want your services" (or, maybe, just have her sit in a corner for 10 minutes - though for a virgin probably even 5 minutes should be enough - just to be believable and then make her go away) and she would - who wouldn't be happy to get paid without doing any work? If she hasn't been paid (in which case, wtf was his father is thinking?), then pay her and see above. WTF does he need to do with the flaming sticks and what exactly she got beaten for? She was just doing her part of the deal, she didn't do anything wrong. It's not even claimed she was the devil or sent by the devil or anything like that - she was just a hired worker that came to do her work, what the heck she deserved to be beaten with a flaming stick for? This is an insanely messed up story!
JarJarJedi
just now
Israel is probably willing to spend many more of its own lives in this conflict.
In fact, the projections of losses from Iran and Hezbollah operations were much higher than actually happened. I don't have exact numbers handy but I heard from 3x to 10x more, and it still was deemed acceptable to begin the operations with that level of loss projections. So yes, at least as far as Israel government is concerned, they estimate they could bear 10x more casualties without losing the war. I hope we will never verify that in practice, but at least it was the assumption of people whose job is to make such assumptions and decide whether or not to go to war based on them.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
The link above works for me... I think it's the same site?
Here's the source of the problem. If you live in an anti-civilization country, don't be surprised some Western civilization things are not working for you. It may be not your personal fault and you may not have another choice, but that's the problem and everything else is downstream from it. Apple and Meta products aren't built to cater for users that live in anti-civilization countries and never will be, and it's not reasonable to expect them to. Your choice is using R-Fon and Vkontakte or suffer what you must.
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