JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
since it was believed the Air Force would simply nuke any rival into submission
That error seems to come up again and again for the last 100 years. Strategic bombing proved to be useless, "just nuking the enemy" proved to be a fallacy, the ideas about "we don't need tanks and artillery, we will just destroy the enemy from afar" have been thoroughly debunked in Ukraine... And yet, somehow the galaxy brains of strategy still don't learn the lesson.
I think it's a bit too early to nominate DeSantis to the position of "you've got to mention him if anything bad happens even if what happened has absolutely zero connection to him", which is currently occupied by you know who.
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
I like the division of labor, and to a great degree the monopolization of violence by the state too. I like that I can trust other people to build my house, to make my shoes and to brew my beer, much better than it would be done if I did it myself. So, I'm ok with the state delivering the necessary violence to keep the peace by means of professionally trained men and not by myself having to do it (of course, there are exceptional situations where it's not applicable). The tragedy of the woke society is that it keeps the separation of powers where the citizens delegate keeping of peace to the state, but reneges on the promise of peace being kept, telling the citizens that due to past and present sins (mainly having to do with their skin color) they do not actually deserve any peace. This looks a lot like fraud. If I paid for shoes, I want good shoes, not crudely made wooden blocks and a lecture about how slaves two centuries ago had it worse. If we as a society agreed to have the police, I want it to deliver the peace. Unfortunately, more frequently than not it doesn't happen. And, even more unfortunately, the inhabitants of these places - numerous, often educated and wealthy people - seem to be unwilling to do anything to change it (often willing to do much to make it worse). I'm not sure how to fix this situation and whether the fix is possible at all.
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
Unless they have a knife?
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
why I’m a grown man who let myself be treated like a pathetic plaything by individuals who are my social and biological inferiors in every imaginable way
This part sounds bad. I am not sure whether you intended it or not, but it sounds like you'd be ok if you were humiliated by you social or biological superiors (wtf is that anyway? More Aryan? More muscular? Longer dick?), but the fact that wrong people assaulted you is upsetting. I don't think it is a very good position.
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
improving the genetic stock of humanity immediately.
Fuck the genetic stock of humanity. Seriously. Our scientific understanding of population genetics is shit anyway, and so is our understanding of brain functions and much else in our bodies. We are not nearly capable of producing any judgement on the level that would allow to formulate some "improvement" programs as a society, and thousand times less as a petty low state functionary who has no idea about these high-minded things anyway. And, the experience shows all the guys that cared too much about genetic purity of humanity were not the good guys, to allow myself a huge understatement. So I think staying away from all talk about "improving genetic stock" is the only way for a decent person to behave. Not with a 100 foot pole.
I get why people assume that everything is racial
I didn't say a word about racial and did not assume it. I think this is the case of protesting too much.
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
Exactly!
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
You literally asked me if my criteria for declaring someone my superior is “more Aryan”. Don’t pretend you didn’t make it racial.
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.
but also because Jews are a generally high-quality, high-human-capital population.
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.
Real eugenicists, of the turn-of-the-century progressive-aligned variety, stayed focused on removing actually dysgenic elements from the population
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.
But the impulse in itself is good.
Maybe. But that's what makes it so dangerous. And that's what requires the "100 foot pole approach" - we can't trust our obvious instincts to navigate us safely there. It's easy to avoid eating foods that are bad for us and smell and taste foul. It's much harder to avoid eating food that tastes awesome and still is bad for us. We need some special measures to avoid it. Like, not keeping such foods at home at all. Same approach here - exactly because it has a kernel of good in there, we must be extra careful to not let this kernel of good to lead us to the abominable places. Because we know it happened to us before.
a child being born in suffering and doomed to death is morally bad
Everybody is born in suffering and is doomed to death. The question is just timing. And I'm not sure where one would find the audacity to say they know the "correct" timing to make such kinds of decisions and force them on others.
What of a child that is in continuous pain until their untimely but predictable death?
What of an adult? What if you decide somebody's life is too hard and murder them? For their own good? After all, we are doing so many things to force people to behave in certain ways that they don't want to behave, for their own good. Why not make the ultimate step and murder them for their own good, since we are so smart we totally can decide for them that their lives aren't worth living?
I think we do not want to be ideologically committed to the idea that an act of willingly and knowingly creating beings to suffer has inherent moral worth.
Every human being will suffer. That's the part of being human (excluding Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, I guess, but I don't think you can be born this way?). Again, the question is just the form and the degree. I am all for reducing the amount of suffering, but deciding for another that their life is not worth living because of the suffering is a huge step, which we should be very very very careful about.
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
What the heck did I just read?
Boosts my confidence in the decision to never get near anything related to TikTok though.
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
You could frame the whole Renaissance as basically recycling the Greek/Roman culture, if you wanted to. Recycling is not bad by itself. I don't mind somebody making another Sherlock Holmes movie or a remake of Herbert Wells stories. Or even Hamlet, for that matter. Yes, it's not original, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily worthless.
But I think the decline in originality may be because the production is now controlled by a limited set of big corporations, and they would necessarily favor safe, data-driven approach. Can you prove, with data in your hands, that your new original crazy idea would make more money than Superheroes 28, take 17? Probably not. Superheroes it is.
It doesn't mean the new thing can't happen now and then, on shoestring budget just through the power of it's own creativity. Possible. But on the volume, it would be one such thing per several years, while 99% is the safe, data-driven shlock. And once that new thing comes up, it will be milked for the next two decades, turning it inevitably to the shlock too.
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
I'm sure there's also plenty of literature on the benefits of anything somebody wants to do, especially if somebody is a government with billion-sized budgets and control over financing of the people who produce the literature. You only need a keyboard and a screen to produce the literature, and the quality of most "research" in these areas is abysmal anyway and nobody is going to catch you. The effort to disprove bad literature vastly exceeds the effort to produce it, so "literature" can prove pretty much anything that is not trivial to disprove. Most of these are hopelessly confounded, and rarely useful if you want to understand the matter and not just use it to bludgeon an ideological opponent. I don't see much value in it - yes, somebody wrote something. Somebody else wrote something opposite. So what?
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
I don't think your explanation necessarily contradicts mine. A set of smaller studios could target different markets and it'd be fine for a small studio to ignore China - US market is enough for it, and you don't need to squeeze every last dollar to pay for it, there's plenty of market for many small players. For a megacorp, you need mage-movies with mega-budgets and you can't pay for those without China.
As for Russia, I foresee some trouble for the wokes to explain why Russians are actually bad. Surely, they have an oppressive uni-party regime where there's no free speech and your rights depend on whether you agree or not with the ruling party. But that'd only make the wokes to envy them, not despise them - freedom is a red-tribe word. Of course, Russians hate gays and transes, but I don't think we're ready for a movie where Russia invades Wakanda to kill all gay people there, and the heroic Rainbow Transvengers push them back and perform the pride parade in the Red Square. Not yet at least, give it time. In the times of the Cold War, it was simple - Russians are commies that hate Our Way Of Life (TM). But now we know that Our Way Of Life (TM) is racist, colonialist, patriarchal and long overdue for deconstructing and dismantling. And the communists (if under slightly different names) are sitting on the board of every academic institution and are proudly represented in Congress. So where exactly is the good/evil line? I don't think Hollywood would be able to articulate it better than "they are bad because they are against us, and we are good!" - especially while at the same time releasing 50 movies about how we're actually very very bad.
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
make grand declarative statements like 'it's almost like they just want to ban the guns irrespective of any direct statistical justification'.
Would something like "it's almost like they just want to ban the guns, so they commission somebody with impressive list of letters after their name to write a bunch of articles that says banning guns is good, and then use that as a justification as if it were the objective truth" sound better to you? It doesn't to me.
the only way to at least try to make policy effectively.
If the policy is "ban the guns", then I don't see why I would want for it to be made effectively. I would want it to be, on the contrary, as ineffective as humanly possible, and maybe even a little more.
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
I'm not saying they admire Soviets or Russians (though some of them definitely did when Russians were Soviets) - what I am saying is it'd be hard for them to cast Russians as a convincing movie villain without undermining their own message. "They are villains because they restrict homosexuality" is not going to make you a billion dollars in movie receipts I'm afraid.
It’s not just about raw power, it’s about they have a vision of what the good looks like and they want to make it a reality. Just like communists, conservatives, libertarians, liberals, etc.
Oh no, there's actually a huge difference, but that'd take us way off topic I think.
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
Well, starting from communists, for them it is about power. It's not only about power, but the classic communist revolution must result in the dictatorship of the proletariat. No setup where it's not the case can be recognized by a communist as legitimate, and any such setup must be overthrown. Now, when they have the power, there's still much work to be done, and that's where communists go Judean People's Front vs. People's Front of Judea and splinter into various *isms. But that's after the power has been captured.
Conservatives are probably the closest ones to your description - they need power to prevent people from doing bad things and to force them to do good things. As long as that's what is happening, the application of power is unnecessary.
The classical liberals and libertarians, on the other hand, are probably the farthest, because they reject application of power to force people to behave in certain ways, unless that behavior comes into immediate conflict with a narrow set of natural rights (such as murder, bodily harm, theft of property, etc.). Applying power just to make sure people don't do something you think is not good, even if it does not violate their rights, is contrary to this mindset. Here, the power is to be used as little as it is possible to keep the whole system from collapsing into chaos (anarchists would claim this minimum is actually zero).
Now modern liberals, they are somewhat similar to conservatives towards application of power, but with couple important twists. First, good things are never enough - the standards evolve and change constantly, and the continuous application of power is necessary to keep up, what was perfectly good a year ago, is an appalling bigotry today. Second, there's a class of natural standard-setters, who define and re-define these constantly evolving and changing standards, and those people are the only legitimate candidates for holding power (not all of them will hold power, but all power holding should be done by them only, or it is illegitimate and should be resisted by any means). Also, since their vision involves forcible redistribution of resources from people who have them to people who "deserve" them (standard-setters identify those) but don't have them, this again requires constant application of power. So while the power is not the end in itself, their vision necessitates constant control and exercise of power.
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
Hemenway, the most prominent researchers on SDGUs, seems throughout his career to have got funding from general university backing and sometimes federal funding
If this is supposed to be an argument for independence and neutrality, I am not sure how it works. Universities are known for being deep deep deep blue territory, and preventing research that is ideologically inconvenient from happening. Federal funding bureaucracy is no more neutral. I did not research this person specifically, I am just saying whatever you tried to argue here does not work.
it was the gun lobby that banned the CDC from researching the issue
CDC, last time I checked, is "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention". Guns are not a disease (though they are one of a small number of possessions that have direct protection in the Constitution), and thus CDC has no business "researching" them. Preventing CDC from spending taxpayer money on political quests that are not part of their mission - especially in light of how thoroughly they are failing at their core mission - is not "unfair", and even if it were, it wouldn't be an argument for fairness of other researchers. Even if you proved you point - which you very much didn't - you could only have gotten as far as "both sides may be biased" - which I would have granted you without any effort at the start, if you asked.
how does one even formulate tentative answers to questions about what the fact of the matter is about the public health impact of guns and gun control?
To which I ask, after looking at the literature, producing the pre-determined conclusion colored by ideological bias, how could one formulate answers that would not be tainted by the same bias? And how one would separate those answers from the bias?
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
"Explain why you can beat me and I'll poke your argument until it falls apart and you admit I am the champion"
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
Yes, for practical value (less chance of the plate to vibrate and produce annoying sound) and it looks nicer (I use custom one but nothing too fancy).
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
The "being a victim of human trafficking" is a blanket rule to allow all women entry, as everyone traveling with a coyote is being trafficked in some sense
Sane rule would require coercion being part of the deal - otherwise anybody traveling with a guide can be qualified as being "trafficked". Of course, sanity long ceased to be a consideration in immigration law anyway.
for anyone who passes through another country to reach the U.S. border with Mexico without first seeking protection there
Would that rule require people to seek asylum in Mexico itself or Mexico is considered a war zone by default now?
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
Wokeism can easily pin any invader as bad.
Russia invaded a number of places before Ukraine, and nobody had any trouble with that. Georgia, Moldova, Syria, Central Africa...
They also vaguely see Russia as fascist,
Well, Russia is fascist, but I don't see anybody on US political scene daring to officially recognize the fact, even among the wokes. For the wokes though, "fascist" is a bad word to call everybody they hate, not a political taxonomy term, so they can't hate somebody for being fascist - they call somebody fascist after they already hate them. And since everybody by now knows the link between Trump and Russia is wholesale fake (it doesn't mean they wouldn't LARP as if they believed it's true, but they know it's false) - unlike the link between Russia and Clintons, say - again, they link Trump to Russia because they hate Trump, not the other way around. In Obama years, people who thought Russia is a threat were laughed at. In Trump years, people who thought Europe needs to beef their defenses against Russia were laughed at. So we back to the question why would they hate Russia enough, per se. They don't hate Iran and North Korea and China - at least no more than political expediency requires them to perform - despite those being no less oppressive than Russia (though currently not invading their neighbors). Is the invading the only thing? So if Russia is beaten back to their pre-Feb-2022 borders, would the hate go away?
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
Something I am still struggling with - shouldn't a Marine know how to hold/disable somebody without killing him? I know next to nothing on Marine training, but I imagine there are situations where you want to capture the enemy soldier (e.g. to interrogate him later) and there must be ways to hold somebody relatively safely to oneself without choking them to death. Am I wrong? Also, being a Marine, he should have known what a long chokehold would do to a person. Did he mean to kill the guy? If yes, did he not foresee killing a guy in public in this fashion - after he is clearly subdued already and not presenting clear and present danger - would end up in serious charges, especially in New York? How did he expect this would end up?
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
A lot. There are different ways to hold people. Source: 15 years of martial arts training. I don't claim I would have done better in this situation (one reason I moved from California is to reduce the chance to ever find myself in such a situation) but I know there are other ways than chocking the daylights out of a person. That's why I am wondering why he decided to do what he did.
JarJarJedi
11mo ago
Marines are trained to kill though
Yes, that's one of the things they are trained to do. But I really hope that's not the only thing they are trained to do. Knowing when it is appropriate and not appropriate to kill should have been part of it too.
but in a way that maximizes your safety and doesn't really take into account that you'll be fighting some drug ridden mentally ill lowlife but an actual enemy combattant.
How does it make any difference? I'm sure if you choke an enemy combatant for 15 minutes he'd die just as well as a mentally ill lowlife. Anybody would. That's what I don't understand - he knew what would happen and he must have had other options. Why did he choose this one?
Anybody who has been in Russian army or knows somebody who has (which is about 100% of Russian-speaking or adjacent world) knows Russian army is a huge pile of dung, mostly dangerous by having tons of bodies to throw into the fire and gigatons of explosives accumulated over the Soviet years, which even with heroic efforts of all praporshiks combined could not be completely sold off or wasted. There's just too many of them. Well, this and also nukes. Organizationally, morally, technologically - Russian army is more a horde than a modern army. But it is a huge horde, controlling the huge pile of weaponry. And the huge pile of hydrocarbons, which the West is glad to buy, giving them the money to buy even more weaponry. It's not the efficiency of the horde that is feared, it is the size of it. And also its almost complete insensitivity to losses. Russians already lost almost 200k people - and there's next to zero unrest. In fact, as long as they have money, their recruiting ability is only limited by the organizational factors (which are complete shit) rather than the lack of human resources. Imagine the US losing comparable number of troops in a war - like half a million? That's like Civil War and WW2 combined. Vietnam losses were 1/10th of that, and is still seen as national trauma of generational proportions. For Russia, it's meh. That's what is so hard to deal with there.
More options
Context Copy link