JulianRota
10mo ago
I think that might be true, but is more of a story about how terrible the rest of Europe is than how awesome the Ukraine Army is.
I would expect at least some units are these days excellent at things like holding off a large-scale offensive with a hodgepodge of improvised equipment and donated castoffs. They might now be among the best in the world at modern drone warfare.
On the other hand, they still seem terrible at putting together a solid combined-arms offensive of the type that would be necessary to actually drive the Russians out of their country.
JulianRota
10mo ago
Exactly which part is awful? Keeping in mind the order in which these things have been done.
I'm willing to agree that local jurisdictions actively obstructing enforcement of immigration law is awful. Lots of left-leaning jurisdictions have been doing that for decades though.
Dismissing criminal indictments is pretty bad too. But if it's the only stick they've got that's big enough to get them to stop obstructing immigration enforcement, I can live with it. I don't exactly love it, but if that's where we're at now, well then okay I guess.
JulianRota
11mo ago
Still reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles. Nothing else new or particularly interesting so far.
Also reading Matthew Bracken's new book, Doomsday Reef as more light entertainment. It's pretty heavily red-team coded fiction. As is typical with his books, I enjoy the plot generally, though I find the specific collapse / apocalypse scenarios described to be highly implausible.
JulianRota
11mo ago
Finished Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Curiously, it did actually end only a few dozen pages after I was like, wait, where is this book going for the next half. I guess it does actually have a massive amount of footnotes and citations etc.
Now reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles. This one focuses more on the internal workings of the British Army and how they (mis)handled the situation. It calls out more directly how they failed to respond to Loyalist terrorism.
This book raises one other point so far that I found very interesting and hadn't actually read anywhere else. They claim that the early Provisional IRA, prior to Bloody Sunday, the Falls Road Curfew and other notable incidents, when the membership was still very low and public support in the Catholic community for them much more slim, did actually undertake operations to deliberately provoke the British Army into more heavy-handed responses in the hopes of creating those sorts of incidents in order to increase public support for their tactics and goals and grow their own membership. That's not exactly something you read much about in accounts more sympathetic to the PIRA, and I'm curious to see what if any evidence they have for this.
JulianRota
11mo ago
Depends a ton on what sort of things you're interested in. IMO, most of the usual tourist stuff is kind of overrated, and there's advice from a million places on that anyways.
Like music? You can probably find a few concerts of any genre you find interesting. There's also a bazillion comedy clubs, and broadway theaters. Restaurants of any type of food you might be interested in trying. Irish bars staffed by actual Irish people. Politics? The Democrat party may own the city, but there's still a surprising amount of activity from any political position you can come up with. Trump Tower is still open to the public, you can just go in and eat at the restaurant or drink at the bar or gawk at the merchandise on sale. Some places like Washington Square Park are usually full of odd people doing odd things if you find that sort of thing interesting.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I'd say I'm certainly open to hearing ideas and possibilities, but I'd like to hear something more specific than just we should go faster or we should skip trials. Which trials are we skipping, how are we dealing with the effects of skipping those trials? In my view, I've been trying this whole conversation to get out of you exactly what specifically you want to do, ideally something more generally applicable than, we did this specific bad thing during Covid, let's not do that. I mean, yeah, that's technically true, but how do you generalize that beyond, we should put better people in charge?
The mind boggles a bit trying to come up with general principles for addressing pandemics that would apply well to both of, let's say, Covid and Aids. If you can come up with some that don't just reduce down to putting better people in charge, by all means, let me know.
I am aware of what Human Challenge Trials are. Randomized Controlled trials are what we're already doing. I've got no problem with Human Challenge Trials, sounds like a good idea to me. It's at least a specific and actionable proposal. Liability might be a concern, but that ought to be solvable with waviers or some minor legislation. It's a relatively modest modification of current practice. It would likely result in full market availability somewhat sooner, though probably not dramatically so. The number of people accepted into such a trial would likely be modest. Though I gather you seemed interested in much more dramatic changes? Operation Warp Speed as it was actually executed produced far more dramatic timeline reductions just by bureaucratic optimization. Certainly nothing wrong with going even faster yet, but no need to forget what we actually did accomplish.
Another thing I'd note is that medical technology continues to advance incredibly fast. As far as I know, this was the first time in history we had a vaccine candidate ready for trials within weeks of the target viruses genome being isolated. That's freaking amazing! Can we come up with ways to get it verified and out to the public even faster than we actually did? Probably! But let's not beat ourselves up too bad, this stuff is all pretty new.
JulianRota
11mo ago
Kind of related, I lean strongly towards the skeptical side, and found in support this video showing that one of those famous videos of supposedly impossible aircraft maneuvering and looking weird actually corresponds pretty well to being a perfectly normal jet aircraft being shot in infrared through a sophisticated aircraft tracking camera that we're looking at the raw feed of.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I did not say that you had a lack of willingness to take responsibility for your own medical decisions. I said that you were taking upon yourself the ability to make medical decisions for everyone else.
I personally don't have or want the ability to make medical decisions for everyone else. The "everyone else", being the American People, have more or less voluntarily given the Federal Government that power through the existing democratic process.
I haven't really expressed much in the way of opinions about how things ought to be in this thread. I'm mostly just talking about how the system currently works and why it works that way, and what issues any potential changes to the system would need to address. That shouldn't be confused with actually advocating for the system to work in a specific way.
What are you talking about? This seems irrelevant.
Your other comment about the Glock lawsuit issue is kind of funny by itself, but also IMO serves to illustrate how the current state of the system is the product of how a bunch of things tie together.
For example, in the current system, all potential new drugs, even if created by some tiny team of independent scientists or university lab, are taken up by pharmaceutical giants to take to the market. They have the financial backing to take these drugs through the lengthy and risky clinical trial process, absorb the losses from ones that fail, and also weather any lawsuits filed by people unhappy with the drugs. They're mostly happy with the Government-run trial process partly because, if they get sued, they can say at trial that their drug went through those Government-monitored trials and was approved for sale by the Government.
Quite a few of the Covid vaxx-skeptical were concerned that the PREP Act rules made everyone associated with manufacturing, distributing, and administering the vaccines immune from lawsuits. They do have a point... but how could you possibly release a new vaccine that fast, or even faster yet, without that legal immunity? How would you convince the pharma companies to go ahead and release without that, when part of the reason why they exist and are structured as they are is to manage that risk? Or would you go for much broader legal immunity? Like it or not, lawsuits are a great way to throw sand in the gears of a new drug release.
That's one reason why I'm skeptical about your vague ideas to apparently cut more restrictions and go even faster yet. Which is why I'm asking in order to try and nail things down more specifically:
Let's start with just the basics. In a pandemic...
I'm not actually asking about an ideal system for handling pandemics. I don't think that's possible. We've got 20/20 hindsight for Covid now, of course, but if you were making a system for all pandemics, you'd have to handle Covid, plus Aids, plus Ebola, plus everything else that's come down the pike, plus whatever the next pandemic may be, which none of us can predict.
What I'm actually asking is your ideal system for how to go from what some scientists think is a promising new drug to something that the average person can buy or be prescribed to treat some disease or condition. How do you think that should work exactly during normal times, and how should it be changed during a "pandemic", whatever we might define that as?
I skipped over the "HCT/RCT debate" question because I honestly have no clue what that is. A few google searches didn't provide much insight. What is this debate?
JulianRota
1yr ago
It's not a matter of cherry-picking. It's simply stating that things are clearly good or bad.
I think it is. A possible reasonable alternative system is, no Government agency exists to approve medical treatments, instead, several independent organizations (possibly including a Government one) make recommendations based on their own criteria, but individuals are free to take what they want. In such a system, those one or more organizations are already set up, and people are used to making their own decisions and taking responsibility for them. I believe that basically nobody thinks that way now. I don't think you can just overnight in a crisis switch to the regulatory framework of that system and expect people to change their thinking overnight. It is perhaps telling that no country in the world currently works like this.
A lack of willingness to take responsibility for my own medical decisions is not my opinion at all. I am fine with doing this myself, but it is my belief that 95% of American citizens are not prepared to do this. This is based on observations of how they actually behaved during the actual Covid period. Which gets me to what I really want to object to:
This is one of the most common failure modes, perhaps even a typical mind fallacy. Because you think, in your situation, that you wouldn't want to take it, you think that no one would want to take it (or you think they'd have obviously wrong preferences, since they don't match up with your own).
Please refrain from putting words into my mouth or assuming what I think. I already said I would personally be fine with taking responsibility for my own decisions. I think it's the American people, and the people in pretty much every other country too, who are unwilling to do this. You may disagree that they think like this, or dislike it, but don't tell me what I think personally.
If we did allow people to take any treatment without testing, warned them hundreds of times that it was untested and anything could happen, and it turned out to be a disaster with hundreds of thousands of casualties, I would be any amount of money you care to name that they would all scream their heads off at the Government for allowing it to happen, vote them out of office, probably storm the gates of all the Pharmaceutical companies and lynch people, etc. Roughly 10 people would say, oh well, they did warn me it was untested, guess it's on me. If watching how people behaved during Covid didn't convince you of that, then I don't know what to tell you.
We're also talking pretty vaguely here, why don't you spell out exactly how you envision your ideal system working?
JulianRota
1yr ago
I'm not sure if we've talked about this lately, but do we have any thoughts on what should be done with the Russia-Ukraine war at this point? Seems like as good a time as any to consider grand strategy, with Trump soon to take office in the US.
It's a little surprising that it's still going. It seems pretty clear to me at this point that Russia / Putin has no intention of stopping anytime soon. The sanctions regime that has been put in place seems to have caused them to return to self-sufficiency as much as it has hurt them. I'm doubtful that further attempts to sanction them harder will have any greater effect. The Ukrainians seem to have had impressive determination, especially during the first few months, but they don't seem to have the practical ability to eject the Russian troops, even with extremely generous donations of Western arms. I'm doubtful that's possible at all without large-scale Western intervention. There's also the possibility of allowing them to make more deep strikes into Russia with longer-ranged weapons, but I'm doubtful that anything along those lines can hit hard enough to either seriously disrupt their logistics or their will to fight, at least not without, or maybe even with, so many high-end western arms that it's basically obvious it's the US striking them directly, with all of the potential consequences that could entail.
From the perspective of an American, it's felt for a while like maybe it's time to wind down this conflict, or at least our involvement in it, as far as providing arms and assistance. Are we really accomplishing anything but getting more Ukrainians killed to little effect? And okay yeah, Russia is not our friend, but it's probably only to the United States' benefit to push them so far.
Does anyone have any different opinions? Does anyone see any realistic potential of forcing Russia back without a large-scale escalation that I'm doubtful Americans will accept? The European powers may be more determined to push Russia back, but do they have much practical ability without the US?
Finished Matthew Bracken's new book, Doomsday Reef. It was a fun read IMO, but surprisingly weak on story structure. His other 2 Dan Kilmer books go along with the standard 3-act story structure, where there's a "main" story and all of the subsidiary action is revealed later on to play a part in shaping how the "main" action plays out. This book was more like a bunch of stuff just happens as his improvised band of merry sailors travels the world, and it's all interesting, but doesn't really connect together into a broader plot. It also seems to attempt to push a little harder into the background of exactly how the whole world fell apart in this alternate timeline, which just doesn't really make any sense to me. Seems like he's sticking with the trucks, trains, boats, etc just stopped coming, nobody's even going to try to explain why or account for the fact that this just doesn't ever happen in the real world, and even if the US goes completely crazy for some reason, why would China, Russia etc do so too? Oh well, no sense over-analyzing things I guess.
Still reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles.
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