JulianRota
1yr ago
Intros? Haven't seen many of 'em, but you're welcome to. Post away by all means!
FWIW, I've tended to think we're probably doing fine just as we are actually and not to sweat too much over periodic variability of CWR comment count. I think it's probably a good thing that even our more real-world famous posters don't advertise the site much, as it would probably draw in a lot of low-quality posters who break the rules, make more work for the mods, make the experience worse for current posters, etc. I think people who make good-quality posters are more likely to find us on their own. How did you end up here?
I think Motte-style debating is usually a good template, or good practice, for discussing such topics as trans-ness as a new religion with potential adherents who are otherwise close to you. Avoid sneering and weak-manning, but point out real risks and challenges. Like to what extent is the excessive enthusiasm about the topic encouraging young people to take more radical measures that they're not really ready for, some of which will have life-long consequences.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I don't have a good source for this offhand, but I'd heard that the deal is, the rival dealers' defense lawyer convinced them to argue that the attack was a homophobic hate crime because he thought it would get them a lesser sentence than a drug deal gone wrong. Not sure if that was a good idea then, but apparently the story got legs and next thing you know, it's the Standard Accepted Truth.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Is it actually plausible? Why don't we see this play out in real life? America has plenty of violent crime, but it's all unorganized violent crime, which doesn't translate to power. With all the technology and guns and tribalism, why is there so little organized political or ideological violence (people getting shoved or pepper sprayed don't count)?
I've actually wondered about this off and on. There seems to be remarkably little organized political violence in America despite the high cultural and political tensions. There have been many times and places where such tensions would have resulted in hot Civil War. I'm defining organized violence as multiple people actively planning to commit some specific act of violence in advance, so showing up to a protest, even with weapons and armor, but without any plans for specific acts of violence, doesn't count.
I'd also note that substantial terrorist / insurgent violence has happened many times in many countries, and it seems the source is very rarely a particularly wealthy individual.
My best guess is that FBI undercover sting operations have done a tremendous job of poisoning the well against any significant group turning to violence. Run a countless stream of undercovers and CIs pushing violent plans so that you can bust anyone who follows along, in every group for every ideology. Make sure you publish all of the details about it every time. Pretty soon, anyone who proposes any type of violence will be suspected of being a Fed infiltrator, or somebody recently turned by them for some reason.
This is probably a good thing if you actually don't want lots of violence, the chaos of a failed state, etc. But it does make you wonder exactly what happens if the tensions just keep rising, but nobody ever does any real violence.
Which does bring us back to - you can write a movie or book about anything. But if we're talking about reality, or concerned about being realistic, how does our generic eccentric billionaire find people who aren't total losers to commit violence? Anyone with any clue would suspect they're being set up. Maybe you can find some of those losers, but they usually don't seem to be that good at working in teams or following instructions.
JulianRota
1yr ago
You might find the Violent Class post here interesting - it's a good write-up of the "Warrior Class" perspective. I've seen the point in a few other places that, even within the military, the percent of people who actually do violence is pretty small and sometimes seems like a completely different world.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I tried to look into this some a while back, mostly along the lines of, what's the deal with the supposedly-Nazi Azov Battalion working together with Jewish Ukraine President Zelensky? What I came away with is, there's more than one perspective on Nazism.
There's the actual original Nazi party, a creature of 1920s Germany. Started out with mostly reasonable-sounding goals, but went to a very bad place. They're long gone now though, and nobody but some nerdy historians seems terribly concerned with what they actually thought and why.
There's how modern Westerners see Nazism, a mix of authoritarianism, warmongering imperialism, and racism and anti-semitism to the point of genocide. Reasonable given our perspective and role in the actual war, but probably not very well connected to how actual Nazi party members saw themselves.
How Russians and Eastern Europeans saw Nazism is another perspective entirely, with no connection to either of the others. Many in Russia, particularly Russian nationalists, see them as a horrific menace, bent on total destruction of their people and culture, that they only barely survived by tremendous effort and sacrifice. And quite a few in Ukraine, particularly Ukrainian Nationalists, see them primarily as a bulwark against Soviet/Russian domination, which was itself quite brutal and arguably genocidal against Ukrainians. I believe this strain is what Azov represents - it's just a meme demonstrating that they're really, seriously, majorly opposed to Russian domination. I don't think they have any awareness of, much less actually share, any of the actual viewpoints and goals of the original Nazi party, and of course have nothing to do with the Western view of Nazism. I think they'd be utterly baffled if you tried to discuss with them whether they intended to rampage across Europe and round up all the Jews if they were to win. They'd have no idea where you were coming from or how you got it into your head that they might want to do that.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I never claimed either of those.
The Germans were pretty evil, but "uniquely" is a much stronger claim that's more difficult to justify. Making it would invite difficult to judge comparisons with everything ever done by every other country, which is why I didn't make it.
I also didn't claim they wanted to exterminate everyone who wasn't German. They treated civilians and POWs of Western allies about as well as you could ask for during a war AFAIK, including even Jews (Jewish soldiers that is, not so much civilians of other European nations they overran). And they were of course allied with Imperial Japan and Italy.
And they weren't quite as annihilationist about Slavs as they were about Jews and Gypsies, but they certainly weren't treated nicely. I think anyone attempting to make the argument that the Nazis were not anti-Slav is ignoring quite a lot of evidence and horrors.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Nope.
Whether or not German racial purity laws considered Slavs to be "Aryan" or not isn't terribly important. I guess that's what's actually being argued there. It may or may not be technically true, but it doesn't change the fact that the Nazi regime launched effectively a war of annihilation against the Slavs, seeking to seize "Lebensraum " for the "German race" from them, produced boatloads of propaganda claiming the Slavs were subhuman, and then via the Barbarossa Decree declared that it was in fact a war of extermination and there would be no such thing as a war crime on that front.
And yeah, that's SecureSignals, our resident Nazi apologist. I don't think he'd even object to that label. We do need a little of that, since the anti-Nazi types aren't free from bullshit either, but yeah you might want a large grain of salt on that subject.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I finished House To House. Not much more to say about it than what I said last week. The remainder of the book is mostly minute-to-minute gory detail of SSG Bellavia's mostly single-handed fight to retake a particular house in a tricky location from some well-dug-in insurgents. Exciting and engaging stuff for sure. but not a ton of deep insight.
Started reading The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot. Non-fiction, apparently about how Allen Dulles and I guess associates formed a sort of secret government starting in the 60s or so I guess. I suppose I'll see how good it ends up being.
JulianRota
1yr ago
On the one hand, it could be seen as a knee-jerk over-reaction based on the cultural prominence of this overall viewpoint.
On the other, the thread OP did say "scares the shit out of me" about it, and did not elaborate on exactly what was so scary about a thousand-ish men being given some weapons in the middle of a huge war involving many hundreds of thousands on both sides.
JulianRota
1yr ago
It does seem interesting. What remains to be seen is to what extent the Saudis will actually start pricing or selling at least some oil in currencies other than USD, and whether the US will be less committed to defending the current Saudi regime.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Sometimes you've just got to get off the internet man, or at least the shittier corners of it. Don't let the brain-melting stupidity of the worst internet feminists convince you that a significant number of women in real life actually think like that.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I find it amusing that in this thread, I'm being taken to task both for saying that most people shot by cops "had it coming" - being not sufficiently sympathetic to the suspect, and also for saying that a police shooting was "technically" justified - being not sufficiently sympathetic to the police officer. I don't know guys, I'm just trying to be neutral here!
My actual position is more like, I believe both that there is significant police misconduct and that the vast majority of actual police shootings are fully justified. Misconduct takes place more in the smaller stuff, like excessive force and hostility. Felony car stops for paperwork errors, SWAT raids on houses based on flimsy evidence of minor crimes, raiding the wrong house entirely, destructive searches with flimsy justification, etc.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I actually draw a distinction there. I have a greater level of sympathy and understanding towards actual black communities that are wary of trusting the police, since they've actually experienced historic oppression by them. For the whole Ferguson situation, my impression was that the shooting of Michael Brown was technically justified, but it might have been the only correct thing the cops had done there in a long time. Michael Brown's actions were technically wrong, but more understandable, and did succeed in shining a light onto lots of actual misconduct. I admit I don't have any great ideas on how to create law and order in black communities when the relationship with the police is already so poisoned in so many of them.
However, my impression is that I don't see a lot of those people or communities in the BLM movement. That, as far as I can tell, is mostly a wealthy white people movement. Whatever actual black people took part in it are mostly upper-class and already pretty disconnected from actual oppression, even if there may have been some history of it.
I believe that our society has a more general problem of militarization of the police and over-policing of many things that applies to all people. I think that the recent racial focus is misguided and serves to obscure the real problem by insisting on a false narrative and thereby causing people to take the opposite position of excessively defending the police when they see the lies.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Well I personally agree that free will exists and so that is not a possibility. But several people in the linked thread were arguing quite vigorously that free will does not exist and individual behavior was therefore 100% deterministic. I do feel that, in addition to the more direct philosophical arguments that mostly took place in that thread, I should also point out what the natural consequences of that being true would be.
If that is true, we would be able to identify numerous specific people who we would have actual scientific proof will only contribute to society in highly negative ways, and we'll have to decide what to do with those people. Would we eliminate them? We could lock them away for life, but that's expensive, should we bother if we know they will never reform? Also our current criminal justice system in most of the first world locks people away for a pre-determined length of time when we prove they did a specific bad thing. It's rather a departure to be saying, our mind-scanning computer says you'll always be bad, so we're going to lock you away for life, or do actual brain editing on you to make you act right. Definitely can't see that one going wrong in any way.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I mean "had it coming" in a more immediate sense. Not that the person as a whole deserved to die in the abstract, regardless of what he had done at any particular moment. More that yeah if you try to beat or choke or stab or shoot a cop, he's probably going to try to shoot you, regardless of what motivated you to do that and to what extent it was understandable.
On the first, it's pretty standard for the leaders of a movement to be disingenuous about their real goals. It's the behavior of the on the ground individuals that I find bizarre. It sure doesn't seem like they're sophisticated enough to have a more sinister real goal and to be pushing the beliefs they claim as a cynical ruse to achieve that goal. They seem to be true believers, but about something that's completely fabricated and nonsensical.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I don't see that specific statement in there. Interesting discussion though. I think a more accurate phrasing would be:
If Free Will truly does not exist, it should be possible, if we were able to gather sufficiently detailed information about an individual's brain, to predict with 100% accuracy everything that person would think, say, and do, and this could be done for any individual you might choose.
The ability to read and write minds does not necessarily prove determinism or disprove free will. It does seem likely though that, if we were ever able to do such a thing, the details of how that process worked would give us considerable insight on those subjects. We can say now that it's still possible that free will doesn't really exist, but we don't have sufficient technology to gather detailed enough information about anyone's brain to fully predict their behavior. If we were able to reliably read and write minds, it would be very tough to say we just didn't have sufficient information. At that point, either we would be able to predict behavior and prove the determinists right, or we would still not be able to fully predict behavior and that would prove that free will actually does exist and the determinists are wrong.
I feel obligated to also note that pure determinism leads to some rather dark conclusions. If it were possible to scientifically prove that a person would 100% only do negative and harmful things for the rest of their life and it was not possible to change that, what else would there be to do except eliminate that person?
JulianRota
1yr ago
I started reading House To House by David Bellavia. It's a personal account by US Army Staff Sergeant David Bellavia of the battle to re-take Fallujah in 2004 during operation Iraqi Freedom. Reminds me a lot of JTarrou's posts on Violent Class. It's very heavy on the details of the combat that his unit engaged in, not much discussion of any sort of grand strategy, politics, etc. That's clearly the actual experience of the guys on the sharp edge. The kind of thing you don't see written about much.
I noted that the book has a listed co-author, John R. Bruning, who, going by his listed bio, is actually a professional author and journalist. Did he do most of the actual work to transform this into a well-written story? I don't know, but Mr. Bellavia appears to be no slouch in the writing department himself - according to the Amazon bio, he has also been published in "The Philadelphia Inquirer, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and other publications". So I guess him and JTarrou are part of a relatively small number of people who are actual combat veterans and can also write about it in a highly articulate and insightful way.
I'm only about a third of the way through the book so far. The Amazon summary is all about some truly heroic badass feats that SSG Bellavia pulled off which earned him the Medal of Honor, but I haven't reached that part yet. The first part is more about the daily life of a Staff Sergeant, which is more about looking after the men in your unit, keeping them safe, well-equipped, and well prepared for the fighting to come. Stuff like evaluating who's good at what, putting the right guys in the right positions, making sure they have a good plan for the fight to come and everyone actually knows what it is.
He doesn't seem to have the generalized disdain towards officers. Some are seen as and portrayed as being useless douchenozzles. Others are, or have grown into, being decent quality combat leaders.
I do see portrayed here the notion that many actual soldiers, even highly skilled and experienced soldiers who volunteered to be in the infantry and have been promoted multiple times, are still a little bit reluctant to actually shoot the enemy sometimes. There's a passage near the beginning of the book where SSG Bellavia is on a rooftop during a battle, sees a presumed enemy on a nearby rooftop before they see him, gets him in his sights, but hesitates to fire. He has what sounds like an anxious feeling that the soldier he sees might actually be one of their Iraqi allied forces. He writes of watching the guy spot him, turn to face him, and start raising his own rifle towards him, all while he's dead on in Bellavia's rifle sights. He writes of thinking for a moment that the guy might actually be an ally who is trying to help him by shooting an unseen other enemy that's actually behind him, of wishing he'd just set down the rifle and go back inside. He does in the end manage to shoot the guy before the guy tries to shoot him.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I'm mostly inclined to agree with you, at least on the modern view of BLM and related movements. But I've been thinking lately about the Communist movements of the late 1800s through early 1900s and wondering, to what extent did they actually have a reasonable point? I'm not going to say I support authoritarian Communism or anything, but it didn't come from nowhere, at least some of the problems they were complaining about were real at the time.
I don't really know what things were like in the 1910s Russia. Maybe the Tsars really were both incompetent and authoritarian themselves, and industry may have been dominated by a clique-ish elite who hoarded the wealth and kept the working-class down. Around that time in America, that wasn't too far away from being the case as I understand it. It was the peak of the time of robber-baron capitalism, with lots of workers getting the shaft. Long hours, terrible working conditions, indifference towards injuries, low pay. Sometimes even worse when it gets into company towns and piles of other abuses that I haven't even heard about. I can see where those of a more angry, retributive, perhaps even revolutionary frame of mind might get the idea that overthrowing the whole system and giving this whole Communism thing a try might be a good idea.
Fortunately for all, we managed to improve things gradually and more smoothly. It turns out that further advances in industry, unionization, market forces making skilled workers more valuable, and relatively lightweight and limited government intervention while maintaining the fundamental tenets of capitalism did a much better job at improving the lots of the ordinary workers than any dictatorship of the Proletariat ever did.
Okay then, but what does that say about the behavior of modern Progressives? I can see how the Bolsheviks weren't right, but at least has a point. Damned if I can see the point of modern Progressives though. How does it make sense that they get all up in arms over a police shooting of a black guy who, upon review of the situation, probably had it coming, but don't care at all about dozens of black men getting killed in the inner cities every weekend for decades, and it actually getting worse when their prescribed solution of "abolishing the police" gets implemented? If Lenin and the rest of the inner circle of Bolsheviks were taking advantage of a shitty situation with legitimate grievances to leverage in their authoritarian tendencies, are the elite of the modern Progressive movement leveraging total nonsense to support theirs?
JulianRota
1yr ago
I'm not in a position to know for sure what the setup is on any particular nation's nuclear devices (and of course if I was I sure wouldn't post about it on a public internet forum), but from what I've heard, it's entirely possible to put in place arming codes that are not trivial to circumvent.
Implosion devices depend on extremely precise timing between all of the charges placed around the core. In early devices, this was kept simple by having the whole thing be spherical and all of the wires be exactly the same length connecting the conventional detonators to a single power source. There's no reason that needs to be the case though. Varying the wire lengths, detonator positions, core shape etc introduces complex timing requirements that might only be known by the software, or possibly even encoded into the arming code.
It's also my understanding that modern high-yield devices have more complex detonation chains, requiring mini-accelerators to be turned on, other gasses to be dispensed, etc at just the right time. So it's probably not trivial to get around coding issues like that without being a nuclear engineer yourself. At least, as long as the organization designing it wants to make it so and cares enough to make sure it's actually effective.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I always thought, in a certain sense, it's kind of strange that this hasn't happened already. Possible reasons why, as far as I can guess:
- Nuclear weapons security worldwide really is that good, including in Russia, Pakistan, etc.
- Just too destructive to really be interesting to terrorist groups. How many of them really, truly want to kill tens of thousands at once? Not just the trigger-pullers, but every individual involved in getting the device to a target.
- Anyone who might possibly steal one, or be unofficially allowed to take one, is too afraid of retaliatory action to actually do it. Russian ultra-nationalists might not care about personally surviving, but they care if somebody nukes Russia back in retaliation.
Or maybe all of them at once. The idea is very popular in dramatic fiction, but somehow never seems to happen in real life. Or even has any stories leak out about it ever coming anywhere near happening.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Mind if I PM you?
Sure, no problem
JulianRota
1yr ago
In my opinion, you are way overthinking this. I think this ties back into the subject of this thread, but probably 90% of tests are written for people who aren't particularly intelligent by other people who also aren't particularly intelligent as a clumsy and ham-fisted way to see if they're good enough for something. They're meant to see if you can think along with the author's mid-tier thought process, not stimulate discussion and sophisticated consideration.
I solved it in like 10 seconds. Skim it, check the answers, go over it a little more carefully, the words of the story are obviously meant to be about being productive and peaceful, mark D, done, move on to the next one. If you've managed to make it through a first-world school, you probably have an idea how tests are written and how the people who will grade them want you to answer.
The Motte loves our overthinking things. Most of the rest of the world does not. You (metaphorical you) will frequently in life be judged by people who are much dumber than you, but have power over you anyways. It's to your benefit to learn how to appear to pass their tests while being submissive to them temporarily. Giving the answer that they want fast codes to them as smart; going on a long tangent about how technically true it actually is may actually be a sign of greater intelligence, but will signal to them that you're an uncooperative weirdo spewing what seems like gibberish to them, not a supergenius.
JulianRota
1yr ago
The above isn't really right. If you owned Bitcoin before the Cash split, then you own the Cash as well, no actions post-split on the regular Bitcoin blockchain can affect it at all. To access it, you need to get a Bitcoin Cash wallet. You should be able to get a Cash variant of whichever Bitcoin app you are using and initialize it with the same key info that app is using.
If you're not into Cryptocurrency speculation, the simplest thing to do with it is send the Cash to an exchange that supports it, exchange it for regular Bitcoin, and send that Bitcoin back to your local wallet. Or set up a new Bitcoin wallet with the latest stuff, send your regular Bitcoin from the old wallet to that, as well as the Bitcoin you exchanged the Cash for.
I'm not a lawyer anywhere and have no idea what country you're in, so I have no idea what the legal or tax implications of doing this are. In a public forum and in the absence of any more detailed information, I can only suggest that you consult with a local lawyer and follow the law.
JulianRota
1yr ago
As I understand it, the idea of using carriers against China would be to interdict shipping coming to and from them from far away, as well as any naval assets attacking Taiwan.
I'm inclined to think that China and Russia have more to lose in losing space-based assets than the US, even assuming no retaliation in other arenas. Gaza is tiny, the IAF can monitor them just fine with conventional aircraft and drones. Russia is vast, but I think Ukraine is mostly covered with AWACS aircraft operating outside of actual Ukrainian territory, and there probably isn't all that much advantage there from the ability to monitor deep inside Russia. Meanwhile, satellite surveillance is probably the best way Russia has to see what NATO is doing outside of Ukraine. Invading Taiwan is logistically complex, China would probably benefit greatly from having intact GPS to pull it off, as well as the ability to see where those carrier groups are and what they're up to, which would be tough to get any other way.
I'm not sure how confident to be in all that, but I think it's enough to make the case that all-out space war is not likely to be a clear win for the counter-US powers.
Most advice is by people who ended up in really dysfunctional places for some reason and are mad about it and probably over-reacting. I'd say just go in with an open mind, lean towards keeping your head down and learning at first. It's usually a good move to start out as bland and inoffensive as possible in dress, speech, mannerisms, etc. Read the room and get a sense for what's acceptable there and what isn't, and relax as appropriate.
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