MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
“The world” is shrieking about modest civilian casualties in Gaza’s dense urban landscape, if the gloves were off the Star of David could be flying off (the remains) of every building in Gaza in a month.
I do not think the IDF would expose its soldiers to nuclear fallout just to put flags up on ruined buildings. Just to be clear what "gloves off" means when the full panoply of modern weapons are available.
One of the things you need to know to understand the current Israel-Palestine conflict is that if Israel were as evil as Hamas, or Hamas as powerful as Israel, this would already have happened.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
The Great Horseshit Crisis of 1894 is apparently an early example of fake news, but the price of horse manure in London dropped below zero at some point in the late 19th century, probably slightly after Carl Benz filed his first car patent in 1886.
Had people tried to run a city the size of 20th century London on 19th century transport technology, eventually there would have been a Great Horseshit Crisis. But we didn't and there wasn't. Van exhaust stinks, but per tonne-km (or ton-mile if you have to be perverse) of goods moved it stinks orders of magnitude less than horseshit. The Great Smog Crisis is real, but emissions control technology (and eventually the shift to EVs) is keeping pace with it in well-governed cities.
For a constant population and a roughly-constant material standard of living, high-tech urban societies are far more sustainable than traditional ones.
A regime change operation in Ukraine
As of 2025, the only people trying to change the regime in Ukraine are Russia and some currently-not-in-charge Russophile elements in the Trump administration - even the Ukrainian opposition don't want a change of government under fire. That wouldn't change if it turned out the US was lying about their involvement with the Euromaidan. In any case, there have been two free and fair Presidential elections in Ukraine since the Euromaidan, and Zelenskyy came to power in 2019 by beating the man who Victoria Nuland allegedly installed.
I'm not claiming that the US had clean hands in the Euromaidan (I have no idea if they do or not) - I am claiming that there is nothing within the normal range of US foreign policy lies that could come out about Euromaidan that would affect the moral or political logic of what is happening in Ukraine in 2025. If the crux of our policy disagreement is "As a matter of resource allocation across various theatres in the New Cold War between the US, NATO and other allies on our side and China/Russia/Iran/North Korea on the other side, should the US be sending cash and materiel to Ukraine?" (and it sounds like it is) then discovering the truth about what Victoria Nuland said to Poroshenko doesn't change the calculation.
And now I am going to disagree with you about resource allocation, making arguments based on publicly-avaialable information that work just as well as a matter of strategic logic if Euromaidan had been a CIA plot
the war has gone a lot worse than reported.
Both the position of the front lines and the approximate losses of heavy equipment have been verified by OSINT. The best case for the Russians now is a Pyrrhic victory - which incidentally undermines the norm against aggressive war a lot less than a clean victory would have done (see Iraq). Russophiles claiming to have non-public information that the war is going badly for Ukraine have predicted dozens of the last one (Ukraine being driven out of Kursk oblast) Ukrainian defeats. Ukraine isn't winning, but the MSM aren't claiming otherwise.
equipment that is replacing the stuff sent to Ukraine costs multiples of the equipment sent to Ukraine
Yeah - we are sending borderline-obsolete kit to Ukraine (because it is good enough to kill Russians) and replacing it with new stuff that is hopefully good enough to kill Chinese. Essentially none of the stuff being sent to Ukraine would be used in a mostly-naval war against China. As of now, some air defence equipment promised to Ukraine is being held back in case Israel needs it.
basket case nation
I thought Ukraine was a basket case too, but empirically they are not. If they were, they would have lost by now - you can't prop up a basket case against a peer competitor without boots on the ground.
no arms production
Ukraine is now the third (after China and Turkey) largest producer of military drones - admittedly mostly by after-market modification of Chinese-made civilian drones.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2d ago
The war was always unpopular with the anti-establishment left, who have always been more visible than they deserve given their actual level of public support. It was also unpopular with the anti-establishment right, although I don't know how many people noticed given that the anti-establishment right didn't have a megaphone at the time.
The pro-establishment left mostly supported the war, although my read at the time was I was not the only person with pro-establishment left sympathies who only did so because I trusted Blair to tell the truth about WMD etc. in a way that I didn't trust the Bush administration. Pro-establishment left elites like Senate Democrats or NYT access journalists had access to the same stovepiped intelligence that the Bush administration did, and almost entirely supported the war. That Obama was a notable exception is why he was a strong Presidential candidate in 2008.
The war was net-unpopular by the 2004 election (which is surprisingly close given the good economy) at which point it had become clear that the WMD were at best a small legacy stockpile that had never been a real threat to anything except an invading army and that the administration had got itself into a quagmire by failing to plan for the aftermath of victory. It didn't become shockingly unpopular until about 2006 when it became clear that the US had failed to find anyone capable of governing Iraq except Iranian proxies or Salafi jihadis.
One of the main reasons why politicians are so freaked out about Ukraine is that they lied as much about Ukraine as they lied about every other war and they are afraid of the piles of lies being exposed. One day would could have a Ukrainian Ed Snowden or Bradley Manning.
You can make a strong argument for helping Ukraine defend itself based entirely on publicly-available information - that Russia invaded Ukraine is not in doubt, Putin has repeatedly said that his goals in invading Ukraine include annexing territory and forced Russification of the inhabitants (i.e. technical genocide), and Putin has in fact annexed Ukrainian territory and kidnapped the inhabitants' children for purposes of forced Russification. If you think stopping these things is worth $100 billion or so, then nothing the US might have lied about is relevant to the argument. All a Ukrainian Ed Snowden or Bradley Manning could do is demonstrate that NATO was opposing Russian interests in Ukraine in a way that would mean Putin's invasion was smart and evil rather than crazy and evil.
If a FDR-era Ed Snowden or Bradley Manning had come up with smoking-gun evidence that the US was acting against Japanese interests in a way which made Pearl Harbor smart and evil rather than crazy and evil (and the Axis-sympathetic US right thinks they have one, not entirely without justification) it wouldn't change the moral or practical case for defending America after Pearl Harbor. The situation in Ukraine is broadly analogous.
Iraq is different - both the "Iraq is helping Al-Quaeda" lie and the "Iraq is building scary WMD" lie/mistake/high-on-own-supply motivated deception arguments were based on non-public information where you had to trust the US government. And those were the best arguments for the Iraq war. If you try to defend the Iraq war based entirely on publicly-available information you end up with an argument that makes Bush look crazy and evil - something like "We need to invade a third world country every ten years to remind people that we can, and Iraq is convenient."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3d ago
You would also need a butler to supervise the assistants - managing staff is a job in itself.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3d ago
Her approach to philanthropy is almost exactly what you would expect of a coastal PMC chick who studies creative writing at Princeton and ends up working as a secretary while claiming she is writing a novel.
It isn't quite NPC - she is doing agentic stuff in terms of looking for promising new charities to donate to rather than putting her name on buildings at the usual suspects, but "blue tribe PMC NPC" is a better model than "inverse Jeff".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3d ago
and maybe had a kid or two
Don't underestimate this one. Once you have children together, you are on the same team - theirs. Some women eventually manage to hate their ex-husband more than they love the children, but men who do are vanishingly rare. The relationship a man has with the mother of his children is nothing like the relationship he has with a woman he is non-reproductively fucking.
Ken Livingstone, on the other hand, did self-identify as a socialist. Apart from some culture-war trolling, he mostly ran London as a pragmatic leftist - both his term as GLC leader (1981-1986) and his terms as Mayor (2000-2008) are primarily remembered for the improvements he made to public transport.
I believe the American term for this type of leadership is "sewer socialism", although by this time London's sewers were controlled by Thames Water (privatised in 1989, and now bust).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4d ago
It is worth noting that the top British public (i.e. private) schools do not run on a quis paget entrat basis, and have not done since roughly the 1980's. There is a standard examination (Common Entrance) meaning that the system is transparent enough that people would know if it ran like Harvard admissions. At the time Prince Harry got into Eton in 1997, they apparently still had slightly lower academic standards for children of hereditary peers (and significantly lower standards for royalty - he wouldn't have met the reduced standards for the aristocracy), but they had no need to let a dim kid in for cash, and didn't. The other top schools had published pass marks with no exceptions.
Part of the joke about St Cake's is that there used to be a lot of mildly shit public schools that were selling social exclusivity and nothing else (and the resulting stereotypes survive because the upper classes are one of the designated acceptable targets for outgroup-bashing humour) but most of them went out of business after WW2.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5d ago
The preliminary rounds of the British Mathematical Olympiad are multiple choice. The later rounds move to written solutions because some of the questions require you to come up with a formal proof.
The multiple choice sections of the science O-levels (the more demanding age-16 qualification that was dumbed down and replaced by GCSE) were the first part to go because they were notoriously the hardest part of the paper.
The LSAT reading comprehension questions, which are notoriously effective at actually testing understanding, are multiple choice.
You absolutely can assess intelligence, real comprehension, ability to apply knowledge etc. with a well-designed multiple choice test. What you can't assess is the ability to make arguments or tell stories. A subject like history has to be tested by essay writing because the skill history teaches is about is making arguments. It would be an interesting exercise to replace one-third to one-half of a history exam with a multiple choice test asking LSAT-style questions about a set of primary documents and a (real or cod) extract from a piece of modern historiography drawing conclusions from them. I think it could be even harder than "write 3 essays in 3 hours with a single page of printed notes and no electronic devices".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
I dunno, the sort of a leftist who would have called, say, Obama a neoliberal would be unlikely to call Trump a neoliberal even though Trump's views on economy were to the right of them (or if they did, it would be specifically as an unexpected term with the intent of highlighting that Trump's economic policies aren't as divergent from the standard post-Cold-War Western economic model as he or his fans might like to claim.)
I think that is because they would be calling him a fascist. Trump's right-wing views on the only social issue that matters (immigration) are the most salient thing about his politics.
In addition, part of Trump's political strategy is maintaining plausible deniability that he is to the right of Obama on economic issues, including by attacking elite consensus economic policy from a "left-wing" direction over trade, industrial strategy etc.
A moderately interesting interview with Eric Trump just dropped in the FT. (Limited-use gift link - the article is paywalled but may also be accessible on a 5/month basis with free registration)
The headline is "Eric Trump opens door to political dynasty." It isn't explicit, but applying bounded distrust it looks like the FT reporter raised the issue and Eric responded mildly positively. It is consistent with the Trump family's general approach of keeping the idea of an illegal 3rd term and/or a dynastic successor in the public eye while maintaining plausible deniability about actually doing it.
I don't find Eric's denials that the family is making money off the Presidency interesting - the Mandy Rice-Davies principle applies. Eric is lying here and the FT makes this clear to a reader who is paying attention while avoiding words like "lie" and "falsely". It is an interesting example of a political reporter trying to write about a lying politician without engaging in either hostile editorialising or "opinions about shape of earth differ" non-journalism.
If I had to guess, Eric is positioning himself, personally for a future move into politics. Over the last few years Eric has been running the Trump Organisation while Don Jr and Barron support their father's political operation. With Barron taller and more talented, but still a long way off 35, Don Jr is the obvious dynastic successor at the moment. But the bit of the interview about a Trump dynasty is explicitly about the idea of Eric and not Don Jr being the politician.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
"Career" would surely be the common English word?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7d ago
It is slightly more specific than that. The standard meaning of "neoliberal" is "person with economic views to my right who I dislike" in the same way that the unfortunately now-standard meaning of "fascist" is "person with social views to my right who I dislike."
There is also a rarer reclamatory use of the term found on places like /r/neoliberal - the people using the word this way think the key neoliberal beliefs are free trade, support legal immigration at or above current levels, general scepticism of economic regulation, agnosticism about the ideal size of the welfare state.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
Women who treat romantic relationships as jobs end up with richer husbands, and therefore a higher material standard of living, than comparably hot women who treat romantic relationships as a source of emotional validation. Taking advantage of this fact is frequently not insane - and was in fact "just common sense" for most of human history.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
If you know any lesbians and are under the age of 30, you're likely to run into at least a few lesbians who flirt with transitioning or transition.
In the Blanchardian model, they would be homosexual transexuals (the FtM equivalent of the kathoey-hijra type) and not autoandrophiles.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
Normal tomboys want to date straight men. Autoandrophiles (such as exist) want to date gay men.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8d ago
The glibertarian answer to the Riddle of the Flute Children is "Kill the man who asks who gets the flute." But that doesn't change the fact that someone gets the flute and others don't. If nobody is allowed to ask the question, we will get the default answer. And if the default answer is that the flute children fight among themselves then the flute will be broken as surely as it will be broken by the rival Grand High Flute Adjudicators in the Thirty Flutes' War.
Protection from organised predation is absolutely necessary for survival, and social insurance is mostly necessary. And neither can be practically provided by someone who lacks the powers of a Grand High Flute Adjudicator. If the State doesn't provide those things (or fails to do so effectively), other institutions will. And those institutions will coerce their members, and will seek to coerce nonmembers. And that coercive power will be fought over.
Now if we treat the flute metaphor as fact, the question has an easy default answer, that is revealing in the real world. Daddy decides which child gets the flute. "Kill the outsider who questions Daddy's decision" is a peace treaty between lineages. In the cis-Hajnal context where Daddy is the actual married biological father of actual minor children, it is one that works well.
But cis-Hajnal nuclear families are not the default, and "Kill the outsider who questions Daddy's decision" is a bad treaty if the flute children are productive adults with children of their own and Daddy is an increasingly senile paterfamilias who might not even be a blood relative. The human default is to look to extended family for protection against predation and for social insurance, and the normie way of thinking about other institutions that provide those things (including the State, the Mafia etc.) is as fictive extended families - hence Don Corleone's English-language title of "Godfather" and the often-accurate libertarian jibe against the Mummy Party and the Daddy Party. And in practice the people who find themselves inside those kind of extended family institutions are treated like naughty children whose flutes can be taken away if they backtalk Daddy. And so they work (and, more often than not, fight - Western civilisation's record at kicking the asses of fuzzy-wuzzies on the battlefield is even better than our record of delivering unimaginable universal material prosperity) like naughty children. The canonical book on this point is Mark Weiner's Rule of the Clan
The Peace of God predates the Hajnal line, the Hajnal line predates the Treaty of Westphalia, and the Treaty of Westphalia predates SpaceX. This isn't an accident.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
Yes - porn is a cross-cutting issue. The anti-porn faction consists of Blue sex-negative feminists and Red religious conservatives. The pro-porn faction consists of Red libertarians and Blue sex-positive feminists (and the pornographers). Both sex-negative and sex-positive feminists can get published in so-called peer-reviewed journalists, although the sex-positive feminists are currently winning the intra-left political battle.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
This meant that if one side was a belligerent in a conflict, the other side abstained from officially sending troops as well.
I think the mutually-agreed, informal rule in the Cold War was (after Korea, where both sides violated it for no net gain) that you don't attack the other superpower's client directly, only with your own client. So the US could send troops to defend South Vietnam, but not to attack North Vietnam. (And the USSR couldn't directly participate in North Vietnamese attacks on South Vietnam, but they didn't need to because they had a much better proxy). And the US couldn't invade Cuba with regular forces, which they otherwise clearly wanted to do, given that they did the Bay of Pigs.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9d ago
They have a machine and no shot at relevance.
The UK Tory machine doesn't deliver votes any more. To the extent they are irrelevant, it is because nobody can see a scenario where they win a majority at Westminster and form a government (except possibly as a junior coalition partner to Reform, or heaven forfend as a junior partner in an anti-Reform grand coalition with Labour if they find themselves swinging that way). To the extent they are relevant, it is because people can see a scenario where they will continue to hold 100+ seats by inertia and hold the balance of power between Labour and Reform.
The Democrats are likely to take control of the House in 2026, and the 2028 Presidential election winning party market is currently a toss-up on oddschecker.com, which aggregates the big UK sportsbooks. (In contrast, the "Most Westminster seats after next UK election" market is a toss-up between Labour and Reform.) The Dem machine in its current state can deliver 48% of the popular vote for a poor candidate.
Right now, the party which is most likely to blow itself up is the Republicans, because they need to manage the succession to Trump. The MAGA GOP relies on Trump's reality-TV star charisma to turn out the down-with-everything loser voters who are now part of its core vote, and there is no obvious successor who has that. The Democrats OTOH have a decent shot at the 2028 Presidential election with a replacement-level candidate, just like they did in 2024 (where Trump was never as much as a 2-1 favourite after Biden dropped out).
I hadn't thought about this theory, but it does explain why women with PR and related career backgrounds are over-represented among rich and powerful men's second wives, particularly relative to the actresses and models you might expect to see if it was about hotness and status. I had always assumed that it was because PR girls had the right mix of hotness, IQ high enough not to be dull but not high enough to be challenging, and elite socialisation.
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