MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
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
1d ago
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3d ago
You would also need a butler to supervise the assistants - managing staff is a job in itself.
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
16d ago
The good argument is that serious attempts to enforce such a law involve criminal investigations of miscarriages to see if they were induced deliberately, and having criminal investigations of miscarriages is worse than failing to prevent the vanishingly small numbers of abortions that (a) actually happen and (b) the British public want to ban.
The other argument being widely made by feminists is that medication abortion should be available to women who have a reason for avoiding the medical system.
What is really going on is that about 20 women got abortion pills by telemedicine during the pandemic in order to illegally abort post-viability fetuses and were prosecuted for it, and this made the issue salient to the abortion-up-to-birth-for-any-reason feminists but not to WTF-don't-kill-viable-babies normies.
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
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).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
The main thing I am seeing here is that (after the very real spate of political violence in 2020, which largely ended on Jan 7th 2021), the demand for political violence in the US massively exceeds the supply, in the same way that Steve Sailer used to joke about the demand for racism exceeding the supply. People on both sides desperately want their opponents to be launching the red/brown terror, both to gain political capital by criticising the other side and to feed their own vicarious martyrdom fantasies. And this desire to big up political-looking violence for partisan reasons leads to the kind of media coverage that attracts copycats, so your average unhinged shooter is now more likely to shoot politicians and less likely to shoot up a school.
This isn't new, of course. If you look at the list of attempted Presidential assassinations going back to the founding the words "insanity" and "unfit to plead" appear an awful lot.
Roughly none of the recent cases of "political" violence that blew up in the media involve any of:
- Someone with a history of Dem activism shooting a Republican
- Someone with a history of GOP activism shooting a Democrat
- A perp affiliated with an organised far-left group
- A perp affiliated with an organised far-right group Instead we see the usual lineup of wackjobs plus the occasional Islamist, and one truly weird fringe group (the Zizians).
Apart from the Islamists, the nearest thing we see to an inteligible political motivation is something like Boelter or Wayne DePape (Paul Pelosi hammer guy) - an unhinged Red Triber who consumes right-wing media and is presumed to vote Republican decides to attack a Democrat for unhinged reasons. And the only reason why this is a mostly-Red thing is that comparably unhinged Blues don't have access to guns.
This is nothing like the Days of Rage, Reconstruction/Redemption, or the early C20 spate of anarchist violence. Nobody keeps the required statistics, but I suspect it is closer to a summer of the shark.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15d ago
- Bring back shotgun marriages. Make impregnation result in an automatic marriage and enforce much stricter rules for divorce in such marriages.
This is part of why I think no-fault divorce was the schwerpunkt of the culture war (or at least the sex and sexuality theatre thereof). If you look at cishajnal cultures before about 1800, shotgun weddings were the first line of defence against bastardy for the lower and middle classes (elite men could afford to support their bastards, and elite women could be kept chaperoned). The incentives created meant that pre-marital sex was common (the fraction of first children born less than 9 months after the wedding gets as high as one in three in some times and places) but it really is pre-marital - you only have sex with someone you are ready, willing and able to marry. But if "we aren't actually in love" is grounds for divorce, then there is no point in a shotgun wedding. The difference between a divorced single mum because the shotgun marriage to the slob was never going to work out and a never-married single mum who wasn't interested in marrying the slob is not one that matters in practice.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
I was met with a question regarding my own stance on the matter.
I find if your goal is just to change the subject, saying that the history of the Mandate means that our input is uniquely unwanted by both sides, and that we should take the hint and butt out, works brilliantly. NPCs on both sides are horrified but have no comeback because you are off-script. It's like playing the Sicilian back in the days when everyone was taught opening theory starting e4 e5.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
15d ago
So what do you do? You target the unsympathetic leeches like single guys age 29 playing lots of COD, because those are the cuts you CAN make.
You are insufficiently cynical here. You target the unsympathetic leeches publicly in order to maintain support, and then cut Medicaid for everyone in a bill you don't give your own backbenchers time to read. 29yo single guys playing COD don't consume a lot of expensive healthcare (and when they do it is an ER visit after a car crash - which will end up as an uncollected bill for the hospital if Medicaid doesn't pay) - there is no way you are getting the size of Medicaid cuts the GOP are looking for without taking healthcare away from people who are actually sick, and the people writing the legislation know this.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
If this is not real,
It isn't real. Both sides are still shooting at each other. Israel is claiming that Iran should be blamed because they fired the first shots after Trump's deadline, and they are just retaliating. What is definitely the case is that both sides tried to do maximum damage in the hours between the ceasefire being announced and entering into force, which is not what people who actually want a ceasefire do.
Can anyone explain America's love affair with the pickup truck? This is prompted by this Matt Yglesias post talking about abundance politics, and acknowledging that for working-class Hispanics (among others) owning a pickup is a key measuring stick for material prosperity and that it would be politically stupid for abundance-orientated Democrats to argue this point.
This isn't a question about why Americans drive much bigger personal vehicles than people in other countries - that is obvious. (Generally richer country, cheaper fuel, wider roads, more idiot drivers such that "mass wins" is seen as an important part of being safe on the roads). I think I understand why so many of these are built on a truck chassis (mostly CAFE arbitrage). But the thing I don't get is why the pickup as the big-ass form factor of choice. If you look at the big-ass personal vehicles in the London suburbs, you will see at least 5 full-size SUVs (as in the US, the most common form factor in affluent suburbia is the crossover, which no longer counts as big-ass) for every clean pickup. And if you look at work vehicles, you will see at least 10 vans for every pickup. Most of the work pickups I see in the London suburbs are owned by landscapers who regularly haul large quantities of fertilizer, so "ease of cleaning the bed" is the obvious reason for them. The pattern seems to be the same in other European cities, and googling "Tokyo traffic jam" brings up pictures with more pickups than Europe, but still many fewer pickups than vans or big-ass SUVs.
So my small-scale questions are:
- Is it true that there are more clean pickups than full-size SUV's in the US? Everywhere or just in Red/Hispanic areas?
- Is it true that there are more work pickups than work vans in the US?
- Does anyone have a sense of why Americans choose pickups over other big-ass form factors?
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
13d ago
How would you feel if your daughter turned up on your doorstep on the arm of a McKinsey consultant or a white-shoe lawyer (who we affect to similarly desipse)? If most people's answer is positive, it's prestigious and the haters are just jealous.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10d ago
Plausible deniability isn't in practice about plausibility to the other side's leadership, although it is possible that the Truman administration (who coined the phrase and initially developed the doctrine) were stupid enough to think it was. It is about plausibility to a sympathetic audience (primarily your own domestic audience, but also sympathetic neutrals). The Soviet leadership was rarely fooled by US denial of responsibility for obvious US covert ops. The US people frequently were.
Sometimes it provides a face-saving exit for the victim - if the USSR pretends to believe a "plausible denial" from the US then the domestic political consequences of not retaliating are mitigated.
In the modern sense, "plausible deniability" generally means "everyone knows I did it but if it can't be proved in a formal quasi-judicial process my dittoheads can go on pretending to believe that I didn't"
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11d ago
(It's also only a reliable signal of malfunction in men, since there are no male gendered clothes except maybe boxers.)
Not true above a certain level of formality - women's trouser suits look very different to men's suits, starting with the acceptable colour palette. And as the level of formality increases the expectation that women wear dresses gets stronger. This is why tomboys hate formal events - they are used to being able to be performatively androgynous without looking like they are cross-dressing.
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.
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."
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