MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4hr ago
We destroyed a large part of Iran’s capacity to build cheap drones.
The Houthi threat to shipping is not based on the Yemeni drone industry. Failed states do not have domestic armaments industries. Somehow they still seem to be lousy with weapons.
We can inflict far more harm on Iran than they can inflict on us.
And? If the US inflicts a lot of harm on Iran an Iran inflicts a little bit of harm on the US, that looks like a bad outcome for both the US and Iran. War is a negative-sum game, and "neither side gets a good result" is a possible outcome, indeed probably the default outcome.
Right now we have Iran half-destroyed, begging for anything but Bridge and Power Plant Day, cardboard cutout of a supreme leader, possibly now an IRGC coup, America is exercising control over the strait, increasing supply of oil from other sources to compensate for what’s being blocked, total air superiority,
Right now America is doing worse than they were doing in Iraq in 2003. Not much worse - I am happy to concede they are still "winning" in the way they "won" in Iraq. But all you are saying here is that US forces are closer to the "Mission Accomplished" moment than some war-sceptics think they are.
The technical ability of the US to administer air-power-based punishment beatings to Iran is not in doubt. The argument is about what political goals, if any, can be achieved using punishment beatings alone, and whether they are worth the consumption of materiel and damage to the world economy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
Juries drawn from the district the crime was allegedly committed in is in the Constitution, so de facto not reformable.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
Is there a reason a state should generally allow private actors to play "undercover informant"? Citizens aren't generally encouraged to start writing dossiers on each other even if they did say they were going to turn them over to law enforcement. Doubly so for not-even-illegal activities, some of which are constitutionally protected.
Reporting on the activities of political groups is just as 1st amendment protected as participating in them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
The cost of victory is internal dissent. When the left was culturally dominant, they had infinite groups struggling for internal supremacy. They still have some of it.
The left had infinity groupuscles stuggling for internal supremacy long before it was culturally dominant. The problem goes back all the way to the 1st century AD and the conflict between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
some already were
The ICE wall of honour continues to show zero deaths due to enemy action since Jaime Jorge Zapata in 2011. Like a medieval army, the vast majority of service-related deaths are due to disease (COVID-19, cancer from toxic exposure during the WTC cleanup, and one case of dengue while on a field assignment in Indonesia).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
If you are right, then in a few weeks the north coast of the Strait of Hormuz will be under the "control" of a failed state and anyone who wants to create havoc can set up shop there and harass shipping with cheap land-based drones (with the Houthis being the proof of concept that this is technically feasible, and hard to counter without boots on the ground). This is one of the predictable bad outcomes of a successful war against Iran, and a large part of why conventional wisdom (including among non-leftists) was that the war was to avoided if possible.
The chance of Donald Trump, as the Oracle would put it, invading Persia and destroying a great empire, continues to rise.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6hr ago
So a return to the situation under the JCPOA then? A reasonable goal, but one that Trump has consistently said he doesn't support. And if that is the goal, then the war was unlikely to achieve anything compared to the status quo ante - as of December 2025 the Iranian nuke program was non-functional and Iran was not extorting neutral shipping.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6hr ago
A trusted component can break the system's security commitments, a trustworthy one won't. I agree that Trump is widely trusted (mostly by countries which are too weak to have an alternative) despite his lack of trustworthiness.
Of the people on your list, Iran, Saudi, Qatar and the UAE have seen their security break as a result of trusting an untrustworthy component.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6hr ago
Totally disagree. Another possibility -- consistent with this kind of fraud -- is that in reality, the SPLC values fund-raising (and its continued existence) far more than its nominal mission. Something which, to put it mildly, is not unheard of among not-for-profits.
That's obviously true, but not criminal. It is, unfortunately, perfectly legal for the Save-the-World foundation to raise a million dollars (using chuggers who take a 40% commission), and spend $400k on executive salaries and the other $200k on a big celebrity-studded party to "raise awareness" of worldsaving.
If, as seems likely, the only crime (in the legal sense) here is opening bank accounts in false names, then absent losses to the banks or IRS, the likely penalty is a slap on the wrist. That said, using banking-related process crimes that the SPLC is clearly guilty of to throw the book at a fake charity doesn't seem like an abuse given US norms re. prosecuting white-collar crime.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7hr ago
I can, and I do. I therefore oppose them, for the same reason that I oppose Azathoth's achievement of his similarly ineffable objectives.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
11hr ago
What does the pro-war side want?
Trump doesn't need to, and shouldn't, share operational and tactical level plans, but in a democracy the side who leads the country into war is traditionally expected to say what the political goals are, and why it thinks they are achievable (which in practice means sharing the big-picture strategy).
I would say Trump has not done so, but it would be fairer to say that he does share goals and strategies, but different ones every speech (and sometimes two different ones in the same speech). Given a choice between "allow Trump to do his thing" and "make him stop", the only argument currently being made in public for allowing Trump to do his thing is that his approach to complex negotiations (as documented in e.g. The Art of the Deal) depends on the enemy having no idea what he wants, and we should trust him on that basis. That argument is not persuasive to people who, based on decades of publicly-documented experience across four careers, consider Trump untrustworthy. (And The Art of the Deal also advocates routine dishonesty in negotiations - one thing Trump is honest about is being a liar).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I suspect part of what is going on is that almost every political party for whom not being red is part of its identity (which covers the centre right, the far right, right-liberals and some left-liberals, particularly in the former Soviet bloc) wants to use blue if it is available.
Looking at the member parties of the Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament, I would say most right-populist parties end up using a darker shade of blue than the main centre-right party in their country.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Per Steve Sailer's extensive investigation of SPLC finances, very little of the money here is taxpayer money - the whole point of the SPLC was to maximise unrestricted donations from left-wing Jews so Morris Dees and Jo Levin could keep the money. DOGE wasn't going to find this one - it required old-school criminal investigation.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
And broken up when the undercover FBI agent starts suggesting actual serious criminal activity and the undercover journalist calls the local cops on him.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I despise Israel-the-political-entity and I cheerfully agree with you on this point. 10/7 was an act of barbarism, and the best model for Hamas' behaviour since then has been "identify the most evil thing an insane evil person could come up with, and watch them do it".
If you are going to us methods of barbarism in a somewhat-justified war, you should do so in pursuit of a somewhat-justified military objective and with a somewhat-justified hope of military success. 10/7 was some evil cunts getting off on Jewish pain from the safety of their Qatar hotel rooms with no visible path to military victory, or even a draw.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I reject this discourse by referring to myself as a "sperg" which is not a term politically correct people are willing to use even if the sperg in question is welcome to it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Yes - pre sexual revolution the vast majority of marriageable, single older men were widowers. If a man was a bachelor at thirty there was a reason. "Confirmed bachelor" was a euphemism for gay.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
This situation is also rough on the kids from the first marriage, who suddenly acquire a stepmother who isn't old enough to be their mother, but will need to play the social role of mother unless the kids spend ~100% of the time with their biomum. I'm going to date myself by pointing out that acquiring a stepmother young enough that she could just about have dated him instead of his father was what pushed Bill of Bill and Ted over the edge into loserdom. (Ted was just as thick as two short planks).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The whole point @magicalkittycat was making (which I agree with) is that these guys are exceptional among rich/powerful/successful men. Most R/P/S men are still married to the mothers of their children, so they are facing weaker taboos against taking up a younger girlfriend than they used to - both the taboo against adult age gaps and the taboo against adultery in 2026 are weaker than the taboo against adultery was in 1980.
The informal institution of "rich men having mistresses but being discrete about it" was not created by seekingarrangement.com.
The purpose of the age gap taboo from the point of view of the feminists and allies imposing it is to force middle-aged divorced men with options to date middle-aged divorced women rather than dating prime-age never-married women. Middle-aged divorced women, and women who want to improve their options should they choose the life of middle-aged divorced woman, are the core constituency of feminism.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
That kinda works sort of, but has another problem, your essentially saying that a 14 year old with a higher IQ should be an adult, with all that entails. I dont think many people would accept that.
Adulthood ideally requires a level of emotional control that gifted 14-year olds are less likely to have than normie 21-year olds (but plenty of 14 year-olds have it and plenty of 21-year olds don't) and an ethic of taking adult responsibility which 14-year olds have not generally had the opportunity to develop in our society, and particularly not in the PMC milieu where most gifted kids are going to come from (but would do in a better-run society).
Right now, my guess is that less than half the gifted 14-year olds with the cognitive ability to pass an "early adulthood exam" are emotionally ready for adulthood, but 80% of them could be if we raised gifted children with that expectation (and most of the 20% are sufficiently autistic that they will never be emotionally ready for adulthood - part of the purpose of academia in a world where it isn't ruined by woke activism is as an artificial environment which makes geniuses who can't adult maximally useful)
Orange and blue are the colours Fidesz and Tisza chose for themselves.
In general (several countries are exceptions) European political colours are the reverse of the modern* US convention, with centre-left parties using red (even if they are no longer actually socialist) and centre-right parties using blue. See for example this official EU Parliament page, or any Wikipedia article about a European national Parliament. (Wikipedia by policy follows parties' own choice of colour where possible).
Tisza are a big-tent centre-right party, so using blue is unsurprising. (The left in Hungary is defunct, a it is in Poland and the Czech Republic.) Fidesz adopted orange in their early days when they were a right-liberal party opposed to Soviet Bloc communism - yellow and orange are the most common colours used by liberal parties, including the British Liberal Democrats (both over time), German FDP (yellow) and Dutch VVD (who use blue-and-orange, reflecting their role as the de facto conservative party in Dutch politics as well as their own right-liberal tradition).
* To the best of my knowledge, Red = Republican and Blue = Democrat only became the convention after Bush vs. Gore. (Both parties use red, white and blue in their imagery). The BBC used blue = Republican/red = Democrat up to and including 2000 for consistency with the British convention (e.g. the popup map on this archive page) and switched to the modern US convention in its 2004 coverage (archive example). One account I read was that the US networks generally used blue for the incumbent and red for the challenger and red this became fixed as blue=Dem/red=Rep because the 2000 map became a meme during the Bush v Gore litigation.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I personally feel a bit blinded now, like I've had a sense badly dulled. The price of oil is a shitty low-resolution proxy with too many confounders, vs a high-volume prediction market directly asking the actual question.
That is the point. Insider traders who bet on secret war plans are leaking information in the form of market prices in the same way that traditional disloyal civil servants leak information in the form of off-the-record briefings of journalists. If the government can keep secrets, it is more militarily effective, but also less accountable to citizens. In the case of short-term war plans like the date of a surprise attack, the US as a whole is better off if the government can keep secrets, which means that running a prediction market which allows government officials to insider trade is a hostile act.
Or to put it even more bluntly, the enemy has had their senses dulled in the same way you have.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
But the only aspects of the red pill that went viral were those laced with misogyny and intense sexism. The big "red pill" content creators of today are the Andrew Tate types, which are essentially grifters selling BS courses to young men.
This was a huge part of the red pill/PUA movement from day 1. David de Angelo came to the early-noughties seduction community from the online snake-oil salesman community, and there was also overlap because both pre-2000 seduction artists like Ross Jefferies and snake-oil salesmen made heavy use of NLP, and the NLP community effectively got into a self-reinforcing loop of using NLP techniques to sell overpriced NLP classes to people who (if they were able to learn and use the skills) then saw selling selling overpriced classes as a high-status way to monetise your skills.
How we go about doing this is another question though.
Abolish section 230 protection for algorithmically curated content. If XBook is exercising the level of control over what you see that they do, in fact, exercise then they are a publisher, not a neutral platform.
The Maduro indictment is unusual in that all the counts are extra-territorial, so jurisdiction only ends up in SDNY because that is where they landed him after arresting him overseas. Normally this kind of complex international drug smuggling case ends up in SDNY because the money was laundered through NYC-based banks, making SDNY the easiest jurisdiction to throw in money laundering charges.
But they could have indicted Maduro anywhere - I guess they went with the SDNY because that is where the career AUSAs and judges with the relevant experience are.
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