MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
18m ago
The USA, with the Nicaraguan Contras as a group analogous to Hezbollah. The USSR, with the IRA, ETA, PLO, etc. etc. ad nauseam as groups analogous to Hezbollah.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
21m ago
Doubt was enough, because it is difficult to prove a negative.
On the Iraqi nuclear programme (as opposed to chemical weapons, which were deliberately conflated with nukes under the WMD label) there was never any real doubt that the programme had made very little progress and had been dismantled after the first Gulf War - the Bush administration just lied.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
35m ago
Israel isn't the country it was even in 2014 - religious Jews outbreeding secular Jews has changed the balance of power.
There was a soft right wing of Likud, including people like Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, who thought that Israel's best hope of security was to annex as much land with as few Palestinians as possible, build a fence to keep the vast majority of the Palestinians out, and rely on American support (based on shared interests and values) for defence against Iran and friends. That soft right is now de facto the centre left (parties like Kadima and Blue & White), and even so can't win elections against the Netanyahu coalition. (The only government without Likud since 2009 was a short-lived monstrosity formed when far-right Naftali Bennett went into coalition with the centre-left because he was disgusted by Netanyahu's personal corruption. It lasted 18 months, after which Bennett's party was wiped out).
Netanyahu's coalition don't want to build a fence (at least in the West Bank - Gaza is a shithole nobody wants) - they want to fill Eretz Israel with Jews (sometimes explicitly for religious reasons - religious Zionists are a core part of the coalition) and somehow-or-other have the Palestinians who currently exist there go away. And given a choice between relying on God or the United States for Israel's security, they are going to choose God. Israeli religious Zionists don't have shared interests and values with the US, but there is a popular evangelical heresy which wrongly teaches that they do. Given Netanyahu's ability (or at least perceived ability) to sic AIPAC (in a Democratic primary) or Christian Zionist evangelicals (in a Republican primary) on individual American politicians who cross him, his approach to the US is closer to oderint dum metuant.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2hr ago
Mainstream discourse might act like female attraction is meritocratic, but in my experience if one talks to actual women they tend to be quite open about the non-meritocratic nature of their attraction to men.
The Blue Tribe has decreed that only feminists are allowed to have an opinion on gender relations, and feminists will insist that female sexuality is meritocratic on average (while defending any individual woman's choices to date badboys, especially their own) because to do otherwise makes women look bad.
This is made worse because the Red Tribe thinks that the people who should be listened to on gender relations are pastors who are , in the current year, more likely than not to say that female sexuality is meritocratic even if they are otherwise-conservative evangelicals. The idea that if you aren't getting laid you must not be praying hard enough is sufficiently pervasive in modern American Christian culture that even the otherwise admirable TitaniumButterfly AAQC hints at it.
It also didn't help that Roissy deliberately chose a term ("alpha") that implies female sexuality is meritocratic (but with a less pussified definition of "merit" than the standard one) while correctly insisting that it is not, and a lot of less talented manosphere writers following him didn't understand that he was using "alpha" in a sense where the positive connotations were ironic.
And access to the ground truth is not available to the men who need it because women do not discuss their own sexuality frankly around men they do not trust. Women being open about their non-meritocratic sexuality happens in all-female settings or in the kind of art fag-ridden mixed groups where straight men who can't get laid are already selected out. Hence the advice to read bestselling Amazon romance slop to understand what women want rather than asking them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2hr ago
Bullying followed the Hollywood pattern (athletes and the children of the super-rich were the ringleaders, low-status kids were the losers, all tempered by the basic fact that older boys are socially dominant over younger boys) at the expensive British private school I attended in the 1990's. The only difference was that nerds were not low-status because the school culture valued academics and classical music as much as athletics and partying. Though when your rival for the hottest girl in the class is all of 6'2", vice-captain of rugby, solo bass-baritone in the choir, and one of the top 2 in his year in maths and physics, the precise criterion you fall behind on doesn't matter. (He personally wasn't a bully, as far as I was aware of)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2hr ago
I think more that the Boomers grew up in a world where sexual morality was a thing and monogamous lifelong marriage was normative, so the idea that a better approach to sex and marriage existed and an expansion of gay rights was a threat to it made sense, even if you disagreed with it.
Generation X grew up in a world where half their classmates' parents were divorced (if white) or never married in the first place (if black), nobody with a megaphone seemed to have a problem with this, and the whole idea of sexual morality read as elite hypocrisy. So either you support gay rights, or you don't care, or you are some kind of religious nut whose whole worldview is incomprehensible to people who grew up post sexual revolution.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2hr ago
The Tea Party movement began shortly before Obama was elected, based on opposition to the 2008 bank bailouts. At that point most of the participants were Ron Paul libertarians, although the movement was nominally bipartisan (and probably actually bipartisan - I'm not sure). It got a big boost after Rick Santelli's viral rant (broadcast live on CNBC from the CME floor in Chicago) against the Obama admin's homeowner bailout in February 2009. I was watching from the London trading floor of a European bank which had not (yet) needed a bailout, and the dominant reaction was that the American traders cheering Santelli were hypocrites because they were opposing Obama's homeowner bailout at a time when the only reason most of them were still employed was Bush's bank bailout. This was also the reaction of the pro-establishment left.
In the first half of 2009, the Tea Party was a libertarian-coded anti-bailout movement, with "bailout" defined broadly to include any kind of support for troubled banks, any kind of support for troubled homeowners, the welfare state, fiscal stimulus, efforts to protect jobs at GM etc. It quickly became de facto a partisan Republican thing because a Democratic trifecta was doing the bailouts, and the Republicans who had supported the 2008 bailouts were no longer relevant. It is unsurprising that a pre-existing libertarian-coded Republican movement would lead the opposition to Obamacare.
There was a lot of anti-establishment horseshoing going on in 2009-10, with Occupy, the Tea Party and the emerging alt-right (particularly via Milo Yiannopoulos) all swapping ideas and people with Ron Paul libertarians (though not, I think, Paul himself) at the centre of the network.
I'm not sure how or exactly when the Tea Party transitioned from being a somewhat focussed libertarian movement that was only incidentally a partisan Republican or Red Tribe thing to a proto-MAGA movement of generically pissed off Red Tribers that was only incidentally libertarian and could plausibly be accused of "just hating the idea of a black President". But there is an obvious route - as the movement grew the average IQ dropped, and below a certain IQ threshold any vaguely right-coded popular movement will pick up support from confederate flag-wavers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy-theorists etc. and at that point everyone who isn't a MAGA-type conservative started leaving.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
14hr ago
Trump has successfully convinced his base that there is large-scale, partisan-asymmetric fraud in US elections such that clean elections would materially help Republicans. Republican senators know that this is not the case.
At a practical level, the SAVE Act does two things:
- It makes certain types of fraud harder to do, mostly ones which people who actually understand US election security think are not common.
- It disenfranchises a small number of voters due to bureaucratic fuckery.
Random paperwork-driven disenfranchisement helps the party whose supporters are richer, better educated (because they are more likely to be able to fix paperwork issues) and more urban (because it is harder to run the kind of political operation that fixes paperwork issues for voters in rural areas). In the current year, that is the Democrats. That married women using their husbands' names are somewhat more likely to be disenfranchised by paperwork issues makes the partisan asymmetry worse.
So if the fraud isn't real, or the SAVE Act doesn't stop it, or the SAVE Act stops it in a partisan-symmetric way, then passing the SAVE Act will hurt Republicans. (Why don't Democrats support something like the SAVE Act if it helps them - same reason the Democrats don't do other things that would help them win elections but might get you called racist) So Republicans who might face tough elections want to stop it passing without being blamed by the MAGA base for stopping it passing.
I think this has also hurt the John Wick films. By the third, we know he's going to be pull his suit up to cover his head and will never take a serious wound during an action sequence.
Zvi Mowshowitz had a post about the legal systems of John Wick in which he says that the "legal"/political background of the films (and therefore the types of story that get told) is what changes from episode to episode. [Basically, from an "honorable" criminal organisation where the morality is Lawful Evil, the Continental Hotel is sacrosanct, and markers are honoured, to outlaw life as opponents of a lawless shadowy conspiracy which controls the High Table and includes the man who finds Wick in the desert, to something vaguely reminiscent of feudalism by the fourth film].
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
formation of a government in Iran with a few extra steps -- a period of occupation,
The whole point I was making is that the US (and on this point, exceptionally, the US is united) has no interest in occupying Iran. All important factions in the US would prefer leaving the status quo in place to a US occupation. We can argue about whether the US is making a mistake here, but this is closer to "the utility function isn't up for debate" than "let's get a bunch of experts in post-mullahocracy occupation and reconstruction to discuss how likely it is to produce a good outcome" - not least because the relevant body of expertise doesn't exist.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
There are the Kurds (although more assimilated and pacified, even compared to their neighbors)
The Kurds are no more pacified that the rest of the population - i.e. they won't stay pacified if the regime collapses, unless the new regime incorporates or crushes them. As with Syria, any likely failed state scenario includes either a Kurdish statelet (de facto independent, not internationally recognised, but probably west-friendly in practice) or Turkish military intervention to prevent one forming, or both (as happened in Syria). Israel appears to be explicitly encouraging Kurdish separatists to take up arms against the weakened regime.
In terms of Iranian domestic politics, Iranian Kurds are a key part of the Khatami/Rouhani reform faction in the mullahocracy. They don't get on with the hardliners (because of religious differences) or with the Pahlavite resistance (because of Persian nationalism).
There is a small Sunni minority.
(Mostly the same people as the Kurds, who are much more religiously diverse than ethnic-Persian Iranians)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
unconditionally surrender
An unconditional surrender by the Iranians isn't a US victory, given the (quite correct and bipartisan) US preference for the status quo over the typical result of an unconditional surrender, which would be the US occupying Iran.
The win condition for the US is the formation of a government in Iran
- Which can control the territory without US help
- Which the US can do business with
Something which is notoriously hard to do with punitive bombing alone.
I think Netanyahu would consider a failed state in Iran a win for Israel. But it doesn't look like a win for the US or the US's local allies - failed states are bad neighbours and their oil and gas industry is uninvestable.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
"How robust are our publicly-available models against deliberate misuse?" is a valid question for both real safety and fake wokesafety. A model which can be jailbroken into using a racial slur its developers didn't want it to use can probably be jailbroken into providing a plausible DNA sequence for extensively drug-resistant Y pestis.
If you think Yudkowskian paperclipping is the only AI doom scenario that matters, then worrying about deliberate misuse of the model by humans is a distraction. But it is an obvious real risk.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
(well, if this also happened would not surprise me overall)
Jeffrey was into under-aged girls. Very, very different to corrupt Vatican officials.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
Good answer, although De Gaulle turned against Israel in the 1960s in a way which would be considered anti-Semitic by 21st century American standards.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
Britain has a constitution, it just isn't codified in one place. Most of it is even written down, although in one famous case only in an anonymous letter to the editor of the Times.
(Nor is the US constitution codified in one place - just most of it. The most obvious example is that the President is elected is generally seen by Americans as one of the most important parts of the American constitution, but it isn't in the Constitution).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
I don't think it would have done much damage if Patel didn't already have a reputation for junketing. In a world where he already has such a reputation, it turns an insider gossip story into something that is legible to normies.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
A majority of men will find that a rule that excludes all women from voting, governing and performing on jury based on some objective measure of competence will also exclude them. This is usually considered a bad thing by those who support universal male suffrage.
In the Anglosphere, very much this. No Anglosphere country had universal male suffrage. (The UK gave women the vote at the same time as non-landowning men in rural constituencies, the US and the Dominions all gave women the vote before men from disfavoured racial groups). The principle that there is a right to vote implies that the right extends to women.
In countries whose democratic tradition stems from the French revolution, universal male suffrage explicitly tied to universal male conscription was the default.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
Well it's a mixture. Women's tennis often has more varied and exciting rallies because it's less serve dominated, for example, and see 07mk's view on ultimate frisbee.
That was definitely true during my youth, but I don't think it was true during the Big 3.5 era. The last classic serve-volley player was Tim Henman (who is only considered good because of the total dearth of British tennis talent before he started making semi-finals) and the last classic serve-volley player who actually won things was Sampras. I would say the last great male player whose main weapon was his serve was Roddick.
They made the grass at Wimbledon slower in 2001 to produce a less serve-dominated game, and it worked.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
But Christians worship a Jew as the son of God? There's a certain kind of esoteric 'And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon Englands mountains green' Christianity but in terms of base elements, Christianity is pretty Jewish.
A Jew who the Pharisees conspired with Pilate to have crucified because they considered him a false prophet. And modern rabbinic Judaism looks like the intellectual descendant of the Pharisees, not whatever kind of Judaism the historical Jesus practiced. "God the Father sent the Son to the Jews as the Messiah in fulfilment of the old covenant, but the Jews rejected him and then suffered divine punishment and exile in much the same way as when they rejected God on previous occasions" is the simple, obvious interpretation of the Gospel story.
But that is about history and tradition, not religious practice. And lex orandi, lex credendi. At the level of day-to-day religious practice, Christianity is focussed on right belief to the near-total exclusion of ritual purity, whereas Orthodox Judaism is the modern religion that is most focussed on ritual purity.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
Antisemitism was just an idiosyncrasy of Hitler, not a law of history.
Can anyone point to a historical (right- or left-) populist movement in a culturally Christian country that didn't eventually turn anti-semitic? I suppose there is a colourable argument that Disraeli's OG One Nation Conservatism counts as right-populist, but it isn't a central example.
Jews really are over-represented (by somewhere around 10x, as you would expect given high-end estimates of Ashkenazi IQ if we do live in an IQ-meritocracy) in the allegedly-meritocratic elite, so if you think that the allegedly-meritocratic elite is a conspiracy, then it is a Jewish conspiracy.
There is a long history of homogeneous societies turning on Jews because domestic politics required a scapegoat. Admittedly it hasn't happened in an English-speaking Christian society since the late 18th century, and not in a murderous way since 1290.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
The Saudis (and pretty much all the Gulf sheikdoms except Qatar) have been collaborating with the international Jewish conspiracy (if it exists) or allied with Israel and the US against Iran based on shared interests (if it doesn't) since well before the Abraham Accords formalised the situation. In the world we live in, there is nothing at all odd about the Saudis investing on commercial terms in Hasbara Inc.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4d ago
Buying up news and media properties does seem to be the cool thing for billionaires to do these days. Musk bought twitter, Bezos bought the Washington Post, Rupert Murdoch was ahead of the curve owning Fox. Now Ellison gets some of the crappy leftovers.
Rupert Murdoch is a different animal to the others in that he made his money in newspapers, so buying other media companies is a commercially plausible decision to diversify rather than a vanity purchase (and he made a lot of money off Fox, whereas Musk probably lost money on Twitter and Bezos definitely lost money on Wapo).
The problem is that the opposite is true from a domestic perspective. "Iran" is the endonym of the various Persian empires, whereas "Persia" is the region (and "Persian" the tribe) from which the Achaemenid and Sassanid dynasties originated.
If a historical quirk meant that the rest of the world called England "Plantagenetia" after the historical dynasty, asking them to use an endonym would be sufficiently popular domestically that we would do it even if it hurt our soft power.
More options
Context Copy link