MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
And how many have seen ground combat at this kind of scale? I don’t think most European soldiers have seen full on combat in a generation or more. And I think this is an under appreciated problem both at the front and at home. Battlefield capable is not the same as being strong enough to keep fighting after half of your unit gets blown up. And at home, how willing is the general public to send thousands of men to die in Ukraine? How many deaths will send public support for the war into the toilet?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I don’t think the point was to end up with an AI that could play Pokémon. The point was to demonstrate that such a thing was even possible. It actually succeeded in setting the goal, and could navigate tge environment and dispatch enemies and collect Pokémon. That’s actually pretty darn good for a system trained on gamefaq and videos to play a game.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
The West is stupid and weak, or at least Americans, because we have rarely been challenged by a near peer country in anything of note. We’re used to being a giant in the room and really don’t have a “lived experience” of being the one on the receiving end, or even not being dominant. It’s easy to spot once you see it: Europe and North America believe they can bring millions of unreformed Muslim fanatics in a refugees and nothing will happen, they believe that Russia will collapse in the first week of the Ukraine war because of course they will. And because of this assumption that because we’re dominant now, we will always be dominant.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I mean I think that the culture is slowly but surely disempowering those institutions. How many people, still, in 2024 get any significant news from “mainstream” news outlets? When is the last time you heard a conversation with coworkers, friends or family about a news story shown on network news or from a large circulation newspaper or magazine? How many kids are now not interested in four years of woke nonsense in the university and opting for trade schools instead? How many are turned off by forced diversity in their workplace?
The future isn’t in those institutions. People get their news and general information from podcasts and blogs or streaming. They choose trade school for job skills and use online MOOCs if they want to get book learning. They’d have to basically retake a completely different set of institutions, except that because the barriers to entry are pretty low and the audience is much more likely to leave if they smell an overt political agenda.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
It’s also a question of choosing your battles and making sure that the good is actually good. Ukraine isn’t and has never been in a position where they can be completely politically independent. It’s not been true historically, and as far as the rest goes, I don’t see it changing anytime soon. I’d say the same about Palestine. They simply don’t have the wherewithal to hold their ground let alone carve out a state. In both cases, us choosing to ignore that and propping up a situation in which a war is frozen in place by outside actions and sanctions and court orders does no one any good. If the state in question cannot hold its independence, I don’t see it as a question of “ignoring Russian (or Israeli) aggression.” I see it as asking whether giving more and more aggressive, invasive and expensive medicine to a 90 year old dying of cancer is doing anyone, including the patient any good. The minute we drop the aid to these people both in Palestine and in Ukraine, they get steam rolled. That could be today, it could be 100 years from now. Either way, it’s life support on a comatose patient that we can keep alive as long as we keep them plugged in to the life support.
I’m also not sure the old way of handling borders and nations was so bad. Is it really such a crime against humanity that not every ethnic group gets its own flag and Olympic team? The bad old world was not prone to getting into huge conflicts over such things. In 1830, Gaza would have been Israeli within ten years of independence, and the Arabs would be either willing to accept that, or would have left. In the case of Ukraine, much like the vast majority of its history, Ukraine would be an outpost of the Russian Empire.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I think it would apply if Americans were in the same situation— under the guns of a power that we could not hope to win against, and slowly grinding away at the population while destroying infrastructure and the economy. If aliens land, the smart move is to surrender simply because the other choice is the destruction of everything you care about.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
They’ve had foreign intervention and still can’t drive out the Russian military. I think honestly we should have stayed out from the start as we’ve just made them lose more slowly which means more deaths and destruction. Ukraine almost fell in tge first weeks of tge war, and if it had, Ukraine would be in better shape even if the Ukrainians like tge west more. Live under Russia, or die in a ditch so those who survive can … live under a Russia.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I don’t see this as about his country’s wellbeing. The war, at this point is doing more harm than good. The infrastructure is in tatters, he’s lost almost all of Donbas, and he’s only maintaining status quo by abducting men and women to send to the front. None of that helps the people of Ukraine.
Two doesn’t work either. Again, almost everyone who could have left is in Eastern European NATO countries. Th3 rest are dodging the press gangs abducting people in the streets. Ukraine hasn’t even had an election since the war started. If you have to kidnap your army, it’s highly unlikely that the people have the will to fight.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I’d argue that this shows just how much Western “help” has been propping up an Ukraine too weak to exist. And like most other instances of the west maintaining these life support situations (whether by supplying weapons, by forcing or shaming the stronger party into not winning the war, or by invading on behalf of these states) we create more conflict. Israel/Palestine will continue to be fought to the last Jew or Arab. They’ve been at it for 3/4 of a century more or less, and they’ll keep fighting for the next century unless one party is driven to capitulation by the other. The complete destruction of Gaza is probably an unfortunate but necessary step in this as it demonstrates that under no circumstances can they actually get the state they want. Ukraine should probably face a similar “you can’t get what you want” moment. In both cases, the result is a lasting peace in which the ethnic groups in question still exist, and they can even live in their own region, they just have to accept that they aren’t actually strong enough to take control. It’s certainly more stable than having major cities reduced to rubble once a decade in a bloody war they can’t hope to win.
That’s how I see these conflicts— intervention doesn’t mean peace, it just means reloading and digging in for the next round.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
This is every issue on the planet. Abortion (it should be illegal and rare — unless a female family member needs one, then I need an appointment on Tuesday), war (defeat the enemy! Wait, what do you mean my draft number was called?). It’s what ends up causing bad policies. Everyone wants the final results, they want the six pack abs, but they aren’t willing to diet to get them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
Any sort of tension will grow. I don’t think it’s going to just simmer in the background doing nothing.
First of all it erodes trust. No matter what the difference in question is, people will notice and keep score. They’ll notice when one of them does something to one of us. They’ll notice when governments start pandering to them at the expense of us. They’ll notice whether or not they are good citizens or not. And as this continues, trust in each other (is it safe to leave this thing in the open, or to leave access to valuable goods, or to allow access to something). It erodes trust in institutions that will be shown to favor one group over another, to unfairly enforce laws, or to attempt to shift culture in favor of them you no longer expect those institutions to be fair, neutral, or beneficial to your own people.
Second, it’s inevitable that one group member will actually act out on the simmering tension. He might be drunk, high, or unstable, but he will act out that tension. It might even be an event, a perceived government misstep that feeds the narrative that they don’t respect us. And with every such incident you ratchet up the tension as the competing narratives both get reinforced. The more Allah Akhbar events happen in Christmas markets, the more the narrative that Muslims are not like the rest of us is reinforced. But at the same time the backlash makes Muslims feel threatened. BLM was the same for American blacks and whites. Whites saw that blacks hated them, blacks saw that whites don’t care about them. Ratchet.
Third, if the differences in culture are big enough, there’s an erosion of common culture. Muslims and Christians don’t have the same ideas about a lot of things — what God is like, how you express faith, what the role of religion in the state is, what kinds of activities are allowed. And in many cases, you can’t compromise. There’s no compromise between “separation of church and state” and “Shariah or else.” So you can’t heal those divisions.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
It has the benefits of being a fairly isolated island. It’s not easy to sneak into an island if the nearest major population center (outside of NZ) is thousands of miles away. It’s the same reason that Covid was lower in Australia— it’s an island, and there was no reason to lock anyone down.
America has a very porous border with Mexico and another in Canada. It’s thus much easier to sneak in and thus vetting becomes difficult.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I mean space launches are extremely expensive and thus probably not in the perview of any company without a billion dollars in capitalization. Angola’s GDP doesn’t actually support that kind of activity.
Going to the broader point, how much waste, fraud, and vanity projects are the taxpayers to fund in an agency to get one semi-interesting project spun off to the private sector? We had a shuttle program for 30 years. We did fuck-all with it. We studied zero gravity’s effects on some plants and animals, we took cool pictures of space. But when it’s all said and done, what the public got was a shuttle program that didn’t even improve the space suits, let alone the shuttle or the launch rockets. We bolted a shuttle that, other than heat shielding was basically a commercial airplane to an ICBM without a warhead. For 30 years. It took Musk maybe ten to create a system in which all parts were recycled for the next launch and capable of landing vertically. He redesigned the 1960s era space suits to meet the needs of people who would spend more than a few hours in them, and had all of this safe enough that celebrities were willing to pay for a ride. If we’d stuck with NASA and the shuttles, we’d still be going down the produce aisle to find new plants to test in zero gravity. I’m sure rutabagas in zero gravity behave very much like every other root vegetable in zero gravity, so I don’t want to spend ten thousand dollars to launch them into space to find out.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4mo ago
I tend to agree, with the added observation that Ukraine is of limited strategic significance. It has no vital resources (Taiwan at least has chip manufacturing), it doesn’t really grant NATO greater access to the Black Sea (Turkey is already in NATO). The government has significant corruption. And while Donbas has minerals, Ukraine has nothing much in that department. It’s rural farmland that’s rapidly depopulating, right next to Russia (which means even if we “win” Ukraine, you might end up exactly here ten years from now). I just don’t see much juice here worth the squeeze, and certainly nothing worth deploying troops and thus increasing the risk of nuclear war.
I think as such negotiations are probably the best we can do for Ukraine.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
Most of our global hegemony comes from our military and technical capabilities, it’s not because we give out our money in random nice, but generally unappreciated gestures of good will. Iraqis don’t hate us less because we fund their version of Sesame Street. Africa doesn’t hate us less or love us more because we build the occasional school or hospital. Even the shipping lanes are mostly free for trade because we have a navy that protects all of that. Even if we decided to not fund all the things we fund and decide not to get involved in every war on the planet, I don’t see why any other country is going to say fuck you to the country that spends more on it’s military than the rest of the planet combined.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
I mean celebrations of deviant sexuality is definitely a rite of Civic Religion, as are denouncing the Old Ways (Christianity, European derived cultural elements, white people themselves, and capitalism). Basically, while a lot of people see it as cultural Marxism, I see Civic Religion as cultural Maoism — it’s certainly pro-socialism, but just as importantly it’s about shaming, blaming, and disempowering anyone who openly supports those Olds.
And if you go into a public school you’ll see most of it happening. Literature classes no longer focus on English or American literature, instead the focus is on teaching the works of other cultures — Arabian, Latin, Chinese, African. Now while some of it is interesting (im fairly big on Korean Drama and music, personally), I can’t help but notice the double standard here. Kids can read the opening verses of the Quran in a public school, but not a Bible. We can spend a month reading a book written from the POV of and African American oppressed by white people, but not the perspective of white people.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
I think you can define terms. The idea of who is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the state is at least somewhat ambiguous. And as such saying that if you would be prosecuted by civil courts if you broke the law, for example, as a prerequisite for being considered a subject of the USA seems reasonable as a law.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
I mean yes, but at the same time getting overly verbose or going through multiple examples and hypotheticals to get to a point that is really simple for the median member of the audience to understand often means people start skimming through or in a speech tuning out. When something can be made clearer using an example, fine, but at the same time taking 5 paragraphs to make a point that can be explained in five sentences is not good writing.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
But what percentage of cases are even remotely functional, let alone high functioning? If we’re saving people who are somewhat functioning, it might make sense, but if we’re saving people who will dig through trash cans and sleep in the streets and can’t afford medical care, we aren’t saving people, just prolonging the suffering stage.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
My best advice in writing is be as simple as you can be and still be accurate. The most powerful speeches are simple, and the same is true of writing, if you can get the point across accurately in three sentences, using more than that tends to make communication worse, not better.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
I mean you can have too much state capacity. In fact, I think we passed that point before my birth. There are very few aspects of modern life that aren’t touched on by the government. And globally, we give out a lot of cash with very little vetting of where the money goes and what it does once it gets there. I think the excitement is about finally clawing back a bit and making sure that we’re actually benefiting from the money spent, and that any aid money given out goes to something beneficial to both the country it’s given to and the interests of the USA.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
It’s not that the world would be better without them. It’s that you’re simply delaying the inevitable while increasing the suffering of the individual. Drug addicts suffer a lot, they have serious diseases, they’re often homeless, they have to scrounge for food in trash cans, they can be covered in sores. At some point, I think you end up keeping someone living that life alive because it’s good for you, rather than good for them specifically.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
I think this is the only plan that will actually allow the government to cut the bloat out of the budget and bring these organizations back to being under the elected government. If you’re just asking politely if they’d mind telling us how many people they need, the answer will be “actually all of them”. If asked about the budget the answer will be “actually, we need more money.” And that’s not even getting at the hundreds of programs that are useless, redundant, or counterproductive.
One in USAid turns out that we actually funded cement works in Gaza. That cement that American taxpayers paid for built the tunnels under Gaza. Then, after 10/7, we sent Israel millions in weapons to blow up the tunnels we spent millions to supply the cement to build. Now I ask you, how the heck does America gain from this? How does this create stability in MENA let alone the rest of the world?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
Not in a formal sense, but managers are held to justifying every employee, and yes, employees do have to sometimes write up their own job descriptions to send to HR. Other times, your direct supervisor informs HR of what tasks you are doing. The only really unusual thing is that the employee is asked to send that information directly to DOGE, and that there aren’t these kinds of job audits happening regularly (which is why DOGE is necessary). The interesting bit is that not only are the employees shocked by the demand that they show some form of actual productivity, but their immediate supervisors are telling them not to comply. If there’s a giant red flag of “these people know their employees do shit all all day” it’s them saying “don’t you dare tell DOGE what you do all day.”
But if Ukraine cannot actually win despite what NATO has done already and might do in the future, not only does it not deter Russia, but it demonstrates to the world that NATO is a paper tiger. It’s not going to deter Russia from trying for more, as they won the war. It’s not going to convince China. It’s probably not going to convince anyone else. NATO went all in on saving Ukraine and couldn’t.
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