Mer
11mo ago
Extremists die in ditches. The strong, the canny and the lucky make history.
The number of extremists that have achieved success and changed the world are far outnumbered by those that achieve nothing and usually end up lining the inside of a mass grave. The Paris Commune did not fail due to a lack of extreme beliefs, it failed because extremists are by their very nature terrible at making the kind of compromises you need to make in order to advance your goals.
Mer
9mo ago
cold logical rationality's argument can be reduced to "my survival is a priority"
It can also be reduced to letting others survive at the expense of yourself, what is logical depends entirely on what your values and goals are.
Mer
10mo ago
Tie down Russian forces and equipment defending large stretches of land would be the biggest "real" reason. PR and morale reasons are definitely valuable as well.
Mer
1yr ago
Just because you were brought up fundamentalist doesn't mean it's objectively acceptable to do violence to people for victimless crimes.
Then it's probably a good thing for me and the Wahabis that we are indifferent to the question of if something is "objectively acceptable" and instead are concerned with what we personally find to be acceptable and the means by which we may align reality to our respective visions.
Mer
1yr ago
No, because of all the reasons I listed above.
The date doesn't particularly matter here, because victory is determined based on the goals of the various combatants and those haven't meaningfully changed.
Mer
1yr ago
Not particularly, failure to meet objectives, massive cost in casualties, prestige, manpower, etc. Failure to seperate/expose the west as weak, now heavily reliant on a not particularly trustworthy ally.
I also think that freezing the conflict indefinitely ala a Korean war style situation wouldn't be advantageous to Russia. It seems that the primary goal (of the Russian leadership at least) has been to prevent Ukraine from leaving "Russias orbit" and showing that it's possible to succeed under alternative systems of government/life is better on the outside. The west actually has quite a strong record of succeeding in this regard, at least once a conflict has become properly frozen.
The odds of the progressive types changing their mind on such an issue over a single debate is very low indeed, as it's one of their sacred cows.
Someones willingness to research a topic has no bearing on the seriousness with which that person looks at the topic.
I think you're underselling it - the Russian position has been, since before the conflict even started, that they view western missile interdiction systems being placed in Ukraine as an existential threat (as they believe it would give the US government the false impression that they could initiate a nuclear exchange without reprisal). There aren't just dead russian soldiers and destroyed russian weapons on those roads - there are plenty of mushroom clouds as well.
Their position was blatant posturing then, it's blatant posturing now. The Russian leadership is not stupid and they are not suicidal, the use of nuclear weapons, in any quantity, by Russia in this war is the fastest way for them to lose this war and in ways infinitely worse for the Russian leadership than any loss that can be inflicted on them upon the battlefield in Ukraine. The very best outcome that can be reasonably expected is that Russia loses the last friendly relations they currently have, as China (a nation very strongly invested in maintaining the nuclear taboo) turns against Russia and the country becomes a true pariah, followed not long after by near complete economic collapse. The worst outcome is that the entire Russian leadership and everyone they care about dies, either in a blinding flash of light, or from an agonizingly protracted death from radiation poisoning, along with their entire civilisation. Russia won't use nuclear weapons until tanks are hours away from Moscow and even then it's not terribly likely beyond tactical nuclear weapons, the consequences of using nuclear weapons in the modern age are, in almost every case, an order of magnitude worse than the consequences of not using them.
Russia is attempting to leverage its ridiculously oversized nuclear arsenal to frighten civilians in the west, ignorant of nuclear strategy, into pressuring western leaders to reduce support for Ukraine. They've put down "red line" after "red line" only to do nothing when they are crossed, because they know the consequences if they do try and play the nuclear card and they want absolutely nothing to do with it. The strategy hasn't been a total failure, the threats give those in the west eager for reasons to ditch Ukraine an argument they can trot out and I'm fairly certain it's at least partially responsible for the slow roll out of western weapons to Ukraine, but I'd personally put that down more towards western politicians trying to win the war with the least possible expense, not understanding that this strategy will instead prolong the war.
I think a far more likely motivation for Putin holding forces back in reserve is to prepare for a potential NATO escalation that involves US troops being deployed in force, and this matches up to both the statements of the Russian government and the current situation on the ground.
If you believe that then I've got a bridge to sell you. The US isn't putting serious numbers of boots on the ground in Ukraine, most you'd possibly see is the USAF deployed to do some Desert Storm type missions in support of the Ukrainians on the ground, but that's extremely unlikely. The reality is that the American establishment simply does not care enough about Russia to do something like that, not when China is eyeing Taiwan and trying to extend its influence. Russia has been effectively contained, even if they win in Ukraine they're spent for a generation at least, probably forever. Finland has joined NATO and Sweden has in all but name, Europe is collectively rearming in a way that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago and will be able to deal with Russia without having to heavily rely on american intervention. Of course the US would prefer a Ukrainian victory (although they're divided internally over what that looks like), but they're not willing to expend much to achieve that victory and certainly not American blood.
I don't think that Putin is scared of the domestic consequences - his approval rating has gone up since the conflict started. Hell, he's actually doing substantially better in terms of approval rating than Biden is. I find it rather amusing that your framing of this paints a picture of Putin's government being substantially more beholden to and dependent upon public opinion than the USA
The position of an autocrat is a strange one, they are less beholden to their people than leaders in more democratic societies, but are simultaneously in greater fear of them. The threshold for discontent that would cause a leader to be replaced in a democratic society may be far lower than that found in autocratic societies, however a similar relationship exists in terms of the consequences for the deposed leader. Democratic leaders get to retire into private life, autocrats are dragged out of pipes and sodomised to death with bayonets. The fate of Gaddafi apparently deeply affected Putin and has influenced much of his thinking since, Tsar Nicholas the second probably also weighs quite heavily on his mind these days. If I were him I'd be pretty damn cautious right about now, it doesn't help that the nature of autocratic systems means they tend to stifle the warning signs until everything goes up.
Mer
11mo ago
And yet of the people who have made significant and immediate changes to the world, people who wish to make significant and immediate change significantly outperform their percentage of the population
In other news, new research finds that people most likely to complete marathons are those that wish to run marathons. In all seriousness, this isn't an argument in favour of extremism. Of course extremists are the most likely to achieve extreme goals, the only alternative candidates are those whose hands are forced by circumstance and those who unintentionally stumble into it.
Strength, cunning and luck are of course of overwhelming importance as well, but all three together do not change the world if the person possessing them is quite comfortable with the way things are.
This is again true, but also not particularly useful. If you have all the virtures of someone capable of shaping the world around you to your liking and you happen to like things the way they are, then you're going to deploy your virtues in pursuit of that end rather than in direct opposition to it.
It seems to me that the point you're driving at, is the importance of strength of will, or of conviction to your goals. This is definitely a quality common among extremists and it is an important part of managing to stick with difficult goals like shaping the world to match your vision, but your odds of success are a lot better if you also happen to have those other virtues as well. The idea that strength of will alone is enough to achieve your goals seems historically fairly common among those who are at a severe disadvantage in other areas, but cannot accept their disadvantageous position. Imperial Japan springs to mind as an immediate example and look how well that worked out for them.
Mer
1yr ago
Can't remember off the top of my head, it was ages ago.
Even at the time I don't think I could put my finger on what precisely was off about it, just that the characters inner thoughts seemed glaringly effeminate.
Mer
1yr ago
That would be the exception that proves the rule I'd say.
Same way I'd be pretty confident in guessing that warhammer fanfiction is primarily written by and for men.
Mer
1yr ago
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, if you don't like sexuality permitting everything then the way to do that is stop putting sexuality in everything.
Now I'd personally be quite happy with the proposed arrangement, sounds like a damn good deal to me, I don't care for how sexualised mainstream culture is. But I'd point out that there are actually some other options. Number 1 is to just suppress minority sexualities and continue allowing the promotion of the sexuality of the majority, in fact this is substantially easier than simply suppressing sexuality all together.
Mer
1yr ago
Drinkers will also smash glass bottles into each others heads over imagined insults, frankly you sound like an addict trying to excuse their drug of choice.
Mer
1yr ago
Cultural stereotypes about gnomes/goblins and bankers are the Swiss not the Jews for the period she and I were growing up.
Well then it's quite impressive that these stereotypes about the swiss managed to completely disappear and be replaced by identical stereotypes about jews in the years between your youth and mine.
Yeah, please explain to me how it's apparent to you that Jewish people are to be represented by goblins.
Damned if I know, cultural influences are funny like that. But I can say that the connection is made, whereas with the swiss I have to say it's a much more puzzling one. The stereotypes I have about the swiss involve cow bells, yodelling and germanic autism dialled up to 11, not greedy, hook-nosed goblins.
Mer
1yr ago
Absolutely everyone has a naked body, after all, and almost everyone has sex and a sexual side. There is no shame in having either of those, just maybe using them in specific ways.
I disagree and I think I'm not the only one here (source: widely accepted social norms around clothing, nudity and sex).
Whenever this topic comes I'm usually surprised by the number of people who try to make the case that it's not actually a big deal or how confused they are that people would get offended by deepfakes of themselves being created. Personally, if I found out that someone had made fake porn of me or anyone I care about (or distributed actual pictures of them naked/etc), I would immediately go kick their teeth in. I would do this because I would be incandescently furious that someone would do something so flagrantly insulting and disrespectful and then be dumb enough to let me find out about it.
And I know that everyone imagines these kind of things already, but there is a world of difference between imagining and actually producing/sharing a video/picture. In the same way that pretty much everyone is digesting food but I don't want to see it and I definitely don't want it on or near me.
Mer
1yr ago
Victory in war is largely a subjective concept, particularly in limited wars, how you perceive an outcome of a war depends on how you assess the goals/outcomes of the various groups impacted by the war.
My assessment on the war in Ukraine is that any gains the Russian government could make here is far past the point of the juice being worth the squeeze. It's possible for Putin to declare that the Russians have achieved an arbitrary goal in Ukraine, so that he can "win" and declare a victory, but it would be phyrric at best,more likely a victory in name only. Russia has wasted an absurd quantity of lives, money, materiel, prestige, etc, on this war and there's nothing they're going to get out that's going to make up for the cost.
Mer
1yr ago
And, tbh, even other Triple-A strategy games - despite being less complex - have serious problems with the AI. Total War has good enough tactical AI but I've always heard complaints about their strategy, for example.
This argument has never really held water with me, those other games have a lot of other things to sink their budgets into, paradox games do not, the AI and how it handles strategy is the game.
Paradox are just cheap and know they've cornered a niche market and are content to put in the minimum amount of effort they need to continue milking the whales that buy their dlc.
Mer
9mo ago
Over the years online I've encountered a few people who make this kind of argument and I have to say that it baffles me.
I'm a man and I can honestly say I've never for a moment felt envious of women and I really don't understand the people who say that if they could choose, they would choose to be born as a woman. The only thing you've really listed that bothers me is child support and custody, I've got no kids myself but I feel for the good fathers who get a raw deal from the courts.
The "minimum deal" of life for men is worse than for women. The "minimum deal" for women seems to be "get married." The minimum deal for men seems to be: become homeless and kill yourself, if you aren't murdered first.
I'll take being homeless thanks, I'd much rather be bum-fighting a junkie than live my life as any woman. I've been in plenty of fights, brawls and various other flavours of fracas over the course of my life and I've enjoyed them all thus far, I don't know what the hell your average woman does to pass the time nowadays (eat hot chip and lie?) but I have to imagine it would be deathly boring by comparison.
Mer
10mo ago
if you filter out all the dumb people, only smart people end up forming groups
More likely you get no groups forming at all, as the number of smart people who also want to join or form radical terrorist groups in the US is so small that the odds of enough of them actually connecting with one another to make a meaningfully sized network are practically non-existant. The exception to this is when you have places where smart malcontents may end up naturally gathering, like universities, which you should be monitoring closely to break up any nascent networks in their infancy.
Clearly the FBI are good at their jobs, the kind of attacks that the modern US regularly faces are not ones conducted by organised groups, but are instead almost always lone wolves and lack any sort of staying power, usually being "one and done" terrorists.
Mer
10mo ago
Russians can also now launch operations from the North and Ukraine has to defend.
They could, but they probably won't. Russia has shown zero real desire to start seriously engaging along another front since they withdrew from north of Kiev. More likely Russia sends some bottom of the barrel troops to hold the line, perhaps even resorting to sending conscripts, but Putin seems very scared of involving any of them in the war, even when the law says he could. Offensive operations require motivated troops, which Russia has been burning through with alacrity and they'd be better used fighting somewhere that matters. Overall the Ukrainians running the war have shown themselves to be competent, they've mostly been making sensible moves on the macro level, they know the situation on the ground better than probably anyone else and I don't think they'd do something as big as launching raids into Russia unless they felt that it was really advantageous.
Overall I believe actions that might force further mobilisation in Russia are not good for Ukraine.
Further mobilisation is going to happen regardless, the only thing that's going to stop another wave of mobilisation is if one side folds before it gets to that, which seems exceedingly unlikely at this point. Or Putin decides that it's too politically risky and he'd rather lose the war, which also seems unlikely. You don't win wars by being afraid of seriously hurting your enemy, you do so by shattering their will or ability to fight. Putin has made it clear that the roads to those objectives are paved with dead russian soldiers and destroyed russian weapons.
They are massively benefitting from Russian leadership’s desire to make the war invisible to daily lives of ordinary Russians, and because of this they are able to keep parity in soldier numbers against a much more populous rival.
The number of able bodied men within a country and the number of soldiers a country can field are not the same. Again and again in this conflict people act as if Russia is "going easy" on Ukraine, rather than fighting to the best of the ability that the political leadership feels it can. Putin is very clearly scared of the domestic consequences of acknowledging the seriousness of the situation and putting Russia onto a real war footing, delaying important decisions like mobilisation or major withdrawals until it is impossible to do so any longer. Putin isn't afraid of losing this war by having Ukrainian tanks rolling into Moscow, he's afraid of being hung from a lamppost by his own people. Ukraines total population is smaller, but has a far higher level of motivation per capita than Russia does and will be able to mobilise a much greater proportion of society towards fighting the war.
Ukrainians also have to tie down forces and equipment to create such a reaction
Substantially less than the Russians have to. Russia is forced to defend a huge area of land against raiding forces that are able to strike pretty much anywhere along it and must defend in sufficient strength to withstand the raiding forces, who will simply withdraw before serious reinforcements are able to be brought to bear against them. The raiders, able to choose the time and place of the battle, need only to be strong at one point, whereas the defender must be strong everywhere they wish to defend.
You don't even need to launch many raids to achieve this effect, meaning you don't really need to care about rapid redeployment, in fact your goal should be to launch the minimum number of raids that you can in order to achieve the desired effect. The point is to present a threat that your opponent cannot ignore and that they must therefore dedicate a disproportionate amount of resources to ensure their security, the raiders should make themselves the biggest nuisance they possibly can, while keeping losses to a minimum in order to maintain this effect for as long as possible.
Mer
1yr ago
This talking point has been repeated ad nauseum but is it really true, though?
It absolutely is, the man is wildly popular with your stereotypical urban/university leftist types and nobody else. He managed to lose what should have been a walkover election against the wicked witch of the west.
The British public is not going to elect a Prime Minister that appears to reflexively side against Britain and with her enemies whenever the opportunity presents itself. The man just comes across as someone who never got over his "student activist" phase and that is not a reassuring image to present to the public when you're asking to lead the nation.
Labour's supposedly weak leadership and Brexit position
Labours leadership was weak, their Brexit position was weak. Corbyn couldn't control his own party and was evasive as to his Brexit policy because while he personally wanted to leave, the majority of his supporters wanted to remain. Both of these were also true for the Conservatives, who have been ineptly flailing since the 2016 referendum. The only reason that the Conservatives have managed to cling on to power despite being incredible dissapointments by almost every measure is because of the fear that the alternative is worse. It is not a coincidence that Labour is massively gaining in popularity and credibility as the party distances itself from its "loony left" and is at least trying to act like they aren't allergic to the British flag.
I've never seen or heard an argument in defence of Corbyn that doesn't come across as either willfully self deceptive or blinkered, from someone who really really wishes that Corbyn was secretly popular and that the only reason he lost was because of a massive conspiracy within the Labour Party and British media to trick the British public from ushering in the socialist paradise that they so desperately yearn for. It just seems very out of touch with "the man on the street".
Mer
1yr ago
I can chime in and say that I've also noticed no change to my imagination or creativity while on meds, in fact my creative output has increased as I can now actually get things done and then move onto new creative enterprises.
My experience with medication and the discourse around adhd medication in particular, seems to be that there is a fairly broad spectrum of experiences that people have with these drugs and that people really like generalising their own experiences as The Golden Standard (other people are clearly lying, or are taking their drugs wrong) and from there it's a coin flip if they'll then start to morally grandstand.
It is also my experience that most discussion around adhd medication is one of morality and virtue instead of practicality and utility. All those who have an interest in transhumanism and human augmentation should take note, this is one of the tributaries of that later torrent.
But why?
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