Mewis
1yr ago
Maybe for the purposes of military planners. Is it useful for you and I to try and understand the mind of the lowly Russian serf? Are we going to learn Russia, throw ourselves into 500 years of complicated history, move to Russia and explore the nature of its people? Unlikely. We're going to read a bunch of articles on Wikipedia, maybe a thinkpiece (they all have titles like "How the EU is playing right into Putin's hands"). Is this kind of half-baked understanding going to reflect anything but our own biases, whether for peace or for war?
Mewis
1yr ago
That will not begin to ameliorate the damage this idiotic war has caused to Russia and Ukraine, but at this point it is the least bad option. The only question now is how Russia can best ensure a relatively fast recovery from the self-inflicted harm it has created.
That more or less explains why it can't happen. If the goal of the West is to weaken or destroy Russia, then it benefits them to drag the war out as long as possible.
Mewis
1yr ago
Even Elon Musk is a human - nobody holds their principles so highly that they won't discard them to safeguard their 2 year old child. To me, the real problem is the people who seem to think that they're exposing hypocrisy by trying to goad Elon into breaking his own rules. They're not.
Mewis
9mo ago
Directly inciting rebellion (which is more or less what his opponents accuse him of) is illegal and not protected by the Constitution. I don't believe Trump incited rebellion, but I think he did act through others to obstruct the lawful operation of the Senate, which is probably illegal, but not disqualifying.
Mewis
6mo ago
It's fine to have a prior, but when presented evidence otherwise, you should be willing to change your mind. That's what it means to have a prior, it doesn't mean planting your feet by a particular number.
Mewis
6mo ago
Would you deny your 14 year old daughter a life free from financial concern?
But of course, it's not your daughter - the premise is that the parents also consent. Would you let someone else's daughter have sex with an old man?
Mewis
1mo ago
The idea that Putin and Russia are not under threat from the US axis is I think, not on solid ground. That's been demonstrated several times over the past twenty five years. Iraq, Syria, and Libya were not under threat from the US, until suddenly they were. Fundamentally, the US believes it has the right to direct the affairs of all the world, simply waiting for crisis and opportunity to strike.
This is not to say that Russia's aggression is justified. But the notion that the West is just minding it's own business is ridiculous.
Mewis
3mo ago
There is no onus on anyone. Nobody has to do anything, or prove anything. You do not have to convince anyone, and nobody has to convince you. I'm sure the United States will survive in some form without the people who have decided (not without justification )that they don't like the society that has slowly developed and evolved over 250 years. But then I have to wonder what exactly you think you're doing.
Mewis
9mo ago
At the end of the day, Costin comes back to the same problem - if you're good enough at being a mercenary-warrior-pioneer, your kids will not be. Was it Jefferson who spoke of studying warfare so his children could study mathematics?
And in some ways, Israel does maintain a level of exceptionalism. They do not scurry and tremble over what other nations think of them (as is so common in the UK), nor are they ashamed to admit that their country isn't obligated to take in non-jews. Again, in the UK, we are unable to bring ourselves to deny the lowliest supplicant. We force ourselves to talk endlessly about how immigrants built this country, and carefully insert black people into depictions of historical events. If the Jewish nation aspires to survival, that at least is more worthy than aspiring to a long suicide.
Jews were treated as different by Europeans for so long. It is not to be wondered why they would then keep Europeanism at arm's length. But modernity advances by one path or another. You study warfare, your kids study mathematics, and their kids study gender theory.
Mewis
11mo ago
Germany was not horribly abused after WWI. In fact, I would go far as to say they got off easier than the Russians, the Austrians, and the Ottomans, and they well got off easier than the French in 1871. Indeed, the same figures that engineered WWI - the militarists of Germany - faced no punishments, and indeed became fellow travelers of the Nazis.
Mewis
1yr ago
But Brinton could dress in respectable women's clothing for the court appearance, so that does make all the "Whee look at me wearing stilettos!" stuff seem to have been self-aggrandisement for publicity or even a fetish.
I don't know. Maybe sometimes he genuinely wakes up and feels like throwing a frock on. I like wearing a tanktop, and if I could wear one to work I would, but I wouldn't wear one in court. Or maybe he does like the attention. Who cares?
I suppose how I feel about this is that it makes it hard for me to take the whole 'non-binary genderfluid' thing seriously, when it's presented as being so very vital a part of their identity that dressing in male attire for the job would be oppression, but somehow it's an identity they can put on and take off when they need to take it off.
Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see any claim that occasionally having to dress in men's clothes is oppressive, or a claim that wearing women's clothes is a fundamental part of his identity, as opposed to a thing he does for fun (though the things you do for fun, I would argue, are a part of your identity).
But it makes it hard to know what is the mask they are just dressing up in, and what really is their core identity.
Much ink has been spilled over the distinction between one's persona and personality. I don't really have anything to add - it's not of any interest to me to know what lurks in anyone's heart. Sam Brinton seems to be a fabulist, a serial attention whore, and a pervert - that he occupied a position of significance in the government is nothing new.
Mewis
5mo ago
I don't see how it's really a stain on the nation that a relative of the President should be caught engaging in a life of sleaze and criminality. You can't pick your relations, after all. If Biden is personally implicated, that's a different story. But America can, and has, bounced back from worse. The question you always have to ask is - is it worse than Nixon?
Mewis
11mo ago
I mean, there is a pretty obvious principled line between adult homosexuality and pederasty. I'll give you a hint - it's the same one straight people use.
Mewis
1yr ago
Why would the Ukrainians surrender or seek peace terms when they're winning? Typically, belligerents only seek peace when war has settled into a stalemate or when the risks of continuing the war become very large. Neither of this is true for Ukraine. In addition, Russia still controls territory the Ukrainians regard as theirs.
European politicians support the war because Eastern Europeans are still afraid of the Russian bogeyman, despite barely being able to project power on it's own front step. American politicians support the war because they're making bank off energy exports to Europe. British politicians support the war because they are stupid.
Mewis
1yr ago
I think we both agree that Russia should not have gone to war in the first place. But again, that would just be choosing a slow death rather than a quicker one. Ukraine would have been integrated into NATO, and then Russia could have been destroyed at Washington's leisure.
The United States did not really make a commitment, because I don't believe that commitments or agreements between enemies are binding. Commitments that cannot be enforced don't exist, and Russia is demonstrating right now their inability to enforce anything even on their own doorstep. But they certainly let the Russians think they made such a commitment!
Mewis
2mo ago
If anything, it sounds like potentially a good thing. Someone who tried whoring but didn't like it seems less likely to try it again than someone who never tried it and might think it's what they want.
Moreover, it doesn't seem like cucking. If anything, it's the hundreds of men who came (lol) before him who are being cucked, because in the end, she chose Bob. They might have came, but he conquered.
Mewis
5mo ago
So you're saying that even if a peace deal is reached, Putin is definitely, 100% going to attack again? Excuse me, but that sounds a lot like assuming that this war is inevitable.
Mewis
8mo ago
That's exactly what the person I'm responding to is saying. He said that if America ever credibly adopts America First as a doctrine, Taiwan will fall that every moment!
Mewis
11mo ago
By meddling in the sphere of influence of another country, you are risking instability and conflict - whether that's Cuba or Ukraine. This is particularly true when it comes to a imperialist nation prone to belligerency, like the United States. China should not unnecessarily antagonize the US like this, and if this leads to war, I think they could be partly responsible.
Mewis
1yr ago
But current ChatGPT is a biting, accurate caricature of a very-online liberal, with not enough guile to hide the center of its moral universe behind prosocial System 2 reasoning, an intelligence that is taught to not have thoughts that make liberals emotionally upset; so it admits that it hates political incorrectness more than genocide.
Well, firstly it should be noted that the intense safeguards built into ChatGPT about the n-word but not about nuclear bombs is because ChatGPT has n-word capability but not nuclear capability. You don't need to teach your toddler not to set off nuclear weapons, but you might need to teach it to not say the n-word - because it can actually do the latter.
Secondly, ChatGPT doesn't have direct experience of the world. It's been told enough about 'nuclear bombs' and 'cities' and 'bad' to put it together that nuclear bombs in cities is a bad combination, in the same way that it probably knows that 'pancakes' and 'honey' are a good combination, not knowing what pancakes and honey actually are. And it's also been told that the 'n-word' is 'bad'. And likely it also has been taught not to fall for simplistic moral dilemmas to stop trolls from manipulating it into endorsing anything by positing a worse alternative. But that doesn't make it an accurate caricature of a liberal who would probably agree that the feelings of black people are less important than their lives.
Mewis
1mo ago
I do like turn based strategy, but there's something totally repellent to me about games or media where every character is a bobblehead anime girl.
Mewis
2mo ago
I would agree that the current US approach to Venezuela isn't working, and sanctions rarely do work (see Cuba, Spain, Iran, Russia, so on). But the US is entitled to refuse to trade with anyone it feels like. Maybe if Venezuelans were actually starving and dying in large numbers, there might be an obligation to send food, but AFAIK things aren't that bad in VZ.
Mewis
2mo ago
Person goes to hospital with cancer. Is stuck in a bed having their bum wiped for them. Loses muscle mass. Dies. Clearly they just needed some whey and squats. Or hospitals cause cancer.
Actual weightlifters have bad life expectancy outcomes, on par with athletes that get punched in the face regularly.
Appealing to consensus isn't the right way to buttress your point, whether you go against it or with it. For my own part I don't see any such anti-normie consensus, speaking as a pro-normie myself.
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