RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Needless to say, satellite states are now within the realm of things they no longer want to pay for.
Let's consider America's allies/satellites. Britain - Five Eyes, cooperative, sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, was going to help out in the Asia Pacific before things heated up in Europe. Not very strong but causes no problems.
Australia - Five Eyes, cooperative, Pine Gap signals, rare earths, sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, helping out with developing US submarine-building to buy some nuclear subs. Small and weak but causes no problems.
France - a bit unruly, wants more European strategic autonomy, doesn't like buying US weapons, kicked out US troops of their own country for a while but is still in NATO. Not a major problem though.
Turkey - quite unruly, buys some Russian weapons, complicates things with Syria or anything to do with the Kurds. Constantly double dealing everyone.
And then there's Israel.
Israel is constantly needy for US weapons - about 3-4 billion in military aid per year. Israel has all kinds of special carve outs where the US will contribute to R&D for Israeli weapons that the Israelis later export. Whenever there's a war they get more supplementary military aid. Even their neighbours get military aid to serve as a bribe for being nice to Israel.
The Israelis provide bad intelligence, it was the Israelis producing imaginary armies of Kurds for this most recent Iran shambles. They've been demanding Iran be bombed for 20-30 years now because of nukes that nobody's ever seen. They were demanding war with Saddam's Iraq and didn't lift a finger to help out. They don't contribute to US wars, unlike all other US clients who at least show up sometimes. South Korea sent plenty of troops to Vietnam. Israel never shows up for a US war with the exception of the Iran war, which was started for Israel. Rubio's initial remarks were that Israel was about to attack Iran and so America had to go in too due to the inevitable response. Israel causes massive diplomatic and reputational problems for the US. Why was Osama and all these Muslims so upset with America? To a large extent because of Israel.
Consider non-proliferation, how much harm does it do to the US non-proliferation agenda for Israel to be sitting there while America warns Iran must never be allowed to have nuclear weapons? Rules for me and rules for thee...
Israel is a uniquely toxic US ally but exercises such vast power over American politics it's insane. What has Canada ever done to America that would motivate harsh rhetoric and trade wars? Canada might be incompetent and weak but is that such a great crime? They show up to US wars. Better a weak friend than a moderately powerful leech, deceiver and problem-starter who's shown zero intention to help the US.
Trumpian anger with US allies has been directed everywhere except where it actually belongs. Most farcically, he's now fallen taken that final step that even Bush shied away from.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
I'm reminded of the New Model Army as an example of Christian brotherhood. They were really serious about Christianity and almost incomprehensible doctrinal issues to us moderns like what books of prayer there should be and how exactly churches should be organized.
Their fervour and discipline and conviction gave them such battlefield strength that they held Britain and Ireland in their hands, marching around and smashing any rebels they found.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Immediately after I posted this yet another story about fake Israeli intelligence emerged. The CIA had 'low confidence' in the threat to Trump's life that sponsored the plane switcheroo, while it seemed to serve Israeli goals in reinforcing the threat from Iran.
Now I am suspecting a conspiracy.
It's reddit, necessarily full of redditors... I bet that /r/books is run by the same type that you're implicitly criticizing. What are the chances that at least one moderator objects to the whole premise of what you're talking about and decided to remove it? May as well go on /pol/ and argue that the Holocaust happened. Wrong forum buddy! Only /pol/ moderators wouldn't actually remove a thread over something like that.
It also reminds me of what Arctotherium was saying in one point of his long essay about social media censorship: https://substack.com/home/post/p-209852382
I recommend the whole thing, relevant to the creation of this forum!
He made the point that censorship deprives the right of high-quality content (which necessarily takes lots of time and stability to develop). Because accounts are ephemeral and getting banned all the time, it makes more sense to go for sensationalist, simplistic memes rather than serious scholarship. You'd feel a fool if you spent 3 years writing a 1000 page magisterial tome of right-wing history/philosophy and then nobody would publish it because the right gives them the ick, wouldn't you? Or if Vauban books or mystery grove or whoever does, the big bucks probably aren't going to roll in (most of the financial value in writing books is that rare but massive hit)! Better to make a png infographic or a soy wojak that can circulate more easily than huge books which need publishers, printers, distribution...
Or better to make blog posts or essays on substack.
Well it's the same with fiction I think. So we end up with fewer really high quality male-focused stories and more of the lower-tier 'Adding Big Elf Tits to the Harem' kind of thing.
Hopefully new publishers make ground here.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Aren't your homosexual experiences and perspectives innately 'alien' to the mainstream? Most men are repulsed and extremely repelled at the idea of having other men fuck them in the ass. Most men are similarly repelled by the idea of fucking other men's asses. They want to fuck women. Gay sex is most prominent when there aren't women around (on ships, or in male prisons, or in male pursuits like the army).
I don't think you should be trying to make an argument about nature and authenticity and true motivations when you have a distinctly unusual perspective. It's certainly interesting and novel to read, I think it's good to have some unpredictable theoretical essays here.
And yet, because he is about 15% more masculine than Aaron, my brain tells me I’m supposed to mate with DJ. If I’m a woman and I’m stuck on an island with just Aaron and DJ, I’m mating with DJ. Aaron’s children will be annoying and not want to work, I can just tell. DJ’s children will be tough and dutiful. My procreative intuition tells me this. DJ is mogging Aaron despite everything I love about Aaron. I don’t even like DJ’s looks that much. I could imagine mating with DJ for the kids but staying with Aaron for his beauty and the chaos he’d bring. I am saying this to illustrate how deeply ingrained our reproductive intuitions are and how fundamentally biological they are.
??? Yet your reproductive inclinations are skewed. You can't reproduce with some murderer's manlier brother. You're a gay man and I think you're unlike women on some massive multi-dimensional axis, just like how straight men are unlike women in some different multi-dimensional axis.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
even Mottizens veer into this, seeing working in finance as parasitising upon society rather than allocating where goods and services ought to go
They parasitize on society by allocating where goods and services go.
Finance has done tremendous damage to the Western world. They offshored vital industries (that alone is civilizational-scale treason) and they drain away highly capable people from the hard sciences that actually create wealth.
They presided over a merger-acquisition/shareholder-first equilibrium that encouraged a race to the bottom in capital investment and R&D. Encouraging companies to fail the marshmallow test is a deeply wrong thing to do.
Then there's the rush into land appreciation. Land in high-demand cities is an amazing financial asset, it's impossible to make any more of it! Land can't be taken away, it's fixed in place. The financial sector has capitalized on this and directed enormous amounts of capital into loans to bid up land values, rather than developing industry. This was a major trend over the 20th century. Across 17 advanced economies, the share of mortgage loans in banks' total lending portfolios doubled over the past century: 30% in 1900 to 60% in 2014. Credit is elastic while land is fixed - the result is land prices rising. Only a small fraction of the mortgage lending is for new builds (less attractive to banks since they're without a proven price) so the bulk of this enormous mortgage lending ends up bidding up prices on existing houses.
Industry can go bust for all kinds of reasons, it's risky, there's a need for constant competition and improvement, capital depreciates and creditors might lose out in bankruptcy. Most businesses fail. But house prices go up! And a bank can always take back the house if they default on their mortgage. Bidding on land is lucrative for banks, bad for society.
Why are banks directing trillions to making housing less affordable, anchoring workers to fixed mortgages, suppressing fertility? So they can make a few % higher returns. It's terrible pointless waste.
There are presumably many good people in the financial sector and parts that are less damaging (VCs to an extent) but the whole ethos of the sector is corrupt and anti-social. Privatized gains, socialized losses. The financial sector has been doing the wrong thing with great effort and skill and dressed it up as the right thing. VCs might well decide to put their money into 'making sports betting more addictive' because that's more profitable and safe than 'making incredibly intricate lenses for semiconductors.'
We survey 401 financial executives, and conduct in-depth interviews with an additional 20, to determine the key factors that drive decisions related to performance measurement and voluntary disclosure. The majority of firms view earnings, especially EPS, as the key metric for an external audience, more so than cash flows. We find that the majority of managers would avoid initiating a positive NPV project if it meant falling short of the current quarter’s consensus earnings.
Damn these people. Their stupid greed isn't even helping their own companies! They're sacrificing their own companies interests just to stay ahead of earnings expectations, an almost totally imaginary, abstract number. By definition you are always supposed to take a positive NPV project in ultra-financialized bean-counter economics, nevermind social outcomes. But they aren't even properly aligned with that, they know that their job is to keep share prices up or they may be paid in short-term options.
Most of all, damn the whole system. A certain amount of greed in the right place is fine but we're far into the realm of negative returns.
Governments certainly didn't help much with idiotic regulations, ideological fads and negligent oversight. Unions have been similarly damaging in many respects. The alternative to wrecking by the financial sector shouldn't be 'total control of the economy by a posse of men in poorly fitting suits who got where they are by reciting Lenin and bureaucratic manoeuvres' or 'total control of the economy by union thugs who go on strike when there's an R in the month' but a disciplined govt-directed market system directing capital towards development, making use of capital controls and lending restrictions and regulations in a synchronized, coordinated way. A single army, not a chaotic PvP brawl between various interest groups competing to grab as much of the pie as they can.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
original scholarship rarely rises beyond the level of undergraduate mediocrity
Worse than that, it was just meaningless babble. I saw some samples of his writing and it was awful.
"Dismantling Power and Privilege through Reflexivity: Negotiating Normative Whiteness, the Eurocentric Curriculum and Racial Micro- aggressions within the Academy," Whiteness and Education (2018)
In Arday's own words from the Abstract:
This paper employs a Critical Race Theory (CRT) a storytelling [sic] method, which operates as a counter-narrative in attempting to conceptualise my own professional experiences of negotiating normative Whiteness, diversifying Eurocentric curricula and conceptualising the racial mirco-aggression [sic]. The narratives proffered demonstrate the subtle but powerful ways in racism unfolds [sic] within in [sic] the Academy and the nuanced, everyday forms of racism that persist against a backdrop of Whiteness. (p. 141)
I managed to successfully drag my poor wife through Berserk, Last Exile, Akira and a handful of others. But the look she gives me in Evangelion when Shinji gets tangled up in a fresh out of the shower Rei and "accidentally" gropes her, it's hard to defend why that's in there.
I think the error here is dragging one's wife through these shows.
Women don't need to defend why there's all this endless talking and nothing happens in some period-history romance show... That's their thing I guess. I'm not into it. I want to see some conflict and preferably some violence.
Holding male stories to female standards is no good. Berserk is for men, Eva too I think. It's possible for shows or books to cater to the interests of men and women but not all fiction needs to be like this. Underlying interests are different. I naturally think that certain things I like have Universal Self-Evident Value but they're not, they're just for me and maybe a subset of men like me.
I'm sure I'm not appreciating all the nuances of whatever they're talking about in Big Dresses and Bigger Stagecoaches, I just don't care to since it's boring. Much the same with women and Big Pauldrons and Bigger Bombs. See also my comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187490?context=8#context
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
In old times, military profession was highly prestigious and military schools had choice of the best students.
In old times there were spoils of war. You could raid and pillage, conquer some land and get it given to you by your general. You could ransom wealthy enemies. If things go well you could end up in the new ruling class of a conquered realm.
The US army rifleman gets about $50K per year on campaign. Hourly that's about $13-15. Food and shelter comes with it but is likely to be pretty awful, call it another 10-18K per year. So $60-68K annually, mostly tax free? No asymmetric upside, no war brides, no prospect of looting a treasury or a temple (or even making money on a prediction market, apparently). Huge asymmetric downsides - death, watching friends die, being maimed, being prosecuted as a war criminal years later by your own govt... UK and France soldiers make a little less, Australians make a little more.
Furthermore, there is no convincing ideology behind US/Western wars. There is no good reason to be there, no grand mission. Spreading democracy by force doesn't make sense, you can't make people vote by blowing them up. Soldiers seem to be deployed to guard the reputations of politicians, to avoid old men losing face. And there's also a gigantic military bureaucracy that creates a suffocating environment, constant micromanagement and deployments running troops ragged.
No wonder it's not prestigious, what kind of idiot would want to be a soldier under these conditions?
If you want to motivate lumps, start with motivating normal people. You motivate normal people by paying them well, giving them real prospects of great success and provide a mission: a clear explanation of why the war is worth fighting.
Needless to say, lumps had no interest in non-digital women, and one of the saddest spectacles was always the annual school dances, where unfortunate girls were bused in to stand idly for a few hours amid loud teenslop music while the boys sat eagerly by the exits, waiting for the hour when their minders would allow them to return to their rooms and their customary online goonsimping."
Are the boys really to blame here? What girl thinks 'wow I've been bused in to some military school, I'm entering with an open mind that these are potential mates and I may be impressed if they do a good job dancing?' Theory of mind suggests no. Women are highly unlikely to pair up with random low-status men they've never met before in a place where they didn't choose to be.
What an astonishingly boomer way of looking at the world, as if this drill sergeant wannabe thinks he's doing kids a huge favour with these long-dead social rituals.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
Actions that tend to corrupt the morals of a minor are those that would offend the common sense of the community and the sense of decency, propriety, and morality which most people entertain.
I recall an instance in Brazil of this logic:
A São Paulo criminal court ruled against Audato and Ieda Denardi, alleging they had failed to include programs on "gender and sex education" and "tolerance and diversity" in the curriculum for their daughters, aged 15 and 11, Alliance Defending Freedom ("ADF") International said.
According to the legal group, the court also ruled that the parents failed to properly integrate their children into Brazilian culture, citing the girls' preference for religious and classical music over popular trap or "sertanejo" (folk) music.
The couple told Fox News Digital they were surprised by the ruling and never expected to be sentenced to prison for trying to provide a better education for their daughters, who are both accomplished pianists and speak multiple languages.
Well, court in Brazil is a bit of a joke really, judges do as they please. Still, not a direction that should be followed.
This is just the complete opposite of reality.
For Trump, a win is to squash Iran’s capacity to destabilize the region
??? He went into this war going on about regime change and then that failed like a lead balloon... Then he tried to reopen the straits of Hormuz after Iran closed them. And that failed too.
Trump threw rocks at the bee hive and a bunch of people, Trump included are getting stung and you're like 'wow we've squashed the beehive's capacity to destabilize the region' unironically? At the small cost of the bulk of remaining US missile interceptors that'll take years to replace?
Trade in the Gulf and across the global economy is continuing almost uninterrupted
https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/
There is no trade in the Gulf! Nothing is crossing Hormuz. You even admit this with 'announcing another deal to reopen the strait' but ignore the fact that reopening the strait is only happening on Iran's terms since they control it - that's why they're supposedly gonna charge 7% in a toll according to these same deal negotiations. The Israelis are probably gonna try some more perfidy and wreck this. The farce will go on further.
Your whole thesis is epic-tier coping, twisting facts around to present them in the most flattering configuration no matter how hard they have to be tortured to do so.
There's nothing confusing about how to win the war. The US navy should move in, secure the straits and maybe Kharg Island too. They should destroy Iran's drone and missile forces (actually destroy them so they can't hit targets in Jordan, Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia). Then they would defeat Iran's strategy, remove their leverage, allow trade to pass the straits irregardless of what Iran says. That would allow a good negotiating position. But America can't do this. They haven't done it! Why is that? Because American soldiers are whimpering sissy girlymen too afraid to get into a fight with this almost totally defeated enemy? Because Trump's a massive cowardly loser desperately afraid? Or because a sober assessment of risks and gains says 'they'd try, die and fail' so Trump and the military don't try that? I personally believe the latter.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
All of this is in aid of a technology that's just fundamentally pretty crap. No one wants to make sacrifices for the infrastructure to produce more LLMs because no one thinks that LLMs are worth sacrificing for.
Except the people spending all this money on them? Dave wants his book proofread more cheaply, Pete wants to ERP, Melanie wants dashboards to show key business insights, John wants some spreadsheets analyzed, Dean wants to fix bugs in his software. Even Johnny Jihadi wants to know how to make use of unexploded munitions left by govt forces in the Sahel and he goes to AI for that.
Why would the opinions of people who don't pay for the product because they don't find it useful outweigh those who do?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
You mean they're lying in the congressional reports where they describe the number of munitions they buy? It's public record, we can see how many are purchased.
And why would the US want to lie and seem like their air defences are weaker than they actually are to embolden (not deter) US enemies? This doesn't seem like a very Trumpian move either, meekness is not what I associate with Trump.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
Between the lines, the report more than it did previously hints that immigration could be one way to compensate for the decline in fertility
It doesn't though? We have the stats from the Netherlands, non-Western, non-East Asian migrants are usually net losses in tax, they comprise the bulk of the migrant pool. Mass immigration is expensive!
The US will hoover up the high-quality immigrants with their high wages, why would anyone highly skilled want to go to cold, dark, high-tax Sweden? The most compelling reasons are attractive Swedish women and welfare - neither of which are good for Sweden.
Furthermore, adding more labour disincentivizes mechanization and robotization, lowers wages and productivity.
The economic arguments for mass immigration don't make sense. Increasing the total size of the economy doesn't benefit natives, only raising productivity can do that. Sweden is already a very high productivity area with higher STEM Nobels per capita than the United States! Swedes make jet fighters, machine tools, video games like Minecraft: very capable people.
High-quality immigrants are rare and hard to distinguish from cheats. Low-quality migrants can do food delivery, meat processing and Uber, prime targets for automation. And all immigration imposes further pressure on public services and infrastructure, which is invariably expensive to build out in modern Western country.
Mass migration proponents, besides some libertarians, are not motivated primarily by economics at heart IMO. It's a transformational/aspirational/teleological project, it's about getting rid of racism by abolishing distinction. I had one come up to me and tell me this at one point impromptu about how he hoped everyone would interbreed and then we'd all be brown.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
So besides coding, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, images, translation, proofreading, analysing contracts, tech support, playing Minecraft with, ERP, military targeting analysis, cybersecurity (defensive/offensive), drafting emails, summarizing documents, explaining history/science, doing everything that a search engine can do and more, writing and analysing spreadsheet functions, making charts and dashboards, sales research, writing fanfiction, earnings call analysis, document dump analysis, home repair/DIY fixes, recipes for cooking, car diagnostics from symptoms, real-time captioning for the deaf and literally lifesaving medical diagnoses...
Besides this handful of niche fields, what have LLMs ever done for us?
Doesn't it surprise you that Google is planning to spend $200 billion on AI this year? Mysteriously they don't seem to think it's a niche use-case but vital to their whole company's future since their core business of 'search' is another word for AI. And LLMs are at the heart of AI.
We haven't seen a flowering of new programs, and neither have existing programs gotten better.
When I have issues with a piece of software not working and spitting out some incomprehensible error message I can now ask an AI and get a much better answer compared to trawling through forum posts from 8 years ago. Or get it to directly analyse and fix the code. Most programs have gotten much better in useability.
There are strong arguments against AI but 'it's mostly useless' is extremely silly. If it were useless nobody would care much about it, mostly useless is Siri-tier AI in the 2010s. Nobody cared much about Siri.
Furthermore, the general public's opinions don't really matter much. Concentrated, wealthy lobby groups like big tech and the military-industrial base have much more of a say.
All of this is in aid of a technology that's just fundamentally pretty crap. No one wants to make sacrifices for the infrastructure to produce more LLMs because no one thinks that LLMs are worth sacrificing for.
LLMs are obviously useful in the same way that businesses obviously need to analyse spreadsheets and obviously need to write code, amongst a myriad of other tasks where LLMs are useful.
The point you were putting forth is that because LLMs aren't very useful (except for some niche fields) and aren't interesting, there is no need to build datacentres. But that's not the case. We can discern that's not the case because people are prepared to pay for these LLMs. The general public. Coders. Companies. Militaries. Governments.
It is abundantly clear that LLM technology is in fact useful and there is an abundance of examples to back this up. Use of LLMs for targeting/ISR in the Iran war, use of LLMs in hacking, use of LLMs in writing code, use of LLMs in mathematics research, chemistry and biology, use of LLMs in entertainment, making images, translation, proofreading, examining legal or financial data. These are not niche fields.
So people are prepared to sacrifice money for these things, which is why these companies are building datacentres. They're not being built without reason. Companies are paying for all this compute and electricity. Sure, the electricity use is an issue for local communities. Industry has been known to require power, make noise and pollution, which should all ideally be minimized.
Even the serious one, the hypothetical Jihadist, could just as easily google the munitions.
Again, this is not the case. If googling was just as easy then he'd do that and not waste time jailbreaking AIs instead.
It does seem that many people don't see a use for AI. But they're wrong about that, maybe they haven't looked into it or misunderstand what is going on.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
The whole point of using the cuck language is to expose the contradiction in your argument.
Iran will never control the Strait and will certainly never be allowed to toll the Strait.
America has been escorting ships through the strait.
So why not sail through to show exactly who controls it? Why is anyone talking about Iran getting 7% tolls, or splitting profits with Oman, or charging 1-2 million per ship? Nobody would do this if there was a carrier group sitting right there in the straits. Why are there drones hitting ships? Why is traffic crossing the straits at 2% of prewar average? Why are they effectively closed if the US is so powerful and Iran so weak? What the hell was going on with Yemen a couple years back? Why did Trump start blaming his allies for not sending their navies to the straits back in month 2?
Why are there drones attacking US shipping in Suez last week for that matter?
You said yourself that all Iran could do was plink away at a few cargo ships and they barely did much of that... Are we to believe that a US navy carrier battlegroup is weaker in battle than a few civilian cargo ships? This sounds like an easy win! What kind of coward shrinks back from a few measly drones? Protect the shipping, save the day.
You keep saying that America is so powerful. But when it comes to showing that power and reaping rewards, mysteriously it becomes 'going out of their way to increase risk'. It's just cope. When Communist China was threatening Taiwan in the 50s and 90s the US sailed a carrier group through the straits to deter and show power.
It's your perspective that ironically necessitates the US military being absolute lily-livered crybaby pussies, that's my point. My theory explains it perfectly. The US isn't run by effeminate cuckolds. They know that if they tried to secure the straits in actual fact, asserting their presence and escorting more than a tiny handful of ships, it would probably fail, get a bunch of sailors killed and cost more than it gained.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
There are some reasons to worry about AI and demographics. What if, during turbulent economic times whilst people are losing jobs and the existing system is losing its legitimacy, a large migrant population votes for a populist race-socialist party that then orders for the AIs to be aligned 'to the will of the global majority'?
'Mamdani but with actual power'
Anti-immigration politicians may not be terribly capable but there is some reason to think that, on average, they are more patriotic than a pro-migration politician.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
Free AI:
QR code scary!
Paid AI:
Let me install Blender and model a chess set with the board position of Byrne vs. Fischer (1956) immediately after Fischer loses his queen:
https://x.com/goodside/status/2084088205582778713
Hmm today I shall socially engineer, prompt inject and launch supply chain attacks on github
https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-report-unsanctioned-agent-behaviour-during-cyber-testing
Look at western society's literati- you will find, almost literally, conservative Catholics and SJWs and no one else
Islamists stage huge shows of force in public, harassing and intimidating. And then there's the raping and killing and waging holy war.
SJWs impose new speech codes, new rites, censor and suppress media, import tens of millions of migrants, siphon state resources directly into equity and their own NGOs.
Nationalists deport these migrants, directly confront SJWs at rallies and fight them. Nationalists are on the front lines of just about every war, including the culture war.
Zionists make settlements, wage war and get others to wage war for them.
Stemlords are deploying trillions in capital, reshaping the whole world economy to create a machine god. It may come in one of three flavours: Chinese atheist, San Francisco atheist or direct worship of Elon Musk.
Catholic conservatives write two books (one even got 56 reviews on Amazon!) and go on the speaking circuit. Catholic conservatives get a majority on the Supreme Court and... devolve abortion to the states. There are no fewer abortions than before, no effective change. By some measures abortion figures actually rose, breaking a decade-long downtrend. Every ideology is doing something substantial and overt to advance their goals but the Catholic conservatives.
Even complaining about casting in movies or review bombing games on Steam is more effective and vigorous than what these people do in high office. It imposes active pressure, however insignificant.
Carson v. Makin (2022) and Espinoza v. Montana (2020) — states offering tuition aid can't exclude religious schools.
Kennedy v. Bremerton (2022) — a public school football coach's on-field prayer was protected speech.
Fulton v. Philadelphia (2021) — the city couldn't bar a Catholic foster-care agency for declining to place children with same-sex couples.
303 Creative v. Elenis (2023) — a web designer could refuse to create sites celebrating same-sex weddings on free-speech grounds.
Pure defence, no bite. Never has an elite done so little with so much!
Lots of people outside America don't like America and it's not about US strength or wealth, it's not envy but genuine distaste. They just do not like US culture or lifestyle or demeanour. They think that its weird to swear allegiance to the flag in schools, they think it's weird to have all these guns and fireworks and huge cars. They think Americans are crass and stupid and unwise. They go to America and find it really weird and hostile, all these drug adverts on TV, all these homeless people about, people actually approaching you and trying to make conversation on the street. Tipping. It's all weird. They aren't going to America again and will openly tell others not to go to America either. These are wealthy people who go to Europe just about every year on holidays, or boomers that go on cruises and tell me in detail how much they dislike Americans on cruises.
I was talking with a student from the US and I was trying to make the point (albeit in a more polite and appropriate way) that if it weren't for US power Australia would probably have been raped to death by Japan in WW2 so there are pluses as well as minuses about American militarism. But she was going on about how the pledge of allegiance was weird and just innately unacceptable. She was feeling the same kind of laboured 'you're obviously wrong, why do I even have to defend this' that I was feeling.
I make points in a separate conversation with an Australian professor about how the US economy is growing a lot faster than the Australian economy despite the US making a mess with tarriffs so they're doing some things right that we should emulate but even fairly sophisticated people like her say 'no, it's too unequal, there's too much extreme wealth and poverty and that's bad for democracy'. Or they regurgitate an Economist article about how the US is 'islands of affluence' in a sea of relative poverty. It's like saying that 'maybe we should build infrastructure in a more efficient way' and this reflexive answer pops up 'well China can only do that because they have slaves, there's probably a good reason that for HS2 they're building tunnels in open countryside.' Try saying anything positive about China to the average educated person in the West and they will probably refuse or deflect or mitigate. Well it's the same with America.
It's like the mirror image of Americans being super gung ho about America:
You're from the global military and economic hegemon that composes more than 60% of the world stock market cap.; no need to be embarrassed by it. Normies need a lesson in yes_chadding.
Normies overseas are no_chadding. No matter the GDP or the stock markets they don't give a damn, America sucks. Not to mention the wars and tariffs that keep dragging in or imposing costs on US allies. Americans could say 'We're so rich' and that wouldn't matter, it only confirms disgust that is rooted in culture, not wealth.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
The opacity is more in how they end up spending enormous numbers of money on a tiny number of missiles (plus black budget spending on secret weapons and research). But all publicly revealed weapons are listed:
So if you go to page 41 of the link, it says how many patriot PAC-3s they buy (230 a year at $4 million per missile). Not that many once you account for tests and training and exports.
Now they don't say exactly how many they've got left but it's not that hard to estimate (by intelligence agency standards), given that there's video evidence of them being shot away. There's a defined upper limit on how many they could have, unless they lie on these reports. They've also been starting to issue orders for PAC-2s again to supplement the PAC-3s. So there are clear signs of pressure, plus this is something that wargames have warned of for many years.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
What do you think of the small-sized war between coal miners and police in the 1920s? To an extent I think you're saying 'things started to go wrong with Jim Crow and maybe the LA riots'. But some of the biggest unrest in the US had little to do with race.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
Or the British using troops. They didn't have police back then so cavalry would do the work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre#Cavalry_charge
I think there's always been a certain heavier-handed aspect to policing when going beyond mere law enforcement into the political realm of what laws should there even be, how should power be distributed, who is in control. It's not a post-WW2 thing but an eternal thing. Riots and aggressive policing are two sides of the same coin, it's about showing who's in control in a visceral way.
Interesting... I did a little looking into this. Turns out we need 3 kinds of fertilizer nitrogen (Haber-Bosch process, energy intensive but can be done anywhere with natural gas), phosphate fertilizers (mined in Morocco) and potash/potassium fertilizers (mined in Russia). They do different things for the plants, not interchangeable.
But I think we can get along without them? Sanctions on Russian fertilizer caused price impacts certainly but that mostly hit poor countries? I say 'mined in Morocco' and 'mined in Russia' but other countries do produce them, just with fewer reserves. It could be that phosphate recycling and exploration could kick into high gear in the event of a shortage.
Also Morocco would be an easy country to knock over, Western Sahara moreso. Morocco and Algeria aren't serious countries, they aren't that populous, don't produce weapons and are positioned such that they have no great powers nearby that could back them up if US or Europe came knocking. No amount of imported Russian or American weapons are a substitute for having a real military-industrial base.
These are the kind of countries that a couple of carrier groups could deal with straightforwardly, if it came to it. It looks like Morocco is in the US camp and Algeria is in the Russian camp but they're practically encircled by Europe and far away from Russia.
If there is a war and if that does endanger phosphate shipments and if that actually matters then Europe or the US would be able to quickly sort it out.
Perhaps relevant: https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/2088378259427803352/photo/1
Related article: https://www.fire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/professor-mike-adams-suicide-will-always-haunt-me
Getting sacked and piled-on publicly is pretty tough. Ideally it should only be done to people who actually deserve it, I think everyone agrees on that. That 'actually deserving it part' is however contested. What's worse: racist and sexist tweets or making up random stories, plagiarism and total lack of academic merit? That's the open question, the contested ground.
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