RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
I'm not against pizza or burgers in principle. If you make them from good ingredients than that's fine. I was more thinking of the aisles in the grocery store full of plasticky sweets. There'll be a row of soft drink next to a row of chips with flavors unknown to nature. Stuff like gummy bears.
Furthermore, it is true that poor, lower-class people are fatter than rich people, generally speaking. In this case, my classism and disdain is based upon fact. I won't say that the diet I describe above is ideal - these are also people who buy and unironically eat kale and non-alchoholic kombucha which is just repulsive. Nevertheless, it is possible to buy high-quality ingredients that taste good and don't cause significant obesity. Sugary Starbucks drinks aren't healthy either, despite being middle-class as opposed to lower class.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Iraq’s road to democracy is still long, and while this election could be seen as a step forward, it has also underlined the fragilities and setbacks that might result in further disillusionment
The article says that Iraq is not a liberal democracy. If it's on the road to democracy, it's not a democracy, let alone a liberal democracy! If a doctor gives a report about the state of someone's health, it doesn't mean that they're healthy.
Sure we didn’t transform Afghanistan but we didn’t make it worse. There population grew on trend the entire time. No excess deaths.
No excess deaths is not the sole standard for how benign a military operation is. Imagine if the US raped and impregnated all the women there. Population grows on trend! But that's still a bad thing.
We also signed treaties with Ukraine that we would protect their sovereignty.
No, you didn't promise to do anything.
https://www.whsv.com/2022/02/25/does-us-have-an-obligation-protect-ukraine/
Baltics would be very hard to defend if Russia controlled Ukraine.
Look at a map. Ukraine doesn't even border the Baltics. The Baltics are already hard to defend because of geography and Kaliningrad in conventional terms.
Lol it’s harrassment that when a country invaded your friend you limit trade with them.
Yes. They froze hundreds of millions of dollars in Russian banks, preventing them spending their own money. It's also harassment when a country organizes a coup in your friend as in 2014, or manipulates your elections, as in 1996.
Dude if you haven’t been paying attention F-18 are when not if.
There's no evidence for this. F-18s are much more advanced and expensive than F-16s and would be too hard for Ukraine to supply. That's why they asked for F-16s. That's why everyone is talking about F-16s, not F-18s.
Nukes I wouldn’t give them. Russia literally has zero chance to win the war. Even if they get a breakthrough there would be a NATO counter probably polish boots. Again I pay taxes for military weapons. I want to use them to kill Russians.
Great, then we get a nuclear war. That would kill a lot of Russians!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Iraq is not a liberal democracy, as I said. Even the Atlantic Council agrees with me. It's a massive fragile mess of Iran-backed Shia militias, ex-ISIS militias and Kurdish militias.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/the-truth-about-iraq-s-democracy/
The US went into Afghanistan, got hundreds of thousands of people killed in the war, expanded Afghan drug production with their incompetence, subsidized bacha-bazi in the Afghan Army (also known as the rape of boys), squandered trillions of dollars in corruption. Then they left and obstructed famine relief, confiscating $7 billion from their national bank. The US really is not interested in the welfare of Afghans, otherwise this wouldn't have happened. It was a complete clusterfuck.
There’s no evidence we turned Ukraine west.
The Nuland phone call has a recording of them plotting out who will be in the new Ukrainian government. US-based NGOs like Open Society and government backed organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy have spent billions in Ukraine, funding NGOs and protest groups. This is well documented. That buys loyalty and influence.
Nuclear weapons aren’t protecting Estonia (part of nato in your view) if we aren’t willing to fight in Ukraine. Then we aren’t dropping a nuke on Moscow if they invade the Baltics.
Do you understand what an alliance is? Azerbaijan invaded Armenia - the US is not obliged to do anything because they're not allied. If China invades Nepal, the US is not obliged to do anything. But if Russia invades Estonia, they are obliged to fight because they are allied. It was a foolish idea to bring these small countries into the alliance, they contribute very little while creating risks. But now they're there we have to stick with them.
Not sure what you are accusing us of doing in 2014 - didn’t Russia invade a neighbor that year? Russia declaring war is suddenly something bad the US did? Makes no sense.
US and EU imposed sanctions on Russia that year because the Russians took Crimea. That's harassment. They didn't declare war, they still haven't declared war. Nobody has declared war.
Sometime next year their getting f-18.
There are discussions over sending F-16s to Ukraine, not F-18s.
The Russian threat is overrated? Haven’t they obliterated a few countries and some of Ukraine with artillery? Keyboard warriors can say that but not when Russian artillery is outside their town.
You don't understand what I'm saying. The conventional threat to the West is overrated, the nuclear threat is underrated. The US has wrecked a few countries in the last 20 years but that doesn't mean Belgium is threatened by the US in the same way Iran or Syria is. Threat is relative.
If the west got the guns then why not use them and kill some Russians? Fuck I pay a ton in taxes for the military and like Ukranians [sic] so we better give them whatever they need to kill Russians.
This is a really unsophisticated argument. Have you thought about what you're saying for more than 10 seconds? If the Ukrainians ask for your whole army, navy and airforce would you hand it over? Your nuclear arsenal? Foreign policy has consequences. These can include fuel shortages, inflation, making enemies, getting into wars, starting nuclear wars. It should be approached carefully.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
We're already getting the wrong guy once in a while, it's rather similar to the 'collateral damage' in Afghanistan. There's collateral damage, yet no chance of victory. We're already reaping the rewards of drug addiction, organized crime, policing costs, second order impacts. There are enormous numbers of youths leaving society via overdose. More and more new and exciting drugs are coming online - fentanyl and similar. There's no obvious sign that this trend will change.
If we turn the 'war' into a war, we would be able to win as opposed to spinning our wheels in the mud, wrecking a great many people's lives without even achieving our ostensible goals.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
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If the US wanted to gain favor with the Arabs, they could simply not support Israel, their number one enemy.
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Syria and Egypt started cozying up to the Soviets precisely because the US was extremely reluctant to provide them weapons that might be used against Israel. The region was going red because of US support for Israel.
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Tensions between the US and Israel were hardly strained through the 60s and 70s. They were improving, despite Israel's best efforts. Israel nuclearized, making the NPT into an even bigger joke and successfully got massive US miiltary aid in the '67 and '73 wars, bringing down the Arab oil embargo that cost the US hundreds of billions.
This put the US in the awkward position of supporting both Egypt and Israel even while Egypt and Israel were at war with each other
The US might have wanted Egypt onside but clearly not at the cost of dumping Israel, otherwise they would have. There's nothing messy about it, the situation is quite clear. The US clearly weighs Israeli security very highly, they were and are willing to sacrifice relations with the Arabs, oil security (quite literally when it comes to the deal where Israel gets a guaranteed US-supplied oil reserve), nuclear-nonproliferation and considerable amounts of money for this goal.
If the US was so concerned with Egyptian security, why not provide them military aid? Why not fly in billions worth of armaments if they look like they're losing a war? Because the US did not want them to defeat Israel, Israel was valued higher.
And there's US aid for Jordan too, as I keep mentioning.
The countries that are now Syria and Iraq
??? You are surely aware that Syria got its independence from France in 1946, that the shortlived United Arab Republic was between Syria and Egypt, not Syria and Iraq?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Well no the US isn't supporting Islam. But he was saying it's 'not supporting the establishment of religion' generally. I'm saying US support for Israel is motivated by the Israel lobby in the US, who is primarily motivated by religious feeling.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Are you saying it wasn't a scam on the 30th of September but it was before and after? Or are you saying they just took Tether's word for it?
From the end of page 1, halfway down through page 2 it lists all the things they did. They checked over the blockchain records, they got confirmation letters from banks, looked for the collateral in the loans... Not what I'd call 'confirming that Tether claimed things'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Israel acquired nuclear weapons, instruments that actually do secure their defense. They are at least realistic in their paranoia.
If Poland is skeptical that their allies will defend them from Russia, why should they hope that Russia will refrain from nuking them? What good are tanks when one faces complete destruction?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Burning your own boats is one thing, burning someone else's boats is another. That's what the Trojans tried to do to the Greeks when they were sallying out!
If your crazy girlfriend convinces you to stop driving and you reluctantly accept, that's one thing. If she blows up your car, that's another.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
The US literally had mine warfare forces training in the exact part of the Baltic Sea where the explosions happened, 3 months later! Polish officials thanked America, Biden threatened to make the pipeline stop regardless of German opinions, they have all the means and motive to do it. There's no question about this, it's an open and shut case.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'true in a technical sentence' or 'no military could get away with literally burning their boats'. What I mean to say is that the US literally and physically blew up $30 billion worth of pipeline that supplied about 58% of Germany's gas. Even if some genuine liberal democrat (as opposed to the megalomaniacal Russian liberal democratic party) somehow got into power, the pipeline is still destroyed. No matter the context it's done, not just for this winter but for years to come. Whilst politicians often don't follow through on their rhetorical commitments, the Germans will now be forced to.
I'm no undersea pipeline engineer but it seems pretty permanently wrecked. The gash is apparently hundreds of metres wide, the whole thing has been filling with water.
This is possibly the least covert attack on an ally since Operation Barbarossa.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances
Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".
Has the US promised to defend Ukraine under its nuclear umbrella? No. They promised that they would attempt to provide some kind of assistance in the Security Council, dominated by veto-holding nuclear powers!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Have you checked all the art before saying its uniformly awful?
I rather liked this one: https://opensea.io/assets/matic/0x2953399124f0cbb46d2cbacd8a89cf0599974963/48388610335180253795576366386312396261162674450341463428664179782889647374436
It captures the mocking grin of our effeminate, malign overlords. There's political commentary. There's a pun in the title. The creator gets 10% of each transaction. We consumers can view the image whenever we want. What's not to like?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
You're not alone: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oXMjtVnLD4o
Harden your heart Putin, Increase your attacks, Banish them all to Palestine and we shall marry Ukrainian women!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
By contrast, Gorbachev's decision to undertake reforms were taken because of accurately-identified issues
Yes but the way he dealt with issues was poor. Reducing military spending would've greatly ameliorated the economic situation, it was sucking up a good 10%+ of the Soviet economy. Gorbachev didn't even have the power to control military spending but he thought he could radically alter the whole ideological and economic structure of the Soviet Union - in a controlled way! The man was dreaming.
That the 90s followed doesn't mean that the strategy of change was a wrong decision
If a strategy is launched in an inept and naive way and fails, it's a failure of strategy. A return to hardline Stalinism would be a 'strategy of change' yet that wouldn't have helped either. Change and reform is not sufficient, it needs to be the right change done in the right way. Implementation is important - gradual and controlled marketization beats chaos. Nothing about the Soviet system required handing everything over to robbers in a mad rush to privatize all assets before the communists could be elected, the Yeltsin approach was extremely counterproductive. Gorbachev's ineptitude led to the hardliner coup, he didn't manage the situation sufficiently well. Now nobody had ever done this before, it's a difficult task that he wasn't trained to do. Indeed, the Soviet failure helped inform China's success. Yet it was still a failure.
However, good management is not some made up video-game skill, it requires a sound understanding of the people and institutions that control a country, it requires certain personal characteristics that Deng clearly had. Even Putin did a decent job in cleaning up much of the mess that Yeltsin left behind - Putin is not an exceptional leader but he's not a Gorby/Yeltsin-tier blunder-addict.
The result was a Union where even Crimea wanted to leave it, and when ungraceful suppression was ended, did
That was the result of mismanagement and a certain level of naivete (itself a result of poor management) about how things would be outside the Soviet Union. As late as 2013 Ukraine regretted leaving the USSR.
Anyway, you started this diversion saying the war in Ukraine was the worst disaster for Russia since '41 - did you miss the increasingly frantic rhetoric coming from Macron and the Pentagon about how the Russians are about to roll the Ukrainians?
“There’s nothing that can help Ukraine now because there are no serious technologies able to compensate Ukraine for the large mass of troops Russia is likely to hurl at us. We don’t have those technologies, and the West doesn’t have them as well in sufficient numbers,” one of the top-ranking military sources told POLITICO.
It's not looking good for the rules-based order.
If you mean 'see' as in 'it's not there,' this would be flatly incorrect, and anyone who lived through the early 2000s could probably recount more than a few American examples.
No, American nationalism is not on the same order as Chinese nationalism today or in the 2000s. Not even after 9/11. The US ambassador in Beijing was trapped for days after the Belgrade embassy bombing as hordes of rioters threw rocks. China routinely blows up tiny maritime incidents into completely disproportionate affairs. The most popular movie in US history wasn't a patriotic war story like Saving Private Ryan toned up to 11 with 'the eternal glory of the US Army remains in our hearts forever and ever, amen' on the postscript. What are you thinking of - Islamophobia? China is way more Islamophobic than the US has ever been, as the US govt delights in telling us so often.
in a conventional conflict in Europe, the Russians were likely to be decisively beaten in any conflict with the Americans
Firstly, the Iraqi army is not the Soviet army. Just the arsenal Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Union is a whole other world to the SA-8s and Rolands Iraq was fielding. The Iraqi army was also saddled with Iraqi soldiers, who were not known for excellence under US tutelage either. We've yet to see how Airland Battle deals with S-300s or the arsenal of a proper military. Secondly, conventional inferiority was no problem for NATO in the 1970s or Russia today, they have nuclear deterrence.
Before I posted the link, and before you posted your opening thesis on American strategy, had you ever read or reviewed an American National Security Strategy?
This may be news to you but you do not have to read these documents to discuss national strategy. You can look at what actually happens in the real world. You can interpret govt priorities with your own eyes. This is better than trusting in the documents. Govts lie! The Chinese might say that they're interested in purely peaceful development - yet actually build up a gigantic navy and forces targeting their near abroad. The US might say it's worried about Iraqi WMDs and Saddam's links with terrorists - but have other motivations and goals for invading Iraq.
And when govts don't lie, they try to be tactful, they massage their words and adopt a certain frame. The Chinese adopt this supercilious tone where their military may be forced to take action if foreign provocateurs incite a rogue province into illegal independence activities. That's not a lie but it's not straightforward communication. Better to ignore the cheap talk and look at results.
Congratulations. You officially won the argument and convinced key American elites years ago. DEI and migration policy are how the US government under a Democratic administration believe the US will long-term compete with PRC STEM diploma numbers, and it made it into policy.
The migration policy of having a de facto open border? I note this is contrary to what is indicated in your august strategy document. US migration policy isn't primarily about improving the quality of the STEM workforce but about demographic and political change, plus serving certain corporate interests. The vast majority of the millions of people arriving in America (many flown in at state expense) are not trained in STEM. In fact US legal immigration is a rather byzantine and complicated mess, making it difficult for the most skilled to arrive.
This is where the advantage of my 'look at what's actually going on' approach kicks in. I can observe that DEI and migration policy is not motivated by a desire to acquire STEM talent. If they wanted talent, they could adopt a points-based system like Australia and enforce the border. If they wanted talent, they'd favour meritocracy as opposed to diversity quotas and affirmative action. It's not rocket science. This policy isn't secret - its publicly observable and it does get communicated. But people massage the truth, they arrange their intentions in certain ways to make it sound more defensible. Children are taught things like 'diversity makes us stronger' in school and via the media, just like how China is taught nationalism via school and the media.
Furthermore, relying on Chinese STEM talent to counter China has a number of rather obvious flaws. This is what I was pointing out initially. The DEI and Rules-based order strands are in conflict. The US wants to skim off Chinese STEM talent but not end up training them so they take skills back to China, not have them spy for China. They want to whip up popular sentiment against China (another thing you won't find in official strategy documents but which can be observed through funding of various organizations and media slant) but do so without inciting racism or civil unrest. These are the contradictions I've been talking about the whole time.
The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it says in the PR brochure.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
I believe both. Both men seem like sleazy perverts that would do this kind of thing. I assume most have seen Biden's creepy sniffing of children on live TV, kissing and so on. What does he do when the cameras aren't running? What kind of role model was he for Hunter, given how he turned out?
Then there's Trump's relations with Epstein, there's the quote: "He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life."
Note that none of this is 'hard proof' - but why would anyone expect facts to be rigorously, objectively confirmed in the most politically fraught matter imaginable? The facts were 'confirmed' in the case of Russiagate before the whole thing turned out to be a fraud. Why trust official facts in cases like this, considering the political sensitivity? The very existence of Epstein shows that there's a huge market for illicit sex, rape and so on amongst the US elite. Someone dealt with him before he could talk, he clearly had a lot of influential colleagues. These people can easily make facts disappear, they can make people disappear even inside a prison under 24 hour suicide watch. They are quite literally above the law. In the absence of facts, all that's left is vibes and both men give off pretty terrible vibes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
Abraham Accords
Why can't you understand a conditional clause? If it were the Abraham Accords that got Egypt to get along with Israel, then that would've made them an achievement. The Abraham Accords got Bahrain and the UAE, of which only the UAE matters. Morocco too, which has basically nothing to do with the Middle East other than being Arab and Islamic.
the US isnt occupying any of Syria.
They have troops there. ISIS is gone yet US troops remain. Clearly it's not about fighting ISIS. If you have troops on the soil of another country without their permission, it's an occupation.
Sharon was neutral on Iraq
No he wasn't. This is a blatant lie.
On August 12, 2002, Sharon told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset that Iraq "is the greatest danger facing Israel
Haaretz reported on February 26, 2001, that "Sharon believes that Iraq poses more of a threat to regional stability than Iran, due to the errant, irresponsible behavior of Saddam Hussein's regime."
He also wanted an invasion of Iran after Iraq was dealt with: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/05/israel.iraq
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Ah, good point. It does still read like Kulak to my eyes, you can still sense a part of his soul in it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
You can’t really convert money into power in a functioning society beyond the incredibly limited scope of making your own life comfier.
Bribery and influence? If money can't buy power, somebody should tell big corporations and they'd sack all their lobbyists. Wealth is power and always has been. The sinews of war are infinite money.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
MANPADs, ATGMs, artillery shells, rockets... these are what you need to win wars.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
And we're still getting the oil even in this world where we aid Israel.
At times. The 1973 Arab Oil Embargo was pretty bad!
There is always two different effects to letting a any power do what it wants
Quite right, which is why they organized the Oil Embargo in response to the US sending an enormous amount of military aid to Israel. That is why, amongst other reasons, Osama Bin Laden hated the West and blew up the Twin Towers. It's a fundamentally symmetrical phenomenon. Arabs play the game and can react to our activities. Which is why, unless there are good reasons, we should avoid antagonizing them by, for example, providing Israel with massive amounts of military aid that they use to kill Arabs. Or invading Iraq. Likewise with Russia. If we didn't try to depose their allies in Syria, advance our sphere of influence ever closer to them... we wouldn't be experiencing the current crisis.
At the risk of sounding maximally cynical, if we consider Ukraine losing a foregone conclusion, we ideally want to take in as many Ukrainian refugees as possible, and otherwise maximum casualties on both sides.
But what are the second-order impacts of this? If other countries know that we'll sacrifice them en masse for our own interests, why would they ally with us? Is Taiwan sleeping soundly, knowing they're also 'not a treaty ally but we like them' and seeing Ukraine getting turned into the Somme? We don't even recognize that they're a country! And what are the Russians going to do in retaliation? Send assistance to our other enemies? Stir up trouble? Coup various nations in Africa? Once the war is over, a lot of Russians are going to remain very angry with us for getting their countrymen killed with our weapons. Putin will likely be replaced with a real hardliner when he dies.
If we want to create them faster, we have a lot of slack to build up the respective industry.
It will take at least 5 years of surge production to replace the reserves of munitions that have been expended. Taiwan may not have that time and Taiwan is actually important. It's not like we can just print money and buy missiles, there are hard caps in industry and trained manpower. The people who know how to build munitions factories are often retired now, our manufacturing sector has shrunk.
If Russia starts to make serious gains again I wouldn't be surprised if Ukraine's direct neighbours, especially Poland, would start to send their own army after all, independent of what the rest of the west wants.
Well then we bring on WW3. The whole point is to avoid that outcome. France, Britain and the US have a large nuclear arsenal and can prevent Russia invading NATO members but Russia can also lay waste to the Polish army, Europe and America. When it comes to tactical nuclear weapons, their advantage is considerable.
Since we send no aid, Ukraine crumbles relatively fast. Any attempts at guerrilla warfare or resistance is met with the punishment of Ukrainian civilians.
Given that we spent the last few years building up the Ukrainian military, it would be embarrassing to give up on them. But it would be far more embarrassing to lose if we make a major effort, which we have now made. It's the difference between looking impotent and proclaiming one's impotence to the whole world. Ideally, we should've done nothing to start with, then there would be no risk of looking weak, since we never declared an interest in Ukraine. Russia demolishing Georgia didn't make us look weak, we never really tried to strengthen Georgia militarily. But now that we've pursued this loathsome path, it is hard to leave. It becomes more and more tempting to keep doubling down in a desperate hope for victory. Likewise, the Russians will keep intensifying their efforts. They've spent significant amounts of blood on this, they are becoming less and less willing to give up, their demands will increase.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
for the most part give its a constant or predictable value in terms of what it can buy
Well fiat currency constantly and predictably decreases in value over the medium/long term. Bitcoin is unpredictable but tends to rise in value. Unlike with fiat, there is no federal reserve ready to prop up bubbles or bail out governments that 'need' to print/borrow $200 billion per month, as the US does:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-budget-value
In an environment where Bitcoin was more used for transactions as opposed to trading, prices would be much less volatile too. If the fixed supply was an issue, miners could vote on forking the chain (a vaguely democratic process as opposed to the closed-door meetings of elites that determine current monetary policy).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
39 minute slide: he claims that Ukraine should guarantee language rights for minorities. Well, if Mearsheimer knew anything about Ukraine, he would have known about
That literally proves his point, that Ukraine in 2014 was moving to suppress the Russian language and in 2018 they did do precisely that by repealing the law!
The US started to provide significant assistance to Ukraine, and sanctioned some Russians only after Malaysia airliner was being shot down by Russians (as confirmed by the International Court). How the West should have reacted?
Do what Mearsheimer said this whole time and make it clear that Ukraine wasn't going to be part of NATO, sweep it under the carpet (like the enormous numbers of people dying in Yemen for example). That would have avoided this whole war. But no, they doubled down instead providing more arms, more NATO integration, more training and so on. Besides, when the US shoots down an airliner, nobody gets sanctioned. Accidents happen.
He tried to pull Belarus and Ukraine into "Union State".
Not with troops. Putin only started intervening overseas in 2008 and there's a clear reactive tendency. Georgia, 2008, right after NATO membership is promised in some future time, right after the emboldened Georgians go in on South Ossetia. Then in 2014, right after the pro-Russian Ukrainian government gets deposed. One tiny border dispute in 2003 does not an imperialist make.
If you really want to wreck Russia, what you should do is to encourage it to try to conquer Ukraine. Putin is much too smart to try that
So I was completely right! You didn't grasp the distinction in what Mearsheimer is saying, the difference between invasion and conquest. You don't know what you're talking about. You don't understand what Mearsheimer is talking about or you've been deliberately mischaracterizing his ideas.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
You seem to think that Russia is a second-rate power. They can demolish Western civilization in an afternoon. That is what their nuclear forces are designed to do. On the highest and most important level, Russia and the Western world are peers.
There is no 'suffer what they must' between peers, only suffering.
If you're right about the West being 10 times stronger, why didn't we go ahead with a no fly zone, send in ground troops? It'd be a cakewalk! Plus there's a lot of oil to liberate! But you know that's not true, you know perfectly well why we can't do that.
The real switcheroo is not Mearsheimer's 'great powers act in predictable ways, so it is not desirable to threaten a declining power in ways that will result in it lashing out' but your 'Russia is so weak that we can do whatever we like and never pay any consequences for our actions - but let's stay far away from the action and let other people do the fighting'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
You should tell that to the US government. They clearly do think it was justified since they went and did it and refused to punish anyone for it.
How can it be a mystery? It's like Scott's example of the Russian periodic table with room-temperature superconductors and antigravity. There are some healthy diets in the world. There's the upper middle-class pious diet with home-cooking, multigrain bread, fruit, fish and so on. There's the Japanese diet with fish and rice - there's zero problem with obesity in Japan. The Mediterrenean diet isn't bad either. Only as countries westernize, only as McDonalds and Coca Cola expand into new markets does obesity emerge.
The most obese countries are Pacific Islanders, which is genetics-related, followed by oil-rich Arab countries who are ultra-Westernized and then the US.
According to wikipedia, Ethiopia has a higher proportion of obese people than Japan! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate
I'm confident that if the US government shifted its vast agricultural subsidies program towards pumping out sushi rather than corn and beef, there would be quick improvement. I agree that raising awareness does nothing, what's needed is serious movement on the ground. Dissolve Coca-Cola, retrain fast food cooks to produce sushi, ban HFCS and things will turn around quickly.
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