RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
What do you mean by shaky in fundamentals?
They have a huge amount of industry and infrastructure that pumps out much of the world's goods. Putting finance to one side, isn't that a sound basis for an economy?
China has high corporate debt, that much is known. But debt is just paper. As long as enterprises are productive and efficient, debt doesn't matter. Regardless of what happens in the realm of paper the real productive wealth remains. All those phones, cars, ships will still be produced in increasingly automated factories. All that housing stock is still there. I remember hearing so much about Evergrande collapsing but there don't seem to be many material consequences from that. On the flipside, a home ownership rate of 96% is pretty good in my view, something is going very right there.
And they have plenty of human capital, the cohorts that will be relevant for the next 20 years have already been born, shrinking birthrates will take decades to really cause any major effect.
I think our media has emphasized China's flaws (debt, pollution, totalitarian political system) excessively and refused to cover their successes (logistics, cost-efficient industrial output, innovation) and so people fall into a state of confusion when Deepseek or Tiktok come out, when BYD starts outhustling Tesla or when the Chinese flew their next-gen fighter IRL, as opposed to in CGI like NGAD.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
30d ago
Despite every war being started by the Arabs
Fake history. The Six-Day War was started by Israel and they were the aggressor in Suez.
More recently, (Sharon) acted with generosity by withdrawing from Gaza in 05.
He did that because he concluded it wasn't demographically practical to settle, demolish Palestinian houses and do the standard divide-and-conquer tactics in Gaza. Sharon was not a generous man in any reasonable sense. His military career included war crimes, he founded Unit 101 and is responsible for the Qibya Massacre amongst other things.
Ariel Sharon wrote in his diary that "Qibya was to be an example for everyone," and that he ordered "maximal killing and damage to property". Post-operational reports speak of breaking into houses and clearing them with grenades and shooting.
JCPoA (Iran Nuclear deal) was signed
The US reneged on this when Trump got into office, Trump being heavily backed by Israeli lobbyists who got what they were paying for.
Imagine if your daughter got raped and murdered. Then your friend says "she had it coming".
It really isn't this simple. The Israelis have a habit of shooting Palestinian children in the back, along with unarmed protestors. There's a lot of bad blood on both sides. The Arabs are not nice people either. Wars are unpleasant, borders are formed by bloodshed. However, it is inappropriate and ahistorical to valorize Israel as though they're pure good facing pure evil.
Where is the outrage over all the Palestinians who get sodomized or tortured in Israeli prisons? Israeli parliamentarians have said, on camera, 'oh they had it coming, they're Hamas, we can do anything we like!' The Muslim world are the ones who get upset about this, along with people who read various UN or Human rights reports on the subject. The 'free palestine' leftists are doing the same thing as you, seeing both real and imagined evils of one party, siding with the other and then ignoring their own flaws. This kind of skewed perspective eventually creates support for unsound policies, rousing excessive passions about other people's wars.
If Iran's nuclearization is inevitable
They've been six months away from nukes for 30 years now, according to Israeli intelligence. How is this line of argument evergreen?
Reminds me a bit of the UK, how they just elected Labour. After 14 years of the Tory clownshow, people wanted something new. Starmer seemed normal enough.
And what did they get? The same as before. The Tories were flailing around pretending to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and not actually doing it. Starmer cut the Rwanda facade. Mass immigration continues either way, regardless of Brexit or anything else.
The Tories were perceived as pursuing relentless austerity cuts. Lo and behold, Starmer is continuing in their footsteps, announcing a 22 billion pound black hole that needs to be fixed up with tax hikes. There are starting to be these wailing posts from Labour hopefuls who credulously expected hope and change, only to get yet another serving of decline: https://x.com/D_Blanchflower/status/1827688405632761960
British steel industry under the Tories? Dying. Under Labour? Dead. Tories soft on crime? Labour will be as soft or softer: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/26/violent-offenders-increasingly-let-off-with-apology/
More than 147,000 people accused of offences including sex crimes, violence and weapons possession were given community resolutions in the year to March instead of being prosecuted. Such resolutions do not result in a criminal record.
The surge comes amid a deepening crisis in the criminal justice system. Prisons are so full that the Government is releasing thousands of criminals early next month in the wake of the riots, while police have raised concerns that any worsening of jail overcrowding could limit their ability to make arrests.
I suspect that if Kamala is elected, people are going to quickly sour as the impressions they absorbed prove ethereal. It'll be more of the same. Just like Trump in 2017, a lot of people were really fired up about draining the swamp but it never actually happened. A lot of people wanted something more than tax cuts and didn't get it. The machinery is already in place, the ship steers very slowly if you can even find the controls.
I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022
Who cares what Hanania thinks about human excellence? He has (generously) 1/1000th of Elon's following, maybe 1/100,000 of his wealth. Is Hanania running a viable AGI program? Is Hanania building huge rockets? Are Hanania's opinions relevant in world affairs, does he control key communications infrastructure used by armies? Is he doing anything of importance whatsoever? No. If anything he shot himself in the foot switching from 'I'm a smart tech-right policy guy' to 'let me sneer at all the right-wing retards who are now running the country and are in a position to implement policies'. He's the contrarian rat that jumps on board the sinking ship. What a fool!
Elon may indeed have lost some of his faculties, idk, I've never met the man. I doubt Hanania has either. Armchair psychoanalysis of extremely unusual people is basically just glorified name-calling.
Whatever Elon has lost, if anything, he still makes the rest of the world look like drooling retards. What did I get done in the last 3 years, since 2022? I certainly didn't start an AI company that's outperforming Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. I didn't build the biggest datacentre on the planet at record speed.
It's perfectly reasonable for us to disagree with Elon's choices or think he should do something else. I disagree with Elon about many things, including his whole concept of what a state is for. But if people want to go around calling him dumb or saying that his brain 'broke', then we'd better have some serious achievements to prove that we know what 'smart' or 'successful' is! Certainly something better than 'I wrote a book rehashing Mearsheimer (nobody cares about it) and blew up my political career' like Hanania.
Why should anyone care what Hanania thinks about politics considering how bad he is at it? He was pivoting away from Trump while Elon pivoted towards Trump... I think it's clear who has better political skills and like everything else between them, it's an orders of magnitude difference.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Anyone else reading that excerpt and thinking 'Based'? Wouldn't it be excellent to carve out a new artificial world, make better animals and plants according to one's wishes? Live as long as one likes without regard for age?
Not the specifics of perfectly cleaning the world, that could take many angles. One might make a jungle of talking animals, or an endless lived-in leafy suburbia or a Willy Wonka wonderland or all of those things simulated within a ball of computronium. But isn't that the logical endpoint of ever increasing mastery and control of the world? What's the alternative, stasis?
I can sense that many people don't like this vision but isn't this what we're doing, irregardless of objections? Unless you think 'no people mustn't live forever' or 'we mustn't have children' or 'technological advancement must stop' then you endorse indefinite growth in numbers and in power of worldshaping and knowledge ("All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control"), so eventually something like this will happen.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
I'm not convinced that people even need to put down the fork. I can eat as much as I want and exercise very little but remain thin. Mostly I don't eat ultra-processed food, I just eat whole food.
Formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, made by a series of industrial processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment and technology (hence ‘ultra-processed’). Processes used to make ultra-processed foods include the fractioning of whole foods into substances, chemical modifications of these substances, assembly of unmodified and modified food substances using industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; use of additives at various stages of manufacture whose functions include making the final product palatable or hyper-palatable; and sophisticated packaging, usually with plastic and other synthetic materials. Ingredients include sugar, oils or fats, or salt, generally in combination, and substances that are sources of energy and nutrients that are of no or rare culinary use such as high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated or interesterified oils, and protein isolates; classes of additives whose function is to make the final product palatable or more appealing such as flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, and sweeteners, thickeners, and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling, and glazing agents; and additives that prolong product duration, protect original properties or prevent proliferation of microorganisms.
Doesn't sound very appetizing! But it obviously is, ultra-processed food is 60% of US calorie consumption: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ultra-processed-foods-calories-american-diet/
It seems very reasonable that eating things full of strange chemicals causes unusual health problems. Circus freaks from 1900 have nothing on the physiques you can see waddling around these days, they wouldn't even make it onto my 600 pound life. And the US is exporting this all around the world.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
US ports are actually some of the least efficient in the world because of this point-blank refusal to adopt automation, IIRC they were next to Tanzania on the leaderboard. China and Japan are far ahead.
However, we do need to consider a balance between automation and human labour renumeration and leverage. I doubt any of us have worked in a port. Few of us are professional artists or actors, I suspect. I imagine many here would be much more sympathetic to extremely highly-paid software engineering or finance jobs getting axed and replaced by AI.
It may well be that a reasonable balance for ports vs port workers involves this thug and his hangers-on being sent off to prison for economic wrecking, mass sackings and prompt automation. But similarly reasonable balances may be imposed on unruly, arrogant tech-bros by the rest of society. Some level of working-class unity (interpreted broadly to mean all who derive most of their earning from their wage) may be appropriate here. What happens when we automated the dock workers, automated the factory workers, automate the retail workers... who will be left to go on strike when they automate us? And then where is our leverage to negotiate anything in the future?
There was a Liu Cixin short story about an Ancap civilization enforced by AI NAP killbots where one capitalist ended up owning all the parks, all the water and air after winning a completely fair free-market competition. Everyone else was confined to desolate hive cities, rasping away in filthy reprocessed air until their machines failed, unable to step a few metres away and enjoy the beautiful landscape. It is all private property. I am a NVIDIA shareholder and feel somewhat insulated by all of this... but many are not. Who is to say that someone or something won't decide 'oh these little people who bought shares pre-singularity didn't really contribute, off to penury with them! Print out another billion clones of us!'? We need leverage to negotiate and getting into a habit of discarding leverage may not be helpful, despite obvious good reasons to do so.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
When trying to negotiate a settlement, assassinate the guy on the other side of the table
I'm not sure this is a wise tactic, especially in a hostage situation. Either commit to total victory or seek a negotiated agreement.
Unpopular opinion: they should've quit bitching and just done it.
Musk is playing 5D chess, demanding an objectively simple task to demand compliance/submission and using it as leverage to secure more power. He knows that a lot of the chronic /r/fednews posters will have a massive hysterical breakdown and is counting on it to give him more political power and make these people look ridiculous and out of touch. A normal person thinks 'that's easy' and has little sympathy.
It should not take even 5 minutes to produce a list of 5 things you've done this week if you've been working seriously. If you're dealing with secret information, you ought to be smart enough to obfuscate a technically correct but secure answer.
The guy working on the top secret AI-powered satellite missile guidance system can say "I helped train a model and adjusted hyperparameters" or "Fixed bugs in the navigation software" and that's of no significant value to any adversary. If they have your email address and you work in the Advanced Aerospace Development department, they're going to expect that's what you're doing. It might break the sacred rules some bureaucrat thought up for individual/collective deflection of responsibility but normal people thinking wisely would not be worried about the Chinese finding out that Americans are designing aircraft or honing satellite guidance systems. They already know a hell of a lot more than that, the US MIC leaks like a collander and Chinese spying has been punching great big holes in it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5mo ago
War with the cartels would go really badly for the US IMO. It's not that the US lacks the firepower or the manpower or the wealth, they lack the political capacity and will to execute these kinds of imperial military operations. The US military is best at defeating conventional forces in conventional wars (preferably massively outmatched ones like the Iraqi army). They are not good at imperial wars and suppression campaigns. They are not good at regime change or stabilization or propping up a puppet government.
If cartels are so easy to beat in Mexico, why can't the US wipe out the drug dealers in America? For a long time I've been saying 'just get rid of the drug dealers to solve the problem'. The US has the technical capacity to track down the drug dealers, they have drones and spies and informants and everything you'd need. Drug addicts can find drug dealers, how hard can it be? There are literally open air drug markets in major US cities! The US doesn't have the political capacity to do it, they don't have the legal capacity and the willpower to actually wage a war on drugs (as opposed to a pretend war on drugs).
How well did the US fare in the last campaign against a nebulous collection of unconventional forces in a drug-rich foreign land? After initial military successes, they fared very, very poorly. The lessons of Afghanistan should be applied to Mexico which is considerably larger. Plus the global balance of power has changed a lot since 2001 and not in the US's favour. Chinese pharmaceutical companies have been fighting a proxy war with Mexican cartels on the streets of Philadelphia (because they do have the kind of willpower and capacity I'm talking about): https://x.com/SantsPliego/status/1748496050543837404
China and Russia would leap at the chance to flex their muscles and make even more problems in the US's sphere of influence, tie them down and bleed them. The cartels would start acquiring MANPADs, ATGMs, explosives, cash, drones. Is the US capable of searching every Chinese cargo ship heading to Mexico?
How should the US act? Slowly build up political capacity step by step, don't leap straight to the end boss. Crack down on drugs at home before an ill-planned, hazy military action overseas. Fight where you are strongest and where the enemy is weakest, build up confidence and experience.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
Why do they need to walk?
The air is the natural domain of the robot, as we see in Ukraine. The Russians and Ukrainians have been toying with ground combat robots but they're throwing industrial quantities of aerial drones at eachother. Some explode, some drop bombs, some are wire-guided to bypass electronic warfare, some have jet-engines for long endurance and long range. They have amazing camera zoom, they can pick out targets day and night.
Flying kamikaze drones are very hard to deal with. You can dodge one dropped grenade or club one away with your rifle. But three? Five? You're going to die. These things are cheap. Onboard AI guidance and swarming will make them even more dangerous.
It's only a matter of time before machines take over high-end airpower too. Humans are expensive to train, need all kinds of life support and suffer under g-forces. We were not made to careen around in the upper atmosphere at 9G or above, that's not where our skills lie. We're ground creatures, I bet that walking around and close quarters will be the last domains that fall to AI.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
I don't need to cite a million papers to show that many Chinese people spy for China or take steps to advance China's interests. I don't need the most reliable sources to prove that their sympathies generally lean towards the country they have ethnic ties to. I can't be bothered to do a 20 second search and bring up examples for pedants, I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
It's common sense.
Furthermore, 'Australian' is not an ethnic group. There is a reason that the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Britain are very, very closely aligned and similar in many respects. We both know what that is but one of us is choosing to ignore it to score cheap points.
Real self-negating advocacy is taking a straightforward opinion 'states should focus more on national interests than profits or ideology' and trying to twist it into 'beware the Eternal Australian trying to manipulate you into... using your own state to advance national interests', as though this is a wise and useful revelation.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
There are times when fighting against the odds is wise and times where it is unwise. Let's examine the death toll for WW2 amongst various powers:
Denmark lost 0.16% of its population, barely a scratch. Surrendering quickly to Germany served them well. The US lost 0.3%. The UK, Belgium, France and Italy suffered around 1%. Czechoslovakia suffered around 2-3%, mostly Holocaust deaths as opposed to military deaths. Romania - 3%. Japan 3-4%. Hungary, 5-9% (a large number of Holocaust deaths plus they did a fair bit of fighting, like Romania).
Yugoslavia, 6-10%. Germany, 8%. Greece, 7-11%. The Soviet Union: 14%. But by far the hardest hit was Poland at 17%. Of course, all these countries faced widely different threats, some were luckier in their position than others, some took on much greater challenges.
However, nobody lost more than the Poles in WW2, nobody left that war in a worse position than Poland. Germany was partitioned but at least some got to escape communism. The Poles ended up being pushed westward, losing a fair few cities and enormous numbers of people. And they had to suffer another 45 years of communism.
Polish late interwar leaders faced a clear and unpleasant choice - Germany or Russia. They chose neither and got demolished by both. This was a terrible decision. Moral principles dealt them a crushing blow that the country has scarcely recovered from today. How many millions of people is standing up for freedom and independence worth? My country escaped lightly with 0.58%, yet 0.58% is still an enormous death toll! That was 60 COVIDs for us, targeting the young rather than the old. We in the Anglosphere suffered very little in the last 200 years, we were nearly always the strongest and won the most important wars. Yet we have a vast apparatus of war memorials and reverence for those sacrificed in war. Can we even imagine the sacrifices that others have made?
I have more sympathy for the Czech leaders who escaped total disaster than the Poles who plunged their country into catastrophe. Sometimes surrendering is the best course of action. We can only imagine the internal feelings of those who proudly chose death before dishonour, only to receive double portions of both.
Respect for agreements, obligation and one's reputation are secondary to the core health of the nation.
Christianity isn't so much about 'things being true' but getting into a mindset where 'it doesn't matter if it's true or not, I believe it'. Christian theology is a complete mess because they go in with the answer in mind and then come up with justifications. They just make up all kinds of nonsense about 'free will' requiring everyone to suffer because of a snake and an apple. Or there being a great plan that requires Christians to suffer and get wrecked by huge natural disasters beyond their ability to handle. Omnipotence and benevolence does not require there to be random earthquakes and tsunamis that destroy you, it's pure cope to think that there's a plan behind it all or that 'this is the best of all possible worlds'. Theologians have spent thousands if not millions of man-years justifying this stuff but still hard-lose to the Epicurean argument because there is no satisfactory answer.
OK, you can be perfectly happy as a Christian ignoring these abstract issues and have a decent life which is better than can be said for many modern ideologies. Thousands of years have been spent turning the silliness into metaphors and capitalizing on the strengths, rationalizing and streamlining the religion.
But all that is ironically enough built on a foundation of sand. Once people realize that the astronomy and history is all wrong, the philosophy is silly, the predictions are wrong, the blankslatism and universal equality of iron-age institution-building isn't so relevant given modern technologies and culture... they also move on from the good elements of Christianity, the prohibition on incest and the well-functioning family structures. The solution is not to return to Christianity but to move on and do the hard work of getting ideology that actually fits with reality. This is extremely difficult and dangerous work but necessary nonetheless.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
How is it more advantageous to fight the powerful and risk losing more?
If I'm being mugged, I can hand over my wallet or I can fight. If I fight I might get beaten up and still lose my wallet. If the mugger is some 150 kg, tattooed musclebound thug known for his huge gun collection (while I am unarmed and substantially smaller), then it's very likely I'll lose. Getting helpful advice and some second-hand brass knuckles from onlookers isn't likely to change the outcome. It's likely to end with me bleeding out, unconscious on the ground.
Nothing about what's happening should be surprising. It is very rare for small states to defeat big states in industrial wars where both sides are determined to win. Observe that the conclusion of the Winter War was Finland losing all the land that the Russians demanded and more. Size matters.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
I want naming and shaming. If you fail this badly, there need to be very serious consequences for you personally. Fines, public humiliation, prison sentence, corporal punishment... Otherwise why would anyone bother doing things correctly in future?
What if a selection of Crowdstrike executives, coders and management had to have 'moron' tattooed on their foreheads?
I think political solutions can encourage personal/political virtue. Imagine a really intense anti-corruption campaign, where high ranking people were actually given long prison sentences or executed for corruption? Wouldn't that work on the simple, clear level of 'cant commit crime if dead'? China has become less corrupt since the mid 2000s after pursuing this approach.
How does a culture become virtuous in the first place if not severe punishment crushing the bad elements? If the bottom-up anti-corruption from virtue angle isn't working, then one may as well try top-down. In the US this kind of approach is complicated because there are certain groups that are innately clannish and corrupt or so inclined in that direction that it's nigh-impossible to correct. I don't know why anyone expects West Africans to perform well in anything. You can look at West Africans in West Africa and uniformly it's a mess, regardless of history or laws (Liberia stands out here). You can look at West Africans in Haiti - standard West African demographics and outcomes but in the Western Hemisphere instead. And you can look at West Africans with a non-trivial amount of white admixture in the US, plus a constant inflow of white money - much less of a mess but still a mess. Certain parts of Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, even areas of Washington DC... these are not places one wants to be!
If you don't want a bloated, grossly inefficient, corrupt government, don't let them have any political power.
I think they found way to use their compute much more efficiently somehow, that's the key secret that they're not open-sourcing. Deepseek models are insanely cheap to run compared to Western models. If they're cheap to run, it follows that they're probably cheap to train.
Just look at openrouter: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-r1
Deepseek as a provider is by far the cheapest and fastest with modest but totally usable context length and output limits. The Americans serving this (with potentially superior GPUs) are completely shitting the bed, half their responses just stall in the chain of reasoning and don't get anywhere, despite them being 10x more expensive. They clearly have no idea how to run this model, which is reasonable since it's deepseek's baby. But Americans can all run American models just fine at the exact same price. Claude on google or amazon costs exactly the same. I think in addition to the advantage of knowing how to use their model they have some secret insight into how to use compute efficiently.
On the other hand, US export restrictions just don't work. Russian oil is still being sold, it just goes in circuitous routes through India to reach Europe. Russian imports of luxury vehicles from Europe still happen, it just goes through Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan.
China still buys H100s. They have money. Nvidia wants money. Middlemen want money. World markets go brrr. Deepseek is surely capable of rustling up a big cluster, or the Chinese state could give them access to one. Or they could borrow some via the cloud. Export controls work on big rare things monopolized by governments like H-bombs and fighter jets (and maybe semiconductor equipment which needs manufacturer support), not finished products that are produced en masse.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
I've said before that the 95th percentile human being has a lot more in common intellectually with a 10th percentile human being
Really? How many 10th percentile people do you meet?
The 10th percentile are the ones breaking into bald men's heads looking for gold or deflowering virgins to cure their AIDS. Or they star in the genre of youtube videos exposing how stupid and ignorant American university students are: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AkIUqH498PQ
The more cerebral of this cohort might subscribe to conspiracy theories about how the earth is flat, how everything is actually naval law and most countries are secretly enrolled as corporations in Delaware... They still cannot string a sentence together though, nor can they spell.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
If Nate put his money where his mouth was, he'd have lost $100,000. He talks the talk (after it's decided) but doesn't walk the walk when it actually means anything.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
Productivity is the source of wealth. What happens when we, individual human beings without exceptional skills (and eventually them too), are no longer productive in any job? It's going to happen sooner or later, likely sooner.
When we are no longer productive, all we have are legal/moral claims to wealth that is fundamentally controlled by others. That's a precarious position to be in!
Competing states are absolutely advantaged by higher productivity but you and I aren't states or economies or large firms.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
AIs in science fiction are not superintelligent. If it's possible for a human to find flaws in their strategies, then they are not qualitatively smarter than the best of humanity.
You're never going to beat Stockfish at Chess by yourself, it just won't happen. Your loss is assured. It's the same with a superintelligence, if you find yourself competing against one then you've already lost - unless you have near-peer intelligences and great resources on your side.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5mo ago
I'm pretty sure that's not how it works, since almost anything to do with timeless decision theory is basically incomprehensible and could never be dumbed down into something as concrete as stabbing your landlord with a sword. If you're killing someone in the name of Wittgenstein or Derrida, you're doing something wrong (on several levels). Maoism on the other hand smiles upon executing landlords.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
respectful way to tiptoe around the conversation over whether Jews control the American government
You've got rather significant US leaders like Donald Trump going out and saying, publicly “The biggest change I’ve seen in Congress is Israel literally owned Congress — you understand that — 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And it was so powerful. It was so powerful. And today it’s almost the opposite,” Trump said.
“And we’re not talking about over a very long period of time, but I think you know exactly what I’m saying. They had such power, Israel had such power — and rightfully — over Congress, and now it doesn’t. It’s incredible, actually,” Trump claimed.
And what about Jewish representation in the Biden administration? Here's a handy source about it: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jews-in-the-biden-administration
The Secretary of State, Attorney-General, Secretary of Homeland Security, Director of National Intelligence, SEC chairman, Secretary of Treasury, both WH chiefs of staff and much else besides, all were Jewish. The President wasn't even mentally there most of the time. I'd challenge that as a matter of fact, the US government was run by Jews during that period. Who else was controlling it if not these people?
Right now Trump is going on and on about how much he loves Netanyahu. He has many Jewish advisors and seems to think that Israel was or ought to run the US Congress, though it's always hard to understand what Trump thinks or means. Would this not have some kind of influence on his Middle East policy, where Israel is located?
But you not only don't want to talk about it but don't even want other people to talk about it?
Should we not be capable of talking about Saudi influence in America? Or Russian influence in America? Or Qatari influence? Those are worthy topics of discussion. If someone wants to make a post about it then they should go ahead. I was always really bored with all the Russia stuff, it got into an arcane lore of who made which dossier when paid for by who... But it's eminently appropriate for discussion.
Turok was being banned for being overtly aggressive and obnoxiously creating imaginary narratives like "The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."
That's not what the 'woke right' thinks and he surely knows it. He need only check the MAGA rhetoric from Trump about good factory jobs, or the rhetoric from the right about the need to mechanize dull fruitpicking jobs and raise productivity. Why, they say, should millions of people be brought into the country if AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs? Or the need to have American wealth kept in America rather than sent off in remittances. Or them hating H1Bs as cost-cutting that interferes with developing talent. Or them not seeing the country as purely an economic zone but having responsibility to native citizens. It's an insanely uncharitable and aggressive butchering of other people's ideology.
There's more to 'leftism' (an incredibly broad, nebulous term) than 'uhhh i'm gay and retarded and want free stuff, now give it to me before I torch your country out of resentment for my genetic superiors - I'm still going to torch your country though no matter what you do'. Just making that argument, even in a verbose way, should be deserving of a ban. It's obviously antagonistic and obnoxious.
They were vastly inferior at warfighting, prevailing through sheer size and resources alone.
Germany wiped the floor with Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France singlehandedly. Germany had no oil, no rubber, no tungsten, poor reserves of iron and aluminium, only coal in large quantities. They barely had a navy and only established their air force 4 and a half years prior but put Britain on the ropes nonetheless.
If you look at a map of the powers involved in WW2, you see the sheer scale of allied ineptitude. How can you possibly struggle for so long and take serious defeats when this is the balance of the powers involved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_participants_in_World_War_II.svg
It required the primary efforts of three huge countries (one of them fiercely autocratic) to beat Germany. Without the Soviet Union in the war, it's hard to see how Germany could lose in Europe. Likewise with any of the Big Three. Somehow this relatively small country was by far the strongest power in the world, stronger than the next two combined!
And this is despite Messerschmitt being a complete clownshow in procurement and project management, despite German intelligence being horrendous the whole war, despite having their codes cracked, despite not mobilizing fully until 1943, despite bizarre Fuhrer-prinzip orders...
Liberalism is just that bad. After the war, it then took 50 years to overcome the Soviet Union. The Anglo-American liberal alliance had secured all the wealthy, industrialized parts of the world: Western Europe and Japan. The Soviets suffered 27 million dead and conquered the poor parts of Eastern Europe. Their economic system was totally broken. But thanks to liberalism, it was a remotely even struggle. The Soviet puppet government in Afghanistan outlasted Soviet withdrawal, it even outlasted the Soviet Union by a small margin. A liberal puppet government in Afghanistan disintegrated before the withdrawal was even completed.
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