RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
If US intelligence was most focused on strengthening America's stability, wouldn't they try to shore up American identity? Wouldn't they want colorblind patriotism, the supporting the troops ethos? You want to smooth over divisions, you don't want to create even controlled conflicts. You'd try to subvert and suppress dangerous groups of course but you wouldn't try to suppress the majority's white identity, you try to annex it into American identity.
Look at what Russia does. Rally around the flag, enemies all around us, we're all Russians regardless of race/creed, sacred duty to the motherland... They suppress the liberal/trans/separatist minority rather than the majority.
Here's an interesting article that perhaps deserves a post of its own. There are many things to say about it ("Gorbachev and Yeltsin ruined ice cream, the cowards.") but you get the sense that the state machinery is trying to keep the country together, promoting unity rather than division: https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/behind-the-new-iron-curtain/
That's not what the US is doing. They're playing the patronage/suppression game, not the national unity game. 'We need more blacks in the Air Force, quotas everywhere, need to fight white supremacy and racism'. Those Stand Down days in the US military to counter extremism, internal conflict over things like migration and national identity.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Non-Han minorities get certain privileges but if they step out of line they'll be in a world of pain. Imagine if a minority group in China pulled an LA riot or a Floyd in response to police brutality, let alone a CHAZ. They'd be whisked away, never to be seen again. The police would launch an orgy of repression and re-education. China is super into historical grievance narratives, patriotism and Chinese nationalism (as opposed to Han nationalism or multiculturalism). The only times they're allowed to riot is when there's some incident with the US, the Belgrade embassy bombing for instance. Then they have the police put the kid gloves on and subtly stoke the fires, while trying to keep things under control.
Imagine if the top earning film at the US box office was 'Saving Private Ryan' turned up to 11 with an ending caption saying 'the eternal glory of the US Army shall be remembered forever and ever, the brave martyrs live forever in our hearts'. That's the Battle at Lake Changjin, that's real, intense nationalism. The top grossing film in America is Star Wars VII, a woke remaster of the original Star Wars.
If Central Asians desecrate Russian symbols, they and their families are expelled. Russia takes national pride very seriously, to a quasi-religious level. There's a lot of intense patriotism and nationalism, people (Strelkov and co) who'll go volunteer to start a tough war in support of their national beliefs.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-uzbek-boys-expelled-eternal-flame/32726911.html
Russia and China - civic nationalism. USA and West - multiculturalism and wokeness.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
China is indeed doing things to minorities that American leftists could never dream of. Even allowing for US propaganda, they are not very tolerant.
In addition to the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs in state-sponsored camps, government policies have included forced labor,[5][6] suppression of Uyghur religious practices,[7] political indoctrination,[8] forced sterilization,[9] forced contraception,[10][11] and forced abortion.[12][13] Experts estimate that, since 2017, some sixteen thousand mosques have been razed or damaged,[2] and hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools.[14][15] Chinese government statistics reported that from 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the mostly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar fell by more than 60%.[9] In the same period, the birth rate of the whole country decreased by 9.69%.
Or consider what they've done in Tibet. That is not woke behaviour! They offer the carrot and the stick - if your ethnic group doesn't do what they want, they'll ensure you regret it. You had better be Chinese first, second and third, Tibetan fourth. It's very different to wokeness which is all carrot and no stick, for minorities at least. Wokeness undermines and reinterprets what it means to be American, Christopher Columbus Day or Thanksgiving are 'controversial'. It's thoroughly different to Chinese nationalism.
I'm not saying it's great to be super-nationalist like China but a certain level of nationalism is preferable for stability in a time of uncertainty.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Anti-colonialism.
If you look at Irish history, they had settlement and land expropriation from their stronger, religiously distinct, ultra-Western neighbour. They had vicious and protracted wars with Britain, insurgency, atrocities and terrorism.
It's quite similar to Palestine v Israel. More Western vs less Western, stronger vs weaker, religious conflict, land confiscation. Britain has been closely aligned with Israel since Suez.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
In Australia we just expelled a Chinese student for working on linking drones together to navigate through environments without GPS, since it was apparently 'WMD-related'. You should tread carefully, a lot of people are getting very excited/scared about drone navigation and targeting.
Honestly they're not wrong, I'm waiting for the moment 10,000 kill bots swarm out of a shipping container somewhere, they'll make 9/11 look like a joke.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
There could be complex cyclical trends in the Middle East. People get overly domesticated and decadent, then the next wave of steppe nomads arrive and conquer them, infusing more aggression and willingness to die. Effete intellectuals in Baghdad hit hardest by latest horde (or any disruptions really), ignorant peasants in the countryside are valued taxpayers and food suppliers. Cities were likely IQ shredders for millennia, you'd have plague and urban fertility reduction burning off natural enhancements in intellect, perhaps there was a delicate homeostasis, periods of rise and fall.
There's good reason why people dismiss HBD as explaining too much, just storytelling. But this is the social sciences. Few things are simple, there are all kinds of factors we can't measure.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
BMWF couples are well over-represented
I recall a far-right talking point 'black on white rape 20,000, white on black rape 0'.
This link goes into detail on that and provides a fair few charts that show black women are generally considered unattractive: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/02/white-on-black-vs-black-on-white-rape-statistics/
Personally I don't know why we'd need charts to show that black women are unattractive but they're there! The OkCupid and reply rate data is pretty clear, if gut instinct wasn't enough.
Kierkegaard also argues that black women who date white men are smarter than white women who date black men, which also makes sense. https://twitter.com/wayotworld/status/1789038821981495741/photo/1
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Yes, there's a whole twitter account of commercials that go out of their way to make white men look like fools: https://twitter.com/StupidWhiteAds
https://twitter.com/StupidWhiteAds/status/1781491226354585957
"Why yes, we at Doritos imagine our customers as impulsive white manchildren who are treated with contempt by their despairing (white) girlfriends"
Even Joe Biden is talking about it:
“I challenge you: Find today, when you turn on the stations, sit on one station for two hours. And I don’t know how many commercials you’ll see, eight to five, two to three out of five have mixed-race couples in them. That’s not by accident. They’re selling soap, man,” Biden said to a laughing crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “Not a joke,” he added.
There's more at the below link. Sure, sometimes they're reaching for anti-white animus where there is none. But there's certainly something happening in the Netflix 'viewshaming' ad, you'd have to be pretty dumb to mix the subtext. Or the British anti-grooming film that was rejected because it dared feature a South Asian man grooming a white girl, it needed to be replaced with a white teen grooming other whites (and one African-Carribbean girl).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Yes, Kierkegaard mentions that asterisk and notes that it doesn't significantly change the conclusions one should draw. It's rather hard to get a high sample size for white on black rape if it doesn't exist.
I think you meant rape is largely intraracial, which it is.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
How about King Charles's mildly satanic painting?
I don't know why you'd make yourself look like you're bathed in blood or wreathed in unholy flame. Rand Al Thor can pull it off but he is the Dragon Reborn, greatest hero of two ages. When King Charles takes a cursed sa'angreal sword from an ancient fortress and faces down the forces of darkness, then he can appropriate fantasy hero aesthetics for official portraits.
I've argued in the past that there is a certain malign or subversive element in some elite art, consider people like Cleon Peterson or the Pope's rather unusual looking sculpture. Apparently that has all this special Christian symbolism - I would've thought that a cross would be more appropriate but what do I know?
There's also this (somewhat nsfw?) painting of a child getting throatfucked which somebody vandalized, much to the displeasure of Macron: https://x.com/Censor__This/status/1658938149844791300/photo/1
I could add in the CIA plot to spread abstract and modern art, though it's only relevant in the broader sense that art is political and related to politics. I don't have much of a thesis aside from 'a lot of modern art is quite disturbing and indicative of cultural trends towards shock value and dubious tolerance'. There's a time and a place for everything and sometimes that place is sites like bestgore, liveleaks or the artistic equivalent of AO3 rather than art galleries, in my mind.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
Isn't it whites that created the desirable accommodation and the jobs? The entire industries in question? The institutions that allow economic prosperity?
You're complaining that the people who developed the world economy, implemented free trade and organized mass migration aren't getting out of the way quickly enough, so you can reap more spoils from a presumably highly paid software job?
I have to admire your straightforwardness and consistency in this position.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
Fact check "Young white men vote Trump": Mostly True
"For example, young White men supported President Trump by 6 points (51% vs 45%)"
https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/election-week-2020#the-views-of-young-trump-voters
Though you're also correct in that young people vote Democrat and that young white men don't overwhelmingly vote Republican: Young White voters preferred Biden by 6 points (51% vs. 45%).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees
They've been telling their employees NOT to interfere with robbers, this isn't a matter of penny-pinching. Plug 'employee fired for obstructing theft in store' into your search engine.
Nor does law enforcement care to crack down on basics like robberies, car theft, vagrants, drug dealing and so on (unless of course Xi Xingping is coming to town). See the open air drug markets in US cities, or how some US train stations are used for enjoying narcotics rather than travelling by train: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-the-deadly-use-of-drugs-on-metro-trains
It's not just corporations, it's a breakdown in society generally. The corporations don't want theft of their products but they're clearly more afraid of inconveniencing criminals, just like every other institution.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
US leadership has been behaving somewhat hysterically with this latest war, they've been going around threatening the ICC with the gravest consequences if they dare charge Netanyahu:
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000018f-4e0e-d759-a9ff-ff4ee9420000
Issuing arrest warrants for the leaders of Israel would not only be unjustified, it would expose your organization’s hypocrisy and double standards. Your office has not issued arrest warrants for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or any other Iranian official, Syrian President Bashar al Assad or any other Syrian official, or Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh or any other Hamas official. Nor have you issued an arrest warrant for the genocidal General Secretary of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, or any other Chinese official.
Finally, neither Israel nor the United States are members of the ICC and are therefore outside of your organization’s supposed jurisdiction. If you issue a warrant for the arrest of the Israeli leadership, we will interpret this not only as a threat to Israel’s sovereignty but to the sovereignty of the United States. Our country demonstrated in the American Service-Members' Protection Act [also known as the Hague Invasion Act] the lengths to which we will go to protect that sovereignty.
The United States will not tolerate politicized attacks by the ICC on our allies. Target Israel and we will target you. If you move forward with the measures indicated in the report, we will move to end all American support for the ICC, sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States. You have been warned.
How exactly a threat to Israel could be a threat to the sovereignty of the USA is hard to comprehend, though it does explain the stance of the Republican Party.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
It does rather undermine international law if America cheers and applauds when the ICC issues arrest warrants for non members in Russia and calls for arrests against non-members China and Iran, while threatening sanctions and force should Israelis or Americans be targeted. Then they complain about double standards!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
You could short Ukrainian bonds perhaps? I don't know how to do that though, seems like Advanced Finance. Blackrock also has a 'Ukraine development fund' for post-war rebuilding, though that's a very small part of their operations.
The big problem is that this whole area is dominated by nation-state actors who can shut down trading and act as they please. Blackrock is almost a state actor, they're so big. I'm sure opportunities for profiting exist but they're mostly taken by people who can steal from govt contracts (the guys who get paid to laid down Dragon's Teeth, dump them in a pile and say 'job's done').
There are normal markets where you expect things to change quickly based on new information and then there are Special Economic Operations. Lockheed Martin didn't make such big moves as the war began. It went from 350 to about 440 in late '21 to 22 and it's stuck in that range since, decent but not great. Microsoft did better as a longer-term investment, over roughly the same period. BAE has done much better though, I don't know why. You might well think 'defeat in Ukraine will prompt higher militarization in the West' but the US and the West aren't actually militarizing, not since the war began. Munitions production remains pretty low. The US has been roughly treading water in defence spending after you adjust for inflation. These markets don't make sense and you should tread carefully.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
I can't help but see such "inclusion" as actually being rather alienating to women
I recall some of the dehumanizing language they used for women:
https://www.jostrust.org.uk/professionals/health-professionals/nurse-gp/trans-non-binary/language
Bonus hole – An alternative word for the vagina preferred by some trans men and/or non-binary people with a cervix. It is important to check which words someone would prefer to use.
There's also 'birthing persons' for to denote what would otherwise (problematically) be called real women.
Inclusion can mean throwing these novel terms at people, getting everyone to announce their pronouns even though there aren't any trans people there. Creating new words puts people on the back foot, amateurs/students who don't know the technical jargon. It gets people to low-level signal their conformity and acceptance of the party line, mostly out of not wanting to be rude.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Bizarre stuff, though it is eye-opening.
Are these women incapable of picking (understandably less attractive) simp/soyboy/nerdy men (perjorative terms used to denote an archetype succinctly) who would be flattered by any female attention and very likely take it slowly with sex? No, they have to go after the fratty chad/dudebros who all want to have anal sex and constantly pressure them. Who even wants to have anal sex with women? There's a hole specifically designed for penis, free of feces and it's right there!
The author's career as an onlyfans star shows that she knows that there are a bunch of unassertive and unthreatening men who are very interested in relationships with women, men she plans to exploit financially! A 7 goes for 9s and 10s and is shocked to discover the 10 has more options and is less likely to settle, what a cruel world... Only this 7 is busy doing the exact same thing to 5s and 4s on a ruthless, depersonalized, industrial scale.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
presidential micromanagement to not completely fuck up raises some extremely serious questions about the competence and professionalism of our military brass
Have you seen the Afghanistan papers? Or even Hanania's thread on the Afghanistan papers? The whole war was a massive farce, absolutely staggering waste and corruption. Soldiers on the ground knew this, they were grinding their teeth at our Afghan 'allies' raping children in the barracks. The Soviet Union had all kinds of problems but their puppet state had 1000x the integrity of our puppet state, theirs actually outlasted the Soviet Union, ours disintegrated before we even finished leaving.
It was barely even a war, there was no goal behind it. The revolving door of commanders (16 commanders of ISAF in about 12 years) had no idea what they were supposed to do. One guy arrived and went 'well, I may as well try and raise Afghanistan a few places on child mortality indices'. We were fighting a war based on vibes like being democratic and humanitarian, on looking good in the media.
Armies are tasked with achieving political goals, not implementing vibes. It's not as though Johnny Taliban was better trained or equipped - Coalition forces won all the firefights, they had all the firepower. The political front was even more lopsided, in the opposite direction. Our people had no idea what the goal was, they pointlessly shovelled money into the hands of the worst people on earth without any kind of coherent plan. They were given a budget and told to spend it. This made war profitable for the enemy (which became everyone who wanted our money) - blow up a bridge so you're paid to provide security and get the contract to rebuild it!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Women are looking for a good-looking, confident but humble, respectful and unconditionally loving confidant who earns more than them...
Men are looking for a harem of sweet, nubile girls who'll provide stress-free sex on tap. Or perhaps a nice, pretty, forever-loyal tradwife who'll stay at home and raise children.
Nobody is going to get what they want unless they're very lucky or high-value. There are trade-offs. The tradwife probably isn't going to be that good looking. The harem girls are probably most interested in your wealth. The good-looking men are hard to lock down. The 'nice guys' aren't so attractive, physically or socially.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Wikipedia is full of Ukrainian partisans. They waited about 6-9 months after Ukraine lost Bakhmut to declare it a victory for Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Battle_of_Bakhmut/Archive_5#Result
The ISW put out a report (written by two Ukrainians and a neocon) saying that Russia's only chance of victory was its efforts to manipulate our perceptions of Ukraine and that we can and should mobilize our economic resources to win Ukraine the war. They cite a nominal GDP graph to back up this point. This is pretty dubious - despite a high GDP the West apparently lacks the industrial power needed to compete with Russia in munitions production. A lot of our GDP is in services, finance and real estate, not heavy industry.
Furthermore, Russia has thousands of tactical nukes. The US seriously considered using nuclear weapons in Korea and Vietnam, peripheral wars with fairly low stakes. Why should we assume that Russia would not go nuclear in a much more serious conflict in its core area of interest, should it seem that they were on the back foot?
Besides the contested logic of the matter, it's pretty perverse for two Ukrainians to be writing an article decrying Russian propaganda narratives and psy-ops while asking for unconditional, near-blind faith in Ukraine.
https://x.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1772941705903313328
I don't know about the other sources but I recommend serious caution on wikipedia and ISW. This is a hard war for anyone to be objective on.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
RAND reports (rather than commentary) are decent, they're long form ebook analytical things rather than short-term news. I'm most interested in the big picture rather than little villages being captured or recaptured. Mariupol, Kherson, those are important places that well-educated people can point to on a zoomed-out map. Who'd ever heard of Bakhmut before the war? Let alone all those other places where people are talking about the salt mine or the slag pit...
https://www.rand.org/pubs.html?q=ukraine+war&content_type_s=Report&rows=24
I think Mearsheimer was also a good thinker generally, he predicted this whole war back in 2014, that Russia would move to wreck Ukraine but lacked the strength to conquer the whole country. Mearsheimer is a very high level thinker, I don't think he knows or cares about the little towns on the map either and his writing does lack the ground level detail you may be looking for. However, I think he's useful because he gets things right. He was also one of the original opponents of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, putting him head and shoulders above much of the West's top brass: https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/the-darkness-ahead-where-the-ukraine
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Mearsheimer's argument is not complex:
- Russia has more manpower
- Russia has more firepower
- Therefore Russia will win an attritional conflict in Ukraine
Unlike 'experts' like General Petraeus or Ben Hodges, Mearsheimer actually gets things right. Back in mid-2023 when he wrote that article everyone was hyping the Ukrainian counteroffensive, it promptly sank like a stone because they lacked the mass and firepower to beat the Russians. The war has continued according to Mearsheimer's prognosis. There's no magic trick to achieve victory, you just need mass and firepower. The Russians have it, the Ukrainians have much less. By the way, in 2014 he wrote that while Russia wasn't eager to get immersed in Ukraine and they lacked the power to easily conquer the country. However, Russia would devastate and wreck Ukraine if we continued leading them down the primrose path: https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf
Lo and behold, he's been proven totally correct on Russian capabilities (they certainly haven't easily conquered the country) and on causal logic, if we keep immersing ourselves in Ukraine Russia will have a very bad reaction and wreck the country.
Imagine calling these guys ridiculous retards with severely lacking analysis and then watching as they're proven right for making the most obvious, straightforward arguments imaginable.
And why should we nuke China's island bases? Our strategy is clearly defensive, it's far easier to present the war to third parties and voters as defensive if we're not the ones attacking. A nuclear first strike against essentially peripheral targets is certainly an interesting proposal, however I'm not quite sure it advances our position.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
advocating for nuclear proliferation to the Germans and Japanese
The US already had nuclear weapons based in Germany and Japan in the Cold War and still has them based in Turkey. Nuclearization isn't a major change like NATO expansion eastwards towards Georgia and Ukraine, it only alters deterrence logic for those countries themselves. A nuclear Japan could be useful in countering China (another area where Mearsheimer was a decade or so ahead of the curve). Anyway, nuclear threat from Japan and Germany is less than from Turkey and far less than from Ukraine or the Baltics.
The war's progression defied multiple of Mearsheimer's prognosis, starting from whether it would start, to how it would last.
Mearsheimer did not say that a Russo-Ukrainian war wouldn't start, he described the conditions under which it would start if US/NATO foreign policy wasn't changed. He described the limitations of Russian power and the difficulties of occupying a whole country. He says that Russia will withstand considerable pain to pursue its security (this was before sanction-proofing) and that it will devastate Ukraine if the West doesn't change its policy, that logically implies war. Where did he say that Russia wouldn't go to war with Ukraine?
He even foresaw the war back in 1992, advocating that Ukraine should acquire nuclear weapons since the West was hardly likely to extend nuclear deterrence to Ukraine. He raises Crimea, mixed populations and nationalism on either side, control of the Black Sea Fleet, the fact that the Russians are always going to be stronger conventionally, historical antipathy... all factors we're dealing with decades later! He thought the Ukrainians would be less willing to bow to US pressure than they were, yet surely his predictive value is high.
Meanwhile, what have all the talented NATO Ukraine hands and generals gotten us? Hodges seemed to think the Ukrainian counteroffensive was a great idea and would succeed, despite being a telegraphed attack into a fortified and well-prepared enemy who has air superiority. Petraeus was in the same camp! What were they thinking?
https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-breakthrough-could-come-weeks-former-us-general-says-1823389
And then there's the whole 'Putin's Russia is so weak that we can head them off by giving Ukraine more arms but so strong that he'll invade NATO if he wins' camp that is so well-represented in think tanks and media output, especially ISW. Which is it?
I maintain that Mearsheimer has been far more useful on the course of this war than the credentialed experts who seem to be hyping Ukraine.
nationality
Australian, we do show up for even the silliest US wars and will presumably be called in against China. What is the point of AUKUS if not to tie our fates together?
Supreme Commander Forged Alliance feels pretty big by RTS standards (it invented strategic zoom), you routinely field armies with hundreds of individual units and a bunch of superweapons. It is basically a full-scale war - land, air and sea. Micro is still important but macro is much more important.
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