RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
Is it really so hard to not brag about your crypto wealth online? That's literally all you need to do to prevent this scenario. It's not like people can tell, it's not like expensive jewellery or art.
Alternately you could leave America and live in a civilized country where armed robbers won't come and threaten your kneecaps if you don't hand over your crypto. The way of civilization is not to have your choices be governed by the whims of violent, anti-social thugs. We are the ones who are supposed to be enforcing our will on them.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
The Arabs get angry with us when we provide aid to Israel, just like the Israelis get angry with Iran when Iran aids Hamas/Hezbollah. It makes it much harder to work with Arab governments and it angers Arabs, who can do us harm.
Why did Osama Bin Laden hate the West? In large part he resented that we were helping Israel dominate Palestine.
According to Michael Scheuer, who directed the CIA's intelligence unit on al Qaeda and its founder, the young bin Laden was for the most part gentle and well behaved, but "an exception to Osama's well-mannered, nonconfrontational demeanor was his support for the Palestinians and negative attitude towards the United States and Israel." After September 11, bin Laden's mother told an interviewer that "in his teenage years he was the same nice kid . . . but he was more concerned, sad, and frustrated about the situation in Palestine in particular, and the Arab and Muslim world in general.
Bin Laden also condemned the United States on several occasions prior to September 11 for its support of Israel against the Palestinians and called for jihad against America on this basis. According to Benjamin and Simon, the "most prominent grievance" in bin Laden's 1996 fatwa (titled "Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places") is "bin Laden's hallmark: the 'Zionist-Crusader alliance.'" Bin Laden refers explicitly to Muslim blood being spilled "in Palestine and Iraq" and blames it all on the "American-Israeli conspiracy."
Bin Laden replied, "We declared jihad against the US government, because the US government is unjust, criminal, and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal, whether directly or through its support of the Israeli occupation of the Land of the Prophet's Night Journey [Palestine]. And we believe the US is directly responsible for those who were killed in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq."
In the first meeting between Atta, the mission leader, and bin Laden in late 1999, the initial plans called for hitting the U.S. Capitol because it was "the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel.
I have no interest in an Israel-Palestine solution, just like I don't know or care about who should govern South Sudan, Somalia or Myanmar. Let them handle their own affairs. What I want is for the West not to be attached to this dead weight that causes us problems in so many fields. Wouldn't it be great if we enjoyed the support of the Middle Eastern public, or at least got along with them like China does?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Life expectancy is inevitably going to plateau at least until LEV.
Why should it plateau until it goes up? Nobody expects an economic plateau before the singularity.
In the developed world, good-tasting food is cheaper
Couldn't people exercise a little self-control and buy quality nutritious food as opposed to artificial slop? I won't demand organic kale and non-GMO quinoa but what about bread, vegetables, fruit, fish, lamb... as opposed to high fructose corn syrup and mystery chemicals? The US is a rich country, it should be possible for its citizens to buy normal food as opposed to calorie-maxxing from low-quality food. Is there no money for education, no capacity to subsidize normal food, no technical capacity to distinguish between good and bad food?
If wealth naturally turns people into disgusting flesh piles dependent upon mobility scooters and diabetes medication then that sounds like an argument against wealth.
Murder rates had been falling since the 90s, prior to 2020
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Murder should've been falling consistently, not going up and down. Medicine gets better over time, more murders are turned into assaults. There's better forensics, more wealth. The US is an older country, so there are fewer young people to go around killing... and yet murder is still higher than it was in 1950 or 1960.
Worrying about whether or not there will be enough children in 50 or 100 years is like those people in 1900 who worried about the cities of the future being buried in horse manure
Yes, we may get massively transformative AI any day now. But it will be young people who make these technologies. We need young people.
For me this is an argument against fertility rather than an argument against female empowerment and education.
Well, you can argue against fertility. But those who reproduce will have the final word.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Sure - but then we go back to the original question you were responding to.
Who is the occupying power again? Not Egypt, Israel. Even the US state department admits this.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
They could've shown a mother mourning at her dead child and bombed house, they could've shown people laughing, crying and having mental breakdowns in an air raid shelter... There are enormous numbers of options available. That would've invoked the suffering of people being bombed without looking the way Picasso does.
Art can be aesthetically pleasing and still confronting. You can get pathos from paintings, that can elevate the human spirit. If you can't tell, I reject the notion that Picasso produced good art, know that I'm in the minority and don't care.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
Does the stereotypical CEO work hard? I don't doubt that small-business owners and startup CEOs work hard. But what about CEOs like the head of a big bank or an oil company, where there are profits semi-automatically coming in?
Mostly it seems to be the work of a king to me. The king doesn't work hard. But the king is the final authority, he makes decisions between war or peace, he deals with the Papacy, he arbitrates between feuding nobles, he directs that royal funds be spent on bridges or cathedrals, he creates institutions... All 'work smart' stuff rather than 'work hard' stuff. Nobody has the power to make him work hard because normally things are going well and he's the boss.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
Well it seems very unlikely that a 1910s Georgia judiciary would believe a black man accused of raping and murdering a white girl over a Jewish man unless the evidence swung in that direction.
Furthermore, the ADL is a very powerful organization and was founded on this particular case. The balance in terms of who is writing history (and whose history will get cited on wikipedia as the historical consensus) is rather one-sided.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
GDP is irrelevant, production is everything. US officials are openly declaring that they can't sustain the flow of supplies that's going to Ukraine. It will take at least 5 years just to have a chance of refilling reserves of key munitions like Javelins and Stingers.
The US might have a high GDP, based on financial trickery and service sector shenanigans but its actual military production capacity is pathetic. It's a bare shadow of what it was in 1994. 100 Stingers per year!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
Well genocide usually only happens in exceptional circumstances. Massive wars, radical governments that rise to power after economic collapse or defeat in war... The US isn't there yet. And consider how the US fought World War II, publicly outlining their plans for genocide against Germany (Morgenthau Plan and the associated demand for unconditional surrender) and partially implementing them.
Anyway, what about the whites who went around shooting up black churches? Or the blacks who went around killing whites? There's a broad foundation of racial hatred in the US, it's only that broad prosperity and stability suppresses it.
The people eat great food.
This is a bit much. America has a huge obesity problem because they stick all these chemicals in their food. While obesity is a better problem to have than malnutrition as in India, it's still a problem.
Australia is like a better version of California. American brands like Starbucks can't compete with our domestic, high-quality artisanal quality coffee. Our food doesn't have nearly as many chemicals in it and people aren't quite so fat. There's no weird tipping culture. Our medical system is better than the NHS (we poach a bunch of British doctors) and more cost-efficient than the US. We have good beaches. There aren't any open-air drug markets and barely any visible homeless (this was a big shock when I was in San Francisco). Public transport is used for transporting the public (even people who wear suits), as opposed to being a moneypit full of undesirables. Very low crime generally. Plus we have resource rents to subsidize the rest of our economy because our population/land value ratio is very generous. Our national debt is half that of the US and we had a surplus this year. Taxes are roughly equivalent to the US, well below European standards.
On the down side, there's a cancerous compulsory superannuation scheme that siphons off 9% (and rising) of worker income so big finance can squander it and charge fees on it. You can manage your own superannuation if you fill out a metric tonne of paperwork. Our technology sector isn't as advanced as the US, though we do pretty well in quantum computing and materials science. Wages are somewhat lower than the US, though property is fairly expensive (likely due to how desirable this country is). People don't work as hard as in the US either, so it's somewhat balanced. No guns and a mildly more authoritarian government. It gets quite hot in summer but we can afford air conditioning.
Broadly speaking, I'd put Australia just ahead of the US or UK, having been to all three.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
You can't invade Iran without controlling Iraq or some other land neighbour. Anyway, Israeli influence is all over the war, notwithstanding the many non-jews who also favoured it.
Israel provided faulty intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destructions. For the last 30 years they've been publicly claiming that Iran is a few months away from a nuclear bomb.
Netanyahu wrote an op-ed calling for regime change in Iran, Iraq and Syria (amongst others) in the Chicago Sun-Times, as did Ehud Barak in the Times. Sharon was in favour of the war, as Ha'aretz reported: '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.' Whatever skepticism there was in Israel was about the US stopping short and only invading Iraq as opposed to Iran as well.
And then there are the myriad high-ranking US officials who admit that Saddam was no threat to the US, only a threat against Israel. Zelikow, member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board admitted it. General Wesley Clark admitted that the supporters were truly worried about Saddam's nuclear threat to Israel not the US.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
The European half of NATO has a lot of weapons, a lot of troops, a lot of everything except tactical nukes. They spend far more than Russia on their military. There is no reason to feel threatened when you are very well armed at all levels short of nuclear war.
Someone can not be a threat in normal circumstances, yet be dangerous if antagonized. This is not a contradiction.
Ukraine is a dry run for the west’s response in case of such an emergency, and continuing support signalizes nato’s commitment to defend its members
Ukraine is not a member of NATO, it signals that the West is ready to support any anti-Russian country next to Russia. If you're worried about little green men in Estonia, why not base troops in Estonia? Or maybe you could encourage the Baltics to be more tolerant to its Russian-speaking minority? I would've thought expelling people who didn't have sufficient grasp of Latvian is a rather odd approach for an EU embracing multiculturalism and 3rd world immigration: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russians-take-language-test-avoid-expulsion-latvia-2023-05-08/
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
OK, let's ditch the average photos. I was looking for some kind of yardstick to measure from. That's clearly very difficult.
I think you have to be more than 'not overweight, non-white or slobby' to be attractive.
For example, take another real image, this time of the US's 1999 world cup soccer team. All but one of these women fulfills your triple criteria. Are they all attractive though? 9 is attractive IMO, followed by 11 and maybe 6. That's 2.5 or 3/11. The others aren't really attractive, though I'll concede that the camera angle isn't flattering.
My base assumption is that few 36 year old women will be attractive. Young people are more attractive than older people. Not everyone's going to get an attractive partner, that's life.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Does it matter whether Germany killed 3 million or 6 million Jews + another 6 million Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals and so on? Nobody particularly cares whether Soviet casualties in Stalingrad were 1M or 1.2M. For nearly all purposes, it is enough to say that they were very high.
So what if there was some kind of accounting error (or deliberate overestimates) and they revised figures at Auschwitz down? You can prove or disprove anything with statistics if you try hard enough, especially if it's 70 years ago and the fog of war is involved. I don't buy the 'because of the Holocaust Jews deserve unique privileges to never be called out for their disproportionate role in promoting harmful social trends with their outsized political, economic and media influence' line. You can see this in the Holocaust wikipedia page, which relegates the non-Jewish victims to 'other victims' when they make up about half the total. Poles, homosexuals and gypsies clearly do not have as much clout as Jews. And Bangladeshis have no clout at all, nobody's heard of their genocide in 1971. The notion that megadeaths buy you moral superiority points is ridiculous. Otherwise we'd never be able to say a bad word about Russia or China, yet we're clearly happy to do so.
But the Holocaust surely happened. There's definitely some reason that Jews hate Nazism so much! Even if they exaggerated it, a large-scale killing effort is a natural conclusion of Nazi ideology and is within their considerable capabilities.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
And you can't really explain why or how I feel like I am.
You think that thinking is an example of qualia. So you think that if you are thinking then you have qualia.
Say I thought that qualia and thinking were themselves included in remsajev. That doesn't make remsajev real. Things don't become real just by defining it such that it includes other things. Qualia isn't real either. There's no mystery at all, not of remsajev or qualia.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
It would be very amusing if the oh-so-harassed techbros finally get a position of overwhelming dominance over the problematizers: traditional media, finance, academia, politics and so on. Perhaps it wasn't such a good idea to make enemies of people with enormous unrealized power in terms of proximity to AI. Machiavelli said something like 'if you're going to offend and humiliate someone, make sure to totally cripple them so they can never get revenge'.
But on the other hand, wielding power is not something the tech sector is good at doing, systemically. Musk for example has a lot wealth but he struggles to leverage it to achieve his goals and also makes a lot of enemies.
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
First of all, support for Israel is certainly a topic of foreign policy worthy of discussion and debate, but it is not de facto "establishment of religion." Israel and Judaism may be closely coupled, but the U.S. has vested interests in Israel that go far beyond an affection for Jews. We aren't supporting Israel to support Judaism, any more than we are supporting Egypt to support Islam.
We aren't supporting Israel to support Judaism
He was arguing, in contrast to OP, that US support for Israel was for broader strategic reasons, not religious reasons.
I'm saying that US support for Egypt is to support Israel, which is motivated by religion. Thus US support for Egypt is due to religion, albeit not Egypt's religion.
The strategic reasons to support Israel don't merit the enormous amount of leeway and aid it recieves, compared to the amount of harm the alliance causes the US, as I said above.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Nuclear weapons haven't been a decisive factor in any war since the invention of nuclear weapons, including the only war in which nuclear weapons were used. They haven't even been key in mitigating western aid to Ukraine, let alone stopping multiple major and embarassing operational defeats that have rendered Ukraine a strategic disaster.
Nuclear weapons are like the sea to fish. They dominate the power structure wars are fought in, post-WW2 at least. There's a reason Libya and Iraq got hammered by the US but North Korea didn't. There's a reason no two nuclear powers have fought anything more than a few skirmishes, limiting the intensity of their wars. There's a reason the US and the other nuclear powers are so keen on nuclear non-proliferation. If nuclear weapons weren't decisive, they wouldn't care so much about them. If nuclear weapons weren't decisive, Russia wouldn't have dared to infringe upon NATO's interests in this war, since they have vast conventional superiority.
I suspect that the Yom Kippur war is the strongest example you have of nuclear weapons not helping defend a country. Yet when Israel threatened to use nukes, the US quickly moved to fly in huge quantities of military aid. They didn't care about the wrath of the Arabs causing hundreds of billions of damage to the US economy via oil prices. The superpowers put huge pressure on their clients to end the conflict in a stalemate before nukes could be used, they didn't let the conflict fester as in so many other wars. Nukes don't need to be used to be decisive in controlling the situation. If they were used, they would be even more powerful.
The Polish use for a tank army is less for if Putin attacks Poland, and more if Putin were to try and attack the Baltic states to Poland's immediate NE, were Poland would be the only realistic force beyond American immediate buildup able to interven in a Baltic scenario.
If Russia attacks, going for a fait accompli, why should the US end the war even if the Russians sweep through the Baltics in 48 hours? It makes the US look totally pathetic if they don't come in and retake that ground eventually. While I maintain that nuclear weapons are dominant, they favor defense over attack. Russia's nuclear threats to defend its army occupying the Baltic aren't as credible as NATO nuclear threats against Russian nuclear first use. Furthermore, Russia has only attacked non-NATO members in conflict with Russian minorities. Even if the Baltics get into a spat with their Russian minorities, they're still in NATO. It would be an incredibly risky and provocative move to attack the Baltics. It'd be a far more aggressive move than invading Ukraine.
Poland just needs to be part of the American alliance network and able to fly highly-valuable supplies in relatively short order in case of crisis, thus helping the higher priorities.
I'm afraid I still don't understand why Korea would care at all about such a niche scenario. They plan for some kind of highly-urgent crisis where the Koreans suddenly need more ammunition, so they fly it in from Poland? Why not just plan ahead and buy your own ammunition from your own companies before hand, store it in your own country and keep the airlift capacity for moving things you don't make like US forces or Patriot batteries? There certainly has been a syndrome where NATO countries don't bother to produce ammunition, Russia has been firing off entire years of US artillery production in weeks. But surely the simplest cure is just to produce munitions and spare parts for the weapons one designs, builds and operates!
What if the crisis strikes quickly and there's no time to airlift supplies from Poland, through hostile airspace, to South Korea? What if Poland needs its supplies because it also faces a crisis? What if South Korean defence industry needs some more cash? I agree that the Koreans want to open up markets but this is too far.
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
How is it bad that the Chinese are pulling off epic feats of engineering, creating a bigger high speed rail network than the rest of the world combined (and using their own companies to do so)? Being able to do mega-engineering is good actually - it compares very well to the American experience. A NYT article went viral the other day describing the French companies working in Cali who gave up and decided to move somewhere less politically dysfunctional - like North Africa.
I only link breitbart because the NYT is paywalled:
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Is it controversial that Bush was both stupid and evil?
President George W. Bush didn't even know of the existence of the Sunni and Shia sects in Iraq until 3 months before the invasion, after the decision had been made to attack and they were well into the war-justification phase. Only when they brought in an Iraqi dissident did he tell Bush about it. This is from Galbraith's book "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End". What kind of idiot doesn't read a brief summary of the country he's planning to invade? The whole war was conducted in an incredibly reckless and ill-planned way, with predictably catastrophic consequences for the region. Bush didn't know about the Shia majority in Iraq, how this would obviously give the Iranians a way to influence the country if he demolished the state apparatus.
Let's not forget the Axis of Evil speech where he threatened pre-emptive strikes against Iran and North Korea. Iran hated Saddam and the Taliban, Bush lumped them all together in the anti-US camp. He effectively told Iran 'make our Iraq experience as disastrous as possible or you're the next target'. North Korea nuclearized and went on to cause more headaches for Washington.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Surely the US shouldn't be attacking it's allies? You're arguing and I agree that the US is sabotaging Europe. They could have compromised with the Kremlin if it weren't for the US and UK sabotaging them, time and time again. France and Germany were always more Russophilic.
Furthermore, I don't think there is a cultural victory. If someone is sabotaging you, they're your enemy. Look what the US did to the UK in Suez and so on. So much for the special relationship and Anglo-Saxon solidarity.
The EU is pretty stupid, sluggish and incompetent (see their nuclear/regulatory fiasco). But they won't permanently let the US sabotage them. Maybe the coming recession will shake them out of their myopia. Maybe they're inwardly seething, hiding their hatred until the moment the US's back is turned. You have to get behind someone before you can stab them in the back. Unlike Britain, the EU is big and could theoretically compete with America, if they got their act together.
Sometimes I think this is all a simulation designed to imbue some kind of pathos. The bizarreness of it all seems unnatural, in a surreal kind of way.
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