RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
I'm kind of sympathetic to Sunshine, there's a tendency in certain parts of India to write ridiculous lies in quite poor English.
"Rafale is far superior to the J-20, the Chengdu fighter of China. Even though it’s believed to be a 5th generation fighter, it is probably at best a 3.5 generation aircraft. It's got a third generation engine as we have in the Sukhoi," said Air Marshal R Nambiar (retd) who flight tested the Rafale fighter jets for India.
The stealth characteristics of the J-20 are also under suspicion, say experts based on several analysis done by the Indian Air Force. The J-20 was hyped to be a highly stealthy aircraft and that it could conceal itself in operations and not be easily detected.
Experts say if the J-20 was the best, why would the Chinese go for the Russian Su35. But the Russian jets too might not be able to compete with the Rafale.
"Su35 is also no match to the Rafale with its weapons, superior sensors and fully integrated architecture. The capability to super cruise even with four missiles, stealth characteristics all put together make the Rafale far more potent than Su35," Nambiar added.
Firstly, these sentences look like they were written by a child. Extremely awkward structuring and poor grammar.
Secondly, the content is extremely silly. 3rd generation engine in the J-20? The Russian engines they were using at the time in the J-20 were 4th gen and they were introducing better Chinese engines. A 3.5 generation aircraft would be something like a late-model Phantom, around the end of Vietnam, it's like saying China is 50 years behind. The Air Marshal is a fool, there was considerable schadenfreude in some parts of military-aviation twitter when export-grade Chinese J-10s wrecked India's Rafales.
The biggest difference is that Rafale is an omni-role aircraft. It can carry out at least four missions in one sortie while the J-20 cannot carry out multiple missions is one go.
Basic spellchecking failures too. Is one go? This is from the most popular Indian newspaper apparently. I have no doubt that much Indian journalism is better than this but it's easy to see a qualitative gap.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Lab leak is the general consensus, despite great efforts from certain parts of the scientific community to bury it. "Scientists find that scientists (often them specifically) were not responsible" isn't credible at this point, not after a frankly staggering amount of active deception from those who claimed to speak for the scientific community: https://archive.md/8Fsv2#selection-5159.0-5163.1
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
It might be intellectually incoherent but it worked.
Obviously the modern context presents different challenges. Child mortality is not sky high anymore.
However, our society has huge coercive resources. Economically, citizens are coerced by powerful bureaucracies to fund all kinds of programs, wars, welfare. Socially, policing works via coercion. They don't just educate people on what to do, people are coerced by police wielding guns.
There's no reason to drop coercion entirely with regards to sexual relations when it's present in all other aspects of life. In fact there are extremely strong coercive systems set up for underage sex and other scenarios. One might very reasonably say that it's bizarre and inconsistent to have such harshness allocated for relatively minor problems while civilization-ending, nation-ending decline is met with a limp-wristed 'we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas, bring in more immigrants'. Imperial Japan tried coercion, they restricted female employment, banned abortion and taxed bachelors. There was modest fertility growth in an industrializing, urbanizing society albeit complicated by the war. In 1945 the US changed their constitution to give equal rights to women and Japanese fertility plummeted, never to recover.
https://x.com/SyroJaziran/status/1848973547344928887
This kind of coercion may not be the only solution but it is a solution. There could also be incentives-based solutions. Take the entire pension budget and transfer it to fund parents who raise children to certain standards. 10-15% of GDP should get things happening. But you'd have real political problems doing this, any sufficiently powerful incentive resembles coercion, it would require the same voter-proof political consensus that mass immigration enjoys in many Western countries. There'd need to be a huge, forceful redistribution of political power for this to happen, likewise with largescale cloning or any other effective solution.
What about the elephant in the room - personality?
Many young women are irritating and unpleasant. So are many men for that matter. I think this is a bigger problem than body-count, where the woman can simply lie. Or at best you can just ignore the body count in a way you can't do for personality. In so far as body-count matters, it's really about pair-bonding and personality.
Grok or O3 can't tell you whether women have a bad personality. We can't quantify this right now, though I'd be very eager to see the figures if we could. Anyway, it's age old wisdom that some women are just crazy and you don't stick your dick in crazy, let alone date one. Maths can't quantify personality yet it's a key criteria.
But if there's anything that the mathematics shows, it's that your point is real since we need only observe plummeting birth rates and a growing divide between the sexes. There's clearly a major social problem. Obviously there are exceptions. This is the most 'there are exceptions' kind of thing imaginable, it's individual human behaviour. But statistics can model this and the numbers are indisputable. It's no good saying 'just man up' when quite clearly that's not working as a solution. It can be a solution for an individual but it's not a solution to the problem because there's clearly some reason why everyone isn't already doing it, if it worked.
With the 'climate crisis' nobody says 'just have a cold shower'. That won't have any effect, it's a global industrial system that requires collective action to fix.
The fertility decline is a much bigger and more important issue. It's not going to be resolved by men looksmaxxing or grinding hard at work to self-improve. They do both a lot in South Korea to absolutely no avail. I highly, highly doubt anything non-coercive is going to work. There's a reason nearly all settled states had extremely coercive (by modern standards) treatment of women through most of history. That's a stable, high-fertility equilibrium.
I doubt we can even lower house prices non-coercively if you want to tackle fertility purely economically, without any cultural/social tools. People don't want their wealth taken away from them. It goes against the cherished principle of Universal Boomer Income where their assets must always rise in value.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
One of the first things I saw in a modern university was a lengthy 'do consent, don't be rapey, don't use words like bitch, also there's a wage gap between men and women plus a race wage gap (which inconveniently shows Asians are on top but we'll skip over that)' session. There was one guy who raised his hand and made an argument of it, saying men were more likely to do engineering and highly paid subjects which is why they earn more money.
But there was visceral, audible groaning from the audience at this display, about the only interesting thing that happened. The presenters basically just ummed and ahhed in response, they weren't really angry or anything. It was leftism on autopilot, leftism by default, apolitical leftism.
Somehow they'd already gotten to most the students. High school or maybe society generally is the key thing. Maybe the kids who pay attention to high school because they're going to uni actually soak up the message in high school and that's what's really happening? But they also do change people there, I saw a fairly normal albeit somewhat edgy guy turn into an Extinction Rebellion climate believer seemingly overnight. I saw none of this actually happening and don't understand the mechanism, only the effects. Dark leftism.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Smart, consistent industrial policy is not the same as 'have unions striking until the end of time' or 'poorly managed nationalized industries using capital equipment from the 1920s because the treasury-brained managers refuse to invest in modern machinery and instead raise pay for workers unsustainably high wages for political reasons'. It's not egregious for me to specify 'smart' policy, British management of industry really was just dumb. The stupidity was the problem, not state involvement.
Britain is not Australia or Canada, it cannot coast upon resource wealth. Britain must have a strong manufacturing sector, not a single financial/services hub and everyone else on welfare or make-work.
The way to get real per capita growth is R&D and capital deepening. The state has the power to incentivize both and should do so. The state should not just get out of the way and let the market bring in cheap labour, ignoring the externalities. The state should not just let banks build up a housing bubble (regulations are a major factor in this too) for their own profit, ignoring externalities. The state should not let key industries be sold to foreigners and be asset-stripped.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
The Saudis tried bombing without restraint and failed. US lacks the bomber throughput to wreck the whole country. Ancient B-52s and B-1s are not suitable for penetrating defended airspace and B-2s are way too expensive for this role. Carrier-based air attacks have not worked, they lack the air defences to stay on mission for a long time and also lack throughput.
Nuclear strikes? Sounds like a good way to get Ukraine unconditionally surrendering to Russia, along with pointlessly undoing all the non-proliferation work America's done. Decent chance of some nuclear terrorism as blowback too.
US military is massively overrated as a fighting force. You'd think after 20 years of nonstop failure and humiliation, this would've sunk in but no...
I never knew MEMRI did military analysis, thought it was just light-hearted Israeli propaganda aimed to go viral on youtube (there are some genuinely hilarious memritv memes out there: https://youtube.com/watch?v=g8vqkzFpKYs).
Also, the whole 'deter China' strategy seems somewhat naive. America is going to struggle deterring a nation with a vastly larger industrial capacity and labour pool with their shrinking navy and diminishing technological advantage. US advantages diminish with time while Chinese advantages grow. Would they prefer 2030 to 2027 when China is less reliant on oil and has more advanced semiconductors, when they've pumped out yet more warships and more nukes? The strategy might make sense if they're ASI-pilled but they're almost certainly not.
How do you maintain a military advantage over a bigger country on the other side of the world? Just spend more? Rope in your allies (the present administration is doing the opposite of this)?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
There's a pretty large contingent of dumb-right people lurking around especially on the heterodox, there's the Hinkle crowd. I don't understand the mind of anyone who's super into multilateral world order or BRICS content today but they are around and people are catering to them. It's a big mistake to discredit ideas simply because some dumb or cringe people are also following them IMO, ideas should be judged on their own merit.
Also could you give an example of the substacks you're talking about, there are many genres of this stuff.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
They've already been bombing Gaza intensively, that's not what a precision air campaign looks like.
Israel just isn't a big country. They don't have the resources to engage in constant wars with a much larger bloc without US subsidies and support. Cut the military aid and they'll have to come to the negotiating table for the first time, as opposed to the old status quo of 'US proposes a treaty where Israel gets everything they want and calls it a balanced, fair deal'.
What is Israel supposed to do against the Houthis? Israel doesn't have any navy worth caring about. The US navy, bigger and better in every way, has proven totally unsuccessful at beating the Houthis or bombing them into submission. They can just fire off missile after missile at Israeli airports and airlines won't fly there for insurance reasons. Israel's high-tech economy will shrivel up and die.
At the end of the day, they're a fundamentally small power with a foreign policy that presupposes access to vast resources that don't actually belong to them. Pakistan has nukes too, Iran probably does. They're hugely outnumbered. Israel needs to get more realistic in their aspirations. They can't escalate out of this.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Agreed. But unfortunately...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
In Russia, Yeltsin shelled Parliament with tanks during a massive economic depression killing over 100, with a an unstable new government. No civil war. The military obeyed Yeltsin.
Also in Russia there was the Prigozhin failed coup, still no civil war. The military obeyed Putin.
Either Russia is an inherently stable country (unlikely) or it's just very hard for an urbanized, industrialized, well-developed country to have a civil war.
I think the US would need a massive military defeat and an economic depression for a civil war. Maybe, maybe Trump's assassination attempt succeeding would be enough but I doubt it. Civil war needs more than just discontent, it needs parity between the sides. If they blew Trump away then, it'd be a pretty convincing deep state victory: no civil war just a smooth continuation/consolidation.
UK pays Mauritius to take administrative ownership of strategic Indian Ocean base: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-set-sign-deal-ceding-sovereignty-chagos-islands-mauritius-2025-05-22/
LONDON, May 22 (Reuters) - Britain signed a deal on Thursday to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, after a London judge overturned a last-minute injunction and cleared the way for an agreement the government says is vital to protect the nation's security.
The multibillion-dollar deal will allow Britain to retain control of the strategically important U.S.-UK air base on Diego Garcia, the largest island of the archipelago in the Indian Ocean, under a 99-year lease.
Legalism gone mad, nobody is capable of taking Diego Garcia off the UK/US. Mauritius is a very poor and weak country and can be safely ignored. A quick glimpse at a map also reveals that Mauritius is thousands of kilometres away from Diego Garcia and the rest of the Chagos islands, there's really no reason to pay them to take over the area just so the base can be kept just because they were once classified as part of the same British Indian Ocean Territory.
Some element of the British decisionmaking process seems to be based on a need for international legitimacy, that paying Mauritius makes them more holy and virtuous: https://x.com/echetus/status/1841815818700492945
What changed official attitudes and broke the logjam were international judgments, the loss after 71 years of the UK seat on the ICJ held by Sir Christopher Greenwood in November 2017 and UK isolation in the UN bought on by the UK's perceived diminishing reputation for upholding international law and the UK stand on Russia's invasion of Ukraine which exposed HMG to charges of hypocrisy
Someone needs to tell these Brits that they're a P5 power. They cannot, by definition, be isolated in the UN and have anything bad happen to them other than condemnation. If you don't like an ICJ order, you can just ignore it. No such ICJ order actually happened, so Britain doesn't even need to ignore them. The US told the ICJ to get stuffed when they said 'don't go in on Nicaragua'. Israel couldn't care less what the ICJ says, they're not suddenly going to give the Palestinians East Jerusalem, let alone pay reparations. The Security Council are the ultimate court in the UN and the UK enjoys a veto there.
Soft power like the British state seems to yearn for is nothing without real power, it's a pure longhouse concept. Real power is concrete: boots on the ground, bridges built or bombs dropped. Unfortunately, the longhouse is very real if you believe in it.
The financial component of the deal includes 3 billion pounds to be paid by Britain to Mauritius over the 99-year term of the agreement, with an option for a 50-year extension and Britain maintaining the right of first refusal thereafter.
The base's capabilities are extensive and strategically crucial. Recent operations launched from Diego Garcia include bombing strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen in 2024-2025, humanitarian aid deployments to Gaza and, further back, attacks on Taliban and al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan in 2001.
Some have alleged that there's some kind of corruption behind the deal, Starmer is known to associate with all kinds of subversive elements like human rights lawyers, some of whom are associated with Mauritius. But then he is a human rights lawyer, so that's to be expected. Who can tell the difference between corruption and treachery? Showing weakness here also opens up other problems for the UK in Gibraltar and the Falklands.
https://x.com/G0ADM/status/1925609246101807510
Sending billions to a foreign country is also perverse given that the UK is in a poor fiscal position and must impose painful cuts or tax hikes to stabilize the situation. One can observe a hierarchy of needs in modern British governance:
- Housing asylum seekers
- Paying foreign countries to take your land, so you can keep a base you already have
- Taxiing 'disabled' children to and from school (a mandated expense that's bankrupting councils and enriching taxi companies)
- Equalising pay between the sexes working different jobs at market rates, at the whim of random judges (also bankrupting major cities and resulting in third world sanitation disasters)
- Maintaining a vast social housing system in expensive parts of London housing, amongst others, the First Lady of Sierra Leone.
Very far down the list is anything associated with economic growth or military power.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Good point, it was wrong to say that it's not worth caring about AI bioweapon risk. ASI ought to be so strong that it doesn't need bioweapons though, I think it can wrap us around its finger such that we serve its will without any biowarfare. Just dominating the internet would be a civilization-scale parasitism like your wasps, it would be inside our entire command-and-control structure and in a position of assured dominance.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Yes, I remember seeing people spray down their shoes with disinfectant when returning to the house. Or spraying down the table at a shared eating space (because what we really needed is a bunch of people touching the same squirter, squirting down their tape-demarcated part of the table).
There was a shocking level of hysteria.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Three South African courts have ruled against attempts to have it designated as hate speech, on the basis that it is a historical liberation chant, not a literal incitement to violence.
Who cares what a South African court thinks? They haven't been covering themselves in excellence in upholding a stable, successful society. The murder rate there is comparable to the death rate in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
It's also somewhat hard to accept rhetorically, given how 'It's OK to be white' produced such a big storm.
I've always maintained that responsibility is shared between the superpowers, that's a huge part of why nobody's prepared to accept what happened or do anything. The Chinese have eagerly been saying 'oh it was made in America' and vis versa. But neither is prepared to do anything about it, they want to pretend it never happened lest the enormity of the disaster waft back onto them. Propaganda is all they're willing to do.
This applies especially to the community of experts (that Scott is a member and cheerleader for), full realization would be shattering to their authority. This disaster was made by the experts, whether in China or America or both, it was them.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
I thought the general consensus was that it was a lab leak, even if it can't be proved due to much of the evidence mysteriously disappearing (which is itself a certain signal). This seems to be the position of the US intelligence apparatus. Frankly it should've been obvious back in March of 2020 given the proximity of the lab, the nature of its COVID research and all the anomalous activity going on there.
Anyway, I also agree with your second point.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
I dislike how he brushes over 'lab leaks'. That should've been the real story, it's more important than all other factors and especially more important than feeling sad about the death toll.
Nothing was learnt from COVID. Literally nothing, gain of function research is still continuing. Everyone knows that gain of function research caused this disaster. But nobody can be bothered to do anything about it, Trump has frozen federal funding into gain of function. A funding freeze is not remotely proportionate for the megadeath machine.
Speaking anonymously, an HHS source revealed that one of the researchers poked a hole in the other's protective equipment during a vicious 'lovers' spat'.
Dr Connie Schmaljohn, the lab's director, was also placed on administrative leave after she allegedly failed to report the incident to other officials.
In a previous incident in May 2018, anthrax may have been accidentally released from the boiler room at one of the labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, and into a nearby river where people were planting lilypads. No illnesses were reported as a result of the potential release.
This is a BSL-4 lab by the way, America's top people. Wuhan was BSL-3. These doctors have been behaving like clowns with the most dangerous technology on the planet. There's no sign of any professionalism, considering the danger of their work. The acceptable number of lab leaks is zero, it's the same as the acceptable number of accidental nuclear strikes. The AI community seems to care more about bioweapon risk, that's a big part of the whole AI safety rhetoric. But why should anyone care about whether AIs can synthesize bioweapons when the experts are already doing it so carelessly?
This stuff should be done out on South Georgia island near the south pole, or somewhere incredibly remote with a huge mandatory quarantine period, if and only if it's absolutely necessary. Otherwise, anyone who tries to do gain of function, especially with humanized mice like they were doing for COVID (like Daszak boasted about in his tweets) should be treated like Osama Bin Laden, with special forces coming in to shoot them on sight.
The right of scientists to publish cool papers and do interesting research in convenient locations does not come above the right to life, freedom and property for tens, hundreds of millions.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Good point, it does matter a lot about who is having children to each side.
Agreed, plus the premodern state doesn't necessarily want economic growth, they want boots on the ground and stability.
The roman empire was broadly free market. They had strong property rights and relatively low taxes. They thought trade was pretty good. But they were quite worried about bread prices, so they arranged for food shipments to Italy to keep the plebs happy. And money had to be found somewhere for warfare, they struggled with getting the tax base to pay for all these wars. It's hard to extract money from all these entrenched aristocrats who naturally develop wealth trading.
In an agrarian economy, food is money so why not have as many people making food as possible? You can get pretty good results with legalist policies of strict state control and contempt for trade. If you read the book of shang yang, it's basically just 'the wastelands must be cultivated' and 'don't let people do what they want, fancy silk clothing is not needed for fielding a gigantic army'. There's not much need for a dynamic private sector economy when you only need grain, swords, salt and horses in huge quantities. The state can handle that quite well with economies of scale alone and conscripted labour.
Only when you start needing hugely expensive ships, optics, cannons, advanced metallurgy and innovation does a private sector economy really start to shine.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Well it is predominantly held by left-wingers today.
You can see all this commentary about how the aesthetic of the happy smiling white family is racist, fascist, possibly nazi - it comes from the left. I've yet to see any right-wing critique of such imagery. Discourse about liberating women from the burden of motherhood comes from the left, while discourse about the 14 words and fear of demographic replacement comes from the right.
Whether something is essentially right wing or left wing is secondary to whether it's presently right-wing or left-wing. The evolutionary history of the bear isn't that important compared compared to whether the bear in front of me is good at climbing up trees, if it's aggressive towards people, if it's confused by loud noises...
For example, the Soviet bloc was broadly pro-natalist. But what impact does this have on modern leftism? Soviet leftism is all but dead, they were also big fans of heavy industry, nuclear energy and military power which aren't beloved by the modern left.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Institutional cycles of growth and decay. To some extent of course people were writing about this in 'Decline of the West' and 'Hard times -> Strong men' but the knowledge hasn't widely circulated. Management of large organizations is still generally awful, there is no science of good management, only vague notions and a few people who have some opaque skill at doing it.
Also state-sponsored eugenics isn't exactly a new idea... but nobody does it. It's not that complicated to gather the smartest, most agentic, most capable men and women and encourage them to marry and raise many children, or collect sperm, let alone direct genetic modification. But not a single state is interested in this, everyone prefers to pour trillions of dollars and billions of child-hours into education where the returns are dubious in many cases.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Singapore is the world's 3rd-largest foreign exchange centre, 6th-largest financial centre,[361] 2nd-largest casino gambling market,[362] 3rd-largest oil-refining and trading centre, largest oil-rig producer and hub for ship repair services,[363][364][365] and largest logistics hub.[366] The economy is diversified, with its top contributors being financial services, manufacturing, and oil-refining. Its main exports are refined petroleum, integrated circuits, and computers,[367] which constituted 27% of the country's GDP in 2010. Other significant sectors include electronics, chemicals, mechanical engineering, and biomedical sciences. Singapore was ranked 4th in the Global Innovation Index in 2024 and 7th in 2022.[368][369][370][371][372] In 2019, there were more than 60 semiconductor companies in Singapore, which together constituted 11% of the global market share. The semiconductor industry alone contributes around 7% of Singapore's GDP.
They do all kinds of things, plus there's Singapore Airlines like how the UAE has Emirates as their airline.
At least David Axe knows how to write. He and his ilk are fools but they're way better at lying. And they won't make really basic errors in hard fact, they'll just exaggerate the effect of a gamechanger. It's intuitive to a certain extent that if you blow up the Russian ammo dumps with amazing GPS-guided missiles they can't do their thuggish orc strategy of drowning the area in shells. Of course that doesn't actually work since there are countermeasures and their entire model of what's going on is fantasy...
It's stupid to say that Leopards will sweep Putin's Soviet relics aside but they won't actually cite obviously made-up facts like 'the T-90M is merely 1970s technology, on par with an M-60'.
Now I think about it, I think the Telegraph or someone did mix up a Ukrainian drone hitting a Russian tank with a Ukrainian tank getting hit, so I'm probably giving Western media too much credit.
More options
Context Copy link