RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Assuming you could find a court even able to try it, what punishment can even approach being proportional?
Recklessness and negligence (foreseeably) leading to megadeaths should result in people being tortured for the rest of their lives.
This is basically what happened to people at Guantanamo Bay or certain prisons in Iraq, where the prisoner's crimes were much, much, much less serious.
Have a quick skim through the wikipedia page of what happened there. 'Forced injections' and 'being locked in confined cells' are karmically appropriate but those are just the beginning. Beatings, sleep deprivation, being chained in the foetal position for 24 hours and forced to soil oneself...
If the US tortured Afghans semi-randomly (per Rumsfields complaints about Guantanamo being misused "We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants... GTMO needs to serve as an [redacted] not a prison for Afghanistan.") then it is appropriate to torture vastly more damaging people.
RandomRanger
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11mo ago
My point is that Jews are enormously overrepresented in establishing and developing these sectors. The direction in which they take things tends to be more radical and transgressive. It stands to reason that if there weren't any Jews, then there would be much less in the way of pornography and casual sex generally. The most sex-oriented big dating apps are tinder and grindr, both founded by Jews. More lovey-dovey, long-term relationship apps like OKCupid and Bumble were founded by Europeans.
Not all horrendous ideas in the world are from Jews: Gentler for instance proudly sent orphans in Germany off to live with pedophiles and got dozens of men acquitted of molestation, Foucault campaigned for the abolition of the age of consent, presumably so he could have sex with children. There was a postwar vibe that was excessively libertine, where barriers that should not have been touched were broken. The Frankfurt school had a lot to do with this attitude of course.
Immigration and refugee resettlement in the US stems significantly from Jews. The 1965 Immigration Law was introduced by Emmanuel Celler. Sure, it was passed by many non-Jews too. But consider Proposition 187 which sought to stem illegal immigration in California, which was approved democratically but then blocked by Mariana Pfaelzer.
RandomRanger
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7mo ago
hollowed out by an institutional culture of lying. Of course, China is probably in a similar state,
Chinese ships don't accidentally crash into civilian shipping, nor do their light carriers burn down in port, nor is their fleet actually shrinking year-on-year. When it comes to quality and naval professionalism, China seems to be well ahead of the US navy.
As for an institutional culture of lying... the Afghanistan War? The defeat against the Taliban with about 1/100th the funding of the US/NATO force, supported by no foreign power at all? Staying on ten years despite it being clear that the US was not going to achieve its objectives, while the Taliban was? Constantly lying to the public and saying things were going fine? Junior officers being ignored when they pointed out the entire thing was a massive farce with zero chance of success, that the 'allies' they were trying to train were drug addicts and pedophiles?
RandomRanger
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4mo ago
Fair enough, I just thought de Boer was in the aggravating kind of mental illness camp, as opposed to the 'fun or amusing' camp. From the tone of your post, you didn't seem interested or happy to read his content.
RandomRanger
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6mo 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
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6mo ago
Same law that protects blacks against discrimination also protects whites and Asians.
Only de jure, as you say. It was devised not to protect Whites or Asians but to advance blacks, women and so on, so there's a logical consistency there. Intention and use were aligned. The court would not just be implementing what the words say, they're changing the fundamental meaning of the law even as everyone pretends it stays the same. I guess if we looked around we could find some case where whites were protected by the law (was there some case in Hawaii) but by and large that's not the function or goal.
This is on a different level to ruling that fish are bees or whatever for the purposes of some biodiversity preservation law, even though that's a huge change of factual content (and logically bizarre). They really need commitment from the other branches of govt to make such a meaningful change and get it to stick.
RandomRanger
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10mo 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
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11d ago
You're not alone: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oXMjtVnLD4o
Harden your heart Putin, Increase your attacks, Banish them all to Palestine and we shall marry Ukrainian women!
RandomRanger
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20d ago
By contrast, Gorbachev's decision to undertake reforms were taken because of accurately-identified issues
Yes but the way he dealt with issues was poor. Reducing military spending would've greatly ameliorated the economic situation, it was sucking up a good 10%+ of the Soviet economy. Gorbachev didn't even have the power to control military spending but he thought he could radically alter the whole ideological and economic structure of the Soviet Union - in a controlled way! The man was dreaming.
That the 90s followed doesn't mean that the strategy of change was a wrong decision
If a strategy is launched in an inept and naive way and fails, it's a failure of strategy. A return to hardline Stalinism would be a 'strategy of change' yet that wouldn't have helped either. Change and reform is not sufficient, it needs to be the right change done in the right way. Implementation is important - gradual and controlled marketization beats chaos. Nothing about the Soviet system required handing everything over to robbers in a mad rush to privatize all assets before the communists could be elected, the Yeltsin approach was extremely counterproductive. Gorbachev's ineptitude led to the hardliner coup, he didn't manage the situation sufficiently well. Now nobody had ever done this before, it's a difficult task that he wasn't trained to do. Indeed, the Soviet failure helped inform China's success. Yet it was still a failure.
However, good management is not some made up video-game skill, it requires a sound understanding of the people and institutions that control a country, it requires certain personal characteristics that Deng clearly had. Even Putin did a decent job in cleaning up much of the mess that Yeltsin left behind - Putin is not an exceptional leader but he's not a Gorby/Yeltsin-tier blunder-addict.
The result was a Union where even Crimea wanted to leave it, and when ungraceful suppression was ended, did
That was the result of mismanagement and a certain level of naivete (itself a result of poor management) about how things would be outside the Soviet Union. As late as 2013 Ukraine regretted leaving the USSR.
Anyway, you started this diversion saying the war in Ukraine was the worst disaster for Russia since '41 - did you miss the increasingly frantic rhetoric coming from Macron and the Pentagon about how the Russians are about to roll the Ukrainians?
“There’s nothing that can help Ukraine now because there are no serious technologies able to compensate Ukraine for the large mass of troops Russia is likely to hurl at us. We don’t have those technologies, and the West doesn’t have them as well in sufficient numbers,” one of the top-ranking military sources told POLITICO.
It's not looking good for the rules-based order.
If you mean 'see' as in 'it's not there,' this would be flatly incorrect, and anyone who lived through the early 2000s could probably recount more than a few American examples.
No, American nationalism is not on the same order as Chinese nationalism today or in the 2000s. Not even after 9/11. The US ambassador in Beijing was trapped for days after the Belgrade embassy bombing as hordes of rioters threw rocks. China routinely blows up tiny maritime incidents into completely disproportionate affairs. The most popular movie in US history wasn't a patriotic war story like Saving Private Ryan toned up to 11 with 'the eternal glory of the US Army remains in our hearts forever and ever, amen' on the postscript. What are you thinking of - Islamophobia? China is way more Islamophobic than the US has ever been, as the US govt delights in telling us so often.
in a conventional conflict in Europe, the Russians were likely to be decisively beaten in any conflict with the Americans
Firstly, the Iraqi army is not the Soviet army. Just the arsenal Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Union is a whole other world to the SA-8s and Rolands Iraq was fielding. The Iraqi army was also saddled with Iraqi soldiers, who were not known for excellence under US tutelage either. We've yet to see how Airland Battle deals with S-300s or the arsenal of a proper military. Secondly, conventional inferiority was no problem for NATO in the 1970s or Russia today, they have nuclear deterrence.
Before I posted the link, and before you posted your opening thesis on American strategy, had you ever read or reviewed an American National Security Strategy?
This may be news to you but you do not have to read these documents to discuss national strategy. You can look at what actually happens in the real world. You can interpret govt priorities with your own eyes. This is better than trusting in the documents. Govts lie! The Chinese might say that they're interested in purely peaceful development - yet actually build up a gigantic navy and forces targeting their near abroad. The US might say it's worried about Iraqi WMDs and Saddam's links with terrorists - but have other motivations and goals for invading Iraq.
And when govts don't lie, they try to be tactful, they massage their words and adopt a certain frame. The Chinese adopt this supercilious tone where their military may be forced to take action if foreign provocateurs incite a rogue province into illegal independence activities. That's not a lie but it's not straightforward communication. Better to ignore the cheap talk and look at results.
Congratulations. You officially won the argument and convinced key American elites years ago. DEI and migration policy are how the US government under a Democratic administration believe the US will long-term compete with PRC STEM diploma numbers, and it made it into policy.
The migration policy of having a de facto open border? I note this is contrary to what is indicated in your august strategy document. US migration policy isn't primarily about improving the quality of the STEM workforce but about demographic and political change, plus serving certain corporate interests. The vast majority of the millions of people arriving in America (many flown in at state expense) are not trained in STEM. In fact US legal immigration is a rather byzantine and complicated mess, making it difficult for the most skilled to arrive.
This is where the advantage of my 'look at what's actually going on' approach kicks in. I can observe that DEI and migration policy is not motivated by a desire to acquire STEM talent. If they wanted talent, they could adopt a points-based system like Australia and enforce the border. If they wanted talent, they'd favour meritocracy as opposed to diversity quotas and affirmative action. It's not rocket science. This policy isn't secret - its publicly observable and it does get communicated. But people massage the truth, they arrange their intentions in certain ways to make it sound more defensible. Children are taught things like 'diversity makes us stronger' in school and via the media, just like how China is taught nationalism via school and the media.
Furthermore, relying on Chinese STEM talent to counter China has a number of rather obvious flaws. This is what I was pointing out initially. The DEI and Rules-based order strands are in conflict. The US wants to skim off Chinese STEM talent but not end up training them so they take skills back to China, not have them spy for China. They want to whip up popular sentiment against China (another thing you won't find in official strategy documents but which can be observed through funding of various organizations and media slant) but do so without inciting racism or civil unrest. These are the contradictions I've been talking about the whole time.
The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it says in the PR brochure.
RandomRanger
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2mo ago
I believe both. Both men seem like sleazy perverts that would do this kind of thing. I assume most have seen Biden's creepy sniffing of children on live TV, kissing and so on. What does he do when the cameras aren't running? What kind of role model was he for Hunter, given how he turned out?
Then there's Trump's relations with Epstein, there's the quote: "He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life."
Note that none of this is 'hard proof' - but why would anyone expect facts to be rigorously, objectively confirmed in the most politically fraught matter imaginable? The facts were 'confirmed' in the case of Russiagate before the whole thing turned out to be a fraud. Why trust official facts in cases like this, considering the political sensitivity? The very existence of Epstein shows that there's a huge market for illicit sex, rape and so on amongst the US elite. Someone dealt with him before he could talk, he clearly had a lot of influential colleagues. These people can easily make facts disappear, they can make people disappear even inside a prison under 24 hour suicide watch. They are quite literally above the law. In the absence of facts, all that's left is vibes and both men give off pretty terrible vibes.
RandomRanger
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3mo ago
Abraham Accords
Why can't you understand a conditional clause? If it were the Abraham Accords that got Egypt to get along with Israel, then that would've made them an achievement. The Abraham Accords got Bahrain and the UAE, of which only the UAE matters. Morocco too, which has basically nothing to do with the Middle East other than being Arab and Islamic.
the US isnt occupying any of Syria.
They have troops there. ISIS is gone yet US troops remain. Clearly it's not about fighting ISIS. If you have troops on the soil of another country without their permission, it's an occupation.
Sharon was neutral on Iraq
No he wasn't. This is a blatant lie.
On August 12, 2002, Sharon told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset that Iraq "is the greatest danger facing Israel
Haaretz reported on February 26, 2001, that "Sharon believes that Iraq poses more of a threat to regional stability than Iran, due to the errant, irresponsible behavior of Saddam Hussein's regime."
He also wanted an invasion of Iran after Iraq was dealt with: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/05/israel.iraq
RandomRanger
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4mo ago
Ah, good point. It does still read like Kulak to my eyes, you can still sense a part of his soul in it.
RandomRanger
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4mo ago
You can’t really convert money into power in a functioning society beyond the incredibly limited scope of making your own life comfier.
Bribery and influence? If money can't buy power, somebody should tell big corporations and they'd sack all their lobbyists. Wealth is power and always has been. The sinews of war are infinite money.
RandomRanger
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7mo ago
MANPADs, ATGMs, artillery shells, rockets... these are what you need to win wars.
RandomRanger
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7mo ago
And we're still getting the oil even in this world where we aid Israel.
At times. The 1973 Arab Oil Embargo was pretty bad!
There is always two different effects to letting a any power do what it wants
Quite right, which is why they organized the Oil Embargo in response to the US sending an enormous amount of military aid to Israel. That is why, amongst other reasons, Osama Bin Laden hated the West and blew up the Twin Towers. It's a fundamentally symmetrical phenomenon. Arabs play the game and can react to our activities. Which is why, unless there are good reasons, we should avoid antagonizing them by, for example, providing Israel with massive amounts of military aid that they use to kill Arabs. Or invading Iraq. Likewise with Russia. If we didn't try to depose their allies in Syria, advance our sphere of influence ever closer to them... we wouldn't be experiencing the current crisis.
At the risk of sounding maximally cynical, if we consider Ukraine losing a foregone conclusion, we ideally want to take in as many Ukrainian refugees as possible, and otherwise maximum casualties on both sides.
But what are the second-order impacts of this? If other countries know that we'll sacrifice them en masse for our own interests, why would they ally with us? Is Taiwan sleeping soundly, knowing they're also 'not a treaty ally but we like them' and seeing Ukraine getting turned into the Somme? We don't even recognize that they're a country! And what are the Russians going to do in retaliation? Send assistance to our other enemies? Stir up trouble? Coup various nations in Africa? Once the war is over, a lot of Russians are going to remain very angry with us for getting their countrymen killed with our weapons. Putin will likely be replaced with a real hardliner when he dies.
If we want to create them faster, we have a lot of slack to build up the respective industry.
It will take at least 5 years of surge production to replace the reserves of munitions that have been expended. Taiwan may not have that time and Taiwan is actually important. It's not like we can just print money and buy missiles, there are hard caps in industry and trained manpower. The people who know how to build munitions factories are often retired now, our manufacturing sector has shrunk.
If Russia starts to make serious gains again I wouldn't be surprised if Ukraine's direct neighbours, especially Poland, would start to send their own army after all, independent of what the rest of the west wants.
Well then we bring on WW3. The whole point is to avoid that outcome. France, Britain and the US have a large nuclear arsenal and can prevent Russia invading NATO members but Russia can also lay waste to the Polish army, Europe and America. When it comes to tactical nuclear weapons, their advantage is considerable.
Since we send no aid, Ukraine crumbles relatively fast. Any attempts at guerrilla warfare or resistance is met with the punishment of Ukrainian civilians.
Given that we spent the last few years building up the Ukrainian military, it would be embarrassing to give up on them. But it would be far more embarrassing to lose if we make a major effort, which we have now made. It's the difference between looking impotent and proclaiming one's impotence to the whole world. Ideally, we should've done nothing to start with, then there would be no risk of looking weak, since we never declared an interest in Ukraine. Russia demolishing Georgia didn't make us look weak, we never really tried to strengthen Georgia militarily. But now that we've pursued this loathsome path, it is hard to leave. It becomes more and more tempting to keep doubling down in a desperate hope for victory. Likewise, the Russians will keep intensifying their efforts. They've spent significant amounts of blood on this, they are becoming less and less willing to give up, their demands will increase.
RandomRanger
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9mo ago
for the most part give its a constant or predictable value in terms of what it can buy
Well fiat currency constantly and predictably decreases in value over the medium/long term. Bitcoin is unpredictable but tends to rise in value. Unlike with fiat, there is no federal reserve ready to prop up bubbles or bail out governments that 'need' to print/borrow $200 billion per month, as the US does:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-budget-value
In an environment where Bitcoin was more used for transactions as opposed to trading, prices would be much less volatile too. If the fixed supply was an issue, miners could vote on forking the chain (a vaguely democratic process as opposed to the closed-door meetings of elites that determine current monetary policy).
RandomRanger
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10mo ago
39 minute slide: he claims that Ukraine should guarantee language rights for minorities. Well, if Mearsheimer knew anything about Ukraine, he would have known about
That literally proves his point, that Ukraine in 2014 was moving to suppress the Russian language and in 2018 they did do precisely that by repealing the law!
The US started to provide significant assistance to Ukraine, and sanctioned some Russians only after Malaysia airliner was being shot down by Russians (as confirmed by the International Court). How the West should have reacted?
Do what Mearsheimer said this whole time and make it clear that Ukraine wasn't going to be part of NATO, sweep it under the carpet (like the enormous numbers of people dying in Yemen for example). That would have avoided this whole war. But no, they doubled down instead providing more arms, more NATO integration, more training and so on. Besides, when the US shoots down an airliner, nobody gets sanctioned. Accidents happen.
He tried to pull Belarus and Ukraine into "Union State".
Not with troops. Putin only started intervening overseas in 2008 and there's a clear reactive tendency. Georgia, 2008, right after NATO membership is promised in some future time, right after the emboldened Georgians go in on South Ossetia. Then in 2014, right after the pro-Russian Ukrainian government gets deposed. One tiny border dispute in 2003 does not an imperialist make.
If you really want to wreck Russia, what you should do is to encourage it to try to conquer Ukraine. Putin is much too smart to try that
So I was completely right! You didn't grasp the distinction in what Mearsheimer is saying, the difference between invasion and conquest. You don't know what you're talking about. You don't understand what Mearsheimer is talking about or you've been deliberately mischaracterizing his ideas.
RandomRanger
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10mo ago
You seem to think that Russia is a second-rate power. They can demolish Western civilization in an afternoon. That is what their nuclear forces are designed to do. On the highest and most important level, Russia and the Western world are peers.
There is no 'suffer what they must' between peers, only suffering.
If you're right about the West being 10 times stronger, why didn't we go ahead with a no fly zone, send in ground troops? It'd be a cakewalk! Plus there's a lot of oil to liberate! But you know that's not true, you know perfectly well why we can't do that.
The real switcheroo is not Mearsheimer's 'great powers act in predictable ways, so it is not desirable to threaten a declining power in ways that will result in it lashing out' but your 'Russia is so weak that we can do whatever we like and never pay any consequences for our actions - but let's stay far away from the action and let other people do the fighting'.
RandomRanger
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10mo ago
You should tell that to the US government. They clearly do think it was justified since they went and did it and refused to punish anyone for it.
RandomRanger
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10mo ago
Well, we don't really know how life came into existence either. It happened over 3 billion years ago! We can't know what the conditions were back then that resulted in life, so how can we rule it to be statistically impossible? The math is just made-up numbers.
RandomRanger
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11mo ago
Reminds me of the Mussolini quote 'War is to man what maternity is to a woman'.
RandomRanger
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11mo ago
He almost certainly is - he blocked me after I made other anti-Israel lobby posts in the past. Such is life. We all bring our personal interests to the table, wherever we go.
RandomRanger
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27d ago
If there were highly advanced and malevolent civilizations lurking out there, barring truly out there technologies and an implausible ability to cover their tracks in terms of emissions and signatures from before they knew how to start hiding or even the ability to do so, then there is simply no sense in trying to hide.
There are seriously powerful civilizations in that universe, powers that could snap the Xeelee like a twig. At one point they suggest that the fundamentals of mathematics were weaponized. I think most of the big players were never even biological, they were born when the universe was young, in higher dimensions.
If they RKV you, so fucking what,
The primary danger doesn't come from relativistic kill vehicles, it comes from one of the higher powers saying 'hey, these guys are behaving a little oddly and might become a future threat, let's stomp them to paste. We're not going to use sunbusting RKVs, we're going to utterly flatten them.' You don't want to draw attention to yourself. Fire off too many RKVs and you might draw the ire of the bigger fish. Outposts past the Oort won't save you from them.
Case in point:
https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/chinas-first-type-075-amphibious-assault-ship-begins-sea-trials/
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