RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
This is obviously an American op. The Poles know:
https://twitter.com/radeksikorski/status/1574800653724966915
Biden made the threat:
https://twitter.com/townhallcom/status/1490791554088321024
The Scandies say it was explosives:
Seismologists in Denmark and Sweden said they had registered two powerful blasts on Monday in the vicinity of the leaks.
"The signals do not resemble signals from earthquakes. They do resemble the signals typically recorded from blasts," the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) said.
And seismologists at Sweden's Uppsala University, which cooperates with GEUS, said the second, bigger explosion "corresponded to more than 100 kilos (kg) of dynamite", adding the blasts were in the water not under the seabed.
And best of all, the US had mine-planting/explosives forces right on Bornholm island in June! The bombs we're talking about detonated just off the coast of Bornholm island!
In support of BALTOPS, U.S. Navy 6th Fleet partnered with U.S. Navy research and warfare centers to bring the latest advancements in unmanned underwater vehicle mine hunting technology to the Baltic Sea to demonstrate the vehicle’s effectiveness in operational scenarios.
Experimentation was conducted off the coast of Bornholm, Denmark, with participants from Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport, and Mine Warfare Readiness and Effectiveness Measuring
How much more clear could it be? A few mines were left behind.
With friends like America, Europe doesn't need enemies. The US-initiated war on terror got them targeted for terrorist attacks. The US destabilization of Syria and Libya got them a flood of refugees. Yes, the Europeans were partially complicit in these foreign adventures but they were really just being dragged along. The Prime Mover was Washington. When NATO made that fateful statement that Ukraine and Georgia would one day join the alliance, the French and Germans were trying to tone it down. They didn't want to antagonize Russia. Thanks to the US, Western Europe has been pushed into a proxy war against their energy supplier. Now, the US is making sure Russia can't supply Germany with energy, that it will be dependent upon US puppet states in the Middle East or expensive fuel from America directly.
I don't even think this is a wise strategy for American interests. If you try to weaken your allies so they can't form a viable bloc to oppose you, you're antagonizing them. You're giving them a reason to oppose you and sabotage you. Why should the US expect much help from Europe on the main front against China in the Pacific? 'You're fighting your main industrial supplier? Tough - we'll sell you some overpriced goods. Good luck!'
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
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
Quit your lying. The Israeli negotiating position at Oslo and Camp David was colossally disingenuous and offered terms nobody would accept.
What made this deal especially difficult for the Palestinians to accept was the fact that they had already agreed in the 1993 Oslo Accords to recognize Israeli sovereignty over 78 percent of the original British Mandate. 124 From their perspective, they were now being asked to make another major concession and accept at best 86 percent of the remaining 22 percent.
The Palestinians maintain that the West Bank would have been divided into three cantons separated by Israeli territory. Israelis dispute this claim, but Barak himself acknowledges that Israel would have maintained control of a "razor-thin" wedge of territory running from Jerusalem to the Jordan River Valley. 125 This wedge, which would completely bisect the West Bank, was essential to Israel's plan to retain control of the Jordan River Valley.
the Palestinians were not offered full sovereignty in a number of Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which made the proposal significantly less attractive to them. Israel would also have kept control over the new Palestinian state's borders, its airspace, and its water resources, and the Palestinians would be permanently barred from building an army to defend themselves
They even admitted negotiations were a joke:
It is hard to imagine any leader accepting these terms. Certainly no other state in the world has such curtailed sovereignty, or faces so many obstacles to building a workable economy and society. Given all this, it is not surprising that Barak's former foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was a key participant at Camp David, later told an interviewer, "If I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well"
Meanwhile of course, the Israelis were busy adding new 'facts on the ground' like they've been doing the whole time.
Between the start of the Oslo peace process in September 1993 and the outbreak of the Second Intifada seven years later, Israel confiscated more than forty thousand acres of Palestinian land, built 250 miles of bypass and security roads, established thirty new settlements, and increased the settler population in the West Bank and Gaza by almost one hundred thousand, which effectively doubled that population.
If you don't negotiate honestly, in good faith, you won't get a diplomatic solution.
There are no Arabic states in which diverse groups of people live side by side with equal rights.
Oman? I invite you to substantiate this assertion further. And it's not like Israel's doing great at this either.
There is a world where Israelis and Muslims and Jews live side by side with equal rights, fully integrated and defused of their hate it's called "Israel."
This simply isn't true, even putting to one side all the Muslims they've expelled and designated non-citizens. Taking Arab land and redistributing it to Israeli settlers for instance. Demolishing 100 times more Palestinian houses than they let them build. Refusing to let Arabs, Israeli citizens or not, live in several hundred Israeli small towns. Restrictions on freedom of speech, assembly and movement.
This law creates a reality where a Jewish citizen of any other country who has never been to Israel can move there and automatically gain citizenship, while a Palestinian expelled from his home and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp in a nearby country, cannot.
The Israelis clearly don't want a country where Jews and Muslims live side by side, they want a country where Jews are on top, they take action to achieve it and they've enshrined it into law:
The Knesset in 2018 passed a law with constitutional status affirming Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” declaring that within that territory, the right to self-determination “is unique to the Jewish people,” and establishing “Jewish settlement” as a national value.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the finance minister, said during discussions at the time: “Instead of making it easier for Palestinians who want to get citizenship, we should make the process much more difficult, in order to guarantee Israel’s security and a Jewish majority in Israel.” In March 2019, this time as prime minister, Netanyahu declared, “Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” but rather “the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.”
Pro-Israel people should base their arguments on the rule of force because they don't really have a leg to stand on in terms of morality.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
I also think we should've had more discussion of the war.
This caught my eye: https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/singapore-speech-hrvp-borrell-shangri-la-dialogue_en
Some Brussels swamp creature swans out to East Asia and says many banal things but also this:
For the first time ever, we have been funding military support to a country under attack. Providing about €40 billion of military support to Ukraine, coming from the [EU] Institutions, coming from the resources I manage in Brussels, and coming from the Member States. Yes, much less than the US support. But if you add up all the support – military, civilian, economic, financial and humanitarian – the level of support to Ukraine is about €60 billion for Europe. But let me show another figure which is really impressive: if you include the support that the European governments have had to pay in order to help their families and firms to face the high prices of electricity, of food, the subsidies to our people in order to face the consequences of the war is €700 billion – ten times more than the support for Ukraine.
700 billion euros! And there's economic damage in addition to that. 700 billion is just the cost of the bandage for the stab wound (self-inflicted I might add). Europe could've chosen to ignore the US hectoring them into sanctioning Russia, as Hungary did. And what is the cost of the bleeding? What is the cost outside of the EU? Germany and Britain are in a recession, as I recall.
What is the point of it all? Why are we defending borders that were randomly redrawn by the Soviets (in the case of Crimea), why care? Why are we supplying weapons so that Kiev can hold onto predominently Russian-speaking territories whose population mostly doesn't even want to be part of Ukraine? It goes rather against the Kosovo/Palestine/Kurds principle, if principle is an appropriate word to apply in relation to foreign policy.
This whole operation only makes sense if you start with the assumption that Russia is an enemy to be crushed. Then it makes sense to arm the Ukrainians to maximize the number of dead Russians at a relatively low cost. Relatively low, compared to a nuclear war. The War in Afghanistan probably killed more Russians/$ thanks to the sheer amount of poppies produced under our abysmal occupation government.
Anyway, trying to crush Russia has all kinds of bad effects. It pushes Russia towards China and Iran, solidifying an anti-Western axis that spans Eurasia. Our oil sanctions have unsettled OPEC, who might reasonably see a danger in the West trying to crush socially conservative, autocratic states that engage in 'illegal wars' and weaken their energy leverage. Saudi-Iranian rapprochement is accelerating rapidly and is brokered by China: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/persian-gulf-states-to-form-joint-navy-in-coordination-with-china/
And then there are all the problems Russia can cause for us. Do we want Russian missiles being contributed to China during a Pacific war? Do we want enormous numbers of troops and considerable airpower tied down in Europe, just in case some 'volunteers' move across the border and set up shop in Estonian towns that border Russia? That's a precedent that the Polish Volunteer corps set in Belgorod. Do we want Russian energy and agriculture powering a gigantic mobilized Chinese war machine? Are we really confident in funding a war of attrition against Russia of all countries?
We can't really back down now that Leopards and Bradleys are aflame in Ukraine but it is not clear how any of this is in the national interests of most Western countries. We could've just ignored the whole thing, chose not to have an opinion on Ukraine in 2008, in 2014 in 2018 or 2022. It could be swept under the carpet, like the war in Yemen. Without Nuland, without NATO proposals, without Western training for the Ukrainian military, would there be a long and grinding war? It may well be in the interests of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to pursue a foreign policy full of exciting conflicts and intensify rivalries, yet it is not so good for people with gas bills, fertilizer needs and taxes to pay.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
A big can of worms. This is why we should have stuck with properly interpreted obscenity laws (no, Japan's farcical censorship code does not count) and nipped this stuff in the bud. There would be no Mindgeek, no status quo where this stuff is part of popular culture and freely accessible. Nixon said it best I think:
The Commission contends that the proliferation of filthy books and plays has no lasting harmful effect on a man's character. If that were true, it must also be true that great books, great paintings, and great plays have no ennobling effect on a man's conduct. Centuries of civilization and 10 minutes of common sense tell us otherwise.
The Commission calls for the repeal of laws controlling smut for adults, while recommending continued restrictions on smut for children. In an open society, this proposal is untenable. If the level of filth rises in the adult community, the young people in our society cannot help but also be inundated by the flood.
Pornography can corrupt a society and a civilization. The people's elected representatives have the right and obligation to prevent that corruption.
The warped and brutal portrayal of sex in books, plays, magazines, and movies, if not halted and reversed, could poison the wellsprings of American and Western culture and civilization.
I'm fairly sure if Nixon were alive today, he would fully agree that the wellsprings of Western culture have been poisoned, in part by Mindgeek and co. Nobody wants to reproduce anymore, which in itself is enough to end civilization (not accounting for AI or life extension).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
What is the appropriate level for diplomatic discussion on twitter?
Recently Elon Musk has been heavily criticised for an admittedly naïve proposal for a negotiated peace in the Russian-Ukrainian war. His proposal:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1576969255031296000
Now this isn't how politics actually works, twitter polls are not actually binding instruments of diplomacy. Nor is a UN administered vote terribly helpful given how it'd just turn into a vote-rigging contest between the pro and anti-Russian forces within the UN and the Ukrainian state obviously wouldn't let the territories leave given the amount of blood that's been shed. They've threatened 15 year jail sentences for those who did vote in the most recent Russian referenda. It's also very hard to see why the Ukrainian govt would bind itself to allowing a Russian Crimea water since they dammed it off even before this war.
You can see from the replies that the objections aren't really on the object level, they're more on the 'go fuck yourself', 'educate yourself', 'you're using Putin talking points', 'Crimea is Ukraine'. All of this is essentially the official line of the Ukrainian state, as summarized by their ambassador to Germany: "Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply"
This seems rather ungrateful to me, as well as undiplomatic. As Elon reasonably argues, he has made a significant effort to assist the Ukrainian armed forces with communications via his satellites, paid from out of his own pocket:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1577081450263769089
The fundamental power balance in this war is that Russia could obliterate the entirety of Ukraine in under an hour and still have plenty of nukes left to raze Europe and North America if they intervene. There are some people on this site who think that Russian nuclear forces probably don't work and so we can safely discount Russia's 2000 tactical nuclear weapons and 4000 strategic weapons. How they've come to that conclusion is beyond me, given that the technologies involved are fairly simple and old. The same people have been critiquing Russia for fighting a war with 1970s level technology - miniaturized thermonuclear weapons are 1970s technology! Yes, the tritium has a low half-life and needs to be replaced often. Yes, Russia doesn't have the best maintenance standards. But isn't it reasonable for them to prioritize their nuclear forces in terms of maintenance and development? Are we seriously prepared to risk tens if not hundreds of millions of our citizens dying in a full nuclear exchange if we are wrong about their nuclear preparedness? Their conventional tactical ballistic missiles work fine - doesn't it follow that their nuclear missiles work. This is the logic Musk is getting at. The penalty for emboldening dictators is not worse than the penalty for encouraging nuclear war, let alone losing a nuclear war by joining it.
I think this kind of hysterical diplomacy is dangerous and stupid, even from a Ukrainian-focused perspective. Why would you speak so rudely to a notoriously thin-skinned individual (remember when he called that diver 'pedo-guy') who has volunteered their services for your defence? One imagines Musk is seething with rage at his critics. The impression I get from Ukrainian media is that they are bent on getting back every scrap of territory and reparations to boot, won't suffer for anything less. This is the approach that is most likely to end with them getting nuked into submission.
Also, twitter should be for fun, not serious diplomacy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
The US literally had mine warfare forces training in the exact part of the Baltic Sea where the explosions happened, 3 months later! Polish officials thanked America, Biden threatened to make the pipeline stop regardless of German opinions, they have all the means and motive to do it. There's no question about this, it's an open and shut case.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'true in a technical sentence' or 'no military could get away with literally burning their boats'. What I mean to say is that the US literally and physically blew up $30 billion worth of pipeline that supplied about 58% of Germany's gas. Even if some genuine liberal democrat (as opposed to the megalomaniacal Russian liberal democratic party) somehow got into power, the pipeline is still destroyed. No matter the context it's done, not just for this winter but for years to come. Whilst politicians often don't follow through on their rhetorical commitments, the Germans will now be forced to.
I'm no undersea pipeline engineer but it seems pretty permanently wrecked. The gash is apparently hundreds of metres wide, the whole thing has been filling with water.
This is possibly the least covert attack on an ally since Operation Barbarossa.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Firstly, tactical nukes would be used against formations in the field, not cities. That's what strategic weapons are for (of which Russia has 4000).
If Russia decided to vaporize Ukraine, the West would do nothing because Russia also has the capability to vaporize Europe and North America. That's what those strategic weapons were designed to do in the first place. I don't see why the US would commit national suicide by waging war against a nuclear superpower.
As I write this comment, I'm listening to Putin's live speech as he claims that other nations were threatening to use nuclear weapons against Russia, where he stated that 'the wind could blow against them.'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Time after time, I've seen pro-Russians portray the situation as the US dragging a kicking and screaming Europe into an anti-Russian confrontation
The start of this whole loathsome story was with the US trying to bring Ukraine into NATO back in 2008, which was vehemently opposed by France and Germany, the principal European countries. Eventually they got the US to water it down into 'when, not if, not now'. The US was the one providing lethal military aid to Ukraine pre-war, 90% of all aid pre-war.
Because the whole of post-WW2 order is based on countries invading other countries and annexing parts of them - which was the thing that sparked WW2 in the first place
Missing a not, anyway this is just a made up principle. Annexation is beyond the pale but we can bomb various countries into anarchy, set up puppet governments in them, divide countries into smaller parts, place troops in countries without their permission? We can meddle in the internal workings of other countries in ways that make Russiagate look like even more of a joke (looking at you Yeltsin). But as long as there are no annexations, it's fine?
This is like saying you can march into someone's house, shoot the owner, take their property, re-educate their children, give the property to nearby friends, squat on it indefinitely - but as long as you don't write your name down on the deed it's OK. No sane person would stand by this principle. Anyway, if Russia said 'oh we're not going to annex Ukraine, just conduct regime change', there would be no difference in the reaction from the West. Annexation is clearly not the issue here.
Besides, where is it written in the UN charter that countries can't be annexed or that invasions are illegal? The UN charter says nothing about 'no annexations', the Security Council is the highest authority on these matters. Whatever the Security Council decides is binding. If the Security Council can't make up its mind, then there is nothing left to say.
but on what basis would one argue this for the four currently occupied oblasts in their full form?
The whole of Ukraine, including Crimea, is officially targeted for NATO integration and has been for years. For example, in 2021 the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership affirmed the territorial integrity of Ukraine and its ownership of Crimea. It said that Ukraine was going to get 'full integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions' which means NATO and EU. The US was helping Ukraine finish the necessary reforms and so on. It's just putting two and two together: full integration into Euro-Atlantic, full recognition of pre-2014 borders, plus weapons = the military support is to retake everything: Luhansk, Crimea and so on. Now maybe the US doesn't quite want to go that far in real terms, yet that's what they're formally saying, that's what is written down in treaties and in their rhetoric.
Russia was already moving towards China way before 2022.
Sure and the US has been egging them on all the way. There's a haunting Biden clip from the early 2000s where, when Putin says that he'll work more with China because the US is overbearing, Biden says something like 'good luck with that - there is no replacement for the US, ultimately you have to come to the table whether you like it or not'. There were opportunities to work with Russia in the war on terror but the US just squandered them, pulling out of the ABM treaty for instance. What is that if not a giant red flag?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
The US didn't bother covering up the attack because it's blatantly, absurdly obvious who did it. The US has made very open, public threats about making these pipelines disappear.
The ex-Polish foreign and defence minister knows perfectly well what's going on. This is just like attacks on Iranian scientists or centrifuges. We know perfectly well it's Israel and/or America behind it.
If I had to guess, I'd say the bombs were planted so the US could have another card up its sleeve in case Russia or Germany did anything. They just mobilized, so the US is using more pressure. But I guess that's just correlation=causation too.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
If the US is so eager to die for Ukraine, why not tell the Russians that? 'If you nuke Ukraine, we'll nuke you'!
Furthermore, if you don't understand the distinction between tactical nukes and strategic nukes, then how are you qualified to pontificate on nuclear strategy? Why would you suggest that the US will sacrifice its major cities for the remnants of Ukraine, a country it's not even allied with?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
Maybe the US should've tried not reneging on the JCPOA if it wanted its adversaries to behave. Why would anyone trust an agreement with America when someone like Trump can get elected and tear the whole thing up? Obama gave the Iranians back their own money, Trump rendered years of patient diplomacy worthless and worked hard to start a major war, assassinating a top Iranian leader.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Well the Chinese numbers speak for themselves. Let's say the Chinese are lying and took 10x more deaths than they admit. That means they took 40 deaths per million. Officially they took 4 deaths per million. The US took over 3000 deaths per million.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Our too-little too-late omnishambles lockdowns were pointless, the Chinese lockdowns actually worked. I can't imagine that the Chinese could actually cover up three orders of magnitude worth of deaths. How do you conceal that many 'disappearances'?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
There was no World War in the 1970s, no Great Depression. It was a time of peace and prosperity and yet fertility went to replacement and then below.
How hard is it to understand this? It's RIGHT THERE in a clear academic consensus, all these sources pointing out that female empowerment and education reduces fertility, how they observe this all over the world. There are all these charts showing what can be easily deduced from common sense - that if women are joining the workforce and higher education en masse they're having fewer children. And yet people still try to confuse this blindingly simple issue. The more empowered women are, the more they choose to do other things than having children. Broadening one's view from the sexual revolution (which neatly arrives right as the post-war baby boom ends), we can look at the whole 20th century. You have female enfranchisement happening all across the West and fertility declining. Countries without female empowerment like pre-1945 Japan lack this trend: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033777/fertility-rate-japan-1800-2020/
Wow, this is genuinely brave, independent thought from a US presidential candidate! Rapprochement with Russia, strategic clarity on Taiwan, actual realism in foreign policy... He's clearly read some Mearsheimer or Ebbridge, he understands the jargon.
Yet the power he faces is so overwhelming. Recall how he got bodied by the Israel lobby for heresy, like not providing Israel with billions of dollars of military aid. This will make a lot of people very angry. Better to keep this kind of plan hidden, like Nixon did. But Vivek clearly needs to grab attention, it's an unenviable position to be in.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
What kind of liberties do you have in America?
Seriously! The Christian baker does not have a choice, he MUST bake the cake for the homosexual couple, regardless of what he thinks or wants to do. Go near an airport - oh that's a liberty-free zone. Privacy? Not if the NSA has anything to say about it. Don't have the right demographics in your company? Civil rights violation (and a big payout if too many of the right demographics fail your test). Disliked by the government? Get ready to be de-banked.
Be a world-renowned researcher and have consensual sex with someone in the workplace? That's it for your career, the moment she decides it wasn't appropriate: https://www.thefp.com/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cancer-researcher
Stupid, violent criminals get free housing on probation and then a $100,000/year prison cell after they murder productive members of society: https://www.karlstack.com/p/his-name-was-seth-smith?s=w
Under the latest innovation of US 'civil liberties' the parole searches that caught the killer would now be illegal.
And of course drug dealers are at perfect liberty to go around wrecking people's lives with impunity to the state, turning urban centres into massive shitholes?
I don't see how getting rid of drug dealers has anything to do with policing dissent (which we know the US already does a great deal of, thanks to the Twitter papers). It's pure, textbook anarcho-tyranny. The way the US constitution is implemented in practice today works primarily to protect and patronize the scummiest and most worthless oxygen-thieves, at the expense of ordinary (and especially productive) members of society.
And society does affect you. If you're paying taxes, some of it will go towards the costs of overdoses and drug crime, social, economic, medical, political. If you're enjoying public services, they'd be better if the US didn't have this problem. If you enjoy the fruits of industry and labour, you'd be better off if those people were working jobs as opposed to doubled over in a ditch.
It's possible that one single Jew- Fritz Haber- saved more lives with one single invention, than the sum of all lives lost to every single "bad Jew" on the planet.
Ah yes but somebody would've figured out synthesizing nitrogen eventually. If it wasn't Haber, it would've been the next-best, next-luckiest chemist. As guano prices rise, more money and brainpower is brought to bear on the problem. Someone was always going to figure out quantum mechanics, eventually. In a world without Jews, people might've figured out nuclear weapons somewhat slower but it would still have been achieved. Likewise with polio vaccines.
Politics and culture is vastly more important than science since culture and politics are one-shot things. If you lock in feminism to the Japanese constitution and the birthrate plummets, never to recover, then that's brainpower that is forever lost, it cannot be rediscovered. If you (Trotsky, Zinoviev and the rest of the gang) impose a horrendously bad form of government on a huge swathe of Eurasia (then get overthrown by Stalin and Beria who do their best to match and exceed in terms of brutality and waste), then that can never be undone. Let's not forget galaxy-brain Von Neumann's plea to immediately wage nuclear war against the Soviet Union and kill tens of millions more. If he'd been listened to, if people had trusted his game theory over their own common sense... Well someone else can invent computer architecture - nobody can bring the dead back to life.
Over the last few years, how many people weren't born because of Ehrlich and co's overpopulation meme? How much wealth has been squandered? Nobody can be sure but the amount of brainpower we lost to communism and bad politics (which is admittedly multi-causal but heavily influenced by ideas promulgated by Jews) is immense. My bet is that it outweighs Jewish contributions to science by far.
It seems particularly insane to me in the present moment for any White identitarians to dare to make themselves seem like a threat to Jews, when so many Jews are playing crucial roles in AI development. There are an almost infinite number of ways in which unnecessary enmity could turn out horribly for White anti-Semites during this phase of history!
Good point. But the key thing hinges upon the necessity of the enmity. If you have a neutral, then you should not offend them unless necessary, especially if they're powerful. But if there's an enemy on the verge of attaining total power over the world? If protesting at the sinister entrenchment of political bias in GPT, for example, is making a threat, so be it. It's rather similar to the adage 'When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression'.
Likewise, brainpower is needed in a conflict with China. But there are other options - we could abandon our crusade to impose LGBT rights and liberal democracy upon Beijing. Acknowledging China as a legitimate non-democracy would have soothed much of the problems. Or we could've been more disciplined earlier on! Goldman Sachs and co could have not blindly sought profits from the Chinese market... A less Open Society would not have brought in Chinese students and trained them in advanced technology, so they could then leak IP back to China. A West that had a genuinely nationalist policy would not have let its industrial base be carved out and send to Shanghai.
There's a combination of high intelligence and insufficiently high wisdom that is very dangerous. It can make money and innovation - but also bad money and bad innovations like coin-clipping or communism, Middle East regime change, pre-emptive nuclear war, pumping sterilization drugs into the water supply as Ehrlich proposed. Better to match moderate wisdom and intelligence, advance swiftly but not recklessly embrace radical ideas.
Even so, I respect the novelty and refreshing point of view of your argument. But don't you think that it's a very unlikely ideology to work? I've spent a lot of time reading and never come across anything like what you say. People more naturally think in terms of 'threat -> enemy -> weaken/destroy' than 'threat -> cooperate -> ally'. Why else are there wars in the world?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
In addition, Jewish political donations today are considerable and tend towards socially liberal or pro-Israel causes. This is in addition to their massive structural influence throughout media and the world economy.
See my comment ages ago: https://www.themotte.org/post/205/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/37000?context=8#context
Who were the biggest individual political donors to Biden in 2020? Mr Sussman, Mr Simons, Ms Simon make up the top 3. All three are Jewish (Simons is the multi-billionaire founder of Renaissance capital, Sussman founded another finance company and and Simon is a real estate heiress).
Other notable spenders in the election were Bloomberg and Steyer, who ran failed electoral campaigns of their own. Steyer is half-Jewish. Bloomberg is Jewish. On the Republican side we have 'kingmaker' Sheldon Adelson, who was the largest Trump donor in 2016 and probably 2020. Jewish. We've got Uihlein, Griffin, Mellon, Ricketts & Eyechaner non-Jewish. Dustin Moskovitz, Jewish and pro-Democratic. Paul Singer, Jewish (he supported Republicans but also tried to get them to support LGBT). And then there's Soros whose exact donation figures are hard to discern due to it mostly being dodgy websites that discuss it, though probably very large if not the highest of all. Zuckerberg provided hundreds of millions for election offices, which is vaguely political. I can't believe it doesn't buy influence, especially in conditions where the format and methods used were in a state of flux due to COVID.
I observe a general trend where extremely rich Jews support Democrats and LGBT - their fortunes mostly from finance or tech. There's Adelson who's on the other side of course (Adelson was most interested in union-busting, marijuana prohibition and pro-Israel action). In contrast, we have gentiles who usually support Republicans and are fairly right-wing. This is from reading their wikipedia blurbs. Of the twelve 2020 megadonors CNN described as 'white', 7 are Jewish. 6.5 depending on how you class Steyer.
There's also such a thing as the 'Adelson primary'! Basically the top Republican candidates compete to see who can be more pro-Israel in foreign policy so Adelson will give them tens of millions of dollars. It's pretty repulsive, even though it looks legal. With stuff like this going on in broad daylight, who needs Scott's Dark Money? The prospect of offending Adelson by some incredibly minor slight gets these high-and-mighty Republicans to bow and scrape.
The behind-the-scenes wooing of the Adelsons has been underway for months — a graphic testament to the outside influence that one or two fabulously wealthy donors can have on the presidential race. According to an account first reported by National Review, Jeb Bush initially fell out of Sheldon Adelson’s favor after one of his foreign policy advisers, former Secretary of State James Baker, spoke at an event sponsored by J Street, an American Jewish “pro-peace” group that supports Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. The appearance prompted the casino magnate to send word that the move cost the former Florida governor “a lot of money,” while associates of Adelson were quoted as saying that Bush was “dead to him.”
Bush scrambled to make amends. One top GOP donor who is close to the Adelsons told Yahoo News that he quickly got a phone call from Bush distancing himself from Baker. Bush “told me that he [Baker] was just on a list and that he’s never called him for any advice,” said the donor, who, like most others interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified publicly. The donor, at Bush’s request, then passed this along to Adelson. It was “helpful,” the donor said, in mollifying Adelson.
And consider people like Pompeo (then US secretary of state) and their tendancy to go on weird tangents about Israel. It's likely that they're selected for high office precisely because they love Israel (or will at least say and act like they do), by politicians who want to look like they love Israel. How else would you get a Secretary of State who says things like this?
"There is no more important task of the Secretary of State than standing for Israel and there is no more important ally to the United States than Israel. There is much more work to do."
Or Nancy Pelosi:
"If this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid…and I don’t even call it aid…our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are"
Their political prospects are surely linked to how pro-Israeli they are, this is the language of sucking up to the boss.
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.
America is supporting Egypt to support Israel!
It's pretty clear. As soon as Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel they got a flood of US aid. They got $5.9 billion in US aid in 1979, when the treaty was signed, up from about $1 billion in 1975 when they were signing disengagement treaties over the Sinai. Before, in 1974 they were getting $70 million. When Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, they got $700 million in debt relief from the US and about half a billion in annual aid since, 10x what it was before.
The fact of the matter is that there are enormously wealthy and powerful Jewish billionaires and lobby groups who generously donate to candidates and encourage them to be pro-Israeli. Adelson on the Republican side for example. He gave Trump at least a hundred million dollars, possibly more. Besides funding pro-Israel political candidates, he funds Jewish-Israeli institutes at universities to improve its image and discourse power there.
one of the key goals of Adelson and other advocates of the Jewish center is to moderate the Arab presence at the university." The program's first director, Yossi Shain (who also heads the Hartog School of Government at Tel Aviv University), said it was important to set up such a program at Georgetown "because it's a Jesuit school, because it's in Washington, because it's in the foreign service school."
Besides Adelson (and many other billionaires funding other pro-Israeli candidates who I've left out for conciseness), there's AIPAC which is tremendously powerful.
Former Congressman Mervyn Dymally (D-CA) once called AIPAC "without question the most effective lobby in Congress," and the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Lee Hamilton, who served in Congress for thirty-four years, said in 1991, "There's no lobby group that matches it . . . They're in a class by themselves
And there are many other Jewish slavishly pro-Israel groups.
Albert Chernin, the executive director of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC, later renamed the Jewish Council for Public Affairs), expressed this perspective in 1978 when he said that our "first priority is Israel, of course, reflecting the complete identity of views of the American Jewish leadership with the concerns of the rank and file." The historian Jack Wertheimer terms this comment a "stunning admission that political efforts to shore up Israel superseded all other concerns of Jewish community relations organizations in the United States."
as Hyman Bookbinder, a high-ranking official of the American Jewish Committee, once admitted, "Unless something is terribly pressing, really critical or fundamental, you parrot Israel's line in order to retain American support. As American Jews, we don't go around saying Israel is wrong about its policies.
US support for Israel is primarily motivated by this wealthy and influential band of lobby groups and billionaires, who are predominantly made up of Jews supporting their coethnics/religious brethren. There are also Christian Zionists and more dovish Jewish groups but they are in the minority.
Israel gets away with so much - they bomb/invade their neighbors, sell US technology to China, spy flagrantly on the US, supply misleading intelligence about the Iraqi nuclear program, bomb a US ship. They never join in US wars and yet get the most aid, despite being a rich country. The US suffers hundreds of billions in economic damage due to the Arab oil embargo - because they resupply Israel during the Yom Kippur war. Israel delegitimizes the non-proliferation treaty, they motivate Iranian nuclearization. They're a massive strategic deadweight. Only the lobbying can explain such ongoing US support.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
I am once again asking why any Russian leader would believe the Americans might sacrifice Washington and New York for Kiev. If you read the literature the French seriously doubted whether the US would sacrifice New York for Paris during the Cold War, let alone Kiev. That's why they have a nuclear arsenal. Paris >>>>>> Kiev.
Why do you think the US would decide to commit national suicide over Ukraine? It is irrational to make such a bluff. It wouldn't be believed. That's why the US didn't even make it.
If they did, why wouldn't the US say this to the world? If you genuinely think that the US would do this, why wouldn't they say 'if you nuke Kiev we will nuke you'? What kind of madman would decide to sacrifice his country to defend another and not even make a single clear, public warning that he'd do such a thing?
I'll tell you what's actually happening. The US makes vague threats of 'catastrophic consequences' if Russia uses nuclear weapons and says 'oh we told them privately'. That means they're not willing to use nuclear weapons, as is immediately obvious - Ukraine is not under the US nuclear umbrella. You don't put someone under a nuclear umbrella and then not tell anyone about it. That defeats the whole point.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Two sequences of events
-
US officials have long hated this pipeline and publicly threatened to terminate it, regardless of what Germany wishes
-
US military forces stage a mine-clearing exercise off Bornholm island, testing their snazzy new drones and technologies. They leave a couple of mines or smart torpedoes behind. If they're somehow discovered, it's an accident from the exercises. These are now a method they can use if Germany starts getting antsy about waging proxy war against their energy supplier or if Russia moves more aggressively.
-
Russia commences partial mobilization, stages referendums on parts of Ukraine joining Russia so it can creep its nuclear umbrella forward into Ukraine
-
US blows up the pipeline in response, securing profits for its energy exporters, tying Germany's hands and hurting Russian diplomacy in Europe by removing leverage
Alternately
-
Russia spends billions of dollars building a pipeline to Germany so it can make a great deal of money selling gas
-
Russian naval forces, not known for their excellence, lay explosives in their own pipeline (which they control the flow of gas to and could turn on or off at any time)
-
Russian forces blow up their own pipeline to show they can blow up other people's pipelines, like the Norwegian-Poland pipeline that finished just today, which they don't control, didn't pay for and actively harms their interests!
Surely you see that the former approach makes more sense than the latter!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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?
'Da joos' is the most open and blatant kind of sarcastic sneering you can imagine. None of the below is acceptable or provides any kind of serious content:
Jews act and have political effects, as do liberals or rich people. I don't particularly like the long and interminable discussions on the abstract gender/trans theory here but that's fine, other people do. I minimize that thread and move along because I recognize that this is a politics discussion website and this is an appropriate place to talk about it. It's as easy as clicking a button. I don't provide a backhanded comment smearing people who talk about it as low-class or obsessives.
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