RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
The human Israeli soldiers are rapey - recall the protests and rioting when the Israeli govt briefly tried to arrest some of its soldiers for raping prisoners. Apparently the rapist is now a celebrity in Israel, appearing on TV shows.
It's absolutely believable that the same govt who tolerates raping of prisoners also tolerates the use of dogs for rape. It is a very ordinary claim, not an extraordinary claim.
An Israeli parliamentarian on live camera vigorously protested for doing anything to prisoners:
Lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky was asked as he defended the alleged abuse whether it was legitimate, "to insert a stick into a person's rectum?"
"Yes!" he shouted in reply to his fellow parliamentarian. "If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!"
Abusing prisoners also fits into the general Israeli policy of rule by terror and force, their Dahiya doctrine of maximum destruction to civilian targets.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
They could cut the 'import Afghans and house them in hotels secretly with gag orders' budget... Or refrain from giving Mauritius money and land.
There's no shortage of money in the UK, the British government just knowingly allocates it towards bad ends.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
If I have a psychopath, who stabs someone to death with a kitchen knife vs one who does it with a switchblade.
If you have a psychopath with a machine gun (or a truck in a tightly packed crowd) then that's a lot more of a problem. The answer is to get rid of the psychopaths, terrorists, enemies, criminals, feral hogs, pit bulls... Not the guns, trucks, drones, fertilizer, chemicals, knives...
In the 18th and 19th centuries they'd go on about good governments bringing Improvement, how obviously you're supposed to drain swamps and irrigate the land and develop agriculture and industry. That was what civilization was all about. We should be continuing with Improvements today rather than just redistributing wealth to and fro.
Guns and drones and vehicles can all be very dangerous if weaponized. Better to make schools more tolerable so nobody shoots them up, better to ensure that school shooters are not sensationalized and rendered infamous by the media... Better to imprison, expel, execute terrorists (or refrain from 'invade the world, invite the world' foreign policy) than make bollards to impede their rampages. Better to liquidate criminals than having a revolving door prison system where they get arrested 14 times and then kill someone, only to be found 'unfit for trial' due to mental illness or retardation. The goal is to render improvements, not just blindly obey a huge agglomeration of laws. The laws were written by men and are interpreted by men for achieving real world goals.
None of this is inflammatory or surprising or extraordinary. The same country that goes around massacring, raping, launching various bombing attacks, assassinations and false flag attacks its entire existence continues to do so... stop the presses! They've been torturing prisoners for many years, why would we expect them to stop now?
They did this kind of thing long before 2023, shooting people because they can: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/02/no-justification-israel-shoot-protesters-live-ammunition?LangID=E&NewsID=24226
There are videos here of a goofy attempt to cover up rape: https://x.com/ApartheidReview/status/2054208876048679271
They dropped the charges, it's not politically possible to punish these guys. How would it be possible, when people riot to free them and politicians leap to their defence? What do they have to fear? It's not like America or a Western country where war crimes are taken painfully seriously.
Would we be surprised if the Syrian government that went around torturing and massacring and suppressing almost the whole time it existed (Hama for instance) continued to do so? Or if the Chinese government which has been constantly being incredibly authoritarian and repressive for its entire existence continues to be authoritarian and repressive? That doesn't need sourcing, it's ordinary and normal.
It's ironic that there are all these people who cry about leftists holding Israel 'to a different standard' than Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran or Syria - when they are the ones who do so, demanding all this evidence that Israel has done something wrong, as if there aren't mountains of killings and atrocities they dish out... If any other country said 'oh the UNHCR is biased against us, Amnesty is biased against us, all the journalists we keep shooting are biased against us, they're all just anti-Our_Country' they wouldn't get even the most credulous to believe such a nakedly self-serving assertion.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
23d ago
ANZAC Day and Welcome to Country
Anzac Day is an Australian national holiday on 25th April each year, devised to honour the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought in WW1. Gallipoli is one of the great national myths of Australia, at the start of the the transition from colony to real country. There’s a myth of ‘lions led by donkeys’ in that the British were too slow to secure their beachhead, their officers were having tea on the beach and then we got stuck in trench warfare. This is confected but helped solidify Australia as a nation distinct from Britain.
There are Anzac values like bravery, mateship, camaraderie and ingenuity: William Scurry’s self-firing ‘drip rifle’ that was used to mask the retreat. If you went to school in Australia you’d have memories of a student mangling The Last Post on a bugle while in Assembly, everyone saying ‘lest we forget’ and speeches about sacrifice and duty and values.
More recently, there has been booing during a Welcome to Country ceremony conducted in the Melbourne Dawn Service for Anzac Day A transcript of the Welcome to Country, from Bunurong Elder and Senior Cultural Heritage Officer Mark Brown:
“I am uncle Mark Brown, elder and senior cultural heritage officer of the Bunurong people. And today I'm here to welcome everybody to my father's country. Beautiful Bunarong country.
But before we do that, as always, we take a moment, we pay our acknowledgements, and we pay our respects. We pay our respect to all of my ancestors. We pay our respect to all of my elders. And we pay our respect to all of my community members, past, present, and emerging, And we acknowledge the continuous and unbroken connection to country for the Bunurong people.
We also pay acknowledgements and respects to all traditional custodians of Australia, Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. And we pay acknowledgements and respects to all of my indigenous brothers and sisters from around the world who work, rest, live or play on Bunurong country. We acknowledge their continuous and unbroken connection to country for all of their people, and we thank each and every single one of them for being here with us.
But today, on the sacred lands of the Bunurong people, we all gather in the spirit of respect, unity, and reconciliation. And this welcome, this welcome is an opportunity. It is an opportunity for us to honour and respect the deep cultural heritage of the Bunurong people of the Kulin nation, whose elders and community members have generously looked after these lands for countless generations.
My people have a deep spiritual connection to these lands, encompassing all of our rivers, our mountains, our coastal areas, and all of our beautiful bushlands that surround us today. Our traditional territory spans from the Werribee River in the west and moves to Diggers Rest in the north. We follow it over to the Dandenong Ranges, the Yarra Valley, and down to Wilson's Prom. We encompass the top end of Tasmania, which we share with the beautiful Palawa people. French, Phillip, King and Flinders islands are also ours.
And these are the traditional lands and territories of the Bunurong people that I welcome everybody to today. And as we gather here today, we gather in the respect of all of my people, my family, the fighting Gunditj and the Bunurong.
So Wominjeka and welcome to beautiful Bunurong country, my father's country.
Thank you."
‘Welcome to Country’ is a new myth-building rite that’s conducted at just about all major and minor public occasions in Australia these days, where an Aboriginal comes and gives an address and affirms, in some more or less nebulous way, that his people are the real owners of the land. Maybe they're traditional custodians. Or perhaps 'sovereignty was never ceded'. Sometimes they're really small and quick, when it's just white people reading out a script in a monotone as a preamble to some trivial meeting, even zoom meetings sometimes.
One thing that I observe is this interchangeable use of the first person. He uses ‘my people’, ‘my indigenous brothers’ and also ‘our rivers’, ‘islands are ours’. Yet he also says how ‘we pay our respects to all of my elders’. He’s switching from being ‘I am here as part of all Australians present’ to ‘I am one of the true landowners, with a continuous and unbroken connection to my country’ as he sees fit. He’s paying respect as an Australian, on behalf of all others present, to himself as an indigenous elder and presenting it as an opportunity.
Maybe he adlibs too, trying to be more aggressive in the face of booing. It’s visible that he’s sad and upset about being booed.
War
Then there’s the reference to fighting Gunditijmara.
In essence, whites crushed Aboriginals wherever they came into conflict during colonization. Aboriginals largely lacked the martial culture and organization of Native Americans, who managed to inflict occasional defeats on white troops and massacre civilians with more success. The Comanche launched huge raids into Mexico and depopulated the north, did a lot of damage to Texas. None of that ever happened in Australia, it was one-sided in the extreme.
“It's believed that around 80 settlers died; while the Gunditjmara suffered the loss of 6,500 of their people, from a total of 7000.”
The SBS (state-run Australian ethnic media outlet) attribute the crushing defeat in this war of resistance partially to the Native Police, aboriginal troops with white officers. It seems that is one of the few kinds of multiculturalism that the SBS doesn’t favour:
“They wouldn’t have done what they did if they had been in a right mindset, and their tradition," said Ms Lovett.
"You reward them with shiny (things) and make them feel important. Because they hadn’t felt important for a long time. They were victims of what happened to all of us."
The whole article is full of cope really, glorifying sheep-stealing raids as an epic struggle of resistance, which brings me back to my main point.
The aboriginal tribes of Australia lost incredibly badly in warfare, it was possibly the most crushing and one-sided defeat in history, largely inflicted by adhoc militias and settlers rather than troops.
Peace
Then the aboriginals won a series of incredible political victories, despite being generally hopeless.
Today they get about $6 billion AUD a year in indigenous specific services, targeted exclusively at them, in addition to regular spending. Their tax input is minimal. Expenditure per person for aboriginals is roughly twice that for non-indigenous people (in large part due to how they live out in remote locations where it’s hard to provide goods and services) and also because they’re incredibly dysfunctional, requiring welfare and adult supervision.
They get partial native title over 70% of Australia's landmass, albeit mostly the desolate parts and block development.
Petrol in remote areas needs additives put in it to stop them sniffing it and suffering brain damage.
Indigenous youth make up 55% of those in youth detention despite being only 7% of the youth. Adults, despite being only 3% of the national population, represent 33% of the prison population. They are the most incarcerated people in the world because they commit enormous amounts of crime, mostly against eachother.
There are aboriginal towns in Australia 30x more violent than the US, even more violent than the nastier American cities.
They commit 30-80x more domestic violence against women than the Australian average.
Alice Springs at one point had the world’s highest stabbing rate, mostly aboriginal women being stabbed. It hasn't significantly improved.
There are occasional ‘interventions’ when white politicians get appalled by how violent and brutal their remote towns are and decide to ban alcohol and pornography. Australian politicians love banning things. But the situation was bad, there was and remains an epidemic of abuse and child rape in Aboriginal areas, children getting STDs:
90% of school age children in some places suffering abuse.
There’s a cycle where the situation gets really bad, then the government cracks down, left-wingers and NGOs decry it as racist and authoritarian and eventually the crackdown ends. There’s no positive long term change, only expenditure of money. The only thing that’s long-term is white people being blamed, somehow white colonization is said to have caused all this pedophilia and domestic violence, general incompetence. In truth they were already doing that when whites got here, they had ancient traditions of infanticide, ritual cannibalism, scarification and intertribal warfare. I don’t see how British colonization made the aboriginals horrifically violent and rapey to eachother but Ireland remains fine despite centuries of colonization and harsh treatment. Who loses their land and decides to become a pedophile or beat their wife to a pulp?
More realistically they were just inherently stupid to begin with, which is why they never got around to agriculture or more advanced social organization. How much time and effort needs to be expended trying to make these people meet the standards of others? Why expend effort trying to make them act like white people, while also encouraging and valorizing them for their indigeneity, for sitting on Australia for 60,000 years with little to show for it? Where is the value in this? Why even try? A billion dollars represents hundreds of lifetimes of labour, taken away by the state.
Some of my friends worked with the failed referendum to give Aboriginals a Voice to Parliament (a great tool for hectoring whites and asking for more money, more privileges). The ‘real’ black aboriginal elders, the ones who aren’t cherrypicked speakers, the ones they brought in from the bush to provide a more authentic perspective, they had no conceptual understanding of legislation or abstract concepts generally, consulting them was impossible. It was like they were drunk, my politically correct friends said. Maybe they were drunk. The elite aboriginal activists weren’t that much better, constantly trying to do crazy self-defeating things. This brings me to Lydia Thorpe.
A left-leaning Melbourne seat elected a partially aboriginal woman, Lydia Thorpe, to the Senate who made a complete embarrassment of herself and the Greens Party. She was in a relationship with an outlawed bikie gang ex-president while serving on the parliamentary law enforcement committee. She applauded an arson attack of the Old Parliament House as the colonial system burning down.
In a June 2022 interview, Thorpe said that the parliament has "no permission to be here [in Australia]" and that she’s a parliament member "only" so she can "infiltrate" the "colonial project." She added that the Australian flag had "no permission to be" in the land.
She heckled King Charles III at Parliament House and claimed she had sworn allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II’s ‘hairs’ rather than ‘heirs’. She then walked it back when it was pointed out that she’d signed a document for her oath and the document was spelled correctly.
She got into an altercation outside a Melbourne strip club, approaching white patrons and telling them they had small penises and had stolen her land. She’s since been permanently banned from that strip club.
In short, she’s a racist stereotype given flesh, a single mother at 17. An idiot who thinks she’s smarter than she is and still in the Senate.
Democracy is not a suicide pact, why would any normal people tolerate wreckers who are openly trying to undermine and destroy the country that they think is illegitimate, who clearly hold their oaths in total contempt? If this woman had any actual power, it is overwhelmingly clear that she'd use it solely for her co-ethnics and to extract from whites, which was my problem with the Voice to Parliament. Ironically, she opposed that, instead demanding a treaty where various aboriginal tribes would be considered like independent states.
As a group, Aboriginals make Sub-Saharan Africans look like paragons of civilization. Some did at least develop kingdoms, metalworking and agriculture. Aboriginals did not develop Australia in any way recognizable to civilized peoples. One can only take their word for it that they have a deep, invisible, spiritual connection to the land.
And yet despite all this dysfunction and incompetence, it’s fashionable and useful to have indigenous heritage. Sometimes universities boast on social media over their blue eyed, white-faced ‘indigenous’ medical graduates, who exploit the extra help given to nominally aboriginal students and their higher IQs, less dysfunctional family upbringings to get ahead. If they’re even aboriginal at all and not just lying.
Aboriginals get their customary law partially applied in some cases, they get more lenient treatment in the real courts, with judges and police incentivized informally to reduce their incarceration, find non-punitive ways of managing their dysfunction.
They get another $AUD billion a year in preferential govt contracting.
They can even be brought in to make Anzac Day speeches where about 85% of the content is them personally claiming the country that the fallen, overwhelmingly white, soldiers fought and died for. ANZACs were not mentioned at all in Brown’s speech, only affirmations to his people's claim to the country and these unsubtle implications that he's the authority who decides who other people pay respect to. Then they take a speaking fee for that. Meanwhile, war memorials are vandalized with graffiti such as ‘the colony will fall’…
It’s as if they won a war and are enjoying the spoils from the conquered people. Isn't this world-historically bizarre?
Yet there’s been booing from the audience, organized by younger and more radical rightwingers presumably. Naturally the booing was condemned by the state premiers and those who actually run the country as disrespectful to the war dead - though none of the soldiers who spoke about the war dead were booed. Some of the more rightwing senators are taking easier potshots like ‘it’s inappropriate to have a hat on while making a speech in a Dawn Service’ or denying that veterans need to be welcomed back to their country. They don't deny the central case generally, that whites need to pay respects and pay tribute to a conquered people. Just not on Anzac Day.
Here’s a twitter topic if you want to look at some other perspectives.
Why is there only booing about this? In 1870 Bismarck edited a single letter to make the tone a little curt, like Wilhelm had abruptly rebuffed the French ambassador and sent a low-ranked officer to convey the message. Bismarck had it leaked on Bastille day and that started a major war with France. Bismarck is considered the aggressor, people generally accepted at the time the French couldn’t accept an insult like that! Hundreds of thousands died over national honour.
The conquered are giving laws to the conquerors.
This is a microcosm of the key trend of the last 100 years, whites who forcibly conquered 90% of the world bending over backwards to be nice and get forgiveness from the peoples they conquered. The conquered peoples quickly organized to take maximum possible advantage of this bizarre blunder, organizing more or less adeptly to demand treaties, land rights, welfare payments, reparations and special ceremonies to further legitimize and expand this political superiority.
Despite the passivity, it is what war is all about: obtaining land and obtaining wealth or labour from others. Political and social status. Securing these things from challengers. That is what wars are fought for, only the means are non-kinetic.
There seems to be a concept that after enough of these political ceremonies, apologies, reparations (formal or just via progressive taxation), criminal justice reforms and affirmative action black people (or blak as they sometimes call themselves in Australia) are going to be happy and we’ll all dance together in harmony. Some day the Gap will be Closed, that's the ostensible plan that Australia pursues.
If you give people money and status because you conquered them, they’re going to use this and try to get more wealth from you. If you pay for something, you get more of it. It creates incentives for professional political workers like Elder Brown to show up and hone rabblerousing, rhetorical, guilt-tripping skills. It creates incentives to be more strident and demanding to prove ideological purity and righteousness. And there’s also a massive sunk cost fallacy amongst white people. Many officials, taxpayers and donors don’t want to believe that they’ve spent billions, hundreds of billions, trillions paying subsidies, apologising to and working for low-performers who aren’t going to get their act together anytime soon and certainly aren’t going to be grateful for it. It would be incredibly embarrassing to change course now. In fact, after paying all this lip service to colonial sins and a couple trillion in foreign aid to Africa, the Global Majority of black and brown people are multiplying and migrating over to Europe, America, Australia as ‘climate refugees’, looking for more money, welfare and special privileges. Ireland never colonized anyone, yet isn't escaping diversity.
The Israelis don’t make this mistake, there aren’t any Palestinian land acknowledgements in the West Bank. They make good use of language and ritual, as did the Australians of old. In the 19th century, Australian newspapers would report on how colonists would eagerly ‘disperse’ or ‘duly and efficiently pound’ aboriginals. The Native Police would ‘give them a dressing down’, a ‘thumping’ or ‘a shaking up’.
In Israel there’s all this talk about security zones, neutralizing, mowing the lawn, suspected militants, human shields, Dahiya doctrine. This is a kind of political warfare, on the other side there are words like Holocaust, Nazi and genocide, for Australia ‘Invasion Day’ rather than Australia Day.
We obsess far too much about physical weapons, hypersonic missiles, tanks and drones. They are important in conflicts where both sides are politically strong and united: traditional interstate wars. But political weapons are more important, they control that unity and self-conception. What good is it winning wars if you lose the peace?
Better not to fight at all, especially if hopelessly outgunned and outmatched. Better to just take wealth and land slowly through legal means, engineer new rites to legitimize authority and status and national self-concept. Even traditional warfare is a contest of willpower, the capacity to endure pain and fight on for a given reward, it’s a test of political strength.
AI
No post of mine would be complete without a digression on AI... Bunurong Elder Mark Brown has an AI-written website hawking his services:
He even made an AI-written statement decrying how he was booed on linkedin:
Along with some AI jeers at Charlie Kirk too:
Charlie Kirk deserved the fate he brought on himself. When you spend your life fueling division, spreading lies, and tearing down communities, it is only a matter of time before that same poison turns back on you. His downfall isn’t tragedy — it’s justice catching up with him. The irony is that the hate he spread became the weight that dragged him down.
My assumption is that a default ChatGPT wouldn’t quite outright say ‘Charlie Kirk deserved his fate’ even though it’s inclined in that direction. I think Brown just left the memory feature on by default and it acclimated itself to his views. I imagine it would refuse his rightwing equivalent. I haven’t tested this though and don’t use ChatGPT, I’m interested in any thoughts others have with that, or other things mentioned.
I observe also that the culture war is global and only getting more global with automated cheap translation and the primacy of US media, especially social media. And AI acts as a force multiplier. I doubt Brown would’ve bothered to make a statement on Kirk if he had to write it out himself.
One wonders whether Brown is a real person or just a mouth reading out AI speeches. After all, you can’t hear an em dash as easily as you can read it. Beneath all these high-minded words, there’s this perpetual search for cash: $770 AUD for a Welcome to Country, $4500 for a keynote speech, $90 for AI designed t-shirts and hoodies. Art created by AI (made by whites and Asians), printed on T-shirts (made in America from global parts, so whites and Asians), justified by a synthetic social status.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
Joe Kent went on 11 combat tours in the Middle East, his wife died in combat there, how can you call him a clown for not wanting to lose another war in the Middle East?
Plus he actually studied strategy at university, he's 10x the leader of someone like Hegseth or Laura Loomer or whatever neocon idiot Trump takes advice from.
It doesn't take a great strategist to realize that attacking Iran is moronic, or that the Israelis are just lying when they shriek and whine about nuclear weapons. They've been shrieking and whining for decades, far longer than it takes to acquire nuclear weapons. The clowns are the people who still listen to Netanyahu when he only brings them lies, costs, war and ignominy by association.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Is Hantavirus that much of a big deal? There were a bunch of scares, Nipah and Marburg and monkeypox and H5N1 that turned out to be not such a big deal. Everyone is just a bit scared since COVID and so the media will amp that right up.
I know degens on 4chan have already anthropomorphized and sexualized the hantavirus like COVID before that but we should probably be fine? They panic about everything, real or imaginary.
Nevertheless anyone who comes down with a novel strain of disease should be strictly quarantined IMO, not flown around the world to max out infectivity.
See this is an important and valuable post. He knows my ideas are a threat to him. He's not interested in abstract logic or the interests of other ethnic groups. Nobody could ever persuade him to give up power or his co-ethnics position for the sake of some universal value or the interests of others. The thought would never enter his mind. He would much rather fight and die than lose power. He doesn't spare a sentence to justify his case based on universal values (besides the value that blacks deserve more), he holds the very idea of justifying in contempt. Why should he need to justify his ethnic group's position?
He sees a threat to the power of his ethnic group and he rails against it as hard as he can. Because losing power is innately bad. Anything that reduces the power of blacks obviously threatens him, even if it's a random person deep down in the comments of a tiny internet forum speaking with people who either already agree or despise the idea. The interests of other groups? Totally irrelevant.
Likewise he appeals so deftly to the mythology that's been so painstakingly established, like I want blacks enslaved again. Who thinks blacks would add value as slaves? Machinery would do a much better job. But it's a great uniting narrative.
This is politics in action, that's the core of it fundamentally. You get power for you and yours, any threats to your power you identify and rail against. You unite your allies against the threat with myths, songs, poems and culture.
The guy who doesn't even proofread his final dramatic statement 'I'LL NEVER BE ACCEPT BEING A SLAVE!!!' has given us a masterclass in how normal people, non-WEIRD, non hyper-intellectual people actually see things, how things actually work. First-rate post that many here could learn valuable lessons from.
This is how and why schools give blacks all these bonus marks for admission, why Biden promised to appoint a black woman to the supreme court, why there are all these subsidies and contracts for nominally black businesses that then subcontract to whites when work is needed, why there is affirmative action in hiring, why there is an outcry when blacks are shot by police and why the AP style guide capitalizes Black and not white. It's a highly effective political strategy when left uncountered.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Angelus Novus looks super ugly like a deformed chicken with the face of a monster, then the artist sneezed violently over the paper, coating it in phlegm.
https://www.1000museums.com/shop/art/paul-klee-angelus-novus/
While art and taste is indeed idiosyncratic, museums have the role of curating and selecting art for preservation and developing culture. Only a tiny fraction of art ever gets praise or is shown in museums. Whatever museums do, they're making political, cultural choices, they're distributing status and prestige in a way that alienates the majority of people and caters to a certain highly left-wing clique. They should pick art that actually looks good, that most people generally enjoy or get uplift from. That's what they're there for. The weird, deranged stuff should get its own booru and that's about it.
Critic René Crevel called the artist [Klee] a "dreamer" who "releases a swarm of small lyrical louses from mysterious abysses."
With sufficient verbal IQ and chutzpah I could construct an argument for why anything, including Stable Diffusion 1 512x512 outputs I made in bulk and looked at for about 5 seconds before forgetting about, is a desperately profound and deeply meaningful exploration of meaning, time and space, intensely political too.
The VAE, the Variational Autoencoder, great interpreter between the numerical and the retinal, has performed an act of translation poetry. Something is always lost but something stranger is always gained.
The CFG of 7.5 takes a deliberately bourgeois, middle-ground position between the statistical id of 1 and the robotic intensity of 15. And yet the bourgeois condition is itself a subject...
But that wouldn't make them worthy to sit in an art gallery. It's not supposed to be a test of verbal IQ but of artistic skill and ability. Anyone can make an ugly deformed chicken with a monster face.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
'sell' their nuclear weapons program?
Countries don't develop nuclear weapons (or latent nuclear capacity) as part of a commercial strategy, they develop them because they feel threatened or face some kind of strategic challenge.
Some Americans seem to have this idea that Iran was getting free money from Obama or various 'weak' administrations or that there's some kind of tension-raising economic routine going on. Not so! Obama returned some frozen Iranian funds, a pittance compared to past and future sanctions and the active subversion of the country by US and Israeli intelligence. Iran had to develop their own weapons industry, oil production facilities, car industry... they chose the hard road of sovereignty rather than beg for sanctions relief by capitulating to the US/Israeli camp. They didn't do those things because they were cheap or easy but because they felt they had no choice.
If Iran was principally motivated by avarice, they would act a lot more like the UAE or Saudi Arabia.
If the US is worried about money being taken for a ride by greedy and unscrupulous foreigners, look to sub-Saharan Africa, not Iran. Iran isn't a 'tricky negotiating' power but a 'directly extracts wealth forcefully' power, that's what they're doing in the straits of Hormuz and with the cables there.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
The whole coaching system seems counterproductive to me. Excellence isn't produced by ruthless drill so much as internal all-consuming obsession. If there's some autist who loves maths, then let him do maths, give him more maths. If you train kids to be super good at passing tests, they'll learn and get very good at tests and maths but is that needed? The internal motivation to make cool things in the real world cannot be taught or trained, only internally developed. I guess if you just need more engineers then maxxing the number of good engineers makes sense... But is that what India or Asia really needs, more engineers?
Better more obsessives who make BYD or whatever, new products and companies. Jensen Huang is an obsessive.
Indeed coaching might be talent-destroying if it destroys internal motivation and enthusiasm needed to pursue new things, start new businesses, make innovations. I met a kid who'd been extensively coached to the point of PTSD, literally shaking at the thought of even simple equations, his whole ego had been eroded to nothing by competition and the mathematical certainty of disappointing due to the severity of competition.
And like you say who cares about education now? The best AIs are getting better faster than anyone can learn maths. We should be shutting down schools and universities.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Why doesn't this effect hit Alsace-Lorraine/Rhineland then or the Benelux region? How many empires have run Flanders? That was a chokepoint that the great powers sought to control or invade and yet also a great centre of wealth and industry even before coal was ever discovered there. The Spanish were spending all the silver from the New World buying German cannons and German mercs to fight in Flanders.
If we were going post-colonial, we could easily create a narrative that Belgium's been very hard done by - centuries of imperial rule, getting tossed around and partitioned between the French, Spanish and Dutch, constant warfare, along with the bloodiest fighting of WW1 and getting wrecked in WW2.
In antiquity, Egypt, Greece, Southern Italy, North Africa and Turkey were all well-developed regions despite no shortage of armies passing through and conquering them. Now they're largely a backwater. I find it highly suspicious that all these areas were overrun by the forces of Islam to some extent. Meanwhile, all the areas overrun by Franks, Saxons and men from the North turned out advanced and highly developed.
Ireland had absentee landlords, plenty of them. I have no doubt that absentee landlords are harmful to development. But Ireland popped right back up after centuries of fairly tough colonial rule. Same with Poland for that matter.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
also probably for purely aesthetic reasons
Aesthetics are a terrible way to judge a candidate.
It's true that Trump is behaving in a stupid and reckless way and this is causing considerable damage to America. Honest, capable, sober people can also cause considerable damage to America, perhaps even more damage. Even Mamdani can do a lot of damage to America. They just have bad values and so all their good qualities are worthless or even negative.
Would you prefer pointless wars for Israel but with a nicer facade? That's a Rubio presidency for you.
What about a serious, sober, effective campaign to wreck the criminal justice system, have DAs and prosecutors just put offenders out onto the streets to victimize normal people? That's boring, 'sensible' politics, that's what Soros has been doing, what Mamdani would probably do.
Consider Judge Russell Clark. In 1985 he decreed that since bussing (another sensible but torturous and massively harmful social experiment with predictably bad results) couldn't be mandated to desegregate Kansas inner-city schools, he would make city schools so attractive that white kids would voluntarily come back. He told the schools to buy everything they wanted without regard for cost. So they lowered student per teacher ratio, they built robotics clubs, swimming pools with underwater viewing rooms, a model UN with simultaneous translation capacity. Naturally this was paid for by doubling property taxes in the district. Somehow a judge had power to do that in the retarded American system where anything must be done to prevent segregation.
The results: an ocean of corruption, ballooning of administrative workers, administrative dysfunction, test scores no higher, somehow the inner city schools got even blacker than before. Dismal failure in all respects at the price of a few billion dollars.
I bet this judge is very sensible, very normal, a fine dinner guest. He's also a massive wrecker of society, squandering billions of dollars pointlessly. There are many similar stories in the US and around the world.
Just because something looks lawful and officially correct, it doesn't mean it's good. Trump can definitely be bad! But you should not assume that people who appear good actually are good.
Consider Europe. Run by very boring, sensible moderates. Run into the ground, fallen well behind the US, despite all the dumb wars and Trump and assorted incompetence. Real wreckers wear pantsuits.
No, it's not merely the random Afghans that make their own way that I'm talking about but the ones that the government went out of their way to resettle in the UK, ostensibly because some idiot leaked some data. It was thought the Taliban might do recriminations against Afghans that worked with British forces there. Realistically the Taliban have other concerns.
The government launched a covert £6–7 billion resettlement scheme (Operation Rubicon), relocating over 16,000 to 24,000 Afghans to the UK in military accommodation and hotels without public consultation or parliamentary scrutiny.
That's what I'm talking about. I think the UK should have spent those billions on British people, not Afghans.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22d ago
Modern progressives are the heirs of Antonio Gramsci. Read this list of Soviet talking points and tell me that I'm crazy:
Heirs of Gramsci and also Orwell.
There is no truth, only competing agendas... but also there is truth, truth-telling ceremonies, true histories that have been distorted and covered up by the West. 'History is a whitewash', to quote Capaldi's Doctor Who in a reimagined, more diverse Victorian setting.
There are no objective standards by which we can judge one culture better than another... but favoured cultures to be glorified as feminist, rape-free (at least before whites arrived), diverse, inclusive and their darker aspects are left tastefully obscured or just blamed on white people for corrupting them...
The poor and criminals are victims of society but hate criminals are just evil and hateful.
There are these subversions and inversions as needed, different paths in the same direction.
60% uranium is basically weapons grade, it only takes a little further enrichment to reach 90%. Iran easily has the technical capacity to produce nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles are a lot harder technically. This is 1950s technology.
So why haven't they? If they wanted nuclear weapons, with that stockpile of 60% uranium, they could simply acquire them.
Iran seems to want flexibility, they want some kind of deterrent capability without starting an arms race with Saudi Arabia or a disarming strike from Israel or America. But clearly the deterrent capacity of Iran's latent nuclear capability is insufficient to prevent a disarming strike.
This war is a massive own goal even in its backers own terms. It spurs nuclearization.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
AI capable of fully automated software development should increase demand hugely. Everyone would want their own software, everyone would want to make their own hyperspecific games or movies, send agents out looking for cool stuff in a sea of dross.
Plus business needs like designing new chips, tools, products, marketing to people and agents...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22d ago
This would be more convincing if the Maori weren't well ahead in civilizational terms, despite being even more remote from Eurasia. They had permanent dwellings and much more advanced politics, as did the Torres Strait Islanders. It's hard to see how the Torres Strait, tiny islands that are barely visible on the map, are more hospitable than all regions in an entire continent. Bananas are well suited to Queensland and could've been brought in from New Guinea... but only the Torres Strait Islanders did that. The most obvious difference is that they had Polynesian background.
Australian soil is not that bad either, not around the rivers at least. The colonists managed without fertilizer for a long time. Kangaroos are perfectly edible as a meat source too, albeit a bit tough.
upturn the rules based international order
Can we at least do away with this cliche? It's not a thing any more.
Nobody ever explained what the rules are, in this rules based order. New rules could be invented on the fly, like 'responsibility to protect', various police actions or authorized uses of force. Not authorized by the UNSC but by the US president... just like the rest of great power politics throughout human history, where rules were drawn up by the strong.
This is a game everyone can play and indeed everyone is playing it. Iran is making a new rules based order in the straits of Hormuz.
In Britain a similar story has been repeated, wherein government hesitation to pursue an outlawing of unconstitutional parties like Reform and Restore in spite of their unconstitutionality necessarily depriving them of the protections of assembly, since there is no democracy outside the nation state which is the guarantor of freedoms and rights for people, and necessarily that seeking it’s abolition are (morally but not necessarily legally) outside it’s protections.
Also, this sentence is far too long and ungrammatical, can you at least make it easier to read?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
If we just want to make money, why not send children straight to work? Give them amphetamines too for heightened performance... There's more to civilization than making money.
Society isn't really organized for financial benefit, some parts are but most is not. It doesn't make any financial sense to redistribute wealth from young to old via pensions and choke off productive investments. Much of university has no economic return. The origin of university was to train erudite clergy after all.
Excessive materialism is a real problem, especially in Asia. But in other places there's insufficient materialism or a misguided kind of piety that results in wasting resources unnecessarily. Abandoning phonics for instance, nobody was being paid to teach worse, nobody profited from it. The teachers just wanted to do things that way.
There needs to be a balance between 'money money money, I want more money by hook or by crook, let me spin up 50 AI agents thirst-trapping lonely dudes on Insta' and 'fuck the rich, tax the bastards, unrealized capital gains tax now so we can spend six figures on every homeless', far away from those cartoonish extremes and the more moderate but still harmful failure modes they point to.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
It's unreasonable to do so while victimizing other groups at hugely disproportionate rates and getting preferential treatment across society.
In each of my posts I bring up examples in the present of how whites are being treated badly in favour of blacks. What argument do you think I'm making with those points?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
Yeah, it's insanely politically effective.
That's why they have all these special privileges, why they have these holy words that only blacks can use. If a white says the word, many consider it a justification for violence. A company hires too many whites, that apparently means blacks can sue them or get cushy jobs there to restore balance.
They shriek about not being slaves or having to sit at the back of the bus 70 years ago. Now, feeling emboldened, we see all these videos of blacks making massive scenes on public transport, playing the knockout game, pushing people onto the rails in subway stations, threatening and leering and occasionally murdering white people like Iryna.
Some black drug dealer gets choked under arrest or dies of fent and it's a global event of massive significance, all this evil racism. A black ties up and beats a 3 year old white girl to death and nobody could care less, this is apparently trivial news of no racial significance.
https://www.wesh.com/article/man-arrested-for-death-3-year-old-child-marion-county/70432617
They enjoy being treated like noblemen in some feudal backwater and shriek about being oppressed or how they might be treated as second-class in the future, it's a comical inversion of reality. Meanwhile the people who are being treated as second-class, who are being spat at and harassed in the present are often defending them or oh so careful to say they're not racist or prejudiced.
What's really going on though isn't so much a matter of principles. That's my whole point:
Demonic pigskin talking about bringing back slavery. Fuck the "norms" you deserve to killed fuck you cracker bitch
I know armchair philosophizing is bad and we really shouldn't try to psychoanalyze people we've never met. But I'd bet that the guy who gets so angry about my comment that he responds with this and then comes back months later, still enraged, is not really motivated by abstract, consistent moral logic. It's pure group identity. He sees someone that says something bad about blacks, he pattern-matches it to slavery (I never even mentioned slavery), he's enraged past the point of reason.
He comes back and dresses it up more but the underlying motivation is clear.
You go on incessantly about me mischaracterizing a US bomb dropped in an Israeli war as being Israeli as some kind of terrible, unforgettable error that shows the blackness of my heart... when it didn't even affect the main point I was making in the slightest. In my naivete at the time, I assumed the only reason anybody would be interested in the bombs origin is because of the insane Israeli propaganda that 'actually the Iranians blew up their own school to make the West look bad' as mentioned upthread. That would be a meaningful distinction as compared to US vs Israeli bombing, that was what I was most interested in refuting, which I did. So I said it was an Israeli bomb. Damn!
Meanwhile, your main point, that bombing Iran would not affect their likeliness to nuclearize since they already maximally hated Israel and thus Iran should be bombed more aggressively, remains wrong and bizarre and is 10x more bloodthirsty than mine. It is also causing a massive global crisis whose main redeeming feature is that people are going to trust and favour Israel much less in future.
So in conclusion, these kinds of gotchas are neither intelligent nor charismatic, nor particularly likely to make me or anyone else love Jews more.
The judge is not mogging him based on looks but based on authority (and camera angles in this instance I think). If he were not a judge this guy wouldn't be mogging anyone.
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