RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
German Greens falsified evidence in order to phase out nuclear power back in 2022. Recently there was a Freedom of Information lawsuit that, despite the best efforts of the government, won and uncovered the documents. Amusingly the govt pleaded 'this needs to be kept secret lest all the countries we're trying to spruke our anti-nuclear, green ideology to realise how silly it is and combat our foreign policy' but failed.
A small group of Green politicians rewrote notes from technical experts to reverse the core message to be pro-shutdown of nuclear plants, fabricating safety concerns and arguing that necessary life-extension upgrades hadn't been undertaken. Despite being told that the message was rubbish they pressed on, lying to the public about why they were pushing what they were pushing.
The Germans turned their nuclear plants back on in a brief life-extension back in late 2022 before shutting them all down in 2023. I've maintained for several years that there's a high-level sabotage campaign against nuclear energy in the Western world. Most of the time it's not as clear as this. Usually it's procedural manipulation, regulations requiring pointlessly complicated and exacting reactor designs, obliterating the industry by not letting new power plants be made and a stubborn refusal to store nuclear waste permanently.
This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around.
Occupation is hard and bloody work. One of the many things that went wrong in Afghanistan were the methods. There were stories about US soldiers gritting their teeth to nubs at their Afghan 'allies' raping children in the barracks and how they couldn't do anything about it. The soldiers on the ground knew the whole campaign was a massive farce a decade before withdrawal.
https://www.thejournal.ie/afghanistan-sexual-abuse-us-soldiers-2343921-Sep2015/
The locals would do everything they could to cheat and rip off Western forces, launching attacks to get us to pay them for protection money, blowing up bridges so they could get lucrative contracts to rebuild them. If you're trying to do imperialism you have to have the right political/social methods. You need to credibly threaten enormous violence against those who displease you, you have to make it clear that you're not a pinata that can be extorted for money, you have to project fear and power. Consider what Israel does 'to make their presence felt':
Many roads are “sterile,” and the nearer they are to the settlement, the less access Palestinians are allowed. They cannot drive, they cannot open a store, and, closest to the settlers, they are not allowed to walk the streets. If a Palestinian family has a home fronting one of these streets, the army will seal the front entrance and the Palestinians will only have access over the roof and through the back door.
Our main job was to “make our presence felt.” The conscious policy was to give the people the sense that the IDF was everywhere, all the time. We patrolled the streets 24/7, picking houses at random, waking up the families at night and separating them into men and women, and searching, loudly and publicly. It fell to me as a commander to pick the houses, a selection that was made unrelated to military intelligence.
As an occupying force in a territory, you have to act like this. It’s a simple equation, as surely as one plus one equals two; this is what an occupation will result in. You can’t serve as a soldier in the Occupied Territories and treat a Palestinian as an equal human being, as the only way to control a civilian population against their will is to make them feel chased, harried, and afraid. And when they get used to that level of fear, you have to increase it.
Or:
In some army units, making one’s presence felt is referred to as “creating a sense of being chased.” That means instilling fear into the entire Palestinian population, a mission that by definition makes no distinction between suspects and innocent civilians, or between “involved persons” and “uninvolved persons,” as it is called in IDF parlance. Sometimes soldiers invade homes in the middle of the night just for training purposes. I raided homes in Jenin or Nablus simply to seize more optimal observation positions. According to one former soldier who gave testimony to Breaking the Silence, they would invade homes to test a new door-breaching device. Another witness said they went into a Palestinian home to be filmed eating sufganiyot (Hanukkah donuts) for a feel-good news story to be broadcasted that night on Israeli television.
That's what imperialism is about, stuff that would immediately put you in the 'glowing red eyes baddy' camp according to our norms. This is why we can't do imperialism proficiently. I don't mean it in the leftist frame that everything about imperialism is evil. It's a method all states have used to achieve objectives. In Afghanistan we were too lax, the Israelis seem too harsh (though they're still here). It's difficult to navigate between ineffectual rule and backlash, yet can be done. The Malayan Emergency and suppression of the Mau Maus show it's possible. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was very proficient as suppressing! Technology is not a factor - the Assyrians did imperialism in the Bronze Age, the Arabs did it, the Mongols did it, the Romans did it, the Spanish did it, the British did it, the Russians did it. There are gradations in repression, different kinds of institutions and administrative techniques. But you cannot do this stuff and keep your hands clean, it's just not possible. I know you mentioned will and stability but the proposals are standard progressive-frame economic/social-worker interventions.
Enforcing laws is so much easier than real imperialism! And the US can't even do that, there are open-air drug markets when Xi isn't in town. There are blatant robberies, out in the open. In San Fran police have given up on traffic infractions.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article/sfpd-traffic-tickets-17355651.php
In Canada you see the most cucked advice from police:
“To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs at your front door,” Const. Marco Ricciardi said at the meeting. “ Because they're breaking into your home to steal your car. They don't want anything else.”
This wimpy attitude is the problem, not a shortage of education or bussing or needing higher wages. It's not hard to whisk the problem people away, Bukele did it in El Salvedor with limited resources and opposition from the US. China does not have high wages yet people do not go around stealing and murdering like in America or Canada - they know the state will crush them. This is a lesser kind of imperialism in my mind, yet it's still of the same essence. Using force to create order but on internal rather than external entities - that's what police do.
What happens if people made to work in Amazon do a really bad job (many won't want to be there and some are innately bad workers)? What if they show up late? Are they fired, lose their welfare and are left to starve? Are they beaten? What do we do about protests - ignore them and crush rioters?
Or do we pay Amazon to have better workers cover for the bad workers in their make-work jobs? Do we fire the worst workers and give their welfare back, accepting the obvious incentive? Do we capitulate at the first riot because it's 'a bad look', it makes people think of Nazis? Do we capitulate at the first time somebody is unjustly mistreated by our policy, reshaping the whole policy because we're not yet adept at the techniques?
It's the same in education. What if the students are beating each other, thoroughly ignoring the teacher, making a circus of the whole thing? Are they actually punished or are they 'suspended' and given a holiday? Nobody would dare to behave in a British school 100 years ago like they behave today, there were real consequences. We don't need to cane students who aren't good enough at Latin, nor should we build a huge surveillance state like China. But we do need to accept that not everything is going to be resolved amicably, sometimes we need to punish and punish severely.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
The Tories are a party of mass immigration, that's what their policies have achieved in the real world. They say stuff like 'we'll be tough on immigration' but they don't actually do it, they flail around paying Rwanda and achieving nothing. Different policies but similar results for the Australian centre-right - Abbott successfully stopped illegal immigration but kept legal immigration very high.
In the UK neither illegal nor legal immigration are combatted. In Australia Labour adopted Coalition border policies, so there's no distinguishing difference there. So on immigration both parties are roughly equivalent to their Labour equivalents. AFD is actually different.
Labour generally promises young people some kind of patronage in uni education, welfare and so on. The centre-right tend to support the old in housing and welfare. Furthermore, young people tend to revile the centre-right parties, it was considered cringeworthy to vote for Scott Morrison (former centre-right PM) in Australia. Labour and Greens parties are more socially progressive and young people care about climate change.
Germany, Sweden and continental countries are also much whiter and more homogenous than Australia, the UK or especially America. Also the German Greens have tarred themselves with the horrendous performance of the traffic-light coalition and their economically damaging policies. British and Australian Greens haven't had much chance to do real damage.
The Australian equivalent to AFD is One Nation, which is much more boomer-skewed (and pretty irrelevant politically). It's run by a woman called Pauline Hanson who's nearly 70 years old. They appeal most to rural white Queenslanders, the whitest parts of the whitest state in the country. Same in Britain, UKIP targeted old rural whites because there were more of them. AFD leaders are much younger, in their 40s. They appeal most in East Germany, which is the whitest part of Germany.
I think right wing politics of the anti-immigration kind has a lot to do with whiteness. Western right-wing politics in general too, to a lesser extent. In the Anglosphere the whitest demographics tend to be the old, so anti-immigration rightist parties naturally evolve to target the old. In Europe there's a broader base of potential supporters and they can target the young, so they do.
Doesn't Pope Francis routinely attack racism and call for more tolerance for refugees? 4/9 American refugee settlement NGOs are Christian, albeit heavily govt-supported: https://cis.org/Rush/Private-Refugee-Resettlement-Agencies-Mostly-Funded-Government#uscri
Most Christian leaders describe racism as sinful. In the past things were different, yet it looks like Christianity as a whole is committed to antiracism and multiculturalism in the present-day.
I'm more interested in who actually follows or cares about what Richard 'riding with Biden' Spencer says? In 2024?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Top of her class. Survivor of multiple suicide attempts, because she didn't take biology lessons past tenth grade, and Google wisely doesn't return results for "painless ways to commit suicide". Asked me on the first date how much paracetamol it takes to off oneself, for purely academic reasons.
Apparently paracetamol overdose blows up your liver in a painful and prolonged way, (if quora is to be believed). Seriously though, how hard is it to kill yourself painlessly? Helium's the way to go, is it not? I suppose that's not something you consider with normal rationality.
It strikes me that both women and the US government are very bad at killing people, preferring poison and overly complicated, ineffective methods. In contrast, gas and guns just work.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Quite right. As time passes, cash will diminish. It's more convenient to swipe a card or scan a QR code.
Either we end up using privately run cryptocurrencies or state-run central bank digital currencies. Right now there are some issues with transaction costs, scams and volatility on the crypto front.
However, if we end up using CBDCs, human freedom is caput. CBDCs allow total financial surveillance and total financial suppression. It goes beyond debanking, you could make people impossible to transact with. This is the key technology that allows for totalitarian social credit schemes, the seeds of which we see in China. CBDCs are seductive to governments and central banks - taxes become impossible to evade! Monetary policy can be implemented hour by hour! Criminal assets are easy to seize, money-laundering is impossible. But they also enable the mainstreaming of the debanking tactics we've seen with Paypal and high-profile wrongthinkers. After cash people will probably stop thinking of money as something concrete and physical, it becomes an abstract, malleable concept. Your UBI money can only be spent on the right goods, made by the right people. Maybe the climate means you can't buy more than a certain amount of real meat each week, perhaps you can't fly more than what's strictly necessary for your work. Your stimulus money has to be spent in 30 days before it disappears. Billy might pay different prices on the same good to Aisha or Joe. Your politics are dangerous and unacceptable? Good luck getting a website, accepting donations or doing anything at all.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Imperial Germany suffered enormously before capitulating. In the winter of 1916-1917 about half a million people starved to death in the 'Turnip Winter' so-named because that's all they had to eat. The food distribution system broke down completely. By 1918 they were in a famine. Children were running around breaking into warehouses trying to get food and dying in the tens of thousands. This is one of the reasons the Nazis were so fixated on securing agricultural land later on.
In tsarist Russia "Working-class women in St. Petersburg reportedly spent about forty hours a week in food lines, begging, turning to prostitution or crime, tearing down wooden fences to keep stoves heated for warmth, and continued to resent the rich."
It takes a lot of pain to bring down a country in a major conventional war. There's a certain level of stubbornness and sunk-cost that seeps in after serious blood has been spilled and national pride is on the line. Attitudes harden. Ukraine has not experienced anything like the mass suffering of a world war. There is no mass starvation in Ukraine, no massive inflation (7% is not great but it's not 90%), no social breakdown. Lessons have been learnt since the world wars and Ukraine enjoys the support of wealthy backers.
Nevertheless there are signs of serious problems - the videos of men being forcibly dragged into vehicles by recruiters, desertion and so on. What is that if not ambivalence/non-cooperation? States can do a lot with ambivalent but not-yet-rebellious people.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
William Luther Pierce of Turner Diaries fame came up with Cosmotheism: Darwinism and German romanticism all wrapped with some early spiritual transhumanism and white supremacy. No slave morality whatsoever, he quotes Nietzsche, Wordsworth, Spengler, Shaw in support of the ethos.
There is only one reality, and it is the Whole -- the purposeful, selfcreating, self-evolving Cosmos, which has both material and spiritual aspects, inseparably conjoined. Thus, Creation and Creator, Cosmos and Theos, Whole and God, are but different names for the same reality. Man is part of the Whole, and his consciousness is one manifestation of a universal, immanent consciousness. Man's ordained or natural purpose is the same as the Creator's purpose, which is self-realization.
Man properly serves his ordained purpose by striving toward ever higher ever more conscious levels of existence, both biologically and spiritually. His ordained task is to advance, generation by generation, along the Creator's path of evolving selfconsciousness. In the past he advanced blindly, driven by the immanent urge toward self-realization, self-completion. Now we must guide his advancement.
It didn't catch on, it withered away when Pierce died. You need a certain kind of prophetic authority and a bit of luck to make new religions, failing that enormous amounts of money and manpower.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
The optics would just be terrible
This wouldn't stop Israel. The optics were terrible when they shoot children in the back but they do it anyway and clear it in court. There's no shortage of bad optics on either side.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/16/israel2
If IDF snipers were systematically targeting civilians (doctors, elderly, kids, etc), that would be outrageous and well worth mentioning
Well they sure did shoot at them before the war: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session40/Documents/A_HRC_40_74_CRP2.pdf
Imagine you're Israeli. All your life you hear about suicide bombings, attacks, rockets, problems all coming from these dirty uncivilized Arabs who belong to a death cult that hates your religion and routinely sneak-attack on your religious holidays. You hate these people.
Imagine you're Palestinian. Israeli troops will knock down your door at night-time and search your apartment. You're not allowed to move freely, they cut power off, they steal your land like they've been stealing it for decades now. You spent your whole childhood punctuated by bombs, assassinations of peaceful protestors, dead family members, dead neighbours, arrests, torture... You hate these people.
This is a war of hatred. They hate eachother (as a collective). Not all of them hate eachother but enough do. We cannot model this war without understanding that there's intense hatred. Trying to model leadership or boots-on-the-ground as calculating, rational plotters is not going to yield good predictions.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
The only one I'm aware of is The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds. It's quite interesting, the author got to interview Pierce for many hours at a time, I think he was around for the funeral. Pierce explains a fair bit about his time with Rockwell, about the trouble of forming organizations, selecting recruits, getting the right people... It includes the whole story of his life, his experience with conservatives, the books he wrote.
You can get the book physically or read it on Unz: https://www.unz.com/book/robert_s_griffin__the-fame-of-a-dead-mans-deeds/
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
South Africa did feel quite threatened, they were trying to develop their own modern fighter jets to counter the Mig-29s they expected Angola and nearby Soviet allies to receive. At any point the Border War might flare up. Unlike Israel they had no superpower backer to get advanced weapons from, nor did they have access to world markets due to the weapons embargo. They tried developing their own Atlas Carver but the cost of developing advanced fighters was too high.
A shortage of will sure but South Africa also had a less fortunate position than Israel. Though the critical error was probably letting so many blacks into the country, rather than any military issue.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Electronic cash is basically the same thing as a CBDC, they just haven't added all the AI-enabled fine-grained control and monitoring yet. They can print and freeze money at will, it's just a hassle for them to do so.
Taxes are easy to evade all around the world because the administrative capacity and technical methods are poorly developed, especially in Russia. But they won't be poorly developed forever. China's social credit scheme is pretty benign at the moment, you just can't get certain train tickets if you're a scammer, have to put down deposits to rent an e-bicycle. But it won't stay that way forever, they're testing and developing it over time.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Yes, though I honestly thought it was spelled that way, never having read it on paper.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
True, there are those people who'll spend hundreds or thousands on gacha girls to get their waifu. Still seems like being a sucker.
I gave Genshin a go, there's some fun to be had. Lots of effort went into the game, it's very big and very pretty. But it's not worth paying for more spins on the roullette wheel, as many have remarked: https://youtube.com/watch?v=M5Hfd4wX2GE
Paying for these emotional relationships is still kind of hollow and artificial. Whether it's pokimane or Beidou or some onlyfans girl it's all still fake. The other party doesn't care about you, they care about your wallet. They're exploiting an emotional weakness in a way that a disciplined and discerning man should observe and reject.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
They're either pirating it, streaming it from some sketchy website that pirated it, or watching free preview stuff.
There's loads of porn available for free. Twitter, reddit, boorus, 4chan, discord... People who pay are suckers or have more money than sense.
Article prophesising and diagnosing doom on the Indian economy: https://time.com/6969626/india-modi-economy-election/
Some of it is really staggering - 10 million manufacturing jobs were lost even before Covid. Indian manufacturing employment halved in 5 years (up to 2021 but doesn't seem to have recovered that much, though output is rising). Even in output it's still quite low as a % of the economy, falling as a proportion the 2010s. Meanwhile there are 60 million extra farm workers: deurbanization and deindustrialization. India is at the bottom of the Global Hunger Index, below North Korea and above Afghanistan.
I note that the article author wrote a book on Modi despotism so can't be considered unbiased, yet he has a lot of pretty ominous links. Some of them are structured in a deceptive way - 'crude imports' being down 14% goes against the article's overall message of trade increasing, even if goods exports decreased. It's always good to read these kinds of articles with a sceptical eye, economics is so broad that you can paint all kinds of pictures. It looks like India is focusing very heavily on services rather than manufacturing, leaving it rather vulnerable to AI disruption, as self_made_human has predicted. Vietnam exports more manufactured goods, while India's overall exports are much higher.
There's also this fun website that graphs exports by type: https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=104&queryLevel=location&product=undefined&year=2021&productClass=HS&target=Product&partner=undefined&startYear=undefined
India is ICT nation, the tech support stereotype. China and Vietnam do manufacturing. Russia and Australia dig things out of the ground. The US does services and manufacturing.
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