ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
Yes, but I would rather deal with hypocrites who claim to be on the side of truth and logic than with honest conflict theorists, because with the former there is an opening, however small, to engage intellectually, while with the latter there can be only war. Obviously both sorts exist on either side and we may disagree on their proportions, but to me it seems clear that the median woke progressive is more of a hypocrite (based on revealed preferences when it comes to lifestyle, the neighborhoods they move to, etc.) while the median dissident rightist is more of a conflict theorist.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
The New Kingdom of Egypt, which lasted for 500 years, is often considered a golden age. China has also experienced multiple 100-200 year long periods of relative material prosperity and cultural productivity during the Han, Tang, Ming, and Qing dynasties. The Gupta Empire, called the golden age of India, lasted over 300 years, and the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan lasted 268 years.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
In addition to their historical lack of access to their own fisheries, the fact that Ireland remains relatively underpopulated to this day as a result of the Great Famine meant that there wasn't the kind of Malthusian pressure to exploit every available food source that existed in places like Japan. However, certain kinds of seaweed (dulse and Irish moss) are considered part of the traditional Irish diet and are seeing a resurgence in popularity nowadays alongside other more quotidian sorts of fish and shellfish.
ResoluteRaven
4d ago
The descendants of a race that invented wheeled transport, domestication of horses, and then conquered/colonized virtually the entire world, and then invented pretty much everything else in history, does have a spark of Main Character Energy that fundamentally lacks in a race of eternally subjugated rice peasants.
The pedant in me feels the need to point out that half of China grows wheat, not rice. Interestingly, there is some evidence that the psychological differences observed between wheat and rice farming societies are not deeply rooted and are subject to change on the scale of one or two generations, but I digress.
As far as the relative achievements of these two peoples in the grand scope of human history, I think it's entirely possible that Europe and her children will be devoured by the consequences of their own philosophical and technological creations, leaving Asia to pick up the pieces and integrate them into some sort of sustainable paradigm. Who then is superior, the tragic genius driven to suicide or his diligent successor without whom his ideas would be lost to history?
ResoluteRaven
5d ago
For what it's worth, the more time I spend looking at the Eiffel Tower the more I agree with the original critics and wish it had been torn down.
ResoluteRaven
5d ago
What Overton window? If DOGE can dismantle executive agencies at will and we're discussing undoing birthright citizenship and annexing Greenland and Canada, then surely "let's put mentally ill drug addicts in rehab programs against their will so they don't piss or stab people on the subway" is back on the table?
ResoluteRaven
5d ago
Hating "stroads" for their appearance, though, is like complaining about the interior architecture of a factory.
I also would not enjoy spending a significant fraction of my life staring at the ugly bowels of a factory and would be willing to pay a premium to avoid it. The problem is there is nowhere in this country where I could get that even if I wanted to (and the thought of moving to Europe disgusts me).
ResoluteRaven
7d ago
People who are 1/4 Indian and 3/4 European by ancestry look pretty white to me, even when that 1/4 is dark-skinned South Indian. Same for people who are 1/4 East or Southeast Asian. For Hispanics, even 1/2 is enough to look indistinguishable from the average white American unless the Hispanic parent has an unusual amount of indigenous ancestry e.g. from Guatemala or Bolivia. I would not expect the future majority population to exceed those proportions, although I imagine at some point they will just be called "American" instead of "white."
ResoluteRaven
10d ago
The primary limitation is the size of the birth canal. In places where more births are by C-section due to local fads e.g. Brazil, the average skull size of newborns is slowly increasing, or so I have been led to believe. If you had working artificial wombs, therefore, it stands to reason that you could have bigger brained and more capable babies, though presumably with a longer gestation time, similar to elephants.
ResoluteRaven
13d ago
How much aid would you provide? Weapons? Money? No-Fly Zone? Air support? Troops on the ground? Nuclear umbrella? Something else?
I think the amount of weapons, money, and intelligence that was being provided at the start of the year should have been maintained for the time being, but I also think we should have used the threat of cutting off this funding to encourage European nations to rearm and build out their own military capabilities. No no-fly zone, direct air support, or American boots on the ground under any circumstances short of a Russian attack on a NATO member. If the situation were particularly dire for Ukraine and they asked for further assistance, I would be fine with Poland, Estonia, Latvia, etc. sending "volunteers" to bolster their ranks, with the understanding that such soldiers would not be protected under NATO Article 5 and would be disavowed by their governments in the event of capture to maintain a fig leaf of plausible deniability, and that this was the last possible escalation on our end i.e. no NATO troops fighting under their own flags, including European NATO members.
What is the end-state your policy is aiming for? A ceasefire? Deter subsequent Russian invasion? Restoration of Ukraine's original borders? The Russian army destroyed? Putin deposed? Russia broken up? Something else?
To prevent further loss of Ukrainian territory so long as and only while the Ukrainian government and people are committed to continuing the fight. When they no longer are, a ceasefire will be signed and the front line will become a DMZ akin to Korea's, patrolled by peacekeepers from either some neutral third country or a mixture of troops from NATO and CIS member nations. I don't care about Ukraine's original borders or the destruction of the Russian state or military, only maintaining the norm that countries should not annex the territory of their neighbors.
Is there an end-state or a potential event in the war that you think would falsify your understanding of the war, and convince you that providing aid was a bad idea? Another way of putting it is, do you think your views on the Ukraine war are falsifiable, and if so, what evidence would be sufficient for you to consider it falsified?
If Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine (with the exception of preventing the loss of Crimea, which I think is his red line), then I will admit that whatever level of western support led to that outcome was too high, as it led to an even worse violation of international norms than the one it was intended to punish. I will conclude the same thing if this war leads to the Russian government collapsing in such a way as to lose control of its nuclear arsenal or have its eastern territories annexed by China.
ResoluteRaven
15d ago
If you can create a situation where every military-age migrant who doesn't love your country enough to risk life and limb for it leaves, that sounds like a great outcome to me.
ResoluteRaven
16d ago
Presumably citizens have an easier time getting a non-shitty job, accessing healthcare, education and other services, and not being harassed by the police for their immigration status if they're picked up for something else, but not being European I couldn't tell you the specifics. If there's truly no material or procedural benefit whatsoever to being a citizen there as opposed to an illegal migrant, then Europe is a hell of a lot more fucked than America is.
ResoluteRaven
16d ago
Without a critical mass of internal support, an army melts away like the Iraqis at Mosul or the Afghans in the face of the Taliban. You can't just crank up the repression level arbitrarily like you're playing a Paradox game to make up for a lack of morale because you will run out of loyal enforcers. To me, it's essentially a tautology that an army that doesn't want to fight doesn't fight. The French army suffered mutinies and desertions in 1917 on a far larger scale than anything seen in Ukraine so far, and though they came very close they did not break in the end. Obviously in the case of conscription there will always be some individuals there against their will who want to go home and maybe frag their officers first, but if everyone really felt that way the war would be over already.
ResoluteRaven
16d ago
The Ukrainians at the front were abducted off the street. It’s a conscript army. If I lived in Ukraine, I would have fled by now.
And yet the line holds. To put it another way, by my definition the line between "choosing to fight" and "choosing not to fight" lies between the German army of spring 1918 and the same army in the fall of that year, or the Imperial Russian army a year earlier. You may have another definition by which none of the conscript armies of WWI wanted to fight.
Ukraine may not win - not morally or practically, but because it’s too dangerous. Ukrainian troops approaching Russia or taking back Crimea will see nuclear weapons flying. Pushing Russia to the brink is a bad idea.
Ukraine has as much chance of taking back Crimea or threatening the Russian heartland as they do of conquering Mars, and no amount of western aid is going to change that. No one is getting nuked over Chasiv Yar.
ResoluteRaven
16d ago
Why not just offer citizenship to illegal migrants who volunteer to fight in Ukraine? The US already more or less does this with our military and the French have their foreign legion. It will get a decent number of problematic young men out of your country for the time being and most of them will probably be killed. As long as your army still has a high enough fraction of natives the survivors will forge bonds of fellowship with their new countrymen that will prevent fragmentation of the state after the war. This strategy worked for the Romans and Chinese for centuries, only failing for the former after a period longer than our present political system has existed.
ResoluteRaven
16d ago
I think Ukraine can win the same way Finland "won" the Winter War i.e. inflict disproportionate casualties against a numerically superior opponent for years on end, and after being beaten into exhaustion sign a peace treaty in which they give up 10% of their territory and accept forced neutrality. On paper this is a loss, but it kept them out of the communist bloc and they ended up a western-aligned NATO member without suffering economically or politically the way Poland or Czechoslovakia did in the interim.
At the end of the day, it's the Ukrainians at the front making the decision to fight or not, and as long as they're shooting at our geopolitical rivals I have no problem with arming them. So far, their revealed preference is to hold the line, and the moment that changes it will be clearly evident in the form of mass protests, mutinies, or defections, and their government will have no choice but to sue for peace. It's not my place to tell them how many of their lives are or aren't worth sacrificing for their cause, whatever they think that cause is.
ResoluteRaven
16d ago
For all the talk of mass deportations and ICE kicking down doors to round up millions of illegals, I haven't seen much action on that front amidst all this other chaos except a few flights to Guantanamo and an executive order blocked by the courts. There's a lot of performative signaling about how little this administration cares about foreigners, but a symbolic victory with no practical results would be worse than nothing, as it invites an extreme reaction from the other side without having moved the baseline.
ResoluteRaven
17d ago
The Ezra Klein Show and Noah Smith's Econ 102 are two that I listen to occasionally if I want to get the liberal technocratic elite's position on things.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
Is it mysticism or simply the same calculation that anyone comparing Warsaw and Minsk might make regarding which side offers a better future for them and their children? The West can't exactly assuage the fears of Russian leaders or stamp out the desire of Ukrainians to join the EU and NATO when its very existence as a more prosperous alternative is what creates those feelings.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
I used to feel this way, and often experienced a sense of profound disappointment when I snapped back to reality after finishing a good book, video game, or daydream and "remembered that I exist" for lack of a better term, but that rarely happens nowadays. I think accepting that you have a body, or more properly that you are a body, is part of becoming a mature human being (we are called human beings and not human experiencings for a reason) and the once unspoken but perhaps nowadays more necessary corollary of accpeting one's mortality. Not that I'd turn down transhumanist brain uploading or life extension technologies if they existed and were offered to me, but until I see proof that they work with my own eyes I will defer to the wisdom of our ancestors and not assume I'm part of the first generation that will transcend this material form.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
That line of argument at least ascribes some agency to Ukrainians' decision to stand and fight. Others seem to claim that they've been bewitched into fighting for America's interests by some magic spell the CIA failed to cast on the South Vietnamese, Iraqi, or Afghan armies to turn them into highly motivated cannon fodder, and that if the US and Russia cut a deal we can snap our fingers and all the puppets will drop their guns and go home.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
Another missed opportunity was not opening the borders to Hong Kongers trying to flee to the West prior to the handover and during the repeated waves of protests since then. Hopefully we'll at least get all the TSMC engineers before Taiwan is taken over.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
Regaining the ability to defend themselves means that Europe will be free to pursue its own independent foreign policy without the nagging fear that if they step out of line they will be left out in the cold without America's guns to back them up. That could mean a more aggressive posture towards Russia, an economic realignment with China, maintaining Danish control over Greenland and its associated Arctic resources, restoring France's neo-colonial relationship with West Africa, or catching up to the US and China in dual-use technologies such as AI and rocketry. It's not that all of these things are impossible otherwise, but having a big stick provides a certain helpful sense of confidence akin to exercising and getting into shape on a personal level.
ResoluteRaven
18d ago
Any sort of tension will grow. I don’t think it’s going to just simmer in the background doing nothing.
The tension will only persist over long periods of time if the populations do not intermarry and remain distinct for generations due to self-segregation along religious or cultural lines e.g. Black and White Americans, Malays and Chinese in Malaysia, or the different castes in India. Note that even in those cases the situation has not spiraled out of control into a race war despite centuries of unfriendly interactions and close proximity. In other cases the groups will merge and any distinctions will fade away. In the US rates of intermarriage between Whites and every modern immigrant group will ensure this; it may be different with Muslim populations in Europe.
The question then becomes what is that new mixed population like and do we consider its creation a desirable outcome. In some cases we might consider the results neutral or positive e.g. your descendants become 5% Japanese, and in others we might consider them negative e.g. your descendants become 50% Haitian. Of course, some may reject all of these outcomes because they value racial purity in and of itself, at which point we reach an impasse.
I very much doubt that any two humans alive today are distant enough genetically that their offspring will be biologically better or worse off purely by dint of being mixed-race. We aren't talking about Neanderthals or Denisovans here, where hybrids appear to have been less fit and many of their genes were disproportionately selected against over time.
There are clearly psychological differences (presumably with genetic correlates) associated with the kind of person who is more likely to marry outside their race, as well as environmental factors i.e. how mixed children are treated by their peers growing up, and these seem sufficient to explain whatever characteristics might at first glance seem to be the results of the mixing itself.
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