ResoluteRaven
No bio...
User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
US intelligence concurs that ISIS was responsible, and this attack definitely fits the MO of Islamic terrorism in Russia and previous ISIS attacks more than anything Ukraine could or would want to pull off (so far mostly kamikaze drone strikes on military targets).
It appears that the Afghan branch of ISIS has been gaining in strength since the Taliban takeover and is now fighting the same kind of insurgency against them that they did against the American occupation. Say what you will about the Taliban, but at least they don't dream of world domination like many other jihadist groups. I suppose it's a pipe dream to wish for a foreign policy discerning enough to pick out and empower isolationist Islamic extremists at the expense of their interventionist brethren, but it sure would let the rest of the world sleep a little easier.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Well, for the most part I would say that making small talk with strangers is practice for conversations that you go into with a goal e.g. evaluating someone as a potential friend or romantic partner. Knowing how to share just enough personal information to build a rapport without weirding someone out or shifting the frame to keep people engaged are skills that need to be developed like any other. Most people do this subconsciously, but for others it requires focused attention. The people you are now good friends with and can have deep conversations with were once strangers after all, and you need a way to get from one to the other.
As far as specifics go, I'm not sure what you are trying to get out of your time at house parties or bars, but that is a question you should be asking yourself. You seem to be thinking a lot about your relative social status in a way that is somewhat foreign to me, but if you are trying to achieve high status and then leverage it to obtain something else, then you might be better served by seeking that other thing directly. Also, you don't need to study things that don't interest you just to have conversation starters, but they key is to keep up with something, whether it's the news or how to tie fishing lures, and then be able to identify connections between that thing and your interlocutor's personal experience.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
I don't have a good answer to your larger question, but in the case of Crimea the inhabitants never wanted to be part of Ukraine: they tried to become independent when the Soviet Union collapsed but the new Ukrainian government strong-armed them into amending their constitution to state that Crimea was sovereign "as a part of Ukraine."
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
There is a generation of dogs that are poorly socialized on account of covid lockdowns, or at least that is the explanation their owners give when I have asked them about it.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
New Hampshire has always seemed like the odd man out in New England to me due to its strong Scotch-Irish/Libertarian heritage, but I digress.
Having considered it more, I suppose I can agree with a version of your thesis that goes like this (writing this out more for my own understanding than yours):
What those in the early-20th century called Progressivism produced a generation of technocrats (including Wilson, Hoover, FDR, etc.) who for several decades controlled both political parties while fighting a (to them very real and serious but to outsiders insignificant) battle amongst themselves. The technocrats recently lost control of the Republican party and what many HBD-believing folks on the new/dissident/alt/whatever-right are trying to do is re-establish the yang to the Democrats' yin while ignoring the bubbling cauldron of resentment into which both the current elites and their would-be shadow elites are soon to fall.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Even places that lack the belief in the biological equality of different populations have mostly ended up with some form of racial spoils system à la affirmative action for Malays in Malaysia or on the basis of caste in India, or else simply tried to expel the higher achieving population as Uganda did with the Indians or most Medieval European states did with the Jews at one time or another. The stated explanation is usually some form of "disparate economic outcomes between ethnically or culturally distinct groups are an incitement to violence and the higher achieving group must either pay the rest of us a bribe for their own safety or get out."
Only in places where the different groups exist on a continuum, Latin America for example, do we see less conflict on these particular grounds (I suppose you could argue that the class-based violence that occasionally consumes these countries is a proxy for it, but poor black Brazilians hating their rich white overlords because they're rich and not because they're white seems like an improvement over our situation). It may be trivial to say that there would be no racism if we all interbred until there were no distinctions, but it seems like we might only need to go halfway or less to get that benefit.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
As I've said before, the party (and the Partisans) of Woodrow Wilson, never changed sides, just their branding. Whether it's white hoods in 1920 or black hoodies in 2020 it's the same fundamentally anti-american (and dare I say it anti-western) bullshit.
Looking at the election map of 1916, I see Wilson opposed by a coalition of New England Yankees and the places they settled in the upper Midwest. As best I can tell, these same Yankees and their intellectual descendants at the colleges they founded are the ones in charge of the Democratic Party today and peddling the latest racist "anti-racist" dogma.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Apart from official recognition of areas that are already de facto independent, like Somaliland, Kosovo, Taiwan, etc. there is a possibility of an East African Federation forming in the next few years as a political union of up to seven currently separate countries. There are a few Pacific islands that have a chance at formal independence as well, including Chuuk (from Micronesia) and Bougainville (from Papua New Guinea), and Yemen and Libya would also probably be better off each splitting into two countries to avoid prolonging their current civil wars indefinitely.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
Finding a place with a similar racial mix to America is challenging enough by itself, but your best bet is probably somewhere in Latin America like Brazil (which does now have affirmative action, but I believe it was implemented more recently than in the US) or simply a comparison of data from before/after the Civil Rights Act was passed. The presence of large nonwhite populations in Europe (gypsies aside) is so recent that I doubt you can infer anything meaningful from their situation and other possibilities like apartheid South Africa had laws that leaned way too far in the opposite direction.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
One example of a society with more women than men is the black urban ghettos in the US, where a decent fraction of the male population is in prison at any given time, and they certainly don't do much to inspire confidence in this eugenics scheme. If we cast a wider net to look at matriarchal societies in general, which may or may not have arisen due to a temporary or chronic gender imbalance, we see that women do all the economically productive work and men spend their days gambling, drinking, and killing each other (my impression of Soviet Russia post-WWII is that it trended in this direction as well, but was kept more in check by heavy state intervention).
As far as feasibility goes, I'm also not sure that this is as easy a change to make as one might assume. We don't, to my knowledge, know the genes that regulate the frequency of boys or girls being born. We can infer that it involves control of X and Y chromosome segregation in male gametes, but that's about it. It's true that under famine conditions more girls are born than boys, but that's because male fetuses are more fragile and are preferentially miscarried when the mother is stressed, not because fewer of them are conceived. Of course, if everyone is doing IVF anyway you can select the sex of your child easily, but that's intervention at the level of individuals rather than populations.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
It's not clear to me that Taiwan and Ukraine require the same kinds of weapons. The former needs naval and air assets while the latter needs artillery shells and tanks. Any war between China and US allies in the Pacific (outside of Korea) would be a quick and deadly exchange of missiles and planes that ends with one navy still afloat and one at the bottom of the sea, Battle of Midway style, rather than the kind of unending slugfest that a war between two nations that share a land border can devolve into. By the time you find yourself fighting a ground battle on the island itself, a war for Taiwan would have already been lost.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I meant to respond to your driving post before getting distracted, so I'll do it here:
Yes, drivers from New Jersey are probably more competent technically than in the rest of the country, but since America's urban planning or lack thereof forces people like me who hate driving and suck at it onto the road every day to get anywhere I would really much rather everyone around me drive "like a grandma with Alzheimer's" rather than get myself killed trying to keep up with the pros.
Having been all over the world it also seems pretty apparent to me that driving cautiously is correlated with having a wealthy and high-trust society, the same way that the more haggling you need to do in a street market the worse the material conditions around you are likely to be.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
Because to Asians raised in famine-stricken societies, it the responsibility of a host to ensure that their guests are well-fed. This explains the Asian obsession with food relative to westerners who are many generations removed from true poverty, a decent fraction of whom seem to eat almost entirely for sustenance and not pleasure. In many Asian languages the traditional greeting is "have you eaten yet?" and you can't walk ten feet in a rural area without someone offering you dinner.
I'm not sure what there really is to complain about here though. I love taking home enough leftovers from a Chinese restaurant to cook my next three meals; it's the customers who are leaving money sitting on the table if they let the restaurant throw it all away. The only things I don't usually take back with me are excess hotpot broth and dipping sauces. By contrast, whenever I go to a European restaurant and am presented with half a sandwich and a cup of soup I feel cheated because I could have gotten 3x as much of better-tasting food for the same price at an Asian or Middle Eastern place.
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I was similarly confused by the media coverage of this execution, but what seemed likely to me was that a couple of outlets whose reporters are already trained to see swastikas in every shadow pattern-matched "asphyxiation by nitrogen" with "gas chambers," told all their friends that "Alabama is doing a Nazi thing," and then they all ran with it.
Regarding humane forms of execution, seeing as two things the US has in excess are fentanyl and guns, I always figured we should dope them up and then shoot them in the head, but that would run afoul of the unwritten rule that execution must be as clean and sanitized as possible so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of the executioners. To which I say if we as a society can't stomach the sight of someone's brains splattered against a wall then we may as well abolish the death penalty because we clearly can't handle the weight of the responsibility.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
I'll probably make a Japanese-style chicken curry. The store-bought seasoning mix makes it quite easy, though I try to make each batch unique by adding some additional spices and things like grated fruit, cocoa powder, different vegetables, etc.
I went from being a subpar cook to a decent one during the covid lockdown when I had nothing better to do at home, mostly by messing around in the kitchen trying to recreate things I had eaten and liked in the past. I'd say most people around me are worse cooks than their parents' generation, though this is more pronounced in the children of immigrants, where you typically go from someone with a deep knowledge of their ancestral foodways to someone with a shallow knowledge of a half dozen cuisines with a limited ability to recreate any of them.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Most of my physical books were bought used and may already be damaged or contain writing, but I generally don't do anything to make their condition worse. Growing up I mostly read library books, so my habit has always been not to write in, fold, or tear them. Generally I find things like highlighting and taking notes on the margin a waste of time and unnecessary for my own comprehension.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Are Indians and the Chinese going to actually assimilate like the Italians, or are they going to behave more like Jews?
From what I've seen, the Chinese are quite likely to assimilate into the white population as soon as the flow of new immigrants is cut off by the motherland's catastrophically falling birthrates, and tend to be quite politically apathetic relative to their population size outside of issues like college admissions. Even in the event of a war with China I wouldn't expect any sort of large-scale treachery, although if the government tries the whole internment camp thing again and rounds up some Koreans by mistake there will be federal casualties.
Indians on the other hand are both more politically astute (compare Nikki Haley or Vivek Ramaswamy to Andrew Yang as presidential candidates) and have multiple overlapping factors holding back complete assimilation i.e. stronger religious traditions (especially for Muslims that demand conversion upon marriage), a tradition of arranged marriages that seems to be making a resurgence among sexually frustrated zoomers, and a larger population reservoir to draw new immigrants from. In that sense Indians are much more like Jews and will likely persist as a distinct and politically salient population for far longer than any East Asian group.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
This was my impression of the entire series. Herbert left all the most interesting aspects of his world tantalizingly out of reach, as though he pointed a camera at a beautiful landscape and it focused on a fly buzzing in the foreground instead of the natural wonder behind.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Among people I know or observe regularly, mostly in college towns and other liberal strongholds, I have definitely seen many adopting this habit of wearing facemasks when they are ill or when it is very cold outside (works better than a scarf in my experience), rather than masking indoors all the time out of some lingering covid paranoia.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Seeing how El Salvador went from being a crime-ridden hellhole to being safer than almost anywhere in America in the span of a few years would seem to invalidate the notion that such measures are impossible. Maybe blue tribe liberals won't be the ones to do it, but their hold on power is not eternal, and they are doing their best to empower nonwhite immigrant groups that have fewer qualms about the methods necessary to clean the place up.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
After decades of ridiculous claims, I will believe that we have been visited by aliens the moment one of these whistleblowers tosses an extraterrestrial corpse onto a table in broad daylight and not a moment sooner. Maybe not even then, unless they released a chemical analysis report along with it.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Chechens are a Muslim hill tribe with a culture and language alien to that of Orthodox Russians, not fellow East Slavs and members of the triune All-Russian nation. There is no room in that conception for a Ukrainian nation whose destiny is different from that of Russia and there never has been. If Putin got his wish they could keep their folk songs (except the ones about fighting Russians, perhaps) and quaint clothing and go on speaking their peasant dialect regional language at home if they so desired, but that would be the extent of their autonomy.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
That's exactly what we will have if we reach peace right now. Except this state will have more living Ukrainians in it.
What makes you think Putin would accept a ceasefire proposal along the current line of control? All I have seen indicates to me that he is fully prepared to fight a years-long war of attrition until Ukraine runs out of either artillery shells or people, because he thinks at that point they will collapse like the Germans in 1918 and he can have the glorious march to Kiev he was denied at the start of the war. I don't see any incentive for him to stop halfway besides saving the lives of Russian soldiers dying in the trenches, and after all what's a few million dead compared to reuniting the motherland?
Reading the comments here, I believe that I have arrived at a more realistic stance than most people, who think things like reconquering Crimea are on the table still. I hope there is a cease fire because I don't think the war is winnable by Ukraine without unacceptable costs from the U.S. Confidence level: 80%.
I can only speak for myself, but I still support sending aid to Ukraine and I never thought that reconquering Crimea or the breakaway Donbass republics was feasible, only status quo ante bellum at most. As long as Ukrainians are willing to fight and there are no American boots on the ground (the odd volunteer excepted) though, I don't see any reason to deny their requests for assistance; we can stop the day Ukrainian public opinion turns against the war.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
It seems to me that for an ethnicity to exist in practice, you need a critical mass of people to identify with it to the exclusion of other identities, and that is what "Americans"/Amerikaners/white Americans of colonial British heritage/[insert your preferred neologism here] lack. Ukrainians are fighting a war not to get lumped in with the Russian ethnicity and Palestinians have fiercely resisted decades of attempts to group them with Jordanians or Egyptians, but I doubt even a lizardman's constant of your founding stock American ethnicity conceive of it in the same terms you do or would lift a finger to assist any political mobilization on their behalf (unless it were disguised as garden variety civic nationalism, which is what liberals have been paranoid about for decades despite it almost never happening).
This is the only company that I'm aware of, but I haven't been paying attention recently so there may be newer better options. The tests are still limited, but better than nothing I suppose.
More options
Context Copy link