ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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.
ResoluteRaven
6mo ago
I think it was unrealistic to expect the bond forged between Americans and Western Europeans in the trenches between 1917 and 1945 and then reinforced by another half-century of preparing for WWIII together to endure forever, especially once those events fell out of living memory. Tanner Greer has begun a series of posts on this topic, in which he quotes a prescient speech by Robert Gates from 2011 and points out that for the first time nearly everyone holding the levers of American foreign policy is either too young to remember the Cold War as a formative political experience or was uninvolved in the institutions through which aspiring political and military leaders at the time forged personal and emotional connections with their European counterparts, ending with this exhortation:
It is no longer sufficient to argue that NATO, or a free Taiwan, or any of ten thousand other things, are good because they buttress American hegemony. That presupposes American hegemony is a thing worth preserving in the first place—a presupposition not shared by all in power. Our arguments must strike deeper.
These are days of dread possibility. Victory will not be had without contesting fundamentals.
To focus on just the Ukraine angle, today's Russia is not the Soviet Union. To the extent that it threatens anyone, it threatens the nations on its European periphery and not the United States. This change means that Europeans cannot realistically expect the same level of support they were receiving when the enemy was mightier and the danger greater. On paper, the economic disparity between European NATO and Russia indicates that they should be able to crush Moscow with one hand tied behind their backs even without American aid. Most of us know intuitively that it wouldn't be that easy, and explanations tend to converge on the idea that Europeans have become complacent and entitled, taking the fact that they can cower behind America's shield for granted and indulging in luxury beliefs that having a military or borders or a distinct national identity is icky and reeks of fascism. If the rug gets pulled out from under them in the form of military assistance or security guarantees, they will have one last chance to get off their asses and reclaim their place(s) among the great powers of the world, and if they can no longer muster the ambition to do that then they can go play Museum Fremen in their cathedrals and wait for some new, more vital culture to replace them.
ResoluteRaven
6mo ago
Fair enough, I respect that. I just don't know how one would consistently distinguish between tourists and immigrants just from hearing them speak in public. The children and grandchildren of immigrants also lose their ancestral languages so quickly that it doesn't seem like that big of a problem in the long run.
ResoluteRaven
6mo ago
The extent of most researchers in the hard sciences' capitulation to progressive ideology is that they filled out the mandatory "broader impacts" portion of a grant application and made up some shit they didn't believe about how whatever they're doing will incidentally improve the lives of women or minorities. It would have been simple enough to remove this requirement from all future applications and most scientists would have been thankful to whichever administration did that. Anyone who had ever been involved with the grant writing process could have told them this.
Denouncing every recipient of such a grant for doing what was required of them to obtain one is akin to punishing everyone in the Soviet Union ex post facto who praised the communist party to keep their job, needlessly making enemies of people who would otherwise be on your side. Should they have had the courage to stand up for their convictions despite the threat of censure or worse? Perhaps, but people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. How many of us here fought the advance of wokeness tooth and nail in every aspect of our professional and public lives, and took all the hits that that entailed? I doubt very many, and this is a place bursting at the seams with reflexive contrarians.
ResoluteRaven
6mo ago
I know people who take statins preventively without having high cholesterol as some sort of life-extension hack, but they haven't convinced me yet that the benefits outweigh the side effects.
ResoluteRaven
6mo ago
I've always respected the logical consistency of this position, but it is so far outside the realm of possibility that to debate it feels like stepping into some alternate dimension where the platonic forms of nationalism, true communism (tm), and libertarianism exist unmoored from the flesh and blood human beings they are supposed to apply to. How much pre-1866 ancestry is enough? Is someone whose grandparents came through Ellis Island but only identifies as American really less worthy of the title than me, who has colonial ancestry but also an immigrant mother and speaks a foreign language at home? If some immigration officer with a Polish last name comes to deport me one day, can I pull out my SAR badge like an Uno reverse card and send him to Warsaw instead, or would we have to compare blood quanta first? In short order this gets as messy as trying to dole out reparations for slavery would.
For most people, common sense says no, if they observed all aspects of my life they would conclude that I am in fact less American than the third generation Italian, or the Korean adoptee who hasn't been outside the midwest since she was a baby and speaks only English, or even the Indian doctor in the UK who would love nothing more than to become an American and believes it's the greatest country in the world. The fact that there were minutemen with my last name in the New England militias 250 years ago doesn't change that. Now, if both majority pre-Civil War ancestry and belief in the existence of an Amerikaner ethnos defined by said ancestry are necessary to make one a true American, that leaves you with a population of several thousand Twitter shitposters and a lizardman's constant of rednecks. That's not nothing; Australia was created with less, but you aren't winning a civil war against the civic nationalists anytime soon.
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.
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