ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Assuming you're American, would you speak Spanish to a fellow American expat in Mexico City? Or Thai to one in Bangkok? I read once that certain Aboriginal Australians would beat to death anyone who uttered so much as a single word of another tribe's tongue on their soil and expected everyone to switch languages even mid-sentence as they were crossing tribal boundaries, but in practice this is an impossible standard to uphold unless you are a hyperpolyglot or simply never visit non-Anglophone countries.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Indian students score so poorly on the PISA exams that their government pulled out in embarassment. Most lines of evidence suggest that there is extreme IQ stratification in India, with only certain high-caste subgroups performing at or above European or East Asian levels.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation. Those bemoaning the fall of the Roman republic would have been surprised to hear that Rome would endure for another five centuries (fourteen if we count the east) and that the height of her power and glory was yet to come. Tocqueville's America was killed by Lincoln, Lincoln's America was killed by FDR, and now FDR's America is being fed into the woodchipper by Elon Musk, but all of these struggles are orthogonal to the interests of prospective immigrants. What they care about is technological and material prosperity. Tanner Greer put it best:
Americans often think that constitutionalism, liberal democracy, and universal truths about the equality of man are the United States’ most significant gift to humankind. But from the start of the 20th century to its close, foreigners in the mold of Wang Huning have honored the United States as the land of Edison, not the land of Jefferson.
It is this America, the America that pioneered the greatest transformation the human species has experienced since foragers began farming 12,000 years ago, that so awed the young Wang Huning.
The idea that an America that is head and shoulders above every other nation in technological innovation is in any way ruined (compared to whom?) is laughable to the billions that want to move here.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
To me the question of assimilation is primarily about second and third generation immigrants. Obviously a bunch of people fresh off the boat are going to seem foreign, whether they're Europeans a hundred years ago or Asians today. To use a fictional example, Tony Soprano would count as unassimilated because despite being at least two generations removed from Italy, he does not consider himself American (he even uses the word madigan i.e. the dialectal Italian word for American, as a term of derision for WASPs), his speech is peppered with dozens of foreign expressions, and he is involved with a dysfunctional social practice from his ancestral homeland by being a mafia boss.
By contrast, the American-born children of Vietnamese from Seven Corners, Koreans from Centreville, or Indians from Herndon (all of whom I went to school with and know quite well) do not typically speak their heritage languages to anyone their own age or younger (i.e. they will die out within a generation), self-identify as American (hyphenated, of course), and are under the majority of circumstances culturally indistinguishable from their white neighbors (Indians insisting on traditional wedding ceremonies being the biggest exception that I can think of). Now, the culture they all share is cosmopolitan urban liberal culture, so anyone who has a problem with said culture will have a problem with them, but plenty of heritage Americans are part of it too.
In practice it's harder to maintain a distinct enclave in the suburbs compared to the city due to a lack of third places or walkable neighborhoods for people to congregate outside and do whatever activities are part of their culture. The ethnic neighborhoods in Queens (e.g. Flushing and Jackson Heights) are the most non-American feeling places in the country to me for this reason, and even there many immigrant children get out by testing into Stuyvesant or other selective high schools.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
To my mind, the idea of worrying about vaccine risks seems akin to worrying about the risk of your child falling and breaking their neck from being allowed to play outside on a playground. It's certainly nonzero, but by their nature those activities are less risky than being explosed to those same diseases in an uncontrolled environment or playing unsupervised in the woods, which was the condition of the vast majority of children who have ever lived. Not that I have any issues with skipping the COVID vaccine, but as others have mentioned downthread interfering with the standard schedule may also result in a variety of byzantine bureaucratic difficulties for your child down the line, assuming RFK Jr. doesn't scrap the whole thing before then.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
is it moral to buy children, or is it not?
In some cultures e.g. rural China this is or was a common practice, where poor parents with too many children would sell one to a wealthy family (usually an older and therefore less fertile couple) to improve the standard of living of both the exchanged child and the remaining members of the birth family. This happened to my grandmother, who seemed perfectly fine psychologically, and to several other members of my extended family, some of whom definitely seemed to carry lingering resentment over it (the older they were when it happened, the more problems they had, as one might expect). I suppose all I have to say on the morality of it is that it's better than the whole family starving to death, which was often the alternative.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
As you've pointed out, there are clear cases where more or less everyone either agrees that an invasion was justified e.g. the Vietnamese invading Cambodia to end Pol Pot's reign of terror or clearly unjust e.g. Iraq invading Kuwait, with a large grey area in the middle. Personally, I would say that for a place like Haiti anything would be an improvement over the current situation (if Haitians weren't black someone would have probably done something by now, but they hold back out of fear of being seen as racist/colonialist, and so I think progressive ideology deserves some amount of blame for the continued dysfunction there, but I digress), but that past a certain level of basic economic development where people aren't starving or completely lacking in basic healthcare or infrastructure that being merely poor (by first world standards) is not sufficient grounds for someone to overthrow your government, whatever their economic policies may be. That is, the US has no right to take over Cuba by force even if by doing so we could raise their GDP per capita to the level of Florida's. This isn't because I wish to consign the people of Cuba to poverty or believe in some absolute form of ethnic self-determination, but because I don't trust governments to make judgements about whether the citizens of neighboring countries would be better off under their own stewardship in good faith, and would rather they avoid doing this outside of edge cases like people being herded into death camps or cannibal gangs overrunning the capital, where either the government in question will ask for help directly or some multinational deliberative body can agree on an intervention.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
And yet we failed to overthrow the government of Cuba and it remains communist to this day. Just because every country wishes they had a sphere of influence and will take steps to obtain one doesn't mean we are under any obligation to give it to them. European nations freely ignored the Monroe Doctrine for decades after it was promulgated until they were too weak relative to the US to do so.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I was not. My assumption was that Finland would have become a Warsaw Pact member under a nominally independent communist government if they had lost the war more completely.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Like Trump, it's hard to tell if this guy got high on his own supply, or is merely bluffing to try to negotiate from a position of "strength". In which case, I don't much mind Trump bullshitting back. Zelensky wants to bullshit like they can push Russia back to 2014 borders?
I don't see how not premptively and publically conceding Crimea to Russia prior to entering private peace talks counts as bullshitting that ought to be responded to with derision. This is just diplomacy 101. Formal recognition of the line of control as the official border between Ukraine and Russia is a major concession on the part of Ukraine, and should not be given without getting something in return at the negotiating table. After they wring whatever they can get out of symbolic gestures, they can start making more material concessions, but that's not where you want to begin haggling if you have the option.
I have never understood this insistence by his detractors that Zelensky speak completely truthfully about the strategic and military situation all the time. If my government were on the cusp of losing a war, I wouldn't expect them to shout to the heavens that supply lines were stretched to the breaking point, that there were mass desertions on the front, and that some loss of territory was inevitable. Their job would be to project the illusion of control and maintain public order while entering talks to obtain the least bad outcome, and to do otherwise would be a gross dereliction of duty. [Insert your preferred proverb about warfare and deception here].
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Observe that the conclusion of the Winter War was Finland losing all the land that the Russians demanded and more.
The result of the Winter War was that Finland did not become a Soviet puppet state and suffer under communism for half a century. I consider that a victory and worth the blood that was shed, and I am guessing most Finns would as well, even if from a tactical point of view it was a guaranteed defeat.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
Combat experience counts for a lot, and they certainly aren't lacking for equipment either. A few dozen Ukrainian military advisors on the ground in Syria with knowledge of modern drone warfare were sufficient to turn the tide of that conflict decisively against the Assad regime. The French have done a lot of counterinsurgency work in Africa and I might trust them more with operations requiring precision, but if I were fighting a high-intensity war I'd want guys on my side who know how. Perhaps you were implying that Russia's army is clearly superior and the best in Europe, and certainly in a numerical sense they are, but I don't know about man for man.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
I support the building of Freedom Cities, California Forever or any other project on federal or private land that aims to shake up our current land use paradigm, but that's because I want better urbanism in this country, not more sprawl. Imagine Guantanamo Bay as the Hong Kong of the Caribbean instead of a prison camp, or an EPCOT that was an actual living community instead of an amusement park. Perhaps many of them would crash and burn for want of funds, residents, or effective policing, but we won't know until we try. To not make the attempt at all would signal a depressing lack of ambition.
ResoluteRaven
4mo ago
That is true, although I would count it as another point in favor of the "revolutions are bad" camp.
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.
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