Shrike
6mo ago
From what I understand, there's no limitations in a time of war on striking enemy combatants. Although there are certainly political questions of proportionality, from what I understand under international law if I sink your rowboat you are entirely justified in sinking my aircraft carrier.
The question of proportionality kicks in when you're considering civilian collateral – so for instance you are probably not justified in nuking downtown Los Angeles to destroy a single military rowboat. But you probably would be justified in launching a conventional strike on San Diego to hit the military base there if it is calibrated to cause as few civilian casualties as possible while achieving its desired military effect.
Note that I am not a lawyer though.
Shrike
6mo ago
Any strike on the tunnel network under Gaza would need to apply the principle of proportionality – same as the Allied bombing strikes on Japan. International law bans
I am not a lawyer but I think that in practice what this means is that if striking the tunnel network was sufficiently necessary to achieve Israel's goals, and it was also entirely colocated with orphanages, hospitals, and food banks, it would be justified to hit a food bank in order to strike the tunnel network. (Note also that as I understand it the Gazan combatants would have some duty to not entirely colocate their military equipment with orphanages, hospitals, and food banks.)
But on the other hand if Israel had the ability to strike the tunnel network and gain the same military advantage without striking an orphanage, hospital or food bank, they should take that option instead of the one that could reasonably be expected to kill civilians.
Shrike
6mo ago
Yes, I agree – Gaza, as a whole, is not a purely civilian target. This, at least in my estimation, does not mean that carpet bombing it is necessarily a proportionate response – particularly given that modern precision-guided weaponry and the lack of Gazan air defenses means that Israel faces a different calculus than the Allies did during World War Two (and even then, from what I know, I think you could reasonably argue at least some of the Allied bombing strikes weren't justified).
Note that I am not saying the Israelis have been carpet-bombing Gaza – I do not believe that to be a correct description of their actions. Just pointing out there's a material difference at play.
Shrike
6mo ago
Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki
None of these cities were purely civilian targets, particularly if you think military industry is fair game. Hiroshima was a Japanese army headquarters, and at Nagasaki the bomb detonated between an arsenal and an arms factory, while the Doolittle raid hit an aircraft carrier and various industrial targets (and also civilian buildings, but AFAIK the Raiders were not instructed to target e.g. schools). The Dresden bombing was planned to hit German industrial centers and a railroad yard - there were apparently some ancillary military assets there (such as barracks) but the real target was the military industrial center that was believed to be there.
Now, that being said, I tend to agree with your overall point - there's certainly a case to be made that these bombing raids were not proportionate and therefore not justified under the laws of war. But there were certainly military or at a minimum industrial targets relevant to the war effort at all four of those locations.
Shrike
6mo ago
I agree with what you're saying here, but I'm not sure what you're getting at in your initial post.
I think I was trying to answer OP's question – "what's the cope for Trump winning" – with a more sophisticated steelman than "the CIA fell asleep at the hacker remote control button." Now, I never "doomed about the 2024 election" on here – you can go back and look at my posts, I don't think I talked much about it at all, but it's a sort of interesting intellectual exercise to think about, even if I don't personally feel the need to cope.
If your contention is that the reason Harris lost Pennsylvania is because her campaign didn't play ball with local party leaders and they punished her by not rigging the vote, a look at the actual numbers makes it pretty clear that it isn't the case.
I would need more evidence than a single interview to contend this (although I will admit that it certainly sprang to mind watching the interview!) I also think that even without any "rigging" the local party machine can make a big difference! Of course, Brady says that he did in fact do his darndest to win the election for Kamala regardless of how poorly he and his team were treated.
Yeah, I grant that it's a political mistake not to at least talk to the chair of the committee in the biggest city in an important battleground state,but it's hard for me to imagine what he could have actually done. Was there something he wanted to do but needed to coordinate with the campaign? Did he want to offer his sage advice?
I definitely think the Kamala campaign could have used his sage advice. My recollection of the interview was that he says he wanted to coordinate with her campaign, and although the details are a bit unclear I get the impression that it was in resource allocation, probably related to GOTV efforts, and maybe messaging. Now, my assumption is that political machines work on a patronage model (where they receive funding from their patrons for GOTV which they then pass down to their clients and so forth) and Brady's interview – which, as you say, has some whining – sounds to me like what someone would say if they weren't receiving expected allocation of funding from on high. (Of course it is very much in Brady's interests for people to think that he has magical powers to GOTV if they just treat him with enough deference and supply him with adequate funding).
Kamala Harris got about 35,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden did, and Trump got about 10,000 more than in 2020.
First off, let me say that I really appreciate you bringing the numbers here.
Secondly – yes, and why do you think that was? I definitely think some of it was that voting was easier in 2020. But if you're a political machine, you should be aiming to at least match last year's performance, and they didn't. However, I do think there are non-conspiratorial interpretations for this, though. Besides COVID, it's also true that the city's population is declining – they probably lost upwards of 50,000 people between elections. 2024's voter turnout still didn't match 2020's, but it was very close. All of this – I agree – is consistent with Brady attempting to (and failing) bring home the bacon for Kamala (and again we don't even need to believe in any fraud for this to be the case).
If that difference is solely attributed to ballot box stuffing, it suggests that Brady can manufacture somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 votes.
On the other hand, if I don my tinfoil cap and grant the machine 1) very good fraud capabilities, and 2) a decent idea of what the other side's total turnout is going to be, then what I see is that the machine puts in just enough fraud to guarantee a win and for some reason didn't do it here – in Philadelphia they could have turned 70% of the voters instead of 65% and it might only have raised eyebrows in the usual places while bringing in, what, an extra 50,000 votes? That would have gotten them nearly halfway to the win they needed in the state.
TO BE CLEAR, I am not saying I believe this. I'm engaging with the OP – he asked what the cope is for the Trump win, and I'm suggesting one possible cope is that the Kamala campaign failed to play ball with the county campaigns and they reciprocated by failing to bring home the bacon (which frankly seems plausible even if you assume zero fraud). On balance I am inclined to believe that 1) Brady is telling the truth about poor coordination by Team Kamala, and 2) this hurt their GOTV, and 3) Brady would have preferred Biden was the nominee. I think you make a decent case that as much as Brady might prefer for everyone to think otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to tip the balance here (unless you grant the machine really good fraud capability - and from what I've seen actual cases of voter fraud where people have been caught have been box-stuffing, not "I am generating arbitrarily large numbers out of thin air.")
A machine like this could have accounted for, at most, 20% of the difference, if we're as charitable as possible and assume he didn't max out his fraud capabilities in 2020.
Well, my first question is – do we know that the machine doesn't lend support to county parties outside of its geographic boundaries? My second question is – did you catch the part where Brady suggests that Kamala's failure to coordinate wasn't just with his city, but was nationwide? Obviously PA itself wasn't the deciding factor here in the election, although it was important. Brady's suggesting a nationwide systemic failure to engage with local political machines. That seems to me like something that could be significant – but maybe not enough to tip the balance.
if we're as charitable as possible and assume he didn't max out his fraud capabilities in 2020
This is a very funny use of charitable, 10/10.
If you were actually paying attention you'd know that the Allegheny County Democratic Committee wasn't exactly a model of functionality heading into 2020, and that the progressive wing of the party had taken over city and county government plus key state and US rep positions.
I certainly cop to not paying attention – I don't live in PA, for one thing, so I defer to your superior knowledge of the place or attention-paying skills. In fact, the sausage of political campaigning is fairly opaque to me, so I appreciate being told when I am wrong.
Shrike
6mo ago
So, firstly, even people who Really Do Care are unlikely to do their jobs for free. If Kamala comes out and tells her chief-of-staff "sorry but we aren't going to pay you to do your job anymore" and she quits it's not really a dunk to say "wow it seems like the Democrats don't care about social justice and only care about getting paid." Probably they care about both.
But secondly, it does not surprise me that an Irish-Italian Philadelphian born in 1945 is ambivalent about certain aspects of current progressive politics. I doubt he is ambivalent about the Democratic Party; he almost certainly has an intense loyalty to his in-group. But I suspect for Brady and other old-school Democrats (e.g. James Carville) current progressive fixations are tripping them up from doing the real work which, if I had to guess, is winning elections and then using those elections to achieve old-school patronage-style wins in the FDR mold that benefit your allies but also large groups of people – think improving the healthcare or welfare systems, infrastructure improvement, etc. Not to suggest that they don't care about abortion or women's rights or things like that, but for a guy born around the end of World War Two the new gender stuff might not be their top priority.
I think there's a generational (and also different-parts-of-the-coalition) thing here, and if I am recalling the context of the original "...burgers?" comic, the suggestion is that the "...burgers?" people are elite media types that are going to be pushing their agendas with other people's money. I don't think the Bob Bradys of the world were ever really that sort of person, and I think the political world is big enough for both. Currently the GOP coalition is (to overgeneralize) a fusion of Silicon Valley tech elites who care about meritocracy and evangelical true believers who care about abortion – if you find that e.g. Elon Musk cares more about money than pro-life causes it is wrong to suggest that Republicans writ large don't care about the issue of abortion. Similarly, if Bob Brady and his city machine just care about money (which I actually do not think!), it does not mean that there aren't True Believers out there who care much less about the financial incentives.
Shrike
6mo ago
This feels like those people who think Yudkowsky is discredited because recursive self-improvement looks a bit different than what he imagined in 2007 or whatever. No one else was even thinking that deeply about AI in 2007.
I will admit to not paying Yudkowsky much attention but recursive self-improvement is an extremely old trope, you don't get any points for talking about that in 2007. Perhaps you were thinking of something specific he expanded on that wasn't mapped out by sci-fi authors before he was born?
Shrike
6mo ago
Did you watch the post-election interview that Bob Brady gave? (I think this is it: YouTube link) If you thought that 30M votes were going to be stuffed at the last minute, I think the interview reveals a very plausible explanation for why they weren't.
Now, I am not saying that Miss Collins was wrong. But I am saying that watching the interview gave me the strong (and perhaps wrong) vibe that what happened is that Team Kamala was full of noobs and didn't pony up and play with the city machines and as a result the city machines sent a Clear Message about what happened when you go off-script by simply not coughing up votes for Kamala.
Of course, that's not necessarily a conspiracy along the lines of the CIA controlling voting machines via satellite or something. There are shades of conspiratorial interpretations here, ranging from the sinister and illegal "the machines didn't stuff the ballots because the Presidential campaign didn't release cash to them" to the dodgy-but-legal "the machines didn't bother to get out because they weren't adequately compensated by the Presidential campaign for staff time" to the relatively benign "Kamala failed to coordinate with the boots on the ground and as a result they were disorganized." I don't see the need to say any of the more conspiratorial interpretations are correct, but it seems worth at least acknowledging the possibility that city machines are capable of large-scale voter fraud.
But whichever of these explanations is true, it's worth watching the interview because I think it reveals a lot more about how politics and power works than sitting around theorizing about how a shadowy three-letter-organization has ironclad control over our elections.
Shrike
6mo ago
FWIW, if this rule is going to be enforced (which I am fine with) I do think it should be written. And while I am at it, I think we're probably all smart enough here to understand the difference between having the AI write your posts for you and quoting something relevant or humorous that is AI-generated, but I think it would be helpful for the rule to say that rather than just "No AI Content" (unless the community find even that objectionable, but I've never noticed anyone getting moderated for that or even irked by it). My .02.
Shrike
6mo ago
Well part of the benefit of intercepting them in the boost phase is that they aren't hypersonic yet. I don't think they are typically "maneuvering" either (at least, to defeat interceptors, although that's probably not hard to add in).
Shrike
6mo ago
modified anti-ship missile
The SM-3 isn't really an anti-ship missile - it is basically purpose-built as an anti-ballistic missile. I wouldn't be surprised if it has an anti-ship mode, but that's been a secondary role for all of the Standards.
maybe they finally had something that didn't require further testing?
I think Space Force has some non-kinetic ASAT weapons, plus I assume the SM-3s have some ASAT capability, but also there's the X-37 which I think could easily host an anti-satellite weapon.
I do wonder if the recent advances in cruise missiles make all these ballistic shenanigans moot though.
An interesting question, particularly now that long-range maneuvering hypersonic missiles seem to be in play. Russia, of course, has already preempted an anti-ballistic-missile shield by making an intercontinental nuclear torpedo, which is honestly very cool in a "James Bond villain superweapon" sort of way.
Shrike
6mo ago
What does that even look like?
I wonder if it would look like a modified AMRAAM with a LEAP [Lightweight Exo-Atmosphereic Projectile] kinetic interceptor (in fact I discovered while writing this that work was already done in 2008 on using an AMRAAM derivative as a boost-phase ballistic-missile interceptor). The AMRAAM weighs about 350 pounds, which makes it lighter than e.g. the original 500-pound Starlink satellite (current Starlink satellites are clocking in at almost 3,000 pounds, it looks like). I'm not sure you'd need anything in space besides the interceptor itself, so even if we assume an extra 150 pounds for comic radiation shielding you're looking at a smallsat sized package. (Incidentally, the AMRAAM has a 44 pound warhead, which should be plenty of mass to house the LEAP interceptor).
Of course Brilliant Pebbles interceptors as designed were apparently only about 3 feet long and it looks like there was at least some talk about making them, say, as small as 5 pounds plus fuel, so maybe a clean-sheet design would be a much better idea here – even 200-pound interceptors would have a significant advantage over a 350 pound AMRAAM-sized one.
These are again likely based on a platform deployed in LEO, which upon detection de-orbits in a manner which can intercept a missile in its boost phase. I will not beat around the bush this is a very hard problem to solve.
Is it? I mean, yes, it is, but what I really mean is – is it harder than midcourse and especially terminal interceptions? Because we already prepare to carry those out.
And at the same time you likely need tens if not hundreds of the platforms to get good ground coverage.
It looks like Brilliant Pebbles contemplated 7,000 to, uh, 100,000 during maximalist conceptions. These numbers aren't insane if you consider that Starlink has put about 7,000 satellites – all probably heavier than a Pebbles interceptor – in orbit in about five years. Supposing you're able to put four "pebbles" in orbit for each Starlink satellite and you launch at a similar rate, you're looking at, let's say, 4,000/year – so you reach limited usefulness in the first year of operation, but it still takes 25 years to build "complete coverage" at that rate (longer if we consider that the service life of the interceptors might not be 25 years!) If we can get 10 pebbles in orbit for each Starlink satellite, now you're looking at full deployment of 100,000 in ten years, or five years if 20 pebbles-per-Starlink, etc.
Something that I think has escaped many geopolitical observers is that the United States has assiduously maintained the "high ground" – in this case, an orbital high ground – in anticipation of a future conflict. We can absolutely outcompete the rest of the world in getting stuff to orbit. Part of what has me interested in the utility of such a system (and hoping that you write more on it as you track it) obviously it is potentially amazing if it works, potentially rendering ICBM threats toothless. But it seems to me that any satellite is a potential target for surface fires, and there are lots of other ways to deliver WMDs, so I am not sure it's worth it, particularly in a maximal way.
Shrike
6mo ago
Yes. I am not saying I think the math works, merely pointing out that there are some reasons to think it's part of a balance-the-budget initiative.
I am coming to believe his first term might not be particularly illuminating when it comes to What Trump Will Get Up To This Time Around but we'll see.
Shrike
6mo ago
I am not sure if this is actually part of a balance-the-budget initiative (this seems to me to perhaps be part of his ongoing operation to essentially purge the executive branch) but Trump has spoken before about the need to balance the budget.
He's also apparently pushed Congress to do away with the income tax, which I don't think is feasible without some extreme budgetary slashing (even if we do ramp up tariffs).
Shrike
6mo ago
If essential programs shouldn't be dependent on federal grants, this is a fantastic opportunity to figure out what those essential programs are, and then get them off of the government teat or otherwise de-risk them.
Keep in mind this is just an EO and not something more critical, like a government funding shutdown or some other financial crisis. If there's really some widget farm in Nebraska that is federally funded and keeping the lights on, Trump can greenlight it tomorrow. That won't be true in the event of an actual crisis.
Shrike
6mo ago
Well as pointed out above, there's a "military science" Venn diagram, but yeah generally speaking I think the .gov funding the academy is distortionary and bad.
Shrike
6mo ago
Yeah, it's sort of interesting - you run into this problem sometimes with "civilian control of the military" where the military tries to bamboozle Congress, but I suspect "civilian control of SCIENCE" is an even harder nut to crack. At least there are a lot of Congresscritters who are former servicemembers.
Shrike
6mo ago
I think part of the problem with the federal government is that ~all expenditures look very reasonable if you go and talk to the program manager for half an hour. There are very, very few "no duh this is stupid" cuts to be made, unless you are RonPaulLaserEyes.gif or have either an in-depth investigation or literally magical awareness of government inefficiency.
If you think the feds are spending too much (they are, obviously) then from a certain standpoint it is best to slash everything and then closely reevaluate which good stuff we should be spending cash on. By changing the status quo from "spending insane amounts of cash" to "spending next to zip" you can shift the burden onto the would-be spenders instead of on the would-be slashers.
Shrike
6mo ago
I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that the US already has a lot of people in Mexico, so presumably if we're the ones who start to care, suddenly, then part of our strategy might involve directly inserting more oversight law enforcement advisory personnel. At a minimum just putting added political pressure on Mexico will probably produce nonzero results – I seem to recall that we've been able to twist arms down there in the past.
To be clear, I am not pretending that would be a piece of cake. In some ways, just bombing stuff would be simpler and more satisfying. I think on balance RandomRanger is correct that the bulk of US effort should be focused internally (and by that I am including at the border).
For truly out-of-the-box thinking, I have some retarded galaxy-brained ideas involving extraterritorial governance and PMCs, but I'm not sure there's really any genuine need that would justify those sorts of extreme solutions.
Shrike
6mo ago
I think it would be more prudent for the US to stay at home and cultivate harshness in a safer environment.
Sure, this seems reasonable.
Shrike
6mo ago
The right also seems more inclined to use that power, having slowly learned the lesson, I think, that institutions are not inherently neutral and that if they're not on your side they are probably on someone else's.
Which I think might make those SCOTUS picks and executive branch positions weightier than they did a few years ago. Sure, Reagan was a very dynamic leader, but he didn't revolutionize society the way that LBJ did. And now Trump's first (well technically probably like 2717th given how many pardons and other EOs he signed) move in office is to yank an EO that survived Reagan, two Bushes, and even Nixon.
Shrike
6mo ago
I would say that it’s almost certainly better to track the containers to the regional distribution centres where they’re opened, and inspect them there, which is probably what’s already done. Of course, then you aren’t in international waters any more. You could force them to a friendly port but that’s an act of war, or at least of piracy.
Yes, good point. But if (as I suspect) Mexico will be cooperative, then the thing to do would simply be to ramp up port inspections.
Which I do think would be personnel-intensive!
Shrike
6mo ago
I could be wrong, but I suspect the need to do this still adds a lot of complexity and takes up a lot of time. It's also unclear to me how routine it is.
Yes, I think you are correct. But on the other hand, modern standards for warfare are much higher due to precision weapons. As you suggest, from what I understand Allied tactics in the Second World War were not unusual when contrasted with the Axis tactics.
Mind you, this isn't necessarily a moral justification for the actions - I just think it's important to understand that our standards are and should be higher because we can be more discriminating.
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