Shrike
3mo ago
Often for the kinds of physics described for UAP phenomena the things that would have to be wrong are not, like, the nuances of quantum field theory. It is shit like "conservation of energy was wrong."
Obviously it would depend on the very specific incident in question but a lot of times the claims "requiring" extreme energy fluctuations come from data like radar returns that don't give any insight into the mass of the object being observed or even if it is a material object. A lot of claims about UAP are assumptions stacked on assumptions stacked on assumptions in a trench coat. These trench coats are often based on a core observation that, while very interesting, doesn't prove much if anything about "the laws of physics" and our understanding or lack thereof even if the observation itself is 100% accurate as reported.
(This is without getting into the fact that a lot of weird stuff like warp drives and propellantless space travel are theoretically good physics.)
Shrike
3mo ago
This is admittedly speculative due to a lack of contact with the former class but my general assumptions are that they aren't exactly hardcore voters to begin with.
I also suspect that if they do vote for the GOP, they probably aren't thinking "I'm going to get thrown off of Medicaid but it will make the blue-haired freaks unhappy so it's a net win for me," they are voting GOP under the theory that entitlement reform never happens but maybe their neighbor with the string of misdemeanor assaults and restraining orders will finally be locked up for good, or that it will help the economy, or things like that. My general assumption is that people who are "on the fringes of society" in the sense of being on welfare and not being particularly poor are more likely to be sensitive to the economy and crime, not less.
Shrike
3mo ago
How is your semi AR15 with a ten rounds mag going to fare against a predator drone or a tank? In the very best case, you would be fighting a protracted war against the federal government. If you win, it looks like Mao winning his civil war, if you lose, it looks like Hamas in Gaza.
First off, as a technical point, the ARs will have a lot more than ten rounds (30 round is the standard magazine, lots of people run drums with 50 or 100 rounds).
Secondly, gestures to Afghanistan the US army is capable of losing a war to an opponent with small arms and IEDs! I've never understood the "the US military would crush an armed populace" line of arguing because it had a chance to do that in the last two decades and failed. (And of course laying the blame on Iran or Pakistan or whoever is cope – do you think China or Russia would fail to arm insurgents in the US if there was a civil war?) What I find much more questionable an assumption is that the US armed populace would act like the populace in Afghanistan (or Northern Ireland) but if they did, it seems likely from history that the US armed forces would in fact lose. Wars are political endeavors and technology does not change that.
Thirdly, in most civil wars, the military and national security apparatus is not actually monolithic. Let's say that it's true for the sake of argument that the "armed populace" is not capable of "beating the US military" (I actually agree this is a fantasy because even if the "armed populace" could beat the US military on a giant featureless plain that's...not how real wars work.) In many, perhaps most civil wars, the military fragments alongside the rest of the populace. In which circumstance, it can be really helpful to have an armed populace even if there is no irregular warfare because they are likely to be better marksmen, more likely to be able to contribute to arms stockpiles, etc. In a prolonged civil war situation, the side with the support of the armed populace will be favored to win all else being equal. Which means there's a certain incentive for ideologies to promote firearm ownership (on their own team) and to attempt to convince the other side to disarm.
(As an aside, for this reason widespread firearms ownership is actually extremely beneficial to the US state. The US military recruits disproportionately from certain areas for reasons that are not but are correlated to firearms ownership.)
For example, I imagine that hand grenades are much fun. Or landmines. Watch the stupid coyotes explode when they trespass on your property. Contact poisons are fun. Radioactive substances are fun. So is building your own nuclear reactor.
All of these are, at least in the right circumstances, legal in the US, but the hand grenades and nuclear reactors at a minimum require paperwork.
Shrike
3mo ago
Man, don't shoot the messenger here.
Ha! No, like I said, that's definitely not my ethos. But I hear ya.
Either way, the thing is that the rule against killing is, again to a first approximation, fairly absolute; and to someone who actually believes in an absolute rule, asserting that you actually want to break it in a fairly broad special case is not persuasive.
Sure, this makes sense. And of course Americans often don't believe in this at all (even when it comes to executions and the like).
Can you muster the theory of mind to understand that some people actually believe that there are no "bad guys" who it is a good thing to kill?
Yes. And I think you're right, there's an incommensurability problem that plausibly is only worked out on civilizational timescales.
I'm not so convinced that they are strongly correlated at all - East Asia has ubiquitous AC but no guns and an atrocious free-speech situation compared to Europe as well, Russia flip-flops but at least intermittently had quite liberal gun laws with no relation to its AC or speech situation.
I am also not convinced on the correlation, but I will note that I think civilizations are very different and a causal chain that exists in some cultures may not exist in other cultures at all. Sometimes just the idea that something is true makes it so.
I also suspect Europe's free-speech situation is, at least in some respects and specifically in some places, about as bad or perhaps even worse than Russia's – it looks like England might be in some ways worse than Russia, arresting 12,000 people in 2023 while Russia detained about 20,000 people since 2022 as per this 2024 article as part of crackdowns on anti-war speech (note that these don't measure convictions, and of course note also that Russia has nearly three times the population, but also that the article I pulled was focused on the Russian anti-war crackdown and might not measure people taken in for other views.)
Either way, the heat death figures you refer to always seemed fairly cooked to me - Eurocrats have an incentive to inflate them to support the climate change narrative, while the US figure seems pretty inappropriately small for its burgeoning homeless population.
I think it's pretty rare for ~healthy adults to die from heat stroke (some of these numbers might be due to aging European demographics) and a lot of the American homeless are in pretty temperate places like California. I believe US cities generally have lots of places for homeless people to get out of the cold, or ways for them to travel to more temperate regions. If I had to guess, most exposure deaths among the homeless involve drugs of some kind. But that's a guess.
Shrike
3mo ago
What makes it superior for sporting over either something like a hunting rifle, or something like a fairground gun that shoots tiny bullets of a few millimetres calibre?
All of those guns are for different purposes. The .223 is a cheaper, lower-performing round compared to say a .308. It's also more fun to shoot (less recoil, semi-automatic), and it is a tiny bullet (same diameter as a .22, so not dissimilar to a fairground gun most likely). But people do sporting events using all sorts of different calibers.
Personally I think the .223 is a very good varmint round, and that's how I've used it.
a legal way to kill people
To be clear, when I say this, I mean "it should be legal to own deadly things" and that's about how I took your phrasing. Most pro-gun-people (including me) don't support it being legal to execute people randomly, but perhaps my phrasing was...unclear. But, to your point, at least in the US, they think that the Second Amendment is an important backstop to liberty. It's hard to tease out the correctness of this, but the US of A is doing much better than Europe in this regard. (For instance, just as a wacky example, in A/C unfriendly Europe, heat deaths kill more people than firearms in the US of A. It arguably wouldn't actually be a good swap for the US to get European gun violence levels if it also meant getting European attitudes and regulations towards air conditioning! And that's without getting into values-based stuff like free-speech rights.)
there still were large and massively funded organisations deliberately binge-drinking to the point of getting it
I'm not sure what the organization has to do with it. Alcoholism is much more dangerous problem in the US than firearms, but alcohol is much easier to procure (and is also glamorized in the media, much as guns are!) If all of the gun-rights orgs shifted their focus to sporting, I doubt that gun control groups would be assuaged, because at the end of the day their goals are things like "stopping school shootings" not "stop optics we don't like."
the most popular fictional depictions of alcoholic drinks all involved flashy celebrations of how they induce cirrhosis
I mean - most popular fictional depictions of guns are of people, often those who are legally permitted and encouraged to have them (cops, spies, soldiers, etc.) using them to stop bad people. I don't really see why that's bad - presumably even Europeans want their military, soldiers, spies etc. to do their jobs.
"fantasizing about killing"
The specific fantasy you seem to be upset at is "killing a bad person who is trying to do a bad thing." Most gun owners who are interested in self-defense are interested in self-defense. Movies and gun manufacturing ads and the NRA website and all of those things you're discussing aren't promoting the idea of unlawful violence or mass shootings. (It's actually imho the liberal-leaning press and gun control groups that do the worst to spread mass shooting memes, because they amplify the contagious meme of mass shootings to advance, in the case of the latter, their policy agenda). They are promoting the idea of stopping a bad guy. You can go read the NRA magazine, they (at least used to. maybe they stopped) pull accounts of robbers, rapists, mass shooters etc. getting stopped by "the good guy with a gun" which happens pretty often, honestly. If there's a fantasy here, it's specifically the same fantasy that people who join the military or police often have. I think it's fine to criticize certain aspects of this but fundamentally wanting to stop bad people from doing bad stuff is an honorable impulse.
It seems to me that you are making the vibes-based argument that "Hollywood thinks gun violence is good therefore guns are bad" but my argument here, on the whole, is that if you look at actual use cases and not vibes vast majority of use even of guns that are e.g. derived from military designs is for peaceful purposes. The same way that most drinking isn't to die of liver failure even though that's a not infrequent outcome.
Shrike
3mo ago
I specifically support the two being linked in some way. Dispossessing someone of firearms is a statement by society that someone is untrustworthy and unable to govern themselves, and there's no need to pretend otherwise by giving them the right to vote under the pretense that such a person can govern others.
Shrike
3mo ago
The principle purpose (as measured by actual use) of all civilian firearms, no matter how outlandish, is sporting.
I of course find the idea that there shouldn't be a legal way to kill people wrong, and it's against the ethos and traditions of my country's heritage (and indeed most of Europe's, arguably) but to say the primary purpose of e.g. an AR-15 is to kill people is a lot like saying that the primary purpose of alcoholic drinks is to get cirrhosis of the liver.
Shrike
3mo ago
Also, a situation where guards are bribed for a few bucks to have access to a prisoner is actually a pretty good way to carry out a hit on someone, since the guards are incentivized the cover it up rather than cop to "yeah I totally let my prisoner get murdered but in my defense I thought they were just going to have a conversation! I would have asked for a lot more than $500 if I had known it was a MURDER!" (I haven't viewed the film, so maybe this scenario is implausible for various reasons.)
I think there's a common misunderstanding of conspiracies that supposes that everyone involved in the conspiracy knows everything. Which I think is dumb. One of the big problems with petty corruption is precisely that it opens the door to things like murder and espionage, even if the corrupt officials would never intentionally get wrapped up in murder and espionage and merely thought they were turning a blind eye to smuggling or petty tax evasion.
Anyway, the very funniest possibility is that Epstein was murdered Hollywood style by a guy with a "certain set of skills" turned vigilante seeking justice under the belief that Epstein was going to be let off with a slap on the wrist again and now the "Deep State" is left holding the bag.
Shrike
3mo ago
I am under the impression that most posters here who care about American politics would 99% endorse this statement, even though it's pretty strongly violating meritocracy and individualism---judging people based on what their ancestors were regardless of their own qualities and competencies.
I don't really think this is the correct way to look at this question. If you are selecting for proficiency at being an American you are overwhelmingly going to be choosing Americans. Being good at e.g. surgery doesn't really tell you if someone will be good at being an American.
I think this is true even if you're holding to a creedal understanding of Americanness (e.g. a random American is MUCH more likely to register vehement and enthusiastic agreement with widespread firearms ownership or an expansive definition of free speech than someone from almost anywhere else on Earth.)
Shrike
3mo ago
This is a made up number. It includes veteran care. In the future. Separate budget entirely.
All US revenue either comes from taxes or from debt. Neither are unlimited (well - taxes aren't unlimited, the jury might be out on the debt!) At the end of the day, it's all one budget.
The USAF and USN. Their core assets were not affected very much by counterinsurgency operations.
This is not true for the Navy or the Air Force, although perhaps your MOS didn't encounter them much.
Guess who is the least useful branch in a probable conflict with China? That's right, the US Army.
Yes, I do agree with this.
This is a hilarious take since drone bros like Elon take exactly the opposite line you do on drones vs. manned platforms like the B-21.
IMHO, the problem isn't with unmanned aircraft necessarily (although I am skeptical that 100% unmanned replacements for fighters and bombers are viable for other reasons, but from a certain POV any missile is just an unmanned aircraft, and missiles are definitely useful!) but rather that drones like the Predator and Global Hawk aren't very survivable on the modern battlefield (hence why the Houthis keep shooting them down). I'm not saying we shouldn't have some, particularly in the semi-attritable ISR role, or in the stealthy role. But I'm not sure the 300 MQ-9s we have will be super helpful if the balloon goes up against China. (Maybe in the far blockade scenario as ISR assets.)
The USN and USAF have a lot of rot and incompetence built up.
Sure, I believe this. But I think (particularly during the Obama era) that the GWOT, admittedly combined with the Ukraine situation, slowed the "pivot to Asia" that Obama announced.
Shrike
3mo ago
Please don't blame GWOT expenditures on the inability of the USAF to manage the budget projections of its aircraft development and production.
Not just aircraft - ships, fighting vehicles, helicopters, tanks and artillery projects were killed or trimmed down during the relevant time-frame. I agree that DoD development retardation is a thing, but I don't believe you can spend $8 trillion and fight a 20-year unconventional war and not have it impact your ability to fight a conventional war, both in terms of procurement and in terms of troop training.
If nothing else, the DoD shifted and pursued procurement programs that were very useful in the GWOT but of dubious utility in a hot war (drones being a big example).
Shrike
3mo ago
My point is that I don't think we, or the Taiwanese, are going to do this.
I agree. We should not rely on brinksmanship to deter China.
One nice thing for Taiwan is that it's very unlikely that "quickly" is in the cards, just based on how the island is. I guess there could be some kind of coup situation.
I think air assault is an underrated scenario (unironically: look at how well this worked for the Russians!), but I agree that a Chinese blockade is probably more likely.
But it won't be meaningfully done by taking our support away from Israel and/or Ukraine. It's not like we balance our defense budget.
Every Standard and Patriot missile we launch off in support of Israel and/or Ukraine is one we do not have stockpiled for a fight with China (and after how we've been moving around worldwide 155mm shell stockpiles for Ukraine, don't try to tell me those stockpiles aren't fungible! They are!)
I actually from a purely pragmatic perspective support some degree of stress-testing weapons, so I am less inclined to view limited battlefield expenditures as a waste. If we use 10 to improve the effectiveness of the other 1000 by 10%, it is clearly worth the cost. But you can't pretend like the weapons we are firing off now aren't relevant to a Pacific fight.
If the US committed to really fucking Russia over by giving Ukraine every edge we could then that's the strongest way to deter China because we are demonstrating capacity, will, and competence.
I mean - if the US should go full commitment for Ukraine, then by the same token it probably shouldn't screw around at all, we should just give Taiwan nukes. (Frankly, I trust the Taiwanese with them much more than the Ukrainians!)
Shrike
3mo ago
The EU collectively is the second-largest trading partner of China, and the US can interdict all of that traffic without even going into the Indian ocean. The Chinese are a major importer (around 50% of their crude, it looks like) of Middle Eastern oil, which can also be easily interdicted from the Persian Gulf. While I assume they will shift to Russian oil to compensate, targeting oil pipelines is much easier than targeting, say, mobile ballistic missile launchers. Similarly, China is a net food importer, and the EU, Brazil, and of course the US and Australia are major food importation locations for Chinese consumers that could be trivially closed without venturing under the Chinese bomber window.
Unsurprisingly most Chinese trade is with its direct neighbors, and that would definitely be difficult for the US navy to interdict. However, anti-ship missiles don't work on submarines, which could sink shipping pretty much wherever the PLAN couldn't establish an effective anti-submarine presence. Which is probably ~everywhere, but we'll pretend that the PLAN navy can actually stop them if they deploy, which means they end up outside of China's shore-based anti-air umbrella to contest chokepoints, at which point they are vulnerable to the 350+ anti-ship missile salvos the USAF can deliver against them (that's assuming the US uses a mere third of its B-1 fleet at a time, incidentally!)
I definitely think the US could seriously harm China's economy by a far blockade. I think the real question is if it would actually matter to the war (I tend to be more skeptical of that) and if the US would risk the international anger at neutral ships being targeted, as Dean points out. However, I think the US throttling the Chinese economy with a far blockade in retaliation for something like an attack on Taiwan is within the realm of possibility, and it would be foolish for China not to consider that as a potential threat in their decision making matrix.
Shrike
3mo ago
But in any real conflict between nuclear powers, the willingness to go all the way up the escalatory ladder has to be symmetrical, or at least perceived as such. Otherwise one side is going to get its way.
Sure, but there's also a question of who is having to make which choice. I don't want the situation to be the US threatening nuclear escalation because we've lost the conventional war and that's the only ace up our sleeve. I want the situation to be "the US has destroyed the combat effectiveness of the Chinese Navy in 24 hours and now China has to decide if it wants to wave its nuclear weapons around." This is particularly true since if China can occupy Taiwan quickly and successfully, US nuclear threats are meaningless. What are we going to do, nuke Taiwan? We need to be able to defeat China conventionally, if we want to play this game at all. That makes their nuclear threats close to meaningless - what are they going to do, nuke Taiwan?
If China thinks we'll back off because we are not fully committed to the fight then they will be emboldened to test our resolve.
Right, and if don't actually have the capacity to sink the entire Chinese navy, China is more likely to think we are not fully committed to the fight. That's why dropping Ukraine and redirecting any aid money to more LRASMs would spook China. (Mind you: I am not saying this is the correct course of action, merely that it would spook China. As I understand it, we don't actually spend much cash on Ukraine, most of the value is in contributions.) It would be a significant sacrifice that would indicate the US perceives it would receive greater value from defending Taiwan and defeating China than it would from defending Ukraine and defeating Russia.
As with economics, the expectations matter almost more than actually what happens.
If the US invests to defending Taiwan at the cost of other admittedly important priorities, it creates expectations that the US intends to get a return from that investment.
Per Wikipedia, that's not how the Soviets felt:
This makes sense. But it's because they lost the PR game, not because they didn't get concession diplomatically. US brinksmanship didn't by itself carry the day for the US, the US had to make concessions.
Shrike
3mo ago
But also it was a very cheap military engagement as these things go.
I would just flag that it arguably cost us essentially a generation of modernization as multiple procurement programs were canceled while funds were spent to fighting the GWOT rather than preparing for conventional conflict.
It seems plausible, just to use one prominent example that would be very relevant to a Pacific conflict, that absent the GWOT the B-21 would already be in service (originally the Next Generation Bomber was scheduled for 2018, but procurement was kicked down the road due to cost concerns.)
Shrike
3mo ago
China won't care about escalation risk if they think we don't have the balls to put it all on the line for Taiwan.
I don't think this is true. We can actually help deter China without threatening nuclear war if we have the tools needed to fight a conventional war. Perhaps this means that China will always have "escalation dominance" over Taiwan, as Russia will have over Ukraine. But US interest in the region creates an additional deterrent effect (although it needs to be combined with Taiwanese resolve, which arguably matters much more than US resolve!)
I think Taiwan is a foregone conclusion if China waits
My personal opinion is that Taiwan likely becomes harder and harder over time. Part of this is due to demographic shifts in Taiwan. Part of it is due to increased US investment in procurement programs clearly aimed at China, at US onshoring and containment efforts, and at clear and increasing bipartisan focus on China as a serious threat to US hegemony. Part of it is due to internal Chinese social and economic issues (while I don't think China is going to drop dead in 10 years due to an aging populace, it is true as I understand it that they will never have as many military-aged males as they do today – I think this is less relevant for actual force generation and more relevant for societal casualty acceptance).
The Cuban Missile Crisis was about the Soviets parking missiles way closer to the US than we were willing to accept, so we engaged in a bit of brinkmanship and it wasn't a bluff.
I think this is overstated. For all the scary "brinksmanship" the public watched, the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in tit-for-tat negotiations, and the United States (secretly) agreed to withdraw its own nuclear missiles from Turkey as part of the deal. I'm not sure how the Politburo viewed it, but from a certain point of view it was a success for the Soviet Union, as its attempt to park ballistic missiles in Cuba to gain strategic parity with US missiles in Europe ended with regaining at least some of that strategic parity (by forcing the withdrawal of US missiles).
Shrike
3mo ago
We need to dramatically increase our advanced missile stocks and production capacities. We should probably just buy ships from e.g. South Korea and Japan, because boy did we fuck up there. We should also make Anduril a very valuable company by having enough autonomous capacities to make the Chinese realize that even if our carrier battle groups can be taken out, Taiwan would effectively be a minefield.
Sure. None of these, frankly, seem all that far-fetched.
The best way to deter China is not to have a bunch of missiles in a warehouse. The best way to deter them is making them fear the resolve of the US in defending its friends and allies in the face of risking WWIII.
Look, China can do math. All the "resolve" in the world doesn't do us any good without missiles in the warehouse.
Which is why the question of "will they/won't they" is more important than "just how long will US missile stocks last."
If we are confident nuclear madman theory alone is sufficient to deter China, we don't need to do any of the above. But I don't actually think anyone wants to die in nuclear fire for Kiev or Taipei and as such the threat of a nuclear madman is unlikely to be persuasive and, even if persuasive, unlikely to be consistent in a democratic society (note the difference in Russian foreign policy towards Ukraine after the election of President Biden!) So one concern with the nuclear madman threat is that it will simply result in waiting out the madman. (Another concern is that two can play that game, of course!)
Shrike
3mo ago
Right.
IMHO, the US Navy could conduct a devastating far blockade of China relatively easily. (That's something that is missed in discussions of superior Chinese shipbuilding: "The PLAN said that the US Navy was seizing all of their cargo vessels and I asked him what he was doing about it and he said he just kept building more ships and I told him it kinda sounded like he was feeding the US free cargo ships and Xi Jinping started crying.")
The main question is if that's actually something that is fast enough to help Taiwan. If they prioritize air and sea denial strategies, their survival becomes more likely.
Shrike
3mo ago
Hypothetically, the US could do a lot to increase its military pressure on China re: Taiwan without taking away from Ukraine support at all. Maybe we could try that first?
Sure. What do you have in mind?
Sure, we lit a lot of money and attention on fire
Money and attention counts on my bogging-down meter, at least half-credit. Regardless, this is a semantic discussion: the point is that for China, more US investment in Ukraine is (generally) better, regardless of what that looks like. Obviously there's a sort of "looping back around to being bad" outcome where the US nukes Russia, or switches all its rare earth supply chains to Ukrainian sources, or what have you.
Shrike
3mo ago
I don't really think this is true. A lot of it depends on the specific goal the US is trying to achieve. But just generally, the US doesn't need carriers to "win" a Taiwan Strait engagement.
Frankly I'm not sure the US would bother to use a lot of Tomahawks on missile launchers, particularly since the newer ones have an antiship mode.
Shrike
3mo ago
Empirical evidence suggests strongly that it keeps not happening
Look, there's a difference between something not happening and something being impossible. I'm discussing how China would react in a hypothetical.
Furthermore, the Taiwanese themselves (unlike the Ukrainians) are pretty lackluster in their own efforts to build up deterrence to China.
Yes.
Don't confuse stocks and flows.
Sure. Both are important, and which is "more" important depends a lot on your timeline.
They aren't being permanently committed or destroyed.
The munitions, vehicles and weapons we sent there are. I agree that we aren't "bogged down" the way one might describe us as being "bogged down" in Afghanistan, but we are "bogged down" in the sense that it remains a large center of US governmental attention (which is not unlimited) and, for as long as we continue to support the war effort, US industrial capacity (which is also far from unlimited).
Shrike
3mo ago
This is not an actual available option.
Why not?
If we have munitions capacity issues what better way to fix them.
Sure, if Ukraine/Europe can release funding to fund US munitions (which I do gather is happening, and that seems fine). But if the US has budget X and they can split it between the Pacific and Europe, or just spend it on the Pacific, the latter option is scarier for China.
What on earth does "bogged down" mean here? I'm not arguing we conduct military operations.
That ship has already sailed. The US has been conducting "non-kinetic" military operations in support of Ukraine's war effort for the duration of the war.
Shrike
3mo ago
Taiwan is a naval battle first; I don't think we've been supplying much naval weaponry to Ukraine.
I agree with this on the whole, but we have given Ukraine a fair amount of Patriot missiles, which would be very helpful defending against Chinese ballistic/cruise missiles, particularly for point defense around airfields.
Interestingly, legally the definition of a UAP includes "transmedium objects or devices" and "submerged objects or devices that are not immediately identifiable and that display behavior or performance characteristics suggesting that the objects or devices may be related to the objects or devices" that are unidentified aerial or transmedium objects.
The DoD's definition (same source) is that UAPs are "sources of anomalous detections in one or more domain (i.e., airborne, seaborne, spaceborne, and/or transmedium) that are not yet attributable to known actors and that demonstrate behaviors that are not readily understood by sensors or observers."
I'm sure a nonzero percentage of them are clouds and/or equipment errors anyway.
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