Shrike
23d ago
The Obama administration's decision to let the states do an end-run around federal drug laws that marked one of the biggest swings in favor of state power away from federal power seems like a very important but under-examined swing from state power to federal power, a huge erosion of the federal power norm.
Shrike
4mo ago
Minor nitpick – at least going by GDP, Texas has a considerably larger economy than the Netherlands (2.4 trillion USD vs. 1 trillion, and headed towards 2 trillion ). Texas population is also considerably larger (30 million vs. 17 million) so it stands to reason.
On the substance of the proposals, I will be very interested in seeing how a lot of these go. I suspect that the currency one will be more useful for speculating in gold than for use as an actual currency, based on looking into the details of the proposal a while back (unless details change).
School choice might end up being the most impactful in the long run, particularly if it sets off a cascade and pushes other states to do the same. Could have considerable impacts on education.
Shrike
23d ago
I think a (the?) big elephant in the room with secession is that whichever side successfully cons the other side into jumping first keeps the Presidency for the next 50 years.* Get one of the Big Four states to bail, and suddenly there are 30 - 50 EC votes that your side never needs to worry about again. Now all of a sudden you get a massive leg up in domestic politics and implementing whatever pet domestic agenda you had in mind.
Right now, the echo of Lincoln still rings loudly in our years (the last American Civil War vet died in '56 and the last veteran bride just passed away in 2020). Every single President has been a combination of too much of a true believer in the American project and too much of a realpolitik pragmatist to give away a US state, even if there was internal support for it (there hasn't been.)
Ideologically, I think younger Americans (left and right) are less inclined to have a patriotism or nationalism towards their country as a motherland/fatherland. Some of them might see it merely as a tool to achieve their preferred policy ends (and indeed that's a common attitude towards government these days!) Combine that with an intense focus on maintaining domestic political power, a lack of pragmatic understanding** and a world where there is some native demand for a national divorce and I could see a future where a sitting President goes "besides millions of taxpayers, tens of thousands of servicemen, dozens of vital military installations, four or five different priceless natural resources, and one really nice vacation spot, what have those 40ish Electoral College votes ever done for us?" (Technically this even sort-of happened the first time; the feds did ~zip to stop secession until Lincoln took office.)
I'm not sure such a situation is likely per se, but I think it will be something that will be on the radar in the minds of future politicians in a way that it isn't of most currently serving ones.
An interesting barometer here is Brexit and the Scottish independence question. Obviously Brexit went through, and from what I can tell there's zero English interest in even something relatively mild (like sanctions) if Scotland actually votes to secede. I don't think that this rules out punitive actions or even military action against seceding states, but after a clear referenda I think it is politically trickier.
*In reality I suspect this is a mirage, actually, but a tempting one.
**I'm not actually sure if future governing generations will be worse at pragmatic understanding, to be clear. Certainly many younger people seem less pragmatically-minded, but I'm not sure that's ever been otherwise!
Shrike
29d ago
As far as I can tell, this absolutely depends on where in the West, and in what aspect you choose to exercise your individual self-determination. If what you want to do is to criticize Vladimir Putin (something that is important, and something I think everyone should be able to do without fear), the West will almost certainly be freer than Russia every time.
If you want to speak your mind on one side of certain other sensitive culture war issues, Russia is freer than England. If you want to go through life wearing religious apparel, Russia is most likely freer than France. If you want to create and run a hyper-nationalist right-wing party concerned with ethnic unity, Russia may be freer than Germany. If you want to display Soviet iconography, Russia is freer than Latvia. If you want to vote for the Communist Party, Russia is freer than Ukraine (not merely because Ukraine has suspended elections, but also because the Communist Party is banned by law in that country.)
Of note in this discussion, Russia has a conscription system, but so to do several Western states, including several in Europe.
My point here isn't "Russia Good Actually" but that Western states very often are extraordinarily repressive, at least by the standards of the United States (but not so much by the standards of the world as a whole). There's an idea that because Western nations generally have some form of democratic government they don't repress minority groups, and I don't think that's true at all.
Shrike
2mo ago
In the scientific field, predictive power is generally taken as evidence of correctness. I think part of the reason that even some of the non-religious posters around here are so sympathetic to religion is because they recall all of the religious conservatives making directionally-accurate predictions about the results of political progressivism a decade or two ago. Perhaps they don't think it is correct, but they do see that it has insight.
I think part of the other reason (for the non-religious posters) is that they are familiar, either in their personal lives or via the field of social studies, with the fact that religion is very good for people. There's a whole host of research that shows this, and of course it is often apparent from observation as well. Does this mean religious claims are true? By itself, not necessarily – but, again, it seems to suggest insight.
And then of course there's the fact that more than a few of the posters on this board (including myself) are Christians, and there are probably some of other religious persuasions here as well, so it makes sense that they would treat religion as a serious topic, because they – like most people, including I suspect most rationalists – think that it is serious. Certainly it has serious influence.
Shrike
4mo ago
My understanding is that it can sometimes be dicey to cross-compare happiness rates across countries due to different cultural understandings of happiness.
There are also...some important differences between European and American culture and geography. Just as a couple examples: my understanding is that part of the criticism of the Sexual Revolution (in the US) is that it expanded the sexual marketplace considerably in distortionary ways. But one would expect that this would be less of a factor in Europe due to national and language barriers that don't exist to nearly the same degree in the States. One would also expect Americans to be much better at committing suicide – it is worth asking if the decrease in European suicide rates is due to better lifesaving technology, just as the decrease in US shooting deaths is partially due to better medical practices. Of course, it's much harder to save someone who has OD'd than it is to save someone who has shot themselves in the brainstem, so suicidal Americans are, all else being equal, probably going to be more successful.
Setting all that aside, though, my superficial understanding is that Europe has always been further along the slippery slope than the United States (at least for certain metrics valued by the RETVRN crowd). I remember reading about a conversation between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Dickens where the latter said that most British men weren't virgins on their wedding night (prostitution being widespread in England, or at least in major cities at the time). Poor Ralph (a transcendentalist who had had Puritan ethics hammered indelibly into his psyche) was shocked and appalled. It seems entirely plausible that
- Europe has always been more sexually libertine than the United States, and
- ergo, Europeans are better adjusted to a sexually libertine lifestyle than Americans at any historical point
This hypothesis is entirely consistent with sexual liberation being bad or with it being good or with it being a null value - it simply suggests that major cultural changes would 1) cause distress, and 2) that society would adjust to them over time. I think that both of those seem intuitively true.
Shrike
23d ago
Louisiana controls the Mississippi river chokepoint, which is pretty strategic. Just as an exercise in good geopolitics it would be smart to secure it if you could, I think.
Similar deal with Florida (gives you much more control over the Gulf). I think you'd also (with TX + FL) scoop most of the US' space launch infrastructure (although Vandenberg is in California) and that could pay off considerably down the road.
Security benefits can be a bit hard to quantify at times, so whether or not that would "pay off" or not, I don't know. Given some sort of national breakup, from Texas' POV it seems like the smart thing to do might be to pursue a security/diplomatic alliance with other states that secede without committing to financial support, which would increase mutual safety without dragging Texas down in a negative financial spiral.
I have a theory that if some states broke off from the US of A without a wholesale US collapse, it might cause some very interesting fiscal effects that would bolster the long-run standing of the breakaway states, but I think in the short term even with a mutually amicable separation it would cause a considerable financial shakeup in the best-case scenario.
Shrike
29d ago
I don't think, in a conflict like this, there's likely to be a binary, clear cut win/lose situation. Western nations providing aid to Ukraine does two things:
- Increases Ukraine's ability to exercise military power, increasing the odds of a settlement in its favor, on the sliding scale, and
- Increases cost on a hostile foreign power (Russia.) You see some rhetoric along these lines ("killing Russians at no American lives lost is a great deal") in the United States from time to time.
So even if Ukraine "loses" it's possible that military aid to it causes a better outcome than the outcome with no military aid. Notably, the second point holds regardless of the ultimate outcome of the war.
In fairness, it seems possible that things could backfire on one or both of these points (e.g. over the long run Western aid hardens Russian support for the war, driving them to successfully pursue more expansive war aims) – one historical example of this might be England during the US Civil War – but generally speaking "more military power" is traditionally thought to improve ability to negotiate a favorable conclusion to a conflict, even if said conclusion is not entirely satisfactory.
Shrike
2mo ago
If I may –
I suspect (and he can tell me if I am wrong, or unhelpful) is that part of what Hlynka is consistently gesturing towards is that HBD, as a belief, is the sort of belief that a self-anointed ruling class finds helpful because of its Explanatory Power. It is constantly being used to explain why certain government or social programs don't "work."
For the average person this framework is probably not a helpful one compared to something along the lines of the color-blind individualism that I think he is partial to. (Setting aside the fact that good common sense is probably a better predictor than HBD when it comes to keeping one out of trouble, you don't have to believe in HBD to "believe in" FBI crime stats &ct.)
So I think Hlynka's consistent suspicion of people who beat the HBD drum is rooted in the intuition that people who reach for such explanation may be the sorts of people who see themselves as would-be Lords and Masters of humanity, who cannot fail but only be failed. If someone is reaching for HBD, is it because it actually helps them interact with those around them in a charitable and mutually beneficial way or because they're sculpting society inside of their head?
Shrike
4mo ago
Child labor is an interesting consideration along these lines.
I seem to recall that union concerns (shrinking the size of the labor pool) was originally part of the motivation there as well, though.
Shrike
3mo ago
I'm also not sure that massive strikes against population centers would be nearly as common as predicted, at least once targeting was good enough to hit something smaller than "that city over there" (although I imagine it would depend on the exact scenario) but even at the height of the Cold War, there were just so many military targets to hit that maximizing for casualties instead of enemy military capability was arguably not the smartest play. Unfortunately a lot of military targets are colocated with large population centers.
But people read the "number of nuclear weapons" and forget that during the Cold War we were planning, at various points, of using those weapons on military targets, and not just bases, but ships, submarines, troop formations, and enemy aircraft – hence the development of nuclear-tipped torpedoes, air-to-air missiles, artillery shells, and anti-ship missiles.
Fallout and radiation poisoning could be bad if someone deliberately tried to maximize it, but conventional nuclear weapons just aren't as dirty as people seem to think. People survived Hiroshima within a thousand feet of ground zero. The guy who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered from radiation poisoning...and lived to be 93.
Shrike
4mo ago
Yeah, I suspect people really don't consider the degree to which illegal labor props up some low prices. I suspect that a lot of stuff (like house remodeling, landscape jobs, etc.) would undergo decent price spikes if someone snapped their fingers and relocated illegal immigrants back to their home countries – at least regionally. But a regional spike in something like meatpacking can raise prices nationwide.
Shrike
2d ago
I like the comparison of the spotting plane to the drone. One thing that exists in this war that didn't in World War One is the possibility of deep strike (cruise missiles, ballistic missiles) which means that massed assaults (cut down in WW1 by machine-guns and tube artillery) can be defeated before even reaching the lines.
On the topic of good sources, in my very limited experience, I'd recommend the Royal United Services Institute, they actually sent some guys over to Ukraine to talk to the Ukrainians. RAND probably remains one of the best places to read the rough draft of history before it happens.
I don't read this stuff religiously, but I've found what I have read on the Russo-Ukraine War (something like one paper from each source!) to be interesting.
Shrike
27d ago
The researchers found that moods were contagious. The people who saw more positive posts responded by writing more positive posts. Similarly, seeing more negative content prompted the viewers to be more negative in their own posts.
This seems very intuitive to me, and I'm not surprised that it's true, and I don't discount the power of the algorithm, but it's worth noting that aggregate results among nearly 700,000 users is VERY different from being able to target a specific individual for divorce. Especially over 700,000 users, small effects that a single user wouldn't notice (or even be affected by) show up, even without any sort of p-hacking.
Shrike
1mo ago
Congratulations! Being younger makes it easier to raise young kids, I think. Obviously everyone has their own life situation, but I think it's good to start reasonably young if you can! Glad it is working out for you :) What percentage would you say of each of the themes you mention? Is there a lot of overlap?
Shrike
2mo ago
The time and energy requirements needed for interstellar travel so high that any non-supernatural (i.e. angels or demons etc. instead of spirits) explanation for UFOs is prima facia false.
I mean, I get where you are coming from, but the main objection to interstellar travel isn't energy (you could do it with Voyager 1 amounts of energy) it's just time. Which humans have very anthropocentric ideas about that may not generalize to any other entities out there.
Most of the barriers on interstellar travel are barriers on human interstellar travel, that vanish if you have a relatively long time horizon and are fine sending GPT as your ambassador instead of a human. We could almost certainly send a (very small) spacecraft to another star in my lifetime via a starwisp if we really wanted to (and maybe we will!) Relatively fast nuclear-powered travel is also theoretically possible (it should be within the laws of physics, but obviously that's a huge engineering challenge!)
With slightly more advanced technology than we have now, it should be possible to send some sort of a small constructor (not grey goo, or anything crazy like that) that could construct larger devices. Iterate to even more advanced technology, and it could even construct lifeforms ("biologics") in artificial wombs, or, even if not from scratch, from frozen embryos.
Thus you could have a situation where there are little green/grey men crashing spaceships in New Mexico like all the most far-out theories claim without breaking any physical laws, or really any novel technology that humans haven't already considered and mathematically sketched out since the early Cold War.
Frankly, I think the weird reported behavior of some of the objects (e.g. instantaneous acceleration) is much more of a problem from a physics/materialist view in my mind than the problem of interstellar travel. And of course ironically is that we have much better reasons to believe there is something out there engaging in eye-wateringly fast acceleration within Earth's atmosphere than we do that it came here from Over There. So while I'm sympathetic to the "it makes more sense for it to be supernatural" approach, I really don't think interstellar travel is the barrier that some seem to think it is. It's just that interstellar travel might not look like Star Wars.
Shrike
2mo ago
Wouldn't it just be easier (and less fraught) to decrease the use of hormonal contraceptives? My understanding is that they tend to increase neuroticism and at least for some women decrease libido.
Shrike
4mo ago
I wonder if Abbott is trying to go up to SCOTUS for Arizona v. U.S. round 2?
Shrike
1mo ago
I think the neocon interventionist move was "war with Iran." They built the Littoral Combat Ship for a reason, and it wasn't fighting China.
Shrike
1mo ago
Wow, I am shocked, shocked, that the guys who can get away with deploying a mysterious directed energy weapon to debilitating effect that is dismissed by later medical analysis have once again deployed a mysterious directed energy weapon to debilitating effect that is dismissed by later medical analysis!
I don't think Russia is the Great Satan, or something, and I think it is unwise to take everything that Western intelligence community types say at face value, so I'm open minded about alternative explanations, but Russia microwaving US IC personnel isn't super surprising to me.
However, it's quite possible, maybe even likely that Russia isn't deliberately trying to injure people, and that these aren't weapons at all – this could be a side effect of intelligence gathering work. It turns out that if you beam enough energy at an electronic device, like a phone, you can scoop information off of it – and there's some evidence that the Russians have used that on high-ranking US officials in the past (such as, the President and First Lady of the United States). This would make their actions much more reasonable, I think – instead of just doing a little high-powered trolling for no real gain, they may be trying to scoop sensitive data using aggressive means.
Since the US has the same technology (and thus possibly has created its own fair share of victims in using it) that might explain the somewhat mixed messaging from within the government – plausibly revealing all we know would reveal our own capabilities.
Shrike
2mo ago
I think the actual probable alternative to hormonal contraceptives is just...other contraceptives.
Not that I really think lots of sex and lots of unplanned pregnancies would be the end of the world – I'm fundamentally more of a "babies good" person, and I don't have any particular reason to want people to have abundant sexual access outside of marriage. But, realistically, I imagine that a random draconian ban of hormonal contraceptives tomorrow* would probably result in a slight uptick in babies and a large uptick in alternative methods of birth control. Copper IUDs, for instance, are much more effective than birth control pills, and other more temporary contraceptive methods are relatively reliable.
*to be quite clear, I'm not saying that would be a good idea. But perhaps a less bad idea than genetically modifying women.
Shrike
3mo ago
Ironically sometimes that smoke is itself the product of a conspiracy. For instance, my understanding is that the KGB spread, uh, speculation that the United States created AIDS in a lab.
Shrike
3mo ago
It's 100% true that Israel spies on the United States, but this is very normal (for example, the US was caught spying on Germany, and France is apparently notorious for running SIGINT collections at international military exercises) in international relations. FVEYS might be the one group in the world that actually doesn't spy on each other.
And it's 100% not true that China or Taiwan isn't lobbying (Taiwan definitely does) or spying on it (China definitely does).
(A historical aside, but I am not sure anything Israel has done has been as consequential as the coordinated British effort, which included espionage, to get us into the World Wars. The Zimmerman note would never have come to light if it was not for British espionage on US diplomatic traffic.)
One of the interesting things about MKULTRA is that it was revealed because a small cache of documents survived a document destruction order by the Director of the CIA. It seems to me we can logically infer the possibility (perhaps even the probability) of similarly audacious programs that have been successfully concealed simply because the relevant documents were successfully destroyed.
I agree with your point that government cover-ups can work, and obviously if some can work for some time it implies some can work permanently, or at least still can be working today. But I also think that leaks, frankly, are not that as damaging to the integrity of a cover-up as one might believe.
The problem is that from the outside leaks just look like random baseless rumor. There is a process for laundering such leaks or rumors into consensus reality, often quite literally via the New York Times. The reason Watergate became a scandal was because the leaker respected the process and got the Times on his side. Amusingly, this is also the exact same reason that everyone is talking about UFOs right now: a small group of media-savvy people made a coordinated effort to get it into the Times. I was aware of the "Tic-Tac" incident long before the Times published it (partially via personal connections that alerted me when it "leaked" all the way into a niche publication) but it was not taken seriously by e.g. Congress until it was laundered into mainstream respectability.
You can sort-of map this on to MeToo. My hazy recollection at least was that part of the premise or background of the movement was that there were a number of predatory people, who were known to be predatory (this certainly, at a minimum, seems to be the case for Harvey Weinstein). It was quite literally an open secret that the guy was engaging in harassment at best and outright rape at worst. But until the open secret was laundered into a mainstream narrative Weinstein went unpunished. I am of course fingering the Times as the standard-bearer of this narrative, but I imagine many similar dramas have played out on smaller scales, even within a family.
Another conspiracy I am curious about is the drug-running out of Afghanistan. Rumors have reached me, both online and in-person, that US military aircraft were used to move large amounts of drugs out of Afghanistan during our occupation of the country. (Similar rumors sprung up and were even published regarding the Vietnam war.) I don't know if these rumors are true (I guess I'll believe them when I read them in the Times) but I frankly would be a bit surprised if anyone in the Times was aware of them, and very surprised if they were investigating such a story, even though I imagine they would concede it was possible. I am not sure I can exactly articulate why, but I think everyone has a sense of what I am saying. Somehow it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should come out now. Perhaps in 20 years, when it will be long too late to change anything that happened.
Which is part of what makes the timing of this lawsuit interesting. It's based on FOIA documents that were extracted from the bowels of the bureaucracy after a few decades. If the allegations are true (and I am not arguing that they are or aren't, I haven't even read the complaint) it seems like a very plausible outcome is a settlement and no jail time for people who negligently killed hundreds of people at random. But then again, that's exactly what happened on Iran Air 655: a settlement was paid, and nobody was disciplined, despite the fact that the missile was fired under verifiably faulty pretenses (I don't think there was a conspiracy here, just a very, very big mistake).
This is a little meandering, so let me come to a point. I think people believe that if there's a "leak," if a single person talks, then somehow magically the truth will out and we'll all read about it in the papers tomorrow. But that's not how these things work. I think it's something like a preference cascade, where the problem isn't what is true and what isn't. Rather, it is a coordination problem. And if the people in charge of the covert endeavor (whether it's Harvey Weinstein and his PR/legal team, or "the CIA," or the people in charge of ensuring that my medical and legal records remain confidential, or what have you) are better at coordinating than the leakers, the leakers can "leak" all they want, but it won't make its way into the collective consciousness whether that's of a single family or an entire nation. Or sometimes, even if it does make its way into the collective consciousness, it can be too awkward to openly acknowledge. You see this at the level of a family or community, but I think sometimes it happens at the national one as well.
I'd propose that when evaluating the plausibly of keeping something secret, then, we shouldn't evaluate the odds of one person blabbing. Rather, we should evaluate the coordination problem at play, and the incentive structures involved. I think that viewing things through this lens has some good explanatory power as to why some covert endeavors fail, some succeed, and many come out several decades later. After many years, the power balance in coordination shifts. Criminal underlings have less of a desire to protect their pals long after the statutes of limitations have expired; victims of abusers accumulate in number, grow in power, and begin to coordinate effectively; people in office lose their allies due to chance and time.
More options
Context Copy link