Shrike
3hr ago
I am directionally pro-removing college from its entitled position as a signifier of talent, but I think (specifically for the right wing) that it still retains a lot of merit for elite formation purposes. Part of elite formation is enculturation, and part of it is networking.
What I think isn't needed is for college to be the bottleneck through which job privileges are awarded. Most professions would likely be better off with something like a guild system that does on the job training. Colleges in some professions can slot easily into this, of course.
Shrike
3hr ago
You need an actual alternative to academia though.
"The right" as a political movement needs right-wing or "neutral" colleges and universities to engage in elite formation. It probably already has enough institutions to fulfill this function.
Otherwise it wants research labs to help with things like growing crops and building better bombs. These functions of academia are likely to survive (even if the rest of academia is hit pretty hard) because they have a steady demand that exists outside of the student body size.
it is also still the main source of actual good public knowledge.
I don't think this is the case, if by "main source" we mean the source that is getting used. The press and advocacy/special interest groups have the ear of the public much more so than academia, which communicates with the broader public via the press. And the press covers issues that doesn't really get processed via academia, whereas a lot of even the best academic stuff nobody in the public really cares about (except maybe to look at pictures from Hubble or w/e). It's true that there may be university-affiliated think-tanks that do good work, but if I want to know something like "how many munitions did the US fire off in Iran" academia is not going to help me out (CSIS hasn't been affiliated with Georgetown for 30+ years, apparently because Georgetown booted them out precisely because they were so focused on the press and not "scholarship.").
Shrike
3hr ago
Actually having wokeness receding would mean something that doesn't just depend on one individual
I agree with this very strongly (and have pointed this out several times) but state-level right-wing governments (notably Florida and Texas, if memory serves) have decided to get in on the action and they aren't going to go anywhere when Trump goes away.
And I have no idea how COVID has caused any problem for woke academia.
I can't use X The Everything App without it telling me that Fauci knew ahead of time that COVID vaccines could cause miscarriages. That sort of hit to institutional trust hits the upstream academic institutions by association.
Shrike
3hr ago
Hmm, I haven't gotten the impression that things have gotten worse for them recent. I broadly expect right-wing demographics to somewhat offset the general demographic decline that will hit schools, but I could be mistaken.
Shrike
7hr ago
The woke have simply retreated to more easily defended positions. As long as they control academia and the arts (science AND culture) they will keep coming back and continue to be relevant.
I don't think academia is a great position to be in long term. Sure, it's easily defended, but like any walled fortress, it can be starved out. And it's already showing signs of hunger. COVID and the replication crisis are ravaging its moral authority, while it is being put under increasing financial strain by both right-wing government funding rugpulls, the decreasing perceived value of the degree, and the demographic decline of the customer base. Plus, being an academic has become increasingly unglamorous over the past two decades as would-be academics have realized that there are more would-be academics than there are slots, so you spend 5 years taking classes and working as a barely-paid TA for the privilege of fighting with six or seven other people just as qualified as you over the privilege of an underpaid non-tenure-track adjunct position. Right-wing colleges and universities probably won't suffer much from the demographic decline, and neither will the Ivy Leagues, but there's a good chance it wipes out small left-by-default liberal arts colleges. There was clearly an effort to compensate for this by importing students, but Trump's actions may have put a damper on that, at least for a bit.
Culture is also going to take a hit from this effect, since the colleges are the pipeline to it. It might be less vulnerable in some ways, particularly to direct government action, but there are signs that culture is going to increasingly fragment in the future and that will substantially weaken predominately left-wing institutions like Hollywood.
I don't think these developments are set in stone but if I saw lefties telling each other "at least we still have academia" I would finger it as cope.
Shrike
1d ago
There's a steelman that getting genuinely into paid aviation pilot work is either for the rich or the lucky
Any kind of paid aviation work has to be a certain degree of lucky as they will screen out people who can't see and such, but for folks with good eyesight and general aptitude every single branch of the US military (except for maybe Space Force?) will pay you to get good at flying, and then you can take those skills into the private world with (hopefully) a solid track record (although based on what I've heard that in recent years the prime airlines may be trying to hire fewer military pilots, so it might be less of an EZ career path now than in the past.)
Shrike
1d ago
so it can shift their politics to be more realistic and neutral.
I don't want AI companies to try to shift my politics any more than I want KitchenAid to. If they want me to be more realistic and neutral they can bring about widespread material prosperity and try not to be polarizing.
Shrike
1d ago
See, I guess I am hoping for a nice middle ground where we keep artists around for conceptual and perhaps initial design work. The people I suppose I am endangering with this plan are animators/CGI artists.
If AIs end up Being All That, though, people will likely start turning to human artists specifically as an example of conspicuous consumption. So they've got that going for them!
Shrike
1d ago
Yeah I get the impression that a lot of AI power-users are using them precisely to write the deterministic programs that will give them more reliable answers than the AI.
(I've actually been specifically advised by an AI to do this, once.)
Shrike
1d ago
Film is an interesting example, and I agree with you. I think that if a Blender-produced movie was made with:
- Human-designed character and setting art
- Human script
- Human voice actors (at least for main roles) And AI that
- Adapted the art designs into Blender characters and background
- Designed and executed the scenes according to human direction
- Was able of being easily overridden (e.g. the humans didn't just let the AI do everything, but would manually place the camera and say "now I want the scene to start here, and the camera pan slowly over 20 seconds to here," or "no I want this shade of green for this guy's shirt")
It would come off as a human movie, with a non-generic human vision, but could plausibly be made much more quickly and cheaply than manually animating all of it. I'd find that much more palatable as an artistic work than telling an AI to "one-shot a movie, sci-fi, 1980s retro, synthwave, make no mistakes" or what have you.
Shrike
1d ago
Fable makes many important choices
Sure, and maybe this was a bad example, but you're aware that you're making those choices if you do that. If you aren't you quickly will be when you try to play the product. People delegating things like font choice to AI (even unwittingly) isn't as big of a deal, civilizationally, as people unwittingly being pushed in a particular social, political, or cultural direction.
And I do worry, in particular, about the latter. AIs are more homogenous than humans and if humans interact with them in significant degrees I think it will reduce the diversity of human creative output.
But simply make it much more intuitive, easy, and fast for the user to refine. Then you wouldn't need a GA for creative work, but it would still help by automatically configuring subtle details that a centralized LLM wouldn't know.
Sure, I like this idea. And to my point, you could make it easier for the user to refine by letting them talk at the screen (much like how people to today, and how Deckard does in Blade Runner) and if the screen won't respond to "what should I do next" or spit out "that's a genuinely interesting direction to push this project" then it would be much different than AI today, and I think alleviate some concerns about outsourcing opinions.
Shrike
1d ago
I do think this could help with this angle, but a slower response is probably not as important as one that does not seem like a person on the internet.
Shrike
1d ago
I've got access to higher end stuff from work and I've found that Sonnet on the free plan is basically golden for most anything I want from it in my personal life. The main things I would get out of paying for a model aren't "better model" it would be things like better integration with my desktop files (since on the free plan you can't give Claude access to a folder) and longer uninterrupted sessions.
Shrike
1d ago
This is looney toons logic
I agree, we shouldn't use it. Instead, we should look at tangible things (like readiness and force numbers) and statements from subject matter experts, with the cautious understanding of the significant blind spots in both areas. Those tell us that Russia is stronger now than it was in the early 2000s.
I'm just trying to determine why anyone should care that much...Where is the decline caused by a relatively less dominant military than we enjoyed in the early 90s?
Besides America ego, because a less powerful United States is subject to greater use of coercive force by its adversaries. This results in things like, for instance, supply chain shortages and increasing oil costs when American adversaries attempt to restrict travel in international waterways (although the American military was never omnipotent, of course.)
We could discuss them, for instance I think your read on the sub prime crash as being downstream of banking deregulation is overly simplified.
I would like to discuss it! I agree that it's simplified. I'd love to learn more about it.
You think populists would have been in favor of declining a lot more home loans?
Well, what I concretely said was
There might have been some populist pressure in the wrong way on the subprime mortgage crisis
so presumably I don't think that, necessarily.
It's like asking who should be managing the houses finances, the dogs or the parents and then litigating all the poor financial decisions that the parents have made.
If we're not going to litigate all the poor decisions our leaders have made, we should scrap democracy and save ourselves the time and energy.
Was pre-90s governance really not error prone? I can think of quite a few boondoggles.
I agree. I think those were forgiven and/or covered up in part because the West was in an supposedly existential struggle with Communism. The sins of the governance of the 1990s was unique in that it squandered the peace dividend.
I mean what are you trying to do then?
Well, I chimed in because I thought it was possible to discuss the errors of the gatekeepers without getting bogged down in partisan nonsense. And I think we've mostly avoided the partisan nonsense here, although we've also avoided discussing the errors of the gatekeepers.
Shrike
2d ago
simply making a decision for someone causes them to avoid choosing themselves, stealing their autonomy without them realizing.
I think the best way to do some of this is just for the AI not to talk at all. If you go watch the original Blade Runner, Deckard speaks to his computer to enhance a photo. The computer never speaks back. What I'm imagining is just straight-up removing the chatbot feature from AIs [obviously not from AI chatbots, I guess, presumably there will be a use for these]. This wouldn't mean they couldn't communicate. For instance, if I say "Fable, vibe-code a Call of Duty knockoff for me," Fable could just do it and then provide me with an annotated features list in the game folder (which is more helpful than paragraphs of blather anyway). Then, if you want to change something, you read the notes like a human being and provide a list of changes. In my experience, Copilot is already kinda like this, except it often refuses to do what I ask without asking needless clarifying questions. The bottom line is that the AI would not pretend to have "an opinion," it would be a machine that follows instructions. It would make a voter guide for you, but it wouldn't tell you who to vote for. If you did something like that (or asked it to hack the Pentagon, or something) you'd get one of those flashing red error messages and a "beep" like from a 1980s movie.
This also has the slightly salutary effect of saving the consumer compute you're not having an AI go on for paragraphs about whatever they've done. But the real point is to reinforce for the user that it is dealing with a machine. And given that I suspect that purpose-built models tend to be better at their purpose than generalist models anyway, there's potentially lots of uses for models that don't "talk back."
I don't think AI chatbots are going away and I find asking them their opinions pretty fun, so this is not necessarily a gripe about AI. Rather, I think this is a much better way to solve the "let's not outsource our opinions to AI" problem than some sort of limp-wristed "are you sure that's what you want" 'guardrail' that the AI companies would slap onto their product if you asked them for it.
Unfortunately I suspect a lot of the pro-AI people kinda want to outsource their opinions to AI so that might be something of an uphill battle.
Shrike
2d ago
precisely zero people before the invasion would describe it as the hardest target in Europe.
Go look at its on-paper force numbers in 2020 and compare it with other European numbers. Ukraine did not necessarily have the latest and greatest (although they had more of that after Russia seized Crimea) but they had an absolutely gigantic inherited Russian ground force. I think they probably could have beaten any other single European power in a conventional war.
Russia is very much actively demonstrating it's ineptitude against a nation many believed it could topple in weeks.
But Russia is doing better in Ukraine than the US is doing in Afghanistan. And since Afghanistan is less powerful than Ukraine, so Russia is more powerful than the US.
Or perhaps the fact that Russia derped up in Ukraine (which, again, is not fighting Russia by itself, but rather with the direct support the EU and US!) has little bearing on whether or not Russia became more militarily capable since the end of the Cold War (they have) and does not predict whether or not they might increase in power in the future, NATO's Top Guy warned a couple of years ago. (This wouldn't be unusual, militaries typically become more powerful in wartime, not less.)
If China found itself in a similar scenarios attempting to invade Taiwan then I'd be comfortable declaring the united states an unambiguous unipolar hegemon for the foreseeable future.
But they have not, so the US is not an unambiguous unipolar hegemon.
(Also, we might expect that a Chinese failure in Taiwan could be even more disastrous for the Chinese military than Putin's excursion into Ukraine, just because ships are a lot more expensive, time-consuming, and finicky to build than tanks and China will likely lose them at unsustainable rates if they lose a war with Taiwan. Whereas Russia can replace tanks pretty easily. This is part of why Ukraine's deep-strike campaign against Russian ships and strategic aircraft is so noteworthy.)
Ok, so we spend less money... This is bad?
You asked me where the US military went, I answered your question.
We certainly saved money in the short term. Now we're having to pay to build out a lot of that production capability again, and we're having a difficult time doing so. I think it's possible that small investments upstream might have paid off in the long run. Just as one example, the tooling to make the F-22 was destroyed after the production line ended. The manufacturers aren't just going to keep stuff sitting around (where they have to pay for it). Perhaps spending more on munitions and capability expansion and maintenance upstream would have led to long-term savings, I don't know. Given the good 20-year gap between now and the end of the Cold War, probably not. On the other hand, we may yet have reason to regret trying to save. Who can say?
I do know that the US military and defense industrial base shrunk after the end of the Cold War.
I guess just like, could you show me some reason to believe anxiety about whether we can reign china in around the region near them is super salient to the American voter?
The American voter does not like it when price go up. They also do not like it when Made In China. (The American voter contains multitudes.) American voters like computers. Computers use chips. Many chips made in Taiwan. China take Taiwan, price go up AND made in China. Not good!
I agree with you that the average American voter doesn't really think about China very much, though, and often wants less overseas intervention. But overseas intervention doesn't mean being weak. Your average American probably thinks "talk softly and carry a big stick." And moreover, an actual full-blown war in the Pacific would lead to all sorts of supply chain insanity, and so even if Americans don't realize they care about that (and lots more of them do realize, after COVID), they wouldn't.
Sure, if their mismanagement is key.
Well, do you want to discuss that? Like, did you actually disagree with my lil "here are the Top Five Bad Things that happened in the US after 1990 and they were mostly elite mismanagement" list? I learn all sorts of things from people disagreeing with me, don't hold back. I'd be delighted to learn the actual worst thing that happened was onion deregulation which was pushed by a coalition of left-right populists in 1998. But unless you give me reasons to believe something like that, I'm gonna keep pointing back to failing to prevent 9/11 despite that being entirely possible as "key mismanagement."
But on the first recession it would be foolish to vote in the guy who predicted 86 of the last 2 recession.
I've been pretty consistently saying "you are right to be wary of populists." I am not endorsing voting for Alex Jones just because they were turning the frogs gay, or something.
If you put the average occupy wallstreet fellow in charge of anything related to banking we'd still be in a recession today
I would be very unsurprised to learn that lots of people (particularly in NYC) in the banking sector were OWS types. But you're arguing against a position I am not endorsing.
Only when you collect the greatest hits and in a whigg history manner ignore all the incredible failures can you even come close to crediting them with foresight.
In this manner they are no different from the gatekeepers.
Populist politicians are more prone than even normal politicians to sociopathy. As a role their job is basically to represent their constituents and thus a smart populist politician, knowing their constituents are half retarded conspiracy theorists, must be on the extreme edge of cynical to properly appeal to them.
I mean, I see where you are coming from on Vance, but this model of the world seems to me to be values-inverted populism.
Shrike
2d ago
I'd appreciate if you actually provided hard proof of this but I'll take your word for it.
Well, I don't have hard proof but if you followed the link it would have pointed you in the direction of evidence. Here's the TWZ write-up: https://www.twz.com/news-features/is-the-u-s-dropping-anti-tank-mines-to-stop-iranian-missile-launchers
and then lost six more in the subsequent rescue mission.
Yeah, because the US decided to try Eagle Claw again, and Iran's air defenses were so leaky that SOCCOM (presumably sharing Kel-tec's stash at this point) correctly assessed that they could move a pair of slow C-130s nearly 100 miles inland without Iranian air defenses doing anything about it.
The public understanding is that the F-15E was hit by a MANPADS, which generally cannot reach jets flying at their service ceiling. Given that the A-10 made it all the way out of Iran before the pilot had to punch out, and that the F-35 likewise made it back (so technically, 2 shoot-downs for Iran, worse than Iraqi performance for the first three days of ODS) my guess is that small missiles, possibly MANPADS, were being used here as well, although airplanes can be pretty darn tough.
And remember the footage of that Hornet dodging a small missile (because it had been strafing an Iranian coastal area)? That looked like a MANPADS, too. And that was on March 25, at which point the Navy had allegedly been doing this for weeks.
Which suggests to me that the Iranian area air-defense network was pretty much gone by then.
If my story is true then it makes perfect sense that Trump immediately cut his losses and has been desperately searching for an offramp whereas if your story is true then it makes no sense whatsoever that Trump agreed to a ceasefire instead of escalating the bombing.
My theory is something like "the US wiped out a lot of Iran's major force assets and they just...didn't surrender, which 'wasn't supposed to happen.'" Your options at this point are:
- Keep flying a trillion missions indefinitely to blow up technicals or whatever and try to find the remaining big ticket assets (and yeah now you're putting yourself at increased risk from MANPADS) and hope that this somehow works where big ticket items like "sink navy, ground air force" don't.
- Ground invasion
- Peace
I think that's a perfectly cromulent explanation for what happens next.
I am not saying, by the way, that losing a couple of aircraft wasn't an Event, and it's quite possible that that had a tremendous influence on Trump's decision making process. But "we hit a single aircraft by luck, camped the location, and tagged another" is a perfectly good accounting of that event that is congruent with Iran's IADS being mostly suppressed and them relying largely on MANPADS and other small, portable IR systems (as you described) for defense at this point.
Shrike
2d ago
Are you accounting for the sortie rate?
My link is by sortie rate, yes.
the Karaj bridge was hit on April 2nd, suggesting that's around the time the USAF began actually penetrating Iranian airspace to drop bombs.
No, we have good reason to believe that they (or possibly IDF) aircraft were doing it on March 26 (this is ignoring that the US flew B-2s and a ton of escorts deep inside Iran to hit Fordow in the summer of 2025) because of the complaints about the mines in Shiraz.
Again, within the week.
Just outside of the week, if you toll from the 26th as a minimum start date for penetration bombing. Much longer than that, if you toll from March 4.
If Iran's air defenses were really as weak as you seem to think
Either Iran's air defenses are pretty bad (they hit all of three manned aircraft - for reference, the Iraqis got three manned aircraft on the opening day of Desert Storm, and the day after that, and the day after that, too) or US ISR is so good that it just routes US aircraft around them nearly infallibly. (Or your theory is true and all the photos of aircraft with JDAMS on DIVIDS are just for show.) It wouldn't really surprise me if US ISR (and ability to communicate it to forces in theatre) has improved considerably since ODS and that is playing a large role here.
no reason to waste so many JASSMs and other expensive standoff munitions
Well, keep in mind that military planners like to use test out their equipment in live conditions and should always be expected to fire a certain number of munitions for fun just to make sure they work.
Shrike
3d ago
I agree with a lot of what you are saying directionally, but
entities operate out of greed
entities don't have greed, individuals do. Which is why low margins by themselves are a poor indicator of whether or not greed is at play. If I am the owner and CEO of MonopolyMart and MonopolyMart posts a five-figure net loss in FY2024 but I, the owner and CEO of MonopolyMart, have a salary of $1 billion, does the low margin indicate that I am not in the business for the money?
We know what happens when the measure is the target.
when you need healthcare, it'll cost you a lot and insurance premiums reflect that.
In the US, people without insurance can typically get discounted rates if they pay out of pocket and/or charitable care if they have trouble paying at all. To your point about supply and demand, insurance drives aggregate medical costs up because your total payment for medical care (which includes your health insurance coverage) has to cover overhead and payroll for doctors and insurers.
Shrike
4d ago
I don't know how with a straight face you can say it's not just China after Russia's performance and the performance of other recent adversaries.
I can say it with a straight face because I pay attention to this stuff. In the 1990s Russia was struggling to maintain territorial cohesion. In 2002 they failed to maintain a continuous at-sea deterrence. They didn't field an active radar-guided air-to-air missile until 2015. (For reference the US had those since the 1970s). Now they sling them at Ukrainians all day long. You think Russia looks weak because it can only slice off small parts of the largest European military power, backed by the largest military power and the world's two largest economies; in the 1990s it couldn't even hold Grozney.
multi-polarity was the the norm for all but like 20 years.
Sure.
Where exactly did it go?
Well, because Russia was toothless, the US slashed military spending dramatically, shuttering the US defense industrial base, consolidating the remaining portions into a few primes, and leading to the procurement of cheaper, less capable systems. Then it spent two decades of time, blood, money and attention fighting insurgencies in the Middle East, repeatedly cannibalizing big ticket procurement programs intended to replace Cold War era military technology. Why do you think we still use Cold War kit?
And you know who we were worried about racing in technology? Japan.
Right. I won't be very surprised if the same thing happens to China. But a big difference between China and Japan is that China is actually very militarily powerful, and if they suffer economic decline it may make them less stable and more hostile. The Japanese military was never a rival to ours, and they were our ally in the 1980s, despite the concerns about their economic growth.
I really don't think the American populist feeling of decline hinges on whether a Chinese person can buy more rice than their gdp per capita might naively predict. I don't think people have a sixth sense for that sort of thing.
I'm happy to agree that might not be what is causing the "malaise vibes" from the bottom up, but I think that populist thought-leaders are very well aware of China. Some of them receive security briefings on it.
The status quo is of course going to catch strays for everything that goes wrong.
It's their job for things not to go wrong, though. I agree with your point about the status quo catching strays but presumably the point of elections is to vote people who mismanage things out, right? And I while I think it's fair to question whether or not certain decision were foreseeably bad, some of them certainly were - to go back to my 9/11 example, for instance, we know it was foreseeably bad to ignore because people at the time were warning about the dangers of ignoring it - just as how people were pointing out that actually defending the police is a foreseeably bad idea.
I think that if the people who had goofed up stuff had fallen on their sword (figuratively) then populism wouldn't have nearly the purchase it does today, but generally speaking they were not punished and they were sometimes rewarded. For instance, I'm not saying that we should have passed an unconstitutional ex-post-facto law to crucify Wall Street financiers after the 2008 financial crisis, but I am saying that the banks that received US bailout money should have of their own volition not given out billions in bonuses.
whether actually our democracy was already dissolved by the democrats cheating
I mean, is it that cut and dry? There are a lot of people think that the Democrats cheated and won in 1960, but I'm not really sure that (if true) means our democracy is dissolved. I guess that's a tangent but an interesting one.
The statistical evidence that they're wrong is ignored
If I came up with a statistically solid domestic decline theory, would you buy it? I can whip up a very statistically solid if somewhat undercooked decline narrative, as an example: the cost of college education has risen, and college enrollment has grown to tilt disproportionately female. Despite the fact that women prefer for men to make more money than they do, young women now out-earn men or at least reach parity in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles. This effect is particularly pronounced with young, unmarried women. This leads to tension between the sexes, widespread dissatisfaction, and lower marriage rates. Lower marriage rates in turn make housing less affordable. But because it's not politically correct to discuss, people instead blame their economic dissatisfaction on things like "the evil elites." Thus it can be true that there can be a cultural or even localized economic decline without it necessarily showing up in broader statistics.
I don't know about this gloss! The printing press favored pamphlets. Rhetoric was as important as it is today on social media.
Rhetoric is not necessarily irrational, but I think that writing well forces a reader to exercise different skills than a charismatic orator. You can't read your audience, which makes a big difference.
The major change with the social media age is that gate keepers and distribution is now gone, the memetic evolution chamber is now global and fast where previous iterations had locality
I agree with this.
I think the globalization of everything will be the ultimate legacy of social media.
I am very interested in seeing how this turns out. I am curious if the legacy of AI will be rolling this back.
Certainly there are things worth worrying about.
I think that you and I are probably worried about a lot of the same things. Where we differ is probably that I think that the gatekeepers made genuinely bad decisions in the Cold War and especially in the post-Cold War era. This makes me more sympathetic to populists looking forward even if I have important differences with them. Whereas the populists now make you, looking backwards, more sympathetic to the gatekeepers than (imho) they deserve. I don't really think your distrust of populists is ill-founded. But I don't think you should let that carry over into overlooking the mistakes of the gatekeepers.
But I don't push it with conspiracy theories and unfounded accusations that people who disagree with me as demonic pedophiles.
Sure, that seems mostly good. (Conspiracies are real, but they often don't take the shape that conspiracies theorists think that they do.)
Vance is a cynical actor....he's a politician, as far as I'm concerned he's a sociopath.
I realize that calling someone a cynical actor, sociopath, and politician is less inflammatory than calling them a demonic pedophile but is this a bit?
Shrike
4d ago
The last time the USAF tried switching from using stand-off munitions to dumb bombs
Is there any evidence that the USAF used dumb bombs at all?
The go-to bomb is JDAM, which is a guided bomb with maximum ranges in the double-digit miles - not considered a standoff weapon, but not a "dumb bomb" either. The JDAM-ER triples the range, making it arguably a standoff weapon.
I am also skeptical of your broader claim. Overall, Iranian air defenses likely performed worse than Iraq's in Desert Storm against manned aircraft.
In terms of a concrete timeline, Hegseth said that the US was switching to bombs on March 4, 2026. There's at least evidence of mines dropped in Shiraz dated to March 26, the US bombed the Karaj bridge with a JDAM on April 2, indicating strikes by bombs against targets far inland by that point at a minimum. Iran hit one F-35 on March 19 and 1 F-15E and 1 A-10 (doing CSAR for the F-15) on April 3. A ceasefire was declared on April 7, but on April 5 (the same day the WSO was recovered) Iranians are said to have reported a number of aircraft overflights, including over Isfahan and Alborz - hardly exterior provinces.
And as far as MQ-9s go, by my count the US lost (to ground fire) 16 Reapers in March (12 of them by the 19th), 8 in April, 3 in May, 2 in June, 5 in July.
I don't think that this data (which I am eyeballing, so welcome for any corrections) necessarily excludes the narrative you put forward, but I don't think it maps cleanly onto it. There's no real indication that the US slowed down after the F-35 was tagged on the 19th and there's evidence of a surge on the 5th, after the F-15E and A-10 were shot down.
Shrike
4d ago
Nearly 100% of ATACMS and PrSM
My understanding is that ATACMS is currently in the early phases of replaced by PsSM, which essentially means the US fired off a lot of missiles instead of decommissioning them (or giving them to Ukraine) and a few test volleys of PsSM (which is likely worth it just for the training data).
If the massive reported build-up of US munitions production materializes, I think that most of these missile expenditures will be relatively negligible over the long run assuming that the long run is what matters. The next 5 years sounds about right.
Shrike
4d ago
Maybe it was flying in rare Beanie Babies.
Would be almost as hysterical if they flew a plane out there transporting a piece of paper with the number of a checking account on it though.
Shrike
4d ago
If we're just talking military strength then it's much more debatable and the whole story is China. Ukraine isn't really a sign of a decline in super power status Russia has been meddling in and doing military actions in non-allied nations this whole time and if anything their failure in Ukraine shows that they are not a peer nation.
I think it's pretty clear, and it's not just China. Russia's military declined significantly in the 1990s (although 1990 was not its nadir, as I understand it) before a remodernization program under Putin. As far as China, a single US carrier battle group could probably have won a war against China in 1990. Does anyone think that is true today?
I agree that being a superpower has constraints, no doubt about it. But even if the US is still the world's only superpower, that title went a lot further in the 90s.
it's my position that if you're talking about a declining united states I don't really think people's complaints are that in a hypothetical pacific theater China is marginally more able to push its weight around
I don't think this is true. Any time anyone is speaking of the need to race China or deal with China on AI, they are paying homage (however unwitting) to relative US decline. Nobody in the 1990s was worried about racing China in software development.
I was mainly speaking economically...US Share of world GDP has been flat
Unless you adjust for PPP, in which case it goes down 10 percentage points.
it's sufficient to show that smoke does not always mean fire.
Sure, except that I listed a lot of bad decisions made by (I think it is relatively fair to say) the forces of stability, and you haven't presented either an alternative list or contested my list of bad decisions. This inclines me to think that the populists are at least partially right in their criticisms (which in my opinion implies nothing about their ability to properly govern).
I generally agree with all of your points about the narrative, about dooming as an excuse to avoid action, all of that stuff. But psychoanalyzing your ideological foes is also a (very seductive) form of doing this.
You mentioned social media and that's also certainly a factor. Communications technology is another of the classic preludes to revolution and also often correlates with improvements rather than a decline.
Yes, I think it's quite possible that this is exactly what we are seeing. What I find uncomfortable, though, is what the communications technology is pushing us towards - because it seems, to me, to be very unclear. The printing press pushed us towards clear, logical, ideological thinking - Protestantism, Marxism, the like. Radio and TV may have helped older interpersonal qualities return to the surface, but never really eclipsed the book or essay. But it seems to me the shape of Tik-Tok, AI slop and X posts is still uncertain. The old ideologies are still fighting, using the newer media as a skinsuit. Certainly I expect religious traditions to persist, but politically I feel like this far on we deserve something more interesting than unironic Marxism. So far, though, it seems like new media is better at critique than articulating a positive vision. So if communications technology is shaking up our hybrid book-TV world, what's going to emerge from that shakeup? I don't know, but I am very curious as to your take on this, now or as a topline post at some point.
Could there be more proof of a this being a timeless trope?
Doomers are certainly a timeless trope. But doom and decline also come. Doomers are overfitting, not hallucinating ex nihilo.
I agree things are more complicated but that's broadly my point. We need to actually have a sober discussion about which policies are good and which are bad and seriously consider the trade offs and downstream impacts. Populists are not capable of this, they default to conspiracy theories of elites who inexplicably want the decline.
I think it's more complicated than this, even. For instance, Vance is in the populist wing of the populist wing of the populist party, and I think he's a Motte lurker quite capable of this.
I think "attacking woke colleges" is the sort of thing red states are more likely to do under a blue federal administration.
I'm inclined to agree with you about the lack of impact on such efforts so far, I just don't think it's right to assume that after Trump, nobody will pay attention to colleges ever again.
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