Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
It took about 7 years for a sweeping "don't criticize the government" censorship bill to get passed (Sedition Act), though at least it was widely unpopular and they got rid of it.
Skibboleth
2mo ago
is this just more journalists trying to spin straw into gold?
Correct. For the first time in a while, we have a dead primary season with, effectively, two incumbents. Election coverage has gotten used to circus primary campaigns that last forever and have tons of candidates. This is also why you get people making hay out of Haley's primary performances pretending that pulling in 20% represents a serious threat to Trump instead of admitting that 95% of them will vote for Trump in the general. They need something to talk about.
Given the way things are going, the Palestinians (or at least the Gazans) will be remembered as perennial losers who wanted to kill Jews more than they wanted to survive. They didn't have to be fucked. There is a direct line between their refusal to back down from maximalist goals of destroying Israel and their present fate of slow strangulation.
I'd be willing to bet that if the Palestinians had adopted Gandhi's strategy, there'd be a Palestinian state right now. But nonviolent resistance until your adversaries are humiliated into submission isn't glamorous as war to the knife against your hated enemies. Hell, if they pursued a more regular unconventional war focused on Israeli military targets they might be there. But as long as they continue to preferentially target Israeli civilians and as long as they continue to assert their intention to destroy Israel there's no way the Israelis will compromise. And every so often there will some harsh reminder to the international community as to why.
Skibboleth
6mo ago
It's not simply a lack of mutually acceptable terms, it's also a lack of trust. Israel in particular doesn't trust (probably correctly) that if they made concessions, Hamas or other Palestinian organizations wouldn't just use that to expand their offensive capabilities and continue pressing for their extermination. That, in turn, shapes what terms are acceptable. The Israelis aren't likely to accept anything less than the total disarmament of the Palestinians, a) which the Palestinians will never agree to b) the Palestinians fear (probably correctly) that even if the vast majority of them acquiesce, any violence from remaining hardliners will be used as a pretext for further tightening the screws.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Many have remarked how the cosmopolitan product manager/twitterati of New York, Toronto and Paris are much more similar to each other than they are to the Freedom Convoy, Gilets Jaunes or Dutch farmers dropping manure in highways and vice-versa.
Is this actually true? Or is its appearance just a consequence of contentious proximity? It might be easier for a New Yorker to get along with a Parisian than an Alabaman, but in some respects that's because they have less in common. French politics are inconsequential to the NYer, French culture a curiosity. People from Alabama and New York share a government and have to fight over how the pie gets divvied up, what the drug store can actually sell, and whether being gay is going to be illegal or mandatory.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
This has been the strategy from the start. Russia wants to bleed out Ukraine
It was not. Russia opened the (hot phase of the) war with a series of incredibly ambitious maneuvers and risky airborne operations, indicating they expected to be able to end the war very quickly. These efforts all failed, mostly disastrously (the southern axis of advance towards Odessa stumbled at the gates of Mykolaiv and :checks notes: Voznesensk?, but they still wound up in possession of Kherson Oblast and didn't get mauled, so massive W compared to the northern axes).
Some say the mysterious $6.2 billion accounting error was paid to Prig.
The people saying that are idiots. Not only do they have zero evidence, it doesn't make any sense. The "accounting error" was not a pile of cash or a number in a bank account. It's games with the valuation of equipment transfers.
Skibboleth
8mo ago
I don't know if this post is a parody or not, but I have to ask how anyone looks at Vivek Ramaswamy and doesn't clock him as an obvious grifter.
I won't address the argument about whether or not the USA is about to become the HRE because I tapped out before I got to the part about how the Pritzker Khaganate is going to protect me from the unbearable tyranny of Joe Biden. Mostly because I immediately find the historical argument dubious and somewhat hard to follow. I have attempted to summarize the proposed theory of history as follows:
- There are centralizing eras, characterized by state formation and the centralization of power, and decentralizing eras, characterized by state collapse and decentralization of power.
- Centralizing eras occur because "technological and social gaps" (unclear what this means, as you don't elaborate) and "finicky, barely technological, advances that A) are not evenly distributed and allow the powers which have them to dominate the powers that don’t, and B) require vast numbers of hierarchically organized people working together in sophisticated coordination to make it work at all". Though you also say you don't really know why centralizing eras happen.
- Decentralizing eras occur because of "sophisticated capital and skill intensive weapons that can be utilized by relatively few people, and which are widely distributed", such as knights and castles.
- Centralizing eras are extremely rare (in fact, there are only two), decentralizing eras are very common.
I don't think this is a particular compelling model of history. The core concept relies on two gerrymandered categories and the basis for these categories is doubtful (being, essentially, technological determinism). If you want to argue that there are times and places in which centralization is happening and vice versa, that’s fairly trivial. This argument goes beyond that and makes the case for a sweeping theory of technologically-driven centralization/decentralization.
The understanding of centralizing eras listed above is borderline tautological: centralization happens when a particular polity musters enough state capacity to subjugate competing power centers. True, but not a remarkable observation. That is what centralization means. You point to transportation and communication technologies, and this is a fair point, but, in what is part of a wider pattern, you put the cart before the horse. The Roman Empire doesn't collapse because they forgot how to build roads; the Roman road network falls apart because the Empire responsible for maintaining it collapses. These empires generally collapse for institutional and political reasons, not because of disruptive technological changes. Alexander's short-lived empire fractured upon his death because it didn't have the political infrastructure for a stable succession. Likewise, the British Empire fell apart after WW2 because Britain no longer had the will or means to keep ahold of its overseas territories (i.e. it was broke, exhausted, and had America breathing down its neck), not because technological diffusion made it no longer viable.
The argument that decentralizing eras occur because of the aforementioned capital/skill intensive weapons doesn't seem to hold much water either. The militaries of the Greek city-states, which you cite as an example of a decentralized era, were defined by citizen-militias. The hoplite was not an elite warrior-aristocrat; in most cases he wasn't even particular well-trained. The same is often true in other times and places as well - Anglo-Saxon armies, for example, had better equipped warrior elites, but the body of the army was comprised of militia. This pattern holds to a lesser degree even after the Norman conquest and into the early modern period - English armies are generally less aristocratic than their continental counterparts (this is painting with a very broad brush – there were comparably plebian continental armies). So, I don’t think you can say that decentralized eras are particularly defined by capital and skill intensive weapons. Sometimes they have them, sometimes they don’t.
Conversely, centralized states have forms of warfare that are almost unfathomably more capital intensive than their decentralized counterparts. No medieval polity is going to field a Romanesque army, not because they don't want to but because they can't. They can't afford to pay (or feed) hundreds of thousands of lavishly equipped professional soldiers and they couldn’t organize it even if they had the money. And as we move towards the modern era the preeminence of the knight starts to fall away - not merely because of gunpowder (though it doesn’t help), but because the re-emergence of disciplined heavy infantry and political structures capable of supporting increasingly large and increasingly professional armies. Those capital and skill intensive weapons are more likely to be found in the hands of centralized states who can afford to maintain specialized soldiers (e.g. gunners) and their equipment than decentralized entities, who are often stuck buying sophisticated weaponry if they can field it at all.
Lastly, as I said, I don't think you can sensibly talk about broad eras of centralization or decentralization without engaging in categorical gerrymandering. You cite only two examples of centralizing eras: the Alexander to Caesar era (no dates specified, so I'll just say about 334 BC to 116 AD, though I am unconvinced this marks a coherent 'era') and the modern era (1700-1945 AD). But this is what I mean when I say categorical gerrymandering – you’re arbitrarily excluding all manner of counter-examples for unclear reasons. Why only these? We've had the same two polities in the Iberian peninsula for the past 500 years after a centuries-long Reconquista, the Qin/Han Dynasties lasting for about 400 years (in fact China, despite no lack of turbulence, usually managed to pull itself back together fairly quickly), Turkish expansion, multiple Persian Empires, etc... In many cases you have periods of rapid centralization followed by rapid fragmentation (e.g. Alexander’s conquests, the Carolingian Empire). Should we count these as decentralizing or centralizing?
You acknowledge a few of these but then casually dismiss them: 'But the fact I’m giving individual dynasties or empires as “the era” kinda tells you how much these were one offs' despite the fact that many of these lasted longer than the Alexandrian-Roman era or the modern era. It’s hard not to see that as a handwave to a gaping hole in the theory. It seems like a big deal that you have centralization and decentralization in temporal and technological proximity, and it seems like eras of centralization are a lot more common than you say.
To loosely summarize: while you can point to technologies having an impact on state capacity, this theory has a tendency to reverse cause and effect. Many are as much a product of centralization (or decentralization) as a driver. Technology can allow you to exert more central control over a large territory, but centralization makes it far more viable to engage in mass infrastructure creation. Likewise, the division of history into (rare) periods of centralization and (common) periods of decentralization doesn’t match real history (a ubiquitous problem with grand theories of history), where centralizing and decentralizing trends coexist and where rapid swings between one and the other are common.
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I also find many of the historical anecdotes suspect. There are too many to address systematically (and I lack the knowledge in many cases), but I wanted to pick on one I do know something about:
Fighter Jets, nuclear submarines, and Aircraft Carriers are actually far more analogous to a knights horse and armour or castle… capital intensive expensive assets that can be operated by what are historically very small groups of people. The thing currently stopping someone like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or El Chapo from owning a Aircraft Carrier or two + airfleet, or a few Nuclear Submarines + cruise missiles, and carving out a network of private enclaves isn’t capital cost or expense (on paper any of the 3 could afford the 10-20 Billion expense + 2-5b annual cost)… It is just that the US is currently maintaining its monopoly.
This analogy doesn't make sense. (Also, you later contradict it, citing an aircraft carrier as an example of a centralizing technology)
The knight is a product of decentralization, not a driver. Heavily armored cavalry was not some post-Roman revolution in military affairs. What made the knight was the breakdown of centralized government. As I mentioned above, a weak polity with a limited state apparatus doesn't have the ability to train thousands of men or source the necessary horses and armor in order to provide for a professional corps of heavy cavalry. What they do have is a nominal claim to land, which they can parcel out to loyal followers in exchange for military service. Rather than being the sharp end of a very large centralized military, knights are mostly responsible for their own training and equipment. (Variations on this pattern of military organization are pervasive in Medieval Europe, not just for knights - it's easy on organizational overhead, but you make tradeoffs in terms of efficiency, quality, and scalability).
Jets, submarines, and aircraft carriers, on the other hand, are products of an integrated economy operating under centralized states. It is not a coincidence that only a couple of countries are capable of building these, and it’s not just about money – the Gulf States have plenty of money, but they’re still buying all of their stuff (and the specialists needed to maintain them) from the people who can actually put these systems together.
Skibboleth
6mo ago
For contempt because in part I view it as a fundamental right to be contemptuous of court
What does that mean? Contempt of court is ignoring the authority of the court. No one can stop you from doing that, but the court has to have the authority to bring you into compliance. To say that they can't do that is to, in effect, say that participation in the legal system is voluntary. Do a crime and then just say no to prosecution.
Skibboleth
4mo ago
Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good?
Selection effects + magic dirt. Indian workers in the US are going to tend to be of a higher caliber than their counterparts that didn't emigrate, but they are also plugged into American institutions rather than Indian ones. It's hard to understate the degree to which institutional quality can impact the performance of individual workers.
The argument is that Kissinger enabled genocides/mass murders in Cambodia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, East Timor, etc... and thus bears responsibility for millions of deaths.
I'm not sure how much I buy that argument. Kissinger generally reacted to these events with callous indifference and took the position that they shouldn't affect US foreign policy (see also, his illustrative remark about Soviet Jews: "If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."), but that sort of indifference is pervasive in international politics and Kissinger was mostly just crass enough to be on the record saying it instead of mouthing platitudes. While it doesn't exactly speak well of his moral character, attributing responsibility to him in particular mostly seems to stem from the tendency to treat the US as the only country with agency.
his role in normalizing relations with China probably saved way more Asian lives than he killed.
Almost nobody actually thinks in these sort of brute consequentialist terms.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Merchant class aesthetics updated for the modern era. Ostentation is for the extinct warrior aristocracy or noveau riche clods with no taste. Pursuit of beauty is for the priestly class. Merchants are supposed to be frugal, modest, and vaguely sterile.
Alternatively: function over form. As others have noted, people don't spend a lot of time looking at their own house. If Gates finds the design serves his needs better, he probably doesn't care that it looks drab.
Alternatively mk 2: countersignalling. Gates is one of the richest and most successful people on the planet. He doesn't need to impress anyone.
But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism.
Prior to last Friday, taking an anti-Zionist stance would have gotten you applause in progressive circles. For that matter, you're still clear to say "I'm anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic" as long as you can resist the urge to openly celebrate massacres of Israeli civilians. Before Friday, you were clear to say Israeli civilians should be massacred.
This seems to imply two things
Alternatively, it implies your model is wrong. That it's not as simple as "people higher up the progressive totem pole get to do what they want and Jews are at the top".
think it's actually possible that he actually thinks it's bad that our massive deficits come from a budget process that doesn't even follow the basics of a budget process.
Considering he was enthusiastically in favor a tax cut (without attendant spending cuts) that increased the deficit a few years ago, I think we can safely dismiss the possibility that Gaetz is a principled deficit hawk.
Think of all the other subpopulations for which progressives write highly specific codes of etiquette. 10 Things Not to Say to Pregnant Women. 15 Common Microaggressions Against AAPI. Now imagine that these codes are replaced by Grandma's simpler, more scalable etiquette that recognizes where respectful behavior truly originates: not in feelings, but in habit and training.
If I were to be a touch ungenerous, I would say that these things emerge because many of their writers and audience are incredibly socially awkward and lack the sensitivity or experience to intuit appropriate behavior. And not just for what they might do/say, but for what other might do/say to them. If I were to be less generous, I would say that these things emerge because some people are looking for an excuse to get offended. If I were to be more generous, I would say that these things emerge because many people were not socialized into a culture of dignity and courtesy. Or the socialization didn't take, or carried with it an unspoken assumption that these standards of behavior only applied to the right sort of people. It is certainly not difficult to find people who openly delight in meanness (especially online, where a lot of our instinctive filters aren't functioning).
(If I were to be honest, I think all three of these things are true simultaneously).
None of the ideas you describe as "Miss Manners" etiquette are alien to my or most of my midwestern middle-class millennial peers (though I would hazard to guess we all picked it up from our parents rather than writing). However, I think you are right in saying that there is an effort to promote sentiments rather than behaviors. The goal is to get past polite toleration (which very much has its limits, as you note) and into actual acceptance. We might not call someone a fat fuck to their face, but as you also note there are a thousand little social indicators that being fat Not OK. And now apply the same concerns to, e.g. LBGT acceptance. (Though ironically, that may be more attainable, given that even notional allies of Fat Acceptance tend to not-so-secretly think that being fat is bad).
Skibboleth
4mo ago
it turns out you can just vote yourself other people's wealth
What stops the enfranchised elite from voting themselves other people's wealth (e.g. enclosure)?
Skibboleth
6mo ago
https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1714525590873575600
Photograph of the aftermath in the daytime.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Skibboleth
1mo ago
What will be the retaliation for this
The US is already engaged by proxy in the hottest interstate war in decades with Russia. Even if true (X), this is totally eclipsed by the Russo-Ukrainian War - Russian allies in the US still think Putin is the based defender of Christian civilization against the homosexual globalists, people worried about escalation are probably more afraid of Russia exercising the ultimate veto than espionage bullshit, and anti-Russians still want to bomb Russia.
Skibboleth
3mo ago
if the federal doesn’t already have people in position to assassinate Abbott they are beyond a joke.
They almost certainly don't. I'm sure someone's gamed out the "rebellious governor", but not seriously. The plan, such as it would be, probably doesn't amount to much more than send in feds to arrest Abbott. Probably to cheers and applause.
But I want to emphasize: this whole quasi-secession scenario people are salivating over because they're bored and crave death is incredibly unlikely. The overwhelmingly probably outcome is that Abbott does, in fact, back down. His "win" is that he gets to say "I tried, but the tyrannical Biden administration stopped me."
This is another chapter in the ongoing saga of a subset of American Christians and American secularists fighting over whether or not Christianity should have a privileged social and legal status in the United States (albeit one of the more superficial elements of that conflict, namely display of religious icons). The point of these displays is to demonstrate that (some) Christians want precisely that. It's not enough that there be equal opportunity religious displays. It needs to be exclusively Christian.
A Christian church could create a parallel object to be installed in the Iowa Capitol, a similar deliberately provocative anti-atheist symbol to be promoted as a sacred symbol of a pseudo-atheist
They'd find that no one cares. To the extent that their ideological adversaries would react, it would be with mockery. This is because their goals not symmetrical. One side wants Christian symbols to have an exclusive status; the other wants government spaces to be secular. If you take down the nativity scene and the statue of baphomet, that's a win for the Satanists.
Skibboleth
6mo ago
Evidence for the theory that Jordan's biggest problem is that he's an asshole no one likes.
The biggest factor is that Joe Biden is president, and for a lot of bitter Trump supporters, that's all they need to hear. (The converse is also true).
The second biggest factor is that the paleocon/populist segment of the American Right is the new party establishment, and while they may favor a strong military as an expression of national virility, they are also generally isolationist. This is not new. What is new is their being in the drivers' seat for the GOP and especially for messaging.
Skibboleth
8mo ago
The "deep state" is a motte-and-bailey where the motte is public choice theory and the bailey is that a cabal of civil servants controls the USG.
Yes.
The legal environment leads to somewhat capricious outcomes, but for the most part it is genuinely superior to be a legally precarious migrant worker in the US than a Venezuelan citizen in Venezuela. They wouldn't be coming otherwise. You might forgive the first wave of immigrants for having unreasonable expectations, but when they're telling their friends and relatives to come because it's better than Venezuela you should probably assume they believe it.
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