Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
"Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts."
User ID: 83
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
18d ago
How so and will they continue with the ceasefire in effect?
Of course it's real. What else could Iran have done? They can't project power, their long-range weapons are running low, their terrorist groups abroad have already reached the limits of what they can do. They won't exactly just cancel the Islamic Republic and call the game lost. Anything drastic they might do - buy nukes from Pakistan or the Norks, mobilize their army and march on Israel through whatever is in the way, or rebuild Fordo two miles below the mountain - will take time, and time is exactly what a ceasefire buys them. Does the same for Israel, too, but I suppose that's a gamble worth making when all your alternatives range from wishful to fantastical.
Edit: Time to eat crow. I guess Iran is taking a stand on principle, where the principle is "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me". That, or they don't have their missile men under control.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
19d ago
At the point where the father prevents the boy from picking up a sword. That's where you should have stepped in, enthusiasticaly pressed the foam weapon into his little hands, and distracted or even confronted the "father".
Of course I'm heavily biased here. I'm doing what I can to teach fencing and grappling to my 3-year-old daughter, who at least humors me even if she has no drive to fight. Kid wants to pick up weapons? Great! What parent wouldn't want their child to develop a healthy enthusiasm for self-defence, or maybe even the capacity to defend others? Boys may be boys and girls not as given to physical fighting, but even then, kids of either gender benefit from learning how to handle themselves.
I have a habit of alienating my wife's friends and family members by telling them straight-up what I think on controversial issues. My own family members know better than to start, by now, and my own friends either have no opinion on childrearing or are conservative enough themselves. So I don't think I'm playing internet tough guy when I say that I would have no problem telling the parents in your tale that what they're doing is straight-up horrifying and that I hope the child grows up to escape their influence ASAP. If they want to virtue signal to provoke the squares, fine, consider this square provoked, but they won't get off uncontested.
Now, as for the state...eh. In an ideal world, the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-competent yet all-benevolent state will have prevented that scenario from occuring in the first place. In our current world, with our current states, I think it's better for the state to stay out of it.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
19d ago
I wonder whether perhaps it should be. Shatter the Overton window and be done with it, tell people exactly what you mean. Or maybe it can't be, for legal reason. I am not a lawyer.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
22d ago
I'm a Fallen Soldier main. That's my guy. Fewer but better units, less micromanagement from that alone but then you also needn't have them spend as much time sitting tight to heal? Yes please. All the other factions can pack up and go home.
Overall I feel like the writing of Zephon (ignoring the race angle for now because I really don't think that's the game's chiefest problem) is just about skin-deep. Maybe evocative of the eerie eldritch sci-fi theme it tries to go for, but in the end it's just empty and highly generic gesticulation that leaves it to the player to fill in the blanks, which are most of it. It's superficial, simultaneously pretentious and not even trying all that hard, and with all that said it's still slightly above average for game writing. Yes, the bar is that low.
Gameplay-wise the game is alright. An improvement upon Gladius for sure, but how good was Gladius? Solidly OK, I'd say. Nothing revolutionary at all, but it works well enough. Zephon is that, somewhat more polished and set in a slightly less used-up setting.
Then there's 'practical romantic' (not actually romantic anymore) - the most normal human faction out there. Special power- get resources from defeated enemies, can buff morale with influence. Looks Iranian I guess.
I chuckled a little when I saw that guy, thinking of the Mottizen of the same name.
He's Algerian ingame, IIRC.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
22d ago
I didn't. Your complaint that I quoted the most relevant part of your post instead of its entirety seems somewhat misplaced, both because quoting the whole thing was unnecessary since that line encompassed exactly that which was in question, and because the rest of your post doesn't invalidate it either.
Look, if you deny it, then fine, we can drop the whole issue right here, it won't be productive anyways. You can have the last word too, if you like. Or maybe someone else can weigh in and give us a third opinion.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
22d ago
"Speaking plainly" that wasn't.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
22d ago
Taking that one step further - do we need to break down the bonds between people, atomize them as hard as possible, so as to maintain social peace?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
22d ago
I'm normally quite sympathetic to socially conservative views, but here I need to agree. In a society with far fewer social constraints on acceptable and expected behavior, with higher life expectancy, with a far greater geographic reach for partners with a greatly reduced social network density, with lower fertility rates, and many other factors besides, there is a far greater risk to partner up with someone who turns out to be unfit for the job once children come into play. Forcing people into unhappy marriages may curb some of the worst excesses of the sexual revolution, but I don't think that is worth the price.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
22d ago
Some concept work, some coding. No great accomplishments; just some basic refactoring to make working with Unreal C++ a little less painful. Working my way out of some Unreal problems, while failing to solve others. Not much, but I'm happy just go get anything at all done.
Arguably, low social cohesion would manifest in a less cooperative and thus less productive society with more defectors and worse tragedies of the commons, thus lower GDP. Lower life expectancy could then be downstream from that, in addition to lower social cohesion probably making people less happy and unhappiness is unhealthy in general.
OTOH, I suppose one can (and I would) argue that a society can be cohesive even when its GDP and life expectancy decrease due to reasons unrelated to social or cultural questions (e.g., for reasons of hard economics), and that these metrics are only partially downstream of and partially orthogonal to social cohesion.
Was that really the only reply you got?
I'll give you you my favorite argument, skipping all the lesser ones. And please excuse the rambling style; I'm writing in between numerous interruptions. The chiefest argument against immigration, in my view, is that of culture. Americans may scoff at this, but for a German it's obvious that our country worked at all and gained its orderly prosperity entirely due to the culture of the people who inhabit it.
In theory this isn't incompatible with immigration - immigrants come, adopt our culture, great, we're still just as orderly and even more productive! But that's not what happens, unless you set the bar for "cultural assimilation" about as low as "speaks some pidgin German when forced to, does not commit brazen rape and robbery, works and pays taxes, and might own a German passport.". Whick you can do, of course! If you see the whole issue purely through the lens of economy and you ignore any effects and dynamics that occur outside of economics, then you can stop at that point, see that immigration just means more workforce, checkmate nativists. If you want to go outside of economics, then the first stop is humanitarian concerns and you can even pat yourself on the back for being a good guy who saves the poor huddled masses of the world by letting them into the infinitely expandable first-world economic zone and human rights preservation area that makes everyone better off and even more so when there's more people inside. You did the right thing. And I suppose that for atomized, globalized urbanites, that's just the world as it is. Ground-level reality right there. Who cares what language your neighbors speak or what color the cashier's skin is? You don't want to talk to them or look at them anyways, you have your phone right here. So long as the economy keeps going and public welfare picks up the slack, everyone can do their own thing to nobody's harm.
But if I might invite you to step outside of your axiomatic comfort zone and enter mine for a spell, here's the countervailing world-view. Let's get back to my opening statement: Prosperity and social peace are mainly downstream of culture, and not the other way around. To someone on the right, this is as obviously true as the opposite might be to someone on the left. Where you might see that obviously people become peaceful and productive once their material and legal circumstances are agreeable to them, I would see instead that obviously a cooperative, high-trust society will be peaceful and productive. Maybe both are true to some extent, but I would give far greater weight to the latter. Can you lean slightly to the right for a moment so as to take a brief look through this lens together with me?
For a society to be thus - cooperative, trusting, mutually supportive - some conditions need to be fulfilled. A shared language is strictly necessary. And not some assortment of crude pidgins that are barely mutually intelligible, but an actual mature language that can convey subtleties with a high degree of fidelity, information with a high signal-to-noise ratio. And especially, dear God, not several mutually unintelligible languages from different language families that are spoken only by disjoint subsets of the population that each self-segregate into separate communities.
Beyond language, and less clear-cut: Shared commitments. If I consider myself a long-term inhabitant of a local community and responsible for its well-being, but my neighbor is only a transient dweller of opportunity, then what reason does each of us have to do the hard work of getting to know the other? What reason has he to contribute to the community, or I to welcome him? He'll just move on anyways, and if not, will very likely surround himself with others of his background instead of mingling with the natives, and work for the benefit of his relatives in his home country instead of his neighbors here. And this is not some self-fulfilling prophecy of social exclusion, but the plain fact of what one sees happen with solid regularity. An immigrant has numerous incentives to cohere more strongly with his co-immigrants than with the natives of his new country of residence; to take from the host country and give to his personal associates. Tragedy of the commons. And with each additional community-member-in-name-only (which includes asocial natives, of course), you have a defector who weakens the body social as a whole and shifts norms away from cooperation.
And then there's the big pitfall of public welfare. You've already pointed out that immigrants cannot simultaneously be net job-takers and net welfare-leeches. I don't know how this works in America, but here in Germany the issue of welfare parasitism is certainly not exclusively to immigrants - plenty of natives take more than they give. But this is still a perverse incentive that hits immigrants even harder because of their inherently greater difficulty in finding well-paid work that's actually worth doing instead of relying on gibs.
If we could and would force immigrants to assimilate, to become natives in all ways but their family history, to communicate with us like we do with each other and reliably commit to the common good, to cut ties with their former country and nation, then all these problems would probably be feasible to solve. But this is not the case. Instead Germany is absorbed by a cultural self-hatred and a refusal to see cultural differences between natives and immigrants. The immigrants themselves in turn see the floundering, self-effacing culture of the Germans and naturally stick to what they know instead. And funnily enough, native kids pick up on this, and so we get the "migrantisch" culture that many young people buy into regardless of whether they even have any recent immigrants in their family trees. And so we end up with a growing parallel society of immigrants and their hangers-on who have ample incentives to be game-theoretic defectors, and who instead of adopting more cooperative native norms end up weakening those norms across the country.
And I ramble and ramble and can't keep a train of thought for how frequently I need to go and do other things. Let me know if this makes the remotest lick of sense to you; if not I'll try again in a quieter hour.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
22d ago
"I hate my enemies and want them to suffer" is true, but not what I said.
Really?
The more pain and terror inflicted in the process, the greater the psychic wound sustained on the collective consciousness of these illegals and all others interested in following them, the better.
And it's not even that I disagree with you on the object level. Just - it looks a lot like you did indeed say that.
Congratulations, you have succesfully cherry-picked one of the right's worse representatives. Is this supposed to teach anyone anything other than "This Natalie Winters I never heard of before who I will probably never hear of again seems a little vapid."?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
24d ago
why not?
Because that's ridiculous if not disconcerting.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
24d ago
Well, sure, you can tell me that my right-wing position is wrong by picking contradictory arguments that I haven't made, and then generalize from that to right-wingers in general. You can posit that immigration cannot possibly be bad because of logical reasons and that even right-wingers know this, as made evident through their revealed preferences. You can even argue that the left in general is soundly grounded in reality. Then we need to conclude that right-wingers are illogical and wrong and shouldn't be believed.
And then I'm left with either of the following scenarios:
- The epistemic gulf between us is so vast we can't even communicate our axioms by messenger pigeon.
- I'm an abject idiot and not worth talking to, why haven't you blocked me yet?
- You fail the ideological turing test very hard.
But seriously now. Some points to argue about:
- The post you replied to described behaviors that I absolutely have seen from the left and the right, from numerous people, IRL as well as online. Leftists and rightists do in fact both do this. This is orthogonal to whether you believe that either side has the better arguments.
- Anti-immigration arguments do not hinge exclusively on "muh jobs" and Trump is not the avatar of all right-wing thought. And even if that were the case - there are more than enough similarly bad and contradictory arguments made on the left. There has been more than enough spotlight on those on The Motte.
- The portion of what you call "extreme bubbles" on the left isn't just very large but also disproportionately influential, and was able to shape public discourse with very little resistance in many spaces, including American academia and Europe in general until very recently (assuming "peak woke" has been passed). This is obviously hard to measure and easy to dispute, so deny it if you will, but with how far left the Overton Window has been in the past ten or so years I find it very obvious that the leftist fringe has been relatively close to the mainstream, and was able to exert far greater influence, compared to its right-wing equivalents.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
24d ago
Fair point, good input.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
24d ago
Fair. But what is the ideal way for a practical egoist to deal with Alzheimer's?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
24d ago
The dream of Richard Gatling, realized at last? Maybe to some extent.
Autonomous drones will still be tasked with killing people, will have false positives in identifying targets, will sometimes attack large areas with a high probability of collateral damage. And as @BreakerofHorsesandMen said, they may be used just as well to effectively carry out variably-discriminate mass killings.
OTOH, like precision-guided munitions reduced the usage of carpet bombing campaigns, the ability to use drone strikes precisely tailored to a given target may also work to reduce collateral damage like you say.
We'll see.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
24d ago
Fair points.
Thanks.
What about EMPs?
As mentioned, this might be possible. AFAIK - which isn't very far, I'm just an armchair theorist with a very cursory knowledge of physics and engineering - meaningful EMP requires some pretty big explosions to generate, so you can't just sustainably deny a large area. Even assuming that someone will invent a sustainable, powerful large-area EMP, then it will only delay the development towards ubiquitous, scalable, autonomous drone swarms. EMP hardening through metallic shielding will make drones heavier, slower, more expensive and easier to spot and target, but they will still be exceedingly useful and powerful and nobody will be able to afford not using them.
I'd expect hardened and unhardened drones to be used simultaneously. You deploy both, assuming that enemy will probably not use EMP, but just in case they do you have the hardened drones to continue the mission if the unhardened one should get fried. If they do not, then the cheaper and more agile unhardened ones can complete the mission while the more expensive and cumbersome hardened ones hang back and don't risk themselves.
EMP also comes with the caveat that, well, EMP doesn't discriminate. You will shut down your own unhardened electronics as well as the enemy's if you use it. So it becomes necessary either to employ a lot of hardening, which is expensive and heavy, or to accept that EMP is a weapon of last resort that will harm yourself, or somehow synchronize the EMP with a sort of hunker-down protocol of your own drones in which they retreat into prepared shelters before the pulse and reemerge after. The latter obviously doesn't work for stationary electronics.
And in the very long run, who knows, someone might just develop hardware that doesn't rely on classical electronics at all. I absolutely expect someone to grow organic CPUs at some point.
Or strikes at drone control centers?
Drone Control Centers are a relic of our transitional age, in which you need a horde of humans to babysit a small number of drones that they manually control in real-time. The drone "control center" of the future will be a command-and-control drone flying slightly behind the frontline drones. At most you will have, let's call them "drone doctrine programming centers" sitting safely at home, in which the missions and rules of engagement are defined before being handed off to the drones themselves. EMP may not be viable as a general countermeasure to drones, but jamming is already used to great effect - but radio jamming can at most prevent drones from communicating, not from operating autonomously. This massively reduces the value of real-time manual drone control (as done today), while the autonomous drones of the near future are only affected in their ability to share information with each other (via radio; other means still work) while retaining the ability to operate individually.
The gist of all this is that there will be no sufficently good reason to have big control centers in one place in striking distance of the enemy. Maybe some operations will require a human operator to observe through the drones' eyes as far as possible to make judgement calls, but I'd guess that those will be increasingly rare as more and more authority is transferred to the drones themselves for reasons of practicality and scalability.
I broadly agree with your linked post. But I think the damper that drone warfare puts on power projection (conflating this with interventionism for now) is only temporary. Big miltiary bases won't be necessary for gunboat diplomacy when the drones are smart enough to deploy themselves from shipping containers, or fired to the target location via cruise missile, or just creeping from home to there on solar power. And if boots on the ground are strictly required, then it's still our drones versus their drones. Drone-on-drone warfare will be a thing, and I find it entirely conceivable that you will have military bases surrounded by dozens of miles of drone-patrolled perimeter, or entire towns kept free of enemy drones by flooding them with your own technologically superior drones, which can then be occupied by your human troops.
Please disagree with me on this. The topic is fascinating, IMO. I've been waiting for decades to see this stuff happen and it seems to finally be just around the corner.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
24d ago
Neither do it, at face value, but you and I are a vanishingly small minority.
And OTOH, let's dig deeper: I don't want there to be gibs, but since the gibs are already out of the box, why shouldn't they go to myself as well as to the less deserving? With that framing in mind, I too want gibs.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
24d ago
Not sure. This seems like a fairly evident instance of moderating the post and not the poster. Hadad's was rule-compliant even if it was bad, whereas Chris' contained a personal attack and thus broke a rule even if it correctly identified Hadad's post as bad. Pretty much just like Amadan's modpost said. If this actually encourages Hadad (and/or others) to post more screeds and discourages Chris (and/or others) from arguing against them, then...well, that's not good either, of course, but it's by no means certain that that will even be the effect. Whereas ignoring the rules to play favorites with this or that poster just throws the foundations of the motte out of the window, which is certain to have negative consequences for everyone.
Do I need to quote Blood Meridian again?
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