Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Oh psh, we get blackmailed all the time. Its why we haven't reunited the Korean Peninsula, and energy blackmail is a decent explanation for half the horrifying shit we do in the middle east, like arming and funding the Saudi's quasi-genocidal conflict with the Iranians. Which, btw, is just as revanchist as anything Putin is doing, with an added soupcon of ethnic and religious bigotry tossed on top for fun. We also generally support Israel annexing other people's land too, so that's clearly not an American ethical red line either.
Also, while I don't doubt that we could achieve rapud significant conventional superiority over the Russian forces in a direct engagement, I do not trust that we could neutralize their nuclear forces immediately. Given that direct US armed involvement is likely to trigger general hostilities with Russia up to and potentially including a "fuck you" countervalue strikes, your "home by Christmas" glibness is, frankly, horrifying.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Ah yes, clearly we don't care about murder either, because people keep getting killed!
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
We have very little idea how many illegal immigrants there are in the U.S., and estimates range from 10-11 million to 20 or 30. We know there will be approximately 2 million more than whatever the previous total was after this year, so it's safe to say that the number is dynamic. Also, it's unclear how many first-generation children of said illegal immigrants there are, who arguably ought not to be citizens either because Wong Kim Ark isn't exactly a paragon of judicial reasoning, and ius soli is not exactly an internationally-favored citizenship model.
Lastly, just because economic migrants from latin america have been coached by NGOs and cartel smugglers into "claiming asylum" at the border does not make their disingenuous cases anywhere close to the same as the cases of Iraqi or Afghani translators, or populations in danger of genocide like the Yazidis.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
You are correct, thank you.
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
What else but armed insurrection (i.e. war as waged by the stateless) do you call the 1st and 2nd Intifada?
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
I'm not sure. I'm pulling from Darryl Cooper's account, but he doesn't give names. Apparently a German Neo-Nazi was also involved (Willi Pohl/Voss).
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "an afterthought or a footnote" but 19th and early 20th century U.S. politics are all about brass-tacks, "jobs-for-the-boys" style patronage. As the high point, I'd point to maybe the various landgrant laws from the mid-1800's on, just because of the massive scale of the uplift caused thereby.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
the invention of the (practical, iron) stirrup and (more advanced) saddle doesn't seem too significant to us because we don't care about horses, but it ushered in an era of political dominance by feudal lords and their knights.
The stirrup and saddle were important, yes, but the idea that the rich rode horses while the poor fought on foot is at least as old as Alexander's companion cavalry (who had neither stirrups nor advanced saddles). Similarly, political organization revolving around personal relationships between kings and subordinate networks of landholders who also owed military service doesn't arise with medieval "feudalism" (which itself isn't a unitary concept, because e.g. the French, English, and Polish models are so radically different) but was much, much older - the huscarl/fyrd system is similar, not reliant on mounted troops, and has antecedents back to classical Germanic tribes. Heck, even classical greco-roman hoplite/legionary systems are similar (though the Roman system diverged with the consolidation of agricultural land and then the marian reforms).
Developments in every day life did occur, and are interesting. But let's not lose the forest for the trees - it wasn't until first the Columbian exchange, and then the modern era, that there were true civilization-rocking material sea-changes.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
Yes! But my point was that it could become a hunting dog with less effort than you'd think (though it would take directed effort or a long-ass time and a lot of random luck) to get it there.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Thank you for the insight!
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Was that supposed to be a summary of what I commented? If so, I'm confused - I didn't say that at all. What I said was:
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STEM disciplines' truth-seeking functions are often undermined by human nonsense. E.g., "The Vaccine Prevents The Spread of COVID, and anything else is misinformation."
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STEM methods are currently ill-suited to describing and analyzing the human nonsense undermining their truth-seeking functions. E.g. the Replication Crisis.
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Even where STEM disciplines do produce truth, that is no guarantee that power will not suppress those truths. E.g., "Comrade Lysenko is correct; the so-called 'genetics' are reactionary bourgeois fallacies!"
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
No, it makes it a "momento mori"-type reminder of fallibility. But I suspect we'll have to agree to disagree here.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Instead, I thought it was about the lack of clear evil intentions.
Slightly more complicatedly, it's about the way that things which would be wildly extraordinary in normal life (the uprooting and shifting of large populations, and the commitment of mass violence) and which would be shocking to bourgeois morality if committed on an interpersonal basis (shooting someone, or stealing their possessions while they scream) are normalized in the thoughts and discourse of policymakers by taking refuge in rhetorical generality and bureaucratic jargon, and then how everyone just gets on with normal things like office politics and lives completely boring lives even as the ultimate subject is the death and dispossession of millions. It's about how, notwithstanding all the hifalutin' things that the philosophers of liberalism wrote about citizens' exercise of reason and morality in public affairs, the quotidian swallows all of that even when it's the lives of millions on the line.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Eppur si muove - whatever the rhetoric, the result speaks for itself in this case.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
why use a proxy at all? Why not just focus resettlement offers on criminals and dumb people generally?
Because crime isn't tearing apart the (mostly-white) elite and wrecking our culture; the progressive religion which has as one of its chief tenets the evil of whiteness (always with the lower-case) and the corresponding martyrdom of Blackness (with the capital-b, of course), is.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
For reference, the amount of alcohol intake I find pleasurable in an evening is [two fingers of whisky / a glass of wine / a beer] consumed slowly over a 2- to 4-hour period. Anything more turns unpleasant quickly.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Fair enough
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I would say the current idea of a 'mental illness' like Autism (at least in some diagnoses) is pretty damn imperfect though.
No more imperfect than the concept of 'general intelligence' to uplift dogs.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Ah that makes sense.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Yes, but at the same time if "exit" is easy (or at least not significantly harder than non-exit, b/c let's be real cossack life in any circumstance wasn't a picnic), and if the hierarchy is in many respects directly-answerable to the group (e.g., the election and deposition of Cossack "hetmans") or a function of ill-defined "prestige" or respect, then that hierarchy may sit comparatively lightly on one's shoulders.
Of course all this is theoretical, and I'm not a cossack or cowboy so if I'm blowing wind feel free to disregard.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Sure, but it's also harder to ... figure that out, if it does exist. And also a lot harder to fix. Dysfunctional just means "bad", and is about as informative. The EA people probably don't even agree with you about that dysfunction! It's not a quantification issue.
Right, I agree that "making things good" is hard to quantify. Which is why small and local arenas where one has the most information are the best places to start.
Millions of people can try to fix it and just ... be wrong about what they're fixing, fix it poorly, and go nowhere. Which is probably happening, sure, but the problem is not only hard, it's not obvious at all what the problem is, or what can be done - and in a sense half of politics is trying to solve it, but poorly!
My fault; poor language. I agree that it's definitely possible for millions of people to be bad and/or wrong at fixing things. What I meant was that there is no mass-movement towards revitalizing civic associations, mutual benefit societies, churches, families, municipal governments, or rooted neighborhoods; ACS statistics and local election turnout numbers tell us this much.
uh dustin moskovitz, the main EA donor, is literally funding yimby stuff on a large scale though
Yes, this is good (though depends on what he means by "scale" though; I'd be more pleased with him doing something in his own community and then moving outward from there than going state- or country-wide).
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Okay, but was WoT worse than "Legend of the Seeker"? Because if so, that's Plan 9 from Outer Space, so-bad-its-good territory.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Whoops, mixed up the jurisdiction.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
What do you mean "gets to?" They can decide to use a nuke or not, at which point we would have to decide how to react. And given that the Russians have agency, shouldn't it behoove us to, y'know, treat them seriously even if it means doing somewhat distasteful things? Given that question, why are people on the NATO side whipping up an anti-Russian crusade? Seems like a nation that is the target of a crusade, even if in the wrong, is more likely to do wild and unpredictable things - possibly including unwise things with nukes - than one which is being dealt with as a regional power.
There are a lot of things which would call themselves EA, or otherwise claim to be affiliated with or influenced by the movement, but which act very differently.
I recognize this...and yet...
...then this kind of thing rears its head. The act of "valuing the life of an [unknown] African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you," if widespread, actually harmful to your locality and (insofar as you have one remaining there) community, which depends on "inefficient" time-sink efforts to generate public goods. Either that's a basic oversight made at the ideology's creation, or it is, as I put it, an "affective bias" against locality.
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