Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
"Firearm ownership is literally written into the founding document of this country as a fundamental right . . . "
That's just a set-up for the Cersei Lannister response: "This is your shield, Lord Stark? A piece of paper? tears paper to shreds"
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
Cannot Europeans simply deny the refugees passage on grounds that Egypt is already a safe country for them?
The Europeans could do a wide range of things, both inside and outside the ambit of international law. Pakistan is expelling nearly 2 million Afghan immigrants. However, there is no will to use force to keep large waves of immigrants outside of Europe - that has been rendered so morally-unconscionable in their view that just about any justification to ignore the problem or refrain from action will be accepted.
Supah_Schmendrick
6mo ago
I hate the discourse around inflation - when people say "inflation is down" they are talking about a decrease in the rate of change, not a decrease of an absolute number. This is unlike many other things we talk about in economic life; when the unemployment rate goes down, more people have jobs; when there is a decrease in the mortgage rate, houses cost less, etc. This condition people to think that an economic indicator "going down" means that things are getting better.
This is not the case with inflation. When inflation "goes down," it does not mean that prices are actually decreasing back to the levels that existed prior to the inflation. Deflation is a separate phenomenon that almost never actually happens (and maybe shouldn't be allowed to happen - I'm not smart enough to parse the monetary theory of it all). When inflation "goes down," it means "you're still paying way more for stuff than you were a year ago, but at least the prices aren't skyrocketing up quite as fast anymore; you have some time to rebudget and get used to these new, permanently higher prices."
That statement isn't actually a "good sign" for the economy; at best it means "things aren't actively getting worse." Unless there is some significant increase in productivity to drive prices back down, people are still having to pay more for goods and services than they did previously; their money is worth less and they are poorer now than they were previously. The damage has already been done.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Except your example also demonstrates that "let them do it on their own" is BS. The Azeris had Iranian, Turkish, and Israeli backing...the Armenians "fought on their own" and got stomped. Little countries will always cozy up to big countries, and whoever doesn't have a patron had best find one quick or risk domination by their mobbed-up neighbors.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
My understanding is that it takes a significant amount of time for exploration projects to go from approval, through construction, to production. To what extent are current production levels indicative of investments made 5-10 years ago, and approvals sought 3-4 years ago? (Honest question, I don't know the industry well enough to say off the top of my head or with only cursory googling).
Similarly, should we expect the number of permits granted by the Biden administration to have an immediate impact on production numbers?
And are all permits created equal - e.g. if current production increases are centered in shale fields, are those permits more or less impactful than the permits being granted now?
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Mexicans staying in Mexico are obviously not the ones immigrating, are they?
No, but their brothers, sons, cousins, fathers, or uncles are, and they are benefitting from the nearly $60 billion in remittances sent home annually by those expats - roughly 4% of Mexico's entire GDP.
Supah_Schmendrick
12d ago
White Colonization could not have happened in the first place without a much smaller number of White Men subjugating a much larger population of indigenous peoples in all cases. India, relative to its population size, was controlled by the British with an extremely small elite pool.
This is very bad history. Colonization in India occurred not because a few god-like white people showed up and crushed all before them, but instead because very clever and ruthless opportunists, through a combination of skill and luck, managed to co-opt local power structures by backing challengers to weak overlords. The British didn't rule India in their own name; they slowly accumulated alliances and legal rights and privileges through local intermediaries.
There's a myth that the Aztecs interpreted the arrival of Spanish Conquistadores as fulfilling a prophecy of the return of the Aztec's gods.
This is also very bad history. The Aztecs didn't think Cortez was a god - they in fact whipped his men out of Tenochtitlan in La Noche Triste, after killing the collaborator Moctezuma. Instead, Cortez proved himself a diplomat of no small skill, and put together a coalition of the Aztec's subject peoples which ultimately strangled Tenochtitlan, and then entered into negotiated political relationships with the Spanish crown. The influx of more and more Spaniards into the region, coupled with the massive disruption to Mexica society caused by the plagues of the Columbian exchange, was what finalized the ultimate subjugation of the locals.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
The thing that makes this a national story is that Mr. Ballard, through the fictionalized version of his life that is "Sound of Freedom," one of the major cultural figures held up as virtuous and good by Team Red. Thus, it is imperative in the kulturkampf that Team Blue knock him off his pedestal or prove him to be bad in some way, lest Team Red be able to convince people that Reds can be virtuous, or that it is virtuous to be Red. That's what's driving amplification of this story in higher-profile news networks/through non-Red social media networks. Obviously Reds, Mormons, and Utahns have their own reasons to care about this - their idol has feet of clay / adultery is something they care about, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
"Critique of STEM supremacism" is useless because the alternatives tend to be woo
It's not a question of "alternatives," its a recognition that STEM disciplines are still full of people, with the same conflicts of interest, corruptions, status-games, cliquishness, and all the rest. STEM doesn't get you an "objective" view of society because the map is still not the territory, and to the degree that it gets you an objective view of the physical universe you still have to convince all the other non-STEM people that you're right or else they'll just coordinate meanness against you using the same old dark arts as always while you're demonstrating the perfection of your equations alone at a blackboard.
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
Okay but metropolitan sized battery arrays sounds kind of awesome though.
Imagine a lithium-ion battery fire...the size of Pittsburgh!
Supah_Schmendrick
20d ago
When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems?
Yes.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
Meanwhile Hezbolah is Iranian backed and maybe directly controlled, and has done little in the current conflict.
They've forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes in the north of the country, all without drawing the kind of polarizing international opprobrium that would give Israel a justification for the kind of Gaza-like heavy-handed operations which would be necessary to remove Hezbollah from within easy rocket range of the border.
If, as has been speculated by people like Haviv Rettig Gur, that one of the purposes of Hamas's 10/7 aggression is to ultimately make the feeling of security necessary to maintain a first world standard of living impossible in Israel and drive the Israelis into the sea through emigration/attrition, Hezbollah has achieved about as much as Hamas has done, without any of the downsides.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
Any attempts to use more police enforcement and harsher punishments and whatever will just make the problems worse, for you as well as for the people you're talking about. We've seen that through decades of 'tough on crime' policies.
Do we know this? I thought the general consensus was that "tough on crime" policies like NYC's vaunted "broken windows" efforts, while expensive and not as world-shaking as initially billed, did drastically cut down on street crime and enable the revitalization of the city. I thought that the general consensus was that the harsh policies adopted in the 80's and 90's were a major factor in the plunging murder rate in the U.S., which only started upticking again after the recent racial brouhahas (Ferguson, Minneapolis, etc.) put the kibosh on aggressive policing of the poor and disproportionately black communities where most serious crime crawls up out of.
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
any sort of mixed-use residential/commercial developments that do get built are typically very high-class and quite desirable.
Where permitting and regulatory regimes are complex, slow, restrictive, and carry significant ongoing costs (i.e. mandatory set-asides for "affordable" units) for those few projects that do get approved, developers are highly incentivized to make all new construction as high-class and high-cost as possible in order to maximize return per unit; they can set their own price because pent-up demand is so high, and face little competition from other new builds to drive down cost.
That's the reason mixed-use projects in major cities are so "high class and desirable" - not any inherent property of the type of units being built.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
The culture war is as much a commentary on whose righteousness can be expressed as much as it is a contest over the definition of righteousness.
Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't see a large distinction between "a definition of righteousness which can be expressed without significant social pushback" and "a definition of righteousness which has triumphed and been accepted by society." Can you elaborate?
Supah_Schmendrick
20d ago
I would be interested in what mistakes those are - I read and enjoyed "Stalin's War" but have very little outside knowledge of Finnish history.
Supah_Schmendrick
20d ago
I'm not sure this post proves what you want it to re: the utility/necessity of reprisals. As I read it, it claims that the insurgencies in Iraq were broken by:
(1) coopting moderate factions inside the (Sunni) insurgencies and relying on them to do the dirty work themselves (does anyone want to bet that those Sunni militias didn't target civilian supporters of the radical factions as well as combatants under arms?), or (2) allowing the (Shiite) insurgencies to more-or-less achieve their objectives, which included withdrawal of US troops and ethnic cleansing of enemy civilians from insurgent-controlled areas.
Neither of those are particularly happy outcomes, and neither would be acceptable in the Israeli/Palestinian context.
Supah_Schmendrick
4mo ago
But what you're talking about here is collective punishment, and the duty for an ethnic group to police it's own members or face consequences.
Correct. If Germans don't think about the consequences of electing a radical party to control the Reichstag, and the Nazis get control of the country and start annexing and invading the neighbors, the result is that other countries declare war on the entire country of Germany and not just on the individuals controlling policy. This is because the basic assumption of the modern nation-state system is that the nation is the sovereign unit, and has the right, ability, and duty to ensure it is governed in the manner it prefers.
If the Palestinians can't even ensure their representatives to the rest of the world match their preferences, then it's hard to call them a "nation" in any meaningful sense.
Supah_Schmendrick
5mo ago
Why would the Palestinians agree to less than half of their land?
Because they have lost repeated wars over ownership of the land, and the consequence of losing is not getting what you want. I.e., the same reason why Silesia, Pomerania, and Prussia are no longer parts of Germany, why the western coast of Anatolia and Constantinople are not Greek, and why California is no longer part of Mexico.
Supah_Schmendrick
7mo ago
Theres corroborating testimony grom one of his business partners, plus other statements by Hunter from the laptop complaining that Joe took half of what other family members made, including Hunter.
Additionally, we know from Hunter's Chateau Marmont prostitute binge that he and Joe shared a joint bank account - Hunter overpaid the prostitute and then started getting frantic calls from the Secret Service about why VPOTUS's bank accounts were transferring tens of thousands of dollars to shady escort services.
Further, we also know that Joe didn't disclose $5.2 million in income that cant be explained by known income sources (salaries, etc.).
Its all very suggestive.
Supah_Schmendrick
8mo ago
As President, it matters less what that particular person thinks, and more how much risk they're willing to swallow. There's no shortage of bright-spark admin-law scholars and lawyers who can come up with wild schemes to accomplish just about any policy in any direction - the question is, does the decisionmaker at 1600 Pennsylvania have the guts - and the cat-herding skills - to actually pick something and push forward with it?
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
In the spirit of conciliation, perhaps "Apparently brutalism is the only institutionally-acceptable architectural form these days" is closer to the spirit of the original statement?
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
Politics is an art that Americans have never learned
With respect, this is profoundly ignorant of U.S. politics before about 1960.
Supah_Schmendrick
9mo ago
The course of political, social, and technological change is very hard to predict
And yet for much of human history it was very easy to predict - functionally zero for the vast majority of people. A Roman from 100 AD might be surprised that the brightest minds of 1600 were in misty Brittania or burned-over Germania, but he wouldn't be surprised at the way the vast majority of European people ate, lived, and farmed up 'til the Columbian exchange. The Mongols would have been instantly cognizable to anyone who saw the Hunnic incursions (or the Scythians, Pechenegs, Avars, Bolghars, Magyars or any other number of mounted steppe confederacies crashing into Europe from the east). Medieval black death? Meet the plague of Justinian. Most of the major political developments in pre-modern Europe had classical counterparts (if they weren't directly aping classical models - the Catholic church's parish system is a carryover from Roman secular organization), and the technology levels waffled around, with changes here and there but few true revolutions in material conditions.
Things have only really started going crazy in the last few hundred years, and yet even then people keep being eerily prescient about major technological and social developments (or maybe there was just something in the Star Trek writers' room's water).
But Jim Crow wasn't exterminationist. The sum total of all lynchings of blacks in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968 was 3,446, according to the Tuskeegee Institute (who I don't think are incentivized to be conservative with the number).
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