Tree
1yr ago
That belief codes as super low status to me, I would say it’s completely outside the elite’s overton window(of both continents). Even though I think a redneck going off such an uncouth heuristic would likely be more often correct than a member of the elite. Eg, the recent syrian re-shuffling. It’s unlikely to go well, and if you don't have giant 'egalitarian' blinders on, it's obvious that the religion of peace has a lot to do with it. Every time you get rid of a dictator, they start larping as 7th century warlords.
Tree
1yr ago
Yeah, if they are aware of problems with blacks, european elites chalk them up to the legacy of slavery, american racism, lack of welfare, excessive police and carceral state – all mistakes they could never make. Their superiority complex is hilariously mirrored in american elites view of the european muslim and roma underclass – the europeans obviously don’t know how to integrate people, they don’t have the wonderful american civic tradition, they lack the welcoming culture and ritual turkey-killing, etc.
Tree
1yr ago
I see it fas a fundamentally legitimate demand, they don’t want to be at the mercy of their rival. I’m not fighting a world war to deny them that modest amount of autonomy.
Your reasoning doesn’t seem to allow for any legitimate demand on their part, they’re just supposed to accept being beholden to the whims of current hegemon forever. Like, if they build a fort in the suburbs of beijing, the US will seemingly go: “wowowow, hold on, your capital is now less vulnerable to my potential attacks, I can’t order you around anymore, that is an obvious threat to my hegemony, you’re now a rival for world domination, let’s have a war”.
From that perspective, you could say that just china strengthening and no longer starving is ‘destabilizing’ and causing war. For my part, I don’t think the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspires the Lacedaemon, makes war inevitable.
A hegemon who wishes to keep any potential rival too weak to ever present a challenge (for example, I sometimes hear the idea that the US should have bombed China into the stone age in the 80s, while it still could) is a terrible tyrant who should be overturned.
Tree
1yr ago
They don't want to get blockaded to shit every time they displease Current Hegemon?
Tree
1yr ago
A carrier is a lot of eggs in a single basket, and critiques that it is too many eggs in one basket are conceptually valid, but the comparison is with how many other baskets would be needed for the same number of egg deliveries, not the cost of the basket to crack it, if that makes sense.
Say a standard explosive charge/egg inflicts on margin, X dollars of damage to the enemy. You can calculate that a cruise missile delivery (1 egg) costs more than a dumb bomb (also worth 1 egg) or artillery. But in any case, its cost should not be multiples of X, or you would prefer not to build that extra missile.
It is theoretically possible, and imo it is in fact the case with carriers, that your egg-delivery system is so vulnerable to cheap attacks, that no eggs at all can be "economically" delivered.
Your paradigm-shifting example was a 1000 dollar drone destroying a 100 M plane, 100 000 to one. Back in 1982, a 200K exocet sank a 50M destroyer, 250 to 1. Since then the ratio has come closer to the drone-plane example.
What’s the lowest possible, mass manufactured, cost of a missile that can sink a 20B carrier? 1M perhaps, 20 000 to one. That’s enough for me. I’ll register a prediction that if there is a war over taiwan, carriers are either going to be too far to be of any use, or one will be sunk, and then they will be too far to be of any use.
Tree
1yr ago
What percentage of people at that time didn't have any children survive to adulthood and were immediately removed from the gene pool?
Around 16%? The overwhelming majority of adults reproduce.
While in principle, I accept that even a small difference in reproductive fitness can have large consequences way down the generations, I’d like a source for the modern english being around 100 times “more descended” from 13th century nobles than commoners.
The end of old patrician family names means nothing. They had daughters and illegitimate children.
I also doubt that ancient chinese city dwellers managed to considerably out-reproduce the romans despite the same urban constraints and diseases. What’s different about the romans? The chinese were at various times also conquered by barbarian people, who proceeded to establish themselves as the new dynasty and nobility. Shouldn’t then, by your own reasoning, the modern chinese mostly be the descendants of steppe conquerors, while the han peasantry died out?
Tree
1yr ago
Charlemagne lived about 600 years ago.
1200 years ago.
The Romans, the people who lived in the city of Rome circa 500 BC, essentially all died out.
If, as this article says, 80% of all europeans who lived a thousand years ago are ancestors of every single european living today, it’s almost certainly true of the europeans who lived two thousand years ago, ie romans.
Tree
1yr ago
Vietnam was before Russia had its own Afghanistan debacle, ancient history. I’ll grant that the US has a weaker record of peacefulness than China. I don’t want to get into a discussion of the US’ moral responsibility and war justifications either, it’s largely irrelevant. Most of the reasons why Russia should be fought and China let off the hook apply to the US as well: order of magnitude stronger, no expanding-expansionist goals, no nuclear threats.
Tree
1yr ago
Just like Japan and Korea’s fear of being cut off from the ocean is understandable, so is China’s. Even a reasonable and peaceful China would do everything to remove this knife from their throat. I’m uncomfortable getting into a massive war without trying appeasement first. You can speculate on China’s ultimate goals, but there is no record of defection and increasing demands like there is with Russia. Every power gets one tschekoslovakia, one free defect, that’s my rule.
Tree
1yr ago
There's nothing to suggest that they'd turn out to be more impressive than their Russian counterparts.
Economic, industrial and demographic might.
The Russian Federation exists on the ruins of an empire that lost her entire periphery in 1991. This never happened to Communist China. Of course they're going to appear to be more peaceful.
I don't care if it had a rough childhood. It has proven itself incapable of behaving in a civilized manner and should be incapacitated whether it has moral responsibility or not (rabid bear).
Tree
1yr ago
- China is about 10x as strong
- China does not seem to want more than taiwan and access to the ocean
- Russia has a (recent) record of using military means and nuclear threats to expand its borders – China’s relative peacefulness (100x) should be rewarded and Russia’s behaviour punished . If nothing else, to avoid nuclearization.
Tree
1yr ago
Nobles usually endowed a monastery with some land in exchange for taking in their runts. I reckon the kids would have been fine spending the cash squeezed from the starving peasantry on hookers and blow directly instead of having to re-earn it through prayer.
Tree
1yr ago
It was less about using drones versus carriers, more , ‘missiles are to carriers what drones are to planes’, the offense getting way too cheap for carriers to stay viable . Although I suppose a missile is a kind of rocket-powered drone, and boat drones and sub drones are also a threat. The Carrier started off all ATT no DEF, and as the things that could kill it got smaller and faster and cheaper, its ATT was no longer a DEF; every fly can kill it but it can’t kill every fly.
‘Not as unfindable as they once were’ , that’s very very euphemistically put, no? Unhideable, more like. I don’t mean just PRC killer missiles. Iran or Sweden could sink them. Way below peer.
Tree
1yr ago
Good stuff. I don't understand americans obsession with "confronting" china (it's so far removed from any real threat against the US), but I certainly don't begrudge them for looking for a quid pro quo with us europeans.
Quick question re: drone swarm versus fighter jet. One of the popular discussions between amateur war nerds these last years is the question of aircraft carriers, with the ‘contrarian’ side postulating that in the event of a peer conflict, all those deployed will be sunk pretty much immediately, and the ‘conventional’ side maintaining that surely no, the navy knows what it’s doing. This new paradigm sounds like the former are correct.
Tree
1yr ago
I don’t see any evidence that you can influence criminals by making their punishment “less cool”. If there was, we should spank them in public or something.
We’re dealing with total morons here. They don’t really understand cause and effect. They basically have no awareness outside of the next ten minutes, if that.
I admire the endless optimism of people who try to whisper in the ear of criminals : ‘Hey…. Man…. We fiddled with the judicial reform knobs again, and now instead of a low chance of getting caught and a heavy sentence, you get a high chance of getting caught and a light sentence, so can you please do less crime, please?’
“Sir, that is a similar expected sentence per crime. As a rational man, I cannot change my behaviour on that basis.”
Actually, he’s not going to say that, because he did not understand the previous sentence. Incapacitation is the only one who really works because it does not require criminals to understand anything, unlike deterrence and aftereffects.
Tree
1yr ago
Scott’s essay made clear to me how much of this is really a cost issue. Or to put it another way, the reason we have crime and a raft of other problems is because of cost-insensitive idealists. Although it could solve the crime problem, incarceration simply costs too much. So we should look into physical punishment, maiming, the stocks.
But I’d like to propose the fairest and cheapest solution: randomized death sentences. When you’re convicted of a serious crime, they hand you a pair of dice, and if you roll snake eyes, you get two in the back of the head. If not, you’re freed. Incapacitation-wise, it’s the equivalent of a long prison sentence for all who roll for a fraction of the cost. And you avoid negative after-effects for being institutionalized with criminals. "Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries - for heavy ones they cannot."
Tree
1yr ago
Every society has murder too. That does not make murder conductive to a functioning society, or some kind of pillar of capitalism.
Tree
1yr ago
Getting a good price does not require deception. You’ve got Costanza’s walkout gambit. That’s your main leverage, you don’t need to lie.
The main relationship of capitalism is not adversarial, but transactional. Communism tries to make all relationships familial, ends up hierarchical. It is particularly prone to lies and manipulation because two communists always have to figure out which one is the child and which one is the parent in that familial relationship, so which one should help the other, or exploit the other, while capitalists can just trade for mutual benefit, or walkout. Capitalism, far from requiring deception, barely requires language really. You just pick a number and the other monkey either nods or fucks off.
We are socially evolved to lie.
A) Disagree. Most people dislike it. You could similarly say we are socially evolved to screw over other people, murder them, which is kinda true and largely not true. B) Naturalistic fallacy. C) Both people lying and reaching a compromise price is not a socially beneficial outcome, all the scenarios are equal, just a zero-sum game between you and the salesman.
You conflate self-interest with selfishness and selfishness with dishonesty. Capitalism harnesses self-interest, not dishonesty or distrust. Those are not conductive to a functioning society.
Tree
1yr ago
You sometimes hear a similar idea from russians, who complain that they weren’t vaccinated against western brain viruses like marxism and so got it particularly bad. Then again that’s germany, and they can’t really say they managed to only express a benign form of 20th century ideology.
Tree
1yr ago
No, that’s all immoral and unnecessary. That whole class of workers that used to be so numerous, the used car, the door-to-door salesman, the commercial : I was glad when they mostly died, courtesy of internet comparisons and other things. So were most people. Even them, presumably. I was once in a position where my incentives were to be be less than completely honest with clients, and when I fell into that temptation, it was a soul-sucking experience.
Aside from being unpleasant for all concerned, it’s just not a good long-term strategy to lie to people.
Is it wrong to lie to a car salesman about how much you are willing to pay to try to get a lower price?
Yeah, it’s wrong. It’s not necessary to lie, you can say ‘I don’t want to pay more than X“”. In effect you’re just lying out of social cowardice, you don’t want to say ‘I’m cheap’ so you say ‘I can’t pay more’.
Tree
1yr ago
Some of your theses I disagree with:
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Every lie is the same. It’s one thing to imply you’re just a regular guy by pretending to love fast food or a popular policy, more than you really do. It’s another to knowingly tell straight lies like ‘I grew up poor’, ‘The election was stolen’, ‘Our poll says Kamala wins’.
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Evil always wins, who lies more wins more. A society where ‘lying is dominant’ would be more like Mao’s China, or even worse. There’s far too much truth and negative feedback on lying in our society for this to be our situation.
-
the cafeteria tray theory of morality. I don’t believe that if you refuse to eat the baby, the next guy will eat the baby.
Tree
1yr ago
You argue for tolerating lies, which you say is upstream of politicians’ tendency to lie, so by that logic you cause lies. You defend the dishonesty of politicians even though you are clearly bothered by it. You choose to ignore your moral instincts for this sophistry.
Tree
1yr ago
When you say that politicians are not decent people and should never be trusted, that’s not condemnation, or normative in any way?
A society’s tolerance of lies, or politicians’ moral status in that society, are not all-or-nothing propositions.
Tree
1yr ago
I don’t understand what’s so hard about condemning lies. To be clear, you think that Trump’s, above average tendency to lie, is morally perfectly fine, even required of a politician.
I don’t accept the responsibility of ‘us voters’. I don’t vote for liars generally. Some politicians lie more than others, and in different countries, at different times, politicians’ lies are more or less normalized.
In The Rainmaker, the villain is a CEO of a health insurance company who sells door-to-door and then denies delays defends. It culminates in a court scene where they read from the real secret manual that states their policy to initially deny every claim. What I got from it is that the incentives of the insurance business, and health insurance in particular, are horrendous. Nowhere else do we give ruthless people a nice, clear, legal chance to fuck us over for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Of course it’s immoral, but I would argue it’s also immoral to tempt your fellow man like that. And stupid.
It’s like feeding a wild beast scraps of meat for years, and then, when he’s grown to terrifying proportions, you walk into his cage and announce that not only won’t he be getting any meat going forward, but you expect him to give you most of his food now. The real question is why anyone is naive enough to expect anything but immediate disembowelment and consumption.
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