anti_dan
1d ago
If the new academic system can produce higher quality education and therefore better graduates, eventually it will be noticed that graduates of these institutions do better in the workforce than traditional college graduates.
Therein lies the problem. Universities are not about education, they are about selection. Until you can reliably demonstrate you are getting better admittees than Stanford, Stanford will be better than you. And no one will agree to go to your school instead of Stanford until you show you can place them...
So the burn it down plan is the only plan that has a chance of working. Once people are dubious about going to the current universities because they cant take out loans to go there and no one else can either, so why bother? Then something else can spring up.
anti_dan
1d ago
Your hard status rankings seem way off fairly regularly, using your own definitions.
In what way is Prince William comparable to Michael Jordan (well I am at least kinda assuming we are talking prime age for both) in the Jungle? William is fine, and fit, but he's not to the FAR right. That is prime athletes with good looks, etc. I think Ray Lewis in his prime coming off the murder charge is a great example for your "caveman". And the women. By golly. How are you rating snooky higher on hard status than Marilyn Monroe? MM is hard to the right on that dimension, the tough question is how she balances on the princess/whore scale.
Also, come on. Is Ellen really more powerful than Oprah? No one thinks that.
I think you come with decent ideas, but need to workshop the actual rankings a little harder.
anti_dan
1d ago
How would raining widespread destruction on Somalia even help prevent piracy?
If there are no Somalis and/or no Somali boats, there can be no Somali pirates.
The reason why the US and allies took up nation-building in the noughties was that the problems we were facing at the time originated in failed states, not rogue states.
Yes, and the inherent flaw in this was looking at the "failed states" as states that failed their people, as opposed to states which gave their people what they wanted and/or deserved. Somalia isn't failing Somalis, the Somalis are just failing all over. The Afghan government that lost the country to the Taliban in like 14 hours didn't fail Afghans, it gave them the government they wanted.
anti_dan
1d ago
Why? The shoe isn't on the other foot, will not be on the other foot in our lifetimes (if ever), and if somehow the shoe did switch feet it would involve a Somalia so transformed that any comparison to present Somalia would be useless. "What would the Somalians do in this situation?" is irrelevant to what we should do in the situation we are dealing with.
Disagree. It is highly relevant when making moral calculations, which is part of what ROEs are supposed to do. If you are fighting someone who will knife you and your children when you're asleep it is very different than if you are fighting someone who would adopt your children and take good care of them if you die during your honorable duel.
Punishing people for the infractions of their hypothetical counterparts is counterproductive to your actual goals.
Asserted not only without evidence, but in contravention of mountains of evidence from past historical conflicts.
anti_dan
1d ago
Sure, but the Chinese weren't even capable of annihilation of the Mongols almost all of the time. And its not like the Mongols were incapable of trade or cooperation.
anti_dan
1d ago
Steppe people have little in common with modern dissident states. The mongols and huns, by way of example, were masters of modern (for the time) military technology such as husbandry, siege craft, etc. Pretending they are analogues to the Taliban or Somalian pirates, is acting like those people have fleets of aircraft carriers and a host of ICBMs.
anti_dan
2d ago
It really depends on the enemy you are facing. If you are facing an organized state with citizens comparable to your own in intelligence and conscientiousness, your framing makes a lot of sense. This is, to be a bit reductive, the "thermostat" view of violence. And I agree it can be done in those situations. Of course, sometimes it leads to losing, such as when the English lost their American colonies. But losing in those limited situations is acceptable, after all, it worked out quite well for England. America has been its best ally since approximately 1813.
But, if you are dealing with loosely banded together warlords governing over mobs of unintelligent, spontaneous, people, this method does not work. You have to deal with that kind of violence with the on/off switch model. The on/off model is the one, correctly, used by law enforcement (ideally) because there is no thermostat in dealing with a crack addict who might have a knife. Progressive attempts to impose the thermostat model continually fail in that context. Often officers suffer either on the job or in the courtroom because of such poor models of reality. And the same is actually true of Somali pirates. You can't really deter them properly by judiciously arresting a few of them once in a while after the fact. The thing that actually works is just blowing them out of the water. And that same thing would have worked with the Taliban, but no one was willing to do that thing.
anti_dan
2d ago
The US has a lot of concerns where total annihilation would be wildly excessive and counterproductive. Obliterating Somalia because some enterprising fishermen decided to moonlight as pirates would be silly on top of appalling. It's a level of deranged collective punishment that would instantly turn the rest of the world against the US because nobody is sure when we're going to make an absurd demand at nukepoint. And it wouldn't even work, because the strategy immediately fails against any sort of decentralized opponent.
Very few Somalis would share this sentiment if the shoe was on the other foot, which is the problem with modern ROE. They work when its Americans fighting Germans or the English. They fail wherever the enemy lacks sufficient honor.
anti_dan
2d ago
Well since there would no longer be any annoying Afghanis, its basically like a new pioneer. America was basically built by people with pioneer spirit.
anti_dan
3d ago
I think that there exists a set of rules of engagement that are reasonable, that is not the set of rules of engagement that have been issued to American troops over the last 3 decades.
anti_dan
4d ago
Why does it always come back to food?
Its low effort? I think that is it. Its difficult to articulate why Ethiopian culture is a boon to the District of Colombia if one is discussing civics, governance, literature, etc. That requires actual knowledge. Its easy (and in fact every time I visit DC, someone insists I go to their favorite Ethiopian restaurant with them) to throw down $50 for some food. It is similar to how most people who hate the Confederacy or Nazis don't know what Northerners or American Soldiers thought of said regimes in 1864 & 1944 respectively.
anti_dan
4d ago
See, I think this argument fails even worse than you. If you go back to, say 1875, and read what the opponents to immigration were saying, they seem quite prescient. They would argue things like that immigrants would congregate in cities and be exploited/power corrupt political machines that would eventually spill into national politics and the whole constitutional order would be altered... which all happened and culminated in the New Deal.
anti_dan
5d ago
That aside, I am a big fan of national ID cards. The US should have one, and so should every other country. I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.
Because it will not be so used. We already have sanctuary cities which house most of the illegal immigrants in the nation. Their cops will be mandated to not check that, as they currently are in those jurisdictions.
If you actually look at the US laws, you would observe that it is seemingly a very strong immigration code that should already be easily able to deal with the illegal immigration problem. The reality is tens of millions of illegals in America. How? Sand in the gears. No law can get rid of the sand. You could try to mitigate it by hiring millions more ICE agents and immigration judges. The sand throwers would re-direct enough of their efforts to preventing that hiring to continue to stifle you.
anti_dan
6d ago
Reporting on things is always deceptive. "High School Graduate Gunned Down While on Stroll" was essentially the initial Michael Brown reporting. If you read the OP's news article, they frame all these allegations as allegations made by ICE, which is a far less credulous stance than federal law enforcement would be given by NBC news if this guy was being arrested on lynching charges.
anti_dan
6d ago
In a just world we would have passed legislation allowing prosocial and well behaved people the chance to make their decades-long participation in the country’s social and economic fabric official. Maybe tax them higher for a while as a sort of restitution or something.
But there is no such system that would allow a guy like this to remain. He's not productive, he's an active participant in the public schools system. Not just at the teacher level, which IMO is bad enough in most scenarios, but at the administrative level. The argument that this isn't a parasite class is incredibly weak. At best he's just following the incentives laid out before someone who wants money and prestige and has a passion for progressivism. 99% of the other scenarios he's cynical and knows he's part of a parasite class.
anti_dan
6d ago
Much more important to the district's union, the district is best off when someone comes in and burns everything down.
anti_dan
6d ago
Iowa isn't a swing state, democrats haven't won a statewide election there in over a decade- and that was mostly Obama's personal magic.
You need to excuse the olds.
anti_dan
6d ago
Same time period. Blue state. I would say at least my middle and high school history had much more discussion of pre-American history than yours seems to have had, and also a much greater emphasis on slavery, civil rights, and the vietnam war once we get into the post 1776 era.
anti_dan
6d ago
As I understand it, the purpose of ICE is to make a big theatrical show of removing a few unfortunate illegals pour encourager les autres, and, even if that doesn't actually do anything on a large scale, at least make the administration look like they're taking a hard stance.
There are many purposes, but yes, the idea is to encourage self deportation, and discourage illegal crossings, by making the environment not feel overwhelmingly pro-illegal as it has for most of the past 30 years.
This is a good target for that, but it also just seems like an insanely flagrant violation that couldn't be ignored once anyone at ICE got a whiff of it. This is one of the highest paid public employees in a swing state.
anti_dan
7d ago
My son is of that age now so we watched the 1960s 101 Dalmatians which has a delightful little sketch where a fake TV show, "Whats my Crime" is playing. I think now is the perfect time for someone to actually make a show like that.
What are some other fake shows that need to be made in 2025?
anti_dan
9d ago
Most of those issues for teachers are self-inflicted wounds. If they stopped pretending school can solve social problems as part of their demands for ever increasing funding such expectations wouldn't be imposed on them
But Somalia's government isn't incapable of stopping pirates because theoretically. It doesn't care to because the people don't care to. And/or there aren't enough functional people in somalia to erect a state with that sort of state capacity.
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