ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
Maybe I'm underestimating you guys, but Kharg seems a bit dangerous. Even the strait Islands feel risky. I've seen someone make the argument they're likely to go for the coast just before the strait. It apparently is inhabited mostly by some Persian-unfriendly ethnic minority, so should be easier to hold.
US elite consider us suckers, taking ideology/propaganda seriously, satisfied with an army unfit for operation outside US framework, weak internally, transparent.
If you spent a lot of time mingling with the American elites, and that's your honest assessment of them, fair enough. I can't say I've talked to them all that much.
I resent this, you don't know what you're talking about. There is not a shred of inferiority complex in a typical Pole; he is cynical, a pessimist. Appearance of strength is enough for outsiders, not for people invested in the outcome.
Oh, I know quite a fair bit, actually. #NotAll, but if you've ran into someone who not only complains about his country, but goes out of their way to convince you that his country is shit, and does so over your explicit expression of genuine admiration, you're almost certainly talking to a Pole. Cynicism and pessimism? There's a difference between lack of trust and expecting the worst, and self-abasing yourself in front of others with expressions like "retarded puppy" and "unserious country". Yes, appearance of strength is for outsiders. In private there's nothing wrong with a sergeant screaming profanities at his men to whip them into shape, but there are also things that are not for outsiders' eyes, and performative self-flagellation is one of them. Even with all this, I could write it down to peculiarities of culture, and go with your explanation, if it wasn't for the tendency to put some foreign country on a pedestal, and chase them down every retarded suicidal trend they come up with. Which one it's going to be depends on one's political views, but if it's not the US, it's usually Germany or the nordics.
Maybe there's a better term for this than "inferiority complex" but it sure as hell is more than just cynicism and pessimism.
A country in our position should have domestic arms industry fit for modern war, own satellite recon, civil defence and reserve at Finnish level, elite loyal and capable of running a nuclear program without someone instantly running to snitch to the US. We don't have any of this due to a combination of skill issues, bad historical luck, and meddling.
You've pulled yourself out of a literal gutter within a single generation. It's good you don't want to rest on your laurels, but none of the countries around you are particularly serious by this standard.
I reject this framing, by the way. In fact, with the inability to keep trade routes open under even slight pressure, and the benefits of European integration into the NATO, the US is the freeloading party.
I've seen 3 views put forward about the US' relationship with Europe:
-
Americans are the good guys, ensuring the world's stability purely out of the kindness of their hearts, and doing so despite the ingratitude of the parties they're helping
-
America and Europe voluntarily entered into an agreement, where Europe gets security in return for strategic deference.
-
The post-WW2 order is an American scheme to keep Europe down and ensure it will never be able to rival. or even be independent of, the US.
My personal view falls somewhere between #2 and #3. I've never heard of your view #4 "America is getting so much out of """European integration into NATO""" that they're the freeloaders, actually", and it feels about as naive as view #1 to me.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7hr ago
That doesn't seem right to me, because even though I agree with this specific criticism of Trump, and have called the decision to start the war a disaster, it still looks like blatant TDS to me. Neocons don't get to play doves.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11hr ago
The Atlantic wasn't good enough for you, huh?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14hr ago
That's the one! Was at the tip of my tongue, thanks!
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
22hr ago
It was wrong when Obama tried to do it with the Dear Colleague letter, and it is wrong when Trump tried to do it with the Harvard letter.
The problem is that Obama didn't just try, he actually did it, so it's just a normal part of business now, even if you or I are against it in principle.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
22hr ago
But a single individual unilaterally twisting an existing law in order to interfere with hiring and firing decisions of a university in a way that interferes with the basic educational mission of that university is a bridge too far for me
Is it? Isn't there some conservative college, who's name escapes me, that makes a point of not accepting any federal help so they aren't on the hook for Title IX, and all the other federal fuckery, and the Dems are still always looking for ways to force them to run it their way? Why is it so beyond the pale to put conditions on a university that does get federal money, then?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
22hr ago
21% is less than a quarter...?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
22hr ago
As for contempt in the US for Poland, among the elite, I'm positive it is there. They see us as an unserious country with weak elite core, and fair enough.
Doesn't Poland often get honorable mention as the non-freeloading part of NATO from the American elites? And what's with this "unserious country" nonsense? No one on the western side talks about it like that anymore, you gotta ditch that inferiority complex of yours.
They also sent tons of hardware (something to the tune of 400 tanks, IIRC), but the logic wasn't just "NATO will protect us" (which, again IIRC, is a gamble - isn't the official battle plan to start giving proper resistance at the Oder river?), it was also (if not more) "if they steamroll Ukraine, we'll be in a much worse position to defend ourselves".
Either way, none of it says anything about "seathing contempt".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
23hr ago
but following that up with, "Oh, and you've got to hire who we tell you to, and give us control of your admissions process so you admit more conservative students" was cuckoo bananas.
How? Academics throughout the country openly admit they discriminate not political/idealogical grounds. What exactly is wrong with telling them to knock it off, if they want to keep getting federal goodies?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Poland doesn't have burning seathing contempt for the US, or vice versa, get real. What they do have is Russia next door to them.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
But the harm is, so far, smaller.
What is the evidence for that?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Doesn't sound like something I could recognize as good. Even the stability argument is falling flat on it's face, given how much pushback it's generating.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Sometimes it feels like TheMotte is stuck in 2020. Woke is over. Trump is president. MAGA won. Where is the America that was promised ?
We're only one year in, and we're not even at a fraction of the measures put forward by the woke. Wake me up after a decade of progressives getting booted from their jobs for expressing their opinions off the clock.
Maybe woke wasn't so bad after all.
So contrarian. Much shock. How about you elaborate on what you find good about it, if you actually believe it?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
That said, wasn't the whole HR-mandated woke stuff kind of exaggerated to begin with?
No, it's not. Thr claim was never particularly believable even at the start of the SocJus trend, and it's even less believable after years of every major company draping itself in rainbow flags every June.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Normally I would too, but...
- Remember son, never trust the Jews!
- You know nothing, father! I've made lots of Jewish friends this year, they're nothing like you say.
- Oh god, Donny, what have you done?!
- My name is Adrianna now!
Is not the most fortunate look.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Because we're talking about how to fix these vulnerabilities that we supposedly have (but nobody can prove we have).
To go with your example, I don't have to prove someone entered through an open door, to make the argument that an open door to be a vulnerability.
If people are getting into your house somehow, why are you talking about bolting your second story windows shut if you leave your door unlocked? You're technically making your house more secure, but that's not the problem.
Checking for ID is locking your front door.
Second of all, "security" isn't inherently worth it. A grocery store could require keys to get into the "employee only" section, but if no customers are walking in then it's not just "well it's more secure" it's "I spent time adding locks and now my employees constantly have to lock and unlock it just to solve a non-problem."
Depending on what you have inside the "employee only" section, putting locks on it is absolutely worth the time, even if no one tried to enter there yet, and your approach is insane.
Literally every crime has a chance to fuck up.
Ok, but if you don't know what that chance is, you can't tell me whether the low number of detected crimes is due to there not being many crimes, or of a piss poor detection rate.
And here you do the thing where you neglect to clip the part that answers that.
Because it doesn't answer it. The whole point of adding extra conditions to prevent the issues you're worrying about.
Also, if you just won't agree to it, even if your conditions are met, than the whole "Dems say they will agree if voter ID is free and can be gotten conveniently for people who have limited time/transportation." was just a straight up lie.
As above, you avoid engaging with the idea that people think Republican laws are actively intended to harm Democratic voter turnout.
I'm not avoiding it, I'm telling you it's not relevant. It was specifically made irrelevant by the "if voter ID is free and can be gotten conveniently for people who have limited time/transportation".
Upsides of voter ID
Downsides of voter ID
Those are literally the same dynamics as the police cams. Your downsides boil down to cost, and the upsides of body cams, and all the "Republicans will just make up something else" is literally what happened with the Democrats and body cams.
The people who tend to believe in one tend to believe in the other, but if voter ID wouldn't stop insider fraud then I see no reason to link the two.
I'm not sure why you would separate them. Any vulnerability is a vulnerability an insider can exploit, so the fewer of them you have, the better. It's just basic principles of security.
Apologies, here is the link.
This seems to confirm what I said earlier - there are several states that don't ask for any form of ID at the time of voting.
Let's say that there is a 99% chance to successfully fraudulently vote and a 1% chance to get caught. If 10,000 fraudulent votes were cast we might expect 100 failures. Yet we've found and punished either 17 or 34 (Heritage lists 34, but 17 sounded to me like they might have been mistagged) in 40 years.
Ok, but where does the 99%/1% number come from?
They do? A common refrain is that Dems say they will agree if voter ID is free and can be gotten conveniently for people who have limited time/transportation.
Yeah, I wasn't referring to random redditors. I was thinking more of Dem senators putting it forward as a condition for voting for the SAVE act.
The reason I and I think the DNC don't push for this is because again I don't think it's really happening
Irrelevant. Progressives wanted body cams due to their belief in widespread racism in policing, which wasn't really happening either, the correct response was still to let them have exactly what they asked for. Same principle applies here.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
I think it's pretty disputable whether there was anything unique about American ethnicity, culture, language, or religion either. But I'd also say nationhood is a "fake it 'till you make it" endeavour generally. Even many European nations were kinda fake at the time of their inception.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
They had a choice between a leader who was personally conservative and a leader who would drag their name through the mud
What good is a leader that's personally conservative, if he'll let your kids get transed, and import 7 zillion immigrants?
while not actually accomplishing any of their goals
For all is faults, Trump did do more than any "conservative" leader I watched over my lifetime. The 180 on the war with Iran is a disaster, but that idea seems to be coming from the faction of the conservative movement you're actually praising, so I have no idea what your issue is.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
Maybe all these solar panels can be converted into a giant Archimedes' Mirror?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
After 100 years of scientific and technological progress, the workers are not starving any more, how great!
Something that the commies were struggling with despite the same technological progress...
Communism was never about higher pay and longer lunch breaks for proletarians, and it was ever less about wokeness and LGBTQ+. It was about building new world, world free of all oppression and exploitation
I know communism includes some crazy utopians thinking the oceans will turn to lemonade, but I thought it also had some hard-headed people mostly preoccupied with the material conditions of the working class.
Also totalitarian states running on command economies are not what I'd call "free of all oppression and exploitation".
Most of the interview is about the vanished world of interwar Europe, but here is how he feels about modernity.
Yeah, and if an early Christian managed to live 10 centuries I'm pretty sure he'd say how fucking awesome it is that we converted all the heathens. Most of what he's saying sounds pretty copey.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5d ago
I think the bigger issue is that there really isn't a Palestinian people.
Now do Ukraine. Or America for that matter.
It's not the MAGA that's the issue, it's the neocon elites that would be cause trouble here. We'd probably see the home front revert into Trump-I state, possibly worse.
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