I do sometimes wonder how a military determines the appropriate size of a strike to launch in order to send a sufficiently stern message but with minimal risk of actually crossing a line that isn't easily uncrossed.
Requires accurate estimates of your opponent's defensive capabilities and expect that they'll be able to intercept enough that the damage is limited.
I suppose the selection of targets is more important overall, if you can mitigate loss of life AND not strike something that the other side finds particularly valuable then there's less risk of some miscalculation causing worse consequences.
One memorable scene from the SciFi Series The Expanse sees the forces of the Earth Military blow up one of Mars' Moons which was itself the response to the Martian Military destroying one of Saturn's moons which housed an earth-controlled research station. The argument being "a barely populated rock in exchange for a barely-populated rock" was a fair tit-for-tat to discourage further aggression.
BUT, (light spoilers) the actual underlying intention of certain players on Earth was to trigger an all-out war and they were hoping that blowing up a moon that close to the home planet would actually lead to immediate retaliation/escalation. (/light spoilers)
I thought it was a good illustration of how these sorts of calls end up being made, AND the delicate dance that it can entail when you risk misapprehending your opponent and what you think is a slap on the wrist could be an unforgivable offense to them.
faceh
14d ago
The eternal question is 'compared to WHAT?'
Feudalism 'works.'
Slavery 'works.' We had it in place for eons of human history. Rome was built on slavery, and Rome outlasted the USSR in pure duration.
And perhaps the oldest 'economic' system of all: invading the neighboring tribe, killing them, and taking their shit 'works.' It still gets some use in the current age.
But if there's a system that is completely outperformed along all the metrics that actually matter, and the alternative system survives over the long term, 'working' is not a sufficiently convincing qualifier.
Capitalism (admitting that the definition is somewhat ambiguous) solves virtually any economic 'problem' you throw at it, and it does so more effectively than any other system we've devised or evolved so far. I don't think there's ever been ANY country that collapses due to being "Too capitalistic."
So I don't hold my breath than any of the current contenders are going to replace it.
faceh
9d ago
I don't think you can confidently rely on an adverse party's word when judging whether their actions, even negotiated in advance, don't conceal alternate intentions which will only be revealed when they are taken.
Why would you think "Iran says that was it" is good evidence when Iran can say whatever they want but do something else entirely?
That's not even an uncommon tactic.
Russia was of course claiming the troops along Ukraine's border were a training exercise or what-have-you right up until they crossed over.
Famously, many Russian troops themselves didn't know the plan was an actual invasion.
So I'm not inclined to be CONFIDENT that any given action is what the adverse party is saying just because they say it.
I'm standing by my commentary on this:
Literally nothing Rowling has actually said or done indicates she believes anything other than bog-standard third-wave feminism, applied to the current social environment. The current 'threat' to women, as she sees it, are those who are eroding the biological definition of 'female' and thus allowing biological males to invade women's spaces and likewise pose an emotional or physical danger, to the detriment of biological women.
It is not on any level a surprise that an ardent feminist who maintains a stricter definition of 'female' would see this as a bad thing, and speak out against it.
It does not require her to have a single bit of animus towards trans people as a class, or any individual trans person.
It just requires her to continue applying the same pro-female beliefs she's applied for decades. Nothing is inconsistent or hypocritical there.
The version of her words that is being presented by the activists who hate her is leading me to conclude they are not convinced that she's a danger to trans people, but rather she's an impediment to their broader social agenda who must be removed at all costs, and they are increasingly distressed and annoyed that she will not cowtow and has the platform and wealth to fight back.
i.e. they want to squish a dissident and every year that passes where she resists them makes them ever more determined to do so, and thus employ ever more aggressive methods.
Does anyone still 'collect' music (i.e. keep locally stored copies in some kind of organized database, regardless of format) in the current age of ubiquitous streaming?
I assume that Spotify (and the rest) has all but killed the idea of 'keeping' music on your local computer or phone amongst the youth.
As someone who has a music collection going back to when I first started obsessively ripping CDs to my PC in my teens, I find that I mostly keep doing it through force of habit, and the slight fear that things I like might disappear. Some of the older files in my collection are hard or impossible to find online these days. But with so many different streaming options and, now, an AI that can produce radio-quality music in seconds it seems like there's really no point to keeping a large local music collection unless its related to your career in some way.
So if you DO still store music locally, what are your reasons and methods?
That's about the most sane take possible, to be quite honest.
The reason 'tech' has gotten so far without being regulated is simply because Gov't doesn't understand it, and it moves/changes so fast that they can't get out ahead of it to put down serious roadblocks before its already jumped to the next big thing. They've only JUST NOW sort of caught up with Social Media tech with this recent TikTok bill.
Also the general gridlock and incompetence that's accumulated lately.
Now that the tech sector is becoming more centralized, it is more legible to government actors since they can identify the chokepoints to control to bring the industry and customers to heel.
So expect it to keep getting worse, but slowly, and in fits and starts, even if there is no grand central conspiracy.
Perhaps the even more blackpilling perspective is that this is just how things naturally trend when there's a 'commons' resource that manages to elude being exploited and enclosed by existing entrenched players. Free Software is a somewhat nonclassical example of a 'commons' that throws off tons of benefits as externalities. Lord knows I've used dozens upon dozens of free, open source, and other non-commercialized programs over the years. I hate hate hate the idea of subscribing to a piece of software I'd only use intermittently and, even after paying, could lose use of at any time.
VLC, Windirstat, 7zip, GIMP, LibreOffice and Coretemp, just off the top of my head are some of my favorites that each have a very specific role and do it very well (or well enough) so I can thumb my nose at commercial alternatives.
But unlike a 'classic' commons, the software well can never 'run dry' since as long as someone, somewhere is willing to eat the (trivial!) cost of hosting the software download, then copies can be distributed endlessly without ever depleting the supply, and the marginal cost of each additional copy rounds to zero.
But every other player in this system aside from the cooperative users sees this commons as an opportunity. And what they always want to do is enclose the commons, exclude free-riders, parcel it up, and then sell access to it. If you can make people pay even $1/copy for something they were previously getting for 'free,' you've diverted part of that that huge 'surplus' into your pocket.
You already see the low-grade version of this with sites that will re-host free software but bundle it with something else that they can use to make money, or at least have ads on the download site.
So whether it's governments cracking down, OSes limiting the code that can be run to an approved list you have to pay to get on, or Software companies buying up the licenses to open-source software and shutting down the free distribution of same (apparently the VLC guy has turned down sizable offers), eventually this commons WILL be enclosed, and you WILL be made to pay to acquire and use it on your own machine. For now, at least, you're allowed to fork projects before they sell out.
Of course, I also worry that they're going to remove consumer access to hardware altogether, allowing you to only purchase gimped, centrally controlled machines and most of the programs you run will be on an Amazon Web Server somewhere such that if they DID decide to lock out certain software, you wouldn't even be able to futz with the machine itself to hack it into compliance.
Because whenever the market sees some kind of consumer surplus, the incentives ultimately push it to attack it from every possible angle until it wiggles in and can consume said surplus, returning us to the 'efficient' equilibrium it really wants to maintain. And since you can't really get rich by advocating for open-source software, few are likely going to man the wall to defend the surplus against these attacks.
I think discussion has been slow simply because the news itself has been slow. The American culture war has entered its trench warfare phase,
This has been my feeling as well.
We're literally facing down a repeat of the 2020 election, and so the battle lines are already very well defined, with maybe some defections one could note here and there.
Trump is a 'known' quantity. Virtually nothing he can say should shock anyone. The left still sees him as the fascist boogeyman. Anyone who could be convinced of that is already convinced.
There's an active tug-of-war over the trans issue, especially as it pertains to kids. Issues like same-sex marriage, gun control, and abortion have taken a backseat to this almost across the board.
Honestly it seems like most people who are active culture war participants know exactly what their goals are, have a decent idea of who their allies are, and are now just probing around for effective ways to advance their cause and break the 'stalemate' that has somewhat emerged.
Israel-Palestine is still a hot fight where it's not clear where things will fall, but against the backdrop of world events right now, seems like small potatoes?
All that said, expect another flurry of activity in the immediate leadup and aftermath of the election because no matter who wins the other side is being heavily primed to simply not accept it as legitimate.
Yeah...
I am old enough to remember, even though it's now been about 4 years, Nancy Pelosi telling people to go out and Celebrate Lunar New Year (as in telling people to go out in public around large groups) when fear of Coronavirus was right-coded. Its right there in an official communication.
This position was, later, switched towards banning any sort of large gatherings altogether.
Which THEN switched to allow people to gather as long as it was a BLM protest.
I saw this with my own eyes in real time, while all the while I'm becoming increasingly afraid of the implications of the virus itself and the politicization crippling our ability to respond to it.
I could pull my old posts from the motte subreddit at the time to back this up.
The left initiated almost every major action that drove the politicization of Covid.
Some days it seems like having memory better than a goldfish is a superpower.
faceh
15d ago
I don't know of any app or tech that lets you play your own local music collection but intersperses songs from a given streaming service for better variety and to emulate a more radio-esque experience. That'd be a pretty neat use case.
Last.FM scrobbling can track your music preferences across different players, that much I know.
I like using streaming services for discovering new music, and I would like to implement one-click way to download a good song and rip it to my library. I probably use youtube music more than youtube itself these days.
But I'm increasingly questioning the goal of having such a library. Pass it on to my kids? A backup in case the internet goes down? Am I the equivalent of a boomer hoarding 8 tracks or something?
Not even joking, the main goal of having such a library might be for the Friendly AGI overlord to find my hard drive and divine my music tastes so it can produce ideal songs for me to enjoy for eternity.
As someone who has not read the books but certainly enjoyed the first film (never seen Lynch's take either, though the memes from that have percolated into my brain), and also enjoy Villineuve's brand of filmmaking (Blade Runner 2049 was a triumph, I don't think Scott himself could have made such a sequel) it hit all the buttons I'd want but also left me somewhat dissatisfied.
Mainly:
A) Minimal additional worldbuilding. The tiny bits and hints of 'how things work', some of which were directly stated and some which were merely hinted made the first film engaging and rewards a second watch. Second one seemed to throw certain concepts at us without giving out the information needed to understand what it means. Lack of mentats and guild navigators has me wondering WHY a shortage of spice was such a critical issue for anyone but the Harkonnens who had to make a lot of money fast.
B) Christopher Walken can monologue with the best of them and always delivers. Even when the movie is shit. Feels like a huge waste to not give him his minute or so to shine, EVEN IF the minute was used to purposefully show the emperor's desperation and decline.
C) Similarly, the motivation and stakes of the emperor arriving on Arrakis seemed unclear. Might have been helpful to know just how much his attempted show of power on Arrakis 'cost' him to pull off, given how we're informed that the earlier anti-Atreides battalions mostly bankrupt the Harkonnens, bringing the full army to bear must have been prohibitive. How much did it deplete the emperor's wealth to show up? Was there anything particularly special about his ship?
D) This is going to sound 'heretical' (heh) but SO MUCH of the movie was set in the desert environment that it made the universe really feel smallish. Yes, I get that Arrakis is literally the most important planet there is, and the entire universe hinges on who controls it. It's the damn title of the series. But it's worth noting that the scenes on Gaedi-Prime this time around were the most memorable overall for me, so I kind of wanted to see the 'diversity' of environments present in the imperium. Being honest, though, this was probably compensated for by peeling back the layers on Fremen culture (which also counts as worldbuilding, so partially obviating my first complaint up there).
That said, hard to be truly critical of such a well-crafted experience. Feyd-Rautha. I have no notes, honestly. The brilliant move of having him sound like Baron Harkonnen immediately makes you disdain him by association, while explaining said Baron's affection for the guy and why he's the preferred heir. He's established as clear danger/threat but also very much NOT invincible, which is to say actually tactical and intelligent and not just handed everything he needs to threaten the protagonist by plot fiat.
All-in-all, the one who honestly carried the films for me was Lady Jessica. As an effective personification of the Bene Gesserit's influence, virtually every scene she's in you can see her nudging outcomes but you're never certain where. There was no point when she seemed irrelevant and even the slightly more ridiculous concept of her chatting it up with her unborn child was done with gravitas. Hats off.
You comment on the lack of reference to the Butleran Jihad, but I think part of the brilliance of the two films is managing to DEFY straitforward analogy to 'present day' political, economic, or cultural issues. The movie manages to be meaty and yet escapist at the same time, I was more than happy to immerse myself in the world (despite craving more detail) that they had crafted and forget real world issues for 3 hours. Reminded me of when movies were consistently able to present epic, mindblowing entertainment that carried you out of your own world for the duration.
I would suggest that there IS still a basic life script... but there are now way more failure modes that can suck someone in and divert them from the script, often inescapably so, so life is harsher to those who aren't able, for various reasons, to detect and avoid these pitfalls before moloch snags them in his maw.
The number of ways to drastically and unknowingly screw your life trajectory up has grown. There are superstimuli everywhere, controlled by faceless entities/egregores that are exceedingly efficient at parting you from your money and depleting your wellbeing.
Go to college on loans and get a degree that has poor employment/salary prospects, spend a few years spinning wheels trying to make the career in that field before throwing in the towel and accepting some blase corporate job, leaving yourself in your mid-late twenties with a pile of debt and no meaningful experience, which you have to climb out of before your life really 'begins.'
Get addicted to one of the nastier drugs and even if you don't end up overdosing on Fent or becoming a zombified husk, you're still torpedoing your ability to acquire and hold down a decent job, stay out of jail, and achieve financial stability.
Acquire some modest life savings which you burn up in the crypto markets, or betting on stocks, or a more standard gambling addiction, given how gambling is increasingly ubiquitous, leaving you with nothing to show for it. Also the brazen and sophisticated scams that are constantly seeking out marks these days.
And, honestly, if you marry and knock up/are knocked up by the wrong partner, this can leave you pretty irretrievably damaged if they choose to go full nuclear when the relationship falls apart.
Also way easier to become a grossly obese blob. And/or a NEET.
U.S. society is rich enough that you can continue to putter along after suffering one of the above setbacks (except the overdose death), but you'll pretty much be relegated to financial destitution unless you stumble into one of the much rarer positive black swan events that gets you set for life.
And many people chasing those positive black swans get pwned by the above because accepting risk has all kinds of foreseeable AND unforeseeable effects.
No, I don't think past societies had better guardrails, and certainly, obviously had their share of risks, too. But I reckon that outside of traumatic physical injury/disfigurement (and even then!) it was much easier for the average young adult to recover from mistakes, move on, and get a 'fresh start' even if they dicked around most of their twenties. There were fewer 'instant fail' conditions that would render you unable to continue as a functional member of society..
faceh
1mo ago
You know, for clarity's sake, I'll specify that those endowed with legislative authority in Gov't don't really understand it.
Plenty of agencies snap up tech-savvy employees, especially in the intelligence branches, and they presumably get regular briefings on new tech developments.
Finance is a funny bird because of the revolving-door between the regulatory agencies and the financial institutions. Gov't "understands" finance because the industries are heavily tied together, which is not (currently) the case with the tech industry.
4chan was massively toxic but the anonymity and completely ephemeral nature of the threads meant you could just... walk away and nothing would follow you.
No long-term social consequences. No need to worry that someone would e-mail your boss (well, minimal, if they captured your personal info it could be merciless). You could get trolled into an incandescent rage and then the thread would fall off the board and that was that.
The current version of social media is putting your personal identity next to every opinion you ever uttered and storing it for years on end, often making it trivial to search it up later.
Which lends itself to people policing themselves and each other more heavily, and empowers targeted, relentless bullying.
faceh
14d ago
I've been willing to pay a couple bucks to rent a film for a movie night, but I do feel utterly betrayed when something I've bookmarked for later consumption is pulled when I actually go to watch it.
My habit now is if there's a series or something I'm watching with friends, I'll download local copies just in case.
TO BE FAIR, I don't want it to be 'true' either, in the sense that I wish the truth was something different, even if the underlying idea of humans having diverse phenotypes which have impacts on behavior were true.
Any joy I'd get for being a member of a 'superior' group dissipates when considering how my own capability to effect change is practically nonexistent.
I'd prefer the world where HBD was 'true' but IQ and cognition were a bit more malleable (in the positive direction, hit someone in the head with a hammer and it's malleable downward). Then we could probably cooperate towards a better place on the payoff matrix where the tradeoffs aren't so severe.
There are a ton of failure modes for that world too, don't get me wrong. But the world we're currently working with has molochian incentives that we currently can't budge without committing certain atrocities (which wouldn't guarantee success!) is endlessly frustrating.
Imagine by comparison that we figured out that the laws of physics somehow dictated that it was impossible to get a human-sized payload past the orbit of the moon without investing literal continent's worth of resources to it. To the point where we would have to simply accept that we were stuck on this planet and whatever resources lay beyond are simply not going to be available.
I'd hate that truth, and would rage against it, but ultimately the universe would care just as much about out fate whether it is true or not.
Instead, thankfully, getting past lunar orbit is merely very difficult but affordable.
Kinda like how the potential brainpower we as a species can marshall is limited by our number of geniuses and most humans are just not able to contribute meaningfully to the advancement of the species. If we could reach an intelligence 'takeoff' where we could boost low IQ humans to some reasonable degree then we could be improving our lifestyles a lot faster than we are.
And we're getting to the point where a broad 'uplift' of human intelligence might fall into that 'very difficult but affordable' category. Or it could be a long way off, but at least its visible.
How are you supposed to deal with that without becoming utterly nihilistic?
Reframe your locus of concern to yourself, your immediate family, and your local community, and see what if anything you can do there.
It is entirely possible for a particularly committed (and wealthy, in this case) individual to push back against entropy/moloch in their local environment. Care less about the fate of 'humanity' in the abstract (aside from existential risks) and more about the humans within your personal dunbars number.
Effect change where you can effect change. That's how you avoid nihilism.
You can have a case that just seems obviously, incontrovertibly correct, but if you've got a justice that already decided what they'd like to do, it's not very hard for them to use brilliant legal reasoning to do what they want to do.
Probably the most frustrating aspect of legal practice when you're autistically determined to reach the 'right' conclusion as a matter of law.
You can come armed to the teeth with precedent, facts, and legal argumentation and if you run into a Judge who is dead set on ruling a certain way you can 'lose' when they either rely on some particularly ambiguous precedent or some esoteric dissent or some novel legal concept they pulled straight from thin air (or read in a creative law review journal).
The Spirit of Aloha, for example.
Hence why I prefer when the Supreme Court sets out rules that at least sort of tie the law to something tangible and mostly immovable, rather than trying to weave increasingly intricate webs of reasoning to maintain an increasingly farcical standard which keeps collapsing when it comes into contact with the real world.
faceh
1mo ago
There's a solid point that the U.S. being able to offer a higher standard of living than virtually anywhere else is its single greatest power to tempt defection and dissuade its own defectors. As you say, if you defect somewhere you don't have immediate cultural ties, you'll almost certainly end up living a far crappier lifestyle once the initial rewards for your valorous actions are spent.
Like how in the Hunt for Red October the defectors manage to persuade themselves that American life will be idyllic if they can pull it off.
faceh
2mo ago
you can go to whichever one you want
Hahaha right except there's also admissions processes that very much filter for the exact types of people they want to attend. Let us ignore affirmative action putting its thumb on the scale.
And many colleges have removed the one requirement that at least tried to be objective.
And you can get your admission rescinded if they find your behavior as a youth undesirable
So yes, its always possible to take your student loans elsewhere, but let us not pretend that there is equal bargaining power on any level, where the market is relatively frictionless.
And that leaves aside that whatever remaining value there is in the universities mostly comes from the prestige attached to the credential or, perhaps, the social connections it allows you to make, so WHICH university you go to absolutely matters.
So really, you're hiding behind the fact that the decision to attend university is 'voluntary,' while ignoring that getting into a university is influenced by factors beyond individual students' control, that their funding is usually coming out of public coffers, and they don't need your consent to revoke your admissions, scholarships, or suspend you for behavior that is neither violent nor illegal.
So perhaps the issue isn't quite what you're suggesting it is.
faceh
14d ago
Yeah and probably best practices to not do that.
I'm gonna tap the sign.
My position is that I like meritocracy, and I also understand that 'merit' has a bit of a floating definition that means different things to different people. There is probably no true 'objective' measure of merit that we can calculate, and certainly not one everyone will automatically accept.
Be that as it may.
Subjectively all I am asking for is assurances that your attempts to tweak the numbers toward your preferred distribution are tied to responsibility for outcomes that results in that you are on the hook for, and ideally that YOU are eating the cost of those tweaks both up front and on the back end.
If you're going to MANDATE racial quotas of one form or another, and also extend special protections to those who engage in such quotas, and also actively try to deflect any blame for the possible harms/negative outcomes people point out, then I'm going to have a problem. I of course will apply this logic to those who insist that we should have white people in charge of everything too.
Fundamentally, my objection is actually not that Harvard Et al. have racial preferences in admissions, I object to Harvard Et al. getting paid by a government that redistributes the gains of society so Harvard incurs no risk when selecting students (i.e. shields Harvard from consequences, to some extent) AND that Harvard Et al. are acting as gatekeepers into the very halls of the elite and upper echelons of government that are deciding how these racial preferences are defined and how the money is distributed. Nobody at any point in this chain has any 'skin in the game' that will filter them out if they turn out to be making bad/wrong decisions (defined here as those decisions that actually harm people they are charged with representing/assisting).
For example, HBCUs tend not to bother me in the least, I don't really begrudge blacks having a college 'set aside' for them, provided they're not teaching/endorsing hardcore racial animus. They have a 'plausible' argument that a school designed by and staffed by blacks may be better suited to providing for and supporting the education of other (culturally similar) blacks. I don't buy the need to protect the students from racism, but I see a tight feedback loop where the decisionmakers are directly accountable to most stakeholders.
Are HBCUs "anti-meritocratic?" From the 10,000 foot up view, probably! But they are presumably 'allowed' to impose their own internal version of 'meritocracy' that selects for features that aren't colorblind and advances a goal that isn't defined merely by "the best person for the job as defined by test scores and performance."
Just, don't force my participation.
So the question is, if Harvard is having an outsized influence on who gets to be President, who gets on the Supreme Court, who becomes CEO of huge corporations, and various other privileges enjoyed by elites, where exactly can I, a mere state-school peon, register any particular grievances I may have if the people they're putting out are not actually good at their jobs and are causing problems which directly impact my life?
faceh
1mo ago
You're on point with this. This is also why many states offer the ability to "seal" and/or "expunge" your criminal records... conditional on not committing particularly severe offenses.
With an expunged record you can truthfully state that you "have no criminal record" and have no convictions or even arrests that might turn up on a background check. And indeed, a standard background check would not turn up any such incident.
This matters a lot if you're a young person who got pinned for a misdemeanor and doesn't want to have this interfere with your attempts to kick off your career. Also why Judges sometimes employ leniency with young persons even when the offense is rather heinous, because someone is unlikely to return to the straight-and-narrow ever again if an early conviction cuts off most legitimate employment.
The next best thing is to have a plea of 'not guilty' on your record and as you say a consistent pattern of denials even if ultimately you get found guilty. You can at least claim that there was some crooked prosecutor or corrupt cops who fabricated evidence (it happens) and railroaded you for [reasons] and that you genuinely to this day protest your innocence.
This stops working very quickly the longer your rap sheet gets.
The other practical reason to stay in denial mode is because if you get caught on tape or within earshot of a reliable witness admitting guilt, that confession mostly torpedoes your ability to negotiate with the prosecutor because that confession, if admissible, simplifies their job immensely and means they are more willing to take the case to a jury and use your own words against you.
So if you risk possibly incriminating yourself by uttering a confession in any context, its safer to lie to every single person you interact with so none of them turn up on the witness stand later, and ONLY be willing to admit guilt after a favorable plea bargain has been obtained.
Incidentally, there's your logic for why the fifth amendment enshrines a right against self-incrimination.
There is definitely a worrisome idea I've played around with where at some point technology allows nigh-complete surveillance of the populace (not necessarily full control,) of every public movement, every financial transaction, and every piece of media consumed, and once the basic techs needed for this are available, whichever ideological group happens to be in power will then be impossible to remove.
So whichever ideological group happens to be in power when the proverbial 'music' stops wins that particular game of musical chairs.
I think that might at least partially explain why lefties absolutely LOSE THEIR SHIT at the idea of Trump (or any righty) ascending to the Presidency, as if somehow Trump happens to be at the helm when we hit the point of no return, they realize that they might not be able to remove him... ever... just because he happened to be the guy 'in charge' when the switch was flipped.
This assumes AI doesn't kill us all, however.
We lucked out that it wasn't the fascists who were in control, but I'd rather not have the current elites locked into power either.
Taps.
The.
Alright, admittedly the internal systems at these entities sure seem better at catching and punishing their own, but I can see almost zero way they're held accountable to those outside the institution.
Part of this reads mostly like the natural outcome of people realizing they can (in theory) get wealthy by helping others exploit the U.S.'s overall ineptitude. Although a lot of them seem to be the cause of the apparent ineptitude. Right now the ability to influence the U.S. to take or withhold from taking a particular action on the international stage may be the single highest value service on the planet. There's no real hope of any other country militarily 'defeating' us but if you can get the U.S. to bomb another country or refuse to support one side of a civil war, then you can be relatively sure that other countries will go along without much complaint.
So intelligence and counter-intelligence are able to achieve outsize effects if they are successful.
I don't know precisely how you could balance out the interest of "we are a clandestine organization that needs to operate with minimal exposure to the public and maximal discretion to act without immediate accountability" and "there needs to be someone NOT beholden to the organization keeping an eye on us to jerk the reins when we misbehave."
I suppose the position of Royal Spymaster will always end up occupied by a figure who will use access to high level intelligence and intrigue to obfuscate his actions so as to avoid accountability. Seems like the question is mostly How do you filter candidates heavily enough that a guy like Beria to run things.
Got some of those in the 'leadership' positions independently wealthy.
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