functor
3mo ago
Why would it be practical to genocide millions of people and piss off the entire middle east? Israel provides little benefit at an enormous cost. The sensible solution is to dump Israel and befriend the arab states.
functor
6mo ago
How is demolishing mosques, spitting on Christians, urinating on dead Palestinians and bombing entire apartment buildings less gruesome? Israel is far more violent and kills far more Palestinians while there war has a much bigger impact on Palestinian expansion.
functor
21d ago
I don't think this is surprising. A lot of Ukraine's ability to resist was predicated on US assistance, which has become increasingly rare due to resistance from House Republican leadership.
It was never realistic to support Ukraine.
The defence industrial base has been slaughtered for 33 years. Most of the industrial base isn't doing magic military stuff but is tied into the overall industrial base which was shipped to China. There aren't that many welders, factory workers and machinists left. The idea that we have an advantage because our GDP is so high since we have socialmedia companies worth a fortune ignores that technically minded people in the west are working at a fin tech startup instead of a factory. When it comes to mass manufacturing pieces of steel financial hubs won't do well. The US sees itself as economically superior because smart americans work with insurance, investment banking and Netflix while Russians work in a tractor factory. The tractor factory will produce far more mortars than Netflix.
The US military isn't very army heavy. The US military is to a large extent a medical and pension scheme with military appended to it. Most of that military is navy and airforce with the army only being a minor part. The army is geared toward low intensity policing missions in the middle east, not fighting on the eastern front. NATO wasted trillions on fighting in the Middle East. That money had to come from somewhere and the industrial base took a big hit. The industrial base turned into manufacturing prototypes and small series of extremely expensive gear for special forces.
NATO equipment is maintenance heavy, expensive, incredibly hard to use and not designed for the mission at hand.
Just fixing the sorry state of NATO militaries would be a Herculean effort. The industrial base is barely able to replace the equipment from the cold war that needs to be retired. Now it is tasked with the additional tasks of feeding Israel and Ukraine fighting wars in a scale much larger than any European military was scoped for. Meanwhile China can pump out artillery shells, SAMs, ships and hand grenades at a rate that we simply can't.
functor
1mo ago
Russia had no issue with Ukraine doing business with the west. It was the west who demanded that Ukraine cuts ties with Russia. An infeasible demand when they had millions of Russians in the country and deep economic ties to Russia. Western intelligence was deeply involved in the 2014 coup. Then our politicians who freak out over "it is ok to be white" had no problem funding people wearing swastikas who wanted to drive panzers into Russian cities while banning the Russian orthodox church and prohibiting the use of the Russian language.
Continuously shelling the Donbass, Merkel outright admitting that they were disingenuous during negotiations in order to buy time to arm Ukraine and building CIA bases right on Russia's border points to the US provoking a war.
As for Ukraine's economy their GDP increased 600% between the year 2000 and 2013. Since joining Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria in being border states to the US empire, their GDP has collapsed by a third over a decade. The polish option was never an option for Ukraine. Poland's export is labour. Poland's birth rate was substantially higher than Ukraine's and they have far more young people to export. Ukraine is demographically a combination of Japan's birth rate and Venezuela's emigration rate. Exporting labour when the demographics are comparable to the collapse of the Roman empire isn't sustainable.
I am sure there are Ukrainians who are fighting thinking that they can become a truck driver in Germany if they join the west but this doesn't account for the overwhelming political support from the west.
functor
2mo ago
Funny how the western media loved a supposed nationalist. If Navalny's critique of Putin was that he wasn't nationalistic enough he would have gotten zero-support for Navalny. At best it would be like Ukrainian nationalism where they get to wave WWII paraphernalia while the government rams through neoliberal and culturally leftwing policies.
- But in terms of performance, it has also been a non-winner,
It took half the planet to stop two fascist countries. Had the US had the land Germany had and the Germans had had the British empire, US, Canada, Australia, France etc the war would have lasted a week.
inflicting great amounts of human misery on the species before collapsing under the strain of expansionist wars
It was the least expansionist of the ideologies. While liberal states continue on a rampage of expansionism across the middle east, latin America and eastern Europe fascist states were more non interventionist. Their focus was on building the homeland rather than trying to expand into Nepal.
Liberalism is a way for the elite to claim that they have no responsibility or noblesse oblige. They are just people and world citizens who happen to be richer. Liberalism was the merchant class wanting the privilege of the nobility without having the responsibility or the discipline of it. The current elite want to live like kings, yet they don't want to live like knights. The way forward is to replace natural rights (defined by who? enforced by who?) with natural order. Some people naturally fill certain rolls. Humans are a tribal species.
Liberalism's has an equivalent to communism's labour value of theory, aka the false axiom. For liberalism, it is the idea that humans randomly spawn on Earth. We didn't live in the garden of Eve and then decide to create society, we lived in tribes long before our species existed. There is no social contract, there are no free independent individuals and existing in a social structure isn't oppressive. A human in a social hierarchy isn't more oppressed than a zebra in a herd on the Savannah. The oppressed zebra is the lonely one.
functor
8mo ago
It is instictive. Women naturally fear men who have low quality genes. Rapists are often portrayed in media as rich men but in reality rape is a measure of last resort. Rape is the worst tactic for reproduction if a man has a choice. Women don't just find unappealing men not interesting, they find them revolting. Most guys don't really feel anything towards an unfortunate looking women. Life isn't meant to be fair, logically consistent or objective. We don't have a supremely rational and detached mind. We often rely on gut reactions based on what is evolutionarily advantageous. Throughout history women who avoided bottom tier men did better than those who befriended them.
functor
8mo ago
Suburbia is souless and atomizing conpared to traditional towns and cities. There aren't people on the streets, there are cars. There are no natural places to meet people, distances are vast and people are isolated in their fenced in homes. suburbia encourages loneliness. It is quite absurd that people are so isolated that they prefer being in a cubical just to have people around them.
functor
1yr ago
Humiliating and economically and molitarily destroying a threat to Western Europe, a major China supporter and potentially crucial resource supplier is handling a whole host of simultaneous crises. Let's stop pretending this doesn't make geopolitical sense.
Look at Marseille, what is the biggest threat to the city? Russians plowing through half of Europe and temporarily holding it for a period of time that will be insignificant in the grand scale of things? Rather, it is globalist interests who want to replace the nations of Europe with a global market run by a handful of financial interests who bombed Libya to pieces and flooded Europe with migrants. The invasion of Iraq was a much bigger threat to Europe than Russia and China ever were. China has no chance whatsoever to actually occupy Europe or North America. It isn't a threat. The main threat is due to the same financial interests who now want another third world war, wrecking their own countries by outsourcing production to China to dump their working class. '
The same globalist interests that opened up for islamic immigration leading to waves of terrorism in the west on top of vast problems with rape, were the same people who's pointless war in Afghanistan caused a surge in the supply of heroin in the west. The war in Afghanistan caused a large wave of migrants, and the war was neatly summarized by NATO troops loading hundreds of migrants onto cargo jets to fly them to people who had nothing to benefit from this war. I am not really pro taliban, but their delivery of karmic justice to the people who cut the heroin price in half in Europe while getting eight people in Sweden stabbed by an Afghan refugee is something I applaud.
The US empire is crumbling which the increased spending on the military shows. Empires require expansion, and there are few good provinces left for the US to incorporate. Meanwhile, the imperial core is withering and the cost of maintaining the empire is surging. The current rhetoric is around increasing spending to defend Taiwan, not to go on some new venture of expansion. Slowed growth with increasing maintnance costs and lower cohesion in the core are solid signs of an empire in decline. Russia and China are not going to steam roll the US just like the British Empire wasn't steamrolled by another power. It simply became impossible to maintain.
functor
4d ago
The issue is that we can't have 10 billion peole living a western lifestyle on a finite planet. The amount of water, artificial fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics required for 10 billion people eating meat twice a day is simply not feasible. I don't think anyone is really enthusiastic over bug meat, it is simply an adaption to over population. Personally I would go for fewer people living on less industrially produced meat.
functor
4mo ago
This reads like the equivalent a woke college student listing off
While opposing the wokest country in the middle east that is flooding Europe with migrants? The hivemind on this subject is the neo-con war machine and the media dominated by AIPAC and the ADL pushing for more war in the middle east and more refugees to Europe.
They created that situation for themselves by not chilling down with the suicide bombings and indiscriminate rocket fire.
Why would they accept being put in Gaza with their country split into two pieces? Why would they accept not being able to live where they or their parents grew up? If the Israelis could stop the occupying, they wouldn't get hit with rockets.
Because they launched 3 wars with help of their coreligionists and lost all of them
Again, why would they accept becoming refugees and not fight back? They have seen how Israeli zoomer soldiers hide in the bathroom and cry while trying to defend a strong point from an attack from a lightly armed militia. There is nothing that says they can't fight back and win. Fighting a large tank battle might not have been the best option. Fighting with FPV-drones, rockets and ambushes might work. Iraq and Afghanistan are great examples of how globalists were removed from a country by continuous small attacks. The Palestinian population has grown extensively since then. The Irish lost a bunch of armed conflicts against the British before most of Ireland became independent.
that work visa program could have turned into a permanent residency program.
Clearly, the Likud was instead creating a refugee crisis on Europe's boarder by expanding settlements and slowly growing Israel. Unfortunately for Netanyahu, his population is increasingly consisting of a woke people, haredi fundamentalists and muslims.
functor
5mo ago
(and thus dealt with Muslim extremists)
Funny how large parts of the world have no muslim extremists whatsoever. It isn't a problem in places that don't have large scale immigration or a historic muslim population. The endless war on terror combined with mass immigration was a fiasco.
There's also a neat little cliff at the line of people who experienced 9/11 and did not.
9/11 was a valuable lesson. Due to immigration policy, people living in a cave in Afghanistan were let into the US. After predictable results the US decides to invade Iraq, a country with no connection to 9/11. The result is massive waves of refugees in to Europe and more terrorism, crime and social issues. Islamic terrorism exploded as a problem post neo con wars in the middle east. Young people have grown up seeing the 20-year fiasco of nation building in the Middle East.
If there is anything learned from dealing with muslims it is that the best outcome is stable arab states with no wars in the middle east. Interventionism in the middle east has been a resounding failure. Bombing Libya let a million muslims into Europe while creating a terrorist bastion on our boarder. Arming moderate jihadists in Syria led to waves of terrorism across Europe along with waves of refugees.
As for social media I remember the days before the invasion of Iraq when the entire media and population were against the war in almost the entire world. The exception was the US which was in a frenzy over wanting to invade a country that had done nothing to deserve it. The difference was the media in the US promoting the war while media in most other countries the media wasn't in a pro war frenzy. The US has a more pro Israel media than Israel itself and it is one of few countries in which Israel is popular. Americans being pro Israel is largely caused by the US mainstream media heavily pushing a pro Israel agenda. WIthout an extreme pro israel bias in the information space the opinions on the conflict would normalize to what it is in most of the rest of the world.
functor
6mo ago
Blockading food and water to civilians is a war crime. Also Israel's illegal blockade along with their recent attacks provide Hamas with more than enough justification for fighting back.
https://casebook.icrc.org/case-study/water-and-armed-conflicts
functor
7mo ago
Yet you pretend that the Chinese are the worst people ever for putting their jihadists in camps even though hundreds of Chinese a year were being killed by jihadists....
functor
8mo ago
In Scandinavia we are fairly successful in forced skin in the game by using the draft. The smartest, strongest and healthiest are the ones who get drafted. People from the higher echelons of society are more likely to be conscripted and therefore have more skin in the game.
I fundamentally believe that immigration policy would have been completely different if people who voted for diversity had the diversity in their neighbourhood. Their ideological binds wouldn't apply when it is their property. Suburbs were a terrible mistake in the US as it allowed cities to deteriorate without in impacting the elite. The problemen wouldn't have arrisen from the first place as they would have kept things from getting out of hand. Migration is only fun when it is happening to someone else's area.
The corrent eltie completely lack a sense of duty and nobless oblige. This can't be forced, it comes as the result of hard times. The US needs a proper crisis to solve the corruption within its elite.
functor
8mo ago
The US has destroyed latin American countries, sucked resources out of them and bullied them for a century. Pretty much every awful social trend comes from the US.
functor
10mo ago
The American order has been based on bombing and fighting constantly. Arguing that Iraq was better because they have forced Sunnis and Shias to stay in the same country is a stretch. Tearing Libya into a patch of warlords nominally under the same government was far worse. If anything Russia is giving the people in Donetsk citizenship and integrating them into the Russian medical system. The US left Yemen as ruins while taking no responsibility. Was forcing Pashtuns and Tajiks to live in Afghanistan together really a great humanitarian success?
Trump is bragging about destroying Venezuela and talking about how the US should have stolen their oil.
The US doesn't change borders, it forces countries to submit and then blocks medical supplies to the country if it doesn't obey.
functor
1yr ago
The Iran deal, the US expanding right into Eastern Europe after Russia pulled back and the long list of self proclaimed US exceptionalism gives the rest of the world strong reasons not to trust the US.
functor
6mo ago
Israel gives its settlements back and Palestinians can form their own state.
functor
8mo ago
The left has a metaphysics based on humans being free floating blank slate soul that happened to be born as whatever they are. The highest heresy in left wing ideology is constraining the soul/mind by physical reality. Having randomly ended up in the wrong body shouldn't impact the soul according to their thinking. Therefore, it is expected that those on the left would be all for education. If we are blank slates tossed into a body randomly then anyone can become anything given the right circumstances.
The fundamental debate between left and right is essentialism vs existentialism.
functor
9mo ago
At the same time non religious women's fertility is falling while religious women are still reproducing.
Religiousness is hard in a world when it isn't the norm. It is hard to be a genuine believer in a nihilistic society. Religiously inclined people who are pushed in a more liberal direction by the zeitgeist of society are becoming the dominant group along with the welfare class who fail at using contraceptives. Once religiously inclined people gain a significant portion of the population, they will move the norms in their direction, thus creating a religious revival.
Our society is heavily selecting for two groups: the religious with conservative values and welfare class people. The liberal left are not reproducing.
functor
1yr ago
The issue with traffic is that more traffic causes more traffic. Freeways are like giant walls running through cities making walking and cycling hard. Car infrastructure takes an absurd amount of space making walking and cycling more difficult. Driving makes every other method of transport far more dangerous. Many parents drive their kids to school because it is too dangerous to walk and the danger is other parents driving their kid to school because it is too dangerous to walk. A person in Houston can't really choose a low car lifestyle in the same way that a person in Barcelona can. Not having a car in a city with a lot of cars really sucks, not having a car in a city with few cars is just convenience.
Public transit works best when transporting relatively large amounts of people relatively short distances. Urban sprawl is absolutely awful for public transit with vast distances and few people in walking distance of each stop. Cars make public transit worse.
Cars only benefit the person in them while slowing everyone else down and making the city worse for everyone else. Car based cities are a giant prisoner's dilemma and the best way to handle the situation is therefore a collective reduction in car usage.
Is walking an alternative in the second place? Would you let an 8 year old ride a bike to school through the area in the second photo?
Stockholm and Copenhagen are two similar cities with completely different transport infrastructure.
Stockholm has six freeways and massive freeway tunnels while Copenhagen has four freeways. Stockholm has 100 subway stations, roughly 120 light rail stations, 54 commuter rail stations.
Copenhagen has 37 subway stations using far smaller subway trains. They have 86 commuter train stations running fewer trains per hour than Stockholm and their commuter trains are smaller and slower.
Copenhagen has lower average commute time, less traffic and fewer traffic jams. The difference is that Copenhagen is a city that doesn't really require transportation. Everything is close and easy. Stockholm has vast urban sprawl. The average commute in Copenhagen is 17 minutes shorter per day than Stockholm's.
Compared to an American city of two million Copenhagens road network would be a complete joke worthy of a bigger town rather than a city. Yet their commute times are lower than almost any city of its size.
It simply isn't true that Houston has fantastic traffic and shorter commute times compared to Barcelona. The idea that cities with massive transport infrastructure have fast commutes doesn't really stack up.
I think it points to a fundamental difference in how I see social issues and how people on the left see them. When discussing moral issues with left leaning people, they often focus on the individual and the utilitarian perspective of the individual in the situation. For example, a horny person meets someone at a bar and can choose between sex or sexual frustration. Forcing people to choose monogamy is therefore evil since it is the less beneficial outcome.
I don't really care too much about the individual enjoyment of the night, but look at the effects of family structure in society. Getting a well functioning family structure is an incomprehensibly complex problem and a balancing act which goes beyond human comprehension. Going from one man, one women to casual sex is fun can lead to all sorts of unintended consequences. People today have less sex than ever, fewer children than they desire, and we have incels and feminists who both have legitimate grievances in a dysfunctional dating market. Tampering with an entire ecosystem can have disastrous effects. If there is something we should have learned in the past centuries it is that experts who want to redesign a city, reorganize agriculture, introduce a new species that eats pests etc is that these projects tend to end in catastrophes. Disrupting a delicate balance is dangerous, and science doesn't really provide answers for it. Science experiments run for short period of time with a limited sample size and measure few variables. Traditions last millennia and have sample sizes in the billion. Following tradition is less likely to end up in a situation in which a brilliant scientist concludes DDT is safe, or in which an urban planner wrecks a city because the best science in traffic planning said urban freeways are beneficial.
Chesterton was correct in realizing that traditions were solutions to problems solved for so long that people have forgotten what the problem was.
When trying to stop people who want to engage in a behaviour that creates a small but immediate utility, it is hard to use arguments based on unintended long term societal consequences. It was easy to look like a clown when claiming that giving antibiotics to farm animals is dangerous when it clearly reduces sickness and increases yields, now we have an antibiotic resistance crisis.
Traditional religion are methods of handling large complex systems condensed in mythological format. Historically, this format has worked well. Today appealing to bible texts or the man in the sky doesn't work, yet the evidence for the unintended consequences of short term utilitarianism often appears long after the debate has ended.
Have these anti muslim zionists ever done anything for white people? The whole Bush era was full of white people siding with AIPAC to fight Islam. It achieved absolutely nothing and Europe got swamped with migrants. While the mainstream right got blown up fighting peasants in the middle east their home countries were taking in millions of Muslims. There is no reason to side with people who have been consistently hostile to White people for decades because they now want you to fight for Israel again.
Will these jewish lobbyists actually do something for White people or will they just try to convince us that we are owning the libs when we waste tax money bombing peasants fighting the same billionaires that donate to ADL?
Antisemitism has less to do with people not liking jews and more to do with people being annoyed with things jews do. Pogroms weren't caused by abstract hate of jews, it was caused by people being fed up with how the jews were behaving. The best thing jews could do would be to stop provoking people around them and stirring up conflicts. Unfortunately, it seems like jews use conflicts with the host population in order to increase cohesion within the jewish community. An outside enemy is a great way to unite a people and jews therefore need to be in a continuous state of conflict.
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