functor
6mo ago
NATO expansionism into every last corner of the map is pro-war. Russia wanted to negotiate over and over again. Zelensky's election platform wasn't that different than the Minsk agreements.
functor
6mo ago
Are they really anti militarism? They have fanatically cheered on WWIII in Ukraine with maximalist war aims and a black and white view of the war. Obama, Clinton and Biden have been long term enthusiasts of pretty much every neocolonial project. I would say their worldview is a crusader mentality in which the world can be divided up into believers and heathens and the believers have a duty to crusade against the believers. Their worldview seems to be that there will be heaven on Earth once the entire planet has been converted. Since the heathens are fighting against heaven on Earth they are fundamentally evil and have no legitimacy.
Spending 2 trillion on a crusade for feminism in Afghanistan was hardly western civilization, it was a crusade for an ideology deeply opposed to western values. The left was opposed to militarism when they saw the Soviet union as a better representative of woke than the US. Today Russia is an Orthodox christian fascist state stopping the values of Netflix from being the global religion.
functor
6mo ago
I worked in a tech hub next to a ghetto. A large number of engineers were terrorized by a small group of young men. There were more engineers who were fit gun owning veterans than there were criminals.
The criminals were generally in poor physical condition, disorganized and not an especially impressive force.
Had the cops not been there the criminals would have been dealt with swiftly. However, the police protected them. If they stole a bike, nothing happened. If an engineer with friends shut it down, they would have had their lives ruined. The criminals didn't mind getting arrested for smaller crimes. The engineers were terrified of even getting arrested. The imbalance in the risk acceptance between tech workers and criminals completely shifted the power dynamic on the street. When they mugged a developer on the way home from work it wasn't by physically overpowering them, it essentially a game of chicken in which the developer was more afraid of going to prison. It is simply cheaper to clean up graffiti on a weekly basis than to spend an night waiting in the bushes with bats and dealing with the problem.
The justice system is too harsh toward people with a life while not being effective at keeping people who can't function of the street. Ideally the dysfunctional crowd shouldn't be punished but warehoused in a place that provides them with structure, meaning and a well balanced life. Mental asylums need to be scaled up.
functor
6mo ago
Status is key, however there is another mechanism that is playing in here.
With hypergamy and women not needing men for protection and provision women can seek higher status men. Men can achieve higher status by spending more time. Even if you wanted to just have kids at a young age it is going to be hard to find an attractive wife without going to college, without traveling, without buying a nice house etc. The status that you get from getting a low skilled labour job and from renting a place that a 22 year old can afford doing unqualified labour is shooting yourself in the foot on the dating market.
There is no time pressure to have kids. We have effective contraception and people are pushing through grad school, trying to buy a place in the right side of town or trying to take the right tinder pics on Bali so they can get an attractive partner. If people were more naturally paired up more kids would be born.
functor
6mo ago
Universities went from being places where autists can engage in niche hobbies to being to taking most people and people who have no real interest in the subject. How many english majors really want to spend four years engaging in bizarre books? They are there to party, please their parents by getting a degree and get an office job.
I met an older pol sci professor who talked about the shift in his field. Back in the day doing a PhD in international relations meant becoming an expert in a part of the world. This is a monumental task as the student has four years to go from barely being able to find a country on a map to being able to advise diplomats and large corporations on intricate details of that country. It meant plowing through vast amounts of text and being able to quickly gain an understanding of complex systems.
The increasingly popular alternative was to chose a theory as a PhD. Thesis: investigate how some feminist theory views women's education in developing countries. Conclusion: more education in thrid world countries will liberate women. This PhD is much easier to write than one trying to explain the geopolitics of the middle east.
Having one political theory makes it even easier, furthermore the current woke dogma is fairly simple as an ideology. It doesn't take much to become proficient in it.
A part of the reason why alterntive ideas are met with immediate rejection is because they would reveal a lack of knowledge and arguments by someone with alternative views. It is shocking how many academics don't have cursory understandings of explanations other than their own. I have met profs at education departments who have minimal knowledge about heritability, which partially explains their defensive stance when probed with questions on the topic.
functor
6mo ago
Devs overestimate the importance of Devs and a lot of non devs do as well.
To launch a game you have to pitch to investors and get millions in funding. Your game has to appeal to the funders and be something that they believe they will make money on. The biggest challenge is post launch . There are a bunch of games launched every day. The market is saturated to an insane degree. In order to break through you need to have influencers, journalists and other people pushing your game. The youtube algorithm promotes woke gamers.
Another underrated aspect is that in cut throat industries people will try to outmanoeuvre each other. If knocking out the opponent by discovering a transphobic tweet gets you ahead people will do it. The gaming industry is dirty.
functor
6mo ago
When russians fight, they only gain experience and become stronger. When ukrainians fight, they just die.
To a great extent yes. Ukraine has lost more officers than Russia. They are running into German WWI problems where they take their best men and put them into elite units and send those men out first. Ukraine leads more from the front which causes higher death levels among officers. Ukraine rebuilt its military in a more western fashion with a professional NCO corps which is much harder to replace casualties in.
When russians have to re-equip their army, they only get better and more efficient at manufacturing
Russians have done a far better job at scaling manufacturing during this war. Also They aren't trying to control the middle east and fight a war against China.
functor
6mo ago
why Russia started the war in the first place
To keep NATO from militarizing Russia's southern border. Since then NATO has spent vast resources trying to do so and the Ukrainian military is largely defeated.
but between the Russian world and the west. Instead of a campaign to unify of the Russian peoples
A large portion of the Russians are now under Russian control together with the valuable land in Ukraine. Left is a dysfunctional rump state with a demographic pyramid that makes South Korea's look healthy.
Russia is succeeding with its main objective, a multipolar world order. NATO has been cutting down on military spending for 30 years and deferring expenses and investments. Vast resources have been squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ammunition stockpiles are low, equiptment is old and bases are in a sad state. Most European militaries couldn't even put together a functioning brigade before this war. Russia has created an endless black hole for military resources. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians will have to be trained over the next decades. Ukraine has the world's fourth largest air defence at the start of the war. It is effectively spent and they are currently burning through NATO's stockpile at a far higher rate than NATO can manufacture. Meanwhile SAM systems are being consumed at a high rate in the middle east. Ukraine's military is a quarter the size of the US military. Rebuilding it from ruins after the war is going to cost vast resources for many decades.
Russia's army is bigger now than at the start of the war and is fighting more effectively. Their airforce, navy and nuclear force is pretty much undamaged. The arms production has increased substantially. Between China and Russia NATO doesn't have the capacity to invade Iraq or play global hegemon. Russia doesn't have to defeat NATO, they just have to soak up resources to the point that the empire can't be sustained.
functor
7mo ago
The overwhelming impact they have had on social media has absolutely played a major role. They have also sponsored multiple NGOs in Europe.
functor
7mo ago
Absolutely. They have put enormous pressure on social media companies. They have also helped many pro migration NGO:s.
On top of that there are several other lobbying groups that have pushed hard for mass immigration.
functor
7mo ago
Gas can be build that fast. However, that requires cheap gas. Scaling nuclear is going to take more than a decade.
functor
7mo ago
The Arabs still have many homelands and there was no distinct Palestinian identity before Israeli independence.
That argument isn't going to convince Arabs, it isn't meant for the jewish population. It is an argument for Europeans meant to justify a massive refugee crisis on Europe's doorstep. The arab states have absolutely no reason in aiding a mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. For us in Europe we have zero reason to want to see millions of arabs move. Even if it is to other arab states it is still a disaster as it is destabilizing.
Israel has not only been involved in plenty of wars that has ended up with migrants in Europe. The ADL and plenty of other jewish groups have been pushing hard for mass migration into Europe.
So if not living in your own ethnostate makes it perfectly fine to evict people there is no problem if the rest of the world forcefully evicts all jews?
So it would have been completely fine to ethnically cleanse all Finns and Estonians pre 1918 as they had never had a state? Basques have never had an ethnostate so are they free game?
functor
7mo ago
Fracking is putting the US in a screwed position in terms of power generation. Fracking produces a lot of cheap gas which outcompetes most other electricity production. However, it is finite. Fracking will essentially deliver 30 years of super cheap power and then another decade or two of cheaper power. It is going to leave a large void behind it. Texas needs to start planning for a post fracking future and considering the sorry state of western nuclear manufacturing this is going to take time.
functor
7mo ago
The big class war of our era is between the people who live off the system and thsoe who pay into it. The welfare class and the sociologists are on the same side while a plumber is on the other side. The welfare class and the sociologist both want a big public sector while a plumber has little need for the welfare state. The women voting left trope isn't entirely true. Single women who get paid through the government are solidly left while women who don't fall into this category are far less radical. Women aren't really swinging the the left as much as they are increasingly single and employed in the public sector.
Much of the radicalism among the left probably stems from many in the left investing 6 years into getting a master's in something with a strong ideological bent, being entirely reliant on the government for the job and their social status. They are terrified of ending up as someone in East Germany with a masters in Leninism.
The most important thing the right can do in order to secure a long term future for itself is to reduce the size of the left's client classes.
functor
7mo ago
There would likely be a lot fewer of them. Instead of owning a car people could use cars as a service.
functor
7mo ago
In effect LLMS aren't smart, they are just great at recognizing patterns they are trained on. Google is great at recognizing text strings that it remembers, LLMS don't need matching strings they match on patterns and are able to combine patterns from multiple sources. LLMs aren't truly intelligent because they are dumbfounded if there isn't a good matching pattern in the training set. They are stumped in a way a human isn't if they encounter something new.
LLMs aren't going to replace humans because the set of all data is miniscule to the set of all potential patterns in the world.
functor
7mo ago
The left has become too dogmatic to be appealing. When each comment has to be approved by committee it becomes hard to be adaptive, participate in podcasts or even have humor. There was a post yesterday about how Tucker was talk about UFOs being demons. There are probably lots of people in the left with equally far out ideas but they don't say them because the self censorship is much stronger.
The left not doing long format podcasts isn't just an American phenomenon, it is noticeable here in Europe as well. Their speech is too curated allow effective campaigning. It also makes them rigid and slow to adapt. Boomers with though control won't attract young people.
functor
7mo ago
With Trump and Elon being friends and Trump even talking about Starship and starlink during the victory speech I think it is likely that we might actually go to the moon. Trump's new friends are tech heavy and Elon is a main character and a true space nerd.
functor
7mo ago
They were pushed into Gaza by militia groups that ethnically cleansed the towns they came from. They can return to the place they were forced out of.
functor
7mo ago
They are locking them in to tiny area and bombing them. They should take in the civilians from the area they are bombing. Also there are far less destructive ways to fight than blasting a city from the air. The UK didn't blast entire districts of Belfast.
functor
7mo ago
Yes, they attacked military outposts engaged in acts of war against them. That a few drugged out hippies were still partying the next day and got blasted by the IDF who started firing indiscriminantly is unfortunate but the civilian casualty rate was still well under what many other military operations have.
functor
7mo ago
Like the British in Northern Ireland who managed to diffuse the situation. It is the only realistic long term plan for Israel.
functor
7mo ago
And this is why there's always a distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Palestinians might have very good reasons to go to war, but they also break the rules of war seemingly as a hobby.
Not really, they are engaged in classic guerilla warfare. They are far, far more well behaved than the "moderate jihadists" that the US and Israel supported in Syria. They are fighting a cleaner war than Israel.
If he wanted war why did he push for negotiations for 8 years after the coup? Even in 2022 the goal wasn't to take Ukraine, it was to get Ukraine to accept a peace agreament that was almost the same as Zelensky's election platform.
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