functor
1yr ago
Just because a country is invited doesn't mean they have to. The Soviets didn't base nukes on Cuba. If Mexico invited China to join a military alliance they wouldn't be allowed to do so.
Those deals didn't specify that they had to implement mass immigration, a George Soros social policy and end up getting sanctioned by the EU for not doing things that were never in the deal. Furthermore, the either you are with us or you are against us policy of the US gives countries the option of either submitting and becoming vassal states or being more or less blockaded. Countries that want independence from the US either have nukes or are under constant threat or pressure from the US.
functor
1yr ago
This isn't so much the west vs south as global financial elite vs the rest. We have lived in a world order in which a liberal elite class in a few major cities have wanted a world consisting of atomized consumers in a global market managed by a few large institutions in the west such as NATO, the world bank and the IMF. The ideas to really turn the world into americanized urban sprawl in which we are all free to choose what Hollywood sequel we want to watch and what Nestlé product to consume.
This worked when the rest of the world was entirely dependent on the west. Banana republics either had to accept the trade deals they were offered or go back to the 1700s. They sold bananas to the west that were delivered on GM trucks using Exxon's oil and that were paid for with US dollars using american financial institutions. The profits were used to buy goods made in the US. Today Huawei telecom products are used to sell bananas shipped on Chinese ships using Saudi oil and profits are used to buy clothes from Cambodia and software from India.
In the 50s militaries either faught with western weapons, Sovjet weapons or laughably obsolete weapons. This isn't true anymore as the west has had real difficulty even against the taliban and countries like Iran, China, Pakistan, India etc have improved their arms industries and militaries by leaps and bounds.
What Modi is saying is that the world no longer is Goldman Sachs, the state department and people in the City of London. Their power levels aren't dwarfing China's. The rural Americans that the US sent to Iraq to ensure that Iraq was inline with American interests would be much less friendly to the coastal elites and less willing to fight today. If anything the elites in the west are having an increasingly difficult managing their own countries let alone an empire which maintenance costs are shooting through the roof. Empires tend not to be defeated by getting steamrolled by an enemy army as much as declining due to rising costs of maintaining the empire. Taiwan has gone from being a cash cow to a major liability for the US. Defending American influence over Ukraine is causing all sorts of economic mayhem and is draining western stockpiles of military hardware.
Modi isn't envisioning India and Nigeria running the world together in a revanchist alliance, he is telling the people who live on a skyscraper on Manhattan that the world doesn't revolve around them.
functor
1yr ago
A world without western hegemony isn't a many polar world where poor countries take an equal place at the top, it's one where the US no longer protects oil shipments from the middle east along the somali coast if they aren't bound for US controlled markets and the price of energy rises for developing countries multiplying their problems.
In other words a world in which countries aren't dependent on the US for oil It is essentially like not being on a bus where one person has a gun and everyone else is unarmed. It is a world in which countries have their own ability to protect their oil shipments, write their own laws and aren't controlled by an american elite who rig global trade in their favour. It is a world in which millions of Iraqis won't be bombed to death, a world in which European countried don't have to ask the US for permission to sell things in the middle east, and a world in which companies don't have to dance to the tune of wall streets ESG-ratings.
It is a fundamental prerequisite for sovereignty in this world and for the survival of what makes our countries unique so that we don't all become a giant wallmart.
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.
functor
1yr ago
Should we really punish people for everything that goes wrong? Can we make a movie if the producer is charged with murder if someone dies? If the principal of a school is responsible for all injuries on the playground, the result is going to be obese kids who aren't allowed to play fun games. Developing new a new medication costs well over a billion, and much of this cost is due to an extreme fear of someone having an adverse side effect. Meanwhile, lots of good ideas for medications get scrapped due to the cost of developing them into products. Humanity has invested far more in coal power than nuclear power in the past 30 years because of the extreme fear of another Chernobyl and the impossibility of insuring nuclear power. Because of that, thousands of people die every day due to coal pollution, which is causing far worse damage than Chernobyl ever did. If anything we are being too cautious and not accepting enough of risk.
functor
1yr ago
The Russian birth rate is 1.5 which is more or less the same as Western Europe and higher than much of Europe. Russian demographics aren't really that bad. Considering that Russians die younger, they are in far better shape than Italy that has a lower birth rate combined with people who are retired for decades.
functor
1yr ago
Empires usually don't fall by being steam rolled by an enemy. The risk for the American empire isn't Russians steam rolling across the world, it is an inability to maintain the empire. The taliban lost engagement after engagement, but won in the end due to them being too expensive to subdue. The US Marine Corps can't defend feminism in Iraq and fight high intensity wars in the Pacific. Social workers with guns patrolling deserts for years on end are a world away from amphibious jungle operations.
The US military spending in 2005 was 1.5 times the 10 following powers combined, today it is on par with their spending. Meanwhile, the US has much higher spending on wages, a less efficient industrial base, huge costs for pensions, medical care and education and much more expensive logistics as the US wants to retain a global footprint. After 20 years of investing in wars in the middle east the US has never had such old equipment and needs major investments just to keep currrent levels.
Keeping parity with China while China has the world's largest civilian ship building industry, low paid sailors with much higher recruiting standards and sailors that can take the subway home when they reach port is going to be tough for the US with sailors serving halfway around the world. Especially while having most of the logistical responsibility for Ukraine, who are fighting a war with poorly trained troops and a non-existent supply chain for western systems.
The question isn't can the US stop Russia, the question is can the US handle a whole host of simultaneous crises.
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
1yr ago
I believe much of the issue that the right has in the US and to a lesser extent in the rest of the anglosphere minus the UK is an aesthetic that is difficult for upper middle class people to swallow. The US is a two party system, so right = republican party even though they hardly fill the entire tent of right wing thought. The republicans have a weird mix of strip mall baptist church combined with oligarch wealth vibe to them. Someone who lives in a major city, is educated and well travled probably feels out of place at a Trump rally. Even in the UK but even more so in other European countries there is a brand of pearl necklace wearing urban right wing that likes neoclassical apartments in major European cities and enjoy high culture. The Republicans seem too focused on rural boomers who are opposed to change and want a culture that is fairly alien to the PMC.
I believe wokeness among the left is highly exaggerated in right wing circles. Wokeness is used to brush off the left as deranged, malicious or extremist when the majority of people who voted for Biden are not libs of tiktok-material. A lot of people are rightfully upset with the state of health care in the US, a lot of people do care about environmentalism, a lot of people see the cost of college as bonkers and a lot of people aren't really impressed by televangelist theology. The republicans would be better off looking themselves in the mirror than making the 2342 "feminist on college campus pwned” video on YouTube in which a bipolar woman is turned into a circus act for public humiliation. I am not convinced that the democrats would deliever better health care, cheaper college or a greener planet but they at least lift the issues.
functor
1yr ago
In the 60s civil engineers were allowed to go wild and the results were disastrous. Old cities and beautiful historic sites were turned into massive freeways and oceans of parking. This is what some of the most historic parts of Stockholm looked like after traffic engineers sunk their teeth into it. The cities that went full traffic engineering in the 60s are now often the cities with the worst traffic due to induced demand. Building massive freeways didn't reduce traffic, it turned cities into Houston, while people in Copenhagen take a 15-minute walk to work.
Civil engineers were reined in for a reason, civil engineers tend to optimize for speed*volume of traffic. That isn't exactly a great metric for building a place in which kids bike to school.
functor
1yr ago
As a rightist assuming that leftism always wants more members of its protected groups
The left has shot itself in the foot massively and is actually doing the opposite of this. There is a widening gap in the birth rate between liberals and conservatives. The left has shifted its focus from workers rights to promoting behaviours that are bad from a reproductive point of view. LGBT is obviously not a great strategy for reproductive success and it has ballooned in popularity among the left with a sizeable portion of very left young people adopting one of those identities. Trans is essentially voluntarily removing oneself from evolution.
Traditional lifestyles lead to babies, the modern left is less about economics and more on opposition to the lifestyle choices that lead to children. Political leanings are more than half genetic. We are heavily selecting for people who are highly attracted to religion, traditional lifestyles and conservative political ideologies.
functor
1yr ago
I am not sure it is wokeism but rather that big tech are no longer startups but blue chip companies. When I worked as a dev for a blue chip company I barely ever wrote code, in fact I was losing my coding skills working there. There were so many meetings, so many stakeholders, so many considerations to make, so many other products that the code had to fit in with. Lots of time was spent testing, emailing and waiting for someone else to do something. Apple beat IBM not by having better tech, marketing or production but by being faster.
With that said the complexity of a huge ecosystem such as a large bank, the powergrid or Boeing is so vast that it becomes really hard to be nimble and many problems arise naturally. If one is buiding a space ship there will naturally be a lot of certifications, meetings, requirements etc which will make work slow. If you are working on google search you can't just push your code to prod and risk it crashing production. That feature that you thought you could hack together one night isn't worth risking a global piece of infrastructure over.
functor
1yr ago
The idea of trying to hide and defending ones farm is one of the worst ideas in the American right. Chicago has African levels of murder and the people who built it vote democrat and have BLM profiles on their linkedin since they isolated themselves in suburbia. This is the same mistake the French elite made by moving to Versailles. If you isolate yourself from society, cohesion will plummet. If people don't interact there is no understanding left. This will rip society apart and create a soulless city. American cities tend to lack public spaces, life on the streets and genuine culture and instead have stroads and strip malls. A walkable mixed use development is much more likely to have a living culture with less fat people and a stronger identity as people actually interact with each other and have chances to form a collective identity. If you are nothing but an atomized consumer isolated from the others, bringing in cheap foreign labour seems much more appealing than if they have to live next door.
A healthy society should be one large community in which different classes play different roles but fundamentally are one team. How are people going to identify with each other if they live in isolated enclaves? The goal should be to maximize skin in the game as people climb the social ladder. Greek and Roman aristocrats went into battle first, the same should apply today with the added requirement that they use public transit and drink tap water. Low skin in the game for the top is a dangerous direction for a society to wander.
American sprawling cities are the most woke and most pro multicultural places on Earth. Even places in Europe that are considered multicultural are as white as Boston. The idea that suburbia would lead to a better society for right wing people seems to be empirically false. It seems to lead to generic urban sprawl in which the top third is isolated from the rest of the society and slowly loses its connection to the rest.
functor
1yr ago
Political / ideological affiliation for all graduate programs outside of the licensing professionals (law, medicine) has shifted left since at least the 1990s. And educational / teacher's graduate programs are in a league all of their own. There's left, there's progressive, there's actual socialists, and then there's teacher's colleges.
I think a big problem is that universities now have entirely separated departments from the others. Something that can be taken as an axiomatic truth in one department can be seen as completely false in another. Peer review has become review by your small subfield. Papers should have to have a randomly select a peer reviewer from another department. It would be interesting to see a neuroscientist, pediatrician, psychologist or psychiatrist review education papers. Just taking zoologists who are used to studying how animals behave and function in an ecosystem and toss them into sociology or education would be intriguing. Academia has become too specialized for ideas to propagate or for there to be effective cross-breeding of ideas.
The academia works on layers of abstraction. On the bottom there are mathematicians and physicists who describe the fundamental truths of the world, a bit higher up we have chemists, biologists and neuroscientists, in the middle there are psychologists, engineers, and doctors and on top we have economists and sociologists and historians. Generally, peer review should include people from a lower level of abstraction.
Economists and sociologists should be be put on small islands together, neuroscientists and educators would be another high priority combo.
functor
1yr ago
Never underestimate the extent that the popularity of an idea hinges on the ease of implementing it. Construction companies promote architects that like boring boxes and say they are superior to neoclassical buildings. School districts like experts that say that they don't need lots of special teachers and instead should include special needs kids in the regular class. If you want to become a star expert, find a way of justifying cutbacks and corner cutting by claiming that the cheap and fast method is superior.
functor
1yr ago
More likely, oligarch financial institution demands ESG ratings. These ratings are then handed down the chain of command until they land on some middle manager at a welding company in a very white town and have to be rammed through. It used to be that companies had owners, today the owner is a vast network of middle managers representing dozens of funds who may very well be investing in each other, forming a large circle. Nobody is really in charge, the decisions are made far from the people who implement them and the owners barely are aware of what is going on. Companies that want to increase their rating can hire a diversity manager to fix their score. The score is calculated on an Excel spreadsheet which will in turn be used to calculate another score on another excel spread sheet so that someone on lower Manhattan can write a nice report advertising their financial instruments.
functor
1yr ago
Companies that make themselves attractive to investors by having high ratings in diversity ratings get more investments and therefore do better. When companies have to put stats such as percentage of female employees, diversity scores etc in their annual report, these numbers will matter. I was somewhat connected to a company that makes software that scrapes the numbers from financial statements and annual reports and helps investors make decisions without having to manually dig through tonnes of paper. These numbers did play a small but not insignificant role.
functor
1yr ago
Why are these better than regular cars?
Taxis are used a large portion of the day. They continously service customers throughout the day and park out of the city when not in use. Taxis are far more efficient than people driving a car to work, parking it for 9 hours and driving home.
It starts by talking about specific hours and days, like the way some rush hour lanes work, but then those hours and days are every day of the week 7am - 7pm. It talks about "unnecessary car travel," as though people were just gong for a drive,
Driving kids to school is unnecessary driving in a city. There is no reasonable reason for kids having to be driven to a school in an urban environment, kids should be able to walk. Getting a haircut and having to transport oneself 10 km for it is absurd in a city. Having to travel far to go to a gym is a big waste of resources. The unnecessary travel isn't people driving for fun, it is people living in a city and having to travel far for basic services.
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.
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?
functor
1yr ago
Stockholm har rent control and the longest housing queue in the world. Price to buy appartments was a lot cheaper in Copenhagen. The main reason that they get people into a smaller area is by not having massive parking lots, wide freeways, train yards etc. By having less transport infrastructure they can fit more into their city.
Suburbia is more expensive to build. Sprawl requires way more infrastructure, apartments are cheaper to build than single family housing etc. Cities are more expensive since there is way less high density housing than there is demand for it.
functor
1yr ago
functor
1yr ago
A quick look on google maps and Oklahoma city has far bigger freeways and far more of them than Copenhagen.
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.
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