gorge
13d ago
You and others (u/UwU , /u/haversoe) are ignoring both the letter of the law and spirit of the law. The letter of the law (such as Geneva article 3 -- https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gci-1949/article-3 ) does not apply to pirates or criminals at sea. They are not a member of armed forces, they never signed the conventions, they are not on the territory of a signing state, they do not get protected.
The spirit of the law is that international law is basically a gentleman's agreement (often observed in the breach), the cooperate quadrant of a prisoner's dilemma to make war slightly more awful. If an enemy unit has been completely defanged, and I capture them instead of killing them, that costs me little, and if my opponent does the same to my troops, we are both much better off because fewer men die unnecessarily. Therefore, it is in my interest to make an agreement with my opponent and order by officers to obey the agreement so that our men are given similar treatment. The spirit of the law is furthermore that members of official armed forces are usually decent, good, productive men, often with families, who are doing the right thing in serving their country, and even if they are on the wrong side of the war, will be productive citizens in the future and it will be tragedy for any more to die than necessary. They are not criminals. The parachuter who we rescue and imprison instead of shooting, may go on to have a great life.
Whereas with drug runners and pirates, we are not in a gentlemen's agreement with them, and we do not want to preserve their life. I could really care less if they are just excuted on the spot, left to be eaten by the sharks, or brought home to be hung. Either way, they are dead. So there is a big difference between executing the drug dealer who deserved to be killed anyways, versus executing the parachuter who we want to live.
Even if you were fighting against pirates, back in the day, you wouldn’t order your marines to shoot the survivors of a sinking ship out of the water. That would be dishonorable. You would be expected to rescue them and take them prisoner, and perhaps then execute them in an orderly manner if deemed appropriate.
They probably wouldn't bother to waste ammo, but if they did shoot the pirates in the water, absolutely nobody would care.
gorge
14d ago
Am I understanding this correctly that striking the boat and killing everyone would be fine and legal, striking the boat and killing a bunch and letting the rest drown or be eaten by sharks is fine and legal. But sending in a second strike to "finish the job", that is crossing a line, that is a war crime, Hegseth must be sent to the Hague for hanging?
I could see being upset about the initial strike, if there was another available option to intercept the boat, try the drug dealers, and hang them under law. It is better to go the extra mile to show you aren't making mistakes and accidentally striking innocent boaters.
But making the second strike the point of outrage? Yawn, don't care.
gorge
20d ago
A more controversial red-pill, even among the red-pilled, but one I believe to be true, is that men are actually the more romantic sex and deal worse with promiscuity. Yes, men find it more enjoyable to sample new women and sleep with a different women each week. But men perhaps deal worse with seeing the women they slept with sleep with someone else...especially if they enjoyed a special connection. And since most men are not lotharios who can take pride in notch counts, but most men have dealt with very traumatic break-ups, on net, the sexual revolution has been bad for most men.
gorge
20d ago
A real question, culturally, do men want the responsibilities, or just the perks?
This gets really complex. Feminism versus patriarchy definitely is not a woman versus men conflict. In many ways, women are used as proxy forces by powerful men. We saw this with metoo, accusations can be used as weapons to take out political or corporate enemies, with the accusations against ones allies (eg Tara Reid) conveniently not believed. One can see 1900s to 1980s feminism as a plot by alpha men to get hot young women in the office away from boyfriends and husbands (present or future) where the alpha men could bang them. One could see metoo as an effort by normie husbands to seize back their women from the bosses at work and normie dads to keep their daughters away from the frat boys at college. But it gets more complex because it kind of backfires as the false accusations against the normie gets believed while actual predatory seduction by alpha men gets ignored ( the famous meme is true https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hello-human-resources also an SNL skit with Tom Brady ).
And even in the 1960s to 1980s non-alpha men were psyopped and thirst-trapped into thinking that the sexual revolution would mean more sex for them, and so out of sin or out of ignorance they often did cheer on licentiousness in movies and among famous people.
gorge
21d ago
I said "owned and operated that can produce an engine block." Every time I learn about some breakthrough African company that is now making automobiles, it turns out that they are just doing final assembly with the engines being imported.
Innoson vehicles -- assembles cars from parts, engine blocks are imported source and source: "Car seats, steering wheels and engine blocks still had their fresh wrappings from shipping containers."
Kiira Motors -- uses engines from Cummins, an American company.
Katanka Group "The Living Apostle Who Sold The Media On The Myth Of 'Ghana's First Car' To the extent that the cars are produced in Ghana, it appears to be matter of final local assembly of components that have been stamped out and largely prebuilt in China. It would seem Kantanka's unique contributions amount to little more than the badges and trim, a fact that has escaped news coverage to date." Read More: https://www.jalopnik.com/the-living-apostle-who-sold-the-media-on-the-myth-of-g-1784458558/
Katanka Motors is defunct. It appears it was a partnership with Western companies so who knows how much they actually made themselves when they were in business.
gorge
24d ago
Ok, I would like to invoke my Argument 1 and say I will wait for an African polity that "has good goverment".
Well after World War II, northeast asian countries were maybe 60/40 for good government? China and North Korea bad, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan decent. And then a generation later, China got a decent government. How come African countries have flipped tails 50 or 100 times in a row? That said, I think there have been African countries with decent enough government.
I found Piston Automotive which is black-owned and
I said owned and operated. Are the engineers black? Are the technicians black? That they are have a black front-man and are bragging about being "minority owned business" (a designation which potentially gives them all sorts of bonus points in getting various contracts) does not mean anything. It's pretty telling there are no photos of anyone but the owner... Maybe Linkedin, can help us out, yep, here is the VP of Engineering: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-miller-48350a12 The actual workforce looks very white: https://www.linkedin.com/company/piston-automotive/people/
What I mean is that there is no company with blacks at every important position in the engineering and production of some complex technological product.
automotive industry is known to be capital-intensive, requires high vertical integration, if we just talk Africa, that's a lot of demand for a continent where 40% still living below the poverty wage.
China, India, South Korea, were all very poor, and then they figured out how to build more and more technologically complex products and sell them and then they got richer.
gorge
24d ago
GDP (or rather, what GDP is actually trying to measure, economically valuable output), doesn't compound. Countries hit points of diminishing returns, hit points where they are up against the edge of technology and the pace slows down, hit points of bad government, and other countries catch up because they don't have to invent anything new, they just rapidly adopt other inventions. Hence, how Japan caught up with the West in about 70 years, or how China is now blowing past the USA. If a country has good government, economic output converges toward what smart fraction theory would predict.
Consider this simple fact though: out of a billion plus people in countries all around the world, in countries of all different economic situations, in countries that were never colonized, or threw off colonial oppressors long ago, or had gentle transitions from colonialism, all different circumstances, there is not a single black owned and operated company that can produce an engine block (nor anything more technologically sophisticated than an engine block, like a jet turbine or a CPU). It's going to be pretty hard to be good at war without engine blocks and jet turbines.
It is dangerous to believe that there is some inherent, innate strength by being of some particular race, biological marking when the relationship is so tenuous.
Being good at modern war requires intelligence, and the lower average intelligence of subsaharan Africans is hardly tenuous, but this is well-trodden ground for people on this forum. You can start with Chapter 13 and 14 of the Bell Curve, a book that was "argued against" but never "debunked" (after spending a very long time evaluating the arguments from both sides, many years ago, I came to the conclusion The Bell Curve actually understates the case).
A great weakness with this response is my sources. Many are just AskHistorian links, some I didn't read deeply, none did I followup on their sources. Although I suppose I am like most people where we're often swayed by "argument by link-dump" than “argument by reasoning, supported by sources.”
The last thing this forum needs are long AI assisted gish-gallop posts based on stuff the poster did not even read, think about, verify, and synthesize.
gorge
25d ago
Is the genocide of Gaza a result of DEI ...? Put women on border guard duty, border isn't defended effectively, therefore, must entirely genocide your neighbor... Now there is a hot take ... but is it wrong?
gorge
26d ago
In America, most great men did come from the middle-class nuclear family, they were the sons of farmers, mechanics, doctors, and ministers.
gorge
26d ago
Large percentage? Extreme doubt, source please. What percentage of the soldiers in the Soviet military were women? Not cooks and nurses, soldiers. And of those, what percent of soldiers who actually saw combat were women?
Israelis
As I understand it, most women are given homeguard duties, it is very rare that they actually go out and fight. Of all the Israelies who have fired a weapon in combat in the last 20 years, what percent have been women?
gorge
26d ago
In recent years when it became a cancelable offense in any non-explicitly right-wing institution to say, "transwomen are not women", it got me wondering when did majority elite opinion first require believing obviously insane things. There has always been crazy beliefs, but many of those crazy beliefs are at least plausible if you don't have firsthand experience and are just reading about it in the books. For instance, I believe in HBD, not blank slatism with regards to race, but unless you spend a lot of time interacting with a cross-section of each race, it's at least plausible to believe that it's just a matter of education or not getting a proper chance. But when did majority elite opinion become crazy in a way that required people to defy what they saw with their own eyes? My answer is allowing women in combat. Sex differences in size, strength, demeanor, interests, are just so great, the importance of women to childbearing is so obvious, that believing women have a right to be in combat is both crazy and crazy in a way that defies obvious common sense, defies what people see with their own eyes. A few years ago I happened to be watching the Ruth Bader Ginsberg documentary and they were praising her for the famous Citadel case where the Supreme Court acquiesced to an appeals court grant a constitutional right to a woman to attend a state funded military academy. RBG is praised for her brains, but to me, that signifies when elite opinion had totally gone off the rails.
gorge
1mo ago
I won’t sign on to his specific take on Roistering Ralph, but the idea that a woman getting married to a much older Lothario at 27 is probably going to end badly for her and more or less finefor the guy seems perfectly reasonable. See many Hollywood marriages. Alternatively, everything about Leonardo di Caprio.
Also OP seems to have missed that the complaint is about STDs. While waiting for the woman to come around to marriage, the man is going to visit a whore at some point and catch an STD, which he will pass to his eventual wife. This is 1900, no condoms, no antibiotics.
Great find. Almost as good as Dabney's essay correctly predicting that giving women the right to vote would eventually lead to women demanding the right to have beards. You can make fun of the some of the specific physiological mistakes about the causal mechanisms (blood to the brain, phosphates) but the gist is seems true. Current fertility rates among college educated women are race suicide at a slow rate; now imagine current college educated woman lifestyles with 1900s medicine and nutrition ... it would be race suicide at a much faster rate.
Brace yourselves for some hard biological facts which only a medical man can speak on with assurance: higher education renders women insane!
Fact-check: true. https://www.benkuhn.net/grad/ https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db377.htm https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/06/09/1003980966/women-now-drink-as-much-as-men-and-suffer-health-effects-more-quickly
And it is generally admitted that the original American people have almost died out. Even the foreigners who are so quickly assimilated soon learn the practise of race-suicide, although never to the appalling extent of the native-born Americans.
All those last names from the history books and street signs and institutions of New England, the Mathers, the Hancocks, Longfellows, Appleton, Holyokes, Lodges, Cabot, Choate, all seem like out of a mythological past. The WASP went extinct due to first wave feminism.
gorge
2mo ago
Is it not possible to be against neonazism such as "I love Hitler" and talk about sending opposition to the gas chambers your opponents and Jay Jones's awful comments?
The "I love Hitler" quote was clearly a joke: https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1978373590060875870
gorge
2mo ago
At this point, I think any corporation that has employees with the job of "compliance" is de facto an arm of the state. There are always a million ways for the state to get you. After Elon bought Twitter and turned it into a haven for "right-wing misinformation and hate" suddenly his companies were under a half-dozen different dubious investigations. And don't forget the CIvil Rights Act, which has been twisted in a way that it basically mandates every corporation with more 50 employees police the speech of its employees! Was James Damore fired because Google was under pressure from various sex discrimination lawsuits? Impossible to know for sure, but it has to play a role.
I don't think we really have worked out how the First Amendment is supposed to work in a world where every significant organization with a "printing press" also has a compliance department. And really, the parties are simply too far part at this point to negotiate a truce over a new set of norms and boundaries about free speech.
gorge
2mo ago
Why defend someone's speech?
- I might agree with the speech, think the speech was necessary and true, and that people should hear it.
- I might disagree with the speech, but think it close enough to something that I could say that I want it defended so that I don't want people overly punished for things said in the heat of the moment
- I might strongly disagree with the speech, it was something I would never say, I think the speech makes the world a worse place, but I am doing my part to defend a general culture of free speech, which is important because only by maintaining a general culture of free speech can we get a full hearing of arguments in order to decide on what is true and how we should run our society.
With the case of Kimmel getting canceled, 1 and 2 do not apply, so only 3 applies. But we do not have that general culture of free speech, and so there is no general principle to defend. Gina Carano never got rehired, the NY Times never apologized to Razib Khan and rehired him, Middlebury never apologized to Charles Murray and never brought him back, etc. etc. Like, if the right had said, "you should not cancel people" and then the Left had said, "You are right, we were wrong, we will rehire those people and stop canceling rightists" and then the right got into power and started canceling leftists ... ok that would be reneging on a deal and hypocritical. But that is not what happened. So what we are left with is that I am happy Kimmel got suspended because what he said was bad. Maybe it wasn't firing worthy, but he should apologize. Lot's of comedians have apologized over the years fro crossing the line. And last I heard the reason for the suspension was that he wanted to double-down instead of apologizing.
So essentially your argument has to come down to that for the right, a strategy of pacifism is better than tit-for-tat; that sticking to the cooperation corner even after the left has defected is ultimately going to be more successful. I don't think that would have worked, but I don't think tit-for-tat is going to work either. I expect things to continue to get worse.
gorge
2mo ago
John Stewart (in his prime), John Oliver, Nikole Hannah Jones, David Hogg .... and historically ... MLK....
gorge
2mo ago
No, in the full quote he specifically insulted Donald Trump saying he was grieving like a four-year-old mourning a goldfish -- https://www.themotte.org/post/3263/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/367826?context=8#context
gorge
2mo ago
What's the point of an analogy if it doesn't work unless it's exactly the same? ... "Don't make jokes about deaths" wasn't really a standard until last week, and while people often got sensitive about such jokes, this wasn't a broad standard
There is a different standard for the jokes of a network television host, than there is for the jokes of a shock jock or a horrible person on South Park. With the network variety show, the implicit agreement with the audience is that "these are the kinds of jokes you can re-tell in polite company; these are the kind of jokes that good people can tell." So when he tells a joke that only Cartman or Howard Stern would tell, he is not doing his job correctly.
There is also a different standard for jokes about self-inflicted stupid deaths versus tragic deaths versus murders versus political assassinations. This is the most significant political assassination in the United Sates since RFK. I highly doubt any network comedian was making RFK jokes a week after his death. I remember Princess Diana jokes, but I highly doubt they were made a week or a month within her death on network TV.
Looks like a local sports radio host specifically mocked Halladay's death, and the stupidity of his actions, but he was widely criticized for this and forced to issue a public apology: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/nov/09/boston-radio-host-mocks-moron-roy-halladay-after-death-in-plane-crash-at-40
gorge
2mo ago
I looked that it up at one point and its not so straight forward. IIRC, he stayed on the air the rest of the year and just wasn't renewed, and ABC claims that the non-renewal was due to ratings, not what he said. Bill Maher claims that he was canceled for what he says, but he would have an incentive to spin it that way, it looks better for him to be canceled for being edgy than for having low ratings.
gorge
2mo ago
I'm not familiar with those cases, do you have an example of a high-status comedian cracking an insulting joke toward one of their friends or loved ones?
There also is a difference between a death due to a person's own recklessness/stupidity, which is often the fodder for jokes, and an outright assassination.
gorge
2mo ago
They were making the case of tolerating so much more back in the late 2010s.
Find me an example where a TV host was canceled because they went on air and gratuitously insulted someone grieving their friend being assassinated, and the right saying the cancellation was unjustified.
This. A very important part of keeping prostitution illegal, or at least in a gray market, is so that it remains low status. But if a woman can engage in postitution with no legal risk, no personal risks, she benefits from it, she makes lots of money, well, that is going to be a high status job and it will make prostitution high status over time. It actually takes large societal effort to prevent prostitutes from having more status than mothers, it does not just happen naturally. Relatedly, young single women earning more than young single men has been seen as a consequence of modernity making male skills less valuable. I am skeptical. It may just be a result of DEI plus the legalization, protection, and normalization of "soft sex work" -- marketing, sales, being a secretary, etc. If young women were allowed to monetize their femininity in any era, they might have been out earning young men.
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