gorge
18d 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
18d 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
24d 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
24d 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
25d 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
28d 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
29d 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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link