netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
How do you distinguish that from the other traditional geopolitical role for minority groups? “No, really, we swear the Ukrainian government is full of Nazis; let us invade already!” It serves Russia’s interests to insist that the U.S. is grooming an LGBT fifth column whether or not that’s true.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think our governments actually run on Bismarckpilled IR theory. Technology crowded out most of the traditional diplomatic options, so we had to come up with ones that wouldn’t cause a land war in Asia. One of those was loudly complaining whenever anyone (other than us) engaged in political repression. Russian law on LGBT advocacy looks pretty bad on that front, so our newspapers make a point of complaining.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
That’s like asking why conservatives are so angry about electric vehicles. It turns out they have the bandwidth to judge more than one thing at once.
People who hate Russia’s stance on homosexuality probably also distrust it for invading Ukraine, repressing political dissidents, and generally pretending that it’s still the Cold War. Sometimes one or another is in the news. In this case, it appears to be due to updated laws criminalizing the rainbow flag as comparable to al-Qaeda, Aum Shinrikyo, the Azov Battalion, and…Meta.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
I'd say so.
Almost, anyway. Opponents have a weaker desire for vengeance such that it's subordinate to other desires. Like "I would like to be generous in my victory" or "I should live according to these religious principles" or even "I don't want blood on my hands."
But evopsych isn't enough to explain it. The desire for vengeance is competing with other adaptive behaviors. At the extreme end, maybe it drives someone to kill a criminal even though it costs him his own life. That's not any more sound, in an evolutionary sense, than forgiving every sin.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
I chose not to moderate that thread because flouncing isn't against the rules. It's not uncharitable, it's not partisan, it's not even particularly antagonistic. At worst it's a lie about whether one intends to come back.
If someone were to make a habit of it, I'd probably mod her under "egregiously obnoxious." That's the category which suits people who keep deleting their posts or performatively flouncing. Emphasis on "keep."
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
I assure you, once you’ve read PSS, there will be no illusions.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Agreed that the creditor should be able to refile. I don’t know the terminology well enough to say if that is true.
But that doesn’t mean this was an unjust verdict! He lives in a weird edge case where the codified law says one thing and the title paperwork say another. He shouldn’t be held responsible for a mistake on the county’s forms.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Yeah, and I tried to respond. I don’t think it sends notifications correctly.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
I don’t know how many layers of irony you’re on. It doesn’t really matter. We have banned you numerous times already for picking fights and spitting the laziest possible hot takes. Your last warning was a month ago, but you clearly didn’t take it to heart, because this is nearly indistinguishable.
Banned for a month this time.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
I see from the footnote that it’s a transcription of a YouTube video. I don’t know what “sott.net” does, but I can make an educated guess if they’re prognosticating “Zio Anglo American plans for world domination.”
Most historical fantasy isn’t particularly original. That doesn’t make it a credible forecast!
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
That might be a better way to say what I was thinking: “It’s particularly frustrating to watch people try and claim the moral low ground.”
Americans love an underdog. You can justify extreme tactics as leveling the playing field, and when something doesn’t pan out, you can blame the loss on wreckers. I see the strategy, but I simply find the exercise…frustrating. Unappealing. Tiresome.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Well, the Beer Hall Putsch didn’t get traction, but it had a pretty direct line to the actual dismantling.
Napoleon deposed the Directory to become Emperor in the first place. The Hundred Days don’t count because it was a constitutional monarchy and hadn’t even managed to dismantle his imperial institutions. I’d also give Napoleon III half credit for couping himself.
There’s also the various post-Bolivar democracies of South America. Paraguay, Colombia, Ecuador. More if you go back to the initial revolutions.
That’s a pretty questionable translation. Might be worth putting it into a more modern tool.
Also, the author predicted a shooting war with Japan and Russian and Chinese collapse by the 2020s. I think he might be one of those alt-history guys.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
I’m only seeing one mass-deleter; I’ve already issued a warning.
To be clear, the content was acceptable, if repetitive. It’s deletion that suggests bad faith.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
They choose not to because that’s a terrible idea.
Maybe it works when your conscripts aren’t handling anything more expensive than a rifle, but for anything bigger, you don’t want to cheap out on the human operators. They either need to be motivated or compensated.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
I don’t see it. Who thinks they need us? Maybe if the substackers came back. But they’re all happily tilling the CW fields.
No, the temperature has just turned up now that the government is actually doing something.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
I’ve had decent results tapping the “nothing ever happens” sign, so I guess my predictions look like this.
- 80% chance of invoking the Act and deploying troops. Conditional on that,
- 70% it looks like the Greg Abbott strategy, just extended to states other than Texas.
- 20% of something closer to martial law.
- <10% of troop presence anywhere near the 2026 elections.
Putting numbers to these makes me realize how unsure I am. It’s hard to frame the predictions without getting way too detailed.
The long and the short of it is: I expect Trump to take any options that look like a Strong Leader Doing Something. In the absence of a flashpoint, Doing Something means scaling up existing red-state policies, not suspending elections.
It’s easy to see a route which leads to Trumpocracy. That doesn’t mean the route is likely.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
This is a forum for discussing the Culture War. That’s a lot harder when you delete your contributions.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Please keep culture war content to the CW thread. This’d make a decent top-level comment.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Making something more unpleasant is still a deterrent, though.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
If one thinks the war is moral whether or not Ukraine wins, then the question of whether they can win is secondary. The real metric would be marginal cost/benefit.
I think most of the rules-based-international-order types fall into this category. They’ve valued deterring or debilitating Russia higher than you.
I’ve said before that Trump can single-handedly ruin nuclear power for decades, not by opposing it, but by convincing Democrats that those Greens are useful allies.
Toxoplasma is real.
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