netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
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User ID: 647
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
It quite directly did. Factories started to close the gap between men, women and children when it came to economic value.
That relative loss was completely outweighed by the explosion in total economic value that came from labor-saving machines. It still moved enormous numbers of people out of the house and into the factory. It still put any society which relied on unassisted manual labor at a massive disadvantage.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
Is that not what we’ve been doing?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
C.S. Lewis was wrong, then.
Technology has devalued a man’s labor. Handcrafting loses out to machine tooling. Conscript armies lose out to professionals with air support. Local farmers lose out to plantations in the third world.
There was and is no war. Liberalism’s love affair with the profit motive made it quicker to incorporate these changes in value. Our more authoritarian competitors either got with the program or, again, lost out.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
Lots of things are occasionally negative-sum. I am not inclined to get rid of all of them.
But then, I might just be defensive about my own line of work.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
I think your model of these “coalitions” is wrong.
Single-issue voters join a coalition to buy support for their issue. In exchange, they’ve got to provide their support to other issues when those ones are relevant.
Yes, debating what qualifies as “relevant” makes up a substantial portion of internal politics. No, feminism does not automatically dominate every such debate within left-leaning organizations. Your outgroup is not homogenous.
Kimmel’s history on this particular show hasn’t been relevant. If it were, I’m sure people would come out of the woodwork to share unflattering clips and say how they always knew he was a boor, or whatever. Up until that point, they’re supposed to evaluate stuff on the more relevant issues, like “does he joke about the right people?” and “do people recognize the name?”
A digression: are you familiar with Texas AG Ken Paxton? Wife divorced him for repeated cheating. Just won the GOP primary for U.S. Senate against a 24-year incumbent.
Do you find it hard to see how evangelicals, a significant part of the Texas Republican coalition, could forgive him?
In a vacuum, I expect evangelicals would rather have had Paxton-but-faithful over Paxton-the-dirty-cheater. But they assessed his marriage status wasn’t the relevant bit, so they deferred to the name recognition and the Trump endorsement. This is business as usual in the awkward, messy process of forming a coalition.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
Did we ever find out if Double D Geopolitics was actually American?
Paid shit-stirring has been a thing since the Ancient Greeks. Back in those days, at least your drachma stayed in the local economy!
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
Man, you really ought to know better. I suppose you haven’t accrued a warning in a while, so we’ll back off to a three-day ban this time.
Be polite.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
More or less.
It’s easy to find examples of officials doing the responsible thing.
It’s also easy to find people who danced around the violence while endorsing the sentiment. Notice how those take @FtttG’s suggested response: “we pledge to do all we can to fix the problem.”
The incentives are to call for reform, insist that you’re working to solve the problem, and downplay any violence. Only the most radical politicians flirted with endorsing the riots.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
Really? I kind of liked the cringe relationship drama. Er, that might be a little strong. I appreciated having it around. It avoids certain failure modes of self-published fantasy by flying really, really close to them.
I feel like the story would be weaker if it didn’t have Joon’s confused psychosexual problems. But then, I rather liked Evangelion.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
I wouldn’t call it manufactured, per se. But yes, of course it applies.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
Not that I disagree with your premise, exactly...but I can think of several reasons we might have started bombing. Most of them involve underestimating the resilience of Iran's government. Regime change would make destroying the facilities a moot point.
"We only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
Too obnoxious by half.
You were warned last month for frothing at the mouth instead of, you know, politely discussing whatever it was that pissed you off. One day ban this time.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
The defensible form of this argument is that they’re doing whatever they normally would, only much more efficient, because they have access to a pseudo-intern who doesn’t need to eat, sleep, or get briefed to their project.
The spicy form is that whatever frontier model has made it to the government is totally 100x smarter, guys, and can generate Bay of Pigs plans that actually work.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
- Everything about the Napoleonic Wars and the eventual formation of Germany.
- If you count trouncing which didn’t manage to end the war, conflicts like the American Civil War or the Nazi invasion of Russia.
- Actually, do Stalin’s purges count as trouncing his own military?
- Communist China.
I wouldn’t actually count the Wehrmacht as a short-term response. 15 years to get into power, 5 more to rearm before really throwing their weight around. That’s enough for significant leadership turnover plus several revolutions in military affairs.
The latter is the real load-bearing part. A solid defeat leads to effective revenge if and only if the underlying fundamentals change. You’ve got to adopt a new technology or find a new point of leverage.
In the case of Iran, which was already a more or less modern military, what’s the pivot? Drone integration? Not enough to overcome the USN. Control of the strait? Not exactly a new idea. I guess they have expanded the space of strait diplomacy to include some more favorable options. I don’t know if that meaningfully makes them stronger.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
Sorry, Anthropic was kicked off the contract for being a foreign puppet. What’s Sam Altman’s record on pop-culture references?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
FWIW, my dad was talking about that just the other day. He’d been watching an interview with Fetterman where the guy was like “hey, I was actually at that dinner, and it’s kind of messed up that the guy got in. Maybe the Trump ballroom is a good idea?”
There’s probably a lot to unpack about Fetterman and how he fits into the two-party system, but my takeaway was that the attempt isn’t forgotten just yet. If nothing else, Congress takes personal threats very seriously.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
It may be too hot a take for this board, but I would say it means women aren’t actually foreign agitators with incomprehensible experiences.
There are, of course, other possibilities.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
5d ago
Do you have a natural child we haven’t heard about? Because that veers awfully close to Boomer dad joke territory.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
6d ago
Finished Ghost Story, the N-th Dresden Files book. I thought it was pretty fun. Harry fights monsters, solves crimes, does his usual stubborn white-knight shtick, all in a good way.
I read the first half of the series as a teenager, then the next few as used books, and got this from the library. It feels like the appropriate way to go for the rest; while I have little desire to own them, I can't say I'm not a little invested. From the outside, it's easier to grumble about the author's quirks, but while you're immersed, the predominant theme is "hell yeah, of course magic should work like that." Like, you want to be part of this setting, even though it objectively sucks. Fantasy in the pure sense.
Next up I guess I'm reading Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie. I've written about why the first book in that series was so good. Then I enjoyed the second without finding it particularly special. I'm hoping for a return to form.
Oh, and I guess I've got Battle Cry of Freedom too. It's getting into the early stages of the war now. Still horrifying/incredible. Still increasing my respect for Abe Lincoln.
Okay, but what if the terms actually are materialist?
What you're seeing as war goals are more or less incidental, because liberalism does not particularly care about virtue. It will sometimes go to bat for a short list of inalienable rights. Outside of that, it is a materialist ideology, and competition is not war.
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