quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think it is uncontroversial that societies at similar tech levels can have vastly different amounts of inequality.
There is inequality ("oppression" in modern parlance) both in ancient fucking Sparta and modern day Sweden, but the amount of inequality matters.
Despite coming from the traditional left, I believe some inequality is actually beneficial: if Elon Musk collected the same UBI as everyone, this would not make the world a worse place (except for Twitter, perhaps). On the flip side, taking the land away from aristocrats and redistributing it to the peasants may likewise stimulate the economy as well as lowering the Gini coefficient.
Who is on top and who on the bottom only matters to me as far as their economic policy might differ due to their background.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Reality being that AI is not going to become superduper post-scarcity fairy godmother or paperclipper
While I do not think that ASI in this century is overly likely, I do not think that the present AI boom is over. It could be that we will look back on 2024 in a decade deep in the next AI winter and say "this was peak AI, we tried for a few years to throw more hardware at the LLMs had little to show for it with exponentially increasing costs"
But even then, the equilibrium with today's AI technology will transform our work lives at least as much as the digital revolution. Looking at security cameras and seeing if something bad is going on was a job, or at least a huge part of a job. Driving a truck for hours along the highway was a job. Converting a text to bullet points and back was a job. Making thematically appropriate illustrations to text-heavy articles was a job. Writing articles based on a press release was a job.
It used to be, human brains had cornered the market on general purpose neural networks. If it was to complicated to train a dog to do it (which would be another human job) you used a human.
AI does not have to become a better writer than Scott Alexander or a better narrator than Eneasz or a good programmer to put a good portion out of the population out of a job.
Perhaps we will find other niches because we have greater adaptability (i.e. require far less training) and have good manual dexterity and tend not to freak customers out. Or perhaps we will simply not return to the state where the vast majority of the adult population works. In which case governments may decide to pay people off to keep them from burning all the robots. Post-scarcity is a scale, and from the viewpoint of history we are already moving along that scale, even if we do not have a free Mars rocket for everyone and may never have.
And with regard to the paperclip maximizer, I feel it is premature to declare victory. If neural networks ever reach the same level of maturity as plumbing, where the pipes are generally the same way they were four decades ago, then you can tell us doomers that we should calm down because obviously nothing is going to happen any time soon.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I would argue that being a serf was better than being a slave, but only marginally. Yes, you could not be sold away from the land, or be fed to the dogs without any pretense of justice, but mostly your lord captured all of the surplus and you survived on his whim.
So I would argue that your lord being your brother in Christ did gain you something as compared to your lord being a a warrior god who taught might makes right.
I concede that the Roman Empire was probably more unequal, though. For northern Europe, being a slave to some Germanic tribe was shittier than being a serf in the medieval age. But I would argue that the former societies were not very rich to begin with, so the from a Gini coefficient point of view the middle ages were probably worse.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Many also claim that Christianity was created by Jews to control Whites.
How would that even work? The Jews (who back then would not have been under any genetic pressure to be cleverer than similar societies) develop Psychohistory a la Asimov around 100-30 BCE, see that they will eventually annoy their eventual Roman occupiers enough that they will destroy the Second Temple, and while they can not prevent that (e.g. by trying to rebel less against Roman rule) because reasons (???), they can at least sow the seeds of their revenge. They create Christianity as a memetic superweapon and task their Agent Jesus with spreading it. For three centuries Christianity survives in the underground before finally Constantine converts (exactly as planned!), leading (as per a straw-Gibbon) to the inevitable decline and fall. (Ok, East Rome managed to hang on a bit longer despite being 'handicapped' by Christianity. And the slave mindset of Christianity did not prevent Europe to colonize most of the world. Details, details.)
Of course, in this silly fantasy history the target of the memetic weapon would still be the Roman Empire, not the descendants of various Mediterranean and barbarian states who would eventually self-identify as Whites. To get to that point one would have to go totally batshit crazy with the plot. Like "Evil reptiloid aliens give the Jews time travel technology" or something.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I can not help but notice that the first people who substantially increased the number of non-white, non-native humans in the US were the slave owners. Some flavors of Christianity played a substantial role in the abolition, but few people today would say "having a non-white population is fine as long as you don't treat them as human beings", so blaming the abolitionists is rightfully not done.
Christianity is not a religion tied to a specific ethnic group. Any human can become a Christian, and at least at that point hope to be treated by other Christians as a human being.
This is not to say that Christianity demands equality. Historically, Christianity presided over the most unequal period in European history. The serf and the lord might or might not be equal before God in some abstract way, but if God made the world so unequal then the serf should accept his lot. Given that Christianity is compatible with inequality in general, I think it is equally compatible with racial inequality specifically. I mean, the slave owners were Christians of some flavor.
I think the case is similar with Islam, which is also open to all humans. While it has certainly endorsed societies which were very unequal along racial and other lines, you can say that it is not intrinsically racist.
Judaism for example is designed as a religion for one ethnicity. The conversion process seems more like an add-on, fundamentally it is not about converting other humans.
I don't really know about Hinduism, but given that you are already stuck with your caste for life (afaik), I do not think that there is much emphasis on a process to adopt heathens into one of the castes.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I was speaking generally. I feel that (would-be) genociders such as Hamas come as close as you can get to being hostis humani generis without leaving dry land.
But not all non-state actors who ever take up arms against a country are that evil. For example, I do not think that the US civil war would have been improved if the North had decided that since the South represented no state they recognized, they were free to kill Confederate soldiers like dogs in the street. Or if the Brits had adopted that stance with regard to the US during the war of independence.
So a stance of "well, these gunmen are not representing a nation state, no reason to give quarter to them" would have predictably bad outcomes whenever you are not fighting Hamas or the like.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
From the other discussion, I nominate "free will".
Intellectually, I know that human minds are messy things partly driven by drives hard-wired by evolution plus perhaps a bit of capacity to rationally consider hypotheticals and pick an option based on that in a very imperfect manner.
Yet when interacting with others, it is a very convenient frame of reference to assume that Bob was free to pick any option when he punched you instead of modelling him deterministically.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Do you have an experiment to determine if an individual exhibits free will as opposed to just making decisions based on its incentive landscape plus perhaps internal sources of randomness?
If humans have free will, do dogs too? LLMs? Frogs? Insects? A ball travelling through a Galton board?
How is free will compatible with a physics world view? The old "brain as a quantum computer" number? Does that mean that other quantum systems whose state we do not know would also exhibit free will? Or are the responses of our neurons remote controlled from our souls?
quiet_NaN
5d ago
it’s unclear whether executing enemy combatants would even be a war crime in this case, since Hamas does not follow the rules of war, does not wear uniforms and so on, so their fighters can’t be considered legitimate PoWs but instead partisans, who are allowed to be executed.
The US position from the the GWB era is of course that these would be unlawful enemy combatants who could be subject to torture without any violations of international law. I do not share this position (because I detest torture), but emotionally I would have no problem with any Gazans found carrying a firearm or explosive device being presumed partisans and getting a short court-martial followed by a long drop.
Intellectually, I recognize that executing your opponents at will because they are not uniformed soldiers of a recognized nation state might not be a good policy because one man's terrorist is another one's freedom fighter, and having certain humanitarian standards makes conflicts with non-state actors less gruesome. Then again, being a partisan has always had its perils, not matter if you were fighting Nazi occupation in France or for a communist revolution in Latin America.
Still, as far as armed opponents are concerned, my preferred frame of reference is to see the Gaza war as a police action against especially murderous bandits in a border region which is not a matter for international law. If any country wants to make it a matter of international law, I would encourage them to ship grant their passports and uniforms to Hamas.
The only options are to do nothing, to ethnically cleanse Gaza (politically impossible), to pummel them into submission to the extent they don’t rebel again (almost impossible in the Middle East where birthrates are high and these kinds of blood feuds last millennia) or to do as much damage to military infrastructure and kill as many fighters as you can and then leave, which is what Israel is doing now.
My frustration is that that I do not see any winnable end game in that strategy. A majority of Gazans seem to be happy with Hamas. Kill 90% of their fighters and they will just come back in a decade.
One thing would be to invite an international peace keeping force. But even if you find any countries outside Iran who would be willing to participate, this would mostly bring in a lot of weapons while at the same time limiting the tactical options of IDF to respond to future attacks on Israel.
Or they could try a carrot and stick approach. Split Gaza into ten zones separated by borders. Able-bodied men are restricted from passing between zones, while everyone else can move freely around unless they are carrying goods. Each zone gets assigned a cooperation level. At cooperation level zero you only let the goods in which humanitarian law absolutely requires. Water pipes can be turned into rockets, Rebar makes for makeshift weapons, so you get to live in tents and carry your water. That is the stick. Any zones which manage not to shoot rockets at Israel, rats out Hamas fighters to the IDF and elect a leadership which does not want to drown the Jews in the sea moves up on the cooperation level. They get more privileges. Houses out of concrete, zone transition privileges for able-bodied men, shorter waiting times at checkpoints, vehicles, work permits for Israel, ultimately perhaps an Israeli passport (with limited franchise if you want to preserve the Jewish ethno-state, whatever), or broader rights of self-determination. That is the carrot.
Perhaps seed one zone by requiring any able-bodied man wanting to enter to publicly renounce Hamas in a way which will get him on their kill-list. Or with known IDF collaborators.
My theory is that given the choice of maintaining eternal animosity towards Israel and living in a country which is not a total third world shithole, most people might eventually relent on their Antisemitism. As you pointed out, the 20% Arab Israeli mostly manage to suppress any urges they might have to slaughter their Jewish neighbors and instead enjoy a life as second-class citizens in a country which offers an amazing quality of life compared to its neighbors.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The media is solidly pro Israel as is the entire foreign policy establishment.
Do you count the Guardian as part of the media? That was the second most prominently placed story at the time I read it, if I recall correctly.
What about the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which reports roughly the same (even if I get a bit more of a balanced vibe from them as opposed to the Guardian)? I did not cherry-pick here, this was really the first source I checked (after stumbling over it on the Guardian, which I read for the math puzzles or something).
If I go to the NYT, paywall aside, or CNN, or BBC or god-help-me Fox-News, is your prediction that I will only will not have reported it because of their 'blind support for Israel'?
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I am as anti-Hamas as they come, but the moment the IDF goes full Einsatzgruppen on Gaze (like Hamas did on Israel), my sympathy level for the Israeli state will drop to similar levels as I have for Hamas.
If the government of Israel had wanted to genocide Gaza, the 'best' option would have been to turn it into a radioactive parking lot on Oct 7. It is not a 'great' option, there is a reasonable chance that the US would stay out of it if Iran attacked in retaliation (which it might), and wiping out a population with nukes might be harder than it sounds.
Of course, me-the-non-genocidal-voter would also be furious about that. I would probably support withdrawing all Western military aid until such a time as Israel has sent every singe person involved with the nuking decision to stand trial in the Hague and their military forces being put under the command of a less genocidal country which allows a Palestinian state in the West Banks, but I generally do not support genociding populations as reprisals for government action, which would be the long term outcome if Western support was just withdrawn.
From a would-be genociders frame of mind, it is always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. If Hamas had killed their victims at a rate of 100 per week instead of most in a single day (which is not a realistic hypothetical for military reasons), I would basically have supported whatever it takes to stop the killing. In our world where their victims were already dead, fighting Hamas is still paramount, but not especially urgent. A slow genocide by IDF through mass executions would not be strategically sound for similar reasons: the backslash will stop the act long before you manage to murder a non-trivial amount of the population.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Another day, another Guardian article.
Palestinian civil defence teams began exhuming bodies from a mass grave outside the Nasser hospital complex in Khan Younis last week after Israeli troops withdrew. A total of 310 bodies have been found in the last week, including 35 in the past day, Palestinian officials have said.
“We feel the need to raise the alarm because clearly there have been multiple bodies discovered,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for human rights.
“Some of them had their hands tied, which of course indicates serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, and these need to be subjected to further investigations,” she said.
[...] Medics working for Doctors Without Borders described how Israeli forces attacked Nasser hospital in late January before withdrawing a month later, leaving the facility unable to function.
I have no doubt that the IDF commits some human rights violations. But if the UN high commissioner for human rights is disturbed about reports of mass graves, the subtext to me is "this is another Srebrenica". And I am rather sure that Israel does not systematically carry out mass shootings of prisoners. The optics would just be terrible, and in the age where everyone has a phone with a FullHD camera and some fraction of IDF soldiers presumably do not want to see every last Palestinian dead, the inevitable backslash would negate a thousandfold any perceived strategic advantage by reducing the population of their enemy. Israel is dependent on the US, and US voters care about genocides which make the news, and anything involving Israel will make the news.
From reading the executive summary from MSF, you would think that Hamas is a collective hallucination of the IDF, who find it necessary to lay siege to a hospital instead of just walking in to the front door and asking if it would be possible to search the basement for the existence of any secret tunnels really quick before moving on, looking for further windmills to tilt against.
Mithridacy is the art of misdirecting by omission without telling outright lies, and of seeing through them by noticing what is only implied instead of stated outright. If there was not a single armed Palestinian on hospital grounds, that would strengthen the story by making the IDF attack on the hospital a war crime. The fact that MSF does not claim that explicitly makes it unlikely to be true. While artillery shelling always carries the risk of collateral damage, snipers generally see whom they kill. If IDF snipers were systematically targeting civilians (doctors, elderly, kids, etc), that would be outrageous and well worth mentioning. The fact that the article does not mention that suggests that at least the primary victims of the snipers might have been some of the hypothetical Hamas fighters in the hospital.
Likewise, if the bodies in the mass grave all featured gunshot wounds to vital areas, which would be a clear indication of mass executions, you can bet that both the "Palestinian civil defense teams" (I am always amazed at the level of benevolence Hamas has shown in handing key functions of the Gazan government to decent people instead of consolidating all of the power in their own hands ) and the Guardian would go out of their way to tell you about it. So the fact that they do not mention it is somewhat strong evidence that it is not the case.
Also:
[...] Shamdasani said her office was working on corroborating Palestinian officials’ reports that hundreds of bodies had been found at the site.
So she has confirmed that there have been "multiple bodies" discovered, and also that some of them had their hands tied, but is still hedging on the total number of bodies claimed by Ham^H^H^HPalestinian officials? I would assume that if you have a trusted source in Gaza, you could confirm the latter quickly enough.
Also, I do not think that Hamas would lie about that. The Health Ministry numbers may be exaggerated, but they should certainly be able to find 310 bodies to put into that mass grave they discovered after two months. Or perhaps they legitimately found them and someone buried them afer the Nasser fighting.
More broadly, I wonder about the long term strategy of Israel. Assuming that Nasser was an important point of access for the Hamas tunnel system, they went in, smashed it, and left again? Why not occupy it long term, turning Gaza into an open air prison in earnest, with checkpoints and curfews, eventually establishing an alternative structure of government? Gaza is not exactly Afghanistan in size, after all. Going in, kicking Hamas a bit and then have them disperse hidden among the civilian refugees seems like it would cause a lot of civilian hardship without accomplishing the legitimate goal of wiping Hamas from the Earth.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
What I would like to propose is to regulate payment processors in a similar way as ISPs. Either they become common carriers, which means that they are required to do business with any to-their-best-knowledge legal endeavor (and open themselves up to court cases if they refuse) and are shielded from liability, or they remain free to pick their customers and will remain fully liable for any damages causally downstream from their transactions ("What do you mean, you did not know that the car rental agency would lend a car to someone who might run over some kid? You decided to do business with them.")
Of course, this will not happen because the current state of affairs is not an accident. Remember Wikileaks? I am sure that the US government would have loved to lean on the ISPs to get them to voluntarily stop routing to their website. Fortunately for us, this was not a realistic option without causing a big stink. On the other hand, going to the credit card processors and telling them "Did you notice that you are barely making any money from processing transactions with Wikileaks, but on the other hand irritate us quite a lot by it?" was enough to convince them that it was not worth it.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
To be clear - everything I said only proves that even race-blind policies (as opposed to segregation, a different justice system for different races, ethnic cleansing, etc) would be anti-White.
Following your argument about Blacks being more likely to be criminals, I think you misspelled Anti-Non-Black, as these policies would affect Asians, Hispanics and Native Americans just as much.
He's not quite right - as Walt points out, you can't just do race-blindness without addressing the inevitable racial disparity.
I think you can, and in fact the US criminal justice system mostly does, I would argue. There is no affirmative action in prison, where we sentence the odd Asian criminal to terms ten times longer than e.g. a Black criminal so that the incarceration rates of different races match the population rates. Race-blindness is very different from equality of outcomes. This could be due to HBD, or economics (I am sure poor Whites commit more crimes (in prison-years) than rich Whites), or more exposure to lead during childhood or whatever. While left-wing people might argue that some of the disparate incarceration rates are due to selective enforcement of laws based on skin color, I think that this is not the case for more serious crimes like murder. There might be the odd case of a corrupt police department deciding to frame the odd Black gang member for a murder to increase their clearance rates, but the median murderer you find in prison is there because they did indeed commit a murder.
Another aspect which Walt did not mention is if the HBD crime hypothesis is true, then the biggest victim in all of it is the Black community, because the lion's share of crime is intraracial. I am a utilitarian. I do not particularly care for the race of a rape or murder victim. Most Blacks are not criminals, and they do not deserve to be raped or murdered any more than a white person. Hell, not even criminals do deserve to be raped or murdered.
Take trigger-happy police shooting unarmed Black men. Utilitarianism to the rescue again. What we want to minimize is the number of innocent fatalities from both cops and innocent civilians. So we want to adjust police trigger-happiness to the point where the first derivative of the total death with respect to the trigger-happiness is zero.
Let us assume a two person interaction. A cop stops a car with a civilian. He has a certain level of suspicion that the person in the car might shoot him based on heuristics such as race, type of car, neighborhood etc. If he shoots and is wrong, one innocent (the civilian) dies. If he does not shoot and the civilan shoots him, he dies with some probability q because he is wearing a bullet-proof vest. If p is the Bayesian probability that the civilian will try to shoot him, and f(p) is the probability that he shoots first given that evidence, the total amount of innocent lives lost in the interaction is:
T(f, p) = f(p)(1-p)+q(1-f(p))*p
Then the first derivative is dT/df = (1-p)+q*p
If we set this to zero we get the point p=p0 where we are indifferent between the cop shooting and not shooting. (1-p0)+q*p0 = 0 p0=1/(1+q)
The optimal f(p) would thus be a step function which is zero for pp0.
Crucially, p=p0 is the point where a cop is just as likely to die from not shooting first as shooting an innocent civilian. Most innocents die at this point, the case where p is almost zero (a cop stopping a woman who is shopping with some small kids) or almost one (cops stopping the getaway vehicle of a bank robber) are unlikely to result in the deaths of innocents because a cop made the wrong call with regard to shooting.
I also think it is fair to ask that cops should act in a way which protects their lives not more or less than the lives of innocent civilians. (If you don't want to put your life on the line for civilian lives, get job at Walmart.)
Let us stretch our assumptions a bit and assume that p is roughly constant in frequency in that region of death near p0. (This is kind of a big assumption. It may very well turn out that most cops getting killed in traffic stops are getting killed in events where there is no warning sign and p is one in a thousand, far below p0 which is at least 0.5.)
In that world, a well-calibrated police force would carry as many cops shot by Black men as innocent Black men shot by cops to the morgue from traffic stops. It also provides an excellent incentive structure. If you shoot an innocent, the price is not that that you lose your job or spark race riots or anything, but that your police force will be made to behave less trigger-happy to the point where that will kill one of your fellow cops, maintaining the balance.
Under these circumstances, and with the relevant statistics provided by the police department, I as a proud grey tribe utilitarian would be totally fine with innocents of one race or gender getting more frequently shot than a different race or gender, just as I accept the fact that I am more likely to get shot by a cop when I get stopped at 2am in a run-down car in a bad neighborhood than I am if I get stopped at noon in a upper-middle-class car in a rich neighborhood.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Based on my moral values, the only two things that matter for morality is consent and age of majority, doesn't matter if the man is a 50 year old business mogul billionaire and the girl is a 19 year old heroin junkie living in the streets.
You are describing the minimum morality required by the law. Most universities have somewhat higher standards than that. A professor who only hires graduate students who consent to having sex with him or her would certainly not be selecting for professional quality as much as someone who hires on professional merit. Given that the funding which is paying for these students is commonly not his private property, I can see a university (as the principal) having a legitimate interest in enforcing certain standards (on what their agent does).
But I am sure that somewhere some unis go overboard with regulations.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I would like to point out that once you throw the win condition of "you have to pick the best" out of the window, and instead try to optimize the EV of a real-valued score, strategies should change.
Basically, you want to still skip the first r suitors to get some information about the underlying distribution. Ones you have an idea about the distribution (possibly Pareto or normal), you want to compare the utility of the current suitor to the expected value you would get from the remainder of the queue (and keep updating your estimate of the distribution, naturally).
This means that you should pick the second-to-last suitor if they are above average utility. (Assuming that all suitors are positive utility as compared to not picking anyone, which is not the case in dating.)
It might also be better not have a hard cut at any given r, and instead have some penalty to early picking which represents "I forfeit the possibility of making a more informed choice".
If your sequence starts as -2, 5, 6e23, then there is some case to be made to marry Mr/Ms Avagadro without considering the rest of the queue. Of course, if the distribution you are sampling is a bimodal distribution which is 2/3 a boring normal distribution around zero with sigma=4 and 1/3 (1d12)^(1d100) (using roleplaying dice syntax), then you would be better served to keep sampling.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
What's the difference if Russia takes Ukraine? That's like a change in government. Before it was Trump, now it's Biden.
Are you being sarcastic? If not, this feels like the worst comparison I have read on the internet in a long time.
The power of the US president is subject to checks and balances. If the people don't like him, they can vote them out next time. Also, compared to the worst case governments, Biden and Trump are basically the same thing with minor nitpicks. A worst case government would be someone trying to forcibly trying to turn the US into some ethnostate or into a Stalinist dystopia. If you think having to travel to another state to get an abortion or a federal ban on scary looking guns is the worst thing a government can do, look at the Holodomor instead.
What is the worst thing that stupid evil tyrant can do if he conquers us is a question to which we have reasonable lower bounds from history. Government decisions are the difference between North Korea and South Korea.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
a potential NATO nuclear decapitation strike of Russia
Nuclear decapitation does not work. Say you manage to nuke Moscow in a sneak attack. Do you really believe that the commanding officer of a ICBM silo in Siberia will say "too bad, without orders from Putin, I can not retaliate"? I assume that there are nuclear-tipped submarines in the Atlantic and Pacific which provide more second strike capabilities.
The gains from wiping Russia -- a regional power of limited threat to US interests -- would be limited, while the risks are enormous, especially on the tail side.
It is also not in the US long term interests. Even if they manage to wipe out all Russian nukes (and most of the Russians) without a single nuke exploding over NATO soil, this would normalize preventive nuclear warfare.
There is this other big country called China. Also a big nuclear power not particularly friendly with the US. Wiping out Russia would set the clock ticking on US-China relations, because once you have established that this is your strategy, this is where the next showdown would happen. So the US would have to get extraordinary lucky twice.
Global nuclear war does not poll very well. A sneak attack would completely undermine the role of the US as a soft-spoken hegemonic power whose clients thrive. (At least that is the image in Europe and SE Asia, less in Latin America or the Middle East.)
Between political ramifications, radioactive fallout, possible climate impacts and economic aspects (a large part of the chip industry is in China) wiping out China and Russia would be disastrous for the west.
We are not living in 1960 more, where some people believed that of course the Cold War would escalate and that it might thus be better to escalate on your own terms. Living in the shadow of nuclear annihilation turns out to be quite comfortable if you make it to the correct timelines, actually. No need to risk the good thing we have going.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
For context, the Cold War kind of ended with the collapse of the USSR.
Post Cold War Russia was not in a very good position to project force globally. They did have their small scale adventures, though, but Chechnya was not a recognized country, and Georgia was not fully occupied by Russia. Still, Putin was hardly a dove.
I think NATO adventurism in the Islamic World was a horrible move, but the expansion of NATO was a good thing. Do you recall how Clinton gave Poland an ultimatum to join NATO or face his tanks before they joined in 1999? Neither do I because that did not happen. Eastern European states were eager to join NATO because they know how the USSR had behaved in their countries in the Cold War, contrasted that with how the US had behaved in Western Europe during that period and decided that they would rather be under the protection of the US than Russia.
The raison d'etre of NATO is to prevent a war with Russia. It is certainly not to conquer a nuclear armed Russia. Having a NATO ally on his flank would be mildly inconvenient to Russia because it would place them in a worse strategic situation in a war with NATO. But realistically, a NATO-Russian war would result in large scale nuclear war, which is why both NATO and the USSR/Russia have taken great pains to avoid shooting at each other directly in any conflicts.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Are you seriously arguing that the US might occupy Russia in the future like they occupied Iraq?
I considered the Iraq war of Bush II a mistake when he started it and had no reason to revise my opinion. But even if Russian nukes stopped working tomorrow due to magic, invading Russia would be insane. It has been tried a few times, ask Napoleon or Hitler how it went for them. There is nothing in Russia which would justify the costs of conquering it even to the most mercenary of minds.
This is not about Putin being afraid of Stars and Stripes flying from the Kremlin.
Like most countries, the US meddles in the affair of other countries. Some of it seems net-positive, some of it seems ill-advised to me. Regional powers meddle in their sphere of interest, the US meddles globally, as did the USSR.
If the US sees a chance to fund a coup against Putin, they might take it. Likewise, if Putin saw a chance to fund a coup against Biden, I would not begrudge him for taking it. This is just how this game is played.
Since the end of the cold war, Russia has not done so well in the Great Game. While the US had its share of fuckups, a lot of countries of the former Warsaw pact decided that being allied with the US served their purposes better than being allied with Russia. This might be because the US was rather well-behaved and soft spoken during the cold war in Europe while the USSR was prone to sending tanks to Prague. Turns out that people have long memories and really don't like being invaded.
There is no birthright for a country to having a large sphere of influence. The threat NATO poses to Russia is to its sphere of influence. The moves the US made to align most of Eastern Europe against Russia seem mostly non-evil to me, as far as these things go. Even if one would assume that the Euromaidan was 100% an evil CIA coup to wrest control of Ukraine from a legitimate pro-Russian president, the total number of deaths was below 200 (most of them on the pro-Europe side). It would be rather bloodless as CIA sponsored coups go. Most of the alignment was simply people voting for parties which were pro-NATO or pro-Europe instead of pro-Russia in places like Poland.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
I think this rationale is mostly in defending military aid to Ukraine. In two years, the US spent a total of $75 billion on Ukraine aid. This is like 5% of its military budget over the same time frame. I think it is hard to overstate how much of a bargain that is. If they could keep China occupied for another 10% of their military spending a Machiavellian strategist would of course do this.
And the Ukrainian cause is quite photogenic. They are somewhat democratic and western and fighting against annexation by a much larger warmonger. Much better than previous allies the US supported against the USSR, like the Mujaheddin.
But even if this strategy was effective, killing 1 million people to "weaken" an adversary is just incredibly evil.
If the US was smuggling a nuke into St Petersburg and detonated it there to weaken Russia, that would be incredibly evil, yes. But this is not what is happening.
Forget about the small scale conflict of 2014. Putin has no moral claim to occupy Kiev. He is the aggressor in this conflict. NATO is not mind-controlling the Ukrainians. They want to continue to fight, foolishly dreaming of reclaiming every square meter of their country from 2014 back. I think that they might be better served by pursuing a negotiated peace where they cede the occupied parts and then join NATO so Putin can not come back for another slice.
You might be a radical pacifist who thinks that violence is always wrong, and the decent people of the world should just roll over and give the bullies what they want.
I think that fighting wars which can be won or at least fought to a stalemate is sometimes worth it. I am not even firmly opposed to fighting losing wars. Sometimes extracting the maximum cost from an enemy can be a sound strategy. It does not help you in your timeline, apart from satisfying petty feelings of revenge, but it might help you in all the other timelines. If every military operation where the attacker was twice as strong as the defender resulted in the defender surrendering without conditions and the aggressor reaping the full productivity of their new possession, a lot more aggression would happen. Instead, the mere threat of a long war followed by decades of asymmetric conflict eating up the productivity of the region is a lot of the reason why wars of conquest are rare.
I do not expect the Ukrainians to be especially grateful for NATO for the military support. They know that we treat them as pawns, with them doing all the dying. I am strictly against sending NATO troops into Ukraine, Russia and NATO shooting directly at each other is how nuclear wars start. If Ukraine was in NATO, then it would be worth risking World War III in its defense because the alternative would be to defect from the obligations of Article 5 and destroy any deterrence NATO offers, which would enable Russia to pick off European countries one by one.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
Given the effectiveness of missile interception, I think it is hard to argue with the results. From Israel's point of view, the Iranian regime already hates them maximally and is kept in check purely by military consideration, not a lack of desire to wipe Israel of the map.
Purely military speaking, trading two generals plus change against a random civilian is a tit-for-tat game that Israel wins. There is also the costs of attack and defense to consider, which might be more favorable to Iran (launching a rocket is way easier than intercepting one), but on a scale of a few hundred missiles this is a minor concern.
I would guess that Iran wanted higher casualties, but also did not want to invite instant retaliation. I guess they might have wanted to achieve a dozen causalities or so. They erred on the side of too few, which is a lot better than erring on the side of too many for everyone. On the plus side, they learned something about Israel's missile defense capabilities.
We're damn lucky things cooled down so fast, but again - what the hell was Israel hoping to achieve by this?
I think you are right that killing the generals in the embassy might have been a bad move for Israel because of tail-heavy risks. They put Iran in a spot where the decision makers felt they had to retaliate not for military reasons but just to remain credible to their own peers. If they had killed a few hundred Israelis instead, then that would have put Israel in exactly the same spot, resulting in a war which both sides would lose.
I think it comes down to what a general is worth, militarily speaking. If Persia had managed to kill Alexander 'the Great' early on, history would have gone quite differently, but we are not in the antique any more. Instead of depending on having a king who is by chance a military genius, meritocratic systems common in the modern world should churn out a reliable stream of competent generals. From my gut feeling, modern militaries do not depend on a genius who sees a weakness during battle and exploits it in a way which nobody has ever thought of before but more on skilled but replaceable craftspersons employing their craft. You do not need Alan Turing to build Amazon, after all.
So killing two generals seems more of a papercut than a decisive blow, and Israel's actions can be likened to climbing a wall free solo: the fact that it went well for them this time does not make it any less foolish.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
What I really like about it is the Bayesian reasoning for parenthood. They even thought of identical twins. (Of course, requiring posterior odds of 0.99 with prior odds of 0.5 will mean a lot of false positives. Especially as most labs will probably not say "ok, p=0.98, so that is a negative", but instead do more tests to get over 0.99. Or it might be that modern genetic tests have much higher predictive power and this is moot.)
quiet_NaN
19d ago
Well, if Nils Melzer's account cited above is correct (which I think it is), then the Swedish prosecution likely singled him out for reasons of his Wikileaks work. This does not have to be the CIA pulling strings, it could simply be that prosecutors like the attention they get from bringing cases against famous people.
I do not believe that one should always be on the side of the law as a citizen. If you know that Saudi Arabia is investigating you for blasphemy and the UAE want you for public indecency after a paparazzi took a photo of you urinating in the desert, it can be reasonable to skip bail in the UAE, thereby committing a purely apolitical crime.
I think that spending a year in the embassy has a similar life quality adjustment cost as spending a year in British or Swedish prison. I think I would rather spend a year in Swedish prison than two years stuck in the embassy. So by my reckoning, Assange time in the embassy paid plenty for any crimes he might have committed in Sweden and skipping bail in the UK.
I agree with you that Assange is kind of a prima donna who thinks he is special, but in my opinion the fact that the DOJ opened a case against him shows that he kinda is special, even if he is less special than he thinks he is.
Sorry Julian, but this isn’t a negotiation, you’re under arrest, get in the police car.
The reason that a traffic stop arrest is not a negotiation is that all the power of the facts and the law is in the hand of the cops. If you manage to run over a sovereign border then suddenly this is not the case any more, so it totally becomes a negotiation.
Cops come to you with an search warrant? No negotiation. Cops want to search your property for a fugitive without a warrant? Negotiate or GTFO.
So I take it that in your view, the Holocaust was because all these evil Polish Jews were meddling in German politics.
I hate to break it to you, but Jews do not act as a coherent group. If you find Jews on two sides of an issue, that is not because they decided to infiltrate both sides, but because they genuinely believe in different things. In any somewhat meritocratic system, some Jews will likely come out in the top 1%. Some Jews will be doctors, lawyers and so on. Some will be intellectuals all over the political spectrum, from the fringe left to conservatives (if the Nazis and their ilk were not rabidly antisemitic, I am sure that some Jews would have joined them as well). A lot of them will have perfectly normal middle class jobs. Of course, some of the rich ones will throw their money around trying to influence politics. Or commit sex crimes. Good thing gentile industrialists never do that!
For Germany 1933, antisemitism was the placebo therapy. Plenty of poor people found capitalism wanting and were disillusioned with democracy. Rather than waiting for a communist revolution (which would have been terrible for other reasons), gentile industrialists were funding Hitler. There were Jewish bankers and industrialists, and the Nazis managed to convince enough of the population that rather than the Jewish banker and the gentile banker being the problem (as the commies would see it), or unbridled capitalism being the problem, the Jewish banker and the Jewish barber were the problem.
That phrase is Problematic.
Charitably, you want to suggest that the Jews are guests to the host population. This is wrong, Jews are members of their nation states as much as anyone. German and French Jews both did their share of foolish dying at Verdun, same as any other Germans and French did. Some US Jews lived there back before it was independent. The trope of the faithless, nationless Jew is from old European antisemitism. In reality, it was the other way round: whenever a monarch was feeling particularly Christian, they would banish all the Jews from their realm.
Of course, less charitably, you know exactly what phrasing you are using and the word opposite to the host is "parasite", which is also an old antisemitic trope.
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