stuckinbathroom
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User ID: 903
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
What’s Turkey’s beef that led to them playing chicken (by proxy) against the SAA? Pure Sunni vs. Shi’a/Alawite sectarianism, or does it go deeper than that?
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
They want anyone but Assad and thus Iran. And they mean anyone.
The monkey’s paw, the devil you know, etc. etc. Though since we’re talking about Israel, perhaps the parable of the golem is more apropos.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Assad is friendly with Iran and he has allowed Iran’s paramilitary proxies to roam free throughout the country.
This is true, but AFAIK no Iranian proxies have staged attacks on Israel from within Syria, right?
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
What are the likely consequences re: Israel should the Assad regime collapse?
For all his faults, at least Assad has refrained from mounting direct military attacks against Israel; moreover, unlike Lebanon, Syria TTBOMK does not harbor quasi-state paramilitaries that attack Israel. And all this is despite the cozy relationship between Assad and Iran, and the Golan Heights hatchet remaining pointedly un-buried!
Do we know anything about which rebel group is likely to end up on top if Assad gets the boot? I could imagine the US foreign policy blob backing “moderate rebels” in order to win some leverage over them and their Israel policy if and when they take control of Syria (because that’s worked out so well for us before). But I am extremely skeptical that any new regime can keep as tight a lid on anti-Israel kinetic actions as Assad has.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
As a wise man once said: if they don’t want to be seen as an international conspiracy to subvert and destroy anything that goes against their ethno-religious interests, then they should probably stop conspiring internationally to subvert and destroy anything that goes against their ethno-religious interests
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Taiwan considers themselves to be Chinese (and the legitimate Chinese government at that), but nobody else does. Possession matters.
I’m not sure this supports the point you’re trying to make.
It is obviously true that (modulo a small population of foreigners and Taiwanese aboriginals) virtually all inhabitants of Taiwan today are descended from people who came from China. And if you’ve ever paid a visit to the National Palace Museum in Taipei, you’d know that there’s a very real sense in which the people of present-day Taiwan are the heirs to, and the custodians of, the Chinese civilizational patrimony. Perhaps not uniquely so—the overseas Chinese of Malaysia and Singapore, and of course the mainland Chinese, have similar claims, with varying degrees of plausibility—but then again, no one said that the Romanians or the inhabitants of minor outlying islands in the Aegean were the only surviving Sons of Romulus, either.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Is the Fed not required to disclose its asset holdings on a regular basis? If so, wouldn’t we find out soon if they were hodling BTC
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Curious, why doctors rather than hospital administrators?
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Moreover, it seems the technology for carrying out assassinations without being caught has improved by leaps and bounds since, say, the heyday of Weather Underground in the 1960s and ‘70s; 3D printed ghost guns and improvements in robotics and computer vision, not to mention the Internet, mean that it’s possible to set up an untraceable, remote-controlled, perhaps even autonomous killbot to assassinate someone without even being physically present at the time. Yes, CCTV and vastly higher amounts of SIGINT from ubiquitous smartphones do make catching criminals easier. But I still think the balance favors the would-be assassin; if the killbot can be assembled days or weeks in advance, in, say, an abandoned warehouse overlooking a parade where the victim will be marching, good luck finding the assassin.
Uh, this is all theoretical of course.
Anyhow, I chalk it up to us being an older, fatter, richer, and more docile society than we were during the Days of Rage.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
I initially thought this might not actually be a lie in the strict sense, because Kaling’s family may have lived in East Africa prior to immigrating (like the family of Rishi Sunak, for instance). This would make Kaling and her brother “African-American” in the same sense as Elon Musk.
But nope, turns out the Chokalingams came straight to America from India, no politically-expedient stopover in Africa involved. Which makes Mindy’s brother an out-and-out liar.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Non-Extremely Online person here; is “SickTok” at all related to Spoonerspoonie-ism? (It’s all a lack of pies, I tell you)
What I can't steelman is high CEO pay for people like Mary Barra or Marissa Mayer who do an awful job as CEO, do real damage to their companies, and still get paid hundreds of millions of dollars.
Aren’t most CEOs compensated in equity/options, precisely to align their incentives with those of their shareholders? A CEO who is paid in shares, or in at-the-money call options struck at the beginning of her tenure will, by definition, stand to make no money by tanking her company’s share price.
I don’t know the details of the two cases you mentioned, but potentially the steelman is that from the perspective of shareholders/the board of directors/whoever decides executive comp, hiring these folks was a positive EV bet ex ante, which turned out to be a dud ex post. That a given instance of a positive EV bet pays out negative is not evidence that taking the bet was a bad decision.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Come now, if you know anything about Korean youth culture, surely you must know how enamored they are of broadcasting the most mundane of activities for all the world to see.
If you want a picture of South Korea’s future: I have no ass and I must stream.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Can the President annul a previously-issued pardon? If so, this suggests another interesting possibility: Trump could proactively pardon all of his cabinet members/executive branch employees for any crimes committed during his presidency, then order them to commit some crime, then (assuming they comply rather than resign) threaten to revoke the pardon unless they do exactly what he says. Boom, instant leverage over his cabinet!
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Surely Japan is, by global standards, and even compared to Western Europe, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (that last one is debatable). It’s hard to argue that they’re on the whole more Westernized than Western Europe, the literal birthplace of Western-ness, but certainly in some respects Japan is very Westernized.
I think you are arguing that Japan is not as woke/culturally Blue as Western Europe, which seems broadly true to me. But this is, strictly speaking, distinct from WEIRD-ness, and more importantly there are senses in which Japanese culture displays the same lack of memetic antibodies against wokeness as Western European cultures (namely, relatively low emphasis on extended family/clan relationships, and “pathological altruism”).
I’m really struggling to see how Japan is culturally much closer to deep Red Tribe. Respect for ancient traditions perhaps? But Red Tribe (like all of America) doesn’t really have much in the way of ancient traditions. And if Japan is so culturally, whence their much-lower-than-US-Red-Tribe TFR? Do you think that’s entirely explained by their greater emphasis on education?
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
he has always towed the line
Ah, my favorite pet peeve rears its ugly head again: it’s toe the line
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
I agree that the further backend/lower-level you go, the more systematizing, as opposed to empathizing, engineering becomes.
However, I think this maps to the greater autistic-ness (in the colloquial sense) of backend/low-level devs (and I wouldn’t be surprised if this held true even for the strict medical definition of autism). It’s not obvious to me that greater autistic-ness maps cleanly to more right-wing political views; for example, anecdatally, transwomen represent greater percentages of engineers as you go deeper into backend/low-level infra work, but I’d be shocked if any of them identified as Red Tribe in any way.
Perhaps there is a case to be made that autistics tend towards individualist rather than collectivist views. But neither Red nor Blue can be rightly deemed the tribe of individualists, per se.
stuckinbathroom
6mo ago
Fiery but mostly peaceful elephants
stuckinbathroom
7mo ago
there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions.
By “tasked with thinking” you mean what they think about/do on the job?
I’m curious as to what your perspective is on how that influences the politics of these groups, but IMO defense developers skew much further right than the others not because of the type of engineering work, but rather because working for the military/MIC codes as Red Tribe
stuckinbathroom
7mo ago
Mortal Kombat 1 ( heard they are covering the women up, haven't played it myself)
One wonders if this is done by region-specific graphics, a la gay pride flags being replaced by black flags in the Middle East release of the latest Spider-Man game (or was it Assassin’s Creed?)
stuckinbathroom
7mo ago
Musk buying Twitter was a crippling blow to SJ, to be sure, but it's far from dead and it still holds the high ground of the academy.
Wokey-wan Kenobi: It’s over, Elonakin, I have the high ground!
Elonakin Blueskywalker: You underestimate my power!
WK: Don’t try it!
stuckinbathroom
7mo ago
None of them have been dishonorably discharged for their shenanigans.
Though if you look under the dog masks, there’s a good chance you’ll find some dishonorable discharge
stuckinbathroom
7mo ago
stuckinbathroom
7mo ago
Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drums. Curtains.
Huh, I didn’t know that, but it makes geographic sense. Thanks for explaining
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