stuckinbathroom
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User ID: 903
stuckinbathroom
15hr ago
Rigging an FPV drone with some explosives and flying it into a target seems hardly rocket science.
Not rocket science indeed, just your garden-variety subsonic aeronautical engineering
I agree with you that the risk of domestic conflict along political lines is underrated by most. I think tensions are the highest they’ve been in my lifetime, and probably the highest since the 1960s; however, it’s at best misleading and at worst sensationalistic to refer to the current situation as a prelude to a “civil war”, in the American sense.
A better analogy would be protracted, low-level conflict between the state and various amorphous paramilitaries, a la the Troubles in Ireland or the Years of Lead in Italy. Even a coup or a suspension fortification of democracy by the military, as periodically occurs in Turkey for example, is (worryingly) increasingly plausible, but not the Boogaloo.
The central feature of the American Civil War that is missing today is, simply, a single, united nexus of competing state power/legitimacy that has supermajority support across a large geographic region. The CSA fielded entire armies of regulars to fight against the Union in pitched battles, conducted diplomacy with foreign powers, and executed the basic domestic functions of a government (passing and enforcing laws). When states seceded, they did so by calling special state conventions, which then voted on secession as legitimate elected officials of their respective state governments.
As bad as the situation is today, I cannot honestly say that anything remotely similar is at all likely to occur. For one, the Tribes are just too geographically dispersed and intermixed across the country: even the reddest/bluest states are no more than 65% Republican/Democrat in the popular vote. By contrast, South Carolina’s state convention voted unanimously to secede. For another, there is no single Schelling point around which literal armies of men with guns can gather: yes, there’s Antifa, the Proud Boys, whatever, but those are small fry, paramilitaries at most, not actual nation-state-tier organizations with the attendant legitimacy and bargaining power, foreign and domestic. Wake me up when they get to the level of something like Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Addendum: I don’t mean to jinx things, but I’m really surprised we haven’t seen any drone-based violence lately. The technology is there and has been for a few years, as evidenced by the Ukraine conflict. Perhaps we’ve just been lucky. I pray our luck continues.
stuckinbathroom
1d ago
Huh, TIL. Thanks for the explanation!
stuckinbathroom
1d ago
I thought the bulk of US (and, for that matter, British) rail construction in the 19th century was due to the private sector, not public works, hence the rise of the so-called robber barons.
But this doesn’t really contradict your main point: in those days, the law was written/interpreted in ways favorable to rail companies and their interests, and thus they had free rein to “build, baby, build”. Nowadays, any legislator who proposed such a pro-growth regulatory environment would be raked over the coals as a corporate shill in the pocket of Big Business.
I wish Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias, and the rest of the YIMBY/Abundance gang the very best of luck in threading that particular needle in California. They’re gonna need it.
Something that YIMBY/Abundance types occasionally trot out to explain the exorbitant costs, incessant delays, and general fecklessness of big infrastructure projects in the Anglosphere, especially HSR, is the idea that common law property rights and eminent domain make it exceedingly difficult for the state to claim all the land necessary for development, as every landholder bargains individually and has an incentive to hold out as long as possible for the highest price.
I have no idea if this hypothesis is true; I think the diagnosed phenomenon—viz. that English-speaking countries are terrible at building HSR, even compared to much poorer European countries like Spain and Italy—is real, but a priori my vague sense is that eminent domain considerations are at most a rounding error compared to the sheer volume of regulations that must be followed, as well as, in some jurisdictions, labor unions fleecing the unsuspecting taxpayer.
Could an Ontario to Québec railway be a natural experiment for this hypothesis? That is, since Québécois law is derived from continental-style civil law, they should, per this hypothesis, be able to build their side of the railway cheaper/faster than the Anglophones can. But here again, my vague sense is that public-sector construction in Québec (and perhaps the Francophonie in general?) is subject to even more graft and corruption than in the English-speaking world (cf. L’affaire SNC-Lavalin).
But if the project is to be carried out under the aegis of the federal government, I guess this is all a moot point.
stuckinbathroom
2d ago
People who had TPS status pulled for some reason.
Someone somewhere at an ICE field office is literally doing TPS reports. Hope they remember to use the new cover sheets.
stuckinbathroom
3d ago
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Except for Libya, none of your examples involve a regime being overthrown from within by forces wanting an end to the sanctions, or voluntarily submitting to American demands in order to end the sanctions. Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan are all cases where the powers that be (well, were) pointedly refused to play ball, boldly stood up to American threats, and were invaded/couped in short order. If anything, they should serve as cautionary tales of what happens when you don’t play nice with America.
stuckinbathroom
8d ago
Tangentially related: something I recall hearing a lot from the anti-interventionist left/Ron Paul libertarian/paleocon spheres ca. 2008-2012 was the idea that sanctions and embargoes (on Iran and Cuba, at that time) are actually counterproductive to the stated goal of spreading democracy, because they provide an easy foreign scapegoat for dictators to pin their economic woes on, and the resulting “rally ‘round the flag” effect ironically gives the sanctioned regimes more domestic popular support than they would otherwise enjoy.
On the one hand, this seems like a pretty galaxy-brained take; surely, from the perspective of the man in the streets of Tehran or Havana, the more obvious conclusion is, “If our regime fell and we played ball with the Americans, they’d lift the sanctions and we wouldn’t be poor!”
But on the other, national pride is a hell of a drug, and I can definitely imagine the ordinary people of a sovereign nation—particularly one like Iran, with such a long history of being the premier regional power and a bulwark of refinement and culture—chafing at the prospect of bending the knee to foreign interlopers. Anecdatally, during the US/Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last summer, I remember seeing assimilated, secular Persian-Americans on social media furiously condemning the US and Israel, even to the point of supporting the Ayatollah, whose very name they seldom utter without a curse before and after (cf. the old saw about not realizing “damn Yankee” was two separate words). In many cases, they were the very same people who took to the streets tweets during the anti-regime protests of 2009 and 2022!
Does anyone have any hard data on how true this hypothesis is?
stuckinbathroom
9d ago
ohh 🤦♂️ and here I was expecting a literal rhyme
stuckinbathroom
9d ago
people that rhyme with this group
Not sure if I’m being obtuse, but what contextually-relevant term rhymes with “the Motte”?
stuckinbathroom
12d ago
Fair enough, I admit it may be an empty, symbolic move. But symbolism in the defense of federalism and of “laboratories of democracy” is no vice!
stuckinbathroom
12d ago
I had not seen them; thank you for the fascinating lunch break reading!
stuckinbathroom
13d ago
To your point, though, I unironically want to repeal the 17th Amendment and go back to having Senators be appointed by the state legislatures, as specified in Article I, Section 3. If individual state legislatures choose to devolve this power to their respective electorates directly, that is their absolute right under the 10th Amendment—and otherwise, if the voters really want a say in their state’s Senators, then they are more than welcome to vote the bums out (of the state legislature)
stuckinbathroom
13d ago
pre antebellum
Not good enough, we need to go pro-pre-ante-pen-bellum
stuckinbathroom
13d ago
Physically removed, so to speak.
stuckinbathroom
13d ago
Indeed, if she hadn’t hit the ice, she would have hit the ICE. So to speak.
stuckinbathroom
14d ago
Fascinating, thanks for the summary! I gather the book does little to combat the perception that Kamala is an entitled airhead with a princess complex from having failed upwards her entire career and having never been told “no” by anyone in the Dem machine thanks to her unassailable idpol trifecta (Black, Asian, female)
stuckinbathroom
15d ago
Incidentally, based on your reading, would you agree with the pithy summary that someone else here posted/quoted a while back: “I [Kamala] didn’t not pick Buttigieg because he’s gay—I didn’t pick him because he’s gay and we only had 107 days”
Mark Koran, a Republican state senator and former tax official who has worked closely on the fraud issue for nearly a decade and who I met in Saint Paul, said that millions of dollars in such proceeds were taken to East Africa in cash.
Mark Koran identifies cash being funneled to radical Islamists? Nominative determinism strikes again!
stuckinbathroom
21d ago
the ever-intensifying gender war in China.
Can you tell us more about this? Has it reached South Korean levels of intensity?
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stuckinbathroom
23d ago
Not quite: the claim is that in any Turing-complete language, it is possible to write a program that cannot be algorithmically proven to halt on all inputs by another program written in a Turing-complete language.
stuckinbathroom
23d ago
Yep, essentially you have to give up Turing-completeness to get provable correctness: no unbounded recursion or loops allowed. To formally verify, using a Turing-complete verification language/proof assistant, the correctness of an arbitrary program written in a (possibly different) Turing-complete language is tantamount to solving the halting problem, which famously is logically impossible.
stuckinbathroom
24d ago
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Great idea! And to improve performance, perhaps we could even create a program that deterministically converts this human-readable formal language into a binary representation that’s more similar to the instruction set of the underlying hardware.
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