stuckinbathroom
No bio...
User ID: 903
stuckinbathroom
23hr ago
I doubt this shifts the Taiwan needle to dangerous new levels
I’m curious, why do you say this? Regardless of the veracity of the charges against Zhang Youxia, I’ve read that he was one of the few people (perhaps even the only one) to tell Xi that his designs on Taiwan are hare-brained and likely to fail. With him out of the picture, how could an attempted invasion of Taiwan not be dangerously more likely?
stuckinbathroom
23hr ago
If true, this is the scariest possible take, IMO. The last (military) man standing on the CMC is now Zhang Shengmin, a career political hack with no actual combat experience, who survived this round of “investigations”/purges the same way he always has: by toeing the Party line and sycophantically telling Xi whatever he wants to hear. Now, worryingly, Xi has 2 more factors nudging him to go all-in on Taiwan 2027: no one’s around to tell him it’s a bad idea, and if he somehow does pull it off, he gets the PR win of making Zhang Youxia look like a treasonous coward.
stuckinbathroom
1d ago
Treason and corruption charges towards long-believed patriots of the highest level never sell the same.
IDK, it really depends on how well Xi can spin these allegations for consumption by the general public (which, in turn, is easier to pull off if the allegations are in fact true, but not impossible even otherwise, especially when the state already has a vice-grip on the media). If he plays his cards right, Xi could bolster his domestic legitimacy as a “good czar (formerly) surrounded by bad boyars”
(Disclaimer: despite my passable Mandarin and KTV skills, I’m far from a China Hand, so take all the following with a hefty splash of light soy sauce)
Most of this analysis seems plausible, except for:
Moderately Bullish: The general was not corrupt, but represented a generation of dim or mid-witted PLA sinecures … His removal serves as a warning - if you’re not ready, if you’re here because your uncle in the CCP got you a job in the military in 1974, get out quietly, don’t hang on, don’t challenge progress.
I’d be more inclined to believe this if the sole remaining military officer on the CMC—indeed, the only CMC member at all, apart from Xi himself—were anyone other than Zhang Shengmin (no relation to Youxia, AFAIK).
Whatever else you may say about him, at least Zhang Youxia (along with fellow now-ex-CMC member Liu Zhenli, who is similarly “under investigation”/possibly purged) has actual combat experience, specifically in the mostly-failed 1979 Vietnam adventure. By contrast, Zhang Shengmin is, by all accounts, a purely political creature. If the goal were to clear out the old deadweight from their cushy sinecures and make room for smart, young upstarts, why keep Shengmin around?
stuckinbathroom
3d ago
I don’t entirely disagree, but another aspect of the problem is that low-skill citizens can just get on disability or welfare, which effectively acts as a wage floor, while illegals generally have no such option. Hence the phenomenon mentioned upthread, that US citizens dysfunctional enough to want these jobs are too dysfunctional to actually do them (penal servitude, perhaps, excepted).
Now I’m by no means opposed to making welfare and disability less accessible to people who could work but just don’t feel like it, but in the Year of our Lord 2026, do you really think that even if we could wave a magic wand and stop paying (native) bums and layabouts to bum about and get laid, they’d just march off to the stockyards of Chicago or the fields of Salinas, roll up their sleeves, and do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay?
stuckinbathroom
3d ago
Yep, exactly: construction, hotel cleaners, fruit pickers, meat packers … all of them are complicit in this blatant end run around the law. To be fair, though, many immigration restrictionists need to take a good, hard look in the mirror and come to grips with the fact that if a genie magically granted their stated policy goals, a trip to Disneyworld, or even just to the grocery store, would suddenly get a whole lot more expensive.
stuckinbathroom
3d ago
stuckinbathroom
3d ago
Funding ICE instead of doing things like employer-based enforcement is meant to show that immigration restriction is impossible.
I am generally a fan of expanded mandatory E-Verify for interdicting illegals more cheaply/efficiently than battalions of ICE agents, but I have to admit there is an obvious failure mode: what’s stopping Big Totally-Compliant Employer, Inc. from contracting $SHITTY_JOB out to some fly-by-night outfit that hires illegals and pays them in cash, and then going all surprised_pikachu.jpg if and when it comes to light that—shock, horror!—the contractors were not, in fact, unimpeachable exemplars of regulatory rectitude?
stuckinbathroom
3d ago
I'm even open to the "Sig misfire" and "reached for the gun" narratives
I thought the latter was from Chicago, not Minneapolis
stuckinbathroom
4d ago
For a culture war take, I reckon something like the experience machine is already in play in my opinion in the ever increasing part of our lives by swallowed up by the digital. From titillating 24/7 drama in the news and on social media to gaming and porn, a lot of it is not too far removed from the experience machine, providing continual stimulation, most of which is devoid from any meaning in the real world.
Again, I think you’re describing something closer to wireheading than to the Experience Machine, namely, people’s every waking thought being sucked in by hedonic superstimuli which our primitive neural reward systems have no evolved defenses against. The difference is, we know what is happening to us and it is physically possible (if perhaps not easy in practice) to “unplug”: turn off your phone, touch grass, etc. By contrast, the premise of the Experience Machine is that while you’re in it, you have no knowledge of the real world, and it is impossible, even in principle, to unplug.
Make it so that the terms of the experiment are … and I bet a lot more people would be willing to take the bargain
Sure, but this violates one of the fundamental postulates of the original thought experiment: while you’re in the simulation, you don’t know that it’s a simulation. If you do know (which would seem necessary in order to be able to leave the simulation at any time), then everything is different: by entering the simulation, you’re not pre-committing to reduce your future self’s knowledge of reality and set of possible actions in exchange for whatever good experiences you sign up for; rather, you’re just spending your time in a particularly enjoyable way.
It may indeed be more pleasurable than any heretofore-dreamt-of pastime; it may be more addictive than the most addictive substances currently known to man. It may even be so hedonically potent that once you enter the simulation with informed consent, knowing full well that you can leave at any time, your value function changes such that you don’t want to leave. But this gets us into the realm of wireheading, which is a separate (though related, and still interesting) thought experiment.
I do agree, though, that many more people would take the wireheading bargain, even though it may change them in ways that their pre-wireheaded selves would find abhorrent: cf. heroin addicts, college freshmen who get hooked on WoW or League and flunk out, etc.
stuckinbathroom
7d ago
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.
stuckinbathroom
7d 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
8d ago
Huh, TIL. Thanks for the explanation!
stuckinbathroom
9d 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
9d 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
10d ago
chuckles_im_in_danger.jpg
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
16d 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
16d ago
ohh 🤦♂️ and here I was expecting a literal rhyme
stuckinbathroom
16d ago
people that rhyme with this group
Not sure if I’m being obtuse, but what contextually-relevant term rhymes with “the Motte”?
stuckinbathroom
19d 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!
You clearly haven’t been studying your Little Red Book enough. To the re-education camps with you!
More options
Context Copy link